Post-Soviet Russian Liberalism in Search of Its Futures Past

The end of the Soviet Union, the disappointments of the 1990s, and the rise of Putin — in the wake of these shocks Russian liberals have struggled to comprehend both what has happened and which possible futures remain. This study traces the formation of liberal thought in Russia through the lens of the economists who have functioned both as key propagandists and public intellectuals and also as network and party builders for liberalism as a political force. As I show, liberalism does not exist in the abstract, but in the historically specific constructions of situated actors. In creating technical disciplinary knowledge economists assembled specifically Soviet and Russian visions of liberal polity. I look at debates both scientific and popular around liberalism and its genealogies in Russia during the “null” decade (the 2000s) culminating in the protests of 2012. Actors shaping current events have turned to history to try to comprehend their present — especially to the legacies of Khrushchev’s thaw and its reverberations in the period of perestroika. Their historical hypotheses map forgotten or repressed Cold War-era imaginaries of reform socialisms onto important social transformations, such as the rise of the Soviet scientific-technical “intelligentsia” as quasi-“middle class”, and generational transformations in consciousness more often explored through the lenses of art, literature, and dissidence. In the wake of the Cold War — the “end of History” — the political horizon has constricted. This study asks after the generativity and fecundity of liberalism through the post-Soviet condition.