Yves here. Americans, who typically have the memories and historical knowledge of goldfish, likely attribute the ease of whipping up Russophobia with the red scares of the McCarthy era, and later movies and works of fiction that depicted Russians as bad guys. Well, not all:
Sadly, The Russians Are Coming, in poking fun at anti-Soviet paranoia, was an exception that proved the rule.
Nevertheless, suspicion and antipathy towards Russia culture has deep roots, going back to the Catholic Church proselytizing Eastern Slavs. The Vatican was effective in creating a religious and cultural identity among people, many of whom were of the same genetic stock as Russians, anchored in the West. These very deep roots explain why mere dog whistles work so well.
Please note that Dr. Sotirovic repeats the neoliberal view that the US is dependent on foreigners to buy its bonds. We have explained that that is not true as far as Federal debt is concerned. But they US could suffer severe currency depreciation in an “investor revolt” scenario. Up to a point, that is what Team Trump wants. I’ve been told they would like to see the dollar 15% to 30% cheaper.
By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic, Ex-University Professor, Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies Belgrade, Serbia
The 2018 Skripal Attack Case
The current orchestrated Western policy of total Russophobia, directed by Collective West, can be recorded to start by the British Cabinet of Theresa May – the focal servant-dog to US global imperialism. Followed by the creation of the War Cabinet of the US President Donald Trump (first administration), it was a nothing else than a jumping to the new stage of the post-WWII Cold War (2.0) which was originally started (1.0) by the US, It is not over since its main task of total economic, political, and financial subordination or/and occupation of Russia still is not realized. The Russian punishment, at that time just diplomatic, was a “punishment for Russia’s alleged nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian/MI6 double-agent, Sergei Skripal (66) and his daughter Yulia (33), who was visiting her father from Moscow” [1] (March, 2018).
However, it was quite obvious that “blaming Russia for Skripal attack is similar to ‘Jews poisoning our wells’ in the Middle Ages” [2] In other words, the 2018 Skripal Attack Case was just another Western “false flag” in international relations with a very precise geopolitical purpose – to continue the Cold War 1.0, revived post-Yeltsin’s Russia.
We have to remember that originally American administration started the Cold War 1.0 as it was “the Truman administration (1945−1953) used the myth of Soviet expansionism to mask the nature of American foreign policy, which included the creation of a global system to advance the interests of American capitalism”.[3] However, the current Western virus of total Russophobia (the Cold War 2.0) is a natural continuation of historical Western anti-Russian policy, which had looked as if it was over with the peaceful dismemberment of the USSR in 1989−1991.
P. Huntington’s Warnings and International Relations (IR)
Samuel P. Huntington was quite clear and correct in his opinion that the foundation of every civilization is based on religion (i.e., on metaphysical irrational beliefs).[4] S. P. Huntington’s warnings about the future development of global politics as taking the form of a direct clash of different cultures (in fact, separate and antagonistic civilizations) are, unfortunately, already on the agenda of international relations.
Here we came to the crux of the matter in regard to the Western relations with Russia from both historical and contemporary perspectives: the Western civilization, as based on the Western type of Christianity (the Roman Catholicism and all Protestant denominations) has traditional animosity and hostility toward all nations and states of the East Christian (Orthodox) confession.
As Russia was and is the biggest and most powerful Christian Orthodox country, the Eurasian geopolitical conflicts between the West and Russia started from when the German Teutonic knights and the Swedes from the Baltic were constantly attacking northern Russian territories up to the fateful battle in 1240, which the Swedes lost to the Russian Prince of Novgorod Alexander Nevski at the Battle of Neva.
However, only three decades later, the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Algirdas (1345‒1377), started to occupy the Russian lands. That process continued with the Roman Catholic common state of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it launched its confessional-civilizational imperialistic wars against the Grand Duchy of Moscow at the very end of the 14th century; i.e., after 1385 when Poland and Lithuania became united as a personal union of two sovereign states (the Union of Krewo).[5]
Role of the Vatican
The present-day territories of Ukraine (which at that time did not exist under this name) and Byelorus (Belarus, White Russia) became the first victims of Vatican policy to proselytize the Eastern Slavs. Therefore, the biggest part of present-day Ukraine became occupied and annexed by Lithuania till 1569[6] and after the Polish-Lithuanian 1569 Lublin Union by Poland. In the period from 1522 to 1569, there were 63% of the East Slavs lived on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania out of its total population.[7]
From the Russian perspective, the only way to stop an aggressive Vatican policy of reconversion of the Christian Orthodox population and their denationalization was by military counterattacks to liberate the occupied territories. However, when it happened from the mid-17th century till the end of the 18th century, a huge number of the former Christian Orthodox population had already become Roman Catholics and the Uniates, losing their original national identity.
A conversion to the Roman Catholicism and making the Union with the Vatican on the territories occupied by the Polish-Lithuanian common state till the end of the 18th century divided the Russian national body into two parts: the Christian Orthodox and the pro-Western oriented converts who, basically, lost their initial ethnonational identity. This is especially true in Ukraine – a country with the biggest number of Uniates in the world due to the Brest Union signed in 1596 with the Vatican.
The Uniate Church in (West) Ukraine openly collaborated with the Nazi regime during WWII and for that reason, it was banned after the war till 1989. Nevertheless, it was exactly the Uniate Church in Ukraine which propagated an ideology that the “Ukrainians” were not (Little) Russians but instead a separate nation with no ethnolinguistic or confessional connection with the Russians. Therefore, a way was opened to the successful Ukrainization of the Little Russians (and Minor Russia), Ruthenians, and Carpatho-Russians during Soviet (anti-Russian) rule. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Ukrainians became an instrument of the realization of the Western anti-Russian geopolitical interests in Eastern Europe.[8]
The unscrupulous Jesuits became the fundamental West European anti-Russian and anti-Christian Orthodox hawks to propagate the idea that a Christian Orthodox Russia does not belong in a real (Western) Europe.
Due to such Vatican propaganda activity, the West gradually became antagonistic to Russia. Russian culture was seen as disgusting and inferior, i.e., barbaric, as a continuation of the Byzantine Christian Orthodox civilization. Unfortunately, such a negative attitude toward Russia and the East Christianity is accepted by a contemporary US-led Collective West for whom Russophobia has become an ideological foundation for its geopolitical projects and ambitions.[9] Therefore, all real or potential Russia’s supporters became geopolitical enemies of a Pax Americana, like the Serbs, Armenians, Greeks, Byelorussians, etc.
Western Defeats and Russian Blowback
A new moment in the West-Russia geopolitical struggles started when the Protestant Sweden became directly involved in the Western confessional-imperialistic wars against Russia in 1700 (the Great Northern War of 1700−1721) which Sweden lost after the Battle of Poltava in 1709 when Russia of Peter the Great finally became a member of the concert of the Great European Powers.[10]
A century later, that was a Napoleonic France to take a role in the historical process of „Eurocivilizing“ of „schismatic“ Russia in 1812, that also finished by the West European fiasco[11], similar to Pan-Germanic warmongers during both world wars.
However, after 1945 up to the present, the „civilizational“ role of the Westernization of Russia is assumed by NATO and the EU. The Collective West, immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, by imposing its client satellite Boris Yeltsin as the President of Russia, achieved an enormous geopolitical achievement around Russia, especially in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
Nevertheless, the Collective West started to experience a Russian geopolitical blowback from 2001 onward when the B. Yeltsin’s time pro-Western political clients (Russian liberals) were gradually removed from the decision-making positions in Russia’s governmental structures. What a new Russia’s political establishment correctly understood is that a Westernization policy of Russia is nothing else but an ideological mask for economic-political transformation of the country into the colony of the Collective West led by the US Neocon administration[12] alongside with the task of the US/EU to externalize their own values and norms permanently. This “externalization policy” is grounded on the thesis of The End of History by Francis Fukuyama:[13]
…that the philosophy of economic and political liberalism has triumphed throughout the world, ending the contest between market democracies and centrally planned governance.[14]
Therefore, after the formal ending of the Cold War 1.0 in 1989/1990, the fundamental Western global geopolitical project was The West and The Rest, according to which the rest of the world was obliged to accept all fundamental Western values and norms according to the Hegemonic Stability Theory of a unipolar system of the world security.[15] Nevertheless, behind such doctrinal unilateralism as a project of the US hegemony in global governance in the new century clearly stands the unipolar hegemonic concept of a Pax Americana, but with Russia and China as the crucial opponents to it.
Stability Theories and IR
According to the Hegemonic Stability Theory, a global peace can occur only when one hegemonic center of power (state) acquires enough power to deter all other expansionist and imperialistic ambitions and intentions. The theory is based on a presumption that the concentration of (hyper) power will reduce the chances of a classical world war (but not and local confrontations) as it allows a single hyperpower to maintain peace and manage the system of international relations between the states.[16] Examples of ex-Pax Romana and Pax-Britannica clearly offered support for an imperialistic idea that (the US-led) unipolarity will bring global peace. That inspired the viewpoint that the world in a post-Cold War 1.0 era under a Pax Americana would be stable and prosperous as long as the US global dominance prevails.
Therefore, a hegemony, according to this viewpoint, is a necessary precondition for economic order and free trade in a global dimension, suggesting that the existence of a predominant hyperpower state willing and able to use its economic and military power to promote global stability is both a divine and rational order of the day.
As a tool to achieve this goal, the hegemon has to use a coercive diplomacy based on the ultimatum demand that puts a time limit on the target to comply and a threat of punishment for resistance as, for example, it was a case in January 1999 during the “negotiations” on Kosovo status between the US diplomacy and Yugoslavia’s Government in Rambouillet (France).
However, in contrast to both the Hegemonic Stability Theory and the Bipolar Stability Theory, a post-Yeltsin Russian political establishment advocates that a multipolar system of international relations is the least war-prone in comparison with all other proposed systems. This Multipolar Stability Theory is based on a concept that a polarized global politics does not concentrate power, as it is supported by the unipolar system, and does not divide the globe into two antagonistic superpower blocs, as in a bipolar system, which promote a constant struggle for global dominance (for example, during the Cold War 1.0).
The multipolarity theory perceives polarized international relations as a stable system because it encompasses a larger number of autonomous and sovereign actors in global politics, which as well as giving rise to a greater number of political alliances. This theory is, in essence, presenting a peace-through model of pacifying international relations as it is fundamentally based on counter-balancing relations between the states in the global arena. Under such a system, an aggressive policy is quite hard to implement in reality as it is prevented by the multiple power centers.[17]
A New Policy of Russia and Cold War 2.0
A new policy of international relations adopted by Moscow after 2000 is based on a principle of a globe without hegemonic leadership – a policy which started to be implemented at the time when the global power of the US as a post Cold War 1.0 hegemon declines because it makes costly global commitments above ability to fulfill them followed by the immense US trade deficit – even today the cancer of American economy which the current US President desparately wants to heal. The US share of global gross production has been in the process of constant decline since the end of WWII.
Another serious symptom of American erosion in international politics is that the US share of global financial reserves has drastically declined, especially in comparison to the Russian and Chinese shares. The US is today the largest world debtor and even the biggest debtor that ever existed in history (36.21 trillion dollars or 124 percent of the GDP), mainly, but not exclusively, due to huge military spending, alongside tax cuts that reduced the US federal revenue. The deficit in the current account balance with the rest of the world (in 2004, for instance, it was $650 billion), the US administration is covering by borrowing from private investors (mostly from abroad) and foreign central banks (most important are those of China and Japan). Therefore, such US financial dependence on foreigners to provide the funds needed to pay the interest on the American public debt leaves the USA extremely vulnerable, especially if China and/or Japan decide to stop buying the US bonds or sell them. Subsequently, the world’s strongest military power is at the same time the greatest global debtor, with China and Japan being direct financial collaborators of the US hegemonic leadership’s policy of a Pax Americana after 1989/1990.
It is without any doubts that the US foreign policy after 1989/1990 is still unrealistically following the French concept of raison d’état that indicates the Realist justification for policies pursued by state authority, but in the American eyes, first and foremost of these justifications or criteria is the US global hegemony as the best guarantee for the national security, followed by all other interests and associated goals. Therefore, the US foreign policy is still based on a realpolitik concept that is a German term referring to the state foreign policy ordered or motivated by power politics: the strong do what they will, and the weak do what they must. However, the US is becoming weaker and weaker, and Russia and China are more and more becoming stronger and stronger.
Final Words
Finally, it seems to be true that such a reality in contemporary global politics and international relations is, unfortunately, not properly understood and recognized by the current US President Donald Trump as he is going to be just another Trojan horse of the US Neocon concept of a Pax Americana followed by the megalomanic Zionist concept of a Greater Israel of „From the River to the River“[18], and, therefore, there are no real chances to get rid of the US imperialism in the recent future and to establish international relations on a more democratic and multilateral foundation. Therefore, the US-led Western turbo Russophobia since 2014 has already driven the world into a new stage of the post-WWII Cold War–2.0.
__________
[1] Peter Koenig, “Russian Exodus from the West”, Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization, 2018-03-31: https://www.globalresearch.ca/russian-exodus-from-the-west/5634121.
[2] John Laughland, “Blaming Russia for Skripal Attack is Similar to ‘Jews Poisoning our Wells’ in Middle Ages”, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, 2018-03-16: http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/march/16/blaming-russia-for-skripal-attack-is-similar-to-jews-poisoning-our-wells-in-middle-ages/.
[3] David Gowland, Richard Dunphy, The European Mosaic, Third Edition, Harlow, England−Pearson Education, 2006, 277.
[4] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, London: The Free Press, 2002.
[5] Zigmantas Kiaupa, Jūratė Kiaupienė, Albinas Kuncevičius, The History of Lithuania Before 1795, Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000, 106‒131.
[6] On the Lithuanian occupation period of the present-day Ukraine, see: [Alfredas Bumblauskas, Genutė Kirkienė, Feliksas Šabuldo (sudarytojai), Ukraina: Lietuvos epocha, 1320−1569, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2010].
[7] Ignas Kapleris, Antanas Meištas, Istorijos egzamino gidas. Nauja programa nuo A iki Ž, Vilnius: Leidykla “Briedas”, 2013, 123.
[8] About this issue, see more in [Зоран Милошевић, Од Малоруса до Украјинаца, Источно Сарајево: Завод за уџбенике и наставна средства, 2008].
[9] Срђан Перишић, Нова геополитика Русије, Београд: Медија центар „Одбрана“, 2015, 42−46.
[10] David Kirbz, Šiaurės Europa ankstyvaisiais naujaisiais amžiais: Baltijos šalys 1492−1772 metais, Vilnius: Atviros Lietuvos knyga, 2000, 333−363; Peter Englund, The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltava andthe Birth of the Russian Empire, London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2003.
[11] On Napoleon’s military campaign on Russia in 1812 and its fiasco, see [Paul Britten Austin, The Great Retreat Told by the Survivors, London−Mechanicsburg, PA: Greenhill Books, 1996; Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, New York: Harper Press, 2005].
[12] The US-led NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 is only one example of a gangster’s policy of a violation of the international law and the law on war when the civilian objects became legitimate military targets. Therefore, the attack on Serbia’s television station in the downtown of Belgrade on April 23rd, 1999 attracted criticism by many human rights activists as it was apparently selected for bombing as „media responsible for broadcasting propaganda“ [The Independent, April 1st, 2003]. By the same gangsters the same bombing policy was repeated in 2003 in Iraq when the main television station in Baghdad was hit by cruise missiles in March 2003 followed next day by the destruction of the state radio and television station in Basra [A. P. V. Rogers, Law on the Battlefield, Second edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, 82−83]. According to the international law expert Richard Falk, the 2003 Iraq War was a „crime against Peace of the sort punished at the Nuremberg trials“ [Richard Falk, Frontline, India, No. 8, April 12−25th, 2003].
[13] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
[14] Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, Tenth edition, USA: Thomson−Wadsworth, 2006, 588; Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 54−55.
[15] David P. Forsythe, Patrice C. McMahon, Andrew Wedeman (eds.), American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, New York−London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006, 31−50.
[16] William C. Wohlforth, „The Stability of a Unipolar World“, International Security, No. 24, 1999, 5−41.
[17] Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, Tenth edition, USA: Thomson−Wadsworth, 2006, 524.
[18] On the policy of Zionist movement, see [Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, London‒New York: Verso, 2024, 23‒49.
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I think that Sotirovic makes some good points, but I also think that Sotirovic is over-egging the assertions about Vatican influence and the perceiving of Byzantine civilization as inferior.
What went on in the Baltic region and in western Russia was nation-building, mass conversions, crusades (yep), and suppression of minorities. One thinks of Swedish expansionism, the merger of the newly converted Lithuanians into Poland, the crusades of the Baltic Germans against the local populations, and the suppression of the Novgorod Republic. This part of Europe was “overly dynamic,” as Naked Capitalism writers often note, and the results were a mess.
The Union of Brest was somewhat more complicated and also involved local politics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Brest
In the Mediterranean basin, the historic complications are even harder to parse. Yes, the Fourth Crusade was against fellow Christians. Yet the mix of Orthodox and Catholic populations in the Mediterranean world — and in Italy and Greece and Lebanon — is somewhat different. I’m thinking of the initial mess that Venice made in Crete — only to right itself and hold on to Crete for four hundred years. I’m thinking of Corfu / Kerkira.
And I am reminded of the Byzantine scholars who moved to Venice after the fall of Constantinople of 1453 to usher in new levels of Renaissance thought.
Much to contemplate here. I am not discounting the continuing Russophobia of the West. Yet I note the absolute ignorance of the culture of Orthodoxy in the U S of A as well as the long history of monarchs forcing their religion on their subjects.
Commenter AG posted this link yesterday.
The horrifying history of East Prussia, the oppressions of the Teutonic Knights, and if I may be so bold, Lithuanians as a side show of history.
Yes, there is Russophobia. But the history of the region isn’t determined only by religion and language:
https://archive.is/Fv7S6
There was so land much to steal.
Thank you, DJG.
I often read Andrei Martyanov and Rina Lu (on X) and note their obsession with the Vatican, an obsession rarely shared by Catholics like me and even my English godchildren (grandchildren of a Uniate grandmother, a postwar refugee from Ukraine to London via Vienna (mmm)).
Russia has been seen as a rival by the UK since the 18th century. That rivalry has withstood rule by white and red emperors. Russia’s resources have been coveted by British oligarchs since the 19th century. (I have originals of Russian government and corporate bonds in the study at home.) The situation is now complicated by a PMC and European elite that despises what modern Russia embodies and the descendants of immigrants like the new head of MI6 (Blaise Metreweli / Dobrovolska / Borkovska*) (and the French woman who was president of Georgia) and their ancient hatreds.
There’s a Guards subaltern descended from another who carried the regimental standard at Sebastopol. The current one carried at Trooping The Colour a couple of years ago.
*Let me crowbar this tidbit in: UK readers may have heard the Times criticise the proscribing of Palestine Action and two other groups for terrorism and the arrest of sympathisers, including an 83 year old Anglican woman priest. It appears that the disquiet in Whitehall over the Israel influenced appointment of Metreweli (over three more senior and experienced spooks and the UK’s envoy to the UN) is also to be found in that article. Some officials are worried about Israel’s influence on ministers and officials and the shredding of the British state’s legitimacy to appease / placate Israel.
My parents are from Mauritius. There are roads and villages called Alma, Inkerman and Sebastopol around the island. It’s the same in Australia and Canada.
Colonel Smithers: Astute, as ever.
Yes: “I often read Andrei Martyanov and Rina Lu (on X) and note their obsession with the Vatican, an obsession rarely shared by Catholics like me and even my English godchildren (grandchildren of a Uniate grandmother, a postwar refugee from Ukraine to London via Vienna (mmm)).”
I am reminded of some articles here that have a whiff of Presbyterian fundamentalism — the pope is the Antichrist. It is too convenient.
The Catholic church is no more organized than the Orthodox churches are — which means that Catholicism is a rather disordered movement indeed.
If anything, the quarrel between the Orthodox churches and the Catholic church is like sisters who can’t get along — because they share the same familial traits.
I have no idea of contemporary Roman Catholic practices (except for sexual scandals) but I do know that historically, there were vast differences between Rome and the other centers of Christianity. Rome decided on hegemony, however, and even though it was the least of all the centers (in fact called the ‘whore of Babylon’) and had a doctrine that favored oligarchy and wealth, it was able to bribe enough warlords to wipe out Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople through the Crusades. The other Christian centers folded, but the Eastern Church moved to Moscow. Those who study such things claim that the Eastern Orthodox Church is much more ‘Christian’ than Rome in terms of original Christianity. Regardless, it does not suffer the vagaries of sex scandals that Rome does because it allows priests to marry.
You are right. Seems to me that they drink too much Vatican Kool-aid at the Undisclosed Location.
Colonel, I am curious about your comment. I have never noticed any anti Vatican obsession in Martyanov, and I’m usually sensitive to such things. Perhaps you have examples in mind?
I live in Canada.
I’m within 300 metres of Raglan, Redan, Balaclava, and Alma streets. The city seems to have been expanding a bit about the time of or just after the Crimean War.
The antipathy was often mutual, as per the famous quip of the naval commander Loukas Notaras to the historian Doukas in 1452 (when the reunion between the Eastern and Western churches brokered at the Council of Ferrara in 1439 was proclaimed by the Russian cardinal Isidore of Kiev in Hagia Sophia): “I would rather a Turkish turban [in Constantinople] than a Latin mitre.” Deep public disaffection with such a desperate religious settlement, which implied conceding the superiority of Rome over the Eastern patriarchates as well as the filioque clause, might have been one of the factors in the fall of Constantinople shortly thereafter.
Russophobia is often exaggerated and easily found everywhere by less discerning Russophiles and a certain type of Russian patriot, but it is nevertheless real enough. (It is like anti-Semitism in all of those regards, though avowed opposition to it is utilised by somewhat different people.) For example, I am not sure the Jesuits had that much to do with it, though I would not be surprised if they did. It’s just that they are themselves popular subjects of conspiracy theories, letting other interested elite groups skate by unnoticed. Admittedly I haven’t dug into this very deep, but I long had the impression that Polish aristocrats, with their more immediate grievances and designs against us, had more to do with propagating anti-Russian myths throughout the early modern period than the Jesuits.
The Will of Peter the Great is a prime example of an early Russophobic conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_of_Peter_the_Great (Wikipedia, as ever, is not reliable as a final word but serves as a starting point.) I still see it referenced in some unexpected places (e.g. an English-language roleplaying game book), apparently as fact. By the way, as the article mentions (with some illustrative links), Karl Marx was a major subscriber to this theory and to the Russophobic worldview in general. This was downplayed to the point of being utterly erased in Soviet times but since rediscovered, with indignation, by some patriotically-minded Russian leftists such as Sergey Kara-Murza. I get the impression that this strain was kept alive by some of the more anti-Soviet Western Marxists, though. Perhaps that helps explain the effectiveness of anti-Russian cliches in left-identifying or ex-left circles in the West.
Daniil Adamov. Indeed:
I long had the impression that Polish aristocrats, with their more immediate grievances and designs against us, had more to do with propagating anti-Russian myths throughout the early modern period than the Jesuits.
As we see from the current behavior of the Polish governments, when the Polish elites have no foreign country to blame (Germany, Russia, those darn Lithuanians), they might have to learn to solve their own problems. Which wouldn’t fit in with their romantic and messianic nationalism.
There is the general religion-based Russophobic drive, but the socio-economic aspect is more significant, and it is also more overlooked.
The Polish aristocrats ultimately got wrecked by Russia, first during the partitions, and then when the communists took over, and this is a crucial factor in the history.
Because Poland was the ultimate oligarchy in European history, and an extremely vicious one too, much like what we have now. But it was destroyed by the strong centralized state the hated Moscovites built, and it was destroyed precisely because Poland was such a degenerate oligarchy that the state eventually stopped functioning, while centralization in Russia had the exact opposite effect.
When you hear bragging about how they were all about “freedom” coming from the direction of Poland, always keep in mind what kind of “freedom” they actually meant. In their case, the freedom to lord over the peasants and exploit them with no limits imposed by a central government. The young Polish revolutionaries of the 19th century ultimately secretly dreamed of the Russian Tsar not being there to control them and they becoming aristocrats themselves. The peasants didn’t really care either way as their lot was not going to improve (which is why those uprisings failed — popular support was lacking).
That is not to say that Tsarist Russia was not a brutal oligarchy itself too. It was, and it ultimately fell apart because of it. But still, the Tsar was more often than not trying to keep the aristocrats in check so that they don’t completely erode his own power (which is what happened in Poland).
Then the communists take power and the primary reason they managed to do so (contrary to “theory”) and then keep power for so long was the autocracy that preceded them, which meant that the strong bourgeois reaction that kneecapped the nascent communist revolutions in Western Europe was not there in Russia.
And in general Russian autocratic tradition had primed the Russian people for communism, which in practice can only work as a strong centralized state. Same reason it established itself successfully in China too.
That was an even more bitter pill to swallow for the Polish aristocrats.
Of course, it extends further West. The second most vicious oligarchy in Europe was the one that formed in Britain, though there they were in a better position to export their internal dysfunction to the rest of the world and conquer it in the process. But for the reasons described above, Russia was a mortal threat already centuries ago, and doubly and triply so in the 20th century when it was communist.
In the end people’s actions come down to control over resources, when you get to the core of their motivations.
P.S. Putin is a 1990s neoliberal at heart, and he deserves a lot of very bad things to happen to him for that and for all the Russian people that died as a result of it, during the war and in the peacetime decades prior to it. But despite that when you look at what is happening in the Russian economy, you see how bit by bit, at any given moment somewhere in the giant country this and that enterprise that never should have been but were privatized in the 1990s are getting nationalized. Defense industry, everything else related to it, airports, etc. It’s absolutely not the rapid, deliberate and open way Lenin did it, but it is a continuous process.
And at the end of that process you find Gosplan…
It’s just the nature of the place I guess.
Thank you for taking the time to write this marvelous comment, not a history buff by any means (the most thorough study I’ve made would be reading through Hobbawn’s Age of series), your oligarchy comment re: Russia, East Europe and China fill a considerable gap in understanding.
So it would be fair to say why Britain didn’t suffer revolution despite the vitality of its oligarchy could be routed in a number of factors? off top of my head:
a) the distribution of church wealth post reformation to the aristocracy that strengthened their position
b) The outcome of the civil war/Cromwellian revolution establishing a rudimentary civic society more robust than the bourbons (which led to less inter elite completion which any genuinely revolutionary force could plug into), which allowed the upper echelons to essentially choose their monarch Ala William of Orange and later the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,
c) Dee’s scheme (which he allegedly got via enochian magic) for the British empire model bringing looted resources back into the country
d) All this fostering an Industrial Revolution (in addition to the UK being blessed with the right kind of natural resources) which kept the aristocracy robust and necessitated a educated underclass and bourgeoisie which led to an eventually marked improvement in quality of life for the majority towards the end of the 19th century
e) Ably assisted by arguably the most effective and long-lived media propaganda machine in world history which continues today and extends to include Fleet Street, the BBC & literary pillars such as Shakespeare and Dickens (notably his lowsy take on the French Revolution in a tale of two cities).
All of those are true, but the biggest factor was that Britain was an island, and nobody tried to conquer it since the 11th century.
That also meant much less having to be spent on defense, and what was spent on the military was directly synergistic with projecting power overseas and building an empire.
And then once the empire was there, it pumped immense wealth into the imperial core. Up to a point, of course, then diminishing returns on investment hit.
But still, the Anglo-Saxon empire today is still the largest one there has ever been.
Tally up the just the five countries:
1. Canada — 9,984,670 km^2
2. USA — 9,525,067
3. Australia — 7,741,220
4. New Zealand — 268,338
5. UK — 244,376
Total: 27,763,671 km^2
And it was yet another 15M km^2 larger a century ago.
That is enough real wealth to cushion a lot of internal contradictions.
For comparison, the USSR at its peak was 22.4M km^2, the Mongol Empire at its peak was 24M km^2.
Meanwhile Poland was in a bad geostrategic position with no natural defensive borders, which necessitated strong centralization and huge investment into the military. The aristocrats were primarily concerned with their personal wealth though, and that doomed it.
P.S. Contrast the advantages the UK (and now the US too) enjoyed with Russia’s situation. Russia never had defensible borders until it expanded to the shape it was in after 1945 (which was then promptly squandered mere 45 years later) and most of that land was always very poor until the Industrial Revolution; only then did what was below the ground become valuable. The climate there is generally unfavorable for agriculture and little surplus was produced. And it was mostly expanding into deserts and tundras, i.e. even worse regions. Which had to be developed and defended, i.e. it was a net loss for the core (which is why, in the extreme case, Alaska was abandoned), but not taking over that land was not an option, because otherwise the core was exposed to invasion. Also, the military technology needed in that environment was not the kind that is synergistic with global power projection.
In general, there are fundamental differences between the British style of colonization and Russian expansion. The British did one of two things:
1) Where climate was suitable, they exterminated the local population and dumped off their own excess into the emptied space, alleviating their internal problems
2) Where it wasn’t, they simply thoroughly looted the place.
Meanwhile Russia always expanded to adjacent territories, and with the rare exception of situations such as with the Circassians, left everyone in place. There was very little “return of investment”, mostly the opposite — those were poorly developed territories that needed subsidies from the core, but there was no choice, they had to be developed, because they were not distant colonies they were a real part of the country, and their successful defense depended on them being sufficiently developed.
It is also why WWII was a loss for the USSR — Stalin may well have hoped to at least secure his western perimeter by expanding the communist realm to the Atlantic shores, and perhaps hoped to secure all three of China, Japan and South Korea too. In the end he exited the war surrounded from all sides, not solving the problem at all. And he did not get the rich developed industrialized regions he was hoping to get his hands on, he was stuck with needing to subsidize a much less developed periphery while having to defend from all sides, and this after the catastrophic devastation of the war (which was the result, again, of having no defensible borders). It was already a bad situation, but once the Chinese were flipped it was game over. The USSR was eventually overextended and collapsed, Russia is in a much worse position today…
HUH? The Spanish Armada was most definitely an attempt to conquer England.
Hitler intended to invade England in 1940. But he needed to take out the RAF first. And in a perverse stroke of luck for the UK, the accidental Allied bombing of civilians in Berlin led Hitler to focus on attacking cities with the rationale that that would draw out the RAF, rather than systematically destroy airbases and support infrastructure.
And they didn’t even manage to land.
Neither did the Nazis.
Meanwhile Russia has been invaded how many times since 1066?
This is grounds-shifting and bad faith argumentation. Don’t try to misrepresent what you wrote. You said: “…. nobody tried to conquer it since the 11th century.”
Actually, now Kouros reminds me, between the 1640s and 1746 Ireland and Scotland made repeated invasion attempts against England with the aim of restoring Catholicism and the House of Stuart.
So that’s a whole century’s worth of potential invasions of England, usually involving France as a participant in these attempts to restore the Stuarts and, IIRC, there may still have been a Jacobite pretender as late as the Napoleonic Wars.
Because the Irish and Scots got so badly beaten, no one thinks of these episodes as invasions of England. But the Irish allying with the great Catholic powers, France and Spain, was a serious strategic concern for the English because then they could be invaded from the West. Cromwell took the New Model Army into Ireland and shipped 60,000 Irish off to the colonies for that reason.
Didn’t the Dutch landed in Great Britain at some point?
Kouros: Didn’t the Dutch land in Great Britain at some point?
The Glorious Revolution of 1688.
But William of Orange was invited in by a league of major English nobles to replace James II, whose Catholic policies had alienated Protestant England and who fled to France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_William
The intent was to establish constitutional monarchy and the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy. The English had already had Cromwell’s revolution and civil war twenty years earlier, and weren’t going back to that.
William did bring over 20,000 troops. But in the event they were used to put down resistance in Ireland and Scotland, not England itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Boyne
Napoleon assembled an invasion army around Boulogne and other places on the Channel in 1796 and, IIRC, htad dispatched an invasion force towards Ireland, a major component of British territory a couple of years before that.
I think the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 was a result of Napoleon trying to unite the Spanish and French fleets to gain control of the Channel in another attempt to invade Britain.
Conquer? If you mean the intention was annex England, you are mistaken
Spain did not have the spare resources to occupy and annex England, as it was fighting the Dutch rebels, the French, and had to maintain a huge fleet of galleys in the Mediterranean to protect against the Ottomans and the constant piracy and raids from north Africa. Philip understood this. The best he hoped for was regime change, i.e. to get a Catholic monarch on the English throne (many English were still Catholic) or, failing that, to force Elizabeth to stop supporting the Dutch rebels. Ultimately they did succeed after many years of war, in the Treaty of London 1604. However, even though Spain continued to be the dominant power until the middle of the 17th century, it remained seriously overstretched, especially with the outbreak of the Thirty Years and associated wars, finally leading to its eclipse by France in the second half of the 17th century. There’s a lesson there for modern superpowers.
I don’t recognise the assertion that “Putin is a 1990s neoliberal at heart”. I think from the evidence based on his background in Leningrad, his legal training, service in the KGB and St Petersburg, and his 26 years in power, he is powerful strategic thinker and tactical pragmatist who will use whatever tools are necessary to ensure the maintenance, development and longterm survival of Russia civilisation and this is what confuses the dimmo Western political élite.
Well, “powerful strategic thinkers and tactical pragmatists” do not maneuvre their countries into situations in which they are being bombed daily with hundreds of cruise missiles (light cruise missiles for now, but that will change), with something blowing up increasingly deep inside Russia every day while the territories they previously owned turn militantly hostile against them (it is no longer just the Baltics and Ukraine) and they don’t do anything to fight back (even though they are sitting on the most powerful strategic arsenal in the world).
In the case of Ukraine, what did Ukraine look like when Putin took power, and what does it look like now? Who presided over that dramatic transformation? Do I need to say more?
This looks much more like controlled demolition than “ensuring the maintenance, development and longterm survival of Russia civilisation”.
You need to stop Making Shit Uo. Russia is not being bombed daily by hundreds of cruise missiles. That is so ridiculous as to completely discredit you. The West doesn’t have remotely enough to do that even if they could, FFS.
Time to get your Putin hatred seen to.
How did Russia look when Putin came to power in 2000 and how it looks now?
How does Ukraine looked in 2000 and how it looks now?
Russia still controlled all of the post-Soviet space except for the Baltics. Even the Baltics had joined NATO, but NATO had not yet moved in the way it has now.
And it was absolutely unthinkable for anyone to be launching drones and missiles into Russia, or to invade it with a large combined arms NATO force. Or, god forbid, to attack the strategic nuclear forces. Everyone was certain that the response to such transgressions would be immediate and nuclear.
All of that is now completely normalized, i.e. the country’s security is totally destroyed.
In the year 2000 Banderites were still a marginal force in Ukraine, everyone spoke Russian, watched Russian TV and had no intention of going to war with Russia.
I don’t need to describe what Ukraine is now.
Again, who has been in power over that quarter century, and who presided over these changes?
P.S. If your question is about economics and trying to imply how well Putin has done in that area, well, then you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
Don’t confuse shiny skyscrapers with real development in the areas that truly matter. By that logic Dubai has a solid economy and is doing fantastically well when the reality is that in a century at most it will be a ghost town having run out of both oil and water and even now e.g. the Iranians can take it largely without a fight in a couple days if they wish so.
During Putin’s first 15 years in power his main goal was preserving the Yeltsin project. Which is what he was installed to do by the people who really held power. So the deindustrialization of the country continued, and living standards improved for only two reasons:
1) oil prices went up dramatically
2) some concessions had to be made because otherwise there was a real threat of actual communists taking power back (which, had there been fair elections, would have happened already in the 1990s, and is why Putin replaced Yeltsin).
Everything you see as a truly positive development after 2014 and before that was driven by external factors.
The US withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2001 and the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 were the triggers to dust off a lot of late Soviet weapon programs, which are the basis for the current Russian supposed technological superiority in strategic delivery systems. Superiority, however, that is useless if leadership refuses to use those systems against the right targets.
And the (still modest) reindustrialization and on-shoring of the last decade was forced on the Kremlin by the situation in Ukraine and the sanctions.
They would not have done it otherwise, they were perfectly happy with Russia being a technologically backward resource appendage to the West.
Compare to what Stalin did — in 1929 he came out and said “We have a decade to catch up or we will be crushed in the coming major war”. Prophetic words, but prophetic words that were acted upon and that saved the country (though catastrophic damage was not avoided).
Putin knew a major war was coming the moment he became president, did he react to that the way Stalin did back in the days?
Yet more Making Shit Up. This is absolutely absurd. Real GDP per person grew 5x under Putin. Life expectancy at birth increased from 65 years to over 72 (the US comparison is 77 to 79.2). The prison population fell from about 1 million to 300,000.
Your Putin hatred is completely distorting your vision.
Putin is very much a neoliberal. He believes in fiscal orthodoxy and outside of making sure the state controlled the military, has not been at all a fan of public ownership of productive assets. In fact, Putin’s neoliberal tendencies were why Belarus didn’t do much in the way of economic integration until very recently, where the SMO forced Russia into more of a government-control mode.
I think there is a difference between an ideological belief in fiscal orthodoxy and the use of its toolkit to ensure that Russia builds up foreign reserves and maintains a low level of inflation to protect Russia’s economy in a world in which it was attempting to align with a neo-liberal West and, in the event, a West which prefers to destroy your state and seize its resources. I would assume that Putin is worldly enough to see that economic fashions come and go but civilisations are worth preserving and, in a war economy, different regulatory tools are more useful than those more favoured in a peacetime economy.
Also, as a general point, when I studied economics, fiscal orthodoxy lay in the need for an active fiscal policy to regulate aggregate demand to achieve full employment, economic growth, a low level of inflation conducive to economic growth and a balance of payments equilibrium over the medium term. Since then, of course, the world has been turned upside down and there is an excessive reliance on monetary policy presumably because it relieves politicians of any significant responsibilty for the wellbeing of their voters other than to help make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the PMC to become the new precariat. But perhaps I have grown old and cynical.
Sotirovic skips over the Soviet period, it doesn’t really fit his thesis. The absolute hatred/fear in the West of Bolchevism, the Communist International, and later, Stalinism and the planned economy, was an entirely new side to Russophobia.
I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention the “Tatar yoke.” The notion that Russians are not white, but rather the descendants of the barbaric and cruel Genghis Khan, must lie at the root of anti-Slavism and Russophobia.
The history is pretty clear, Sir Robert Wilson – who was the British observer to Alexander I’s army in Russia – was horrified when the Russians started rolling back the French, acquiring central European allies and ending up in Paris. Although the Russians came nowhere close to beating Napoleon in Eastern Europe on their own Wilson wrote clearly that the greatest threat to Britain was ‘the awakening Asiatic horde’ and this created a huge amount of concern in Britain.
I date the weird British hatred of Russia from 1820 when it starts in earnest. Until then Britain could command the continent by closing the ports but no such tactics would effect Russia. After this you see ongoing British meddling and outright conflict and the standard British policy of ‘do whatever it takes to weaken Russia’. From what the West calls “The Crimean War” because this was only the only theatre of a huge war where they won to overt British help in the Russo-Japanese War (the British sent their spy Reilly in to get the plans of Port Arthur. He was supposed to give the plans of the base to the Japanese but he sold it to them instead. Never trust a Russian turncoat like Reilly). The British scheme to assassinate Lenin precipitated The Red Terror in the Russian Civil War. In fact that war would have had a tiny fraction of its horrific casualties if Britain (and to a slightly lesser extant the USA & Japan, I have no idea what France was trying to achieve apart from getting out of its sudden war debt to the USA) had just left the Russians to sort their society out themselves.
Then begins the long sordid history of the Interwar behaviour to the USSR which was one of the factors of the Stalinist repressions (Stalin being another factor), the brief currying of favour during The Second World War and then the renewal of unceasing hostility of The Cold War, As we’ve seen this hostility had nothing to do with communism, it had everything to do with this unreasoning fear and hatred of Russia.
British, or, more specifically, the City of London’s financiers’ support for Japan in 1904-1905 is described in excruciating detail in this book: https://rijs.fas.harvard.edu/publications/foot-soldier-finance-minister-takahashi-korekiyo-japans-keynes
Kuhn, Loeb & Co. was not shy about the damage it intended to cause Russia via funding Japan’s war efforts. Compare those actions to the funding of NGOs active in Ukrainian media in the early 2010s, funding Azov after 2014, and the planning of the post-Maidan government. I cannot think of a better example of “history rhymes”.
Comparing the Skripal poisoning to “Jews are poisoning are water” is new to me and the parallels between classic anti-Antisemitism and 2016-2025 Russophobia are too obvious to ignore, down to the image of a (Jewish or Putin-faced) lobster taking over the planet. To this day, many commentators on the NYT and other D-leaning websites continue to believe that Putin is secretly pulling the levers of power in the US and elected Trump in 2016.
Kuhn Loeb was a US investment bank. It NEVER was British.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuhn,_Loeb_%26_Co.
You are correct, and I should have been clearer.
I have misplaced the book I referenced, but IIRC most of the loans were placed via City of London. Kuhn, Loeb provided initial direct assistance in the US markets but also made introductions to City of London bankers. Ernest Castel (London) was a very active supporter.
(correcting an earlier response).
You are correct that Kuhn, Loeb was never in the City of London.
I misplaced my copy of Foot Solder to Finance Minister, but IIRC Kuhn, Loeb & Co. provided direct placement of Japanese debt with US investors but also made introductions to City of London bankers. Ernest Cassel (London) was prominently involved in placing the Japanese debt.
That is a great book, the chapter from it you are referring to is “Fundraising During the Russo-Japanese War: 1904”
As that chapter details, Japan’s financing of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 was a joint British-American affair, where about half the 10 million pounds Japan needed came from Britian and the other half came from New York, the latter case because of the influence of Jacob Schiff of Kuhn Loeb. Takahashi was in London working to raise the money and met Schiff at a dinner party; the next day Takahashi was “dumbfounded” when he was informed that Schiff wanted help Japan raise the money they needed by issuing five million pounds of Japan’s bonds in New York.
pg 150:
Interesting how the British are always happy to stab Russia when the opportunity presents itself.
more on Schiff, pg 152:
Boy, that certainly sounds familiar to today doesn’t it? Just replace the Romanovs with the mullahs.
Blogger Patrick Armstrong came out with a recent post talking about this. How the Russians say that the west has always hated them. He was doubtful until he read a book on the Crimean war which had the same old tropes as being used today-
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2025/05/20/anti-russia-through-the-years/
That war was in the 1850s but that hatred must have preceded it by decades to be so strong in that war. And it still exists. At the start of the SMO it was like a switch was flicked in Europe and everything Russian was being banned – planes, authors, trees, foods, dancers, painters, popular singers & musicians, etc. It was crazy to watch and it was like an extended version of the 1984 two-minute hate sessions only it kept going for month after month, year after year. It got to the point that the EU has wrecked itself trying to destroy Russia but they are not stopping. There will be many a phd thesis written about this phenomena – unless they are banned and censored.
And Russian hatred in the US? Should it be mentioned that Russiagate and Russiadidit came on the heels of the disastrous performance of Hillary Clinton in 2016 so party operatives went with this theory so as to not admit that they had the most experienced politician in America lose to a game show host? And it has been kept up by Democrats and Neocons – or do I repeat myself- for nearly a decade. Hating on Russia pays very well in some circles, even though long term it will sabotage America’s fortunes and security.
The Tsar was going “too far” pushing the Ottomans out of the Balkans, Bulgaria was too much for the Tsar to get!
Was Crimea a diversion or a new European colony?
Good that you mention Bulgaria.
Which is a good starting point to review Western hypocrisy once again, especially the parts about “values” and further back in time being a good Christian.
The Ottomans carried out a lot of massacres against Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians in the 19th century, and all throughout Britain supported them because their main goal was to defeat Russia.
The Greeks eventually leveraged their claims on the legacy of Ancient Greece plus being a maritime merchant culture and managed to integrate a lot of their elites into the West.
The Serbians and especially the Bulgarians were not so fortunate.
And then there were the Armenians…
That is stuff that happened a long time ago. Which even then, when Europe was still professing to be Christian, showed that if you were not their kind of Christian, you did not count as a full member of the human species, but something less.
But it is still the same today.
Armenians were ethnically cleansed from Karabakh two years ago, not a peep from the West. Full-scale ethnic cleansing of the worst kind, carried out in the open, etc. Everybody forgot about their universal human values, freedom and democracy.
It didn’t even start there, though — there were millions of Christians in Iraq and Syria, a lot of them were massacred or expelled by ISIS in the mid-2010s, supported by you know who. And now they are finishing the job in Syria. Again, supported by the usual suspects who are otherwise deeply committed to universal human rights and values.
A lot of Christians in Gaza too. But not the right kind of Christians, apparently…
Which should be having alarm bells ringing in Skopje and Sofia, who are the two Orthodox countries in NATO that have diligently lined behind the policies of their current masters. Maybe one day Turkey will demand something from them too, and the West will, as it has repeatedly done in the past, again treat them as less than fully human and deserving protection.
This goes deep, very deep…
My buddy in Auckland took us to see where naval gun emplacements around the harbor were situated against a Russian invasion, circa 1888.
https://rnzncomms.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/russian-scare-chapter-1.pdf
We got the same in Sydney Harbour-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Denison#Military_fortress
But it was always a dud. Made a great place for a restaurant though.
The Russians have themselves to blame for a lot of this.
It goes back to the immediate post-WWII situation.
The truth of the war was that it was not a war of Nazi Germany against the USSR, it was a war of practically all of Europe against the USSR. And even the British may easily have ended up on the other side if it wasn’t for the way the opening phases of the war played out. But ultimately it was likely an intentional British ploy to instigate another major continental war in order to weaken their adversaries, and in this case particularly, to destroy the USSR.
We now know two still mostly forgotten/unknown facts:
1) Operation Pike. In 1939-1940 the British and the French planned on bombing the Soviet oil fields in Baku, using their bases in the Middle East as a launch point. This was before Operation Barbarossa, before the French were defeated, and on the Soviet side, before the vast Western Siberian and northern Caspian oil deposits were discovered, i.e. at the time their primary oil source were the fields in Azerbaijan and in the Northern Caucasus. This was also before anyone had tried to bomb oil fields, i.e. it was not known how difficult it is to take them out (as would be discovered in Romania a few years later), but the intent is what matters here, and the intent was to completely wreck the Soviet economy and instigate regime change though the resulting chaos
2) Operation Unthinkable. Before the war was even over in 1945, the British were putting together plans for war against the USSR, quickly revised to include nuclear bombing too.
The Soviets knew all of these things, and could have fought against the established official narrative by presenting the alternative, much closer to the truth story, i.e. Europe as a whole was out to get them and there were few innocents. It would have had the advantage of being fully consistent with communist ideology and also true.
But for a variety of reasons they stuck with the official line of blaming it all on the Germans.
Had they not done that, it would have been much harder for anyone to commit the ultimate act of treason in all of human history and dissolve the USSR for the vague promise of being accepted as part of the club in the West. The folly of that would have been obvious to everyone and nobody would have agreed. Presumably…
Then since the 1991 they doubled down on that fake official narrative.
And what did that bring them?
Yes, indeed, a switch was flipped in 2022, and it turned out that the grandchildren of the Nazis are still Nazis, have not forgotten anything all those decades, and are plotting revenge. Oh, and they still desperately need to get their hands on Russia’s lands and resources. Who could have imagined…
The official Russian narrative would have been re-purposed in the Western media as Russo-phobic propaganda. The history you are recounting here is not common knowledge in the West; especially the US.
The change in tone from Russia since 2022 is partly due to it becoming an autarchy: sufficent resources to sustain itself economically; sufficient miiltary skill to defend it’s borders and send devastating projectiles anywhere on the planet; and the diplomatic skill to get the majority of world population (China particularly) to NOT hate on it.
The tables are turning: the West is done for!
Some of Hitler’s allies went willingly, others less so.
Hungary was bought with the Northern Transylvania taken from Romania and Romania was persuaded with the recovery of Basarabia (presnt day R of Moldova), which the non-agression treaty btw Germany and Russia let the Soviets free hand in Romania, half Poland, Finland. So some of the allies were made by the Soviet actions.
But what I find interesting though is the fact that the perceived level of rossophobia in the romanian population is not very high. It is constantly being wipped by MSM, but it is hard, since the romanians see for instance Ukrainian agricultural products replacing romanian products on the shelves. Also, for at least 70 years, there isn’t any active memory of issues with the russians, and in more distant past, it was the ukrainian cossacks that were raiding Moldovan villages, towns and monasteries, as frequent as the tatars. Russian arrival put an end to all of that.
Russians helped the romanian principalities gain the independence from ottomans in 1878 and in 1917 helped stand the german onslaught (the french helped with instructors, the russians with actual armies).
Romanians turned orthodox in mid 1350 as a defence against catholic Hungary and Poland and turned their alphabet to latin in late 1700s early 1800s due to the ever grater Russian proximity.
The western yoke was perceived as an iron yoke, while the ottoman or russian (when it was) was perceived as a wooden yoke.
I think this is the crux of the matter, the western europeans really must make use of iron to implement supremacy for maximizing resource extraction. Simple commerce does not suffice. It is the rationale of capitalism, which Lenin said leads to imperialism. It is not necessarily catholicism or the “Anglo-Saxons” but the drive for cheap resources, markets, cheap labout and promising “El Dorados” that is the main driver.
The English Revolution amped the discourse against royalty and catholicism to very high levels, with the incipient capitalist class pumping lots of money for anti-carlist pamphlets, news, etc. Most, if not all, lies. This is the origin of the British yellow press. There is a cold mind at work there, nothing irrational. But hoi polloi need some wipping to go with the flow.
Russia has real sins against Romania.
Moldova especially.
There are several situations like this, all created with the active participation of the Kremlin, and now some are blowing up in their face rather dramatically
Moldova is one. There is no such thing, they are Romanian. Not the whole territory, but still. Yet the Kremlin tried to make it a separate nation, for its own strategic reasons.
Macedonia. No such thing, they are Bulgarians. But the Comintern adopted the macedonization line in the interwar period.
Ukraine. This is ultimately a Western project, yet a primary driver of Ukrainization in the interwar period were the directives from Moscow. People were punished for not speaking Ukrainian in Odessa and Kharkov (where nobody had a clue what that is) in those years.
You can see what is happening now in Ukraine as Moscow getting some payback for those past sins.
Not just there — Azerbaijan is a completely made up by the USSR entity too, there had never been such a thing in history, though in this case it is harder to pin it down as a sin against anyone in particular because of the ethnoreligious complexities of the Middle East.
These all ring true; which doesn’t make other considerations about Russia and Putin that you have expressed valid.
Regarding: “that hatred must have preceded it by decades to be so strong in that war. And it still exists.”
That hatred goes back a millennia. Check out the book “Creating Russophobia” by Swiss author Guy Mettan. This Western racist attitude goes back to the split in Christendom that separated it into Catholic and Orthodox factions, and encompasses the Orientalism per Edward Said.
Quoting Guy Mettan:
“Russia upsets the image the West has of itself and the world. The clash between the West’s idealized image of itself and its harsh reality as viewed by Russia clarifies the Western psychological need for demonization of Russia.” p98
“… originally the translation of the Slavic word for ‘king’ little by little took on the negative meaning of ‘tyrant,’ as a Slavic king (despot) could be nothing but a tyrant.”p146
“The charge was mainly against the Russian commune, presented as generating uniformity, with the State crushing the individual. … Discourse on the middle class took second place in favor of the cult of the individual … as bearer of democracy, progress and civilization against powers that sought to crush him”p166
“Suddenly after 1815, Russia Becomes a Threat … ‘The contradictory sequel of nearly three centuries of consistently friendly relations, this hostility found expression in the Crimean War. … And in the three primary holocausts of modern times, in which among the major powers Great Britain alone escaped defeat, her victory thrice depended on the military collaboration of Russia. Why then did Russophobia became a persistent British sentiment?’ … lucid and premonitory, so much so that they remain relevant sixty-five years after their formulation and perfectly match the American and European Russophobia of this beginning of the 21st century. Why did Russia, which three times had saved the western world, then at a time when she did not, or not any longer, represent a threat to it, and even now still, generate so much hatred and hostility in Western media, universities and chancelleries?”p178-9
“English and American Russophobia was primarily engendered by the imperial ambitions of these two countries and by their irrepressible drive to dominate the world.”p202
“To convince, manipulating words is not enough. … An easy myth must be fabricated that will lodge in the collective imagination. … This myth has a function … to ‘substitute the truth to better calm apprehensions and provide explanations that bring back tranquility … ‘a narrative on reality whose function is to justify the past and the present.’ … the metanarrative must also transform the past. … The main mission of memory occultation is to wipe out any traces of the positive historical role of Russia in Europe … building the myth of Euro-Atlantic union by opposing it to the myth of the threatening Russian bear … If NATO were to be viewed as aggressive, rather than Russia, the entire construction of the myth would collapse. … the same experts, tirelessly repeat the same refrain: Putin is a villain, Russia wants to invade us.”p310-312
Interesting read.
The first 20 years of my mostly military career was cold war. USAF encouraged study/reading to understand our main enemy. Soviet and Russian were not distinguished.
In 1980 plus or minus a year or two, I lived on a SAC air base. We provided “alert” aircraft! Most certainly their targets were in Russia. One Saturday night on that base PBS showed “Alexander Nevsky (1938), Battle on the ICE”.
Over the years I have found conversion and now believe war to be utterly incompatible with the teaching of Christ. That includes denying all anger I held toward former “enemies”.
Vatican being involved in war is example of how human that institution is. The Vatican claims it is true to the Gospels, which is not obvious with its silence about Kiev, Lebanon and Gaza. It is a human institution that worries too much about worldly things, politics.
I recently read a sermon by a Mellkite (a group “in union” with the Pope) Catholic priest . He asked can you see any situation where Jesus would say “go ahead shoot that enemy soldier’s head off?”
Someone has either been afraid of what Russians would do with all that natural wealth and/or used fear as excuse for their covetousness of the resources.
Maybe Leo will do better.
War between Orthodox and Rome has always been wrong.
A longer German essay on the subject from 2 years ago posted, naturally, by alternative site MULTIPOLAR.
It was then offered in an Engl. version too:
The long lines of Russophobia
Western politicians and journalists can repeatedly express extremely derogatory views about Russia without being publicly criticized. Rhetorically, it seems that any taboo can be broken. This negative treatment, which is hardly imaginable in relation to other countries, goes far beyond objectively justified criticism of the Russian leadership and is just as observable in times of war as in times of peace. Those in charge resort to certain stereotypes and insinuations about Russia that have been repeated for centuries and are deeply ingrained in the Western subconscious.
STEFAN KORINTH , April 24, 2023
https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/the-long-lineage-of-russophobia
He quotes among others Swiss Guy Mettan who too was quoted by Richard Sakwa on this very subject in the latest conversation with Glenn Diesen.
The essay starts with these harrowing quotes:
“The only truth emerging from Russia is lies.”
Robert Habeck, German Minister of Economics (2022)
“What is the peace that exists under Russian occupation, worrying every day that you will be murdered in cold blood, raped or even abducted as a child?”
Annalena Baerbock, German Minister for Foreign Affairs (2023)
And it ends however with Victor Klemperer (who is mostly known for his WWII diaries and probes into the “Nazification” of the German language, “Lingua Tertii Imperii”):
“I want to emphasize it particularly profusely here and today. For it is so bitterly necessary for us to get to know the true spirit of the peoples from whom we have been closed for so long, about whom we have been lied to for so long. And about none have we been lied to more than about the Russian.”
Of course one could add to Habeck and Baerbock hundreds of post-2021 quotes, like draining Russia of her minds (“brain-drain” discussion) or NATO´s Florence Gaub´s comment in a major TV discussion with idiotic host Markus Lanz – had it been about Israelis it would have ruined her career:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Gaub
April 2022:
Florence Gaub: We mustn’t forget, even if Russians look European, that they aren’t Europeans – in the cultural sense – who have a different relationship to violence, who have a different relationship to death.
Markus Lanz: More capable of suffering, or what do you mean?
Well, (stammering) …there isn’t this liberal, postmodern approach to life; life as a project that everyone shapes individually, but life can also end quite early with death – I mean, Russia also has a relatively low life expectancy, I think 70 for men, um, that’s just… people simply deal with the fact that people die there differently.
Markus Lanz: Hmm.
Florence Gaub: That’s dramatic.
p.s. To make it crystal clear, in Germany this is inherent to almost the entire elite not just since 2022. But it was articulated in such unambigiuous ways only after Febr. 2022. And yet if I speak to people – and I repeat myself – who share my shock – those same minds are capable of comparing Putin and Netanyahu. The level of incompetence is of historic proportion. Everywhere.
So after initially opposing to comparisons with WWII by now I am indeed asking, had the world had the bomb since 1939 (think “MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE”) what would have been different?
p.p.s. One of the reasons why I have become so disgusted with this country and it´s cultural and academic elite in particular was another interview with same Florence Gaub.
For German-speakers.
If you want to know how to conduct a “sophisticated” and funny interview, yet deeply dishonest, with a Western-style suprematist, crypto-anti-Russian-Nazi, and for understanding how is happening what is happening in the EU, listen to it. The topics left blank are shocking (as is not addressing her above comment) –
Jakob Augstein meets military strategist Florence Gaub
52 min.
https://www.radioeins.de/programm/sendungen/sendungen/353/2312/231204_radioeins_und_freitag_salon_22765.html
The interview was conducted by – former ally of Julian Assange – German newspaperman Jakob Augstein, who appeared as witness in Assange´s first court case, 2020 I think.
Augstein is the son of famed SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein, and he is half-brother of high-level journalist Franziska Augstein (editor with important German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung, now writing in its economics department and ex-wife of Süddeutsche senior ediotr and former judge Heribert Prantl).
Jakob Augstein is however best known as founder (yeah the money runs deep in the Augstein family) of leftist weekly FREITAG, which I have abandoned since spring 2022 as I have abandoned Süddeutsche Zeitung too, both papers I have grown up/old with. In Munich it was usual for school kids to visit Süddeutsche Zeitung´s HQ, e.g.
– so in the light of all this – I can only applaud Andrei Martyanov every single day, regardless that I don´t share several of his social analyses or other antics – I am and will always be indebted to his scholarship and astute views. This is also true for the insightful commentariat of Moon of Alabama, which led me to NC in the first place and several others, like Anti-Spiegel.
Thanks for these astute comments. I think you would agree that most former citizens of the GDR have positive feelings for Russians.
Indeed – even though I can only quote others who know this better, since I am child of the FRG – but that tells you what “German elite” today means and excludes.
Considering the knowledge about the Third World e.g. amassed in the GDR, the great tradition of literary analysis (Verlag Volk und Welt), or simply TV and radio commentators and hosts who – literally overnight – were out of a job after serving an audience of millions of East Germans. Not to speak of the expropriation of IP, companies and businesses and their ideas.
All of that built on and fed by hatred, and by faith in supremacy of a highly fraudulent German capitalist elitism (see my hints under NC´s entry about Ursula von der Leyen.)
From here in the UK the Skripal / Salisbury Poisoning case was our ‘Russiagate’ – a case in which all critical thinking and any journalism at all was thrown out of the window because Putin. The Establishment can just shrug off the amazing coincidence that it was the most senior nurse of the British Army who happened to be passing by and that a befuddled paramedic gave Sergei the treatment for nerve agent by mistake rather than the treatment for the drugs overdose that everyone suspected he had suffered at the time.
The massively expensive Government inquiry into the case has been a farce as Tim Norman’s excellent 3 part analysis shows in excruciating detail – our Government can get away with anything.
https://propagandainfocus.com/schrodingers-novichok-12-points-from-the-dawn-sturgess-inquiry-part-1/
The followers of the Uniate Church in Ukraine make up 10%. Most of the people there are Orthodox. And they supported the West in Kiev not for religious reasons, but simply because of money. It seemed to them that the West was giving them more than Russia. It was constantly written on the Internet that Americans pay more. That’s what a Ukrainian saleswoman from a souvenir shop in Athens told me ten years ago. It’s all about money. Imagine, this happens most often.
Since it´s new, from German HINTERGRUND magazine:
German version but translateable with google since no paywall.
Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union: also a US proxy war
https://www.hintergrund.de/politik/welt/hitlers-krieg-gegen-die-sowjetunion-zugleich-ein-us-stellvertreter-krieg/
“The USA supported the Soviet Union against the invasion of Hitler’s Wehrmacht – this is well known worldwide. But before that, the USA had politically supported Hitler, equipped Hitler’s Wehrmacht with the most modern army, and also supported the other fascist dictatorships of Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, and Chiang Kai-shek in China. US corporations and Wall Street banks then supported Hitler’s Germany during the war, for example by laundering stolen gold and stolen stocks into globally marketable currencies. Thus, the war was prolonged, claimed even more victims – and, thanks to US support, became the largest US proxy war to date, against the common main enemy – which, logically, the Soviet Union was officially declared to be immediately after the war.”
By WERNER RÜGEMER
Rügemer is known for his investigative work e.g. on Blackrock.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=werner+R%C3%BCgemer&__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=3UBJI0GES8S1D&sprefix=werner+r%C3%BCgemer%2Caps%2C201&ref=nb_sb_noss
The primary premise promoted by the old Vineyard of the Saker blog was that the West/Russia conflict was all about religion. Saker himself was devoutly Orthodox but those of us who aren’t particularly religious can buy into the notion of religion as the doctrinal core to a tribal and then nationalistic and power oriented group. After all just look at the Middle East or India versus Pakistan.
One could even make it religion versus lack of religion since one apparent source of hostility to Russia among the DEI is Putin’s supposed discrimination against gay people due to his Orthodox beliefs.
It’s all a bit deep for me but does suggest the self serving think tank notion that foreign policy is all about rational pursuit of economic interests leaves out something that doesn’t quite fit.
This is hard to buy since the Communist Soviet Union was atheist and drove those Orthodox who did practice underground.
Russia is still a predominantly atheistic country. Excessive piety in Russia is more likely to cause laughter than understanding. American Protestants, with their constant quoting of the Bible in Russia, are perceived as backward people from past centuries.
Excessive piety, yes, but as for “predominantly atheistic”, a majority identifies as Orthodox according to any polls I’ve seen. Of course, a majority in that majority is not “votserkvlyonniye”, “in the church”; they don’t actually practice it and they may not understand it very well. But if a majority claims to be religious, that does have some relevance. Militant atheists and secularists – in both communist and pro-Western flavours – do exist as well, but they’re a loud yet largely powerless minority.
Then I’ll say this – literally everyone in Russia is a materialist. I’m even sure that you’re a materialist too. You probably even adhere to dialectical materialism.
Nope. Though I’m sure some people are.
He was talking about circa 2014 Russians. I believe Putin is a believing Orthodox. This has apparently caused resentment among groups like Pussy Riot and a film of that period, Leviathan, is of that theme.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2802154/
As far as I can tell, Cold War USSR was not nearly as atheist as it was during 1920s and 1930s. The Orthodox Church, I believe, played a huge role in mobilizing patriotism during World War II and gained a certain official respectability. (I think Khrushchev wanted to bring back some of the prewar anti religious policies, but it didn’t stick, I believe.) Where the anti religious policy did work with rather brutal efficiency was towards the Ukrainian Eastern Catholics, who were driven completely underground by force (This was different from the Roman Catholics in, say, Lithuania, who were allowed to continue, although the conference of bishops was suppressed.) I distinctly remember Russian acquaintances telling me in 90s snd 00s that there was a big religious revival taking place…although it wouldn’t have been loud the way US Southern Protestants are (but no one else in the world are that loud, except South Korean Protestants–but their traditions do come from the US South, mostly Methodists This shows up in oddly numerous grads from places like Vanderbilt and Emory among late 19th/early 20th century Korean intellectuals.)
There was a substantial underground revival in the last Soviet years already, which helped prepare the ground for what came after. Christianity often thrives when persecuted, but moreso when the persecution isn’t vigorous enough to overwhelm it completely and is eventually allowed to lapse (so when I see militant American atheists calling for “banning religion”, I wonder if they realise what they’re asking for).
On the other hand, people hoping for any sort of advancement could and did still get in trouble for any serious expression of religiosity, as at odds with Party discipline. One historian was ratted out by a priest at some point in the 1960s (or maybe 70s?) for buying a Bible. He wouldn’t have been shot for it of course, but the implications for his career were grave. The head of his department bailed him out by explaining that they specialised in the study of Ancient Near Eastern history, so the man was simply looking for a source…
Religion is essential for the whole Eastern Europe conquest project. Even more so in the Balkans than in the Ukraine.
It wasn’t religion.
I have a small example.
Between 1000 and 1200s the Hungarians moved from the Carpathian Basin (Pannonia) into Transylvania, which was mostly occupied by proto-romanian speaking people. Once that conquest was finished and some colonists were brought on the limes, the Hungarians tried to moved south and east, in the ramaining romanian speaking territories.
The stories of such conquest and forced assimilation, especially of the elites (some being romanized pecenegs), strengthened the spine and led to the creation of Wallachia and Moldova which originally were hewing towards Rome, especially given the Latin/Roman origins of the population and culture.
However, the siding of Rome with the expanding Hungarians and the Poles from north moved the leadership to fully adopt orthodoxy and chirilic alphabet and thus creating a cultural limes as well as the geographical barrier that the Carpathians represented.
And then, when the Orthodox Czars and the Russians came closer and closer, with intention of conquest, the romanian elites immediately switched to latin alphabet, again creating a cultural limes.
Religion serves a political end, it is not an end in itself. Land ownership and sovereignity over the land is an end in itself.
And this item again by MULTIPOLAR BLOG
By German Russia scholar Hauke Ritz (also well known from his work together with Ulrike Guerot)
Ritz one of the few who taught in Russia and spoke there until very recently.
Use google to translate. The text is a free excerpt from Ritz´s study
“From the Decline of the West to the Reinvention of Europe”
However his understanding of the military side of the matter is probably limited.
From the decline of the West to hostility with Russia
At the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany lacked a public awareness of the world’s ability to shape itself. The situation was quite different for the United States, whose hegemony has since been expanded and is accepted here as a given. European values such as diplomacy and understanding, which grew out of its own history of war, were undermined. In his recent book, Hauke Ritz traces the decline of the West – with Germany at its center. He speaks of a “colonized consciousness among Europeans” and an “almost childlike immaturity” in US foreign policy. Multipolar is publishing excerpts.
by HAUKE RITZ
March 27, 2025
https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/niedergang-des-westens
Michael Hudson has studied the events of the past leading to our debt-ridden, financial capitalist society. One event was the evolution of Rome in the 12th century. I have no idea of contemporary Roman Catholic practices (except for sexual scandals) but Professor Hudson teaches that historically, there were vast differences between Rome and the other centers of Christianity. Rome decided on hegemony, however, and even though it was the least of all the centers (in fact the epithet ‘whore of Babylon’ had genuine origin) and had a doctrine that favored oligarchy and wealth, it was able to bribe enough warlords to wipe out Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople through the Crusades. The other Christian centers folded, but the Eastern Church moved to Moscow. It is easy to surmise that it has been an enemy of Rome ever since.
Those who study such things claim that the Eastern Orthodox Church is much more ‘Christian’ than Rome in terms of original Christianity. Regardless, it does not suffer the vagaries of sex scandals that Rome does because it allows priests to marry. So, there are deep doctrinal differences that motivate the Vatican’s hostility.