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Political Liberalism in Postcommunist Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

This article examines the discussion among Russian scholars and activists concerning the principles of political liberalism in Soviet Russia during the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) and in independent Russia during the Yeltsin presidency (1991-present). After a review of the emergence of liberalism during the Gorbachev years, the analysis focuses on three models of political liberalism which have emerged in the context of Russian postcommunist state construction. Each competing model of liberalism—statist, rule of law, and social—offers a different vision of the principles of political liberalism and the strategies necessary to institutionalize liberalism as the foundation of the postcommunist polity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1996

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References

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60 These same moderate liberals, for example, opposed Yeltsin's military policies in Chechnya in the winter of 1994–1995 and criticized the president for not solving the crisis through negotiation and political means.

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85 Already in 1990, Dahrendorf, Ralf, in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Random House, 1990)Google Scholar, hinted that political leadership must provide the critical foundation for democratization in East Central Europe and the then-USSR until that time when a constitution and civil society could be institutionalized. See pp. 98–99.

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93 Kuznets, Dmitry, “Positions: The Fate of the Constitution,” Sevodnya (27 11 1993), p. 2Google Scholar, as translated in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 45: 48 (1993): 46.Google Scholar

94 The most likely liberal candidate for this position going into the December 1995 Russian parliamentary elections was Grigorii Yavlinski, leader of the liberal Yabloko party. The poor showing of the party in the elections, however, {Yabloko received 45 seats in the 450 seat Duma, as compared to the 158 seats of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), does not bode well for the liberals.

95 Chuprinin, , “Choice: Notes of a Russian Liberal”p. 71.Google Scholar