Nearly two centuries after it was first published, Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia remains remarkably relevant today. Each time Russia’s relations with the West grow tense, Letters from Russia enjoys a revival. George F Kennan, the US diplomat and originator of the Cold War policy of containing Soviet expansionism, said it explained Stalin’s rule. More recently, it was reprinted in French and English in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Custine travelled to Imperial Russia in 1839, four years after his fellow aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, published Democracy in America. Custine’s father and grandfather had been guillotined in the revolution, and he expected to find in Russia “new arguments against the despot that reigns at home, against disorder baptised with the name of liberty”.
But an innkeeper warns Custine that “a country which is quitted with such joy and re-entered with such regret is a bad country”. In St Petersburg, he is horrified by the “pillaging army” of bureaucrats and spies. He outsmarts them by posting banal missives to family and friends while sewing the notes destined for his book into his coat lining.
Most of all, Custine is shocked by the fear which permeates Russian society. “In Russia, fear replaces, that is to say paralyses, thought,” he writes. “It is an emotion that, when it reigns alone, can produce only the appearance of civilisation.”
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The consequence of fear is submission: “Unlike the terror which hovers over all heads, submission becomes the general rule of conduct; victims and executioners, all practise the obedience that perpetuates the evil which they inflict or to which they submit.”
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The book has not been translated into Ukrainian, but passages reminded me of conversations with Ukrainian friends who complain of what they describe as the serf-like mentality of Russians.
Letters of recommendation from French aristocrats secured an audience for Custine with Tsar Nicolas I. The tsar, like Vladimir Putin today, saw himself as “continuing the work of Peter the Great”.
What surprised him, Custine wrote 183 years ago, “is not that one man, nourished on the idolatry of his own person... should undertake such things and carry them through... Among all the voices testifying to the glory of this single man, not one rises above the chorus to speak for humanity against... autocracy. You can say of the Russians, both great and small, that they are intoxicated with slavery.”
Russians need foreign conquest to offset the humiliation of slavery, Custine concludes, predicting that Russia will threaten Europe. The tsar, he says, “has many masks, but no face”.
Putin too has many masks. In 2001, George W Bush said he looked Putin in the eye and saw his soul. Yet even Donald Trump has questioned the Russian leader’s sincerity. In April 2025, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Putin’s continued firing of missiles into civilian areas of Ukraine “makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along...” In July, Trump said that when he told Melania what a “wonderful talk” he’d just had with “Vladimir”, she replied, “Wow, that’s strange because they just bombed a nursing home.”
Custine recalls the “Potemkin villages” set up along the route of Empress Catherine’s inspections of the newly conquered lands of Novorossiya – southeastern Ukraine – and Crimea in 1778: “the facades of villages set up at intervals on boards and painted canvas, a quarter of a league away from the road, to let the triumphant sovereign believe that the desert has been populated during her reign. The Russian mind is still obsessed with such notions: everyone disguises what is bad and shows what is good before the master’s eyes.”
Similarly, Putin has persuaded Trump, his acolytes and the “peace lobby” in Europe that Russia is winning the war and that Kyiv must surrender Donbas to limit the damage.
Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin is a contemporary attempt to explain Russia. Olivier Assayas’s film version, released last month, is a box-office success. It made me uneasy, however, because it seems to confirm the present-day ethos that ruthless cruelty is the only path to success; that empathy, as Elon Musk put it, “is the fundamental weakness of western civilisation”.
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Anna Colin Lebedev, a French political scientist and expert on post-Soviet societies, called the film “practically the best gift we could give the Kremlin” and said it was “dangerous” because it shows Russia as Putin wants it to be seen: as all-powerful.
Colin Lebedev, who left Russia at age 14 but maintains close contacts there, says Russians refer to Putin as “the old man”, never “the tsar”, the sobriquet used constantly by da Empoli and Assayas. As played by Jude Law, Putin is an austere leader who shuns fancy food, distrusts fawning courtesans and prefers strenuous exercise to alcohol and carousing.
I suspect that Custine’s description of the Kremlin he toured in 1839 remains more accurate: “Jail, palace, sanctuary; a bulwark against foreigners, a Bastille against the nation, the support of tyrants and the dungeon of peoples... a dwelling suited to the characters of the Apocalypse.”
