The Union of the Russian People (URN) - one of the largest national-monarchist parties of the conservative persuasion - emerged in November 1905 in many ways as a reaction to the emergence of liberal and radical left political parties in Russia, which set the task of changing the state system.
In November in St. Petersburg, the I founding congress of the union was held and governing bodies were formed, including the Main Council, the chairman of which was elected the famous Russian pediatrician, Doctor of Medicine Alexander Dubrovin. Initially, the Main Council consisted of 30 members, among whom were a large Bessarabian landowner, actual state councilor Vladimir Purishkevich, editor of Moskovskiye vedomosti Vladimir Gringmut, wealthy Kursk landowner, state councilor Nikolai Markov, who was called the "Bronze Horseman" for his striking resemblance to Peter I, an outstanding philologist, academician Alexander Sobolevsky, a famous historian and author of brilliant school textbooks on Russian history, Professor Dmitry Ilovaisky and others. The central printed organ of the party was the newspaper Russkoe Znamya, published by Dubrovin himself.
Alexander Dubrovin
In August 1906, the Main Council of the party approved the party charter and adopted the party program, the ideological basis of which was the "theory of official nationality", developed by Count Sergei Uvarov back in the 1830s - "autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality." The main software installations of the SRN included the following provisions:
1) the preservation of the autocratic form of government, the unconditional dissolution of the State Duma and the convocation of a legislative council Zemsky Sobor;
2) rejection of any form of state and cultural federalism and the preservation of a single and indivisible Russia;
3) legislative consolidation of the special status of the Russian Orthodox Church;
4) priority development of the Russian nation - Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians.
At the same time, under the auspices of the party, a broad popular movement "Black Hundred" was created, which was initially led by Gringmut. By the way, this organization was based on the ancient form of Russian communal (rural and posad) self-government in the form of a centenary organization. And the very name "Black Hundred" stemmed from the fact that all rural and township communities in Russia were taxable, that is, "Black", hundreds. Incidentally, it was these "black hundreds" that formed the backbone of the famous Second Militia of Kozma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, which saved the country in 1612.
Soon, sharp contradictions began to grow among the leaders of the RNC. In particular, the comrade (deputy) chairman of the Main Council, Purishkevich, who possessed extraordinary charisma, began to gradually push Dubrovin into the background. Therefore, in July 1907, the Second Congress of the Union of the Russian People was urgently convened in Moscow, at which Dubrovin's supporters adopted a resolution directed against the irrepressible arbitrariness of Purishkevich, who, in protest against this decision, resigned from the party. However, the story did not end and was further developed at the III Congress of the RNC, held in February 1908 in St. Petersburg. This time, a group of eminent monarchists, dissatisfied with the policy of Alexander Dubrovin, filed a complaint with a member of the Main Council, Count Alexei Konovnitsyn, which led to a new split not only in the very central leadership, but also in its regional departments: Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and others. As a result, in November 1908, Purishkevich and his supporters, including the rector of the Moscow Theological Academy Anthony of Volynsky, Archbishop Pitirim of Tomsk, and Bishop Innokentiy of Tambov, who left the NRC, created a new organization - the Russian People's Union named after Mikhail Archangel.
Vladimir Purishkevich
Meanwhile, the situation inside the SNR continued to aggravate even more, which led to a new split in the party. Now the "stumbling block" was the attitude towards the State Duma and the Manifesto of October 17th. The leader of the RNC Dubrovin was an ardent opponent of any innovations, believed that any limitation of autocratic power would bring extremely negative consequences for Russia, while another prominent monarchist Nikolai Markov believed that the Manifesto and the State Duma were created by the will of the sovereign, which means that the duty of every true the monarchist does not argue on this score, but obey the will of the monarch.
According to a number of modern historians, this development of events became possible because Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin was personally interested in weakening the RNC, who sought to create in the III State Duma a centrist majority loyal to the government, consisting of moderate nationalists and constitutionalists (Octobrists, progressives and part of the Cadets). One of the main obstacles to the implementation of this plan was precisely the RNC, since both Dubrovin himself and his supporters had an extremely negative attitude towards all the "three whales" of Stolypin's domestic policy:
1) they did not accept his flirtation with the constitutional parliamentary parties and subjected the main "government" party, the All-Russian National Union, to merciless criticism;
2) the course of transforming Russia into a constitutional monarchy by transforming the State Duma and the State Council into real legislative bodies of power was absolutely unacceptable for them, and they demanded the restoration of unlimited autocracy;
3) finally, they were opposed to the destruction of the peasant land commune and all the agrarian reforms of Stolypin.
Pyotr Stolypin
In December 1909, while the leader of the RNC was undergoing treatment in Yalta, a "quiet coup" took place in St. Petersburg and his new deputy, Count Emmanuil Konovnitsyn, came to power. Dubrovin received a proposal to limit his power as the honorary chairman and founder of the RNC, with which he categorically disagreed. However, he could not regain its former influence in the party, and in 1911 it finally split into the "Union of the Russian people" headed by Markov, which began to publish the new newspaper "Zemshchina" and the magazine "Bulletin of the Union of the Russian people", and "All-Russian Dubrovin Union of the Russian People”headed by Dubrovin, the main mouthpiece of which remained the newspaper“Russkoye Znamya”. Thus, Stolypin's policy towards the RNC led to the fact that from the most powerful and numerous party, in the ranks of which there were up to 400,000 members, he turned into a conglomerate of various political organizations, whose leaders suspected each other of secret machinations and were constantly at odds with each other. … It is no coincidence that the former Odessa mayor, General Ivan Tolmachev, wrote with bitterness in December 1911: “I am oppressed by the idea of the complete collapse of the right. Stolypin achieved his goal, we are now reaping the fruits of his policy, everyone is up in arms against each other."
DEAD END OF "MEN'S DEMOCRATISM"
Later, repeated attempts were made to recreate a single monarchical organization, but this important task was never solved. In 1915, the Council of Monarchist Congresses was created, but it did not work to recreate a single organization.
Later, in the public consciousness, a deceitful bloodthirsty image of the "Union of the Russian People" and the "Black Hundred" was quite thoroughly formed, which still forms a negative attitude towards the entire Russian patriotic camp. The main features of this demonized image were that it was the Russian monarchist parties:
1) were marginal organizations, consisting quite often of lumpen and urban madmen;
2) were used by reactionary circles in their narrow class selfish interests;
3) acted as organizers of mass Jewish pogroms and did not disdain the mass murder of their political opponents.
Meanwhile, on the conscience of the "Black Hundred" there were only three political murders, while on the conscience of left-wing radicals - tens of thousands. Suffice it to say that, according to the latest data of the modern American researcher Anna Geifman, the author of the first special monograph "Revolutionary Terror in Russia in 1894-1917." (1997), more than 17,000 people became victims of the "Combat Organization of the SRs" in 1901-1911, including 3 ministers (Nikolai Bogolepov, Dmitry Sipyagin, Vyacheslav Pleve), 7 governors (Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Nikolai Bogdanovich, Pavel Sleptsov, Sergey Khvostov, Konstantin Starynkevich, Ivan Blok, Nikolay Litvinov).
It is simply ridiculous to talk about the low intellectual level of the Russian Black Hundreds, since among the members and supporters of this movement were such great Russian scientists and figures of Russian culture as chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, philologist Alexei Sobolevsky, historians Dmitry Ilovaisky and Ivan Zabelin, artists Mikhail Nesterov and Apollinary Vasnetsov, and many others.
Historians and political scientists have long been asking the sacramental question: why did the RNC and other patriotic parties collapse? To some, the answer may seem paradoxical, but it was the Russian Black Hundreds that were the first real attempt to build in the Russian Empire what is now commonly called “civil society”. And this turned out to be absolutely unnecessary for either the imperial bureaucracy, or radical revolutionaries, or Western liberals of all stripes. The Black Hundred had to be stopped immediately, and it was stopped. After all, it is no coincidence that the most perceptive politician of that time, Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), wrote with great apprehension, but with amazing frankness: “In our Black Hundreds there is one extremely original and extremely important feature, to which not enough attention has been paid. This is a dark peasant democracy, the crudest, but also the deepest."
