Chicherin, Boris Nikolaevich (1828–1904)

Chicherin was a Russian liberal historian of law, a political and religious philosopher and a public figure, who briefly served as Moscow’s elected mayor (1882–3). Before the mid-1860s he advocated ‘conservative-liberalism’, his term for a partnership between strong central government and the educated public designed to promote civil rights and the rule of law. After 1866, he championed constitutional guarantees of individual liberty against state and societal interference, fashioning in the process a Russian version of ‘classical liberalism’. Chicherin was modern Russia’s most significant liberal thinker and one of its most influential philosophers in the Idealist tradition. He is still read today by Russian philosophers and historians of social thought. Moreover, his political ideas gained wide currency among the political elites in the late Soviet period and especially in post-Soviet Russia.