To sum up: Russia has enough strength and influence to challenge their most significant rivals, NATO. Russia competes with NATO politically and economically, which is why they might appear to be “anti” Western. The reality is that Russia isn’t anti-American any more than Americans are anti-Russian. We’re all just competing for the same resources.
It’s called competition, it’s the natural order of things. A country like Russia has the resources to compete to be top dog, and that’s what they will do, same as the US, China, India, etc.
Mosier, I see you have beat me by 2 minutes on your post, very competitive!
You may be surprised to learn that the US and George Bush is, in fact, wildly unpopular throughout the world, not just Russia.
So why SHOULD the Russians have a favorable view of the United States? What has the US done for Russia recently?
The aqueduct?
Omniscient, you’re making a mistake by thinking that now Russia is no longer communist, it is exactly like the West and wants to be that way too. Both are wrong. It’s not true that with the fall of communism, the Russians started anew with a clean slate. They built on the remains of the communist system. In many respects, the old power structure has determined how the new one looks. Putin is an exponent of that old power structure and the way of thinking that came along with it. The political system, which is *really, really * far being a representative democracy, is also reminiscent of the old system both in its formal and informal aspects.
As to anti-western behavior: the Russians* like to believe they’re different. They’re not European, they’re not Asian, they’re Russian. Also, they like the idea of being a powerful and respected if not feared nation. While the loss of the Baltic states cost Russia maybe 1 per cent of its total area, it feels to them like Russia was dismembered. They do not understand why the Baltics wanted independence, why they did not want to be Russian, why they wanted, for instance, their own language - what’s wrong with Russian, it’s only the best language in the world.
So while it might not really matter to us in the West, the Russians feel pretty strongly about things happening in what they see as their backyard, and they feel they’ve been wronged a lot. For example, the death of Milosevic in 2006 was a major deal and many people believed that it was Richard Holbrooke/NATO/the US/The Dutch Government etc. who had killed him.
- I’ll just this as a shorthand for ‘many Russians, but not all of them, of course, because there’s tremendous variation etc., etc.’
historically Russia has always had a great fear of feeling ‘surrounded’ by hostile powers, either directly or through their satraps.
What has Russia done for the US since the end of WWII? I mean, aside from not nuking us.
So the consensus is that there is absolutely no strategic reason for them to be adversarial? Interesting.
What does that have to do with the attitude of RUSSIANS towards the west?
Take their unsecured nuclear stockpile and hold them safely so that they wouldn’t be sold on the open market by newly minted ex-Soviet arms dealers. For one.
Wow, you clearly haven’t been reading what anyone’s said at all. It seems like you came in with some preconceptions, most of them wrong, and aren’t willing to waver from them.
Caspian oil pipelines, and not having NATO members directly along their borders. Both of these things are reasons to invade a neighboring country.
Svejk Well in all fairness the majority of Russia’s land area is practically empty, and the Baltic states contain more people than the current population of Russia.
The fact that the United States invaded Russia might have something to do with it.
1918-1920 Russia: US sent 15,000 troops to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok as part of an Allied force in opposition to the Bolsheviks
Actually, it seems that 2/3rd of the replies haven’t been reading anything, you included. You just quoted two reasons why Russia invaded Georgia. I’ve said over and over that that’s not the question I’m asking. What does the Caspian pipeline have to do with Russia’s opinion of the West? What does Georgia and Ukraine’s petition to be part of NATO (which was soundly refused) have to do with Russia’s opinion of the West? They have plenty of reasons to be pissed at Georgia, I’ve never asked that.
At this point I’ve just given up.
Well the answer is Russia doesn’t really have an anti-western sentiment outside of being economic rivals.
I really don’t understand why you’re having such a hard time.
Russian are wary of the West because they believe that the West is out to get them. They believe that strong countries always impose their will upon weak ones, and as the West is strong, it naturally wishes to impose its will on Russia. To them, that’s the way of the world.
It’s a combination of paranoia and an awareness of their country’s history. Americans can’t understand this attitude, mainly because America has never been anyone’s bitch.
And this is in response to what I wrote how? Of course most of Russia’s land is empty. That doesn’t prevent them from feeling that Russia is now too small and that the loss of the Soviet republics is a shame. As to the Baltic states containing more people than Russia, in my book 141,888,900 > 1,340,600 + 3,361,100 + 2,268,000, so, how do I put this … what the hell are you talking about?
that’s just simply not true. for someone who’s been chastising others for not reading posts, I’d think you do good in giving my previous post a go once more.
Ok, I give. I was thinking of other nations as ‘Baltic states’ that probably are not ‘Baltic States’. I synonymized it in my mind with former Soviet Republics. Like Poland with it’s 38m people for instance. My point was that in the European side of Russia there were far more people than on it’s Asian half where most of it’s land area was. I wasn’t disagreeing with you.
Well, yeah, that’s obviously true, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with what I said about the way Russians think. Also, just to nitpick, Poland was never a Soviet Republic.
Your post really didn’t say much about anti-western sentiment. Seeing themselves as different doesn’t imply that they are anti-western. Israel sees themselves as different and I wouldn’t consider them anti-western. Japan is different but not anti-western. The bit about how they should be powerful is exactly what I meant about being economic rivals. The point I was making is that they didn’t attack Georgia because they hate the west but because they wanted to control it and not us. They want to influence the pipeline so they can leverage a lot of influence over Germany and the Eastern European nations. Being upset that the Baltic states left doesn’t exactly imply a hatred of the west as far as I can tell. Europe is Russia’s main business partner. I don’t see any hatred in that. They wanted to nerf NATO for strategic and economic reasons. Basically I see it as qualitatively different from the Cold War, where the reasons are far more clear and not a murky blend of irrational paranoia and high flying rhetoric.
No one - in this thread - cares why Russia invaded Georgia. The OP wondered why there is an anti-Western sentiment in Russia. His bewilderment stemmed from some faulty assumptions which in my post I tried to disspell - but there is an anti-Western sentiment which is pretty strong, of which I offered an example too. Of course there’s strategic reasons for Russia’s recent behavior. However certain beliefs regarding the West but more importantly Russia’s former grandeur (which during the eighties and nineties disappeared but which is now being restored) also plays a role, and it certainly plays a role in determining the way the Russian people feel about all this.
Of course, it is true that the resentment in the former Soviet Republics as well as in the countries of the former Warsaw pact is due to fact that the Russians have been grade A assholes to them for most of the post-war period, and not due to any Western anti-Russian incitement, but the Russians don’t see it that way: the Slavic world and any other people that might have ended up in the Slavic world, such as Estonians or Hungarians or what have you, belongs to them to their sphere of influence. They resent the fact that this view of the world is not shared by the people there, they don’t understand it and they blame ‘The West’. Incidentally, this is a line of thought that is very traditional and goes back to Tolstoi, who was strongly anti-modern, but this tradition was also very present in the recently deceased Solzhenitsyn, who was both against communism and against capitalism and who saw both communism and capitalism as inventions of modernism, brought in from the West which had no place in Russia. Rather than blame the people who tortured him and the people who ordered his emprisonment, he blamed some amorphous entity outside of Russia.
And right now, the Russians are for the most part firmly behind their government, happy that perfidious Georgia is being subdued (I’d hate to be a Georgian in Georgia now, but even more to be a Georgian in Moscow), and they see any and all criticism coming from the West as a confirmation of their previously held beliefs that the West is out to get them and out to prevent Russia from being great once more.