Rehabilitating the Political Right of Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

Two generations of Russian scholars and public intellectuals have established the importance of the study of the political right (a loose umbrella term covering the ideologies of conservatism, nationalism, monarchism, and the populist radical right), not only for its time and place, but also for its enduring resonance in Russian political culture. The recent scholarly study of the political right has been a mix of detached, balanced discovery of a piece of Russia’s political heritage and a sympathetic rehabilitation of ideas and personages long vilified or sent to scholarly oblivion. This issue of our journal features the work of contemporary Russian historians on the politics and ideology of the prerevolutionary political right. Coupled with our previous issue on Russian conservatism, the purpose of the present issue is to capture an important historiographical and political moment in the early 2000s in post-Soviet Russia. Initially, scholars and pundits alike focused on rediscovering political ideas and movements that had been denigrated or ignored for generations, thereby making the study of the political right “normal.” Beginning in the 1990s, when many political organizations and parties, as well as politicians, sprouted in post-Soviet Russia, important monographs on conservative organizations and political parties as well as biographies of leading figures of the political right deepened an understanding of the place of the right in Russian political and intellectual life and social movements. Along the way came several valuable collections of documents, republication of writings of the leading conservative ideologues, anthologies of sources, and useful reference works. Finally, making extensive use of local archives and the local press, regional research has given spatial specificity to right-wing movements. Beginning in roughly 2000, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and pundits built an infrastructure for the research and dissemination of conservative views consisting of centers, serial publications, and websites with varying degrees of activity and regularity, thereby expanding the reach of the study of the political right. Several websites combine nonacademic RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY 2021, VOL. 59, NOS. 1–2, 1–9 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611983.2021.1956271