Abstract

The article covers the history of K.F. Golovin's salon, which was held from the second half of the 1880s until the death of its host in 1913. The salon occupied a prominent place among other similar informal gatherings (V.P. Meshchersky's, E.V. Bogdanovich's salons) which influenced the formation of the contemporaneous government policy. Grown out of the “Ellipsis”, an informal circle of economists discussing the agrarian and economic problems of Russia, the salon gradually expanded the range of topics to include questions of the political structure of the empire. The article shows the importance of the salon as an unofficial politicized institution prior to the First Russian Revolution, when its activities to some extent compensated the lack of political freedoms. K.F. Golovin's Wednesday coterie was attended both by public figures of the right wing and middle-ranking officials. In some cases, certain agricultural policy measures (V.I. Kovalevsky, the Commission on the Impoverishment of the Central Provinces), which were later implemented, were tested there. K.F. Golovin's salon played a prominent role in the discussion of the drafts aiming to change the political system in 1905, especially concerning the establishment of the State Duma, and namely, the question of the form of popular representation and the electoral law (a mixed electoral college, the forming of the workers' curia, etc.). In parallel K.F. Golovin and the regular visitors of his “Wednesdays” took an active part in the attempts to unite the moderate-right and create a political party on this basis. These attempts continued to be made until 1912, but ended in failure. The history of the salon also shows the importance which unofficial right-wing thought had, first and foremost, for the authorities: public figures often offered better recipes for solving complex problems, while the ban on political activity created a deficit of government support from loyalist citizens, a deficit which could not be covered by the activity of the bureaucratic apparatus. The Wednesday salons were part of those complex mechanisms which tied the promonarchist public and the authorities. However, by the early 20th century they had clearly become insufficient.