imperial syndrome and its influencethan half of those surveyed (52 per cent) explained Ukraine’s aspi-
ration to draw closer to the EU thus: ‘Ukraine has become a puppet
in the hands of the West and the USA, who are pursuing an anti-
Russian policy’ (Levada Centre 2014e).
In popular consciousness, the growth of a phobia about the
West is not connected with the revival of Soviet traits in Russian
life. Russians explain the changes with reference to the incom-
patibility of Russian and Western civilisation: ‘So we changed,
became a democracy, and the West still does not like us – that
shows their innate Russophobia.’
First, Soviet consciousness returned (in the late 1990s), and
then, the idea of empire was gradually rehabilitated in its pre-
Soviet version. The fact of the matter is that in the Soviet Union
the term ‘empire’ had held entirely negative connotations. Terry
Martin, an authoritative historian of Soviet nationalities policies,
has provided documentary evidence to support his conclusion
that ‘Lenin and Stalin understood very well the danger of being
labeled an empire in the age of nationalism’; therefore, Soviet
leaders never referred to the USSR as an empire (Martin 2001:
19). And to this day the rulers of contemporary Russia stubbornly
call it a federation, although it increasingly displays the charac-
teristics of an imperial system. From school, the Soviet people
have had it instilled in them that an empire is ‘bad’, a ‘prison of
the peoples’ and a regime against which the great Lenin struggled,
and that imperialism is the final stage in the decay of capitalism.
Thus, the rehabilitation of the term ‘empire’ at the beginning of
the twenty- first century seems all the more surprising.
It is noteworthy that in the year 2000, several publishers chose
to issue novels written within the anti- utopia genre (prose in the
style of George Orwell, illustrating contemporary life in the shape
of future events) devoted to Russia as an empire (see Divov 2000;
Gevorkian 2000; Krusanov 2000; van Zaichik 2000). The inter-
est in the anti- utopia genre, which is sometimes called a ‘coded
language’ genre, is telling in itself. There was no demand for
such literature in Russia in the Gorbachev and Eltsin era. On the
contrary, after many years behind the ‘iron curtain’, the post-
Soviet public was hungry for the truth, and cast themselves over
literature that depicted real problems. The most popular current