It was common in those days to speak of Russia living on a “volcano.” In 1908, the poet Alexander Blok used another metaphor when he spoke of a “bomb” ticking in the heart of Russia. Some tried to ignore it, some to run away from it, others yet to disarm it. To no avaiclass="underline"
whether we remember or forget, in all of us sit sensations of malaise, fear, catastrophe, explosion.… We do not know yet precisely what events await us, but in our hearts the needle of the seismograph has already stirred.126
*V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm vgodypervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), 169. Nicholas first made a personal appearance in the Duma in February 1916, ten years after the parliament had been established, in the midst of a grave political crisis brought about by Russia’s defeats in World War I.
*There is a striking difference between the deputies to the first two Russian Dumas and those who in 1789–91 ran the French National Assembly. The Russians were overwhelmingly intellectuals without practical experience. The Third Estate, which dominated the Estates-General and the National Assembly, by contrast, consisted of practical lawyers and businessmen, “men of action and men of affairs.” J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1947), 26–27.
*According to M. Szeftel, the tsarist government authorized no oppositional political parties prior to its collapse in 1917 (The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906, Brussels, 1976, 247). They existed and functioned in a legal limbo.
*According to Witte (Vospominaniia, II, Moscow, 1960, 545), this body was deliberately called “Council of Ministers” rather than “cabinet” further to distinguish Russia from Western constitutional states.
*“I am in no sense in favor of absolutist government,” Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1884. “I consider parliamentary cooperation, if properly practiced, necessary and useful, as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible”: Max Klemm, ed., Was sagt Bismarck dazu?, II (Berlin, 1924), 126.
*In March 1907, a worker incited by a right-wing politician named Kazantsev killed Grigorii Iollos, another Kadet Duma deputy, also Jewish. When he realized that Kazantsev had misled him into believing that Iollos was a police agent, the worker lured Kazantsev into a forest and murdered him.
*Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskie Otchëty, 1907 god, II, Vtoroi Sozyv, Sessiia Vtoraia, Zasedanie 36 (St. Petersburg, 1907), 435–36. Stolypin’s statistics were somewhat strained: not all the natural population increase (which was actually higher than he estimated—namely, 18.1 per 1,000) occurred in the rural areas of central Russia. Still, his conclusion was correct, as the results of the agrarian expropriations of 1917 would demonstrate.
*One of the misleading commonplaces in Russian historiography, promoted by Communist historians, is that Stolypin’s agrarian measures were meant to promote a class of kulaks, defined as rural usurers and exploiters. In fact, they had the very opposite purpose: to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury and exploitation.
*The program, which disappeared after his death and was presumed lost, was made public forty-five years later by Stolypin’s secretary, A. V. Zenkovskii, in his Pravda o Stolypine (New York, 1956), 73–113. See further Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 130–32, 137–38, 218.
*The New York Times, December 14, 1911, p. 1. This action was denounced in some Russian circles as intolerable interference in Russia’s internal affairs, and by a German conservative newspaper as reflective of the “parvenu spirit that rules not only American society but American politics”: Ibid., p. 2.
*The SD deputies, tried after the dissolution of the Duma, when their parliamentary immunity had expired, were convicted and sentenced to hard labor: P. G. Kurlov, Gibel’ Imperatorskoi Rossii (Berlin, 1923), 94.
*When told by Kokovtsov that this was an unwise move and that he would do better to accept the Tsar’s suggestions, Stolypin replied that he had no time to fight intrigues against him and was politically finished in any event: V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I (Paris, 1933), 458; A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i TretHa Duma (Moscow, 1968), 338.
†Trepov was taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks and executed along with many other hostages at Kronshtadt on July 22, 1918: Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I, 462. Durnovo died in 1915.
*Kryzhanovskii Archive, Columbia University, Box 2, File 5. Kryzhanovskii carried out Stolypin’s request, saving only his letters to the Tsar: Ibid. Stolypin’s fear of being assassinated in Kiev may have been occasioned by the disinformation which his future killer supplied to the Okhrana, as described below.
*A postmortem revealed that Stolypin’s heart and liver were so diseased that he would probably have died of natural causes before long: G. Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma (Washington, D.C., 1981), 207–8.
†B. Strumillo in KL, No. 1/10 (1924), 230. In his fictional account of these events, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attributes Bogrov’s action to the desire to protect Jewish interests allegedly threatened by Stolypin’s ideal of a “Great Russia.” Solzhenitsyn thus “reconstructs” Bogrov’s thinking: “Stolypin had done nothing directly against the Jews; he has even succeeded in easing their lot somewhat. But this was not sincere. One must know how to identify an enemy of the Jews more deeply than from appearances. Stolypin promotes too insistently, too openly, too provocatively Russian national interests, Russian representation in the Duma, the Russian state. He is building, not a country free to all, but a national monarchy. Thus, the future of Jews in Russia depends on the will of someone who is not their friend. Stolypin’s development does not promise prosperity to Jews.” (A. Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoe koleso, Uzel I: Avgust Chetyrnadtsogo, Part 2, Paris, 1983, 126). There is no evidence to support this interpretation. Quite the contrary. Bogrov, who came from a thoroughly assimilated family (his grandfather had converted to Orthodox Christianity and his father belonged to the Kievan Nobles’ Club), was a Jew only in the biological (“racial”) sense. Even his given name, which Solzhenitsyn chooses to be the Yiddish “Mordko,” was the very Russian Dmitrii. In his depositions to the police, Bogrov stated that he had shot Stolypin because his reactionary policies had brought great harm to Russia. In a farewell letter to his parents written on the day of the murder, he explained that he was unable to lead the normal life which they had expected of him (A. Serebrennikov, Ubiistvo Stolypina: Svidetel’stva i dokumenty (New York, 1986), 161–62). The most likely source of the claim that Bogrov acted as a Jew and on behalf of Jewish interests is a false report in the right-wing daily, Novoe vremia, of September 13, 1911, that prior to his execution Bogrov told a rabbi he had “struggled for the welfare and happiness of the Jewish people” (Serebrennikov, loc.cit., 22). In reality, he had refused to see a rabbi before his execution (Rech’, September 13, 1911, itv Serebrennikov, loccit., 23–24.)
*“Most strikes … arise in organized trades and industries. As trade unionism spreads to previously unorganized industries, it is often accompanied by strike waves”: J. A. Fitch in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIV (New York, 1934), 420. A similar conclusion is drawn, on the basis of U.S. experience, by J. I. Griffin in Strikes (New York, 1939), 98.