ABSTRACT
The years of consolidation under P. A. Stolypin and Count Kokovtsov were a period of Great Russian nationalism. Some impression of the economic progress in the last years before the First World War can be given by output figures for certain major industries. One of the subjects most seriously discussed in the Duma was education. Here the revolutionary years had brought real progress. Since the aristocratic romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century had given place to the bourgeois nationalism of the twentieth, the Russian authorities, who had once favoured the bourgeoisie of Poland against the landlords, now preferred the landlords. Russia was drawing rapidly nearer to Western Europe. In such conditions the conspiratorial revolutionary was becoming an anachronism, and was so regarded by a growing number of Russian Marxists, both among workers and among intellectuals. To them Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, passionately defending the earlier type of organisation, seemed a utopian reactionary.
