




Neither the repressive nature of the present regime nor the innate hostility of the Russian “cultural tradition” toward liberalism can explain this calamity. These are pseudo-explanations that serve the country’s liberals as pretexts for their own innocence. If liberalism is to be reborn in Russia, one must understand the political causes of its demise. Liberalism failed as an ideology in Russia in the wake of communism’s collapse. Now liberals must free themselves from the burden of the Boris Yeltsin legacy — its unabashed neoliberalism — and confront the type of capitalism expressed by the present regime’s “authoritarian capitalism.”...
If the opposition liberals want to escape from their confinement to the political salons of Moscow and St Petersburg, they must come to grips with the country’s new political and economic realities. They must disclose the present system’s inherent tensions, and they must address actual grievances by proposing feasible and popular political courses of action.
From a comment by Boris Kapustin in “The Moscow Times”


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