Philip Longworth

A strange reluctance to be free

issue 18 March 2006

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was widespread talk of Russia soon becoming an open, democratic polity with a thriving civil society. Under President Putin such hopes have faded. The state has seized back much of the power it lost under Yeltsin, devolution has yielded to centralisation, and the prevailing tone is authoritarian rather than libertarian. Yet all this has been popular. Why should the Russian people prefer authority to liberty? The American historian Richard Pipes sets out to answer this question in his latest book.

Montesquieu thought that autocracy was a function of Russia’s immensity. Controlling so vast a space with so low a population density encouraged centralised, authoritarian government. Another factor was that land was plentiful, creating little pressure to establish property rights, the usual foundation of a free, democratic society. The short growing season and the savage climate, so conducive to natural disasters, also promoted authoritarianism, though Pipes pays scant attention to environmental factors.

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