Of all the love-hate relationships that have sprung up between Russians and outsiders, the one that was least troubled by love involved the French aristocrat and travel writer the Marquis de Custine. He visited Russia in 1839 and wrote a bestselling book about his experiences. Custine claimed in advance to love Russia, but these feelings did not survive his first encounter at the border. Even as he was going through customs, his contempt for the Russians had begun to show. On one journey, already frustrated by the poor quality of the road, he looked around him and spotted ‘a large number of badly constructed wooden bridges, one of which seemed quite perilous’. On the basis of this, he concluded, as usual, ‘Human life is worth little in Russia.’1
Nine years later, revolution spread across Western and Central Europe, shaking governments and sometimes briefly deposing them. But the revolutions of 1848 did not extend to the Russian Empire. The Economist was in no doubt why this was, claiming in its final issue of that year: ‘her population is not yet civilized enough to feel those yearnings after freedom and self-government which have agitated Europe’. Over the next century and a half, The Economist would remain consistent in its use of adjectives. ‘Russia’s only aim in the 1990s was to become a normal, civilized state,’ the newspaper insisted in September 2011, before describing how it failed. Reporting on the Sochi Olympics in February 2014, the same paper wrote that it was ‘a dream’ to consider Russia to be ‘the sophisticated and civilized country’ that was presented in the opening ceremony.2
A century earlier, on 28 June 1914, a Serbian-backed group of conspirators murdered the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, during a visit to the imperial city of Sarajevo. As a result, the Austrians wanted to go to war with Serbia, to get revenge and kill off the irridentist menace to their empire in the Balkans. But the Austrians knew that the Russians stood behind the Serbs, their fellow-Slavs – and Russia was allied to France and Britain. Threatening Serbia was a high-risk strategy. Austria could only issue its aggressive ultimatum to Serbia because it was confident of the unconditional support of its German ally. Germany, famously, gave it the ‘blank cheque’ that partly made the First World War possible. Why would it do this? Because of the Russia Anxiety. The British and the French overestimated Russian economic power in the run-up to 1914, and this influenced their strategic judgements; but Germany made an even more dangerous miscalculation. Many influential Germans were convinced that Russia posed a far more deadly threat than was really plausible. Russia’s economy developed very rapidly in the two decades before 1914, but it did so in a far more uneven way than many observers imagined it was doing, and it was scarcely the case that it was mere years away from becoming an unstoppable global powerhouse, as German policymakers feared. In fact, Russian GDP was still less than two-thirds that of Germany. Two weeks before the Sarajevo assassination, the German emperor, chancellor and foreign minister were all convinced of the grave threat posed to Germany by the Russian war machine: it was about to ‘overwhelm’ them if they did not take action.3 The July Crisis opened up the opportunity for a pre-emptive war. It came just in time, as the Germans believed that a German-Russian war in, say, 1917 might already be unwinnable. Of all the various causes of the First World War, the Russia Anxiety is one of the most persuasive.
Custine, The Economist, Kaiser Wilhelm: they all felt the Russia Anxiety. They either expressed contempt for the barbarians in the East, denying them the attributes of civilization, and making their country a separate, ‘other’ place, or they worked up an exaggerated fear, based on the conviction that the biggest country in the world posed an imminent, even catastrophic threat. They used extravagant language – the end of the world is often nigh during outbreaks of the Russia Anxiety – and encouraged international recklessness. But the Russia Anxiety has another symptom: not just contempt or fear, but also disregard. After the end of the Cold War, Russia seemed to disappear from the calculations of Western policymakers. It was not considered to be an independent actor worthy of consideration. Following a pattern that recurred from time to time, after a Russian defeat or strategic overreach, ‘the West’ as good as said, ‘We’ve won. That’s it. Game over. We won’t be hearing from them again.’ According to one Washington analyst who worked in the Defense Department in the 1990s, America’s post-Cold-War foreign policy (expansion of NATO, wars in the Balkans and the Middle East, forceful projection of US values and interests, including in Russia) completely disregarded the possibility that Russia had its own legitimate interests. ‘We didn’t do it because we wanted to hurt them,’ she said. ‘We did it because we didn’t care if it hurt them.’4 This more passive strain of the Anxiety can have the same effect as active contempt and fear: ‘othering’ the biggest European country and increasing strategic instability. But the Russia Anxiety is a cycle, and disregard can soon turn into contempt and then to fear. For centuries, outsiders have looked at Russia and felt superior or afraid. Years after the end of the Cold War, the sum of these feelings is as dangerous as ever, even though history shows that the Anxiety is almost always misplaced.
That might even be true in the great Russia crisis of the age of Trump and Putin. By taking a snapshot of this crisis, framing it between the US presidential election of November 2016 and the Russian election of March 2018, we can see what the Anxiety looks like, how it works, and the risks we take when we wilfully lose control of the way we talk about Russia.
All the elements of the Russia Anxiety converged during the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. In the absence of a consensus to explain the rise of Trump, and lacking concrete evidence for widespread claims of Russian intervention in the election, Russia again became a proxy for evil in the eyes of Trump’s opponents, most of the media and the wider American establishment, especially in the intelligence services and the Pentagon. Even to raise a doubt sometimes seemed like treason. ‘We are at war,’ declared Morgan Freeman, the Hollywood actor, in September 2017, nearly a year after the election, using the language of the self-fulfilling prophecy.5 He meant with Russia, though – it deserves emphasis – America and Russia have never been to war.
By the summer of 2016, Trump had secured the Republican nomination. It was around this time that allegations emerged about the involvement of Russians in his campaign. ‘Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West,’ wrote the journalist Franklin Foer in July, ‘and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump.’6 The evidence for all this was circumstantial, dating back to visits that Trump had made to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. But in July 2016, four months before the poll, Foer was clear. ‘A foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States,’ he wrote, ‘has attached itself to a major presidential campaign.’ It became an international scandal.
Was Trump the Kremlin’s candidate? A series of reports by a former British intelligence officer, originally commissioned by the Democrats, was leaked at the start of 2017. ‘The Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting the US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for at least five years,’ wrote Christopher Steele, the reports’ author, in June 2016. He drew on the testimony of two senior Russian figures, a Foreign Ministry official and a former intelligence officer, who also told him that President Putin himself was involved in the conspiracy. And there were salacious details, apparently taken from cameras hidden in Trump’s bedroom at the Ritz-Carlton hotel when he visited in 2013.7
On 6 January 2017, two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the director of national intelligence published a report on the Russians’ cyber escalation of their ‘longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order’. ‘We assess,’ the DNI wrote, ‘Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.’ Thanks to the efforts of the seventeen US intelligence agencies, his report expressed ‘high confidence’ that ‘Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process,’ while sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and showing ‘a clear preference for President-elect Trump’.8
Secretary Clinton blamed Putin in significant measure for her defeat. ‘In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead our people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its preferred candidate,’ Hillary explained in her memoir about the campaign. Her imagery turned medical. For Clinton, Russia had unbound a deadly contagion, and was itself suffering from the effects. ‘Now that the Russians have infected us and seen how weak our defences are, they’ll keep at it,’ she wrote.9 Americans have often seen Russia as an ‘airborne pathogen’, as the historian Sean Guillory put it. In the 1940s, the Cold War policy of containment was designed to protect against the infectious threat. He cites General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove, the black comedy of 1964. Ripper rails against the Soviet Union’s attempts ‘to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids’.10
The late Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham spent the New Year of 2017 with Ukrainian soldiers and talked of Russia’s ‘act of war’ against the United States. Congressman Pete King of New York professed ‘no doubt’ on live TV that ‘Putin is evil’. Vanity Fair asked whether ‘Putin’s masterplan’ is ‘only beginning’. Politico wrote of ‘the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us’. In Syria, where Russian forces supported the government of President Assad, the risks of an inadvertent collision with the United States seemed high.
But is Putin really as all-powerful as Vanity Fair suggested? Half a century of academic analysis shows that power has never been a unitary thing in either the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia, but that different government and economic institutions – not to mention interest groups, patronage networks and leading personalities – actively struggle to defend and extend their influence while monitoring and generally working with the grain of public opinion, at least in domestic policy. This is despite the appearance of total centralization, even in the hands of one man. Christopher Steele himself, in a report of 5 August 2016, pointed towards ‘two well-placed and established Kremlin sources’ who claimed that Sergei Ivanov, then head of the Presidential Administration, believed that Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, had overextended himself into foreign affairs. According to the Steele report, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev took the same line as Ivanov. ‘Talk now in the Kremlin of Trump withdrawing from presidential race altogether,’ noted Steele, ‘but this is still largely wishful thinking by more liberal elements in Moscow.’11 In other words, it was never clear who initiated which policy, or which decision was made where and on the basis of what information.
During the first year of Trump’s presidency, Robert Mueller began the independent judicial investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump election campaign and the ‘hostile power’ of Russia (the report was scheduled for publication after this book went to press). Speculation was periodically rife. ‘When a country can come interfere in another country’s elections, that is warfare. It really is,’ said Nikki Haley, United Nations ambassador, on 19 October 2017. No Trump cabinet official had yet suggested a state of war. In January 2018, the defence secretary of the United Kingdom argued that Russia’s aim for Britain was as follows: ‘Damage its economy, rip its infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths.’ Even the BBC was moved to suggest that this might be ‘alarmist’.12 It sounded like the Russia Anxiety in action. Foreign governments and writers were openly expressing contempt for Russia. Fear of Russian aggression motivated the construction of what looked like an anti-Russian alliance. In building that alliance, Western governments seemed again to be placing Russia outside their definition of civilization.
But then an attempt was made in Salisbury on the life of a Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal, together with his adult daughter, days before the Russian presidential election of 18 March. The British government said that the weapon was a nerve poison – a chemical weapon – that could only have come from a Russian facility. In effect, they blamed Putin personally. Putin responded by asking what interest the Russian authorities could have in such an ostentatious attempted murder, just before a major election and weeks before the country was due to host the football World Cup, and demanded to see the evidence. The implication was that others – governments, renegade spies, expatriate oligarchs – had an interest in humiliating and sidelining the Russians even further, and that the fingerprints might belong to conspirators in other countries. Or was it a rogue element in Russian espionage, others speculated, implying that the Kremlin’s control of its own secret services might be dissolving? It certainly seemed an elaborate and high-risk way of uniting Russian public opinion against the West days before polling. But the British foreign secretary kept going, comparing the forthcoming World Cup to the 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany.
A few days later, President Putin was re-elected with 75 per cent of the vote on a 70 per cent turnout. ‘The West turns on Russia,’ announced the free Metro newspaper to British commuters on 27 March after twenty-nine NATO and EU countries worked in concert to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats and spies. The Russians reciprocated with their own expulsions. When the Americans closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, the Russians shut down the American consulate in St Petersburg. Perhaps only the fear of nuclear weapons could stop war from breaking out. Or perhaps the opaque bond between the two election victors might be a strange source of peace. Going against his advisers, President Trump congratulated Putin on his re-election.
The Trump-Putin crisis was real. In Washington it was a response to events in Ukraine, Syria and cyberspace, and in Moscow it was a pushback against the general treatment of Russia in world affairs since the end of the Cold War.
But it was also accidental. Whatever meddling had taken place in the US electoral process, and however precisely or skilfully it had been targeted, the outcome of the election came down to chance. Just a few thousand extra votes for Hillary Clinton in three swing states – out of 129 million that were cast in total, countrywide – and she would have matched her clear victory in the popular vote with a win in the Electoral College and been elected to the presidency. American politics would itself have defanged the crisis: with no need to paint Trump as a creature of Russian manipulation, or to argue that Russia had ‘brainwashed’ a fringe of voters, Democrats would not have called for the Mueller enquiry. With a president in office who respected them and gave them access, the American intelligence services would not have needed to express their view of Russia quite so openly and volubly. True enough, with Clinton as president, the underlying problem might have worsened – the sense in Moscow was that the American government would only view the world on its own terms, disregarded Russia’s status, and that Russia was entitled to respond to perceived threats to its security – but there might well have been no full-scale flare-up of the Russia Anxiety in Washington. No historian, speaking as a historian, could evaluate the pictures painted by spies and cybernetics experts about the 2016 election, but the historic themes of the Russia Anxiety were nevertheless openly on display. The fearful assumption of unique malevolence and extraordinary capacity – the claim that the Russians could locate and change the opinions of selected groups of voters in carefully chosen electoral districts, often preoccupied as they were with local issues and personalities, as part of a masterplan to install their own candidate in the White House and sow doubts about the integrity of the voting system and the value of democracy – soon alternated with contempt for strategic overreach, tactical bungling and internal Russian weaknesses. The Russia Anxiety is cyclical, although the cycles can overlap and change their order, and the contingency of the Trump-Putin crisis only showed this up again. In the middle of 2018 it was even suspended, thanks to Russia’s hosting of the World Cup, which charmed millions of visitors and hundreds of millions of TV viewers, with longer-term results that might be important.
Both real and accidental, the Anxiety’s most important location was in the imagination, where the phantasmagoria took shape. In the age of Trump and Putin, it became ever more difficult to distinguish reality from rhetoric. ‘Fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ were supposed to be everywhere, their apparent ubiquity often blamed on Russian misinformation programmes, but the Russia Anxiety itself was, as ever, a conflation of fact and fiction. It seemed that many leading figures lacked the appetite for making the distinction. In fact, even the simplest distinctions became impossible. ‘Russia’ and ‘Putin’ were forever elided into each other, one easily standing for the other. Photos captured the president with sinister sunglasses, a withering look or an empty gaze. An Economist cover in October 2016 had a photograph of Putin’s face coloured blue and shaded in black, with the background red; his eyes were missing, replaced by little red fighter planes. In the Western imagination, this confected image was the face of modern Russia.
For hundreds of years, such images have created and formed the Russia Anxiety. They have given energy to the cycles that push the Anxiety from fear to contempt to disregard and back to fear. But these cycles do not always follow the same pattern, and the Anxiety has never been a permanent or fixed condition.
The Russia critics of the early twenty-first century sometimes had a good tune, but they were often singing from an ancient songbook. Those who have written books about Russophobia have tended to emphasize that it is age-old, even if they are themselves prompted to write by a present-day crisis.13 Some date Russophobia to partings of the ways between East and West in Europe, beginning with Constantine’s decision to move the capital of the Roman Empire eastwards from Rome to Byzantium (Istanbul) in 330 AD.14 Soon enough, the division between an Eastern and a Western Europe was politically defined, though in early medieval times, it was the Byzantine East that possessed the richer culture and the greater power. When Grand Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus, the forerunner of the modern East Slavic states (the largest of which is Russia), was christened in 988, it was Orthodoxy, taken from Byzantium, rather than Catholicism from Rome which was adopted across the realm. Was this the moment when ‘Russia’ chose East, not West? In 1054, the Schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism seemed to place Kiev and, soon, Moscow (which was founded in 1147) on the proverbial wrong side of history. And then the invasion of the Mongols in 1240 effectively increased the distance between Moscow (and Kiev) and ‘the West’, a distance which facilitated the assumption of barbarism.
Despite its shortcomings, this argument is attractive for one big reason: it emphasizes moments of decision and external ill fortune, not genes or geography, in erecting barriers between the Russian lands and what would become the West. Russophobia – and the Russia Anxiety as a broader phenomenon – was not inevitable. But in the very length of its chronology, it implies a way of thinking which by now can’t or won’t change. This is a fallacy. The backdrop of the Russia Anxiety is old, but it’s not that old. In its recognizably modern form – as a specifically anti-Muscovite syndrome of disregard, contempt and fear – the Russia Anxiety dates to the sixteenth century, when merchants, government officials and churchmen travelled eastwards to Muscovy in much larger numbers and for lengthier stays than before, partly thanks to improved communication links via the White Sea. The accounts of visitors from Western and Central Europe became well known. Some of these were marked by calm observations and careful scholarship, others by sensational hearsay and plagiarism. No wonder that contemporary audiences found much to be anxious about, or that posterity had access to a useful mine of prejudices. The relative remoteness of the Russian lands made them an easy screen on which readers could project their wildest fantasies.
Sigismund von Herberstein represented the Holy Roman Empire in its Muscovite embassy between 1517 and 1526. This was during the reign of Vasily III, just before Ivan the Terrible came to the throne, at a time when Muscovy was becoming a significant European power. Muscovy was expanding its borders. Its economy was more deeply integrating into regional, continental and even transcontinental trade routes. Herberstein was a sharp-eyed resident of this changing society. Twenty years after his departure, his account of Muscovy was published. It soberly described Muscovy’s history, political rituals and religious practices. And it resorted to fantastical anecdotes and generalizations. Herberstein tells a story that has entered the folklore of Russia-watchers, about a blacksmith of German extraction who was married to a Russian woman. Their marriage seems satisfactory, until the woman claims that her husband does not love her. Why do you say such a preposterous thing, he asks. Because, she replies, ‘you have never beaten me’. When the blacksmith went on to do this ‘most cruelly’, he told Herberstein that ‘his wife showed much greater affection towards him. So he repeated the exercise frequently; and finally, while I was still at Moscow, cut off her head and legs.’
Such stories furnished the emerging legend of a special Russian predisposition to violence and cruelty. Herberstein used them too to conjure aphorisms about a national character of passivity, reducing the complex Muscovite economy of unfree labour to the idea that ‘this people enjoy slavery more than freedom’,15 a notion that some journalists and academics borrowed to describe Russians in the Stalin era, and even the early twenty-first century. A German theologian, Sebastian Franck, drew together various first-hand accounts and then elaborated on them in a work of 1534. ‘In sum,’ he wrote, ‘the people of the Muscovite state are rude, and furthermore they are subject to great servitude and tyranny, such that, as is the case among the Turks, anything anyone has is considered to be the king’s own, and the king holds everything as his property.’16 Franck’s assumptions about the relationship between the manners of the people, their location beyond the realm of civilization and the implicit threat of tyranny have shaped 500 years of perceptions, on and off. Take Giles Fletcher, the English merchant who wrote of ‘the Russe commonwealth’ in 1591. In his opening epistle, he addressed the queen, Elizabeth I, telling her that Muscovy was ‘a Tyrannical state (most unlike your own) without true knowledge of God, without written Laws, without common justice’. Its people were ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’.17 Yet much of the latest research into Muscovy places its economy on a European continuum and its justice system within European norms.18
In the seventeenth century, the range of contacts between Muscovy and the West increased, shifting perceptions. Peter the Great (1682–1725) dramatically increased the significance of the process, setting Russia on course to be a modern state, a world empire and a European power. Being part of Europe and closer to ‘the West’ meant two different things. It was the chance to borrow administrative practices, legal principles, architecture and fashion. But it was also the necessity of engaging in the violent struggle for mastery that periodically characterized relations between the powers. Peter’s armies were at war with Sweden, Catherine II’s armies would fight the Turks, while Elizabeth and Alexander I found themselves preoccupied with pan-European conflicts. This new era of war and diplomacy was one in which Russophobia would have to be reconfigured, or at least superficially so.
The British, for example, might still have looked down on the Russians, but they were no longer on opposite wartime alliances as they had been in the Petrine era, and by the middle of the eighteenth century they saw the Russians as useful and effective partners, with a strong army, a massive territory and an invulnerable geography, potentially the key to their continental policy. According to a British writer, describing the contemporary history of Europe in 1748, ‘Experience has taught us what Effects a Shew of Liberty only could produce in a Country accustomed to Slavery, and groaning under the Yoke of Tyranny and Oppression: for in less than half a Century the Empire of Russia, from a poor contemptible people scarce spoken of in History, became a Nation formidable in War, and great in policy.’19 A large and established expatriate British community lived in St Petersburg in the eighteenth century, including men of business, doctors, gardeners, soldiers, technical experts and their families. They assembled in the city’s English church, several of whose chaplains travelled widely in Russia and wrote extensively about its history and culture for an audience back home. One of them, the Reverend Daniel Dumaresq, was especially proficient at developing links between the scholarly worlds of Britain and Russia. After 1800, chaplaincies in Moscow, Archangel, Riga and Odessa made cooperation and mutual understanding better. Among eighteenth-century tourists, a number of upper-class British men of letters wrote conscientious and well-informed accounts of Russian life, while the penal reformer John Howard investigated Russian prisons and chose to live in comfort in Crimea before his death. Casual Russophobia, the oxygen of the Russia Anxiety, was not abundant in this milieu.
It was not that the Russia Anxiety disappeared. After all, it is always a stubborn and dangerous survivor of world history. But it is a contingent one, activated by politics or personal dislike. It comes and goes, often rising and falling in the cycle that goes from fear to contempt to disregard. Edward Clarke, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, proved in his own narrow way that it was probably always just below the surface even when it was not in view. ‘They are all,’ he wrote when he visited Russia, ‘high and low, rich and poor, alike servile to superiors; haughty and cruel to their dependents; ignorant, superstitious, cunning, brutal, dirty, mean.’20
Likewise, the Anxiety was a force of variable strength in France. Russia and France enjoyed a ‘golden age’ of relations between the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the French Revolution.21 The Russian nobility was increasingly Frenchified. They spoke French, embraced French culture, set up salons that let them inhabit a version of Paris. The common language and shared cultural sensibility allowed them to fit in with the European aristocracy, although not always as equal partners. Voltaire and Diderot symbolized the links between the French and Russian Enlightenments. But Catherine the Great reacted to the Revolution with deep mistrust, and the execution of Louis XVI brought the golden age to a close. Within a few years, the countries were at war. Unsurprisingly, France’s defeat by Russia in the Napoleonic Wars unleashed the Anxiety for years to come.
The most elaborate display of the Russia Anxiety in the nineteenth century was the so-called Testament of Peter the Great, published in France in 1836. It enumerated Russia’s fourteen-point plan for world domination. Even long after it was proved to be a forgery, it continued to be published and discussed as if it were genuine. War scares, Polish rebellion, flare-ups of the Eastern Question, in fact any moment when Russia caught the public’s attention – during all of these episodes, the fake Testament was prime evidence for the prosecution. It had an afterlife in Cold War debates in the 1970s.22 It remains a reference point in the imaginations of some policymakers – whether or not they have ever heard of it. Lighter but no less pernicious was Gustave Doré’s History of Holy Russia, a grotesquely illustrated historical caricature published in the 1850s, in which the pornography of violence substitutes for Russian history, in a mean-spirited parody of apparent Russian barbarism over centuries. It was not a great success. But it was republished in Germany in 1917, 1937 and 1970, in France in 1967, and in the USA in 1971, in part as propaganda, in part as scholarly evidence for the back story of a particular definition of Soviet politics (one in which Ivan the Terrible and Leonid Brezhnev were actually the same man).23
But that came later. In their own time, such works as the ‘Testament’ of Peter the Great and Gustave Doré’s History were the context in which France went to war against Russia in Crimea. By the 1850s, fear of Russia had given way to disregard and contempt, manifested in the conviction that French political culture was superior; in fact, anti-Russian feeling helped to define France’s sense of its own politics. After all, backward old Nicholas I was on the throne in Russia, suppressing the Poles, when the French were establishing their newly liberal ‘July monarchy’.24 Similarly, by the 1830s and 1840s, some British elites began to define their own qualities – in their land of liberty and civilization – in distinction to Russia. The consequences of all this were grave geopolitical risks. One of many propaganda tracts on the subject from that period was On the Designs of Russia by the Member of Parliament and army general, George de Lacy Evans. It contained an eight-point plan explaining how to defeat Britain’s greatest enemy. Top of the list: attack it pre-emptively.25
Britain’s Russia Anxiety survived the Crimean War and made Britain reckless in its imperial dealings with Russia. The Anxiety has often distorted how policymakers interpret the risk that Russia poses to them, collapses the timeframe in which a Russian threat can be resolved and exaggerates their country’s capacity to defeat it (it was the same for Germany in 1914). In the second half of the nineteenth century, there was little prospect that the British could fight a successful war against the Russians in either Asia or Europe, because of the configuration of alliances and the distribution of military and naval resources. Knowing this, but partly blinded by the Russia Anxiety, the British rolled the dice, but drew back, in two dangerous war scares of 1878 and 1885.26
The Anglo-Russian encounter between the 1840s and early 1900s, marked by rivalry over India, espionage clashes and alliance-building in Europe, is one of the most potent historical sources of the Russia Anxiety. Yet the Anxiety was not hard-wired: even at this time of imperial competition and European tension, the Anxiety came and went, had consequences of varying seriousness, and was contingent on events. Even in the run-up to the Crimean War, both governments were capable of cordial and careful relations, as they worked out exactly how to pursue their interests in south-east Europe. Nicholas I made a successful visit to England in 1844. The war was not the consequence of an inevitable contest between incompatible societies. During the fighting, British subjects in Russia were largely allowed to go about their lives peacefully and normally.27 While hatred there might have been, and extravagant language there certainly was, actual examples of physical violence between the two countries after the Crimean War ended were zero apart from during the exceptional circumstances of the Russian Civil War, when British troops fought for one group of Russians in opposition to another.
Historians have come to argue that the ‘Great Game’ – the probes and counter-strikes, the espionage and the strategic competition between Britain and Russia over north-west India, Afghanistan and Turkestan – has therefore been overblown, and even the term ‘Great Game’ was largely a later invention.28 The two countries might have come close to war in the region in 1878–9, thanks not least to the tension-raising and misunderstanding-inducing Russia Anxiety, but local leaders, such as Abd al-Rahman Khan, had a much better grip on strategy and policy than the sometimes hapless great powers, who looked more like blunderers than master planners.29 One of the reasons why the Anxiety can be so virulent but also fleeting is that it represents an accumulation of Russophobic rhetoric rather than real conflict. This was not a ‘clash of civilizations’ in any strategic or substantive sense,30 though the language of British politics often placed Russia outside the boundaries of civilization. Yet Russia was not at war more often than the other great powers, not least Britain itself.
France, Britain and Russia ultimately became allies, fighting the First World War together. By then, though, Germany’s fears of Russian conquest help to explain the reckless calls for a pre-emptive war in 1914. The German court had been divided in its attitude to Russia during the nineteenth century, with one side strikingly pro-Petersburg. Bismarck, the pragmatist, joined Germany to Russia in two major international agreements which helped to determine the course of European affairs, the Three Emperors’ League in 1873 and then the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887. But general cultural attitudes in Germany were not so positive. In history and geography textbooks used in German schools between 1890 and 1914, Russia was usually shown to be ‘backward’, ‘barbaric’ and ‘Asiatic’. ‘We do not love the Russians, certainly not,’ stated the Frankfurter Zeitung. ‘They are dangerous to us and doubtless in their thinking and morality true Asians.’31 Yet when war broke out, it was the Austrians who surpassed themselves in the atrocities they committed against local populations on the Eastern front (the Russians were also far from innocent).32
In the United States, meanwhile, sympathy and understanding towards Russia were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, partly promoted by the Russian connections of two presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. The Russia Anxiety was a force, once again, that was dependent for its existence on specific events. For many, such as the poet Walt Whitman, a sense existed that Russia and America were similar places, possessing a continental destiny, a messianic approach, even an instinct for liberation (serfdom and slavery were famously abolished at almost exactly the same time). By the later nineteenth century, though, this very similarity generated a more insidious understanding of Russia: that it was a bit like America but could be much more so if only it tried harder. It was not yet really civilized but it had the promise to become so. Plainly, there was a measure of contempt in this, and it was a variant of the Russia Anxiety. The great Russia expert of the time, George Kennan, whose namesake and relation became the country’s leading Russia hand of the twentieth century, turned Russia into America’s ‘double’, demanding that it mimic the United States.33 In turn, this was one of the dimensions of America’s twentieth-century Russia Anxiety. Looking through American lenses and deliberately not seeing the country on its own terms, Anxiety-prone observers were bound to see Russia as alien and malign or a disappointment and a poor learner.
After the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the Anxiety turned into the Red Menace, which was the background to the rise of fascism in Italy and of Nazism in Germany. This was the Russia Anxiety for a new generation, partly reprogrammed in the ideological language of urgent anti-communism. The Bolsheviks were the latest incarnation of the Russian barbarian. Hatred of the Left and hatred of Russia reinforced each other in what became, for the far Right, a virtuous circle. Italy’s ‘two red years’ between 1918 and 1920 prompted an aggressive reaction that caused Mussolini to come to power by 1924. Although there were a number of reasons for the growing success of the Nazi Party in the 1920s, one of them was widespread fear of the extreme Left and the Russian Revolution. British and French bad feeling towards communism and Russia itself – which by the 1930s was a blend of reasonable moral judgement and age-old prejudice – contributed to the failure to form the pragmatic anti-Nazi alliance in 1939 that might have prevented a regional conflict becoming a world war. But for all its deep-seated prejudices and the high-risk approach to foreign affairs that it engendered, the Anxiety could quickly dissolve when circumstances demanded. Few people and places were more popular in Britain and the USA during the Second World War than Uncle Joe, ‘the Russians’ and the Soviet Union.
At its heart, the Russia Anxiety is a Western phenomenon. The view onto Russia from other parts of the world has often looked quite different. Despite the long Russian border, China has not suffered from the Russia Anxiety. Relations date from the seventeenth century, when Muscovite expansion reached the Amur River.34 For about 200 years, through to the middle of the nineteenth century, relations were calm and productive, facilitating trade. Neither side assumed it was superior to the other. This changed during the nineteenth century, as China was opened up and exploited by the great powers. Such notorious episodes as the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60, prosecuted by the British, left deep anti-Western wounds. As a European power, Russia was implicated in an anti-Chinese superiority complex. It took part, for example, alongside Britain, France, Germany, the United States and several others in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, a prolonged cry of anguish against Western imperialism. But Russia was not only of the West, it was also Eurasian, with much of its territory lying in Asia; its imperialism was not quite so based on scientific racism.
Chinese elites became increasingly interested in Russia from the late nineteenth century. They learned about Russian culture, as more works of Russian literature were translated, and they pursued diplomacy, with the opening of more consular missions. What they saw was similar problems. Russia offered the Chinese an example of the perils and possibilities of modernization on a transcontinental landmass. And within a few years, it gave Chinese communists a model of revolution. China and the new Soviet Union formalized diplomatic relations in 1924, though Chinese forces had intervened against the Reds during the Russian Civil War. By 1929, massive instability across Eurasia, not least tensions over Mongolia, would interrupt diplomacy again. The People’s Republic sought the friendship of the USSR after 1949, and many of its leading cadres had personal links to Moscow, even maintaining a love affair with the Russian Revolution,35 but relations worsened after Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin in 1956, even descending to a brief border conflict in 1969. It was only really with the Soviet collapse of 1991 that a new Chinese-Russian modus vivendi could emerge, leading to a Treaty of Friendship in 2001. In the Xi-Putin era, the level of military cooperation and arms trading, and the quality of cautiously amicable relations on the border, increased, at the same time that they were declining with the West.36 Whatever each side might say about the other in private, this was a more polite and less risky relationship than Russia has with the Western powers, perhaps because no Asian military alliance defined itself against Russia in the way that NATO did.
And what about Africa? Russia did not have an empire in Africa, so it didn’t exploit Africans, as the British did across the continent; it didn’t massacre them, as the French did in Algeria; nor did it exterminate them, as the Belgians did in the Congo or the Germans tried to do in their south-western colony. In the twenty-first century, Russia was not buying up land and resources in the quasi-imperial manner of contemporary China. So there were no historic or present-day circumstances in which the Russia Anxiety could take hold. Nor did the Cold War create them, though the continent was a theatre in which soft power was exercised and proxy wars were waged, not least in Angola, Liberia and Ethiopia. The Soviet Union’s development programme, in projects such as the Aswan Dam in Egypt, created positive associations. In the 1985–6 academic year, 18,118 black Africans came to the Soviet Union as students, with stipends and fees paid by Moscow (in a policy not calculated to reduce racism, the stipends were three times the level granted to Soviet students).37 The end of the Cold War dramatically reduced these connections. Russia’s image in Africa probably depends upon present-day initiatives rather than on history.38 But the Russia Anxiety is unlikely to get in the way.
And why be scared of Russia in South America? Congenial relations, fleshed out with a record of cultural exchanges and personal links, extend back to the nineteenth century, sometimes boosted, as in the case of Brazil, by modest migration from Russia.39 The Russian Academy of Sciences has a Latin America Institute with close ties to similar scholarly bodies in South America. Spanish and Portuguese were significant languages in Soviet higher education. In 1985–6, 17,277 Latin Americans came to study in the USSR; just over one-third of them were Cubans.40 But things can change fast, for worse as well as for better. Mexico has no heritage of the Russia Anxiety, and yet a cut-out of one was quickly assembled for it. ‘The Russians are coming to get our oil. Russia already controls Venezuela’s oil,’ claimed an audio message, sent to hundreds of thousands of mobile phone users via the WhatsApp messaging service during Mexico’s presidential election year of 2018. The then American secretary of state Rex Tillerson warned the government about likely Russian interference in the poll.41 It was unclear whether anyone would take any notice, or whom the Russians were supporting, though the American stance towards the Mexican poll was obvious in April 2017, when John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security in the US government, had let Mexicans know that a left-wing president ‘would not be good for America or Mexico’.42
But they have taken notice in other far-flung places in the past. Russophobia became a global industry thanks to the British Empire. Yet what, really, could be more preposterous than Russophobia in New Zealand? British culture in the colony transmitted a tendency to feel the Russia Anxiety, one that was exacerbated by pre-1914 imperial rivalry and then by anti-communism. It came and went: during the First World War, in which soldiers from New Zealand fought in disproportionate numbers, public feeling was anti-German, not anti-Russian. And it had specific qualities, such as worries about undercutting by Soviet trade, especially after Soviet dumping of butter on the UK market in 1931. Hounding of pro-Soviet academics – McCarthyism before McCarthyism – gave way to inter-governmental cooperation, when the finance minister, Walter Nash, travelled to Moscow in April 1937. When war broke out in 1939, Russophobia was less evident in the life of New Zealand than at any time in the previous forty years.43 Again, the virulence of the Anxiety quickly dissipated when the time was right.
Let’s draw some preliminary conclusions. The Russia Anxiety is a historically deep-seated feature of international relations. Western commentary since the end of the Cold War has often been ‘hysterical and one-sided’, according to one of the most respected of writers on the subject – and he was describing the 1990s, not the Trump-Putin years.44 ‘Healing its imperial and Russophobic complexes is going to take time,’ wrote one expert on the American ‘anti-Russia Lobby’ – in 2009.45
This is not an imaginary construct in the heads of Russians. Among Westerners, feeling the Anxiety can seem instinctive and natural, even a careful response to events, but it is usually irrational, a displacement, a political choice rather than a necessity; and when there are good reasons to be worried, the Anxiety distorts and exacerbates them. Fear of Russia among its immediate neighbours on the western border is, by contrast, involuntary, while fear elsewhere, even among former adversaries in Turkey or Afghanistan, is minimal. Meanwhile, no one can predict the international effects of the Russia Anxiety; they can amount to nothing, or they can contribute to the outbreak of war. Either way, submitting to the Russia Anxiety is a decision, and a high-risk one.
But it’s easy to succumb. When people do, and whether they realize it or not, they often draw on a set of categories devised by a nineteenth-century French aristocrat who freelanced as a Russia expert. Writing about his Russian adventures during the reign of Nicholas I, Astolphe de Custine compiled the most enduring taxonomy of the Russia Anxiety.
Custine, whose vituperation began this chapter, was perhaps the most important link between the bald Russophobia of the sixteenth century and the more differentiated Russia Anxiety of the twenty-first. The account of his journey to Russia of 1839 was based on a simple narrative arc of revelation and disillusion. A fan of Nicholas I from afar, and smitten once he met him in person, Custine claimed a pro-Russian agenda for his trip. He shared with other French aristocrats the sense that Nicholas embodied a stable compact between sovereign and nobility. Custine was anxious about the consequences of tyranny, which, he fretted, derived from too much democracy. Perhaps Russia offered answers that France had failed to find. But from his arrival in Russia he was convinced it did not. The aggressive anti-Russian qualities of his book were hardly captured in its original title: Russia in 1839. It became a success in its own time. Edited and republished more than a century later during the Cold War, when it was stripped of historical context and read in a literal manner,46 its messages carried to new generations. It is still lauded on ‘must-read’ lists about Russia and cited in travel guides.
Custine’s book elaborated a Russian phantasmogoria but it was not entirely the result of misplaced fears and unfair judgements. Although Custine described a personal and intellectual journey, it was not an idiosyncratic one. It made sense to his fellow countrymen. He had come of age during the Napoleonic Wars. As a result of their invasion of Russia, the French had suffered half a million casualties. They had experienced the humiliation of Russian soldiers parading through Paris and the presence of a triumphant tsar. On French soil, Alexander celebrated Russian nationhood and mocked the French. Even twenty-five years later, it was not surprising that Custine’s position turned anti-Russia, or that there was such a big audience for his observations. Custine’s description of Russia was a caricature, but anti-Russian feeling in France was not only the result of an irrational Anxiety.
He was born in 1790. Three years later, his father – himself sympathetic to the Revolution, but nevertheless an aristocrat – was executed during the Terror. His mother had tried to save her husband’s life and then after his death to revive her family’s prospects. She forged contacts across high society, starting a long-running affair with Chateaubriand, not least for the purpose of saving her remaining family. But despite his advantages – being an aristocrat in the era of France’s monarchical restoration, not to mention having a modest fortune and a brilliant mother – Custine did not live up to the promise of his circumstances. He spent a few years in the diplomatic service, but back in France he drifted from salon to salon in search of a wife. He and his mother didn’t have the resources to keep up their estate, and a good marriage was the best prospect of boosting their income. His mother eventually found the perfect match for him, a very young woman called Léontine, whose family lived not far from them in Normandy. Her fortune was adequate, and they married in 1821. They immediately had a child. She died a year after that, pregnant again, at the age of twenty.
Custine had felt affection for his wife. She had not only been a source of financial salvation but an alibi, because Custine was gay. His mother lived a worldly life, so she was aware of the reason for her son’s frequent trips to Paris. Shortly after the marriage, a young Englishman, Edward Sainte-Barbe, moved into the household in Normandy. When Léontine died, the two men stayed together until Custine’s death thirty-four years later. Their home was as openly a homosexual one as was consistent with propriety. Both men had affairs with others, but they stayed true to each other. In 1835, they admitted a young Pole, Ignatius Gurowski, to their household. Ignatius’s family had been sent into exile from the Russian Empire following its participation in the Polish uprising of 1831. Custine was interested more generally in the exiled Polish community and knew Chopin.
Keen to learn more about the Russian Empire of which his friends had been a part, seeing literary opportunities after completing a successful travelogue on Spain, and ready to make a case, if he could, to end the enforced exile of the Gurowski family, Custine set off from Paris for the German Baltic coast in June 1839, where he caught a steamship from Lübeck to St Petersburg. After spending time in the capital and then in Moscow, he more briefly visited the nearby provincial towns of Yaroslavl, Nizhnyi Novgorod and Vladimir. He was usually surrounded by French-speaking high society. Just over three months later, on 26 September, he left the Russian Empire and arrived in Tilsit.47
Russia in 1839 was published in 1843. Priced at 30 francs for four volumes, it quickly sold out its run of 3,000 copies. A second edition sold out, too. Translations soon appeared in English, Swedish and German. A Belgian publisher printed a pirated edition. Over the next decade, further editions – legal and not – enjoyed success, until Custine put together an abridged version for propaganda purposes during the Crimean War.48
The record of Custine’s experiences, styled as letters home, merged Russophobic comments in a compelling travelogue. On display are all the strands of the Russia Anxiety. For a start, there was fear. Custine was always uneasy during his Russian travels. He projected his worries onto a wider argument about international affairs that carried great weight throughout the Cold War and again in the 2010s. ‘I can see the colossus from nearby,’ he wrote. ‘[…] It seems to me that it is principally destined to punish the evils of European civilization by another invasion.’ His fear easily elided into contempt. Russia was a ‘colossus’, and the European civilization of which it was not a part had its own failures and ‘evils’, but Russia was separate, different. ‘Between France and Russia there is a Great Wall of China,’ he surmised: ‘the language and character of the Slavs.’ His contempt for the people behind the wall was boundless. He consistently denied that they were civilized. ‘Imagine a half-savage people who have been regimented, without being civilized,’ he wrote: ‘then you will understand the moral and social state of the Russians.’ In turn, contempt shifted towards disregard. ‘The Russians have nothing to teach us,’ he sniffed. Civilized Europeans could turn their backs on the Russians and get on with their own plans for carving up the continent. But not quite, because the cycle of the Anxiety turned disregard soon enough into fear. Custine himself immediately finished the thought: they might not have anything to teach us, ‘but there is much that they can make us forget.’49
Custine’s was a pathology born of lack of national self-awareness. His own father had been consumed by the French Revolution at a time when the ‘heart’ of Europe – Paris – was experiencing a total collapse into brutality and lawlessness. Yet he had no doubt that his own people were entirely civilized, and that this gave him the ability to see that civilization was never more than a veneer in Russia. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their case, and knowingly or not, Cold Warriors in the 1950s followed Custine’s script, as did the received wisdom of the 2010s. The script itself drew on centuries of similar descriptions, and ultimately on an appeal to history itself.
Custine’s journey was across time as well as space. His case against Russia rested not simply on what he saw in 1839, but on an argument about the structure of history over the longue durée. Another dimension of the Custine taxonomy was chronological, about the essence of history and the historical process.
He pointed to Russians’ problem with history, ‘with no Middle Ages, with no ancient memories, with no Catholicism and with no chivalry behind them’.50 It was as if nineteenth-century Russia lived against a backdrop of oblivion. Russia had plenty of history compared with, say, the United States, but the design of its past – the periods and labels that one might use to describe it – were quite different from that of France. Greeks and Romans had made it to Custine’s homeland (admittedly the former rather tangentially), leaving an imprint, not least in the historical imagination. The Greeks had established colonies in the southern Russian lands, but the Romans had not, and so the ‘ancients’ were indeed a less obvious historical presence than they were in French self-understanding. Before the Riurikid dynasty and the foundation of Kieven Rus in 862 AD, the territory was governed by tribes which left no written record. In this sense, Custine was not wrong about Russia’s lack of ‘ancient memories’, even if the connection between the ancient Mediterranean and the prospects for modern civilization, either in 1839 or the twenty-first century, is only a debating point.
Custine’s claim that Russia had no Middle Ages, though, is a different matter. By any reasonable measure, medieval Russia lasted for centuries and has a rich historiography to describe and explain it. But this period was invisible to Custine when he looked back on Muscovy, because, for him, the Middle Ages were created by Catholicism. The East Slavic lands were formally Christianized during the reign of Vladimir the Great in 988, but theirs was the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire. It came ultimately from Constantinople, the ‘second Rome’ that was the seat of the Roman Empire from the fourth century until 1453. No matter that for hundreds of these years Byzantium was a flourishing and complex civilization at a time when Western Europe was experiencing the ‘Dark Ages’, and Rome was permanently under threat from ‘Barbarians’; for Custine, it was St Peter’s Holy See in the Italian peninsula that was the guardian and creator of Christian culture.
Few would deny that the Orthodox and Catholic traditions contributed to social and cultural differences inside Europe. But to exaggerate the distinction is to follow Custine down a rhetorical approach to history whose effect is to exclude Russia and perhaps also Greece and Bulgaria from Western civilization. It seems reasonable enough, too, to say that different parts of Europe experienced the Middle Ages in different ways. For instance, the East Slavic lands did not have a direct analogue of self-governing city-states or of guilds, which offered groups of craftsmen some organized autonomy from the state in northern Europe.51 But how much difference this has made to historical change over the long term is really just a matter of speculation.
For the Marquis de Custine, Russian history was inadequate. It got low marks. He passed this viewpoint on to later Western Europeans and Americans. The Russia Anxiety is exacerbated by a confusion about history: not just a matter of mistaking the historical facts one could invoke to explain current events, but of imagining a whole historical process that was apparently guiding events in an undesirable direction. We might call it the fallacy of ‘instant history’. Used right, history might resolve the Russia Anxiety. Used wrong, it makes the Anxiety much worse.
At the heart of the Trump-Putin crisis as it played out between the two elections of November 2016 and March 2018 was the seductive peril of assuming that events were not complex or contingent at all. Instead, they were unprecedented in their course or ancient in their causes. They might even be simultaneously both. After all, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have one thing in common: a rise to power that was both unimagined and inevitable.
What could this mean? Both men enjoyed political success against all the odds. Their rise was completely unanticipated. Appointed prime minister in August 1999, a position from which he was catapulted to acting president within months, Putin confounded the global industry of Kremlin-watchers. And Trump: well, the possibility of his election was an international joke until election night itself. But once they had assumed the presidency of their respective countries, their triumphs became somehow inevitable, explicable by the deep social and cultural forces of the time. More than this: they both fitted into the deep patterns of the past. They were History Men. Putin was the product of centuries of Russian violence, expansionism and greed. Trump was the manifestation of America’s original sin, the unresolved issue of race, and of its great contemporary struggle, the challenge to its supremacy in a globalized economy, historic forces which together secured the loyalty of his electoral base.
We might call it instant history, instant in the speed of its analysis, and instant too in how it imagines the passage of time. Instant history assumes one of two things, depending on what needs to be explained. Sometimes, it instantly and unreflectively assumes inevitability, drawing straight lines between what happened in the past and what is happening now. Or, at other times, it draws an instant cut-off, following which things today are completely new. Both halves of instant history generate the Russia Anxiety. Take ‘hybrid warfare’, the idea that Russian foreign policy brings together episodes of armed force with campaigns of fake news, aggressive digital interventions with the cultivation of political extremists. Hybrid warfare is warfare without conventional war. Arguing that such a strategy is brand-new and uniquely pernicious is what instant history is all about. Instant history allowed people to say that Russia was at war with America when on calmer reflection this was simply not the truth. America–Russia relations might not look like a war – battles between soldiers, bombs out of the sky – but that is because, the instant historians say, it is a new type of war. But no one who lived through a war would recognize this as a war, and most military historians do not see the strategy as a new one. While the technologies and the term might be novel, the principles of hybrid warfare are as old as the hills, used in the ancient world as well as during the Cold War (not least by the United States).52
Perhaps more common, though, is the assumption of inevitability caused by the intransigence of history’s deep structures. This is instant history, too, though in another way, because it often represents an instant historical judgement on current affairs, a reflex in our historical imaginations: it must be like this now because it has been before; perhaps it’s always really been like this. And yet much of what happens in the present looks like the result of our own actions now: our good intentions, malice and luck. A family of Soviet celebrities illustrates the point.
They were a grand Soviet family. Sergei Mikhalkov was a famous children’s writer of the Stalin era. His first son, Nikita, was a ubiquitous actor in the post-Stalin years. He became a film director and then a part-time politician after 1991. His credits include Burnt by the Sun, an award-winning film about Stalin’s Terror. Nikita’s brother, Andrei, took their mother’s surname, Konchalovsky. He was another major figure in the film industry, working with Andrei Tarkovsky and directing adaptations of Chekhov and Turgenev that won international prizes, before going to work in the United States. With their creative talents, resourcefulness and ideological adaptability, the Mikhalkovs showcased some of the themes of Soviet life.
Although famous for his children’s poetry, Sergei’s most influential work was the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem, composed in 1944. This stirring tune became part of the soundscape of the Cold War, the soundtrack to Communist Party congresses and Red Square parades, Olympic medal ceremonies and documentaries about the space race. When Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin in 1956 the lyrics were no longer appropriate. The music remained, but without words to accompany it. Two decades passed before a new version was approved in 1977. After the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, when many of the symbols of the old regime were removed, some music by the nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka became the new national anthem. But it didn’t tug at the heart strings in quite the same way. In late 2000, in the months following Putin’s first election to the presidency, the Soviet anthem was reintroduced.
Of course, it needed new words – it made little sense to praise the Communist Party of Lenin – and Sergei was brought out of retirement to compose new lyrics. He was eighty-seven. One of its original signature lines, ‘raised up by Stalin, we’re true to the people’ (you can hear the words if you know the tune as it scans the same in Russian) had become ‘raised up by Lenin to follow a just cause’ in its late Soviet variant. Of course, all this went in the text of 2000. For instance, one famous line – ‘the party of Lenin, the strength of the people’ – was replaced by another: ‘the wisdom of ancestors, borne by the people’.53 Those words – the wisdom of ancestors, borne by the people – lie at the heart of this book. Let’s call them the Mikhalkov Line.
Do historical events and personalities really walk along the Mikhalkov Line? After all, the notion of ‘the wisdom of centuries, borne by the people’ is influential rhetoric in some Russian circles. For others, of course, history walks along a path parallel to the Mikhalkov Line, and contemporary Russia enjoys not the consolation of historic wisdom but the burden of centuries of backwardness, or anti-democracy, or coercion. At the heart of the Russia Anxiety is usually an assumption that contemporary Russia is not the distillation of hundreds of years of wisdom, but rather an awful accumulation of error, passivity and violence. This is the reasoning of instant history: if something is not brand new, it’s probably deeply ancient. But it is implausible that the historical process resembles a one-way road. Russians have spent their history straying from the Mikhalkov Line and its parallel pathway, just as the populations of all societies have strayed from their equivalents. The German ‘special path’, or Sonderweg, is a poor kind of explanation for German history, and Russian history also deserves a more sophisticated reading.
This is partly because historical change is so often the result of chance. In a country whose history is marked by big events – invasion, war, revolution – contingency has played an outsize role in shaping its development. The direction of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century was partly determined by the weather, so that, as it turned out, Moscow would overtake Kiev for good as the metropolis of East Slavic civilization. Personality-driven, cloak-and-dagger conspiracy was the only reason for the elevation to the throne of the most influential Romanovs, Peter in 1682 and Catherine in 1762. Later, the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 depended on the most improbable combination of circumstances.
And it is also because of all the obstacles that clutter the Mikhalkov Line, making easy transit along it impossible. It can be tempting for historians, under pressure to justify the purpose of their work or keen to push a political agenda, to simplify the link between the past and the present. In 1811, Nikolai Karamzin, the writer who has a claim to be Russia’s first great historian, found himself in conflict with Tsar Alexander I’s leading adviser, Mikhail Speransky. Karamzin believed that Speransky was proposing reforms that compromised the principles of autocracy. Seeking to defend autocracy, Karamzin wrote, ‘the present is a consequence of the past. To judge the former one must recollect the latter.’54 But reading the connections between past and present is fraught with risk. For a start, historical sources are products of their time – not our time. And the present cannot only be the consequence of the past. Too many unique contingencies are at any moment in conflict with each other. Countless pasts, near and distant, long ago and recent, and often contradictory to each other, simultaneously contribute to the fleeting present. The relationship between past and present has aspects that seem solid and logical, possible to describe. But it has other dimensions that are simply inscrutable, to historians and to anyone else. And, complicating everything still more, Russia, like many other countries, has had moments when its rulers self-consciously embarked on a new start, wilfully discarding their relationship to the past, or partly claiming to do so – most of all, Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century, and the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Mikhalkov Line – a transit point for the Russian Anxiety – is quickly blocked off by this more careful analysis of history.
Back in the 1840s, Custine’s French audience gleefully consumed his conclusions about the country that had roundly defeated it two decades before. He also had a rather more select audience back in St Petersburg. Nicholas I rose above the reaction to the book of his former guest – a man he had invited to his daughter’s wedding and entertained in high style – and did not dignify it with a response. But he apparently read the book and threw it to the ground in fury.55 Custine’s work and that of others, and their recycling in wider conversations, have always redounded on the country they describe. Faced with the Russia Anxiety, Russians have reacted in a number of ways, some of which have made the Anxiety sharper. Worst of all, some of them have swallowed the Anxiety whole. If the Russia Anxiety has had a 500-year history, it’s no wonder that the Russians themselves have been affected by it.
‘It is embarrassing to be Russian these days,’ says Uncle Boris, shortly before his grisly demise in the BBC’s 2018 international gangster drama, McMafia. He’s talking to his Anglicized nephew, a smooth-talking banker indistinguishable from his public-school contemporaries. Uncle Boris wants to remind the younger man of the feelings inspired by his post-Soviet family heritage, which created such a sense of awkwardness when his nouveau riche relatives dropped him off at his boarding school at the start of term. But in early 2018, any lingering embarrassment was only the start of the problem for expat Russians (99.99 per cent of whom were peaceable souls and not oligarchs, spies, gangsters or prostitutes). At the time the TV series aired, Russians were objects of suspicion, and contact with some of them raised doubts about one’s patriotism. In the United States, where the series did not show, news media and politicians were still speculating about whether any official who had recently had a conversation with the Russian ambassador might be a potential traitor. Within weeks, the concerted international response to the attempted murder in the United Kingdom of the double-agent Sergei Skripal had led to dozens of diplomatic expulsions and threatened a major international crisis.
Faced with hostile rhetoric and worse, Russians at home and abroad had a choice of answers. One response was to fight fire with fire. Vladimir Medinsky, who would soon become minister of culture, completed a three-volume bestseller called Myths about Russia in 2011. By then, post-Soviet Russia’s disillusion with the intentions of the West was already solidly established. Medinsky combined sober analysis with rhetorical broadsides, plausibility with tendentiousness. He argued that ‘the creation of black political myths’ about Russia in the West extended as far as ‘total hatred’ and ‘Russophobic paranoia’ whose aim was to weaken Russia’s international standing and domestic cohesion, allowing ‘the seeds of self-disparagement and complexes’ to germinate. Such an approach takes reasonable points – that the historical relationship between today’s Russia and Latvia is not simply a matter of the former crushing the latter, or that the Russian defeat of Napoleon was due to human effort and not just a result of the weather – and extracts from them an angry challenge to the West.56 Another popular author, the TV host Igor Prokopenko, took a similar idea and expressed it more concisely. ‘This is not the first century,’ he wrote, ‘in which Western intellectuals have pedantically taught us to be ashamed of the fact that we are Russians.’ Prokopenko’s myth-busting agenda was still more explicitly driven forward by the notion of national revival than Medinsky’s. His aim, he wrote, was to confirm in the reader’s mind the ‘necessity to love the motherland’.57
This populist tone and language recall some of Donald Trump’s speeches during the election campaign of 2016. Vladimir Putin has drawn from a more subtle repertoire of similar sentiments. Commentators interpreted his election victory of 2018 as a success for the ‘patriotic majority’. But most of this majority are quiet folk, keen to avoid international politics, or, if they must face them, to pull up the drawbridge, at least psychologically. Given centuries-long anxieties about foreign invasion, and decades-long fears about the good faith of the West, a fortress mentality is a natural Russian response at moments of international crisis. But perhaps the most common response is fear of war. In Russia’s past and present, war scares don’t generate jingoism, but they compound the existing fear of war. The idea that nationhood is more powerfully felt and expressed in Russia than in other countries, that the Russians are forever on the lookout for a chance to sacrifice all for Mother Russia – that all it takes is for the right leader to tell them what to do, or the right combination of insults and incentives to drive them forward, pitchforks raised – is one of the most misguiding clichés in European history.
Still, the character of Uncle Boris reminds us that some Russians are embarrassed about their national origins. Others are ashamed or angry about the actions of their fellow citizens. There are people everywhere who condemn their own country for its sins, look down upon their compatriots, even renounce their citizenship. In the case of Russia, these self-critical arguments have often been conducted in exile. A common message is love for country but hatred of its government. This was the mission statement of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, writing in his Vermont compound in the two decades after 1974. But it also informed the émigré characters who populate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov or Ivan Bunin, or the Russian intelligentsia-in-exile that was so significant in American university and government departments during the Cold War.
Some Russians have taken renunciation to its bitter conclusion. The philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev was the most famous example of all. ‘Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, learnt nothing from the world, and bestowed not a single idea upon the fund of human ideas,’ he wrote in 1836. ‘We have not contributed in any way to the progress of the human spirit, and whatever has come to us from that progress we have disfigured.’58 This caused a major scandal in St Petersburg. It is a fearsome charge sheet. Russophobia is perhaps most pungent when it takes the form of a dialogue of agreement between insiders and outsiders. Chaadayev’s argument that Russia was uncivilized was an historical one: he claimed that Russia lacked a history; it did not possess organic or useful traditions. ‘Russian civilization is still so close to its source,’ wrote Custine, whose trip to Russia was three years after the Chaadayev cause celèbre – ‘that it resembles barbarism.’59 When he set off for Russia, Custine carried in his pocket a letter of introduction to Chaadayev.60 Custine had read widely in Russian sources, and before setting out he must have come across the writer and social critic Alexander Radishchev’s work of 1790 about his journey from St Petersburg to Moscow.61 ‘A barge-hauler who goes to the tavern with downcast head and returns blood-spattered from blows to the face may help to explain much that has seemed puzzling in Russian history,’ posits Radishchev.62 This is merely silly, but it is right up Custine’s street.
The comic novels of the Soviet period put this self-critical strain of the Russia Anxiety under the literary microscope. ‘I wish I’d been born in a small French town,’ says Nikolai, the lazy and incompetent main character of Yuri Olesha’s Envy (1927), ‘grown up on dreams, set myself some lofty goal, and one fine day left my little town, and walked to the capital, and there, working fanatically, achieved my goal. But I wasn’t born in the West.’63 In Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow, a satire on Soviet theatrical life, written but not published in the 1930s, one’s origins are always something to be denied, modified or completely rewritten. The characters in Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue, first published in Paris in 1985, are waiting in line for they know not which deficit item, but the more foreign it is the better. Perhaps they are coats with Astrakhan collars. ‘Sure they’re not Bulgarian?’ asks one character. ‘Of course not. Real Turkish. That’s why there’s such a queue,’ says the next person in line.64
Less ironic self-criticism came from out-and-out opponents of communist rule: not those like Solzhenitsyn, who made a distinction between people and system, and retained affection for one while condemning the other, but those who came to see the West as a much preferable alternative to their homeland. Such people included ‘White’ émigrés, fleeing the Revolution to Prague, Berlin, Paris or Shanghai, and then scattering around the world, together with their sons and daughters born in exile. And there was a much smaller group, of political dissidents, Jewish ‘refuseniks’ who had been allowed to emigrate in the 1970s, and even defectors. Some of these people were critical of the West; others idealized it, and defined the Soviet Russia they had left behind in contradistinction to it. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB spy who defected to Britain in the 1970s, later wrote of the Soviet population that it ‘was composed entirely of Homo Sovieticuses: a new type had been created, of inadequate people, lacking initiative or the will to work, formed by Communist society.’65
The recycling of outsiders’ Russophobia by insiders is a toxic process. Perhaps no one worked harder to avoid such an outcome, or inadvertently contributed to its realization, than the American diplomat and writer George Frost Kennan. He’s our first lesson in how history can dissolve the Russia Anxiety.
The most significant encounter between Russia and ‘the West’ in the twentieth century took place in the imagination of George F. Kennan, America’s leading expert on the Soviet Union and Russia during the Cold War. Kennan was a true Russia expert, a man of deep thought and good faith, and as such was immune to the Russia Anxiety. His worries about the intentions of the Soviet leadership were rational, the result of knowledge, experience and reflection. In some ways he loved Russia. ‘Outside the little oasis of the diplomatic colony,’ he wrote of the pre-war Moscow embassies, ‘there stretched still, fascinating and inviting, the great land and life of Russia, more interesting to me than any other in the world.’66 But even as he presented a sympathetic view of Russians, the result could be alienating. ‘The air of Russia is psychically impregnated,’ he wrote, ‘as ours is not.’67 Gifted as he was, he saw the oppressive patterns in Russian history of common cliché, and though he added fine grains and paradoxes to the picture, he sometimes presented a grandiose and emotional view of the country, which only added fuel to America’s Russia Anxiety during the early Cold War. He gave a generation of Americans the intellectual tools to exploit the Russia Anxiety in ways that he himself came to deplore.
Yet his achievement in the interface between Russian scholarship and high diplomacy in America’s Cold War was formidable. Unlike narrower minds, he framed a critique of Soviet policy and then doubted it, remaining true to his scholarly instincts yet retaining his political influence. In so doing, he came to suggest a cure for America’s Russia Anxiety through greater national self-awareness. This was an intellectual trajectory which his harder-line admirers came to see as the result of a blind spot.68 In the career of George F. Kennan we might bring together the strands that run through this chapter. His life and work remind us that the Russia Anxiety is an historic condition that’s existed for centuries but which we shape ourselves by our own interpretation of history; they permit us to observe the logical conclusion of the Anxiety, the risk of mass destruction; and they show us a way to reduce the Anxiety safely.
Kennan was born into a prosperous Wisconsin family in 1904. His father was a lawyer, and his mother died when he was very young. The family looked outwards. They travelled to Europe, learned languages and found out about an ageing relation, also called George, who explored Siberia, wrote major books about it, and became one of the most influential Russianists of his day. The younger George studied at Princeton and spent a summer footling around Western and Southern Europe. After he graduated, he passed the exams for the Foreign Service. He remained a diplomat for a quarter of a century. In the 1950s, he began a second, long career as a scholar and public intellectual at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, though he twice emerged from academic life to take up ambassadorial appointments, including briefly to the Soviet Union in 1952. He lived to be 101, the ultimate Russia hand.
Even if the elder George’s Russian exploits were only peripheral to his childhood, Kennan’s whole life was a meditation on, and an intervention in, Russia and the USSR. When he had the chance, after postings to Geneva and Hamburg, he began to study Russian. The Service gave him three years to do so, funding his time as a student of Russian language, literature and history in Berlin. Then they sent him to Riga to try out his expertise. It was the nearest he could get to Russia, and the place where he started a family with his Norwegian wife. Two years later, in 1933, Kennan was part of a small team setting up an embassy in Moscow, after Washington finally established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. He stayed for five years, after which he was posted to Prague. Kennan’s war was a mixed one: he endured internment in Germany for several months, served in the diplomatic mission in Lisbon, worked back in Washington, DC, and then returned to Moscow. After a last spell back at Washington, followed by his resignation and translation to Princeton in 1950, he returned briefly to diplomatic life in 1952 as ambassador to Moscow. Kennan had wide experience of Stalinism in its three acts: the 1930s, the Great Fatherland War and after 1945. He was not encumbered by a revolutionary past, and his viewpoint did not emerge from detailed knowledge of Marxism. ‘Distaste for the Stalin regime,’ Kennan later wrote, ‘did not come by way of disillusionment of an earlier enthusiasm.’69 He knew the Soviet Union from within and without, from above and below, or at least as much as a Stalin-era diplomat could; he had an independent understanding of the country’s domestic life and its international politics, and a scholarly appreciation of its literature and history. Stalin himself praised Kennan’s language skills. They said he sounded like an intellectual from the age of Pushkin.
Despite being declared persona non grata after some undiplomatic utterances while visiting Berlin, following little more than a summer as ambassador between May and October 1952, Kennan’s reputation was secure. It rested on the so-called Long Telegram. On 22 February 1946, labouring under the effects of a bad cold, and with Ambassador Averell Harriman away, Kennan wrote a 5,000-word analysis of the Soviet threat to the US and the West and sent it to his colleagues in Washington by telegram, partly to be sure of attracting their attention. It was the longest telegram in the history of the State Department. In it, Kennan argued that the time had come to draw a line in the sand. It was impossible to negotiate with the Soviet Union, whose government was trapped by a combination of Russian history and Marxist ideology. But he also argued, in a quieter and somewhat contradictory key, that compromises might be possible, that the Soviets had no interest in advancing any further, and that their government was rational in its intentions, if conspiratorial in its organization.
The Long Telegram was keenly read back in the State Department, where officials focused on the essential differences it portrayed between the USSR and the West, and the futility of accommodation. It articulated a sense that already existed, and prefigured Churchill’s speech about the Iron Curtain that he delivered in Fulton, Missouri, the following month. The Telegram was transmitted to a wide and enthusiastic audience through an anonymous article Kennan wrote for Foreign Affairs the following July, where he talked more explicitly about ‘containing’ the USSR.
When his authorship was revealed, Kennan became a diplomatic celebrity, and remained one for the rest of his life. He influenced President Truman, for whom the Telegram was the analytical basis of the containment policy. Most of Kennan’s admirers today perceive him as the de facto author of the policy that saved the Western world. Before the Long Telegram, the narrative goes, the Americans were wobbling, trying to see the best in Uncle Joe. After the Telegram, the scales fell from their eyes, and the outlook was clear. There was no truck in dealing with the Soviets. But war was too dangerous. So the adversary had to be contained. Kennan wanted the Americans to stand up politically to Stalin’s government, and to establish a common defence, based on a shared political agenda, with their European allies. ‘Never,’ he wrote later, ‘[…] did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.’70
Kennan neither wanted war nor wished to court it. The paradox was that he provided the intellectual rationale for a US policy that transcended his intentions. He fretted about a ‘Truman Doctrine’ of ostentatious containment, with its ‘universal and pretentious note, appealing to the patriotic self-idealization which so often sets the tone of discussion about foreign policy in our public life, but which is actually unrealistic and pernicious in its effect on the soundness of public understanding of our international situation’. Kennan wrote derisively about John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, who ‘spoke of that “liberation” and that “massive retaliation” which, in reality, he had no intention of inflicting on anybody’.71 He was very cautious about the military and did not want any talk of war, which was one of the reasons why he helped to design the Marshall Plan as a scheme to which the USSR and Eastern bloc were invited, even though he knew that the Soviets would decline the invitation and force their satellites to do the same. But Kennan’s ideas were taken further and pushed out of context. Determined that the Soviets should advance no further, the ‘Truman Doctrine’ underwrote the CIA’s anti-communist intervention in Western European elections, and the attempt to shore up the anti-communist opposition in the Greek civil war. In time, it would be the basis of interventions in Latin America, the stand-off with Khrushchev in Cuba and the war in Vietnam. But long before then, the Russia Anxiety had turned to panic in Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings. Russian émigrés in the United States might have feared McCarthy, but many of them felt the Russia Anxiety. Kennan contributed to the intellectual licence that enabled this.
George Kennan, with his training and wide-ranging experience, looked at Russia in layers. The result was his profound alarm about the Russia Anxiety. First was the layer of deep historical structures. Here Kennan implied a paradox. On the one hand, the Soviet leadership’s behaviour was predictable, deriving from ingrained cultural patterns, as well as the imperatives of Marxist ideology; it was very likely to perceive certain kind of threats, to express itself volubly as a result, to ready itself for war. On the other hand, it was open to negotiation and compromise. This was precisely because it had no intention of launching a war. Instead, it was a formidable political and ideological adversary that had to be opposed by political and ideological means. Second were the social layers, of people and government, which Kennan believed did not overlap and possessed different characters and aims. The people were peaceful, independent-minded and terrified of war, while their government uttered bellicose rhetoric when it had the chance.
In short, it was the Soviet government that was the opponent of its American counterpart, but not the Russian people (or, presumably, the Soviet peoples).72 A third layer was the international status of the Soviet Union. Here, Kennan made a distinction between political adversary and military enemy. He always argued that the Soviet Union was the former, by virtue of the formal logic of its ruling Marxist ideology, which posited the failure of capitalism, but should never be the latter. A fourth layer, related to this, was the nature of its political system, totalitarianism. Kennan was clear: despite the claims of the totalitarian theorists of the early post-war years, Stalin was not Hitler, the Soviet Union was not Nazi Germany, and post-war ‘Russia’ was different from pre-war Germany because it did not pose a plausible military danger to the United States or its European allies. When he was ambassador in 1952, Kennan deplored the use of his embassy for the posturing of military visitors and spies. Why did US intelligence officers have to stand on the roof of the embassy and take photographs of Soviet spies taking photographs of them? Why did the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House have to gather American forces near to the Soviet border? He hated the Stalinist political order. But he thought that Washington was courting war.73
So what was the answer? Political pressure: yes. Military planning: no. ‘[M]ilitary plans had a way of giving reality to the very contingencies against which they purported to prepare,’ he warned. Korea laid out the terrible risks. The US aerial bombing of the eastern Korean city of Rashin was ‘frivolous and dangerous’, it was ‘so close to the great Russian port of Vladivostok’. He interpreted the majority support in Congress for expanding the Korean War as a de facto call for war with the Soviet Union and China, and imagined that Stalin would see it the same way.74
In 1948, the Americans were deciding on the precise form of the peace treaty that they would impose on Japan. Kennan tried to see the problem from the point of view of Moscow. What about making a treaty to which the Soviets would also assent, rather than simply deny that they had interests in the region too? True enough, the Americans had borne the sacrifices of the war against Japan together with their Western allies, but the Soviets had the rights of proximity: the Sea of Japan was as close to the USSR as the Caribbean was to the USA. In 1945, Soviet forces had occupied islands in Japan’s Kuril chain, off their own Far Eastern coast, and they had taken back South Sakhalin, which stretched from the Soviet mainland almost to Japan, and had been lost in the war of 1904–5. Most important, revolution in Korea brought the peninsula into a Soviet-Chinese sphere of influence that threatened conflict with the United States. Was the Japanese peace treaty an opportunity to solve these problems in one go, by trading off the demilitarization of Japan for that of Korea, and the withdrawal of American and Soviet troops alike from the region? Why should the Soviets exit Korea unilaterally while the Americans were making it increasingly clear that they were in Japan for the long haul? He argued that the Soviet government was not duplicitous in negotiations, or at any rate not about specific issues of arms and territories (vague big-picture commitments were another matter). Nor did it want to go out and occupy other countries: there was simply no evidence that it sought to expand, at least beyond the position of its armed forces in Europe in May 1945. Kennan’s argument did not get very far. The USSR and China soon formed an alliance, and the Korean War broke out in 1950.75
As the Cold War went on, and Kennan spent more time at Princeton, at his second home in rural Pennsylvania, and in many trips to other parts of the United States he came to know America better than before. He was a patriot, but he found deficiencies in American democracy and society that led him further to question the bipolar morality of the Cold War. In 1967, in his memoirs, he wrote of how ‘American statesmanship’ always seemed doomed to suffer the effects of ‘neurotic self-consciousness and introversion’, with foreign policy focused not on the world outside, but on domestic opinion and the machinations of Congress.76 And it would be better not to make extravagant moral claims on behalf of oneself and one’s policies.
By the time of perestroika, Kennan had come half-circle. In the spring of 1987, he wrote that the threat of forty years before had been ideological, not military, but now ‘the situation is almost exactly the reverse’. And yet it was not Moscow as such that threatened the United States. ‘[W]hat most needs to be contained,’ he claimed, ‘is not so much the Soviet Union as the arms race itself.’ Nuclear weapons and the expansion of military technologies on both sides were threatening the world. At a time of global fluidity, when no one could be sure of Gorbachev’s intentions, let alone predict the end of the Soviet Union, Kennan was prepared to dissolve the Russia Anxiety by a process of self-examination. On the one hand, he wrote, ‘we are going to have to learn to take as the basis for our calculations a much more penetrating and sophisticated view of that particular country than the one that has become embedded in much of our public rhetoric’. And on the other: ‘we are going to have to recognize that a large proportion of the sources of our troubles and dangers lies outside the Soviet challenge, such as it is, and some of it even within ourselves’.77
Kennan amplified these arguments once the Cold War was over. The United States should reject an interventionist foreign policy. Its leaders should not get carried away with a messianic vision.78 If the attachment to Western values was eternal, NATO need not be. The long-term endurance of alliances such as NATO had unpredictable effects. ‘Their very existence creates new situations, which their creators could never have envisaged,’ he wrote in 1993.79 And America should look to itself. ‘[T]he greatest service this country could render to the rest of the world,’ he went on, ‘would be to put its own house in order and to make American civilization an example of decency, humanity, and societal success from which others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes.’80
But Kennan’s prescription was not followed. Perhaps it never could have been. And so the Russia Anxiety was revivified, even during the 1990s. As others pointed out, America pushed a democratizing agenda on Moscow, but with little concern for the particularities of the Russian case, so that it came across as patronizing and triumphalist. There was little material support or institutional encouragement; no great global settlement emerged.81 Instead, Russia was just a ‘bad learner’ who didn’t become like us because of its historic burdens, even its genetic deficiencies (it was common to speculate on just how much had been lost from the gene pool during Stalin’s Terror and then the Second World War). By extension, Russia’s presence at the high table of diplomacy, when it was invited, was merely a matter of begrudged courtesy.82
With the end of the century in sight, when Kennan was approaching his own centenary, he found it ‘distressing’ that ‘anxiety and suspicion of the new Russia’ were widespread in the Western press. For him, there was no plausible threat that Russia would want to extend itself beyond its borders. Even Crimea, which he saw as a special case, was not an open target of Russia’s leaders. ‘There is,’ he argued, ‘no country anywhere in the world whose inhabitants, including what the Communists used to call its “ruling circles”, have less to gain and more to fear from new military involvements than do those of the Russian Republic.’ Kennan’s critics were quick to point out the implausible optimist, or the Russophile of good faith betrayed by the ill intentions of what came next, or the 1940s visionary who could not apply his brilliance to an entirely new and even worse world.
Twenty years on, it remains easy for Kennan’s critics to dismiss him. But since he wrote these comments in the 1990s, Russia’s fundamental interests remained the same, though it began to defend them aggressively. What changed the most were the circumstances outside its borders, including the rise of interventionist dogma in American foreign policy and the expansionary logic of European institutions. Kennan argued that Europe was a patchwork of exceptions and geographical absurdities that could be happily maintained if policymakers retained a sense of rationality and contingency. Serious discussion of extending NATO towards Russia’s borders was ‘unreal, unnecessary, and in highest degree deplorable’. It was not that Russia would ever be an American-style democracy; but it was not a threat. The problem was the Russia Anxiety. ‘[L]et us … not confuse ourselves, and let us not unnecessarily complicate our problem, by creating a Russia of our own imagination,’ he pleaded.83 Would he have thought the same today, after Ukraine, Crimea, the 2016 election and the 2018 mass expulsions of diplomats? When he wrote the Long Telegram, he saw a clear and present ideological danger, an adversary that needed to be told clearly of American resilience. He was not the type to take a soft line. Yet he would certainly have deplored the language with which Russia was demonized in American politics and media in the age of Trump and Putin. He would have looked for greater clarity and less politicking in the investigation of events. And he might have thought that the Russian crisis was in part one of America’s making.
If the shade of Kennan could not meet Trump or Putin, to everyone’s detriment, what would we learn from an encounter between him and the ghost of Custine?
In 1963, Kennan gave a lecture at the University of Belgrade. Six years later, visiting All Souls College in Oxford, he gave that year’s Chichele Lectures. In 1970, he left his base at Princeton to give a talk at Harvard. In each case, he was refining the same subject: the Marquis de Custine. Could Kennan resolve Custine’s Russia Anxiety, or would Custine play on Kennan’s Anxious moments?
Kennan exposed the contradictions and inaccuracies in Custine’s book, its derivative nature and its reliance on rumour, and the extent of what Custine missed. For Kennan, Custine was not wrong in his descriptions of corruption, or the ‘pretentiousness of high society’, or the gap between Russia and the West, as they existed in 1839. But he missed the complexity of Russian society. He did not see that many Russians themselves understood their problems all too well. Kennan approvingly quoted one of Custine’s Russian critics. ‘We do not propose to place ourselves, on our own initiative, at the head of civilization: we do not claim to be the tutors or regents of other nations,’ this critic wrote. ‘But we too have our place in the sun, and it is not Monsieur de Custine who is going to deprive us of it.’84 This is a familiar source of Russian Angst: of being talked down to, excluded from the room, ignored or misinterpreted. Putin understands it well; his speeches are often designed to hit the exposed nerves of his fellow citizens.
So Kennan concluded that Custine’s was not a good book about Russia in 1839. But it was ‘an excellent book, perhaps the best of books, about the Russia of Joseph Stalin, and not a bad book about the Russia of Brezhnev’. What the imaginary Russia of 1839 and the real Soviet Union of 1939 had in common, for Kennan, was a lack of social dynamism, suggesting that change could only come through revolutionary violence. Custine missed the emergence of liberalism and other-thinking in Russian society, which would in time generate the great reforms of the 1860s and the emergence of ‘society’ in the late imperial period; but these were precisely what was absent under Stalinism. And Custine’s Russia of 1839 came to pass a century later not because of inevitable patterns of Russian history but because of chance: the unlikely combination of circumstances that caused the Russian Revolution. In other words, Russian realities were not caused by instant history, the assumption that events are either unprecedented or provenanced by antiquity. Custine created a phantasmagoria, but he was right about the failures of Russian monarchy. He glimpsed a possible future, but only by chance, as the Russian Revolution did not need to happen. And even in Soviet society, Kennan concluded, there existed, as isolated elements, the same positive, regenerative forces that existed in nineteenth-century Russia.85
In this way, Kennan entered into Custine’s Russia Anxiety, faced its worse prospects for the 1930s and the 1970s, but then dismantled the Anxiety from within. He was unlike his successors. Determined to see Russia and the Soviet Union on their own terms, willing to be critical of America, uncomfortable with absolutes, and prepared to change his mind when he was wrong, he showed how past and present could combine to diminish the Russia Anxiety.86
Kennan was gone, and there was nobody to replace him. In the second decade of the twenty-first century – the age of Trump and Putin, of Crimea and cyberspace, of recklessness and hatred – the Russia Anxiety has reached an almost unprecedented size. And yet the Russia Anxiety is not a permanent condition. It’s a syndrome whose symptoms come and go. Some people and countries are not susceptible to it; others can control the symptoms when they start. The Russia Anxiety is partly formed by history, but, as Kennan showed, history also offered possible ways to resolve it.
Instant history and wilfully misunderstood history have been environments in which the Russia Anxiety has thrived. They have made possible the widespread myth of a special path of Russian history, a specially bad path, of barbarism, poverty and un-freedom. This black legend of Russia’s damaged destiny has been a risk to world peace in the past and it might be again, as we’ll see in the next chapter.