The Revival of Russian Conservatism

Vladislav Iakimovich Grosul, ed., Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia: Ideologiia i praktika [Russian Conservatism of the 19th Century: Ideology and Practice]. 440 pp. Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2000. ISBN 5898260277.

Pavel Iukhimovich Rakhshmir, ed., Konservatizm i tsivilizatsionnye vyzovy sovremennosti: Materialy mezhdu-narodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii. Perm´, 29 fevralia-1 marta 2000 g. [Conservatism and the Civilizational Challenge of Contemporary Life: Materials of the International Scientific and Practical Conference Held in Perm´, 29 February-1 March 2000]. 140 pp. Perm´: Permskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2000. ISBN 5794401737.

A. I. Narezhnyi et al., eds., Liberal´nyi konservatizm: Istoriia i sovremennost´. Materialy Vserossiiskoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii. Rostov-na-Donu, 25-26 maia 2000 g. [Liberal Conservatism: History and the Present Day. Materials of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference Held in Rostov-on-Don, 25-26 May 2000]. 383 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001. ISBN 5824301913.

A. Iu. Minakov et al., eds., Konservatizm v Rossii i mire: Proshloe i nastoiashchee [Conservatism in Russia and the World: Past and Present]. 261 pp. Voronezh: Izdatel´stvo Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2001. ISBN 5745511885.

As Russians approached the new millennium, they witnessed and participated in a remarkable, even shocking development—the revival of conservatism on the Bolshevik Revolution's home ground. Among the unmistakable symptoms of that revival were: the flourishing of centrist, nationalist, and right-wing parties in the elected Duma; the self-identification of an increasing segment of the public as conservatives; the ostentatious decision by the country's president, Vladimir Putin, to distance himself from the "liberal" social experimentation that had characterized the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years; and, finally, a series of governmental actions designed to restore health to shaken institutions and traditions of Russian statehood. Substantively, these actions sought to revitalize Russia's powerful centralized state and to secure the country's territorial integrity in places of historical contestation such as Chechnya. Meanwhile, to signal its continuity with the patriotic legacy of the past three centuries, the government manipulated symbols of Russian greatness—for example, by adopting the imperial flag as the national banner, by incorporating the imperial double eagle into the presidential banner, and by inserting Russian nationalist words into the 1944 "Stalinist" Soviet anthem. Although it cannot be said that the Russian government as a whole has embraced conservative principles—Putin has styled himself a pragmatist and realist rather than a conservative ideologue, and Duma factions span the entire political spectrum—the cumulative effect of recent events has clearly shifted the government's political equilibrium point far to the right of where it rested a short ten years ago.

Given the substantive and symbolical transformation of the political climate, it is no surprise to discover that since 1991 in Russian university circles conservatism has become a fashionable topic, an intellectual trend that has both mirrored the larger conservative revival and contributed to it. This article focuses on the development of academic interest in conservatism over the past decade. After briefly analyzing the reasons for the new fascination with conservatism and explaining the contours of that fascination, I review a series of recent books on conservatism's historical dimensions. My hope is to highlight strengths and weaknesses of burgeoning Russian scholarship on conservatism and to show how those strengths and weaknesses are connected to the conservative turn in contemporary political life.

I

Anyone familiar with Soviet scholarship on imperial Russia knows that among Soviet historians Russian conservatism commanded scant attention. Under Stalin the writing of imperial history focused mainly on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, on the economic exploitation of the masses under feudalist and capitalist arrangements, on peasant resistance to serfdom, and on the genesis of a Russian working-class movement guided by the Social Democratic Party. Until the appearance of the Zaionchkovskii and Leningrad "schools" in the post-Stalinist period, the systematic study of the government's "internal politics" was...