Liberalism in 1904

Even if several zemstvo representatives were founding members of the Union of Liberation, overall, zemstvo opinion was extremely unsympathetic to the direction that the union was prepared to pursue through an alliance with the revolutionaries. Most zemstvo members preferred the road of peaceful evolution. The representatives of very different political camps saw it as the safest and soundest way to achieve constitutional government. According to this view, a future Russian representative assembly was to develop out of the zemstvo institutions. Witte recalls in his memoirs: As I showed in my memorandum, zemstvo institutions represented a constitution from below that, without