This article distils Edward Said's celebrated critique of Orientalism and applies it to the mainstream Western discourse on Russian foreign policy. It finds that the literature in this field, while not as afflicted as the material towards which Said's strident criticism was originally directed, displays a number of the characteristic symptoms of Orientalism – the exaggeration of difference, assumption of Western superiority and resort to clichéd analytical models. To overcome this malaise, it is proposed that scholars make greater efforts to break free of these ‘mind‐forg'd manacles’ and reflect more deeply upon the assumptions underpinning their scholarship.