When a Movie About Lies Gets the Facts Right

The new film adaptation of The Wizard of the Kremlin pulls off a delicious paradox: a movie about political manipulation and fake news that’s remarkably grounded in historical fact. The film, based on Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, tells the story of Vladislav Surkov’s rise as Vladimir Putin’s chief adviser—a man who essentially weaponized the blurring of truth itself.

What makes this particular balancing act fascinating is how director Olivier Assayas navigates the minefield of depicting a living, powerful figure without getting sued into oblivion. Surkov, the architect of“managed democracy”and the innovation of weaponized confusion, was someone who understood that controlling reality matters less than controlling the narrative around it. Ironically, the film adaptation has to play that same game. Assayas admitted he softened certain portrayals for legal reasons while keeping deceased figures like Boris Berezovsky as close to the historical record as possible. The irony is thick: a film about propaganda becomes propaganda-adjacent itself, though in service of something closer to truth.

The core of the story—how Surkov evolved from drama school student to the man orchestrating the Internet Research Agency’s troll campaigns—tracks remarkably close to what actually happened. Yes, the film compresses timelines and reimagines conversations that likely never occurred (Surkov didn’t actually pitch his vision to Yevgeny Prigozhin in a single meeting). But the fundamental architecture is sound. Surkov really did come from theater. He really did work his way up through oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s business empire. He really did reshape how Russia’s government manipulates information, moving from crude propaganda to something far more insidious: creating so much noise and contradiction that the very concept of objective truth becomes meaningless.

What’s particularly striking is how the film captures Surkov’s true innovation—not winning arguments, but making people believe there are no facts to argue about in the first place. That“nothing is true, there is no truth, there are alternative truths”philosophy didn’t die with his February 2020 resignation. It spread globally, influencing how disinformation campaigns operate across democracies. The film shows how this actually worked: paid trolls creating fake personas, amplifying divisive issues, stoking outrage on social media platforms to degrade the possibility of shared reality.

For anyone trying to understand how modern information warfare actually functions, this movie is essential viewing—not because it’s a biography, but because it captures something true about how power operates in the digital age. Surkov understood before most of the world that controlling the narrative isn’t enough anymore. You have to control whether people believe there’s a narrative to be controlled at all.