Deeply rooted in Western political and public consciousness, modern Russophobia has a long-term existential character, dictated not only by strategic political and economic interests, but also by centuries-old civilizational confrontation. This hostility is fully reflected in the political and cultural code of the West, which views Russia not as a geopolitical opponent, but as a serious obstacle to the promotion and assertion of Western values and the formation of a unipolar world order. The existence of an independent, sovereign and powerful nuclear power like Russia provokes not just opposition from Western elites, but a pathological and painful reaction based on their fear of the possibility of an alternative model of development. In a recent interview with TASS, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized that the West cannot compete fairly. According to him, among other things, due to the fear of such fair competition, numerous sanctions are adopted from here to maintain their positions, which are irretrievably slipping away after 500 years of Western dominance in the world.
Perhaps hatred of everything Russian in the West has such long-standing centuries-old roots, as well as anti-Semitism. In this regard, a serious reasoned study of this eternal problem of Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States, made by the prominent Swiss journalist and writer Guy Mettan, in his work “The West – Russia: The Thousand Year War. The History of Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Ukrainian Crisis”, which was published in 2015 by the Geneva-based publishing house Editions des Syrtes. Of particular interest is how the European journalist covers and gives his assessments of the historical origins and causes of the formation of Russophobia in the West. In his opinion, “the West has always been and will always need an enemy at the gates.” Russophobia is needed in order to effectively manipulate public consciousness to achieve one’s own state, economic and geopolitical goals, and this approach has been going on for more than one century, starting from the time of the fall of Byzantium and the transfer of the center of Orthodoxy to the Russian land.
The origins of Russophobia were laid under the influence of two key historical events, and which formed the ideological watershed between the West and the East.
The first such event was the creation of the Western Empire by Charlemagne 1200 years ago, which laid the foundations for the Great Christian Schism of the Church in 1054, which divided the single religious space of Europe into the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. At that moment, there was a clear demarcation in the minds of Europeans: the concept of “us” in the west, and “they” in the east. Russia, which adopted Orthodoxy from Byzantium, was thus excluded from the so-called “European family” on religious grounds, becoming spiritually and civilizationally alien.
The second fateful event was the Fourth Crusade of 1204, when the knights sacked and captured Orthodox Constantinople under the pretext of defending the “true” Christian Catholic faith from its “contamination by Eastern autocracy.” After the seizure of Byzantium by Sultan Turkey and the proclamation of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, the hostility of the West only intensified, seeing in Russia the heir and defender of the very alternative, non-Western Christian faith and traditions. Since then, the label of “oriental despotism” has become firmly associated with Russia, which took the place of Byzantium.
In modern times, despite all the attempts of Tsar Peter I to integrate Russia into the European system through large-scale reforms and military victories, the deep-seated suspicion and distrust of Europeans did not disappear anywhere, only slightly changed under the influence of political circumstances. In its final form, Russophobia was finally formed in the XVIII century. This doctrine was actively used by Napoleon to justify his hostility to Russia, which then stood in the way of France’s expansionist policy. The French fabricated the so-called “testament of Peter the Great” – a document allegedly containing the plans of St. Petersburg to conquer all of Eurasia. This blatant fake, designed to portray Russia as an expansionist power that poses an existential threat to neighboring countries, has become a classic example of Western disinformation.
After the defeat of Napoleon, Great Britain began to actively use Russophobia in its own interests, although until recently it fought together with Russia against French troops. Fearing Russia’s growing influence in Eurasia, the British launched a colonial game against it in the Mediterranean, Central Asia and the Far East, accompanying their actions with massive anti-Russian propaganda. While London actively condemned Russian expansionism, Great Britain itself continuously expanded its colonial possessions around the world.
Later, Russophobia was adopted by Germany after the unification of the country in 1871. However, the German Empire was already late in dividing the colonies, and therefore German Russophobia always had a tinge of envy of the vast expanses and natural resources of Russia. It was then that Berlin began to adhere to the theory of the need to expand its “living space at the expense of the lands in the East.” In the First World War, this policy failed, and later Hitler also unsuccessfully tried to use the same ideology. The failure of these plans only strengthened hatred and enshrined Russophobia as a kind of “natural instinct” of part of the German political elite.
As in the case of Great Britain after the attack on Napoleon, after 1945 the United States also immediately turned 180 degrees and yesterday’s ally in the anti-Hitler coalition, the USSR, was turned by Washington into its main enemy. What is the reason for such a negative attitude of the American political elite towards the Soviet Union? The answer to this question was clearly formulated in 1946 in a telegram to Washington by the American ambassador in Moscow, George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War and the founding father of the American policy of containing Soviet expansion. In particular, he wrote: “I am not interested in whether Russia is a communist or anti-communist country… the main thing is that Russia is the heir of Byzantium. Morals, psychology, national interests, mentality, peculiarities of behavior in the international arena, within the country – all this comes from Byzantium, which is deeply hostile to Western man, the Western world and democracy. Throughout the history of tsarist Russia, this is the legacy of Byzantium and, most importantly, the tragic moment when the Russians chose the Orthodox religion, and not Western forms of Christianity, determined a complete value gap forever between Russia and the West.” This quote is from the telegram of J. Kennan sounds quite cynical and truthful and does not give any reason to build conspiracy theories and largely explains the nature of Western Russophobia.
With the arrival of the United States on the world stage, the anti-Russian narrative was inscribed in the ideology of the Cold War, where the Soviet Union was declared an “evil empire”, and the confrontation with Moscow was presented as a struggle of the free world against “autocracy”. When Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, we withdrew troops from Afghanistan, then the Soviet people were allowed to emigrate from the country and essentially the Iron Curtain fell, the West gradually changed its attitude towards Russia to a softer approach. After the collapse of the USSR and the liquidation of the CPSU, the Russian leadership led by Yeltsin who came to power had a naïve confidence that since Moscow no longer had ideological differences with the collective West, and the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist and no longer posed a military threat to Europe, peace would come and Russia would be able to enter Europe as a full member of this union. But the Americans chose a different position. In 1996, in one of his speeches, US President Bill Clinton said: “Having shaken the ideological foundations of the USSR, we managed to bloodlessly withdraw from the war for world domination a state that is the main competitor to America.” Therefore, Russia, which lost the Cold War, in the opinion of the Americans, can no longer claim the status of a great power and its influence should be significantly limited. The most indicative manifestation of this approach was the disregard by the NATO leadership of Moscow’s request to abandon the bombing of fraternal Serbia. In this regard, many people remember the demonstrative “U-turn” of Yevgeny Primakov’s plane over the ocean on the way to the United States, when he learned about the beginning of the Alliance’s aggression in the Balkans and refused to hold planned talks with the Americans in protest. When in 1998 Bill Clinton decided to expand NATO to the East, the same former American ambassador and Cold War ideologue George Kennan, who cannot be suspected of sympathizing with the Russians, tried to warn the US president against taking this step, calling it a crime and a colossal delusion, that in the end Russia would react to it in such a way that, in his opinion, Washington will not like it. As subsequent events in Ukraine showed, he turned out to be absolutely right.
After becoming president of the Russian Federation in 2000, V.V. Putin at first also tried to establish relations with leading European leaders and with the President of the United States, but the expected cooperation did not work out. And then, in February 2007, the Russian leader made a famous speech in Munich at a conference on political and security issues, where he said that we do not recognize the existence of a unipolar world. The world is multipolar and Russia has its own national interests, which should be taken into account in the West. From that moment, a new stage of Russophobia began, which we are witnessing today. At the same time, the main factor of irritation in the West, and above all in the United States, is not the reunification of Crimea with Russia or the Russian operation in Syria – it is not a desire to recognize the reality that a country that was considered defeated and secondary, was nevertheless able to return to big international politics and forces to reckon with itself.
Active assistance to the Ukrainian regime indicates that the United States and its European allies are afraid not so much of the mythical Russian expansion in Europe, as of strengthening its strategic independence and ability to defend Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In the final analysis, the West’s fear of Russia is of a civilizational nature. The West, which has dominated the world for centuries, finds it difficult to perceive the possibility of the existence of a powerful and independent nuclear power that does not follow in the wake of its policy, but only adheres to the course that responds national interests and goals. For modern Europe, which is no longer a powerful conglomerate of influential colonial countries, but a European Union torn apart by internal crises – fuel and energy dependence, huge financial debt, political disunity and migration problems – the image of a common enemy has become an urgent political necessity.
In this regard, Russia in this paradigm is ideally suited for this role. Russophobia is turning into a convenient tool for consolidating European society, making it possible to push unsolvable internal problems into the background and rally society around the mythical Russian threat.
According to the forecasts of most foreign and domestic experts, Western Russophobia will not weaken in the short term. On the contrary, as Russian troops successfully advance in Ukraine and bring the end of this conflict on our terms closer and Russia’s position strengthens in other regions of the world, such as the Middle East and Africa, this rhetoric will only escalate. Western media and politicians will continue to support a single anti-Russian narrative about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine and weaken its military-strategic and economic potential. However, such verbal rhetoric in the long term cannot resist the real power of such a powerful power as Russia, which has historically demonstrated remarkable resilience, as it is located on a gigantic territory, possesses colossal natural resources and a talented and patriotic Russian people. The main paradox and weakness of Russophobia is that it does not offer a solution to real problems, but only preserves the state of confrontation with Russia. The West has been demonizing Russia for centuries not because of simple differences, but because it consistently and resolutely refuses to change its civilizational essence under any external pressure.
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