Suffering Victory: Soviet Liberals and the Failure of Democracy in Russia, 1987–1993 by GuillaumeSauvé. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, 2025. 258 pp. $31.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐50

Guillaume Sauvé has written an impressive and nuanced analysis of broadly liberal thinking published in the Soviet Union during the perestroika period and in the immediate post-Soviet years. The book’s paradoxical title derives from a remark by Otto Latsis, “We suffered victory,” which refers to the switch in support of numerous liberal intellectuals in the last years of the Soviet Union from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin and the subsequent “unconditional support” of many of them for post-Soviet Yeltsin as “the person who could defeat the ‘Red-Brown’ reactionary forces” (pp. 2, 165). That, however, meant tarring the intellectuals with the brush of Russia’s unpopular economic reforms that triggered extremes of inequality, plunged millions into poverty, and linked the liberals with “the rule of a corrupt and predatory elite” (p. 165). This contributed to these intellectuals’ subsequent political marginalization. Sauvé delineates in some detail the distinctive views of a variety of influential Russian “liberal” tendencies, while focusing especially on six people: two historians, Iurii Afanas'ev and Leonid Batkin; two literary critics, Iurii Burtin and Iurii Kariakin; the journalist Len Karpinskii; and the physicist and longstanding dissident Andrei Sakharov. His concern is not with their specialisms but with their publisistika and political interventions. Sakharov is the sole representative of the sciences in this select group. Publications of liberals and democrats from other professional backgrounds are relatively neglected by Sauvé, including the significant contributions to political discourse of social scientists, jurists, and mezhdunarodniki (international relations and area studies specialists). That is not a criticism of the book, but a pointer to the scope that still exists for further study of the ideational innovation of the perestroika years. The author seems to be most in sympathy with Batkin’s combination of moral seriousness and pragmatism, as compared with Burtin’s moral absolutism. Sauvé notes that for Batkin “democracy is not the triumph of truth over falsehood” but the institutionalization of “inevitable public contestation” (p. 180). No one leader, Batkin observed, can embody democracy or be entitled to decree what is true and what is false. It is “terribly dangerous” if someone is “in charge of determining the criteria that make it possible to distinguish truth from its distortions.” It is better, wrote Batkin, “for everyone to be able to lie and for everyone to be able to denounce the lie” (p. 180). In spite of his relative neglect of social scientists’ contributions, Sauvé does bring in economists when they contribute to the thick literary journals or weeklies. He correctly notes the huge impression made by Nikolai Shmelev’s eloquent advocacy of the market, and of the universality of economic laws, in Novyi Mir in 1987. He discusses also the contribution of economists Yegor Gaidar and Anatolii Chubais to systemic transformation of the Russian economy, noting the political cover Yeltsin provided for them. “Yeltsin did not hesitate,” writes Sauvé, “to use authoritarian measures to carry out unpopular economic reforms,” while being careful to declare his “allegiance to democratic principles” (p. 139). Sauvé devotes useful attention to the arguments of Andranik Migranian and Igor Kliamkin in favor of an “enlightened absolutism” that would give priority to implementing radical marketizing economic reform over democratization. Drawing attention to Migranian speaking positively of Stalin as “the only one able to contain the bureaucracy’s omnipotence” and of “the state’s totalitarian domination” being “consolidated” only “after the Twentieth Party Congress,” Sauvé observes that “this is surprising, to say the least, coming from a liberal intellectual of that time” (p. 130). Incompatible with classification as a liberal would be another way of putting it. Migranian is credited by Sauvé with rather more originality than he was due for distinguishing authoritarianism from totalitarianism (and not very well, judging by his remark about the Twentieth Congress) and democratization from democracy, both being commonplace distinctions in Western political science, with which Migranian had some familiarity. Linguistic innovation can have enormous political significance in a highly ideologized authoritarian system. Sauvé credits economist Gavriil Popov with being the first, in April 1987, to blame the administrative system (or administrative-command system, as it quickly became known) for many of the Soviet Union’s troubles. Essentially, this meant the Communist system, but it was too early to say that publicly. However, a pejorative labeling of the system was a very large step—qualitatively different from pre-perestroika writing about “shortcomings.” Gorbachev embraced the new terminology. Speaking candidly with Margaret Thatcher in December 1987, he even went a bit further, telling her that up to the present “we have not been able to cross the threshold beyond the Stalinist system of administrative government.” Sauvé cites comparative research showing that “citizens who do not experience political alternation through elections lose faith in their ability to influence political outcomes and consequently tend to favor patriarchal forms of participation, such as writing complaints and supplications to the authorities, leaving the elites unconstrained” (p. 166). Therefore, he argues, “Russians’ acquiescence to democratic erosion in subsequent years need not be traced back to an alleged atavistic legacy of apathy inherited from Soviet times—an assumption spectacularly contradicted during perestroika” (p. 166). Most of the intellectuals about whom Sauvé writes are now dead and those who are left have largely fallen into obscurity. It was, however, eminently worthwhile returning to their arguments. This well-written book should stimulate further work on the political thinking of the perestroika era.