Golitsyn's Concept of People's Representation in 1905, Toward the History of Zemstvo Constitutionalism

Scientific article

doi 10.28995/2073-0101-2025-1-50-66

For citation

Novoselsky, Sergey S. (2025). A. D. Golitsyn's Concept of People's Representation in 1905, Toward the History of Zemstvo Constitutionalism, Herald of an Archivist, № 1, pp. 50-66, doi 10.28995/2073-0101-2025-1-50-66

Novoselsky, Sergey S., European University in St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia

Golitsyn's Concept of People's Representation in 1905, Toward the History of Zemstvo Constitutionalism

Abstract

The article analyzes the events of 1905, which determined the fate and shape of the future Russian parliament. If earlier discussions about the need to transform the state system of the Russian Empire were the domain of a relatively small group of intellectuals, the Troubles forced those who had not been interested in politics before to think about it. This led to a marked increase in political projection, with the ideas of convening a Constituent Assembly and universal suffrage gaining great popularity in society. In the summer of 1905, the project of popular representation, drafted by Prince Alexander Dmitrievich Golitsyn (1874-1957), chairman of the Kharkov provincial zemstvo, which is discussed in this article, opposed these sentiments. The note he prepared was a response to both the escalation of the revolutionary crisis and the rapid politicization of the zemstvo movement. Unlike most similar projects, A. D. Golitsyn's note was sent not to the Council of Ministers, but to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was deposited in the fonds of former Minister P. D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). This is the first time the document has been introduced into the scientific turnover. When analyzing it, the approaches of intellectual history proved useful, which allowed us to consider the note in a broad socio-political context. The author's proposals are of interest not in themselves, but in comparison with the assessments that contemporaries gave to the idea of representative power. Therefore, the article pays special attention to the way A. D. Golitsyn's ideas were measured against the governmental, zemstvo and neo-Slavophile discourse. The prince's project was at the crossroads of these worldviews and combined their various elements. A. D. Golitsyn was related to the majority of the November 1904 Zemstvo Congress in demanding a parliament and categorically rejecting corporate (primarily class) representation. With a significant part of the bureaucracy - Slavophile ideas and rhetoric. At the same time, A. D. Golitsyn firmly defended the need for autonomy of zemstvo self-government from the activities of representative institutions. Thus, the prince tried to organically build the people's representation into the political “landscape” of the Russian Empire, seeking to make it more resistant to the challenges of the time. The analysis of A. D. Golitsyn's project and its place in the discussion of ways out of the revolutionary crisis shows that the idea of representative power in the middle of 1905 was rapidly becoming dominant in the Russian socio-political intellectual space.

Keywords

Russian Empire, 1905, Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, revolutionary events of 1905, “Bulygin Duma” project, Slavophile ideas, people's representation, constitutionalism, public thought, zemstvo movement, A. D. Golitsyn, ideas of convening the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, project of people's representation, women's issue and suffrage, Neo-Slavophile way of thinking, classical liberalism.

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About authors

Novoselsky Sergey S., PhD in History, European University in St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, Junior Researcher, Russian State University for the Humanities, Institute of History and Archives, Department of History and Theory of Historical Science, Moscow, Russian Federation, Associate Professor, +7-495-250-71-09, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The article was received in the editorial office on 04.04.2024, recommended for publication on 20.12.2024