The motif of the article is to substantiate the thesis that Russian liberalism is an original, self-sustained phenomenon differing in essence from the western analogues. Holding that genuine liberalism may be only conservative, the author argues that the conservative-liberal value system definitively took shape in the beginning of the 20th century in the conception of the authors of the “Vekhi” and was the result of an organic synthesis of the westernists’ and the Slavophils’ ideas. In the author’s estimation, the discrepancies between the Russian and the Western liberals are underlain by the divergence in the interpretation of person, which entailed differences in the approaches to liberty and to correlation of person and society, of person and the state.