Stolypin, the Dumas and Reform to 1914
The Promise Withdrawn
Six months after he had signed the October Manifesto, Nicholas II issued the Fundamental Laws of April 1906. Article 4 stated that ‘Supreme Autocratic Power belongs to the Emperor of All the Russias.’ The Manifesto had hinted at constitutional monarchy. The Fundamental Laws confirmed that Russia was nothing of the sort. The Duma could pass laws, but only if the Tsar approved. He could dissolve it at will, control the military and foreign policy, and rule by decree under Article 87 when it was not sitting. He kept the right to appoint and dismiss ministers. Russia became, in legal terms, a constitutional façade over an autocratic core.
The Fundamental Laws of April 1906 reserved ‘Supreme Autocratic Power’ to the Tsar. He could dissolve the Duma at will, rule by decree under Article 87 between sessions, and appoint and dismiss ministers without consultation. The Duma had legislative initiative but no real power.
Four Dumas in Eleven Years
Between 1906 and 1917 there were four Dumas. Each was less representative than the last because Nicholas changed the electoral rules whenever the result displeased him.
The First Duma (April–July 1906) was elected on a relatively wide franchise. Kadets dominated it and demanded land reform, civil liberties and ministerial accountability. Nicholas dissolved it after seventy-two days. The Second Duma (February–June 1907) was even more radical, with strong showings from Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. Nicholas dissolved it under a fabricated charge that Social Democrat deputies were plotting against him — the so-called ‘coup of June 1907’ — and rewrote the franchise to favour the propertied classes.
The Third Duma (1907–1912) was the only one to serve its full five-year term. The new electoral law gave one landlord vote the same weight as 260 peasant votes and 543 workers’ votes, producing a body Stolypin could work with. The Fourth Duma (1912–1917) was similarly conservative but increasingly critical of wartime mismanagement; in August 1915 a ‘Progressive Bloc’ of moderate parties demanded a government enjoying public confidence. Nicholas refused. The Fourth Duma would still be sitting, technically, when the Tsar abdicated in March 1917 and its members improvised the Provisional Government.
Three structural problems doomed the Dumas. First, the State Council — an upper house, half appointed by the Tsar — could veto anything the Duma passed. Second, the Tsar held the budget for the army, navy and his own court outside Duma control, removing the parliament’s most powerful weapon in any constitutional system. Third, deputies had no control over ministers, who answered only to the Tsar. The result was a body that could complain but never govern. Liberal historians (Lieven, Pipes) treat the Dumas as a wasted opportunity; revolutionaries treated them as a façade that proved violent revolution was the only route to change.
Stolypin’s Carrot and Stick
In July 1906 Nicholas appointed Pyotr Stolypin as Prime Minister. Stolypin had two beliefs that defined his time in office. First, the regime needed to crush political violence ruthlessly. Second, it needed to create a class of prosperous, conservative peasant smallholders who would be loyal to the throne. He pursued both with equal vigour.
The repressive side became known as Stolypin’s necktie. Field court martials were authorised in 1906 to try suspects accused of political violence. Verdicts had to be delivered within forty-eight hours and executions carried out within twenty-four hours of sentencing. Between 1906 and 1909 around 3,000 people were hanged. Stolypin himself survived an assassination attempt in August 1906 that killed twenty-seven people at his home and wounded his daughter.
The Wager on the Strong
The reforming side was equally radical. Stolypin’s land legislation of 1906–1911 allowed peasants to leave the mir, consolidate their strips into a single farm, and own the land outright. He hoped to create a stratum of prosperous ‘wager-on-the-strong’ peasants who would side with the regime against urban radicalism. About a quarter of European Russian peasant families had left the mir by 1916, more in fertile southern provinces and far fewer in the impoverished north. The remaining redemption payments were abolished in 1907. Industrial growth resumed and grain exports recovered.
Yet the policy had limits. The richest peasants benefited; the poorest often sold their consolidated plots and drifted back into the cities as fresh proletarian recruits. The land hunger that had driven the 1905 jacquerie was not solved — in 1917 peasants would still seize manor estates. Stolypin himself believed he needed twenty years of peace to complete the transformation. He was assassinated by a Socialist Revolutionary at the Kiev Opera in September 1911.
In April 1912, troops fired on a strike of British-owned Lena Goldfield miners in eastern Siberia, killing about 270 unarmed workers. The massacre revived urban militancy and produced a wave of strikes in St Petersburg and Moscow that lasted into 1914. By July 1914 there were strike levels and barricades in the capital comparable to those of 1905, briefly interrupted only by the outbreak of war. The lesson was awkward: Stolypin’s land reform might be working in the countryside, but the cities had returned to the boil.
Stolypin combined harsh repression (around 3,000 hangings via field court martial) with the most ambitious land reform of Tsarism (peasants leaving the mir, redemption payments abolished, ‘wager on the strong’). About a quarter of peasant families had left the mir by 1916, but his death in 1911 cut the experiment short.
A Regime in Stalemate
By 1914 Russia looked superficially stable. Industrial output was rising; the rouble was strong; the Third and Fourth Dumas had not been dissolved. Yet under the surface the political settlement was broken. Stolypin was dead and Nicholas had not replaced him with anyone of comparable energy. The Duma functioned as a debating society, not a government. Strikes were back to 1905 levels. Liberal parties had lost faith in cooperation with the Crown; revolutionaries had lost faith in liberal parties. The regime had survived the storm of 1905 by promising change and then withholding most of it. The next storm — the First World War — would arrive in August 1914 and find an autocracy with no functioning safety valve left.