Part II
Normality, Friendship and Liberty?
We are Europeans.
Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987
You will find that I have no other view than the greatest welfare and glory of the fatherland, and I wish for nothing but the happiness of my subjects, of whatever order they may be. All my thoughts are directed towards the preservation of external and internal peace, satisfaction and tranquillity.
Catherine the Great, 1764
Neither [the USSR nor the West] can accept friendly criticism, and each makes wild pronouncements about the other because of ignorance. In fact, our worst enemy is not the other side, but our own intolerance. If we want peace, which now means the survival of the world, no less, we must recognize truth – about ourselves and others.
Sally Belfrage, British writer and journalist, 19581
No one is going to write a history of Russia, its power, people and place in the world, that claims to be an unvarnished story of normal life, international friendship and popular freedom. Russian history is far from the sum of these qualities – and yet they are much more common than the Russia Anxiety can account for. Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world, and almost everything about its past and present can seem outsize and extraordinary, often not in a good way. In many ways, moreover, the Soviet period was an historic outlier, creating a unique world. But on almost all levels, Russia’s experience has often been ‘normal’. Its economic performance, the everyday operations of its legal system and its cultural norms historically fit within a European framework. Russia’s political system, though not democratic, has usually been flexible, capable of evolution, and based on a measure of legitimacy. The country’s internal life has usually not been ostentatiously coercive. Its empire expanded like other empires did, and often less violently. Russia has not been at war more frequently or posed a greater international danger than the leading Western powers, and has often been the ally of half or more of them. In other words, Russia’s experiences mostly fit within reasonable international comparisons. Over a millennium, Russians have lived out lives not dramatically different from those of other Europeans. The age of ‘tears without end’, between 1904, when war with Japan broke out, and 1953, when Stalin died, is a unique dark age, but even those terrible years fitted into a wider European and global story. Understanding Russia’s history and its present-day predicaments is enriched by changing perspective, giving a little ground, and looking again at one’s own national culture, too. The Russia Anxiety, of course, is based on the opposite approach. In Part II, we explore five of the Anxiety’s bêtes noires – issues of democracy, violence, ‘the West’, expansionism and war – to show that normality, friendship and liberty are solvents in which the Anxiety might dissolve.