Authors

Discussion

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian government officials and propagandists have increasingly started talking about a particularly sinister actor in world politics: the Anglo-Saxons. Supposedly both the originators of the war and in control of such other key actors as the EU and its member states, who if it were not for this outside influence may be more inclined to see things Russia’s way, the Anglo-Saxons are portrayed as both a powerful and devious bunch. Rather than evidencing a sudden interest in early medieval English history, this increased use of course refers to the more contemporary ‘Anglos’—the Americans and the British. But why refer to these countries by a term referring to the inhabitants of England a millennium or more ago? We argue that the increased use of the term Anglo-Saxons serves three functions in the Russian propaganda discourse. First, it delineates a particular ‘other’ for Russia within the larger ‘other’ of the ‘collective West’, creating degrees of separation where Russia is closer to the more reasonable, European others. Second, it buttresses the civilizationist thinking increasingly present in Russian discourse, construing an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization within the wider West that makes, for example, the otherwise too ‘young’ United States into a worthy civilizational adversary. In so doing it also draws on the long-standing racialization of the Anglo-Saxon term in other linguistic contexts. Finally, it serves as part of a counter-stigmatization strategy whereby Russia tries to deflect blame from itself onto the supposed ‘real’ culprits in Ukraine and world politics – the bloodthirsty and relentlessly expansionist Anglo-Saxons.