Does the history of Russia between 1905 and 1917 suggest that peaceful evolution towards constitutional government was possible?

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Does the history of Russia between 1905 and 1917 suggest that peaceful evolution towards constitutional government was possible?

The October Manifesto of 1905 created for the first time a form of organization, which may be recognised as a legal political party. These ‘parties’ were split between Social Democrats (Bolshevik and Menshevik groups), Socialist Revolutionary groups, Liberals (such as the Kadets) and the rightists. Each socialist facet of the political proto-system, and also Tsar Nicholas II, promoted some form of radical social and political change within Russia. The Social Democrats assumed a Marxist viewpoint that a bourgeois revolution would beget a working class proletariat uprising in the very near future; the Socialist Revolutionaries were of the opinion that their strength from the October ‘victory’ had to be consolidated and used to build up a revolutionary support base; and the Tsar was intent on dispensing with politicians and rescinding his ‘unnecessary’ weakness shown in 1905, and flooding any attempt at government with right-wing inclined peasants. The Revolution of 1905-1907 was, to all intents and purposes a failure. The 1905 strikes had allowed parties, but the weak, overly ambitious strikes from the socialists against the Tsar had not achieved their aim of ousting him from power. No revolution took place. On the other hand, Nicholas II was not the strong ruler he had committed himself to being in 1905. The SRs, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were hardly crushed. In fact, Stolypin’s attempt to advance the Tsar’s position through the introduction of the Third of June electoral Law, guaranteeing a rural nobility majority in government and the Duma, curtailing representative government, did little more than to convince sceptical Mensheviks, particularly Trotsky, to unite behind the liberal’s struggle against Stolypin’s system and continue the fight against Tsarism. Yet, one must not forget that, with the exception of the Tsar, a cripple and unimpressive figure increasingly considered a lame duck by his court and officials, each group advocating revolution automatically assumed that at the end there would be some form of multi-party democratic government based on a new and radical constitution, but certainly not dictatorship. Lenin used the term dictatorship in his work What is to be Done? (1902), but only to clarify the governmental system which would introduce complete democratisation, implicitly suggesting that accommodation of all points of view would be a feature of post-revolutionary ‘dictatorship’. It is not until 1917 that Lenin uses the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, dispensing with the idea of complete democracy and inclusion of the peasantry.

 It is perhaps useful to clarify what constitutional government means. Whilst one may argue that government need not consist of many strata, a government that is without many strata is, in effect, a dictatorship. However, the term constitutional government does not preclude the idea of a constitutional dictatorship, only totalitarian or authoritarian rule. In effect, the constitutional rights of each individual as an equal entity precluding non-democratic dictating forms as good a constitutionally controlled government as any other system. This vision of equality for all and each mans voice counting as much as the next is obviously not practical in a regime operated by a centralist urban proletariat, with a senior party structure necessary for distribution of land or grain. In light of this, we are left with the definition of constitutional government as a party or system controlled by constitutional or doctrinal principles. In effect, is it possible that the Tsar could have held onto power, or was it reasonable to expect a system to casually usurp the Romanovs and continue with a modified constitution without the need for revolution? One must assume that revolution not only marginalizes but also financially destroys certain areas of society; this provokes ‘hunger jerk’ reactions, necessarily leading to a need for suppression of anti-revolutionary trends. This assumption is key, since whilst one has to analyse if the effects of 1905-1907 precluded a transition to consensus politics, one must also consider if the revolution itself was inevitable?

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 The Socialist Revolutionaries’ leader, Victor Chernov, expressed before a 1908 party conference that another full-scale revolution was a certainty. When one considers this statement, it is more useful not to look at the potential revolutionaries since it is almost certainly the case that they would have continued the fight against Tsarism regardless of other factors, but to look at the power base to be overcome. In this case Nicholas II and the existing constitution. The Third of June electoral rule in 1907 committed rural nobility to the government. As Hans Rogger has pointed out, this was hardly the best ...

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