After the fall of the USSR in 1991, some Western and former Soviet leaders wanted Russia to join NATO. Thirty-five years later, such dreams have turned to mutual hostility.
Vladimir Putin’s often contradictory impulses toward the West echo sentiments and actions that go back more than a millennium. Their complexity makes it difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate what can or should happen next.
If US President Bill Clinton’s policies toward Russia seemed to swing between soft and hard, part of the explanation may be that Strobe Talbott, the president’s main adviser on Russia, wrote his senior thesis at Yale on the controversial Russian diplomat-poet Fedor Tiutchev (1803-1863), considered his country’s third greatest lyric poet after Pushkin and Lermontov.
Noted for his strong and often changing views on Russia and the West, Tiutchev expressed a warning that remains valid in 2026 (using Roger Conant’s translation):
“Who would grasp Russia with the mind?
For her no yardstick was created:
Her soul is of a special kind,
By faith alone appreciated.”
In his twenties, Tiutchev held the West in high esteem, but later took the opposite view. He chided his colleagues for the naivety of their hope the West might someday respect Russia.
Yet if an observer tallied what Russia has received from the West over the centuries, the list is impressive.
For a start, there is a debt to the Scandinavians who developed Novgorod and Kiev; then to the First Bulgarian Empire and its Preslav Literary School for the Cyrillic alphabet; to the Teutonic crusaders who pressured Pskov and other Russian city-states to cooperate against an external threat; and to Dutch shipbuilders and German scholars who helped Tsar Peter I modernize his country.
Voltaire and other Europeans brought Catherine I into the Enlightenment; Europeans worked with Russia to defeat Napoleon and stabilize the continent; US presidents mediated an end to Russia’s disastrous war with Japan; allied with Kerensky’s Provisional Government against the Kaiser; helped Stalin defeat Hitler; kept the Cold War cold; and, after the Soviet collapse, tried to create a partnership with post-Communist Russia.
For Vladimir Putin, Russia is a Third Rome — more pure than the corrupted first Rome and the Byzantine second Rome, which fell to Islam in 1453.
Russian civilization, according to Putin, is based on Orthodox Christianity but integrates the faiths of the many non-Russian communities under Mother Russia’s umbrella. Putin sees Russia not merely as a nation-state but as a distinct “civilization-state,” a unique, sovereign, and self-sufficient entity blending elements of the Tsarist and Soviet empires.
To him, this “Russian World” is superior to degenerate Western liberalism. It includes a shared spiritual and cultural space with Belarus and Ukraine, the latter of which he regards as a “tool” created by external forces rather than a real state.
Putin’s often contradictory assertions mirror those of Tiutchev, who lived, loved, and sometimes worked in Europe for more than two decades. He thrived in the literary salons of Munich as Bavaria’s King Ludwig I sought to make his capital the “Athens of Germany.”
Tiutchev spoke French most of the time, even with his two wives, but wrote poetry in gorgeous Russian that included old Slavic phrases.
For Tiutchev, Europe was civilization. He saw his native land as bleak, occupied by untutored peasants, and a place where everything was dependent on rank and the brutal corporal punishment of the knout.
Yet Tiutchev still endorsed the spiritual values of Russia, with its Orthodox faith.
And he publicly defended his motherland against a withering portrait of a slave society painted by the Marquis de Custine. While in private he agreed with the Marquis, he planted pro-Russian propaganda in European media.
Notwithstanding his reputation as a bon vivant, Tiutchev actively defended the image of Imperial Russia and criticized Europe’s decadent lifestyle. But when he returned to Russia and his family estate, he felt out of place and was dismayed that the peasantry had no culture and the nobility focused on power and privilege without the refined ways of Europe,
Tiutchev was both a Slavophile, dedicated to the unique traditions of Mother Russia, and a Pan-Slavist, who sought to unite all Slavic peoples under Russian leadership. Slavophilism was primarily cultural and domestic, while Pan-Slavism was geared toward international politics and expansion.
Putin’s doctrine of Russian civilization recalls the Slavophile devotion to Russian values, while his foreign ambitions resemble Pan-Slavism, except that his ambition extends into Western Europe.
For centuries, Tiutchev wrote, Western Europe did not understand that there was another Europe — Eastern Europe. It was a legitimate sister of the West and a more sincerely Christian world, cohesive in its component parts and living its own individual life.
This Europe had been shrouded in chaos but finally, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the hand of a giant “sundered this shroud and the Europe of Charlemagne found itself face to face with the Europe of Peter the Great,” he wrote.
Putin often references Peter and fancies himself as his heir. Tiutchev is a valuable guide to his thinking.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security, Foreword by Jack F. Matlock (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
