"After the fall of the Soviet Union there was – for a time – a commonly held view that Russia had been a normal European state before the Communist experiment (and that it would return to being one after the end of Communism). The first part of that judgment is certainly untrue. The Russian empire, until the very end of its development, had very little in common with the other main European powers in terms of ideology or state structure. The prerevolutionary Russian elite of the nineteenth century was intent on overcoming what they saw as an age-old exclusion of Russia from the continent through recreating European culture under new and better circumstances. What the Europeans saw as backwardness was in reality, it was argued by many, a virgin opportunity to create a more genuine and unpolluted Christian civilization in the east, which, in time, would become the redeemer of a decadent and declining continent. Meanwhile, Russia remained an autocratic state, in which much of the elite’s legitimacy was built on continuous continental territorial expansion, especially, in the nineteenth century, towards the east and the south."