Russia beyond Pussy Riot: "There is a growing feeling that most Western people belong to a different humanoid group from us..."

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571904-leading-role-played-anti-americanism-todays-russia-dread-other

Russia and America

The dread of the other

The leading role played by anti-Americanism in today’s Russia

Feb 16th 2013 | MOSCOW

IF AMERICA did not exist, Russia would have to invent it. In a sense it already has: first as a dream, then as a nightmare. No other country looms so large in the Russian psyche. To Kremlin ideologists, the very concept of Russia’s sovereignty depends on being free of America’s influence.
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Maksim Shevchenko, a TV journalist and a Kremlin-approved crusader against liberalism, wrote recently that “Russia and the West are at war…There is a growing feeling that most Western people belong to a different humanoid group from us; that we are only superficially similar, but fundamentally different.”

Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, says the Kremlin has imposed its traditionalist agenda on Russian society by prosecuting Pussy Riot, the punk singers who performed obscenely on the altar of Russia’s main cathedral, by banning the promotion of homosexuality and by blocking the American adoptions. This has allowed the Kremlin to present protesters against Mr Putin not only as foreign agents, but as a bunch of homosexual, blasphemous mercenaries ready to sell their children to the evil empire.