You can never get into the head of a Russian with Western logic.

"You cannot understand Russia with your mind, you cannot measure it with the common yardstick: there is a particular essence in it. You can only believe in Russia." The poet Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev wrote this in the 19th century and it is still valid today. The immense country, the largest on Earth, has a soul divided in two, between its European vocation and its constantly oscillating Asian roots, always prey to its contradictions, between the desire for refinement and the bloody Slavic barbarism. Since the time of Ivan the Terrible, it has possessed strength and exercised it without temperament. Every novelty has been imposed from above, with the vertical process of change imposed on the horizontal dimension of acceptance of the present. Peter the Great, who was such not only in stature but also in ideas, understood that the wind of history came from the West and uprooted every resistance to modernization. The autocratic Tsar marked the way for Europe as the main stage of action for all the Russias, not necessarily territorial expansion, which will also happen through the pushes against the doors that history opened, and in 1703 he gave them the jewel-city of Petersburg on the Baltic, which will become a Russian lake. (...)

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