A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  The First Two Dumas

  Whereas the Fundamental Laws introduced numerous restrictions on the position and powers of the Duma, the electoral law emphasized its representative character. The electoral system, despite its complexities and limitations, such as the grouping of the electorate on a social basis, indirect elections, especially in the case of the peasants, and a gross underrepresen-tation of urban inhabitants, allowed almost all Russian men to participate in the elections to the Duma, thus transforming overnight the empire of the tsars from a country with no popular representation to one which practiced virtually universal manhood suffrage. The relatively democratic nature of the electoral law resulted partly from Witte's decision in December 1905, at the time when the law received its final formulation, to make concessions to the popular mood. More significantly, it reflected the common assumption in government circles that the peasants, the simple Russian people, would vote for their tsar and for the Right. After a free election, the First Duma convened on May 10, 1906.

  Contrary to its sanguine expectations, the government had suffered a decisive electoral defeat. According to Walsh, the 497 members of the First Duma could be classified as follows: 45 deputies belonged to parties

  of the Right; 32 belonged to various national and religious groups, for example, the Poles and the Moslems; 184 were Cadets; 124 were representatives of different groups of the Left; and 112 had no party affiliation. The Cadets with 38 per cent of the deputies thus emerged as the strongest political party in the Duma, and they had the added advantage of an able and articulate leadership well-versed in parliamentary procedure. Those to the Left of the Cadets, on the other hand, lacked unity and organization and wanted mainly to fight against the regime, purely and simply. The cause of the Left in the First Duma had been injured by the fact that both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats had largely boycotted the election to the Duma. The deputies with no political affiliation were mostly peasants who refused to align themselves permanently with any of the political groupings, but belonged in a general sense to the opposition. The government received support only from the relatively few members of the unregenerate Right and also from the more moderate Octobrists. The Octobrists, as their name indicates, split from the Cadets over the October Manifesto, which they accepted as a proper basis for Russian constitutionalism, while the Cadets chose to consider it as the first step on the road to a more democratic system.

  Not surprisingly, the government and the Duma could not work together. The emperor and his ministers clearly intended the Duma to occupy a position subordinate to their own, and they further infuriated many deputies by openly favoring the extreme Right. The Duma, in its turn, also proved quite intractable. The Left wanted merely to oppose and obstruct. The Cadets, while much more moderate and constructive, seem to have overplayed their hand: they demanded a constituent assembly, they considered the First Duma to be, in a sense, the Estates-General of 1789, and they objected to the Fundamental Laws, thus in effect telling the government to abdicate. Similarly, while they insisted on a political amnesty, they refused to proclaim their opposition to terrorism, lest their associates to the Left be offended. But the most serious clash came over the issue of land: the Duma wanted to distribute to the peasants the state, imperial family, and Church lands, as well as the estates of landlords in excess of a certain maximum, compensating the landlords; the government proclaimed alienation of private land inadmissible, even with compensation. The imperial regime continued to the last to stand on the side of the landlords. After seventy-three days and forty essentially fruitless sessions, Nicholas II dissolved the First Duma.

  The dissolution had a strange sequel. Some two hundred Duma deputies, over half of them Cadets, met in the Finnish town of Viborg and signed a manifesto that denounced the government and called for passive resistance by the people. It urged them not to pay taxes or answer the draft call until the convocation of a new Duma. Although the Viborg Manifesto cited as

  its justification certain irregularities in the dissolution of the First Duma, in itself it constituted a rash and unconstitutional step. And it turned out to be a blunder as well, for the country failed to respond. The Viborg participants were sentenced to three months in jail. More important, they lost the right to stand for election to the Second Duma which was thus deprived of much of its potential leadership.

  In contrast to the first election, the government exerted all possible pressure to obtain favorable results in the election to the Second Duma, and it was assisted by the fact that much of Russia remained in a state of emergency. But the results again disappointed the emperor and his associates. Although - as one authoritative calculation has it - the Duma opposition, including mainly the Cadets and the Left, might have declined from 69 to 68 per cent of the total number of deputies, it also became more extreme. In fact, a polarization of political opinion, with both wings gaining at the expense of the center, constituted the most striking aspect of the election. More specifically, the Cadet representation declined from 184 to 99 deputies, while the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who this time participated fully in the election, gained respectively 64 and 20 seats. The entire Left membership in the Duma rose from 124 to 216 deputies. Significantly, the Duma personnel underwent a sweeping change, with only 31 members serving both in the First Duma and in the Second, a result not only of the penalties that followed the Viborg Manifesto, but also of a preference for more extreme candidates. Significantly too, the number of unaffiliated deputies declined by about 50 per cent in the Second Duma.

  The Second Duma met on March 5, 1907, and lasted for a little more than three months. It also found itself promptly in an impasse with the government. Moreover, its special opponent, the prime minister, was no longer the nonentity Ivan Goremykin - who had replaced the first constitutional prime minister, Witte, early in 1906 - but the able and determined Peter Stolypin. Before it could consider Stolypin's important land reform, he had the Second Duma dissolved on the sixteenth of June, using as a pretext its failure to comply immediately with his request to lift the immunity of fifty-five, and particularly of sixteen, Social Democratic deputies whom he wanted to arrest for treason.

  The Change in the Electoral Law and the Last Two Dumas

  On the same day, June 16, 1907, Nicholas II and his minister arbitrarily and unconstitutionally changed the electoral law. The tsar mentioned as justification his historic power, his right to abrogate what he had granted, and his intention to answer for the destinies of the Russian state only before the altar of God who had given him his authority! The electoral change

  was, of course, meant to create a Duma that would co-operate with the government. The peasant representation was cut by more than half and that of the workers was also drastically cut, whereas the gentry gained representation quite out of proportion to its number. Also, Poland, the Caucasus, and some other border areas lost deputies; and the representation of Central Asia was entirely eliminated on the ground of backwardness. At the same time the election procedure became more indirect and more involved, following in part the Prussian model. In addition, the minister of the interior received the right to manipulate electoral districts. It has been calculated that the electoral change of June 1907 produced the following results: the vote of a landlord counted roughly as much as the votes of four members of the upper bourgeoisie, or of sixty-five average middle-class people, or of 260 peasants, or of 540 workers. To put it differently, 200,000 members of the landed gentry were assured of 50 per cent of the seats in the Duma.

  The electoral change finally provided the government with a co-operative Duma. And indeed, by contrast with the first two Dumas which lasted but a few months each, the Third Duma served its full legal term of five years, from 1907 to 1912, while the Fourth also continued for five years, from 1912 until the revolution of March 1917, which struck just before the Fourth Duma was to end. In the Third Duma the government had the support of some 310 out of the total of 442 deputies: abo
ut 160 representatives of the Right and about 150 Octobrists. The opposition, reduced to 120 seats, encompassed 54 Cadets, smaller numbers of other moderates, and only 33 deputies of the former Left. The Socialist Revolutionaries, it might be noted, boycotted the Third and Fourth Dumas. To indicate another aspect of the change, it has been calculated that whereas non-Great Russians had composed almost half of the membership of the First Duma, in the Third there were 377 Great Russians and 36 representatives of all the other nationalities of the empire.

  In the election of 1912 the government made a determined effort to obtain a Right majority that would eliminate its dependence on the Octobrist vote, but it could not quite accomplish its purpose. The Fourth Duma contained approximately 185 representatives of the Right, 98 Octobrists, and 150 deputies to the left of the Octobrists. Because of their crucial central position, the Octobrists continued to play a major role in the Duma, although their number had been drastically diminished. For the rest, the gain of the Right found a certain counterbalance in the gain of the Left.

  The Octobrists, who had replaced the Cadets after the electoral change of June 1907 as the most prominent party in the Duma, represented both the less conservative country gentry and business circles. While their Left wing touched the Cadets, Right Octobrists stood close to the old-fashioned

  Right. The party enjoyed the advantages of skillful leadership, in particular the leadership of Alexander Guchkov, and operated well in a parliament. The Octobrist deputies, it might be noted, were the wealthiest group in the last two Dumas. The Cadets, who became the loudest voice of the Duma opposition, were, above all, the party of professional people, although their influence extended to large layers of the middle class, especially perhaps of the upper middle class, as well as to some landlords and other groups. The Right, which consisted of more than one party, defended to the limit the interests of the landlords, although it also made demagogic efforts to obtain broader support and paraded some priests and peasants in the Dumas. Bitter dissatisfaction, widespread among the Russian masses, found a modicum of expression in the Duma Left.

  Stolypin's Policy

  With the Duma under control, the government could develop its own legislative program. The architect of the program, Stolypin, has been described as the last truly effective and important minister of imperial Russia. Stolypin's aim consisted of "pacification" and reform. "Pacification" meant an all-out struggle against the revolutionaries, for, although the mass opposition movements characteristic of 1905 no longer threatened the regime, terrorism continued on a large scale. Practiced especially by the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries and by the Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists who had split from the main party, terrorism caused some 1,400 deaths in 1906 and as many as 3,000 in 1907. The victims included police officers and agents, various officials, high and low, and numerous innocent bystanders. In August 1906, for example, the Maximalists blew up Stolypin's suburban residence, killing 32 persons and wounding many others, including the prime minister's son and daughter, but not the prime minister himself.

  Stolypin acted with directness and severity. By the end of 1906, 82 areas in the Russian Empire had been placed under different categories of special regulations; also, the publication of 206 newspapers had been stopped, and over 200 editors had been brought to court. Moreover, Stolypin introduced summary courts-martial, consisting of officers without juridical training, which tried those accused of terrorism and rebellion. The trials and the execution of sentences were carried out within a matter of some two days or even a few hours. Although the special courts-martial lasted only several months - because Stolypin never submitted the law creating them to the Duma and it expired two months after the Second Duma had met - they led to the execution of well over a thousand persons. "Stolypin's necktie" - the noose - became proverbial in Russia. The policy of "pacification"

  succeeded on the whole. The Maximalists and many other terrorists were killed or executed, while numerous revolutionaries escaped abroad. A relative quiet settled upon the country.

  It should be added that Stolypin continued to sponsor police infiltration of the revolutionary movement and an extremely complex system of agents and informers. Such police practices led, among other things, to the emergence of remarkable double agents, the most notorious of whom, the unbelievable Evno Azeff, successfully combined the roles of the chief informer on the Socialist Revolutionaries and of leader of their Battle Organization. In the latter capacity he arranged the assassination of Plehve and other daring acts of terrorism.

  Stolypin intended his "pacification" to constitute a prelude to important changes, especially to a fundamental agrarian reform. That reform, introduced by an imperial legislative order in the autumn of 1906, approved by the Third Duma in the summer of 1910, and developed by further legislative enactments in 1911, aimed at a break-up of the peasant commune and the establishment of a class of strong, independent, individual farmers - Stolypin's so-called wager on the strong and the sober. The emergence of a large group of prosperous and satisfied peasants would, presumably, transform the Russian countryside from a morass of misery and a hotbed of unrest into a conservative bulwark of the regime.

  The new legislation divided all peasant communes into two groups: those that did not and those that did engage in land redistribution. In the first type all peasants simply received their landholdings in personal ownership. In the communes with periodic redistribution every householder could at any time request that the land to which he was entitled by redistribution be granted to him in personal ownership. He could also press the commune to give him the land not in scattered strips, but in a single location; the commune had in effect to comply with this request if separation occurred at the time of a general communal redistribution of land, and it had to meet the request "in so far as possible" at other times. Similarly, the commune had to divide its land into consolidated individual plots if requested to do so by not less than one-fifth of the total number of householders. Moreover, separated peasants invariably retained rights to common lands, meadows, forests, and the like. Indeed a partitioning even of pastures and grazing lands was permitted in 1911. Finally, the commune could be entirely abolished: by a majority vote in the case of nonrepartitional communes, and by a two-thirds vote in the case of those that engaged in a redistribution of land. It is significant that the reform made the household elder the sole owner of the land of the household, replacing the former joint family ownership which remained only in the case of households containing members other than the elder's lineal descendants.

  Stolypin's major agrarian reform - the impact of which on Russian economy and society will be discussed in a later chapter - received support from a number of related government policies and measures. Notably, the Peasant Land Bank became much more active in helping peasants to buy land, while considerable holdings of the state and the imperial family were put up for sale to them. Also, reversing its earlier attitude, the government began finally to encourage and help peasant migration to new lands in Siberia and elsewhere in the empire. Stolypin's reform, it should be added, made peasants more equal legally to other classes, not only by reducing the power of the commune, but also by limiting that of land captains, and by exempting peasants from some special restrictions. In a different field of action, the ministers and the Dumas worked together to develop education, which made important advances during the last years of the imperial regime. In fact a law of 1908 foresaw schooling for all Russian children by 1922. The government also broadened labor legislation, worked to strengthen the army and national defense, and engaged in a variety of other useful activities.

  However, all this fell short of fundamental reform. Only Stolypin's controversial agrarian legislation attempted a sweeping change in the condition of the Russian people, and even that legislation had perhaps too narrow a scope, for Stolypin was determined not to confiscate any gentry land, even with recompense. Moreover, progressive measures remained intertwined with reaction. Thus constituti
onal Russia witnessed a terrorism of the Right - for example the assassinations in 1906 and 1907 of two Cadet deputies to the First Duma - as well as a terrorism of the Left, and the terrorism of the Right usually went unpunished. Stolypin, himself from the Western borderlands, acted as a nationalist and a Russificator, for one thing reviving the ill-fated policy of trying to Russify Finland. Besides, the government lacked stability. The prime minister, who was after all something of a constitutionalist, antagonized much of the Right in addition to the Left. He managed to have one important piece of legislation enacted only by having the emperor prorogue the legislature for three days and suspend two leading members of the State Council; his high-handed tactics made the Octobrist leader Guchkov resign as chairman of the Third Duma. On September 14, 1911, Stolypin was fatally shot by a police agent associated with a revolutionary group. Stolypin's successor, Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, possessed intelligence and ability, but not his predecessor's determination or influence within the government. After a little more than two years he was replaced by the weak and increasingly senile Goremykin, who thus became prime minister for the second time. Goremykin assumed the leadership of the government in early 1914; in a matter of a few months he and Russia had to face the devastating reality of the First World War.