The Russian Revolution

When he first learned that the zemtsy planned a national congress Mirskii not only approved but asked and received the Tsar’s blessing for it. In so doing he was under the misapprehension that the gathering would confine itself, as, indeed, had originally been planned, to zemstvo matters; in this belief, he inadvertently misled the Tsar. When he learned of the revised agenda, he requested Shipov to have the congress postponed for several months. Shipov thought this impossible to arrange, whereupon the minister requested that it move to Moscow. This, too, was rejected, so Mirskii agreed to have the congress proceed as planned but in the guise of a “private consultation” (

chastnoe soveshchanie). His approval conveyed the misleading impression that the government was prepared to contemplate a constitutional and parliamentary regime.

Expecting the Zemstvo Congress to come up with a constitutional project, Mirskii asked Sergei Kryzhanovskii, an official in his ministry, to draft a counterproposal. His intention was to formulate a program that would include the maximum of oppositional demands conceivably acceptable to the Tsar.³²

In this atmosphere of great expectations, the oppositional groups felt the time had come to combine forces. On September 17, representatives of the constitutionalist Union of Liberation met secretly in Paris with Socialists-Revolutionaries as well as Polish and Finnish nationalists, to forge a united front against the autocracy.*

The Paris Conference was a prelude to the great Zemstvo Congress held in St. Petersburg on November 6–9, 1904, an event that in terms of historical importance may be compared with the French Estates-General of 1789. The analogy was not lost on some contemporaries.³³

The congress met in private residences, one of them the apartment of Vladimir Nabokov (the father of the future novelist) on Bolshaia Morskaia, within sight of the Winter Palace.³⁴ On arrival in the capital, the delegates were directed to their destination by the police.

A number of resolutions were put up for a vote, of which the most important as well as the most controversial called for an elected legislature with a voice in the shaping of the budget and control over the bureaucracy. The conservatives objected to this motion on the grounds that political democracy was alien to Russia’s historic traditions: they wanted a strictly consultative body modeled on the Muscovite Land Assemblies that would convey to the throne the wishes of its subjects but not interfere with legislation. They suffered defeat: the resolution in favor of a legislative parliament carried by a vote of 60–38. There was near-unanimity, however, that the new body should have a voice in the preparation of the state budget and oversee the bureaucracy.³⁵ It was the first time in the history of modern Russia that a legally assembled body—even if assembled under the guise of a “private consultation”—passed resolutions calling for a constitution and a parliament—even if the resolutions did not use these taboo words.

In the weeks that followed, the platform adopted by the Zemstvo Congress provided the text for the many public and private bodies that met to take a stand on national questions, among them the Municipal Council of Moscow, various business associations, and the students of nearly all the institutions of higher learning.³⁶ To spread the message as widely as possible, the Union of Liberation organized a campaign of nationwide banquets—modeled on 1848 France—at which the guests toasted freedom and the constitution.³⁷

The first took place in St. Petersburg on November 20, the fortieth anniversary of the judiciary reform; 676 writers and representatives of the intelligentsia affixed their signatures to a petition calling for a democratic constitution and a Constituent Assembly. Similar banquets were held in other cities during November and December 1904. The socialist intelligentsia, which at first had poured scorn on these “bourgeois” affairs, eventually joined in and radicalized the resolutions. Of the forty-seven banquets on which there exists information, thirty-six are known to have followed the Zemstvo Congress, while eleven went further and demanded a Constituent Assembly.³⁸ The provincial authorities, confused by conflicting signals from the capital, did not interfere, even though Mirskii instructed them in secret circulars to prevent the banquets from taking place and to disperse them if they defied government prohibitions.³⁹

After the Zemstvo Congress had adjourned, Shipov briefed Mirskii on its resolutions; the minister listened sympathetically. Later that month, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, the rector of Moscow University, submitted at Mirskii’s request a reform proposal, which Mirskii gave to Kryzhanovskii and Lopukhin, the director of the Police Department, to edit for submission to the Tsar.⁴⁰