The British Prime Minister is often credited with saying how carefully bilateral relations with Russia should be managed. We checked whether Thatcher really belonged to these words.
February 23, 2022 on the air of the Vesti program on the Russia 1 channel came out a story by correspondent Mikhail Antonov about how the sanctions imposed against Russia will affect Europeans. Criticizing various actions and statements of British politicians, Antonov said: “It is not known exactly whether Margaret Thatcher formulated her thought in exactly this way, but she is credited with the following statement: “If you spit on Russia, it will wipe itself out. If Russia spits, half the world will choke!”
A day later, the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” published an open letter from Boris Gromov, head of the All-Russian public organization of veterans, Hero of the Soviet Union, former governor of the Moscow region and deputy of the State Duma. In a text addressed to “the leaders of the USA, EU, NATO, England and other countries,” Gromov declared support for the actions of the Russian leadership and criticized the actions of foreign leaders. In particular, the author of the open letter urged the recipients to “remember what M. Thatcher said: “... if you spit on Russia, it will dry itself out. And if Russia spits, then half the world will choke.” A few days later, Gromov’s letter was posted by several thematic publics on VKontakte.
Antonov’s story and Gromov’s open letter are far from the first mentions of Thatcher’s “quote.” With minor differences in wording, it appeared about a year earlier in Twitter, and in 2018 became the title of one of the posts on the platform "Yandex.Zen". There is also a rather different version of the words attributed to Thatcher. On the website of aphorisms “Pearls of Thought” meets the wording “If the world imposes sanctions on Russia, it will wipe itself out. If Russia imposes sanctions on the world, it will drown.”
Judging by a search on other social networks, the earliest mentions of this phrase date back to 2014. For example, immediately some users Facebook posted Thatcher’s “quote” on its pages in August, and then it was added to the Pearls of Thought website in a second formulation. On Twitter, the “quote” became post later, in autumn and winter, and towards the end of the year one can find references to Thatcher’s alleged statements on Pikabu and in LiveJournal.
At the same time, the words about “spitting on Russia” attributed to the “Iron Lady” are not found at all in English-language sources published before the end of February 2022 (later - only in translations Gromov's letters). We were unable to find the phrase we were interested in in academic texts either in Russian or in English. Probably the most complete collection of documents related to the “Iron Lady” is collected by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. On the organization's website available an open collection of thousands of interviews, speeches, statements and public comments by the British Prime Minister. In none of these sources was it possible to find a single phrase that was in any way similar to that attributed to Thatcher on social networks.
Some Internet users suggestthat the phrase, which has been periodically passed off as a Thatcher quote over the past few years, is the result of folk art. Possible predecessor of the expression: “If you spit on the collective, the collective will dry itself, if the collective spits on you, you will drown” from the science fiction novel by Pavel Kornev "Black Dreams" (2008). Even earlier, in 2002, this phrase was put into the mouth of one of the characters by Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov, created alternative voice acting for the first film in the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy.
Based on currently available sources, it can be concluded that there is no evidence that Margaret Thatcher ever used the phrase attributed to her. This quote does not appear in the collection on the Thatcher Foundation website or in any other authoritative English language source. In Russian, the phrase began to be attributed to Thatcher in 2014 by users of social networks, while it is very similar to another phrase that appeared long before and was in no way connected with the “Iron Lady”.
Cover photo: Johnny Edditt/AFP via Getty Images
Incorrect quote attribution
- Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Speeches, interviews & other statements
- Did Margaret Thatcher say that the economically viable population of Russia is 15 million people?
- Did Bismarck say: “I know a hundred ways to get a Russian bear out of its den, but not one to drive it back in”?
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