The collapse of the Russian Empire is largely predetermined by internal crisis facts, burdened by the emerging external problems. Among the internal factors most often called the revolutionary situation, when the lower classes do not want to live the old way, and the tops cannot manage as before. It is precisely because the tops cannot "manage and manage as before" that the process of the split of the elites is witnessing. The political polemics of the pre-revolutionary years were about the quality of Russian power and the historical mission of the Russian intelligentsia. The intellectual elite itself was split into several irreconcilable ideological and political camps. As a result, the very assessment of the quality of power also has a very wide range of opinions, which significantly complicates the work of modern research on the freedom of general and private opinions. It was the inability to come to inner agreement and ruined the authoritarian and liberal elite communities of imperial Russia, opening the way to power to authoritarian-totalitarian revolutionary elites.
