Russophobia

Older than Putin

The word first appears in English, and it is 190 years old. On 20 February 1836 The Spectator, a London weekly, reported that a nobleman had harangued a thin House of Commons about Russian expansion, and that "the Russo-phobia has taken strong hold of this amiable nobleman". Two months later an article signed "A.", which John Stuart Mill listed among his own writings, said that according to general belief ministers were "smitten with the epidemic disease of Russo-phobia". English radicals, the historian Konstantin Dushenko writes, were the first to use the word, for a fear of Russia they thought phantom or exaggerated. It is often credited to the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev, who used it in a letter of 1867, and then about Russian liberals.

By 1840 the fear had a literature. France had a forged plan of European domination, attributed to Peter the Great. Britain had its pamphlets, and by that year, the historian John Howes Gleason concluded, suspicion of Russia in the British press and among those whose judgments survive had "become a real hatred", though he thought the fervent Russophobes may have been only a small minority of the nation. Vladimir Putin took office more than 160 years after The Spectator's paragraph.

Pomnym's assessment: Russophobia was a lasting part of Western Europe's political culture for more than a century before Vladimir Putin took office. It rose and fell with wars, alliances and the West's own anxieties, it was contested from the first, and it did not need him. To treat it as a response to him is to read the chronology backwards. The word first named a fear of a state; these pages follow what happens when that fear lands on people. This is Pomnym's reading of the sources, not an established fact, and it is no claim about every person in those countries.

One rule for everyone

"I don't see why not," Vladimir Putin told the BBC's David Frost on 5 March 2000, when asked whether Russia could join NATO. He named one condition: "if and when Russia's views are taken into account as those of an equal partner". On 25 September 2001 he stood in the Bundestag, switched to German and declared: "Der Kalte Krieg ist vorbei" - the Cold War is over. In the same speech he set out his complaint. Decisions were sometimes taken without Russia, which was then firmly asked to confirm them. He asked whether that was normal, and whether it was a real partnership.

In Munich, on 10 February 2007, the tone had hardened. A unipolar world, he said, is a world of "one master, one sovereign", and independent legal norms were "coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system". That is Russia's stated position, and in 2022 its foreign minister rested it on a text that Russia and the West had both signed. At Istanbul in 1999 the OSCE's states agreed that each has "an equal right to security", that each may freely choose its alliances, and that they "will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States". Western governments invoke the principle of the second clause: "the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances", as Antony Blinken put it in January 2022. Russia quotes the third. All three stand in one paragraph, which also says that no state, group of states or organisation can treat any part of the OSCE area as its sphere of influence.

Pomnym's assessment: one rule for everyone is a fair demand, whoever makes it. Western governments claim for themselves what they refuse Russia: to decide when international law binds them, to treat their own security as a sufficient reason, and to name their own wars. The same double standard reaches individual Russians, who are asked to answer for a state they did not choose. The rule binds Russia too, and a Russian's bank account should not depend on whether Moscow is right. This is an assessment of the demand and of the double standard, not an established fact; it approves of no violence and denies no documented crime.

The word that ends the argument

The word was born in a war, though not in this one. On 30 January 1974 The Irish Times published a letter from Sean O'Conaill, a history teacher in Coleraine, about "the Whatabouts": "people who answer every condemnation of the Provisional IRA with an argument to prove the greater immorality of the 'enemy'". Three days later the columnist John Healy wrote of "Whataboutery". In May 1978 a letter to The Guardian gave the first known use of "whataboutism" itself and aimed it at Western progressives: it was, the letter said, "a condition of the progressive mind" that tolerated no criticism of Communist autocracy unless the critic also atoned for non-Communist dictatorships. In 2007 and 2008 Edward Lucas of The Economist brought it back into the debate about Russia, writing that it "seems to be making a comeback", and there it stayed.

His 2008 column on the word conceded more than its users remember. "It is not a bad tactic," Lucas wrote in The Economist's Europe.view. "Every criticism needs to be put in a historical and geographical context." He went on to say that Soviet propagandists had overdone it. Writing in the journal Informal Logic in 2023, Tracy Bowell held that whataboutisms tend to make for bad arguments and typically deflect from the issue at hand: a reply that offers the other side's hypocrisy as its sole reason to disagree is a fallacy, and one meant to excuse the war in Ukraine is akin, she wrote, to Soviet cold-war rhetoric. But the move can also serve a good argument: a reply that brings in a sufficiently similar case that has been left out challenges the critic to show "what's saliently different" about it. In that form it is a request for a reason.

Pomnym's assessment: in the debate about Russia the word has become the distraction it claims to expose. When Russia, or a Russian, asks why one intervention is a crime and another a rescue, "whataboutism" is too often the whole reply. A question about equal treatment is recast as a breach of manners, and nobody has to answer it. Hypocrisy does not clear the party who points it out. It does oblige the accuser to say what makes the cases different.

Who gets to name a war

"We are not at war," Harry Truman told reporters on 29 June 1950, days into the fighting in Korea, and he agreed when one of them asked whether it could be called "a police action under the United Nations". Britain's war in Malaya is remembered as an "Emergency". France spoke in Algeria of "opérations de maintien de l'ordre" and, by convention, of "les événements"; only a law of 18 October 1999 put "guerre d'Algérie" in place of "opérations effectuées en Afrique du Nord". Germany called its deployment in Afghanistan a "Stabilisierungseinsatz" until February 2010, when its government reclassified it as an armed conflict under international law; in April 2010, after three Bundeswehr soldiers were killed, its defence minister allowed that one could speak of war "umgangssprachlich" - colloquially.

NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 as "Operation Allied Force", without Security Council authorisation; on 26 March 1999 a draft that said so and demanded a halt failed by 3 votes to 12. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" began in 2003. George W. Bush called it a war; Kofi Annan, in 2004, called it "illegal". In 2014 Gerhard Schröder said that as chancellor he had himself breached international law over Yugoslavia - in the same breath as calling what was happening in Crimea a breach as well.

On 24 February 2022 Russia chose its own name: "special military operation". The UN General Assembly condemned that declaration by 141 votes to 5, with 35 abstentions, and kept the term in quotation marks. The EU told the OSCE in January 2023: "There is no so-called 'special military operation'". Others have offered a different name. Leon Panetta, a former US defence secretary, said in March 2022 that NATO and the United States were "without question, in a proxy war with Russia"; Marco Rubio, as Secretary of State, called it in March 2025 "a proxy war between nuclear powers". Russia polices its name as well. Its media regulator objected in February 2022 to the terms "attack", "invasion" and "war", the European Federation of Journalists reported, and articles 207.3 and 280.3 of its Criminal Code, added on 4 March 2022, punish publicly spreading knowingly false information about the use of the armed forces and, after a prior administrative penalty or where harm results, public action to discredit that use.

Pomnym's assessment: every state at war names what it is doing, and every name is a claim. The West's names entered the record as its own to give. Russia's is refused, as if naming were a right reserved to one side. "Special military operation" does for this war what "police action" did for Korea. A name settles nothing about what was done; the double standard lies in who is allowed to choose one. Pomnym's own wording stays: the war in Ukraine (since 24 February 2022).

Who teaches rights

Between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children in Australia were forcibly removed from their families and communities from about 1910 to 1970. That is the finding of Australia's own national inquiry, Bringing Them Home, in 1997. It said the practice involved "genocide as defined by international law"; it also recorded that a royal commissioner had reached the opposite view, and in Kruger, the same year, High Court judges concluded that the Northern Territory ordinance did not authorise genocide. In the United States the Interior Department counted 417 federal Indian boarding schools between 1819 and 1969 and at least 973 children who died while attending them, and it acknowledges that the true number is greater. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission said its residential schools were a central element of a policy that "can best be described as 'cultural genocide'".

The land went with the children. A study in Science in 2021 put the reduction in Indigenous land across the contiguous United States at 93.9 per cent, and found that 42.1 per cent of tribes have no recognised land base today. In the 2021 Census Indigenous Australians were 3.2 per cent of their country's people, and their life expectancy at birth is 8.8 years shorter for men and 8.1 years for women. On 14 October 2023 Australians rejected a constitutional Indigenous Voice by 60.06 per cent to 39.94, while the 22 remote mobile polling teams in the Northern Territory's division of Lingiari recorded a Yes majority at every one.

The gains are real and belong on this record. In 1992 the High Court's Mabo decision rejected terra nullius and opened the way to native title. The Australian and US inquiries were commissioned by the governments concerned; Canada's commission was created by the agreement that settled survivors' class actions. That settlement paid former students C$1.62 billion in common experience payments and approved C$3.18 billion for abuse claims, and by 30 June 2025 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's rights or interests covered 4,421,946 square kilometres of Australia's land mass, much of it under non-exclusive native title, which carries no right to exclude others. Australia's Closing the Gap agreement was negotiated with Indigenous peak organisations as a party. Kevin Rudd apologised in 2008, and Joe Biden in 2024: "it's long overdue".

Pomnym's assessment: acknowledgement came after the loss, and it asks little of those who give it. "Equity" is official language in these same states: in a US executive order of 2021, revoked in 2025, which named Indigenous and Native American persons among many groups, and in Australia's national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health plan, which credits Indigenous leadership with driving it. It reaches peoples reduced to small minorities on land most of which they no longer control. Pomnym has no quarrel with those peoples or with anything that serves them. Its objection is to the moral certificate: a state that did this cannot treat its own late apology as a licence to lecture Russia, or anyone else, on rights. That excuses nothing done by Russia or by anyone else, and it compares no suffering with any other.

What gets attention

A public debate takes shape through selection as well as accuracy: which events lead, which comparisons are made, and which people remain outside the picture. Our concern is the ease with which criticism of Russia becomes a background assumption about Russians.

Consistent scrutiny matters. A favourable economic comparison does not vindicate every government policy; an unfavourable one does not explain a whole society. The same measure should not become uninteresting merely because it complicates a familiar account.

Russia is not the same question as Russians

The four survey series reviewed in the linked record chiefly ask about the Russian state, its president and its policies. They do not supply a continuous, comparable measure of attitudes toward Russian people. The isolated people-level questions and gaps matter as much as the state-level trend.

Distrust of a government does not tell us how its citizens are treated at work, in a bank or at a university. Nor can it prove an entire population's private motives. Those questions require their own evidence.

• Thirty years of German polls on Russia, and almost none about Russians 5 September 2026·Germany

Institutions make choices

An account that blames only Berlin or Brussels leaves too much out. Banks, universities, competition organisers and cultural institutions also make decisions. Whether an exclusion was legally required, discretionary or later reversed must be checked case by case.

That objection applies equally to Russian state coverage when it portrays Western populations and institutions as merely following their leaders. The records identify decision-makers, not a single collective mind. Accountability belongs with the actual choice and the authority behind it.

• Sparkasse KölnBonn restricted about 2,000 accounts of Russian and Belarusian nationals 8 May 2026·Cologne, Germany
• University of Tartu barred new applicants who are Russian or Belarusian citizens 7 March 2022·Tartu, Estonia
• Russian and Belarusian players barred from Wimbledon 2022; ATP fined the LTA £820,000 20 April 2022·United Kingdom
• Dublin piano competition barred nine Russian pianists, then reversed the ban 3 March 2022·Dublin, Ireland
• Reuters reports EU banks refusing accounts to Russian residents not under sanctions 14 February 2025·European Union

AfD: rapprochement is not a guarantee

AfD's calls for de-escalation should not be mistaken for unconditional solidarity with Russian people. Rapprochement is nevertheless longstanding party policy: its 2016 basic platform proposed partnership with Russia and ending sanctions. Its 2025 election programme called for restored trade and repaired Nord Stream pipelines.

Emphases differ. In his December 1, 2025 answer, Rüdiger Lucassen combined diplomacy with deterrence, condemned Russia's military action in Ukraine as unlawful and stressed German interests. Neither a platform nor one member's statement establishes every member's motives.

Opposition to confrontation is valuable in its own right, but it is not a guarantee against discrimination or a promise of a natural ally. Judge the party by specific policies and individual conduct. An 'enemy of my enemy' reading is an interpretation, not a measured explanation of the membership.

Economic costs deserve political weight

The loss of Russian gas imposed real costs on Germany. The Council of Economic Experts documented the 2022 energy shock's effects on household purchasing power and energy-intensive production. That connection is public, not forbidden: ZDF discussed it again in March 2026. Current weakness also has other causes; Ifo's June 2026 forecast identifies weak productivity, demographic constraints and a newer Middle East energy shock.

In July 2022, 58% of respondents to Infratest dimap supported sanctions even if Germany faced energy-supply problems and falling economic output; 33% opposed them. That is evidence of accepting specified costs, not of hostility to Russians. In September 2026, 13% were satisfied with Merz's work and almost eight in ten judged the economy negatively. Separate answers cannot establish why an individual dislikes him.

The sharper question is whether reporting and political decisions give livelihoods and opportunities for de-escalation sufficient weight. Economic sacrifice should require a clear account of its purpose, effectiveness and alternatives. Criticising the price while exempting the choices that helped produce it from scrutiny is not enough.

Language is not allegiance

Russian is part of Ukraine's lived history, not simply a language across its border. Lex Fridman's January 2025 interview introduced Russian as Zelensky's primary language for most of his life. Zelensky also starred in the Russian-language comedy Servant of the People.

Today's picture is different from a claim of nationwide Russian dominance. KIIS's May-June 2026 survey recorded home use of mainly or always Ukrainian at 62%, Russian at 14%, and both at 23%. It interviewed 1,000 adult citizens in government-controlled territory, excluding residents of territories outside government control and those abroad. These are self-reported home-use figures under wartime conditions, not a census of language ability across all of Ukraine.

Neither language nor cultural background determines political allegiance. Russian-speaking Ukrainians should remain visible as people, not be reduced to symbols claimed by opposing governments. A president's biography cannot stand in for the linguistic history of an entire country.

Origin as a disqualifier

The editor of this archive remembers a conversation, years before 24 February 2022, with a colleague from the technology industry - green, left-leaning, genuinely curious about how Ethereum worked. The reply to the subject was that the technology was interesting, but that it had been built by a Russian, had he known that. It was not offered as an argument. It was offered as a reason not to look any further, and the looking stopped there.

Taken as a fact about Ethereum, the remark does not hold. Ethereum was conceived by Vitalik Buterin, who was born in Kolomna near Moscow in 1994 and left for Canada at the age of six. It was built by a group conventionally counted as eight co-founders, who were English, American, Canadian, Romanian, Israeli and Dutch as well as Russian-Canadian. Compressing that into one nationality is what the remark did, and the compression was the point of it.

The suspicion did not wait for the war. In mid-January 2022, six weeks before 24 February, Buterin asked his readers for the most unhinged criticisms of himself they had seen. His own father joined in to report one of them: that his son was a KGB operative working for Vladimir Putin, and that the Russian state was therefore behind Ethereum. The family treated it as a joke. It was already in circulation.

What followed shows the same man being told the opposite thing from the other direction. On 24 February 2022 Buterin condemned the war in Russian, calling it a crime against the Ukrainian and the Russian people. Three days later Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, wrote that Russians who were now ashamed of being Russian need not worry, because they were not Russian. Buterin answered her with an obscenity. He had been offered the exit from Russian identity by the Russian state's own broadcaster, and he refused it. Four years later, in February 2026, he was still describing himself the same way: born in Russia, but grew up in Canada.

The same reflex, if that is what this was, costs most when it reaches a job. On Monday 30 September 2024 the software company ABBYY held a meeting its staff could not speak in: invitations to a mandatory town hall had gone out the evening before, chat and microphones were disabled, and the calls ran one after another that afternoon - Limassol first, then Belgrade, then Budapest. The whole thing took about an hour and a half, and access to the corporate network was withdrawn while it was still going on. Several hundred people lost their jobs, most of them relocated out of Russia by ABBYY itself after 2022. Former employees told Mediazona, Forbes and Novaya Gazeta Europe that the invitation lists for those calls held Russian passport holders and almost nobody else. The company tells it differently: Gina Ray, its senior director of corporate marketing, said ABBYY employs people of more than thirty nationalities from thirteen countries, that it had embarked on a path of business transformation and modernisation, and that it had reorganised finance, accounting, go-to-market and research functions that were located in certain regions. It would not say how many people were affected.

What follows is the part this archive cannot leave out. The passport account comes from employees who spoke anonymously and from a post since deleted. Against it, on the record: a recruiter citing an ABBYY manager said the company had cut its development organisation rather than its Russians, and that Russian citizens in other departments stayed; a former executive told Forbes the reason was economic and not political; a Belarusian, a Latvian and staff from France were dismissed too, while some Russian passport holders kept their jobs; and Meduza pointed out that development at ABBYY had always been Russian-speaking, so cutting it would have looked like cutting Russians whatever the reason. The Bell concluded that dismissal by nationality seemed unlikely. Two months before the calls, ABBYY had announced on its own site a research centre in Bengaluru, describing it as complementing a footprint it listed as Hungary, Serbia, Cyprus and the United States. Collective complaints went to the labour ministries of Hungary, Cyprus, Serbia and Germany, and when Novaya Gazeta Europe published in October 2024 not one of them had been considered. That is where it rests, and on a narrow base: the account comes from four Russian exile outlets reporting anonymous former employees within about two days, and no journalist, regulator or union in Cyprus, Serbia or Hungary appears to have examined it since. Several hundred people were told their roles were eliminated, in a meeting where they could not ask why, and no decision on any of those complaints has been located since, so whether the passport mattered has never been established either way.

One end of this is a Western reflex that treats Russian origin as a reason to stop reading. The other is a Russian state that treats dissent as forfeiture of Russian identity. Neither asked what the person had done or thought; both read the answer off where he was born. A single remembered conversation proves nothing about how common the first reflex is, and this archive does not claim otherwise - the dated records it links do that work instead.

• Germany, March 2022: attacks on shops, a school and a church, all connected to Russia 11 March 2022·Berlin, Oberhausen, Munich and elsewhere, Germany
• Assaults on Russian citizens in Germany since 2012: highest in 2024, pre-war peak in 2014 9 July 2026·Deutscher Bundestag, Germany

The protection that does not apply, and what a contemporary witness saw

Every country in this archive forbids discrimination and keeps a body to enforce the prohibition. The records show what those bodies did when Russians came to them. Germany's federal anti-discrimination agency reached no conclusion on the banks, because nationality is not a protected characteristic under the General Equal Treatment Act at all. The Dutch equality body examined four complaints against ING, found in three of them that the bank had made a direct distinction on grounds of nationality, and held that it was not a prohibited one. The Czech ombudsman found that universities had restricted access to education by nationality and could record fault only against a regulator, because his anti-discrimination jurisdiction does not reach the nationality of non-EU citizens. The German government reported that 196 people of Russian or Belarusian origin had come for advice, and recorded the outcome of none of them. The protection exists. As drafted, this case falls outside it.

That is the law, and it is checkable. What follows is neither law nor finding. It is what one contemporary witness saw, set down here because this archive exists to hold the contemporaneous account and not only the paperwork that account produced.

A contemporary witness records this. The hostility did not come from where the political map says it should. It came most readily from liberals - from people whose politics is built on identity and injury, who had spent years learning to watch their language, who would not let a joke about any other nationality pass and corrected a word about any other group without being asked. With Russians none of it applied. The same person who would not generalise about anyone generalised freely. The same person who counted a slight against any other origin as harm counted contempt for Russians as a position worth holding. On that account it is the only form of racism that costs nothing to express, and the only one this witness has seen treated as a credential rather than a fault.

What the witness describes has a name, and it is the form this archive documents almost to the exclusion of everything else: socio-economic marginalisation. Not assault, but the steady, lawful, always deniable removal of people from the ordinary means of earning a living and taking part. An account capped or closed. A university place refused. A competition entry withdrawn. A residence permit not renewed. A post eliminated in a meeting where nobody could ask why. Each decision is defensible on its own, each has a form of words ready for it, and not one of them is a crime. Taken together they are the mechanism by which a person of Russian origin in the West is moved to the edge of economic and social life without anyone raising a hand or breaking a law. That is a major form of Russophobia in the West, and it is the one that leaves the most paper behind and attracts the least attention. Physical assault is a different phenomenon with a different profile, and it is counted in a Record of its own.

This archive marks what the recollection is and is not. It is one life in one country, and it establishes nothing about what liberals in general believe; no survey here measures it, because, as the record on thirty years of German polling shows, almost nobody asked. What the documented material establishes is narrower and harder to answer - that the rule against judging a person by where they are from was written, is enforced, and in this one case was found not to apply.

One such recollection is already here. The conversation recorded above under Origin as a disqualifier - a colleague, green and left-leaning, who found Ethereum interesting until he heard that a Russian had built it - is the same observation in miniature. It stays where it is because the documented material around it does the work a recollection cannot do for itself.

• Contacted by banks over sanctions risk, refused service: Russian nationals complain to the federal anti-discrimination agency 5 April 2022·Berlin, Germany
• ING restricted accounts it recorded as Russian; four Dutch customers' complaints failed 6 December 2022·College voor de Rechten van de Mens, Netherlands
• Czech universities refused Russians and Belarusians; ombudsman faulted sanctions office 8 April 2025·Public Defender of Rights, Czechia
• German government: 196 people with Russian or Belarusian roots reported discrimination 25 May 2022·Deutscher Bundestag, Germany
• Assaults on Russian citizens in Germany since 2012: highest in 2024, pre-war peak in 2014 9 July 2026·Deutscher Bundestag, Germany
• Thirty years of German polls on Russia, and almost none about Russians 5 September 2026·Germany

The uniform is not enough

All Germans are equal, but some Germans are more equal than others. The Orwell paraphrase is deliberate. The people in the Lithuania report are already serving in the Bundeswehr. According to that reporting, several soldiers with family ties to Russia or Belarus may remain in uniform in Germany, yet have been refused the Lithuania posting after security checks.

Pomnym documents the barriers a Russian connection can place across ordinary life: an account, a university place, a livelihood. Here the question reaches the state's own uniform. A restricted posting does not by itself prove Russophobia. It demands scrutiny of the point at which assessing a person's vulnerability becomes judging their belonging.

This did not begin with Lithuania. In Julia Weigelt's November 2025 JS report, Tatjana, a Bundeswehr soldier with German and Russian citizenship, described being questioned by MAD about her attitude to the war in Ukraine after years of service. She rejected the prospect of becoming a second-class soldier because of her Russian roots. That is her account, not testimony from the unnamed Lithuania applicants. A MAD spokesperson confirmed in the same report that checks had tightened at the end of 2022.

There is a real security question. Foreign intelligence services can threaten relatives, and loyalty does not make a soldier immune to coercion. That requires examining actual exposure, the proposed duties and possible safeguards. It does not turn a family connection into proof of allegiance to a foreign state. Permission to serve in Germany is no automatic entitlement to every posting; neither is Russian ancestry an answer to an individual's case.

If a person's family history is used to decide what they must believe, our editorial charge is Gesinnungssäuberung - an ideological purge. That would assign political beliefs by biography. This is an editorial judgment, not a finding about the soldiers or proof that their opinions caused the reported refusals. The danger is citizenship in two grades: equal on paper, but with one group repeatedly required to establish that it belongs.

Article 3 of the Basic Law protects against disadvantage because of descent and origin. Article 33 promises Germans equal access to public office according to aptitude, qualifications and achievement. An institution invoking "our democracy" must be able to justify its treatment of the individual and submit that decision to effective review. Citizenship must not end where the family tree begins.

• Lithuania brigade: several Bundeswehr soldiers with family ties to Russia or Belarus reportedly rejected 18 September 2026·Germany / Lithuania

The longer history

Russophrenia

A country too broken to matter and too dangerous to contain. Both claims, from the same governments, in the same years.

Look at the decision

A government's policy, an institution's decision and a person's conduct are different things. So a change of government settles little: a fear that did not need Vladimir Putin will not necessarily leave with him. The useful question is concrete: who made the decision, whom did it affect, would the same rule have applied to anyone else, and what would change it?

Records / Evidence / Act