The Duran Podcast - The Future of Russian Liberalism - Paul Robinson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

The Future of Russian Liberalism - Paul Robinson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Paul Robinson, a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa. And yeah, we're meeting today to discuss one of his most recent books, which is on Russian liberalism, as a very important topic relating to Russia and I would say also in the West, as you point out even in your introduction, we are seeing a crisis, if you will, at least we're talking about a crisis in liberalism in the world, and often a lot of these discussions can also be related back to the discussions they've had in the past in Russia.

Anyways, I thought perhaps we could start with defining liberalism and the role it's had in Russia to start with a very wide question. Yeah, that's, you know, it's much easy. easier sending down. I'm now written a book on conservatism and one on liberalism. And I think the main conclusion in my mind I've drawn is these are very bad terms, which probably hide more than they reveal, but particularly because, you know, what is meant by liberalism has changed significantly over the decades so that, you know, some people who describe as liberals now are in direct conflict with what are called classical liberals who

idea to what, you know, liberalism originally meant. So it's very, very hard to determine exactly what this thing is. There's one author, I quote you know, Duncan Bell, who, in a study on what is liberalism, and said, well, you know, it's basically

whatever people who are called liberal state is. But I think you can try and talk maybe not of liberalism, but the liberalisms, plural, which was sort of related group of ideas, which have certain things in common, but not all, you know,

so you can identify certain features which are present in many liberalisms, and some are present in one liberalism and not another, and they form a sort of family of related ideologies, which are founded, at the centre of which is the idea of the person or the individual and of the need and desire to promote the interests and dignity of the person. But then, of course, that's also arguably innate in many religions, for instance, not necessarily of liberalism.

But liberalism has a particular sort of set of values and institutions which it associates with the proper development of the individual. And those would be things I value such as liberty, equality. would be the most obvious. And then institutions such as freedom of speech, democracy, free markets in particular. I know most of the most sort of classical things, but different actors within the liberal family will put more value on one than on the other. So you could be a economic liberal, but not be a political liberal. and you could be a political liberal and not be an economic liberal.

Right? So, you know, in Russia, it was often being what we call liberal authoritarianism. So that's not, you know, classical liberalism. It's its own sort of nuance. And in Russia was a particular problem because liberalism has become very associated with Westernism. So being a liberal tends to mean believing that Russia is a European country, that its destiny is in Europe and that history is moving inexorably

towards Western-style liberal democracy and therefore Russia must copy whatever is the most advanced form of Western fashion at the time, in essence. Now, you don't need to be a Westernizer to be a liberal, and a liberal might not be a Westernizer, and a Westernizer might not be a liberal, but that's unusual

in a Russian context. Generally speaking, Westernizers are liberals and liberals or Westernizers. Not exclusively. And that creates certain problems, of course, for Russian liberalism because it is so closely associated with this idea of Westernism. Well, can I say, first of all, that I thought that you've just written a wonderful book. You wrote a wonderful book on conservatism, and I think this book on liberalism is also, in Russia, is also extremely interesting.

And I'm just going to mention a few of my main takeaways about this. First of all, liberalism, both Russian imperial liberalism and Soviet and post-Soviet liberalism are Russian phenomenon. They're not imports into Russia that have been inserted by the West. I think a lot of people think that, but they are events, their movements that have stemmed from Russian political economic conditions, and they reflect those conditions. The second is that there is a very long history of politically liberal attitudes.

And I think your point about placing specific values on individuals, on individual rights, is perhaps for me, looking at all of this, the key uniting thread, the sense that there is a specific value, the individual. It may be in the exercise of political rights, of personal rights, of economic rights. This, as you correctly said, varies from time to time. But anyway, there are periods when liberal attitudes can have quite a lot of traction within Russian governments. But

periods when there are specific liberal political movements in Russia up to now have been fairly confined in time. So reading your book, it seemed to me, for example, that there's a very long period in 19th century Russia where you get various officials, some very senior. officials, people like Speransky, the Milutins, others, other people in universities, people like Professor Granavsky, I probably get his name wrong, but people like this, who have strongly liberal attitudes and liberal perspectives. But I don't, I didn't get the sense then that there is a specific liberal political movement. And then suddenly, and I do think it's quite sudden,

this is my impression from reading the book, it suddenly bursts, it develops into a specific political force sometime around 1890. And it remains very strong right up until the revolution and then it goes into emigration and then it sort of fades away.

And then something rather similar happens in the Soviet. Union in that again, you have people who have liberal attitudes or liberal perspectives who start to emerge. Sometimes they're very influential. They influence the Kasegan reforms in the 1960s. They're close to or they're involved in some ways with Yuri Andropov within the Soviet bureaucracy on the Soviet system. But a concrete liberal political movement, again, only starts to emerge. Perhaps after the 1968 events, you mentioned the Prague Spring,

perhaps just to add myself, the Daniel and Sinyavsky trials in the Soviet Union. And then there's, again, a sudden emergence of liberal ideas, liberal thinking. and it starts to develop some kind of political form. And it gains force until the 1890s, when again, it contracts. And I'm going to suggest that one of the things that makes this happen is that there's a sudden moment of revelation on the part of people who are inclined towards. some sort of liberal ideas or liberal attitudes, that the government, which up to that point, maybe they have not been exactly hostile to,

is not going to evolve in the liberal directions that they want. So in the 1890s, there's the period of Alexander III's clamped down and Nicholas II, clamped down. In the late 1960s, early 1970s, there's the Prague Spring, the action against the Daniel and Sinyavsky people of that kind. And that sort of triggers a kind of reaction. And at that point, you start to get a kind of liberal perspective form. And in both cases, the interesting thing about this process is that once this liberal movement in both cases starts to develop, over a certain period of time, it becomes radicalized.

And where previously it had shown some interest in working with the existing government, it ultimately becomes implacably hostile to it and effectively seeks its overthrow. Now, is this an oversimplification? Is this, I mean, these are takeaways from my book. I'm not suggesting that, you know, this is the correct view, but reading this, this is what I felt, that liberalism does exist in Russia. The attitudes precede the movements, and the movements are in some respects a reaction to what the state, to what the government.

actually does. I think that's not a bad description. I mean, both liberalism and conservatism can be described as attitudes as much as political movements. And certainly in Russia, liberal political movements have nearly always been weak. What you have had, a liberal change when it's happened in Russia has generally happened due to one of the 19th century called enlightened bureaucrats. And the same could be said again for the Gorbachev era.

These people, they're not really liberals. You know, you mentioned Sparansky and Milutin. We're not really liberals, but that people who sense that the status, the state of things are not good and that something has to change in order to move things forward. So in the case of the militants, you know, you have defeating the Crimean War, which sends needs a lot of people to say, look, you know, we've got to, things have got to change, right? some liberalisation is necessary. And similarly, under Gorbachev,

there's this sort of attitude. Things have got to change. If we liberalize things, things will get better. Now, of course, it doesn't work out that way because once they start liberalizing things, things begin to go off the rails fairly rapidly, as it turns out. And then you get this radicalization you spoke about,

does happen. And so there's sort of, you might say, two strands of in Russian liberalism. There's the status strand, which is supportive of the state and believes in the state can be the liberalizing force, such as, you know, Alexander V. Second freeing the serfs, right? So you have to support the state because the state is the, it is the force for reform. And then you have the people who say, no, this state is reactionary. it's got to go. And they become, you know, outright revolutionaries,

which is pretty much what happens around 1905, when, you know, the Liberal Party is not, well, according to some critics, it ceases to be a Liberal Party, but the cadets and so on, because they've basically allied with revolutionary forces. And, I mean, you could see a similar process, you know, in contemporary Russia, where, you know, there are, for many years, what we're called, you know, systemic opposition

or systemic liberals, those who've worked within the Russian state, and that there are still a few, not many, but, you know, there are some huddled within the echelons of the sort of economic apparatus of the Russian state and the central bank and the finance ministry and so on, who still seek to work within the system. But most have moved into not only opposition, but of course almost revolutionary opposition, you know, that the Putin regime must be over-throwed. So this radicalization then takes place. At which point, you know, people say, some historians say, well, are they still more liberals at that point? Because liberalism is generally associated with sort of gradualism.

So you can have a very conservative liberalism, which believes in the state as the, the mover of reform, but you can also have a very revolutionary liberalism as well, and both of these aspects have existed side by side in Russian history. Well, it seems like a lot of this goes back to your original, well, argument why liberalism comes in many forms, because, of course, on one hand, you have, a lot of it would be focused on the role of the government, and me and Alexander discussed this in the past, as well, which is in the early 19th century, a lot of liberals, so for example, market liberalism as being a source of economic independence from the states, a way of reducing the role of the

states as a form of classical liberalism. Well, at the end of the 19th century, you had more liberals looking towards the state as a partner or ally in terms of reducing some of the power of the market forces, especially the larger oligarchies. case. And you also have the same within the state and the individual. Often you have liberalism seeking to advance the individual. You see this often perhaps reducing the influence of culture, traditions, the family, the group essentially as an entity. But then if you have more radical individualism, then there's less balances to the state. That is, the state would

have more influence over the individual if all the other centres of powers if it was weakened. So it is a difficult yes to nail down. It's very complicated. Yeah, it's a good word. For instance, in 19th century Russia, because

you get, for instance, after the great reforms of the 1860s you get Zavans, what's called the aristocratic composition where you get rezoned. Big landowners. who become, who say, well, you know what, really we need to get rid of, now we got rid of surfdom, you know,

we need to change everything. Nothing works anymore, but the state's out to get us. So we need representative government. And we need to, you know, liberate the peasant commune, eliminate the peasant commune and go to free market relations in the countryside.

So in many ways, that classical liberals, but they're doing this because they know very well, you know, they will dominate any representative government because, you know, it is probably going to be a property franchise and the rich people will be on, be in charge. And then they know that free market relations in the countryside will consolidate, you know, very economic power. So the liberals, or the people who are called liberals, are against all these things. So we can't have representative government because then these reactions will be in charge. And we, you know, we really can't have free market in the countryside because the peasants will be.

you know, will be exploited and that will be terrible and then revocally revolutionary problems. So then you have to, well, who's the real liberal now? Is it because the people that espousing classical liberalism are people who everyone sort of agrees at a reactionary. And the people who are liberals are saying, no, no, we've got to keep the peasant commune and we've got to, you know, capitalism is bad and we should have an autocratic state. So it'll get really complicated. so you can have

sort of part of liberalism but not another part and you can see some other things in later time so when the Soviet Union is collapsing you get people like Anatoi Chubias, you know, famous member of Yeltsin's government

if he wrote this piece in just the final years a couple of years of the Soviet Union saying well you know you need to do this radical economic reform But if you have democracy, the people are going to hate it, and they're going to vote against it. Right.

So, you know, you're going to have to use undemocratic methods in order to have this, you know, to bring democracy over us, you know. So when you say, well, you know, are these guys really liberals and we're not? It gets, it gets, it gets, it gets caught. I have to say, I found the whole business in the book about the aristocratic opposition, wanting to get representative institutions and radical reforms in the countryside. Absolutely fascinating. And this reminded me, I have to say, of long ago, when I was studying at University French 18th century history,

there's even something of that there. You have liberals at that time, the Encyclopedists and people like that. They're talking about personal liberties about reasons, and enlightenment and all that kind of thing. And the people who are advocating at that time for representative institutions, or at least for a role in government,

are in fact the aristocracy, basically because they're unhappy about paying taxes. And the liberals, or proto-liberals, not really liberals at that time, they actually tend, of anything, to support the state, the king, because they think he's the person who's going to carry out all of those reforms.

Anyway, I don't want to get to side, Yeah, and also, I mean, the French Revolution was largely a reaction to free market reforms carried out by, I forgot what the name of the particular strand of. NECA, the social crowd. I had a bunch of free market economists, his finance minister, and everyone hated them, right? And that was very much what it was a reaction to. So, you know, it's tricky, and it's very easy to bracket people into these things. or conservative, whatever. But as I

study this more and more, I think we probably need a new language of political philosophy, because we have these sort of 19th century terms, which perhaps are not desperately meaningful anymore. I'm sure that's right. Coming back to the point of the Russians,

the other thing is they don't just become radicalized and authoritarian, there's also a tendency to actually support violence, either violence against the government in the period running up to the revolution, or, you know, when the revolution happens and it all goes wrong, some of them talk about violence to reimpose order. And there's this lady... member of the cadet party who says, you know, that she wants machine guns, that, you know, we have to have...

I mean, she was married to English. Well, exactly. So there we go. And then coming more recently, there's the other, I think there's the post-Soviet liberal who says, you know, that he sees a, you know, a group of elderly pensioners protesting and he wants to machine gun them too. I don't know whether one should make too many parallels, but there is a kind of radicalization, which does seem to me to feel that you know, you've got to impose controls and do this in very violent ways,

which contradicts and ultimately, I suspect, discredits the entire liberal ethos that these people have previously promoted. So that one of the reasons for the crisis of liberalism in Russia is precisely because they started to turn to these very things. At least that was my impression. It is often associated with a very strong dislike of perceived enemies. Now, before the revolution, it wasn't the liberal supported violence. I think generally they disliked revolutionary violence,

but they weren't willing to condemn it. Yeah. Because they hated the government more, right? And to condemn the terrorism would mean saying that, you know, Stilipin was right to hang the terrorists, and they were not willing to do that, even though, you know, this meant that the state would have nothing to do with them. So the cadet Stipin actually offered to legalize the cadet party,

which was never formally registered as a party. And he said, look, we'll allow you to register as a party. if you just say we condemn revolutionary terrorism and they said we're not going to do it and then of course later when they're in exile they start writing things oh you know basili mcclarkov famous you know member to connect party writes these sort of things well you know i think we think we got that one wrong it turned it turned out but you know the people weren't so nice after all and the there was this naivety that you know one

One, terrorist terrorism was all founded on hatred of the government. So if you could overthrow the government, then there'd be no reason for everyone to be radical and communist anymore. They just all become liberals like you. And then they sort of realize that actually no, this is not true. And suddenly, you have people like Arivna take over with him saying, yeah, we need machine guns. Because because the masses are a black mass of evilness. And there's, so you have like almost two objects of distrust. The first object of distrust is the state, which must be overthrown.

But the second order to stress is the people. Because the liberals, you know, eventually, and they still do come to the recognition, but the people don't support them. And that, and therefore, you know, they come to the conclusion that the never liberal the people are backward, they're uneducated, they need, it's the job of us liberal is supposed to bring them to enlightenment, but in the meantime, you know, we need to keep a firm control over them. But, of course, by being against the state, you then destroy the thing

which does have firm control over the people, and then that creates some difficulties for. This is a bit similar to some arguments from John Stuart Mill. he was making a similar argument that the people, the masses, don't always know what's good for them. So democracy is not, it can be the wind in the sale of liberalism, but at times when the masses, he argued, could be stupid, the liberal elites would have to rule, ignore them. But I'm curious though, if Russia has, if the introduction of liberalism, Russia has more of a violent route, because in your book you point at some point that many in Russia would consider the introduction of liberalism to have started to some extent, of course some before, but in 1825 with this Decemberist revolt

because then you had former, well, not former, but Russian military who had defeated Napoleon. They came back from France. They brought their ideas with them. and how do you advance liberalism in Russia? Is it by bottom up through these ideas? No, they instead try to instigate a coup, so a revolution toppling the government based on foreign ideas, remaking it almost in the image of France. So it takes anti-government position immediately.

It also conflates liberalism with westernization, again, throwing away organic Russian ideas with foreign, where it almost becomes treasonous. And I used to the word treasonous because this is almost a label liberals end up with in Russia. If you want to look at Borosielsen's foreign minister, foreign minister, for example, Andrei Kosovo, he's now, imagine a foreign minister, he takes on American citizenship, he moves to Miami, and now he spends his time on Twitter calling for killing,

Russian soldiers in Ukraine. I mean, it's quite like this has almost become the stereotype of liberals in many circles in Russia. Now, this is not a smear against liberalism, but this idea that the liberal is a pro-Western and against the Russian state, one that's not capable of working within the political system in Russia. Because you see a lot of other political parties seems to have been brought into the fold. So you have, yeah, from the left to the right, They can even work with communists within the system, but the liberals haven't really found their place within Russia, sometimes, it seems. No, I don't think they have. I mean, there's an interesting quote I have from one person who says, in Russian's tragedy is people who value freedom don't like tradition, and people who value tradition don't like freedom.

so liberals who value freedom at the same time too often are perceived rightly or wrongly to not like Russia very much and people who went to Clemenseltz's patriots on the other hand don't seem to like freedom very much and Russia's and perhaps never been able to find what you might call a sort of national liberalism which is able to on the one hand

take some degree of pride in Russian national traditions and at the same time, you know, promote individual freedom. Or at least it has failed to convince the Russian people that it does. So Russian liberals, to this day, I mean, and from the Decemberus onwards, would say that they are the true patriots, that the state, is destroying the country. The state is reactionary and oppressing the people that in opposing the state, they are therefore patriotic people,

right? Because you cannot love your country and commit it to be ruled by a regime which is leading it to disaster. The public business is, of course, very... Does, as you say, very easy to bring you very close to... sort of line where opposition turns into treason. And then certainly in the case of December, when you're trying to kill

the Tsar, you've obviously crossed that line. And, you know, you have it in 1985 when members of the cadet party are openly pro-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese. They don't actually collaborate with the Japanese, but they make it very clear that

they want the Japanese to win. They don't cross the line into treason because they never actually do I think about it. It's just sort of writing articles underground going, you know, Yeah, Japan. That's about as far as they take it. But still, the sentiment is there. And, you know, in today, of course, you will have some liberals who simply say they're opposed to the war in Ukraine, but of course there'll be others who have gone a step further and actively support Ukraine and actively support measures being taken against Russia. And at that point, you, you, you

you're crossing the line again, right? And then everyone gets tainted with that accusation. And as a result, it's always being this, you know, rightly or wrongly, there has been a perpetual perception that liberals lack patriotic feeding. That's not necessarily true.

We saw that in, you know, the first world when liberals were very gunho, but nonetheless that that perception persists. It's used by Russian rulers to undermine liberals, and they don't have a very good response to it because it's a line which works very well, and also because liberalism in Russia, and there's another point I think I should mention,

it has, you know, what I guess communists would call a narrow social base. So it's tended to lack strong roots outside, basically outside intellectual, outside people who use their brains to own their living. So the cadet party around 1905, it was called a party of professors because it was. Over 50% of its central committee were university professors and those who weren't were lawyers and doctors. and nowadays liberalism in Russia is associated with what people call the creative classes so it would be

journalists, IT professionals people like that but you know what the communist called workers and peasants have simply never been in the membership of the movement at all really and that again cements

this idea that this is some force which certainly doesn't understand the people and isn't in touch with the people and is alien to the people and even hostile to the people. Now that may not be fair that's the perception people have and it's very ruinous to liberalism's

political prospects. Is that partly because of this focus on the West that I mean it goes beyond the subject of your world with just a Just a possible question. Is it because they look always to the West, they're very, very keen on Russia becoming European?

I mean, not all of them, but this seems to be the sort of predominant view, that they want Russia to be European, they want it to be Western, they see Britain, France, the United States nowadays, as the ideal that one must achieve. So that instead of looking around them, looking at what goes on in factories and farms and mines and in all of these sort of places and the kind of lives that people have in housing estates and all of those places, that they're more focused, they're too much focused on what's going on outside in other places

and that if they perhaps thought rather less about the West and more about the immediate problems around them, that that might change because one of the most interesting things that, I found, again, at the very end of your book, is that you mentioned things that Russians do like. And a lot of the things that they like, or at least according to this survey, they like, are things that one associates with liberalism. I mean, they like a lot of the things that liberalism offers. impartial administration of the law, for example, being one of them. And one can come up with other things. So on its face, if you look at liberal ideas in the abstract,

if they were addressed to the Russian public in a kind of Russian way, one might feel that they would actually gain some transatlantic, action. It's perhaps because Russian liberals have a tendency not to do that. Again, I noticed that you mentioned in the book and it was, it was again a passage that, so I found very interesting that if we're talking about later, you know, the sort of Soviet liberals that the people who are active in the liberal movement in the Soviet Union, they were not much interested in people outside their own circle.

they were not really engaging with the large mass of the Soviet population. And there is a fundamental mistake. I mean, the Bolsheviks and Putin and people like that, Russian conservatives have shown much, seem to have shown much more interest in the Russian population than liberals do. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to that. It has been said that Russians don't. actually dislike liberalism, they just dislike liberals.

And, you know, there is some, you know, as you say, statistical evidence, which would, you know, suggest that basic ideas of liberalism, you know, like, you know, individual freedom and, and, you know, rule of law and so on, and so on are widely held, yes. But liberalism themselves, particularly because of, you know, the term liberalism is sort of a dirty word. It always has been. In the late 19th century,

liberalism was kind of a dirty word because it maybe weren't radical enough. It was like, you're like weak and feeble, right? Because you're a liberal, not a real revolutionary. And nowadays, you know, liberalism associated with the, you know, poverty of the 1990s. So it has a label. It has a label problem,

even if people don't, if they really thought about, wouldn't necessarily dislike what it's meant to stand for. They don't like the label. And the overt Westernism is not helpful in a period when Russian Western conflict is so extreme. And it has been an important part of, you know, Russian liberalism really since its beginning. If you go back again to around 1900,

the leader of the cadet party, Pavia Milukov, was a historian, and he was a historian who had what they call a positivist view of history, a historical determinism, but all of history was moving, according to laws. And these laws dictated that we all became,

you know, Western European liberal democracies and therefore, you know, and what is and is becomes a ought, because this is true, we ought to be doing this, because it is standing in the way of history is harmful. And you have a very similar belief in the radical reformers of the 1990s, who believe of equal further that, and I include some quotes in this in the book, that, you know, there are absolute rules of economics which apply everywhere, And whether you're Argentina or Germany or Russia, it doesn't matter.

The economic policy needs to be the same everywhere, because that is the laws of economics, which is Western free market liberalism, as they understood it, which was, I think, not actually very well. and this overt Westernism is problematic because it can be very easily used against them. I think the Russian state today is very adept at using this against liberals. And therefore, you know, discredit liberals, even if not necessarily, discrediting what we would imagine to be the ideas of liberalism, which at least in theory the Russian state still adheres to. At least in theory, and then you listen to Putin's speeches, he's never said, like,

democracy is bad, we are supporting autocracy against democracy. No, I mean, he doesn't say that, and you read denunciations by, for instance, Sergei Lavrov, a feminist of Western foreign policy. He says the problem with liberal, rules-based international order is that it disobeys hypocritical. It disobeys all the rules of liberalism. That's not actually an attack on liberalism. It's saying, you so-called liberals aren't. So officially, the Russian states has never disclaimed these principles, but it has blackened the names of those who have that label. But wouldn't the problem then be...

Well, would you say that the Russian government rejects, will move towards becoming more or less liberal? Because again, a key problem, we always go back to this idea of what is the foundation of liberalism. Because Putin has also at one point. You opened up your book with this, stating that the liberal idea has come to an end. But at the same time, you see in Russia, people have their individual freedoms. they like their freedoms, they're not prepared to give them away. But again, they go back to this label and often a more radical interpretation of liberalism in which you reject tradition, faith, the state, and all, I guess, collective identities.

But again, this is not, liberalism doesn't necessitate this. Again, this is why earlier on when I mentioned the late 19th centuries, because, well, you saw the same thing happening then. You had the individuals that were, you know, liberated, if you will, from the communes, from their, from faith, from, you know, all groups. And they ended up then in the cities, they confronted with oligarchs living in poor conditions. They didn't really have any support system as they didn't pass. A lot of this gave the grounds for a lot of the radicalism, which, you know, became wind in the sale of socialism. So to what extent is? is the core of liberalism, not the label, but the actual value of individual freedoms.

Is this really under attack? Because I don't really get that impression always in Russia at all, actually. But this is because I wouldn't necessarily see upholding traditions as contradictory to liberalism. Indeed, we often forget that liberalism in the French Revolution was introduced with nationalism. So you had the understanding often that the rights of the individual was also balanced by the nation, which is the group identity, a nation with a culture, tradition, history, something that unites the people as well. So how would you be beyond the labels of how it's been seen as more, maybe treacherous,

how would you see liberalism going in Russia today? Well, I think in terms of you might say core values and institutions where there has been a change in recent years is particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine clearly there has been some clamp down on political liberty I think that's quite clear

it's quite dangerous to openly oppose the war you will likely find yourself in prison if you if you do that. And the, you know, before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2002,

the state allowed a certain space for the liberal media. It had, you know, what Russians called a roof. So, which is like some sort of degree of protection against the state. I mean, there was, you know,

limitations on what they could do, but it was, same time, it was, you could, you know, limit what TV Dorj or Nova Gazeta newspaper could do, but at the same time, it's clear that you don't close them down, right? They're allowed to exist. And this is coming on from fairly high up. Okay. Once the war starts, that all goes. The roof is, it is removed, and the liberal media is that bit which had been allowed to exist as sort of to make the impression that we allow it, okay, that was removed. Right.

So in that sense, I think political liberty has certainly, you know, declined in recent years. Economic freedom is a more tricky statement because the Russian statement remains, and Putin remains officially committed to it. And Putin makes endless statements about how we've got to get bureaucrats off people's backs and stuff like this. We can't return to the command economy. And then, you know, two years later, he'll make the same speech,

which makes it obvious that all the efforts to get bureaucrats on people's back to failed dissonry. And in the meantime, the role of the state in the economy is growing and grow. So as, you know, the sort of declaratory principle that, yeah, we don't want a Soviet economy, we don't want too much state involvement. We realize that, you know,

entrepreneurs can do this better, than we can, but at the same time, there's, you know, as Howard McWill and said, you know, events, dear boy. And events have pushed the state into an ever-increasing role in the economy, which means that, you know, the free market probably is not what would be optimal. And of course, economic sanctions have rendered this inevitable, because once you're under very heavy pressure from foreign economic sanctions, then it really running a free market economy becomes counterproductive. I mean, and probably ruin us.

That point the state has to start stepping in and doing things. So in that sense, I think clearly there has been some backtracking. Similarly, you talk about the conservative family values thing. I mean, there has been some backtracking that two previously, the Russian state's view of, you know, LGBT things, well, as you can do it as long as you don't be too obvious about it. Right. Now they're pushing back even on that to some degree.

So, you know, I think, you know, we're talking about core liberal values and institutions, clearly I think that they're not such a strong state now as they were 10 years ago. I think that's fairly clear. whoever they could bounce back again when the war is over. I was going to say, because this seems like a trend in... Because war has a particular constraining influence.

I mean, you know, you can see the same thing in Ukraine. Ukraine is not a, you know, liberal free market democracy, right? Because, I mean, it's a state which is fighting for its existence in war. It's not going to be. It couldn't be. It would be absurd for it to be. So will it be bounced back once the war happens? I don't know. But this is consistent in Russian history, isn't it?

Over the past 200 years, every time Russia opens and have more liberal reforms, they end up in some, not because of the reforms, but they end up with some clash with foreign powers, usually some Western countries, and then they backtrack, they tighten things up. And this has been... Yeah, I think... foreign conflict is, and this is not a message Western politicians like to hear,

but foreign pressure on Russia is probably the worst thing you can do for Russian people. Because inevitably, the response of Russian state to foreign pressure is to clamp down. As you say, this is a historical pattern. And even like history is now of the Great Terror in 1947, 1938. tended to have knew that what caused it was Stalin's fear of becoming world war and the need to purge any possible enemies within before the war so that nothing happened to him, similar to happened to the Tsar in 1917. So it was very much rising international tension because actually previous to that,

Stalin had been pushing hard for his new constitution and actually was pushing, actually pushing things like multi- multi-candidative elections to party posts, which was, you know, I mean, obviously, was still going to be controlled, but he was actually moving towards reducing the tension a little bit. And then, you know, tension starts really rising with Germany and suddenly it's, you know, great terror.

And similarly, I think the worse our relations have got between the West and Russia in the current day, would the worse, the condition of, Russian liberalism has become, and will become, similarly to the Gorbachev era, you will only, liberalism will only go hand in hand with an easing of international tension. So, you know, there will be,

the Russian state will feel an ability to lay off of it, you might say, when it feels under less international pressure, probably. I can't predict for sure This is a point actually that you make in the book that periods of liberalisation in Russia tend to happen during periods of peace this was true in the 1860s

it was true in the 1980s we are not in a period of peace we're in a very very tense period at the present time but it was bad as the 1930s thank goodness But anyway, we are in a very, very tense time. Hopefully the reaction will not be the same in Russia. We won't be in the same in Russia.

I think as long as current tension continues, I think prospects of liberalism are very poor. That's, you know, I don't see much way around at the time. But it does seem to me that looking forward the conditions for a kind of organic, development in some ways have never been better. The population is highly educated. It has become politically quite experienced because we've had relatively open period of political participation or involvement in Russia now extending quite a long time. You mentioned this very, very

significant growth of civil society in Russia, which I myself have come across and which hardly ever gets in the West any recognition. And obviously we hear a lot about NGOs, but the number of NGOs that attract the attention in the West and indeed of the Russian government is very small. You know, the sort of Western ones, there are huge numbers of civil society, you know, agencies and things that operate in Russia all the time.

If you've watched one of the recent Russian, films, I can forget its name, but not by the man the director of Leviathan, but it was another film. You actually see at the end, one of the Russian civil society organizations come into play.

They do exist. They have never been more numerous or more active. And all of that in the necessary conditions of a stable and economically stable, because there

is a lot of economic stability in Russia now, society, could potentially have quite an important effect going forward and perhaps it might result in a new kind of political forces that pick up and bring forth liberal ideas which are not connected to the West in quite the way that could be true. Because we don't recognise what you're calling civil society as being civil society because there's a view that civil society is only civil society. It's liberal pro-Western civil society. And going back to your question about Westernism, I mean, you can clearly see in other Eastern European countries what's happening in Georgia now.

And what happened in Ukraine in 2014, that there is in what you might call opposition civil society, a very firm view that you know, being Western is this sort of civilizational choice, right? And therefore this turns NGOs into fundamentally revolutionary forces. And this is obviously what the Russian government has been trying to prevent and calm down on. but the result of course, that leads to very different, it leads to interesting debates among scholars of civil society about whether a civil society which is not oppositional

is really a civil society. Because if a civil society is not willing to hold the state to account, is it really independent, can you really call it a civil society? These are kind of arguments people have. Now, I don't have a clear answer because it's not particularly my field of study, but, you know, there is obviously a very large number of NGOs and charitable organizations and so on it within Russia who, more, as you say, than ever before in history, who do their thing. They are helping local governments very often. and they, you know, if you're a local charity,

you need to cooperate with the local government to do anything. So you don't really want to get involved in politics. But because it's so apolitical, will it then create a foundation for a liberal order? I don't know. This was an argument you're making, which was used by sort of moderate liberals in the late 19th century. called small deeds liberalism.

Yeah. And the idea of small deeds liberalism was by doing this sort of stuff, like a charity work at the local era, you would gradually, little by little, create the seeds of a liberal order. It was then abandoned because people said, well, look, this is going to take a thousand years. So you may be right, Alexander,

but it may be that this is too slow. process to ever satisfy people who do have the liberal label. Indeed, especially they're Russian liberals who are never using to. I was actually thinking of precisely the point you made because about the Zensvah and the sort of structures that they created around them and they spun around them. But of course, the point is that today's Russia is profoundly different from that of the 19th century. I mean, we're not longer looking at an agrarian peasant society, 80% of the population, much of which is, I mean, the social gap between it and the intellectual elite class is enormous. It's a completely different society. Many of these civil society structures, which as I said, I have come across them personally,

do exist. They actually are formed by precisely the people who benefit from them. I mean, they will be formed by, you know, if we're talking about the war, mothers who want to support the soldiers at the front, or people who want to help children through schools, that sort of thing, their own children. In other words, this is a, this is closer. to a civil society

such as we perhaps know in our own societies in the West than the kind of civil societies that existed in Russia in the late 19th century when, as I said, it was more an elite trying to

The issue then acts on whether it's a liberal civil society. Well, or liberal civil society. So, I mean, the critical is in liberal civil society. Now, and certainly, you know, go back to the labels, the people who would consider themselves liberals wouldn't consider it a... And then you'd have to come down a question, and we in the West would certainly never recognize it as such. No. So we will never, even if you decide it will never be recognized as the true liberalism by anyone over here.

I mean, the reason I bring this up is precisely because, again, going back to that sociological survey, which I accept is, I mean, it's, you know, you can't perhaps place too much on it, and it's not even clear-cut. But it does suggest that within wider Russian society, the people who are involved in these particular civil society-type movements, many ideas that we personally associate with liberalism or are actually popular. and one assumes that they are popular, especially, with the people who are involved in this kind of thing. I mean, I think it's, I think this is where perhaps we need to be very careful in the West, in that we shouldn't welcome developments in another society

because they are, you know, they're seen as sympathetic to us in the West. I think that's where I think we go often very wrong, if things develop within Russia in this kind of way. Civil society structures are created and political structures are created and economic ones. There are now lots of people who run their own businesses in Russia. Again, I've come across them. There are lots of private businesses in Russia.

There are organized labor groups. There are all kinds of people who think and talk about all of the things and what I'm saying is they need to be given time to breathe if they are both obviously internally by the Russian state but also by us and if we perhaps do slacken off the pressure exactly as Glenn was saying then they will start to breathe and we could find ourselves seeing a Russia revolve which may not be quite the liberal place that we would like it to be, but which would perhaps have some of those liberal accents

that already seem to exist there. That's what I'm saying. Well, I think you're probably right, but of course the condition of that is, it is a degree of detente, essentially. Yes. Well, yes, which is perhaps unsurprisingly. I mean, I think that is right. Well, I mean, it's what I would like to see anyway, putting aside anything else.

But it would be better for us and it would be better for them. Yes. I mean, you know, pieces, I can I put it, pieces, pieces good for everybody. So, yeah. Unfortunately, I think we are, we have an attitude that, you know, you can only achieve our maximalist, but we won't, you know, we, we, we want maximalist goals.

goals and that maximumist goals can only be achieved by political and economic and some degree also now military pressure, which I don't actually think is actually correct. Yeah. I mean, you know, at this point people obviously accuse me of being an appeaser or something, but historically, appeasement has often worked actually. Well, I would say, I would say, I would see this is the condition of liberalism. It's actually it requires it. Exactly. I mean, I would say the diametric opposite is some of appeasement. It's acting in long-term self-interest

amongst other things. Yeah. I mean, if you want states which are in conflict will not be liberal. Because conflict requires mobilization of society.

Yes. Which therefore inevitably the needs you in a liberal direction, whereas peace will allow the underlying, as you say, liberal attitudes of people to greater opportunity to flourish, because also the state finds it less threatening. I just get a lot and make one very last point, which is the other thing that I found very interesting about the book

is that I'd always assumed very lazy leave that liberals in Russia had always been adherence of lazy fare, free market economics. It turns out that is not the case at all. And again, perhaps we in the West have an over-high expectation that the only kind of liberals that make sense to us are liberals who do have those types of.

views and that might be rather unhelpful. And it may also be a good thing if people in Russia who have liberal views rediscover the fact that there has been a diversity of economic views, economic perspectives on how economics in their own country can be organized, including for people who seem to have had, well, more social democratic views. than strictly, you know, pure classical liberalism, liberal ones. And given, going back to that survey, I was interested to see that if we were talking about young people, they seem to say that social democracy, well, we don't know what they mean by that, that that seems to be their most popular way forward.

I think radical as fair has been very I mean I personally I'm quite free market oriented but you know in a Russian context

that that's a no start it's a non-starter now simply because of the experience in 1990s you know it's fairly discredited

and you know there's an interesting book by a a Russian Tatar emigre, I think she's now Oxford University or something, I can't remember her exact name. It's called the Red Mirror, I think.

And she says, you know, Russian liberalism will never get anywhere until this negative perception of the 1990s goes away. But that's kind of a no hope up, because it's not going to go away. So, rather than changing the perception of the 1990s, you probably need to change liberalism.

Right? Because that free market model is just, it's a non-starter. Even though, of course, even within the Russian state, there are still those who ideally would like to go back to it. But some people who actually regard, you know, conservatives who regard the Russian state as a bastion of evo-neo-liberalism. I've come across them many times. So, you know, the head of the central bank and others being being private, prime examples. But yes, you're right. I mean, historically speaking, Laceyferior economics have not been desperately strong in Russian liberalism,

except for that brief period in the early 1990s. Well, we seem to have run out of time. No, I would just like to point. I very much agree on this idea that I think we might be doing a disservice to Russian liberalism by trying to guide it too extensively, because I think often, much like what you discussed with civil society, it has a tendency, instead of being one other center of power to reduce the concentration of power in the state as a balance. In the West, we have often an incentive to maybe embrace or advocate for a very anti-government liberalism in Russia, simply because we have a very adversarial relationship.

But I think, you know, George Kennan pointed out in the 90s, you know, should let the Russians be Russians. Something along those lines. I think it has to be more organic, to be more moderate, for the liberals to find their position inside the political system. Because at the moment, they seem too revolutionaries,

this idea of overthrowing the state as a condition to advance liberalism. Of course, the incrementalism, is, yeah, can be, has a different challenge to it, but I think this, yeah, this bad label is not just the 1990s, something stuck with them. It has been quite consistent and I think it's, I think it's this revolutionary streak, this very anti-government approach. It does mean that government shouldn't be criticized or balanced, but again, this old day of uprooting the past and doing something completely different. I think incrementalism would be a much more healthy path for it. Anyway, I said, do any of you have any final comments before we wrap up?

I just to urge people to read Paul's book, Paul Robinson's book, which I have to say, I find extremely interesting. It complements your conservatism book very well, if I may say. And I think the two should be read together. and just to also quickly say, it was very interesting to see how liberalism and conservatism in Russia can overlap sometimes so that someone like Karam's in, people say sometimes he's a liberal,

even though most people think he's a conservative. So things of this guy. I mean, it makes you understand an awful lot about Russia, which I didn't understand before or see. So I generally would strongly say, people should read this book. They really want to understand both the Russia that was

and the Russia that is, the Russia that is being a product of the Russia that was, obviously. Well, thank you. Thank you, Alexander. Yeah, I very much agree. If you order, well, not with, when you order the book, Russian liberalism by Professor Robinson,

get the Russian conservatism at the same time. I notice the same theme, the concepts, the time periods. It's very, very much complement each other. So, yeah, both great books. So anyways, thank you both for, yeah, coming on and anyone for listening. Thank you.