A great reader of our tragedies leaves with Alain Besançon

It also leaves Alain Besançon and Europe loses one of the clearest interpreters of communism, Russia and totalitarianism in its most subtle forms. A profound scholar of the intellectual origins of Leninism, of Soviet communism and of the indelible traces of the tsarist autocratic tradition, no one better than him knew how to explain Russian despotism by inscribing the aberration of Vladimir Putin in the bloody furrow of Russian history, when the princes of Muscovy not giving up ferocity to reign with terror they were able to eliminate their heirs even if they were their own children.