Winston Churchill once said of Russia that it was a”'riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. His one-liner reinforces the commonly held notion that “Mother Russia” is so deeply mysterious that it is ultimately unfathomable.  

There are good reasons why we also can find ourselves mystified by and in awe of Russia - the sheer size of the land mass of the Russian Federation is mind-boggling. The scale of the suffering endured by Russia in its history can and should leave us agape, perhaps particularly the scale of the military and civilian causalities suffered during World War II. 

I also wonder how many people reading this article have ever met a Russian or visited the country. For many, it is terra incognita, and its people remain those inscrutable, soulful, long-suffering creatures of myth that inhabit the blizzard-blasted steppes.

What we do know seems impossibly exotic – the mystique of the Orthodox Church, the Cyrillic alphabet, the density of the ideas embedded in the books, if we can even manage to plough through them since they are so dauntingly long! 

So what? There is a striking line in Louis de Bernières' novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which a Greek proclaims, “We are Greeks; the laws of nature do not apply to us”. I suppose we all play this cultural superiority game from time to time, pre-empting criticism from outsiders by stating that any unfavourable judgement is invalidated by their ignorance of our rather special culture. 

The dangerous upshot of this apparently harmless game, however, is that it can lead to the implicit claim that those who are just different are, in fact, exceptional and must, therefore, be permitted to play by a different moral standard. 

So, whereas most critically-minded people would regard the slogans nationalistic Americans indulge in as a matter of deflationary ridicule – 'manifest destiny', 'city seated on a hill', 'the greatest country in the world' – we allow some societies to get away with mystifying us with an image of exceptional otherness. We are persuaded that we can't understand the “Russian soul”, so we give them a unique status and a free pass to behave in ways we would never dream of tolerating in others.

In practice, this means we do not respond to unacceptable behaviour in one group as we would respond to similarly inappropriate behaviour of another. Imagine the reaction if the UK decided to invade the Republic of Ireland, arguing that this was 'historic British land'. Imagine if any of the post-imperial European nations attempted to take back some of their old colonies and, in the process, obliterated whole towns and cities. Imagine if the Vice President of the USA regularly threatened to nuke other countries. 

All of these things the Russian regime has been doing for over two years now, and some of us remain mutely “neutral” about it.

Imagine if public intellectuals in the West wrote things like the following about Africans: “Today's Ukrainians are a race of degenerates that crawled up from the sewage. Genocide is in order”. This violent, racist, genocidal remark is a quotation from the  Russian public intellectual Aleksandr Dugin, whose “philosophy” has chilling echoes of the race theories of the 1930s, which branded some groups as Untermenschen (sub-humans). 

If that is what he thinks of his culturally similar neighbours, most of whom also speak Russian, we should not be surprised if he has an even lower opinion of African people. The quotation I discovered is so shocking as to be unprintable.

I fear that our flirtation with Putin's Russia and our “exceptional” treatment of it is not going to end well for South Africa and Africa in general.