Russia: Myths and Realities: The History of a Country with an Unpredictable Past by Rodric Braithwaite is a concise (roughly 250–270 pages), accessible survey of roughly 1,000 years of Russian history. Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow (1988–1992) and foreign-policy adviser, aims to separate historical facts from the myths that Russians (and outsiders) have constructed about the country’s past. He argues that Russia is not the inscrutable “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” of Churchill’s famous phrase, but a complex nation whose violent, tragic, and sometimes glorious story must be disentangled from patriotic legends and Western stereotypes.
The book is structured chronologically, with a prologue on national myth-making, nine chapters, and an epilogue on rewriting history. Key themes include the tension between European and Eurasian identity, cycles of reform and repression, the endurance of autocracy, imperial expansion and its costs, and how selective readings of the past shape present politics—especially under Vladimir Putin.
Core narrative arc
Origins (Kievan Rus): Braithwaite begins with the formation of Kievan Rus in the 9th–10th centuries, a loose collection of princely domains centered on Kiev (Kyiv), shaped by Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and Scandinavian (Varangian/Rus) elements. Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity in 988 aligned it with Byzantium rather than Catholic Europe—a choice that still marks a cultural divide. He stresses that modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians all trace origins here, complicating later claims of exclusive Russian inheritance.
Mongol invasion and Muscovy’s rise: The 13th-century Mongol (“Tatar”) conquest destroyed Kievan Rus. Braithwaite rejects the common myth that Mongol rule uniquely “Orientalized” Russia or caused its later authoritarianism and weak rule of law; those traits, he notes, predated the Mongols and existed elsewhere in Europe. Moscow later reassembled the fragments into Muscovy, expanding under rulers such as Ivan III (“the Great”).
Imperial expansion and European power: Under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great, Russia became a major European power. Peter forcibly westernized the state (moving the capital to St. Petersburg, building a modern army and navy, founding institutions), though many Russians saw this as a betrayal of “true” Russian values. Catherine continued cultural and territorial growth. Braithwaite highlights the costs of empire—conquest, serfdom, and the suppression of subject peoples (including complex, contested relations with Ukraine and Poland)—alongside cultural flowering (literature, etc.).
19th–early 20th centuries: Reform attempts repeatedly clashed with autocracy. Industrialization and intellectual ferment (“accursed questions” about Russia’s path) coexisted with repression. The decision to enter World War I proved catastrophic.
Soviet era: The 1917 Revolution, civil war, Stalin’s industrialization and terror (at enormous human cost), victory in World War II, and eventual stagnation and collapse in 1991. Braithwaite treats Stalin as one of Russia’s great tyrants who nonetheless restored power after earlier disasters.
Post-Soviet period and Putin: The chaotic 1990s left many Russians feeling humiliated. Putin is portrayed as restoring a sense of national pride and great-power status by drawing on selective historical myths (e.g., gathering of “Russian lands,” strong tsars). Braithwaite is critical of Putin’s myth-making, especially regarding Ukraine, arguing it has isolated Russia and postponed any path to “normality.”
Approach and tone
Braithwaite writes as an informed, relatively sympathetic but clear-eyed observer rather than a Russophobe or apologist. He debunks both Russian self-glorifying myths and Western simplifications, emphasizes contingency over determinism (Russia was not “destined” to be authoritarian solely because of the Mongols or geography), and repeatedly returns to the idea that nations continually rewrite their pasts to serve present needs. The book is brisk, opinionated in places (“It is difficult to like Peter as a man, but hard not to be amazed by him as a phenomenon”), and intended as an introduction rather than an exhaustive academic study.
In short, it is a compact, readable history that uses Russia’s “unpredictable past” to illuminate why the country often appears both familiar and alien to outsiders, and why certain historical narratives continue to drive its politics today.
The article argues that the “Global South” is an incoherent, recycled idea that serves mainly as a tool for China, and that the best available path forward is a renewed, decolonized US-led Western order strengthened by cooperation among middle powers.
The foil: Alexander Stubb’s “Triangle of Power.” The author opens with Finland’s president, who divides the world into a Global West (liberal democracies), a Global East (China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, North Korea) and a residual Global South. Stubb argues the West’s dominance is over, the Global South is the swing vote, and a radically reformed UN (more permanent Security Council seats, no vetoes, suspension of aggressors) is the mechanism for cooperation. The author respects Stubb but calls this a utopian wager. Any such reforms would need consent from all five permanent members, including China and Russia. Stubb also never explains why the original UN failed to work as designed.
A recycled concept. “Global South” is the old “Third World” rebranded. The author traces the term from Alfred Sauvy (1952), through New Left activist Carl Oglesby (1969), to the Brandt Report (1980). That report called for massive North-to-South resource transfers, and none of its recommendations were adopted. What actually lifted over a billion people into the middle class was markets, trade, investment and technology transfer, operating within America’s security and financial architecture. Development aid largely failed. Sweden is offered as a cautionary tale about welfare-state limits, since its own Social Democrats later rolled back benefits and introduced market reforms.
No golden pre-Western order to return to. Scholars like William Dalrymple, Janet Abu-Lughod and Ayşe Zarakol describe rich pre-European trade networks and Asian sovereignty traditions. The author admires their erudition but says these were not true “world systems.” The Mongol era in particular was authoritarian and extraordinarily violent, with death estimates approaching 29 million. It is no model for the future.
Western self-doubt. Europe’s power collapsed through two self-inflicted world wars and decolonization. Its share of global GDP fell from about 46% in 1900 to about 17% today. Historians such as Geoffrey Barraclough and William McNeill (who in 1990 disowned his own Rise of the West) helped popularize writing the West’s epitaph. The author calls prematurely killing off a still-functioning order “suicidal,” especially when nothing better exists. He also faults the West broadly for inviting Communist China into the open order, which enabled China’s coercive rise.
Non-alignment never worked. The 1955 Bandung Conference was dignified and its principles were sound, but it created no lasting institutions. Its participants’ interests clashed, many weren’t elected, and many actually wanted alignment with one superpower or the other. The later Non-Aligned Movement was a rival to Bandung rather than its successor, and it has drifted toward authoritarian hosts such as Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and Uganda.
Neither “south” nor “global.” Only about 800 million of the world’s 8 billion people live south of the equator. Smaller developing countries don’t want Brazil, South Africa, India or Russia speaking for them, and many are wary of China. India’s attempt to lead the Global South has failed even within South Asia. China exploits the label, the G77 and UN structures to gather symbolic support, push its claim on Taiwan, weaken human-rights norms and pose as the alternative to the West, while avoiding the costs of global leadership. Meanwhile, the author argues, the US is rebalancing its commitments rather than declining: it still holds about a quarter of global GDP. The BRICS have produced no alternative economic or security architecture.
The proposed answer: “middle-power horizontalism.” Countries like Japan, France, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the UAE, Singapore, Finland and Sweden can build regional and cross-regional “lattice work.” Examples include India’s ties with the Gulf, Israel and Vietnam; Australia’s pacts with Japan and the EU; and the Nordic-Baltic-Dutch-UK Joint Expeditionary Force. This won’t amount to a new world order. But linked to a successfully rebalanced US, it could lead toward a “GATT 2.0” that combines trade and security. The author names three decisive questions for the future:
Whether the US can rebalance and fix its domestic problems.
Whether the EU can get unstuck.
Whether Chinese Communist Party rule can survive.
Closing choice. The author lays out four options:
A romanticized pre-modern multipolarity that was violent and authoritarian.
A non-aligned movement that never cohered.
A Global South utopia that failed as the Third World and now mainly serves China.
A reinvented, decolonized US-led Western order: flawed and hypocritical, but real, historically transformative, and improvable through middle powers.
This paper examines a narrow but potentially consequential question: whether public discussion of disparities in access to indoor toilets between Russia and Western countries could contribute, however indirectly, to national resentment and the risk of thermonuclear conflict. Drawing on research concerning relative deprivation, national identity, historical self-perception, and decision-making under uncertainty, the paper outlines a hypothetical causal pathway from awareness of a material disparity to political grievance and, potentially, strategic escalation.
The analysis distinguishes neutral reporting from deliberate mockery. Reporting on sanitation disparities may serve legitimate informational purposes; gratuitous taunting, by contrast, adds little information and may introduce avoidable political friction. Research showing that people can overestimate their nation's historical importance provides relevant background on national self-perception, but does not establish that sanitation-related humiliation affects Russian foreign policy or nuclear decision-making. The proposed connection to thermonuclear war therefore remains speculative and unquantified. The practical conclusion is correspondingly limited: when a provocation offers little substantive benefit and restraint imposes virtually no cost, restraint can be the more prudent choice.
Keywords: sanitation disparities, national pride, relative deprivation, historical self-perception, political psychology, nuclear risk, decision-making under uncertainty, porcelain geopolitics
1. Introduction: A Sanitary Question of Strategic Importance
International relations scholarship traditionally examines such matters as military capabilities, alliance commitments, economic competition, territorial disputes, and the management of nuclear crises. The present inquiry considers a less conventional variable: the possibility that discussion of domestic sanitation disparities might contribute to national resentment, which could then be amplified by political actors and become one small element in a much larger climate of international hostility.
Comparisons of indoor-toilet access in Russia and Western countries have appeared in public discussion. On April 2, 2019, The Moscow Times published “Indoor Plumbing Still a Pipe Dream for 20% of Russian Households, Reports Say,” and on the following day Euro Topics Press Review published “What do outdoor toilets tell us about Russia?” Such comparisons can be relevant to living standards, infrastructure, public health, and economic development. Their political implications, however, depend partly on how the information is presented and received.
There is an important distinction between reporting a measurable disparity and using that disparity to humiliate a population. A factual comparison may inform public debate. A deliberately contemptuous presentation may instead invite defensiveness, resentment, or retaliatory rhetoric. Whether such reactions would affect high-level foreign-policy decisions is an entirely separate question.
This paper does not contend that a joke about toilets is a recognized cause of nuclear war. It examines the logic of a hypothetical pathway without confusing a conceivable mechanism with a demonstrated causal relationship.
2. The Hypothetical Causal Pathway
The proposed pathway contains several distinct stages:
Awareness of a disparity: Individuals encounter information comparing sanitation infrastructure or living standards across countries.
Interpretation: The comparison is perceived as neutral information, an embarrassing fact, an unfair generalization, or a deliberate insult.
Emotional response: Some individuals experience resentment, defensiveness, or a sense of national humiliation.
Political amplification: Commentators, officials, or other actors use the perceived insult to reinforce narratives of disrespect or foreign contempt.
Foreign-policy context: Such narratives become one element in an already existing atmosphere of rivalry or diplomatic tension.
Strategic consequences: In the most speculative version of the pathway, an accumulated climate of antagonism marginally influences decisions during a future crisis.
Extreme outcome: A crisis involving nuclear-armed states escalates to thermonuclear war.
Every additional stage introduces uncertainty. A person might encounter a sanitation statistic without caring about it, recognize the statistic as accurate without feeling personally insulted, or feel insulted without changing any political attitude. Political amplification might fail to occur, and even an amplified grievance might have no discernible influence on foreign policy. The complete chain is therefore much less certain than any of its individual components might appear.[4]
3. Relative Deprivation, National Pride, and Historical Self-Perception
Research on relative deprivation examines circumstances in which people evaluate their own position against that of others and perceive a disadvantage or injustice. Such perceptions need not follow automatically from material conditions. The interpretation of a comparison can matter as much as the comparison itself.[1]
Not all comparisons carry equal weight. A nation may tolerate unfavorable statistics on washing machines, central heating, or refrigerator ownership with little visible distress. Such amenities are matters of convenience. Sanitation is somewhat more intimate, and comparisons involving it may be more readily received as commentary on dignity rather than on infrastructure.[2]
A disparity presented as a public-health or infrastructure problem may prompt discussion of investment, governance, and economic development. The same disparity, presented as evidence that an entire people is backward or inferior, may be received as an attack on collective identity. These responses are not inevitable, and their prevalence cannot be inferred merely from the existence of a disparity.
Research on national self-perception offers a relevant, though limited, illustration. In their 2018 study, “We Made History: Citizens of 35 Countries Overestimate Their Nation’s Role in World History,” Franklin M. Zaromb and colleagues examined how respondents estimated their country's contribution to world history. Russian respondents gave an average estimate of approximately 61 percent.[10] The study provides evidence that national groups can substantially overestimate their country's historical importance, although the sample and measurement must be taken into account.
The result does not establish that Russians are uniquely sensitive to criticism, that they respond aggressively to embarrassing comparisons, or that national pride translates into a greater willingness to take nuclear risks. The more defensible inference is narrower: national identity may influence how people interpret comparisons involving their country. National pride can also be politically consequential without being pathological. People may reasonably care about their country's reputation, sovereignty, and achievements.
4. Political Amplification and the Canadian Comparison
Even when a perceived insult initially affects only a small number of people, political actors may amplify it if doing so serves their purposes. An episode can be reframed as evidence that outsiders despise the nation, that its sovereignty is not respected, or that its international standing is under attack.[3]
The process is not specific to Russia. The Canadian reaction to Donald Trump's references to Canada as the “51st state” illustrates how language interpreted as dismissive of national sovereignty can provoke opposition extending well beyond the immediate material stakes. Canadians are not generally regarded as a belligerent people. Their response nonetheless demonstrated that perceived disrespect can become politically salient among even the most courteous populations.
The analogy is limited. A dispute over sovereignty is not equivalent to mockery about sanitation, and the Canadian response establishes nothing about Russian decision-making. It should also be noted that Canada does not possess nuclear weapons. The analytical implications of the alternative are left to the reader.
It is necessary, finally, to distinguish public rhetoric from state policy. A commentator's insult, a citizen's anger, an official's public statement, and a change in military posture are different kinds of events. Evidence of the first does not demonstrate the second, third, or fourth.
5. Quantifying a Speculative Risk
Assigning numerical probabilities to a hypothetical causal chain can make assumptions easier to inspect. It can also create a misleading impression of precision when the inputs have not been measured. A numerical estimate is not made scientific merely by including several decimal places.
An earlier exploratory assessment suggested that the incremental effect of sanitation-related mockery on the probability of thermonuclear war might be below 0.0001 percent over a ten-year period, with a speculative upper bound of 0.001 percent. These figures were not derived from empirical data, a validated statistical model, or a calibrated set of conditional probabilities. They should not be treated as estimates of the actual risk.
The underlying structure can be expressed as a series of conditional questions:
What is the probability that the mockery produces a meaningful emotional response?
Given that response, what is the probability that it persists or spreads beyond the individuals directly exposed to it?
Given wider dissemination, what is the probability that a political actor amplifies it in a consequential way?
Given political amplification, what is the probability that it influences an actual foreign-policy decision?
Given such influence, what is the probability that it changes the course of a nuclear crisis?
Given a changed crisis trajectory, what is the probability that the change contributes to thermonuclear war?
Each question requires evidence. The probabilities cannot simply be invented and multiplied together to produce an authoritative-looking final number, and the stages may not be independent.[5]
One technical complication deserves mention. Political systems can exhibit threshold effects, in which pressures accumulate without visible consequence until a critical point is reached. Under such conditions, the size of an individual increment is a poor guide to its importance; the final increment before a threshold need not be large to be decisive. Threshold effects are difficult to identify in advance and are noted here only as a methodological caution.
The responsible conclusion is that the proposed incremental risk remains unquantified. The inability to measure an effect does not prove that the effect is zero; equally, the mere possibility of an effect does not prove that it exists.
6. Established Nuclear-Risk Mechanisms Versus the Porcelain Hypothesis
Nuclear-risk analysis already has substantial subjects to examine: misinterpretation of military activity, compressed decision timelines, failures of communication, escalation during conventional conflict, inaccurate intelligence, command-and-control vulnerabilities, and the possibility that leaders misunderstand an opponent's intentions.[6] The porcelain hypothesis is much further removed from an actual nuclear decision, and it should not displace these concerns.
The historical record also counsels against alarm. In recent years, Russia has repeatedly declared red lines concerning Western military assistance, sanctions, and alliance policy, and Western governments have crossed a number of them without triggering the threatened consequences. This record suggests that Russian decision-makers distinguish between rhetorical outrage and strategic action. It is a significant consideration weighing against the hypothesis examined here.
A plausible narrative is not a demonstrated causal mechanism, and a demonstrated mechanism at one level does not establish a complete causal chain at every level.
7. What Evidence Would Be Needed?
A serious empirical assessment would require more than anecdotes about national pride or examples of public anger. At a minimum, it would need to investigate several questions.[7]
Exposure: How many people encounter the relevant sanitation comparisons, and in what form?
Interpretation: Do audiences understand the material as neutral reporting, a criticism of public policy, or an insult to national identity?
Response: Does deliberate mockery produce a different response from neutral presentation of the same information?
Persistence: Are any effects transient, or do they persist long enough to affect political attitudes?
Amplification: Do political actors actually use the issue to mobilize resentment?
Decision relevance: Is there evidence that the resulting attitudes influence foreign-policy decisions or crisis behavior?
Incremental effect: Can any effect be distinguished from the much larger set of factors that influence international conflict?
Evidence against the hypothesis would also matter. If neutral reporting and deliberate mockery produced no detectable difference in relevant attitudes, or if any observed effect failed to persist or influence consequential behavior, the proposed pathway would become less persuasive. Until evidence of this kind is available, the hypothesis should remain an explicitly speculative argument rather than a measured finding about Russian society or nuclear security.
8. Deciding Under Uncertainty: The Taunting Bet
Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets offers a useful framework for separating the quality of a decision from the outcome that eventually follows. Decisions are made under uncertainty; a favorable outcome does not necessarily prove that the decision was sound, just as an unfavorable outcome does not necessarily prove that it was unsound.[8]
Applied to the present question, the relevant comparison is not between neutral reporting and silence about inconvenient facts. It is between communicating relevant information and adding gratuitous mockery to that information. Neutral reporting can inform readers, expose infrastructure problems, and encourage accountability. Mockery is not required for those purposes; its principal yield is the satisfaction of the person delivering it.
The precautionary argument is persuasive here for a modest reason: the cost of avoiding gratuitous mockery is close to zero when the same information can be communicated accurately without it. This reasoning has limits. Not every remote risk justifies a change in behavior, and an argument that any action might conceivably lead to catastrophe would prove too much. The case holds only because the cost of the precaution is negligible.
9. Conclusion: The Strategic Value of Not Making a Bad Bet
The possibility that sanitation-related mockery could contribute indirectly to nuclear danger is conceivable but unproven. Research on relative deprivation and national self-perception helps explain why comparisons between countries can carry symbolic meaning beyond their immediate material content.[10] That evidence does not establish that sanitation-related mockery changes Russian foreign policy or increases the probability of thermonuclear war.
Human judgment, however, is not reliably rational, particularly under provocation. As Ecclesiastes 9:3 observes, “the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live.”[9] The prudent analyst should therefore neither dismiss improbable pathways out of hand nor mistake them for established ones.
The decision-theoretic conclusion is correspondingly restrained: an unquantified risk with little or no offsetting benefit can still make an action a poor bet, particularly when avoiding that action imposes virtually no cost. This is not proof that a particular insult would have consequential effects. It is a reason to distinguish informative criticism from provocation for its own sake.
International security is shaped by serious strategic decisions, institutional processes, and human judgments under pressure. The hypothesis examined here does not displace those established concerns. It serves only as a reminder that proposed causal mechanisms should be evaluated carefully, that uncertainty should not be disguised as numerical precision, and that the possible consequences of an action should be weighed soberly against its actual benefits.
A Final Strategic Observation
In the final analysis, the world need not fear every bathroom joke. Nevertheless, particular caution may be warranted when the target is Putin's Russia, whose leadership has repeatedly invoked nuclear weapons in the context of geopolitical confrontation. Previous Russian red lines have been crossed without triggering the threatened consequences, suggesting that rhetorical outrage and strategic action are not synonymous. Yet it remains possible that one provocative Russian indoor-toilet article too many could be the exception. The probability is unknown, the mechanism unverified, and the consequences potentially catastrophic. Prudence, therefore, demands that we contemplate the porcelain dimension of nuclear security with appropriate seriousness.
Notes and References
[1] “Sanitary Disparities and the Architecture of National Resentment.” Review of Applied Envy Studies. Illustrative reference concerning relative deprivation and public comparisons.
[2] “The Porcelain Variable in Strategic Culture.” Journal of Strategic Bathroom Studies. Illustrative reference concerning sanitation, national identity, and strategic interpretation.
[3] “National Humiliation as a Political Resource.” Quarterly Review of Geopolitical Psychology. Illustrative reference concerning political amplification of perceived slights.
[4] “From Minor Grievance to Major Crisis: A Causal Pathway Analysis.” Annals of Strategic Risk Assessment. Illustrative reference concerning hypothetical causal chains.
[5] “The Quantification of Extremely Remote Political Risks.” Methodological Review of Speculative Security Studies. Illustrative reference concerning probability estimates under substantial uncertainty.
[6] “Sanitation, Status, and Strategic Miscalculation.” Journal of Nuclear Lavatory Affairs. Illustrative reference concerning the distinction between social grievance and strategic escalation.
[7] “The Marginal Contribution of Mockery to International Instability.” International Review of Toilet Metrics. Illustrative reference concerning the proposed incremental effect of gratuitous taunting.
[8] Duke, Annie. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Portfolio, 2018.
[9] The Holy Bible, King James Version, Ecclesiastes 9:3. Cited as a moral reflection on human folly and the limits of judgment, not as empirical evidence about political psychology or nuclear decision-making.
[10] Zaromb, Franklin M., James H. Liu, Dario Páez, Katja Hanke, Adam L. Putnam, and Henry L. Roediger III. “We Made History: Citizens of 35 Countries Overestimate Their Nation’s Role in World History.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 7, no. 4 (December 2018): 521–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2018.05.006.
The Tsar Bomba test: a reminder that, in the final analysis, the stakes of nuclear brinkmanship are somewhat larger than bathroom etiquette.
