Is Russia Europe? This is an important issue that has been outstanding for several centuries. Geographically, Russia is undoubtedly Europe – 120 out of 144 million Russians live in the European part of our country. But from a cultural point of view, the answer is not so obvious. The question is an important one, because I believe the twenty-first century is an age of competition between civilisations: Euro-Atlantic, Islamic, Confucianist and so on. I happen to think that competition is good for the human race – it stops us stagnating and resting on our laurels. But competition also means struggle, the defence of one’s own interests and the choice of allies.
In this context, Russia is the last undecided country with a kindred European culture. Note that I say ‘kindred’ – perhaps even sisterly – but not totally the same. We are part of the European family, and inter-family conflicts are often the most difficult. Russia has always felt an ideological threat from Western Europe, which, given other geographical realities, means the threat of destruction and chaos. At the same time, Western Europe was and remains for us the model of an ideal future, which we sometimes try to adopt for ourselves. Suffice it to say that the ideologies of socialism and communism came to Russia from Germany, Great Britain and France. In Russia, they resulted in a tyrannical socialist state, while Western Europe also adopted them to some extent, but without the tyranny. Throughout the eras of tsarist autocracy, Soviet rule and now the two decades of Putin’s criminal gang, the West has been both an ideological enemy and the standard by which we measure ourselves. Every Russian recognises the old Soviet exhortation to ‘catch up with and overtake the West’ as the expression of our national inferiority.
Western Europe, on the other hand, has always felt threatened by Russia’s huge size, by its incomprehensible vastness and its disorderly nature. The West has tried to organise us in its own way or to distance itself from us, always without success. The West created strange images of the Russians: Western intellectuals saw us as terrifying Dostoyevskian characters, unaware that many Russians regard Dostoyevsky as a depressive outsider with psychological problems and his characters as incomprehensible in their sufferings, about which we have no desire to read. On the contrary, anyone who is familiar with popular Russian art and crafts – Khokhloma wood painting, Palekh lacquer miniatures, Gzhel ceramics – knows that they are distinguished by their cheerfulness and romanticism.
The psychological conflict between our branches of the common European civilisation did not begin with Putin, and his departure will not in itself put a stop to it. Up to the end of the Soviet era of stagnation, the government was promoting anti-Westernism, so the Russian people naturally regarded being pro-Western as a sort of protest. But Russians have made the usual error of psychological transference, assuming that because we love the West, the West must love us, too. That was bound to be a mistake. The West was busy with its own problems and the reduction of the threat from the east was simply seen as an opportunity to do business without interference. Western speculators and failed businessmen came to Russia, projecting their own problems on us. Russians took them to be examples of what all Western people were like (just as the West took us all to be Dostoyevskys).
The love began to fade. The symbolic turning point in the relationship was when Primakov decided to turn back his plane over the Atlantic after the NATO decision to bomb Yugoslavia in 1999. Those bombs hit us Russians in our hearts and created Russia’s version of our own Versailles syndrome. When Putin came to power, it allowed him to revive an anti-Western trope – that ‘the only thing the West understands is force’.
