In 1842 the writer Nikolay Gogol published Phone Number List The Dead Souls , a satire on Russia before the emancipation of the serfs. Like any work that belongs to that genre, various elements of Russian society appeared there described in a Phone Number List burlesque manner, such as corruption and greed. In 1854 the book was translated into English but the chosen title was Everyday Life in Russia . English publishers had Phone Number List converted a literary text into an ethnographic one to highlight the supposed barbarism of Moscow. This was not new.

In 1839 the Marquis de – the French aristocrat Phone Number List who would later be taken up by Aleksandr as the protagonist in his award-winning film The Russian Ark (2003) – had published his book From him which he described the Russians as drunken, intolerant, and promiscuous, with appalling tastes in the arts, and, moreover, with scant and bad manners. Something similar had been written by the diplomat Phone Number List Joseph de in his Saint Petersburg Evenings of 1821, after spending several seasons in the Saint Petersburg of the tsars. Some decades later, some intellectuals who had read Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov concluded that the Russians were all "crazy, melancholic and suicidal." Even in times before Phone Number List Peter the Great, travelers and diplomats described his time in the Empire in the worst terms.

For centuries, then, there has been a European Phone Number List tradition that attributes to Russia those practices that are disapproved in its own territory. The triumph of communism in 1917 and the rise of the Cold War in the 20th century only increased the dose of preconceptions. Thus, a famous French historian had no problem highlighting Phone Number List Lenin's Kalmyk (read: Asian ) origins to explain Bolshevik barbarism . Mass culture was not exempt from representations of the Soviet Union either, and productions soon emerged Phone Number List that placed the Russians as the.