Russia should be allowed to escape the cliches of its past

Of all Europe's nation states refashioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is Russia which lends itself most easily to parody. The cliches mount up as foreigners struggle to understand a country which is almost, but not quite, "European". It is therefore "cowboy capitalists" who have stripped the assets of the nationalised industries in a wave of ill-thought-out privatisation. Chechnya can be used to illustrate the still-ravenous paw of the "Russian bear" bent on oppressing subjugated nationalities, while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as the latest example of a recurrent figure: the "Russian autocrat". In the early 21st century, the heir to the tsars and the old style politburo is surrounded by "oligarchs" rather than priests bearing icons or commissars carrying guns. But although the influence of the rich has replaced that of Orthodox priests and Marxist Leninist commissars, the secrecy of power and the seclusion of the powerful seems continuous in Russia.

Alexander Litvinenko's murder, unsurprisingly, has been the cue for further recycling in Britain of conventional wisdom about Russia - a country doomed to imprisonment by its past because of a persistent failure to embrace the liberal values of western democracies. This shadowy figure emerged out of a world in which the line between public authority and private vendetta, between law and paranoia, seems blurred by our standards. And his own fantasies about plots and subversions, written up by him in a series of books, are the very stuff of paranoid delusion. A minor figure in his own trade of intelligence and security, murder has elevated him so that he is yet another sacrificial victim to Russia's persistent lawlessness.

Russia was Britain's ally in two world wars. The family of the last tsar was dynastically linked to the British royal family. Peter the Great's policy of imposed westernisation, which turned Russia into a great European power, owed much to what he had learned about English technology during his visit to London. Even before that there was a long tradition of Anglican scholars and priests establishing links with the Orthodox, since both churches were meant to be Catholic but not Roman. But despite these historic links, Russia has been persistently seen as an alien, hostile power to British interests. The revolutions of 1917 leading to the installation of a communist regime in Moscow, and the cold war rhetoric about a new empire bent on global domination, are of course the major reasons for this divergence. But as far as British policy was concerned this was just the latest chapter in an older story. Pan-Slavism was one of the great 19th-century ideologies, and the idea that the Russian tsar was the protector of all the Orthodox faithful was seen as an imperialist claim. It destabilised the idea of neatly parcelled out nation states and held out the prospect of an imperial Russia encroaching on to eastern Europe.

Pan-Slavist fervour was a mass enthusiasm, broad in its aims and unpredictable in its effects. These were qualities that it shared with its successor as an ideological unifier - the more secular religion of Marx and Lenin. Both these phases in Russian ideology disturbed Britain's imperial progress. Russia was therefore vilified as a land of "icons and cockroaches", of prejudice and obscurantism before the revolution, and as a destabiliser of world order after it. What was continuous was Britain's determination to preserve its own empire, and resolute opposition to any Russian expansion of influence.

Portraying Russian government as inevitably corrupt and inefficient is a traditional British game. It's also a highly selective one. If 90s capitalism in Russia was a rough affair, it was no different from American capitalism in the late 19th century and Britain's in the 18th. Clive of India and his army of mercenaries, Henry Ford's battles against unionisation, and the business activities of Russian oligarchs share a similar pattern of energy and amorality. When it comes to accusations of corruption, the typically high British moral tone seems particularly silly. Societies breed the kind of corruption which reflects their own values. Buying an oil company because you are a friend of the government, bribing the politburo so you can remain a member of the nomenklatura, writing a cheque to become a member of the Lords: morally speaking, these are just different versions of corruption adapted to different societies.

Russia's history as a frontier state, along with the disorder that comes with that condition, is a long one. But this has more to do with geography than with some national mental debility. Britain's domestic order reflects the tightness of her borders and the US lost some of its wild west qualities once the frontiersmen got to the Pacific. Both Tsarist and Soviet Russia expanded more than they could handle, although both periods contain striking examples of industrial growth and organisational power despite the conventional scorn poured on "Five Year Plans". The Russia of today, a more moderate sized country, has returned to the limited boundaries that make authority easier to enforce. And in this respect it is in much the same position as 18th-century Britain was at the start of her imperial march, restoring order domestically and ready for greatness.

Hywel Williams