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11 Russia in the Global Parliamentary Moment, 1905–1918: Between a Subaltern Empire and an Empire of Subalterns

The establishment of the legislative State Duma (17 October 1905) and the adoption of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire (23 April 1906) by Tsar Nicholas II during the Revolution of 1905–1907 seemed to make Russia a constitutional state. In 1907, Vladimir Matveevich Gessen and Boris Emmanuilovich Nol’de, two prominent liberal legal scholars, listed Russia, together with Persia and Montenegro, as the new constitutional states in their comprehensive collection of contemporary constitutions. Articulating a popular progressive view, they claimed that the failures of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) unmasked the inefficiency of bureaucratic autocracy, spreading the critical attitudes to the ancien régime beyond intellectual circles and transforming them into a broad liberation movement across the whole country. Few intellectuals, however, viewed the Duma as a parliament equal to its Western counterparts. It occupied a subordinate position to the State Council, which was reformed into a partly appointed upper chamber, and did not control the cabinet, which contributed to the term “sham constitutionalism”. The non-universal, indirect, and unequal elections were further limited with the