![]() ![]() Though Russia wouldn’t emerge as a “dark double” until the late 19th century, it nevertheless was imagined as a kind of a long lost twin. Indifference, however, did not wholly mean disinterest. Civil War, an act born of a mutual history in human bondage and its abolition: Russia in 1861, the United States in 1865. Russia was the only great power to support the North during the U.S. It was a nation “almost shut out from the sea,” its presence on the world stage was merely represented as “articles of commerce,” and “excluded from the possibility of rivaling” the United States. ![]() In “ Common Sense,” for example, Founding Father Thomas Paine viewed Russia with indifference. Constitution to inspire reform in Russia.īut much of the early American discourse on Russia, though replete with denunciations of Russian despotism, viewed it as a fascinating yet far-off land of little consequence. Thomas Jefferson had an active correspondence with Alexander I and even sent the tsar drafts of the U.S. Petersburg when he was 14 and become the United States’ first minister to the Russian empire in 1809. John Quincy Adams served as a secretary in St. ![]() Some key figures in the American republic had friendly, even intimate relations with Russia. William Penn, founder of the Pennsylvania colony, had an audience with Peter I in 1698 during the latter’s European tour. Photo by Jeff Share via Our Move Archives/FlickrĪlthough contacts with Russia were few in the 18th and early 19th century, they nevertheless included some prominent figures in U.S. Participants in the 1987 American-Soviet Peace Walk enter a summer camp with the Pioneers. It’s a distorted, disfigured, inchoate, even horrifying image, but still an enigmatic source for American self-juxtaposition and psychological displacement. For Russia, as David Foglesong has argued, served as a “dark double” or “imaginary twin.” In American eyes, Russia has appeared as a distortion of the American self, reflected through a carnival mirror. Where Russia stood on this spectrum had less to do with Russia as it did the United States. Historically, Americans relate to Russia with indifference and amicability, as an object of fascination and mystery, and even as an analogous and kindred nation.Īt the same time, Russia has served as a symbol of ignobility, a prototype of despotism, a barometer of backwardness and even evil itself. Historically, Russia has had a much more ambiguous and contradictory place in the American mind. In fact, to reduce Russia’s place in the American imagination to merely the absence or presence of Russophobia is itself an act of injurious reductionism. The wave of Russophobia around Donald Trump is mostly a product of a profound shift in American discourse about Russia in the 20th century. The Register even stressed that U.S.-Russian relations “have been and will long necessarily be of the most amicable nature.” Nor was there an American version of Britain’s preeminent Russophobe David Urquhart, who, in the words of one contemporary, was “successful in his design to diffuse a feeling of terror and a spirit of hatred toward Russia in the public mind.” Indeed, the trope of Russia as a giant octopus threatening to ensnare Europe had little currency in the United States until the Cold War. magazine Niles’ National Register published the “Testament” in 1843, the claims of Russia’s imperialist impulses fell flat. Its contents were so potent Napoleon I ordered the French press to pen articles showing that “Europe is in the process of becoming booty for Russia.” The “Testament” enjoyed repeated resurrection in every European war with Russia until World War I. The so-called “ Testament of Peter the Great,” a spurious text that spelled out a blueprint for Russian imperial domination, undergirded Russophobia in France and Britain throughout the 19th century. Russophobia emerged quite late in the United States compared to other European powers. Here, he gives a historical rundown of Russophobia in the United States. writer and journalist Sean Guillory hosts Sean’s Russia Blog Podcast, a weekly podcast on Eurasian politics and culture. historian for an account of their homeland’s grappling with foreign influence, be it political, moral, cultural or imaginary. We asked one Russian historian and one U.S. Photo by Jeff Share via Our Move Archives/Flickr ![]()
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