The Russian Revolution полностью

To the Kadets, the Duma was a battleground: with appeals to the “masses,” they meant to force the Crown to give up all power. Such doubts as sober-minded liberals may have entertained over the wisdom of a confrontational strategy were stilled by the spectacular victory which the Kadets won in the Duma elections. As the most radical party on the ballot, they attracted much of the vote that would have otherwise gone to the SRs and SDs: this created the illusion that they had become the principal national opposition party. With 179 out of 478 deputies, they emerged as the strongest group in the lower house: owing to the worker votes, they captured all the seats in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even so, they controlled only 37.4 percent of the seats; lacking an absolute majority, they needed allies. They could have sought them on the right, among conservative liberals. But determined to maintain a hold on the peasant and worker electorate, they turned leftward, to the agrarian socialists who had been elected as individual candidates and came to be collectively known as Laborites (Trudoviki).

Drunk with success, believing themselves to be on the eve of a second, decisive Revolution, the Kadets went on the offensive. Under the leadership of Miliukov, they expressed a willingness to join the cabinet but on one condition: that the Tsar agree to convoke a Constituent Assembly. As has been noted, Witte’s negotiations with liberal conservatives (Shipov, Guchkov, and others) also had had no issue.²⁰ The Crown would make several more attempts to bring liberals and liberal-conservatives into the cabinet, to be rebuffed each time. The stage was thus set for a parliamentary confrontation not over policies but over the very nature of Russia’s constitutional regime.

The Crown approached the opening of the Duma with trepidation but without a program. What actually transpired when the Duma convened exceeded its worst fears.

Nicholas had been assured by liberal bureaucrats that elections presented no threat to him because the provisions ensuring the preponderance of peasants would produce a cooperative Duma: it was the same mistake the French monarchy had committed in 1789 when it doubled the representation of the Third Estate in the Estates-General. Not all shared this optimism: Durnovo, the ex-Minister of the Interior and one of the most astute politicians in Russia, had cautioned that the majority of the deputies would be drawn from the radical rural “semi-intelligentsia,” who were eager to solidify their hold on the peasantry.²¹ Indeed, nearly one-half of the deputies to the First Duma were peasants, many of them of this type. And they turned out to be very different from the deferential muzhiki with whom the imagination of Slavophile conservatives populated Russia. Kryzhanovskii thus describes the revulsion that seized official circles at the sight of the hordes of peasant representatives who descended on St. Petersburg in the spring of 1906:

It was enough to take a look at the motley mob of “deputies”—and it was my lot to spend among them entire days in the corridors and the garden of Taurida Palace—to experience 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 St. Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and malice. If one were to assume that these individuals really represented the people and its “innermost aspirations,” then one would have been forced to concede that Russia could survive for at least one more century only by the force of external constraint, not by that of inner cohesion, and that enlightened absolutism was for her the sole salutary form of government. The attempt to found the political system on the will of the people was obviously doomed to failure because in this mass any consciousness of statehood, let alone of shared statehood, was totally submerged in social hostility and class envy: more correctly, such consciousness was entirely lacking. It was equally futile to place one’s hope in the intelligentsia and its cultural influence. In the Duma the intelligentsia was relatively weakly represented and it clearly yielded to the seething energy of the dark masses. It believed in the power of good words, it upheld ideals that were entirely alien and unnecessary for the masses, and its only role was to serve as a springboard for the Revolution. It could not act creatively.…

The attitude of the peasant Duma delegates toward their responsibilities was curious in the extreme. They brought with them petitioners on various matters: these they placed in the [deputies’] seats, from which Duma personnel had no little trouble evicting them. On one occasion, the police detained on a street adjacent to Taurida Palace two peasants who were selling entrance tickets to it: both turned out to be Duma deputies, of which fact the Chairman was duly apprised.