The Octobrists and the Gentry, 1905–1907: Leaders and Followers?

MICHAEL C. BRAINERD

The crisis of 1905 created a new political environment in Russia. The social upheaval and governmental collapse did not quite add up to a revolution. Yet the endemic and mounting tensions under the old regime had now burst out into the open. Precariously balanced relationships and conventional patterns of deference were irrevocably destroyed. Social, economic, and ethnic cleavages were exacerbated, and the vital concerns of Russian subjects of all classes became suddenly politicized. Moreover, new institutions were created: a limited monarchy, a unified cabinet headed by a premier, a broadly representative legislature, and political parties. Thus, Russia was propelled, without benefit of a gradual transition, from absolutism into the age of mass politics, from the eighteenth century into the twentieth.

If the landowning gentry did not wish to have reforms forced upon them, if they wished to defend as much as possible of their economic, political, and social advantages, they would have to play an active role in the period of recovery. As the state emerged from the crisis of 1905, the gentry¹ was presented with several alternatives. One possible response to the new circumstances was to absorb and develop the tradition of zemstvo liberalism—traditions that encompassed the political idealism of the 1870s as well as the humanitarian and economic “small deeds” of the eighties, and that had been renewed in the national congress movement after 1896. It was the legacy of the finest spirits the provincial nobility had produced, imbued with a sense of responsibility for the rural community, profoundly moral and anti-bureaucratic. Here perhaps was a political tradition that the gentry could call its own, and through which it could serve the nation. But zemstvo liberalism had unmistakable shortcomings: it was parochial, essentially rural, and too patiently meliorist for a time of crisis. It was founded on the assumption that landowners and villagers could work together peacefully to resolve common problems—a premise that was being challenged by vivid evidence of class conflict in the countryside. The “illuminations” of 1905 (burning of manor houses and outbuildings) might be regarded as a passing phase of excess, but the first Duma elections in early 1906, in which peasant majorities blackballed gentry candidates and demanded massive expropriation of estate lands as the legislature’s first priority, showed that cooperation was most probably a fantasy.

A second alternative was to reinvigorate the noble soslovie, to exploit the privileges of the first estate. The gentry dominated the zemstvos and could turn these bodies to the defense of the landowners against the intelligentsia and the peasants. Moreover, the dvorianstvo possessed its own representative institutions, the assemblies of the nobility, which had the right to petition the ruler directly. The events of 1905 and the victory of radicals in the zemstvo congresses revitalized the corporate nobility. In 1906 its representatives met in a national congress and a permanent organization, the United Nobility, was created to act as an extraparliamentary pressure group on behalf of the legal and economic privileges of the nobility. But soslovnost’ was a concept manifestly outdated in the twentieth century, and its advocates were backward-looking at a time when, as even conservatives admitted, modernization was unavoidable. It bore little relation to economic and social reality—and indeed ran contrary to it, for the exercise of their privileges isolated the nobility, unnecessarily antagonized other social groups, and exposed the weakness of the landowners. The government, threatened by intelligentsia constitutionalism on one side and massive peasant rebellion on the other, might simply decide that the gentry were superfluous.² The gentry must appear to act not for themselves alone but for the welfare of the state and the whole nation.

There was still another alternative: the Russian gentry could adapt to the parliamentary form of politics and organize a political party. This alternative was represented by the Union of October 17, one of the two principal parties that grew out of the zemstvo congresses. At the congress of zemstvo and city representatives that met in November 1905, the minority, led by the founders of the Union, held that the majority, dominated by the Constitutional Democrats, had lost its mandate.³ This was so not only because the congresses had adopted a radical political and social program but especially because the majority had refused to acclaim the Imperial Manifesto of October 17, creating a representative legislature and promising civil liberties. The moderate minority declared:

The congress, insofar as it speaks for provincial Russia, should have assisted in calming society and rendered its support to the government, instead of dictating the conditions of its exacting program. . . . We think that the zemstvo assemblies and city dumas which sent us would have adopted different resolutions in a political crisis of such severity. They would have considered it their duty to assist the government. . . .⁴

Thus the Octobrists took their stand in the mainstream of pre-1905, loyal zemstvo liberalism.

While this might seem a step backward, it offered a possibility of something quite new. Octobrism’s dual base in the two “solid” classes of local self-government, the landowners and urban property owners, contained a potential for leadership more consistent with the program of general modernization and with a representative legislature. The Octobrists were not a party of the gentry alone and could thus give a more “national” color to their activities. At the same time, the Union never had any serious appeal for workers and peasants; thus, it was tacitly but solidly grounded in the interests of private property. Realization of Octobrism’s potential depended in part, however, on whether, after the immediate revolutionary threat subsided, the gentry could transcend the boundaries of soslovie, particularly the traditional values and interests separating them from urban property owners.

The Union of October 17 combined two very different strains of political thought and two diverse futures lay before it. It could follow the program of moderate gentry liberalism, the harmonious vision of a reconciliation of social conflict and removal of the bureaucratic obstacle between tsar and people. Or it could develop along the lines of a partisan political party, drawing its support mainly but not exclusively from Russia’s propertied classes. From 1905 to 1907 the Union’s leaders wrestled with this choice (which was not, of course, as clear to them as we see it historically). During that time support for their position was tested several times in Duma elections. Finally, in October 1907, when the Third Duma convened, the Octobrists formed the largest party group (fraktsiia) in it, though they lacked a majority. Whom did this fraction represent? What were the implications of the Union’s difficult first years for the success or failure of the Third Duma? These are questions that must be answered before Russia’s constitutional period can properly be understood.

At its founding, the Union was headed by a man who personified moderate gentry liberalism and whose national reputation and influence were the Octobrists’ greatest asset. President of the Moscow zemstvo board for a decade, D. N. Shipov (1851–1920) had been, at the turn of the century, the zemstvos’ principal spokesman in their resistance to the policies of the Witte government. As the initiator of the clandestine zemstvo congress of 1902, Shipov had fathered the zemstvo “movement” but came to dissent from the constitutionalist majority after November 1904.

Shipov’s political philosophy was rooted in Slavophile monarchism rather than western liberalism, and it was thoroughly moral and religious.⁵ Reform in Russia, he believed, should be consonant with Russian cultural traditions, and its goal should be to restore the lost spiritual bond between tsar and people. Constitutional separation of powers, as practiced in the West, he found repugnant, because it implied a conflict of interests and was, therefore, alien to the Russian understanding of life.⁶ By the same logic, “politics,” as the word is generally understood, was equally alien to Shipov’s intellectual tradition.⁷ He bitterly resented at first the tsar’s decision in August 1905 to take the constitutional path. Nevertheless, once the constitutional principle had received official endorsement, Shipov first resigned himself to the fact and then consistently advocated a faithful adherence to the chosen course in order to restore respect for the government and the monarchy.

The other major figure at the inception of the Union of October 17 was A. I. Guchkov (1862–1936). Guchkov had emerged at the congress of zemstvos and cities in September 1905 as a catalytic figure in the liberal movement: “The appearance of A. I. Guchkov introduced a clear schism. It made possible a new and more precise expression of political ideas and separated the participants of the congress into political parties.”⁸ The issue that Guchkov grasped was Polish autonomy. He demanded that the liberals deny political autonomy for any of the nationalities subject to the Russian crown (except Finland). “If we diverge on this question alone,” he said, “we are political enemies; and if we agree, we are allies.”⁹ Of course, the delegates were hopelessly divided on other issues, especially the land question. But it had been difficult to defend the minority’s position against a suspicion of self-interest. By challenging the patriotism of his adversaries, Guchkov placed the minority on less vulnerable grounds and dealt a decisive blow to the unity of Russian liberalism.

Guchkov threw himself into political combat with the same zest he had once shown fighting for the Boers in South Africa. His adventurous character has often been cited as a partial explanation of Guchkov’s political success. But daring alone could not have won him the respect of the veterans of the zemstvo movement. He was able to move into leadership of the minority chiefly because of his political acumen, a quality that many of the older generation of gentry liberals lacked. Guchkov had a good sense of timing and fearlessly exploited controversial issues for the sake of publicity. It was Guchkov, according to Shipov, who first proposed the idea of a party to replace the congresses as the national organ of the zemstvos and city dumas.

Guchkov was chosen a delegate from the Moscow city duma to the July and September congresses. But it would be a mistake to see him then, or at any time in his career, simply as a representative of Moscow industrial or commercial interests. Although his family occupied a middling status in the Moscow merchantry,¹⁰ he spent hardly any time in business activities. His political role was more that of an intelligent than of a leader and spokesman of the business community.¹¹ Indeed, in the fall of 1905 he rejected the concept of political parties representing only business and committed himself instead to the Octobrist Union with its potentially broader social base.

If Shipov was a neo-Slavophile, Guchkov was an unapologetic Westernizer. He saw Russia’s future prosperity dependent on her ability to compete with the other powers militarily and economically. In the age of imperialism, competition urgently demanded modernization of the state, the military, the economy, and society. It made sense to adopt the patterns that had proven their worth in the West, especially in Britain and Germany. Consequently, Guchkov had no hesitation in affirming the suitability of constitutional government for Russia. It was a pragmatic necessity:

For a long time I have viewed constitutional monarchy as the political form necessary to insure the complete and fundamental reconstruction of our way of life. Doubtless, at one time another outcome was possible, and the autocratic system which created our great nation and solved many internal problems still had a brilliant future ahead. If the autocracy had been conscious of its historic mission to use its great powers to serve the interests of the mass of the people, if it had become democratic, it would have earned the right to a glorious existence. But it was diverted and became linked to the narrow interest of one estate [soslovie]. Thus it became responsible for the evil done in its name by the self-seeking and was brought to ruin.¹²

Guchkov’s liberalism perhaps most closely resembled that of the mid-nineteenth-century European nationalists. On one hand, it incorporated constitutionalism and the bourgeois rejection of aristocratic privilege. On the other, it was characterized by rhetoric about national destiny and a special reverence for the state. For Guchkov the concept of a “democratic autocracy” presented no paradox, and he claimed for the Octobrists, in contrast to the Kadets, the virtue of gosudarstvennost’.

What united Shipov and Guchkov, despite their many philosophical differences, was agreement about the bureaucratic autocracy’s dangerous neglect of the nation’s needs and the consequent necessity of a constitution to revitalize the state. They further agreed on the importance of the institutions of local self-government—the zemstvos and city dumas—as a source of legitimate, experienced, and moderate representatives for the nation in the new parliamentary system.

The Octobrist central committee was fully as complex a partnership as that of Shipov and Guchkov. There were two separate and equal divisions of the committee: one in Moscow, the other in St. Petersburg. Both central committees included gentry and nongentry, but the Petersburg committee was entirely composed of leading public figures and businessmen of the capital. All representatives of the provincial gentry were members of the Moscow central committee, even when their homes were closer to St. Petersburg. Nongentry men had a slight numerical predominance in both committees. The original membership of the Moscow central committee in December 1905 included five gentry zemtsy (Shipov, P. A. Heyden, M. A. Stakhovich, N. S. Khomiakov, and N. S. Volkonskii),¹³ six representatives of commerce and industry (A. I. Guchkov, V. P. and P. P. Riabushinskii, S. I. Chetverikov, N. M. Perepelkin, and A. I. Gennert), and a prominent attorney (F. N. Ple-vako). The Petersburg group included three noble landowners (P. L. Korf, M. V. Krasovskii, and V. V. Gudovich) as well as seven members who were not (F. E. Enakiev, P. A. Tarasov, A. N. Nikitin, N. N. Per-tsov, A. la. Brafman, G. G. Lerkhe, and Iu. N. Miliutin).¹⁴ But numerical preponderance and the fact that they provided most of the Octobrists’ funds¹⁵ did not automatically give the nongentry members a dominant role. The nobles more than made up for lack of numbers by their prominence and wide contacts in the provinces. They were all gentry “notables,” leaders in the zemstvos and the corporate organizations of the nobility. Respected by their peers as temperate, cultured, and socially responsible figures, their opinions and their patronage were important forces in local affairs, where old ways persisted notwithstanding the ostensible beginning of the constitutional era.

The Octobrist program, despite this assembly of talent, was not a very significant contribution to political discourse. Although it borrowed much from the liberal platform that had taken shape since 1903, it was evasive, ambiguous, and incomplete. It endorsed the basic civil rights and advocated the rule of law. It called for immediate convocation of a State Duma (not a constituent assembly) elected by “general” (obshchii not vseobshchii—universal) suffrage but did not mention how the elections should be conducted. This was transparently disingenuous, since the Octobrist leaders were known to oppose direct elections in the countryside, and the November zemstvo congress minority resolution had rejected them. The proposed legislative program—improvements of agriculture, minimal concessions to labor, expansion of local self-government, universal secular elementary education, and judicial independence—offered nothing surprising and avoided controversy even at the cost of coherence. In the matter of land reform, the Octobrists accepted the principle of compulsory redistribution of some estate land, but only as a last resort, with fair compensation, in cases where the need was of national importance.¹⁶ This formula was crucial in the Union’s appeal to the gentry, for it denied the peasants’ claim to all the land (the radical thesis) and asserted instead the inviolability of private property (subject to the state’s right of eminent domain). Thus, the dangers of representative government, from the landowners’ point of view, might be reduced.

The program’s first article stressed the patriotic slogan for which the Octobrists were most noted: the integrity of the empire. Otherwise, even the Union’s founders never gave the document great significance. It was one of the necessary trappings of a political organization, but not a platform to which anyone could be held. The ambiguities and omissions testify to the haste with which the founders covered up, instead of reconciling, their differences. In place of the program, Octobrist propaganda focused on the even more ambiguous October Manifesto. Specific issues of reform were submerged under patriotic rhetoric, though the “principles” of October 17 remained unrealized.

A binding program would, indeed, have been a hindrance, since the goal was to create a large, rather than a disciplined, organization. The Union (or “league”) of October 17 grew as a loose alliance of individuals and groups opposed to revolution but in favor of constitutional monarchy. The negligible significance of the Octobrist program was emphasized in an appeal composed by Shipov:

Entry into the Union of October 17 cannot in any way violate or conflict with the autonomy of the individual parties which join it; and their different convictions on various political, social, and economic questions can be no obstacle to the organized cooperation of parties and persons pursuing at present one common principal goal.¹⁷

Only revolutionaries and partisans of the old regime were specifically excluded. In short, the Union of October 17, because of the urgency of the crisis and the dominance of the Shipovian line in its creation, was not conceived as a political party at all, but as a broad coalition for the attainment of a single, common short-term goal: to arrest the revolution at the stage marked by the October Manifesto.

Inescapably, therefore, the Octobrists faced enormous problems in entering the parliamentary era. There was an acute need for leadership, and in the areas of organization and doctrine the Octobrists had not made a good beginning. The “league,” heterogeneous, loosely guided, and professedly nonpartisan, was by nature unsuited to a parliamentary party. The ideology needed for a sense of common purpose was largely unformulated. The collaboration of gentry and bourgeoisie rested principally on a mutual antagonism to popular revolution. The crucial question for the Octobrists was whether—as the revolutionary crisis gave way to more normal parliamentary politics—they could create a coherent organization with distinct goals and a dependable constituency.

The first attempt to come to grips with these problems was made at a joint session of the central committees in St. Petersburg on January 8-9, 1906. On the agenda were the convocation of the first congress of the Union, scheduled for early February, and plans for the electoral campaign. The first question was whether to invite only members of the Union of October 17 (including the “union” parties) to the congress or to open it to all “moderate progressive elements.” Shipov favored a broadly defined center, but Guchkov bluntly insisted on the futility of a nonpartisan strategy. The immediate task, he declared, should be to build up the Union’s organization and “define its physiognomy.” He warned that the discord and complications inevitable in an open congress would paralyze the Octobrists and distort the outcome. It was essential not to lose the opportunity to refine and publicize the specifically Octobrist position on constitutional issues and reforms. Guchkov proposed to invite Octobrists only—in effect, a first step in converting the “league” into a more homogeneous political party.

Shipov, defending the idea of a nonpartisan coalition, demurred. “Theoretical” questions and articles of the program were subject to diverse interpretations even among Octobrists, he said, but there would be no disunity among moderates regarding the “practical, vital” matters, namely, convening the Duma without delay and electing as many moderate deputies as possible. Only Stakhovich and Korf supported Shipov. Twelve speakers agreed with Guchkov, citing various reasons: half of them raised organizational considerations and others felt that the objectives named by Shipov were not sufficient reason for a congress. The majority voted to hold a congress of Octobrists only.

Having won his first round, Guchkov outlined an agenda for the congress. There would be discussion of current events and government policies first. Then, most of the congress’s time would be devoted to amplifying certain points of the program. Shipov, joined by Heyden, objected again to submitting the program to discussion, but Guchkov’s view was adopted by a majority.

To be sure, Guchkov did not intend to discuss the whole program. He selected certain points that, he said, would serve to clarify the Union’s position and improve its standing at the polls. An affirmation of constitutional monarchy would differentiate the Octobrists from the right. For the other flank Guchkov chose the Polish question.

This neatly balanced agenda could not long survive a discussion. Stakhovich suggested reinforcing the offensive against the left by adding a condemnation of political strikes. Other committee members proposed that the congress consider the questions of religious toleration and of minority (landowners’) rights under the electoral law. Most important, of course, was the problem of land reform: Heyden insisted on including it, and Shipov maintained that if other specific issues were to be raised, it could not very well be avoided. Opposed were Korf, who found the significance attached to the problem exaggerated, and Miliutin, who asserted that the peasants’ needs were not so much material as spiritual.¹⁸ With good reason, therefore, Guchkov warned that it would be difficult to come out of such a discussion with honor; and Stakhovich predicted that any resolution that the congress might adopt on the agrarian question would be damaging and embarrassing. Nevertheless, the conferees voted seven to six for including it in the agenda.

Taking advantage of the unsatisfactory turn, Shipov and Korf moved to reconsider whether the congress should debate the program. A majority of nine against four were now opposed, apparently agreeing with Khomiakov that the result would be the opposite of the intended unity. Heyden and Stakhovich dissented, but Guchkov reversed himself, since, with the inclusion of the agrarian question, debate on the program would not serve his purposes. One part of his plan he salvaged by stipulating that local committees be urged to submit reports for use by the central committee on the nationalities question and the harm caused by strikes. The agenda of the congress, it was decided, would include reports on organization, government policies, and tactics.

The inadequacy of this outcome must have bothered both Shipov and Guchkov. The nationalities question would, in fact, be reinstated in the congress’s agenda by the delegates themselves, as would the agrarian problem, the religious question, and labor reform. The central committee’s decision in January deprived the congress of any possible significance either for consolidating the Octobrists as a party or for creating a nonparty, moderate electoral coalition. The announcement of the congress, signed by Shipov and Korf, was an attempt to recoup. All those who “sincerely desire peaceful reconstruction and the triumph of order, legality, and true freedom in Russia, all who equally reject both stagnation and revolutionary upheaval” were urged to become Octobrists in order to participate in the congress. This phraseology as well as the following declaration of goals suggest Shipov’s authorship:

[The immediate aims of the Octobrists are to elect] the best people, true supporters of the rights and freedoms proclaimed by the Imperial Manifesto of October 17, who are imbued with the consciousness that the popular representative assembly must strive to bring about a reconciliation in the country by means of creative legislative work and consolidation of the state power.¹⁹

The conference of January 8-9, 1906, revealed how far the founders of the Union of October 17 were from sharing a common understanding of objectives, tactics, and the meaning of Octobrism itself.

Shipov distrusted the Union from the outset and was aware of the dangers in its heterogeneity, though he himself was largely responsible for that. He preferred to continue with an ambiguous program, limited, short-term goals and an informal organization, which would make possible a continuation of the moral leadership of the veteran zemtsy. Recognizing the panicky mood of the Octobrists’ constituencies, Shipov also feared a detailed discussion of sensitive issues. Finally, he wished to postpone narrowing the Octobrists’ position until after the elections, in the hope that a new moderate party might be formed in the Duma to reunite the “best people” of the liberal zemstvo movement and exclude those whose principles were less than liberal.

Guchkov, on the contrary, recognized instinctively that the era of congresses, when a handful of obshchestvennye deiateli could claim to speak for the nation, was irretrievably closed. To participate in the new constitutional system, which assumed a competitive, parliamentary style of politics, he felt the need for a party with its own program and a definable constituency. He cautiously selected political, not socioeconomic, issues with which to identify the Octobrists; but he feared no essential contradictions between their constituency and his own goals. He had no loyalty to the zemstvo movement, and as early as September 1905 he had ruled out collaboration with the Kadets.

Significantly, Guchkov’s proposal to give priority to organizational goals was upheld by most of the nongentry members of the central committee. Having no attachment to . the tradition of congresses, which was an expression of gentry liberalism, nongentry Octobrists moved more easily into the era of political parties—it was probably not a coincidence that that was a context in which the preeminence of the nobility in political and social life might wane. The conditions that permitted Shipov to lead the Union with no regard for the opinion of its constituents made them uncomfortable. Hence their support for “defining the physiognomy” of the Octobrists, thus limiting the Union’s identification with the personal views of Shipov and Heyden.

What were the Union’s organization and membership like in 19051906? According to claims made at the first congress in early February, there were seventy-eight Octobrist organizations in thirty-six provinces. Twenty-three of them were in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A fragmentary picture of forty-one branches in twenty-one provinces, with a total enrollment of 24,348 members, can be assembled from various sources, especially from two series of reports submitted by provincial governors in response to Police Department inquiries in the fall of 1906 and again in late 1907.²⁰ Nominal membership in single units ranged from fifteen to several thousand, although between one hundred and four hundred was typical. Active membership in all cases was considerably lower.

Octobrist committees were usually located in the capital, and possibly one or two of the larger towns, of a province. As a rule the organization did not extend to the villages, which, as far as conservatives were concerned, were the purlieu of the extreme right, which benefitted from the efforts of village priests and officials. Subordinate to provincial and city committees were “sections” (otdeleniia), formed in the city wards and district (uezd) towns.

At the core of the Octobrists’ active membership—drawn usually from the district and provincial zemstvos and the municipal dumas—were “solid” citizens, propertied or professional men. As in the central committees the initiative, but not numerical superiority, typically belonged to the landowners. In the early months of the Union’s existence merchants, manufacturers, managers, and owners of city real estate deferred to the gentry, who took their inspiration from the zemstvo congress minority. Moreover, under the electoral law of December 11, 1905, the landowners were a far more important constituency than the bourgeoisie. The role of the Octobrist zemtsy was, therefore, crucial.

We have, fortunately, a detailed account of the local campaign of one gentry member of the Central Committee. There was no open political activity in P. A. Heyden’s Opochka district of Pskov province until he himself arrived from Moscow on December 29.²¹ With customary energy he at once formed a provincial Octobrist committee: among its twelve members were government officials, merchants, landowners, doctors, and one priest. When Heyden departed shortly after the New Year, however, the committee was beset by troubles. The provincial governor ruled that officials could not participate, and public organizational meetings were not permitted. The remaining members then had second thoughts about committing themselves openly and the committee disintegrated. Heyden returned for the election, but failed in a new attempt to create an Octobrist organization. A public meeting on February 17 attracted mostly radicals and went completely astray from its purpose—to name an Octobrist slate of candidates.

Heyden, to the distress of local authorities, made considerable efforts to expound the October Manifesto and preach constitutionalism to the peasants in their villages. He seemed oblivious to the villagers’ lack of interest in lawmaking and their alarming resentment of what they considered his evasiveness on the only important question: when would they get more land? He did not attempt to recruit them for the Octobrists, and party labels in the end had no significance in the elections. Heyden triumphed over more liberal opponents first in Opochka, then in the provincial elections, not as an Octobrist but as a well-known and respected local figure. The peasants, who controlled the provincial assembly, chose him to head their delegation simply because he was the candidate they knew best and trusted most of all the “lords” to explain the mysteries of the Duma.

The basic reason for Octobrism’s failure to strike roots in Opochka was probably the unimportance of the landed gentry, who were outnumbered by peasants even in the landowners’ electoral curia. On the other hand, insofar as Octobrism had any influence, it took a characteristic form. The closest thing to an Octobrist organization was an informal, private group of “Heydenists,” probably mostly zemstvo activists. There was little or no effort to reach a mass constituency, and no interest in political activity between elections.

This story suggests certain conclusions about the nature of the Octobrists’ political activities. First, the Union’s prospects were closely related to the activities of moderate zemstvo deiateli and depended on their ability to exploit personal constituencies. M. A. Stakhovich’s role in Orel was much like Heyden’s in Pskov. M. V. Rodzianko led his considerable following of moderates in Ekaterinoslav zemstvo affairs into the Union, although not on the basis of any clear program.²² N. A. Khomiakov seemed to have little contact with the Union’s organization in the city of Smolensk. But though he resembled Shipov in his disdain for partisan politics, he exercised the same moderating influence in the Smolensk Duma elections as he did in zemstvo affairs. The Volkonskii family’s influence in Riazan similarly benefitted the Octobrists, even though a committee of the Union was not organized there until January 1906—and the purpose then was not to compete with the local monarchist party, but only to choose delegates to the Union’s first congress.²³ A second conclusion suggests itself: a specifically Octobrist program, a campaign platform, and party organization seem not to have had much importance. And a third observation, which follows from the foregoing, is that the Octobrists’ strongest potential constituency outside Moscow and St. Petersburg lay in the zemstvo gentry. Among these moderates, active in local affairs, the prestige of the Octobrist “notables” was the Union’s greatest asset.

The elections to the First Duma were disastrous for the Octobrists’ pretensions to be a major political force. Out of more than five hundred deputies, a preliminary estimate gave thirty Octobrists, but by official count at the opening of the session there were thirteen. Apparent Octobrist victories in Perm, Orel, and Olonets provinces evaporated in defections to the Kadets, the liberal Domocratic Reform group, and the Trudoviki. Octobrist successes in Moscow province (three deputies), Riazan (three), and Tula (two) were hailed as important. But the significance of these few cases should not be exaggerated. The three “Octobrists” from Moscow province, for example, were in reality two candidates of the Trade and Industrial Party and one monarchist. The industrialists had bolted their electoral bloc with the Octobrists and joined the right in the provincial electoral assembly. This combination had succeeded in filling all four Duma seats, defeating the Octobrist candidates, Shipov and S. I. Chetverikov.²⁴

In the twenty European Russian cities with direct elections the Kadets won overwhelmingly with 83 percent of the vote. The Octobrists’ principal combination, the United Committee of Constitutional Monarchist Parties, was defeated on home ground in St. Petersburg. The sole Octobrist elected from the cities was from Ekaterinoslav, the only city where the majority of electors was to the right of the Kadets. In Tula city and in Taurus province local Octobrists joined with the Kadets against the far right, and moderate Kadets were elected (Prince G. E. Lvov in Tula), but these instances of cooperation with the Kadets were exceptional.

How did the Octobrists fare among the provincial landowning gentry? Only fragmentary information is available on the results of the first-stage elections in the land-proprietors’ curia.²⁵ These partial results give the Octobrists 14 percent but show a surprisingly large proportion of the electors to the Octobrists’ left (34 percent) and a significant proportion to their right (24 percent) with 26 percent independent or unknown. Obviously, among the land-proprietors’ electors the Union of October 17 had not met a strongly sympathetic response.

This failure may be partially explained by the deceptive nature of the land-proprietors’ curia. Under the electoral law of December 11, 1905, the votes of gentry landowners were much diluted by those of small and nongentry proprietors. One study identified less than 46 percent of land-proprietors’ electors in forty-five provinces of European Russia as nobles, and far from all of them were large landowners. The rest of the electors were peasants (26 percent), bourgeois, clergy, and professional men.²⁶ This dilution is more than sufficient to account for the apparent extent of radicalism in the land-proprietors’ curia. It is unlikely that there were many leftists among the more substantial gentry proprietors and still more unlikely that their peers would have voted for them. Much evidence points to such a conclusion: the extraordinary winter zemstvo sessions held in many provinces and the elections to the State Council from the nobility and from the zemstvos in March and April revealed a strong rightist trend. Inescapably, the gentry’s political center of gravity was to the right of the Octobrists. The moderate center in Russian politics was, in fact, quite small, and the Union of October 17 found itself on the left wing of the provincial gentry.

All this testified eloquently to the failure of Shipov’s ideal of a center union, a patriotic league excluding only the radical left and the reactionary right. The ambiguities of Octobrism did not appeal to an electorate polarized by the revolutionary crisis. Such successes as Octobrist candidates enjoyed in the First Duma elections were, we must conclude, largely personal.

Before the elections to the Second Duma the leadership of the Union had split. In the summer of 1906 a new party, Peaceful Renewal (Mir-noe obnovlenie), was created by P. A. Heyden and M. A. Stakhovich. Its program was significantly closer to the liberal mainstream. The most radical concession was in the area of land reform: the Mirnoob-novlentsy recognized the peasants’ right to such land as they habitually rented and to land in excess of a maximum norm to be established for private estates. Heyden’s avowed purpose was to create a party that could unite the moderate gentry with the peasants—the traditional rural “all-class” ideal of zemstvo liberals, now adapted to electoral politics under the law of December 11, 1905. Morally unable to accept the reality of the gentry reaction and disapproving of the policies of the new premier, P. A. Stolypin, Shipov at the end of July threw his support behind Mirnoobnovlentsy. Guchkov’s instincts prompted him otherwise. At the first opportunity he put the question directly to the test. In response to the explosion of a bomb at Stolypin’s summer residence, the government proclaimed harsh new measures against terrorism, including courts-martial. Liberals were outraged, but Guchkov declared his full support of Stolypin, at the same time expressing confidence that the government, while determined to restore order, was irrevocably committed to modernization. Response from the provinces favored Guchkov’s stand for law and order as a precondition for reform without revolution, and the majority of the central committee did not follow Shipov, who quit the Union early in September.

Approaching the Second Duma elections, Guchkov affected a patriotic fervor and was hailed in the conservative press as the father of “national liberalism” in Russia. He revitalized the provincial organization, won a large contribution from the “greatest capitalists in Moscow,” and began to publish a daily newspaper, Golos Moskvy. In the elections (held at the beginning of February 1907) the Octobrists appeared to fare a little better than before. The Second Duma had a right wing of about ninety deputies, among whom an early count identified twenty-six Octobrists.²⁷ An Octobrist fraction was soon formed with twenty members and nineteen “adherents,” a form of affiliation that did not require even nominal agreement with the Union’s program. Nevertheless, in the first-stage elections the Octobrists’ popularity had not substantially improved.²⁸ After administrative manipulations that greatly reduced the influence of nongentry in the land-proprietors’ curia, 24 percent of its electors were to the Octobrists’ left, 18 percent were Octobrists, 5 percent were unknown or independent, and more than 50 percent stood to the Octobrists’ right.

Despite Guchkov’s efforts to publicize the Union’s turn to the right, party programs and official candidacies hardly played a greater role in the second elections than in the first. In the interval, it is true, political consciousness on the right had increased in response to the First Duma’s expropriatory land program, terrorism, and the recovery of government initiative under Stolypin. During 1906 a significant degree of differentiation among conservatives occurred.²⁹ The Union of the Russian People (srn), the United Nobility, and various nationalist organizations presented vigorous alternatives to Octobrism. But the gentry voters, many of them newly politicized and in a reactionary mood, did not declare decisively for these alternatives, nor did they respond to the Octobrist appeal.

In local politics, in the first stage of the Duma elections and in the provincial electoral assemblies, a majority of the gentry identified themselves simply as pravye (rightists). This designation implied no precise program and it encompassed a broad spectrum of opinions, which opened a way for the Octobrists to improve their position somewhat. Moderately conservative landowners (umerenno-pravye) had reservations about the liberal and constitutional aspects of the Octobrist program, but they had not discarded the kinship and respect they felt for individual local notables who happened to be Octobrists. Thus many of the “rightists” supported Octobrist candidates in the provincial assemblies. At the outset of the Second Duma the Octobrists in turn took a friendly and cooperative attitude toward the deputies on their right. When the Octobrist fraction was organized, its moderate-rightist “adherents” were almost as numerous as the declared Octobrists.³⁰

On legislative issues, however, the alliance of the Octobrists and moderate-rightists was put to a severe test because the leadership of the Octobrist group was relatively liberal. These “left” Octobrists joined with the Kadets in a demonstration of protest against the courts-martial, and they offered a compromise on the land question that conceded the compulsory transfer of some private estate land to the peasants.³¹ These gestures left much of the fraction far behind, and they were made without the concurrence of the central committee, which certainly would not have consented. Thus, the Union was in disarray when its second congress met in May 1907.

Even more emphatically than the central committee had intended, the congress repudiated the “liberalism” of the Left Octobrists. The delegates showed a degree of hostility to the Second Duma and a preference for administrative repression that came close to a rejection of constitutional government. Guchkov and the committee barely contained the congress’s movement to the right within the bounds of Octo-brism. Further, many delegates were strongly sympathetic to extreme Russian nationalism. Patriotism had always served the Octobrists as an opening to the right, but Russian ethnocentrism was an embarrassment to the central committee. Some of the Union’s most reliable support, financial and electoral, came from German elements in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Baltic provinces, and New Russia. Also, the Octobrist leaders were on the whole too genteel to profess overt anti-Semitic or anti-Polish views. Consequently, nationalism could carry the Octobrists only so far.

Declining to espouse outright either the reaction that dominated the zemstvos and city dumas or the extreme nationalism promoted by representatives of the western provinces, and yet unable to take a firm constitutionalist stand, the Union verged on political extinction. The progovemment newspaper Novoe vremia withdrew its support, declaring, “This is a bore, not a party!”³² The survival of the Octobrists seemed even more doubtful when they failed at the new zemstvo congress (meeting less than a fortnight after the coup d’état of June 3) to lead the gentry delegates to approval of the government’s project for reform of local self-government. If the congress was, as Golos Moskvy called it, a “rehearsal for the Third Duma,”³³ it seemed certain that the Octobrists would be submerged by the right in the elections.

Instead, the Octobrists appeared in the Third Duma as the largest fraction, with 155 members and adherents, and were by common agreement considered to be the dominant party in the first three sessions. The new electoral law of June 3 had, of course, tipped the balance in favor of the landowners; but this fact, as the first two Duma elections had showed, was not necessarily an advantage for the Octobrists. Indeed, the data for the Third Duma elections—which are quite detailed—show the same weakness of the center in comparison with the right in the first stages.³⁴ As before, we have little information on the voters themselves, but there is much more for the provincial electors. Those of the land-proprietors’ curia, who now composed 51 percent of the total number of provincial electors (more in most districts of the agricultural provinces), distributed by “political orientation,” were 62 percent rightists, 23 percent moderates, 8 percent leftists and 7 percent unknown. The vague political terminology of this official tabulation underscores the government’s resistance to the idea of a party system, and it is unclear what criteria were applied to distinguish moderates from rightists. Most probably, however, Octobrists were classified as moderates and amounted to about a fifth of the electors. In order to explain how the Octobrists overcame their weakness between the first elections and the opening of the Duma, it is necessary to examine the electoral process and the formation of fractions in detail.

Voting in the land-proprietors’ curia were 10,191 large property owners, or only 35 percent of those eligible.³⁵ Also voting for the electors from the land-proprietors’ curia were 5857 mandatories of small proprietors (mostly landowners), elected in preliminary assemblies. No basis exists in the statistics for determining the soslovie or political preference of the voters in the land-proprietors’ curia. The electors they chose, however, besides having the general political complexion cited above were composed mostly of hereditary and personal nobles (61 percent) and clergy (22 percent). Eighty-seven percent were of the Russian nationality. Solely occupied in agriculture were 37 percent. Twenty-one percent were Orthodox clergy, 17 percent were in government service, and 16 percent were in private occupations.³⁶ Clearly, even under the law of June 3 the land-proprietors’ curia was more diverse than is usually supposed. Large landowners accounted for slightly under two-thirds of the voters, and the role of the clergy—guided by the Ministry of the Interior and the Holy Synod—was important in assuring rightist majorities. Unfortunately, the data do not permit further investigation of the political preferences of any specific occupational or age groups or any soslovie. Interpretations of the Octobrists’ success must be impressionistic, relying on inference, memoirs, and newspaper accounts.

When the deputies arrived in St. Petersburg, about one hundred had indicated a preference for the Octobrist fraction; of these about sixty were landowners and twenty-five bourgeois.³⁷ In all probability, a relatively small number of Octobrists had been elected as such to the Third Duma. Platforms and party candidacies, as before, played little part. On the other hand, local “parties” and personal followings, groupings among the gentry that often antedated 1905, were extremely important. That these combinations were sometimes called “Octobrist” should not obscure their essentially traditional, local, and personal character. In the first stages of the Third Duma elections, as in the Second, Octobrists were elected by the votes of “rightists.” This effect was magnified by the advantages given the large proprietors under the June 3 electoral law. Furthermore, in view of the low rate of the land proprietors’ participation in the Duma elections, it is likely that among the gentry voters there was a relatively high proportion of zemstvo activists. Such a hypothesis is supported by the fact that the Octobrist fraction in the Third Duma included thirty-two of the delegates to the June 1907 zemstvo congress. One participant recalled it as a “congress of the future Octobrist fraction.”³⁸

Among the zemtsy were many prominent Octobrists. These men did not usually attempt to give the elections a partisan character but collaborated with other conservatives to manage the Duma elections as smoothly as they traditionally had zemstvo affairs.³⁹ The elections in the provinces were very unlike those in the six large cities with separate representation, where deputies were elected directly, by party slates, in two curiae. Many of the provincial deputies were simply “moderates” (that is, moderate-rightists), chosen on the basis of local popularity and known antipathy for radical solutions.⁴⁰ As soon as the elections were over, Octobrist notables began vigorously to recruit for their fraction: this was the second stage in the process by which the Octobrists snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Eight out of eleven of the Kharkov deputies were led by A. D. Golitsyn, V. A. Bantysh, and N. V. Savich to join the Octobrists. The entire Chernigov delegation of ten, guided by Iu. N. Glebov and M. A. Iskritskii (nominally a member of Peaceful Renewal but already in the Second Duma an adherent of the Octobrists), enrolled in the Octobrist fraction. N. A. Khomiakov also carried the entire Smolensk contingent into the fraction. In each of these cases the apparent preference of the provincial electors, according to the government survey, was rightist—overwhelmingly so in Kharkov and Smolensk and by a strong plurality in Chernigov. In a third stage, recruitment continued and even intensified in the capital, as the Octobrists competed with fractions on both their flanks for the still unaligned deputies. One right-wing source alleges that Guchkov, who had been elected from the city of Moscow, attempted in a social call at the club organized by extreme rightist deputies to induce defections to the Octobrist fraction.⁴¹

Thus, in contrast to their patent weakness before the elections and despite their flirtation with liberalism in the first two Dumas, the Octobrists enlarged their fraction, from 100 to 155 deputies, mostly at the expense of the right. What made such a coup possible? One factor, evident from the foregoing, was the prestige of local Octobrist notables. This influence transcended political differences to a remarkable degree: N. A. Melnikov of Kazan listed both liberals and extreme conservatives among the gentry Octobrists to whom he felt drawn.⁴² A. D. Golitsyn wrote that the Kharkov deputies were impressed with the prestige of the Octobrist leaders, with Guchkov, and with the potential strength of the Octobrist fraction.⁴³ To uncommitted deputies who were not sufficiently impressed by these intangibles the Octobrists may have promised desirable committee assignments.⁴⁴

In short, the Octobrists’ power in the Third Duma was not based, in the usual sense, on a constituency among the voters. Their assets lay in the social affinities binding the zemstvo gentry, in the deference shown to the veteran obshchestvennye deiateli, and in the experience several of these figures had acquired in the Second Duma. The Octobrists could also capitalize on the personal leadership of Guchkov and on his presumed collaboration with Stolypin. Finally, though they lacked a majority, the Octobrists’ center position seemed to give them the leverage to control the Duma. Against these strengths, however, must be weighed the lack of an agreed political platform or program of legislation. S. I. Shidlovskii accused Guchkov of a careless attitude toward the fraction’s political unity⁴⁵—an accusation that has frequently been cited. In fact, Guchkov did propose a minimum program of legislation at the first general assembly of the fraction, in order, he said, to give it a degree of homogeneity (odnorodnost’).⁴⁶ Right and Left Octobrists alike opposed him, and thus the Octobrist fraction had from the outset a fragile unity and an illusory strength.

The organization of so diverse a group was a problem to which, evidently, little serious thought was given. As chairman of the central committee, Guchkov headed the fraction. Supporting him was an executive bureau made up of deputies who were members of the Central Committee, or who had sat in the first two Dumas, and a few other prominent provincial Octobrists. Left Octobrists dominated the bureau—several of them were members of the Central Committee as well as veterans of the Second Duma whose experience was now very useful. Still, since their “liberalism” had been rebuked but not recanted, their dominant position in the party’s bureau needs some explanation. Paradoxically, their liberalism was something the Octobrists could not do without. Though they sometimes embarrassed him, Guchkov maintained a close alliance with the Left Octobrists, for they were the bearers of the standards that distinguished Octobrism from the right: constitutional monarchy, legality, equality of sosloviia and nationalities, and modernization. Nationalism, another potentially vital force in the Octobrist fraction, tended to push its members toward the right. As the Octobrist deputies leaned to the right they slipped from Guchkov’s control. While he needed the votes of the conservative majority of his fraction, Guchkov was bound to the Left Octobrists by their common commitment to a separate fraction and program. Thus, although the Left Octobrists were the Union’s weaker faction, Guchkov’s tactical reliance on them artificially enhanced their position in the Third Duma.

There was no effective caucus of the Octobrist fraction. Attendance at general meetings was low—the highest recorded was eighty-nine in 1909, when a revolt by the fraction’s right wing threatened to tear the Octobrists apart. Discipline was a perennial problem, and there were several revisions of the fraction’s charter, none of which overcame the fact that any serious attempt to enforce unanimity would have caused it to split.⁴⁷ From the first session the fraction divided into three identifiable factions: left (twenty to twenty-five members), right (about the same), and center. In the Fourth Duma the center took the name “Zemstvo-Octobrists,” which might as well have been applied in the Third. This group was much smaller than one hundred deputies, if non-Octobrist adherents and those whose membership was only nominal are excluded. On the basis of very little evidence a reasonable estimate would be that there were fifty to sixty Zemstvo-Octobrists. It was here, if anywhere, that the moderate, responsible representatives of the nation, experienced in local self-government, in whose name the Union of October 17 had been founded, might be discovered.

The leading figures among the Zemstvo-Octobrists were such men as M. V. Rodzianko (Ekaterinoslav), E. P. Bennigsen (Novgorod), K. N. Grimm (Saratov), Prince I. A. Kurakin (Iaroslavl), professor M. M. Alekseenko of Kharkov University, and F. N. Plevako, doyen of the Moscow legal profession. The zemstvo style and attitudes that prevailed in the moderate center of the Octobrist fraction are clearly reflected in the memoirs of one deputy, N. A. Melnikov.⁴⁸ An active Union member who carried the burdens of organizing, campaigns, and the party newspaper in Kazan, Melnikov was warmly welcomed to the Duma by Guchkov and immediately became involved in the work of the executive bureau, to which he was later elected.

Melnikov was a young man (thirty-three years old in 1907), but already an experienced zemets. His estate was small, and at the university he had begun to study medicine, then turned to agriculture and a career in the zemstvo. Subsequently president of the Kazan provincial zemstvo for many years, Melnikov promoted extensive humanitarian and economic programs. Yet he was not a liberal in the programmatic sense. At the June 1907 zemstvo congress he opposed democracy on principle and proclaimed the benefits of gentry paternalism. Melnikov had identified with the Octobrists in 1905 because of their leadership in the attack on the Kadets at the zemstvo congresses and in the provinces. Although he did not sympathize with the “retrograde” faction in the zemstvos, he regarded radicalism as the greater danger.

Melnikov had joined the Union with reservations. His activism did not make him a partisan:

Personally, I joined the Octobrists not because I agreed unconditionally with their program. The party framework often seemed confining. But when one has decided not to be only a spectator in politics, it is necessary to have some kind of a political passport. I preferred to get it where there were many representatives of the zemstvo world and people whose way of thinking was like mine.⁴⁹

The world of partisan politics was not a comfortable environment for the typical Zemstvo-Octobrist. He retreated from political combat, and party discipline was a concept alien to his sense of individual dignity. Moreover, he was afflicted with a nagging sense of inferiority in relation to the intellectuals of the opposition. His impulse was not to debate or negotiate with the Kadets but to shun them and suppress them. The leading spokesmen of his fraction had an obligation to respond to Miliukov and Rodichev, but the rank-and-file Zemstvo-Octobrist was unprepared by his education and style of life for the intense partisanship, quick wit, and ultimate compromise required by parliamentary politics. He buried himself in committee work or, like Melnikov and K. N. Grimm, eventually resigned from the Duma.

The political habits that had induced the Kazan zemstvo and others to repudiate not just the zemstvo congress of November 1905 but even the one a year earlier were still alive for Octobrists like Melnikov. Despite their de facto acceptance of the Duma’s legislative powers, the zemstvo Octobrists did not conceive of taking the initiative away from the government. The Third Duma was to realize the ancient ideal of cooperation between the central administration and gentry-dominated self-government. More than any of its predecessors, the Stolypin government had their confidence; the Duma’s powers of review were held sufficient to control the long-resented bureaucracy; budgetary sanctions or direct legislative conflict would never become necessary.

To maintain the precarious unity of the fraction, Guchkov deliberately isolated it from outside influences that might upset the equilibrium and interfere with his tactical freedom. Leadership of the Union was transferred completely to the fraction’s bureau. The central committee, left in the care of its pedantic secretary, K. E. Lindeman, was eliminated from decision-making. In contrast to the Kadet central committee, which met regularly in St. Petersburg and had authority over the fraction, the Moscow Octobrists heard only occasional reports from the Duma. The St. Petersburg central committee members, who had worked actively with the fraction in the Second Duma, were wholly ignored from the opening of the session.

The suppression of the central committee was accompanied by a deliberate neglect of the provincial organization. Whereas Guchkov had once looked to provincial Octobrists for support against Shipov, he now took pains to insulate himself and the fraction from them. Guchkov had fewer illusions than in 1906 about the Octobrists’ ability to lead the provincial gentry. Ironically, though he had once seen the zemstvos as a base for turning the Octobrist league into a party with real force vis-á-vis the government, his ability to collaborate with and to influence Stolypin now depended on suppressing the party’s organization and obscuring its “physiognomy.” Allowed to follow their instincts, the Zemstvo-Octobrists would have blended with the right, as they did in local politics, and ceased to appear as a force for constitutional government and modernization.

Isolated from its constituencies, the fraction was more stable and, especially, more manipulable. Shidlovskii correctly observed that it became “like a tool in the hands of Guchkov,” serving not a definite program but the tactical needs of its chief. But though Guchkov may have been politically ambitious and over-impressed with Stolypin, as Shidlovskii and others have charged, his goals could not be separated from real legislative accomplishments. The rebirth of the Union of October 17 in time for the Fourth Duma elections and the political survival of Guchkov himself depended absolutely on a creative and productive record in the Third Duma. The succeeding five years showed the futility of this calculation. Each test of strength between Guchkov and Stolypin (who was increasingly severely pressed from the right) resulted in defeat for the Octobrist leader—from the Naval General Staff Bill to the Western Zemstvo crisis. Guchkov could not rely on the fraction, which lacked will and discipline to resist the government or the court, and the Third Duma was unable to rise above the level of “legislative vermicelli.” By 1912 the Octobrists were too weak to fight government interference in the elections on behalf of the right and too demoralized to overcome voter apathy.

The final act was played in the winter of 1913-14. At a conference of the fraction in November Guchkov declared that Russia was confronting a new revolutionary crisis because of the short-sightedness and incompetence of the government. He called upon the fraction-now from outside it, for he had not been returned to the Duma—to take an actively critical stance, to speak for the nation against the government:

The evident danger of the present moment lies not in the parties of revolution, not in antimonarchist propaganda, not in antireligious teachings, not in propaganda for the ideas of socialism and antimilitarism, not in anarchist agitation against the State. Our historical drama is that we are forced to defend the monarchy against those who are the natural defenders of the monarchical principle, the Church against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the army against its commanders, and the authority of the executive power against those who exercise it.⁵⁰

A minority of the fraction, twenty-two Left Octobrists, responded favorably, but the majority resisted any change in tactics. First the Left Octobrists, then the Zemstvo-Octobrists resigned from the fraction, bringing to a natural death a body that could only exist in a state of paralysis. This final rejection of Guchkov by the Zemstvo-Octobrists clearly pointed out the weakness of the Union of October 17 as a political party. As long as it courted the zemstvo gentry and followed them to the right, it appeared strong. But whenever in the Third and Fourth Dumas it attempted to lead, to engage the government in combat with the political weapons provided by the constitution, the gentry refused to follow.

NOTES

1. The term “gentry,” it seems to me, is useful as a designation for the provincial Russian noble landowner, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the provincial nobility became reasonably distinct from the aristocracy of the court and upper bureaucracy. As a translation of the Russian “pomeshchik” it appropriately suggests a certain economic and social status and an intense involvement in rural affairs. A full comparison with the English gentry or of Russian provincial institutions with the English is not intended.

2. See the discussion at the Third Congress of the United Nobility, in March 1907. Trudy tret’iago s’ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh ob-shchestv (St. Petersburg, 1907), p.255 and passim.

3. The Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) were the first to organize their party, meeting in Moscow on October 12-18. The Octobrist program was drafted at the end of October, but the formation of the Union was not announced until the close of the zemstvo congress.

4. From the papers of D. N. Shipov, orbil, f. 440, kn. 4, d., 4.

5. “My understanding of life is grounded in the religious consciousness which was inculcated in me since childhood, but it took shape finally under the moral influence of two Russian thinkers—F. M. Dostoevskii and L. N. Tolstoi” (D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy [Moscow: 1918], “Predislo-vie,” n.p.).

6. Vospominaniia i dumy, p.329.

7. “The Slavophiles were animated by a bitter hostility to the very idea of the party system. They viewed political parties as organizations of factional interests, feverishly seeking by servile maneuvers or by intimidation the favors which the state itself was not legitimately entitled to bestow upon them.” Leopold H. Haimson, “The Parties and the State,” in Cyril E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, i960), p.115.

8. N. I. Astrov, Vospominaniia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1941), I, 314.

9. Pravo, 1905, no. 38, p.3172.

10. P. A. Buryshkin, Moskva kupecheskaia (New York: Chekhov, 1954), p.111.

11. Buryshkin, a peer (Moskva kupecheskaia, p.314), and P. N. Miliukov, an adversary (God bor’by [St. Petersburg, 1907], p.163), agree on this point. The intention here is not to deny Guchkov’s role as a spokesman for capitalism in general but rather to stress that he acted as an individual and as a politician.

12. A. I. Guchkov, Rech’, proiznesennaia 5-go noiabria 1906 goda Pred-sedatelem Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Soiuza 17-go Oktiabria A.I. Guchkovym na obshchem sobranii v S.-Peterburge v zale Dvorianskogo Sobraniia (Moscow, 1906), p.7.

13. The zemtsy were from Moscow, Pskov, Orel, Smolensk, and Riazan provinces respectively.

14. Korf was formerly and Gudovich actually marshal of the Petersburg nobility; Krasovskii was a senator with estates in Chernigov. Enakiev was an officer of several international oil and metal combines. Tarasov and Nikitin were industrialists. Pertsov, Brafman, and Lerkhe were professional men, and Miliutin (son of the mid-century bureaucrat-reformer, N. A. Miliutin) a wealthy and well-connected dilettante.

15. This is especially true for Moscow. None of the zemtsy were wealthy men, but the Guchkovs and Riabushinskiis and their friends among the industrialists and in the stock exchange had ample resources. In St. Petersburg not only Enakiev and Tarasov but also Gudovich, Korf, Lerkhe, and Miliutin probably tapped important sources of funds.

16. Even among Octobrists there was disagreement over whether “fair” compensation should be based on the inflated rental value of the land or on its actual productivity. Evading this issue, the program held that the Duma should decide.

17. TSGIA, f. 869, op. 1, d. 1289, 1. 38.

18. “Nuzhda krest’ianskaia ne stol’ko zemel’naia, skol’ko dukhovnaia” (Krasnyi arkhiv, XXXV [1929], 170).

19. TSGAOR, f. 115, op. 1, d. 46a, 1. 14.

20. See TSGAOR, f. 102, O.O. (1906), d. 9 and d. 828; f. 102, op. 7 (1906), d. 9 and d. 828; and f. 102, IV (1907), op. 99, d. 164.

21. V. B., “Opochetskiia vospominaniia o gr. P.A. Geidene,” Russkaia mysl’, November and December 1907. The author’s point of view is liberal but not partisan.

22. B. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1909–11), IV:278-79.

23. Russkoe slovo, February 2, 1906. In emphasizing the Octobrist program in Tambov, V. M. Petrovo-Solovovo was a significant exception among the central committee zemtsy. His speech inaugurating the Union’s Tambov committee was reprinted by the Octobrist central committee: Soiuz 17 ok-tiabria, ego zadachi i tseli, ego polozhenie sredi drugikh politicheskikh partii (Moscow, 1906). According to the provincial governor, Petrovo-Solovovo’s agitation garnered the support of the “progressives” among the Tambov gentry, about one-third, for the Union. TSGAOR, f. 102, O.O. (1906), d. 828, ch. 14,11. 1-2.

24. Shipov gave an account of these maneuvers in Vospominaniia i dumy, pp.427–29.

25. Rech’, April 10, 1906. The term “land-proprietors” is used here, despite its awkwardness, to emphasize the social diversity of the curia (discussed below).

26. S. M. Sidel’nikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1962), p.136.

27. Novoe vremia, February 17, 1907.

28. The observations that follow are based on data for 90 percent of the provincial electors, compiled by Aleksei Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo Vtoruiu Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp.234–39.

29. This differentiation is reflected in the governor’s reports on changes in party strength between 1906 and 1907, for example, TSGAOR, f. 102, op. 99, d.164.

30. A fraction of Pravye (Extreme Rightists) was also formed in the Second Duma, and several presumed Octobrists chose to join it. At the local level, however, and in the Third Duma elections the term pravye retained its broad sense.

31. M. Ia. Kapustin, in a speech on April 9, proposed giving the peasants unutilized estate land and land habitually rented to them by the landowners, who were to be compensated with state bonds.

32. May 10, 1907.

33. June 10, 1907.

34. Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del, Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu Tret’iago Sozyva (St. Petersburg, 1911).

35. Of the voters eligible on the basis of a full tsenz, 95 percent qualified by the area of their landholdings. Also eligible were owners of mines and noncommercial property-most of the latter represented dachi and usadby in Moscow and St. Petersburg provinces.

36. It is unfortunate that the statistics do not differentiate hereditary and personal nobles, which would be an aid in distinguishing between gentry and civil servants. Note that only those with no other occupation were listed as zemlevladel’tsy.

37. Vladimir Gorn, “Spasiteli Rossii,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 1, 1908, p.64-65.

38. N. A. Melnikov, “19 let na zemskoi sluzhbe,” p.128, in the Columbia Russian Archive. Forty-eight of the 158 delegates became members of the Third Duma; besides Octobrists there were 11 rightists and 5 opposition deputies.

39. S. I. Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1923), 1:109.

40. This was the thesis of a memorandum on tactics in organizing the fraction, submitted to the central committee by P. Kutler of Tambov. TSGIA, f. 869, op. 1, d. 1290, 11. 78-86.

41. A. S. Viazigin, Gololobovskii intsident (Kharkov, 1909), p.5.

42. “19 let na zemskoi sluzhbe,” p.134.

43. A. D. Golitsyn, Vospominaniia (obshchestvenno-politicheskii period), p.224, in the Columbia Russian Archive.

44. Viazigin, Gololobovskii intsident, p.5.

45. Vospominaniia, I: 202.

46. TSGAOR, f. 115, op. 1, d. 19, 1. 138ff.

47. This was recognized already when the Octobrists yielded to the demand of the Right to exclude the opposition from the Duma’s presidium in exchange for electing N. A. Khomiakov president.

48. “19 let na zemskoi sluzhbe,” particularly pp.126–51, in the Columbia Russian Archives.

49. Ibid., p. 130.

50. Golos Moskvy, November 10, 1913.