This was not new: in 1839 the India Phone Number List Marquis de Custine – the French aristocrat who would later be taken up by Aleksandr Sokúrov as the protagonist in his award-winning film The Russian Ark (2003) – had India Phone Number List published his book From him Russiain which he described the Russians as drunken, intolerant, and promiscuous, with appalling tastes in the arts, and, moreover, with scant and bad manners. Something similar had been written by the diplomat Joseph de Maistre in his Saint Petersburg Evenings of 1821, after spending several seasons in the Saint Petersburg of the tsars. Some India Phone Number List decades later, some intellectuals who had read (mis.

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton India Phone Number List Chekhov concluded that the Russians were all "crazy, melancholic and suicidal." Even in times before Peter the Great, travelers and diplomats described his time in the Empire in the worst terms. For centuries, then, there has been a European tradition that attributes to Russia those practices that are disapproved in its own territory. The triumph of communism in 1917 and the rise of the Cold War in the 20th century only increased the dose of preconceptions. Thus, a famous French historian had no problem emphasizing Lenin's India Phone Number List Kalmyk (read: Asian ) origins to explain Bolshevik barbarism . Mass culture was not exempt from representations of the.

Soviet Union either, and India Phone Number List productions soon emerged that placed the Russians as the bad guys in the movie. This is well known by James Bond and Rocky Balboa from the fourth installment of the saga, but also by Maxwell Smart or the ineffable MacGyver. The list is long but these examples are India Phone Number List enough to show how Russia was observed, for centuries, through the lens of prejudice and essentialism. The explanation is complex but simple at the same time: from what we call the West, that country was considered as a cultural other . close but otherfinally. As such, he India Phone Number List was reduced to a position of subordination and stigmatized as the negative mirror of the West that built his identity through a contrast of binary pairs.