This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (September 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the Russian article.
Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
After translating, {{Translated|ru|Либерализм в России}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance.
This article gives an overview of liberalism in Russia. It is limited to liberalparties with substantial support, namely those that have had a representation in parliament. The sign ⇒ denotes another party in the scheme. The listed parties didn't necessarily label themselves as liberal.
Russian liberals advocate the expansion of political and civil freedoms and mostly opposite to Vladimir Putin. In Russia, the term "liberal" can refer to wide range of politicians – simultaneously to Thatcherism/Reaganomics-related pro-capitalism conservative politicians (they are related to 1990s shock therapy "liberal" reforms), to centre-right liberal politicians (as in European political spectrum) and to left-liberal politicians (as in the US political spectrum). The term "liberal democrats" is often used for members of nationalist far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. There are opposition (Russian opposition) and pro-government (pro-Putin) liberal politicians in Russia. Pro-government liberal politicians support Putin's liberal policy in economics.
After the fall of communism, several new liberal parties were formed, but only one of them Yabloko (Yabloko – Rosiyskaya Demokraticheskaya Partiya, a member of Liberal International) succeeded in becoming a relevant force. This is a left-of-center liberal party. The Union of Right Forces (Soyuz Pravykh Sil, a member of International Democrat Union) is a right-of-center liberal party. It can also be seen as a democratic conservative market party. In this scheme, the party is not included as liberal, being considered a democratic conservative party, but it can also be called liberal because of its pro-free-market and anti-authoritarianism stances. The so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is not at all "liberal" – it is a nationalist, right-wing, populist party.
Solidarnost is a liberal democratic political movement founded in 2008 by a number of well-known members of the liberal democratic opposition, including Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov and others from the Yabloko and former Union of Right Forces (which had just merged with two pro-Kremlin parties).
Republican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party (de facto 2010–)[edit]
Mikhail Speransky is sometimes called the father of Russian liberalism. His ideas were discussed and elaborated by such 19th-century liberal republican radicals as Alexander Herzen, Boris Chicherin, and Konstantin Kavelin. Based on their ideals, various early 20th-century liberal parties evolved, the most important of them being the Constitutional-democratic Party, headed by Pavel Milyukov.
From Liberation Union to Constitutional Democratic Party[edit]
1905: The Liberation Union (Soyuz Osvobozhdeniya) merged with the Union of Zemstvo-Constitutionalists (Soyuz Zemstev-Konstitutsionistov) to form the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Konstitutsiono-Demokraticheskaya Partya), formally known as the Party of Popular Freedom (Partiya Narodnoy Svobody), led by Pavel Milyukov.
1906: A moderate faction of the ⇒ Constitutional Democratic Party formed the Party of Democratic Reform (Partiya Demokraticheskikh Reform).
1912: Merged into the ⇒ Progressive Party.
From Party of Peaceful Renovation to Progressist Party[edit]
1906: A left-wing faction of the Octobrists, together with dissidents of the Constitutional Democratic Party and of the Moderate Progressive Party, established the Party of Peaceful Renovation (Partiya Mirnovo Obnovleniya).
1912: Merged with the ⇒ Party of Democratic Reform into the Progressist Party (Progresivnaya Partiya), led by Georgy Lvov.
1917: Most of the party merged into the ⇒ Constitutional Democratic Party, some continued as the Radical Democratic Party (Radikal'no-Demokraticheskaya Partiya).