He was called the "The Wizard of the Kremlin". The enigmatic Vadim Baranov was a director then producer of reality TV shows before becoming the eminence grise of Putin, known as the Tsar. After his resignation from the post of political adviser, the legends on his account multiply, without anyone being able to disentangle the false from the true. Until, one night, he entrusts his story to the narrator of this book... This story plunges us into the heart of Russian power, where courtiers and oligarchs wage constant war. And where Vadim, having become the main spin doctor of the regime, turns an entire country into a political theater, where there is no other reality than the fulfillment of the wishes of the Tsar. But Vadim is not an ambitious man like the others: drawn into the darker and darker mysteries of the system he helped to build, this lost poet among the wolves will do anything to get out of it. From the war in Chechnya to the Ukrainian crisis, via the Olympic Games in Sochi, The Magus of the Kremlin is the great novel of contemporary Russia. Revealing the underside of the Putin era, it offers a sublime meditation on power.