A recent tweet by conservative columnist and vlogger Dennis Prager about the news media posing a greater threat to “Western civilization” than Russia has prompted a fierce backlash on online media.

It has also indirectly given voice to an age-old question about Russia: is she Western, or not? Are Russia and America bound by the same ties that unite us with Europe? Or is Russia something other, a stranger to the international order crafted by the ascendancy of European culture?

The answer? Well… it’s complicated.

There are historically two schools of thought on the subject. The first, headed by the Marquis de Custine, views Russia as indelibly Asiatic and implacably alien to Europe, shaped in particular by its long rule under the Mongol hordes. In Custine’s telling, the Russian people had “just enough of the gloss of European civilisation to be ‘spoiled as savages’, but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like ‘trained bears who made you long for the wild ones.’”

Though modern liberals, progressives (and some conservatives) who buy into anti-Russian rhetoric would never be so gauche and unguarded as to give voice to such racially-tinged sentiments, Custine’s travelogues in fact provide the historical basis...