Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture by Richard Pipes

From the Publisher

Russian Conservatism and Its Critics provides the first account of Russia’s immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, the most formative and powerful idea in Russia’s political history. Richard Pipes considers why Russian thinkers, statesmen, and publicists have historically always argued that Russia could prosper only under an autocratic regime.

Beginning with an insightful study of the origins of Russian statehood in the Middle Ages, when the state grew out of the princely domain but was not distinguished from it, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics includes a masterful survey of Russia’s major conservative thinkers and demonstrates how conservatism is the dominant intellectual legacy of Russia. Pipes examines the geographical, historical, political, military, and social realities of the Russian empire—fundamentally unchanged by the Revolution of 1917—that have traditionally convinced its rulers and opinion leaders that decentralizing political authority would inevitably result in the country’s disintegration. Pipes has written a brilliant thesis and analysis of a hitherto overlooked aspect of the Russian intellectual tradition that continues to have significance to this day.

Foreign Affairs

Unless one buys into historical determinism or believes autocracy to be a genetic Russian trait, nothing says that Russia cannot escape its past. Yet, as Vladimir Putin's Russia again flirts with authoritarian shortcuts, the resonance of that past grows louder. No contemporary historian has thought longer or harder about the intellectual and political roots of Russian absolutism than Pipes, and in this taut, elegant essay, he compresses five centuries of "conservative ideology" into a deft portrait of adherents from Joseph of Volokolamsk (1439-1515) to the liberal conservatives at the end of the nineteenth century. The tradition, he argues, originated in the Muscovite notion of the country and all within it as literally the private patrimony of the ruler. This in turn denied Russia the two institutions that eventually tamed kings in the West: an "independent nobility and middle class, and private property in land." But so too did the fear of losing control of an ungainly, piebald empire sustain faith in autocracy as Russia's natural and necessary form of government.

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• Table of Contents

Table of Contents