The Elections to the Third Duma: The Roots of the Nationalist Party

ROBERT EDELMAN

By the summer of 1907 noble landowners in the provinces had moved in a sharply conservative direction. As shown above, liberals were thrown out of the zemstvos in the elections of 1906–1907, and a considerable mass of noble landowners, galvanized by the events of the revolutionary years, began to speak out in sharp defense of their historic privileges and interests. The new electoral law issued after the coup d’état of June 1907 would assure these elements of the Russian nobility a preeminent position in the Duma. However, in neither the Third nor the Fourth Duma periods did a political formation emerge to organize them into a coherent political force. The group that came closest, in a structural sense, was the Russian Nationalist party.

Formed late in 1909, the Nationalists were unrepentant defenders of noble privilege and property. But although they were conservative, the Nationalists developed an approach to the organization and use of political power that resembled that of modern, Western, parliamentary parties. The organizational structure of their party differed from that of the more moderate Octobrists, and it contrasted even more sharply with the still more conservative extreme right fraction (pravye),^* who sat between the Nationalists and the Duma’s right wall. Despite their clear differences of program and organizational form, all three groups drew support primarily from the landed nobility. It is my intention here to explain these differences by analyzing the elections to the Third Duma in order to determine the ways, beyond ideology, in which the Nationalists were unlike their closest political rivals. As a result of this examination, it will then become possible to identify those characteristics of the Nationalists’ own social base which most strongly influenced their later development.

The primary purpose of the new electoral law was to reduce the political weight of the popular elements that had proven unreliable in the first two Dumas. The peasantry, which the government had hoped would be a conservative force, paid for having disappointed the state’s hopes by losing 56 percent of its vyborshchiki (electors). Industrial workers lost just under a half of their electors. In contrast, the number of electors of the landowners’ curia was increased by slightly less than a third.¹ Thus, the Third Duma gave little expression to the aspirations of the broad Russian public. Yet it accurately reflected the interests and political development of the large property owners who were assigned a dominant position by the new electoral law.

The decree of June third has been explained elsewhere.² Accordingly, I shall restrict myself to mentioning several structural and historical factors that permitted large landowners to control the electoral process beyond their already inflated share of the vyborshchiki (49 percent).³ Of immense importance for the future development of the Nationalists were the discretionary powers granted to the Minister of the Interior, the most significant of which was the option to create curiae based on nationality in those regions in which Russian interests might be especially threatened. The June third decree had specifically stated that the new Duma should be “Russian in spirit,” and the number of seats allotted to national minorities was sharply reduced.⁴

An extremely important segment of the landowners’ electoral assembly was composed of clergy who served as the delegates of churches owning land in each district. In areas in which the Russian landowning element was either weak or suffered from absenteeism, the clergy played a crucial role as protectors of privilege.⁵ Nevertheless, priests were by no means monolithic in their support of the forces of order. Nor did they always assume this task with enthusiasm. A reward of Duma seats was the usual compensation for services rendered.

The control of gubernia electoral meetings by a conservative, wealthy majority affected the composition of the Third Duma’s peasant delegation.⁶ As in the old law the electoral assembly of each gubernia was to elect at least one deputy from among the electors of the peasant curia. Previously, the peasants had chosen their own deputy; now this was to be done by the entire assembly. The assembly’s majority sought to choose reliable men who fitted readily conservative stereotypes of the properly loyal peasants. This did not result in the selection of a chorus of toadies—on issues directly affecting the peasantry, the peasant deputies could be very militant. But most of them sat with the center and right factions, at least formally supporting those who had put them there.⁷ It should therefore be stressed that neither the clergy nor the peasants in the Third Duma represented an independent stratum. Notwithstanding important individual exceptions, these groups went along with those nobles who dominated the Octobrist, Nationalist, and pravye fractions. Any analysis that might view them as diluting the basic class nature of the various conservative parties would ignore both social structure and historical experience.⁸

Analyzing the elections to the Third Duma is a difficult task. The evidence available does not afford a complete picture of all levels of the process. Archival materials on the conduct of the 1907 elections are sparse, and newspapers tend to be incomplete, contradictory, and episodic. Statistics have presented a problem. The only universally accepted figures have been those on the Duma members themselves. Information on the vyborshchiki has been more suspect, but the appearance of previously unused statistical material, prepared by the government, gives a more precise picture of this level of the process.⁹ Below this level, one cannot venture with any degree of precision, although broad descriptions of social and economic structure are, of course, possible and necessary.

Serious difficulties also arise because of the imprecision of nomenclature. The political terms used to describe the vyborshchiki who attended the provincial electoral assemblies were especially vague. The broad descriptions “right,” “moderate,” and “left” were most commonly used. But these terms held different meanings for different people, and newspapers introduced their own variations. A generally accepted terminology never did emerge. On a more profound level, it should be remembered that choices of descriptive words and terms of reference were fundamental to the way in which various groups comprehended and perceived events. Thus, while the terminological confusion makes the electoral process less susceptible to the use of modern analytical techniques, the categories chosen by particular historical actors become, in and of themselves, extremely important for an understanding of the politics of the Regime of the Third of June.

In this sketch of the political landscape of the Duma, I shall first devote attention to the center and right-wing fractions that emerged there, broadly characterizing their programs and drawing social portraits of their Duma deputies. From this should emerge clues that will suggest in what direction to proceed in delineating the Nationalists’ social base and future political development.

On the eve of the Duma’s convocation, the Octobrist newspaper Golos Moskvy, drawing on its own earlier reports, broke down the center and right groups in the following manner:¹⁰

This covered most of the terms used during the campaign. “Right nonparty” is perhaps the best description of that large bloc of deputies who did not define themselves in any way beyond the broad term “right.” This breakdown shortly gave way to a more simplified division of Duma fractions as deputies picked to formal affiliations. The most commonly cited figures are those given by the leading Soviet specialist on the Third Duma, A. Ia. Avrekh:¹¹

Before their merger in 1909, the Nationalists were divided into the moderate right fraction of seventy-six and the National Group numbering twenty-one. Flanked on the left by the center and majority fraction of the Octobrists, the future Nationalists quickly broke off from the pravye with whom they had been lumped at the opening of the Duma.

The pravye were a disparate collection of reactionaries, displaying little ideological unity or parliamentary discipline.¹² Their most publicized figures, all landlords, were the archreactionaries V. M. Purishke-vich and N. E. Markov II, the Vilna deputy G. G. Zamyslovsky, and the Kiev sugar baron and landlord Count A. A. Bobrinsky. The attitudes of the pravye toward popular representation ranged from overt hostility to reluctant acceptance. Any further attempt to define their views quickly comes down to the overly familiar stereotype of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality. Anti-Semitism and an obsession with repression of revolutionary activity were also common among them.¹³ Beyond this rather vague characterization, one hesitates to venture. Mistrustful of political parties and Duma fractions, which were said to represent special interests, the pravye affirmed their loyalty to the autocracy, which in their view spoke for all Russia. They also rejected any political causes that might in any way undermine the indivisibility of the Empire. Few pravye deputies ever developed a close relationship with their constituents; indeed they sought to avoid the charge of representing specific local interests. For them, political parties were dangerous alien organizations that could only fragment the empire.

The anachronistic attitudes of the pravye fraction made its relationship with the popularly oriented Union of Russian People uncomfortable. The urp has been referred to as the social base of the pravye, even during the elections of 1907.¹⁴ In point of fact, respectable rightists were not pleased with the Union. The mass agitation of a “new right,” often associated with the Union, distressed respectable but reactionary nobles with its demagoguery.

Because of this fact, the electoral law of June Third sounded the death knell of the Union of Russian People. The urp became superfluous with the restriction of the franchise: the need to attract lower class votes had passed. Counterrevolution with all its déclassé connotations fell by the wayside, an ugly reminder of the turbulence of the revolutionary period.¹⁵ The Union’s mass membership, always exaggerated, began to evaporate even before the 1907 election campaign. Usually reliable governors’ reports on the size of the Union vary widely. On June 7, 1907, the Kiev governor reported that the urp numbered 15,000 throughout the gubernia but that the group was not particularly active.¹⁶ He also noted that 680 people belonged to the Soiuz russkikh liudei, and 400 were in the Union of Archangel Michael.¹⁷ In Minsk, the urp was credited with only 450 members, while a group called the Russian Borderland Union was said to number 12,716.¹⁸ National figures based on a compilation of all the governors’ reports give some picture of the size of right-wing groups during 1907. The Union of Russian People was said to have 356,738 members, but numerous governors were quick to point out that their figures were based on reports for 1906, a time when the Union had been more active. 47,792 people were associated with various other right-wing groups, and 14,035 members were ascribed to the Octobrists. The urp and the Octobrists were the only two parties that appeared with any regularity in the reports, but the governors noted that many local branches of both parties were either inactive or had ceased to function.¹⁹ Thus there remained a large group of uncommitted conservative voters even within the limitations imposed by the new electoral law. The grip of the urp on this group was slipping fast, and its relationship with the Duma pravye, for whom it might have provided support, was eroding quickly, since the latter had ceased to play a crucial role in the newly modified political arena.

Despite the sharp status distinction between the Duma pravye and the cadres of the urp, a social breakdown of the deputies themselves reveals them as something less than the pinnacle of Russian high society. Of all the center and right-wing factions, the pravye had the lowest percentage of noble members (twenty-three of fifty). They had more priests (eighteen), and these priests were more independent than the priests of any other faction. Peasants and two professional men made up the rest of the pravye deputies.²⁰ Altogether, theirs was an atypical social profile: in all other conservative factions the nobility played a more clearly dominant role.

Unsurprisingly, extreme rightists were strong in areas where the local landed nobility felt particularly threatened by the peasantry. Kursk, which had suffered severe damage from peasant disturbances during 1905 and 1906, had elected ten pravye. Elsewhere, the fraction was successful in gubernias where Russians were threatened by other nationalities. The presence of a large number of Jews usually gave rise to strong countersupport for the far right. Kherson gubernia, which included Odessa, with a population one-third Jewish, had sent four pravye. The western provinces were a stronghold: Volynia had elected ten pravye: the pravye had also won two of Vilna’s three Russian seats.²¹ The future Nationalists also drew support from the western provinces, and it should be remembered that both they and the extreme right had labelled themselves simply as “right” during the election campaign. Such Nationalist leaders as P. N. Balashev, D. N. Chikha-chev, A. S. Gizhitsky, N. N. Ladomirsky, F. N. Bezak, and N. K. Von Gubbenet, to name just a few, had all used this general term.²² In the west, far right groups usually represented an extreme and often distorted variety of the nationalism and anti-Semitism of their more numerous moderate neighbors. The pravye differed sharply with the future Nationalists on questions of political form. They mistrusted the kind of political party the Nationalists came to build, and did not share the Nationalists’ positive feelings for Stolypin, with whom the new party was to work in close harmony after 1910.

Just to the left of the deputies of the moderate right sat the Octobrists and their adherents. Attempts to correlate the Octobrists’ program with their social base are difficult. Most often characterized as a party of the nobility and the big bourgeoisie, the Octobrists, normally defenders of private property, haphazardly followed a mildly constitutionalist program that led them on occasion to assume positions contrary to the immediate interests of those propertied classes they were supposed to represent. Avrekh characterizes the Octobrists as “bourgeois in program but landlord in social base.”²³ Elsewhere, he calls them the party of “the big bourgeoisie and the capitalizing landlords.”²⁴ He seeks to distinguish the party’s left wing as the bourgeois section; the right wing as landlord—a distinction that fails to hold up under the simplest empirical scrutiny.²⁵ Avrekh does recognize, however, that the role in the party of the bourgeoisie has been over-stressed. Only 15 of the 124 Octobrist deputies in the Third Duma (third session) can be characterized as bourgeois.²⁶ Avrekh goes on to note that Octobrist deputies had roughly the same social background as the moderate rights.²⁷ To argue that the Octobrists’ positions reflect in some direct way the peculiarities of their class composition does not explain their true nature, nor is it a useful guide to understanding the behavior of individual party members.

The multiclass base and broad appeal of the Union of October is revealed by a breakdown of its deputies according to soslovie:²⁸

These men characterized themselves as: “. . . A constitutionalist center not striving toward the seizure of government power but at the same time steadfastly maintaining the rights of popular representation within the boundaries specified for it by the Fundamental Laws.”²⁹ It was this ambiguous constitutionalism that attracted noble landlords schooled in the pre-1905 traditions of zemstvo liberalism. From the Duma statistics, the Octobrists emerge most sharply as a party of the landowning nobility. Of all the center and right fractions, it is the Octobrists who had the highest proportion of nobles (64.7 percent). The peasant and clergy elements in the faction were small, making it possible to characterize the Duma Octobrists as primarily nobles, representing that segment of the dvorianstvo which had received its political education in the zemstvos of central Russia with their quasi-liberal traditions. All zemstvo members were by no means liberal. Yet, those who were touched by the phenomenon of “zemstvo liberalism” were motivated by a concern for legality and social justice that led them to adopt positions, particularly concerning the peasantry and traditional privileges, that were often in opposition to their immediate interests as landlords. This did not mean that they rejected private property; merely that they were not always consistent in its defense.

Given these ideological ambiguities, described above by Michael Brainerd, Octobrist unity was always exceedingly frail. Largely derived from the ideas and hopes of its more progressive leadership, the Union’s program inspired neither the entire Duma fraction nor most of the provincial Octobrists. So sympathetic an observer as the British diplomat, Neville Henderson, was to note in 1907: “They consist . . . of leaders without followers. . . . The views of their leaders are personal and do not represent those of the party as a whole. This statement perhaps explains the lack of public support for the Octobrists. . . .”³⁰ After an interview in 1908 with Khomiakov, Richard Seymour reported to London: “A split in the Octobrist party had already been foreshadowed and would not be a regrettable eventuality as that party had hitherto only been held together by force of circumstances and its membership were not inspired by any real unity of aims.”³¹ While these statements may be overdrawn, they do make clear that the Octobrists were by no means ideally suited to the task of organizing the gentry into a modern political party.

Having discussed their neighbors to the right and left, we are brought to the center of our concerns—those deputies who later became the Nationalist fraction. Once the forces on the right had coalesced, this group would consist of some seventy-four moderate rights and twenty-three members of the National Group, the number varying slightly from session to session. As we have seen, the party’s deputies had been elected largely under the broad label “right,” and we can say strikingly little about them at this early stage of their development. If we ignore the bourgeois wing of the Octobrists, the moderate rights and National Group present substantially the same social picture as the Octobrist fraction, making allowances for a somewhat larger number of peasants and members of the clergy. The Nationalist faction in the Third Duma (third session) consisted of:³²

Of all the political factions in the Duma the Nationalists had the most harmonious relationship with the members of the clergy in their ranks, and the Nationalist peasants were an equally carefully selected group. Thus, the nobles maintained complete control of the faction while comprising a smaller percentage of their Duma delegation (57 percent) than the Octobrist nobles made up of theirs. What is striking about the men who eventually joined the Nationalist faction is the minimum of preconceptions they brought to the Duma. Not tied to any party, they were representative of that large element of noble sentiment that felt the Duma pravye to be immoderate and the Octobrists to be too enamored of dangerous constitutional notions and too eager to cooperate with the left. Although believers in autocracy, the moderate rights nevertheless supported representative institutions and prudent reforms. After 1905 the need for noble political organization, independent of the autocracy, had become clear to them. These noblemen were evolving out of their traditional state service roles and groping for new ways in the context of the Third of June Regime to manifest their political independence. At the time of the 1907 election campaign none of the existing political factions really appealed to them. Thus there existed a large bloc of independent, uncommitted gentry sentiment that the moderate rights in the Duma could be said to represent. In this sense, the future Nationalist deputies bore a certain resemblance to the newly elected English country gentlemen of the late eighteenth century described by Namier: “The distinguishing mark of the country gentlemen was disinterested independence: he should not be bound either to administration or to any faction in the House, nor to a magnate in his constituency ... he should owe his election to the free choice of the gentlemen of the county. . . .”³³ In a report prepared for the British Foreign Office Bernard Pares noted: “These [the moderate rights] are country gentlemen who, having [had] no such class unity as the English gentry, took no particular interest in parties until the Reform movement. . . . The more apathetic of the country gentry now woke to life and expelled the Cadets . . . from the zemstvo all over the country.”³⁴

As we have seen, the representatives of these country gentlemen in the Duma did not differ markedly from the Octobrists in their social origins (soslovie). However, the use of several other criteria—landownership, education, geography, and occupation—enables us to distinguish them from their neighbors to the left.

The two groups differed quite sharply in terms of educational background. Excluding those with military educations (because this category implies a specific type of education), fifty-four of one hundred twenty-four Octobrists in the third session (45 percent) had received higher education, while only twenty-two of the eighty-nine future Nationalists (25 percent) had completed the university. This may account for the Octobrists’ greater receptivity to a politics of ideas. In addition, thirty of those fifty-four Octobrists had attended the elite universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, making them part of an educated aristocracy that had been at least touched by the major intellectual currents of the time. In contrast, only six of the university-trained Nationalists had been schooled in the capitals. The largest single group (6) had studied in Kiev at St. Vladimir.³⁵

The sharpest difference, however, was geographical. The two parties drew their support from different regions rather than dividing the vote in each gubernia. A few provinces had elected deputies from both parties, but, as noted above, the pattern was for one of the conservative groups to dominate a gubernia’s delegation; strong consensual traditions among the landed nobles who dominated most final electoral assemblies had much to do with this phenomenon. Nationalist deputies came primarily from the western borderlands. Thirty-three originated from the nine western gubernias originally included in Stolypin’s controversial proposal to introduce zemstvos in the borderland. Of these, twenty-seven were from the six southwestern and Bielorussian provinces covered by the final bill—Kiev, Podol’e, Volynia, Minsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev. Kiev, with eight Duma members, and Minsk and Podol’e, with six each, had the largest Nationalist delegations. The three Northwest gubernias, Kovno, Vilno, and Grodno—later eliminated from the western zemstvo bill—had elected altogether only five future Nationalists. In other border areas the party had thirteen members. Bessarabia, under the influence of the enormously wealthy Krupensky family, had sent seven deputies, and Kherson four. In the left-bank Ukraine and in other gubernias near the western borders the future Nationalists had thirteen Duma members. Only eleven deputies came from the capitals or Central Russian gubernias, and five of these were from Tula, where the families of such leading Nationalists as V. A. Bobrinsky and Prince A. P. Urusov exercised a great influence on the local nobility. It is important to note that most of the eventual leadership of the Nationalist Party, which emerged from the moderate rights—P. N. Balashev, F. N. Bezak, S. M. Bogdanov, and D. N. Chikachev—came from the strongholds of Kiev and Podol’e. P. N. Krupensky and V. A. Bobrinsky were to play leading roles in Duma politics, but in internal party life they carried less weight than did the men from the west. The National Group of twenty-three deputies, which sat between the moderate rights and the pravye until the formation of the Nationalist faction, came from roughly the same areas as the moderate rights, but none of its members were from Kiev, Podol’e, or Minsk, the areas of the greatest strength of the moderate right. Grodno, Mogilev, Voly-nia, and Kursk had sent three deputies each. Other Nationalist Group members came from Kherson, Pskov, and Poltava. The leader of the group, Prince Urusov, came from Tula, just south of Moscow.³⁶

The fundamental institutional distinction between the western gubernias and central Russia—the absence of zemstvos—affected the types of occupations the Duma members had previously pursued. The breakdown by party and occupation was:

As there is a considerable overlap, these figures are not entirely convincing: many deputies had been engaged in different occupations at different times, But one basic distinction is clear: the Octobrists had grown out of the zemstvo movement with its peculiar approach to politics, while the future Nationalists, evolving from a once-strong service tradition, were not committed to any single field of endeavor.³⁷

Landholding was more extensive among Octobrist deputies. Eighty-three of them owned tracts larger than 200 desiatiny, (desiatin – 2.7 acres). Forty-two of the Nationalists owned such tracts, the average being 1,686 desiatiny. The Octobrists who owned land averaged 2,349 desiatiny. These figures give some credence to the view that more economically secure landlords were more willing to forego class interest on occasion, while threatened elements would be concerned less with legality and more with survival. While it may be absurd to characterize as threatened any group whose average holding is over 1,500 desiatiny, we shall see below that the Nationalists did represent a segment of the nobility that was severely challenged on the most concrete day-to-day level.³⁸

The Western Borderland

The Nationalists drew their greatest numbers as well as their leadership from the western borderland. The party received scattered support elsewhere, drawing in part on the bloc of uncommitted dvorianstvo opinion mentioned above, but the peculiarities of the west had a crucial impact on Nationalist ideology, program, and organizational form. Since the middle ages this region had been dominated by the Poles. It had become, in 1794, part of the Russian Empire, but the area remained dominated by Polish noble landlords. After the Polish rebellion of 1830, still more Polish nobles moved into the area.³⁹ After the rebellion of 1863, however, Russian landowning in the area began to increase with state support: by 1907 Russians of all soslovia held more land than their Polish neighbors. Most of this land had originally been held by recently rewarded bureaucrats. These first Russian pomeshchiki had been especially prone to absenteeism, and they were deeply imbued with the service mentality. By 1907, however, second-and third-generation descendants, both female and male, held title to these estates, and many chose to remain on the land and farm.⁴⁰

For all their recent gains, Russian noble landlords of the west still lived a precarious existence, challenged on the land by Poles and in the commercial life of the towns by Jews. Despite their control of resources, both Jews and Poles were only small minorities of the total population of the western provinces. The percentages for the nine western gubernias were:⁴¹

The “Russian” category includes Great Russians, Bielorussians, and Ukrainians. Great Russians numbered only three or four percent of that total. The peasantry was primarily Ukrainian or Bielorussian. Thus, the Russian landlord was cut off from the peasantry by clearly perceived class divisions and separated from the Polish nobility by equally sharp national and religious barriers. Faced with this situation, Russian pomeshchiki came to fasten on to any means that might strengthen their position on the land and give them political power. By invoking Russian nationalism, the west Russian gentry appealed to outside authorities for support in the struggle with Polish landowners. Not surprisingly then, the ethnic composition of the west provided the basis for the local Russians’ special obsession with nationalism.⁴²

This particular distribution of nationalities also serves to explain a fundamental institutional peculiarity of the western borderland. The zemstvo reform of 1864 had not been extended to the western provinces: to do so would have given control of local government to Polish nobles who, after the revolt of 1863, were considered politically untrustworthy. A law of April 2, 1903, created appointed zemstvos in Kiev, Podol’e, Volynia, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev. The members of these assemblies were chosen by the Ministry of Interior, and these peculiar institutions were deemed entirely inadequate by local Russian landlords.⁴³ To be sure, the Polish element had been eliminated, but the appointment of members made the ethos of these bodies essentially bureaucratic. Furthermore, only the gubernia assemblies held any power; on the uezd level, they were merely consultative.⁴⁴ Therefore, the appointed zemstvo merely aggravated local awareness of Russian landlord absenteeism, which, although diminished with passing generations, still remained a problem.

The bureaucratic solution to the west’s problem had been necessitated by the historic domination of landholding and agriculture by technically advanced Polish landlords. By 1907, however, according to Ministry of Agriculture figures cited by V. V. Shulgin, the total number of desiatiny privately owned by Russians in the southwest gubernias of Kiev, Podol’e, and Volynia far exceeded that owned by Poles.⁴⁵

The pattern of large ownership by Poles and smaller tracts owned by Russians had also diminished. The amount of land held by Russians and Poles in allotments of more or less than 200 desiatiny (a figure that is Shulgin’s point of distinction and has no special analytic meaning) broke down as follows:⁴⁶

Even by the earlier figures of the 1897 census, Russian landlords owning more than 200 desiatiny had been slightly more numerous than their Polish counterparts:⁴⁷

The real political distinction emerges, however, when the franchise requirements of the electoral law are introduced. The number of po-meshchiki possessing sufficient property to meet the full census requirement (for participation directly in the district assemblies of the landowners curia) was markedly greater among the Poles than among any of the Russians:⁴⁸

This predominance of large Polish property had its effect on the composition of the west’s State Council delegation chosen by special noble assemblies: all were Polish. Had the 1890 zemstvo law been introduced into the borderland without alteration, Polish landlords would have dominated local government.

Because of this area’s high fertility and accessibility to the international grain market, production for profit rather than subsistence was the rule. Land was either farmed by the pomeshchiki themselves or rented on long-term leases to people who could run it profitably. Often renters were light industrial firms involved in food processing. Distilling and sugar beet refining were the most common such enterprises. Generally, agriculture in the borderland, particularly in the southwest gubernias of Kiev, Podol’e, and Volynia, was characterized by a well-developed capitalist economy. Much of this modernity is explained by the existence of a commercial market more developed than elsewhere in Russia. Market relations pushed the gentry of the region, both Polish and Russian, into the modern capitalist world of profit, competent bookkeeping, and efficient organization.⁴⁹ These were not traditional noble characteristics, and the effect was unsettling. It deprived the landlord of the smugness, and the political passivity, that went with the absolute domination of the relatively self-contained world of the traditional village untouched by the market. Instead, the western pomeshchiki moved in the unfamiliar world of money-lenders, shippers, and other middlemen, whom they confronted in the towns of the borderland. The necessity of functioning in this urban economic context was particularly disturbing to Russian landlords, who had only recently left the far stabler and more secure environment of the bureaucracy. While their new environment made them feel more insecure than their central Russian counterparts, it also made them more open, by necessity, to comparatively modern approaches to both economics and politics.

There were few self-sufficient communes and dues-collecting landlords in the west. The profitability of farming was reflected in the high value of land, especially in the southwest. There land sold for an average of 128.7 roubles per desiatin in 1900, a figure exceeded in value only in the left-bank Ukraine and the southern steppe.⁵⁰ In addition, the borderland exhibited a higher concentration of land in the hands of large holders and a higher level of private landholding than the rest of Russia. Of this private land, 61.7 percent was owned by nobles and 13.3 percent by peasants.⁵¹

Significantly, noble landlords of the west had lost far less land over the course of the late nineteenth century than had their central Russian counterparts. Since Emancipation, the dvorianstvo of the empire had generally been losing its grip on the land, but the pomeshchiki of the southwest still retained 84 percent of what they had owned in 1877. The figure for Bielorussia was 88 percent, in comparison with a national average of 70 percent.⁵² Much of this resilience is attributable to the performance of the more efficient Polish landlords, who had never been distracted by the necessity of state service, and many of whom had formally studied agronomy. While not always direct participants in agricultural activity, west Russian nobles nevertheless had a conception of agriculture that derived from the experience of their more advanced Polish competitors. For this reason among others, the Russian landlord of the west came to perceive agriculture as a modern productive force, which could bolster and indeed define his social position.

In Gaisin uezd of Podol’e roughly two-thirds of the holdings were managed by their owners. One-third had been rented out on long-term leases.⁵³ Little land was left fallow or given to peasant communes to cultivate in exchange for rent. Crop rotation had become more sophisticated in the west. In Gaisin 85 percent of the land was under multifield tillage, and the few individual holdings on which we have information were also multifield.⁵⁴ As noted above, the west had always been a fertile field for the growth of private peasant holding; yet ownership of most of the land was still firmly in noble hands. In Kiev gubernia, 14,304 private owners were members of the dvorianstvo, while only 2,673 peasants held land privately.⁵⁵ Aside from land ownership, in Kiev gubernia there were 53,113 people of the noble estate and 2,972,275 peasants.⁵⁶ In Volynia 47,024 dvoriane dominated the lives of 2,241,062 peasants.⁵⁷ These figures reflect the classic pattern of concentration of wealth in the hands of a relative few, but they also show that the ranks of the nobility were not miniscule: nobles were present in sufficiently large numbers to make up a sizable constituency to which the Nationalists would later feel accountable.

One finds leading Nationalist figures engaged in both renting and farming. Professor V. E. Chernov was vice-president and later president of the Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists. A medical specialist in the city of Kiev, Chernov had no time for agriculture despite his noble ancestry, and so rented his 1,068 desiatiny in Uman uezd to the Ver-niachsky sugar factory. Leaving the professor 52.3 desiatiny for usad’ba, the factory planted 786.6 desiatiny and left 214 as forest. 16 desiatiny were unusable.⁵⁸ The opposite pattern obtained for the Nationalist deputy, A. A. Pototsky. A member of one of the empire’s wealthiest landowning families, Pototsky owned land in Podol’e and Kiev.⁵⁹ He had fifteen villages in Zvenigorod uezd of Kiev gubernia. Pototsky actually farmed 14,598 desiatiny while renting out 891. Of the land he worked, 8,305 desiatiny were planted, all of it in a ten-field system; 4,199 were left as forest; 296 were given over to raising hay; and the manor’s usad’ba lands comprised 421 desiatiny.⁶⁰

A more mixed approach was exhibited by Konstantin Konstantinovich Pototsky, who possessed some 30,625.7 desiatiny in Gaisin. Of this land, 5,260.3 desiatiny were managed by Pototsky while another 5,559.5 desiatiny were in forest land. The remaining 19,805.8 desiatiny were rented out on long-term leases to a variety of people. Of the land actually worked by K. K., 4,588.93 desiatiny were planted in a multifield arrangement, 22.7 went for usad’ba and hay-raising land, 191.2 were rented to peasants, 178.5 was occupied by Pototsky’s own sugar factory, and 1.2 were given over to a distilling plant.⁶¹ Information on the estates of several relatives of Nationalist deputies reveals an even clearer pattern of agricultural modernity. Of nine such holdings, all but one were multifield, and the one three-field estate provided the grain for a large distilling operation. All the estates had either sugar beet refining or distilling factories; in some cases both.⁶² This is concrete proof of the Nationalists’ involvement in production for the market. This involvement in market relations had compelled these men to do business regularly in the city of Kiev, the economy of which was heavily geared to sugar and alcohol. This practical involvement in city life, in turn, had significant political and institutional consequences, which will be elaborated below.

While the future Nationalists exhibited a variety of patterns of land use, the limited number of our examples should caution us not to assume an automatic relationship between specific approaches to landowning and the politics of the Nationalist party. But the tendencies toward activism and involvement with the market are clear. What is crucial is that agriculture in the west, regardless of the particular form of tenure, was capitalistically organized, and the importance and profitability of agriculture reinforced the commitment of Russian landlords to retain their lands. Capitalist agriculture coupled with the confrontation of different nationalities created a particularly volatile political setting.

Because of their desire and ability to maintain their estates, the landlords of the west were extremely unsympathetic to peasant demands for land. Indeed their very success in holding onto their property had created an especially acute land shortage for the peasantry of the west. Many peasants had been forced off their allotments to work as wage laborers on the landlords’ huge sugar plantations. Even most of those who held onto some land could not make ends meet, and they too had to seek employment, for piteously low wages, on the estates of the pomeshchiki. Thus the relationship between the landlords of the west and those who worked their lands more closely resembled that of a capitalist and his employees than that of a traditional feudal landlord and his peasants. In contrast to much of the rest of Russia, something far more like a class of capitalist farmers confronted a class of agrarian laborers in an intense, bitter, and daily struggle.

Importantly, the landlords of the west did not have to search their memories to find proof of the seriousness of what could properly be called a class struggle on the land. In the course of the massive peasant revolts of 1905 and 1906, it was the southwest that had the highest per capita incidence of disturbances of any region. Bielorussia ranked third. Moreover, these were neither the elemental burnings and lootings nor the sporadic forest offenses typical of the rest of Russia. The peasants of the west engaged in well-planned, highly conscious strikes for higher wages and better working conditions. While this movement met with some initial successes, it eventually was brutally repressed by the autocracy’s policemen and soldiers. By the end of 1907, the landlords had been reminded of their ultimate dependence on the state, and the peasants had once again been thwarted in their desires.

Excluding the provinces of Moscow and Petersburg, the southwestern gubernias had an especially large percentage of urban residents. By 1910 the city of Kiev had a population of just under half a million, which made it the third largest city in Russia.⁶³ Of a population of 4,200,354 in Kiev gubernia, 604,135 lived in towns larger than io,ooo.⁶⁴ This is 15 percent, a figure higher than the national percentage of 13 percent, and particularly high if we eliminate the two capitals from our calculations.⁶⁵ In Volynia some 9 percent lived in towns, and in Podol’e the figure was 8 percent.⁶⁶ However, Kiev dominated the entire southwest, serving as the central city for landlords from Podol’e and Volynia, many of whom maintained houses or apartments there. Since the 1860s, when it had been an administrative and military center of 68,000, Kiev had experienced an astronomical demographic growth:⁶⁷

Industrial expansion had been enormous, especially during the 1890s. Much of it involved light industries closely related to agriculture. Sugar beet refining and distilling were the major industries. Railroads had played a crucial role in the city’s growth: the agriculture products of the borderland found easy access to a newly revived European grain market. By 1907 this growth had somewhat slowed down and unemployment was a serious problem.⁶⁸ The political unrest of the previous two years had been suppressed, but the Nationalists’ future supporters could not help but feel that they were sitting on a powder keg.

Urbanization also had a profound effect on the politics of the Nationalists. This aspect of the party’s development distinguishes it sharply from the Octobrists. After eliminating from consideration the capitals, from which the Octobrists drew most of their bourgeois support, one is struck by the absence of large cities in areas that returned Octobrist deputies: Samara, Chernigov, Ekaterinoslav, Poltava, Voronezh, Tambov, Khazan, Kaluga, and Kharkov all elected large numbers of Octobrist deputies, but only the last even approached Kiev in size. Moreover, in those areas of Bielorussia that were least urbanized—Mogilev and Vitebsk—the Nationalists did not fare as well; whereas in Minsk, which was roughly similar to the southwest, seven deputies who would become Nationalists were elected.

The precise influence of urban society on west Russian nobles was well delineated by V. V. Shulgin. I have cited Shulgin extensively because he can truly be said to reflect the views of the Russian landowning nobility of the western borderland, and it is, of course, the Russian gentry’s perceptions that concern me here. In particular, Shulgin provides a highly revealing analysis of the effect of urban politics in the absence of elected zemstvos in the southwest.

Many descendants of the original chinovnik landowners had remained on their land to take up farming, yet there existed no institutional framework that brought them into regular contact with one another. Rarely seeing their neighbors, they lived isolated lives. Shulgin compared them to dachniki, who lived alone with their families in summer vacation cottages. Atomized in this way, they lacked any real community. This interpersonal alienation was compounded by a sense that farming was an inadequate form of self-objectification, or often simply boring. Public activity could offer a solution to this psychological problem, but given the absence of well-functioning zemstvos, no arena for this public activity existed in the countryside. To engage in public activity, it was necessary to go to the city:

Often people meet each other, for example in Kiev, and find out to their amazement that they are close neighbors or even farm land in the same uezd. To such an extent did Russian landowning exist in isolation that men were kept in their little cells. It was clear that given such a situation people who wished to occupy themselves with public affairs . . . had no place in the countryside. They had to run to the city to find both gratification for their spiritual needs and a way to expend their energy. [Only] people of an exceptional nature remained on the land, either scorning society or feeling called to the land.⁶⁹

Thus, the initial political experience of those who later became Nationalist leaders had unfolded in the cities of the west, particularly Kiev. Only in the towns and cities could they find the sort of personal involvement that they sought. As a result, their approach to party work came to be influenced by the urban political culture and social structure to which they had been exposed. Shulgin’s chief complaint was the lack of a satisfactory institutional structure in the countryside. He sought a framework that would give the Russian landowners of the region the possibility of playing an independent local political role, freed of the tutelage of the bureaucracy. “The local population must think for itself and be able to help itself.”⁷⁰ To be sure, the Russian landowners should organize to dominate the new local institutions, and thus to control local life. In this respect, the Nationalists’ approach to the zemstvos was entirely different from that of nobles in central Russia. The elected zemstvo was not to be above party politics; rather, it was to be the arena for the struggle for power in the western borderland. Local elections were to be contested under the same party label as those that had emerged in the Duma.

The Electors

Until now, analyses of the electors have been drawn from incomplete and inconsistent newspaper accounts. These reports used a variety of terminologies and often did not corroborate each other.⁷¹ There are available, however, statistical breakdowns of the Third Duma electors compiled by the Ministry of Interior’s Osoboe delo-proizvodstvo po vyboram. While the categories used by the Ministry would not necessarily occur to the modern political analyst, the government’s criteria are sufficiently clear to permit greater understanding of this level of the electoral process.

For purposes of comparison it is useful to look at certain of the national totals on all the electors. By soslovie:⁷²

By political tendency:⁷³

By education:⁷⁴

My concern here is to compare the results for areas that returned Nationalists with those that elected Octobrists, in order to determine if it is possible to draw still more precise distinctions between the two parties. I shall be comparing the six western gubernias that received zemstvos in 1911 (Kiev, Podol’e, Volynia, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev) first with other gubernias that chose future Nationalists (Bessarabia, Tula, and Pskov), and second with regions that went heavily Octobrist (Ekaterinoslav, Samara, Chernigov, and Poltava).⁷⁵

Most striking is the numerical weakness of the nobility in the landowners’ curiae of the western gubernias. They do not constitute even half the landowners’ curiae, the very category in which one would expect them to be dominant. This stands in marked contrast to other Nationalist gubernias and to Octobrist strongholds.⁷⁶

The large number of priests in the west is the most salient feature of this comparison. It clearly demonstrates the severe problems that Russian landlords faced in these gubernias. While the soslovie distribution in the Octobrist and Nationalist Duma fractions was basically the same, this similarity did not carry over to the vyborshchiki who elected them. These statistics reveal the Nationalists to be the representatives of an especially weak segment of the landed nobility, which could not be secure in the belief that their wealth and position would assure them representation in the Duma. Instead it was necessary for them to do what nobles had not done previously: organize politically. As the statistics reveal, the clergy was to play a special role in the development of their political organization.

Priests were to act as a surrogate for Russian noble interests, a role with which they were not always happy, but one that they ultimately accepted and fulfilled. Had the priests’ position been one of absolute independence, it is reasonable to assume that the number of clerics in the Nationalist fraction in the Duma would have been considerably larger than it was. The large number of clerical electors may partly explain the Nationalists’ intense concern with religious questions during the course of the Duma. Yet it seems reasonable that the party’s ideological predispositions and concern for nationality probably would have assured a strong interest in religious matters under any circumstances. What is really underscored here is the extreme precariousness of the west Russian landlords’ position. Severely threatened, they were far less likely to play with such notions as legality and constitutionalism than were their central Russian counterparts. The Nationalist constituency concentrated first and foremost on safeguarding its most immediate interests.

The Russian nobles of the west had been more involved in state service and less in “public activities” than their Octobrist counterparts, a fact easily explained by the absence of zemstvos in the west. While this phenomenon affected the attitudes of those deputies who came from the borderland, its broader explanatory force is limited by the fact that the rate of participation in zemstvo work in Nationalist areas where such bodies did exist is roughly the same as that encountered in Octobrist regions. Indeed, the material presented on Octobrist electors and Nationalist electors outside the west reveals no major differences for any criterion save political tendency, the very factor I have sought to explain. Even the large number of so-called moderates (116) in the Octobrist strongholds requires qualification. In Samara and Ekaterinoslav “moderates” did dominate the assemblies, but in Poltava and Chernigov “right” electors were far more numerous. This similarity of characteristics makes the phenomenon of Nationalist strength outside the west difficult to explain.

But if there are not sharp “objective differences” between the electors of the Octobrist and future Nationalist deputies (except for the western provinces), what is to be made of the contrasts I have drawn above between the two Duma factions? One of the sharpest contrasts, it will be remembered, was in educational level. 45 percent of the Octobrist Deputies had gone to universities, as opposed to 25 percent of the Nationalist Deputies. When we exclude the peasant and church-affiliated deputies of both Duma factions from our calculations, the contrast between Octobrist and Nationalist Deputies becomes even more acute. Of the Octobrist Deputies, who were nobles, bourgeois, and professionals, 51 percent had had higher education; while the figure for the Nationalists was 39 percent. No such differences are discernible between the electors of the two parties, however; the national average of electors in the landowners’ curia with university training was 37 percent. In the western gubernias, 35 percent of the electors in this curia were university educated, while in the other Nationalist strongholds, the figure was 40 percent, the same as the percentage that obtained in the Octobrists’ strongholds. The pattern is clear: The Octobrist Deputies exhibited a higher educational level than the people who had elected them, while the Nationalists were more typical of their electorate. This finding would appear to reinforce my earlier contention that the Octobrist faction was less representative of its imputed social base than were the Nationalists.

The electors of the first city curiae repeat the pattern we discerned in the landowners’ assemblies. The western gubernias show different results from both the nonwestern Nationalist and Octobrist provinces. These latter two groups of gubernias again are similar in all categories with the exception of political inclination. Outside the west, the electors of the first city curia were generally allied with the landlords. In the borderland, however, there were fewer nobles among the urban electors, and Jews tended to dominate the city assemblies. Their politics were decidedly left wing. The breakdown in the first city curiae:⁷⁷

Quite clearly, alliances between electors from the landowners’ curiae and those in the first city assembly did not occur in the west, forcing the local Russian gentry deeper into the embrace of the clergy. The fact that so much of both landed and commercial wealth was in the hands of aliens naturally reinforced the chauvinism of many Russian landlords, but it also gave to their particular form of nationalism a highly expedient and pragmatic character. While certain more romantic Russian nationalists were often willing to subordinate immediate interests to nationalist principles or to view nationalism as a supraclass ideology, the Nationalist party’s principles were nearly always consistent with the most basic, pragmatic interests of their constituents.

The figures for the vyborshchiki amplify the suggestion, given by the profiles of the Duma fractions, that the Nationalists represented a less secure and historically established element of the dvorianstvo. The national divisions in the western borderlands further exacerbated this feeling. The insecurity of the landowners of the west goes far to explain the intransigence of the Nationalists’ defense of what they perceived to be their immediate interests. The Nationalists were far less willing than the Octobrists to engage in a politics of compromise. The Nationalists’ unswerving support of the Western Zemstvo Act, which introduced zemstvos into the borderland in 1911, is probably the most dramatic case of this attitude. In fact, it was around the demand for zemstvos in the borderland that the Nationalists coalesced during the first years of the Third Duma.⁷⁸ The campaign for control of local government in the west provided a broad basis for the development of the Nationalist Party. It was not a simple question of extending an institution to a region where it did not exist; rather, the western zemstvo issue highlighted all the party’s fundamental concerns.

Basing their politics on concrete economic and political interests, the Nationalists evinced a modernity that carried over to the organizational forms they evolved during the course of the Third Duma. The party developed a network of local organizations, which maintained contact with, and had a strong influence upon, the Duma faction. Unlike other parties, these local groups sought to contest zemstvo and city Duma elections in terms of the same political affiliations that had emerged on the national level, and, perhaps most importantly, the Duma faction and the party’s national center maintained constant contact with the localities. Thus, the Nationalists actually represented, in the truest sense of the word, the interests of a clearly defined constituency. Yet this specificity and modernity of organization owes much to the peculiarities of the western borderland. In the last analysis, one is drawn to the conclusion that the peculiar character of the Nationalist party was primarily a regional phenomenon.

It was the Nationalists’ greatest failure that they could not extend their base in the west to the rest of Russia. The party had some success in central Russia in the Fourth Duma elections (1912), but it failed to increase the size of its Duma fraction (eighty-eight). Stolypin’s absence from the scene does much to explain these mixed results. Some thirty nonwestern deputies who earlier might have joined the Nationalists affiliated instead with Krupensky’s new center group. The Octobrists were reduced to less than one hundred deputies. Thus, in the years before the war the Fourth Duma was left with no consistent, working majority. The result was drift and apathy. The Nationalists were as much to blame for this state of affairs as anyone else, but, as their most vocal spokesman, A. I. Savenko, pointed out repeatedly, this political sloth only mirrored the indifference and aimlessness of the social classes represented in the Duma.

The war reanimated national politics. The autocracy’s military and logistic failures reopened the gap between state and privileged society. The Nationalists, with ties to both state and society, found themselves caught in the middle. The creation of the clearly oppositional Progressive Bloc in the summer of 1915, with its call for a ministry of public confidence, forced them to take sides, which they were unable to do as a united group. For all their talk of modernity, many of the Nationalists still had not entirely forsaken the service tradition. Thus, they could not reach a common view on joining the Progressive Bloc. The result was a party split. Shulgin and V. A. Bobrinsky led thirty-six Nationalists into the Progressive Bloc, while the party’s president, P. N. Balashev, continued to lead those of the Nationalist deputies who refused to follow the others. From this moment on, the Nationalists, as a party, ceased to be a significant force on the national political scene.

To recapitulate, there are four main factors that account for the Nationalists’ political behavior in the western provinces:

1. The capitalist organization of borderland agriculture, the accompanying market relations, the high value of land, and production for profit rather than subsistence undermined traditional noble attitudes and intensified the desire of landlords to retain their lands. This provided a material basis for the evolution of class consciousness. To be sure, this is not a sufficient explanation given the presence of capitalist forms of agriculture in some areas of Octobrist strength. It is, however, the necessary first step for any understanding of the Nationalists. Had agriculture in the west been more traditional, they would have turned into a very different kind of political formation.

2. The division and conflicts of nationalities in the west contributed to a sense of precariousness among the Nationalists’ supporters. The greater wealth and efficiency of Polish landlords made Russian noble landowners extremely insecure both economically and politically.

3. The greater wealth of the Polish landlords had made it impossible to introduce elected zemstvos in the borderland: according to the property requirements of the 1890 law, the zemstvo would have been dominated by Poles. It was politically impossible to allow local government in an area near Austria and Germany to be in the hands of unreliable aliens.

4. The absence of zemstvos made it necessary for Russian noble landlords interested in public activities to go to the towns, primarily Kiev, where they were exposed to a modern urban political culture in which the class struggle was a clear and unavoidable element of everyday reality. This contributed to a still greater sense of social conflict. It also provided the Nationalists with a whole new set of terms of reference about politics, which they proceeded to apply, along with the peculiar intensity of urban politics, to the politics of the countryside.

I should stress that these basic determinants cannot be viewed in isolation. No single one provides a sufficient explanation, nor is any one more important than the others. Taken separately, each can be said to apply to groups other than the west Russian gentry. It is only the combination of these factors, together with the political culture to which they gave rise, that explains the genesis and peculiar character of the Nationalist party.

NOTES

* I shall use the Russian pravye (rights) to refer to the extreme right Duma fraction. Right, used in English, will simply serve as shorthand for right-wing.

1. A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i tret’eiunskaia sistema (Moscow, 1966), p.16.

2. Samuel Harper, The New Electoral Law for the Russian Duma (Chicago, 1908). Fyodor Dan, Novyi izhiratel’nyi zakon (Spb., 1907). Alfred Levin, “The Russian Voter in the Elections to the Third Duma,” Slavic Review, December 1962, pp.660–67, has valuable information on procedural aspects of the law, the text of which can be found in Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. XXVII, #29242. See also Geoffrey Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment (Cambridge, 1973), pp.45–48, and Levin, The Third Duma: Elections and Profile (Hamden, 1975).

3. C. Jay Smith, “The Russian Third State Duma,” Russian Review #3, 1958, pp.201–10.

4. E. D. Chermenskii, “Bor’ba partii i klassov v IV gosudarstvennoi duma (1912–1917 gg.),” t.I, Doctoral dissertation, Moscow, 1947, p.70.

5. Ibid., p.21.

6. Statistical compilations by the government, previously unused, provide the possibility for a more solid empirical basis for discussions of the 1907 election campaign. Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del, Vybory v tretiu gosudarstvennuiu dumu (hereafter Vybory) (St. Petersburg, 1911), p.171. Alfred Levin’s “The Russian Voter . . .” (see note 4), “The Reactionary Tradition in the Elections to the Third Duma,” Oklahoma State University Occasional Papers (Stillwater, 1962), and his recent book The Third Duma are the only works on the elections themselves. Avrekh in Tsarizm i tret’eiunskaia sistema and in “Tret’eiunskaya monarkhia i obrazovanie tret’edumskogo pomeshchi-che-burzhuaznogo bloka,” Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta, #1, 1956, pp.1–70, avoids the problem, offering neither an investigation of the election campaign nor a real analysis of its social significance. Hosking’s discussion, pp.45–48, is also brief, though more insightful than that of Avrekh.

7. Dan, p.30.

8. Smith, p.202.

9. See note 6.

10. Golos Moskvy, November 1, 1907.

11. Avrekh, Tsarizm . . ., p.20.

12. Father Fiodr Nikonovich, Iz dnevnika chlena gosudarstvennoi dumy ot Vitekskoi gubernii (Vitebsk, 1912), p.11.

13. G. Iursky, Pravye v tret-ei gosudarstvennoi dume (Kharkov, 1912), p.3

14. Levin, “The Reactionary Tradition . . . ,” p.4.

15. Kievlianin, November 2, 1909.

16. Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabrskoi revoliutsii (hereafter TSGAOR), fond 102, departamenta politsii, 4-Oe deloproizvodstvo, 1907, delo 164, list 302.

17. TSGAOR, f. 102, D.P., 4-oe deloproizvodstvo, 1907, d. 164, 11. 149-50.

18. TSGAOR, f. 102, D.P., 4-oe deloproizvodstvo, 1907, d. 164, 1. 191.

19. TSGAOR, f. 102. D.P., 4-oe deloproizvodstvo, 1907, d. 164, 1. 281.

20. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 3-yi sozyv—Portrety, biografii, avtografii (hereafter Portrety) (St. Petersburg, 1910).

21. Obzor deiatel’nosti Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, tretyi sozyv, Chast’I, pp.72–93

22. Okrainy Rossii, no. 43, October 27, 1907; no. 47, November 24, 1907.

23. Avrekh, “Stolypinskyi bonapartizm i voprosy voennoi politiki v Illei Dume,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 1, 1956, p.20.

24. Avrekh, “Tret’a Duma i nachalo krizisa tret’eiunskoi sistem,” Isotori-cheskie zapiski, no. 53, p.53.

25. Avrekh, “Tret’eiunskaia monarkhia,” Istoria SSSR, t. VI (Moscow, 1968), p.346.

26. Portrety.

27. Avrekh, “Tret’a Duma . . . ,” p.54.

28. Portrety.

29. TSGAOR, f. 115, 0.1., d. 34, 1.1.

30. Public Records Office (hereafter pro), Foreign Office series 371, vol. 318, no. 27698, August 19, 1907.

31. pro, fo 371, vol. 513, no. 31810, September 14, 1908.

32. Portrety.

33. Sir Lewis Namier, “Country Gentlemen in Parliament, 1756-84,” in Crossroads of Power (New York, 1962), p.31.

34. pro, fo 371, no. 30901, September 5, 1908.

35. Portrety.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. V. V. Shulgin, Vybornoe zemstvo v iugo-zapadnom krae (Kiev, 1909), p.17.

40. Ibid., p.20.

41. These figures are from Mary Schaeffer, “The Political Policies of P. A. Stolypin,” (doctoral diss., Indiana University, 1964), p.268. They are based mainly on the census of 1897.

42. Avrekh, “Vopros o zapadnom zemstve in bankrovstvo Stolypina,” Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 70, 1962, pp.61–112. Edward Chmielewski, “Stolypin’s Last Crisis,” California Slavic Studies (3), 1964, pp.95–126, and The Polish Question in the Russian State Duma (Knoxville, 1970), A. S. Izgoev, P. A. Stolypin (Moscow, 1912). All three writers show a tendency to regard the Nationalists’ concern with nationalism as an autonomous factor divorced from questions of class. See also Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (London, 1967), p.674. Of all historians who cover this period, Seton-Watson appears to be the only nonspecialist who is sensitive to nationalism’s broad political appeal. He draws a useful parallel to Germany, where nationalism, and later fascism, was strongest in southern border areas.

43. Chmielewski, The Polish Question in the Russian State Duma, p.82.

44. Shulgin, pp.25–32.

45. Ibid., p.50. In citing these figures from Shulgin, we are primarily interested in the kinds of information on which the Russian landlords based their opinions, for we are concerned here largely with their state of mind and less with the objective conditions of land ownership.

46. Ibid., p.56.

47. Ibid., p.36.

48. Ibid., p.37.

49. A. M. Anfimov, Krupnoe pomeshchiche khoziaistvo evropeiskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1969), p.167.

50. S. D. Kovalchenko, “Agrarnyi rynok i kharakter agrarnogo stroia evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XIX—nachale XX veka,” Istoria SSSR, no. 2, 1973, p.47

51. N. A. Proskuriakova, “Razmeshchenie i struktura dvorianskovo zem-levladenia evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XIX—nachale XX veka,” Istoria SSSR, no. 1, 1973, p.61.

52. Ibid., p.64.

53. Materialy po agrarno-ekonomicheskie issledovanie iugo-zapadnogo kraia (hereafter Materialy) (Gaisin, 1908) p.v.

54. Ibid., p.3.

55. Ves’iugo-zapadnogo kraya (Kiev, 1907), p.9. A. I. Yaroshevich, Ocherki ekonomicheskie zhizni iugo-zapadnogo kraya (Kiev, 1908), p.12.

56. Materialy, p.4.

57. Ves’iugo-zapadnogo kraya, pp.7, 220.

58. Materialy, p. 122.

59. Anfimov, p.394.

60. Materialy, p.148.

61. Ibid., p.7.

62. Descriptions of these estates were made by the Ministry of Agriculture. See Kratkie spravochnye svedenia o nekotorikh russkikh khoziaistvakh, izdanie vtoroe, vypusk vtoroi (St. Petersburg, 1901). It is necessary to be extremely cautious about drawing direct political conclusions from this information. There is no way of specifying the precise relationships of these landlords to the Nationalist deputies, nor can one be certain of the extent and nature of communication that went on between family members. Obviously joint family membership is no definite determinant of shared political opinion, but as a general indication, this particular connection is, I think, meaningful. The estates mentioned in the Kratkie svedenia include additional information on the lands of A. A. Pototsky, p.182, and K. K. Pototsky, p.242. Others were the heirs of N. A. Bezak, p.177, P. E. and A. I. Suvchinsky, p.214, Praskovaia Aleksandrevna Urusova, p.188, Nikolai Petrovich Balashev, p.244, Nikolai Matveich Chikhachev, p.265. Finally, it should be noted that there is no guarantee that this group is in any way typical. It does, however, correspond to most general accounts of the nature of agriculture in the borderland.

63. Cited from Goroda Rossii v 1910 godu, compiled by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of the Interior, cited in Seton-Watson, p.674.

64. Ves’iugo-zapadnogo kraya, p.7.

65. Ibid., p.218.

66. Ibid., p.453.

67. Institut istorii, akademia nauk USSR, Istoria Kieva, t. I (Kiev, 1965), pp.339–41, 464.

68. Ibid., p.462.

69. Shulgin, p. 19.

70. Ibid., p.33.

71. See McNaughton and Manning, this volume. The same imprecision in zemstvo elections existed on the elector level in Duma elections.

72. Vybory, p.272, figures taken from various sections.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. The choice of these particular gubernias requires some explanation. As noted before, the western provinces were the Nationalists’ area of greatest strength. I have not included the northwest gubernias of Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno, all of which were eliminated from the original proposals for western zemstvos. The future Nationalists did well in Grodno, but pravye were chosen in Vilna and Kovno, where national curiae divided the regular assemblies, presenting figures that cannot be readily correlated with these other findings. Bessarabia and Pskov were selected for their proximity to the western borders, while Tula was included to represent the limited phenomenon of Nationalist success in central Russia. Ekaterinoslav (eight), Chernigov (nine), and Samara (nine) returned the largest delegations of Octobrists, with Poltava (seven) close behind. The last province also voted in four moderate rights and has been included both to prevent the Octobrist sample from being too pure and to counterbalance the impact of Vitebsk (where three Octobrists were chosen) on the statistics for the western gubernias.

76. Vybory, p.272.

77. Ibid.

78. Robert Edelman, “The Russian Nationalist Party and the Political Crisis of 1909,” The Russian Review (January 1975), pp.22–54.