Useful Idiots Dept.: His TV Star Mother's "love for Russia was real, visceral"; a French writer admits that she "was particularly blind"

A Celebrated French Writer Loved Russia, writes Constant Méheut in the New York Times; War Forced a Reckoning. It is an article that the French people's love with all things Russian, and how it has made them turn a blind eye towards the Kremlin — while unleashing scorn and hatred towards the Yankee nation. 

Regarding "a distinctly French fascination with Russia", I notably remember the mother of the writer interviewed, one historian by the name of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse who was always raving and ranting on French news programs and talk shows about the Russian people and Russian society. The worst part of this is when these useful idiots claim proudly to know better than historians, and that during World War II, Europe — including France itself — was not freed by the U.S. Army but by the Russians.  Right: Go tell that to the Poles, the Balts, and the Hungarians. (Spasibo za Insta-ssylku, tovarishch Sara.)

On Feb. 24, 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine and Moscow turned overnight into a pariah city, Emmanuel Carrère, one of France’s most acclaimed nonfiction writers, boarded a plane bound for the Russian capital.

 … Mr. Carrère spent 10 days in Moscow, long enough to watch a world collapse around him. New laws punished anyone who dared call the war a war, and his friends scrambled to flee.

Perhaps most disquieting for a man whose passion for Russia once had led him to spend weeks in a backwater 440 miles east of Moscow — an experience he recounted in “My Life as a Russian Novel” — was realizing how many Russians either backed the war or simply looked away.

“Something inside me was shattered, and still is, and my love for Russia has taken a serious blow,” Mr. Carrère said in a recent interview in his Paris loft, its all-white walls lined with rows of books. He noted that all that had once drawn him to Russia — its rich literature, tragic history and larger-than-life personalities — now seemed to have culminated in a brutal war.

“There’s a kind of dizzying depreciation of Russian values,” he said.

This reckoning pulses through his latest book, “Kolkhoze,” released in France in August and slated for U.S. publication next year. A best seller in France and one of four finalists for this year’s Goncourt Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary honor, it is a kind of autobiography that explores Mr. Carrère’s Russian roots and his relationship with his mother, who during her lifetime was France’s leading historian of Russia.

   … His introspective writing about Russia also has held up a mirror to many others in France, beginning with his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. Her complacency toward the Kremlin, which Mr. Carrère critiques sharply in the book, shows a distinctly French fascination with Russia, shaped by a shared history of revolution, empire and cultural masterpieces.

 … His mother, raised by a Russian-Prussian aristocrat mother and a Georgian immigrant father who spoke Russian to her, was a prolific historian of Russia and a fixture on television debates about the Kremlin. She passed that passion on to her son, taking him on a research trip to Moscow and handing him to read, at just 13, “The Idiot,” Dostoyevsky’s 650-page dive into the Russian soul.

That education gave Mr. Carrère “a feeling that there’s a life that’s more intense” in Russia, he said.

 … His mother, who died in 2023, was particularly blind, he writes in “Kolkhoze”: “Her love for Russia is real, visceral. The tragedy is that it morphed into indulgence for Putin, and for the past 20 years she continuously carried the Kremlin’s message” to successive French presidents, telling them that “Russia is a great country that cannot be judged by our standards and that Putin is a man of peace — provided he is not humiliated, of course.”

“Looking back, one realizes we should have understood much sooner,” Mr. Carrère writes.

But he didn’t, not until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 … In Moscow, he saw “this Russia at war take shape,” he said, as belligerent rhetoric drowned out everything else and Kremlin propaganda “was calmly absorbed by quite a number of people.”

 … Georgia is where he began seeing Russia through the prism of colonialism, as a country that had long dominated its smaller neighbors, first through empire, then the Soviet Union. Now it was seeking to reclaim that domination.

“War made me realize it,” he said. “I honestly don’t think I would ever have thought of Georgia as a colonized country before.”

 … The experience unsettled Mr. Carrère. Yet it helped him “see things through the eyes” of Ukrainians, he said, and grasp why Dostoyevsky, with his anti-Western, nationalist bent, is reviled there. Still, he hopes that when the war ends, the reckoning will be more measured.

[The Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko] said the trip, organized by PEN Ukraine, an association of writers, was important to show Mr. Carrère “what the Russian world actually means, what it really brings” behind the “facade of Russian culture.”

 … Since 2022, Mr. Carrère has traveled four times to Georgia and as many to Ukraine. Will he keep writing about Russia? He’s not sure. He said he wanted to find other roots.

“Because a void has opened up,” he wrote in Kometa in late 2023. “Because I loved Russia and, however shocking it may be to say this about an entire people, one can still love some Russians, but one can no longer love Russia.”