Unbeknownst to him, however, a backstage intrigue was set in motion. Several members of the State Council, led by Vladimir Trepov, organized, with the help of Durnovo, opposition to Stolypin. The bill’s opponents charged that by offering the Poles a separate electoral chamber Stolypin institutionalized ethnic particularism, thus violating the traditional “Imperial” character of Russian legislation. Witte, one of the bill’s most vociferous opponents, argued that “under the flag of patriotism they are striving to create in the western land a local oligarchy in place of tsarist authority.”99 But the true purpose of the camarilla was to bring down Stolypin.
Trepov and Durnovo asked for private audiences with the Tsar. After they had laid before him their objections, Nicholas agreed to release the right-wing deputies in the State Council from having to follow the government’s recommendation: they could vote as their conscience dictated.100 In giving them this freedom, Nicholas neither sought the advice of his Prime Minister nor informed him of it. Stolypin, therefore, had no cause for apprehension when he appeared in the State Council on March 4 to witness the final vote on his bill. Many of the deputies who would have voted for it if the Tsar had instructed them to do so now felt free to cast negative ballots. As a consequence, the bill’s key clause, with the controversial proposal for two electoral chambers, one for Russians, the other for Poles and the other ethnic groups, went down in defeat, 92–68. Stunned, Stolypin stalked out of the Council chamber.
He could be under no illusion: the incident was a vote of no confidence in him, ostensibly cast by the upper chamber but in fact engineered by the Imperial Court. Furious, he decided to force the Tsar to reveal his hand. The next day, he submitted his resignation. Nicholas rejected it and urged Stolypin to reconsider. Why not resubmit the bill to the Duma and the State Council, he suggested, implying that on the next round he would ask that it be supported. Stolypin refused. When the Tsar asked what he would like him to do, he requested that both houses be prorogued long enough to allow the bill to be enacted under Article 87.* He further asked that Trepov and Durnovo be exiled from St. Petersburg.
Nicholas pondered Stolypin’s request for four days, and then granted it. On March 12, both chambers were prorogued until March 15. Having learned of this decision, the State Council quickly took a vote on the entire bill, which resulted in its being rejected by the overwhelming majority of 134–23.101 On March 14 the western
Stolypin’s precipitate action had disastrous consequences, alienating from him all political parties.102 When he appeared before the Duma to justify his actions, he had virtually no supporters. The press condemned him; so did high society. Guchkov resigned in protest as head of the Octobrist Party: the cooperation between Stolypin and the Octobrists, which had proved so constructive in the first two years of the Third Duma, now came to an end. Last, but not least, Stolypin incurred the enmity of the Tsar, who never forgave anyone for humiliating him: and that Stolypin had done so was clear to public opinion, which realized full well that in proroguing the Duma and exiling Durnovo and Trepov the Tsar had acted under duress.103 In official circles it was said at this time that Nicholas had made up his mind to be rid of Stolypin, and that his days as Prime Minister were numbered.104 Isolated and spurned, he became, in the words of Kokovtsov, “a completely changed man”105—brooding and irritable where he had been supremely self-confident and magnanimous.
The Empress Dowager Marie, the mother of Nicholas II, who had always urged him to come to terms with society and favored liberal officials, shared with Kokovtsov her sense of despair at these developments:
My poor son, how little luck he has with people. Someone turns up whom no one here knew, but who proves to be intelligent and energetic, and manages to restore order after the horrors which we had gone through nearly six years ago. And now this man is being pushed into the abyss. And by whom? By those who claim to love the Tsar and Russia, and in reality are destroying him and the Fatherland.… How dreadful!106
