a very close-run thing.
And so the First State Duma met in April 1906. The largest group of deputies within it was constituted by peasants belonging to no party. Contrary to Nicholas II’s expectation, however, these same deputies stoutly demanded the transfer of the land from the gentry. He reacted by dissolving the Duma. The party with the greatest number of places in the Duma was the Constitutional-Democratic Party and its leaders were so angered by the Duma’s dispersal that they decamped to the Finnish town of Vyborg and called upon their fellow subjects to withhold taxes and conscripts until a fuller parliamentary order was established. Nicholas faced them down and held a further set of elections. To his annoyance, the Second Duma, too, which assembled in March 1907, turned out to be a radical assembly. Consequently Nicholas turned to his Minister of Internal Affairs, Petr Stolypin, to form a government and to rewrite the electoral rules so as to produce a Third Duma which would increase the importance of the gentry at the expense of the peasantry.
Stolypin was a reforming conservative. He saw the necessity of agrarian reform, and perceived the peasant land commune as the cardinal obstacle to the economy’s efficiency and society’s stability. He therefore resolved to dissolve the commune by encouraging ‘strong and sober’ peasant households to set themselves up as independent farming families. When the Second Duma had opposed him for his failure to grant the land itself to the peasantry, Stolypin had used the emergency powers of Article 87 of the Basic Law to push through his measures. When Russian peasants subsequently showed themselves deeply attached to their communes, he used a degree of compulsion to get his way. Nevertheless his success was very limited. By 1916 only a tenth of the households in the European parts of the empire had broken away from the commune to set up consolidated farms — and such farms in an area of great fertility such as west-bank Ukraine were on average only fifteen acres each.19
It was also recognized by Stolypin that the Imperial government would work better if co-operation were forthcoming from the Duma. To this end he sought agreements with Alexander Guchkov and the so-called Octobrist Party (which, unlike the Kadets, had welcomed the October Manifesto). Guchkov’s Octobrists were monarchist conservatives who thought roughly along the same lines as Stolypin, but insisted that all legislation should be vetted by the Duma.20 At the same time Stolypin wanted to strengthen a popular sense of civic responsibility; he therefore persuaded the Emperor to increase the peasantry’s weight in the elections to the zemstva. Peasants, he argued, had to have a stake in public life. The political, social and cultural integration of society was vital and Stolypin became convinced that Russian nationalists were right in arguing that Russia should be treated as the heartland of the tsarist empire. Further curtailments were made on the already narrow autonomy of Poles, Finns and other nations of the Russian Empire; and Stolypin strengthened the existing emphasis on Russian-language schooling and administration.
At court, however, he was regarded as a self-interested politician bent upon undermining the powers of the Emperor. Eventually Nicholas, too, saw things in this light, and he steadily withdrew his favour from Stolypin. In September 1911, Stolypin was assassinated by the Socialist-Revolutionary Dmitri Bogrov in Kiev. There were rumours that the
Yet it was no longer possible for tsarism to rule the country in quite the old fashion. In the eighteenth century it had been exclusively the nobility which had knowledge of general political affairs. The possession of this knowledge served to distance the upper classes from the rest of society. At home the families of the aristocracy took to speaking French among themselves; they imbibed European learning and adopted European tastes. A line of exceptional noble-men — from Alexander Radishchev in the 1780s through to an anti-tsarist conspiracy known as the Decembrists in 1825 — questioned the whole basis of the old regime’s legitimacy. But vigorous suppression did not eliminate the problem of dissent. Some of the greatest exponents of Russian literature and intellectual thought — including Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy — made it their life’s work to call for a drastic change in conditions.
Permanent opposition had taken organized form from the 1860s despite the prohibition on the formation of political parties, on the holding of political meetings and on public demands for political freedom. Most of the rebels were believers in agrarian socialism. Called the
The culture of opposition was not confined to the revolutionary activists. In the nineteenth century there was a remarkable expansion of education: secondary schools and universities proliferated and students were remarkably antagonistic to the regime. The methods of instruction and discipline grated upon young people. Nor did their unease disappear in adulthood. The tsarist order was regarded by them as a humiliating peculiarity that Russia should quickly remove.
Their feelings were strengthened by journalists and creative writers who informed public opinion with a freedom that increased after 1905.21 Previously, most legal newspapers had been conservative or very cautiously liberal; afterwards they spanned a range of thought from proto-fascist on the far right to Bolshevik on the far left. Although the Okhrana closed publications that openly advocated sedition, the excitement of opinion against the authorities was constant. Not only newspapers but also trade unions, sickness-insurance groups and even Sunday schools were instruments of agitation. The regime stipulated that trade unions should be locally based and that their leaderships should be drawn from the working class. But this served to give workers an experience of collective self-organization. By thrusting people on to their own resources, tsarism built up the antidote to itself. The rationale of the old monarchy was further undermined.
Even so, the Okhrana was very efficient at its tasks. The revolutionary leaders had been suppressed in 1907; their various organizations in the Russian Empire were penetrated by police informers, and the arrest of second- rank activists continued. Contact between the
The repression secured more time for the dynasty; it also strengthened the determination of the revolutionaries to avoid any dilution of their ideas. At the turn of the century it had been the Marxists who had been most popular with political intellectuals. A party had been formed, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, in 1898. But it quickly dissolved into factionalism, especially among the
These specifications alarmed his opponents — the so-called Mensheviks (or Minoritarians) — in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party who had always contended that Russia should undergo a ‘bourgeois’ revolution and complete her development of a capitalist economy before undertaking the ‘transition to socialism’. They denounced the projected dictatorship as having nothing in common with genuinely socialist politics. And they wanted a more loosely-organized party than the Bolsheviks had devised.
The other great revolutionary party was the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, which inherited the traditions of the narodniki of the nineteenth century. Their leading theorist was Viktor Chernov. Unlike the narodniki, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not think that Russia could move straight into socialism without a capitalist stage of economic development. But whereas the Marxists, be they Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, saw the urban workers as the great revolutionary class, the Socialist-Revolutionaries held the peasantry in higher regard and believed that peasants embodied, however residually, the egalitarian and communal values at the heart of socialism. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries recruited among the working class, and in many cities, were rivals to the Russian Social-
