The period between the revolution of 1905 and the outbreak of World War I in July 1914 witnessed a welter of confusing portents of political change, both positive and negative. Relaxed censorship, increased religious freedoms, the installation of a semiparliamentary regime, and rising urban literacy rates have provided optimists with a certain factual support for their contention that Russian society was well on the road to adopting the hallmarks of West European culture and shedding the legacy of the tsars: autocratic rule, mass illiteracy, and the debilitating coarseness of life among peasants and workers. Critics of this optimistic assessment point, however, to the tsarist government's refusal to accord full legislative power to the State Duma and State Council, the persistence of a ministry responsible to the tsar, and the failure of liberals to pass a land reform that might have forestalled the peasant revolution of 1917.