Parliaments and Revolutions: Socialist State Crafting in the Russian Imperial Borderlands

• In Event: The Revolution of 1905 and Its Aftermath in the Borderlands of the Russian Empire

Abstract

My paper seeks to find a broader synthesis of borderland pathways out of empire towards a national state form. It will explore the political trajectories of the early twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland (leading cases) and territories later composing Latvia and Georgia as auxiliary ones. I want to scrutinize the contrasting political choices of political actors (chiefly socialist parties) in these western borderlands of the Russian Empire. There is no possibility of neatly dissecting causes and outcomes because of the encompassing, entangled nature of the imperial system and the high impact of exogenic factors on the trajectory of each case. However, some synthetic insides concerning the 1905 unsettling of imperial stability and later divergent trajectories of these regions are possible.

Author

• Wiktor Marzec, U of Warsaw (Poland)/New Europe College, Bucharest