Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The Duma might have become an effective intermediary between government and people if the workers, peasants, and non-Russian nationalities had felt that it gave them a reliable means of feeding their views into the political arena. They tried to treat it as such: mass participation in the first elections in 1906 was very high. The result was a Duma whose majority put forward the kind of programme one would expect from peasant petitions, with the demand for radical land reform in pride of place. The government set its face against this demand, and dissolved the Duma before it had lasted three months. A Second Duma, elected in the same way, gave similar results. It seemed as if the outcome of the abrupt experiment with a popular legislative assembly was to be a fruitless confrontation between it and the regime.

The government dissolved the Second Duma too. That might have been the end of the Duma as an institution. But government had also been strengthened by the creation of the post of prime minister. Its holder, Petr Stolypin, had a broader political vision: he insisted the Duma should continue, though with a reduced franchise, which gave the dominant position to landowners, urban elites, and Russians; some non-Russians lost their voting rights altogether. His intention was to strengthen the monarchy by providing it with an institutional base among the empire’s elites and thus create a political Russian nation.

As part of his plan, Stolypin endeavoured to release peasants from the village commune and make them full citizens, in order to promote modern commercial farming and create a politically loyal class of small landed property owners. The Third Duma passed his reform. But the distance between the state and the people was revealed yet again. Stolypin’s vision foundered on a complex and many-faceted rural reality. Most peasants, even if they wished for more freedom to engage in the market, still needed to participate in the decisions of their village community, and still wanted the security provided by the communal safety-net. Many villagers passively or actively resisted the claims of those who wished to separate their land from the commune’s, usually because separation disrupted communal arrangements (for crop cycles or pasturing livestock, for example) and threatened to restrict the freedom the commune still enjoyed to redistribute land periodically according to its own criteria. Even where wholesale retitling and enclosure of the land was carried out, officials discovered that communes continued to govern many aspects of land use as before.

Stolypin soon found himself in a hard place between the Duma and the Tsar. Nicholas had granted the October Manifesto reluctantly and hankered after downgrading the Duma once the revolutionary movement had subsided. He was supported by many courtiers. At the same time, the nobility, using their bastion in the State Council, resisted Stolypin’s other proposed reforms, which would have weakened their hold on local government and justice, the education system, and the armed forces. Stolypin, for his part, was murdered in 1911, in circumstances that have remained obscure.

The First World War

The engaged and articulate political public had greatly increased as a result of 1905. The number of newspapers and journals grew exponentially, and they attracted readers from social classes which the press had hitherto scarcely reached. Censorship was much weaker, so that considerably more information was now available, and controversial issues were discussed in a lively and accessible language. The result was that, when war broke out in 1914, politics had become much more raucous and confrontational than before 1905.

War nevertheless offered a last chance to create national unity. When it broke out, massive crowds flooded on to the streets to cheer the Tsar. The Duma voted war credits and then prorogued. Zemstvos and municipalities offered to take over medical care and other services for the army. ‘Civil society’ was being created in emergency mode.