A question from one of my followers: “Why can’t we ever come to an agreement with Russia on terms that work for everyone? Why can’t we understand each other?”
Today we’re going to talk about the history of mutual misunderstanding and the reasons behind it.
How to Make Friends with Outsiders
To understand how different peoples can actually interact with one another, we need to look at some basic patterns of human behavior.
As humans, often without realizing it, we act according to behavioral patterns inherited from our distant ancestors who lived during the Ice Age. Back then, our ancestors lived in small groups but frequently met with others for large communal hunts or exchange of brides. This pattern continued for tens of thousands of years.
From those times, we’ve inherited the following behaviors:
First: We are loyal to our close ones because we feel that we can’t survive without them. This may no longer be true, but this strategy ensured the survival of our species throughout its history.
Second: We instinctively don’t trust those who don’t look like us. This fear likely originates from the risk of infection brought by different human species who might have carried diseases our ancestors had no immunity against. There were many species within the Homo genus in the past, but now only one remains—Homo sapiens. The problem of other species is long gone, yet we still have an instinctive fear of people who, though they look human, are different from us. This explains why racism still exists and why it’s so difficult to eradicate.
Third: We begin to trust outsiders only in two cases: when we do something together and when we share stories. In ancient times, cooperation was essential for large communal hunts when many groups would gather in one place to hunt migrating animals. With only stone tools, it would be impossible to bring down a mammoth or even a bison alone. But with the help of a few dozen hunters, it becomes a different story. This is why we find activities like volunteering, political demonstrations, and religious rituals so rewarding. The essence of this is the Olympics—combining the thrill of competition, shared enthusiasm, and communal emotions.
But our ancestors met not only for hunts but also for bride exchanges and military alliances. All of this was based on trust, and trust is born when we share stories. A story turns an outsider into someone familiar. You understand what they’ve gone through, how they act in the present, and what they strive for.
Our ancestors shared stories around the campfire, and from this grew everything—mythology, religion, science, and art. We still follow this program today. If we know the stories of a particular people, we don’t fear them. But if we don’t know anything, we are terrified.
For example, how scary are Italians to you? Probably not scary at all—because any modern person living in the West carries an immense amount of stories in their memory about Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, Italian cinema, and so on. I’m not talking about politics here, but about the instinctual perception of any Italian.
Now, think about it—how personally scary are Russians to you? If you feel fear, there’s only one reason: you know stories about Russians told by outsiders, but you don’t know the stories told by the Russians themselves. Put simply, if you haven’t sat by the fire with a Russian and listened to their story, your subconscious will likely view them as a suspicious outsider.
The Closed Country
The West has a poor understanding of Russia, primarily because it knows very little about it. This has been the case historically.
In ancient and medieval times, Russia was nearly inaccessible to travelers. While anyone could easily visit Italy or France, getting to Russia was a much more difficult task. It’s one thing to sail across the warm Mediterranean Sea or journey along Roman roads in the dry, sunny weather, and quite another to trek through forest paths full of bandits, muddy from endless rain or covered in deep snow.
Traveling within Russia was also difficult—both due to its climate and local laws, which restricted movement for anyone deemed unnecessary. As a poor country with a highly inefficient system of governance, Russia did its best to hide the true state of affairs from outsiders. After all, if you know your enemy’s weaknesses, you can exploit them.
Mutual misunderstanding was further fueled by the fact that intellectuals in Western and Central Europe communicated in Latin, while Russians spoke Greek—the language of Byzantium. Add to this the religious difference: before the Reformation, the West was Catholic, while Russia was Orthodox. Both sides considered each other heretics.
In the 18th century, a flood of foreigners came to Russia—English and Danish merchants, German engineers and doctors, Italian artists, actors, and architects, and later refugees from France fleeing the Great French Revolution. But all these people settled in Moscow and St. Petersburg, lived in tight-knit communities, interacted only with aristocrats, servants, and shopkeepers, and essentially knew nothing about how 99% of Russia’s population actually lived.
This continued until the 1917 Revolution, after which Russia shut itself off from the outside world behind the Iron Curtain. This didn’t happen after World War II, as many believe, but in the 1920s. For foreigners, entering the USSR was extremely difficult. Exceptions were made for socialist movement figures, foreign engineers hired to help build Soviet industry, and tourists who paid huge fees to see the Kremlin and the imperial palaces. But these tourists were not allowed—and could not—move freely throughout the country.
Do you know what this led to? Primarily, it led to Russian stories disappearing from the Western literary scene. There was a brief period in the late 19th century when Russian writers—Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky—were actively translated and read. But Soviet rulers stifled the free development of literature, only releasing works that had the party’s blessing.
If the party didn’t approve of you, you couldn’t be a writer—you simply wouldn’t get published. And if that’s the case, how could you possibly make it to the West? Who would even know about you, no matter how much of a genius you were?
As a result, Western intellectuals and readers got used to living without us. And returning to the literary fold is nearly impossible: people simply don’t trust you because you’re from Russia. They don’t give you a chance because they don’t expect you to be capable of writing well or making money for publishers and agents. The English—yes. The Swedes—yes. The French—yes. But the Russians—no. After all, if we don’t know your stories, they must not be interesting.
The Consequences of Ignorance
The West’s poor understanding of how Russia is structured internally has always played into the hands of Russian rulers. Due to its isolation, the USSR instilled such fear in the United States that it sparked the Cold War. From the outside, the USSR seemed much more powerful and frightening than it actually was. Throughout the Soviet years, the country was poor, mired in corruption, and suffering from extreme inefficiency. People would think one thing, say another, and do a third—just to survive in the circumstances they found themselves in.
My great-grandmother considered a piece of sugar a treat. My grandmother couldn’t even cook at first because there was nothing to cook with. In the 1930s and 1940s, a normal meal was simply a piece of bread.
I grew up in the 1980s, but in my childhood, there were no toasters, no mixers, and no blenders—we didn’t even know what they were. Do you know how many TV channels there were in the early 1990s? Two and a half. Two federal channels, and half the day was filled with local TV.
You couldn’t just travel to another city and stay in a hotel—it was too expensive. And who would even let you stay in a hotel if you weren’t traveling for work or part of an official tourist group?
We didn’t even dream of owning a car—it was out of reach. We never went to restaurants. The first time I went to a restaurant was when I was 18 or 19, and that happened after the collapse of the USSR. And, by the way, I am the daughter of highly professional engineers. If I had been born in the USA, I would definitely belong to the upper-middle class. Well, that was the upper-middle class we had in the USSR.
But who among those making decisions in Washington or London knew how things really were in the USSR? They relied on what experts and spies told them. And where did the experts get their information? They had either state-sponsored media, which pushed propaganda narratives, or the accounts of immigrants, who were few and far between.
And spies always have their own interests. If you present the USSR as a terrifying threat to the entire world, you’ll get a lot of money. But if you write the truth, your work loses its value.
The One-Way Game
After the collapse of the USSR, Western scholars who were fluent in Russian and skilled at working with historical documents started coming to Russia. But these were academics whose work was read only by specialists and a few fans of Russian history. There was no cultural bridge between Russia and the West; the exchange went in only one direction. Starting in the 1990s, a flood of Western films, books, and later, internet content, flooded into Russia. Everything cool and fashionable came from the West, and the population eagerly consumed it.
But in the opposite direction, there was no exchange. Only festival films, which no one in Russia had ever heard of, and reports about oligarchs, Olympic champions, beautiful spies, and hired killers reached the West. That was it—nothing more.
Before the war in Ukraine, the media would only cover Russia if Putin attacked some other “brotherly” republic or if there was a major disaster. Even then, these reports were fleeting. I tracked this intentionally. My friends living in Russia listened to propaganda and genuinely feared that the West wanted to invade Russia. I specifically took screenshots from CNN, Fox News, and the BBC to prove to them that no one in the West was even thinking about attacking Russia. The West wasn’t thinking about Russia at all.
And it’s understandable. When the military threat from the USSR disappeared, everyone just got on with their own affairs. And then it turned out that in Eastern Europe, a festering boil was growing—one no one had noticed because everyone was looking the other way.
Fake Narratives
In the USSR, only two fields of art reached unprecedented heights: ballet—because there was no need to speak—and propaganda art—because it spoke to what was beneficial to the current leadership.
During the Soviet era, Moscow actively supported left-wing movements of all kinds, skillfully pulling them to its side. Often, this wasn’t about money. For instance, an author could be “bribed” by a huge circulation of their books or by lavish receptions with crowds of adoring fans. It was about creating awe, confusion, and even fear—there were many ways to achieve this. But the best method was simple: logical persuasion. You focus only on the facts that benefit you, dismiss the ones that don’t, construct a logical chain, and repeat it multiple times from various sources.
This creates the illusion of “everyone’s talking about it” and “well, it’s obvious!”
If you plant the right narrative in someone’s mind, they’ll do exactly what you want them to. The key is to make them believe they’re fighting for all that’s good against all that’s evil. Get them emotionally invested in something, and they’ll defend your viewpoint, because they don’t want to look foolish.
They’ll fight for their own righteousness, pouring all their energy into it.
I’ve seen many times when Western press and politicians repeat Moscow’s propaganda narratives. Some of them are fully aware of what’s going on and go along with it because it personally benefits them. But there are plenty who simply don’t realize they’re being manipulated and that they’ve been fed a distorted narrative. They then run to social media and spread it further—like a virus.
How to spot a fake narrative from the truth? There’s only one way: comprehensive knowledge of the subject. If you know a lot, you’ll notice when a fake narrative contradicts your knowledge. But if you don’t know anything, you’ll swallow whatever is fed to you.
Misinterpretations
Another major issue is the incorrect interpretations by Western historians, political scientists, and commentators. There are excellent specialists on Russia, but their voices are usually drowned out by the loud chorus of those who judge Russia either based on themselves or some fantasy-based notions from who knows where.
To understand what’s going on, we must consider the following:
The majority of Russian rulers belong to the generation born in the 1950s. They studied at Soviet universities in the 1970s when all social sciences were extremely ideologized, more like church dogmas than actual academic disciplines. In fact, some fields, like political science, didn’t even exist. So, the narratives in the minds of Russian rulers don’t correspond to the narratives many Western commentators have about them.
For example, some people claim that Russia’s main foreign policy goal is to close strategic gaps along its borders. They say Russia needs to reach the Carpathians to prevent a potential invasion from the West.
What invasion from the West? What are you talking about?
Russian rulers consider Europe to be weak, fragmented, and ineffective. They’re well aware that Europe has neither a capable army, nor a developed military-industrial complex, nor solidarity. In fact, Europe hasn’t been helping Ukraine much because it simply doesn’t have the resources to do so. As one Russian official said, “Europe has money, and that’s it. What are they going to use to defend themselves from us? Wads of money?”
There’s no need to invent things, and there’s no need to project your beliefs and knowledge onto people who live in entirely different conditions and think about different things.Look at official documents with real consequences and track where real money flows.
Before the war, every high-ranking official had property in the West, and many still do. Plus, often their children and grandchildren live in the West and have no intention of returning to Russia.
The war in Ukraine started for only one reason: Mr. Putin began to lose popularity—which was already apparent from sociological data—and he believed that a quick, bloodless conquest of Ukraine would rally public support, just like it did in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Do you think he only gets Botox in his face? No. His power also needed “beauty injections.” But something went wrong.
The great leader simply made a mistake, overestimating his strength and underestimating the Ukrainians. And while the bureaucratic apparatus and ordinary people initially panicked, they eventually fell in line because Vladimir Putin figured out how to win them over. He promised that those who supported him would profit from the war and those who opposed him would end up behind bars. See, it’s simple!
How to Fix the Situation
Russia isn’t going anywhere on the map of Europe. It’s unlikely to collapse because, economically and politically, that would be highly detrimental. The West, one way or another, will have to establish relations with Russia. And if it wants a relatively stable peace and mutually beneficial agreements, it must address the root cause of the mutual misunderstanding: the curse of ignorance. It’s important not only to study the rulers but also all the social strata—otherwise, nothing will be clear.
