Spare a thought for the poor British Council: harassed and intimidated by Vladimir Putin's goons, dragged into a diplomatic spitting contest between Britain and Russia, and attacked at home by the likes of Damien Hirst and Lucian Freud for changing the way it delivers arts abroad. In Moscow, the British Council is condemned as a nest of spies and a force for cultural imperialism; in Britain, it is often dismissed as faintly embarrassing, a liberal love-in for the great and the good, sending Morris dancers to Kamchatka and inflicting Elizabethan madrigals on bemused Afghans.

Even the name sounds dowdy and impersonal. The Italians have the Dante Alighieri Society, the Germans named their international cultural institute after Goethe, while the Chinese chose Confucius. If only the inventors of the British Council had opted for the Shakespeare Institute, then the Russians would surely pause before using it as a political punchbag. Nobody thumps the Bard with impunity.

Yet, for all its trials, the British Council remains a cultural beacon, deploying art as diplomacy, spreading British ideas about education, science and technology, and above all the language, throughout the globe. The council came into being specifically to counteract Nazi plans for global cultural hegemony. “When the Thousand Year Reich arrives,” declared Rudolf Hess, “English will become a minor German dialect of no importance.” That English is today the undisputed global lingua franca is due, in no small measure, to the British Council.

It is also a bargain. The 70 British Council teaching centres in 53 countries received only £195million in grants last year, out of a total income of £551million, the difference being earned by teaching English and commercial consultancy.

The British have always felt ambivalent about officially advertising our own culture. In Victorian times, this unwillingness to proselytise sprang from pure arrogance. As Harold Nicolson once wrote, our imperial forebears believed that “if foreigners failed to appreciate, or even to notice, our gifts of invention or our splendid adaptability, then there was nothing that we could do to mitigate their obtuseness. The genius of England, unlike other countries, spoke for itself.”

The French, meanwhile, were pouring huge quantities of treasure into la mission civilisatrice. “Make them love France,” Talleyrand told his ambassadors. It took Rex Leeper, a brilliant Australian, to persuade the authorities here, in 1934, that British culture would not speak for itself very loudly without funding.

Leeper never denied that his British Council was in the business of cultural propaganda, but this was not imperialism by another name or the imposition of alien art forms on subject peoples. As this newspaper noted at the time, the British Council “exists to spread British ideas, to make known abroad the English way of life and English language. It relies, as is the English way, upon persuasion...not by ramming propaganda down other peoples' throats.” That is still the case: Russians visit the British Council centre entirely at will.

There have always been those who believe that quiet cultural influence is no match for force. “Which is the best propaganda for us,” demanded Beaverbrook's Daily Express, deeply opposed to the very idea of the council, “the roar of British bombers and fighters or the melody of madrigals broadcast by the British Council?” Putin would surely agree with that philosophy.

Despite mockery from the likes of George Orwell, and periodic attacks from both Right and Left, the British Council has been astonishingly successful. In 2006 the French Government set up CulturesFrance, an attempt to rebrand Gallic culture modelled on the council. The Chinese have been swift to appreciate that economic muscle goes hand-in-hand with cultural self-promotion: there are now some 120 Confucius Institutes in 50 countries (ten have opened in Britain since 2005), promoting the study of Chinese languages, history and culture, while studiously avoiding politics.

Art and diplomacy were always entwined. Rubens was the greatest artist of his time, but also a supreme diplomat, knighted by both England and Spain for his work as an envoy in the 1630s. Today cultural diplomacy is perhaps more important than ever. But in President Putin's increasingly nationalist and xenophobic state, Russia seems to be embracing the old animosities of the Cold War, when foreign culture was seen as threatening.

Where Britain pours money, energy and expertise into the British Council, Russia replies with blasts of unvarnished government PR. Ironically, it is Putin's attitude that most closely resembles that of Imperial Britain, in which innately superior Russian culture is simply left to speak for itself.

Some within the British Council see Russia's aggression as an index of the council's failure in that country. If more effort had been made after the collapse of communism to win over future leaders to an appreciation of British culture, then perhaps the current diplomatic explosion might have been avoided.

Yet the sort of cultural diplomacy practised by the British Council for the past 74 years works in some surprising ways. As it was bullied into closing down its St Petersburg centre this week, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, blasted Britain's imperial attitudes and “nostalgia for colonial times”. This is the very same Sergei Lavrov who decided, out of all the universities in the world, to send his daughter to the London School of Economics.

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