Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

Introduction

T his book grew out of a keen interest in the political culture of contemporary Russia, whose post-Soviet transition made current many issues from the late imperial era. The long nineteenth century now speaks directly to the present and parallels between the late tsarist and post-Soviet periods abound despite the obvious differences. One of the most provocative questions that reemerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union is liberalism’s viability as a political force. During the s, reformers who referred to themselves as liberals misjudged the effects of economic shock therapy that they implemented according to a Western “liberal” model, which reemerged in the late twentieth century as a conservative agenda in its classical laissez-faire sense. Because of these mismanaged economic reforms, liberalism became a term of abuse in Russia synonymous with reckless socioeconomic experimentation, rapacious capitalism, rampant corruption, and political chaos. None of this was true about Russia’s prerevolutionary liberalism, which deserves closer examination that is sure to enrich the current debate about liberalism’s future by exploring the nuances of previous socio-economic transformations in Russia. This work will attempt to salvage liberal values by analyzing the liberal development program that evolved in the late Romanov Empire during a period of similarly destabilizing socio-economic transformations brought on by the relentless economic development that characterized the Western world as a whole in the nineteenth century. By the s, several states in the new and old worlds had to transform estate-based administrative systems into participatory ones, which resulted in the War of Reform in Mexico, the Civil War in the United States, the Ausgleich out of Introduction  which Austria-Hungary emerged, the unifications of Italy and Germany, and the Third Republic in France. Russia became part of this wave of reformism after the embarrassing defeat in the Crimean War (–) uncovered the Romanov Empire’s socio-economic backwardness. Tsar Alexander II (– ) launched the Great Reforms with the emancipation of the serfs in  and then restructured the courts, the administrative system, and the military. As part of the administrative reform, the Russian state created a network of local self-government units known as zemstvos in .1 Set up on the district and provincial levels, they tended to local socio-economic needs such as schools, clinics, infrastructure, veterinary care, and insurance, but were explicitly forbidden to involve themselves in political affairs. Popularly elected and bringing together landowners and peasants, the zemstvos became the first officially sanctioned experiments in inclusive self-administration.2 In combination with the other reforms of Alexander II, the zemstvos stimulated the growth of professions as they soaked up doctors, teachers, agronomists , architects, lawyers, and many other specialists. As a middle class began to develop, the disparate professional groups sought mutual contact and a framework through which to articulate their aspirations independently of the state.3 Professional and academic organizations sprang up all over the Russian Empire.4 Such organizations, together with the zemstvo network and a renaissance of journalism, became the building blocks of a vibrant extraparliamentary civil society.5 The s also spawned a powerful radical revolutionary movement whose members considered the Great Reforms a diversionary tactic due to their incomplete nature: the peasants did not receive land into private ownership, the zemstvo network did not culminate with a proto-parliamentary imperial zemstvo institution, censorship was eased but not abolished, and the police system remained intact. The Romanov Empire entered a volatile period as the state navigated the treacherous current of reforms. Challenges came not only from revolutionaries, but also from an increasingly influential liberal component of civil society that saw the Great Reforms as unfinished, but stopped short of calling for the overthrow of the government. The subject of this book is this loyal opposition to the state. The story’s central characters are the thick monthly journal the Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy, –) and the remarkable constellation of intellectuals who ran it between  and  when this flagship of Russian liberalism became the most influential social and intellectual journalistic institution in an empire where literary culture wielded unparalleled influence.  Introduction At the height of its popularity in the s and s, the Herald of Europe sold around eight thousand monthly copies, but this number does not reflect family members who read it and access to public library copies. For comparison ’s sake, the most popular thick journal in...