ABSTRACT
How much free speech is enough? In Russia, where there was hardly any experience of uncensored speech, freedom paradoxically meant something that was boundless and wild. As we saw in the last chapter, the idea of unlimited freedom (volya), the urge to break boundaries in an autocratic society, has struggled with the concept of freedom with responsibilities (svoboda). It has created confusion in what is already a difficult terrain about where to plot ethical boundaries between liberty and licence, freedom and order, regulation and censorship. Playwright Aleksandr Gelman acknowledged the problem towards the end of the ‘free’ Yeltsin years: ‘When we had no freedom we dreamed of it as something that was not and should not be subjected to regulation. The very expression “regulating freedom” seemed blasphemous to us. It’s only now that we’re beginning to realise that the most important thing is to regulate freedom. You must regulate freedom to strengthen, consolidate and make it irreversible’.1
