John Lloydgoes to a gathering in Moscow where westerners and Russians cannot even find a common language to discuss Kosovo

On one of the roads around Moscow, near an old bus plant next to the village of Golitsyno, there is a group of buildings signposted "Methodological Teaching Centre". In this rather well-appointed institute, the Moscow School of Political Studies, now in its seventh year, holds its main annual event - a gathering of Russian politicians, analysts, business people and commentators with as many as 20 foreigners of similar professions. Peter Mandelson has spoken there; Shirley Williams attends frequently; Bernard Ingham is back this year for a third time. It was here, a few days ago, that I witnessed the extraordinary gulf of understanding that exists over Kosovo between westerners and even the most liberal, informed and enlightened Russians.

The first speaker was Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the school's most notable graduates, who, at 34, is now a deputy to the Russian Duma (parliament) and leader of "Our Home is Russia", a centrist, broadly pro-stability party. His admirers see him as a future president. He talked, indeed, of the Russian presidency and spoke of how Boris Yeltsin's term of office "must be judged a step forward". It retained freedoms and remained open; but now was the time to surpass its crippling limitations.

This was heart-warming for those who have developed an affection for Russia. But - as Russia will do to sentimentalists - there was a kick in the teeth round the next corner. The second speaker was the French political scientist Dominique Moisi, who had elected, not without some inward trepidation, to speak on Kosovo. Until then, Kosovo had conformed to the famous episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil, faced with some German guests, implores everyone loudly "not to mention the war". Except that, in this case, nobody did mention it - until Moisi spoke.

With limpid certainty, he demonstrated why this war is essential if we are to make any claim to be what we profess: civilised societies. Two things governed our response, he said: Auschwitz, which makes us resonate to images of deportations of masses on sealed trains; and Vietnam, which seems to teach that embroilment in foreign wars brings disaster and shame. Yet this "dramatic dialectic" is overlaid with one of the results of globalisation - that neither the public nor its leaders can ignore a horror when it is on everyone's screens. From this, argued Moisi, flow two more contradictions - a demand that something must be done, but that it be done without the loss of a single soldier (on our side). For us Europeans, Kosovo was a frustration; it showed that our reach did not measure up to our ideals, and we must again turn to the Americans for assistance in our own backyard. Yet, in the end, what could we do? We could not turn away from barbarism in our midst and leave it unchecked. "The cost of not acting would have been much higher than that of acting - though that is and will be huge."

He stopped - and about his head broke a storm. The 50 or so Russians seated round a long rectangle, who had listened in stillness to the simultaneous translation of his words, could hardly wait their turn to take the microphone. Some were conspiracists: they believed the war had been unleashed because the US wanted to smash the euro, or because the rivers of Kosovo ran with gold, or because Nato wanted to test its latest weapons. Others came back again and again to the central problem of breaking international law - a fragile thing, which was in the power of the powerful to break but was also the only protection the powerless (among whom they implicitly and bitterly counted themselves) had against arbitrary action. Some saw it as a direct attack on Russia; the moderates as an indirect one. One deputy said that if Scotland declared independence from the UK, the English would bomb it. Moisi, never losing his charming smile, said: "But that shows you know nothing of democracy; it is simply inconceivable." The man snorted with contempt, and turned away, as if he had no time for such a fool.

This was not a disagreement on balance, a view that the consequences of ethnic cleansing had to be lived with because the consequences of stopping it were worse. Here, instead, was a room - a nation - of people who all believe that the prime mover of evil is always the US and its lackeys in Europe.

Many believe that the refugees' tales of horror are lies. The morning after Moisi spoke, David Beasley, a former governor of South Carolina, returned to the theme of Kosovo. He had been to the Balkans to do a report for the US Republican leadership. He had gone as a sceptic. After three weeks in the refugee camps, he became a hawk. One woman had described Serb paramilitaries taking her baby and smashing his head to pulp against a wall, then casually shooting her husband through the head. Letting her go was perhaps the ultimate cruelty, he said. Yet no Russian I talked to afterwards was impressed.

The philosopher Yuri Senokosov, the husband of the school's director, said that the Russians had a mentality which would not change for two generations; it was a Soviet mentality, a way of looking at the world which was bound to see Nato's action as a threat. It could not imagine Nato acting for humanitarian reasons. Besides, he added, the west was indulging in a kind of moral imperialism. He accepted it was genuine in its moral protestations; but in forcing them on others, it was acting like the Inquisition. For a man who makes almost a fetish of moderation, it was a terrible word.

So in this remarkable meeting, we, Russians and westerners, found that we inhabited two different mental universes. The rich west wants to stop horror; it uses images of the Holocaust to remind itself of the darkness of the 20th century. But these images are rare in Russia; they were never shown in Soviet times, when the fate of Jewry was simply submerged in the holocaust that happened to Russia. It has no guilty spur; no experience of human rights as a separate discipline; little discourse of engagement with globalisation, which would point to the porousness of states and the need for individual rights to take precedence over state rights.

We talked and talked, and had no language. And so we had to leave it.

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