“The Russian liberal,” wrote the nineteenth-century philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, “is a thoughtless fly buzzing in the ray of the sun; that sun is the sun of the West.” From Chaadayev’s day to the present, Russians have regarded liberalism as an elitist, alien Western import, at odds with ordinary people’s basic values. Its two brief moments of influence—from the revolution of 1905 to the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917, and from Mikhail Gorbachev’s proclamation of perestroika and glasnost until the presidency of Vladimir Putin—ended in illiberal regimes and the discrediting of liberal ideas.

When Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, and especially after the USSR collapsed in 1991, it seemed as if Western liberalism would at last triumph. Political pluralism, human rights, and a decentralized economy became the order of the day even in Russia. Why, then, did everything change under President Putin? And why have Russians so thoroughly rejected liberal culture and politics? In the 2016 elections—fraudulent, to be sure—Russian liberals failed to elect a single delegate to the Duma. The historian Benjamin Nathans reports that Russian liberals routinely drink toasts to “the success of our hopeless cause.”1

Something similar happened after the October Manifesto of 1905 transformed Russia into a constitutional monarchy. When the Romanov dynasty collapsed in March 1917, legal power passed to the Duma and its initially liberal leaders until the Bolsheviks seized control eight months later. By the end of 1917 the feared Cheka—the first version of the Soviet secret police—was in operation. Why was liberalism so incapable of preserving the power it inherited?

History is written not only by the winners but also about the winners and their principal opponents. When I studied Russian history in graduate school, the period from the Decembrist revolt of 1825 until the Bolshevik takeover was depicted as a struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionaries, with only the briefest mention of liberals. The central documents of Russian liberalism—the essay anthologies Problems of Idealism (1903) and Landmarks (1909)—escaped consideration.2 Yet there was a significant Russian liberal movement, whose importance extends beyond Russian history. For one thing, some Russian thinkers, especially from the 1890s to 1917, found new and perhaps useful ways to defend core liberal values. For another, the failures of Russian liberal movements may tell us why Western assumptions about liberalism’s universal appeal so often prove counterproductive.

The historian Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the liberal Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) party from its founding in 1905 until its ban by the Bolsheviks in 1917, embraced a liberalism that resembled its Western counterparts. Heavily influenced by English utilitarianism and Auguste Comte’s positivism, he presumed that just as the same physical laws prevail everywhere, so do the same historical laws. All societies are bound to develop liberal democratic institutions, an idea that again became familiar almost a century later in Francis Fukuyama’s meditations on “the end of history.” In his splendid new book on Russian liberalism, Paul Robinson cites Miliukov’s comment that “civilization makes nations, as it makes individuals, more alike.” The socialist Alexander Herzen, along with Russian radical populists, had maintained that Russia could forge a path of its own that avoided Western bourgeois society, but Miliukov, along with many Marxists, insisted that history allows only one path: Russia had to obey “the laws of political biology.” The forms of civilized political life, Miliukov famously explained, “are as little national as are the use of the alphabet or the printing press, steam or electricity…. When a new era of history knocks at the door, it is useless to place restraints and delays in its path.”

Despite the failure of Miliukov’s prediction, Russian liberals in the Yeltsin era made remarkably similar statements. Pyotr Aven, the minister of foreign economic relations in the early 1990s, insisted that “all countries from the point of view of an economist are the same,” while the historian Leonid Batkin proclaimed in a 1988 article that the West “is the general definition of the economic, scientific-technical and structural-democratic level without which it is impossible for any really modern society…to exist.” No Marxist ever subscribed to historical determinism more ardently than these liberals.

Miliukov regarded moral values as entirely relative, grounded in social needs and developing according to historical laws. So much confidence did Miliukov place in those laws that he grossly underestimated the possibility that illiberal parties like the Bolsheviks might triumph. In his view, terrorist attacks and inflammatory language were bound to abate once there was universal suffrage. Liberals of the Yeltsin era also underestimated the danger of illiberal alternatives.

Russia’s most original liberal thinkers belonged to an alternative tradition that, unlike Miliukov and his followers, rejected utilitarianism and positivism. They did so, in part, because Russia’s nihilists and revolutionaries had already derived from these philosophies entirely illiberal political conclusions. Ideas that for Westerners seem to cluster naturally together do not necessarily do so in Russia.

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Russian liberalism differed from Western counterparts because Russian conditions were so different. The social base of Western liberalism, a commercial middle class, was almost entirely lacking in nineteenth-century Russia. Liberalism’s appeal there was not economic but intellectual, and its proponents were not businessmen or industrialists but enlightened noblemen, professionals, and academicians. Without a social base, these liberals of the intellect resembled that “ingenious architect” in part 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, “who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundation.” In Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, the aristocratic brothers Kirsanov embrace liberal ideas out of sentimentality and as an upper-class fashion. The radical Bazarov, son of a poor army doctor, rejects their elitist, Europeanized talk. “Aristocracy, Liberalism, progress, principles,” Bazarov snarls. “What a lot of foreign…and useless words! No Russian needs them, even as a gift.”

Prerevolutionary Russian liberals typically paid little attention to laissez-faire government policy, free trade, or other economic issues so important to their Western counterparts. Their liberalism did not necessarily presume capitalism. On the contrary, Russian liberals tended to favor a strong welfare state, which is one reason Miliukov boasted that the Kadets were the most left-wing liberal party in Europe.

Liberalism entails the rule of law, which restrains government power and ensures individual rights, but until 1861 over a third of Russians were serfs, owned by noblemen and entirely outside the law. Subject to corporal punishment by their owners, serfs needed permission to marry and, as Russian fiction amply illustrates, could be bought, sold, or lost at cards. Even after their liberation, peasants were tied to communes, which meant they lacked rights as individuals. It is no wonder that, as nineteenth-century liberals lamented, most Russians entirely lacked a “legal consciousness” and could understand law only as brute force arbitrarily applied.

While peasants were unfamiliar with legality, educated Russians tended to be positively hostile to it. “In this respect,” wrote the Ukrainian legal philosopher Bohdan Kistyakovsky in Landmarks, “how different our history has been from that of other civilized nations!” Although the conservative Slavophiles—a movement dating from the 1840s that opposed cultural Westernization—believed in free speech and a private sphere, they resolutely opposed legal guarantees as contrary to the Russian spirit. While “Western man” adopted “formal justice,” the Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov explained, Russians preferred “inner justice.” “A guarantee is not needed,” he asserted. “A guarantee is an evil.”

On the left, populists, Marxists, and anarchists rejected the very idea of a “legal person” with rights. Nikolai Mikhailovsky, the leading radical populist of the 1870s, famously proclaimed that “freedom is a great and tempting thing, but we do not want freedom if, as happened in Europe, it only increases our age-old debt to the people.” Kistyakovsky ruefully cited Mikhailovsky’s “rejection of law”:

Skeptical about freedom, we were prepared to solicit no rights for ourselves; I don’t mean privileges—that goes without saying—but even the most elementary paragraphs of what in the old days used to be called natural law. . . . “They flog the muzhik [peasant], let them flog us.”

Russians have often defined themselves as the opposite of Germans, who are comfortable with legal restraints and patiently await improvement occurring steadily over generations. The Russian soul, it was said, demands justice immediately. There is no time for legal niceties! Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, stressed the disastrous consequence: “What a false path!…They could not afford to wait, and so we, their great grandchildren, are not at the same point as they were…but much further behind.”

Lenin regarded law as a mystification ensuring bourgeois power before the revolution and impeding the Communist Party after it. In his view, law should never restrain the party, only enunciate its changing will, a view of law that followed directly from his definition of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”:

The scientific term “dictatorship” means nothing more than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term “dictatorship” has no other meaning but this—mark this well, Kadet gentlemen.

Although utilitarianism (along with positivism and secularism) was the natural ally of legality in England and France, in Russia it implied rejection of law. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment overhears two students discussing the newly fashionable idea that has been obsessing him: Doesn’t the utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number not only permit but sometimes even demand murder? Wouldn’t it be a good deed, suggests one student, to kill and rob the noxious old pawnbroker who preys on the poor?

On one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief …. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands on every side!… Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all…. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!

By the same logic, doesn’t utilitarianism justify revolutionary terrorism and civil war to create the perfect society? After all, however many people lose their lives now, countless future generations of citizens will outnumber them.

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Reacting to such thinking, some prerevolutionary Russian liberals rejected utilitarianism and other “scientific” social sciences and turned instead to idealism and religion. There they discovered ideas justifying individual human rights. As Randall Poole observes in the introductions to Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia (2021) and to his fine translation of Problems of Idealism, the most original and influential Russian liberal thinkers identified lichnost’ (usually translated as “personhood”) as a crucial concept. Made in the image of God, each person has the inalienable right to be treated as an end rather than as mere means. The enormous significance of Kant, explained the liberal theorist Pavel Novgorodtsev in an article called “Kant as Moralist” (1905), “consists precisely in the fact that he again directed thought to the…internal sources of the spirit in which man knows his infinite vocation and absolute worth.”

Nothing mattered more to these liberals than freedom of conscience, which they regarded as an absolute, not relative, value. Even though this ethical norm, like all others, arose historically in specific social conditions, they argued, it could be justified rationally and “metaphysically.” In their view, positivists and historicists had deprived ethics of its essence, its “oughtness,” which cannot be reduced to existing conditions. “We seek absolute precepts and principles—in precisely this lies the essence of moral searchings,” explained Novgorodtsev in Problems of Idealism, “and we are answered with the indication that everything in the world is relative and conditional.”

“Ought,” these idealists insisted, can never be derived from “is.” All attempts to do so necessarily “smuggled” moral norms into purportedly objective scientific laws, including “laws” of history. In identifying “later” with “better,” for instance, positivists illogically claimed a scientific basis for their own values. Hadn’t scientific thought since Bacon rejected any ascription of purposes, let alone human purposes, to nature? For fundamental rights to be universal and objective, these idealists reasoned, they must be grounded in something beyond a particular society’s institutions and history. It’s not enough to say, for instance, that slavery and torture contradict European ideas of the past few centuries. They must be wrong everywhere and always. But how can such a position be justified?

Idealist Russian liberals discovered a justification in a rethinking of “natural law,” which, for many, also entailed a revival of Christian belief: people have rights because they were made in the image of God. This association of liberalism with Christianity often puzzles Westerners who trace liberalism to the Enlightenment rejection of religious authority. But with secularism firmly linked to radical illiberalism, it made sense for Russian liberals to look favorably upon religion. As the historian Vanessa Rampton observes in Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia (2020), her excellent history of Russian liberalism, Sergei Bulgakov, later a major Orthodox theologian, took it as self-evident that participation in reformist causes should be motivated not by self-interest but by “an absolute order of the moral law, by a dictate of God.” Lenin had comments like this in mind when he rejected any talk of the “sanctity of human life” as so much religious twaddle.

For Westerners, it often seems self-evident that civil and political rights must accompany each other and that human rights entail democracy. Russians reasoned differently. As Robinson points out, the mid-nineteenth-century philosopher Boris Chicherin and the liberal historian Timofei Granovsky believed that democracy could work only if people had already attained a legal consciousness and respect for the civil rights of others. If not, the result would probably be—as is often said today—one person, one vote, one time. The George W. Bush administration’s failures abroad derived in part from its assumption that voting is all a liberal democracy requires.

Chicherin proposed that Russia first develop respect for law and civil rights before proceeding to political rights. In England, after all, rights were first granted to the aristocracy. Only after these rights were thoroughly understood and taken for granted were they extended, step by step, to lower classes. Six centuries separate the Magna Carta from the Reform Bill of 1832. That is why English rights have a solid foundation, Russian liberals reasoned, and so Russia too must accept gradualism, however abbreviated. Decades, at least, must be allowed for people to grow accustomed to legality and basic civil liberties before political rights are granted, first to noblemen and only after that to peasants. As Chicherin observed, “There is therefore nothing ethically troubling in denying political rights to poor people,” precisely because it is necessary to take “into account the political sophistication of a people.”

Is democracy an end in itself, or is it valuable primarily as a way of preserving civil liberties? If the latter, what happens when democracy curtails those liberties? Chicherin was well aware that intellectuals, as well as peasants, were unprepared to exercise political rights responsibly, as their behavior in the Duma was to show. Nicholas II, of course, resented parliamentary limitations on his prerogatives, but even when the government was prepared to cooperate, the Kadets, despite professing belief in constitutional monarchy, refused to do so, lest they be compromised by dealing with a hated regime. Although the Kadets did not engage in terrorism, they justified it. “Condemn terrorism?” the Kadet leader Alexander Petrunkevich asked. “Never! That would be the moral death of the party!”

For democracy to work, people must value compromise, but Miliukov did not. In his 1955 article “Two Types of Russian Liberalism,” the historian Michael Karpovich contrasted Miliukov with a rival liberal, Vasily Maklakov, who regarded “the main evil of Russian life” to be not a lack of democracy but “the helplessness of the individual in the face of bureaucratic discretion, the lack of legal bases for his self-defense.” This arbitrariness resulted from the refusal to accept any limitations on power, as if moderation and compromise signified cowardice and an absence of integrity. For Miliukov, such soft-minded thinking reflected Maklakov’s background as a lawyer, accustomed to imagining both sides of any case and “seeing a share of truth on the opposite side, and a share of error on his own.” As leader of the Kadets, Miliukov rejected this “philosophy of compromise.” Is it any wonder that Russia’s first experiment with constitutionalism failed?

Because the overwhelming majority of Russians were uneducated, Russian liberals, in contrast to their Western counterparts, often favored a strong state. How else could liberal reforms be implemented? In Russia reforms typically come from the top, imposed by authoritarian methods. Liberal reforms, it seemed, would have to come about in the same way. Robinson cites the liberal Konstantin Kavelin, who wrote in an 1848 letter to Granovsky: “I believe in the necessity of absolutism in present-day Russia, but it ought to be progressive and enlightened.”

Authoritarian liberalism strikes Westerners as paradoxical, but conditions favoring it—an educated class trying to impose Western values on a recalcitrant population—are hardly unique to Russia. I recall the historian Firuz Kazemzadeh mentioning the Shah of Iran, then in power, who imposed Western liberal norms, such as civil rights for women, by authoritarian means.

In the 1990s many Russian liberals unreservedly embraced authoritarianism. They recognized no other choice, because most Russians, in their view, were not just unenlightened but uncivilized, if not barely human. In dealing with the masses, declared the philosopher Merab Mamardashvili in his article “The ‘Third’ State” (1989), “we are dealing with a disorganized, lost, feral consciousness.” In his recent book The Return of the Russian Leviathan (2019), the journalist Sergey Medvedev argues that the masses’ Nietzschean ressentiment inclines them to “the morals of slaves.” As Robinson explains, intellectuals embraced the “two Russias” theory (especially after the invasion of Crimea in 2014), with zombified masses confronting a high-minded, educated elite. “The Russian people,” declared the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov in 2007,

for the most part are divided into two uneven groups. One part is the descendants of serfs, people with a slavish consciousness. There are many of them and their leader is V.V. Putin. The other (smaller) part is born free, proud and independent. It does not have a leader but needs one.

Russian nationalists often attribute Western hostility to “Russophobia,” but no Westerner has expressed greater hatred of Russians than Russian reformers themselves. “Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, bestowed not a single idea upon the fund of human ideas, contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit,” proclaimed Pyotr Chaadayev. If the ancient barbarian hordes invading the West had not passed through Russia, he continued, “we would scarcely have furnished a chapter in world history.” A character in Turgenev’s novel Smoke declares that Russians did not even invent the samovar.

The reformers of the 1990s were even harsher. “Alas, I don’t love the Russian people,” explained the journalist Dmitry Gubin, since they gravitate to

conformism, opportunism, doublethink…. If the people were given their freedom, they’d turn America into atomic ash, restore the death penalty and imprison all the liberals and anyone who simply has any brains.

Valeria Novodvorskaya, a prominent member of the first Soviet opposition party (founded in 1988), deemed the masses unworthy of existence. “We are not dealing with people, with equal opponents, but with some evil black fog,” she wrote in the journal Ogonyok in 1994. “I am completely prepared to get rid of every fifth person…. I am prepared to use any methods to win this civil war.” Since eliminating every fifth person was what Stalin had actually done, it is hard to dismiss her words as mere rhetoric. Russians “vote for the authorities,” she explained, because they have “the psychology of beggars…. And if this people dies out, then, quite honestly, the hell with it.” Russia is “so terrible that if the atomic bomb dropped on it and killed us but at the same time killed the system, that would be a desirable outcome.”

Western commentators during the Yeltsin era rarely grasped how ardently Russian liberals embraced authoritarianism. As Anatoly Chubais, the economist chiefly responsible for privatization, explained,

There is a fundamental contradiction between the aims of reform (the forming of a democratic economy and society) and the means of their achievement, including measures of an antidemocratic nature.

Many regarded Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who imposed market reforms, as a model. Yeltsin fit the bill. Immediately after the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, he enacted a series of authoritarian measures, postponing local elections and assuming the right to appoint regional governors. As Robinson notes, “Liberal authoritarianism had found its man.”

Two years later, when Yeltsin encountered parliamentary opposition, a delegation of Russian writers advised him “not to become obsessed solely with constitutional matters. . . . After all, your opponents are past masters at bogging down any problems in endless coordination-and-agreement meetings”—which is, one might think, how democracy generally works. When Yeltsin ordered the army to shell the Russian White House, where the parliamentary opposition had barricaded itself, most liberals supported him.

The former dissident and future presidential human rights adviser Sergey Kovalyov regarded it as unimportant that Yeltsin’s actions violated the constitution. “What is constitutionalism,” he asked, “following the bad letter of a bad law or the fundamental principles of constitutionalism?” No wonder these liberals were sometimes called “market Bolsheviks.” As Robinson notes, Izvestia published a letter signed by forty-two leading intellectuals “urging Yeltsin to dissolve the Communist Party, various nationalist organizations, associated media outlets, all local councils (soviets), and the Constitutional Court.” Yeltsin needed no encouragement. As the economist Yegor Gaidar observed, “It immediately became clear that the first casualty was democracy itself….All the power in the country was in his hands. We had leapt…into a de facto authoritarian regime.”

If this is what Russian “democrats” were like, should we be surprised that authoritarian rule has returned? Or that Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor? And if Westernizing liberals expressed such contempt for the Russian people, is it surprising that liberalism became a dirty word?

Some stories Robinson recounts allow us to see how clueless educated liberals seem. In response to Western sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia imposed countersanctions on certain Western goods, including European cheeses. “Liberals were indignant,” Robinson explains. Medvedev complained:

Among the losses of recent years—the free press, fair elections, an independent court—what has hurt especially hard has been the disappearance of good cheese…a piece of brie, a bottle of Italian chianti and a warm baguette…drew him [the Russian] close to Western values.

The filmmaker Inna Denisova enthused about a European supermarket that “made me so emotional…. My little Gorgonzola. My little mozzarella. My little Gruyère, chèvre and Brie. I held them all in my arms—I didn’t even want to share them with the shopping cart.”

By now Russia has not just rejected liberalism; it has made opposition to it the country’s essential mission. “Liberalism is an absolute evil,” asserted the influential ideologue Aleksandr Dugin in his book The Fourth Political Theory (2009), and “‘freedom from’ is the most disgusting formula of slavery, inasmuch as it tempts man to an insurrection against God, against traditional values, against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people and his culture.” Under liberalism, Dugin argued, people lack “any collective identity, and the ideology of ‘human rights’…is practically compulsory.” Since the Enlightenment, he continued, Europeans have passed off parochial Western values—“liberal democracy, parliamentarianism, free markets, human rights, and so on”—as universal. Insofar as non-Western cultures accept these values, they become cultural slaves.

It seems to Dugin and others that Russia is uniquely capable of saving other non-Western cultures because “the entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument…against Western culture, the struggle for upholding our own…Russian truth, our own messianic idea.” Such rejection of liberalism’s universalist claims is not uncommon. We need only recall the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew’s defense of illiberal “Asian values” during the thirty-one years he was prime minister, and its strong appeal across East and Southeast Asia.

The failures of Russian liberalism suggest that if we are to react intelligently to other cultures, we must avoid assuming that their Westernizers are bound to triumph or that everyone, given the chance, wants to be like us.