constituent assembly to guarantee basic civil liberties. Despite frequent clashes with the government, Petrunkevich remained active in politics even after his exile following the Bolshevik revolution.
At the turn of the century, Russia was on the eve of revolution. Rapid industrialization under appalling conditions fostered a radical working class movement, while a surge in the peasant population produced widespread land hunger. At the same time a middle class of capitalists and professionals was emerging, and from it came many of Russia’s leading liberals.
The last emperor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), proved singularly incapable of handling the Herculean task of ruling Russia. He quickly dashed any hopes liberals may have entertained for reform when he dismissed notions of diluting his autocratic power as “senseless dreams.” Nonetheless, the liberals remained active.
In 1901 they established their own journal, Liberation, and two years later an organization, the Union of Liberation. When Russia exploded in the Revolution of 1905, the Union coordinated a movement that ranged from strikes to terrorist assassinations. Nicholas made concessions that only fueled the rebellion and in April, liberals were demanding the convocation of a constituent assembly to create a new order. In October, Nicholas issued the October Manifesto, guaranteeing basic civil liberties and the election of a national assembly, the Duma, with real political power. By then the liberals had their own political party, the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets). It seemed that liberalism’s great opportunity had arrived. At the very least, several liberals achieved national prominence in the years after 1905. Pyotr Struve, an economist and political scientist, originally embraced Marxism, but by 1905, he espoused a radical liberalism that called for full civil liberties and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. He was elected to the Second Duma and supported Russia’s entrance into the World War I. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Struve joined the unsuccessful opposition and soon left Russia for good.
The most prominent liberal of the late imperial period was the historian, Pavel Milyukov. In 1895 his political views cost him a teaching position, and he used the time to travel abroad, visiting the United States. His public lectures emphasized the need to abolish the autocracy and the right to basic civil liberties. But Milyukov also realized that liberalism was doomed if it failed to address the land issue in an overwhelmingly agrarian nation.
Milyukov supported Russia’s participation in World War I, but by 1916 he was so exasperated with the catastrophic prosecution of the war that he publicly implied that treason had penetrated to the highest levels of the government. When the autocracy collapsed in February 1917, Milyukov became the foreign minister of the provisional government, the highest office ever reached by a Russian liberal. It did not last long. Under great pressure, in May he issued a promise to the allies that Russia would remain in the war to the bitter end. Antiwar demonstrations ensued, and Mi-lyukov was forced to resign. He died in France in 1943.
Despite the efforts of Milyukov, Struve, and others, Russian liberalism increasingly fell between two stools. On the one hand were the revolutionaries who had nothing but contempt for liberals with their willingness to compromise with the imperial system. The regime’s supporters, on the other hand, saw the liberals as little better than bomb-throwing revolutionaries. In a society as polarized as Russia was in 1914, with a political system as archaic as its leader was incompetent, any form of political moderation was likely doomed.
The Communists thoroughly crushed all opposition, but some brave individuals continued to call for human freedom, the most important being Andrei Sakharov. A physicist by training, he was a man of extraordinary intelligence and courage.
LIGACHEV, YEGOR KUZMICH
Admitted as a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the age of thirty-two, he was deprived of the lavish privileges accorded the scientific elite of the USSR on account of his subsequent advocacy of human rights and civil liberties. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, Sakharov returned to national prominence; he died almost exactly two years before the demise of the Soviet Union on Christmas 1991.
In the Russian Federation of the early twenty-first century, political terms such as liberal, conservative, radical, and so on are almost meaningless. But liberalism in its more traditional sense won a major victory in the 1996 presidential election when Boris Yeltsin defeated the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin’s liberal credentials were later much criticized, but he successfully defended freedom of speech, the press, and religion, and he initiated free market reforms. At the very least, liberalism became more powerful in Russia than any time in the past. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; MILYUKOV, PAUL NIKOLAYEVICH; NICHOLAS II; RADISHCHEV, ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fischer, George. (1958). Russian Liberalism: From Gentry to Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hamburg, Gary. (1992). Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Roosevelt, Patricia. (1986). Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Stockdale, Melissa K. (1996). Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880- 1918. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Timberlake, Charles, ed. (1972). Essays on Russian Liberalism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1986). Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon.
Yevsei Grigorevich Liberman’s education and career were erratic and undistinguished. He graduated from the law faculty at Kiev University in 1920 and then earned a candidate of sciences degree at the Institute of Labor in Kharkov. In 1930 he began to work in the Kharkov Engineering-Economics Institute. During World War II he was evacuated to Kyrgyzstan, where he held positions in the Ministry of Finance and the Scientific Research Institute of Finance. He returned to the Kharkov Engineering-Economics Institute after the war and in 1963 became a professor of statistics at Kharkov University. At various times he was also the director of a machinery plant and a consultant to machinery plants.
Liberman’s personal experience in actual enterprises helped him to understand the shortcomings of the Soviet incentive system. As early as his doctoral dissertation in 1957, he suggested reducing the number of planning indicators for firms and focusing on profit instead. In 1962 he became a cause c?l?bre when he published an article in Pravda that proposed making profit the sole success indicator in evaluating enterprise performance. Since Liberman was not a significant player in economic reform circles, it is thought that others, such as Vasily Sergeyevich Nemchinov, engineered publication of this article as a trial balloon. Thus he was more significant as a lightning rod around which controversy swirled than as a thinker with a sophisticated understanding of economics or of the complex task of transforming the Soviet administrative command system. See also: NEMCHINOV, VASILY SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Liberman, E. G. (1971). Economic Methods and the Effectiveness of Production. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press. Treml, Vladimir G. (1968). “The Politics of Liberman-ism.” Soviet Studies 29:567-572.
(1897-1983), economist who proposed making profit the main success indicator for Soviet enterprises.
(b. 1920), a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (December 1983 to mid-1990), and member of the Politburo (April 1985 to mid-1990).
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Yegor Ligachev criticized Gorbachev’s reforms and Yeltsin’s leadership style. PACH/CORBIS-BETTMANN. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.. Ligachev was deeply disturbed by the collapse of Communist power in Eastern Europe and the flaccid response to those events on the part of the Gorbachev regime. Nor did he support the general secretary’s decision to end the CPSU’s monopoly of power in February 1990. In the spring of 1990 he moderated his critique of the regime in an apparent effort to win election as deputy general secretary at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress, but he lost the election by a wide margin. Following the reform of the Secretariat and Politburo at the congress he retired from both bodies. He did not fully condemn the attempted coup against
