Vanessa Rampton. Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution.

Abstract

Vanessa Rampton’s ambitious book on Russian intellectual history, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution, explores the evolution of ideas in the liberal band on the political spectrum in Russia during the long nineteenth century. Rampton situates her account in a broad international context, teasing out liberalism’s many strands and identifying the tensions that became apparent in it as political ideas formulated in Europe and America collided with Russian political realities and instability during and after the 1905 revolution. In her introduction, she usefully surveys some of the European philosophical underpinnings of liberalism in the writings of Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hamann, Herder, Hegel, Constant, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Humboldt. In chapters 1 and 2, she examines the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory in the period up until the late nineteenth century and in the period around the 1905 revolution, respectively. In chapter 3, she deals with Russian liberals’s reflections on constitutionalism, the rule of law, and democracy in the early twentieth century and discusses their modification of their views on such matters in the light of their experience in 1905 and in the four dumas that functioned in the period 1906–1917. Chapter 4 is concerned with the loss of cohesion in the liberal camp after 1905 and contains a fresh discussion of the epochal Landmarks volume of essays—by Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Aleksandr Izgoev, Bogdan Kistiakovsky, Petr Struve, and Semion Frank—published in 1909. Chapters 5 and 6 delve into the thought of two pairs of important thinkers in the Russian liberal camp whom Rampton characterizes as affected predominantly by idealist philosophical influences, in the case of Kistiakovsky and Pavel Novgorodtsev, and positivist influences, in the case of Maksim Kovalevsky and Pavel Miliukov. In her brief conclusion, she then underlines the topicality of discussion of liberal values in the modern world, in which these values are threatened by the surge of nationalistic populist ideologies, and the continuing relevance—not least for those in the middle of the political spectrum in post-Soviet Russia—of Russia’s encounter with liberalism in the late imperial period.