I teach Russian history for a living, and I sometimes ask a class to tell me the first thing they think of when they hear the word ‘Russia’. Students suspect a trick question and turn their gaze towards the middle distance. But what’s the trick?
In the new age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin I asked a group of students a slightly different question from the one above: what they thought when they heard the name Putin. The image that one of them put forward was precisely what the media presented: a villain from a James Bond movie. His policies were violent and expansionist; his rule was arbitrary and coercive. He ran a kleptocracy and a mafia state based on a veneer of Russian nationalism. It was a house of cards, ready to fall. But then the student did what many excellent students do: mid-statement, uninterrupted, he pulled himself up short, breathed out and suddenly changed direction. He struggled to find coherence in terms such as ‘mafia state’. Sensing the perils of received wisdom, he wondered if he was only saying what he was supposed to say, and he set about adjusting his position in full view of the rest of the class.
The question was not only about Russia, or about Putin: it was about the limits of how we understand the world around us. After all, observers had for years told different stories about Putin’s Russia. For some, Putin had reshaped and modernized his country. Under his leadership, Russia emerged from the chaos and misery of the 1990s. He established a stable economy that was more flexible and open than before, and that raised living standards, at least in metropolitan centres, even after oil prices had long stopped rising. Presenting himself as dignified, articulate and decisive, he also stabilized the country’s politics. Many Russians led normal lives, forming reasonable ambitions and plausible plans to realize them. It was easy enough to understand Putin’s popularity. Was this another aspect of the truth?
I teach history, as I’ve said, and so the problems I discuss with my students concern the past, even if the conversation has turned towards the present day. When it comes to Russia, history shapes our imaginations – and defines our misperceptions. Was the present really the consequence of the past? Had Vladimir Putin made Russia modern, or had he allowed it to revert to type? In the age of Trump and Putin, did the West’s Russia crisis come out of the past, or did it point towards a uniquely dangerous future?
Every day brought a new headline describing Russia as a hostile foreign power, with talk of annexation, fighting, mischief, hacking, hit jobs, sanctions, corruption and a short road to war. News programmes led with encroachments on airspace, interventions in elections and nerve poison in the medieval English town of Salisbury. In the years that followed Vladimir Putin’s third election victory in 2012, Russia was cast as an extraordinary danger, and its president became Public Enemy Number 1.
Of course, people in ‘the West’ – itself not an undivided category or one that’s clearly distinct from Russia – worry for good reasons about Moscow: its deteriorating relations with NATO, its scarcely transparent political system, its oligarchic capitalism, the allegations of political violence sometimes levelled against its government and its tensions with former Soviet republics, especially the conflict with Ukraine. In the present and the past alike, there have been moments of enmity, hostility and incomprehension that were real, not imagined or inflated. Think back to the closing in of the Cold War at the end of the 1940s and the start of the nuclear arms race. Imagine the need for answers in Salisbury in early 2018. But by then the anger on the TV screens was so loud that it was impossible to evaluate risks and reflect on motives. Incidents that were important but of a different order, culminating in the ‘cyberwar’ of the 2016 American election, were taken out of context, exaggerated, given strategic coherence and imagined as an ideological crusade. Among military and intelligence officers, politicians and journalists, and across the public squares of America and Britain, it became acceptable to say what you wanted to say about Russia, and talking heads on Russian TV returned the compliment. One of the differences with the Cold War was that both sides, perhaps, seemed to forget that they were dealing with a massive nuclear power equal only to themselves.
Yet while the level of indignation was exhausting, it was not new. Perhaps because of its proximity to Western Europe (China is much further away), its size (the biggest country in the world) and its out-of-focus familiarity (no country is simultaneously so exotic and ever-present) Russia has sometimes seemed a unique menace in Western eyes. This feeling, usually based on error and even more often on prejudice, has come and gone for at least five centuries. We might call it the Russia Anxiety. At its worst, it creates a preposterous bogeyman and is itself a threat to world peace, most catastrophically so in July 1914.
This book analyses the history of the Russia Anxiety, but it does not only look backwards. It shows how history can be a platform from which to look at Russia more calmly, reasonably and accurately. But even when the discussion stretches to the time of writing, like it sometimes does in my classes, the judgements are historical, never contemporary. Their relationship to the present is suggestive, not decisive. This is a work of history with an unconventional structure and an open interest in current events. Telling stories from every age of the recorded past, it scrutinizes the patterns that connect Russia’s history with its possible futures. But these patterns are obscure and unexpected. They defy predictability. And they make Russia seem more similar to other European countries and even the United States. Perhaps the Russia Anxiety cannot survive such a careful and critical way of thinking about history. In any case, this book invites you to make the journey back into the Russian past and to look at the present anew.