SUMMARY:

Chapter 10 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “The Twentieth Century: Empire in the Era of Mass Society.” Its first part, which revisited the story of the “revolt of the masses” that culminated in the Revolution of 1905, was published in the previous issue of Ab Imperio. The emperor’s 1905 October Manifesto introducing the constitutional regime was the game changer: it gave the Russian Empire a second chance, and restored the role of Nicholas II as supreme arbiter.
Part 2 of the chapter covers the post-Manifesto decade marked by the political stalemate between the newly formed parliament (the State Duma) and the government backed by the emperor. Parallel to the growing popular disillusionment with politics, both revolutionary and parliamentary, the seemingly apolitical sphere of public reformism developed in Russia. The political nation of the pan-imperial educated public (obshchestvennost’) succeeded in partially offsetting the disintegrating potential of multiple nationalizing movements (ethnocultural, political, or regional) and coordinating self-organization efforts to modernize the society. Russian obshchestvennost’ embraced the transatlantic reformist culture of early progressivism, with its contempt for the government and idealistic belief in the efficiency of partial improvements brought about by popular campaigns and the implementation of expert knowledge. A more viable form of imperial polity that began taking shape in Russia in the early 1910s could thus be legitimately characterized as a “progressive empire.”