A brand new, outdated specter is haunting the world: the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons.
Effectively, that’s what the Kremlin needs the world to imagine.
Take the brand new Russian state-backed movie “Tolerance.” Launched in September 2025 to a lower than enthusiastic public response, the dystopian story of ethical decay within the West opens with a warning of an “omnipresent Anglo-Saxon liberalism” that may “trigger the last word degradation and extinction of once-prosperous international locations and peoples.”
Scary stuff. However the movie isn’t the primary time that Anglo-Saxons have been cited as a risk to the Russian lifestyle.
Because the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian officers and their colleagues within the Kremlin-controlled media have taken to referring to their Western adversaries as “Anglo-Saxons.” International Minister Sergey Lavrov even said that the “Anglo-Saxons” in query are bent on defeating Russia “with the fingers of the Kyiv regime.”
Certainly, evaluation one in every of us performed with Adrian Rogstad on the College of Groningen taking a look at statements posted on the Russian international ministry web site discovered a marked improve in “Anglo-Saxon” references after the invasion of Ukraine – 86 of them in the midst of 2022, in comparison with simply 27 within the earlier 20 years. International ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s March 2022 remark that the “Anglo-Saxon world won’t ever cease … It’s like an insatiable monster,” is typical of the best way “Anglo-Saxon” is used. The time period even made it into the official Russian international coverage idea revealed a yr later, the place within the part titled “The U.S. and different Anglo-Saxon states,” the US is known as “the principle inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian coverage 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 by the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson as a result of he “stands in clear distinction to the place of the standard Anglo-Saxon media.”
This creeping use of “Anglo-Saxon” as a slur hasn’t gone unnoticed within the West. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy stated in 2023 that the usage of the time period was “very unusual” given the multiethnic character of American society.
Reviews recommend that with the election of a extra Russia-friendly president in Donald Trump, the phrase from the Kremlin was to not use the time period for People, particularly. However it seems not everybody obtained the memo – pro-Putin State Duma Deputy Viktor Vodolatsky lately warned in opposition to “Anglo-Saxons” making a “level of stress” within the South Caucasus by way of the U.S.-led peace efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
As specialists in Russian discourse and post-Soviet nations, we see the elevated use of “Anglo-Saxons” as reflecting deeper tendencies that faucet into Putin’s use of historical past to justify the invasion of Ukraine and smear his perceived enemies, whereas exploiting political divisions in Europe and America.
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 fifth and sixth centuries. Alfred the Nice united the warring fiefdoms of southern England within the ninth century and declared himself king of the Anglo-Saxon realm.
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However the time period didn’t enter wider utilization till lengthy after the “Anglo-Saxon interval” ended with the invasion of England by French-speaking Normans in 1066.
Actually, it wasn’t till the reign of Henry VIII within the sixteenth century that students began to check with the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, in a bid to distinguish the nation from Catholic Europe – one other use of historical past for political goals.
However the time period actually took off within the nineteenth century, when it was folded into pseudoscientific racist justification for the British Empire. That got here to an finish in World Conflict I, when Britain and America discovered themselves preventing in opposition to Germany – the placement of Saxony. In 1917, the British royal household modified their title from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Even U.S. President Woodrow Wilson – an acknowledged racist – insisted that People weren’t Anglo-Saxons.
There issues stood till 1964, when American professor E. Digby Baltzell revealed “The Protestant Institution,” which popularized the time period “White Anglo Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, to check with middle-class People of European descent.
By the 2000s, it was largely white supremacists who had been utilizing the time period Anglo-Saxon as a synonym for a modern-day demographic. Educational journals and teams devoted to finding out the Center Ages dropped references to “Anglo-Saxons” as a result of racist connotations.
Make Moscow medieval once more!
It’s in opposition to this background of Anglo-Saxon as a time period appropriated by white supremacists that fashionable Russian utilization ought to be seen.
Russian propaganda has lengthy sought to speak up the far proper in Europe and America, with whom Putin’s “nationwide conservatism” has a detailed affinity. It does so to sow division in Western democracies and fracture the liberal worldwide order. The intention is to painting the U.S. and U.Okay. as warmongering Anglo-Saxon nations, thereby encouraging the French, Germans and different Europeans to keep away from following their lead.
Extra broadly, the references to Anglo-Saxons displays Russia’s view that international politics is pushed by a “conflict of civilizations,” through which Russia represents the values of conventional Europe, and it faucets right into a centuries-old concern of perfidious Western encroachment on the Russian state.
It additionally matches a sample of Putin referencing Russia’s medieval previous to elucidate the nation’s present insurance policies, even when he wants the invasion of Turkic tribes within the Eleventh century to justify COVID-19 measures.
Putin has tried to justify the invasion of Ukraine by claiming that fashionable Russia is the direct descendant of ninth-century Kyivan Rus, and that Ukrainians are subsequently actually Russians.
The Russian authorities has invested closely in attempting to steer its residents that they’ll hint their id all the best way again to a distant previous in medieval instances – at a time when Anglo-Saxons dominated England.
However in leaning on outdated terminology common with white supremacist teams in a bid to sow division and antagonism within the West, Putin appears to be retreating into an imaginary world of the medieval previous.
