Ethnic minorities: Creating a Ministry of Nationalities; full equality for all citizens regardless of nationality and religion; administrative decentralization in the areas populated largely by non-Russians to allow the latter a greater voice in running their affairs; elimination of the Pale of Settlement and other discriminatory laws against the Jews.
Social legislation: Formation of ministries of Social Security, of Health, and of Labor; compulsory elementary schooling; state insurance for the aged and disabled; a national health program; full legalization of trade unions.
To carry out this program Stolypin required the powers of a Peter the Great, or, barring that, at least the unstinting support of the Crown. He enjoyed neither, and hence only a small part of his reform agenda saw the light of day.
The difficulties he faced are illustrated by his unsuccessful effort to improve the status of Russia’s Jews. High bureaucratic circles had recognized for years that something had to be done about the medieval legislation regulating Jewish subjects. This sense was inspired less by humanitarian than by political considerations. The security police had been aware for some time of the disproportionate number of Jewish youths in the revolutionary movement, and although many of its members believed that Jews were a sinister race bent on subverting and destroying Christian society, more intelligent police officials attributed the young Jews’ radicalism to the obstacles which Russian laws placed in the way of their career opportunities. There were also powerful financial reasons for abolishing Jewish disabilities. The director of the Banc de Paris et Pays Bas expressed a view prevalent among foreign financiers when he advised Kokovtsov, the Finance Minister, that it would benefit Russia’s international standing if she granted her Jewish subjects civil equality.68 Russia’s treatment of Jews poisoned relations with the United States, which objected repeatedly to the refusal of the Russian authorities to grant entry visas to American citizens of Jewish faith. In December 1911, the U.S. Senate, on the recommendation of President Taft, would unanimously renounce the U.S. Russian treaty of 1832 on these grounds.*
Stolypin raised the Jewish issue before the Council of Ministers, and secured a solid majority in favor of doing away with many restrictions on Jewish residential and occupational rights. He forwarded a proposal to this effect to the Tsar. Nicholas rejected it on the grounds of “conscience.”69 The refusal ended the possibility of Imperial Russia ridding herself of her anachronistic Jewish legislation and ensured the animosity of Jews at home and abroad.
Stolypin was determined not to repeat the mistake of his predecessor, Goremykin, who had no government program with which to attract voters. Having announced his reform program, he involved the government in the electoral campaign by paying subsidies to friendly newspapers and staging spectacles for potential supporters of pro-government candidates. For this purpose he allocated modest sums, such as 10,000 rubles to be spent in Kiev on electoral propaganda, “allowances” for needy voters, and the staging for peasant voters of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. He soon became painfully aware of the paucity of means at the government’s disposal to rally public support. Later he resorted to bribing deputies to vote for government bills.70
Stolypin tried, without success, to bring representatives of society into the cabinet.
On assuming office, he engaged in negotiations with Alexander Guchkov and Nicholas Lvov, offering the former the portfolio of Trade and Industry and the latter that of Agriculture. The two made their acceptance conditional on other representatives of society being included in the cabinet. Stolypin next contacted Dmitrii Shipov and Prince George Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government. They posed stiff demands: a government commitment to expropriating some landed property, the abolition of capital punishment, and an end to martial law. These terms may have been acceptable, but the government could not possibly agree to a further demand that a majority of the ministerial portfolios, including that of the Interior, be turned over to non-bureaucrats.71 Using Kryzhanovskii as intermediary, Stolypin also made approaches to the Kadets with the view of having them join the cabinet, but nothing came of this effort either.72 In January 1907, he attempted once more to come to terms with the Kadets, hoping to wean them away from the radical parties. At this time the Kadets had not yet secured status as a legally recognized association. Stolypin offered to grant them such status if they would denounce terrorism. Ivan Petrunkevich, one of the patriarchs of the liberal movement and a member of the Kadet Central Committee, responded that he would rather the party perish than suffer “moral destruction” by acquiescing to this demand. This terminated the discussions.73
To the government’s dismay, the Second Duma, which opened on February 20, 1907, was even more radical than the First, for the SRs and the SDs had now abandoned the boycott. The socialists had 222 deputies (of them, 65 SDs, 37 SRs, 16 Popular Socialists, and 104 Trudoviki, affiliated with the SRs): they outweighed right-wing deputies by a ratio of two to one. The Kadets, tempered by the failure of their previous tactics, were prepared to behave more responsibly, but their representation was cut by nearly one-half (from 179 to 98) and the opposition was dominated by the socialists, who had no intention of pursuing legislative work. The SRs had resolved in November 1906 to participate in the elections in order to “utilize the State Duma for organizing and revolutionizing the masses.”74 The Social-Democrats at the Fourth (Stockholm) Congress, held in April 1907, agreed to commit themselves “to exploiting systematically all conflicts between the government and the Duma as well as within the Duma itself for the purpose of broadening and deepening the revolutionary movement.” The congress instructed the Social-Democratic faction to create a mass movement that would topple the existing order by “exposing all the bourgeois parties,” making the masses aware of the futility of the Duma, and insisting on the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.75 The socialists thus entered the Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work and disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity.
To make matters still worse from the government’s point of view, Orthodox priests elected to the Duma, usually by peasants, shunned the conservative parties, preferring to sit in the center; several joined the socialists.
The Second Duma had barely begun its deliberations when in high circles it was whispered that the Duma was incapable of constructive work and should be abolished or at least thoroughly revamped. Fedor Golovin, the chairman of the Second Duma, remembered Nicholas speaking to him in this vein in March or April 1907.76 The outright abolition of the Duma, however, proved impractical for political as well as economic reasons.
The political argument in favor of retaining a parliamentary body has been mentioned earlier: it was the need of the bureaucracy for a representative body with which to share the blame for the country’s ills.
The economic argument had to do with international banking. A prominent French financier informed Kokovtsov that the dissolution of the First Duma had struck French financial markets like a “bolt of lightning.”77 Later, in 1917, Kokovtsov explained the close relationship which had existed under tsarism between parliamentary government and Russia’s standing in international credit markets. The market price of the Russian state loan of 1906 sunk rapidly after the dissolution of the First Duma. When rumors spread that the Second Duma was to suffer a similar fate, Russian obligations with a face value of 100 dropped from 88 to 69, or by 21 percent.78 Experience thus strongly suggested that the liquidation of the Duma would have had a disastrous effect on Russia’s ability to raise foreign loans at acceptable interest rates.