Autochthonous and Practical Liberals: Vestnik Evropy and Modernization in Late Imperial Russia
Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study investigates a strain of liberal thought based on materials published in the thick journal Vestnik Evropy, which formed a unique synapse in the matrix of Russian social thought.The period under examination, 1892-1903, was a testing ground for liberal values as Finance Minister Sergey Witte forced industrialization on an agrarian society.With the Witte System as background, the Vestnik liberals articulated an alternative socio-economic development program to those of the Finance Ministry, the Marxists, and the populists.The dissertation also analyzes Vestnik Evropy as an institution with a unique interpretation of late imperial politics.The first part integrates the biographies of Vestnik's main contributors-founder and chief editor Mikhail Stasiulevich, de facto council and domestic expert Konstantin Arseniev, historian and literary scholar Alexander Pypin, and foreign policy and economics specialist Leonid Slonimskii.The second part explores Vestnik's conceptual affinity with populism, the evolution of its views on the agrarian crisis and the peasantry, and its eventual separation from populism.The second part also focuses on the articulation of an economic democracy beyond the commune through the extension of local self-government, or zemstvo, rights and responsibilities and the part they played in amortizing modernization's effects.The third part examines Vestnik's criticism of Marxist ideology, how the authors associated it with a justification of the late imperial modernization, and iii Robert Belknap has argued that the "community of journals" made the "Russian literary world a tight and structured whole" and created "an extraordinary literary form" unlike anything in the West.7 Much as they had done with the genre of the novel, Russians took the European journalistic tradition and in the 1850s transformed it into a 6
Author: Anton Fedyashin
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2173403302