Union of Liberation

Before the founding: Osvobozhdeniye and the Schaffhausen meeting

The origins of the Union of Liberation go back to 1902, when Russian liberal exiles launched the periodical Osvobozhdeniye (Liberation), which carried ideas such as constitutional monarchy. The core of the organization formed out of the supporters of that journal. At a founding meeting held in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, on 2-4 August 1903, figures who would later lead the Russian liberal camp, among them Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Vernadsky, Petrunkevich, Milyukov and Struve, debated whether to create a party or a movement. Struve's view prevailed: a broad front should be created to win political freedom by legal means. One more conference in Kharkov in September of the same year was still required.

Founding and program

The first congress was held illegally in private apartments in St. Petersburg on 3-5 January 1904. Its program called for a constitutional monarchy, voting rights, the right of nationalities to self-determination and the compulsory alienation of privately owned land, and it advocated holding illegal zemstvo congresses. The organization's tactic was to 'besiege' the autocracy through public mass campaigns. The ruling Council elected Petrunkevich (Tver) as chairman and Annensky (St. Petersburg) as deputy chairman, and included Bulgakov (Kiev), Peshekhonov (St. Petersburg), Pyotr Dolgorukov (Kursk), Prokopovich (St. Petersburg), Nikolai Lvov (Saratov), Shakhovskoy (Yaroslavl), Kovalevsky (Kharkov) and Bogucharsky-Yakovlev (St. Petersburg).

1904: war, conferences and the banquet campaign

The organization united 'liberation' circles scattered across twenty-two cities into a single national movement.

When the Russo-Japanese War began immediately after the founding, patriotic motives kept the Union from launching a single anti-autocratic campaign, and its activity was largely limited to distributing the journal. After repeated defeats at the front shifted public opinion, and after the assassination of Interior Minister Plehve brought Sviatopolk-Mirsky to office and opened an 'era of trust' toward society, the movement resumed. In September it took part in the 'Conference of oppositional and revolutionary organizations of the Russian state,' which opened in Paris on 17 (30) September 1904 and lasted nine days, and reaffirmed the principle of replacing the autocracy with constitutional and democratic government.

The second congress, held in St. Petersburg on 20-22 October, decided to come out of the underground and announce its existence in its own press, and above all adopted three policies: to work for the adoption of constitutional resolutions at the forthcoming zemstvo congress; to organize a campaign of banquets on 20 November, the anniversary of the judicial reform, demanding freedoms, popular representation and a constitution; and to begin forming professional-political unions and unite them into an association, the Union of Unions, to secure those demands.

The banquet campaign consisted of gatherings in St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large cities held on 20 November under the guise of banquets marking the fortieth anniversary of the judicial statutes. Liberal opposition figures spoke on the need for freedoms and a constitution and adopted resolutions demanding political reform. More than 120 gatherings took place in thirty-four large cities across Russia and involved roughly 50,000 participants. Reports on these banquets barely reached the legal domestic press, but the foreign press and especially Osvobozhdeniye carried fairly full accounts, with the resolutions reproduced in full and the speeches set out in detail.

Around this time Father Georgy Gapon, who led the country's largest workers' organization in St. Petersburg, became convinced that workers could achieve their aims only together with other estates and established contact with the Union. At a joint meeting in late November, the Union's representatives proposed that the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers submit its own petition as well, and Matyushensky of Nashi Dni (Son of the Fatherland), the newspaper the Union founded, took part in drafting the workers' petition. It was Gapon himself who decided to carry it in a procession to Nicholas II on 9 January 1905.

1905: a sharper program and dissolution

In December 1904 the Union began forming trade unions not for the defence of workers' rights but for participation in politics, and in February 1905 these merged in the capital into a central committee of the Union of Unions. The third congress, held in Moscow on 25-27 March as the revolutionary movement grew, adopted a new program demanding the convocation of a nationwide Constituent Assembly, an eight-hour working day and the alienation of privately owned land. In April an illegal printing press was set up, which printed the Leaflet of the Union of Liberation (15 April - 4 September 1905, six issues), and in the summer the Union issued both a Charter of the Union of Workers and a draft Russian constitution titled Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire, which provided for a bicameral parliament.

At a congress convened by the members of the Union in Moscow on 8-9 May, the all-Russian Union of Unions came into being, the most influential organization the liberals created. Petrunkevich, chairman of the Union of Liberation's Council, presided, and a permanent chairman appeared only at the end of that month: Milyukov, a member of the same Council, was elected, and after his arrest in late summer the place was taken by Lutugin, also a member of the Union. For the next five months, until the general strike, the Union of Unions effectively stood at the head of the revolution.

After the rout at Tsushima the tsar received a delegation from the zemstvo congress joined by representatives of the St. Petersburg city duma. Nearly the whole group consisted of members of the Union, and the address submitted to the emperor spoke of the need, in the name of 'order and internal peace,' to convoke popular representatives 'chosen for this equally and without distinction by all Your subjects.' At the fourth congress, held in Moscow on 23-25 August 1905, delegates opposed boycotting the merely consultative Bulygin Duma and decided to join the commission set up to create a party that would take part in elections to it.

During the general strike in October the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies was created to lead it, and Khrustalev-Nosar, a member of the Union, was elected its first chairman. On 15-18 October a congress convened by the joint commission of those unions founded the Constitutional Democratic Party; from that moment the Union of Liberation ceased to exist. Its left wing rallied around the journal Bez Zaglaviya.

Composition and size

The only figure indicating the Union's mass character is 1,600 members as of March 1905. They were concentrated mainly in large cities, among them Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Kiev and Kharkov. In Moscow in September 1905 there were occupational groups of lawyers, historians, zemstvo doctors, natural scientists, actors, writers, engineers, teachers and professors, while two groups, of Poles and Jews, were organized along national lines. As for the Union's archive, Struve handed it for safekeeping to the Archive of the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in December 1917 before leaving for the Don; under the Bolsheviks it was discovered during a purge in 1930 and immediately classified.

Historical significance

The Union of Liberation was Russia's first major liberal political organization: the first nationwide attempt to press the autocracy through legal means and mass campaigns in order to win a constitutional order. It failed to secure an independent position in the 1905 Revolution and dissolved when the Kadet party was founded, but its network, personnel and tactic of professional unions became a basis for the later Russian liberal movement.