Prix Guizot-Institut de France 2022

What was the Soviet regime, which disappeared in 1991-1992 in the great earthquake of the twentieth century, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today? Was it a political UFO, something hitherto unknown in the human order, as experienced by contemporaries who retained a free spirit? Or a pure product of Russian history, with all its burdens and ruts? Because of the secrecy surrounding the Kremlin, the Soviet regime has long seemed like a black box.
The declassification of numerous archives on the Communist world from the Gorbachev period onwards has changed all that. This book bears the mark of the thirst for knowledge that has seized those who, for many years, had been reduced to studying the USSR by interpreting rare clues. It deals with the most diverse aspects of the history of the USSR: the originality of a foreign policy entirely possessed by an ideological project, at once utopian and utterly cynical, yet supremely effective; the role of the state security services; the use of crises in the strengthening of power; the shock of the real war, the German attack of June 1941, in a state that had been waging an offensive against the whole world from the outset; the impact of the clan struggle within the ruling core, an essential factor in the regime's evolution; the problem of succession in a de-institutionalised State/Party.
Paradoxically, the evolution of post-communist Russia, which is the subject of the third part of this book, has shed new light on the history of the USSR and the Russia of the Tsars. It reveals continuities that had been masked by the radical novelty of Lenin's regime. It is now possible to think about Russia over the long term - and this is the only approach that will give us a better understanding of a world so different from our own, whose shadow continues to extend over Europe.