Stephen Kotkin

So the constitutionalists, otherwise known as the cadets, we would call them the classical liberals.

They're the private property, constitutional order, anti-autocracy people fighting the czarist regime.

They're going to be the protagonists of the February Revolution in 1917.

And it looks like they could possibly be the solution because they're against arbitrary, autocratic, unjust rule, and they're in favor of constitutional order.

That's not how they behave once they're in power, but let's leave that aside.

But here's your problem.

And this was...

Foreseen by the interior minister who puts down the 1905 rebellion revolution, Piotr Dornavo, who understands that the liberals, the constitutionalists, classical liberals, the ones who want private property and constitutional order, probably if they had their druthers, a constitutional monarchy like you have in the UK and Britain at the time.

But Dornavo says to them, you guys are fools, because if you take down the Tsar, you won't get a constitutional order, you'll get chaos and anarchy, and you'll get a massive social revolution by the peasants predominantly, but also by the nationalities and the workers, and you will bring on the opposite of a constitutional order.

So instead of fighting against the Tsar,

you should throw in your lot with the Tsar against the Stalins and the social movement that came from the investment in modernization.

And so, Dornavo has proved right.

He's proved right not just in Russia, by the way.

In many places in the world at the time, between like 1905 and 1925 or so, 1926 in the case of Portugal,

You have constitutional revolutionary attempts, attempts to introduce constitutional order.

Mexico, Iran, China, Russia, Portugal, and they all fail.

The constitutionalists take power for a brief period of time and then they're swept out by a more leftist, more social-oriented revolutionary process.

And so the constitutional epoch of the early 20th century turns out to be a bust.

It had to have happened beforehand.

So before the modern era, why?