The Russian Constitutional Monarchy in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Among the many scholarly virtues of the dedicatee of this volume of essays has been an audacious willingness to place the Russian Revolution in a comparative perspective of time and space. To their discredit, historians of the Russian constitutional monarchy, for the most part, have been reluctant to emulate Paul Dukes’s pioneering example. The debate on the fate of the monarchy, launched in the middle of the 1960s by Leopold Haimson and revived recently by the author of this essay, has been overwhelmingly Russian-centred.1 Evaluation of the reformed monarchy’s chances of survival after 1906 and of the prospects of political and social stability has occurred in terms of the particular conjuncture of domestic circumstances. There has been little effort to examine the Duma monarchy’s chances in the light of the experience of other European constitutional monarchies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The purpose of this brief essay is to take the first tentative steps towards remedying this deficiency in the historical treatment of the ‘renovated’ political structure of the Russian autocracy in the brief period between Peter A. Stolypin’s ‘coup d’etat’ of 3 June 1907 and the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914.2 As a truly adequate survey of this theme would require the space afforded by a monograph, the author has consciously chosen to open what he hopes will become an on-going debate in the future by focusing his preliminary thoughts upon two aspects of the history of the Russian constitutional monarchy. In the first part of the essay attention will be directed to the ‘constitution’ itself, the Fundamental State Laws of April 1906. The second part will concern the implementation of this constitution in the eight years after its promulgation.