ABSTRACT
The discussion of freedom, its intrinsic appeal and ‘what is to be done’ to attain and sustain it has a long-established history in Russian political thought and literature. Reflections on the meaning of freedom of speech, however, have been surprisingly rare. Perhaps the very magnitude of censorship under tsarism and the totality of its grip in the Soviet era made a discussion of the subject vague and irrelevant, other than in poetic lament. If the concept of free speech was considered at all, it tended to be seen as the flip side of state censorship. Once censorship was removed, free speech would naturally follow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian commentators and international observers alike assumed that as the barbedwire had been torn down free institutions and values would flourish. Of all the pillars of democracy – good governance, free and fair elections, the rule of law, civil society – it was thought that free speech would be the simplest and fastest to implement. It turned out not to be so. In signing up to the model of western democracy, the Russian media could
turn for examples to the Anglo-American tradition with its belief in the preeminence of free speech. Illustrious moments in the development of free speech run like a golden thread from Milton to Mill, from the First Amendment to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ that lie at the heart of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights. They could have turned to Voltaire and the French Enlightenment. Russians also have their own illustrious figure in Aleksandr Radishchev who, in denouncing serfdom in the eighteenth century found time in his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow to elaborate, in Voltairean tones, on the value of free speech. Radishchev might well have been a role model, much as the English might turn to Milton for a rousing defence of free speech, but as the father of radical thought with its thread running all the way to communism, Radishchev was not an acceptable icon in post-communist Russia.
