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Conclusion
- University of Wisconsin Press
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- Additional Information
A lthough its popularity and impact noticeably decreased on the eve of the revolution, the Herald of Europe left an important legacy. The journal never questioned Russia’s belonging to European culture and never took the “us versus them” approach to it, although the editors believed that Russia followed a unique socio-economic evolution. Focusing its readers’ attention on Russia’s domestic conditions, the Herald never allowed them to lose sight of the extended family of Western nations to which Russia belonged and made comparisons to its Western neighbors without encouraging inferiority complexes. In other words, Herald liberalism held the promise of non-convergent socio-economic evolution without the stigma of backwardness. By analyzing Russia’s socio-economic trends, the role of the state in directing modernization, and the part of local self-government in this process, the Herald of Europe helped its readers to articulate questions about modernization in terms of civic participation that challenged the autocratic model of state-society relations without undermining social stability. Immersion in local self-government eliminated the conflict between private and political life and integrated the individual by allowing him or her to acquire extraparliamentary social significance. It is no accident that many Russian liberals who became prominent in the Duma era emerged out of the pre- zemstvo movement. Modernization according to the Herald model encouraged Russians to understand themselves through participating in local selfgovernment —a constructive act that nurtured individuality within a pluralistic environment. Contextualizing Russian liberalism in the experiences of its Central European cousins during the age of mass politics sheds valuable light on Herald Conclusion liberalism’s advantages. Having challenged the rights of the crown in favor of the up-and-coming educated and economically empowered minorities, European liberalism led to the appearance of mass politics by the end of the nineteenth century, which in turn began to threaten liberalism’s core values. While in England, “piecemeal widening of the franchise . . . slowed and modulated the arrival of mass politics, making life easier for the liberal-minded,” liberalism’s experience in Central Europe proved a lot more complicated.1 For example, fin de siècle Austrian liberals experienced a rude awakening when their Vereine-based vision of civil society proved unrealizable. Mass politics, it turned out, no longer resembled a club with voluntary membership that enforced universal rules of conduct and ran under an invisible hierarchy of active and peripheral members. In order to safeguard the purity of their message, Austrian liberals embraced nationalist rhetoric.2 In Germany, liberals embraced individualism and elitism that reflected their ambivalence towards democracy, while the metropolitan ideals that enabled political differentiation for German liberals eventually morphed into national chauvinism .3 Herald liberalism’s emphasis on local self-government prevented it from following the Central European path. Nonetheless, it faced opposition from a government unable to distinguish between social spontaneity and subversion, loyal opposition and radicalism. The censors’ attitude to the journal after demonstrates the arbitrariness of judgment that hung over the journal. In , a censor wrote that the Herald of Europe “was in open opposition to the state” and suspiciously sympathetic “to the widest possible autonomy for our borderlands.”4 Four years later, another censor described the journal’s “extraordinary uprightness and prudent moderation” in “melancholically dragging one foot” in its efforts to remind society “of the benefits of social self-government.”5 The attitude towards the Herald during the s was indicative of the tsarist government ’s increasing inability to perceive real threats. In , Pobedonostsev’s protégé Mikhail Solovyov was placed in charge of the Main Department of the Press and every journal issue’s fate became more precarious. Pages were repeatedly cut and printing arbitrarily stopped and then allowed again. Stasiulevich wrote in : “Our journalism now has to think less about what it says than about what it must not say.”6 The conservatives who engineered the fading of Witte’s star around also created problems for the Herald. For example, Anatolii Koni wrote that interior minister Pleve criticized him face-to-face for cooperating with Stasiulevich.7 Was there no greater threat to social stability than a liberal journal? Conclusion [34.229.50.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:22 GMT) In , the Herald still had only one warning, but this changed after the governor of Finland, Nikolai Bobrikov, complained to censorship chief Solovyov that the Herald supported national aspirations and incited opposition to the governor’s initiatives in Finland.8 As a result, the...