Some deputies immediately began to carry on revolutionary propaganda in the factories, to organize street demonstrations, to incite the mobs against the police, and so on. During one such demonstration on Ligovka, the leader of a brawling mob, one Mikhailichenko, a deputy representing the miners of the Urals, was beaten up. He showed up the next day in the Duma and participated in the discussion of this incident with a face so heavily bandaged that only his nose and eyes were visible. Peasant deputies got drunk in taverns and engaged in brawls: when attempts were made to have them arrested, they claimed personal immunity. The police were at first very confused, uncertain what they could and could not do in such cases. In one such incident, the doubts were resolved by an old woman, the tavern owner, who, in response to a drunken deputy’s claim of inviolability, gave him a thrashing, shouting: “For me, you are quite violable, you SOB,” following which she threw him out.… There were grand ceremonies at the burial of one Duma deputy, whose name escapes me, who had died of delirium tremens: in one funeral speech he was referred to as a “fighter fallen on the field of honor.”
Following their arrival [in St. Petersburg], some deputies were sentenced by
On the opening day of the Duma, the Tsar received the deputies in a solemn session at the Winter Palace and delivered an address in which he promised to respect the new order. The Duma, on a Kadet motion, responded with a revolutionary challenge, approved by all but five deputies. It demanded the abolition of the upper chamber, the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, compulsory expropriations of certain landed properties, and amnesty for political prisoners, including those sentenced for terrorist crimes. When the Court, having gotten wind of the Duma’s response, refused to receive the Duma deputation sent to present it, the Duma passed with virtual unanimity a vote of no confidence in the cabinet coupled with a demand that it yield to a ministry chosen by itself.23
This behavior threw the government, accustomed to conducting its affairs with utmost decorum, into disarray. The security services were especially alarmed, fearing the inflammatory effect of Duma rhetoric on the countryside. According to one police official, the very existence of a constitutional regime confused the peasants. Unable to figure out why the authorities allowed Duma deputies to demand changes in the system of government while punishing private persons for making similar demands, they concluded that the Duma’s “revolutionary propaganda was carried out with the approval and even encouragement of the government.”24 Given that the prestige of the government among the peasants had declined anyway from the loss of the war with Japan and its inability to suppress the Socialist-Revolutionary terror, the police had reason to fear losing control of the villages.
In these circumstances, the Court decided on dissolution. As soon as they learned of this decision, the Kadets and other left-of-center deputies wanted to stage a sit-in, but they had to give up this plan because the government had the Duma surrounded by troops. The dissolution order may have violated the spirit of the Fundamental Laws but it was certainly legitimate. Nevertheless, the Kadets and some of their associates saw it as an opportunity to throw down the revolutionary gauntlet. Adjourning to nearby Vyborg, a Finnish city outside the reach of the Russian police, they issued an appeal to the citizens of Russia to refuse paying taxes and providing recruits. The protest was both unconstitutional and futile. The country ignored the Vyborg Manifesto, and its only consequence was to bar the signatories, among whom were many leading liberals, from running in future elections.
Thus, the overconfident liberals lost the opening skirmish in the war they had declared on the constitutional monarchy.
The October Manifesto had mollified the moderate, liberal-conservative opposition, but neither the liberal-radical nor the socialist politicians. The latter regarded it as merely a preliminary concession: the Revolution had to continue until total victory. Under the incitement of left-of-center intellectuals, the violence in the country went on unabated, evoking from the right a counterterror in the form of pogroms against students and Jews.
