State Duma (Russian Empire)

• 1. Introduction

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  The State Duma of the Russian Empire, also called the Imperial Duma, was the lower house of a legislature whose upper house was the State Council. It met in the Tauride Palace in Saint Petersburg. On the 1st of November 1916, by the old calendar, Pavel Milyukov stood in that building and attacked the government of Boris Stürmer. He spoke of "Dark Forces" at work in the state. Then he asked a question that became famous: "Is this stupidity or treason?" The Duma that heard him had convened four times between 1906 and the empire's collapse in February 1917. How did such an assembly come to exist at all? Why did its character change so sharply from one election to the next? And how did a body so often held on a short leash end up at the centre of the empire's final weeks? Five men chaired it between 1906 and 1917, and the answers begin with the rules written for it before the first of them took his seat.

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• 2. Powers On Paper

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  On the 6th of August 1905, by the old calendar, Sergei Witte issued a manifesto announcing that a Duma would be convened. Nicholas II had appointed Witte to manage the peace negotiations with Japan after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was pressing hard on the throne. At first the promised body was thought to be purely advisory, and it earned the label Bulygin-Duma.

  The October Manifesto went much further. In it the emperor promised more civil liberties, broad participation in a new "State Duma", and legislative and oversight powers for that body. The Duma would be the lower house, with the State Council of Imperial Russia above it.

  Nicholas II, however, was determined to keep his autocratic power, and he succeeded. On the 23rd of April 1906 he issued the Fundamental Laws, which gave him the title of "supreme autocrat". No law could be made without the Duma's assent. Yet the Duma could not pass a law without approval from the State Council, a body dominated by nobles. Half of its members were appointed directly by the emperor, and he kept a veto of his own.

  Under the Fundamental Laws of 1906, ministers were neither appointed by the Duma nor responsible to it. Government at the executive level therefore answered to the throne alone. Nicholas could dismiss the Duma and announce new elections whenever he wished. Article 87 also let him pass temporary emergency laws by decree. In practice, Russia remained a non-official absolute monarchy.

  The first Duma opened four days after the Fundamental Laws were issued, on the 27th of April 1906.

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• 3. The First Duma

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  About 500 deputies took seats in the first Duma, and a boycott shaped the room. The Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the most radical left parties, stayed out of the election. That left the moderate Constitutional Democrats, known as Kadets, with around 184 deputies. The Trudoviks, or Laborites, an alliance of slightly more radical leftists, came second with around 100. Smaller parties to the right, including the Octobrists, held around 45 between them. Other deputies, mainly from peasant groups, belonged to no party.

  The Kadets drew their strength from the cities. Their relatively moderate stance gave them steady appeal with voters. Rural communities committed to other parties, however, and often paid the Kadets little attention.

  The 73 days the first Duma sat, ending on the 8th of July 1906, brought little success. The emperor and his loyal prime minister, Ivan Goremykin, were keen to keep the assembly in check and reluctant to share power. The deputies wanted continuing reform, including electoral reform and, most prominently, land reform. Sergei Muromtsev, a Professor of Law at Moscow University, was elected chairman, and Lev Urusov gave a speech that became famous. Scared by this liberalism, the emperor dissolved the assembly. He reportedly said, "Curse the Duma. It is all Witte's doing."

  Pavel Milyukov regarded the Russian Constitution of 1906 as a mock-constitution. In frustration, he and approximately 200 deputies, mostly liberal Kadets, went to Vyborg, then part of Russian Finland. From there they issued the Vyborg Appeal, which called for civil disobedience and a revolution. Largely ignored, it ended in their arrest and the closure of Kadet Party offices. Among other things, this helped pave the way for a different makeup of the second Duma.

  Pyotr Stolypin, named prime minister on the day of the dissolution, would be the man to face that next assembly.

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• 4. The June Coup

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  The second Duma lasted 103 days, from the 20th of February 1907 to the 3rd of June 1907. Among its new members was Vladimir Purishkevich, who strongly opposed the October Manifesto. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, dropped their boycott of the Duma. So did the Socialist Revolutionaries. The election was an overall success for the left. The Trudoviks won 104 seats, the Social Democrats 65, split between 47 Mensheviks and 18 Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries 37, and the Popular Socialists 16.

  The Kadets, now the most moderate and centrist party, were outnumbered two to one by their more radical counterparts. Even so, Stolypin and the Duma could not build a working relationship. Land confiscation divided them. The socialists and, to a lesser extent, the Kadets supported it, while the tsar and Stolypin vehemently opposed it. Stolypin's brutal attitude toward law and order was a second point of friction.

  On the 1st of June 1907, Stolypin accused the Social Democrats of preparing an armed uprising. He demanded that the Duma exclude 55 Social Democrats from its sessions and strip 16 of their parliamentary immunity. The Duma rejected this ultimatum. Two days later, on the 3rd, an ukase, or imperial decree, dissolved it in what became known as the Coup of June 1907. The alleged insurrection plot rested on dubious evidence.

  In the manifesto dissolving the Duma, Nicholas II went into considerable detail. He wrote: "To Our regret, a significant portion of the members of the second Duma did not justify Our expectations. Many of those sent by the people to work for them did not go with a pure heart, with a desire to strengthen Russia and to improve its system, but went rather with an explicit intention to increase unrest and to promote the disintegration of the state." The new Duma, according to the tsar and Stolypin, "must be Russian in spirit." The electoral law for the third Duma shrank the assembly. It cut representatives from non-Russian regions and cities, to prevent the election of Liberals, Socialists, and local Nationalists.

  Yet Nicholas II was unwilling to be rid of the State Duma altogether.

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• 5. Lords And Lackeys

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  Stolypin and the tsar used emergency powers to rewrite the electoral law. Votes from landowners and owners of city properties now counted for more. Votes from the peasantry, whom Stolypin accused of being "misled", counted for less. In the process, the Fundamental Laws themselves were broken.

  The result was a third Duma, sitting from the 7th of November 1907 until the 3rd of June 1912, dominated by gentry, landowners and businessmen. The Octobrists were the largest party, with around one-third of the deputies. The assembly earned the nicknames "The Duma of the Lords and Lackeys" and "The Master's Duma". Its makeup made clear that the new electoral system would always produce a landowner-controlled Duma. The tsar would hold vast influence over it, unlike with the first two assemblies.

  The arrangement allowed better, if hardly ideal, cooperation between the government and the Duma. It lasted a full five-year term, passed 200 pieces of legislation and voted on some 2,500 bills. It backed improvements to Russia's military capabilities, Stolypin's plans for land reform, and basic social welfare measures. The power of the hated land captains was consistently reduced. It also supported more regressive laws, such as those on Finnish autonomy and Russification, driven by a prevailing fear that the empire would break up.

  Since the dissolution of the second Duma, a very large proportion of the empire lived under martial law or a milder state of siege. At various times and in various places, it was forbidden to mention that dissolution. The funeral of Sergei Muromtsev, the Speaker of the First Duma, was off limits, as was the funeral of Leo Tolstoy. So were the fanatical right-wing monk Iliodor and the notorious agent provocateur Yevno Azef.

  Stolypin was assassinated in September 1911. His finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, replaced him, and Kokovtsov balanced the budget regularly and even spent on productive purposes.

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• 6. A Duma At War

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  The Fourth Duma was elected in September and October 1912 and opened on the 15th of November 1912. Its first session ran until the 25th of June 1913, and its second from the 15th of October 1913 to the 14th of June 1914. Among its members was Alexander Kerensky, a Trudovik and a promising newcomer. Another was Roman Malinovsky, a Bolshevik who was secretly a double agent for the secret police.

  In March 1913, the Octobrists, led by Alexander Guchkov, commissioned an investigation of Grigori Rasputin. It examined allegations that he was a Khlyst. The leading party then divided itself into three different sections.

  On the 1st of July 1914, the tsar suggested reducing the Duma to a merely consultative body. The July Crisis intervened, and an extraordinary session met on the 26th of July 1914. On the 8th of August it sat for three hours to pass emergency war credits, and it was not asked to stay because it would only be in the way. The Duma then volunteered its own dissolution until the 14th of February 1915.

  The third session gathered from the 27th to the 29th of January 1915. A serious conflict arose that January, because the government kept information about the fighting secret from the deputies. In May, Guchkov initiated the War Industries Committees. They united industrialists supplying ammunition and equipment to the army, mobilized industry for a prolonged war, and put political pressure on the tsarist government.

  On the 17th of July 1915, the Duma reconvened for six weeks. Its deputies were increasingly displeased with tsarist control of military and governmental affairs. On the 21st of August the tsar refused their call to replace his cabinet with a "Ministry of National Confidence". Roughly half the deputies then formed a "Progressive Bloc", which became a focal point of political resistance in 1917. The tsar's announcement that he would leave for the front at Mogilev added urgency, because the bloc's members feared Rasputin's influence over Tsarina Alexandra would grow. The Duma prorogued on the 3rd of September 1915.

  Before the war, the government and the Duma had circled each other like indecisive wrestlers, neither able to make a definite move. The war made the political parties more cooperative, until they practically acted as one party. The Duma gathered on the 9th of February 1916, after the 76-year-old Goremykin had been replaced by Stürmer as prime minister. The Duma met on condition that Rasputin not be mentioned. The deputies were disappointed when Stürmer said that, because of the war, it was not the time for constitutional reforms. The tsar visited the Tauride Palace for the first time in his life, which made it practically impossible to hiss at the new prime minister.

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• 7. Ministerial Leapfrog

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  The sixth session opened on the 1st of November 1916 and ran until the 16th of December. Alexander Kerensky used harsher words than anyone. He called the ministers "hired assassins" and "cowards", and said they were "guided by the contemptible Grishka Rasputin!" Stürmer and Alexander Protopopov asked in vain for the Duma to be dissolved. Stürmer's resignation looked like a concession. Ivan Grigorovich and Dmitry Shuvayev declared in the Duma that they had confidence in the Russian people, the navy and the army, and that the war could be won.

  On the 19th of November, Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the founders of the Black Hundreds, gave a speech in the Duma. He declared that the monarchy had been discredited by what he called the "ministerial leapfrog". The numbers bear him out. During the seventeen months of the "Tsarina's rule", from September 1915 to February 1917, Russia had four Prime Ministers and five Ministers of the Interior. It had three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers and three Ministers of Transport, along with four Ministers of Agriculture. The churn removed competent men from power. It also disorganized the work of government, since no one remained in office long enough to master the job.

  On the 2nd of December, Alexander Trepov climbed the tribune to read the government programme. The deputies shouted "down with the Ministers! Down with Protopopov!" The prime minister was not allowed to speak and had to leave the rostrum three times. Trepov threatened to shut the troublesome Duma completely.

  Meanwhile the tsar, his cabinet, Alexandra and Rasputin debated when to open the Duma again. The options were the 12th or the 19th of January, the 1st or the 14th of February, or never. Rasputin suggested keeping it closed until February, and Alexandra and Protopopov supported him. On Friday the 16th of December, Milyukov told the Duma: "maybe we will be dismissed to the 9th of January, maybe until February". That evening the Duma was closed until the 12th of January, by a decree prepared the day before. A military guard had been on duty at the building.

  A quoted assessment of the Okhrana held that, by the end of 1916, the liberal Duma project was superfluous, and only repression or a social revolution remained.

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• 8. Collapse And Dissolution

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  The February Revolution began on the 22nd of February 1917, after the tsar had left for the front, when strikes broke out in the Putilov workshops. On the 23rd, International Women's Day, women in Petrograd joined the strike. They demanded woman suffrage, an end to food shortages, and an end to the First World War. All gatherings on the streets were absolutely forbidden. Even so, on the 25th some 250,000 people were on strike.

  The tsar ordered Sergey Semyonovich Khabalov, the inexperienced and extremely indecisive commander of the Petrograd military district, and Nikolay Iudovich Ivanov to suppress the rioting by force. Instead, soldiers of the fourth company of the Pavlovsky Life Guards Regiment refused to fall in on parade, shot two officers, and joined the protesters. On the Monday, soldiers of the Volhynian Life Guards Regiment brought the Lithuanian, Preobrazhensky and Moscow Regiments out onto the street to join the rebellion. The liberal Vasily Maklakov, speaking for the Progressive Bloc, argued that all members of the Council of Ministers should resign, "to make it clear that they want to go in a new way."

  On the 27th, the Duma delegates received an order from the emperor to prorogue until April, which would leave them with no legal authority to act. According to Buchanan: "It was an act of madness to prorogue the Duma at a moment like the present." The Duma refused to obey and gathered in a private meeting. The delegates formed a Provisional Committee of the State Duma, which ordered the arrest of all the former ministers and senior officials. A crowd and soldiers occupied the Tauride Palace. That evening the Council of Ministers held its last meeting in the Marinsky Palace and formally submitted its resignation to the tsar.

  Guchkov, along with Vasily Shulgin, travelled to army headquarters near Pskov to persuade the tsar to abdicate. The committee sent commissars to take over ministries and other government institutions, dismissing the ministers the tsar had appointed. It formed the Provisional Government under Georgi Lvov. On the 2nd of March 1917, that government decided the Duma would not be reconvened.

  After the Kornilov affair and the proclamation of the Russian Republic, the Provisional Government formally dissolved the State Duma on the 6th of October 1917. On the 20th of October a Provisional Council of the Russian Republic convened as a stand-in parliament, to hold the stage until the election of the Russian Constituent Assembly.

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