ABSTRACT
The industrial possibilities opened up by emancipation of the serfs was a great incentive for a section of the people to eschew revolutionary activities and try to find in the exploitation of Russia’s vast resources a possible way out. The Russian intellectuals and professional classes had for some years been travelling in Europe, and the deas of parliamentary government with a representative assembly based on a wide franchise of all citizens, voting in their places of residence rather than in their places of work, was becoming widespread among this section of the public and even among the urban workers. Russia was in throes of conflict between workers and factory owners, between peasant and landlord, while nationalist movements were running strong among the smaller people of the Empire. Russia had jumped too suddenly into a parliamentary democracy without any preparatory education in the working of so delicate a mechanism, and without that spirit of compromise which alone could make it work.
