Personal rights and freedom were all well and good, but they could not provide the strength and security of the state. Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America, where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own core values. These were patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost—a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries—and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.
