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This chapter provides a brief historical survey of Russian conservative ideology over the past two centuries. It does not purport to reconstruct Russian conservatism as a narrative of conceptual evolution. To be sure, each new generation of conservatives recycled ideological building blocks from the past in order to provide convincing responses to the historical challenges of the moment. However, this chapter emphasizes the importance of the contextual interpretation of conservatism, and therefore depicts conservatism as an ideology concerned primarily with the problem of change, tradition, and cultural authenticity.