ABSTRACT
In 1839 the Marquis de Gustine dismissing all possibility of liberal reform in Russia. The view that Russia's political culture has been inhospitable to anything but brute autocracy has long been shared by some very thoughtful American scholars all along the ideological spectrum. Leopold Haimson or Columbia University has argued that Russia's liberal movement collapsed before the revolutionary parties did because it was cut off from the masses, extremely narrow in its social base, and hopelessly fragmented. Russia and the peoples of the Soviet Union possess another tradition as well, a classically liberal heritage in many ways analogous to that of Western Europe and North America. Russia's direction differed from Britain's and Americas, especially in its greater centralization and in the larger role in the economy reserved for government. Many Russians, both within the government and outside it, look longingly to a romanticized communal past dominated by Orthodoxy and patriarchal institutions.
