Nick Spencer enjoys three books on Russia

Who’s afraid of the Russian Bear? We all are, it seems – and needlessly so, according to Mark B. Smith’s The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It (Allen Lane, £25; Tablet price £22.50). Westerners, Smith argues, judge Russia by different standards, convincing themselves that the country is uniquely and threateningly different, incapable of sustained democracy, inclined to violence and terror, expansionist, fundamentally non-European. None of this is true, he argues – or at least when it is true, it is no truer for Russia than for us.