The First Russian Revolution: the Barometer Indicates a Storm

Abstract

The real transition of the Russian Empire to constitutional monarchy would be possible in the case of complete consolidation of the society and political parties, the government and the sovereign. However, the evolution of the Russian political system began to be traced, suffering a real collapse of transformation in the direction of dualism. The Empire was already preparing to go from the birth of monarchical constitutionalism to the regime of personal rule of the emperor. In other words, reverse it. To what extent was it possible to limit an unlimited monarchy? After all, it was not possible to become a completely bourgeois state of Russia at the turn of the century, the legislation still called Nicholas II a monarch, and only the Red October finally managed to eliminate feudal remnants. One cannot, however, belittle the role of the Supreme Manifesto of October 17, 1905, that proclaimed the inviolability of civil liberties and tried to delineate the boundaries of absolutism. The centuries-old institution of absolutism was reorganized one way or another, and its updated principles on April 23, 1906, became the core of the Basic State Laws. Are conditionalities and reservations applicable to an act of the highest legal force? Does history know the subjunctive mood? To this day, there is no consensus in science in assessing the events of the First Russian Revolution, which sometimes faded at the zenith of the next decade. The limitation of power by the State Council and the State Duma acted as a kind of fiction, which ultimately revealed the incapacity of the constitutional monarchy in Russia. The actual return to the regime of the personal rule of the autocrat clearly showed all the mediocrity of relying on the organs of popular representation.