<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Helene Carrere d'Encausse, a widely respected historian of Russia who in 1999 became the first woman to lead the Academie Francaise, died on Saturday aged 94, her family said.</span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"She died peacefully surrounded by her family," they told AFP in a statement.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Carrere d'Encausse was the author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But she is also credited with having predicted before most the breakup of the former Soviet Union and Russia's subsequent difficulties with ethnic minorities</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">She wrote about those issues in her 1978 work, "The Shattered Empire".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">She was born in Paris on July 6, 1929, to a Georgian father and a Russian mother, in a family that had roots in Austria, Germany, and Italy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">She obtained French nationality in 1950, when she was 21 years old.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A former political science professor in Paris, she once described herself as "French from head to foot. A case of perfect integration".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Carrere d'Encausse was also elected to the European Parliament on a right-wing list in 1994, a seat she held until her election as permanent secretary of the French Academy in 1999.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">French President Emmanuel Macron hailed her as "a major historian, the first woman to be permanent secretary of the Academie Francaise -- like it, her legacy is immortal". AFP</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>