of the parties giving various degrees of support to the President.Boris Yeltsin himself was blamed by some journalists for theoutcome, in particular for not giving more support to Russia’sChoice, the only bloc committed to continuing economic reformsat a fast pace.Although this is not the place for a full analysis of the electionresults, or indeed of Russia’s Choice, we may approach at leastsome of the issues involved by turning our attention to acontradiction between the party’s symbol—Peter the Great—andits motto—Liberty, Property, Legality. In reality, Peter the Great whoruled Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century had littleto do with the introduction of these three concepts, all of whichmade their first clear appearance there in the second half of theeighteenth century.‘Freedom and liberty’ make their first appearance in a decreeissued on 18 February 1762, granted by Tsar Peter III to the nobility.Even then, several strings remained attached, as may be seen inthe decree’s last words, commanding all the Emperor’s ‘obedientand true sons to despise and scorn’ those who evaded his service:such defaulters would ‘not be allowed to appear at Our Court, orat public meetings and celebrations’. A dozen or so years later, afalse ‘Peter in’ (in fact a Cossack named Pugachev masqueradingas the Emperor who had been murdered in the summer of 1762and replaced by Catherine II) rewarded his followers in a majorpeasant uprising with the same ‘freedom and liberty’ among othergifts, while giving the order in his edict of 31 July 1774 thatthose who were formerly nobles in their estates, theseopponents of our authority and disturbers of the empireand destroyers of the peasants catch, execute and hangand treat in the same way as they, not having Christianity,have dealt with you, the peasants.Arguably, the contradiction between two such views of freedomreached its climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917: certainly, wemay already see some of the distinctive features of Russian historyas a whole in the decrees of 1762 and 1774.2These two same documents may be used to illustrate conceptsof property as well as of freedom. Of the first of them, RichardPipes wrote in 1959: ‘Altogether, it is difficult to exaggerate theimportance of the edict of 1762 for Russia’s social and cultural