The Kadet Party and the Elusive Ideal of Internal Democracy

Abstract

Most of us encounter stenographic reports, protocols, and minutes of political parties or institutions in connection with specific topics. Efficient researchers do not simply sit and read such documents in their entirety for extended periods of time; rather, we focus our efforts on a specific incident, time period, or person. Moreover, because these documents were often handwritten, [End Page 117] occasionally typed, sporadically available in published periodical literature, and almost always stored in archives, until now it was nearly impossible to conceive of reading through a decade's worth of such documentation for its own sake. Consequently, reading through the recently published materials of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party's Central Committee and party congresses and conferences from 1905 to 1914 for the purposes of this review was a remarkable experience in and of itself. Readers are transformed from outside observers to party insiders and in the process become more sympathetic to the dilemmas faced by a liberal party committed to internal party democracy even while stymied in constructing it in the Russian political arena.