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

To this elegant palace the peasant Duma deputies brought the political culture of their village barns. 'It was enough to take a look at this motley mob of "deputies" ', remarked one shocked senior official, 'to feel horror at the sight of Russia's first representative body. It was a gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian Land had sent to Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it.' Hundreds of peasant petitioners came to the Tauride Palace from every corner of Russia: some to appeal about a decision of their local court; some to complain about their taxes; others simply to check up on the activities of their elected delegates. Sergei Semenov found himself among them. He had been sent by a meeting of the peasants in his volost of Andreevskoe with a mandate on the land reforms which, as he recalled, 'I was supposed to make sure the Duma passed.' The musty smell of the peasants' cheap tobacco and their farmyard clothes filled the long corridors of the palace. The floors were covered with the chewed husks of their sunflower seeds, which they spat out regardless of public notices that most of them could not read. Some peasant deputies got drunk in

taverns, became involved in brawls, and when attempts were made to arrest them claimed immunity as Duma members. Two were even found selling 'entrance tickets' to the Tauride Palace. It turned out that they had been convicted for petty thefts and swindles, for which they should have been disqualified from standing for election.⁵

Partly because of this village element, the Duma proceedings had a decidedly informal air. The English journalist Maurice Baring compared the sessions to 'a meeting of acquaintances in a club or a cafe'.⁶ A deputy might begin to speak from his seat and continue to address the hall as he strolled up to the tribune. He might break off his speech in mid-sentence to talk to the President or offer a brief explanation of some detail. Sometimes the deputies at the back of the hall would engage in a private debate of their own, and when the President called for order would move out into the corridor. It was as if the politics of the street, or rather of the field, had been brought inside the parliament building. Perhaps the Duma was bound to be disorganized: this, after all, was Russia's first parliamentary experience; and there were many similar conventions — the National Assembly of 1789 or the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 immediately come to mind — where novice politicians made a hash of things. And yet it seems that the Russians were by nature especially ill-prepared for the disciplines of parliamentary practice. Even today, in the post-Communist Duma, a similar informality is on display, verging on the manners of the beer-house. Russian democracy can be rather like the Russians themselves: chaotic and disorganized.

Most of the peasant deputies, about a hundred in all, sat with the Trudovik group (Labour), a loosely knit agrarian party, whose main plank was the need for a radical solution of the land question through the compulsory expropriation of all the gentry's property. This made it the obvious choice of the peasants once their usual party of choice, the SRs, had decided, along with the SDs, to boycott the Duma elections. The Kadets were the biggest party in the Duma, with 179 deputies (including Obolensky and Lvov) out of a total of 478. This was a gross exaggeration of their true level of support in the country, since the Kadets had won much of the vote that would otherwise have gone to the SRs and SDs. But their electoral success had none the less given them a sense of their own legitimacy as spokesmen for 'the people'. Inspired by this historic role — and a little frightened of it lest they should fail to match the radical expectations of the masses — the Kadets adopted a militant posture of opposition to the government which set the tone for the Duma's short and troubled existence.

From its opening session, the Duma was turned into a revolutionary tribune. It became a rhetorical battering ram against the fortress of autocracy. On that first day the deputies arrived at the Tauride Palace in a militant mood