with the outside world cut off; until at last the government Constitutional mandate of October 17/30, 1905. was forced to yield, and on the 17/30th of October 1905 the tsar issued the famous manifesto manifesto promising to Russia a constitution based on the main principles of modern Liberalism: national representation, freedom of conscience and opinion, guarantees for individual liberty.
The enormous programme of constitutional reform foreshadowed in the manifesto had to be elaborated in haste by Count Witte, the minister of the interior, under circumstances by no means promising. The organs of government seemed paralysed by the repudiation of the principle on which their authority was based, and the empire to be in danger of falling into complete anarchy. The revolutionary terrorists took advantage of the situation to multiply outrages; popular agitation was fomented by a multitude of new journals preaching every kind of extravagant doctrine, now that the censor no The “Union of the Russian People.” longer dared to act; in December the trouble culminated in a formidable rising in Moscow. The revolutionary terrorists were countered by the terrorists of the reaction who, under the name of “the Union of the Russian People,” began an organized extermination of the elements supposed to be hostile to the traditional regime. The “black band” (chernaya sotnia), or “black hundreds,” as they were branded by public opinion, directed their attacks especially against the Jews, and pogroms,[1] i.e. organized wholesale robbery and murder of Jews, occurred in many places, it was believed with the connivance of the police and veiled approval in exalted quarters.
Meanwhile the political parties which were to divide the new Duma had taken shape. Apart from the extremists on Development of political parties. one side or the other, frank reactionaries on the Right and Socialists on the Left, two main divisions of opinion revealed themselves in the congresses of the zemstvos that met at Moscow in September and November. In the former there had been a fusion between the Radicals, supporters of the autonomy of Poland and a federal constitution for the empire, and the Independence party (Osvobozhdenya) formed by political exiles at Paris in 1903, the fusion taking the name of Constitutional Democrats, known (from a word-play on the initials K.D.) as “Cadets.” The more moderate elements found a rallying cry in the manifesto of October, took the name of “the Party of 17 October,” and became known as “Octobrists” In the zemstvo congress of November the “Cadets” protested against the “grant” of a constitution already elaborated, and demanded the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. The Octobrists, on the other hand, supported Count Witte's moderate programme, the most important provisions of which were the extension (11 December 1905) of the suffrage under the stillborn constitution of August, and (20 February 1906) the reorganization of the Duma as the Lower House, and of the Imperial Council (half of which was to be elective) as the Upper House[2] in the new parliament.
The elections were held in March 1906, and on the 27th of April the emperor Nicholas II. solemnly opened the first Duma The first Duma. of the Empire. The “Cadets” commanded an overwhelming majority in the Lower House, and their intractable temper and ignorance of affairs became at once apparent. The address in reply to the speech from the throne, voted after a debate in which abstract theories had triumphed over common sense, demanded universal suffrage, the establishment of pure parliamentary government, the abolition of capital punishment, the expropriation of the landlords, a political amnesty, and the suppression of the Imperial Council. When the minister of the interior, M. Goremykin, who had succeeded Witte at the head of the government, met these preposterous demands with a flat refusal, the House voted, on the motion of M. Kuzmin-Karaviev, for an appeal to the people (July 4).[3] Four days later the government dissolved the Duma, M. Goremykin at the same time being replaced by M. Stolypin. The “Cadets” refused to accept this action and, in imitation of the famous meeting in the tennis-court at Versailles, The Vyborg manifesto. adjourned to Vyborg in Finland, where, under the ex-president of the Duma, M. Muromtsov, they drew up and issued a manifesto calling on the Russian people to refuse taxes and military service. Its sole result, apart from the punishment which afterwards fell on its authors,[4] was to show how little the majority of the dissolved Duma had represented the Russian people. Isolated mutinies in the army followed, and terrorist outrages here and there—notably, in August, the dastardly bomb outrage in the Isle of Apothecaries at St Petersburg, which seriously injured one of M. Stolypin's little daughters; but the mass of the nation and of the army remained wholly unmoved, while the repetition of troubles was made more difficult by the establishment of field courts martial with summary powers.
The second Duma met on the 6th of March 1907. M. Stolypin had not ventured to alter the electoral law without parliamentary The second Duma. consent, but with the aid of a complaisant Senate the provisions of the existing law were interpreted in restrictive sense for the purpose of influencing the elections. The result was, however, hardly more satisfactory to the government. The “Cadets,” it is true, lost many seats both to the Socialists and to the extreme Right, but they held the balance of the House, of which the Octobrists and the Right together only constituted one-fifth, and their leader, M. Golovin, was elected president of the House. The temper of the second Duma, was, indeed, even more democratic than that of the first; but M. Stolypin did his best to work in harmony with it, realizing that under the existing law another dissolution could but lead to a like result, and shrinking from the only alternative—an alteration of the law by a coup d'état, a course which could only be justified on the plea of extreme necessity. On the 19th of March he laid before the House his programme of reforms, which included the emancipation of the peasants from the control of the communes and the handing over to them of the crown lands and imperial estates. The majority, however, refused to be reconciled. The abolition of the field courts martial was demanded; on the 13th of April a bill for the expropriation of landlords was carried by a two-thirds majority,[5] and the 30th the Army Bill would have been lost but for the Polish vote. The crisis came with the discovery of a treasonable plot for the subornation of the army, in which many Socialist members of the Duma were involved. On the 14th of June Stolypin's proposal for the arrest of 16 members and the indictment of 55 was shelved by being referred to a committee. Alteration by ukaz of the electoral law. The excuse for which the government had been waiting was thus provided, and two days later the Duma was dissolved. An imperial ukaz fixed the new elections of the for the 14th of September, and the meeting of the third Duma for the 14th of November; at the same time, in violation of the October manifesto, the electoral law was altered, so as to secure a representation at once more Russian and more conservative. The non-Russian frontier provinces (okrainas) had even before been under-represented (one member for every 350,000 inhabitants, as against one for every 250,000 in the central provinces); the members returned by Poland, the Caucasus and Siberia were now reduced from 89 to 39, those from the Central Asian steppes (25) were swept away altogether; the total number of deputies was reduced from 524 to 442. Even more drastic were the changes in the electoral machinery, by far the most complicated in Europe, established by the law of 1905.[6] This was based on the principle of indirect
- ↑ Pogrom = pillage, destruction.
- ↑ See the section Government and Administration, above.
- ↑ Of this M. Chasles remarks that it would have been a revolutionary act even in republican France.
- ↑ They were condemned in 1907 to three months' imprisonment and loss of civil rights.
- ↑ This was reversed, on the 8th of June, by 238 votes to 191, after a patient exposition by M. Stolypin of the fact that there was plenty of land in Russia for the peasants without any attack on private property.
- ↑ The electoral law covers 107 octavo pages.
