Can it really be said that Guchkov did not remain true to the original program of the Union of 30 October? The lifetime of the Third Duma presented, as he saw it,
a picture of Russian life as it has not been since the 1860s: the regime and society, which had always been irreconcilable enemies, now drew closer. The main role in this act of reconciliation was played by Stolypin, with his quite exceptional combination of qualities. It was only thanks to his fascinating personality, and to the noble qualities of his intellect and character, that an atmosphere of goodwill and trust on the part of society gradually formed around the regime, in place of the hatred and suspicion that had been there before. The Third Duma’s levelheadedness and moderation had a profound educational effect on Russian society. An unprecedentedly favorable situation was created, holding the promise of renewal in all areas of our life.
Ah, but the old stick-in-the-muds who had grown moldy in office were not going to crawl out of the nation’s way so quickly. By the spring of 1909, as soon as the rumblings of revolution had died down, these phantoms, these monsters, rallied round the throne—to help get rid of Stolypin. Plans for his retirement were in hand when Guchkov said, in a press interview, that
the constitution is under threat from rightist groups, emeritus bureaucrats out of office under the new system, the right wing of the State Council. While Stolypin was waging war on revolution, the right could live in peace. But once the age of reform set in, the rightists realized that their triumphs were nearing an end. As the revolution subsided, forgetful people who had hypocritically tolerated the Manifesto as a thoughtless concession now raised their heads. Those who had brought Russia to unprecedented humiliation, and who somehow vanished when the deadly debt was to be paid—these people are now creeping out of their old manure piles and taking over important positions.
Furthermore:
Stolypin forgives no one for theft, bribe taking, or greed. In such cases he is merciless. When the menacing round of senatorial inspections began, the dark kingdom of bribe takers and peculators was in turmoil. Ripples of fear for their existence disturbed those marsh dwellers.
(Stolypin nonetheless outlasted that spring. The Emperor was not yet too sick of him, and apparently did not yet feel dangerously overshadowed.)
The special feature of the center was that Guchkov could just as forcefully impugn the left.
If in the past there could be any illusion about the moral significance and political effectiveness of terrorism, if in the past in certain social circles terrorism was surrounded with an atmosphere of sympathy, and even empathy, the puddles of blood and mud have by now deprived terrorism of that aureole. And our state and social system has proved stout enough to withstand the mindless onslaught of mindless people. Who can deny that terrorism has degenerated into savage, mindless malice? The last few years, marked by the activity of the Liberation movement, have made their modest contribution to the growth of hooliganism. Just remember how the revolutionary movement began in Russia. With the Decembrists. And where it ended. (Cries from the left: “It hasn’t ended yet!”) Terrorism pitilessly destroys not only those who are its real and dangerous foes, it kills blindly, randomly, anybody and everybody. Earlier it may have been possible to suppose that a modicum of self-sacrifice and heroism was to be found in the ranks of revolution, but heroism has long ago migrated to the opposite camp. We have to acknowledge that the policemen, the soldiers, the generals, governors, and ministers who have bravely remained at their posts year after year after year, exposing themselves and their families to danger from one minute to the next—they are the true heroes! (Applause in the center and on the right.)
Guchkov urged the whole Duma to support the bill on aid to families whose breadwinners had been killed by revolutionaries, which would help to cure the moral malaise in the country and would
put an end to, or reduce, the bloodshed which is the misfortune and the shame of our motherland.
His urging, needless to say, was in vain. The Constitutional Democrats, as well as the socialists, would have been untrue to themselves if they had ventured to condemn revolutionary terror out loud. Heads incorrigibly slewed leftward could not return to a midway position.
From the extreme left groups we hear nothing but speeches full of suspicion, full of poison, full of hatred. This shows just how sincere is their participation in the onerous work we are carrying out.
There were other opportunities to confront the left later on. Terrorism was always the issue. Later in 1909, Karpov, chief of the Okhrana in Petersburg, was blown up in an apartment rented by the police themselves on Astrakhanskaya Street. There were noisy questions in the Duma, in which both the left and the Kadets insinuated that this was a put-up job, alleging that the apartment was a police bomb-making factory. Why, the center retorted, would the police need a bomb factory, and a secret one at that? To cause explosions? No, the left ingeniously replied, they needed bombs to plant when they made a search.
Such was the ardor on both sides of the Duma, each of them ever eager to prove that it was in the right and “the others” eternally at fault, that speakers ignored the factual details as well as their opponents’ arguments. The inexhaustibly flowery Rodichev, whose tongue had brought him fame, and very nearly condemned him to death, now recited from the Duma platform an article in a French newspaper by the émigré Burtsev (such things were possible in this “conservative” Duma),
whom the Kadet faction trusts more than it does the chairman of the Council of Ministers.
But he had omitted—unintentionally, no doubt, Guchkov said sarcastically—the passage in Burtsev’s article confirming that the man who carried out the explosion (Petrov-Voskresensky) was
an agent of the revolution, an executioner acting for the revolutionary tribunal and assigned to the Okhrana camp as a double agent.
This prompted Guchkov to assert:
Representatives of revolutionary parties often present themselves to the police, offering their services for money. Moral decay has gone a long way in the revolutionary camp. So far that they have moved on from the old slogan “All is permissible in political struggle” to a new one—"All is permitted in all areas of life.” The idealistic and heroic period of the revolution, known to us all by hearsay, has long ago receded, and the brigand period has now set in. Deputy Chkheidze over there will probably not contradict me. In the days of the Liberation movement I got letters from the Caucasus telling me that every so-called political expropriation was simply robbery with violence, to raise funds for the revolution, and always accompanied by lavish binges in the best restaurants in Tiflis. Whenever one of these binges took place people knew that there had been a political expropriation.
Then, turning to the left:
If you expose police procedures which really are meant as provocation you will always find allies in us. But if what you want is to disarm the state and the government in the struggle with revolution—it’s no, thank you.
In this way he stood up firmly against loud and furious onslaughts from the left, from the right, and at times from the left and right simultaneously, sometimes winning support, sometimes roundly abused, but always in the belief that he was steadily steering a middle course, trying to keep the peace between Russia’s rulers and Russian society, so that they could work creatively, and always in the hope that both the rulers and society would someday limit themselves and renounce their inordinate demands.
This was the special characteristic of the parliamentary center:
There are groups in the Duma who are not at all concerned to make our legislative labors bear fruit. Our “comrades” on the left constantly insist, and hope, that nothing will come of the Duma, and that what we need is a great catastrophe,
while the rightists raised the threat that the Duma itself would cause the catastrophe, and the regime looked on the Duma with contempt and saw no need to reckon with it. But
both sides will be disappointed. The Duma will succeed in reestablishing truth and ju
stice in our country.
Sound legislation was more important to the center than to anyone else. Its special characteristic was its need to cover its flanks, sometimes with the right wing, sometimes with the left, joining now with the right to outvote the left, now with the left to outvote the right, so as to make some progress and defend the country’s interests.
In alliance with the left, Guchkov
—(in 1908) supported the protest against the unprecedentedly high-handed behavior of the Governor-General of Moscow, who had the effrontery to demand that books banned by the censors should be confiscated, and indeed handed in to the authorities;
—(in 1909) supported the right of the Old Believers to preach their faith openly (the socialists, of course, were all in favor, but the Orthodox Church tried to deny them this freedom);
—condemned the harassment of attorneys (when the Ministry of Justice—just imagine!—attempted to withhold permission to visit prisons from lawyers who passed forbidden items to prisoners);
—(in 1910) asserted that “the need for a system of pacification has passed. We no longer see any obstacles which could excuse delay in granting civic freedoms. We are waiting!”;
—(in 1912) was for investigation of the shooting of strikers in the Lena goldfields, where “conditions of slave labor prevail which happily belong to the vanished past as far as the greater part of Russian industry is concerned,” and where the authorities had “panicked and lost their heads because they feared for their lives”;
—stirred by a telegram from Korolenko, interceded for and saved a man condemned to death for a political crime.
But it was also characteristic of the center that none of this won it any political allies.
At times Guchkov sounds a little weary:
We feel rather isolated, both in the country and in the Duma.
It would have been better not to have to depend on anybody, not to join any kind of bloc: the fruitful parliaments are those with an independent center, the weak ones those with an unstable center. There, one of the unexpected things that can happen is a union of right and left against the center. And it did happen—in surprising circumstances. The Octobrist group proposed that the 1912 session of the Duma should deal first with two questions of the greatest importance to peasant Russia: order on the land and order in the courts—the regulation of land use and the reestablishment of elected local courts independent of the administration. The right wing of the Duma was, of course, against this. But would the left be for it? Not at all. The Social Democrats opposed it, because it “wouldn’t help” (wouldn’t help them). But what of the Kadets? The flower of the Russian intelligentsia? The Kadets were also against: inviolability of the person was a much more urgent and important matter.
So the Octobrist center was short of votes.
Gentlemen, we are confronted with a red-black bloc and that is the curse that bedevils Russian life. (Laughter on the right and the left, applause in the center.) Never before has this bloc behaved so cynically. We all, of course, need to score off our opponents, but the living body of the people should not be our battleground. We shall wreck the bill and leave the population without effective courts for long years to come.
And what of it? Let them do without.
Back in March 1910, Guchkov had preferred to be elected president of the Duma—so that, in accordance with the custom, he would have regular audiences with the Emperor. He had high hopes of directly influencing the Emperor and indeed of changing the course of Russia’s history.
You will forgive me, Your Majesty, but I have made it my specialty to tell you only worrisome things. I know that you are surrounded by people who communicate only what it is pleasant to hear.
He interested the Emperor, fascinated him even. His aim was to break the ice between Duma and Emperor. The Emperor listened attentively (in passive mode he always carried conviction) but also often spoke his mind animatedly. Guchkov suspected at times that other wills voiced through the Emperor—from behind inner doors, or in his oppressed mind—the likes and dislikes, the caprices and the intrigues of elusive shadows, lurking, whispering. Then again, there was a difference of six years in age—and from his higher rung Guchkov could look down with compassion on this amiable semblance of a Tsar devoid, alas, of any positive ambition.
Guchkov shared with Stolypin the tragic role of defending the monarchy against the monarch, the authority of the sovereign power against the holders of power.
My life belongs to the Emperor, but my conscience does not belong to him, and I shall fight on.
Sukhomlinov kept the Emperor entertained by inventing new military uniforms (the Emperor took a childish delight in them, he would have become a prey to melancholy if the whole army had been dressed alike), was careful not to weary him with boring reports, and concealed shortcomings. Above all he hindered the replacement of the existing High Command with generals capable of waging war. In his audiences with the Tsar, Guchkov complained that all measures to reform the army had been slowed down, that the arms industry was not expanding, and that technical improvements depended entirely on imports from abroad. But what he read in the Emperor’s eyes was: “Trying to get even with the minister?”
Guchkov was irrepressible, forever issuing challenges—even in his year as president of the Duma he could not restrain himself, but fought and survived one of his many duels, this one with a fellow Octobrist, Count Uvarov, and left the Duma to serve a four-month sentence in the fortress, but was pardoned by the Emperor after serving less than a month. (Guchkov’s duels should have included one with Milyukov, for insulting him in the Duma.)
But then Guchkov slipped up. After a very warm reception by the Emperor he shared his triumph and his hopes with too wide a circle of Duma colleagues, and this got into the newspapers. The next time, the Emperor received Guchkov coldly, did not even sit down, and did not even say goodbye to him. And that was that.
Rash impulses and erratic behavior of this kind also troubled the course of cooperation between Guchkov and Stolypin. And when in March 1911 Stolypin put through the Western Zemstvo bill by suspending the Duma and the State Council for three days, Guchkov found it necessary to dissociate himself vehemently and show the whole world that he was not a party to it. He gave up the presidency of the Duma, which had become a tedious chore since his breach with the Tsar, and went on a factfinding mission for the Red Cross to plague-stricken Manchuria (where he was too far away to be in danger of recall). Steeling himself, he thought up an explanation of his drastic overreaction for the benefit of the astonished Stolypin:
You know how much your victory always meant to me and how I loathed your enemies. But the step you are taking is a fatal one, not just for you personally (I know that you are indifferent to that) but to the renewed Russia which is so dear to you and which, thanks to your own efforts, has begun to emerge from chaos.
Guchkov returned from Manchuria in August, a few days before Stolypin’s assassination. He was met by a rumor that the Finnish nationalists were planning an attempt on Stolypin (which may have been true) and managed to warn Kurlov in Kiev (but not Pyotr Arkadievich himself, not wanting to worry him).
In September, with fifty or so other Octobrists, he went by special train to Kiev for the funeral.
Whether or not he regretted not supporting Stolypin at the last stage of his career, he now made the murdered man’s cause his own. The Octobrist Central Committee accused the Kadets of deliberately playing on the feelings of the public in a way that made the assassination easier. On the fortieth day after Stolypin’s death the Octobrists stated, in a Duma interpellation:
The revolutionary parties and Russia’s enemies have combined to carry out their long-standing threat to revenge themselves on the man who once crushed revolution.
Guchkov, supporting the interpellation, said:
This was a life for the Tsar and for the motherland … The generation to which I belong was born with Karakozov’s shot ringing in their ears. The bloody and dirt
y tide of terrorism washed over our fatherland, and carried away the Tsar Liberator. Terror impeded and still impedes the steady march of reform; terror put weapons into the hands of reaction; terror obscured the dawn of Russian freedom in a bloody mist. All this is fresh in everyone’s memory. (Cries of “Bravo!” from the right and the center, and of “Fairy tales!” from the left.) Now terror has removed even the man who did more than anyone to put representative government on a firm footing in our country.
Worms pullulated around the open sore that was eating into the living organism of the Russian people. They made our sickness the source of their health. (Shouts on the left: “The Okhrana!”) For this gang nothing existed except career considerations and calculations of personal gain. (“Bravo!” from the right and center.) These were the big bandits, “greedily thronging,” but with a supporting cast of petty crooks. When they found their tail being trodden on, their claws clipped, their restaurant bills queried, they facilitated by direct action and willful negligence the murder of the chairman of the Council of Ministers.
The interpellation named Kurlov, Spiridovich, Verigin, and Kulyabko—all four of them—and Guchkov in his Duma speech gave further details: they had taken bribes and purloined letters of credit. He spoke of
the vicious circle in which the government flounders helplessly. The regime is the prisoner of its own servants. If you tread on the head of the snake (Puryshkevich: “Don’t expect support from us!”) it will sting whoever dares to, and for some it may be a fatal, farewell sting. If you pension off the guilty, and otherwise everything stays as it was, you are doomed. There is another way—the complete reorganization of our political police. Have you the strength of will for that?
November 1916 Page 85