Bursts of prejudice against entire peoples and their cultures have accompanied geopolitical tensions since time immemorial, with numerous nationalities and ethnoreligious groups falling victim to bigotry that emerges out of conflict in the international system. Anton Bespalov, Programme Director of the Valdai Club, explores the nature of Russophobia, a form of national prejudice that is politically charged like no other.
For the past several years, Russia has been consumed by a public debate over a worldwide surge in Russophobia—above all across the collective West, but also in those countries of the world majority where Western media and culture carry particular weight. This has produced proposals
to write Russophobia into Russian law and to punish foreign citizens and officials for it. In 2024 the government backed
a bill to that effect; two years on, it appears stuck in committee. The reasons are not hard to find: the near-certainty of unenforceable verdicts against foreign nationals, the risk of duplicating laws already on the books, and, above all, the vagueness of the term itself.
Indeed, an instantly, emotionally legible word turns out to bundle together a disparate set of phenomena—the “cancellation” of Russian art, bans on athletes competing under the Russian flag, chauvinist rhetoric, discrimination on linguistic grounds. Different causes, different mechanisms—but a common thread runs through them: the target is one’s belonging to Russia or the Russian people, and the result, for anyone who identifies with either, is a feeling of deep injury.
That logic was laid bare by the recent uproar over Michael Martens, a correspondent for the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who asked at a press conference in Belgrade what Europe could do to “help kill more Russians.” The remark—a breach of both journalistic ethics and basic decency—drew sharp criticism in Russia and Serbia alike, and even his own paper ultimately called the phrasing ambiguous and out of step with its editorial line.
The outrage was entirely understandable, and it raises questions worth sitting with—chief among them, the one-sidedness of German atonement for Nazi crimes: acknowledging the Holocaust while looking past the war of annihilation waged across the USSR and Yugoslavia. That selective memory produces a kind of moral blindness, one that keeps contemporary Germans from grasping why Russians reacted as they did—up to accusing the journalist of inherited Russophobia because his grandfather held high rank in the Nazi military, speculating that today’s Germany secretly dreams of a “Fourth Reich,” lamenting that Germans never paid a steep enough price after 1945. It’s worth saying plainly that none of this does much to carry Russia’s case to the world; it only feeds the same cycle of rhetorical escalation. The historian Artem Drabkin put it well: “We cannot answer the call to ‘kill more Russians’ with a call to kill more Germans, Ukrainians, or Europeans […] Defending one’s country, destroying an armed enemy in battle, trying war criminals, demanding retribution—all of that is right and necessary. But a people cannot be declared a legitimate target.”
It’s a safe bet that Martens, even now, still doesn’t understand what actually triggered the reaction. He sees himself as the representative of a moral superpower—the European Union—and of a country, Germany, that has settled its moral debts in full, and therefore feels entitled to present the bill to others. That the settling was achieved through decades of national self-suppression, under sustained outside pressure, only sharpens the moralizing tone: we managed it, so should you. One could reasonably ask who, exactly, failed to see Germany’s reckoning through properly, and when—but the underlying fact stands: for the elite stratum that dominates Western public discourse, the confrontation with Russia is, first and foremost, a moral one.
That, it seems, is the key to understanding the recent surge of what we call Russophobia in the West—a startlingly ambitious attempt to “cancel” a substantial piece of human civilization, spanning science, art, sport, tourism, entire fields of human endeavour. Ultimately it aims at the same thing sanctions do: forcing a country, in this case Russia, to “change its behaviour.”
The premise is that once the goal is achieved, the cancellation can be lifted as readily as it was imposed. But two things complicate that. First, Russia’s own history suggests that behaviour change forced from outside is simply not an achievable goal. Second, sanctions regimes never stay contained—they generate a new, more complicated reality for the target and for everyone else. Russia’s “cancellation” has dredged up such disparate sediment as a Custine-style disdain of “civilized Europe” for “barbaric Russia,” and centuries of Eastern European fear and grievance, amplified now by the region’s seat at the Euro-Atlantic table. The upshot has been a swift, de facto legitimization of Russophobia in the West—exemplified by Meta’s (Organization is designated as an extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) decision
to temporarily allow calls for violence against Russian nationals on its platforms (a decision that later got the company designated as extremist in Russia).
Formally, a distinction is usually drawn between hostility toward the Russian state and hostility toward Russian citizens; in practice, that line dissolves easily. Meta’s policy was hedged with conditions on paper—restricted to a handful of countries, with calls for violence against Russians in general still officially barred—but in practice it opened a Pandora’s box. Once users had a “license” to call for violence at all, many stopped policing themselves in any respect, and moderators were overwhelmed by the resulting flood of hateful comments. In the West, the decision itself drew criticism as a dangerous precedent—hate speech legalized by corporate fiat. As the American commentator Matt Walsh put it: “the social media companies got together and decided that actually it’s okay to call for violence as long as it’s against Russians. Our Big Tech overlords are now literally deciding who deserves to live and die.”
That said, there’s nothing abnormal about hostility toward Russia as such—what’s pathological, to varying degrees, are the specific forms it takes. Any major power draws a full spectrum of reactions, from admiration to hatred; phobias are, in some sense, simply the tax that comes with great-power status. Anti-American sentiment across the Global South is no secret, periodically crystallizing into the chant of “Death to America.” But even Iran—to which the slogan is generally traced—consistently insists that it targets imperialist policy, not the American people, and the chant was even suspended
after September 11, 2001, as a gesture of sympathy for the victims.
China’s rising power is generating its own backlash—in places that had little history of anti-Chinese sentiment before, like Central Asia, where Chinese economic presence keeps growing, and of course in the United States, where China has by now settled firmly into the role of principal adversary. Conspiracy theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 gave global Sinophobia a considerable additional push.
If these countries’ experience is any guide, fighting phobias should not become an end in itself: a full victory over national prejudice is probably beyond reach—even as individual acts of discrimination absolutely deserve pushback. By the same token, investment in image-building doesn’t pay off when the image is treated as the end in itself, as China discovered after decades spent trying to project soft power following Western templates.
The authors of a forthcoming Valdai report on Russian-Brazilian relations look closely at the sharp improvement in Brazilian attitudes toward China, despite the continuing dominance of Western—chiefly American—cultural and media discourse there. Describing China’s economic role in Brazil, particularly in technology, they conclude that “economic and material benefits can help to minimize media and political attacks and boost a country’s popularity, even in the face of opposition from those who control the means of production of narratives.”
Indeed, Russia is not in a position to offer its European neighbours comparable material benefits right now. Russian energy, to which Europe owed no small part of its prosperity in an earlier era, is too abstract a thing for most ordinary citizens to feel; while the steady drumbeat of warnings about cold winters without Russian gas tends, if anything, to backfire. Meanwhile, “organic growth” in goodwill toward Russia looks plausible in the countries of the world majority, where some intriguing shifts are already visible—Russia’s rising popularity in parts of West Africa, for instance, where it’s increasingly seen as a security provider and a genuine anti-colonial force.
As for Europe, where national prejudice runs centuries deep and merely takes more or less civilized forms depending on the era, it would be unrealistic to expect Russophobia there to be overcome entirely. A country’s or a people’s image is built from many things at once—historical memory, value systems, the accumulated experience of contact at both the state and the everyday level. Some of that is open to revision, and cultural, scientific, and educational exchange, tourism and travel, all do real work here; some of it is not. Even within Western Europe, where decades of deliberate reconciliation and trauma-healing have gone into relations between former adversaries, it would be naïve to assume mutual hostility has been fully extinguished.
Russia’s own history is instructive here: prejudice, on its own, has never been an insurmountable obstacle to constructive relations—even with countries where anti-Russian sentiment runs close to the core of national identity. During the Cold War, the USSR built a relationship with Finland in which tangible economic, security, and foreign-policy advantages gave Helsinki every incentive to keep the traditional Russophobic sentiments firmly in check. Ultimately, building a broad, positive agenda (even where it is hard to imagine today) will do more than trying to answer every fresh flare-up of Russophobia from a defensive crouch.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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