From this point on it could only be a matter of time before the Duma was dissolved. A battle of nerves ensued as the parliamentarians continued to show their defiance in a series of radical speeches from the tribune of the Tauride Palace. The tension was such that many deputies later claimed to have lost weight in these weeks, though the hot June weather probably helped. From the government’s point of view, the revolutionary mood in the country was still a threat — the peasant war on the manors had revived in the spring with a ferocity equal to the previous autumn’s, while the SR terrorist campaign had still not been quelled — and the Duma’s militant stance was bound to encourage it.
The crux of the matter was the Duma’s determination to appease the peasants with radical land reform. Both the Kadets and the Trudoviks were loudly advocating the compulsory expropriation of all the gentry’s surplus land (the former with compensation and the latter without). There had been a time, during the ‘Great Fear’ of 1905, when many landowners might have been prepared to accept some form of expropriation in order to save their skins. ‘If we do not make some concessions,’ one besieged squire had argued before his local council of nobles, ‘the revolution will come from below and fires will flare up everywhere from one end of the country to the other.’ Even Trepov had once said to Witte: ‘I myself am a landowner and I would be glad to relinquish half of my land if I were convinced that under these conditions I could keep the remainder.’ But as the revolutionary tide receded, the landowners became less inclined to compromise. The Tsar spoke for them when he said, ‘What belongs to the landowner belongs to him.’ The provincial zemstvos, once strongholds of the liberal opposition, now became bastions of law and order. The United Nobility, which was formed to defend property rights, had powerful supporters in the court, the State Council and the Civil Service. It led the campaign against the Duma’s reform proposals on the grounds that granting additional land to the peasants would not help solve their problems, since these were caused by the inefficiencies of the communal system and not by the shortage of land. The argument was strongly coloured by recent experience: having always viewed the commune as the bulwark of the old rural order, these conservatives had learned in 1905 that it could easily become the organizing mechanism of the peasant revolution. ‘In other countries there is much less land per capita than in Russia,’ declared Prince A. P. Urusov to a meeting of landowners in May 1906, ‘yet there is no talk of land shortage because the concept of property is clear in the minds of the people. But we have the commune — which is to say that the principle of socialism has destroyed this concept. The result is that nowhere else do we see such unceremonious destruction of property as we see in Russia.’8 The abolition of the commune and the creation of a peasant landowning class were now seized upon by the gentry as an alternative to the Duma’s radical land reform.
