Hélène Carrère de Encausse and the errors of the Kremlinologists

What goes on behind the Kremlin walls? This was the question that, during the long existence of the Soviet Union (1917-1991), certain figures known as the Kremlin strove daily to answer. KremlinologistsThey supposedly knew everything there was to know about a secretive and complex regime. When the time came, it became clear that they knew almost nothing: the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them completely by surprise. Kremlinologist Europe's most celebrated woman, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, was a perfect example of that group blinded by its own prejudices.

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (1929-2023), perpetual secretary of the French Academy, was subjected in her later years to an exercise in forced transparency. Her son is the writer Emmanuel Carrère, known for recounting his own life and the lives of those close to him in each of his works. When Emmanuel published A Russian novel (2007), mother and son stopped speaking for a few years. Emmanuel revealed that Helène's father collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of France and was executed, his body never found, after the liberation. Helène believed her dazzling career was about to collapse.

The position of "perpetual secretary" of the Academy sounds like a career sentence, but it constitutes the most prestigious position in the complex world of French intellectuals. It includes, among other things, an official residence almost as luxurious as the Élysée Palace. Despite Helène's fears, the revelation changed nothing: the Kremlinologist He remained in his perpetual watchtower until death.

But both A Russian novel like the most recent work by Emmanuel Carrère, Kolkhoze (2025), not yet published here and focused on her mother, offers illuminating insights into the biases that repeatedly distorted Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's analyses of events in the Soviet Union and later in Russia.

Various Kremlinologists Many famous figures had family origins in Russia or in countries heavily influenced by it. Americans Richard Pipes and Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, came from Poland, and for them, Moscow was always threatening. The opposite was true for Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, born in Paris as Hélène Zourabichvili, the daughter of a Georgian father and a German-Russian mother who had fled the Soviet revolution: she was fascinated by the Russian Empire. Although her ancestors were 75% Georgian, she chose the maternal tradition of the Von Pelken family, former prominent members of the Tsarist aristocracy. She spoke fluent Russian and preferred to forget Georgian.

In KolkhozeHer son Emmanuel is letting slip, here and there, the mother's misjudgments in his prophecies KremlinologicalThere was one fundamental one: based on her doctoral thesis, Hélene was convinced that if the Soviet Union ever entered into crisis, it would be due to the uprising of its Muslim republics. Despite the case of Chechnya, which occurred after the dissolution of the USSR, this never came to pass.

Nor was Hélene Carrère d'Encausse right—let's explain such a pompously French name: the daughter of Georgian and Russian refugees married a French insurance broker and combined his two surnames to achieve an aristocratic sound—after the collapse. In her books The triumph of nationalities (1990) and Victorious Russia (1992) predicted that the former Soviet society, thanks to its high level of education and its negative experience with communism, would quickly integrate into the network of democratic societies in Western Europe. That, too, failed to happen.

Despite everything, Hélène maintained her prestige as a leading expert on Russian complexities. There wasn't a French president who didn't consult her regularly. After all, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse had access to Vladimir Putin and spoke with him privately. And yet, the Academy's perpetual secretary maintained until her last day that Russia would never invade Ukraine. A week before the invasion, she declared that Putin was "a rational man, aware of the risks, who would never embark on a reckless action."

The French press mercilessly attacked her. "An Academic in the Fog," was one headline. Le Monde A long article about her mistakes. In "Kolkhoz," Emmanuel Carrère explains that his mother's "visceral" love for Russia led to "indulgence toward Putin" and that, "for 20 years, she never stopped conveying the Kremlin's message to the Élysée Palace, repeating to Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron, and her successive foreign ministers that Russia is a great country, that we cannot judge it according to our own criteria, and that Putin is a man of peace, provided he is not humiliated."

My personal impression is that, between specialists who hate Russia and specialists who viscerally love Russia, we remain very poorly informed today about "what goes on behind the Kremlin walls."