A character study

An Air Force attaché and a CIA station chief at the American Embassy in Moscow discuss the Russian character in a 1988 novel by Nelson DeMille:

Hollis opened the cabinet and took out a six-inch statuette of a man in riding livery. He said "What is it, Seth? The Tartar influence? The Kazak influence? Why aren't they exactly like us? I know they can look Scandinavian or Germanic, like Burov, but it's something more than genetic. It's a whole different soul and psyche, an ancestral memory; it's the deep winter snow, and Mongols sweeping over the steppe, and always feeling like they're inferior to the West and getting shafted by Europe and Cyrillic letters and Slavic fatalism and an off-brand Christianity and who the hell knows what else. But whatever it is, you can spot it, can spot them, like an art expert can spot a forgery across the room.