September of A.D. Protopopov as acting Minister of the Interior had raised the hopes of the moderate liberals, men like Miliukov, who still sought to win reforms from the government through conciliation. Protopopov was an Octobrist landowner and textile manufacturer, a member of the Progressive Bloc, and Deputy Chairman of the Duma. His appointment was widely seen as government capitulation to the liberal opposition — one soon to be followed by the appointment of a Duma ministry. But in fact it was no more than a clever political manoeuvre by the court. The Duma was due to convene on I November and Protopopov, as a 'Duma man', was seen as the best man to control it. 'Please take Protopopov as Minister of the Interior,' the Tsarina had urged her husband. 'As he is one of the Duma it will make a great effect and shut their mouths.' Protopopov was a fanatical mystic (he once told Kerensky that he ruled with the help of Jesus Christ) and, unknown to the liberals, a protege of Rasputin (who, as he once told Brusilov, was 'saving Russia from a revolution'). He was ambitious and ridiculously vain — he was clearly overwhelmed by the honour bestowed on him by the Tsar — and was thus unlikely to endanger his own position by making common cause with the opposition. When the real nature of his role became clear — he soon donned the uniform of the Imperial Gendarmerie, an archetypal symbol of tsarist oppression — an old Duma colleague begged him to resign. Protopopov replied: 'How can you ask me to resign? All my life it was my dream to be a Vice-Governor, and here I am a Minister.'57
Disillusionment with the new minister set in very quickly. Hope gave way to hatred in Duma circles. Protopopov's obsequiousness to the imperial couple was nauseating. Instead of providing a bridge between the liberal opposition and the government he turned himself into a lackey of the court and was roundly condemned as a traitor to the parliamentary cause. On Rasputin's request, he ordered Sukhomlinov's release from prison — most of the country would have had him hanged for treason — and banned public organizations from meeting without the police in attendance.
By the time the Duma reassembled, on I November, even the moderate Miliukov was finally forced to acknowledge that the time for co-operation with the government was rapidly passing. With the radicals in his own Kadet party
calling for open revolt, he now decided to seize the initiative by condemning the government in his opening speech to the Duma. He listed its abuses of power, denouncing each in turn and ending each time with the question: Is this folly or treason?' The effect of his speech, as Miliukov later recalled, was 'as if a blister filled with pus had burst and the basic evil, which was known to everyone but had awaited public exposure, had now been pinpointed'. He succeeded in turning the Tauride Palace into the Tribune of the Revolution once again. There were other more fiery speeches in the Duma that day — from Kerensky, for example — but the fact that a statesman as cautious as Miliukov, and one, moreover, with such close connections to Allied diplomats, had openly used the word 'treason' was enough for the public to conclude that treason there had been. This had not been Miliukov's aim. To his own rhetorical question he himself would have answered 'folly'. Yet the public was so charged up with emotion that by the time it read his speech it was almost bound to answer 'treason'. The fact that the speech was banned from the press and had to be read in well-thumbed typescripts passed from hand to hand only further inclined people to read it as being more radical than it was. In some versions of the typescript a particular social grievance would appear inserted into the middle of the speech (for example, claiming that in addition to its other abuses the government treated teachers very badly). 'My speech acquired the reputation of a storm-signal for the revolution,' Miliukov recalled. 'Such was not my intention. But the prevailing mood in the country served as a megaphone for my words.'58 It was to be a salutary lesson for any future liberals — especially those of 1917 — trying to halt a social revolution by the power of words. Having stoked up his rhetoric in order to help his Duma colleagues let off steam, Miliukov had succeeded in firing the engines of radical protest in the country at large.
What Miliukov had failed to appreciate was the extent to which a revolution had now come to be seen as unstoppable, and even desirable, not just by the radicals but by conservatives too. His own strategy of conciliation and parliamentary struggle, with the aim of reaching a compromise with the government, was rapidly losing ground. As one general at Stavka remarked, there was a 'widespread conviction that something had to be broken and annihilated, a conviction that tormented people and gave them no peace'.59 Even the Tsar's immediate family were now lining up behind the liberal opposition. On 7 November the Grand Duke Nikolai urged him to let the Duma appoint a government. The Moscow and Petrograd branches of the United Nobility, since 1905 the firmest pillar of the autocracy, gave him similar advice. In short, there was practically no one outside the narrow ruling clique at the court who did not see the need for a fundamental change in the structure of the government.
Yet again Nicholas tried to manoeuvre himself out of a corner by
making half-hearted concessions. On 8 November Sturmer was dismissed, to the Duma's rejoicing, and A. F. Trepov became the new Prime Minister. Here was a final chance for the liberals to make their peace with the government. For Trepov, who saw himself as a latter-day Stolypin, was determined to win the support of the moderate elements in the Duma by making concessions. Miliukov was ready to accept his olive branch (and no doubt a seat in his cabinet). But the radical and socialist deputies, spurred on by the inflammatory speeches of the Trudovik Kerensky and the Menshevik Nikolai Chkheidze, were determined to bring down the government and called for an alliance with 'the masses' in preparation for a popular revolt.
This was essentially how the Duma remained divided through the following weeks of complex political manoeuvring between November and the February Revolution. Miliukov's Kadets, in the words of the secret police, looked on the prospect of a revolution 'with feelings of horror and panic', and 'if the government offered the slightest concession would run to meet it with joy'. Yet the hope of concessions was fading fast. For the Tsarina was flatly opposed to Trepov (she wanted him hanged like Guchkov), while the threat of the radical left was growing all the time. This increasingly gave the initiative to Kerensky and the other Duma radicals, who would open the doors of the Tauride Palace, if not directly to the crowds on the streets, then at least to their more polite representatives. The language of their speeches became increasingly violent, as they sought to express — and thus capture — the mood on the streets. They openlv called on the people to overthrow the regime and ridiculed the moderates' calls for calm as a pretext, in the words of Kerensky, to stay in their 'warm armchairs'. Yet they also had cause to worry that the popular mood was passing over their heads too, that the crowds on the streets were becoming contemptuous of the Duma and looking elsewhere for their leaders. For as Vasilii Shulgin, the Nationalist leader, put it, 'no one believes in words any longer'.60
From now on it was a question of whether the revolution would start from below or above. The idea of a 'palace coup' had been circulating for some time. Guchkov was at the centre of one such conspiracy. It aimed to seize the imperial train
liberal politicians and generals supported the plan, including Brusilov, who told the Grand Duke: 'If I must choose between the Emperor and Russia, then I march for Russia.' But this plot
