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Episode 10.43: The Coup of 1907

So this is the fourth and final new episode from our little run of long awaited return of Revolutions immediately turns into a two week break thing we got going on. By the time you’re actually listening to this, I will have already disappeared back into the final manuscript edits for Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. But once that is done and I come back in two weeks, the production schedule — and just my life — should be back to normal. And while I’m here talking about Hero of Two Worlds, I have joyous news: we now have a cover, and the book is officially available for pre-order wherever you pre-order your books from. This is actually happening, the publisher just told me that it’s all live and ready to go last week. So you can find Hero of Two Worlds on bookshop.com or any of your favorite local bookstores. Now, the official publication date is not until August 24th, so there’s still a long ways to go, and I promise I won’t be plugging the book week in and week out, at least not until April or May. But if you just go pre-order right now, you won’t have to think about it ever again. I’m just saying. It’s out there. Go check it out. Pre-order it. Do it for me. Do it for your favorite local bookstore. And they have really taken it in the teeth this past year so I’m sure that they would love your business.

Now this week, we come to what we could plausibly call the final, final end of the Revolution of 1905. As we have seen in all of our revolutions, it’s very difficult to nail down when these things start and stop, because real lived history does not come with clear markers. Now the tightest lines we can draw for the Revolution of 1905 have it starting with Bloody Sunday, and ending with the October Manifesto. Now for our purposes, I went ahead and started it with the Zemstvo Congress in November 1904, because I think the revolution was happening by then, and then I push it through the beginning of the First Duma in April of 1906, when the revolution appear to have won. But lots of people push it out to the end of the Second Duma in 1907, which is what we’re going to talk about today, because the end of the Second Duma is when it became clear that the forces of reaction were going to triumph over the exhausted forces of revolution.

As we discussed last week, Prime Minister Stolypin had about six months to work with a free hand to get as much of his reform program in place before the elections to the Second Duma commenced at the beginning of 1907. But after the new year came, he had to put all of his attention into those elections. The hope was that he would be able to make the new duma friendlier and more compliant than the first one had been. To help ensure this result, Stolypin’s government put their thumb on the scale wherever and whenever they could. They had a discretionary fund that they use to promote conservative candidates, and buy positive editorials in the newspapers. Stolypin also continued to withhold legal recognition from several political parties, which prevented them from meeting openly and ensured that their publications would be censored or shut down, and that candidates formerly associated with those parties would be disallowed from running for office. These non recognized parties included all the revolutionary socialist parties of course, but also the constitutional democrats, the Kadets, who are being punished for drafting and signing the Vyborg Manifesto.

But that did not stop those parties from contesting the election. They just had to be more circumspect about how they went about it. Many leaders of the various parties, including Pavel Milyukov and the Kadets Lenin and his Bolsheviks, Martov and the Mensheviks, set up shop just over the border in Finland. Now though Finland was a part of the Russian empire, it operated under a special constitutional arrangement out of the direct reach of the Russian authorities. And among the Finns, the Revolution of 1905 led to a great stirring of patriotic anti-tsarist nationalism. And the mayor of Helsinki, for example, was happy to not lift a finger to stop the Kadets and socialists from meeting and publishing freely in his domains.

Now the Kadets though were somewhat chastened by their experience in the First Duma. And they adopted a different posture this time around. They had gone into that First Duma hoping to establish bold new terms of a parliamentary constitution, and have that be a prerequisite for any further work. This time, their goal was to prove the duma had a constructive role to play in government at all. Their working slogan was preserve the duma at all costs. This would no longer be about storming the citadel of autocracy, but instead about beginning, as Milyukov put it, an orderly siege. They would advance and take positions carefully, without risking the tsar’s wrath, or convincing him the duma needed to not just be dissolved, but abolished. They even said they no longer demanded the right to select government ministers, only that those government ministers have the confidence of the duma, which basically just meant, are they willing to work with us, rather than we expect to impose our choices on the tsar.

But this strategy would be made difficult by some of the colleagues who would soon be joining the Kadets in the second Duma. The various revolutionary socialist organizations, including the SRs and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, reassessed their attitude towards the Duma. If you will recall from episode 10.38 during the elections for the First Duma, they all concluded that this was a trap, and a farce, and they boycotted the elections. Many of them now considered this to have been a mistake. The peasants and the workers had ignored their calls to boycott. They embraced the duma as a legitimate voice of the people, and so it hurt the standing of the socialists to see their natural constituents, or at least who they considered their natural constituents, to turn away from them towards leaders who were running for election.

So, now presented with a second bite at the apple, many revolutionary socialists believed that they should run candidates. Not because they thought bourgeois parliamentary democracy was cool, but because they didn’t want to become irrelevant to the workers and the peasants, and because if they won, they would have an awesome platform to denounce the tsar and spread their own propaganda.

The social democrats predictably broke down along Bolshevik-Menshevik lines. Lenin argued that the duma was still a farce, and they should focus on continuing to organize armed revolution. Participating in the duma would probably force them to make alliances with the liberal Kadets and compromise their principles, which would derail the whole socialist revolutionary project. The Bolsheviks wanted to look to their bomb throwing cousins amongst the SRs as their most natural allies moving forward. And as we will discuss when I get back, they also wanted to embark on a policy of expropriation, which is to say, become bank robbers.

Meanwhile, guys like Martov, Axelrod, Plekhanov, and the other Mensheviks encouraged participation in the duma. And after winning majority control of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at a party congress in the spring of 1906, their view became the official party view. With democratic politics now somewhat in force, they should begin the long awaited process of turning themselves into a legal, political party, modeled on the German Socialist Party. They should run candidates, organize out in the open and cultivate a mass movement. This had, after all, been the plan going all the way back to the 1890s. Lenin and his supporters scoffed at their naivete. They were not a legal party. They could not operate out in the open. The state was handing out Stolypin neckties and shutting down their presses and arresting their members. Most of the empire was still under emergency law. There was no democratic civil rights or political freedom to speak of. It was all a mirage. Lenin said, if we follow the law, the law is going to lead us all to our deaths. But the Mensheviks prevailed, and ran candidates for election in early 1907.

A similar debate unfolded amongst the SRs, and I promise after I get back, we’ll talk a lot more about what was happening inside these revolutionary groups after the revolution of 1905 was over. But, inside the SRs, there was a break between so-called popular socialists, who wanted to run for election and represent the peasants and then on the extreme other side, Maximalists, who wanted to focus on armed revolution, keep up the terrorist campaign, and continually expand their target list. So the SR coalition saw factions break off in either direction: one towards legal politics, the other running as fast as they could in the other direction. The central committee of the SRs now decided that they should run for seats themselves, though, obviously on a platform of aggressive land reform, not, you know, socialist revolution.

The elections for the duma unfolded in two stages over January and February 1907 and the results shocked everyone. The Kadets really took it in the chin. They dropped from about 185 seats in the First Duma to only about a hundred in the Second. But those losses did not shift to the conservatives, despite the government’s money, influence, threats, and bribes. When the final returns came in there weren’t but 10 or 20 true right-wing delegates. Instead, Kadet losses went almost entirely to the radical left. Mensheviks aligned socialists won 65 seats. The popular socialists won another 16 seats. The SRs themselves won 37 seats. And this was added to the peasant Trudovik Labor Party, who once again numbered about a hundred. So, taking all 450 or so delegates to the Second Duma, more than 300 were aligned with the left. Rounding out that total war, another 50 or so non-partisan independents, a handful of cautious Octobrists, and then groups representing the minority nationalities; there was a group of 46 Polish nationalists and 30 Muslim delegates from the Asian periphery.

So the Second Duma was not more conservative and compliant. It was, in fact, more radical and hostile. This was a major blow to Stolypin and the government, who had been banking on a more conservative assembly. The prime minister faced criticism from conservatives that he was now aiding and abetting a revolutionary assembly, but he convinced the tsar and his colleagues in the ministry that the duma would work with him. And he defended the duma, because he believed that if they did what the conservatives wanted, and simply abolish the duma entirely, that it would invite more revolution not less. But the presence of all the radicals was also a blow to the Kadets, who were hoping to hold a moderate democratic line also in defense of the Duma. The Kadets hoped to prove that they could work constructively with the government, but man. All those Mensheviks and SRs and radicals were going to make that very hard to pull off.

The Second Duma opened on February the 20th, 1907, and this time there was no fanfare or pomp or speeches from the throne. They just arrived at the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg on the appointed day, and started working. Now the Kadets may have lost seats, but they were still a pretty well-organized block of votes, and they held the balance of the majority in their hands. And as they settled into their initial sessions, the primary goal of the Kadets was to focus on legislation that fit two basic criteria. First, that the Duma would be united in support of it; and second, that the government would sign off on it. This meant they wanted to focus on things like guaranteeing civil liberties, judicial reform, and restructuring local government. In those areas, they would find broad unity inside the duma and a willing partner in Stolypin. They wanted to avoid at all costs having to deal with issues that might splinter the duma’s unity, or create friction with the government. But this project is going to fail, because the two main issues that are going to consume the Second Duma, were guaranteed to destroy unity and create friction with the government: the land question, and the terrorism question.

Now for his part, Stolypin’s attitude was not dissimilar to the Kadets. He wanted to prove the duma could be a constructive force. But even as he sought compromise and agreement with the Kadets and the Octobrists in the duma, there was a fundamental divide in their respective outlooks. Stolypin clearly considered the duma to be something far more like a government ministry than an independent assembly. He did not want them to be an equal partner; they were subordinate to the government. Stolypin saw the role of the duma as a place where issues could be raised for the government to respond to, and then, after being alerted to some pressing concern, the government could craft responsive legislation for the duma to approve, giving that legislation legitimacy that straight imperial decrees might not have. But Stolypin did not believe the duma had the right to, as he put it, voice disapproval, censure, or distrust of government policy. They were not there to act as the political opposition. So he regarded their role as something like the Ministry of Raising Issues or the Ministry of Popular Ratification. And a lot of the coming conflict is far less about the specific issues at hand, and more, whether the duma was going to wind up a subordinated discussion group, or would they be an independent assembly composed of the nation’s representatives acting on behalf of the nation, not the government. Even as the Kadets and Stolypin tried to find common ground, they were simply too far apart on this basic question to ever really make things work.

The relationship between the, the duma and the government was put to an early test when Stolypin delivered his first address to the assembly on March the sixth. He outlined his program for the duma, and promised to send them all kinds of bills for consideration. Bills about terms of political freedom, civil rights, local government, judicial reform, labor conditions, education reform. He also promised to abide by the terms of the rewritten Fundamental Laws, what we call the constitution of 1906. He promised to submit to the duma, all the decrees that had been passed since July, including his momentous land reform decree for their review and approval.

But while many in the chamber liked what they heard, a young Menshevik delegate responded by getting up and attacking Stolypin and the government and the entire state of the empire. Autocracy still reigned everywhere. Emergency laws were the rule, not the exception. The police abused their powers, landlords oppressed peasants. This led to up speeches that were equally accusatory and rancorous. Stolypin responded by standing up and saying that he made no apologies for doing his duty, for maintaining peace and order and combating violent revolutionaries. And while he had every intention of working with the Duma, as he just said in his speech, he would not tolerate deputies using the duma’s platform to encourage sedition and revolution. He said, such attacks aimed at paralyzing the government, they all amount to two words addressed to the authorities: hands up. But he refused to be held hostage by threats of violence. And to these two words, he said, the government must respond in complete calm and secure in the knowledge that it is right with only two words: not afraid.

The nature of the duma’s ultimate dysfunction came from the fact that while the Kadets tried to advance their cautious siege, radicals on either side either demanded they storm the castle, or were deliberately trying to sabotage any working relationship between the duma and the government. And this wasn’t just about the Mensheviks and the SRs and more radically inclined Trudoviks. Those radical right wing delegates were connected to the URP, the Union of the Russian People, which was a proto-fascist party and they set out to so as much dissent and distrust and hostility as possible, to break of the duma, or prove that they needed to be outright abolished. The tsar loved the URP, and from the get-go he himself was clearly waiting for any excuse to dissolve the duma. He wrote his mother that he detested the duma, and could not wait to dissolve them, but he said, quote, it is too early for all of that. One must let them do something manifestly stupid or mean, and then slap, they are gone.

So, as I said, the Kadet plan to focus on things everyone could agree on was doomed, partly because a lot of people in the room didn’t want it to happen, and partly because of there was no agreement on some of the biggest issues of the day. Like for example, the land question.

As we discussed last week, the land question was especially fraught because Stolypin made it clear he was not going to compromise on his vision for turning Russia into an empire of independent farmers. He expected the duma to approve it. But the Mensheviks and the SRs and the Trudoviks were determined to expropriate land and hand it out to the peasantry either communalizing or nationalizing it, but not privatizing it. So the Kadets successfully stymied efforts to even form a committee to address the land question until April the fifth. But they couldn’t hold it off forever, and in early May, three different proposals emerged from that committee, all of which rejected Stolypin’s privatization plan. On May the ninth, the duma voted to endorse in principle large scale land expropriation, which Stolypin staunchly opposed. The very next day, the prime minister came down and delivered a speech, imploring them not to go down this route, that large-scale expropriation would be the ruin of the empire. He said, don’t listen to radicals who only want to do this because it will invite the hurricane of social revolution. And he said, quote, they need great upheavals. We need a great Russia. It was all the Kadets could do to avoid taking a final vote on the land question, because it would surely prove that the duma and the government could not, in fact, work together.

Now the other big issue that’s going to help break the Second Duma is the question of political terrorism. As you may have noticed, there’s something of an undeclared civil war going on out there. The Maximalist wing of the SRs, the guys who didn’t want to engage with the Duma, were still out there shooting people and blowing people up. At the end of January of 1907, 52 officials were killed in the span of just a week. And I have seen numbers that say there were about 2,500 people killed in 1907 alone, and another thousand or so in 1908. Stolypin’s family had almost been blown up, and he himself remained under constant guard because so many people were actively trying to kill him. So for the prime minister, this was personal.

Meanwhile on the other side, the forces of order, the police and the military, and the Okhrana, used various emergency laws and courts marshal to fight just as hard and just as violently. Between 1907 and 1909, a total of about 26,000 people were executed, imprisoned, or exiled for various crimes, whether real or imagined. Because of this running civil war. Stolypin demaned the duma categorically condemn terrorism. But this put the Kadets in a very tricky position. The Union of Liberation, that alliance of anti-autocratic forces who had banded together in 1905 to force the tsar to capitulate, had been built on a foundation of mutual non-criticism. And the Kadets took that seriously. They themselves were not terrorists, and they did not like violence, but they also didn’t want to openly criticize those who supported it. And they also knew that if they denounced terrorism, they would probably lose the support of a lot of people. In January 1907, Stolypin offered Milyukov a deal: if you denounced terrorism openly, I will legalize your political party. But ultimately Milyukov decided it would ruin his reputation and make the Kadets seem like sellouts and turncoats. They also rightly suspected Stolypin of purposefully trying to drive a wedge between the tsar’s opponents on the issue, to first divide and then conquer.

There were two other fundamental reasons why the Kadets did not want to criticize terrorism. First, there was the belief that terrorism, and the threat of more terrorism, had been a big reason the tsar had caved; that the Kadet program of democratic freedom had been made viable by the violent wing of the revolution, if only because it made the Kadet seem like the safe and sane alternative.

The other hangup was that many Kadets pointed out that right wing groups and the state authorities were engaging in as much political terrorism and political violence as the left wing revolutionary groups. Those punitive expeditions from January of 1906? All the field courts martials from the past year? The Black Hundreds? All the anti-Semitic attacks? When you added it all up, the body count far exceeded that of the SR combat organization. And it was as personal for them as it was for Stolypin. Milyukov had been beaten up by a far right wing gang in broad daylight. In July 1906 — so just after the dissolving of the First Duma — an ethnically Jewish Kadet delegate had been assassinated. The URP and the Black Hundreds were quickly implicated, as evidence emerged that the four men arrested after the assassination had been hired to do the job. After these four defendants were tried and convicted, the tsar personally pardoned them. Then, right here in March of 1907, as the Second Duma was underway, another Kadet delegate was assassinated, and again, the URP was implicated. Nearly every Kadet delegate routinely received death threats from right-wing reactionary groups. So, to them, the idea that political terrorism was strictly a left wing problem was flagrantly hypocritical.

As Stolypin tried to force the duma to take a vote on condemning terrorism and as the Kadets tried to avoid the issue, tips came in through the Okhrana spy network that Mensheviks and soldiers had met in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical School. The delegation of soldiers had allegedly presented the socialists a long list of complaints about conditions, and asked them to take up their cause and do something about it in the duma. The authorities also now had in hand a paper written by a Bolshevik encouraging the social democrats to take up the cause of the soldiers, invite representatives from the army and navy to meet at party headquarters, and form a concrete alliance. The basis of that alliance would be if the government ever sought to expel socialist delegates from the duma, that the army would rise up and come to their aid.

The government then got a further tip that on May the fifth, delegates and soldiers would be meeting together the home of a Menshevik. So, that night, the police raided that home and detained 35 deputies that they found there. But they did not find any soldiers, nor any incriminating paperwork that would serve as proof that they were engaged in some kind of revolutionary military conspiracy. On May 7th, Stolypin then came down to answer questions about the mistreatment of these deputies. The authorities had violated their rights and privileges and immunities. And he said that the police had dug up even more incriminating evidence, but nothing more was said about it for several weeks. In fact, no further action was taken until Stolypin concluded the Second Duma was never going to approve his land reforms or take a firm stance on terrorism. So, the Second Duma had to go the way of the first Duma and he needed an excuse to dissolve them.

On June the first, Stolypin addressed a closed door session. He announced that the government had reviewed evidence linked to the raid, and that the St Petersburg prosecutor was ready to bring charges against at least 16 Mensheviks delegates, and they needed to interview dozens more. But to do all of this, they needed the duma to expel 55 socialist deputies to clear a path for the investigation and the charges. This was an incredibly provocative demand. For the duma to straight up expelled delegates and hand them over to the authorities for punishment, just because the government asked them to. So the duma voted to form a committee and look into the affair, and they worked around the clock for the next 36 hours. But by the end of June the second, they still weren’t ready to make a final decision, because the members of the committee had found lots of exaggerations and dubious claims about the evidence. It was long on accusation and short on evidence. The committee came to the conclusion that there was probably not a real military conspiracy — at least not anything like the government was claiming and that it was all extremely circumstantial and flimsy.

That same evening, a small delegation of Kadets met with Stolypin to work out some kind of compromise. Stolypin said there could be no compromise. He said, expel the 55 socialists and free the duma from their taint. He helpfully pointed out that expelling the socialists would give the Kadets an even stronger working majority. But the Kadets said, if we did that, we wouldn’t be able to look each other in the eye. If we expel our colleagues and hand them over to the police, just because the government demands it, we won’t be able to look anyone in the eye. So Stolypin told them, well, I hope to meet you all in the Third Duma.

It’s obvious in retrospect that this was all a strategy to either bring the Duma to heel, or to serve as a pretext for dissolving them. The tsar certainly expected the latter. He wrote Stolypin on that same June the second: “I waited all day long with impatience for notification from you that the disillusion of the accursed duma had been completed. But at the same time, I feel in my heart that things are not moving along smoothly and are being dragged out. This is intolerable. The duma must be dissolved tomorrow on Sunday morning. It is necessary to display decisiveness and firmness to Russia…. The dispersal of the duma is now the right thing to do and vitally necessary. There must be no delay, not one minute of hesitation! God favors the bold!”

The tsar did not have to wait much longer. That night, the police rounded up and arrested about 200 people, including the 16 Mensheviks most implicated in the alleged plot. Then at 6:00 AM on Sunday, June the third, 1907, the placards went up all over St. Petersburg announcing the dissolution of the duma. The tsar’s accompanying explanation said that the city was done quote to our regret, which ha ha yeah right. He also, said radical duma members had quote, the intention of increasing unrest, and promoting the disintegration of the state. He specifically pointed out the participation of a group of elected delegates in a plot to overthrow the government, which he called, quote, an action unprecedented in the annals of history, which ha ha, no it’s not.

As before, the dissolution of the duma was accompanied by an announcement that a new duma, a Third Duma, would convene in November 1907. The duma as an institution would not be abolished. But to ensure the Third Duma would not be like the first two, the announcement said the electoral laws had been rewritten to ensure men of virtue and wisdom were returned. And you know what that means. The distribution of seats and the process of election were completely changed. Most cities were no longer treated as independent entities, but absorbed into the surrounding rural areas to stop urban liberals from winning seats. Wealthy landowners were awarded many, many more seats; poor rural villages were given many, many fewer. They also straight up eliminated about a hundred seats that were awarded to minority nationality communities on the periphery of the empire. The Third Duma was designed to be an all Russian affair. And finally, the election was now going to be a three-stage process, to ensure that by the third and final stage, the only electors left choosing the actual delegates would be the wealthiest landowners in Russia.

Because of the abrupt and unilateral rewriting of the election law that accompanied the dissolving of the Second Duma, we call this moment the Coup of 1907 or Stolypin’s Coup. It wasn’t just about calling a new election, but about arbitrarily rewriting the fundamental laws of the empire to eliminate political opposition. And to be very clear, the electoral process was something that was written into the Fundamental Laws. And the thing is, stolypin couldn’t even appeal to Article 87, that provision that said the tsar could rule by decree when the duma was not in session, because Article 87 explicitly excluded changes to the Fundamental Laws from the list of things the tsar could issue decrees about. All the government could appeal too, was the tsar’s historic authority, and the vague claim that, well, he rewrote the Fundamental Law, so he could rewrite them again as he saw fit. Except, he had literally written into the Fundamental Laws that he was no longer allowed to do that. This was one of the core parts of pure absolutism that was supposed to have been jettisoned as a result of the Revolution of 1905. And it is why this moment right here in June of 1907 is considered the final, final end of the Revolution of 1905. Because by arbitrarily and unilaterally rewriting the electoral law, the tsar was reasserting the principle of absolutism, and he got away with it.

So how did Nicholas get away with it? How did Prime Minister Stolypin pull this off? They were brazenly flouting the verdict of the Revolution of 1905 and daring anyone to stop them. Well, they got away with it because the people of Russia were, by now, sinking into apathy, despair, resignation, and hopelessness. They had worked themselves at the red line for years, and discovered the tsar was just waiting for them to drop from exhaustion. The police and the Okhrana continued to round up people, and shut down presses, and exceed their authority without constraint or punishment. Over the course of June the third, and the week that followed, about 600 total people were arrested and taken into custody in St. Petersburg, with similar raids unfolding in other urban centers across the empire.

But there were no riots or strikes or protests in response. The army in St. Petersburg had been put on alert, but they never had to leave their barracks. There was just a collective depressed resignation. One of the overarching lessons of the Revolutions podcast — and probably the history of Rome too, for that matter — is that rulers can do whatever they want with the power that they wield if nobody stops them. All the laws and constitutions and statutes and norms and rules in the world are not going to stop them. And here in Russia in 1907, that’s exactly what we’re watching happening. Russia’s temporary drift towards constitutional government was stamped out. Absolutism was reasserted. But one of the other overarching lessons of the Revolutions podcast is that there’s often a price to pay for such brazen and naked abuse of power.

So we will leave it there. When we come back on February the 14th, we will push out into the space between the Revolution of 1905 which is now considered over and done with, and the coming Revolution of 1917. But between now and then I have to go back to work on Hero of Two Worlds — I just got the manuscript back about an hour ago, right before I started recording this. So, let me remind you one last time that it is actually out there and available for pre-order even though technically the manuscript isn’t done yet, but go pre-order it if you want, and I’ll see you back in a couple weeks.