LONDON -- U.S. President Bill Clinton has just been visiting Russia, stopping on the way in Western Europe to collect the Charlemagne Prize for his contribution to European unity.

For the president, the journey onward to Moscow must have seemed a short one because he believes, and has been loudly asserting, that Russia is really part of Europe and ought, eventually, to be a member of the European Union.

Unfortunately, geography and history are against him. It is true that the most populous part of Russia is adjacent to Europe, and it is true that the 19th-century Russia of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, of Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Lermontov, was a very European affair, ruled from the Baltic city of St. Petersburg and -- in cultural terms -- oriented thoroughly westward.