The Ambivalence of Early Gentry Liberalism in Russia

ABSTRACT Using material from contemporary scholarly debate, the author shows that the term “early Russian liberalism” remains conceptually vague both in content and in its chronological sense. In the strictly conceptual approach, the beginnings of liberalism correlate with its doctrinal form, which corresponds to the liberalism of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. There is no unanimity in modern historiography on the question of criteria for liberalism, but there is an understanding that the simple imposition of Western models is methodologically wrong, since it would ignore a national specificity for which the main feature is the integration of the liberal worldview with the principle of autocracy. This article considers early Russian liberalism in the chronological sense as a response to the challenges of the time. The historically conditioned diversity of liberal forms allows us to demonstrate the complexity and ambiguity of Russian liberalism as a phenomenon and its syncretic nature. Early liberal ideas were generated among the upper nobility as a means of protecting them from the tyranny of those in power. The main obstacle to the development of political-legal discourse in Russia was paternalism. Alexander I’s encouragement of a liberal agenda contributed to the temporary liberalization of the political system but did not change the essence of the legal situation. Nicholas I’s usurpation of the political discourse began the process of marginalizing political liberalism’s ideas and led to the transformation of liberal discourse into an essentially latent liberal one and a formally ethical one, which prevented full implementation of a liberal agenda.