Newspaper correspondent The world in Moscow, a specialist in the countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, winner of the prestigious Albert-London prize for the written press in 2019, the Frenchman Benoît Vitkine, 38, has a certain taste for gray areas.
In 2020, with Donbass (Les Arènes, Senghor Prize 2020), his first novel, he knew how to embody with rather rare finesse the fratricidal conflict between Russian separatists and Eastern Ukrainians. A region that the journalist-turned-novelist knew well, having covered it since 2013.
With Wolves, his second black novel, Benoît Vitkine takes as its setting this time the Ukraine of 2012, in the wake of the election of Olena Hapko, the richest businesswoman in Ukraine, to the presidency of the country of 44 millions of inhabitants. During the thirty days that will precede the swearing-in ceremony, Russian secret services, local oligarchs, political forces in the shadows or in broad daylight will engage in a merciless struggle to impose their law and prevent him from reigning as she does. would like on the country.
“It’s a country that I learned to know little by little while working there,” confides Benoît Vitkine, reached by telephone in Moscow, while he continues to cover Russian news. A slightly more framed interview than usual: a law signed on March 4 by President Vladimir Putin provides for firm imprisonment for the authors of publications of “false information” concerning the activities of the Russian army in Ukraine — sentences that can go up to 15 years in prison. Provisions which force all journalists present in Russia, including the correspondent of the World, to walk on eggshells when they speak about the events that have hit Ukraine since February 24. Many international media have suspended their activities in the country.
In the fantasy factory
Benoît Vitkine spent a lot of time in Ukraine, especially in the East to cover the Donbass, mainly in 2014 and 2015.
A formidable “fantasy” factory, he says, which sometimes runs at full speed. The country would be cut in two, in three, even in four. With Russian speakers on one side and Ukrainian speakers on the other.
For the author of Wolves, the reality nevertheless appears to be a little simpler. “Yes, there are disparities, but that does not prevent it from being a country with a certain unity. These are things that interested me. And this country, I really like it very much. It is desperate, often, but it is interesting. And he’s also quite romantic, but that, I realized after the fact. »
From 1974 to 2012 in Wolves, mixing the codes of the political thriller with a sometimes atmospheric writing, Benoît Vitkine will make this 52-year-old woman climb the “film heroine physique” through the levels of industry – but also those of crime. From the east of the country to Odessa, passing of course through kyiv, this “city of four hundred churches, a hundred times looted, a hundred times burned and a hundred times rebuilt”, he writes.
The “female dog”, as she is also nicknamed, hopes to rein in the oligarchs who plague her country – the Son-in-law, the Hairy, the Technocrat, all the “wolves” of the title – and gain the status of true head of state. But once she becomes president, will she be less tempted to steal than the others?
Vladimir Putin’s regime nevertheless intends to maintain its invisible hold on Ukraine. To compromise the president-elect, the Russian secret services will try to pull out of the mothballs an old business of a Ukrainian arms company resold to the Russians.
Long-toothed oligarchs
Power-hungry businessmen, former mafiosos converted into media conglomerates and politics, they are “hardly less harmful than Mexican traffickers”. Even if their trajectories seem to him quite comparable to those of their Russian counterparts, the Ukrainian oligarchs are more interesting in the eyes of Benoît Vitkine, who mixes with a certain brilliance in this novel intimate adventures and geopolitical issues.
“It’s because, on the Russian side, something happened: a certain Putin went through it and it changed the oligarchic landscape quite a bit. That did not clean it up: the oligarchs who were made in the 1990s on the rent from hydrocarbons, on privatizations, are still there and are still economically important. On the other hand, he continues, they are no longer so politically important. Because Putin explained to them that they had no say in politics, and he created a new caste of oligarchs who are his friends, who are just as rich, but more powerful than the oligarchs traditional. »
In Russia, therefore, the system has made the oligarchs people under control, while in Ukraine they have retained much more room for maneuver. There is a form of political pluralism in Ukraine, believes Benoît Vitkine, which involves oligarchic pluralism: “A Ukrainian oligarch is someone who will need a political party to defend his piece of fat. »
It’s hard not to lend the character of Olena Hapko resemblances to Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister and muse of the Orange Revolution, nicknamed the “princess of gas”. But that character, the novelist notes, was arguably inspired in equal measure by Petro Poroshenko, the billionaire businessman who served as Ukraine’s president between 2014 and 2019.
Fifty shades of Grey
Fiction, for this journalist, is an instrument that allows him to dive more deeply into certain destinies. “People in these regions have extremely rich stories, made up of many shocks and traumas,” he explains. And that, when you’re a journalist, that exists, it’s a material that is real, to put it a little curtly. What the novel allows is to combine several characters into one. In order to synthesize, to make things either more understandable or more spectacular. And then to be able to play with these destinies, to confront them with other things. »
It remains that the Ukraine of 2012, as depicted in the novel, can also echo that of 2022. “It is the Ukraine which is not necessarily the Ukraine dreamed of by Putin, points out Benoît Vitkine. For him, the idea that this artificial country is sovereign and independent is an incongruity. But in the logic of a corrupt oligarchic system, it would still be possible for the strongman of the Kremlin to put up with it. “Because an oligarch can be bought, manipulated, blackmailed. What I portray in the book. »
“Ukraine, which is trying to emancipate itself from this model, to turn to a more transparent, more European mode of operation,” he continues, “is not only unacceptable for Russia, but it also represents a danger for Russian control. »
His third book will take as its subject the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in August 1991, at the time of the break-up of the USSR. Still many shades of gray, but not at all a noir novel, he promises, “something more linear, a much lighter, romantic ballad”.