The Secret Plot to Destroy Russia | Alexander Mercouris

## Politics behind the narrative What the conversation makes unmistakably clear is that Russophobia is not a spontaneous cultural prejudice but a deliberately cultivated political narrative with deep roots. The antagonistic image of Russia as militaristic, backward and treacherous was actively produced in the European public sphere from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That origin story matters because it strips the prejudice of its supposed innocence: these were not merely popular misperceptions but strategic portrayals manufactured when established powers—initially Britain and France—suddenly faced a newly ascendant Russian power after the Napoleonic wars. Those early campaigns were not ephemeral. They found oxygen in newspapers and literature, and so the political judgment hardened into cultural mythology. Once embedded in fiction, cartoons and polemics, the stereotype ceased to be debated as policy and instead became a taken-for-granted lens through which Russian actions were read. The consequence, as surfaced throughout the exchange, is that many Western elites and publics now operate with an inherited script about Russia that predates modern events and therefore resists correction by contemporary evidence. To challenge it therefore requires not a narrow fact-check but a conscious political decision to interrogate and dismantle the story’s premises. ## Russia as weak but dangerous One of the most striking paradoxes the discussion highlights is the enduring double-image of Russia as simultaneously feeble and terrifying. This is not an accident: it is a functional contradiction that serves a political purpose. If Russia is fundamentally weak and prone to collapse, then Western pressure, sanctions and escalation can be justified as effective policy. If it is fundamentally evil and aggressive, then mobilization against it becomes morally imperative. Blended together, these claims produce a narrative that legitimizes confrontation while assuring audiences that victory and containment are achievable. This logic has been remarkably resilient because it is self-protecting. Admitting that Russia might be robust—able to absorb shocks, respond asymmetrically and project influence—would undercut the optimism that confrontation is inexpensive and inevitable. Conversely, if Russia’s threats were downplayed entirely, the urgency to maintain large-scale containment policies would fade. The discussion emphasized how these paired misperceptions were not neutral mistakes but mechanisms of political mobilization that have been perpetuated across centuries. ## Russia, culture, and the “good Russian” The conversation also examined how political narratives leak into culture in ways that perpetuate stereotypes even when creators are not consciously propagandizing. From nineteenth-century travelogues and graphic novels to contemporary film and literature, certain recurring portrayals—Russians as collusive in their own oppression, as uniquely cruel, or as slavish to a tyrant—have become clichés. The cultural power of these images is especially pernicious because culture confers verisimilitude: audiences ‘feel’ they know what Russians are like even when knowledge is thin. A particularly consequential cultural trope is the “good Russian.” As the participants observed, within the Western imagination a Russian can only be morally acceptable if they renounce or oppose their country. Loyalty to Russia is, in that framing, tantamount to moral bankruptcy. That demand has palpable consequences for Russian intellectuals and émigrés: to be welcomed in Western institutions or media often requires a public distancing from the homeland. This produces a social incentive structure that distorts genuine debate inside Russia and rewards voices that confirm Western suspicions—thereby reinforcing the cycle. At the same time, it spawns counter-reactions in Russia where critics of the government are sometimes dismissed as agents of foreign influence, further polarizing discourse and narrowing civic space. ## Gorbachev, reform, and Western bias The conversation’s historical sweep places particular weight on how the West misread late Soviet reform and its aftermath. Gorbachev’s reforms, internal crises, and ultimately the Soviet collapse are often narrated in Western discourse as vindications of an inherently backward, brittle Russia that imploded under its contradictions. But that account elides nuance: internal strains, elite politics, and long-term social transformations played decisive roles, and Russians themselves were agents in shaping those outcomes. The bias lies not only in misattribution of causes but in the refusal to acknowledge Russian agency and complexity. Simplifying histories into a narrative of inevitable collapse serves both as moral smugness and a template for contemporary policy: if Russia once succumbed to internal collapse, so can it again, given enough pressure. The result is a perpetual underestimation of Russian resilience and an overconfidence in policies designed to provoke systemic failure rather than negotiate strategic accommodation. ## NATO, power, and why Russia was excluded The archival and political genealogy the conversation sketches helps explain why decisions about European security—NATO expansion and the framing of Russia as an out-group—were not neutral technical judgments but choices shaped by longstanding rivalries. Excluding Russia from the post-Cold War European security order was not an inevitability of events alone; it followed from political calculations about power, threat perception and the utility of keeping Russia at arm’s length. Seen this way, NATO’s enlargement and the rhetorical marginalization of Russia can be read as continuations of the nineteenth-century project: managing a contested European order by framing Russia as a problem to be contained rather than a partner to be integrated. The conversation suggests that these policy choices have become self-perpetuating: once Russia is treated as an external menace, that treatment becomes justification for policies that in turn produce distrust, leaving little space for reconceptualizing mutual security in genuinely inclusive terms. ## What Russia can do to fight back If the narrative is politically constructed, the conversation implies, it can be politically deconstructed. There are two complementary routes for Russia to resist delegitimization. The first is defensive: strengthen societal resilience and state capacity so that attempts to delegitimize or destabilize fail, and so that simple narratives of imminent collapse ring hollow. The second is proactive and cultural: invest in soft power—travel, exchanges, open debate, literature, music and film—that humanizes Russians to foreign audiences and complicates caricatures. Crucially, dismantling a centuries-old script requires more than issuing counter-narratives; it requires exposing the politics that sustain those narratives. Making the case that Russophobia functions as a form of racism or habitual othering could put political pressure on Western elites to change course. That will only happen, however, if there are interlocutors on both sides willing to insist on honest debate rather than performance. The conversation also warned against simplistic reprisals: embracing isolationist or purely propagandistic tactics only feeds reciprocal distrust and validates those who said Russia had no plausible alternative but repression. ## Film, music, and culture examples The last part of the exchange focused on how artistic forms both reflect and reinforce political images. Historical artifacts—like Gustave Doré’s mid-nineteenth-century graphic portrayals and Custine’s travel writings—were singled out as early codifications of Russophobic imagery. Those works framed Russians as primitively violent and willing participants in their oppression; once canonical, such tropes migrated across genres and eras. In contemporary cu

The 250-Year Plot to Destroy Russia | Alexander Mercouris Alexander Mercouris of The Duran discusses Russophobia as a long-running political and cultural story. Mercouris explains how anti-Russian images were built in Britain and France, how fear and hate mix together, and why the West keeps repeating weak and evil stereotypes about Russia. He also talks about Gorbachev, NATO, Russian agency, and how culture, travel, and open debate could help break these false ideas. Links: The Duran: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDuran Alexander Mercouris: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexMercouris Alex Christoforou: https://www.youtube.com /@alexchristoforou Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00: 00:00 Introduction and Russophobia origins 00:06:58 Politics behind the narrative 00:13:20 Russia as weak but dangerous 00:18:13 Russia, culture, and the “good Russian” 00:24:30 Gorbachev, reform, and Western bias 00:33:03 NATO, power, and why Russia was excluded 00:37:28 What Russia can do to fight back 00:44:19 Film, music, and culture examples #Pascal Welcome back to Neutrality Studies, everybody. Today again live with me, the one and only Alexander Mercouris. Alexander, welcome. #Alexander Mercouris I'm delighted to be here and to meet you properly for the first time, Pascal, one-to-one. Of course, we've been in contact many, many times, but this is the first time we've met, and it has been an enormous pleasure. #Pascal Likewise, I really enjoyed our many hours that we’ve now had to talk about world politics. And world politics is what we need to discuss now. We’ve had a conference on Russophobia, and you actually gave a brilliant exposé where you looked at the—well, the literary heritage that we have about Russophobia. Can you give us the gist of it? #Alexander Mercouris Well, my view about Russophobia is that if we're talking about the West, it is a relatively recent phenomenon. It starts around the late 18th, early 19th century. It begins to take off in a very big -- 1 of 17 -- way after the fall of Napoleon, in which Russia played a central role. Russia had emerged as a result of these wars as the greatest military power in Europe. It had done so as a relatively new entrant into the European power system. And the established powers, primarily Britain and France, but especially France initially, were very, very alarmed by this. So straight after the Napoleonic Wars, we have a constant media campaign. In Britain, directed against Russia, the British media starts talking about Russia in very much the same way that they talk about Russia today—as a militaristic, aggressive empire, and a rather backward and autocratic empire as well. And then France takes up the baton, so to speak, and they put this all in literary form. And we start to get, from the 1840s, all sorts of expressions in French literature about Russia, which distill the Russophobia, if you like, that you're already finding in the British media. And these French literary works—Custine's *Russia in 1839*, that's one. And even more remarkable, a graphic novel produced in 1854 at the start of the Crimean War by the French illustrator Gustave Doré. These basically have created the Russophobic image of Russia that we know today. #Pascal And you actually explained how it moves forward, right? And how we see certain stereotypes that keep coming up again and again. What are the actual stereotypes that you’ve identified through this French and British literature that we find? #Alexander Mercouris So Russia is backward, Russia is savage, Russia is a tyranny. The people of Russia are oppressed, but they collude in their own oppression. The Russians are devious, they're aggressive, they delight in violence and cruelty, they are absolutely not to be trusted, and anything good that we hear about them is, first and foremost, Russian disinformation. And that's actually a very, very early development, by the way. The Russians are already being blamed for disinformation fairly early on. And we get more literary expressions of this that start to follow. And I discuss various novels that appeared in the 19th century, the second half of the 19th century, that repeat these various stereotypical ideas about the Russians. And these then continue to get amplified during the 20th century as well, where, of course, the confrontation with the Soviet Union provides a further pretext for them. And a particular point that I made is that one of the reasons these stereotypes and themes about Russia have been so long-lived is that they have never been confronted in the West. People have never come out and said, these are manifestations of Russophobia, a type of racism, that this way of depicting Russians, stereotyping them, is essentially racist. And for that reason, since they're never confronted in that way, people just go on repeating them. #Pascal -- 2 of 17 -- Why do you think that is? Because the West—and this morning I talked to our colleague Richard Sakwa, and he calls it always the political West—I mean, we've had several waves in which we recognized that, no, there are very strong forms of racism that were used. I mean, obviously, like racism based upon skin color, but then also this anti-Semitism is huge, and there's a huge recognition of that. Why do you think that there was never a recognition that we also did this to the Russians, and maybe even beyond the Russians? I mean, the Slavic, the Slavs, actually—and this is something that often comes up in my discussions with people from the former Yugoslavia, right? Croats and Serbs and Bosniaks that say, like, no, it's the Slavic world that's basically being excluded out of the political Western narrative—but that goes together with some form, in my view, of Russophobia, Slavophobia. Why do you think that that was never confronted? #Alexander Mercouris Right, because there has always been a political dimension behind it. Russophobia in itself was a political creation. I went into a discussion about how it came about, how it was deliberately manufactured in France. The original Russophobia was manufactured in France during the time of Napoleon himself, in preparation for his eventual confrontation with Russia. And Russia's position as a great power has meant that Russia's great power rivals—initially Britain, then Britain and France, then Germany, then the United States, but also still Britain and France—politically, they always had an incentive to keep it going and unchallenged. If Russophobia is ever to be quelled, that would require a political decision, firstly to abandon it, and second to confront it. And that decision has never been made. #Pascal Yeah, so you're of the opinion, of the view, that it is the politics of these two powers, and maybe by now also the United States and whatnot, that is driving Russophobia, and not Russophobia that's driving the politics. #Alexander Mercouris Absolutely. It is the politics, the geopolitics, the rivalry, the aggressiveness that ultimately drives it. Now, one has to qualify that, because of course what then happens is that Russophobic views get so entrenched and embedded in the Western consciousness that they start, in a way, to shape policy. So policymakers themselves come to internalize this image of Russia which has been politically created, and you get the feedback, and that affects the decision-making. But if there's ever a proper, sustained political decision to confront it, to expose it as a type of racism, then I think it would collapse very quickly. And at that point, by the way, we would be moving beyond the Russophobia. And that's the moment when perhaps a real rapprochement with the Russians can take place. #Pascal -- 3 of 17 -- Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there. It's just funny, fascinating. I mean, especially if you think about it as a type of racism, because the idea is, of course, no, I mean, the Russians are white mostly, right? Although that statement excludes all of the Asian part of Russia, because there are Kazakhs, there are others, there are so many ethnicities inside Russia, but... this idea that, no, no, no, among the whites there's no racism, of course, but there is. I mean, the basic motivation is that one, this exclusion and this stereotyping, and really kind of very dumb stereotyping as well. What... the one that fascinates me the most is the one where you're saying the Russian people are oppressed, but they're guilty of their own oppression. Can you elaborate on that? #Alexander Mercouris Yes, this is the extraordinary idea that the Russian people themselves have a servile nature, so that they actually seek and want a tyrannical government to be imposed on them. And when that happens, the tyrannical government engages in an oppressive way, and the Russians at some level almost welcome it and collude with it. I give a very ridiculous and indeed absurd example, which is from the book by Gustav Dore, the graphic novel that I talked about, where Ivan the Terrible basically annihilates the entire Russian population. There are only two people left, and he orders them to arrest and execute each other. And because they're Russians, that's what they immediately do. #Alexander Mercouris So, I mean, the whole concept is... #Alexander Mercouris It's nonsensical. And of course, it begs the question, if all the Russians have been killed by their own ruler, what kind of history does Russia have afterwards? Which Doré, by the way, never really confronts. But you can see there the example of how Russians are prepared to basically collude in their own oppression. The two last survivors, when ordered, arrest each other and execute each other to fulfill the order of the Tsar. #Pascal The point is, and these stereotypes are coming up again right now, right? And we're speaking on the 12th of June today, 2026, right? So after more than four years of the war in Ukraine... This idea of oppression, right, and the Russian people being responsible for that as well, it goes hand in hand with this funny idea in the political West that all you need to do is put a bit of pressure and then the Russian regime will collapse because people will rise up, the Iranian regime will collapse and people will rise up. Is this idea actually inspired by Russophobia that's then applied to other jurisdictions? -- 4 of 17 -- #Alexander Mercouris I think where it goes back to is the Russian Revolution, in the sense that, of course, there was a major political crisis in the middle of a war and an economic crisis in Russia. Now, of course, what the West does not acknowledge is that before the Russian Revolution took place, before the monarchy fell, there was a very, very long period of political change and political crisis within Russia itself that was organically developing. But the Russophobic narrative has always found it very difficult to grapple with the idea that Russians have agency, that there is such a thing as Russian society, that Russians actually have opinions, and that these opinions actually have the ability to shape politics in Russia itself. So the assumption is that despite all of its apparent outward strengths, Russia, because it's savage and primitive and weak—savage and primitive because of the contradictions in the system— ultimately is weak. It's a house of cards, and if you blow hard enough, it'll all come tumbling down. That, by the way, is very, very much the message of Gustav Dyer's book, which was written in the first year of the Crimean War—that Russia isn't as strong as it looks. It's actually really weak. All t