- Your Majesty!
- What?
- It's indecent to pick your nose!
- Everything is decent for the king!
Dialogue from the movie "The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors", 1963
And when there is freedom around, Everyone is his own king!
Alexander Khazin. Song from the movie "Cain XVIII" (1963)
History of Russian liberalism. On the pages of "VO" there are often discussions in the comments, the authors of which, with great pleasure, but clearly with a stupid mind, mold on each other a variety of labels of an impartial nature, apparently believing that in this way they are causing trouble to the opponent or the author of this or that article. In fact, this is not the case. As for the offensive words, it is worth turning to the opinion of the Chinese Yi Pun, the hero of Jack London's story "Hearts of Three." Besides, the opinion of anonymous critics is not worth much. As for the labels, one of the most popular today is “liberal”. The word comes from the Latin liberalis, which means "free". Obviously, there is every reason to talk in detail about what liberalism is and what its history is in our country. Therefore, a series of articles is planned in which liberalism in Russia will be discussed. And this is the first article in this series. Well, it will be illustrated with shots from popular children's movie stories. As they say, the tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it!
However, before we talk about liberalism itself and its history, let us turn to our very recent past, since there are very instructive moments there. Let's start by remembering this: “I can’t resist the pleasure of citing the most ancient“Code of Tyrants”that Aristotle allegedly described” (I found it in Bertrand Russell's “History of Western Philosophy”).
(From the article by Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR N. Amosov "Realities, ideals and models", the journal "Science and Life" No. 5, 1989.)
Now let's fast forward to the 90s and remember the then popular "label": "red-brown". Well, who are "red", no need to explain, but who are "brown"? Do you think our "fascists"? H-e-e-t! That was the name of the supporters of Zhirinovsky, who denounced the communists, but nevertheless united with them into one common "bogey". Who invented this and how did you manage to launch this stupid label into the public consciousness? But I succeeded … Although it did not take root, it looked very strange. A kind of hybrid of a snake and a hedgehog …
And the government also needs to rely on ideology. It cannot live without it even when it is officially canceled. And she also needs social institutions to serve as props. And in the 90s, our society began to actively promote the idea of … collegiality! That the Russian people are conciliar, that everything went through the cathedral and drove us by the cathedral. But something with collegiality did not work out, and all talk about it was quickly curtailed.
However, they found a new, so to speak, retaining stone of the young Russian democracy: the zemstvo. In his revival they saw the primordially popular forms of the rule of the people, and this despite the fact that the same Lenin very aptly called the zemstvos "the fifth wheel in the cart of the Russian autocracy." And here it would be just right to recall these words, replacing "autocracy" with "statehood", but our journalists, who were clearly entrusted with glorifying the zemstvo, preferred not to remember this.
It just so happened that the "zemstvo period" in the history of our democracy is especially familiar to me. The fact is that the zemstvo immediately gave the green light to defend candidate dissertations, and people, naturally, immediately took advantage of this. Just look at how many candidate dissertations were defended in the late 90s - early 2000s on the zemstvo only in Penza! And the themes are one more beautiful than the other: "Socio-economic activities of the zemstvo institutions of the Penza region in 1865-1917: based on the materials of the Penza province" (1998, candidate of historical sciences Polosin SN); "Organization and main directions of activity of the zemstvo institutions of the Penza province, 1865-1890." (2000, candidate of historical sciences Sineva N. Yu.); "Penza provincial press on the activities of the zemstvo in the period from 1864 to 1917: on the example of" Penza provincial vedomosti "and" Bulletin of the Penza zemstvo "(2005, candidate of historical sciences Peterova A. Yu.). Moreover, if the first two works are very weak (and this is putting it mildly), then the last one is very much even nothing. It was done by my graduate student, whose scientific advisor I was. However, it is not at all difficult to verify this statement of mine: it is enough to download these works from the Internet and compare. Even a layman will see a definite difference. However, soon it all died out somehow, but as for the labels "cathedral" and "zemstchik", they never appeared, although they could, why not?
However, most likely, our government just finally realized that it is much more profitable to have support in hearts based on fear than on love. And this is how the next “enemies of the people” were born - “liberals” who live “on Soros grants” and dream of “destroying” everything around, and becoming masters of what has been destroyed… what? However, this question is one of the rather indecent ones, and we will not analyze it for now. The main thing is that there have already been conciliarism, zemstvo, and now for several years now we have another object of public attention: "liberalism." But its vector, in contrast to conciliarism and zemstvo, is rotated 180 degrees!
Well, now, after this introduction, let's turn directly to the topic of our material. To begin with, the Middle Ages witnessed the first sprout of liberalism, when the sovereign lords sought to protect their lands from the tyranny of the monarchs. And above all in England, they achieved their goal: in 1215, the British barons managed to obtain from King John Lackland a signature on the famous document: Magna Carta, where the following remarkable words were recorded: or outlawed, or expelled, or otherwise destroyed, except by the lawful court equal to him and by the laws of the country … "And this was a huge achievement, because before that" everything was decent for the king!"
The educated people of Europe already in the Renaissance became acquainted with the works of such ancient authors as Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, who reflected on the merits and demerits of monarchical and republican forms of government, tyranny and the rule of law. Well, European lawyers inherited from Rome Roman law, where the concepts of property, owner and all his rights were developed in great detail. And this heritage of antiquity also had a very strong impact on the formation of new liberal ideas.
The significance of the "Magna Carta" was also in the fact that it set a precedent that later extended to most European states. And although at first only the nobility received the right of personal freedom, as a result of bloody civil strife and revolutions in Holland, England and France, both townspeople and peasants obtained similar rights for themselves. The famous Russian historian, philosopher, religious thinker and publicist G. P. Fedotov (called by one of the critics "the most intelligent and subtle Russian thinker of the 20th century") wrote on this occasion that in Europe "noble privileges were not so much eliminated as they were extended to the entire people".
However, homo sapiens society still developed so slowly that only by the end of the 19th century. in Europe, states began to appear, built precisely on the principles of liberalism, understood as follows:
Complete freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; the state structure is based on constitutional orders that reject absolutism, local self-government is given preference over centralization, freedom of the individual against police custody, the equality of women is guaranteed, all class privileges are abolished, the people participate in the administration of justice, the burden of taxation is distributed in proportion to income, that is, who earns more, he pays more. Accordingly, economic liberalism is opposed to restrictions on freedom of trade and freedom of labor.
Medieval Russia developed in a way similar to European, although not without peculiarities associated with its natural geographical position. She was baptized almost 500 years later than France (the official date of the baptism of France is 496), and the main transport routes in the forest regions of Russia were rivers. However, in the XI-XIII centuries. the number of cities that had self-government in the form of veche meetings of the townspeople rapidly increased, which did not allow the princes, who claimed full power over the cities, to gain too much strength. That is, in Russia at that time there were all the conditions for the emergence of its own "Magna Carta". But then the Mongol-Tatar invasion began, which dealt a heavy blow to the Russian cities. But the peasantry up to 1293 still somehow "interrupted". However, this year, perhaps, was the most terrible year of the second half of the 13th century. Dudenev's army was in no hurry, unlike Batu's army, and the chronicler boldly compares them and writes that the enemies "villages and volosts and monasteries" and "made the whole earth empty", and people not only from cities, but even from the forests of ". That is, before that it was still possible to hide in the forests, but now the "cursed Tatar" found a way to "harass" people from there.
However, any medal has an obverse, and there is also a reverse - a reverse side. The flip side of all these horrors was the strengthening of the princely power in Russia, which often relied on both the strength and the authority of the Horde! And when the Moscow princes, and then the Moscow tsars, threw off the Horde burden, no one could resist their power in Russia. There was no such force, although, yes, there were always "boyars-conspirators" who dreamed of limiting the autocracy of our rulers in their favor. And they reserved their own "charter" for every convenient occasion!
Was the Polish prince Vladislav invited? He was invited, but at the same time they drew up a kind of "constitution" that limited his power in favor of the ancient clans. Was Anna Ioannovna invited in 1730? Invited! But were the "conditions" drawn up? Were! Even if she tore them up later. Well, the reason for all these failures is obvious: the Russian tsars had all the power over the land. A nobleman could receive an estate from the king for faithful service, but he could also take it away. And the serfs, enslaved, by the way, by the Cathedral Code of 1649, saw in the tsar-father their only protector before their masters, and they did not at all want the political rights of the nobility to expand even more. It is clear that no one asked their “willingness” or “unwillingness”, but here such a factor as “popular opinion” was important, and the tsarist government understood this perfectly. The same Fedotov wrote about it this way: “People brought up in the Eastern tradition, who breathed the age-old air of slavery, would never agree with such freedom - for a few - at least for a while. They want it for everyone or for no one. And that is why they receive it "for no one"."
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And since the Russian monarchs did not want to voluntarily share power with the nobles, they had only one way out - to fight the objectionable monarchs by means of conspiracies. That is why the XVIII century. here it became the era of palace coups, and even a joke was born that the autocracy in Russia is still limited, although not by the constitution, but by "different circumstances": for example, the rifle belt with which the emperor Peter III was allegedly strangled,while his son Paul I would have been beaten at first, received a blow to the temple with a heavy gold snuffbox and was eventually strangled by an officer's scarf. So our Russian sovereigns inevitably had to pay great attention to their own security, and they were also hostages of the lack of freedom that existed in the country!
However, life was restless for the nobles themselves. Forty impostors named Peter III - it was not without reason. The uprisings of both serfs and Cossacks took place in the country one after another. It got to the point that, realizing the danger of the situation with slavery in the country, the favorite of Princess Sophia, Prince V. V. Golitsyn at the end of the 17th century. the first to speak about the abolition of serfdom. Nobody suggested to Empress Anna Ioannovna that it should be canceled, but the Chief Prosecutor of the Senate A. P. Maslov himself. But what did she say to him? "It's not time yet." And why, in fact, is not the time? Yes, simply because the autocracy in this case would have to agree to a compromise with that part of the nobility, which already then demanded its "share" in the management of the empire, and it was simply not ready for this. To part with absolute power … it is, oh, how hard it is!
