From the editor: Graphic novel gives new reason to revisit Putin’s murderous career
We've all had more than enough of Vladimir Putin, but there may yet be a new way of looking at the Russian dictator that brings additional insights into his behaviour - in the form of a graphic novel. Andrew S. Weiss, a vice president of the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has teamed up with artist Brian “Box” Brown to produce Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin, which will be published next month by Macmillan/First Second. Andrew told me via Zoom how the project came about and what he really thinks of its subject.
A page from Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin by Andrew S. Weiss & Brian “Box” Brown (Macmillan/First Second, November 2022)
First of all, Putin is “a bad man”, Andrew is keen to emphasise. The book is a 277-page whistle-stop tour of the lows and further lows of the former KGB officer’s career, from his training period in the Soviet security services in Leningrad through to his invasion of Ukraine in February. It can’t cover everything (such as his multitude of assassinations and all the political prisoners and hostages he has tormented), but it devotes considerable attention to the way Putin has cultivated relationships with Western leaders and delves into his motivations for trying to force Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit.
So what inspired someone who is more used to writing academic-style articles for a thinktank choose to create a graphic novel? “I was always someone who dipped in and out of reading graphic novel,” Andrew says. “Probably someone whose tastes were pretty predictable in terms of things that I really liked, growing up in the ‘80s and when the medium really took off in the ‘90s. But what I think was always really concerning to me was the extent to which Putin’s image was deliberately cartoonish, but it wasn’t always clear that people were in on the joke, either inside Russia or in the external audience.” When Putin first took over from Boris Yeltsin Russian imagemakers made this cartoonish version of him to reassure people that the country was in good hands, Andrew adds. He was depicted as an intelligence officer who “showed up for work, and was sober, and knew a thing or two about weapons and the military”.
In 2016 as Donald Trump ascended to the US presidency, Americans started playing the same imagery back in a literal way, as opposed to a questioning way, Andrew says. “A big part of my motivation was to ask, if you strip things back, what are you really left with? And it’s a mixed picture. He is a former intelligence operative and he’s been in power 20 years, he’s done a lot, so it’s not just all made up… The graphic novel seemed like a really good way to go back and forth in the timeline, which I really thought was important to the book, where you see something Putin’s doing and then you look back at a historical antecedent or historical event that was so formative or important, and you can kind of toggle back and forth. Obviously Putin does that himself – he’s always placing his rule in this bigger historical sweep.”
Andrew’s agent put him in touch with Brian Brown through another cartoonist, Mark Siegel, who is the editor of the imprint First Second. Brian’s previous works include graphic novels about actor André the Giant, comedian Andy Kaufman, Tetris and the legal status of cannabis. “When I first saw Brian’s work I was like wow, this is so distinctive, it’s not the kind of noir style or overly literal graphic novel, he does this much more minimalist, singular thing,” Andrew says. This is the first book Brian has illustrated that someone else has authored.
“I did a lot of photo research and things like that, and I was pretty insistent when I would give him the pages that I wanted to avoid visual cliché and I wanted to avoid and minimise playing on the Kremlin’s playing field,” Andrew continues. “There are all these things they are constantly doing to sacralise, make the Kremlin into this kind of sacred place and Putin is the sacred inheritor of Russia’s great victory in World War II, and I was trying really hard not to fall victim to their depiction and their iconography, if I can use that word.” Andrew was “really blown away” by what Brian produced, he says. Exciting panels and splashes of colour to highlight key moments make reading the book a non-stop pleasure, I can confirm.
Telling the story in this format was “kind of liberating”, Andrew says. “It’s a lot like writing a movie script or a TV script, where at least I did it more as scenes, and each spread of two facing pages was a scene where I had to come up with a core point… The thing which I was also trying to do was use as much original source material as possible, either Russian-language or things like declassified documents, that would sort of capture people who were dealing with Putin or the aspects of Putin’s background or Russian history that aren’t the ones that are trumpeted on the pages of major newspapers or have sort of created this collective, airbrushed version of reality.”
Memoirs of foreign leaders were a great source, Andrew says. “To give the man his due, he’s formidable. He’s been doing this now for 20-plus years, so he’s oftentimes more experienced and more agile than some of the foreigners he’s dealing with, and he has the virtue of knowing what he wants. Obviously it’s not things that we want, but he’s pushing and opportunistic all the time, and he’s not just hanging out… I really see Putin as a Class A opportunist and improviser, rather than the big strategic genius and master planner that he’s sometimes portrayed as being.”
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