Fiction has a habit of coming to life in Russia. On the evening of 2 April 2023, the military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky appeared at an event in St Petersburg organised by Cyber Front Z, a group of semi-professional keyboard warriors who boost Kremlin war propaganda online. With more than half a million followers, Tatarsky was a mid-tier celebrity on Telegram, the social media app that has become a hub of Russian news and political debate.

As guests mingled, a young woman with long, salon-waved blond hair approached Tatarsky. She presented him with an unusual gift: a gold-painted statue of himself. About two minutes later, the statue exploded, killing Tatarsky and injuring 42 people. The blond woman – 26-year-old St Petersburg native Darya Trepova – was arrested the next day. She said she had believed the statue contained a listening device, not a bomb, and that she had acted on orders from a man in Ukraine she knew only as “Gestalt”.

Trepova was an unlikely killer. A vegan feminist who had dropped out of medical school and worked at a vintage clothing store, she had been arrested at an anti-war protest in February 2022 and held for 10 days. Not only was there nothing to suggest that she would carry out an assassination, Tatarsky was an odd target, a bellicose social media influencer without real power. Trepova was sentenced to 27 years in prison for her crime.

Absurd yet disturbing, memorable yet baffling, the incident seemed straight out of a story by Victor Olegovich Pelevin, one of Russia’s most famous living writers. In at least one respect, the connection between fiction and reality was direct: “Vladlen Tatarsky” was not the military blogger’s real name, but a nom de plume inspired by the hero of Pelevin’s 1999 novel Generation P. The notoriously reclusive Pelevin did not comment on Tatarsky’s assassination – he hasn’t communicated with the press since 2010 – but his most recent novel, Cool, published in late 2024, closed the circle of reference. The novel featured a perverse caricature of Darya Trepova as Darya Troedyrkina, a castrating feminist tasked with assassinating a male dictator. Her last name means “three holes”.

Once the brightest star of Russia’s post-Soviet literary scene, Pelevin has retreated into an ideological hall of mirrors, writing elaborate satires of gender and authoritarianism while avoiding direct engagement with Russian politics. The real-life Trepova, however misguided, was motivated by her indignation at Russia’s war; Pelevin made her into an anti-feminist joke. At a time when many of his literary peers have fled Russia for political reasons, Pelevin’s descent from dazzling young writer to misogynist crank mirrors the decline of mainstream Russian culture in a new era of authoritarian censorship.

Pelevin started publishing fiction just as Soviet censorship was crumbling thanks to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness. He soon became famous for edgy, hallucinogenic stories that could never have been published under the old Soviet system. By the time Generation P came out, he was already acclaimed not only in Russia, but in the US and throughout Europe. With its puns, postmodern games, and vigorous mixture of high and low culture, his work chimed with larger trends in global literature. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “a Russian David Foster Wallace, Will Self, Haruki Murakami”. According to Time, he was the “psychedelic Nabokov of the cyber age”.

More than this, Pelevin’s writing seemed to provide an ever more accurate guide to the new workings of Russian power. Generation P imagines advertising, television and politics as the key tools that corrupt, secretive interests use to create a false reality. The novel’s hero, Vavilen Tatarsky, is an aspiring poet whose literary ambitions are scrambled by the Soviet collapse. In the free-for-all of newly capitalist Russia, Tatarsky goes into advertising, “translating” American slogans into Russian ones. (“Gucci for Men: Be a European, smell better.”) In typical Pelevinian fashion, this over-the-top satire of an already-over-the-top reality soon transmogrifies into an occult, psychedelic fantasy. High on mushrooms, Vavilen discovers that the Russian government is a virtual reality scripted by writers, acting in service of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. Vavilen gets a job scripting Russia’s simulacrum of democracy. Soon he’s writing lines for Yeltsin and for the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who treats Russia as his own private Monopoly board. The novel remains one of the best literary snapshots of the precarious, delirious, grimly hilarious mood of 1990s Moscow. Published in the US as Homo Zapiens and in the UK as Babylon, it has sold more than 3.5m copies worldwide.

Pelevin has long been lauded as a kind of soothsayer who predicted Russia’s post-truth, neo-imperial present. Fans believe that his novels foretold the rise of Putinist coercive political spectacle and the descent of post-Soviet Russia into a sham democracy (Generation P); Russia’s engineering of a 2014 rebellion in eastern Ukraine and its full-scale invasion in 2022 (in S.N.U.F.F., published in 2011); and even the rise of Chat GPT (in iPhuck 10, from 2017). Pelevin’s avid readers include the notorious Vladislav Surkov, who worked as a leading Kremlin spin doctor from 1999 until 2014. Like the assassinated military blogger, Surkov is a Pelevin fan who resembles a character from a Pelevin novel: a would-be writer turned ad man turned political puppet master, who helped fashion Russia’s descent into ultra-cynical, media-driven virtual politics in the 2010s.

Pelevin’s oracular quality has been heightened by his total absence from public life. Even when someone announced his death online in 2016, he did not come forward to offer a correction. This erstwhile prophet is so elusive that rumours have swirled that he has been replaced by a neural network or a team of ghostwriters. As his fellow writer Dmitry Bykov once put it: “No one knows where Pelevin lives – because Pelevin lives on the astral plane.” His only communications are through his annual novels. In Russia, a new one appears every fall amid a flurry of press.

Over the past decade, many of Pelevin’s peers have left Russia out of fear or disgust at intensifying censorship, political repression and the assault on Ukraine. They have been declared foreign agents, put on wanted lists, arrested in absentia, stripped of publishing contracts, rejected by booksellers. Bykov suffered an apparent poisoning in 2019, which bore similarities to the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. He now lives in the US, and booksellers in Russia are reluctant to sell his work.

Pelevin, on the other hand, has managed to escape government censure, and his books continue to sell well. His place of residence is a closely guarded secret – even the continent is uncertain – but there is no reason to believe that he left Russia out of fear for his own safety. His precise position on the political spectrum is also something of a mystery. But his failure to choose a side on the war in Ukraine has earned him the antipathy, even contempt, of anti-war Russian writers and critics. In the view of one Russian literary critic, Pelevin has become a pro-Putin writer whose popular fiction is a “horrible cocktail of postmodernism and fascism” that recruits supporters for the regime. But Pelevin’s work also includes mockery of Russian ultranationalist philosophy and a clear hatred for authoritarianism. Rather than actively supporting Putin, he advocates a philosophy of all-encompassing cynicism that invalidates any hope of political change. This, it seems, is part of the reason he continues to be so popular in his homeland.

Pelevin’s Russian editor and agent are under strict orders not to comment on any aspect of his personal life. Fans debate whether he lives in Berlin or London, Thailand, Korea or Japan. He has never had any social media presence. Since the early 1990s, he has hidden behind his trademark sunglasses; even when he was included in a New Yorker portrait of the six best young novelists in 1998, he refused to remove them for a photo by Richard Avedon. He has not allowed himself to be photographed in public since 2001 and has not given an interview to a journalist since 2010.

The basic facts of Pelevin’s early years are a matter of public record, at least. As a young child, he lived in a communal apartment in central Moscow, sharing a single room with his parents, before the family moved to their own apartment in a newly built high-rise complex on the outskirts of the city. He had an exceptional memory, but he was not a particularly good student. He trained as an engineer and worked for a while servicing trams. A friend and former colleague once recalled how he and Pelevin spent their spare time making fake Japanese figurines, “ageing” them with acid and selling them on the street.

Pelevin had become fascinated with Buddhism when he was a boy, studying it through Soviet atheism textbooks. As a young man, he worked part-time for a journal of esoterica called Nauka i Religiya (Science and Religion), where he published an article on how to decipher runes. His first short story appeared in a 1989 issue of the journal that also included Stalin’s horoscope and an article about the abominable snowman. His first story collection, The Blue Lantern, published in 1991, won an important prize in Russia’s newly established ecosystem of western-style literary competitions.

In his early, now classic, short stories and novellas, Pelevin drew on the Russian literary canon, the dismal humour of the late-Soviet period and its violent, sequinned aftermath, to create existential comedies that shocked and delighted his readers. The documentary Restless Garden, made by the Russian-American director Victor Ginzburg in August 1991, is a surreal snapshot of the world that shaped Pelevin’s early work. In the film, the beautiful bohemians of Moscow have gathered in Gorky Park to perform an “erotic art ritual”, complete with torch dances and wheels of fire. They are protesting Soviet repression – but in a matter of days there will be no Soviet government at all. The performance is a cross between a Duran Duran video and a Babylonian fertility ritual. A former ballerina turned stripper dances in a dovecote. The vodka-swigging Night Wolves, a gang of bikers who would later become avid supporters of Putin, serve as security. Impossibly beautiful women dance in mermaid tails, twirling around a man sporting a phallus made from a plastic funnel.

While Ginzburg was filming this scene, Pelevin was most likely at his parents’ apartment, finishing his novella Omon Ra. Completed just days before the coup that precipitated the USSR’s final collapse, Omon Ra presents a grotesque alternative vision of the country’s space programme, which is still remembered as one of its proudest achievements. In Pelevin’s version, the cosmonauts had their legs cut off so that they could fit into the clapped-out Soviet spacecrafts. Like Laika the space dog, they were sent to die because the USSR didn’t have the technology to bring them back. Or perhaps, the novel suggests, they never went to space at all, and the whole “space programme” was a hoax, a vibrating box filmed in the Moscow metro system.

Nearly everyone, in Russia and abroad, took Omon Ra to be satire. And they loved it. In the US, Spin magazine named it the novel of the year. But Pelevin explicitly rejected the label of satirist. In an interview, he explained that Omon Ra was in fact “a novel about coming of age in a world that is absurd and scary. My part of the scary world was Russia.” His novels were getting at something more universal than mere mockery of the Soviet Union. In his laconic 1993 novella The Yellow Arrow, passengers live on a train that is hurtling inexorably toward a broken bridge. When someone dies, the body is heaved out the window. Life on the train certainly resembles Russian society in the early 1990s, with its grotesque corruption, widespread drunkenness, bandit-entrepreneurs, underground artists and interest in the occult. But a Buddhist interpretation is equally apt. Pelevin was telling his readers that those in search of freedom must find a way to exit the moving vehicle – if not through death, then perhaps via meditative transcendence, or literature itself. “The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena,” he once told an interviewer. “So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you.”

Even after these early successes, Pelevin continued to live at his parents’ apartment, spending hours alone in his bedroom with his PC and PlayStation and little more than a mattress on the floor. (One of his early stories melds the computer game Prince of Persia with Soviet central planning.) Meanwhile, the world outside his bedroom was falling apart. Thanks to economic shock therapy, privatisation and hyperinflation, along with the near collapse of the state, Russia in the 1990s was such a violent, crime-ridden place that people were afraid to answer their own front doors. In the mid-90s, Pelevin sent a letter to Barbara Epler, his editor at the independent American publishing house New Directions. “I think you can use express mail to send the contract,” he wrote. “The only problem with it is that they deliver it at your place, and no sane person in Moscow opens the door at the ring. But if I know that something is going to arrive, I’ll take the risk.” Epler has a vivid memory of asking him, during his visit to New York, what elderly Russians were doing now that their pensions were worthless. “They die,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.

“I feel disgusted by everything about my country,” Pelevin told the New York Times in 2000. “In the Soviet times you could escape from the evil of the state by withdrawing into the private spaces of your own head; but now the evil seems to be diffused everywhere.”

Even before he stopped giving interviews, Pelevin was unusually hard to pin down. Was he sinister or generous? Charming or boorish? How did he want readers to interpret his works? A 1996 interview with Clark Blaise, the director of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program, is the only available video of Pelevin speaking. He wears sunglasses throughout. His voice is soft, almost soothing, and he has a winning, ironic laugh. He speaks English with the fluency and occasional mispronunciations (“paradigm” with a hard g) of a voracious reader. Throughout the interview, he resists literary and political labels, and all metaphorical readings. Of his forthcoming novel, The Life of Insects, Pelevin says, smiling: “It’s about insects, Clark.” Novels, he argues, are not a good way to learn about a country. If you want to learn about Russia, why not read a news article instead? Here is his trademark perversity; in 1996, many of his foreign readers were attracted to his work precisely because it provided a portal into post-Soviet life that was more vivid and more perceptive than anything they could read in a newspaper.

At the time, Pelevin was helping to remake the Russian publishing industry, which was facing a crisis. This was a country whose greatest export was often said to be literature, where writers gave their names to thousands of streets, institutions and towns. But the collapse of the Soviet Union had destroyed the structures that had shaped Soviet and dissident literature for decades. Publishers were struggling to stay afloat. Detective novels, romance fiction and sensational nonfiction swept the market. One of the bestselling books of 1994 was a sequel to Gone With the Wind, written by “Julia Hillpatrick” – who was, in fact, a group of men employed by a Minsk publishing house.

Pelevin, who straddled the realms of high literature and pulp fiction, was one of the only serious writers who sold well in this venal new marketplace. His first long novel, 1996’s Chapaev and Void (published in the US as Buddha’s Little Finger and in the UK as The Clay Machine-Gun) has been called the first post-Soviet Russian literary bestseller. In the late 90s, one Russian publication declared Pelevin the most fashionable writer in the country. Russian Playboy called him a “wizard”. The glamorous editor of Russian Vogue, Aliona Doletskaya, arranged for Pelevin to meet her and a Vogue journalist, Karina Dobrotvorskaya, at a Moscow sushi restaurant in 1999. When he arrived, two hours late, he began knocking back sake. In her article about the meeting, Dobrotvorskaya observed that he seemed to be playing a character. He spoke in the slang of Russian hoodlums, laughed long and loud at his own jokes, hooted with delight when he heard or pronounced a pleasing turn of phrase, and made extremely vulgar jokes about “thoroughly banging” women. When she took out a recorder, he expressed disappointment at the fact that an attractive interviewer only wanted to dine with him in order to record his bon mots. Later he suggested that if he sounded smart enough, she’d take off her clothes.

This was not how the intelligentsia expected a great Russian writer to behave. In her account of the lunch, Dobrotvorskaya used a clever selection of interspersed quotes from Pelevin’s work to indicate her mounting impatience with his juvenile and sexist behaviour. The article was accompanied by a candid photo that remains the most unflattering image of Pelevin in circulation. His face puffy and belligerent, the famous writer looks like a drunk, ageing hooligan. He later claimed to the New York Times that Doletskaya had tricked him into the interview, recording him with a hidden microphone. But he is known for misleading journalists, especially foreign ones.

In her article, Dobrotvorskaya made it clear that she was considering throwing a drink in Pelevin’s face. But she admitted that she was impressed by his bizarre, energetic mixture of the language of Russian classics, advertising slogans and thieves’ slang – the same kind of slang that Putin would later use in interviews. Pelevin was, in the words of the scholar Bradley A Gorski, “too irreverent to be a literary author, but too smart to be a pulp author”. Pelevin was a master of having it both ways and, for a while at least, this slipperiness was an asset rather than a liability.

“Victor Olegovich has established his own brand so well that he should be a case study in textbooks on branding and ads,” one of Pelevin’s former editors once told a Russian journalist. “He’s the one no one sees, but everyone talks about.” When Gillian Redfearn, an editor at the UK sci-fi publisher Gollancz, edited Pelevin in the early 2010s, all communication occurred through a go-between. This intermediary told Redfearn there would be no question of an author photo. Gollancz published two of Pelevin’s novels, and then, “as mysteriously as he came into our list, he vanished again,” Redfearn told me.

In a 2013 Russian television documentary about Pelevin, those who knew him in his youth describe his physical appearance as if they are helping to solve a world-historical mystery. Even his height, the shape of his eyes, his physical bearing are objects of fascination. He is big, with beautiful hands and an enigmatic smile. He doesn’t look western, but he isn’t eastern, either. The editor of a magazine that published Pelevin’s early work says that she wouldn’t be able to recognise him in a crowd. According to the director of a film adaptation of one of Pelevin’s books, his face is closed “like a fist”.

Russian reporters continue to pursue Pelevin with fervour. In 2021, journalists at a Russian tabloid combed his recent novels for clues about his possible whereabouts. Turkey, the Canary Islands, Cuba and Thailand emerged as the most likely candidates. The reporters reviewed the passenger manifests of flights to and from those countries and Sheremetyevo, Moscow’s international airport, and found that from 2017 on, Pelevin had travelled between Bangkok, Barcelona, Phuket and Málaga. On 30 November 2019, he had gone to Bangkok; in December 2020, he received a new passport at the Thai embassy; on 10 February 2021, he received his visa. He was weathering the pandemic in Thailand.

The reporters used a description of a Thai retreat in his most recent novel to find a real centre that fit the bill; it was on the island of Koh Samui. They called reception. It turned out that Pelevin was staying there under his real name, and the receptionist gave the reporters his bungalow number. He didn’t answer the phone in the room and, despite all the effort and money the journalists had spent in their pursuit, they didn’t doorstep him. Instead, they loitered for days outside the hotel, waiting for him to come out. Then they took his picture. In it, we see an unremarkable middle-aged man in Pelevin’s signature mirrored sunglasses, along with grey sandals, a black T-shirt and black cargo shorts. Fortunately for the reporters, he had his surgical mask pushed down to his chin. The news caused excitement across the Russian internet: Pelevin had been found! Finally he had been shaken from the perpetual youth ensured by the absence of new portraits.

From time to time, Pelevin’s invisible hand reaches out of cyberspace to toy with the public. In 2022, the well-known Russian rapper Slava KPSS posted on Instagram about a recent surprise. “A couple of years ago, a strange man started writing to me by email, offering good money for a series of interviews, but the publication he named couldn’t be found in Google. The questions he asked were, to put it mildly, strange … He asked about my attitude to Buddhist philosophy, history, rap battles.” The interview never appeared anywhere, and the rapper forgot about it. But when Pelevin’s 2022 novel KGBT+ was released, the rapper found that the main character resembled him and used words taken verbatim from the interview he had given to the mysterious journalist. Slava KPSS was delighted. Pelevin, of course, made no comment.

Whether Pelevin lives in Moscow, in Thailand or on the astral plane, his public is in Russia. So are his publishing contracts and the booksellers who stack his books high on publication day. His prodigious output and refusal to do publicity made it harder to secure foreign publishing contracts; his most recent book to be published in English was 2011’s S.N.U.F.F. No longer translated or celebrated in the US or western Europe, he is likely dependent on his Russian publishing contracts for his income.

In Russia post-2022, earning a living through writing requires skilled evasion of dangerous political issues. Above all, one must not speak out against Russia’s war in Ukraine. Boris Akunin, another of the greatest post-Soviet publishing successes, became an important figure in the protests for fair elections in 2012. He left Russia in 2014. Since stating his opposition to the war in Ukraine, he has been declared a foreign agent and placed on a wanted list. He has been dropped by his Russian publisher and his books are no longer carried by a major retailer and ebook site.

With his longstanding commitment to ambiguity, irony and public silence, Pelevin was well prepared for this new literary environment. He has neither condemned the war nor voiced support for it. Readers can find both pro- and anti-Kremlin positions in his works of the past decade. Part of the difficulty in discerning his views is that Pelevin has shifted away from stories set in a recognisable version of Russia. Instead, his annual novels address a topical theme, often one that concerns the west as much as Russia. Several allude to Ukraine, international politics, prison camps and secret police, but they never offer any explicit criticism of Putin or his policies. Love for Three Zuckerbrins (2014) was a dystopian fantasy involving social media, Ukraine’s Maidan protests and the video game Angry Birds; Methuselah’s Lamp, or the Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons (2016) was about identity politics, Atlanticists and Russian nationalists, making light of all three; Secret Views of Mount Fuji (2018) was a scornful parody of #MeToo.

In 2022’s KGBT+, Pelevin’s 19th novel and the second highest-selling Russian novel of the year, both Russian nationalists and contemporary western liberals police and imprison people: the protagonist chooses the pseudonym “KGBT+” to appeal to both sides. Yet the idea that the two sides are in opposition is just a setup: in reality, members of the elite from both sides of the political spectrum live together as immortal, disembodied brains in a storage facility, earning money when their supporters clash. The novel’s rather facile anti-elite cynicism played badly with those Russians who are deeply concerned by the country’s descent into unmitigated authoritarianism. Even the Buddhist-inspired solipsism of Pelevin’s earlier work now rubs some readers the wrong way. What is the point of brooding about the prison of consciousness when political prisoners are dying?

Still, his work continues to sell in Russia. In 2023 and 2024, the top selling title published by Eksmo, Pelevin’s publishing house, was a pink-jacketed self-help book called Treat Yourself Tenderly. Pelevin’s books were not far behind. Many Russians are disgusted by official politics but even the mildest political opposition is dangerous. In an atmosphere of ever-intensifying censorship, with the last traces of free political speech eradicated from Russian life, it is safest to remain out of the fray. The Soviet experience and the failures of post-Soviet democracy also left many with intense distrust of politics in general. KGBT+ propounds the gospel of “letitbe-ism” – in Russian letitbism. This quasi-Buddhist philosophy suggests that whatever happens will happen whether you like it or not, so why not just accept it? Beneath his countercultural facade, Pelevin has become a prolific exponent of contemporary Russia’s dominant religions: cynicism and quietism.

The well-known Russian literary critic Galina Yuzefovich has been reading Pelevin since she was 17, when her father gave her a copy of The Life of Insects. (“It’s about insects, Clark.”) Today she is an erudite scion of the Russian intelligentsia in exile. She lives in Cyprus, where she moved after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Her continued enthusiasm for Pelevin in recent years has made her an outlier. In a 2023 online lecture about Pelevin’s work, she opened by saying, as if at an AA meeting: “I’m Galina and I read Pelevin.”

Yuzefovich has argued that Pelevin is like an oracle to whom Russians turn when they need help interpreting their reality. His evasion of direct questions, his refusal to offer any kind of “content” except his novels, his renunciation of any public presence, only serve to increase his authority. In her review of KGBT+, Yuzefovich wrote that Pelevin’s tone was “psychotherapeutic”. For her, the novel served as consolation and encouragement, advising readers on how to survive the current circumstances. “It’s as if Pelevin is leading us to the edge of an abyss,” she wrote then, “taking us by the hand and saying: ‘Don’t be afraid, jump.’”

Pelevin has long been notorious for punishing his critics with insulting roles in his books. But Yuzefovich’s generous reviews of his annual novels in the Russian exile outlet Meduza won her a rare honour: she was featured as a positive character, Fish, in his 2023 novel Journey to Eleusis, where she answers the narrator’s questions about the relationship between Russian literature, the national soul and violence. The name Fish, along with the character’s effortless insight, was a reference to the name of Yuzefovich’s Telegram channel, Pilot Fish, which has about 50,000 subscribers. When I interviewed Yuzefovich, she sounded pleased about her cameo in the novel.

We spoke before the release of Pelevin’s latest book, Cool, which takes place in the same universe as several previous works. As many Russian critics noted with indignation, Yuzefovich has an even bigger role in this one. In Cool, Fish is affiliated with Darya Troedyrkina’s band of macho feminists armed with lethal “neurostrapons”. Fish has long, demeaning scenes of bondage sex with an eminent Bolshevik writer. Their safe word is “Yanagihara” – a reference to the author of the bestselling A Little Life, a dark novel of sexual trauma among gay men that is no longer available for sale in Russia, where there is a sustained campaign against “LGBT propaganda”.

Cool has garnered some of the worst reviews of Pelevin’s career. More and more critics believe that he is tarnishing his legacy and embarrassing himself. “A creative crisis cannot be cured by describing sex with a literary critic,” wrote the columnist Natalia Lomikina. The critic Anastasia Zavozova compared Pelevin to “the withered Cumaean Sibyl”, who asked for longevity without asking for eternal youth; eventually, she shrank until she was kept in a jar, only her voice remaining. The Fish tale has a strong whiff of self-destruction: why would Pelevin humiliate one of his most prestigious admirers? Yuzefovich did not publish her customary review of Pelevin’s annual novel. When we swapped messages more recently, she told me that it came as “a great disappointment, both personal and literary”. Even more than by his sexual fantasies, she was disgusted by the political “cowardice and opportunism” that has replaced the ambivalence and ambiguity of his earlier work.

Two weeks after Cool was published, an unknown person affixed a plaque to a building in the brutalist late-Soviet high-rise complex where Pelevin spent much of his early life. It reads:

In this housing complex, in a three-room apartment, Victor Olegovich Pelevin lived with his family: a world-famous Russian and Soviet writer, winner of 23 literary awards, an opponent of consumer culture and the author of the quote: ‘An anti-Russian conspiracy certainly exists.’

A similar plaque had appeared to celebrate the singer Shaman, whose whole career is based on his eager support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. This is sad company for a writer who was once celebrated around the world. The quote, which comes from Generation P, seems intended to position Pelevin as a proud Russian nationalist who supports the war in Ukraine. But the person who made the plaque was either a lazy reader, or wilfully misconstruing Pelevin’s original work. The full sentence in Generation P is longer: “An anti-Russian conspiracy certainly exists – the only problem is that the entire adult population of Russia participates in it.”

While Russia and Iran have deepened cooperation in recent years—especially through military-technical exchanges and shared opposition to Western influence—the Kremlin has signaled that it would not be obligated to support Iran militarily in the event of an external assault, despite the Strategic Partnership Agreement signed in 2021. This stance reflects a careful Russian balancing act and raises questions about the credibility of its strategic commitments, the fragility of bilateral trust, and the limits of Moscow’s great-power ambitions.

Russia often prefers non-binding or vague commitments in its bilateral agreements. The strategic partnership with Iran contains no mutual defense clause, unlike NATO’s Article 5. This gives the Kremlin maximum flexibility to avoid entanglement in direct military conflicts that do not serve its core interests.

Russia is deeply stretched militarily due to its ongoing war in Ukraine and other global operations. A direct confrontation with the U.S. or Israel over Iran would be strategically disastrous, opening another front that Russia cannot afford.

Despite tensions, Russia maintains a delicate but functional relationship with Israel, especially over Syrian airspace deconfliction. A full military commitment to Iran could fracture this balance and alienate wealthy Gulf partners like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with whom Russia coordinates within OPEC+ and broader energy diplomacy.

Implications for Russia’s Reputation as a Security Partner

1. Erosion of Trust

Russia’s reluctance to offer Iran concrete military backing may undermine perceptions of Moscow as a reliable strategic partner, especially for countries facing Western military pressure.

2. Pattern of One-Sided Alliances

Other states—such as Armenia, Serbia, or Central Asian republics—may interpret Russia’s stance as a warning: even strong rhetoric and partnership agreements don’t guarantee military protection. This can lead to diplomatic hedging or movement toward other security guarantors (e.g., China, Turkey, or even NATO).

3. Damage to Multilateral Initiatives

Iran may rethink its engagement with Russia in multilateral formats such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or BRICS, where Tehran has sought deeper alignment. The lack of military assurances could reduce Moscow’s appeal as a pillar of alternative international order.

Impact on Bilateral Relations with Iran

1. Growing Asymmetry

The Russia-Iran relationship is becoming increasingly asymmetric: Iran provides drones and military tech for use in Ukraine, while Russia offers little concrete protection. This breeds resentment and could limit Iranian cooperation over time.

2. Strategic Recalibration in Tehran

Iran may seek to diversify its partnerships, increasing outreach to China or accelerating its domestic military build-up. It may also question the sincerity of Russia’s anti-Western stance if Moscow continues to maintain equivocal relations with Israel or Arab rivals.

3. Tactical vs. Strategic Alliance

Russia and Iran may remain tactical partners—cooperating in Syria or against Western sanctions—but will struggle to build a deep strategic alliance without mutual defense assurances.

Consequences for Russia’s Broader Diplomacy

1. Weakening Soft Power in the Global South

Many non-Western states view Russia as a counterweight to Western hegemony. If Russia is seen as unwilling to “walk the walk” when allies are threatened, it undermines that narrative.

2. Credibility Gap in Security Promises

If Moscow’s strategic partnerships don’t include clear commitments or response plans, countries facing security threats may turn toward China’s rising defense networks or Western security umbrellas for protection. Russia’s refusal to commit to Iran’s defense in a future war exposes the limits of its power projection and the transactional nature of its alliances. While pragmatism may protect short-term interests, the long-term consequence is a reduction in diplomatic trust, a decline in influence among vulnerable partners, and the reinforcement of Russia’s image as a selective and self-interested power, rather than a dependable global actor.

Strategic Ambiguity: Russia’s Reluctance to Defend Iran and the Limits of Its Global Commitments

Introduction The strategic relationship between Russia and Iran has drawn considerable international attention in recent years. Both countries have found common ground in opposing Western dominance, particularly U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Eurasia. However, Russia’s refusal to provide a concrete military guarantee to Iran in the event of an external assault—despite the 2021 Strategic Partnership Agreement—exposes the asymmetry and limits of this alliance. This paper examines why the Kremlin has taken this position, what it signals about Russia’s credibility as a strategic partner, and how it will impact both the bilateral relationship with Iran and Russia’s broader diplomatic posture.

I. Russia’s Strategic Ambiguity: A Calculated Choice

1. Non-Binding Nature of the Strategic Partnership Agreement Unlike formal military alliances, such as NATO or the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Russia-Iran Strategic Partnership Agreement lacks enforceable defense clauses. This is a deliberate feature of Russian foreign policy, designed to preserve flexibility and avoid entanglement in conflicts that could escalate beyond Moscow’s control or interests.

2. Avoiding Strategic Overextension Russia is already heavily engaged in Ukraine, managing its military presence in Syria, and maintaining influence across Africa and Central Asia. Committing to Iran’s defense would risk overextending Russian military capabilities and provoke direct confrontation with the United States, Israel, or their allies. The Kremlin prefers to retain maneuverability rather than becoming entangled in another high-stakes theater.

3. Balancing Regional Relationships Russia has cultivated a complex network of relationships in the Middle East, including with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Taking a firm pro-Iranian military stance could jeopardize these ties, particularly given Israel’s opposition to Iranian entrenchment in Syria and its ongoing military operations against Iranian-backed forces.

II. Implications for Russia’s Reputation and Global Commitments

1. Perceived Unreliability Russia’s unwillingness to defend a key partner like Iran raises doubts among other allies and partners regarding the reliability of Russian security guarantees. Countries that have previously relied on Moscow for support—such as Armenia or Belarus—may now question the depth of Russia’s commitments.

2. Shift Toward Transactional Diplomacy The Kremlin’s position underscores a broader shift toward transactional diplomacy: engaging in partnerships for immediate strategic benefit without long-term security commitments. This approach undermines the trust necessary for sustained alliances and can erode Moscow’s influence in regions where competitors like China are offering more concrete alternatives.

3. Challenges to Russia’s Soft Power in the Global South Many states in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia view Russia as a counterweight to Western interventionism. However, if Russia is perceived as unreliable or self-serving, its soft power appeal will wane. This could lead to a strategic realignment toward other powers or multilateral institutions.

III. Effects on Russia-Iran Bilateral Relations

1. Rising Iranian Frustration Iran, which has supplied Russia with military drones and technology during the Ukraine conflict, may view Russia’s reluctance to commit as a betrayal. Tehran may begin to reassess the balance of the relationship, seeking more leverage or reducing cooperation in areas like Syria or arms sales.

2. Asymmetric Partnership and Strategic Drift The imbalance in the relationship—with Iran providing more tangible support to Russia than it receives in return—could lead to a gradual drift. Iran may pivot more toward China or attempt to assert greater autonomy in regional affairs, reducing Russian influence.

3. Tactical Cooperation Without Strategic Depth Despite tensions, Russia and Iran are likely to maintain tactical cooperation in Syria, energy coordination, and circumvention of sanctions. However, the absence of mutual defense commitments limits the depth and resilience of their alliance.

IV. Broader Consequences for Regional and Global Politics

1. Decline in Russian Mediation Credibility Russia’s role as a mediator in Middle Eastern conflicts depends on its perceived neutrality and reliability. Its unwillingness to support Iran militarily could diminish its clout in future negotiations or multilateral efforts.

2. Incentive for Alternative Alliances Iran and other nations may increasingly look to China, regional organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), or even new blocs for security and economic cooperation. This could reduce Russia’s influence in institutions where it once played a leading role.3. Strategic Vacuum and Greater Instability By not offering a firm commitment, Russia risks creating a strategic vacuum in the event of a major crisis involving Iran. This could lead to greater instability in the Persian Gulf, heighten sectarian tensions, and draw in other global powers with unpredictable outcomes.

The surprise appointment of a hard-line critic of Jan. 6 protesters to lead the FBI’s Washington Field Office has set the conservative political world ablaze and put new FBI Director Kash Patel in the line of fire from a vocal group of President Donald J. Trump supporters.

News first broke April 4 in the New York Times that Steven J. Jensen was named assistant director in charge of the most powerful of the FBI’s 56 field offices. Conservative critics and pundits who were expecting to see the FBI gutted and reformed under President Trump took the news of Jensen’s appointment hard.

Jensen 'built the construct for the January 6 witch hunt.'

After the Times published an article about Jensen’s appointment, the Gateway Pundit called it “fake news.” On April 6, Blaze News confirmed Jensen’s appointment to the key FBI job. Debate raged on social media on whether Jensen’s appointment was real and why the FBI had not made a formal announcement of the promotion. Such major appointments are typically announced via a news release.

“He was a key figure in this domestic terror push against January Sixers, according to testimony before the House,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “He treated them all as terrorists and was one of the key instigators in pushing the narrative within the bureaucracy that these folks needed to be jailed and ferreted out.”

The FBI’s National Press Office declined to comment on Jensen’s appointment and referred Blaze News to the homepage for the Washington Field Office, where Jensen is now listed as the assistant director in charge.

Jensen was associated with some of the worst rights abuses at the FBI, according to Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project.

“Steve Jensen should not have a job at the FBI,” Howell told Blaze News. “He was on the bleeding edge of some of the worst abuses at the FBI. The coordinated pushback on those calling him out is unfortunate, but it’s already had to backtrack on key points.

“For instance, first it was that Jensen was not promoted,” Howell said. “That turned out to be unequivocally false. Now we’re at the stage of people pretending it’s a good thing that he was promoted.”

George Hill, retired FBI national security intelligence supervisor, called Jensen the “Tomás de Torquemada of the J6 round-up of ‘domestic terrorists.’” Torquemada was the first grand inquisitor of Spain in the 15th century.

In testimony before Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Hill said he took part in regular phone conferences led by Jensen and former FBI Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono.

New FBI Director Kash Patel. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

“So you know, this is a conversation that took place almost two years ago,” Hill said in a private transcribed interview. “But the Philadelphia office said, ‘Well, there’s no evidence of any kind of, you know, violent leanings or insurrectionist leanings,’ to which Steve Jensen said, ‘You know, I don’t give a blank, they’re godd***ed terrorists and we’re going to round them all up.’”

Hill said as chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section at FBI headquarters, Jensen hosted regular conference calls that began two days after the Jan. 6 protests.

“This conference call, everybody could dial into it,” Hill said on the April 7 episode of "The Kyle Seraphin Show." “So this is going into all the fusion centers where you have chiefs of police dialing in. You have members of the state police usually up to the rank of colonel participating, and all these people have direct access to people on the governors’ staff, the mayors’ staff.

“So this information, this narrative of how our country almost fell, was going into the executive mansions of every state in the country and every mayor’s residence throughout the country on a twice-daily basis,” Hill said.

Jensen “built the construct for the January 6 witch hunt,” Hill said. “After January 6, he had a ready-made buffet of never-ending domestic terrorists to go after, and he went at them very aggressively.”

'It’s absolutely indefensible.'

Hill was the subject of blowback on X over his testimony, which he said was never called into question prior to news about Jensen surfacing on April 4.

“That my name is about to get dragged is a diversion from the facts that are already in evidence that are unassailable, that Steven Jensen was the organizer of the entire J6 roundup, from the identification of subjects through the prosecution,” Hill said.

Text of an email circulated on X April 6 by Blaze News confirmed the appointment of Jensen as head of the Washington Field Office. The March 28 email said Jensen would assume the role on March 31.

“While this came rather unexpectedly as I recently was asked to serve as the acting Operations Director for the National Security Branch, I firmly believe in the philosophy of servant leadership and service over self,” Jensen wrote in a statement released by Phillip Bates, acting assistant director in charge of the Mission Support Division at WFO. “They are the driving forces of who I am and how I lead, and I am renewing my commitment to these principles as I transition into this new leadership role at WFO.”

Jensen has been with the FBI for 19 years, most recently as special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Columbia, S.C. He was chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., from April 2020 through October 2021 and had a key role in the investigation of the Jan. 6 protests at the U.S. Capitol.

The news of Jensen’s elevation to run the Washington Field Office thundered across conservative social media.

“I’m going to call out any fraud who tries to suck up to Kash by defending the Steve Jensen promotion,” former Jan. 6 defendant William Pope wrote on X. “The man hunted down J6ers, destroyed American families, and labeled us terrorists. It’s absolutely indefensible.”

Pope added: “Jensen gets the gold mine. J6ers get the shaft,” and said, “You can’t drain the swamp by promoting the swamp.”

Members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation SWAT team patrol the Longworth House Office Building on Jan. 6, 2021.Photo by Erin Scott/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Howell said that U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the powerful House Committee on the Judiciary, was behind the pressure to name Jensen to the FBI post. Jordan denied the assertion through an unnamed spokesman, according to journalist Breanna Morello.

Former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend, who was suspended without pay after raising concerns about the level of FBI force used to round up even misdemeanor Jan. 6 suspects, called Jensen’s appointment “disappointing.”

“Steven Jensen exposed himself as partisan when he weaponized the FBI to persecute Americans over January 6,” Friend told Blaze News.

Former Jan. 6 defendant Jennifer Heinl protested Jensen’s promotion, recounting how the FBI “completely destroyed my life.”

“I’m one of the so-called terrorists that he didn’t give a damn about,” she wrote on X. “A mom from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with no criminal background who was let in the open doors on the Senate side by Capitol officers. For 45 minutes, I walked around calling family members to let them know I was OK. Yeah, I was such a danger that you waited months to come get me and then after that completely destroyed my life.”

Fitton said he’s troubled at the lack of discussion so far about reforming the FBI and Department of Justice.

“For all I know, he’s a good guy and we’re all misinterpreting it,” Fitton said, “but what I am not seeing out of the FBI yet and what I’m not seeing out of the Justice Department yet is a radical remaking or even talking about it that we’ve seen with USAID, that we’ve seen with the Department of Education. There’s nothing the FBI is doing that another federal agency or local or state law enforcement can’t do.”

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, apparently responding to growing impatience for change but without directly referencing the controversy, asked for continued forbearance as the process unfolds.

"When you see something happen, and the entire story isn’t public, and the underlying facts aren’t all public, it may appear counterintuitive to our reform agenda. I promise you, it’s not an accident," he posted to X on Sunday evening.

"I realize asking you to 'trust me' is a waste of time. Watch what happens, continue to demand results, be cautious of narrative 'traps,' let time put the puzzle pieces together, and what we’re doing will make sense. I see and hear you and your feedback."

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

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DOGE’s days appear to be numbered.

Elon Musk recently suggested that he will be done with his work in the near future. President Donald Trump told reporters this week that “at some point, he’s going to be going back” to running his companies. As far as the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump said “it will end”.

All of that talk was before Musk faced a setback Tuesday in Wisconsin, where voters rejected his choice for a state Supreme Court candidate despite more than $21 million in personal donations and his campaign appearance over the weekend. There are more problems for the billionaire entrepreneur at Tesla, his electric automaker, which saw a 13 percent drop in sales in the first three months of the year.

Now, Trump has told members of his Cabinet and other close contacts that Musk will soon step back from his government role, Politico reported on Wednesday, citing three people close to Trump.

A White House source told Reuters that Musk's investors want him to return to his companies, that his work with DOGE would be done within 130 days, and that he had communicated that to the president multiple times.

Musk was not leaving before his DOGE work was done "and no one is pushing him out", the source added.

The White House has not disclosed any clear timeline for closing down DOGE, and the government cost-cutting organisation was never supposed to become a permanent fixture in Washington. But it could be reaching a conclusion faster than anticipated. DOGE was originally intended to operate until July 4, 2026.

Now there are signs that it already is winding down. DOGE employees have been shifted to various federal agencies, which are supposed to take the lead on cutting costs. Government-wide layoffs are underway to accomplish some of the goals laid out by Musk and Trump.

“We think probably over the next two or three months, we’ll be pretty much satisfied with the people that are working hard and want to be members of the administration,” Trump said last week.

The potential end of DOGE does not mean Trump will stop shaking up Washington. But it appears the administration’s efforts will be entering a new phase that is less focused on Musk, whose chainsaw-wielding work as a presidential adviser made him a political lightning rod.

DOGE was initially envisioned as an independent advisory panel, with Musk sharing leadership with Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur. Ramaswamy dropped out and is running for Ohio governor, and DOGE became part of the government. It was stocked with Musk's allies, who were dispatched throughout the bureaucracy to cancel contracts, access sensitive data and push for cuts. 

Musk presumably has a ticking clock on his tenure. He was hired as a special government employee, which means he can only work 130 days in a 365-day time period.

“I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame,” Musk told Bret Baier of Fox News on March 27. So far DOGE is well short of that target, according to its own calculations, which have been criticized as inflated and inaccurate. 

Musk did not commit to leaving the administration by any particular date, and it is unclear how the administration is tracking Musk’s time. On May 30, it will be 130 days since Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Trump told reporters on Monday in the Oval Office that “I’d keep him as long as I could keep him” and “he’s a very talented guy”.

The Republican president was known for explosive breakups with top advisers during his first term, but anyone hoping for such a split with Musk has been disappointed.

“I think he’s amazing, but I also think he’s got a big company to run,” Trump said. “And so, at some point, he’s going to be going back.”

Asked if DOGE would continue without Musk, Trump demurred. He said Cabinet officials have worked closely with Musk and may keep some of the DOGE people at their agencies.

“But at a certain point I think it will end,” Trump said.

Musk's poll numbers lag behind Trump's, which Democrats believe they were able to use to their advantage in Wisconsin. 

Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel, who Musk supported, and ensured the state Supreme Court's liberal majority. 

In the closing days of that campaign, Musk described the race as “important for the future of civilisation”. He struck a different tone afterward.

“I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” Musk wrote on X at 3:13am.

(FRANCE 24 with AP and Reuters)