ABSTRACT
There were three major continuities pertaining to the whole period between 1905 and 1991. The establishment and operation of parliamentary bodies were accompanied by constant tensions between the globally circulating Western normative concepts and ideologies and their vernacular counterparts. The juxtapositions of Russian and Soviet institutions to their European and North American counterparts persisted for the whole period. Another continuity was in the predominance of political representation of social categories (nationality, gender, occupation, class, religion, region, age, and so on) over representative government based on individualized civil rights, although the scope of recognized or permitted categories changed. Political representation was at times conceptualized in corporatist terms, but its origin lay in the imperial rights regime and the attempts to translate the composite imperial space to a representative assembly. Finally, the elites that created most of the central parliamentary bodies did not envision them as legislative institutions. The main objective of the assemblies was to rally the population, defined through social categories, around the political leadership and demonstrate that it was loyal.
