The State Duma and the State Council of the Russian Empire: An Institutional and Functional Analysis

The article presents the author’s position regarding the relationship, powers, and interactions between the State Duma and the State Council, as well as the impact of the identified facts on the political trends of Russian society. It examines the primary projects, concepts, and principles guiding the operations of the State Duma and the State Council, including their historical development and key political-legal trends. In the first part of the article, a terminological, historical, and legal overview of the studied institutions of state power is provided. The second part analyzes the origins of the Russian parliamentary system that had developed by the end of the Russian Empire. The third part synthesizes the findings of the study, establishing and analyzing the influence of the political and social processes within the Russian Parliament on the political evolution of Russian society, as well as other national societies that con stituted a part of the Russian Empire. The work conducted on primary sources, along side an institutional-functional analysis of information regarding the aforementioned state institutions, leads to the conclusion that the political and legal formalization of the positions of the State Duma and the State Council was characterized by a complex and multifaceted historical nature. The article includes facts examined in Russian historiography and analyzes the underexplored aspects of political trends in western, ethnically non-Russian territories of the Russian Empire — primarily in Poland and Finland — substantiated by research conducted by foreign scholars.