The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

What Was the Constitutional Democratic Party?

The Constitutional Democratic Party was founded on 12-18 October 1905 at a congress in Moscow, in the days immediately after the October Manifesto. The 47 founding organisations were drawn from the zemstvo movement, the legal profession, the universities, the professional classes, and the All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry. The first chairman of the party was the Moscow law professor and historian Pavel Milyukov, a former student of Theodor Mommsen and a leading Russian specialist in Balkan history. The party took the name Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya Partiya and was known by the abbreviation Kadety (Cadets) (Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990; Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004).

The founding

The Constitutional Democratic Party was the political wing of the late-imperial Russian liberalism. The Russian liberal movement had been organised in the 1890s and 1900s in the zemstvos (the local self-government bodies) and in the intelligentsia organisations of the universities, the press, and the legal profession. The first pan-Russian liberal organisation was the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists, founded in 1903, which worked for the establishment of a constitutional order. The Union was reorganised as the Union of Unions in 1905, and the Constitutional Democratic Party was the political party that the Union produced.

The party was the most professionally organised and the most politically coherent of the Russian liberal parties. Its manifesto, the Vyborg Appeal of June 1906, called for a Constituent Assembly, the abolition of the autocratic system, universal suffrage, land reform, and the development of Russian civil society. The party had a small but vocal central organisation, with about 50,000-100,000 declared members by 1906. It was, in a real sense, the Russian equivalent of the British Liberal Party or the German Free Democrats (Pipes, 1990).

The program

The Constitutional Democratic Party advocated:

  • A constitutional monarchy with a responsible parliament
  • Universal suffrage and a fully elected parliament
  • Civil liberties, including freedom of speech, assembly, and association
  • Land reform, including the redistribution of land to the peasants
  • The abolition of the autocratic system
  • The development of Russian civil society and the rule of law
  • The recognition of national minorities’ rights, including the right to cultural autonomy

The party’s program was the most coherent liberal political program of the late imperial period. It was, however, also a program that the Russian peasants did not understand, that the Russian workers did not support, and that the Russian middle class could not afford. The party was, in effect, a party of the educated middle class (Pipes, 1990).

The party in the Duma

The party was the largest single political force in the First State Duma in 1906, with about 161 deputies. The party’s chairman, Sergei Muromtsev, was elected Speaker of the First Duma, and the party’s deputies were the most vocal in the Duma. The First Duma was dissolved on 21 July 1906, after 73 days in session, and many of the party’s deputies signed the Vyborg Manifesto urging passive resistance.

In the Second Duma (1907), the party had about 100 deputies. The Second Duma was dissolved in June 1907 in what is sometimes called the “Stolypin coup,” and the new electoral law of 3 June 1907 substantially reduced the representation of the Constitutional Democrats. The party’s deputies in the Third and Fourth Dumas were reduced to a rump, and the party became a parliamentary opposition in a chamber where the government’s majority was firmly in place (Ascher, 2004; Pipes, 1990).

The decline

The party’s decline was the result of three factors: the limited franchise, the failure to develop a mass following, and the increasing radicalism of the Russian political scene.

The limited franchise reduced the party’s representation in the Third and Fourth Dumas, and the party’s deputies were isolated in a chamber dominated by the Octobrists, the Right, and the Nationalists. The party failed to develop a mass following, and its members were concentrated in the educated middle class of Moscow, St Petersburg, and the major cities. The party was increasingly out of touch with the workers, the peasants, and the national minorities, who were the majority of the population.

The party’s decline was accelerated by the rise of the more radical socialist parties, including the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, which were able to mobilise the support of the workers and the peasants. The Constitutional Democrats, with their commitment to constitutional methods and to the rule of law, were increasingly out of touch with the more radical elements of Russian society.

The party in 1917

The party was an important political force in the events of 1917. The party’s leader, Pavel Milyukov, served as foreign minister in the First Provisional Government (March-May 1917), and the party’s members were the leading deputies in the Petrograd Soviet. The party, however, was unable to address the fundamental problems facing Russia, and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 marked the end of the party as an important political force. Many of the party’s leaders — Milyukov, Maksim Kovalevsky, Nikolai Muromtsev, Fyodor Kokoshkin, Sergei Muromtsev — fled Russia in the wake of the revolution, and the party was eventually banned by the Soviet government (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).