Although in the eyes of many contemporaries and historians the unilateral change in the franchise announced on June 3, 1907, amounted to nothing less than a coup d’état, in the eyes of the government it represented a compromise, an alternative to the abolition of the Duma. Using the draft which he had prepared for Goremykin, Kryzhanovskii wrote three proposals that substantially altered the franchise as well as certain provisions of the Fundamental Laws for the purpose of ensuring greater legislative authority for the Crown.
The formal pretext for dissolving the Second Duma was the charge that some of its Social-Democratic deputies had plotted to incite mutiny in the St. Petersburg garrison. Stolypin has been accused then and since of provoking the incident, but in fact the conspiracy had been uncovered by police agents who had caught the SDs meeting secretly in the home of one of their deputies with representatives of military and naval units belonging to revolutionary circles.81 With this evidence in hand, Stolypin appeared before the Duma and requested that the parliamentary immunity of all the SD deputies be lifted so that the accused could be turned over to a court. The Duma agreed to suspend the immunity only of those deputies against whom there existed concrete evidence of sedition. Stolypin would have preferred to dissolve the Duma and order new elections, but he came under irresistible pressure from the Court to revise the Duma’s electoral procedures.* The Second Duma was dissolved on June 2, 1907.
The new electoral law, made public the next day, unquestionably violated the constitution, which forbade using Article 87 to “introduce changes … in the provisions for elections to the [State] Council or Duma.” That much even Kryzhanovskii conceded.82 To get around this limitation, the change in the franchise was decreed by Imperial Manifesto, a law issued on matters of urgent state importance. This procedure was justified on the grounds that since the Tsar had not sworn an oath to observe the new Fundamental Laws, he was free to revise them at will.83 The new law favored the propertied classes by using assets rather than legal status as the criterion of franchise. The representation of industrial workers and national minorities was sharply reduced. Disappointed with the behavior of communal peasants in the first two Dumas, the government also cut down their share of the seats. As a result of these changes, the representation of landowners (a category which included many peasant proprietors) increased by one-half while that of communal peasants and workers fell by one-half. The result was a more conservative and ethnically more Great Russian body.
The term “coup d’état,” often applied in the polemical and historical literature to the change of the electoral law on June 3, 1907, is hardly justified. After all, the Duma continued to function, retaining the legislative and budgetary powers granted it in the Fundamental Laws: the Manifesto of June 3 explicitly reconfirmed the Duma’s prerogatives. In the years that followed the Duma would give the government a great deal of trouble. Only the outright abolition of the lower house or the abrogation of its legislative powers would have qualified as a coup. June 3 is more properly viewed as a violation of the constitution. It was in the Russian tradition of integrating every independent political institution into the state system.
The Third Duma, convened on November 1, 1907, was the only one to be permitted the normal five-year span. As intended, the new body was much more conservative than its predecessors: of the 422 deputies, 154 belonged to the Party of the 17th of October, and 147 to right-wing and nationalist groupings. This representation assured the conservatives of a two-thirds majority. The Kadets were whittled down to 54 seats; associated with them were 28 Progressives. The socialists had 32 deputies (19 Social-Democrats and 13 Trudoviki). Although the government could feel much more comfortable with a legislature in which conservatives had such preponderance, it did not enjoy automatic majorities: Stolypin had to engage in a great deal of political maneuvering to secure passage for some of his bills. Ministers were frequently called to account and on occasion the government failed to have its way.
The Octobrists, who dominated the Third Duma as the Kadets had dominated the First and the socialists the Second, were committed to the existing constitutional arrangement. They defined their task as follows:
to create in the Duma a constitutional center, not aiming to seize governmental power, but at the same time, determined to defend the rights of the people’s representative assembly within the limits laid down for it in the Fundamental Laws.84
