In this sense, Miliukov was correct to insist (against the advice of most of his Kadet colleagues) that Russia would not have a real constitution until the Tsar had specifically acknowledged one in the form of a new oath of allegiance. For until then Nicholas was bound to feel no real obligation to uphold the constitutional principles of his own Manifesto, and there was nothing the Duma could do to prevent him from returning to the old autocratic ways once the revolutionary crisis had passed. Indeed the Fundamental Laws were deliberately framed to fulfil the promises of the October Manifesto whilst preserving the Tsar’s prerogatives. They forced the new constitutional liberties into the old legal framework of the autocracy. The Tsar even explicitly retained the title of ‘Autocrat’, albeit only with the prefix ‘Supreme’ in place of the former ‘Unlimited’. Nicholas took this to mean business as usual. As he saw it, the limitations imposed by the Fundamental Laws applied only to the tsarist administration, not to his own rights of unfettered rule. Indeed, in so far as the bureaucracy was viewed as a ‘wall’ between himself and the people, he could even comfort himself with the thought that the reforms would strengthen his personal powers.
And the Tsar held most of the trump cards in the post-1905 system. He was the supreme commander of the armed services and retained the exclusive right to declare war and to make peace. He could dissolve the Duma, and did so twice when its conduct failed to please him. According to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws he could also legislate by emergency decree when the Duma was not in session, and his government used this loophole to bypass parliamentary opposition. The Duma Electoral Law established an indirect system of voting by estates heavily weighted in favour of the crown’s traditional allies, the nobility and the peasants (still quite mistakenly assumed to be monarchists at heart). The government (the Council of Ministers) was appointed exclusively by the Tsar, while the Duma had a veto over its bills. But there was no effective parliamentary sanction against the abuses of the executive, which remained subordinate to the crown (as in the German system) rather than to parliament (as in the English). There was nothing the Duma could do, for example, to prevent the government from subsidizing Rightist newspapers and organizations, which were known to incite pogroms and which even tried to assassinate prominent liberal Duma leaders. The Ministry of the Interior and the police, both of which retained close ties with the court, were quite beyond the Duma’s control. Thanks to their sweeping and arbitrary powers, the civil rights and freedoms contained in the October Manifesto remained little more than empty promises. Indeed there is no more accurate reflection of the Duma’s true position than the fact that whenever it met in the Tauride Palace a group of plain-clothes policemen could be seen on the pavement outside waiting for those deputies to emerge whom they had been assigned to follow and keep under surveillance.2
The Duma was a legislative parliament. Yet it could not enact its own laws. Its legislative proposals could not become effective until they received the endorsement of both the Tsar and the State Council, an old consultative assembly of mostly reactionary nobles, half of them elected by the zemstvos, half of them appointed by the Tsar, which was transformed into the upper house, with equal legislative powers to the Duma itself, by a statute of February 1906. The State Council met in the splendid hall of the Marinsky Palace. Its elderly members, most of them retired bureaucrats and generals, sat (or dozed) in its comfortable velvet armchairs whilst stately footmen in white livery moved silently about serving tea and coffee. The State Council was more like an English gentleman’s club than a parliamentary chamber (since it emulated the House of Lords this was perhaps a mark of its success). Its debates were not exactly heated since most of the councillors shared the same royalist attitudes, while some of the octogenarians — of which there were more than a few — had clearly lost most of their critical faculties. At the end of one debate, for example, a General Stürler announced that he intended to vote with the majority. When it was explained to him that no majority had yet been formed since the voting had only just begun, he replied with irritation: ‘I still insist that I am with the majority!’ Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to present the State Council as either ridiculous or benign. The domination of the United Nobility — to which one-third of the councillors belonged — ensured that it would act as a force of reaction, and it voted down all the liberal Duma bills. It was not for nothing that the State Council became known as the ‘graveyard of Duma hopes’.3
