Beseda

'debate') was a clandestine discussion circle consisting of liberal "zemstvo men", among them prominent and grand names of the Russian aristocracy.

[1] The intelligentsia discussion group was formed in the wake of resumed persecution of the zemstvos after increased liberties during the Russian famine of 1891–92.

Founders of the circle were Dmitry Shakhovskoy, Pavel Dolgorukov, and Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy.

[1] In the following two years, the Beseda would become the "leading force of the Russian constitutionalists movement", with a wide spectrum of public men, from industrial magnates and slavophiles to civic leaders, supporting it, and its calls for reform.

The resumed persecution in 1900 had also banned Dmitry Shipov's Moscow Provincial Zemstvo Council, formed 1896 and closed shortly after, which drove him, "a reluctant revolutionary", into the circles of the radical constitutionalists.