2023-08-05 20:07:09
by ANTONIO CARIOTI
The French historian and politician, a great expert on Russia, died on Saturday 5 August in Paris at the age of 94. She was the mother of the writer Emmanuel Carrre
It wasn’t easy to study the Soviet Union when the archives were closed, the sources fragmented, the official data spoiled by regime propaganda. Yet the historian Hlne Carrre d’Encausse, who disappeared on Saturday 5 August in Paris at the age of 94, the first woman to lead the Acadmie franise, understood that the greatest risk for that immense multi-ethnic state stemmed from the awakening of national identities, which in some ways the communist rulers themselves had helped to fuel. Her book Explosion of an empire?, released in France in 1978 and in Italy in 1980 (Edizioni e/o), had proved to be truly prescient in concluding that the problem of nationalities was the most irreducible, inescapable and urgent to face for the ruling class of the USSR.
A member of the Acadmie franise since 1990 and its permanent secretary since 1999, Hlne Carrre d’Encausse was nevertheless born stateless in Paris on 6 July 1929, daughter of the Georgian Georges Zourabichvili, descendant of an aristocratic family that flourished under the Tsars and was reduced to poverty by Bolshevik revolution. In 1944, just fifteen, she had lost her father, who in Bordeaux acted as an interpreter for the German occupiers and had been taken by strangers, probably partisans, never to return. He had disappeared into thin air, his body was never found: a family tragedy which Hlne’s son, the famous writer Emmanuel Carrre, had first spoken publicly about, over sixty years later, in his book Life as a Russian novel (Einaudi, 2009).
Assuming French citizenship in 1950, two years later Hlne had married Louis Carrre d’Encausse, and had then distinguished herself in historical studies: her perfect knowledge of the Russian language and culture had meant that she turned primarily towards Sovietology, also if later he would have dedicated important books to the tsarist period, such as the biography Catherine the Great (Rizzoli, 2004).
In Explosion of an empire?, thanks to which she had gained international notoriety, the author had illustrated the failure of the Kremlin’s attempt to amalgamate the different ethnic groups of the USSR into a culturally homogeneous Soviet people. She in particular had highlighted the persistence of the Muslim identity in the republics of Central Asia, marked by a strong link with tradition and a high birth rate. Instead, she had underestimated the vitality of the Baltic nations, whose extinction she had even feared due to the declining demographic rate: a mistake, because it was precisely the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who implemented the first secessions from Moscow. It can be said that that book had identified with extreme lucidity the structural weakness from which the hull of the Soviet Union suffered, but not the exact point where, a dozen years later, the initial leak that would have led to the shipwreck of the superpower would have opened. Communist.
Of moderate ideas, a MEP in the ranks of Jacques Chirac’s Gaullists from 1994 to 1999, Hlne Carrre d’Encausse obviously had no sympathy for the founder of Bolshevism. In the biography Lenin (Corbaccio, 2000) he had pointed out the profound contradictions in his work, while acknowledging in him an exceptional political instinct, and he had underlined that in revolutionary Russia, since 1918, an unprecedented state terror had unfolded, of which the head communist was evidently most responsible.
On the other hand, significant empathy shines through in the essay that Carrre d’Encausse had dedicated late in his life to the Russian communist leader Aleksandra Kollontaj, the first female minister in history, released in France in 2021 and in Italy by Einaudi in 2023. A book as fascinating as a novel , on a very prominent personality, who survived among other things – a rare case among the old Bolsheviks – the Stalinist terror.
The French scholar then showed herself rather indulgent at first, moving from history to current events, towards Vladimir Putin. You had also seen in the Kremlin’s intervention in Syria a relief action for Eastern Christians threatened by Islamic fanaticism. And she stressed that Ukrainian nationalism had its responsibilities in the 2014 crisis in Crimea and Donbass. However, the large-scale invasion of 2022 had caused her to revise her judgement. You had openly condemned the imperialist action of the Kremlin and the claim to deny the Ukrainian identity. In her opinion, Putin, placing himself in the wake of tsarist arrogance, had seriously underestimated the ability of the attacked to resist. A mistake destined to cost him and Russia dearly.
August 5, 2023 (change August 5, 2023 | 20:44)
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