The Constitutional Monarchy in Russia, 1906–17

Abstract

A little over three decades ago, in December 1964, Leopold Haimson published in the Slavic Review his renowned two-part article, ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917’.1 Just as all Russian literature was supposed to have emerged from underneath Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, so one feels that likewise almost all Western research into the constitutional monarchy in the period 1906–17 has derived from Haimson’s ‘The Problem’. The two articles set out in many ways the parameters of the ensuring debate about the fate of the constitutional monarchy in the early twentieth century. The subsequent replies to Haimson in the pages of the Slavic Review the collections of essays edited by T.G. Stavrou and George Katkov, many monographs on the constitutional politics and the revolutionary parties after 1906 have been moulded, consciously or otherwise, by Haimson’s theory of dual polarisation between educated, privileged society and the ancien régime on the one hand, and between privileged society and the urban workers on the other, and also by Haimson’s bold claim for the existence of a new revolutionary crisis on the eve of the First World War, which presaged not the February but the October Revolution of 1917. In the years after Haimson’s thesis appeared, much of the argument centred on the ‘pessimistic’ versus the ‘optimistic’ interpretation of the directions Russian politics and society were taking after 1906, or, putting it differently, between ‘evolutionists’ and ‘revolutionists’.KeywordsCivil SocietyForeign PolicyOfficer CorpsOccupational AllegianceHigh CommandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.