The Russophobia and Slavophobia of Marxism
Part 1. The historic roots of Russophobia
Poster on the GUM department store building, 1962
On the historic Parade of Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War on June 24, 1945, opposite the Kremlin and Lenin’s mausoleum, on which stood the leaders of the communist party and the Soviet state, portraits of Lenin and Stalin hung on the wall of GUM, and the colonnade of the Bolshoi Theater was adorned with portraits of Marx and Engels. Our victorious troops passed by them in parade formation; they were also featured in postwar parades on May 9. The ideological subtext of this is obvious. The Patriotic War was won as if not by the Soviet people (with the decisive role of the Russian people), but by the communist party, its ideologues and leaders.
Photo: rodina-history.ru
Marx and Engels were European “thinkers” who fiercely hated Russia and the Russian people, and along with them all Slavs.
But nothing more outrageously inappropriate than the portraits of two bearded Germans on the parades of Victory over German and European Nazism can be imagined, because Marx and Engels were European “thinkers” who fiercely hated Russia and the Russian people, and along with them all Slavs. But their Slavophobia and Russophobia is not a personal whim, but an ancient European disease, and the founders of the “true and all-conquering doctrine” were seriously ill with it. What is this disease, and what symptoms did Engels and Marx suffer from? Let's delve into this age-old problem, which is now highly relevant, has taken the form of paranoia in contemporary Europe, and has a direct bearing on Russia.
A Millennium of Hatred
The Battle on the Neva. Illustrated chronicleThe origins of Slavophobia and Russophobia go back to the Great Schism of 1054. From that time on, in Western Europe, inhabited by Romano-Germanic peoples, a sense of the eastern border of the “truly Christian world” began to form, beyond which lies something alien, mysterious, hostile, which one must fear and fight against. And since Slavic peoples lived there, Western Europe and the Roman See began a thousand-year struggle with Slavdom, often relying on the Western Slavic Catholic Polish ethnos.
The crusades sanctioned by the Holy See moved in two streams: the main stream went in waves through Byzantium to Palestine, and the other in the thirteenth century moved to the Slavic-inhabited east and northeast of Europe. Knights of the German Catholic spiritual-knightly Teutonic Order and the Orders of the Swordbearers (1202–1237) and the Livonian Order (1237–1561) established by it went with sword and fire against the “Slavic barbarians,” wishing to capture their fertile lands and convert them to their faith. This invasion of European “civilizers” was stopped in the 1240s by Novgorodian Rus’ weakened by the Mongol invasion, led by the Novgorod (now saint) Prince Alexander Nevsky; and in the Battle of Grunwald (1410) the combined forces of the Slavs under the leadership of Polish King Władysław II Jagiełło and Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas won a decisive victory over the army of the Teutonic Order, putting an end to German expansion.
The Battle of Grunwald. Artist: Jan Matejko, 1878
But under the influence of defeats from the Slavs and with the creation of the Muscovite state at the end of the fifteenth century, a large ideological myth about Muscovy and the “Muscovites” based on absurd phobias began to form in Western Europe. The well-known Renaissance writer François Rabelais (1494–1553) placed “Muscovites, Indians, Persians, and Troglodytes” in one row. In essence, this was already Russophobia, although such a term did not exist then.
A special role in spreading hostility to the “Muscovites” was played by the Baltic region, where during the Catholic colonization of the region, when Teutonic knights converted pagan Baltic and Baltic-Finnic tribes to Christianity, turning the newly converted ancestors of Latvians and Estonians into serfs on the conquered lands, a special layer of Ostsee1 nobles2 was formed, who founded cities and fortresses in the Baltic region and introduced feudal administration. In the sixteenth century, the Ostsee nobles accepted Lutheranism, declared the conquered church possessions their property, and reconverted the locals previously converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism. The Ostsee feudal lords acquired large land allotments in Livonia and Estland and began to control the main trade routes and harbors on the coast of the Baltic Sea, living in contentment and abundance.
But their profitable possessions became the arena of struggle between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (from 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), the Muscovite Tsardom, Sweden, and Denmark. The Livonian War (1558–1583) broke out—the first major war of Russia (then the Muscovite Tsardom) with united Europe, clearly designating for Western people the eastern limits of Europe, which ended beyond the Narva River and Lake Pskov. When in 1558 the Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) began the war with the Livonian Confederation and it was forced to go under the authority of the Commonwealth, the Ostsee barons, fearing that the “Muscovites” would take away their lands and wealth, began to frighten Europeans with the “Muscovite” threat and spread terrible fables about the Muscovite Tsardom threatening Europe.3
The Capture of Narva by Ivan the Terrible. B.A. Chorikov, 1836
Livonia was declared the “eastern bastion” of European civilization. Against the “eastern barbarians” in alliance with the Livonian Order stood Lithuania and Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Denmark, Sweden, and many mercenaries from all over Europe. The goal of Muscovy was declared by them to be “the final destruction and devastation of the Christian world” and the slogan of Europe’s holy war against the “diabolical forces” creeping from the East was put forward. A powerful ideological-psychological war against Russia began, including the publication of Russophobic books and the printing of “flying leaves” (leaflets), which included short illustrated texts for the mass reader. They were cheap, simply written, and reached a significant part of Europe’s population.
Russophobic propaganda was conducted in several directions. The “terrible Muscovites” were presented through images of the Old Testament. The salvation of Livonia was compared to the deliverance of Israel from the tyranny of the Egyptian pharaoh, and Ivan the Terrible was compared to that pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Herod. He was constantly called a tyrant, so that the word “tyrant” since then became a common noun for defining all rulers of Russia. The authors of the leaflets claimed that the “Muscovites” were the legendary biblical wild people Mosoch, with whose invasion the predictions of the end of the world were associated.
The second popular theme of “Livonian” propaganda was the demonstration of the “Asian” nature of the Russians. Ivan the Terrible was depicted dressed in the clothes of a Turkish sultan. They wrote about his harem of fifty wives, whom he killed, and leaflets depicted his oprichniki shooting for fun with bows at naked girls running across the field.
Livonian leaflets were full of descriptions of cruel executions to which the “Muscovites” allegedly subjected defenseless Livonians.
The third theme is the atrocities of the “barbarian non-Christians” in Livonia. The leaflets were full of descriptions of cruel executions to which the “Muscovites” allegedly subjected defenseless Livonians. The texts were accompanied by terrible engravings.
And, finally, disgust for the “Muscovites” was aroused by fantastic stories about their terrible manners (they dress wrong, eat wrong, bathe often, etc.). The theme of “sinful” family bathing in Russian baths by men and women, which until the era of Catherine II was a common thing in peasant Rus, was very popular4.
Juraj Križanić,5 a Slavophile who put forward the idea of uniting the Slavs—thus described the methods of Russophobic propaganda:
“When they write something about the Russian people, they write, as we see, not history, but a satirical and joking song. Our vices, imperfections, and natural shortcomings are exaggerated and spoken ten times more than they really are, and where there is no sin, they invent it and lie”6.
Thus, Russophobia from the Baltic region spread throughout Europe and entered the consciousness of Europeans. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, it prevailed as contempt for the “barbarian Muscovites.” But after Peter I’s victory in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), when a huge powerful power suddenly arose in the east of the European continent, with which Europe did not know what to do, hatred and “Russo-fear” were added to the contempt for the “Muscovites.” Thereby, the classic phenomenon of phobia (with the prefix “Russo”) was formed as a combination of hatred (with a touch of contempt) and fear. Complex relations between Europe and the Russian Empire began, in which Europeans always sought to weaken or deceive Russia.
Battle of Poltava. Artist: Pierre-Denis Martin the Younger, 1726
From the end of the eighteenth century, fear of Russia and Russians in combination with hatred for them clearly manifested themselves in the public and political life of Great Britain, explained by the rivalry between the Russian and British empires for influence in Eurasia, which went down in history as the Great Game. The very concept of “Russophobia” (russophobia) was introduced in 1836 by English radicals for polemical purposes, as a designation of irrational fear of the “Russian threat,” by which was meant not so much Russia itself and the Russian people, but possible threats from the Russian state to British interests in Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. The word russophobia in the English press of that time meant “fear of Russia,” combined with the creation of a negative image of the Russian Empire, which did not always imply hostility to Russians. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, the term “Russophobia” took root in the English-language press, from whence it spread around the world.
In the times of Catherine II, the saying was born in Europe: “The Russian is more fearsome than the Turk.”
Russophobia lived in continental Europe as well, which was frightened by the Russian threat, concocting fakes like “Peter I’s Testament,” in which Russia’s aspiration to world domination was mentioned. In the times of Catherine II, the saying was born in Europe: “The Russian is more fearsome than the Turk.” A special contribution to the spread of Russophobia in the Old World was made by the book by the French Marquis Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839. The author, apparently not finding satisfaction in Russia for his Sodomite sins, poured a bucket of slop on Russia and its society that spread across Europe. The book painted an extremely gloomy image of Russia as a backward state, whose inhabitants are lazy and stupid; where life is so disgusting that mothers mourn their children at birth as at death; and it is ruled by a stupid despot worthy of his wretched people. Custine explained the deplorable state of affairs in Russia that he invented by the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and the consequences of the Mongol invasion.
A special group of Euro-Russophobes was made up of ideological liberals and democrats who sympathized with European national-liberation movements (Polish, Italian, Hungarian) and saw in the Russian Empire an obstacle to these peoples’ path to freedom. With this are connected the surges of Russophobia in Europe during the two Polish (1831, 1863–1864) and Hungarian (1848–1849) national uprisings, as well as the Crimean (1853–1855) and Russo-Turkish (1877–1878) wars. This kind of “liberal” Euro-Russophobia found a response in the milieu of the Russian intelligentsia (A. I. Herzen and others).
By the beginning of the twentieth century, hostility to Russians (as to Jews) was very widespread in Europe, although not explicit. In different wars, European powers tried to attract Russia to their side, called it an ally, although in fact they were no allies of Russia but rather pursuing their own selfish interests. Racial theories proliferated in Europe, in which Russians were called a “barbarian people” and even “subhumans.”
Group photograph of Wehrmacht soldiers. On the school blackboard is written in chalk: “The Russian must die so that we can live” (Ger. Der Russe muß sterben, damit wir leben). Occupied territory of Bryansk region, October 2, 1941
The quintessence of these views was revealed by the ideology of Hitler’s Nazism. Speaking on July 13, 1941 in Stettin before his activists, Reichsführer SS Himmler stated:
“When you, my friends, fight in the East, you continue the same struggle against the same subhumanity, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, later… under the name of Hungarians, and subsequently under the name of Tatars; then they appeared again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism.”7
On the photograph of Wehrmacht soldiers taken on October 2, 1941, on the school blackboard was written in chalk: “The Russian must die so that we can live.”
Subhumans were to be destroyed. And Nazi Germany, by special methods condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal as war crimes and crimes against humanity, solved the long-standing European problem by destroying Jews and Russians. This was done not only by the “black order SS.” On the group photograph of Wehrmacht soldiers taken on October 2, 1941 in the Bryansk region, on the school blackboard was written in chalk: “The Russian must die so that we can live.”
“Russia – West. Thousand-Year War. Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Crisis in Ukraine. Why We Love to Hate Russia So Much,” book by Guy MettanAfter the Second World War, Russophobia in the West subsided. But now, in connection with the events in Ukraine, Russophobia in Europe is literally foaming at the mouth, taking the form of paranoia. The contemporary Swiss political scientist and journalist Guy Mettan in his sensational book, Russia – West. Thousand-Year War. Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Crisis in Ukraine. Why We Love to Hate Russia So Much (2015) defined this phenomenon as follows:
“Russophobia is a phenomenon of collective psychology, a psychopathy fed by biased interpretation of facts and situations in such a way as to ultimately present Russia, Russians, or their leader in a negative light. Like antisemitism, Russophobia is not a transitional phenomenon associated with specific historical events. It, like hostility to Jews, acquires different forms as a result of its transformation depending on the context and country. It is not the result of a conspiracy, as it is formed and openly disseminated by the mass media.”
Along with Russophobia, Slavophobia has existed in Europe from ancient times—the non-acceptance by “civilized” Europeans of Slavs (excluding Poles), whom they considered barbarians standing in the way of Europe’s progressive development. Slavophobia pushed the crusaders to conquer Slavic lands. And when their time passed, Slavophobia in Europe continued to live and in the middle of the nineteenth century received “scientific” justification.
The founder of European racial theory, French Baron Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), in his four-volume work, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855) assigned the Slavs to the “inferior race” and wrote that the Slavs, once in antiquity a white Aryan people, “went to the northeast of our continent and there entered into destructive juxtoposition with the Finns,” as a result of which “the Slavic language, having common generic characteristics of Aryan languages, was subjected to strong Finnish influence. And as for external signs, they also approached the Finnish type.” Gobineau attributed passivity to the Slavs “as a result of a large proportion of yellow blood” and, comparing Slavic and Semitic peoples, wrote:
“The Slavs in Eastern Europe performed the same function of long and silent, but inevitable influence that the Semites took upon themselves in Asia. Like the latter, they created a stagnant swamp, in which, after short-term victories, all more developed ethnic groups drowned.”
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau. Paris, Firmin-Didot frères publisher, 1853–1855. Original edition, printed at the author's expense in a circulation of only 500 copiesAnd further:
“In the West, the Slavs can occupy only a subordinate social position and are unlikely to play a noticeable role in future history, as they did not play it in the past, if not for the huge territory they occupied. Being on the border between Europe and Asia, the Slavs serve as a natural transitional element between their western and eastern Mongoloid kinsmen.”8
Gobineau’s theory was long ignored until in 1876 he met the composer Richard Wagner, who enthusiastically responded to his ideas and contributed to their dissemination through his son-in-law, the English Germanophile-racist Houston Chamberlain (1855–1927) living in Germany—one of the creators of Nazi ideology, at whose bedside Goebbels wiped away tears. One of Hitler’s biographers G. Schott called Chamberlain the “prophet of the Third Reich” and in 1934 wrote:
“German people, do not forget and always remember that this ‘foreigner’ Chamberlain called the ‘foreigner’ Adolf Hitler your Führer.”9
Gobineau’s theory of “higher” and “lower” races was adopted by Austrian racists as well. The Austrian monk and publicist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in the book Theozoologie (1904) derived the theory of “zoo-humanity,” dividing people into the “Aryan race” called to rule, or “people of God” (Gottmenschen), and representatives of “lower races” and the sick, whom he called to subhumans (Untermenschen) and called for sterilizing them or exiling them to Madagascar. Liebenfels designated the Slavs as "subhumans", as well.
Heinrich Himmler in a brochure on racial theory published in 1940, “The SS Man and the Question of Blood,” thus defined the area of activity of the Nordic “master race”:
“The main area of distribution of the Nordic race covers the coast of the North and Baltic Seas, Northern Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia, England, and Holland.”
“SS Man and the Question of Blood,” brochure by Heinrich HimmlerThe rest of Europe’s territories, in his opinion, are inhabited by representatives of other races and “barbarians” (Slavs), subject to ruthless exploitation and destruction.
In the end, Slavophobia and Russophobia, as a form of racism and aggressive xenophobia immanent to Western European civilization, took deep roots in Europe. It is not surprising that the founders of the “science” of capitalism and revolution K. Marx and F. Engels joined it, a significant part of whose intellectual legacy (in addition to describing the historical mission of the proletarians, who “have nothing to lose but their chains, but they will acquire the whole world”) is devoted to Slavic and Russian themes. Until the end of the 1950s, this topic was not covered in the USSR. After the publication of the complete collected works of Marx and Engels, it was noticed in narrow circles of the capital’s intelligentsia, but it was not advertised, and party ideologues in every way “pushed it back.”
The ice broke during perestroika, when people started talking about it, and the famous Soviet mathematician, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences I. R. Shafarevich published the brochure “Russophobia,” which highlighted the problem and contributed to the popularization of this term.
Igor Rostislavovich ShafarevichAfter the collapse of the USSR, people started talking openly about Russophobia at the official level, because it became a problem in many post-Soviet countries. Marxists also started talking about it. A milestone in the rethinking of Marxism in the Slav-Russian context was the study published in 2008 by the prominent Soviet and Russian scientist-chemist and social scientist, chief research fellow of the Institute of Socio-Political Studies of the Russian Acacemy of Sciences, professor of Moscow State University S. G. Kara-Murza, “Marx Against the Russian Revolution.” It caused a storm of negative emotions among orthodox Marxists of the old Soviet school, although Kara-Murza did nothing seditious, but only read and comprehended what is written in the complete collected works of Marx and Engels, published under the auspices of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, and cited only some quotes. But since it is impossible to refute them, Russian communists try not to notice this study. After all, Kara-Murza showed that Marx and Engels were haters of Russia and inveterate Slavophobes and Russophobes (especially Engels), and from there direct threads to V. I. Lenin’s views on Russia and the Russian people, which largely determined their tragic fate in the twentieth century.
This is what Kara-Murza writes:
“Stirring up the ideas of Marx and Engels about peoples is painful for us because they are mixed with hatred and rigid 10precisely toward Russians and Russia. This is generally strange to us, we could not believe in the racism of the Germans for a long time, even though they were already burning our villages, and to hear such things from people whose portraits hung in Russia for several decades in all offices causes psychological shock. But we need to calmly overcome it, without giving in to wounded national feeling. Of course, it would be easier to study this painful topic with the example of some other nation… But that’s how it turned out. Marx and Engels are thinkers of the West, moreover, thinkers who put forward a great doctrine of world order under the aegis of the West, one of the main models of globalization with the arrangement of the world according to the principle ‘center—periphery.’ And since the sixteenth century (since the Livonian War) Russia for the West is like a bone in the throat… Russophobia is an old, rooted part of Western culture, and we need to look at this reality without falling into hysteria from what cannot be changed. We have to live—both with the West and with Marxism, even if it has gone under the cover of new ideological layers. And that means we need to know them… The problem of the relationship between the class approach and ethnic ideas in Marxism must be known, because this chapter of Marxism directly influenced the course of the historical process in Russia.”11
It is hard to disagree with this, so let us delve deeper into this previously forbidden topic, read the volumes of the works of Marx and Engels published in the USSR and comprehend what is written there.
To be continued…
1/29/2026
1 Ostsee (Ger. Ostsee) — the German name for the Baltic Sea; hence “Ostsee nobles” — Baltic German nobility.
2 The Ostsee nobility is the collective name of the Courland, Livonia, and Estonia nobility, which ethnically belonged mainly to the Ostsee Germans or to the Swedes.
3 This situation is repeating itself these days in a surprising way, when the leaders of the Baltic dwarf states, fearing that Russia, having “dealt with” Ukraine, will take on them, threaten Europe with the Russian threat and seek to draw NATO into a war with Russia.
4 Given the anti-Russian sentiments of the Baltic Germans, Peter I, after conquering the Baltic States following the Northern War, left them all their property, wealth and privileges, including local self-government. After that, the Ostsee nobles faithfully served the Russian Empire, becoming the mainstay of the Russian throne in the region. During the First World War, up to a quarter of the officers of the Russian army were descendants of the Livonian knights. And the troops of the 1st Russian Army of the Northwestern Front was under the command of General P. K. von Rannenkampf (1854–1918), a native of Estonia, in August 1914. They defeated the 8th German army of General M. von Prittwitz in the Battle of Gumbinnen. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks offered Rennenkampf to join the service of the Reds, threatening him otherwise with execution. But he refused, saying, “To save my life, I will not become a traitor and will not go against my own people. Give me a well-armed army, and I will gladly go against the Germans,” and was executed.
5 Juraj Križanić (c. 1618–1683) was a Croatian theologian, philosopher, writer, linguist, historian, ethnographer, and missionary priest who advocated the union of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the unity of the Slavic peoples. In 1659, he arrived in Moscow, where he refused to be baptized again, was accused of supporting Uniates and sent into exile to Tobolsk, where he lived for 16 years. In Tobolsk he wrote his works: “Politics,” “On Divine Providence,” “Interpretation of historical prophecies”, “On Holy Baptism,” and “Grammatical research on the Russian language,” where he put forward the idea of an All-Slavic language. In 1676, he received a royal pardon, returned to Moscow, but soon left Russia. He died in a battle with the Turks near Vienna in 1683.
6 The Russian idea: the frontiers of Defense (lecture) // https://lektsia.com/5x60b.html .
7 Rodionov V. Ideological origins of racial discrimination of Slavs in the Third Reich // https://web.archive.org/web/20130727022004/http://actualhistory.ru/race_theory_origins .
8 Rodionov V. Ideological origins of racial discrimination of Slavs…
9 See: Mosyakin A. G. European Nazism: roots, crown, fruits. // Native Ladoga, 2024. No. 2. pp. 209-238.
10 Here and further, the emphasis in the text is added by the author.
11 See: S. G. Kara-Murza, Marx Against the Russian Revolution (Moscow: 2008) Chapter 2. The doctrine of progressive and reactionary peoples // https://djvu.online/file/lDf6zfRIVcfTh .
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