By Gary Saul Morson, New York Review of Books, February 2025

Review of Paul Robinson’s Russian Liberalism.

“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.”

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. 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.”…

Read full article here.