The Duma Monarchy

[Nentsia]

The Duma Monarchy in Russia
1905 - 1917
Part I. Saving the Monarchy


I promised Flobro to do an article-thingy on Russian history, and perhaps an interesting one would be about the so-called Duma Monarchy or the Duma era, the period between 1905 and the 1917 Russian February Revolution during which the Russian Tsar accepted some form of constitutional limits to his ''autocratic'' powers and enabled the creation of an elected legislative body, the Duma.

It is an interesting period to look at because 2017 is the centenary year of the Russian February Revolution and the October Revolution (the one where Bolsheviks came to power and established a Communist dictatorship). But instead of focussing on the events of 1917, which are very chaotic, confusing, and messy, the Duma period that preceded it is what I find personally more interesting. Because here the Russian Tsars were experimenting with democratic reforms and parliamentary politics, in a desperate attempt restore public confidence in the monarchy. One question that always accompanies this final episode of the Russian Empire is whether the creation of a Russian constitution and parliament would’ve been the beginning of a modern, constitutional Russia - capable of averting violent revolution and bloody civil wars. The argument of many historians often goes that, had the World War not ruined the fun, the Duma Monarchy would've never collapsed. Other historians instead point to the fatal flaws in the design of the Duma system, its subsequent failure to alleviate political and social tensions within Russian society, and therefore in fact seeing it as the cause for further deepening the political rifts that would later enable Russians to murder fellow Russians. Lets be clear that historians agree that the Duma Monarchy functioned poorly. It was a political mess. The disagreements arise about whose fault that was, and whether the system had any future at all. Of course it also touches upon the never-ending historical debate about the ~main cause~ of the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanovs.


(Wojtech Kossak, Bloody Sunday. The Russian word for sunday, ''Voskresenye'', is coincidentally the same as the Russian word for Christ's Resurrection...)

''Bloody Nicky''
It was in the beginning of the year 1905 when thousands of workers from the St. Petersburg factories - many of them peasants who had recently abandoned their villages - laid down their work and followed the peaceful march of priest Father Grigory Gapon. Carrying crosses, candles, icons and portraits of the young Tsar, Nicholas II, the crowd headed towards the Winter Palace over the Nevsky Prospekt avenue to offer him a petition asking for worker rights and basic liberties.

The new Tsar was young and inexperienced. In 1894, ten years earlier, he suddenly inherited the throne after his father suddenly died. Nicky had never been given any preparation, and had to learn the very basics of politics when, at the age of 26, he was suddenly in charge of the largest empire in the world. Few people around the new Tsar had any confidence in him, and even Nicky himself believed he was unfit for the task. Nicholas' coronation of 1896 became a national tragedy. Thousands had gathered at the Khodynka fields just outside Moscow for celebrations, but a panic broke out and more than a thousand people were crushed to death. Nicholas, shocked by the tragedy, wanted to cancel the festivities at his court that evening, but he was pressured to carry on with the protocol. The young Tsar wept during the dancing in the ballroom. Ten years later, when Nicholas' first and only son was born and diagnosed with Haemophilia, the Tsar believed his reign was cursed. Nicholas' wife vanished from public life, feeling guilty for having doomed the Romanov dynasty, and tried to find comfort among the many spiritual ''healers'' that the Petersburg elite liked to hang out with - especially a mysterious Siberian named Grigory Rasputin. The Romanov family withdrew itself to its estates at Tsarskoye Selo, where they took care of their son, but also found themselves in a bubble - steadily losing sight of the reality in Russia, becoming strangers to the population.

As the workers moved through the streets of St. Petersburg, the Cossacks lined up. The climate had been very tense. In 1904, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Vyacheslav Plehve, had been blown up by revolutionaries. Father Gapon, the priest leading the march, was in fact an agent working for Plehve's secret police and their project to infiltrate the factories. Now he was a lose cannon. When the Tsar announced he would come over from Tsarskoye Selo to St. Petersburg for some festivities, Gapon and the workers saw it as an opportunity to address the incompetence of the government, which had just lost a war against Japan. Sensing a plot to kill the Tsar, St. Petersburg had been transformed in a military fortress. Nicholas was at Tsarskoye Selo. For no clear reason, the Cossacks lost their nerve. Men, women, and children were riddled with bullets, their icons and portraits of the Tsar-Father falling into the bloodied snow. Throughout Europe, Nicholas was denounced as a blood-thirsty monster. In Russia itself, the event was a crucial moment towards 1917. It shattered the historical myth of the sacred unity between Tsar and People, and more importantly, it de-legitimized Nicholas as Tsar. Since ancient times, it had been a popular belief among Russians that the Tsar was as a father to the people, and thus responsible for their well-being. A Tsar who did not look after his flock, was therefore not a true Tsar, and revolt was not only justified, but almost a must. This logic pervaded all the great previous popular uprisings in Russian history, with peasant armies denouncing the Tsar as a ''false Tsar'' and supporting a pretender who claimed to be the ''True Tsar''. After the Bloody Sunday massacre, the news quickly spread across Russia that ''Nicholas Romanov, Formerly known as the Tsar, had spilled the innocent blood of Russian workers''.

An eye-witnesses of Bloody Sunday would later recall the reaction of the petitioners to the violence. ''I observed the faces around me, and I detected neither fear nor panic. (...) I saw these looks of hatred and vengeance on literally every face. The Revolution had been truly born, and it had been born in the very core, in the very bowels of the people.''

The Abyss

The Tsar's response to the events could not have been more insensitive. He invited a delegation of workers to Tsarskoye Selo, where, instead of listening to their rather simple demands, he lectured them as a bunch of children who had been naughty. Violent revolutionaries took their revenge by blowing up Nicholas' uncle, Sergey Alexandrovich - governor of Moscow.

From there, things went from bad to worse. Peasant disturbances spread across the countryside, with landless peasants seizing land and attacking wealthy land-owners. Strikes shut down factories, workers formed revolutionary ''councils'', Soviets, Cossacks rioted in the streets, Pogroms erupted against the Jews, and as Russian sailors lost their lives in the war against Japan, they mutinied as well. The urban and provincial educated classes, professionals, and even businessmen, supported the revolutionary disturbances - demanding political participation. By October 1905, the entire country had come to a standstill under the chaos. As factories, trains, and peasants had stopped working, food supplies came to a standstill. Schools closed, hospitals shut down, and even electricity went down.

The forbidden Russian Social Democratic Party was among the factory workers helping to organize themselves politically, and preparing them for confrontation. St. Petersburg was quickly reinforced by extra troops, with bridges being lifted to isolate the centre from the working-class districts, and machine guns posted in front of government buildings. Complete silence then reigned in the streets of the capital, with everyone awaiting the storm.

Behind the scenes, at Tsarskoye Selo, Nicholas met constantly with his advisors, his chief minister Sergey Witte, and a special Crown Council that had to explore the possibilities of implementing reforms. Nicholas' advisors all told him the same: he had two options. Crush the rebellion, and rule by force alone. Many more ''Bloody Sunday's'' would follow. Or give the people their constitution and their civil rights. Virtually all of Nicholas' advisers told him to do the latter. But Nicholas was so indecisive that one of his uncles, Prince Nikolai Nikolayevich the Younger, reached for his gun, pressed it against his head, and threatened to commit suicide in front of the Tsar - rather than to use his troops against the Russian people.

Sergey Witte, a brilliant administrator of distant Dutch descent, was the chief advocate of the ''constitutional'' path, not because he was a liberal, but because he sincerely believed it was the only viable way to preserve the monarchy. The Tsar finally caved in and enabled Witte to write and publish the October Manifesto, which promised the people civil liberties, an elected Duma representing all social classes, and that no law could come into effect without approval of the Duma.

Constitutional Autocracy

The October Manifesto did not solve the monarchy's problems. On the contrary. Unrest continued, only now, politics had been complicated. The moment that the Court announced its intention to create an elected representative body, representatives of especially the educated and professional classes demanded to have a say in how the electoral system should work, and what the exact powers of the Duma should be. The Court continued to exclude the public in this process, and decided over the future electoral process within the secretive meetings at Tsarskoye Selo. But also within the Court, disagreements emerged over these issues. The Court was basically divided between those who wanted to reduce the Duma to a sham-parliament, and those who were (out of a deep conviction of the popular loyalty to the Tsar) willing to make the best of it. For example, how should the voting system work? The conservatives argued in favor of an estate-based representation, which would exclude the newly emerging classes (the provincial middle class and urban working classes), which happened to be the most radical among the people. It would also heavily favor the Orthodox church, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, and the peasantry - all of them hostile to Liberal and Socialist ideas.

Sergey Witte was among those favoring an estate-based voting system over universal suffrage, when the Crown Council convened in december 1905. In private conversations between Witte and Tsar Nicholas, before the session started, Witte tried to manipulate the Tsar, warning him that the Duma would not immediately pacify the country. At the same time, Witte tried to assure him that in the long run, the Tsar would enjoy popular support. Nicholas' answer set the tone for the future Duma Monarchy: ''I very well understand that I am not establishing a helper, but an enemy.''

After lengthy and heated discussions, in which everyone agreed the goal was to avoid a ''radical'' Duma, but sharply disagreed which electoral system was useful to achieve that, a compromise was reached by Sergey Witte. He proposed a Duma on the basis of universal male suffrage, thus bringing in a large amount of unreliable peasant representatives, radical members of the intelligentsia, the provincial middle class, and the proletariat. To counter the unavoidable radicalism of the Duma, they would reform the already existing State Council into a legislative body as well, with its members hand-picked by the Tsar.

On top of that, another addition was made. Some historians have referred to Russia's social system since 1861, the abolishment of Serfdom, as ''social Apartheid''. The various social estates, the peasantry in particular, were excluded in many ways, and treated as a foreign people. If a peasant committed a crime, for example, he did not go to the ordinary justice court, but was sent to a special court for peasants. This element was added to the voting system. The estates voted separately, and the results of the peasant voting would not have the same weight as that of the landed gentry. In the background, a violent uprising had broken out in Moscow.

The Tsar in the end went with the most complex system one can imagine. He rejected universal suffrage, and went for estate-based voting, but in order to satisfy the new classes without inviting too many radicals, and to limit the influence of the peasantry, he also added property and tax requirements. Then there were also separate rules depending on the type of property, (landownership and business), which were further subdivided into types of business, location, and for workers it all depended on the size of the factory they worked in. The new Electoral Law of December 1905 was difficult to understand even to lawyers, leave alone to illiterate peasants. The government didn't even bother to inform the public that the Duma was going to be a bicameral legislature, with the Tsar appointing the State Council as the upper chamber.

The elections produced a radical Duma, but not as radical as feared. By far, the most dominant party was the Constitutional Democratic Party, nicknamed the ''Kadets''. It was a staunchly liberal movement, demanding much tougher political reforms to strengthen the constitutional order, and mainly representing urban and provincial middle classes and peasantry. Many of them had taught peasants to read, cured peasants and doctors, or defended peasants in courts as lawyers. The peasants trusted them, and they vowed to serve peasant interests. Their economic views were leftist, if not Marxist, since they distrusted industrial capitalism and demanded redistribution of land for the peasants. The left wing of the Duma was dominated by the Trudovik party, a moderate breakaway faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The SR was a radical peasant movement, resisting industrial capitalism, the monarchy, and demanding land redistribution. It boycotted the elections, but the Trudoviks did want to participate. The third largest group consisted of ''independents'', mainly aristocrats, land-owners, nationalists, and others who - so opposed to democratic politics - refused to join or form any political party at all.

The Tsar received the new legislature in April 1906 in the throne room of the Winter Palace. For the first time in Russian history, representatives from all over the country, from all classes, were present in one room and stared at eachother face to face. It was a bewildering experience for them. Peasants in dirty clothes, merchants in frock coats, lawyers in suits, priests in robes, aristocratic officers in braided uniforms, courtiers and noble families with lavish decorations - all of them in one room, and shocked by what they saw across the room. One group was infuriated the wealth and splendour of the Tsar, the Tsar was insulted by the cool attitude of some in the room, and the other group was disgusted by what they saw as barbarian bomb-throwers.

The Russian Empire was now an Autocracy with an elected parliament, but it did not yet have a constitution. That would be the first task of the State Council and the State Duma.