Political and intellectual legacy of Nikolai Ivanovich Astrov in Russia and in emigration

Introduction This study aims to reconstruct the political and philosophical legacy of Nikolai I. Astrov, whose work bridges prerevolutionary liberalism and the intellectual traditions of the emigrant community, and to demonstrate how his writings transform the language of administrative service into a philosophy of memory, responsibility, and civic mission. The relevance of the research lies in the need to clarify how liberal ideas and categories of responsibility are reshaped under conditions of institutional collapse and forced displacement. Methods The study is situated within an interdisciplinary framework that integrates tools from memory studies, intellectual history, and conceptual history. The corpus comprises 48 publications, 37 letters, one volume of memoirs, and six public lectures. Qualitative coding and lexico-semantic analysis were applied; Cohen’s κ coefficient reached 0.82, indicating strong inter-coder reliability. Results and discussion The analysis suggests that Astrov articulated a distinctive model of civic identity grounded in the interplay between the ethics of action and archival reflection. The study contributes to scholarship on Russian liberal thought and émigré intellectual history by showing how administrative practice can be reconfigured as a language of ethical responsibility and memorial testimony. The practical value of the study lies in the potential application of its findings in courses on the history of political thought, public history, and the philosophy of memory, as well as in the development of digital cartographies of the intellectual networks of the Russian diaspora.