Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

No less than by revolution, Russian history is haunted by the specter of roads not taken. Historians of late imperial Russia might seek to avoid teleological shadows cast by 1917, but the denouement of revolutionary collapse and violent civil war inevitably looms on the horizon of all attempts to explain what became of the Great Reforms. Why did the 1860s apparently fail to deliver the promise, cherished by Russian liberals, of a law-bound, constitutional order underpinned by individual rights and representative government, which would integrate the peasantry and the non-Russians into a cohesive and stable society and withstand the dislocations of rapid modernization and ultimately of World War I? And what did liberals themselves make of the opportunities afforded to them during the turbulent decades before 1917? Were they the hapless victims of historical forces beyond their control or the authors of their own political failure? Taken together, David Feest’s Ordnung schaffen, Stefan B. Kirmse’s