Director of research at the CNRS and president of Mémorial France, Nicolas Werth has devoted many notable works to the history of the Soviet Union. He publishes “Poutin, chief historian” (Gallimard, Coll. “Tracts”, 2022, 64 p., €3.90).
LE FIGARO.
- It is widely said that Vladimir Putin refers to both Russian imperial history and that of the Soviet era.
What is the reality of this "syncretism"?
And why does Putin accept Stalin's legacy while rejecting Lenin's?
Nicholas WERTH.
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To understand what is happening today, you have to go back over the last thirty years.
The collapse of the Soviet Union created an absolutely fundamental void of meaning.
In the 1990s, Russian politicians and media responded by insisting on a return to the glorious tsarist past;
Russia was going to resume the path that had been traced and broken by the historic accident of 1917. There was therefore a valorization of the tsarist period, in particular…
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