J.F. Kennan’s geopolitics and sources of Russian strategic conduct in the context of confrontation with the West

The article examines the work of G.O. Pavlovsky (1951-2023) «The System of the Russian Federation. Sources of Russian Strategic Conduct: the G.F. Kennan Method», published in 2015. The published text was written in 2016 but for a number of reasons it was not published. However, today, in the context of a special military operation in Ukraine and an unprecedented escalation of Russia's confrontation with the collective West the discussion of this work is gaining new relevance, since it reflects a set of anti-Russian narratives promoted by Western think tanks, including through the sponsorship of representatives of the Russian political science community. According to the author of the article, the book by G.O. Pavlovsky is a typical example of a distorted Western-centric interpretation of the «origins of Russian conduct», focused not on a scientific search for the real political and geopolitical causes of the patterns of Russia's domestic and foreign policy, but on consolidating the clichés that have developed and are carefully maintained in the collective West about Russia as an «abnormal» country that does not fit into Western standards of the «rules-based world order».