Russia has baffled the west for centuries. Arthur Miller said there could be found in images of Russia “a longing, an aspiration … a sense of contradiction, and paradox reaching down to the roots of Russia”. Churchill’s description of the Soviet Union is the most famous but in trying to figure out that “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, category errors were often made. The great historian Tony Judt has pointed out that post Soviet Russia was not a European state, but a Eurasian empire, so maybe the mistakes have sometimes been ours. As we tried to see…

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