Union of Liberation
Pyotr Struve selected the contributors, five of whom had previously contributed to a 1902 volume, "Problems of Idealism", and he had attended the 1903 Schaffhausen Conference that laid the foundation for the Union of Liberation. A founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party in 1905, Struve had served in the Second Duma in 1907, then went on to edit the journal "Russian Thought". In his essay, he argued that the intelligentsia owed its identity to standing apart from the government because it had coalesced in the 1840s under the impact of atheistic socialism. Thus, when the government agreed to restructure along constitutional lines in 1905, the intelligentsia proved incapable of acting constructively toward the masses, within the new framework.