The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  To the disappointment of the opposition, the Crown retained the power to appoint ministers. This provision intensely annoyed the liberals, who wanted a parliamentary cabinet made up of their own people: it would prove the most contentious issue in relations between the government and the opposition during the final decade of the monarchy. The liberals refused to compromise on this issue: the government’s willingness in 1915–16 quietly to adopt the American system of nominating ministers acceptable to the parliament met with no response from them. Nicholas, for his part, adamantly refused to grant the Duma the power to appoint ministers because he was certain that they would make a mess of things and then wash their hands of it by resigning.

  The Crown retained the right to declare war and make peace.

  Last, but not least, the Crown did not fulfill the promise of the October Manifesto to assure those elected by the nation of “an effective opportunity to supervise the legality of the actions” of the administration. Apart from the right of interpellation, which could be used to embarrass the administration but not to influence its policies, parliament had no control over the bureaucracy. Members of the bureaucratic establishment, the police included, remained for all practical purposes immune to legal prosecution. The administrative corps of Imperial Russia remained, as before, a body outside parliamentary supervision and above the law—a “meta-juridical” body, as it were.

  Two further provisions of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 call for comment: for although they were also to be found in other European constitutions, in Russia they would be particularly abused. As in Britain, the Duma had a normal term of five years, but it could be dissolved earlier at the monarch’s pleasure. The English Crown in modern times would not have dreamt of dissolving Parliament and calling for elections except on the advice of the leader of the parliamentary majority. In Russia, it was different: the First Duma lasted only 72 days and the Second 105 days, both sent home because the Crown was unhappy with their conduct. Only after June 1907, when it unilaterally and unconstitutionally altered the electoral law to ensure a more tractable Duma, did the Crown allow the lower chamber its normal five-year span.

  Even more pernicious was the government’s recourse to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, which authorized it to issue emergency laws when parliament was not in session. Under the terms of this article, such laws lapsed unless approved by parliament within sixty days of reconvening. The authorities made free use of this clause, not so much to deal with emergency situations as to bypass normal legislative procedures, either because they were considered too cumbersome or because parliament was unlikely to act favorably: occasionally, the Duma was deliberately prorogued to enable the government to legislate by decree. Such practices made a mockery of the legislative powers of parliament and undermined respect for the constitution.

  The existence of a legislature made it impractical to continue conducting ministerial business in the traditional manner. The Council of Ministers (Sovet Ministrov), previously a body without authority, was now made into a cabinet under a Chairman who was in fact, if not in name, a Prime Minister. In its new guise, it marked a departure from the patrimonial custom of having ministers report individually to the Tsar. Under the new arrangement, decisions taken by the Council were binding on all the ministers.*

  Whether one regards the Fundamental Laws of 1906 as a major advance in Russia’s political development or as a deceptive half measure, a “pseudo-constitution” (Scheinkonstitution) as Max Weber called it, depends on one’s criteria. Judged by standards of the advanced industrial democracies, the Russian constitution certainly left a great deal to be desired. But in terms of Russia’s own past, of five hundred years of autocracy, the 1906 charter marked a giant step toward a democratic order. For the first time the government allowed elected representatives of the nation to initiate and veto legislative measures, to scrutinize the budget, to criticize the monarchy and to interrogate its ministers. If the constitutional experiment ultimately failed to bring state and society into partnership, the fault lay not so much in the shortcomings of the constitution as in the unwillingness of Crown and parliament to accept the new arrangement and function responsibly within its provisions.

  Once the country had been given a parliament, it was virtually certain that its leadership would fall to the liberals. The 1905 Revolution, of which the October Manifesto had been the main fruit, had two distinct phases, the first successful, the second not. The first phase had been initiated and managed by the Union of Liberation, and reached its climax in the October Manifesto. The second phase, which began the day after the Manifesto had been issued, dissipated itself in brutal pogroms instigated by both the revolutionary and reactionary parties. It was ultimately crushed by the forces of order. As the organizers of the first, successful phase of the Revolution, the liberals were its main beneficiaries. They intended to exploit this advantage to push Russia into a full-fledged parliamentary democracy. The decision of the two principal socialist parties, the Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries, to boycott the Duma elections ensured their victory.

  The Constitutional-Democrats adopted an extremely aggressive parliamentary strategy for they saw in the socialists’ boycott a unique opportunity to capture the socialists’ constituency. They insisted on treating the new Fundamental Laws as illegitimate: only the sovereign nation, through its democratically elected representatives, had the right to draw up a constitution. The conservative liberal Vasilii Maklakov thought that the leadership of his party, spellbound by the vision of 1789, would settle for nothing less than a Constituent Assembly:

  I recall the indignation of the Congress [of the Kadet Party] over the promulgation of a constitution on the eve of the Duma’s convocation. What made it especially dangerous was the absence of pretense in this indignation. The liberals should have understood that if the Emperor had convened a national representative body without setting for it legal limits, he would have opened the gates to a

  revolution

  . They did understand this now and were not frightened by the prospect. On the contrary: they rebelled against the idea that the Duma must work within the

  framework

  of rights set forth by the

  Constitution

  . Which goes to prove that they did not take this Constitution seriously. According to them, the “national representation” was sovereign and had the right to demolish all the walls which the Constitution had erected around it. One saw the source of their mentality. Their spirits were fired by memories of the Great Revolution. The Duma appeared to them as the Estates-General. Like it, it had to turn into a National Assembly and give the country a true Constitution in place of one which the vigilant Monarchy had surreptitiously granted.

  19

  To the Kadets, the Duma was a battleground: with appeals to the “masses,” they meant to force the Crown to give up all power. Such doubts as sober-minded liberals may have entertained over the wisdom of a confrontational strategy were stilled by the spectacular victory which the Kadets won in the Duma elections. As the most radical party on the ballot, they attracted much of the vote that would have otherwise gone to the SRs and SDs: this created the illusion that they had become the principal national opposition party. With 179 out of 478 deputies, they emerged as the strongest group in the lower house: owing to the worker votes, they captured all the seats in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even so, they controlled only 37.4 percent of the seats; lacking an absolute majority, they needed allies. They could have sought them on the right, among conservative liberals. But determined to maintain a hold on the peasant and worker electorate, they turned leftward, to the agrarian socialists who had been elected as individual candidates and came to be collectively known as Laborites (Trudoviki).

  Drunk with success, believing themselves to be on the eve of a second, decisive Revolution, the Kadets went on the offensive. Under the leadership of Miliukov, they expressed a willingness to join the cabinet but on one condition: that the Tsar agree t
o convoke a Constituent Assembly. As has been noted, Witte’s negotiations with liberal conservatives (Shipov, Guchkov, and others) also had had no issue.20 The Crown would make several more attempts to bring liberals and liberal-conservatives into the cabinet, to be rebuffed each time. The stage was thus set for a parliamentary confrontation not over policies but over the very nature of Russia’s constitutional regime.

  The Crown approached the opening of the Duma with trepidation but without a program. What actually transpired when the Duma convened exceeded its worst fears.

  Nicholas had been assured by liberal bureaucrats that elections presented no threat to him because the provisions ensuring the preponderance of peasants would produce a cooperative Duma: it was the same mistake the French monarchy had committed in 1789 when it doubled the representation of the Third Estate in the Estates-General. Not all shared this optimism: Durnovo, the ex-Minister of the Interior and one of the most astute politicians in Russia, had cautioned that the majority of the deputies would be drawn from the radical rural “semi-intelligentsia,” who were eager to solidify their hold on the peasantry.21 Indeed, nearly one-half of the deputies to the First Duma were peasants, many of them of this type. And they turned out to be very different from the deferential muzhiki with whom the imagination of Slavophile conservatives populated Russia. Kryzhanovskii thus describes the revulsion that seized official circles at the sight of the hordes of peasant representatives who descended on St. Petersburg in the spring of 1906:

  It was enough to take a look at the motley mob of “deputies”—and it was my lot to spend among them entire days in the corridors and the garden of Taurida Palace—to experience horror at the sight of Russia’s first representative body. It was a gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to St. Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and malice. If one were to assume that these individuals really represented the people and its “innermost aspirations,” then one would have been forced to concede that Russia could survive for at least one more century only by the force of external constraint, not by that of inner cohesion, and that enlightened absolutism was for her the sole salutary form of government. The attempt to found the political system on the will of the people was obviously doomed to failure because in this mass any consciousness of statehood, let alone of shared statehood, was totally submerged in social hostility and class envy: more correctly, such consciousness was entirely lacking. It was equally futile to place one’s hope in the intelligentsia and its cultural influence. In the Duma the intelligentsia was relatively weakly represented and it clearly yielded to the seething energy of the dark masses. It believed in the power of good words, it upheld ideals that were entirely alien and unnecessary for the masses, and its only role was to serve as a springboard for the Revolution. It could not act creatively.…

  The attitude of the peasant Duma delegates toward their responsibilities was curious in the extreme. They brought with them petitioners on various matters: these they placed in the [deputies’] seats, from which Duma personnel had no little trouble evicting them. On one occasion, the police detained on a street adjacent to Taurida Palace two peasants who were selling entrance tickets to it: both turned out to be Duma deputies, of which fact the Chairman was duly apprised.

  Some deputies immediately began to carry on revolutionary propaganda in the factories, to organize street demonstrations, to incite the mobs against the police, and so on. During one such demonstration on Ligovka, the leader of a brawling mob, one Mikhailichenko, a deputy representing the miners of the Urals, was beaten up. He showed up the next day in the Duma and participated in the discussion of this incident with a face so heavily bandaged that only his nose and eyes were visible. Peasant deputies got drunk in taverns and engaged in brawls: when attempts were made to have them arrested, they claimed personal immunity. The police were at first very confused, uncertain what they could and could not do in such cases. In one such incident, the doubts were resolved by an old woman, the tavern owner, who, in response to a drunken deputy’s claim of inviolability, gave him a thrashing, shouting: “For me, you are quite violable, you SOB,” following which she threw him out.… There were grand ceremonies at the burial of one Duma deputy, whose name escapes me, who had died of delirium tremens: in one funeral speech he was referred to as a “fighter fallen on the field of honor.”

  Following their arrival [in St. Petersburg], some deputies were sentenced by

  volost’

  and other courts for petty theft and other swindles: one for having stolen a pig, another for purse snatching, etc. Altogether, according to information gathered by the Ministry of the Interior, the number of deputies in the First Duma, mainly peasants, who, owing to the careless makeup of the lists of voters and electors, turned out to have been convicted of pecuniary crimes that disqualified them from participating in the elections, either before they had entered the Duma or within one year after its dissolution, exceeded forty persons—that is, about 8 percent of the Duma’s membership.

  22

  On the opening day of the Duma, the Tsar received the deputies in a solemn session at the Winter Palace and delivered an address in which he promised to respect the new order. The Duma, on a Kadet motion, responded with a revolutionary challenge, approved by all but five deputies. It demanded the abolition of the upper chamber, the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, compulsory expropriations of certain landed properties, and amnesty for political prisoners, including those sentenced for terrorist crimes. When the Court, having gotten wind of the Duma’s response, refused to receive the Duma deputation sent to present it, the Duma passed with virtual unanimity a vote of no confidence in the cabinet coupled with a demand that it yield to a ministry chosen by itself.23

  This behavior threw the government, accustomed to conducting its affairs with utmost decorum, into disarray. The security services were especially alarmed, fearing the inflammatory effect of Duma rhetoric on the countryside. According to one police official, the very existence of a constitutional regime confused the peasants. Unable to figure out why the authorities allowed Duma deputies to demand changes in the system of government while punishing private persons for making similar demands, they concluded that the Duma’s “revolutionary propaganda was carried out with the approval and even encouragement of the government.”24 Given that the prestige of the government among the peasants had declined anyway from the loss of the war with Japan and its inability to suppress the Socialist-Revolutionary terror, the police had reason to fear losing control of the villages.

  In these circumstances, the Court decided on dissolution. As soon as they learned of this decision, the Kadets and other left-of-center deputies wanted to stage a sit-in, but they had to give up this plan because the government had the Duma surrounded by troops. The dissolution order may have violated the spirit of the Fundamental Laws but it was certainly legitimate. Nevertheless, the Kadets and some of their associates saw it as an opportunity to throw down the revolutionary gauntlet. Adjourning to nearby Vyborg, a Finnish city outside the reach of the Russian police, they issued an appeal to the citizens of Russia to refuse paying taxes and providing recruits. The protest was both unconstitutional and futile. The country ignored the Vyborg Manifesto, and its only consequence was to bar the signatories, among whom were many leading liberals, from running in future elections.

  Thus, the overconfident liberals lost the opening skirmish in the war they had declared on the constitutional monarchy.

  The October Manifesto had mollified the moderate, liberal-conservative opposition, but neither the liberal-radical nor the socialist politicians. The latter regarded it as merely a preliminary concession: the Revolution had to continue until total victory. Under the incitement of left-of-center intellectuals, the violence in the country went on unabated, evoking from the right a counterterror in the form of pogroms against students and Jews.

  The agrarian unrest of 1905–6 had two consequences. It ended, once and for
all, the peasantry’s traditional pro-monarchic sentiments. Henceforth, the muzhik no longer looked to the Tsar to give him the land he coveted, but to the Duma and the liberal and radical parties. Second, the peasants of central Russia succeeded in “smoking out” many landlords, who, frightened of the assaults on their properties, disposed of their estates and cleared out. These developments accelerated the liquidation of landlord agriculture which had begun with the Emancipation Edict and would be completed in 1917. After 1905, the peasantry was the largest purchaser (37–40 percent) of land that appeared on the market. Landlords, who in 1863–72 had bought 51.6 percent of the land, in 1906–9 accounted for only 15.2 percent of the purchasers.

  The peasant jacquerie was exacerbated by the Socialist-Revolutionary campaign of political terror.25 The world had never known anything like it: a wave of murder which soon gripped hundreds if not thousands of young men and women in a collective psychosis—murder as an end in itself, its ostensible objective having long been lost sight of. Although the declared targets were government officials, notably policemen, in practice the terror could be quite indiscriminate. As is usual, it shaded into ordinary criminality, some of its perpetrators extorting money and intimidating court witnesses. The majority of the terrorists were youths—two-thirds of them twenty-two or younger—for whom the daring, often suicidal operations turned into a kind of rite of passage into manhood. The most rabid element among the terrorists, the Maximalists, killed for the sake of killing, in order to speed the collapse of the social order. The effects of SR terror extended beyond the lives it extinguished and the repressive countermeasures it provoked. It lowered still further the already low level of political life in Russia, demoralizing those actively engaged in politics and making resort to violence a normal way of dealing with difficult problems.