Putin Regime Redefines Russophobia Even as It Uses the Term More Often, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 2 – “From Tyutchev to Shafarevich, “Russophobia” referred to those who “do not like Russians as a people,” an analogy with words like Judeophobe for those who do not like Jews and Polonophobe for those who do not like Poles, but the Putin system has shifted the term “from an ethnic to a state level,” Vadi Shtepa says.

            But despite this deceptive sleight of hand, Moscow still expects the term to have the same psychological punch it had earlier when it was about hostility to Russians rather than primarily about hostility to the Russian state, the Tallinn-based Russian regionalist and editor of the Region.Expert portal says (facebook.com/vadim.shtepa/posts/2282946065089704).

            An example of this shift is provided by Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova who labels “anyone who does not like Kremlin policy ‘a Russophobe,’ even though there are many Russophiles in the world – and in the academic milieu particularly – who do not like the present-day Kremlin.”

            But according to Zakharova, “they are all now ‘Russophobes.’”

            This is not simply playing games with words, of course.  By redefining Russophobia in this way, the Kremlin has reinforced the notion that the Russian state rather than the Russian people is what matters and that Russians are a state nation rather than a nation that has the right to articulate its own state.

            Unfortunately, because the Putin regime has changed the definition rather than the word, many do not see what is going on and reject the application of the emotionally-loaded term to themselves, something that also serves the Kremlin’s purposes particularly well because it leads some to back away from their criticism of the Russian state lest they be denounced in this way.