Kate Turska: The illusion of a familiar Russia

by Kate Turska, Co-chair of the Ukrainian Association of New Zealand (North) and the head of Mahi for Ukraine

For decades, the West has suffered from a peculiar blind spot when it comes to Russia. We have tended to see a country that looks familiar enough to be understood through familiar categories: European, white, historically Christian, culturally rich, no longer communist and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly travelling – however imperfectly – along the same historical road as the rest of Europe.

That assumption has survived remarkably well, even as the evidence against it has accumulated.

Russia has invaded neighbouring states, annexed territory, attempted to erase Ukrainian sovereignty, systematically repressed political opposition at home, exported disinformation and political interference abroad, embraced increasingly explicit imperial rhetoric and defined liberal democracy itself as an adversarial model. 

Yet much Western analysis still searches for explanations that make Russian behaviour essentially reactive: NATO expansion, Western provocation, legitimate security concerns, historical grievances, American overreach. Somewhere beneath the aggression, we are repeatedly invited to imagine, there remains a Russia whose underlying interests and worldview are sufficiently similar to ours that, if only its grievances were properly understood, some durable accommodation could be found.

I think this fundamentally misunderstands Russia.

Part of the problem is familiarity itself. We tend to recognise ideological and civilisational distance much more readily when it looks obviously different from us. China is one obvious example: explicitly communist and authoritarian, culturally distinct from the West and increasingly powerful, it is readily understood as a strategic and ideological adversary. There is an enormous amount to condemn in its conduct: Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, censorship and surveillance, repression of dissidents and religious communities, coercion toward Taiwan, support for Russia and more. There is little temptation to imagine China as essentially Western underneath an unfortunate political system.

Russia benefits from almost the opposite instinct. Because it looks more familiar, we are much more inclined to search for an underlying compatibility: a European, historically Christian society whose authoritarianism, aggression and hostility toward the West can somehow be separated from what Russia fundamentally is. That assumption deserves considerably more scrutiny than it receives.

It also contributes to another mistake: confusing different categories of threat. The country with the greatest capacity to challenge Western power is not necessarily the country whose political ideology, conduct and demonstrated willingness to inflict harm are the most extreme. Power, capability and strategic competition are not synonymous with evil.

A weak actor can be extraordinarily malevolent. A powerful actor can be extraordinarily dangerous. The concepts can overlap, but neither logically entails the other. Strategic threat is ultimately a question of what somebody can do to you. Evil, if we are going to use the term seriously, is a question of what somebody is willing to do to others.

Russia has launched a war of territorial conquest in Europe. Its conduct has involved enormous civilian suffering, attacks on civilian infrastructure, occupation, torture, executions, forced displacement, the transfer of Ukrainian children, systematic repression in occupied territories and repeated nuclear coercion. This is only the most recent chapter in Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, and Ukraine itself is only one part of a much longer story.

There is an important distinction here between capacity for harm and demonstrated willingness to inflict it. Russia has demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to incur and inflict harm continuously. Recognising that does not make other authoritarian powers benign, nor does it require some theoretical competition over which state is morally worse. It simply means Russia should be judged according to what Russia actually believes, represents and does, rather than being placed instinctively closer to us because it looks more familiar on the surface. 

The illusion of ideological familiarity

That instinctive familiarity is precisely why the same ideological scrutiny we readily apply to political systems that look obviously alien needs to be applied to Russia, rather than treating it as essentially Western with an unfortunate authoritarian government currently sitting on top of it.

Contemporary Russian ideology is profoundly anti-liberal, anti-democratic, imperial and fascistic in character. It elevates the state above the individual, embraces extreme nationalism and militarism, cultivates a leader cult, glorifies sacrifice and violence, suppresses political pluralism, rejects liberal democracy as weakness and asserts the right of a supposedly exceptional Russian civilisation to dominate peoples and territories it considers historically its own.

The Soviet Union’s official ideology was communist and contemporary Russia’s is not. But abandoning communism did not somehow turn Russia ideologically into the West. One authoritarian ideological system was replaced by another.

Nor has that ideology remained within Russia’s borders. Russia has a long history of supporting, sustaining and exporting authoritarian systems when doing so weakens democratic alternatives. The Soviet Union created, armed and sustained authoritarian regimes across its sphere of influence; North Korea itself emerged with decisive Soviet backing, with Moscow supporting Kim Il Sung and helping construct the new state and its institutions. Contemporary Russia continues that tradition in a different ideological form. It may no longer export communism, but it continues to export and reinforce authoritarianism as a model of power.

Economically, the assumption of Russian familiarity is equally misleading. Russia did not become a liberal capitalist society simply because Soviet communism collapsed. It developed into a kleptocratic system of state capitalism in which property rights are contingent upon political loyalty, enormous sectors of the economy are controlled by the state or politically connected elites, independent businesses can be expropriated or destroyed when they conflict with regime interests, corruption functions as an instrument of governance, and proximity to political power determines access to wealth.

There is nothing meaningfully libertarian about such a system. Limited government, secure private property, equality before the law, voluntary exchange, individual liberty, freedom of speech and association, protection from arbitrary state coercion and constraints upon executive power are fundamentally incompatible with the way the Russian state operates.

The fact that Russia is no longer communist does not make it capitalist in the liberal sense. Formal private ownership exists largely at the pleasure of an authoritarian state. If the ideological objection to China is that the Communist Party ultimately stands above the individual, law and private property, Russia should be examined through precisely the same lens. In Russia, the Kremlin ultimately does too.

A Christian civilization?

The same misconception appears in a different form when Russia is described as culturally or morally closer to the West because it is historically Orthodox Christian and presents itself as a defender of traditional values.

Christian symbolism is not evidence of Christian conduct.

Russia is constitutionally secular. The Russian Orthodox Church has enormous cultural and political significance, but contemporary Russian governance is not Christian government in any meaningful theological sense. Nor is identifying as Orthodox as a matter of nationality, culture or tradition equivalent to practising Christianity or organising one’s moral life around Christian teaching.

If Russia is genuinely to be evaluated through a Christian lens, then surely Christianity itself should determine the criteria: truth, human dignity, mercy, justice, protection of the innocent, sanctity of life, treatment of the stranger, opposition to murder and theft, repentance and love of neighbour.

A government does not become closer to those principles because its leader appears in an Orthodox cathedral, and neither does the society.

In fact, one of the more disturbing characteristics of contemporary Russian ideology is precisely its appropriation of Christianity and traditional-values rhetoric to support the claim that Russia represents an alternative civilisation to the supposedly decadent West. This does not mean individual Russian Christians are insincere. It means the state’s deployment of Christianity should not be confused with either the state or society behaving Christianly.

And there is something particularly strange about the broader assumption that Russians must somehow be morally closer to Westerners because they are white, European-looking or culturally familiar. Christianity provides remarkably little justification for such moral tribalism. Shared skin colour and European ancestry are not Christian moral categories.

Familiar according to whom?

More fundamentally, I am not convinced Russia is nearly as culturally or politically familiar to the West as Westerners have been taught to believe.

We see white, European, Slavic, historically Christian people and instinctively place Russia within the same broad civilisational family as Western Europe. But physical and superficial cultural familiarity can conceal enormous differences in political culture and historical development.

Russia did not possess centuries of liberal democracy and then suddenly lose its way under Vladimir Putin. It has no sustained historical tradition of liberal democratic government or peaceful democratic transfer of power. For most of its history political authority has been intensely centralised: tsarist autocracy was followed by Soviet totalitarianism, then by a brief and deeply troubled democratic experiment after the Soviet collapse, and almost immediately by the reconstruction of authoritarian rule under Putin.

The imperial element matters just as much.

What Russia is doing in Ukraine did not materialise from nowhere in 2014 or 2022. Behind it lies a much longer Russian and Soviet history of territorial expansion, domination of neighbouring peoples, forced Russification, suppression of national identities and languages, genocides, population transfers and incorporation of other peoples and territories into an imperial political project.

So when Russia is described as culturally familiar, the question should be: familiar according to whose account of Russian culture and history?

Russia has been extraordinarily successful at constructing and exporting a particular image of itself: a great European civilisation of literature, ballet, music, spirituality, intellectual depth and Christian tradition. But the cultural canon exported to the West is not the entirety of Russian historical experience, and it certainly is not the experience of peoples who encountered Russia primarily as an imperial power.

Empire does not merely conquer territory. It also decides whose history gets called history, whose literature becomes universal literature, whose language becomes the language of sophistication and whose culture gets subsumed into somebody else’s story.

Ukraine provides perhaps the clearest example. Russian imperial narratives have for centuries blurred or denied distinctions between Ukrainian and Russian history, appropriated Kyivan Rus as foundational Russian history, suppressed Ukrainian language and cultural expression, subjected Ukrainians to repeated campaigns of repression and genocide, and treated independent Ukrainian political identity as artificial or illegitimate.

Putin did not invent that worldview. He inherited and radicalised a much older imperial conception of Russia and its relationship with its neighbours.

Even describing Russia as simply a white Slavic Christian country reproduces part of the distortion, because the Russian Federation encompasses numerous non-Slavic, non-Christian and indigenous peoples whose territories became incorporated into Russia through centuries of imperial expansion.

This changes how Putinism itself should be understood. There are obviously features specific to Putin and his regime, but the intellectually serious explanation cannot simply be that an essentially Western country unfortunately became authoritarian again. There are striking continuities in the conception of the state: centralised authority, elevation of state power above the individual, imperial entitlement toward neighbouring peoples, suspicion of independent political organisation and a conception of security in which neighbouring countries exercising genuine sovereignty can themselves become threatening.

Putin is not an inexplicable aberration from centuries of Russian liberal democracy.

The Russia that talks to the West

There is another dimension of Russia that remains badly underestimated in Western analysis: the enormous difference between the Russia that speaks outwardly and the Russia that speaks to itself.

Russian external messaging and Russian internal messaging are often radically different things.

What is presented to Western audiences – through official diplomacy, English-language media, sympathetic commentators or carefully constructed narratives about traditional values, legitimate security concerns, historical grievances and Western provocation – is frequently sanitised and calibrated for Western consumption. It employs concepts Western audiences recognise and may sympathise with, particularly when those audiences lack the historical context necessary to interrogate them.

Listen to Russian domestic discourse, however, and the picture can become considerably less ambiguous.

Political figures speaking to Russian audiences, state media, ideological commentators and the wider domestic information environment routinely express ideas in far more explicit imperial, expansionist and dehumanising terms than those normally presented to Western audiences. Concepts carefully euphemised externally are discussed internally with considerably less restraint.

For those of us who speak Russian and understand the cultural and historical references, this difference is impossible to miss. We can listen to what Russia tells the West and then listen to what the same political and information ecosystem tells Russians about Ukraine, Ukrainians, Europe, America, the Russian empire, Russia’s supposed historical entitlement to territory and what victory is actually supposed to mean.

Put those two information environments side by side and much of the supposed ambiguity disappears.

Most Western audiences cannot perform that comparison themselves. They do not speak Russian, do not consume Russian domestic information and often lack sufficient historical context to recognise what particular words, symbols and references signify. Consequently, they encounter disproportionately the version of Russia’s argument that Russia has constructed specifically for them.

Sometimes, however, the problem is not inability but intellectual laziness. Russian internal discourse is accessible. Researchers, journalists, Ukrainians, Russians and others from the region translate and contextualise it constantly. Engaging seriously with it simply requires moving beyond the comfortable Western framework in which every Russian action must ultimately be explicable through NATO expansion, security dilemmas, American behaviour or some rational grievance the West can understand and potentially resolve.

If you want to understand what a state actually believes and intends, do not listen only to what it tells its adversaries. Listen to what it tells its own people when it thinks it is speaking to itself.

Do that consistently with Russia and the gap between the familiar, supposedly Christian, conservative European civilisation marketed to parts of the West and the imperial worldview articulated internally becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

And then listen to Russians themselves

It is equally revealing to listen not only to what the Russian state tells Russians, but to what Russians tell one another, particularly when they are not performing for Western audiences.

There is an enormous Russian-language ecosystem of interviews, social media, Telegram commentary, street interviews and ordinary public discourse (from Russians inside Russia and, importantly, from Russians living safely abroad) in which many of the imperial assumptions underpinning the state repeatedly appear at a societal level: denial of Ukrainian nationhood, entitlement to Ukrainian territory, contempt for supposedly lesser neighbouring peoples, nostalgia for empire or the Soviet sphere, acceptance of violence as a legitimate instrument of state power and the assumption that Russia possesses some natural right to dominate its neighbours.

Westerners will often hear a Russian say they are against the war and interpret that statement through their own moral framework without asking why.

Opposition can mean opposition to killing Ukrainians and violating Ukrainian sovereignty and international law. But it can also mean opposition because Russia is losing, because mobilisation affects someone personally, because the war has been badly executed, because sanctions are inconvenient or because Ukraine should, in their view, have been subjugated through some less costly means.

Those are radically different moral positions.

If you consume only what Russians choose to say in English to Western audiences, it is remarkably easy to construct a picture in which Putin and a small political elite are the problem while Russian society is essentially their hostage. Once Russian-language discourse is examined at scale, that distinction becomes considerably less comfortable.

This does not mean every Russian thinks alike, nor does it require them to. The point is that Russian imperialism is not merely something the Kremlin imposes upon an otherwise liberal society from above. Important elements of it are socially reproduced from below as well. The regime shapes society through propaganda, education and repression, certainly, but it also draws upon beliefs, historical myths and hierarchies with deep social roots. The relationship is reciprocal.

That is why Putinism cannot be understood simply as something Putin did to Russia. The state manufactures and radicalises these beliefs, but it also reflects and exploits a political culture in which many of them already existed. To understand Russia, we therefore have to listen not only to what the Kremlin tells the West, or even what the Kremlin tells Russians, but to what Russians tell one another – and what they tell Ukrainians and the other supposedly lesser “brothers” – when the West is not the intended audience.

The axis forming around Russia

This is also why the emerging alignment of authoritarian states is sometimes misunderstood when viewed almost entirely through material power.

Russia is not the strongest state in that alignment. Other actors bring their own resources, interests and ambitions. Russia is dependent upon some of them in ways that would have been unthinkable for Moscow not long ago.

But being the strongest member of an axis and being one of its principal ideological and destabilising forces are not the same thing.

Russia has demonstrated something particularly consequential: an extraordinary willingness to act. To invade, annex, destabilise, sabotage, interfere, threaten nuclear escalation, absorb enormous losses and impose still greater losses upon others in pursuit of an imperial vision. It has spent years attacking not simply individual Western policies but the legitimacy of the liberal international order itself, while cultivating relationships with states and movements willing to challenge that order from very different ideological starting points.

Russia has increasingly functioned as an accelerant: demonstrating how far norms can be violated, how aggressively democratic societies can be manipulated, how openly territorial conquest can return as an instrument of state policy and how effectively grievance, nationalism, civilisational mythology and authoritarianism can be fused into a coherent challenge to the existing order.

This matters because Western observers often instinctively identify ideological distance by appearance. Communist China looks like the ideological adversary. Russia, stripped of the hammer and sickle and wrapped instead in Orthodox crosses, conservative rhetoric and European cultural references, looks less alien.

Yet if ideology is judged by the relationship between the state and individual, attitudes toward liberty and law, treatment of neighbouring peoples, conception of sovereignty, use of political violence, tolerance of pluralism and belief in the state’s right to dominate society and territory, contemporary Russia is not sitting somewhere awkwardly on the edge of the Western liberal tradition, but repudiating it.

The mistake the West keeps making

After the Cold War, Western governments and intellectual institutions invested enormously in the expectation that Russia would eventually converge with the West. Russia became a difficult but ultimately European partner, while China remained visibly communist, culturally different and increasingly powerful.

That framing had consequences. One country felt alien; the other familiar. One country’s authoritarianism therefore appeared civilisational, while the other’s could be interpreted as a temporary political deviation.

More than three decades later, that assumption should be impossible to sustain.

Modern Russia has not merely become authoritarian internally. It has developed and exported methods of propaganda, disinformation and political interference; attacked neighbouring states moving toward democratic systems; reinforced authoritarian regimes abroad; reconstructed an imperial national mythology; weaponised religion; and increasingly defined liberal democracy itself as an adversarial model.

Its political economy places the state above meaningful property rights. Its ideology places the state above the individual. Its imperial worldview places Russian claims above the sovereignty of neighbouring peoples. Its propaganda places political utility above truth. And its conduct in Ukraine demonstrates what happens when those ideas cease to be rhetoric and become state action.

If we insist upon using a term as profound as evil in international affairs, particularly if we invoke it from a Christian or moral perspective, then GDP, industrial capacity, naval tonnage cannot decide the question. We have to examine ideology, intent, conduct, human dignity, aggression, repression, historical continuity and what a state has demonstrated it is prepared to do to other human beings in pursuit of its objectives.

Judged that way, Russia has an extraordinarily strong claim to being not a secondary problem orbiting some greater authoritarian threat, but one of the central ideological and moral challenges of the present international order.

Not because of Ukraine alone, and not because of Putin alone, but because of the totality of what contemporary Russia represents and what Russian political power has repeatedly represented: centuries of autocratic and imperial political tradition; conquest, subjugation, forced Russification and erasure of other peoples; an enduring belief in Russia’s entitlement to dominate its neighbours; a contemporary ideology that is authoritarian, ultranationalist, imperial and fascistic; a kleptocratic economic system in which the state stands above law, property and individual liberty; the deliberate corruption and weaponisation of Christianity; systematic repression of independent thought; support for authoritarianism abroad; active undermining of democratic societies; and a political culture in which many of these ideas are not merely imposed by the Kremlin but reproduced within society itself.

Add what Russia has demonstrated it is prepared to do in practice – invasion, annexation, mass killing, torture, deportation, destruction, nuclear coercion and the attempted eradication of another nation’s identity – and the habitual Western instinct to place Russia in some lesser moral category because another adversary is richer, stronger and potentially more dangerous begins to look profoundly misplaced.

Capacity for evil and demonstrated commitment to it are different things.

Russia may no longer possess the power of the Soviet Union. It may increasingly require stronger authoritarian partners to sustain its confrontation with the West. It may never again be capable of competing with the United States or China on equal economic terms.

None of that makes its ideology less radical, its imperialism less consequential or its conduct less revealing.

Perhaps the West’s most persistent mistake has been to look at Russia and see a distorted version of itself: European but estranged, Christian but corrupted, capitalist but kleptocratic, potentially democratic but temporarily authoritarian.

It may be time to consider a more uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps Russia is not a Western country that keeps failing to become what we expect it to be.

Perhaps we have simply spent far too long refusing to see it for what it is.