ABSTRACT
The collapse of Communism has brought about a welcome diversity of opinions and views among Russian political thinkers. Only a few of these views have been presented here and the book can by no means claim to give an exhaustive picture of the varied and, at times, very exciting debate on political liberalism in post-Communist Russia. Rather, I have been selective with thinkers whose works have been discussed here. However, the criteria of selection were outlined at the outset. First of all, I narrowed this overview to those Russian scholars who are active members of the academic community. This inevitably excluded some valuable contributions to the Russian public debate by politicians such as Yegor Gaidar and Igor Chubais. Some justification for this exclusion should lie in the fact that, although the views of Gaidar and others certainly merit some attention, they rarely contribute theoretically challenging and novel approaches to the debate. Although Gaidar’s State and Evolution (Gaidar 1995) is noticeably motivated by the search for an overall theory that would explain the results of the Yeltsin reforms, his approach mainly utilises older conceptual models that seem to have lost their purchasing power in political and social thought today. Others, such as Chubais (Chubais 1998) are well versed in the theoretical and social debate on Russia and liberalism, yet their contributions go rarely beyond the reiteration of known and tested conceptual models or, worse, at times remain locked in preconceived and well-rehearsed dichotomies.
