Writing to Joshua Speed in 1855, Abraham Lincoln claimed that if Americans continued to make exceptions to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].” For other disappointed Westerners, however, Russia has been seen not as a paragon of servitude but as an object of fascination and even as a potential savior. In the 1930s, many left-wing intellectuals were bamboozled by Stalin's professed attempt to build a socialist utopia. Today, Putin's self-presentation as a defender of traditional values appeals to certain segments of the right. As Isaac Nakhimovsky's study of the Holy Alliance shows, this tendency of the Western mind to discover in the land of the tsars a vehicle for the fulfillment of its moral hopes is nothing new, and its persistence says more about the unresolved tensions in our liberal politics than it does about the reality of Russian autocracy.

Created by the monarchs of Russia, Prussia, and Austria after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the Holy Alliance promised to end great power rivalries through “the application of Christian moral principles to politics” (2). As Nakhimovsky's impeccably re