The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth in Russia have been named the Silver Age [serebriannyi vek]. This was a period of unprecedented, perhaps never surpassed, economic, cultural and intellectual blossoming. It also was a period of unbridled political expectation and unparalleled disaster. After the war against Japan (1904–5) was lost and the first revolution (1905) came about, the tsarist regime embarked on a path of cautious constitutional concessions (soon revoked), which created a political landscape populated by a variety of parties – the very word ‘party’ articulating the dividedness of society. All parties were led by members of the intelligentsia, who spoke ‘in the name of’ a constituency that, in most cases, was not at all present in the party itself (Malia 1996: 71). Not only Struve, but most political leaders were ‘revolutionaries without masses’, who had yet to create their own constituency (Kolerov 2020: 33). After 1905, it became painfully clear that, ‘strictly speaking, not one of the political parties in Russia had a stable, fittingly organised political basis’ (Karpovich 1997: 403).

The Constitutional Democrat Party [KD] (f. 1905) prioritised constitutionalism over revolution, while ‘all the parties to the left of the Kadets subordinated their commitment to a constituent assembly to social revolution’ (Malia 1996: 71). This explains why the liberals could not forge a coalition with reform-minded forces in the government, and why the evolutionary approach of Maklakov lost out to the revolutionary orientation of Miliukov and Struve (Karpovich 1997: 395, 399). Meanwhile, the government, led by reformers like Stolypin and Witte, persisted in an energetic, deliberate and consistent policy of top-down modernisation, international competition and capitalism.