Reading more and more about Russia, it seems to me russian people were always paranoid about the west...

Reading more and more about Russia, it seems to me russian people were always paranoid about the west, feeling they needed to defend from it by conquering a lot of lands. Am I wrong about it? What can explain those mixed feelings, since Russia was still very influenced by western Europe.

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The fate of the Byzantines?

It's because Russians (the people) have slave mentality and the Russian rulers instil fear into them at all times. Their propaganda for the last centuries (basically the whole history of Russia as a country) is "We might be bad, but Europeans want to kill you and so it's better to live like dogs with us than to be killed. Now go and get killed on the front because I want more land."

This really is a tragic image because of the exact moment of realization and horror at what he's done.

Not really true. The first Russian monarch to have any meaningful interaction with the West (as in west of Poland-Lithuania) was Peter the Great (who reigned from 1682 to 1725), who was a huge euroboo and loved everything about the West and forced Russia to be more like them. His successors made only minor rollbacks on his Westernisation efforts, and when Catherine the Great came around she was obsessed with Western philosophy and (some) Enlightenment ideas. Alexander I (her grandson) fostered close relations with each major Western power (France, U.K., Austria, Prussia) - though at different times), and his nephew Alexander II abolished serfdom, attempting to free the peasants like they had been in the West. By the time of Nicholas II, he had realised that he desperately needed to industrialise like the West had, and he tried to do this before the war.

It's sort of a meme that Russia was anti-West and anti-innovation. They were to a degree before Peter the Great and his father Alexei, but after them it was generally only the conservative bishops and other religious figures that opposed too rapid a Westernisation.

Watch this, it's like 2 minutes and actually manages to explain a lot.

youtube.com/watch?v=W6LIhNgsQoc

Crimea, Napoleon, Hitler

>Teutonic Knights
>Poles
>Swedes
>French
>Germans
>Americans
Yeah, no reason, we are just paranoid.

>Teutonic Knights
Novgorod has a stupid border skirmish against a scouting force, and communist propaganda memed it into some battle for the existence of Russian civilization.

Meh, all european countries have been invaded by the rest of europe.

Okay then, we feel our culture is threatened by Western culture (Catholicism).
Now not so much.
Russia definitely belongs among European nations, but we are also our own thing in some ways.

Nowadays it's not "the west" they're angry about but spefically and explicitly USA. Most Russians unironically love Germany and don't give much of a shit about Britain.

This picture describes Russian history perfectly: random acts of aggression followed by realization and self loathing.

good critical thinking skills

>Novgorod has a stupid border skirmish against a scouting force, and communist propaganda memed it into some battle for the existence of Russian civilization.
Bullshit. It was memed exactly when it happened, and while it wasn't a battle for Russian civilisation, it was pretty sweet victory in all ways.

>it seems to me russian people were always paranoid about the west

Yeah dude why would Russians be concerned about the west trying to take their land, that would never happen...........

Our Rivals were always in Europe, except Turkey. Same thing with the other European states, but we were easternmost of them.

>only russia has been attacked by other country, ooooohhhh poor russia, such bad destiny, surrounded by enemies, we want only peace, why oh why, we're such victims, such innocent nation
meanwhile in the real world:
>biggest country in the world by area
>russia

inferior slavic reasoning ability

>"biggest country in the world"
>ahem*
>stares in bong*

He said country, not the Rotschild trading enterprise.

>constantly attack and enslave neighbours
>"we liberators"

>gets attacked by some big European country
>"boo hoo why are you picking on us, not fair"

>comrades we must expand into ukraine and poland to protect us from the western counter revolutionaries we must spread the revolution comrades
>WTF WHY AM I BEING ATTACKED RUSSIA IS PEACE LOVING FUCK U WESTERN IMPERIALISTS DID YOU KNOW THAT WE HAVE TIGERS *funds revolutions in africa*

RUSSIA WANTS PEACE

>RUSSIA WANTS PEACE
A PIECE OF YOUR LAND

>Krautchan shit
You have to go back.

I'd be paranoid about the east

>wtf Russia expanded East to stop nomadic shits from raiding them? How dare they!

Russia probably had the biggest excuse for its Empire, no matter how far east they went there were still more nomadic/tribal shits that thought it would be fun to play cowboys and indians. The situation is comparable to the USAs manifest destiny imo, the only thing that stopped both was the Pacific ocean.

Russian westward expansion is less justified but can still be explained logically. Their country has very few natural roadblocks for invading armies which made their most important cities easy targets especially for Poland-Lithuania who had taken advantage of this closeness and was able to enter Moscow in 1610 for example. The Swedes and the Turks were also viable threats for their western cities.

The easiest way to stop this is by putting more land between your main cities and the enemies border. It had saved them more than once because of the sheer distance it would require to move an army to reach their main cities.

>it seems to me russian people were always paranoid about the west
We're kind of the same about the east.

>Am I wrong about it?
A little bit. Slavic history in general is filled with invasions from a foreign power. Hell, the first documentations of the Rus' came during the Mongolian invasions.

t. butthurt vatnik

scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar

Russian Royal genealogy is recorded. Please point out a Tatar in Ivan IV's ancestry then.

And the British are ruled by a German queen. That proves nothing.

>Slavic history
Please stop referring to Russia with such a general term as "Slavic". Just because now they're the biggest Slavic country doesn't mean they get to have this just for them.

>Russia
>european nations

in your fucking dreams snownigger.

That's true the tsars played a huge part in the westernarization of Russia, but it had to be done from the top, and Peter faced much opposition.

Long history of being invaded by collective west every 100 years or so. And inevitably, long history of whipping the ass of collective west every 100 years or so. I don't think there's a country in Europe whose soldiers weren't killed during some grand invasion of Russia. Portugal maybe. Somewhere there is a Spaniard autistically shitposting about Russia on Congolese chalk drawing board because his grandpa froze off his balls during siege of Leningrad.

Teutonic "skirmish" with Old Prussians ended with genocide of the latter. Germans have always been and will always remain autistic genocidal maniacs

>This is the highpoint of art analysis on Veeky Forums for the general populace of pol dwellers and brainlets

>t. retard

Says la creatura I bet.
You mutt fucks have no right to get uppity

There is a book published last year that covers this. Russia: The Story of War by Gregory Carleton.
Over all it's not very good and pretty heavily biased when it comes to modern Russia but it does a decent job of why the Russian people have felt that way about both the West and East for so long and how almost all wars of expansion were justified because of this in the Russian consciousness.