Liberalism in Russia:
Some Historic
Background
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S
hortly after the collapse of the USSR, liberalism, in thought as well as in practice, seemed
to have a promising future in Russia, the hopes born of the Yeltsin years quickly gave
way to disillusion and even bitterness, to the point that today liberalism is nearly absent
from Russian politics. To explain the failure of liberalism in Russia, political experts and
economists have often blamed, and continue to blame, the absence of any liberal praxis, resulting in
the perceived Russian ‘taste’ for an authoritarian government. In reality, in the 18th century, liberal
thought was well alive in the Empire, embraced both by those proximal to power and by those
who opposed it. Throughout the 19th century, it continued to develop and gain an audience right
up to the February 1917 Revolution, which marked its apogee. Very quickly, intrinsic difficulties
precipitated the failure of liberal ideas in Russia and it was not until the very end of the 20th century
that a new form of liberalism emerged. This article attempts to understand why liberalism, despite
its relatively early appearance, has failed, over time, to establish itself as an ideology and credible
political practice that is not without consequence in Russia’s current political condition. To this end,
we will first examine the dawn of liberalism and liberal thought in the mid-18th century through its
progress into the last third of the 20th century. We will then come to the maturation of liberalism,
which runs from the last third of the 19th century to the February 1917 Revolution. Finally, the
third part of this essay will address the virtual disappearance of liberalism during the Soviet years,
and its rapid renaissance at the end of the Gorbachev era and during the Yeltsin presidency.
Marie-Pierre Rey, Professor, University of Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne, member of the Scientific
Committee of the Observatoire franco-russe.
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The Origins of Liberalism in Russia
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If we define liberalism as a movement that, politically, aspires to guarantee
civil and individual liberties, establishes a state under rule of law founded by a
representative government and economically promotes free enterprise and
private property, it is clear that liberalism had made its way into Russian political
culture in the 18th century 1. Of course, since the beginning of the 16th century,
liberal overtures were heard in Russia. The letters of Andrey Kurbsky, denouncing
the omnipotence of Ivan the Terrible, the cruelty of his regime and his disdain
for human liberties can be considered the first liberal manifesto to appear in the
country. But it was during the reign of Peter the Great that liberalism appeared as
a political concept imported by scholars, diplomats and scientists who traveled
to Western Europe and shared early translations of English philosophers,
starting with Locke 2. The liberalism that won over the most educated levels of
the Russian nobility’s elite had two defining characteristics: it fit an essentially
political logic, (without attacking serfdom, which framed the socio-economic
system) and accompanied a marked Anglophilia. “Why wasn’t I born English?
How I adore the liberty and spirit of this nation!” This is what Princess Ekaterina
Dashkova, first president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, went so far as to
write, expressing all her passion for the British parliamentary system. At the end
of the 18th century, under the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers,
Montesquieu in particular, Russian liberalism diversified its references, honoring
French thought and gaining a broader audience with the social elite, from the
wealthiest nobility, to secondary nobles and commoners alike. For example
the printer/publisher Nikolay Novikov or Alexander Radishchev, who would
be the first in Russia to consider liberalism beyond politics – like Novikov,
Radishchev was passionately involved in defending Enlightenment values and
individual liberties – but also in economic terms by calling for the abolition
of serfdom.
Nascent liberalism influenced even the highest circles in Russia. In 1767,
Catherine II, “M. de Montesquieu pillaging” as she herself admitted, drafted a
1. For an overview see Victor Léontovitch, Histoire du libéralisme en Russie, Fayard, Paris, 1986.
2. For the exchanges between Russia and Europe, see Marie-Pierre Rey, Le Dilemme russe, la Russie et l’Europe d’Ivan le
Terrible à Boris Eltsine, Flammarion, Paris, 2002.
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Nakaz (Instruction), addressed to the commissioner responsible for developing
a new legislative code. In it, she declared herself in favor of a state, built upon
law that would guarantee individuals the same liberties as the nobility and bourgeois elite. At the same time, in the economic realm, the empress promoted free
enterprise and private property. However, the French Revolution, 1791 – 1793,
replaced the liberal ideas of 1789 with even more radical ideas of democratic
inspiration; this scared her and she quickly reversed course. This struck a serious
blow to individual liberties, as evidenced by the arrest of Novikov and then of
Radishchev, reaffirming the autocratic nature of her power and solidifying the
socio-economic condition founded on serfdom.
However, liberal ideas did not disappear completely. During the reign of
Alexander I, Russia published (in Russian) works by Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy
Bentham and Adam Smith, and the freedom and individual rights of the nobles
and bourgeois were confirmed. It was at the request of the emperor himself, that
in 1808-1809 Mikhail Speransky led a group inquiry in support of an imperial
power governed by law. A few years later, Nikolay Novosiltsev would draft a
constitutional charter completed in 1820. At the same time, agrarian reform
projects emerged resonant with liberalism, and in 1801 came projects by Platon
Zubov and Admiral Nikolay Mordvinov, both devout Anglophiles, in favor
of developing privatization in Russia and the eventual abolition of serfdom. In
any case, this enthusiasm led only to reforms of limited scope. In particular, as
no political representation was put into place, giving rise to the emergence of
secret societies at the end of Alexander I’s reign. Some, such as the Society of
the South, were of a radical, Jacobin persuasion; others defended programs of
liberal inspiration, as was the case of the Society of the North, which, under
the influence of Sergey Muravev, came out in favor of a representative and
federalist 3 government. But following an attempt on the emperor’s life and a
plot against his autocratic regime, in December 1825, oppression took over and
subsequently the reign of Nicholas I was characterized by a fierce policy against
liberal ideas.
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3. On liberalism and the Society of the North, see Julie Grandhaye, La République interdite, le moment décembriste et ses
enjeux, xviii-xxie siècles, Champ Vallon, Paris, 2012.
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PORTRAIT OF COUNT MIKHAIL SPERANSKy (1772-1839)
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Source: oil on canvas by Alexander Yarnek, 1824, State Art Museum, Irkutsk.
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The “Gendarme of Europe” relentlessly tracked menacing liberals within
the Empire (born of his intransigence toward the liberal-inspired Polish insurrection in 1830-1831) as well as outside the Empire, including the participation
of the Russian Army in repressing the Hungarian uprising at the request of the
Habsburgs in 1849. Nonetheless, the long reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) was
a period of growth during which liberal ideas, particularly under the influence
of the historian Timofey Granovsky, continued to gain an audience. Moreover,
it should be noted that it was by order of Nicholas I that Mikhail Speransky
advanced legislation guaranteeing a number of inalienable rights to individuals.
At his death in 1855, Nicholas I was succeeded by his son Alexander II.
Educated in a liberal spirit by his tutor, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, and influenced
by Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, using the catastrophic Crimean War
to illustrate the extent of archaisms the country suffered, it was without great
difficulty that Alexander II launched a massive campaign for liberal reforms.
In March 1861, serfdom was abolished and individual freedom was given to
the serfs; three years later the first local elections attended by all social classes,
the Zemstvos, were established and the same year reform of the judicial system
separated justice from the administration, demonstrating great progress within
a few short years. However, Alexander II would not provide his subjects with
a constitution. Though the emperor had this under advisement, and was the
victim of a terrorist attack in March 1881 by the splinter group Narodnaya Volya
(The People’s Will), his successors, retrenched in their autocratic prerogatives,
no longer wanted a constitution. It was this refusal of further development that
inspired a new wave of liberal ideas in Russia that fused with the fight for rights
and freedom taking shape in the last third of the 19th century.
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From the Birth of Liberal Parties to the February 1917
Revolution: a Missed Opportunity
During the years 1880-1890, Russian liberalism underwent a double mutation. It became the prerogative of legal scholars, lawyers and professors to make
law the political weapon of choice. Boris Chicherin, professor of law at Moscow
University, in his Course on State Science and History of Political Theories, advises a
gradual transition for Russia toward a constitutional state.
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Meanwhile, liberalism was now embedded in common systems, namely the
Zemstvos which, at the time of Alexander III and Nicholas II, refused to make
any concessions and would become a setting for political apprenticeship, even
if what was debated were local concerns regarding health, education, roads, etc.
However, by focusing on legislation and strictly political issues, liberals in the late
19th century tended to neglect agrarian concerns even as they became an issue
of vital importance. Indeed, Alexander II’s reform may have freed the peasants
from serfdom, but did not provide them with access to land or a way out of
their misery. Protest campaigns of malcontent swept the nation in favor of more
radical and revolutionary movements, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR),
than those of the liberals.
Born of the Russo-Japanese War, the Revolution of 1905, suddenly forced
the emperor to concede. With the October Manifesto, Nicholas II was
pressed to grant inalienable rights (including freedom of conscience) and an
assembly, the state Duma, was created. A semblance of political life emerged
and two liberal parties appeared, the Octobrist Party and the Constitutional
Democratic Party (or Cadet Party) led by Prince Lvov and Pavel Milyukov. In
favor of constitutional and parliamentary progress based on a Western model,
both parties rose through the ranks to represent liberal professionals and the
emerging business class.
Meanwhile, in 1906, Minister Stolypin launched an agricultural reform
whose objective was to promote capitalization for small agri-business and entrepreneurship: indeed, the time for political and economic liberalism seemed to
have come.
But the hopes of the 1905 Revolution were quickly dashed. Firstly, land
reforms benefited only a minority of farmers. Secondly, in 1906, Nicholas II
reversed his position toward true parliamentarianism. This unyielding refusal,
together with the disastrous defeats suffered during World War I and the
economic crisis, seriously affected life behind the lines and precipitated the fall
of the regime in February 1917, which led to the formation of a provisional
government.
Comprised of a majority of liberals in favor of setting up a constitutional
monarchy or liberal republic, led by Prince Lvov (president of the government),
Pavel Milyukov (minister of foreign affairs) and Alexander Kerensky (responsible
for military affairs), the new government quickly adopted strong measures
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regarding rights and liberties. In the wake of the Declaration of March 19
proclaiming civil liberties and equal rights, it abolished the death penalty,
recognized freedom of conscience and announced the future convening of a
constituent assembly. On the national level, they declared autonomy for the states
and recognized Poland’s right to independence. Socially, under pressure from the
popular Petrograd Soviet, which was spontaneously established in February, it
reduced the workday to eight hours in the capital. However, on two fundamental
points the provisional government did not adopt the measures expected: they
decided to continue the war, in order to honor international agreements signed
by the czarist regime, while the people, exhausted by an unpopular war, wanted
peace. To the great displeasure of the peasants who were looking forward to it, they
did not offer any new agrarian reform, preferring to rely on the work of the future
Constituant Assembly, for the sake of respecting the law.
These two unresolved issues would cost the provisional government dearly.
New defeats suffered by a Russian Army weakened by desertions and mutinies,
dwindling resources weighing heavily on the rear and, finally, the explosion of
nationalist movements that led to the secession of some regions – in June, the
Ukraine adopted a national parliament, the Rada, and was leaning toward independence. All these factors led to a continued weakening of the government,
which in the summer of 1917 found itself opposed on its left by the Bolshevik
Party and on its right by movements nostalgic for the lost monarchy. A victim of
its own legalism and procrastination, the provisional government was in its turn
swept away during the October 1917 Revolution, bringing the Bolshevik Party
to power and the end of liberal ideas in Russia for a long time.
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From the October Revolution to Today,
Vicissitudes of the Liberal Idea
The Soviet regime effectively buried a liberal idea that the failure of February
1917 had already helped discredit. Authoritarian use of force, denying human
rights and repeated violations of civil liberties served to suppress any further
reference to liberalism in the country. And it was only tentatively, since the
1960s, in the wake of the first dissidents, that these references have reappeared.
Here we must acknowledge the key role of Andrey Sakharov. With his essay
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entitled Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, selfpublished (samizdat) in 1968, he revives the liberal movement making respect
of individual rights the platform of his political campaign. In 1976, a committee
for compliance with the Helsinki Accords was formed by a group close to
the physicist Yuri Orlov, who helped to advance public policy and civil rights.
However, the swift dismissal of Andrey Sakharov and his condemnation to
internal exile in Gorky in 1980 struck a further blow to these ideas and it wasn’t
until Perestroika and the substantial political changes that accompanied it for
liberal values to be rediscovered in Russia.
Political and economic freedom were seen as values and tools to facilitate the
return of Russia to the status of Western powers founded on law and to enable
both modernization of the economy and its adaptation to new international
realities. From this position, Gorbachev’s Perestroika regime ended the single
party regime, organized the first multiparty elections and reintroduced private
property in 1987 after 70 years of a state-run economy and, in 1990, signed the
charter for a new Europe, emphasizing its commitment to a state under rule of
law. Afterward, under President Boris Yeltsin, Russians experienced political
life founded on free elections and, in November 1991, an ambitious program
of mass privatization was launched under the leadership of young liberal economists. Yegor Gaidar became head of the Russian government and Anatoly
Chubais’ mission was to complete the process of privatization that, organized in
phases, continued until 1998.
Very quickly, however, cruel disappointments began to emerge, starting
with Boris Yeltsin’s armed overthrow of the Parliament in 1993. It seems the
new Russian state had not renounced the authoritarian and repressive practices
inherited from its predecessors, while in years to follow, the struggle against
terrorism was readily used as a pretext for repeated breaches of human rights. As
for privatization, their principles and practices were diverted for the benefit of
a predatory oligarchy. If the privatization of real estate, services and small businesses benefited the entire population, the major industrial privatizations were
carried out to profit a minority of oligarchs who shared, with the complicity of
the state and to the disdain of liberal competition dogma, whole segments of the
national economy. Colossal fortunes appeared in only a few years, while the state,
nearly bankrupt, turned out to be incapable of ensuring essential functions such
as health, education and the security of people and property.
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Very far from initial aspirations, these results quickly provoked, among a
population terribly impoverished and brutalized by the economic crisis, a deep
rejection of the liberal idea whose effects are still felt now. The Yabloko Party,
which more that any other, embodied the liberal élan, faded away in just a few
years; its outstanding leaders were marginalized, in an ever more difficult situation, by the new electoral laws adopted in 2004 and 2005. While for the most
part economic liberalism continued to structure the Russian economy, it also
suffered serious blows as evidenced by the breakup of Yukos and the official or
unofficial re-nationalization of other key economic sectors and enterprises, to
the general indifference of the population.
Nevertheless, if the liberal parties now seem nonexistent or incapable of
embodying a coherent opposition force, it can be seen that their ideas have not
disappeared entirely, that they still run through Russian society and nourish the
opposition we see now. Whether by the blogger Alexey Navalny denouncing
with vehemence and constancy the corruption of the Russian state and its
breaches of individual liberties, by Boris Akunin, a writer demanding the installation of a state under the rule of law and respectful of civil liberties, or by Mikhail
Prokhorov, a businessman insisting on the necessity of guaranteeing entrepreneurial freedom, all of them, in spite of the diversity of their backgrounds, are
in favor of individual and civil liberties and agree to the same rejection of state
authoritarianism. The response they get, especially among the urban and educated
middle classes of big cities, shows that liberal ideas are still anchored in some
segments of the population without, however, becoming a force for political
struggle, and that is the paradox, if not the tragedy, of Russian liberalism today.
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