The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674333192, 9780674333185

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THE FORMATION OF POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE FIRST NATIONAL ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA

The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia Terence Emmons

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1983

Copyright © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Publication of this b o o k was assisted by a grant from the Publications P r o g r a m of the National E n d o w m e n t for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Emmons, Terence. The formation of political parties and the first national elections in Russia. Includes bibliographical references and index. Konstituisionno-demokraticheskaia partiia—History. 2. Soiuz 17 oktiabria (Russia)—History. 3. Elections—Soviet Union—History. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1894-1917. I. Title J N 6 5 9 8 . K 9 5 E 4 7 1983 324.24702 82-15804 ISBN 0 - 6 7 4 - 3 0 9 3 5 - 9 1.

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Preface The old regime survived longer in Russia than in any other European state, and when the end came the outcome was not only uncommonly violent but radically different in character from that of the other European countries where divine-right absolute monarchy had been challenged by civil society in the name of popular sovereignty: neither a full-fledged constitutional order as in England and France, nor the Scheinkonstitutionalismus of post1848 Germany and Austria, but a truly new departure—"the first socialist state." The standard chronology of Soviet historiography notwithstanding, there never was a "bourgeois revolution" in Russia: the old regime, shaken but not fundamentally altered by the revolutionary challenge of 1905-1907, finally succumbed to the combined opposition or indifference of most of the significant social groups in the country and was succeeded after eight months, during which unified state authority essentially disappeared, by the Soviet regime, which consolidated its authority in the course of a long and bloody civil war and exists to this day. It has been widely, if not universally, conceded that the chances for a moderate, "European" issue from the crisis of the Russian old regime were remote by 1914, and by 1917, after nearly three years of total war had led to extreme dislocations in the political and economic orders, perhaps altogether excluded. There was, however, a brief period at the beginning of the general crisis of the old regime—roughly bounded by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904 at its outset and the Stolypin coup d'état of June 1907 at its close—when such a solution seemed a real possibility. This book concentrates on that period, with some forays into preceding developments, occasionally going as far back as the period of reforms in the 1860s. More specifically, this book is concerned with two distinct but directly related subjects: the process of political-party formation that took place in the course of the Revolution of 1905 and on into 1906, and the first national elections, which were held in the spring of 1906. In regard to the first of these subjects, the study addresses a variety of questions: How did the various political organizations come into being and ultimately coalesce into parties, in some cases even before October 17, 1905, under a regime that until then not only lacked a national parliament (the radiating source of most parties in the history of Europe and America), but prohibited any manner of political organizing? And why did these specific parties with their specific strategies and programs come into existence, rather than others, more or fewer, with different aims? What were the structures of these

viii

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parties like, both in terms of organization and of membership, and what were the sources of their support in Russian society? In regard to the second subject, the study analyzes, first of all, the role of the political parties in the first elections, when the population of the empire was first called upon to express its political will; but it also examines the electoral process in general, for what it has to reveal about political attitudes prevailing among major social groups and, in small measure at least, about the character of those groups themselves. To the extent permitted by the sources, the study examines the election campaigning, the electoral process itself, and its results for the entirety of European Russia (fifty provinces plus the Don Cossack Territory), where the vast majority of the empire's population lived. The focus throughout the study is on the "constitutionalists"; that is, those elements of the mobilized population committed to introducing a constitutional order in Russia, one in which political authority would be controlled by law and representative institutions, a national parliament in the first place. ("Liberalism" as used here applies to a considerable part of the constitutionalist movement but is not coextensive with it.) Accordingly, the "parties" dealt with here are those that were conceived to pursue goals—political, social, or economic—through electoral and parliamentary politics, as opposed to those "parties" that sought to organize the masses for revolutionary action, on the one hand, or for the purpose of restoring "true autocracy," on the other. Although the focus is on the constitutionalists, other political formations to their right and left are considered in the process of establishing the part of the political spectrum that was occupied by the constitutionalist movement, its boundaries in the body politic. At the same time, considerable attention is paid to the demarcation lines that separated the several constitutionalist organizations one from the other. In concrete terms, this focus means that the study concentrates on the Constitutional-Democratic party, the Union of October 17, and their respective allies around the country. Through examination of the formative development of constitutionalist groups and parties in the process of rapid political mobilization leading up to the first national elections and through analysis of the elections themselves, the book assesses the forces existing in prerevolutionary Russia that favored resolution of the constitutional crisis in the direction of a European-type parliamentary order, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of why they failed and, thereby, of shedding some more light on the nature of the Russian Revolution. This study may be distinguished from earlier works on Russian constitutionalism and liberalism, and political parties, by two principal characteristics: (1) its attempt to explore in detail the social forces that supported a constitutional order in Russia before 1917; and (2) its treatment of the entire segment of the political spectrum occupied by the

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ix

constitutionalists, as opposed to the history of single parties. Finally, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the first national elections in Russia. The study of party formation in Russia is not only of strictly historical interest. As recent developments in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece have shown, the appearance of new parties in countries with nonexistent or atrophied political-party traditions is a matter of contemporary significance. The problem is of interest in contemplating possibilities for political development in what have come to be known as "the one-party states," including Poland, of course, but also the Soviet Union, where, and in regard to which, there has recently been much speculation about the possible social and institutional foundations for a political opposition. This is not meant as a predictive statement, although the historian of early twentieth-century Russia must, I think, find certain parallels between the political situation in the Soviet Union today and that which obtained under the old regime on the eve of the Revolution of 1905. In the preparation of this study I have enjoyed help from many quarters. Among institutional sources, I shall mention only those without whose support its execution would have been quite impossible: the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program, for support of research in the Soviet Union in 1970-71 and 1978; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for a fellowship in 1 9 7 3 - 7 4 ; the American Council of Learned Societies, for a fellowship in 1 9 7 4 - 7 5 ; the International Research and Exchanges Board, IREX, for making it possible to spend several extended periods of time in Soviet archives and libraries over the last decade; and Stanford University, including the Hoover Institution, for its help in a variety of ways too numerous to mention. Thanks are due Robert H. McNeal for permission to reproduce the map of provincial divisions in European Russia, 1905, from Sergei Pushkarev, The Emergence of Modern Russia, 1801-1917 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963; reissued Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1982). I am most grateful to those colleagues working on related subjects who without exception generously shared the unpublished results of their research: Michael Brainerd, Gilbert Doctorow, Robert Edelman, Nancy Frieden, Raúl Garcia, Roberta Thompson Manning, Bertrand Patenaude, V. V. Shelokhaev, P. I. Shlerain, and Nathan Smith. Among the many persons to whom I am deeply grateful for assistance and counsel on this project, special thanks are due to my beloved teacher Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii and to Kornelii Fedorovich Shatsillo, in their several capacities as mentors, colleagues, and intercessors on my scholarly behalf during my visits to Moscow; to Leopold Haimson, Michael Confino, and W. H. Roobol, who read the entire manuscript in its penultimate draft and showered me with wise criticism, some of which I

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Preface

have taken to heart; to Robert Edelman, Gary Hamburg, and Mark von Hägen, who read parts of the work and offered sound advice; to Maria Griaznoff, my assistant at the Russian Review, who cheerfully took on far more than her share of the work and responsibility for the journal while its editor was physically or mentally in absentia working on this project; to Hilja Kukk and Wojciech Zalewski, of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University libraries, respectively, for their imaginative and determined pursuit of bibliographical rarities on my behalf; to Betty Herring, who typed the manuscript with virtually unerring accuracy and intelligence; to my colleague Wayne Vucinich, who helped me in many ways; and, last but not least, to Victoria Emmons, who helped me in more ways than she knew.

Contents Introduction

1

Part I. The Formation of Political Parties 1. 2.

The Constitutional-Democratic Party and "L'ouverture à Gauche" The Union of October 17 and Its Allies: Raznosherstnaia Kompaniia

21 89

Part II. The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign 3. 4.

The Kadet Bloc The Octobrist Bloc

145 206

Part III. The First National Elections 5. 6. 7.

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections and Special City Elections Phase II: The Provincial Elections Results and Prospects Abbreviations Appendix. Party Alignments of Zemstvo Activists, 1905-1906 A Note on Literature and Sources Notes Index

237 294 353 382 383 398 402 509

La Providence n'a créé le genre humain ni entièrement indépendant, ni tout à fait esclave. Elle trace, il est vrai, autour de chaque homme, un cercle fatal dont il ne peut sortir; mais, dans ses vastes limites, l'homme est puissant et libre; ainsi des peuples. Alexis de Tocqueville

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Introduction Constitutions in almost all states have been introduced at various times, in bits and pieces, and for the most part amidst violent political upheavals. The Russian Constitution will owe its inception not to the inflaming of passions and extremity of circumstances, but to the virtuous inspiration of the Supreme Authority, who, in ordering the political life of his people, is fully capable of endowing it with proper forms. M. M. Speranskii

Every attempt to introduce West European parliamentary forms of government into Russia is doomed to failure. If the tsarist regime is overthrown, its place will be taken by pure undisguised communism, the communism of Mr. Karl Marx who has just died in London and whose theories I have studied with attention and interest. D. A. Tolstoi

I came to understand—not for my own sake, of course, but for Russia's— that a constitution, if introduced now, would place the country in the same situation as Austria. What with the people's lack of culture, our national borderlands, the Jewish question, and so on, only autocracy can save Russia. What's more, the muzhik won't understand a constitution; he will understand only one thing: that they have tied the tsar's hands. And then— my felicitations, gentlemen! Nicholas II

" T h e fundamental, and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow tempo of her development, with the economic backwardness, primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting from i t . " 1 So begins the introductory chapter, entitled "Peculiarities of Russian Development," of Trotsky's famous history of the Russian Revolution. It had become c o m m o n p l a c e long before Trotsky w r o t e those words to explain things about Russia in terms of its historical backwardness and peculiarities—for Russia, it seemed, was not only backward, but backward in a peculiar w a y . 2 F r o m the perspective of European history, the most striking long-term features of Russian peculiarity were the hypertrophy of state power, the survival into the twentieth century of a social structure still largely

2

Introduction

dominated by orders, or hereditary estates, and, relatedly, the relatively weak development and lack of independence of civil society. The transition from a society of orders to a class society had begun, essentially, only with the abolition of serfdom in 1861; it was far from completed, and in some important respects not far advanced, when Russia entered the new century. According to the commonly used criteria, Russia was still a "traditional society" at the beginning of this century: the bulk of the population earned its livelihood in agriculture and lived in villages rather than towns.3 Although the first national census of 1897, which recorded an urban population of only 13.4 percent of total, failed to accurately reflect recent advances in urban development and nonagricultural economic activity, the fact remains that over three fourths of Russia's 129 million inhabitants were peasants (krest'iane) who lived in village communities, occupied mainly with agriculture on land held, for the most part, in communal tenure. Four fifths of the 97 million members of the peasant estate were still illiterate in 1897. The peasants had been relieved of a number of legal disabilities in the emancipation and succeeding reforms, and enjoyed a modicum of participation in local self-administration with other social groups, but for the most part they were administered as an order apart in their villages and volosts,4 and justice in most matters was dispensed for them in separate peasant courts. Administratively, legally, and, insofar as subsistence farming was still widespread, to a considerable extent economically, the mass of the peasantry lived in isolation from the rest of the population. The most significant inroads into peasant isolation were linked to the spread of literacy, which was making rapid headway among village youth by the end of the century, and to urban-industrial development. The industrial labor force was drawn in the early stages of industrialization primarily from the communal peasantry of the central provinces, which was suffering from acute land shortage and underemployment by the end of the nineteenth century. The number of workers in manufacturing, mining, and metallurgy had doubled in the 1890s, reaching about 2.5 million by 1900. Industrial workers from the peasantry remained peasants in the eyes of the law, and, indeed, they generally maintained ties with the village; many even retained farming allotments. The same was true of many workers employed in a variety of other nonagricultural pursuits, such as transport, road work, commerce, and domestic service. By the end of the nineteenth century a patent of hereditary nobility (dvorianstvo) was a much less reliable indicator of occupation, education, and general social position than was membership in the peasant estate. Only slightly more than half the hereditary noble families who together made up less than 1 percent of the country's population still owned landed estates, and these were extremely diversified in size and value.5 The rest were divorced from the land altogether—either the descendants of families whose holdings had been decimated by inheritance practices or sale, or members of

Introduction

3

families ennobled through state service that had never had land—and were engaged in a variety of occupations, including state service (civil and military) and the rapidly growing "free" professions (law, medicine, journalism, and so forth). State service and other occupations were also widely engaged in, often out of economic necessity, by nobles whose families still had land. Despite this diversity, nobility—with or without land and regardless of wealth—carried a number of privileges. Nobles still enjoyed preferential access to the higher levels of the educational system, and they still enjoyed a near-monopoly in the upper echelons of the state administration and the officers' corps.6 Better-off landed nobles dominated the zemstvos, the organs of limited local self-administration, and, through their provincial noble corporations, played a major role in the general administration of the provinces: the provincial marshal of nobility was ex officio a high functionary at the top of the provincial administration, and the district marshal was the most important representative of government authority in the district.7 Because of the nobles' preferential access to education and the alacrity with which they took advantage of it in the course of the nineteenth century, a sizable proportion of the educated elite and the "white-collar class" as a whole—the intelligentsia in the broadest sense—was of noble origin. The total size of the intelligentsia so defined was about 726,000, or 0.6 percent of the total population in 1897. There were then about 90,000 graduates of tertiary educational institutions in the country (mostly from the seven established universities, which had begun to turn out significant numbers of graduates by midcentury; higher technical schools began to be an important factor in education only at the end of the nineteenth century). The number of graduates of secondary institutions stood at about 675,000. The large majority—about 75 percent—of university graduates were nobles, as were about a third of all secondary-school graduates (and a much higher proportion of graduates of the university-preparatory gymnasia).8 While the variety and size of the free professions were growing rapidly by the end of the nineteenth century, so too was the state bureaucracy. The proportion of the educated minority that was employed in some form of state service was very high—perhaps as high as half the total group.9 Because of the well-known peculiarities of Russian industrial development, particularly the leading roles played by the Russian state and by foreign entrepreneurs and capital, and the related concentration of production in a few very large enterprises, the spurt in industrial growth that got under way in the 1890s was not accompanied by the rise of a numerous and influential native commercial-industrial bourgeoisie. The Russians who became directors and shareholders of the new enterprises and investment banks were mostly "new men" without family fortunes who owed their positions to technical skills or government connections. Many were technically trained Petersburg civil servants. The established Moscow

4

Introduction

merchantry, which had accumulated considerable wealth in textile production and a few other branches of manufacturing, had quickly accommodated itself to the new conditions by branching out into new types of production and by forming family-dominated joint-stock companies, but its numbers were small and it was heavily dependent on the state both for contracts and for regulation of labor relations. 10 Russian civil society (obshchestvo) at the turn of the century was thus not only small as a proportion of the total population, but its capacity for action independent of the state, not to mention in opposition to the state, appeared to be extremely limited because of its links to privileged noble status, its dependence on the state for employment, and its lack of control over major economic processes. Nevertheless, the main constituent elements of civil society were mobilized in opposition to the regime coincidentally with the emergence of an urban mass movement, which was spearheaded by the still small but partially politicized and strategically located industrial labor force, and by widespread spontaneous peasant disorders in the countryside. Through this unique concatenation of events, Russian obshchestvo was able to extract from the autocracy in October 1905 the promise of constitutional reform, including an elected parliament with legislative authority and, for the first time in the country's long history, toleration of open political-party activity. A constitutional-reform movement and a socialist revolutionary movement had coexisted in Russia since the 1860s, when the state itself had undermined the foundations of the old order by abolishing serfdom and instituting a number of other reforms. Both movements from the beginning consciously drew on the European revolutionary tradition in their challenges to the legitimacy of the old regime. The constitutional-reform movement was gotten under way by representatives of the landed nobility in their confrontation with the government over the issue of emancipation and how it was to be carried out, and was then carried over into the zemstvos, the organs of limited local self-administration that were brought into existence in 1864; they were generally dominated, especially at the provincial level, by nobles. Although support for constitutional reform in the zemstvos fluctuated over time, it remained a minority movement there until the end of the nineteenth century. 11 The Russian revolutionary movement took its inspiration more or less directly from the European revolutionary left of 1848. The first attempts to organize for revolutionary action came in the reform era, in anticipation that the government's conservatively motivated, cautious reforms would set off a broad popular movement, if not a peasant rebellion. It was sustained at first by intelligentsia youth, mostly of noble origin, in and around the universities. For the first two decades, the reformers and the revolutionaries essentially went their separate ways. Until the assassination of Alexander II

Introduction

5

in 1881, the Russian left was generally negatively disposed toward "mere" political reforms (a lesson drawn, in part, from the experience of the left in the revolutions of 1848) and tended to associate constitutionalism with "capitalism" and "the bourgeoisie," toward whose specters the peasantophile radical intelligentsia youth, who were already reading Marx after their own fashion, were as inhospitably disposed as they were toward the realities of the autocracy. 12 Following the failure of the populists' terrorist strategy, which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II and the onset of a prolonged period of political reaction instead of the regime's capitulation to direct popular sovereignty for which they had naively hoped, the idea of uniting revolutionaries and reformers in a struggle for the limited goal of constitutional reform gradually gained ground among the remnants of the revolutionary movement surviving in European emigration, especially with the spread among them of the influence of orthodox Marxism (orthodox in the sense that Marx's views on the past and future development of European society were held to be applicable in their essentials to Russia as well). The influence of Marxism became very widespread in Russian intellectual circles in the mid-1890s, when the advent of rapid industrial development seemed to confirm that Russia's was not be be a separate path of development as the populists had hoped. By this time, even the keepers of the populist faith in exile in London began to propagate the idea of a joint effort with the reformers for a constitution as a necessary precondition for advancement toward changes in the social and economic spheres. Inside Russia this confluence of opinion led to the formation in the mid1890s of the short-lived "People's Rights party," which brought together old revolutionaries returned from exile and younger intellectuals of various ideological persuasions (primarily Marxist and populist) for the purpose of uniting all oppositionist groups in the country for the overthrow of autocracy and the establishment of a constitutionalist regime.13 A stimulus to this convergence of opinion about the possibility of such a movement was the growing perception toward the end of the century, as Leopold Haimson has observed, of the emergence of an independent civil society (obshchestvo) which was generally hostile toward the existing regime. 14 The reality behind this perception was the consolidation by about this time of a rudimentary professional middle class (the product of the regime's considerable investment in higher education over the preceding decades and of the country's economic development) and the pressure for political participation that naturally accompanied it; simultaneously, there developed a general trend in state policy, set under way after the death of Alexander II and continuing through the reign of Alexander III (1881— 1894) and the first decade of the reign of Nicholas II, that was hostile not only toward expansion of political participation but also toward manifestations of public initiative in a wide range of ostensibly nonpolitical areas of

6

Introduction

culture, education, and popular welfare. 15 A crucial, but by no means the exclusive, bone of contention between most of the emergent civil society and the state bureaucracy was the latter's industrialization policies, directed since 1892 by Sergei Witte, minister of finance. With their concentration of state resources, largely derived from taxation of the agrarian sector, on heavy industrial development, these policies were widely opposed in educated society, from populist intellectuals at one extreme to large landowners at the other. The tax pressure exerted on the peasantry by these policies was very widely blamed for setting off the famine and cholera epidemic in east-central Russia in 1891-92, the major public scandal of the 1890s. The industrial downturn that set in at the turn of the century (19001903) and then, in 1902, the first large-scale peasant disturbances since the 1870s (in Poltava and Kharkov provinces) accelerated the sense of urgency and broadened the ranks of the discontented to include, among others, many formerly passive noble landowners. Considering the conditions prevailing in Russia prior to 1905, it is not surprising that it was the most radical opponents of the regime who were first to organize for the political struggle—clandestinely and, in the beginning, for the most part abroad. By definition, only "professional revolutionaries" could take the risk and time required for such activity. By the time the crisis of the old regime was sufficiently advanced to propel significant numbers of "nonprofessionals" into political action, the revolutionary organizations were already relatively well established, at least in their leadership groups and programs. After an abortive first attempt as early as 1898, the Marxist Social Democratic party was established shortly after the turn of the century by pioneers of the Russian Marxist movement together with those converts of the 1890s who were devoted to mobilizing the working class for revolutionary action. They were stimulated to organize by the appearance in 1896-97 of the first manifestations of mass working-class strike activity, and by the simultaneous development of revisionist views among other Marxist intellectuals. The populist Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) founded their party in short order (they first proclaimed the existence of a party at the end of 1901), partly in reaction to the organizing activity of the Social Democrats (SDs) and, by 1902, under the stimulus of the revival of peasant activity. Because of the necessarily underground and elitist character of their activities and their doctrinal stances, neither of the revolutionary parties was able to attract more than a small portion of the intelligentsia with socialist sympathies, let alone the broader ranks of the educated minority, which were now too numerous and ideologically differentiated for any single party, or two parties, to encompass. These circumstances gave rise to a new and unique organization

Introduction

7

(modeled nevertheless to a considerable extent on the revolutionary parties), the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia), which set itself the task of mobilizing into the struggle against the autocratic regime the widest range possible of civil society—from the socialist-oriented "democratic intelligentsia" on the left to the gentry zemstvo constitutionalists on the right. Lacking any narrow ideological program, or rather desisting from the elaboration of one because of the ideological diversity of its membership, the Union of Liberation had succeeded to a remarkable extent in its task by early 1905, stimulating organized demands for constitutional reform in the zemstvos and among the professional intelligentsia; and the united-front strategy of the Liberationists was accepted, although not without reservations and concern for their own organizational and ideological independence, by the revolutionary parties. A sort of concord on first political objectives was reached, with the result that a considerable part of Russian obshchestvo was now mobilized to press the demand for constitutional reform. Under the stimulus of this broad, if irregular, movement on the one hand, and the increasingly evident inability of the regime either to prosecute the war with Japan into which it had stumbled in January 1904 or to deal with mounting urban and rural violence at home, by the early months of 1905 even traditionally conservative Russian industrialists and the provincial noble corporations had been at least partially mobilized into the opposition. The culmination of the "liberation movement" came with massive strike activity beginning in September 1905, which yielded by the second week of October the country's first general strike, in which virtually all of industry, the communications and service sectors, the professions, the schools, and even many government offices were closed down. Faced with the nearly unanimous opposition of civil society, a workingclass strike movement that supported society's political demands (in addition to pressing its own economic demands), and an unprecedented level of peasant disorders in the countryside (which had also begun to accelerate rapidly in September in response to the breakdown of order in the urban centers); demoralized by the humiliation of defeat in the war with Japan, which had been terminated in August by a negotiated peace; and unsure of the loyalty of the armed forces at his disposal because of recent (albeit isolated) rebellions in the army and navy, Nicholas II at last promised in the imperial manifesto issued on October 17, 1905, to introduce civil and political liberties and to summon a legislative assembly elected on a broad franchise. Plans for including an element of public representation in government did not of course originate during the October crisis. Various schemes for consultative representation had been under discussion intermittently in government circles ever since the introduction of a European-style system of

8

Introduction

ministerial-bureaucratic government in the early years of the reign of Alexander I (1801—1825). Indeed, the first well-known plan, which already contained the element that was to appear in almost all future plans elaborated in government circles until 1905—representation from permanent bodies of local self-administration rather than by means of special elections—was the work of the architect of the new ministerial system, M . M . Speranskii. Others followed. 16 The first to adapt that principle to the institutions of elective local self-administration created in the 1860s, the zemstvos, was actually drawn up before they were in operation, by the then minister of internal affairs, P. A. Valuev, in a draft submitted to the tsar in 1863. Valuev correctly foresaw that the zemstvos would become the focus of constitutionalist aspirations and proposed forestalling them by institutionalizing at the outset central representation from the zemstvos in an anodyne appendage to the State Council, the empire's supreme consultativelegislative organ, which until 1906 was composed entirely of high officials appointed by the emperor. Most later plans borrowed heavily from the Valuev project. Several such plans were considered in the ensuing years of Alexander II's reign ( 1 8 5 5 - 1 8 8 1 ) , and although Alexander himself was not disposed to the idea of public representation, there was a nearly general assumption among his advisers that sooner or later, as part of the country's advancement toward the status of a modern European polity, representative institutions would be introduced in Russia. 1 7 During the political crisis created by the revolutionary terrorist campaign, in fact just a few days before it took his life, Alexander came around to approving a first step toward introduction of a considerably diluted version of the Valuev plan in a draft presented by his de facto prime minister, General Loris-Melikov. That was the last time serious consideration was to be given to plans for representative institutions before the onset of the final crisis period of the old regime, although the government did continue, as earlier, to consult on an ad hoc basis with various groups of "public men"—representatives of the zemstvos, town councils, the noble corporations, and so on. In the early stages of the general crisis, which came during V. K. Pleve's tenure as minister of internal affairs ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 4 ) , the regime attempted to use repression as the main method of dealing with the growing demands for political reform. The reversal of this trend came with Pleve's assassination on July 15, 1904, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War. After a month's hiatus, the vacated office was assumed by Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who turned to the strategy of conciliation that led eventually to constitutional reform. Mirskii's basic plan was to win over the more tractable members of the opposition, the zemstvo liberals who had been brought to a high point of discontent by the Pieve administration's punitive measures against the zemstvos, by resurrecting the scheme for consultative representation from

Introduction

9

the zemstvos and town dumas. The only direct product of Mirskii's plans for political concessions during his tenure was the ukaz of December 12, 1904, which promised improvements in regard to civil liberties and limitation of arbitrary actions by government officials, but made no mention of public representation. That point in Mirskii's draft had been struck out at the last moment by Nicholas II. The vague promises of the December 12 ukaz did nothing to impede the momentum of the political opposition, and following the tragic Petersburg workers' demonstration on January 9, "Bloody Sunday," when about 130 peaceful demonstrators and innocent bystanders were killed by government troops, the question of representation was again raised in government circles (the petition drawn up by Father Gapon's Workingmen's Assembly, which the workers had tried to deliver to the tsar on January 9, included a request for constitutional reform). To internal pressure for reform there was now added external pressure in the form of warnings from French financial circles that Russia would be unable to secure further French loans in the absence of significant political reforms. By early February the Council of Ministers had come around, with the tsar's approval, to conceding the necessity of some kind of public representation, and on February 18 a rescript to the new minister of internal affairs, A. G. Bulygin, was issued announcing the tsar's intention to summon elected representatives to participate in "preliminary elaboration and discussion of legislative proposals." The rescript authorized creation of a special conference under Bulygin for working out the means for implementing this very generally stated intention. Although it was accompanied by a manifesto that called on the population to pray for "the greater strengthening of true autocracy," it was still an unprecedented concession of principle. The fundamental structure of the representative system called for in the rescript was worked up in the chancery of Bulygin's ministry by the same official, S. E. Kryzhanovskii, who had earlier drafted Mirskii's proposals. Significant modifications were later introduced in the Council of Ministers and then in the special conference called for in the rescript, but they did not affect the basic system first advanced by the ministry. 18 The Mirskii proposals had skirted the issue of whether to convene a separate representative assembly or to attach public representatives to the State Council (the more time-honored variant), although Mirskii had expressed preference for the latter. In the tradition of government-generated plans, they had designated representation from the provincial zemstvos, the "crowning of the edifice," rather than by special elections. The ministry's new draft on the State Duma, as the representative chamber was thereafter to be called, went considerably beyond the Mirskii proposals in some respects, while retaining much that was by now traditional in government schemes. The issue of a separate institution versus attachment of an elected

10

Introduction

element to the State Council was now decided in favor of the former, on the grounds that the principal function of public representation—to give the main social groups and regions of the country the sense that their views were being consulted—would require a much larger body than a mere satellite of the State Council. The competency of the Duma was considerably greater than anything seen or implied in earlier government plans. Although the Duma was explicitly identified as a consultative (zakonosoveshchatel'noe) body in the manifesto accompanying the publication of the final legislation on August 6, 1905, and its recommendations were not to be binding on the sovereign, a broad range of legislative and budgetary matters would have had to be submitted to its consideration, in parity with the State Council. Moreover, the Duma was granted the right of interpellation of government ministers, and it could initiate legislation: amendments of existing laws or new laws, not extending, however, to the Fundamental Laws defining the basic structures of the governmental system. If the Duma could gain the concurrence of the State Council in rejecting proposals put to them, no government-sponsored bill could become law. However—and this was the essential provision that justified designation of the Duma as consultative—the Duma alone could not prevent passage of government-sponsored bills; at least the implication of the lapidary statutes on the Duma was that the government could promulgate legislation with the approval of the State Council alone. 19 Although the statutes framing the competency of the Duma were the subject of considerable discussion in the several instances through which the draft legislation passed, it was the electoral system for the Duma that was given the most prolonged scrutiny and went through the most substantial changes from the original draft to the final form it took in the "Bulygin constitution" published on August 6. The traditional scheme, representation from the zemstvos, did not survive the first reviews of the draft within the ministry, although Kryzhanovskii preferred it and continued to believe it was the best system all the while he was elaborating schemes on demand for special elections in succeeding months and years; 20 it was rejected by Bulygin on the grounds that it would lead to politicization of the zemstvos, and that it would be too restrictive of the franchise in regard to both social groups (primarily the peasantry) and territory (the zemstvos existed in only thirty-four of the fiftyone provinces of European Russia). Neither of the two extreme possible bases for special elections— universal suffrage or election by the traditional estates—was given serious consideration: the former was simply too radical a departure, whose results, except for the certainty that propertied elements would be buried in the popular vote, were impossible of prediction; the latter faced a coalescence of opposition from various viewpoints, but it was generally accepted that the estate system no longer accurately reflected social realities.

Introduction

11

By an inertial process of elimination the government planners settled on the multistaged curial system already in use for elections to the zemstvos and town administrations. This system would be easy to implement, since the zemstvo and town voter-qualification records could be used, and its results could be more or less accurately anticipated. As in the original zemstvo system (certain changes introduced in 1890 were bypassed), the electorate was divided into three categories: private landowners; a curia of owners of industrial and commercial enterprises and other urban property; and the peasantry. The system was "class-based," with individual economic status as the criterion for enfranchisement, except for the peasant curia, which simply encompassed the peasants living in village communities. District assemblies for each curial group were to choose electors (vyborshchiki); the electors from all the curiae would then gather together in a provincial assembly for election of deputies to the Duma. As in the zemstvo system, holders of full property qualification in the first two curiae could participate personally in the district assemblies, while owners of less than a full cens could gather in preliminary assemblies and send one delegate (upolnomochennyi) per full cens to the district assemblies. Peasant representation was to pass through two stages preliminary to the district assembly: election by the peasant village community of delegates to a volost' assembly, and election there of delegates to the district assembly. The provincial assembly of electors from the three curiae was to elect by majority vote the number of Duma deputies allotted to the province. That number was to be based on a general population ratio (1:250,000; a higher ratio was later introduced for the borderlands), while the distribution of electors' seats among the curiae in the provincial assembly was to be based on the total value of property owned within each curial group. Finally, separate representation, also based on the property-qualification system of the 1892 statutes of urban self-administration, was to be accorded the largest cities of the empire. Although the general outlines of the ministerial draft on the electoral system emerged intact in the August 6 law, its content was subjected to considerable correctives in the course of its discussion in the State Council and the special conference. These included a number of adjustments designed to extend the suffrage to a few groups and territories that were not included in the early scheme, and to reduce the level of representation from the borderlands; the basis of curial representation was shifted, for facility's sake, from direct property assessment to amount of zemstvo taxes paid, and so on. But the main target of the critics of the ministry scheme in these meetings was the weight it allotted to the peasants and the landowners, respectively, in the electoral system. Kryzhanovskii and Bulygin had anticipated that the curial system would produce a Duma that would look very much like a provincial zemstvo assembly—a body dominated by noble landowners with an interest

12

Introduction

in public affairs—and they were generally concerned to keep peasant representation in the Duma at the lowest possible level commensurate with the foundations of the system. In their view, a Duma with large numbers of unlettered and politically inexperienced peasants would be incapable of serious work. 2 1 Kryzhanovskii aimed to ensure the appropriate composition of the provincial assemblies through the election of provincial electors by general district assemblies of voters and delegates from all three curiae—the same system that had produced the predominantly noble provincial zemstvo assemblies. 22 Although the majority of the State Council apparently had no quarrel with Kryzhanovskii's aim, it nevertheless struck out the provision for general district assemblies, thereby assuring that the distribution of electors among the curiae in the provincial assemblies would be fixed. This was essentially a concession to the argument that the ministry plan provided insufficient guarantee of adequate representation from the peasantry, although apparently no one but Kryzhanovskii realized that its result would be provincial assemblies radically different in composition from the zemstvo assemblies that had served as the ministry's model. 23 In the special conference, which was drawn from a broader and more heterogeneous group of dignitaries than that allowed by the professionalbureaucratic milieu of the ministry and State Council, arguments were heard for reviving the estate principle so as to produce a Duma with a fixed proportion of deputies from each order. Although these arguments were rejected, a compromise in the form of having the peasant electors select a separate deputy from their midst in each of the fifty-one assemblies of European Russia was supported by the advocates of the estates idea, mostly conservative nobles. The latter were joined by bureaucrats who questioned the loyalty of the nobility to the throne, pointing to widespread noble participation in the zemstvo constitutionalist movement, and believed the rank-and-file peasantry would be more likely to provide conservative support for the regime. 24 (In keeping with the same view of peasant conservatism, the literacy requirement for election to the Duma was also removed.) No changes were made, however, in the relative weight of the curiae in the provincial assemblies. According to the ministry's calculations, these stood in the aggregate at: Curia Percent of provincial electors Peasant 43 Landowners 34 Urban 23 Aside from the highly disproportionate ratios of representation for the different groups of the enfranchised population, significant social groups would have gone entirely unrepresented in this system, including the

Introduction

13

industrial workers, small private (mostly peasant) landowners, and the great mass of the urban population without significant property or business affairs, which included the bulk of the intelligentsia. 2 5 Here matters stood until October 17, at least in regard to the Duma and its electoral system. 2 6 Then came the October Manifesto. The manifesto was the work of Sergei Witte and his assistants, Witte having been given the leading role in the government upon his return from Portsmouth in September as the figure generally recognized in the government to be best suited to deal with the mounting crisis situation. Although Witte had apparently come to the conclusion in the weeks immediately preceding the general strike that preservation of autocracy was a lost cause and the time for a parliamentary order had arrived, 2 7 his immediate aim was to split up the opposition and gain time for the government; and in this, at least for the short term, he succeeded in adequate measure. The manifesto was accordingly addressed primarily to the liberal opposition, and its concessions, though far-reaching in principle, were stated abstractly enough to allow for considerable flexibility in their realization. The manifesto's concessions wçre embodied in three points: the first promised to honor the right of habeas corpus and freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. The second point promised to extend the franchise for elections to the Duma so as to include "those classes of the population that are now completely deprived of electoral rights," without suspending the established timetable for elections (January 1 9 0 6 ) , and leaving "the further development of the principle of general suffrage" to be worked out in the new legislative system. 2 8 The third and final point stated that " n o law may go into effect without the approval of the State D u m a , " and assured that the Duma would be given a "genuine p a r t " in monitoring the legality of the actions of government officials. The principle of representative government had at last been recognized by the regime, if only in the most general terms. T h e issue of electoral reform was engaged immediately by Witte, who, as of October 19, when the law creating a united ministry (that is, a cabinet system of government) was published, officially became the country's first prime minister. The basic scheme for carrying out the promise of point two of the manifesto was readied in a few days (once again by Kryzhanovskii): a mechanical increase in the electorate by significantly lowering qualification levels in the two property-based curiae (in the process, property in the strict sense in fact ceased to be a prerequisite for qualification), and the creation of a separate workers' curia, analogous to that of the peasant curia. 2 9 T h e aim of the revisions was clearly stated in the conference Witte called immediately after issuing the manifesto: to satisfy the demands for participation in the elections by "those classes of the population which have been most aroused by deprivation of electoral rights; namely, the workers

14

Introduction

and persons living by intellectual labor." 3 0 It appears that the admission to the polls of a much wider group of smallholders in the landowners' curia and of the petty bourgeoisie in the urban curia flowed more or less automatically from the decision to expand the franchise to the working class and the intelligentsia. The decision to give the workers a separate curia was linked to the general system: short of instituting universal suffrage, it was the only way the workers could be given a more or less visible role in the elections. Unlike the peasants, however, the workers were not given a special allotment of deputies in the Duma; their delegates would simply join the others in the provincial assemblies and large-city assemblies. The December law greatly expanded the size and character of the electorate in the urban and landowners' curiae. The peasant curia was not affected by the December 11 revisions. The relative weight of the curiae was also left essentially unchanged: the workers' delegates would occupy only 2.5 percent of the electors' seats in the provincial assemblies of European Russia. With the convocation of a parliament armed with considerable legislative authority in the offing, the government moved, at the same time it was broadening the suffrage system, to alter other structures of the central government so as to better deal with, and control, the new element of public representation. The first items on the agenda, both in fact under consideration before October in connection with the projected Bulygin Duma, were the creation of a united ministry, or cabinet system, which had long been contemplated but never realized in Russia, where each minister had traditionally dealt directly with the sovereign; and the reform of the State Council into an upper house with powers equal to those of the Duma. The united ministry, though flawed in important ways (the prime minister could not control appointments of the other ministers and generally lacked control over the internal operations of the individual ministries), was made law immediately after issuance of the October Manifesto. The reform of the State Council, which in contrast to the introduction of the cabinet system constituted an obvious encroachment on the October promise concerning the power of the Duma, was made the subject of a special law defining its composition, competence, and operations, issued simultaneously with a law defining the details of the competence and operations of the Duma, on February 20, 1906. Finally, a new version of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, accommodating all these changes, was issued on April 23, 1906, a scant three days before the convening of the first State Duma. These laws followed upon lengthy discussions, extensive searches through the constitutions of the European monarchies, lengthy debate about whether or not Russia had become a constitutional monarchy, and numerous redactions, which cannot be dwelt on here, 31 although a general

Introduction

15

idea of their content is necessary for understanding the political context in which the new parties operated and the elections were held. The ultimate structures of these institutions were not predestined, and in fact remained uncertain until the final acts were published, although there was to be observed a general tendency as their preparation progressed to mold them into conservative restraints on the new public representation. Moreover, Witte was clearly motivated by the idea of forestalling the Duma's preoccupation with constituent functions—the avowed aim of most of the political groups that were preparing to take part in the elections—by presenting the Duma with a fait accompli in regard to the political constitution. (It should be noted that there was very little questioning in government circles of the regime's right to elaborate the political constitution prior to convocation of the Duma; the government had not ceded any constituent functions to the Duma on October 17.) Renovation of the State Council consisted of two related parts: expansion of its sphere of activities to include legislative authority; that is, its assumption of the status of an upper chamber with legislative parity with the Duma-to-be, and alteration of its composition. The council was to serve as a conservative counterweight to the Duma, making it unnecessary for the sovereign to expose himself to the accusation that he was operating against the popular will be frequently vetoing Duma measures. This transformation in the functions of the State Council necessitated reform of its composition, in order to enhance its autonomy: in its old composition—mostly superannuated career bureaucrats and generals—the council could hardly be taken seriously as an independent element in the political constitution. It was accordingly decided to introduce elective representatives from "responsible groups" of the population into the council. After much debate, it was decided that the elected portion of the council would be no less than half the total, and would be filled by corporate elections from the clergy, the provincial zemstvo assemblies, the provincial corporations of nobility, the Academy of Sciences and the universities, and the organizations of trade and industry. In effect, more than two thirds of the elected deputies were to be provided by the landed nobility: the provincial zemstvo assemblies and the noble corporations were allotted three fourths of the ninety-eight elected seats on the council. The "Institution of the State Duma," published the same day as the law reforming the State Council, incorporated the promise of the October Manifesto that no law would go into effect without the Duma's consent. At the same time, it established that no measures issuing from the Duma could take effect without the approval of the State Council and the emperor. Bills could be initiated by the executive branch or by either chamber of the legislative branch. However, prior to taking legislative initiative, the Duma was required to inform the appropriate ministry and to attend upon it for

16

Introduction

one month, so that the ministry could prepare a bill of its own or otherwise respond to the Duma's expression of need for new legislation in the area in question. The law likewise honored the second part of point three of the October Manifesto, concerning supervision of the actions of government officials, by providing that the Duma had the right of interpellation. This right was hedged, however, by the provision (article 40) that ministers could refuse to respond to calls for interpellations "on subjects that, for considerations of state security, should not be made public." It also provided that ministers could send their assistants to respond to interpellations, and, most significantly, it explicitly stated that the right of legislative initiative of the Duma did not extend to the Fundamental Laws; that was the prerogative of the monarch alone. In addition to matters of legislative initiative and review, the law enumerated the other areas of Duma competence, mainly having to do with examination and approval of the state budget and other financial activities of the government. Finally, the law stipulated that the Duma, which was ordinarily to be convened for a five-year term, could be prorogued by order of the emperor, with the stipulation that the order was to call for new elections and set the date for convening a new Duma. And, in the manifesto that accompanied the publication of the laws on the State Council and the Duma, the emperor proclaimed that the executive could institute emergency provisional "measures" (mery) that ordinarily required legislative review prior to their implementation. These "measures" would have to be submitted for the approval of the Duma within the first two months after its reconvocation, however, if they were to remain in effect. The Fundamental Laws and the laws concerning the institutions of the Duma and the State Council were ruled outside the sphere of application of this procedure.32 Revision of the Fundamental Laws was required by the changes in the political constitution brought about by the October Manifesto and the succeeding laws on the State Council and the Duma. The document issued on April 23 might have been significantly more liberal in regard to such matters as the definition of civil rights and the circumscription of the power of the Crown had its preparation not taken place within the context of a power struggle between Witte and I. L. Goremykin (soon to succeed Witte as prime minister); the two vied for Nicholas's favor by proposing revisions in the text of the Fundamental Laws in the direction of minimizing the concessions of political power made on October 17. 33 However, the foundations of the new political constitution had already been enunciated in the February 20 laws and the accompanying manifesto. The central significance of the new rendition of the Fundamental Laws lay in the fact that by at once incorporating the main provisions of the laws on the Duma and proclaiming that changes in the Fundamental Laws were the sole

Introduction

17

prerogative of the emperor, they formally excluded the possibility of the Duma legally occupying itself with changes in its own structure or competence. The first article of the first chapter of the Fundamental Laws proclaimed: "Supreme autocratic [samoderzhavnaia] authority belongs to the All-Russian EMPEROR. God himself ordains submission to HIS authority, not only from fear, but also as a matter of conscience."34 Nicholas II, in the last Tsarskoe Selo conference held in April 1906 to discuss the draft of the new Fundamental Laws, tried to persuade his advisers to restore to the traditional formula on the autocratic authority of the emperor the qualifying adjective "unlimited" (neogratiichennaia), but with two exceptions (one of them, significantly, his next choice for prime minister) they all objected that this would be both untruthful and unpolitic, and Nicholas reluctantly conceded the point. At the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was just starting to confront the political-institutional issues arising from the conflicting concepts of the old regime and popular sovereignty. These issues were those that had already been dominating the political life of most West Euopean countries for at least half a century: the questions of the form of central government and of the relations between central and local government, of civil and political rights and control over the bureaucracy, of suffrage, public representation, and the formation of political parties for organizing public participation in constitutional government. The fact alone that when these issues were finally engaged in Russia they were still being contested in western and central Europe promised that the transition from autocracy to a new political-institutional order would not be easily or rapidly accomplished.35 The Manifesto of October 17, 1905, set the stage for the open struggle of political concepts and institutions: it conceded the principle of effective public participation in government, but the circumstances surrounding its promulgation and subsequent planning for institutional change in high places revealed that the ruling elite expected that the new institutions could be molded in such a way as to allow them to remain in control.

I THE FORMATION OF POLITICAL PARTIES The reign of Emperor Nicholas II witnessed from the outset the growth of the social movement against intensification of the bureaucraticauthoritarian regime that had been introduced during the reign of Alexander III with the annually renewed measures for increased security and the emasculation of the Great Reforms of Emperor Alexander II. The fateful division of Russians.. .into " w e " and "they"; that is, bureaucracy and civil society, became progressively sharper. The former was joined from the right by reactionary black-hundreds elements, and the latter from the left by radical revolutionary elements. In the center stood those elements that could have been the link between government and society, but which, for all their desire to work productively and be useful, remained as if between two stools, which is frequently the case with moderate elements in a time of acute struggle between extremes. P. D.

Dolgorukov

1 The ConstitutionalDemocratic Party and "L'ouverture à Gauche" All the more is there needed the organization of a political party that would set itself the task of utilizing the enormous accumulated revolutionary energy of the Russian intelligentsia and would gradually transform and heal the revolutionary milieu. P. B. Struve

T h e conditions for the formation and consolidation of revolutionary democracy depend on the immediate disintegration of the ConstitutionalD e m o c r a t i c party. Only by stepping over the latter's political corpse can it take its place, together with the proletariat, at the helm of the revolution. T. Belskii

By far the largest party to emerge on the stage set by the October Manifesto was the Constitutional-Democratic party, generally called simply "the Kadets" (Kadety), or KDs, after the first two initials of the party name. The Kadets, who had in fact publicly proclaimed their existence three days before October 17, were to go on in the following months to establish an impressive network of local groups around the country for participation in the first national election campaign, and then to emerge as the largest party in the first Duma. An inquiry into the fortunes of Russian constitutionalism properly begins with the Kadet party. In this chapter I first examine the ideological, institutional, and social origins of the Kadet party; and then I go on to consider, against that background and in the context of ongoing events, the early development of the party's program, organization, and strategy and tactics, prior to the first elections. The focus here is on the party leadership and the central organs of the party: basically, its first two congresses and its central committee.

22

The Formation of Political Parties

Origins of the Kadet Party The final step to party politics had been a long time coming for the founders of the Constitutional-Democratic party when they gathered for its constituent congress in mid-October 1905 at the height of the country's first general strike. The men who took the initiative in creating the party in the autumn of 1905 shared a commitment of some years' duration to seeking a way out of the country's social and political crisis by peaceful means—but not, however, by mere petitions intended to bring the sovereign to his senses. 1 In their view, this traditional strategy of the gentry liberals had proved inadequate; the regime had to be compelled to capitulate. A few of the group's elder statesmen had come to that conviction already during the political crisis of the late 1870s (simultaneously with elaborating the idea of a united front with the revolutionary opposition). 2 More had come to it in the mid-1890s, provoked by the famine of 1891-92, and some only in the first years of the century. All had reached it by 1902, the year of the creation of the Witte Commission and the anticlimactic "Shipov" zemstvo congress. These men believed that the transformation of the autocracy into a constitutional regime—a regime providing for open political agitation and parliamentary institutions—would allow for the peaceful resolution of the country's outstanding problems through the contest of parties, including the government party, in the parliamentary arena and through broad public participation in governance. Or at least they believed the game worth playing as the only conceivable alternative to revolutionary violence and anarchy, on the one hand, and reaction on the other. The strategy of the constitutionalists was to mobilize the largest possible numbers of what they variously called "nonclass public opinion," "the Russian intelligentsia as a whole," or, as Miliukov explained for an American audience in 1904, those "elements as, either by their social position or by their political views, are intermediate between the rulers and the revolutionaries; i.e., which are oppositionary without being revolutionary." 3 Through such efforts they hoped to compel the regime to capitulate to demands for introduction of basic civil and political rights, and to bring about the calling of a constituent assembly which would set up a system of representative government. 4 Obviously, they believed, or hoped, that the force of organized public opinion alone would suffice to make the regime yield to definitive reforms. Given the primacy of political liberty in the constitutionalists' scheme of things, the details of the constitutional order—one- or two-house legislature; republic or constitutional monarchy; direct or indirect elections, and so forth—were, within rather broad limits, matters of tactical, rather than strategic, importance for them: their program could be, and was, modified and elaborated as political fortune dictated. The same situation obtained in regard to questions of social and economic policy, especially the agrarian question, on which there were considerable differences of opinion among

The Constitutional-Democratic Party

23

them: their various sentiments ranged all the way from support for full nationalization at one extreme to grudging recognition of the necessity of redemptive confiscation of some private estate-land for supplementing peasant allotments at the other.

Osvobozhdenie

and the Zemstvo Campaign

The Kadet founding fathers had first proclaimed their goal of forming a political party in the summer of 1902 in the maiden issue of the émigré journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), for whose existence they had been principally responsible. In a statement "From the Russian Constitutionalists," they declared: "We offer this program as the first attempt at a platform designed to unite the diverse groups from which, under the dual pressure of governmental reaction and revolutionary struggle, a Russian constitutionalist party seems likely to take form." 5 The principal author of the 1902 declaration was the one-time history professor Paul Miliukov, whose nom de plume for the journal, "ss," appeared at its end. He was helped in drafting it by Ivan Petrunkevich, the patriarch of zemstvo constitutionalism; Prince Dmitrii Shakhovskoi, a long-time zemstvo activist and pioneer in the field of popular education; and Shakhovskoi's friend, Alexander Kornilov, at the time working as a journalist following a decade in government service as a specialist on peasant problems in Poland and Siberia. The statement had been extensively discussed in both zemstvo and professional-intelligentsia circles in Tver, Kostroma, Vologda, and Moscow in the several months preceding its publication. 6 It was occasioned, said the authors, by "ceaseless disorders in the institutions of higher education, the widespread working-class movement, agrarian disturbances by peasants, the extraordinarily widespread distribution of revolutionary publications among the lower orders of the population, new outbreaks of terrorism, as manifested in the killing of two ministers in the space of a single year." 7 The authors of this statement and the editor who published it, Peter Struve, reflected quite accurately the broader group of "Russian constitutionalists" who had taken the initiative in setting up Osvobozhdenie and had participated in the discussion of its programmatic articles. That broader group included veteran zemstvo constitutionalists from many provinces, among them such well-known figures as D. E. Zhukovskii (who put up most of the money for starting the journal), Count P. A. Geiden, A. M. Koliubakin, A. A. Stakhovich, Prince Peter Dolgorukov, Iu. A. Novosiltsev, and N. N. Lvov. It likewise included professional intelligentsia of essentially three types of political orientation and experience: (1) those with longstanding links with the zemstvo constitutionalists (many of them zemstvo deputies themselves, but also practicing liberal professions, mostly academic or legal, in the capitals), such as V. I. Vernadskii, P. I. Novgorodtsev, V. E. Iakushkin, S. A. Kotliarevskii, and M. I. Petrunkevich;

24

The Formation of Political Parties

(2) "legal Marxists" or, like Struve, "ex-legal Marxists," that is, intellectuals who had participated in the dissemination of Marxist ideas in Russia in the 1890s but had stayed out of the Social Democratic party, including S. N. Prokopovich, E. D. Kuskova, and V. Ia. Bogucharskii (Iakovlev); and (3) a small group of "legal populists," principally the colleagues of the patriarch of Russian populism, Ν. K. Mikhailovskii, in the offices of the journal Russkoe bogatstvo—N. F. Annenskii and Α. V. Peshekhonov. The last two groups, unlike the first, were mostly professional journalists; all three groups were largely of noble origin. In 1902 the zemstvo group was the predominant one. It was their idea to create Osvobozhdenie, and their money that launched it.8 Until the middle of 1905, however, the constitutionalist leadership had resisted pressure from their followers to set up a formal party organization,9 preferring to maintain a loose united front extending from the right center to the far left. It was generally assumed that establishment of political parties would come only after the basic conditions of political liberty had been won. Then the grand coalition would break down, and a number of new parties would naturally spring up in response to the challenge to compete for power in the arena of parliamentary politics. With the common enemy vanquished, the victors could afford to and would inevitably take to struggling among themselves for the spoils. Premature creation of a party with a precise program would split up the opposition before the prize was won, opening the floodgates to reaction. When the constitutionalists first emerged in 1902 as an organized group outside the confines of the traditional territory of Russian constitutionalism, the zemstvo, they did so, paradoxically, primarily in order to pursue the task of mobilizing the zemstvo institutions in support of constitutional reform and the application of pressure on the government from that quarter. Although constitutionalist reformers had never been more than a small minority in most provincial zemstvos,10 they had experience and the prestige of the zemstvo institutions behind them, and to many in the opposition, even on the far left, the zemstvo institutions appeared (and would continue to appear until the end of 1904, at least) to be, in the phrase of the SD leader Potresov, "the Archimedes fulcrum by which democratic agitation could move the monolith of autocracy." 11 At the time, the Osvobozhdenie constitutionalists believed that a program of purely political reforms-—a democratically elected parliament with legislative authority, operating in conditions of civil and political liberty—could serve as a general rallying point for the discontented zemtsy. Social and economic reforms—specifically agrarian reforms—were significantly omitted from their early program. Struve's editorial statement in the first issue was even more explicit than the constitutionalists' in anticipating that the zemstvos would take the lead in producing the desired reform program: "The editorial board will [not] on its behalf present its readers with a ready-made

The Constitutional-Democratic Party

25

program containing, point-by-point, the solution to all the basic problems which the fundamental transformation required by the country raises. Such a program must still be worked out by the public figures of our country and, first and foremost, by those working in the organs of self-government. The editorial board of Osvobozhdenie counts not on providing them with a program, but on receiving one from them." 12 To be sure, at the beginning of his statement Struve had announced that "the cultural and political liberation of Russia cannot be either exclusively or predominantly the affair of a single class, a single party, a single teaching," but it was clear that in mid-1902 the zemstvo movement still seemed to Struve and his collaborators to be the main center of reformist, nonrevolutionary opposition. Given the personal experience as zemtsy of most of that group, the absence of other institutionalized settings for the activities of "public men," and the recent reactivation of the zemstvo congress movement, culminating in the May 1902 congress of zemstvo leaders, this was an understandable view. A bill of grievances including those of the constitutionalists but adding others specific to the zemstvos was presented in a letter "from zemstvo deputies" printed in the second number of Osvobozhdenie: By the establishment of [tax] assessment limits [1901], the zemstvo has been completely deprived of the possibility of any kind of significant economic impact on the life of the people. The maintenance of [emergency food] supplies has been taken completely out of its hands. It confronts interference at every step in the fulfillment of its most important cultural mission, that of popular education... The exchange of opinions between district and provincial zemstvos of different provinces has been expressly forbidden . . . Such behavior of the government toward the zemstvo is fully explainable by the well-known memorandum of Minister of Finance Witte 13 in which the prevailing government view that the activity of the zemstvo should be gradually reduced to nil and replaced by a purely bureaucratic order is clearly stated. 14 Although the "Slavophile" authors of this letter pointedly refrained from endorsing the political program of the "Russian constitutionalists," they did find it possible to express solidarity with Osvobozhdenie, calling it an "ally of the zemstvo," and to declare their "readiness to go hand in hand with it toward the achievement of our common goal." They described this goal, the "only way out" of the current impasse, not as "a state order in which the representatives of the government and the representatives of the people are.. .two mutually distrustful enemy camps, but, on the contrary, one in which the government would be the proper agent of the needs and aspirations of the people." 15 Although they avoided the word "constitution," such statements encouraged the convinced constitutionalists that

26

The Formation of Political Parties

their authors were only a step away from conversion, if they were not in fact already constitutionalists sans le mot. Only considerable future experience would teach them that this was not necessarily so. The zemstvo congress of May 1902 had been organized by D. N. Shipov, chairman of the Moscow provincial zemstvo board, in response to the latest affront to zemstvo sensibilities in the form of the convocation by Witte in February of a "Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture." The numerous provincial and district committees of the conference were set up in strictly bureaucratic fashion and bypassed the zemstvos as institutions altogether, although they included quite a few zemstvo men as "local experts." 16 A general readiness to demonstratively condemn this initiative showed in up several informal gatherings of zemstvo leaders in March and April: there were numerous proposals that zemstvo men should boycott the Witte committees if invited, and there was general agreement that a common front should be presented by the zemstvo men in the committees if they were to participate. It was the purpose of the May congress to take decisions and give guidance in these matters. Although rejecting boycott of the committees, the congress, consisting of fifty-two persons, most of them chairmen or members of provincial zemstvo boards, strongly condemned in its resolutions the bypassing of the zemstvos and called for inclusion of elected representatives of the provincial zemstvos in the deliberations of the central conference (and in the Ministry of Agriculture as well). It was decided that officers of the zemstvos, as "government officials," were obliged to participate in the committees, but they were to make a point of identifying the views they might express there as personal ones, unauthorized by their institutions, and they were to present to the committees memoranda on the agrarian problem which were to be drawn up according to a general plan (outlined at the congress) and subsequently submitted for discussion to their respective zemstvo assemblies. In this way, the zemstvos would have some say in the deliberations of the committees. A fairly bold, if vague, statement on the necessity of dealing with the agrarian problems not only by palliative measures but by "elimination of those general conditions hindering [agricultural] development," was also added.17 These promising beginnings, from the constitutionalists' point of view, were not carried through in a satisfactory way. Shipov, after interviews with Witte and the new minister of internal affairs, Pieve (whose predecessor, Sipiagin, had been assassinated by an SR terrorist on April 2), engineered the withdrawal of the point of the May resolutions calling for elected zemstvo representation in the central government agencies at the end of July. And only a few zemtsy in a few committees made the kind of principled objections (especially in regard to "general conditions"; that is, criticism of the political order) that might have been expected from the mood and declarations of the May congress. On the other side, Pieve now undertook a veritable campaign against the zemstvo, declaring the May

The Constitutional-Democratic Party

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congress illegal; arranging for imperial reprimands for leading figures like Shipov and M . A. Stakhovich (Orel marshal of nobility); arresting several of the zemtsy w h o had been most outspoken in the local committees (for the most part, those w h o had called for political reforms); forbidding others to continue zemstvo service; interfering in the selection of representatives to the provincial committees (whose work began in early 1903); and issuing orders to the provincial governors to prohibit discussion of the conference committees' affairs in zemstvo sessions. 18 The disappointing performance of the zemtsy in the affair of the Witte committee and the general passivity of the zemstvo in the face of such actions by the government were instrumental in leading the constitutionalists to revise their opinion of the zemstvo's potential for mobilization with regard to constitutional reform. They probably understood from the beginning that by no means all zemstvo men shared their goals, and gradually they came to realize that even among those w h o did, by no means all could be counted on to actively pursue them. A variety of other experiences within the zemstvo milieu led to the same conclusion. In the meantime, the regime remained intransigent, unimpressed by the overtures of moderate zemstvo leaders like Shipov and Stakhovich or by zemstvo petitions, and the social and economic crisis continued to deepen. By about the end of 1902, the zemstvo was proving to be no exception to a general rule of politics: as it was as a whole being mobilized into opposition, it was simultaneously undergoing internal differentiation. It is easiest, of course, to identify the two extreme formations in that process: on the one side, the convinced constitutionalists w h o believed that significant reforms could come only within the framework of the introduction of a parliamentary system with formal limitations on the power of the Crown, and w h o believed that the struggle for reform would have to go beyond the bounds of the zemstvo to mobilize support among broader strata of the population if it were to succeed. O n the other side were those w h o explicitly rejected "constitutionalism," believing that the necessary reforms could be realized within the framework of an autocracy purged of "bureaucratic arbitrariness" by means of simple consultation with the people's representatives, and w h o remained committed to seeking their goals within the bounds of the zemstvo movement; here, in effect, ideas of political reform and popular representation essentially amounted to the traditional idea of "crowning the edifice," that is, introduction of a central consultative assembly of representatives from the provincial zemstvos and town dumas. Shipov was the most prominent and articulate representative of the latter position. He linked it to an "ethical-social idea" based on harmony and mutual responsibility between state and society, while he attributed the constitutionalist position to a "rationalist-positivist" view that focused on "constant competition.. .between society and state" and the struggle for individual rights. 1 9 Shipov's views, and by extension the programmatic

28

The Formation of Political Parties

position of the "nonconstitutionalist" opposition with which he was associated, ineluctably attracted the label "neo-Slavophile," or simply "Slavophile," although many who adhered to that general position did so without the aid of any elaborate "zhizneponimanie" (concept of life) of the sort Shipov had worked out for himself. 2 0 Between these two poles there was a broad range of opinion within the zemstvo reform movement. There were men who shared the constitutionalist goals of the " l e f t " but were hesitant, if not downright unwilling, to get involved in political activities that would carry them into contact with elements outside the traditional sphere of deferential zemstvo politics. There were those who, while also formally adhering to the idea of constitutional reform, looked in practical terms to a "crowning of the zemstvo edifice" in a way that was little distinguishable from the scenario of the "Slavophiles." And there were men who accepted the Shipov program strictly out of fear that tampering with the institution of autocracy might open the floodgates to revolution. Thus, drawing the line between "convinced constitutionalists" and others was no simple matter; moreover, views changed with the passage of time and accumulation of frustration at trying to accomplish the common limited goals that had been laid out, among other places, in the resolutions of the May 1 9 0 2 congress. 2 1 The process of growing differentiation within the zemstvo opposition in the years preceding 1 9 0 5 and the variety of views involved is probably best documented in the records of the Beseda circle, a group of prominent zemstvo men representing a majority of the zemstvo provinces, which gathered several times a year between 1 8 9 9 and 1 9 0 5 . 2 2 The circle was originally set up as a sort of clearinghouse and lobby for zemstvo affairs visà-vis the government and, more specifically, to facilitate coordinated zemstvo responses to what was generally seen as a new government offensive against the independence and competence of the zemstvo institutions. In 1900—1901, the circle had tried to mobilize the zemstvo (and noble) institutions against the ministry of education's campaign to assert bureaucratic control over local primary schools, and in 1 9 0 2 - 1 9 0 3 , the circle was a coordinating center for zemstvo objections to the procedures of Witte's special conference—that is, it was concerned at first with strictly "zemstvo" affairs. By early 1 9 0 2 , however, the question of the relation between purely zemstvo concerns and broader political reform had clearly inserted itself into the group's discussions, revealing from the outset the presence of the two polar positions described earlier (the group included such stalwarts of the "zemstvo left" as the twin princes Peter and Paul Dolgorukov and Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi, and of the "Slavophile right" as Shipov, M . A. Stakhovich, and N. A. Khomiakov), and with time a variety of intermediate positions became crystallized. As the crisis in the country deepened, especially after the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1 9 0 4 , the constitutionalists became a distinct majority at the circle's meetings, partly through entrance of hew members and partly through the

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changing views (that is, radicalization) of old members. By deliberate choice of its members (many of whom were by now involved in the Union of Liberation or at least in the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists), the circle remained, however, a forum for zemstvo views in general until the next zemstvo congress in November 1904, after which a meeting of the circle's members adopted the constitutionalist position taken by the congress majority as the general will of the zemstvo. By that time, Shipov and several other "Slavophiles" had ceased attending the Beseda meetings. In the end, the circle's "left" (the majority of its members, in fact) joined the Kadet party; the "right" for the most part entered the Union of October 17. 23 Until rather late in 1902 the editor of Osvobozhdenie still evidently entertained the hope that, with time and the continued demonstration of ineptness by the regime, the nonconstitutionalist "Slavophile" element in the zemstvo movement would come over to advocacy of constitutional reform. To facilitate that move, he actually avoided the word "constitution" in his early editorials, using instead the term "zemskii sobor," the consultative "assembly of the land" of pre-Petrine Russia with its mythencrusted historical connotations. Struve had even printed "Slavophile" communications alongside the writings of the zemstvo constitutionalists who were his closest supporters. 24 Presumably, Struve thought the "zemskii sobor" could be given the proper constitutionalist content at the appropriate time. Struve's hopes began to fade before the end of the year. He had all along been publishing others' criticism of the zemstvo men's faintheartedness, 25 and a definite shift had occurred in the editorial position with the publication of an exchange of articles between Miliukov ("ss") and Struve in the issue for mid-February 1903. This exchange marked the constitutionalists' transition from a strategy of working essentially within the zemstvos to one of bringing together the "convinced constitutionalists" there with like-minded elements outside the zemstvo. (The union with nonzemstvo elements had been envisioned all along, of course, but had, in effect, been postponed until consolidation of zemstvo ranks.) This union could be achieved, it was argued, only by developing a more precise program, with stronger emphasis on an uncompromisingly constitutionalist position, commitment to the principle of universal suffrage, and inclusion of a platform on the major social questions of agriculture and labor. Miliukov opened the exchange with a pointed critique of the editor's policy of cooperation with "such defenders of an ideal autocracy as M. A. Stakhovich, D. N. Shipov, N. A. Khomiakov, and many other respected zemstvo activists," and their identification in the journal as "liberal elements." "If the 'idealists of autocracy' and the 'incurable Slavophiles' are to pursue a common goal with the constitutionalists, then this goal, obviously, cannot be constitutional reform." This was in fact Struve, echoing Miliukov. The alacrity with which Struve adopted his critic's position suggests that Struve himself may have

30

The Formation of Political Parties

been having second thoughts about his ecumenical approach to the zemstvo movement for some time. Now, at any rate, he expressed full agreement with Miliukov. Only by breaking with the nonconstitutionalist "right" and becoming demonstratively "democratic" could an organization (he was already using the term "party") acquire a sufficiently wide base, "uniting all the politically conscious elements of classless Russian society, which are closely bound by their sympathies and tradition to the popular masses and their tradition." 26 The Union of Liberation and the Intelligentsia Campaign With the decision to differentiate between allies and opponents in the zemstvo movement and to actively seek allies outside it—among the "third element" (hired technical and professional employees of the zemstvos), the urban professional intelligentsia, and, somewhat later, among organized elements of minority nationalities—came the formation of the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia) and the elaboration by the union of a series of programs, each more detailed than the preceding one, culminating in the program adopted by the union's third congress in March 1905. 2 7 The points of that program on land and labor were clearly designed not so much as means for appealing directly to the peasantry and the industrial labor force, as for the purpose of soliciting support among the intelligentsia. As the general crisis deepened, the solicitation of support among the intelligentsia came increasingly to acquire the form of competition with the revolutionary parties for the politically still uncommitted members of the intelligentsia. This rivalry took place within the framework of a united front against the autocracy, to which both parties, the constitutionalists and most of the revolutionaries, continued to pay at least lip service. The constitutionalists acquired an organized basis for such competition in the formation of the Union of Liberation. Its first formal congress was held in January 1904, but its preparation had been under way essentially since the first meetings of zemstvo constitutionalists and professional intelligentsia held in early 1902 for discussion of the programmatic articles for the first issue of Osvobozhdenie.2S The organization was built largely on the groups of zemtsy and intelligentsia that subsequently came together to prepare contributions for the journal and, in the provinces, to handle its distribution. 29 Definitive impetus to formation of the union was given by a meeting of some nineteen leading zemstvo constitutionalists and professional intelligentsia at Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in July 1903, where the name, "Union of Liberation," was first used. A first meeting on Russian soil, preparatory to the formal congress, was held in Kharkov in September of that year. The statutes (ustav) of the union, prepared at Kharkov and adopted at the January 1904 (Petersburg) congress, characteristically embraced "constitutionalist" and "democratic" goals: "destruction of

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autocracy and establishment of a constitutional regime in Russia," and the vow that "in all economic and cultural problems which we will confront, we will be unswervingly guided by the interests of the laboring masses (trudiashchikhsia)."30 The Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists was set up as an organization distinct from the Union of Liberation, and its formal consolidation, in a meeting on November 8, 1903, in Moscow, actually preceded the first formal congress of the Union of Liberation; it was, however, the founders of the Union of Liberation, already involved in setting up the latter organization, who took the initiative in its creation. It was undoubtedly their experience in recent zemstvo developments and in Beseda that led them to create the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists apart from the Union of Liberation. In seeking to mobilize even the "convinced constitutionalists" among the zemtsy for the reform movement, it was apparent to them that an "organization of zemstvo character," as Shakhovskoi put it, rather than a "conspiratorial organization where confrontation with unknown elements would await them," was needed. Although many of its most prominent members were equally prominent in the Union of Liberation, it was thus not a mere branch of that organization, for it included many others who would not join the Union of Liberation and even refused to enter the Kadet party when it was created. 31 For the constitutionalists with ties to the zemstvo institutions, competition with the revolutionary parties became an issue of special urgency when the latter began to make significant inroads among the increasingly politicized professional organizations, made up largely of third-element zemstvo employees. This situation was clearly at hand by early 1904 at the time of the Third Congress of Technical Education and the Ninth Pirogov Congress of doctors and other medical personnel, which were held in Petersburg almost simultaneously with the first congress of the Union of Liberation. At a Beseda meeting in mid-January, just after these congresses, Prince Peter Dolgorukov reported that the teachers who had come to the Petersburg congress were apparently being drawn into meetings of SD circles, "which," he said, "is very unfortunate, for one would wish to see them in the ranks of the zemsty." Dolgorukov then called on the members of his circle to "come to an agreement and come out with a political program. We must act on the live elements of society, otherwise we risk being left behind." 32 This competition became a matter of particular concern following the banquet campaign of November-December 1904 organized by the Union of Liberation, which mobilized unprecedented numbers of professional men into the political opposition in support either of the resolutions of the recent November zemstvo congress or of the more radical slogans then being propagated from the Union of Liberation leftward: the summoning of a constituent assembly elected by "fourtail" (universal, secret, equal, and

32

The Formarion of Political Parties

direct) suffrage, amnesty to political prisoners, an immediate end to the war, and so on. 33 Resolutions calling openly for political reforms were taken at nearly a hundred populous banquets or similar convocations in scores of Russian towns within the space of a few weeks. The banquets were carefully planned by the Union of Liberation local branches in accordance with a general resolution taken at the union's second congress in late October 1904. In the absence of a reasonably free press, a series of banquets throughout the more important towns of the country appeared to be the best method for "uniting the bulk of the country's intelligentsia around the constitutionalist banner." 34 This plan, based on the union's experience with politically oriented banquets in Moscow and Petersburg, was adopted as point two of the union's tactical plan for the purpose of eliciting "constitutionalist and democratic resolutions of a much more decisive tone than those which are to be anticipated from the congress of zemstvo and town duma men [scheduled for November 6.]" 3S The banquet campaign, in keeping with another directive of the union's second congress, set off a proliferation of "political-professional" unions, organizations formed along professional lines for the pursuit of political reform. The first of these—the Doctors' Union, the Academic Union (the "professors' union"), and the Engineers' Union—were in fact organized at the banquets and other meetings of late 1904 by members of the Union of Liberation. Their example was followed in a rapid proliferation of similar unions in the winter and spring of 1905, and by the formation, in May, at the initiative of the Engineers' Union, of the "Union of Unions" (Soiuz soiuzov). Consisting at first of thirteen member-unions, the Union of Unions may have reached a combined membership of more than 100,000 persons by October 1905. Its leadership and several of the constituent unions— especially the Union of Railway Employees and Workers—played crucial roles in the organization in October of the country's first general strike, which resulted in the tsar's Manifesto of October 17 promising substantive constitutional reforms. Of the seventeen constituent unions formed before the end of 1905, the majority, in addition to those already named, were organized around intelligentsia or "semi-intelligentsia" professions (lawyers, writers, teachers; clerks and bookkeepers, pharmacists, foresters), or white-collar employment groups (government, zemstvo and municipal employees, railway employees and workers, postal and telegraph employees); and a few more were based on nonoccupational categories (the Union for Women's Rights, the Union for Jewish Equality, the Peasants' Union). 36 In the spring and summer of 1905, the unions, and particularly their coordinating body, the Union of Unions, provided an institutional framework for the competition among parties and putative parties for support among the broad ranks of the intelligentsia. The experience of the banquet campaign demonstrated to the constitutionalist leadership that if they were to appeal to the broad ranks of the

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"democratic intelligentsia" their program would have to incorporate the two basic slogans of the revolutionary left: the constituent assembly and the fourtail suffrage formula. The original statutes of the Union of Liberation had mentioned neither, leaving open the question of "the concrete forms in which free political institutions can be realized in Russia," and referring to the suffrage system only in general terms of universality. In subscribing to the declaration of common principles elaborated as late as September 1904 at a Paris "conference of oppositional and revolutionary parties," the union had committed itself only to replacing autocracy with "a free democratic regime based on universal suffrage," although in a statement accompanying the text of the conference resolutions, the union declared acceptance of the fourtail formula to be an essential basis for political reform. 37 Article 12 of a constitutional project worked up by the union's Petersburg and Moscow leadership for the second, October 1904, congress endorsed the summoning of a constituent assembly elected by fourtail suffrage as the "exclusive correct path" to reform, but it was never submitted to a vote there. A program prepared at about the same time by union members in Paris, including Struve, which served as the basis for the program officially adopted at the third congress in March 1905 (although not made binding on individual members), finally did include both points. 38 Both were incorporated subsequently into the first program of the ConstitutionalDemocratic party. A socioeconomic platform was also finally adopted by the third congress of the Union of Liberation in March 1905, for essentially the same reasons that the political platform of the left was adopted there: the accelerating mobilization of the intelligentsia and activization of the mass movement in late 1904 and early 1905. It, too, was to become the basis for the corresponding parts of the Kadet party program. The two essential parts of the union's socioeconomic platform were the articles on agrarian and labor reform. The first proposed, principally, a new distribution of land to the peasantry, involving, where necessary, forced (but compensated) expropriation of gentry-estate lands. The second outlined a system of labor legislation, including introduction of the eight-hour workday, "immediately where possible, and gradually elsewhere." The union's socioeconomic program had taken its final form only just before the third congress met, despite the call for detailed agrarian and labor platforms by Osvobozhdenie as early as the beginning of 1903. The participants in the Schaffhausen conference agreed in July 1903 to include social and economic demands in the program of the projected Union of Liberation, and even the principles of government intervention in agrarian relations and land expropriation were accepted there (although in very general terms and not without much misgiving on the part of some present). In the months following the conference the elements of a socioeconomic program were elaborated in the pages of Osvobozhdenie (S. N. Bulgakov's

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The Formation of Political Parties

article of October 1903 [no. 33] already outlined the basic points on agrarian reform that would go, first, into the program of the Liberationists, and then into the Kadet program). Nevertheless, the statutes adopted by the founding congress of the union in 1904 included nothing more specific by way of a socioeconomic program than a vow to be guided on these questions "by the interests of the laboring masses," as noted. Even the draft program of October 1904 still lacked the central points of both the agrarian and the labor platforms of the March 1905 program. 39 The procrastination of the Union of Liberation in officially adopting a program replete with a socioeconomic platform and endorsement of the political slogans of the left (and then even with a caveat), despite repeated appearance of these questions on the agenda since 1902-1903, was almost certainly due to apprehension about alienating the more cautious, mostly zemstvo, elements in the union and the affiliated Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists. Shortly after the Petersburg, Moscow, and Paris groups had prepared programs incorporating these points, a Moscow meeting of the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists (November 2 - 3 , 1904), where draft resolutions for the forthcoming zemstvo congress were prepared, endorsed only a general demand for public participation in government; they said nothing about a constituent assembly or the system of suffrage, although a vocal minority of zemtsy, both at this meeting and at the November zemstvo congress, where the constitutionalists' resolutions were adopted, supported a formulation including demand for the "fourtail constituent assembly." 40 Economic demands were not even touched upon in the congress or the meetings of Zemstvo Constitutionalists that preceded it. Although it could be argued—and was so argued at the time—that the Zemstvo Constitutionalists' rejection of the radical political formula and avoidance of economic issues was motivated by fear of alienating the more cautious zemtsy outside the unions whose support for a constitutionalist resolution they were seeking at the November zemstvo congress, it is clear that apprehensions among them about these issues, with their obvious implications for the political and economic position of the landed nobility, went deeper than that. In the Union of Liberation, the procrastination over them and, indeed, the postponement of adoption of a general program until the third congress in March 1905 (and then with the addition of an escape clause for individual members) point to the existence of tensions among a variety of outlooks within the organization. To some extent, this tension was the product of the union's success in recruiting among the intelligentsia. The union was clearly growing rapidly, was mainly an urban organization, and by the time of the banquet campaign had branches in many of the provincial capitals and university towns of European Russia as well as the two capitals of Moscow and Petersburg. At the third congress, 1,600 formally inscribed members were accounted for, nearly a third of them from the two capitals and most of the rest from

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twenty-three provincial capitals. There is evidence that in the union's leadership—its council and the group of delegates to its congresses—the relative weight of urban intellectuals was growing at the expense of constitutionalists who had emerged from the zemstvo movement: if the two groups were represented in near parity in the first council of ten elected at the first congress, the former subsequently grew much more rapidly than the latter through cooptation. By the middle of 1905, the council had 2 0 - 2 4 members of whom 17—19 were nonzemtsy. The "zemstvo" element among the delegates to the first congress was already outnumbered by nonzemtsy (according to K. F. Shatsillo's count, the figures were respectively 19 and 29 delegates), and the disparity steadily grew with succeeding congresses: the number of zemtsy delegates grew to 27, but the number of nonzemtsy grew to 67. (Of 170 delegates identified from the records of all four congresses of the union [that is, up to August 1905], Shatsillo counted 54 zemtsy, 116 nonzemtsy.) A broadside published by the union described the makeup of the fourth and last congress (August 23, 1905) as about 25 percent "zemstvo and town [duma] activists," and about 75 percent "so-called 'third element' and persons of the free professions." 41 The significance of these figures is somewhat problematical. The very distinction between "zemtsy" and 'nonzemtsy" tends to be artificial, since many of the urban professionals of gentry origin were also zemtsy; that is, they sat as deputies in the infrequently convened zemstvo assemblies and had been involved, to varying degrees, in the zemstvo movement. Moreover, as soon as one begins to look at individual cases, it becomes clear that lines of ideological orientation and political temperament tended to crisscross that division very freely. 42 Nevertheless, these figures do indicate a general trend in the union's constituency: although the three basic elements— zemstvo constitutionalists; professional men close to them in outlook and often in background; and the more "ideological," Marxist- or populistoriented, intelligentsia—that had been present from the first stages of the union's development all remained well represented in the leadership, men with no previous connections with the zemstvo movement became an increasingly large part of the group as a whole. The same general trend was occurring, it stands to reason, in the membership of the union at large. This was particularly pronounced in the large Petersburg group, where the more radically oriented intelligentsia element clearly predominated in 1905. The aim of the founders all along, of course, had been to mobilize support for constitutional reform as widely as possible, and the Union of Liberation was meant to be a coalition of diverse individuals and groups who agreed on that one goal as a matter of first priority, not a party of ideologically united men who could be expected to agree on a detailed political program. Proposals to create a "party" were raised, and decisively rejected, at each of the union's convocations until the fourth congress in August 1905. The wider the net was cast, the less likely it became that the

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The Formation of Political Parties

union could simply be transformed into a political party and its membership at large made into party members. The Decision to Form a Party The radicalization and differentiation characteristic of Russian political life in the course of the revolutionary crisis, especially following the events of January 1905, compelled the constitutionalists to move in the direction of partisan politics based on a more precisely defined program and strategy. They hesitated and continued to plead faithfulness to a united front with the revolutionary parties, for the conditions of free political activity had not yet been won, but they increasingly felt the need to set an anchor against the general drift, in order, as Miliukov put it in his American lectures, to mediate between revolution and reaction.43 Struve had been calling intermittently for the creation of a liberal democratic party in the pages of Osvobozhdenie since early 1903. After the hiatus caused by the formation of the Union of Liberation on a clearly coalitional basis, Struve resumed his partisan refrain at the height of the "governmental springtime." By mid-October 1904 he was writing (in an article appropriately titled "Organization and Platform of the Democratic Party") that it was "necessary to take advantage of this altogether extraordinarily propitious moment in order to energetically gather support for a broad democratic program and, in the heightened social temperature, to forge a strong organization." By adopting a "broad democratic program" in which the main platform would be "universal and equal suffrage" as the basis for all elections, the "liberal democratic party" would be able to count on the allegiance of the bulk of the intelligentsia and could mount a national movement, enlisting the popular masses, for a peaceful transition to the new order. 44 The broad support for constitutional reform revealed by the banquet campaign further encouraged Struve, and he began to anticipate turning the tables on the revolutionary parties in the competition for the support of "democracy." In early 1905 he was arguing that the working-class movement, led by the SD party, could be gradually turned over to the workers themselves; it would become a "trade unionist" organization on the German model, and the intelligentsia who currently constituted the main population of that party would move, he implied, to their natural home, the liberal democratic party.45 The adoption of the "liberal democratic program" that he had helped prepare for the March 1905 Union of Liberation congress and its virtual endorsement by the zemstvo congress that met in April further encouraged Struve in the propagation of this view, and moved him now to define the liberal democratic party as the "union of the zemstvo opposition and the democratic intelligentsia."46 And the news of the acts of the July (6-8) zemstvo congress—including an informal endorsement of a draft constitution sponsored by the Union of Liberation, and a public declaration to the

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people calling for support of constitutional reform—prompted Struve to enthusiastically pronounce the imminent "birth of a nation, for which the democratic party must hurry and organize itself in order to be on hand to serve as midwife at the great event." 47 In practical terms, all this looked very much like an appeal for the Union of Liberation and the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists to transform themselves into a party—that is, a more unitary organization with a precise program—and this was essentially the path taken by the constitutionalist leadership. But while accepting the basic strategy, they for some time resisted Struve's urgings, fearful that such an action would split up the opposition before the prize of political liberty had been won. This particularly worried Miliukov, who until early July was conducting polemics on this issue both with Social Democrats in the legal press and with Struve and several other Liberationists in the pages of Osvobozhdenie. Miliukov defended both the professional-political union movement and the Union of Liberation against those—especially the SDs, but also some fellow Liberationists—who wished to see their mobilization functions taken over by political parties. Miliukov argued that the unions were still mobilizing professional people into political activism at a rapid rate, and that the premature creation of a liberal party would split up the Union of Liberation into mutually hostile parties. Even as late as the meeting of the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists on July 9 and 10, where it was resolved by a majority of those present to proceed directly to formation of a party, Miliukov hesitated and ventured that perhaps negotiations with other groups would show that "organization of a new party is premature." 48 Such was the power of the idea of a united front avant le mot, understandable in view of the smallness and fragility of Russian civil society. The general consensus in the constitutionalist leadership in mid-1905 seems to have been that without the preliminary advent of political liberty, the constitutionalist party could have no chance of success in competing for mass support with the revolutionary parties: the latter had stolen a march on the constitutionalists in agitating among the masses, and the constitutionalists could not be expected to engage in large-scale conspiratorial activity or duplicate the insouciant maximalist promises of the revolutionary parties to the masses. 49 Struve's protestations that the doctrinaire "revolutionism" of the extreme parties was a hindrance rather than an aid to their success among the masses, and that, accordingly, the moderate program of the liberal democratic party would be more appealing to the political wisdom of the masses do not appear to have found any echoes in the liberal movement. 50 The only hope for acquiring a mass basis of support seemed to lie in the prior establishment of a political order in which the party could proceed legally and openly with the gradual political enlightenment of the masses—through propaganda, and especially through involving them in elections and practical experience with parliamentary institutions. By July 1905 the constitutionalist leadership finally proceeded to form a

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The Formation of Political Parties

party—not because they had been persuaded by Struve that virtually the entire intelligentsia would enter it, but because they had come to the conclusion that only through proclaiming a party with a definite program could they provide a rallying point for support of their solution to the revolutionary crisis in the face of accelerating differentiation among politically conscious elements of the population. In the zemstvo movement, the Shipovites had already departed, and now there was growing awareness of differences between zemstvo constitutionalists of a more conservative orientation and those of the mainstream; and the same process was occurring between "liberal" and "democratic" intelligentsia within the Union of Liberation and the professional-political union movement. Miliukov's experience in the Union of Unions was revealing in this regard: when the Union of Unions majority voted at its third congress at the beginning of July (July 2—3), despite his best efforts, to boycott the elections to the Bulygin Duma, Miliukov was finally forced to abandon the argument he had until then used in the polemic over party formation—namely, that the professional union movement had revealed a common political outlook (which he called "constitutional democracy") among the professional intelligentsia. 51 He apparently came about the same time to the conclusion that there could be no effective cooperation with the Social Democrats, who were stimulated by the news of the Potemkin mutiny in June to renewed belief in the possibility of a successful armed uprising. 52 Finally, outside the ranks of the intelligentsia, groups of landowners and groups of men in business and industry were forming to draw up programs which, if well to the right of the Kadet program in most respects, were not so far from it as to rule out potential centrifugal influence on a part of the body politic over which the future Kadets sought to extend their control. 53 It was anticipated that the formation of an " o p e n " party with a radical, but not doctrinairerevolutionary, program could stop the drift of many professional people in the direction of support for the revolutionary parties, on the one side, and that it could mobilize significant numbers of people for whom participation in any kind of conspiratorial organization—even the Union of Liberation— had been unacceptable, on the other. Serious discussion of setting up a party began after the Union of Liberation program was endorsed by the April zemstvo congress, but the direct impulse came from the promulgation of the "Bulygin constitution"— in fact, not its formal promulgation, which came only on August 6, but the circulation in late May and early June of an unauthorized preliminary draft and rumors that it was about to be promulgated as law. 5 4 The Bulygin constitution was, in effect, seized by them as the way out of an increasingly untenable situation created by the ongoing differentiation within the opposition movement. Even though its publication was unaccompanied by any relaxation of the general prohibition on political parties, and the parliamentary order it outlined was rejected out of hand by the constitutionalists themselves, 55 it nevertheless carried enough of a prospect for

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organizing and agitating openly in preparation for elections and for transferring the political struggle to the parliamentary arena to overcome their hesitation about abandoning coalition politics. So reasoned Miliukov in a newspaper article published the day after official promulgation of the Bulygin law: The law allows for some freedom of electoral campaigning, and an election campaign cannot be conducted without the existence of political parties. Without a doubt, these parties, which already exist in embryo, will rapidly take shape and will operate completely openly... Therefore life itself will create freedom of organization and assembly... The point of view must be adopted that [these liberties] flow of themselves, of logical and natural necessity, from the existence of public representation.56 The final initiative came, like that of 1902 which had led to the founding of the Union of Liberation, from the zemstvo constitutionalists. The Union of Liberation leadership had apparently been ready to proceed in that direction at its third congress in March, but opinion among the delegates there was so divided on programmatic issues that movement toward a party was set aside. It was reactivated by the resolutions taken at the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists' meeting held in early July (July 9 10) immediately after the zemstvo congress in Moscow. The participants elected twenty of their number to set about organizing "a constitutionaldemocratic party that would consist of a broad circle of active persons of like mind in the country and would have a full and consistent program, including articles on economic, fiscal, regional, and national questions, in cooperation with groups that are close in their views." This resolution prompted the convocation of a fourth congress of the Union of Liberation (August 2 3 - 2 5 ) , which in its turn resolved "to proceed immediately to organization of an open Constitutional-Democratic party," for which purpose a committee of forty members was elected and directed "to enter into relations with other political [obsbchestvennye] groups and to take all necessary measures. The point of departure for such preliminary work should be the program of the Union of Liberation adopted at the union's third congress." 57 Among the forty members of the committee elected by the Union of Liberation were fifteen of the twenty Zemstvo Constitutionalists.58 According to Miliukov's memoirs, where he quotes from a resolution of the Union of Liberation's fourth congress, a compromise was established between the two groups: the Zemstvo Constitutionalists accepted the Liberationist March program, and the Liberationists accepted "the tactics of an open political party in the European sense of the word." 59 In his opening speech to the first party congress, Miliukov said that the party's organizers believed that the diverse elements he described as being of

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The Formation of Political Parties

both "constitutionalist" and "democratic" persuasion could be formed into a party "if only the party is not considered to be an eternal union." 6 0 Just what sort of secular union it was supposed to be was, however, a subject of controversy among the members of the organizing committee whose tasks included preparing a draft party program. 6 1 There were at least a few committee members, including M. M. Vinaver, S. I. Izmailov, and M. V. Chelnokov, who apparently still had nothing more in mind than a short-term organization for the forthcoming electoral campaign. But the committee majority, led by Miliukov, Peter Dolgorukov, Kornilov, and Shakhovskoi, adhered to the argument advanced by Miliukov in his August articles advocating participation in the Bulygin Duma—that the party would not be formed simply to participate in the election campaign and then disappear; that the campaign, on the contrary, was to be taken as an opportunity for party building rather than as an end in itself. 62 There was considerable debate over the program as well, judging from the laconic record of the committee's meetings. Those who saw the task at hand to be only the winning of election contests for the Bulygin Duma, with its restricted suffrage system, saw no need to include anything in the program but the political platform, or were for adoption of the resolutions of the September zemstvo congress as the party's program, which amounted to the same thing. But the long-time constitutionalist leaders, supported by the majority, called for the full program of the union as the basis of the program to be presented to the founding congress of the party for its approval, at the same time allowing for coordination with the September congress resolutions where these essentially coincided. 63 The crucial programmatic issue was that of agrarian reform, to which the entire last session of the committee was devoted. Miliukov and the other leaders understood that this platform of the future party's program, more than any other, would draw the lines to right and left and determine the kind of party it was going to be. Essentially three positions were revealed in the discussions: that of the extreme left, which would have liked to see all gentry lands confiscated and either turned directly over to the peasants or nationalized together with all other lands (that is, the positions of the SR and SD programs, essentially); that of the extreme right, which considered confiscation of private lands permissible only in exceptional cases and in no event envisaged complete extinction of gentry landholding; and that of the middle, which emerged victorious by maneuvering between the extremes, allowing the left to interpret the agrarian program (already elaborated in its essentials by the Union of Liberation) as a "minimum" program, and the right to consider it a "maximum" program. "We are forgetting our goal," Miliukov warned the defenders of both extreme positions at one point. "We are writing the program of the KD party. This is not the Peasants' Union, nor is it a landowners' party. We must take a middle line. Expropriation is possible, but this must not be spelled out too concretely." 64

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The organization bureau decided, after some debate, to invite three delegates per province to the founding congress, plus twenty delegates each from Petersburg and Moscow. These delegates were to be elected by local Union of Liberation or Zemstvo Constitutionalist groups where possible; elsewhere, they could simply be appointed. Members of the organizing groups and the Council of the Union of Liberation could take part in the congress ex officio. Invitations were sent by the bureau to forty-seven local groups in as many provinces, requesting them to convene meetings of their sympathizers and to elect their three delegates, "insofar as possible, from all strata of society." At these meetings, participants were also invited to discuss the party program from the point of view of local needs and conditions, using for this purpose the program of the Union of Liberation, which by this time had been printed in a number of places and widely distributed. 65 Because of the rail strike that had isolated Moscow by October 8, the congress did not convene in its full complement of 150—200 delegates and ex officio participants. There appeared instead delegates elected, by combined groups of Liberationists and Zemstvo Constitutionalists, from Moscow, Petersburg, Tver, Novgorod, Arkhangelsk, Vladimir, Iaroslavl, Stavropol, Astrakhan, and Vilno; in addition, a number of members of the two organizations from Kazan, Kaluga, Kursk, Simbirsk, Pskov, Saratov, Tambov, Tula, and Kharkov provinces, and from the city of Tiflis, who happened to be in Moscow at the time, were coopted by the bureau to participate as well. In all, there were about 80 delegates. Thirty-six of them came from Moscow, 11 from Petersburg, and the remainder from the provinces named. 6 6

The First Party Congress (October 12-18, 1905) T h e Party P r o g r a m The program provisionally adopted by the first Kadet congress was essentially the March Union of Liberation program, somewhat modified by the organizing committee. Its adoption appears to have caused remarkably little debate. Partly because of the rail strike, the meeting was dominated by the men who had taken part over the years in the gradual elaboration of that program, together with other members of its direct sponsor, the organizing committee. Particularly significant in this regard was the absence of most of the Petersburg delegation from the Union of Liberation (which in the end would refuse to join the new party). Had it been present, the misgivings of Miliukov and the moderate majority of the organization bureau about a rekindling of the disagreements that had shown up in the March Union of Liberation congress would probably have been realized. According to Miliukov's memoirs, he and his moderate colleagues had resolved beforehand to hold to the programmatic and tactical line approved by the July

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The Formation of Political Parties

and September zemstvo congresses and to resist more extreme demands that they thought were likely to be made in the heightened political temperature of the general strike. They had decided to go ahead with the congress, despite these misgivings and despite the absence of two thirds of the delegates, because of the need for haste in the rapidly developing revolutionary situation. Miliukov's opening speech, which claimed that the new party's constituency was generally committed to "social reform" while simultaneously arguing the primacy of "political reform," was composed with the impatient left of the Union of Liberation leadership foremost in mind. 6 7 The program reflected that combination of "constitutional" and "democratic" reforms deemed necessary by the party leaders for establishment of a party uniting the broadest elements of the "nonrevolutionary intelligentsia." It was also meant to appeal specifically to minority nationalities: the demand for equality of all citizens before the law and the guarantee of basic civil and individual liberties was amended to assure their extension to national minorities and to include cultural self-determination as a basic right of citizens. A special article (3) was devoted to democratic local self-government and autonomy, with special reference to Poland and to the restoration of the Finnish constitution. This article came out of the debates of the September zemstvo congress—the first congress to be attended by a sizable representation from the nonzemstvo provinces. It had been bombarded with petitions from groups representing various nationalities (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others). The inclusion of this article amounted to a bid by the party leaders for support in the national borderlands. 6 8 The articles on the political system called for a legislature, with legislative initiative and ministerial responsibility to it, to be elected by fourtail suffrage. The question of a second chamber was left open, although it was provided that should a second chamber be constituted, it should consist of representatives of the organs of local administration reorganized on the basis of universal suffrage and extended to the entire country. Extensive court reforms, commencing with the restoration of the 1864 judicial statutes, were also called for. It has been justly remarked that the sections of the program dealing with financial-economic policy, agrarian and labor legislation, and education (articles 5 - 8 ) set the Kadet program off from those of other Russian constitutionalist parties, as well as from the mainstream of European liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 69 The financial section provided for abolition of peasant redemption payments, gradual abolition of indirect taxes and their replacement by graduated income taxes, and reform of tariff policies "with the aim of reducing the cost of objects of popular consumption and the technical advancement of industry and agriculture."

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The agrarian legislation essentially repeated the terms of the draft program worked out in the organizing committee. 70 The two basic points of the program (in addition to clauses calling for aid to resettlement and surveying, control over conditions of rent and agricultural labor, insurance, and the like) were: 36. Increase of the area of land usage by the population engaged in working the land with its own labor; that is, including landless and smallholding peasants as well as various categories of small landed proprietors, by means of state, udel, cabinet, and monastery lands, and also by means of alienation for the same purpose at state expense of privately owned land in necessary amounts [v potrebnykh razmerakh], with compensation to the present owners according to just (not market) valuation. 37. Alienated lands enter a state land fund. The principles according to which lands from this fund are subject to transfer to the population in need of it (ownership, personal or communal usage, and so forth) are to be established in accordance with the peculiarities of land tenure and land usage in the various regions of Russia. 71 The only substantive difference here between the draft and the final program was the inclusion in article 36 of the phrase "in necessary amounts." This was a compromise between those who wished to leave that question entirely untouched in the program and those at the congress who, with the socialist parties, favored the granting of land to the peasants according to a "labor norm," an amount sufficient to occupy the peasant family regardless of the effects of its implementation on other forms of landholding (it may be recalled that this view had been expressed in the discussions of the organizing committee). The labor platform of the Kadet program called for the right to organize and strike; for the extension of labor legislation and regulation to all forms of hired labor and institutionalized participation of workers' representatives in control organizations and labor disputes; and for state insurance for old age and disability. It also added a number of points on the control of labor conditions. The most controversial of these was article 44 on the introduction of the eight-hour work day, which called for "the rapid introduction of that norm wherever possible at present, and its gradual introduction in the remainder of enterprises." Again, this was a compromise between those who supported the socialist parties' program demanding immediate universal introduction of the eight-hour workday, and those who were apprehensive about the economic consequences of such a measure. The platform on education was based on "democratization and decentralization of education," including the right of private and public

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The Formation of Political Parties

initiative in the organization of schools, academic freedom and free organization for students, university autonomy, the expansion and rationalization of the educational system at the secondary and tertiary levels, and the introduction of universal, free, obligatory primary education. A very large role was assigned to the (reformed) organs of local selfgovernment in all this. Party Organization The congress also adopted a set of party statutes for governing the internal organization of the party. These statutes, drawn up by D. I. Shakhovskoi, were accepted by the congress without significant discussion, probably because the provisional nature of the party at that point made the question of organization academic. In any case, the same statutes were adopted unchanged by the second party congress in January 1906; and the third congress in April 1906, which did review them with an eye to meeting the requirements for "legal" political parties set down in the legislation of March 4, 1906, left them again virtually unchanged. 72 The congress elected a "temporary" central committee of thirty, which was to manage party affairs until a second congress, properly representative of local party groups, could elect a regular central committee in accordance with the party statutes. The second congress, originally to have been called in two weeks' time, was first postponed until after the planned November zemstvo congress (this decision was taken even before the end of the first congress's work), and then further delayed because of continuing communications problems. The December uprising in Moscow and the state of martial law declared in connection with it still further delayed the calling of the congress and also caused the site of the congress to be moved from Moscow to Petersburg. 73 The central committee headquarters were in Moscow, and remained there until the third party congress, when, with the opening of the Duma, the committee decided to move to Petersburg. In fact, a good deal of the committee's activity was concentrated from the beginning in Petersburg, where better than half its members had their permanent residences and where the central party newspapers were published beginning in late February. Tactics The tactics of the new party at its inception were in general dictated by the organizational task; that is, by the party-building strategy already described, the commitment to developing the "big democratic party" (Miliukov) that had led to the calling of the first congress in October. The second main task of the party, organization of the electoral campaign, depended on success in the first task and had in any case to wait on the

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resolution of the question of the electoral law, the Bulygin law having been, in effect, annulled by the October Manifesto with its promise for a more democratic suffrage. The first congress of the Kadet party issued two public resolutions, one before and the other immediately after proclamation of the October Manifesto. In the first, issued on the first day of the party's formal existence (October 14) over the signatures of the members of the organization bureau, the party declared its complete solidarity with the strike movement, whose general goals were described as immediate introduction of basic liberties, "free election of popular representatives to a constituent assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct, and secret ballot, and a general political amnesty." All these goals were declared common to the strike movement at large and to the new party. There was no longer any question of whether political liberty would come to Russia, nor whether it would come "from above or below"; the only question was whether it would be won, from below, by violent or by peaceful means. The party declared itself in favor of peaceful means but warned that it was up to the government to decide whether the strike movement would end in peaceful acquisition of liberty or in a bloodbath. In either event, the resolution intoned, the party "sides in advance with the popular demands and places on the scales of the people's liberation all its sympathy, all its moral force, and will give it all possible support." The second resolution, issued on October 18, the last day of the congress, was a response to the October Manifesto. It expressed the party's dissatisfaction with the concessions of the manifesto, on the grounds that it failed to give adequate recognition to the principles of political liberty. Furthermore, it proposed that the most satisfactory way out of the present crisis would be through immediate introduction of the basic rights promised in the Manifesto; immediate holding of elections to a constituent assembly based on a completely democratic suffrage, rather than the proffered Duma (it was allowed, however, that the Duma could serve as "one of the means" for bringing about the convocation of a constituent assembly); immediate removal of all government officials "who by their previous actions have aroused the wrath of the people"; and, finally, it repeated the demand for a full amnesty to political prisoners and religious dissenters. 74 It seems impossible to ponder Kadet tactics in this crucial initial period of the party's existence without recalling the rather acrimonious debate on the subject that was conducted in the pages of the Paris émigré* press in the 1920s and 1930s between those former comrades of the first Kadet central committee, Miliukov and V. A. Maklakov. There is no need to describe the terms of that debate in full here, 75 but certain points in it are helpful for coming to an understanding of the behavior of the Kadet leaders in the early months of the party's existence.

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The Formation of Political Parties

Maklakov's basic premise (it was he who took the offensive in the debate) was that the regime, in issuing the October Manifesto, had committed itself in good faith to limitations on its authority and to the constitutional-representative arrangements that commitment implied. From this premise followed his opinion that those among the Kadet leaders who were sincerely committed to constitutional reform ought at that point to have sided firmly with the "historical state power" against "the Revolution"; that is, the revolutionary parties and the mass movement to which they were giving encouragement in late 1905, even if this would have meant giving up aspirations for creating a large political party. 7 6 At least in retrospect, Maklakov saw the party as a continuation of the liberation movement. If its front was narrower than that of the movement as a whole, it still included in its ranks people with "revolutionary ideology" and had sided with "the Revolution" against "reaction," leaving no place for those seeking a liberal or moderate solution. With the advent of constitutional monarchy (October 17), the incipient party should have broken up into several parties, according to the diverse interests and temperaments coexisting within it. 7 7 At the time, the large majority of the party leadership obviously did not accept this interpretation of the October Manifesto, and of the government's intentions generally, and Miliukov found no reason to change the diagnosis twenty-five years later. 7 8 What is significant for our purposes is not Maklakov's well-known speculations about what might have happened had the Kadet leaders tempered their "revolutionism," but rather his perception of the overwhelming concern of the party leaders following the October Manifesto to preserve party unity, a concern which, he rightly observed, led them to play down real ideological differences within the party; and his perception that this urge to maintain the party was dictated by the leaders' past experience. 79 Behind the issue of party unity (between "constitutionalists" and "democrats") lay indeed the past experience of relying on "public opinion" and "zemstvo m e n " (to whom Maklakov, retrospectively, wished to entrust the fortunes of reform after October 17), and the conviction born of that experience that the regime would submit to significant reform only if confronted by a broadly mobilized citizenry (obshchestvo). This conviction had been a long time developing, but by the same token it was not one that could be cast off in response to the mere publication of a laconic government manifesto. It was this generally shared conviction among the party's initiators that led directly to recognition of the strategic necessity of acquiring the support of the "democratic intelligentsia," without which, as well, there could be no hope for a large popular following in the future. The commitment to this strategy became all the stronger in the autumn of 1905 and winter of 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 6 , when, under the impact of mounting

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popular disorders, the committed constitutional reform-minded element in the zemstvos shrank to a small core, the mass of the zemstvo and gentry assemblies shifting their political orientation distinctly to the right, toward support of "the historical state power." In some instances this shift took the form of support for the nascent Union of October 17, but the shift eventually swept further to the right than that. After October 1905, most of the recently opposition-minded landed gentry essentially relapsed into support of the regime, faute de mieux. By the winter of 1905-1906, as the level of peasant violence against gentry property and lives reached unprecedented proportions, zemstvo assemblies were petitioning the government to delay introduction of the civil liberties promised in the October Manifesto and to continue the rule of martial law and extraordinary measures until full restoration of order. 80 The "line on the right" that Miliukov referred to in his October speech was being drawn much closer in than he or his colleagues probably could have imagined then. All this could only serve to reenforce the wager on the nonsectarian left, l'ouverture à gauche. The party leaders' confrontation of the two basic issues at the height of the revolution in late 1905—the question of relations with the revolutionary parties and the mass movement, and the question of relations with the government—was made with that wager constantly in mind.

From the First to the Second Congress (November 1905—January 1906) First Steps When, a few days after publication of the October Manifesto, Prime Minister Witte approached the executive bureau of the zemstvo congress in his search for public men to participate in the reformed cabinet he would head, the bureau's delegation, consisting of F. A. Golovin (chairman of the bureau), Prince G. E. Lvov, and F. F. Kokoshkin, laid down the following conditions for any possible participation: (1) convocation of the fourtail constituent assembly "for elaboration of the fundamental laws," (2) immediate introduction of the liberties promised in the manifesto, and (3) complete political amnesty. These conditions, presented to Witte in a meeting on October 21, ruled out continuation of discussions. The delegation's declaration to Witte was published (Witte had been obliged to agree to this as a precondition to opening the discussion) in Russkie vedomosti on October 23. 81 Although the delegation's terms were not based on a specific ruling of the new Kadet party, they were, as Miliukov noted, in the spirit of the party at the time; in effect it was a party action (Miliukov participated in the meeting preliminary to the delegation's departure, and Kokoshkin, like

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The Formation of Political Parties

Miliukov a member of the first party central committee, was included in the delegation to assure adherence to party views). 8 2 The uncompromising character of the delegation's response to Witte's overture surprised many contemporary observers. It is clear that Shipov, who had been the first to urge Witte to turn to the zemstvo congress "majority" with offers of ministerial posts, had fully expected that the manifesto would suffice to cause the bureau to end its "opposition to the government" and to enter Witte's cabinet. In his view, the bureau's response testified to " a complete lack of awareness of the necessity to preserve and support the authority of state power in the current period." 8 3 Shipov had misread the political attitudes prevailing in the Kadet leadership at the time of the party's inception. Whether Witte had done so is problematical, as are most aspects of his political behavior, but it is quite unlikely that he could have expected any of the Kadet leaders to enter his cabinet on the terms that he would not, or could not, change: retention of the most important posts for appointees from within the bureaucracy; and most important—the real bone of contention—appointment of P. N. Durnovo, at that time assistant minister charged with police operations, as minister of internal affairs. Even Shipov and his colleagues from the right wing of the zemstvo opposition, A. I. Guchkov, M . A. Stakhovich, and several others, to whom Witte had first turned in his attempt to get a few "public men" in his new cabinet, would not enter on these terms, and Witte was compelled to form an entirely "bureaucratic" cabinet, without benefit of the veneer of public confidence he had hoped to acquire by their participation. 8 4 In any event, the Kadet leadership's attitudes, along with the tactics that flowed from them, were spelled out for all to see in an article published by Vladimir Nabokov in the liberal lawyers' newspaper Pravo, just two days after the zemstvo bureau delegation had met with Witte. It amounted to an official party analysis of the current situation. 8 5 Nabokov began by identifying the party's ultimate goal with that of the " l e f t " in general—"social reform." But the road to social reform lay through political reform, the first and most urgent task. The basic elements of political reform were: "universal suffrage, liberty, and a constitution produced by a constituent assembly. The convocation of the latter is, therefore, the direct and most immediate task of party activity." He maintained that the October Manifesto, whatever its shortcomings, was the product, the trophy, of the liberation movement. The party's first steps would be fateful: if it took the right path, its future " a s a powerful and viable organization will be guaranteed and it will become one of the major factors in the full and complete emancipation of Russia." A false step would threaten it with destruction. It was therefore imperative that the party determine its relations toward (1) the government, and specifically the manifesto, and (2) the revolutionary parties. The former, Nabokov wrote,

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had been appropriately outlined in the founding congress's resolution on the manifesto. As for relations with the revolutionary parties, party policy should be guided by the necessity "to conserve the energy and increase the power of the opposition mood, the mobilization of all opposition forces." That should be the slogan for the party's relations with the left: "We must unite on the basis of our common interests, putting aside all that divides us. We will not accept what is organically foreign to us and is ruled out by our political raison d'être [politicheskii smysl], but we do not demand sacrifices of principles concerning means from anyone in the name of the common good. We can only hope that the powerful union of diverse forces will of itself remove those means that we, organically and politically, cannot accept as our own." Nabokov concluded that, in view of the widespread counterrevolutionary violence of the last few days, "we would consider a split between us and those standing on our left... not just a political mistake, but a political crime." In short, political victory was not yet won. What had been gained was the work of the liberation movement as a whole, including the revolutionary parties and the strike movement; therefore, the demand for the constituent assembly would not be abandoned nor any break made with the revolutionary left. The party, however, was not to be expected to participate in the organization of armed confrontation with the regime. This warning, at the outset of the most violent phase of the revolution, did not bode well for relations between the Kadets and the revolutionary parties.86 In the stormy months following the October Manifesto and the party leadership's first bold response to it, the party moved progressively away from the slogans that had linked it with the parties of the left—the demand for immediate convocation of the constituent assembly, and acceptance of the possibility of, if not active support for, a "democratic republic." It emerged from the second party congress in mid-January 1906 having abandoned the demand for a constituent assembly (as an institution distinct from the Duma promised in the manifesto) and with a program revised to express explicit support for a constitutional monarchy. However, while leading party members gave increasingly urgent warnings in November and early December against continuation of the general-strike movement and criticized its encouragement by the revolutionary parties, arguing (correctly) that the popular movement was nearing exhaustion and that confrontation would push the regime to outright reaction, the party leadership as a whole all the same avoided general condemnation of the mass movement or of the revolutionary parties. The Kadet party continued, at least formally, to observe the tactic of a united front with the left and placed ultimate responsibility for the continuation of disorder and violence on the intransigence and procrastination of the

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government. In particular, the government was blamed for having provoked the December uprising in Moscow. 8 7

The November Congress The first significant step away from the slogans of the united front showed up in the resolutions adopted by the November congress of zemstvo and town duma representatives. The large majority of participants in this congress (held from November 6 to November 13 in Moscow) were prominent figures in the then just-forming local groups of the Kadet party. In the tense atmosphere of mid-November, the delegates displayed great diversity of views about the proper response to the current situation, ranging from an unrestricted vote of confidence for Witte's government at one extreme to the demand for immediate convocation of the constituent assembly at the other. The tension at the congress was pointed up by Witte's invitation to the zemtsy (through a quasi-private telegram to Petrunkevich) to patriotically come to the government's aid in the face of anarchy (Witte referred specifically to the outbreak of rebellion in Sevastopol), and by the almost simultaneous receipt by the congress bureau of a protest from the Moscow soviet accusing the congress of dalliance with the autocracy. 8 8 Miliukov, recently coopted to the congress bureau, played honest broker at the November meeting, elaborating with his bureau colleagues a set of resolutions that were, in effect, resolutions of the Kadet party: they were intended as such by the party leadership, and were so interpreted in the contemporary press. An initial resolution calling for convocation of a constituent assembly was voted down by a vote of 137 to 80. Following this vote, the phrase "constituent assembly" was dropped from the main resolution of the congress and replaced by the demand for proclamation of an act providing for "Immediate summoning of public representatives by universal, direct, equal, and secret ballot, and for formal endowment of the first assembly of popular representatives with constituent functions, for drawing up, with the confirmation of the sovereign, a constitution of the Russian empire." This "first assembly" was also to be "empowered to establish the basic principles of agrarian reform and to take necessary measures in the field of labor legislation." The resolution went on to call for democratic reform of the zemstvos and town administrations, and other measures for introduction of a legal order (including revocation of the emergency legislation, amnesty to political prisoners, abolition of the death sentence, immediate introduction of the liberties mentioned in the October Manifesto, and a purge of the administration, particularly of officials who were known to have encouraged pogroms). 8 9 The formula on the first assembly, which had been worked out by the congress bureau, had, as Miliukov noted in his memoirs, "removed from the agenda the demand for a separate convocation of a constituent assembly,

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and rumors that the party intended to declare Russia a democratic republic were refuted; while, on the other hand, the decision to limit the competence of the 'first assembly' to exclusively constituent functions was also revoked." 9 0 In this way, the position of the nascent Kadet party shifted perceptibly to the right, setting it off from the revolutionary parties in a way it had not been before. " O u r parting of the ways with the left parties found its first precise formulation here." 9 1 Efforts were made to minimize the significance of this shift. Pravo editorialized in the issue in which it printed the congress resolutions that abandonment of the constituent assembly demand amounted only to a "semantic shift": the Kadet leaders were not really rejecting the constituent assembly as they had understood it all along, only avoiding a term that had come to be given a special definition by the SDs and SRs, a definition entailing "the absolute condition of the removal of the existing government, and then temporary chaos, from which the constituent assembly, in complete freedom and with no ties to the past, would create a totally new order—the democratic republic." By contrast, the congress, "while resolving that the Fundamental Law must indeed be elaborated by a constituent assembly, at the same time expressed the conviction that under present conditions there can be no talk of a republic, and the constitution will be subject to the sovereign's confirmation. Thus, if the members of the KD party voted on the question at hand against the constituent assembly, one should interpret that as disagreement with the term, not with its essential character." 9 2 Although there was some truth to the point that the Kadets' idea of a constituent assembly had not changed in any fundamental way, the question of why the "semantic shift" designed to point up the differences on that issue with the revolutionary parties was taken just then was not addressed in the Pravo editorial. Witte's overture to the congress had provoked much specilation. The newspaper Rus' editorialized hopefully that the congress might become a sort of provisional government under Witte. 93 Miliukov recalled that in this atmosphere—panic about anarchy and general disorder on the one hand; government overtures on the other—"the congress produced several resolutions adapted to the situation that had developed, with the obvious purpose of facilitating the possibility of a deal [sgovor] with the government, should negotiations be continued." 9 4 The party leaders wished to give a signal of their essential moderation to Witte, despite their earlier refusal to cooperate with him in the government on his terms. That this was indeed a consideration in the change in the party program (for that is what the congress resolutions amounted to) was made clear by the decision taken at the end of the congress to send a delegation to Witte with an explication of the terms by which the government could obtain the support of the zemstvo congress: essentially, by putting its resolutions into effect. The delegation

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was to deliver a copy of the resolutions and present an explanatory statement of that import. The congress's terms were unacceptable to Witte. He took revenge on the zemtsy, whom he had twice solicited, by refusing even to receive the delegation (consisting of Petrunkevich, S. A. Muromtsev, and Kokoshkin), and by responding only some days later through the Council of Ministers with a warning of the dire consequences of the congress's failure to support the government in its realization of the principles of the October Manifesto and the maintenance of order. 95 In hindsight, it seems unlikely that Witte at that juncture could have been expected to relinquish tested implements for handling popular unrest (the emergency legislation of 1881) or to turn loose convicted revolutionary activists. This was realized at the time by a fair minority of the November congress, including Miliukov, who argued strongly against sending a delegation to Witte, but objections were overruled by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-seven with three abstentions. 96 The Kadet Interpretation of the Constituent Assembly The two basic interpretations of this current term in Russian political discourse were spelled out with characteristic vividness by Maklakov in one of his numerous election campaign speeches in early 1906. He told a Voronezh audience that: "history yields two types of constituent assemblies: the one, exemplified by the constituent assembly in France in 1848 after the overthrow and flight of Louis Phillipe, which possessed full sovereignty and could create the new order as it pleased; and the other, exemplified by the assemblies in Austria in 1848 and in Prussia in 1867, both of which convened under the monarch and drew up a constitution." 97 As far as the Kadet party was concerned, Maklakov continued, given the fact that the emperor had remained, albeit limited by "fundamental constitutional laws" (he should have said "by the promise of fundamental constitutional laws"), "a constituent assembly i s . . . a meeting of representatives of the people who should work out the fundamental laws and definitely not that meeting which abolishes and stands in place of the former emperor." The employment of the term in both senses was nearly as old as the constitutionalist movement. The first use of the specific term "constituent assembly" on record p a y have been by none other than Ivan Petrunkevich, in a brochure he wrote in early 1879, The Immediate Tasks of the Zemstvo (Blizhaishchie zadachi zemstvo). Petrunkevich there used the term in its more moderate sense. It was employed in the more radical, revolutionary sense in the same year in the program of the Executive Committee of The People's Will (Narodnaia Volia). Part Β of their program declared: As socialists and populists, we propose that our first task is to free the people from the oppression of the present government anJ bring about a political revolution with the aim of transferring

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power to the people. By means of this revolution we shall first of all provide that the people will henceforward develop independently, in accordance with their own will and inclination... 2. We propose that the will of the people would be adequately expressed and executed by a constituent assembly [uchreditel'nym sobranient], freely elected by universal vote and provided with instructions from its electors. 98 The term had been used in its moderate sense" by the "Russian constitutionalists" in the first number of Osvobozhdenie in 1902 (in point of fact, they used the term "constituent organ" [uchreditel'nyi organ] rather than "constituent assembly"). Although Maklakov's claim that this was the sense in which the party leadership as a whole employed it may have been exaggerated, at least the notion of a "constituent assembly" had all along been more or less synonymous with the "Duma with constituent functions," summoned by the Crown, its constitutional project subject to royal ratification. One significant change had, of course, taken place since 1902: the idea of the "first assembly" being elected by a "democratized" zemstvo—a common property of Petrunkevich's 1879 scheme and the 1902 program—had been replaced by recognition of the principle of election by universal, direct suffrage. This change was a response to challenges to the constitutionalists' democratic credentials from the left, as expressed, for example, in the resolution on relations with liberals adopted at the Social Democrats' second congress in 1 9 0 3 . 1 0 0 More generally it amounted to recognition that the citizenry extended beyond the ranks of the zemstvo constituency. In a public polemic with Prince E. N. Trubetskoi in January 1906, Miliukov wrote: " I affirm that the notion of 'constituent assembly' held by persons closely involved in the organization of the party had from the very beginning a different meaning than that with which it was used by our extreme parties." 1 0 1 At the November congress, even the advocates of retaining the resolution calling for a constituent assembly, such as A. M. Koliubakin and Professor Luchitskii, appear by all evidence to have given it the more moderate interpretation; they were concerned about the party's ability to compete with the revolutionary parties if it surrendered the slogan to them. 1 0 2 A small left-wing faction in the party leadership, led by the selfstyled Marxist lawyer M. L. Mandelshtam, came close to the revolutionaries in their understanding of the term; that is, that the constituent assembly should be a completely sovereign body. They apparently believed at the time that the regime could be pressured into convening such an assembly. 103

The Appeal Leftward The breakdown of negotiations with Witte (if they can be called that) was soon followed by a series of government actions that were interpreted by the

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Kadet leaders as serious reneging on the promises made in October: the declaration of martial law, first in Poland and then in ever-widening areas of the country; wholesale use of courts-martial, which freely employed summary executions to put down disorders, especially peasant disturbances; the closing down of a number of newspapers in late November; the government's apparent unwillingness to act decisively to stop the wave of pogroms and other forms of right-wing violence that set in in many places in the country immediately after the manifesto's proclamation, (there was widespread suspicion that it was actually encouraging such violence); and, finally, the promulgation of the new electoral law on December 11. These developments naturally made the Kadet leaders increasingly doubtful about the regime's commitment to serious reform, and this growing doubt reenforced the need to appeal leftward at the same time that they were engaged in dissociating themselves from the goals and policies of the revolutionary parties, which in their view were encouraging anarchy and violence. In these delicate circumstances, the party leaders stepped up their campaign to win the allegiance of nonparty socialists among the "democratic intelligentsia." This was the task of a major Pravo article of November 20 by A. A. Chuprov, entitled "The Constitutional-Democratic Party and Socialism." 104 Taking Miliukov's speech to the first congress as his text, Professor Chuprov expanded on its proposition that the party could accommodate socialists as well as nonsocialists, and must do so if the constitutionalist forces were to be strong enough to have a significant influence on the course of events. Chuprov, answering accusations by former comrades in the Union of Liberation that the Kadets had destroyed the united front, declared that a close-knit party organization was demanded by the facts of Russia's geography and national diversity: anything but a unified country-wide organization would fatally dissipate its energies in problems of communication, local issues, and so on. The time had come, Chuprov wrote, to abandon Miliukov's recommendation in his speech opening the first Kadet congress that the groups brought together in the party avoid spelling out their principal differences for the sake of unity. Explicit recognition of the duality of party composition should now be made, and steps should be taken to clarify "the principal views of both uniting factions." Here, in contrast to the lateOctober article by Nabokov in the same paper, emphasis was no longer on cooperation with the parties of the left against reaction, but quite explicitly on competition with the revolutionary parties for the support of nonparty socialists; that is, as Chuprov believed, the broad reaches of the intelligentsia: "people of the free professions, zemstvo and municipal administration employees, and so on," but in particular "that intelligentsia 'third element' that played a prominent role in the Union of Liberation and is hesitating to enter the doors that have been opened for it [into the party]." 105

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Chuprov argued that a frank examination of views held within the party, while revealing differences of ultimate goals, would also reveal very extensive identity of short- and medium-range goals, and would thereby demonstrate that the Kadet party was a more appropriate place for the mass of nonparty socialists who were, he claimed, revisionist-oriented and believers, like the socialists who were already in the party, in evolutionary socialism rather than in the idea of a single, cataclysmic leap. The process of examination would also reveal that the evolutionary socialists in the party shared a program of reforms, even in fairly long-term perspective, with the nonsocialist but "social-reformist" other half of the party—the "zemtsy and dumtsy" representatives of the possessing classes. This half, though not sharing the ultimate goals of the socialists, "will not of course view [these reforms]106 as the preparatory phase of something yet to follow, but will support them out of sincere sympathy toward cultural work, out of simple striving toward 'social peace.'" This clarification process would remove from the party that "bourgeois veneer" (nalet burzhuaznosti) that it currently possessed in the eyes of many members of the intelligentsia, hindering them from entering the party. In practical terms, Chuprov was calling for an "indication of general goals pursued by the party in the area of economic and social policy," which, once elaborated, would take the form of amendments to the party program. The program would avoid mention of "ultimate goals" only. 107 Essentially the same line of argument was pursued, or echoed, a little later by the Odessa party leader Professor Ε. N. Shchepkin, in his newspaper Za svobodu (For Liberty.) 108

The Second Party Congress (January 5—11, 1906) Changes in the Party Program Despite the significantly reduced weight of the more moderate zemstvo element at the second congress,109 the party leadership not only succeeded in winning the congress's endorsement for withdrawal of the "constituent assembly" in favor of the "duma with constituent functions" for the party program; it also put the seal on its differences with the revolutionary parties by adding to article 13 of the program the phrase: "Russia should be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy." The first matter was dealt with in a "clarification" by the central committee in response to a call from the floor for restoring the term "constituent assembly" to the program. This "clarification" (introduced by Miliukov) was then adopted as a resolution by the congress. It stated: "In the party's use of the term, 'constituent assembly' signifies an assembly of public representatives with constituent functions [sobrante narodnykh predstavitelei s uchreditel'nymi funktsiiami] summoned for the purpose of drawing up the Fundamental Laws [osnovnogo zakona], and not an assembly endowed with completely

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sovereign authority [oblechennoe vsei 'polnotoi vlasti']."110 This was the only reference to the "constituent assembly" in the congress resolutions. Local party groups were left at liberty to use the term or not, on the theory that the "clarification" had made the choice of terminology inconsequential—a caveat clearly intended to placate the minority at the congress that was unwilling to part with the cherished slogan of the left. 1 1 1 The change in article 13 preceded the clarification in the congress's deliberations. In the first party program article 13 had merely stated that "the constitutional structure of the Russian empire is defined by the Fundamental L a w . " 1 1 2 What was to be understood by the phrase that now replaced it, "Russia should be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy"? This was explained in the introduction to the separate edition of the second congress's resolutions and the revised program: " B y 'constitutional monarchy' is understood a monarchy with public representatives possessing the decisive voice in the promulgation of laws, in the preparation of expenditures and revenues, and in overseeing the administration. A 'parliamentary monarchy' is one in which governance is carried on by ministers who have the confidence and support of the majority of the national assembly. 1 1 3 The congress made two other changes in the program: (1) it changed the wording of the agrarian program that dealt with the valuation of land subject to expropriation, making more precise the vague "fair price" mentioned in the first version (it called for valuations based on average income derived from the land); and (2) it made female suffrage an explicit part of the program. This minor adjustment in the agrarian program was the sole programmatic result of a long and dramatic controversy at the congress on the agrarian question, which showed that the widely divergent views revealed in the organizing committee before October 1905 were still represented in party councils. Essentially the very general compromise formulations of the first congress were left intact once it was realized that no more precise prescriptions could gain general agreement. The second point concerned article 14, which called for the national assembly to be elected by "universal, equal, direct, and secret ballot, regardless of confession, nationality, or sex." In the first redaction, a footnote to this article had allowed that support for immediate introduction of female suffrage was not obligatory for party members. That footnote was removed in the redaction approved by the second congress. It had been included in the first version by the party leaders on the grounds that the unconditional demand for female suffrage might oblige the party to reject a proffered electoral law based on universal manhood suffrage, something they were obviously loath to do. Experience since the issuance of the December 11 electoral law apparently convinced them that most party members did not consider female suffrage a mandatory part of an acceptable electoral law, so they allowed the footnote to be deleted (not without some objections from their midst), thus satisfying those who felt

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strongly about the issue on principle and did not wish to see the party's commitment to female suffrage diminished by any qualifications. A rather lame account of the removal of this "misunderstanding" was provided in the explication of the congress's resolutions by Vladimir Nabokov and I. V. Gessen in the first issue of the party weekly. 114 The party also added to its name, as a second title, "People's Freedom party" (Partila narodnoi svobody), to meet objections that its hyphenated name of European loanwords was incomprehensible to the people. Although there can be no doubt that the party's declaration for constitutional monarchy had the effect of sharpening the differences between the Kadets and the socialist parties, the motives that lay behind that decision are not entirely obvious. It is probably true that the majority of the party leaders had thought all along that a constitutional-parliamentary monarchy was the historically proper and preferable next step in Russia's political development (this was in effect admitted in the "clarification" quoted earlier). The party's leading specialists in constitutional law concurred in this. Kokoshkin, in the debate on the issue at the congress, declared the question of choosing between a constitutional monarchy and a republic purely academic in Russia: republics had been established in new nations, like America, but in countries with traditions of monarchial government, the transition from monarchy to republic was much more difficult. If countries like Belgium and Norway had not yet made that transition, then in Russia, he warned, "rivers of blood" would flow if an attempt to make a direct leap to a republican form of government was made. The implicit point was that the transitional order would need the legitimizing authority of the monarchy. S. A. Kotliarevskii, along with Kokoshkin one of the party's leading experts on constitutional law and comparative politics, made much the same point, with more prophetic overtones, in an article published in Struve's journal Poliarnaia zvezda (Polar Star) in March. 115 It is fairly clear that the commitment to constitutional monarchy made at the second congress was not simply a matter of flying true colors now that the failure of the insurrectionist strategy of the left had been revealed.116 In some measure it was also prompted by communications from local party groups of the belief that the mass of the population was in fact monarchist. These were referred to in the clarification, and it may be noted that in the party archives there are a fair number of letters from local party groups from this period (several of them groups considered to be on the party "left") that urged the party leaders to declare for monarchy if they wished to make any head way among the peasant electorate. 117 In circles to the right of the Kadets, where it was generally accepted that people like Miliukov and Petrunkevich were republicans at heart, the party's endorsement of constitutional monarchy appears to have been seen as a purely tactical move. 118

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The programmatic change appears to have received little objection in principle in the debates at the second congress. It was challenged primarily on tactical grounds concerning the question of preempting the constituent function, the possibility of alienating republican sentiment in the party, and so on. In the end, the central committee's proposal for revising article 13 was approved by a vote of seventy-seven to thirteen, seven abstaining. 119

Strategy and Tactics In regard to the problem of the Duma and its activities, the second congress not only gave formal endorsement to the November zemstvo meeting's resolution allowing for more than strictly "constituent" functions for the Duma (the Duma could give attention to pressing questions of agrarian and labor legislation); it went measurably further, belying the apprehensions of Miliukov and others in the central committee about prevailing attitudes on the Duma question. (Miliukov had anticipated a significant boycottist sentiment among the delegates, and in his principal address to the congress had proposed treating the problem of tactics toward the Duma as two separate questions—participation in the elections and participation in the Duma—arguing that the former was absolutely necessary for furthering the party's own organization and agitation, regardless of outcome, whereas the latter depended on the outcome of the elections: the more seats for the party, the more tempting participation in the Duma would be. Miliukov's proposition was made into a resolution, and the congress in virtual unanimity—with only one and two negative votes, respectively—voted in favor of participation in both the elections and the Duma itself.) 120 Although the congress unanimously rejected the proposition that the party's Duma delegation should "undertake.. .organic work as in a normal institution" (that is, regular legislative activity), thus reaffirming the "constituent character" of the Duma-to-be, it went on to vote by large majority not to restrict the Duma's functions exclusively to "elaboration of an electoral law and a bill of rights," and to resolve that the Duma should occupy itself, in addition, with "legislative measures of an unquestionably urgent character required for the pacification of the country." 1 2 1 In the following resolution the congress rejected a proposal that the measures in question be spelled out, but it in effect smuggled a list of them—matters of agrarian reform, labor reform, and legislation on the status of the nationalities—through the back door in the form of a separate resolution (presented by Struve and Rodichev) on "material for the party's electoral campaign manifesto." Before it could be passed, however, it had to have attached to it a reiteration (supplied by Kokoshkin) that the Duma's primary task was, after all, democratization of the electoral law and its own prompt replacement by an assembly convened on the basis of that law. 1 2 2 This curious concatenation of resolutions and amendments reflected the

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tension at the congress—not so much between different groups of delegates as within the individual delegates' own minds—produced, on the one hand, by the recognition that with the promulgation of the new electoral law on December 11 and the suppression of the December uprising soon afterward, the government was getting back in the driver's seat and that in this situation "organic work" in a Duma elected by an insufficiently democratic suffrage system and endowed with insufficient powers might be the necessary sphere of political activity for the short term at least; and, on the other hand, by the generally held conviction that the first Duma could only be an arena for conflict with the regime, given the basic incompatibility between the party's commitment to fundamental constitutional change and the regime's evident continuing resistance to it. For all the lowering of sights that had taken place in the party leadership since October, acceptance of the projected Duma as a "normal institution" would have, in Miliukov's words, "gone beyond the limits of current party ideology and would have constituted a definitive break with the 'left doctrine,' " which was still generally subscribed to in the party leadership. "The Duma seemed to all of us to be an organ of struggle with authority, not an organ of cooperation [sotrudnichestvo]."123 Summing up his impressions of the second congress in the first issue (February 22) of the party weekly brought into existence in conformance with its resolutions, Miliukov wrote that despite considerable differences on long-range issues and matters of ideological principle,124 the congress had shown virtual unanimity about tactics and, in general, the immediate tasks ahead. Time would show that the conclusions to be drawn from this demonstration of virtual unanimity were more problematical than Miliukov let on, but about the demonstration itself there could be no doubt. This was shown principally in the congress's unanimous endorsement, and transformation into a formal party declaration, of M. M. Vinaver's "report on tactics." 125 Vinaver began his report by stating as a generally accepted matter of fact that "it is clear that party membership depends more on tactical considerations than on programmatic ones." But the absence (paradoxically) of a general formulation of the party's "tactical methods" (takticheskie priemy) had led to confusion on all sides about the character of the party: on the right there was a tendency to see the Kadets as encouragers of violence; that is, they were seen to be occupying one position with the revolutionary parties; whereas on the left, and not only within the ranks of the revolutionary parties, the Kadet party was seen as essentially lacking any tactic, in the sense of a concrete plan of action. The situation was badly in need of clarification. It was some time yet before the Duma would meet, if it was going to meet at all, and the struggle for a proper system of representative government was still in progress. Vinaver proposed to outline what the party's tactic should be in this situation, and what its position

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should be vis-à-vis the tactics of other groups engaged in this struggle (that is, the revolutionary parties). The "two social groups" that formed the party shared a belief in the power of public opinion, the conviction that the regime, faced with the opposition of "conscious public opinion," would inevitably collapse. This dictated their approach to political action, which Vinaver characterized as "the path of disorganization of authority by means of organization of social forces [obshchestvennykh sil; that is, the organization of public opinion]." In the beginning, this activity was necessarily clandestine, "or at least semiconspiratorial." As the possibilities for open activity increased, the role of propaganda grew, and the available methods for organizing public opinion multiplied, but the basic tactical approach had not changed, "and could not change, for it is founded on a definite, deep political faith, which is independent of external conditions." The extreme parties had not changed their tactic since the advent of the possibility of open activity either, a tactic "linked to direct force as a weapon of political revolution," and reproaches from that quarter that the Kadets lacked a tactical program contained an implicit challenge to adopt the tactic of the revolutionary parties. This challenge, Vinaver said in the key passage of his address, had to be given a definitive answer: We must tell ourselves definitively and once and for all that we lend all our strength to the broadest possible organization of public opinion by all possible means of propaganda and agitation, and that, although participating in realistic means of direct influence on the regime, so long as they do not take the form of armed uprising, the party does not see in them the main instrument of its tactic. To say this does not amount to condemning other tactics—this is less than ever the time for mutual criticism; this amounts only to identifying ourselves. The party has recognized and continues to recognize the necessity of all manners of protests, manifestations, and demonstrations against the bureaucratic regime, which is the common enemy of all oppositionist groups. The party recognizes the political general strike as one form of peaceful organized struggle with the government, on the condition that the calling and means of its organization be approved by the party in view of the tasks of the moment and the country's interests. But the party considers it necessary to clarify to itself and to others that it considers the main arena for its activity, in keeping with its political faith, to be the organized representative assembly, and that its activity outside such an assembly should be concentrated primarily on agitation and propaganda. 126

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There was nothing essentially new in Vinaver's disavowal of armed uprising and restriction of party activity to "agitation and propaganda." The same message had been conveyed by Nabokov in his analysis of the current situation in late October and by many other party leaders on various occasions. Much the same could be said about the primary importance attached to the parliamentary framework: that had been clear ever since promulgation of the Bulygin Duma had precipitated creation of the party organization. Its raison d'être presumed the existence of such a framework, however inadequate and "undemocratic" it might be. 1 2 7 But this was the first time that these points were officially elevated to the status of a defining characteristic, or principle, of the party. Having witnessed from the sidelines the politics of insurrection and its defeat, the Kadet leaders had come to the point of recognizing that, in effect, their critics on the left were right: they essentially had no "extraparliamentary tactic"; that is, no plan of action for the current, "preparliamentary" period, apart, of course, from organizing work in preparation for the election campaign, which was by this time in full swing. Vinaver's report, and its acceptance by the congress, amounted to explicit recognition that there was nothing else to do, given the Kadets' constitutional unwillingness to engage in conspiratorial and insurrectional activity, but to place all their hopes on the forthcoming elections and the parliament that would come from them. "We are neither Blanquists nor Jacobins," Miliukov intoned at the congress. "This is neither boast nor criticism; it is plain fact." 1 2 8 It is true that Vinaver and other party leaders continued to pay lip service to the concept of the united front of all oppositionist groups until basic reforms were actually in hand, 1 2 9 and there was of course general anticipation that the first Duma would be above all a scene of conflict between representatives of the public and the regime. But the party had definitely lowered its political sights by early 1906 and had come a long way in the process of setting itself off from the revolutionary left—through abandonment of the cherished slogans of the left, as through the "selfdefinition in terms of tactics" embodied in Vinaver's report. It would be easy, but wrong, to conclude that this measuring off from the revolutionary parties through "self-definition in terms of tactics" reflected an attitude of despair or defeatism in the party leadership. Actually, the act of "self-definition" reflected a spirit of confidence and guarded optimism such as had not previously existed in their ranks. The party leaders were encouraged to point up their differences with the revolutionary left, as the Menshevik historian of the party pointed out long ago, "by the entire complex of political conditions following the first decisive defeat of the revolution." 1 3 0 They after all anticipated that the elections and the Duma would soon materialize, putting an end to the impasse; and with the defeat of the tactic of armed uprising in December

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and then their decision to boycott the forthcoming elections, the revolutionary parties had temporarily abandoned the political field to the Kadets (wholesale arrests of local groups of the revolutionary parties were of no small importance in this process). It was clearly in the party's interest at this point to emphatically dissociate itself from insurrectionist tactics. At the same time, the appearance of parties to their right—primarily the Octobrists, the Trade-Industry party, and the Party of Legal Order—tended to deflect from the Kadets accusations of compromising with the regime or simply being the defenders of propertied interests.131 These developments appear to have encouraged them, on the one hand, to anticipate an influx into the party from the ranks of the "nonparty intelligentsia." On the other, the party leaders seem also to have anticipated as late as the second congress that the government's reactionary behavior would bring the party new adherents from the more cautious, but respectable, elements of society. 132 And, finally, there was the consensus about the need to maintain party unity that was shown at the second congress. In the long article in the first issue of the party weekly already mentioned, Miliukov proclaimed himself well satisfied with the outcome of the congress. This first properly representative congress had affirmed the basic program and tactics of the first congress, thus showing that the lines that had been drawn at the outset of the party's existence, delimiting it to right and left, had been correctly drawn. Uncertainty on all these matters had persisted until the meeting of the second congress, and then had dissipated. Unanimity about tactics and the immediate tasks ahead, the practical frame of mind that had prevailed, the general recognition of the need for party solidarity and discipline, the attitude of "party-mindedness" or "party patriotism"—all this permitted the conclusion that the party had been born, 133 The tone of the article fairly exuded optimism about the party's strength and cohesiveness. And the upshot of it all was that the party was now prepared to enter blocs in connection with the forthcoming elections: "Those who find that their road and their tasks are the same as ours, and whom we can believe share our goals and methods, we vigorously call to our side. Whether anyone answers our call or not, we shall in any case remain true to ourselves and shall serve our cause. Let us be judged by our actions." 134

The Kadet Leadership: A Generation in Politics General Characteristics Previous political experience and established political attitudes have been repeatedly mentioned here as factors in the behavior of the party leaders in the first few months of the party's existence. Who were the top party

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leaders, and to what extent can their cooperation and shared views be attributed to common backgrounds and shared political experience? Any attempt to isolate the " t o p " or "central" leadership group in the party from the local leaders or the "followers" at large must be somewhat arbitrary. There were a few persons in the top councils of the party in the early period of its existence who were rarely heard from or who stayed in the party for only a short while (Ν. N. Lvov and Ε. N. Trubetskoi, for example); and there were also a few persons of considerable importance in the movement leading up to the party's creation who remained influential figures in the party but were never formally members of these councils (for example, F. F. Oldenburg, V. A. Rozenberg, and A. I. Shingarev). But status and power on the whole coincided in the membership of the central committee of the party produced by two elections: the first in October 1905 at the first congress, and the second at the next congress in January 1906. The committee coopted several more members between the second and third congresses, and the third congress added ten new members in order to partially redress the heavy imbalance in the committee in favor of men from the capitals. About half this total group had been members of the organization bureau that had planned the founding congress. Drawn from the combined committees of leaders of the two preparty coalitions, the bureau was the core of the party leadership, and the central committee elections and cooptations in effect only added members to it. 1 3 5 These will all be considered as the leadership group. In all there were forty-seven persons in it: forty-six men and Ariadna Tyrkova. 1 3 6 The median age of those in the central committee in 1905 was forty. About three fourths of them were Russians of noble origin; the remainder were mostly of Jewish origin. Virtually all had been to university. The large majority of the party leadership were born, then, in the 1860s, and had gone through university—primarily Moscow and Petersburg universities—in the 1880s, following the assassination of Alexander II. They were, to use a term current at the time, "men of the eighties" (vos'midesiatniki). 137 Of the dozen who were not, eight belonged to the first generation of zemstvo constitutionalists; that is, those who had sought as early as the 1870s and 1880s to lay the groundwork for constitutional reform through activity in the zemstvo institutions. Among these veterans were such prominent figures as Petrunkevich, deRoberti, Luchitskii, Muromtsev, and Iakushkin. Several of them had taught in the universities at the same time that they had been active in zemstvo affairs. Nearly half the total central committee group—twenty-one—were university professors, or ex-professors who had been dismissed for political reasons. In addition, there were a half-dozen editors and journalists; about the same number of lawyers; and eight or nine who had no occupations outside zemstvo service—leaving to make up the total one medical doctor,

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two industrialists, and one peasant. A dozen, perhaps a few more, combined professional careers with zemstvo service. Almost all of these were university professors. This group, then, about half of which consisted of people in the liberal professions, about a quarter of whom were zemtsy, and another quarter of whom constituted a linking element, had a foot in both the professions and the zemstvos. The professional profile dominates, but zemstvo connections are very extensive. If one looks at the core group of the first temporary central committee—the real founding fathers—the picture is somewhat different, but not radically so: it is more nearly dominated by zemtsy and by professors and other professionals who were also zemtsy—seven zemtsy tout court, eight professors and one publisher active in zemstvo affairs, plus two other professors, four lawyers, three publicists, and one zemstvo statistician. 1 3 8 Among the professional men without zemstvo ties, a background of service in the town administrations was quite common, and a few members of the total group were active in both zemstvos and town dumas. The combined individual biographies represented in the Kadet leadership group reflect very well fundamental aspects of the history of the constitutional-reform movement in Russia leading up to the foundation of the party: the zemstvo origins and long-term connections of that movement with the zemstvo institutions; and at the same time, the pervasive and equally long-term linkages between zemstvo men and urban professionals. The most striking characteristic of this group of party leaders is the predominance within it of university-educated "men of the eighties" of hereditary noble background who, following their university years, went either into zemstvo work as a primary occupation or into the liberal professions while maintaining at the same time some level of activity in the zemstvos. C o m m o n Experiences For the most part, the leadership, especially the first central committee group, had been in mutual contact socially, in the zemstvos and in more expressly political settings, over a period of many years preceding the founding of the party. In many cases these contacts date from the late 1880s and early 1890s, and in a fair number they extend back to the university years and even beyond that to childhood. For most of the leadership group, first contacts in a political setting date from the last years of the reign of Alexander III when many of them were first becoming involved in zemstvo affairs and a number of clandestine "zemstvo conferences" were held. At these meetings, discussion of matters directly related to the famine and the agrarian crisis gradually gave way to discussion of more general zemstvo problems, and then to critiques of the

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zemstvo statutes of 1890, the institution of the Land Captains (zemskie nachal'niki) introduced by the legislation of 1889, and other aspects of the "counterreforms" of the immediately preceding years. 139 Both zemtsy and nonzemstvo professional and academic people in the capitals in the party leadership had been involved throughout in the "zemstvo conferences." Contacts between the zemtsy and professionals without zemstvo ties undoubtedly were established through the intermediacy of acquaintances active in both areas, and occurred in such settings as the jours-fixes or "vechera" hosted by Professor Ianzhul in Moscow, which were regularly attended in the late 1880s by Miliukov, V. A. Goltsev, and A. I. Chuprov, among the nonzemtsy, and Kablukov, the Petrunkeviches, the Oldenburgs, I. Kh. Ozerov, P. A. Korsakov, and Prince Shakhovskoi, among the zemtsy. In Petersburg, a similar function was performed by the "evenings" of K. K. Arsenev, attended by Struve, Miliukov, Nabokov, S. A. Kotliarevskii, and various zemtsy from Tver, Novgorod, and several other provinces. In 1889-90, a series of eight "zemstvo colloquia" was organized in Petersburg by Arsenev and others to discuss the zemstvos and local selfgovernment in general, presumably in connection with the then impending legislation on the zemstvos. Among the participants were many of the zemtsy and professional intelligentsia who later emerged in the Kadet leadership.140 A few of the future Kadet leadership group, and a number of other future Kadets, were members in 1893-94 of the clandestine People's Rights (Narodnoe Pravo) party, an abortive precursor of the Union of Liberation. (These were mostly professional men and students from the nonzemstvo wing of the future party who came into it directly from the Union of Liberation; at the time of Narodnoe Pravo's brief existence, most of them \ 141

were quite young.) Many of the future Kadet leaders were involved in the loosely organized "address campaign" of 1894-95, which had been provoked directly by the change on the throne but appears to have grown out of the zemstvo conferences. The addresses to the throne from nine different provincial zemstvos all criticized bureaucratic arbitrariness, asked for extension of the competence of the zemstvos in various respects, and, in effect, called for institutionalized consultative zemstvo representation in the capital (without anywhere saying this in so many words). 142 The flurry of responses, in mimeographed brochures in Russia and in publications abroad^ to Nicholas II's out-of-hand rejection of the zemstvo petitions as "senseless dreams" was the common work of both zemtsy and intelligentsia, all future Kadet leaders.143 Some of the contacts and friendships within the Kadet leadership went further back in time than the efforts in the late 1880s and early 1890s to organize zemstvo and "public" opinion in opposition to the regime's policies toward the zemstvos. A striking example of such early contacts,

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involving several of the party's most prominent leaders, is the story of a remarkable circle of childhood friends, the "Priutino Brotherhood" (Bratstvo Priutino, Priutintsy), who formed the center of a close-knit group of socially conscious students at Petersburg University in the 1880s. 144 The "brotherhood" had its origins in a small group of seven Russian gymnasium students of service-noble background in Warsaw, where most of their fathers were serving in the army or the Russified post-18 63 civil administration. They included, most notably, Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi, Alexander Kornilov, and the brothers F. F. and S. F. Oldenburg. When these four went off to study at the university in Petersburg, they expanded their circle by another half-dozen students, including Vladimir Vernadskii and S. M. Grevs. 145 Most of the members of this circle .later participated in the founding of the Kadet party. Kornilov and Shakhovskoi were the party's first secretaries, and Vernadskii was an active member of the preliminary committees and the first central committee of the party. Others were elected to the first Duma. The Priutintsy were distinguished in their Petersburg student period by several characteristics: (1) They were deeply influenced by populism (narodnichestvo) and resolved early in their student years to devote themselves to improving the welfare of the Russian peasantry. In preparation for this, they spent a good deal of time reading and discussing populist literature (the works of Gleb Uspenskii, Zlatovratskii, Nekrasov, and other favorite authors of populist youth since the 1870s). They also made a special study of popular literature and of the sectarian movements. (2) They categorically rejected revolutionary activity, and especially terrorism. They did so in direct reaction to the terrorist movement of Narodnaia Volia, which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, a tragedy they considered counterproductive of the populist movement's own aims: it had led to the reaction that pervaded government policy throughout the 1880s. In the political vocabulary of late nineteenth-century Russia, the Priutintsy were "narodniki-kul'turniki"; that is, "cultural," as opposed to "political," populists; but populists all the same. (3) Mixed with their populism was the influence of Leo Tolstoi's religious conversion, which occurred at the outset of their university years, and of Tolstoi's postconversion ideas in general (themselves rooted in the populist tradition). Several of the Priutintsy made pilgrimages to Iasnaia Poliana to see the great man, and one of them, Shakhovskoi, became quite close to Tolstoi; it was he, apparently, who was responsible for Tolstoi's episodic participation in the zemstvo conferences of the 1890s. 146 The Priutintsy's interest in Tolstoi's teachings, especially his emphatic rejection of violence, appears to have been stimulated by their reaction to the terrorist movement and the assassination. For a time several of the Priutintsy also fell

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under the influence of the extraordinary religious positivist and communist William Frey. 147 (4) While students the Priutintsy were the principal organizers of a number of educational and philanthropic enterprises, various student study circles, groups for the spread of literacy and the translation and publication of "literature for the masses," and so on. (5) The members of the group intended to devote themselves either to academic-scientific careers or to careers of public service, particularly popular education sponsored by the zemstvo, and other zemstvo activities. Most of them followed one or the other of these "enlightenment" paths, or some combination of the two. 148 The brotherhood remained intact after the university years. It organized famine relief in 1891-92 in several districts of Tambov province, 149 and went on immediately afterward to become heavily involved in the cultural and social work of the zemstvos and in other projects (including the purchase in 1890 by Vernadskii, Kornilov, S. F. Oldenburg, and several other university friends of the journal Severnyi vestnik, which they managed for a short time in a first effort to propagate a liberal political program). 150 The core members of the postuniversity group—the Oldenburgs, Shakhovskoi, Kornilov, and Vernadskii—were at or near the center of a series of organizations in which developed the personal contacts and shared experiences that gradually gave shape to the group that emerged as the Kadet leadership in late 1905: the zemstvo conferences of the early 1890s, the Beseda circle and its publishing enterprises, the group that founded Osvobozhdettie in 1902, the Union of Liberation and the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists, and the organization bureau of the zemstvo congresses. In all these organizations Shakhovskoi played a particularly important role, often that of the main organizer (he was, among other things, the main contact man between the zemstvo constitutionalists and Struve's editorial office in Stuttgart and then Paris; the secretary of the Union of Liberation; and then the first secretary of the Kadet central committee). 151 The story of the Priutintsy is suggestive about the origins of attitudes and values prevalent among the Kadet leadership, where so many members of that circle and their friends from their university years eventually found themselves. Although the brotherhood was undoubtedly extraordinary in a number of ways—in its cohesiveness, in the earliness of its social commitment, and probably in the importance that religious seeking played in the development of some of its members' world views 152 —there is good reason to believe that many of its members' social and political attitudes were widely shared among student youth in the 1880s, especially at Moscow and Petersburg universities, where the sizable majority of the Kadet leaders matriculated. 153 By their own testimony the Priutintsy came into contact with a much larger circle of like-minded students, most of whom also

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eventually joined the Kadet party. And other sources indicate that the attitudes characteristic of the Priutintsy were not restricted to Petersburg student youth. The memoirs of Alexander Kizevetter, who appeared in Moscow in 1884 from the distant steppe town of Orenburg to study under the great historian Kliuchevskii, are an eloquent case in point. Kizevetter calls particular attention to the sense of civic duty prevailing among Moscow students in the mid-1880s—the "gospel of small deeds," the "idea that the path to big results lay through intense work in the realm of small deeds"—and contrasts it to the revolutionary romanticism of the preceding 1 Ç4 generation. Essentially the same picture of student youth of the 1880s is presented in the memoirs of several other contemporaries, including those of Maklakov, which were cited earlier in reference to the activities of the Kadet party in 1905. Maklakov comments in particular on the special effect that the state's reactionary policies in the 1880s had on that generation: "The attacks by the reactionary regime on the institutions [created by the reforms] of the 1 8 6 0 s . . .idealized them in the eyes of the progressive part of Russian society. Work in them became an idealistic mission." 1 5 5 It was obviously the zemstvo institutions that Maklakov had principally in mind, although this attitude also pointed to work in the town administrations, and to careers in fields like law, medicine, and education. Against the background of this kind of testimony, it seems reasonable to suggest (and nothing more can be done with a complicated subject badly in need of several scholarly monographs) that the generational experience of the "men of the eighties" had something to do, as a matter of impetus, with the significant transformation that overtook the zemstvos in the late 1880s and early 1890s. 1 5 6 From their foundation in the mid-1860s through the better part of the 1880s, the zemstvos by and large (there were exceptional cases earlier) invested little attention or money in popular education, social services, and technical aid to peasant agriculture. Then, about the time mentioned, many of them turned quite energetically to the task of improving the cultural and economic condition of the peasantry. Expenditures in these areas, mostly by the provincial zemstvo boards which now came to take a leading role in zemstvo affairs for the first time in most provinces, grew rapidly. The zemstvos (again, primarily the provincial zemstvos) became major employers of technically trained personnel, the latter growing in number from a few thousand at the turn of the decade to nearly fifty thousand by the end of the century. The "third element" as a significant phenomenon in Russian life dates precisely to this period, the term itself coming into general usage as an ideologically charged designation for the hired employees of the zemstvo (and town administrations) just before the turn of the century. 157 All the chroniclers of the zemstvo have remarked on how the growing third element, made up largely of idealistic populist youth of nongentry

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(raznochinets) background, came increasingly to influence the attitudes of the "second element" (the elected zemstvo deputies and board members, mostly landed gentry), making them more aware of the plight of the peasants and of their own social responsibilities. But the initial turn toward concern with peasant welfare, without which the proliferation of the third element could not have occurred in the first place, came of course from the second element; the growth of the third element depended on allocation of funds by the zemstvo assemblies. This initial "democratization" of the zemtsy's views (as Veselovskii liked to put it) has generally been accounted for in terms of the influence of the growing agrarian crisis, particularly as manifested in the famine years of 1891 and 1892, and as a response to the general trend of government economic policies, which were seen to be injurious to the agrarian sector as a whole. 1 5 8 These factors are not to be neglected, but it is remarkable that the beginnings of the new movement in the zemstvos coincided with the entry into zemstvo affairs of many idealistic young "men of the eighties" as they finished their educations and reached the statutory age (twenty-five) for participation in the zemstvo elections. Particularly marked was the influx of urban professionals with rural ties into the zemstvo assemblies. Of the 120 outstandihg examples of this kind provided by Veselovskii, the large majority became members of the Kadet party. 1 5 9 It is also remarkable that in his historical sketches of zemstvo affairs in the thirty-four zemstvo provinces, Veselovskii's standard paragraph on the "upswing of the nineties" almost invariably makes prominent mention of "men of the eighties" who later became Kadets. 1 6 0 The extraordinary importance of generational patterns in modern Russia has received widespread recognition. Ever since the 1860s (beginning especially with Turgenev's classic generational novel, Fathers and Sons), much of the discussion of Russian social thought and movements has been carried on in terms of the "men of the forties," "men of the sixties," "men of the seventies," "men of the eighties," and "men of the nineties" (the last generation to reach "the age of dominance" before the 1917 revolution). Those men who went through Russian universities in the 1880s and left memoirs or relevant correspondence were generally quite conscious of having belonged to a special "generation," and tended to use that term (pokolenie in Russian) unselfconsciously, as Kizevetter did in the passage cited earlier. The aversion to revolutionary violence and the crucial role assigned to culture that were so characteristic of the Kadet leadership appear to have been grounded in attitudes nurtured, by and large, in the 1880s. The special character of the generation of the eighties was formed by the revolutionary terrorism culminating in the assassination of Alexander II and by the government's reaction to that act, which included elaboration of policies whose aims appeared to be to do away with the relatively liberal institutions created in the 1860s: in addition to serf emancipation, the

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judicial reform that introduced the jury and the institution of the bar into Russian life, the institutions of local self-governance, the university reforms, and others. 161 The cult of revolution was foreign to this generation, and the "gospel of small deeds," grounded in populist attitudes developed among educated Russian youth in the 1870s, was linked to work within the institutions created by the reforms of the 1860s; work to defend and extend the influence of those institutions in Russian life. 162 The usual explanation of the Kadet leaders' political behavior in 1905 as a simple function of their occupation or social status—whether "professional bourgeoisie," "bourgeois intelligentsia," or "zemtsy"—quite ignores the question of the origins of their career choices, which seem to have lain in political and social attitudes formed in youth. 163 By the early 1890s the generational nexus that had been productive of the attitudes characteristic of the "men of the eighties" had been broken. There now began the great vogue of Marxism that was to reign among politically conscious university students for the better part of a decade, and with it the increasing politicization of student life. The top leaders of the Social Democratic party were mostly "men of the nineties." By all accounts, the decisive event in this atmospheric shift was the famine of 1891-92, which made a profound impression on Russian student youth. This is not to say that the generative pattern of attitudes described earlier disappeared completely (nor for that matter would it be possible to dispute that there were a great many students in the universities during the eighties who had not adhered to that pattern). The fact remains that the major political parties that came into existence in the early years of the twentieth century to challenge the old regime were led by contemporaries who were not coevals. Among the Kadet leaders, the "spirit of the eighties" was predominant. It is instructive in this regard to compare the age structure of the Kadet leadership with that of the leadership groups of the two major revolutionary parties, the SDs and the SRs. Figure 1 is based on the Kadet leadership group described in this chapter and on the smaller top leadership groups of the revolutionary parties around 1905 (eighteen SDs and thirteen SRs) as identified in the studies of David Lane and Maureen Perrie. 164 I have tried elsewhere to describe in some detail the path by which men of the eighties were led into politics around the turn of the century, and from there in short order to confrontation with the regime, however hesitant and largely rhetorical that confrontation may have been. 165 The key to that evolution appears to have been the frustration these men encountered in their chosen fields of cultural work. 166 The source of their frustration lay in the actions of the state in these years in regard to the institutions and professions in which they worked—actions that may be characterized as partly obscurantist, partly bureaucratic-expansionist (and competitive with the zemstvos for tax revenues), and on the whole born of fear of losing political control in a period of rapid economic and social

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change. Discontent among these people was profoundly exacerbated at the end of the century by the rapid development of the agrarian crisis in which peasant overpopulation and underemployment in a majority of the zemstvo provinces threatened to obliterate the effects of the cultural and social work of the zemstvos and other institutions. Among zemtsy and professional men alike, the exacerbation of the crisis, if not its very origin, was almost universally blamed on the government's industrialization policies then being administered by Sergei Witte. The industrial depression that began in 1900, despite its international character, exacerbated their discontent with government policy. 1 6 7 This brief essay on the Kadet leaders may help to suggest, at least, how the generational experience shared by most of them influenced their views on politics and society, and their political behavior, during the crisis of 1905. Their distrust of the imperial bureaucracy was not merely what could be expected from agrarians upset by protectionist tariffs or from a politically ambitious professional middle class, but something more profound: their views on the Russian people, paternalistic as they were, were not simply those of yesterday's serf-owners, but owed much to intelligentsia (especially populist) traditions, while their idea of the intelligentsia, and of their party, as nonclass or supraclass formations, was more than a tactic; and their notions about acceptable forms of political behavior, though certainly not free of apprehensions about popular violence (by the same token they were relatively free of romanticism on that subject), had been molded by the political lessons they had drawn from the experiences of the 1870s and 1880s. At the same time, these remarks should not be taken to mean that the Kadets were motivated solely by idealism and disinterested convictions. In the first place, the remarks apply only to a small leadership group; there will be ample illustration of the role of "interests" and of lack of idealism in the fortunes of the Kadet party in the pages that follow. Second, even for the leadership group it would be impossible to rule out the factor of selfinterest, if only of a relatively farsighted and generalized character. For the most part the Kadet leaders represented a new group in Russian society, a professional middle class, whose educational and social status naturally cultivated the desire to participate in the formulation and execution of public policies, to have a say in the governing of the country commensurate with their status. Indeed, it may not be going too far to say that the Kadet leaders thought people like themselves ought to be running the government.

Factions in the Party Leadership The steering of the party ship between the Scylla of encouragement of revolutionary violence and the Charybdis of compromise with the regime

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generated some friction within the party leadership in the months following October, but nothing so severe as to produce defections comparable to the initial withdrawal from the party by the Petersburg group of the Union of Liberation led by members-elect of the first central committee. In fact, the only defection from the leadership in this period was that of the idealist philosopher Prince Ε. N. Trubetskoi, an old hand in the zemstvo constitutionalist movement and delegate to the second party congress from Kiev, where he taught philosophy in the university. (Because of the rail strike, he had not attended the first congress.) Shortly after the second congress closed, Trubetskoi publicly announced his withdrawal from the party on the grounds that he could not accept the rules on party discipline. This announcement, in the pages of Russkie vedomosti, was accompanied by a bill of charges against the party which in several respects foreshadowed the charges brought against the intelligentsia as a whole in the Vekhi (Signposts) articles published in 1909: the party, as it had revealed itself to Trubetskoi at the second congress, was suffering from the "fatal inadequacies" of the Russian intelligentsia. It was generally doctrinaire in outlook. More specifically, it was insincerely monarchist (the same charge Shipov was making about the same time), it was basically socialistic (witness its agrarian program), and it had adopted a welter of mutually contradictory resolutions concerning party tactics vis-à-vis the government and the Duma: essentially, he accused the party of being too "revolutionist" in refusing to accept unqualifiedly the need for "organic work" in the Duma. 168 This bill of charges by a prominent figure in the constitutionalist movement did not go unheeded. Miliukov and Iakushkin rebutted it forthwith in the same newspaper, essentially reiterating Miliukov's earlier characterizations of the party and of the party tactics developed at the second congress; and the defection was the subject of extensive discussion in a number of newspapers and journals for several weeks. 169 Trubetskoi in the meantime went about setting up his own "Party," the "Independents' Club" (Klub nezavisimykh), in Moscow. The Kadet leaders' energetic response to Trubetskoi's démarche was obviously intended to firm up the party's right flank and prevent further defections on that side. If there were defections there, they did not in any number follow Trubetskoi into his "Club," which played no significant role in Moscow politics and soon passed from the scene altogether. 170 But the virtual absence of defections in the leadership did not signify complete harmony of views there. Two main spokesmen, both equipped for a time with press outlets for their views, appeared on the "right" and "left" respectively, of the party leadership, and to some extent engaged in criticism of the leadership's "center," led principally by Miliukov, although their publicist efforts were for the most part directed outward, toward the nonparty intelligentsia: P. B. Struve, who, together with his closest

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collaborator, Semen Frank, edited a weekly Petersburg journal, Poliarnaia zvezda (The Polar Star), from mid-December 1905 to mid-March 1906; and M. L. Mandelshtam, who was affiliated with the Moscow newspaper Zhizn' (Life), which appeared for a few weeks in November-December 1905. The " R i g h t " The position delineated in Poliarnaia zvezda can be described as "right" of party center only with qualifications: Struve and Frank proclaimed themselves socialists, and deliberately chose the name of their journal in order to establish their connection with the revolutionary tradition going back, through Herzen, to the Decembrists of the 1820s. Like the rest of the party leaders, they held the regime responsible for the post-October violence, they defended the party program energetically, and they participated in the rebuttal of Trubetskoi's accusations. Moreover, Struve was from the beginning one of the leadership's strongest advocates of a "democratic" strategy: on the strength of this, he was elected chairman of the party's labor committee, which was charged with drawing up its project on labor legislation, and he was probably the most emphatic proponent of the party's need to go beyond the ranks of the intelligentsia to seek mass support. Finally, a good part of the material Struve and Frank printed in Poliarnaia zvezda was written by party leaders who were in no way associated with a "right" orientation in the party leadership, including Petrunkevich, Rodichev, Nabokov, and Kizevetter, among others. All the same, Struve and Frank did begin to elaborate in their journal that philosophical-political position, stressing absolute values and the idea of the individual above "party questions," for which they were to become well known in the years following the revolution of 1905. They expanded on the dangers to civilization posed by the violence of the masses and the revolutionary intelligentsia, and they dwelt on the themes of gosudarstvennost' (roughly: awareness of interests of state or of the nation as a whole) and kul'tura, declaring that now was the time to impose "order" on the revolution and that it was the duty of the intelligentsia to overcome its estrangement from the people through cultural work among the masses, rather than deepening that gulf, as the revolutionary parties were doing with their advocacy of class struggle and social conflict. (Struve's views on the contemporary scene were spelled out with particular clarity in his "Notes of a Publicist" [late January 1906]: "The rule of the bureaucracy and the landowning class over the people cannot be overcome by peasant rebellions and land seizures, by political strikes and armed uprisings, but only by intensive creative work. However paradoxical it may seem, we propose that the revolutionary intelligentsia should now—in the name of the revolution!—go to the people preaching order") Much the same line of argument was pursued in Poliarnaia zvezda by S. A. Kotliarevskii, particularly in

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regard to the role of the state. 1 7 1 These were all subjects that would be developed further after the failure of the revolution and would dominate the Vekhi discussion in 1909. 1 7 2 Before the convening of the Duma, however, Struve and Frank, although going somewhat further than the central leadership group in denouncing "revolutionary adventurism" and the "mystique of revolution in general," 1 7 3 were not prepared to throw down the gauntlet to the revolutionary parties or in general to dissociate themselves from that particular "revolution" in which they believed the country was still involved. Although they printed Professor A. A. Kaufman's article summoning the party to do just those things, it was preceded by Frank's critical introduction (nearly as long as the article itself), which warned that counsel of political passivity in a revolutionary situation was suicidal; that, although Kaufman's criticism of the revolutionary parties' tactics was just in some respects, the Kadet party must not shut its eyes to the revolutionary movement, but "conquer and direct it." In the present situation, in which "there is not only no constitution, but no legal o r d e r . . .only civil war," all parties were by the nature of things revolutionary. 1 7 4 In short, it can hardly be said that Poliarnaia zvezda went significantly further in criticizing the revolutionary parties or the "mystique of revolution" than did Miliukov and many other party leaders following the December uprising. Although the journal reflected a rather particular intellectual current within the moderate opposition movement, it does not seem justified to describe Poliarnaia zvezda as the organ of a well-defined "right-wing" faction in the Kadet party leadership.

The "Left" It is even more problematical to speak of a well-defined "left wing" in the party leadership. The most that can be done is to point to a few people in the leadership group who demonstratively identified themselves with "nonparty democracy" or the "democratic intelligentsia" and its aspirations, and to raise the question of why they remained with the party rather than follow their nonparty Marxist and populist colleagues from the Petersburg Union of Liberation out of the party. 1 7 5 It was characteristic of these people that they insisted, beginning with the first discussions in September and October 1905, that the Kadet party was a temporary bloc or coalition which would endure only until the conditions for the victory of socialism were prepared. The most self-consciously "leftist" position in the Kadet leadership was assumed by the small group that collaborated in the publication of Zhizn', led by the Moscow lawyer M. L. Mandelshtam. Zhizn' took a frankly Marxist stand and justified the presence of Marxists in the liberal party on the grounds that the contemporary historical situation was not ripe for a proletarian victory. 176

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In his youth in the eighties, Mandelshtam had been one of those radical intellectuals who had at first occupied a transitional position between the ideology of Narodnaia Volia and orthodox Marxism and then finally embraced Marxism. He began a serious study of Marx while in exile in 1886, and in the late eighties was participating in circles engaged in propagating Marxism in Kazan and Simbirsk. 177 Mandelshtam later became a noted defense lawyer in cases arising in the first years of the century from the Kishinev and Gomel pogroms and workers' demonstrations, and in the trials of various SDs and SRs. In 1904-1905, Mandelshtam had been active in the Union of Liberation and was a leading figure in the professional union movement in 1905. As a member of the central bureau of the Lawyers' Union and the council of the Union of Unions, Mandelshtam, like Miliukov, had been opposed to the boycottist tactic of the Union of Unions majority. Mandelshtam was a member of the organizing committee of the Kadet party, but unlike his ideologically kindred colleagues there, Prokopovich and Bogucharskii, Mandelshtam accepted election to the central committee and remained in the party. In his memoirs, he explained his actions and those of other Marxists who entered the party in terms of four factors: (1) the low level of "party-mindedness" of his generation (men of the eighties!); (2) their constitutional lack of faith in armed uprising, which the revolutionary parties were advocating in late 1905; (3) their view of the party as a temporary bloc, "united for the immediate goal of overthrowing the autocracy"; and (4) their fear that "forcing the revolution" would alienate the "commanding classes" from the party at a time when the masses were not yet prepared. Mandelshtam also noted that entry into the Kadet party was eased by the fact that there were no "capitalists" in the party, that the landowning element in the central committee was relatively free of class prejudices, and that the party program was broad and flexible. 178 As for the accusation by Kuskova and Prokopovich that the Kadets had broken up the liberation coalition before victory over the old regime, Mandelshtam explained that at the time he thought success was more likely to come in the existing state of disorder through pressure on the regime from the "right wing of the party" (that is, the "constitutionalists," to whom the ruling elite might be willing to listen) than from revolutionary assault. And he retrospectively turned the accusation against them and the other socialists of the Union of Liberation who had refused to enter the party: "Such people as Prokopovich and Kuskova, and almost all the Popular Socialists,179 were by their very natures not cut out for revolution. Abandoning the opposition for the revolution, they did not reenforce the revolution, but only weakened the opposition. In them [the opposition] lost champions, while they only got in the way of the revolutionaries with their indecisiveness. " 1 8 0 Essentially the same position was taken by Ε. N. Shchepkin (a member of the central committee group coopted by the third party congress) and N.

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Lange, both professors at the university in Odessa, in their evanescent newspaper, Ζ,α svobodu, whose first issue appeared on December 5, 1905. Like Zhizn', their paper emphasized the coalitional character of the party, describing its participants as "tsenzoviki" (that is, propertied intelligentsia) and "intelligentnyi proletariat" (those educated persons who depended entirely on their salaries); took pains to dissociate the party from capitalist interests; and expanded on the socialist convictions of the party's left. At the same time, they criticized the tactics of the SDs and SRs: the masses had to be prepared for any fundamental changes in the political and economic order, for such changes could be achieved only by reform, "by the people themselves, in the assembly of their representatives elected by universal suffrage." For these Marxist revisionists the general scenario remained essentially the same as for the Social Democrats, at least until 1905: Russian history could be divided into three stages—autocracy, the constitutional order, and the socialist regime ("as the ideal of the future"). But "the only tasks corresponding to the contemporary period in the country's history are those of the Constitutional-Democratic party, which are characteristic of, and necessary for, the second stage." 1 8 1 It is remarkable that the articulate socialist "left" in the party leadership appears to have been exclusively of Marxist orientation. Russian populism—whether nonparty or SR—lacked, in contrast to Russian Marxism, a firmly entrenched doctrinal view that necessitated looking at the intelligentsia as a whole and the liberal intelligentsia in particular as "bourgeois," representing different and essentially irreconcilable class interests than the "democratic masses." Accordingly, it would seem that there was, at least for the time being, less need for intèlligentsia of populist orientation who could not accept the SR party's program or tactics to feel defensive about joining the Kadet party. Moreover, much of the Kadet leadership was linked to populist traditions. 1 8 2 In short, it was probably easier for populists to accept the Kadets' self-characterization as a nonclass party of the intelligentsia than it was for the Marxists. 1 8 3 This seems to have obviated the need for disputations between ideological confreres inside and outside the party. Perhaps more to the point, before the first elections there was no organizational refuge for populists between the Kadets and the Socialist Revolutionaries on the left, in contrast to the situation with the Marxists, and thus no direct competition with the Kadets for the allegiance of "evolutionary populists." (As noted the Marxist "left" in the party polemicized for the most part not with fellow Kadets but with socialists outside the party.) Both "right" and "left" tendencies in the party leadership were in essential agreement with the center about political tactics. One might even say that they shared a common attitude about the permissible forms of political behavior, as well as a general commitment to a constitutional order

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in which political authority could be controlled by law and representative institutions, whether or not one held to an "ideal of the future" that provided for the eventual transcendence of that order. In experience, the two—the attitude about political behavior and commitment to a constitutional order—were probably inseparable, and may be taken as the defining characteristics of Russian constitutionalism.

Between the Kadets and the Revolutionary Parties: "The Interstitial Left" The Kadet party was the largest organized manifestation of the forces of Russian constitutionalism to appear in 1905; as already noted, however, it did not encompass them all. A number of political organizations took form between the Kadets and the boundary separating constitutionalists from the nonconstitutionalists of the right, the most important of which was the Octobrist union. Between the Kadets and the boundary on the left that separated constitutionalists from revolutionaries there were no organizations comparable to the Octobrists on their right. Yet the Kadet party did not abut directly, as it were, the revolutionary left. There was an "interstitial left," of little organizational significance but of crucial importance for drawing the elusive line that separated reformers from revolutionaries in 1905-1906. Following formation of the Kadet party, two groups in particular sought to organize, or at least influence, the "interstitial left," the socialist intelligentsia that remained outside the revolutionary parties on the one side and the Kadet party on the other: on the Marxist nonparty left there was the effort led by Kuskova, Prokopovich, and other Marxist colleagues from the Petersburg Union of Liberation and Union of Unions to influence "nonparty democracy" with their journal, rather uninspiringly called Without Title (Bez zaglaviia), which appeared in Petersburg from the end of January to the middle of May 1906. On the populist side, an organizing effort was undertaken by a group of populists on the editorial staff of Russkoe bogatstvo which eventually, but only after the first elections, resulted in the creation of an independent "legal" party of some size ("legal" in the sense that it was committed to acting openly within the current framework of "legality," rather than conspiratorially). This was the Popular Socialist party (PSP).

The Marxists On the whole, the Marxists in question stood rather close to the Kadet leadership and had long since parted company with the Social Democrats. The founders of the PSP, by contrast, stood closer to the SR party, at least

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until the first elections, than to the Kadets, although they had extensive acquaintances in the Kadet leadership and had participated along with them and their Marxist rivals in the Union of Liberation and Union of Unions. Both groups had cooperated in the autumn of 1905 in the St. Petersburg Union of Unions, which had played an important part in the October strike and in virtually all the other major political developments up until the middle of January 1906, when the fourth congress of the Union of Unions adopted a resolution supporting boycott of the forthcoming elections. That action spelled the effective end of the Union of Unions in the capital: its leadership (essentially coextensive with the leadership of the Petersburg branch of the Union of Liberation) then split into its Marxist and populist components, from which emerged the Bez zaglaviia group and the Popular Socialist group, respectively.184 The Bezzaglavtsy were too few, being essentially limited to the editors and contributors of the journal, 185 to have had much impact on the election campaign, and there is no evidence that they even tried to participate as a group in the elections (that is, they put up no candidates), although they generally favored participation in the elections and carried on polemics with the advocates of a boycott. The Popular Socialists actively boycotted the elections along with the SRs, and accordingly did not get around to organizing their party until the elections were over and the boycottist tactic abandoned. In the context of the present study, both groups are more significant as articulate representatives of that "nonparty" radical opinion that both the Kadets and the revolutionary parties sought to attract, and to some extent as influences toward keeping independent socialists out of the established parties, rather than as active participants in the struggle of parties. The Bez zaglaviia group wasted no time in raising the question of their differences with the Kadets on the right and the Social Democrats on their left—why they were in neither one nor the other party. So far as relations with the Kadet party were concerned, the answer to the question was provided in the first issue of the journal: it was partly a matter of differences over the goals of the Kadets; and partly a matter of differences over tactics—or rather, they accused the Kadets of essentially lacking any tactics, of being only observers of the revolution: "They are not against the revolution in general, at least they are not unequivocally against it. But they are not with the Russian revolution, or at least they are not in it. They are on its sidelines. They are its spectators, its critics. 186 But worst of all, the Kadets failed to understand that the revolution was not over. This was the central message of Kuskova's indictment in the third issue of Bez zaglaviia. In forming a party devoted exclusively to "legal means" of political action, the Kadets had split up the united opposition, the liberation movement, before its work was done. So far, Kuskova wrote, only the "glimmerings of liberty" existed in Russia, and the forthcoming Duma was not a parliament. Its transformation

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into a true parliament could come about only through the actions of progressive deputies supported by a nationwide movement outside the Duma. Under these conditions the splitting up of the liberation movement was "more harmful than ever before." The current atmosphere was reminiscent of the 1860s and 1880s, when the reaction got under way "because the liberals began to emphatically draw attention to their 'lack of sympathy' for the methods of struggle of the other parties:" 187 "The [Kadets'] struggle on two fronts is a crime against the cause of popular liberty in the absence of established forms of political struggle, when the only force of the popular parties consists in isolating the government from the people and from society." 188 All the same, Kuskova remarked in conclusion, one could not deny the enormous importance of the Kadet party on the contemporary political scene. Alone in the opposition it was the only "genuine West European party," in the sense that its purpose was "existence in parliament"; it had "set up a bureau, hung up placards (which have been taken down, incidentally, by non-West European chiefs of police), organizes meetings, undertakes agitation, and, most important, it puts forward its candidates." 189 Kuskova allowed for supporting these candidates so long as they pursued the line of uniting the liberation movement, and "where there are no candidates of the radical parties or candidates of groups of our type." But there was no question of actually joining the Kadet party. The basic differences ruled that out. 1 9 0 On the question of participating in the elections in general, the position of Bez zaglaviia was firm, if eclectic. Kuskova referred in her article to exercising the vote as a "civic duty." In the same issue, V. V. Vodovozov devoted an entire article to the question of whether or not "progressive Russians" should take part in the forthcoming elections (the issue appeared on February 5). Vodovozov argued that they should, even though the elections' outcome was almost certainly going to be a conservative, if not reactionary, majority, in order to expose the Duma from within, to avoid being blamed for its character by having abstained from voting, and, most of all, in order to take advantage of the possibilities provided by the election campaign for political agitation. 191 The situation in regard to the revolutionary parties was less clear, partly because of the boycott issue. The left in general, according to the Marxist count Paul Tolstoi, writing in the first issue, was united by a desire to "change the correlation of forces in the country" whatever their specific recipe for the future order, and not merely by the desire to see the creation of representative institutions (like the Kadets); by their adoption of the tactic of "revolutionary methods"; and by their republicanism. 192 The Bezzaglavtsy, according to Kuskova's prescription, would have supported candidates of the revolutionary parties in preference to Kadet candidates. But they were boycotting the elections. Relations with the revolutionary parties were further complicated in Kuskova's view by the fact that on the

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left there were not really any parties at all, only "circles of propaganda and agitation," lacking any proper party organizations, on the one hand, and "the broad mass movements that more or less conform to the designs of these circles," without being controlled by them, on the other. Of the two currents, Social Democratic and populist, only the former, given the general character of the country's economic development, had any chance of taking charge of the "democratic working masses" as a whole and taking the lead in the "slow process of transformation of the entire social order, the transition from capitalism to socialism." This last phrase gave expression to the revisionist Marxist view that had isolated Kuskova and her colleagues from the "orthodox" at the turn of the century, and Kuskova was not about to abandon it now: she and her colleagues would join the Social Democratic party only when, in conditions of political liberty, the "circles" had fused with the masses and abandoned their "narrow class fetishism" and their Jacobin tactics: "The socialism to come can be created only by citizens, not by 'dictators' of whatever type they may b e . " 1 9 3 The central theme of the later issues of Bez zaglaviia remained that of the first few: the theme of resurrecting the liberation movement for carrying the revolution to its conclusion ("The revolution will end when the people will have been given the right to defend their rightful demands by parliamentary means"). Both the Kadets and the SDs were taken to task in this regard: the Kadets for their excessive "party-mindedness," for attempting to break up the solidarity of the opposition, 194 and in general for failing to realize the revolution was not yet over; the SDs for their revolutionary romanticism in general and their boycottist tactics in particular. 195 After the elections, when it became clear that the Duma would be generally "oppositionist" and that the Kadets would be the biggest party there, the tone of Bez zaglaviia's comments about the Kadets changed, in the last few issues, toward encouragement, but only encouragement to exploit their victory and use the Duma for strictly "constituent" purposes before getting on to any "organic work," even concerning the issues of land and labor. 1 9 6 For all their revisionism and dislike of the sectarian behavior of the SDs (the Bolsheviks in particular), the Bezzaglavtsy remained rather doctrinaire Marxists. They were no more willing than the SDs to accept the idea that the liberal party was anything more than a temporary coalition of basically incompatible social groups; and they remained convinced that the proletariat was the most "progressive class" in Russian society and continued to make their political judgments primarily in terms of the welfare of the working-class movement. The Populists Although the Popular Socialists' critique of both the Kadets and the revolutionary parties was in many respects similar to that of the Bezza-

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glavtsy, the developments leading up to the founding of the Popular Socialist party (Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partila, "Enesy") in the summer of 1906 reveal the differences that separated "nonparty" socialists from the Kadets and from the revolutionary parties alike. In addition, they provide some direct evidence about the conscious character of the struggle among parties for the allegiance of the "democratic intelligentsia." 197 The initiative for the creation of this party, which claimed, like the SRs, to be squarely in the tradition of Russian populism, was taken by members of the editorial staff of Russkoe bogatstvo, principally N. F. Annenskii, V. A. Miakotin, and Α. V. Peshekhonov. (V. G. Korolenko, the journal's editor-in-chief at this time, was not directly involved in the political ventures of his colleagues.) Annenskii, an elder statesman of populist publicism, was the group's most authoritative figure. Peshekhonov was its leading theoretician and publicist. Like so many other members of the professional intelligentsia, the Russkie bogachi had by about the turn of the century fixed their attention on political reform and the problems of uniting the various opposition elements in the country to that end, without changing their general populist orientation. In the process, they soon became involved both with the Socialist Revolutionary party and with the Union of Liberation. 198 Like their Marxist counterparts around Bez zaglaviia, and usually in cooperation with them, the Russkoe bogatstvo group was deeply involved in the political events of 1904-1905. Through the Petersburg Union of Liberation they were active in the organization of the Petersburg banquets in November and December 1904; they had connections with the workers' movement led by Father Gapon; and they were involved in the professional unions and the Union of Unions throughout their existence. By early 1905 the Russkoe bogatstvo group was beginning to define its own position on social and political questions within the general framework of the Union of Liberation, much as the future Kadets were doing. They took strong exception, for one thing, to the apparent willingness of some of their Liberationist colleagues to take advantage of the electoral system foreshadowed by the Bulygin rescript (February 18), and they had a special meeting in late February for the purpose of outlining their own "program of ideas." 199 But because of the general leftward drift of the nonsocialist opposition, in the union and in the zemstvo congress movement, no immediate separations seemed called for. The first definite steps toward a split with the nonsocialist liberals in the movement came with the April Agrarian Congress (April 27-29) organized by the zemstvo constitutionalists, to which various "experts," including Marxists in the Union of Liberation, were invited, but from which the legal populists were evidently deliberately excluded because of their known support for land nationalization. 200 The legal populists' move toward independent organization was further encouraged by the Peasants' Union's adoption in its first congress (July 31-August 1, 1905) of an agrarian

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program essentially identical to the one they had elaborated in the pages of Russkoe bogatstvo.201 A parting of the ways with the "liberals" was thus precipitated by the latter's apparent move toward compromise with the regime vis-à-vis the Bulygin project, and by the prospect of mass support held out by the formation of the Peasants' Union with a program of apparently unanticipated moderation. Before October 17, however, the Russkoe bogatstvo group took no decisive steps toward secession from the Union of Liberation, although they had been predicting its demise as early as April, 202 essentially because there were no possibilities for "legal" political agitation and organizing before then. 203 Meanwhile, they moved toward political consolidation more or less in step with, and partly in reaction to, the actions of the future Kadets, organizing a number of discussions with sympathizers outside the editorial board in September even as the nascent Kadets were setting up their organization bureau and discussing programmatic issues in preparation for their first congress. The populists nevertheless waited for the Kadet party to emerge before taking any direct action toward setting up a party of their own, apparently because they thought there was some chance of a fairly radical program emerging from the discussions preliminary to the creation of the Kadet party. 204 When these anticipations were disappointed and it simultaneously became possible to engage in political agitation more or less freely, the Russkoe bogatstvo group set up an "initiative committee" which prepared an announcement about the formation of the Popular Socialist party, including a brief outline of the party program. They had this set in type and planned to publish it over their signatures immediately after October 17. 205 For some reason, they hesitated. Perhaps they succumbed to the illusion, which was widespread on the left immediately after proclamation of the October Manifesto, that the end of the old regime had come and the liberals were about to take over, and accordingly chose not to intervene in the situation until the liberals had delivered the coup de grâce. In any case, shortly after the manifesto's publication, Victor Chernov arrived in Petersburg representing the émigré leadership of the SR party and drew them into discussions about setting up an open populist political party as a joint venture with the SRs—either as a parallel organization to the conspiratorial SR organization, or (as Annenskii insisted) through outright liquidation of the underground party and consolidation of populist forces in a single open party.'Negotiations about this merger occupied the group throughout November and December. The radical, but until then nonparty, newspaper Syn otechestva was designated as the official organ of the putative open party; Chernov and the old Narodovolets N. S. Rusanov from the SRs, and Peshekhonov and Miakotin from Russkoe bogatstvo joined its editorial board with the blessing of its publisher, S. P. Iuritsyn, and the chief editor, G. I. Shreider. This joint experiment very shortly broke down—there were signs that it

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was not going to work even before the cooptation to the editorial board of the representatives of the two groups—although it was terminated formally only by a vote of the first congress of the SR party at the end of December. Sytt otechestva was in effect an organ of the SR party alone during the last few weeks of its existence. It was closed down on December 2 in the government move against the left-wing press. 206 The main differences preventing cooperation of the legal populists and the SRs in setting up a single populist party can be ascertained with fair accuracy by comparing the accounts given from each side of the controversy by Peshekhonov and Chernov, although at points it is difficult to distinguish real motives from ulterior rationalizations. Essentially, the Russkoe bogatstvo group was profoundly suspicious of the SRs' conspiratorial and terrorist activity, on the one hand, and of their view of "the revolution," as they saw it, on the other. The legal populists' own views were basically evolutionary and, within the framework of the populist tradition, statist: the advent of a democratic political order (the fall of autocracy) would allow for resolution of social questions (the transition to socialism) by peaceful means, through legislative and state-administrative action. This general view showed up quite clearly in their position on the central issue of the agrarian question: they proposed nationalization of all the land at the initiative of the constituent assembly (as opposed to the "socialization" advocated by the SR program—that is, essentially turning it all over to the peasant communes), with implementation by state agencies, rather than as an after-the-fact legalization of the results of an unorganized mass movement by the peasants, "zakhvatnym" or "iavochnym poriadkom." By proceeding in this way, they argued, a sound foundation would be laid for the development of legal consciousness among the peasants, bloodshed would be avoided, and in general a solid basis for a socialist order established. By contrast, an elemental chernyi peredel (peasant seizure and redistribution of the land) would destroy such legal culture as existed in the country and provoke extensive bloodshed, not only between peasants and landowners but also among peasants quarreling over the spoils. Furthermore, "socialization" of the land would in fact perpetuate private ownership and "petty bourgeois mentality." 207 (The legal populists also tended to favor demolition of the peasant commune, the sacred cow of the SR program, although they shared with the SRs, in contrast to the Marxists, a view of the peasantry as an essentially homogeneous social formation which would be preserved through application of the "labor norm" in land distribution.) The Russkoe bogatstvo group accused the SRs of demagogically encouraging direct peasant action, a narodnyi bunt, and of being essentially anarchist: "[The SRs] had as much, and perhaps more, faith in the "juridical initiative" [pravotvorchestvo] of the individual villages as in the supreme state organ, the constituent assembly. They were not disinclined to confront

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the latter with an accomplished fact, which it would, nolens volens, have to sanction. That, perhaps, constituted the main essence of our disagreement with the SRs." 2 0 8 Although Chernov assuaged some of their worst suspicions about the SRs' view of the peasant movement and fully agreed that the conspiratorial, underground organization was "undemocratic" by nature, subject to various abuses, and in general a transitory phenomenon, neither would he part with the basic concept of the spontaneous "juridical initiative" of the peasant masses, nor would he agree that the time for abandonment of "the revolutionary method" had come. He would in general not subscribe to the idea of "evolutionary socialism." 209 For the Russkoe bogatstvo group, apprehensions of an ideological order were mixed with more personal ones: Annenskii and his friends feared that association of their journal with the SRs might drive their much more prominent chief editor, Korolenko, from his present nonpartisan populist position in the opposition movement into the Kadets' camp. Probably more important in the minds of these men, who had come to think of themselves as the guardians of the populist tradition and unofficial heads and chief theoreticians of a potentially realizable party of the populist-oriented intelligentsia as a whole, was the apprehension that they and their journal might become the creatures of the established, émigré-centered, SR party. Annenskii took umbrage at Chernov's identification of "the party" with the SRs: the SR organization was only part of "the party"; its teacher and theoretical laboratory was Russkoe bogatstvo. In his view there was only one solution: Russkoe bogatstvo would take the initiative in setting up a single open party for all, into which all the members of the old, illegal party would go, except for the few who might be needed to maintain an underground organization of a purely technical-revolutionary character as a satellite of the large party. 210 Chernov perceived in all this a profound gulf of mutual distrust and incomprehension between the "legáis" and "illegals" of the populist movement. He deflected Annenskii's ultimatum by pointing out that the SR party could not possibly agree to such an "organizational revolution" without holding a party congress, and the arrangements for cooperating in the publication of Syn otechestva went on. Apprehensions were not dissipated, however, and the suspicions of Peshekhonov and Miakotin were apparently increased by the brief experience of collaboration with the SRs in Syn otechestva. At the end of December they journeyed to Imatra for the SR congress, where the "organizational question" was to be raised, "without confidence that the SR party was capable of quickly opening up and incorporating all the forces of populism." 211 At the second session of the congress on December 30 (evening), which was devoted to the party's organizational statutes, the representatives of Russkoe bogatstvo spoke up for the need to create an open mass party.

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Understanding, after the defeat of the December uprising and other recent demonstrations, that the autocracy was not moribund and that the SR leaders accordingly would not be likely to disband their underground organization voluntarily, Miakotin offered a motion, prepared by Peshekhonov, that the party, while preserving its existing organization, use its resources to set up "an open political party as a separate organization built on broad democratic principles." The motion was defeated by a vote of all against one, seven abstaining. The congress instead voted through a two-part motion which, first, committed the party to work for the establishment of "the kind of regime" that would allow the party to operate as an open mass organization, and then ruled that "in view of present political conditions and the needs of the current struggle, the party of Socialist Revolutionaries recognizes an immediate transition from a conspiratorial organization to a completely open one to be as yet impossible." 212 Annenskii and his friends stayed on for the next morning's session at the request of the party central committee, to avoid the appearance of irreconcilability, and then returned to Petersburg. The failure of the attempt to set up an open populist party through cooperation with the SRs was followed by a hiatus in this kind of activity on the part of the Russkoe bogatstvo group which lasted for the duration of the electoral campaign to the first Duma. Since the editorial staff as a whole, after some initial argument, came out for a boycott of the first elections, the need to face up to the task of forming a party was temporarily absent. Several of the group debated with Kadets in preelection meetings in Petersburg. Although the history of the Popular Socialist party itself lies outside the scope of this study, a few points about its foundation are worth mentioning. The party that was finally brought into being in the summer of 1906 was organized in and around the first Duma, where the group finally found the resources to set up a party which, although small, was something more considerable than a mere collection of mutually acquainted writers and editors. Unlike the revolutionary organizations or the Kadet and Octobrist parties, the Popular Socialist party was an "internally created" party, dependent on the parliamentary institution as a means of communicating with like-minded individuals and of mobilizing membership beyond circles of personal acquaintances and the confines of the capital. The Russkoe bogatstvo group was instrumental in setting up the left-of-Kadet Trudovik, or labor, fraction in the Duma, consisting primarily of deputies of peasant origin. According to the historian of the party, Peshekhonov was the author of the first draft of the Trudoviks' agrarian program (the famous "project of the 104"). 2 1 3 It was apparently the success in forming the Trudovik group, with about one hundred members the largest organized group in the Duma next to the Kadets, that inspired the Russkoe bogatstvo men to set up the PSP with the help of intelligentsia members of the Trudovik fraction,

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essentially as an attempt to give the Trudoviki an organized base outside the Duma (this design was reflected in the name they gave the party at the outset: Trudovaia [Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia] partila). The first organizing meeting of some forty persons was held in the offices of Russkoe bogatstvo on May 26, 1906, and the founding party meeting was held on June 14. Although the majority of the Trudovik fraction remained outside the new party, the latter managed to establish about fifty local groups and acquire a membership of about two thousand by the time of the second Duma elections, in which nine of its candidates were sent to the new Duma. 2 1 4 The creation of an open party of the populist left had been justified by the Russkoe bogatstvo group at the first SR congress in terms of the general need for mobilizing mass support in the current situation. Peshekhonov elaborated on this need in his retrospective account of their split with the SRs. In the first place, he wrote, when the need for mass mobilization had become apparent in 1905, the expansion of a conspiratorial party like the SRs beyond a certain limit was dangerous, given the lack of controls inherent in such an organization: provocateurs and criminal elements could (and, he rightly reflected, did) find their way into the party. But the most important motive for him and his colleagues in seeking to set up an open populist party lay elsewhere: in the fact that the conspiratorial party was unable to "recruit and properly exploit very valuable resources that were unsuited for underground w o r k " and the consequences that followed from that fact: The lack of intelligentsia forces at the disposal of the [SR] party was felt soon and sharply enough. That is not to say that suitable forces were lacking—there was a sufficiency of them within the bounds of the populist persuasion. But the SR party, with its almost exclusively militant tactics and its program [obliged them] to remain outside the party. Worse than that: they began very quickly to go over to the Kadet party, which already on October 18, 1905, had emerged from the underground and entered the open arena. As a result, that party attracted a significant part of the Russian intelligentsia, including, and perhaps most of all, populist intelligentsia.215 An American historian has published an incisive critique of the conventional view that activization of the liberation movement just after the turn of the century was the result of a shift in the leadership of Russian "liberalism," "from gentry to intelligentsia." 216 The author argues that no significant changes occurred then in the leadership of Russian "liberalism," which was already a complex mixture of zerntsy and intelligenty; what changed was their strategy: from one concentrating on the zemstvos as the

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center of the constitutionalist movement to one looking beyond them to the broader ranks of the nongentry intelligentsia. On the whole, detailed study of the organizational and programmatic origins of the Kadet party confirm this thesis. At the same time, the "conventional wisdom" on this issue 217 should not be dismissed out of hand: the constitutional-reform movement did begin to pass in these years from a zemstvo-centered movement to a movement involving much broader elements of Russian obshchestvo. And this was not only a matter of tactics, but one of basic programmatic issues and of the very character of the rapidly expanding leadership as well. In response to these developments there occurred a split in the ranks of the zemstvo "liberals," a subject touched upon in this chapter which will be examined more closely in Chapter 2. The story of the formation of the principal constitutionalist party in Russia, the Kadets, reveals much about the kind of support for a constitutional order that existed in Russia. The nature and limits of this support among the intelligentsia is more clearly seen in the relations between the Kadets and the "interstitial left" on the one side, and between the latter and the revolutionary left on the other. The demarcation line between reformers and revolutionaries shows up most clearly on the populist left, in the relations between the Russkoe bogatstvo group and the SRs. The Kadets found to their left, well beyond the bounds of liberalism as generally defined, a considerable fund of support for constitutional reform. Both revisionist Marxists and moderate populists shared prevalent Kadet attitudes about the paramount importance of culture, the role of the state in the new order, and even attitudes toward the parties of the revolutionary left. At the same time the Kadets found on their left a spirit of rivalry and engrained mistrust, arising in no small measure from the zemstvo-gentry origins of the constitutionalist movement and the prominent part still played in it by zemstvo nobles. In addition, the behavior of the Kadet leaders in the first few months of the party's existence aroused doubts about their commitment to the common political goal of the left to which they had subscribed in October: convocation of a constituent assembly by universal, direct suffrage. These circumstances boded ill for the stability of the party in more or less direct proportion to its success in attracting representatives of the "nonparty socialist left" into its rank.

2

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies: Raznosherstnaia Kompaniia We pity the extreme parties, as those that have fallen into error, but we fear the "Kadets," not only in the interests of our party, but for the sake of the future happiness of our motherland. M. V.

Krasovskii

It is a complete misunderstanding to say that our task is to defend our "Union" at any cost. The "Union" wants to defend the state, the "Union" wants our motherland to grow stronger and prosper, as one whole, on the basis of equal and common just laws for all, not as a collection of mutually indifferent and isolated tribes, lacking any firm union among themselves or the concept of state unity. P. S.

Chistiakov

D. N. Shipov and the Zemstvo Background The prehistory of the Union of October 17, which began to take shape within a few weeks of the first Kadet congress, was until the middle of 1905 much more exclusively a matter internal to the zemstvo milieu than had been the origins of the Kadet party. Only in the second half of the year were zemtsy joined by urban elements: men in industry, commerce, and the professions. Formation of business organizations had begun early in 1905, and the first congress of representatives of municipal administrations (dumas) was held on June 1 5 - 1 6 , 1905. 1 These overlapping organizational frameworks then became, after the zemstvo, the two principal sources of communication and leadership upon which the Octobrist union was initially built, although they never approached the significance of the zemstvo in that regard. The articulation of a fairly distinct "Slavophile" minority within the zemstvo opposition was clearly in evidence by 1902. Those who were hostile to the idea of a "constitution" (but not to a "zemskii sobor," or consultative assembly) and disapproved of extending the political opposi-

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tion movement beyond the zemstvo milieu began, in reaction to the organizational démarches of the constitutionalists, to seek support for their solutions and defense against the inroads of their more radical colleagues within the zemstvo movement. In the end they too emerged as constitutionalists, once their "Slavophile" solution had been ruled out by the regime's promulgation of the Bulygin constitution and the October Manifesto, but they remained of a distinctly more moderate inclination, less alienated from the "historical state authority" than the zemstvo "left" that had been involved in the Union of Liberation and the formation of the Kadet party. Until mid-1905, the leading figure in this wing of the zemstvo movement was D. N. Shipov. Shipov and the Zemstvo Revival Shipov had been drawn into the revival of the zemstvo congresses at the turn of the century by the government's offensive against zemstvo prerogatives and, in particular, by Witte's memorandum on the incompatibility of autocracy and the zemstvo. He joined Beseda, and in 1900-1901 was actively involved in the preparation of at least two petitions to the tsar: one, explaining the errors of current government policy and suggesting ways of remedying the situation, was to have been circulated for signatures to the provincial zemstvo chairmen, marshals of nobility, mayors, and other prominent "public men" and then submitted to the tsar. This plan collapsed in the autumn of 1901 when the circle that was to prepare it split up into three factions: a "Slavophile right," which rejected any proposals to introduce an elected-representative element into state affairs (this "faction" consisted of only one member of the circle, F. D. Samarin); the position represented principally by Shipov, N. A. Khomiakov, and M. A. Stakhovich, who presented a set of theses (drawn up by Shipov) calling for, among other things, participation by elected public representatives in unspecified ways in the preparation of legislation by the central government; and the constitutional left (Prince Paul Dolgorukov, R. A. Pisarev, and Prince S. N. Trubetskoi), which, in Shipov's rendition, "found the idea of a restoration of an ideal autocracy Utopian... and saw the only way out of the difficult situation in which the country found itself in a decisive replacement of the bureaucratic order by a constitutional order." 2 Together with N. A. Khomiakov, Shipov had also prepared a petition in answer to Witte's memorandum. 3 This activity led directly to Shipov's organization of the May 1902 zemstvo congress. Shipov linked the political positions of the constitutional left and of his own group to different world views and derivative political philosophies: on the one hand, the constitutional left held the rationalist-positivist view that sees social and political life primarily as a "process of constant competition

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. . .between society and state," constructs the political order exclusively on the basis of rights, and holds that "the general welfare can come from manipulating the external forms of social and political conditions." Shipov's view, by contrast, was based on "Christian love and unity," which held that "the foundation of the life of the state should be an ethical-social idea, and that the unity of state authority with the population must be grounded in recognition by both sides of their moral debt and responsibilities." According to this view there could be no improvement in the general welfare "without internal, spiritual development of the individual."4 In Shipov's judgment the Russian constitutionalists' outlook was a Western import, alien to Russian culture. In the West, he wrote to his friend Chelnokov in 1902, concern for economic well-being and formal rights pushes into the background the spiritual side of the ordinary person and prevents the consciousness of moral obligation before oneself and those near to one. The activity of individual persons is determined in the West for the most part, it seems to me, by the demands of public law [obshchestvennoe pravo] and not by a consciousness of Christian obligation, love for one's fellow men, and the responsibility of selfless service. In Russia, by contrast, "the popular Orthodox spirit does not give such independent significance to the sphere of law, but rather seeks and wishes to find there an expression and realization of moral law, the foundations of Christ's teaching. Our people always instinctively wish that the legal way conform to God's way." 5 Shipov believed that this popular Russian spirit found expression in geniuses produced by the people, and the greatest of them, in his opinion, was Tolstoi, "the Russian genius who has succeeded in comprehending the outlook of the Russian people and in expressing it as an idea that has attracted the attention of the entire cultured world." Shipov acknowledged a profound debt to Tolstoi: My view of life owes much to him. If one can say so, he returned me to Christ, or more exactly, he helped me to analyze and understand the essence of Christian teaching.. .The teaching of Tolstoi implanted in me the quite definite and clear conviction that the meaning of our entire life lies in helping with all our strength to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth and that the only path to it lies in the law of love, granted to us by Him who brought us into the world. It became clear to me that the path by which socialism, rationalism, and so-called European culture attempt to bring about

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Among the Russian constitutionalists Miliukov was, for Shipov, the person whose views epitomized all that he disapproved of in Western European culture. 7 "Serenity and dignity, together with firmness, consistency, and solidarity among the zemtsy, constitute a force," Shipov wrote to Chelnokov in mid-1903, "that the government cannot possibly neglect or fail to come to terms with. If the government at present is lacking in moral consciousness, society, all the same, must always observe the demands of ethics in its action and relations [with others]." 8 Throughout this early period of his political activity, Shipov clearly believed that the "only way out of the difficult situation" lay in "calm work of the public institutions and in exercising influence on the ruling groups and classes standing near the throne through persuasion and explanation of the misunderstandings on which their political outlook is based." 9 Shipov was one of the first leading zemtsy to identify political manifestations outside the zemstvo framework with "the revolution." From its first appearance, he expressed hostility toward the journal Osvobozhdenie, accused it of displaying "revolutionary tendencies," and was thinking as early as September 1902 of setting up an émigré organ to counteract Osvobozhdenie that would propagate a "program corresponding to the genuine needs of the present time." The audience he hoped to reach with such an (illegal!) organ was "the ruling circle," the "Petersburg spheres." By disseminating "correct and calm criticism" of the government's erroneous ways, such a journal could be expected to have a sobering effect and genuine influence on the "spheres" (ν sferakh), whereas "Osvobozhdenie, with its tone and use of vague and meaningless phrases, can only give support to the revolutionary current and can only have a negative influence on the spheres, which should be the object of influence, encouraging them to identify the goals of the zemstvo people with those of the revolutionary propaganda." 10 Shipov continued to adhere to his view of proper political behavior despite Pleve's betrayal of his trust following the May 1902 congress and even despite Pleve's subsequent attacks on the zemstvos: in early 1904 Pieve stepped up his effort to remove "undesirable elements" from zemstvo boards by purging the Tver zemstvo institutions of about a hundred elected zemtsy and third-element employees, and in April Shipov himself was denied confirmation in office as chairman of the Moscow zemstvo board following his reelection. 11 Despite Pleve's actions and the deterioration of Russia's conduct of the war against Japan, Shipov remained politically inactive through most of the summer of 1904, apparently due to apprehension that the "split between

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the state authority and society" was getting out of hand. He feared that many zemtsy who had been in agreement with his political program had, as a result of his dismissal and related actions, become convinced that the only way out was "the path of political struggle against the existing regime," a path that he would never take. 12 The November 1904 Congress Pleve's death and his replacement by Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii at the end of August changed the situation. It now seemed that congresses of zemtsy could be held without further straining relations between the government and the zemstvos, and Shipov agreed to participate in the organization of another congress to be held before the regular zemstvo sessions began at the end of the year. The decision to summon a congress was taken unanimously at a meeting of the congress bureau (elected at the 1902 congress) on September 8. The more cautious bureau members, like Shipov, were encouraged by the hope that, after all, the reform movement could be contained within the framework of the zemstvo and petition politics.13 The bureau drew up a program for the congress that could not have offended Shipov: the subjects of discussion were to be the recent ministry actions against the zemstvos and "needs created by the war"; no mention of constitutions or any kind of public representation "at the center" was made. However, following Mirskii's widely publicized speech at the time he officially took office (September 16), in which he spoke of an attitude of "sincere benevolence and sincere confidence toward public [obshchestvennye] and estate [soslovnye] institutions and toward the population in general," the constitutionalists were inspired to draw up plans for introducing explicit political demands into the resolutions of the forthcoming congress. The congress bureau itself had taken the initiative following Mirskii's speech of adding discussion of the general political situation to the agenda, but although all its members except himself were, according to Shipov, "convinced constitutionalists, and for the most part belonged to the Union of Liberation," 14 it went only so far in its draft resolution as to call for "proper participation in legislative work by public representatives in the form of a separate elected institution." As Shipov pointed out, this was a deliberate compromise, meant to leave open the question of whether the legislative body would have a decisive or only consultative character, and thus to avoid a split in the zemstvo movement before the congress could meet. 15 However, the Union of Liberation had committed itself at its second congress (October 20-22) to turning the zemstvo congress toward an "open declaration of constitutionalist demands," and the congress of Zemstvo Constitutionalists held in Moscow a few days before the opening of the zemstvo congress (November 2—3) added to the bureau's imprecise

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declaration on public representatives the demand for their "participation in the realization of legislative authority, in the formulation of the state budget, and in the control over the legality of the administration's activities." 1 6 This language, although saying nothing about the system of suffrage or a constituent assembly, was clearly meant to exclude the possibility of a merely consultative assembly. This "constitutionalist" amendment of the bureau's theses was introduced only during the discussion of the resolutions at the congress itself. It was supported by a majority of seventy-one delegates; a minority of twenty-seven, led by Shipov, voted against it, preferring the bureau's original draft. 1 7 Shipov had opposed the introduction of political issues into the bureau's agenda following September 16 and had threatened to resign from the bureau and not attend the congress when his advice was ignored, but he allowed himself to be persuaded to stay on in the belief that he could exercise a moderating influence at the congress; this even led him, as noted, to participate in the drafting of the theses calling for public representation in Petersburg. At the congress Shipov, who was elected chairman by proclamation, argued passionately against addition of the "constitutionalist" amendment in an emotional oration in which he summarized his entire social and political philosophy. 1 8 Although his position was defeated at the congress, Shipov came away thinking that unity in the zemstvo movement had been preserved. He had been impressed by the restraint shown by even his most vigorous opponents, and he had been particularly pleased to see that there was no sympathy expressed at the congress for the idea of summoning a constituent assembly; so far as he could see, there was unanimous agreement that political reform should come, as he wrote, quoting from N . N . Lvov's speech at the congress, " a s the emancipation of the peasants was carried out: at the initiative of the supreme authority." 1 9 Moreover, Shipov and his erstwhile opponents were able to cooperate fully in producing a memorandum, at Mirskii's request, explaining the motives for the congress's resolutions and suggesting ways of implementing them. 2 0 Shipov concluded that despite "some disagreement on the question of the character of our public representation" the congress was unanimously in favor of preserving the unity of the zemstvo movement and devoted to "creation of a firm tie between the state authority and the population." 2 1 In a speech after the formal adoption of the resolutions, Shipov went so far as to declare that the entire congress, minority and majority, had been guided, consciously or not, by that "ethical-social idea" that was the foundation of his own world 22

view. Shipov's hope for a strengthening of the bond between government and "society" and a peaceful solution to the country's problems was reenforced by the warm reception given him after the congress by Mirskii, who appeared to sympathize with the congress resolutions (apparently Mirskii

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noted no significant difference between the majority and minority positions on public representation) despite his earlier refusal to give official permission for the congress or to receive a formal delegation from it. 2 3 Shipov was further encouraged by the wide positive response to the congress resolutions in zemstvo assemblies around the country. 24 Thus it was not the differences exhibited at the November congress that led Shipov to the idea of organizing the "minority" on its own; on the contrary, the congress temporarily revived his hope for zemstvo unity and the possibility of victory for his solution. 25

The Split with the Zemstvo "Left" The decisive event in the split between the "constitutionalists" and the "Slavophiles" in the zemstvo movement was not the November congress but the banquet campaign that was gotten underway after the congress to carry the demands for political reform beyond the zemstvo circles to a broader public. More precisely, it was participation in the campaign by zemtsy, including many members of the congress majority, who, as members of the Union of Liberation or Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists, were active in organizing the banquets. This decisive move by fellow zemtsy into the broader public arena with the aim of mobilizing support for political reforms going well beyond those envisioned by Shipov and his sympathizers constituted for them nothing less than a betrayal of the zemstvo cause, a wrecking of the chances for a peaceful resolution through interaction of government and zemstvo. The "inevitability of a schism" between the two groups of zemtsy was thus determined, Shipov wrote: on the one hand, there were those who stuck to the path already laid down by the "zemstvo liberation movement"; on the other, there was "the group of zemstvo activists who, seeing the main task of the liberation movement to be the demand for rights and their formal guarantee, found it possible to realize these demands only by means of an open struggle with authority, drawing into this struggle to ensure its success broad circles of the population, heedless of the complications in the life of the country that would inevitably result from that kind of tactic." 2 6 Shipov's perception of the political attitudes and tactics of his zemstvoliberationist opponents was correct. He also attributed to them the failure of Prince Mirskii's attempt to have a system of consultative public representation through the zemstvos included in the reform program announced in the imperial ukaz of December 12, which was essentially a response to the resolutions of the November congress: according to Shipov's account of a conversation he had with Mirskii in 1906, the more radical demands and attitudes manifested in the banquets were exploited by Mirskii's opponents in the State Council to discredit the zemstvos' intentions in general and the motives behind the November congress resolutions in particular. 27 (It

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should be noted, however, that Shipov laid the ultimate blame for the general situation on the government, as he wrote in a letter to Professor Guerrier in March 1 9 0 5 : " H o w depressing it is to admit that the cause of all that is going on is the government, which could not understand in time the just demands of the epoch, take the lead in the social movement, and give it proper guidance.") 2 8 Despite the intensified activity of the zemstvo constitutionalists in pursuit of their goals following the November congress, 2 9 Shipov bided his time until after the publication of the Bulygin rescript and the ukaz to the Council of Ministers on February 1 8 , 1 9 0 5 . As late as January 1905 Shipov and Khomiakov cosponsored a minority address to the throne in the Moscow noble assembly with their erstwhile colleagues from Beseda, Paul Dolgorukov, Iu. Novosiltsev, and S. N. Trubetskoi, asking the tsar to "summon elected representatives to participate in state affairs," in opposition to a majority address of a markedly reactionary character. 3 0 The rescript and ukaz of February 18, the former essentially reviving Mirskii's promise to introduce a system of popular representation that had fallen by the wayside in the December ukaz and the latter inviting the public (or so it was generally interpreted) to submit reform proposals to the Council of Ministers, set off a new wave of petitions: from zemstvos, of course, but also from every manner of constituted professional, cultural, and scientific group; from municipal dumas; and, for the first time in any number, from associations of industrialists and businessmen. It became clear that a leftward shift had occurred in public opinion: the zemstvos, until then generally less specific and more respectful in their appeals than the November congress had been, were now more strident and openly pugnacious in their messages to the government. A majority of those provincial assemblies that met after the rescript was issued (this was not the time of regular zemstvo sessions) expressed lack of confidence in the government's ability to carry out reforms and demanded that elected representatives of the zemstvos and dumas be included in the Bulygin Commission. 3 1 A similar shift leftward could be observed among the assemblies of nobility, although they on the whole remained more conservative and respectful of the autocracy's prerogatives than did the zemstvos. 3 2 Shipov, for whom style in politics was a matter of the greatest importance, must have been considerably disturbed by these developments, especially the shift in the general tone of what then passed for political discourse. More specifically, the discussions in the zemstvo congress bureau after February 18, in preparation for a new general congress in April, convinced Shipov that any hope of sustaining the unity of the zemstvo movement was now gone. 3 3 Shipov rightly perceived that the bureau's majority had abandoned the zemstvo movement's "right" in order to pursue a tactic of cooperation with the nonzemstvo intelligentsia. Once he became

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aware of the majority's intention of getting the next congress to endorse the liberationist constitutional project, 34 Shipov withdrew from the bureau and set about seeking supporters and drawing up his own "draft project for organization of popular representation in agreement with the fundamental idea of the minority of the November congress of zemstvo activists."35 The "Minority" Organizes Shipov turned first of all to other members of the November minority who were in Moscow, and then contacted others thought to be sympathetic to their outlook. Shipov and a small group of his Moscow supporters drew up a statement of their views on the proper system of public representation and published it as a brochure in early April 1905. 3 6 Their project essentially called for creation of the upper house, alone, that was provided for in the liberationist (Kokoshkin-Lvov) constitutional draft as part of a two-house parliament: a state council elected by a democratized and geographically expanded system of zemstvos and municipal dumas.37 This body was to be called the State Land Council (Gosudarstvennyi zemskii sovet). Unlike the Liberationists' upper house, however, this one was to be merely consultative, at least by implication, for the "minority opinion" was evasive about its precise status. Nevertheless, with the first paragraph declaring that "popular representation does not contradict the idea of autocracy," the second that "popular representation should not have a parliamentary character, but should serve as an organ for the expression of public opinion," and the fifth explicitly providing that "the ministers are responsible not to the popular representative body but to the sovereign," it was inevitable that the project would be labeled a proposal for a consultative assembly by its opponents.38 The twenty clauses of the "opinion" were introduced by a preamble that was mainly Shipov's work and essentially repeated his political profession de foi: rejection of the theory of popular sovereignty based on an ideal of individual rights, and affirmation of the "social ethic" based on the idea of mutual responsibility. The preamble also took specific issue with the notion that every citizen is able to actively participate in politics. Political participation should be the job of the "best people," and building the representative system on the existing institutions of local government would assure that experienced men familiar with local needs would participate in the elections, and those they elected would be known to them personally. By contrast, universal suffrage and direct elections (as in the constitutionalists' project) would result in people voting for candidates known only by their party affiliation, candidates who would wage their campaigns on the basis of "slogans that excite and encourage selfish interests and class instincts." It was all summed up in a single long sentence: "The election of popular representatives by the organs of public self-administration guarantees the

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proper selection [otbor] of the genuinely best and most mature forces of society for the purposeful direction of the political life of the country, and excludes or significantly decreases the element of political struggle, into which the entire population of the country is inevitably drawn under universal suffrage." 39 This vision of deferential politics and social harmony was essentially the transposition of the "zemstvo idea," of which Shipov had long been one of the country's most eloquent exponents, to the level of national politics. It could not help but find some sympathy among the zemstvo nobles and propertied townsmen who had devoted years of their lives to work in the "organs of self-administration," where they were accustomed to running things. Shipov and his friends went to the April zemstvo congress, knowing that the congress bureau intended to seek endorsement of the liberationist constitutional draft and prepared to offer their alternative amidst general uncertainty about the political orientation of this first congress to be made up primarily of elected delegates from the local zemstvos.40 After their resolution and a compromise resolution introduced by some of the constitutionalists in the hope of preserving unity in the congress had failed, and the bureau's position had passed by a comfortable majority, Shipov and his group withdrew from the congress and issued a call for a congress of their own to meet on May 22—26 for the purpose of gathering support for their solution of the issue of popular representation.41 Although he is silent about it in his memoirs, the fact is that Shipov had been planning to call a separate "minority" congress well before the April congress met, probably coincidentally with his exit from the congress bureau; indeed, according to his original plan formulated sometime in March, a separate congress was to have met simultaneously with the April "majority" congress. Shipov's archive contains a letter dated March 31 intended for the representatives of the November congress minority, inviting them to a conference in Moscow on April 24 in the name of "a group of persons sharing the opinion of the minority of the participants in the conference of November 6 - 8 of last year." It was to be a conference of public men who would be willing to accept as the basis for discussion of questions of popular representation the following proposition: "Popular representation should not have a parliamentary character with the goal of limiting the tsar's authority, but should serve as an organ for the expression of public opinion, for the establishment and preservation of firm unity and living contact between tsar and people." 42 As he wrote in this letter, Shipov had already decided that there was no longer any point in continuing "mutual discussion by zemstvo activists of diverse political convictions of questions about the organization of popular representation," and he therefore proposed separate congresses, that of the majority to meet in Petersburg (as the bureau had already proposed), and the minority at about the same time in Moscow. Such an arrangement, Shipov concluded, "will

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lay the foundation for the organization of two political parties," whose elaboration of programs on representation would have great significance "when society reaches the point of having to elect the first public representatives." 43 It was in connection with this plan that the "minority opinion" was published in the second week of April, and even before that the newspapers were already carrying reports of the imminent formation of two parties: the minority's "zemstvo-noble" (sometimes also referred to as the "national progressive") party, and the "liberal democratic" party of the majority. 44 Shipov got encouragement for setting up a "political party" from various quarters in March and early April. In the unsent letter of March 31, he referred to the March meeting of provincial gentry marshals in Moscow, which had come to conclusions "corresponding to the basic proposition" of the minority, and his archive contains numerous letters from this period, mostly from zemtsy but also from civil servants and a few university professors, congratulating him on the intention of forming a "zemstvonoble" party. 45 All the same, Shipov appears to have entered partisan politics with a heavy heart and premonitions of defeat. He admitted as much in a letter to Professor Guerrier on March 17: he expressed doubt that the Duma, however constituted, could lead soon to restoration of peace in the country and speculated that its failure to satisfy the Utopian demands of the peasantry would lead to general disenchantment and create fertile soil for revolutionary propaganda; and he admitted that the "minority" lacked the intellectual resources possessed by the "left parties." 46 When Minister of Internal Affairs Bulygin let it be known in early April that he was displeased with the proposed zemstvo congresses, Shipov postponed his plans and never sent the letter just quoted. The congress bureau went ahead with its plan for an April congress, however, and the minority agreed to attend the general congress on the condition that it be held in Moscow. 47 Almost immediately after the end of the April congress, as noted, Shipov and his friends revived their plan for holding a separate congress and on April 28 issued a printed invitation to a congress scheduled for late May. The invitation made no mention of earlier plans for holding such a congress, although it repeated much of the draft letter of March 31. The agenda contained six points, all concerning alternative systems of representation and the suffrage basis for it. 48 The introduction to the invitation referred to bringing together only those who either did not approve of the principle of universal and direct suffrage in general or did not think such a system workable for the time being, and the invitation asked its addressees to see to its circulation "among those who sympathize with the opinion of the minority of the zemstvo congress." Despite their obviously partisan intentions, the organizers also invited the entire zemstvo congress bureau and a number of other

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individual participants in the November congress who were clearly not in sympathy with the minority position, including Paul Dolgorukov, Prince G. E. Lvov, A. A. Mukhanov, A. A. Svechin, and several others. Most, but not al, of the majoritarians declined to attend.49 Seventy-three zemtsy, about half the total invited, gathered with Shipov and his group in the assembly hall of the Moscow nobility on May 22. The main subject of debate among the agenda items was point three: whether elections should be direct or through the zemstvos and town dumas. Rodichev, one of the few majoritarians to show up, was the principal and rather lonely defender of direct elections. Khomiakov was the main speaker for election through the zemstvos. In the voting on this issue on the twentythird, fifty-five participants supported the organizers' proposal for electing representatives through the zemstvos, fifteen voted for general (but twostage) elections, and three defenders of elections by estates (sosloviia) abstained from voting.50 Discussion of agenda items soon yielded, however, to debate over whether or not to accept the zemstvo congress bureau's invitation to participate in a general emergency congress that the bureau had decided to convene immediately after hearing the news of the Russian fleet's defeat in the straits of Tsushima. This news reached the capital only a few days before the Shipov congress convened. F. A. Golovin (chairman of the congress bureau) extended the invitation through Shipov just before the minority congress convened on the twenty-second. The general congress was to open on the twenty-fourth. Golovin told Shipov that the bureau had decided that the zemtsy should put aside disagreements in these threatening times and make a united appeal to the tsar to cooperate in the pacification of the country. This explanation could not fail to impress Shipov, and he agreed to present the proposal to his meeting, while expressing apprehension that the "aggressive attitude characteristic of the majority" would dominate the congress and lead to further deterioration of relations between "authority and society." This apprehension was echoed by others at the Shipov congress, but a sizable majority acceded to Shipov's argument that since the meeting was going to take place anyway, participation by the minority could at least have a moderating effect on the meeting and its resolutions.51 The minority congress participants met for the last time on the morning of the twenty-fourth and then reassembled with the others at the house of the Zemstvo Constitutionalist Iu. A. Novosiltsev. The coalition congress, chaired by the universally respected middle-of-the roader Count Geiden, lasted two days. According to Shipov's account, his apprehensions and those of others expressed during the discussions in the minority meeting were confirmed: many strident voices were heard arguing that the time for loyalist petitions had passed, and appeals were made for the entire congress to present itself in Petersburg to launch a national campaign of petitions. The surviving record of the debates generally supports Shipov: the large

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majority was not interested in bridging the gap between government and society but rather in expressing outrage over the actions of the government, and wished to petition the throne not in order to enhance its authority in perilous times but to demand "an immediate change in the state order on the foundations endorsed by the majority of the zemstvo congress of 1904." 52 At the same time, Shipov's minimum expectations were met: the petition that eventually emerged from the debates was considerably milder and vaguer than it undoubtedly would have been had the minority group not participated, and the delegation that was to deliver it to the tsar was to consist of a mere dozen men instead of the much larger groups proposed by some participants. Although the petition was still too radical for Shipov, he did sign it and stayed on until the end. Moreover, the delegation was received personally by Nicholas II—the first such delegation to be received this way—and the eloquent and conciliatory speech delivered at the audience by Professor S. N. Trubetskoi could have been written by Shipov himself. 53 Although the petition's analysis of the current situation was more abrupt than that of Trubetskoi's speech, it was just as careful in distinguishing between the tsar and his government, and was no more precise about the desired political changes. The key passage read: "Deign to summon without delay popular representatives, elected for that purpose equally and without distinction by all your subjects. Let them decide, together with y o u . . . the question of war and peace... Let them together with you establish the renewed state order." 54 The petition to the tsar was, however, accompanied by a resolution intended for the Council of Ministers. Following a similar preamble on the evils of the "regime of bureaucratic arbitrariness" (prikaznoi stroi), it listed three measures "absolutely necessary for the salvation of the country": (1) Immediate convocation of a freely elected statewide representative body for resolution together with the monarch of the questions of war and peace and of establishing the state order. (2) Expeditious revocation of laws, institutions, decrees, and orders contrary to the principles of freedom of the individual, speech, press, unions, and assembly, and proclamation of a political amnesty. (3) Expeditious renewal of the personnel of the administration by bringing into the leadership of the central government persons who are sincerely devoted to the cause of state reform and who inspire confidence in society.55 Although cast in very general terms, these demands were clearly those of the constitutionalist left of the zemstvo opposition: the minority's scheme for representation through the zemstvos was cast aside, and there was more

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than a hint that the representative body would have powers equal to the tsar and that its functions would be "constituent," not merely consultative, although the slogans of the fourtail suffrage and the constituent assembly were avoided. The majoritarian leadership of the congress received widespread criticism for the muted language of its petitions and, in general, for having once again engaged in the politics of loyal petitioning, but it had, at least momentarily, created the public impression of zemstvo solidarity on the issues of reform. The minoritarian congress and its doings were all but forgotten in the publicity surrounding the petition and the delegation to the throne. 56 Withdrawal of the Minority Following the coalition congress, Shipov once again withdrew from the political arena, to emerge only after October 17 as an initiator of the Union of October 17. He spent the summer in the Far East on zemstvo war-relief business and participated in no further zemstvo congresses. The minority congress movement had for the time being come to an end. The July zemstvo congress was dominated by the constitutionalists, and by its acts— the provisional approval of the liberationist constitutional charter, 57 and especially its unprecedented decision to make a public "appeal to the people" to reject the Bulygin constitution and support a system of "true popular representation, by means of a universal vote"—ensured a definitive split with those in the zemstvos who were fundamentally unwilling to engage in political activity outside the familiar framework of the established institutions of local self-administration. The developments of the spring and summer of 1905 seemed to dash the hopes of Shipov and his well-wishers for uniting a broad spectrum of support in the ranks of the nobility and noble zemstvo men across the country for the minority's moderate reform solution of crowning the zemstvo edifice. The national zemstvo organization was swept by an increasingly aggressive constitutionalist posture in the April, May, and especially July congresses, and many local zemstvos—a majority of those meeting in the spring and summer—came out in favor of the congresses' constitutionalist demands. This shift even penetrated to the generally much more conservative provincial noble corporations and the convocations of provincial marshals of nobility, which became increasingly aggressive in their pronouncements about the political situation; their June conference in Moscow endorsed the May zemstvo congress's demand for immediate summoning of a national representative assembly, although it remained silent about the distribution of power between crown and assembly.58 At the same time, the minority's critics on the right, particularly the Samarin group and the noble founders of the nascent Union of Russian Men (founded in

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late April 1905), were growing increasingly active and uncompromising in their hostility toward the general drift of zemstvo politics. For the time being they had a small following, but they constituted a rallying point for basically conservative landed gentry should the revolution become more threatening to them than reaction, and thus also limited the spectrum of recruitment for the minority. 59 Nevertheless, despite the prospects for a "battle coalition" between the zemtsy as a group and the professional men organized in the professionalpolitical unions entertained by Miliukov and other speakers at the great celebration banquet held in Moscow immediately after the July zemstvo congress, 60 the congress's resolutions did not signify the general conversion of the zemtsy to democratic constitutionalism. Rather, they indicated the maximum point to which any significant group of more or less representative zemtsy could be brought in their opposition to the regime, under the quite particular set of circumstances prevailing in mid-1905. This situation was correctly understood by the majority of the Zemstvo Constitutionalists who met immediately after the general congress in July to take the first steps toward constitution of the Kadet party and by various other observers. Their apprehensions were fully confirmed by the "zemstvo reaction" that set in in earnest following the October days. 61 The great stumbling block to enduring success of the liberationist-Kadet program in zemstvo-noble circles was the whole spectrum of questions concerning relations between noble landowners and peasants. Vague as the liberal program was, it seemed to threaten gentry property and encourage the peasants to satisfy their proverbial, ever intensifying land hunger at the expense of the landholding nobility; moreover, the electoral system it proposed threatened to inundate the gentry vote with a sea of peasant votes which, it was widely believed, would be manipulated by extremists and would bring an end to the accustomed gentry predominance in the institutions of local self-administration. This was the part of the zemstvo constitutionalists' program that Shipov and his "minority" had chosen to concentrate on in their bid for support in the spring of 1905, and not without good reason: while recognizing that the wave of discontent with the regime counseled silence on the issue of limiting the authority of the Crown, they perceived that the full (fourtail) electoral program of the majority was not generally endorsed in the zemstvos and that there was significant hesitation about it even in the ranks of the organization of Zemstvo Constitutionalists. No more than a quarter of the provincial zemstvos ever went so far in 1905 as to endorse direct elections, and a sizable minority (thirty-seven against seventy-one, with another seventeen voting for the Shipov position) voted in favor of universal but indirect elections at the April congress, the only one at which the specific question of the desirable type of electoral system was put to a vote. 62 . Thus the "majority" program was vulnerable to running aground on

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the rock of gentry self-interest on several counts, and this meant that the more moderate, "minority" position, even when it became "constitutionalist by imperial command" after the October Manifesto, had lost a battle, but not the war, for support in gentry-zemstvo ranks. The tide began to turn, in fact, almost immediately after the July congress: peasant disturbances, on the upswing ever since the late winter, were now affecting whole regions for the first time since 1902. They were generally directed against gentry estates—land seizure, cutting of wood, looting of stores, and arson were widespread in many of the zemstvo provinces. And virtually everywhere the peasants were given a voice—in the economic councils of local zemstvos, in public meetings, in the branches and first general congress of the Peasants' Union—they demanded expropriation of gentry estates or, very frequently, distribution of all the land to the peasants. These developments, in particular, led to second thoughts among the zemstvo gentry about the wisdom of the turn to the people sanctioned by the July congress in its hope of winning mass support for a moderate solution to the general crisis,63 or about the attractiveness of a system of universal and direct suffrage. In the post-October conditions, the "minority" was compelled to go considerably beyond the program it had developed in the spring of 1905, abandoning along the way both the strictly consultative assembly and indirect elections. By this time, however, the specific solutions of the spring of 1905 were no longer at issue; the minority remained untainted by the odor of class betrayal that now pursued the Kadets; and, most important, they clearly wanted to "stop the revolution" at the October Manifesto.

The September and November Congresses and the Union's "Appeal" Alexander Guchkov and the September Congress The consolidation of what was to become the Union of October 17 was begun in earnest at the congress of zemstvo and municipal duma men that met in Moscow on September 1 2 - 1 5 , 1905 (the "fifth congress"). As already noted, the Kadet organizing committee introduced its program at the September congress through the congress bureau, which was dominated by leaders of the nascent party. 64 Although the "minority" at the September congress remained small, about the same size it had been in the earlier congresses, it was now galvanized into coordinated action in opposition to basic elements of the program endorsed by the congress majority. The initiative was taken mainly by Alexander Guchkov, who now made his first appearance at a zemstvo-town congress. Although Dmitrii Shipov was soon to reenter the political arena, to participate in the founding of the Union of October 17 and become the first chairman of its central committee, it was

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Guchkov who, beginning in mid-September, took the lead in organizing the union. The son of a M o s c o w merchant-manufacturing family of peasant OldBeliever origin, Guchkov appeared at the September congress as a representative of the M o s c o w municipal duma. Like a number of other third- or fourth-generation members of Moscow families that had made fortunes in manufacturing and then turned to more diversified economic activities (finance, banking, and so forth), Guchkov had become a more or less fulltime "public m a n " after his university studies: he had taken part in the famine relief work of the early 1890s and, after a long stay abroad, during which he fought against the English as a volunteer in the Boer War, he returned to M o s c o w and was elected to the municipal duma in 1901. His absence from the congresses up to September was due to his work in the Far East as assistant head of the Russian Red Cross. His characteristic fearlessness had caused him to be captured there, and he had returned to Moscow following the armistice directly from internment in Japan. 6 5 There was nothing of the Tolstoian pacifism or congenital distaste for political struggle so characteristic of Shipov in Guchkov. His appearance at the September congress, according to his fellow Moscow dumets, the future Kadet leader Ν . I. Astrov, "introduced a sharply defined split, and facilitated a new and more precise exposition of political ideas and the division of the congress's participants into political parties." 6 6 Although the record of the congress is elliptical, it is clear enough that Guchkov and his supporters carefully avoided challenging those aspects of the majority program that would have caused them to be labeled mere representatives of propertied elements—the Kadet economic program, including the agrarian platform providing for compulsory alienation of gentry estate-land and the labor platform (these issues were voted on in September for the first time at a congress of this kind)—nor did they directly challenge the proposed competency of the legislative assembly. 6 7 Guchkov himself had long since been a convinced "constitutionalist," and even Shipov had by n o w abandoned the idea of a merely consultative assembly. He believed that in issuing the Bulygin document, the government had abandoned the principle of moral solidarity in favor of legal norms as the foundation of the state order, and that once this was done formal limitation of the power of the Crown by a legislature was inevitable. 68 The minority voted against the majority in a bloc of 37 votes (out of a total of nearly 200) on two major issues only: the character of the elections for the legislative assembly, where they opposed direct elections while accepting the other three "tails"; and the program on nationalities and regional autonomy, where they voted against inclusion of the statement providing for the legal acquisition of autonomous status by various regions of the empire following general constitutional reform. 6 9 The minority had good reason to believe that there was considerable support for indirect

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elections among the congress participants, and the issue was apparently not made the subject of prolonged debate at the congress. By contrast, Guchkov chose to make a demonstrative issue of the question of decentralization, or regional autonomy. He threw down the gauntlet to the majority in a dramatic statement that began with the words: "If we diverge on this one question alone, we are political enemies; if we agree, we are allies." 7 0 He then went on to label the Kadets' article on autonomy " a program of concealed federalism" and, in a series of rhetorical flourishes, to predict the disintegration of the empire if it were implemented. Guchkov argued that the introduction of general political rights and of extensive local selfgovernment throughout the empire would satisfy the regional-national needs of the borderlands without any federative arrangements. 71 It is clear that in the question of the integrity and strength of the empire Guchkov had perceived a rallying point that could serve the congress minority without identifying it with narrow class-interest, and he meant to make the most of it by calling for a roll-call vote that would put the names of the supporters of the two positions on public record, an unprecedented step in the annals of the until then semiconspiratorial congresses. The proposal was rejected by the majority. 7 2 Nevertheless, this was a masterful political stroke: by seizing on this issue Guchkov and his supporters could take refuge in patriotism and lay responsibility for splitting the zemstvo movement on the Kadets. Although Guchkov was going too far in accusing his opponents at large of "concealed federalism," 73 it was they, not he, who had insisted on raising the nationalities question at the congress in the first place and had circulated Kokoshkin's report "on the rights of nationalities and on decentralization," at least partly with the aim of gaining support for the nascent Kadet party among the national minorities, some of which were represented at the September congress for the first time. 7 4 They did so despite warnings from moderates like Count Geiden (even Guchkov had cautioned about this at the beginning of the congress) that the issue would produce a schism. 75 It may be, as Miliukov claimed in his memoirs, that the Kadet leaders were surprised that the nationalities/decentralization question proved so divisive at the congress, and were anticipating that the agrarian question would be the most disputed part of their program. 76 If so, they underestimated the political acumen of their opponents, who let the agrarian platform go through unimpeded. In any case, the nationalities question did cause great controversy during the debates, and the substantial number of abstentions in the voting revealed much wider hesitancy about the majority position among the delegates than the number of negative votes cast indicated. 77 It should also be noted that the "appeal to the people" that was finally endorsed by the congress incorporated the Kadet economic program and their tactic toward the Bulygin Duma, but passed over in silence the issue of direct elections (calling only for "universal suffrage") and the nationalities /regional autonomy question. 78

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Despite evident discord, the congress voted in near unanimity on its third day to set up a united "central electoral committee" in Petersburg in anticipation of forthcoming elections to the Bulygin Duma. 79 This committee fell by the wayside in the rush of events following the congress, and its proposed members emerged in the leadership of the Kadet, Octobrist, and Democratic Reform parties, the majority becoming, of course, Kadets. 80 Reactivation of the Minority The "zemstvo minority" was reactivated immediately following the September congress. Several of its representatives, such as N. S. Volkonskii, former Riazan marshal of nobility, wrote articles attacking the congress specifically on the decentralization issue (generally following Guchkov's line of argument at the congress); and N. A. Khomiakov, Shipov's close associate in the declarations of the spring, circulated an open letter at the end of the month to various zemtsy, primarily chairmen of district boards, calling on them to recall the radical representatives to the congresses who wanted to dismember Russia. 81 Before October 17, however, only a handful of district zemstvos had responded positively to Khomiakov's appeal or otherwise actively demonstrated discontent with the congress.82 Shipov had fully anticipated that issuance of the October Manifesto would cause the zemstvo congress bureau to end its oppositional stance and accept Witte's invitation to enter his cabinet. The failure of the negotiations between the congress bureau and Witte and the militant declarations of the Kadet party, not only before, but immediately after October 17, impelled the reluctant Shipov to reenter the political arena. 83 Action in the center and on the right pushed him in the same direction. The post-October days saw the proliferation of interest-group parties, some accepting the manifesto, others rejecting it, outright or in part, and many of them established on a strictly local basis for local issues. Being opposed to proliferation of interestgroup parties in general, and unable to join with any of the larger of them out of philosophical-political differences, Shipov returned to the idea of creating an organization that would unite all the political groups and individuals, both those that sympathized in principle with the points proclaimed in the Manifesto of October 17, as well as those who accepted their practical inevitability at the present time, in order to create a membership of the State Duma that would be able to guarantee the establishment of a legal order in the country together with support for the state authority, on the basis of cooperation between governmental and public forces. 84 At just this time Shipov was thrown into close contact with Guchkov. They traveled to Petersburg together several times at the end of October and

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early November for discussions with Witte about entering his ministry. In lengthy discussions Shipov found Guchkov in full agreement about the urgent need to set up a counterweight to the Kadets and their allies to their left. Guchkov assured Shipov that there was widespread discontent with the "majority" among zemstvo activists, and that a secession from the congress movement of a more or less significant group was inevitable in the very near future. They agreed on the need to facilitate the organization of sympathizers behind the zemstvo minority position. The breakdown of Witte's negotiations with the moderate group to which Shipov and Guchkov belonged about entering his cabinet only increased their sense of urgency. 85 Following October 17, with the promise of a representative order and the rights that had apparently been supported by most politically active zemtsy secured, accelerating peasant unrest and the threat of more general strikes to come swept the ground from under the zemstvo opposition. Not many zemstvos went so far as the Tula provincial zemstvo, which demonstratively withdrew its mandate from its representatives to the congresses and then went on in its November meeting to urge the government to retain the Bulygin electoral law rather than implement the promises of the manifesto about expanding the suffrage. However, other zemstvos and dumas did follow in withdrawing the mandate, and, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, the congress bureau began receiving numerous telegrams from zemstvos, dumas, and gentry groups urging the forthcoming November congress to support the government, oppose the calling of a constituent assembly, and reject the regional autonomy that had been endorsed by the September congress majority. 8 6

The November Congress and the Octobrist "Appeal" Some delegates to the November congress withdrew on their own, on the not unreasonable grounds that the congress had become a partisan organization, but the "minority," in somewhat reduced numbers, came to the congress, once again led by Guchkov. It was quite evidently Guchkov's plan to recruit among the delegates to the congress for his new party and, in general, to use the congress as a forum for publicizing its position, which was defined largely in terms of arguments with the dominant Kadet position. Guchkov had taken the initiative in arranging the preliminary meetings for preparing a draft program of the new party. These meetings were under way before the end of October, and the organization of a new party was being announced in the capital newspapers before the end of the month. The union's appeal was apparently being circulated in printed form over the signatures of the twelve Moscow organizers at about the same time. The launching of the union came with the congress: Guchkov and his colleagues organized a dinner on November 8, which was attended by about one hundred men, including "that part of the congress that resolutely opposes

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continuation of revolutionary tactics." Here Guchkov read aloud the union's "Appeal" before publishing it as a brochure on November 10, over the same twelve Moscow signatures. On November 14 it appeared in Petersburg over the signatures of twenty-one local sponsors. 87 At the congress the future founders of the union, including Guchkov's brother, Ν. I. Guchkov, Stakhovich, Count Geiden, Prince Volkonskii, and others, and in the first place Guchkov himself, engaged in a sort of running skirmish with the majority over the points of the resolutions proposed by the bureau: the point on "constituent functions" for the legislative assembly (to which they were generally opposed); on amnesty for political prisoners (Guchkov opposed a blanket amnesty); on abolition of the death penalty (Guchkov proposed adding a sentence in which the congress would condemn "violence and murder as a means of political struggle"); on rescinding martial law (he called for its retention in areas such as Poland, where he claimed there were armed uprisings under way); on autonomy for Poland (there were diverse opinions here: Guchkov modulated somewhat his earlier position, now arguing against autonomy only indirectly by posing rhetorical questions about the fate of minority nationalities within Poland, and the group united only in supporting postponement of the entire question for consideration by the Duma); and they objected to the aggressive tone of the resolutions as a whole. A group of sixteen, including the above-mentioned men presented a special opinion dissenting with the majority position on the constituent functions of the legislative assembly, rejecting premature resolution of the Polish question, and declaring that at the present critical moment the congress should be helping to calm society and showing support for the government, rather than dictating terms to it. This resolution was presented on November 10, the same day the union's "Appeal" appeared. 88 The Octobrist appeal was accompanied by what amounted to a draft party program, consisting of two "basic principles" and six "questions of highest state importance" that would have to be dealt with by the forthcoming Duma, along with the union's general guidelines for their solution. The contents of this document as a whole are best presented in comparison with the Kadet position—not only the Kadet program, but Kadet resolutions from the time of the October Manifesto to the drafting of the appeal—to which it was a response. Although reference was made to the need for full and rapid realization of the principles outlined in the manifesto, the stridency and impatience with the manifesto characteristic of Kadet statements were virtually absent from the Octobrist appeal; its overall import was that the manifesto was the crossing of the Rubicon: the Russian people had become politically free, the state had become a state ruled by law, and the regime had become a constitutional monarchy. The manifesto therefore deserved the support of all who rejected either stagnation or revolutionary upheaval, even if they

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had differing views on specific social, political, or economic issues. The Octobrists appeared to be only slightly hesitant about the likelihood of the October promises being carried out, and they were strongly supportive from the outset of a constitutional monarchy, a strong state built on Russian traditions. Another significant difference between Octobrists and Kadets was revealed in what the Octobrists had to say about their own organization. The Kadets, who thought of their organization as a modern European political party, had preliminarily drafted a set of party statutes, which were designed to set up fairly rigorous standards for party membership and enforcement of party discipline. The Octobrists simply invited "both individuals who sympathize with the mentioned goals and entire parties whose programs coincide with the program of the union in their basic features" to join their organization.89 In the articles of the Octobrist draft program, the contrast with the Kadet program was more subtle, but quite significant: the Octobrists also dwelt on the theme that equality of all citizens before the law specifically included national minorities, and they also called for democratization and extension of local self-government; at the same time, these reforms were explicitly linked to the preservation of the "unity and integrity of the state," the title of the first "basic principle" of their program, and, except for Finland, there was no mention of autonomy for any part of the empire; the "idea of federalism" was explicitly rejected. Whereas the Kadet program called for the full fourtailed suffrage as the basis of the electoral system, the Octobrist program referred to "general suffrage" (obshchee izbiratel'noe pravo), which implied a rejection of direct elections without actually saying so. 90 The representative assembly, whose legislative powers were specifically enumerated in the Kadet program, was referred to in the Octobrist draft as having been granted by the manifesto in the form of "the right of active participation, together with the monarch, in legislative labors and in the administration of the country." The idea of calling a constituent assembly was, of course, emphatically rejected. On the crucial agrarian question, the Octobrist program admitted the possibility of alienating gentry land, like the Kadet program, but this was to be only a last resort, "in cases of state significance," and various other measures were suggested as the proper way out of the land crisis: regulation of small-scale renting, financial assistance, aid to migration, distribution of state lands, and so on. The populist tinge of the Kadet agrarian program, with its references to labor norms for land usage and creation of a state land fund, was entirely absent in the Octobrist draft. Like the Kadets, the Octobrists recognized the importance of the labor question, and devoted an entire article of their draft program to it. While recognizing the right of workers to form unions and strike and the need for labor legislation on a variety of matters, "in accordance with the principles

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adopted in this area in the most enlightened industrial states," the Octobrist provisions were at once much less specific and more encumbered by qualifications than were the corresponding parts of the Kadet program: individual workers were not to be compelled to join unions or participate in strikes; industries and other enterprises involved in the preservation of public health and state security were to occupy a special status in regard to labor's rights. There was no mention of a limit on the length of the working day for the working population at large. And the article stated at the outset that the labor question could not be satisfactorily resolved "without support for industry as a whole," that is, without taking the employers' interests into account as well as those of the workers. In the financial section of their program, the Octobrists echoed the Kadets by calling for introduction of a progressive income tax, accompanied by gradual reduction (the Kadets wanted elimination) of indirect taxes on "objects of primary necessity." Apart from that, there was little similarity. No mention was made of abolition of peasant redemption payments, while specific measures were indicated for encouraging the industrial and general economic development of the country, such as the expansion of the rail network and other parts of the infrastructure, and the opening up of stateowned natural resources to private exploitation. There was no analogue to these recommendations in the Kadet program at all. In general, one must agree with the observation that the Octobrist program, in marked contrast to the Kadet program, seemed to be placing economic, and specifically industrial, development before welfare. 91 One can only speculate about the role played in the drafting of the labor and financial platforms by the conscious desire to appeal to industrial interests. It must have been, in any case, modulated by the concern to avoid alienating agrarian interests. It is significant in this regard that the program was silent on the issue of protective tariffs, the endorsement of which could have been counted on to win friends among industrialists but just as surely would have alienated landowners. Finally, although the Octobrists agreed with the Kadets in most essentials about the needs of education—general expansion, solicitation of both public and private initiative, introduction of universal primary education with state support as a matter of urgency—they were silent on the issues of academic freedom, student organization, and university autonomy, all of which were raised in the Kadet program. The Octobrist stance at the outset of the union's existence was in sum moderately progressive: it endorsed constitutional limitation of the autocracy and the need for a variety of administrative, legal, economic, and social reforms, although these were more often than not vaguely defined and hedged by restrictions that were rather transparently meant to assuage the fears of gentry landowners and businessmen. At the same time, the Octobrists emphasized the primary significance of maintaining the unity

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and restoring the integrity and power of the state. In the founders' view, the Kadets had sided with the revolutionary left in order to carry the revolution on to some kind of definitive break with the established order. 9 2 T o counteract this movement, but also to consolidate the essential concessions that they believed had been made on October 17 against the anticonstitutional right which was begining to organize itself, they took to the political arena. They expected to mobilize support primarily through the zemstvos and municipal administrations in their most influential constituencies, the landed gentry and men in business and industry, and their initial programmatic statement catered to both groups within the limits imposed by the overall goals of the nascent organization. Much more so than with the Kadet leadership at the outset, the Octobrists' goals were short-term ones, and the organization was not even conceived of as a party, but rather as a coalition of groups and factions—some already existing, others anticipated—for their pursuit of these goals. For this organization they chose an appropriate name: The Union of October 17. 9 3

From the Appeal to the First Congress Following publication of the Octobrist appeal in Moscow and Petersburg, a central committee, consisting of the twelve signers of the appeal with Shipov as chairman, was set up in Moscow. The Petersburg organizers formed their own committee of ten, which was then recognized as a branch of the central committee equal to the Moscow branch. Its chairman was Baron P. L. Korf. The branches would meet together in Moscow to discuss important issues. Diversity in the O c t o b r i s t Leadership This geographical-organizational dichotomy brought together distinctly different groups. Among the original twelve signers of the Moscow declaration were nine veterans of the zemstvo movement—six from the congress "minority" and three Zemstvo Constitutionalists—and three men from the Moscow "big bourgeoisie." 9 4 The Petersburg group was more complex; it included mainly large landowners from Petersburg province, professional men involved in Petersburg industry and finance (mostly civil engineers), and industrial entrepreneurs tout court. Many of them were deputies to the Petersburg duma (the " m a y o r " of Petersburg among them), and several of the dozen or so of them who were of noble origin were involved in zemstvo and noble institutions. What linked most of these men together, including most of the nobles among them, were ties to Petersburg business and industry and the urban politics of the capital. 95 Zemstvo experience was much less strongly represented in the Petersburg group than in the Moscow group, although nonzemtsy actually had a

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majority in both of the central committee groups (there were five zemtsy in the Moscow committee and three in Petersburg, all of the latter involved as well in the business world). The relatively weak representation of zemstvo experience among the Octobrist leaders is one of the characteristics that most obviously distinguishes them as a whole from the Kadet leadership group, although the role played by the zemstvo "minority" in the union's foundation was of first importance, and its representatives made up a significant part of the Moscow central committee. The occupational-professional profile of the Octobrist leadership is markedly different from that of the Kadets in several other important respects. Although higher education was a common attribute (although not a practically universal one, as among the Kadet leaders),96 there were very few practitioners of the free professions among them. Most of the educated zemtsy among the Moscow group had no professions outside zemstvo service; and in Petersburg, at least half of those with higher education were trained as civil engineers, and several others who had law degrees were also occupied mainly in business or industrial enterprises, a connection that was, of course, almost totally lacking among the Kadet leaders. There were no university professors in the Octobrist leadership. If the typical Kadet leader was an academic of noble background with experience in the zemstvo institutions, the typical Octobrist leader was in Moscow a zemstvo veteran without direct ties to the free professions, and in Petersburg a member of the board of directors of several banks and industrial enterprises with an engineering education who was active in the municipal administration. The Moscow zemstvo tradition and Petersburg big business were the two rather unlikely poles of the initiative group of the Union of October 17 that led contemporaries to characterize the Octobrists as "an ill-assorted lot" (raznosherstnaia kompaniia). Ill-assorted as they may have been, the Moscow and Petersburg Octobrist leaders tended to have one thing in common that distinguished them as a group from their Kadet counterparts: they were older, on the average, by a decade. A few, such as Geiden and Volkonskii in Moscow and Baron Korf in Petersburg, were old men in 1905; most of the others were born in the 1850s, and only four were born as late as the decade of the 1860s. 97 The Octobrists and the Government In the few months between the publication of the October Manifesto and the union's first congress, the Octobrist leadership, with its only slightly qualified supportive attitude toward the government, was contacted by the government on several occasions about participating in the setting up of the new post-October order. Even before the creation of the union Shipov and Guchkov had been invited by Witte to join his cabinet, but had refused (Guchkov much less readily than Shipov), ultimately because Witte would

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not part with Durnovo. Following the collapse of these negotiations, they were nevertheless invited by Witte to draw up a project for carrying out the expansion of the suffrage system promised in the manifesto. Together with several other Octobrist and moderate Kadet leaders they drew up a draft of a suffrage system in Moscow at the end of October. This system provided for universal manhood suffrage, with direct elections for the large cities and two-stage elections for the rest of the country, and proportional election of Duma deputies in the provincial electoral assemblies. 98 The Octobrist leaders Shipov, Guchkov, M . V. Krasovskii, and Stakhovich, accompanied by S. A. Muromtsev and Prince G. E. Lvov from the Kadet party and V. D. Kuzmin-Karavaev of the Party of Democratic Reforms, submitted this draft to Witte in early November and defended it at a special meeting of the State Council to which he invited them (Muromtsev only at Shipov's insistence). Then, on December 5, Shipov, Guchkov, and Baron Korf of the Octobrist central committee participated, once again at Witte's invitation, in the Tsarskoe Selo special conference, personally chaired by the tsar, from which the December 11 electoral law issued. Here they once again defended their project, in modified form, without much success: they may have persuaded the tsar to extend the suffrage somewhat and to include workers' electors in the provincial assemblies, but they got nowhere with their arguments against the curial system of indirect v o t i n g . " Under the opposing pressures of accelerating revolutionary violence on the one side and the accumulating evidence of the regime's lack of dedication to the principles of the October Manifesto on the other, the Kadet leadership had gradually modulated its "revolutionism," while remaining basically hostile toward the regime and its policies. How did the Octobrist leaders act under these opposing pressures, which were in some ways even more severe for them because of their having identified themselves so fully with the manifesto? Shipov and his colleagues had tried to cooperate with the government, first in the matter of joining the cabinet and then in the revision of the electoral system. They were not encouraged by the results in either case, and they had ample opportunity to observe what Shipov delicately called " a n absence of sincerity and straightforwardness on the part of Count Witte, as well as his obvious inability to free himself from the engrained habits and ways of the bureaucratic o r d e r . " 1 0 0 The Octobrist leaders were being forced to conclude that "the government's policies appeared to be a mockery of [the October Manifesto], from which the entire country anticipated a renewal of its political life, excluding the possibility of establishing cooperation between the state authority and society." 1 0 1 The basic Octobrist strategy of combining support for reform with support for the government was rapidly becoming untenable, and this yielded tensions within the union.

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The general meeting of the Octobrist membership convened on December 4 in Petersburg revealed something of the tension that had developed by that time within the union leadership. One of the opening speakers, M. V. Krasovskii of the Petersburg central committee, a senator and wealthy Chernigov landowner, called for unequivocal support for the government in view of the threat of elemental peasant disorders, which were being fanned by socialist propaganda. This view was supported by a second speaker, and a third, Count Sheremetev, even blamed the government for being insufficiently aggressive in restoring order and suggested that the union monitor the actions of local government agencies in this regard. At least one speaker, however, the lawyer P. S. Chistiakov (a director of the Russian Petroleum Association and later a member of the union's central committee), countered these proposals with a call for the union to escape from utter dependence on the government by working up a progressive economic program (including tax reform and further concessions on the land question) with which they could become a mass party supported by peasants and workers. 102 It is impossible to say how the debates might have gone in meetings planned for the following weeks. They were aborted on December 13 by order of the gradonachal'nik forbidding "general meetings" in the capital. 103 The Petersburg union leaders were at a loss over how to respond to this action. When an invitation to discuss the matter finally came from Count Witte at the end of the month, the entire central committee turned out to argue that the dilatory behavior of the government in regard to the reforms promised in the manifesto and the violation of the right of public assembly and other civil rights of the population were irritating society and creating an attitude of mistrust toward the government. Witte refused to accept unlimited right of assembly and (all this according to Shipov) declared that the government had no need of society's confidence. By way of reassurance, however, he declared that fears that the Duma would not be summoned were groundless, and ended by saying that the tsar's will in regard to carrying out the manifesto was "immutable." 104 Shortly afterward, Novoe vremia carried a report of an interview with Witte in which he had apparently said that the tsar remained an "unlimited autocrat" after October 17 and that the manifesto itself could be taken back at any time. 105 By then, according to Shipov, the central committee of the union had come to regard Count Witte's politics "with complete distrust." But the continuing decay of order tended to immobilize the Octobrists' growing dissatisfaction with the government. This was demonstrated in their response to the Moscow insurrection. The Moscow Octobrists would not condemn the armed suppression of the Moscow uprising, which began a few days after the Petersburg meeting. Octobrists in the town duma, led by

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the brothers Guchkov, voted down Kadet-initiated resolutions criticizing Governor-General Dubasov's employment of force in Moscow, and Ν. I. Guchkov gave a much-publicized toast to him on New Year's Eve. 106 The Eve of the First Octobrist Congress The crisis of confidence in the Witte government, prompted by the Novoe vremia story, led the Octobrist leaders to convene a special session of the combined central committee in Moscow in early January (8-9), for discussion of the current situation and definition of the union's position in regard to government policies. Also on the agenda were the question of summoning a general congress of party delegates and the question of cooperation with other parties and groups in the forthcoming elections. Shipov noted in his memoirs that there was generalized distrust of the government among the conference participants. Rumors of impending governmental démarches, such as the promulgation of the Fundamental Laws and the possibility of Witte's removal from office, were discussed.107 At the same time there seemed to be general agreement that there was no alternative to supporting the existing Witte government. This point was made by both chairmen, Korf and Shipov. Shipov argued that the removal of Witte could at the present juncture only produce a more reactionary cabinet, probably led by Durnovo: "Therefore," he concluded, "it is necessary, although with a heavy heart, to support the cabinet, but all possible influence must be exerted to prevent postponement of the convocation of the Duma." 1 0 8 The conference then turned to the issue behind the Novoe vremia story. There was lengthy discussion about whether or not it was appropriate that the tsar should go on using the title "autocrat" (samoderzhets) after October, and whether the tsar ought to take an oath to uphold the new constitutional order. Both were decided without noticeable opposition and were discussed along with the question of support for the Witte government in the press release prepared for distribution at the end of the conference. This release, based largely on Shipov's words, stated that because of the recent statements about the tsar's authority after October, the central committee of the union had come to the conclusion that the emperor had "voluntarily limited his authority in the legislative sphere." The release went on to explain that although from the time of the summoning of the Duma the monarch could no longer be considered "unlimited" (neogranichennyi) in his authority, this would not prevent preservation of the historic title samoderzhets, which originally had been used (by Ivan III, 1462-1505) to signify the country's independence from foreign domination, had subsequently been borne by tsars whose authority had not been unlimited, and so forth. The title, in fact, ought to be preserved because its removal from use in church services "could lead to civil strife and schism [smuta i raskol\."

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Finally, it was agreed that the oath would be required only from the successor to the throne, not from Nicholas II. The press release reiterated the Octobrists' adherence to the view that the manifesto had promised a constitutional monarchy, and that it was the union's main purpose to help in its realization. The union therefore declared its readiness to support the existing ministry "to the extent that it will deliberately and sufficiently realize the rights and freedoms granted by the...Manifesto of October 17." 1 0 9 The committee went on to lay plans for the first general congress of the union, set for February 8, and to work up its agenda. The discussion of the agenda for the congress revealed, first of all, an extraordinary diversity of views about just what the function of such a congress, and of the union itself as an organization, ought to be. Shipov had introduced the proposal to summon a general congress with the idea of having it define the union's attitude toward government policy; that is, primarily as a means of bringing pressure to bear on the government to summon the Duma and carry out the promises of October 17. He quite obviously thought of the congress as a sort of continuation of the zemstvo congresses up through the November 1904 congress, rather than as a step in the organization of a political party; indeed, in the arguments over the purposes of the congress he said that he anticipated that the union's organizations in the provinces would disband completely as soon as the elections were over. 110 He would admit to using the congress to further cooperation somehow with other, nonmember, parties in the elections in order to avoid political struggle and interestfactionalism among moderate monarchist groups, but the idea of using the congress to help forge a party organization was foreign to him and, he added, not without justification, it would be too late in mid-February to begin talking about organizational questions, for the beginning of the elections would then be only two weeks away. He accordingly proposed summoning a congress not only of the union and its constituent parties but of all other parties whose programs were more or less similar to the union's, in order to put maximum pressure on the government to proceed with dispatch in the realization of the promised reforms and the summoning of the Duma, and for cooperation in the election of appropriate candidates to the Duma. 111 A number of central committee members took strong exception to Shipov's ideas about the congress. Guchkov and Miliutin, in particular, were of the opinion that the primary purpose of the congress was to strengthen the union's internal organization, in the first place the ties between the local groups and the central committee. And a large majority of those present rejected Shipov's proposal for a coalition congress in favor of a more properly "party" meeting, insofar as the complex nature of the union allowed. It was resolved to summon a congress only "of the Union of October 17 and the parties that are known to belong to it." From one to five

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delegates were to be invited to attend the congress from each provincial branch of the union and from each constituent party, as well as all members of the combined central committee and two members from each of the precinct branches in Petersburg and Moscow. 112 Shipov's suggestions on the congress agenda were also rejected by most other members of the central committee. Most at first agreed that the central committee ought to put a number of specific questions that had been insufficiently developed in the union's appeal on the agenda, with the aim of exploiting their propaganda value in appealing to the electorate, but there were diverse opinions about what these questions ought to be. P. P. Riabushinskii prudently warned that the placing of specific programmatic questions on the congress's agenda might lead to endless debate, but his advice was not heeded and seven questions were proposed for discussion.113 However, a majority of the committee could agree on placing only three of them on the congress agenda: the nationalities question, the peasant-land question, and the question of strikes. There was nothing approaching unanimity even with regard to these three questions, particularly the land question, which passed an initial vote by a margin of one. Guchkov, who was generally in favor of developing specific questions at the congress for their propaganda value and for their usefulness in setting off the union's position from both left and right, 114 was against this question, fearing that it would lead to schisms at the congress. Baron Korf spoke in agreement with Guchkov's apprehension. The most insistent proponent of putting the land question on the agenda was Count Geiden, who argued that, as this was the main question for the peasants, the union would have no chance of getting peasant votes if it were not raised at the congress and at least basic principles on it outlined there. 115 In the end the committee retreated altogether from the idea of putting specific programmatic questions on the congress agenda, and a compromise solution, offered by F. E. Enakiev, was accepted. The agenda was to be restricted to three general points: (1) review of the reports of the central committee and provincial branches on the organization and general situation of the union, (2) discussion of the government's policies as of the time of the congress, and (3) tactics for the forthcoming elections. All programmatic questions were to be omitted, with the understanding that individual central committee members could introduce such questions at the congress if time allowed. 116 A second general meeting for Petersburg members of the union was organized by the Petersburg branch of the central committee at the end of January, following the lifting of the ban on public meetings in the capital. It revealed the same unwillingness or inability in the union leadership to take a firm oppositional stance toward the government. It also revealed that the trend toward "party-mindedness" was growing noticeably stronger as election time approached.

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Despite Miliutin's detailed review of the party's disappointing relations with the government since the preceding meeting of December 4, most of the speakers from the party leadership at least affected mild contentment with the progress toward implementing the manifesto's promises, and Miliutin himself at the end of his discourse claimed that the Octobrist tactic of "restrained but persistent" pressure on the government had been justified by results: the ban on meetings had been lifted! 117 The one attempt during this protracted meeting to claim that the government had done nothing effective by way of fulfilling the promises of October and to energetically condemn the government's increasingly unrestrained use of force, by A. A. Pilenko, a professor of international law at Petersburg University, was met with noise and confusion, and the chairman, Baron Korf, and several other prominent central committee members criticized this vigorous attack on Witte's policies and dissociated themselves from Pilenko's views in general. 118 The main concern of the speakers at this meeting, most of them members of the Petersburg branch of the central committee, was tactical questions about waging partisan politics in the electoral struggle. The record of the speeches shows that the partisan tone already present in the combined central committee meeting earlier in the month was even more pronounced here, as might have been expected in a general meeting for union members in the most highly politicized city in the empire only a few weeks before the anticipated date of the elections. The speakers talked like politicians and clearly thought of their organization (at least in Petersburg) as a "party," a word they frequently used, engaged in a competition for support among the electorate. The constitutional-monarchist bloc in Petersburg, in which the Octobrists played the role of senior partner along with several other moderate constitutionalist groups, was subjected to detailed analysis at the meeting, and this exercise was followed by a review of the union's already considerable efforts at publishing political propaganda, discussions of the details of the election process, composition of electoral lists, and so on. A good deal of attention during the discussion of electoral tactics was devoted to the subject of Octobrist differences with the Kadets, who Miliutin identified as their "most dangerous opponents," although he took care to warn that the danger from the as yet incipient right was not to be discounted either. 119 M. V. Krasovskii gave a speech directed expressly to the question of defining those differences with the Kadets that should be emphasized in campaigning against them. The union occupied a central position, and would have to wage a struggle on both right and left flanks, but whereas delimitation on the right was fairly easy—the right stood for return to the old order—that on the left, between Octobrists and Kadets ("our near relatives") was not so easy to draw: the Kadets, too, were constitutionalists, even constitutional monarchists since their second con-

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gress; they did not reject the right of property; and they said they were for local autonomy only, not federalism. The Octobrists would have to emphasize their true monarchism, defense of private property, and defense of the unity and integrity of the empire, and point to the Kadets' doubtful sincerity on all three questions (they had become monarchists only to appeal to the monarchist people; they would not stand up against socialism; and their autonomy program would lead to the nearly complete dismemberment of Russia). But Krasovskii admitted that the distinctions would be difficult to prove. In the end he came down to this essential difference between Kadets and Octobrists: the former wanted to take over the rule of the country, whereas the latter were concerned with principles, "the striving for justice, work, and love of order," which transcended any party and involved the good of the country as a whole. 120 It was especially the idea of the necessity of upholding a strong state as the prerequisite for the welfare of the country as a whole to which the speakers continually returned in identifying the distinguishing characteristic that set their union off from the Kadet party. It was this difference, argued Chistiakov, one of the most party-minded of the Petersburg leadership, that had split the zemstvo opposition movement and led to the creation of the Octobrist union, and should be emphasized at the hustings: This position on the state must be explained and analyzed for all our electors; it must be understood what kind of strife the country is living through now, and what kind of danger threatens it if this position does not emerge victorious Close ranks, use all means to this end, and remember our motto: liberty and the state principle [gosudarstvennost']. That motto is vital for the life of our motherland. Forward! For the good of our motherland, her strength and her future! 121 At the end of the meeting three resolutions presented by the central committee were adopted for submission to the general p^rty congress in February: (1) "That the government should return to the path of steadfast fulfillment of the imperial will as expressed in the Manifesto of October 17"; (2) "that the government should not only hasten by all possible means the elections to the State Duma but should identify the precise date of its convocation"; and (3) "that among the guaranteed civil rights be included the right of petition." 122

The First Octobrist Congress The diversity of views over basic issues that had shown up in the January discussions reappeared with even greater force at the first party congress convened on February 8. Despite the progressive enhancement of "party-

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mindedness" since the founding of the union, agreement about fundamental issues of a sort that would permit reasonably unified tactics in the forthcoming elections seemed to be less likely than ever. When, during the central committee meeting in early January, Guchkov had placed the need for defining the "physiognomy" of the union in first place on the congress agenda, he, like the Petersburg colleagues, was primarily concerned with the demarcation line on the left. To distinguish the union from the Kadets he had intended to exploit the issues of political strikes and uprisings and the nationalities question, and had specifically recommended raising the nationalities question at the congress in order to accumulate information from local union groups for agitational purposes (ν boevykh tseliakh). As for setting the party off from the right, Guchkov, like others at both January meetings, had assumed that the issue of constitutional monarchy would be sufficient, although he did not minimize the importance of delineation (razmezhivat'sia) on this side as well. By the eve of the congress it had become clear to Guchkov and others in the Moscow leadership that the problem of drawing the line on the right was going to be a much thornier one than they had earlier anticipated. In Moscow itself the situation was reasonably clear: the Octobrists were united with the firmly constiutionalist Trade-Industry party (TIP), and the energetic campaigning of the frankly reactionary Monarchist party led by the editor of Moskovskie vedomosti, Gringmut, had tended to draw off less compatible fellow travelers from the minority of the zemstvo congress movement and to serve as a focus for conservative sentiment generally. But in Petersburg a more numerous collection of parties, some of them with less than impeccable constitutionalist credentials, were loosely linked with the Octobrist organization in a "united committee of constitutional-monarchist parties" for doing battle with the Kadets in the elections.123 And with the onset of the zemstvo reaction in the provinces there came a proliferation of organizations of various degrees of conservatism with which the Octobrists would have to come to terms, given the conservative drift among the union's potential constituency. The Moscow leadership responded to this situation by reasserting the union's criticism of government policy and stressing its constitutionalist commitment generally. Emphasizing these points in a newspaper interview just before the congress opened, Guchkov even drew some limits to the extent to which he was willing to exploit Great Russian nationalism. All groups in the population were to enjoy the same civil and political rights, he pointed out. There was a need for the Octobrists to set themselves off from the chauvinist and nonconstitutional right generally: A certain number of people have joined the union whose constitutionalist, mettle has not yet been tested in practice. The Octobrists are very little delimited from the parties of the right, in particular from the Party of Legal Order, one of the factions of

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The Formation of Political Parties which has without any doubt lost its constitutional aspect. Consequently, the Union of October 17 has its "rightist" members whose sympathies are unmistakable. It is very difficult for pure constitutionalists to work with them. 1 2 4

With the proliferation of right-wing groups in the provinces it must have appeared to Guchkov and other sincere constitutionalists in the union leadership that the union risked losing its character as a moderate but decisively constitutionalist organization and, with that, its potential as a force for a moderate solution to the political crisis. 1 2 5 At the congress Guchkov was firmly supported in his position by Shipov and Stakhovich-of the zemstvo "Slavophile" group in the Moscow central committee. Nearly 400 delegates representing seventy-eight branches of the union or affiliated organizations from thirty-five provinces and regions participated in this first general congress of the union. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total came from the two capitals alone. 1 2 6 The opening speeches at the congress were given by Shipov and Guchkov. They were followed by. Stakhovich, who gave the central committee's report opening discussion of the question of the union's position vis-à-vis the government and its current policies. Shipov began by reaffirming the union's commitment to the October Manifesto and its full realization as the only way out of the political crisis, and then went on to excoriate the government's actions since October in terms hardly less severe than those Pilenko had used in the Petersburg meeting: the government was not proceeding with due speed to the convocation of the Duma; it had not fulfilled its promises in regard to expansion of the suffrage with the electoral law of December 11; Witte had acted in bad faith in taking counsel with him, Shipov, and other public men—this had been a charade, a waste of time. As for the civil liberties proclaimed by the Manifesto, no normative steps were being taken by the government, a situation that gave rise to extensive arbitrariness and abuse of authority by local officials and had produced the explosive revolutionary movement at the end of the year and its bloody repression. One might admit the necessity of brute force in that specific instance, but the government was continuing to pursue the path of "extreme repression," employing violence and arbitrariness against the peaceful population, violating all rights and liberties. "The congress," Shipov concluded, "must resolve the question of its relations toward such activity on the part of the government. Only then can the parties brought together by the union fulfill together their tasks and their responsibility before the motherland." 1 2 7 Guchkov repeated many of the same points and concluded that the existing cabinet could not save Russia, but the greater part of his speech addressed the problem of the union's self-definition. The rapid growth of local Octobrist groups showed that the solution offered by those who had

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separated themselves from the doctrinaire left wing of the zemstvo-town congresses and had come out in support of the synthesis of tradition and renewal represented by the October Manifesto was a viable one; but these groups had appeared without central direction, "like mushrooms," and now was the time for the union to define itself "in the economy of Rusian political parties"; differences of opinion should not be feared at the 1

congress. Stakhovich condemned the government even more vociferously than had Shipov. None of the fundamental promises of the manifesto were being carried out by the government; it had in effect revoked the manifesto. Suppression of the armed uprising was one thing, continued exercise of arbitrariness and violence against the peaceful population was another, and this was becoming the general practice: "We see that millions of Russian citizens have been labeled revolutionaries, that the government wishes to overpower all Russians who are dissatisfied with its lawless actions and protest againt arbitrariness and violence." The situation was grim. The government seemed intent on overthrowing the established order: "It has prepared its own destruction. But its destruction may be followed by the destruction of the dynasty and of all Russia." Octobrists could sympathize neither with revolution nor with reaction. 129 Although Stakhovich's speech was apparently greeted with enthusiasm by most of the congress delegates, the resolution he introduced with it defining the union's stand on government policies provoked long and passionate debate and was approved in the voting by the slimmest margin (142-140). The closeness of the vote prompted the central committee to call for an article-by-article vote on the resolution, whose results were revealing: the first two articles, calling on the government to hasten the elections and to set an early date for convocation of the Duma (no later than April 25) were passed unanimously, but the third and fourth points, which demanded the abolition of the extraordinary legislation of 1881 and its replacement by temporary regulations guaranteeing the liberties promised in the manifesto, restriction of martial law to actual cases of armed uprising, and abolition of capital punishment without court trial, provoked much opposition. Impassioned defenses of the extraordinary measures and martial law were made, a sizable minority voted against the third and fourth points, and many others abstained.130 If the split on the question of censuring the government was not enough to point up the diversity of opinions represented at the congress, the debates and resolutions on programmatic questions—which were taken up at the insistence of various groups of delegates, despite the central committee's decision in January—made this obvious. The nationalities question, the agrarian question, and the labor question were all raised and turned over to committees for drafting reports for the congress. The committee on the nationalities question (okrainnyi vopros),

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consisting primarily of Russians living in Poland and the western borderlands, presented a draft resolution that proposed support for proportional representation of nationalities in the elections in the borderlands, a scheme designed to produce at least one Russian deputy from each of the border provinces and two from the Kingdom of Poland. The central committee's formal opposition to this proposal, presented by Guchkov, who said that the union rejected differential treatment for any nationality along with autonomy for any region, 1 3 1 led to a compromise solution devised by the central committee. It merely stated that the Duma, when reexamining the electoral law, should take into consideration the "just representation of the interests of the minority and of different groups of the population." 1 3 2 The agrarian question, on which the central committee had itself been divided, was sent to committee at the insistence of G. K. Schmidt of Minsk. The committee was unable to finish its project, and the congress in the end adopted two articles calling for participation of landowners and peasants in local land reform commissions. 1 3 3 The labor question was rather less divisive. The committee draft was approved without opposition, except for the article mentioning protection of industry as well as of labor: landowner-delegates objected to this article on the grounds that it implied support for protective tariffs for industry. The industrialists at the congress had to be content with a vague reference to "conditions favorable to the development of industry." 1 3 4 Those who feared that the union would be submerged in a sea of monarchist groups and wanted to use the congress, as Guchkov put it, " t o define ourselves in the economy of Russian political parties" more decisively than had so far been done, were unable to convince the majority at the congress of the urgency of doing so. As near as they got was a compromise amendment specifying adherence to constitutional monarchy and the other promises of the October Manifesto, along with rejection of a constituent assembly, as conditions for membership in the union. This amendment, which was criticized by some for being too lax and by others for being too restrictive, was hardly a substitute for party discipline. 135 But the leaders pushed the issue no further. It was clear that the threat of disintegration of the union on the eve of the elections was seen as the greater danger, and this essentially aborted the effort at stricter definition of the union's position on various issues. Although Shipov closed the congress with an upbeat speech, in which he claimed that the congress had clearly defined the union's position among the political parties, he understood that not unity but diversity had prevailed. Worse than that, in his view, the opposition manifested at the congress toward removal of the extraordinary legislation and martial law, together with indifference toward issues of civil liberties, demonstrated that the union contained elements who saw it chiefly as a means for protecting

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their "property and class interests," rather than as a way to further the liberation movement.137 Partly as a matter of political attitudes and partly for tactical reasons, the Kadet leadership had avoided drawing a firm demarcation line to their left. The Octobrist leaders, responding to a rather similar complex of impulses, had avoided drawing a clear demarcation line to their right. For both leadership groups this tactic involved the risk of taking on unruly and inconstant adherents and allies on the one side and the risk of attrition on the opposite flank. As a result of the Octobrist tactic, one did not have to move very far to the right of the Guchkovs and Shipovs, still within the ranks of the union, to pass out of the sphere of shared principles into that of "interests." This situation made any kind of direction from the center problematical and promised that quite a varied collection of bedfellows would take up under the blanket of the Union of October 17. Reaction to the Manifesto concerning the State Council That the die was cast for the duration in this regard at the first congress was shown by the central committee's reaction to the manifesto of February 20, on the State Council. Whereas virtually all other professedly constitutionalist political groups roundly condemned the legislation of February 20 as a violation of the promises of October 17, the Octobrist leaders once again could not agree about what to do in response to the government's act. When the combined central committee convened on February 27 to discuss this challenge to the Duma's authority, two positions were put forward: that of Shipov and most of the Moscow representatives, who argued that the law on the State Council amounted to a rebuilding of the bureaucratic wall (sredostenie) between tsar and people, and that represented principally by the Petersburg leaders, Korf, Krasovskii, and A. F. Meiendorf, who were inclined to see the reformed State Council as a welcome control over the Duma should it prove too radical. It would also, they argued, deflect the onus of rejecting the Duma's projects from the person of the tsar. A majority of the combined group (eleven to six) found with Shipov and his supporters that the law of February 20 had violated the Manifesto of October 17, and it was resolved that a report or motion to this effect be prepared for the next party congress. The two branches were instructed to draw up the motion independently and then work out the final text in a new combined meeting. The Moscow committee group published their text, in the spirit of Shipov's position, on March 6, but it was rejected by the Petersburg committee on the grounds that it implied a rejection of the two-house system in principle and acceptance in principle of ministerial responsibility to the legislature, neither of which the Petersburg committee was willing to accept. In a meeting of March 9 the Petersburg group ruled that the acts of

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February 20 did not violate the October Manifesto, but they also indicated that they would agree to take part in a joint declaration to the effect that the Duma should have the right to submit directly to the Crown legislative projects rejected by the State Council but approved a second time around by a two-thirds majority of the Duma. However, after second thoughts encouraged by Baron Korf, the Petersburg committee withdrew even this offer. 138

The Problem of Allies: L'ouverture à Droite The organized groups that entered the Union of October 17 were without exception local organizations, usually restricted to a single provincial capital. There were other organizations, however, that were sufficiently close to the Octobrists in their political goals and outlook to have been in contact and some degree of collaboration with the Octobrists, but did not become constituent parts of the Octobrist union. They provide a necessary perspective for coming to terms with the problem of the social background of Octobrism and are a significant part of the story of political-party formation in their own right. Overview There were five such organizations of any significance: the Trade-Industry party (Torgovo-promyshlennaia partita; henceforward TIP) and the Moderate-Progressive party (Umerenno-progressivnaia partita; MPP), both founded in Moscow at the same time as the Union of October 17; the Progressive-Economic party (Progressivno-ekonomicheskaia partita; PEP), the All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry (Vserossiiskii torgovopromyshlennyi soiuz; UTI), and the Party of Legal Order (Partita pravovogo poriadka; PLO), all founded in Petersburg, the former two in the weeks just after October 17 and the latter, alone in this constellation, a few days before the Manifesto was issued (October 15). All but the PLO among these groups were closely linked to the business world of the capitals and grew out of preexisting businessmen's associations there. The PLO was a much less homogeneous organization, set up by and, in its local branches, populated by a collection of government officials, professional people, gentry, and clergy, as well as businessmen. Among the founders of all these "parties" were men who also participated in the founding of the Union of October 17 and who remained in both organizations.139 None of these organizations, however, were simply constituent parties of the Octobrist union before the first national elections, although one, the Moscow MPP, a very small organization, apparently united with the Party of Democratic Reforms before the elections (to merge

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eventually with the Peaceful Renewal Group). 140 Of the two parties among them with significant networks outside the capitals—the TIP and the PLO—the former was a fairly consistent collaborator with the Octobrists in the elections, whereas the latter was more often than not opposed to the Octobrists in conservative monarchist blocs. It nevertheless advertised itself in the beginning as a "constitutionalist" party in the Octobrists' sense of the word, and for a time participated in the constitutional-monarchist bloc in Petersburg. 141 There is an important element of truth in E. D. Chermenskii's conclusion that "the capitalists very soon became convinced of the inconvenience of parading under their own flag, under the banner of the Trade-Industry and similar parties, insofar as the very name of the party lay bare its bourgeois nature and hindered the deception of the people," and that this, together with a pragmatic appreciation of the self-defeating character of competition among a number of parties little distinguished programmatically one from the other, helps to explain their relatively ephemeral existence. 142 But Chermenskii misleadingly implies that all these "bourgeois" parties split up before the first elections and that virtually all the elements from them that remained politically active entered the Octobrist union. Actually, apparently only one of them, the MPP, disbanded before the elections, and the remainder were by no means generally allied with the Octobrists during the campaign. It is true that they did not long survive the elections, for it was precisely their virtually total lack of success in them (the TIP alone gained representation in the Duma, by a single deputy) that brought home to their organizers their political impotence and hastened their demise. 143 The UTI and PEP apparently disbanded shortly after the elections; the TIP disbanded in late 1906. The PLO lasted long enough to form a bloc with the monarchist right in the second Duma elections but did not survive those elections as an independent organization. 144 The Octobrists were the chief beneficiary of the demise of these parties, but by no means the sole one: the fate of the MPP organization has already been mentioned; the electoral alliance arranged by the PLO party leadership with the right in the second elections led to the breakup of that party, with part of its membership entering the Octobrist union and part entering the right-wing parties, principally the Union of Russian People. 145 Most of the members of the TIP who remained active after its disbandment apparently did enter the Octobrist party. The independent existence of these parties through the first elections, their far from generally cooperative relations with the Octobrist union during their existence, and the dispersion of their memberships in several directions upon their demise all reflect a variety of interests and attitudes in the middle of the political spectrum that could not be easily accommodated even in the hospitable Union of October 17. What were the differences that

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kept them from combining forces in the Octobrist union in good time for the elections? Businessmen Organize The "big bourgeoisie" (krupnaia burzhuaziia)—industrialists, men in finance and in large-scale commerce—was the last significant element of the mobilized population to become politically active. 146 Russia's big businessmen had long deplored the frequent manifestations of working-class discontent and the government's propensity to conduct experiments with "police socialism" at their expense, and their dissatisfaction had been accelerated by the economically debilitating war in the Far East. But not until the dramatic events of Bloody Sunday were they moved to criticize policies and formulate political demands. 147 The cue seems to have been taken from the zemstvo movement through the intermediacy of the municipal dumas, where ties with both business and the zemstvo world were not uncommon, especially in Moscow. Representatives of Moscow big business had participated in the political discussions preceding the November 1904 zemstvo congress and had carried its resolutions to the Moscow duma, which endorsed a political resolution analogous to that of the zemtsy in a meeting of November 30, 1904. 148 But it was not until after January 9 that businessmen's organizations as such began to enter the political arena. 149 Resolutions from various businessmen's organizations around the country—stock exchange societies, associations of steel producers and factory owners, and so on—began to flow into the offices of the chairman of the Council of Ministers and of individual ministries. This activity was given particular impetus by Minister of Finance Kokovtsov's argument before a meeting of industrialists in Petersburg on January 24 that the main cause of the labor strikes was economic discontent and that immediate economic concessions by the industrialists were called for. Kokovtsov's revelation of the government's position on workers' disturbances produced an immediate reaction from the industrialists. The Moscow industrialists led off on January 27 with resolutions rejecting the government's interpretation of the disorders: the strikes were not economic but political, directed against the government; conflicts between workers and employers were due to the absence of legal organizations for representation of workers' interests and of channels of arbitration, together with government demagogy. Accordingly, establishment of basic civil rights for all the population, including the right of workers to form unions and to strike, was a prerequisite for peaceful resolution of the labor question; and the only satisfactory way to bring about this and other reforms was through a system of popular representation. This proposition—that the interests of industry required changes in the political system and giving the workers the

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right to organize and to strike as an instrument of arbitration—was repeated in the following days in petitions from groups of industrialists from Petersburg and about a dozen other major industrial and commercial centers. 150 Simultaneously, industrialists moved to work up a concerted plan for rejecting the concessions to labor called for by Kokovtsov. The most noteworthy of these efforts was the "convention" worked out for submission to the Russian industrialists by a special subcommittee of the Moscow Stock Exchange Committee in February and early March. Employers were to agree to make no concessions on a number of points, including reductions in the length of the working day pending general legislation, no pay to workers on strike, no participation by workers in establishing wages and other aspects of factory policy, no minimum wages, no rules for overtime pay, and so on. The draft convention did, however, recognize in principle the right of factory workers to organize. 151 The next step for Russian big businessmen in the crisis was an attempt to organize nationally in order to present a dual-purpose united front: to demand reforms from the government, and to withstand demands from labor. The first attempt to summon a nationwide convocation of industrialists, the analogue of the general zemstvo congresses, was the "conference of representatives of industry of various regions" held in Moscow on March 10-11 at the initiative of Savva Morozov acting through the Moscow Stock Exchange Society. Its purpose was discussion of the aforementioned convention and the possibility of its universal adoption, and discussion of the general political situation. 152 The conference failed to produce universal endorsement of the Moscow convention, and there was enough diversity of opinion on political questions to prevent elaboration of a united political platform, but there was a general agreement that the political situation was responsible for the strike movement and that political reforms were consequently necessary. The conference participants further agreed to set up a permanent organization of Russian industrialists, although there does not appear to have been general agreement about its functions. 153 Finally, the conference endorsed a memorandum addressed to Bulygin, calling on him to include representatives of the "main groups of the population," including the industrialists, in the commission charged with working up the system of popular representation promised on February 18. The memorandum was delivered to Bulygin by a special deputation of conference participants on March 19. 154 It seems clear that the industrialists were apprehensive that the representative system would draw primarily on the zemstvos for representation in the capital and would thus tend to favor agrarian interests at their expense. The zemstvo congresses were not only a model but also a challenge to the industrialists. As with other elements of the mobilized population, the business community was pushed toward political-party organization by the impend-

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ing promulgation of the Bulygin duma law. A second conference of industrialists met in June ( 1 0 - 1 1 ) ; it was devoted entirely to the question of representation of business interests in the forthcoming legislative system. The conference sent a telegram to Bulygin requesting that industry be represented in the Duma in a manner appropriate to its importance for the present and future economic development of the country. 1 5 5 T h e First T r a d e - I n d u s t r y Congress A first general congress of trade and industry was finally convened on July 4 at the initiative of a group of representatives of heavy industry at a meeting in Petersburg on June 2 1 . This group set up a bureau for drafting a general political program for the congress, whose aim, in their view, was to establish a single trade-industry party for the country. They acquired the endorsement of the Moscow Stock Exchange Committee, the congress's host, in a June 2 7 meeting in M o s c o w . 1 5 6 The main jobs for the congress were, then, establishment of a "party of trade and industry" for participation in the upcoming elections, and the agenda question of elaborating business's view of the proposed Bulygin law. The discussion of both questions revealed at the outset that no united party of trade and industry was going to come out of the congress. A majority of the representatives attending rejected the Bulygin constitution and supported establishment of a two-house parliament with legislative authority, one house (the Duma) to be elected by universal, but two-stage, suffrage, the other to represent regions and institutions. A minority essentially supported the Bulygin project. In this minority were N. A. Naidenov, the head of the Moscow Stock Exchange Society, and other members of the society, whose majority had supported the Bulygin project all along. They proceeded to withdraw the society's sponsorship of the congress on the grounds that it had departed from its proper sphere of discussion in raising the question of a Duma with legislative (as opposed to consultative) powers. At the same time, an order to disband was received from the Moscow governor-general, who had been informed by Naidenov of the turn of discussion in the congress. Following the governor-general's order, a vote was taken on whether to support a consultative Duma, that is, the government project, or legislative representation on the principles that had been worked out by the zemstvotown congress then in session. All the representatives of the Moscow Exchange Society, the Elets Exchange Committee, and the IvanovoVoznesensk Committee on Trade and Manufacturing voted for the former, whereas all the other delegates supported the latter. The minority groups then withdrew from the congress, and the congress majority reconvened in the house of P. P. Riabushinskii, who along with A. I. Konovalov, S. I. Chetverikov, S. N. Tretiakov, I. A. Morozov, and about a half-dozen others

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had opposed the majority in the Moscow Exchange Society on the Duma issue. The unofficial "Riabushinskii congress," to which members of the Moscow Exchange minority had been coopted—they had been systematically excluded from the delegation to the general congress by Naidenov's majority—met for two more days. Support for the "zemstvo" legislative project and for universal but two-staged suffrage was reaffirmed by a large majority, a new bureau was elected, and a delegation was sent to the zemstvo congress to propose discussions about political cooperation. 157 This episode turned out to be the furthest the Russian business leaders went as a group in their opposition to the government in 1905. 158 It was also the nearest Russian businessmen came to setting up a united tradeindustry party: the zemstvo-town congress refused to receive the businessmen's delegation on the grounds that a resolution had been passed to receive greetings from other public groups in written form only. It is not clear whether this refusal was a manifestation of the perennial disdain by intelligentsia and gentry liberals for the "merchantry," as some have claimed, or of more immediate calculations, such as the fear of provoking police intervention or alienating popular support. In any case, the attempts at united action with the zemtsy ended there, and the plans for summoning another business congress for the end of July or early August also came to nothing. According to Norpe's account at the congress of the Union of Commercial and Industrial Enterprises in January 1906, the idea of founding a united political party "of the entire Russian bourgeoisie" was abandoned after the July 1905 congress, but it is not clear how soon after. The congress bureau went on to draw up a political program, which found its way into a well-known collection of political-party programs published in early 1906, and at least one historian surmised that the idea of creating such a party was entirely abandoned only in November or December 1905. 159 Failure of the Unity Movement The causes for the flagging of this movement before October are unclear. Several factors may have been involved. For one thing, the withdrawal of the influential Moscow Exchange Society, still controlled by the conservative Naidenov-Krestovnikov faction after the July congress, must have had a debilitating effect on the unity movement: the society and the new congress "majority" carried on a campaign of mutual denunciations and recriminations, partly in the press and partly in communications to the central government, for some time. 160 Another factor may have been the government's crackdown on the "legal" opposition after the July congresses by forbidding further meetings of the kind and harassing participants. 161 Finally, the renewal of labor unrest in the late summer and early autumn,

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particularly in Moscow, may have had a dampening effect on the opposition mood among business leaders generally. In any case, there was an established impediment to political unity among business leaders well before the onset of the general-strike movement in the diversity of views on political questions, not only as between the "Naidenovtsy" and the "Young" but also among various groups and individuals in the July congress majority. In the much more complex conditions created by the general strike and the promulgation of the October Manifesto, the efforts of business groups to organize politically took the form of a great many local 1

organizations. The organizational residue left at the center by the 1905 unity movement among the business groups took the form of the Congresses of Representatives of Commerce and Industry, which met annually from 1906 to 1915. These congresses and their council and executive committee, which were the permanent organs of the congresses between meetings, were involved not in the pursuit of political goals, but in the representation of business interests before the central government. 163 What lay behind the diversity of political views that excluded formation of a single "bourgeois" party? One of the first Soviet historians of bourgeois politics in 1905, S. E. Sef, believed these differences reflected basic conflicts of interests between traditional commercial capital and modernizing industrial capital (particularly in mining and metallurgy). It is true that the more conservative supporters of the consultative assembly at the July congress were all representatives of commercial exchanges, that is, "traditional Russian capital." It is also true, however, that the congress participants, who represented "commercial" and "industrial" capital almost equally, did not divide up at all neatly along these lines on the main political questions. 1 6 4 The large majority of the representatives of the exchange societies went with the program devised by the initiative group of representatives of heavy industry, and some of the leading representatives of "industrial capital" sided with the Naidenov minority, while the most liberal stance at the congress was taken by representatives of "traditional commercial capital." The efforts of Sef and others to save his thesis by introducing epicyclical qualifications are not convincing in light of the evidence from the July congress. 1 6 5

The Moscow Dispute The clearest, best-documented political differences within the "big bourgeoisie" showed up in the ranks of Moscow big business, particularly in the split between the established leadership of the Moscow Exchange Society, led by N. A. Naidenov and G. A. Krestovnikov, who continued to enjoy the support of a majority of the society's members throughout this period, and the "Young" faction led by Riabushinskii, Chetverikov,

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Konovalov, Tretiakov, and I. A. Morozov, which apparently also remained fairly stable in size. The political conflict between the conservative leadership of Moscow big business and the "Young" dated back at least to the days immediately following Bloody Sunday when a group of textile manufacturers in the Moscow duma, future leaders of the "Young" faction, proposed a resolution calling on the government to give workers the right to organize and strike. The Moscow duma adopted the resolution, but it was repudiated in the name of the Moscow Exchange Society by N. A. Naidenov as "unrepresentative of the opinion of the commercial estate." 166 This was the beginning of the split that culminated in the breakup of the July congress. Even a superficial acquaintance with the leading figures involved in this dispute shows that, at least for Moscow, tidy correlations between political positions and types of capitalist enterprise are quite out of the question. The "Young" were for the most part scions of the same Moscow kupechestvo dynasties, often of peasant old-believer stock, which had evolved over several generations from trade to textile manufacturing and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, to diversified enterprises including textile production, heavy and light machine industry, commercial banking, and various kinds of commercial enterprises, just like their opponents, the Naidenovs and Krestovnikovs. What generally distinguished them from their competitors, as their sobriquet indicates, was their age: they were for the most part about a generation younger than the majority leaders; like the Kadet leaders, they were mostly born in the 1860s (Chetverikov, born in 1853, was a notable exception to the rule). It could be argued that, coming later into control of their family businesses, they were further removed from the old merchant mentality of conservatism in investment practices and subservience to the government. They were on the whole better educated, more widely traveled and Europeanized, and more interested in social and cultural affairs outside the sphere of their business contacts than were their elders. Several of them—most notably the Tretiakovs and Morozovs—were leading patrons of the arts. Like the brothers Guchkov, many of them qualified as "public men from the kupechestvo," with the significant difference that they remained intimately, perhaps primarily, involved in business affairs. But the distinctions here between them and their elders were often matters of degree, and not always of great degree. Their older rivals had also traveled far down the same road in their business affairs, and some were prominent public men. Naidenov, for example, was a long-time and very active participant in the Moscow duma, and the publisher and financier of many historical works and collections of materials, particularly about the Moscow kupechestvo and the history of the city. Krestovnikov, too, had a long record of public service in Moscow and was a graduate of the university (faculty of natural science) and author of a number of works on

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organic chemistry. Neither of these men could be called traditionalists in their business practices either. 167 If, nevertheless, the conservative leadership of the Moscow Exchange Committee seemed to be linked more closely than the "Young" to the old kupechestvo attitudes of servility and deference toward the state authority from which all manner of regulation and permission in economic affairs flowed, the link was in many respects already far from firm. Age, of itself, may have been an important factor in the differing political outlooks of the leaders of the Moscow business community in 1905. Formation of the Business Parties The Petersburg industrialists were the first to move toward establishment of "purely capitalist" parties following the publication of the October Manifesto. The first such party to issue its appeal and program, on October 21, was the Progressive-Economic party. The initiative for its creation came from the same group of large Petersburg metallurgical industrialists who had earlier taken the initiative in organizing the July congress and drawing up its bureau's program, which the PEP's program closely resembled. Industrialists in the council of the Petersburg Society of Industrialists and Factory Owners, which was chaired by M. N. Tripolitov, had been contemplating the formation of a Petersburg-based party of their own ever since the failure of the attempt to create a united party in July. 168 Tripolitov explained the purpose of the new party in a bid for support at a general meeting of representatives of Petersburg business organizations on October 31: its aim was to defend the interests of industry, to stand up against the working-class movement and socialism. 169 Tripolitov addressed the question of why there was a need for his party, and why they could not join forces with one of the already existing major parties, the Social Democrats and the Kadets. With the former, of course, "representatives of capitalism" could have nothing in common. As for the Kadets, who on the face of it were closer to the businessmen's views, union was also ruled out by their declarations: Tripolitov quoted directly from Miliukov's address to the founding congress of the Kadet party where he had denounced "manchesterism" and dissociated his party from agrarian and industrial interests. 170 Thus the only solution was "organization of an independent party," which could then form political alliances without compromising its basic aims. 171 There was considerable opposition at this meeting to Tripolitov's efforts at setting up a separate business party. Branfman, Klimenko, Fedorov, and other future Octobrists warned that a strictly businessmen's party would be branded, in Klimenko's words, "a party of plutocrats, a party of capitalists," and would be unable to gain a popular following. Thus Tripolitov and his sympathizers in the Petersburg society were obliged to set

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up their party without the coordinated support from the Petersburg business organizations they had hoped to obtain at the meeting. A decision taken there to summon another general meeting of representatives of Petersburg business groups in order to elect a central committee for the new party was never carried out, and the function of a central committee was performed by an ad hoc group of members of the council of the Petersburg society led by Tripolitov and la. P. Beliaev.172 The program of the new party was moderately liberal and differed little in essentials from the Octobrist program, which had not yet appeared. It clearly revealed the special interests of its authors only in the particular attention paid to economic policies designed to foster private economic development: expansion of the infrastructure (railroads, merchant marine, and so on), protective tariffs, withdrawal of the state from competition with private industry, and related demands. The appeal that prefaced the program identified the party's slogan as "freedom, knowledge, and work," and referred to "the mighty figure of the genius worker...the reigning carpenter, Emperor Peter the Great," as a model worthy of emulation by every Russian citizen. The program provided for universal suffrage, imprecisely defined. On the agrarian question, it avoided the issue of alienation of gentry lands but did call for increasing peasant holdings "for the purpose of expanding small individual farming and cooperative farming"; and it stated that barriers to the breakup of the commune should be removed. The PEP labor program provided that workers should have the right to organize and strike "as peaceful means for regulating relations between workers and employers," and limits on working hours for women and minors (but not adult males), workers' insurance, and other improvements in the conditions of labor were also endorsed. 173 As the Octobrists were to do, the PEP emphatically rejected the need for a constituent assembly and emphasized the integrity of the empire, rejecting any concession on the issue of autonomy. The slogan "Russia—united and indivisible" stood at the head of the program. 174 The Progressive-Economic party took an energetic part in the first election campaign, paid a good deal of attention to recruiting members (by the end of the year the party could claim a membership of almost 4,000), and tried seriously to attract working-class votes. This latter intention could be seen in the labor platform, and the publication of the party program was accompanied by a special "appeal to men of labor." The party also published a newspaper directed to a working-class audience in the first three months of 1906, elaborated plans for setting up dining halls for workers' families at the Putilov works, and so on. 175 On the whole, there was little separating the PEP from the Octobrist union, and when the Octobrist organization was set up, the PEP leaders entered it. The two parties cooperated in the constitutional-monarchist bloc

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in Petersburg, and following the first elections the party was absorbed into the Octobrist organization. The independent appearance of the PEP can be attributed to the momentum for political organization built up before October in industrialist circles, the failure of attempts at cooperation with the zemtsy, and the late appearance of the Union of October 17. The Petersburg Union of Trade and Industry made its appearance almost simultaneously with the Octobrists: its first meeting was held on November 11, 1905. The UTI was a peculiar sort of organization, a combination of a political party and a businessman's union for representation of the interests of commerce, and to a lesser extent industry, before the government, the public, and the anticipated Duma. 176 The UTI was set up by a group of Petersburg merchants and appears to have included primarily merchants and small manufacturers, along with some salaried employees of private businesses. 177 The UTI was created in direct response to the events of October. Its founders appear to have been especially concerned to hasten the summoning of the Duma, out of fear that for political reasons the bureaucracy might take measures injurious to trade and industry in the interim between the issuing of the manifesto and the calling of the Duma. 178 In its appeal and comment on its program, the union was sharply critical of government policies, not only in regard to trade and industry but in the field of civil rights as well, and firmly supported the institution of the rights promised in the October Manifesto. In its political platform the UTI emphasized the decisive powers of the Duma and explicitly declared that the cabinet was to be formed from the Duma majority. Unlike the other organizations aspiring to be political parties with a mass following, the UTI had no "social program" (that is, platforms on the agrarian and labor questions), but it did have an extensive "economic program" consisting of proposals on how to facilitate trade, and to some extent industry, although in keeping with the party's origins the emphasis was primarily on commerce, and there was some expression of hostility toward large, government-protected industrial syndicates. 179 The UTI seems to have been called into existence to defend a rather specific set of interests in the special circumstances of the post-October period, a task that was not being directly undertaken by parties with aspirations to represent fairly broad elements of the population. Reikhardt suggests that just because of the peculiarly "representative" character of the UTI, its raison d'être was removed after the establishment of the congresses and council of the representatives of trade and industry in April 1906, its function as a political party (to "represent" its leaders' interests in the Duma) having been obviated by total lack of success in the first elections. 180 The two major Moscow business parties took shape later than their Petersburg counterparts. Indeed, the stimulus to formation of the TradeIndustry party seems to have been provided by the political initiative of the

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Petersburg businessmen, and the Moderate-Progressive party was in its turn formed in reaction to the creation of the TIP. Both grew directly out of the two factions that had developed over the course of the year in the Moscow Exchange Society. The Trade-Industry party was the creation of the society's conservative majority, and it concentrated, perhaps more than any other "business" party, on the restoration of order, with relatively little insistence on the realization of the promises of the October Manifesto. As early as October 13 the society's majority had put through a resolution calling on the Moscow governor-general to declare a state of martial law in the city. At this early stage in the revolutionary situation, the "Young" still believed that the general strike could lead to the desired reforms.181 The momentum of the conflict within the exchange society was sufficient to lead to the formation of two separate parties in the conditions created by the manifesto, although the deepening of the revolutionary situation soon led the minority to abandon their opposition stance and put aside differences with the majority for the sake of a common front against the revolutionary movement: the November 12 TIP appeal to voters was signed by the Riabushinskiis, Konovalov, and I. A. Morozov, and the MPP soon disappeared from the scene, the first of the business parties to do so. The first meeting of the TIP was held on November 8, and its appeal to voters was issued four days later, together with a first version of a party program. After perfunctory recognition that the manifesto had created the conditions necessary to allow the government to regain the confidence of the country and endorsement of the "new state order," the TIP appeal turned to the threat posed by the revolutionary parties and the reigning anarchy ("smuta"), and concluded: "It is necessary to join together, to form a powerful party for assisting the government in the task of pacifying the country and realizing the newly proclaimed principles." 182 The four principal aims that would serve to rally people to the party were: 1. Full cooperation with the government for the realization of the new principles proclaimed in the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, and for safeguarding law and order [zakonomernyi pravoporiadok], 2. Preservation of the unity of Russia. 3. Realization [regulirovanie] of the rights of freedom of conscience, confession, religion, person, speech and the press, organization and assembly, and inviolability of domicile, as granted to the population by the Manifesto of October 17, by laws assuring the integrity of the state and safeguarding both individual citizens and the population in general. 4. Constructive activity of the State Duma. 183 Under article 4 was listed what amounted to the social and economic program of the party. Its presentation under that rubric was meant to show

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that the party would not countenance the idea of further transformations of the legislative order (the Kadets' "constituent functions"). 184 In an "amendment no. 1" to the program, which was designed to point up its differences with other parties, the TIP explicitly rejected cooperation with any parties, reactionary or revolutionary, that did not accept the Manifesto of October 17, but concentrated on the left, that is, anyone who "talks about the summoning of a constituent assembly, or wishes to make of the first convocation of the State Duma only a constituent assembly"; anyone who calls for "the dismemberment of Russia, who agrees to the granting of autonomous rule to Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and so on" (autonomy for Finland was accepted); anyone who "promises an eight-hour working day to the workers"; and anyone who demands full or partial elimination of protective tariff duties—"in other words, those who consider that it is all the same for the country whether the goods sold in it are of domestic or of foreign manufacture." 185 Somewhat later the TIP issued another amendment to its program, elaborating further on its differences with other parties, this time with other constitutional-monarchist parties of the center, primarily the Octobrists, in mind. Why was the party maintaining its separate existence despite the appearance of other "constitutionalist progressive parties"? For one thing, some of these parties were overly dogmatic and were already identifying specific legislative projects for adoption by the Duma. But there was another, "purely external" reason for maintaining the "party of trade and industry": trade and industry were of basic importance to the life of the country, and it was therefore right that their representatives be included in the legislature. However, these people were unorganized, scattered about the country, and susceptible to being dispersed among various parties on local issues. Therefore, the party's founders had decided to create a rallying point for them, and had chosen the party's name accordingly. They ended up predicting that the party would receive the votes of "those who recognize the enormous significance of the country's industrial activity," and promised that their deputies would "take upon themselves as members of the Duma concern for Russian commercial-industrial activity and for all those citizens who take part in one way or another in that activity." 186 If the TIP was one of the business parties most obviously concerned with the economic welfare of the business community, the ModerateProgressive party of the "Young" was surely the least concerned with business interests in its program. In fact its program differed in no major respects from the Kadet program, except on the issue of autonomy and in regard to "several questions concerning labor legislation," as the party stated outright in the appeal preceding its program. As these caveats suggested, the MPP stood firmly against autonomy or federalism. On the labor question it opposed, in an elaborate explanation, the introduction of absolute norms for conditions and hours of work, mainly on the grounds

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that Russia had so many holidays that if Russian industry were to compete effectively with Western industry, yearly, rather than daily or weekly, labor norms should be established. 1 8 7 It was perhaps only on the one issue of labor norms that the MPP program (as much in its explanations as in its concrete recommendations) revealed the economic interests of its authors. On the agrarian question their program differed in no significant way from the Kadet program, including provision for alienation of private lands. The MPP political program, again like that of the Kadets, called for election, by fourtail suffrage, of a Duma with legislative authority and responsibility of government ministers to it. All these issues separated the MPP not only from the other business parties but from the Octobrists as well. All four of the "business parties" discussed here possessed characteristics, rather different in each case, that militated against their assimilation by the Octobrist union, even though many of their leaders were simultaneously its members; and the programs they elaborated put the Octobrists on notice that if they were to appeal widely to business elements they would have to modify their own program significantly, particularly in regard to labor and economic reform. T h e Party o f L e g a l O r d e r Although business elements and even some prominent industrialists were involved in its formation, the Party of Legal Order was not a business party in the way the four parties just discussed were. It shared with most of the center parties a strong emphasis on the unity of the state, but there was nothing in its program that was addressed specifically to the interests of the business community. Nor did its social and economic program seem to reflect the interests of the landowners. The labor platform advocated, in general terms, limiting working hours, universal insurance, and general improvements in the conditions of labor. Like most of the business parties its agrarian platform favored the development of individual farming, but it also mentioned the necessity of granting additional land to peasants and an implicit recognition that at least some of it would have to come from the gentry estates. In general the platform was cast in language that seemed to reflect sympathy for the plight of the peasantry. 1 8 8 Even though it was one of the four most widely represented constitutionalist parties to take part in the first elections, the origins of the PLO remain rather obscure. Such information as exists is mostly in the appeal and program that the party published in October 1905. The first meeting of the party was held in the St. Petersburg duma building on October 15, two days before publication of the manifesto. It had already then proclaimed itself " a constitutionalist party with a defined p r o g r a m . " 1 8 9 An "explanation" attached to the PLO's summary program told what had led the party's

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organizers to set up the party even before October 17: the September zemstvo-town congress's endorsement of immediate autonomy for Poland and of the possibility of other regions receiving autonomous status following establishment of the new parliamentary order; more precisely, it was the deliberate concealment of this federalist scheme from the public— the September congress's apeal, it was correctly noted, was silent about these resolutions—and the apprehension that the people, who were not supporters of restructuring the state along federal lines, might be led to vote for men who were. In other words, the initiators of the PLO began to organize in reaction to the resolutions and appeal to the public of the September zemstvo congress, with the particular goal of combating its federalist proposals. 190 The PLO accordingly proclaimed "the unity and indivisibility of Russia" the most important point in their program and, as the second most important, "strong state authority," without which a legal order would be impossible. The PLO appeal took pains to point out, however, that by strong state authority was meant not "force and arbitrariness but strict observance of the law and safeguarding of the civil liberties guaranteed by it from encroachment from whatever quarter." 191 Indeed, the question of strong and unified state authority aside, the PLO program was not notably conservative or generous toward the existing regime, and in some respects appeared to be rather left of center. The party's "explanation" was not sparing in criticism of the government, and it identified two principal measures that would serve to restore the government's authority: swift and severe prosecution of the adventurers responsible for getting Russia into the war with Japan, and amnesty for political prisoners and victims of religious persecution.192 This party, which, like the Kadets and Octobrists, claimed to be above class and interests—its appeal declared that the Duma deputies should not be "petitioners for the interests of any particular region, nations [piemia], estate, or occupation"—was founded by a rather diverse group of men, including primarily technically trained government officials and professional men, businessmen and business employees, teachers and professors, and some nobles resident in the capital. 193 Much the same sort of occupation distribution prevailed among the leaders of the party's local branches that were eventually set up in twenty-one provinces. Judging from their names, most of the party leaders, both in Petersburg and in the provinces, were Russian Orthodox. The mixture of nationalism, criticism of the regime, and affirmation of the rights promised by the October Manifesto contained in the PLO documents, together with what is known of its leaders, suggests that the initiative for creating the party came from basically conservative representatives of the technical intelligentsia employed in government service and industry, and perhaps some businessmen skeptical about the political

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chances of the "business parties," who had been aroused to political action by despair over the behavior of the ruling elite on the one side, and the actions of the "responsible elements" of society on the other. Whatever the intentions of its initiators, the party's emphasis on "Russia, one and indivisible," together with a certain independence from any particular interests, seems to have attracted to the party Russian nationalists of rather varied occupational backgrounds, particularly in the borderlands, whose political orientation was generally rather to the right of center. This conclusion seems to be borne out by the behavior of PLO groups in the elections: they cooperated with the Octobrists least of any of the "bourgeois parties" and in several cases were allied with the reactionary right in blocs directed specifically against the Octobrists. Eventually the party split up between the Octobrists and the radical right. 1 9 4 A review of the "bourgeois" parties of the constitutional-monarchist center provides additional perspective on the character of the Union of October 17, which was by far the largest and most enduring of the political formations to appear in that part of the political spectrum in the wake of the October Manifesto. The predominantly zemstvo-noble background of the Moscow leadership and the heavy weighting of the Petersburg group toward commerce and industry notwithstanding, it seems unjustified to identify the Octobrist union as the party of either the landowning nobility or of the big bourgeoisie, or as a simple combination of the two, as is so often done in writing about Russian political parties. It may have been a party in large measure constituted of gentry and business elements, but it certainly was not "the party of the gentry and the bourgeoisie": neither landowners nor businessmen entered the union in any numbers that could be said to have constituted a significant proportion of these social groups, 1 9 5 although in the provinces the main constituent element of the Octobrist union was provided by provincial zemstvo nobles. 1 9 6 At least before the first elections, the Octobrists could not reasonably be called even the most significant party representing Russian big business, but only one of a number of parties in which business elements played an important part. The flurry of independent political-organizing activity among businessmen and industrialists before the first elections shows rather clearly that these circles did not consider the Union of October 17 to be "their" party. And even after the demise of most of the "business parties" following the elections, the Octobrists could hardly claim to represent the business community at large, for much of it dropped out of political-party activity altogether, content with the ministrations on their behalf of the congresses of industry and trade. In the end, there was some justification for the Octobrists' claim (the same as that made by the Kadets) to be above narrow class interests. Like the Kadets they deliberately avoided identification with specific interest-

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groups and tried to appeal to the "nation as a whole." And like the Kadets they attempted to take advantage of the momentum and organizational potential of the zemstvo movement without simply being of it. At the same time, the gentry-dominated zemstvo institutions played an important part in the formation of both parties, as will be seen in Chapters 3 and 4.

II THE PARTIES, THE STATE, AND THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN

3

The Kadet Bloc According to my observations, this party was formed after the Manifesto of October 17 from elements that are extremely diverse in their political tendencies; namely: (1) unavowed revolutionaries and socialists who lack the civic courage to propagate their ideas openly; (2) national minorities [inorodtsy] of various categories (with the exception of the majority of Tatars and German colonists), who seek autonomy and equality of rights; (3) unprincipled intelligentsia proletarians, primarily minor employees in various institutions, whose purpose is, on the one hand, to drape themselves in the modish flag of "peoples freedom," and on the other to pour out the accumulated bitterness of their dull existence in idle chatter; and (4) the party leaders, convinced fanatics of the idea of people's freedom according to West European recipes. Reply of the governor of Tauride to a ministry circular on the results of the elections (March 28, 1906)

This and the following chapter survey political-party activity in European Russia in the months leading up to the first national elections. The focus is still on the Kadets and the Octobrists; other political groups are considered primarily in the context of their relations with these two preeminent parties. In these chapters I describe how party networks were established by the Kadets and the Octobrists and what they were like, in terms both of organization and of constituency. I also examine their participation in the preelection campaign and, in that framework, their relations with the government and its local officials on the one side, and with other political groups on the other. In this way one can get some idea of the social bases of the parties, and one can take some measure of the significance of parties in the political life of the country on the eve of the first elections. In this way, too, one can perceive the attitudes prevailing in the imperial bureaucracy toward the new political institutions and processes introduced in the wake of the October Manifesto. These attitudes were a major factor shaping the evolving relations between government and opposition in Russia.

A Survey of Political-Party Organizations on the Eve of the First National Elections Of the well over one hundred different political organizations that came into at least nominal existence during the first election campaign, only four

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could lay claim to anything approaching a country-wide network: the Kadets, the Octobrists, the Trade-Industry party, and the Party of Legal Order. Of the four, only the Kadets and the Octobrists possessed organizational networks that, however loosely woven, covered virtually all of European Russia: both had at least one party committee in the large majority of provinces. The Kadets lacked their own party organization only in the Baltic provinces of Kurland and Estland; the Octobrists lacked local representation in the same two provinces and in the outlying provinces on the eastern perimeter of European Russia, Viatka and Ufa. 1 Although the density of party organization varied greatly from province to province, the norm for both parties was a provincial committee in the capital town and two or three committees in district towns. On the eve of the elections the total number of provincial, town, and district committees may have been as many as 200 for the Kadets, somewhat fewer for the Octobrists. 2 The overall similarity in the two parties' organizational networks is striking, the more so if notice is taken of the general coincidence in their geographical distribution: by and large, where the Kadets were best represented, so too were the Octobrists. The densest party networks were of course in the two capitals, where by election time both parties had, in addition to their central organs, a provincial committee and a special city committee for the capital with branches in most of the city precincts. Next came the capital provinces, with district committees in most districts. They were followed by a number of nearby provinces, Vladimir, Tver, Riazan, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Kursk, 3 and Smolensk, where the parties had committees in most of the districts in addition to a provincial committee. Then came the outlying zemstvo provinces, only a few of which (Poltava, Tauride, Saratov, and Samara) had party networks as dense as the central region. The only nonzemstvo provinces in which the parties had fairly extensive networks were Kiev in the Ukraine and the Don Cossack Oblast in the South. Marked exceptions to the general rule of comparable representation may be found in a few provinces, such as Perm in the northern Urals, where the Kadets had numerous committees but the Octobrists were quite poorly represented; or Vitebsk, a nonzemstvo western province where the Octobrists had a provincial committee, several district committees, and party groups "in many villages and volosts," while the Kadet organization was limited to the town of Vitebsk. 4 Behind the similarity of party networks lay great differences: in the character and scale of party activity, in the composition and size of membership. Although an accurate count is out of the question, it is clear that for the country as a whole, Kadet membership was many times larger than Octobrist membership on the eve of the elections. Total Kadet membership has been estimated at about 100,000 as early as January 1906,

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and it may have reached 120,000 by the eve of the elections. Estimates of total Octobrist membership for the same period range from 10,000 to 24,348. 5 The next best represented parties, the TIP and the PLO, lagged far behind the Kadets and Octobrists, with committees in twenty-three provinces each, but neither was a merely regional party and one or the other had representation in thirty-six of the fifty-one provinces of European Russia. The TIP was represented, as one would expect, in all the provinces of the central industrial region, 6 and outside that region primarily in other important commercial and industrial centers. The Party of Legal Order was not represented in the central industrial region at all, with the exception of a single group in the town of Rzhev (Tver province); its organizations were to be found for the most part along the perimeters of European Russia. In only nine provinces were both parties represented. 7 The TIP had considerably more local branches, altogether, than the PLO: it may have had as many as sixty-three committees as compared to the PLO's thirty-nine (not counting a number of poorly identified small groups in one or two provinces), with most of the difference accounted for by groups in Moscow and Kostroma, where the TIP had a combined total of twenty-nine. In any given province outside those two, these parties usually had only a single committee, usually in the provincial town. 8 Looking across the Russian landscape in search of the other constitutionalist parties that had sprung up in the capitals beginning in October 1905, one finds very few signs of life. The MPP, the TIP's rival from the Moscow Exchange Society, managed to extend its activities to four other provinces: Vologda (Totma), Nizhnii Novgorod, Smolensk, and Tauride (Yalta district). The Radical party never got outside the city of Petersburg, nor did the "professors' " Party of Democratic Reforms. The Free Thinkers' party may have had one branch outside the capital, in Kazan. The Petersburg industrialists' Progressive-Economic party remained confined to the capital. A considerable number of strictly local constitutionalist parties participated in the election campaign. Most of them, except for parties of national or ethnic minorities, were organized by local merchants and industrialists, government officials, professional people, or landowners, appear to have been of quite moderate constitutionalist outlook, and for the most part had been transformed into branches of the Union of October 17 by the time of the elections. Such were, for example, the Don Progressive party (Novocherkassk), the National Party of October 17 (Ekaterinoslav), the Union of Law and Order Based on the Manifesto of October 17 (Orenburg), the Committee of Free Thinkers (Poltava), the union "Tsar and Liberty—Law and Order" (Pskov), the Constitutional-Monarchist Union of Landowners and the National-Monarchist party (both in Saratov), the Party of Liberty

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and Order (Smolensk), the Union of the Party of the Center (Izium, Kharkov province), the Union of Peaceful Struggle (Revel and other towns of Estland), and a number of others about which very little is known or whose independent existence was so ephemeral as to have escaped notice even in the provincial press. The only other political organization seriously engaged in competing for votes that could lay claim to anything beyond local or at most regional representation was the right-wing Union of the Russian People (URP) (Soiuz Russkogo Naroda), which on the eve of the elections had branches in fourteen different provinces. 9 Outside the two capitals, these were for the most part very small organizations, usually limited to a single town. Four other parties of the monarchist right with pretensions of participating in the elections were more than strictly one-town organizations: the Russian Assembly (Russkoe Sobranie), which had transformed itself into a political party in November 1905 for participation in the elections and had branches in five provinces outside its home base of Petersburg; 10 the "For Tsar and Order" party with groups in Kaluga and Moscow (Podolsk); the National Center party (Narodnaia Partila Tsentra), with groups in Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, and Petersburg (province); and Gringmut's Monarchist party, which was represented outside the province of Moscow in Kiev, Perm, and Riazan. Although quite a few local right-wing groups sprang up around the country before the elections, most seem to have been quite small and to have played an insignificant part in the election campaign. Even the URP, by far the most energetic and "partylike" of the right-wing organizations, which took the election campaign quite seriously and entertained hopes of getting a significant popular vote, especially among peasants, had very little solid organizational structure outside the two capitals before the first elections. Despite the extensive participation of right-wing mobs in street violence beginning in October and the onset of the "zemstvo reaction," the right was just beginning to organize for national politics by the time of the first elections, lagging markedly behind both the moderate and the more radical constitutionalists. 11 Surprisingly insignificant at the time of the election campaign was the Union of Russian Men (Soiuz Russkikh Liudei), which had been the most active and demagogic of the pre-October right-wing organizations. Although the union appears to have been represented by five groups at the second "All-Russian Congress of Russian Men" (Vserossiiskii s'ezd russkikh liudei) in Moscow in the second week of April 1906, available records show the URM active under that name during the election campaign only in Tambov and Kozlov. By that time it appears that the URM had been largely absorbed into the URP, with which it had a great deal in common in program and tactics. 12

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Significant Regional Organizations and Nationalist Movements in the Election Campaign The most extensive regional organizations were to be found on the western perimeter (that is, the Baltic provinces, the West, and the Southwest), where, generally speaking, the empire's greatest variety of ethnic-linguistic and confessional groups coincided with its highest levels of population density, industrial development, urbanization, and political mobilization (with the exception of the capitals, the Kingdom of Poland, and a few restricted areas of the interior). The two groups with the widest and densest distribution of organizations active in the election campaign were the Jews and the Poles,13 both among the empire's politically and culturally most developed minorities, and the two most widely distributed in the West. Primacy belongs to the Jewish organizations, and in particular to the Union for the Attainment of Equal Rights for Jews (Soiuz Dlia Dostizheniia Polnopraviia Evreev), which had branches in at least fourteen provinces, mostly in the Pale of Jewish Settlement.14 The union, a constituent member of the Union of Unions, was not conceived as a party, properly speaking—members of other Jewish political organizations, including Zionists, could and did belong simultaneously to the union—but as a league for the pursuit of the goal identified in its name and, during the election campaign, for coordination of Jewish votes to send to the Duma deputies devoted to it, Jews or non-Jews. The union was formed in Vilno in February 1905 at the initiative of the liberal Jewish group that ran the Petersburg Russian-language journal Voskhod; most of them were members of the Union of Liberation.15 In many of the provinces where the union was active, a number of other Jewish political organizations participated in the election campaign, including the principal Zionist organizations in Vilno, Dvinsk, Vitebsk, Kiev, and Mogilev, the Jewish Nationalist party in Dvinsk and Vitebsk, and the Jewish ConstitutionalDemocratic party in Riga and Mitava (special Jewish units of the Kadet party). In virtually all the major towns of the West there were formed Jewish electoral committees or blocs in which all these groups generally cooperated in presenting a common list of candidates.16 The Jewish Bund and several socialist-Zionist parties boycotted the elections. Polish nationalist or predominantly Polish Catholic groups participated in the electoral campaign in at least twelve provinces. The most widespread of these was the Constitutionalist-Catholic party (it was generally identified by its Russian name, Konstitutsionno-Katolicheskaia Partiia), which had branches in four of the six Lithuanian and Belorussian provinces, where the bulk of the Polish population of the empire outside the Congress Kingdom lived. The party was founded by the Bishop of Vilno (Baron Edward von) Ropp at the beginning of 1906 for the express purpose of uniting all

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Catholics in the western provinces (that is, predominantly Poles, but also Lithuanians and some Belorussians) for the elections with a program very much like that of the Kadets. Although some Lithuanian and Belorussian Catholics did join this party, it remained essentially a Polish party. 17 Outside the Lithuanian and Belorussian provinces most of the Polish political groups were strictly local, and where several coexisted in one province, as in Kovno, Kurland, Kherson, and Podolia, they generally formed Polish electoral blocs similar to the Jewish committees. The Polish National-Democratic party, which dominated the elections to the first Duma in the Congress Kingdom, was hardly organized in the neighboring western provinces by the time of the first elections. It became a major collector of votes in Lithuania and Belorussia only in the second elections.18 The other major nationalities of the West—the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians—also generated nationalist parties to participate in the election campaign, and in a few cases, most notably those of the Lithuanian Popular-Democratic party in Kovno (the center of ethnographic Lithuania and the only western province in which Lithuanian-speaking people constituted a clear majority of the population) and the Estonian Progressive party in Estland, these parties played a major role in the elections. In the West as a whole, political mobilization along national lines played a major part in the election campaign, and the "allRussian" parties were for the most part obliged to operate in a framework of nationality blocs, if at all, in the region. There were great differences among the national parties in the West. There was generally a close connection between the variety and number of political groupings on the one hand and the level and character of socioeconomic development within the national groups on the other. Thus the Latvians and Estonians, the most developed and differentiated national populations in the area, possessed a gamut of political parties, from moderate groups representing landowning and commercial-industrial interests to revolutionary socialist parties appealing to workers and poor peasants; while the predominantly poor peasant Belorussians had produced only one significant political party by early 1906. 19 In the overall political spectrum, the national parties were as a lot well to the left of center. A conservative wing was virtually nonexistent, except among the Germans of the Baltic provinces, and even the most conservative of the German parties, the German Conservative party, stood firmly for introduction of the civil rights promised in the October Manifesto. 20 This situation may be attributed in part to the widespread coincidence in the West of ethnic-linguistic boundaries with lines of social cleavage. Throughout the area from the Baltic to the Southwest, large (gentry) landholding was mostly in the hands of groups whose nationality was different from that of the mass of the rural population, whether peasants, small farmers, or

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landless laborers: Germans in the Baltic provinces, Poles and Russians elsewhere, predominated among the landed gentry. 21 The better part of industrial and commercial enterprises in the Baltic provinces was controlled by Germans, while the working-class population there, the largest proportionally in the empire, was made up almost exclusively of Latvians and Estonians. A similar situation prevailed in the Ukraine, where most industry and commerce was in the hands of Russians, Poles, or Jews. Belorussians and Lithuanians lived almost exclusively in rural areas, whereas Jews constituted from 50 to as high as 90 percent of the populations of Lithuania's towns. (Jews constituted a disproportionately large part of the urban population throughout the West.) Thus, among some of the western nationalities, the elements that took the initiative in the establishment of the Russian conservative parties were weakly represented. Among others, discontents arising from government policy toward non-Russian cultural and religious aspirations and the association of bureaucratic abuses with Russian dominance tended to bring into the opposition elements that among the Russian population were inclined to remain loyal or passive: parts of the gentry and professional middle class, commercial and industrial elements. This is particularly noticeable among the Polish nobility and Jewish middle class, but it touched the German nobles and middle class as well. The influence among the nationalities of the revolutionary socialist, mostly Marxist, parties, 22 especially where there were significant native intelligentsias and working-class populations, pushed the national parties leftward and restricted the appeal of parties oriented essentially only toward attainment of national, as opposed to social and economic, goals. In terms of popular followings, the revolutionary parties were the most powerful parties in 1905 and early 1906 in much of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Baltic. At the same time, all the socialist parties active in the West had to have relatively extensive nationalities programs, and differences over the nationalities question were a central factor in the proliferation in the West of socialist factions within a single national area and, in particular, the appearance of the "national" Social-Democratic parties. Because the socialist parties as a rule boycotted the elections, the field was left to a variety of nonsocialist national parties, although some of them were divided on the issue of boycotting, with the result that their campaign activities in early 1906 were seriously hampered. A major hindrance to the growth of the Ukrainian Radical-Democratic party prior to the first elections, for example, was disagreement within its ranks about whether or not to boycott the elections.23 More significant than the issue of boycott as factors limiting the success of the nationalist parties in the first elections were a low level of national consciousness among sizable portions of the enfranchised populations,

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especially illiterate peasants, and the general noncoincidence of politicaladministrative and ethnographic boundaries, which fragmented the political weight of the national groups throughout the area. Outside the western perimeter, Muslim nationalism was the basis of the only other significant regional movement in European Russia to be active in the first elections. The Muslim national party was particularly influential in European Russia in the provinces of Kazan, Ufa, and, to a lesser extent, in Perm, but its influence extended to the Muslim populations of the Crimea, the Caucasus, the steppe oblasts, central Asia, and parts of Siberia. 24 This organization was established and led by representatives of the Volga Tatar intelligentsia, for the most part professional men from the city of Kazan. They took the initiative in the creation of the Muslim Union (Ittifak), whose first congress, attended by 1 5 0 - 2 0 0 representatives from Muslim peoples of the empire—mostly Tatars, but also Kirgiz, Bashkirs, Turkmens, Sarts, and others—was held "conspiratorially" on a steamboat near Nizhnii Novgorod during the great fair in August 1905. The union declared its goals to be "the drawing together of Muslims of all the regions of Russia on the basis of the sociocultural and political interests and needs of contemporary Russian life"; the general cultural development of the Muslim population as a whole; and equality with the Russian population "in all political, civil, and religious rights." To those ends the union pledged to work for the common cause of establishing the rule of law and representative government in the empire. The organizations for the coordination of the Muslim vote in the first elections evidently grew directly out of the union. In the second congress of the union, held in Petersburg on January 1 3 - 2 3 , 1906, its leaders, a number of whom had just come from the second Kadet congress, put through a resolution to cooperate with the Kadets in the election campaign. 25 In its ability to dominate the allegiance of coreligionists, especially Turkic-speaking Tatar Muslims, the movement must be considered one of the most successful of the "nationalist" movements to have participated in the first elections. This success seems to have been an "advantage of backwardness": a relatively low level of socioeconomic development among the bulk of the Muslim peoples of European Russia, and therefore a relatively low level of internal social antagonisms, combined with the power of traditional Muslim faith and culture to unite groups scattered over a very wide geographical area. 2 6

Kadet Central Party Organs in the Election Campaign The Party Statutes: Membership, Organization, Party Discipline, Finances The party statutes recognized as party members "persons accepting the party program and agreeing to submit to party discipline established by the

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party statutes and the party congresses." Admission into the party could be administered by the central committee, by persons empowered by the central committee, and by provincial committees. Until formation of provincial committees, persons who had taken part in the election of representatives to the founding congress were to be considered party members. Members were to pay periodic dues in amounts to be determined by the party congresses. Expulsion from the party could be carried out by the admitting body, but the decision could be appealed to the party congresses. The general and the local (that is, provincial) party congresses and the central and provincial committees they would respectively elect were to be the official organs of the party. General congresses were to meet at least once a year and were to consist of representatives of the provincial committees and the independent committees of large cities, members invited by the central committee, and persons invited by the congress itself. The general congress was empowered to resolve questions involving modifications in the party program, statutes, organization, and tactics, to elect and supervise the activities of the central committee, and to handle a number of other matters that were left unspecified. The central committee's internal organization was left up to the committee itself, and it was given rather indefinite powers, including overall administration of party affairs and the party press, the right to coopt new members, and the task of approving provincial groups as official branches of the party. The provincial committees were given powers of similar scope at their level. With the approval of the provincial committees, independent city committees could be formed and endowed with the same powers. The provincial committees could also establish auxiliary (vspomogatel'nye) district and other subprovincial party committees. These statutes reflected two basic circumstances: (1) the structure of the electoral law, according to which the basic electoral unit was the province, with exceptions made for a number of large cities; and (2) the fact that the organizational predecessors of the party—the Union of Liberation groups, the zemstvo constitutionalist groups, and the professional-political unions—had for the most part been organizations of the provincial capitals and other large towns. In addition, the hierarchical organizational structure and the concern for control over party membership embodied in the statutes seemed to reflect the experience of several decades of political conditions in which all such activities were at least nominally conspiratorial. In particular, much was probably taken from the Union of Liberation in this respect.27 In practice, the party organization around the country grew in a much more haphazard fashion than the statutes prescribed. Many provincial committees were created only after party groups had come into existence in district towns or at other levels; in several cases groups outside the provincial capitals were recognized as "provincial" committees; members were coopted by a wide variety of party groups at various levels, and so on.

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But the model outlined in the statutes was left in force as a normative device, and also no doubt because it was realized that the expenditure of effort on such matters in those turbulent days would have been a waste of time. Probably for the same reason, the articles of the statutes dealing with party discipline were also left unelaborated beyond the general statement about adherence to the program and the payment of dues. 28 Looking forward to a mass membership and voluntary donations by better-off members, the founding congress had established monthly dues of only five kopecks to be paid into the central party treasury for each party member. Total dues were to be set by the local party groups themselves. The congress had also ruled that each provincial group make an initial contribution of 200 rubles for central committee expenses during the first three months of the party's existence (to February 1, 1906). In actuality, very little was forthcoming from either source; the local groups for the most part ignored both these provisions. The central committee report for 19051907 stated: "The majority of party groups and organizations treated quite carelessly and indifferently the responsibility of providing funds to the central party organ." 29 This statement is fully borne out by the materials on party finances preserved in the party archive. 30 The central committee's activities for the entire period of the election campaign and for some time afterward, including the publishing of the party organ, Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody, involving expenses exceeding 60 thousand rubles for 1906, were financed almost exclusively by a few wealthy members of the party leadership, most notably by V. D. Nabokov, Pavel Dolgorukov, and I. I. Petrunkevich. 31 The Party Organization In the first months of its existence, up to the second congress, the central committee of the Kadet party had no chairman; its affairs, consisting primarily of correspondence and maintenance of ties with local party groups, were run by a paid secretariat consisting at first of Shakhovskoi, Kornilov, and A. N. Maksimov. The ad hoc treasurer of the party was M. V. Sabashnikov. At the second congress Prince Pavel Dolgorukov was elected chairman of the central committee, and at the same time two vice-chairmen, V. D. Nabokov and Ν. V. Teslenko, were elected. Shakhovskoi and Kornilov remained the party secretaries, and Sabashnikov was officially installed as party treasurer. Until the third congress of the party in April 1906 the central committee was located in Moscow. After that, in connection with the convocation of the Duma, it was moved to Petersburg, where, in fact, a good deal of its activity had been concentrated from the beginning; more than half its members had their permanent residences there and the party newspapers, the Vestnik and Rech', were published there beginning in late February. In

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the weeks up to the second congress the committee met once a week, and often more frequently. At the second congress, biweekly plenary sessions, alternating between Moscow and Petersburg, and a permanent bureau and secretariat for the Petersburg-based part of the committee were established. 32 The activities of the central committee before convocation of the Duma fall naturally into two phases: the first, extending from October 1905 to the second congress in January 1906, was devoted primarily to organizational matters—the committee's own organization, the organization of the next congress, and the organization of party groups throughout the country. The second phase, from the end of the congress in January through the elections, was devoted primarily to the party's election campaign. This period ended with the summoning of the third party congress on the eve of the convocation of the Duma (April 21-25), after which the entire central committee moved to Petersburg and became involved with the work of the party's Duma delegation. The period of greatest proliferation of local party groups was November 1905 to January 1906, and the central committee's part in the process was almost entirely limited to the weeks before mid-November, when the second round of postal and telegraph strikes began, to be followed shortly by the uprisings in Moscow and a number of other towns and the wave of government repressions that came in reaction to them. From mid-November until the second congress the central committee's ability to communicate with local party groups was therefore extremely limited. 33 These circumstances point up the importance of the first party congress in October and of the November zemstvo congress in the process of party formation. The latter in particular brought together in Moscow the better part of the delegates to the founding congress who had been unable to attend because of the rail strike in October, and a special meeting of Kadet participants in the November zemstvo congress was convened immediately after the congress adjourned. Its main purpose was to stimulate organization of provincial committees of the party. 34 Kornilov asked at this meeting (November 12-14) for reports on the creation of local groups, and all were encouraged to work at their formation. This meeting appears to have gotten the work of Kadet organization in the country off the ground, leading to rapid proliferation of local committees in the weeks immediately following, up the time of the second congress. 35 The second congress was attended by 157 delegates representing thirtyfive provincial committees—the precise number of provinces that had been represented in sum at the October and November meetings—and twentythree town committees. 36 When the secretary's report on the organization of the party in the country revealed that the central committee's communications with the periphery were far from adequate (while making the report, Kornilov learned for the first time about the existence of a number of party

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committees from delegates on the floor),37 a committee was appointed to produce a questionnaire on the state of local party groups in order to establish better communications in preparation for the elections. The questionnaire was circulated to all known party groups on January 17, 1906, and on the basis of responses, which were far from complete and in some cases not forthcoming at all, the central committee was able to compile and publish in late February a directory of local party groups with names and addresses of contacts. 38 This more or less systematic inventory of party organizations permitted the central committee to maintain contact with most significant local groups by mail and wire, and to supplement those contacts by visits from central committee members or committee representatives. The mails were used to send circulars to party groups dealing with the campaign, to distribute party agitational listerature, and so on. These activities essentially got under way following the second congress. The large majority of party groups had already been formed, and the central committee now turned its attention to trying to increase party membership within these groups and to propagandizing the party program as widely as possible among the population through them. 39

Agitation and Propaganda These two tasks were identified as the most immediate party concerns in V. M. Gessen's report to the second congress, "On the Technical Aspects of the Electoral Struggle": "The time remaining until the elections should be devoted to attracting as many members as possible into the party, and to the dissemination of the party's ideas among persons outside the party." 4 0 Gessen's report identified the printing press and the lectern as the main means at the party's disposal for propaganda and agitation: it called for wide distribution of party literature and the creation of a party press, both central and local; and for preparation of "well-trained cadres of party orators" by provincial committees for carrying on agitation around the provinces. The lead was taken in both areas by the central committee itself. Even before the second congress V. A. Maklakov had set up a "course" for the training of young party orators (mainly for activity in Moscow), and about the same time "agitational courses" began to be organized by the central committee in both Moscow and Petersburg. These courses, consisting of model lectures on various aspects of party program and tactics and on special topics, such as the woman question and relations with other political parties, were attended by agitators from the capitals and from various provinces. Following the second congress the lecturers in these courses made the rounds of the provincial committees. Their visits were often the major event in the election campaign in many provincial towns, especially in places where, either because of administrative interference or lack of resources, the

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party could reach nonparty members only through newspaper reports on occasional party meetings in town. Maklakov, Miliukov, and Professor Kizevetter seem to have been the party's most popular orators on the provincial circuit during the campaign. 41 The publishing activities of the party were very extensive. At first activity was limited to the publishing of pamphlets, brochures, and small books intended for mass distribution (many of them the texts of speeches prepared for the agitational courses). The main party publisher was the firm Narodnoe Pravo (The People's Right), which had been established in the summer of 1905 by M. G. Kommissarov in preparation for the election campaign to the Bulygin Duma. He and a group of central committee members ran it in accordance with a special party statute. According to Kornilov's report to the second congress, Narodnoe Pravo had already by that time turned out more than a dozen different brochures in a total of 605,000 copies. 42 The secretariat also published a number of brochures and appeals in the name of the central committee itself, and the rate of publication by both sources increased rapidly after the second congress.43 Many of their publications were reprinted by local party groups. The first attempts to set up a central party newspaper, Miliukov's Svobodnyi narod and Gessen's Narodnaia svoboda, survived the Petersburg censors' scrutiny for only two and six issues respectively in December. Designed as general political newspapers that would comment on current affairs from the Kadet point of view, they were to some extent replaced subsequently by the Petersburg paper Pravo and the Moscow Russkie vedomosti, both long-established "national" papers dominated by Kadets and their sympathizers. The second congress moved to create an official party organ devoted specifically to party affairs, and this was realized with the creation of the Petersburg weekly Vesttiik narodnoi svobody, which received permission to begin publishing on February 22, 1906. Its editor and angel rolled into one was V. D. Nabokov. A group of Petersburg Kadets were simultaneously given permission to begin printing the big political daily Rech', which under Miliukov's editorship became one of the most widely read "intellectual" newspapers in Russia until the Bolshevik revolution. 44 The seriousness of the party's intention of acquiring mass support among peasants and industrial workers was underlined by the acts of the second congress. In addition to identifying the land question and the labor question as the most urgent "organic" issues for the Duma (along with the nationalities question), the congress created special "permanent commissions," one for gathering materials on and explication of the agrarian question, and another "for developing and popularizing the party program on the labor question." 45 Both commissions were entrusted not only with the elaboration of the party's position on the respective questions in anticipation of Duma legislative bills, but also with propagandizing the

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party program on these questions among the masses through publication of brochures and leaflets. The agrarian commission prepared most of the party's popular expositions of the land question for the peasants that were published by Kommissarov's firm. The bulk of party publishing in this period was directed toward the peasants in the form of simplified expositions of the party's agrarian platform, with the brochure "To the Peasants" (Κ krest'ianam) leading the list in an edition of 100,000 copies. The labor commission, chaired by Struve, the party's most tireless proponent of agitation among workers, prepared a special appeal to workers which, after discussion in the central committee meeting with representatives of local committees (February 19-20), was published over the central committee's name in the second issue of the Vestnik and as a separate brochure.46 The second congress adopted a rather flamboyant memorial resolution in memory of Bloody Sunday, introduced by the Petersburg party committee, and also passed a resolution to enter into discussions with the leaders of other parties concerning the possibility of reserving a number of seats in the Duma for workers—a demonstrative· recognition of the underrepresentation of workers in the December electoral law. 47 The bulk of the party's popular agitational effort was, however, devoted to the peasants, whose electors would have an absolute majority of votes in the electoral assemblies of a few provinces and a plurality in most others. Awareness of this fact was reflected generally in the amount of party propaganda devoted to the agrarian question, and more specifically in Gessen's guidelines for party groups in the election campaign: they emphasized agitation among the peasants wherever possible, and especially among the peasant electors.48 The party's first "popular" newspaper, V. E. Iakushkin's Narodnoe delo, published in Moscow, was directed primarily toward the peasantry. Coordination of the Election Campaign The general rules and guidelines for local party groups were laid out in Gessen's twenty-one-point program, which was finally adopted by the central committee meeting with representatives of local party groups in the third week of February. The basic principles of the party's electoral platform (that is, the party program) were to be established by the general party congress, and the central committee was to monitor the activities of local groups in the campaign, with the power to censure actions that were "morally reprehensible or contradictory to the basic points of the party program." The central committee was also charged with systematic collection of information on the course of the campaign and the election results. Local committees were charged to report on the latter as soon as they became available. In addition to the agitational-propaganda work, local party committees

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were charged with checking voter-registration lists, in order to look for irregularities and to encourage unregistered party members or sympathizers to register. The tactical report directed that voters' meetings were to be exploited by the party to the fullest possible extent for propagating the party program and criticizing the programs and candidates of other parties; party candidates were to take the lead in these meetings. Local party committees had the right to enter on their own initiative into agreements with other strictly local parties concerning mutual support of candidates, while the central committee was responsible for arranging any electoral blocs with parties of more than local scope. The central committee also established general guidelines on electoral alliances, in circular no. 71 (February 19-20), which declared that "temporary accord for mutual support in the elections is possible only with those groups and parties that support a constitutional state order based on universal suffrage." 49 The tactical report emphasized that the crucial point for agitation in the elections would be the provincial electoral assemblies, and that within them agitation among the peasant electors would be the central task. The party leaders foresaw that most peasant electors would arrive at the assemblies uncommitted to any political party and that contests would ensue there for their support. It was up to the local committees to size up the physiognomy of the electoral assemblies in order to anticipate the number of votes the party would be able to control, and so on. The names of the party's candidate-electors, who were to be designated by party committees with as much participation by the party constituency as possible, were to be publicized as soon as the lists of eligible voters appeared, except when the committees found it unwise to do so (that is, when it was anticipated that party candidates might be arrested or struck from the voters' lists on technicalities). The party's candidates could be changed, depending on the outcome of negotiations with other parties or groups. The same conditions were to apply in the matter of selecting the party's candidates for the Duma deputyships from among the electors: they were to be designated by provincial or city committees with as much cooperation from the membership at large as possible, and could be changed as circumstances required. Their identity was to be revealed when the local committees thought best. Insofar as possible, the party's candidates for Duma deputies should be party members, although party organs could present the candidacy of nonparty members even without entering into blocs with other parties, on the condition that the central committee be informed. These were the basic rules of election campaigning laid down by the party leadership. As can be seen, they anticipated extensive alliance activity with other parties and groups throughout the electoral process, and in particular with peasant electors in the electoral assemblies: the clause allowing for presentation of nonparty candidates for the Duma was

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included in anticipation of having to offer places on the lists to peasants in return for support from the peasant electors. This anticipation proved well justified.

The Question of Legalization of the Party The legal situation in regard to the civil liberties of association, meetings, and the press promised by the October Manifesto remained highly ambiguous during the period of the election campaign, particularly in regard to the activities of political parties. The publication on March 4 of the temporary rules on "societies and unions" came too late to have much effect on the situation during the campaign. The Kadet central committee first discussed the implications of the temporary rules only on March 19. The committee decided that the party should seek postponement for submission of the party statutes for registration of the party, as provided in the rules, until the meeting of the third party congress; it further decided to have the party register as a Petersburg-based "single all-Russian political society" (there was no provision for "parties" in the March 4 formula), rather than as a collection of provincial party groups, many of which, it was anticipated, would have great difficulty getting registered, especially in provinces where martial law was in effect. 5 0 As it happened, the party could not have registered before the outcome of the first elections had it wished to, for the Petersburg Office on Registration of Societies and Unions was not yet in operation and began to function only in midsummer, a delay caused by a dispute between the Petersburg chief of police and another high official over which of them would chair the meetings of the new office. 51 Since article 33 of the temporary rules required positive action by the authorities to close down an unregistered society or union, the postponement assured that no action would be taken against the party for the time being simply for its having failed to register, at least in Petersburg. Nevertheless, the uncertain status of the party throughout the remainder of the election campaign gave free rein to those local authorities who chose to identify the party as a threat to public order. 5 2

The Kadet Party in the Provinces Formation and Structure Mention has already been made of the crucial role played by the first party congress and the November zemstvo meeting in Moscow in getting under way the process of party formation in the country. A rapid proliferation of provincial groups occurred during November and December. Using unspecified materials from the party archive, E. D. Chermenskii claims to

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have pinpointed the time of formation of 102 local party groups. Of these, 59 (nearly 60 percent) came into existence in the course of November and December (34 and 25 groups, respectively).53 The proportions seem reasonable and are confirmed by the central committee's own report on the first two years of the party's existence, which noted that few party groups were formed after the second congress, except for temporary electoral committees. 54 According to my count, based partly on central-committee questionnaires and partly on press accounts, groups in twenty-nine provinces out of thirty-seven for which approximate time of appearance can be determined were established in November-December 1905 (15 and 14, respectively).55 The remaining eight provinces had established party organizations already before the end of October 1905, with one exception. 56 In at least four provinces, party organizations had been created even before the first general congress of the party. In Vilno an independent "Jewish Group of the KD party" was established some time before the congress on the initiative of Dr. G. D. Romm, who became its chairman. 57 In Vladimir preparations for setting up a party organization had been begun by local Liberationists in the summer of 1905. 58 In Voronezh a group of Liberationists and Zemstvo Constitutionalists had elected a temporary party bureau of five and a twenty-man committee before mid-October in anticipation of taking part in elections to a Bulygin Duma. 59 And in Poltava a party group had begun to organize in September 1905 and had had two provincial party meetings before the first general congress met. At their third provincial meeting in November, the Poltava Kadets adopted the party program issued by the first Kadet congress. 60 The Moscow city group was officially established immediately following the first congress, on October 22, but it had in effect to start over in January 1906 because of the extensive disruptions in the city during December. The Petersburg city organization, which eventually became the largest and most elaborated party organization in the country, was formed only in mid-November; the refusal of the Petersburg Union of Liberation directorate to adhere to the new party had required a regrouping of Kadet forces there and an entirely new organizational structure. 61 There is more than the chronology of local party-group formation to indicate the importance of the October and November Moscow meetings for party formation in the provinces. Almost everywhere, the delegates to the first congress and the party "initiators" of the first congress deputations played a prominent role in the first leadership groups in the provinces, and many of them went on to gain election to the Duma, which was usually a good indication of prominence in the local party organizations. 62 Behind the initial delegates and party initiators lay the organizational groundwork of local Union of Liberation and zemstvo constitutionalist groups. The better part of the 68 party initiators can be identified as participants in the zemstvo constitutionalist movement (44 positive

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identifications; the actual number was undoubtedly larger), and at least 29 were members of the Union of Liberation, 18 of these also belonging to the former group. Altogether then, at least 56 of the 68 initiators were definitely involved in the liberation movement on one or both sides of it, and well over half of the 121 delegates to the constituent party congress were veterans of the zemstvo constitutionalist movement. Taking the combined groups, at least 142 of 189 were involved before October in the liberation movement. These bare facts about the party initiators should be sufficient to give some idea of the significance of the Union of Liberation and, especially, the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists in laying the groundwork for the Kadet party across the country. The party drew on these two organizations not only for the central party group; the same sort of foundation underlay the local party branches, by and large. 63 Their rapid proliferation throughout the country in the last months of 1905, especially considering the political situation at the time and the extensive disruption of communications, would hardly have been conceivable without such an organizational basis to build on. Although the general pattern seems reasonably clear and confirms the generalizations about the role of the two parent organizations in the formation of the party first made by the party's own founders and later repeated by historians (the only revision of the accepted view might be to accord rather more weight to the zemstvo constitutionalist branch, and to the zemstvo movement in general, than has usually been done), 64 there were a significant number of places where the organizational origins of party groups were rather different. An important role was played by the Jewish and Muslim organizations on the western and eastern perimeters, respectively. In Vilno, for example, the local party organization was created by the Union for Jewish Equality, which set up a "Jewish Group of the KD party." As noted, this group was formed even before the Kadet first congress. 65 Much the same origin lay behind the party groups in Vitebsk, Volynia, Grodno, and Kovno. The Muslim organization played a major role in party formation from the beginning in Kazan, as it did in the province of Ufa (and to a lesser extent in Perm). In both these provinces prominent members of the Muslim community who had been active in the first Muslim congress played leading roles simultaneously in the Kadet party and in the Muslim movement. 66 In some other provincial groups the party had organizational precursors in peculiar local organizations that had not been directly associated with either of the unions. The Rostov-Nakhichevan group in the Don Oblast grew out of a local "Democratic Group," which was organized in November 1904 and took the initiative in arranging banquets locally, including the large Rostov banquet of December 5. After the banquet campaign the group worked out its own political and economic program, based on the Union of Liberation draft program, and it sent delegates to the

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third congress of the union in March 1905, but retained its own program and identity until formation of the Kadet party. Following publication of the Bulygin constitution the group set up an election committee; and after the September zemstvo congress it adopted the program endorsed by the congress. Its activities were halted by the Manifesto of October 17 and a pogrom of Jews in Rostov on October 18—19, which caused some members of the group to flee or go into hiding in the city. It recommenced activity in mid-November, and the constituent meeting of the local Kadet party group followed almost immediately, on the eighteenth. The organization committee of the local party group was elected from leaders of the "Democratic Group" and of the Bulygin election-campaign committee. 67 Even in provinces where the roots of the party organization lay squarely in the preceding zemstvo movement—in the Don Oblast both distance from the center and the absence of zemstvo institutions more or less predicated a special organizational background—there were occasional special antecedents to the Kadet groups. In Kaluga, for example, the origins of the Kadet organization lay in a "gathering for discussion of the general zemstvo congress" on October 8, 1905. This gathering was the brainchild of local Zemstvo Constitutionalists who were seeking sympathizers among the zemtsy for their program. Two tendencies, however, appeared at the meeting: the constitutionalist one, in the majority, and another distinctly to its right. The meeting elected a bureau of seven and decided to form a "Kaluga Union of the Progressive Group," but its bureau's activities were held up by a pogrom that began shortly afterward. Only at the end of December did the group meet again, this time to form the Kaluga branch of the Kadet party. The more conservative participants in the group left immediately to enter either the Octobrist union or the "For Tsar and Order" party. 68 In Vladimir an organization populated mainly by professional people and known as the "Tuesday circle" (kruzhok vtornikov) was a direct predecessor of the Kadet party organization, along with the Union of Liberation. It had been created in late 1904 and was principally responsible for arranging the banquet campaign in Vladimir. According to a local leader's report to the party central committee, this circle had laid the ground for the party network in the province by working up a distribution system for legal political literature, organizing a series of lectures beginning in the spring of 1905, and so on. Together with members of the Union of Liberation, they had arranged the meetings in September 1905 to discuss formation of a party organization and to elect delegates to the first Kadet congress. Professors played a prominent role in setting up Kadet party organizations in university towns. They were numerous in the councils of the party in both Moscow and Petersburg, 70 of course, but they also took leading roles in Kazan, where half of those on the sixteen-member provincial committee were professors, 71 making the university, along with the Muslim

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organization, the main source of party leadership. The Kiev city- and southwestern-regional committee of the party also had heavy academic representation. 72 And nearly half the Kharkov party leadership seems to have been made up of university professors. 73 The party group in the university town of Odessa was set up mainly by professors and was generally dominated by them. 74 It is interesting to note that in the only other major university town in European Russia, Iurev (Dorpat, now Tartu), Russian faculty members were chiefly responsible for setting up the local branch of the Party of Legal Order. Without knowing the details of professorial politics in Iurev, one surmises that this exception to the general rule of predominantly Kadet sympathies was related to the insecurity these Russian professors, representatives of the government's russification policies in education, must have felt in that predominantly non-Russian environment. They were not likely to be pleased by the Kadets' nationalities program. 75 Until detailed studies of the Union of Unions and its constituent unions in 1905 have been made it will be impossible to assess adequately their significance in the general process of political-party formation or in other areas of political life, but it is fairly clear that a few of them were important conduits into the Kadet party. Most, however, were sufficiently diverse in terms of the political orientation of their memberships to prevent their simple transformation into units of any single political party. 76 . In its congresses the Union of Unions had consistently demanded the direct convocation of the constituent assembly and called for a boycott of the elections, first to the "Bulygin Duma," and then to the Duma that was to be elected on the basis of the law of December 11, but three of the constituent unions had opposed the boycott resolution of the third congress in July—the Academic Union, the Union of Writers, and the Union of Secondary School Teachers—and four others had abstained in the voting— the Peasants' Union, the Union for Jewish Equality, the Union of Veterinarians, and the Union of Primary School Teachers. These seven unions as a group had proposed a minority resolution to leave the question of boycott open. 77 Among the minority, the Peasants' Union and the two teachers' unions stood well to the left of the Kadets politically, so they probably did not contribute significantly to formation of Kadet groups, despite their position on boycott. 78 Of the minority unions, the Academic Union alone was predominantly Kadet-oriented and appears to have played an important part in mobilizing the professoriat into the Kadet party. Founded at the end of December 1904, it had 129 representatives of thirty-nine institutions of higher learning in attendance at its second congress held at the end of August 1905. 79 Its resolutions were strictly "Kadet," and the organization bureau for congress later entered the Kadet party almost to a man. 80 In effect, the Academic Union followed Miliukov out of the Union of Unions after the

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July congress. 81 According to Kirpichnikov the membership of the Academic Union in late 1905 totaled 1,544 in thirteen branches, mainly in the capitals and the main university towns. 8 2 Two other professional-political unions formed at the initiative of the Union of Liberation counted many future Kadets among their leaders: the Lawyers' Union and the Writers' Union. But both had too large a contingent of men whose political sympathies lay on the left to permit them to enter the Kadet party as a body. The Lawyers' Union had its origins in the days following Bloody Sunday in a series of meetings of Petersburg lawyers held for the purpose of organizing aid for arrested workers. The first general congress of the union was convened in Petersburg at the end of March (28-30) 1905. The nearly 200 delegates included such prominent future Kadets as Vinaver, Teslenko, Mandelshtam, I. A. Kistiakovskii, A. R. Lednicki, Rodichev, Maklakov, Kedrin, and I. V. Gessen, but a radical faction was present from the beginning. Whereas perhaps more than a quarter of the delegates subsequently became prominent Kadets, and the Moscow delegation in particular was heavily weighted toward that orientation, the Petersburg delegation was less so, Kiev's even less so, and some delegations from provincial towns seem to have contributed no leaders at all to local Kadet organizations. 83 The delegates of the Lawyers' Union voted with the boycottist majority at the third congress of the Union of Unions in July, but at their own (second) congress in Moscow in early October (5-7), a modest majority of the 50 delegates attending voted against boycotting the Bulygin elections. Most of the majority there soon entered the Kadet party. 8 4 By late 1905 the union had about 2,500 members, with the bulk of the membership concentrated in the two capitals and a half-dozen other large towns. 8 5 The Union of Writers, which was in fact a journalists' union, 8 6 was even more divided in political outlook than was the Lawyers' Union. There was general agreement about immediate political goals—those of the Union of Liberation—both in the preliminary conference of March 3 - 4 and in the first and only general congress of the union, which met in early April (5-8) (both meetings were in Petersburg), but there was no agreement over social and economic issues and the question of whether they ought to be included in the union's program and resolutions. Although a sizable majority of the delegates at the union's congress voted for socialist resolutions on land and labor, there was no such majority in the voting on more specific measures of agrarian and labor policy, and the drafting committee finally proposed withdrawing the resolutions on social and economic issues for the sake of preserving unity, a proposal that was adopted by a vote of seventy-four to twenty-seven. These differences reflected less a socialist-nonsocialist dichotomy among the delegates than differences on the left, between a populist-oriented "liberationist" majority and an SD minority. 87 The SDs, who constituted the twenty-seven-man minority in the voting on the

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drafting committee's proposal, left the union after the defeat of their counterproposal that the union forgo all programmatic work and restrict its activities entirely to electing representatives to the Union of Unions, where they were to agitate for the latter's breakup into political parties. 88 After the removal of the SDs from the union, there remained the dichotomy between the more doctrinaire populist left and the "protoKadets." The central bureau elected at the congress after the SDs' exit (which was also to serve as the union's delegation to the Union of Unions) contained only a minority of future Kadets, if some quite prominent ones, 89 and although quite a few of the newspapers represented at the congress supported the Kadets during the election campaign, only a few became, in name or in effect, Kadet party organs (Pravo in Petersburg, Russkie vedomosti in Moscow, Severnyi krai in Iaroslavl, Bessarabskaia zhizrt' in Kishinev, and perhaps a few others). If on the whole the Kadet party organization grew from the center outward, from the early party convocations in the capitals and from even earlier institutional predecessors also formed there, and from the provincial capitals outward into the provincial hinterlands, there is evidence that the process of party formation in the country was by no means uniformly a matter of directions emanating from the center. In many provinces the work of party organization never got much beyond the provincial capital, whether because of lack of human and financial resources at the local party groups' disposal, administrative hindrances, or a combination of the two. Moreover, the provincial committee did not always take the lead in setting up other groups in the province; sometimes district or small-town groups were set up quite independently of, and on occasion prior to, the provincial organization. In the Don, for example, several party groups sprang up separately and only later banded together in a provincial organization. 90 In several provinces individual district or small-town committees sprang up independently of and usually before the provincial committees. 91 And in Perm province an "oblast committee" for four districts, complete with organizational, electoral, agitational, and finance subcommittees, was set up before the creation of the provincial committee in Perm. In Kherson province the Odessa group was created before the provincial committee in Kherson, was more populous than the Kherson organization, and generally dominated party affairs in the province. The provincial committee was apparently located in the provincial town merely to conform to the party's organizational statutes. 92 Whatever the sequence of their establishment and relative importance, most of the local Kadet groups seem to have cooperated well and fit themselves into the statutory framework provided by the central party organization. There was, however, at least one exception to the rule: in

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Briansk district of Orel province, an autonomous party group, apparently populated by technical employees and workers in the Maltsev factories, was set up in the industrial village of Diatkovo. Although it was formed later than the district committee, it was not the latter's creation and refused to cooperate with the district group, to the point of preparing its own list of candidates for the electors in the district. 93 The Provincial Leadership Looking beyond the party's top leaders toward the leadership of local party groups one finds a great paucity of information beyond mere names about most members of a group that—taking membership in provincial and city committees as the basic criterion—must have counted somewhere between 500 and 1,000 persons. The best way to get a reasonably accurate idea of the group characteristics of the provincial leadership is to begin with the Kadet delegation to the first Duma, which encompassed the largest group of local Kadet leaders about which fairly detailed biographical information is available; and then to supplement an analysis of that information with the less systematic and often quite impressionistic information available about the broader ranks of local party leaders. The large majority of the 153 deputies who identified themselves as Kadets in the responses to the questionnaire distributed to the Duma deputies by N. A. Borodin in May 1906 were drawn from the leadership of the provincial and city groups of European Russia; very often they were the generally acknowledged leading figures in the local organizations. 94 On the whole, the group of deputies surveyed by Borodin appears to have been fairly representative of the broader group of provincial party leaders. The median age of the Kadet deputies polled by Borodin was precisely the same as that of the party's top leadership group: forty-one, 95 although only a third of them were "men of the eighties" (not counting the central committee members in the delegation). However, if one selects out those who had not been active in party affairs before their election—primarily men from the peasant curia and non-Russian participants in the Kadet bloc—one is left with a core group of one hundred party regulars (the twenty-one central committee members-deputies are excluded here as well), among whom "men of the eighties" constitute fully a half, and the distribution range is considerably narrowed. The difference is made up largely of men over forty-five, often prominent "elder statesmen" of zemstvo liberalism. Sixty-seven percent (102 or 103 persons) of the Kadet delegation had higher educations, mostly from Russian universities, and about half the total higher-educated group had studied in the two universities of Moscow and Petersburg. The others had studied in foreign universities, higher military (usually medical or technical) schools, and especially in technical

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and professional institutes. Only 10 percent had received no more than primary education. If one considers the smaller group of 100 party regulars, the proportion with higher education rises to 90 percent, with better than two thirds (68) having studied in universities.96 Of 75 Kadet deputies for whom the information is available, the distribution by faculty of specialization is as follows: Law Natural sciences Medicine Technology/agriculture History-philology

32 16 13 9 5

As can be seen, technical-scientific education was much better represented in the Kadet Duma contingent than in the central committee group; just over half of the 75 (38) had scientific, medical, or technical educations, although the law faculty remained the single most popular specialization. 97 On the whole, the emphasis was definitely toward professional training. Indeed, 70 percent of Borodin's Kadet group earned their livings in some kind of occupation other than farming, business, or manual labor. To be sure, this group of white-collared occupations included paid zemstvo service as the largest single category (thirty deputies, or 30 percent of the higher-educated group), and many of these were zemstvo board chairmen and members—second- rather than third-element employees. But professional employment accounted for twice as many, including thirteen professors, eleven teachers and school inspectors, thirteen doctors, fifteen lawyers, seven editors and writers, and two engineers. There were in addition twelve civil servants (chinovniki) and four priests. The remaining 30 percent of the Kadet delegation consisted of nine peasants (that is, land-working peasants), two industrial laborers, twentytwo landowners (zemlevladel'tsy; these were deputies who gave this designation as their occupation), eight people in trade or commerce (torgovtsy), one industrialist, and one "houseowner" (domovladelets). Fully 60 percent of Borodin's Kadet respondents (ninety-two) belonged to the hereditary noble estate. The only other estate represented by more than a handful of Kadet deputies was the peasantry, although as noted only a small number of these men were actually tillers of the soil. Most (thirtysix) were representatives of the "peasant intelligentsia": schoolteachers, scribes, agronomists, and so on of peasant origin working in the villages, or simply intelligentsia of peasant origin. The remaining twenty-five deputies were scattered among the meshchanstvo, kupechestvo, dukhovenstvo, and cossacks. Zemstvo connections, as can be seen from these figures, involve a lower proportion of the Kadets in the Duma than in the top central committee

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group; nevertheless, if one takes into consideration not only the men who gave their occupations as zemstvo administrators but also professional men, landowners, and a few others who were zemstvo duputies at the time, the zemstvo tie links at least seventy of the group, and even more if one includes previous connections with zemstvo service. A precise count is impossible, but it appears that between sixty and seventy of the Kadet deputies were noble landowners who owned enough land to qualify for zemstvo election and had served in the zemstvos. 98 Although this accounts for a substantial majority of all nobles in the group, it should be noted that nearly a quarter of the Kadet nobles (twentytwo) had no land at all, and active involvement in agriculture among the rest seems to have been rather exceptional, as indicated by the small number of Kadet noble deputies who gave their occupation as "landowner." Moreover, most of them were elected from the urban curia, rather than the landowner's curia, indicating at the very least that they maintained residence or owned substantial property in town (only twenty-nine of the Kadet deputies were sent up from the landowners' curia). 99 Looking at the group of one hundred party regulars in the delegation, nobles account for sixty-three; persons of peasant origin, only eight to ten (and only one of these actually worked the land for a living). 100 The remainder were mostly intelligentsia of neither noble nor peasant origin, including seven men of clerical origin (only two were priests; the others were civil servants or third-element employees); eight men of merchant origin (all but one of them, a zemstvo doctor, were Jewish professional men); and four men born into the meshchanstvo (including one former mayor, two lawyers, and one agronomist-estate manager). 101 Judging from the rather sporadic information about the membership of the Kadet provincial committees, 1 0 2 there is little indication that the provincial leadership at large differed greatly from the core group of Duma deputies: these were primarily professional men and zemtsy, with a prevalence of the former. Third-element and salaried employees were relatively few and constituted a significant part of local party leadership in perhaps only the two northern provinces of Arkhangelsk and Olonets. 1 0 3 People occupied in commerce or industry were somewhat better represented, especially in the borderlands. 104 Workers, shopkeepers, priests, and peasants were hardly to be found at all, 1 0 5 and there were very few women in the provincial Kadet leadership. 106 There were at least twenty-four provinces (all but one of them zemstvo provinces) whose leadership groups could fairly be called "mixed," with both urban professional men and zemtsy well represented on the provincial committees. 1 0 7 Another eighteen (thirteen of them nonzemstvo provinces) appear to have been dominated by professional men. 1 0 8 There were only two provinces in which zemtsy clearly dominated within the provincial leaderships. 109

170

The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign

The Party Rank and File It is of course even more problematical to attempt to characterize the rankand-file membership of the party, but a few generalizations can be made with fair assurance. First, it is clear that party membership was drawn overwhelmingly from the urban population. Even if one takes the highest estimate of total membership—approximately one hundred thousand—as true, fully a quarter of the total came from the two cities of Petersburg and Moscow alone, and most of the rest came from provincial capitals. 1 1 0 Second, given the numbers involved, the rank-and-file membership was of necessity more "plebian" than the party leadership groups: in addition to professional people, there were significant numbers of salaried personnel employed by government, public, or private institutions. People in trade and commerce were also fairly well represented. Landowners—that is, gentry without other professions, aside from zemstvo or noble-corporate service— were generally in a small minority in the party groups. At the same time, neither the peasantry nor the industrial labor force, with a few notable exceptions, contributed significant numbers to Kadet party ranks. Finally, there were considerable regional variations in the structure of party membership. A few party groups responded to the central committee's questionnaire with precise numbers and detailed breakdowns of their membership according to occupation, status, and sometimes national-confessional characteristics. But these were indeed few in number and were usually, as might be expected, for party groups with relatively small populations. There is, however, one set of sources that does provide information about occupational-professional status for a significant mass of party members; namely, the lists of the party's candidate-electors in the separate city elections, most of which were published, along with some indication of occupational status, as part of the election process. To be sure, these candidates were not typical of the mass of party members: they were limited to the larger cities, and they naturally tended to be drawn from the most active and prestigious party members. Their numbers were nevertheless considerable—there were 80 electors' seats to be filled in the eighteen separate city elections in European Russia and there were 160 in each of the two capitals, or a total of 1,760 seats, and the party as a rule put up a candidate for every seat. Given the very considerable weight of the large-city groups in total membership, the information on the party's candidates does allow us to perceive something of the general contours of the party's rank-and-file membership, particularly when it is contrasted to what is known of the leadership groups. It has been possible to identify 1,138 of the candidates put forward by the Kadet party for the city elections. With only a few exceptions they were

The Kadet Bloc

171

party members. They are represented here in Table 1 according to descending numerical weight in categories that are for the most part designations (or groupings of designations) given by the candidates themselves when they registered to vote. Using as a guide criteria provided by the newspaper Nasha zhiztt', a friendly critic of the Kadets on the left, 1 1 1 it may be seen that professional people accounted for 677 or just under 60 percent (59.5 percent) of the total number of Kadet candidates. Of the 40 percent of nonprofessionals (that is, nonintelligentsia professions according to contemporary conceptions), perhaps no more than 10 percent (110) wre engaged in any kind of business or commercial enterprise (merchants and factory owners), while only 6 percent (68) can probably be ascribed to the little-educated or uneducated working population (meschane, peasants, industrial workers, artisans, and clerks and shop assistants). The remaining quarter must be ascribed to the generally better-educated segment of the population that was engaged in nonintelligentsia occupations (salaried employees in government offices or private businesses, ranking civil servants, and so on). In general, the relative weight of the liberal professions was higher in the capitals, and especially in Petersburg, than in the cities at large. (Petersburg and Moscow were the only cities in European Russia with populations of over a million; the next largest city was Odessa, with a population of 405,000.) According to Nasha zhizrt's count, they accounted for 76 percent of the Petersburg party-candidates (126 of 160), as compared to about 60 percent for the cities as a while. 1 1 2 This situation reflected the general distribution of these professions in the country, with a very high proportion of scholars and writers concentrated in the capitals, but with more even distribution among cities of doctors and lawyers. 113 By contrast, merchants, industrialists, and salaried employees (both state and private) were distinctly underrepresented in the capitals: there were only 1 merchant and 2 factory owners (out of 95 and 15, respectively, for all cities) from the capitals; only 27 out of 119 salaried employees of private concerns (all from Moscow); and only 3 salaried state employees (all in Petersburg). So, too, was the third element: identifiable third-element representation came entirely from other cities, with the exception of one person in Petersburg. The lack of third-element representation in the capitals was probably due mainly to the presence in the capitals of left-of-Kadet political alternatives, although status competition for the electors' seats may also have been involved. It may be that relatively low representation of doctors and lawyers was also related to the more abundant political alternatives, to both right and left, in the capitals than in most other cities; and the same may have been true of the business-related occupations just mentioned. Thin as it is, the evidence about the party membership of the central

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Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

269

engaged in commerce or industry who paid no less than 50 rubles of the basic commercial tax annually, and owners of commercial-industrial enterprises of equivalent proportions in rural areas of the district; persons anywhere in the district who paid the commercial tax of the highest bracket for personal commercial activities; and persons in urban settlements who paid the state apartment tax of the tenth bracket or higher (a very small group of urban dwellers who rented apartments for no less than 1,320 rubles per annum in the capitals, somewhat less elsewhere). In the special city elections electors to the separate city assemblies were to be chosen by persons in the twenty largest cities of European Russia owning property evaluated for the urban taxes at no less than 1,500 rubles (twice that sum for Petersburg and Moscow) or paying the special commercial tax at the same level as in the urban curia (again with the exception of the two capitals, where the level of taxation was set at ten times that amount, or 500 rubles); persons paying the first bracket of taxes for commercial activities; and persons paying the state apartment tax of the tenth bracket or higher. The cities with special elections were to be divided into electoral precincts corresponding to the existing police precincts; the allotment of electors—80 in all the cities except the two capitals, which had 160 each—among the precincts was to be undertaken by the town council (gorodskaia uprava) or an analogous institution in conformity with the distribution of population in the city. Each of the city assemblies was to elect one deputy to the Duma, again with the exception of the capitals: Moscow was allotted four deputies, Petersburg, six. 115 As with the landowners' curia, eligibility for voting in the urban curia or in the special city elections was to be determined by local officials on the basis of the tax records, and a list of eligible voters was to be published and distributed in each district and large city no later than six weeks before the elections. Except in a few marginal cases, no registration for voting was required. The restricted suffrage in the urban curia provided by the August law would have allowed the eligible voters to gather together in a district town assembly and ballot for candidates using the customary urns and balls (shariki), just as in the district assemblies of landowners or peasant delegates. Only in the special city elections in the largest urban centers were the elections to be conducted by depositing secret written ballots at polling places, with the electors' seats going to the candidates receiving the highest number of votes in a single round of voting. 116 The December 11 amendments greatly increased the size of the urban electorate. Lositskii estimated the total urban electorate under the August 6 law (for sixty-one provinces; that is, European Russia plus Poland) to be 229,575, whereas under the December 11 law he calculated it as 2,709,458, better than a tenfold increase.117 A precise count for Kharkov confirms the accuracy of the scale: under the August law the city electorate of Kharkov

270

The First National Elections

would have been 2 , 0 4 0 ; under the new law it was 2 5 , 8 5 7 . 1 1 8 In Moscow the August 6 registrants constituted about 15 percent of those eventually registered after the December amendments (8,117:52,045). 1 1 9 In most of the large towns the registered electorate under the December law seems to have ranged from between 10 to 15 percent of the total population. In Moscow and Petersburg, however, the eligible electorates were nearer to 5 percent of the total population, reflecting the particularly heavy representation in those largest commercial-industrial centers of groups that remained outside the franchise even under the December law (in part because of special restrictions for those two cities), or were included only in the workers' curia. The great expansion in the electorate derived primarily from two elements of the December law: its enfranchisement of the tax-paying population as a whole, rather than just the upper strata of taxed groups; and its admission to suffrage of persons employed within the city limits by state or public institutions (except for laborers and menials). 120 Qualification by occupancy of an apartment, another provision of the December amendments, did not of itself add much to the electorate, since almost half the apartment dwellers would have voted anyway as the owners of their apartments and the great majority of apartment renters would have qualified under either the tax or employment provisions. People who paid no municipal taxes and were not qualified by employment—workers, domestics, and petty employees of various kinds—for the most part rented only rooms or "corners" and thus remained excluded from the electorate. 121 The expansion of the urban electorate by the December law required revision of the mechanics of registration and voting. J h e established instruments of registration—tax and employment records—could not generate lists including all the newly eligible voters (this was in part due to the lowering of the residence and status qualification period from three years to one), so a special article was added providing that persons who believed themselves eligible to vote but whose names were not found on the published electoral lists could take the initiative to register by coming forward with proof of their qualification within three weeks after publication of the December 11 law. Thus the urban curia was the only one in which any significant proportion of the eligible electorate had to take the initiative to register to vote. It is not possible to say how widely this initiative was taken. In Moscow, at least, where the town duma board was extraordinarily conscientious about promoting registration, some 2 2 , 0 0 0 registrations by individual initiative were made, in addition to the 67,500 generated by the statistical department of the duma board and the 4 , 0 0 0 provided by institutions. 122 In the December law, and then in greater detail in an instruction of the minister of internal affairs dated February 24, amendments to the mechanics of elections were made to take account of the great expansion of the

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

271

electorate. District voters' assemblies with more than 500 participants (regardless of the curia, although the provision was applicable in practice for the most part only to the urban curia) were now to vote with written ballots as in the special city precinct elections. The February instruction detailing the use of ballots allowed that printed lists of candidates could be used as well as hand-filled ballots, provided they conformed to a standard format. This meant that parties could print up their lists of candidates for preliminary distribution among the voters, who could take them to the polling places as ballots. This measure alone greatly increased the likelihood that parties and party-line voting would play a much more significant role in the urban elections, at least in the larger towns and cities, than elsewhere. 123 The Urban Electors Of the better than 80 percent of the urban electors accounted for in Table 10, over two thirds (68 percent) were of a more or less well-defined party orientation, a significantly higher proportion than in the other two curiae; this was the only curia of the three in which a clear majority of electors fell outside the nonparty category. Moreover, a significant proportion of the electors unaccounted for or listed in the nonparty column probably belonged to one or another of the established political orientations, with the heaviest weighting for the Kadet bloc. If one examines Table 10 to find those provinces with significant proportions of electors, say above a quarter, listed in the nonparty category, it is immediately noticeable that most of them belong to one of two groups: provinces in which a high proportion of the urban population was mobilized for the elections by nationalities groups outside the formal parties, which generally cooperated with the local Kadets, 124 or outlying provinces to the north and east where the level of political mobilization was relatively low. 125 Two or three provinces from the central region that fall in this category were in each case the scene of special circumstances. In Tambov (with eleven of the twenty-six electors identified as nonparty), the low level of party affiliations appears to be due to two factors: the virtually total suppression of political agitation in the province during the campaign period, and the annulment of the Tambov district urban elections, which had produced five electors, all Kadets. 126 In Voronezh the majority of "nonparty" electors appear to have in fact been supporters of the Kadets, 127 and a similar situation obtained in Kharkov. 128 It has not been possible to determine anything about the characteristics of the nine out of fifteen "nonparty" electors in the Tula urban curia. The sum of these qualifications appears to be that the qualities of indifference or unawareness of party politics that characterized the bulk of "nonparty" electors in the rural curiae cannot be applied to most of the urban electors in that category. The relatively high level of political awareness that these figures about

272

The First National Elections

Table 10 Number of Urban Electors and Their Political Orientation. Province Arkhangelsk 3

Total

KD

2

Progressive

Octobrists

TIP

Right

Nonparty

2

Astrakhan

16

—

—

1

Bessarabia

21

6

3

—

—

3

7

2

3

—

—

—

—

—

20

8

5

Vladimir

48

23

3

7

Vologda

13

5

1

1

Volynia b

40

5

13

—

Voronezh

22

6

4

—

Viatka

34

19

2

—

—

3

Grodno

26

7

6

—

—

1

Don oblast c

37

10

3

Ekaterinoslav Kazan

63

23

1

18

5

1

—

Kaluga

21

11

4

—

Kievd

71

6

7

—

8

—

Kovno

16

2

Kostroma

28

16

Kurland 6

19

Kursk f

28

Livland 8

15

Minsk1*

20

9

Mogilev

16

14

Moscow

63

21

6

13 9 —

—

1

6

3

8

4

2

1

21 11

—

10 12

1

—

—

23

1

—

—

38

—

—

1 — —

—

4

—

4

24

12 4

1

1

8

—

6

—

3

—

—

1

1

—

3

—

—

1

9 2

Vilno Vitebsk

—

15

2

6

2

11

2

—

Vestnik PNS, 1906, no. 6, pp. 441-470. a. There was no separation of the urban and landowners' curiae in this province. According to the Kadet tables, the urban voters elected 2 of the 13 electors. b. The urban curia in Volynia was entirely dominated by the Jewish Union, whose members got all 40 electors' seats; they supported the Kadet national program (D-M; MV, 2: 98-103). c. According to the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, all 7 electors from Cherkassk district were Kadets; this would bring the total of Kadet electors to at least 17. d. According to the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, the urban curia gave complete victory to Kadets; and according to the paper Otgoloski zhizni, there were at least 24 Kadets, and no Octobrists, among the urban electors (4/18/06). e. The urban elections in this province were carried without exception by a progressive nationalities bloc (Latvians, Russians, Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians) of KD orientation. In the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, 3 of the urban electors were identified as KD party members, but according to the definitions used in the Kadet tables, more would be identifiable as Kadets, or as "progressives." f. According to the newspaper Sovremenrtik, 3/21/06 (Kursk), the electors included 18 Kadets, 8 nonparty progressives, and 2 conservatives; according to the same newspaper for 3/25/06, there were 18 Kadets and 10 nonparty progressives; and according to the paper Narodnoe delo, 4/1/06, they were all KDs or KD supporters. g. In the elections in the urban curia of this province full victory went to the Estonian Progressive party, part of the Kadet alliance, and therefore according to the criteria used in the Kadet tables all 15 electors should be listed in the Kadet or progressive columns, as in Kurland. SOURCE:

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

273

Table 10 (continued) Province Nizhnii Novgorod Novgorod Olonets' Orenburg1 Orel Penzak Perm Podolia Poltava Pskov Riazan1 Samara St. Petersburg1" Saratov" Simbirsk Smolensk0 Stavropol Tauride p Tambov Tver" Tula Ufa Kharkov Kherson1

Total

KD

18 16 14 23 18 15 52 37 49 10 27 38 15 35 17 19 8 23 26 30 15 26 43 31

8 2

Progressive 5 3

Octobrists TIP —

—

— —

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

23 6 9 6 6 11 13 24 6 5 1 15 7 11 1 6 14 15

2 2 5 12

1 —

—

—

2 4 —

1 4 7 1 2 2 2 6 1 8 5 1

—

—

8 —

—

—

4

5 7 2

—

3

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

2 3 1 13 1 —

—

2 1

— —

—

1 3 1 3

— —

—

11 —

3 2 5

—

—

2 6 13

1

—

7

2 9 12 13

—

—

—

3 6 14 —

4

4

—

2

—

3

—

—

2

—

5

—

6

Right Nonparty

9 10 12 9

h. All representatives of the progressive-nationalities bloc (17 Jews and 2 Poles) (D-M [Minsk]). i. According to the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, at least 5 of these electors (all from Petrozavodsk) were Kadets. j. In Orenburg district, at least, the Kadets are known to have gotten all seven electors' seats (these included Tatar adherents to the Kadet bloc, but also at least 3 nonparty members) (D-M, Orenburg). k. According to the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, the electors included 4 Kadets, 6 progressives, 1 monarchist, and 6 unspecified. 1. According to reports from the districts, the Kadets appear to have done much better than these figures indicate: perhaps as many as 12 electors were identified as Kadets (MV, 7: 180-185). m. This overcount is unexplained in the documents. n. According to Saratovskii listok, 4/11/06, the urban curiae sent up 32 "leftists" (Kadets and further left) with the Kadets not necessarily in a majority, for the left-wing "Soiuz trudiashchikhsia" had a bigger following in the province and more electors in the provincial assembly than the Kadets (Volzhanin, 4/16/06). o. Of 16 electors noted by Dmitriev-Mamonov, there were 7 Kadets, 2 Octobrists, 1 TIP member, 2 progressives, and 4 unspecified. p. According to Krymskii vestnik, 3/22/06, there were among the electors 17 Kadets, 2 "leftists," 3 PLO members, and 1 nonparty Kadet-sympathizer. q. Dmitriev-Mamonov made the count at 14 Kadets, 9 Octobrists, 7 monarchists, and one nonparty elector.

The First National Elections

274

Table 10 (continued) Total

KD

Chernigov Estland8

37 14

Iaroslavl Totals

23 1,343

5 1 14 437

Province

Progressive 12 —

4 158

Octobrists

TIP

Right Nonparty

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

42

68

1 60

1 —

4 350

r. Dmitriev-Mamonov counted at least 2 1 Kadets among these electors, s. The urban elections here gave full victory to the progressive Estonian-Russian Union, which supported the Kadet national program (D-M [Estland]).

party affiliations suggest is reenforced by what is known of the voter turnout in the urban curia. The evidence is scanty but sufficient to suggest that about 5 0 percent of the registered electorate generally turned out for the urban elections. 129 The urban curia yielded about 40 percent Kadet electors (the real proportion probably approached 50 percent) or better than half—53 percent—for the "opposition" as a whole. Only 9 percent of the total, or 13 percent of party-affiliated electors, adhered to the center Octobrist or TIP parties, while the monarchist right did better than either one of the center parties (with sixty-eight electors) but not as well as the center as a whole: the right accounted for only 6 percent of the total, or 9 percent of partyaffiliated electors. 130 According to Table 10, the left (Kadets and "progressives") had an absolute majority in the urban curiae of thirty-seven provinces, a minority in ten, and the situation was more or less in balance or unclear in three others. In most of the provinces where the left failed to get a majority of electors, the difference was made up primarily of nonparty electors. In fact, in only one province—Moscow—did the other parties taken together provide more electors than the left; one of them, the TIP, actually outnumbered the Kadet electors (twenty-four to twenty-one). In two other provinces, Novgorod and Orel, the combined number of electors from the center and right parties more or less equaled the number from the left. In fifteen of the provinces carried by the left, with 3 7 0 electors' seats in question altogether, a decisive contribution to the prevalence of the left in general and of the Kadets in particular (in several cases, the exclusive cause of it) was made by the nationalities groups, particularly the Jewish organizations in the West and Southwest and the Baltic nationalities parties in the Baltic provinces. Predominance of the left tended to be greatest in these areas, with a few exceptions. In all the western provinces and in Volynia and Podolia in the Southwest, this was almost entirely attributable to the Jewish vote. In Vilno province all the electors (seven) in the urban curia were Jews supported by the Jewish Union and the Kadet party. 131 In Vitebsk all but

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

275

one of the urban electors were Jewish, candidates of the Jewish electoral committee, and a fair number of them were members of the Kadet party. In Volynia all forty urban electors were candidates of the Jewish Union adhering to the Kadet party. At least twenty-five of the twenty-six urban electors in Grodno province were candidates of the Jewish Union; at least eight of them were Kadet party members. 132 In Kovno all the urban electors, again, were the candidates of the Jewish bloc. The same was true in Mogilev, where most were also Kadet party members. In Minsk seventeen of the twenty urban electors were candidates of the Jewish electoral committee, which cooperated in the elections with the Kadets and other nationalities groups (the other three electors were candidates of the Polish committee). At least half were formally members of the Kadet party. In Podolia the thirty-seven electors included thirty-two Jews, candidates of the Jewish Union and the Jewish electoral committees in the towns of that province. As noted earlier, Jews constituted a very high proportion of the total urban population in all these provinces, approaching and in several cases exceeding 50 percent and everywhere being by far the largest single nationality group in the urban population. 133 The makeup of the urban population was more variegated in a number of other provinces where the urban curia was dominated by the left. Here the nationalities groups participating in the left bloc around the Kadet party were usually given electors' seats in numbers proportional to their weight in the population. Since the number of electors allotted to a given urban curia was often smaller than the number of nationalities groups involved, not all participating groups got to be represented among the electors. In Poltava most of the urban seats were won by representatives of the Kadet, Ukrainian Democrat, and Jewish Union bloc. In Chernigov province the comfortable majority for the Kadet-progressive bloc was helped considerably by the Jewish urban vote, although the Jewish population was only large enough to gain five electors' seats in the curia for the province as a whole. 134 In Kherson the bloc of Kadets, Ukrainian Democrats, Jews and Poles got most of the electors' seats. At least twenty-one of the thirty-one electors were Kadet party members, including Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles, with Russians and Jews predominating. 135 In Tauride province, where the Kadets got seventeen of the twenty-three electors' seats and all but three of the others went to the left as well, the Kadet candidates were supported by Jews and Tatars in addition to significant portions of the Ukrainian and Russian voters. 136 In the Baltic provinces the nationalities blocs linked with the national Kadet organization took all the urban electors' places without exception. These were dominated by Latvians and Estonians. The Germans, who in all three provinces constituted a significant minority of the urban population, were unable to get a single elector into the provincial assemblies through the urban curia. Urban Russians, Poles, and Jews contributed to the victory of the nationalities parties. 137

276

The First National Elections

In most of the central Russian provinces where they prevailed, the Kadets' margin of victory was less great than in the borderlands, although there were a few provinces where the margin was substantial: in Viatka, where nineteen of the thirty-four electors were Kadets; in Petersburg, where thirteen of the fifteen electors were Kadets; and in Saratov, where they took twenty-four of the thirty-five electors' seats. Significant if less impressive victories were recorded in Vladimir and Iaroslavl provinces. There tended to be a close correspondence in the central provinces between the extent of Kadet organization and agitation during the campaign period and their degree of success in the urban elections. This was evident in Petersburg, Vladimir, and Iaroslavl, where the Kadet organizations were particularly large and active. In central Russia the victory of the Kadets was generally that of the party proper, but in at least two provinces, Viatka and Saratov, independent left parties—the Democratic Union in Viatka and the Union of Laboring Men in Saratov—contributed significantly to the left victory. Both stood programmatically between the Kadets and the revolutionary left. 1 3 8 Conversely, as noted, in most of the provinces where the left failed to make a good showing the difference was taken up primarily by nonparty electors, suggesting a relatively low level of political mobilization among the urban population. These were for the most part outlying provinces or provinces in which political agitation had been held to a minimum by local authorities using the provisions of the emergency legislation: Astrakhan, Bessarabia, Vologda, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Olonets, and Stavropol. In Novgorod and Orel, where the combined strength of the parties to the right of the Kadets was at least equal to that of the left, a low level of Kadet activity during the campaign resulting from administrative restrictions met with a remarkably high level of activity on the "right" (Octobrists in Novgorod, and the more conservative Union for Law and Order in Orel). 1 3 9 The Moscow provincial urban elections were a case apart. The level of political mobilization within the urban electorate at large was very high. Both the Kadets and the center bloc were uncommonly active throughout the district towns of the province, and most urban electors ran under party labels. The Octobrist-Trade and Industry center bloc easily outnumbered the Kadets in the urban elections. This unique outcome was due to the success of the center bloc's campaign for support among the urban population of the district towns, especially merchants and their employees. In several districts—Klin, Bronnitsy, Podolsk, and Serpukhov—this kind of support was sufficient to give all but one or two of the electors to the TIP, and a majority to the center bloc in most of the others. Nearly half of all the Kadet electors in the provincial urban curia came from the single district of Moscow (without the capital city). This fact strongly suggests that although the commercial-manufacturing elements mobilized for the center were able to dominate the elections in the old commercial towns of Moscow province, in Moscow district the spillover from the capital city limits of its more

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

m

varied urban population (which made possible the overwhelming victory of the Kadets in the capital itself) allowed the Kadets to carry the urban elections for that one district as a whole. An element in the success of the center bloc among the urban electorate of Moscow province may also have been the recent memory of the December uprising in Moscow; in any case it was widely cultivated by the center bloc campaigners, who did not fail to remind their listeners and readers that the Kadets had refused to condemn the revolutionary parties for their behavior during the December events. 140 The Special City Elections As can be seen from Table 11, the special city elections returned overwhelmingly Kadet electors. In the two capitals and in seven other cities the entire contingents of electors were candidates of the Kadet party; in another four the large majority were Kadets; and in only three, Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, and Tula, did the Kadets fail to obtain an absolute majority of electors—but only in Ekaterinoslav was the result the election of a nonKadet to the Duma. All but that one of the twenty-eight Duma deputies sent up from the special city elections in European Russia were Kadet-bloc candidates. 141 The much larger proportion of Kadet electors returned in the special city elections as compared to the urban curia elections at large appears to confirm the points already made about the character of the party and its appeal: the Kadets were predominantly an urban party; they were most active in the large towns; and they drew membership and voter support from the more "modern" elements of the urban population (with the exception of much of the industrial labor force), whose relative weight in the population tended to be directly related to the size of the town. Generally speaking, the larger the town, the better the Kadet showing in the elections, and the special elections were held in the twenty largest towns. (Accordingly the Kadets also tended to do better in the urban elections in the districts of the provincial capitals, usually the largest towns in the provinces.)142 There were exceptions to this rule: as Table 11 shows, elections in a few of the smaller cities with separate elections—including the smallest of all, Kursk, with a population of only 52,896—were as exclusively dominated by the Kadets as the largest cities of the empire, but the general correlation between size of population and Kadet strength is strong. Another factor facilitating Kadet victory in the larger urban centers was the mechanics of the election process. The possibilities for party-line voting in general and for dominance in the elections by the Kadet bloc in particular were enhanced by the rules providing for voting by secret ballot and permitting use of printed ballots. In the urban curia at large there were a

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292

The First National Elections

agitation had tended to produce a disproportionately large number of moderate and conservative workers' representatives. The tactic could have succeeded, from their point of view, only if the boycott had been universal in at least a few provinces and cities, something they should not reasonably have anticipated. Table 13 shows the data presented in this chapter on the political orientation of the electors (with all cautions still in effect). The Kadets emerged as the preeminent urban party in the first elections, taking about 4 0 percent of the electors' seats in the provincial urban curia and nearly 1500 of the 1 7 6 0 electors' seats contested in the special city elections. Of all the urban electors' seats contested (provincial and special city combined), the Kadets filled better than 60 percent with members of their party. As a result, the Kadets sent twenty-six deputies to the Duma from the special city elections, including some of the party's most impressive figures. Thanks mainly to their strength in the urban curia, the Kadets also constituted the largest defined party group among the provincial electors, with about 14 percent of all provincial electors accounted for. Their weight varied from province to province, but in most assemblies they were far from having the majority required for certain victory in the election of Duma deputies, even assuming that in most cases they would be able to count on the support of their "progressive" colleagues (Kadets and "progressives" together made up only slightly over a quarter of all electors). The decisive factor in most assemblies would be the ability of the partisan groups of electors to attract sufficient support for a majority or plurality from the large mass of nonparty electors, who constituted nearly 60 percent of all electors. The bulk of the nonparty electors were peasants from the rural curiae. Given the general homogeneity of the peasants' outlook and their universal preoccupation with the issue of land, it could be anticipated that in many assemblies they could be mobilized as a group in support of that

Table 13

Political Orientations of Provincial Electors

Curia

Total

Accounted for

KD

Progressives

Octobrists

TIP

Monarchist

Non party

Peasants Landowners Urban Total

2,532 1,956 1,343 5,831

2,262 1,760 1,115 5,137

84 202 437 723

237 255 158 650

18 146 60 224

12 42 54

116 291 68 475

1,807 854 350 3,011

SOURCE:

Vestnik PNS,

1906,

no. 6, pp. 441-47.

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections

293

party or group of nonpeasant electors who promised most in regard to the resolution of the land question from the peasant point of view. Of all parties that had defined agrarian programs and were represented in some strength in the provincial assemblies, the Kadets generally stood the greatest chance of success. Nevertheless, a great deal depended on the specific mix of political orientations and on a number of other circumstances peculiar to each province.

6

Phase II: The Provincial Elections

On March 26, 1906, Dmitriev-Mamonov sent an urgent report to Prime Minister Witte on the electoral process to that date in twenty-eight provinces. In it he speculated on the outcome of the voting in the provincial electoral assemblies, a majority of which were beginning their work that same day. 1 After reviewing the distribution of electors in the assemblies by curia, Dmitriev-Mamonov analyzed the political orientations within each curia. The urban voters, he concluded, had given victory primarily to the "left parties": among 445 electors of known political orientation, 260 were Kadets and another 46 were "progressives" or members of other parties of the left; the Octobrists and the TIP together had 103 electors; and the parties to their right were represented by a total of 29 electors. Among 398 politically identified electors from the landowners' curia there were 102 Kadets and 45 "progressives"; 110 Octobrists, TIP members, and other "moderate liberals"; and 134 electors identified with the right-wing parties. The landowners' electors, in other words, were fairly evenly distributed among left, center, and right orientations. Dmitriev-Mamonov then went on to consider the electors of the two nonpeasant curiae together: in terms of "left" and "right," the "left" had a significant margin of 453 to 376 (counting the center and right together). The electors from the peasant curia were described as "an entirely unknown quantity," with no more than one hundred occupying any kind of defined political position. "One can only say that the peasants show a pronounced tendency to vote down all nonpeasants, and therefore the peasant electors in many provinces 2 will try to put through their own candidates as members of the Duma without joining either right or left." 3 The struggle in the provincial assemblies, Dmitriev-Mamonov concluded, would involve three groups: "The KDs, the center-right coalition, and the peasants, and in the majority of cases no one of these groups will possess an absolute majority." As a result, it seemed likely that in many provinces the elections would be completed only on the third day, when a plurality would be sufficient for election of deputies. This situation was seen to be generally most favorable for the Kadets, thanks to their solidarity and, in some places, to their numbers. The "coalition" of the center and right, by contrast, although in some places an established fact, was unstable; its

Phase II: The Provincial Elections

295

constituent parts were too diverse to act with similar solidarity. The.peasant electors, in their turn, were too unorganized; moreover, their success would be hampered by "petty vanity and the wish [of the individual peasant elector] to get himself elected member of the State Duma." 4 Turning finally to individual provinces, Dmitriev-Mamonov wrote that victory was more or less assured for the Kadets in the provinces of Vladimir, Iaroslavl, and Petersburg (in these provinces the left bloc, with the Kadets as senior partners, held a comfortable majority of the electors). They were seen to have good chances of success also in Kursk, Kostroma, Tauride, Kaluga, and possibly in Tver and Kharkov as well (in all these provinces except Kharkov the left bloc was still the dominant party group with about a third of all electors; Tver and Kharkov were presumably more questionable than the others because of the relatively strong showing there of the center and right parties). Victory for the center and right was assured, Dmitriev-Mamonov thought, in Novgorod and likely in Orel and Tula (in these provinces the center-right group outnumbered the left considerably and the peasants lacked an absolute majority—although they were very close to it in Tula). The assemblies of Arkhangelsk, Olonets, Pskov, and Ufa provinces were likely to send to the Duma exclusively nonparty peasant deputies (the peasant curia in all these assemblies had sizable majorities among the electors except Pskov, and two thirds of the Pskov electors were in fact peasants). Dmitriev-Mamonov disclaimed the possibility of making even an approximate prediction of the outcome of the elections for the remaining provinces, especially those of the western region, where the party struggle was overshadowed by the contest between nationalities. 5 Table 14 shows how Dmitriev-Mamonov's predictions stand up against the actual outcome of the elections in the provinces he considered. As these comparisons show, Dmitriev-Mamonov considerably underestimated the fortunes of the Kadets by and large (he appears to have overestimated their strength only in Kaluga), and he overestimated the strength of the center and right; they nowhere emerged with a majority of deputies in these provinces. Finally, he also seriously overestimated the ability of the peasants to put through deputies exclusively from their midst in those provinces where the peasant curia provided a majority of the electors.6 As with the preliminary stages of the elections, it is best to begin the analysis of the provincial assembly elections by looking at their results. Table 15 juxtaposes information about the electors in the provincial assemblies with information about the political orientation of the Duma deputies at the time they were elected. The table shows that the deputies who were elected in the provincial assemblies fall overwhelmingly into two groups: Kadet bloc and nonparty. The nonparty group is larger than the Kadet group, but if the 51 deputies

296

The First National Elections

Table 14 Election Predictions and Outcome.

D-M Predictions

Number of Deputies' Seats Contested

Kadet victory assured or likely Vladimir

6

Iaroslavl

4

Kaluga

5

Kharkov

10

Kostroma

6

Kursk St. Petersburg Tver Victory for center-right Novgorod Orel Tula Victory for nonparty peasants Arkhangelsk Olonets Pskov Ufa

SOURCE: T S G L A , f . 1 2 7 6 , o p . 2 , d . 8 , p p

10 3 8 6 8 5

2 3 4 10

175-177,

Deputies Elected, by Political Orientation

4 KDs, 1 progressive (factory owner), 1 nonparty peasant 3 KD regulars, 1 nonparty peasant 2 KDs, 1 centrist, 1 rightist, 1 nonparty peasant 6 KDs, 3 progressive peasants, 1 worker 5 KDs, 1 independent leftist All KDs 2 KDs, 1 peasant (KD) 7 KDs, 1 peasant SD 1 KD, 1 Octobrist, 4 nonparty peasants 1 Octobrist, 7 peasants 2 Octobrists, 3 peasants

2 KDs 1 KD, 1 Octobrist, 1 peasant (Octobrist) 1 Octobrist, 3 peasants 4 KDs, 6 Muslim nationalists (supporting KD program) and various handbooks

and

newspaper accounts about the membership of the first Duma.

elected separately by the peasant curia, most of w h o m were nonpartisan, are removed, the size of the t w o groups elected plenarily by the assemblies is virtually identical: 143 Kadets and 142 nonparty. T h e Kadet deputies were f o r the most p a r t professional people and zemtsy f r o m the u r b a n a n d landowners' curiae. There were as many as

Phase II: The Provincial Elections

297

twenty-five persons of peasant origin among them (the number of these from the peasant curia was smaller, about sixteen), but most of them were intelligentsia. Most of the nonparty deputies were electors from the peasant curia. Their "nonparty" label, however, cannot generally be taken to indicate an absence of political awareness. The deputies from the peasant curia of European Russia—in all there were about 180 of them7—included not only land-working peasants (zemledel'tsy) but a significant number of rural intelligenty, third-element employees, men in trade or commerce, and even a few urban professionals: about 60 percent of them were strictly landworking peasants; perhaps as many as 25 percent apparently had no occupational contact with the land; and the remainder combined peasant farming with some other occupation, usually in trade or crafts.8 Although these figures alone give sufficient warning against treating the nonparty group as a homogeneous mass, this was more than a catchall category of the statisticians. Table 15 reflects the dominant tendency (outside the borderlands, where national groupings sometimes prevailed) for the deputies from individual provinces to be polarized between the predominantly nonpeasant candidates of the Kadet party and electors from the peasant curia, but it reveals little more than that. In order to properly understand the varying fortunes of these and other groups, and the attitudes and goals prevailing among the electors, it is necessary to examine the political process that occurred within the individual assemblies. In keeping with the general theme of this study—the role of the political parties in the elections—the assemblies may be grouped for examination according to the varying fortunes of the dominant party bloc. As may be seen from Table 15, 21.7 percent (31) of the Kadets were elected in eight assemblies outside the western borderlands where they enjoyed virtually exclusive success.9 Another 36.4 percent (52) were elected in twelve assemblies (also excluding the western borderlands) where the deputies' seats were divided exclusively between Kadets and nonparty electors.10 Another 17.5 percent (25) of the Kadet deputies came from fourteen provincial assemblies (once again excluding the West) where deputies other than Kadets or peasants were also elected.11 Thus just over three fourths (108:143) of the Kadet-bloc deputies, mostly members of the party properly speaking, were elected in the predominantly Russian-populated part of European Russia. The remaining 35 were elected in nine of the twelve provinces of the western borderlands.12 In view of the absolute majority held by peasant-curia electors in fifteen provinces and by peasants including smallholders from the landowners' curia in several more, it is remarkable that exclusively peasant deputies were returned only from the assemblies of Podolia, Stavropol, and Tambov. To them may be added the assemblies of Vologda, Orel, and Pskov, where in each case a single Octobrist from the landowners' curia was elected in addition to the peasant deputies.13



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Results and Prospects

355

Table 17 Political Orientations of First Duma Deputies, Late April 1906. Parties

Number

Percent

Kadets

182

Leftists

47

Progressives

36

8.03

Octobrists

26

5.8

40 10.4

Trade-Industry

2

Rightists

8

1.8

Democratic Reforms

4

0.9

Nationalities parties

60

13.4

Nonparty

83

Total

448

SOURCE: Sidel'nikov, Obrazovanie 1962), p. 192.

0.44

18.5 100

(rounded)

i deiatel'nost' pervoi gosudarstvennoi

dumy (Moscow,

a result of the combined processes of ongoing party formation and the continual arrival of new deputies from distant regions of the empire. Table 17 shows how the deputies were distributed among various political groupings at the outset of the Duma sessions. By mid-May the party composition of the Duma, according to Borodin's analysis of the same 448 deputies' responses to his questionnaire, looked like Table 18. Table 19 reveals the disposition of deputies by parties near the end of the Duma's existence. As can be seen, once constituted the general proportions of the

Table 18 Political Affiliations of First Duma Deputies, May 1 0 - 1 5 , 1906. Parties

Number

Percent

Kadets

153

34.1

Trudoviki

107

23.8

63

14.0

Autonomists Democratic Reforms

4

0.9

13

2.9.

Moderate Progressives

2

0.4

Trade-Industry

1

0.2

Nonparty

105

23.4

Total

448

Octobrists

100

(rounded)

SOURCE: Borodin, "Lichnyi sostav pervoi gosudarstvennoi dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh," in A. A. Mukhanov and V. D. Nabokov, eds., Pervaia gosudarstvennaia duma. Vypusk pervyi. Politicheskoe znachenie pervoi dumy (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 23-24. (Sidelnikov selected the same 448 deputies for his reconstruction of the political complexion of the Duma at its outset.)

356

Results and Prospects

Table 19 Political Affiliations of First Duma Deputies, June 26, 1906. Borodin

Sidelnikov

Parties

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Kadets

179

37.4

176

36.0

Trudoviki

94

19.6

102

21.0

SDs

17

3.6

18

3.7

Polish Kolo

32

6.7

33

6.8

2.5

14

2.8

1.2

Nonparty

12 6 26 12 100

6 26 12 100

Total

478

Nonparty Autonomists Democratic Reforms Peaceful Renewal party Progressives

SOURCE:

deiatel'nost,

.54 2.5 20.9

100

Adapted from Borodin, "Lichnyi sostav," p. p. 196.

487 27,

1.3 5.3 2.5 20.7

100

and Sidel'nikov, Obrazovanie i

larger political groupings did not change radically during the course of the Duma's existence. The Kadets sent about 130 established party members to the first Duma from the elections in European Russia, and this number grew to somewhere between 1 7 0 and 180 by the end of the Duma session, mainly through the arrival of deputies from the Caucasus, central Asia, and Siberia. 2 They constituted more than a third of all the deputies assembled. The second largest formation in the first Duma, 3 the Trudovik fraction, began to take shape in Petersburg just before the opening of the Duma, as a few deputies-elect who were veterans of the Peasant Union took it upon themselves to unite the peasant deputies as they arrived from the provinces—first the not insignificant number who were known to have had connections with the Peasant Union, and then, through them, other peasant deputies-elect who were thought to be sympathetic to the union. A sort of orientation club for arriving peasant deputies was set up for this purpose near the Nikolaevskii railway station. The Trudovik organizers at first planned to create an exclusively peasant organization, mainly for fear that the presence of nonpeasants would scare off the politically uncommitted peasant deputies whom they hoped to keep away from the Kadets or other parties and to inobilize for the left. The artificiality of maintaining an exclusively peasant fraction soon became apparent, however, to the group's main initiators, Aladin, Shaposhnikov, Kutomanov, Buslov, and Zabolotnyi. Although elected from the peasant curia, they were all intelligenty who had, in the words of the party's historian, "long since ceased to share [the peasants'] perception of the world

Results and Prospects

357

and way of life." 4 And more like them were arriving daily. After the arrival of the Saratov delegation, most of whose members shared these characteristics, it was agreed that the fraction would be open to "all who stand for the laboring people, who live by their own labor, and are capable of defending the interests of the laboring people." 5 The group grew rapidly to about 130 members, and then shrank to just over 100; about 80 percent of the members were of peasant origin, but only some 40 percent were peasant cultivators. 6 Although there was a considerable variety of political orientations and related differences over such concrete issues as the agrarian and nationalities questions among the Trudoviki, it was the populist Peasant Union group that took the lead and generally set the tone of the fraction. 7 Virtually identical in size to the Trudovik group was the nonparty group, which was not really a disciplined fraction but a kind of political way station. One hundred five deputies, nearly two thirds of them Russian landworking peasants, identified themselves as nonparty for the May questionnaire. Some of them appear to have been sympathetic toward the Kadets and other parties of the opposition but stayed out of the fractions for fear of retaliation from local authorities. 8 The remainder were mostly Russian nobles from the landowners' curia who were generally conservative in their views but apparently did not wish to associate themselves openly in the Duma with the defeated monarchist organizations. 9 The next largest formation to take shape in the Duma was the Autonomist group, to which sixty-three deputies without other party affiliations belonged at the time of the May questionnaire; these were predominantly Poles from the Kingdom of Poland and the western provinces. 10 The Autonomists soon formed into two distinct groups: the larger Polish Circle (Koto), consisting of the thirty-four NationalDemocratic deputies from the Kingdom of Poland; and the smaller group of "Nonparty Autonomists," mostly Poles from the western provinces who stayed out of the Kolo to avoid accusations of having abandoned the interests of their multinational constituencies for the cause of Polish separatism. The other western nationalities did not organize separate fractions in the first Duma. With the consolidation of the Polish groups, whose members numbered together about forty-five, the remaining deputies who had initially identified themselves as Autonomists joined one or another of the large fractions, primarily the Kadets or the Trudoviki; a few remained in the nonparty group. 11 There were no other groups of comparable size in the first Duma, although an interesting attempt was made there to consolidate a large centrist fraction by bringing together the few Octobrists, right-wing Kadet deputies, and peasants. The upshot of this attempt was the disappearance of a separate Octobrist fraction and the formation of the Peaceful Renewal

358

Results and Prospects

group (PR), which eventually grew to twenty-six members, the same number that had entered the Duma as candidates of the Octobrist bloc. It included most of the original Octobrist-bloc deputies, two right-wing Kadets, one member of the Party of Democratic Reforms, and one of the two Trade-Industry party members who had been elected to the Duma. All but one of them were landowners. 12 The new fraction was formed on the initiative of the Octobrist deputies Count Geiden and M. M. Stakhovich, who persuaded their fellow Octobrists in the Duma to abandon the Octobrist label and endorse a more radical program of land reform, which in its essentials differed little from the Kadet program. 13 Their proclaimed long-range aim (whence came their justification for dropping the unpopular name and changing the agrarian program) was to create a party based on cooperation between the landowning gentry and the peasants. 14 Geiden and his colleagues were hoping to get the Octobrist organization as a whole to adopt these changes, thereby laying the foundations for an eventual center-constitutionalist majority in the Duma that would occupy a position essentially midway between the Octobrists and the Kadets: a party with firmer reform commitments, especially in regard to the agrarian question, than the Octobrists, but less rigid in its opposition to the government than the Kadets. Their démarche led to a crisis in the Octobrist party. Following the Duma's dismissal and the Vyborg appeal by many of the Kadet and left deputies, which was condemned by Peaceful Renewal, Shipov emerged from inactivity once again, now to lend his support to Peaceful Renewal and its aim of forming a grand center coalition. He arranged meetings for this purpose in late July between leading Octobrists, the PR leaders, and Kadets (Maklakov and Struve among them) who were critical of their party's Vyborg tactic. Shortly after these negotiations came Guchkov's public expression of support, on August 24, for the government's introduction of field courts-martial and other new measures of repression introduced following the assassination attempt on the life of the new prime minister, P. A. Stolypin. Geiden and the other PR leaders then resigned from the Union of October 17, as did Shipov, who now entered the PR. The new party elected a temporary central committee in September, chaired by Geiden, and, following an initial refusal, it was legalized in October. The appearance of Peaceful Renewal was a test of the cohesiveness of both the Octobrist and Kadet organizations, and both withstood the test without major losses. The Octobrist organization remained by and large with Guchkov, approving his tactic of supporting the government's actions for the restoration of order without repudiating the union's constitutionalist commitment in principle. And the Kadet organization survived the crisis caused in its ranks by the Vyborg appeal through the efforts of Miliukov and other centrist leaders who arranged a compromise position for the party on Vyborg: approving the manifesto condemning the government for

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having dissolved the Duma, but abstaining from implementation of its call for acts of civil disobedience. 15 With the arrival of the five Caucasian deputies who had been elected as candidates of the SD party (Mensheviks), and in keeping with the Menshevik-sponsored resolution taken at the SD congress in late April, a separate Social-Democratic fraction was formed in the first Duma. The Caucasian SDs were joined by another late-arriving SD deputy from Akmolinsk and by deputies already present, mostly workers from a special workers' group in the Trudovik fraction. Together they brought the fraction to a total membership of seventeen or eighteen. The three or four successful candidates of the business parties joined after mid-May with another eight or nine deputies in a "progressive group," which Borodin described as the "extreme right" of the Duma. 17 The smallest fraction in the first Duma at the time of its dissolution, with six members, was the Party of Democratic Reforms led by M. M. Kovalevskii and V. D. Kuzmin-Karavaev. In most respects the Democratic Reform fraction operated as an appendage of the Kadet party in the first Duma. The overall effect of the Kadets' unexpected success in the elections was to reenforce substantially their commitment to the tactical resolutions on the Duma that had been adopted at the second party congress in January and, more generally, to heighten the anticipation that the Duma would become an "organ of struggle" with the government over the still unresolved issue of whether or not Russia was to be transformed into a proper parliamentary regime. This commitment was made even stronger at the third party congress, which was held on the eve of the Duma's convocation. There was much heavier representation at the third congress than in the previous congresses from radically oriented provincial groups, whose delegates appeared flush with victory in the elections, irritated with their conflicts with the local bureaucracy, and little informed about the situation in Petersburg. Feeling was widespread at the congress that the party had ridden to victory on a wave of popular revolutionary sentiment; that the party's deputies-elect accordingly had the responsibility of representing not only the party but this general revolutionary mood. 18 The prevailing combative mood was further reenforced by the regime's recent efforts to forestall "constituent" action by the Duma: the promulgation of the statutes on the Duma and the State Council on February 20. The government's floating of a large loan from France in order to withstand financial pressure from the Duma further reenforced anticipation of confrontation. There was much indecisive debate at the Kadet congress over programmatic issues, especially the agrarian question. The constituency of the congress and the heightened atmosphere in which it was working made consensus on specific programmatic issues even less likely than at the second

360

Results and Prospects

congress. In the end, the third congress passed the issues on, in the form of the recommendations of the several program committees, to the party's parliamentary delegation. There may have been cool heads present, especially among the central committee members, 19 but the debates on tactics tended to be over whether to adopt radical or more radical resolutions: the concluding statement of the resolution on Duma tactics proposed by the central committee, which enjoined the Kadet deputies to defend "the people's demands as formulated by the party.. .even to the point of an open break with the government," or that introduced by the radical leader of the Viatka party group, I. N. Ovchinnikov, which asserted that the "progressive majority" of the Duma would uncompromisingly fulfill the people's will and would turn directly to the people for support if they were to run into obstacles set by the "dying regime, in the form either of the bureaucratic government or the State Council." After two inconclusive ballotings on these versions, a third gave a majority of 119 to 73 for the central committee's text. 20 The unanticipated publication of the Fundamental Laws on the penultimate day of the congress only increased the sense of righteous outrage and made conflict seem more likely than before. 21 A special resolution was issued, condemning that act as a violation of the rights of the people, an attempt to transform the Duma into "the handmaiden of the bureaucratic government," and ending with the declaration that "no obstacles set up by the government shall restrain the people's representatives from carrying out the tasks set them by the people." 22 "This was already the style of the first Duma," Miliukov recalled in his memoirs, "the conflict had, in reality, begun before it opened." 23 There were differences of opinion in party councils and within the Kadet Duma delegation, but the prevailing view on the eve of the Duma's convocation was that the party's chances of winning the struggle for shifting the center of political power from bureaucracy to parliament were good, that the government would not dare withstand the Duma. Thirty-three years later, Miliukov ruefully recalled the stormy applause that had greeted Kizevetter's ringing words at the third congress: "If they dissolve the Duma, that will be the government's last act, after which it will cease to exist." 24 The party's tactic for the first Duma, elaborated as usual mainly by Miliukov, endorsed by the central committee, and accepted essentially intact by the third party congress, was to confine the conflict with the regime insofar as possible to the Duma, to keep the struggle for power, as Miliukov characteristically put it, "within civilized limits," and to let the burden of breaking those limits, should things come to that, lie with the government. 25 This tactic required accepting the institutional framework created by the February 20 statutes on the Duma and the State Council. Work could be done within that framework, in the Duma, on the two fundamental popular mandates expressed in the elections and already embodied in the second

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party congress resolutions: revision of the electoral law to universal suffrage, and agrarian reform including expropriation of private land. 26 The first order of work in the Duma was to introduce bills on these subjects. The formal resolutions adopted by the third congress added as subjects for early legislative initiative the issues of civil rights, national rights, political amnesty, and the abolition of capital punishment. It also called for appointment of a parliamentary committee for investigation of illegal actions committed by government officials since October 17. 27 The stance taken by the Kadets in the first Duma was influenced by their need to maintain a coalition with the Trudoviki, whom they by and large recognized as representing the mood of the masses (even if they did not know how to properly defend the masses' interests in parliament) and without whose support the Kadets could not have maintained a reliable majority in the Duma. 28 In any case, for the Kadets, who for the most part controlled the first Duma's procedures, as much as for the Trudoviki leaders and the Social Democrats to their left, the first Duma was first and foremost the scene of a struggle with the government for political power; its aim, as Petrunkevich put it, was to "break the power of the bureaucracy." Many of the speeches made by Kadets on the floor of the Duma left nothing in their stridency and radicalism to those of the most fiery SD and Trudovik leaders. 29 The distinction between themselves and the far left on which the Kadet leaders insisted—that the Kadets were committed to waging the struggle in parliament and generally within the bounds of the Fundamental Laws and that the Duma was "more than just a means to them," whereas the leftists looked on the Duma purely as a means for discrediting the regime and appealing for popular support 30 —must have been small comfort to the government under attack, although some members of it were certainly aware of these differences and had hopes of splitting the Kadets away from the opposition by coopting them into the government. The atmosphere of conflict led in short order to a state of paralysis in the relations between the Duma and the Goremykin government. Following the emperor's greeting to the members of the Duma and the State Council, the Duma, on the initiative of the Kadets, produced a reply to the speech from the throne (as they chose to interpret Nicholas's greeting), in which the general goals of the Duma majority were laid out—both those principal goals that could be advanced by legislative initiative in the Duma and those that would demand exercise of the royal prerogative under the Fundamental Laws. 31 The reply, which contained in generally stated terms all the points of the Kadet tactical program, was adopted unanimously by the Duma, with Count Geiden and ten other moderates absenting themselves from the chambers during the roll call. The emperor refused to receive the Duma delegation selected to present the reply, and on May 13, Prime Minister Goremykin delivered the government's answer to the reply, which rejected all its points out of hand,

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Results and Prospects

making no distinction between questions on which the Duma had the right to prepare legislation and those that required exercise of the royal prerogative. The rejection of the Duma's agrarian-reform plan, and of its provision for expropriation in particular, was given especially detailed refutation. 32 The response was taken as an outrage by the Duma majority; the minister's anticipatory rejection of the measures within the Duma's competence was declared a violation of the constitution; and a formal vote of nonconfidence and a demand for the government's resignation was passed by a large majority in the Duma. At this point relations between the government and the Duma essentially broke down. On the government side, the ministers ceased attending Duma sessions, generally sending their assistants to answer Duma interpellations (if responding at all), and during the first month of the Duma's existence they presented no legislation for the Duma's consideration, with the exception of two bills prepared in the Ministry of Enlightenment concerning the establishment of certain private courses of instruction and funds for construction of a greenhouse and a laundry at Iurev University. Demands for the Duma's dismissal were being made in the Council of Ministers even before the Duma's formal adoption of its reply, and the view was widespread there that cooperation with the Duma was out of the question; it would have to be dismissed and the electoral law revised to produce a Duma not dominated by the opposition. It was decided, however, to await an appropriate occasion: immediate dismissal without sufficient provocation would probably produce repercussions in the country (reports that the Duma had wide popular support, that great hopes were attached to it, and that the provincial governmental institutions were widely discredited were coming in from the governors and were being communicated to the tsar by Stolypin and Goremykin). 33 The Duma, on its side, proceeded directly to the preparation of its own legislative bills, principally based on the drafts that the Kadet central committee subcommittees had been at work on since their second congress, ignoring in the process the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fundamental Laws. 3 4 The first area of substantive legislation begun by the Duma was agrarian reform, with draft bills sent to committee by the Kadets and by the Trudovik fraction. Both, of course, provided for large-scale expropriation of private estates, with the Trudovik plan going considerably further in that regard than that of the Kadets. 3 5 Although it may be an exaggeration to say that the Duma simply ignored the bills of some substance that began to be submitted to it by the ministries in June, it is true that most of them were never put on the agenda, let alone sent to committee, before the Duma's dissolution, and only one, a bill for supplementary famine relief funds, was approved by the first Duma. 3 6 At the same time, the Duma used its right of interpellation very extensively in order to carry on a running inquiry into current administra-

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tive practices, including an inquiry into complicity by government officials in the Belostok pogrom, which occurred while the Duma was in session. Special investigating committees for inquiries in the field were appointed, and a general Duma committee for the investigation of criminal actions by government officials after October 17 was set up at the end of May. In all, there were nearly 400 interpellations introduced in the two months of the Duma's existence, and on the few occasions when ministry officials appeared to respond to them, they were often booed and insulted from the floor and, on at least one occasion, not even allowed to speak. 37 Faced with the hostility of the Duma and yet reluctant to dismiss it, a number of highly placed persons, including several ministers in the Goremykin government, explored over the second half of June various combinations for altering the composition of the government so as to make coexistence with the Duma possible. One of the combinations proposed, the only one that could have succeeded in significantly altering relations with the Duma, was the creation of a Kadet ministry; that is, a government de facto responsible to the Duma majority. Although none of the more powerful ministers in the Goremykin government supported this solution, which would have entailed their removal from power, it was given serious consideration in circles near the throne and, apparently, by Nicholas II himself. 38 This solution would have been acceptable to the Kadet leaders, several of whom (principally Miliukov and Muromtsev) were approached by administration figures at the time, and it is clear that some of them, including Miliukov, believed for a time that there was a strong possibility of their being summoned to power. 39 It is not clear when the alternative of forming a ministry from the parliamentary majority was ruled out in government circles by the consolidation against it of the principal ministers and other officials who would have been the first to lose their positions in the event. 40 In any case, the campaign for dissolving the Duma and creating a new but entirely "bureaucratic" ministry under his leadership was decisively joined by the energetic minister of internal affairs, P. A. Stolypin, toward the end of June. It appears that Goremykin took the decision to proceed directly to dissolve the Duma on July 2, and in the next two or three days the plan was elaborated and sanctioned in principle by the tsar. Sometime between July 3 and July 5, the final decision was taken by the tsar to dissolve the Duma on July 9 and to replace Goremykin by Stolypin, whose decisiveness in the preparations for dissolution had apparently convinced Nicholas that he was the man to take charge under the new political conditions. 41 The occasion for dismissal presented itself to Stolypin in the "Declaration to the People" issued by the Duma in response to a public communiqué of June 20 by the Council of Ministers on the agrarian question. This communiqué, which laid out the government's alternative to the agrarian reforms proposed by the Duma majority, was apparently made in anticipa-

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tion of the impending dissolution of the Duma. According to the advice given the tsar by one of the most persistent advocates of dissolution, State Comptroller P. K. Shvanebakh, a move against the Duma should be preceded by a proclamation for the peasants, "explaining the complete impracticality of the Duma's agrarian projects and laying out the ensemble of the government's measures for meeting the peasants' needs." 42 The aim was to combat the idea that the Duma had been martyred for its defense of peasant interests, and it was executed with rather impressive demagogic skill.43 In the Duma the government communiqué was generally taken as a threat to the Duma's legislative authority, and it was soon decided (on the proposal of the moderate Kuzmin-Karavaev) to answer with the Duma's own public statement on the agrarian question. Following stormy debate a declaration restating the Duma's agrarian-reform plans, pointing out that the government communiqué did not have the force of law, and calling on the population to wait for solution of the agrarian problem by the Duma was passed by the Kadets alone on July 6: the other fractions to right and left either abstaining or voting against it for their several reasons. As Miliukov remarked in his memoirs, the Kadets were put in the unenviable position of simultaneously taking the step that would serve as the pretext for the Duma's dissolution and revealing that they could not in fact command the solid majority on which a Kadet ministry could rely. 44 In the early hours of Sunday, July 9, the doors of the Tauride Palace were locked, a guard mounted, and the imperial order dissolving the Duma and calling for new elections and convening of a new Duma in seven months was posted on the doors. Led by the Kadets, about a third of the deputies repaired to Vyborg just across the Finnish border, where they proceeded to sign and publish the next day a manifesto "to the citizens of all Russia." The Vyborg manifesto described the dissolution of the Duma as a violation of the people's right of representation, 45 explained the government's action as the result of its wish to stop the Duma from carrying out its reform program, particularly the agrarian reform, and warned that the government would act arbitrarily in the seven months intervening before the summoning of a new Duma, using all means at its disposal to acquire election of a servile Duma (implied here was an arbitrary revision of the electoral law), and might not reconvene the Duma at all. In its second part the manifesto called on the people to engage in passive resistance or civil disobedience—by refusing to pay taxes or submit to military recruitment—in order to compel the government to summon a new Duma promptly. 46 The Kadet chronicler of the Vyborg manifesto would later claim that it had accomplished its main aim: the next Duma was called on schedule and was elected under the same suffrage law as the first Duma. 47 But the fact was that neither the dissolution of the Duma nor the Vyborg appeal elicited any significant response among the population. One of the casualties of this

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experience was any illusions entertained in the Kadet leadership about the utility of the party network they had built up around the country for any purpose other than competing in elections. It had in fact become clear to the Kadet leaders very early that the party groups that had sprung up around the country to take part in the first elections did not constitute a stable network of political communication. As already noted, many of these groups never bothered to respond to central committee inquiries, and the party secretariat's repeated efforts to collect the minimal dues that were a formal condition of membership were almost entirely unsuccessful: from the beginning the expenses of the central party organs and the capital press were met by contributions from a few wealthy members. And despite the party leader's earnest injunctions to local delegates at the third party congress to go on working at building up the party in the postelection period precisely in anticipation of the need to mobilize popular support for the Duma in its struggle with the government, central committee inquiries showed that many party groups had vanished by the second half of 1906. The absence of solid organization was particularly felt in the wake of the Vyborg appeal, when the party leaders tried to mobilize local party groups to effect its implementation: not only the public at large, but the party itself failed to respond to the manifesto. 4 8 During the course of the summer the Kadets retreated from the idea of trying to implement the second part of the Vyborg manifesto and turned toward preparing for the next elections. In his tactical speech to the fourth party congress (September 24-28, 1906) Miliukov relegated the manifesto to the status of a "historical document." 4 9 This marked the end of the party's uncharacteristic venture into illegal action.

The Elections to the Second Duma The revival of party activity in the second election campaign confirmed that a good deal of Kadet party organization consisted essentially of temporary election-campaign committees. The second elections also prove, however, that the Kadets' strong showing in the first elections was not a fluke, not merely the result, as it is usually explained, of the revolutionary parties' boycott of the first elections, which left the Kadets as the most radical party in the elections amidst a radically minded electorate. To be sure, the Kadets' strength was considerably diminished in the second Duma, but they remained the largest party in the Duma, and an analysis of the second elections, held in February 1907, shows that reduced representation in the Duma was not the result of a dramatic shift of voter support away from the Kadets to the left parties, which were all now participating in the elections. Although there are difficulties in comparing party-affiliation figures for the two Dumas, Table 20 provides a reasonably accurate picture of the

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Table 2 0 Political Affiliations of Deputies, First and Second Dumas. Parties

Number in First Duma

Number in Second Duma

Socialists (SD, SR, PSP)

17

Other left (including Trudoviki)

94

98

185

108

Progressives (including Peaceful Renewal)

25

35

Polish National Democrats

32

32

Octobrists (with other moderates)

13

31

Kadets (with adherents)

Extreme right Nonpartisans Total

77

—

72

112

21

478

474

SOURCE: Adapted from the table in Rech', 2/15/06. Although the table fails to account for all deputies in either Duma and distorts somewhat the reality of political groupings, it does reflect clearly enough the shift in political orientations. For a more complete picture of party affiliations in the second Duma, see Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo 2-tu Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 250-251, and Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Ukazatel' k stenograficheskim otchetam. Vtoroi sozyv. 1907 god. Zasedattiia 1-53 (20 fevralia-2 iiunia 1907 g.) (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 27-33.

general redistribution that took place. The table shows a remarkable swelling of the two extremes of the political spectrum in the Duma. This shift took place only partially at the expense, so to speak, of the center, and of the Kadets in particular, for the greatest dislocation was out of the nonparty groups. (It should be noted, however, that the figures on the Kadets in the table conceal the fact that the proportion of "adherents" in the total was much larger in the second than in the first Duma; the effective drop in Kadet representation was on the order of 4 0 percent.) 50 The data on the political orientation of provincial electors in European Russia demonstrate that by and large the gains of the extreme parties in the Duma, and of the left in particular, did not take place as a result of the Kadets' having lost ground numerically among the electors in the provincial assemblies. As Table 21 shows, Kadet representation among peasant delegates, although remaining modest, was actually larger than it had been in the first two elections. In the landowners' curia Kadet representation was reduced noticeably (from 11.5 to 8.9 percent), but in the urban curia the Kadets accounted for considerably more of the electors than in the first elections (this is partly attributable to the highly incomplete character of the data on the first elections; but even if one compares the data of the two elections in strictly proportional terms, Kadet representation falls by only a fraction of a percent). As a percentage function of total provincial electors accounted for in each election, the Kadets actually increased their strength slightly: from 14.1 percent to 14.3 percent.

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Table 21 Political Orientations of Electors, First and Second Duma Elections. Second Duma

First Duma Number

Percent

Number

Percent

Peasants Progressives Kadets Octobrists Nonpartisan Right Left

(total 2,262) 237 84 18 1,807 116

10.5 3.7 0.8 79.9 5.1

(total 2,258) 561 103 43 248 563 582

24.8 4.6 1.9 11 25 25.8

Landowners Progressives Kadets Octobrists Nonpartisan Right Left

(total 1,760) 255 202 146 854 291

(total 1,726) 185 154 312 81 814 82

10.7 8.9 18 4.7 47.2 4.8

City Progressives Kadets Octobrists Nonpartisan Right Left

(total 1,115) 158 437 60 350 68

(total 1,302) 283 501 55 21 116 311

21.7 38.5 4.2 1.6 8.9 23.9

Total for all curiae Progressives Kadets Octobrists Nonpartisan Right Left

(total 5,137) 650 723 224 3,011 475

(total 5,286) 1,029 758 410 360 1,493 975

19.5 14.3 7.8 6.8 28.2 18.4

Curiae

—

—

—

—

—

14.5 11.5 8.3 48.5 16.5 —

14.2 39.2 5.4 31 6.1 —

12.7 14.1 4.4 58.6 9.2 —

SOURCE: Figures for the first Duma are from Vestnik PNS, no. 6 (1906): appendix. Figures for the second Duma are from no. 6 (1907): appendix. The totals for the Trade-Industry party have been left out of the first Duma tally, and the "moderate" entry has been left out of the second Duma total statistics. This table was compiled by Bertrand Patenaude.

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Results and Prospects

The most striking thing about the figures on the political orientation of the provincial electors is the rise of the extreme right in both the peasants' and the landowners' curiae, and of the left as well in the former, accompanied by the virtual disappearance of nonparty electors among the landowners and their truly astonishing attrition, from nearly 80 percent to 11 percent, among peasant electors. This phenomenon was obviously a reflection of the continuing political mobilization in the country. Among the landowners' electors the dramatic shift rightward may have been in some measure attributable to the decline in the number among them of peasant smallholders' delegates brought about by the Senate "clarification" of October 7, 1906, 51 but it appears mainly to have reflected increased mobilization and consolidation rightward in the political orientation of large landowners in response to the experience of the first Duma, whose public confrontation with the government over the issue of forced expropriation of noble estate-lands was closely watched in gentry circles. In the absence of special research on the subject, one can only speculate about the meaning of the attrition of the nonparty group in the tabulations on peasant electors. It seems doubtful that it reflected extensive mobilization among the peasantry at large. The especially marked increase of peasant electors on the far left was probably related to the more or less aggressive activity for the first time in the provincial assemblies of representatives of the parties of the populist and Marxist left. 52 The essential difference, then, in the provincial elections to the second Duma lay not in the strength of the Kadets in the provincial assemblies (although there were a few assemblies with considerable changes in this regard), 53 but in the much higher degree of political mobilization and polarization now obtaining among the other electors. This is not to say that there was no attrition in the popular vote for the Kadets. That there was attrition is clear from an examination of the returns in the urban curia, which had been and remained the main source of Kadet strength. And here the attrition was mainly to the benefit of the socialist parties, as was made particularly clear in the cities with special elections, where the correspondence between the popular vote and the party affiliation of the Duma deputies elected was closest. This time Kadets were elected in only nine instead of nineteen of these special elections in European Russia, and took fifteen instead of twenty-six deputies there. 54 As nearly as can be judged, about 58 percent of the electors chosen in these elections were Kadets, as compared to 83 percent in the first elections; the remainder were split almost evenly between electors to the left of the Kadets and those to their right. 55 Where the Kadets ran alone in the second elections—in about half the urban elections, apparently—they generally collected about as many popular votes as the parties to their left and right combined. Of 307,733

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popular votes accounted for in sixteen towns (including the capitals), the Kadets took 138,039, or about 45 percent. Where left, right, and center all ran separate candidates, the Octobrists did nearly as well, in the ensemble, as the socialist parties in collecting popular votes, and together with the extreme right generally attracted more popular votes than did the parties to the left of the Kadets. 56 The Kadets emerged victorious once again in both capitals, now running alone, and although their recorded popular vote was lower than in 1906 (more noticeably so, as might have been expected, in Petersburg than in Moscow), the Kadets showed altogether impressive strength, considering that their vote was now much more nearly a truly partisan one than in the bloc voting of 1906. In Petersburg the number of votes cast in 1906 for the Kadet bloc in the twelve precincts had been 39,657; in 1907 it was 28,698. A precinct-by-precinct count shows that in most cases the number of votes lost by the Kadets was quite close to the number of votes taken by the left bloc (SDs, SRs, PSP, and Trudoviki; in all, the left bloc took about 25 percent of the popular vote). 57 In Moscow, attrition of the Kadet popular vote was on the order of 10 percent (from about 65 percent to 55 percent); correspondingly, the left bloc there took about 13 percent of the vote. (The vote to the right of the Kadets was about one third the total in Moscow; about 20 percent in Petersburg.) 58 In view of the more competitive atmosphere prevailing in the provincial assemblies in the second elections, it is not surprising that there were considerably fewer Kadets in the deputations sent to the second Duma from those provincial assemblies where they had earlier either dominated the elections or shared the deputies' seats with predominantly nonparty peasants. 59 In the first case, this result suggests that in those provinces where there was already a high level of mobilized opposition in the first elections, and the right was weak, the end of the boycott by the socialist parties gave vent to the expression of political sympathies that had been blocked in the first elections. The supporters of the left in these provinces made their weight felt. In the second case, the results were more complex. In Viatka the left bloc took all the seats, and Kadet weight was seriously undercut by the left in Samara and Ekaterinoslav provinces, although what they essentially meant in several of these provinces was that the formerly nonpartisan peasant partners in the coalition had in the meantime acquired leftist political labels. And in two such provinces—Poltava and Smolensk—what appears to have happened is that the nonpeasant Kadets were displaced by nonpeasant deputies politically to their right. 60 There were some dramatic changes in the assemblies that had sent up politically mixed delegations to the first Duma, but the Kadets held their own in this group (the Kadets now sent twenty-four deputies to the Duma,

370

Results and Prospects

as compared to the twenty-five they had sent to the first Duma). Losses were mainly to the right, through the landowners' curia, but the dissipation of Kadet strength by the left in the urban curia was also a significant factor. Kadet attrition was proportionally greatest in the West, except for the Baltic provinces, where the returns remained virtually identical to those in 1906. 61 The number of Kadet-bloc deputies from the western provinces (the Baltic excluded) fell from twenty-five to five. With the exception of the contribution of the Kiev assembly—which, as could have been expected from the strength of the left and the generally high level of political mobilization obtaining already at the time of the first elections, produced a predominantly left-oriented and almost exclusively peasant delegation to the second Duma—the Kadet losses in the West were mostly to the right. They were displaced by Polish National Democrats in the Vitebsk elections; by Octobrists and Monarchists in Minsk; by one Monarchist and two "progressives" in Grodno; and by Monarchists in Mogilev. With the exception of one or two "progressives," these were landowners or professional men, mostly Russian, elected together with peasants who were also mostly on the right according to the press reports. 62 Moderate or conservative landowners and peasants now predominated where liberal Jewish-urban, Polish-landowner, and nonparty peasant coalitions had earlier been victorious: in Minsk the Jewish-Polish coalition was replaced by one of "Russian" landowners and peasants, the groups that had demonstrated against them in the first elections; in Mogilev the Jewish-Polishpeasant bloc which had been dominated by peasants was replaced by a conservative landowner-peasant coalition in which the landowners predominated; essentially the same pattern prevailed in Vitebsk; and in Grodno the Jewish-peasant delegation was replaced by one of "Russians" and peasants. Only in Kovno in the Northwest did the Jewish-peasant bloc apparently survive, electing three peasant adherents of the "JewishLithuanian party" and two Jewish lawyers—both Kadets—to the Duma. The Vilno elections were dominated by the Polish National Democrats. Conservative mobilization of landowners was a major factor in the second elections especially in those western borderland areas where Russian landowners must have felt particularly vulnerable to threats to their status but still were able to carry heavy weight in the provincial assemblies. In several provinces the independent consolidation of the Polish vote behind the National Democrats also contributed to the breakdown of the Kadet bloc. The National Democrats were more conservative than the Kadets in social policy, and in particular objected to the opposition's plans for expropriation of estate lands. The elections to the second Duma demonstrated that the Constitutional Democrats could attract a considerable vote in their own right in competition with the socialist left, particularly among the urban population. This urban support came not only from professional and intelligentsia

Results and Prospects

371

elements but extended fairly deeply into the ranks of salaried employees, shopkeepers, and the like: the "petty bourgeoisie." Much of this support, of course (as party leaders were the first to recognize), did not extend beyond the ballot box, 6 3 but it proved to be remarkably stable. 64 From the perspective of the second elections it can be seen that the Kadets' strength in the first Duma, which was quite out of proportion to their popular support or even their representation in the provincial assemblies, was the product of a particular historical moment, two of the most salient features of which were the relatively low degree of political mobilization still obtaining among the electorate, especially the peasantry, and of the structure of the electoral system. The importance of the electoral system may be judged by the fact that the Kadets still did extremely well in the second elections. Would they have done as well had the first elections been held on the basis of universal, direct suffrage, as the Kadets and all parties to their left wish 4 ? Ironically, the answer is almost certainly not. It is not easy to imagine how elections by universal, direct suffrage would have functioned at that time, given the state of literacy and communications prevailing in the country, and specifically in the absence of a system for the preliminary identification of a limited number of candidates by generally known political labels, but, because of these very conditions, it is extremely unlikely that any single party could have taken more than a small minority of the Duma seats. It is more likely that the Duma would have been quite variegated politically, with a considerable number of deputies being associated with the local cadre or patronage parties that had sprung up in profusion before the first elections. 65

Implications of the First Two Elections for Later Political Developments Without entering into a detailed discussion of the coup d'état of June 3, 1907, it can be seen how the character of the first two elections contributed to that momentous event in the history of the Russian state and were reflected in it. The circumstances of the Kadets' remarkable success in the elections explain a great deal about their behavior in the first two Dumas, the subject of much mutual recrimination between former party members after 1917 which has been carried over into the historical literature. More generally speaking, these circumstances explain much about the conflict between the Duma and the government that issued in the coup d'état of June 3. The Kadets' dependence on peasant support reinforced the populist sentiments that ran deep in party circles, and with them their commitment to a program

372

Results and Prospects

of radical land reform that could not be accommodated to the government's emerging plan for conservative agrarian reform, based on dissolution of communal tenure and encouragement of small private farming, which was introduced as interim legislation in November 1906. In the background lay the paramount issues of the nature of the new order and the distribution of power in it; but in the foreground, as the most important substantive issue at stake in the conflict that led to the "Third of June System," lay the agrarian question. 66 By the same token, the Kadets found their most reliable support in the Dumas, particularly in the second Duma, among the national minority groups. Some of them, like the large Polish delegation, were not enthusiastic about the Kadet agrarian program but supported it because of the party's nationalities program. In this way the agrarian and nationalities questions were inseparably intertwined in the first two Dumas. It was hardly accidental that the two groups whose representation was most drastically undercut by the revision of the electoral law of June 3, 1907, were precisely the peasants and the Poles (along with diverse other national minorities). 67 June 3 marked the real end of the "Revolution of 1905." With the waning of the mass movement, agents of the imperial bureaucracy led by Stolypin were gearing up for sweeping reforms (most of them elaborated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs even before 1905). The regime was moving into a pattern of response to threats to its power and stability that had been repeated several times over in the nearly two hundred years of the empire's existence; the situation bore particular similarities to the period of great reforms that followed the Russian defeat in the Crimean War sixty years earlier. 68 The Duma, whose plans for agrarian and political-administrative reforms were far more radical than the government's, stood in the way; therefore the Duma, as a broadly representative assembly, was removed. This act was at once a dramatic reassertion of the government's authority and an admission that the reforming bureaucracy's plans were incompatible with more or less democratic public representation. The two main aims of the electoral law promulgated on June 3, 1907, were to increase the weight of the propertied strata, especially the large landowners, and to increase representation of the "Russian element": the new Duma, declared Stolypin's manifesto of June 3, would become "Russian in spirit." 69 The most important feature of the new electoral law was its radical redistribution of the weight of the curiae in the provincial assemblies. As Table 22 shows, the landowners' curia, now largely purged of peasant smallholders (the Senate clarification of October 7,1906, was enlarged upon in several ways, making it impossible for any member of a peasant village community to vote in that curia), was greatly increased in weight. Now the landowners would enjoy an absolute majority in twenty-seven of European Russia's fifty-one provinces, half the vote in four others, and a plurality closely approaching half almost everywhere else.

Results and Prospects

373

Table 2 2 Distribution of Electors by Curiae in European Russia According to the Laws of December 11, 1 9 0 5 , and June 3, 1 9 0 7 (in percentages). Curiae

1905

1907

Landowners Peasants Urban Workers

32.7 42.3 22.5 2.5

49.6 a 21.7 26.2 2.3

SOURCE: N. I. Lazarevskii, ed., Zakonodatel'nye akty perekhodnogo vremetti 1904— 1906gg., 2d. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 366-402; Samuel N. Harper, The New Electoral Law for the Russian Duma (Chicago, 1908). a. For the empire as a whole, the landowners' electors slightly exceeded half (50.4 percent).

The additional weight of the landowners came primarily at the expense of peasant representation, which was halved in the aggregate. The peasant curia no longer enjoyed a majority or plurality in any provincial assembly. Aside from the arithmetic adjustment of the curiae, other restrictions were placed on the peasant curia, beginning with the incorporation of the Senate clarification restricting voting to actual heads of peasant households and ending with the removal of the peasants' earlier exclusive privilege of electing a separate deputy in each provincial assembly: now seats were also set aside for landowners and urban electors in virtually all the provinces, and for a variety of other categories in a few, with the result that 194 of the 4 4 2 deputies' seats were predetermined so far as curia was concerned; and all were to be elected by the provincial assemblies at large. This scheme meant that in most provinces the large landowners could greatly influence, if not dictate, the identity of the peasant-curia deputy. 7 0 Although the aggregate weight of urban representation in the provincial assemblies was not reduced (it was in fact very slightly increased), the character of that representation was significantly affected by the new law. In the first place, the privilege of separate representation was removed from all but seven cities of the empire: Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Riga, Kiev, Warsaw, and Lodz. Second, the urban electorate was subdivided into two curiae, with a very small part of the electorate, possessors of sizable business enterprises or other urban property, grouped into a first urban curia with more than half of the electors allotted to it; and the remainder, the vast majority of the urban electorate, in the second. 7 1 Finally, the law drastically curtailed representation for Russia's borderlands: the total number of deputies from the borderlands was halved, while separate representation for the Orothodox population in these areas was markedly increased. The overall decrease in the statutory number of Duma deputies from 5 2 4 to 4 4 2 came almost entirely at the expense of the borderlands. 7 2

374

Results and Prospects

In general, the results of the third elections must have been encouraging to the government, especially since the illegal promulgation of the new electoral law produced no untoward public reaction. Although there are as usual no firm figures on the political orientations of the Duma deputies, it is clear that the opposition had been more than halved, from more than two thirds to less than one third. S. N. Harper gave the following figures (the labels are his): 73 Extreme rightists 76 Rightists 40 Octobrists 155 Progressivists 52 Constitutional Democrats 46 Leftists (including the national groups) 35 Extreme leftists and socialists 28 And A. Ia. Avrekh used the following figures in his work: 74 Rights Moderate right and National group Octobrists and adherents Progressives Kadets Muslim group Polish Kolo Trudoviki Social Democrats

50 97 154 28 54 8 18 13 20

As can be seen, the familiar party groups (with the exception of the Russian National group) are still there, 75 but in radically changed proportions. It appeared that Stolypin had found the kind of representative system he needed in order to proceed with his reforms: 76 one that would not only desist from open confrontation with the government but would provide support for his program against its numerous opponents in the bureaucracy, at court, and in noble circles.77 As in Prussia in 1849, it appeared that monarchy and aristocracy had combined successfully to defeat the democratic revolution. History, however, is full of paradoxes and unintended consequences. By the commencement of the Duma's third session, some fifteen months after its initial convocation, Stolypin's Octobrist-led majority was beginning to disintegrate and it had become clear that all his ministry's major reform plans, with the exception of the agrarian legislation, were confronting powerful resistance. 78 Eventually—during the fourth Duma session in

Results and Prospects

375

November 1913—the Octobrist fraction would collapse entirely, splitting into three separate groups; 79 and well before his death at an assassin's hand in the Kiev Opera House on September 1,1911, Stolypin had been forced to abandon virtually all the main elements of his reform plans except the agrarian legislation. 80 With regard to the system of representation, the "Third of June System," as it came to be called, was in the first place a wager on the provincial nobility; it involved a wager on the strong yeoman peasant only as a matter of political futures. This short-term gamble on the nobility was linked to a long-term strategy based to a considerable extent on the conclusion that the role of the nobility in local affairs had already declined and would continue to do so, necessitating the cultivation of new bases of support in rural Russia. 81 The nobility, in effect, was being asked to use its newly acquired voice in affairs at the center in order to assist in the emasculation of its established status and authority in the provinces. Therein lay the basis for the conflict between Stolypin and the noble organizations and the main social dimension of the struggle that ensued over the implementation of the bureaucratic reform program. 82 Although there is little direct evidence that would demonstrate a decisive role for the groups representing conversative noble interests in the defeat of Stolypin's local-reform plans, their actions undoubtedly tended to reenforce opposition to his policies in the imperial bureaucracy and at court. At the very least, it is clear that Stolypin failed to find among the noble landowners whose voting power he had so generously increased the kind of support he needed for success. One of the most ominous developments for the fortunes of Russian constitutionalism in the period after June 3 was the rapid disintegration of the extraparliamentry organizations of the two major constitutionalist parties, the Kadets and the Octobrists. The atrophy of the Kadet party network cannot be measured precisely, but it is clearly reflected in the records of its central committee. By 1908 party leaders were talking of having to start the entire process of party building over again, beginning with the old network of zemstvo acquaintances. 83 A central-committee survey in early 1908 revealed that Kadet committees were still active in only eight provinces and had completely disbanded in all but twelve others; and theses adopted at a party conference in November 1909 explicitly recognized "the isolation of the party from the population." With the collapse of the party network in the country came a reduction in the activities of the party's central organs: in 1910 the Petersburg and Moscow branches of the Kadet central committee met only five times each, and not a single plenary session was held. 84 The failure of the Kadets to build a strong organization left them ill-prepared to engage in the politics of mass mobilization in 1917. What was responsible for this failure? To some extent it can be explained by the success, in the heyday of the first campaign period, of the

376

Results and Prospects

party's ouverture à gauche, which brought into the party an unstable, radical-intelligentsia element that would leave the party as other political alternatives presented themselves and the prospects of parliamentary politics diminished. Many local party committees had been set up in those early days by intelligentsia groups that were considerably to the left of the central party leadership. There was also erosion on the right among the zemstvo gentry who had come into the party on the wave of gentry opposition that broke even as the party was being set up. These disaffections were in the long run perhaps less important than the political culture shared by the professional and zemstvo men who continued to sympathize with the political ideas of the Kadet party. Until 1905 the politics they had known had been the occasional politics of the zemstvos, which were in some respects more like gentlemen's clubs than public bodies. Politics as a profession was unknown to them, especially the kind of politics that involved agitation among the masses and confrontation with the rabblerousers of the revolutionary left, who had taken every opportunity to use the public meetings arranged by the Kadets in the first election campaign to denounce the Kadets in the most vociferous terms as the party of the bourgeoisie and the gentry masters. This spectacle had probably been more than enough exposure to the politics of the street for many Kadets, although there were those, even in the party leadership, who did not shun the street, and from time to time through the war years and into 1917, appeals were heard in party councils to turn to the politics of mass agitation, in full awareness of the programmatic implications of such a démarche in a rapidly polarizing society. But these appeals did not prevail. 85 For all their aspirations to create a mass party the Kadets remained, in many respects, a cadre party. Attrition in Octobrist ranks, like the developing crisis in the party's Duma fraction, was closely linked to the "left-Octobrist" leadership's support for Stolypin's reform program, especially that part of it that would have ended gentry predominance in the zemstvos and in local administration generally. This policy led to widespread tension between the rank-andfile Octobrist "membership" and the party leadership, and to widespread defection, either rightward or out of national politics altogether. To the extent that Stolypin's "system" depended on cooperation with an Octobrist majority in the Duma, which in turn depended on the gentry vote, the undermining of that majority led to the demise of the system; it also led to the collapse of Guchkov's "zemstvo strategy" for building a strong moderate-constitutionalist party. 86 The Russian political scene before World War I did not bode well for Russian political evolution along the lines of either West European or Central European models. The movement to shift the center of political power from Crown and bureaucracy to parliament that was mounted in the years between 1904 and 1907 had failed, and its instruments, the con-

Results and Prospects

377

stitutionalist parties, were subjected to rapid attrition in succeeding years. In its turn, the conservative reformism of the Stolypin ministry proved incapable of building a firm foundation of support and acceptance in the new legislative institutions, in the government bureaucracy, or at court. 87 When the monarchy collapsed in 1917, conditions in the country were far less propitious for either of these alternatives than during the days of their prewar ascendancy. In Russian politics the "cercle fatal," cited in the epigraph to this book from Tocqueville's Democracy in America, had by that time been drawn extremely tight. In historical perspective, the coup d' état of June 3 appears to have put paid to the Kadet strategy of continuing the political struggle but containing it within the bounds of the representative institutions, and thereby to a reasonable chance of attaining a peaceful transition from autocracy to constitutional democracy. The Kadets were caught in a veritable dilemma after the dissolution of the first Duma: in order to "preserve the Duma," the Kadets would probably have had to repudiate their own program, particularly their agrarian program. 88 From the perspective of the outcome of the Revolution of 1917, Kadet politics seem to have been ambivalent, if not quixotic. Given the intransigence of the regime on the one side and the Kadets' isolation from the masses on the other, why did they not either break off with the regime altogether so as to be in a position to gain real popular support, or else allow themselves to be coopted by the regime and become responsible conservatives working for change? 89 The answer to this question lies in the very nature of the party, an organization created to weld together the two fairly distinct tendencies in Russian obshchestvo that Miliukov had identified in his opening speech to the first party congress with the two halves of the new party's name: the "constitutionalists" and the "democrats." In the rather awkward English of his American lectures, Miliukov had predicted before the party's creation that "the possibility of a peaceful outcome for the Russian political unrest depends entirely upon the circumstance whether or not it will be possible for this political group to influence the government without becoming untrue to the public opinion which is the only source of its power." 90 Miliukov was raising here the central question of whether united pressure from civil society alone was capable of compelling the regime to submit to substantial political reforms. Most of the Kadet leaders did indeed "fear the masses," an accusation regularly leveled at them by their more radical contemporaries, by Soviet historiography as a whole, and by a considerable number of Western historians. The point would seem to be not to contest that issue but to understand the perceptions that lay behind the Kadets' position. These perceptions are implicit in the words of Miliukov just quoted: he and his colleagues understood that the prospects for a constitutionalist solution to the crisis of the old order in Russia were not great. Given the weakness of

378

Results and Prospects

the institutional and cultural underpinnings for a constitutional order, the small size of civil society, the maximalist aspirations of the peasantry and a considerable part of the working class, and the existence of a developed revolutionary movement prepared to encourage those aspirations—given, in short, the backwardness of Russian society and the lateness of the old regime's crisis—they feared that a revolutionary mass movement, once under way, would be unlikely to lead to a moderate constitutionalist solution to the political crisis. Subsequent history shows that this was not an unreasonable perception. The Kadet strategy amounted to finessing political reform "from above" by bringing pressure to bear on the regime from obshchestvo, short of revolutionary violence. Reform would lead to an order in which people like themselves (and some of the Kadet leaders had quite specific ideas in this regard) would be invested with political authority. Its legitimacy would be grounded in both the popular vote and the tradition of the monarchy. Although the Kadets subscribed to the principle of universal, direct suffrage, they did not do so out of a belief in the "political wisdom of the masses." For them, political wisdom lay with the educated, Westernized elite, the "bourgeois intelligentsia" to which they belonged. Was the Kadet strategy realistic? It was for a time, in the sense that the kind of order they sought seemed a reasonable possibility. Serious informal negotiations were carried on between the government and the constitutionalist opposition throughout the period extending from October 17, 1905, through the duration of the first two Dumas. 91 If during that time both sides had been somewhat more willing to compromise, a modus vivendi might have been found. It cannot be denied, however, that there were deep-seated structural impediments to compromise on both sides: on the side of the government were the tsar's well-known convictions, ingrained bureaucratic mistrust of public participation in governance, interministerial and interpersonal rivalries, and partially institutionalized pressure from conservative aristocratic groups; and on the side of the Kadets were the political experience and perceptions of the party's leaders, the basic strategy shaped by them, and the character of the party's membership and support. With the reassertion of the regime's intransigence in 1907, the liberals were left to face the fundamental dilemma arising from the incompatibility of their moderate solutions with mass mobilization. In the years following 1907 their strategy became increasingly unrealistic, as the government steadfastly held to its virtual monopoly on political authority and as the ongoing polarization of political attitudes characteristic of these years steadily undermined the Kadets' claim to speak even for "public opinion" as a whole. Increasingly bitter controversy over tactics within the party leadership ensued. By 1913 it appeared to Miliukov, at least, that the party might at last split up, and after a brief respite at the beginning of the war the

Results and Prospects

379

intraparty controversy continued and deepened over the question of the party's proper stance vis-à-vis the regime in wartime. And yet the party, or at least the established party leadership, held together, through the conciliatory efforts of the center group led by Miliukov, the chief broker of party unity from start to finish. Indeed, from his point of view and that of his closest collaborators, such as Kokoshkin, Vinaver, and Nabokov, the necessity of maintaining party unity grew as the prospect of establishing a mass following receded from view, for they still hoped to receive power from above. Their hopes were actually increased toward the end by the anticipation that the war would expose weaknesses and needs to the regime that would compel it to call in the Kadet ministériables.92 When they at last succeeded to ministerial posts in the provisional government in February 1917, they were not granted real power by the tsar (despite Miliukov's earnest efforts to obtain the element of legitimacy that continuity would have given the new government) but were handed a vague semblance of power by the Petrograd Soviet. Neither the political circumstances of the country in February 1917 nor the party's own condition and traditions boded well for its emerging as a major political force in the Russian Revolution. 93

Abbreviations Appendix A Note on Literature and Sources Notes Index

Abbreviations GIM MV

ORLB ROPB TsGAOR

TsGIA f. d. op. ch.

Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei (State Historical Museum), Moscow "Materialy Vitte po vyboram ν pervuiu gosudarstvennuiu dumu" (Witte materials on the elections to the first state Duma), ROPB, f. 1 0 7 2 , vols. 1 - 1 5 Otdel rukopisei Leninskoi Biblioteki (Manuscript division of the Lenin Library), Moscow Rukopisnyi otdel Publichnoi Biblioteki im. Saltykova-Shchedrina (Manuscript division of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library), Leningrad Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii, vysshikh organov gosudarstvennoi vlasti i gosudarstvennogo upravleniia SSSR (Central state archive of the October Revolution, the higher organs of state authority and state administration of the USSR), Moscow Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Central state historical archive), Leningrad Fond (Archival collection) Delo or edinitsa khraneniia (Basic unit within archival collection) Opis' (Inventory reference to archival unit) chast' (Part of archival unit)

NOTE: All place references to archival material have been given in terms of the conventional English " p . " (page), to avoid confusion between the Russian abbreviation for " S h e e t " ( " 1 . " ) and the number " 1 . "

APPENDIX

Party Alignments of Zemstvo Activists in 1905 and 1906 The following congresses of zemstvo and town duma representatives took place: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

November 6 - 9 , 1904 April 2 4 - 2 5 , 1905 May 2 4 - 2 5 , 1905 July 6 - 8 , 1905 September 1 2 - 1 5 , 1905 November 6 - 1 3 , 1905

These are keyed 1—6 in the table below, under the column "Congresses attended." The positions of the officials who attended the congresses, indicated in the adjacent column, are keyed as follows: c.d.b. c.p.d. d.b. d.d. d.m. o.b. p.b. p.d. t.d.

= = = = = = = = =

chairman, district zemstvo board chairman, provincial zemstvo board member, district zemstvo board district zemstvo deputy district marshal of nobility member of the organizing bureau for the congresses member, provincial zemstvo board provincial zemstvo deputy town duma deputy

In a few cases these positions are attributed to persons who no longer occupied the offices at the time they attended the congress(es).

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