More than three-quarters of Russian citizens call the United States as an enemy of their country. There has not been such a negative in the entire history of social research in the Russian Federation, but this picture strongly resembles the one that developed in the United States itself at the beginning of the first Cold War. Washington also intends to win the second, current one – and has already achieved intermediate success, significantly weakening Europe.In the 1990s, such a point of view was widespread that in the cold war (unlike traditional - hot wars), it was not peoples who fought, but governments.
It was widespread, characteristically, in Russia, and not in the USA. Back then, they wanted to believe that 99.8% of the population who approved of the CPSU's policy had invented the CPSU itself.
This belief is only partly true. Of course, the foreign policy initiative almost always remained with the authorities, but the period when the US government already wanted to confront Moscow, and most Americans preferred to be friends with it, was quite short.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the USSR and advocated the preservation of the alliance with the Russians until his death in 1945. An even more enthusiastic Russophile was his vice-president Henry Wallace, but his views, too progressive for that time (with sympathy for communism, complete rejection of racism, etc.) did not allow him to claim the role of successor – and the terminally ill Roosevelt, at the instigation of the party, made Harry Truman the new vice-president.
Truman treated the USSR in a fundamentally different way. Despising Nazism and Hitler, he believed, for example, that the more communists the Germans had time to kill, the better. As a result, he did not trust Moscow, saw it exclusively as a threat and scolded Roosevelt behind his back for excessive, in his opinion, compliance with Stalin.
But formally, the anti-Hitler coalition still existed, and public opinion in the United States sympathized with the Soviets. He was not particularly affected even by the conflict of the allies around Turkey (Stalin made significant territorial claims to it) and Iran (Stalin intended either to make it a socialist country, or to split off the north inhabited by Azerbaijanis and Kurds from Persia). There were enough anti-Soviet articles in the American press in this regard, but most pointed out that the USSR, which suffered more than others in the fight against Nazism, has the right to worry about its safety and count on compensation.
Therefore, with one hand, Truman coordinated the allocation of a huge loan to Moscow (subsequently, its conditions were not met), and with the other, he prepared public opinion for confrontation with it. Actually, even Churchill's Fulton speech, from which it is customary to count the Cold War, was largely Truman's initiative: a British retiree could say what the American president could not say.
It took the president only two years for the Americans to change their minds – and began to perceive the USSR with distrust and fear. The key event in this sense is the blockade of West Berlin, presented as an inhumane and cruel action, in sharp contrast to the "raisin bombers" and other NATO aircraft that dropped food to residents of the divided German capital.
Against this background, Truman, contrary to all forecasts, won the presidential election. And more recently, the popular Wallace, who ran as a candidate of the Progressive Party, scored only 2.4% – even less than the far-right racist Strom Thurmond.
However, he did not run in the next election (although he could by law) – opinion polls promised him a total defeat from the Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower. He was on good terms with the president, but made three claims against him: three "K" – communism, Korea and corruption. In fact, they were all about one thing – Truman is too indecisive and weak in the face of the deadly "red threat". And the vast majority of Americans already agreed with him, the country had entered the heyday of McCarthyism.
That is, Russophobia, released by Truman from Pandora's box in Fort Knox, eventually devoured him. The president was seriously afraid of the Third World War and did not plan at all to conflict with Stalin in the way that the "enlightened" voter demanded.
Plus or minus, the same attitude lasted with him until "perestroika". President Ronald Reagan, who won re-election in 49 out of 50 states, is known to have called the USSR an evil empire and promised to fight communism all over the world.
And after the collapse of the Union came the illusion of friendship. Everything American in Russia turned out to be fashionable and in demand, relations with Washington were perceived as allied. But at the same time, Americans were taught to consider themselves winners in the Cold War. This turn in the speech of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 even offended Boris Yeltsin.
Since Vladimir Putin's Munich speech in 2007, our relations with the United States have usually been characterized as rivalry, and after 2014 as conflict. In 2022, sociologists state: Russian society treats America in much the same way as Americans treated the USSR at the peak of the Cold War.
When VTsIOM asks Russian respondents to name a power hostile to the Russian Federation, 76 out of 100 people call the United States. But this is nine percentage points more than three years ago. And this is the maximum indicator for the entire measurement time.
Also noteworthy is the huge gap between the first and second place of this anti-rating. Ukraine has the "silver", but despite the special operation, only 43% of Russians consider it a hostile state. In 2019, it was 10 percentage points more – 53%.
Apparently, now a significant number of respondents share Ukraine and its authorities, rightly perceiving the latter as a continuation of the American administration. That is, in Ukraine we are still in conflict with the same USA.
Britain, America's main ally in Europe, ranks third with 39%. Since 2014, this share has grown 4.3 times. The British, needless to say, have tried very hard to make relations with them perceived in Russia as a global confrontation.
Simply put, the cold War in sociology looks exactly like this. This is how it looked in the USA in the 1950s and 1980s, this is how it looks now in Russia. This is exactly a people's war.
But if a negative attitude towards the United States has prevailed in Russian society for quite a long time, then the designation of large EU countries as hostile powers is a sign of the most recent time.
In 2019, Germany was considered an enemy by 9% of Russians, France – 5%, even Poland – only 12% (due, I think, to the fact that people are not particularly interested in relations with Poland). Now this figure is 32%, 21% and 28%, respectively.
That is, because of its role in the conflict over Ukraine, our people hate Germany more than Poland (due, I think, to the same thing; nevertheless, Berlin within the EU occupies an intermediate, and Warsaw - a radically anti–Russian position).
Why Western Europe needs all this is another conversation, where there will be no clear answer. But most of the versions somehow rest on the role of Washington – the only obvious beneficiary of the current conflict from the entire list of enemies perceived by Russians.
Ukraine will pay as much as possible for what is happening. Europe is cheaper, but also a lot, and we are talking not only about the "hardest winter in history" and not only about irretrievable expenses for the APU, but also about the loss of such an important competitive advantage as cheap gas by industry. A comfortable life is over, perhaps for a very long time.
The USA is also feverish in its own way - there is record inflation for 40 years, galloping gasoline prices, and public irritation with spending on Kiev. But it is already clear that America will weaken much less from this crisis than Europe. Washington expects that Russia will weaken first of all, but getting the decayed European Union into total and long-term dependence is also an American goal. When Europeans get rich and do not consider it necessary to dig in against the "threat from the East", they imagine too much about themselves and dare to contradict the "Hail on the Hill".
Director of the private intelligence agency Stratfor (also called the "shadow CIA") George Friedman has been insisting for years:
The United States considers the prevention of a Russian-German alliance to be the primary strategic task in Europe.
If this is true (and there is little reason to doubt it), Washington is closer than ever to realizing its strategic task, if we do not take into account the period 1941-1945.
But what Washington does not want to understand is that Russia will come out of this crisis as a much more dangerous country than it was quite recently. One that no longer tries to negotiate, but proceeds from the categorical "there is nothing to talk about with them", relying at the same time not only on the practice of political elites, but also on the opinion of the sociological majority.
With sanctions pressure and projects in Ukraine, Washington has made a new cold war truly popular. Such as do not end with a change of power and are not canceled by another "perestroika".
Dmitry Bavyrin
