Russia’s Liberal Parties have Failed Because Most Parties Called Liberal Really Aren’t, Minchenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 13 – “Liberal” is a curse word for many Russians for a variety of reasons but one of the most important is that most Russian parties identified as liberal haven’t been committed to liberal principles and thus have not received support from business interests that would benefit from genuine liberalism, Yevgeny Minchenko says.

            The Moscow political analyst who heads the Center for Research on Political Elites at MGIMO, says that if one examines parties in the Russian Federation which have identified themselves as liberal, one discovers that few of them were actually committed to liberal values or misunderstood that term (svpressa.ru/politic/article/506440/).

            Russia’s Choice, for example, had “little relationship to liberal values like the division of powers” but instead defended what Yeltsin did in 1993 and thus served as a policy for “the continuation of privatization and the creation of a new entrepreneurial class and new big business at any price.” (stress supplied)

            Democratic Choice of Russia failed in 1995, Minchenko says, because “it was a small coalition of officials who held power as a result of privatization” as it was conducted and had ties to Westernizers in Moscow rather than a commitment to liberalism. As a result, that party suffered defeat and “lost its base.”

            And today’s New People Party isn’t liberal either, he continues. “This is a party of technological progress,” an entirely different thing. “In the classical understanding, liberalism promotes the rights and freedoms of the individual as the highest value.” But Russia’s nominally “liberal” parties were concerned only with privatization.

            They believed and believe that if state property is privatized, in whatever way and with whatever consequences, the result will be liberalism, a complete misunderstanding of what liberalism is about and the reason why most Russians now view liberalism with distaste, largely because they haven’t seen a genuine version of it.

            Had parties arisen that were committed to these principles, they would have had a better chance of success, Russia would be a different place, and liberalism would not have the image it has in Russia today.