Laws of history

Closing the Book on Russian Liberals

Nearly three years after President Vladimir Putin’s return to the country’s top post, and a year after the annexation of Crimea , Russian authorities seem to have solved their liberal problem once and for all. Up until relatively recently, liberals were useful for a number of reasons: to imitate democracy and political process; to help let off steam; to retain, as strange as it may sound, some element of feedback. But after the new low in relations with the West—unprecedented in probably the past 30 years—there is no need to imitate anything, including the existence of liberal parties, like Mikhail Prokhorov’s Civic Platform, which was recently abandoned by its founder.