In the last quarter of the twentieth century the reputation of Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin underwent a remarkable revival, both in Russia and the West. Already before the collapse of the Soviet Union Chicherin fascinated those Soviet philosophers of law who sought stealthily to combine civil liberties with state power. That fascination, masked by an accompanying critique of Chicherin's bourgeois liberalism, was expressed in an important 1975 book by Valerii Dimitrievich Zor'kin. The collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, the unexpected elevation of Zor'kin to the post of chief justice of the Russian Constitutional Court, the broad search by intellectuals for new ways to combine freedom and authority in the post-Soviet era, and a general scholarly reconsideration of the Russian national tradition in philosophy—all these factors contributed indirectly to the new interest in Chicherin's political thinking.

At the beginning of the new millennium...