Time was running out. Information reaching political leaders in Moscow and Petrograd (and corroborated confidentially, as we now know, by the police) indicated that the economic hardships of the urban population could any day explode in mass unrest. If such unrest was to be prevented, the Duma had to seize power and do so soon. There was not a moment to lose: if riots broke out before it took charge, the Duma, too, could be swept aside. This imperative—the perceived need to act before the outburst of popular fury—lay behind the irresponsible and, indeed, dishonorable conduct of the opposition leaders in late 1916. They felt they were racing against the clock: the question was no longer whether a revolution would occur, but when and in what form—from above, as a coup d’état directed by themselves, or from below, as a spontaneous and uncontrollable mass revolt.61
In September and October the main opposition parties, meeting at first separately and then jointly, as the Progressive Bloc, held secret conferences to devise a strategy for the forthcoming Duma session. Their mood was unyielding: the government had to surrender power. This time there would be no temporizing and no compromises.
The driving force behind this revolutionary challenge was the Constitutional-Democratic Party. At the meeting of its Central Committee on September 30-October 1, complaints were heard that the party had lost contact with the country because it no longer behaved like an opposition. The Left Kadets wanted to launch a “merciless war” against the government, even at the risk of provoking the Duma’s dissolution.62 The Kadet Party formally adopted the strategy of confrontation at a conference on October 22–24. Thanks to the information supplied by police agents,63 we are well informed of the proceedings of this meeting, perhaps the most consequential in the party’s history. Miliukov came under attack for being too cautious and too eager to maintain the legitimacy of the party in the eyes of the authorities. The country was lurching to the left and unless the Kadets followed suit they would lose influence. Some of the provincial delegates, who were more radical than the party’s Duma deputies, thought it a mistake even to waste time on parliamentary debates: they preferred that the party appeal directly to the “masses”—that is, engage in revolutionary agitation as the Union of Liberation and the Union of Unions had done in 1904–5. Prince P. D. Dolgorukov thought that the moderate Miliukov retained his position as the party’s leader only because there was still hope that the government would dismiss Stürmer: should it refuse to do so and send the Duma packing, Miliukov would be finished. It was the last chance to confront the government in parliament.64 Colonel A. P. Martynov, the outstanding chief of the Moscow Okhrana, passed to his superiors the information gathered by agents at the Kadet conference, along with personal comments. In his opinion, the thrust of the Kadets’ strategy lay in the resolution which spoke of the necessity of “maintaining contact with the broad masses of the population and organizing the country’s democratic elements for the purpose of neutralizing the common danger.” He added that the Kadets were terrified of a revolution breaking out either now or after the war, when the country would face problems beyond the government’s ability to solve.65
To force the government to capitulate, the Kadets adopted the riskiest course imaginable: it was so out of character for a party which prided itself on respect for law and due process that it can only be explained by a mood of panic. The party resolved publicly to charge the Prime Minister with high treason. There was not a shred of evidence to support this accusation, and the Kadets well knew this to be the case. Stürmer was a reactionary bureaucrat, ill qualified to head the Russian government, but he had committed nothing remotely resembling treason. Rumors of treason, however, were so rife in the rear and at the front that they decided to exploit them for their own ends, playing on the Prime Minister’s German surname.*
The Kadets coordinated their plan with the other parties in the Progressive Bloc. On October 25, the bloc agreed on a common platform: to demand the dismissal of Stürmer, to call for the repeal of laws issued under Article 87, and “to emphasize rumors that the right was striving for a separate peace.”66
The opposition leaders thus set out on a collision course from which there was no retreat: they would confront the Crown with a revolutionary challenge.
