Разрешенные, но закрытые собрания киевских прогрессистов перед выборами в Государственную думу 1912 года

The article introduces the publication of documents depicting the rallies in support of Progressive candidates from Kiev (Kyiv) during the 1912 elections to the State Duma: police reports, newspaper articles, and a personal diary entry. Attitudes toward the prospects of the Ukrainian national cause were central to the polemics between the candidates representing “patriotic” and “progressive” blocs, who perceived this cause as part of a bigger political agenda, regardless of their own ethnic background and cultural affinity. Other key topics of the campaign concerned attitudes toward the struggle of sales assistants for regulated work hours and mandatory days of rest (loyalists opposed the regulation, Progressives supported it), and toward the Stolypin land reform. Even though peasant communal landholding was virtually absent in Kiev province, Progressive candidates from Kiev found it necessary to refer extensively to the plight of inner-Russia’s peasantry.

With a few exceptions, the local press was on the side of the Progressives, depicting their campaign quite sympathetically and in great detail. The government supported the loyalist candidates and only hesitantly authorized rallies for oppositional candidates. Still, the police intervened and dismissed their meetings, even including a private gathering in a restaurant, under the pretext of their having trespassed the limits of legal politics. As the published documents demonstrate, even though the police reacted only to the socioeconomic and political criticism of the regime – disregarding the quite explicit endorsements of Ukrainian national claims – the logic of political polarization firmly associated the Ukrainian national agenda with opposition to the tsarist regime.