Stolypin raised the Jewish issue before the Council of Ministers, and secured a solid majority in favor of doing away with many restrictions on Jewish residential and occupational rights. He forwarded a proposal to this effect to the Tsar. Nicholas rejected it on the grounds of “conscience.”69 The refusal ended the possibility of Imperial Russia ridding herself of her anachronistic Jewish legislation and ensured the animosity of Jews at home and abroad.
Stolypin was determined not to repeat the mistake of his predecessor, Goremykin, who had no government program with which to attract voters. Having announced his reform program, he involved the government in the electoral campaign by paying subsidies to friendly newspapers and staging spectacles for potential supporters of pro-government candidates. For this purpose he allocated modest sums, such as 10,000 rubles to be spent in Kiev on electoral propaganda, “allowances” for needy voters, and the staging for peasant voters of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. He soon became painfully aware of the paucity of means at the government’s disposal to rally public support. Later he resorted to bribing deputies to vote for government bills.70
Stolypin tried, without success, to bring representatives of society into the cabinet.
On assuming office, he engaged in negotiations with Alexander Guchkov and Nicholas Lvov, offering the former the portfolio of Trade and Industry and the latter that of Agriculture. The two made their acceptance conditional on other representatives of society being included in the cabinet. Stolypin next contacted Dmitrii Shipov and Prince George Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government. They posed stiff demands: a government commitment to expropriating some landed property, the abolition of capital punishment, and an end to martial law. These terms may have been acceptable, but the government could not possibly agree to a further demand that a majority of the ministerial portfolios, including that of the Interior, be turned over to non-bureaucrats.71 Using Kryzhanovskii as intermediary, Stolypin also made approaches to the Kadets with the view of having them join the cabinet, but nothing came of this effort either.72 In January 1907, he attempted once more to come to terms with the Kadets, hoping to wean them away from the radical parties. At this time the Kadets had not yet secured status as a legally recognized association. Stolypin offered to grant them such status if they would denounce terrorism. Ivan Petrunkevich, one of the patriarchs of the liberal movement and a member of the Kadet Central Committee, responded that he would rather the party perish than suffer “moral destruction” by acquiescing to this demand. This terminated the discussions.73
To the government’s dismay, the Second Duma, which opened on February 20, 1907, was even more radical than the First, for the SRs and the SDs had now abandoned the boycott. The socialists had 222 deputies (of them, 65 SDs, 37 SRs, 16 Popular Socialists, and 104 Trudoviki, affiliated with the SRs): they outweighed right-wing deputies by a ratio of two to one. The Kadets, tempered by the failure of their previous tactics, were prepared to behave more responsibly, but their representation was cut by nearly one-half (from 179 to 98) and the opposition was dominated by the socialists, who had no intention of pursuing legislative work. The SRs had resolved in November 1906 to participate in the elections in order to “utilize the State Duma for organizing and revolutionizing the masses.”74 The Social-Democrats at the Fourth (Stockholm) Congress, held in April 1907, agreed to commit themselves “to exploiting systematically all conflicts between the government and the Duma as well as within the Duma itself for the purpose of broadening and deepening the revolutionary movement.” The congress instructed the Social-Democratic faction to create a mass movement that would topple the existing order by “exposing all the bourgeois parties,” making the masses aware of the futility of the Duma, and insisting on the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.75 The socialists thus entered the Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work and disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity.
To make matters still worse from the government’s point of view, Orthodox priests elected to the Duma, usually by peasants, shunned the conservative parties, preferring to sit in the center; several joined the socialists.
The Second Duma had barely begun its deliberations when in high circles it was whispered that the Duma was incapable of constructive work and should be abolished or at least thoroughly revamped. Fedor Golovin, the chairman of the Second Duma, remembered Nicholas speaking to him in this vein in March or April 1907.76 The outright abolition of the Duma, however, proved impractical for political as well as economic reasons.
The political argument in favor of retaining a parliamentary body has been mentioned earlier: it was the need of the bureaucracy for a representative body with which to share the blame for the country’s ills.
The economic argument had to do with international banking. A prominent French financier informed Kokovtsov that the dissolution of the First Duma had struck French financial markets like a “bolt of lightning.”77 Later, in 1917, Kokovtsov explained the close relationship which had existed under tsarism between parliamentary government and Russia’s standing in international credit markets. The market price of the Russian state loan of 1906 sunk rapidly after the dissolution of the First Duma. When rumors spread that the Second Duma was to suffer a similar fate, Russian obligations with a face value of 100 dropped from 88 to 69, or by 21 percent.78 Experience thus strongly suggested that the liquidation of the Duma would have had a disastrous effect on Russia’s ability to raise foreign loans at acceptable interest rates.
Stolypin was prepared to keep on dissolving Dumas and calling for new elections as long as necessary: he confided to a friend that he would emulate the Prussian Crown which had once dissolved parliament seven times in succession to gain its ends.79 But this procedure was unacceptable to the Court. Reluctantly giving up its preference for outright abolition of the lower chamber, the Court ordered a revision of the electoral law to ensure a more conservative Duma.
It is known from the recollections of Kryzhanovskii that while the First Duma was still in session, Goremykin had submitted to the Tsar a memorandum complaining of the “failure” of the elections and criticizing the revisions in the franchise originally devised for the Bulygin Duma which had the result of giving the vote to workers and greatly increasing peasant representation. Nicholas shared Goremykin’s view. Early in May 1906, certainly with the Tsar’s authorization, Goremykin requested Kryzhanovskii to draft a new electoral law which, without disenfranchising any one group or altering the basic constitutional functions of the Duma, would make it more cooperative. Kryzhanovskii’s hastily drawn-up proposal was submitted to the Tsar later that month but it had no issue, possibly because the prospect of having Stolypin take over as Prime Minister aroused hopes that he would know how to cope with the second Duma.80
Now that these hopes were dashed, Stolypin asked Kryzhanovskii to devise a change in the electoral law which would enhance the representation of “wealthier” and “more cultured” elements.
Although in the eyes of many contemporaries and historians the unilateral change in the franchise announced on June 3, 1907, amounted to nothing less than a coup d’état, in the eyes of the government it represented a compromise, an alternative to the abolition of the Duma. Using the draft which he had prepared for Goremykin, Kryzhanovskii wrote three proposals that substantially altered the franchise as well as certain provisions of the Fundamental Laws for the purpose of ensuring greater legislative authority for the Crown.
The formal pretext for dissolving the Second Duma was the charge that some of its Social-Democratic deputies had plotted to incite mutiny in the St. Petersburg garrison. Stolypin has been accused then and since of provoking the incident, but in fact the conspiracy had been uncovered by police agents who had caught the SDs meeting secretly in the home of one of their deputies with representatives of military and naval units belonging to revolutionary circles.81 With this evidence in hand, Stolypin appeared before the Duma and requested that the parlia
mentary immunity of all the SD deputies be lifted so that the accused could be turned over to a court. The Duma agreed to suspend the immunity only of those deputies against whom there existed concrete evidence of sedition. Stolypin would have preferred to dissolve the Duma and order new elections, but he came under irresistible pressure from the Court to revise the Duma’s electoral procedures.* The Second Duma was dissolved on June 2, 1907.
The new electoral law, made public the next day, unquestionably violated the constitution, which forbade using Article 87 to “introduce changes … in the provisions for elections to the [State] Council or Duma.” That much even Kryzhanovskii conceded.82 To get around this limitation, the change in the franchise was decreed by Imperial Manifesto, a law issued on matters of urgent state importance. This procedure was justified on the grounds that since the Tsar had not sworn an oath to observe the new Fundamental Laws, he was free to revise them at will.83 The new law favored the propertied classes by using assets rather than legal status as the criterion of franchise. The representation of industrial workers and national minorities was sharply reduced. Disappointed with the behavior of communal peasants in the first two Dumas, the government also cut down their share of the seats. As a result of these changes, the representation of landowners (a category which included many peasant proprietors) increased by one-half while that of communal peasants and workers fell by one-half. The result was a more conservative and ethnically more Great Russian body.
The term “coup d’état,” often applied in the polemical and historical literature to the change of the electoral law on June 3, 1907, is hardly justified. After all, the Duma continued to function, retaining the legislative and budgetary powers granted it in the Fundamental Laws: the Manifesto of June 3 explicitly reconfirmed the Duma’s prerogatives. In the years that followed the Duma would give the government a great deal of trouble. Only the outright abolition of the lower house or the abrogation of its legislative powers would have qualified as a coup. June 3 is more properly viewed as a violation of the constitution. It was in the Russian tradition of integrating every independent political institution into the state system.
The Third Duma, convened on November 1, 1907, was the only one to be permitted the normal five-year span. As intended, the new body was much more conservative than its predecessors: of the 422 deputies, 154 belonged to the Party of the 17th of October, and 147 to right-wing and nationalist groupings. This representation assured the conservatives of a two-thirds majority. The Kadets were whittled down to 54 seats; associated with them were 28 Progressives. The socialists had 32 deputies (19 Social-Democrats and 13 Trudoviki). Although the government could feel much more comfortable with a legislature in which conservatives had such preponderance, it did not enjoy automatic majorities: Stolypin had to engage in a great deal of political maneuvering to secure passage for some of his bills. Ministers were frequently called to account and on occasion the government failed to have its way.
The Octobrists, who dominated the Third Duma as the Kadets had dominated the First and the socialists the Second, were committed to the existing constitutional arrangement. They defined their task as follows:
to create in the Duma a constitutional center, not aiming to seize governmental power, but at the same time, determined to defend the rights of the people’s representative assembly within the limits laid down for it in the Fundamental Laws.
84
Its guiding philosophy was a state based on law—law equally binding on the administration and society. Alexander Guchkov, the party’s leader, was descended from a prominent Moscow merchant family founded by a serf and had received his education in Western Europe. According to Alexander Kerensky, who described him as “something of a dour loner with an air of mystery,” he had opposed the Liberation Movement.85 He had a low opinion of the Russian masses and did not feel comfortable with politicians. A devoted patriot, in temperament and outlook he resembled Stolypin, whom he helped to split the right-wing in the Third Duma, separating from it the more moderate elements; these, organized as the Nationalist faction, together with the Octobrists, formed an absolute majority and helped Stolypin push through many of his legislative bills.86 Much of the rank and file of the Octobrist Party had its roots in the zemstvo movement and maintained close links with it.
To gain support for his legislative programs, Stolypin annually assigned 650,000 rubles from secret funds for subsidizing newspapers and bribing influential right-wing deputies.87
The Third Duma was an active body: it voted on 2,571 bills introduced by the government, initiated 205 of its own, and questioned or “interpellated” ministers 157 times.88 Its commissions dealt with agrarian problems, social legislation, and many other issues. The year 1908 and even more so 1909 were periods of bountiful harvests, declining violence, and renewed industrial development. Stolypin stood at the pinnacle of his career.
Yet at this very time the first clouds appeared on the horizon. As noted, the constitution had been granted under extreme duress as the only alternative to collapse. The Court and its right-wing supporters viewed it, not as a fundamental and permanent change in Russia’s system of government, but as an emergency measure to tide it over a period of civil unrest. The refusal to admit that Russia even had a constitution and the insistence that the Tsar’s not swearing an oath to the new Fundamental Laws absolved him from having to observe their provisions were not lame excuses, but deeply held convictions. Thus, as the situation in the country improved, and the emergency attenuated, the Court had second thoughts: with public order and rural prosperity restored, did one really need a parliamentary regime and a Prime Minister who played parliamentary politics? Stolypin, who had said of himself that he was “first and foremost a loyal subject of the sovereign and the executor of his designs and commands,” now appeared “a most dangerous revolutionary.”89 The main objection to him was that instead of acting in parliament exclusively as an agent of the Crown he forged there his own political constituency. Stolypin believed that he was putting together a party of “King’s Friends,” not for his own, but for the King’s benefit. The monarchists, however, saw only that his political practices led to a diminution of Imperial authority, or at least such authority as Nicholas and his entourage believed him to be entitled to:
Stolypin would have been the last to admit that his policy tended to weaken the Emperor’s independent power—indeed, he considered the source of his own authority to lie in the fact that it had been entrusted to him by the autocratic monarch. Yet, inevitably, that was the effect of his policy, since he realised that in modern conditions that state could only be strengthened against revolution by increasing in it, through parliament, the influence of the landowning, professional and educated classes. And this could only happen at the expense of the Emperor’s own independent power. It was this undeniable fact which gave the reactionaries’ arguments such force in the mind of the Emperor.
90
This was the crux of Stolypin’s difficulties with the Court, the cause of his waning support and ultimate disgrace. After his death, the Tsarina would admonish his successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov, with reference to Stolypin, “not to seek support in political parties.”91 In general, the more successful Stolypin’s policies were, the less were his services required and the greater grew the Court’s antagonism to him. Such was the paradox of Russian politics.
His reforms and reform projects also alienated powerful interests. The agrarian reforms, designed to give Russia a class of peasant landlords, threatened that segment of the rural gentry which saw itself as irreplaceable Kulturträger. His efforts to decentralize the administration and make bureaucrats legally accountable aroused the hostility of the officialdom, while his plans to curb the police gained him no friends in those quarters. His unsuccessful efforts on behalf of Jews infuriated the extreme right.
Nor did he gain in public support what he lost at the Court. The liberals never forgave him for “Stolypin’s neckties” and for the manner in which he abused Ar
ticle 87 to circumvent the Duma’s legislative power. To the extreme right he was an outsider brought in to extinguish a revolutionary conflagration who abused his position to accumulate independent power. Those who, in Struve’s words, regarded the constitution as “camouflaged rebellion” (zamas-kirovannyi bunt)92 despised him for taking it seriously instead of working to restore autocracy. In the militant atmosphere of Russian politics, with one set of “purist” principles confronting others, equally uncompromising, there was no room for Stolypin’s pragmatic idealism. Assailed from all sides, he began to falter and commit political blunders.
Stolypin’s first conflict with the Third Duma arose over the naval budget of 1909.93 At the beginning of 1908, the government proposed to construct four battleships of the Dreadnought class to protect Russia’s Baltic shores. In the Duma, the Kadets and the Octobrists joined forces to oppose this bill. Guchkov argued that Russia could not afford a large and expensive navy. Miliukov supported him: Russia, he said, already was spending proportionately more on her navy than Germany although she had little sea commerce and no overseas colonies. The two parties preferred the funds designated for the Dreadnoughts to be spent on the army.94 In 1908 and again in 1909 the Duma turned down requests for naval appropriations. Although the passage of the budget by the State Council sufficed to get the naval program underway, the Duma’s rebuff forced Stolypin to seek support from parties to the right of the Octobrists—a shift which led him to pursue a more nationalistic policy.
His most fateful parliamentary crisis came about indirectly because of this shift over the bill to introduce zemstva into the western provinces of the Empire. The bill encountered strong opposition in the upper chamber, where zemstva did not enjoy popularity. Determined to make this issue a test of his ability to administer, Stolypin decided to force it regardless of the cost.
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