Russia’s Liminal Appeal

Of Europe but Not the West

Vasily Surikov’s depiction of the Great Moscow Masquerade of 1722, featuring bears. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The American right is increasingly sympathetic toward, and even supportive of, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with Putin, followed by the assassination of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, put the unwholesomeness of this trend into sharp relief. However, as recounted by Anne Applebaum, Carlson’s antecedents include the proto-MAGA cultural pessimist Pat Buchanan and, in inverted form, the pro-Stalin American fellow travelers of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Whether the “useful idiot” is on the left or the right, the sordid facts of life under a dictatorial regime are beside the point: “The American intellectuals who now find themselves alienated from the country that they inhabit aren’t interested in reality. They are interested in a fantasy nation, different and distinct from their own hateful country.”

Much of American pro-Putinism is undoubtedly due to rank partisanship and contrarianism toward elite opinion: if Biden and the New York Times are for Ukraine, we must be for its opponent. Macho images of a shirtless Putin riding on horseback don’t hurt. Still, there are deeper currents to Russia’s appeal that can be encapsulated in the statement that Russia is a European, but not a Western, country. Stephen Kotkin, a scholar of Russian history, is a proponent of this take:

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is.

Obviously, this analysis can and should be complicated and questioned. Although Putin has said that “Russia both geographically and mentally considers herself a part of Greater Europe,” Russia is a multinational empire spanning two continents. Some of its fiercest ideologues claim a specifically Eurasian, rather than merely European, identity as central to its world-historical mission. The Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union, though paltry, was formed with the intent to rival the European Union. Roughly 20% of Russians belong to ethnic minorities, and some Russian territories are predominantly composed of Turkic, Mongolian, and Caucasus peoples. Even ethnic Russians living in geographic Europe do not necessarily consider themselves, and have not always been considered, strictly European.

The Mongols controlled what is now Russia from the 13th until the 16th century, severing the Eastern Slavs from political and cultural developments in Europe. The aphorism “Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar,” attributed to Napoleon, reflects longstanding European cynicism about Russia’s civilized bonafides. While the Enlightenment swept Western Europe in the 19th century, Russia doubled down on absolute monarchy and serfdom. Tsarist propaganda countered the French revolutionary slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” with the mantra "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” Russia itself has been characterized by a divide between Westernizers, embodied by Peter the Great (who forbid the nobles at his court to have beards), and Slavophiles like Dostoevsky, who extolled its unique history as preparation for a messianic destiny.

But whether Russia is precisely European or not, it “reads” that way to an American right-wing audience. Putin himself alluded to the most unambiguous aspect of Russia’s European identity in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson: “I'm just saying that we kind of look the same, but our minds are built a little differently.” Put another way, ethnic Russians are white and physically resemble other Northern European peoples. They are also nominally Christian, although religious observance is statistically low and non-Orthodox churches are persecuted. Perhaps for American cultural warriors, Russia’s anti-gay laws make up for the country’s low church attendance and high abortion rates. Regardless, for white Christians disillusioned with Western values, Russia offers a seemingly familial alternative in a way that Communist China never could.

Kotkin’s statement that “the West is a series of institutions and values” and “not a geographical place” reflects a cosmopolitan attitude that has contributed to the West’s internal disillusionment. Most momentously, George W. Bush’s hubristic attempt to impose Western institutions and values on Afghanistan and Iraq helped to discredit their supposed universalism. The failure of Bush’s foreign policy ultimately severed the American right from its Reaganite identity as defenders of Western values. Instead, under Trump’s influence, American patriotism devoid of any universalist content, and contemptuous even of other Western countries, has taken its place. The “Make America Great Again” movement is ambivalent or at odds with the Enlightenment values that actually motivated America’s founding fathers.

Yet a purely cosmopolitan view of the West is also historically flawed. Kotkin is obviously correct that non-European or European-derived nations, such as Japan and South Korea, have adopted some Western institutions and values. But the qualifier “some” is important. Japan is certainly a democracy, but it is also an ethnically homogenous society with a restrictive immigration policy. If valuing “diversity” is key to being Western, then it’s hard to see how Japan qualifies. More fundamentally, Japan, like much of the rest of the world, differs from the West in key psychological ways. Westerners are, as summarized by evolutionary biologist Joseph Heinrich, “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical,” in contrast to much of the rest of the world.

Western psychology developed as a result of a particular historical, religious, and cultural evolution. Even our objectivity has subjective roots. As philosopher Leszek Kolawkoski observes, “The very act of suspending judgment is culturally rooted: it is an act of renunciation, possible only from within a culture which, through learning to question itself, has shown itself capable of the effort of understanding another.”¹ Much of the West’s evolution took place in Europe, but it is rooted in the Mediterranean world: Jerusalem, Athens, and their eventual hybridization in Rome. What we now consider the West was once, in a sense, Westernized, through the imposition of Greco-Roman culture and then Christian religion on the primitive north. German nationalism, which valorized the pagan Germanic tribes who fought Rome, romanticized a return to this European, non-Western past. Taken to an extreme, European anti-Western thought has tended toward neopagan antisemitism, with Christianity being conceived as a foreign (Semitic) ideology.

Right-wing Westerners’ glorification of Russia as a European, but non-Western, model reflects a basic failure to understand and appreciate the depths of their own tradition. They see Western values as culminating in open borders, gender fluidity, and failed international adventurism. Left-wing Westerners, meanwhile, are quick to impugn Western values as a self-serving mask for irredeemable imperialism and racism. But the deepest roots of the West are in Socrates questioning all received wisdom, the Bible declaring that humanity was created in the image of God, and the still-unfolding, ever-productive interplay between these foundational forces. Leo Strauss, a great interpreter of Western tradition, wrote that “Western man became what he is, and is what he is, through the coming together of biblical faith and Greek thought. In order to understand ourselves and to illuminate our trackless way into the future, we must understand Jerusalem and Athens.” Anything Westerners criticize about the West has already been criticized within the Western tradition itself: that is essential to its strength and ability to self-correct.

The West is not a synonym for Europe, but it cannot simply be reduced to contemporary liberal ideology either. The West is a trans-continental heritage expressed in religion and philosophy, literature and art, from which political values are ultimately derived. Russia, despite its liminal geographic position and predilection for Mongol-derived despotism, has itself contributed to the West’s greatness. Harold Bloom rightly devotes a chapter to Leo Tolstoy in his magisterial The Western Canon, and any student of Western thought and art must pay homage to Russian cultural titans. In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin himself mentions the possibility of Russia joining the West politically as part of NATO. Perhaps, sometime in the post-Putin era, Russia will finally and fully become a European and a Western country, revitalizing both itself and the West in the process. But in the meantime, Putin’s Russia will no doubt continue to inspire Westerners who should seek inspiration from their own tradition instead.

1. From “Looking for the Barbarians” in Kolakowski’s excellent 1990 essay collection, Modernity on Endless Trial.