Russia’s Current Turn Against West Product of Earlier Successes in Copying West, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 3 – Increasing hostility to the West among all age groups in Russia reflects a pattern earlier described by Russian-American social theorist Liah Greenfeld in her 1992 book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (translated into Russian in 2008), Mikhail Sokolov says.

            That Russians have turned against the West has been documented by VTsIOM in a 2022 repetition of a 2000 poll which found that Russians in all age grousp who consider the West and democracy harmful to their country has dramatically increased over that period (wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/vlijanie-zapada-i-rossiiskaja-kultura).

            In an analysis of those result, Mikhail Sokolov, a sociologist at St. Petersburg’s European University says there are specific reasons for this shift in each generation but that the explanation for the shift as a whole is more significant (reforum.io/blog/2022/10/31/s-chego-nachinaetsya-nelyubov-k-zapadu-i-pochemu-eyo-stanovitsya-bolshe/).

            Sokolov suggests that Greenfeld had the right of it when she argued beginning in the 1980s that national identity in Russia has regularly passed through a cycle of change reflecting political crises with liberal reforms coming after defeats and periods of reaction in contrast after victories.

            According to Greenfeld, he continues, this cycle has three phases. First, when Russia experiences defeats, its leaders and people conclude that its entire path was wrong and that the country has to be transformed in the image of the West. Second, there is a period of optimism when that seems to work.

            And then, third, there comes a period when Russian leaders decide they have learned everything they need to and can turn their backs on the West. That they do and try to insist on their uniqueness and dominance, a position that works until the next defeat, itself rooted in that attitude, leads to the return to the beginning of the cycle once again.

            This pattern is so powerful an explanation, Sokolov argues, that it indicates that those who hope for the rising generation to break out of it almost certainly are mistaken. Not only will the young with age become more conservative and hostile to the West, but other groups will be swept along with the pattern Greenfeld describes.