And yet on that first day, when the Duma deputies took their seats in the Tauride Palace, there was nothing but hope in their hearts. Seated on the Kadet benches, Obolensky found himself next to Prince Lvov, who was ‘full of optimism’ about the new parliamentary era. ‘Don’t believe the rumours that the government will close us down,’ Lvov told him with confidence. ‘You’ll see everything will be all right. I know from the best sources that the government is ready to make concessions.’4 Most of the Duma members shared his naive faith that Russia had at last won its ‘House of Commons’ and would now move towards joining the club of Western liberal parliamentary states. The time for tyrants was passing. Tomorrow belonged to the people. This was the ‘Duma of National Hopes’.
No one believed that the Tsar would dare to dissolve the Duma and risk a storm of criticism from the liberal public at home and abroad. It was confidently assumed that Russia’s dependence on Western finance, renewed in 1906 with the biggest foreign loan in its history, would force him to retain the liberal structure of the state. That Nicholas despised ‘public opinion’, and had no legal obligation to respect it, was forgotten. So too was the fact that Witte, the architect of the new parliamentary order, had just been replaced by Ivan Goremykin, an old-fashioned reactionary and favourite of the court who regarded the Duma as an unnecessary obstacle to his government. The young parliamentarians innocently believed that, so long as they had ‘the people’ behind them, they would be able to force the Tsar to concede a fully sovereign parliament. Russia would follow the path of France after 1789, from the Estates-General to the Constituent Assembly.
The Tauride Palace was the birthplace, the citadel and the burial ground of Russian democracy. Until February 1917 it was the seat of the Duma. During the first weeks of the revolution it housed both the Provisional Government (which moved to the Marinsky Palace on 7 March) and the Petrograd Soviet (which moved to the Smolny Institute in July). Then, for a day, 6 January 1918, it played host to the first fully democratic parliament in Russia’s history — the Constituent Assembly — until it was closed down by the Bolsheviks. No other building on Russian soil has ever been the scene of such turbulent political drama. How incongruous, then, that the palace should have been so graceful and serene. It was built in 1783 by Catherine the Great for one of her favourites, Grigorii Potemkin, who assumed the title of Prince of Tauride after his conquest of the Crimea. Designed in the style of a pantheon, decorated with Doric pillars and classical statues, it was a peaceful suburban refuge from the noise of the capital and was surrounded by its own private park and lakes. The Catherine Hall, where the deputies assembled, had semi-circular rows of seats and a dais at one end bearing Repin’s portrait of Nicholas II. Behind the dais were three large bay windows looking out on to a landscaped vista that could have been painted by Watteau.
To this elegant palace the peasant Duma deputies brought the political culture of their village barns. ‘It was enough to take a look at this motley mob of “deputies” ’, remarked one shocked senior official, ‘to feel horror at the sight of Russia’s first representative body. It was a gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian Land had sent to Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it.’ Hundreds of peasant petitioners came to the Tauride Palace from every corner of Russia: some to appeal about a decision of their local court; some to complain about their taxes; others simply to check up on the activities of their elected delegates. Sergei Semenov found himself among them. He had been sent by a meeting of the peasants in his volost of Andreevskoe with a mandate on the land reforms which, as he recalled, ‘I was supposed to make sure the Duma passed.’ The musty smell of the peasants’ cheap tobacco and their farmyard clothes filled the long corridors of the palace. The floors were covered with the chewed husks of their sunflower seeds, which they spat out regardless of public notices that most of them could not read. Some peasant deputies got drunk in taverns, became involved in brawls, and when attempts were made to arrest them claimed immunity as Duma members. Two were even found selling ‘entrance tickets’ to the Tauride Palace. It turned out that they had been convicted for petty thefts and swindles, for which they should have been disqualified from standing for election.5
