A strange reluctance to be free
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.