Union of Liberation

해방동맹

Russia's first major liberal political organization, founded in St. Petersburg in January 1904. Built around the exile journal Osvobozhdeniye (Liberation) edited by Struve, it united underground circles of constitutionalists across twenty-two cities into a single national movement and adopted a tactic of 'siege' of the autocracy through public mass campaigns. Its three-point strategy, adopted in October 1904, was to push the zemstvo congress toward constitutional resolutions, to stage a banquet campaign under the pretext of the fortieth anniversary of the judicial reform, and to organize professional unions into a 'Union of Unions.' It dissolved after the October Manifesto when the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party was founded, and most of its leading figures joined the Kadets.