This study of Prince L΄vov, the zemstvo and Russian liberalism draws on Thomas Porter's previous work, but it is also the result of his collaboration with Lawrence Lerner, whose 1976 dissertation is the main source of Chapters 4 and 5. The book rests largely on published sources but in addition cites material from the archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (fond 102), and from papers of the Party of Peaceful Renewal (fond 887) in GARF. Porter and Lerner analyze liberalism in the last two decades before 1917, with emphasis on the moderate zemtsy and Duma Progressists. Their book helps us understand Prince L΄vov's reputation as an embodiment of the propertied rural and urban public, but it is not a detailed biography of him. The book asks whether the 1917 revolutions were inevitable or not, a old debate framed by Soviet scholarship, by Leopold Haimson on the divide between “society” and “the masses,” and by Richard Pipes’ theory of a Bolshevik coup d’état. The authors do not squarely face recent turns in scholarship, such as the theory of Russian continuity across the revolutionary “divide.”
The book sketches L΄vov's early life, from his birth in Dresden in 1861 to his involvement in the Beseda circle in 1900. He was a moderate reformist who hoped the central government would allow the zemstvos the latitude to collaborate with one another in the country's improvement. In zemstvo politics from 1900 to 1904, he aligned himself with the program of Moscow provincial board chair Dmitrii Shipov and against the more strident liberalism of the Tver΄ zemstvo leader Ivan Petrunkevich. In 1904, when minister of internal affairs, Viacheslav Plehve, decided to block the formation of a united zemstvo organization to aid the Russian war effort in the Far East, L΄vov and other zemtsy successfully appealed that decision to the tsar. From mid-1904 through mid-1905, L΄vov helped coordinate the zemstvos’ medical relief effort on the Japanese front, through the General Zemstvo Organization. The authors’ analysis of this relief effort is one of their book's highlights.
After 1905, L΄vov remained head of the General Zemstvo Organization. The authors demonstrate that, in 1906, this organization funded famine relief and that before 1912, it assisted thousands of peasants in Siberia under Stolypin's resettlement program. The authors take these successes as proof that state-zemstvo cooperation after 1905 was more robust than other historians have realized.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss liberal politics under the Duma system. In 1906, L΄vov joined the moderate constitutionalist faction, the Peaceful Renovationists. He sought reconciliation of the public and state, an end to the death penalty but also to political terrorism. During the Third Duma period, he associated himself with the Progressists—a party dominated by businessmen who regarded constitutional government as the best answer to popular unrest in the empire. Between 1907 and July 1914, the Progressists held up the banner of inter-factional liberal collaboration, yet they often criticized the Kadets and Octobrists, particularly when the Octobrists made common cause with the Right. In the Fourth Duma, the Progressists contributed to reform of volost΄ institutions and championed the principle of strict adherence to the law, but they also watched helplessly in May 1913 when the Duma committee fell apart. Their hands were further tied in January 1914, when the tsar appointed as Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin, an enemy of cooperation with representative institutions. The authors describe L΄vov as a leader of the Progressists from 1907 on, yet strangely his name does not often figure in this section of the book.
Chapters 6 and 7 discuss zemstvo liberalism during war and revolution. L΄vov headed the All-Russia Zemstvo Union and helped coordinate its activity with relief efforts by the Union of Towns. Unfortunately, the Union's effectiveness in treating wounded and sick soldiers elicited fear from the central government that L΄vov wanted the Union to displace it. Late in the war, L΄vov complained publicly about the “political struggle” being waged against the Union, but until 1917 he refused to break with the government.
In February/March 1917, when the regime lost its grip in Petersburg, L΄vov took two portfolios in the Provisional Government: its chairmanship and internal affairs. The authors praise L΄vov for supporting the extension of civil liberties in Russia in 1917 but fault him for abolishing the office of provincial governors—an action they consider the Provisional Government's “single biggest mistake” (214). The authors observe that the zemtsy had by 1917 expanded civil society to include the peasantry. Yet, they contend, L΄vov and the Progressists had too much faith in the peasants’ democratic sensibility. When the Provincial Government temporized in arranging elections to the Constituent Assembly, it drove the peasants in a revolutionary direction. The authors close by celebrating L΄vov's effort before July 1917 to unite Russian liberals in the first coalition government and by decrying Paul Miliukov's “petulant” opposition to that unity (229).
