The Vossische Zeitung (4 October 1905, Morning Edition) publishes a letter from a participant of the Zemstvo Congress. Concerning the outward appearance of the congress: "everything so parliamentary"... "ripe for the Duma"...

* Two possibilities: (1) The State Duma only grumbles. (2) The State Duma fights for a bourgeois government. (Tertium non datur [no third option]. The State Duma cannot consistently fight for revolution). In both cases (1) and (2), insurrection decides. Case (2) — a convenient pretext, nothing more. The danger of the Petrunkeviches et Cie. in power.

"On this point, the question of the boycott, I had expected a livelier discussion. It is dismissed rather briefly; the delegates had evidently already reached agreement beforehand"... Perhaps there would have been no debate at all if de Roberti had not spoken against the boycott. "There is unanimity in public; among the people there is not such unanimity"... "Son of the Fatherland" polemic with "Our Life" etc.

"It is not my intention to go into the controversy in detail here; I also wish to leave undecided for the time being whether the zemstvo and city delegates have not shifted somewhat more to the right in recent months than would be desirable: one will have to discuss these matters frequently. In any case, however, it would have been more correct to discuss the boycott question at the congress in somewhat greater detail: I fear that weapons have been placed in the hands of the more radical groups against those — let us call them — moderate constitutionalists."