Throughout the period from 1905 to 1907, disorders were especially violent in non-Russian regions of the empire, where the revolutionary movement took on an added ethnic dimension, as in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Georgia, and parts of Ukraine. There was also persistent fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the towns of Transcaucasia.
A campaign of terrorism, waged by the Maximalists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party against policemen and officials, claimed hundreds of lives in 1905–07. The police felt able to combat it only by infiltrating their agents into the revolutionary parties and particularly into the terrorist detachments of these parties. This use of double agents (or agents provocateurs, as they were often known) did much to demoralize both the revolutionaries and the police and to undermine the reputation of both with the public at large. The nadir was reached in 1908, when it was disclosed that Yevno Azef, longtime head of the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also an employee of the department of police and had for years been both betraying his revolutionary colleagues and organizing the murders of his official superiors.
The split in the Social Democratic Party was deepened by the failure of the 1905 revolution. Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks agreed that a further revolution would be needed but disagreed fundamentally on the way to bring it about. The Mensheviks favoured cooperation with the bourgeois parties in the Duma, the new legislative assembly, in order to legislate civil rights and then use them to organize the workers for the next stage of the class struggle. The Bolsheviks regarded the Duma purely as a propaganda forum, and Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) drew from 1905 the lesson that in Russia, where the bourgeoisie was weak, the revolutionaries could combine the bourgeois and proletarian stages of the revolution by organizing the peasantry as allies of the workers. He was also moving closer to Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon)'s theory that the forthcoming Russian revolution, taking place in the country that was the “weak link” of international imperialism, would spark a world revolution. Lenin did not reveal the full extent of the changes in his ideas until 1917, but in 1912 the split with the Mensheviks was finalized when the Bolsheviks called their own congress in Prague that year, claiming to speak in the name of the entire Social Democratic Party.
The State Duma
The October Manifesto had split the opposition. The professional strata, now reorganizing themselves in liberal parties, basically accepted it and set about trying to make the new legislature, the State Duma, work in the interest of reform. The two principal socialist parties (Socialist Revolutionary Party), the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, saw the manifesto as just a first step and the Duma (which at first they boycotted) as merely a tribune to be exploited to project their revolutionary ideas.
The empire's Fundamental Laws were amended in 1906 to take account of the Duma. Russia was still described as an “autocracy,” though the adjective “unlimited” was no longer attached to the term, and an article confirming that no law could take effect without the consent of the Duma effectively annulled its meaning. Alongside the Duma there was to be an upper chamber, the State Council, half of its members appointed by the emperor and half elected by established institutions such as the zemstvos and municipalities, business organizations, the Academy of Sciences, and so on. Both chambers had budgetary rights, the right to veto any law, and the ability to initiate legislation. On the other hand, the government was to be appointed, as before, by the emperor, who in practice seldom chose members of the Duma or State Council to be ministers. In addition, the emperor had the right to dissolve the legislative chambers at any time and, under Article 87, to pass emergency decrees when they were not in session.
The Duma electoral law, though complicated, did give the franchise to most adult males. The first elections, held in spring 1906, produced a relative majority for the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets (Kadet)), a radical liberal group drawn largely from the professional strata that wished to go beyond the October Manifesto to a full constitutional monarchy on the British model and to grant autonomy to the non-Russian nationalities. The next largest caucus, the Labour Group (Trudoviki), included a large number of peasants and some socialists who had ignored their comrades' boycott. The two parties demanded amnesty for political prisoners, equal rights for Jews, autonomy for Poland, and—most important of all—expropriation of landed estates for the peasants. These demands were totally unacceptable to the government, which used its powers to dissolve the Duma. The new premier, Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich), then used Article 87 to pass his own agrarian reform (Stolypin land reform) (see below), known as the Stolypin land reform, and to institute special summary courts-martial against terrorists; under the jurisdiction of these courts, some 600–1,000 suspects were executed.
In early 1907 new elections were held; to the government's disappointment, the Social Democrats (Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party), having abandoned their boycott, did very well, coming in as the third largest party, behind the Kadets and the Trudoviki. The monarchists also performed better than before, so that the house was sharply polarized, but with a preponderance on the left. Unable to pass his agrarian law through it or to cooperate with its majority in any other way, Stolypin advised the tsar to dissolve the Second Duma on June 3 (June 16, New Style), 1907.
Nicholas did not, however, abolish the Duma altogether, as some of his advisers wished. Instead, he and Stolypin altered the electoral law in favour of landowners, wealthier townsfolk, and Russians to the detriment of peasants, workers, and non-Russians. The Third Duma, elected in autumn 1907, and the Fourth, elected in autumn 1912, were therefore more congenial to the government. The leading caucus in both Dumas was the Union of October 17 (known as the Octobrists (Octobrist)), whose strength was among the landowners of the Russian heartland. The Octobrists acknowledged the October Manifesto as a sufficient basis for cooperation with the government and accepted Stolypin's agrarian program as well as his desire to strengthen the position of the Russian nation throughout the empire.
In practice, however, their cooperation did not bear much legislative fruit beyond the agrarian reform. Many nobles were worried by Stolypin's proposed reform of local government and justice, which would have weakened their dominant position in the localities. They were also alarmed that more and more land was passing from their control to other social classes. Their opposition was articulated by a pressure group known as the United Nobility, which had numerous members in the State Council and close personal links with the imperial court. Stolypin increasingly found that his reform measures, passed by the Duma, were being blocked in the State Council.