Russians dislike westerners portraying them as European cultural outsiders and attribute the stereotype to Russophobia. However, they acknowledge and even celebrate their exceptionalism among themselves. As Alexander Gerschenkron phrased it, Russia might have been just like Europe if Tartar domination (1237–1480) and its malign legacy hadn't prevented it from assimilating three great cultural movements: humanism, the Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and the Reformation (1517). Even this formulation is too generous. Russia also lacked any practical acquaintance with Roman law, which underlay the Magna Carta and the foundations of western economic, political, and civic institutions. For at least a millennium, the land of Russia has been different, even though it has modernized and borrowed western institutions in its own fashion over the centuries.

A deep appreciation of Russia's special characteristics and potential is indispensable for any serious assessment of the post-Soviet epoch, its immediate antecedents, and its prospects. Without it, analysts tend to assume that the economic, political, and societal foundations of Russia and the West are identical, that the only factor dividing them is relative backwardness, and that any unfinished business will be speedily completed, culminating in Russia's full westernization. Where there once was a gulf separating East and West in the tsarist and Soviet eras, the East now is expected to dissolve seamlessly into the West. Indeed, this was the dominant view until the spring of 2004, when Vladimir Putin's growing authoritarianism and economic illiberalism gave pause to both the World Bank and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).