complicated provisions for interpellation, that is, questioning of ministers by the Duma. Furthermore, the State Council, which had functioned since its creation by Alexander I as an advisory body of dignitaries, became rather unexpectedly the upper legislative chamber, equal in rights and prerogatives to the Duma and meant obviously as a conservative counterweight to it. 'No more than half' of the membership of the upper house was to be appointed by the emperor - appointed not even for life but by means of annual lists - and the other half elected by the following groups: 56 with very high property standing by the provincial zemstva, 18 by the gentry, 12 by commerce and industry, 6 by the clergy, 6 by the Academy of Sciences and the universities, and 2 by the Finnish Diet.
Whereas the Fundamental Laws introduced numerous restrictions on the position and powers of the Duma, the electoral law emphasized its representative character. The electoral system, despite its complexities and limitations, such as the grouping of the electorate on a social basis, indirect elections, especially in the case of the peasants, and a gross underrepresen-tation of urban inhabitants, allowed almost all Russian men to participate in the elections to the Duma, thus transforming overnight the empire of the tsars from a country with no popular representation to one which practiced virtually universal manhood suffrage. The relatively democratic nature of the electoral law resulted partly from Witte's decision in December 1905, at the time when the law received its final formulation, to make concessions to the popular mood. More significantly, it reflected the common assumption in government circles that the peasants, the simple Russian people, would vote for their tsar and for the Right. After a free election, the First Duma convened on May 10, 1906.
Contrary to its sanguine expectations, the government had suffered a decisive electoral defeat. According to Walsh, the 497 members of the First Duma could be classified as follows: 45 deputies belonged to parties
of the Right; 32 belonged to various national and religious groups, for example, the Poles and the Moslems; 184 were Cadets; 124 were representatives of different groups of the Left; and 112 had no party affiliation. The Cadets with 38 per cent of the deputies thus emerged as the strongest political party in the Duma, and they had the added advantage of an able and articulate leadership well-versed in parliamentary procedure. Those to the Left of the Cadets, on the other hand, lacked unity and organization and wanted mainly to fight against the regime, purely and simply. The cause of the Left in the First Duma had been injured by the fact that both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats had largely boycotted the election to the Duma. The deputies with no political affiliation were mostly peasants who refused to align themselves permanently with any of the political groupings, but belonged in a general sense to the opposition. The government received support only from the relatively few members of the unregenerate Right and also from the more moderate Octobrists. The Octobrists, as their name indicates, split from the Cadets over the October Manifesto, which they accepted as a proper basis for Russian constitutionalism, while the Cadets chose to consider it as the first step on the road to a more democratic system.
Not surprisingly, the government and the Duma could not work together. The emperor and his ministers clearly intended the Duma to occupy a position subordinate to their own, and they further infuriated many deputies by openly favoring the extreme Right. The Duma, in its turn, also proved quite intractable. The Left wanted merely to oppose and obstruct. The Cadets, while much more moderate and constructive, seem to have overplayed their hand: they demanded a constituent assembly, they considered the First Duma to be, in a sense, the Estates- General of 1789, and they objected to the Fundamental Laws, thus in effect telling the government to abdicate. Similarly, while they insisted on a political amnesty, they refused to proclaim their opposition to terrorism, lest their associates to the Left be offended. But the most serious clash came over the issue of land: the Duma wanted to distribute to the peasants the state, imperial family, and Church lands, as well as the estates of landlords in excess of a certain maximum, compensating the landlords; the government proclaimed alienation of private land inadmissible, even with compensation. The imperial regime continued to the last to stand on the side of the landlords. After seventy-three days and forty essentially fruitless sessions, Nicholas II dissolved the First Duma.
The dissolution had a strange sequel. Some two hundred Duma deputies, over half of them Cadets, met in the Finnish town of Viborg and signed a manifesto that denounced the government and called for passive resistance by the people. It urged them not to pay taxes or answer the draft call until the convocation of a new Duma. Although the Viborg Manifesto cited as
its justification certain irregularities in the dissolution of the First Duma, in itself it constituted a rash and unconstitutional step. And it turned out to be a blunder as well, for the country failed to respond. The Viborg participants were sentenced to three months in jail. More important, they lost the right to stand for election to the Second Duma which was thus deprived of much of its potential leadership.
In contrast to the first election, the government exerted all possible pressure to obtain favorable results in the election to the Second Duma, and it was assisted by the fact that much of Russia remained in a state of emergency. But the results again disappointed the emperor and his associates. Although - as one authoritative calculation has it - the Duma opposition, including mainly the Cadets and the Left, might have declined from 69 to 68 per cent of the total number of deputies, it also became more extreme. In fact, a polarization of political opinion, with both wings gaining at the expense of the center, constituted the most striking aspect of the election. More specifically, the Cadet representation declined from 184 to 99 deputies, while the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who this time participated fully in the election, gained respectively 64 and 20 seats. The entire Left membership in the Duma rose from 124 to 216 deputies. Significantly, the Duma personnel underwent a sweeping change, with only 31 members serving both in the First Duma and in the Second, a result not only of the penalties that followed the Viborg Manifesto, but also of a preference for more extreme candidates. Significantly too, the number of unaffiliated deputies declined by about 50 per cent in the Second Duma.
The Second Duma met on March 5, 1907, and lasted for a little more than three months. It also found itself promptly in an impasse with the government. Moreover, its special opponent, the prime minister, was no longer the nonentity Ivan Goremykin - who had replaced the first constitutional prime minister, Witte, early in 1906 - but the able and determined Peter Stolypin. Before it could consider Stolypin's important land reform, he had the Second Duma dissolved on the sixteenth of June, using as a pretext its failure to comply immediately with his request to lift the immunity of fifty-five, and particularly of sixteen, Social Democratic deputies whom he wanted to arrest for treason.
On the same day, June 16, 1907, Nicholas II and his minister arbitrarily and unconstitutionally changed the electoral law. The tsar mentioned as justification his historic power, his right to abrogate what he had granted, and his intention to answer for the destinies of the Russian state only before the altar of God who had given him his authority! The electoral change
was, of course, meant to create a Duma that would co-operate with the government. The peasant representation was cut by more than half and that of the workers was also drastically cut, whereas the gentry gained representation quite out of proportion to its number. Also, Poland, the Caucasus, and some other border areas lost deputies; and the representation of Central Asia was entirely eliminated on the ground of backwardness. At the same time the election procedure became more indirect and more involved, following in part the Prussian model. In addition, the minister of the interior received the right to manipulate electoral districts. It has been calculated that the electoral change of June 1907 produced the following results: the vote of a landlord counted roughly as much as the votes of four members of the upper bourgeoisie, or of sixty-five average middle-class people, or of 260 peasants, or of 540 workers. To put it differently, 200,000 members of the landed gentry were assured of 50 per cent of the seats in the Duma.
The electoral change finally provided the government with a co-operative Duma. And indeed, by contrast with the first two Dumas which lasted but a few months each, the Third Duma served its full legal term of five years, from 1907 to 1912, while the Fourth also continued for five years, from 1912 until the revolution of March 1917, which struck just before the Fourth Duma was to end. In the Third Duma the government had the support of some 310 out of the total of 442 deputies: about 160 representatives of the Right and about 150 Octobrists. The opposition, reduced to 120 seats, encompassed 54 Cadets, smaller numbers of other moderates, and only 33 deputies of the former Left. The Socialist Revolutionaries, it might be noted, boycotted the Third and Fourth Dumas.
