Russians Like Symbol of Their Country Russophobes Invented, Bavyrin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 2 – Two-thirds of Russians like the bear as a symbol of their country even though it was originally developed by the country’s opponents and used as a propaganda tool against them, Dmitry Bavyrin says.  “In this,” he suggests, “is something from Dostoyevsky if not from Sacher-Masoch.”

            Why have Russians adopted as their symbol and even come to believe that it is part of their national tradition an image that was in fact dreamed up by the country’s geopolitical opponents to make fun of or to suggest that the Russians were a wild and barbarous people? the Vzglyad commentator asks (vz.ru/society/2019/12/2/1011291.html).

            “Initially,” he writes, “this playing at an association did not have under it politics, only as aspect of objective reality. The bear is the largest predator on the European continent and Russia is the largest country beyond which there extended still more enormous and unmastered spaces.” There is also the fact that “the Greek words for ‘north’ and for ‘bear’ are different in only one letter.

             And “finally,” Bavyrin says, “already at the time of the Muscovite principality, Russia was the supplier of specific goods – bear skins and living bears, including the white bear.” Europeans knew little of Russia except from the reports of diplomats, and one, von Herberstein illustrated his reports with a picture of bears.

            “There was no Russophobia or anything close to in in this book,” the Moscow commentator continues. But the image of the bear became associated with the image of Russia for people in Europe from then on. However, they did not equate the land with a bear. Instead, “the bear was as it were a particular feature of Russia but not its symbol.”

             But in the 18^th century, the British created a series of prints showing Russia as a bear, part of the tradition in English of “animalistic maps” based on caricatures.  The French took this over at the time of the Crimean War and gave the Russian bear a new dimension. If for the English, the Russian bear represented aggressiveness, for the French, it stood for “uncouthness.”

            “Gotfried Leibniz, the founder of Berlin Academy of Sciences, called the Russians ‘baptized bears,” to stress what he saw as their wild nature. “Later this analogy was used also by the Nazis when Goebbels’ propagandists showed Russia as a bear with “a characteristic ‘Jewish’ nose.”

            When the bear as symbol of Russia came to America in the early 19^th century, the positive feelings Americans had toward Russia then meant that the use of this symbol carried with it the ideas that Russia was strong “’in the good sense.’” Later, during the Cold War, the Americans invested the symbol with more negative meanings.

            “It isn’t surprising,” Bavyrin says, that the bear was for Americans a more important symbol of Russia than Red Square, the Kalashnikov and the matryoshka doll. “In Russia itself, it occupied only fourth place, behind the two-headed eagle, the Kremlin, and the birch tree, according to a researcher from Ivanovo State University.

             That Russians have now taken up this symbol and made it their own is “not a sign of weakness. On the contrary, it is an indication of strength,” an intentional act of redefinition. In Soviet times, the population didn’t know about American use of the bear as the symbol of Russia; but the elite did – and it tried hard to replace it with gentle Mishka at the Olympics.

            But now, polls show, Russians want to have the bear be their simple not as some friendly plaything but as a symbol of strength and power.