THE ROAD NOT TAKEN:

In a contribution for RFE/RL's Russian Service titled Back To February, [ liberal politician and Yabloko party candidate for the 2018 presidential election Grigory Yavlinsky] Yavlinsky argues that, between the abdication of Russian Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, Russia took a "detour" into a 100-year "dead end."

Russia's historical path, Yavlinsky says, was disrupted by the October coup and the January 1918 dispersal of the Constituent Assembly that had been elected to determine the form of the country's future government.

"Since that time, Russia has not had a legitimate government," Yavlinsky writes.

The February Revolution came about, Yavlinsky argues, because the monarchy had rejected political modernization and because whole swaths of a dynamically changing society -- former serfs, the emerging bourgeoisie, the growing working class -- had no opportunities to influence political processes.

"The main reasons for the fall of the autocracy are well known -- the slow pace of reforms, the inability of the authorities to cope with change, the transformation of autocratic power into an obstacle to the modernization of the country and the government. Autocracy rejected political modernization and was hopelessly left behind by historical developments.... And with that, it lost its legitimacy. Does this sound familiar?"

Despite these crises and the pressure World War I, however, the country's leaders in the summer of 1917 found a potential way out. Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich. Michael, however, refused to take the throne without the consent of an elected Constituent Assembly.

Like most of the political elite at that time, Michael anticipated that the assembly would write a new constitution that would create either a constitutional monarchy or a republican form of government. Most importantly, Yavlinsky argues, the Constitutional Assembly would ensure the perpetuation of the government's legitimacy.

"The Constituent Assembly is the main signpost on the historical highway the country should have taken in February 1917," Yavlinsky writes.

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