Then, beginning on September 6, 1908, the weekly newspaper Bakinsky rabochy [“Baku Worker”], became the new print voice of the Oil Industry Workers Union. Addressing its readers, the paper wrote: “Comrade readers! After a long interval, we have gained another opportunity to interact closely with you through the printed word. We were forced to keep silent at the key point of our struggle with the oil industrialists, when the printed word, discussion of pressing issues, and the exchange of opinions were especially needed.... We don’t need to disseminate much about our program, about the paths we will take and to which we will call the Baku working class. We are old acquaintances of the Baku workers and know each other well.... Comrade workers! The Bakinsky rabochy will be your newspaper, as was the Gudok before us, so the more interest you take in us and the more actively you participate in it, the more fully it will reflect your needs and desires.... Do not forget this, and try to help your newspaper do what good it can for you.”
The oilfield and refinery workers answered the call. The paper established a firm relationship with the broad masses of workers, and became their favorite publication, in whose pages they found answers to the burning issues of their lives.
It should be noted that beginning in 1906, another labor union was operating on the Absheron Peninsula, alongside the Oil Industry Workers Union. This was the Mechanical Production Workers Union, for specialists involved in the servicing of oil fields and refineries. For some time, despite the fact that they addressed essentially the same issues, these two labor unions were often unable to coordinate their activities properly. Not until several years had passed were they able to overcome their differences and address the question of forming a single labor union—the Union of Oil Workers and Allied Trades. Formed in February 1912, the Union did much to help raise the level of activities to protect the vital interests of oil workers.
Oil on the Agenda of the State Duma
The history of Russian parliamentarianism provides the best argument against any idea that Russia has no democratic traditions. The Russian Federation, just like other nations, came to parliamentarianism by a long route, using the method of trial and error. Here we must mention the predecessors of domestic parliamentarianism: land, urban, and university self-government in the Russian Empire; class self-government in the centralized Muscovite state; and finally, the veche (public assembly) in many cities of Kievan Rus.
Russia’s first representative parliamentary institution (in the modern sense of the term) was founded by Emperor Nicholas II’s Manifesto establishing the State Duma and the Law Creating the State Duma, both promulgated August 6, 1905. Under pressure from the liberal wing of the government, represented mainly by his Prime Minister Sergey Witte, in an atmosphere of massive revolutionary demonstrations, Nicholas II decided to cool down the political situation in Russia by showing his subjects that he intended to consider the public need for a representative branch of government. This is explicitly stated in his Manifesto: “The time has now come, following their good beginnings, to call elected people from all Russian lands to permanent and active participation in the drafting of laws by including, to this end, a special legal-consultative establishment among high government institutions, which is authorized to carry out the preliminary development and discussion of draft legislation and to review the list of state revenues and outlays.” As the Manifesto makes clear, the new body was initially conceived with only a consultative role.
The following Manifesto of October 17, 1905, “On the Improvement of State Procedures,” substantially expanded the Duma’s authority. The Russian emperor’s sovereignty, i.e., the autocratic nature of his power, was retained. The procedure for elections to the first Duma was defined in an election law promulgated in December 1905, which instituted four curias, or citizen classifications, for the purposes of election: landowners, urban residents, peasants, and workers. We should note that the elections themselves were still not universal (they excluded women, people under 25 years of age, soldiers, and a variety of ethnic minorities), nor were they equal (one member of the landowners’ curia represented 2,000 voters; one member of the urban curia represented 4,000; one member of the peasant curia represented 30,000; and one member of the workers’ curia represented 90,000) or direct (election was a two-stage process, and for workers and peasants, it was a three- and four-stage process).
Having accorded legislative powers to the State Duma, the tsarist government did everything possible to limit them. In the Manifesto of February 20, 1906, it transformed the Russian Empire’s supreme legal-consultative establishment, the State Council (which had existed since 1810), into a second legislative chamber with veto power over decisions of the State Duma. On April 23, 1906, Nicholas II approved a code of Basic State Laws, which the Duma could amend only at the initiative of the tsar himself. In particular, these laws specified a whole series of severe restrictions on the activities of the future Russian parliament. The tsar retained full power to govern the country through a ministry answerable only to him, to manage foreign policy, and to control the army and navy; during recesses between sessions, he could promulgate laws that were then merely formally ratified by the State Duma (Art. 87 of the Basic Laws).
The first State Duma lasted from April to July 1906 and convened only one session. Of 499 deputies elected to the first Duma, the most numerous bloc was members of the Constitutional Democratic Party, numbering 179 deputies. The Octobrists were represented by 16 deputies, and the Social Democrats, by 18. The so-called ethnic minorities had 63 representatives, and another 105 representatives were unaffiliated. Representatives of Russia’s agrarian labor party, or, as they were called at the time, the “Trudoviks,” comprised an impressive bloc of 97 deputies, and retained this quota through practically all of the Dumas. Sergey Muromtsev (1850–1910), a professor at the College of Roman Law at St. Petersburg University, was elected chairman of the first Duma.
From the very outset, the first Duma demonstrated that it did not intend to accommodate caprice or authoritarianism on the part of the tsarist government. In response to the emperor’s throne speech of May 5, 1906, the State Duma adopted a message demanding amnesty for political prisoners; real exercise of political freedoms; universal suffrage; elimination of land set aside for the treasury, appanage, and monasterial property; and so forth.
In turn, the emperor’s disparaging attitude toward the Duma became apparent when the first bill he sent to the deputies for consideration involved the question of allocating 40,000 rubles to build a palm conservatory and a laundry facility at Yuryev University (now Tartu University).
During its brief life, the first State Duma discussed a large number of issues: repeal of the death penalty and amnesty for political prisoners; freedoms of the press, of unions, and of assembly; civil equality; the Black Hundreds pogrom in Bialystok and others; labor unions; assistance to the unemployed and starving; and naturally, one of the main issues, the agrarian question. In all, it considered 391 requests from the Russian government and approved 261. The government rejected all parliamentary proposals expressed as wishes for partial political amnesty, creation of a “government answerable to the State Duma,” expansion of suffrage and other freedoms, increased peasant land ownership, etc. In turn, the Duma passed a resolution of complete lack of confidence in the government and demanded its resignation, whereupon the Duma was dissolved by Nicholas II, going down in history as the “Duma of Public Anger.”
The second Duma was convened in February 1907. As chairman, it elected the noted land movement figure and Deputy for Moscow Province, attorney Fëdor Golovin (1867–1937), one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party. In all, this Duma operated for 102 days during only one session. Most of its meetings were devoted to problems of procedure. This became a unique way of fighting the government during the discussion of various bills, which the government believed the Duma had no right to raise or discuss. The government, answerable only to the tsar, did not wish to consider the deputies’ opinions, and the deputies, regarding themselves as the people’s elected representatives, did not wish to submit to this state of affairs, striving to achieve their goals by one means or another. Ultimately, this confrontation became one of the main causes of the second Duma’s dissolution on June 3, 1907.
As a result of the introduction of a new election law in Russia, a third State Duma was formed, the only one of the four that survived its full five-year term under law, from November 1907 to June 1912. It held five sessions. As chairman, the Duma elected Nikolay Khomyakov (1850–1925), a leader of the October 17 Alliance. In March 1910, he was replaced by Aleksandr Guchkov (1862–1936), a noted politician and leader of the October 17 Party, and a year later, the Duma elected Mikhail Rodzyanko (1859–1924), a major political figure and one of the leaders of the October 17 Party.
The fourth Duma, the last in the history of autocratic Russia, arose during a period of increasing crisis for the country and the whole world: the eve of the First World War. Five sessions were held between November 1912 and October 1917. The fourth Duma differed little in makeup from the third, except that a considerable number of clergy were added to the ranks of deputies. The chairman of the fourth Duma for its entire term was Mikhail Rodzyanko. It should be noted that the Fourth State Duma played a leading role in instituting the Provisional Govern-ment after the collapse of the autocracy. Beginning in March 1917, it operated through private meetings, but on October 6, 1917, the Provisional Government of the Russian Republic ordered the Duma dissolved in connection with preparations for elections to the Constitutional Convention.
In all four State Dumas, the ranks of the deputies were dominated (in various proportions, of course) by members of the landed gentry, trading and industrial bourgeoisie, urban intelligentsia, and peasantry. They brought to the institution their ideas of ways for Russia to develop and their skills in public debate. It was especially illustrative that the intelligentsia used skills acquired in university lecture halls and courtrooms, while the peasants brought many democratic traditions of community self-government. In their work, the deputies made wide use of a system of inquiries. In response to any emergency, after collecting a certain number of signatures, the deputies could submit an interpellation, that is, a demand that the government account for its actions, to which one or another minister had to respond. Thus, the birth of Russian parliamentarianism provided valuable experience combating authoritarian propensities in the activities of rulers. The practice of discussing various bills in the Duma is still of unequivocal interest for modern parliamentarians. For example, the third Duma had some 30 deputy committees. The more important committees, such as the budget committee, had several dozen members. The Duma’s own legislative initiative was limited by the requirement that each proposal have at least 30 sponsors. Based on one such initiative, the Duma developed and adopted one of the most progressive factory and plant laws in Europe.
In the opinion of a number of Russian historians, on the whole, the work of the State Duma was an important factor in the political development of early 20th-century Russia, substantially affecting many sectors of public life, including the development of the oil industry. This is where the first attempt was made to begin truly meaningful, systematic efforts to introduce civil law principles into the use of mineral resources, and to correct contradictions in the framework of the rigid administrative regime governing the exploitation of oil fields and the need to ensure freedom for private enterprise.
As an example, we can cite the inquiry of October 19, 1909 submitted by a group of 42 members of the October 17 Alliance bloc in the State Duma, “On the Illegal Cession of Oil-Bearing Parcels in Baku Province,” which spoke of a flagrant violation of law on the part of the Russian Ministry of Trade and Industry in allocating oil-bearing lands on the Absheron Peninsula to two highly placed tsarist dignitaries, hunt director [Jägermeister] Vasily I. Mamantov and hunt director Pavel P. Golenishchev-Kutuzov-Tolstoy. Discussion of this inquiry in the State Duma erupted in a loud scandal, and exposed a shocking forgery with the assignment of oil-bearing lands to “dead souls”56—the Caucasian Partnership, which had ceased to exist in 1900, and two long-dead entrepreneurs, Bastamov and Shkhiyants. This parliamentary session was widely covered in the Russian and foreign press, and evoked a strong public response, which ultimately caused the minister of industry and trade, privy councilor Vladimir Timiryazev, to resign in disgrace.
In early 1913, Russia saw a substantial rise in petroleum products prices, and began to experience a shortage of kerosene, lubricants, and residual oil, which created serious problems for the normal operation of the national economy. In March 1913, the State Duma sent the government an inquiry, “On the Activities of Syndicates in the Oil Industry,” where it raised the following question fairly clearly: “Is the Minister of Trade and Industry aware that the activities of major oil companies are giving obvious and clear indications of the existence of an illegal oil-industry syndicate? If so, what steps has he taken to investigate these illegal activities and to curtail further existence of the syndicate?” The discussion of this parliamentary inquiry within the government led to the development and implementation of a series of concrete steps to develop the national oil industry and correct the situation in the country’s oil market, and led to a certain mitigation of the petroleum fuel shortage. But the First World War, which began in August 1914, prevented the full implementation of these plans.
We should note that the history of parliamentary activity in tsarist Russia is extraordinarily relevant and necessary today. It teaches the public representatives of our time to be combative, to be able to defend the public interest under strong pressure from the executive branch, to engage in sharp parliamentary debate, to find creative ways for the body of deputies to work together, to maintain a high degree of professionalism, and to be proactive lawmakers.