To the government’s dismay, the Second Duma, which opened on February 20, 1907, was even more radical than the First, for the SRs and the SDs had now abandoned the boycott. The socialists had 222 deputies (of them, 65 SDs, 37 SRs, 16 Popular Socialists, and 104 Trudoviki, affiliated with the SRs): they outweighed right-wing deputies by a ratio of two to one. The Kadets, tempered by the failure of their previous tactics, were prepared to behave more responsibly, but their representation was cut by nearly one-half (from 179 to 98) and the opposition was dominated by the socialists, who had no intention of pursuing legislative work. The SRs had resolved in November 1906 to participate in the elections in order to “utilize the State Duma for organizing and revolutionizing the masses.”74 The Social-Democrats at the Fourth (Stockholm) Congress, held in April 1907, agreed to commit themselves “to exploiting systematically all conflicts between the government and the Duma as well as within the Duma itself for the purpose of broadening and deepening the revolutionary movement.” The congress instructed the Social-Democratic faction to create a mass movement that would topple the existing order by “exposing all the bourgeois parties,” making the masses aware of the futility of the Duma, and insisting on the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.75 The socialists thus entered the Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work and disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity.
To make matters still worse from the government’s point of view, Orthodox priests elected to the Duma, usually by peasants, shunned the conservative parties, preferring to sit in the center; several joined the socialists.
The Second Duma had barely begun its deliberations when in high circles it was whispered that the Duma was incapable of constructive work and should be abolished or at least thoroughly revamped. Fedor Golovin, the chairman of the Second Duma, remembered Nicholas speaking to him in this vein in March or April 1907.76 The outright abolition of the Duma, however, proved impractical for political as well as economic reasons.
The political argument in favor of retaining a parliamentary body has been mentioned earlier: it was the need of the bureaucracy for a representative body with which to share the blame for the country’s ills.
The economic argument had to do with international banking. A prominent French financier informed Kokovtsov that the dissolution of the First Duma had struck French financial markets like a “bolt of lightning.”77 Later, in 1917, Kokovtsov explained the close relationship which had existed under tsarism between parliamentary government and Russia’s standing in international credit markets. The market price of the Russian state loan of 1906 sunk rapidly after the dissolution of the First Duma. When rumors spread that the Second Duma was to suffer a similar fate, Russian obligations with a face value of 100 dropped from 88 to 69, or by 21 percent.78 Experience thus strongly suggested that the liquidation of the Duma would have had a disastrous effect on Russia’s ability to raise foreign loans at acceptable interest rates.
Stolypin was prepared to keep on dissolving Dumas and calling for new elections as long as necessary: he confided to a friend that he would emulate the Prussian Crown which had once dissolved parliament seven times in succession to gain its ends.79 But this procedure was unacceptable to the Court. Reluctantly giving up its preference for outright abolition of the lower chamber, the Court ordered a revision of the electoral law to ensure a more conservative Duma.
It is known from the recollections of Kryzhanovskii that while the First Duma was still in session, Goremykin had submitted to the Tsar a memorandum complaining of the “failure” of the elections and criticizing the revisions in the franchise originally devised for the Bulygin Duma which had the result of giving the vote to workers and greatly increasing peasant representation. Nicholas shared Goremykin’s view. Early in May 1906, certainly with the Tsar’s authorization, Goremykin requested Kryzhanovskii to draft a new electoral law which, without disenfranchising any one group or altering the basic constitutional functions of the Duma, would make it more cooperative. Kryzhanovskii’s hastily drawn-up proposal was submitted to the Tsar later that month but it had no issue, possibly because the prospect of having Stolypin take over as Prime Minister aroused hopes that he would know how to cope with the second Duma.80
Now that these hopes were dashed, Stolypin asked Kryzhanovskii to devise a change in the electoral law which would enhance the representation of “wealthier” and “more cultured” elements.
