Thoughts on Russia and the West

 

Thoughts on Russia and the West

June 20, 2026

Something, I’m not sure what, has started me thinking about Russia again. I have a PhD in Russian history. I traveled to the Soviet Union twice and spent most if not quite all my time there in Russia.[1] I lived in the USSR for an entire academic year doing dissertation research, mostly in Moscow but also some in what was then Leningrad. I never got the chance to use my PhD much, but I still have it; and I still know more about Russia than most Americans do by far.

And I’ve been wondering a couple of things. The first is: What do Americans need to know about Russia? I think that mostly what they need to know is how different Russia really is from the West. Russia has no meaningful democratic traditions whatsoever. Russians, or at least their rulers, do not value human life nearly as much as most of us in the West do. Vladimir Putin may well have cost the lives of one million or more of his own people with his insane invasion of Ukraine, and that tragic fact seems to bother him not at all. That’s not surprising. Russian military tactics have long consisted of throwing wave after wave of soldiers at an enemy, losing many if not most of them, and simply overwhelming the enemy with numbers. That’s a big part of the explanation of how the Soviets were able to defeat the Nazis.

Putin has also reinstituted an authoritarian if not totalitarian government in Russia after the collapse of Russian communism. Civil liberties we take for granted (or at least did until Trump came along) simply don’t exist in Russia and never have. Russians were freer under the tsars than they were under the Soviets or are under Putin, but the Russian autocracy was an authoritarian, thoroughly un-democratic form of government too.

Which raises the second question: What historical developments account for the differences between Russia and the West? The first answer to that question that comes to my mind today is that Russia became Orthodox Christian not Roman Christian. Russia became Orthodox Christian in 988 CE when Grand Prince Volodymyr (better known in the West by his Russian name Vladimir) converted to Orthodox Christianity under the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church headquartered in Constantinople. He could have converted to Roman Catholic Christianity, but his economic ties to Constantinople made it quite likely that he would eventually convert to Orthodox Christianity, which, of course, he did.

When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity, the eastern and western Christian churches were still in full communion with each other, but there were already sharp distinctions between them. The eastern church was thoroughly Greek. The western church was thoroughly Latin. The Greek Christians traced their church’s lineage back to Constantine more directly than the Latin Christians did. The Greek Orthodox Church was grounded in Greek culture and history, the Roman Catholic Church was grounded in Latin culture and history. It was, I believe, inevitable that they would go their separate ways. In 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome, that is, the Pope, excommunicated each other. This so-called Great Schism cemented the separation of eastern and western Christianity that had begun with cultural and linguistic differences (the east spoke Greek and the west spoke Latin) and, by the eleventh century CE, had developed into theological differences as well. Most significantly, the eastern Orthodox Christians never accepted the claims of the Pope to supremacy over the other Christian patriarchs, including the Patriarch of Constantinople.

By the time Volodymyr of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity, a major difference between the histories of the eastern and western Christian churches had already become apparent. In 800 CE, the Pope crowned Charlemagne, a secular ruler of territory now part of Germany and France, as a secular king. We see here the beginnings of something that became a major part of west European history but not east European history, namely, the conflict between the church and the state over secular primacy. Various princes and kings of western Europe fought the Papacy for their own independence for centuries. A well-known, if substantially later, example is Henry VIII of England breaking with Rome, nominally at least over the question of his divorce from his first wife.

No such conflict between the church and secular rulers ever occurred in the Orthodox countries, including Russia. Instead, in the Orthodox countries the church became a bulwark of the state. With the rather odd and ultimately not that meaningful schism of the Old Believers from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, the Old Believers not being affiliated directly with the Russian state, no significant schism ever occurred in the Russian Orthodox Church. Instead, the Patriarch of Moscow was always a staunch supporter of the monarchy., perhaps even more so after Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate in 1721 and replaced it with a synod consisting mostly of bishops. The Russian Orthodox Church was tied directly to and never opposed the Russian autocracy about anything. It doesn’t oppose Putin about anything either.

Perhaps many westerners dismiss the importance of churches in history, but the way the Russian Orthodox Church always supported and never opposed the Russian state had immense consequences in Russian history. In the west, secular states became a power base separate from the church in effect if not in law. The church always remained a source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state. Opposition to both the church and the state thus became a staple of western European history and culture. No such source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state ever developed in Russia. There was never an institutional basis for opposition to the state the way there was in the West.

Another stark difference between the West and Russia developed beginning in about the fourteenth century CE. It was the Renaissance, first in Italy, then across western Europe. Most of the significant figures of the Renaissance remained Roman Catholic or, later, Protestant; but the Renaissance introduced something into western culture that has always been lacking in Russia. The artists of the Renaissance celebrated the human form. Many of them were, in effect, Christian humanists. They focused on individuals in a way Russian artists of the time never did. They painted nude women and sculpted nude men. No artists in Russia did any such thing at least until the nineteenth century. The value of the individual human being grew in western Europe during and after the Renaissance in a way it never did in Russia.

Then comes the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It comes in the West that is, not in Russia. Protestant Christianity, which became the dominant Christianity in the northern regions of western Europe, stressed the individual in a way the Russian Orthodox Church never did. Beginning with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformers stressed the personal relationship of each believer with God apart from the church. That’s why they translated the Bible into their local languages, so that their people could read what they called the word of God themselves rather than learn of it only from the church. No such development ever occurred in Russia.

Then we come to the Enlightenment. In 1637, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am,” and the world has not been the same since. It’s not that western culture was completely unacquainted with human reason. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, for example is strictly rational. But before the Enlightenment, reason was not the ultimate standard of human knowledge or wisdom. Essentially everyone in the West accepted divine revelation, in the Bible and otherwise, as that ultimate standard. Anselm of Canterbury’s book Cur Deus Homo, which established the classical theory of atonement, is very rationalistic, but it Is not exclusively so. It accepts the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation without trying to reason its way to that doctrine.

In getting to his conclusion “I think therefore I am,” Rene Descartes did the radically new thing of using only his personal reason to answer the question he was asking. He set out to doubt everything he could doubt. He put nothing beyond his power of doubt. He found that he could doubt everything except that he was there doing the doubting. Hence, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ process and his conclusion were rationalistic in ways western thought had not been before him.

Over the course of the next two centuries, human reason became the standard of knowledge, truth, and wisdom throughout western culture. The founders of the United States of America, for example, were children of the Enlightenment. Their thought was rationalistic not religious in any meaningful way. Jefferson’s famous statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a thoroughly rationalistic statement. It relies not on divine revelation for its truth but only on human reason. By the middle of the nineteenth century, western thought was primarily rationalistic and scientific.

No such development ever took place in Russia. It is true that some of the tsars and tsarinas of the eighteenth century were attracted to and dabbled in western culture. Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 168-1725), tried to westernize (though in no way to democratize) the Russian government with some limited success. Tsarina Ekaterina II, known to us as Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796) corresponded with French Enlightenment thinkers but then, she was German not Russian. And, like Peter, she did nothing to make Russia in any way more democratic. Enlightenment thinking made little or no impact on Russian culture generally. Russian science did appear in the eighteenth century and made some significant contributions to world knowledge. Moscow State University is named after the eighteenth century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. The Scientific Revolution was part of the Enlightenment, but neither rationalistic thinking nor science made any significant impact on Russian culture at least until the nineteenth century.

Russia has no meaningful democratic tradition whatsoever. The earlier Russian rulers were Grand Princes like Volodymyr of Kiev. They were essentially autocratic rulers. When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE, the entire Russian populace became Orthodox Christian. That conversion may have been nominal at first, but Russian Orthodoxy came to permeate Russian life and culture from top to bottom, and it began in Russia when an absolute monarch converted. The control of the country by the Grand Princes generally and the Grand Princes of Moscow in particular just deepened over the centuries. When Russian autocracy finally collapsed (at least in its tsarist form) in 1917, it was still true that, by and large, the Russian people remained at least superficially committed to both Orthodoxy and autocracy.

There is yet another aspect of Russian history that explains a good deal about Russian thought and the actions of the Russian government. Russia’s history is one of foreign invasion after foreign invasion. Russia has no naturally defensibly land borders. Moscow rose to prominence among the Russian states in the thirteenth century because in 1240 the Tartars, coming from the east, conquered what today is Ukraine, including the former Grand Principality of Kyiv. The Russian Grand Princes and tsars fought land wars at least with Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the French. Finally, the Soviets fought a horrifically devastating war against the German Nazis. National security from foreign invasion is a concern for the Russian people and their leaders in a way we Americans can hardly understand.

That’s why Putin can’t stand the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. That’s why, in my opinion, it was wrong for NATO to admit states some of which had been part of the USSR and others of which had been members of the Warsaw Pact. It was perfectly predictable that NATO doing so would provoke a reaction from Russia that may strike us as paranoid but that is perfectly reasonable in the Russian context. Putin may well not have invaded Ukraine had NATO not admitted Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and other states formerly under Soviet domination.

Russia has no history of meaningful democracy or concern for human rights, but there are a couple of things worth looking at. The first Russian revolution of the twentieth century took place not in 1917 but in 1905. Public unrest, rioting actually, and the revolt of much of the Russian military (especially the Navy, which had just suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Japanese) forced Tsar Nicholas II to adopt governmental reforms that had a democratic appearance. There was a national legislature called the Duma that was more or less freely elected. It debated and passed legislation like a western legislature, but there was a significant difference between it and, say, the British Parliament. The tsar didn’t have to obey any law the Duma passed. The reforms of 1905 changed Russian autocracy in name only.

Nicholas II abdicated in February (March new style) 1917, and Russian autocracy came to an end at least in its tsarist form. The first government that replaced the tsardom is known as the “Provisional Government.” It was nominally democratic, and there was no longer a tsar who could disregard its enactments. It was, however, utterly ineffective as a Russian government. It refused to pull Russia out of World War I though the country was falling apart because of the war. It refused to enact foundational laws because it said it had to wait for a “Constituent Assembly” to draft a new Russian constitution, something that never happened. And, of course, the Provisional Government lasted only from February to October (March to November new style), 1917. It had no meaningful impact on Russian thought or culture.

Comes October 25 (old style, November 7 new style), 1917. On that date, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat against the Provisional Government. The Soviet Communists came to call this coup “The Great October Revolution,” but it was nothing of the sort at the time. It did, however, lead to a civil war in Russia that lasted until 1922, from which the Soviet Communists, under Lenin, emerged victorious. Lenin and, most particularly his successor Stalin, created one of the most totalitarian, brutally violent, and brutally oppressive political systems the world has ever seen. It was only 74 years from the Bolshevik coup in 1917 to the end of the Communist regime in Russia at the end of 1991, but in those 74 years the Soviet Communists suppressed all opposition, often with long prison terms under murderous conditions or with bullets in the back of the head. More than they ever had before, the Russian people came both to fear their government and to understand that they had no say in what their government did. The Soviet Communists held elections, but they were fake elections. No one opposed to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was allowed to run, and the Communists always won by 95% or more. Soviet democracy was a pure sham.

When the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991, Russia adopted the most democratic constitution it had ever had. There were meaningful elections at all levels of government. The Russian presidency was powerful, but there were, and are, legislative bodies with real legislative authority. Yet even before Vladimir Putin became president on Jan. 1, 2000, Russian democracy was far from perfect. The way the government divested itself of the state-owned industries from the Soviet era created both a culture of mafia rule and the power of so-called “oligarchs,” immensely rich men who controlled all of the major industries including mining and oil and gas production. There were elections, but the national government was completely in the pockets of the oligarchs.

Whereupon Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin enters the picture. Putin had been a low-level KGB officer in East Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He’d had to deal with anti-Communist rioters in Dresden. President Boris Yeltsin first made him head of the Russian successor to the KGB and then named him Prime Minister. Yeltsin resigned at the end of 1999, and, as Prime Minister, Putin became president pro tem. He won his first election as president a short time later. He has essentially ruled Russia ever since.

Putin is in many ways an unreformed Russian communist. He no longer spouts Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he has created an authoritarian state that is about as close to Soviet totalitarianism as he can get. He has nationalized the public media and strictly controls the Internet. He has had his most prominent critics exiled or killed, sometimes both. He has suppressed opposition nearly as effectively as the Soviet Communists had done. Russia remains nominally democratic, but its democracy is for show only. It is, for example, illegal to criticize Putin’s immoral and illegal invasion of Ukraine. Note that the Patriarch of Moscow fully supports that invasion despite its undeniably sinful nature.

Let me share three experiences from my two times in the Soviet Union that may well demonstrate some of the differences between Russia and the West. I was first in Russia in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour through Indiana University. One day, in what was then Leningrad, our group met a Russian man and chatted with him. He said to us: “You Americans always talk about what’s bad about our country and our government. But how would you like it if people went around saying bad things about your government?” This was at the height of the 1968 presidential election. Most of the people in our group had “Clean for Gene” stickers on their luggage, expressing support for the strongly anti-Vietnam War candidate Gene McCarthy. We thought: Hell. We say negative things about our government every day! That’s the American way!” Well, it definitely is not the Russian way.

Then, once again in Leningrad but this time at a dorm of Leningrad State University in 1976, the Soviet Defense Minister had just died. He had been a prominent figure in the Soviet government for a long time. I said something about it to some Russian students. They just shrugged and said: “That’s his business.” They not only didn’t care, they weren’t the least bit interested in the fact that a prominent Soviet leader had died. The specifics of that incident are probably understandable, but I think these students’ reaction tells us something important. The Russian people just didn’t care about what was going on in their government because they had absolutely no say in what it did.

Finally, the Berdyaev incident. When I resided at Moscow State University for the 1975-76 academic year, I got to know to know a Russian student at the University. He assured me that he was an atheist and that he didn’t understand how so many Americans could say they believe in God. Nonetheless, as I was about to leave Moscow for the last time, I gave him a book by the great Orthodox Russian theologian and philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. My friend nearly began to weep. He said: “You cannot know what you have done for me.”

Perhaps not, but I think I have a pretty good idea what I might well have done for him. He knew full well that the communist regime under which he lived and studied had stolen his people’s history. They had bastardized it to fit a Marxist ideology. Historians wrote and spoke mostly not to discover and disclose the truth about the past but to prop up the Soviet system. The Soviet regime had also attempted to steal people’s nationality from them. Soviet citizens were supposed to be “the new communist woman” and “the new communist man” and not actually be Russians or any other of the numerous nationalities within the USSR. Berdyaev may have been a Russian Orthodox theologian, but that meant that he was profoundly Russian. He had left Russia to avoid the communists. Some Russian young people at the time were being attracted back to the Russian Orthodox Church not because it was Christian but because it is so quintessentially Russian.

My friend had probably heard of Berdyaev. Berdyaev had been a member of what’s called the Vekhi Group. That was a group of former Marxists who left Marxism behind and returned to the Russian Orthodox faith. The Soviet communists despised them. They called them class traitors. I’m sure the Soviets saw them as evidence of the way bourgeois society steals people away from the Marxist truth and gets them to accept a faith that, for the communists, served only to perpetuate that bourgeois society. I had given my friend an opening into something profoundly Russian that he thought he would never have.

Russians like my friend knew that they lived under a regime that bastardized and stole their people’s history. They expected, and today I’m sure expect, nothing better from their government. Until some MAGA fascists in Florida and elsewhere started to prohibit public schools from teaching the truth about American history, this is something none of us have ever had to deal with. It is, however, and long has been, part of what the Russian people live with.

It should be obvious from this brief overview of Russian history and my few personal stories that Russia is a very different place from the West, including from the United States. When the USSR ceased to exist, many people in the West thought Russia would become a functioning parliamentary democracy. That thought was unrealistic if not outright naïve. Few Americans understand the power of history, but a people’s history really does matter. Russia’s history and present lived experience are radically different from those of the United States and the rest of the West. Russia has no meaningful history of democracy of any kind. Human life does not mean in Russia what it means to us. Russia has no meaningful history of centers of power in the country other than the government together with either the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Communist Party, or both. Russia has a history of opposition to the state being brutally suppressive. That happened to some extent under the tsars. It happened vociferously under the communists, and it happens that way today under Putin. Russians see national security from a perspective of having been invaded over and over again. They have a memory of having been a world power and of having an extensive, geographically contiguous empire. They lost both of those things when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they aren’t happy about it.

We cannot expect Russia to function or behave like a western representative democracy. It may be such a democracy on paper today, but then it was such a democracy on paper under the Soviets too. We must not be led by superficial appearances and propagandistic claims. We must not project western ways and values onto Russia. Russia is far more Asian than are any of the countries of the West, especially in her politics. The Russias are a great people. They have achieved spectacular successes in science, beating the US into space. They have produced worldclass literature, visual arts, and music. The Russian people are quite cold and unfriendly in public, but in private they are among the most friendly and welcoming people you will meet anywhere.

I want very much to like Russia and the Russians, but today I cannot do it. I am so mad at Putin over his invasion of Ukraine that sometimes I fee like I’m going to burst. There isn’t a shred of justification for it anywhere. It has inflicted immense harm on both the Ukrainian and the Russian people. It has made Russia more of a pariah nation than she even was before the invasion. I admire Russian culture. I respect the Russian people. I despise their government, what it has done to its people, and what it has done on the international stage. Still, Russia has an important presence in the world, and we must do more than most Americans ever do to understand her. Perhaps my little effort will help my country in that regard.

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[1] In the summer of 1968 I spent a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Kyiv, Ukraine. Otherwise my time in the USSR was all in Russia.