Political scientist Alexey Chesnakov, who heads the scientific council at the Center for Political Conjunction, has published a comprehensive analysis tracing how the concept of the enemy has served as Russia's central mechanism for societal mobilization from medieval times to the present day.
The study was released on September 3, 2026, as part of the project Russian Political Dictionary, a joint initiative conducted alongside Russian media outlets Lenta.ru and Mash under senior editor Maxim Gabrielyan and creative producer Alexander Nepogodin.
According to the project, the word enemy represents one of the foundational terms in Russian political history, serving across different eras to classify steppe nomads, foreign invaders, rebels, class adversaries, and political dissidents to define the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
Political functions of the enemy concept
Chesnakov noted that the term enemy concentrates historical experience, cultural beliefs, and political realities, enabling a society to answer questions about its collective identity and perceived dangers.
Chesnakov stated that an enemy is not necessarily a personal adversary or an individual human being, but can also encompass entire social groups, competing political forces, ideologies, religious movements, or abstract threats such as degrading ideas, epidemics, viruses, or extraterrestrial life.
The research outlines four core functions performed by the concept: defining threats clearly for mass consciousness, mobilizing society by setting internal divisions aside, justifying emergency decisions and rapid resource reallocation by authorities, and reinforcing collective identity through shared values and traditions.
To illustrate how threat perceptions spur technological mobilization, the study highlights the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, which accelerated space exploration, advanced defense research, and led to the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.
Linguistic roots and early Russian history
The word enemy ranks among the oldest terms in the Russian language and appears in 11th and 12th century manuscripts, including the Primary Chronicle.
In his 1893 Dictionary of the Old Russian Language, linguist Izmail Sreznevsky documented multiple meanings for the term, defining it as an external military adversary, a personal foe, or an ungodly spiritual force.
A later dictionary spanning the 11th to 14th centuries categorized the term into four distinct definitions: an opponent or non-friend, a military adversary, an ideological opponent, and the devil or evil force.
The biblical tradition linked the word to the Greek ekhthros and Latin inimicus, both connected to the Hebrew term satan, which literally signifies an adversary or enemy of God in the Old Testament. The Gospel of Matthew describes the enemy sowing seeds as the devil, while Svyatoslav's Izbornik of 1073 warned readers never to trust an enemy.
Linguists trace the word to the Common Slavic root vorg, which relates to persecution and hostile actions, with cognates such as warg or varg in Old Germanic and Scandinavian languages denoting outcasts and robbers stripped of legal protection.
Enemy perception in Tsarist Russia
Frequent military conflicts with nomadic steppe tribes, the Mongol invasion, Crusaders, and neighboring Western states deeply influenced early Russian culture. Ethnographer Vera Sokolova noted that folklore created a collective archetype of the foreign threat, applying identical descriptions to Tatars, Lithuanians, and Polish lords.
Historian Alexander Chudinov observed that popular memory consistently ascribed two main traits to foreign enemies: hostility toward Christianity and extreme cruelty toward civilian populations.
The 15th century Tale of the Rout of Mamai recorded Prince Dmitry Donskoy lamenting that while harm from a traditional enemy of the Christian race must be borne, his close friends had schemed against him by siding with the Horde.
Russian legal codes established harsh penalties for collaboration. The Sudebniks of 1497 and 1550, followed by the Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649, mandated the death penalty for assisting an enemy in capturing a city, entrenching treason as a core element of enmity.
Tsar Ivan the Terrible explicitly called Prince Andrey Kurbsky an enemy of Christianity after Kurbsky fled to Lithuania, equating political treason with religious apostasy.
In 1722, Theofan Prokopovich introduced formulas regarding enemies of the fatherland and monarchy in his political treatise Truth of the Monarch's Will.
Tsar Alexander I issued a manifesto on December 25, 1812, describing Napoleon as an enemy on the face of the land and summoning the population to defend the nation, establishing the 1812 conflict as the Patriotic War.
Poet Alexander Pushkin depicted changing political allegiances in his 1828 poem Poltava, describing how Hetman Ivan Mazepa transformed from an ally of Peter the Great into a powerful enemy flashing with proud eyes and brandishing a saber along the Desna River.
Tsar Nicholas II invoked similar religious rhetoric in a manifesto on July 20, 1914, declaring that a united Russia would repel the daring onslaught of the enemy during World War I.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, enemy perception incorporated ethnic dimensions. Historian Viktor Dyatlov identified the emergence of Yellow Peril rhetoric alongside traditional anti-Polish and anti-Semitic stereotypes, while interwar Polish authorities supported Prometheism to weaken Russia through national independence movements.
Historian William Fuller noted that wartime spy mania led Imperial Russian authorities to suspect citizens based on ethnic origin, generating an atmosphere of suspicion that undermined government authority without solving military challenges.
Bolshevik ideology and Soviet repressions
The 1917 revolutions shifted the concept of the enemy from foreign invaders to internal class adversaries. The term enemy of the people drew from ancient Rome's hostis publicus and French Revolutionary legislation.
In his 1917 article On the Enemies of the People, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin wrote that 20th century enemies were not monarchs, but landowners and capitalists as a class.
Soviet authorities targeted class-alien elements, including nobility, landowners, capitalists, clergy, bourgeois specialists, intelligentsia, kulaks, Green movement participants, monarchists, liberals, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks.
Historian Boris Kolonitsky stated that this class rhetoric accelerated violence into full-scale Civil War, while White Movement leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky admitted that anti-Bolshevik forces failed because they treated the conflict as a conventional war against an external foe rather than gaining public sympathy.
The RSFSR 1926 Criminal Code formally defined the enemy of the workers, permitting social defense measures such as stripping citizenship, exile, and forced labor based on past activities.
During the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin described internal opponents as wolves in sheep's clothing. In a 1937 address, Stalin asserted that eradicating Trotskyite double-dealers would leave the Soviet state unthreatened by internal or external enemies.
Article 131 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution formally categorized individuals encroaching on socialist property as enemies of the people, applying Article 58 penalties for counter-revolutionary crimes.
World War II and post-Stalin shifts
The Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941, turned Soviet enemy perception into an existential battle for survival against Nazi Germany's Generalplan Ost, which aimed to colonize Eastern Europe under the Lebensraum policy through mass deportation, enslavement, and extermination.
On occupied Soviet territory, approximately 13.7 million civilians perished, including over 7.4 million who were deliberately exterminated, 4.1 million who died from famine and disease, and more than 2.16 million who died during forced labor in Germany.
In response, Stalin shifted propaganda toward historical patriotism. In a radio address on July 3, 1941, Stalin cited past victories over Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, and in a November 7, 1941 parade speech, he invoked historical military commanders Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov.
While internal repressions eased during wartime, campaign searches for cosmopolitans, saboteurs, and spies resumed in the late 1940s alongside Cold War rhetoric against the Western imperialist camp.
Following Stalin's death, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced the concept at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, stating that Stalin's use of the term enemy of the people had caused many innocent people to suffer.
The term was removed from the RSFSR Criminal Code in 1958 and omitted from the 1977 Soviet Constitution, replaced during the Cold War by ideological terms such as imperialism and probable adversary.
Post-Soviet evolution and public opinion
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, official Russian rhetoric largely avoided the word enemy during the 1990s, using neutral terms to describe disputes over NATO expansion or the war in Yugoslavia.
External threat rhetoric resurfaced in the 2000s and sharpened following events in 2014 involving Ukraine, Crimea, and the Donbas war. Western strategic documents subsequently classified Russia as a major threat, including the 2022 United States National Security Strategy and NATO's Strategic Concept.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia does not seek enemies and requires friends, but added that the country will not allow its national interests to be infringed upon.
Sociological data from the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center revealed that when asked which countries are hostile to Russia, respondents most frequently named France at 48 percent, Great Britain at 42 percent, Germany at 41 percent, and Ukraine at 38 percent, with sociologists noting Ukraine dropped from second place over three years because many view Ukrainians as a brotherly people.
Regarding internal threats, the survey showed that 41 percent of respondents consider individuals designated as foreign agents to be enemies and traitors, while 30 percent report strong negative emotions toward them.
Philosophical and legal theories of the enemy
Sergey Rebrov, a junior research fellow at the Sociological Institute of FNIStS RAS, noted that 19th century philosopher Vladimir Solovyov framed the struggle against enemies in religious terms, equating it to a battle against the Antichrist.
Solovyov developed concepts of All-unity, Godmanhood, and the Russian Idea, and warned in his 1891 article The Enemy from the East of a future civilizational conflict between Western nations and China.
Philosophers Konstantin Leontiev and Nikolai Danilevsky evaluated enemies through civilizational frameworks. In his book Russia and Europe, Danilevsky identified ten full cultural-historical types, including Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Germano-Roman, alongside two American types in Mexico and Peru that suffered violent deaths, defining the enemy as an entire civilizational organism.
Legal thinkers Lev Tikhomirov, Nikolai Zakharov, and Pyotr Kazansky linked the enemy concept directly to state sovereignty, asserting that anyone threatening the established normative order constitutes an enemy.
This legal perspective anticipated the work of German theorist Carl Schmitt, who centered political philosophy on the distinction between friend and enemy and the concept of decisionism during states of emergency, though Schmitt remains controversial due to his support for the Nazi regime.
Chesnakov recommended four books for further study on political enmity: Power and Decision by Panagiotis Kondylis, On Inhumanity by David Livingstone Smith, Talking to the Enemy by Scott Atran, and War and Its Transformations in Modern Society by Natalya Balakleyets.
