The article analyzes a particular set of ideas, in which liberalism, conservatism, and deep traditionalism is combined organically with philosophical and political radicalism and utopianism. A key example of this kind of thought is in the works of N. M. Karamzin, the Russian historian and political thinker who continuously vacillated between liberalism and a historically colored conservatism. Karamzin believed that an absolute monarchy could well accept the basic demands of liberalism as a government program or even as the basic principle of a state system without any harm to itself. Such a combination in one person of diametrically opposite trends - liberalism and antiliberalism - already at the stage of the formation of the liberal tradition for Russian social thought was by no means accidental, but rather natural. It is also difficult to give up the impression that ancient utopian ideas, either directly or in the form they took in French revolutionary thought, influenced not only Karamzin but also Muraviev and Pestel, the authors of the first radical constitutional projects. In the end, it can be argued that the ideas of Karamzin not only largely predetermined the nature of the evolution of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism, but were also quite consonant and even natural to the ideas of Kavelin in political, historical and, in a certain sense, purely theoretical aspects, in spite of all their paradoxes. By the early twentieth century in Russian ideological discourse the images of two opposing dangerous alliances appeared, which, undoubtedly, had a direct impact on practical politics. As one of the consequences in the same period, a polemical tradition was completely formed, which can hardly be called a creative dispute. This polemic tradition has survived to the present day, again and again engendering deep skepticism about any real prospects for the implementation of the liberal reform program in modern Russia.