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‘Renovated Russia’ in Bureaucrats’ Memoirs: New Publications

Soviet historians used to associate pre-revolutionary state officials with upholding the autocracy. The serious political changes initiated during the revolution of 1905 were connected exclusively with the pressure of the revolutionary mass on the authorities. The failure of the revolution led to the hampering of reforms and the strengthening of reactionary political trends. ‘When the stricken petrel of the revolution fell to the ground, the owls of reaction flew out to hunt’ was the pathetically comic phrase with which the prominent Moscow historian Aron Iakovlevich Avrekh began his Tsarism and the Third of June System. The ‘owls of reaction’ were directed by P.A. Stolypin’s government. It manipulated the Octobrist–Kadet and Right–Octobrist majorities and led a reactionary political course to reverse the concessions made during the revolution. Though this interpretation was dominant in Soviet historiography, there existed another way of looking at the role of the bureaucracy in the transformation of Russia’s political system after 1905. The Leningrad researcher V.S. Diakin maintained, contrary to Avrekh, that ‘the Right and Stolypin were not the same’. For Diakin the conflict between the liberal bureaucrats, who saw the necessity of serious reforms, and the most reactionary part of Russian gentry, who resisted them, was the most important component of the political struggle in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and