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WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS 2025

A son's reckoning with a formidable mother, Russia and the history that shaped them both.

On 3 October 2023, beneath the dome of Les Invalides, the French Republic honours Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – renowned historian of Russia, member of the Académie Française, national figure. Among the mourners stands her son, Emmanuel Carrère, wondering who this formidable woman truly was: to the country, to history, and to him.

In Kolkhoz, Carrère turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most intimate and ambitious book yet. From aristocratic Russia to Soviet Central Asia, from émigré salons to the shadow of the gulag, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride. There are white Russian ancestors clinging to vanished grandeur; relatives lured back to Stalin’s USSR and swallowed by silence; a father obsessed with genealogy and lost nobility; and, at the centre, a mother whose brilliance, ambition and authority shaped both French intellectual life and her son’s inner world.

As Carrère sifts through letters, archives and contested memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another. What does it mean to inherit exile and privilege at once? How do political faith and historical catastrophe reverberate across generations? And can a son write about his mother with honesty without betraying her?

By turns sweeping and surgical, tender and unsparing, Kolkhoz is a family epic and a reckoning: a meditation on communism and its afterlives, on filial piety and rebellion, and on the uneasy border between truth and love.