Yves here. While this John Ruehl article gives a useful long historical view of US-Russia relations, I find its extreme underplaying of the impact of what we Americans like to call the Communist Revolution on the US posture towards Russia to be bizarre. The US had long been crassly mercenary, as recounted long form by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
In keeping a big factor that depending on your view of FDR, either enabled or propelled him to make reforms that benefitted ordinary worker was the rise of the Communist-sympathetic CIO, as in if FDR did not make concessions to force capitalists to share more, they might see even more privileges stripped from them. Similarly, the reason that Stalin approved the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was that Russia had cast about to find any possibly ally so as to hold off a predictable German attack. Russia was universally rebuffed.
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Follow him on X @john_ruehl. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
Washington’s relationship with Russia appears likely to continue its decades-long decline, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on May 22 that formal diplomatic talks over the Ukraine war are effectively frozen. U.S. President Donald Trump’s last meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in August 2025 in Alaska. While the meeting was free from overt hostility, the restrained press conference that followed reflected the cold and distant relationship between the countries, with little meaningful engagement since. No American president has visited Russia since Barack Obama in 2013.
Russia is the only great power with which Washington has an openly adversarial relationship, as Trump’s visit to China in May 2026 and emphasis on his friendship with President Xi Jinping reflect a desire for amicable relations with Beijing, even if it masks greater tensions.
The decaying relationship between Russia and the U.S. has all but erased the international affairs model they built over the second half of the 20th century. Cold War confrontations forced Washington and Moscow to de-escalate through agreements on arms control and maritime encounters, stabilizing relations and setting global standards. Many of those agreements, along with post-Cold War arrangements and treaties, have since collapsed, and America’s advantage over a weakened post-Soviet Russia has left the balance uneven, reducing once well-defined spheres of influence.
Russia’s struggle to control Ukraine and the uncertainty surrounding Washington’s role in global leadership have been reinforced by each side complicating the other’s position. Yet much of the talk about their antagonism ignores their deeper history of failing to gain traction. U.S. perceptions of Russia rarely go back before 1945 and the beginning of Cold War tensions, while Russians increasingly refer to the U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War roughly two decades prior as the starting point of souring relations between them.
However, both countries need to understand that distrust and cooperation have been ebbing and flowing for more than two and a half centuries and require stabilization for their own interests and global well-being.
Early Contact
The first official Russian expedition to sight the Alaskan mainland came in 1741, led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering, in search of animals for the lucrative fur trade. After years of incursions, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska was established on Kodiak Island in 1784, and dozens of Russian merchants, explorers, and missionaries began to settle in the region.
American merchants had already established a transatlantic trade relationship with Russia before the U.S. War of Independence, in violation of Britain’s Navigation Act. The Russian Empire’s neutral stance during the war helped build trust that would fuel commerce after, with American traders beginning Arctic trade by the 1790s. Russia established the Russian-American Company (RAC) as a state-sponsored colonial trading monopoly in 1799 to consolidate Russian commercial interests in North America, basing political administration in Novo-Arkhangelsk (now Sitka, Alaska).
Fort Ross, established in northern California in 1812, became the company’s southernmost outpost. Spain and later independent Mexico both claimed the area, but neither had sufficient presence to deter Russian development, which also unsettled Washington. In 1821, Russia officially laid claim to much of the Pacific west coast down to the modern U.S.-Canadian border, before American and British objections pushed its claim back to the present southern border of Alaska.
The overlap between expanding Russian and U.S. activity was also felt in Hawaii. The RAC briefly established a foothold at Waimea Bay after a shipwreck in 1815 and had limited success in trade and building relations with different native Hawaiian groups. However, the Russians were forced to withdraw in 1817 after pressure from native groups and Americans.
Still, ongoing Russian development in the Pacific Northwest kept concerns elevated in Washington. In 1823, then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told the Russian envoy that the U.S. would “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on… [American continents].” The Monroe Doctrine, revealed later that year and strongly shaped by Adams, explicitly warned Russia and several other European powers against further expansion in the Americas.
Russia nonetheless continued its efforts to expand its American holdings, and the signing of the Russo-American Treaty for Oregon in 1824 established boundaries between the two powers on the West Coast. By the late 1830s, the Russian population (which included Russians and other ethnic groups within the empire) peaked at just 823 documented colonists in its American territories. Contemporary estimates suggest that the Indigenous population was a little more than 10,000, with a further 12,500 known through contract but not formally registered, and approximately 17,000 more living beyond Russian administrative reach.
Continental Powers in Contrast and the End of Russian America
In Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840, French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville refers to Russia and the U.S. as emerging continental powers shaped by Europe but expanding across different frontier regions and following sharply contrasting political trajectories.
The U.S. appeared centered on freedom for settlers, with Russian society based on general servitude. American expansion was often through individual initiatives within a loose democratic system, while Russia advanced under centralized autocracy. Yet both appeared destined to “sway the destinies of half the globe,” stated Tocqueville.
Within decades, they were increasingly crossing paths in the Pacific, and Russia’s decision to abandon its American holdings was a practical one. The 7,500 miles from Alaska across barren Siberia to the centralized leadership in St. Petersburg complicated administration. “On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for… $7.2 million,” according to an article in The Conversation.
Combined with bankruptcy after wars in Europe, Russia viewed its American territories as increasingly peripheral and under threat from the British, and accepted transferring those regions to Washington. Russia sold Fort Ross in 1841 and Alaska in 1867, ending more than a century of Russian America, as it eyed Central Asia for expansion.
Even before the sale of Russia’s American territories, Moscow and the U.S. had entered a more cooperative phase. Russia offered strong support to the Union during the Civil War, including sending its Baltic and Pacific fleets to winter in New York and San Francisco in 1863. Tsar Alexander II and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln tied the latter’s emancipation proclamation to the Tsar’s emancipation of Russia’s serfs two years earlier. After the war, parts of the American and Russian elite also explored the idea of longer-term alignment.
But they never found a solid footing. Russia’s push into Manchuria in 1900 conflicted with America’s Open Door Policy in China, and the termination of the Russian-U.S. trade agreement in 1911 pointed further to how fragile their relationship remained.
Russian Revolution and U.S. Intervention in the Civil War
The two countries briefly aligned on the same side in World War I. Russia exited the war after the 1917 Revolution, and while the November 1918 armistice ended fighting with Germany, the U.S. forces were still deployed on wartime operations. “Russia had begun World War I as an ally of England and France. But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, installed a communist government in Moscow and St. Petersburg that pulled Russia out of the conflict and into peace with Germany,” stated the Smithsonian magazine.
The U.S. public saw the war in Europe draw to a close while troops remained in Russia, still engaged in a mission that had begun under the wider conflict and now continued into the country’s civil war.
The U.S. first sent about 5,000 troops to Arkhangelsk in northern Russia in September 1918 under British command as part of a larger allied intervention. This action was originally intended to prevent any German advances and attempts to access Western weapons stockpiled in Russia, but soon expanded into Western efforts to defeat the Bolsheviks.
In Siberia, U.S. forces led by General William S. Graves arrived in 1918, also part of a larger international deployment. Their instructions were to similarly protect Western munitions stockpiles and control the Trans-Siberian railway to help evacuate the Czechoslovak legion. There was vague support in Washington for Russians experimenting with self-government in the region, but this support was less ambitious than British, French, and Japanese efforts against the Bolsheviks.
Graves kept his distance from allying with White Russian units, unsettled by reports of atrocities and unwilling to be drawn fully into the civil war. As Bolshevik forces advanced in early 1919, rising American casualties gave the Wilson administration an exit from a campaign few in the country supported, and American forces left by August 1919 from Northern Russia and in April the next year from Siberia.
The U.S. intervention did not, however, end relations with the Soviet state. The Siberian expedition was also about reining in Japanese expansion in the region, which unsettled both Moscow and Washington. Though Japanese military activity surged after American departure, they left in 1922following discussions with the consolidated Soviet government and after facing sustained U.S. pressure.
The relationship between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was also aided by the reluctance of Washington to explicitly support either side in the civil war. Notable U.S. figures and politicians from the Progressive movement even expressed favoritism for the Bolsheviks as more democratic than the Tsar.
That’s not to say there wasn’t fear on both sides; the first Red Scare intensified concerns in the U.S. about communism’s impact on culture, politics, and commerce, while the U.S. featured heavily in Soviet political rhetoric. But while the U.S. didn’t recognize the Soviet state until 1933, the decision opened the way for another brief alliance during World War II.
Modern Relations
Much of the rest of U.S.-Russian history is well-known. The Cold War that began after the end of World War II saw Washington and Moscow engaged in a global competition for ideological and military supremacy for almost 50 years, before the Soviet collapse and the emergence of the U.S.-led order.
The short-lived post-Cold War stability didn’t take long to break down. Even amid some earnest instances of cooperation, proxy conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine and Syria in the 2010s, and the full-fledged Russian war in Ukraine since 2022 mark a steady deterioration in relations. Rising friction in the Caucasus, Libya, Central Asia, and the Arctic further signifies a steady bilateral breakdown that rivals the worst days of the Cold War.
But Russian-American history has shown periods of cooperation and balance that required restraint and concessions from both sides at sensitive moments. Russia and the U.S. remain neighbors, and relations have recovered from lows comparable to the present day. Stabilizing a great power rivalry that never found its footing would require both countries to reconsider their global and regional roles, rather than continuing to aggravate each other and leading to international tensions alike. Without building a more stable foundation, the rivalry between the two countries will continue to reassemble itself in new, destructive forms.
The Kochs have been driving the hatred too for quite some time but only after the earned their first millions in Soviet Union
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF KOCH INDUSTRIES: HOW STALIN FUNDED THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT
https://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/
Jane Mayer’s biography of the Kochs, Dark Money, says Fred Koch built refineries for both Stalin and Hitler. Koch hated the Russians, even if they paid him for the refinery, and loved the Germans. He like Germans so much he hired a German nanny to help raise his boys. When I say she was a Nazi, I’m not referring to her type of discipline. She was a member of Hitler’s party, and returned to Germany to join the rise of the Third Reich.
So Charles and David Koch, Fred’s politically active sons in recent years, were literally raised by a Nazi.
The NY Times says they contributed $889 million to right-wing politics in 2016. Just for reference, Uber-capitalist, pseudo-lefty George Soros reportedly spent only $27 million on politics that year.
Sure but Soros spent plenty of money on his NGOs that year, which interfere with politics and then some.
In Havana, the U.S. embassy is a modern building prominently placed on the Malecón and the Spanish embassy is a magnificent mansion even more centrally located. The Russian embassy is an ugly fortress in the suburbs.
The Russians have been remarkably good at alienating their sometime dependents.
The U.S. relationship with Russia has been driven, not just colored, by the deeply-felt hostility of some groups or factions in Russian-adjacent states and communities. Imperial Russia dominated Finland, the Baltics, Poland, the Balkans and the Caucusus, and the Soviet Union did as well, in its own fashion. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Georgia, Armenia have deeply-felt and ambivalent histories with Russia. Finland, Poland and the Baltics have political cultures more purely hostile.
The U.S. has hosted émigré and immigrant communities and those communities have come to staff the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including officials, journalists and think tanks. Prominent figures like Victoria Nuland, Blinken, Anne Applebaum are examples.
The felt hostility to Russia present in political cultures in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe traces back to Imperial Russian interventions and aggression. Communism and communist ideologies have added layers. Whatever the merits of the local (from an American viewpoint) historic grievances, those divisions and resentments become strategic vulnerability and they have interested advocates in the U.S.
Whether exacerbation of divisions and hostility to Russia within Russian-adjacent states is wise and in America’s interest seems like an obviously central question for American foreign policy, but it may be very difficult to call into question the present policy of aggravating Russia’s relationships with its neighbors, by cultivating a division of politics in those countries into pro- and anti-Russian factions. A kind of cold war contest is underway across these regions with at least one active, hot war and several latent armed conflicts in latent states.
I think these sort of people just need something to do and pleasing their sponsors is their calling.
For these prominent wretches, to paraphrase the big guy, if russia didn’t exist, they’d be in some cubicle rejecting health insurance claims.
Wasn’t it Machiavelli who warned against letting emigres construct foreign policies?
The danger of trusting those who are in exile from their own country, being one to which the rulers of States are often exposed, may, I think, be fitly considered in these Discourses; … I believe from “The Prince” but I did not note the source.
For the USA, Ahmed Chalabi is a good example.
Re your opening graf–so it’s all about the architecture?
Not that the above article claiming revelation of the “roots” is much more informative. The real roots undoubtedly trace back to Wall Street, Newport and other nests of WASP-capitalism. For America’s nouveau riche and their aspiration to be like the Brits a country where people go around calling each other comrade was obviously anathema.
Brian – all good points, and important to understanding. I would add that the history and antagonism between east and west Asia goes a lot further back than the 18th century. The peoples that came out of the steppes, after all, largely contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire. It’s part of our cultural dna, a mostly unconscious imperative that drives what we think and what we do.
So Saxons came from steppes and overrun Roman Britania which colors our attitudes even today?
I’d say Imperial Russia created the Baltic states and Finland (part of family history, so I do know a thing or two), mainly by replacing the Germanic ruling class with more indigenous ruling class and especially freeing the Baltic serfs from the serfdom. Not because of they had a good heart, but because Russia need a buffer zone against Germanic aggression and creating a national identity was one tool in the box.
What is, and I keep repeating this, almost always left out from these discussion is that between the Russian and Soviet Empires dominating them all these states (plus Poland with Finland as the sole exception) turned into right-wing landowner dictatorships that heavily suppressed any social and political movements. And in 1941 in Baltics they did kill the local Jews often before German troops even arrived.
In 1991 the descendants of these people returned from North America and UK, and brought with them their resentment of Russia/Soviet Union. That is the legacy of the landed gentry vs the common folks issue never having been really settled in the way it happened (or was just buried under customs and habits) in central and western Europe. It’s easier to blame Russia than admit that most of it was ourselves (Finland, again, being the exception for actually having a civil war between the Haves and Have Nots [for which the Haves did originally blame Russia, of course]).
If you really look into the local histories, it’s pretty obvious that most of Russia’s neighbors own their statehood to Imperial Russia, at least to some extent. That and the Bolshevik’s principle of national self-determination during Lenin’s leadership. Even if it usually started as a buffer zone against Germans, Ottomans or Persians.
M.K Bhadrakumar on the religious angle
https://www.indianpunchline.com/why-biden-loves-to-demonise-putin/
“Russia is the only great power with which Washington has an openly adversarial relationship”
Sorry, mate, Iran is a great power too.
Wow. Talk about skipping literally some of the most important or interesting parts.
For instance, the diplomatic intervention of the US in the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War. Because it was important for the US to check Japanese expansion even then, so under the guise of providing a neutral ground for end-of-war negotiations, the US enabled Russian diplomats to salvage some semi-decent outcomes from the whole affair. Something the Japanese did not forget…
Incidentally, the William Graves contingent in Siberia – rather, the Far East (via Vladivostok) – their instructions were also to ensure the Japanese did not lope off a chunk of Siberia, which the Japanese did attempt to do but were ultimately checked by the advancing Soviet forces.
I won’t even mention the 18th century bit where the Brits, before they hired the Hessians, tried to “hire” some 50 thousand Russian soldiers from Catherine the Great to come and crush the budding American Revolution. Catherine refused. It’s not a direct contact with the Americans, but as good a place to start the narrative as any.
But by far the most important omission is the post-Soviet era. We get one mealy-mouthed paragraph listing some conflicts. What? That’s it? The US-Russia relationship in the 1990s is literally the proverbial original sin, the root of all evil, as it were. Because under Yeltsin, Russia acted de facto as an American puppet state, and the installation of Putin at the end of 1999 was, in a very soft-kid-gloves way, the rough equivalent of kicking the Americans out a la Iran in 1979. [Briefly, the Russian elites were incredibly spooked by the bombing of Serbia in 1999, figuring they might be next; Putin was brought in to restore economic and political sovereignty, including by putting the internal house in order, especially in the oil and gas industry. Khodorkovsky was “martyred” basically for wanting to sell Yukos to BP, despite being explicitly told not to do so.]
Which sequence of events is what initiated the drive for regime change and the dismantling of Cold War arms controls, starting very early in the Bush Jr years, so that by 2008 we got our first US-Russia proxy war in Georgia…
…but no, we get none of that, not even a footnote. Somehow, somehow “stability broke down”. By itself, apparently. Ugh.
Yes, this was exactly my reaction. The author’s narrative was basically “hey guys, remember when you were friends, you can do it again,” as if the US and Russia were former buddies who just kind of drifted apart. Not only does this drastically underplay the degree of US hostility after the Revolution, as Yves and others note, but any historical discussion that bears any relationship to reality would have to acknowledge the degree to which (1) Russia and its people *wanted* a cooperative and friendly relationship with the US after the fall of the USSR, and (2) the US, rejecting these entreaties, did everything it could to loot, isolate, and permanently balkanize the country.
The author does mention “proxy conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine and Syria in the 2010s, and the full-fledged Russian war in Ukraine since 2022” in discussing the “break down” in “post-Cold War stability.” But as you say, he makes it sound like these were just “stuff that happens” which alienated these two old friends, rather than part of a long-term project by one of them to destroy the other. “Proxies” require sponsors, after all.
William Taubman’s Gorbachev: His life and times spells out these rebuffs. So many uncreative dinosaurs in DC then and a political system incapable of mutually beneficial agreements.
I had a similar reaction. This article glosses over the period from the fall of the USSR that defines the reasons why US- Russia relations are “declining”. The hyper link on Ukraine goes to a article which doesn’t mention America’s role in fermenting the current mess in Ukraine. I’ll include a link from a recent Due Dissidence which covers a small part of that:
Victoria Nuland LIES Her Way Through Ukraine Debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94eubfb200o
If Russia did not exist as the great competitor to the US, then the US would have to had invented it. It has been used to justify the spending of untold wealth in the defense industries over the decades because of such things as the Missile Gap or the Mine Gap or whatever. Truth be told, the US could easily have made a settlement with Russia decades ago so that both countries would have been at peace but where is the financial profit in that? The US broke about every treaty and agreement that they had with Russia as they thought Russia weak so could get away with it. Turns out that Russian technology has made that country an impossible country to attack or invade so the US went with Project Ukraine instead. But at the heart of this trouble is money. The US remembers when Russia was on its knees because they trusted the west and want those times back again. And if that could happen, this time they will finish the job and cause Russia to break up into dozens of countries whose tens of trillions of dollars could then be sucked out of them all. That’s an awful amount of money and it constantly tempts the US and other western elites.
Right. The new Cold War is about keeping the gravy train of that other Cold War running. Otherwise lots of people in DC and the defense industries would have to get real jobs.
Yes, boys & girls: The M-I-C is the k-e-y to hostilities…
It is an interesting US-centered view, even then it misses several important chapters as other comments have described.
However it ignores the Russian view that WW2 has never finished as far as some are concerned. They see the rise of the same forces that inflicted vast numbers of deaths on Russian citizens , encouraged by the US , UK and EU. People in the West may want to ignore this, but its very real to Russians. They see this as an existential struggle, if they lose they lose their country completely, if the West ( US) loses they merely lose the ability to pillage the Russian wealth and maybe reduce their hegemonic position.
US mercantilism and EC drive to federalism fuel the problem, but there are some deeply emotional issues in play as well. The roots are European in origin.
“27 million” is the very short response that I offer to those who argue that I am defending a horrible, aggressive Putinocracy. If the argument continues, I throw out another number: “about 400,000”. The number of USA citizens, almost all military, killed in WWII, both European and Pacific theaters.
Germany was dead broke and starving from WW1 and the Versailles Treaty. London and Wall Street financed the mustache’s military to make it strong. Great Britain wanted Germany to get Czechoslovakia to increase its industrial power to wage war with the USSR. Appeasement was a false narrative. Great Britain gave Poland a phony security guarantee and urged it to get belligerent with Germany to trigger WW2. The Anglos’ goals were to destroy Germany and weaken the USSR (27M deaths). They were wildly successful.
And also the USUK seriously planned on re-arming the Germans and sending them back to fight the Soviets again but Hitler refusing to surrender until his army was ground to dust sort of ruined that plan.
I suspect some of this is due to remembered grudges of eastern European immigrants including Poles and Jews over occupation and mistreatment by the czarist regime. An analogy is the unceasing hostility of U.S. Cubans to any hint of cooperation with the current regime even if it means suffering of their island compatriots. Ethnic minorities can be potent politically.
To be fair, the Czarist regime more often than not prevented or stopped the pogroms and opened new regions for Jewish settlements. Admittedly the policy was fluid (an understatement) and always retained some forms of oppression.
Most often the tormentors of the Jews and Polish in the Russian Empire were the Ukrainians and the Greek (go figure). Unless, of course, you mean the Polish uprisings whenever the owning class feared loss of privileges and manipulated with empty promises their serfs to fight the Cossacks.
Hey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a biker! Enjoy the ride Nassim!
This was supposed to be in today’s links. Sorry!
I didn’t see any reference to the ‘official’ soviet position of atheism as being a big factor. In reality, we know it’s meaningless but it was an effective brainwashing tool for the oligarchy. Like slavery being ‘in the bible’ as an excuse for free labor, ‘godless commies’ was just an excuse to prevent workers rising and demanding fairness. ‘Under god’ wasn’t even added to the POA until 1954.
“The U.S. appeared centered on freedom for settlers, with Russian society based on general servitude. American expansion was often through individual initiatives within a loose democratic system, while Russia advanced under centralized autocracy.”
Hmmm, I don’t understand the language here. It seems to me that “freedom of settlers” might mean genocide of the natives, and “general servitude” could be local cultural preservation? I must confess I don’t know the history of Russian colonization of Siberia, but it seems to me the result was not genocidal erasure. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But is this really the difference between “loose democracy” and “centralized autocracy”?
I would give even a bachelors degree student an F for this ridiculous history paper. First of all of course the utter lack of real coverage of the vassalage of Russia in the 1990s and Putin’s role in reasserting Russian sovereignty. Then the utter misrepresentation of the US reaction to the communist revolution . His assigned readings to help fix these, and many other major issues would include:
– “The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in US-Soviet Relations”, Davis & Trani
– “Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post Communist Russia”, Cohen
I remember Michael Hudson had an interesting talk about the similarities of today with the schism of 1054. Isn’t that the original east west divide? So you figure the millennia the roman church was in the process of getting rid of all the competition, so they could rule the world., happened to be the same time the west(the roman church) split with those who would not bow down and created their own church. Lotta baggage there.
Skip forth another 800 years….. the battle of the priests for “the truth”… so called… now being brought along with nation building (us/them), wars, exploitation, in-fighting… among the royals….and propaganda…. everywhere… all the time…
then comes the twentieth century, and all those things everyone knows, the reds the whites, the cousins,etc… all being folded into twentieth century issues.
Labor vs. management/owners. The poor vs the rich. and the winning side(the west/US) in the 20th century needed a boogey-man… to control the masses. All these populist drives. better working conditions, workers rights. womens rights/vote,All those things the rulers of the republic really didn’t want. But with a population of people who suffered through the depression and many gained a sense of comradery, solidarity, and a real sense of why the masses need to look look out for themselves FROM the owner class. The choice was easy. The owners fomented and supported the new socialists. il duce/hitler…and the fascists… have been fighting “the commies” ever since.
And considering my entire lifetime all these stereotypes are in EVERY facet of existence since my grandparents were born… it is in the cultural makeup of the people now.
So , short answer on why there is a split between russia and the west , I would say, “habit”.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/distant-friends-and-intimate-enemies/EB00F7480D5DA1CB564FAE01BBB673C3
Comprehensive, and published last October.