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.

[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.

[Nentsia]

The Duma Monarchy in Russia
1905 - 1917
Part III. Fragile Stability



Tsar Nicholas and his prime minister Stolypin (most right figure in white) during a visit in Kiev, 1911.

From 1908 to about 1914 Russia experienced both strong economic growth and a sense of political stability. Culturally the country blossomed as the West discovered Russian literature from Anton Chekhov, Russian ballet from Diaghilev, painting by Kandinsky and Malevich and music by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Even philosophically, Western audiences were intrigued by the ideas of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Russian ‘soul’. When historians talk about the Duma Monarchy’s potential to save the Romanov dynasty and avert revolution or civil war, they often have these years in mind. The Duma started to function, took a constructive role, and there was an effective government, headed by the visionary strongman Pyotr Stolypin. Had the World War not derailed the project in 1914, the rocket-like economic growth during those years would’ve surely solved many of the social conflicts, like in other European countries in the 19th century, and thus a stable, prosperous, politically moderate Russia would emerge by the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Other historians point out that the Duma Monarchy’s own success from 1908 onwards carried the seeds of its own destruction. The single-most destabilizing factor in Russia since the 1890’s had been the flood of proletarian workers to the overcrowded cities, and with every step towards further economic modernization, their numbers and grievances swelled. Throughout the long history of Russia, social disturbances had occurred, large and small, but because they occurred among the peasantry – it was distant and isolated from the political centers such as Moscow or Petersburg. But with the internal migration to the cities, Moscow and Petersburg were now industrial centers, with hundreds of thousands of frustrated workers, living under worse conditions than the peasant villages they had abandoned, and living only a few districts away from the political heart of the Empire. One single workers’ uprising could do what dozens of enormous peasant rebellions never could. Workers constituted only a few percent of the total population, but they were highly concentrated around the political and economic center of the empire.

In fact, most of the first generation workers coming to a city like Petersburg experienced a total cultural shock. St. Petersburg was not unlike most other European capitals such as Paris or Vienna, with its palaces, enormous shopping malls, modern fashion, electric communication networks and cars. But the workers arriving there came from an ancient world that had not significantly changed since the 18th century. The elite lifestyle that the cosmopolitan Petersburg jet-set confronted the working classes with on a daily basis, while the workers lived in cramped barracks without any salary or toilets even, was a recipe for hatred and violence. By 1910, the workers in major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg made up between 40 and 50% of the population.

The revolutionary movement had not been idle since its defeat after 1905-1907. A new and radicalized branch was emerging, known in intellectual circles as the Marxists. But within this Marxist camp, a radicalized core was formed, calling themselves the ‘Bolsheviks’, headed by Vladimir Lenin. Until then the revolutionary movement was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Narodnik movement. Marxism was a relatively new phenomenon, providing it with a new way of understanding Russian society – a key ingredient combined with the experiences of the past failures. Especially Lenin himself, whose brother was executed in 1887 for terrorist activities, vowed to learn from the mistakes of the past. For the time being however, the revolutionary movement was weak. Its leaders were exiled, the movement itself was discredited, and the Duma Monarchy appeared too strong after 1907.

A House United

An interesting feature of the 1907-1914 period was the newfound unity that helped to cement the Empire and the new Duma, if only for a few years. As the foundations of the monarchy became more fragile, Tsar Nicholas II invoked more and more rituals and symbols to express the mythical unity between Tsar and People, and the divine mission of Russia and its Orthodox Church to bring order, culture and civilization to the many peoples of the Empire.

Pyotr Stolypin, the prime minister, discovered nationalism unifying force in the Duma, where the Rightist faction (dominated by the All-Russian Nationalist Union) and the centrist Octobrists formed the majority, together with the Independents (often reactionary aristocrats who refused to subscribe to political parties), and the right-wing leaning members of the Liberal Kadet Party. Although these political factions all wildly differed on many issues, they could agree on a number of national themes. First of all, they supported Stolypin’s cry for a ‘Great Russia’, after the military humiliation by Japan, the growing tensions in the Balkans, and the increasingly threatening attitude of the German Empire. On this issue, the Court, the government, and the Duma from the far-right to the Liberals could shake hands.

But this also gave rise to new tensions. The great-power chauvinism of the Duma and the Tsar far exceeded the ambitions of the government under Stolypin, which lacked the financial resources to rebuild Russia’s naval might. Stolypin tried to convince the Duma instead that industrialization and economic modernization should have the priority over rearmament, in order to build a Great Russia. The Tsar himself, obsessed with military grandeur, and who genuinely believed he was destined to expand Russia’s borders throughout Asia, was reluctant to go along with Stolypin. On a personal level, Nicholas loathed Stolypin, who – like everyone – had a tendency to lecture the Tsar who was seldomly taken seriously.

It also wasn’t quite clear who was Russia’s main enemy. Tsar Nicholas, the Court, and the radical Union of the Russian People resented Russia’s political alliance to decadent France since 1893, and they saw the conservative German Emperor as a much more natural ally. Former Interior minister Pyotr Durnovo, and then member of the Imperial Council as he belonged to the ancient aristocratic Durnovo family, warned Tsar Nicholas on the eve of World War I that a war between the German Empire and the Russian Empire would produce no victors and destroy the Monarchy in both countries.

This aristocratic position was starkly at odds with the rest of the Duma and Russian society, where nationalism produced strong anti-German sentiment. The Russian masses resented the political influence of Baltic German aristocrats, Russian industrialists detested their German rivals, and tensions in the Balkans revived Pan-Slav sentiments, which traditionally viewed Germany, Austria and their Pan-German aspirations as a threat to the Slavs of Central Europe. Despite these internal differences, public indignation over German aggression, and the denunciation of Jews and Socialists as enemies of Russia helped to forge a superficial sense of unity within Russia.

Stolypin’s Downfall

It would however cost the head of prime minister Stolypin. As the number of international crises in the Balkans, Persia and Turkey rose exponentially after 1908, Stolypin constantly had to say ‘no’ to war enthusiasts at the Court, the military and in the Duma. He also ran into trouble with the Tsar himself, who used his reactionary connections in the Duma to frustrate Stolypin’s reforms. While military generals pressured the government to expand its military budgets, the Russian finance ministry became increasingly dependent on French loans to make ends meet.

Influential reactionary aristocrats never wasted an opportunity to warn the Tsar that Stolypin was a traitor, a closet liberal, and a stain on Russia’s autocracy. Among them was former prime minister Witte, the founder of the Duma Monarchy. Stolypin eventually sealed his fate when he took on the mysterious Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin was a fraud from Western Siberia, posing as a ‘Starets’, Orthodox spiritual healers that were fashionable among the Petersburg elite. Rasputin used the mysterious attraction he had on aristocratic women to make his entry into elite circles, and was eventually introduced to the depressed and despairing German wife of the Tsar. He promised them that he could do what no doctor could: to cure their son Aleksei and save the Romanov dynasty.

By 1911, rumors about the dangerous presence at the court of Rasputin, and about sexual affairs between the Empress and this Siberian vagabond, forced Stolypin to banish Rasputin from St. Petersburg. Rasputin went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he maintained contact with the Empress. She came to hate Stolypin, for taking away the one person who could alleviate the pain of her only son.

Tsar Nicholas began to block Stolypin’s legislation, with arguments like ‘an inner voice’ keeping him from signing. When even the Imperial Council turned against Stolypin, full of the Tsar’s confidants, he gave up and resigned. Fearing that this would create precedence, the Tsar simply rejected Stolypin’s resignation and the two butted heads.

Later that year, Stolypin accompanied the Tsar to a trip to Kiev. Rasputin was surprisingly in Kiev as well. As Stolypin’s carriage drove past him and the crowds, Rasputin began to scream ‘Death is chasing him!’

That day, the imperial entourage attended the opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov at the Kiev Opera House. During the break, a man entered the building with a revolver, walked towards Stolypin and shot him twice. The Tsar and his daughters had seen everything. Stolypin died several days later. The assassin was a member of the Revolutionary movement, but also a police informer. The official story claimed that he had defected back to the revolutionary cause and supplied false information to the police that enabled him to assassinate Stolypin. But why didn’t he shoot the Tsar then?

Before long, Rasputin returned to the Court. The Empress did not realize how her German ancestry, her self-imposed isolation, combined with her association with public enemy Rasputin placed a time-bomb under the Russian monarchy. From here, things would only get worse.


(Stolypin's funeral procession)