It will never win, nor will it ever lose - By Sergei Shelin

The Drama of Ideas

IT WILL NEVER WIN, NOR WILL IT EVER LOSE

By Sergei Shelin
September 2006
Source

No matter how far Russia has departed from liberal ideas, it will have to return to them

“Present-day Russia is like a cow which is being pulled by the liberals to the Western market. But it wouldn’t go, afraid of being disgraced or even devoured there.” Such is the conclusion of daily observations by Viktor Yerofeyev in his novel Good Stalin published this year.

The idea that Russia is the least suitable ground for implementing liberal ideas was expressed in a much sharper way by Ludwig von Mises, the most radical of all liberal ideologists. “The people guided by the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Lenin in their life are unable to build a stable social organizaion. They will slide to utter barbarism,” he wrote in his book Liberalism published in 1927.

Even going over from these extremes to the ideological mainstream, we shall have to admit that in the opinion of nearly all foreign and most domestic analysts Russia is a country where liberalism has always failed.

To make guesses about the future, we should look at the liberal doctrine from the domestic point of view, in the light of the experience of embodying it in Russia.

Definitions of liberalism

There are as many definitions of liberalism as there are liberals, but let us turn to official sources in order to avoid confusion in terminology.

“Liberalism is a bourgeois ideological, social and political trend uniting advocates of bourgeois parliamentary system, bourgeois freedoms and freedom of capitalist enterprise. According to this system of views, social harmony and progress can be achieved only on the basis of private property, by ensuring sufficient freedom of individual in economy and in all other spheres of human activity (because the welfare of society is allegedly formed naturally by individuals as a result of the achievement of their personal aims.” (From the Greater Soviet Encyclopaedia).

Thus, we see the cult of individul freedom and the belief that public welfare will be built thanks to the above-mentioned freedoms. This definition looks almost satisfactory, thus proving that the people knew about liberalism even under totalitarian rule, though it was not practised then. Let us compare this knowledge with the definition given in the early 20th century, in the times rather liberal according to Russian standards:

“Liberalism is, first, a trend in policy contrary to conservatism, striving for reforms and for building the state and society on the principles of personal freedom, freedom from oppression by the church, despotic power, police regulations, customs, and so on, and, second, in the sphere of economic life it demands absolute freedom of industrial activity, freedom from state interference.... Having arisen as a protest against restraints imposed by the police state, economic liberalism was used by capitalist employers as protection against the movement of the working people enslaved by them. The need of softening the extremes of economic liberalism by social legislation protecting the interests of the working people has been generally recognized now.” (the Small Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Brockhous and Efron).

The famous dictionary explains the general truth of its time: “pure liberalism” turned into an instrument of exploiters and, for its own benefit, must be diluted with socially useful state regulation. Let us introduce our own definitions to understand better the world historic logic which led to this situation, that is, divide the liberals into political, ideological and practical ones. The first realize (or would like to realize) liberal principles through government bodies, the second work out and renew these principles, and the third carry them out in their daily life.

“Perhaps I am the most free man in Russia, but it is virtually a minor achievement, because no particular rivalry is observed in this sphere,” the above-mentioned Viktor Yerofeyev writes in his novel. It is the self-proclamation of a practical liberal with a hint that there are not many such liberals in Russia. What can be said then about the liberals of two other, higher varieties?

But before turning to the drama of Russian liberalism, let us recall the short period of the flourishing of pure political liberalism in the West.

Their road

Liberalism, as a victorious political concept, existed only for several decades in the mid-19th century. It was the time of triumph of the principles of free trade and the political triumph of party liberals in the parliaments of Britain and many other European countries, including Prussia.

In the 1870s, and even earlier in some countries, European political liberalism began a strategic retreat, bombarded by charges of indifference to the suffering of poor people, patriotism and the interests of national economies, yielding to the social policy of Bismarck and the democratic imperialism of Disraeli, and not knowing how to get adapted to the widely introduced universal suffrage behind which loomed the spectre of people’s socialism and nationalism.

Incidentally, at the same time liberal principles penetrated into the ideological platforms of various political trends and often being, turned back at first. But since then, the political organizations, describing themselves as purely liberal, could pretend more and more rarely to be parties of the majority.

The latest example is the outcome of German elections in September when the Free Democrats, remote successors to the Prussian liberal orthodoxes, got a tenth of the votes considering it a very good result.

The 20th century, especially the first half of it, was a bad time for those liberal politicians who remained uncompromisingly loyal to historical principles of liberalism. But in the 1920-1940s, the same circumstance facilitated the work of several liberal ideologists, whose intellectual search was not fettered by any political pragmatism at that time.

The most striking of these ideologists was the Austrian thinker Ludwig von Mises, the teacher of Friedrich von Hayek, who became famous later. One of the present-day researchers noted that almost none of his disciples followed his teacher to the end.

The frankness and consistency of the recipes offered by Mises remain unsurpassed. He proposed to abolish all forms of protectionism, ban any interference of the state in the economy, fully privatize schools, abolish unemployment benefits, and lift restrictions on the interstate migration of labor. These and other proposals of the Austrian thinker make his writings an ideal manual demonstrating both the intellectual power of the liberal doctrine and its inability to become in the undiluted form an effective political platform.

After World War II, in the years of struggle against the Stalin variant of socialism and, simultaneously, the attempts to adapt socialism to the Western reality, the ranks of ideologists of liberalism sharply increased and some of their books (Hayek’s anti-socialist pamphlet, The Road to Slavery, first of all) have become a manual for intellectuals, but they were not yet used in real politics.

The Chicago University became the stronghold of ideologists of the liberal economy in those years. The future Nobel prize winners Hayek and Friedman, and Harberger, the teacher of future economic assistants of Pinochet, worked there. In the United States, the advocates of the ideas of economic liberalism had to call themselves libertarians because the word “liberal” referred to those who defended national minorities, the poor citizens, and all moderate leftists who believed that the rights and freedoms of the offended people must be protected by the state.

In the 1960s, the old Mises wrote with sarcasm that the self-styled American liberal strives for the omnipotence of the government, firmly opposes free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning carried out by the authorities, that is, socialism.

In the eyes of the patriarch, any retreat from the orthodox economic liberalism remains at least a delusion and rather a treachery. In real life, some freedoms always conflict with others, and every champion of human rights and freedoms often has to decide what freedoms he can waive for the sake of those which seem to him more important at the given moment.

In the West, traditional liberals came to power in the 1970s and 1980s. This happened in a peculair way — in the form of an alliance between liberal economists and politicians who are not quite liberal or not liberal at all. It was the time of Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys in Chile, and simultaneously the time of Reagan, Pinochet and Thatcher.

The next wave of this movement swept through Eastern Europe and Russia 15 years later. It revealed several variants of combination of economic liberalism with big politics and confirmed the experience of the 20th century: pure liberalism is no longer a dominant political force. Besides, it was the time when the road of Russia merged for a short time with the road of new Europe, when the star of Yegor Gaidar rose as high as the star of Leszek Balcerowicz and Vaclav Klaus.

Let us move now to the sme point along the thorny way of Russia.

Our road

Without going deep into the past, we can say that the first Russin czar who clearly expressed liberal leanings was Alexander I. His reign was not the time of freedom of enterprise, freedom of the press, and other freedoms. It was the time when restrictions in these fields were lessened.

Almost the same can be said about the next prominent liberal – czar Alexander II. His liberalism was not conceptual and classic either. It was the liberalism of a contrast with the past — ideologically contradictory under the circumstances of that time. This was vividly expressed by the main reform of his reign — the liberation of peasants from the power of landowners was accompanied by the strengthening of the peasant commune which regulated the life of its members even tougher in some respects.

Russia could never make up for several decades lost as a result of this. The belated attack of the Stolypin administration against communes had almost no chance of success, while the image of Stolypin (often represented now as the first Russian liberal in power) is hardly close to reality if we regard him from the standpoint of administrative practice, not rhetoric. Stolypin was too authoritarian and nationalistic to be regarded as a liberal. The same can be said about attempts to represent him as a real politician — he was too much inclined to hair-brained social planning and imposing on the majority what it did not obviously want.

In those years, political parties started to act in Russia. Among them was the liberal Constitutional-Democratic Party which, between 1905 and 1907, was even the party of the majority. It was that very left liberalism with a socialist shade passionately exposed by von Mises. Together with the protection of freedoms and rights, the Constitutional Democrats offered social guarantees to the workers and the compulsory redemption of the land owned by landlords for distributing it among the peasants. Highly doubtful from the standpoint of respect for private property, this action was quite realistic politically: the peasants firmly decided to divide the landlord property and would do so in any course of events.

However, there was also much political nonsense in the political aims of the Constitutional Democrats — for instance, their excessive intolerance of czarism or considering the struggle for the Balkan states, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus an urgent state task. However, the Constitutional Democrats did not get a chance to govern Russia. The February 1917 revolution threw them overboard. For a short time Russia was governed by moderate socialists who were liberals in comparison with their successors, the Bolsheviks.

Extirpating all varieties of traditional liberalism, the Soviet power engendered its own one. The liberals of the Soviet model were the politburo members suspected of the inclination to indulgence, and since the 1950s, the label liberal was applied to the reform-minded party intellectuals working in the news media, culture and related areas. The liberals of perestroika and post-perestroika appeared precisely in these sections of society.

In the 1960s, in a conflict with the official system, dissidents appeared. The liberalism of most of them was not orthodox either. Andrei Sakharov, who advocated convergence of capitalism and socialism, was a liberal in an American rather than Mises’ interpretation of this notion. Since the days of the “thaw,” the number of practical liberals, usually far removed from public discussions, has been constantly growing, too. The liberals of all kinds constituted a minority at all levels, and this fact was fundamentally important for the subsequent course of events.

The last general secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, was the first and only liberal on the Soviet throne. True, his ideal, a hybrid of socialism and freedom, did not meet the standards of von Mises and von Hayek. Though their market anti-socialism hit the mark, they did not catch a fundamentally important thing. The perestroika launched by Gorbachev carried the people away, though for a short time, not by the idea of returning to Lenin’s sources but by the idea of freedom. This idea proved rather strong to survive the change of the regime and revive in a new form as the idea of a capitalist revolution in the economy.

The early 1990s became the best time for liberal economists. True, Gaidar’s views never reached the Chicago liberal radicalism, and he never held the top post in power, but the likeness of Russian policy to Polish or Czech one was evident at that time. The ways quickly parted then. As soon as the edifice of new Russian capitalism began to rise among the ruins, Russian political liberalism, rejected by the disappointed masses, began a quick and disorderly retreat. The slogans of those who convicted it markedly resembled the slogans that were in Europe, especially in Germany, in the 1870s, in the years of the first retreat from liberal policy. At that time, the liberals were already accused of ruining the majority of the people, opening the borders to predatory foreign capital, and protecting the oligarchs who were quickly enriching themselves.

Most of the intellectuals, who at first supported the market reforms in Russia, changed their opinion. This is natural because in all countries the intellectuals depend on state support and value freedom of speech and protest much more than freedom of private enterprise. As regards practical liberals, respectfully called the middle class, they did not become a new support because of their reticence and lack of clear preferences, though obviously exaggerated hopes were set on them.

The liberal parties first moved into the background and then, in the authoritarian atmosphere of recent years, they found themselves marginalized. The transition from the propaganda of market freedoms to the protection of political ones was a slack process. The main thing is that the people, for whom the freedoms of the 1990s were an abstract TV game, gave no clear signals.

Let us turn to Western experience once again to answer whether liberalism can return to big Russian politics and, if it can, in what way.

The price of victory

In the 20th century, the mass people’s parties of the West — Christian Democrats and Social Democrats — gradually adopted many liberal aims, mixing them with their traditional ones. This limited state liberalism without regular liberals became the visiting card of postwar Europe. More or less ideologically consistent liberals, such as Erhard, were rather an exception at that time.

The situation changed when time came to make the economy free. Liberal economists came to power, but they were in the ranks of mass political movements guided not only by liberal feelings.

Both Russian and Western experience shows that it is impossible to stir up the enthusiasm of the people merely by calls for a sound economic policy and the promises of prosperity for all who would achieve it by their hard work and personal enterprise. Practical liberals in other countries can be far more active and politically mature than in Russia, but they do not constitute a majority anywhere and hardly ever will.

The slogans of freeing the economy attracted the people away only when they were part of a broad political platform together with the slogans of patriotism (sometimes nationalism), justice, religious morals, and others. This is how Thatcher and Reagan came to power and then governed their countries. This is how Pinochet ruled (with the specific features of dictatorship). Such is the policy now practiced by the Czech president Vaclav Klaus, a pragmatic liberal economist and, simultaneously, a patriot and Euro-sceptic, the only reformer of the early 1990s still in power.

This also prompts the ways of a possible return of liberalism to Russia. The independent political actions of old liberal parties with all their manoeuvres, unity and disunity, is only one of such ways and, most likely, not the main one.

Another way is penetration of liberal ideas into government bodies at every level. No matter how far these bodies have departed from the mentioned ideas, they will have to return to them. The only question is whether they will come on time or be late.

Lastly, the main way is the adoption of the ideas of freedom by broad and various political movements, which will inevitably rise and grow. I think, they will decide the fate of Russian liberal principles for the next few years and decades. As regards the long-term perspective, there is perhaps, no reason to worry about liberalism. Not only the world but also Russian experience shows that liberalism is deeper, broader and more lasting than its concrete embodiment of any kind. It is a fundamental idea, one of those which never win and are never subdued completely.