The Constitutional Experiment
The October Manifesto provided a framework within which the Russian state and Russian society should have found it possible to reduce the tension dividing them. This it failed to accomplish. A constitutional regime can function properly only if government and opposition accept the rules of the game: in Russia, neither the monarchy nor the intelligentsia was prepared to do so. Each regarded the new order as an obstacle, a deviation from the country’s true system, which for the monarchy was autocracy and for the intelligentsia, a democratic republic. As a result, the constitutional interlude, while not without achievements, was largely wasted—a missed opportunity that would not recur.
In affixing his signature to the manifesto, Nicholas vaguely realized that it meant “constitution,” but neither he nor his advisers were intellectually or psychologically ready to acknowledge that a constitution spelled an end to the autocracy. Although the manifesto pledged that henceforth no law would go into effect without the approval of a popularly elected legislature, the Court seemed unaware that this pledge entailed a constitutional charter. According to Witte, it was only two months later that Trepov broached the need for such a document.1 And when a constitutional charter was issued in April 1906, its drafters studiously avoided the word “constitution,” designating it as “Fundamental Laws” (Osnovnye zakony), the name traditionally used for the first volume of the Code of Laws.
Nicholas did not regard either the October Manifesto or the new Fundamental Laws as affecting his autocratic prerogatives. In his mind, the Duma was a consultative, not a legislative body (“I created the Duma, not to be directed by it, but to be advised,” he told the Minister of War).2 He further felt that in having “granted” the Duma and the Fundamental Laws of his own free will he was not bound by them: and since he had not sworn an oath to uphold the new order, he could also revoke it at will.3 The obvious contradiction between the reality of a constitutional regime and the Court’s insistence that nothing had changed had bewildering consequences. Thus, even Peter Stolypin, the closest Russia had to a genuine parliamentary Prime Minister, in private conversation insisted that Russia had no constitution because such a document had to be the product of agreement between rulers and subjects whereas the Fundamental Laws of 1906 had been granted by the Tsar. In his view Russia’s government was not “constitutional” but “representative” and the only limitations on imperial authority were such as the Tsar saw fit to impose on himself.4 And what is one to make of Vladimir Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor, who while addressing the parliament exclaimed, “Thank God, we have as yet no parliament!”5 Maurice Baring, an English student of Russia, concluded from personal observation in 1905–6 that ideally Russia’s bureaucracy wanted “parliamentary institutions and autocratic government.” Russians similarly joked that “the Tsar was ready to give a constitution as long as autocracy remained intact.”6 To the extent that such contradictory attitudes lend themselves to rational explanation, this is best sought in the tradition of Muscovite consultative bodies called Land Assemblies (Zemskie sobory), convened from time to time to give tsars non-binding advice. But, of course, by the terms of the October Manifesto and the Fundamental Laws of 1906 the Duma was a legislative, not a consultative body, so that the analogy with the past had no relevance except perhaps on the psychological level.
The behavior of the Crown under the constitutional regime cannot be understood without reference to the various monarchist groups which treated the October Manifesto as a trick played on the Tsar by the wily Witte and his alleged Jewish backers. In their view, too, neither the manifesto nor the Fundamental Laws were inviolate: what the Tsar had given, he could take back. These groups, composed largely of landowners (many from the western provinces), right-wing publicists, and Orthodox clergy, backed by lower-middle-class groups, espoused a very simple ideology: autocracy and Russia for the Russians. Increasingly, their outlook reduced itself to a rabid anti-Semitism, which saw in Jews the source of all of Russia’s woes—enemies of Christianity and a race bent on attaining world domination. The most influential of these bodies was the Union of the Russian People, which organized patriotic demonstrations, published virulently anti-Semitic literature, and from time to time arranged for Jewish pogroms, using gangs of urban thugs called “Black Hundreds” (Chërnye sotni). These extreme right-wing groupings, which in many ways anticipated the German National Socialists of the 1920s, in democratic elections would have been unlikely to gain a single seat in the Duma. They owed their disproportionate influence to the identity of their views and interests with those of the Crown and its more reactionary officialdom. It was they who encouraged Nicholas and his wife in the belief that the country remained staunchly loyal to the Romanov dynasty and the ideals of autocracy.7
The more liberal bureaucrats were not averse to conceding limited power to a representative body: according to a high official, the idea of a representative institution with which to divide responsibility (if not authority) for governing Russia “grew like grass” in governmental circles.8 The rationale behind such sympathies was spelled out by Kaiser Wilhelm II in a letter to the Tsar in August 1905 in connection with the announcement of the so-called Bulygin Duma:
Your manifest directing the formation of the “Duma” made an excellent impression in Europe … you get an excellent insight into the mind of your People and make them carry a part of the responsibility for the future, which it would have probably liked to saddle solely upon you, thereby making a wholesale “critique” and dissatisfaction with deeds done by you alone impossible.9
But in the eyes of the bureaucracy these benefits could accrue only if parliament confined itself to largely ceremonial functions. Vasilii Maklakov thus describes the attitude on the eve of the First Duma of Ivan Goremykin, the Tsar’s favorite minister:
As concerned the Duma, it was for him exclusively a factor complicating legislative procedures. This complication seemed to him, at bottom, unnecessary: but once it had been regrettably made, then it had to be reduced to a minimum. This was not difficult. The government’s plan for the Duma was simple. To begin with, it would be sufficient for the deputies to have the honor of being received in audience by the Emperor: then their mandates would be verified and the rules worked out. This would be followed by a recess, brought about as quickly as possible: in this manner, the session would be prorogued until autumn. Next would come the discussion of the budget. The practical exigencies of life would assert themselves, turmoil calmed, order restored, and everything would be as before.10
Not all Crown ministers thought in these terms: Stolypin, in particular, would try to bring the Duma into a genuine partnership. But Goremykin reflected more accurately the attitudes prevalent at the Court and among its conservative supporters—attitudes which precluded effective parliamentary government at a time when autocratic government had ceased to be feasible. As if to demonstrate his feelings toward the Duma, Nicholas refused to cross its threshold, preferring to receive the deputies in the Winter Palace.*
Later, after the Revolution, some officials of the tsarist regime justified the monarchy’s unwillingness to share power with the Duma with the argument that Russian “society,” as represented by the intelligentsia, would have been incapable of administering the country: introducing parliamentary government in 1906 would merely have served to unleash the anarchy of 1917 that much sooner.11 But these arguments, voiced in emigration, had the benefit of hindsight: a conservative-liberal parliamentary coalition cooperating with the monarchy and its officialdom would certainly have proven more effective than the same coalition turned out to be in March 1917, after the monarchy had abdicated, when it had no alternative but to seek support from the revolutionary intelligentsia.