EDITORIAL PAGE — A new dawn in Russia

In 1830, Russian intellectual Peter Chaadayev wrote a series of provocative essays which caught the attention of Nicholas Nadeshdin, publisher of the St.

Petersburg journal Telescope. Nadeshdin had time to publish only the first of Chaadayev’s “Philosophical Letters” before he was exiled and his journal shut down. The hapless Chaadayev fared little better; at the command of Tsar Nicholas I, he was pronounced insane and placed under medical supervision.

Chaadayev’s “crime” was to examine the common bonds that united the peoples of Europe and then publicly praise the West’s patrimony of inherited ideas.

“There [in Western Europe], each individual is in full possession of the common heritage and, without difficulty or effort, gathers to himself those notions which have been scattered throughout society, and profits from them,” he wrote. “Do you want to know what those ideas are? They are the concepts of duty, justice, law and order.”

The intellectuals of the day soon found that while it was acceptable to praise the scientific progress and material prowess of the West, it was heresy to look outside of Russia for spiritual, moral and intellectual values. It was feared that such ideas would subvert autocracy and Orthodoxy and undermine the prevailing Slavophile sentiment that Russian peasants should not be educated or raised from poverty because this would corrode their inherent piety and pureness of soul.

Russia has spent most of this century trying to suppress “subversive” Western ideas, such as democracy, free enterprise and the freedoms of religion, speech and assembly. The notion of individual rights never took hold in Russia; it was first sacrificed to autocracy and, later, repressed by the collective. But, as many a dictator has found, nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

While Russia is in the midst of an economic and political renaissance, it has come with a price. Many Russians, seeing market forces in action for the first time, despair over the associated rise in crime and lawlessness. It is no comfort to tell them that the dawn of capitalism, in both Great Britain and in a young North America, also had its dark side; complete with robber-barons, organized crime and the grim living standards described in Charles Dickens’ novels. Sitting back and waiting for the evolutionary process to unfold will not solve Russia’s immediate problems.

Fortunately, Russia has an educated population and a vibrant intellectual community that finally has a role to play in political life. The doors are open to the ideas and principles that Chaadayev and other Russians believed should be used to lay the foundation of a modern nation.

In Russia’s past, wars and revolution were the only agents of change. Today, as in other parts of the world, the primary agent of change is trade.

Economic co-operation between Russia and Canada, for example, is already leading to several initiatives, including one in which the Canadian government is taking part in a legal reform program. Supported by the Canadian International Development Agency, this initiative will result in Canadian legal experts working with their Russian counterparts to modify Russia’s civil code.

This project is aimed at reforming the commercial provisions of the civil code to ensure a more stable, predictable business and investment environment in the country.

We think Chaadeyev might have approved.