From Russia with Love

Today I want to draw my readers’ attention to the work of the French writer Emmanuel Todd who has the reputation of being astonishingly prescient as he recounts in this post from Russia where he was delivering a lecture about his new book “Defeat of the West” which I will download in the next few days (although be warned – it’s in French)

In France, I am what you would call a left-wing liberal, fundamentally attached to 

liberal democracy. What distinguishes me from people attached to liberal democracy 

is that, because I am a social anthropologist, because I know the diversity of the world 

through the analysis of family systems, I have a great tolerance for outside cultures 

and I don't start from the principle that everyone must imitate the West. 

The bias towards knowing-it-all is particularly traditional in Paris. I believe that every 

country has its own history, culture and path. 
The first history books I read, when I was 16, were about the Red Army's war against 

Nazism. I have the feeling of a debt that must be honoured. I would add that I am 

aware that Russia emerged from communism on its own, through its own efforts, and 

that it suffered enormously during the transition period. I believe that the defensive 

war that the West forced Russia into, after all that suffering, just as it was getting back 

on its feet, is a moral failure on the part of the West. So much for the ideological, or 

rather emotional, dimension. As for the rest, I am not an ideologue, I don't have a 

programme for humanity, I'm a historian, I'm a social anthropologist, I consider myself 

a scientist and what I can contribute to the understanding of the world and in particular 

to geopolitics comes essentially from my occupational skills.

Then, at Cambridge, I had as my thesis internal examiner another great British historian, 

who is still alive, Alan Macfarlane. He had understood that there was a link between the 

political and economic individualism of the British (and therefore of Anglo-Saxons in 

general) and the nuclear family identified by Peter Laslett in England's past. 

I am the student of these two great British historians. Fundamentally, I generalised 

Macfarlane's hypothesis. I realised that the map of communism at is peak, around the 

mid-1970s, looked very much like the map of a family system that I call communitarian 

(which others have called patriarchal family, or joint-family), a family system that is somehow 

the conceptual opposite of the British family system.

He then emphasises his work as a researcher -

I'd like to make one thing clear about my reputation. 95% of my life as a researcher has been devoted to the analysis of family structures, a subject on which I have written books of 500 to 700 pages. But that's not what I'm best known for in the world. I am known for three geopolitical essays in which I used my knowledge of this anthropological background to understand what was going on. In 1976, I published “The Final Fall - an essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere” in which I predicted the collapse of communism. The fall in the fertility rate of Russian women showed that the Russians were people like everybody else, in the process of modernising, and that no homo sovieticus had been created by communism. Above all, I had identified an increase in infant mortality between 1970 and 1974 in Russia and Ukraine. The rise in mortality among children under one year of age showed that the system had begun to deteriorate. I wrote that first book very young, when I was 25, and I had to wait about 15 years for my prediction to come true.

In 2002, I wrote a second geopolitical book, “After the Empire – the breakdown of the American 

order”, at a time when everyone was talking about the American hyperpower. We were 

told that America was going to dominate the world for an indefinite period, a unipolar 

world. I was saying the opposite: no, the world is too big, America's relative size is 

shrinking economically and America will not be able to control this world. That proved to 

be true. 
In After the Empire, there is a particularly correct prediction that surprises even me. 

One chapter is called ‘The Return of Russia’. In it, I predict Russia's return as a major power, 

but on the basis of very few clues. I had only observed a resumption of the fall in infant 

mortality (between 1993 and 1999, after a rise between 1990 and 1993). But I knew 

instinctively that the Russian communitarian cultural background, which had produced 

communism in a transitional phase, was going to survive the period of anarchy of the 1990s, 

and that it constituted a stable structure that would enable something to be rebuilt.
There is however a huge mistake in this book: I predict in it an autonomous destiny for 

Western Europe. And there's an omission: I don't mention China.

This brings me to my latest geopolitical book, which I think will be my last, “La Défaite de 

l'Occident” (The Defeat of the West). It is in order to talk about this book  that I am here in 

Moscow. It predicts that, in the geopolitical confrontation opened up by the entry of the 

Russian army into Ukraine, the West will suffer a defeat. Once again I appear in opposition 

to the general opinion of my country, or my side since I am a Westerner. I will first say 

why it was easy for me to write this book, but then I would like to try to explain why, now 

that the defeat of the West seems certain, it has become much more difficult for me to 

explain in the short term the process of dislocation of the West, while still being able to 

make a long-term prediction about the continuation of the American decline.
We are at a turning point: we are moving from defeat to dislocation. What makes me cautious 

is my past experience of the collapse of the Soviet system. I had predicted this collapse 

but I have to admit that when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I wasn't able to foresee 

the extent of the dislocation and the level of suffering that this dislocation would entail for 

Russia.
I hadn't understood that communism was not just an economic organisation but also a 

belief, a quasi-religion, structuring social life in Russia and the Soviet Union. 

The dislocation of belief was going to lead to a psychological disorganisation far beyond 

the economic disorganisation. We are reaching a similar situation in the West today. 

What we are experiencing is not simply a military failure and an economic failure, but a 

dislocation of the beliefs that had organised social life in the West for several decades.

The core of my thinking is referred to in the title of my book, La Défaite de l'Occident 

(The Defeat of the West). It's not Russia's victory, it's the defeat of the West that I'm 

studying. I think that the West is destroying itself.
To put forward and demonstrate this hypothesis, I also had a number of indicators. 

I'm going to confine myself here to the United States. I had been working for a long time 

on the evolution of the United States. I knew about the destruction of the American 

industrial base, particularly since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. 

I knew how difficult it would be for the United States to produce enough weapons to fuel 

the war.
I had managed to estimate the number of engineers - people dedicated to making real things 

- in the United States and Russia. I came to the conclusion that Russia, with a population 

two and a half less numerous than that of the United States, was able to produce more 

engineers. Quite simply because only 7% of American students study engineering, whereas 

the figure in Russia is close to 25%. Of course, the number of engineers should be seen 

as a general indicator, which refers in greater depth to technicians, skilled workers and a 

general industrial capacity.
I had other long-term indicators for the United States. I had been working for decades on 

the decline in the level of education, on the decline in the quality and quantity of American 

higher education, a decline that began as early as 1965.

Other References

https://emmanueltodd.substack.com/

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine

https://ednews.net/en/news/world/641606-emmanuel-todd-are-witnessing-the