The Death of Ivan Liberal

Russian liberalism is not just in crisis, politically speaking. It has ceased to exist. It is not represented in the parliament, it has disappeared as a focus of public debates, even among intellectuals, and its claims to be a credible and politically attractive ideology now seem vain if not preposterous. I use the term “Russian liberalism” as an umbrella concept embracing the political practices and mechanisms, both the neoliberal and social liberal types, which identified the “exit from communism” with the establishment of the rule of law, political and ideological pluralism, the market economy and an openness to the West.

Neither the repressive nature of the present regime nor the innate hostility of the Russian “cultural tradition” toward liberalism can explain this calamity. These are pseudo-explanations that serve the country’s liberals as pretexts for their own innocence. If liberalism is to be reborn in Russia, one must understand the political causes of its demise. Liberalism failed as an ideology in Russia in the wake of communism’s collapse. Now liberals must free themselves from the burden of the Boris Yeltsin legacy — its unabashed neoliberalism — and confront the type of capitalism expressed by the present regime’s “authoritarian capitalism.”…

The same liberals today castigate the regime, and with good reason. The absence of an independent judiciary, severe limitations of the freedom of the mass media, rampant corruption in all branches of bureaucracy and the systematic harassment of nearly all opposition are genuine ills. It is one thing, though, to articulate all these grievances and quite another to set out an attractive and politically mobilising ideology. Russia’s liberals have to send forth a message that resonates with the broader public, and it can’t just be some sort of rehearsal of people’s “superstitions.” It means coming up with a compelling alternative…

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If the opposition liberals want to escape from their confinement to the political salons of Moscow and St Petersburg, they must come to grips with the country’s new political and economic realities. They must disclose the present system’s inherent tensions, and they must address actual grievances by proposing feasible and popular political courses of action.

From a comment by Boris Kapustin in “The Moscow Times”