Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals were faced with a dilemma. They had to choose between modernizing their country, thus imitating the West, or reaffirming what was perceived as their country's own values and thereby risk remaining socially underdeveloped and unable to compete with Western powers. Scholars have argued that this led to the emergence of an anti-Western, anti-modern ethnic nationalism. In this innovative book, Susanna Rabow-Edling shows that there was another solution to the conflicting agendas of modernization and cultural authenticity – a Russian liberal nationalism. This nationalism took various forms during the long nineteenth century, but aimed to promote reforms through a combination of liberalism, nationalism and imperialism.

Besides absolutists of the right (the tsar and his adherents) and left (Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks), the Russian political landscape in 1917 featured moderates seeking liberal reform and a rapid evolution towards a constitutional monarchy. Vasily Maklakov, a lawyer, legislator and public intellectual, was among the most prominent of these, and the most articulate and sophisticated advocate of the rule of law, the linchpin of liberalism. This book tells the story of his efforts and his analysis of the reasons for their ultimate failure. It is thus, in part, an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Although never a cabinet member or the head of his political party—the Constitutional Democrats or “Kadets”—Maklakov was deeply involved in most of the political events of the period. He was defense counsel for individuals resisting the regime (or charged simply for being of the wrong ethnicity, such as Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus). He was continuously a member of the Kadets’ central committee and their most compelling orator. As a somewhat maverick (and moderate) Kadet, he stood not only between the country’s absolute extremes (the reactionary monarchists and the revolutionaries), but also between the two more or less liberal centrist parties, the Kadets on the center left, and the Octobrists on the center right. As a member of the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas (1907-1917), he advocated a wide range of reforms, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens’ judicial remedies, and peasant rights.

Liberalism is a crucially important topic today; this book adds the important yet neglected Russian aspect to its history.

An examination of property rights reforms in Russia before the revolution reveals the advantages and pitfalls of liberal democracy in action--from a government that could be described as neither liberal nor democratic. The author analyzes whether truly liberal reform can be effectively established from above versus from the bottom up--or whether it is simply a product of exceptional historical circumstances.

The author aims to show that the liberal intellectual tradition in pre-revolutionary Russia was in fact much stronger than is usually believed, the main concern of Russia's liberal thinkers being the problem of the rule of law. He concentrates on six thinkers: Chicherin, Soloviev, Petrzycki, Novgorodtsev, Kistiakovsky, and Hessen. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Susanna Rabow-Edling examines the first theory of the Russian nation, formulated by the Slavophiles in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and its relationship to the West. Using cultural nationalism as a tool for understanding Slavophile thinking, she argues that a Russian national identity was not shaped in opposition to Europe in order to separate Russia from the West. Rather, it originated as an attempt to counter the feeling of cultural backwardness among Russian intellectuals by making it possible for Russian culture to assume a leading role in the universal progress of humanity. This reinterpretation of Slavophile ideas about the Russian nation offers a more complex image of the role of Europe and the West in shaping a Russian national identity.