Hélène Carrère d'Encausse "wanted to be optimistic in her way of thinking about Russia"

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who died on Saturday August 5 at the age of 94, had published, for fifty years, more than twenty books devoted to Russia or the USSR, a territory from which her parents originated, at least on its margins, since his father was Georgian and his mother also had German blood.

Le Point asked another great historian of Russia, Marie-Pierre Rey, the author in particular of The Russian Dilemma, Russia and Western Europe, from Ivan the Terrible to Boris Yeltsin, to evaluate this contribution to this discipline of the perpetual secretary of the French Academy.

Born in 1961, Marie-Pierre Rey had met her in 1981. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse had just been elected professor at the University of Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and was one of her master’s students. “His seminar, which was on Soviet foreign policy, was enlightening, she recalls, and it influenced me a lot in my own research. I owe him the subject of my master’s degree, which focused on the Franco-Soviet (Laval-Molotov) pact of 1935, and later the subject of my thesis, which was devoted to Franco-Soviet relations under de Gaulle and Pompidou. It is on these foreign policy themes that we like to discuss and also on our current and future work. »

But these specialists were still few in number, little known to the French public, and this for two main reasons. First, because it was difficult to be a historian of a country whose archives were difficult to access, where it was still rare to go there to carry out field investigations and where the official press was the main source of information. information, to the point that we spoke of “Sovietology”, because in fact the Soviet Union was studied from the speeches and the official texts that it produced on itself.

Then because the French public debate around the USSR, divided and passionate, left little space for distanced analysis. It is enough to recall the controversial reactions successively aroused by the publication, in French, of Victor Kravchenko’s book I chose freedom and then of the first volume of The Archipelago of the gulag by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

To these difficulties was added a third in the case of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. By deciding to work on Soviet Central Asia – where she managed to go in the 1960s – and by focusing on the link between Islam and Revolution, she was a pioneer but was not in tune with the times. . This explains why his works Reform and Revolution among Muslims in the Russian Empire, Bukhara, 1867-1924, taken from his postgraduate thesis, then The Great Challenge: Bolsheviks and Nations 1917-1930, taken from his State thesis , both remarkable for their erudition and rigour, have remained of limited circulation.

It was by starting from the links between Islam and Marxism, between tradition and revolution, that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse encountered the question of politics in the USSR and that she came to be interested in the structure and functioning of the power. This approach led her to an ambitious study, The Soviet Union from Lenin to Stalin: 1917-1953, published in 1972 and then republished in the form of two biographies respectively devoted to Lenin and Stalin.

These books give pride of place to the question of politics, which will remain omnipresent in his reflection. This is evidenced by his book Confiscated Power: Rulers and Ruled in the USSR. At the same time, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse took an early interest in diplomatic issues, highlighting, in a very new way, the specificity of Soviet foreign policy and its dual functioning, shared and sometimes torn between Party and State. Thus The Soviet Policy in the Middle East: 1955-1975 or even the work The Big Brother, the Soviet Union and Sovietized Europe.

In 1978, The Shattered Empire will make its public notoriety, with a daring hypothesis which sees, in the demographic imbalance between the republics of Asia and Europe, the cause of the future disappearance of the Soviet Union. The hypothesis will not be verified since it is indeed from the Russian center that the implosion of a breathless system will come, but the success will not be denied, leading the historian to enter the French Academy in 1990 .

It was also at this time that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse turned to tsarist history, to which she devoted biographies – Catherine II, Alexander II, Nicolas II – and thematic essays. Finally, among his latest publications is a summary addressing the long-term Franco-Russian relationship. This shows the variety and scope of his work on the subject.

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse gave herself up little, but her passion for the history of Russia, understood in the broad sense, radiated and her love for this country just as much. She had a number of friends and fellow admirers in Russia, and her works were translated there. We met on several occasions at colloquia or conferences in Russia, where she always went with enthusiasm, wanting to be optimistic in her way of thinking about Russia despite the pitfalls that she did not underestimate.

If you had to read a book by her on Russia, which one would you highlight and why? Is this your favorite?

Le Malheur russe, an essay on political murder is, in my eyes, the most powerful because it embraces Russian history in the long term and approaches it from an original angle.

The work of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse ended with a book dedicated to the revolutionary Alexandra Kollontaï. Isn’t he one of the most beautiful characters in Russian history?

One of the most beautiful but also one of the most complex because its destiny is one with that of a country, the USSR then in the process of being born. Kollontaï was not only an intellectual, a revolutionary muse but also a woman of power, successively a member of the People’s Commissariat [equivalent of minister, editor’s note] for public assistance then a diplomat.

She contributed to advancing the cause of women in the USSR, but suffered setbacks as her positions on morals disturbed the rather traditional vision of the couple held by Lenin. Moreover, this convinced revolutionary also became a Stalinist, without much qualms, acquiescing in the use of terror as a political weapon. So many facets that could only seduce Hélène Carrère d’Encausse.

Didn’t her desire to make the West understand Russia inevitably lead her to show some leniency towards Putin before 2022?

Yes, but to understand does not mean to excuse. However, before 2022, and again after, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse more than once lacked foresight and discernment with regard to Putin’s power. That said, despite his concern for objectivity, it is not always easy for the historian to escape the grip of his subject.