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Relevance of the Duma in Late Imperial Russia

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188912172


Was the Duma a viable parliamentary institution?

Viewpoint: Yes. The Duma had many features of a modern parliament and was a central element in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia.

Viewpoint: No. The Duma's limited powers and fractious relations with the autocracy cast doubt on its relevance in the late Imperial era.


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Until 1906 Russia had no elected representative institution for the whole country. Created as the result of Tsar Nicholas II's promise to allow for one in the October Manifesto of 1905, the Gosudarstvennaya Duma (State Assembly) represented great democratic hopes to many Russians.
Positive and negative views of the Duma abound. Its supporters argue that the Duma was developing real political parties, legislative experience, and national political platforms that suggested movement toward true democracy. Although imperfect, it was not all that different from other parliamentary institutions emerging in the early twentieth century. Russia's path to modernization (without major political upheaval) could have followed on its early successes.
Yet, pessimists look at the Duma as a source of fractious relations with the Russian autocracy. Wrenched from the tsar in a tense political and social situation, the Duma was never seen by the regime as anything more than a stopgap, to be derailed as soon as possible after 1905. Its early sessions were short-lived, ended prematurely after controversial debates that did not suit the regime. Its electoral rules were illegally rewritten in 1907, and many of its controversial early members were arrested or otherwise sanctioned. Even at the end of the empire, the regime still would not recognize it as a barometer of popular opinion or a vehicle for managing popular aspirations.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Duma had many features of a modern parliament and was a central element in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia.

In evaluating the Russian Duma and its role in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy, it is important to remember that during this time (1905-1917), the concept of one- person, one-vote was not in existence anywhere. In the United States, women did not yet have the right to vote, and senators were appointed by state legislatures until 1914. The British House of Commons was not elected by universal manhood suffrage (or female suffrage) until 1918, and the House of Lords held veto power over all Commons legislation until 1911. France had universal manhood suffrage but did not enfranchise women until 1945. When democratically elected parliaments appeared in Russia, they came with the hopes and ideals of the French Revolution, which suggested immediate change for the country. Unfortunately, in reality, reform progressed much more slowly.

The creation of an elected parliament in Russia, the Duma, was just one of a series of reforms enacted after the revolution of 1905. Thus, any analysis of the success or failure of the Duma has to be seen in the broader context of institutional reform, which also included the reform of the State Council and the Council of Ministers. The State Council was one-half elected, although the elections were by interest groups. The other half was appointed by the tsar. The Council of Ministers was reorganized so that, for the first time in Russian history, a chief minister would preside over it. The first premier, Count Sergei Witte, was a leading reformer and architect of the 18 October 1905 manifesto that abrogated some of the monarchy's prerogatives. It is important to note that Tsar Nicholas II accepted the new institutional structure and, after approving these reforms, did nothing to undo them during the rest of his tenure. There would always be a Duma with its various powers, which included reviewing and approving the national budget.

The role of the tsar did not change significantly with the decree of reforms. He was and remained Autocrat of All the Russias. This title was enshrined in the opening of the Fundamental Laws. Critics of the tsar and the reforms often point to this autocracy and Article 87, which permitted the tsar to enact by decree any law while the Duma and the State Council were not in session, as evidence that the reforms were only nominal. Furthermore, the tsar disbanded the first two Dumas (April-July 1906 and February-June 1907) because he was unable to work with them and, using Article 87, rewrote the election laws so that the Third Duma (November 1907-June 1912) was more to his liking. In an additional limitation the Duma and State Council were forbidden from discussing the military or foreign affairs, which closed off from their review a large portion of the state budget.

Yet, despite these limitations, real progress toward limiting the powers of the Russian tsar was being made. The Duma and State Council had control over significant portions of the budget and could discuss anything in chamber. Press coverage of all the actions and discussions of the Duma and the State Council was widespread and free from tsarist interference and state censorship. In all of the legislation considered by these bodies, there were extensive and intensive debates. There were many opinions and no real parties, only factions, which limited the ability of a single group to gain a majority to push legislation opposed by the tsar. There were serious problems between the tsar and the Duma, but much of the early tension had to do with how the first two Dumas approached the tsar. Their goal was to wrest power from the tsar. The tsar also saw them as direct challengers to his authority. In contrast, the Third Duma, and to a lesser extent the Fourth Duma (November 1912-March 1917), focused on developing and implementing policy. That was a much more mature way of broadening power and influence; instead of demanding it, they proved that they were capable of governing through legislative actions and debates.

The sessions of the Third and Fourth Dumas were filled with serious debates about the direction of the empire and passed many policy initiatives. One bill eliminated many of the rights of the Grand Duchy of Finland, and another restructured voting rights in the western zones of the empire in order to extend elected local government there. Although the State Council rejected it, the tsar approved it under Article 87. The 1908 decision to fund the expensive construction of the Amur Railroad, a route to Vladivostok that avoided Chinese territory, and attempts to create a Naval General Staff revealed that the elected representatives of the Russian people were really interested in improving and strengthening the empire together with the tsar and not always in opposition to him. In all of these works, direct challenge to the tsar was limited. Instead, Russia's parliamentarians worked through legislation that slowly shaped the empire.

The focus of much of the legislation that the Duma considered dealt with social issues. The goals were to improve the situation of all Russians and to keep the economy growing. Premier Petr Stolypin's land reforms, finally approved in 1910, altered the lifestyle of Russian peasants by eliminating the redistribution of land in peasant communes and replacing it with private, hereditary property. Another major bill, passed in 1908, called for the implementation of universal, compulsory, elementary education. A final act of the Third Duma was to pass an insurance act for sick and injured workers in June 1912, in an attempt to limit rising labor unrest.

World War I was an important turning point in the role of the Duma and the State Council, despite the fact that they rarely sat in full session. The tsar was afraid (and rightly so) that debates would not just be limited to the immediate challenges faced by the government and could easily turn into an attack on the monarchy and its handling of the war effort. The tsar also saw that Duma support was essential in galvanizing patriotism at the outbreak of the war. As war approached in 1914, the tsar, the ministers, and the court were much less confrontational with the Duma. In times of trouble, sessions of the Duma and State Council were called in an attempt to gain public support for reforms. One example is the creation of the War-Industry Committees following the military defeats of 1915.

Despite limited sessions, the Duma, and to a lesser extent the State Council, gained power and influence over Russia's policies during the war by adapting to the changing situation and using their positions as the empire's only representative bodies. The leadership of the Duma met regularly (often weekly) throughout the war to coordinate all activity of its representatives. Some Duma members were assigned as liaisons to local government organs and war-relief committees. Members of the Duma and State Council, however, held real power during the war as members of the various government committees, especially the War-Industries Committees. Together, they often made up 40 percent of committee membership and could effectively control their policies. One example followed the decision by the Special Commission for Defense to take over the operations of the Putilov factory. The Duma and State Council members on the commission gained the ability to decide how to distribute state armament contracts over the opposition of the technocrats in the established bureaucracy. In this way and others, the elected representatives of the Russian people could influence the course of the war and try to improve the empire's chances to succeed. The debates did not disappear; they merely shifted from the floor of the Duma and the State Council to the committee room.

The Duma's central role in the government of the Russian Empire came to fruition in the February Revolution of 1917. Although the tsar had formally disbanded the Duma and State Council prior to his abdication, the Duma was the only body that had the authority, legitimacy, and connections to form the Provisional Government and govern Russia. The Duma had been and continued to be an active participant in shaping the policies of the Russian state.

-- Brandon Schneider, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. The Duma's limited powers and fractious relations with the autocracy cast doubt on its relevance in the late Imperial era.

The State Duma never developed into a viable parliamentary institution. Created from the fires of the revolution of 1905, its genesis lay in the weakened Russian autocracy's fear during a time of mass unrest, fear that gave way to renewed confidence and a deep reluctance to follow through with reform as stability returned to the empire. Far from mollifying the tsar's political opponents, the concession of an elected legislature with limited powers merely emboldened them to continue challenging his power and gave them a new platform from which to make radical demands. Neither the Right nor the Left approached the Duma as a place for measured debate, realistic compromise, or constructive dialogue to solve Russia's ills. The autocracy viewed it at worst as a den of revolution, at best as a refractory instrument of its will, and most of the time as an annoyance. Much of the opposition perceived it either as a half measure that would only be brought to perfection by another and more successful revolution or as a transient stopgap that would ultimately prove incapable of preventing massive social and political transformation.

Tsar Nicholas II plainly did not want to share power with an elected legislature. He believed that his power came to him directly from God and that his main responsibility on the throne was to preserve that authority intact in order to pass it on to his son. His scenario of power was not inclined toward modernization, political or otherwise, and his ideal period of Russian history was the seventeenth century, when the autocracy he so desired to protect took form. His favorite predecessor was Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexei I, who preserved much of Muscovy's traditional heritage. Not insignificantly, Nicholas II named his only son and heir Alexei, deliberately in honor of his pre-Petrine predecessor. Such symbolism belied the political realities of the late imperial era. In 1895, only ten years before he consented to the creation of the Duma, Nicholas II had dismissed a local government (zemstvo) petition for national representative institutions as "senseless dreams." Even as late as December 1904, when he consented to a mild reform program, the tsar still maintained that "under no circumstances will I ever agree to a representative form of government."

Nicholas II's concession of the Duma put him in an awkward position. His October Manifesto, promulgated at the height of a national general strike that paralyzed the empire and portended massive upheaval in the autumn of 1905, failed to retain an important place in his thinking. The Fundamental Laws of February 1906, which spelled out how the Duma was to be elected and function, exposed great efforts on the part of the autocracy to limit its powers. First, the body's powers of legislative initiative were limited. It could vote for the most part only on bills submitted to it by the government. Its decisions were then subject to the veto of the State Council, an upper chamber dominated by appointed placemen of the tsar and corporate representatives of mostly conservative institutions, such as the Orthodox Church. The tsar held supreme veto power. Second, the Duma enjoyed only limited powers over a huge portion of Russia's budget, including the court, which controlled a substantial part of Russia's landed property, government administration, and state expenses. Third, the Duma had no say over foreign policy, police and internal-security affairs, ministerial appointments, or military command, all of which remained in the tsar's hands. Fourth, the tsar reserved the right to dissolve the Duma at will for any reason at any time during its standard five-year sessions. When the Duma was not in session, Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws gave him the further prerogative of implementing any type of legislation by emergency decree. Even with these major limitations, the autocracy still imposed onerous restrictions on the Duma's suffrage, which heavily favored rural areas over cities and landowners over peasants. The legislature, in other words, was intended for domination by social elements that the autocracy felt to be sympathetic but nevertheless did not trust with an important amount of state authority.

Despite the electoral restrictions, a large segment of the first deputies elected to the Duma actively opposed the autocracy and remained fundamentally unsatisfied with the tsar's concessions. Rather than look to the legislature as an institution that might aid Russia's evolution into a more democratic polity or ameliorate some of the worst features of tsarism, they instead called for its immediate transformation into a parliament of a type that would at the time have been one of the world's most liberal. Expressed in shrill tones, the Duma's first address to the throne was little more than a repetition of many of the demands made by political radicals in the turbulent autumn of 1905, refined with specific responses to new features of the political order. A majority of its delegates wanted universal manhood suffrage unencumbered by the restrictions of the Fundamental Laws, full control over ministerial appointments, the abolition of the State Council, and radical land reform, either with or without financial compensation to owners.

To a great degree it was a case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The civic unrest of 1905, largely channeled into organized opposition by many of the same liberal and radical intellectuals who now sat in the Duma, had led to the creation of a national public platform in which they could discuss virtually any topic with impunity. Their status as Duma members protected them from arrest, a sanction they all had potentially faced--and which more than a few had suffered--just a year earlier. The liberalization of censorship laws, academic and journalistic expression, and public associational life all ensured that Duma debates and discussions would circulate freely and influence public opinion. Yet, like many revolutionary leaders, they failed to adapt to the new and more mundane conditions of parliamentarism. Indeed, many leading liberals declined Premier Sergei Witte's late-1905 offer of ministerial portfolios--an honest attempt to include them in Russia's government--because their principles would not allow them to work with conservative ministers. The challenge that the Duma presented to the autocracy was nearly as uncooperative as the autocracy's disdain for the Duma.

The opening of the Duma itself symbolized the uneasiness with which each side regarded the other. A famous photograph shows its members and the tsar's courtiers glaring at each other across the throne room of the Winter Palace, where the Duma delegates were received with a polite speech that said nothing about reform. The Duma's first legislative session, from April to July 1906, was a true disaster. It lasted for only seventy-two days out of the projected five years set down in the Fundamental Laws. Its practical legislative work effected little change. The first two bills submitted for the Duma's consideration by the government provided for the creation of a new laundry facility and greenhouse. The chamber's radical rhetoric solved no problems and merely provoked the tsar, suspicious of its intentions even before it began meeting, to dissolve it. To protest this measure, more than one hundred Duma members fled to the comparative safety of Russian-ruled Finland to draft a resolution of protest. The government's unproductive response was to arrest them all upon their return and then judicially bar them from sitting in the Duma thereafter.

New elections were duly held, but the Second Duma, which met only from February to June 1907, was in many ways more disappointing than the first. Breaking with their initial decision to boycott the legislative body, Russia's socialist parties--the Social Democrats (whose Bolshevik and Menshevik factions sat separately) and the Socialist Revolutionaries--fielded electoral candidates and together won more than one hundred seats. Yet, instead of using their success to advocate reform in the manner of Western revisionist socialists, they determined to use their access to a national political forum only to try to revolutionize the masses with propaganda and discredit the existing political system by obstructing meaningful legislation. Neither goal did much to further the Duma's image as an evolving parliament or soften the government's attitude toward it. By early summer the tsarist secret police discovered evidence of a plot in which several socialist deputies were encouraging representatives of military units stationed in St. Petersburg to foment rebellion. Petr Stolypin, who had become premier a year earlier, presented the full Duma with this evidence and demanded that the suspect deputies be stripped of their legal immunity to face prosecution. The legislature hesitated, and the government used the affair to dissolve the Duma again.

Yet, simply holding new elections with public knowledge of the scandal was not enough for the autocracy, some elements of which even wanted to use the crisis to abolish the Duma altogether. In a technically legal move that nevertheless violated the spirit of the Fundamental Laws, the tsar dramatically changed the legislature's electoral procedure to make it even more favorable to conservative landowners and more heavily weighted in favor of ethnic Russians and Orthodox Christians at the expense of ethnic and religious minorities. It was not quite the blatant coup d'état that contemporary critics and some historians have claimed, but it showed as little inclination on the part of the government to work honestly with elected representatives of the Russian people as the Duma radicals displayed to work constructively with the government. Despite his reformist program, Stolypin did not prove to be the greatest advocate of Duma authority. He had no qualms, for example, about using state funds to bribe the press and pliable Duma members to support his agenda. Nor did he rely on the legislature's imprimatur for his most important reform, which allowed for the breakup of the traditional communal form of peasant land tenure. Instead he passed it under Article 87 in late 1906.

Not even the alteration of the electoral law secured a compliant legislature, however. Although a large majority of the Third Duma's delegates were reactionaries, conservatives, or moderate supporters of the new political order established by the Fundamental Laws (leading them to be called "Octobrists," after the October Manifesto), they were hardly the "parliament of lords and lackeys" that disenfranchised radicals vilified. The Third Duma (November 1907-June 1912) met almost uninterruptedly for its full five-year session and conducted a much more serious program of legislative work than its predecessors. Yet, on a fundamental level it failed to establish a durable relationship with the government. During discussions of a naval construction bill in 1908-1909, its leadership directly challenged the tsar's authority over the military by insisting that control of the naval budget be vested in the responsible ministry rather than the court. The tsar deeply resented this intrusion into his prerogatives and secured the bill's passage in the State Council. While the Duma had attempted to leverage a matter of national defense to alter the political foundations of the country, the autocracy stepped on the legislature's budgetary prerogatives. Neither measure engendered mutual trust. In 1910-1911 a bill to extend elected local government into the Russian Empire's predominantly Polish western provinces passed the Duma and enjoyed Stolypin's support but failed in the upper chamber. The premier's solution was to convince the tsar to dissolve both legislative bodies for three days so that he could implement the bill on his own under Article 87. This step brought Stolypin considerable ire from outmaneuvered conservatives (and from the tsar himself, who felt humiliated by the process), but it also convinced many Duma members that they, a majority of whom had supported the bill after all, were regarded as unnecessary and irrelevant in major affairs of state. The Octobrist Party, which had supported the government since the Third Duma's opening, moved into opposition and denied Stolypin the majority support he would have needed to work effectively in the future. The frustrated premier remained ineffectual for the rest of his tenure, which was ended by an assassin's bullet in September 1911.

The Fourth Duma, elected in November 1912 and sitting until March 1917, closely resembled the political complexion of the Third, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 led it to offer its own dissolution as a means of ensuring national unity. This step in itself reveals how deep the divide between Duma and autocracy really was--the Duma leaders appeared to believe that Russia's war effort would have been hindered by a legislative body functioning under their own leadership--but the spirit of the gesture was short-lived. A year of serious military setbacks and mounting domestic problems led to the Duma's recall for a six-week session in July 1915. At that time its leadership, many of whom had been involved in various independent organizations created to aid the war effort, strongly renewed their calls for a ministerial government responsible to the nation. About two-thirds of the Duma members joined the so-called Progressive Bloc to work for that goal. Even most of the tsar's own ministers endorsed their effort, but Nicholas II steadfastly refused to see any benefit in entrusting his people's elected representatives with greater power. In November he allowed the limited Duma session to end and did not recall it for another year. In the months that followed, he fired most of the ministers who had supported the Duma's calls for national representative government.

The last Duma session in late 1916 again revealed how unbridgeable the gap between it and the autocracy truly was. The hints at cooperation earlier in wartime had vanished, and from its first day of meetings the Duma became little more than a soapbox for revolution. Aleksandr Kerensky, a nominally socialist delegate who later became a Provisional Government minister and premier, called for the dismissal of all the tsar's ministers. The Constitutional Democrat Party leader Pavel Miliukov delivered a litany of government policies and decisions he found objectionable and paused after each item to ask whether they resulted from stupidity or treason. Such confrontational rhetoric both further weakened the Duma's standing in government eyes and, in Miliukov's case, suggested to the public--falsely--that the country's leaders were traitors deliberately sabotaging its war effort and plotting defeat. Miliukov subsequently admitted that he knew the latter to be untrue at the time of his speech, but his dishonest statements nevertheless inflamed popular opinion.

Surprisingly, however, the government responded with concessions. Not only did Nicholas II decline to dissolve the rebellious session, but he also gestured toward fulfilling radical demands by dismissing his despised chief minister, Boris Stürmer, and replacing him with Aleksandr Trepov, who had a reputation as a conciliatory moderate. Trepov's first speech emphasized his willingness to work with the Duma to solve problems in a meaningful way.

Rather than celebrate or try to build constructively on this victory, however, the Duma merely demanded further concessions. In early December the Menshevik delegates walked out of the body. The remaining radicals heaped abuse on Trepov and renewed their calls for sweeping dismissals. Kerensky incited the people of Russia to civil disobedience. Vladimir Purishkevich, a right-wing deputy, denounced leading officials whom he accused of selling out Russian interests to the Germans. Shortly thereafter he participated in the assassination of the influential Siberian mystic Grigorii Rasputin, a favorite of the empress. These incidents only antagonized the regime and ensured that further calls for representative government were ignored. Even as late as February 1917, when urban unrest in Petrograd threatened Nicholas II's position on the throne, he could still make fun of "that fat fellow [Duma president Mikhail] Rodzianko" who "has again written me all sorts of nonsense, which I shan't even bother to answer," when Rodzianko urged him to respond to the disorder in the capital by naming a cabinet responsible to the Duma. The tsar remained cemented in his convictions when similar advice came to him from his last chief minister, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, who claimed to speak on behalf of the entire cabinet, and from members of his own family, several of whom were already to talking to Duma leaders about the future of Russia. Ultimately the unrest was not tamed, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, and more than three centuries of Romanov rule came to an end. The results may not have been different if Nicholas II had followed the advice that reached him in his final days on the throne, but both the Duma's antagonism and his own stubbornness in a time of major crisis indicated that cooperation between government and legislature was a lost cause.

-- Paul du Quenoy, American University in Cairo


THE MANIFESTO CALLING THE FIRST DUMA

The empire of Russia is formed and strengthened by the indestructible union of the Tsar with the people and the people with the Tsar. This concord and union of the Tsar and the people is the great moral force which has created Russia in the course of centuries by protecting her from all misfortunes and all attacks, and has constituted up to the present time a pledge of unity, independence, integrity, material well-being, and intellectual development in the present and in the future.

In our manifesto of February 26, 1903, we summoned all faithful sons of the fatherland in order to perfect, through mutual understanding, the organization of the State, founding it securely on public order and private welfare. We devoted ourselves to the task of coordinating local elective bodies [zemstvos] with the central authorities, and removing the disagreements existing between them, which so disturbed the normal course of the national life. Autocratic Tsars, our ancestors, have had this aim constantly in view, and the time has now come to follow out their good intentions and to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of laws, adding for this purpose to the higher State institutions a special consultative body intrusted with the preliminary elaboration and discussion of measures and with the examination of the State Budget. It is for this reason that, while preserving the fundamental law regarding autocratic power, we have deemed it well to form a Gosoudarstvennaia Duma (i.e. State Council) and to approve regulations for elections to this Duma, extending these laws to the whole territory of the empire, with such exceptions only as may be considered necessary in the case of some regions in which special conditions obtain. . . .

We have ordered the Minister of the Interior to submit immediately for our approbation regulations for elections to the Duma, so that deputies from fifty governments, and the military province of the Don, may be able to assemble not later than the middle of January, 1906. We reserve to ourselves exclusively the care of perfecting the organization of the Gosoudarsivennaia Duma, and when the course of events has demonstrated the necessity of changes corresponding to the needs of the times and the welfare of the empire, we shall not fail to give the matter our attention at the proper moment.

We are convinced that those who are elected by the confidence of the whole people, and who are called upon to take part in the legislative work of the government, will show themselves in the eyes of all Russia worthy of the imperial trust in virtue of which they have been invited to cooperate in this great work; and that in perfect harmony with the other institutions and authorities of the State, established by us, they will contribute profitably and zealously to our labors for the well-being of our common mother, Russia, and for the strengthening of the unity, security, and greatness of the empire, as well as for the tranquillity and prosperity of the people.

In invoking the blessing of the Lord on the labors of the new assembly which we are establishing, and with unshakable confidence in the grace of God and in the assurance of the great historical destinies reserved by Divine Providence for our beloved fatherland, we firmly hope that Russia, with the help of God Almighty, and with the combined efforts of all her sons, will emerge triumphant from the trying ordeals through which she is now passing, and will renew her strength in the greatness and glory of her history extending over a thousand years.

Given at Peterhof on the nineteenth day of August, in the year of grace 1905, and the eleventh year of our reign.

NICHOLAS

Source: James H. Robinson and Charles Beard, eds., Readings in Modern European History, volume 2 (Boston: Ginn, 1908), pp. 375-377.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1992).

Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988).

Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Alexandra Korros, A Reluctant Parliament: Stolypin, Nationalism, and the Politics of the Russian Imperial State Council, 1906-1911 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

D. C. B. Lieven, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (New York: Dial, 1983).

R. B. McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907-17 (London: Historical Association, 1977).

Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, volume 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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