From this point on it could only be a matter of time before the Duma was dissolved. A battle of nerves ensued as the parliamentarians continued to show their defiance in a series of radical speeches from the tribune of the Tauride Palace. The tension was such that many deputies later claimed to have lost weight in these weeks, though the hot June weather probably helped. From the government’s point of view, the revolutionary mood in the country was still a threat — the peasant war on the manors had revived in the spring with a ferocity equal to the previous autumn’s, while the SR terrorist campaign had still not been quelled — and the Duma’s militant stance was bound to encourage it.
The crux of the matter was the Duma’s determination to appease the peasants with radical land reform. Both the Kadets and the Trudoviks were loudly advocating the compulsory expropriation of all the gentry’s surplus land (the former with compensation and the latter without). There had been a time, during the ‘Great Fear’ of 1905, when many landowners might have been prepared to accept some form of expropriation in order to save their skins. ‘If we do not make some concessions,’ one besieged squire had argued before his local council of nobles, ‘the revolution will come from below and fires will flare up everywhere from one end of the country to the other.’ Even Trepov had once said to Witte: ‘I myself am a landowner and I would be glad to relinquish half of my land if I were convinced that under these conditions I could keep the remainder.’ But as the revolutionary tide receded, the landowners became less inclined to compromise. The Tsar spoke for them when he said, ‘What belongs to the landowner belongs to him.’ The provincial zemstvos, once strongholds of the liberal opposition, now became bastions of law and order. The United Nobility, which was formed to defend property rights, had powerful supporters in the court, the State Council and the Civil Service. It led the campaign against the Duma’s reform proposals on the grounds that granting additional land to the peasants would not help solve their problems, since these were caused by the inefficiencies of the communal system and not by the shortage of land. The argument was strongly coloured by recent experience: having always viewed the commune as the bulwark of the old rural order, these conservatives had learned in 1905 that it could easily become the organizing mechanism of the peasant revolution. ‘In other countries there is much less land per capita than in Russia,’ declared Prince A. P. Urusov to a meeting of landowners in May 1906, ‘yet there is no talk of land shortage because the concept of property is clear in the minds of the people. But we have the commune — which is to say that the principle of socialism has destroyed this concept. The result is that nowhere else do we see such unceremonious destruction of property as we see in Russia.’8 The abolition of the commune and the creation of a peasant landowning class were now seized upon by the gentry as an alternative to the Duma’s radical land reform.
On 8 July the Duma was finally dissolved, seventy-two days after its convocation. New elections were called for a second Duma session the following February. The Premier Goremykin was replaced by Stolypin, a well-known advocate of the commune’s abolition and a proven executor of repressive measures to restore order in the countryside. The liberals were outraged by the dissolution. Prince Lvov, who had been so confident that it would not happen, now wrote of his ‘anger at this blatant attack on the parliamentary principle’, although as a landowner he had opposed the Duma’s land reform. The dissolution transformed Lvov from a moderate liberal into a radical. He was among those Kadets who, as a protest against it, fled to the Finnish resort town of Vyborg, where they signed a manifesto calling on ‘the people’ to rise up against the government by refusing to pay any more taxes or to give any more recruits to the army.fn1 The Vyborg Manifesto was a typical example of the Kadets’ militant posturing since the opening of the Duma. As for ‘the people’, they were clearly not listening to these liberals. For their Manifesto was greeted with universal indifference. And so the government could now take repressive measures with a quiet mind to silence its brave but naive liberal critics. More than 100 leading Kadets were brought to trial and suspended from the Duma for their part in the Vyborg Manifesto. The Kadets who took their places in the second and third Dumas were on the whole much less radical — and less talented — than those who had sat in the first. Living under the shadow of their party’s ‘Vyborg complex’, they pursued a more conservative line, keeping well within the confines of the tsarist laws, in the defence of the Duma.9 Never again would the Kadets place their trust in the support of ‘the people’. Nor would they claim to represent them. From this point on, they would consciously become what in fact they had been all along: the natural party of the bourgeoisie. Liberalism and the people went their separate ways.
ii The Statesman
Few figures in Russian history have aroused so much controversy as Petr Arkadevich Stolypin (1862–1911), Russia’s Prime Minister from 1906 until his assassination five years later. The socialists condemned him as one of the last bloody defenders of the tsarist order. He gave his name to the hangman’s noose (‘Stolypin’s neckties’) administered by the military field courts to quell the peasant revolution on the land. The railway cars that were used to carry the ‘politicals’ to Siberia were called ‘Stolypin carriages’ (as they still were when they went to the Gulags). After 1917 the most hardened followers of the Tsar would come to denounce Stolypin as an upstart bureaucrat whose dangerous reform policies had only served to undermine the sacred principles of autocracy. But to his admirers — and there are many of them in post-Soviet Russia — Stolypin was the greatest statesman Russia ever had, the one man who could have saved the country from the revolution and the civil war. His reforms, they argue, given enough time, would have transformed Russia into a liberal capitalist society, but they were cut short by his death and the war. A popular tale relates that when the Tsar was signing his abdication order he said that if Stolypin had still been alive, this would never have come about. But this of course is a very big ‘if’. Could one man have saved the Tsar? The truth is that Nicholas himself had been sympathetic to Stolypin’s opponents on the Right; and, frustrated by this royalist reaction, his reforms were doomed long before his death.
Stolypin’s fate had in it much that was tragic. Yet his failure had as much to do with the weaknesses of his own personality as it did with the opposition he encountered from both the Left and the Right in Russia. His story is in many ways similar to that of Mikhail Gorbachev. Both were brave, intelligent and single-minded statesmen committed to the liberal reform of an old and decaying authoritarian system of which they themselves were products. Both trod a narrow path between the powerful vested interests of the old ruling élites and the radical opposition of the democrats. They failed in their different ways to see that the two opposing sides were set on a collision course, and that trying to mediate between them could only create enemies in both camps whilst winning few friends. Trained in the monolithic world of bureaucratic politics, both men failed to appreciate that their reforms could only succeed if they gained the support of a mass-based party or some other broad community of interests. They tried to impose their reforms from above, bureaucratically, without attempting to build a popular base, and that, more than anything else, is the key to their political demise.