Well, my view about Russophobia is that if we're talking about the West, it is a relatively recent phenomenon. It starts around the late 18th, early 19th century. It begins to take off in a very big way after the fall of Napoleon, in which Russia played a central role. Russia had emerged in a result of these wars as the greatest military power in Europe. It had done so as a relatively new entrant into the European power system and the established powers primarily Britain and especially France initially were very alarmed by this. So straight after the Napoleonic wars we have a constant media campaign in Britain directed against Russia. The British media starts talking about Russia in very much the same way that they talk about Russia today as a militaristic aggressive empire and a rather backward and autocratic empire as well. And then France takes up the baton, so to speak, and they put this all in literary form. [...] So "Russia is backward. Russia is savage. Russia is a tyranny. The people of Russia are oppressed, but they collude in their own oppression. The Russians are devious. They're aggressive. They delight in violence and cruelty. They are absolutely not to be trusted. Anything good that we hear about them is first and foremost Russian disinformation." And a particular point that I made is that one of the reasons that these stereotypes and themes about Russia have been so long lived is that they have never been confronted in the West. People have never come out and said these are manifestations of Russophobia, a type of racism, that this way of depicting Russians, stereotyping them is essentially racist. And for that reason, since they're never confronted in that way, people just go on repeating them. [...] Because there has always been a political dimension behind it. Russophobia in itself was a political creation. I went into a discussion about how it came about, how it was deliberately manufactured in France. The original Russophobia was manufactured in France during the time of Napoleon himself in preparation for his eventual confrontation with Russia. And Russia's position as a great power has meant that Russia rivals initially Britain, then Britain and France, then Germany, then the United States, but also still Britain and France. Politically, they've always had an incentive to keep it going and unchallenged. If Russophobia is ever to be quelled, that would require a political decision firstly to abandon it and second to confront it. And that decision has never been made. [...]
The Russophobic narrative has always found it very difficult to grapple with the idea that Russians have agency that there is such a thing as Russian society that Russians actually have opinions and that these opinions actually have the ability to shape politics in Russia itself. So the assumption is that despite all of its apparent outward strength, Russia, because it's savage and primitive, because of the contradictions in the system, ultimately is weak. It's a house of cards and if you blow hard enough it'll all come tumbling down. [...] All the West needs to do is to confront it and almost immediately it will collapse. [...] If they ever admitted to themselves that Russia actually is quite resilient and it's really very strong and it does have the ability to hit back and to respond to what the West is doing then, of course, that's not just one part of the Russian narrative. This Russian stereotype that starts to crumble, it leads inevitably to every other part of it coming under challenge as well. So this is why they cling to it and they cling to it so hard. So it's a narrative that Russian history itself contradicts, that is extremely brittle, that if it were ever properly confronted would fall apart almost immediately. [...]
So the idea is Russia is evil and it's militaristic and it is aggressive. So that makes it dangerous but it is also backward and inferior and primitive and absurd. So that all we need to do is to face up to the Russians and by definition they will fail. So we we must be strong to confront them but if we are strong we will win. It's basically what the function of Russophobia is. It's to mobilize Western opinion [...]. We must confront them to protect ourselves and we can confront them because if we do confront them we are certain to win and they're certain to lose. The beautiful thing about this is, of course, that's something you don't need to spell out. It's something that runs as kind of a a red thread throughout the political development. [...] I mean even people who are not structured to be hostile to Russia will assimilate many of these narratives. So I discussed books and films in which we see Russophobic narratives seeping into [...] even though one senses that [...] people who are making these books or films are trying to do entertainment rather than mobilize opinion against Russia. [...] What started as a political thing has now developed into a cultural statement and has become very embedded into into modern Western culture.
So Russians are always represented, nearly always represented in Western literature and Western films in a particular way [...] Since Russia is evil by definition for a Russian to be good that Russian must turn against Russia. [...] A Russian who is loyal to Russia is by definition evil because Russia itself is evil. So this actually puts enormous pressure on Russians themselves and on a section of the Russian intelligencia because in order to be accepted in the West they have to show to the West that they are opposed to their own country. [...] We have to take some responsibility for this in the West because this attitude that a good Russian is an anti-government Russian does make it much more difficult for Russians to conduct their own internal conversation about the development of their own society [...].
Now here, of course, we point to a major fundamental problem which is that the Russians have never really themselves confronted Russophobia in a proper way. [...] Russians think of relations with the West purely in terms of power politics. They think that if you have treaties, if you have agreements, if you have foreign ministers and presidents meeting, if you have economic links agreed, that's enough. They they don't seem to understand that these ideas, these sentiments, these Russophobic sentiments that exist about them have to be confronted obviously by the West itself ultimately but by Russians too. [...] Russians are very rational in the way they conduct diplomacy and foreign policy. They're very rational. They find it very difficult to understand that others are not and that these perceptions and ideas and emotions have the sway over the West that they do. So I think that is one conceptual problem that the Russians have. [...]
If it's Boris Yeltsyn or Mikhail Gorbachov or the early Putin when they are taking steps which have been against historic Russian interests that shows that they are perhaps not fully good people because they are still, after all, the government of Russia but they're aspiring towards the good. But when they start defending Russian national interests, then of course they become bad because then they are aligning themselves with evil in the first place. In this sense, Russophobia is actually a very convenient tool also of maintaining some sort of of common structure within these different parts of of the political West because on the one hand if it succeeds it will ultimately lead to the dissolution of Russia and if that doesn't happen then that's only proof that the stereotypes are true. It is self reinforcing and that is why it survives because it provides the West always with a convenient explanation for whatever happens. So if the West does something wrong, if the West acts in a way that provokes a crisis, ultimately nonetheless, it is Russia's fault. [...]
I do think the Russians ought to be much more forceful in calling this out and I think that they should call it out in every international forum. Not just in direct discussions with the Europeans and the Americans, but in every international forum at the United Nations, amongst the Global South countries. I think, by the way, there they would find a very receptive audience. All of these societies have been subject to racism themselves. They understand very well how racism works. Racism in the case of Russia might have a different origin. It might be a more artificial construct, but it is racism nonetheless and it works it operates in very similar ways to the way that racism does. And, of course, there would be nothing more devastating, let us say, in Britain than for the Indian foreign minister in an interview to come along to the British and say "what you're saying about the Russians is utterly unacceptable because it is completely and totally racist and I'm not going to accept you talking like that about another nation and another country". If that were to happen and if that were to happen in a big way that would provoke shock and that might lead to a reaction. So that's one thing the Russians could do. [...]
I can remember very well in 2018 when there was the World Cup in Russia that the British government at that time made an enormous effort to dissuade British fans from going to Russia where they might see it for themselves. And that did that did indicate to me at the time that at some level deep down the British elite, the British establishment knows perfectly well that their image of Russia is untrue. [...] In the West most people have a very clear idea of what they think Russia is, it's a country which people believe they know an awful lot about except that the reality is that much of what they know, perhaps most of it, is completely wrong. [...]
I think many of the people would be deeply shocked if it was ever pointed out to them that their representations of Russians are actually racist [...] There has been a massive critical discussion of the music of certain Soviet composers, Shostakovich particularly, and there is an enormous effort by some music critics in the West to claim that this music contains all sorts of anti-Soviet themes, that there are all sorts of coded messages within this music which makes the music good. So that means that an anti-communist, anti-Soviet Russophobe can sit and listen to Shostakovich's 10th symphony and enjoy it because he believes that this in fact is conveying a message which he is receptive to as a Russophobe himself. [...] And you have, for example, in Britain, a television series called Killing Eve where the central character is a psychopathic female young woman serial killer who is also depraved and, of course, she's Russian. But in fact if you look at the plot of the story there's no reason why she has to be Russian. The plot could work, the whole concept could work, the whole television drama could work equally well if she was English. So why make her Russian? Why identify her as Russian in the first place? Now, the makers of that series I am absolutely sure had no intention of creating tensions in the geopolitical sphere. They weren't thinking that they were doing anything fundamentally racist. But it would be better if they realized that they were.
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