What are the reasons for the failure of all liberal innovations in Russian history

Scholars have given different explanations about the reasons for the failure of modern liberalism in Russia. George Fisher, in his book Russian Liberalism, argued that there was a lack of social strata in the constituent elements and structure of Russian society that could carry liberal ideas. In his book Russia and Its Crisis, Milyukov argues that the history of state domination in Russia has prevented the process of "normal" development. Others argue that the main reason is that the level of civilization in the Russian state precludes the possibility of transplanting the Western model of democracy to Russia. These analyses are not without merit, and they provide us with a fulcrum from which to draw, but they share a ****ing flaw: the lack of a larger historical perspective.

Modern Russian liberalism reflects an envy of the strength of Western civilization, a mentality to catch up with the Western powers and integrate into the European family. Guided by this thought, the introduction of the Western value system, economic model and even political system was aimed at integrating into the Western countries. Under these circumstances, the introduction of liberalism into Russia inevitably had a very strong utilitarian coloring, and Western liberalism came into Russia with too heavy a mission, and people always chased after it with the hope of revitalizing Russia, hoping that Russia could embark on the road of liberalism and the way of strengthening the country and enriching the people through civilized and bloodless ways of improvement of individual freedom, systemic democracy and the rule of law, and ultimately making liberalism eventually overwhelmed liberalism. It is in this sense that Western liberalism, in the process of being introduced into Russia, was congenitally deficient and "weak", and struggled in the narrow gap between authoritarianism and revolutionary democracy, and it "often had to make a difficult choice between the opponents of the autocracy and the opponents of the revolution", but "the choice was often difficult". It "often had to make a difficult choice between the opponents of the autocracy and the opponents of the revolution", although "one way or the other they were difficult to accept". But in the conditions of sharp socio-political antagonisms of the time, "Russian liberalism could hardly take the middle road, could not fight both forces at the same time". Although it won the struggle against authoritarianism, and was apparently in the limelight, it was in fact at the end of its strength, and was "golden", and as a result, in the ensuing contest, it was automatically defeated without a few rounds, and was "swept away by the radical movement". There are three main reasons for this.

I. Tension between liberalism, which originated in the West, and traditional Russian culture

Culturally speaking, some of the values of liberalism, though universal, are in general a product of Western civilization, which is "rooted in social pluralism, the class system, civil society, belief in the rule of law, the pro-representative experience, spiritual authority and secularism. experience, the separation of spiritual and secular authority, and the insistence on individualism, all of which began to emerge in Western Europe more than a thousand years ago." As essentially different cultures, Russian culture was necessarily in tension with Western culture, and liberalism, which derives directly from Western civilization, thus had difficulty taking root in Russia. Berdyaev, a prominent Russian thinker, pointed out that the character rooted in the Russian character, whether "innate" or the result of state-dominated socialization, was indeed an obstacle to the liberal guiding principles of state-society-individual relations in a liberal polity, and that liberalism was "incompatible with the Russian tradition" and with the dominant revolutionary ideology of Russia. and the dominant revolutionary ideology of Russia."

Specifically, liberalism takes individualism as its starting point and focuses on the political and economic rights of the individual. It is believed that various values are chemicalized to the end, and that the individual cannot be chemicalized, cannot be an instrument of any abstract purpose. And in the Russian cultural tradition, collectivism is the most important value. Historically, Slavism or populism has taken collectivism as its starting point. According to Berdyaev, the spirit of collectivism is "a spiritual, metaphysical attribute of the Russian nation, which does not depend on any economic form". Thus, in Russia, the freedom sought is never the freedom to do one's own thing in isolation from others and from the community, but rather the realization of collective freedom and social justice. Individualism in the Russian context is more pejorative and implies moral degradation. To this day, many Russians strongly reject the idea of "liberalism," which they consider to be "a poison for humanity" and "an idea that will bring harm to the people". "

Liberalism is the most important of all.

Liberal ideas and principles can be established only when they are combined with certain values. Otherwise, liberal ideas can only float on the surface of political life and cannot become immediate and significant reactions and habits. The philosophical outlook of liberalism is empirical; while it recognizes man's capacity for reason, it recognizes moreover the limits of reason, and thus liberalism is non-essentialist, and thus historically advocates gradual evolution, opposes the construction of society as a whole, and in no way deliberately outlines a utopia for society. The Russian philosophical tradition, on the other hand, while also empiricist, differs from British empiricism in that "what is called 'knowing' in the British empiricist sense means contact with something external and reachable through sense perception. The Russian concept of experience is ultimately the experience of life. To 'know' something means to intervene in this thing by means of inner perception and * * * synesthesia, to understand its inner aspect, to grasp it in its full vital manifestation." Thus, in contrast to the skepticism of British empiricism, Russian empiricism was an essentialism with a view of history that often led to radicalism and utopian fantasies. The Russian philosopher Berdyaev recognized that "Russians are extremists, and it is precisely that which makes one feel like a utopia that is most realistic in Russia." As a result, rationalistic liberalism has no appeal in Russia.

In Russia, the materialized ideas of "social equality" and "social justice" were also one of the main obstacles to the development of liberalism. Liberalism also talks about equality, but liberal equality means formal equality, equal opportunities and equality before the law. In terms of values, it defends value differences and self-determination, and in terms of wealth distribution, it recognizes the inequality of outcome after equality of opportunity. Thus, the liberal conception of justice is procedural justice, while Russian equality refers to equality of results, and for Russians: "There is no greater evil than inequality. Any conflict of reason with equality, the Russian Jacobins demanded the sacrifice or amendment of that ideal; the first and fundamental principle of all justice is equality; and no society is just without the greatest degree of equality between men." But it is true, as Huntington puts it, that "such equality is only possible under an oppressive dictatorship." Despite a period of extreme liberal splendor in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the face of the predatory, unjust reforms of Stolypin that followed, most of the prominent liberals indulged in metaphysical rhetoric and religious fantasies, and "the kind of liberal opposition that serves as a symbol of social justice, the kind of liberal opposition that, when change comes, 'can both that could persuade both the crooks and the peasants' of the power of reason when change comes, has disappeared." As a result, liberalism, which focused on political power and lacked concern for equality before the October Revolution, has been severely weakened, while socialism and populism, which focuses on issues of fairness, have become increasingly influential and have shown a greater appeal than liberalism in the highly unjust reforms in Russia.

In short, collectivism, essentialism and absolute egalitarianism in the traditional Russian culture were opposed to liberalism. In addition to this, the communal world, serfdom, Russian Orthodox teachings, monarchy, the omnipresence of state authority and the non-existence of civil society are far from the essence of liberalism. Liberalism as a heterogeneous culture could hardly be grafted onto the Russian cultural soil, and this was the deep-seated reason for the decline of Russian liberalism.

The inherent weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie

Liberalism is strictly a middle-class ideology, which is based on the class division of social interests. Liberalism thrives on the growing ranks of the proletariat, which in turn depends on the degree of bourgeoisization of society. Unfortunately, however, Russia did not possess a bourgeoisie in the Western sense of the word, and therefore liberalism had few major social pillars in Russia. While it is well known that Russia before the reforms of 1861 was essentially a serfdom, with the development of capitalist relations of production but extremely limited, by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the process of formation of monopoly capital groups in Russia accelerated. The main players in the state economy were usually special monopoly interests. But these monopoly groups, by their very nature, were anti-liberal. In other words, Russian liberalism lacked a stable social class base, as in Western Europe, and as a result, in the course of its development various social strata, from the monarch down to the intelligentsia, were caught up in the wave almost exclusively. The ideological tendencies of the members of these different social strata, in addition to the liberal elements, were many non-liberal, so most of them were insufficient to constitute the class base of liberalism. And the bourgeoisie, the most important social vehicle of Western liberalism, not only appeared late in Russia, but was also seriously underdeveloped, since it developed "within the context of the general domination of serfdom, and to a large extent directly on the basis of the serfdom system "From its inception, it was dependent on the Tsarist dictatorship of the State. In this way, the Russian liberals, who lacked "roots", could not but throw themselves in the face of the state power and the ruling class, but their behavior was seen by the lower classes as a symbol of weakness and conservatism, obviously not radical enough, and they were naturally regarded as the embodiment of the rule of the "landlords and capitalists", and as a symbol of the "landlords and capitalists". They are naturally seen as the embodiment of the rule of the "landlords and capitalists", or at least as one and the same. The result can only be to turn the people away from the middle class and intellectual elites who are truly liberal in orientation, thus encouraging populist and socialist political movements.

Because of their awareness of the inherent shortcomings, almost all the representatives of Russian liberalism admitted that it was impossible to achieve the ideological goals of liberalism on their own. The spiritual leader of Russian liberalism, B. N. Tsitserin, had pointed out in the 1860s that only two forces were powerful in Russia, the tsar and the people, and that nothing firm and consolidated existed between them. This situation remained fundamentally unchanged until the beginning of the 20th century. For this reason, Russian liberalism could succeed only under two circumstances: either the tsarist regime gave way to the spirit of the times and introduced liberal reforms, or liberalism was able to appeal to the masses of the people and gain their support. As the twentieth century progressed, the first scenario became less and less likely. At a time when the clash between the old and the new was becoming increasingly acute, the irrational policy of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, who stubbornly refused to reform, was an important factor leading to the revolution of 1905. At that time, in the view of the liberals, the Tsar would not take the initiative to modernize, and therefore constitutional government was necessary if the Tsar was not to be abolished. Therefore, when the workers' and peasants' movements were in full swing in 1905, they joined hands with them, hoping to realize a political revolution prior to modernization, but the real concern of the workers and peasants was still in their immediate interests, and once their interests were satisfied, their movements subsided. And after that, with whom did the liberal intellectuals join forces against the Tsar? It seems to be a big question, but then Stolypin's reforms inadvertently broke the possibility of peaceful development of Russian society. Nicholas II's perversions exacerbated the contradictions and confrontations between the regime and society, pushing the liberal movement to the left, and Russia's entry into the First World War finally ignited the flame of the centuries-awaited revolution. After the fall of the Tsarist regime, the future of Russia depended on the struggle between political forces with different cultural backgrounds, while the people were undoubtedly the real protagonists on the stage of Russian history in this period, and the desire for peace and land drove the political situation. However, due to various reasons, the liberal political parties that had come to power failed to grasp the pulse of the people and to fulfill their urgent wishes in time, thus failing to maintain the political advantages they had already gained and moving step by step towards the end of their defeat.

The Subjective Failure of the Strategies of the Liberal Parties and Their Liberals

The subjective cause of the decline of liberalism in Russia was the failure of the strategies of the liberal parties and their liberals and the resulting comprehensive social crisis. To summarize, their failures were mainly in three areas:

First, the liberals' program was too idealistic to be put into practice and thus lacked appeal. The Russian liberals made refreshing claims about the state of law, about the supervision of the executive by representative organs, and about the influence of public opinion on state policy. At the same time, however, the liberal movement in Russia clashed with a political culture incapable of solving social problems by legal means; in other words, "the extremely low level of political culture in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century made it very difficult to solve social problems by law." In their struggle to establish a state based on the rule of law, the liberals were confronted with the following difficulties: the extremely low level of legal literacy among the general public and the upper echelons of the rulers, including the intelligentsia; the lack of a tradition of parliamentary institutions and of a corresponding practice of social supervision; the egoism of classes and groups; and the preoccupation with the immediate interests of the various factions, especially among the masses of the peasants and the workers, and the lack of any long-term thinking. These problems, whether they were Russia's own "situational problems" or the "universal problems" it was bound to encounter, were a great challenge to the liberals. If the Provisional Government could not solve these problems, or at least some of the major ones, within a limited period of time, the liberal regime would lose its legitimacy and society would become disillusioned with the Provisional Government. In fact, in backward countries like Russia in the 19th-early 20th centuries, because the peasants and workers were totally unprepared to decide their own destiny for themselves, the liberation program put forward by liberalism in such conditions could only be a pipe dream, and their struggle for freedom, while cleansing the authoritarian system, also impacted on itself due to its lack of understanding by the grassroots, which, in turn, stimulated the radicals even more to, in the course of the revolution to put forward higher demands: from the demand for a constitutional monarchy to the demand for the establishment of a **** and state, up to the slogan of practicing socialism. Because of the lack of a popular concept of functional social management, the revolutionary demands clearly prevailed and were very effective in comparison with the constitutionalist program, which demanded that society work for a long period of time for this purpose. As a result, the coercive approach to solving social problems became popular, thus depriving the liberal constitutional path of its own social base and little appeal, even though liberals did their best to address the realities of what they advocated.

Secondly, the liberal parties lost ground on the most pressing concerns of the people-peace, land, and bread-and as a result gradually lost the trust and support of the people. After the February Revolution, the future development of Russia was faced with a variety of choices, and the crux of the matter lay in who could attract the people - first and foremost the peasants, who constituted the vast majority of the population - to follow them. At that time, the Provisional Government's prestige was very high, and in Lenin's words, the masses in fact had "an attitude of unconscious gullibility" towards it, which they should have taken advantage of to take all necessary measures to win the support of the people in order to consolidate and strengthen the regime. However, the Provisional Government's program of governance only dealt with general political and democratic reforms, and failed to provide effective solutions to the war issue that triggered the revolution, the land issue that was the most pressing concern of the people, and the eight-hour working day. On the contrary, the Provisional Government practically insisted on an imperialist war. It was the note added by Miliukov, then Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, to the Letter to the Citizens addressed to the Allies that triggered the first crisis of the Provisional Government. The note said, "The Provisional Government, with the Allies in one heart and mind, continues to have confidence in the victorious conclusion of this war."...... It was not until the last Cabinet of the Provisional Government met in the fall of 1917 that the question of the desirability of a general peace in Russia was discussed. "Unfortunately, it was already too late." Similarly, the Provisional Government did not attach great importance to the land question, which was of the greatest concern to the peasants, but simply nationalized the Crown lands and left it at that, leaving the other questions, it was claimed, to be left to the Constituent Assembly, and opposing the peasants' rising up themselves to seize the land of the landlords, and opposing the distribution of the land of the landlords. In hindsight, this was a serious mistake. The question of peasants and land was one of the great and long-standing diseases of Russia, which continued throughout the nineteenth century and eventually became one of the leading factors in the collapse of 1917. In fact, it was not a question of curing the peasantry and the land, but of how to cure them, and the reforms of 1861 seemed to have cured the problem on the surface, but in essence they allowed a chronic disease to develop into a terminal one. In solving the agrarian problem, one of the most intractable difficulties was the problem of the rural commune, whose ultra-stable structure seriously hindered the development of Russian capitalism. By 1905, the breakup of the traditional rural commune and the access of the peasants to land had become the greatest demand of Russian society, and it became the deepest root of the revolution, except that the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 had ignited the fuse of the social revolution, and after the revolution of 1905, Stolypin tried to make a thorough diagnosis of the peasants' and the land problem, but in the end, the misdiagnosis led to the collapse of the whole dynasty. But in the end the misdiagnosis led to the collapse of the entire dynasty. History has repeatedly shown that Russia's major social crises seem to stem from this disease, and the short-sightedness and indifference of the Provisional Government's liberals on this issue was one of its great misfortunes.

It is true that the internal and external policies of the Provisional Government were a great improvement over those of the Tsarist era, but they failed to satisfy the urgent demands of the people for peace, land, and bread. P.V. Vorobyev said, "We like to quote a profound phrase: revolution - the festival of the oppressed and the exploited. But the more one thinks about the history of revolutions, the more one realizes that the masses of the people do not stage this holiday unless it is extremely necessary. This is a fact that we have seen in the past and we are seeing now. Therefore, it should be clearly stated that it is not abstract ideas but immediate material interests, the basic necessities of life, the struggle to satisfy them, as the great masses who participated in the revolution said, that impelled them to participate in the revolution." It was on the people's most pressing concerns that the Provisional Government lost ground and was ultimately defeated in the struggle that was to determine Russia's future, as Milyukov later noted, "The defeat of the party that spoke for the people in October 1917 was in fact the result of the people themselves turning to Lenin."

Thirdly, the Russian liberal movement, which already had a very weak base, was internally factionalized and split into a number of parties, such as the October Party, the Constitutional Democrats, and the Party of Democratic Reforms, etc., and it was the fact that there was a great lack of internal unity within these parties that undoubtedly weakened the overall strength of the liberal camp. In the case of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was the best known, despite the many achievements of the period of its existence, the heterogeneity of its composition and the crisis of the revolution led to the formation of different small factions within it, which was particularly evident on a number of issues, especially on the question of leadership. It is generally accepted that Milyukov was the recognized leader of the party, but his position within the party was very delicate, and much of his leadership skills were consumed in calming the sharp conflicts between the different factions. Milyukov was often criticized by both the left and the right, and on the left it was usually Sturuwe and Maklakov who turned on Milyukov. Stuart Loewy represented the signpost school of Russian liberals, starting from the values of liberty and national revival as the basis for uniting the social forces opposed to the existing system and insisting on the most abstract approach to the task of constitutionalism. In him the national idea was a symbol. He looked at the problem too idealistically, engaging more in programmatic arguments and seldom arguing for movement strategy. Maklakov, on the other hand, was a learned jurist, well acquainted with the constitutional institutions of the West, very much in favor of the Western constitutional system and actively advocating its implementation in Russia. He did not differ from Milyukov in this respect, but in the way of realizing the goal. He had a clearer understanding of the reality of Russia, and he knew that the implementation of a constitution in Russia could only take a gradual path. Therefore, he suggested that the revolution would not succeed but would kill the budding European civilization in Russia. As a result, he consistently opposed Milyukov's program, e.g. Milyukov believed that for the Constitutional Democrats an alliance with all democratic (including revolutionary) forces opposed to the autocracy was possible, whereas Maklakov emphasized the necessity of uniting with the autocracy in order to resist the revolutionary forces, which he regarded as the arch-enemy of the not-yet-consolidated constitutional system. The right-wing Petrenkovich and Muromtsev were the traditional leaders of the Constitutionalists, who advocated local self-government bodies in favor of political reforms, had close ties with the liberal aristocracy, and whose more moderate views were embraced by some of the younger aristocrats. It can be argued that the basic contradiction in the Constitutional Democratic Party lies precisely within its ranks, namely the long-standing schism between the classical Western liberal minority, led by Maklakov and Stuart Loewy, and the neo-liberal majority, led by Miliukov, and the local self-governance faction, led by Petrenkovic and Muromtsev.

Together with the fact that the Russian liberals were mostly intellectuals who lacked experience in governing, who were highly educated, theoretical and idealistic, but bookish and detached from the masses, and who lacked the necessary political flexibility under extremely complicated conditions, this accelerated their demise to a certain extent. As a matter of fact, the liberals were unprepared for the sudden outbreak of the February Revolution. The Provisional Government came to power in a hurry, lacking mature experience in leading the whole country on the one hand, and faced with the chaotic situation of defeat at the front line and the collapse of the economy on the other, and coinciding with the break-up of the Czarist feudal monarchy, the various political parties and strata of the society acted vigorously to fight for the participation in the regime and for the acquisition of more political rights. The political struggle for participation in power and for more political rights was open. In the face of the post-revolutionary chaos, the Provisional Government, which was dominated by liberals, was unable to cope with the situation, and the whole control system was in a state of disorganization. To add insult to injury, the Provisional Government was characterized by internal discord, disagreement and even hostility. As a result, within a short period of eight months, from February to October, there were several governmental crises, and five governments, including the Provisional Council of the State Duma,*** existed. All these showed the immaturity of the liberals and their parties in leading the revolution and the state. All this undermined the prestige of the liberals and their party among the masses and weakened the people's expectations of it, and at the same time created an opportunity for the Bolsheviks to oppose the Provisional Government under their leadership and to oppose the pursuit of the policy propaganda of compromise with the government.

Fourth Conclusion

From the above analysis, it is easy to see that the failure of modern liberalism is a sad song of Russia in the course of modernization to catch up with the developed countries in the West. Because liberalism in Russia is an "imported product", and Russia is mainly a peasant country, liberalism in Russia lacks historical and cultural traditions and popular base, and only a part of the aristocrats, intellectuals and bureaucrats as its social carrier. For Russian liberalism, the lower class thought it incomprehensible, the authoritarian regime thought it too radical, and the revolutionaries thought it spoke for the interests of the ruling class; and the Russian liberal movement was after all only a "movement of a few" and "did not become a people's movement in the end". It did not become a people's movement in the end." In this way, due to the huge gap between liberalism and the native cultural tradition of Russia, its social influence and appeal were quite limited, so that authoritarianism, socialism and even anarchism could become the dominant ideology of Russian society, but liberalism could not become the dominant ideology of Russian society. It is for this reason that the Russian thinker Berdyaev said, "Liberal ideology has always been weak in Russia, and we have never acquired a morally prestigious and inspiring system of liberal thought.

But even this does not mean that the failure of Russian liberalism was inevitable, much less that it was unsuitable for Russia. Historical developments are fraught with too much contingency and selectivity. The rout of Russian liberalism also stems from the coupling of a variety of subjective and objective elements, such as the more specific international environment of the First World War. It is true, as Lenin put it, that "without the war, Russia might have passed years or even decades without a revolution against the capitalists." Plenty of facts have proved that revolutions are not inevitable, and I am afraid that it is more worthwhile to reflect on the subjective failures of the liberal parties and their libertarians themselves. But criticism and blame should not be overdone; after all, the transformation of Russian society was not an easy task, and it was even more difficult to apply liberal principles to Russian social practice. In such a large undertaking, it is inevitable that many mistakes will be made and many incorrect decisions will be taken.