The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

On February 4th the Grand Duke Sergius, the most corrupt of the reactionaries, was assassinated. Prince Mirski resigned and was succeeded by Bulygin. Before the new minister was established, the Tsar issued a new ukase affirming the autocratic principle, but Bulygin insisted that he should modify this act of mad defiance, dictated by the palace-clique, by issuing on the same day a promise to convoke a consultative assembly of representatives of the people. He appointed a commission of inquiry, and in reply to a deputation from a second conference of the Zemstvos he announced that a National Assembly would soon be granted. The long-expected ukase appeared on May 10th. It opened on a note of repentance:

“A State cannot be solid unless it holds as sacred the traditions of the past. We have failed in this, and God has punished us. The sovereignty of ancient Russia was indissolubly bound up with ‘the voice of the land,’ with the representatives of the people assembled in council.”

For the first time the Romanoffs perceived that, centuries before their dynasty was cradled, Russia had had a past, and a democratic past.

But the project of the new assembly, the first Duma, turned this avowal into derision. The business of the representatives of the people was merely to examine proposals which would be laid before the Imperial Council: the Tsar alone could initiate and pass legislation. By further regulations, in fact, the members of the Duma were put at the mercy of the conservative Senate. The autocracy was maintained in all its mediævalism. Liberals and radicals now united in a fierce demand of reform. Russia was paralysed by a general strike and the suspension of traffic. More than a million workers were on strike. In a momentary panic the Tsar directed Count de Witte to draw up a list of reforms, and on October 30th (1905) he issued the famous ukase which has since given a name to the vast body of moderate Russian reformers (the “Octobrists”). He would grant manhood suffrage, real national representation, freedom of speech and religion, and so on. As usual, the first breath of liberty let loose a passion of discussion. The radicals and independents united to form the powerful body of the Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets,” or K. D.s). A council of labour deputies was formed with the express purpose of holding the supreme power when the Tsar had been deposed.

In brief, Russia was seen aflame with revolution. There were mutinies in the fleet at Kronstadt and at Sevastopol, and the audacity of the more radical elements led, at Moscow, to the futile and pathetic rebellion in which large numbers of students lost their lives. The revolution was premature. The troops were unprepared for revolt on such an issue as the constitution, and the “Black Bands” everywhere aided the police and dipped their hands in the blood of Jews and radicals. The active rebellion was truculently suppressed, and the jails were packed to suffocation. His reactionary advisers urged the triumphant Tsar to refuse all concessions, but the rumble of the more moderate malcontents was still heard on every side, and the promise of some sort of national assembly had to be carried out.

It was in these circumstances that, on May 10th, 1906, Nicholas opened the first Duma. The name had been invented by the reforming minister of Alexander I, Speranski, and it represented the measure of popular representation which might have been regarded as satisfactory in those semi-feudal days. For a civilisation of the twentieth century it was ridiculously inadequate, and it soon proved only a channel for the comparatively safe release of the boiling, sentiment which filled the country. Before the Romanoff dynasty fell it was customary for polite journalists and essayists to explain that the excesses of the radicals frustrated the work of the new institution. It is unhappily true that the left wing of every reform-movement uses a rhetoric which is little in accord with its loud insistence on justice, but in this case even the work of moderate members of the Duma was obnoxious to the authorities. Day by day the state of the Russian jails, the gross conduct of police and military authorities, and the barbarous practices of their subordinates were brought to light. Week by week men waited, and waited in vain, for the further instalments of reform which had been promised.

The Duma grew more and more vehement in its attacks upon the Government. The Cadets formed the majority of its members, and they formulated their demands for adult suffrage, real parliamentary institutions, the abolition of capital punishment, a political amnesty, the suppression of the Imperial Council, and the expropriation of the large land-owners. Goremykin, a tool of the palace-clique which had put him in the place of Count de Witte, refused to comply, and on July 23rd the Tsar dissolved the Duma. The measure was a failure, and Goremykin had to surrender his place to Stolypin. The ejected Cadets retired to Finland, and appealed to the people to refuse to pay taxes or render military service: for which, three years later, they were condemned to imprisonment and the loss of their civil rights.

Stolypin had the ingenious idea of severing the great mass of the peasants from the radicals by separate concessions, and in October and November the Tsar appealed for their support. They were put on the same footing as other classes in regard to the right of entering the public service or schools, the issue of passports, and in rural elections. They were released from obligatory residence in the district in which they were registered, permitted to take away their share of the communal property, and protected from punishment without trial. By these means, and by tampering with the electoral law (which he dare not yet alter) Stolypin secured a second Duma in which the Cadets were greatly reduced. Instead of 185 seats they now had only 108. But they still formed the largest party, and their leader Golovkin was President of the Duma. In face of their demands the Tsar authorised Stolypin to offer the crown-lands and imperial estates to be shared amongst the peasants, but the radicals were not appeased, and on June 14th, three months after the opening of the Duma, Stolypin demanded a secret session in order to consider an indictment of the Social Democrats, whose number had increased to 77 at the last election. Almost the whole of them were charged with complicity in a plot to undermine the loyalty of the army and navy.

The Duma was still overwhelmingly radical—a sufficient commentary on the Tsar’s claim that the mass of his people clung to the old traditions—and refused to lend itself to this manœuvre. Two days later, June 16th, Nicholas again asserted his power and dissolved the second Duma. It was, he declared, not representative of the “Russian spirit” and would not support his government in suppressing disorder. To make it more representative of this Russian spirit, which was supposed to animate the bulk of the population, he narrowed the electoral qualifications, in violation of his 1905 ukase, and reduced the membership from 524 to 442. The Cadets now sank from 108 to 45, the Socialists from 77 to 17. The conservatives rose from 60 to 100, and the Octobrists from 31 to 110. Liberalism, of one shade or another, still greatly outweighed conservatism even in this mangled representation of the Russian people; and assassinations, strikes, and fiery rhetoric impressed upon Europe the grievances of those who were excluded from representation. In the year 1907 there were 627 executions, and about 70,000 were sent into exile. In 1908 there were 786 executions, and the number of exiles rose to 180,000. The population of the jails of Russia rose from 91,000 in the year 1904 to 174,000 in the year 1910.

This was the “comparative tranquillity” which the chroniclers of Russian events ascribe to the country between 1907 and 1917. Quarterly notices of the number of political executions were put into small type in English and American journals, and from the sombre silence that brooded over the land there issued at times the lurid message of assassination. In 1909 occurred the astounding revelation of the secret-police spy and professed Socialist Azeff, and it became known that outrages were instigated by the police in order to strengthen their system. The former head of the police had to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; the head of the secret police of St. Petersburg was assassinated. In 1911 Stolypin was permitted by the Tsar to suspend the Imperial Council and the Duma, so that he could avail himself of the clause of the constitution which enabled him to pass laws while the councils were not sitting; and on September 14th, while Nicholas sat in his box in the opera at Kieff, he had the horror of witnessing the murder of his complaisant minister. Still he clung to his poor rags of autocracy. Still religious adventurers and spiritist mediums plied their lucratic charlatanry in the palaces. Still the flower of the young generation rotted in the overcrowded jails or languished in Siberia. The jails had a “maximum accommodation” for 107,000 prisoners, and in 1910 about 180,000 men and women were crowded into them. Typhus flourished in them. Suicides of prisoners rose to 160 in a single month. The most brutal outrages were committed on young women and men.