Robert Tombs Robert Tombs

Can Russia ever coexist with the West?

Seeing Vladimir Putin’s bloated face and listening to his increasingly unhinged rhetoric makes it tempting to assume that the current conflict in Ukraine is all about him. His actions and threats take Europe back not just to the 1930s, or even to the 1860s and Bismarck’s cold-blooded ‘cabinet wars’, but to the 1740s when Frederick the Great blatantly grabbed Silesia and set Europe ablaze. In attacking a peaceful sovereign country, Putin has regressed long before the United Nations Charter, and even before 1815, when the war-weary states that defeated Napoleon created a ‘Concert of Europe’ to keep the peace – with tsarist Russia one of the guarantors.

Quite mild-mannered people now express the hope that Putin might be ‘taken out’, and our problems thereby solved. Perhaps. But the real problem may be Russia itself. I don’t mean with its people. I’m not suggesting that there is some dark national psyche. Rather, Russia as a political and geographical entity, an unstable mixture of strength and weakness.

Because of its size and population, Russia has been scaring its neighbours for centuries. But because of its vast distances and backwardness compared with the West – a relative backwardness that remains constant – its autocratic rulers are perpetually fearful of their vulnerability and obsessed by prestige. The result is threatening talk and frequent aggression towards bordering states. Their vulnerability is political – the subversive attractions of western liberalism – at least as much as military, as you have to be as crazy as Napoleon or Hitler to invade those vast expanses.

Dictatorship is what makes Russia dangerous to its neighbours and to itself

The aggressiveness is a matter of record. All powerful states sometimes use force. Britain and America are hardly shrinking violets. Nevertheless, Russia’s history of more than three centuries of conflict on its frontiers is striking.

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Written by
Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs is an emeritus professor in history at the University of Cambridge and the author of This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (Allen Lane, 2021). He also edits the History Reclaimed website

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