Workers formed strike committees; peasants began to make illegal use of the gentry’s timber and pastures and to take over arable land. A mutiny took place in the Black Sea fleet and the battleship Potëmkin steamed off towards Romania. Troops returning from the Far East rebelled along the Trans-Siberian railway. In September 1905 the St Petersburg Marxists founded a Soviet (or Council) of Workers’ Deputies. It was elected by local factory workers and employees and became an organ of revolutionary local self-government. Nicholas II at last took the advice from Sergei Witte to issue an October Manifesto which promised ‘civil liberty on principles of true inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association’. There would also be an elected Duma and adult males in all classes of the population would be enfranchised. Without the Duma, no law could be put into effect. It seemed that autocracy was announcing its demise.
The Manifesto drew off the steam of the urban middle-class hostility and permitted Nicholas II to suppress open rebellion. Many liberals urged that the Emperor should be supported. The Petersburg Soviet leaders — including its young deputy chairman Lev Trotski — were arrested. An armed uprising was attempted by the Moscow Soviet under the Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries in December 1905. But the rising was quelled. Loyal military units were then deployed elsewhere against other organizations and social groups in revolt. And, as order was restored in the towns and on the railways, Nicholas II published a Basic Law and ordered elections for the State Duma. By then he had introduced qualifications to his apparent willingness to give up autocratic authority. In particular, he could appoint the government of his unrestricted choice; the Duma could be dissolved at his whim; and he could rule by emergency decree. Not only Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries but also the Constitutional-Democrats (or Kadets) denounced these manoeuvres.
The peasantry had not been much slower to move against the authorities than the workers: most rural districts in European Russia were categorized as ‘disorderly’ in summer 1905.18 Illegal sawing of timber and pasturing of livestock on landlords’ land took place. Threats were made on gentry who lived in the countryside. Often a cockerel with its neck slit would be laid on the doorstep of their houses to warn them to get out of the locality. The Russian peasant households organized their activities within their communes — and frequently it was the better-off households which took the leading role in the expression of the peasantry’s demands. In 1905–6 the countryside across the empire was in revolt. Only the fact that Nicholas II could continue to rely upon a large number of the regiments which had not been sent to the Far East saved him his throne. It was a very close-run thing.
And so the First State Duma met in April 1906. The largest group of deputies within it was constituted by peasants belonging to no party. Contrary to Nicholas II’s expectation, however, these same deputies stoutly demanded the transfer of the land from the gentry. He reacted by dissolving the Duma. The party with the greatest number of places in the Duma was the Constitutional-Democratic Party and its leaders were so angered by the Duma’s dispersal that they decamped to the Finnish town of Vyborg and called upon their fellow subjects to withhold taxes and conscripts until a fuller parliamentary order was established. Nicholas faced them down and held a further set of elections. To his annoyance, the Second Duma, too, which assembled in March 1907, turned out to be a radical assembly. Consequently Nicholas turned to his Minister of Internal Affairs, Pëtr Stolypin, to form a government and to rewrite the electoral rules so as to produce a Third Duma which would increase the importance of the gentry at the expense of the peasantry.
Stolypin was a reforming conservative. He saw the necessity of agrarian reform, and perceived the peasant land commune as the cardinal obstacle to the economy’s efficiency and society’s stability. He therefore resolved to dissolve the commune by encouraging ‘strong and sober’ peasant households to set themselves up as independent farming families. When the Second Duma had opposed him for his failure to grant the land itself to the peasantry, Stolypin had used the emergency powers of Article 87 of the Basic Law to push through his measures. When Russian peasants subsequently showed themselves deeply attached to their communes, he used a degree of compulsion to get his way. Nevertheless his success was very limited. By 1916 only a tenth of the households in the European parts of the empire had broken away from the commune to set up consolidated farms — and such farms in an area of great fertility such as west-bank Ukraine were on average only fifteen acres each.19
It was also recognized by Stolypin that the Imperial government would work better if co-operation were forthcoming from the Duma. To this end he sought agreements with Alexander Guchkov and the so-called Octobrist Party (which, unlike the Kadets, had welcomed the October Manifesto). Guchkov’s Octobrists were monarchist conservatives who thought roughly along the same lines as Stolypin, but insisted that all legislation should be vetted by the Duma.20 At the same time Stolypin wanted to strengthen a popular sense of civic responsibility; he therefore persuaded the Emperor to increase the peasantry’s weight in the elections to the zemstva. Peasants, he argued, had to have a stake in public life. The political, social and cultural integration of society was vital and Stolypin became convinced that Russian nationalists were right in arguing that Russia should be treated as the heartland of the tsarist empire. Further curtailments were made on the already narrow autonomy of Poles, Finns and other nations of the Russian Empire; and Stolypin strengthened the existing emphasis on Russian-language schooling and administration.
At court, however, he was regarded as a self-interested politician bent upon undermining the powers of the Emperor. Eventually Nicholas, too, saw things in this light, and he steadily withdrew his favour from Stolypin. In September 1911, Stolypin was assassinated by the Socialist-Revolutionary Dmitri Bogrov in Kiev. There were rumours that the Okhrana, the political police of the Ministry for the Interior, had facilitated Bogrov’s proximity to the premier — and even that the Emperor may have connived in this. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Emperor resumed policies involving the minimum of co-operation with the State Duma. Intelligent conservatism passed away with the death of Pëtr Stolypin.
Yet it was no longer possible for tsarism to rule the country in quite the old fashion. In the eighteenth century it had been exclusively the nobility which had knowledge of general political affairs. The possession of this knowledge served to distance the upper classes from the rest of society. At home the families of the aristocracy took to speaking French among themselves; they imbibed European learning and adopted European tastes. A line of exceptional noble-men — from Alexander Radishchev in the 1780s through to an anti-tsarist conspiracy known as the Decembrists in 1825 — questioned the whole basis of the old regime’s legitimacy. But vigorous suppression did not eliminate the problem of dissent. Some of the greatest exponents of Russian literature and intellectual thought — including Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy — made it their life’s work to call for a drastic change in conditions.