The common perception in western and central Europe was that Russia was not \u2018one of us\u2019 <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>\u201cRussia is a European state.\u201d Catherine the Great<\/a>, Empress of Russia, made this statement in 1767 in her Instruction<\/em> \u2013 a document presented as a guide, at home and abroad, to the fundamentally \u2018European\u2019 forms of government shared by Russia with other \u2018civilised\u2019 states of central and western Europe. Catherine was a German princess, but her assumptions were shared by her predecessor, Peter the Great, who attempted to modernise Russian society and institutions along western European lines, as well as her grandson Alexander I, who saved \u2018Europe\u2019 from the tyranny of Napoleon<\/a>, and all of the tsars up to 1917. Imperial Russia was part of Europe, and therefore followed European rules.<\/p>\n
How did this Europeanness manifest itself? Russia shared European Christian traditions and participated in all forms of European culture. European ideas and philosophy \u2013 on forms of government, society, crime and punishment \u2013 were considered relevant to Russia. Russia followed the norms of European diplomacy and was an accepted member of the European states system. Russian armies fought in the same manner as European armies. Furthermore, the tsars consciously copied European institutions, laws and noble titles. They deliberately moulded noble and urban society so that their subjects behaved, and even looked, like west Europeans.<\/p>\n
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Russian Empress Catherine II (The Great), painted by Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder c1793. She continued efforts by her predecessor, Peter the Great, to modernise Russia along European lines. (Photo by Heritage Images\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n There were, however, two problems. First, implementation of European-style institutions was always limited by distinctive Russian features: the sheer size of the empire, which made implementation of change difficult; the existence of serfdom until 1861, which restricted social and economic development; the unwillingness of the tsars to limit their own powers until forced to do so in 1906 after the previous year\u2019s revolution; the slow evolution of a legal consciousness and professional civil service.<\/p>\n
- Hypocrite, reactionary, usurper, sex maniac: is Catherine the Great\u2019s reputation justified?<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Second, a common perception in western and central Europe was that Russia was not \u2018one of us\u2019; it was backward and not to be trusted. However much it tried to follow, or considered it was following, European rules it was never accepted as a fully European state. This uneasy relationship continued until Soviet Russia broke the accepted rules of diplomacy in 1918, threatened world revolution and went its own way.<\/p>\n
Janet Hartley is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her latest book is Siberia: A History of the People<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2014)<\/strong><\/p>\n
Helen Rappaport<\/h3>\n
Russia\u2019s isolation remains largely self-imposed \u2013 a reaction to a sense of being encircled by enemies <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>Queen Victoria<\/a> had trouble making sense of Russia. In 1838, her prime minister Viscount Melbourne defined its fortress mentality. Russia, he explained, \u201cretires into inaccessibility, into her snows and frosts\u201d. Appalled at Russia\u2019s \u201ctotal want of principle\u201d, Victoria saw it as a threat. Russians were \u201cso unscrupulous\u201d and \u201ctotally<\/em> antagonistic to England\u201d.<\/p>\n
Aspirations had been different when Peter the Great, looking westward in the early 18th century, had sought to modernise the backward Russian state. But his was an empire that remained stubbornly different: strange, semi-Asiatic and, quite simply, not like us. Seeing off the Swedes and the French, Russia resisted encroachments by the west and its rule of law. Tsaritsa Alexandra summed it up during the 1900s, saying that the Russians didn\u2019t understand democracy \u2013 they understood only autocratic rule.<\/p>\n
The Soviet imposition of the Warsaw Pact, the comprehensive defence treaty between most eastern European communist states, in the post Second-World-War years underlined a determination to resist the encroachment of Nato and its liberal values. Despite brief periods of rapprochement during the glasnost<\/em> era under Gorbachev, and after the 1991 fall of communism, its continuing isolation remained largely self-imposed \u2013 a reaction to a sense of being encircled by enemies.<\/p>\n
- The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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A soldier waves a Russian flag from his tank on 21 August 1991 after the failure of a military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. (Photo by Willy Slingerland\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n A recent manifestation of Russia\u2019s attitude to rules has been in sport doping scandals. Rules are there to be flouted, and \u2013 with an unerring conviction of its inviolability to punishment (beyond economic sanctions) \u2013 Russia has continued to act in breach of international law and human rights: annexing Crimea<\/a>, the support of Ukrainian separatist forces and of Assad in Syria. The world has protested \u2013 to no avail. Russia continues to play only to its old, entrenched Soviet rules of engagement.<\/p>\n
Events in Salisbury in March 2018 have prompted talk of a renewal of the old enmities of the Cold War. But in truth they never went away. The old nationalism of the tsars has been resurrected with the inexorable rise of Vladimir Putin<\/a> \u2013 a man bent on consolidating the regime entirely to his own agenda, as manifested in the antidemocratic Soviet tactics of murder, provocation and intimidation. As a Russian once observed to the 19th-century German diplomat Count M\u00fcnster: \u201cEvery country has its own constitution. Ours is absolutism moderated by assassination\u201d.<\/p>\n
Helen Rappaport is a writer and historian, author of books including the upcoming The Race to Save the Romanovs<\/em> (Hutchinson, 2018)<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
David V Gioe and Michael S Goodman<\/h3>\n
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