Russian Conservatism in Its International Context

Vera Dubina, Mikhail M. Leonov, and Lars Bantskhav [Banzhaff], eds., Evoliutsiia konservatizma: Evropeiskaia traditsiia i russkii opyt. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii. Samara, 26-19 aprelia 2002 goda [Conservatism in Transition: European Tradition and Russian Experience. Materials of an International Symposium Held in Samara, 26-29 April 2002]. 304 pp. Samara: Nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 2002. ISBN 5934240749.

This book is a result of an international conference held in Samara, containing articles by 21 authors from Russia, the United States, Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Israel, and Belarus, written in Russian, English, and German. The result is an interesting collection that generally manages to place Russian conservatism in its proper international context. Like most collections of conference papers, this one at times lacks coherence, and the quality of articles varies. Even so, many of the articles are indeed well connected with one another, and as a whole the book is well worth reading. By moving freely outside both Russian and English linguistic areas, many authors demonstrate how essential the knowledge of French and German is to the field.

Defining conservatism is a rather difficult task in any country, and the differences between conservatives in various times and places are enormous. The lines separating conservatism, liberalism, traditionalism, and right-wing radicalism are often blurred.¹ As one scholar of Russian conservatism has speculated, in Alexander I's Russia a British conservative might have been taken for an ardent liberal.² Conservatism as a political idea could only emerge when the traditional order was threatened. That is why most historians date the emergence of conservatism on the mainland of Europe around 1800, although in England it can arguably be discerned in the 17th century.³

Defining Russian conservatism presents additional challenges. Those who defended the traditional political order defended the autocracy, a position that nullified the traditional conservative defense of estates. Although important estate rights did exist in early 19th-century Russia, their scope was more limited than in Britain, France, or the German states in which conservatism emerged as a political ideology. Moreover, the Russian state had a tradition of acting as an agent of innovation and change, often against what people considered established traditions. As a result, Russian would-be conservatives supported monarchic prerogatives over the traditional rights of subjects (in practice, generally the nobility) far more than conservatives in Western and Central Europe. This situation certainly changed with the Great Reforms of Alexander II (1855-81) and the Revolution of 1905, but it was not the moderate supporters of these modernizing changes who were called conservatives. Vera Dubina argues that in the 1870s, the term denoted those opposed to the Great Reforms. Although she does not mention it, this makes Russian conservatism rather different from British conservatism, but rather more similar to the French legitimist version, in that both were in a backward-looking opposition to existing political conditions.⁴

Many articles in this collection acknowledge and discuss the ambiguities of the term "conservatism." Dubina analyzes the meanings of the terms "conservatism" and "liberalism" in the second half of the 19th century. She rejects any attempt at a mechanistic application of Western theories of conservatism to the Russian context, naming Karl Mannheim's theory as one that is often misused. She also rejects all ideal types, advocating instead the use of terminology contemporary to the thinkers and movements being analyzed. Here her criticism perhaps goes too far. While Mannheim himself claimed that his analysis was valid only for German conservatism in the first half of the 19th century,⁵ his insights are indeed flexible and general enough to be applied to Russia. Dubina also criticizes theories that define conservatism on the basis of a single political position, such as attitudes toward the French Revolution or the Great Reforms. Since Mannheim approaches conservatism as a style of...