P.N. Milyukov in the 20-30s of the 20th Century: Final Assessments of the “Bolshevik Experiment”

The article examines the evolution of the views and forecasts of P.N. Milyukov, a prominent Russian politician, historian, and representative of Russian left-wing liberalism, regarding Russias development in the 1920s and 1930s, based on publications in the Parisian newspaper “Latest News”. It is revealed that he predicted the inevitable demise of the Bolshevik regime due to the contradictions between the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the socioeconomic model. However, I.V. Stalin and the elite did not wait for popular uprisings to sweep away the ruling regime; instead, they began to create an isolated economic system based on the enslavement of the Russian peasantry. The Soviet economy in the 1930s operated outside all economic laws and was unprofitable, costly, and ineffective. The Bolshevik regime gradually degenerated into Stalinist despotism. According to P.N. Milyukov, the emerging society had nothing in common with the social ideal of V.I. Lenin. Nevertheless, the researcher did not deny the gigantic civilizational shift in Russian industry and agriculture and called this society socialist, despite all its contradictions. The analysis conducted by P.N. Milyukov in the 1920s and 1930s remains relevant in the first quarter of the 21st century.