Russian Conservatism and Its Critics
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A Study in Political Culture
Richard Pipes
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Russian Conservatism and Its Critics provides the first account of Russia’s immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, the most formative and powerful idea in Russia’s political history. Richard Pipes considers why Russian thinkers, statesmen, and publicists have historically always argued that Russia could prosper only under an autocratic regime.
Beginning with an insightful study of the origins of Russian statehood in the Middle Ages, when the state grew out of the princely domain but was not distinguished from it, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics includes a masterful survey of Russia’s major conservative thinkers and demonstrates how conservatism is the dominant intellectual legacy of Russia. Pipes examines the geographical, historical, political, military, and social realities of the Russian empire—fundamentally unchanged by the Revolution of 1917—that have traditionally convinced its rulers and opinion leaders that decentralizing political authority would inevitably result in the country’s disintegration. Pipes has written a brilliant thesis and analysis of a hitherto overlooked aspect of the Russian intellectual tradition that continues to have significance to this day.
Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History Emeritus, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia, and The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, all published by Yale University Press.
"This book fills a blank space in the English language literature on Russia, and it is also a summation of Pipes's own views on the course of Russian history."—Professor Marc Raeff, Columbia University, Emeritus
“This taut, elegant essay, compresses five centuries of ‘conservative ideology’ into a deft portrait of adherents.”
"...a disturbing lesson in the ineradicable nature of tyranny." - Donald Rayfield, Literary Review
'...Pipes has done us a service...' - Philip Longworth, The Spectator
“Richard Pipes’s valuable book, besides being a sweeping and learned historical survey, may help us to understand better some of the unhappy anomalies of post-Gorbachev Russia.”—Joseph Frank, New Republic
Publication Date: January 8, 2006
