Banquet Campaign in Russia

an opposition campaign of zemstvo (district assembly) liberals and bourgeois intelligentsia, organized in the fall of 1904 by the Union of Liberation. The country’s imminent revolutionary crisis and the tsarist government’s failure in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 increased oppositional ferment in liberal landowner and bourgeois circles. On the 40th anniversary of judicial reform, banquets were organized with official permission in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other large cities. At these banquets, representatives of the liberal opposition declared the need for introducing freedoms and a constitution and accepted resolutions petitioning for the carrying out of several political reforms to avert revolution. The Bolsheviks exposed the antirevolutionary character of the Banquet Campaign and the opportunistic tactics of the Mensheviks, who planned to make use of the Banquet Campaign.