Writer Giuliano da Empoli: ‘Putin knows he made a mistake. But one rule of power is to never go back’

Jack’s Brasserie in Bern, founded in 1911, is the canteen of Swiss power. Here, between chandeliers and white tablecloths, five minutes’ walk from the federal parliament, corporate lobbyists schmooze politicians — insofar as it’s necessary to charm Swiss politicians into helping corporations.

Giuliano da Empoli is an Italian whose bestselling debut novel about Russia’s political elite, written in French, appears in English as The Wizard of the Kremlin. But his mother is Swiss, and he holidays near Bern in Interlaken. “I’ve been coming to Jack’s for 40 years,” he says in his near-perfect English, “my father used to take me.” We’ll come back to his father, who inadvertently introduced him to questions of violence and power.

Da Empoli is a neat, slight figure, dressed like the timeless European intellectual, in a dark roll-neck sweater. In Jack’s this winter’s day, in this city where all the destruction of last century never happened, it could be 1924. We get a quiet table at the back, with wealthy Swiss chatter buzzing soothingly around us. Our nearest neighbour is an outsized dog lunching from a silver bowl.

Da Empoli understands power, partly because he once wielded some, as adviser for years to Matteo Renzi, who from 2014 to 2016 was Italy’s would-be modernising prime minister. That’s why his novel has become a guide — devoured by many western politicians — to the mindset of the Kremlin. The book covers Russian power since the 1990s, a subject that da Empoli had been obsessively researching since first visiting Moscow in 2010.

Surveying the diners in Jack’s, he remarks: “In Russia, power is a big beast. In Switzerland power is a kitten, and it’s been domesticated. Through history, it’s been diluted, distributed, at local level and through referendums. Swiss politicians are boring. That’s quite a good thing. The more spectacular a political system, the worse it is, in many ways.”

We’ve eaten together before — we know one another from Paris, where we both live, and in 2016 the progressive think-tank he ran, Volta, published some of my essays as an Italian ebook. After da Empoli switched from writing in Italian to French, I enjoyed his essayistic political books. I then watched him become a star. His novel appeared in April 2022, weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He says: “I never thought it would sell more than 3,000 copies. And when the war broke out, I thought it would be wiped out completely.” It has sold about 650,000 copies in France alone.

We don’t bother with menus. “What I do here is Bloody Mary and schnitzel,” says da Empoli. “I find that quite a pleasant combination.” Schnitzels are Jack’s’ speciality. “Big ones or small?”, asks our waitress. We go big, his with potato purée, mine with salad.

Born in Paris, da Empoli then lived in suburban Brussels, where his father, an Italian economist, worked for the European Commission. In 1984 the family moved to Rome, where his father had become a senior economic adviser to Bettino Craxi’s Socialist government. By 1986, Italy’s far-left terrorist Red Brigades were waning, but a splinter group remained active.

“What happened is, my father used to stop every day at the same newspaper shop, which was a bit silly, I guess. So he was buying his newspapers and this terrorist commando started firing at him. But he had a bodyguard, his driver, a carabiniere. He came out of the car and started firing. He killed a terrorist, so the other ones fled. My father was wounded, one bullet in his hand and two in his leg. I was 12 at the time.”

His father had a police escort from then until his death in a car accident in 1996. “This contributed to my image of Switzerland,” da Empoli says. “You know the last scene of The Sound of Music, when they’re walking in the fields and reach the Swiss border? It was a bit like that. Every summer holiday, we would get to the border by car and my father’s police escort would stay behind: we would be into Switzerland and wouldn’t need an escort.”

He quotes Hugo Ball, co-founder of the Dada movement in Zurich, who during the first world war called Switzerland “a birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions”. “Unfortunately, this might be the case again today.”

Giant schnitzels arrive. In the past, apparently, they overflowed their plates; when Jack’s switched to larger plates, some customers complained, thinking the schnitzels had shrunk. The waitress — speaking a very Swiss mix of French, German and English — recommends pairing them with a Pinot Noir. We obey. The wine (which, happily, won’t show up on the bill) mingles with the Bloody Marys to transport us into a cosy Swiss winter fug. The schnitzels, flavoured with berry sauce, are marvellously tender.

Da Empoli published his first political book aged 23. A decade later, he met the then obscure young Renzi, president of the province of Florence, and became his adviser, or consigliere. He chuckles: “In English it sounds like a Mafioso term.” In 2014, aged 39, Renzi became Italy’s youngest ever prime minister. Did his unexpected ascent carry da Empoli to national power?

“If I can be fully honest with you, the reason I started working with Renzi was that from the beginning I thought he would be — he thought so too, of course — a really powerful, disruptive force. Politics is unfair, it has a kind of animal component. I thought he had that.”

Renzi was not Vladimir Putin, but da Empoli believes some aspects of power are universal. “I think the difference between leader and adviser is that the leader is 100 per cent into his action. There’s no distance between what he does and thinks and who he is. It’s so intense, you need to mobilise so many resources, that the only way is if you’re in it 100 per cent. The adviser keeps a distance, which allows him to be more lucid, and maybe keep giving good advice. This suits certain personalities. It suits me perfectly.”

The job would inform his literary depiction of the Kremlin’s “wizard”, Putin’s imagined consigliere Vadim Baranov. Putin, da Empoli explains, exercises a “premodern” type of power that baffles western European politicians. “He operates with codes that maybe some of our ancestors would have understood better than we do. But Putin’s practically never been on the internet. He’s not on social media. Baranov provides the postmodern theatrics that are also important in Putin’s power.”

Baranov is modelled on Russian political adviser Vladislav Surkov. Has da Empoli heard from Surkov about the novel? “No. I think he’s in a tricky position. There’s not much room in the Kremlin now for eccentric, cynical fantasists. When you start razing cities, and jail for 15 years everybody that calls a war a war, you’re not into spin any more. When sheer brutality takes over, the role of characters like that disappears.”

Da Empoli “suffered” in politics. “It’s not something that at any point made me happy. My relationship to power: I don’t like to have power over others, and I can’t stand anybody having power over me. I also got the disrupter I thought we needed. This, Renzi genuinely was. But did it make Italy better? Am I not now re-evaluating the virtues of a less disruptive approach to politics?”

What he did enjoy, he says, was “to see things from inside. It’s completely different from the perspective you have from outside. Without it, I would never have been able to write my book. And at times you have the feeling that you actually make a difference on some decisions.

“The price you pay is the unbelievable violence,” he goes on. “Of course not physical, but you live in an environment where people are constantly fighting. This is politics. I think politics has a noble mission, which is to stop people killing each other when they disagree. But even when it works, it attracts violent characters. That’s why when somebody’s out of politics, we say he’s ‘dead’. . . That violence is something that lots of people in politics enjoy. I didn’t. Maybe my father’s thing took me on that path, and I had such passion for it, that it took me time to realise I wasn’t in any way made for active politics.”

Power taught da Empoli that he was at heart a writer. Once he’d left politics, and began viewing it as “anthropological theatre”, he could write his novel.

“The reason I’m such an old first-time novelist — I’m 50 — is that I wasn’t ready to do this before. To write this book, I had to go through all the political experience I had, starting with my father’s attack.

“What’s incredible about fiction is it takes you outside your head and inside someone else’s. It’s more and more difficult to get out of our own heads. Because everything reinforces what we already believe. That’s why the difference between fiction and non-fiction readers is immediately apparent when you talk to people. Fiction readers understand that theirs is not the only perspective. That each of the people sitting around us” — he points — “have their own. If you read fiction, you’ve been in some of those heads. If you don’t, even if you read non-fiction, you don’t have that experience.”

I mention the New York Times’ critique: that his book is too understanding of Russia’s leaders, and that its empathy infected French politicians. He shrugs: “It could have been a good critique of a non-fiction book. But the point of fiction is exactly that: to get into someone’s head.”

So what’s in Putin’s head now? “He’s a power animal. Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, says the drive to power is a will to survive everybody, and to survive above everybody. You end up killing everyone because, in a way, that guarantees your survival. That’s why the last [depiction] of Putin in the book is him alone in a graveyard — with his dog, of course. The dog is always important.

“I think he knows he’s made a strategic mistake [the invasion]. But one rule of that kind of power is to never go back, never show any crease in the absolute will and certainty. He wasn’t strong enough to impose his order on Ukraine. But he might be strong enough to impose chaos on Ukraine. And he did take the opportunity to consolidate his order internally, and to make it much more ruthless. This is working, for now.” Putin’s “mistake” might be “playing out not so bad”, he concludes.

The waitress agrees to improvise fruit salads. She removes da Empoli’s half-finished Bloody Mary with a jokey reprimand: “I think you’re done with this.”

He laughs: “We can reach that conclusion. It was practically empty, eh? My wife will be happy, it will confirm to her that I’m not an alcoholic. I talk too much, that’s the problem.”

I reassure him: “It’s your job in an interview.”

“I guess for once it’s justified.”

Has his novel’s success changed him? He chuckles: “I’m confident there will be lows again. Something good, like a book succeeding, can become bad if it traps you into doing things you don’t feel like doing, or hanging out with people you don’t want to hang out with. The same way a bad event can be good for you. This sounds so clichéd. But losing the elections in 2018, I don’t think it was good for Italy, but for me personally it was good, because I dropped out of something that wasn’t for me.”

The novel, he adds, “was a side gig. I never thought I would become a novelist. I did want to write something my daughter might enjoy reading when she grows up, and non-fiction doesn’t age well. But it still is a side project in some ways. I know I can write more non-fiction, but can I write more fiction?”

I ask why he lives in Paris. “Will I move to Switzerland? I went to see a house here before lunch. It’s maybe more what the French would call a fantasme than something I will do.”

What about Italy? He frowns: “Foreigners take the best of Italy. You enjoy all the pleasure, and you don’t have to worry about anything else. But me, I land in Italy and first I have coffee and a piece of something good to eat, and I’m in a good mood. But . . . I’m part of this, so I also suffer in Italy. I can’t stand the quality of public debate, I can’t turn on TV, I can barely open a newspaper. The media ecosystem that shapes public discourse is so degraded — conspiracy theories, all sorts of weirdness. It’s going in the wrong direction, the whole thing.

“On the other hand, I enjoy Paris more than Parisians [do]. If you have two passions like I do, politics and literature, there’s no place in the world which consistently over centuries has intermingled the two, where every president wants to be a great novelist and every novelist has a definite idea of how he would rule the country.”

The waitress brings his espresso, my tea, and free madeleines and chocolates. Pointing at me, she tells him: “He’s so nice, I brought you sweets.” I am delighted by the compliment — then deflated as da Empoli reveals that Jack’s always throws in sweets.

Da Empoli has peered deep into power. Does he still have political ideals? “If you’d asked me in the past, I would have given you lots of convictions. But what’s left now, to me, is this idea that we try not to kill each other. We’ve been successful in the European Union in not doing so for an extraordinary lapse of time. It looked dull, but I think it’s not dull any more, and not obvious any more. So this European thing is the only strong ideal I have.”

He mentions Robert Menasse, Austrian author of novels on Brussels and, improbably, EU enlargement. “Let’s say that in 100 years somebody still reads books, how will they read his book about Brussels? Will they read it like [we read] the Austro-Hungarian writers, Zweig, Musil and Joseph Roth, with this nostalgia of a world that is gone? Whatever happens, there’s a part of innocence in the European project that is lost forever: this idea we had that the world was going to become like us, about gentle treaties and soft power. This European exceptionalism, which was much stronger than American exceptionalism, is what we’ve lost.”

Simon Kuper is an FT columnist

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