Anxiety about Russia after American Primacy

Western elites have lost all judgment about Russia’s role in the world order. Political judgment requires sensing the reality of others. History helps to do that; that is why Isaiah Berlin recommended it.

But Western elites make themselves deaf, numb and blind to the reality of Russia, its past, present and future. They smother reality with the Black Legend of Russian History, a long shadow cast by American Primacy.

The idea of the Black Legend of Russian History comes from Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety - and How History Can Resolve It (2019). This Legend is a version of Russian history that justifies how many in the West smother the reality of Russia to their senses. The Legend fuels hatred, fear, aggression, reckless desires to ‘break up’ Russia or to overthrow its ‘regime.’ It is a phantom made with pseudo-history, prejudice and Russophobia. It disables Western political judgment - among elites and below - through, Smith writes:

“The absolute categories that Western observers have often used to evaluate Russia, without much reflection on Russian conditions or even awareness of their own societies, and the particular view of how history ‘works’ that makes the Anxiety possible.” ¹

One of the great benefits of reading Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety - and How History Can Resolve It is the alternative “Narrative Correction” of the last 6,000 years of Russia’s history that he provides in a dazzling thirty pages. It is one of the best things you can read to reset your ideas about Russian history and Russia’s real roles in the multipolar world today.

* Seminar on Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West *

Emmanuel Todd says the West should stop telling lies about Russia. You can learn more from Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West in this special seminar.

Todd’s best seller on geopolitics is not and will not be available in English.

But this online seminar will explain it all to you. And I will provide translations of key passages of La Défaite de l’Occident.

​Reimagine Russia’s role in the world with the great French historian. Is the West headed to a strategic defeat? Why? And what happens next?

Buy your tickets for the live event 18 December here https://lu.ma/ofseiwwq. Replay will be available especially for readers from more distant time zones.

It is the week before Christmas, I know. So let me know in a comment if you would like me to repeat the seminar in the new year.

The Russia Anxiety

Smith published his book in 2019 in response to the high-water mark of the post-Cold War Russia Anxiety, the claims that Russia interfered in the USA’s 2016 election, including controlling President Donald Trump.

“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.” ²

In 2019 Smith thought history would help calm the rushing waters of anxiety in the years of Russia Gate. Five years later - after the conflict in Ukraine, the ‘sanctions from hell’ and the Cancel Russia campaign - regrettably we know histories based on the Black Legend have fanned the flames of de facto war.

In the anti-Russian climate of opinion in the West over the last five years, especially in the Anglo-American sphere (in which I include Australia) empathy, scholarship, history, intelligence, judgment and any attempt to sense reality have been thrown out of the window.

Let me take one example from the slew of books that have appeared over the last five years fanning the flames of culture war against Russia. It is written by the renowned Anglo-Australian barrister, Geoffrey Robertson. Robertson was born in Australia but has been a British citizen for over twenty years. He enjoyed fame with his Hypothetical shows and marriage to comedian Kathy Lette. He is the kind of human rights advocate who judges Sierra Leone, but defends the USA’s use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to kill 100,000 citizens. In The Trial of Vladimir Putin he sets himself up as judge, jury and prosecutor of the elected President of Russia.

Trials of Putin and Tropes of the Mongol Horde

But the book is deranged by the Russia Anxiety and the primal emotions it arouses. Near the end of Geoffrey Robertson, The Trial of Vladimir Putin, the grandee of high-minded human rights law, evokes a classic trope of Western and especially Anglo-American perceptions of Russian history:

Putin is the last in a long line of perpetrators, beginning with Genghis Khan.³

Robertson voices the Asiatic Despotism trope that is an acceptable form of racism to Atlantic liberals. It has been used to justify Anglo-American imperial expansion and used since Halford Mackinder (Geographical Pivot of History) Russia is ruled by the blood-curdling, nomadic Horde. She has no legitimate claim over her lands. Her ruler is the “last in a long line of perpetrators,” who must be tried by the best silks of London.

Robertson, like a good barrister, lets the jury fill in the blanks with all the killers of Russian history: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and, of course, Vladimir Putin.

Genghis Khan lived and died in Mongolia between 1162 and 1227. He built the Mongol Empire. His direct line of Chingissids ruled large parts of Eurasia, including China through the Yuan Dynasty, Crimea and Ukraine through the Golden Horde, and Russia through the “Tatar Yoke”. But that Yoke ended in 1480. Robertson never bothers with a documented history to justify his claim that there is a long line to the family of Vladimir Putin, who mostly survived Hitler’s Siege of Leningrad. He panders to the reader’s baser instincts. He gives in to his extreme case of Russia Anxiety.

Robertson’s commanding hatred comes not from historical insight, but habitual emotions. It comes from what Mark B. Smith calls the Russia Anxiety. Smith defines the Russia Anxiety as:

“More than a simple undifferentiated Russophobia, the Russia Anxiety, as I see it, is an historic syndrome that alternates between three sets of symptoms: fear of Russia, disregard of Russia and contempt for Russia.” ⁴

The Russia Anxiety is more than Russophobia or traditional Western supremacism. It is an historical syndrome that rests on personal decisions and rides the rhythms of historical events. It changes its emotional colour and intensity over time. At its worst the syndrome causes panic attacks that threaten world peace.

“Western European countries and the United States [including I would add their outer Southern provinces like Australia] have spells of the Anxiety, although it comes and goes, the symptoms switch about, and sometimes they disappear altogether. But the worst outbreaks of the Russia Anxiety exacerbate international disorder and risk war.”

We are, for good reasons and bad, in one of those worst outbreaks now. All the poisons in the mud leech out. Western commentators like Robertson release their psyche’s shadow when they speak about Russia. They unleash their shadow in the Jungian sense. Dressed in noble rhetoric of human rights and Western civilization, a tight silk suit of virtue, they yearn for an outlet for their savage inner drives: the violence, the hate, the division of humanity into good and evil, into the parties of the liberal übermensch and the sub-human others. When Robertson evokes the racist trope of the blood-curdling violence of the Asiatic Horde, he reanimates the Black Legend of Russian History, of a people eternally crippled by its subjection and embrace of the Mongol Yoke.

It is junk history, as Marie Favereaux has documented so well in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. It has little to do with a sense of reality. It sheds no light on the character and actions of Vladimir Putin. It makes no sense of the history of Russia since 1991, or 1945, or long before that. Sensing reality is not the purpose of these gestures; venting evil with a liberal face is. This rhetoric - or all its variations ‘Russia is a mafia state” etc - allows sanctimonious intellectuals, ignorant of what they speak, to release their evil within. It allows ruthless leaders to mobilise the psychic shadows of the Western community towards black operation aims: regime change, ‘decolonisation’, breaking up and looting of the largest territorial state in the world that is in possession of an astonishingly large proportion of its natural resource gifts. It is the primal, jealous fratricidal rage of one part of Greater Europe against its Eastern family, who mingled and miscegenated with the Asian Stranger.

Black Legends of Russian Empire

A similar myth is evoked when historians discuss the “Russian empire,” and how Putin is irrationally nostalgic for its restoration so he can play the part of Peter the Great or Vladimir the Great or even Stalin. This meme dominates the pro-Ukrainian historians who write of the conflicts in Ukraine as a replay of the American War of Independence; in which the plucky Ukrainians fight their red-coated Russian oppressors and finally become the self-determined, monocultural independent state that its ethno-nationalists have longed and killed for since 1918.

This myth dominates the North American Ukrainian historiography that has had a role in shaping US policy towards the Soviet Union and then Russia for decades. Its leading proponent is Serhii Ploikhy, whose Lost Kingdom: a History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin states the legend energetically. Ploikhy writes an alternative history of Russia in which the real Russia is Ukraine. The true nation only existed there, and the Empire stole it and covered up its crime in a distorted nationalism. In this account, the “loss” of Ukraine in 1991 drove the Russian elites mad.

“Will the Russian government and the Russian political and cultural elites acept the ‘loss of Ukraine’?... The answer will depend on the ability and readiness to accept the post-Soviet political realities and adjust Russia’s own identity to the demands of the post-imperial world. The future of the Russian nation and its relations with its neighbours lies not in a return to the lost paradise of the imagined East Slavic unity of the medieval Kyivian state, but in the formation of a modern civic nation within the borders of the Russian Federation.”⁵

Talk by British historians of the ‘Russian Empire’ and Putin’s revanchist nostalgia to make the Soviet Union Great Again is no less a fairy tale. But the war of independence myth does not work for the broken British empire. They act out an instinct for revenge for the collapse of British power, the crumbling of its culture’s prestige from Suez to Brexit. They still nurse resentment that the Soviet Union supplanted the British Empire as a superpower in World War Two; that Stalin and the Soviet peoples, not Churchill and Dad’s Army, defeated Hitler and liberated Auschwitz. Regrettably there is a cottage industry of anti-Russia historians in Britain - Anthony Beevor, Orlando Figes, Peter Frankopan, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland of the Rest is History podcast, and dozens of others. Its power elites believe they have a special relationship with the discipline of history.⁶

Like Geoffrey Robertson, these historians evoke the stain on the Russian soul caused by its mingling and miscegenation by the Asian Stranger. They long for the Russia that was part of Greater Europe, content to be an exhibit in the British and New York Metropolitan Museums. They give their imperial nostalgia a contemporary geopolitical twist. Orlando Figes concludes The Story of Russia with a wildly inaccurate prediction of the effect of the conflict in Ukraine on Russia. Conceding a Russian victory is likely, Figes presents this victory as Pyrrhic. It will set Russia back fifty years, “returning in effect to Soviet-like conditions.” He ought to consult the latest reports of the IMF and World Bank on the Russian economy now being the fourth largest in the world; or perhaps he ought just to open his eyes. But the shadows of hate have closed in on the Western historical mind. So Figes predicts that Russia will return to Natasha’s tainted dance with the Asian devil and the Mongol Horde.

“Isolated from the West, Russia will be forced to pivot east, a turn accelerated by the war and welcomed by a number of the Kremlin’s ideologists, who believe that Russia’s future lies in a Eurasian bloc, opposed to Western liberal values and US global power, with China as its main ally… with China it would represent a dangerous threat to the West’s interests in those regions of the world, from India to the Middle East, where nationalist movements and dictatorships are able to exploit their country’s grievances against the West.”⁷

The Banquo’s Ghost of China returns as a spectre of Genghis Khan. Figes’ history reads like a faxed sheet of US State Department talking points, complete with his defence of the US-led global order and its partition of Eurasia. You read the same script in the output of hundreds of Western historians and journalists who comment on Russia. Most of these historians have made fools of themselves during the latest phase of the war. I wrote about some of their folly during the Prighozhin Affair in 2023. Some historians and their journalistic amplifiers receive support from exiled, bitter Russian oligarchs, like Mikhail Khodorovsky, and the foundations of Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pinchuk. I suspect British intelligence agencies prop up or cooperate with this historical establishment as part of a plan to project British ‘soft power.’ Why? They have done so for decades, including with Arnold Toynbee after World War II. It is a coven of weird sisters chanting Russophobic spells.

Russophobia and its Antidotes

Russophobia is a strange phenomenon that poisons the Anglo-American cultural landscape. Glenn Diesen has explored its origins in British-Russian imperial rivalry from the nineteenth century. Emmanuel Todd suggests some historical-sociological explanations in La Défaite de l’Occident. Mark B. Smith provides the best historical account of the phenomenon that I have read. I will write more about it next year.

The cultural climate, however, remains inhospitable for those who want to sense the reality of Russian history, rather than use Russia as a screen onto which to project disowned evil shadows.

If you want to learn from history, to live in tune with a world shaped by the real Russia and the phantasmagoria of Russophobia, my recommendation for the best book to read remains Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety - and How History Can Resolve It.

There are, of course, other sources. I have recently discovered Vladimir Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin: Russia in Search of its Identity: 1913-2023 (2024), and will be discussing this book here and on the YouTube channel next year. You can watch and read the actual words of the Russian leaders, and judge their character and skills yourself.

You can read Russia’s foreign policy statement here.

You can read or watch Vladimir Putin’s 2024 Valdai Club address and discussion. These forums last generally three or four hours, and are richly informative of both the leader and the cultural reference points of the Russian elites, as I discussed in these YouTube videos on the 2022 Valdai Club forum (“What you need to know about Putin's Speech on the Multipolar World at Valdai 2022”, “What did Putin mean when he said that?” and “Who is afraid of Vladimir Putin? Not the Global South”.

You can watch Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov conduct his most recent interview in English with Tucker Carlson. It is very informative about the events of the conflict in Ukraine, its real causes, and its possible solutions.

However you choose to learn about Russia in the changing world order, go to quality sources and avoid the sewer pipes of Russia Anxiety.

Towards the end of next year, I will write a series on reimagining Russia’s role in the world with history. Assuming, of course, it is safe to do so.

The first months of next year may see a government and military collapse in Ukraine. One would hope the Ruin of Ukraine would lead the long line of perpetrators of the Black Legend of Russian History to reflect. You would wish they listen, at last, to critics and sceptics who told a different story of Russia over the last five years. You would hope there would be a reckoning with errors and fears. In February 2023 I wrote, in The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine, about the reckoning that might come after the strategic defeat of NATO, the USA or the West in Ukraine.

Truth will disperse the illusion. It may take weeks. It may take months or years. But, at some stage, there will be a reckoning. The end of World War I was not good for the deluded European imperial elites. The end of the war in Ukraine will not be good for the imperial American elites. They have spent too long spinning the virtual realities of manipulated news – ‘America makes its own reality’ – to deal with the realities of a changed multipolar world.

They have been exposed as incompetent in waging war with a peer, in fielding diplomacy with independent nations, in framing economies that serve people not bubbles, and, finally, in telling their own people the honest truth. Tragically, the grand illusions of this leadership elite will outlive the conscripted soldiers of Ukraine, that dispensable nation that betrayed itself in search of American glory.

But centuries of fear, contempt and disregard for Russia may not disperse so easily as the mirage of ‘democratic’ Ukraine’s victory plan. Defeat, or even a humiliating retreat, may intensify the Russia Anxiety and the campaign to vilify those in the West who did not ‘stand with Ukraine’.

In a recent interview (Prof. John Mearsheimer : "Russophobic " - Buzzword for MSM), John Mearsheimer, the realist international relations scholar, speculated on how the USA might react to defeat in Ukraine.

I've watched the United States carefully over a long period of time. And when the United States gets into these kinds of situations, it doesn't roll over and play dead. It actually lashes out. It ups the ante.

And I think that what we will do in the years ahead is up the ante versus the Russians. And do everything we can to undermine them in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe more generally.

And the end result of that is poisonous relations for as far as the eye can see.

Whatever happens, I will live by Vaclav Havel’s advice to live in truth. But Tucker Carlson’s first question to Sergei Lavrov was, “Is the USA at war with Russia?”. Lavrov politely demurred by saying “I don’t want to say that.” But then he stated the facts on the ground, all of which point to a hot war between Russia and the USA and its loyal allies like Australia. Wartime conditions might constrict my writing next year. I trust you will understand that I will keep myself safe while still learning from history.

Slow Reads and Great History in 2025

For this reason, I have also decided next year to do the slow read of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. Its epigram announces (Fantastic Journeys Through History):

“A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the major sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment.”

This book will be an antidote to the troubles of our time.

It will help us overcome constrictions on dialogue between cultures, thought across borders, and imagination over time. It will allow us to discuss the deeper truths of the conflicts in Ukraine and with Russia within the magical world of historical fiction, created by this brilliant Polish novelist and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I have updated my “About” page with a summary of the program and membership levels for 2025. There will be three pillars of content spanning the free, paid and founder or renamed “Angels of History” subscriptions:

• Book recommendations and thought-provoking histories of the major powers - USA, China, Europe, India, Russia and more

• Slow reads of great writing on history, including Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (from February 2025)

• Access to my extensive backlist of writing and content, including the Nobel Archive, guides to my writing, videos, and podcasts since 2015, and calls, live streams, and discussions with me.

I will be providing more details of the program for 2025 next week.

Please consider joining me as a paid member or even as an Angel of History.

1. Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety - and How History Can Resolve It, p. 2

2. Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety - and How History Can Resolve It, pp. 44-45

3. Geoffrey Robertson The Trial of Vladimir Putin (2024), pp. 178-179

4. Smith, Russia Anxiety, p. 2

5. Ploikhy, Lost Kingdom: a History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin, p. 351.

6. Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020)

7. Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia (2022), p. 301.