Abstract

During the crucial years between 1904 and 1907, the Russian political forces, intelligencija and public opinion had to cope with the dramatic emergence of several national questions within the territories of the Tsarist Empire. Focusing on the Western peripheries, the essay highlights the role played by the defeat of the Tsarist Empire in the Russo-Japanese war and by the challenge of the national movements both in pro¬moting a revival of Russian nationalism and in inducing constitutionalists belonging to the Union of Liberation to address the issue of imperial reform. The essay further analyzes the attitude of the first two Dumas towards the Polish and the Ukrainian issues, following an interpretative line which stresses the links between the development of nationalism and the formation of representative institutions, regarding the trend towards political modernization as a precondition for the mobilization of ethnicity during the first world war.