Despite Current Defeat, Russian Liberals have a Future if They Seek a Parliamentary System in which Regions are the Most Important Actors, Sorkin Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 16 – Repressed by the Putin regime at home and no longer with allies in the West that they had earlier, Russian liberalism is suffering an existential crisis, with many of its leading lights now in emigration suffering from a deep pessimism about the future, Moscow Times columnist Yefim Sorkin says in a new book.
    In a 256-page volume entitled After the Exodus published in Russian in Germany, he argues there are compelling reasons for this pessimism but that what has happened in both Russia and the West in recent decades may give Russian liberals a chance to recover, albeit one for which there are no guarantees (moscowtimes.ru/2025/03/16/opit-porazheniya-liberalizma-v-rossii-a158074).
    Unlike many Russian liberals, Sorkin suggests that many of the reasons for the defeat of liberalism lie not in some external force but in the liberals themselves.  “In their quest to ‘catch up with the West,’ Russian reformers saw democratic institutions as tools for more effective governance” rather than as means to protect people a recovered state.
    Those who consider themselves Russian liberals failed to understand that, failed to take into account the attitudes of the Russian people, and failed to recognize that they themselves would have to do the heavy lifting, assuming instead that the West would create a democratic Russia and hand it to its liberal allies.
    Now, however, it is clear that “the West no longer views such Russian Westernizers as allies in the struggle to involve Russia in the Western world.” Putin’s war in Ukraine and changes in the West itself have put paid to that. Indeed, Russian liberals “can no longer point to the West as an ideal of development.”
    But precisely because they have been thrown back on themselves, Russian liberals may be able to create a future Russia that is far better than the one they know now by operating on themselves and seeking to promote “a state constructed on the representation of the regions on the basis of parliamentarianism.”
    That is far from the vision of a beautiful Russia of the future that many Russian liberals still hold fast to, but it is far more likely to prove achievable and even more sustainable than their notions given that such an arrangement would put in place arrangements that would make the emergence of a new Putinism at some point in the future more difficult.