increased desire for political and. social recognition. The static political and social system of Imperial Russia offered little place for the new professional groups that formed in the late nineteenth century: sJaadefltjmiojisJ_c^fflmjjl ±ees on illiteracy, doctors and lawyers associations, and so on. These associations tended to be second only to the zemstvos as a recruiting ground for the future Constitutional Democratic Party.
Russian liberalism was-more than any other current of ideas in f nineteenth-century Russia-the work of college professors. The most in- * fluential university professors tended to sympathize with liberalism from the time when Professor Granovskyfirst tried to present some of its salient ideas in his lectures at Moscow University in the 1840's. Granovsky, the1; spiritual father of the original Westernizers, was the first to lecture in detail to Russians on the historical development of laws and liberties in the democratic West.25 He suggested that this pattern of development was preferable to that of Russia-without raising Utopian hopes that it could be duplicated overnight on Russian soil. Although the radicals of the sixties soon overshadowed and disregarded their more moderate liberal professors, the latter were largely responsible for some of the most important liberalizing reforms of the sixties: the introduction of trial by jury and the extension of higher educational rights to women (well before such rights were recognized in the liberal democratic United States).
Chicherin, who became mayor of Moscow and outlived his friend Granovsky by* nearly half a century, was the prototype of the moderate Rechtsstaat liberal.20 In his lectures as professor of law at Moscow, he
stressed the importance of rational laws rather than of parliamentary bodies I as an effective limitation on arbitrary autocratic power.
By the 1890's, however, a new generation of reform-minded intel- j lectuals was once more viewing Chicherin as a timid conservative* just as | Herzen had forty years earlier. The major spokesman for this new, more radical liberalism was another professor, Paul_Mjliukov, the learned and encyclopedic historian of Russian thought and culture. Miliukov's interpretation of Russian culture generally followed the line sketched out by Alexander Pypin, an Anglophile and positivist whose learned articles in The Herald of Europe had really begun the dispassionate, analytical study of the development of Russian thought. In the unfriendly atmosphere of the populist age, he took refuge in exhaustive studies of Russian thought and culture-a path which Miliukov was to follow on several occasions. Though a cousin of Chernyshevsky, Pypin opposed all extremism and sought to continue the tradition of the liberal Westernizers of the forties.
Miliukov translated this wish into practical political activity at the turn? of the century. He fortified his liberal, constitutional convictions with extensive travel in France, England, and America and was influential in steering the amorphous liberal movement into a clear-cut program for 'the political liberation of Russia.' The older aristocratic idea of increased local autonomy and personal liberty was subordinated in the program of the Union of Liberation to the abolition of autocracy. Miliukov urged the ¦ 'immediate convention of a legislative assembly during the war and upheaval of 1904-5; and the_Cadft patty^of which he was a leading spokesman, consistently sought to extend the authority of the consultative dumas which technically acquired legislative rights in August of 1905.
By identifying themselves psychologically with a still distant and idealized America even more than with England and France, the new Rus4 sian liberals were able to think of themselves as apostles of progress rather than apologists for bourgeois self-interest. Miliukov was only the first of a series of Russians to lecture widely in America and write for American journals; and the writings of Woodrow Wilson were known in Russia even before he entered the political arena in the United States. The introduction to a 1905 Russian translation of Wilson's The State, by Maxim Kov-alevsky, a long-time government official from one of Russia's most learned families, is as urbanely insistent on the rational rule of law (whether through constitutional monarchy or representative republicanism) as any contemporary Western essay. Two years earlier, Paul Vinogradoff, an emigre Russian veteran of the zemstvo constitutional movement, had climaxed his career as an authority on English constitutional law by his appointment to the Corpus chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Miliukov,
however, went beyond their moderate demand for a state of laws rather ' than men, insisting that the constitution of 1905 did not go far enough. In addition to demanding popular sovereignty as the prerequisite for any reform, the Miliukov brand of liberals also contended that social reform and partial agrarian redistribution were necessary concomitants of political reform. The radicalism of the Cadet party led in 1906 to the introduction of new restrictions on the activities of the second duma: the most representative national political forum that had existed in Russia since the zemsky sobers of the early seventeenth century. The Cadets had dominated the first duma, seeking in effect to turn it into a legislative body. They protested its dissolution and stated their program in even more radical terms in the Vyborg manifesto of 1906. These radical liberals continued to try to bring Russian political practices into line with those of the Western democracies with which Russia was now allied diplomatically through the triple entente. Miliukov, because of his extensive knowledge of Western practice as well as Russian history, became an increasingly important spokesman for the tradition of constitutional democracy. He was one of the few to accept-indeed claim-the title of liberal; and he was the leading figure in the agitation of the so-called progressive bloc in the last duma of 1915-16: the eleventh-hour effort of liberal reformism to seize the reins of power from the corrupt and inefficient monarchy of the last Romanov.27 The fact that the constitutional liberals were inundated by the revolutionary upheaval of March, 1917, and outlawed by the Bolshevik coup of November should not be taken as indication of any inherent Russian antipathy to liberalism. These events occurred during a war which Russia was technically ill-equipped to continue. Considering the obstacles under which liberals had been laboring in Russia, their progress had been rapid and their programs intelligently conceived. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were in many ways more fearful of the liberals than of any other group during their initial efforts to seize and consolidate power. The Cadets were among the first to be imprisoned; and the appeal of the liberal democratic idea of a constituent assembly had become so great even among the revolutionaries that the Bolsheviks were forced to permit the elections for it to take place in November, 1917. Thirty-six million Russians cast ballots; and when only one fourth voted for the Bolsheviks, the dissolution of the assembly became almost a foregone conclusion. The liberal tradition had come to Russia with too little too late. It was denounced by Lenin as 'parliamentary cretinism.' Miliukov and other Cadet leaders had sought to overcome the uncertainty and political inexperience of Russian liberals. But it is doubtful if even a more confident and experienced liberal party could have established constitutional
and parliamentary frameworks for evolutionary change amidst conditions of war, revolution, and social disintegration.
Through the more radical program of Miliukov, the constitutional democrats had succeeded in gaining new appeal among the intellectuals and in overcoming the indifference to political reform that had been characteristic of the populists. The liberals were aided in this task by chastened, non-revolutionary elements in the populist camp. Mikhailovsky pointed the way for this more moderate populism. After refusing to collaborate with the zemstvo constitutionalists in 1878, he began to argue-on the very pages of the People's Will journal of the late seventies-that socialists should reconsider their traditional hostility toward Russian liberals. His 'Political Letters of a Socialist' recognized that political reforms and constitutional liberties might facilitate the non-violent transformation of society envisaged by the evolutionary populists. A number of influential populists also assigned increased priority to political reform in the emigre journal of the late eighties, Self-Government. The 'People's Justice' organization of 1893-4 committed Mikhailovsky and some three thousand other populist sympathizers inside Russia to the proposition that abolition of autocratic government in Russia was-in the words of one of their pamphlets-'the pressing question' of present-day Russian life. The liberal movement adopted many of the folk rites of populism in order to broaden their intellectual appeal. Banquets, circle discussion meetings, commemorative gatherings, and illegal publications abroad were all utilized by the new generation of liberals as they had been by earlier radicals. Many populists and Marxists, who sought to advance their socialist objectives through practical political activity rather than illegal revolutionary agitation, formed tactical alliances with the constitutional liberals in the late imperial period. Nevertheless, the constitutional democratic cause in Russia was handicapped by the split among non-revolutionary reformers between radical and conservative impulses. In order to gain the support of many intellectuals, minority
