By Patrick Armstrong, Website, 5/20/25

One of the things I’ve often heard and seen Russians say is that the West has always hated Russia and always will. When it needs Russia it will pretend friendship but when the emergency is over it’s back to the same. Britain is often named as the chief hater. I’ve filed this away as something Russians believe to be true but may be exaggerated; after all, every nation is the innocent hero of its own stories. And as Palmerston (of whom more below) said “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests“. Take Britain for example. At the moment London is the principal actor in the anti-Russia/pro-Ukraine camp; before that Cold War opponent; then ally against Hitler; then variable; then ally against Germany; then opponent in the Great Game; then enemy in the Crimean War; then ally against Napoleon and back and forth we go until the first and reasonably amicable trade contacts in Elizabeth’s time. From one to the other as interests dictated.

But a month ago I read something that made me wonder if maybe the Russians had a point. It was Orlando Figes’ book on the Crimean War and I was astounded to see the same anti-Russia tropes that we see today. (All page numbers from Kindle edition)

• The first difficulty for the Allied propagandists in this very ostentatiously Christian age was to justify going to war against a Christian country in support of a Muslim country. For a French newspaper, it was about stopping “the Greek heresy [from being] imposed by Cossack arms on all of us”. (209) In Britain by the assertion that Christians in the Ottoman Empire were perfectly safe (with the British and French overlooking) while Russian dominance would see “their places of prayer either demolished, or converted into temples of a faith as impure, demoralizing, and intolerant, as Popery itself. What British Christian can hesitate as to the course proper for such a country as ours, in such a case as this? (223) Whew! Russia, “blessed by inhuman Priests” (368), isn’t really Christian after all. (But what an image! Cossack sotnyas galloping through Barsetshire to sabre Archdeacon Grantley!)
• And they were as loathsome as their religion. The war was “the crusade of civilization against barbarism” (209) “The defence of mankind” against a “hopeless and degenerate people” bent upon the conquest of the world, a “religious war”. (224) “For the cause of right against injustice”. (223) Against “a country which makes no advances in any intellectual or industrial pursuits, and wholly omits to render her influence beneficial to the world”. (449) Insolence, arrogance and pride; a “bully”. (554) “A Holy War” against the Russians, “heathens”, “infidels” and “savages”. (650) An Anglican clergyman thundered that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack “on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime”. (223)
• These horrid people were unrelentingly expansionist. A popular pamphlet dating from 1828, On the Designs of Russia, written by a future Crimean War general, projected a desire to conquer all of Asia Minor and effect the collapse of British trade with India. (73) The foundation of this was the forged Testament of Peter the Great (102) which set out a plan to conquer Europe; it was widely quoted for years.
• To return to Lord Palmerston. Tremendously influential for decades and Prime Minister for the last year of the Crimean War, he was very anti-Russian. As far as he was concerned, “The main and real object of the war was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia.” (267) The fighting in the Crimea was just the start and his desired result was put forth in his memorandum to the British Cabinet in March 1854. The Crimea and Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire; Finland to Sweden, the Baltics to Prussia, Bessarabia to Austria, Poland independent. (540) Liberation movements against tsarist rule to be supported. (443) (Britain had already been providing weapons to Imam Shamyl’s forces in the long-running Caucasus war. (453)) Poland enthusiastically supported the idea (449) It was generally expected that the fall of Sevastopol would bring Russia to its knees and the Western powers could impose their conditions on the Russians. (269) But, when it finally fell in September 1855, Russia didn’t. Now what? France, which had done the heaviest fighting, was not sympathetic to Palmerston’s desires for more war in the Balkans or the Baltic. The Allies certainly weren’t about to commit the forces required to hold Sevastopol. And so they departed six months later. As the Emperor himself said “Sevastopol is not Moscow. The Crimea is not Russia. Two years after the burning of Moscow, our victorious troops were in Paris”. (535) And he was right: at the end the map hadn’t changed much.
• And, of course, people who objected to this were “pro-Russian” and therefore “un-English” (204)

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Back then Russia was an autocracy ruled by a man ruling by Divine Right (and the Brits happily allied with the last of the series in 1914); then it became “the world’s first socialist state” (and the Brits happily allied with that in 1941 – earlier if Churchill had got his way) and now it’s Russia again but without a hereditary ruler and an all-encompassing ideology. None of these changes, apparently, have made a bit of difference: still expansionist, all round nasty, contributing nothing good to the world, contumacious, better broken up but very unstable and soon to collapse. Our side, of course, from its morally immaculate position, is ever in defence of the Right. If you disagree, you’re “pro-Russian” and therefore “un-English/American/Canadian/European/everything good”.

We’re dealing with something here that doesn’t seem to be very fact-based. Maybe the Russians do have a point.