Happened to be re-reading Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika and New Thinking. (I've read it about five times already - must be an absolute record). While reading it, stumbled across this statement by Gorbachev. "We are Europeans." 
BTW Gorbachev is far from the only Soviet leader to have made such pronouncements. Brezhnev notably insisted on his "European-ness." I think only Stalin once confided to, I want to think, Matsuoka Yosuke, that "we are Asians."
But it's kind of interesting in the sense that no other nation ever went to such lengths to defend their "Europeanness" as Russia (and to what end?) I wonder if this is another expression of the so called inferiority complex.
