ABSTRACT
The revolutionaries' certainty that the autocracy was bound to be driven from power rested more on a reading of historical trends than on a day-to-day assessment of the balance of forces. The ambiguous character of the Gaponovshchina enabled liberals as well as Marxists to view 9 January as the first engagement of a larger and longer battle. The Union of Liberation and the Union of Unions, the latter headed by Paul Miliukov and formed in May of fourteen organizations demanded the Constituent Assembly elected by universal, direct, equal, and secret vote, the so called 'four-tail' franchise. The moderate wing of liberalism accepted the new institution in order to use it as well as all other legal means, to obtain broader civil and political rights. The great October strike which forced the government into retreat and major concessions became general precisely because the workers had adopted the slogans which liberals and radicals had been the first to launch.
