Party for Democratic Reforms

in Russia, a bourgeois liberal party.

The Party for Democratic Reforms was founded in January 1906 by a group of Constitutional Democrats who considered their own party program too “leftist.” In March 1906 it united with a party of moderate progressives and became known also as the Union of National Prosperity. Its program, published on Jan. 18, 1906, favored the “peaceful renovation of Russia” under a “hereditary constitutional monarchy.” It called for the unity of Russia, with autonomy only for Poland and Finland, and for the preservation of “small-scale and large-scale landowning,” with compensation for the alienation of holdings above the maximum limit. The party was very small, having four deputies at the First State Duma and only one at the Second. Its leaders were M. M. Kovalevskii, M. M. Stasiulevich, I. I. Ivaniukov, V. D. Kuz’min-Karavaev, and K. K. Arsen’ev. Its press organs were the newspaper Strana and the journal Vestnik Evropy. At the end of 1907 the Party for Democratic Reforms merged with the Mirnoobnovlentsy (Party of Peaceful Renovation).