Guy Mettan
Ed. Sandro Teti, Rome 2016
pp. 399
The author, journalist, Swiss historian and politician, in this essay describes the historical path of russophobia, starting from Charlemagne to arrive to the present day, with the intent to dismantle the castle of prejudices on which it is based.
"The historical path of Western russophobia is that of a sentiment that arose from mistrust towards Byzantium, then raged against czarist imperialism [...] and finally led to the demonization of tsarist tyranny throughout the nineteenth century, then resumed completely, and without solution of continuity, to be translated in anti-Soviet terms."And that today is destined to increase."A geopolitical interest is clearly emerging which tends to reproduce roughly, mutatis mutandis, the features of the Cold War of the immediate post-war period."
In the past, Russophilia has also existed, but for short periods. It was Russophilia that of the United States, from the summer of the 1941 to that of the 1945, when it was necessary to defeat Japan and Nazi Germany. It was also Russophilia of England from the 1812 to the 1815 and from the 1904 to the 1917. But russophobia definitely dominated and continues to predominate. "And so, throughout the 2014, the establishment and the Western media have never stopped insisting on one and only one thesis: everything that happened in Ukraine is the fault of the Russians. The corruption of the Janucovyč government, the refusal to sign the agreement with the European Union, the clashes of Maidan, the "annexation" of Crimea, the crash of the flight MH17, the revolt of the Donbass: all these events are as many fires set from Moscow. Implied: the United States and the European Union have no fault, and the Ukrainian nationalists have not even tried to extinguish the fire. The maneuver is skillful: just make sure that you exchange the effect for the cause."
No Western commentator has ever mentioned the fact that the Ukrainian crisis began when the temporary government of Kiev decided to ban the Russian language in the Russian-speaking parts of the country. The manipulation of information continued with the attack on the Beslan school, in September of 2004, by the Chechen Islamists: about 400 dead among teachers, children, soldiers and kidnappers. "But as soon as the [...] blood dries on walls, the western media are unleashed. Not against the Islamist persecutors, as it would have been natural, but, paradoxically, against the victims and their liberators."
We must hit Russia and above all Putin, who still directs a much more democratic country than China, even if against his president no one has allowed such attacks. This attitude towards Russia, which comes from afar, however, shows a deep ingratitude. "What would have been if, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Russia had not absorbed, shattered, weakened the aggressiveness of the Mongol khans and the Golden Horde? While the southern half of Russia was enslaved by the Mongols and the northern half wore them down with guerrilla operations interspersed with peace treaties, while the Byzantines were fighting desperately against the Ottomans, medieval Europe had plenty of time to rebuild itself politically and culturally, to raise cathedrals, to devote themselves to courtly love and to cultivate the refinements of scholasticism [...] Without Byzantium there would have been no Italian Renaissance; but without Byzantium and without Russia there would have been neither Christian Europe nor European civilization."
In Europe those who contributed in a fundamental way to nourishing the Russophobia were France, fueling the myth of the expansionism and of the Eastern despotism, above all through the book "La Russie en 1839", of the baron Astolphe de Custine, published in the 1843. The English russophobia, however, was manifested in 1815, when, after the defeat of Napoleon, the United Kingdom found itself without enemies, either by sea or land, except Russia, having defeated Napoleon in 1812, occupied Paris in 1814, and also dominated the Congress of Vienna, represented, for its size and its army, a European power of primary importance, thus becoming, after 1815, a threat. German russophobia was born later, in the late nineteenth century and, after the war, was fueled by the maintenance of the ambiguity between communism and Russia, while, "like Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev and numerous anti-communist militants have shown, it is very possible to be anti-communists without being Russophobes."
While the crimes and darker aspects of communism were attributed to the Russians, it was instead diminished, to oblivion, the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazism in order to "to carry out an ostracism of memory aimed at excluding Russia from the western sphere and discrediting it, reducing the opposition from the West - the USSR to a clash between democracy and communism."
Finally there is the American russophobia that appears after the 1945 "and is unleashed throughout the Cold War, from the ferocious McCarthyism of the 1950s to the articulated theses of the anti-totalitarian struggle of the 1980s, and to their recycling in the anti-Putin struggle since the 2000s."
Today, however, if Europeans want to commit themselves to understanding Russia, not to continue to consider it "other-from-us" we must convince ourselves "of the fact that it is not necessary to hate Russia to talk with it."In fact, if in the 1939 Churchill described Russia as a rebus wrapped in a mystery that is inside an enigma, today"the Russian mystery no longer exists: everything is available to those who want to deal with it."
Gianlorenzo Capano
