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The memoir of that time, Orwell joined the communist militia to fight fascists during the Spanish civil war or well, sparkling pros describes the experiences. He felt the desperation and humanity, and ultimately disillusionment over in fighting amongst the Republican coalition, as they fought their losing battle against a common enemy Franco and the nationalists.
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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.41: The Duma of National Anger
Let us be clear about something. Tsar Nicholas the Second did not want a national duma. The promises he had made in October 1905 had been extracted from him in the midst of the extreme crisis of the general strike, and he almost immediately regretted his decision. In his heart, Nicholas did not believe he should have to share power with anyone or anything. Then, when the elections unfolded in early 1906, he watched the voters overwhelmingly choose liberals and constitutional democrats and reformists over conservatives and reactionaries, and his frustrated disgust only grew. The hasty update to the Fundamental Laws that we call the Constitution of 1906 reaffirmed most of his absolute powers and limited the scope and jurisdiction of the duma as much as possible, but he couldn’t just abolish the duma. It was going to convene, and it was going to be a very annoying thorn in his side.
As the first session of the duma approached in April 1906, the tsar directed much of his angry distaste at Sergei Witte, who Nicholas blamed for talking him into all this nonsense in the first place. So if you’ll recall from the end of episode 10.39, after Witte secured the crucial foreign loan that would prop up the regime for the next couple of years, Nicholas made it clear he expected Witte to resign as prime minister. To replace Witte, the tsar appointed a guy named Ivan Goremykin, and ah, yes, we are back to butchering Russian pronunciation, hooray. Goremykin is going to come and go very quickly, but just know that he was considered a man of the old school, who had served as minister of the interior in the late 1890s and was a loyal conservative absolutist, who was personally well-liked and trusted by Nicholas and Alexander. So while the tsar adhered to the October Manifesto’s promise that the roles of sovereign head of state and political head of government would be kept separate, Goremykin was clearly an extension of the tsar rather than an independent leader.
On April the 27th, 1906, the big day finally came. The first elected national duma in Russian history, convened in St. Petersburg. To mark the occasion, the tsar invited the delegates to the Winter Palace for an opening address. And this scene was the perfect encapsulation of the post-1905 political and social atmosphere, as the victors and the vanquished of the previous year’s revolution met for the first time. On the right side of the hall stood members of the court, upper crust nobles, imperial favorites, generals and admirals, all dressed in their finest finery. They were the traditional leaders of Russia who believed it their birthright and the will of god that they should rule the empire. Their stomachs turned as they looked across to the left side of the hall, where the nearly 500 newly elected duma delegate stood. They were a motley array of lawyers in plain business suits and men of peasant stock wearing simple work shirts, a bunch of gross plebs who did not belong in the halls of power. They weren’t even all Russian. Some of them were Polish. Some of them were Jewish. The members of the court looked at them and saw nothing but a hive of scum and villainy.
Meanwhile, those Duma delegates were hardly less disgusted with what they saw. It was true they did not fit in with the refined crowd at the Winter Palace, but that was the point. They had come to St. Petersburg because they represented the people of the empire, not just a tiny fraction of parasitic aristocrats. That refined crowd over there on the right side of the hall were a bunch of out of touch jackasses who had run everything into the ground. So the duma looked across the hall at those nobles and imperial favorites and generals and admirals and saw nothing but, well, a hive of scum and villainy.
When the tsar finally arrived, the court nobles bowed properly, and followed all established court protocol. The duma delegates, meanwhile, who did not know or care about such pageantry, stood there and greeted the tsar with a blank and stony silence. They did not return his nods or his bows. But it’s not like their rudely antagonistic body language could have made the tsar more hostile to them than he already was. Nicholas was pretty maxed out.
His speech was short, perfunctory, and addressed almost entirely to the court side of the hall. The tsar himself barely looked in the direction of the duma delegates. He offered a few minutes worth of vague platitudes about his hope for unity and mutual understanding after the conflagrations of 1905, then he got up and he left. It was the last time they were all in the same place at the same time.
After the tsar’s opening address, the delegates went to hold their first official session in their new home, the Tauride Palace. It was a fitting space, a neoclassical palace built in the 1780s and purchased by the state by Catherine the Great. And though it did not literally face west — it actually orients north — its neoclassical design and origin at the height of the western facing age of Catherine clearly meant that it faced west. As the delegates made the three mile walk or so from the Winter Palace, throngs of people lined the streets cheering and waving flags and banners and begging the delegates to institute all of the reforms they believed the duma had been called to institute. This walk only reinforced the idea that they were the true representatives of the people, and their job was to correct the terrible course the empire was on. Years of neglect, abuse and mismanagement that had culminated with disastrous military defeat abroad, and a full blown social revolution at home. All of which had been the handiwork of those idiots they had just left behind in the Winter Palace. Their forthright, eagerness to channel a long simmering rage of the people of the Russian Empire and challenge the existing political order would earn this first national duma the title the Duma of National Anger.
As the duma commenced its first session, the delegates looked around the room and took stock of each other. Most did not know each other and since electoral politics was literally a month old phenomenon in Russia, things like party affiliation or political platforms were incredibly nebulous concepts. But the party with the most seats were the Kadets, liberal constitutional democrats, mostly drawn from the ranks of the educated urban professionals. They were first and foremost there to secure individual civil rights and a real parliamentary constitution modeled ideally after the British system. But for the Kadets, that was meant to be the beginning. Once that baseline parliamentary constitutional system was secured, they plan to use it to secure even more social economic and political reforms.
Now, oddly, the most influential Kadet, and probably the single most influential person in the first duma, was not a delegate at all. That was Pavel Milyukov, who I first introduced at the end of episode 10.20, The Liberal Tradition. Milyukov was a historian and professor and journalist who had spent time in jail and in exile, and who had returned to Russia when the Revolution of 1905 got going. Milyukov was important enough that Sergei Witte had tried to bring him into the government back in November 1905, but Milyukov refuse to be co-opted, and instead poured his energy into building the Kadet Party apparatus and secure those victories in the recent duma elections. But like I said, Milyukov himself was not elected to the duma. His newspaper had published the infamous Financial Manifesto that had called for a tax strike to keep the revolution going, which we talked about in Episode 10.38, The Days of Freedom. The government barred anyone who published that manifesto to serve in the duma, and so instead Milyukov hung out in the press gallery, watching everything unfold on the floor in front of him. In between sessions, he and the Kadet delegates met to plot tactics and strategy, and it was sad that Milyukov ran the duma from the tea room. And while that overstates his influence — he wasn’t some kind of puppet master — Milyukov was pretty influential. He was also something of the unofficial voice of the duma writing daily editorials for his newspaper explaining and justifying what the Kadets and the duma were doing.
But though the Kadets were the largest party, they were hardly a majority. They only held about 180 or 185 seats. So alongside them were a couple of dozen Octobrists, uh, extremely conservative liberals who thought the October Manifesto was as far as things ought to go. It was the end of the line, not the beginning. There were also about a hundred delegates totally unaligned with any party, but who would soon prove far more sympathetic to Kadet ambitions rather than Octobrist caution. There was also a small block of delegates from the various national minority groups with Poles being the largest contingent, and they caucused together to secure more political autonomy for themselves in their respective homelands. But the surprise wildcard of the first duma was a group of more than a hundred delegates elected from the Russian peasantry, who were far more radical than the Kadets who called themselves the Trudoviks or the Labor Party. They agreed with the Kadets on most political reforms, of course, but they were far more radical on economic and social reform and most especially on the question of land redistribution.
Conscious that what they did in this first duma would set precedents for all future dumas, Milyukov, the Kadets, and the rest wanted to make clear territorial claims to political power so they did not become mere window dressing for the tsar. The Kadets, as I said, wanted the Russian duma to function like a British parliament with a real controlling influence over government policy. They did not want to end up like the German Reichstag, which was far more subordinated to the will and the whims of the kaiser. So as they settled into their first sessions and got to know each other, a small committee of Kadet and Trudovik leaders drafted a response to the tsar’s opening speech that they called the Address to the Throne. They made some effort to draw a rhetorical distinction between things they believed the duma had the authority to accomplish and things they merely requested the tsar carry out. But taken together, the Address to the Throne was a bold assertion of the duma’s expectation of power. Among the things that they promised and or requested was redistribution of land, the abolition of that state council, the upper house that had only recently been empowered to act as a check on the duma’s authority, they wanted amnesty for all political prisoners coming out of the Revolution of 1905, and they wanted to approve all government ministers and exercise oversight over their conduct in office. They produced a draft on May the second, debated it briefly and then adopted it unanimously. It was essentially a manifesto asserting the duma’s right to be a full partner in government, with an eye on becoming the real center of power in the Russian Empire.
The boldly ambitious Address to the Throne was not what the tsar and his prime minister wanted to hear, because their plan was to absolutely turn the duma into powerless window dressing. Thus the duma’s response to the tsar’s opening address required a response. They needed to nip these wild claims to real power in the bud. And this kicked off the defining dynamic of the relationship between the tsar, the ministry, and the duma over the 72 days of the First Duma’s existence: responses, responses to responses, and responses to responses to responses. The tsar’s own initial response to the response was to refuse to accept it. He told the duma to hand it over to Goremykin, establishing the principle that the duma did not actually have direct access to the throne, they had to go through the prime minister.
Goremykin then came down in person to the duma on May the 13th to deliver his own response to the response, and in a long speech, he rejected practically every demand and request in the duma’s addressed to the throne. There would be no compulsory land confiscation and redistribution. They would not alter the new composition of the state council. The duma had no role to play in questions of criminal amnesty, and ministers would be selected and dismissed at the pleasure of the tsar and the tsar alone. And he made it very clear to the duma that these things had not been considered and then rejected, but they had not, and would not be considered at all.
Now there were a few minor things he threw into this speech that the government would consider, but all the big stuff that duma had demanded and requested? Absolutely not. So the duma responded to this response, one after another delegates rose and denounced Goremykin and the government to continuous applause. No delegates rose to defend the government. After all these denunciations, the duma then drafted a statement that said Goremykin and the government had refused to hear the wishes of the people, they had shown contempt for the people’s interests, that the duma had no confidence in the government, and then finished by demanding all the ministers resign in favor of leaders who did have the confidence of the duma. This vote of no confidence passed 440 to 11.
The duma’s response to the government’s response to the duma’s response to the tsar’s opening address was quite a gauntlet. And it required, you guessed it, a response. Goremykin’s response to the response to the response to the response was to… just ignore the duma. He was all done responses. He instructed government ministers not to appear before the duma or answer their summons, but to instead send low ranking subordinates. When he eventually sent two bills for the duma’s consideration, the first was about approving funds for a single local school, the other was about building a steam laundry for a provincial university. These were calculated and insulting snubs. On top of that, Goremykin directed the state newspapers to publish telegrams from supporters of the government calling the duma an insulting disgrace that needed to not just be dissolved, but abolished entirely. Most of these telegrams were written by people associated with the reactionary Black Hundreds.
So, roughly two weeks into the grand new political order, and it is completely broken down. Goremykin’s high-handed arrogance may have fit with the tsars general disposition, but there were plenty of conservatives that the imperial court who were not exactly thrilled by the prime minister’s handling of the Duma. After all, they were only months removed from a revolutionary conflagration so massive it paralyzed the empire and nearly toppled the regime. The October Manifesto and the resulting national duma were the compromise that was supposed to end all that. So if we treat the duma like trash, everything’s just going to go back to revolutionary conflagration, I mean, surely we can see that. Among those shifting in their seats with increasingly exasperated frustration was the new Minister of the Interior Pyotr Stolypin, who I will introduce fully next week, but just know, at the moment, he’s the one minister who defies Goremykin’s demand that ministers stay away from the duma. When they summoned him to answer questions, it’s the leap and went down and answered their questions.
There were good reasons to do this and to be concerned about re-provoking revolution. The unrest of 1905 may have subsided, but that didn’t mean it was gone. The general strike of 1905 had peaked with 2 million workers off the job. And while there wasn’t anything close to that going on in the spring of 1906, there was still at any given moment around a hundred thousand workers on some kind of strike. Not the same workers in a single prolonged strike, mind you, but continuous flare ups at factories and mines and work sites. And though the number of striking workers at any given moment was now way less than it had been at the end of 1905, it’s still a major increase in what was considered the normal baseline for labor unrest. I mean, remember back in Episode 10.24, we talked about the unprecedented St. Petersburg strikes in 1896, where upwards of 10,000 workers went on strike at the same time. So we’ve come quite a ways in a decade, as now 10 times that number of workers on strike is considered kind of a simmering normal state of affairs.
But the major issue at this point more than anything else was unemployment, which was exacerbated by the return of hundreds of thousands of young men from the old front lines after the defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. In St. Petersburg, the worker focus turned as much from factory conditions and political reform to the treatment of all the unemployed. And while Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs boycotted of the Duma, they were still out there actively organizing among those unhappy and unemployed workers.
Meanwhile, out in the rural areas, there were also recurrent episodes and strikes and slowdowns protesting low day wages or, more than anything else, the lack of land. By one estimate, there were more than 1500 combative episodes in the span between May and July, 1906. Some of them went so far as to launch tax strikes that established short-lived peasant republics, because the communes were mostly self-governing, so their refusal to pay taxes to the authorities was a quasi declaration of independence from the tsar. This too was all influenced by the return of so many young men from the frontlines of the war, that meant more mouths to feed, more strain on limited resources, and by some accounts, they were more militantly hostile to the local authorities when they returned.
But none of this was exactly violent, and even attacks on property and estates were minimal. Although the SR combat organization is still out there, and they are continuing to conduct their campaign of bombings and assassinations.
The most violent episode of this period was not revolutionary at all, it was reactionary. And specifically, I am talking about the Bialystok Pogrom in Russian occupied Poland in June of 1906.
The city was predominantly Jewish. Jews accounted for three quarters of the 63,000 or so people who live there. It was predominantly a commercial and industrial city at this point, and had been the site of ongoing clashes all through 1904 and 1905 as it was a hotbed of the Jewish Labor Bund, an anarchist group called Black Banner and Polish nationalists and socialists of various shapes and sizes. There were assassinations and counter assassinations between police and revolutionary groups that led to martial law being declared in September 1905 that was not lifted until March of 1906. By that point, the new chief of police was a Polish liberal, who sympathized with the Jewish community. His appointment enraged the notoriously antisemitic local police officers, as well as the police chief’s boss, the Russian police komisar who was himself an ardent anti-Semite. They no longer drew any distinction between an individual radical anarchist who happened to be Jewish and the Jews collectively.
As rumors swirled of some kind of anti-Semitic pogrom against the Jewish population, the sympathetic police chief said a pogrom would happen over his dead body, and then that’s what happened. On May the 28th, 1906, that guy was assassinated. The police immediately blamed Jewish killers, but it very quickly came out that the trigger man was actually an ex-police officer who was almost certainly hired by the anti-Semitic Russian komisar. A few days later, on June the first 1906, two Christian precessions marched separately through the city, one Catholic and one Orthodox. Both were attacked. A bomb was thrown at the Catholics and shots were fired at the Orthodox. These shots and explosions triggered a sudden and suspiciously well-timed cry of “beat the Jews” as Black Hundreds stormed out and raided Jewish shops and homes. The police either did nothing to stop them or joined in themselves. The first day of chaotic destruction and beatings and killings then gave way to two more days of attacks that were even more coordinated and now had the support of Russian soldiers. It was only after Minister of the Interior Stolypin ordered local governors to remove those troops and stop the pogrom that the violence finally subsided. The casualties were somewhere between 80 and 200 dead, god knows how many wounded, and at least 150 shops and markets completely destroyed.
The Bialystok Pogrom outraged world opinion, and it also outraged the duma. They summoned Minister of the Interior Stolypin to answer questions, and he said forthrightly, the pogrom was wrong. Then they demanded to know how much state officials from the local level on up were in on this from the beginning, because remember, this is happening right after General Trepov and the gang had been caught writing and funding anti-Semitic screeds during the punitive campaigns back in January and February. The local Russian authorities in Bialystok tried to blame the Polish residents of the city, but evidence emerged that they had been planning this thing for weeks, and eventually the guy who fired on the Orthodox procession was arrested, and he confessed that he had been hired by the authorities to give the pogrom an excuse to get going. This would remain an ongoing scandal that the duma dealt with and used to attack the government, much to the government annoyed and guilty embarrassment.
So we are now into mid June, and there is nothing but mutually antagonistic hostility between the duma and the government. People on both sides feared the consequences of not ultimately finding a way to work together. Inside the court, as I said, there was a real fear that it would trigger another revolution. But inside the Duma the fear was now that they would face a reactionary crackdown. Now there were two stabs at solving the deadlock. One was spearheaded by the aforementioned General Trepov, who on June the 16th, apparently at his own initiative, invited Milyukov to come meet with him. Trepov told Milyukov he thought he could get the tsar to go along with certain parts of the duma’s program and reshuffle the ministry, but this was undermined just a few days later when Stolypin summoned Milyukov to a meeting and offered far less generous terms of compromise. Milyukov assumed this was some kind of tricky double-cross, but really it was just that Trepov and Stolypin did not know what the other was up to.
But these attempts at forming some kind of compromise government acceptable to the duma went nowhere, and were overtaken by events. Specifically, overtaken by the biggest question looming before everybody: land reform.
The duma had no mandate under the revised Constitution of 1906 to actually address the land question, and the government refused to hear any talk of it. But the duma took it up anyway. The Kadets said, look, we can take imperial family property and state land and church land and some property from the largest private estates and redistribute it to the people. But they did not expect this to be raw expropriation, they did expect the state would pay compensation for the seized property. The Trudoviks, meanwhile, who mostly came from those peasant areas, were far more radical. They envisioned, ultimately, total nationalization and redistribution of all property, including mines and all natural resources. Not all at once, mind you, but that was the goal. Russian land belonged to the Russian people.
But as the duma debated the issue of land redistribution, the government suddenly switched strategies, and they decided to outflank the duma and neutralize land redistribution as an issue. They were not actually opposed to the idea of land reform — many at court understood that there was a land crisis that was undermining the legitimacy of the regime and something needed to be done — but that it was important that that something not be done by the duma, who would then be allowed to take credit for it. It had to come from the tsar.
So on June the 20th, 1906, the government issued an announcement. The tsar, the good little father of the Russian people, was going to answer the land question. They announced a system whereby the state would purchase excess land from its current owners, and allow landless peasants to then purchase parcels individually, establishing a peasant bank that would lend them money to do this. They would also encourage peasants to consider migrating from the overpopulated parts of central Russia to less populated areas of the empire where there was simply more land to be had.
When the duma read this announcement, they were furious. The tsar should not be going ahead with such a momentous policy without consulting and getting approval from the duma. They were after all of the representatives of the people. They were also angry at how limited the tsar’s plan was going to be, and how much debt it would force the new peasant owners to take on. So on July 6th, the duma published An Appeal to the People, which assured the people that the duma was hard at work on a plan of their own that would confiscate and redistribute land in a more just way. They criticized the government for circumventing the duma and undermining the legitimate political role of the people’s representatives.
Now, this might have been taken in stride by the tsar, but for the kicker at the end. The appeal to the people encouraged everyone to remain calm and peaceful until the duma’s proposal became the law of the land. Which was read by the tsar and his government as the duma telling everyone to remain calm and peaceful unless the duma’s proposal became the law of the land. It read like a threat to restart revolution if they didn’t get their way.
This was the last straw. The final response to all the responses was simple: it was time to dissolve the Duma of National Anger. Clearly, things were not working. Both the high handed Goremykin and the realistic and calculating Stolypin both advised the tsar to do it: dissolve the duma, call a new election, see if we can’t get a better class of delegates elected who will not be so intransigently hostile. The tsar was thrilled his ministers were finally talking sense.
Now rumors of the duma’s dissolution had swirled since the first address to the throne, but so far the hammer had not yet fallen. To trick the duma into a sense of immediate complacency, the tsar invited the president of the duma down for a personal audience to discuss their issues on July the ninth, and Stolypin agreed to attend a session on July the 10th to answer more questions about the Bialystok Pogrom. But they made those promises knowing neither meeting would ever take place.
Now the tsar had the right to dissolve the duma. It was his right as tsar to do it as long as he called new elections. But it was still a moment fraught with danger. How would the people respond? Would they restart the revolution? To counter this threat, the military and police presence in the capital were beefed up on July the eighth, and suddenly there were lots of armed authorities at the train station and other strategically important points in St. Petersburg.
Then, before dawn on July the ninth, 1906, soldiers surrounded the Tauride Palace before the delegates gathered for the day’s session to ensure that there would be no session that day. Placards were then posted all over the city saying the duma had been dissolved and new elections would be held for a second duma, which would convene in February 1907. It also declared St. Petersburg was now temporarily under emergency law. Gatherings and precessions and proclamations would not be tolerated, newspapers would be censored and prohibited from calling for further protests.
So the delegates arriving for work that day were shocked to find themselves locked out, and the duma dissolved. But they weren’t exactly surprised, they had been expecting something like this for a long time, and contingency plans were in place. Milyukov spent the day literally riding around St. Petersburg on a bicycle, spreading the word to leaders to gather at a prearranged spot in the city to plan a response. At this meeting, they decided to reconvene everyone at the city of Vyborg in Finland, which was just over the border, and outside the immediate jurisdiction of the authorities in St. Petersburg. This was not a permanent solution, but it would probably give them room enough to operate for maybe 12 hours, and that might be all they needed to rally the people of Russia to their defense.
So later that evening about 200 delegates, mostly Kadets and Trudoviks, successfully reconvened in Vyborg. Late in the evening on July the ninth, 1906, they drafted a protest manifesto addressed to the people, from the people’s representatives. It denounced the dissolution of the duma, and called for passive but not violent resistance to the authorities. Specifically, they called for a tax strike, and a refusal to provide new conscripts for the army.
But they had done very little real prep work to make such a coordinated Empire-wide protest work. They were just sort of hoping to call for it and let the people spontaneously come through. But to everyone’s surprise, to the duma’s dismay, and the government’s delight, 1906 was not 1905. And despite the ongoing protest and strikes, it did not appear that either the workers or the peasants wanted to relaunch a full-scale revolution in defense of the ousted Duma. Within days, Milyukov and the other duma leaders received reports from the field that no one was heeding their call. Their manifesto to the people from the people’s representatives was a dead letter. There was not going to be a revolution of 1906.
History is a funny old thing. The massive upheavals of 1905 pretty much caught everyone by surprise. But then just as everyone on both sides is anticipating a resumption of those upheavals in response to the disillusion of the duma, there was just nothing, nothing happened. But as the tsar and his closest imperial advisors breathed a sigh of relief, they did not take it as a sign that all was well, and they could just go back to the way things had been. Part of the reason there was no revolutionary response to the dissolution of the first duma was that they had told everybody a second duma was coming in February 1907. And the tsar’s government was going to have to be smarter about how they handled that second duma.
So, after the Duma of national anger was dissolved, Goremykin submitted his resignation, and the tsar replaced him as prime minister with a man who we will introduce in full next week, and who probably stands as the most powerful and influential leader over the tense years between 1905 and 1917: Pyotr Stolypin.