Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations,
lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of
law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile
Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular
attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the
secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized
version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that
had an enduring impact on Russian political life.
Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style
liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the
left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's
rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity
as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be
defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines
debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the
law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing
society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on
the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of
war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of
system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a
political culture that are still in evidence today.
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