From the outset of the Ukraine war, Skidelsky took every opportunity to puncture the Russophobic stereotypes of Russian expansionism, aggression and authoritarianism used to justify the Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Geoffrey Roberts is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy; University College Cork, Ireland Emeritus Professor of History
Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
A.J.P. Taylor’s The Troublemakers (1957) was the gadfly historian’s favourite own book. Sub-titled ‘Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939’, Taylor celebrated a century and a half of radical opposition to mainstream British foreign policies.
Among Taylor’s heroes were the Radical MPs, John Bright and Richard Cobden, whose resisted rampant Russophobia and opposed Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War.
An opponent of Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, Taylor was himself a troublemaker and among those who opposed the polarisations of the cold war and petitioned for peace and the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
As recent protests against the Gaza and Iran wars show, that dissenting tradition is alive and well.
However, dissent in relation to Britain’s proxy war in Ukraine has been somewhat stifled by the overwhelming weight of the Russophobia promoted by mainstream media and politicians.
Resisting this barrage of pro-Ukraine Western propaganda has been a small but voluble band of academics, analysists, journalists, bloggers and activists who have presented alternative views of Putin’s Russia and of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Lord Robert Skidelsky – who died in April 2026 – was one of the most important of these dissident voices. Indeed, in the mainstream of British politics he was virtually the only major dissenter. Without Skidelsky, there would have been no mainstream political challenge to the Russophobic consensus.
A famous historian and biographer – and a member of the House of Lords – Skidelsky took every opportunity to puncture the Russophobic stereotypes of expansionism, aggression and authoritarianism used to justify the Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Ignored and marginalised by mainstream media, Skidelsky still managed to make himself heard – through articles, letters, interviews, debates and, uniquely, speeches in parliament.
When, in June 2025 the House of Lords debated the massive rearmament and militarisation proposed by Britain’s Strategic Defence Review, Skidelsky was a lone critic:
‘The Review is a superb example of how, starting from a false premise, remorseless logic can lead to madness. The premise is that if Russia is not confronted by a rearmed Europe, it will seek to impose its will on the Continent. Deny the premise and the argument for mobilising society and economy against Russia collapses. What [the Review] reveals is the strength of the warmongering mood of official Britain.’
As Keynes’s. biographer, Skidelsky had a lot to say about so-called ‘military Keynesianism’ – arms expenditure as a means of propping up the general economy. As he pointed out, the idea that arms spending is a good investment is bad politics as well as economics:
‘Once a society accepts that war preparation must be its organising principle, it will begin to see threats everywhere. It will devise an ideology of vigilance, cultivate a rhetoric of existential menace, and treat dissent as a species of irresponsibility.’
As Skidelsky observed, apart from Poland and the Baltics, no country’s Russophobia has been more belligerent than Great Britain’s.
For Skidelsky, Russophobia was a form of political paranoia – ‘the mental delusion that one is being threatened, persecuted or targeted, based on consistent misinterpretation of others’ actions as hostile or malicious’.
Skidelsky’s explanation for the virulent character of British Russophobia was more historical and political than psychological.
Russophobia emerged in 19th century Britain as a response to Russia’s growing power internationally and perceived threats to British imperial interests, especially in Central Asia. There was also a belief that, compared to liberal Britain, autocracies like Russia were inherently aggressive and expansionist. This liberal superiority complex was compounded by the conviction that British imperialism was more ‘civilised’ than the Russian variety. Important, too, was the anti-Tsarist lobbying of Hungarian and Polish exiles in London.
In the early 20th century, Russophobia was, for a while, superseded by Germanophobia, but soon returned with a vengeance in the form of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Sovietism.
The history of British Russophobia, noted Skidelsky, has not been black and white:
“The 19th century record also shows that Russophobia was recurrent rather than continuous, with intense bouts of moral outrage interrupted by functional alliances and compromises. British Russophobia is not an unbroken constant but a durable repertoire of ideas and images that politicians, soldiers, and journalists repeatedly invoke when three conditions align: ideological incompatibility, imperial or security friction, and domestic political utility.”
Because of his staunch opposition to Western propaganda about the Ukraine war, Skidelsky was depicted by opponents as pro-Russia and pro-Putin. When Skidelsky died, Jonathan Eyal, a senior staffer at the Royal United Services Institution, tweeted on ‘X’ that ‘it is with great joy that we mark the passing of a Russian shill, in receipt of money from Russian oligarchs, who justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine’.
Ever thus was the abuse heaped on Britain’s troublemakers.
Certainly, Skidelsky was a friend of Russia, someone who favoured the closest possible Anglo-Russian relationship. Himself of Russian-Jewish heritage, he was keen to recover his Russian roots, and established a society to foster Russo-British understanding. He spent many years re-learning the Russian he had spoken as a child. He attended meetings of Russia’s Valdai Club and served as a non-executive director of the Russian oil company, Rosneft. For Skidelsky, Vladimir Putin was a patriot, someone who was comparable to General de Gaulle, not Adolf Hitler.
But Skidelsky was by no means an uncritical friend of Russia’s.
He agreed that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine but didn’t consider the provocation sufficient to warrant the launch of the Special Military Operation. He saw a dire NATO-Ukraine threat to Russian security as emergent not imminent. He thought there were better ways for Russia to detach Ukraine from the West, including through diplomacy.
While Skidelsky opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he blamed Western intervention in the war for turning what could have been a limited, localised conflict into an epic existential struggle that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and all-but destroyed Ukraine; not to speak of casting the shadow of nuclear war over the whole world.
To the end of his life, Skidelsky remained optimistic the Ukraine war could be terminated by a negotiated peace settlement.
His advocacy of a compromise peace was moral as well as political. He opposed ‘perpetual wars’, supposedly necessary for ‘perpetual peace’ and preferred what he called ‘the morality of reconciliation’ to ‘the morality of outrage’.
In one of his last pieces on the Ukraine war, published by New Left Review’s ‘Sidecar’ blog, Skidelsky wrote that ‘the great sin in war is to be objective’, noting that ‘the great danger in forswearing efforts at truth is that what is imagined may come to pass, with the lies leading to the truth of a ‘full-scale’ war.’
‘The problem we have in making peace’, said Skidelsky , ‘lies in the difficulty of escaping from narratives etched deep in national psyches. The solution to the disorder inherent in a world of sovereign nations is not that they should arm themselves to the teeth, but that they should develop rules of coexistence, and practice the arts of diplomacy and conflict resolution’.
As Skidelsky wrote In his last book – Keynes for Our Times (2026) – ‘our age has eerily come to rhyme with Keynes’s.’
Asked Skidelsky: ‘Does the increasing division of the world into hostile blocs portend a regression to barbarism as happened in the 1930s, or is there a democratic route out of geopolitical conflict? Can democracy tame financial oligarchy? Can it tackle racial and cultural conflict, growing inequality within countries, global warming? Or is a reversion to autocracy, accompanied by domestic and international violence, inevitable?’
Skidelsky believed that an up-dated, modernised Keynesianism was up the task, but concluded the book on a troubled note:
‘The question today is as brutal as the one Keynes posed in 1936: Is an apocalypse needed to jolt politicians out of their intellectual ruts, or can a better analysis of our problems restore health to our diseased civilization in conditions of peace and freedom?’
In trying to be objective, in lending his prestige and eloquence to the struggle against Russophobia, Lord Robert Skidelsky made a singular and irreplaceable contribution to the cause of peace.
_____________________________________________________________________
The reason Putin found no other way than the SMO to confront the west in 2022 was that he thought he was not being taken seriously. The only way to be taken seriouly was to create a shock. It almost worked, as Ukraine was ready to negotiate immediately. That is what Putin was hoping. But no, the west saw his action as an opportunity to teach Putin a lesson. But that leaves evryone in a lurch.The weat in not able or ready to beat Russia and Russia is now unable to force ukraine to surrender since Ukraine is in the hands of the western handlers, who are not suffering directly. The best would be for the EU to admit the truth and negotiate in good faith with Putin.