In her 1978 book "L'Empire éclaté", historian (and later member of the Académie française and the European Parliament) Hélène Carrère d'Encausse predicted that the Soviet Union's political legitimacy would be fatally strained by diverging fertility between its culturally Russian/Eastern European parts (dominant in government and industry but with plummeting birth rates) and its culturally Asian and/or Muslim parts (with growing birth rates but little representation in the established "gerontocracy"). "L'Empire éclaté" generated substantial media interest at the time, winning the 1978 Prix Aujourd′hui.