Populism and the system of estates: two poles of Russian conservatism

There was a time in Russian thought when two idiosyncratic poles of Russian conservatism came into conflict: the “populist” ideal came into contact with the conservative and aristocratic basis, and conflict between the two resulted in one of the most serious fissures in Russian political culture. Tis took place at the beginning of the 1860’s, when the famous newspaper Vestʹ undertook a series of editorials against periodicals supporting the democratizing reforms of Nikolay Milyutin in Poland, where an uprising had been recently suppressed. Tese periodicals included Moskovskiye Vedomosti, Russky Invalid, Golos, and, most importantly, various Slavophile journals. Tough the Slavophiles were not “democrats” in the sense of supporting popular sovereignty, they nonetheless held certain democratic views because of their relative egalitarianism and support for the “society” as the central subject of national unity. In contrast with their position, Vestʹ supported first of all the interests of the class of land owners and offered the solidarity of all corporations of nobility in Russia as the opposing tendency to the “cesarism” of the Slavophiles. Paradoxically, supporters of the estate system came out victorious in the 20th century and formed the new “imperial” ruling elite - the nomenklatura of the Party. Many of the statements outlined in Vestʹ are now reused in right-liberal discourse, and some scholars view modern Russian society as a continuation of the system of estates.