With the Russian Empire teetering on the brink of collapse, the tsarist regime responded to the crisis with its usual incompetence and obstinacy. Witte called it a ‘mixture of cowardice, blindness and stupidity’. The basic problem was that Nicholas himself remained totally oblivious to the extremity of the situation. While the country sank deeper into chaos he continued to fill his diary with terse and trivial notes on the weather, the company at tea and the number of birds he had shot that day. His advisers convinced him that foreign agents had been responsible for the demonstration on Bloody Sunday and he duly filled the prisons with suitable political suspects. A carefully picked delegation of ‘reliable’ workers was summoned to Tsarskoe Selo, where they were lined up like children to hear a short address from the Tsar, in which he blamed the workers for allowing themselves to be deceived by ‘foreign revolutionaries’ but promised to ‘forgive them their sins’ because he believed in their ‘unshakeable devotion’ to him. Meanwhile, the liberal Mirsky was replaced as Minister of the Interior by the decent but malleable A. G. Bulygin, who in effect took orders from his own deputy and chief of police, D. F. Trepov, a strict disciplinarian from the Horse Guards whom Nicholas liked for his straightforward, soldierly approach, and whom he had therefore allowed to become a dominant force at court. When Bulygin suggested that political concessions might be needed to calm the country, Nicholas was taken aback and told the Minister: ‘One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out.’ ‘Your Majesty,’ came the reply, ‘the revolution has already begun.’47
The remark must have been enough to make Nicholas a little uncomfortable, for he soon made promises of political reform. On 18 February he issued an Imperial Manifesto and Decree, which, while condemning the disorders, acknowledged the shortcomings of the bureaucracy and summoned the ‘well-meaning people of all estates’ to unite behind the throne and send in ideas for ‘improvements in the state organization’. Bulygin was instructed to draw up proposals for a national assembly. The Manifesto was a tactical manæuvre, its sole purpose to buy time; there was no sign that it came from the heart. The educated circles on the whole remained sceptical. ‘The main aim of this Manifesto’, Kerensky wrote to his parents on 18 February, ‘is to calm and silence the revolutionary movement that has just begun so that all the forces of the government can be consolidated for one purpose in the future: to prevent any of its promises from being delivered.’ Indeed it was typical of the Tsar’s obstinate adherence to the archaic principles of patrimonial autocracy that at such a moment he should have attempted to shift the blame for the crisis on to the bureaucracy while at the same time appealing to the direct bond between himself and his subjects. If the people had grievances, or so his Manifesto had implied, they should bring them directly to him and they would be satisfied.
And indeed in the following weeks tens of thousands of reform petitions were sent in to the Tsar from village assemblies, army regiments, towns and factories. Like the cahiers, the letters of grievance of 1789, they gave expression to the evolving language of political and social democracy. But their demands were far too radical for Nicholas. Most of them called for a national parliament with sovereign rights of legislation. Yet the sort of assembly which the Tsar had in mind — and which Bulygin finally presented for his signature on 6 August — was a purely consultative one elected on a limited franchise to ensure the domination of the nobles. This was to be a king’s parliament, like the Zemskii Sobor of the seventeeth century, which was compatible with the preservation of the Tsar’s own personal rule. Its main purpose, as Nicholas saw it, would be to inform him of his subjects’ needs and thus enable him to rule on their behalf without the mediation of the self-aggrandizing bureaucracy.48
