This volume contributes to our understanding of the demise of tsarism in Russia on two levels. On the one hand, it offers the first book-length study in English of the early years of the Russian liberal movement since the now somewhat dated Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (1973), surpassing that work through the utilization of archival and other resources made available to scholars since 1991, although Peter Enticott's major source base is contemporary publications, particularly those of the book's prime focus, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), and through extending its coverage across and beyond 1905. On the other hand, the work deliberately sets out to contribute to the longstanding debate among historians that is sometimes referred to as “Wither Russia?”: in short, the issue of whether or not the post-1905 constitutional system was doomed from birth or might have flourished but for the catastrophes of the First World War. Here Enticott comes out strongly against the “unduly pessimistic” (ix) view offered by Leopold Haimson in the 1950s and offers a more optimistic prognosis that is closer to that more recently assayed by Michael Melancon (“Unexpected Concensus: Russian Society and the Lena Massacre, April 1912,” Revolutionary Russia 15, no. 2, 2002), and Wayne Dowler (Russia in 1913, DeKalb, 2010). Ultimately, however, he is forced to concede that, whatever might have been, “in reality the Kadets did not come to power in 1906, and the First World War did, in fact, take place. And given the grave international and internal disasters which beset the country, liberalism and political democracy had little chance of flowering in Russia” (191).

After a brief overview of the development of liberalism in Russia, the book follows a chronological path through the major events of 1905–06, from Bloody Sunday to the dispersal of the Kadet-dominated First State Duma and the issuing of the Vyborg Manifesto. Along the way the author offers discrete sections on aspects of the history and character of the Kadets. There is a particularly detailed and interesting section on party organization (78–83), another on the negotiations for the formation of a Kadet-dominated ministry in 1906 (119–31), and a final chapter on “Kadet Party Policy” (146–69), for example. The last of these unpicks the questions of a constitution and civil rights, local government and regional autonomy, social reform, and agrarian policy. The work then concludes with a very useful chapter (“Who were the Kadets,” 170–82), using a broad range of materials to dissect and adumbrate the nature of the party membership. This may tell us little very new, underscoring the known predominance of professionals in the Kadet ranks, particularly those with backgrounds in the law or academia: did Aleksandr Kerenskii not characterize the Kadets as not a party but a faculty? The chapter covers its subject with admirable clarity and detail, however. One could imagine it serving as the starting point for discussions on Russian liberalism in many undergraduate and graduate seminars.

In the end, Enticott comes down firmly on the side of those who blame the intransigence and short-sightedness of Nicholas II and his entourage for wrecking the Kadet project and the chances for constitutionalism in early twentieth-century Russia. What the volume lacks, however, is a full consideration of the odd mixture of doctrinarism and timidity among the Kadets in some key circumstances: firstly, their insistence upon a full amnesty of political prisoners (including terrorists) as a condition for joining the government, allowing opponents of reform to present the party as a friend of the bomb-throwers and the tsar as the bastion of law and order; and secondly, their unwillingness, as national liberals, to seriously challenge the regime with regard to its dangerous and ultimately suicidal foreign and defense policies that led Russia to the catastrophes of 1914–17. In his conclusion, the author does speculate that, had the Kadets been invited into government, they might have tempered Russia's wholesale support for Serbia during the July Crisis, but largely avoids the issue of the party's failure to divert the government from such a suicidal course at any earlier juncture. A more nuanced analysis might have demonstrated how, by allowing tsarism to dig its own grave in this manner, the Kadets were also, unwittingly, digging their own.