Critics of Democracy in the Russian Empire: Residual Political Culture or Alternative Political Imagination for Pluralistic Space

The paper will survey various critical views of democracy expressed in intellectual debates and later in public and parliamentary politics of the Russian Empire. It will map the historical semantics of the concept, taking into account that in the course of the XIX century it traveled from a liberal-constitutional meaning to a social designation of emerging bourgeois society. For understanding of the history of the concept of democracy in Russian political discourse the author will rely on Geoff Eley innovative account of the emergence of the paradigm of democracy with the help of social movements and questions. The paper will highlight one aspects in the concept of democracy that is usually overlooked: the homogenizing features of participatory political regime which makes democracy intimately tied to the concept of nation and nation-state. Surveying the map of critical charges against the concept of democracy, the paper will try to ascertain which of the charges were inspired by the conservative ideology and which were insured by the critique of nation-centered biases of democracy and a belief in diversity as the key feature of the Russian imperial space.