Over the last decade anti-Westernism has become perhaps the most important single item in the development of a new Russian ideology. It is certainly popular: according to opinion polls including Gallup more than 60 per cent of Russian citizens believe that the US is the greatest danger to world peace — three times as many as in Iran and most Arab countries. True, when asked in which country they would like to live if it were not Russia, an overwhelming majority of Russians opt for the US. But such contradictions are the exception rather than the rule in the rise of anti-Americanism.

How to explain the wide appeal of anti-Westernism? To a certain extent it is the result of the Russian tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Significant numbers of believers in such theories can be found in every country, including Europe and the US, but their number is particularly high in Russia and the Middle East. This may have to do with certain periods in Russian history such as Stalinism when such theories were state-sponsored and became part of official propaganda. The West is held responsible not only for the downfall of the Soviet Union but also for such specific events as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000. Such conspiracy theories have been reinforced by more or less systematic propaganda in the Russian media. A few examples should suffice.

Father Tikhon Shevkunov is a friend of Putin; he accompanied him on several trips abroad. He also has the reputation of being Putin's father confessor — which is almost certainly wrong because, according to those who may know, Putin is his own father-confessor.(Father Tikhon's autobiography, published a few years ago, sold more than a million copies.) Tikhon opted for a career in the church when he was a student at the Soviet film academy. He belonged to a group of young people experimenting with a ouija board to communicate with the dead. They contacted Gogol, who advised them to commit suicide by swallowing poison — whereupon, deeply shocked, they decided to be baptised.

Several years ago, Father Tikhon produced a movie entitled Gibel Imperii (The Fall of the Empire) in which he argued that Byzantium had fallen, not as the result of the Ottoman onslaught, but because its rulers and elites had foolishly agreed to copy Western economic and political models, such as free enterprise and a free common market. As a result of these alliances Byzantium was impoverished, and lost its independence, power and freedom of action. Its wealthy merchants were ruined. A new oligarchy emerged, a Western party and fifth column of sorts. The West (above all Venice) supported separatist movements in the Balkans and as a result the central government became weaker. Western individualism undermined the soul of Byzantium, its religion, and the young generation went to the West to study and absorb all kind of alien ideas.

Most historians derided Gibel Imperii as a crude attempt to falsify history and draw misleading parallels with Putin's Russia. But there could be no doubt about the purpose of such propaganda exercises (frequently repeated) and no doubt it had a certain effect.