FOR A GOOD three centuries now, the British have been at once fascinated and repulsed by Russia. A letter by the sixteenth-century English merchant Richard Chanchellor makes reference to the “barbarous and rude Russe,” comparing the Slavs’ hardy constitution favorably to “the daintiness and niceness of our captains.” Even as contact between the two empires increased, the bemusement never quite abated. Certainly, a similar attitude was evident in Churchill’s narrow-eyed suspicion of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which he famously called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
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