After Stolypin's death, efforts to use the Duma to influence government policy ended. The third Duma (which ran its full five-year term to 1912) and the fourth (which immediately succeeded it) drifted into a role of grumbling subservience. They obediently passed the government bills that were sent to them while engaging in (widely reported) debate on the deficiencies of the tsarist regime. It was, for example, a Duma debate following a massacre of strikers in Siberia in 1912 that helped provoke a nationwide wave of protests that May Day. In this period there was active discussion around Nicholas of closing the Duma down or making it purely consultative - ideas not followed through because of fears of popular disturbances. Even at this unproductive time, however, the Duma did play one crucial (and ultimately disastrous) role. Its steady drumbeat of patriotic and anti-German rhetoric helped build the public atmosphere of aggressive nationalism that was the background to Nicholas's decision to go to war with Germany in August 1914. The Duma then underlined its role as loyalist eunuch by proroguing itself so as not to burden the tsar with 'unnecessary politics'.10
The war both made and ultimately destroyed the Duma as a real force in Russian government. There was plenty to criticise in the way Russia's inadequate and backward administration managed the needs of modern war. As the months passed without the promised quick victory, so the volume of Duma attacks rose. The body was briefly reconvened in 1915 to approve the budget, and then swiftly dissolved to curb such criticism. But as the year proceeded, and the news from the front got worse, so it became clear that the regime needed wider political support to remedy the problems of manufacturing and supply that were a large part of the weakness of the Russian military effort. Accordingly, in July 1915 a number of boards were set up, including Duma members, to tackle these problems. The government seemed finally to be on a route to accepting the Duma as a legitimate, even useful, part of Russian governance.
At the same time, however (19 July 1915), Nicholas decided to reconvene the whole Duma. This brought the roof down.11 The Duma was united in its criticism of the regime's inability to conduct the war effectively, and in its determination to take a greater grip on matters itself. It demanded (and on this had the support of most of Nicholas's ministers) that Nicholas appoint a 'Ministry of National Confidence' answerable to the Duma. Nicholas, crucially influenced by Alexandra (who detested the Duma, and endlessly insisted that he should assert his autocratic authority), dismissed the Duma in September. Now things slid badly downhill. In one of his worst decisions (there is a rich choice) Nicholas had taken himself off to the front to command the army, leaving government in the hands of the 'German' tsarina under the shadowy influence of Rasputin. Rumours of treason at the top, and worse, proliferated. Government was a shambles. The period of 'Tsarina Government', September 1915 to February 1917, saw four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior and three ministers each of foreign affairs and of war. Rasputin was said to be taking huge bribes and debauching all the upper-class womanhood of Petrograd. The most lurid of the rumours were of course false, but deeply corrosive of support for the regime.12
By November 1916 the situation was so bad that Nicholas felt obliged to let the Duma reconvene. The result was a storm in which Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Duma liberals, famously demanded to know whether official policy was 'treason or stupidity' and the Duma, in the most substantial display of teeth of its whole existence, forced the resignation of the prime minister.13 Indeed, the Duma had now taken on many of the aspects of a real parliament. Its members were protected by guarantees of parliamentary immunity, so it was able to become the public echo chamber for criticism of the Romanov regime, entirely subverting the tsar's credibility among the elite, the public and the armed forces. Nicholas made minor concessions, such as appointing a few ministers from among the Duma membership, but nowhere near enough to stem the growing torrent of demands for change.
The final collapse came in mid February in Petrograd. A bread shortage (largely caused by very cold weather) led to street demonstrations on 13 February. Coincidentally the Duma reconvened on 14 February and renewed its assaults. Over the next three days the situation deteriorated dramatically. The demonstrations grew larger and turned violent. For the first time since Bloody Sunday, twelve years before, the troops were ordered to fire on the crowds. Nicholas (far away in army HQin Mogilev) declared the Duma dissolved. Then on 28 February much of the army garrison in Petrograd mutinied and joined the rioters. A huge crowd gathered outside the Tauride Palace, where the Duma met, demanding in effect that it take over the government.
This was the moment when the Duma as an institution met its destiny. It had come a long way from its inauspicious and neutered start. In the course of the past six months it had become the cockpit of national debate and had acquired real authority over the actions of the government. It now faced a historic test. Would it pick up the reins of national authority so visibly no longer held by the distant Nicholas, or would it leave them for others to seize?
This was a test it only half passed. With the mob gathered outside, Duma moderates prevaricated. Their formal reasoning was that since the tsar had dissolved the Duma they could take no further action without his permission. But the reality was sheer fear in the face of the drunken 'dark people' on the rampage outside. Radical members of the
Duma on the other hand, led by the brilliant left-wing lawyer Alexander Kerensky, insisted that this was their moment. The Duma should defy the tsar and lead the revolution. The upshot was an untidy compromise; the coming together, without formal Duma endorsement, of a 'Provisional Committee of Duma members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Individuals and Institutions' - a body whose very name underlines the hesitations of many in the Duma leadership, paralysed as they were by fear of the street, about taking on governmental responsibility.
Kerensky, much later in exile, wrote that the Duma 'wrote its own death warrant at the moment of the revolutionary renaissance of the people . The Duma died on the morning of 28 February, the day when its strength and its influence were at their highest.'14 Kerensky, who became the last leader of pre-Leninist Russia, of course had his own axe to grind about the course events took between February and October 1917. But there is a real counterfactual lurking here. If the Duma had indeed convened and declared itself in charge on the evening of 27 February how might events have gone?
It is not entirely impossible that, courageously and cunningly led, the Duma leadership could indeed have placated the Petrograd street long enough to establish an effective claim to national authority on the grounds that they were the only institution left with any basis for such a claim. They had one important advantage; precisely because of their unrepresentative make-up they were trusted by the officer class and bureaucracy. The key reason why the army chief of staff, Alexeev, did not obey Nicholas's command on 1 March to send troops into Petrograd to put down the rising is because the chairman of the Duma, Rodzyanko, assured him that they would inherit power.15 And if indeed the Duma had been able to establish such a claim to authority the subsequent history of Russia would undoubtedly have been very different.
But there are strong reasons for doubting that any such claim to Duma authority would have survived very long. Already, as the Duma havered, a serious competitor for power was emerging in the form of the 'Petrograd Soviet', a chaotic and ad hoc assembly of representatives from local factories and regiments, powerfully fuelled by class anger, revolutionary venom, and (among the soldiers) aversion to being sent to the front. The Soviet was dominated by an assortment of left-wing parties, with the initially outnumbered Bolsheviks rising in influence as the only party demanding immediate peace. It of course had no real democratic legitimacy, but had one crucial source of power. In the anarchic months after February, it represented, and where necessary deployed, the fearsome Petrograd mob in a way the respectable bourgeois of the Duma could not. The Duma leadership didn't have the backbone to come out on top in any sustained tussle with these forces. A sympathetic commentator later described it as a struggle that set 'those public elements that were sensible and moderate but - alas - timid, unorganised, accustomed only to obeying and incapable of commanding' against 'organised rascality with its narrow-minded, fanatical and frequently dishonest ringleaders'.16