Before the Deluge

Abstract

Both sides loved Russia: the Slavophiles as a mother, the Westernisers as a child N. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea, London, 1947, p. 39. Laura Engelstein's volume of interrelated essays (most of them previously published) advances a deceptively simple argument, namely that for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century Russia failed to adopt the tenets of Western liberalism and instead fell sway to the powerful forces of anti-liberalism. Brief glimmers of hope – the aftermath of the February 1917 revolution and the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – were extinguished, ensuring that the liberal aspiration for the rule of law and a flourishing civil society would be a false dawn. At certain other times too (and to adopt a different metaphor), the instruments of autocratic rule were blunted. The 1905 revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to accept an elected parliament and some civil rights, but the promise of liberal government quickly faded as conservative forces regained the initiative. One consequence of the heavy hand of authoritarian rule was, Engelstein argues, the attractiveness of revolution for many members of the Russian intelligentsia whose liberal credentials were also in doubt. This broad argument is made primarily in relation to the final decades of the Russian empire, so neither Prince Georgii L'vov, the first prime minister of the Provisional Government, nor Yegor Gaidar, the embodiment of post-Soviet liberal aspirations, make an appearance in this book. We are offered instead a thoughtful account of the trials and tribulations of the tsarist state, its defenders and its critics, as well as insights into underlying ideas about the proper place of religion, science and morality in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia.