A brand new, outdated specter is haunting the sector: the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons.
Smartly, that’s what the Kremlin needs the sector to consider.
Take the brand new Russian state-backed movie “Tolerance.” Launched in September 2025 to a not up to enthusiastic public reaction, the dystopian story of ethical decay within the West opens with a caution of an “omnipresent Anglo-Saxon liberalism” that may “cause the ultimate degradation and extinction of once-prosperous countries and peoples.”
Horrifying stuff. However the movie isn’t the primary time that Anglo-Saxons had been cited as a risk to the Russian way of living.
For the reason that full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian officers and their colleagues within the Kremlin-controlled media have taken to regarding their Western adversaries as “Anglo-Saxons.” Overseas Minister Sergey Lavrov even mentioned that the “Anglo-Saxons” in query are bent on defeating Russia “with the hands of the Kyiv regime.”
Certainly, research certainly one of us carried out with Adrian Rogstad on the College of Groningen taking a look at statements posted at the Russian overseas ministry site discovered a marked building up in “Anglo-Saxon” references after the invasion of Ukraine – 86 of them all through 2022, in comparison to simply 27 within the earlier two decades. Overseas ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s March 2022 remark that the “Anglo-Saxon world will never stop … It’s like an insatiable monster,” is standard of the way in which “Anglo-Saxon” is used. The time period even made it into the authentic Russian overseas coverage idea printed a 12 months later, the place within the phase titled “The U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon states,” the US is known as “the main inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West”.
The time period is a specific favourite of Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. In February 2024, Peskov defined that Putin agreed to be interviewed through the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson as a result of he “stands in clear contrast to the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”
This creeping use of “Anglo-Saxon” as a slur hasn’t long past overlooked within the West. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy mentioned in 2023 that using the time period was once “very strange” given the multiethnic persona of American society.
Reviews counsel that with the election of a extra Russia-friendly president in Donald Trump, the phrase from the Kremlin was once to not use the time period for American citizens, in particular. However it seems that no longer everybody were given the memo – pro-Putin State Duma Deputy Viktor Vodolatsky not too long ago warned in opposition to “Anglo-Saxons” making a “point of tension” within the South Caucasus throughout the U.S.-led peace efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
As professionals in Russian discourse and post-Soviet international locations, we see the greater use of “Anglo-Saxons” as reflecting deeper traits that faucet into Putin’s use of historical past to justify the invasion of Ukraine and smear his perceived enemies, whilst exploiting political divisions in Europe and The usa.
Who had been the Anglo-Saxons?
The unique Anglo-Saxons comprised the waves of conquerors from Germanic tribes in Europe that flooded into England – Jutes in addition to Angles and Saxons – within the 5th and 6th centuries. Alfred the Nice united the warring fiefdoms of southern England within the 9th century and declared himself king of the Anglo-Saxon realm.
An Eleventh-century depiction of Alfred the Nice.
Wikimedia Commons
However the time period didn’t input wider utilization till lengthy after the “Anglo-Saxon period” ended with the invasion of England through French-speaking Normans in 1066.
In truth, it wasn’t till the reign of Henry VIII within the sixteenth century that students began to discuss with the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, in a bid to tell apart the rustic from Catholic Europe – every other use of historical past for political goals.
However the time period in reality took off within the nineteenth century, when it was once folded into pseudoscientific racist justification for the British Empire. That got here to an result in International Battle I, when Britain and The usa discovered themselves preventing in opposition to Germany – the site of Saxony. In 1917, the British royal circle of relatives modified their title from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Even U.S. President Woodrow Wilson – an stated racist – insisted that American citizens weren’t Anglo-Saxons.
There issues stood till 1964, when American professor E. Digby Baltzell printed “The Protestant Establishment,” which popularized the time period “White Anglo Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, to discuss with middle-class American citizens of Ecu descent.
Via the 2000s, it was once most commonly white supremacists who had been the usage of the time period Anglo-Saxon as a synonym for a modern day demographic. Instructional journals and teams devoted to finding out the Center Ages dropped references to “Anglo-Saxons” because of the racist connotations.
Make Moscow medieval once more!
It’s by contrast background of Anglo-Saxon as a time period appropriated through white supremacists that trendy Russian utilization will have to be noticed.
Russian propaganda has lengthy sought to speak up the a long way correct in Europe and The usa, with whom Putin’s “national conservatism” has an in depth affinity. It does so that you can sow department in Western democracies and fracture the liberal world order. The purpose is to painting the U.S. and U.Okay. as warmongering Anglo-Saxon international locations, thereby encouraging the French, Germans and different Europeans to keep away from following their lead.
Extra extensively, the references to Anglo-Saxons displays Russia’s view that international politics is pushed through a “clash of civilizations,” by which Russia represents the values of conventional Europe, and it faucets right into a centuries-old worry of perfidious Western encroachment at the Russian state.
It additionally suits a development of Putin referencing Russia’s medieval previous to provide an explanation for the rustic’s present insurance policies, even though he wishes the invasion of Turkic tribes within the Eleventh century to justify COVID-19 measures.
Putin has attempted to justify the invasion of Ukraine through claiming that trendy Russia is the direct descendant of ninth-century Kyivan Rus, and that Ukrainians are due to this fact in reality Russians.
The Russian executive has invested closely in looking to convince its electorate that they may be able to hint their identification all of the as far back as previous in medieval instances – at a time when Anglo-Saxons dominated England.
However in leaning on old-fashioned terminology well-liked by white supremacist teams in a bid to sow department and antagonism within the West, Putin appears to be chickening out into an imaginary international of the medieval previous.
