The Duma Monarchy

[Nentsia]

The Duma Monarchy in Russia
1905 - 1917
Part II. A Great Russia!



The Fall of Witte

The first victim of the new political order was the architect itself, Sergei Witte. After the October Manifesto in 1905, Witte assumed the newly created position of Chairman of the Council of Ministers, thereby becoming Russia’s first prime minister in history.

But Sergei Witte would remain only several months in office, and handed his letter of resignation even before the ceremonial opening of the First Duma in April 1906. Peasant unrest in the countryside continued well into 1907, and Tsar Nicholas personally held Witte responsible for failing to restore law and order, despite giving the people their parliament. But Witte and the Tsar also distrusted each other on a personal level, with Nicholas thinking of him as an arrogant bureaucrat and a closet-liberal. Witte, of lower provincial noble descent, was a relative outsider to the Petersburg Society, and this further made him vulnerable to the revanchist intentions of reactionary aristocrats with access to the Court, where they undermined Witte’s reputation. Back in the 1890’s they could not have done this, for Tsar Alexander III personally liked him. But Tsar Nicholas was a different man.

Despite their mutual dislike, Tsar Nicholas gave Witte the rank of Count and the Order of Aleksander Nevsky for his services to the Empire – for in his final year in power, he not only designed its Duma, but also negotiated a peace treaty with Japan that offered Russia much more than it was entitled to as the humiliated party, and he secured a crucial financial loan from the French, British and Dutch banks that stabilized the Russian economy. This was the crowning of his political career, during which he had also been the key architect of Russia’s industrialization.

Not just Nicholas and the inner Court circles wanted to get rid of Witte. The Right, the reactionaries, undermined him in every possible way. Especially through the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a bulwark of reactionaries, Witte was constantly undermined. His relationship with interior minister Durnovo had become ‘unworkable’. The Liberals who came to dominate the Duma opposed him, for Witte was in fact a genuine Monarchist, who defended the enormous powers still reserved to the Tsar. The executive remained answerable to the Tsar alone, for example. The Revolutionary groups considered Witte to be an agent of repression. Politically speaking, Witte was alone, and he understood this very well.


(Petr Arkadyevich Stolypin)

Make Russia Great Again!

At the beginning of the new Duma era, Russia lost perhaps its most able politician with Sergei Witte’s resignation, but it also found a new leader, a politician in the modern sense of the word, who was exactly what the country needed to make the new system work and to transition towards a modern constitutional monarchy. His name was Petr (Pyotr) Arkadyevich Stolypin. He was the provincial governor of Saratov (central Russia), and former governor of Hrodna (Grodno), in present day Belarus. He had been the youngest person ever in Russian history to hold the position of governor, and he was of high aristocratic descent – but one who chose for a provincial career, rather than at the Court where he certainly belonged.

Stolypin caught the Tsar’s attention in 1905 for his handling of the peasant disturbances in the Saratov province. Rather than using all-out repression, Stolypin visited the peasant communities in person, and engaged in a dialogue with the peasant communes through which he gained their respect. When the Tsar offered him the position of prime minister, Stolypin initially declined, upon which the Tsar burst into tears and grabbed his hand – realizing that this was exactly what he needed: a man who was not interested in power or prestige. Stolypin was a modern politician because he understood that what the monarchy needed in order to survive was popular support. Therefore, Stolypin’s primary goal was to broaden the appeal of the political system to the masses. Instead of avoiding the press, like previous Russian ministers had done, he embraced it as a tool to cultivate a public image. Instead of ignoring or offending the Duma, like Witte and his temporary replacement Goremykin had done, Stolypin used his rhetorical skills to manipulate the Duma and to defend his policies, even though he did not have to answer them.

The political challenges for Stolypin were vast. The country’s war debts were enormous, its fleet was at the bottom before the Korean coast, peasant unrest continued in the countryside, the Duma demanded agrarian reforms, and frequent strikes continued among the workers.

Stolypin first began to restore order. He dissolved the First Duma by Imperial Decree and scheduled new elections, hoping for a less radical Duma. Stolypin was appointed at the beginning of the summer of 1906, but by the end of the summer, some 3,000 revolutionaries, peasants and terrorists had been hanged. Stolypin’s terror became known as the Stolypin Necktie. Stolypin became the primary target of the revolutionaries, who blew up his house while he was sitting at his desk. Half of the building was blown away, his children were injured, but Stolypin walked away and chaired the council of ministers the following morning.

Stolypin then began with working out agrarian reforms in 1906, which was in itself politically dangerous. The Kadets and the Trudoviks demanded radical reforms, and if Stolypin failed to win their confidence, three-quarters of the Duma would become hostile to him. But on the other side, he had to please the Right, the ‘United Nobility’, an association of wealthy landowners whose powerful networks ran through the Rightists in the Duma, to the members of the Imperial Council (upper chamber), to the Court of Tsar Nicholas. Antagonizing them would mean the end, as Witte’s case had proven. On top of that, the Duma had to invent itself entirely from scratch – from trivial matters like protocols and proceedings, to the make up of committees and the implementation of laws. As an institution, it was operating extremely disorganized.

Stolypin had his land reforms implemented by Imperial decree and could therefore proceed without having to antagonize the Rightists and make concessions to the Left. The reform essentially intended to break the almost 500 years old tradition communal land ownership among the peasant communes by allowing individual peasants to claim the plots of land they happened to be working on as their private property. Stolypin’s idea was to turn the landless peasantry into a class of smallholding peasants, giving them a productive incentive and a sense of responsibility and to integrate the peasant as individuals into Russian society.

Unfortunately for the Tsar and Stolypin, the Second Duma was even more radical, now that the most prominent Leftist parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, ended their boycotts and entered the Duma. They dominated with more than two-thirds of the seats. Then followed the no-less radical Kadets, with the monarchist Octobrists and Rightists being a clear minority. As if not even God himself could tolerate this composition, on the first day the Second Duma convened in 1907, the roof of the building collapsed.

The Second Duma, dominated by peasants, workers, radicals, and reactionaries, became a complete madhouse with deputies shouting and fighting eachother. Stolypin, at some point tired of the radical attacks, once explained ‘’All these attacks can be expressed in two words which you address to authority: Hands up! Gentlemen, to these words the government, confident in its right, answers calmly with two other words: Not afraid!’’

In one of his most important speeches, during which Stolypin defended his agrarian reform proposals, he famously exclaimed ‘’You, Gentlemen,’’ as he pointed towards the Leftists in the room. ‘’are in need of Great Revolutions;’’ Stolypin then pointed towards his fellow ministers and the Octobrists. ‘’We are in need of a Great Russia!’’

Several weeks later, the Tsar had enough of it when several radicals called upon the military to rebel. The Duma was dissolved, and Stolypin seized upon the opportunity to impose a new electoral law by Imperial Decree, aimed at reducing the dominance of Leftist parties in the next elections. Under the new electoral law, the gentry vote carried much more weight, thus playing into the hands of the United Nobility association. On top of that, it brought more than 50 Orthodox priests into the Duma. In the Third Duma, opened in November 1907, two-thirds of the seats were held by the monarchist, pro-Stolypin, Octobrists who were led by the Moscow banker Aleksander Guchkov, and the Rightist coalition. The Rightist group consisted of Orthodox priests, independent landowners, the All-Russian Nationalist Union, and the far-right Anti-Semitic members of the Union of the Russian People.


(Members of the Union of the Russian People marching in Kiev)

The Reactionary Backlash

In the previous post I mentioned that the Constitutional Democratic Party dominated the newly elected State Duma of 1906. But it did not reflect the actual mood of the population. The electoral law heavily favored particular classes, but some important political movements simply boycotted the elections. In fact, the largest political movement in Russia, with around 300,000 members, was entirely opposed to the Duma as an institution. This was the so-called Union of the Russian People, founded in November 1905. In Russian however, Soyuz Russkogo Naroda, the word ‘Rus’ is used instead of ‘Rossiiskogo’. The word Rus’ in Russian has an ethnic connotation. The SRN was the creation of an exclusive, reactionary gang of Russian aristocrats, police and military officers, known as the ‘Russian Assembly’. The purpose of the SRN was to appeal to the common man. One of its leaders proclaimed ‘’To the Right of me, there is only the wall!’’

The ideology of the movement rested on two elements: Monarchism and Anti-Semitism. This may seem like a bit of a random combination, but at that time, they were two sides of the same coin. Russia had been a multi-ethnic state ever since medieval Muscovite rulers had begun to settle along the Volga, where they encountered Ugric, Samoyedic and Turkic peoples. In 1905, less than 50% of the Russian Empire’s total population was ethnically Russian. There were somewhere around 90 different ethnicities and nationalities within the Empire. Jews made up 4% of the population and lived in the Western areas, nowadays Ukraine and Poland. So, of all people, why hate the Jews?

The answer for that, I think, lies partly in the fact that they were associated with Revolution and the West, and in Russia the ‘West’ meant Revolution to many people: the French Revolution brought chaos and war to Russia, Russian revolutionaries all studied French and German philosophy, or lived in exile in Paris or London, and Russian conservatives staunchly opposed Western ideas and Western democracy. The Jews were seen as revolutionary agents, operating from the West (Paris), with the goal of destroying Russia. A big role was played by a number of Polish uprisings against Russian rule in the 19th century, supported by the West, and Poland happened to have the highest concentration of Jewish people. Many Poles and Jews fled from persecution to Paris or London. Jews were also associated with assassination attempts on the Tsars, one of which, in 1881, was successful and resulted in major Anti-Semitic pogroms. On top of that, the Jews were forbidden to own land and forced into commerce and finance. They were therefore also associated with Western capitalism, and its industrial destruction of the countryside that infuriated so many Russians.

More uniquely, Tsarist policy had allowed the Jews, as the only ethno religious group, to have their own administration, self-government, and legal courts. This made the Jews only more vulnerable to accusations of Russian nationalists that they formed a state within a state, a fifth column, with a headquarters in Paris, and a conspiracy to destroy Russia. These were not conspiracy theories of a few obscure radicals – anyone on the reactionary Right believed it, especially at the imperial court. Tsar Nicholas’ tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (also the administrative head of the Orthodox Church), once famously declared that Russia should convert one third of the Jews, deport the second third, and let the last third starve to death. Nicholas II himself was also a rabid anti-Semite, and one of those people who read the party newspaper of the Union of the Russian People. Nicholas in fact saw in the Pogroms of 1905 a sign of popular loyalty. ‘’The people became enraged by the insolence and audacity of the revolutionaries and socialists; and because nine-tenths of them are Yids, the people’s whole wrath has turned against them. That is how the Pogroms happened.’’ Tsar Nicholas wrote.

In reality, Jews made up about one-tenth of the membership of socialist and revolutionary parties – still above average though. The idea of a Socialist-Jewish conspiracy to establish a dictatorship and reduce the Russian people to slavery had been circulating among Russian intellectuals since the 1880’s, including Dostoyevsky, but it was massively reinforced by a false publication in 1903. In a document named The Protocols of the Elders of Zion a supposedly converted Jew claimed that he had attended secret Jewish meetings where they discussed their Jewish world conspiracy. The document was a piece of classic Russian disinformation, produced by the secret police. In 1903, there was a political feud going on between Internal Affairs minister Plehve, and the Finance minister at the time, Sergei Witte. Witte, a technocratic modernizer, simply wanted to achieve more freedom of movement and economic liberty for the Jews to aid the development of modern capitalism in Russia. The reactionary Plehve opposed him, fearing that the Jews would gain total control over the Russian economy, and ordered his department to produce this piece of propaganda to sway public opinion against Witte, ‘friend of the Jews’.

Between 1903 and 1906 Russia saw the heaviest Pogroms in its history and the Union of the Russian People played an important role in spreading Anti-Semitic propaganda, but also organizing Anti-Semitic paramilitary gangs known as the Chernosotentsy (literal translation: Black Hundredists), who killed some 1,500 people with their riots. Despite their mass appeal, the Union of the Russian People got only 6% of the vote. Ironically, the Russian government always kept this movement under close watch, distrusting its agitation in the streets and its ability to mobilize the masses. One of the key members, Vladimir Purishkevich – an officer from Plehve’s Internal Ministry, later left the movement and founded Union of Archangel Michael, which did enter the Duma. Another key member was Petr Rachkovsky, head of the Okhranka, the secret police. In December 1905, the leaders of the Union had the honor to meet the Tsar in person. Most importantly, the basement of the Okhranka headquarters was used as the Union’s printing office.

The Union, and its various offshoots, militantly opposed any form of constitution or Duma, seeing it as a bureaucratic obstruction to the spiritual unity between Tsar and People. On top of that, the Duma was perceived as a tool controlled by Jewish Socialists – gradually extending its grip on Russian politics.

In the years after 1905, the Russian government, especially the Okhranka itself, became increasingly wary of the Union. The Union’s anti-capitalist stances, and calls for social equality – as part of its nationalism – was equally revolutionary and dangerous in the eyes of many senior government officials. On top of that, just like the radical Left, the Union and its paramilitary gangs resorted to terrorist attacks and assassinations of senior government members. Petr Stolypin in particular was high on their list, for Stolypin was considered too soft on the Jews. Sergei Witte, who had now joined the reactionary camp to and actively spread negative rumors about Stolypin, also survived an attempted assassination from the far-right.

With order restored both in the country and in the Duma, Stolypin and his ministers could finally focus on their most pressing tasks: the restoration of the Russian economy, and the restoration of Russian military power and prestige. The latter could count on the support of the Duma, now overwhelmingly nationalistic, but the former had more priority. By 1908 Russia stood at the beginning of a newfound stability, and the Revolutionary movement suffered a serious setback during those years, while patriotism, propagated by both Stolypin and the new Duma, helped to forge a new sense of political unity. But this stability was superficial and fragile. At the Court, behind the scenes, dark clouds were pulling together above Stolypin’s head. The Duma Monarchy rested entirely upon Stolypin’s talent to maintain order while implementing reforms. Dark clouds therefore not only formed above Stolypin’s head, but above all of St-Petersburg. Gloomy St-Petersburg.