However much power the tsar and his ministers retained – and it was considerable – they now had to contend with a wholly new political situation, and few of them, Nicholas least of all, were prepared for it.
The next seven years after the dissolution of the second Duma were Russia’s only peacetime experiment in constitutional government with an open press and active public organizations. The fate of the country depended on the ability of Stolypin and others to deal with this new reality. Stolypin’s repression of the revolution met with apparent success: hundreds of activists were executed, especially from the SR terrorist group, and all radical parties lost members in droves to prison, exile, disillusionment, and simple exhaustion. The dissolution of the Duma in 1907 went along with a new, even more indirect and undemocratic electoral system. Some fifty percent of the seats in the new Duma went to the nobility, while the representation of peasants was radically cut, as were the number of seats assigned to the national minority areas in the south and west. The new Duma was overwhelmingly noble, Russian, and very conservative. Most nobles and many businessmen supported the Octobrist party (so-called in their support of the tsar’s October Manifesto), but there was also an extreme right, mostly noblemen, that included leaders of the Black Hundreds. Stolpyin seemed to have a perfect situation in which to carry out his modest reforms, maintain the power of tsar and government, and move toward a more Russian nationalistic policy in the empire. In fact he accomplished little beyond his agrarian program, which proved to be of limited effect. The result of the endless bargaining of Prime Minister and Duma was only to drive a wedge between him and the upper classes. His reforms were too radical for the nobles and yet not strong enough to placate society and the liberals in the Duma. The climax was his 1911 plan to introduce the zemstvo into the western provinces, areas where nobles were predominantly Polish. In order to stack the zemstvo boards against the Poles, Stolypin proposed to increase the number of peasant deputies, Ukrainians and Belorussians whom Stolypin saw as more loyal to the tsar than Polish nobles. At the same time, the zemstvo would relieve the administrative burden on the state and hopefully placate the liberals. In the event, the scheme was too clever to succeed. He managed to get it through the Duma only to have it fail in the Council of State. Stolypin resigned in protest, knowing that Nicholas thought him indispensable. The tsar begged him to return, but Stolypin would not agree unless Nicholas removed some of the extreme conservatives from the government, prorogued the Duma, and enacted the western zemstvo bill by his emergency powers. The tsar agreed, but the incident confirmed his growing suspicion that Stolypin’s plans were too far reaching, and he was too powerful and not trustworthy. Before their disagreements reached a crisis, an SR terrorist assassinated Stolypin in September at a performance in the Kiev opera house.
With Stolypin gone, the tsar turned to lesser figures to run the government. He particularly disliked the institution of a prime minister, and appointed to the office men who would not dominate the cabinet. The result was drift. None of the problems facing Russian society were addressed, and the government was increasingly isolated. In educated society the perception grew, even among conservatives, that the tsar and government did not understand the country and lived in a world of their own. No major issues were addressed, and government measures achieved neither reform nor successful repression. Attempts to use nationalism and anti-semitism to garner popular support backfired. In 1911 the investigation of a murder in Kiev led to accusations of ritual murder against Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish supervisor in a brick factory. The Ministry of Justice in Petersburg and the police “organized” a trial and pamphlets appeared about ritual murder and other supposed crimes of the Jews. Russia, however, now had a relatively free press and the liberal dailies mounted a furious counter campaign. Passions were so inflamed among the intelligentsia that the performance of a play based on the works of Dostoyevsky was shut down in St. Petersburg, on the grounds that the great writer’s anti-semitic nationalism gave support to the prosecution. The trial took place in the fall of 1913 in a regular criminal court in Kiev. The jury remained unconvinced by the prosecution’s evidence and acquitted Beiliss. The result was a major humiliation for the government.
To top it all off, the presence of Grigorii Rasputin at the court added an element of the grotesque to an already bad atmosphere. Rasputin was a wandering monk from Siberia who was introduced into the court at the end of 1905. Empress Alexandra had always been interested in faith healing and hoped that he could help her son, the heir Aleksei. She soon came to believe that Rasputin alone could stop the bleeding. Rasputin thus had unlimited access to the imperial family, in spite of his heterodox religious views and stories (largely true) of drinking bouts and womanizing. The security police set up a whole detachment to watch the monk with the purpose of stopping the rumors as they discredited the tsar and his wife. Rasputin was a real concern to the monarchists and conservatives in the government and Duma and they managed to bring the issue to the floor of the assembly, in the process enraging the tsar. He never realized that they were trying to save the prestige of the throne and instead interpreted their acts as disloyalty. Rasputin, rumors aside, had no political effect that can be traced, but his presence and the real and exaggerated stories further undermined the monarchy.
If the liberals and conservatives in the Duma, for all their frustrations, found in the new order a vast arena for political activity, the revolutionary parties were demoralized, losing thousands of members, especially from the intelligentsia. The leadership went into exile in the West, spending their time trying to keep the movement alive. The movements fissured: Trotsky abandoned the main Menshevik movement and founded his own newspaper in Vienna, commenting from cafés on world politics. The Bolsheviks were particularly contentious, torn by philosophical disputes as well as party tactics and organization. Lenin wrote an entire book denouncing the attempt of some Bolshevik intellectuals to integrate the epistemology of the German physicist Ernst Mach into Marxism. Only around 1912 did the various factions coalesce into organized parties and reestablish a network in Russia. For the Bolshevik party the moment came that year at a conference in Prague that finally consolidated the Bolshevik structure and program, reaffirming Lenin’s belief in the need for an underground party. The Prague conference also marked the beginnings of a generational shift among the Bolsheviks, for the intelligentsia leadership of Lenin’s youth gradually gave way to a younger group that was more plebeian (if not exactly proletarian). They usually lacked university education but were experienced in the ways of the underground and used to making contact with the workers in continuous struggle with the police. One of these was a Georgian Bolshevik, Soso Djugashvili, known as Koba – a shoemaker’s son from the Caucasus. As he made his mark on the movement throughout Russia, he took a new revolutionary pseudonym, Stalin. As Joseph Stalin he would be known to history.