Russofobia Britannica: due secoli di relazioni tra Inghilterra e Russia

Abstract

It is nowadays a common assumption that Russophobia has been a major element in British imperial and foreign policy during the XIX century. However, the afore-mentioned argument fails to show several issues concerning the nature itself of Russophobia, namely its origins and conclusions. Moreover, assuming the phenomenon to be merely a temporary characteristic of England’s policies in a given time span would not account for those events with almost identical features happened after the 1907 Anglo-Russian entente. As a matter of fact, it is possible to identify traces of Russophobia in the official and unofficial comment by English press and policies not only during the Cold War period, but even in the most recent events. Therefore, by the analysis of the international relations between England and Russia starting from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the present work aims to investigate and draw conclusions about the nature of British Russophobia itself. As many authors pointed out from the second half of the XX century onward, it is quite hard to find a suitable definition for the phenomenon. Russophobia is a complex sentiment, all the more so because of the variability of its shapes and its adaptability in the most disparate contexts. In some cases, it may be regarded as an impromptu feeling born as the mixture of political and historical contingencies; but in other cases, it is possible to define it as an historically crystalized ideological foundation, on which a general anti-Russian feeling or propaganda can be developed, thus exceeding national boundaries and temporal-based issues. In its broader sense, Russophobia constitute an emblematic thus controversial example of negative perception of Russia. Such suspicious and prejudicial attitude towards the Russian Federation can ultimately be seen as the direct product of the conjunction of both history and politics. This negative perception permeates the mainstream view and influences the way Russia is perceived by the other actors of the international community. Therefore, Russophobia arises as a genuine representative issue. As it will be shown, the foundations of the phenomenon rest on the iconic recollection of distinctive elements from the past, rarely reproducing the current changings within the international system. The consequences of such a logic can be easily found in the maintained attribution to Russian Federation and its people of those representative and stereotypical models which were signature of the Soviet Union. In that period, the geopolitical bipolarity which permeated the representation of the world favoured the production of a discourse entirely based on the contraposition with the other-than-Western. Nevertheless, it would be academically misleading and inappropriate to address the rivalry with the Soviet regime as the cornerstone of Russophobia, basically because such an argument would just ignore the European events brought up by the imperial competition with Great Britain during the so-called Great Game of the XIX century. In discussing the nature and the consequences of Russophobia, concepts such as national identity, foreign policies and social representations arise as the reflections of a negative perception of Russia deeply rooted in the historical experience of a country. Indeed, although sometimes political decisions are the direct consequence of tangible events, it can be argued that some of these are placed in a specific continuum which targets Russia with a generally negative aura. It is for this exact reason that tracing the historical moments where international relations permanently marked the image of Russia in the eyes of other States becomes extremely important. It is in fact expected that such moments stigmatized the supposed features of Russia, crystalizing and thus allowing them to overcome the boundaries of the political sphere and reach the public domain. In this framework, England emerges as the major example