El estrecho de Bering

In times of communism, party members received updates from the great Soviet Encyclopedia every month. When in July 1953 the dreaded Beria was finally arrested, the encyclopedia still contained a long and laudatory entry dedicated to him. A few days after the arrest, the comrades received an envelope with a page and some instructions: they were asked to, with great care and the help of a razor blade, cut out the text about Beria and replace it with the one attached to them, referring to the Bering Strait. Thus, Bering replaced a disgraced Beria, who, following the usual method of the Soviet authorities, disappeared without a trace. This essay, which won the Grand Prix of Science-Fiction, talks about history in the conditional, what could have been and was not. He talks about uchronia: what would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter or Napoleon had emerged victorious from Waterloo... Carrère mixes chance and causality, reality and fiction, and proposes a most provocative game.