The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa

“Mythology is not a lie,” wrote Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth and archetype. “It is metaphorical.” Myths and metaphors provide the narratives that inspire patriotic devotion, motivate soldiers to fight, and help explain the outside world. And the myths that nations cherish about themselves often reinforce the complementary myths that they adopt about others.

Russia and the United States harbor especially powerful myths about each other. The myth that Russia believes about the United States is that it has vassals rather than allies—that it is a hegemonic power that hides ruthless ambition and self-interest behind appeals to liberal principles and legal order. Americans see Russia, meanwhile, as a country without domestic politics—the ultimate autocratic power whose malicious, unaccountable leader runs roughshod over what citizens want. As long ago as 1855, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln described Russia as a place “where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” 

After more than a century of tension and conflict, the U.S.-Russian relationship is now structured around these myths. Myths weigh down that relationship, obscuring nuance and clear perception. And they have shaped, and will continue to shape, each country’s part in the war in Ukraine. The myth that many Russians hold of the United States is continually driving the Kremlin toward harmful belligerence. 

The myth that Americans hold of Russia is also a trap, leading policymakers to misread the Kremlin and to miss opportunities to weaken the regime or to find compromises. To minimize dangerous misinterpretations, U.S. leaders need to work harder to rise above these myths and archetypes. A better understanding of the United States’ own myths—and of Russia’s—would give U.S. policymakers more flexibility, help to foster strategic empathy, and anticipate future changes in the Russian body politic.

HIDDEN FIGURE

In Russia, it is conventional wisdom that the United States is power-mad. The American public, many Russians believe, is under the thumb of a megalomaniacal U.S. elite. Enthusiasm for a liberal international order gets little traction in Russia not because all Russians are realists but because their mythic view of the United States reduces the liberal international order to a vehicle of American ambition. Many Russians are convinced that U.S. leaders’ references to a supranational web of norms, laws, and partnerships are merely smokescreens for the cooptation that lies at the core of American foreign policy.

The reigning Russian myth is of Soviet vintage. According to this myth, during the Cold War, American capitalist elites wanted to run the world and found innumerable military pretexts to exert their wishes. The nightmare purportedly began after World War II, when the United States rewired the political codes in Japan and Germany, pushed those countries into alliances dominated by the United States, used them as staging grounds for U.S. military operations, and compelled them to serve as cheerleaders for the U.S. national interest. To keep up, the Soviet Union had to build a bulwark of “friendly countries” in Eastern Europe and establish its own global footprint, lest the perfidious United States advance uncontested.

For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility.

The United States’ global influence during this era was real. But the Soviet characterization was a caricature—and one that proved enduring. Even after the Cold War ended, according to the Russian myth, the United States kept seducing others with false rhetoric, including Russia’s neighbors—countries such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states. In this telling, U.S. allies operate more as instruments of American power than as independent states. Where governments resisted—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, and Syria, as well as in Ukraine before the 2014 Maidan uprising—regime change has been the American preference. Hegemony by invitation, hegemony at the barrel of gun: the means may vary, but the end is never in question.

Moscow has paid a high price for holding onto this myth. It has obligated itself to contend with the American monster even at the expense of becoming more dependent on China. The EU’s Eastern Partnership program, which led to Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, was an authentic expression of idealism about the country’s European future, not a covert exercise of American hegemony. But the contention that the CIA had staged a coup in Ukraine was a lie that Russians had long been primed to believe. Even if Russia’s top leaders knew this claim was false, their public insistence on it closed off moderate responses (such as accommodating the new government in Kyiv) and made more extreme options (such as annexing Crimea) seem necessary.

In general, the myth of a United States drunk on power and unwilling to stick to agreements makes it very hard for Moscow to negotiate over regional questions. Russians cannot imagine that the leaders of countries such as Ukraine have minds of their own. For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility, and American hostility toward Russia demands equal Russian hostility toward the United States. If the only language the United States understands is power, then negotiation, deliberation, and the granting of concessions all entail undue risk.

MORAL HAZARD

American myths about Russia have similarly deep historical roots. The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century. It flourished during the Soviet era and briefly retreated during Boris Yeltsin’s nine-year presidency. (Americans venerated Yeltsin as more democratic than he actually was.) Putin has restored the familiar image of Russia. The U.S. approach to the Cold War often had the fervor of a messianic struggle, and Putin once again inspires Americans’ moral indignation.

The United States’ myth of Russia—that Russia is an evil and ambitious tyranny—has some domestic political uses. To interest inward-looking Americans in the outside world, Washington needs to conjure a single omnipotent villain. Americans want to believe that they are fighting an individual who can be killed rather than a whole country that must be subdued. In crisis after crisis, comparisons to Hitler are used to shock democracy-loving yet complacent Americans into action. Putin is simply the latest in a long line of autocratic leaders—Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad, to name a few—who are portrayed as single-handedly obstructing democracy and progress.

Putin’s larger-than-life persona has exacerbated the view that autocratic Russia has no domestic politics and that whatever the ruler wants happens. Brian Jenkins, the senior adviser to the president at the RAND Corporation, summed up this view when he wrote, “At home, Putin faces no elections, no party or state institutions that threaten his rule, no domestic political opposition. He is Russia. And Russia is his.” If Putin is Russia, the only thing that needs to be understood about Russia is Putin’s psyche. Ukraine and its allies are fighting Putin’s war against Putin’s Russia. It is no surprise, then, that the U.S. intelligence community has reportedly made evaluating Putin’s state of mind its top analytical priority.

The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century.

Studying leaders matters for understanding one’s adversaries and particularly for understanding Russia; the Russian president clearly dominates his country. But Putin still faces dilemmas at home. He sits uncomfortably atop a complicated system of competing factions and interests. He needs to ensure that the warring cronies beneath him do not kill one another or rise up against him. At the same time, he must keep the public adequately enthusiastic about him. The biggest producer and consumer of sociological research in Russia is, in fact, the Russian government, which nervously follows minute alterations in public opinion.

Washington’s various wars against evil dictators should, by now, have yielded some hard-won lessons. None of these leaders turned out to be all-powerful. Nor were they responsible for every problem in their polity, as the United States repeatedly discovered after expending enormous effort to remove them from the scene. For every such leader, including Putin, domestic politics set the parameters of their foreign policy. They rarely fought wars without their people behind them. Like democratic leaders, autocrats know how to bring their populations along when they go to war.

Public opinion and the bureaucracy are both somewhat opaque in the dictatorship that Russia has become. But public opinion limits the way Putin wages war and the settlements the Kremlin can accept. Like any belligerent, the Russian government wants to be able to claim victory: if Russia demonstrably loses the Ukraine war, public frustration and outrage may well topple the government.

Committed to the myth of a Russia without domestic politics, however, the United States struggles to interpret Russia. Its policymakers fail to see that many of the Kremlin’s actions are aimed at a domestic constituency. Take Putin’s sudden decision in September 2022 to annex territories in Ukraine, many of which Russia did not even control. Just a few months earlier, Putin had publicly mocked his intelligence chief for suggesting annexation. Putin’s turnabout baffled U.S. analysts, who interpreted it as part of a grand, if phantasmagoric, plan to subdue Ukraine. Was Putin losing his mind? In reality, these aspirational annexations may have been a rhetorical flourish for internal consumption, an opportunistic attempt to rally popular support behind a war veering out of control.

EGO DISTORTION

The burdens that these myths impose go beyond their distortions of reality. In international affairs, myths are dangerous because they entrench archetypes. The archetypal Russia is a malign autocracy, the archetypal United States a rapacious hegemon. Archetypes are the refined cousins of stereotypes, the problem of stereotypes being their negation of complexity. The country that believes its adversary can be understood in simple categories is likely to stop looking for subtle adjustments it could make to its policies and to cease trying to respond creatively to its adversary’s adjustments.

Had American leaders better understood that Russian is not a monolith but is capable of fissuring, for instance, they may have been able to better exploit the 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, capitalizing on splits within the Russian elite and the military. An informed understanding of why those splits occurred could have allowed the United States and its allies to accentuate them, perhaps by highlighting Prigozhin’s attacks on the Russian air force or stressing the ways in which Putin was losing control of his security services. Instead, preoccupied with Putin’s power, Washington missed the signs of division and were bewildered by the mutiny. Washington could be missing similar vulnerabilities emerging ahead of Russia’s presidential election in March, which it presumes will merely be a ritual of autocratic self-congratulation. Putin will certainly win, but it will nonetheless be an important political moment as competing Russian political constituencies jockey for greater power and influence.

The biggest problem posed by the myths that Russia and the United States have of each other is that they are mutually reinforcing. The more fanatical Moscow becomes about contesting putative acts of American hegemony, the more Russia resembles the maniacal autocracy of American myth. And the more Washington envisions Russia as the abiding and wicked “other” in U.S. foreign policy, the more militarized its relations to Europe are bound to become—and the more likely Moscow is to construe the United States’ aims as hegemonic. So far, the war in Ukraine has epitomized this cycle of progressively hardening preconceptions. With every passing month, each country sees its myths draw closer to the objective truth.

Both America and Russia nourish their myths for a reason.

Neither the United States nor Russia can easily dispel the myths that the other holds. Both countries nourish their myths for a reason. The Russian regime wants the United States—and everyone else—to think that it has no domestic politics and that Putinism and Russia are one. If the United States frames the war in Ukraine principally as a struggle for territorial integrity rather than as a good-versus-evil battle against a lone tyrant, Americans may lose interest.

And even if leaders wanted to, it would be hard to dislodge the myths. The more actively Washington deployed public diplomacy to try to change Russian perceptions of the United States, the more Russians would perceive the United States to be manipulating their country. And to transform its image within the United States, the Russian government would have to divest itself of autocracy and pull back militarily from Europe—which has never been a winning recipe for ruling Russia.

These myths will long be with us. But Washington must recognize them as such. If the United States could, in its own internal policy debates, challenge the myth of Russia’s unalloyed autocracy and uncover the ways in which domestic politics and public opinion constrain and construct Russian foreign policy, it might discover tools that could disrupt Russia’s war effort. It would also be more ready for a post-Putin political transition. Politically, Russia tends to change suddenly; its politics do not remain forever frozen.

As they try to predict Russian behavior, U.S. leaders would also benefit from a greater awareness of the United States’ mythical status in the Kremlin, which is wildly at odds with Washington’s self-image. Russians believe that the timeless essence of the United States is the will to power: this clarifies the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and it also explains Russia’s refusal to wind down its devastating war in Ukraine. Captivating as they are, myths mislead by obscuring the awesome complexity and open-endedness of reality. In all they reveal about human nature, myths admit endless interpretation. But at their heart, they are also static—and they get in the way of sound strategy and agile diplomacy.