The Crisis of Liberal Legal Culture in Russia after 1905: ‘The Pedagogy of Freedoms’ and Legal Literacy

Mass political literature was born in Russia during the 1905 Revolution. Individual freedoms and their place in the law were one of its important topics. The booklets that dealt with this subject amounted to some sort of pedagogy of freedoms. This pedagogy shows the vitality of the liberal legal culture of the time, which centered on the universal value of individual rights, as well as on the primacy of the law. In 1917, this pedagogy of freedoms was used again, almost unchanged, but it was overwhelmed by other, more specifically targeted discourses, sinking the universal stance. This gap between the two streams of literature in 1917 is due to a problem that affected the liberal juridical culture after the 1905 Revolution. There was an inconsistency between the teaching of freedoms, on the one hand, and of the law on the other hand. This tension is underlined by B. Kistiakovskii’s contribution to the 1909 Vekhi collection, even if he was unwilling to own such a discrepancy in the liberal pedagogical project. Kistiakovskii did suggest strengthening the said project by reinforcing the influence of professional lawyers. However, this solution encountered many obstacles, and the method of popularization, heretofore the most typical way of meeting the Russian elite’s demand of legal culture, was almost entirely abandoned by the liberals. This allows us to understand why the pedagogy of freedoms in 1917 was nothing but a sterile repetition of an outdated discourse.