In Russian popular culture, strength has long been associated with brutality, notably in the form of three extraordinary rulers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin. What is Russia’s destiny? Is it ‘a European State’, as Catherine the Great declared in the 1760s? Or is it, as Eurasianist philosophers claimed in the 1920s, a distinctive ‘continent apart’, hostile (and superior) to most Western values? Does the power of the state and the relative weakness of civil society condemn the Russians to lurch endlessly between reform and authoritarianism? Can they live peacefully with their neighbours, or must they inevitably consume the territory and populations of those they portray as deadly rivals? What is to be done? Who is to blame? First formulated by the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia, such ‘accursed questions’ have been brought into sharp focus by President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s ‘accursed questions’ – five online talks by Professor Simon Dixon
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