It’s always interesting to delve a little bit in the democratic history of a country.
Now, in autocratic Russia it was very short-lived.
Following the Russian-revolution of 1905 a “constitution” and “parliament” were
established… and yes, those quotation marks definitely belong there.
The quote of parliament’s chairman seems fitting, as he once exclaimed: Thank God we
still do not have a parliament.
-intro-
Tsar Nicholas gives in
It was the summer of 1905 and the Russian revolution following the Bloody Sunday massacre
was in full swing.
During this time leadership among the unorganized strikers emerged and so-called soviets, worker’s
councils were established.
Tsar Nicholas thought about resorting to a violent crackdown, as he had often done before.
Several ministers, among them Sergey Witte, the minister of finance, managed to convince
the Tsar to refrain from doing so.
Nicholas wrote in his diary about these events, lamenting that it made him physically ill
that he couldn’t act decisively, but had to listen to his ministers.
He remarked they acted as if they were headless chickens, and considering the situation he
probably was right.
Nicholas realized he had two options: a full-fledged military crackdown, or granting civil rights
and a parliament, a duma.
The latter option meant a constitution had to be written.
On the thirtieth of October nineteen-o-five Tsar Nicholas signed a document that became
known as the October manifesto.
It transformed Russia into a constitutional monarchy… in theory.
The manifesto promised civil rights, a national legislative assembly, universal manhood suffrage
and freedom of speech, assembly and association.
Rather progressive for a country that seemed stuck in its old autocratic ways, and this
document went further than what the Tsar had promised after the Bloody Sunday debacle.
The manifesto, furthermore, declared that no law could be issued without the Duma’s
approval, and as such, one of the main demands of the population was met.
The politicians of the middle-class got what they wanted: the revolution had been a success.
… At least, that’s what most Russians that celebrated the manifesto thought.
And perhaps it could have been that way, if it had not been for the stubborn Tsar and
his advisers that had not yet learned their lessons from that year.
The Tsar and his advisors had not yet realized the necessity of true reforms, and the fact
they had to be honest about what they promised.
Sergey Witte had been the Tsars main advisor throughout this entire crisis, and he persuaded
the Tsar to accept the manifesto, but Witte simply considered it a means to protect the
monarchy and autocratic government, not so much the spread of enlightenment ideals.
He was noted as saying: “I have a constitution in my head, but when it concerns my heart,
I spit on it.”
The manifesto immediately achieved goal it was meant to achieve.
The revolution lost all its leverage and the authority of the soviets evaporated.
The strikers returned to their work and, while leaders of the strikes kept preaching violent
revolution in order to establish a democratic (or not-so democratic in case of the Bolsheviks)
republic, these calls to action didn’t have much effect.
In the middle of November the Saint Petersburg soviet called for a new strike, but it barely
met any response and Sergey Witte ordered the arrest of its leaders, Leon Trotsky and
Alexander Parvus.
The leadership of the uprising transferred to the Moscow Soviet for a short time, but
they misjudged the situation when they urged for an armed uprising, on the twenty-third
of December, which was subsequently suppressed by Tsarist troops.
That was the official end of the revolution of nineteen-o-five.
The Democratic Experiment
Between nineteen-o-six and nineteen-seventeen, Russia had its first, and only, democratic
experiment until after the fall of the Soviet Union, over 7 decades later.
It wasn’t a widespread, large scale experiment, though.
The First State Duma elections dominated the first couple of months of nineteen-o-six.
All men above the age of twenty-five could cast their vote, and there were 478 seats
to be divided, but only landlords of whom the lands exceeded one-hundred-and-sixty hectares,
could vote directly.
The other categories of electorate, peasants and inhabitants of cities for example, could
only elect through an electoral college.
The result was that a relatively small class of landlords owned thirty-one percent of the
vote, while peasants had forty-two percent and the population of cities had twenty-seven
percent.
A complete disproportionate way to divide the votes.
In March the general elections took place.
These were boycotted by revolutionary parties on the far left: the Bolsheviks among others,
and the right-wing Union of Russian Peoples.
The liberals, on the other hand, held an intensive campaign, lead by the Constitutional Democratic
Party, the so-called Kadets, under Pavel Milyukov.
These received the most seats, namely one-hundred-and-seventy-nine.
The Trudoviks under Alexey Aladyin received ninety-seven seats, the Progressive party
under Ivan Yefremov received sixty, Alexander Guchkov with his Octobrists received sixteen
and the Social Democrats, the Mensheviks, under Julius Martov received eighteen seats.
Before the Duma could even assemble, however, the Tsar undermined its authority…
Classic.
On the sixth of May Nicholas issued a major revision of the Constitution, stating that
“The Tsar of the Russians possessed the essence of the supreme sovereign power and
obedience to his commands was mandated by God.”
This was the answer of Tsar Nicholas to the people that had wondered how much freedom
he would grant the new Duma.
In order to prevent the Duma from containing his own power, he created a State Council
of which half its members were appointed by the Tsar himself, including its chairman.
Nicholas decided he had the right to declare war, to appoint the head of the Orthodox Church
and to dissolve the Duma whenever he found it necessary to do so.
The ministers were accountable just to the Tsar, and they couldn’t be fired, not even
by a vote of no confidence by the Duma.
So in reality there was no democracy and the Duma couldn’t change the course of Russia,
but couldn’t it really?
The Duma in itself resembled the containment of the Tsars autocratic power, and that was
something new when it came to the politics of the Russian Empire.
The First Duma
The first Duma officially opened on the tenth of May, with the Tsar and his court attending
in the Winter Palace.
The council he saw before him, as Witte had predicted, was a peasant-Duma, but it was
a Duma that was opposed to him as well.
There were one-hundred-and-ninety-one peasants of the four-hundred-ninety-seven members.
The peasants were the largest group in parliament, with the constitutional democrats following
closely with one-hundred-and-eighty-four seats, more than any other party.
To the left of them there were over a hundred delegates ranging from social revolutionaries
to social democrats, elected, regardless of their boycott.
Not even fifty seats were allocated to people that were to the right of the Cadets.
Between sixty and seventy delegates represented non-Russian ethnicities, and even though they
had all these differences, the absolute majority of the delegates was very critical about the
Tsar and his ministers.
As the delegates assembled in the Tauride Palace, the permanent location of the Duma,
Sergey Muromtsev was elected as President of the Duma.
One of the first moves was to present an ‘address to the throne’ in which political amnesty,
ministerial responsibility, abolishing the death penalty and direct representative voting
rights were demanded.
These demands were more than the Tsar would ever allow, and he made it clear that he wasn’t
planning on allowing any of this.
The Russian Prime Minister, Ivan Goremykin was sent to the Duma in order to set the delegates
straight.
While a law prohibiting capital punishment was passed, a motion of no confidence of the
government and Prime Minister Goremykin was adopted.
The Duma would only last seventy-three days before the government dismissed it.
Two-hundred delegates fled to Vyborg, Finland.
Much to their dismay there was no reaction from the Russian population.
The first, timid steps towards a parliamentary democracy had collapsed, and exactly those
that had fought for this parliamentary democracy kept silent.
Stolypin in Power
The dismissal of the First Duma wasn’t the end of the first constitutional experiment,
however.
Goremykin was replaced by Pyotr Stolypin as Russia’s prime minister.
Stolypin was a man with a much stronger character, who didn’t think dismissing and ignoring
the Duma was the right way to go.
No, The Duma had to be transformed and used to the advantage of the monarchy.
The second Duma was instituted in February nineteen-o-seven.
Its composition was nearly entirely different, only thirty delegates from the First Duma
remained but because the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries did not boycott
this election, on the surface of it the composition of this Duma was even more hostile than the
previous one.
The Cadets were outnumbered by their more radical colleagues, there were more than two-hundred
left-wing delegates, and only around forty on the right.
Neither wanted the Duma to succeed and together they managed to paralyze its political power.
Stolypin found a way to dismiss the Duma after one-hundred-and-three days, in what became
known as the Coup of June.
Basically, Stolypin accused fifty-five Social Democrats of planning a violent uprising and
wanted their parliamentary immunity revoked, the Duma, obviously, refused and the Duma
was subsequently dismissed.
After the Second Duma was dismissed, Stolypin changed the electoral law in such a way that
he could be certain the composition of future Duma’s was more favourable to the gentry,
landowners, monarchists and nobility, all at the expensive of the less ‘loyal’ groups
of the population: workers, peasants and non-ethnic Russians.
The constitutional democrats, those that had one-hundred-and-eighty-four seats in the first
Duma, owned merely fifty-eight in the third one, with parties on the right-wing suddenly
skyrocketing to one-hundred-eighty-five seats.
The dominating party was the right-wing monarchist Octobrist party under Alexander Guchkov, who
became the chairman of the Duma.
Now, by playing around with the electoral system in the way that Stolypin has done,
he created a Duma that was -more or less- willing to do as he wanted.
He didn’t have to resort to dismissing the Duma and the third Duma actually completed
its full five year term, from nineteen-o-seven to June nineteen-twelve.
The fourth Duma would last until February nineteen-seventeen.
It survived the First World War, but would not survive the February Revolution.
The last 2 Dumas were pliable, earning the nickname the “Duma of Lords and Lackeys”.
Any serious resistance to the Tsar was banished.
As for Pyotr Stolypin; he was assassinated in nineteen-eleven.
There had been ten assassination attempts on his life and in Kiev, during a concert,
Dmitry Bogrov, a Socialist Revolutionary, shot him twice.
Stolypin was replaced by his Finance Minister, Count Vladimir Kokovtsov.
And this Kokovtsov summarized his opinion about the Duma in one simple sentence: Thank
God that we still do not have a parliament.
Reflections
As you can tell, the Duma has never been a parliament in the way that Western Europe,
especially France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands had a parliament.
The Duma has never been able to properly assert influence in Russia’s domestic, or foreign
policies.
Those rights were reserved for the Tsar.
But it would be a gross mischaracterization to state that Russia’s parliamentary experiment
was worthless.
Russia was a large, under developed country and after centuries of autocratic rulers,
it would have been an impossible task to transform it to a parliamentary democracy in less than
a decade.
Though, objectively taking notice of the transformations Russia went through during that time, it is
remarkable how much progress was made in this short period, and the four Duma’s did make
serious attempts at solving several problems.
The mere existence of the Duma was already important as she became the centre of political
life: reports about debates that were held filled newspapers, gazetas, read throughout
the entire country, and public political debates were encouraged by these reports.
While conservatism was dominant, even after nineteen-o-five, and Stolypin managed to control
the Duma, this period was still a period of incredible political activity in Russia.
And as for its delegates: they learned how to use their constrained power in the most
effective possible way.
They could approve and dismiss the budget, occasionally force ministers to step down
and the third and fourth Duma both approved legislation regarding land-reform, attempting
to improve the conditions of the peasantry.
The Russian education system drastically improved during this time and, everything taken into
account, there were some commendable achievements, especially if you consider how much their
power had been constrained and the stubbornness of the tsar.
The First World War, however, was to break out in nineteen-fourteen and three years later
the revolutions of nineteen-seventeen would end Tsarist rule forever.
But that’s a story for another time, thank you for watching this video and what is a
person or event in Russian political history that you would like to know more about and
perhaps see a video of?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing
to my channel.
See you next time.