After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s new leaders were urged to embrace western social, economic and political policies that would lead to the establishment of a liberal social and political order. They did so eagerly and invited western economists and political consultants to help them in the reconstruction of the country. Russia’s liberals believed that they could get Russia “back on track” and resume the same path of development as the west. Scarcely one decade later Russia’s liberals found themselves out of power, and today—like their predecessors that had a brief opportunity to implement these same ideas after the collapse of the Romanov dynasty—they are scattered about Europe’s capital cities puzzling over their failure to implement their grandiose vision of remaking Russia into a “normal”—that is, western—country.

Most explanations for this turn of events center around the economic collapse brought about by the Boris Elˊtsin government’s policies of “shock therapy” and “privatization,” as well as the corruption that has always been part of Russian life. While all these things are true, Paul Robinson delves deeper into the reasons for the failure of “western” liberalism to take root in Russia’s political culture. Defining liberalism is in itself a daunting task, even more so is trying to differentiate between the various strains of Russian “liberalism.” After an excellent, historiographical disquisition about the principles and institutions that are used to identify and define this contested concept, Robinson well chronicles Russian liberals’ fascination with the idea that only the imposition of western norms and values could save Russia from itself. There have been very many scholarly works on the subject that have concentrated on biographies of liberal political leaders, the late imperial experiment in representative government, the failure of the Provisional Government, and so on, but Robinson provides the first comprehensive study of Russian liberalism as a whole from its origins in the late eighteenth century to the present. He covers what had been lacunae in the field such as Russian liberals’ thinking while abroad during their first exile, as well as the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and the contemporary Putin era. His framework examines the cultural, political, and socio-economic aspects of Russian liberalism and, importantly, encompasses not only “actors who have self-identified as liberal” but also “ideas and policies that have been widely recognized as liberal” (16).

Robinson explores the different variants of that philosophy in Russia; indeed, these liberalisms are often to be found in supposedly “conservative” thinkers such as the Slavophiles, or among “enlightened bureaucrats,” a subject he previously examined in his highly praised book Russian Conservatism. Time and again, however, the “western” liberalism embraced by generations of intellectuals and political philosophers proved to be little more than a theoretical exercise that found favor only with an exceedingly narrow social base and never resonated with the Russian people. The disdain many western-oriented intellectuals felt toward the “dark masses” necessarily led to their estrangement from them and the well-founded popular perception that they were elitists—a perception that still holds true today after the calamitous 1990s.

In the early twentieth century only they could “civilize” the backward masses and transform Russian society, a belief shared by their socialist competitors on the left. In order to pressure the tsarist government to hand over power, they allied themselves with these revolutionaries and refused to compromise. Robinson rightly notes just how “remarkably liberal” (81) Prime Minister Peter Stolypin’s (1907–1911) reform program was. Besides guaranteeing by law the personal freedoms promised by Nicholas II in his October Manifesto of 1905, Stolypin wanted to extend local self-government down to the volostˊ level where the peasants would gain a more substantial voice in local affairs. He also proposed that education be made compulsory. Along with the incredible expansion of primary education by the zemstvos in the period 1906–14 by the very same “conservative” nobles who had seized control of these organs of local self-government, and the breakup of the commune and creation of a class of peasant property owners, this promised a gradual reform to inculcate in the Russian peasantry the very values supposedly embraced by western liberals. But, absent the promise of “four-tail” suffrage and the abolition of the death penalty, the liberals continued to oppose the government in hopes of coming into power. Thrice they declined offers to join hands with conservative liberal reformers over “principles” such as Stolypin’s extra-constitutional implementation of election laws. And yet the ideological descendants of these same liberals had no such compunctions when Elˊtsin fired on the Russian White House in 1993 or issued “correct” laws by decree.

Both Russian Conservatism and Russian Liberalism are complementary studies that should be read by any scholar interested in understanding today’s Russia. Moreover, Robinson’s forthcoming book Russia’s World Order (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025) looks at Russia’s rejection of the idea of a single, western liberal path of development (Francis Fukuyama’s thesis) and embrace of the idea of multiple “civilizational” paths (Samuel Huntington’s) that each lead to their own unique destinations. Taken together, these three books will become indispensable standard references for modern and contemporary Russian political thought.