The Monarchists in 1905–17: From Triumph to Catastrophe

Abstract

The right-monarchist (conservative, Black Hundred) movement arose during the First Russian Revolution, as a conservative response to the opposition’s attempts to change the traditional political system. Then, the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, which legalized the existence of political parties, created the conditions needed to institutionalize the right wing and unify the several dozen all-Russian and regional monarchist unions and organizations that were committed to preserving the autocracy. At the forefront of the Black Hundred movement was the Union of the Russian People (URP), founded in November 1905. This was the largest grassroots Black Hundred organization, an order of magnitude larger than the other monarchist parties, that in time absorbed most of them as divisions. Assistance from the URP, whose membership, by the most modest estimates, topped 400,000, was one of the factors that allowed the autocracy to withstand the onslaught of the First Russian Revolution. Aleksei Aleksandrovich Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, former chief procurator of the Holy Synod, would later write this to Nicholas II: