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

(the former with compensation and the latter without). There had been a time, during the 'Great Fear' of 1905, when many landowners might have been prepared to accept some form of expropriation in order to save their skins. 'If we do not make some concessions,' one besieged squire had argued before his local council of nobles, 'the revolution will come from below and fires will flare up everywhere from one end of the country to the other.' Even Trepov had once said to Witte: 'I myself am a landowner and I would be glad to relinquish half of my land if I were convinced that under these conditions I could keep the remainder.' But as the revolutionary tide receded, the landowners became less inclined to compromise. The Tsar spoke for them when he said, 'What belongs to the landowner belongs to him.' The provincial zemstvos, once strongholds of the liberal opposition, now became bastions of law and order. The United Nobility, which was formed to defend property rights, had powerful supporters in the court, the State Council and the Civil Service. It led the campaign against the Duma's reform proposals on the grounds that granting additional land to the peasants would not help solve their problems, since these were caused by the inefficiencies of the communal system and not by the shortage of land. The argument was strongly coloured by recent experience: having always viewed the commune as the bulwark of the old rural order, these conservatives had learned in 1905 that it could easily become the organizing mechanism of the peasant revolution. 'In other countries there is much less land per capita than in Russia,' declared Prince A. P. Urusov to a meeting of landowners in May 1906, 'yet there is no talk of land shortage because the concept of property is clear in the minds of the people. But we have the commune — which is to say that the principle of socialism has destroyed this concept. The result is that nowhere else do we see such unceremonious destruction of property as we see in Russia.'⁸ The abolition of the commune and the creation of a peasant landowning class were now seized upon by the gentry as an alternative to the Duma's radical land reform.

On 8 July the Duma was finally dissolved, seventy-two days after its convocation. New elections were called for a second Duma session the following February. The Premier Goremykin was replaced by Stolypin, a well-known advocate of the commune's abolition and a proven executor of repressive measures to restore order in the countryside. The liberals were outraged by the dissolution. Prince Lvov, who had been so confident that it would not happen, now wrote of his 'anger at this blatant attack on the parliamentary principle', although as a landowner he had opposed the Duma's land reform. The dissolution transformed Lvov from a moderate liberal into a radical. He was among those Kadets who, as a protest against it, fled to the Finnish resort town of Vyborg, where they signed a manifesto calling on 'the people' to rise up against the government by refusing to pay any more taxes or to give any more recruits to

the army.* The Vyborg Manifesto was a typical example of the Kadets' militant posturing since the opening of the Duma. As for 'the people', they were clearly not listening to these liberals. For their Manifesto was greeted with universal indifference. And so the government could now take repressive measures with a quiet mind to silence its brave but naive liberal critics. More than 100 leading Kadets were brought to trial and suspended from the Duma for their part in the Vyborg Manifesto. The Kadets who took their places in the second and third Dumas were on the whole much less radical — and less talented — than those who had sat in the first. Living under the shadow of their party's 'Vyborg complex', they pursued a more conservative line, keeping well within the confines of the tsarist laws, in the defence of the Duma.⁹ Never again would the Kadets place their trust in the support of 'the people'. Nor would they claim to represent them. From this point on, they would consciously become what in fact they had been all along: the natural party of the bourgeoisie. Liberalism and the people went their separate ways.

ii The Statesman