How has all this technology affected the British. Because the internet mostly operates in a kind of 'technical English', we have not had to learn another language. So we can be 'international' while remaining resolutely monolingual (which is a disadvantage even if we think it is an advantage). At the same time the internet has encouraged other people to learn this 'technical English' and to explore a wider world in which they become confident in communicating with people from different nations. So we will continue to enjoy the advantages of communicating with people from other countries and cultures.
Apart from those of us who have visited your country, the British spend very little time thinking about Russia. Some people with vivid imaginations dream about the immensity of your land. Some are devoted to your literature and read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky once a year. Some believe that Russians are incapable of living within a democratic system. Some are appalled and fascinated at tales of your alcoholic consumption. Tourists who have visited Russia speak of your kindness and hospitality. In other words there are plenty of stories about Russia as there always have been, but no clear image of your place in the world scene. So the British as a whole have no particular views. They are certainly not 'anti-Russian'.
In my experience, Russians find this incomprehensible. In universities throughout Russia when I face a group of students and suggest that they ask me questions about Britain, there is a pause, sometimes a long silence. Then someone asks, 'What do the British think about Russians?' My first answer is that if a Russian professor were in front of a class of British students waiting for similar questions, the British students would not ask, 'What do Russians think about British people?' They would not care what Russians think about the British. They would ask questions about Russia since that is the point of such meetings. The depth of Russian nervousness about your image abroad is the unusual aspect of this exchange.
All countries tend to explain the policies of other countries from their own point of view, a habit which leads to many misunderstandings that diplomats try to sort out. So your government supports and rejects policies according to what they believe is best for Russia. That is absolutely normal. But as a people you react differently from the rest of us in seeing yourselves as objects of love or hatred by the rest of the world. You are implicitly saying that if we do not manifestly love you, we must hate you. This is a theme that runs through much of your serious media, and which emerges in these regular questions about how the rest of the world thinks of 'Russians'. It is a misunderstanding. Even the Americans who attract most love-hate in the world do not spend so much time worrying about the possible hatred of people who have never actually given them much thought.
Most of us reckon that individual people are mostly kind and decent - except when they succumb to being cruel or mean-spirited. Most of us know that other countries may be, politically, our allies, our enemies or neutral observers, but that these alliances may shift. An Australian does not see the world as the Englishman does, even if we come from similar cultures with close ties, a shared language and many shared values. In fact Australians make a virtue of being very rude about the English. Do we care? No, we laugh and are rude in return, though not so successfully. And then we return to finding out what Australia is really like.
I have written this section because it seems important to compare your way of looking at the world with ours if you are to reach an understanding of us.
Here is a paradox. London is the most ethnically, nationally diverse city in the world. Like all countries with large immigrant populations we (and especially they) have had to cope with bitterness, fear, prejudice, violence, and injustice. Like some countries, we have struggled to remedy these bad attitudes with education, laws, money, community support, the media, and generations of people who spend years and years in helping each other. On the whole we have not done badly. (That is a very English sentence meaning 'We have not solved the problem completely but we have probably done better than anyone else at solving it.)
And yet - the English remain ignorant of other countries and even proud to be ignorant of them in one specific way: we do not learn or attempt to learn other languages. We expect other people to speak English on almost all possible occasions. This leads to a deafness to other cultures, even European cultures. Our popular newspapers regularly mock the French and the Germans for deeds committed seventy years ago and show remarkably little interest in what has happened since. We mock Americans, too, of course, but without exulting in our ignorance because they speak (more or less) the same language. We are not politically xenophobic, but culturally xenophobic - which is odd because our culture draws happily on rich traditions from all over the world.
Perhaps I am saying no more than that everyone needs someone else to laugh at. In Britain we are trained not to laugh at the weak and the helpless. We think it would be cruel to laugh at, say, children in Malawi struggling to get an education by sharing one book among twenty pupils. (You could make some good jokes about misunderstandings in the book, but we would not make them.) As peoples and countries become confident, richer, more eager to show their own virtues and power, they become the butt of our jokes. Our media was full of jokes about President Putin, although there were far, far more about President Bush. However we are not obsessed with foreigners. The people about whom there are most jokes in our media and everywhere else are our own politicians. The British love to mock the strange habits of rulers and people from other countries, but we enjoy even more mocking the stupidities and failures of our own rulers - and of ourselves.
Conclusion
I once asked a group of adults from a small country who were insisting that they needed complete independence in order to preserve their culture, 'What exactly do you mean by your culture?'
A pause. 'Our national songs. Our national dances.'
'And this is what your country means to you? Songs and dances?'
'Our language...'
'Which no-one else understands.'
'Precisely. We want independence in order to be ourselves.'
This is a very isolationist view of one's national culture. This group felt as if they were a big family with a family's shared history, traditions, troubles, love and jokes. But they did not want anyone else coming into the family. It seems to me that they misunderstood how our closest relationships work. First, unless we accept outsiders into the family, it dies out. Secondly, the point of view of one generation towards a family: 'That party at New Year when we were all staying with John and...' 'Oh yes, and Jane was such a strange little girl - look at how she has turned out now!' differs strikingly from the point of view of a generation that cannot remember John, and for whom Jane has always been a grown-up.
In the same way, a culture is not - cannot be - static. As the present turns into the past, what we now see is affected by that recent past; but as that recent past recedes into a past which can be remembered only by older people, so what we see now is no longer now, but has become the recent past. Consequently any statement about our culture and values is liable to become false as we try to pin it down. And yet if we do not know and understand that past, we cannot be properly anchored in the present. Everything that happens will seem equally trivial, without significance. Cultures are like families - shared memories, shared experiences, mutual affections, mutual exasperation and, in extreme cases, a passionate willingness to fight for what we feel to be our world and our values. But cultures are bound to change, just as you are not exactly like your parents and they were not exactly like their parents.