Mirskii immediately went to work to win public support. He abolished corporal punishment, relaxed censorship, and restored to their posts a number of prominent zemtsy whom Plehve had exiled. He further expressed the intention of lifting the disabilities of the Old Believers and easing the lot of the Jews. He made a strong impression with an address to the officials of the Ministry of the Interior, published in the press, in which he said that experience had taught him that government had to have a “genuinely well-meaning and genuinely trustful attitude toward civic and estate institutions and the population at large.”30
A new era seemed to be dawning. The zemtsy read in Mirskii’s remarks an invitation to hold a national congress. They had held one such gathering in 1902, but surreptitiously because it was illegal. The idea of a public zemstvo congress emerged in late August 1904, immediately after Mirskii’s appointment, and quickly gained the endorsement of both the liberal (constitutionalist) and conservative (Slavophile) wings of the movement. Initially, the planners intended to confine the agenda to zemstvo affairs. But having learned of Mirskii’s remarks, they concluded that the government would welcome their views on national issues and expanded the agenda accordingly. The zemtsy felt it was essential to institutionalize the latest changes in government policy: Mirskii, after all, could prove merely a tool of the “dark forces”—the Court camarilla, above all—to be discarded as soon as he had served his purpose by pacifying the country. In the words of Dmitrii Shipov, the most prominent among the conservative zemtsy, many of his associates felt
that so far, trust in society had been expressed only by the individual placed at the head of the Ministry of the Interior … it was necessary for that one official’s sense of trust to be assimilated by the entire government and clothed in legal form, protected by safeguards, which would preclude shifts in the government’s attitude to society being dependent on such happenstance as the change of personnel at the head of government offices. It was further said that it had become an urgent need to make proper arrangements for legislative activity and to grant a national representative body participation in it.31
These sentiments spelled constitution and a legislative parliament. Some conservative zemtsy thought this went too far, but persuaded that the government wanted to hear the whole range of opinions, they agreed to place constitutional proposals on the agenda of the forthcoming congress, scheduled for early November.
When he first learned that the zemtsy planned a national congress Mirskii not only approved but asked and received the Tsar’s blessing for it. In so doing he was under the misapprehension that the gathering would confine itself, as, indeed, had originally been planned, to zemstvo matters; in this belief, he inadvertently misled the Tsar. When he learned of the revised agenda, he requested Shipov to have the congress postponed for several months. Shipov thought this impossible to arrange, whereupon the minister requested that it move to Moscow. This, too, was rejected, so Mirskii agreed to have the congress proceed as planned but in the guise of a “private consultation” (chastnoe soveshchanie). His approval conveyed the misleading impression that the government was prepared to contemplate a constitutional and parliamentary regime.
Expecting the Zemstvo Congress to come up with a constitutional project, Mirskii asked Sergei Kryzhanovskii, an official in his ministry, to draft a counterproposal. His intention was to formulate a program that would include the maximum of oppositional demands conceivably acceptable to the Tsar.32
In this atmosphere of great expectations, the oppositional groups felt the time had come to combine forces. On September 17, representatives of the constitutionalist Union of Liberation met secretly in Paris with Socialists-Revolutionaries as well as Polish and Finnish nationalists, to forge a united front against the autocracy.*
The Paris Conference was a prelude to the great Zemstvo Congress held in St. Petersburg on November 6–9, 1904, an event that in terms of historical importance may be compared with the French Estates-General of 1789. The analogy was not lost on some contemporaries.33
The congress met in private residences, one of them the apartment of Vladimir Nabokov (the father of the future novelist) on Bolshaia Morskaia, within sight of the Winter Palace.34 On arrival in the capital, the delegates were directed to their destination by the police.
A number of resolutions were put up for a vote, of which the most important as well as the most controversial called for an elected legislature with a voice in the shaping of the budget and control over the bureaucracy. The conservatives objected to this motion on the grounds that political democracy was alien to Russia’s historic traditions: they wanted a strictly consultative body modeled on the Muscovite Land Assemblies that would convey to the throne the wishes of its subjects but not interfere with legislation. They suffered defeat: the resolution in favor of a legislative parliament carried by a vote of 60–38. There was near-unanimity, however, that the new body should have a voice in the preparation of the state budget and oversee the bureaucracy.35 It was the first time in the history of modern Russia that a legally assembled body—even if assembled under the guise of a “private consultation”—passed resolutions calling for a constitution and a parliament—even if the resolutions did not use these taboo words.
In the weeks that followed, the platform adopted by the Zemstvo Congress provided the text for the many public and private bodies that met to take a stand on national questions, among them the Municipal Council of Moscow, various business associations, and the students of nearly all the institutions of higher learning.36 To spread the message as widely as possible, the Union of Liberation organized a campaign of nationwide banquets—modeled on 1848 France—at which the guests toasted freedom and the constitution.37 The first took place in St. Petersburg on November 20, the fortieth anniversary of the judiciary reform; 676 writers and representatives of the intelligentsia affixed their signatures to a petition calling for a democratic constitution and a Constituent Assembly. Similar banquets were held in other cities during November and December 1904. The socialist intelligentsia, which at first had poured scorn on these “bourgeois” affairs, eventually joined in and radicalized the resolutions. Of the forty-seven banquets on which there exists information, thirty-six are known to have followed the Zemstvo Congress, while eleven went further and demanded a Constituent Assembly.38 The provincial authorities, confused by conflicting signals from the capital, did not interfere, even though Mirskii instructed them in secret circulars to prevent the banquets from taking place and to disperse them if they defied government prohibitions.39
After the Zemstvo Congress had adjourned, Shipov briefed Mirskii on its resolutions; the minister listened sympathetically. Later that month, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, the rector of Moscow University, submitted at Mirskii’s request a reform proposal, which Mirskii gave to Kryzhanovskii and Lopukhin, the director of the Police Department, to edit for submission to the Tsar.40
The Trubetskoi-Kryzhanovskii-Lopukhin reform proposal which Mirskii presented to Nicholas early in December 1904 was a cleverly worded appeal to the Tsar’s conservative instincts.41 The authors made the proposed constitutional and parliamentary concessions appear to be a restoration of old practices rather than the revolutionary innovation that they really were. The reforms of Alexander II, they wrote, had ended the “patrimonial” (votchinnyi) regime in Russia by introducing the notion of public interest. They