Moscow's Anglo Obsession

Britain in the Russian Strategic Imagination

"All the world knows that France sneezes when England takes a pinch of snuff."
― Nikolai Gogol, The Diary of a Madman

Russia has never simply feared collapse—it has reimagined it as conspiracy. For over two centuries, Moscow has interpreted every crisis not as a failure of policy or power, but as evidence of foreign subversion. In this worldview, defeats are not miscalculations but betrayals; instability is not organic but engineered. From the gilded intrigues of Catherine the Great’s court to the cold security briefings of Nikolai Patrushev, a single conviction persists: the true threat is not just outside Russia’s borders. It resides within—disguised as reform, civility, or dissent—quietly corroding the state from the inside out. And behind it all, there is almost always the same figure. The same diagnosis. The same enemy. For Russia, the face of foreign subversion has a name: the Anglo.

In most nations, conspiracy is episodic—invoked in moments of crisis. France recalls 1789, Turkey the Treaty of Sèvres. But in Russia, conspiracy is foundational. Suspicion is not a reaction—it is a political philosophy. Institutions are built around it; identity is shaped through it. Betrayal is not an aberration. It is expected.

This sensibility took root in the late 18th century. Catherine the Great, eager to cultivate her image as an enlightened monarch, corresponded with Voltaire and embraced Freemasonry. But the French Revolution darkened that enthusiasm. Regicide and ideological fanaticism turned admiration into alarm. Masonic lodges were shuttered, reformist advisors dismissed. The West no longer represented refinement. It became a vector of instability.

From this reversal emerged a central antagonist: Britain. Unlike the revolutionary fervor of France, Britain’s threat was subtler—cool, methodical, quiet. The figure of the “Anglo” took form: not merely a statesman or merchant, but the embodiment of liberal modernity—rational, secular, calculating. In Russian thought, he stood for a system that dissolved rather than destroyed. His diplomacy masked domination; his liberalism corroded from within. To Dostoevsky, he was the whisperer of doubt and fragmentation. To Ilyin, the schemer behind moral disarmament. The Anglo did not arrive with troops. He arrived with premises.

The Crimean War (1853–56) seemed to confirm this reading. Russia’s ambitions in the Ottoman Empire were thwarted, Sevastopol fell, and the West—led by Britain—emerged triumphant. But for Russian elites, the defeat was not strategic. It was betrayal, engineered by a power that feared Orthodox ascendancy. The 1878 Congress of Berlin, where Disraeli reversed Russian gains in the Balkans, reinforced this narrative. Victories won in battle were nullified at the negotiating table. Maps were not redrawn—they were rewritten against Russia.

Writers gave this paranoia a moral and cultural architecture. Pushkin, in The Captain’s Daughter, framed the Russian steppe as morally untamed but spiritually free—implicitly opposed to the managed order of Europe. Dostoevsky’s Demons depicted liberalism as an imported toxin. Tolstoy’s War and Peace positioned Russian instinct and unity against the sterile logic of foreign diplomacy. The Anglo, in this literary universe, was less a nation than an idea: precise, dispassionate, and existentially corrosive.

Philosophers crystallized the threat into ideology. The Slavophiles—Khomyakov and Kireevsky—posited sobornost, a sacred communal bond, as the antithesis to Britain’s individualism. For them, Britain’s social contract replaced the divine with the transactional. Leontiev warned that British constitutionalism was not harmless governance but a strategic solvent—designed to break down the autocratic state from within. Nikolai Fyodorov elevated the confrontation to metaphysical terms: Russia’s destiny was resurrection and transcendence; Britain’s, mechanization and entropy.

By the early 20th century, this anxiety took theological form. Vladimir Solovyov warned of an Antichrist born of Western rationalism, cloaked in the language of diplomacy and law. Ivan Ilyin, writing in exile, saw British cultural influence as a tool of spiritual sterilization. In his view, the Westernized Russian was not enlightened—he was hollowed out, primed to betray his country in the name of progress.

During the interwar period, Eurasianist theorists like Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Lev Gumilev constructed a civilizational counter-theory. Russia, they argued, was not part of Europe—it was a distinct entity shaped by geography, history, and Orthodoxy. The Atlantic world, led by Britain, represented a hostile force: naval, capitalist, secular, and analytical. Its tools were anthropology, cartography, and education—disciplines that defined in order to dominate.

After 1991, Eurasianism returned with force. Dugin’s rhetoric filled the vacuum. Every revolution—from Belgrade to Tbilisi to Kyiv—was framed as an Anglo-scripted drama. Liberalism was no longer a foreign import—it became synonymous with betrayal. Slavic unity, once a cultural aspiration, turned into a geopolitical casualty. In Ukraine, Russia saw not rebellion or aspiration for independence and autonomy but amputation: an Orthodox limb severed by Westernized elites under foreign direction.

Pan-Slavism, long dormant, also re-emerged. In the 19th century, figures like Mikhail Katkov had cast Russia as the natural guardian of the Orthodox Slavs. British support for the Ottoman Empire or Polish nationalism was viewed not as pragmatic diplomacy, but as an attack on Slavic cohesion. The symbolism endured: the double-headed eagle stood not only for empire, but for divine protection. The bogatyr—Russia’s mythic warrior—was invoked as the last line of defense against foreign manipulation.

The Soviet era codified suspicion into the logic of the state. Foreign sabotage became the ready explanation for unrest, stagnation, or ideological deviation. One enduring example was the Soviet fixation on the Zinoviev Letter, a British forgery from 1924 alleging Soviet interference in British politics. Though exposed as false, it lived on in Soviet political memory as proof that Britain’s liberal system masked an enduring hostility.

Soviet propaganda returned to it throughout the Cold War, treating it as the archetype of British deception—an example of how disruption could be framed as diplomacy. Britain appeared not simply as a rival power, but as an operator skilled in psychological warfare, whose influence seeped through culture, education, and alliances.

Moscow’s worldview remains locked in that lineage of paranoia. It does not register Britain’s strategic exhaustion, its post-imperial confusion, or its internal contradictions. It sees instead the ghost of an unbroken tradition of scheming—the hand that guided Vienna, partitioned the Ottomans, and redrew maps in Berlin.

The reality of a state in constant fatigue, struggling to define its relevance, is displaced by the myth of a calculating adversary. In the Russian imagination, Britain never retreated. It adapted. Its uniforms gave way to diplomats, its cannons to legal clauses, its occupation to influence. The effect is corrosive. Britain is treated not as a faded power, but as a poison—an agent of decay that weakens faith, fractures loyalties, and dissolves memory. Anglophobia is not an occasional instinct in Russia. It is a permanent framework—an explanatory model through which internal tension is translated into external threat.

The 2023 National Security Strategy codified this suspicion in doctrine. While NATO’s military posture is referenced, cultural sabotage occupies center stage: historical distortion, spiritual erosion, linguistic subversion. One of the clauses accuses “unfriendly states” of exploiting domestic vulnerabilities to undermine unity. Patrushev warned of a prolonged campaign to radicalize youth, sever generational continuity, and erode national identity at its roots.

And yet, the Anglo that animates this worldview belongs to another century. Britain no longer orchestrates the global balance. It moves through uncertainty and inertia, its ambitions narrowed by fatigue. But Moscow, unwilling to relinquish inherited phantoms, continues to interpret disorder as design. In doing so, it misreads the present through the lens of ancestral fear—and mistakes erosion for strategy.

This is why, when Russia claims to defend the “real West”—tradition, religion, order—it is not offering a partnership. It is delivering a verdict. In this narrative, Russia alone has preserved the true inheritance of Christian civilization, while the West has surrendered to secularism, relativism, and moral decay. But beneath this rhetoric lies the older polemic: Russia’s self-image as the last Christian empire is directed not only against liberalism, but against the Anglo-Protestant world and the Catholic West it sees as theologically compromised.

Protestantism is cast as the original rupture—the moment authority was privatized, truth fragmented, and the sacred desacralized. Catholicism, especially in its modern expressions, is seen as institutionally corrupt and politically deferential to the very liberalism it once resisted. Thus, when Moscow presents itself as the protector of Europe, it does so with a theology of suspicion.

The West it claims to defend is not the West of Locke or Rousseau—it is a purged and mythologized vision that excludes them. Western conservatives who look to Russia as a civilizational ally mistake polemic for alliance. In Moscow’s eyes, even sympathetic voices are compromised, their ideas infected by the same historical forces Russia believes it alone resisted. The Anglo may evolve in creed, posture, or political language—but in the Russian imagination, he remains what he has always been: the adversary in disguise.

For Russia, one certainty endures across centuries: the Anglo, wherever he is, whenever he appears, is the enemy.