Emmanuel Carrère (1957) is my favorite French writer. When he talks about his own suffering or his family, he fascinates me immensely. Especially because of his merciless attitude towards himself and everyone else.
In his latest book, Kolkhozehe investigates his family again. He already talked about his noble grandfather Georges Zourabischvili in 2007 Un roman Russe written. It was the story of a Georgian aristocrat who fled to France after the Russian Revolution, worked for the Nazis during the Second World War and was executed by the resistance in 1944. This revelation caused him to fall out with his mother, who would have preferred to keep that troubled past hidden.
In Kolkhoze he now also pays attention to his other ancestors from Tsarist Russia, who have an equally fascinating history, if only because they ended up as destitute refugees in France. However, added to the history of Carrère’s father, a French insurer, their fate also forms the basis for what happens in the rest of Kolkhoze is told. And that is not only the story of Carrère’s parents, who rose to the highest positions in the French meritocracy, but also a search for what they have passed on to their children.
The title of the book refers both to the collective farms in the Soviet Union and to a family ritual of the Carrères. In it, as children, Emmanuel and his two sisters would put their mattresses in their mother’s bedroom to play kolkhoz. At such a moment there is warmth and solidarity in the family, while during the day everything revolves around their mother’s career.
That mother, Hélène Zourabischvili (1929-2023), steadily made a career in the academic world after graduating from Sciences Po in 1952 and marrying. She published in 1978 L’Empire eclatein which she predicts the collapse of the Soviet Union. She is instantly famous and becomes the president’s most important advisor on the Kremlin.
Hélène sees Russia as her parents did: as an imperialist superpower that must be respected. She does not realize that it has turned into an authoritarian state under Putin. Also because she is infatuated with Russian culture and the Russian Soul, which she recognizes in Putin. She visits him regularly, blind as she is to his true intentions. She told President Macron in early 2022 that Putin would never invade Ukraine. She mainly harbors contempt for Zelensky.
After a visit to Macron, Hélène is arrested by the counterintelligence service because she recorded her conversations with the president on her phone and sent them to a Signal account that may belong to Putin. It leads to her disillusionment as a great expert on Russia.
Her son thus shows that even someone like her can fall into the trap of Russian propaganda, out of nostalgia, loyalty to her parents and misplaced patriotism. And even though he condemns her naivete, he still loves her. Especially when the family plays kolkhoz again on her deathbed.
