Not at all. I’m also aware that when similarly threatened by Germany before WW1, the UK also allied with a very different Russia. Britain’s foreign policy isn’t always right, but it has always been governed by a certain calm and coolness of judgement, and that includes allying with nations which it doesn’t like and/or may have other, longer-term strategic arguments with.
You don’t actually know anything about the history of colonialism, and what separates the U.S. and RUssia from the big colonial powers, do you? IIRC< even Germany wound up with mroe colonies than the U.S.
Whether it was true or not, one impetus for the burgeoning democracy, socialism, and communism movements was a sense that Russia’s time had arrived - that it was now a real nation able to forge its own destiny as a Great Power, a partly nationalistic and partly ethnicist. In the half-century before WW1, Russia went from being a considered a backwater power of almost no importance to an industrializing nation, and with accompanying fertility in literature and science. The famous Russian Academy, though older than that, became important and very well respected.
In short, Russia transformed from a late-medeival society into a modern nation.
Except possibly for Chechnya, little of what the Russians have done post-WWII seems to have been motivated by hatred for any particular nation. Their primary motivation is fear or paranoia, I’d say.
OTOH, lots of folks hate them some Russians. (Western) Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Georgians, and others who were part of the former USSR have no fondness for Russians, in my experience. This is especially true of people who are old enough to have grown up under Russian domination, though there are youthful nationalists too.
This thread is a whole heap of confusion. But suffice to say that anybody who follows British politics would have no problems with the statement ‘why do the Russians hate the British so much’ even if it is way to broad.
First there’s little to no animosity between the general populations, its not exactly a Serbia-Kosovo affair. Secondly its also a recent occurrence not a historical one, although there have been many periods of hostility between the two in the past there’s no real link to current contentions.
So I would point out several specific events that have poisoned relations between the countries:
The Alexander Litvinko affair which pissed of the British government because they assassinated someone in the UK in 2006
The Russianscaught us spying on them which we strenuously denied until we admitted it. Also 2006.
Russia kicked the British Council out of its Yekaterinburg offices in 2007 and harassed British diplomats.
Berezovsky talks about overthrowing the Russian regime in London - UK refuses to extradite, Russians get more pissed.
2007 UK expels 4 Russian diplomats, some stuff about an important Russian spymaster accusing Britain of undermining Russia but I can’t remember the details
Another billionaire Russian seeks refuge in London (its always London). Yuri Nikitin I don’t really know what happened.
There’s a lot more stuff about Nabucco and various oil pipelines through the Baltics and Turkey which the UK hasn’t supported but this is what I believe has really poisoned govt. relations between the two in the last decade, no matter who was in power. And of course the general criticism of human rights that the UK regularly makes doesn’t endear us to them anyway.
PS: I tried to find cites but much is of the top of my head, so feel free to correct me.
OP, I think you’re just suffering from confirmation bias. You’re far more likely to notice hostility between Russia and the UK than between Russia and any other country. There certainly was hostility between Russia and Germany in the '80s. Remember the Berlin Wall?
It’s certainly not something I’ve ever encountered in Russians I’ve known - and I’ve lived in Eastern Europe and taught EFL for 13 years so have met more Russians than the average Brit (I was out with a few Russians last weekend), so you’d think that at least once it would come up that our countries don’t like each other.
If there really is more Russian hostility to the UK than to other European countries, it’s probably just because of the cold war when the UK and the US were so closely allied against Russia. However, most of Western Europe was involved in this too, plus a lot of the rest of the developed world, and the Cold War is long over, so this still doesn’t seem very likely to me.
Except he’s talking about the present day, so the Berlin Wall and the Cold War have nothing to do with it. And there is very clearly high level hostility between the leaderships of the UK and Russia, the general pop don’t give a crap so its unsurprising your friends don’t have any hostility to the UK.
Compare and contrast Putin’s attitude towards Gerhard Schroder versus Tony Blair, Schroder’s commitment to Gazprom and the Nord stream pipeline (what I alluded to earlier) put Germany on very good terms with Putin who saw the two countries energy interests aligned.
The UK on the other hand favoured the interests of the CEEC’s which was directly opposed to Germany’s (well Schroder’s, there was a lot of opposition) and Russia. When you have an important country directly opposing you in your key market that does not make for friendly relations.
Also France sold Mistrals, an amphibious assault ship to Russia and Britain objected to that as well. More reasons for the Russians to get annoyed.
All of this was underlying that little time line I posted earlier.
