Law, Society and The Domestic Regime in Russia, in Historical Perspective

American experts on the Soviet Union have given much of their time to discussing whether the Russian communist government is going to remain “totalitarian” or instead turn “liberal.” Journalists and scholars alike judge Soviet policies and decrees largely according to whether or not they extend more “freedom” to the Russian people. Similarly, American writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost never inquired as to what purposes the Russian imperial government's policies and decrees were actually intended to serve but only how liberal they were or were not. When one writer said that the Tsar was liberalizing, another would reply that he had not actually surrendered any of his arbitrary power and that Russia was still as oppressive as ever. In American eyes, then, the Russian state apparently cannot move except along a single line that extends from freedom to oppression, democracy to absolutism, similarity to Western institutions to dissimilarity. If Russia is not moving toward one of these poles, then she is not moving at all. Few have suggested that Russian statesmen have been operating along other lines and coping with other problems. Seldom has it occurred to American observers that the question of liberalization has actually been rather a minor one in Russian development.