Kryachkov 2!indd

UNIT VIII
RUSSIA: 
A PART OF THE WORLD 
OR APART FROM 
THE WORLD? 

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Английский язык для магистратуры
R
ussia: a Part of The W
orld or...
READING 1
LEAD IN
1. 
What are the most important facts a foreigner must know about today’s Russia? Its people?
2. How do you think Russia is perceived in the world? What are some of the popular miscon-
ceptions about the country? To what extent is this a recent development and a function of 
centuries-long processes? 
Skim the text and say if there is anything surprising in what the author writes about 
Russia’s perception in the West and the roots of those attitudes.
THE RUSSIAN RIDDLE
Martin Malia
After a thousand years of marching in the laggard Eastern train of Europe, forever hobbled by 
the double burden of poverty and despotism, Russia in 1917 had thrust upon her an improbable 
vanguard destiny. In the wake of Lenin’s Red October, the “Spectre of Communism” proclaimed by 
Marx in 1848 to be haunting Europe at last received a local habitation and a name: Soviet Social-
ist Russia. For the next three-quarters of a century, the Soviet-Russian hybrid stood as the prime 
catalyst of both the hopes and the fears of the West, indeed of mankind. 
The riddle the Red Sphinx posed to Western wayfarers was often resolved by declaring 
the spectre of Communism to be little more than the new face of eternal Russia. For those 
hostile to the experiment, Communism was simply a mutation of tsarist autocracy and thus 
an enduring menace to Western freedom. For those friendly to the brave new Soviet world, its 
difficulties, its shortcomings, and at times its crimes were to be explained away by the same 
tsarist heritage.
The chronicle of the West’s varying assessments of Russia commences with Russia’s dramatic 
impact on Europe following Peter’s victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, and it 
unfolds in four phases. 
The first extends from Poltava to the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, a period when Rus-
sia presents, in the guise of the “enlightened despotism” of Peter I, Catherine II, and the young 
Alexander I, the most benign visage she has ever displayed to the West. The second, begun in 
1815 by Alexander’s Holy Alliance and brought to its climax by the most unbending autocrat of 
the century, Nicholas I, offers the antithesis of the first, with Russia plunging to the nadir of her 
fortunes under Western eyes in her role as the “gendarme of Europe.” During the third phase, 
opened by the Great Reforms of Alexander II following the Crimean debacle of 1854–1856 and 
closed by the fall of the imperial regime in 1917, the West’s negative opinion of Russia is pro-
gressively nuanced and attenuated to the point where, by the early twentieth century, most 
observers again viewed her as an integral, though no longer idealized, part of Europe. The last 
chapter of the story, begun with the October Revolution, defies all clear characterization, for it 
offers the starkest antitheses of white and black, reproducing simultaneously the idealization 
of the eighteenth century and the denigration of the early nineteenth, yet, despite a constantly 
shifting balance, never fusing these extremes into a coherent image, capable of dominating 
Western opinion.
During the three hundred fifty years since the failure of the Habsburgs’ aspirations to uni-
versal empire in the sixteenth century, Europe had lived under a multistate system of inter-

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