Russophobia

How Russophobia entered English as an accusation

In 1836 The Westminster Review attributed the growth of the British navy to ministers who were smitten with the epidemic disease of Russo-phobia. The word is doing two things in that sentence. It names a fear of Russia, and it declares that fear a pathology in the people who hold it, which is an argument about British naval spending rather than about Russia.

The fear itself was already well supplied with material, and the supply arrived in order:

1. On 19 October 1797 the Polish general Michal Sokolnicki submitted a forgery to the French Directory under the title Apercu sur la Russie, known afterwards as The Will of Peter the Great.
2. In October 1812, during the Napoleonic wars, it reached print for the first time in a much-read book on the progress of Russian power. Napoleon had ordered a series of articles showing that Europe was inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia.
3. After the wars his former confessor continued the campaign in a series of books portraying Russia as a barbaric power hungry to conquer Europe.

British Russophobia for the rest of the nineteenth century attached to a specific fear: that the Russian conquest of Central Asia was a precursor to an attack on British-colonised India. That fear produced the Great Game, a run of political and diplomatic confrontations between the two empires.

Why Tyutchev aimed Russophobia at Russian liberals

The poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev, a member of the imperial chancellery, introduced the term russophobia in a letter to his daughter Anna Aksakova on 20 September 1867, though it is thought to have been used earlier.

He did not apply it to foreigners. He applied it to pro-Western Russian liberals who, while claiming to follow liberal principles, took a consistently negative attitude towards their own country and a pro-Western position regardless of what changed in Russian society, and who overlooked violations of those same principles in the West, in justice, in morality and in what Tyutchev called civilisation. He put his emphasis on the irrationality of the sentiment.

That is the shape the word has kept. In English it accused the fearful of a disease; in Russian it accused critics of a bias. In both languages the accusation is that the position is not reasoned, and the suffix is what carries the accusation. The same suffix does the same work in Judeophobia and in Islamophobia, and it is what separates all three from Xenophobia, which fixes on no nation in particular.

Where the stereotypes about Russia came from

European suspicion of Russia predates both coinages by centuries. It took shape in the fifteenth century during Russian expansion under Ivan III, when campaigns against Poland-Lithuania, the Livonian cities and Swedish-held Finland established a perception of Russia as a threat, described by its adversaries as barbaric, un-Christian and imperialistic. During the Livonian War of 1558 to 1583 the Polish-Lithuanian and Livonian German cities embargoed war supplies to Russia and feared that England, which had an active trade mission there, would supply them, an accusation Elizabeth denied.

The accounts that fixed the picture were written by visitors. The Austrian ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein and the English ambassador Giles Fletcher wrote up Russia in the sixteenth century in terms of superstition, brutality and backwardness, and later travellers added drunkenness.

The most successful of them all was the Marquis de Custine, whose four-volume, 1,800-page account of Russia in 1839 appeared in 1843 and argued that the veneer of European civilisation there was too thin to be credible. Official and pirated editions followed at once, along with condensed versions and translations into German, Dutch and English. About 200,000 copies had sold by 1846.

Why Russophobia now names prejudice and propaganda alike

Negative views of Russia are widespread and most prevalent in Western liberal democracies, and by the summer of 2020 a majority of Western nations held unfavourable views of it. Anti-Russian sentiment rose considerably after the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2014, and after the invasion of 2022 Russian-speaking immigrants met harassment, open hostility and discrimination whether or not they were ethnic Russians.

Some analysts hold that Western official rhetoric and journalism about Russian actions abroad contributed to that resurgence. Other researchers describe narratives of Russophobia as a propaganda tactic used by the Russian government and its supporters, in which Russia faces an existential threat from Western powers and must take drastic measures to secure domestic stability, including support for the war in Ukraine. Those narratives have been described as supporting Russian imperialism.

Both descriptions can be accurate at once, which is the difficulty with a word of this shape. Prejudice against Russian speakers is a real and documented thing that happens to individuals. The claim that such prejudice explains a state's behaviour is a separate proposition, and the word does not distinguish between them.