What a festival for the daring liberals! What joy to stand before a long white table, just a little drunk, speak against authority with nothing to fear, and propose a toast to the valiant revolutionaries who had brought such freedom to Russia!
From the throne it looked as if this was what the zemstvo men really wanted, as if they were only pretending to want agreement. Give way to this clamor now, and all would be lost. (And that was no more than the truth.)
So, on 25 December, Nikolai II canceled the clause about a national representation, whether consultative, legislative, or of whatever kind. The rest of the Zemstvo Congress’s program was, in essentials, accepted, but this was no longer good enough for the educated public, particularly as large gatherings were condemned and discussion of matters of state was forbidden. Svyatopolk-Mirsky thereupon resigned.
The point of light had become red-hot, exploded, and left darkness behind it.
Events gathered speed. On 22 January 1905 a workers demonstration was fired on in Petersburg. On 18 February the governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, was assassinated. And immediately the Russian monarch’s ideas and his language changed. Whereas on 25 December
zemstvos and municipal institutions and associations are under obligation not to concern themselves with matters which they are not empowered by law to discuss,
suddenly, in a decree of 3 March:
In Our tireless concern for the improvement of the state services … We have recognized that it would be good to make it easier for Our loyal subjects to be heard by Us. The Council of Ministers will discuss views and proposals submitted by private persons and by institutions.
What incurred punishment on 25 December 1904 was gratefully received on 3 March 1905. Preparations for the establishment of a State Duma were set in motion. The force which recognized only force was retreating.
The League of Liberation, which was “more fully” representative of Russia than the retrograde zemstvo men, poured in through the opening—and swept the great gates away! The League had no discipline, no organization, but its ideas were immediately taken up by a sympathetic intelligentsia—and that was its great strength. Its instructions initiated the creation of unions in Russia—to begin with, only for the “intellectual” professions (i.e., lawyers, writers, actors, academics, teachers), not to defend their professional interests but to put forward identical hackneyed proposals for universal franchise, a Constituent Assembly, and a constitution. The fashion spread to any and every group which could find a name for itself—there was a veterinary union, a peasants’ union, an equal rights for Jews union. They all submitted the very same proposals, and soon merged in a Union of Unions, which embodied “the will of the people” (Milyukov). What else? (Unless it was what Trotsky called it: “the zemstvo bridle, thrown by the Liberationists over the democratic intelligentsia”?) The main object was to overheat the social atmosphere! In the League of Liberation itself, zemstvo members had long ceased to be equal partners with non-zemstvo members: flooded with ever greater numbers of left-wing intellectuals, it bulged even farther to the left. In April 1905 another conference of zemstvos was held—still under Liberationist influence, with banquets and resolutions “superb in its radicalism, establishing a new political record” (Milyukov).
Shipov’s slow-moving group left the conference, swept off the highroad of history.
An amazing time, a delicious time had arrived for the thinkers among the Russian intelligentsia! An informal circle consisting of gray-headed jurists such as Muromtsev and Kovalevsky, together with certain learned youngsters, was in session while the big guns boomed at Tsushima, working out the future Russian constitution (and giving preference to direct elections, so that deputies would not be so close to local realities, would feel less of an obligation to their electors, and would be not rustics but detached persons of high culture). Contributions for the future party of the intelligentsia were already being collected from rich ladies and munificent businessmen. In the best town houses the rich and free, dressed to the nines, listened with bated breath to the bold words of the latest fashionable lecturers, among them the semi-legendary, ever so revolutionary Milyukov, whose academic career had been cut short ten years earlier by his prophecy of a Russian constitution. Since then he had suffered cruel persecution. For a lecture to students purporting to show that terrorism was inevitable, his residence rights were restricted: he could come into Petersburg for the day, but lived out at Udelnaya. He was banished to distant Ryazan. But most of the time he traveled abroad, lecturing in England and America on Russia’s inveterate vices and pseudonymously storming in the journal Liberation. He saw and read a great deal of things foreign, had contacts with socialists (and even with Lenin), and (in history the right man always turns up in the right place at the right age) behold the forty-year-old Milyukov descending on Russia before the new party is founded, to become its leader, as guest lecturer in Moscow putting forward the seductive idea of reconciling constitutionalism with revolution, liberals with revolutionaries, and if Guchkov, his friend from university days, accuses him of bookishness, rootlessness, remoteness from Russian reality, Milyukov can note with justification that
the general feeling was, of course, on my side.
Invoke revolution, welcome its approach, hurry it on with all the powers of the intelligentsia—this situation, this simulation of revolution (it is not here yet, but behave as though it has already begun and has set us free!) was more and more to the liking of progressive Russian society. The Union of Unions, in congress sometimes as often as twice a month, called on its members throughout the country not to ask for freedom but to take it—get to work, make excuses for demonstrations, for political struggle, organize conferences, rallies, street meetings. Milyukov found himself in the chair at one such congress, and
the hope that we would be heard has been taken from us. All means are legitimate against the present government! We appeal to all among our people capable of responding to a brutal blow—strive with all your strength for the immediate removal of the usurping robber gang and put the Constituent Assembly in their place.
The shrewd Milyukov knew what he was doing when he penned the words “robber gang": they helped him to repair and reinforce his reputation with the left when people had begun to accuse him of trying to make peace with the right—a stigma it was impossible to live with at such a time. It was the words “robber gang,” he believed, that drew the boundary between him and Guchkov, between bold Kadetism and collaborationist Octobrism. Milyukov was becoming more and more convinced that making today’s history was more laudable, more interesting, and no whit more difficult than studying that of the past.
The simulacrum of revolution was looking more and more like the real thing. At the beginning of July another conference of zemstvos and towns, this time minus Shipov’s minority, gathered in the huge palace of the Dolgorukov princes on Znamensky Lane, Moscow. The police arrived to break up the unauthorized congress, but were turned away, because those assembled were only “carrying out the Tsar’s wish,” expressed on 3 March,
to make it easier for Our loyal subjects to be heard by Us.
They resolved to
enter into the closest association with the popular masses in order to discuss the impending political reform with the people.
What they had in mind was simply one more fait accompli—a Constituent Assembly. These constitutionalists planned to exploit the agrarian and labor problems in particular to inflame the passions of the masses. Socialists of all hues were busy among the masses in those same weeks trying to “unleash” revolution, and SR terror squads were murdering village constables, police officers, and even governors, in country places and in provincial capitals, while the increasingly politicized masses responded by striking, and setting fire to manor houses in what Gertsenshtein laughingly called the “rural illuminations.” Everything then was moving in the direction of a Constituent Assembly. Some constitutionalists, however, those who had a nice
and not at all burdensome bit of property, of modest or even immodest dimensions, showed signs of fear and backsliding, and Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, unshakable in his principles, had to rebuke them sharply:
If members of our group are so squeamish about physical methods of struggle, I am afraid that our plans for a party will prove barren. No doubt you all rejoice in your hearts at certain acts of physical violence which everyone expected in advance, and the historical significance of which is enormous.
The gathering, duly shamed, adopted the necessary resolutions and disseminated them throughout Russia.
Just half a year earlier a stubborn government had refused to satisfy the smallest demands—and now even big concessions could not blunt society’s appetite. In July the Tsar held a secret conference of his senior retainers to draft a scheme for a Duma. (Also admitted to this conference was Klyuchevsky. Milyukov coyly tells us that
they revealed all their confidential plans to Klyuchevsky, and Vasili Osipovich, with something of his characteristic craftiness
relayed them nightly to his former pupil, in a Petersburg hotel.) On 19 August another manifesto was promulgated, this time on the establishment of a consultative Duma. If it had appeared in Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s time, it might have sufficed. But now the government was showing weakness, not strength. Moving toward reform, not because it had any fixed good intentions, but under threat, the government showed, in every word it said, every step it took, that it did not understand the situation in the country and the mood of society, and had no remedy for them. All the moderate elements calmed down and drew back, but the enraged kept up their mass meetings and flooded the pages of the press. The proposed Duma was rejected not only by the Bolsheviks, even Milyukov’s group wavered (for some reason keeping a wary eye on Trotsky), but the whole lot of them were put in the Kresty prison for a month, the government acting ridiculously, as always, governing as badly as it could, and letting them out a month later without once interrogating them, just giving them a halo. Russia’s rulers had entered the circle of hopelessness in which God takes away reason. In that same fraught August the government gave way and granted autonomy to higher educational institutions—which only meant creating islands of revolution inaccessible to the police: the students raged unchecked in mass meetings, and all sorts of people flocked in to listen and use bad language. Who now needed a consultative Duma? The General Zemstvo Congress in September decided not to boycott it (it was they, after all, who would be elected to it), but to blow it up from inside. After the withdrawal of Shipov’s minority, a newly formed group around Guchkov argued unavailingly with the intellectual theorists of the League of Liberation. The League itself was awash with Social Democrats, and even hid, in private apartments, members of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies wanted by the police.
And so the Constitutional Democratic Party took shape—the Kadet Party, as people soon began calling them with the sort of familiar abbreviation usual among revolutionaries. (The Kadets accepted this nickname. It came to be confused with the term for trainees in military schools, innocently at first, maliciously later on, and when the young men in question found themselves defending those same intellectuals as they fled from the same revolution, the whole bunch of them were doomed and all “Kadets” together.) True, the new party quickly realized that the combination of the letters “K” and “D” meant very little to the ordinary Russian, and they casually changed their name to Party of People’s Freedom: it had a fine ring, and sought to identify them with the people at large. But the new banner would flutter in vain: all tongues trotted out the extra word “Kadets.” Still, the substitution was not just a gimmick: the Kadet leaders genuinely believed that the whole huge nation expressed itself through their minds and mouths, after letting slip in speeches the claim to be spokesmen for the people’s aspirations, which they knew so well.
The founding congress of the party met in Moscow. (In Milyukov’s comic juxtaposition: “Russia’s first capital is the birthplace of Kadetism.”) The general strike was on the way, and the railwaymen’s strike was spreading, so that three-quarters of the delegates could not in fact get there. Illegal, underground parties had existed for many years in Russia (and had come to the surface in the heat wave of 1905), but this was the first party that was legal from birth. Its program showed the leftward dislocation of the neck obligatory for radicals the world over: its slogans, and its coloring, often expressed not the considered view of the party but the need to preserve nourishing ties with the left. The newly ascendant leader, Milyukov, proudly emphasized that they were the youngest of European liberals, and that their program was
farther left than any of those put forward by comparable political groups in Western Europe.
Sharply dissociating himself from all to the right, on the grounds that they were moved by class interests, Milyukov, with the unanimous agreement of the congress, appealed to the potential allies on the left. Indeed, the new party was itself so far to the left that
the founding congress declares its complete solidarity with the political strike movement. Members of the KD Party have decisively abandoned all thought of seeking to attain their aims through negotiation with representatives of the government.
Before the congress ended, a member of the staff of the “professors’ newspaper,” Russkie Vedomosti, dashed in, faint with delight and flourishing a still-wet galley containing the Manifesto of 30 October.
What joy! What a victory! But should they believe it? Or shouldn’t they? Was it a trick? A delaying tactic? Had the enemy lost heart? The delegates flocked to a banquet on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, heaved Milyukov onto a table in the gaming room, and called for a speech. He had already sized up the situation and now proclaimed:
Nothing has changed! The war goes on!
Russia must be led further down the road which had brought her to the Manifesto:
… by combining liberal tactics with the threat of revolution. We fully understand and recognize the supreme right of the Revolution.
It became fashionable to quote a line from Virgil: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. (If I cannot bend the Olympians, I will call up the river of Hell.)
And why not, if revolution was an ally you could use against the government, to frighten it out of its wits? How could you do otherwise if in those first days of the constitution a placard calling for armed uprising hung in the Conservatoire and money was collected from individuals beneath it? If talks on the relative merits of the Browning and the Mauser were given openly? When you had been beating your heads in vain against an unyielding, mindlessly obtuse bureaucracy for so many years, how could you resist the urge to soar on the red wings of revolution in the heat of debate? If stony-faced idiots would not be taught, how could you muster up patience for endless wearisome persuasion? How could you resist the urge to whack them on the skull with a big stick?
As soon as the Manifesto appeared, Witte invited the Kadets to join the cabinet he was in the process of forming. A road had opened for the party, so recently founded, to enter the government, to join responsibly in seeking and patiently erecting a new state structure. What more could they dream of? Was not this what they had striven for—a chance to take over power and show how to rule? But the Kadets were as nervous as they were loud and they made it clear right at the start that they were not prepared to move on from speeches about the demolition of government to the actual work of governing. How much more respectable, how much less constricting to be a critical opposition! (We shall see many of them behaving in just the same way twelve years later: helplessly rejecting power at a moment of acute political crisis.) Their delegation to Witte, headed by the young ideologist and orator Kokoshkin, adopted a provocative tone right from the start. Demanding the creation not of an effective government but of a Constituent Assembly, and an amnesty for terrorists, he would have left the existing government no authority, and indeed no raison d’être. What, otherwise, would have been said to the left of them! If the Kadets had cooperate
d even minimally with Witte, how could they claim to differ from the right?
Alas, they still did not succeed in pleasing the left. No sooner was the Kadet Party founded than the Moscow Liberationists started leaving it, and those in Petersburg, who had not gotten to the congress in time, did not join, either then or later. The League of Liberation slewed leftward, almost following in the wake of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. The Social Democrats saw in even the most negative negotiations with Witte
a shameful step, a deal between the bourgeoisie and the government at the people’s expense,
and ambition to latch on to ministerial posts.
D. N. Shipov, on the contrary, explained the behavior of the Kadets as follows:
This party united in its ranks the best intellects of the country, the flower of the intelligentsia. But the political struggle was for them an end in itself. They were unwilling to wait until the nation’s life was put in order, as different areas of it were discussed by trained and knowledgeable experts; they wanted to involve the whole people, even the unenlightened, in the hottest political struggle as quickly as possible. They called impatiently for elections on a universal franchise in an atmosphere as turbulent as it could be. They refused to understand that the rule of law, the problems of government, and indeed the idea of the state are foreign to the mass of the people, in spite of which they hastened to incite and aggravate discontent, to awaken egoistic interests among the people, to inflame its baser instincts, while ignoring its religious feelings.
November 1916 Page 14