Parliamentarianism in the Ideology of Early Twentieth-Century Russian Conservatives

Abstract

The nineteenth century had seen the entrenchment of the parliamentary system in Western civilization. The geographical placement and close contacts between Russia and Europe ensured that parliamentary ideas would also find their way into the Russian Empire, which is why the ideological struggle over the creation of a representative body in Russia was joined long before the tsar’s manifestos of August 6 and October 17, 1905. As far back as 1896, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, was arguing that popular sovereignty [narodovlastie] was among “the most dishonest political principles” since in reality that power belongs not to the people but to their representatives, whose voters are no more than a “herd” that constitutes their “capital, the foundation of their might and eminence in society” (as if they were “wealthy nomads”). This thesis of Pobedonostsev’s became a key part of the rightists’ ideological constructs and was further developed in works written early in the twentieth century. Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was of the opinion that in parliamentary democracies, the people have no representation of their own; it has only the representatives of the parties that rule over the people.” Anton Semenovich Budilovich, the famous Slavist and member of the Russian Assembly monarchist group, also “held that nowhere in the constitutional world do we encounter the representation of the entire people, only of ‘classes and interests,’ e.g., of the upper, wealthier, and more unmannerly strata of the population.” Professor Andrei Sergeevich Viazigin, chairman of the Khar’kov division of the Russian Assembly and future leader of the rightist faction in the Third Duma, was of the same mind, asserting that in democratic states, “‘Freedom, equality, fraternity’ have proved to be only a fine-sounding battle-cry, whereas the peoples have fallen into an even worse dependency, having become slaves to a heartless and pitiless