November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Our whole object must be to prevent an explosion of popular despair from thwarting victory over Germany. But we must also insure ourselves against the possibility that after the war, when this criminal government stands before a stern tribunal …

  The government was already in the dock, that was settled in advance …

  … we cannot be reproached with having given it our support. We must once and for all establish the fact that Stürmer is in our eyes a hundred times worse than Goremykin.

  (So there! Not so long ago it was impossible to imagine anyone worse than Goremykin. They thought they had to pin the blame for everything on him and knock him off his perch—now there was someone a hundred times worse!)

  In Goremykin we at least had someone straightforward and honest in power.

  (Not what they used to say about him.)

  That was just an insane wager on the part of reaction—it would conquer or perish. Whereas Stürmer is provocation incarnate, the fox in place of the wolf. His function is to delude us and to win time. But we will not help Stürmer to correct the regime’s terrible mistakes: let it perish! We cannot throw so much as a rope’s end to a regime like this! There must be no negotiations with them!

  Milyukov, however, his self-assurance unshaken, persisted:

  The mere existence of the Bloc has pinned the regime in a corner. By extensive publicity in the press and vigorous criticism in the Duma we will compel this regime to submit to supervision by the social organizations!

  And, of course, the tactical calculation of the Kadets had to be kept in mind: the nearer they got to the peace congress, the more certain it was that the Tsar’s government would be delivered into their hands … The Bloc’s hour would come.

  He held his own, and obtained a majority for a considerable time afterward, almost the whole of 1916. The Bloc, so to speak, lay low in the trenches, waiting for the terrible conflict to come, and occupying itself in the meantime with routine Duma business. Nor did Stürmer—provocation incarnate—move to dismiss them, so that the Duma worked peacefully on for the two months before Easter, and for one month in the summer. Indeed, its sessions had a sleepy air about them. There was no major retreat at the front that summer, and there were some successes against Turkey. Things began to look much better, and the government, instead of falling, seemed rather to be strengthening its position.

  But the subdued Progressive Bloc was more and more frequently outshouted by the rabid Unions. Guchkov’s War Industry Committees had scarcely ended their congress—denouncing “the present criminal regime which is working to bring about the complete defeat of our country” and urging “the State Duma to commit itself resolutely to the struggle for power”—when the delegates of the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns assembled in Moscow. These congresses were held on the clamorous insistence of the provinces, especially Kiev, Odessa, and the Caucasus. The circumspect Chelnokov did his best to put off the congress of the Union of Towns but in the end had to declare it open:

  Having made no preparations for war, the government reveals at every step how damaging its role is. When we saw that the government was leading the country to destruction, and condemning the army to a shattering defeat, we were compelled to take matters into our own hands. We had no wish to dabble in politics, but we were forced to. As we did in September, we again demand: A pardon for political offenders! Equal rights for all nationalities! A responsible government!

  Here the irrepressible Astrov broke in:

  The government is in the hands of clowns, crooks, and traitors! Come to your senses! Get out now! We will shortly smash your ally Germany!

  Milyukov rushed in to reason with them:

  The resolution of this congress could be the spark that causes a conflagration. We must not risk breaking with the government completely.

  The star most rapidly rising was that of Prince Georgi Evgenievich Lvov. He had been elected to the first two Dumas on the Kadet ticket, and indeed had made the trip to Vyborg, but had slunk off without signing the appeal. (“We felt that he was not really one of us,” said Milyukov.) By 1915–16, however, every educated Russian not directly involved in government saw clearly just how Russia could and must be saved. Prince Lvov, president of the Union of Zemstvos, was infected, carried away, exalted. He presided over a lavish joint banquet at the Praga restaurant, where the most important participants came together after their congresses.

  Over the dazzling tablecloths, glassware, and silver the finest traditions of 1904 resurfaced. The representatives of Poland, Finland, and especially those of the Caucasus were demonstratively, tumultuously feted—most especially the mayor of Tiflis, Khatisov, who repeated over and over again, at the congress, at the banquet, and in the lobbies:

  Let me tell you that in the Caucasus there are no rightists! In the Caucasus there are only moderate leftists and extreme leftists! And the whole Caucasus does not request—it demands!

  Never mind the resolutions, never mind the declarations, in all these hobnobbings a grandiose new plan evolved: it was time to start ignoring the government completely, time for the organized public to take all Russia’s affairs, all Russia into its own hands. We are at present few in number, of course, but we are the nuclei around which the whole of Russian society can be united!

  Burly Konovalov, a factory owner with a European polish, a great liberal, and an amateur pianist, but not one to waste words, said:

  The rebirth of the workers’ organizations is taking place under the flag of the War Industry Committees. The forthcoming workers’ congress will see the birth of an All-Russian Union of Workers. This compact organization will be crowned, as it were, with a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

  Oh, how he longed for that Soviet of Workers’ Deputies! But, together with Guchkov and Ryabushinsky, he was in more of a hurry to set up something else, the Central Committee for Food Supplies, to take the procurement and distribution of foodstuffs out of the government’s hands.

  The creation of an All-Russian Peasant Union was rather more complicated, but they laid the foundations for it in the shape of the All-Russian Cooperative Union.

  Yet again they were beset by the sacred shades of that first, decisive Union which had given birth to all the others and fused them in one awesome Union of Unions!

  Nekrasov: And when these Unions are all in being they will generate a supreme body to act as the general staff of Russia’s social forces.

  All the national organizations would rally round it. And, with the support of the mobilized people and the mobilized army (there was now no difference between the barracks and the street—a propitious circumstance), “all Russia is in our hands.”

  It sounded so wonderful at banquets, and it was all going so smoothly and so quickly—they need only sit back and await results without letting on to the press. They began quietly working on the composition of a “cabinet of confidence.” The Prime Minister designate was no longer Rodzyanko, who had too seldom pitted his bovine bulk against the crown. Indeed he was suspected of despicable conservatism, and had even accepted a decoration from the Emperor in December 1915. He was supplanted by that spiritual giant, Prince Georgi Lvov, whom all the evidence showed to be a great man born to be the leader of a free Russia. Foreign Affairs must unquestionably go to the outstanding expert, Milyukov. Trade and Industry, of course, to the hardworking Konovalov. Defense probably to Guchkov …

  Alas, the spring and summer of 1916 proved inauspicious for the Russian Liberation movement. The “government of confidence” was approved but not called upon to govern. The Unions were conjured up—but somehow refused to materialize. Greedy traders did not want the movement and prices of goods to be determined by the Kadets, with shop assistants leaving their counters to make speeches. Ignorant peasants did not rush to join the Cooperative Union. No one took orders from the Food Supplies Committee. Meanwhile the “criminal regime of rogues and traitors” had launched an offensive (Brusilov’s), against its “ally” Germany, the army let itself be carried away a
nd attacked successfully, and it even began to look as though Russia would not necessarily lose the war, that the devil would play one of his pranks and let her win! In March it had seemed that the situation was strained to the breaking point, but Stürmer, who was a hundred times worse than Goremykin, was still inexplicably in place. Most alarmingly, the public’s hostility toward the government seemed to be weakening, and there were signs of a willingness to cooperate with it.

  What is more, the government decided to apply ruthless pressure. In April an unprecedented ministerial instruction prohibited unauthorized congresses. As if Zemgor could help the army by day-to-day work alone! It had to have frequent provincial and all-Russian congresses! Then the authorities decided to send a vice-governor to every congress, with the power to terminate any meeting that went beyond the bounds of a strictly businesslike program. In other words, the educated public was deprived of its one remaining right: to assemble at the state’s expense and browbeat and blackguard the government to its heart’s content! An outrageous example of state terrorism!

  The Police Department next deliberately leaked its survey of nongovernmental organizations. It made a brief appearance in the press, was passed around, and many public figures were not at all pleased to learn that their plans and their utterances at supposedly secret meetings were very well known to the Police Department. Since the speeches they made as good, freedom-loving citizens did, according to Adzhemov,

  fulfill all the judicial requirements for proceedings under the statute on attempts to overthrow the established order …

  and since only the incomprehensible naïveté of the government had so far prevented it from invoking this statute, many public figures began behaving more cautiously.

  The mood among the most progressive elements in society was one of profound disenchantment.

  The State Duma made not the slightest bid for power at its tedious June session, and deputies often failed to turn up. The Progressive Bloc simply took a nap while it “awaited its hour,” and its most effective leaders were absent throughout: they had gone off to Europe for some months as members of a parliamentary delegation.

  This outing was, to be sure, a convenient way of doing the only thing left to the Russian middle class: to complain to the Allies about the imperial government, exhibit themselves to parliamentarians in democratic countries, seek their aid, and try to dissuade them from calling in their loans to Russia after the war. (Konovalov, indefatigable as a factory owner should be, begrudging neither time nor money for political ends, suggested to the progressive elements in Russian society that they should publish a special magazine in English and French, in which the Western public would be enlightened as to the nature and the course of Russian liberalism’s struggle against its reactionary government, and profiles would be provided both of useless ministers and of the major figures in the left camp waiting to take over. Such a publication, published in the West and distributed gratis, would help greatly to capture the hearts of the European and American public.)

  Milyukov was not just happy about his European trip, he was in raptures. After all that futile wrangling between parties in Russia anyone would blossom anew in European air! He went home in time to address the Duma before it dispersed. Then—now that he had acquired a taste for it—he hurried back to Europe for the summer, to lecture in Christiania and Oxford and to take a rest from the horrors of war on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was September when he arrived back in Russia—to be greeted by a number of political shocks.

  The year had run on without conflict, and the Bloc seemed to have been sitting still since the dramatic days of its creation. The feeling abroad in Russia’s September air was that the Bloc had missed its chance, that while it sat and waited others were pushing into its place. The unthinkable thought was noised around—that the Duma was a bourgeois mob of Stürmer stooges!

  Milyukov had to reestablish his reputation in democratic circles, and quickly! Willynilly, he had to launch some sort of offensive. Otherwise even Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov could lose his position as leader.

  What particularly galled him personally was that when Sazonov—who might almost have been a member of the Bloc—was dismissed, the precious Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been entrusted to … yes, the old floor mop Stürmer.

  And then there was Protopopov, causing confusion and doing the Bloc a great deal of harm. The marshal of the Simbirsk nobility, who also owned a textile mill, Protopopov had followed fashion and become a member of a War Industry Committee. More important, he was an old, prominent, politically respectable member of the State Duma. In the Third Duma he had questioned the government about the illegal activities of the Union of the Russian People. In 1914 he had been elected to a vice presidency of the Duma by an overwhelming majority—and no one had ever found any serious fault in him. Because of his seniority he had headed the Duma’s delegation abroad, so that he was formally Milyukov’s superior, and on his return was received by the Emperor. That meeting had a consequence which left Milyukov thunderstruck: in September a member of the Progressive Bloc, and one of the Duma’s leaders, was appointed Minister of the Interior!

  What had happened? The Bloc had scored a victory in an unexpected direction and at an unexpected moment. A colossal victory for society, a capitulation on the part of the regime, such as no one would have dreamt of. This was it, the first step toward the creation of a government of confidence. A man assured of the Duma’s confidence, and hence that of the whole people, had become a minister! Further invitations could now be expected. Once you had an Octobrist minister, a Kadet minister was perfectly possible. The whole press welcomed Protopopov’s appointment, and the Stock Exchange responded with a rise in share values.

  Alas, the regime and Protopopov himself promptly shattered the public’s hopes. Protopopov started saying that he was enchanted by the Emperor, ready to exert himself to strengthen the autocracy, and in one interview he went so far as to admit that his program was based on struggle with the social organizations. In short, his appointment proved to be not the beginning of a new era, but a reward for a contemptible turncoat. The Duma deputies had evidently not scrutinized carefully enough those colleagues whom they had chosen to speak for them. Now that they saw him for what he was, they were surprised: he had no education, no special knowledge, no affinity with any stratum of society, he was just a decayed landowner and an impecunious manufacturer, with no serious influence in the Duma, who had made his way under the fashionable flag of left-wing Octobrism. In himself he was an excessively nervous, mercurial, hysterical person, far too impressionable, and mentally so unstable that he had once abandoned his family for treatment by a Tibetan medicine man and even taken to coming downstairs backward. He had no talents whatsoever, was unused to systematic work, had no definite views on matters political, no sense of direction in his activities, “no Tsar in the head,” as the saying went. People began to remember that he had been friends with Sukhomlinov and realized that he must have found favor with Rasputin. So the appointment of this unbalanced person and low traitor was not the welcome inspiration of a certain person whom discretion forbade them to mention but a cunning maneuver intended to split the Bloc.

  For about a month the contempt and loathing of educated Russia was concentrated on Protopopov, until he could stand it no longer and began behaving ridiculously. When the Duma refused to hear his answers to its accusations he changed his ministerial seat for that of a deputy, and sought a hearing from there. A few days later he went to meet the Duma leaders wearing gendarme uniform, fatally damaging himself in their eyes. Though he had been twice chosen, by the Duma and by the throne, his actions and his plans alike were impetuous and misconceived. At one moment he was reinforcing the run-down provincial police force, demanding reports by telegraph on political speeches at zemstvo meetings, drafting a plan for preliminary censorship (which Russia had managed to do without all through the war), secretly monitoring the dealings of the Bloc’s leaders with Buchanan, the British ambassa
dor. At the next he was preparing to complete the abolition of Jewish disabilities, or else contemplating a law on the expropriation of gentry lands (which greatly alarmed the Duma because it was in danger of losing a revolutionary weapon). He created chaos in his ministry by neglecting to read papers. He called in the old police dog Kurlov to assist him, but for fear of the Duma’s reaction hesitated to make his appointment public, and this caused yet another scandal. At the end of October 1916 he was half inclined to cancel the forthcoming session of the Duma.

  Nor did the grain problem escape Protopopov’s attention. He associated himself with (and so helped to discredit) those who favored free trade and the abolition of fixed prices. A Ministry of Agriculture circular came out against the general system of procurement and distribution of grain, involving local committees and cooperatives (suspecting with much justice that the committees would direct their efforts to stirring up the population, as the congresses on price inflation had done), and banned committees at the rural district level. There were hints in the press, which he denied, that he aimed at transferring the management of all food supplies to his own Ministry of the Interior. The grain problem, however, was left up in the air, suspended between two ministries (of the Interior and of Agriculture) and further from resolution than ever.

  The Kadets were less troubled by the grain problem than by the disgrace of their previous association with Protopopov, which had tarnished the Progressive Bloc at a time when even the left of the Kadet Central Committee had begun to deride it.

  Konovalov, feeling the support of an indignant public behind him, and bold as always in his methods, introduced a novel form of consultation.

  The “Konovalov Conferences,” held at his Moscow home, were intended to “quicken the pulse of Moscow life” and start building a bridge between the Kadets and the Social Democrats. This is the sort of thing said there:

  The day after peace comes, a bloody civil war will break out in our country.