







































124                 Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 17 (1)2024: 124-138 
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Misreading Russia 

 

Leigh Sarty, Carleton University1 

 

 

 

 

Abstract 

A key part of the contemporary “Russia challenge” is the West’s tendency to misread that country, 

both its capacity for reform and the West’s own impact on the choices that have shaped its 

trajectory. Excess faith in the power of the market and the applicability of social science theories 

skewed Western policy toward Russia in the 1990s, fuelling the xenophobic and nationalistic 

narratives that laid the foundations of Putinism. Misreading Russia’s historical insecurities after 

the collapse of the USSR ensured that US triumphalism would play badly in Moscow, contributing 

to the toxic environment amidst which Putin ultimately opted to invade Ukraine. None of this 

justifies the recent excesses of the Putin regime, but it does help to make them 

intelligible. Appreciating how the West has misread and mismanaged Russia in the past should 

contribute to more realistic and more effective approaches in the future. 

 

 
 

 

  

 
1 Leigh Sarty is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Senior Fellow 

at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Bill 

Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. 



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Introduction 

 

Scholars of Russia have a lot to grapple with these days. Gabuev (2023) has penned a lament for 

“the Russia that might have been” (2023), while Alperovitch and Radchenko hold out the hope 

that “another Russia is possible” (2022). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has reported more than 

a few calls to “rethink Russian studies” (Prince 2023). The disorientation is understandable.  Just 

over three decades ago, presidents Boris Yeltsin and George Bush spoke of “friendship and 

partnership” (Wines 1992, 1); by 2014, Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and armed intervention 

in Donetsk and Luhansk had marked a resurgence of the Cold War (Legvold 2016). But Russia’s 

full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, surprised even severe Putin critics and 

plunged East-West relations into much darker, unprecedented territory.  

This dispiriting turn of events has been particularly hard on those Russia watchers who 

experienced a turn of comparable proportions, the Gorbachev revolution of the late 1980s that 

heralded democratization, new thinking, and an end to forty years of Cold War. How could such 

high hopes be dashed in just a couple of decades? The answer, this article will suggest, lies in part 

in the way Western scholars and policymakers have understood Russia. Historical illiteracy, faith 

in what Yale historian Timothy Snyder (2018) has called “the politics of inevitability,” and the 

chimera of social science rigour have combined to distort discourse on Russia, resulting in 

misplaced optimism and an underappreciation of the basic drivers of the country’s development. 

At the same time, those of us trying to engage and understand Russia from the outside have 

underappreciated our own role in influencing the perceptions and choices of the leadership in the 

Kremlin. In particular, the laudable but ultimately flawed conviction that democratic values and 

institutions are universally applicable has reinforced those aspects of Russia’s political culture and 

strategic thought that have rendered it fearful of the West. Once the fundamentals of Moscow’s 

international behaviour are identified and the often-unintended impact of Western 

(mis)understandings and actions made clear, the seemingly unintelligible and even tragic 

vicissitudes of Russian foreign policy begin to make sense.  

What follows are the reflections of a member of the generation who witnessed the promise of the 

Gorbachev era and who then went on to work on Canada-Russia relations in what is today known 

as Global Affairs Canada (GAC). Over a span of nearly forty years, I had the privilege both to 

study Russia—as a graduate student and as GAC’s Scholar in Residence—and to engage with it 

diplomatically during two postings at Canada’s Moscow Embassy and as Director for Russia and 

East Europe at GAC. The analysis presented here is, therefore, unabashedly subjective and 

intended to be thought-provoking rather than definitive. If readers are led to appreciate that the 

way the “Russia challenge” has been framed, understood, and managed by the West is an integral 

part of the challenge itself, this piece will have served its purpose. 

My argument is premised on the notion that one can speak meaningfully of a post-Cold War 

consensus in the West’s policy toward Russia, the “West” broadly understood to encompass those 

developed democracies formally and informally aligned with its most powerful representative—

the United States. This is not to say that there were no distinctions between individual countries’ 

approaches to Moscow or that the consensus did not have its critics. However, the belief that the 

collapse of the USSR in 1991 represented an opportunity to advance peace and prosperity was 

broadly shared and informed thinking both in foreign ministries and in the academy. 

Understanding how and why this promise went badly wrong helps to explain the challenge that 



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the collective West faces today with Russia over Ukraine despite the emerging cracks in 

collaborative efforts. 

 

First Principles2 

Half a century ago, the Hungarian émigré historian Tibor Szamuely’s posthumously-published 

classic, The Russian Tradition, boldly declared that “[t]he factor that has probably contributed 

most towards shaping Russia’s history has been her geographical position” (Szamuely 1974, 10). 

My own near half-century in Russian affairs has convinced me that Szamuely was right. All states 

prioritize security; to do otherwise in a world that lacks a sovereign and where conflict is always 

possible is to invite depredation (Jervis 1978; Mearsheimer 2001; Waltz 1979). For Russia, 

meeting this challenge has been uniquely burdensome because of its geographical position. The 

lands that the princes of Muscovy first gathered and expanded close to a thousand years ago were 

notoriously flat; the quality of the soils at their disposal was notoriously poor. The absence of 

natural barriers and attendant vulnerabilities fostered insecurities that today can be said to have 

been “built into the very structure of Russian history” (Harris 2016, 6). This is because the effort 

to achieve security in an environment where this proved difficult locked Russia into patterns of 

behaviour that heightened its sense of insecurity rather than alleviating it. From the earliest times, 

the insecurity of the physical environment, compounded by a hunger for new lands as thin northern 

soils rapidly depleted, led Russia’s rulers to seek security through an expansionist foreign policy 

(Pipes 1974). As historian Geoffrey Hosking (1997, 4) wrote: “Like a cumbersome and nervous 

amoeba…[Muscovy] expanded to fill the space it was able to dominate.” For more than half a 

millennium now, Russia’s international behaviour has been characterized by what Stephen Kotkin 

(2016, 4) has described as “a kind of defensive aggressiveness.” The tragedy unfolding in Ukraine 

is its latest manifestation. 

Geography also helps to account for Russia’s authoritarian political culture. The challenge of 

surviving a “hostile and threatening environment” (Keenan 1986, 122), it has been suggested, 

favoured the “extreme centralization” (131) of authority that has long characterized Russian 

political life. While the more desirably located denizens of the West could afford to enjoy 

“individual socialization,” their Russian counterparts, for whom deference to authority was crucial 

in surmounting military and economic insecurities, could not (Keenan 1986, 127). For Richard 

Pipes (1974), these environmental challenges explained Russia’s unique development as a 

“patrimonial state” where, in marked contrast to the West, a clear distinction between power and 

property never emerged, and unchecked authoritarianism became the norm.  

The most significant consequence of Russia’s physical setting is its proximity to a technologically 

superior and, therefore, menacing West. Overcoming backwardness relative to the dynamic 

societies that emerged on the Western edge of the Eurasian landmass from about 1500 defined the 

evolution of the Russian state. As Marshall Poe (2003, 39) observed, “by a cruel turn, the [sixteenth 

century] Moscovite elite, having just constructed a new and quite typical premodern empire, found 

themselves face-to-face with what was gradually becoming the most dynamic force in world 

history.” The consequences were profound. Geoffrey Hosking has shown how the all-

encompassing, state-led mobilization necessary for ‘backward’ Russia to compete militarily with 

an economically superior West “destroyed or emasculated…[t]he political, economic and cultural 

institutions of what might have become the Russian nation,” that is, a polity built on civic 

 
2 The discussion in this section draws on Sarty 2022. 



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institutions and a shared sense of community. For Hosking, “autocracy and backwardness [in 

Russia] were symptoms and not causes: both were generated by the way in which the building and 

maintaining of empire obstructed the formation of a nation” (Hosking 1997, xxvii). 

This double bind—the need to compete with a more powerful West from a position of relative 

weakness—accounts for the wellspring of Russian authoritarianism: the preponderance of the state 

over society. The argument is familiar to historians. Paul Milyukov, the prominent historian and 

liberal politician of the early twentieth century, put it this way: “Compelling national need resulted 

in the creation of an omnipotent State on the most meagre material foundation; this very 

meagreness constrained it to exert all the energies of its population—and in order to have full 

control over these energies it had to become omnipotent” (quoted in Szamuely 1974, 28). 

Milyukov’s near-contemporary, the widely-read Russian Imperial historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, 

was more pithy: “The state grew fat, but the people grew lean” (quoted in Kotkin 2016, 4).  

This is the engine of Russian history: a ceaseless quest for security in conditions of relative 

backwardness that has skewed the country’s development. Approaches to this challenge have 

varied over the centuries. Peter the Great undertook to match and surpass Russia’s great power 

rivals through ‘Westernization.’ Spurred by Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, 

Alexander II launched the ‘Great Reforms’ of the mid-nineteenth century; Sergei Witte and Piotr 

Stolypin spearheaded state-led industrialization to maintain the Empire’s competitiveness in the 

twentieth. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 as harbingers of world 

revolution who rejected all historical precedent, yet by March 1918, Lenin was prioritizing 

traditional security needs in his acceptance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Joseph Stalin justified 

the brutal industrialization campaign of the first Five-Year Plan by warning that “the weak get 

beaten”— a phrase Vladimir Putin would repeat seven decades later as he began to roll back 

Russia’s post-Soviet democratic reforms (cited in Kotkin 2017, 73). Russian methods of 

governance have varied over time. Efforts to surmount the chronic inefficiencies inherent in a state 

of such preposterous size have created a pendulum of reform and reaction. But the security 

imperative has always remained paramount.  

 

Enter Gorbachev 

Assessments of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev vary. Broadly hailed in the West as the visionary 

who brought an end to the Cold War, he is reviled at home as the man who precipitated the collapse 

of a superpower. Archie Brown, the Oxford scholar who tagged Gorbachev’s rise at the outset and 

followed him closely thereafter, has described his subject as “a genetic error of the system” (Brown 

1997, 88) and “a highly untypical product of the Soviet nomenklatura” (Brown 1997, 316). But I 

am inclined to agree with Stephen Kotkin (2001, 776) that “[f]ar from an aberration, Gorbachev 

was a quintessential product of the Soviet system.” His core challenge was the same as that of all 

of his predecessors: securing state survival in a competitive world. His approach evolved and 

became radicalized only as the true extent of that challenge became apparent. When Gorbachev 

first took office in March 1985, he was very much a typical apparatchik and Communist true 

believer, albeit a highly dynamic one. This essential continuity is worth emphasizing. To be sure, 

the Gorbachev phenomenon cannot be fully understood without reference to the changes in Soviet 

society from Stalin’s death in 1953 through to the 1980s (Lewin 1989) or to the belief that 

Gorbachev was “a second Khrushchev” who promised to realize the intelligentsia’s dream of a 

“humane socialism” (Kotkin 2001, 776). But when Gorbachev and his future Foreign Minister 

Eduard Shevardnadze agreed late in 1984 that the whole Soviet system was “rotten” (quoted in 



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Brown, 81), the spur to act was not philosophical. It came from a fear that, as Gorbachev later 

wrote, the Soviet Union was “clearly losing the competition with its historic capitalist rivals”. The 

age-old curse of trying to match the West had by the early 1980s become an insurmountable burden 

for the geriatrics who had been running the country since the toppling of Nikita Khrushchev in 

1964. Defence expenditures running upwards of 40 percent of the state budget were a key part of 

“what ail[ed] the Soviet system,” not to mention that the gap between Soviet and Western living 

standards had been growing since the mid-1970s (Colton 1986, 32). Five months after Gorbachev 

became General Secretary, his close ally Alexander Yakovlev, former Soviet Ambassador to 

Canada and the intellectual architect of perestroika, painted a stark picture: “The country is 

growing weaker,” Yakovlev warned. “By the year 2000 we’re going to be a second-rate power” 

(quoted in Taubman 2017, 245). 

The utter failure of Gorbachev’s attempt at revival speaks to the true magnitude of the challenge 

that he faced. His selection as General Secretary of the Communist Party placed him at the pinnacle 

of a sprawling state whose bloat and corruption evoked the brilliant nineteenth-century satire of 

Nikolai Gogol. As Gorbachev’s biographer puts it, practices such as cooking statistics, covering 

up mistakes, and lying to one’s superiors “weren’t new; they were as Russian as the vodka that 

comforted those who engaged in them” (Taubman 2017, 247). However, this reality put Gorbachev 

in an unenviable position: “even after he became Soviet leader, he didn’t know exactly how bad 

the situation really was” (Taubman 2017, 238). As the scale of the obstacles to reform became 

apparent, Gorbachev pursued increasingly radical measures, from elections for new governing 

bodies to eliminating the Communist Party’s monopoly rule. The isolated perch of a lifetime 

apparatchik meanwhile blinded him to the role that force and fear had played in running a 

command economy and keeping the country’s disparate nationalities in line. The ‘omnipotent’ yet 

deeply dysfunctional state forged to counter the more powerful West so distorted the leadership’s 

grasp of its circumstances that efforts to ameliorate the crisis instead precipitated the Soviet 

Union’s collapse.  

However inevitable Gorbachev’s failure appears in retrospect, it was difficult not to get caught up 

in the excitement of those times. Kremlin watchers looked on in growing amazement as the 

relaxation of state censorship, known as glasnost (openness), shattered longstanding taboos in the 

realms of history and literature. Pillars of Soviet military doctrine were called into question, 

heralding ‘new thinking’ and a transformation of the Cold War standoff with the West. As a 

Canadian graduate student in Moscow in 1988, I witnessed the thrill as Soviet citizens spoke 

publicly of the failures of socialism and the prospect that theirs, at last, might become “a normal 

country.” But even as Moscovites dared to dream of a better future, their skepticism remained 

undiminished. In a piece I wrote on my return, I assured readers of the Globe and Mail that while 

perestroika was “for real,” it was “not a sure bet” (Sarty 1989).  

The optimism of the late 1980s endured, however, in the foreign policy establishments of Western 

capitals. It is difficult to convey today the intoxicating spirit of that period. The Cold War, the 

defining condition of world politics for close to half a century, was over, and the West had won. 

The director of a prominent Canadian think tank suggested, provocatively but not entirely without 

foundation, that the 1990s might promise “peace in our time” (Wood 1990). Francis Fukuyama 

asserted that the reformist trends then underway in the Communist world marked “the end of 

history,” (Fukuyama 1989) the triumph of liberal democracy over the last of its twentieth-century 

challengers. Though Fukuyama made clear that the spread of liberal democracy was by no means 

assured, nuances were somehow lost in the ‘can-do’ environment of the 1990s (Sarty 2021). The 



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notion that democracy had proved itself as the inevitable wave of the future had an enormous 

impact on Western policy toward Gorbachev’s Kremlin successor, Boris Yeltsin. 

 

The Yeltsin Years 

Yeltsin spoke directly to the popular longings evidenced during perestroika, expressing 

determination to place Russia squarely on the “civilized path” of the West (quoted in Colton 2008, 

218). Unlike his predecessor, however, the brusque apparatchik from Sverdlovsk did not shy away 

from the draconian measures that mainstream economists then deemed essential to shift the 

moribund post-Soviet economy decisively toward the market. Freeing prices on January 2, 1992, 

brought products back to the store shelves, but it also sparked inflation that wiped out people’s 

savings, upended livelihoods, and sowed deep resentments. The privatization of state enterprises 

through the mid-1990s lifted the stultifying burden of central planning but favoured insiders and 

fuelled an ever-deepening divide between average Russians and a new class of the superrich. 

Western advisors such as Harvard’s Geoffrey Sachs figured prominently in this process, in which 

the obvious pains of so-called “shock therapy” were regarded as a price worth paying for the gains 

of market reform.  

Russia’s relations with the West in the Yeltsin era were thus decisively shaped by “the politics of 

inevitability,” Timothy Snyder’s term for the prevalent 1990s belief that with liberal capitalism 

triumphant and all alternatives vanquished by “the end of history,” the market reigned supreme 

(Snyder 2018, 6-7). This meant that, to the limited extent that the human costs of Russian shock 

therapy reached Western capitals, they could be safely dismissed as unfortunate bumps on the road 

to an inevitably brighter, market-based future. As the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs’ 

Desk Officer for Russia in 1994, I can vividly recall noting with satisfaction that some 60 percent 

of formerly state-owned enterprises were then in private hands. My colleagues and I saw this as 

encouraging progress away from communism and any attendant costs as worthwhile. In retrospect, 

it has become clear that, under the uniquely dysfunctional conditions of early post-Soviet Russia, 

measures intended to advance the market and shared prosperity rewarded corrupt, monopolistic 

behaviour that created mighty oligarchs and spread staggering social inequality (Goldman 2003; 

Reddaway and Glinski 2001). The fact that these costs could be associated with Western advisors 

and the governments who supported them played into the nationalist and xenophobic narratives 

that would subsequently undergird the Putin regime (Galeotti 2019; Hill and Gaddy 2015). 

It is worth reflecting on how the West misread Russia in the 1990s. The late Harvard-based 

economist Marshall Goldman, who was one of shock therapy’s most prolific critics, once lamented 

that those who insisted that Russian history and culture had not prepared Russians for a market 

economy “were often dismissed as special pleaders” (Goldman 2003, 25). Yet, as Goldman 

pointed out, the very particular circumstances of Russia’s economic development—the dominance 

of the state in late-Tsarist capitalism, the deference to authority, and the sapping of initiative over 

more than 50 years of Soviet central planning—made a smooth transition to the market extremely 

unlikely. The absence of even a semblance of market institutions and the prevalence of corrupt, 

monopolistic behaviour was a recipe for the distorted outcomes that Russians are still living with 

today (Goldman 2003). Though contemporary critics flagged the gap between shock therapy’s 

prescriptions and post-Soviet realities, broad support in Western capitals for Yeltsin and ‘reform’ 

remained unshaken (Murrell 1993). 



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It would appear to be self-evident that national traits unique to Russia could reduce the 

effectiveness of policy recommendations formulated elsewhere. How could history and political 

culture not matter? Yet such was Western hubris at the end of the Cold War that this truism could 

be overlooked. Understanding why this was so takes us back to Fukuyama’s “end of history” 

(Fukuyama 1989) which can be seen as the culmination of intellectual and political currents dating 

back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The notion that laws of nature and human behaviour 

could be revealed and applied and the life of man perfected traces its origins to that time (Robertson 

2020). It was hard-baked into the political culture of the revolutionary upstart that had just 

appeared on the international scene: the United States (Mead 2001). When the US emerged after 

the Second World War as the most powerful country on earth, its approach to world politics was 

informed by the same faith in science and progress that had inspired the American founding 

fathers. As Nils Gilman (2003, 14) has documented in fascinating detail, the dominant paradigm 

in US academic and government thinking about international affairs in the 1950s and 1960s was a 

theory of “modernization,” holding that “the whole world was destined to converge with the model 

of modernity limned by the United States.” Though modernization theory was largely discredited 

by the 1970s, the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War restored the theory’s 

optimistic, Western-centric ethos to the policymaking mainstream. 

This is not to say that the makers of the West’s Russia policy were entirely blind to the challenges 

that the country faced in the 1990s. However, a weakened, less menacing Moscow had less hold 

on global attention than during the Cold War, and faith in the idea that, however chaotic, Russia 

was putting communism behind it and moving toward democracy and the market made it easier to 

overlook the danger signs and hope that all would somehow be well. Even as enduring corruption 

and chronic socioeconomic inequality continued to raise eyebrows well after Yeltsin had left the 

scene, two leading scholars argued that these were “common flaws of middle-income capitalist 

democracies” that were in no way “incompatible with further economic and political progress” 

(Shleifer and Treisman 2004). The explicit assumption was that Russia’s ‘flaws’ did not render it 

unique, that it was on track to develop like any other middle-income capitalist democracy, in 

accordance with the confident postulates of social science theory. The state of Russia and East-

West relations in 2023 proved quite conclusively that it was not. 

The fate of Boris Yeltsin’s attempt to put his country on a “civilized path” places Russia’s 

distinctiveness in stark relief (quoted in Colton 2008, 218). Timothy Colton’s (2008) masterful 

biography traces the first post-Soviet president’s rapid evolution from populist reformer to 

beleaguered modern-day Tsar, whose apparatchik mindset, reliance on so-called “red directors” 

(the existing managerial elites who steered and distorted market reforms to their benefit), and the 

decision to leave the membership of the security services more or less intact had begun to alienate 

his erstwhile democratic allies before 1992 was out. In his 1994 memoir, Yeltsin compared his 

efforts to the reforms of Peter the Great, which, he suggested, “have not been completed to this 

day…Although we [Russians] have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves” (cited in 

Colton 2008, 227). All the intoxicating forces of transformation unleashed by the events of the late 

1980s and early 1990s were no match for the weight of Russian history. 

 

Putinism 

The leitmotif of the late Yeltsin years was weakness. The economic consequences of the USSR’s 

collapse had barely bottomed out by 1998. The disastrous 1994-5 war in Chechnya manifested 

centrifugal forces that threatened to tear the country apart, while NATO’s march toward 



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enlargement and actions against fellow Slavs in Yugoslavia underlined Moscow’s diminished 

stature abroad. Nothing better symbolized Russia’s enfeeblement than the president himself, who 

seemed never to recover fully from the heart surgery that he underwent in late 1996. The state of 

Yeltsin’s health became a running joke. Moscow cab drivers in those days were never at a loss for 

ribald humour at the expense of their president, whom they contrasted with the scandal-plagued—

yet plainly healthy—US President Bill Clinton. 

This is the essential context for understanding the origins and nature of Putinism. In the words of 

Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy (2015, 739), by the time Putin arrived in Moscow in the mid-1990s, 

“[p]ractically every political group and party across the Russian political spectrum, from right to 

left, felt that the post-Soviet dismantling of the state had gone too far and advocated the restoration 

of Russian ‘state power.’” Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was the direct beneficiary of this 

sentiment. His claim to the presidency was built on his commitment to restoring the power and 

authority of the Russian state, which he framed explicitly in terms of the country’s historical 

destiny. “We must know our history,” Putin intoned in his inaugural speech on May 7, 2000, “know 

it as it really is, draw lessons from it and always remember those who created the Russian state, 

championed its dignity and made it a great, powerful and mighty state” (quoted in Dawisha 2014, 

267). 

Casting the 1990s as an aberration and Putin’s presidency as Russia’s return to its proper path 

highlights the divergence between Russian and Western perspectives on the country’s post-Soviet 

trajectory. It explains Karen Dawisha’s (2014, 7) important observation that while most Western 

analysts have depicted the Putin era “as a democracy in the process of failing,” the more accurate 

lens is “as an authoritarian project in the process of succeeding.” Putin and the elites who support 

him have seen themselves as correcting the errors of the 1990s and their consequences; by painting 

that decade in ever more dire terms, they foster their legitimacy as the stewards of a strong Russian 

state that guarantees order at home and secures Russian interests abroad. 

Central to this narrative is the argument, already prominent by the mid-1990s, that “the West had 

taken advantage of Russia’s weakness” during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years (Hill and Gaddy 

2015, 712). The familiar pattern of Russian history has asserted itself. Though their methods 

differed, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin sought to regain their country’s competitive edge in the 

ongoing encounter with an ever more powerful West. The contention that this had backfired, that 

Russia’s international circumstances were by 1999 more perilous than ever before, was an 

effective tool in the hands of those who had always taken a jaundiced view of market and 

democratic reforms. Such views were particularly widespread in the security services, where Putin 

made his career and from whose ranks he drew his closest and most long-standing allies. 

Once this background is understood, the logic of the decision to invade Ukraine becomes apparent. 

It was not the random act of a paranoid madman. It was the culmination of forces that had been 

building since the collapse of the USSR, forces which traced their origins to Russia’s centuries-

old search for security in the face of a globally preponderant West. As Putin biographer Philip 

Short (2022, 656) put it, “[f]or more than 30 years, Putin had seethed at what he saw as Russia’s 

humiliation following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now he had decided to do something 

about it.” To be sure, Putin’s state of mind is not irrelevant to the story. His advancing age and 

pandemic-induced isolation undoubtedly sold him on the distorted ‘intelligence’ that assured him 

that the ‘rotten’ Ukrainian state would yield in a matter of days. However, failing to appreciate the 

larger historical and geopolitical canvas that renders February 24, 2022, intelligible is to misread 

Russia. 



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Misreading Russia 

Why does the West misread Russia? Broadly speaking, there have been two culprits at work, both 

rooted, I would suggest, in our own ethnocentrism. The first is the conceit that the natural and 

social sciences are comparable, that the latter, like the former, can be understood by developing 

generalizations and deducing explanatory laws. While I cannot pretend to do justice to this realm 

of ontological debate (my graduate days in political science are long behind me), inattention to 

Russia’s distinctiveness contributed to the tumult of the 1990s and tarred well-intentioned efforts 

to assist Russia with the brush of insensitivity. It seems odd that efforts to understand Russia in 

terms of its unique history and political culture should be subject to criticism but such has been 

the case, with those efforts excoriated by “social science theorists who [have] painted area studies 

scholars as hopelessly particularistic and as obstacles to scientific progress” (Hanson 2014). That 

area studies should find itself on the defensive speaks to the institutional weight of academic 

approaches that value the chimera of scientific rigour above all else. To assert that Russia can only 

really be understood on its own terms is to question whether human behaviour can be generalized 

and cover laws developed to the degree that merits calling politics a ‘science.’ More may be at 

stake than a simple search for truth; it is no wonder that our grasp of what makes that country tick 

should have suffered as a result. 

The second reason that policymakers and scholars alike misread Russia is their failure adequately 

to appreciate how Washington’s universalist pretensions—aided and abetted by its NATO allies—

have been perceived in Moscow. One would be hard-pressed to imagine an approach better tailored 

to aggravate Russia’s historical sensitivities than the triumphalism of post-Cold War US foreign 

policy. To be clear, this is not for a moment to justify Putin’s actions; it is to assert that when we 

reconstruct the world as Putin sees it, those actions become intelligible. For anyone steeped in 

Russia’s long history of insecurities bred by the competition with a technologically superior West, 

US President George W. Bush’s 2003 assertion that “the advance of freedom is the calling of our 

time” (Bush 2003) had a chilling effect—particularly since it followed a US-led coalition’s armed 

intervention to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. A year later, Putin (2004) charged that a savage 

terrorist attack in the North Caucasian town of Beslan had been abetted by international forces 

seeking “to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie.’” In the same speech, he admitted that insufficient 

attention had been paid to defence and security issues and quoted Stalin’s famous 1931 warning 

that “the weak get beaten” (Putin 2004). In other words, Putin had no time for the lofty-sounding 

aspirations that followed on the heels of “the end of history,” particularly when pitched in terms 

of ‘universal’ values that were indistinguishable from Western national interests. To believe that 

being told by US President Bush that “democracies are good things to have on your border” 

(quoted in Charap and Colton 2017, 1794) would alleviate Putin’s concerns about NATO 

enlargement is a striking example of misreading Russia. 

It bears underlining how much Putin’s thinking has been shaped by the postulates of Realism 101: 

in a world that lacks any higher authority, state survival is paramount and thinking the worst of 

your adversaries is only prudent. Yet the perilous specifics of Russian history have rendered 

Putin’s take on realpolitik dangerously extreme. While there is much to criticize about the West’s 

approach to Russia following the collapse of the USSR, Putin’s assertion, in his February 2022 

announcement of the invasion of Ukraine, that “the United States and its Western partners…tried 

to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and utterly destroy us” falls wide of the mark (Putin 

2022).  

 



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We may have overestimated Russia’s compatibility with the reforms that we promoted in the 

1990s, but the desire to see a democratic partner play a constructive role in international relations 

was as sincere as it was rooted in self-interest. No rational Western policymaker has ever actively 

sought Russia’s destruction. Yet this is the conclusion Putin has drawn from the frustration of his 

efforts to win the security guarantees and privileges that he believes to be Russia’s due, conditions 

the West can never meet because we hold that the countries bordering Russia have the right to 

choose their own paths. East-West relations have reached a total impasse, and the tragedy 

unfolding in Ukraine is the result. It is not whitewashing the Putin regime to acknowledge that it 

took two to arrive at this outcome. There is no excuse for the savagery that Russia is now visiting 

on Ukraine. No civilized person can escape revulsion at the current excesses of the Putin regime, 

but there is also no escaping the fact that the West is not blameless and that our misreading of 

Russia helped us to arrive at the place we are now.  

 

Conclusion 

At the beginning of this article, I referenced Alexander Gabuev’s (2023) lament for “the Russia 

that might have been.” Once a leading scholar at the Carnegie Foundation’s Moscow Center (prior 

to its closure in 2022), Gabuev is among the thousands of bright young Russians who have left the 

country since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His is as informed a perspective as one could wish 

for, that of a thoughtful and well-connected representative of the generation that has seen its hopes 

dashed by the excesses of late Putinism. Yet the analysis I have put forward here suggests that 

even an observer as expert as Gabuev is capable of misreading Russia. 

Gabuev (2023) fears that Putin’s war in Ukraine may have “permanently foreclose[d] the promise 

of Russia occupying a peaceful and prosperous place in the twenty-first-century world order.” This 

outcome “was not predestined”; it was the product of “the choices that Putin and the country’s 

elites have made over the past two decades” (Gabuev 2023). Instead of seeing EU and NATO 

enlargement as bringing regional stability and enhancing Russian security, Putin and his cronies 

“increasingly focused on revanchism and animosity toward the United States” and replaced 

discussions about “a new, more open Russian state…with propaganda and imperial 

nostalgia” (Gabuev 2023).  

This characterization of the Putin era is entirely accurate, with one important exception: the 

assertion that Putin’s path represented a ‘choice’ and that viable, more Western-friendly 

alternatives existed. My argument is that Russia’s fate has been predetermined by geography and 

history. State survival in the face of a superior and, therefore, threatening West has always 

overridden all other considerations. It has fostered the growth in Russia of a bloated and deeply 

corrupt state at the expense of an atomized and largely powerless civil society. Gabuev (2023) 

himself notes that Putin’s imperialist authoritarianism “fell on fertile ground following the trauma 

of the Soviet collapse.” The ground was fertile precisely because of the specific historical 

conditions that the present article has sought to elucidate. It provides further validation of Karen 

Dawisha’s (2014) characterization of the Putin era as an authoritarian project that succeeded, not 

as an attempt at democracy that failed. 

To believe in “the Russia that might have been” is to overestimate the prospects for fundamental 

change in a country so steeped in geopolitics and history. But does this mean we have to abandon 

all hope? Russian authoritarianism is scarcely monolithic; methods of governance have evolved as 

leaders and circumstances have changed. Reform has given way to reaction, and vice versa, over 



134                 Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies, 17 (1)2024: 124-138 
ISSN 2562-8429 

the whole course of Russian history. It would be folly to suggest that this pattern has now ground 

to a halt, to contend that what we saw in 2023 is what we get for all time. Yet my analysis indicates 

that we should err on the side of caution. A combination of ethnocentrism and self-interest led the 

West to expect more of Russia in the 1990s than its circumstances made possible. We, in turn, are 

an inextricable part of those circumstances. The power imbalance dictated by the West’s enduring 

superiority in both hard and soft power puts a firm limit on how far Russia can ever evolve in our 

direction. Security will always come first.  

I understand that this interpretation of the current East-West impasse represents historical 

determinism. I have argued, in effect, that things are as they are because they had to be so. This is 

also a glaring example of commentary reflecting the time in which it is written. I have framed the 

entire sweep of Russian history through the lens of 2023, which found both Russia’s internal 

conditions and its relations with the West at their lowest point in living memory. As a lifelong 

Russophile, nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong, to be shown that the present 

is an aberration and that the governance pendulum will swing once again toward the promise of a 

better life for Russians and a more peaceful world for them and their neighbours. But these are the 

longings of my heart. Sadly, my head and a lifetime in Russian affairs tell me otherwise. 

 

  

 

  



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