New French prize went to a book about Putin’s private life. It will appear in French only in three weeks

New French literary prizes, the Prix Strasbourg, announced their first laureates on Tuesday, and the main one went to a book about Vladimir Putin’s private life. It was written by two Russian investigative journalists who now live in the United States, Roman Badanin and Michail Rubin. According to the jury, it reads like a spy novel and is the result of several hundred interviews with witnesses, some of whom later disappeared in tragic circumstances. LRT ↗

The full wording of the verdict goes even further than the agency report. The Grand Prix Strasbourg Crédit Mutuel went to the book because, according to the jury, it is “a journalistic and political event”, has thirty chapters and “breaks with the impressionistic approach, with sensationalist biography and with the usual popularization about Putin”. In its own wording, the jury awarded it to “the courage and commitment of two journalists” and added that the book “has its place in Strasbourg and its European Court of Human Rights”. ActuaLitté ↗

What is interesting is where the book was publicly nominated. In July, the organizers published the nominations for three of the four prizes, and Le Tsar en personne was among four essays in the Prix Strasbourg EBRA category, together with a new book on Europe by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. When the main prize was founded, however, it was presented as an award to an author for an entire body of work, and no list of candidates was deliberately published for it. The wording of the verdict corresponds to that, because the jury did not honor only the book, but the work of two people. The essay prize, for which the book was competing, ultimately went to the French journalist Marion Dubreuilová for a book about the trial of Dominique Pelicot, which according to the jury “advanced the fight against sexual violence”. ActuaLitté ↗

The prizes are entirely new; they were established on June 17 this year. Behind them are the banking group Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, the bank CIC, the Strasbourg literary festival Bibliothèques idéales and the media group EBRA, the largest publisher of regional dailies in France. The total endowment of the four prizes is 55,000 euros; the agency report gives 20,000 for the main winner, but the organizers themselves have not published the distribution of the sum among the categories. The jury included people from the book world, journalists from the EBRA group, representatives of the partners and European students. According to EBRA Éditions chief executive Mathilde Reumauxová, the ambition is a prize open to the world, not focused on Paris. LRT ↗

The prizes will be presented on September 29 in Strasbourg’s Saint-Guillaume church during the Bibliothèques idéales festival. In French, the award-winning book will at that moment have been on shelves for exactly twelve days. The publisher Les Arènes is to publish it on September 17 under the title Le Tsar en personne, in paperback for 24.90 euros, and bookshops are so far offering it only for pre-order. In Russian, it was already published last year by BAbook, which was created as a book club around the writer Boris Akunin, and it has 472 pages. Leslibraires.fr ↗

What the book is actually about was described in most detail by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, of which Proekt is a partner media outlet. In it, Badanin and Rubin trace Putin’s path to power through people it was not permitted to write about in Russia. Among them is his Leningrad judo trainer Leonid Usviacov, whom the book describes as a career criminal. In 1994 he was shot dead, and on his gravestone is the inscription “finally I have died, but the mafia lives forever”. The book also takes the reader to the St. Petersburg strip club Luna, where Putin, as deputy to mayor Anatolij Sobčak, used to have meetings, and reconstructs the breakdown of his marriage as well as his role in discrediting Prosecutor General Jurij Skuratov in 1999. “How Putin behaves off camera says much more about his real worldview than his speeches,” Badanin told the consortium. ICIJ ↗

Both paid for that work. On July 15, 2021, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office designated Proekt’s American parent company an “undesirable organization”, turning any cooperation with it into both an administrative and criminal offense, and on the same day the Ministry of Justice placed five people from the newsroom, including Badanin, on the list of “foreign agents”. Proekt thus became the first media outlet in Russia with such a label. According to Rubin, it was a “cumulative response” to what the newsroom had written about Putin and his circle. Committee to Protect Journalists ↗ The consortium adds that in 2021 police searched the homes of both journalists as part of a criminal prosecution for defamation related to their articles about Iľja Traber, whom the consortium describes as a Putin acquaintance and an alleged figure in organized crime. “In a broader sense, this book cost us our homeland,” Badanin said. ICIJ ↗

The jury’s mention of the European Court of Human Rights has a sharp edge. Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe on March 16, 2022, three weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, and on September 16 of the same year it ceased to be a party to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Strasbourg court can still rule only on Russian cases that occurred before that date. The book awarded in its city therefore describes a country over whose more recent actions this court no longer has jurisdiction. Európsky parlament ↗

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What remains verified is a narrow slice. The prizes have been announced, the categories and names of the laureates have been published, and the wording of the jury’s verdict is public. What the book itself claims is the journalistic work of Badanin and Rubin, based mostly on anonymous sources, documents, contemporary articles and memoirs. The consortium described it as a breach of a decades-long taboo that the Kremlin imposed on Putin’s private life, and that is also the reason why its claims cannot be verified from official Russian sources. Of the European media monitored by HotInfo, only Lithuania’s public broadcaster LRT wrote about the prize on Tuesday; Slovak and Czech media have not done so yet. France 24 ↗

Photo: Roman Badanin in an interview for Voice of America. Author: VOA / Wikimedia Commons / public domain.