I have the displeasure of living in SSpain :spain-cool:, and in Europe we’re submerged in Russophobic propaganda that even permeates the language, so much so that in Spain the idiom for drinking a lot of alcohol is “beber como un Cosaco” (to drink like a Kossack). A lot of this stems from anticommunism, from the Jewish-Bolshevism conspiracy of fascist propaganda, from cold-war era bullshit, and now from western imperialism against Russia. This Russophobia and hatred of everything Russian is a powerful weapon of propaganda of western imperialism, and it should be denied and fought against without a doubt.

At the same time, the historical roots of Russian nationalism are those of a repressive form of nationalism (Russian Empire). Lenin himself called the Russian Empire the prison of peoples, meaning the oppressed nations under the Russian centralist yoke, and Russian being the majority ethnicity in Russia leads to modern capitalist Russia to engage in Russocentric policies that harm minority ethnicities in the country. Within Russia, Russian nationalism is definitely used by right wing nationalists and by the state as a cudgel against progressiveness, ethnic and cultural minorities, and is linked to the traditional “family” to socially oppress LGBTQ and women.

The Russophobia of the west funnily enough empowers this, because Russians see their culture and their history denigrated mostly through racism and propagandistic and revisionism, and this only gives arguments to the Russian nationalists. Additionally, the contributions of all other ethnicities of the former USSR are erased by both sides, such as the millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tatars, Maris, Tajiks and a myriad of other ethnicities who fought and won against the Nazi monster and furthered the creation of a fairer and more moral society. All of those get lumped under the label “Russian” when anticommunism rears its head.

So the question is: how do we simultaneously criticise the pervasive Russophobia in the west without defaulting to Russian Nationalism? What form should our arguments and propaganda take, and how do we go about this?