Liberalism has been the most consistently oppositional political philosophy throughout Russian history. This probably also explains why it has received so much attention from Western scholars, often not without a whiff of wishfulness. The common denominator of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism in Russia is a negative one: rejection of arbitrary autocratic rule and struggle against the widespread ‘legal nihilism’ that includes the radicals and terrorists, the socialists and Marxists, and the Christian thinkers with the exception of Solov’ev (Walicki 1992: 9–104). Russian political philosophers generally perceived the law as a mere instrument in the hands of state power, prioritised social justice and equality over individual civil and political rights, and rejected formal legality in the name of true, Christian morality. This contrasts with the undeniable progress of legal culture and penal law since the 1864 reforms, the development of the zemstvo practices of limited local self-government, reluctant moves towards popular representation and constitutionalism, and the increasing academic freedom that yielded ‘legal narodniki’, ‘legal Marxists’ and ‘legal liberals’ (Nethercott 2007; Medushevsky 2006).

There is no generally accepted definition of liberalism. Following Chantal Mouffe, I identify three key principles of the liberal tradition: individual liberty, human rights and rule of law [Rechtsstaat, pravovoe gosudarstvo, gospodstvo zakona] (Mouffe 2000: 2). The distinctive feature of liberalism is not simply the understanding, however crucial, of the human being as inherently free (Kara- Murza and Zhukova 2019: 13), but the idea that this inherent freedom should be the main organising principle of socio-economic and political order. If one links those two orders, the economic and the political, the result is the classical liberalism of John Locke and Isaiah Berlin.