On 19 October 1797 the
French Directory received a document from a Polish general,
Michał Sokolnicki, entitled "Aperçu sur la Russie". This became known as the so-called "
The Will of Peter the Great" and was first published in October 1812, during the Napoleonic wars, in Charles Louis-Lesur's much-read
Des progrès de la puissance russe: this was at the behest of
Napoleon I, who ordered a series of articles to be published showing that "Europe is inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia".
[29][30] Subsequent to the Napoleonic wars, propaganda against Russia was continued by Napoleon's former confessor,
Dominique Georges-Frédéric de Pradt, who in a series of books portrayed Russia as a power-grasping "barbaric" power hungry to conquer Europe.
[31] With reference to Russia's new constitutional laws in 1811 the
Savoyard philosopher
Joseph de Maistre wrote the now famous statement: "Every nation gets the government it deserves" ("Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite").
[32][33]
Beginning from 1815 and lasting roughly until 1840, British commentators began criticizing the extreme conservatism of the Russian state and its resistance to reform efforts.
[34] However, Russophobia in Britain for the rest of the 19th century was primarily focused related to British fears that the
Russian conquest of Central Asia was a precursor to an attack on
British-controlled India. These fears led to the "
Great Game", a series of political and diplomatic confrontations between Britain and Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
[35]
In 1843 the
Marquis de Custine published his hugely successful 1800-page, four-volume travelogue
La Russie en 1839. Custine's scathing narrative reran what were by now clichés which presented Russia as a place where "the veneer of European civilization was too thin to be credible". Such was its huge success that several official and pirated editions quickly followed, as well as condensed versions and translations in German, Dutch, and English. By 1846 approximately 200 thousand copies had been sold.
[36]
In 1867,
Fyodor Tyutchev, a Russian poet, diplomat and member of
His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery, introduced the actual term of "russophobia" in a letter to his daughter Anna Aksakova on 20 September 1867, where he applied it to a number of pro-Western
Russian liberals who, pretending that they were merely following their
liberal principles, developed a negative attitude towards their own country and always stood on a pro-Western and anti-Russian position, regardless of any changes in the Russian society and having a blind eye on any violations of these principles in the West, "violations in the sphere of justice, morality, and even civilization". He put the emphasis on the
irrationality of this sentiment.
[37] Tyuchev saw Western anti-Russian sentiment as the result of misunderstanding caused by
civilizational differences between East and West.
[38] Being an adherent of
Pan-Slavism, he believed that the historical mission of
Slavic peoples was to be united in a Pan-Slavic and
Orthodox Christian Russian Empire to preserve their Slavic identity and avoid cultural assimilation; in his lyrics
Poland, a Slavic yet
Catholic country, was
poetically referred to as
Judas among the Slavs.
[39
