Emmanuel Carrère Publishes 'Kolkhoz', a Family History of Russia and France

French writer Emmanuel Carrère has released his newest book, Kolkhoz, a family history that examines his mixed Russian and Georgian descent. The work won the 2025 Prix Médicis and focuses on his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who died in the summer of 2023 at age ninety-four. Carrère, who is sixty-four, visited Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for the first time in the fall of 2022. He had never set foot in the country before that visit, despite having a cousin, Salomé Zourabichvili, who served as Georgia’s President at the time.

The decision to write the book followed the death of his mother and the confusion surrounding her political views. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was a renowned expert on Russia who became the perpetual secretary of the Académie Française. She lived in a grand apartment on the Seine and spoke at President Emmanuel Macron’s funeral. However, she held a long-standing sympathy for Vladimir Putin that conflicted with French public opinion. On a television broadcast the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she described Putin as a brutal but rational man who would never do such a crazy thing.

Carrère states that the invasion was not the sole reason for writing the book, but rather the realization that his mother was mistaken about the conflict. After the attack, French media criticized Hélène extensively for her previous support of Putin. In January 2023, Le Monde published a profile by Raphaëlle Rérolle with the headline, The Great Russia Expert Shrouded in Fog. The article described her love of Russia as morphing into an indulgence for Putin, with Carrère noting that she spoke on behalf of the Kremlin to French leaders for twenty years.

Hélène was stung by the media coverage, telling family members that she no longer wanted to live in a world where the press had reached such depths of ignominy. Carrère defends her against the accusation of a media lynching, writing that while the articles were harsh, they were not ignoble. He notes that his mother was unaccustomed to criticism. Her Georgian father, who had a prominent surname that caused schoolyard teasing, eventually assimilated into a circle of White Russians in the Paris suburb of Meudon. Hélène shed her Georgian designation when she married a French insurance man, becoming officially and supremely French.

The book also touches on Carrère’s own experiences during the war. In 2023, he worked on a separate book about the Black Sea port city of Kherson, traveling to the front line to collect accounts of the occupation. He was compelled by the fact that Russian forces exhumed the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin in October 2022 as their hold on Kherson weakened. The retreating soldiers moved the bones east into occupied territory, horrified by the thought of them remaining under Ukrainian soil.

Kolkhoz details the inner conflict of Carrère’s mother, who was proud of her aristocratic ancestry yet patriotic to the point of chauvinism. She viewed Putin’s rise as a promising development for Russia’s transition to democracy. Her obstinate sympathy for him was a blow to her cousin Zourabichvili, who ran for President partly to counter Russia’s occupation of Georgia’s northern territories. Carrère captures this tension by describing his mother as both proud of her cosmopolitan roots and French by choice.

The narrative includes a scene where Hélène visits Moscow as a young woman during a layover en route to Uzbekistan. She spends her limited time riding the Moscow metro, which she describes as the deepest and most beautiful in the world. She is moved by the Russian language, buying a map and postcards at a kiosk and telling the salesclerk she speaks Russian because of her aristocratic descent. Carrère writes that she prided herself on understanding the Russians, probing their culture with an intensity that mirrored her own complex identity.