Nationalists

a counterrevolutionary monarchist party of Russian landlords and government officials.

The Nationalist group was established in early 1908, when 20 members of the Third State Duma, mostly deputies from the southwestern provinces, left the common bloc of rightists and formed a separate group. On Oct. 25, 1909, the Nationalists merged with a splinter group from the Moderate Rightist Party, which had been formed on Apr. 19, 1909, to create the parliamentary group of the Russian Nationalists, consisting of about 100 deputies. A single party, the All-Russian Nationalist Union, was founded on Jan. 31, 1910. The chairman of the party and the parliamentary group was P. N. Balashov; among its other leaders were P. N. Krupenskii, V. A. Bobrinskii, M. O. Men’-shikov, and V. V. Shul’gin. The All-Russian Nationalist Club, which opened in February 1910, was affiliated with the Nationalists.

The Nationalists’ main tasks included defending the privileges of the nobility and the landlords’ property and instilling the masses with an ideology of militant nationalism under the slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Their program amounted to little more than extreme chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and the demand for the russification of other nationals’ regions in the Russian Empire. The Nationalists’ attempts to gain wide public support were unsuccessful; their activity was in fact confined to their group in the Duma. The Nationalists had 91 deputies in the Third State Duma and 119 in the Fourth. A group calling itself the Independent Nationalists, made up of 16 deputies in the Third State Duma, split with the Nationalists in April 1911; the Progressive Nationalists split with the Nationalists in early 1915. The latter joined the Progressive Bloc. The Nationalists dissolved after the bourgeois-democratic February Revolution of 1917.