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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.20: The Liberal Tradition, Such As It Is

So I am now back in Paris after a great three week trip to the United States. Sound Education was totally fun Ithica was great, Cornell was great. Shout out to all the cool people I met there. Shout out to all the archivists and librarians who helped me with the Lafayette papers. A big shout out to the trees and the gorges and the waterfalls upstate New York in the fall — it’s, it’s no joke.

Now, in our last episode, we introduced Nicky and Alix, against whom our coming Russian revolutions will be staged. First, the one in 1905, and then the one in 1917. What we’re going to do over the next few episodes, though, is bring forward the groups who will be doing the revolutionary staging, so this will of course mean circling back to our friends in the Emancipation of Labor Group, who are on their way to founding the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But they were not the only ones jockeying for position as the 19th century drew to a close. We will also have, for example, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, better known as the SRs, who rise from the ashes of the old narodists and emerge as a radical neo-populist advocate for the Russian peasantry. There will also be anarchist groups working in the tradition of Bakunin, but who are also now picking up further advances in anarchist theory and practice, but today, we are going to start all this by talking about the historical background of the coming Constitutional Democratic Party, who will be known to one and all as: the Kadets. And the Kadets represent the liberal wing of the revolutions.

Now, so far in this series, we have talked at length about reactionaries and radicals, Marxists, anarchists, and populists, but we have spent very little time on Russian liberals. And in part that’s because Russian liberalism in the 19th century is a notoriously difficult political animal to locate, name, and classify.

Now we have, of course talked a lot about 19th century European liberalism generally in all of our previous series, and in the main, we’re still talking about people who supported constitutional government, limited by defined civil rights guaranteed by the rule of law. Liberals could either be monarchist or republican, but they always wanted some kind of representative assembly at both the local and national level. And if you stretch the definition a little bit, you will also find liberals support free market economics, and a strong belief in the importance of defending private property rights.

But when historians go looking through 19th century Russia looking for liberals like this, they find very few leaders fitting the description. Many will have one or two liberal traits, but also have other traits that seem to undermine our ability to say, oh yeah, yep, that’s definitely a liberal. The absence of clear cut Western style liberalism in the Russian Empire in the 19th century is rooted in the fact that the Russian Empire in the 19th century was not really operating under the same social, economic, and political conditions as western Europe. So even if a Russian were temperamentally inclined towards a liberal position, they would often wind up drawing different conclusions about how to feasibly pursue their ends. And probably the biggest difference, as we’ll see, is their attitude towards state power. Western liberals were often working to carve out space for an individual to operate free of state intrusion. So freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly. And usually with the rule of law guaranteeing protection of private property and their investments, that often went along with all that. And when and where the state was required to provide law and order, free individuals would be given a chance to participate in the crafting and execution of laws that they would live under, most especially when it came to taxes. But in Russia, the same kind of well-to-do educated professional, who might like the sound of all this, typically believed that Russia was a long ways off from achieving it democratically. So if you wanted to do social and economic reform, the central state was actually the only thing capable of doing the job. So it would be through the central state that any great reforms had to be run. Otherwise, it would die in the hands of an archaic, conservative, landowning aristocracy, to say nothing of the hopelessly backward and ignorant masses.

So in many ways, they were operating under conditions akin to Ancien Régime France, where these sorts of reformists in the intelligentsia wanted to energetically use the power of the centralized state to achieve reform. The state was thus their friend, and not their enemy.

As to what kind of reforms our proto-liberals wanted? Well, that was a heterogeneous mix with little uniform agreement. And it often feels like somebody pulled out a bucket, wrote liberal on the side of it, and then dumped in anyone who didn’t fit into some other more recognizable category. So this is about defining liberalism less by what it was, than what it was not. So, for example, a liberal is not a reactionary conservative. These guys don’t like orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. They want reform, and progress, and modernization. And whatever those vague catch all terms might mean, reform progress, modernization, a quote unquote liberal is not into stagnant despotism.

But a liberal is also not a radical revolutionary. They are likely opposed to revolution entirely, preferring slow reform to abrupt change. And for sure they will oppose terrorism as a means towards any end that they want to achieve. So that means that at least temperamentally, they are moderate, they are cautious. They want things to progress peacefully and steadily.

So, whatever your own particular set of beliefs, if you were a non revolutionary reformer, chances are somebody is going to call you a liberal. Which then gives way to a tautology on the positive side: what is it that a liberal believes? Well, whatever these people who we have just called liberals believe. As we’ll see in a second, more than a few of those people, even those name-checked by the future Kadets as their intellectual and spiritual forebears, were not really liberal in any sense that we would understand.

Now, if you will recall, from episode, let’s see 10.11, the guy who got to go down as the quote unquote, father of Russian liberalism was Mikhail Speransky. He was the influential advisor and then de facto prime minister to Tsar Alexander the First in the years between Alexander’s ascension to the throne in 1801, and the French invasion in 1812. Whenever Alexander was going through one of his liberal phases Speransky was there. But the brand of liberalism Speransky was pushing was more like rational, participatory autocracy. Remember, he wanted to augment the imperial throne with a state council and a nested set of elected dumas that would reach up from the local to the national level.

But those bodies were only ever meant to be consultative. The emperor’s word would always be law, and power was never meant to be shared in any meaningful sense. Speransky was inspired a lot by Bonapartism: an empire run rationally by a central administrative system, staffed by a meritocratic bureaucracy, with the window dressing of representative government. Now in other parts of the empire, notably Poland and Finland, Speransky did push Alexander towards a constitutional monarchy, and who knows what would’ve happened had Alexander stayed on this liberalish path, but the tsar did not stay on this liberalish path, and Speransky’s quote, unquote liberal reforms were left not even half done. But still. Liberalism has to come from somewhere, and so Speransky gets called the father of Russian liberalism.

But if we were so inclined, and I am, we can push this back just a little bit before Speransky to the reign of Alexander the First’s grandmother, Catherine the Great. Because it was during her turn as the quintessential enlightened despot that many of the liberal seeds were first planted and cultivated. Not only did she simply model a government that favored energetic reform, modernization, and the rule of law, she also created and patronized this thing called the Free Economic Society, which became a home base for many liberally inclined people in the century to come. The Free Economic Society was initially composed of well-educated nobles who wanted to advance Russia’s economy by importing the latest theories practices and techniques from the west. Among other activities, they would regularly hold essay contests, which were open to thinkers across Europe, including Voltaire, who once submitted an essay on the role of the peasant in society.

The Free Economic Society is going to be mostly focused for the next hundred years on economic and scientific advancement. But the kind of people who are interested in that sort of thing are also going to be associated with political liberalism, even if they’re not inclined to be public about that. So the Free Economic Society would become a kind of loose knit social and intellectual club that kept these types of people connected. And it would continue to keep them connected right into the 1890s, at which point, right around the arrival of Nicholas the Second, the society attempted to grow beyond mere economic ideas, and talk about culture and politics. Because by that point, many educated scholars were arguing these things are all interconnected, and we can’t talk about economics without talking about politics.

But anyway. Springing forward now beyond Mikhail Speransky, the father of Russian liberalism, where do we land? Of course. We land on the Decemberists. The Decemberists, for sure, by their own declarations, believed themselves to be representing the liberal spirit of the age in Russia. This group of post-Napoleonic army officers returned to Russia believing that they were at the forefront of Russia’s date with constitutional destiny. And as we discussed in episode 10.12, they believed in constitutional government, whether a monarchy or republic, getting rid of legal and civil inequality, but most especially freeing the serfs. And along with constitutional government, this idea of freeing the serfs became one of the most consistent themes of Russian liberalism.

Now the Decemberists do wind up staging an armed revolt, so that’s not very slow and steady reform of them, but you will recall that they did not really want to be revolutionaries even as they staged this armed revolt they wanted to have a good old fashioned palace coup, they did not want to call in the people to overthrow the state. And one of the reasons they maybe didn’t succeed in their mission, was they didn’t call in the people who helped them overthrow the state. And so we know how all this turns out: when the Decembers revolt failed, the now secure on the throne Nicholas the First instead introduced orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, which was anathema to anything even remotely resembling liberalism.

But future liberal leaders would talk about the 1830s and 1840s as a time when the kind of comfortable and educated types who might be drawn into liberal political ideas mostly withdrew into abstract discussions on literature and philosophy that kept them out of active politics. The Free Economic Society was allowed to keep doing its business, just so long as it did not deviate from economic and scientific topics. So while during this period we find advancements in the natural sciences, geography, and statistics, to say nothing of art, music, and literature, we find very little open discussion of politics, and certainly not from cautious would be liberals. Now some of the westernizers of the 1840s were of course, looking with some longing at the liberal pamphlets and books coming out of the west, but when the revolutions of 1848 hit — led, as we well know, by liberals and liberal ideas — there was simply no corresponding liberal movement in Russia ready to mount a barricade. Now there were a few liberalish types in that Petrashevsky circle that we talked about in the lead up to 1848, but they were just kind of a mixed bag of intellectual free-thinkers who were already becoming much more enamored with socialism than they were with liberalism. And besides, they were broken up and scattered quite easily in 1849.

So now we’re right at the mid point of the 19th century, and there just aren’t that many liberals in Russia to speak of. If you had an education, you either supported the status quo, or you were getting into way more radical socialist ideas.

But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, once Tsar Alexander the Second arrives in 1855, someone has to be telling him to get going with the great reforms. There is obviously some extant group ready, willing, and able to make that case, and if it ain’t liberals then who is it? I mean, were liberals not the ones looking to liberate the serfs, create elected assemblies, and reform the judicial system to make it more friendly to the rule of law? Well, that all sounds pretty liberal to me.

And yes, there was a group of ministers and intellectuals ready to make those arguments, and in the future, Russian liberals will name this group among their spiritual ancestors, but they would be coming at it from a distinctly illiberal position. This generation of reformers wanted to do everything from the top down, from the center out. In their minds, an enlightened ministry was going to have to use the central bureaucracy to fight a political and social war against the old landed nobility and their anachronistic, presumptions and privileges. Now, they could not afford to be absolutely rigid in this approach to reform, and in plenty of places, expediency and a recognition of the limit to the Russian state meant that the central government could only do so much. But in terms of worldview, these mid 19th century great reformers look a lot like the advocates of 18th century enlightened despotism. And so though they will later be name-checked among the liberal grandfathers of the Kadets, the label liberal is kind of ill fitting. But they weren’t radical revolutionaries, and they weren’t reactionary conservatives, so I will give them that.

But the era of great reforms did carve out a space for people who more comfortably fit the label liberal. Especially liberal democrat, and those were the zemstvo. However circumscribed their mandate, and however limited their actual power, the zemstvos were handed some real power and a mandate to have a large impact on certain aspects of local administration, particularly in infrastructure schools and what we would call healthcare, right, doctors and hospitals. Because of both the nature of the zemstvo — they were elected assemblies working within the legal framework of the state — and because of the nature of their work — this is public reform improvement and administration — the zemstvo naturally attracted people with a liberal worldview. If you were an old stodgy reactionary, you wanted nothing to do with any of these reforms. And if you were a young, radical, revolutionary, well, the zemstvos were just so much empty window dressing, they were democratic lipstick for the tsarist pig. But if you were in between those extremes, if you did not support radical terrorism, but also did not like oppressive police states, well where did that leave you? That left you in the zemstvo. And it turned out to be a space seated by both extremes to a liberal middle.

Now, no less than the radical, the people who joined the zemstvo were disappointed that the great reforms became a bracketed time period, the era of great reform that was limited to the 1860s and did not continue towards what many thought would be the logical constitutional conclusion. The participants in the zemstvo system, both its elected members and the hired professional employees, thought that they were building the foundations of what would be a larger, wider, and deeper system of participatory government, and when that didn’t happen, they started to develop an independent, if ill-defined and unorganized, set of ideas that would earn them the name, the Zemstvo Constitutionalists.

Now, unlike their reformist cousins, those enlightened despots, the Zemstvo Constitutionalists did not trust the central bureaucracy to carry out further reforms or advanced Russia towards liberal freedom and progress. They wanted Russia to renew itself from the bottom up, not the top down. And they believe that a constitution, when it came, had to grow organically from some kind of democratically elected national assembly. It could not be some handed down by the grace of God charter of government thing. Now given that one of their mandates was local education, these constitutionalists put a lot of stock in improving the nature of Russian primary education, to ford a new generation, ready to create and then operate that hopefully organically grown national constitution.

But by now we’re heading into the 1870s, and Russia is barreling headlong towards the People’s Will declaring that the tsar must die. That fight, between the radicals and the reactionaries, is where all the real political action was going to be. And these liberal Zemstvo Constitutionalists were few in number and not particularly influential.

Now, one of the leaders of this little movement, if it could even be called that, was a guy named Ivan Petrunkevich. He spent a lot of time trying to dissuade various radical leaders from embracing revolutionary terrorism and to instead join this slower and more peaceful democratic push for a constitution, but to no avail. Not the least of which, because many radicals saw the proposed political constitution as simply a yoke that rich land owners were trying to slip on the people. They were well aware of the critiques of bourgeois constitutions being made by their brethren in the west, and they did not intend to fall for that same trap.

As he struck out with the radicals, Petrunkevich also lobbied the government saying, you can’t beat this revolution with clubs and guns and trains to Siberia, you need to undercut the reason for the revolutions being. Russia needs freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and a democratic political system. If you give the people a voice and some real responsibility in government, they will stop throwing bombs. In March, 1879, Petrunkevich organized the first semi-clandestine meeting of what would become called the Zemstvo Union, a small group of constitutionalists who had a list of political and social demands. Now at the top of this list was of course a constitution and the standard list of liberal civil rights, but it’s also interesting to note that they wanted the government to also scrap the redemption payments that those emancipated serfs had to pay, as they were an immoral and inflammatory burden on the peasantry.

Because this was all taking place against the backdrop of an open war between People’s Will terrorists and a reactionary police state, the fortunes of these liberal constitutionalists rode like a rollercoaster ride over the next few years. Because shortly after the Zemstvo Union meeting in March of 1879, one of the nearest of the near missed assassination attempts on Tsar Alexander the Second happened in April 1879. Now extremely twitchy, the government viewed the zemstvo leaders with suspicion, even though part of their whole thing was we don’t want to do violent revolution. In this atmosphere, anyone challenging the status quo was suspect, and so Petrunkevich was arrested and exiled to Siberia.

But ironically, two assassination attempts later, and suddenly the fortunes of the liberal Zemstvo Constitutionalists was back on the rise. Especially after the Winter Palace bombing, the tsar and his advisors were like, hell, maybe we do need a new strategy, and so they invited in the new Minister of the Interior Loris-Melikov, who, even if he wasn’t necessarily a dyed in the wool liberal, echoed a lot of what the Zemstvo Constitutionalists were saying, we need to let the air out of this thing. We need a new round of reforms. Probably a round of reforms that move us in the direction of a political constitution.

So Loris-Melikov came into office with a slate of liberal-minded ministers. And for like a split second, it looked like the Tsar Liberator’s reign was going to end as it had begun: with a bunch of progressive reforms moving towards at least a semi-democratic constitution for Russia. But instead, the tsar got blown to bits and the constitutionalists’ fortunes plummeted once again. Alexander the Third had no time or patience for any of this claptrap, and the 1880s became a desert for Russian liberalism. Those who kept the faith through this lost decade emerged with an even greater conviction that the central tsarist bureaucracy could simply not be trusted. Enlightened despotism was well out of favor by the time they came back around again in the mid 1890s.

We’re going to wrap things up today with the culminating figure of Russian liberalism, a guy who’s going to be with us for a good long time: Pavel Milyukov. He’s going to be one of the principal leaders and organizers of the Kadets, and then way down the line is going to end up foreign minister in the provisional government, and in-between, have a pretty lengthy political career in and around the post 1905 Dumas. So, we need to talk about Pavel Milyukov.

Milyukov was born in 1859 into a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, who died when Milyukov was a kid, was a professor of architecture. A precocious child with a great memory, Milyukov taught himself things well beyond the standard Russian education. He learned five languages and went off to university with a particular passion for history. Entering the University of Moscow in the late 1870s means that he’s a student just as the streets are exploding into open war, and though he was briefly expelled for participating in some student demonstrations, he was allowed to return and finish his degree, and he never got too deeply caught up in really real radical politics. So he graduated with a degree in history, and then went on to take up a position teaching at the University of Moscow.

Now until he was about 40 years old, Milyukov was principally known for his work in history. And had he died then, at the age of 40, he still would have gone down as one of the great intellectual figures of his generation. Having read and been inspired by the sociological developments out in the west — he read Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx –Milyukov developed a sociological approach to Russian history. Turning away from what he thought of as a dry recitation of the deeds of kings and emperors, he was interested in the whole of a society’s culture. He was less interested in studying the fishes, and more interested in studying the waters within which those fishes swam. With this approach, he hoped to close once and for all the ongoing debate between westernizers and slavophiles. Milyukov himself was a staunchly European Russian who looked west, and he believed that there was something like a universal evolutionary path for societies, but he also believed that said universal path was guided and directed by the material conditions of a given time in place; that included physical geography, as well as what Marx might call the modes of economic production.

But while he rejected the random happenstance of personality driven history, he also never got on board with determinism of any kind, and he considered himself to occupy a middle space between romantic historians, who wanted to exalt great leaders, and a coming generation of historical materialists, who thought it all came down to conditions and that individuals counted for almost nothing. But that said, he clearly leaned in the materialist direction, and did believe that there was an evolutionary course to history. But that said evolutionary course was leading Russia towards constitutional parliamentary democracy. His dissertation was a study of Peter the Great’s reforms, taking the novel position that Peter himself counted for very little in the story of Peter the Great’s reforms. But then by the later 1890s, he was cranking out what would become called the Outlines of Russian Culture, a hugely successful and influential undertaking that sought to synthesize geography, climate, economics, religion, politics, art, education, and literature, to produce a definitive analysis of Russia and its people. And like I said, if this had been all Milyukov had done, he’d still be getting talked about as a giant in Russian historiography.

But that’s not all he did. Milyukov was interested in politics at a very young age, but he did not follow the radical path. Instead, his study of Russian culture, economics and history led him to the conclusion that what Russia needed more than anything else was a democratic system of constitutional government. No friend of even enlightened despotism, Milyukov believed that the problem was that the state and the people and always been kept well apart from each other, each rarely taking any notice of the other. Remember, at the local level, the villages were still mostly self-governed at this point. This meant that national government policy was wholly unresponsive to the people’s needs. And all this revolutionary trouble, radical terrorists fighting a violent police state, it could be resolved by bringing the people into the state. If you introduce universal suffrage and democratic representative government, you will make the state the people’s concern and it will have to respond to them. Unmet needs will have to be addressed because the people will be the new foundation of power. And if you couple all that with further economic development to raise the standard of living and education, well, now you’re talking about a healthy and robust national spirit, rather than the broken, paranoid, weak, violent, and angry spirit that currently pervaded everything.

So by the mid 1890s, Milyukov was getting more active and more vocal and politics, which would lead him to spend most of the decade between 1895 and 1905 bouncing between stints in prison, forced exile, and voluntary vacations abroad. But that is beyond the scope of our show here, and part of the story that leads us to the revolution of 1905.

So we’ll leave it there. Next week, we will talk about those who thought that men like Milyukov were hopelessly naive, that mere liberal democratic reforms and a constitutional government would never be enough to really liberate Russia. But the people we’re going to talk about next week also disagreed with that weird little Marxist cult who thought that a tiny minority of urban industrial workers were going to be the key to real revolution. The peasants were still the vast majority of the Russian population, and political action must be by the people if it was going to be for the people, and it needed to be for the people.

So next week, we are going to talk about the origins of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.