A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The Duma was a legislative parliament. Yet it could not enact its own laws. Its legislative proposals could not become effective until they received the endorsement of both the Tsar and the State Council, an old consultative assembly of mostly reactionary nobles, half of them elected by the zemstvos, half of them appointed by the Tsar, which was transformed into the upper house, with equal legislative powers to the Duma itself, by a statute of February 1906. The State Council met in the splendid hall of the Marinsky Palace. Its elderly members, most of them retired bureaucrats and generals, sat (or dozed) in its comfortable velvet armchairs whilst stately footmen in white livery moved silently about serving tea and coffee. The State Council was more like an English gentleman's club than a parliamentary chamber (since it emulated the House of Lords this was perhaps a mark of its success). Its debates were not exactly heated since most of the councillors shared the same royalist attitudes, while some of the octogenarians — of which there were more than a few — had clearly lost most of their critical faculties. At the end of one debate, for example, a General Stiirler announced that he intended to vote with the majority. When it was explained to him that no majority had yet been formed since the voting had only just begun, he replied with irritation: 'I still insist that I am with the majority!' Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to present the State Council as either ridiculous or benign. The domination of the United Nobility — to which one-third of the councillors belonged — ensured that it would act as a force of reaction, and it voted down all the liberal Duma bills. It was not for nothing that the State Council became known as the 'graveyard of Duma hopes'.³

And yet on that first day, when the Duma deputies took their seats in the Tauride Palace, there was nothing but hope in their hearts. Seated on the Kadet benches, Obolensky found himself next to Prince Lvov, who was 'full of optimism' about the new parliamentary era. 'Don't believe the rumours that the government will close us down,' Lvov told him with confidence. 'You'll see everything will be all right. I know from the best sources that the government is ready to make concessions.'⁴ Most of the Duma members shared his naive faith that Russia had at last won its 'House of Commons' and would now move towards joining the club of Western liberal parliamentary states. The time for tyrants was passing. Tomorrow belonged to the people. This was the 'Duma of National Hopes'.

No one believed that the Tsar would dare to dissolve the Duma and risk a storm of criticism from the liberal public at home and abroad. It was confidently assumed that Russia's dependence on Western finance, renewed in 1906 with the biggest foreign loan in its history, would force him to retain the liberal structure of the state. That Nicholas despised 'public opinion', and had

no legal obligation to respect it, was forgotten. So too was the fact that Witte, the architect of the new parliamentary order, had just been replaced by Ivan Goremykin, an old-fashioned reactionary and favourite of the court who regarded the Duma as an unnecessary obstacle to his government. The young parliamentarians innocently believed that, so long as they had 'the people' behind them, they would be able to force the Tsar to concede a fully sovereign parliament. Russia would follow the path of France after 1789, from the Estates-General to the Constituent Assembly.

The Tauride Palace was the birthplace, the citadel and the burial ground of Russian democracy. Until February 1917 it was the seat of the Duma. During the first weeks of the revolution it housed both the Provisional Government (which moved to the Marinsky Palace on 7 March) and the Petrograd Soviet (which moved to the Smolny Institute in July). Then, for a day, 6 January 1918, it played host to the first fully democratic parliament in Russia's history — the Constituent Assembly — until it was closed down by the Bolsheviks. No other building on Russian soil has ever been the scene of such turbulent political drama. How incongruous, then, that the palace should have been so graceful and serene. It was built in 1783 by Catherine the Great for one of her favourites, Grigorii Potemkin, who assumed the title of Prince of Tauride after his conquest of the Crimea. Designed in the style of a pantheon, decorated with Doric pillars and classical statues, it was a peaceful suburban refuge from the noise of the capital and was surrounded by its own private park and lakes. The Catherine Hall, where the deputies assembled, had semi-circular rows of seats and a dais at one end bearing Repin's portrait of Nicholas II. Behind the dais were three large bay windows looking out on to a landscaped vista that could have been painted by Watteau.