Nothing documents this drastic C Level Contact List change more clearly than a memorandum from 2014, which appeared in connection with the development of a new political-cultural concept. "Russia should be understood as a unique C Level Contact List and distinct civilization that can be reduced neither to the West (Europe) nor to the East," the authors wrote, adding bluntly: "In short, this thesis - confirmed by the entire history of the country and of his people – says: Russia is not Europe During the last three or four centuries, Russian interpretations of what C Level Contact List is European and what is Russia's relationship with Europe have constantly fluctuated.
In the era of Peter the Great, his C Level Contact List court geographers and historians played a decisive role in redrawing Europe's borders. By designating the Urals as the eastern border of Europe, they decidedly included most of the western territory of the Russian Empire within the old continent. This type of mental mapping C Level Contact List served as a symbolic basis for the Europeanization policy promoted by both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. In her acclaimed her great "draft" of her 1767 policy, Catherine openly declared: "Russia is a European state." For the next two centuries there was constant back and forth as to whether and to what extent C Level Contact List Russia was 'European'.
But as the Soviet Union C Level Contact List drew to a close, the Kremlin seemed to have adopted the Catherine formula. One of Mikhail Gorbachev's favorite ideas was that of a 'common European home'. Boris Yeltsin spoke of a "return to European civilization" and, in 2005, Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia was "a European power" that had C Level Contact List developed and changed "hand in hand with other European nations" over the last three centuries. These days, however, the Kremlin proclaims that Russia is an autonomous civilization that differs C Level Contact List from Europe. Leading political thinkers in the country say that Russia needs to free itself from Eurocentric ideas.