From a Western perspective, Russian political reality often strikes us as harsh, and this harshness also tends to dominate news coverage. This perception has a long history. Examples easily trigger the imagination, from Dostoevsky, who was nearly executed for reading a letter aloud, via large-scale terror authorised by class-war criminals like Lenin and Stalin, to the heavy crackdown on political opposition in the present century. Oppositional activity, from attempts at the tsar's life to the political art of Pavlenskii, appears equally radical. Looking at these events from a global perspective, however, makes them much less exceptional. Besides, there is no shortage of political violence in ‘the West’ either. Moreover, major causes of political violence in Russia, such as autocracy, serfdom and capitalism, are of Western origin, not to mention imported philosophies like Enlightenment rationalism or Marxist socialism. This suggests that we are dealing more with images of Self and Other than with historical and empirical fact. For long stretches of time, Russia has oscillated between two forms of ‘otherness’: either as the Other Europe or as Europe's Other, and in both cases as part of the same divided Christendom. Russia has been Western Europe's constitutive other as much as the other way around, and both sides are uncertain whether the other is an outside or an inside other.

For Russian political philosophers, too, ‘Europe’ has often acted as a major inner yardstick, even though alternative voices have been articulated, from Danilevskii to Dugin. More broadly, Russians expressing the hope that their country might one day become ‘normal’ are referring, as a rule, to the assumed ‘normality’ of Western countries, however much they may simultaneously loathe its hedonistic liberalism. Many categories and topics of political philosophy in Russia are, indeed, of West European provenance, and the different conclusions arrived at by Russian thinkers can, in the majority of cases, be read as the effect, not of different philosophy, but of different circumstances and, hence, different premisses.