The formation of political parties and the first national elections in Russia 9780674333192, 9780674309357

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THE FORMATION QF POLITICAL PARTIES

AND THE FIRST NATIONAL ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA

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The Formation of Political Parties

and the First National Elections in Russia Terence Emmons

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1983

Copyright © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

10987654321

Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the Publications Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Emmons, Terence.

The formation of political parties and the first national elections in Russia. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Konstitutsionno-demokraticheskata partiia—History. 2. Soiuz 17 oktiabria (Russia)—History. 3. Elections—Soviet Union—History. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1894-1917.

I. Title

JN6598.K95E47 1983 324.24702 82-15804 ISBN 0-—674-—30935-9

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Preface

The old regime survived longer in Russia than in any other European state, and when the end came the outcome was not only uncommonly violent but radically different in character from that of the other European countries where divine-right absolute monarchy had been challenged by civil society in the name of popular sovereignty: neither a full-fledged constitutional order as in England and France, nor the Scheinkonstitutionalismus of post1848 Germany and Austria, but a truly new departure—‘“‘the first socialist state.” The standard chronology of Soviet historiography notwithstanding, there never was a “bourgeois revolution” in Russia: the old regime, shaken but not fundamentally altered by the revolutionary challenge of 1905-1907, finally succumbed to the combined opposition or indifference of most of the

significant social groups in the country and was succeeded after eight months, during which unified state authority essentially disappeared, by the Soviet regime, which consolidated its authority in the course of a long and

bloody civil war and exists to this day. It has been widely, if not universally, conceded that the chances for a moderate, “European” issue from the crisis of the Russian old regime were remote by 1914, and by 1917, after nearly three years of total war had led

to extreme dislocations in the political and economic orders, perhaps altogether excluded. There was, however, a brief period at the beginning of the general crisis of the old regime—roughly bounded by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904 at its outset and the Stolypin coup

d’état of June 1907 at its close—when such a solution seemed a real possibility. This book concentrates on that period, with some forays into preceding developments, occasionally going as far back as the period of reforms in the 1860s. More specifically, this book is concerned with two distinct but directly related subjects: the process of political-party formation that took place in

the course of the Revolution of 1905 and on into 1906, and the first national elections, which were held in the spring of 1906. In regard to the first of these subjects, the study addresses a variety of questions: How did the various political organizations come into being and ultimately coalesce into parties, in some cases even before October 17, 1905, under a regime that until then not only lacked a national parliament (the radiating source of most parties in the history of Europe and America), but prohibited any manner of political organizing? And why did these specific parties with their specific strategies and programs come into existence, rather than others,

more or fewer, with different aims? What were the structures of these

viii Preface parties like, both in terms of organization and of membership, and what were the sources of their support in Russian society? In regard to the second subject, the study analyzes, first of all, the role of the political parties in the first elections, when the population of the empire

was first called upon to express its political will; but it also examines the electoral process in general, for what it has to reveal about political attitudes prevailing among major social groups and, in small measure at least, about

the character of those groups themselves. To the extent permitted by the sources, the study examines the election campaigning, the electoral process itself, and its results for the entirety of European Russia (fifty provinces plus

the Don Cossack Territory), where the vast majority of the empire’s population lived. The focus throughout the study is on the “‘constitutionalists”’; that is, those elements of the mobilized population committed to introducing a constitutional order in Russia, one in which political authority would be controlled by law and representative institutions, a national parliament in the first place. (““Liberalism” as used here applies to a considerable part of the constitutionalist movement but is not coextensive with it.) Accordingly,

the “parties” dealt with here are those that were conceived to pursue goals—political, social, or economic—through electoral and parliamentary politics, as opposed to those “parties” that sought to organize the masses for revolutionary action, on the one hand, or for the purpose of restoring “true autocracy,” on the other. Although the focus is on the constitutionalists, other political formations to their right and left are considered in the process of establishing the part of the political spectrum that was occupied by the constitutionalist movement, its boundaries in the body politic. At the

same time, considerable attention is paid to the demarcation lines that separated the several constitutionalist organizations one from the other. In

concrete terms, this focus means that the study concentrates on the Constitutional-Democratic party, the Union of October 17, and their respective allies around the country. Through examination of the formative development of constitutionalist groups and parties in the process of rapid political mobilization leading up

to the first national elections and through analysis of the elections themselves, the book assesses the forces existing in prerevolutionary Russia

that favored resolution of the constitutional crisis in the direction of a European-type parliamentary order, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of why they failed and, thereby, of shedding some more light

on the nature of the Russian Revolution.

This study may be distinguished from earlier works on Russian constitutionalism and liberalism, and political parties, by two principal characteristics: (1) its attempt to explore in detail the social forces that

supported a constitutional order in Russia before 1917; and (2) its treatment of the entire segment of the political spectrum occupied by the

Preface 1x constitutionalists, as opposed to the history of single parties. Finally, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the first national elections in Russia. The study of party formation in Russia is not only of strictly historical interest. As recent developments in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and

Greece have shown, the appearance of new parties in countries with nonexistent or atrophied political-party traditions is a matter of contemporary significance. The problem is of interest in contemplating possibilities for political development in what have come to be known as “the one-party states,” including Poland, of course, but also the Soviet Union, where, and

in regard to which, there has recently been much speculation about the possible social and institutional foundations for a political opposition. This

is not meant as a predictive statement, although the historian of early twentieth-century Russia must, I think, find certain parallels between the political situation in the Soviet Union today and that which obtained under the old regime on the eve of the Revolution of 1905S. In the preparation of this study I have enjoyed help from many quarters.

Among institutional sources, I shall mention only those without whose support its execution would have been quite impossible: the Fulbright-Hays

Faculty Research Abroad Program, for support of research in the Soviet

Union in 1970-71 and 1978; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for a fellowship in 1973—74; the American Council of Learned

Societies, for a fellowship in 1974—75; the International Research and Exchanges Board, IREX, for making it possible to spend several extended periods of time in Soviet archives and libraries over the last decade; and Stanford University, including the Hoover Institution, for its help in a variety of ways too numerous to mention. Thanks are due Robert H. McNeal for permission to reproduce the map of provincial divisions in European Russia, 1905, from Sergei Pushkarev, The Emergence of Modern Russia, 1801-1917 (New York: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston, 1963; reissued Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1982). I am most grateful to those colleagues working on related subjects who

without exception generously shared the unpublished results of their research: Michael Brainerd, Gilbert Doctorow, Robert Edelman, Nancy Frieden, Raul Garcia, Roberta Thompson Manning, Bertrand Patenaude, V.

V. Shelokhaev, P. I. Shlemin, and Nathan Smith. Among the many persons to whom I am deeply grateful for assistance and counsel on this project, special thanks are due to my beloved teacher Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii and to Kornelii Fedorovich Shatsillo, in their several capacities as mentors, colleagues, and intercessors on my scholarly behalf during my visits to Moscow; to Leopold Haimson, Michael

Confino, and W. H. Roobol, who read the entire manuscript in its penultimate draft and showered me with wise criticism, some of which I

x Preface have taken to heart; to Robert Edelman, Gary Hamburg, and Mark von Hagen, who read parts of the work and offered sound advice; to Maria Griaznoff, my assistant at the Russian Review, who cheerfully took on far more than her share of the work and responsibility for the journal while its editor was physically or mentally in absentia working on this project; to Hilja Kukk and Wojciech Zalewski, of the Hoover Institution and Stanford

University libraries, respectively, for their imaginative and determined pursuit of bibliographical rarities on my behalf; to Betty Herring, who typed

the manuscript with virtually unerring accuracy and intelligence; to my colleague Wayne Vucinich, who helped me in many ways; and, last but not least, to Victoria Emmons, who helped me in more ways than she knew.

Contents

Introduction 1

a Gauche” 4 Part I. The Formation of Political Parties

1. The Constitutional-Democratic Party and “L’ouverture

2. The Union of October 17 and Its Allies:

Raznosherstnaia Kompaniia 89 Part IJ. The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign

3. The Kadet Bloc 145 4. The Octobrist Bloc 206 Part III. The First National Elections

City Elections 237 6. Phase II: The Provincial Elections 294

5. Phase I: The Preliminary Elections and Special

7. Results and Prospects 353

Abbreviations 382

Notes 509 402 Index Appendix. Party Alignments of Zemstvo Activists, 1905-1906 383

A Note on Literature and Sources 398

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La Providence n’a créé le genre humain ni entiérement indépendant,

ni tout a fait esclave. Elle trace, il est vrai, autour de chaque homme, un cercle fatal dont il ne peut sortir; mais, dans ses vastes

limites, ’homme est puissant et libre; ainsi des peuples. Alexis de Tocqueville

2S qa

ro

AND »02) ~ :avert Sys Fe FAR EAST &St | Sait .& BSs; of ° »o“) *ee noe : * ts eee a oN” SIBERIA

ws m oy, noe aoene te cog % i (8 PROVI NCES) ry~° it nevertheless carried enough of a prospect for

The Constitutional-Democratic Party a9 Organizing and agitating openly in preparation for elections and for transferring the political struggle to the parliamentary arena to overcome their hesitation about abandoning coalition politics. So reasoned Miliukov in a newspaper article published the day after official promulgation of the Bulygin law:

The law allows for some freedom of electoral campaigning, and an election campaign cannot be conducted without the existence of political parties. Without a doubt, these parties, which already exist

in embryo, will rapidly take shape and will operate completely openly... Therefore life itself will create freedom of organization and assembly...The point of view must be adopted that [these liberties] flow of themselves, of logical and natural necessity, from the existence of public representation.°°

The final initiative came, like that of 1902 which had led to the founding of the Union of Liberation, from the zemstvo constitutionalists. The Union of Liberation leadership had apparently been ready to proceed in

that direction at its third congress in March, but opinion among the delegates there was so divided on programmatic issues that movement toward a party was set aside. It was reactivated by the resolutions taken at the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists’ meeting held in early July (July 9—

10) immediately after the zemstvo congress in Moscow. The participants elected twenty of their number to set about organizing ‘‘a constitutionaldemocratic party that would consist of a broad circle of active persons of like mind in the country and would have a full and consistent program, including articles on economic, fiscal, regional, and national questions, in

cooperation with groups that are close in their views.” This resolution prompted the convocation of a fourth congress of the Union of Liberation

(August 23-25), which in its turn resolved “to proceed immediately to Organization of an open Constitutional-Democratic party,’ for which purpose a committee of forty members was elected and directed “‘to enter into relations with other political [obshchestvennye] groups and to take all

necessary measures. The point of departure for such preliminary work should be the program of the Union of Liberation adopted at the union’s third congress.”°’ Among the forty members of the committee elected by the Union of Liberation were fifteen of the twenty Zemstvo Constitutionalists.°® According to Miliukov’s memoirs, where he quotes from a resolution of the

Union of Liberation’s fourth congress, a compromise was established between the two groups: the Zemstvo Constitutionalists accepted the Liberationist March program, and the Liberationists accepted “‘the tactics of an open political party in the European sense of the word.’”>? In his opening speech to the first party congress, Miliukov said that the party’s organizers believed that the diverse elements he described as being of

40 The Formation of Political Parties both “‘constitutionalist’’ and ‘“democratic”’ persuasion could be formed into a party “if only the party is not considered to be an eternal union.’”©° Just what sort of secular union it was supposed to be was, however, a subject of controversy among the members of the organizing committee whose tasks

included preparing a draft party program.°'

There were at least a few committee members, including M. M. Vinaver, S. I. Izmailov, and M. V. Chelnokov, who apparently still had nothing more in mind than a short-term organization for the forthcoming electoral campaign. But the committee majority, led by Miliukov, Peter Dolgorukov, Kornilov, and Shakhovskoi, adhered to the argument advanced by Miliukov in his August articles advocating participation in the Bulygin Duma—that the party would not be formed simply to participate in

the election campaign and then disappear; that the campaign, on the contrary, was to be taken as an opportunity for party building rather than

as an end in itself.°

There was considerable debate over the program as well, judging from the laconic record of the committee’s meetings. Those who saw the task at hand to be only the winning of election contests for the Bulygin Duma, with

its restricted suffrage system, saw no need to include anything in the program but the political platform, or were for adoption of the resolutions of the September zemstvo congress as the party’s program, which amounted to the same thing. But the long-time constitutionalist leaders, supported by the majority, called for the full program of the union as the basis of the

program to be presented to the founding congress of the party for its approval, at the same time allowing for coordination with the September congress resolutions where these essentially coincided. The crucial programmatic issue was that of agrarian reform, to which the entire last session of the committee was devoted. Miliukov and the other leaders understood that this platform of the future party’s program, more

than any other, would draw the lines to right and left and determine the kind of party it was going to be. Essentially three positions were revealed in the discussions: that of the extreme left, which would have liked to see all gentry lands confiscated and either turned directly over to the peasants or

nationalized together with all other lands (that is, the positions of the SR and SD programs, essentially); that of the extreme right, which considered confiscation of private lands permissible only in exceptional cases and in no event envisaged complete extinction of gentry landholding; and that of the middle, which emerged victorious by maneuvering between the extremes, allowing the left to interpret the agrarian program (already elaborated in its essentials by the Union of Liberation) as a ‘‘minimum” program, and the right to consider it a “‘maximum”’ program. “‘We are forgetting our goal,” Miliukov warned the defenders of both extreme positions at one point. ‘““We are writing the program of the KD party. This is not the Peasants’ Union, nor is it a landowners’ party. We must take a middle line. Expropriation is

possible, but this must not be spelled out too concretely.”

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 41 The organization bureau decided, after some debate, to invite three delegates per province to the founding congress, plus twenty delegates each from Petersburg and Moscow. These delegates were to be elected by local Union of Liberation or Zemstvo Constitutionalist groups where possible;

elsewhere, they could simply be appointed. Members of the organizing groups and the Council of the Union of Liberation could take part in the congress ex officio. Invitations were sent by the bureau to forty-seven local groups in as many provinces, requesting them to convene meetings of their sympathizers and to elect their three delegates, ‘‘insofar as possible, from all

strata of society.”” At these meetings, participants were also invited to

discuss the party program from the point of view of local needs and conditions, using for this purpose the program of the Union of Liberation,

which by this time had been printed in a number of places and widely distributed.°° Because of the rail strike that had isolated Moscow by October 8, the congress did not convene in its full complement of 150—200 delegates and

ex officio participants. There appeared instead delegates elected, by combined groups of Liberationists and Zemstvo Constitutionalists, from Moscow, Petersburg, Tver, Novgorod, Arkhangelsk, Vladimir, Iaroslavl, Stavropol, Astrakhan, and Vilno; in addition, a number of members of the two organizations from Kazan, Kaluga, Kursk, Simbirsk, Pskov, Saratov, Tambov, Tula, and Kharkov provinces, and from the city of Tiflis, who happened to be in Moscow at the time, were coopted by the bureau to participate as well. In all, there were about 80 delegates. Thirty-six of them came from Moscow, 11 from Petersburg, and the remainder from the provinces named.°

The First Party Congress (October 12-18, 1905) The Party Program The program provisionally adopted by the first Kadet congress was essentially the March Union of Liberation program, somewhat modified by the organizing committee. Its adoption appears to have caused remarkably little debate. Partly because of the rail strike, the meeting was dominated by the men who had taken part over the years in the gradual elaboration of that program, together with other members of its direct sponsor, the organizing committee. Particularly significant in this regard was the absence of most of the Petersburg delegation from the Union of Liberation (which in the end would refuse to join the new party). Had it been present, the misgivings of

Miliukov and the moderate majority of the organization bureau about a rekindling of the disagreements that had shown up in the March Union of Liberation congress would probably have been realized. According to Miliukov’s memoirs, he and his moderate colleagues had resolved beforehand to hold to the programmatic and tactical line approved by the July

42 The Formation of Political Parties and September zemstvo congresses and to resist more extreme demands that they thought were likely to be made in the heightened political temperature

of the general strike. They had decided to go ahead with the congress, despite these misgivings and despite the absence of two thirds of the delegates, because of the need for haste in the rapidly developing revolutionary situation. Miliukov’s opening speech, which claimed that the new party’s constituency was generally committed to “social reform” while simultaneously arguing the primacy of “‘political reform,” was composed with the impatient left of the Union of Liberation leadership foremost in mind.°’

The program reflected that combination of “constitutional” and “democratic” reforms deemed necessary by the party leaders for establishment of a party uniting the broadest elements of the ‘“‘nonrevolutionary

intelligentsia.” It was also meant to appeal specifically to minority nationalities: the demand for equality of all citizens before the law and the guarantee of basic civil and individual liberties was amended to assure their extension to national minorities and to include cultural self-determination as a basic right of citizens. A special article (3) was devoted to democratic local self-government and autonomy, with special reference to Poland and to the restoration of the Finnish constitution. This article came out of the

debates of the September zemstvo congress—the first congress to be attended by a sizable representation from the nonzemstvo provinces. It had

been bombarded with petitions from groups representing various nationalities (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others). The inclusion of

this article amounted to a bid by the party leaders for support in the national borderlands.®°

The articles on the political system called for a legislature, with legislative initiative and ministerial responsibility to it, to be elected by fourtail suffrage. The question of a second chamber was left open, although

it was provided that should a second chamber be constituted, it should consist of representatives of the organs of local administration reorganized

on the basis of universal suffrage and extended to the entire country. Extensive court reforms, commencing with the restoration of the 1864 judicial statutes, were also called for. It has been justly remarked that the sections of the program dealing with financial-economic policy, agrarian and labor legislation, and education (articles 5—8) set the Kadet program off from those of other Russian

constitutionalist parties, as well as from the mainstream of European liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.©’ The financial section provided for abolition of peasant redemption payments, gradual abolition of indirect taxes and their replacement by graduated income taxes, and reform of tariff policies ‘“‘with the aim of reducing the cost of objects of

popular consumption and the technical advancement of industry and agriculture.”

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 43 The agrarian legislation essentially repeated the terms of the draft program worked out in the organizing committee.’° The two basic points of

the program (in addition to clauses calling for aid to resettlement and surveying, control over conditions of rent and agricultural labor, insurance,

and the like) were: 36. Increase of the area of land usage by the population engaged in working the land with its own labor; that is, including landless and smallholding peasants as well as various categories of small landed proprietors, by means of state, udel, cabinet, and monastery lands,

and also by means of alienation for the same purpose at state expense of privately owned land in necessary amounts [v potreb-

nykh razmerakh|, with compensation to the present owners according to just (not market) valuation. 37. Alienated lands enter a state land fund. The principles accord-

ing to which lands from this fund are subject to transfer to the population in need of it (ownership, personal or communal usage,

and so forth) are to be established in accordance with the peculiarities of land tenure and land usage in the various regions of Russia. ”’

The only substantive difference here between the draft and the final program was the inclusion in article 36 of the phrase “in necessary amounts.” This was a compromise between those who wished to leave that question entirely untouched in the program and those at the congress who,

with the socialist parties, favored the granting of land to the peasants according to a “labor norm,” an amount sufficient to occupy the peasant family regardless of the effects of its implementation on other forms of landholding (it may be recalled that this view had been expressed in the discussions of the organizing committee).

The labor platform of the Kadet program called for the right to organize and strike; for the extension of labor legislation and regulation to

all forms of hired labor and institutionalized participation of workers’ representatives in control organizations and labor disputes; and for state insurance for old age and disability. It also added a number of points on the control of labor conditions. The most controversial of these was article 44 on the introduction of the eight-hour work day, which called for “‘the rapid

introduction of that norm wherever possible at present, and its gradual introduction in the remainder of enterprises.’ Again, this was a compromise

between those who supported the socialist parties’ program demanding immediate universal introduction of the eight-hour workday, and those who

were apprehensive about the economic consequences of such a measure.

The platform on education was based on “democratization and decentralization of education,” including the right of private and public

eel The Formation of Political Parties initiative in the organization of schools, academic freedom and free organization for students, university autonomy, the expansion and rationalization of the educational system at the secondary and tertiary levels, and the introduction of universal, free, obligatory primary education.

A very large role was assigned to the (reformed) organs of local selfgovernment in all this.

Party Organization The congress also adopted a set of party statutes for governing the internal organization of the party. These statutes, drawn up by D. I. Shakhovskoi,

were accepted by the congress without significant discussion, probably because the provisional nature of the party at that point made the question of organization academic. In any case, the same statutes were adopted unchanged by the second party congress in January 1906; and the third congress in April 1906, which did review them with an eye to meeting the

requirements for “legal” political parties set down in the legislation of March 4, 1906, left them again virtually unchanged.”* The congress elected a “temporary” central committee of thirty, which was to manage party affairs until a second congress, properly representative of local party groups, could elect a regular central committee in accordance with the party statutes. The second congress, originally to have been called in two weeks’ time, was first postponed until after the planned November zemstvo congress (this decision was taken even before the end of the first congress’s work), and then further delayed because of continuing communi-

cations problems. The December uprising in Moscow and the state of martial law declared in connection with it still further delayed the calling of

the congress and also caused the site of the congress to be moved from Moscow to Petersburg.’? The central committee headquarters were in Moscow, and remained there until the third party congress, when, with the opening of the Duma, the committee decided to move to Petersburg. In fact, a good deal of the committee’s activity was concentrated from the beginning

in Petersburg, where better than half its members had their permanent residences and where the central party newspapers were published beginning in late February.

Tactics The tactics of the new party at its inception were in general dictated by the

organizational task; that is, by the party-building strategy already de-

scribed, the commitment to developing the “big democratic party” (Miliukov) that had led to the calling of the first congress in October. The

second main task of the party, organization of the electoral campaign, depended on success in the first task and had in any case to wait on the

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 45 resolution of the question of the electoral law, the Bulygin law having been,

in effect, annulled by the October Manifesto with its promise for a more democratic suffrage. The first congress of the Kadet party issued two public resolutions, one

before and the other immediately after proclamation of the October Manifesto. In the first, issued on the first day of the party’s formal existence (October 14) over the signatures of the members of the organization bureau, the party declared its complete solidarity with the strike movement, whose general goals were described as immediate introduction of basic liberties, “free election of popular representatives to a constituent assembly on the

basis of universal, equal, direct, and secret ballot, and a general political amnesty.”’ All these goals were declared common to the strike movement at

large and to the new party. There was no longer any question of whether political liberty would come to Russia, nor whether it would come “from above or below”; the only question was whether it would be won, from below, by violent or by peaceful means. The party declared itself in favor of

peaceful means but warned that it was up to the government to decide whether the strike movement would end in peaceful acquisition of liberty or in a bloodbath. In either event, the resolution intoned, the party “‘sides in advance with the popular demands and places on the scales of the people’s liberation all its sympathy, all its moral force, and will give it all possible support.”

The second resolution, issued on October 18, the last day of the congress, was a response to the October Manifesto. It expressed the party’s dissatisfaction with the concessions of the manifesto, on the grounds that it

failed to give adequate recognition to the principles of political liberty. Furthermore, it proposed that the most satisfactory way out of the present crisis would be through immediate introduction of the basic rights promised in the Manifesto; immediate holding of elections to a constituent assembly based on a completely democratic suffrage, rather than the proffered Duma (it was allowed, however, that the Duma could serve as ‘‘one of the means”’ for bringing about the convocation of a constituent assembly); immediate

removal of all government officials “who by their previous actions have aroused the wrath of the people’; and, finally, it repeated the demand for a full amnesty to political prisoners and religious dissenters.”* It seems impossible to ponder Kadet tactics in this crucial initial period of the party’s existence without recalling the rather acrimonious debate on the subject that was conducted in the pages of the Paris émigré press in the 1920s and 1930s between those former comrades of the first Kadet central committee, Miliukov and V. A. Maklakov. There is no need to describe the terms of that debate in full here,”> but certain points in it are helpful for coming to an understanding of the behavior of the Kadet leaders in the early months of the party’s existence.

46 The Formation of Political Parties Maklakov’s basic premise (it was he who took the offensive in the

debate) was that the regime, in issuing the October Manifesto, had committed itself in good faith to limitations on its authority and to the constitutional-representative arrangements that commitment implied. From this premise followed his opinion that those among the Kadet leaders who were sincerely committed to constitutional reform ought at that point to have sided firmly with the “historical state power’ against “the Revolution”; that is, the revolutionary parties and the mass movement to which they were giving encouragement in late 1905, even if this would have meant giving up aspirations for creating a large political party.”° At least in retrospect, Maklakov saw the party as a continuation of the liberation movement. If its front was narrower than that of the movement as a whole, it still included in its ranks people with “revolutionary ideology” and had sided with “‘the Revolution” against “reaction,” leaving no place

for those seeking a liberal or moderate solution. With the advent of constitutional monarchy (October 17), the incipient party should have broken up into several parties, according to the diverse interests and temperaments coexisting within it.’ At the time, the large majority of the party leadership obviously did not

accept this interpretation of the October Manifesto, and of the government’s intentions generally, and Miliukov found no reason to change the diagnosis twenty-five years later.’® What is significant for our purposes is not Maklakov’s well-known speculations about what might have happened

had the Kadet leaders tempered their “revolutionism,” but rather his perception of the overwhelming concern of the party leaders following the

October Manifesto to preserve party unity, a concern which, he rightly observed, led them to play down real ideological differences within the party; and his perception that this urge to maintain the party was dictated by the leaders’ past experience.’” Behind the issue of party unity (between ‘“‘constitutionalists” and “democrats’’) lay indeed the past experience of relying on “‘public opinion” and ‘‘zemstvo men” (to whom Maklakov, retrospectively, wished to entrust

the fortunes of reform after October 17), and the conviction born of that experience that the regime would submit to significant reform only if confronted by a broadly mobilized citizenry (obshchestvo). This conviction had been a long time developing, but by the same token it was not one that

could be cast off in response to the mere publication of a laconic government manifesto. It was this generally shared conviction among the party’s initiators that led directly to recognition of the strategic necessity of acquiring the support of the “democratic intelligentsia,” without which, as well, there could be no hope for a large popular following in the future. The commitment to this strategy became all the stronger in the autumn of 1905 and winter of 1905-1906, when, under the impact of mounting

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 47 popular disorders, the committed constitutional reform-minded element in the zemstvos shrank to a small core, the mass of the zemstvo and gentry assemblies shifting their political orientation distinctly to the right, toward support of “the historical state power.” In some instances this shift took the

form of support for the nascent Union of October 17, but the shift eventually swept further to the right than that. After October 1905, most of

the recently opposition-minded landed gentry essentially relapsed into support of the regime, faute de mieux. By the winter of 1905-1906, as the

level of peasant violence against gentry property and lives reached unprecedented proportions, zemstvo assemblies were petitioning the government to delay introduction of the civil liberties promised in the October

Manifesto and to continue the rule of martial law and extraordinary measures until full restoration of order.8° The “line on the right” that Miliukov referred to in his October speech was being drawn much closer in than he or his colleagues probably could have imagined then. All this could

only serve to reenforce the wager on the nonsectarian left, l’ouverture a gauche. The party leaders’ confrontation of the two basic issues at the height of the revolution in late 1905—the question of relations with the revolutionary parties and the mass movement, and the question of relations

with the government—was made with that wager constantly in mind.

From the First to the Second Congress (November 1905—January 1906) First Steps When, a few days after publication of the October Manifesto, Prime Minister Witte approached the executive bureau of the zemstvo congress in his search for public men to participate in the reformed cabinet he would head, the bureau’s delegation, consisting of F. A. Golovin (chairman of the bureau), Prince G. E. Lvov, and F. F. Kokoshkin, laid down the following conditions for any possible participation: (1) convocation of the fourtail

constituent assembly “for elaboration of the fundamental laws,” (2) immediate introduction of the liberties promised in the manifesto, and (3)

complete political amnesty. These conditions, presented to Witte in a

meeting on October 21, ruled out continuation of discussions. The delegation’s declaration to Witte was published (Witte had been obliged to

agree to this as a precondition to opening the discussion) in Russkie

vedomosti on October 23.8! |

Although the delegation’s terms were not based on a specific ruling of the new Kadet party, they were, as Miliukov noted, in the spirit of the party

at the time; in effect it was a party action (Miliukov participated in the meeting preliminary to the delegation’s departure, and Kokoshkin, like

48 The Formation of Political Parties Miliukov a member of the first party central committee, was included in the

delegation to assure adherence to party views).°? The uncompromising character of the delegation’s response to Witte’s overture surprised many contemporary observers. It is clear that Shipov,

who had been the first to urge Witte to turn to the zemstvo congress “majority” with offers of ministerial posts, had fully expected that the manifesto would suffice to cause the bureau to end its “opposition to the government” and to enter Witte’s cabinet. In his view, the bureau’s response testified to “‘a complete lack of awareness of the necessity to preserve and support the authority of state power in the current period.’’®’ Shipov had misread the political attitudes prevailing in the Kadet leadership at the time of the party’s inception. Whether Witte had done so is problematical, as are most aspects of his political behavior, but it is quite unlikely that he could have expected any of the Kadet leaders to enter his cabinet on the terms that he would not, or could not, change: retention of the most important posts for appointees from within the bureaucracy; and most important—the real bone of contention—appointment of P. N. Durnovo, at that time assistant minister charged with police operations, as minister of internal affairs. Even Shipov and his colleagues from the right wing of the zemstvo opposition, A. I. Guchkov, M. A. Stakhovich, and several others, to whom Witte had first turned in his attempt to get a few “public men” in his new cabinet, would

not enter on these terms, and Witte was compelled to form an entirely “bureaucratic” cabinet, without benefit of the veneer of public confidence he had hoped to acquire by their participation.** In any event, the Kadet leadership’s attitudes, along with the tactics that flowed from them, were spelled out for all to see in an article published by Vladimir Nabokov in the liberal lawyers’ newspaper Pravo, just two days after the zemstvo bureau delegation had met with Witte. It amounted to an official party analysis of the current situation.®?. Nabokov began by identifying the party’s ultimate goal with that of the

“left” in general—“‘social reform.” But the road to social reform lay through political reform, the first and most urgent task. The basic elements of political reform were: “‘universal suffrage, liberty, and a constitution

produced by a constituent assembly. The convocation of the latter is, therefore, the direct and most immediate task of party activity.” He maintained that the October Manifesto, whatever its shortcomings, was the product, the trophy, of the liberation movement. The party’s first steps would be fateful: if it took the right path, its future ‘‘as a powerful and viable organization will be guaranteed and it will become one of the major factors in the full and complete emancipation of Russia.” A false step would

threaten it with destruction. It was therefore imperative that the party determine its relations toward (1) the government, and specifically the manifesto, and (2) the revolutionary parties. The former, Nabokov wrote,

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 49 had been appropriately outlined in the founding congress’s resolution on the

manifesto. As for relations with the revolutionary parties, party policy should be guided by the necessity “‘to conserve the energy and increase the power of the opposition mood, the mobilization of all opposition forces.” That should be the slogan for the party’s relations with the left: “We must unite on the basis of our common interests, putting aside all that divides us. We will not accept what is organically foreign to us and is ruled out by our political raison d’étre [politicheskii smys!], but we do not demand sacrifices of principles concerning means from anyone in the name of the common good. We can only hope that the powerful union of diverse forces will of itself remove those means that we, organically and politically, cannot accept

as our own.” Nabokov concluded that, in view of the widespread counterrevolutionary violence of the last few days, “we would consider a

split between us and those standing on our left...not just a political mistake, but a political crime.” In short, political victory was not yet won. What had been gained was the work of the liberation movement as a whole, including the revolutionary parties and the strike movement; therefore, the demand for the constituent

assembly would not be abandoned nor any break made with the revolutionary left. The party, however, was not to be expected to participate in the

organization of armed confrontation with the regime. This warning, at the outset of the most violent phase of the revolution, did not bode well for relations between the Kadets and the revolutionary parties.°° In the stormy months following the October Manifesto and the party leadership’s first bold response to it, the party moved progressively away from the slogans that had linked it with the parties of the left—the demand for immediate convocation of the constituent assembly, and acceptance of

the possibility of, if not active support for, a “democratic republic.” It emerged from the second party congress in mid-January 1906 having abandoned the demand for a constituent assembly (as an institution distinct from the Duma promised in the manifesto) and with a program revised to express explicit support for a constitutional monarchy.

However, while leading party members gave increasingly urgent warnings in November and early December against continuation of the general-strike movement and criticized its encouragement by the revolutionary parties, arguing (correctly) that the popular movement was nearing

exhaustion and that confrontation would push the regime to outright reaction, the party leadership as a whole all the same avoided general condemnation of the mass movement or of the revolutionary parties. The Kadet party continued, at least formally, to observe the tactic of a united front with the left and placed ultimate responsibility for the continuation of

disorder and violence on the intransigence and procrastination of the

50 The Formation of Political Parties government. In particular, the government was blamed for having provoked the December uprising in Moscow.®”

The November Congress The first significant step away from the slogans of the united front showed up in the resolutions adopted by the November congress of zemstvo and

town duma representatives. The large majority of participants in this congress (held from November 6 to November 13 in Moscow) were prominent figures in the then just-forming local groups of the Kadet party. In the tense atmosphere of mid-November, the delegates displayed great

diversity of views about the proper response to the current situation, ranging from an unrestricted vote of confidence for Witte’s government at one extreme to the demand for immediate convocation of the constituent assembly at the other. The tension at the congress was pointed up by Witte’s invitation to the zemtsy (through a quasi-private telegram to Petrunkevich) to patriotically come to the government’s aid in the face of anarchy (Witte referred specifically to the outbreak of rebellion in Sevastopol), and by the

almost simultaneous receipt by the congress bureau of a protest from the Moscow soviet accusing the congress of dalliance with the autocracy.®® Miliukov, recently coopted to the congress bureau, played honest broker at the November meeting, elaborating with his bureau colleagues a set of resolutions that were, in effect, resolutions of the Kadet party: they were intended as such by the party leadership, and were so interpreted in the

contemporary press. An initial resolution calling for convocation of a constituent assembly was voted down by a vote of 137 to 80. Following this

vote, the phrase “constituent assembly’ was dropped from the main resolution of the congress and replaced by the demand for proclamation of an act providing for “Immediate summoning of public representatives by universal, direct, equal, and secret ballot, and for formal endowment of the

first assembly of popular representatives with constituent functions, for drawing up, with the confirmation of the sovereign, a constitution of the Russian empire.” This “first assembly” was also to be “empowered to establish the basic principles of agrarian reform and to take necessary measures in the field of labor legislation.” The resolution went on to call for

democratic reform of the zemstvos and town administrations, and other measures for introduction of a legal order (including revocation of the emergency legislation, amnesty to political prisoners, abolition of the death sentence, immediate introduction of the liberties mentioned in the October Manifesto, and a purge of the administration, particularly of officials who were known to have encouraged pogroms).°? The formula on the first assembly, which had been worked out by the congress bureau, had, as Miliukov noted in his memoirs, “removed from the agenda the demand for a separate convocation of a constituent assembly,

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 51 and rumors that the party intended to declare Russia a democratic republic were refuted; while, on the other hand, the decision to limit the competence

of the ‘first assembly’ to exclusively constituent functions was also revoked.””° In this way, the position of the nascent Kadet party shifted perceptibly to the right, setting it off from the revolutionary parties in a way it had not

been before. “Our parting of the ways with the left parties found its first precise formulation here.””! Efforts were made to minimize the significance of this shift. Pravo editorialized in the issue in which it printed the congress

resolutions that abandonment of the constituent assembly demand amounted only to a “‘semantic shift”: the Kadet leaders were not really rejecting the constituent assembly as they had understood it all along, only avoiding a term that had come to be given a special definition by the SDs and SRs, a definition entailing ‘“‘the absolute condition of the removal of the existing government, and then temporary chaos, from which the constituent assembly, in complete freedom and with no ties to the past, would create a

totally new order—the democratic republic.” By contrast, the congress, ‘“‘while resolving that the Fundamental Law must indeed be elaborated by a constituent assembly, at the same time expressed the conviction that under

present conditions there can be no talk of a republic, and the constitution will be subject to the sovereign’s confirmation. Thus, if the members of the KD party voted on the question at hand against the constituent assembly,

one should interpret that as disagreement with the term, not with its essential character.”’”?

Although there was some truth to the point that the Kadets’ idea of a constituent assembly had not changed in any fundamental way, the question

of why the “semantic shift” designed to point up the differences on that issue with the revolutionary parties was taken just then was not addressed in

the Pravo editorial. Witte’s overture to the congress had provoked much speculation. The newspaper Rus’ editorialized hopefully that the congress might become a sort of provisional government under Witte.?? Miliukov recalled that in this

atmosphere—panic about anarchy and general disorder on the one hand; government overtures on the other—‘“‘the congress produced several resolutions adapted to the situation that had developed, with the obvious purpose of facilitating the possibility of a deal [sgovor] with the government, should negotiations be continued.””* The party leaders wished to give a signal of their essential moderation to Witte, despite their earlier refusal to cooperate with him in the government on his terms. That this was indeed a

consideration in the change in the party program (for that is what the congress resolutions amounted to) was made clear by the decision taken at the end of the congress to send a delegation to Witte with an explication of the terms by which the government could obtain the support of the zemstvo congress: essentially, by putting its resolutions into effect. The delegation

52 The Formation of Political Parties was to deliver a copy of the resolutions and present an explanatory statement of that import. The congress’s terms were unacceptable to Witte. He took revenge on the zemtsy, whom he had twice solicited, by refusing even to receive the delegation (consisting of Petrunkevich, S$. A. Muromtsev, and Kokoshkin), and by responding only some days later through the Council of Ministers with a warning of the dire consequences of the congress’s failure to support the government in its realization of the principles of the October Manifesto and the maintenance of order.”° In hindsight, it seems unlikely that Witte at that juncture could have been expected to relinquish tested implements for handling popular unrest (the emergency legislation of 1881) or to turn loose convicted revolutionary activists. This was realized at the time by a fair

minority of the November congress, including Miliukov, who argued strongly against sending a delegation to Witte, but objections were overruled by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-seven with three abstentions.”°

The Kadet Interpretation of the Constituent Assembly The two basic interpretations of this current term in Russian political discourse were spelled out with characteristic vividness by Maklakov in one

of his numerous election campaign speeches in early 1906. He told a Voronezh audience that: “history yields two types of constituent assemblies:

the one, exemplified by the constituent assembly in France in 1848 after the overthrow and flight of Louis Phillipe, which possessed full sovereignty and could create the new order as it pleased; and the other, exemplified by

the assemblies in Austria in 1848 and in Prussia in 1867, both of which convened under the monarch and drew up a constitution.””’ As far as the Kadet party was concerned, Maklakov continued, given the fact that the emperor had remained, albeit limited by ‘‘fundamental constitutional laws” (he should have said “‘by the promise of fundamental constitutional laws’’), “‘a constituent assembly is. . .a meeting of representatives of the people who

should work out the fundamental laws and definitely not that meeting which abolishes and stands in place of the former emperor.” The employment of the term in both senses was nearly as old as the constitutionalist movement. The first use of the specific term “‘constituent assembly” on record may have been by none other than Ivan Petrunkevich, in a brochure he wrote in early 1879, The Immediate Tasks of the Zemstvo (Blizhaishchie zadachi zemstva). Petrunkevich there used the term in its more moderate sense. It was employed in the more radical, revolutionary sense in the same year in the program of the Executive Committee of The People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia). Part B of their program declared: As socialists and populists, we propose that our first task is to free

the people from the oppression of the present government and bring about a political revolution with the aim of transferrinz

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 53 power to the people. By means of this revolution we shall first of all provide that the people will henceforward develop independently,

in accordance with their own will and inclination... 2. We propose that the will of the people would be adequately expressed and executed by a constituent assembly [uchreditel’nym

sobraniem], freely elected by universal vote and provided with instructions from its electors.7°

The term had been used in its moderate sense’” by the ‘Russian constitutionalists” in the first number of Osvobozhdenie in 1902 (in point of fact, they used the term “‘constituent organ” [uchreditel’nyi organ] rather than “‘constituent assembly’’). Although Maklakov’s claim that this was the sense in which the party leadership as a whole employed it may have been exaggerated, at least the notion of a “constituent assembly” had all along been more or less synonymous with the “Duma with constituent functions,”

summoned by the Crown, its constitutional project subject to royal ratification. One significant change had, of course, taken place since 1902:

the idea of the ‘“‘first assembly” being elected by a ‘‘democratized” zemstvo—a common property of Petrunkevich’s 1879 scheme and the 1902 program—had been replaced by recognition of the principle of election by universal, direct suffrage. This change was a response to challenges to the

constitutionalists’ democratic credentials from the left, as expressed, for example, in the resolution on relations with liberals adopted at the Social Democrats’ second congress in 1903.'°° More generally it amounted to recognition that the citizenry extended beyond the ranks of the zemstvo constituency.

In a public polemic with Prince E. N. Trubetskoi in January 1906, Miliukov wrote: “I affirm that the notion of ‘constituent assembly’ held by persons closely involved in the organization of the party had from the very

beginning a different meaning than that with which it was used by our extreme parties.”’°! At the November congress, even the advocates of retaining the resolution calling for a constituent assembly, such as A. M. Koliubakin and Professor Luchitskii, appear by all evidence to have given it

the more moderate interpretation; they were concerned about the party’s ability to compete with the revolutionary parties if it surrendered the slogan to them.!°? A small left-wing faction in the party leadership, led by the selfstyled Marxist lawyer M. L. Mandelshtam, came close to the revolutionaries in their understanding of the term; that is, that the constituent assembly should be a completely sovereign body. They apparently believed at the time

that the regime could be pressured into convening such an assembly.'°

The Appeal Leftward The breakdown of negotiations with Witte (if they can be called that) was soon followed by a series of government actions that were interpreted by the

54 The Formation of Political Parties Kadet leaders as serious reneging on the promises made in October: the declaration of martial law, first in Poland and then in ever-widening areas of

the country; wholesale use of courts-martial, which freely employed summary executions to put down disorders, especially peasant disturbances; the closing down of a number of newspapers in late November; the government’s apparent unwillingness to act decisively to stop the wave of pogroms and other forms of right-wing violence that set in in many places in

the country immediately after the manifesto’s proclamation, (there was widespread suspicion that it was actually encouraging such violence); and, finally, the promulgation of the new electoral law on December 11. These developments naturally made the Kadet leaders increasingly doubtful about

the regime’s commitment to serious reform, and this growing doubt reenforced the need to appeal leftward at the same time that they were engaged in dissociating themselves from the goals and policies of the revolutionary parties, which in their view were encouraging anarchy and violence.

In these delicate circumstances, the party leaders stepped up their campaign to win the allegiance of nonparty socialists among the “‘democratic intelligentsia.”” This was the task of a major Pravo article of November 20 by A. A. Chuprov, entitled ““The Constitutional-Democratic Party and Socialism.” !°

Taking Miliukov’s speech to the first congress as his text, Professor Chuprov expanded on its proposition that the party could accommodate socialists as well as nonsocialists, and must do so if the constitutionalist forces were to be strong enough to have a significant influence on the course

of events. Chuprov, answering accusations by former comrades in the Union of Liberation that the Kadets had destroyed the united front, declared that a close-knit party organization was demanded by the facts of Russia’s

geography and national diversity: anything but a unified country-wide organization would fatally dissipate its energies in problems of communica-

tion, local issues, and so on. The time had come, Chuprov wrote, to abandon Miliukov’s recommendation in his speech opening the first Kadet congress that the groups brought together in the party avoid spelling out their principal differences

for the sake of unity. Explicit recognition of the duality of party composition should now be made, and steps should be taken to clarify “the

principal views of both uniting factions.” Here, in contrast to the lateOctober article by Nabokov in the same paper, emphasis was no longer on cooperation with the parties of the left against reaction, but quite explicitly on competition with the revolutionary parties for the support of nonparty socialists; that is, as Chuprov believed, the broad reaches of the intelligentsia: “‘people of the free professions, zemstvo and municipal administration employees, and so on,” but in particular “‘that intelligentsia ‘third element’ that played a prominent role in the Union of Liberation and is hesitating to

enter the doors that have been opened for it [into the party].’?°

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 55 Chuprov argued that a frank examination of views held within the party, while revealing differences of ultimate goals, would also reveal very extensive identity of short- and medium-range goals, and would thereby demonstrate that the Kadet party was a more appropriate place for the mass

of nonparty socialists who were, he claimed, revisionist-oriented and believers, like the socialists who were already in the party, in evolutionary socialism rather than in the idea of a single, cataclysmic leap. The process of examination would also reveal that the evolutionary socialists in the party shared a program of reforms, even in fairly long-term perspective, with the nonsocialist but “social-reformist’’ other half of the party—the “zemtsy and dumtsy”’ representatives of the possessing classes. This half, though not sharing the ultimate goals of the socialists, “will not of course view [these reforms]'°° as the preparatory phase of something yet to follow, but will support them out of sincere sympathy toward cultural work, out of simple striving toward ‘social peace.’”’ This clarification process would remove

from the party that “bourgeois veneer” (nalet burzhuaznosti) that it currently possessed in the eyes of many members of the intelligentsia, hindering them from entering the party. In practical terms, Chuprov was calling for an “indication of general goals pursued by the party in the area of economic and social policy,” which, once elaborated, would take the form of amendments to the party program. The program would avoid mention of “ultimate goals” only.!°” Essentially the same line of argument was pursued, or echoed, a little later by the Odessa party leader Professor E. N. Shchepkin, in his newspaper Za svobodu (For Liberty.)!°%

The Second Party Congress (January 5-11, 1906) Changes in the Party Program Despite the significantly reduced weight of the more moderate zemstvo element at the second congress, '°” the party leadership not only succeeded in

winning the congress’s endorsement for withdrawal of the “constituent assembly” in favor of the “duma with constituent functions” for the party program; it also put the seal on its differences with the revolutionary parties

by adding to article 13 of the program the phrase: “‘Russia should be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.” The first matter was dealt with in a “clarification” by the central committee in response to a call from the floor for restoring the term “‘constituent assembly” to the program. This “clarification” (introduced by Miliukov) was then adopted as a resolution

by the congress. It stated: “In the party’s use of the term, ‘constituent assembly’ signifies an assembly of public representatives with constituent functions [sobranie narodnykh predstavitelei s uchreditel’nymi funktsiiami|

summoned for the purpose of drawing up the Fundamental Laws [osnovnogo zakona], and not an assembly endowed with completely

56 The Formation of Political Parties sovereign authority [oblechennoe vsei ‘polnotoi vlasti’}.”''° This was the only reference to the ‘“‘constituent assembly” in the congress resolutions. Local party groups were left at liberty to use the term or not, on the theory that the “‘clarification” had made the choice of terminology inconsequential—a caveat clearly intended to placate the minority at the congress that

was unwilling to part with the cherished slogan of the left.'" The change in article 13 preceded the clarification in the congress’s deliberations. In the first party program article 13 had merely stated that “the constitutional structure of the Russian empire is defined by the Fundamental Law.”!!* What was to be understood by the phrase that now replaced it, “Russia should be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy’’? This was explained in the introduction to the separate edition of the second congress’s resolutions and the revised program: “By ‘constitutional monarchy’ is understood a monarchy with public representatives possessing

the decisive voice in the promulgation of laws, in the preparation of expenditures and revenues, and in overseeing the administration. A ‘parliamentary monarchy’ is one in which governance is carried on by ministers who have the confidence and support of the majority of the national assembly.!!° The congress made two other changes in the program:

(1) it changed the wording of the agrarian program that dealt with the valuation of land subject to expropriation, making more precise the vague “fair price’ mentioned in the first version (it called for valuations based on average income derived from the land); and (2) it made female suffrage an explicit part of the program. This minor adjustment in the agrarian program was the sole programmatic result of a long and dramatic controversy at the congress on the agrarian question, which showed that the widely divergent views revealed in the organizing committee before October 1905 were still represented in party councils. Essentially the very general compromise formulations of the first congress were left intact once it was realized that no more precise prescriptions could gain general agreement. The second point concerned article 14, which called for the national

assembly to be elected by “universal, equal, direct, and secret ballot, regardless of confession, nationality, or sex.” In the first redaction, a footnote to this article had allowed that support for immediate introduction of female suffrage was not obligatory for party members. That footnote was

removed in the redaction approved by the second congress. It had been included in the first version by the party leaders on the grounds that the unconditional demand for female suffrage might oblige the party to reject a proffered electoral law based on universal manhood suffrage, something

they were obviously loath to do. Experience since the issuance of the December 11 electoral law apparently convinced them that most party

members did not consider female suffrage a mandatory part of an acceptable electoral law, so they allowed the footnote to be deleted (not without some objections from their midst), thus satisfying those who felt

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 57 strongly about the issue on principle and did not wish to see the party’s commitment to female suffrage diminished by any qualifications. A rather lame account of the removal of this “misunderstanding” was provided in the explication of the congress’s resolutions by Vladimir Nabokov and I. V.

Gessen in the first issue of the party weekly.'’* The party also added to its name, as a second title, ““People’s Freedom party” (Partiia narodnoi svobody), to meet objections that its hyphenated name of European loanwords was incomprehensible to the people.

Although there can be no doubt that the party’s declaration for constitutional monarchy had the effect of sharpening the differences between the Kadets and the socialist parties, the motives that lay behind that decision are not entirely obvious. It is probably true that the majority of the

party leaders had thought all along that a constitutional-parliamentary monarchy was the historically proper and preferable next step in Russia’s political development (this was in effect admitted in the “clarification”

quoted earlier). The party’s leading specialists in constitutional law concurred in this. Kokoshkin, in the debate on the issue at the congress, declared the question of choosing between a constitutional monarchy and a republic purely academic in Russia: republics had been established in new

nations, like America, but in countries with traditions of monarchial government, the transition from monarchy to republic was much more difficult. If countries like Belgium and Norway had not yet made that transition, then in Russia, he warned, “rivers of blood” would flow if an attempt to make a direct leap to a republican form of government was made. The implicit point was that the transitional order would need the legitimizing authority of the monarchy. S. A. Kotliarevskii, along with Kokoshkin one of the party’s leading experts on constitutional law and comparative politics, made much the same point, with more prophetic Overtones, in an article published in Struve’s journal Poliarnaia zvezda (Polar Star) in March.!!° It is fairly clear that the commitment to constitutional monarchy made at the second congress was not simply a matter of flying true colors now that the failure of the insurrectionist strategy of the left had been revealed.'!° In some measure it was also prompted by communications from local party groups of the belief that the mass of the population was in fact monarchist. These were referred to in the clarification, and it may be noted that in the

party archives there are a fair number of letters from local party groups from this period (several of them groups considered to be on the party “‘left’’) that urged the party leaders to declare for monarchy if they wished to

make any head way among the peasant electorate.'” In circles to the right of the Kadets, where it was generally accepted that

people like Miliukov and Petrunkevich were republicans at heart, the party’s endorsement of constitutional monarchy appears to have been seen as a purely tactical move.'?®

58 The Formation of Political Parties The programmatic change appears to have received little objection in principle in the debates at the second congress. It was challenged primarily on tactical grounds concerning the question of preempting the constituent function, the possibility of alienating republican sentiment in the party, and so on. In the end, the central committee’s proposal for revising article 13 was approved by a vote of seventy-seven to thirteen, seven abstaining.*?”

Strategy and Tactics In regard to the problem of the Duma and its activities, the second congress

not only gave formal endorsement to the November zemstvo meeting’s resolution allowing for more than strictly ““constituent” functions for the Duma (the Duma could give attention to pressing questions of agrarian and labor legislation); it went measurably further, belying the apprehensions of Miliukov and others in the central committee about prevailing attitudes on

the Duma question. (Miliukov had anticipated a significant boycottist sentiment among the delegates, and in his principal address to the congress

had proposed treating the problem of tactics toward the Duma as two separate questions—participation in the elections and participation in the Duma—arguing that the former was absolutely necessary for furthering the party’s own organization and agitation, regardless of outcome, whereas the latter depended on the outcome of the elections: the more seats for the party, the more tempting participation in the Duma would be. Miliukov’s

proposition was made into a resolution, and the congress in virtual unanimity—with only one and two negative votes, respectively—voted in favor of participation in both the elections and the Duma itself.)!?° Although the congress unanimously rejected the proposition that the party’s Duma delegation should “undertake. . .organic work as in a normal

institution” (that is, regular legislative activity), thus reaffirming the “constituent character” of the Duma-to-be, it went on to vote by large majority not to restrict the Duma’s functions exclusively to “‘elaboration of an electoral law and a bill of rights,” and to resolve that the Duma should occupy itself, in addition, with “‘legislative measures of an unquestionably

urgent character required for the pacification of the country.’!7! In the following resolution the congress rejected a proposal that the measures in question be spelled out, but it in effect smuggled a list of them—matters of

agrarian reform, labor reform, and legislation on the status of the nationalities—through the back door in the form of a separate resolution (presented by Struve and Rodichev) on “material for the party’s electoral campaign manifesto.” Before it could be passed, however, it had to have

attached to it a reiteration (supplied by Kokoshkin) that the Duma’s primary task was, after all, democratization of the electoral law and its own prompt replacement by an assembly convened on the basis of that law.!?? This curious concatenation of resolutions and amendments reflected the

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 59 tension at the congress—not so much between different groups of delegates as within the individual delegates’ own minds—produced, on the one hand, by the recognition that with the promulgation of the new electoral law on December 11 and the suppression of the December uprising soon afterward,

the government was getting back in the driver’s seat and that in this situation “‘organic work” in a Duma elected by an insufficiently democratic

suffrage system and endowed with insufficient powers might be the necessary sphere of political activity for the short term at least; and, on the other hand, by the generally held conviction that the first Duma could only be an arena for conflict with the regime, given the basic incompatibility between the party’s commitment to fundamental constitutional change and the regime’s evident continuing resistance to it. For all the lowering of sights that had taken place in the party leadership since October, acceptance of the projected Duma as a “normal institution” would have, in Miliukov’s words,

“gone beyond the limits of current party ideology and would have constituted a definitive break with the ‘left doctrine,’”? which was still generally subscribed to in the party leadership. ““The Duma seemed to all of

us to be an organ of struggle with authority, not an organ of cooperation (sotrudnichestvo].”}*°

Summing up his impressions of the second congress in the first issue (February 22) of the party weekly brought into existence in conformance with its resolutions, Miliukov wrote that despite considerable differences on long-range issues and matters of ideological principle,'** the congress had shown virtual unanimity about tactics and, in general, the immediate tasks

ahead. Time would show that the conclusions to be drawn from this demonstration of virtual unanimity were more problematical than Miliukov let on, but about the demonstration itself there could be no doubt. This was shown principally in the congress’s unanimous endorsement, and transfor-

mation into a formal party declaration, of M. M. Vinaver’s “‘report on

tactics.

Vinaver began his report by stating as a generally accepted matter of

fact that “it is clear that party membership depends more on tactical considerations than on programmatic ones.” But the absence (paradoxically) of a general formulation of the party’s “tactical methods” (takticheskie priemy) had led to confusion on all sides about the character of the party: on the right there was a tendency to see the Kadets as encouragers of violence; that is, they were seen to be occupying one position with the revolutionary parties; whereas on the left, and not only within the ranks of the revolutionary parties, the Kadet party was seen as essentially lacking any tactic, in the sense of a concrete plan of action. The situation was badly in need of clarification. It was some time yet before the Duma would meet, if it

was going to meet at all, and the struggle for a proper system of representative government was still in progress. Vinaver proposed to outline

what the party’s tactic should be in this situation, and what its position

60 The Formation of Political Parties should be vis-a-vis the tactics of other groups engaged in this struggle (that is, the revolutionary parties). The ‘“‘two social groups” that formed the party shared a belief in the

power of public opinion, the conviction that the regime, faced with the opposition of “‘conscious public opinion,” would inevitably collapse. This dictated their approach to political action, which Vinaver characterized as “the path of disorganization of authority by means of organization of social forces [obshchestvennykh sil; that is, the organization of public opinion].”

In the beginning, this activity was necessarily clandestine, “or at least semiconspiratorial.” As the possibilities for open activity increased, the role

of propaganda grew, and the available methods for organizing public opinion multiplied, but the basic tactical approach had not changed, ‘“‘and could not change, for it is founded on a definite, deep political faith, which is independent of external conditions.” The extreme parties had not changed their tactic since the advent of the

possibility of open activity either, a tactic “linked to direct force as a weapon of political revolution,” and reproaches from that quarter that the Kadets lacked a tactical program contained an implicit challenge to adopt the tactic of the revolutionary parties. This challenge, Vinaver said in the key passage of his address, had to be given a definitive answer: We must tell ourselves definitively and once and for all that we lend

all our strength to the broadest possible organization of public opinion by all possible means of propaganda and agitation, and that, although participating in realistic means of direct influence on the regime, so long as they do not take the form of armed uprising, the party does not see in them the main instrument of its tactic. To say this does not amount to condemning other tactics—this is less

than ever the time for mutual criticism; this amounts only to identifying ourselves.

The party has recognized and continues to recognize the necessity of all manners of protests, manifestations, and demonstrations against the bureaucratic regime, which is the common enemy

of all oppositionist groups. The party recognizes the political general strike as one form of peaceful organized struggle with the

government, on the condition that the calling and means of its organization be approved by the party in view of the tasks of the moment and the country’s interests. But the party considers it necessary to clarify to itself and to others that it considers the main arena for its activity, in keeping with its political faith, to be the organized representative assembly, and that its activity outside such

an assembly should be concentrated primarily on agitation and propaganda. !*°

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 61 There was nothing essentially new in Vinaver’s disavowal of armed uprising and restriction of party activity to “‘agitation and propaganda.” The same message had been conveyed by Nabokov in his analysis of the current situation in late October and by many other party leaders on various

occasions. Much the same could be said about the primary importance attached to the parliamentary framework: that had been clear ever since promulgation of the Bulygin Duma had precipitated creation of the party organization. Its raison d’étre presumed the existence of such a framework, however inadequate and “undemocratic” it might be.’?” But this was the first time that these points were officially elevated to the status of a defining

characteristic, or principle, of the party. Having witnessed from the sidelines the politics of insurrection and its defeat, the Kadet leaders had come to the point of recognizing that, in effect, their critics on the left were right: they essentially had no “‘extraparliamentary tactic’’; that is, no plan of action for the current, “‘preparliamentary”’

period, apart, of course, from organizing work in preparation for the election campaign, which was by this time in full swing. Vinaver’s report, and its acceptance by the congress, amounted to explicit recognition that there was nothing else to do, given the Kadets’ constitutional unwillingness to engage in conspiratorial and insurrectional activity, but to place all their hopes on the forthcoming elections and the parliament that would come from them. “We are neither Blanquists nor Jacobins,” Miliukov intoned at the congress. “This is neither boast nor criticism; it is plain fact.”*®

It is true that Vinaver and other party leaders continued to pay lip service to the concept of the united front of all oppositionist groups until basic reforms were actually in hand,'?” and there was of course general anticipation that the first Duma would be above all a scene of conflict between representatives of the public and the regime. But the party had definitely lowered its political sights by early 1906 and had come a long way

in the process of setting itself off from the revolutionary left—through abandonment of the cherished slogans of the left, as through the “‘selfdefinition in terms of tactics” embodied in Vinaver’s report. It would be easy, but wrong, to conclude that this measuring off from the revolutionary parties through “‘self-definition in terms of tactics”

reflected an attitude of despair or defeatism in the party leadership. Actually, the act of “self-definition” reflected a spirit of confidence and guarded optimism such as had not previously existed in their ranks. The party leaders were encouraged to point up their differences with the revolutionary left, as the Menshevik historian of the party pointed out long

ago, “by the entire complex of political conditions following the first decisive defeat of the revolution.”!°° They after all anticipated that the elections and the Duma would soon materialize, putting an end to the impasse; and with the defeat of the tactic of armed uprising in December

62 The Formation of Political Parties and then their decision to boycott the forthcoming elections, the revolutionary parties had temporarily abandoned the political field to the Kadets (wholesale arrests of local groups of the revolutionary parties were of no small importance in this process). It was clearly in the party’s interest at this

point to emphatically dissociate itself from insurrectionist tactics. At the same time, the appearance of parties to their right—primarily the Octobrists, the Trade-Industry party, and the Party of Legal Order—tended to deflect

from the Kadets accusations of compromising with the regime or simply being the defenders of propertied interests.'*' These developments appear to

have encouraged them, on the one hand, to anticipate an influx into the party from the ranks of the “‘nonparty intelligentsia.”” On the other, the party leaders seem also to have anticipated as late as the second congress that the government’s reactionary behavior would bring the party new adherents from the more cautious, but respectable, elements of society.1°” And, finally, there was the consensus about the need to maintain party unity

that was shown at the second congress.

In the long article in the first issue of the party weekly already mentioned, Miliukov proclaimed himself well satisfied with the outcome of the congress. This first properly representative congress had affirmed the basic program and tactics of the first congress, thus showing that the lines that had been drawn at the outset of the party’s existence, delimiting it to

right and left, had been correctly drawn. Uncertainty on all these matters

had persisted until the meeting of the second congress, and then had dissipated. Unanimity about tactics and the immediate tasks ahead, the practical frame of mind that had prevailed, the general recognition of the need for party solidarity and discipline, the attitude of “‘party-mindedness”’ or “party patriotism’”’—all this permitted the conclusion that the party had

been born.'*? The tone of the article fairly exuded optimism about the party’s strength and cohesiveness. And the upshot of it all was that the party

was now prepared to enter blocs in connection with the forthcoming elections: “Those who find that their road and their tasks are the same as ours, and whom we can believe share our goals and methods, we vigorously

call to our side. Whether anyone answers our call or not, we shall in any case remain true to ourselves and shall serve our cause. Let us be judged by our actions.’’!?4

The Kadet Leadership: A Generation in Politics General Characteristics Previous political experience and established political attitudes have been repeatedly mentioned here as factors in the behavior of the party leaders in

the first few months of the party’s existence. Who were the top party

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 63 leaders, and to what extent can their cooperation and shared views be attributed to common backgrounds and shared political experience? Any attempt to isolate the “top” or “central” leadership group in the party from the local leaders or the “‘followers’’ at large must be somewhat arbitrary. There were a few persons in the top councils of the party in the early period of its existence who were rarely heard from or who stayed in

the party for only a short while (N. N. Lvov and E. N. Trubetskoi, for example); and there were also a few persons of considerable importance in the movement leading up to the party’s creation who remained influential figures in the party but were never formally members of these councils (for example, F. F. Oldenburg, V. A. Rozenberg, and A. I. Shingarev). But status

and power on the whole coincided in the membership of the central committee of the party produced by two elections: the first in October 1905 at the first congress, and the second at the next congress in January 1906.

The committee coopted several more members between the second and third congresses, and the third congress added ten new members in order to partially redress the heavy imbalance in the committee in favor of men from

the capitals. About half this total group had been members of the organization bureau that had planned the founding congress. Drawn from the combined committees of leaders of the two preparty coalitions, the

bureau was the core of the party leadership, and the central committee elections and cooptations in effect only added members to it.'*° These will

all be considered as the leadership group. In all there were forty-seven persons in it: forty-six men and Ariadna Tyrkova.'*° The median age of those in the central committee in 1905 was forty. About three fourths of them were Russians of noble origin; the remainder were mostly of Jewish origin. Virtually all had been to university. The large majority of the party leadership were born, then, in the 1860s, and had gone through university—primarily Moscow and Petersburg universities—in the 1880s, following the assassination of Alexander II. They were, to use a term

current at the time, “men of the eighties” (vos’midesiatniki).'°’ Of the dozen who were not, eight belonged to the first generation of zemstvo constitutionalists; that is, those who had sought as early as the 1870s and 1880s to lay the groundwork for constitutional reform through activity in the zemstvo institutions. Among these veterans were such prominent figures as Petrunkevich, deRoberti, Luchitskii, Muromtsev, and Jakushkin. Several of them had taught in the universities at the same time

that they had been active in zemstvo affairs. Nearly half the total central committee group—twenty-one—were university professors, or ex-professors who had been dismissed for political reasons. In addition, there were a half-dozen editors and journalists; about

the same number of lawyers; and eight or nine who had no occupations outside zemstvo service—leaving to make up the total one medical doctor,

64 The Formation of Political Parties two industrialists, and one peasant. A dozen, perhaps a few more, combined

professional careers with zemstvo service. Almost all of these were university professors. This group, then, about half of which consisted of people in the liberal professions, about a quarter of whom were zemtsy, and another quarter of whom constituted a linking element, had a foot in both the professions and the zemstvos. The professional profile dominates, but zemstvo connections

are very extensive. If one looks at the core group of the first temporary central committee—the real founding fathers—the picture is somewhat different, but not radically so: it is more nearly dominated by zemtsy and by professors and other professionals who were also zemtsy—seven zemtsy tout court, eight professors and one publisher active in zemstvo affairs, plus

two other professors, four lawyers, three publicists, and one zemstvo statistician.'°®> Among the professional men without zemstvo ties, a background of service in the town administrations was quite common, and a few members of the total group were active in both zemstvos and town dumas. The combined individual biographies represented in the Kadet leader-

ship group reflect very well fundamental aspects of the history of the constitutional-reform movement in Russia leading up to the foundation of the party: the zemstvo origins and long-term connections of that movement

with the zemstvo institutions; and at the same time, the pervasive and equally long-term linkages between zemstvo men and urban professionals.

The most striking characteristic of this group of party leaders is the predominance within it of university-educated “‘men of the eighties’’ of hereditary noble background who, following their university years, went

either into zemstvo work as a primary occupation or into the liberal professions while maintaining at the same time some level of activity in the zemstvos.

Common Experiences For the most part, the leadership, especially the first central committee group, had been in mutual contact socially, in the zemstvos and in more expressly political settings, over a period of many years preceding the founding of the party. In many cases these contacts date from the late 1880s

and early 1890s, and in a fair number they extend back to the university years and even beyond that to childhood. For most of the leadership group, first contacts in a political setting date from the last years of the reign of Alexander III when many of them were first becoming involved in zemstvo affairs and a number of clandestine ‘“‘zemstvo conferences” were held. At these meetings, discussion of matters directly related to the famine and the agrarian crisis gradually gave way to discussion of more general zemstvo problems, and then to critiques of the

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 65 zemstvo statutes of 1890, the institution of the Land Captains (zemskie nachal’niki) introduced by the legislation of 1889, and other aspects of the “counterreforms” of the immediately preceding years.'*” Both zemtsy and nonzemstvo professional and academic people in the

capitals in the party leadership had been involved throughout in the ‘“zemstvo conferences.”” Contacts between the zemtsy and professionals without zemstvo ties undoubtedly were established through the intermediacy of acquaintances active in both areas, and occurred in such settings as the jours-fixes or ‘‘vechera”’ hosted by Professor lanzhul in Moscow, which were regularly attended in the late 1880s by Miliukov, V. A. Goltsev, and A. I, Chuprov, among the nonzemtsy, and Kablukov, the Petrunkeviches, the

Oldenburgs, I. Kh. Ozerov, P. A. Korsakov, and Prince Shakhovskoi, among the zemtsy. In Petersburg, a similar function was performed by the “evenings” of K. K. Arsenev, attended by Struve, Miliukov, Nabokov, S. A. Kotliarevskii, and various zemtsy from Tver, Novgorod, and several other provinces. In 1889—90, a series of eight “‘zemstvo colloquia” was organized in Petersburg by Arsenev and others to discuss the zemstvos and local selfgovernment in general, presumably in connection with the then impending

legislation on the zemstvos. Among the participants were many of the zemtsy and professional intelligentsia who later emerged in the Kadet leadership.**°

A few of the future Kadet leadership group, and a number of other future Kadets, were members in 1893—94 of the clandestine People’s Rights

(Narodnoe Pravo) party, an abortive precursor of the Union of Liberation. (These were mostly professional men and students from the nonzemstvo

wing of the future party who came into it directly from the Union of Liberation; at the time of Narodnoe Pravo’s brief existence, most of them were quite young.) '*? Many of the future Kadet leaders were involved in the loosely organized “address campaign” of 1894—95, which had been provoked directly by the

change on the throne but appears to have grown out of the zemstvo conferences. The addresses to the throne from nine different provincial zemstvos all criticized bureaucratic arbitrariness, asked for extension of the competence of the zemstvos in various respects, and, in effect, called for institutionalized consultative zemstvo representation in the capital (without

anywhere saying this in so many words).'** The flurry of responses, in mimeographed brochures in Russia and in publications abroad; to Nicholas II’s out-of-hand rejection of the zemstvo petitions as ‘‘senseless dreams” was

the common work of both zemtsy and intelligentsia, all future Kadet leaders.'*° Some of the contacts and friendships within the Kadet leadership went

further back in time than the efforts in the late 1880s and early 1890s to

organize zemstvo and “public” opinion in opposition to the regime’s policies toward the zemstvos. A striking example of such early contacts,

66 The Formation of Political Parties involving several of the party’s most prominent leaders, is the story of a remarkable circle of childhood friends, the ‘‘Priutino Brotherhood”’ (Bratstvo Priutino, Priutintsy), who formed the center of a close-knit group of socially conscious students at Petersburg University in the 1880s.'** The “brotherhood” had its origins in a small group of seven Russian gymnasium

students of service-noble background in Warsaw, where most of their fathers were serving in the army or the Russified post-1863 civil administra-

tion. They included, most notably, Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi, Alexander Kornilov, and the brothers F. F. and S. F. Oldenburg. When these four went

off to study at the university in Petersburg, they expanded their circle by another half-dozen students, including Vladimir Vernadskii and S. M.

Grevs.'*° Most of the members of this circle later participated in the founding of the Kadet party. Kornilov and Shakhovskoi were the party’s first secretaries, and Vernadskii was an active member of the preliminary committees and the first central committee of the party. Others were elected

to the first Duma. The Priutintsy were distinguished in their Petersburg student period by several characteristics:

(1) They were deeply influenced by populism (narodnichestvo) and resolved early in their student years to devote themselves to improving the welfare of the Russian peasantry. In preparation for this, they spent a good deal of time reading and discussing populist literature (the works of Gleb Uspenskii, Zlatovratskii, Nekrasov, and other favorite authors of populist youth since the 1870s). They also made a special study of popular literature and of the sectarian movements. (2) They categorically rejected revolutionary activity, and especially

terrorism. They did so in direct reaction to the terrorist movement of Narodnaia Volia, which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, a tragedy they considered counterproductive of the populist movement’s own aims: it had led to the reaction that pervaded government policy throughout the 1880s. In the political vocabulary of late nineteenth-century Russia, the Priutintsy were “narodniki-kul’turniki’’; that is, “cultural,” as opposed to “political,” populists; but populists all the same.

(3) Mixed with their populism was the influence of Leo Tolstoi’s religious conversion, which occurred at the outset of their university years, and of Tolstoi’s postconversion ideas in general (themselves rooted in the populist tradition). Several of the Priutintsy made pilgrimages to lasnaia Poliana to see the great man, and one of them, Shakhovskoi, became quite close to Tolstoi; it was he, apparently, who was responsible for Tolstoi’s

episodic participation in the zemstvo conferences of the 1890s.'*® The Priutintsy’s interest in Tolstoi’s teachings, especially his emphatic rejection of violence, appears to have been stimulated by their reaction to the terrorist movement and the assassination. For a time several of the Priutintsy also fell

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 67 under the influence of the extraordinary religious positivist and communist William Frey.'*”

(4) While students the Priutintsy were the principal organizers of a number of educational and philanthropic enterprises, various student study circles, groups for the spread of literacy and the translation and publication

of “literature for the masses,” and so on. (5) The members of the group intended to devote themselves either to

academic-scientific careers or to careers of public service, particularly popular education sponsored by the zemstvo, and other zemstvo activities. Most of them followed one or the other of these “enlightenment” paths, or some combination of the two.'*® The brotherhood remained intact after the university years. It organized famine relief in 1891—92 in several districts of Tambov province,'*? and went on immediately afterward to become heavily involved in the cultural

and social work of the zemstvos and in other projects (including the purchase in 1890 by Vernadskii, Kornilov, $. F. Oldenburg, and several other university friends of the journal Severnyi vestnik, which they managed for a short time in a first effort to propagate a liberal political program).'°° The core members of the postuniversity group—the Oldenburgs, Shakhov-

skoi, Kornilov, and Vernadskii—were at or near the center of a series of organizations in which developed the personal contacts and shared experiences that gradually gave shape to the group that emerged as the Kadet leadership in late 1905: the zemstvo conferences of the early 1890s, the

Beseda circle and its publishing enterprises, the group that founded Osvobozhdenie in 1902, the Union of Liberation and the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists, and the organization bureau of the zemstvo congresses. In all these organizations Shakhovskoi played a particularly important role, often that of the main organizer (he was, among other things, the main contact man between the zemstvo constitutionalists and Struve’s editorial office in Stuttgart and then Paris; the secretary of the Union of Liberation; and then the first secretary of the Kadet central committee).'*? The story of the Priutintsy is suggestive about the origins of attitudes and values prevalent among the Kadet leadership, where so many members of that circle and their friends from their university years eventually found themselves. Although the brotherhood was undoubtedly extraordinary in a number of ways—in its cohesiveness, in the earliness of its social commitment, and probably in the importance that religious seeking played in the development of some of its members’ world views'°*— there is good reason to believe that many of its members’ social and political attitudes were widely shared among student youth in the 1880s, especially at Moscow and Petersburg universities, where the sizable majority of the Kadet leaders matriculated.’°? By their own testimony the Priutintsy came into contact

with a much larger circle of like-minded students, most of whom also

68 The Formation of Political Parties eventually joined the Kadet party. And other sources indicate that the attitudes characteristic of the Priutintsy were not restricted to Petersburg student youth. The memoirs of Alexander Kizevetter, who appeared in Moscow in 1884 from the distant steppe town of Orenburg to study under the great historian Kliuchevskii, are an eloquent case in point. Kizevetter

calls particular attention to the sense of civic duty prevailing among Moscow students in the mid-1880s—the “gospel of small deeds,”’ the “‘idea that the path to big results lay through intense work in the realm of small deeds’’—and contrasts it to the revolutionary romanticism of the preceding generation. '>*

Essentially the same picture of student youth of the 1880s is presented

in the memoirs of several other contemporaries, including those of Maklakov, which were cited earlier in reference to the activities of the Kadet party in 1905. Maklakov comments in particular on the special effect that the state’s reactionary policies in the 1880s had on that generation: ‘““The

attacks by the reactionary regime on the institutions [created by the reforms] of the 1860s. ..idealized them in the eyes of the progressive part of Russian society. Work in them became an idealistic mission.” !>> It was obviously the zemstvo institutions that Maklakov had principally in mind, although this attitude also pointed to work in the town administrations, and to careers in fields like law, medicine, and education. Against the background of this kind of testimony, it seems reasonable to suggest (and nothing more can be done with a complicated subject badly in need of several scholarly monographs) that the generational experience of the “‘men of the eighties” had something to do, as a matter of impetus, with the significant transformation that overtook the zemstvos in the late 1880s and early 1890s.*°° From their foundation in the mid-1860s through the better part of the 1880s, the zemstvos by and large (there were exceptional cases earlier) invested little attention or money in popular education, social services, and technical aid to peasant agriculture. Then, about the time

mentioned, many of them turned quite energetically to the task of improving the cultural and economic condition of the peasantry. Expenditures in these areas, mostly by the provincial zemstvo boards which now came to take a leading role in zemstvo affairs for the first time in most provinces, grew rapidly. The zemstvos (again, primarily the provincial zemstvos) became major employers of technically trained personnel, the latter growing in number from a few thousand at the turn of the decade to nearly fifty thousand by the end of the century. The “third element”’ as a significant phenomenon in Russian life dates precisely to this period, the term itself coming into general usage as an ideologically charged designation

for the hired employees of the zemstvo (and town administrations) just before the turn of the century.!°” All the chroniclers of the zemstvo have remarked on how the growing third element, made up largely of idealistic populist youth of nongentry

The Constitutional-Democratic Party 69 (raznochinets) background, came increasingly to influence the attitudes of the ‘“‘second element’’ (the elected zemstvo deputies and board members,

mostly landed gentry), making them more aware of the plight of the peasants and of their own social responsibilities. But the initial turn toward concern with peasant welfare, without which the proliferation of the third element could not have occurred in the first place, came of course from the second element; the growth of the third element depended on allocation of

funds by the zemstvo assemblies. This initial “democratization” of the zemtsy’s views (as Veselovskii liked to put it) has generally been accounted for in terms of the influence of the growing agrarian crisis, particularly as manifested in the famine years of 1891 and 1892, and as a response to the

general trend of government economic policies, which were seen to be injurious to the agrarian sector as a whole.'°® These factors are not to be neglected, but it is remarkable that the beginnings of the new movement in the zemstvos coincided with the entry into zemstvo affairs of many idealistic young “men of the eighties” as they finished their educations and reached the statutory age (twenty-five) for participation in the zemstvo elections. Particularly marked was the influx of urban professionals with rural ties into the zemstvo assemblies. Of the 120

outstanding examples of this kind provided by Veselovskii, the large majority became members of the Kadet party.'°? It is also remarkable that in

his historical sketches of zemstvo affairs in the thirty-four zemstvo provinces, Veselovskii’s standard paragraph on the “upswing of the nineties” almost invariably makes prominent mention of “men of the eighties” who later became Kadets.'®°

The extraordinary importance of generational patterns in modern Russia has received widespread recognition. Ever since the 1860s (beginning

especially with Turgenev’s classic generational novel, Fathers and Sons), much of the discussion of Russian social thought and movements has been carried on in terms of the “‘men of the forties,” “‘men of the sixties,’’ “‘men of the seventies,”’ ‘“men of the eighties,”’ and ‘‘men of the nineties” (the last generation to reach “the age of dominance”’ before the 1917 revolution). Those men who went through Russian universities in the 1880s and left

memoirs or relevant correspondence were generally quite conscious of having belonged to a special “generation,” and tended to use that term (pokolenie in Russian) unselfconsciously, as Kizevetter did in the passage cited earlier. The aversion to revolutionary violence and the crucial role assigned to culture that were so characteristic of the Kadet leadership appear to have been grounded in attitudes nurtured, by and large, in the 1880s. The special character of the generation of the eighties was formed by the revolutionary terrorism culminating in the assassination of Alexander II and by the government’s reaction to that act, which included elaboration of policies whose aims appeared to be to do away with the relatively liberal

institutions created in the 1860s: in addition to serf emancipation, the

70 The Formation of Political Parties judicial reform that introduced the jury and the institution of the bar into Russian life, the institutions of local self-governance, the university reforms, and others.!°! The cult of revolution was foreign to this generation, and the “gospel of small deeds,” grounded in populist attitudes developed among

educated Russian youth in the 1870s, was linked to work within the institutions created by the reforms of the 1860s; work to defend and extend the influence of those institutions in Russian life.“°* The usual explanation of the Kadet leaders’ political behavior in 1905 as a simple function of their occupation or social status—whether “professional bourgeoisie,” “‘bourgeois intelligentsia,” or ““zemtsy”—quite ignores the question of the origins

of their career choices, which seem to have lain in political and social attitudes formed in youth.!® By the early 1890s the generational nexus that had been productive of the attitudes characteristic of the ‘“‘men of the eighties” had been broken. There now began the great vogue of Marxism that was to reign among politically conscious university students for the better part of a decade, and with it the increasing politicization of student life. The top leaders of the Social Democratic party were mostly “men of the nineties.” By all accounts, the decisive event in this atmospheric shift was the famine of 1891-92, which made a profound impression on Russian student youth. This is not to say that the generative pattern of attitudes described earlier disappeared completely (nor for that matter would it be possible to dispute that there were a great many students in the universities during the eighties who had

not adhered to that pattern). The fact remains that the major political parties that came into existence in the early years of the twentieth century to challenge the old regime were led by contemporaries who were not coevals. Among the Kadet leaders, the “‘spirit of the eighties” was predominant. It is

instructive in this regard to compare the age structure of the Kadet leadership with that of the leadership groups of the two major revolutionary

parties, the SDs and the SRs. Figure 1 is based on the Kadet leadership group described in this chapter and on the smaller top leadership groups of the revolutionary parties around 1905 (eighteen SDs and thirteen SRs) as

identified in the studies of David Lane and Maureen Perrie.’® I have tried elsewhere to describe in some detail the path by which men

of the eighties were led into politics around the turn of the century, and

from there in short order to confrontation with the regime, however hesitant and largely rhetorical that confrontation may have been.'® The key to that evolution appears to have been the frustration these men encoun-

tered in their chosen fields of cultural work.'®* The source of their frustration lay in the actions of the state in these years in regard to the institutions and professions in which they worked—actions that may be characterized as partly obscurantist, partly bureaucratic-expansionist (and competitive with the zemstvos for tax revenues), and on the whole born of fear of losing political control in a period of rapid economic and social

_ The Constitutional-Democratic Party 71 52% o, 40

N 30

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T: * It seems clear that the industrialists were apprehensive that the representative system would draw primarily on the zemstvos for representation in the capital and would thus tend to favor agrarian interests at their expense. The zemstvo congresses were not only a model but also a challenge to the industrialists.

As with other elements of the mobilized population, the business community was pushed toward political-party organization by the impend-

130 The Formation of Political Parties ing promulgation of the Bulygin duma law. A second conference of industrialists met in June (10—11); it was devoted entirely to the question of representation of business interests in the forthcoming legislative system.

The conference sent a telegram to Bulygin requesting that industry be represented in the Duma in a manner appropriate to its importance for the present and future economic development of the country.‘*°

The First Trade-Industry Congress A first general congress of trade and industry was finally convened on July 4 at the initiative of a group of representatives of heavy industry at a meeting in Petersburg on June 21. This group set up a bureau for drafting a general

political program for the congress, whose aim, in their view, was to establish a single trade-industry party for the country. They acquired the endorsement of the Moscow Stock Exchange Committee, the congress’s host, in a June 27 meeting in Moscow.'°® The main jobs for the congress were, then, establishment of a “‘party of

trade and industry” for participation in the upcoming elections, and the agenda question of elaborating business’s view of the proposed Bulygin law. The discussion of both questions revealed at the outset that no united party of trade and industry was going to come out of the congress. A majority of

the representatives attending rejected the Bulygin constitution and supported establishment of a two-house parliament with legislative authority, one house (the Duma) to be elected by universal, but two-stage, suffrage, the other to represent regions and institutions. A minority essentially supported the Bulygin project. In this minority were N. A. Naidenov, the head of the Moscow Stock Exchange Society, and other members of the society, whose

majority had supported the Bulygin project all along. They proceeded to withdraw the society’s sponsorship of the congress on the grounds that it had departed from its proper sphere of discussion in raising the question of a Duma with legislative (as opposed to consultative) powers. At the same time, an order to disband was received from the Moscow governor-general,

who had been informed by Naidenov of the turn of discussion in the congress. Following the governor-general’s order, a vote was taken on whether to

support a consultative Duma, that is, the government project, or legislative representation on the principles that had been worked out by the zemstvo-

town congress then in session. All the representatives of the Moscow Exchange Society, the Elets Exchange Committee, and the IvanovoVoznesensk Committee on Trade and Manufacturing voted for the former, whereas all the other delegates supported the latter. The minority groups then withdrew from the congress, and the congress majority reconvened in

the house of P. P. Riabushinskii, who along with A. I. Konovalov, S. I. Chetverikov, S. N. Tretiakov, I. A. Morozov, and about a half-dozen others

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 131 had opposed the majority in the Moscow Exchange Society on the Duma issue.

The unofficial ‘‘Riabushinskii congress,” to which members of the Moscow Exchange minority had been coopted—they had been systematically excluded from the delegation to the general congress by Naidenov’s majority—met for two more days. Support for the “‘zemstvo”’ legislative project and for universal but two-staged suffrage was reaffirmed by a large

majority, a new bureau was elected, and a delegation was sent to the zemstvo congress to propose discussions about political cooperation.'°” This episode turned out to be the furthest the Russian business leaders went as a group in their opposition to the government in 1905.'°° It was also the nearest Russian businessmen came to setting up a united tradeindustry party: the zemstvo-town congress refused to receive the businessmen’s delegation on the grounds that a resolution had been passed to receive greetings from other public groups in written form only. It is not clear whether this refusal was a manifestation of the perennial disdain by

intelligentsia and gentry liberals for the ‘‘merchantry,” as some have claimed, or of more immediate calculations, such as the fear of provoking police intervention or alienating popular support. In any case, the attempts at united action with the zemtsy ended there, and the plans for summoning another business congress for the end of July or early August also came to nothing. According to Norpe’s account at the congress of the Union of

Commercial and Industrial Enterprises in January 1906, the idea of founding a united political party “of the entire Russian bourgeoisie” was abandoned after the July 1905 congress, but it is not clear how soon after. The congress bureau went on to draw up a political program, which found its way into a well-known collection of political-party programs published in early 1906, and at least one historian surmised that the idea of creating

such a party was entirely abandoned only in November or December 1905,"°?

Failure of the Unity Movement The causes for the flagging of this movement before October are unclear. Several factors may have been involved. For one thing, the withdrawal of the influential Moscow Exchange Society, still controlled by the conservative Naidenov-Krestovnikov faction after the July congress, must have had a debilitating effect on the unity movement: the society and the new congress “majority” carried on a campaign of mutual denunciations and recrimina-

tions, partly in the press and partly in communications to the central government, for some time.'®° Another factor may have been the government’s crackdown on the “legal” opposition after the July congresses by

forbidding further meetings of the kind and harassing participants.'® Finally, the renewal of labor unrest in the late summer and early autumn,

132 The Formation of Political Parties particularly in Moscow, may have had a dampening effect on the opposition

mood among business leaders generally. In any case, there was an established impediment to political unity among business leaders well before the onset of the general-strike movement in the diversity of views on

political questions, not only as between the ‘“‘Naidenovtsy” and the “Young” but also among various groups and individuals in the July congress majority. In the much more complex conditions created by the general strike and the promulgation of the October Manifesto, the efforts of business groups to organize politically took the form of a great many local organizations. ‘©

The organizational residue left at the center by the 1905 unity movement among the business groups took the form of the Congresses of Representatives of Commerce and Industry, which met annually from 1906 to 1915. These congresses and their council and executive committee, which

were the permanent organs of the congresses between meetings, were involved not in the pursuit of political goals, but in the representation of business interests before the central government.’ What lay behind the diversity of political views that excluded formation of a single “‘bourgeois’’ party? One of the first Soviet historians of bourgeois politics in 1905, S. E. Sef, believed these differences reflected basic conflicts

of interests between traditional commercial capital and modernizing industrial capital (particularly in mining and metallurgy). It is true that the

more conservative supporters of the consultative assembly at the July congress were all representatives of commercial exchanges, that is, “‘tradi-

tional Russian capital.” It is also true, however, that the congress participants, who represented “commercial” and “industrial” capital almost equally, did not divide up at all neatly along these lines on the main political questions.'°* The large majority of the representatives of the exchange societies went with the program devised by the initiative group of representatives of heavy industry, and some of the leading representatives of

“industrial capital” sided with the Naidenov minority, while the most liberal stance at the congress was taken by representatives of “‘traditional commercial capital.” The efforts of Sef and others to save his thesis by introducing epicyclical qualifications are not convincing in light of the evidence from the July congress.’©

The Moscow Dispute The clearest, best-documented political differences within the “big bourgeoisie” showed up in the ranks of Moscow big business, particularly in the split between the established leadership of the Moscow Exchange Society, led by N. A. Naidenov and G. A. Krestovnikov, who continued to enjoy the support of a majority of the society’s members throughout this

period, and the “Young” faction led by Riabushinskii, Chetverikov,

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 133 Konovalov, Tretiakov, and I. A. Morozov, which apparently also remained

fairly stable in size. The political conflict between the conservative leadership of Moscow big business and the ““Young” dated back at least to the days immediately following Bloody Sunday when a group of textile manufacturers in the Moscow duma, future leaders of the ““Young” faction, proposed a resolution calling on the government to give workers the right to organize and strike. The Moscow duma adopted the resolution, but it was repudiated in the name of the Moscow Exchange Society by N. A. Naidenov as “unrepresentative of the opinion of the commercial estate.” ’©° This was

the beginning of the split that culminated in the breakup of the July congress. Even a superficial acquaintance with the leading figures involved in this

dispute shows that, at least for Moscow, tidy correlations between political positions and types of capitalist enterprise are quite out of the question. The “Young” were for the most part scions of the same Moscow kupechestvo

dynasties, often of peasant old-believer stock, which had evolved over several generations from trade to textile manufacturing and, toward the end

of the nineteenth century, to diversified enterprises including textile production, heavy and light machine industry, commercial banking, and various kinds of commercial enterprises, just like their opponents, the Naidenovs and Krestovnikovs. What generally distinguished them from their competitors, as their sobriquet indicates, was their age: they were for the most part about a generation younger than the majority leaders; like the Kadet leaders, they were mostly born in the 1860s (Chetverikov, born in 1853, was a notable exception to the rule). It could be argued that, coming later into control of their family businesses, they were further removed from the old merchant mentality of conservatism in investment practices and subservience to the government. They were on the whole better educated, more widely traveled and Europeanized, and more interested in social and cultural affairs outside

the sphere of their business contacts than were their elders. Several of them—most notably the Tretiakovs and Morozovs—were leading patrons of the arts. Like the brothers Guchkov, many of them qualified as “‘public

men from the kupechestvo,” with the significant difference that they remained intimately, perhaps primarily, involved in business affairs. But the

distinctions here between them and their elders were often matters of degree, and not always of great degree. Their older rivals had also traveled far down the same road in their business affairs, and some were prominent

public men. Naidenov, for example, was a long-time and very active participant in the Moscow duma, and the publisher and financier of many

historical works and collections of materials, particularly about the Moscow kupechestvo and the history of the city. Krestovnikov, too, had a

long record of public service in Moscow and was a graduate of the university (faculty of natural science) and author of a number of works on

134 The Formation of Political Parties organic chemistry. Neither of these men could be called traditionalists in their business practices either.’°’ If, nevertheless, the conservative leadership of the Moscow Exchange Committee seemed to be linked more closely than

the “Young” to the old kupechestvo attitudes of servility and deference

toward the state authority from which all manner of regulation and permission in economic affairs flowed, the link was in many respects already

far from firm. Age, of itself, may have been an important factor in the differing political outlooks of the leaders of the Moscow business commu-

nity in 1905.

Formation of the Business Parties The Petersburg industrialists were the first to move toward establishment of

“purely capitalist’? parties following the publication of the October Manifesto. The first such party to issue its appeal and program, on October 21, was the Progressive-Economic party. The initiative for its creation came from the same group of large Petersburg metallurgical industrialists who had earlier taken the initiative in organizing the July congress and drawing

up its bureau’s program, which the PEP’s program closely resembled. Industrialists in the council of the Petersburg Society of Industrialists and

Factory Owners, which was chaired by M. N. Tripolitov, had been contemplating the formation of a Petersburg-based party of their own ever

since the failure of the attempt to create a united party in July.'© Tripolitov explained the purpose of the new party in a bid for support at a general meeting of representatives of Petersburg business organizations on October 31: its aim was to defend the interests of industry, to stand up against the working-class movement and socialism.'© Tripolitov addressed the question of why there was a need for his party, and why they could not

join forces with one of the already existing major parties, the Social Democrats and the Kadets. With the former, of course, “‘representatives of capitalism” could have nothing in common. As for the Kadets, who on the face of it were closer to the businessmen’s views, union was also ruled out by their declarations: Tripolitov quoted directly from Miliukov’s address to

the founding congress of the Kadet party where he had denounced “‘manchesterism” and dissociated his party from agrarian and industrial interests.'’° Thus the only solution was “organization of an independent party,” which could then form political alliances without compromising its basic aims.’7!

There was considerable opposition at this meeting to Tripolitov’s efforts at setting up a separate business party. Branfman, Klimenko, Fedorov, and other future Octobrists warned that a strictly businessmen’s party would be branded, in Klimenko’s words, “‘a party of plutocrats, a party of capitalists,” and would be unable to gain a popular following. Thus Tripolitov and his sympathizers in the Petersburg society were obliged to set

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 135 up their party without the coordinated support from the Petersburg business

organizations they had hoped to obtain at the meeting. A decision taken there to summon another general meeting of representatives of Petersburg business groups in order to elect a central committee for the new party was never carried out, and the function of a central committee was performed by an ad hoc group of members of the council of the Petersburg society led by Tripolitov and Ia. P. Beliaev.’”* The program of the new party was moderately liberal and differed little

in essentials from the Octobrist program, which had not yet appeared. It clearly revealed the special interests of its authors only in the particular attention paid to economic policies designed to foster private economic development: expansion of the infrastructure (railroads, merchant marine, and so on), protective tariffs, withdrawal of the state from competition with

private industry, and related demands. The appeal that prefaced the program identified the party’s slogan as “‘freedom, knowledge, and work,”

and referred to “the mighty figure of the genius worker...the reigning carpenter, Emperor Peter the Great,” as a model worthy of emulation by every Russian citizen. The program provided for universal suffrage, imprecisely defined. On the agrarian question, it avoided the issue of alienation of gentry lands but did call for increasing peasant holdings “‘for the purpose of expanding small individual farming and cooperative farming”’; and it stated that barriers to the breakup of the commune should be removed. The PEP labor program

provided that workers should have the right to organize and strike “‘as peaceful means for regulating relations between workers and employers,” and limits on working hours for women and minors (but not adult males), workers’ insurance, and other improvements in the conditions of labor were

also endorsed.”

As the Octobrists were to do, the PEP emphatically rejected the need for a constituent assembly and emphasized the integrity of the empire, rejecting any concession on the issue of autonomy. The slogan “‘Russia—united and

indivisible” stood at the head of the program.'”* The Progressive-Economic party took an energetic part in the first election campaign, paid a good deal of attention to recruiting members (by the end of the year the party could claim a membership of almost 4,000), and tried seriously to attract working-class votes. This latter intention could be seen in the labor platform, and the publication of the party program was

accompanied by a special “appeal to men of labor.” The party also published a newspaper directed to a working-class audience in the first three months of 1906, elaborated plans for setting up dining halls for workers’

families at the Putilov works, and so on.'”° On the whole, there was little separating the PEP from the Octobrist union, and when the Octobrist organization was set up, the PEP leaders entered it. The two parties cooperated in the constitutional-monarchist bloc

136 The Formation of Political Parties in Petersburg, and following the first elections the party was absorbed into the Octobrist organization. The independent appearance of the PEP can be

attributed to the momentum for political organization built up before October in industrialist circles, the failure of attempts at cooperation with

the zemtsy, and the late appearance of the Union of October 17. The Petershurg Union of Trade and Industry made its appearance almost simultaneously with the Octobrists: its first meeting was held on November 11, 1905. The UTI was a peculiar sort of organization, a combination of a political party and a businessman’s union for representation of the interests of commerce, and to a lesser extent industry, before the government, the public, and the anticipated Duma.!’° The UTI was set up by a group of Petersburg merchants and appears to have included primarily merchants and small manufacturers, along with some salaried employees of private businesses.'”’ The UTI was created in direct response to the events of October. Its founders appear to have been especially concerned to hasten the summoning of the Duma, out of fear that for political reasons the bureaucracy might take measures injurious to trade and industry in the interim between the issuing of the manifesto and the calling of the Duma.*”® In its appeal and

comment on its program, the union was sharply critical of government policies, not only in regard to trade and industry but in the field of civil rights as well, and firmly supported the institution of the rights promised in the October Manifesto. In its political platform the UTI emphasized the decisive powers of the Duma and explicitly declared that the cabinet was to

be formed from the Duma majority. Unlike the other organizations aspiring to be political parties with a mass following, the UTI] had no “‘social program” (that is, platforms on the

agrarian and labor questions), but it did have an extensive “economic program”’ consisting of proposals on how to facilitate trade, and to some extent industry, although in keeping with the party’s origins the emphasis was primarily on commerce, and there was some expression of hostility toward large, government-protected industrial syndicates.'”? The UTI seems to have been called into existence to defend a rather specific set of interests in the special circumstances of the post-October

period, a task that was not being directly undertaken by parties with aspirations to represent fairly broad elements of the population. Reikhardt suggests that just because of the peculiarly “representative” character of the UTI, its raison d’étre was removed after the establishment of the congresses and council of the representatives of trade and industry in April 1906, its function as a political party (to “represent’’ its leaders’ interests in the Duma) having been obviated by total lack of success in the first elections. '*°

The two major Moscow business parties took shape later than their Petersburg counterparts. Indeed, the stimulus to formation of the TradeIndustry party seems to have been provided by the political initiative of the

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 137 Petersburg businessmen, and the Moderate-Progressive party was in its turn formed in reaction to the creation of the TIP. Both grew directly out of the two factions that had developed over the course of the year in the Moscow Exchange Society. The Trade-Industry party was the creation of the society’s conservative

majority, and it concentrated, perhaps more than any other ‘“‘business” party, on the restoration of order, with relatively little insistence on the realization of the promises of the October Manifesto. As early as October

13 the society’s majority had put through a resolution calling on the Moscow governor-general to declare a state of martial law in the city. At this early stage in the revolutionary situation, the ““Young”’ still believed that the general strike could lead to the desired reforms.!*!

The momentum of the conflict within the exchange society was sufficient to lead to the formation of two separate parties in the conditions

created by the manifesto, although the deepening of the revolutionary situation soon led the minority to abandon their opposition stance and put aside differences with the majority for the sake of a common front against the revolutionary movement: the November 12 TIP appeal to voters was signed by the Riabushinskiis, Konovalov, and I. A. Morozov, and the MPP soon disappeared from the scene, the first of the business parties to do so. The first meeting of the TIP was held on November 8, and its appeal to voters was issued four days later, together with a first version of a party program. After perfunctory recognition that the manifesto had created the conditions necessary to allow the government to regain the confidence of the country and endorsement of the “new state order,” the TIP appeal turned to

the threat posed by the revolutionary parties and the reigning anarchy (“‘smuta’’), and concluded: “It is necessary to join together, to form a powerful party for assisting the government in the task of pacifying the country and realizing the newly proclaimed principles.” !® The four principal aims that would serve to rally people to the party were:

1. Full cooperation with the government for the realization of the new principles proclaimed in the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, and for safeguarding law and order [zakonomernyi pravoporiadok]}. 2. Preservation of the unity of Russia. 3. Realization [regulirovanie] of the rights of freedom of conscience, confession, religion, person, speech and the press, organization and assembly, and inviolability of domicile, as granted to the population by the Manifesto of October 17, by laws assuring the integrity of the state and safeguarding both individual citizens and the population in general.

4. Constructive activity of the State Duma.!* Under article 4 was listed what amounted to the social and economic program of the party. Its presentation under that rubric was meant to show

138 The Formation of Political Parties that the party would not countenance the idea of further transformations of the legislative order (the Kadets’ “constituent functions’’).'** In an “amendment no. 1” to the program, which was designed to point up its differences with other parties, the TIP explicitly rejected cooperation

with any parties, reactionary or revolutionary, that did not accept the Manifesto of October 17, but concentrated on the left, that is, anyone who “talks about the summoning of a constituent assembly, or wishes to make of

the first convocation of the State Duma only a constituent assembly”; anyone who calls for “‘the dismemberment of Russia, who agrees to the granting of autonomous rule to Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and so on” (autonomy for Finland was accepted); anyone who “promises an eight-hour

working day to the workers”; and anyone who demands full or partial elimination of protective tariff duties—‘“‘in other words, those who consider

that it is all the same for the country whether the goods sold in it are of domestic or of foreign manufacture.”’®° Somewhat later the TIP issued another amendment to its program, elaborating further on its differences with other parties, this time with other constitutional-monarchist parties of the center, primarily the Octobrists, in

mind. Why was the party maintaining its separate existence despite the appearance of other “‘constitutionalist progressive parties’? For one thing, some of these parties were overly dogmatic and were already identifying

specific legislative projects for adoption by the Duma. But there was another, “purely external’’ reason for maintaining the “party of trade and industry”: trade and industry were of basic importance to the life of the country, and it was therefore right that their representatives be included in the legislature. However, these people were unorganized, scattered about the country, and susceptible to being dispersed among various parties on local issues. Therefore, the party’s founders had decided to create a rallying point for them, and had chosen the party’s name accordingly. They ended up predicting that the party would receive the votes of “those who recognize the enormous significance of the country’s industrial activity,” and promised that their deputies would “take upon themselves as members of the Duma concern for Russian commercial-industrial activity and for all those citizens who take part in one way or another in that activity.”’'*° If the TIP was one of the business parties most obviously concerned

with the economic welfare of the business community, the ModerateProgressive party of the “Young” was surely the least concerned with business interests in its program. In fact its program differed in no major respects from the Kadet program, except on the issue of autonomy and in regard to “several questions concerning labor legislation,” as the party

stated outright in the appeal preceding its program. As these caveats suggested, the MPP stood firmly against autonomy or federalism. On the labor question it opposed, in an elaborate explanation, the introduction of absolute norms for conditions and hours of work, mainly on the grounds

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 139 that Russia had so many holidays that if Russian industry were to compete effectively with Western industry, yearly, rather than daily or weekly, labor norms should be established.'®’

It was perhaps only on the one issue of labor norms that the MPP program (as much in its explanations as in its concrete recommendations) revealed the economic interests of its authors. On the agrarian question

their program differed in no significant way from the Kadet program, including provision for alienation of private lands. The MPP political program, again like that of the Kadets, called for election, by fourtail suffrage, of a Duma with legislative authority and responsibility of government ministers to it. All these issues separated the MPP not only from

the other business parties but from the Octobrists as well. All four of the “‘business parties” discussed here possessed characteristics, rather different in each case, that militated against their assimilation by the Octobrist union, even though many of their leaders were simultaneously its members; and the programs they elaborated put the Octobrists on notice that if they were to appeal widely to business elements they would have to modify their own program significantly, particularly in regard to labor and economic reform.

The Party of Legal Order Although business elements and even some prominent industrialists were involved in its formation, the Party of Legal Order was not a business party in the way the four parties just discussed were. It shared with most of the center parties a strong emphasis on the unity of the state, but there was nothing in its program that was addressed specifically to the interests of the business community. Nor did its social and economic program seem to reflect the interests of the landowners. The labor platform advocated, in general terms, limiting working hours, universal insurance, and general improvements in the conditions of labor. Like most of the business parties its agrarian platform favored the development of individual farming, but it also mentioned the necessity of granting additional land to peasants and an implicit recognition that at least some of it would have to come from the gentry estates. In general the platform was cast in language that seemed to reflect sympathy for the plight of the peasantry.'®*

Even though it was one of the four most widely represented constitutionalist parties to take part in the first elections, the origins of the PLO remain rather obscure. Such information as exists is mostly in the appeal and program that the party published in October 1905. The first meeting of the party was held in the St. Petersburg duma building on October 15, two days before publication of the manifesto. It had already then proclaimed itself ‘‘a constitutionalist party with a defined program.”*®” An “explanation” attached to the PLO’s summary program told what had led the party’s

140 The Formation of Political Parties organizers to set up the party even before October 17: the September zemstvo-town congress’s endorsement of immediate autonomy for Poland

and of the possibility of other regions receiving autonomous status following establishment of the new parliamentary order; more precisely, it was the deliberate concealment of this federalist scheme from the public— the September congress’s apeal, it was correctly noted, was silent about

these resolutions—and the apprehension that the people, who were not supporters of restructuring the state along federal lines, might be led to vote

for men who were. In other words, the initiators of the PLO began to organize in reaction to the resolutions and appeal to the public of the September zemstvo congress, with the particular goal of combating its federalist proposals.'?°

The PLO accordingly proclaimed “the unity and indivisibility of Russia” the most important point in their program and, as the second most important, “‘strong state authority,’ without which a legal order would be

impossible. The PLO appeal took pains to point out, however, that by strong state authority was meant not “force and arbitrariness but strict observance of the law and safeguarding of the civil liberties guaranteed by it

from encroachment from whatever quarter.”!?? Indeed, the question of strong and unified state authority aside, the PLO

program was not notably conservative or generous toward the existing regime, and in some respects appeared to be rather left of center. The party’s

“explanation” was not sparing in criticism of the government, and it identified two principal measures that would serve to restore the government’s authority: swift and severe prosecution of the adventurers responsible for getting Russia into the war with Japan, and amnesty for political prisoners and victims of religious persecution.'”* This party, which, like the Kadets and Octobrists, claimed to be above class and interests—its appeal declared that the Duma deputies should not be “petitioners for the interests of any particular region, nations [plemia, estate, or occupation” —was founded by a rather diverse group of men, including primarily technically trained government officials and professional men, businessmen and business employees, teachers and professors,

and some nobles resident in the capital.!?* Much the same sort of occupation distribution prevailed among the leaders of the party’s local branches that were eventually set up in twenty-one provinces. Judging from

their names, most of the party leaders, both in Petersburg and in the provinces, were Russian Orthodox. The mixture of nationalism, criticism of the regime, and affirmation of

the rights promised by the October Manifesto contained in the PLO documents, together with what is known of its leaders, suggests that the initiative for creating the party came from basically conservative representa-

tives of the technical intelligentsia employed in government service and industry, and perhaps some businessmen skeptical about the political

The Union of October 17 and Its Allies 141 chances of the “‘business parties,” who had been aroused to political action

by despair over the behavior of the ruling elite on the one side, and the actions of the “responsible elements” of society on the other. Whatever the

intentions of its initiators, the party’s emphasis on “Russia, one and indivisible,” together with a certain independence from any particular interests, seems to have attracted to the party Russian nationalists of rather varied occupational backgrounds, particularly in the borderlands, whose

political orientation was generally rather to the right of center. This conclusion seems to be borne out by the behavior of PLO groups in the elections: they cooperated with the Octobrists least of any of the “bourgeois parties” and in several cases were allied with the reactionary right in blocs directed specifically against the Octobrists. Eventually the party split up

between the Octobrists and the radical right.'”4 A review of the “bourgeois” parties of the constitutional-monarchist center provides additional perspective on the character of the Union of October 17, which was by far the largest and most enduring of the political formations to appear in that part of the political spectrum in the wake of the October Manifesto. The predominantly zemstvo-noble background of the

Moscow leadership and the heavy weighting of the Petersburg group toward commerce and industry notwithstanding, it seems unjustified to identify the Octobrist union as the party of either the landowning nobility or of the big bourgeoisie, or as a simple combination of the two, as is so often done in writing about Russian political parties. It may have been a party in large measure constituted of gentry and business elements, but it certainly was not “the party of the gentry and the bourgeoisie”: neither landowners nor businessmen entered the union in any numbers that could be said to have constituted a significant proportion of these social groups,'!”°

although in the provinces the main constituent element of the Octobrist union was provided by provincial zemstvo nobles.'”® At least before the first elections, the Octobrists could not reasonably be called even the most significant party representing Russian big business, but

only one of a number of parties in which business elements played an important part. The flurry of independent political-organizing activity among businessmen and industrialists before the first elections shows rather

clearly that these circles did not consider the Union of October 17 to be “their” party. And even after the demise of most of the “‘business parties” following the elections, the Octobrists could hardly claim to represent the business community at large, for much of it dropped out of political-party activity altogether, content with the ministrations on their behalf of the congresses of industry and trade. In the end, there was some justification for the Octobrists’ claim (the same as that made by the Kadets) to be above narrow class interests. Like the Kadets they deliberately avoided identification with specific interest-

142 The Formation of Political Parties groups and tried to appeal to the “nation as a whole.” And like the Kadets they attempted to take advantage of the momentum and organizational potential of the zemstvo movement without simply being of it. At the same time, the gentry-dominated zemstvo institutions played an important part in

the formation of both parties, as will be seen in Chapters 3 and 4.

Il THE PARTIES, THE STATE, AND THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN

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The Kadet Bloc According to my observations, this party was formed after the Manifesto of October 17 from elements that are extremely diverse in their political tendencies; namely: (1) unavowed revolutionaries and socialists who lack the civic courage to propagate their ideas openly; (2) national minorities [inorodtsy| of various categories (with the exception of the majority of Tatars and German colonists), who seek autonomy and equality of rights; (3) unprincipled intelligentsia proletarians, primarily minor employees in

various institutions, whose purpose is, on the one hand, to drape themselves in the modish flag of “peoples freedom,” and on the other to pour out the accumulated bitterness of their dull existence in idle chatter; and (4) the party leaders, convinced fanatics of the idea of people’s freedom

according to West European recipes. Reply of the governor of Tauride to a ministry circular on the results of the elections (March 28, 1906)

This and the following chapter survey political-party activity in European Russia in the months leading up to the first national elections. The focus is still on the Kadets and the Octobrists; other political groups are considered primarily in the context of their relations with these two preeminent parties. In these chapters I describe how party networks were established by the

Kadets and the Octobrists and what they were like, in terms both of organization and of constituency. I also examine their participation in the

preelection campaign and, in that framework, their relations with the government and its local officials on the one side, and with other political groups on the other. In this way one can get some idea of the social bases of the parties, and one can take some measure of the significance of parties in the political life of the country on the eve of the first elections. In this way, too, one can perceive the attitudes prevailing in the imperial bureaucracy toward the new political institutions and processes introduced in the wake of the October Manifesto. These attitudes were a major factor shaping the evolving relations between government and opposition in Russia.

A Survey of Political-Party Organizations on the Eve of the First National Elections Of the well over one hundred different political organizations that came into at least nominal existence during the first election campaign, only four

146 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign could lay claim to anything approaching a country-wide network: the Kadets, the Octobrists, the Trade-Industry party, and the Party of Legal

Order. Of the four, only the Kadets and the Octobrists possessed organizational networks that, however loosely woven, covered virtually all

of European Russia: both had at least one party committee in the large majority of provinces. The Kadets lacked their own party organization only in the Baltic provinces of Kurland and Estland; the Octobrists lacked local representation in the same two provinces and in the outlying provinces on the eastern perimeter of European Russia, Viatka and Ufa.’ Although the density of party organization varied greatly from province to province, the norm for both parties was a provincial committee in the capital town and

two or three committees in district towns. On the eve of the elections the total number of provincial, town, and

district committees may have been as many as 200 for the Kadets, somewhat fewer for the Octobrists.7 The overall similarity in the two parties’ organizational networks is striking, the more so if notice is taken of

the general coincidence in their geographical distribution: by and large, where the Kadets were best represented, so too were the Octobrists. The densest party networks were of course in the two capitals, where by election

time both parties had, in addition to their central organs, a provincial committee and a special city committee for the capital with branches in most of the city precincts. Next came the capital provinces, with district committees in most districts. They were followed by a number of nearby

provinces, Vladimir, Tver, Riazan, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Kursk,’ and Smolensk, where the parties had committees in most of the districts in addition to a provincial committee. Then came the outlying zemstvo provinces, only a few of which (Poltava, Tauride, Saratov, and Samara) had

party networks as dense as the central region. The only nonzemstvo provinces in which the parties had fairly extensive networks were Kiev in

the Ukraine and the Don Cossack Oblast in the South. Marked exceptions to the general rule of comparable representation may be found in a few provinces, such as Perm in the northern Urals, where the Kadets had numerous committees but the Octobrists were quite poorly represented; or Vitebsk, a nonzemstvo western province where the Octob-

rists had a provincial committee, several district committees, and party groups “in many villages and volosts,”’ while the Kadet organization was limited to the town of Vitebsk.* Behind the similarity of party networks lay great differences: in the

character and scale of party activity, in the composition and size of membership. Although an accurate count is out of the question, it is clear that for the country as a whole, Kadet membership was many times larger

than Octobrist membership on the eve of the elections. Total Kadet membership has been estimated at about 100,000 as early as January 1906,

The Kadet Bloc 147 and it may have reached 120,000 by the eve of the elections. Estimates of

total Octobrist membership for the same period range from 10,000 to 24,348.°

The next best represented parties, the TIP and the PLO, lagged far behind the Kadets and Octobrists, with committees in twenty-three provinces each, but neither was a merely regional party and one or the other

had representation in thirty-six of the fifty-one provinces of European Russia. The TIP was represented, as one would expect, in all the provinces of the central industrial region,® and outside that region primarily in other important commercial and industrial centers. The Party of Legal Order was not represented in the central industrial region at all, with the exception of a single group in the town of Rzhev (Tver province); its organizations were to be found for the most part along the perimeters of European Russia. In only nine provinces were both parties represented.’ The TIP had considerably more local branches, altogether, than the PLO: it may have had as many as sixty-three committees as compared to the PLO’s thirty-nine (not counting a number of poorly identified small groups in one or two provinces), with most of the difference accounted for by groups in Moscow and Kostroma, where the TIP had a combined total of twenty-nine. In any given province outside those two, these parties usually had only a single committee, usually in the provincial town.®

Looking across the Russian landscape in search of the other constitutionalist parties that had sprung up in the capitals beginning in October 1905, one finds very few signs of life. The MPP, the TIP’s rival from the Moscow Exchange Society, managed to extend its activities to four other provinces: Vologda (Totma), Nizhnii Novgorod, Smolensk, and Tauride (Yalta district). The Radical party never got outside the city of Petersburg, nor did the “‘professors’”’ Party of Democratic Reforms. The Free Thinkers’

party may have had one branch outside the capital, in Kazan. The Petersburg industrialists’ Progressive-Economic party remained confined to the capital. A considerable number of strictly local constitutionalist parties participated in the election campaign. Most of them, except for parties of national or ethnic minorities, were organized by local merchants and industrialists, government officials, professional people, or landowners, appear to have been of quite moderate constitutionalist outlook, and for the most part had been transformed into branches of the Union of October 17 by the time of the elections. Such were, for example, the Don Progressive party (Novocherkassk), the National Party of October 17 (Ekaterinoslav), the Union of Law

and Order Based on the Manifesto of October 17 (Orenburg), the Committee of Free Thinkers (Poltava), the union “Tsar and Liberty—Law and Order’”’ (Pskov), the Constitutional-Monarchist Union of Landowners and the National-Monarchist party (both in Saratov), the Party of Liberty

148 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign and Order (Smolensk), the Union of the Party of the Center (Izium, Kharkov

province), the Union of Peaceful Struggle (Revel and other towns of Estland), and a number of others about which very little is known or whose independent existence was so ephemeral as to have escaped notice even in the provincial press. The only other political organization seriously engaged in competing for votes that could Jay claim to anything beyond local or at most regional representation was the right-wing Union of the Russian People (URP) (Soiuz

Russkogo Naroda), which on the eve of the elections had branches in fourteen different provinces.” Outside the two capitals, these were for the most part very small! organizations, usually limited to a single town. Four other parties of the monarchist right with pretensions of participating in the

elections were more than strictly one-town organizations: the Russian Assembly (Russkoe Sobranie), which had transformed itself into a political party in November 1905 for participation in the elections and had branches in five provinces outside its home base of Petersburg;'° the “For Tsar and Order” party with groups in Kaluga and Moscow (Podolsk); the National

Center party (Narodnaia Partiia Tsentra), with groups in Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, and Petersburg (province); and Gringmut’s Monarchist party, which was represented outside the province of Moscow in Kiev, Perm, and Riazan.

Although quite a few local right-wing groups sprang up around the country before the elections, most seem to have been quite small and to have played an insignificant part in the election campaign. Even the URP, by far the most energetic and “partylike’’ of the right-wing organizations, which took the election campaign quite seriously and entertained hopes of getting a significant popular vote, especially among peasants, had very little solid organizational structure outside the two capitals before the first elections.

Despite the extensive participation of right-wing mobs in street violence beginning in October and the onset of the “‘zemstvo reaction,” the right was

just beginning to organize for national politics by the time of the first elections, lagging markedly behind both the moderate and the more radical

constitutionalists."? 3 Surprisingly insignificant at the time of the election campaign was the

Union of Russian Men (Soiuz Russkikh Liudei), which had been the most active and demagogic of the pre-October right-wing organizations. Although the union appears to have been represented by five groups at the second “‘All-Russian Congress of Russian Men” (Vserossiiskii s’ezd russkikh liudei) in Moscow in the second week of April 1906, available records show the URM active under that name during the election campaign only in Tambov and Kozlov. By that time it appears that the URM had been largely

absorbed into the URP, with which it had a great deal in common in program and tactics.’?

The Kadet Bloc 149 Significant Regional Organizations and Nationalist Movements in the Election Campaign The most extensive regional organizations were to be found on the western perimeter (that is, the Baltic provinces, the West, and the Southwest), where, generally speaking, the empire’s greatest variety of ethnic-linguistic and confessional groups coincided with its highest levels of population density, industrial development, urbanization, and political mobilization (with the exception of the capitals, the Kingdom of Poland, and a few restricted areas of the interior). The two groups with the widest and densest distribution of organizations active in the election campaign were the Jews and the Poles,!”

both among the empire’s politically and culturally most developed minorities, and the two most widely distributed in the West. Primacy belongs to the Jewish organizations, and in particular to the Union for the Attainment of Equal Rights for Jews (Soiuz Dlia Dostizheniia Polnopraviia Evreev), which had branches in at least fourteen provinces, mostly in the Pale of Jewish Settlement. ‘4

The union, a constituent member of the Union of Unions, was not conceived as a party, properly speaking—members of other Jewish political organizations, including Zionists, could and did belong simultaneously to the union—but as a league for the pursuit of the goal identified in its name and, during the election campaign, for coordination of Jewish votes to send

to the Duma deputies devoted to it, Jews or non-Jews. The union was formed in Vilno in February 1905 at the initiative of the liberal Jewish group that ran the Petersburg Russian-language journal Voskhod; most of them were members of the Union of Liberation.’> In many of the provinces where the union was active, a number of other Jewish political organizations participated in the election campaign, including the principal Zionist organizations in Vilno, Dvinsk, Vitebsk, Kiev, and Mogilev, the Jewish Nationalist party in Dvinsk and Vitebsk, and the Jewish ConstitutionalDemocratic party in Riga and Mitava (special Jewish units of the Kadet party). In virtually all the major towns of the West there were formed Jewish electoral committees or blocs in which all these groups generally cooperated in presenting a common list of candidates.'® The Jewish Bund and several socialist-Zionist parties boycotted the elections. Polish nationalist or predominantly Polish Catholic groups participated in the electoral campaign in at least twelve provinces. The most widespread of these was the Constitutionalist-Catholic party (it was generally identified by its Russian name, Konstitutsionno-Katolicheskaia Partiia), which had branches in four of the six Lithuanian and Belorussian provinces, where the bulk of the Polish population of the empire outside the Congress Kingdom lived. The party was founded by the Bishop of Vilno (Baron Edward von)

Ropp at the beginning of 1906 for the express purpose of uniting all

150 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Catholics in the western provinces (that is, predominantly Poles, but also Lithuanians and some Belorussians) for the elections with a program very much like that of the Kadets. Although some Lithuanian and Belorussian Catholics did join this party, it remained essentially a Polish party.*” Outside the Lithuanian and Belorussian provinces most of the Polish political groups were strictly local, and where several coexisted in one

province, as in Kovno, Kurland, Kherson, and Podolia, they generally formed Polish electoral blocs similar to the Jewish committees. The Polish

National-Democratic party, which dominated the elections to the first Duma in the Congress Kingdom, was hardly organized in the neighboring

western provinces by the time of the first elections. It became a major collector of votes in Lithuania and Belorussia only in the second elections. *®

The other major nationalities of the West—the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians—also generated nationalist parties to participate in the election campaign, and in a few cases, most notably those of the Lithuanian Popular-Democratic party in Kovno (the center of ethnographic Lithuania and the only western province in which Lithuanian-speaking people constituted a clear majority of the population) and the Estonian Progressive party in Estland, these parties played a major role in the elections. In the West as a whole, political mobilization along national lines played a major part in the election campaign, and the “allRussian” parties were for the most part obliged to operate in a framework of nationality blocs, if at all, in the region. There were great differences among the national parties in the West. There was generally a close connection between the variety and number of

political groupings on the one hand and the level and character of socioeconomic development within the national groups on the other. Thus the Latvians and Estonians, the most developed and differentiated national

populations in the area, possessed a gamut of political parties, from moderate groups representing landowning and commercial-industrial inter-

ests to revolutionary socialist parties appealing to workers and poor peasants; while the predominantly poor peasant Belorussians had produced

only one significant political party by early 1906.'” In the overall political spectrum, the national parties were as a lot well to the left of center. A conservative wing was virtually nonexistent, except among the Germans of the Baltic provinces, and even the most conservative

of the German parties, the German Conservative party, stood firmly for introduction of the civil rights promised in the October Manifesto.*° This situation may be attributed in part to the widespread coincidence in the West of ethnic-linguistic boundaries with lines of social cleavage. Through-

out the area from the Baltic to the Southwest, large (gentry) landholding was mostly in the hands of groups whose nationality was different from that

of the mass of the rural population, whether peasants, small farmers, or

The Kadet Bloc 151 landless laborers: Germans in the Baltic provinces, Poles and Russians elsewhere, predominated among the landed gentry.”' The better part of industrial and commercial enterprises in the Baltic provinces was controlled by Germans, while the working-class population there, the largest propor-

tionally in the empire, was made up almost exclusively of Latvians and Estonians. A similar situation prevailed in the Ukraine, where most industry and commerce was in the hands of Russians, Poles, or Jews. Belorussians

and Lithuanians lived almost exclusively in rural areas, whereas Jews

constituted from 50 to as high as 90 percent of the populations of Lithuania’s towns. (Jews constituted a disproportionately large part of the urban population throughout the West.) Thus, among some of the western nationalities, the elements that took the initiative in the establishment of the Russian conservative parties were weakly represented. Among others, discontents arising from government

policy toward non-Russian cultural and religious aspirations and the association of bureaucratic abuses with Russian dominance tended to bring

into the opposition elements that among the Russian population were inclined to remain loyal or passive: parts of the gentry and professional middle class, commercial and industrial elements. This is particularly noticeable among the Polish nobility and Jewish middle class, but it touched

the German nobles and middle class as well. The influence among the nationalities of the revolutionary socialist, mostly Marxist, parties, especially where there were significant native intelligentsias and working-class populations, pushed the national parties leftward and restricted the appeal of parties oriented essentially only toward attainment of national, as opposed to social and economic, goals. In terms

of popular followings, the revolutionary parties were the most powerful parties in 1905 and early 1906 in much of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Baltic. At the same time, all the socialist parties active in the West had to have relatively extensive nationalities programs, and differences over the nationalities question were a central factor in the proliferation in the West of socialist factions within a single national area and, in particular, the appearance of the “national” Social-Democratic parties. Because the socialist parties as a rule boycotted the elections, the field was left to a variety of nonsocialist national parties, although some of them were divided on the issue of boycotting, with the result that their campaign activities in early 1906 were seriously hampered. A major hindrance to the

growth of the Ukrainian Radical-Democratic party prior to the first elections, for example, was disagreement within its ranks about whether or not to boycott the elections.*? More significant than the issue of boycott as factors limiting the success of the nationalist parties in the first elections were a low level of national

consciousness among sizable portions of the enfranchised populations,

152 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign especially illiterate peasants, and the general noncoincidence of politicaladministrative and ethnographic boundaries, which fragmented the political weight of the national groups throughout the area. Outside the western perimeter, Muslim nationalism was the basis of the only other significant regional movement in European Russia to be active in the first elections. The Muslim national party was particularly influential in European Russia in the provinces of Kazan, Ufa, and, to a lesser extent, in Perm, but its influence extended to the Muslim populations of the Crimea, the Caucasus, the steppe oblasts, central Asia, and parts of Siberia.”* This organization was established and led by representatives of the Volga Tatar intelligentsia, for the most part professional men from the city of Kazan. They took the initiative in the creation of the Muslim Union (Ittifak), whose first congress, attended by 150—200 representatives from Muslim peoples of the empire—mostly Tatars, but also Kirgiz, Bashkirs, Turkmens, Sarts, and

others—was held ‘‘conspiratorially” on a steamboat near Nizhnii Novgorod during the great fair in August 1905. The union declared its goals to be “the drawing together of Muslims of all the regions of Russia on the basis

of the sociocultural and political interests and needs of contemporary Russian life’’; the general cultural development of the Muslim population as

a whole; and equality with the Russian population “in all political, civil, and religious rights.”” To those ends the union pledged to work for the common cause of establishing the rule of law and representative government in the empire. The organizations for the coordination of the Muslim vote in the first elections evidently grew directly out of the union. In the second congress of the union, held in Petersburg on January 13—23, 1906,

its leaders, a number of whom had just come from the second Kadet congress, put through a resolution to cooperate with the Kadets in the election campaign.*°

In its ability to dominate the allegiance of coreligionists, especially Turkic-speaking Tatar Muslims, the movement must be considered one of the most successful of the “‘nationalist’””> movements to have participated in

the first elections. This success seems to have been an “advantage of backwardness’’: a relatively low level of socioeconomic development among

the bulk of the Muslim peoples of European Russia, and therefore a relatively low level of internal social antagonisms, combined with the power of traditional Muslim faith and culture to unite groups scattered over a very wide geographical area.*°

Kadet Central Party Organs in the Election Campaign The Party Statutes: Membership, Organization, Party Discipline, Finances

The party statutes recognized as party members “persons accepting the party program and agreeing to submit to party discipline established by the

The Kadet Bloc 153 party statutes and the party congresses.”’ Admission into the party could be

administered by the central committee, by persons empowered by the central committee, and by provincial committees. Until formation of provincial committees, persons who had taken part in the election of representatives to the founding congress were to be considered party members. Members were to pay periodic dues in amounts to be determined by the party congresses. Expulsion from the party could be carried out by

the admitting body, but the decision could be appealed to the party congresses.

The general and the local (that is, provincial) party congresses and the central and provincial committees they would respectively elect were to be the official organs of the party. General congresses were to meet at least

Once a year and were to consist of representatives of the provincial committees and the independent committees of large cities, members invited

by the central committee, and persons invited by the congress itself. The

general congress was empowered to resolve questions involving modifications in the party program, statutes, organization, and tactics, to elect and supervise the activities of the central committee, and to handle a number of other matters that were left unspecified.

The central committee’s internal organization was left up to the committee itself, and it was given rather indefinite powers, including overall

administration of party affairs and the party press, the right to coopt new members, and the task of approving provincial groups as official branches of the party. The provincial committees were given powers of similar scope at their level. With the approval of the provincial committees, independent city committees could be formed and endowed with the same powers. The provincial committees could also establish auxiliary (vspomogatel’nye) district and other subprovincial party committees. These statutes reflected two basic circumstances: (1) the structure of the electoral law, according to which the basic electoral unit was the province, with exceptions made for a number of large cities; and (2) the fact that the organizational predecessors of the party—the Union of Liberation groups, the zemstvo constitutionalist groups, and the professional-political unions—had for the most part been organizations of the provincial capitals and other large towns. In addition, the hierarchical organizational structure and the concern for control over party membership embodied in the statutes seemed to reflect the experience of several decades of political conditions in which all such activities were at least nominally conspiratorial. In particular, much was probably taken from the Union of Liberation in this respect.7” In practice, the party organization around the country grew in a much

more haphazard fashion than the statutes prescribed. Many provincial committees were created only after party groups had come into existence in

district towns or at other levels; in several cases groups outside the provincial capitals were recognized as “‘provincial’’ committees; members were coopted by a wide variety of party groups at various levels, and so on.

154 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign But the model outlined in the statutes was left in force as a normative device,

and also no doubt because it was realized that the expenditure of effort on

such matters in those turbulent days would have been a waste of time. Probably for the same reason, the articles of the statutes dealing with party discipline were also left unelaborated beyond the general statement about

adherence to the program and the payment of dues.”° Looking forward to a mass membership and voluntary donations by better-off members, the founding congress had established monthly dues of only five kopecks to be paid into the central party treasury for each party member. Total dues were to be set by the local party groups themselves. The

congress had also ruled that each provincial group make an _ initial contribution of 200 rubles for central committee expenses during the first three months of the party’s existence (to February 1, 1906). In actuality, very little was forthcoming from either source; the local groups for the most part ignored both these provisions. The central committee report for 1905— 1907 stated: “The majority of party groups and organizations treated quite

carelessly and indifferently the responsibility of providing funds to the central party organ.” This statement is fully borne out by the materials on party finances preserved in the party archive.°° The central committee’s activities for the entire period of the election campaign and for some time afterward, including the publishing of the party organ, Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody, involving expenses exceeding 60 thousand rubles for 1906, were financed almost exclusively by a few wealthy members of the party leadership, most notably by V. D. Nabokov, Pavel Dolgorukov, and I. I. Petrunkevich.*?

The Party Organization In the first months of its existence, up to the second congress, the central

committee of the Kadet party had no chairman; its affairs, consisting primarily of correspondence and maintenance of ties with local party groups, were run by a paid secretariat consisting at first of Shakhovskoi, Kornilov, and A. N. Maksimov. The ad hoc treasurer of the party was M. V. Sabashnikov. At the second congress Prince Pavel Dolgorukov was elected chairman of the central committee, and at the same time two vice-chairmen,

V. D. Nabokov and N. V. Teslenko, were elected. Shakhovskoi and Kornilov remained the party secretaries, and Sabashnikov was officially installed as party treasurer. Until the third congress of the party in April 1906 the central committee was located in Moscow. After that, in connection with the convocation of the Duma, it was moved to Petersburg, where, in fact, a good deal of its

activity had been concentrated from the beginning; more than half its members had their permanent residences there and the party newspapers, the Vestnik and Rech’, were published there beginning in late February. In

The Kadet Bloc 155 the weeks up to the second congress the committee met once a week, and often more frequently. At the second congress, biweekly plenary sessions, alternating between Moscow and Petersburg, and a permanent bureau and

secretariat for the Petersburg-based part of the committee were established. **

The activities of the central committee before convocation of the Duma fall naturally into two phases: the first, extending from October 1905 to the second congress in January 1906, was devoted primarily to organizational

matters—the committee’s own organization, the organization of the next congress, and the organization of party groups throughout the country. The second phase, from the end of the congress in January through the elections, was devoted primarily to the party’s election campaign. This period ended

with the summoning of the third party congress on the eve of the convocation of the Duma (April 21-25), after which the entire central committee moved to Petersburg and became involved with the work of the party’s Duma delegation. The period of greatest proliferation of local party groups was November 1905 to January 1906, and the central committee’s part in the process was almost entirely limited to the weeks before mid-November, when the second round of postal and telegraph strikes began, to be followed shortly by the uprisings in Moscow and a number of other towns and the wave of government repressions that came in reaction to them. From mid-November until the second congress the central committee’s ability to communicate with local party groups was therefore extremely limited.** These circumstances point up the importance of the first party congress in October and of

the November zemstvo congress in the process of party formation. The latter in particular brought together in Moscow the better part of the delegates to the founding congress who had been unable to attend because of the rail strike in October, and a special meeting of Kadet participants in

the November zemstvo congress was convened immediately after the congress adjourned. Its main purpose was to stimulate organization of provincial committees of the party.°* Kornilov asked at this meeting (November 12—14) for reports on the creation of local groups, and all were encouraged to work at their formation. This meeting appears to have gotten

the work of Kadet organization in the country off the ground, leading to rapid proliferation of local committees in the weeks immediately following,

up the time of the second congress.*° The second congress was attended by 157 delegates representing thirtyfive provincial committees—the precise number of provinces that had been represented in sum at the October and November meetings—and twentythree town committees.°° When the secretary’s report on the organization of the party in the country revealed that the central committee’s communications with the periphery were far from adequate (while making the report, Kornilov learned for the first time about the existence of a number of party

156 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign committees from delegates on the floor),*” a committee was appointed to

produce a questionnaire on the state of local party groups in order to establish better communications in preparation for the elections. The questionnaire was circulated to all known party groups on January 17, 1906, and on the basis of responses, which were far from complete and in

some cases not forthcoming at all, the central committee was able to compile and publish in late February a directory of local party groups with names and addresses of contacts.°* This more or less systematic inventory of

party organizations permitted the central committee to maintain contact with most significant local groups by mail and wire, and to supplement those contacts by visits from central committee members or committee representatives. The mails were used to send circulars to party groups dealing with the campaign, to distribute party agitational listerature, and so on. These activities essentially got under way following the second congress. The large majority of party groups had already been formed, and the central committee now turned its attention to trying to increase party membership within these groups and to propagandizing the party program as widely as possible among the population through them.°”

Agitation and Propaganda These two tasks were identified as the most immediate party concerns in V. M. Gessen’s report to the second congress, “On the Technical Aspects of the Electoral Struggle”: ‘““The time remaining until the elections should be devoted to attracting as many members as possible into the party, and to the

dissemination of the party’s ideas among persons outside the party.’*° Gessen’s report identified the printing press and the lectern as the main means at the party’s disposal for propaganda and agitation: it called for wide distribution of party literature and the creation of a party press, both central and local; and for preparation of “well-trained cadres of party orators” by provincial committees for carrying on agitation around the provinces.

The lead was taken in both areas by the central committee itself. Even before the second congress V. A. Maklakov had set up a “‘course”’ for the training of young party orators (mainly for activity in Moscow), and about the same time “‘agitational courses” began to be organized by the central committee in both Moscow and Petersburg. These courses, consisting of

model lectures on various aspects of party program and tactics and on special topics, such as the woman question and relations with other political

parties, were attended by agitators from the capitals and from various provinces. Following the second congress the lecturers in these courses made

the rounds of the provincial committees. Their visits were often the major event in the election campaign in many provincial towns, especially in places where, either because of administrative interference or lack of resources, the

The Kadet Bloc 157 party could reach nonparty members only through newspaper reports on occasional party meetings in town. Maklakov, Miliukov, and Professor

Kizevetter seem to have been the party’s most popular orators on the provincial circuit during the campaign.**

The publishing activities of the party were very extensive. At first activity was limited to the publishing of pamphlets, brochures, and small books intended for mass distribution (many of them the texts of speeches prepared for the agitational courses). The main party publisher was the firm Narodnoe Pravo (The People’s Right), which had been established in the

summer of 1905 by M. G. Kommissarov in preparation for the election campaign to the Bulygin Duma. He and a group of central committee members ran it in accordance with a special party statute. According to Kornilov’s report to the second congress, Narodnoe Pravo had already by that time turned out more than a dozen different brochures in a total of 605,000 copies.** The secretariat also published a number of brochures and

appeals in the name of the central committee itself, and the rate of publication by both sources increased rapidly after the second congress.*° Many of their publications were reprinted by local party groups.

The first attempts to set up a central party newspaper, Miliukov’s Svobodnyi narod and Gessen’s Narodnaia svoboda, survived the Petersburg

censors’ scrutiny for only two and six issues respectively in December. Designed as general political newspapers that would comment on current affairs from the Kadet point of view, they were to some extent replaced subsequently by the Petersburg paper Pravo and the Moscow Russkie vedomosti, both long-established “national” papers dominated by Kadets and their sympathizers. The second congress moved to create an official party organ devoted specifically to party affairs, and this was realized with the creation of the Petersburg weekly Vestnik narodnoi svobody, which received permission to begin publishing on February 22, 1906. Its editor and angel rolled into one was V. D. Nabokov. A group of Petersburg Kadets were simultaneously given permission to begin printing the big political daily Rech’, which under Miliukov’s editorship became one of the most

widely read “‘intellectual’ newspapers in Russia until the Bolshevik revolution.**

The seriousness of the party’s intention of acquiring mass support among peasants and industrial workers was underlined by the acts of the second congress. In addition to identifying the land question and the labor question as the most urgent “‘organic” issues for the Duma (along with the nationalities question), the congress created special “permanent commis-

sions,” one for gathering materials on and explication of the agrarian question, and another “‘for developing and popularizing the party program on the labor question.”’*> Both commissions were entrusted not only with

the elaboration of the party’s position on the respective questions in anticipation of Duma legislative bills, but also with propagandizing the

158 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign party program on these questions among the masses through publication of brochures and leaflets.

The agrarian commission prepared most of the party’s popular expositions of the land question for the peasants that were published by Kommissarov’s firm. The bulk of party publishing in this period was directed toward the peasants in the form of simplified expositions of the party’s agrar-

ian platform, with the brochure “To the Peasants” (K krest’ianam) leading the list in an edition of 100,000 copies. The labor commission, chaired by Struve, the party’s most tireless proponent of agitation among workers, prepared a special appeal to workers which, after discussion in the central committee meeting with representatives of local committees (February 19-20), was published over the central committee’s name in the second issue of the Vestnik and as a separate brochure.*© The second congress adopted a rather flamboyant memorial resolution in memory of Bloody Sunday, introduced by the Petersburg party committee, and also passed a resolution to enter into discussions with the leaders of other parties concerning the possibility of reserving a number of seats in the Duma for workers—a demonstrative: recognition of the underrepresentation of workers in the December electoral law.*” The bulk of the party’s popular agitational effort was, however, devoted to the peasants, whose electors would have an absolute majority of votes in the electoral assemblies of a few provinces and a plurality in most others. Awareness of this fact was

reflected generally in the amount of party propaganda devoted to the agrarian question, and more specifically in Gessen’s guidelines for party groups in the election campaign: they emphasized agitation among the peasants wherever possible, and especially among the peasant electors.*® The party’s first “popular” newspaper, V. E. lakushkin’s Narodnoe delo, published in Moscow, was directed primarily toward the peasantry.

Coordination of the Election Campaign The general rules and guidelines for local party groups were laid out in Gessen’s twenty-one-point program, which was finally adopted by the central committee meeting with representatives of local party groups in the

third week of February. The basic principles of the party’s electoral platform (that is, the party program) were to be established by the general party congress, and the central committee was to monitor the activities of local groups in the campaign, with the power to censure actions that were “morally reprehensible or contradictory to the basic points of the party

program.” The central committee was also charged with systematic collection of information on the course of the campaign and the election results. Local committees were charged to report on the latter as soon as they became available. In addition to the agitational-propaganda work, local party committees

The Kadet Bloc 159 were charged with checking voter-registration lists, in order to look for irregularities and to encourage unregistered party members or sympathizers

to register. The tactical report directed that voters’ meetings were to be exploited by the party to the fullest possible extent for propagating the party program and criticizing the programs and candidates of other parties; party

candidates were to take the lead in these meetings. Local party committees had the right to enter on their own initiative into agreements with other strictly local parties concerning mutual support of candidates, while the central committee was responsible for arranging any electoral blocs with parties of more than local scope. The central committee also established general guidelines on electoral alliances, in circular no. 71 (February 19-20), which declared that “temporary accord for mutual support in the elections is possible only with those groups and

parties that support a constitutional state order based on universal suffrage.””*?

The tactical report emphasized that the crucial point for agitation in the elections would be the provincial electoral assemblies, and that within them agitation among the peasant electors would be the central task. The party leaders foresaw that most peasant electors would arrive at the assemblies uncommitted to any political party and that contests would ensue there for their support. It was up to the local committees to size up the physiognomy of the electoral assemblies in order to anticipate the number of votes the

party would be able to control, and so on. The names of the party’s candidate-electors, who were to be designated by party committees with as

much participation by the party constituency as possible, were to be publicized as soon as the lists of eligible voters appeared, except when the committees found it unwise to do so (that is, when it was anticipated that

party candidates might be arrested or struck from the voters’ lists on technicalities). The party’s candidates could be changed, depending on the outcome of negotiations with other parties or groups. The same conditions were to apply in the matter of selecting the party’s candidates for the Duma

deputyships from among the electors: they were to be designated by provincial or city committees with as much cooperation from the membership at large as possible, and could be changed as circumstances required. Their identity was to be revealed when the local committees thought best.

Insofar as possible, the party’s candidates for Duma deputies should be party members, although party organs could present the candidacy of nonparty members even without entering into blocs with other parties, on the condition that the central committee be informed. These were the basic rules of election campaigning laid down by the party leadership. As can be seen, they anticipated extensive alliance activity

with other parties and groups throughout the electoral process, and in particular with peasant electors in the electoral assemblies: the clause allowing for presentation of nonparty candidates for the Duma was

160 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign included in anticipation of having to offer places on the lists to peasants in return for support from the peasant electors. This anticipation proved well justified.

The Question of Legalization of the Party The legal situation in regard to the civil liberties of association, meetings,

and the press promised by the October Manifesto remained highly ambiguous during the period of the election campaign, particularly in regard to the activities of political parties. The publication on March 4 of the temporary rules on “‘societies and unions” came too late to have much effect on the situation during the campaign. The Kadet central committee first discussed the implications of the temporary rules only on March 19.

The committee decided that the party should seek postponement for submission of the party statutes for registration of the party, as provided in the rules, until the meeting of the third party congress; it further decided to have the party register as a Petersburg-based “‘single all-Russian political

society” (there was no provision for “parties” in the March 4 formula), rather than as a collection of provincial party groups, many of which, it was

anticipated, would have great difficulty getting registered, especially in provinces where martial law was in effect.°° As it happened, the party could not have registered before the outcome

of the first elections had it wished to, for the Petersburg Office on Registration of Societies and Unions was not yet in operation and began to

function only in midsummer, a delay caused by a dispute between the Petersburg chief of police and another high official over which of them would chair the meetings of the new office.°! Since article 33 of the temporary rules required positive action by the authorities to close down an

unregistered society or union, the postponement assured that no action would be taken against the party for the time being simply for its having failed to register, at least in Petersburg. Nevertheless, the uncertain status of the party throughout the remainder of the election campaign gave free rein

to those local authorities who chose to identify the party as a threat to public order.>”

The Kadet Party in the Provinces

Formation and Structure : Mention has already been made of the crucial role played by the first party congress and the November zemstvo meeting in Moscow in getting under way the process of party formation in the country. A rapid proliferation of

provincial groups occurred during November and December. Using unspecified materials from the party archive, E. D. Chermenskii claims to

The Kadet Bloc 161 have pinpointed the time of formation of 102 local party groups. Of these, 59 (nearly 60 percent) came into existence in the course of November and

December (34 and 25 groups, respectively).°? The proportions seem reasonable and are confirmed by the central committee’s own report on the first two years of the party’s existence, which noted that few party groups

were formed after the second congress, except for temporary electoral committees.°* According to my count, based partly on central-committee questionnaires and partly on press accounts, groups in twenty-nine provinces out of thirty-seven for which approximate time of appearance can be determined were established in November-December 1905 (15 and 14, respectively).°> The remaining eight provinces had established party organizations already before the end of October 1905, with one exception.°° In at least four provinces, party organizations had been created even

before the first general congress of the party. In Vilno an independent “Jewish Group of the KD party” was established some time before the congress on the initiative of Dr. G. D. Romm, who became its chairman.°’ In Vladimir preparations for setting up a party organization had been begun by local Liberationists in the summer of 1905.°° In Voronezh a group of

Liberationists and Zemstvo Constitutionalists had elected a temporary party bureau of five and a twenty-man committee before mid-October in anticipation of taking part in elections to a Bulygin Duma.°” And in Poltava

a party group had begun to organize in September 1905 and had had two provincial party meetings before the first general congress met. At their third

provincial meeting in November, the Poltava Kadets adopted the party program issued by the first Kadet congress.°° The Moscow city group was officially established immediately follow-

ing the first congress, on October 22, but it had in effect to start over in

January 1906 because of the extensive disruptions in the city during December. The Petersburg city organization, which eventually became the largest and most elaborated party organization in the country, was formed only in mid-November; the refusal of the Petersburg Union of Liberation directorate to adhere to the new party had required a regrouping of Kadet forces there and an entirely new organizational structure.°! There is more than the chronology of local party-group formation to indicate the importance of the October and November Moscow meetings for party formation in the provinces. Almost everywhere, the delegates to the first congress and the party “initiators” of the first congress deputations played a prominent role in the first leadership groups in the provinces, and many of them went on to gain election to the Duma, which was usually a

good indication of prominence in the local party organizations.° Behind the initial delegates and party initiators lay the organizational groundwork of local Union of Liberation and zemstvo constitutionalist

groups. The better part of the 68 party initiators can be identified as participants in the zemstvo constitutionalist movement (44 positive

162 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign identifications; the actual number was undoubtedly larger), and at least 29 were members of the Union of Liberation, 18 of these also belonging to the former group. Altogether then, at least 56 of the 68 initiators were definitely involved in the liberation movement on one or both sides of it, and well over half of the 121 delegates to the constituent party congress were veterans of the zemstvo constitutionalist movement. Taking the combined groups, at least 142 of 189 were involved before October in the liberation movement. These bare facts about the party initiators should be sufficient to give some idea of the significance of the Union of Liberation and, especially, the

Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists in laying the groundwork for the Kadet party across the country. The party drew on these two organizations not only for the central party group; the same sort of foundation underlay the local party branches, by and large.°* Their rapid proliferation through-

out the country in the last months of 1905, especially considering the political situation at the time and the extensive disruption of communications, would hardly have been conceivable without such an organizational basis to build on. Although the general pattern seems reasonably clear and confirms the

generalizations about the role of the two parent organizations in the formation of the party first made by the party’s own founders and later repeated by historians (the only revision of the accepted view might be to accord rather more weight to the zemstvo constitutionalist branch, and to the zemstvo movement in general, than has usually been done),°* there were

a significant number of places where the organizational origins of party groups were rather different. An important role was played by the Jewish and Muslim organizations on the western and eastern perimeters, respectively. In Vilno, for example, the local party organization was created by the Union for Jewish Equality, which set up a “Jewish Group of the KD party.”

As noted, this group was formed even before the Kadet first congress.® Much the same origin lay behind the party groups in Vitebsk, Volynia, Grodno, and Kovno. The Muslim organization played a major role in party formation from the beginning in Kazan, as it did in the province of Ufa (and to a lesser extent in Perm). In both these provinces prominent members of the Muslim community who had been active in the first Muslim congress played leading roles simultaneously in the Kadet party and in the Muslim movement.®®

In some other provincial groups the party had organizational precursors in peculiar local organizations that had not been directly associated

with either of the unions. The Rostov-Nakhichevan group in the Don Oblast grew out of a local ‘““‘Democratic Group,” which was organized in

November 1904 and took the initiative in arranging banquets locally, including the large Rostov banquet of December 5. After the banquet campaign the group worked out its own political and economic program, based on the Union of Liberation draft program, and it sent delegates to the

The Kadet Bloc 163 third congress of the union in March 1905, but retained its own program and identity until formation of the Kadet party. Following publication of the Bulygin constitution the group set up an election committee; and after the September zemstvo congress it adopted the program endorsed by the congress. Its activities were halted by the Manifesto of October 17 and a pogrom of Jews in Rostov on October 18—19, which caused some members of the group to flee or go into hiding in the city. It recommenced activity in mid-November, and the constituent meeting of the local Kadet party group followed almost immediately, on the eighteenth. The organization commit-

tee of the local party group was elected from leaders of the ‘Democratic Group” and of the Bulygin election-campaign committee.°’ Even in provinces where the roots of the party organization lay squarely in the preceding zemstvo movement— in the Don Oblast both distance from the center and the absence of zemstvo institutions more or less predicated a special organizational background—there were occasional special antecedents to the Kadet groups. In Kaluga, for example, the origins of the Kadet

organization lay in a “gathering for discussion of the general zemstvo congress” on October 8, 1905. This gathering was the brainchild of local Zemstvo Constitutionalists who were seeking sympathizers among the zemtsy for their program. Two tendencies, however, appeared at the meeting: the constitutionalist one, in the majority, and another distinctly to

its right. The meeting elected a bureau of seven and decided to form a “Kaluga Union of the Progressive Group,” but its bureau’s activities were

held up by a pogrom that began shortly afterward. Only at the end of December did the group meet again, this time to form the Kaluga branch of

the Kadet party. The more conservative participants in the group left immediately to enter either the Octobrist union or the “For Tsar and Order” party.®* In Vladimir an organization populated mainly by professional people and known as the “Tuesday circle” (kruzhok vtornikov) was a direct predecessor of the Kadet party organization, along with the Union of Liberation. It had been created in late 1904 and was principally responsible

for arranging the banquet campaign in Vladimir. According to a local leader’s report to the party central committee, this circle had laid the ground for the party network in the province by working up a distribution system for legal political literature, organizing a series of lectures beginning in the

spring of 1905, and so on. Together with members of the Union of Liberation, they had arranged the meetings in September 1905 to discuss formation of a party organization and to elect delegates to the first Kadet congress.°” Professors played a prominent role in setting up Kadet party organizations in university towns. They were numerous in the councils of the party

in both Moscow and Petersburg,’”° of course, but they also took leading roles in Kazan, where half of those on the sixteen-member provincial committee were professors,’! making the university, along with the Muslim

164 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign organization, the main source of party leadership. The Kiev city- and southwestern-regional committee of the party also had heavy academic representation.’* And nearly half the Kharkov party leadership seems to have been made up of university professors.’°> The party group in the university town of Odessa was set up mainly by professors and was generally dominated by them.”* It is interesting to note that in the only other major university town in European Russia, Iurev (Dorpat, now Tartu), Russian faculty members were chiefly responsible for setting up the local branch of the Party of Legal Order. Without knowing the details of professorial politics in Iurev, one surmises that this exception to the general rule of predominantly Kadet sympathies was related to the insecurity these Russian professors, representatives of the government’s russification policies in education, must have felt in that predominantly non-Russian environment. They were not likely to be pleased by the Kadets’ nationalities program.”° Until detailed studies of the Union of Unions and its constituent unions in 1905 have been made it will be impossible to assess adequately their significance in the general process of political-party formation or in other areas of political life, but it is fairly clear that a few of them were important conduits into the Kadet party. Most, however, were sufficiently diverse in

terms of the political orientation of their memberships to prevent their simple transformation into units of any single political party.’°. In its congresses the Union of Unions had consistently demanded the direct convocation of the constituent assembly and called for a boycott of the elections, first to the “Bulygin Duma,” and then to the Duma that was to

be elected on the basis of the law of December 11, but three of the constituent unions had opposed the boycott resolution of the third congress

in July—the Academic Union, the Union of Writers, and the Union of Secondary School Teachers—and four others had abstained in the voting— the Peasants’ Union, the Union for Jewish Equality, the Union of Veterinarians, and the Union of Primary School Teachers. These seven unions as a group had proposed a minority resolution to leave the question of boycott open.’” Among the minority, the Peasants’ Union and the two teachers’ unions stood well to the left of the Kadets politically, so they probably did

not contribute significantly to formation of Kadet groups, despite their position on boycott.”® Of the minority unions, the Academic Union alone was predominantly Kadet-oriented and appears to have played an important part in mobilizing

the professoriat into the Kadet party. Founded at the end of December 1904, it had 129 representatives of thirty-nine institutions of higher learning

in attendance at its second congress held at the end of August 1905.” Its

resolutions were strictly “‘Kadet,” and the organization bureau for congress later entered the Kadet party almost to a man.®° In effect, the Academic Union followed Miliukov out of the Union of Unions after the

The Kadet Bloc 165 July congress.2? According to Kirpichnikov the membership of the Academic Union in late 1905 totaled 1,544 in thirteen branches, mainly in the capitals and the main university towns.®* Two other professional-political unions formed at the initiative of the Union of Liberation counted many future Kadets among their leaders: the Lawyers’ Union and the Writers’ Union. But both had too large a contingent of men whose political sympathies lay on the left to permit them to enter the

Kadet party as a body. The Lawyers’ Union had its origins in the days following Bloody Sunday in a series of meetings of Petersburg lawyers held for the purpose of organizing aid for arrested workers. The first general congress of the union was convened in Petersburg at the end of March (28~30) 1905. The nearly 200 delegates included such prominent future Kadets as Vinaver, Teslenko,

Mandelshtam, I. A. Kistiakovskii, A. R. Lednicki, Rodichev, Maklakov,

Kedrin, and I. V. Gessen, but a radical faction was present from the beginning. Whereas perhaps more than a quarter of the delegates subsequently became prominent Kadets, and the Moscow delegation in particular

was heavily weighted toward that orientation, the Petersburg delegation was less so, Kiev’s even less so, and some delegations from provincial towns

seem to have contributed no leaders at all to local Kadet organizations.*? The delegates of the Lawyers’ Union voted with the boycottist majority

at the third congress of the Union of Unions in July, but at their own (second) congress in Moscow in early October (5-7), a modest majority of the 50 delegates attending voted against boycotting the Bulygin elections. Most of the majority there soon entered the Kadet party.** By late 1905 the

union had about 2,500 members, with the bulk of the membership concentrated in the two capitals and a half-dozen other large towns.®° The Union of Writers, which was in fact a journalists’ union,®° was even more divided in political outlook than was the Lawyers’ Union. There was general agreement about immediate political goals—those of the Union of Liberation—both in the preliminary conference of March 3—4 and in the first and only general congress of the union, which met in early April (S—8) (both meetings were in Petersburg), but there was no agreement over social and economic issues and the question of whether they ought to be included in the union’s program and resolutions. Although a sizable majority of the delegates at the union’s congress voted for socialist resolutions on land and labor, there was no such majority in the voting on more specific measures of

agrarian and labor policy, and the drafting committee finally proposed withdrawing the resolutions on social and economic issues for the sake of preserving unity, a proposal that was adopted by a vote of seventy-four to twenty-seven. These differences reflected less a socialist—nonsocialist dichotomy among the delegates than differences on the left, between a populist-oriented “‘liberationist” majority and an SD minority.®” The SDs,

who constituted the twenty-seven-man minority in the voting on the

166 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign drafting committee’s proposal, left the union after the defeat of their counterproposal that the union forgo all programmatic work and restrict its activities entirely to electing representatives to the Union of Unions, where they were to agitate for the latter’s breakup into political parties.®*

After the removal of the SDs from the union, there remained the dichotomy between the more doctrinaire populist left and the “protoKadets.” The central bureau elected at the congress after the SDs’ exit (which was also to serve as the union’s delegation to the Union of Unions) contained only a minority of future Kadets, if some quite prominent ones,®?

and although quite a few of the newspapers represented at the congress supported the Kadets during the election campaign, only a few became, in

name or in effect, Kadet party organs (Pravo in Petersburg, Russkie vedomosti in Moscow, Severnyi krai in laroslavl, Bessarabskaia zhizn’ in Kishinev, and perhaps a few others).

If on the whole the Kadet party organization grew from the center outward, from the early party convocations in the capitals and from even earlier institutional predecessors also formed there, and from the provincial capitals outward into the provincial hinterlands, there is evidence that the process of party formation in the country was by no means uniformly a matter of directions emanating from the center.

In many provinces the work of party organization never got much beyond the provincial capital, whether because of lack of human and financial resources at the local party groups’ disposal, administrative hindrances, or a combination of the two. Moreover, the provincial committee did not always take the lead in setting up other groups in the province; sometimes district or small-town groups were set up quite independently of, and on occasion prior to, the

provincial organization. In the Don, for example, several party groups sprang up separately and only later banded together in a provincial organization.”° In several provinces individual district or small-town committees sprang up independently of and usually before the provincial

committees.” And in Perm province an “oblast committee” for four districts, complete with organizational, electoral, agitational, and finance subcommittees, was set up before the creation of the provincial committee in Perm. In Kherson province the Odessa group was created before the provincial committee in Kherson, was more populous than the Kherson organization, and generally dominated party affairs in the province. The provincial committee was apparently located in the provincial town merely to conform to the party’s organizational statutes.77 Whatever the sequence of their establishment and relative importance,

most of the local Kadet groups seem to have cooperated well and fit themselves into the statutory framework provided by the central party organization. There was, however, at least one exception to the rule: in

The Kadet Bloc 167 Briansk district of Orel province, an autonomous party group, apparently populated by technical employees and workers in the Maltsev factories, was set up in the industrial village of Diatkovo. Although it was formed later than the district committee, it was not the latter’s creation and refused to cooperate with the district group, to the point of preparing its own list of candidates for the electors in the district.7?

The Provincial Leadership Looking beyond the party’s top leaders toward the leadership of local party groups one finds a great paucity of information beyond mere names about most members of a group that—taking membership in provincial and city committees as the basic criterion—must have counted somewhere between 500 and 1,000 persons. The best way to get a reasonably accurate idea of the group characteristics of the provincial leadership is to begin with the Kadet delegation to the first Duma, which encompassed the largest group of local Kadet leaders about which fairly detailed biographical information is available; and then to supplement an analysis of that information with the less systematic and often quite impressionistic information available about

the broader ranks of local party leaders. The large majority of the 153 deputies who identified themselves as Kadets in the responses to the questionnaire distributed to the Duma deputies by N. A. Borodin in May 1906 were drawn from the leadership of the provincial and city groups of European Russia; very often they were the generally acknowledged leading figures in the local organizations.7* On the

whole, the group of deputies surveyed by Borodin appears to have been fairly representative of the broader group of provincial party leaders. The median age of the Kadet deputies polled by Borodin was precisely the same as that of the party’s top leadership group: forty-one,”° although only a third of them were ‘“‘men of the eighties” (not counting the central committee members in the delegation). However, if one selects out those who had not been active in party affairs before their election—primarily men from the peasant curia and non-Russian participants in the Kadet bloc—one is left with a core group of one hundred party regulars (the twenty-one central committee members-deputies are excluded here as well),

among whom “men of the eighties” constitute fully a half, and the distribution range is considerably narrowed. The difference is made up largely of men over forty-five, often prominent “elder statesmen” of zemstvo liberalism. Sixty-seven percent (102 or 103 persons) of the Kadet delegation had

higher educations, mostly from Russian universities, and about half the total higher-educated group had studied in the two universities of Moscow

and Petersburg. The others had studied in foreign universities, higher military (usually medical or technical) schools, and especially in technical

168 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign and professional institutes. Only 10 percent had received no more than primary education. If one considers the smaller group of 100 party regulars,

the proportion with higher education rises to 90 percent, with better than two thirds (68) having studied in universities.?° Of 75 Kadet deputies for whom the information is available, the distribution by faculty of specialization is as follows:

Law 32

Natural sciences 16

Medicine 13 Technology/agriculture 9

History-philology 5

As can be seen, technical-scientific education was much better represented in

the Kadet Duma contingent than in the central committee group; just over half of the 75 (38) had scientific, medical, or technical educations, although the law faculty remained the single most popular specialization.”” On the whole, the emphasis was definitely toward professional training. Indeed, 70 percent of Borodin’s Kadet group earned their livings in some kind of occupation other than farming, business, or manual labor. To be sure, this group of white-collared occupations included paid zemstvo service as the largest single category (thirty deputies, or 30 percent of the higher-educated group), and many of these were zemstvo board chairmen and members—second- rather than third-element employees. But profes-

sional employment accounted for twice as many, including thirteen professors, eleven teachers and school inspectors, thirteen doctors, fifteen

lawyers, seven editors and writers, and two engineers. There were in addition twelve civil servants (chinovniki) and four priests. The remaining 30 percent of the Kadet delegation consisted of nine peasants (that is, land-working peasants), two industrial laborers, twenty-

two landowners (zemlevladel’tsy; these were deputies who gave this designation as their occupation), eight people in trade or commerce (torgovtsy), one industrialist, and one “houseowner” (domoviadelets). Fully 60 percent of Borodin’s Kadet respondents (ninety-two) belonged

to the hereditary noble estate. The only other estate represented by more than a handful of Kadet deputies was the peasantry, although as noted only a small number of these men were actually tillers of the soil. Most (thirtysix) were representatives of the “peasant intelligentsia’: schoolteachers, scribes, agronomists, and so on of peasant origin working in the villages, or simply intelligentsia of peasant origin. The remaining twenty-five deputies were scattered among the meshchanstvo, kupechestvo, dukhovenstvo, and cossacks. Zemstvo connections, as can be seen from these figures, involve a lower

proportion of the Kadets in the Duma than in the top central committee

The Kadet Bloc 169 group; nevertheless, if one takes into consideration not only the men who gave their occupations as zemstvo administrators but also professional men, landowners, and a few others who were zemstvo duputies at the time, the zemstvo tie links at least seventy of the group, and even more if one includes previous connections with zemstvo service. A precise count is impossible, but it appears that between sixty and seventy of the Kadet deputies were noble landowners who owned enough land to qualify for zemstvo election and had served in the zemstvos.”® Although this accounts for a substantial majority of all nobles in the group, it should be noted that nearly a quarter of the Kadet nobles (twentytwo) had no land at all, and active involvement in agriculture among the rest seems to have been rather exceptional, as indicated by the small number of

Kadet noble deputies who gave their occupation as “landowner.” Moreover, most of them were elected from the urban curia, rather than the

landowner’s curia, indicating at the very least that they maintained residence or owned substantial property in town (only twenty-nine of the Kadet deputies were sent up from the landowners’ curia).?? Looking at the group of one hundred party regulars in the delegation, nobles account for sixty-three; persons of peasant origin, only eight to ten

(and only one of these actually worked the land for a living).'°° The remainder were mostly intelligentsia of neither noble nor peasant origin, including seven men of clerical origin (only two were priests; the others were civil servants or third-element employees); eight men of merchant origin (all but one of them, a zemstvo doctor, were Jewish professional men); and four men born into the meshchanstvo (including one former mayor, two lawyers, and one agronomist-estate manager).'”’ Judging from the rather sporadic information about the membership of

the Kadet provincial committees,’°” there is little indication that the provincial leadership at large differed greatly from the core group of Duma

deputies: these were primarily professional men and zemtsy, with a prevalence of the former. Third-element and salaried employees were relatively few and constituted a significant part of local party leadership in perhaps only the two northern provinces of Arkhangelsk and Olonets.'°° People occupied in commerce or industry were somewhat better represented, especially in the borderlands.'°* Workers, shopkeepers, priests, and peasants were hardly to be found at all,'°° and there were very few women in the provincial Kadet leadership.*°° There were at least twenty-four provinces (all but one of them zemstvo provinces) whose leadership groups could fairly be called ‘“‘mixed,’’ with both urban professional men and zemtsy well represented on the provincial committees.’°” Another eighteen (thirteen of them nonzemstvo provinces) appear to have been dominated by professional men.'°? There were only two provinces in which zemtsy clearly dominated within the provincial leaderships.'°”

170 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign

The Party Rank and File It is of course even more problematical to attempt to characterize the rankand-file membership of the party, but a few generalizations can be made

with fair assurance. First, it is clear that party membership was drawn overwhelmingly from the urban population. Even if one takes the highest estimate of total membership—approximately one hundred thousand—as true, fully a quarter of the total came from the two cities of Petersburg and Moscow alone, and most of the rest came from provincial capitals.'!° Second, given the numbers involved, the rank-and-file membership was of necessity more “‘plebian” than the party leadership groups: in addition to professional people, there were significant numbers of salaried personnel employed by government, public, or private institutions. People in trade and commerce were also fairly well represented. Landowners—that is, gentry without other professions, aside from zemstvo or noble-corporate service— were generally in a small minority in the party groups. At the same time,

neither the peasantry nor the industrial labor force, with a few notable exceptions, contributed significant numbers to Kadet party ranks. Finally,

there were considerable regional variations in the structure of party membership. A few party groups responded to the central committee’s questionnaire

with precise numbers and detailed breakdowns of their membership according to occupation, status, and sometimes national-confessional characteristics. But these were indeed few in number and were usually, as might be expected, for party groups with relatively small populations. There

is, however, one set of sources that does provide information about occupational-professional status for a significant mass of party members;

namely, the lists of the party’s candidate-electors in the separate city elections, most of which were published, along with some indication of occupational status, as part of the election process. To be sure, these candidates were not typical of the mass of party members: they were limited to the larger cities, and they naturally tended to

be drawn from the most active and prestigious party members. Their numbers were nevertheless considerable—there were 80 electors’ seats to be filled in the eighteen separate city elections in European Russia and there were 160 in each of the two capitals, or a total of 1,760 seats, and the party

as a rule put up a candidate for every seat. Given the very considerable weight of the large-city groups in total membership, the information on the

party’s candidates does allow us to perceive something of the general contours of the party’s rank-and-file membership, particularly when it is contrasted to what is known of the leadership groups. It has been possible to identify 1,138 of the candidates put forward by the Kadet party for the city elections. With only a few exceptions they were

The Kadet Bloc 171 party members. They are represented here in Table 1 according to descending numerical weight in categories that are for the most part designations (or groupings of designations) given by the candidates themselves when they registered to vote. Using as a guide criteria provided by the newspaper Nasha zhizn’, a friendly critic of the Kadets on the left,'!’ it may be seen that professional people accounted for 677 or just under 60 percent (59.5 percent) of the total number of Kadet candidates. Of the 40 percent of nonprofessionals (that is,

nonintelligentsia professions according to contemporary conceptions), perhaps no more than 10 percent (110) wre engaged in any kind of business

or commercial enterprise (merchants and factory owners), while only 6 percent (68) can probably be ascribed to the little-educated or uneducated working population (meschane, peasants, industrial workers, artisans, and clerks and shop assistants). The remaining quarter must be ascribed to the generally better-educated segment of the population that was engaged in nonintelligentsia occupations (salaried employees in government offices or private businesses, ranking civil servants, and so on). In general, the relative weight of the liberal professions was higher in

the capitals, and especially in Petersburg, than in the cities at large. (Petersburg and Moscow were the only cities in European Russia with populations of over a million; the next largest city was Odessa, with a population of 405,000.) According to Nasha zhizn’s count, they accounted for 76 percent of the Petersburg party-candidates (126 of 160), as compared to about 60 percent for the cities as a while.’ This situation reflected the general distribution of these professions in the country, with a very high

proportion of scholars and writers concentrated in the capitals, but with more even distribution among cities of doctors and lawyers.'!° By contrast, merchants, industrialists, and salaried employees (both state and private) were distinctly underrepresented in the capitals: there were only 1 merchant and 2 factory owners (out of 95 and 15, respectively, for all cities) from the capitals; only 27 out of 119 salaried employees of private concerns (all from Moscow); and only 3 salaried state employees (all in Petersburg). So, too, was the third element: identifiable third-element representation came entirely from other cities, with the exception of one person in Petersburg. The lack of third-element representation in the capitals was probably

due mainly to the presence in the capitals of left-of-Kadet political alternatives, although status competition for the electors’ seats may also have been involved. It may be that relatively low representation of doctors and lawyers was also related to the more abundant political alternatives, to both right and left, in the capitals than in most other cities; and the same may have been true of the business-related occupations just mentioned. Thin as it is, the evidence about the party membership of the central

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174 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Russian provinces is basically consistent.’’* The rank-and-file membership

is somewhat more “‘plebian” than the group of city candidates, and in certain respects dramatically so. The weight of the free professions is cut nearly in three relative to the candidates group: taking the aggregate of four groups that provided more or less precise figures on occupations, 123 of 633, or just under 20 percent, were in the free professions, as compared to nearly 60 percent for the candidates’ group as a whole. (Even without the

two capitals, the proportion for the candidates is 55.6 percent.)'!° The difference in respect to the free professions is largely made up for in

the provincial party group by a relative increase in lower status, lesseducated elements: meshchane, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, peasants, and

workers, which together account for nearly a quarter of the four-group

sample as compared to only 5—6 percent of the candidates’ group. Businessmen (merchants and factory owners), by contrast, do not increase proportionally in the provincial group, remaining at near 10 percent here as in the candidates group.!?° Ranking civil servants (chinovniki) make up part of the difference, their proportion rising to 11.4 percent in the sample, more than twice that of the candidates’ group, while salaried state employees do

not appear to have been a larger proportion in the four-group sample, although they are less easily identifiable there.'*” Salaried employees of private firms seem to be an even less significant element here than in the candidates’ group, their proportion of the total dropping from 11 percent to

4.3 percent, although here, too, it is less easy to distinguish them as a specific subgroup. The remaining difference is accounted for mostly by noble landowners, whose proportions rise from less than 1 percent in the candidates’ group to over 9 percent in the other.'!® Within the intelligentsia professions, although it is again impossible to

be very precise because of the lumping that was generally done in this category in the local reports, there is some indication that there was displacement of the free professions by less prestigious ones and by the general category of zemstvo employees (third element) in particular: if the third element accounted for less than 4 percent of the candidates’ group, it is

up to 11.1 percent in the other sample.**?

For all the indications of the reach down the social scale as one

approaches rank-and-file party membership, it is the educated, the whitecollared, the intelligentsia in the broadest sense (including landowners, who among the Kadets were virtually all university-educated) that dominates numerically almost everywhere in the Russian heartland. Judging from the available evidence, laboring Russia—even if one includes, in addition to clerks, workers, and peasants, the entire category of ‘““meschane,”’ which

implies relatively little education but not necessarily laboring status— remained in a distinct minority in party ranks, probably not exceeding 20— 25 percent in any provincial organization and, as several of the accounts

show, virtually absent in some. This is particularly true in the case of

The Kadet Bloc 175 peasants and industrial workers. In the four-group sample, peasants account for only 11 percent of membership, and the large majority of these come from the Tver organization, which by all indications was atypical in this respect. Workers account for only 3 percent of the four-group sample,

although there were a few exceptional party groups that were predomi-

nantly worker organizations. The Diatkovo group in Orel province mentioned earlier may have been such a group. The well-known industrial town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk had the largest membership of any group in Vladimir province, about 700 by the time of the elections; 500 of these,

according to the party report, were factory workers.'*° There were apparently no other Kadet “‘workers’ groups” of comparable proportions anywhere in the country.

Kadet party groups in the vast perimeter that encircled the central Russian provinces differed more or less markedly in their makeup from those of the central provinces, depending on the region in question.'’ In the

North, in the provinces of Arkhangelsk, Olonets, Vologda, Viatka, and Perm, party organizations (which were usually quite small) tended to have

very low levels of participation, if at all, by zemstvo nobles. This is not surprising, considering the insignificance of noble landholding in most of the area. (Arkhangelsk had no zemstvo institutions, and the zemstvos in the other provinces had no separate noble curiae, with the exception of three of the ten districts of Vologda.)!** The role of nonnoble intelligenty, including many “involuntary cultural workers” in places of exile, was correspondingly larger than in central Russia.'*? And in at least two of the northern

provinces, Viatka and Arkhangelsk, there appear to have been unusally large contingents of peasants in party groups. /74 The nobility was also thinly represented in the East, along the Volga and in the southern Ural region, and non-Russians constituted a significant

part of the populations of most of the provinces of that area. Tatars, professional men and businessmen, played a significant role in Kadet groups

in most of the region but especially in Kazan, along with Russian professionals and Jewish merchants.'7> In Ufa, the easternmost zemstvo

province, Russians were in a minority even among the nobility, and prominent positions in local party groups were occupied by Tatar and Bashkir zemstvo nobles.'7°

In the nonzemstvo provinces of the far South, Kadet groups were generally found only in the larger towns, and they depended heavily on the diverse non-Russian ethnic groups concentrated there: Jews, Armenians, Ukrainians, Poles, and others. A partial exception to this rule was the Don Oblast, where the party had groups in various Cossack okrugy and stanitsy, established by Cossack intelligenty who had returned to their native regions after completing their educations. Some of the leaders in the town groups were also of Cossack background.!””

In the zemstvo provinces of the southern steppe (Ekaterinoslav,

176 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Tauride, and Kherson), this ethnically diverse urban constituency in party

groups was mixed, sometimes in an uneasy balance, with a zemstvo contingent similar to that of the central Russian provinces.'® The Kadets were both a “Russian” and an “all-Russian” (vserosiiskaia) party, and operated in the borderlands as a nationwide party. In order for it

to exist as an independent organization, however, there had to be a significant mass of Russian or russified persons in intelligentsia professions

of the urban centers. This was particularly noticeable in the western provinces: generally speaking, the further west, the weaker the independent Kadet organization. Even in Kiev, the Kadets were linked from the start of the campaign with Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish organizations, which had participated in the identification of party candidates; and further west, the Kadet organization was essentially dependent on the nationalist groups. The contrast between Kiev and the provinces immediately to the east

along the Dnepr, Chernigov and Poltava, is instructive in regard to this general east-west incline. In those provinces, both of which had predominantly Ukrainian populations and were also within the Pale of Jewish Settlement (and accordingly had large Jewish contingents in the urban population), it is apparent that the zemstvo institutions provided the Kadets

with an organizational framework that was lacking in the nonzemstvo provinces further west. In both Chernigov and Poltava, zemtsy played an important role in establishing the party network; even in Poltava, where the Russian population was only 2.6 percent of the total (and 11.4 percent of the urban population), the party had a fairly dense network of groups and operated independently of the nationalist organizations during the campaign, although they did enter an alliance with the Ukrainian Democrats

and the Jewish Union for Equality during the elections. With certain variations, much the same observations hold true for the party organization in Kharkov province.

In the Southwest (Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia), only Kiev, with its substantial Russian urban population, had any significant independent Kadet organization. Party membership in the other provinces was by all evidence minimal; the Kadets rode on the coattails of the Jewish, and to some extent the Polish, organizations during the elections. (The urban population in both provinces was heavily Jewish: just half in Volynia, and slightly less in Podolia.)!*” In the western provinces (Vilno, Kovno, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev), the Russian element of the population was of the same general proportions as in the Southwest: 3—4 percent of the total (except in Vitebsk, where it reached 13 percent), and 15—20 percent of the urban population. The rest of the population, however, was much more diverse: Belorussians, ranging from 44 percent of the total population in Grodno to 82 percent in Mogilev; Lithuanians in Vilno and Kovno; Jews, generally accounting for at

least half the population of the towns; and, to a lesser extent, Poles.'*°

The Kadet Bloc 177 It was characteristic of the region as a whole that political organization tended to follow national lines rather strictly: some of the nationalist groups adopted the Kadet program and some of their candidates emerged from the

elections as members of the Kadet fraction of the Duma, but it was the nationalist organizations that dominated political life there, so that even had the Kadet party been able to agitate in relative freedom (there were

more than ordinary restrictions on political agitation in the western provinces), its chances of emerging as a major independent party in the western provinces would not have been very great. A Russian element was generally lacking in the Kadet groups of the western provinces, except for a few professional people in the leadership, and there was virtually no support for the Kadets among the Russian landowners and government functionaries of the area. There were more Poles—urban professionals and a few landowners—among Kadet leaders in the West than Russians, and Jews outnumbered both Russians and Poles in

most party groups.

Two basic considerations underlie the contribution of nationalist

groups to the Kadet representation in the West: general recognition that the

best way to pursue goals of national advancement in parliament was to contribute to the strength of the ‘“‘all-Russian” party whose program promised most in this regard; and, relatedly, the need to recruit support for their candidates beyond the limits of their national groups (this was a major consideration particularly in the election of Duma deputies in the provincial assemblies).!7! In the Baltic provinces, finally, nationalist politics so nearly exclusively

dominated in the elections that there was virtually no “supranational” Kadet organization to be found in the area; one finds instead national Constitutional-Democratic parties—Latvian, Estonian, Polish, Jewish—all

recognizing the general Kadet program, but adding to it points that elaborated on local issues and the nationalities question, and generally cooperating with each other in the elections; each, however, had its own organization.'?* Nowhere else in the empire did nationalist politics so nearly dominate the elections as in the Baltic. The peculiarity of the region in this

respect was due in part to the extraordinary number of nationalities cohabiting there: the Latvians and Estonians were predominant, with no nationality other than Latvian or Estonian anywhere constituting more than

a few percent of the total population, but the more mobilized urban populations tended to be highly variegated, with significant representation by other nationalities.’°? Another important factor was the extraordinarily high level of national consciousness among the generally literate masses of the Latvian and Estonian populations.'** This rather lengthy description of Kadet party membership provides a good part of the answer to the question of what kind of a party it was; it reveals much about where the party could expect to find electoral support

178 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign and more members; and it shows that the party’s founders and central leadership group were not closely representative of the lower levels of party

leadership, not to mention its rank and file, but was a group with rather

particular characteristics. The nature of party membership naturally influenced the strategy and tactics of its leaders and had implications for the

relations between leaders and followers. The Kadets drew few recruits from the peasantry (no party succeeded in

mobilizing a large following there for the first elections); and it is not

surprising that the Kadets had little success in competing with the revolutionary left for working-class support. They did prove capable of drawing active support quite widely among the rest of the mobilized population, including its lower urban strata. If these predominantly urban groups that contributed to Kadet membership were small as a proportion of the total population, they were growing rapidly. The Kadets could not claim to be the party of “the broad popular masses,” but they did seem to have the prospect of becoming a mass party. If the party’s central leadership could be characterized as being drawn primarily from the “‘propertied intelligentsia” with well-established ties to the liberal zemstvo tradition, as the party ranks are descended it is the “nonpropertied intelligentsia,” predominantly urban and without zemstvo experience, that comes to the fore (the terms in quotes are borrowed from Struve). This fact alone suggests that political views in

local party groups tended to be somewhat different and generally more radical than those that prevailed in central party councils.

Left and Right in Local Party Groups Serious differences between local groups and the party leadership over questions of program and tactics were not common, although a significant minority of the local groups were quite critical, usually from the left, of the general party line, and it was recognized in the party leadership, especially

after the third congress, that the general tenor of the local party groups often tended to be to the left of the central leadership in political outlook. Disputes within local Kadet groups were also infrequent and where they did occur they were usually not serious enough to threaten the integrity of the local party organization. Demonstrative dissatisfaction with the centrist position of the party leadership was expressed by a few local party groups. For the most part these were groups in which the zemstvo element was weak or nonexistent and party initiators were men who had entered the party from the Union of Liberation side. Outspoken left-oriented party members were particularly well represented in the northern provinces, where political exiles played a prominent role in the early history of the Kadet party. A few of them went so far as to warn the central committee in the spring of 1906 that their alliance with the party was only temporary. In Vologda,

The Kadet Bloc 179 for example, several of the thirty-five persons who gathered to set up a Kadet organization on November 21, 1905, agreed to join the party only if it were understood that the party program was a minimum program for the

group, and if certain additions were made to it. This proposition was accepted by the group as a whole, and the following resolution was sent to the central committee: “Upon entering the KD party, the Vologda group feels obliged to point out that part of its members are adopting the party program not as a matter of principle, but for purely tactical considerations, in order to have a more or less firm basis for realizing their political and social ideals in the near future. For many members of the Vologda group, these ideals are significantly to the left of the more radical wing of the KD

party.”

The Sarapul group (Viatka province) was set up in February 1906 and managed to gather enough support in town to get seven of the eight electors

for the party. From the beginning it was obviously not an ordinary party organization. According to a later report from the Sarapul group, “people of quite different political views joined the group with the sole purpose of utilizing the elections under the common flag of the PNS [Kadets], and when the elections were over, the elements that were not in harmony with the PNS

immediately began to crystallize independently, on the basis of other, primarily socialist, political programs.” In fact, the then chairman of the party committee, Relarov, and the majority of the committee members soon abandoned the party, and the local organization collapsed temporarily.'*° A few groups were even opposed to participating in the Duma elections,

at least until fairly late in the campaign period. In Arkhangelsk province there was strong support in the provincial party group for a boycott of the elections through February 1906; at least that was the main issue of debate

at party meetings until then. The chairman of the provincial party committee, I. V. Galetskii, had gone to the founding congress of the party as

a delegate from the Arkhangelsk Union of Liberation group and had declared there that because of disagreement with the party program he would neither participate in the final voting nor join the party. He nevertheless did enter the party, helped set up its organization in Arkhangelsk at the end of October, and got himself elected to the Duma as the

party’s candidate there. On May 9, however, he withdrew from the party fraction over differences on the agrarian program and joined the Trudovik fraction.°” And in Mogilev province the provincial party group reported to

the central committee on December 17, 1905, that the majority of its members were in favor of boycotting the Duma.!*® Several other groups went on record in late 1905 and early 1906 with strong criticisms of the party’s projected Duma tactics, generally condemning any “organic work”’ in the Duma (Tver, Simferopol, Kherson), or with proposals for amending the party program in a more radical direction (the same groups plus the Iaroslavl and Tauride provincial groups and several district groups)./°? At least one local group, in Melitopol (Tauride), made a

180 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign formal proposal that the Kadet program be rewritten to include nationaliza-

tion of all the land.!*° Criticism of the central party line usually involved dispute within the local party groups concerned. In fact, a fairly distinct bifurcation existed

within party groups in a number of provinces, often revealing friction between the former Zemstvo Constitutionalists and Liberationists who had entered the party organization. The provincial organization in Tauride was dominated by a left wing led by third-element and professional intelligent-

sia from the predominantly urban groups of the Crimean peninsula, but they were opposed by a fairly strong and consistently more moderate faction drawn mainly from zemtsy of the mainland districts. The tension between these two factions led to elaborate compromises at provincial party

meetings, the moderates generally succeeding in toning down the more militant declarations prepared by the left.'*’ In Kherson the large and generally dominant Odessa group, run by professors and professionals who were under considerable pressure from groups of students, workers, and nonparty socialists to make their program more “democratic,” was clearly on the party left. The provincial group, dominated by zemtsy, was much more conservative. ‘7

In Simbirsk disagreements within the party group led to creation of rival newspapers. The provincial committee and the official party organ,

Simbirskie vesti, were controlled by veterans of the zemstvoconstitutionalist movement. A left wing of urban professionals and thirdelement men, including part of the editorial staff of Simbirskie vesti, set up its own newspaper, Simbirskaia narodnaia gazeta, after failing to get its views expressed in the official party organ.'*° Similar polarizations showed up in the party groups of Viatka and Smolensk.'** In other cases, differences within local party groups appear not to have followed the zemstvo-liberationist dividing line. In Orel, where a party “left” kept up a running attack on local party moderates in the pages of Orlovskii vestnik during January and February, the zemstvo element was generally weak, the party leaders were mainly urban professionals, and their critics were third-element men.‘** In the case of Arkhangelsk, where there were considerable differences within the party group, the zemstvo element was missing altogether. And in Kaluga the main source of tension in party

ranks was between factions of zemtsy: the more doctrinaire Zemstvo Constitutionalists , and those who were willing to compromise with more conservative zemstvo activists in order to cut into Octobrist support.'*° Although warnings issued from the struggle of local factions about permanent splits and destruction of the party, actual cases of splintering or secession from party groups by factions appear to have been extremely few in the pre-Duma period. In fact, only two clear-cut cases can be found. The Totma group in Vologda province split up over the party program on Polish autonomy and the eight-hour working day. Some members—according to a

The Kadet Bloc 181 local newspaper report, mostly chinovniki, led by the director of the teachers’ seminary, Mr. Vvedenskii—seceded and formed their own party at the end of 1905. This party was described by its founders as occupying a position midway between the Kadets and the Octobrists: closer to the latter on the Polish question and the labor platform, closer to the Kadets on the suffrage issue. In the elections they cooperated with the Octobrists.'*’

In Saratov a sizable group of Kadets split off to participate in the formation of the socialist “Union of Laboring Men” (Soiuz Trudiaschikhsia). After an unsuccessful attempt to cooperate in the provincial elections, the two parties joined in acrimonious debate and mutual recriminations in the pages of their respective Saratov newspapers. ‘*® On the whole the party organizations around the country held together well through the campaign and election period, and internal dissension was not a usual feature of party life. The two largest and socially most diverse party organizations in the country, in Petersburg and Moscow, were in most respects models of solidarity. In Petersburg open debate within the party

was essentially limited to the issue of whether or not the party should participate in the elections to the State Council and a few tactical questions

of limited scope.’*” There is no evidence of serious dissension in the Moscow party organization before the elections. Party solidarity in the capitals, especially in Petersburg, was undoubtedly reinforced by the existence there of a unique variety of interstitial parties between the Kadets and their main rivals to left and right. These parties appear to have drained off from the Kadet party elements that in other places, inlcuding some of those just mentioned, remained in the party for lack of alternatives, despite considerable differences over both ideological and tactical questions.

The optimism about party cohesiveness that Miliukov expressed following the second party congress was belied in the long run, but it proved

justified so far as solidarity for ‘“‘the immediate tasks ahead” in the preelection period was concerned.'°°

Kadet Campaign Activities and Blocs with Other Parties Administrative Interference Despite claims to the contrary governmental interference in the political activities of the Kadets, and of other parties, in the winter and spring of 1906 was widespread. Two recent studies claim that neither the central government nor its local representatives interfered significantly with the campaign activities of the Kadets and other parties. One of them goes so far as to conclude that “the official policy and action of the central government was not to interfere and to do everything possible to protect free choice’’; that, all things considered (the country’s authoritarian tradition, the lack of electoral experience), instances of government interference at the local level

182 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign

the time.”’>?

were “relatively few,” and that in general “the elections were remarkably free and provided the most accurate reflection of the people’s will possible at

It is true that the legal situation in regard to political agitation was in general unclear. It is also true that the Kadets, in particular, never missed a chance to publicize, sometimes in exaggerated terms, acts of government interference with their campaigning; this was an important element in their agitational strategy, which was designed to elicit sympathy and support from oppositon-minded elements of the population. However, a reasonably

careful scrutiny of what was going on around the country in early 1906 reveals a picture quite different from the one suggested by the assessment just quoted, in regard to both the central government and local administrative organs.!°? The rights of political groups in regard to organization, agitation, and

propaganda remained unclarified throughout the election period. There were the general promises of the first article of the October Manifesto “‘to grant to the population the unshakable foundations of civil liberty based on the principles of genuine inviolability of person, freedom of conscience,

speech, the right to assemble freely and to organize unions,” and the complementary promises of Witte’s report of the same day. Among other

things, the latter called for noninterference by the government in the elections and made oblique reference to the need for reducing both the geographical area and the force of the extraordinary measures dating back to September 1881, which gave local government authorities the power to prohibit public meetings of any kind, to arrest and detain people at will, to shut down newspapers, and so on.’°° There was in addition the series of regulations about public political meeting in general and voters’ meetings in particular that had begun to be

issued in mid-1905 in connection with the preparation of the Bulygin constitution; their last version before the elections was published together with the March 4 rules mentioned earlier. The supplement to the Bulygin ukaz of August 6 had given voters of a precinct the right to hold “special preparatory meetings” for the purpose of discussing the merits of potential candidates; such meetings were to be announced ahead of time to the police

chief, who could assign one of his agents to attend these meetings and empower him to shut it down at will (presumably if he perceived a threat to

public order or heard seditious speeches).'°* In supplementary rules approved on September 18 it was specified that such meetings had to be announced at least twenty-four hours in advance and the names of their organizers supplied.’°> Then on October 12 a special ukaz to the Senate based on the work of the Solskii conference was issued to supplement existing regulations about public meetings, still in anticipation of ““Bulygin”’

elections. This ukaz, which dealt with public meetings for discussion of

“questions of state, society, or economy,” was apparently the first

The Kadet Bloc 183 government ruling to explicitly allow such convocations outside the specific framework of preelection voters’ meetings. Permission to hold meetings was not required, but an elaborate set of conditions was imposed and the police chief could forestall such meetings if he found the conditions were not being met or simply if he considered them a threat to public order. Organizers had

to make written declaration of their intention to hold meetings well in advance, specifying time, place, subject of discussion, names and addresses

of the organizers, and, if prearranged speeches were to be given, of the speakers as well. To see to the observance of these and a number of other conditions, an agent of the governor or police chief was to be in attendance;

he was empowered to order the closing of the meeting if he found any of them being violated. Meetings of legally established organizations were subject to all the same rules, with the exception that they could not be disallowed in advance so long as the subject of discussion was appropriate to the organization in question. Permission for conferences or congresses (s’’ezdy), including those for people of a specific profession or occupation, was to be requested from the minister of internal affairs, and if they were to be used for discussion of political questions they were to be subject to the same rules as other public

meetings. The rules were not to be applied to “private gatherings,’ which were defined in such a way as to exclude any convocation for which open invitations or public announcement had been made. All these provisions

were accompanied by a list of punishments to be prescribed to their violators.'°®

The December 11 amendments to the electoral laws made only one, though not insignificant, change in the clauses of the August 6 legislation concerning preliminary voters’ meetings: namely, that police agents were not to be present at such meetings.!°” And finally, on March 4, “temporary rules on meetings” were issued in tandem with the rules on societies and

unions. With slight modification, they repeated the provisions of the October 12 rules. The one significant difference involved “private gatherings.” Meetings of “‘legally existing societies or unions” attended only by their members, even meetings about which public announcements may have been made, were now assimilated to that status.!°® The provisions of the March 4 rules on societies and unions and earlier

government orders restricted the rights of government employees to participate in voluntary organizations. By the ruling of the Council of Ministers of December 16, 1905, all personnel, both military and civilian, of

the war and naval ministries were forbidden to belong to “‘any unions, groups, organizations, cooperatives, parties, and so on, whatsoever” that had been created for political purposes, to attend any kind of meetings at which political questions were discussed, or to take part in or even be present at “gatherings, meetings, or manifestations of any kind whatsoever.”!°? There were no such blanket regulations for other government

184 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign personnel, but a Council of Ministers’ decree of January 12, 1906, did forbid civil servants to join political parties that sought to “undermine the existing state order,” and higher civil servants, including heads of local government institutions, were expressly forbidden to occupy positions of leadership in any political parties.1°° The March 4 rules likewise avoided any blanket ruling against participation by civil servants in political parties,

but did forbid civil servants, and also employees of private railways and other enterprises ‘“‘of public utility,” to form organizations for political purposes among themselves; and their individual participation in any organizations could “be forbidden if such [participation] is found by their superiors to be incompatible with the demands of their service.”?®' At the outset of the election campaign the right of citizens to organize politically and to participate in election campaigning was thus recognized as

a general principle, but was so set about by restrictions, regulations, and exclusions as to allow a local governor or city police chief to do pretty much

as he pleased, so far as the legal-administrative side of the question was concerned, about the level of political agitation and party campaigning that he would allow within his bailiwick. This situation obtained even in those areas of the empire that were not at that time under one form or another of emergency legislation. Under the terms of the 1881 legislation, which was still in effect in 1906 (and was to remain in effect until the end of the regime), administrative and police authorities in an area placed under “‘reinforced”’ or “‘extraordinary”

security measures were given a wide range of powers to circumvent established legal procedures, including the right to summarily arrest and

detain any person for up to two weeks; to fine and imprison by administrative procedure persons found to have violated the various emergency regulations that constituted part of the security measures; to turn various cases over to courts-martial; to summarily dismiss from their jobs any civil servants (including zemstvo and town council employees; under “extraordinary” security, this rule extended to the elected officials of these institutions as well); to send persons into administrative exile; to forbid any

kinds of meetings whatever; and, under the “extraordinary” measures, to close down any periodical (for the duration) and any institution of learning (for one month). A special article in the statutes (no. 28) allowed for certain

of the emergency powers to be employed by local authorities even in specified areas that were not as a whole placed under the emergency legislation. Moreover, the machinery for sending persons into administrative exile could be applied anywhere in the empire.'® In the spring of 1906 twenty-four provinces of European Russia were,

in whole or in part, under “reinforced” legislation; fifteen were under “extraordinary” legislation. Most of these areas had been declared in a state

of emergency in late 1905 or at the very beginning of 1906. Moreover, martial law had been declared in all of Congress Poland, in all of Livland

The Kadet Bloc 185 and Kurland and in three districts of Estland, in most of the Caucasus region, in many parts of Siberia, and in many restricted areas of interior provinces (mostly along rail lines but also in entire districts and towns, usually factory centers). In all, thirty-nine provinces or oblasts were touched by martial law, including parts of seventeen provinces of European Russia, not counting the Baltic provinces.'®?

In short the potential for extensive administrative interference in political activity in general and in election campaigning in particular was everywhere at hand. So varied was the actual experience in this regard from

province to province, and often from town to town within the same province, that it defies generalizations, except one: administrative interference was very widespread. It took a variety of forms, of which the most common (not necessarily in order of significance) were: prohibition and

disruption of party meetings or public meetings arranged by parties; interference with mass propagation of political information through the press and distribution of party literature;'°* harassment and punitive measures against state employees for involvement in politics; and harassment, arrest, and detention of party members. Prohibition and disruption of party meetings. The October Manifesto and Witte’s accompanying memorandum could have been interpreted by local officials, at least where emergency measures were not in effect, to mean

that political meetings should normally be allowed, providing the proprieties described in the October 12 rules were observed. But there were no further encouragements of that kind; on the contrary, subsequent communications from the center, such as the January 20 circular of the minister of internal affairs, which was one of the few general directives touching on the

matter after October, rather emphasized that local authorities should be very cautious about allowing any kind of public meetings.’®° When emergency measures were applied in many areas of the country at the end of

the year, their import was clearly to neutralize the unrepeated signals of October 17. An example of how the regulations on political agitation could be interpreted by local authorities under these circumstances was the reply of Governor Andreevskii of Voronezh province, most of which was free of emergency measures in early 1906, to an application submitted in accord-

ance with the October 12 rules by the Kadet leaders Koliubakin and Shurinov for permission to hold a party meeting in the provincial capital on January 2, 1906. Andreevskii refused permission on the grounds that the party had no legal right to exist, let alone hold meetings to elect officers, “in accordance with article 3 of the ukaz of October 12, 1905.’’ Moreover, the governor continued in his reply, the party could not participate in any way in the election campaign, since according to the electoral law of December

11, 1905, only registered voters had the right to hold special preelection

meetings, and the voters’ lists had not yet been compiled.

186 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Given administrative traditions, the ambiguity of the central govern-

ment’s intentions in regard to political-party activity, and the general emphasis in the administration in the winter and spring of 1906 on “restoring order,” it is not surprising that the record shows that administrative interference with party meetings was a nearly universal phenomenon.’°”

There is evidence of serious interference with the Kadets’ efforts to hold party meetings and party-sponsored public meetings in at least thirty-seven of the forty-eight provinces in which the Kadets had party organizations. In twelve of these provinces—Grodno, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kursk, Minsk, Novgorod, Orenburg, Tambov, Tula, Kharkov, Chernigov, and Iaroslavl— police interference in this respect amounted to a general and successfully

enforced prohibition on all Kadet meetings whatever throughout the campaign period. In other provinces administrative interference varied from allowing only one or two party meetings, strictly for members, in the provincial capital over the entire period preceding the elections, at one extreme, to

erratic refusals of interruptions of meetings in the provincial capital, inconsistent policy toward meetings in district towns, and perhaps an occasional permission for a public meeting arranged by the party, at the

other extreme. As a general rule the party found it easiest to arrange meetings for members only in provincial towns; party meetings to which

nonmembers were invited were less frequently allowed; and partysponsored public meetings with open invitations to the public were exceptional events, permitted outside Petersburg and Moscow on very few occasions during the campaign period prior to the general meetings of voters, which according to the election law could be convened beginning a month

before local elections were held. Political parties or nationalist groups generally took the initiative in arranging them.

In at least two provinces party meetings were allowed, at least occasionally, until the preliminary stages of the elections were completed, and then the governors refused permission for further party meetings on the grounds that the political parties’ work had been done; now it was up to the electors, who should not be interfered with by the parties. One of these governors, Vatatsi of Kostroma, even concluded that the Kadet party had “no further business existing.” !©® Not only are these cases revealing about official attitudes toward the new parties generally; they also show, like the opinion of Governor Andreevskii cited earlier, that the new election laws

were sometimes interpreted by governors to mean that all political convocations outside the framework of the actual election process (voters’ meetings, preliminary meetings of electors, and so on) should be prohibited. Fully a third of the provinces where party meetings were prohibited

altogether were outside the area of application of the extraordinary measures. ‘©? In general, the governors’ treatment of political activities was

just as severe in these provinces as anywhere in the country.

The Kadet Bloc 187 In those provinces where interference with party activity was irregular, particularly in geographic terms, district police officials were often acting on

their own and their actions simply were not being countermanded by the governors. Where province-wide prohibitions on party activity were in effect, police officials were taking orders from the governors, whose actions

in this respect were not being countermanded by the administration in Petersburg. Following a general prohibition on party meetings by the district police chief in December 1905, the Rybinsk Kadet committee

telegraphed the governor of Iaroslavl with a protest. The governor brusquely replied that he recognized no committees whatever in his province. The committee then wired Witte, who replied that he wished to see a copy of the party program. It was sent, but no response was made. On February 25 Governor Rimskii-Korsakov issued an order forbidding all party meetings in the province.!”° Of the nine provinces for which evidence of administrative interference with party meetings is either minimal or lacking altogether, three—Volynia, Kovno, and Mogilev—were western provinces where Kadet activities were generally submerged in nationalist politics. The Smolensk party group could hold frequent meetings in the provincial capital but was evidently prevented

from carrying on agitation in the districts.'’' In Lifland and Olonets provinces the party could apparently meet freely, although the level of Kadet activity was very low in both provinces. In Pskov and Perm the same situation appears to have prevailed, although in Perm the police interfered with other kinds of party activity, such as distribution of literature among the population, and some party leaders were arrested. Much of Perm was under extraordinary legislation in this period; Pskov was free of it. Finally, in Simbirsk one finds one of the rare cases, perhaps the only one, where the party was on relatively good terms with the governor and city police chief, and both party meetings and party-arranged public meetings were allowed

throughout the preelection period, at least in the town of Simbirsk.*’* The situation of the groups in the capitals deserves special note. These

were the biggest party groups in the country, with the most prominent members, and their activities received the widest publicity. In Petersburg no serious hindrances were offered by the authorities to the holding of party

meetings, although party agitation among the public was forbidden until late January 1906.'7? The number of party meetings, usually at the precinct

level, and of party-arranged public meetings held during the campaign period was very large, especially in the last month before the elections, when the party widely exercised the right to convene voters’ meetings. Toward the end of the campaign period the party was holding some kind of meeting at

least daily, and often there were three or four meetings going on simultaneously in different parts of the city. Thousands of invitations to these precinct meetings were passed out on the street by Kadet activists.

It is apparent that by mid-February the authorities thought Kadet

188 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign agitation was getting out of hand and tried to arrest it. Although the attempt was abandoned after ten days, the episode is revealing about the relations between the party and the government. On February 13 the city bureau of the party was closed down and all precinct party meetings were forbidden

by order of the city governor (gradonachal’nik). The papers printed conflicting versions about where the initiative for these actions had come from. Nasha zhizn’ reported that the gradonachal’nik had first told party

leaders who had come to protest the action that the closure of party headquarters had been an unauthorized act by the police and would shortly be rescinded. But then he reportedly told another Kadet delegation that all

party meetings had been forbidden by order of the minister of internal affairs. The Petersburg duma sent a protest to Witte, and the party sent a delegation, consisting of Miliukov, Gessen, and Kareev, first to Durnovo and then to Witte (on February 16), and meetings recommenced on the eighteenth. There were some sporadic prohibitions on party meetings for a few days after that, but the frequency of party meetings was back to normal by early March.’”* Party meetings continued, however, to be monitored by policemen and were often interrupted by them when they found speeches too inflammatory.'”° During the confrontation, according to Rech’, the gradonachal’nik had told party representatives that he was forbidding Kadet meetings because they were being used as forums by orators of the extreme left parties (which was true)'”° and because invitations were being given out too freely. In general, the Kadets had gone too far. The gradonachal’nik claimed that he had explained his views to Witte, and that Witte had agreed with him that Kadet meetings should not be allowed.'’’

From early January, when the governor-general lifted the ban on political activity that had been established in early December, the Moscow Kadets appear to have been able to agitate without significant hindrances right up to the time of the elections.'”® In the week of February 20-27 alone,

there were twenty-two party meetings in the precincts of Moscow. No temporary conflict with the local administration, such as had occurred in Petersburg, took place there during the campaign period, although in February there were a few complaints from party groups about hindrances on meetings at the precinct level. Interference with the press and the distribution of party literature. In those provinces where party activity was under a general prohibition, this prohibition included distribution of party propaganda, whether by hand or by mail. In the other provinces there was a great deal of variation, just as in regard to party meetings. In many provinces the administration tried, with varying degrees of success, to limit party activity to the provincial capital

and district towns; the privilege of party agitation was as a rule not extended to the countryside or to factory hamlets, where a great deal of the country’s industry was located in the early twentieth century.

The Kadet Bloc 189 There is good evidence that, in addition to the dozen provinces where party activity was under a general ban, there were at least another nine in

which the provincial authorities at least formally forbade any Kadet agitation outside the towns (in some cases, outside the provincial capital alone),‘”? and in at least another three provinces, restrictions on this kind of activity appear to have been very extensive although a province-wide order was not in effect.!®° Considerable hindrances existed almost everywhere else, although it is impossible to judge the extent of them with any precision. There is evidence that the local administration tried specifically to limit

the distribution of party literature in a majority of the provinces.'®! The character of this interference varied from place to place. It most often involved confiscation of party literature designated for distribution among the peasants, and often the arrest of the people from whom it was taken; but it also included the censoring of reports on party meetings in the towns, or

of speeches given at them, the closing down of newspapers, and even blanket prohibitions against the dissemination of any kind of Kadet literature anywhere in the province, even literature that had been passed by

the censors in Petersburg or Moscow. In Ekaterinoslav province, for example, there was a general prohibition

in effect throughout the campaign period not only on the distribution of party literature but also on any reporting about party activities in the press (which were in any case minimal because of other constraints).'°* In Orel a ban was in effect throughout the campaign period against distribution of the

Kadet party program, which the local party group managed to partially circumvent by printing a newspaper report on a speech in which the program was summarized.'®* With the introduction of martial law and extraordinary measures to parts of Tambov province in late 1905, the Kadet party newspaper was closed down and no printing or distribution of party literature, even things legally printed elsewhere, was allowed by order of the

governor.'®* The governor of Iaroslav! province carried on an extensive campaign against Kadet propaganda, confiscating stores of party pamphlets

and prohibiting the printing of party literature and its distribution by the mails within the province.'®° In Odessa the governor-general in February forbade reprinting or distribution of the party program or popularizations of it that were printed elsewhere, and about the same time the local censors began to prohibit its printing locally on the grounds that the articles on

Polish autonomy and the Finnish constitution amounted to seditious proclamations. !*°

Widespread confiscation of party literature intended for the villages

occurred in Vitebsk, Vladimir, Kiev, Podolia, Riazan, Tambov, and Iaroslavl. Confiscations were often accompanied by arrests.'®” The Uman party group in Kiev province claimed in its report to the central committee that police interference with attempts of party activists to reach the villages was general throughout the province, that uncensored literature and even

190 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign copies of the October Manifesto were forbidden, and that any attempts to propagate party programs (except by the Black Hundreds) led to arrest.

Peasants in several villages of Uman district were reported to be so frightened by the arrest of some of their fellow villagers for possession of forbidden literature that they had burned all printed material in the village except their prayer books.'®® Many similar examples from various provinces could be cited. Although it would be reasonable to expect that the authorities would have cracked down hardest on attempts to carry political agitation to the

villages and factory towns in those areas where there was the greatest perceived threat of popular disturbances, the relation between the two does not appear to be very strong. At least it was just as likely, in fact slightly

more likely, for the authorities in provinces where the extraordinary measures were not in effect to prohibit political agitation among the masses as it was in provinces where they were.'®? A comparison of the standard figures on the regional distribution by intensity of peasant disturbances with the available information on restriction of political agitation yields the same conclusion.!?° Administrative pressure on government employees in regard to political participation. The ukaz of January 12 and other communications from the center in the winter of 1905-1906 explicitly forbade civil servants of rank

and responsibility to become members of the bureaus and committees of political parties, without being very specific about which offices or positions were included; they also commented on the impropriety of any government

employee taking an “active part” in party affairs or even belonging to an

opposition party. Plenty of leeway was therefore provided for local authorities to take sanctions against government employees on a wide scale,

including the officers and salaried employees of the zemstvos and town dumas.

The record shows the opportunity was not lost. There are reports available from sixteen provinces of more or less intense pressure on civil servants to stay out of politics during the campaign period. It is safe to assume that the surviving record is far from complete. Only a few of the known cases involved ranking chinovniki; much more common were cases involving government employees whose government jobs could hardly be

called ranking or supervisory, and whose party positions were not particularly elevated, either. A few examples will suffice. In Livland the chairman of the Kadet committee, Bykov, was compelled to resign his party position by the governor-general of the Baltic provinces. He was a factory inspector. Bykov reported to the second congress that a number of employees of the Ministry of Justice in his province had recently been pressured into quitting the Kadet party by the procurator of the district court:*”*

In Nizhnii Novgorod the city school inspector, lordanskii, was fired

The Kadet Bloc 191 from his job because of his party affiliation. He was apparently not a member of the local party committee.'?? In Penza the party leader and editor of the party newspaper, N. F. Ezerskii, was compelled to give up his job as inspector of primary schools.'”? In Tver the secretary of the provincial office

of military affairs, Madzhulinskii, and a member of the provincial administrative board, Nikitin, were both compelled to retire from their jobs by the governor.!** The governor had circularized the provincial administrative offices, forbidding “‘active participation” by government officials in

the Kadet (but not the Octobrist) party. When questioned about the meaning of “active participation,” he reportedly replied that this meant being a member of a party committee.’”° In Chernigov the chairman of the Kharkov Kadet party group, N. N. Miklashevskii, was fired from his job as judge of the district court on March 3, 1906.'° In Jaroslav] the chairman of

the Rybinsk party committee, Pozdniakov, was required to resign that position in order to keep his job as director of the local branch of the state bank.’?” In Orel a tax inspector, S. Lebedev, was refused permission by his superior in the Treasury to be a Kadet party member and vice-chairman of the local party bureau.'”® Fear of reprisals by government functionaries was frequently reported

by party spokesmen to be keeping people out of the party or as an explanation for keeping party membership secret.’”” As noted, the definition of civil servant was sometimes extended to the

zemstvos. In Kostroma, for example, the governor ordered both the provincial marshal of nobility and the chairman of the provincial zemstvo board, the brothers P. V. and I. V. Shulepnikov, either to resign from the Kadet party committee or to resign their positions (dolzhnosti).*°° In Kursk, Riazan, and the Tauride, widespread firing of third-element employees,

often accompanied by arrest and exile, was reported. It appears that reprisals against third-element employees were usually taken under the general terms of the emergency legislation permitting arrest of active or potential troublemakers, rather than under the specific pretext of violation of the conditions of employment by engaging in political activity. Reprisals

were often provoked, in any event, by participation in party affairs.*°" Arrest, detention, and exile of party members during the campaign period. It is in actions of this kind that deliberate governmental interference

in the election process can be most clearly observed. Two interwined motives appear to have been at work in reprisals against Kadet party members: the desire to stop the agitation of party “demagogues” among the

population, especially the peasantry; and the elimination of particularly popular opposition candidates for the seats of elector and Duma deputy.*"*

Arrests of Kadets during the campaign period occurred in at least twenty-four provinces.”°° In Kursk the arrest in early February of two prominent zemtsy and party members, P. M. Lintyrev and N. V. Shirkov,

appears to have been provoked by their contacts with the Peasants’

192 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Union.*"* In Novgorod, A. M. Koliubakin, the most prominent personality

in the local party organization, a party “leftist,” leading figure in the zemstvo congresses, and chairman of the provincial zemstvo board, was removed from office and arrested by order of the provincial governor. He was charged with violation of articles 120 and 130 of the criminal code,

“antigovernment activity” and “agitation among the peasantry.”?° In Riazan the secretary of the Sapozhok group, the zemstvo veterinarian I. S.

Saikovich, was arrested for distributing party literature among the peasants.*°6

In Kherson the local party group reported that the administration was systematically arresting the secretaries of the party committee.7°” Here and elsewhere searches of apartments and party headquarters for literature were frequent accompaniments to arrests.*°° Likely Duma candidates were a favorite target for arrest and exile. In Vilno Dr. Romm, the founder and chairman of the Kadet committee, was

arrested in early March without formal charges, then released on the condition that he spend two months abroad. He left for Berlin on March 11.

Romm’s wife was shown a draft of trumped-up charges, including the accusation that he had presided at a meeting designed to unite local SDs and

SRs.*°? In Kazan, Iu. Kh. Akhchurin, a member of the provincial party committee and editor of the major Tatar newspaper supporting the Kadets,

was arrested on March 5 and was not released until after the elections. Vigorous party protests to the Council of Ministers and extensive publiciz-

ing of the case were of no avail.7‘° N. A. Gredeskul, a prominent party leader and dean of the law faculty at Kharkov University, was arrested without charges in February and exiled to Arkhangelsk province for three years.*'! Many similar cases involving persons of less prominence in party groups could be cited. There is one report of a governor who planned to

arrest the party’s main candidates for deputies’ seats in Kaluga, V. P. Obninskii and V. M. Kashkarov, but was dissuaded from doing so by the minister of internal affairs.*!* In some places the arrests of party leaders reached proportions that

indicate the administration was intent on beheading the local Kadet organizations. The most extreme example of this pattern was in Ekaterinoslav, where the entire provincial committee was arrested on December 19, 1905. Its members were held for various lengths of time and then some were obliged to leave the province; the better part of those that were allowed to remain in town were sufficiently intimidated to retire from party affairs.

According to the party report, the local administration had in this way largely succeeded in its aim of paralyzing party activity in the province.?** Action of similar proportions was taken against the Taganrog group in the Don Oblast, where nineteen members of the party committee and various other party leaders had been arrested and were being exiled from the oblast. Nine electors from Taganrog petitioned the authorities for their release on

The Kadet Bloc 193 the grounds that the party had been left without workers, and the town without doctors, lawyers, and teachers.*!* In Tula seven of the ten members of the Tula provincial committee were arrested and imprisoned in Febru-

ary.*!>° Arrests on the same scale, with candidate-electors as the prime

targets, were reported in Nizhnii Novgorod, Perm, Poltava, Samara, Yalta, and Kharkov.7’° The thinning, if not decimation, of party leadership

ranks was reported in many other places.

Almost all these arrests were made under the provisions of the extraordinary legislation; that is, “administratively,” without formal charges being brought or trials held. Most of those arrested were held in prison for the duration of the election period, and a good many of them were exiled. In a few cases, such as that of Dr. Romm, Kadet leaders were simply obliged to leave the territory of the province, without being exiled to a specific place. The risk involved in being a party candidate led some committees to withhold their candidates’ names until the last possible moment, a tactic

that had been foreseen in the party statutes. The Iaroslavl group, for example, withheld the name of its candidate for the deputy’s seat in the city elections until the electors met for fear that he would either be arrested or otherwise made ineligible for election.”’” In at least one case, in Samara, the party refrained even from publishing its list of candidate-electors for fear of having it decimated by arrest.?'®

The Character of Kadet Campaigning. Within the limits imposed by administrative restrictions and their own resources, Kadet groups engaged primarily in two areas of campaign activity: distribution of party literature, and the holding of meetings. The agitational function of meetings, even meetings for party members only, extended considerably beyond their attendance: reports or verbatim reproductions of speeches and remarks made at such meetings were printed in local newspapers whenever possible. It was for this reason in particular that the party’s leading orators from the capitals were much sought after by provincial groups to give speeches at their meetings. Local Kadet groups had newspapers, either officially published by the party or clearly operating as party organs, in twenty-nine of the forty-eight

provinces in which the party was active in European Russia. The total number of papers was probably somewhere between forty and fifty.7!” The large-scale production of popular political literature by the central party organization was reenforced by that of local groups. An undoubtedly incomplete list of seventy-nine publications from thirty towns of European Russia was published in the fifth issue of the party Vestnik in late March.”*° The better part of these publications were either reproductions of the party program or simplified accounts of its contents; another substantial portion

194 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign consisted of explications of the rules on voting, local party statutes and lists of committee members, and the like. A dozen or so were appeals to various

social groups, primarily the peasantry.7*' How successful were the Kadets in penetrating the countryside with this literature? Considering the difficulties already discussed, the answer must be that on the whole the party’s success in this regard was quite limited. There were, however, a few places where party penetration of the countryside was relatively profound. These cases show something of the party’s aspirations

and tactics for becoming a mass party. The Vladimir group was probably the most active in regard to mass agitation. It operated energetically in the numerous factory hamlets of the province and in many villages. At a mid-January provincial party meeting of delegates from district groups, the Pokrov district representatives reported

on their success in distributing party literature among the peasants of the district, thanks to mobilization of village schoolteachers into the party.?7? A. Smirnov’s report to the central committee claimed considerable success in

this regard throughout the province, and attributed this to the groundwork

laid by the predecessors of the party organization, who had developed contacts in most of the districts and with the Peasants’ Union.?”° One of the

largest producers and disseminators of popular literature in the party, the Vladimir organization claimed that a large demand, exceeding supply, for this literature existed among the peasants and workers of the province.*** The political effects of this work were problematical. Dmitriev-Mamonov concluded that through it the party had acquired “a significant number of voters, not only among the urban population, but among the factory and peasant population of the province as well,”’**> and the election returns do show a higher than average level of support for the Kadets, and of politicalparty affiliation generally, among the peasant electors of Vladimir province.

The large majority of them, however, remained unassociated with any party.

Not many other Kadet groups could report even so limited success outside the towns as the Vladimir group enjoyed, though not for lack of trying. The Kiev party organization was even more energetic in distributing party literature (measured in terms of numbers of copies circulated) and was

able, despite extensive administrative interference, to agitate in some districts in villages, at peasant volost meetings, and so on. As a result, a few

local groups could report substantial peasant memberships.**° Another province with a fairly high level of party agitation in the countryside was Kostroma.?*’ There were alleged to be whole villages that called the Kadets

“our party” and had adopted the party program, even though party members discouraged villages from joining the party en masse for fear of

administrative reprisals.**® ,

The only other province to report a similarly high level of party activity in the countryside was Tver, where this work seems to have found reflection

in an unusally large number of peasants and workers in the party

The Kadet Bloc 195 membership.**” The Kadets did nearly as well in the preliminary elections in

the rural curiae as in the towns, a rare occurrence. The relative success of party agitation in the countryside in Kostroma

and Tver inspired local party leaders to develop concrete plans for transforming the party into a real mass party. In Kostroma a meeting of delegates from local party groups was planned for March 23 following the preliminary elections, partly in order to select the party’s Duma candidates, but also to begin work for expanding party activity among the population in the postelection period. Party members were to take the initiative in forming trade unions, consumer cooperatives, savings and loan associations, and

other institutions that could serve as channels of contact with the population and for recruitment of new members.7°° In Tver, too, a

provincial delegates’ conference (April 18—19) resolved that party activity should henceforward be concentrated on “‘establishing direct contacts with

the popular masses” in order to reinforce the authority of the Duma, “‘to develop conscious preparedness to support this representative system in case of conflict with the government, and in the event of an appeal by the Duma

to realize the rights established for it.”*°’ The same aspirations were expressed in various other provinces where the party had much less success

with popular agitation.*°* The need for mass mobilization to defend the constitutional order against the regime was developed at the third party congress, which convened two days later, as a matter of primary concern for

the party as a whole.**? Most Kadet activity took place, of course, in the towns, particularly in the national and provincial capitals and other larger urban centers, and it was there that public meetings became the central institutional setting of Kadet agitation. Aside from straightforward explications of the party program, the Kadets used these meetings, by and large, to polemicize with their main rivals in the election campaign, the Octobrists, and, to a lesser degree, with other parties to their right. They generally avoided criticizing the parties to their left, except under direct provocation from the audience. In their criticism of the Octobrist bloc the Kadets frequently sounded like the socialists talking about the Kadets: the Octobrists and the TradeIndustry party were the representatives of the landlords and big capitalists. In a large meeting on March 5S in Petersburg, Kadet orators accused the entire right (from the Octobrists to the Union of the Russian People) of distributing propaganda of an “entirely reactionary character.”?°* The

Moscow paper Put’, which supported the Kadets in the Moscow city elections, printed Kadet appeals to the voters just before the elections like this one: Citizen shopworkers [meshchane, civil servants, and so forth]: the

Union of October 17 and the Trade-Industry party consist of chinovniki and rich people—landowners, entrepreneurs, big

196 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign shopowners, bankers, factory owners of all kinds. These people are

all egoists and think only of their interests; not only are they not

concerned about their younger, laboring brother...[but] they strive to get as much for their own pockets out of [his] labor as possible, and their programs are just as egoistic.?>>?

Similar rhetoric was in use all around the country, with certain local variations that do not require detailed discussion. In zemstvo provinces the Octobrists were sometimes identified by the Kadets with the conservative

faction in the local zemstvo that had tried to block improved education, health care, and aid to peasant agriculture. In general, Kadet rivalry with the

Octobrists appeared to contemporary observers as a continuation of old “party” rivalries in the zemstvos.7°° The Octobrists and their allies answered in kind: they tended to make a

point of identifying the Kadets with “the revolution” and the socialist parties. Surely the most frequent specific accusation leveled against the Kadets was that they wished the secession of Poland, if not the “dismemberment of Russia” in general, but the Octobrists also frequently accused the

Kadets of being secret republicans who had endorsed constitutional monarchy for purely opportunistic reasons, and socialists who wanted to take away private property in general and land in particular.*>’ In the West and South, the Octobrists and their allies did not refrain

from casting anti-Semitic and racist innuendos in the direction of the Kadets, although the cruder forms of this tactic were usually left to the “unrespectable” right.*°® The Octobrists and other rivals to the right for the most part answered the Kadets only in their literature and at their own meetings. They generally

stayed away from Kadet-sponsored meetings. Representatives of the revolutionary parties, however, particularly SDs, turned out heavily for these meetings, using them as forums for propagating their positions in the absence of the possibility of holding open meetings of their own. More often than not, this took the form of challenges from the floor of propositions being made by Kadet orators at the podium. The Kadets accordingly usually found themselves at their meetings in the curious position of attacking their

opponents on the right and receiving attacks only from the left. An SDworker described the general situation quite accurately at the meeting of

workers’ delegates in Moscow on February 2: “The ConstitutionalDemocratic party arranges its meetings for the purpose of doing battle with the parties of the right and is invariably confronted exclusively by socialist opponents.”’29?

The self-appointed or official representatives of the revolutionary parties generally spoke up to urge boycott of the elections, but also to brand

the Kadets as the party of the bourgeoisie and betrayer of the liberation movement. The former accusation was usually made during discussion of

The Kadet Bloc 197 the party program; the latter, when party tactics were being explained. It came up particularly during discussions of Duma tactics. A typical example was described in a report in Severnaia mysl’ on a Kadet meeting in April

where Struve had lectured, arguing against the idea of the “Duma with constituent functions.” The first objection from the floor was from an SD who claimed that Struve’s talk demonstrated that the Kadets were moving steadily to the right and that no bourgeois party could restore political equilibrium in the country.**° The interventions of their critics from the left often disrupted Kadet meetings and sometimes caused them to be closed down by the police.**?

Prominent Kadet orators made public complaints about being shouted down by leftist critics,*4* and complaints that the party orators were being

prevented from explaining their program and tactics to the public were commonly voiced in the press. In some places the Kadets were even led to restrict party meetings to party members only in order to avoid confronta-

tions with the revolutionary left. It should be said that friction with the left was not everywhere the rule. There were a few places where the Kadets and the revolutionary parties did not clash in open meetings, either because the organized left was virtually nonexistent or because its local representatives were not persuaded of the wisdom of boycotting the elections and believed that the Kadets were, after all, preferable to the Octobrists.*** But these were rare exceptions. For the most part, wherever a certain amount of public participation was allowed

and representatives of the revolutionary parties did not fear to put in an appearance, they vigorously attacked the Kadet program and tactics.

The Kadet Bloc. The Kadets cooperated during the campaign with the Jewish organizations, primarily the Union for Jewish Equality, throughout the west-southwestern crescent.”** Within the same general area the Ukrainian Radical-Democratic

party, various Polish parties and organizations, and Lithuanian and Belorussian groups adhered to the Kadet bloc.7*° On the eastern perimeter

the Kadets’ most significant partner was the Muslim nationalist organization.**°

In the rest of European Russia there were no significant ‘political organizations with which the Kadets could have cooperated in the elections,

with several noteworthy exceptions. In Viatka the Kadets formed a bloc with a group called the ‘“‘Democratic Union” in order to present a common

slate of candidates for the electors’ seats and then to back common candidates for the Duma positions. This union had been a rival of the Kadets in the early stages of the campaign, when it had been organized to provide an alternative to the Kadets for those who were sympathetic to the

revolutionary parties but opposed to their boycott of the elections. It

198 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign gradually lost its following as the Kadet organization grew in Viatka, and

the bloc was formed in a series of joint meetings held just before the preliminary elections.**’ In Saratov the Kadets formed a bloc with the “Union of Laboring Men” (Soiuz Trudiashchikhsia) for the special city elections. The Kadets and the union published a joint list of candidates for the electors’ positions, fiftynine of them Kadets and the remaining twenty-one candidates of the union. Like the Democratic Union in Viatka and a few other organizations around the country—in Petersburg, Samara, and Kharkov—the Saratov union was created by radical representatives of the ““democratic intelligentsia” who did not agree with the revolutionary parties’ boycott tactic. It was the largest of

such groups. The Saratov union’s initiator was S. V. Anikin, a zemstvo teacher of peasant origin and member of the Peasants’ Union who later was to become one of the leading figures in the Trudovik group in the Duma. Another leading figure in the union was the Menshevik D. A. Topuridze, editor of the newspaper Privolzhskii krai, which propagated the group’s nonsectarian leftist program.?*®

The ULM was brought into existence quite late in the campaign, apparently in reaction to what was perceived to be a rightward drift on the part of the Kadet party, and its bloc with the Kadets was a fragile thing from the start: it was consummated only for the special city elections, in which

only one deputy’s seat was at stake, in order to block a candidate of the

right; the union did not cooperate with the Kadets in the provincial elections, and the city-election bloc nearly collapsed between the time of the general elections and the meeting of the electoral assembly, amidst mutual

recriminations on the pages of the two parties’ newspapers.**?

In Perm the Kadets tried to reach an accommodation with the

“Constitutional-Liberal”’ party, a local group with a program close to that of the Octobrists which had gotten a headstart on the Kadets in organizing, for the purpose of defeating the candidates of the Union of Russian People.

But this plan soon fell through out of programmatic differences— particularly having to do with the issue of Polish autonomy—and the two parties attacked each other, except in the town of Ekaterinburg, throughout the remainder of the campaign and election period. In the electoral assembly the Constitutional Liberals cooperated with the Octobrists, the TIP, and some nonparty “constitutionalist-conservatives.”?°° In Vladimir there was some cooperation between the Kadets and the

local branch of the Peasants’ Union, although this did not constitute a formal bloc. There was a voting bloc between Kadets and Social Democrats in Briansk (Orel province), where a deal was made whereby the Kadets were to support a worker-candidate for a Duma seat at the provincial assembly in return for SD support for the Kadet slate in the preliminary elections. This

deal included distribution of Kadet literature among workers by SD activists.7>'! In Kharkov the Kadets had the support of a workers’

The Kadet Bloc 199 organization, the “‘Nonparty Union of Workers” (Vnepartiinyi Soiuz Rabochikh), which had 1,500—2,000 members.*> There was one, apparently unique, case of a bloc between Kadets and Octobrists in the elections. This occurred in Tula, where the two parties cooperated to block the victory of Count V. A. Bobrinskii’s extreme rightwing party ‘For Tsar and Order” in the special city elections. The Kadets and Octobrists published a joint list of candidate-electors, got a majority in the electoral assembly, and elected their candidate, Prince G. E. Lvov, to the Duma.*°? The existence of a rather powerful right-wing party (its strength

due in part to the help of the local administration) had made this bloc possible, drawing the more conservative elements out of the Octobrist union and encouraging cooperation with the Kadets on the part of the moderates who were left. Ironically, Bobrinskii’s party was all the while officially a

constituent member of the Union of October 17. Some of the blocs in which the Kadets participated were set up quite early in the campaign and involved coordinated agitation throughout the campaign period; others came later, just in time for the parties to agree on a common list of candidates for electors’ seats; and in a few cases the allies came together only as electors to agree on common action in the electoral

assemblies. The last situation obtained in Volynia, Viatka, and Poltava. The main function of the blocs formed in the campaign period was to put up a united list of candidates for the electors’ seats. Relations in these blocs were not always smooth. Wherever the Kadets felt themselves to be the strongest element in a bloc, they understandably tried to obtain the support of other groups at the least possible cost, particularly in terms of electors’ and deputies’ seats. This caused friction on a number of occasions and nearly led to dissolution in a few cases. A situation similar to the one in Saratov mentioned earlier nearly occurred, for example, in Ufa, where the Kadets had been campaigning together with the Muslim Nationalist party.

After cooperating fully in the early stages of the elections, they began to

quarrel over the distribution of the deputies’ seats. The Kadets had demanded a majority of them, but when it became clear that a majority of the electors (76/146) were Muslims, the Kadets were compelled to yield six of the ten seats to the Muslim Nationalists (although two of these deputies were apparently Kadets as well).2°* Similar cases, involving the Jewish

Union, occurred in Simferopol and Odessa, and in Kharkov the bloc between the Kadets and the Jewish Union almost collapsed when the union considered boycotting the elections in protest against administrative interference with the campaign.”°°

The Kadet Bloc in the capitals The extraordinary complexity of the political landscape in Petersburg and Moscow, where a number of small parties stood between the Kadets and

200 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign their major opponents to both right and left, made the possibilities for both cooperation and competition with other political groups particularly great there.

The elections in Petersburg were essentially contested between two blocs: the Progressive bloc, led by the Kadets and including, in addition to them, the St. Petersburg group of Polish voters, the Jewish Union, and the

Peasants’ party (a local party restricted to the city and province of St. Petersburg); and the Constitutional-Monarchist bloc, comprising the Octobrists, the TIP, the Progressive-Economic party, and the party of Legal Order. No other political groupings were of much significance in attracting votes.

The Kadet Petersburg party, which was enormously stronger than any other member-parties of the Progressive bloc, had a party plebiscite and published its list of candidates for the Duma seats allotted to Petersburg on March 10, even before the bloc’s list of candidate-electors had been drawn up. The party leaders had ostensibly decided to proceed in this way so that voters, when voting the bloc’s list of candidate-electors, would know who these electors were going to send to the Duma; in this respect the Petersburg elections came close to being direct elections for known Duma candidates, with the intervening elections amounting to a formality. But it is evident that the procedure was also considered a necessary disciplinary measure for what was anticipated would be a diverse group of bloc-sponsored electors.7°® To be sure, the alliance with the Poles and the Jewish Union, the most important partners in the bloc, had been consummated early enough so that their representatives had been able to sit in on the drawing up of the

long list of Duma candidates by the central committee and then to participate in the plebiscite that narrowed it down, but this order of things could only mean that the allotment of portions of the candidates’ list for the electors’ seats to the junior partners in the bloc could have little significance so far as the final outcome of the elections was concerned. Nevertheless,

even with the issue of the identity of the Duma deputies preresolved, participation by representatives of the junior partners in the preliminary stages of the elections assured that their views would have a hearing in Kadet circles. For the Kadets this participation, up to and including allotting part of

the electors’ seats to bloc partners, was a way of gaining support in the Polish and Jewish constituencies of voters. The cost of this advantage was not high to the Kadets: the Polish group, which was reported to have about 5,000 members, was content with their promise to include an unspecified

number of Poles in the list of candidate-electors.*°’ The support of the Jewish Union, which claimed to control over 6,000 votes and had among its

members many prominent persons, came higher: one elector-candidate from each precinct on the bloc’s list, and one Duma deputy. The Kadets had every reason to accept these conditions because of the size and anticipated

The Kadet Bloc 201 discipline of the Jewish vote, because the party would probably have put up most of the union’s candidate-electors as its own, anyway, and because the

union’s candidate for the Duma, Maksim Vinaver, was a prominent member of the Kadet leadership and the party’s own choice.*°® The Peasants’ party, a newcomer to the bloc with only 283 members in the city and 2,195 in the province, cooperated in return for two candidateelectors on the bloc’s list. The low cost of its cooperation to the Kadets, together with the fact that its program was essentially a copy of the Kadet

program with some added emphasis on the agrarian platform, caused speculation as to whether the creation of this “‘party’’ was not merely a device to allow certain persons to gain prominence and influence in Kadet councils.*°” The question of personalities was undoubtedly involved in the failure of

the Progressive bloc to gain the cooperation of the small Democratic Reforms and Free Thinkers Parties. The first of these stood slightly to the right of the Kadets programmatically and the second perhaps slightly to their left, but in neither case were there great differences on any fundamental issues.?©° In early March it had seemed as if both these parties would join

the bloc; it was even announced in the papers that the pact had been concluded and was only awaiting ratification by the committees of the bloc’s constituent parties, and that a common list of candidates was under discussion.7°! But all these negotiations fell through, essentially because neither of the small parties would bind themselves to have all electors from

the bloc list obliged to vote for the same Duma candidates. They also disputed the number of candidate-electors to be assigned to members of their parties in the common list. Despite the limited number of voters these parties were likely to draw, the Kadets were worried about the two parties’ decision to run their own common list of candidates because they feared that the prominent names on it would lead to ticket splitting by voters who were otherwise likely to vote the straight Progressive ticket. The Kadet press was flooded with warnings that such ticket splitting could only play into the

hands of the Octobrists.*° The two parties differed so little from the Kadets that their lack of cooperation should probably be attributed to the desire to play a more prominent role in the political life of the capital than would have been

possible in the ranks of the Kadet party, which had no shortage of prominent men. This seems especially clear in the case of the Party of Democratic Reforms, with figures like Maksim Kovalevskii and K. K. Arsenev at its head. Both had long been accustomed to having an outlet for their personal views on current affairs—Arsenev as editor in charge of the internal affairs section of Vestnik Evropy, and Kovalevskii as a widely read

publicist. The initiative for forming the party came from Arsenev, and Kovalevskii took up the role of its chief publicist as editor of Strana.*° The election campaign in Petersburg generated yet another party,

202 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign whose main purpose was to provide a political alternative to the Kadets for “democratic intelligentsia” or “‘nonparty socialists” outside the SD and SR parties. This was the Radical party, whose program was worked out and adopted at a constituent congress held on November 3, 1905.*°* For a few

weeks in late January and early February 1906, the party published a weekly paper, Radikal, which was edited by the party founder, the lawyer M. S. Margulies.*©° Radikal elaborated on the main points of the party program. It called for a democratic republic (“‘in its pure form, together with the socialist 'parties”’), convocation of the constituent assembly, broad national-political‘'autonomy for the borderlands, the minimum program of

the socialist parties in regard to labor, and a much more radical land redistribution than that provided in the Kadet program, without, however, providing for the elimination of private property in land. The leaders of the Radical party also entered negotiations with the

Kadets about running a common slate of candidates in the Petersburg elections, and also failed to come to terms with them, in this case principally

over differences about the number of places on the list to be allotted to Radicals. In the end, however, the Radical party in effect came around to supporting the Kadet ticket by abstaining, unlike the Democratic ReformFree Thinkers bloc, from putting up their own candidates’ list.2®° As the paper Peterburgskaia gazeta had predicted in early March, the Radicals in the end had to support the Kadets even though they were the furthest from them on the independent left short of the SDs and SRs. They were simply too small, despite the considerable moral authority of their Duma candidates, Margulies and Professor A. S. Trachevskii. Eventually the organizers of the Radical party drifted into the Bez zaglaviia group of Kuskova and Prokopovich, the soon-to-be-created Popular Socialist party, or the established revolutionary parties, depending on individual ideological orientations.*°” It is a moot question whether the Radical party might have become a more considerable factor in Petersburg politics had it been permitted to agitate as freely as the Kadets—the administration did not allow them to have legal meetings, and their newspaper was closed down after a few weeks in early February.

Another manifestation of the peculiar complexity of the Petersburg political scene was the role played in the election campaign by the Union of Unions and several nonparty coalitions of ‘“‘voters of the left.”” The Union of

Unions Petersburg branch, or the “Petersburg Union of Unions” with its own central committee, had come into existence during the October days of 1905 to help coordinate the general strike in the capital.2°* By early January

the Petersburg union was aspiring to carry on the task of the Union of Liberation, “‘to unite all progressive-oppositional elements of the population on the basis of the demand for the constituent assembly and a universal

suffrage law,’’ but more concretely to agitate for participation in the elections so as to assure the election of Duma deputies who would devote themselves exclusively to passing the law for convening the constituent

The Kadet Bloc 203 assembly. The union’s proclaimed aim was “‘to use the election campaign for pursuit of the goals of the liberation movement.”*°’ In Kolomna and

Liteinyi precincts, at least, the union group cooperated in a “temporary election committee”’ with the Kadets, the Free Thinkers, and the Radical party in a voter-registration campaign.*”° The adoption by the fourth and last congress of the All-Russian Union of Unions held on the Imatra River in Finland, January 14-16, 1906, of a resolution in favor of boycotting the elections was reluctantly adhered to by

the Petersburg organization, which had taken part in the congress as a constituent member. This decision led to the disintegration of the united unions movement in Petersburg. There is no more news in the capital papers

about its activities after the congress,””’ although individual Petersburg unions, such as the Union of Engineers, and individual leaders of the Union of Unions continued to pursue the same goals of getting out the “‘progressive” vote, now acting through such groups as the ‘““Committee of the Left”’ on Vasilevskii Ostrov, or the ““Nonparty Organization of Left Elements of

Moscow Precinct,” and so on.7’* The radical newspaper Nasha zhizn’, which had been generally supportive of the “left liberationist” position in the early stages of the campaign, came out on March 15 for the Kadet ticket as that of “‘the only party that satisfies the elementary demands of liberalism and democratism.”’ By that time it was clear that no viable alternative to the

left of the Kadets existed for those who intended to participate in the elections.

In Moscow the party situation in the election campaign was less complex than in Petersburg, and the Kadets more completely dominated the campaign in the entire spectrum between the Octobrists and the boycotting revolutionary parties. As in Petersburg three lists of candidate-electors were run in the elections, except that the third one in this case was the list of the

Monarchist party. The Octobrists and TIP put up a common list, and the Party of Democratic Reforms and its close ally the Independents’ Club supported the Kadets in Moscow: they did not put up their own list of candidates and appealed to the electorate to vote the Kadet ticket. The Moscow branch of the party had been set up too late, just a week or so before the elections, to draw up a list of its own candidates, and at a meeting held on March 19 its members contemplated two alternatives: to support a combined list of the best men from the Kadet and Octobrist-bloc lists, or to

support the Kadet list. The second alternative was chosen by a large majority on the grounds that the Kadets had many respectable progressive candidates on their list, whereas Shipov was the only acceptable candidate on the list of the Octobrist bloc.?”* The Party of Democratic Reforms was joined in this tactic by the small Progressive party (Progressivnaia Partiia), with which it merged about the same time.*”* The remarkable early organizational success of the Kadet party, in the absence of a tradition of open political parties and before the creation of a

204 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign national parliament, was built primarily on the networks of communication established by the zemstvo-congress movement and the Union of Liberation—especially the former in the zemstvo provinces, where the union itself owed much to the zemstvo network. (This network in its turn depended on

the recently constructed rail network that linked most of the provincial

capitals to Moscow and Petersburg; without it, the kind of political mobilization that occurred in 1905 generally, and the general strike of October in particular, would have been impossible.) The warnings of Witte and other agents of the imperial bureaucracy about the political implica-

tions of the zemstvos were not unfounded. In the borderlands the Kadet presence was linked to national-minority organizations, many of them created only in the course of the Revolution of 1905S.

With regard to both their party organization and their campaign strategy, the Kadets clearly aspired to be a “‘mass party”’: they elaborated a formal program and a concept of party membership and discipline in terms essentially similar to the new mass parties, especially the socialist parties, of

western and central Europe. Similar in this respect as well was their intention of maintaining a centrally controlled hierarchy of party networks

around the country for permanent political agitation and propaganda, rather than mere temporary election committees.*”. In their campaign strategy the Kadets clearly sought to attract mass support, especially among the peasantry. Both the unprecedented level of mass political participation reached by late 1905 and the relatively democratic suffrage system installed in December indicated that the Kadets’ long-term prospects depended on their ability to build a mass following. Before the first elections, of course,

they were massively hindered in this effort, to some extent by their own resources, but especially by government interference. Kadet campaigning was mostly restricted to the cities and towns; they accordingly attached great importance to the prospect of agitating among the peasant electors in the provincial electoral assemblies. The top party leadership was a close-knit elite group of zemstvo and professional men, mostly of the same generation of the eighties and of longstanding acquaintance in the zemstvo movement and the Union of Liberation. The provincial leadership resembled the top leadership to a considerable degree, although the professional middle class more clearly outnumbered the zemstvo-gentry element there. The party rank and file, by contrast, was overwhelmingly urban: largely drawn from the intelligentsia of lower status professions than those represented in the leadership, and with a fair admixture of salaried employees, clerks, and the like. Workers and peasants were few and far between in party ranks.

The success of the Kadets in recruiting among the ‘‘democratic intelligentsia” was a source of both strength and weakness for the party: on

the one hand it made it possible for the party to campaign actively throughout the country, especially in the smaller towns, on a scale that

The Kadet Bloc 205 would otherwise have been out of the question; and it gave them the prospect, at least, of being able to agitate in the villages. On the other hand, this success produced a dichotomy between “leaders” and “followers” that

created considerable tension within the party. Local party groups often tended to be more radical and impatient than the central party leaders. An analogous problem faced the Kadet leaders as a result of their extensive dependence in the borderlands on nationalities whose social characteristics and political aspirations were also often different from those of the Kadet

leaders. As a result, the exigencies of “party building” tended to favor policies and actions that did not always coincide with the leaders’ own convictions. If the Kadet party showed itself to be less than a well-integrated whole in the first months of its existence, the election campaign revealed hostilities and antagonisms within the mobilized population at large that went beyond

the usual conventions of campaign rhetoric and pointed to divisions that

rendered unlikely the prospect of a solid front against the reviving autocracy. On the left, representatives of the revolutionary parties took every opportunity to denounce the Kadets as the party of the bourgeoisie and the gentry masters, regardless of the Kadets’ own tactic of “no enemies to the left.” In their turn, the Kadets’ denunciations in similar terms of all parties to their right, including the Octobrists, only deepened the conviction in that quarter that the Kadets were essentially the same as the revolution-

aries and that, consequently, any cooperation with them against the government was out of the question.

The Octobrist Bloc The Central Organs in the Election Campaign The Union’s Statutes: Membership, Organization, Party Discipline The only version of Octobrist statutes in existence before the first elections was that worked out by the Petersburg branch of the central committee and circulated among the Octobrist leaders in late November. These statutes stipulated in general terms that members of the Union of October 17 were obliged to adhere to the basic provisions of its program, and reserved for the central committee the prerogative of dealing with other political groups and organizations.’ One of the main purposes of the first Octobrist congress in February, in

the view of a majority of the central-committee group, had been the strengthening of the union’s organization and its development into a proper

political party, and one of the three specific items put on the congress agenda in advance by the central committee was a review of the organization and general situation of the union. But only on the fourth day of the congress (February 11) was a report by V. M. Petrovo-Solovovo heard on aspects of the union’s statutes. Following the report it was decided that because of lack of time the statutes “in their Petersburg redaction” should continue to serve as the union’s statutes until a later congress could review them properly.* The congress did adopt, however, what was in effect an amendment to the Petersburg statutes after hearing the tactical report by Kuzminskii: conditions for acceptance of individuals and groups into the union were stipulated, in negative terms. Unacceptable for admission were (1) those who did not accept constitutional monarchy; (2) those who did not strive for realization of the liberties promised in the October Manifesto; (3) those who did not recognize the integrity and indivisibility of Russia,

“with equality for all nationalities”; and (4) those who supported the demand for summoning a constituent assembly. No requirements in regard to other parts of the Octobrist program were mentioned. It was up to the

central committee to decide whether already-existing parties met these conditions and could be admitted to the union.” Although few and broadly stated, these conditions for membership by individuals and groups were very often ignored by local branches of the

The Octobrist Bloc 207 union before the first elections, and there is no sign that the central committee made any effort to enforce them. The most notable case illustrating the weakness of party discipline and the central committee’s evident unwilllingness to enforce that discipline was that of the chairmen of five west-Russian committees (Minsk, Vilno, Warsaw, Riga, and lurev) who carried to the tsar in an audience on March 9 the defeated proposal of the first congress’s subcommittee on the nationalities question, which had called for proportional representation by nationalities and a guarantee of Russian

representation in the border provinces. The central committee did not consider the case until the end of June, and then, despite Miliutin’s energetic denunciation of this action as a flagrant violation of party discipline and his

demand for expulsion of the western chairmen from the union, it took no official action.* It does appear that all admissions of independently constituted parties or other organizations were made through the central committee. Judging

from some of the cases about the country, the criteria for admission set down in the interim statutes and the tactical report seem to have been rather

casually applied. The central committee did at least take seriously the responsibility of keeping track of the constituent groups and parties of the union, and for that purpose drew up an official roster of the constituents of the Union of October 17.° So far as the tactical question of electoral alliances with nonconstituent organizations was concerned, the Octobrist congress laid down an official position only in relation to the Kadet party: no cooperation with the Kadets was possible, because they were political opportunists, secret republicans, and rabble-rousers (the accusations made in the earlier central committee meeting by Krasovskii).© No analogous strictures were made in regard to

parties standing to the right of the Octobrists, despite the Moscow leadership’s attempt to have the congress do so, and local Octobrist groups

went on to conclude alliances during the campaign with apparently complete freedom—on quite a few occasions, with groups whose constitutionalist credentials were doubtful at best. A few cases were reported of local groups consulting with representatives of the central committee about

the propriety of alliances, as well as cases of independent rejection of alliances by local groups with parties that were considered to be too far to the right.

Organization of the Union’s Local Groups and the First Election Campaign The process of formation of the union’s local groups was virtually complete by the time the first Octobrist congress gathered. Shipov had been right in claiming that because of its lateness the organizational role of the congress

would be negligible, at least in the perspective of preparing for the first

208 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign election campaign. It was generally recognized at the congress that the process of formation of local groups, which had been going on before then on a rather impressive scale, had been a development essentially independent of the central party organs. ‘‘Provincial branches,” Miliutin reported to

the Petersburg central committee in late January, “are being created spontaneously, like mushrooms after the rain; we learn about their appearance only afterward, sometimes even accidentally.”’ Essentially the

same remark was made by Guchkov and others at the first congress. The only significant role of the central committee groups in the election campaign outside the capitals and their environs—where they doubled as local leadership groups—lay in the area of propaganda. This was primarily a matter of the production and distribution of popular party literature to local groups for their agitational use. The Petersburg central-committee branch was more active than the Moscow branch on the literary front, publishing and distributing popularized broadsides and pamphlets that stressed those

aspects of the Octobrist program and general outlook that have already been noted: their version of the fundamental significance of the October Manifesto; the need to combat anarchy and restore order; the importance of participating in the forthcoming elections; the significance of the monarchy and the state; the integrity of the empire. The most popular of these tracts was a leaflet called ““On the State Duma” (O Gosudarstvennoi Dume), a simple explication of the parliamentary system, which was published in 1,108,000 copies by the Petersburg party committee before being repub-

lished by the Moscow branch and a number of local groups. In all, the distribution of this leaflet alone was estimated by Miliutin in his report on the party’s publishing activities at the end of January to have reached 4 or 5 million copies by that time.®? Other Petersburg Octobrist publications with

editions in the hundreds of thousands (they were also widely copied) included “A Talk about: Freedom and Inviolability of Person” (Beseda o svobode i neprikosnovennosti lichnosti) and “On Strikes” (O stachkakh i

zabastovkakh). Like the tract on parliament, these were not, strictly speaking, party-progammatic in character. The total output of the Petersburg branch alone had reached 3 million copies before the end of January

1906. The central committee’s publishing expenses, and its general operating

expenses as well, were covered by donations from wealthy members or supporters in business and finance, mostly in Petersburg. Like the Kadets. the Octobrists appear to have taken in virtually nothing from their local groups. ’°

Like their Kadet counterparts, the Petersburg and Moscow Octobrist

centers had speakers’ or agitation-propaganda bureaus set up for the campaign effort in the capitals and elsewhere. Although several central committee members went out to speak at meetings arranged by local groups to which they were themselves attached, the institution of touring orators

The Octobrist Bloc 209 from the center was much less developed among the Octobrists than in the Kadets’ campaign. F. N. Plevako, the prominent Moscow trial lawyer who

was probably the Octobrists’ best-known orator, traveled to several provinces during the campaign. I. I. Pilenko and M. V. Krasovskii also did some touring; at least they spoke at Octobrist meetings in a few places. Like their Kadet competitors, local Octobrist groups reproduced texts of their

speeches in the newspapers as a form of party propaganda. But these Octobrist speakers from the center were few and far between. More important were speeches delivered by prominent Octobrists in the capitals, which were then distributed to local groups and often turned up in the provincial press. The main themes of Octobrist agitation were developed in these speeches, and they tended to be echoed closely in local Octobrist

oratory. This is particularly clear in the development of the main line of

attack on the Kadets. The same themes, and even phrases, run from Krasovskii’s peroration at the January 29 combined central-committee meeting to speeches at the second congress, to Guchkov’s campaign speeches in Moscow (both the congress speeches and Guchkov’s were given

wide press distribution), all contrasting the Octobrist’s true monarchism, defense of private property, and defense of the unity and integrity of the

empire to the doubtful character of the Kadets’ position on all three subjects; and, with particular emphasis, asserting that the Kadets had sided

with “‘the revolution” during the critical days of late 1905, when it had allegedly seemed to them that they might be swept to power by it."

Local Octobrist Groups Formation and Structure The Octobrist central-committee list of February 14, 1906, recorded the existence of Octobrist branches or at least some kind of local contact in forty-six European provinces and the Don Oblast, in Warsaw, Dagestan,

the Kuban, Terek, Tiflis, and Tomsk. The total number of Octobrist organizations included 53 provincial or oblast committees, about 85 district-level committees, and a small number of other groups in volosts, villages, stanitsy, or hamlets. The list also included the names and locations of 21 “constituent parties” in sixteen provinces, plus Baku.’ A little more

than two weeks after the list was prepared Novoe vremia printed a story

that claimed the Octobrist central committee then had on record 63 provincial-level committees, 150 district-level committees, and 16 constituent parties. It also reported that the union had twenty newspapers at its disposal around the country.’° If it is allowed that the Novoe vremia source

probably lumped together all subprovincial groups in the “district” category, the count is very close to that of the committee list, which is generally confirmed by other sources as well.'*

210 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Behind these impressive numbers lay a policital organization that was generally much less coordinated among its parts and much less active than were the Kadets, and had a total membership that could not have amounted to much more than one fourth of the Kadet membership in the country at the same time; that is, no more than approximately twenty-five thousand.'° Outside European Russia, where the general pattern of Octobrist organizations is rather close to that of the Kadets, the Octobrists had much spottier representation than their rivals to the left—in Warsaw, in the steppe and Caucasus oblasts (but not in Transcaucasia), and in a few Siberian towns. In

all these regions the Octobrists’ influence was virtually imperceptible, apparently restricted to small circles of Russian businessmen and civil servants.

The majority of Octobrist groups appear to have come into existence significantly later than their Kadet counterparts. If most Kadet local groups were established in the course of November and December 1905, the period of greatest Octrobrist activity in this regard began only toward the end of

December and continued into February 1906. The large majority of Octobrist groups that were to come into existence before the first elections were accounted for in the February 14 central committee list.*® Chermenskii claims that the revolutionary events of December were the direct impetus to organization of Octobrist groups around the country; that

is, that they were called into existence to combat “the revolution.” However, there is little more than circumstantial evidence for such a claim.

Perhaps equally important as factors in the peaking of the process of formation of local Octobrist groups was the late announcement of the creation of the union, on the one hand, and the stimulus provided by the announcement of the dates for the elections and the new electoral law, on the other. Moreover, as with the central organization, this local activity was to a large extent probably a response to the organizational activities of the Kadets. Just as the formation of the union and the publication of its appeal

had been precipitated by the formation of the Kadet party and the ““Kadetization” of the zemstvo congresses, so in many of the zemstvo

provinces, Octobrist groups appeared in the process of the political polarization of the zemstvos. This process often seemed to reflect longstanding differences and rivalries among zemtsy.*” Another contributing factor to the lag in the process of Octobrist organization in the provinces relative to the Kadets was the fact that with only few exceptions no minority-nationalist organizations played the kind of “feeder” role they had played for the Kadets. The Octobrists were supported by a few German groups, most notably in Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa.'® There was a single case of support for the Octobrists from the Muslim community—in Nizhnii Novgorod, where a local party united with

the Octobrists and the TIP, the Moderate Progressives, had acquired the support of local Muslim leaders despite the decision at the second Muslim

The Octobrist Bloc 211 congress to support the Kadets. They were brought into the center bloc, which presented a single list of candidate-electors for the Nizhnii Novgorod special election.’”

The Octobrists also had the more or less organized support of Old Believer communities in several provinces: in Vitebsk a “Union of Old Believers”” with headquarters in the provincial capital entered a formal alliance with the Octobrists, and Old Believers were reported to have formed the nucleus of Octobrist constituency in several towns of Kazan province.*° They are also mentioned as a constituent element of several other groups in scattered provinces. However, although the founders’ intention of providing an organizational gathering point for already existing groups and parties had some success, in most places the Union of October 17 had to start from scratch. Where the union did incorporate other groups as “‘constituent parties,” this was usually the result of negotiations between

already-estabished Octobrist groups and these local parties, rather than a matter of the latter simply taking on the function of union organizers.*! Among the few exceptions to this rule were the National Party of October 17 set up by M. V. Rodzianko and others in Ekaterinoslav; the Constitutional-Progressive party in Kiev; Prince Urusov’s Party of Liberty and Order

in Smolensk; A. G. Leliukhin’s Moderate-Progressive party in Iukhnov (Smolensk province); and the Union of Peaceful Struggle in Revel. Guchkov’s intention all along had been to recruit leaders for the new party organization in the provinces among the participants of the November

zemstvo congress. Although only sixteen had signed the Stakhovich resolution at the congress, as many as thirty-two supported at least one part

of the minority position (on two-stage elections), and as many as one hundred—nearly a third of the total attendance—may have attended the

November 8 banquet where Guchkov first read the party’s appeal, indicating that at least limited sympathy for the minority position was considerably more widespread than the signatures it collected would suggest.

The role of the “‘zemstvo minority” in establishing the Octobrist party in the country is elusive of measure, but it was undoubtedly considerable. At

least forty-five of the participants in the 1905 congresses, and probably quite a few more, emerged later as more or less prominent members of local Octobrist groups.?* All the Moscow signers of the Octobrist appeal, with

the exception of Chetverikov and Krestovnikov, were congress veterans, and a majority of them came from provinces other than Moscow.*? Some of the Moscow members, and a number of the Petersburg initiative group, had participated in the 1905 congresses as representatives of town dumas. If one takes only the group of thirty-three veterans of the congresses who can be shown to have been prominent in local Octobrist circles, they nevertheless

represent eighteen different provinces and include a high proportion of holders of prestigious local offices: ten chairmen of zemstvo boards (three

212 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign retired), one provincial marshal of nobility, and two mayors of provincial capitals. Thus the role of the zemstvo congress minority in the formation of the Octobrist organization that is suggested by their geographical distribution alone is reenforced by what is known of the participation of zemtsy in the founding of local groups.?* Most prominent members of the zemstvo congress minority went on to become prominent Octobrists, although a few appear to have dropped out of sight during the campaign period, and at least one, A. V. Kucherov of Kharkov, emerged as a Duma deputy on the far right. Whereas nearly half of the original Kadet initiative group made it into the Duma as deputies, the proportion of Octobrist initiators to do so was much smaller: the entire delegation consisted of only twelve to sixteen deputies, and of these only Stakhovich, Count Geiden, and Prince N. S. Volkonskii came from the union’s central committee group. Only one other Octobrist deputy came from the larger congress minority group: Prince G. G. Gagarin of Moscow (who was not, incidentally, the union’s choice).?°

In order to assess the role of zemtsy and the zemstvo institutions generally in the establishment and early activities of the Octobrist party in the provinces, one must turn to what is known of the local party leaders.

Membership Characterists The provincial leadership. The majority of identifiable Octobrist leaders

either were zemtsy or occupied important zemstvo positions, such as chairmanships of zemstvo boards, in about half of the thirty-four zemstvo provinces: in the district groups of Moscow and Petersburg, in Ekaterinoslav, Olonets, Orel, Penza, Poltava, Pskov, Riazan, Samara, Tambov, Tula, Kharkov, Chernigov, and laroslavl.

In Ekatertnoslav the initiative in setting up the “National Party of October 17,” which soon transformed itself into a branch of the Octobrist

union, came from M. V. Rodzianko, then chairman of the provincial zemstvo board. In Olonets the head of the Octobrist group was the long-

time zemstvo board chairman V. V. Savelev, who ran the provincial committee out of his office. In Orel and Pskov groups appear to have been established at the initiative of the most prominent local zemstvo-nobles, M.

A. Stakhovich and Count Geiden respectively. In Riazan province, the home base of Prince Volkonskii (who was not active there himself), the Octobrist leaders included the chairman of the provincial zemstvo board, two district board chairmen, and several provincial zemstvo deputies; at

least three of them were regular participants in the 1905 zemstvo congresses. In Samara the Octobrist leader was the provincial zemstvo board chairman, A. I. Naumov, and most of the other leaders were zemtsy, partners in a rivalry with the zemstvo “‘left”’ that antedated the formation of

parties by some years.2° The Tambov group was led by the long-time

The Octobrist Bloc 213 zemstvo activist V. M. Petrovo-Solovovo (at the time also marshal of nobility in Tambov district) and included the provincial zemstvo board chairman, V. I. Komsin. In Tula, although the general political orientation of the provincial zemstvo was distinctly to the right of the Octobrists, most of the Octobrist leaders were zemstvo nobles.?’ In Kharkov province the Octobrist chairman was a provincial zemstvo deputy (P. P. Dobroselskii), and other leaders included the chairman of the Kharkov district zemstvo board (S. N. Lintvarev) and a district marshal of nobility (V. A. Bantysh of Izium). In Chernigov, the home province of Senator M. V. Krasovskii, one of the first signers of the Octobrist appeal, the group chairman was Count Musin-Pushkin, and another prominent leader was lu. N. Glebov, a provincial deputy and member of the 1905 congress minority. In the provinces of Kostroma, Orel, Iaroslavl, and one or two others, there is evidence that zemtsy were among the union’s founders, but they either appear to have been considerably outnumbered by nonzemtsy or the evidence is too scanty to afford a clear idea of the role of zemstvo men in the formation of these groups.

In many of the provinces where the formation of local Octobrist Organizations appears to have centered around the zemstvo, nonzemtsy were also prominent participants, and other institutional frameworks, particularly the town administrations and to a lesser degree the noble corporations, contributed to Octobrist ranks. There were quite a few marshals of nobility among the Octobrist leaders in these provinces: P. V. Kamenskii in Ekaterinoslav, V. V. Tatarinov in Tula, and G. N. Navrotskii in Poltava were all marshals, as were Stakhovich, Geiden, and PetrovoSolovovo, in addition to being prominent zemtsy. In Poltava, Octobrist

leaders included the mayor of Kremenchug, the senior doctor in the provincial zemstvo hospital, a doctor in the town hospital, a lawyer, and a

notary.2® The Riazan party leaders counted a majority of dumtsy and professional people—the mayors of two district towns, a government official (A. V. Eropkin, who was also a local landowner), several town duma

deputies, and two lawyers.”” In Tambov the half-dozen most prominent party leaders included, among others, the director of the treasury office (P. N. Kutler) and the mayor of Morshchansk.°° In about a dozen zemstvo provinces, the origins if not the membership of Octobrist groups seem to have lain for the most part outside the zemstvo milieu; here the town dumas may have supplied the kinds of contacts provided by the zemstvo institutions in other provinces. In Bessarabia the Kishinev group was founded by M. O. Tiugriumov, director of the local branch of the State Bank, and the first party council elected at a general party meeting on January 22 consisted of two doctors and a treasury official

in addition to Tiugriumov.*’ In Vladimir the members of the Octobrist “provincial bureau” included a tradesman (the group’s chairman, N. A. [asnopolskii), the director of the local branch of the International Bank, a

214 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign factory director, a factory owner, and a worker.°* The Octobrist leaders in Vologda were the town elder, Pulkin, the owner of a small creamery, and

the appropriately named zemskii nachal’nik, Karaulov (“guard”). One future Octobrist from Vologda, who stood as Octobrist candidate in the urban curia, attended the 1905 zemstvo congresses: A. K. Eremeev.°° According to Voronezhskoe slovo (A. I. Shingarev’s Kadet paper), the founder of the Voronezh Octobrish branch was P. M. Kuranov, a store owner and mayor of Boguchar. The group’s other leaders included, along with A. I. Urusul, the chairman of the provincial zemstvo board, a lawyer

and town deputy in Voronezh, and a teacher. (Urusul and the lawyer, Petrovskii, had both attended the 1905 congresses, the latter as a delegate from the Voronezh duma.)** In Kazan the chairman of the local organizing committee was P. I. Krotov, a professor at the university; another member of the committee and editor of the pro-Octobrist newspaper Obnovlenie, B. V. Varneke, was also a university professor. Most of the other Octobrist leaders in Kazan appear to have been Russian businessmen, although the provincial zemstvo board chairman and a former board chairman were also listed among them and at least three Kazan zemtsy attending the 1905 congresses became Octobrists.°> The chairman of the Kursk provincial committee, Anoshchenko, was a medical doctor. The committee also included several businessmen and chinovniki, and a district marshal of nobility.°® The chairman of the Nizhnii Novgorod Octobrist committee was the head of the local exchange (birzha), and the rest of the local leadership seems to have been made up of business

and professional people.*’ The leaders of the Saratov group were mostly lawyers, although they included in their number one district marshal, and one of the lawyers, A. O. Nemirovskii, was also mayor of Saratov and a delegate from the town duma to the 1905 congresses, where he became a member of the town-duma section of the organizing bureau.** In Simbirsk, where Octobrist activity was apparently restricted by the administration exclusively to the capital town, the group seems to have been set up by

professional people, at least some of whom were town deputies.°” In Tauride province the Octobrist organization was established by a group of professional and business people, at least several of whom were active in

town administrations. One of them, Fr. N. Bortaevskii, the group’s candidate for the Duma and coeditor of its newspaper, was an Orthodox priest and missionary.*° Much the same makeup, with a predominance of businessmen, obtained in the Stavropol group, which was set up almost on the eve of the preliminary elections by several large merchants, a priest, and the director of the city bank.** In Tver the Octobrists were also primarily an urban organization. The leadership included the mayors of the provincial capital and of a district town (Rzhev). In general the Octobrist organization

centered around the town administrations and did best in the urban

elections in Tver; whereas the zemstvo, contrary to the usual pattern, was

The Octobrist Bloc 215 rather exclusively the reserve of the Kadets in that province. Finally, there were two zemstvo provinces, Viatka and Ufa, where the Octobrists lacked representation altogether. In sum, it seems fair to say that in the zemstvo provinces the zemstvo congress minority and zemtsy generally played an important and sometimes

dominant but rarely exclusive role in the establishment of Octobrist organizations and in providing them with leaders. In many provinces leadership positions were shared by urban, nongentry elements, very often

people in business and the professions with experience in the town administrations. Outside the zemstvo provinces the union of October 17, which was by

and large a party of Russians, tended on the whole to be quite weakly represented; in those areas where both landowning and business were generally in the hands of non-Russians, Octobrist groups were organized, if

at all, by urban professionals and civil servants. In Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Orenburg, Volynia, Vilno, and Kovno, Octobrist representation was minimal and almost entirely restricted to the provincial capital. In Kurland and Estland there were no Octobrist groups at all. In the remaining nonzemstvo provinces, only Vitebsk and the Don Oblast could claim relatively extensive and intense Octobrist activity. In those provinces of the western perimeter where Russians constituted half or better of the landed nobility (Volynia and Podolia in the Southwest and Mogilev in the West), Octobrist groups were set up and run primarily

by Russian Orthodox landowners.** Elsewhere in the West, Octobrist organizations were the work of urban Russians, professional people and especially government employees. The Grodno branch of the Octobrist union, according to a February 14, 1906, account in Vremia, consisted “exclusively of Russian chinovniki.” In Minsk, too, the Octobrist branch was apparently organized by chinovniki; its leaders included an archpriest, a retired police chinovnik, the director of the Minsk branch of the State Bank, a doctor, a lawyer, and a gymnasium teacher.*°

In Vitebsk one of the largest Octobrist organizations outside zemstvo

Russia was founded by a young teacher in the Orthodox theological seminary, Bogdanovich. Most of his associates appear to have been Russian

professional people. In one district group of the province, Dvinsk, the Octobrists were reported to have a Jewish contingent—a unique case, if true.** In Kiev the Octobrists claimed to have, in addition to the regional committee for the Southwest, local branches in eleven towns and hamlets before the elections, none of which showed any signs of life during the campaign, however. The only persons identified by occupation in DmitrievMamonov’s report on party activities in Kiev province were a professor, a doctor, and an editor of the newspaper Novyi vek. The list of candidateelectors for the Kiev special city elections put up by the Octobrists in a bloc

216 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign with the local “Constitutionalist-Progressive party” consisted mainly of professional people.* The Octobrist groups in the large towns of Rostov, Novocherkassk, and Taganrog in the Don Oblast appear to have been set up primarily by Russian professional people. In Rostov, at least, many of these were town duma deputies and officials of the town administration.*° In Taganrog district the group was reported to count among its members “‘the better part

of the [Russian] pomeshchiki,” but the leaders included a gymnasium teacher, a lawyer, and a “peasant,” in addition to a justice of the peace (almost undoubtedly a Russian noble landowner) and a “nobleman.” Of 101 provincial Octobrist leaders identifiable by occupation, the free

professions account for 25, with doctors and lawyers predominating.*” Another 15 were men in business.*® The remainder included 8 chinovniki, 3

zemskie nachal’niki, 18 zemtsy (6 chairmen of provincial zemstvo boards and 3 chairmen of district boards, 2 members of provincial boards and 1 district board member, and 6 provincial zemstvo deputies), 1 provincial marshal of nobility and 9 district marshals, 9 mayors, 4 members of town

dumas, 2 “landowners,” 5 Orthodox clerics, 1 peasant, and 1 worker. Chermenskii introduces figures on the social composition of thirteen “provincial committees” (in fact, five provincial and eight district committees), mostly of the central-industrial region and the Northwest. The 145

persons constituting the membership of these committees included 41 “industrialists and tradesmen,” 33 chinovniki, 20 “‘persons of the indepen-

dent professions,” 15 pomeshchiki, 10 “salaried employees” (with no distinction between government and private employ), 8 teachers, 8 meshchane, 5 priests, 3 peasants, and 2 workers.*” Although the available information on Octobrist leaders in the provinces is scanty and as usual tends to underrepresent zemstvo and noble associations, it does afford some idea of the breadth of occupational variety among the union’s provincial leadership. Like that of the Kadet party, the

Octobrist leadership included a sizable proportion of professional men, with doctors and lawyers prominent among them. This was true of the majority of zemstvo provinces as well as of the nonzemstvo areas. It is clear, however, that the zemstvo-noble element was considerably more significant

in the Octobrist leadership than in the Kadet. Groups of noble zemtsy, marshals of nobility, and zemskie nachal’niki are encountered more frequently in the Octobrist groups in the zemstvo provinces, and outside them Russian nobles are a significant part of the Octobrist leadership in much of the western perimeter, an element almost entirely lacking in the Kadet leadership of the same areas. The corporate-noble, as contrasted to the zemstvo-noble, contingent is fairly important in the Octobrist provincial leadership groups; it is almost nonexistent among the Kadets. By the same token, businessmen of one kind or another are much more frequently encountered among provincial Octobrist leaders than among the

The Octobrist Bloc 217 Kadets. So are government officials. In several provinces, particularly in the West, the Octobrist groups were dominated by government functionaries. Another element fairly well represented in the Octobrist leadership, and virtually lacking in the Kadet leadership, was the Orthodox clergy.

By contrast, although there were a few professors in the Octobrist groups of most university towns, they were much less in evidence than in the corresponding Kadet committees, and with one apparent exception academics nowhere played the leading role they did in the Kadet committees of the capitals and most other university towns.°? Women, who were present in quite modest but noticeable numbers and positions in the Kadet leadership were, so far as one can tell, entirely absent from the Octobrist leadership at all levels.

The Party Rank and File The characteristics of the broader reaches of Octobrist membership beyond the leadership groups are even more difficult to assess than in the case of the Kadets. Detailed breakdowns of group memberships are virtually nonexistent, and the information on the occupational status of Octobrist candidate-

electors for the special city elections is available for fewer cities. Furthermore, where available, it is for the most part embodied in lists of candidates of a center bloc that included members of the business parties, primarily the TIP, as well as of the Union of October 17 and its constituent organizations proper. For lack of anything better, the information on the

Octobrist-bloc candidates for the city elections nevertheless deserves examination. Table 2 presents the occupational-status characteristics of 604 Octobrist-bloc candidates for the special elections in seven cities (Rostov/ Don, Kazan, Kiev, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Odessa, and St. Peters-

burg), grouped, with certain minor adjustments, in descending order of significance according to the same categories as the Kadet candidates in Table 1. A number of interesting comparisons may be made between these figures on the Octobrist bloc’s candidates in the country’s largest urban centers and the corresponding Kadet figures. One of the most notable distinctions between the two groups, however, is not conveyed by the figures: unlike the Kadet candidates, the Octobrist-bloc candidates almost everywhere appear to have been Russians, and Orthodox. This was as true of the candidates of ethnically diverse Kazan as it was of Moscow, and there were very few exceptions to the rule, principally a few Germans who found their way onto the Octobrist ticket in several cities as members of special

German groups of the Union of October 17. The most obvious difference in the professional-occupational status of

the Octobrist-bloc group is the leading place in it of people engaged in various kinds of business activities—taken together they account for nearly

218 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Table 2 Octobrist Bloc Candidate-Electors for the Separate City Elections.

Occupation/Profession Number Percent

1. Merchants 83 13:7 2. Chinovniki 65 10.7 3. Factory owners 59 eT.

4. Salaried employees, private 506.1 8.2 5. Medical doctors 37 6. Engineers and technologists 33 5.4

7. Professors 31 om | 8. Lawyers ZL 3.6

9. Orthodox clergy 15 23 10. Justices of the peace 14 a3 11. Teachers, educators991.5 1.5 12. Bookkeepers 13. Town duma administrators 8 1.3

14. Shop foremen 7 12 15. Landowners 66 1.0 16. Third element 1.0 17. Retired officers 6 1.0

18. Artisans 5 0.8

Note: (See also explanatory note to Table 1.) In five of the seven cities for which Octobrist bloc candidates’ lists were available, in whole or in part, the lists were put up by the Octobrists in coalition with one or more other parties: in Kazan with the TIP and PLO; in Moscow with the TIP; in Nizhnii Novgorod with the Moderate Progressives; in Odessa with the TIP and a local German group; and in Petersburg with UTI, PLO, and the Progressive Economic party. In Kiev and Rostov/Don, the Octobrists stood alone. With the exception of Moscow and Petersburg, where the number of candidacies was apparently divided equally between the parties participating in the blocs, the manner of dividing up the places on the lists, if any, is unknown, and in no case is it possible to identify the party affiliation within the bloc

half the total, in contrast to the 10-15 percent of the Kadet candidates. Even

if one restricts the comparison to the merchant and factory owner categories, the proportions are 23.3 percent for the Octobrists and 9.7 percent for the Kadets. It is very likely, of course, that a large part of the “big bourgeoisie” entered the Octobrist-bloc list from the business parties,

particularly the TIP, rather than directly from the Octobrist union. It is in any case remarkable that the proportional gain of the merchant and factory owner group in the Octobrist lists in relation to the Kadet lists is

almost exactly balanced by attrition in the liberal-professions group (doctors, lawyers, professors):

Kadets Octobrists Merchants and factory owners, Merchants and factory owners,

110 (9.7%) 385 (23.4%) Doctors, lawyers, and professors, Doctors, lawyers,. and professors, 385 (33.8%) 90 (14.8%)

The Octobrist Bloc 219

Table 2 (continued) Occupation/Profession Number Percent

19. Industrial workers | 0.7

20. Pharmacists and feldshers 4 0.7

21. Artists and architects + 07 22. Buildingadministrators contractors 22 0.3 23. Zemstvo 0.3

24. Non-Orthodox clergy Zz 0.3 25. Clerks and shop assistants 2 0.3

26. Editors 2 0.3 27. Agronomists 1 0.2 28. citizens17 462.8 7.6 29.Honorary Meshchane

30. Town duma deputies 14 23 31. Houseowners 14 2S

32. Peasants 13 ye | 33. Noblemen 8 1.3 34. Zemstvo deputies 4 0.7

Total 604

of any significant number of candidates. For the long run this may be of little significance since the Octobrists’ major partner, the TIP, was soon absorbed into the Octobrist organization. It should be kept in mind, however, that these coalitions gave the candidates’ group a weighting toward business occupations that was not representative of the strictly Octobrist membership,

even in the larger cities, not to mention small towns, and the districts. SOURCES: Kazan: Volzhskii kur’er, 3/12/06; Obnovlenie, 3/23/06; Kiev: Novyi vek, 3/13/06; Moscow: MV, S: 166; Nizhnii Novgorod: Volgar’, 3/14/06; Odessa: Russkaia rech’, 4/5/06; Rostov/Don: Sotuz, 2/18/06, 3/21/06; St. Petersburg: Slovo, 3/15/06.

It should be noted, however, that much of the divergence in these categories

comes from the capitals, especially St. Petersburg. It is less radical, particularly in regard to the liberal professions, in the provincial cities taken

as a group.

The relative weight among the professions within each group of candidates remains fairly similar or involves such small proportions in both groups as to be of dubious significance. The one other category, in addition

to those just mentioned, where both significant proportions and considerable divergence appears is that of government officials. They account

for only 4.4 percent of the Kadet candidates, but 10.7 percent of the Octobrist-bloc candidates. The difference here is again due largely to the Octobrists’ Petersburg list, which included forty-eight of the sixty-five Octobrist-group chinovniki;>’ on the Kadets’ Petersburg list, by contrast, there were only three chinovniki. Outside Petersburg the Kadets in fact had

a somewhat higher proportion of ranking civil servants among their candidate-electors than did the Octobrist bloc: almost 5 percent as

220 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign compared to just over 3 percent for the Octobrist group. It may be that the provincial bureaucracy contributed just as much, and perhaps more, to the active membership of the Kadet party as to the Octobrist bloc, although government officials by all evidence figured more prominently in the top leadership of local Octobrist groups. This may have reflected differential

application of the strictures against political activity by government officials.

Finally, Octobrist-bloc candidates tended to represent higher status levels within professions (not obvious in Table 2, but clear from its sources). This tendency is evident for civil servants and for persons in private employ;

for the medical profession (where the proportion of medical doctors to vrachi is markedly higher for the Octobrists); and for the legal profession (where the several subcategories lower than barrister [advokat] are hardly represented in the Octobrist list). In the teaching profession, where the Kadets clearly enjoyed greater support across the board, Octobrist representation was primarily restricted to university professors and school adminis-

trators (that is, ranking civil servants). Aside from the information about the Octobrist candidate-electors in the large cities just discussed, there exist only scattered characterizations— sometimes unsympathetic and therefore likely to be hyperbolic—about the

membership at large of local Octobrist groups. According to the Kadet press, the Octobrist membership in Vladimir province consisted primarily of

“petty tradesmen” melkie torgovtsy.°* In Kursk, according to DmitrievMamonov’s report, “the majority of the Kursk merchantry, small traders, and a part of the local administration,” belonged to the Octobrist party.°° The Kadet party group in Voronezh reported in late January that “persons of the free professions, doctors, lawyers, assistant barristers, pharmacists, bank employees, treasury employees, exchange employees, merchants, and shop assistants” were demonstratively joining the Octobrist party there.°* The Octobrist press in Voronezh asserted that many peasants had entered the union at its second general meeting on January 15.°° And in the Tauride, too, the Octobrists apparently enjoyed considerable, if scattered, peasant support; there were reports that several village communities had entered the party en masse.°® In the western province of Grodno, according to Vremia (February 14,

1906), the local Octobrist branch consisted exclusively of ‘‘Russian chinovniki,” presumably of middle and lower ranks, as the same report claimed that the higher administrative and military officials belonged to the PLO. Dmitriev-Mamonov described the Octobrist membership in neighboring Minsk as consisting “‘almost exclusively of Russians only, employees in various government institutions.’°”

The Octobrists in the Don seem to have had a Cossack following, judging from the existence of branches in a number of Cossack stanitsy. In Taganrog district the party was reported to count among it members “‘the better part of the pomeschiki.’°®

The Octobrist Bloc 221 In general, the gentry element in the Octobrist membership is elusive of

measurement. It is not heavily reflected in the candidates’ lists from the major cities, as should be expected, but there are indications of a prominent role being played by gentry in the Octobrist leadership, both in the zemstvo provinces and elsewhere, and, as just noted, there are a few reports of extensive recruitment of Octobrist membership among the pomeshchiki. There is also evidence of substantial support for Octobrist candidates in the landowners’ curia in the Duma elections, as well as in the special elections of representatives to the State Council from the provincial zemstvo assemblies (one per province), which suggests considerable participation in the union in that quarter. In the zemstvo elections held in April and March 1906, twelve

provincial zemstvos elected peers who were members of the Union of October 17 to the reformed State Council, and several others had Octobrist

candidates who narrowly missed a majority vote.°? This was a strong showing, much more so than that of the Kadets, who were represented by only six zemtsy in the State Council, but less strong than the far right: nearly half the zemstvo representatives elected to the State Council were politically to the right of the Octobrists, as was a sizable majority of the representatives sent to the State Council by the provincial noble corporations.©° After the first elections the weight of the gentry element in the Octobrist union was enhanced by the business community’s large-scale withdrawal from active politics and by the continued mobilization of the gentry into politics— mostly on the center and right.°’ Moreover, well-known nobles enjoyed prestige and influence in local Octobrist councils quite out of proportion to their numbers, a phenomenon due in part no doubt to established patterns of deference and the initiative roles they had played in establishing local union groups; and in part to their presumed ability to influence gentry votes in the landowners’ curia, which because of the suffrage system and the

structure of urban politics carried far more weight than those of businessmen and industrialists.° Professional people, gentry, businessmen, and civil servants of Russian Orthodox background are the groups that appear to have made the largest contributions to Octobrist membership in these early days, in proportions that varied from place to place. Businessmen and professional men were a significant element in Octobrist membership especially in the “Russian”

provinces. Outside the central areas, and particularly in the western borderlands, business and professional men are less noticeable. In the provinces gentry landowners and businessmen were surely more significant,

proportionally, in the Octobrist union than in the Kadet party, and urban professional men were less so; but the differences in many provinces, at least

in respect to the two parties’ leadership groups, may not have been as radical as has been thought by those who see the Octobrists essentially as an alliance of business and large landowning. The same point should be made

about the participation of government officials in the two parties. All the same the Union of October 17 clearly embraced a considerably

222 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign narrower segment of the mobilized population than did the Kadet party, both in terms of economic and social status and of national and confessional backgrounds. Judging from the available evidence, Octobrist party membership was considerably less “democratic” than was Kadet membership. Its reach beyond the propertied and professional elites was less extensive than

the Kadets’: it did not even touch the third element or the “lower

intelligentsia,” for all practical purposes, and its peasant following was much smaller than that of the Kadets, which was itself modest at best.

Neither party, of course, had any real success (with a few isolated exceptions for the Kadets) in recruiting working-class membership. The Octobrists could claim a certain rank-and-file following among small businessmen, tradespeople, and salaried employees of private enterprises. In

the national borderlands Octobrist groups were populated by small numbers of Russian landowners, civil servants, and, to some extent, businessmen. By the same token, the difference in status and experience between the central leadership and the rank-and-file membership of the Octobrist union

was less pronounced than among the Kadets. Like its Kadet counterpart, however, the Octobrist top leadership had its own ethos and did not simply reflect the outlook of the union’s constituency at large. As we have seen, the

Kadet local groups by and large tended to exert pressure leftward on the central leadership. With the Octobrists the reverse tendency prevailed (with ultimately fatal results for the union): the rank and file was by and large to the right of the central leadership on most issues. This reversal of poles visa-vis Kadet experience was in large measure due to the heavy contribution

by gentry landowners to Octobrist provincial organization and membership.

Despite the relative homogeneity of Octobrist membership in some respects, there was a great deal of diversity with regard to general political orientation and on specific issues among Octobrist groups, not to mention

the other parties that participated in the Octobrist bloc, whether ‘“‘constituent” or temporary allies. These differences tended to show up most clearly in the company the Octobrist groups kept; that is, the other groups with which they formed electoral alliances.

Octobrist Campaign Activities and the Octobrist Bloc Administrative Interference The Octobrists’ experience with administrative interference in Petersburg has already been noted. What were relations with the administration like

elsewhere in the country? Was the Petersburg incident, as some have asserted, a rare exception?®’ How extensive was administrative support for

the Octobrists, something they were often accused of enjoying by their competitors to their left?

The Octobrist Bloc 223 Administrative interference with Octobrist politicking was indeed far less extensive than it was in regard to the Kadets: there were apparently no cases of any Octobrist activists being arrested or exiled; there were no police searches of Octobrist headquarters during the campaign (the search of the Petersburg central committee secretary’s apartment in December appears to have been a unique case for the Octobrists in the preelection period); and apparently no Octobrist newspapers were closed down.®* Nevertheless, interference in Octobrist affairs was not so consequential as one is led to believe by most accounts. The number of provinces in which the authorities put restrictions on all political campaigning, including that of the Octob-

rists, was fairly large: it included at least the provinces of Astrakhan, Vologda, Kazan, Penza, Podolia, Poltava, Novgorod, Pskov, Saratov, Tambov, Kharkov, and Chernigov. In none of those provinces could the Octobrists agitate outside the towns, and in some of them there were more stringent restrictions on their activity. In Novgorod no parties were allowed to have party meetings, and the Octobrists were able to agitate only in the general voters’ meetings that were allowed on the eve of the elections (to be sure, the Kadets were prevented even from participation in those meetings).°° No Octobrist activity was allowed outside the provincial capital in Podolia.®° In Pskov the administration made no distinction between the Octobrists and the “‘left” in regard to political agitation: government officials were forbidden to participate in the Octobrist union by the governor, and requests to hold Octobrist-sponsored meetings in district towns of the province were systematically denied.°’ Reports on general prohibitions of Octobrist activity in district towns are available for Tambov and Kharkov provinces. In the latter, the Sumy group,

which had been denied the right to hold meetings by the temporary governor-general, filed a complaint with the minister of internal affairs.°* In laroslavl, although the Octobrists and their allies were generally allowed to agitate in both towns and villages, in marked contrast to the situation of the

Kadets there, they were denied any public activity during the month of February in the district town of Rybinsk.®? In Vitebsk two local Octobrist leaders, Bogdanovich (the seminary teacher) and Petropolskii, were refused permission to attend the first Octobrist congress in February.’? Many other cases of occasional interference could be mentioned. All this of course amounted to much less interference, on the whole or

in almost any given place, than confronted the Kadets. And in some provinces the differential treatment afforded the two parties by the administration was striking; for example, in the Don Oblast the Kadets were placed under very heavy restrictions, including a general prohibition against agitation outside the district towns, and many of their leaders were arrested and exiled, whereas the Octobrists were able to agitate throughout the oblast. The contrast was even more striking in Ekaterinoslav, where the Kadets were entirely restricted to the provincial capital and even there were not permitted to hold public meetings, while the Octobrists could operate

224 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign freely throughout the province. A similar. disparity existed in Orenburg, Riazan, Tambov, and several other provinces. In some places the Octobrists or their allies were actively assisted by

local authorities in their campaign efforts. The overall extent of such collaboration was not great, but a few reports show evidence of help extended to the Octobrists that went beyond the kind of differential tolerance just mentioned. In the Don, for example, the administration apparently helped the Octobrist bloc in a variety of ways that included authorizing Cossack atamans to give assistance in the distribution of Octobrist-bloc propaganda.’! In Ekaterinoslav, according to the Kadet press, Cossacks and policemen were distributing the Octobrist program.’*

And unspecified forms of active support for the Octobrist bloc were reported in Vladimir, Moscow, and Poltava. In Tver the Octobrist victory in the town elections was attributed by the Kadet press to the active support of the administration and the church hierarchy: priests allegedly recommended

the Octobrist candidates from their pulpits and policemen distributed the Octobrist ballots among the voters. “7 According to Dmitriev-Mamonov’s report, the Octobrists in Iaroslavl had the help of volost administrations, priests, and factory administrations in distributing party literature.”* In most places, however, administrative favoritism in the first election campaign was only negative in character: it consisted of the absence of gratuitous restrictions on those they favored or at least tolerated and the application of restrictions against those, usually the Kadets, of whom they disapproved. Active engagement in political agitation by administrative authorities (except as individual members of parties) was by all evidence quite rare. There was no “‘government party” in the first elections. Neither the central government nor the provincial administrations made any serious attempt to take an active part in the election campaign, either by systematic support of one of the established parties or by sponsoring a party of their own. (This alone shows that the regime was not yet committed to governing

in the parliamentary mode.) It is impossible to measure the overall effect of the relatively favorable treatment accorded the Octobrist bloc by the authorities during the election campaign. Even where Octobrist agitation was freely allowed, the party was

often too weak to take any great advantage of the situation. Moreover, there is some indication that preferential treatment by the authorities tended to compromise the Octobrists in the eyes of the electorate. This conclusion was reached, at least, by several provincial governors in their replies to the

ministerial inquiry into the causes of the opposition’s victory in the elections.”

The Character of Octobrist Campaigning The Octobrist methods of campaigning and political agitation did not differ much from those employed by their Kadet rivals: local Octobrist groups

The Octobrist Bloc 225 distributed political literature—the Octobrist appeal and program, broadsides and placards, and various political tracts—on a scale that seems to

have been comparable to Kadet activity. In some provinces, such as Vologda, Novgorod, Smolensk, and Kostroma, Octobrist activity seems to

have been essentially limited to the distribution of this literature. It was distributed by hand, by party volunteers or hired runners, by mail, and in at least a few places, as mentioned, with the help of the church, the police,

volost administrations, and so on.

There may have been as many as thirty provincial newspapers supporting the Octobrists during the campaign.’° These newspapers propagated Octobrist views by reporting on local Octobrist meetings and especially by reprinting speeches made at these meetings or in the capitals by

leading Octobrist orators. In general, however, Octobrist agitation was both in intensity and in

quality considerably inferior to that of the Kadets. The low level of journalistic and oratorical skills at the Octobrists’ disposal was remarked on

repeatedly by Dmitriev-Mamonov in his reports to Witte and was mentioned by several of the governors in their ministerial reports as a significant

factor in the outcome of the elections.” Far fewer Octobrist meetings for the public were held in the provinces,

judging from the press reports. This was in large part due to lack of resources and organizational skills, but in a number of places the Octobrists

apparently avoided public meetings for fear of their being used by the

Kadets or others to their left to propagate their own positions and, especially where these parties were not allowed to have meetings of their own, to accuse the Octobrists of having ties with the administration.’*However, the Octobrists were responsible for organizing some of the general voters’ meetings in towns in the several weeks immediately preceding the elections, as provided for in the legislation. The Octobrists did make some efforts to agitate for support among the peasants and, especially in the capitals, among industrial workers. They were quite active in the villages of the capital provinces, where they were best organized and had extensive district networks. Elsewhere, extensive Octobrist agitation in the rural population was reported from Ekaterinoslav

province; from the Tauride, where the Octobrists, as already noted, apparently succeeded in enlisting several villages; and from Iaroslavl, where

the Octobrist bloc distributed party literature widely in both towns and villages and held numerous discussions with peasants in volost meetings.’” There was undoubtedly some similar activity in other provinces as well, but by and large work among the peasants was an uncommon feature of the Octobrist campaign.

In Moscow the extensive agitation of the Octobrist bloc among workers, apparently with some help from factory administrations, was organized by the Trade-Industry party rather than the Octobrists proper.®° In Petersburg, where the union had closer ties with industry, the Octobrists

226 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign were especially active among workers. A special workers’ section of the party was formed which, among other things, opened lunchrooms for workers.®! Outside the capitals there appear to have been only a few cases of

Octobrist activity among the working class: in Tver, in IvanovoVoznesensk, and in a few other places.*”

The Octobrists and Their Allies The twenty-odd “‘constituent parties” of the Union of October 17 in sixteen different provinces were almost without exception strictly local parties,®° for the most part confined to a single town or district, and in about a third

of the cases they were the sole local representatives of the union. Independently created constituent parties appear to have been the main basis of Octobrist representation in an entire province in only three cases. In

Ekaterinoslav the chairman of the provincial zemstvo board, M. V. Rodzianko, the Mariupol marshal of nobility, P. V. Kamenskii, and several

others set up a political party in February 1906 for participation in the election campaign and began recruiting members. They called this party the

National Party of October 17 (Narodnaia Partiia 17 Oktiabria). Shortly afterward its founders transformed their party into a branch of the Union of October 17.54 In Kiev the local Octobrist organization had first taken shape

under the name ‘‘Constitutional-Progressive party,” and its leaders had subsequently adhered to the national Octobrist organization when they

became familiar with the Octobrist program. The Kiev organization retained its original name in a new, dual title: ““The Union of October 17 Constitutional-Progressive party” (Soiuz 17 Oktiabria Konstitutsionnoprogressivnaia Partiia). Although this organizational arrangement was in

theory extended to the entire southwestern region (like the Kadets, the Octobrists established an ‘“‘oblast committee” in Kiev), the party was only set up in February 1906 and does not seem to have been active outside the city of Kiev before the elections.®° Finally, the constituent party in Revel,

first set up by some Russians there under the name Union of Peaceful Struggle (Soiuz Mirnoi Bor’by), was the Octobrists’ only organizational

contact in the province of Estland; it seems to have played a quite insignificant role in local election politics.°° On the whole, the role envisaged by Shipov and his friends for their “union” as a collecting or coordinating center for independently established moderate constitutionalist groups was realized on a rather impressive scale,

as indicated in Table 3. There were parties or groups that in terms of program and tactics belonged to the ‘“‘center” or moderate-constitutionalist part of the political spectrum that stayed out of the Octobrist organization. A number of these entered temporary alliances with the Octobrists; others,

for the most part small and ephemeral organizations whose number may not have exceeded a dozen or so, remained independent. Some of these

The Octobrist Bloc 227 Table 3 Parties and Groups Constituent to the Union of October 17.

Province Party

Vilno Constitutionalist Railway Union Vladimir Party of the October 17 Manifesto (Ivanovo-Voznesensk) Vologda Moderate Progressive Party in the Town of Totma Don Oblast Don Branch of the Party of Law and Order on the Basis of the Manifesto of October 17

Ekaterinoslav National party of October 17

Kiev Constitutionalist-Progressive Party Moscow The German Group of the Union of October 17 Union of Pharmacy Proprietors and Pharmacists The Society of Law and Order and the Manifesto of October 17 (Kolomna)

Orenburg Union of Law and Order on the Foundations of the Imperial Manifesto of October 17

Poltava Committee of Free Thinkers

Samara Party of Order

St. Petersburg German Group of the Union of October 17 Constitutional-Monarchist Union of Law and Order

Saratov Constitutional-Monarchist Union of Landowners

Smolensk Party of Liberty and Order Iukhnov Moderate-Progressive Party (Iukhnov)

Kharkov Union of the Center Party (Izium) Estland Union of Peaceful Struggle SOURCE: Based on the Octobrist central committee list for February 14, with minor changes to account for subsequent developments reported in the local press.

cooperated with the TIP or PLO in provinces where the Octobrists did not have an alliance with those parties.®”

The main nonconstituent allies of the Octobrists in the center bloc around the country were the Trade-Industry party and the Party of Legal Order. These alliances were not based on general agreements between the

parties’ national leadership groups, but rather on local agreements, sometimes for a province as a whole and on occasion only for a specific town or district. As Table 4 shows, alliances between the Octobrists and these two parties were by no means the general rule. In the nine provinces where all three parties had branches—Don, Kazan, Novgorod, Penza, Perm, Podolia, Tver, Samara, and Kherson—all three were allied only in the Don and in Kazan; the Octobrists were allied with the TIP in Novgorod and

Kherson and with the PLO in Tver and Samara. The TIP and PLO were allied with each other but not with the Octobrists in Kiev.

228 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Table 4 Participation by TIP and PLO in the Octobrist Bloc.

Provinces With Provinces With

Active Octobrist Alliance +/- Active Octobrist Alliance +/and TIP Groups) (+ = 12; — = 10) andPLOGroups (+ = 10; — = 11)

Vladimir Voronezh+-Arkhangelsk Astrakhan —-

Don + Vilno + Kazan + Vologda Kiev - Grodno ++

Kaluga + Don + Kostroma 1 Kazan + Moscow t Kiev = Nizhnii Novgorod + Kovno — Novgorod + Kursk __ Orel = Livland Penza Perm—=Novgorod Penza 7=

Podolia— —Podolia Perm — Riazan = Samara = Poltava + Smolensk —+ St.Samara Petersburg+ + Tambov Tula + Saratov + Tver = Tver + Kherson Jaroslavl ++ Kherson _ SouRCE: Abstracted from local newspaper accounts.

Relations between the local groups of these parties depended on a variety of circumstances specific to each locale: the character of the leaders and their political orientation, both of which tended to vary widely from place to place (more so for the Octobrists and the PLO; less so for the TIP), the relative strength of the party organizations, the nature of the competi-

tion to the right and left, and so on. On the whole, Octobrist cooperation was more common and more extensive with the TIP than with the PLO. Alliances were consummated in a few more provinces, they were generally established earlier, and they usually involved closer coordination of campaign activities. Moreover, the kind of

outright hostility that characterized relations between the PLO and the Octobrists in a few places—such as in Kursk, where the PLO campaign was

directed mainly against the Octobrists and involved circulation of a brochure that called the Octobrists enemies of the people seeking to turn the country over to foreigners and the Jews®®—was absent between Octobrist and TIP groups. This was understandable. The TIP was a better known and

more stable quantity than the PLO. It generally represented those estab-

The Octobrist Bloc 229 lished business interests with a political outlook, combining basic conservatism with commitment to constitutional reform, that had been represented

in the Union of October 17 from the beginning. In fact, business connections may have provided the basis of the Octobrist-TIP alliance in many cases. In those provinces where the two parties were allied in the campaign, there was generally a business element

in the Octobrist leadership;®? on the contrary, in most of the provinces where the Octobrists and the TIP were both active but failed to cooperate, the leading Octobrists were mainly zemtsy or professional men.”° In Kazan and the Don Oblast, the only places where all three center parties were allied together, the Octobrist groups were particularly eclectic, with business, the professions, and gentry landowning all represented. There was evidently less incentive to cooperation among the center parties where they tended to represent and appeal to different constituencies, especially in the

absence of strong competition from right or left. In some of the provinces where the Octobrists and the TIP collaborated,

the TIP was less an equal partner than a sort of branch of the Octobrist organization, either restricted to a single factory town or at least of much smaller proportions than the Octobrist organization; this was the case in Vladimir, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Novgorod, and in at least one place— Borovichi (Novgorod province)—a TIP group was considered a “‘con-

stituent party” of the Union of October 17.7! In Moscow province, however, the TIP was clearly the leading party in the center bloc. It had more members and was more active in the campaign than the Octobrists, and dominated the bloc in the provincial electoral assembly.7* The Party of Legal Order was a much less uniform and known quantity

than the TIP. The character of its local leadership varied more radically from place to place, and most of the PLO groups tended to be further to the right of the Octobrists than the TIP groups, more willing to compromise their “constitutionalism” and cooperate with the extreme right. At the same

time PLO groups often displayed a marked demagogic and chauvinist inclination that must have been disturbing to many Octobrists.”? The inclination of PLO groups to cooperate with the right was evident in a numbr of places, most notably in Kiev, where the PLO put up common

lists of candidates with the Russkoe Bratstvo and the Kiev Monarchist party; in Kovno, where the PLO was allied with the extreme right-wing party Ruskoe Veche; and in Vologda, where the PLO cooperated with the Union of the Russian People.”* The PLO was most likely to be found allied with the Octobrists when it was a weak and peripheral party (for example, in Tver, the Don Oblast, and Kazan); conversely, where the PLO was relatively strong it tended to avoid alliance with the Octobrists, as in Arkhangelsk, Kiev, Kursk, and Kherson. In Kherson province the Octobrists (and the TIP, with whom they were allied) were active only in Odessa, whereas the PLO had committees in

230 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign Kherson and Nikolaev as well as in Odessa, enjoyed the support of ‘‘the better part of the chinovniki and large landowners” in the province,” and had a far larger following in Odessa than the Octobrists. The PLO was competing there for the conservative vote with the Union of the Russian People, and was for this reason uninclined to take up with a “‘constitutional-

ist” party, particularly one that showed little chance of delivering many votes.7°

Cooperation with the Octobrists was not always associated with a position of weakness, however, and sometimes social and ideological compatibility with the Octobrists was fairly close. In Poltava, for example, where the PLO was at least as active and well represented in the province as the Octobrist party, it was little distinguishable from the latter. Its leaders appear to have been drawn from the same group of zemstvo, professional

men and chinovniki as the Octobrists, and the party was considered a constituent party of the Union of October 17.7’ In Petersburg the PLO had a curious and short-lived relationship with

the Octobrist bloc. Having joined the Octobrist-led ConstitutionalMonarchist Union, the PLO split up in February following the breakup of its council over a scandal that apparently involved both misuse of party funds and a rightward revision of the party program.”® The majority of the council’s members went on to set up a “‘Constitutional-Monarchist Union of Law and Order,” which was chaired by Count V. A. Tizengauzen, one of the original members of the Octobrist central committee group in Petersburg. This union immediately entered (or reentered) the ConstitutionalMonarchist Union and became a constituent party of the Union of October

17. The members of the council and other party members who did not follow the council majority into the Octobrist bloc apparently joined the parties of the far right.?? The Octobrists themselves were not everywhere averse to cooperation with the right. In Vologda the Octobrists cooperated fully with the PLO in

an alliance that included the Union of Russian Men.'°? Octobrists

cooperated with the Monarchist party in the Moscow district landowners’ curia election, and in the Moscow provincial electoral assembly the center bloc’s delegation cooperated with the peasant electors and members of the Monarchist party to carry the election. The deal was arranged by electors from the TIP and was protested, but not abandoned, by the Octobrists.!°! In Vilno all the ‘Russian parties,” including the Octobrists, were united to oppose the Jewish electoral union. Some of the successful Octobrist-bloc electors in the Kazan city elections appear to have been members of the

right-wing Popular Tsarist party.'°* And in Vladimir the Union of the Russian People came out for the Octobrist list in order to avoid dispersion of the anti-Kadet vote. It took this initiative on its own, but the offer was publicly welcomed by the local Octobrist organization.'°?

The Octobrist Bloc 231 The far-rightward list of some Octobrist groups was matched, however, by a strict observance of the union’s “‘constitutionalist” credentials in some

other places. In Kiev the TIP and PLO were united in an alliance with a single party chairman and a single ticket of candidate-electors, which they advertised under the slogan “God, Tsar, People, Law and Order.” In a meeting on February 18 the Kiev Octobrists formally rejected cooperation with this alliance on the grounds that it was in general too far to the right and too vague about its commitment to constitutionalism.'°* In several other provinces as well the Octobrists refused overtures of cooperation from the right, such as that of the Susanin Society of the Defenders of Order in

Kostroma, the For Tsar and Order party in Kaluga, and several Popular Monarchist groups elsewhere. Finally, there are on record at least two instances of Octobrist cooperation with Kadets: in the Mozhaisk urban curia,‘°> and in the Tula provincial elections.'°° Thus in the first months of its existence the Union of October 17 was not a “‘party” in the same sense the Kadets were, but a congeries of local groups, “constituent parties,” and alliances tenuously united by a few very generally stated political slogans: constitutional monarchy, the integrity of the empire, and return to order. The various political combinations that came together around the country under the umbrella of Octobrism suggest that a concept such as “‘constitutional monarchy” (or “the fulfillment of the promises of the October Manifesto”) must have been given widely variant

interpretations within the union bloc. Within such a framework as the union provided there could be no question of general adherence to a firm set

of party statutes or the more specific points of the Octobrist program, including not only its socioeconomic platform but even its demand for further political reform (itself stated in the most general terms). The union,

as its subsequent history would show, was a fragile thing. There were those in the Octobrist leadership, such as Guchkov and Miliutin, who from the beginning aspired to make the union into a mass party along the same lines as the Kadet party, with a firm program, strict rules of membership, and a permanent organizational network in the provinces; some even dreamed of mass support from the peasants. But there

were others, most notably Shipov, who at least in the early days of the union’s existence clearly thought of it as a “‘cadre party” that would essentially limit itself to identifying and supporting suitable candidates for the Duma, without establishing a centralized organization, formal rules of membership, and the like.'°” In the end, the union emerged as a hybrid of a cadre party and a mass party: pushed in the direction of the latter by the relatively democratic suffrage system and the competition of the Kadets, it remained, in its lack of coherent organization and party discipline, as in its

tendency to advance local “notables” in the elections, more like a traditional cadre party.

232 The Parties, the State, and the Election Campaign The patient reader will appreciate why I have dwelt in some detail in the

first two sections of this book on the organization, structure, and membership of the Kadet party and the Union of October 17. Only by doing so is it possible to delineate the approximate contours of that segment of the mobilized population that actively supported a moderate, constitutionalist solution to the crisis of the autocracy, and behind it, of those social groups to which the constitutionalist leaders looked for sources of recruitment to

their parties and for votes. As a proportion of the entire mobilized population, this segment was not especially large, although I think it was considerably bigger than has generally been recognized in the historical literature, where the constitutionalist movement tends to be depicted as a tiny clique of professors and lawyers, together, perhaps, with a handful of enlightened gentry landowners. The Kadets and the Octobrists have been presented here as competitors, even adversaries, and so they were in the specific context described. In the overall spectrum of Russian politics, however, they occupied positions of propinquity. Neither of them contained or was coextensive with the social forces of Russian constitutionalism as it has been defined here. The Kadets came much nearer to doing so than did the Octobrists, but, as noted, there were elements within the Kadet party whose commitment to that party had little to do with its principal goals and might best be called purely tactical. On the other hand part of the forces of Russian constitutionalism were to be found in Octobrist ranks, particularly in its central leadership group and

among provincial activists with experience in the zemstvos and town dumas—men whose commitment to constitutional reform was no less sincere than that of their Kadet counterparts, but for whom neither the political style of the Kadets nor the implications of their program were acceptable.

The Kadet and the Octobrist leaders probed the left and right limits of the political spectrum in their search for support: the kadets’ ouverture a

gauche, and the Octobrists’ ouverture a droite. The former led to incorporation into the Kadet party of an unstable, left-wing intelligensia element, much of which would leave the party as other political alternatives

presented themselves; the latter brought into the Octobrist union a minimally committed collection of essentially conservative, propertied elements that may have constituted the majority of union membership before the first elections. Max Weber, in a contemporary analysis of Russian politics, appropriately characterized the active supporters of constitutional reform in Russia as “essentially a ‘bourgeois’ intelligentsia, understood not in the sense of an economic class, but in the sense of a general life-style [Lebenshaltung] and

level of culture.”’°® Because of the specificities of Russian economic, institutional, and educational development, the “bourgeois” intelligentsia on the one hand overlapped to a significant degree with Russia’s privileged

The Octobrist Bloc 233 first estate, as the organizational history of both the Kadets and the Octobrists clearly shows; on the other hand, it drew little from the bourgeoisie properly speaking. It fell to the lot of the Octobrists—and this is

the key to the organizational and other peculiarities of their union—to straddle the fluctuating, nearly indiscernible boundary that divided the intelligentsia from propertied interests.

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iit THE FIRST NATIONAL ELECTIONS

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Phase I: The Preliminary Elections and Special City Elections The manifesto was solemnly proclaimed in the town cathedral on October 22. Many people had gathered there, including many peasants. The reading of the manifesto disappointed them; they were expecting something ‘“‘about the land,” but here there were only ‘“‘some kind of liberties.” A report from Pskov province

Of a total of 5,982 electors who were to participate in the provincial electoral assemblies of European Russia, 2,532 (42.3 percent) were to be provided by the peasant curia; 1,956 (32.7 percent) by the landowners’ curia; 1,343 (22.5 percent) by the urban curia; and 151 (2.5 percent) by the

workers’ curia.’ As shown in Table 5, the relative weight of the several

Table 5 Distribution of Electors by Curiae in the Provincial Electoral Assemblies (not including workers’ electors).

Peasants Landowners Urban Province Total Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

Arkhangelsk 32 19 59.4 1110 34.4 232 6.2 Astrakhan 50 29 58 5 16 Bessarabia 120 43 35.8 56 46.7 21 17.5 Vilno 21 40 44 he 48.4 7 7.8 Vitebsk 90 31 34.4 39 43.3 20 Va aE Vladimir r J 26 28.2 18 19.6 48 52.2 Vologda 80 46 a0 21 20:2 13 16.3 Volynia 195 69 35.4 86 44.1 40 20.5 Voronezh 165 101 61.2 42 2555 0a 13.5

Viatka 200 148 74 18 9 34 17 Grodno 105 43 41 36 34.2 26 24.8

Don Oblast Ley 73 IZ 47 26.6 37 20.9 Ekaterinoslav 135 34 25.2 38 28.1 63 46.7 Kazan 139 98 70.5 23 16.5 18 129

Kaluga 76 30 39.4 25 IL 21 27.6

238 The First National Elections Table 5 (continued)

Peasants Landowners Urban Province Total Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

Kiev DAS 80 35.6 74 32.9 71 31.6 Kovno 90 39 43.3 35 38.9 16 17.8 Kostroma 92 29 31.5 35 38 28 30.4 Kurland 46 13 28.3 14 30.4 19 41.3 Kursk 150 78 52 44 293 28 18.7 Livland 61 21 34.4 25 41 15 24.6 Minsk 135 41 30.4 74 54.8 20 14.8 Mogilev 109 40 36.7 53 48.6 16 14.7 Moscow 92 16 17.4 13 14.1 63 68.5 N-Novgorod 90 42 46.7 30 33.3 18 20 Novgorod 92 31 yo ed 45 48.9 16 17.4

Olonets 50 27 54 9 18 14 28 Orenburg 105 63 60 19 18.1 23 22.

Orel 122 59 48.4 45 31.1 36.9 18 14.8 Penza 90 47 S22 28 15 16.7 Perm 196 86 43.9 58 29.6 52 26.5 Podolia 195 82 42.1 76 39 37 19 Poltava 181 23 12.7 109 60.2 49 ZT A Pskov 61 24 39.3 27 44.3 10 16.4

Riazan 121 54 44.6 40 33.1 27 He es Samara 180 94 52.2 48 26.7 38 gS | St. Petersburg 47 14 29.8 18 38.3 15 31.9 Saratov 150 64 42.7 51 34 35 2353 Simbirsk 90 ac 48.9 29 S22 17 18.9 Smolensk 90 31 34.4 40 44.4 19 21.1 Stavropol 47 33 70:2 6 12.8 8 b W Tauride 96 42 43.7 31 32.3 23 24 Tambov 180 92 $1.1 62 34.4 26 14.4

Tver 120 49 40.8 41 34.2 30 25 Tula 76 32 151723 19.7 Ufa 150 8842.1 58.729 3638.2 24 26

Kharkov 150 64 42.7 43 28.7 43 28.7 Kherson 150 50 33.3 69 46 31 20.7 Chernigov 150 63 42 50 333 37 24.7 Estland 45 10 7B Me 21 46.7 14 311 Jaroslav] 60 17 28.3 20 33.3 23 38.3

Total 5,831 2 S32 1,956 1,343

SouRCE: Polozhenie o vyborakh...prilozhenie (Lazarevskii, Zakonodatel’nye akty perekhodnogo vremeni, 1904-1906 gg., 2d. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1907], pp. 158-176). Modified to combine peasant and cossack electors from Astrakhan, Don Oblast, and Orenburg, and separating landowner and urban electors in Arkhangelsk and Stavropol.

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 239 curiae varied rather widely from province to province in accordance with differing population and tax structures. Thus the peasant curia’s contribution to the provincial assemblies ranged from a high of 74 percent in Viatka province to a low of 12 percent in Poltava; it provided an absolute majority of electors in fifteen provinces and a plurality in another sixteen. At the other extreme of representation, workers’ electors ranged from a high of 14.8 percent to less than 1 percent, and in several provinces there were no separate workers’ elections at all.7 In Minsk and Poltava the landowners had an absolute majority of the electors in the provincial assemblies. In Moscow the majority belonged to the urban electors. The separate electoral assemblies that convened in the twenty largest

cities of European Russia were populated by 80 electors each, except Petersburg and Moscow with their double allotments, adding up to 1,760 electors; that is, more electors than participated in the provincial assemblies

from the urban curiae. In simple terms of representation by electors, the urban curia accordingly led the way with 40 percent of the total (3,103:7,799), followed by the

peasants with 32.4 percent, the landowners with 25 percent, and the workers with 2.7 percent. The ratio of representation of electors to total population by curia was calculated by A. E. Lositskii on the same basis (for European Russia and Poland):*

Total population, in millions

Curia (Jan. 1906, approx.) No. of electors

Landowners 4 22351 Urban 14 3,455

Peasant 78212,726 Workers 236 This amounts to one elector for the following number of inhabitants by curia: landowners, 2,000; urban, 4,000; peasant, 30,000; and workers, 90,000. Obviously, the weight of individual votes varied greatly among population groups. Moreover, the electoral system left entirely without representation a number of numerically significant groups in the population, including (still according to Lositskii’s calculations, which include dependents): 7 million agricultural laborers, 3.5 million servants, 2 million day laborers (chernorabochie), 1 million construction workers, 1 million workers in commerce, and other smaller groups.° The highly differentiated levels of representation were achieved through the electoral law’s prescription of multitiered elections within curiae and the differential employment of population, property, tax rates, and political-administrative units as the bases of representation (see Figure 2).

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ae, e |2 Known cases of desiatidvorniki having deliberately

refused to elect delegates to the district assembly are remarkably few, perhaps no more than a dozen in all. Four or five of these may have been following the boycottist exhortations of the revolutionary parties and the Peasants’ Union; the remainder were protesting some kind of administrative interference with their proceedings. *”

Peasant interest in the elections seems to have fluctuated rather markedly from province to province. Although in most provinces it was reasonably high, a particularly low level of interest and participation was noted in about ten provinces. The reasons for this are problematical. Four of these provinces were among those in which extensive punitive expeditions

had been recently conducted, and Dmitriev-Mamonov attributed the low level of participation in them directly to terror or indifference bred by these actions.7° In at least one other province, the Don Oblast, a low level of

peasant participation at the volost level (a number of elections were annulled there for lack of attendance) appears to have been due to a combination of bad weather and great distances. In five other provinces— Astrakhan, Mogilev, Penza, Perm, and Riazan—the causes of what appear to be abnormally low levels of peasant interest in the elections are less evident. Dmitriev-Mamonov, usually repeating views expressed in local newspapers, variously attributed the situation to low levels of political agitation and to a “low level of development” (“‘nerazvitost’,” “‘nekul’tur-

nost’”’) of the peasant population.” On the basis of such criteria it is

244 The First National Elections difficult to understand why the general level of peasant interest in the elections should have been lower in provinces like Perm and Mogilev—if

that was indeed the case—than in a number of others. The relatively high level of interest reported almost everywhere else was

not necessarily evidence that the peasants generally approved of the electoral system. There were reports from a number of places of extensive

peasant dissatisfaction with the system of elections, and in at least one volost—Olkhovka, Tsaritsyn district, Saratov province—the peasants elected delegates only so that they could demand the convocation of a constituent assembly at the district meeting of delegates.** These were probably places where the Peasants’ Union and the left parties had been particularly active. On the whole, however, there were few manifestations of indifference to or discontent with the election process. The turnout was generally high, and of all the peasant cahiers collected by the Kadet chronicler only one—

from the Saratov volost—included reform of the representative system among its political demands.?? Political-party allegiance or even awareness of political parties among the peasants who gathered in the volost electoral assemblies was by all evidence quite rare. Some village and volost cahiers expressed support for the Peasants’ Union, and there were scattered reports of volost delegates who were Kadets, SRs, SDs, and even members of the PLO.* In Livland and Estland membership in the Estonian Progressive party apparently penetrated deeply into the enfranchised rural population, as did support for the Latvian Constitutional-Democratic party in Kurland.” But elsewhere in the country reports of peasant hostility toward all the political parties were more common than those about peasant adherence to them, and there is overwhelming negative evidence of total indifference to questions of party politics among the vast majority of peasants involved in the elections. Most villages remained untouched by the modern political culture that had taken

root in the larger urban centers. |

What by and large evoked peasant interest in the elections and the institution of the Duma was the prospect of land redistribution, the perennial peasant solution to Malthusian pressures in conditions of technological stagnation.”® Not that peasants were unconcerned with other issues—taxation, legal and administrative disabilities, local administrative reform, and educational opportunities, especially —but in the first elections all issues other than the land question were of strictly secondary importance.’ The few eyewitness accounts of peasant delegates’ discussions during

the elections fully confirm this point. That of D. D. Protopopov, a prominent Kadet who participated in the elections in the remote district of

Nikolaevsk in Samara province, was typical. While he and the other landowners of the district were voting for their provincial electors, Protopopov chanced to overhear the conversations of the peasant delegates

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 245 in an adjoining room. He reports that they talked excitedly and exclusively about the land, God’s gift that should belong to no one, which was in the hands of a few rich people.2® The peasant deputy from Kazan province mentioned earlier similarly recalled that the first meeting of peasant delegates in his district was given over entirely to discussion of the land question, and specifically to the necessity of taking land away from the pomeshchiki.*?

Exactly the same kind of reports are available from other parts of the country.°°

Virtually all the known peasant cahiers repeated the same demand: transfer to the people of the lands of the pomeshchiki, the state, and the church. The demand was often accompanied by the justification that the land belongs to those who work it and sometimes by more or less elaborate plans for nationalization or socialization, revealing the hand of a compiler guided by a left-party program; but the basic message was everywhere the same, as these examples may serve to illustrate:>'

[We demand] fundamental change in [the system of] land use; allotment of land to every mouth [edok] from land taken from the treasury, monastery, church, and, in extreme cases, private lands, by means of purchase by the state; allotment to the needy of forest land from the same sources. (Maksimovskaia volost, RomanovBorisogleb district, Iaroslavl province) Land should belong to the entire people so that anyone who needs

it could have use of it. Therefore the lands of the state, udel, cabinet, monastery, and church are transferred to the use of the laboring masses without redemption; private lands are transferred obligatorily, in part for redemption by the state, in part without redemption.°* (Nizhegorodskii district)

We demand that our representatives apply all their energy to establishing an order in which every person wishing to work on the

land would have land for himself. We therefore consider it necessary in view of the extreme poverty of our population, in view of its lack of land, as the first and main task to obtain land for the people. Let our representatives in the State Duma put through a law

on obligatory alienation of land into the property of the region [Rkraia]. (Instructions of peasants of Poltava province for Duma deputies-elect)

Landless and smallholding peasants must be allotted monastery, church, and treasury lands without recompense. For satisfaction of the land hunger alienation of pomeshchik lands is necessary by means of redemption by the State Bank at just, not market, prices. (Speech by the peasant Ksenziuk to the assembled peasant electors in Kamenets-Podolsk)

246 The First National Elections Transfer into the hands of the people of these lands [state lands without recompense, private lands for minimal recompense]... All land is placed in the hands of the people for their free use. . . The

system of land usage [is] to be established by the obshchinas themselves...Private property in land [is] to be abolished and replaced by the right of unlimited usage. (Cahier of the peasants of the village Kistinskoe, Blagodarinsk district, Stavropol province) There is evidence that many peasants understood the elections simply as

a means of sending petitions up to the tsar, and the Duma strictly as a convocation for resolving the land question. Dmitriev-Mamonov reported that in Pskov province peasant opinion was said to be divided between those villages that thought the gentry landowners (bary) would use the Duma to

protect their own interests and those where the idea prevailed that the Duma would allow the peasants to address the tsar directly with their petitions (chelobitnye).*? In Chernigov, according to Dmitriev-Mamonov,

the peasants were counting on using the Duma “to get some land” (“poluchit’ zemlitsu’”’).** The governor of Novgorod similarly reported that

the peasants of his province looked on the Duma strictly as a gathering intended to satisfy their need for land.*° In Kharkov, where according to

Dmitriev-Mamonov the peasants were taking a keen interest in the elections, they were everywhere said to be concerned with the new institution primarily as a means for solution of the agrarian question. The Kharkov report went on to say that in selecting their representa-

tives, the peasants were entirely uninterested in questions of party affiliation. They simply selected from their midst ‘“‘worthy fellows whose

lives they knew well” (“‘muzhei dostoinykh, zhizn’ kotorykh otlichno znali”’).°° This refrain was repeated in many other places. The general aim of

the peasants was not to promote the interests of any party but to send up those delegates who could best represent their interests and, in the first place, their need for land—their “‘best representatives,” “true defenders of peasant

agrarian interests,” “their most worthy representatives,” “the most firm supporters of their land interests,” and so on. If party affiliations played no significant role in the selection process, what criteria did the peasants use in identifying their ‘best representatives’? Peasant views on that subject differed from place to place, but a few

basic tendencies are noteworthy. There was a clear priority attached to literacy and articulateness, qualities that led to the election of a fair number

of native “intelligentsia from the people”: third-element specialists, teachers, scribes, railway employees, and the like who had allotments and were eligible for participation in the peasant elections. There was also a widespread tendency to show preference for holders of allotment land only (nadel’nye krest’iane), and small allotments at that,

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 247 evidently as a means of assuring that the land question would be uppermost

in the representatives’ minds. According to Krol the peasants in Ruza district (Moscow province) elected as delegates only those who held allotment land exclusively. ““We would elect you if you did not have your own land,” the peasants reportedly told one candidate who held additional

land outside the commune at an assembly, “‘but as things are you will defend your own interests and not ours.”’” Dmitriev-Mamonov reported that in the predominantly agricultural districts of Nizhni-Novgorod province, all wealthy peasants were systematically being voted down.°® In Pskov peasants in several volosts were reported to have driven peasants with their

own plots in addition to allotment land away from the assemblies, apparently a rare occurrence. Reports of restricting delegates to rank-and-

file allotment-holding peasants are available from many parts of the country.°” At times, the inclination to send up “typical” peasants in terms of economic circumstances must have conflicted with the priority attached to literacy and general “development” (razvitost’). A less frequently reported tendency in the selection of peasant delegates was the systematic exclusion of local peasant officials: elders, judges, clerks,

and the like. This practice was reported for Pokrov district, Vladimir province, in Kaluga, in some places in Moscow province (especially Ruza district), and in some volosts of Podolia, Smolensk, Tula, and Chernigov.*° In Tula the peasants were described as being in a particularly militant frame of mind and were systematically excluding elders and all others who were

thought to be favored by the government administration. As the case of Tula suggests, this kind of behavior seems to have been an expression of hostility toward the local system of authority, dominated by the zemskie nachal’niki, whose creatures the elected peasant administrators often were. An interesting expression of the same attitude was a tendency among peasants, much noted in the liberal and radical press, to select as their

representatives men who had been arrested or otherwise subjected to administrative punishment. This kind of selectivity may have involved a symbolic challenge to the system of authority, but there was probably a more practical calculation involved as well: peasants who had already suffered at the hands of the authorities would be more likely to stand up for peasant interests. This was particularly noticeable at the provincial assemblies in the selection of candidates for the Duma, but it was also in operation at lower levels. In one volost of Orel province the peasants elected as their delegates two peasants who were sitting in jail. The delegates from Simbirsk

district were reported to include a number of men who had received administrative punishment, some of whom had jail records. “Disgraced”

peasants (“opal’nye”’) were reported to be popular as candidates in Smolensk, Saratov, and Kazan, and in Chernigov the peasants of Dremailovskaia volost elected Ia. A. Guzhovskii, a long-time zemstvo

248 The First National Elections employee (insurance agent) who was currently in the Nezhin prison, despite the volost elder’s insistence that the law forbade election of persons under arrest or investigation.*’. This tendency should not be exaggerated. In reading over the reports, it

becomes clear that village and volost officials were far from being systematically excluded from election. Elders, clerks, and other representa-

tives of peasant administration are frequently mentioned among the delegates elected at the volost assemblies, and although such elections were on occasion undoubtedly the result of administrative pressures applied by the zemskii nachal’nik, the local police agent, the parish priest, or the volost elder, more often than not these representatives of the peasant ‘‘establishment”’ were identified as “the best” and “most developed” representatives of peasant interests.** In other words, they often belonged to the small pool of persons in the villages with the skills—literacy and experience in dealing with outsiders—that were widely recognized as qualification for election. In the Baltic provinces, among the Tatars and other Muslim peoples of the

eastern and southern provinces, and also in the Cossack stanitsy in Orenburg, the Don, and Stavropol, the tendency to elect peasant officials was particularly marked. In all these areas peasant officials seem to have been generally identified as protectors of local national and ethnic interests. Among the Tatars preference also was shown toward wealth. Mullahs were likewise numerous among Tatar volost delegates.*

The District Peasant Assemblies Little is known of what happened at the district assemblies of volost delegates around the country. The few memoirs and contemporary accounts

suggest that the delegates often had trouble coming to agreement about candidates for the electors to be sent up to the provincial assembly. This was

understandable, since the assembled delegates generally knew nothing

about one another and lacked any party programs they could gather around. They apparently only occasionally took advantage of the provision allowing for preliminary discussion meetings by the delegates. On occasion the inability of the delegates to produce a majority vote for electors led to protracted meetings, as in Varnavin district, Kostroma province, where the

delegates all stood for balloting, failed to get a majority for a single candidate, and then got into an altercation with the marshal of nobility about extending the assembly beyond the statutory two days.** In Penza province the district assemblies of peasant delegates were reported to be gathering as a rule without any preliminary meetings and without any candidates in mind, and often had to resort to drawing the electors’ names by lots.*° A tendency for each delegate to vote for himself was widely reported.*°

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 249 A marked contrast to what appers to have been the general rule was provided in those district assemblies where representatives of Tatar villages

were present; in the district of Kazan, Ufa, and the Tauride they seem to

have presented a wall of solidarity, usually under the direction of a mullah,*’ in trying to get as many of their own into the electors’ positions as possible. The same kind of behavior was observed among the Bashkirs of Orenburg province, and also among the Cossacks in those provinces (Don

and Orenburg) where they had separate district assemblies from the peasants.*® And in the Northwest, particularly the Baltic provinces, discipline along national-confessional lines was the rule in the peasants’ curia as in the others.

The Peasant Provincial Electors It is clear that most of the district assemblies of peasant delegates did take place and somehow managed to elect the full complement of provincial electors. Reports of assemblies being cancelled for lack of attendance were

extremely rare: at least 90 percent of the provincial electors from the peasant curia, or 2,262 out of a theoretical maximum of 2,532, were in fact elected at the district assemblies.*”? The Kadet party monitored the district

peasant elections as best it could and compiled a table distributing the peasant electors by political orientation, shown here in Table 6. For all the inadequacies of the categories used by the compilers and of the information

on which the distribution of electors among them was based, a few significant pieces of information about the character of peasant participation in the elections are provided by these figures in their ensemble. In the first place it is abundantly clear that like the mass of peasant desiatidvorniki and delegates from which they emerged, the overwhelming mass of the peasant electors remained quite outside the framework of the political parties. There can be little doubt that the total number of nonparty peasant electors was considerably higher than the already overwhelming proportion falling into the ‘‘nonparty”’ column indicates. There is no reason

to believe that any significant proportion of either “progressives” or “rightists” were associated with any specific parties.°° The total number of nonparty electors was therefore somewhere between 1,807 and 2,160 (the total reported minus those identified as Kadets or Octobrists), and probably

much nearer to the latter than to the former number, or approaching 95 percent of the total number of the peasant electors’ group. And these tended to be the more literate and ‘“‘developed”’ men the villages had to offer, who in the process of electoral “filtration” from householders to electors had had

a much greater chance of being exposed to political-party agitation and programs than the mass of their constituents. Assuming for the moment that one knew nothng of these electors’

250 The First National Elections Table 6 Number of Peasant Electors and Their Political Orientation. Total electors

Province allotted KD Progressives Octobrist Right Nonparty

Arkhangelsk — —— 53 13 Astrakhan 29?19 —-‘ — 21

Bessarabia 43 3 3 — 37 Vilno 40 ~—12 ——1 29 2, Vitebsk 31 2 — Vladimir 26 — aoa96— -- — — 37 20 Vologda 46

Volynia 69 1 — 1 5 62 Voronezh 101 —- Z — 6 93

Viatka —— 11 42 86 Grodno148 43 10 — 29 1— Don Oblast 93? 1 1 —4 88 Ekaterinoslav 34 1 — — — 33

Kazan 9830 — 15 3 —— —— a3 Kaluga 3 19 Kiev 39 80—1125 — = 7—56 Kovno He Kostroma 29 5 1 — 4 19 Kurland 13 3 Zz — 1 2 Kursk 78 7 26 — “. 37

Livland4121 >—~ —-— = oo — Minsk — — 15 Mogilev 40 11—— os4,3 11 36 Moscow 16 — — N. Novgorod 42 4 4 — 3 27 Novgorod 31 — 5 — — 26 PRINCIPAL SOURCE: Vestnik PNS, 1906, no. 6, pp. 441-470.

Note: The table reproduces the peasant-curia section of the table compiled by the Kadet election analysts, omitting the distribution within provinces by district. The total number of electors assigned by the electoral statutes to the peasant curia in each province has been added. The Kadet compilers counted as ‘“KDs” members of parties adhering to the Kadet national program, such as the Estonian Progressive party, the Jewish Constitutional-Democratic party, and so on, in addition to party regulars. Under the rubric “Progressives” were grouped “‘all varieties of political orientation between the KDs and the Octobrists with their moderate [allies]. Here are included in general all persons who have shown themselves to be in the opposition [zarekomendavshie sebia oppozitsionno].” It follows that most electors counted in this rubric (especially peasant electors) were not members of an organized party. As Octobrists were counted only electors who supposedly adhered to the Union of October 17; in other words this was not meant to be an indication of mere orientation. As “‘rightists” [pravye] were counted both members of various right-wing parties or groups, as well as “reactionarily oriented persons” who belonged to no party; in short all who seemed to the compilers to be

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 251 Table 6 (continued) Total electors

Province allotted KD Progressives Octobrist Right Nonparty — fas Ge ol et es Ne, Gee eee Ree ee ee see

Olonets Orenburg27 63?——— —— — 2—252

Orel , 59 1 8 — Z 48 Penza 47 — rf — 5 37

Perm 86 — ji —Z 82 Podolia 82 — ~~. — —182 Poltava 23 — — —2 Pskov 24 2 11 — — fy Riazan9454 8 ~2—109733 Samara —-1—[sic] St. Petersburg 14 1Z — 13 — —— 1 Saratov 64 14 ~ —-

Simbirsk —4a 20 32 Smolensk4.431—1 412—

Stavropol 33 -— —— —— — 33

Tauride 42 — 3 34~~ Tambov 92 —— 21 36 67

Tver 33 Tula 49 a2 21 9151— 1 28

Ufa 88 — — — — 88 Kharkov 64 6 - = 4 5 45

Kherson 50 10 +. Z 1 33 Chernigov 63 -—6— —-— 6 Estland 10 —— — —Jaroslavl 17 1 5 — — 10 Total ZSSZ 84 237 18 116 =1,807 “standing somewhat to the right of the Octobrists.”’ Finally, under the rubric ‘“Nonparty” (in the first published tables, literally: ‘““Svedeniia o prinadlezhnosti k partii ne imeetsia”; in later tables this was shortened to “‘bezpartiinye’’) were grouped all electors who designated themselves as nonparty, as well as those who were identified in the sources as

being of indeterminate political orientation (Vestnik PNS, nos. 43-44 [November 8, 1907]). The categories are mostly vague and elastic, and one can only speculate about how the compilers fit into them the spotty, diverse, and rough estimates about electors’ (especially peasant electors’) political attitudes and allegiances coming in from the provinces. One does not have to read many of the local descriptions of peasant electors to understand that attributions were often based on the merest hearsay. It should also be noted that the political orientation of electors was usually determined only upon their gathering in the provincial electoral assemblies, and whatever orientation other than ‘“nonparty” most peasant electors had was usually taken on only there. a. The combined figure for peasant and Cossack electors, elected separately. The statutory numbers are- Astrakhan—24 peasants, 5 Cossacks; Don—14 peasants, 79 Cossacks; Orenburg—36 peasants, 27 Cossacks.

252 The First National Elections eventual behavior in the provincial electoral assemblies or of the very revealing shift in political orientations of the peasant electors in the second Duma elections held in early 1907,°' what could be said about this mass of

nonparty electors except that they did not form part of the politically mobilized population and, more precisely, what could be predicted about their behavior in the provincial assemblies? The answer seems to be both very little and a great deal: very little about various aspects of their world view or about their attitudes toward most of the issues that would be raised in the assemblies by their peers from the other curiae; a great deal in the sense that there were no apparent issues or allegiances that were likely to compete with the one issue on which strong

shared opinion did exist among the peasant electors and around which, under certain conditions, they could be galvanized into something like an organized political force. That issue was of course the land question. If the few Kadets, Octobrists, and members of scattered other parties among them

could be counted on to hew for the most part to party discipline, for the others not even the distinction between “progressives” and “‘rightists” promised much by way of divisiveness; and on the issue of land these distinctions indicated virtually nothing. There is an abundance of examples to show that on the one hand an “opposition-minded” peasant could be a loyal supporter of the monarchy, while on the other the most outspoken monarchist and establishmentarian peasant could be as radical as any other on the agrarian issue.°* There were a few provinces in which a sizable proportion of peasant electors fell into the categories to the left of the nonparty column: Vilno, Kovno, Kurland, Livland, Estland, Moscow, Pskov, Saratov, St. Petersburg, Ufa, and Kherson.>? It is apparent that in most cases these were not signs of Kadet or Octobrist agitational successes; the better part of these electors fell

into the “progressive” category, except in the Northwest, where many belonged to the nationalist parties as well. Six of these eleven provinces were

in the national borderlands, where a much greater proportion of the total population had been mobilized politically than in the interior provinces, generally speaking.>*

In the Baltic provinces, where ethnic identity coincided with nearly universal literacy among the rural population, this mobilization brought very large followings among the native peasantries to the Estonian and Latvian national-democratic parties.°> In Kovno province the bulk of the Lithuanian peasants were apparently less politicized than in the Baltic but showed sufficient solidarity to capture all the electoral seats in the peasant

curia for themselves.°° In Vilno province a similar demonstration of solidarity obtained among the predominantly Belorussian-Catholic peasantry, aided considerably according to contemporary reports by the Catholic clergy.°’ Ethnic-confessional solidarity, even though unaccompanied by

extensive political-party connections, led the compilers of the electors’

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 253 tables to classify the peasant electors of these two provinces in the “progressive” category.® The table has no figures for Ufa province, but much the same can be said of the majority of peasant electors there, Tatar Muslims who demonstrated remarkable solidarity throughout the election process.” The untypically high level of opposition-mindedness recorded for the peasant electors of the remaining provinces in this group may perhaps be written off to the vagaries of information gathering and classification, but most of these were either provinces where governmental punitive measures against peasants had been particularly intense in recent months—the case in both Kursk and Saratov—or provinces with nearby large urban industrial centers, whose peasant populations were extensively involved in part-time employment in these urban centers. It seems likely that both circumstances may have been responsible, in rather different ways, for an unusually high level of politically focused discontent among the peasantry.°° In many respects the area of participation in the preliminary elections that was most revealing about peasant attitudes lay outside the framework

of the peasant curia—in the landowners’ curia, in which a great many peasants participated as owners of private plots of land apart from their communal holdings.

The Landowners’ Curia This curia, like the peasants’, was based on the system of zemstvo representation. The December 11 law provided, however, for participation in the preliminary stages of the elections in this curia of a far broader and more heterogeneous collection of landholders than had taken part in the zemstvo elections. The August 1905 law had provided for district assemblies of owners of land and some other forms of taxed immovable property outside the towns, where the electors to the provincial assembly were to be chosen. As in their zemstvo model, large property owners in the district enjoyed the right of direct participation in these district assemblies, the property qualifications for a direct vote being provided in the statutes and a supplementary table.°! In addition, smaller property owners of at least one tenth of the amount of land or other assets required for a direct vote had the right to be represented in the district assemblies, at the rate of one delegate per full vote-qualifying

allotment, to be elected at one or more preliminary assemblies. Clergy

residing on church lands in the district could also take part in these assemblies on the same basis. The December emendations to the electoral law significantly altered the

character of the landowners’ curia. The most important change was the revocation of the minimum property qualifications for participation by

254 The First National Elections smallholders: now any private owner of taxed land, no matter how little,

could not participate in the preliminary smallholders’ meetings. This provision opened the landowners’ curia to a mass of peasants who, while

remaining members of village communities (and therefore eligible to participate in the peasant curia elections as well), had bought privately a few desiatinas of land. The number of smallholders’ delegates in a given district

assembly of landowners depended directly on the amount of property collectively represented by the smallholders who chose to show up for the preliminary meetings; it tended, therefore, to be elastic and unpredictable. Managers and renters of estates large enough to carry a full vote allotment (tsenz) were also admitted to the landowners’ assemblies by the December amendments.°*

The Smallholders’ Assemblies There are no figures available for the total number of smallholders eligible to participate in the elections. Using the 1895 statistics on private (that is, nonallotment) landholding, Lositskii estimated the total number of smallholders at 650,000, of whom 490,000 possessed less than 10 percent of a full tsenz;°? by 1906 the size of this group must have been considerably greater, in view of the general trend toward diminution of large landowning. Smirnov in 1906 claimed to hve accounted for 187,500 smallholders in just forty-two districts of European Russia.®* To be sure, the potential number of full tsenzes accounted for by smallholders was much smaller; Lositskii (still using the 1895 data) estimated there were about 65,000 of these, as

compared to 55,000 individual holders of the full tsenz. The social and estate background of the enfranchised smallholders was

complex: it included not only peasants who had individually purchased plots of land amounting to less than a full tsenz, nobles, and clergy, but a considerable number of merchants, townsmen, and others.® The turnout for the preliminary smallholders’ meetings was, overall, quite low; contemporary estimates put it at about 14 or 15 percent. It seems clear that the low turnout of smallholders was due in significant measure to problems of organization and communication particular to that category of the enfranchised populace. The smallholders lacked a preexist-

ing institutional framework such as the allotment peasants had for their curial elections. They could not be easily informed about election procedures through the zemstvos or the noble institutions as were most of the large landowners; and unlike their counterparts in the towns they were not easily reached by official announcements or partisan agitation: physical distances alone made this difficult, and the widespread formal prohibition on political agitation in the countryside made it more so. It appears that the smallholders were generally neglected by the political parties; the Kadets, for example, seem to have written them off as conservative elements. Even if

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 255 smallholders were aware of their voting rights and how to exercise them, the

fact that as a rule only a single smallholders’ meeting was scheduled for entire districts, some of which were the size of small European countries,

was enough to rule out participation by many.°’ An exception to these generalizations was the clergy, which was of course linked together by an established network of communications. The parish priests were informed of their voting rights by the church authorities

and encouraged to exercise them, often for the right-wing parties and always for “order and the tsar,’’ under the at least implicit threat of hierarchical retribution. It is probably safe to say that the majority of eligible Orthodox clerics turned out for the preliminary meetings of smallholders, making it possible for them to dominate those meetings in a number of districts.°% Smallholding nobles, by contrast, may have exercised the franchise no

more frequently than their peasant counterparts—partly for the same reasons that obtained generally for this part of the electorate. But it also seems that the gentry anticipated hostility from the peasant smallholders and tended to avoid meetings in places where they knew there would be a peasant majority.°’ In Chernigov, at least, the priests seem to have stayed away from the smallholders’ assemblies for the same reason.”° Private smallholders who were of neither noble nor peasant background appear to have stayed away from the elections with few exceptions, although they held in sum nearly as much private land as did the peasants. The composition of the smallholders’ assemblies—a mix of peasants, pomeshchiki, and clerics, primarily—tended to vary widely from place to place. In at least ten provinces meetings appear to have been generally dominated by land-working peasants.”! In others a fair mix of the basic groups enfranchised in this curia obtained.’* And there were at least a few

districts and one entire province where the assemblies tended to be dominated by priests.”° In Kiev province the 1,472 delegates sent up from the smallholders’ meetings in the province comprised 1,219 peasants, 120 meshchane, 76 Orthodox clerics, 9 Catholic priests, 45 nobles, 2 chinovniki, and 1 Czech colonist.’* In Griazovets district, Vologda province, the district landowners’

assembly was attended by 135 delegates of whom 117 were peasant delegates from the smallholders’ assembly of the district.” In Viazma district of Smolensk province, 265 smallholders participated in the prelimi-

nary assembly: 236 peasants, 20 priests, 5 meshchane, and 4 nobles. In Opochka district, Pskov province, two thirds of the district landowners’ assembly consisted of peasant delegates from the smallholders.’° No claim of typicality can be made for these figures, but they do give an idea of what the reporters on the elections had in mind when they referred to peasant dominance of the smallholders’ assemblies.

The most striking aspect of the reports from areas where peasants

256 The First National Elections dominated the preliminary assemblies was the.nearly universal tendency among them to be militantly opposed to allowing any clergy or nobles through as delegates to the district assemblies. Dmitriev-Mamonov’s report for Voronezh was more explicit on this subject than most, but not atypical: The preliminary assemblies of small landowners clearly reflected the attitude of the peasants toward other estates [sosloviia] during

the elections. At almost all the assemblies of landowners the peasants presented a homogeneous and remarkably unified [edinodushnaia] mass, striving to put through candidates from their

peasant milieu. At the elections they paid little attention to the political ‘““credos” of those they elected, and voted for the candidate

they found sympathetic by his personal qualities. In view of the extreme dearth of preelection agitation, the following method was employed at the elections: the peasants broke up into groups from each volost and each of them identified its candidates, who were then balloted on. At times conflicts with the clergy occurred over

the peasants’ striving to put through their candidates there [alone].””

It is safe to say that the same atmosphere prevailed in Viatka; although we have no description of the preliminary stages in the curial elections there, all but one of the landowners’ electors sent up from the district assemblies were peasants who had come up through the smallholders’ meetings. There as in neighboring Vologda, the contest was mainly with the clergy, since small gentry landowners were in short supply.”° In his report on the Minsk elections Dmitriev-Mamonov remarked that the mass of peasant smallholders, like the allotment peasants in their own curia, were not politically conscious, “but on the other hand their enmity

toward the pany [the predominantly Polish landlords] and kzendzy [Catholic clerics] knows no bounds.”’? The peasant smallholders were unable to command a majority in most of the district assemblies in that

province, but where they did—in the two districts of Bobruisk and Rechinsk—they systematically excluded landlords and priests from the electors’ lists. The Opochka chronicler reported that the peasant-landowner elections there took place “under the influence of extremely sharpened class feeling and extreme mistrust of the gentry [gospoda]: ‘Let through no one from the gentry, those in frock coats or galoshes—we don’t need them. We must elect our brother-muzhik, who has himself experienced our want.’ °° Reports from Smolensk and Chernigov provinces affirmed that hostility of the peasant majorities toward gentry and priests was so strong and manifest

that the latter for the most part stayed away from the smallholders’ meetings.®! In the smallholders’ assembly in Viazma district of Smolensk province where, as noted, 236 of the 265 participants were peasants, they

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 257 reportedly told the handful of priests and the 4 nobles who had shown up: “We want neither gentry nor priests [nam nado ni panov ni popov].” The

gentry soon left and the peasants proceeded to the election of their candidates.*”

In the southwestern provinces of Volynia and Podolia the assemblies brought together an assortment of peasants, Orthodox and Catholic clergy, Polish gentry, and sundry intermediate elements, reflecting the ethnic and confessional heterogeneity of the area. In Podolia, which had one of the highest levels of smallholder participation in European Russia, the preliminary assemblies were reported to have elected 592 peasants, 198 Orthodox priests, 4 Catholic priests, 1 chinovnik, 6 “‘Old Believers,” 3 doctors, 15 hostel-keepers, and 8 meshchane. In Volynia Polish gentry participated in

some numbers but were generally outnumberd by peasants, Orthodox clergy, and Catholic clergy, in that order of importance.*? In Nizhnii Novgorod and Perm provinces, where ethnic and confessional diversity was much less pronounced, the basic mass of landworking peasants in the preliminary assemblies was leavened by significant

numbers of tradesman, artisans (kustary), and clergy, although the landworking peasants remained the majority in both provinces. In Nizhnii Novgorod the smallholders were reported to have elected as delegates to the

district assemblies 191 peasants, 44 priests, 11 tradesmen, 7 gentry, and representatives of several other occupations. The relatively large number of clergy suggests that some of the smallholders’ assemblies were ill-attended by peasants.°* The smallholders’ assemblies of Moscow province yielded a particularly heterogeneous group of delegates, the combined result of the diversified character of small property holding in the province and generally

poor attendance by land-working peasants. A count of the smallholders’ delegates to the district assemblies (not counting the district of Bronnitsy) yielded 97 “‘peasants, meshchane, and craftsmen [tsekhovye],” 78 priests, 3

nobles, 22 honorary citizens and a single merchant, 8 chinovniki, 1 Don Cossack policeman, and 13 members of the intelligentsia professions.®° The

composition of the preliminary assemblies that produced this group of delegates varied widely from district to district: in Bogorodsk, where only 43 of 500 eligible smallholders showed up, 23 of them were clergy.®® In Zvenigorod the meeting of 82 smallholders (out of 238 eligible) included 34 priests and 2 deacons.®’ In Ruza district 90 smallholders took part and sent 22 delegates to the district assembly, about half of whom were peasants and half priests, plus a few gentry.®® As this information on several Moscow districts suggests, in the central Russian region mixed assemblies of smallholders often appear to have been

composed mainly of peasants and priests, the latter carrying significant weight in the meetings because of a very low turnout by eligible peasant smallholders.®?

In at least a few districts, as a result of a particularly low turnout by

258 The First National Elections peasant smallholders and a solid turnout by the clergy, priests actually dominated preliminary assemblies. Thus in Kadnikov district of Vologda province, a province where most of the smallholders’ meetings were dominated by peasants, the eligible peasant smallholders seem hardly to have been aware of the elections: only 51 of 14,000 eligible smallholders appeared at the meeting, 38 of them priests.?? The case of Bogorodsk district, Moscow province, has already been cited. The clergy had near majorities in several other districts of Moscow province, where it was highly

mobilized for participation in the elections and the peasant turnout was generally low in the landowners’ curia. Essentially the same situation prevailed in Shadrinsk district, Perm province, where the smallholders’ assembly sent exclusively priests to the district assembly.”' In Tula province the clergy apparently dominated most of the preliminary meetings for the same reason.”~ In Orenburg priests constituted a sizable proportion of the turnout at many meetings, and in Cheliabinsk district the district assembly

consisted of 15 priests and 3 large landowners, sure proof that the preliminary meeting was dominated by churchmen.”° The clergy was told by the church to defend the established order, but the evidence shows that it was not a solidly conservative element in the elections. In Moscow province the priests from the smallholders’ group were generally described as conservative monarchists (as were many of the

peasants from the same group), but in Kadnikov district the clerical delegates from the smallholders’ assemblies were described as “‘moderates”’ or even “progressives.” It may be, particularly in the assemblies where the

clergy did not monopolize proceedings, that it was priests of populists orientation—known sympathizers with peasant aspirations—who tended to get through. That this was frequently the case is suggested by the behavior of clerics in the provincial assemblies and also, indirectly, by the material Smirnov collected on the second Duma elections, which led him to conclude that the majority of clerics sent up by the smallholders’ assemblies belonged to “progressive groups.”’* The clergy, under direct pressure from the Synod, was even more active in the second elections than in the first. (It should be noted that the Synod’s message to the metropolitans did not make specific political recommendations; it only urged the clergy to participate as actively as possible “‘to defend the faith.’’)?°

In several areas the participation of specific national groups gave a special character to the smallholders’ representation. In the Baltic provinces private landowning was so nearly exclusively dominated by Germans that the landowners’ curia as a whole appears to have been from top to bottom a German preserve.”°

In parts of the provinces of Kazan and Tauride an important and sometimes dominant role in the smallholders’ preliminary elections was played by Tatars, whose voting solidarity and activism appears to have operated in the smallholders’ elections precisely as it did in the peasant

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 259 curia.”” Much the same sort of pattern seems to have prevailed in parts of Ufa province, where the Tatars took fifty-four of the eight-eight electors’ seats in the peasant curia and nine of the thirty-six seats in the landowners’ curia.”°

In Kherson province the German colonists managed, despite their relatively small numbers, to dominate the smallholders’ assemblies in all the districts of the province. In two districts they were able to acquire a majority

in the district landowners’ assemblies and in that way to send twelve electors (out of a total of sixty-nine in that curia) to the provincial assembly. There, together with ten fellow colonists from other curiae, they were able to parlay a Duma deputy’s seat for one of their number, this on the basis of

about 4 percent of the province’s population.”” The organization and discipline of the German smallholders was matched by the indifference of the Russian, mostly peasant, smallholders. By all indications the great mass of the peasants who participated in the elections as smallholders, and they were the bulk of the group, lacked any defined political orientation. As noted, they were generally hostile toward the gentry and often toward the clergy with whom they came in contact in the smallholders’ assemblies. In these respects, as in others, the available

evidence suggests a kind of cohesiveness among the peasants at large, including both strictly ‘‘allotment” peasants and those relatively better-off peasants who could vote in the smallholders’ assemblies. Recognition of differences in wealth and circumstance by peasants does not go entirely unobserved in the sources, but this recognition appears at all levels, in both

curial groups, and there is no indication that the possession of privately owned land was considered any kind of basic distinction among peasants. It seems highly significant that in all the accounts of the elections I have seen there was only one recorded case of friction developing between peasants in

the peasant curia and peasants in the landowners’ curia during the preliminary stages of the elections: that is the case already mentioned of some volosts in the province of Pskov, where peasants with private plots were reportedly driven from the volost assemblies by their fellow villagers on the grounds that they had already exercised their suffrage rights in the landowners’ curia.!°° This behavior may well have been related to the fact that an unusually high proportion of private land in the province, exceeding

half, was owned by the nongentry, principally peasants. There is no evidence that the smallholding peasants, or any significant subgroup among them, were tending to become set off from the peasantry at large and were identifying themselves as having basically different interests, such as might call for electoral solidarity with other groups—the smallholding gentry, for example. This negative evidence is overwhelmingly confirmed by positive evidence from the provincial assemblies, where peasants from both curiae

generally voted together and were treated as a single group by the nonpeasant electors. Most of the smallholding peasants were members of

260 The First National Elections the same peasant communities as the strictly ‘‘allotment” peasants and were

thus neither administratively nor economically set off from them.’”! To be sure, the import of these observations for the long-standing debate about whether, or to what extent, the traditional peasantry was

breaking up into different economic classes by the beginning of the twentieth century is severely limited by the nearly total lack of precise information about the economic characteristics of the “peasants” who actually participated in the smallholders’ elections.‘°* About 25 million desiatinas of private land belonged to proprietors officially ascribed to the peasant estate in 1905, but perhaps as much as 6 million of that total amount was owned by “‘peasants” who had enough land to participate

directly in the district landowners’ assemblies alongside the large pomeshchiki; and another 11.4 million belonged to peasant communes or cooperatives and were thus not linked to voting rights in the landowners’ curia. The remaining 7 or 8 million individually held desiatinas that carried the right to participate in the smallholders’ assemblies were distributed among holdings of a wide variety of sizes, with only about half that sum (4.2 million desiatinas) held in amounts small enough to have belonged to

regular peasant farmers, as opposed to farmers using hired labor and modern techniques, or to absentee landlords (figuring the maximum “peasant” holding at 50 desiatinas in accordance with the conventions of both prerevolutionary and Soviet scholarship).’°° The qualitative evidence suggests that by and large the peasants who participated in the smallholders’

assemblies were relatively small proprietors who still identified their interests with those of the peasantry at large.

The District Elections The smallholders’ delegates joined large property holders with a direct vote in district assemblies of “large landowners’”’ to elect the statutory number of

electors to the provincial assembly. The number of participants in each category in the district assemblies was, within the limits dictated by the structure of private landholding in the district, entirely unpredictable, depending as it did on the amount of land that had been represented in the preliminary smallholders’ meetings on the one side and the turnout of large

landowners on the other. The best evidence (in many cases the only evidence) of what transpired

at these district assemblies is provided by the Kadet tabulation of the political orientations of the provincial electors they chose. It is presented here in Table 7 in the same form as the figures on peasant electors in Table 6. As can be seen, nearly half the total number of landowners’ electors accounted for were nonparty (854), with the other half distributed fairly evenly along the political spectrum from the Kadets rightward, the center of

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 261 gravity being slightly to the left of the Octobrists (Kadets and progressives

= 457; Octobrists, TIP and Right = 449). Sidelnikov has compiled a breakdown of the landowners’ electors for forty-five provinces by status categories, as shown in Table 8. Although

Sidelnikov (or rather his source, the files of the Council of Ministers) unfortunately mixes suffrage-qualification, occupational, and _ estate categories, and systematic information on the relative proportions of smallholders and large landowners is lacking, it is clear enough that large

noble landowners constituted less than half the population of the total group for European Russia as a whole, and that more than a quarter of the

total were peasant smallholders (in strictly estate terms, there were somewhat larger numbers of both nobles and peasants than indicated here).!°* As can be seen in Table 9, the detailed information available for a few provinces shows a fairly close correspondence between the number of peasants among the electors and the number of nonparty electors, with the latter usually outnumbering the former somewhat. It seems reasonably clear that a sizable majority of the nonparty electors were peasants sent up from the smallholders’ meetings. Perhaps as many as 30 percent of the “large landowners” participating in the provincial assemblies of European Russia

were of peasant origin, if not peasants strictly speaking and the total proportion of electors who had come up through the smallholders’ meetings

was around 50 percent.’ Thus the “large landowners’ curiae,” as they were officially designated,

were far from being dominated by large landowners; and as Table 9 also shows, the large landowners in them were divided in terms of political orientation. Although the center of gravity among them was probably somewhat to the right of the Octobrists in most provinces, they were by no means uniformly conservative in political orientation.’°° The political heterogeneity of the landowners’ electors reflected the heterogeneity of most of the district assemblies in which they had been elected. The district-by-district tables on the electors (summarized by provinces in Table 7) show that only slightly more than half the district assemblies with more than one elector’s position being contested produced electors of a single political orientation, despite the voting rules, which made no provision for proportional representation.'°’ The evidence clearly suggests that in at least half the district assemblies (and probably in more) no single political orientation or party could command a majority of the votes. This situation required a compromise in the form of ticket splitting. Ticket splitting within district assemblies, combined with differing orienta-

tions among districts, produced the considerable heterogeneity of the landowners’ curia in most provinces. There were many occasions, as the figures in Tables 7 and 9 show, when the large landowners, though in a majority in the district assembly, did not vote as a bloc because of political

262 The First National Elections Table 7 Number of Landowners’ Electors and Their Political Orientation.

Province Total KD _ Progressives Octobrists TIP Right Nonparty

Arkhangelsk’ 11 4. ooo — — - 7 Astrakhan 5 — —-— -— —— 5 Bessarabia 56 9 14 — — 11 21

Vilno £4} 7 11 14— 3— -—5 20 Vitebsk 39 5 —— 18 Vladimir? 18 2 3 1 —- 7 5

Vologda 21 2 2 1 -— 8 13 Volynia 8642- i63F4— 76 ab Voronezh‘ — 25 Viatka 18361 34 2——~— 424 9 Grodno? a 7 Don Oblast 47 4. — 16 — — 27 Ekaterinoslav 38 pi é 7 —- 4. 21

Kazan ZS p4 33 2Z 1—12i 19 Kaluga 25 Kiev Kovno74 35 6 —851—— —45 24 22

Kostroma*® 3317— 7— 2— 3 21 Kurland‘ 14 — -— 1 Kursk 447 are — 8—— 24 Livland' —— —-10 =—

Minsk 74 =16 5 — — 2 21 Mogilev 5313 10 Z 8 “— ~11s34 Moscow 1 3 1 N. Novgorod 30 4 4 3 — 9 7, Novgorod 5 4+ — Olonets® 945 —1— ~~ 8—27 9 SOURCE: Vestnik PNS, 1906, no. 6, pp. 441-470.

a. There was no separate urban curia in Arkhangelsk province, the urban vote being combined with the rural landowners’; according to the Kadet table, landowners yielded 11 of these electors, urban voters the remaining two. Of the former, 4 were identified as Kadets, 7 as nonparty electors. b. According to Kliaz’ma, 3/25/06, the electors counted: 3 Kadets or further left, 2

nonparty progressives, 1 moderate to the left of the Octobrists, 1 Octobrist, 4 TIP members, 6 members of PLO, SRN or simply ‘‘monarchist,” and 1 of unknown orientation. Here and below are introduced counts by political orientation from local sources

setae considerably from the Kadet tables or are significantly fuller and more c. According to the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, the landowners’ electors included: 5 nonparty peasants, 9 Octobrists, 5 Kadets, and 13 unspecified.

_ Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 263 Table 7 (continued)

Province Total KD_ Progressives Octobrists TIP Right Nonparty

Orenburg 19 — — — om Dek =

Orel 45283— 3 43 — 12=Z1 Penza" — _25 Perm 58 4 16 2 + 9 23 Podolia 76 5456 33 ——= — 15950 Poltava no7.+ 19 Pskov Hi 32+5—~ — 24 20 16 Riazan 40 11 — Samara’ 48 — 9 4 — 14 34 St. Petersburg 187517 — 3 —141 Z Saratov 51 ‘4 2 Simbirsk 29 4 96 4, —10 —— —519 Smolensk 40 5 Stavropol 6 — 1 —— — — 5 Tauride 31 85667 10 0— 10 19 — Tambov 62 4 18 Tver 41 15 1 6 — — 19 Tula 29 — = 2 —. i 20 Ufa 36 — _— — — 5 31 Kharkov 43 + 8 48 19 — 1 iI8 Kherson 69 11 = 34 Chernigov! 5sO0 — 7 _oo 6 37 Estland! 21 — — fare oa = aon! Jaroslav 20 5 3 Z — — 10 Total 1,956 202 255 146 12 291 854 d. Of 31 landowners noted by the Dmitriev-Mamonov report: 21 ‘Polish Catholic

party,” 3 nonparty, 1 monarchist, and 1 unspecified. Of the 36 electors, 35 were identified as Catholics, 1 as Orthodox. e. A newspaper account gave the following breakdown of landowners’ electors by political orientation: 11 Kadets, 4 Octobrists, 6 Rightists, 14 unspecified (including 3 priests and 11 peasants) (MV, 4: 248). f. All the landowners’ seats in the Baltic provinces were apparently occupied by Baltic German nobles of one or the other of the two German parties. g. Other records show that there was 1 Octobrist (a noble landowner) among the electors.

h. Of 19 landowners’ electors noted by the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, there were 2 Octobrists, 2 monarchists, 3 progressives, and 10 unspecified. i. The number of electors given here exceeds the statutory total for this province, as per the Kadet tables. In the absence of other sources, I leave it as reported. j. Of 21 landowners’ electors noted in the Dmitriev-Mamonov report, there were 4 conservatives, 5. Kadets, 7 progressives, 3 Octobrists, and 8 unspecified.

264 The First National Elections Table 8 Status of Landowners’ Electors in Forty-five Provinces of European Russia. Electors

Status group Number Percent of total Noble landowners (full tsenz) 785 45.8 Estate-managers and renters 15 0.9 Non-peasant small landowners 72 4.2

other than land 191 26.0 1 We | Peasants 445 Clergy 103 6.0 Intelligentsia, salaried employees 102 5.9 Owners of immovable property,

Total 1713 100

SouRcE: Adapted with slight modifications from the table in S. M. Sidel’nikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ pervoi gosudarstvennoi dumy (Moscow, 1962), p. 136.

differences among them, and in some cases they allowed for the election of smallholders’ delegates to the provincial assembly. By the same token there

were numerous cases in which district assemblies that were apparently completely dominated by large landowners and sent only large landowners to the provincial assembly were divided in terms of political orientation, as in Volynia province, where the electors’ seats were distributed among three Kadets, seven Octobrists, and two conservatives.!°? Some of the district assemblies must have anticipated the provincial assemblies in their political maneuvering and bloc arrangements. In the district landowners’ assembly in

Vologda district, for example, the clerical delegates first tried out their strength against three parties, the Kadets, the Octobrists, and the PLO, and then joined a bloc with the latter two, with one elector’s position to go to

each constituency in the bloc. The Kadets joined with the peasant smallholders’ delegates against the bloc, but it took all three positions with its plurality./°? Of the 172 districts reported on with more than one elector’s seat and more than one political orientation among the electors, about half—92— included representatives of both the center or right on the one hand, and the

lef or nonparty status on the other, indicating some kind of deliberate compromises in most cases. Provinces with particularly broad spans of political orientation among the landowners’ electors included Bessarabia, Nizhnii Novgorod, Smolensk, Tauride, Tambov, Kharkov, and Kherson. Astrakhan, Arkhangelsk, Viatka (with the exception of Slobodsk district), Mogilev, Olonets, Penza, Poltava (with the exception of Konstantinograd district), Simbirsk, Stavropol, and Jaroslavl (with the exception of Myshkin district) returned predominantly left or nonparty electors. Most of these

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 265 were provinces in which nonnoble landowners dominated the curia by.and large.'!° The center and right together sent up all electors in a number of

individual districts but had a majority of landowners’ electors in the provincial assemblies only in Kaluga, Moscow, Tauride, Tambov, and Kherson. The conservatives alone did not have an absolute majority of landowners’ electors in any province, although there were quite a few individual districts whose electors were entirely on the right, including 3 districts in Voronezh, 4 in Kaluga, 4 in Kursk, 4 in Moscow, and 3 in Tula, to mention only those provinces where this pattern was noted in more than 1 or 2 districts. In some provinces, like Saratov, the political orientation of the electors clearly depended on whether the district assemblies were dominated by smallholders or large landowners. In the latter case the assemblies sent up exclusively men of the right; in the former, which may have obtained only in Saratov district, all the electors were on the left.’!” There is evidence, however, that not all conservative electors came from assemblies dominated by large landowners. In Kirillov district, Novgorod province, exclusively conservative electors were sent up by an assembly dominated by peasant smallholders’ delegates.’ Conversely, in Kresttsy district of the same province the assembly had a large majority of large landowners (twenty-eight of forty-five), but they were unable to vote as a bloc because they were divided into mutually hostile groups: “conservatives,” “‘chinovniki,” and “liberal zemtsy.”’ These elections resulted in one wealthy peasant elector, one factory owner-merchant elector, and one gentry landowner elector. All three were registered in the Kadet table as

nonparty.’?° |

Looking forward to the provincial assemblies, the electors of the

landowners’ curia, who as a whole usually accounted for no more than a third of the electors in the assemblies, could not be expected to support a particular set of candidates or in general to act in unison; rather, most of the

large landowners among them could be expected to split up along party

lines, while the high proportion of nonparty or politically undefined smallholders’ electors among them could for the most part be expected to behave like the delegates from the peasants’ curia.

The Urban Curia and the Special City Elections The Suffrage System and the Electorate Under the August 1905 electoral law the structure of the urban electorate would have conformed closely to that of the zemstvo and municipal statutes of 1890 and 1892.'** The following categories were to-have had the right to

participate in the district urban assemblies: owners of urban property evaluated for zemstvo taxation at no less than 1,500 rubles; other persons

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280 The First National Elections good many districts where the registered voters in the district were not numerous enough to qualify for voting by written ballots, and even where they were in many cases the logistical and organizational problems were great enough to prevent use of printed party-slate ballots by the electorate at large. Even the Kadet party lacked effective organization in a majority of the

districts in the empire. (It should be remembered that the urban curia elections were in fact district elections: they took place in the district town, but involved eligible voters from other towns within the district and owners of certain kinds of rural property in the district as well.) In the provincial capitals and in the largest cities with separate elections the electorate was generally well within the reach of the party printing presses and distribution

capabilities, but this did not hold true for many smaller centers. Although it is known that printed party-slate ballots were used in

probably all of the city elections (and not only by the Kadets), the proportion of voters that used them rather than filling in their own ballots can for most cities only be inferred from the results of the elections. It is clear that in Moscow and Petersburg, at least, very few voters used anything but printed party bulletins. In Moscow, where three fifths of the registered voters were estimated to have belonged to political parties, voting by party lists was almost universal. The returns from one precinct, according to the military governor, revealed that 4,226 voters had turned in printed ballots

whereas only 230 had filled in their own. Although mostly a matter of straight party-ticket voting, the voting in Moscow showed that many voters cast the ballots of parties other than the one they ostensibly belonged to.

According to an analysis in the paper Put’, the registered electorate of approximately 50,000 in Moscow was distributed among the parties as follows: TIP, 13,000; Octobrists, 9,000; Kadets, 7,000; SDs, 3,500; Monarchists, 3,500; nonparty, 20,000.'*° If these figures are reasonably accurate, it seems clear that many members of the center parties (particularly the TIP, whose businessmen-leaders put pressure on their employees to join the party) broke party discipline and voted for the Kadets. Some part of the formally nonparty electorate probably consisted of Kadet sympathizers who did not join the party out of fear of reprisals from their employers but voted the Kadet ticket, although presumably the bulk of eligible voters who did not exercise their franchise (approximately 10,000) also came from this group. The Kadets took 65 percent of the popular vote in the city, while the center bloc got less than half that (the figures are Kadets, 26,932; center bloc, 12,435; Monarchists, 2,263).'*4 In Petersburg, too, the published returns by precincts showed clearly the

predominance of voting by printed lists, particularly for the Kadets. This is demonstrated by the range of voting—highest and lowest counts for candidates of a given party—which was extremely narrow for Kadet candidates, and somewhat wider for the constitutional-monarchist bloc candidates.'*° Returns for Kharkov show consistent party-ticket voting for

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 281 the Kadet candidates, while voting results for non-Kadet candidates ranged widely. '4°

The significance of the printed ballot as such for the outcome of the

elections should not be exaggerated, although it must have greatly facilitated party-list voting, especially in the first election, when the electoral

process was a complete novelty for the voters.'*” Ultimately it was the Organization and energy at the parties’ disposal that counted within the context of the nonproportional system of voting. The general system of the

elections tended to encourage the grouping of individual parties into a few—usually two or three: left, center, and right—blocs, and this tendency was naturally carried to its greatest length in the large city elections, where

strength of party organization and facility of communication were most developed, although it showed up frequently in the provincial elections as well. The possibility of a rival party or bloc carrying all the electors by relative majorities quite obviously discouraged parties from going it alone in the city elections if there was a chance of reaching a tolerable compromise

with parties not too distant on the political spectrum. The lesson was widely exemplified. In Petersburg small parties were drowned in the votes given the two main lists; even senators and other high notables who were the candidates of small parties received only a few dozen votes. Count A. A. Bobrinskii, president of the St. Petersburg duma, who ran his own campaign, got a total of 174 votes. Dr. Dubrovin, head of the Union of the Russian People, got only 631 votes in Narva precinct, a URP

“stronghold.”!*® In Vilno the ‘All-Russian Central Electoral Bureau,” representing the minority Russian-Orthodox population of the city, decided

to run a separate slate of “Russian” candidates rather than support the Jewish party (cooperation with the Polish party was not even considered). None of the Russian candidates got elected; the KD-Jewish party took the majority of electors’ seats, and the remainder went to the Poles.'*?

In Rostov/Don a group of radicals centered around the newspaper Priazovskii krai took exception to the doubtful liberality of a number of Kadet candidates and put up their own list, which was published in the newspaper but not on prepared ballots. A fair number of these candidates who were also on the Kadet list were elected; all the others were rejected.!°° Sometimes, as in Kiev, “neighboring parties” could not agree on a common slate, with disastrous results. In Kiev the Octobrists and the PLO-TIP bloc each ran their own lists; the Octobrists got three electors in the voting, and the center bloc, seven.!°

In a few cases liberal blocs nearly collapsed over arguments about dividing the spoils but in the end survived. The most dramatic case in point

was in Saratov, where the Union of Laboring Men made a substantial contribution to the Kadet-bloc total victory there but then threatened to have their electors withdraw support of the Kadet candidate at the electoral assembly. In Odessa, where the Kadet slate took all eighty seats with the

282 The First National Elections help of the nationalities organizations, considerable tension appears to have

developed over the composition of the candidates’ list. According to a newspaper report, the Kadets and the Jewish group fought over places on the ticket, the Jews first demanding forty-three electors, while the Kadets

insisted on giving them only thirty-three.!°* The exact terms of the compromise are unknown, but a single list was in the end published for the

city as a whole. This may have been the only case of friction within the Kadet-nationalities bloc sufficiently serious to have been aired in the newspapers. The number of candidate-electors from the constituent groups was usually arrived at amicably, and the standard condition imposed by the Kadet party when it was in charge—that in return for putting representa-

tives of the nationalities among their candidate-electors the latter were obliged to vote in the electoral assembly for the Duma candidate designated

by the party—appears to have been honored without exception. The distribution of the popular vote among the parties and blocs participating in the special city elections is not generally available, but a few cases may indicate the proportions involved. In Voronezh, where all eighty

electors were Kadet candidates, the Kadets received 1,350 out of 2,473 votes cast (54.5 percent); the Octobrists got only 700 votes.'°? In Moscow, as already noted, the Kadets got about 65 percent of the popular vote. In Petersburg, where as in Moscow all the electors’ seats went to Kadets, the

Kadet candidates received 62 percent of the votes, or 39,657. The Constitutional-Monarchist bloc received just over 20 percent of the votes.!°4

In Odessa, another election carried completely by the Kadets, the latter received 20,438 votes, the PLO got 4,797, the Union of Russian People 2,663, and the Octobrist-TIP bloc a grand total of 865 votes. Uneven geographical distribution of support for the various parties showed up in the precinct returns, reflecting spatial segregation of the population by social and national groups. A good example of this kind of distribution is afforded by the returns for the city of Kazan: sixty-seven of the electors were Kadet-bloc candidates, comprising forty Russian Kadets and twenty-seven Tatars (some of them party members). In the first and third precincts all the electors were Russian Kadets; in the fifth the seats were shared by Russian Kadets and Muslims of the same ticket; and the second precinct sent up exclusively Muslims of the Kadet bloc (eight of the sixteen electors were party members). The sixth precinct went entirely to the Octobrist bloc candidates, and the fourth was split between the two blocs

(twelve Kadets and four Octobrists).'°> In Orel the twenty Monarchist electors all came from the same precinct (of 3); they were for the most part merchants and senior civil servants.!°® In Astrakhan’s six precincts the Kadets won all the seats in four, and the Popular Monarchist party won all

the seats in the remaining two.'*” Although the same tendency toward geographical segregation of the

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 283 vote showed up in the capitals of Petersburg and Moscow, it appears to have been less pronounced and was remarkably similar in both cities: the range of the Kadet majority of the popular vote by precincts was between a low of 56 percent and a high of 68 percent (the Kadets had a majority in all

precincts of both capitals). The precinct returns suggest a relatively low degree of geographical segregation by social status in both cities.!°* There

are some figures available on the Moscow elections that demonstrate something of the correspondence between the social structure of the precincts and voting patterns in them. Despite the obvious inadequacies of the voter-qualification categories as indicators of social status, the figures do show a consistent positive correlation between levels of representation of voters associated with trade and industry and proportion of votes cast for the non-Kadet candidates, on the one side, and between other population

groups and Kadet support on the other.'>? The reasons for the Kadets’ failure to get an absolute majority of electors in the three elections in Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, and Tula are not entirely clear. Administrative repression, an unusually high level of activity of the center and right parties, and anti-Semitism seem to have influenced the outcome, to varying degrees, in all three cities. In Ekaterinoslav and Tula in particular, administrative repression of the Kadet organizations was extraordinarily strict, rendering them effectively inoperative during the campaign period; by contrast, the center and right parties were able to conduct very active campaigns. '©° In Ekaterinoslav (the one city to send a non-Kadet to the Duma) the local administration forbade

both the distribution of party lists of candidate-electors and the use of printed ballots in the elections—an apparently unique case.*°! Repression was apparently less extensive in Kishinev. In that city and in Ekaterinoslav

the right generally supported the Octobrist ticket in order to prevent passage of Kadet candidates. In both cases the stimulus to this cooperation appears to have been connected with anti-Semitic sentiment. In both cities

the Jewish population was large, but not large enough to dominate the elections as in many towns of the western provinces, and Jews were prominent in the Kadet party. The parties of the right in both cities publicly

labeled the Kadets as the “party of the Yids” (zhidovskaia partiia); the conservative paper in Kishinev even went so far as to provide a “readers’ guide” to the nationality of the Kadets’ candidates. In all those cities in which the Kadet bloc carried a majority of the electors, the outcome of the electoral assemblies was more or less a foregone

conclusion so far as the party affiliation of the Duma deputy-elect was concerned, although the identification of the Kadet candidates was not always a simple process. In one case, and apparently only that one—in Saratov—the bloc broke down between the general elections and the electoral assembly. Fifty-nine of the eighty electors of the Kadet-Union of

Laboring Men bloc in Saratov were Kadet party members, and the

284 The First National Elections remainder were representatives of the ULM. Following the general election

(March 23), the ULM had a meeting (April 4) where they decided to withdraw from the bloc and announced that the ULM electors had the right to put forch their own candidate for the Duma deputy’s seat or, in general, to support any candidacy they chose, now that all the electors’ seats had been kept out of the hands of “the right.” This decision was justified by the assertion that the bloc had been recognized as only temporary by the ULM from the beginning, as well as by reference to programmatic differences. '®

The conflict was carried on to a general voters’ meeting for the city organized by the ULM on April 12. (It appears that the ULM called this meeting in the hope of resolving the conflict.) The ULM electors tried their strength in the first round of voting in the assembly, where their candidate,

the Menshevik newspaper editor D. A. Topuridze, got a minority of the votes (twenty-seven), and then they fell in behind the Kadet candidate in the official balloting.'®? Although there was occasionally friction elsewhere over the composition of the candidates’ list at the time of a bloc’s constitution, once it was established the Kadets’ allies appear to have cooperated fully in voting for a Kadet party member in the city electoral assemblies. This rule held even in Petersburg and Moscow, where the Kadet blocs were relatively complex and the existence of several deputies’ seats to be filled might have been expected

to generate considerable friction within the bloc. As noted earlier, the identity of the party’s Duma candidates in Petersburg was determined by a “party plebiscite.” Of the nine candidates identified in that plebiscite, only seven remained in the running for the six allotted seats, since Rodichev had been elected from Tver province and I. V. Gessen had been excluded from

eligibility (he was under court investigation as editor of the suppressed newspaper Narodnaia svoboda). A meeting of the Kadet-bloc electors was held before the assembly met, at which it was agreed unanimously to elect in the assembly the candidates with the highest popular votes as electors (this

was the recommendation of a special party committee consisting of members of the city committee and precinct representatives). One elector proposed yielding a seat to a workers’ elector, but N. I. Kareev argued that

in view of the boycott of the elections by the majority of Petersburg workers, a workers’ deputy would be looked on as a representative of the conservative minority of the Petersburg proletariat that had participated in the elections. This argument was unanimously accepted and no place was yielded. !° In Moscow the identity of the party’s candidates was decided on only after the general elections in the following way. The party city committee chose seventeen names from among names of electors put up by the precinct

organizations. These names were then. sent to all precinct groups for ranking. The three most popular candidates were to be designated for the Duma seats. The precinct straw vote had been preceded by a vote of the city

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 285 committee and the electors together, which had given the three highest ratings to Kokoshkin (thirty-three votes), Muromtsev (thirty-one), and Gertsenshtein (twenty-three). The next most popular candidate was Pavel Dolgorukov with sixteen votes. The precinct straw vote confirmed the preeminent places of Kokoshkin and Muromtsev, but there was nearly

equal support for Gertsenshtein and Dolgorukov for the third place. Gertsenshtein, however, had a slight edge in the voting and had received more popular votes as an elector; this, together with the argument that he

was needed in the Duma as the party’s financial expert, led the party leadership to put him up as the candidate for the third seat. The exclusion of Dolgorukov, one of the grand old men of the liberation movement, raised a certain amount of objection in the liberal press, but nothing came of it.!®

The fourth Duma seat for Moscow went by decision of the city committee to an elector from the workers’ curia, Savelev, a sort of independent Social Democrat who worked as a typesetter for the Kadetoriented newspaper Russkie vedomosti. This was done in return for the

commitment of the eighteen workers’ electors’ votes to the party’s candidates and, more generally, as a protest against the suffrage disability of

the working class (the propaganda intent of the protest was more or less obvious). It may be noted that in Moscow, unlike the case in Petersburg, the large majority of eligible factory elections did take place, so that Kareev’s

argument would have been less germane there.

A procedure similar to Moscow’s was followed in Kiev: after the general elections the oblast committee arranged a series of meetings with the Kiev city committee, the precinct committees, and the electors, to select a candidate for the Duma seat. Baron Shteingel, a Kiev landowner, was the most popular candidate (especially among the precinct committees), and he

was duly designated.'°°

In the Voronezh special elections the party’s most popular Duma candidate, A. I. Shingarev, declined the offer in order to stay on and run the local party newspaper, Voronezhskoe slovo, and to work at building up the

local organization. Next in line was P. Ia. Rostovtsev, the mayor of Voronezh.'®’ In Samara the party’s first choice, Khardin, was excluded on technical grounds, so the party chose P. P. Krylov.'©* With a few exceptions

such as these in Voronezh and Samara, the Kadets sent up their most prominent local leaders as deputies to the Duma from the special city elections. There is little indication of there having been much difficulty in party ranks in deciding who these people were. Most of the city elections went smoothly. Contestation of results or actual overturn of elections was very rare. In fact, no separate city election was reversed as a whole, although in Rostov/Don the elections in three precincts were reversed by the electoral commission on the grounds of various irregularities. They were reheld on April 9 (with the result that the Kadets got four more electors than in the first round). In three precincts of

286 The First National Elections Ekaterinoslav the elections were protested by the Kadets and other groups on the left who claimed that representatives of the right-wing parties had mishandled ballots and that scare tactics had been used on Jewish voters (that is, threats of a pogrom if a “Jew or in general a progressive” were elected to the Duma). But these complaints were rejected by the provincial electoral commission, whose ex officio chairman (as provincial marshal of nobility) was none other than M. V. Rodzianko, the leading figure in the local Octobrist organization.'©’ In Voronezh, where the elections were swept by the Kadets, their opponents protested the elections on the grounds that the Kadets had printed their bulletins on the press of the city duma

board, but the results were allowed to stand.'”°

The Working-Class Elections The combined effect of the electoral law and worker boycott was such as to make the significance of the workers’ curia elections in the overall electoral process extremely limited, and in some parts of the country quite negligible. There is no way of determining the total number of workers eligible to vote in the workers’ curia, since no registration of eligible persons was made; the number could not have far exceeded 1 million for the country as a whole.*”!

In all, only 151 (some 2.5 percent) of the electors who gathered in the provincial assemblies of European Russia were workers’ representatives, and another 56 participated in the special city assemblies.

Under the August electoral law there had been no separate curial representation for the industrial labor force, and the property and residence qualifications for voting in the general urban curia were such that virtually no industrial workers would have been enfranchised. Even the December

revision of the qualifications for voting in the urban curia would have enfranchised no significant proportion of the working class, few of whose

members rented their own apartments, the minimal qualification for voting.'’* Only a system of universal suffrage could have given significant weight to the industrial labor force in the elections, but the December law made a gesture toward carrying out the promise of the second point of the

October Manifesto vis-a-vis the working class by creating a separate workers’ curia, modeled basically on the peasant curia, with the significant difference that workers’ electors were not given the right to elect a separate Duma deputy in the provincial assemblies.!”° Similar to his peasant-householder counterpart, the individual work-

ingman participated in the elections not on the basis of personal qualification and registration (apart from the general age and sex requirements for all voters and the requirement that he be employed in the same establishment for at least six months prior to the elections), but as a worker

attached to a specific factory or plant—the analogue of the village community. The names of individual worker-voters were not published or

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 287 even compiled; only the names of eligible enterprises, the number of workers employed in them, and the number of delegates they were entitled

to elect were published. On the day of the elections in the factories and

shops (a single day for all enterprises of the province was set by the governor), the workers of the eligible plants were to gather, select a presiding officer from their own midst, and elect their delegate(s). No system of voting or rules about the proportion of votes required for election were prescribed. The results of the voting, however conducted, were to be recorded, signed by the presiding officer and at least ten other participants,

and turned over to the plant manager or administrator, who was to send them on directly to the provincial governor. The ratio of representation was very elastic: only plants employing at least 50 male workers could participate. Moreover, the number of delegates remained at 1 per plant whether the plant employed 50 or 1,999 workers.

The law read that plants with from 50 to 1,000 workers were to send a single delegate to the electoral assembly and that plants with more than 1,000 workers were to send an additional delegate per full additional complement of 1,000 workers. According to a contemporary SD pamphlet, this provision meant that in Eu; opean Russia 145,234 workers in plants

employing 50-100 workers received the right to elect 2,072 delegates, while 475,111 workers in establishments with more than 1,000 workers each elected only 424 delegates.'’* In Moscow only 3 of 331 “eligible” factories were entitled to send 2 delegates to the city assembly of workers’ delegates, and there were none that sent more than 2.'”° Generally speaking,

the larger the plant, the lower was the rate of representation. The calculation that employees of smaller plants were likely to be politically more moderate than those of large size is surely reflected in this system. The workers’ delegates gathered in a single provincial assembly and also in city assemblies in the large cities with separate representation, bypassing the intervening stage of the district assembly that existed in the peasant curia. Delegates were entitled to travel expenses for the journey to the provincial capital at the rate of five kopecks a verst. The provincial and city assemblies, chaired by the mayor of the capital, convened as a body and voted with balls if no more than 500 delegates participated. The delegates had to be present by noon of the opening day of the assembly and to remain until the election by absolute majority or plurality (on the second day) of the designated number of electors. If there were more than 500 delegates, the rule on written balloting was to be applied, meaning that the delegates could show up at any time of day to cast their ballots and the electors’ seats went

to the candidates with the highest number of votes, but the number of delegates in workers’ assemblies apparently nowhere reached 500. In Moscow, where the level of participation was extraordinarily high, with about three fourths of eligible factories represented, the number of delegates was only 252.176 The workers’ electors chosen in these assemblies were to participate in

288 The First National Elections the provincial or special city electoral assemblies on the same basis as the electors from the landowners’ and urban curiae. In provinces where special

city elections were held, the total number of workers’ electors were distributed between the city assembly and the provincial assembly by the

provincial electoral commission in accordance with the geographical distribution of the working class between the capital city and the rest of the province.'”” In some provinces of European Russia there were no workers’ curia elections at all, for the total working-class population, as calculated by

position.'”®. ,

the government, was not large enough to qualify for a single elector’s In the context of this study the main question about worker participation in the elections is, how effective in that curia was the agitation by the revolutionary parties for boycotting the elections? The Russian SD delegation to the Eighth International Socialist Congress boasted that only 10 percent of the eligible workers participated in the factory elections.’’” This estimate must surely be taken with a grain of salt, for there is simply no

evidentiary basis for making even an educated guess. In any case, the aggregate level of worker participation (even if it were determinable) tells very little about the success of the boycott tactic with regard to its actual effectiveness in preventing the election of workers’ delegates and electors. Since no lower limit of participation, or quorum, was set either for the factory elections or for the assemblies of delegates, it sufficed for a few workers in a few factories to participate in the elections to send the full complement of electors to the provincial and city assemblies. The record shows that the statutory number of workers’ electors was elected, in virtually all cases, to the assemblies. Table 12 should give some idea of the varying success of the boycott in different provinces. Taken all together, the boycott of the elections in a high proportion of factories in

several entire provinces and some of the major industrial cities in the country in addition to the extensive absenteeism of eligible workers in many

areas where participation in terms of number of enterprises was high constitute impressive testimony of working-class political consciousness and solidarity. There is also little doubt that the revolutionary parties, particularly the Social Democrats, played the central role in agitating for boycott of

the elections. The workers’ curia was the only one in which the tactic of boycotting the elections found widespread support.'®° Boycotting was most widespread in the larger industrial centers of the central, western, and southern regions, where the working-class movement was in general most developed and the influence of the revolutionary parties

most extensive. The Volga city of Saratov, where boycotting was very extensive, was the scene of particularly energetic working-class activism and

agitation by the revolutionary parties throughout 1905.!*! It should be stressed that even in those areas where the boycott tactic had little success so far as preventing elections altogether is concerned,

Phase I: The Preliminary Elections 289 significant proportions, sometimes the large majority, of eligible factory workers refused to take part in the elections. There are also indications that elections were held under administrative pressure in at least a few cases (in Minsk, most notably), and in some factories the workers participated but made their opinion of the elections known by “‘electing”’ scarecrows, the factory chimney, a deaf-mute, and a stutterer—an imaginative form of boycott. /°2 The fact remains that workers’ elections were held in a large majority of

the eligible enterprises around the country, and this often despite intensive agitation by the revolutionary parties. Moreover, the available evidence on

the political orientation of the delegates and electors suggests that a relatively high level of worker participation should not be equated with political moderation or conservatism on the part of the workers. Rather, the contrary tendency may have prevailed. In Moscow, for example, where the boycott tactic had relatively little success among the workers, the representatives they selected tended to be on the left, particularly SDs. Kazan and several other cities afford similar examples.'®’ By the same token, where

boycott agitation was relatively successful, the representatives elected tended to be more conservative. This was almost certainly because the more

radical workers left the field to more conservative, often high-seniority workers (‘‘staro-sluzhashchie,” as they are described in some reports). Thus in Petersburg, where the boycott agitation had great success in keeping large numbers of workers away from the elections but where the elections were nevertheless held in many plants, the delegates were mostly conservative. In Moscow, by contrast, where both worker and plant participation were high, the delegates and electors were generally on the left.1%4 An essentially similar correlation between the degree of success of the boycott tactic and the political orientation of workers’ representatives may be observed in all the other provinces in which, along with Petersburg, the tactic was successful enough to forestall elections in a high proportion of factories, the representatives there being for the most part of the center or

right. Conversely, in the provinces of Kazan, Kiev, Nizhnii Novgorod, Perm, Kharkov, and Kherson (Odessa), where the boycott tactic was not very successful in stopping elections, the representatives were mostly on the left. There is evidence that this tendency did not prevail in Ekaterinoslav, Novgorod, Orenburg, and Tula, suggesting that the relative conservatism of the workers’ representatives in those provinces did not reflect the absence of

more radical workers but rather was due to other factors. The same may have been true in a few other provinces for which information about both turnout and political orientation of workers’ representatives is lacking. On the whole, it is not difficult to appreciate the revolutionary parties’ early recognition that their boycott of the first elections had been a political error, perhaps particularly in regard to the working-class curia, the one curia in which their agitation had success. Given the electoral system, their

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Phase II: The Provincial Elections 301 Assemblies Swept by the Kadet Bloc The eight assemblies swept by the Kadet bloc were in zemstvo provinces in which for the most part the left was well represented, the center and right were not, and the peasants’ electors were a relatively modest proportion of

the total (or, in a few cases, were uncharacteristically divided among themselves although they constituted close to a majority of the electors).'* In Iaroslavl, Petersburg, Vladimir, and Kostroma provinces the balance of forces among the electors was essentially similar. In Iaroslavl the peasant curia was relatively small (smaller than either of the other two curiae), and the Kadets were well represented in both the urban and landowners’ curiae; they constituted two fifths of the electors and had the likely support of a

contingent of nonparty progressive electors from the nonpeasant curiae

sufficient to give them a majority vote. The center and right were insignificantly represented. The Kadets were able to carry all three deputies’

positions, aside from the peasants’ own deputy, without making any noticeable compromises with either the peasants or other groups of electors: they sent three party regulars to the Duma. The voting shows that whereas

Prince Shakhovskoi, who enjoyed considerable popularity among the peasants and was in general very widely respected locally, got fifty-one of the fifty-nine electors’ votes in the final ballotting, his two party colleagues

received just over the required 50 percent each.’° In Petersburg the peasant curia was also outnumbered by both the other curiae (fourteen peasants, eighteen landowners, fifteen urban electors), and here the level of political awareness among the peasant electors was much

higher than in the central provinces: the Kadet tables listed only three nonparty electors, and most of the electors were evidently to the left of the

Octobrists. The Kadet electors—estimates of their number range from eighteen to twenty-eight—together with progressive supporters accounted

for well over half the total number of electors, and the result was the election of the two party regulars N. A. Kolpakov, a zemstvo doctor of peasant origin, and A. S$. Lomshakov, an engineer and professor at the St.

Petersburg Technological Institute. The peasants’ own deputy, P. A. Bystrov, may or may not have been a party member at the time of his election, but he did adhere to the Kadet fraction in the Duma.'® The peasant electors were also relatively few in Vladimir (26 of 108; the total figure includes 16 workers’ delegates). As in Petersburg, although to a lesser degree, they were exceptionally politically conscious. The urban curia was large (48 electors) and had sent up predominantly Kadet electors. The total contingent of Kadets was close to a third of the assembly. The center

and right parties, although of noticeable strength—there were about 18 Octobrists and TIP members, and approximately the same number of electors on the right—could not have matched the left even if they had combined forces, which they did not do. The Kadet-dominated left was in

302 The First National Elections fact nearly numerous enough to carry the election without any support from the peasant delegates, thanks in part to the support of a majority of the 16 workers’ delegates, acquired by the Kadets by putting up a worker as one of their candidates (Lebedev, who remained a member of the Kadet fraction in

the Duma).!” Vladimir was one of the few provinces where the workers’ delegates were numerous enough in the provincial assembly and the other

circumstances were such as to make them a factor of considerable significance in the outcome of the elections. The Octobrist-bloc electors—landowners and factory owners—were able to command a fairly consistent following of thirty to thirty-five votes and attempted from this base to attract peasant electors, including a sizable proportion of well-to-do, conservatively inclined tradesmen, by inviting them to tea and promising business deals to them. In the end, they were able

to secure enough support to block the candidacy of the Kadets’ leading figure, N. M. Iordanskii, but they were able to do so only by giving their votes to a nonparty progressive elector, A. V. Demidov, who probably stood closer to the Kadets in his political sympathies than to the center parties.'® The Kadet press claimed that the failure of Iordanskii’s candidacy was in

large measure due to a campaign mounted against him by the right-wing press, which labeled him a “red” and an atheist (bezbozhnik).'? In Kostroma conditions for a Kadet victory were less favorable than in the other assemblies already mentioned. Although the peasant curia was small, nearly half the electors were nonparty peasants, counting smallholders’ delegates,”° and the Kadets could rely on no more than a third of the electors.*' Estimates of the strength of the center and right vary; together

they may have numbered nearly as many as the Kadets. The Kadets were nevertheless able to get all their candidates elected by the end of the second day. First they agreed to put in a workers’ elector in return for the workers’ votes (seven); this was A. I. Smirnov. Then they put

up a peasant party member, I. V. Zamyslov. The remaining Kadet candidates were the three party regulars N. A. Ogorodnikov, Z. G. Frenkel, and P. A. Safonov, all professional men.** The Kadets were thus able to carry the elections, but only by ceding a seat to a worker and by including a peasant (albeit a party member) among their candidates. In this way they attracted sufficient votes to carry the elections by a relative majority. In Tver the peasant electors were a larger proportion of the assembly than in the cases discussed so far (49 peasants, 41 landowners, and 30 urban

electors), and the Kadets, with about 30 of the 124 electors, were outnumbered by the center and right parties in the nonpeasant curiae. To carry the elections they would have to make an arrangement with the bulk of the peasant electors. This was done in preelection meetings held during the two days immediately preceding the elections. The peasants spent a good deal of time scrutinizing the Kadets’ agrarian program and then agreed to participate in a straw vote on candidates, with the understanding that the

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 303 seven with the largest number of votes were to be supported in the assembly itself by all participants. This arrangement held and the assembly elections were completed in a single day. The result was the election to the Duma of 3 Kadet party leaders from zemstvo circles, Rodichev, Petrunkevich, and A. S. Medvedev (a lawyer of peasant origin); Professor V. D. Kuzmin-Karavaev, a leading member of the Democratic Reform party who was supported by the Kadets in the Tver campaign; M. I. Maslennikov, a peasant-curia delegate who worked as a zemstvo insurance agent; and 2 peasants. (Both peasant delegates adhered to the Kadet fraction in the Duma.)*? Thus, although the Kadets were obliged to allow their list of candidates to be determined by a

straw vote, they were strong enough and the general disposition of the peasant delegates was such as to produce a delegation made up, except for one, of party members. As the elections discussed so far show, the Kadets generally tried to elect

as many of their leading party members as possible and would not voluntarily yield deputies’ seats to others. Conditions specific to each assembly obliged them to modify that aim to varying degrees and influenced the makeup of the Duma delegations, including the party members among them. In the assemblies of Arkhangelsk, Simbirsk, and the Tauride the Kadet

victories were more problematical. In all three provinces the peasant electors constituted close to half the assembly (in Arkhangelsk they actually exceeded half); most of them were nonparty, and the Kadets were relatively weakly represented. There are no details available about what transpired at the Arkhangelsk assembly. With only one plenary seat at stake, the peasants

may have deliberately decided to support the candidacy of a sympathetic nonpeasant, rather than send exclusively peasant deputies (this decision was

also taken in several other assemblies). In any case, the peasants’ own deputy, A. E. Isupov, a small tradesman from the town of Shenkursk, had joined the Kadet party upon its appearance in the province. He was said to have been influenced in his youth by political exiles living in the region. The other deputy-elect was I. V. Galetskii, the former narodovolets-in-exile who was head of the Kadet organization in Arkhangelsk. Galetskii was a wellknown figure in the province, editor of the newspaper Severnyi listok and a

solicitor (chastnyi poverennyi) who offered his services to the poor.”* Gentry landowning was insignificantly represented in the Arkhangelsk assembly. In Simbirsk peasant electors constituted nearly half the assembly (if one

includes the two workers, legally peasants themselves, the proportion is exactly half: forty-six to ninety-two); the urban curia and the identifiable Kadet contingent were rather small. The center and the right parties were virtually unrepresented, although a group of conservatives (presumably landowners) was reported present. In a preliminary meeting of peasant delegates and nonpeasant electors sponsored by the Kadet party, the Kadets

304 The First National Elections were able to secure three of the five plenary deputies’ seats for nonpeasant party members, who had, however, to be selected from a list of six names drawn up by the peasants in their own straw vote; they asserted that they would not vote for any nonpeasants not on that list. Three leading Kadets

from that list-—V. N. Mikeshin, Prince S. M. Barataev, and N. I. Metalnikov—were accordingly elected, as was one of the peasants’ own candidates, A. P. Andreianov. The second peasant plenary candidate, one Chadaev, failed, however, to receive solid peasant support (apparently because of rumors concerning his personal reputation) and was voted down.

Attempts to restore the majority coalition by putting up several new candidacies finally succeeded with the election of a fourth nonpeasant Kadet regular, I. N. Pustoshkin, the only candidate to draw enough votes to block the election of a worker who had received a majority vote with the help of the conservatives following the failure of Chadaev’s candidacy. There are few details available about this curious process, which seems

to reveal both a relatively high degree of political consciousness and a relatively low degree of discipline among the peasant delegates. The dominant orientation of the peasant group may be reflected in the identity of the two peasant-curia delegates they elected: as their own deputy, the peasants chose A. F. Aladin, a radical member of the intelligentsia who had fled exile to England, where he stayed until his return in late 1905. Their other successful candidate, Andreianov, was likewise a radical member of the intelligentsia from the peasantry, a member of the Syzran zemstvo board

and a leader of the local branch of the Peasants’ Union. Both joined the Trudoviki in the Duma. Some sources attribute Kadet membership to

Andreianov. (He committed suicide a few weeks after the Duma convened.)”>

In the Tauride assembly forty-two of the ninety-six electors were from the peasant curia. The Kadets were reported to have had about thirty-two

party members and three leftist supporters, the center and right were together nearly as numerous, and the group of nonparty peasant delegates was about the same size.2° The voting was accordingly very close. In the

preelection meetings held on March 24 and 25, the Kadets and their supporters (mostly from the urban curia, with a minority from the landowners), a “landowners’ party” (including some Octobrists and members of the PLO), and the peasants all met separately, so that no arrangements between peasant and nonpeasant groups were arrived at before the assembly opened.

In the assembly the peasants (including, in addition to Russian communal peasants, eight Tatars, seven German colonists, and four Karaites) demonstrated little unity: there were a few consistent conservatives among them, perhaps as many as twenty supporters of the Octobrists, and five or ten Kadet supporters. The initial voting on the candidacy of Prince V. A. Obolenskii, the best-known Kadet in the province, revealed a

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 305 nearly perfect split between “right” and “left’—forty-seven to fortyeight—allowing Obolenskii to be elected to the Duma by a margin of one

vote. Following Obolenskii’s election the fortunes of the candidates depended on a different set of circumstances in each case. The next two

Kadets to get elected passed by significantly larger margins than had Obolenskii—A. V. Novikov got sixty-one votes and S. S. Krym got fiftyfive—apparently because of support from among the more conservative

electors who, seeing the impossibility of putting through their own candidates, decided to help put through the more moderate Kadet candidates, like Novikov and Krym, as opposed to Obolenskii and several others who were known locally as radicals.*’ Then the only peasant delegate to be elected plenarily, S. P. Pritula, a member of the Peasant Union, was elected by seventy votes with the support of the Kadets, who had agreed to this candidacy in return for peasant votes for Obolenskii.2® (It is clear from the votes he accumulated that Pritula was given the votes not only of the Kadets and the peasants who had cooperated

with them but of most of the peasant delegates as well.) The last deputy—A. G. Sipiagin, a left Kadet who had recently been fired from his teaching job and exiled from the province—was elected on the second day in an extraordinary way. The Kadets had decided to support

one Posokhin, a peasant “progressive” who was thought to have a sure

following of about half the peasant delegates, in order to block the landowners’ candidate, Skadovskii, who was also known to have some peasant followers. But the largest vote in the initial balloting went to Sipiagin—he received forty-nine votes without the Kadet’s votes, which were committed to Posokhin—who apparently had made a favorable impression on the peasants.” Sipiagin also received some support, however, from landowners, who apparently decided in the course of the balloting that

Sipiagin, a pomeshchik with a sizable estate, would after all be a better choice than a peasant despite his reputation as a leftist. After Sipiagin’s strong showing on the initial ballot, the Kadets switched their support to him. The Kadets thus emerged with four of the five Duma seats from Tauride province, and the fifth went to a peasant intelligent whom they supported.°°

They had, however, gotten only one of their original candidates: Obolenskii. The party’s provincial leadership, dominated by Obolenskii and the

‘left,’ made an interesting and unusual response to this situation: they called a meeting of the provincial organization on April 9, where instructions (makaz) spelling out their responsibilities in the Duma were worked out for the deputies-elect. Their gist was that all departures by deputies from general party rulings were to be held accountable to the party organs. It is

evident that these instructions were devised primarily for Krym and Novikov.*?

With the exception of the cases of laroslav! and Petersburg, the Kadets

306 The First National Elections in all these provinces were obliged to modify to a greater or lesser extent their aim of electing their local leaders to the Duma. It is characteristic of this group of provinces as a whole that no organized alternative to the Kadet

strategy that could have appealed to a significant number of peasant delegates was presented in the assemblies; in particular, there was virtually no organized competition to the left of the Kadets. The nonparty peasants dealt with the Kadets in response to Kadet initiatives for the most part; they had no help from other quarters, and explicit, prearranged bargains were exceptional (Tver and Simbirsk). At the same time, the nonpeasant electors

to the right of the Kadets generally showed little ability to organize themselves; center and right groups did not cooperate. With the exception of the quite limited success of the center group in the Vladimir assembly (made possible by the support of some of the better-off peasant delegates), the center and right gained no Duma representation from these provinces.

Assemblies with Deputies’ Seats Divided Between Kadets and Nonparty Peasants More than a third (fifty-two) of all the Kadet-bloc deputies to the Duma were elected in the twelve assemblies where the seats were, with minor exceptions, divided exclusively between Kadets and nonparty peasants. The relatively greater success of the peasants in these assemblies as compared to

those just discussed may be attributed by and large to two factors. First, these were for the most part assemblies with a sizable absolute majority of peasant electors—from the peasant curia alone in Voronezh (61.2 percent), Viatka (74 percent), Kazan (70.5 percent), Orenburg (60 percent), Ufa (58.7 percent), Penza (52.2 percent), and Samara (52.2 percent); and by means of exceptionally large contingents of smallholders’ delegates in Poltava and Chernigov. Only in Ekaterinoslav and Smolensk were the peasants in a minority, and in both these assemblies specific conditions obtained that allowed the peasants to participate in the distribution of deputies’ seats. Second, there were present in most of these assemblies organized groups of electors independent of the Kadet party that were involved in coordinat-

ing peasant votes in order to get politically conscious peasant deputies elected to the Duma. In at least nine of the twelve provinces in question, the Kadets had to deal with organized groups led by radical intelligenty, many

of peasant origin and from the peasant curia.°* Although the contours of these groups are often obscure, there is enough evidence to show that more than ad hoc responses by peasant electors to Kadet initiatives were involved

in these assemblies. It is characteristic of the assemblies in which these groups were active that an unusually high proportion of peasant-curia delegates were not land-working peasants but “‘intelligentsia from the

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 307 people” and that according to contemporary reports, there was an unusually high proportion of leftists (“levee Kadetov”) and progressives among them.°° Although the terms of the arrangements for sharing the deputies’ seats varied from province to province, the Kadets on the whole tended to split the seats evenly with their partners. For the group of provinces as a whole, 45.2 percent of the total deputies’ seats (52:115), or just 50 percent of the plenary seats, went to Kadet-bloc candidates. These figures reflect the general practice of dividing the positions equally between the two parties to the coalition, rather than in accordance with their relative weights among

the body of electors.°* This practice generally operated in favor of the Kadets.

The outcome of the elections is easiest to understand for those provincial assemblies where the peasants lacked a majority for themselves

but where there were enough Kadets and Kadet-sympathizers from the other curiae to constitute a majority of votes. In several of the assemblies in this group there were also sufficient numbers of supporters of parties to the right of the Kadets to have made a majority with the peasants. These were the assemblies in which Dmitriev-Mamonov had foreseen the outcome lying

in a struggle for support of peasant electors between the two nonpeasant groups and had predicted the Kadets would enjoy the edge. This scenario worked out with fair accuracy in the Smolensk assembly, where the peasants had just over a third of the electors, mostly nonpartisan (twenty-six out of thirty-one), the Kadets numbered about fifteen, and the center and right together about twenty.*? Three Kadet intelligentsia party regulars and three peasants were elected to the Duma as a result of an explicit agreement worked out before the elections in preliminary meetings of electors beginning on April 5, when Kadet committee representatives met with the first peasant delegates to arrive in town. The last of these meetings,

on April 12, was attended by virtually all the peasant delegates, who declared they would cooperate in the assembly only with the Kadets. It was agreed that the party and the peasants would each nominate five candidates

and that the two groups would then vote together to identify the six candidates for the deputies’ seats (contrary to usual practice, the separate peasant seat was included in this procedure). The voting on this list of ten gave an equal number of Kadet and peasant candidates, even though the peasant contingent constituted a substantial majority of the bloc (roughly thirty of forty-five).°° It appears that the nonpeasant partners in the bloc were able to influence the choice of peasant candidates on their combined list, and vice versa: the peasants were not rank-and-file cultivators, but a schoolteacher and two men with industrial working experience; and one of them had been a member of the Peasant Union. Two of the Kadets were zemtsy, but only one was a landowner of any circumstances and all three were professional men.°”

308 The First National Elections In Chernigov, as in Smolensk, Kadet electors and peasant (and some other nonparty) electors came to terms in Kadet-organized preliminary meetings. The candidates’ list worked up at these meetings included five Kadets and five peasants (including, again, the peasants’ own deputy), an equal splitting of the places even though the peasants far outnumbered the Kadets.°® Witnesses described an exceptionally high level of political

awareness, though no specific party allegiances, among the peasant delegates. In the assembly the peasants elected their own deputy on the first day in

near unanimity, and on the following day eight of the nine candidates identified in the straw ballot were duly elected by comfortable majorities that showed the size of the Kadet-peasant bloc to be about 110-120. The agreement broke down, however, over the last candidacy: the peasants failed to support the designated fifth Kadet candidate and tried instead to secure the election of A. Margolin, a radical from the Union for Jewish Equality, which had cooperated with the Kadets in the election campaign.” Margolin, who had apparently made an impression on the peasant delegates in one of the preliminary meetings, withdrew his candidacy, however, as he was one of two official candidates of the Jewish Union in Kiev province.*° The peasants then were able to elect a peasant delegate as the tenth member of the Duma delegation on the third day by relative majority. Thus four Kadet regulars were elected in Chernigov—A. A. Mukhanov,

A. A. Svechin, I. L. Shrag, and N. N. Miklashevskii—and six peasant candidates, of whom only two—A. E. Babich and I. V. Tarasenko—were land-working peasants. The others were T. V. Lokot, a professor in an agricultural institute, la. A. Guzhovskii, a third-element employee, and L. Z. Ostronosov, a weaver. Kurilenko, the peasants’ own deputy, operated a fairly large private farm (twenty-four desiatinas) and was a deputy to the district and provincial zemstvos in Chernigov. All were apparently to the left of the Kadets politically, and all later joined the Trudovik fraction in the first Duma. The candidacy of Guzhovskii, who had been arrested two months before the elections and was in prison, was advanced as a protest against administrative arbitrariness.*! As the discipline among the peasant electors and the characteristics of the “‘peasant”’ deputies-elect suggest, Chernigov was one of those assemblies in which the peasant vote was influenced by a group of radical “‘democratic intelligentsia,” one of the precursors of the Trudovik group in the Duma.*”

The Kadets on the whole fared no worse in peasant-dominated assemblies than in the other provinces of this group. In Kursk, where 78 of the 150 electors were peasant delegates and the Kadets controlled only the small urban curia of 28, the Kadets nevertheless managed to get four of the

nine plenary seats for their party leaders, all but one of them long-time zemstvo activists. This relative success may have been due in large measure to the reputation of Peter Dolgorukov and his Kursk zemstvo followers as defenders of peasant interests.*°

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 309 Three distinct factions appeared in the Kursk preelection meeting: an urban group dominated by Kadets and joined by a few peasant Kadets and landowners; the majority of nonparty peasant delegates; and a conservative group consisting primarily of landowners . The first two groups, more or

less as a whole, cooperated to control about two thirds of the votes. Although the Kadets had assumed that the nonparty peasant electors could be persuaded to cooperate with them because of their general stand on the

land question and civil rights, it turned out that the peasants were more aware of concrete issues than the Kadets had given them credit for, and a firm union was sealed.** The peasant deputies-elect were described as “progressives” who stood close to or left of the Kadets in their views. Four

of the six were third-element employees or teachers, and even the two peasant cultivators among them had had some schooling. According to Bramson, their election was due to the activity in the assembly of a protoTrudovik group of electors, as in Chernigov.* The Samara assembly elected five Kadets (one medical doctor and four

zemstvo deputies) and seven peasants to the Duma. This distribution of Duma seats was arranged in a preelection meeting on March 25. The Kadets apparently had great difficulty coming to terms with the peasant delegates,

who constituted a substantial majority of the electors (94 of the 176 who

appeared for the assembly, and there were more peasants from the landowners’ curia). The alliance was finally arranged, with two conditions attached by the peasants: that the peasants be given at least seven seats— one per district—and that all the peasant deputies be elected first. These conditions were accepted by the Kadets.*° Bramson claimed that the election of five of the seven peasants—all future Trudoviki—was engineered by a proto-Trudovik coalition of ‘“‘conscious”’ peasants and “‘democratic intelligentsia.”*” He provided no figures on the size of that group, but a few well-

placed votes would have been sufficient, since the majority of peasant delegates were quite unorganized, unknown to each other, and, initially, inclined to vote for themselves. (The scheme for distributing the peasant deputies’ seats by district was a rather typical solution to the problem presented by the absence of programs or individual candidacies capable of aligning peasant votes in the assemblies, and it was probably the simple fact

that Samara had only seven districts that allowed the Kadets to get five Duma seats.) The conservative opponents of the Kadets, probably as numerous as they, tried to make a deal of their own with the peasants that would have given all the deputies’ seats to peasant electors selected by the conservatives, but this scheme was rejected by the peasants.*°

There was a similar attempt by conservative electors to break up a Kadet-peasant alliance in the Penza elections, where the peasant majority was of roughly the same proportions as in Samara (forty-five of the eightysix electors who appeared were from the peasant curia). Most of the fifteen urban electors were Kadets; most of the twenty-odd landowners’ electors were conservative pomeshchiki. In three days of preelection meetings, the

310 The First National Elections Kadets (who had sent invitations to all the peasant delegates) managed to strike a bargain with a sizable majority of the peasant delegates to support a

candidates’ list of twelve, *” arrived at by straw ballots, which was split evenly between Kadets and peasants. It was agreed that the six highestranking candidates on the list would be supported in the assembly elections by both parties. The elections turned out in accordance with this arrangement, except in the voting on the sixth candidate, the Kadet party leader, Dr. Genke. The

fact that only two of the five candidates already passed were from the peasant curia, neither of them land-working peasants, was exploited by the conservatives to persuade a sufficient number of peasants to break discipline and prevent Genke’s election. (It seems that Genke’s Jewishness was not neglected in the interchange between the conservatives and the peasants in

the assembly.) The peasants who broke discipline, together with the conservatives, then secured the election of a rank-and-file peasant delegate

who had just returned from the war with a St. George’s Cross. Further attempts to vote in other peasants to displace one of the two Kadets who had already received a majority earlier in the same balloting (N. F. Ezerskii) were rejected, however. The conservatives had succeeded in disrupting the

equal sharing of Duma seats in the Kadet-peasant bloc, although to no direct advantage to themselves. They obviously preferred the election of a

nonparty peasant to that of a Kadet.>° The Voronezh assembly was even more heavily dominated by peasants, with 101 of 166 electors. About 25 Kadets were present (the majority from the urban curia), not counting their nonparty supporters who were nearly as numerous, and the Octobrists were represented by about 18 electors. The local Kadet party committee decided in advance of the elections to support the candidacies of seven peasants and only three party members for the ten plenary seats. The results of the elections were close but not identical to this resolution.°! The deputies elected by the Voronezh assembly included only one Kadet party leader, Khrushchov, and three other nonpeasant candidates

supported by the party; only one of them remained in the Kadet Duma fraction. The remaining six deputies (seven including the peasant curia’s deputy) were nonparty peasants. There are no details available on how peasant support for the party’s candidates was obtained, but it is clear that the local party leaders thought that under the circumstances the results were satisfactory: a party leader, several other deputies close to the party in their views, and peasants who were “progressive.””°* In Viatka province the peasant curia had an even larger majority than in

Voronezh, with 148 of 204 electors coming from that curia alone; and a majority of the few landowners’ electors were nonparty peasants as well.

The Kadets were all the same relatively more successful here than in Voronezh or in Penza, to the extent that half of the plenarily elected deputies—six of twelve—were party candidates. Details on the assembly’s work are not available, but it is clear from

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 311 what is known of the Kadet organization in the province and of the preliminary peasant elections that the Kadets enjoyed considerable support among the peasants prior to the elections and were not as isolated from the peasants as they were in those provinces where the party organization was in the hands of gentry zemtsy and urban professionals. Most of the Viatka Kadet leadership was drawn from the third-element and peasant intelligent-

sia (in this respect it resembled the party organization in Arkhangelsk). These conditions are reflected in the Duma delegation elected at the Viatka assembly: the peasant curia’s own deputy, Sadyrin, a professional agronom-

ist, was an active party member, and the six Kadets from the plenary elections comprised a populist priest (Fr. Ognev), two zemstvo doctors (S. M. Kornilev and S. V. Lozhkin), a school inspector of clerical background (V. S. Nechaev), an estate manager (the party leader, I. N. Ovchinnikov),

and a nonparty “peasant,” the mullah Sh. Kh. Khusainov.°’ Although several of these Kadet deputies-elect had been active in the zemstvo, none were large landowners. The remaining six deputies included five peasants,

all of whom joined the Trudovik fraction in the Duma, and one SD worker.>*

The Viatka elections, like those in Arkhangelsk, must have been encouraging to those Kadets who had aspirations for their party to become

a real mass organization with broad support among the peasantry. But Viatka was not a typical Russian province, and the elections there seem to have shown by negative example the impediments to those aspirations

imposed in most of the central-Russian provinces by the party’s identification with the gentry and “gentlemen” generally. That kind of identification was lacking in Viatka province, where gentry landholding was rare (less than 3 percent of the total) and the zemstvo institutions were in the

hands of nongentry by and large. In the remaining three provinces where the assemblies were dominated by peasant electors and the deputies’ seats were shared between candidates

from the peasant curia and Kadet-bloc candidates—Kazan, Ufa, and Orenburg—special conditions, especially manifestations of Muslim solidar-

ity, prevailed to make the election process and its results rather different from those obtained in the other peasant-dominated assemblies. In Kazan province the peasant curia provided 98 of the 140 electors, mostly nonparty. According to a Kadet correspondent from Kazan, the 136 electors appearing for the assembly were made up of 41 Russian peasants, 40 Tatar peasants, 20 Chuvash, Cheremiss, and various “inorodtsy,” 34 townsmen and landowners, and 1 worker. The Kadet organization in the province outside the capital city was weak and had been able to have little contact with the peasant population during the campaign; the party had not done well in the urban or landowners’ curiae, either. Only 19 of the electors

belonged to the Kadet party. Another 15 belonged to the parties of the center or right, and 102 were nonparty.°° The Kadets in the assembly were nevertheless able to form a majority

512 The First National Elections with nonparty electors from both the Russian and nationalities (primarily Tatar) groups to support a ticket, agreed upon in preliminary meetings, that included two leading party members, A. V. Vasilev, professor of mathematics at Kazan university, and S. A. Alkin, the Tatar leader, a lawyer and editor of the Tatar newspaper in Kazan; the nonparty leftist lawyer K. V. Lavrskii, who was a popular defender of peasants in the courts; a nonparty peasant and trader of Chuvash origin, G. §. Badamshin; a nonparty leftist worker, P. A. Ershov; and four nonparty peasants, generally described as “progressive” or “leftist,” comprising two Russians (I. E. Lavrentev and M. N. Gerasimov), one Tatar (F. Mindubaev), and one Chuvash (la. A. Abramov). By nationality, the deputies thus comprised five Russians, two

Tatars, and two Chuvash; by occupation, three representatives of the intelligentsia professions, five peasants, and one worker.°® Eight of the nine deputies were elected on the first day, and the ninth, a Tatar candidate, on

the second day. Most were elected by votes of 70 to 80 (statutory total: 139); the highest vote, 88, went to Lavrskii. The Kadets in the Kazan assembly operated as coordinators of a diverse but generally opposition-minded majority of the electors, consisting primar-

ily of the urban party members or bloc supporters and Russian and Tatar peasants, and in the process were able to secure at least two deputies’ seats for leading party members, the remainder going to a group consisting for the most part of nonparty electors who stood fairly close to the Kadets in their political outlook.*’ In Ufa province 81 of the 146 electors in the assembly were peasantvolost delegates, but at the end of the elections only three of the ten deputies elected came from the peasant curia. This was the result of the division of the electors along national-confessional lines: Tatar and Bashkir Muslims versus Russian Orthodox. The Muslims initiated this division by convening

separately on the day before the elections (March 24) and preparing an ultimatum for the Russian electors: five Muslim deputies and four Russian deputies, all of them identified by name, were to be elected in the plenary session. These candidates were to be accepted by the Russians or the latter would get even fewer deputies. (The Muslims numbered 76; that is, slightly better than half of the electors in attendance).°®

The Muslims’ ultimatum aroused the Russians, who held their own meeting at which they finally agreed to the numbers proposed but insisted on nominating their own candidates for the four positions. The Muslims accepted this compromise, and the candidates identified by the two groups were elected without exception. The role played by the Kadet party against this background of nationalconfessional rivalry in the assembly is not entirely clear. Three of the four “Russian” candidates were party members, and the fourth was supported

by the party.°? The Muslim deputies, including the separately elected ““peasant”’ deputy, declared that they would be representatives in the Duma

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 313 of the ““National-Muslim party, close in program to the Kadets.”®° Three of these deputies, S. D. Maksiutov, S$. S$. Dzhantiurin, and K. B. Tevkelev (all

Russian-educated large landowners; the last two, at least, were nobles), remained on the Kadet party list in the Duma.°’ It is characteristic of the Muslim electorate in the first elections that all the Muslim Duma candidates in the Ufa assembly were prominent men of high status and educational level and, in at least four of the seven cases, large property owners,°* even though the bulk of the Muslim electors in the assembly were small cultivators or tradesmen.® In neighboring Orenburg province the divisive effects of confessional differences in the assembly were less marked because the Muslims constituted a much smaller proportion of the electors, but they were more than offset by the division between Russian peasants and Cossacks, who were represented in separate curiae in that province. The peasants alone had only 36 electors in the assembly out of 106 (33.9 percent), and probably a third of them were Muslims.°* Twenty-seven of the electors were delegates from the separate Cossack curia, representing interests that were quite distinct from those of peasants living in the villages.© Of the five plenarily elected deputies, there was one Cossack (M. I.

Sveshnikov, a stanitsa judge), one surveyor of Cossack origin (T. I. Sidelnikov), two prominent Muslim leaders of the Muslim National party (Z. S. Rameev and S. Matinov), and one worker from the peasant curia (M. I. Rybakov). At least three of them—the two Muslims and the Cossack— became members of the Kadet fraction in the Duma. A fourth, the surveyor Sidelnikov, was elected as a Kadet but joined the Trudoviki in the Duma. The worker, Rybakov, was described as a sympathizer of the SD party.°°

The makeup of the Duma deputation suggests that the Kadet-Muslim alliance, which had been formed during the campaign, operated in the assembly; by backing the candidacies of two party members who were of

Cossack origin it was able to get enough Cossack support to carry the elections.°”

Finally, in two of the provinces in this group, Ekaterinoslav and Poltava, the peasant curia lacked even a plurality, being outnumbered by the urban electors in Ekaterinoslav (with 63 of approximately 138 electors) and

by the landowners’ curia in Poltava (with 109 of the 182 electors). In Ekaterinoslav the large urban curia yielded a majority of Kadets and their sympathizers, thanks in large measure to the support of local Jewish groups,°* whose strength there allowed the Kadets to carry the elections with relatively little help from the peasant curia; enough support among

peasant delegates was acquired by yielding one place to a nonparty peasant.°’ The Kadets also ceded one place to an independent SD mine worker of peasant background, M. I. Mikhailenko. The remaining six deputies were all the party’s own candidates, including four professional men—M. E. Zemtsov, a Mariupol civil servant, Professor P. I. Novgorod-

314 The First National Elections tsev of Moscow University, V. N. Radakov, a district zemstvo board chairman, and M. I. Sheftel, a Petersburg lawyer and Jewish Union activist—all but one of them from the urban curia. The other two Kadet candidates, S$. M. Ryzhov, a schoolteacher, and L. F. Babenko, a retired

sailor and factory worker, were elected as party members but did not remain in the Kadet fraction in the Duma (Ryzhov, at least, joined the Trudoviki).”°

The weakness of peasant representation in the Poltava assembly was only apparent. In fact, some 130 of the 179 participants in the assembly were peasants, even though there were only 23 electors from the peasant curia among them; the rest were smallholders.”! The Poltava assembly was therefore in essential respects typical of those peasant-dominated assemblies

where the deputies’ seats were shared between peasant and Kadet candidates, and revealed a balance that was not out of the ordinary: the Kadets, constituting a majority of the 49 urban electors, were able to take half the seats for their own nonpeasant candidates.’* In the preliminary meetings the Kadets were apparently only partially successful in overcoming the peasant delegates’ hostility toward nonpeasants with explications of the party’s agrarian program. (In the assembly the small group of conservative electors attempted to block their rivals on the left by exploiting this hostility and urging the peasants to vote in only peasants.) One peasant candidate was elected by a straight majority on the

first day of voting (along with the peasants’ own deputy), and then a stalemate held throughout the second day. Only on the third day, when candidates could pass with pluralities, an alliance of the Kadet-bloc electors

and “the more politically conscious peasants”—the latter organized, according to Bramson, by a group of future Trudoviki’?—elected the remaining deputies: four more peasants, all described as “progressives” (one of them, N. V. Zhigel, was actually the sole delegate from the workers’ curia in the Poltava assembly), and six Kadet-block candidates, of whom

five were prominent party members and the sixth was the UkrainianDemocrat publicist V. M. Shemet.”4 The twelve assemblies just discussed elected 115 deputies to the Duma; 52 of these were Kadets or the party’s candidates, 61 were nonpartisan, almost exclusively from the peasant curia, and 2 were worker-SDs. An unusually high proportion of the deputies from the peasant curiae of these provinces were not in fact land-working peasants, but “intelligentsia from the people,” and probably more than half of them, as well as a few of the Kadets’ own candidates, entered the Trudovik fraction in the Duma.”> The center and right parties went entirely unrepresented in these provinces, and the influence of their representatives on the outcome of the elections was in general virtually negligible, despite the anticipation of Dmitriev-Mamonov and the efforts of conservative groups of electors in several of the provincial assemblies to block the candidacies of their rivals to the left by encouraging

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 315 the peasants to support only candidates from their own midst. Only in the Penza assembly, and only in connection with a single candidacy, did that tactic succeed. The assemblies that produced Duma delegations consisting, more or less in parity, of Kadet candidates and peasant-curia candidates came from diverse regions of the country. In common contrast to the areas of nearly exclusive Kadet victories, however, these regions were for the most part

predominantly rural provinces with large peasant contingents in their assemblies. Moreover, operating in most of them were independent groups of electors—either intelligentsia or Muslim—that were capable of coordinating the voting behavior of the peasant electors to some degree. There is no evidence of such groups operating in the Voronezh assembly, but it was so nearly dominated by the peasant curia and the Octobrist contingent was so large that the Kadets decided beforehand to be uncommonly modest in their claims to deputies’ seats. Essentially the same situation seems to have prevailed in Smolensk where, although the peasants lacked a majority, the

Kadets were very few and were outnumbered by more conservative nonpeasant electors. In Ekaterinoslav, with its large urban curia, the play of forces in the assembly more nearly resembled those obtaining in several of the assemblies swept by the Kadet bloc. The main difference in results there vis-a-vis those assemblies was that Kadet regulars had to share the Duma seats with several independent leftists.

Assemblies Electing Predominantly Peasant Deputies The assemblies of Tambov and Stavropol alone elected exclusively peasant deputies. The assemblies of Vologda, Orel, and Pskov elected all peasant deputies with the exception of a single Octobrist landowner in each case. As can be seen by a glance at Table 15, in three of these assemblies, Stavropol, Tambov, and Vologda, the peasant-curia delegates made up a majority of the electors, ranging from 51 percent in Tambov to 70 percent in Stavropol. In Pskov, and probably in Orel as well, smallholders from the landowners’

curia combined with the peasant-curia delegates to make total peasant representation also exceed half the assemblies. The landowners’ curiae in most of these provinces were of about average proportions, and the urban curiae provided only 15.3 percent of the electors for these assemblies taken

together and in no one of them exceeded 17 percent. Of all the elections in European Russia, those in Tambov were most nearly an exclusively peasant affair. With at least 9 peasants from the landowners’ curia in addition to the 92 peasant-curia delegates out of a total

of about 178 electors, the peasants enjoyed a comfortable majority. The intelligentsia element in the assembly that might have been expected to influence the peasant delegates was very small: the statutorily small urban

316 The First National Elections | curia (26 electors) was made even smaller by the disqualification of the 5 (Kadet) electors of Tambov district, and the large landowners were mostly conservative or nonparty pomeshchiki. Among the peasants themselves, the general level of awareness about political parties and programs appears to have been very low, attributable at least in part to the martial law in effect in the province since December, which had prevented preelection campaigning almost entirely. Most of the peasant delegates were strangers to one another and, according to liberal press reports, had only a vague notion about the nature of the Duma and reflected no particular current of opinion. As a result of this situation, the elections dragged on for four days, with most of the twelve deputies being elected by plurality vote during the last two days. The deputies so elected were for the most part nonparty peasant cultivators of no identifiable orientation, the benefactors of what appears to have been a largely accidental process, except perhaps for the criterion of literacy: most of them appear to have been literate.’°

In Stavropol thirty-three of the forty-seven electors were from the peasant curia, and more peasants had come up through the landowners’ curia. The only representatives of the intelligentsia among the electors were

government officials (two chairman of district councils of justices of the peace and three tax inspectors), to whom the peasants were most unlikely to listen, and there was apparently never any question of peasant cooperation with the three conservative Octobrist merchants who had been elected in the Stavropol municipal elections. The peasant electors immediately manifested

a willingness to vote only for candidates from their own midst. The results of the Stavropol elections were not as random as they seem

to have been in Tambov. According to the correspondent of the radical paper Priazovskii krai (Rostov/Don), the peasant electors consciously sought to elect ’intelligentnye persons prepared to defend the interests of the people.””’ Although there were no generally known candidates among them prior to the preelection meetings, the Stavropol peasant electors selected a volost elder (Z. S. Mishin), a volost scribe who had graduated from a six-

year town school (F. M. Onipko), and a graduate of a teachers’ institute who had once been secretary of the Petersburg zemstvo board and editor of the children’s magazine Detskoe chtenie (Ia. V. Borisov). All three were of leftist inclination and became members of the Trudovik fraction in the Duma.” In Vologda, Pskov, and Orel the elections had remarkably similar outcomes, presumably resulting from essentially similar circumstances. In all three provinces the peasant-dominated assemblies elected groups consist-

ing predominantly of land-working peasants who were for the most part lacking in any noticeable political orientation or other outstanding characteristics,’” together with, in each province, a single noble landowner: the provincial marshals of nobility in Vologda (N. N. Andreev) and Orel (M. A. Stakhovich) and a district marshal (Count Geiden) in Pskov. All three were Octobrists.

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 317 In all three provinces the peasant electors were described in press reports as being more than usually hostile toward all the “‘lords’ parties” (barskie partii) and toward nonpeasants in general.®° As in other places where this attitude held sway, there seems to have been a high level of

fortuitousness in the identification of candidates among the peasant electors. In Pskov and Orel, at least, the field of candidates was narrowed down by the casting of lots, most of the electors having entered their own

names on the first ballot.2 Only two of the fourteen peasant deputies elected by the three assemblies were noncultivators (a much lower rate than

usually obtained among peasant-curia deputies).8* The possession of

unusual war records appears to have been a decisive factor in the identification of at least four of the deputies-elect.®° The apparent act of deference involved in the election of one of the “gospoda” in each of these assemblies was almost certainly directed not toward the political credentials of the gospodin, but toward his status and office-holding credentials, specifically that of marshal of nobility. (Geiden and Stakhovich were of course both nationally prominent figures as well.) In view of the domination of these assemblies by peasant delegates who were generally united by their hostility toward the “masters,” the cession of a deputy’s seat to a marshal of nobility can be understood, it would seem, as the peasant electors’ recognition of the need to send along to Petersburg with their own emissaries a representative of the ‘‘masters’”’ world as their guide and interpreter, if not their leader in the full sense of the word.®* Once

this need was recognized, it made sense to choose the most prestigious representative of that world available. That all three turned out to be Octobrists was probably no accident, however. To be acceptable to the peasant delegates, whose interest in the Duma was focused on their desire for land, their guides’ status credentials had to be matched by at least the

absence of a known orientation hostile to peasant views on the land question; among marshals of nobility, these qualifications were most likely

to be met by Octobrists. Count Geiden’s election is a case in point. He had been voted down in the peasant-dominated landowners’ curia of his district (Opochka) and had gotten into the provincial assembly through the urban curia. There he was

undoubtedly the most prestigious representative of the masters’ world present. His selection as the convoy of the peasant deputation to Petersburg

seems to have been assured by his participation, two days before the assembly convened, in the provincial zemstvo’s election of a representative

to the State Council. At that meeting Geiden, as a candidate, had given a speech defending the equality of all estates and advocating the need for increasing peasant allotments through obligatory alienation of gentry lands where necessary (that is, he took the position of the Octobrist agrarian program). The zemstvo rejected Geiden’s candidacy and elected Nekliudov, a conservative-monarchist pomeshchik, to the State Council. This episode

became known to the peasant electors upon their arrival in Pskov, and

318 The First National Elections Geiden became, according to Nasha zhizn’s correspondent, a sort of hero in their eyes.®°

In Vologda, and to a lesser extent in Pskov, the relative insignificance of

gentry landholding in the province may also have been a factor in the peasants’ willingness to accept a gentry convoy. What in sum seems to have distinguished the assemblies in which the deputies’ seats went almost exclusively to peasants from the other peasantdominated assemblies in which they were shared with nonpeasant Kadet candidates was the relatively low level in the former of social and economic differentiation among the peasant delegates and, relatedly, a particularly low level of urban development. (This group of assemblies elected the lowest proportion of peasant deputies involved in nonagricultural pursuits of any of the three groups of assemblies so far discussed—19 percent as compared to 33 percent for those elected in the second group—and the

proportion of them to whom left-of-Kadet or “progressive” political Orientation was attributed in the contemporary sources was likewise the lowest. Perhaps only in Orel did there exist some kind of cooperation

between intelligentsia electors and a part of the peasant delegates in supporting the candidacies of left-oriented peasant deputies, five of which were apparently successful.)®° The proportion of Kadet party members among the electors in all these provinces, with the exception of Pskov, was well below the average, so far

as the fragmentary data allow us to judge, ranging from 2.1 percent (Stavropol) to 8.75 percent (Vologda). These levels of representation were obviously related to the small size of the urban curia in these assemblies

generally. In Pskov, where the Kadets had a relatively large and active organization during the campaign period, more or less typical for the zemstvo provinces, and a relatively high proportion of party members among the provincial electors (18 percent), whatever opportunity they might have had to come to terms with the peasant electors was apparently

ruined by the Kadet electors’ inability to agree among themselves in identifying the party’s candidates; like the peasants, they apparently all wanted to be in the Duma. Under these circumstances, they could only have appeared to the peasant delegates as so many self-seeking “gospoda.’’®”

Other Assemblies The assemblies in the remaining fourteen provinces of European Russia outside the western borderlands produced a total of twenty-five Kadet-bloc deputies for the Duma. In fact, these came from nine of the remaining provinces, for five elected no Kadets at all.®® In four of the nine provinces—

Kharkov, Kaluga, the Don, and Saratov—the Kadets took about half the deputies’ seats, as in the second group discussed above; the main difference

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 319 was that the remaining deputies were not exclusively or predominantly peasants.

The Kharkov elections, which gave six of the ten deputies’ seats to Kadet candidates, differed least among these provinces from those in which the Kadets had split the seats with peasants, although here two of the three nonparty deputies elected in the plenary session were not peasant delegates:

B. D. Didenko was a workers’ delegate and G. A. Firsov, the provincial marshal of nobility, was from the landowners’ curia.®” Few details about the Kharkov assembly elections are known, but these elections appear to provide a good example of what could happen when the Kadet-peasant balance was not heavily weighted in favor of the latter, partly

because of the arithmetic of curial representation and partly because a substantial portion of the peasant delegates were sympathetic toward the Kadets to begin with. Unable to command enough votes for a strictly party ticket, the Kadets, themselves constituting about 20 percent of the electors, had enough support in the peasant, urban, and landowners’ curiae to allow them to avoid entering into a typical agreement with the peasants; that is, yielding about half the seats to nonparty peasant delegates. The deputies

elected from Kharkov included six nobles (five of them the Kadets’ candidates), three peasants (all Kadets or “progressives,” according to the papers), and one worker.”? Of the “Kadets,” one—M. M. Kovalevskii— was not actually a member of the party; and another—Oranskii—was a peasant who was not in the party leadership and did not remain in the party Duma fraction, although he was certainly considered a party member at the time of his election. The case of Kaluga may be usefully compared to that of Kharkov and

the other provinces not dominated by the peasant curia (in Kaluga the peasants had 38.5 percent of the electors). Here the Kadets appear to have been able to reserve two of the four plenary seats for their local leaders through ad hoc cooperation with both peasant delegates and the conservative landowners’ electors, who considerably outnumbered them.”? The Kaluga Kadets had tried to establish the usual agreement with the predominantly nonparty peasant electors during the two days of preassembly meetings, and thought they had obtained it; but their candidates, the prominent party members L. N. Novosiltsev and V. P. Obninskii, were voted down in the first balloting. In response, the Kadets refused to vote for the peasants’ candidates.”* In subsequent balloting the Kadets were able to

acquire peasant support for their candidates by supporting a peasant candidacy, that of the volost elder K. V. Lagutin; similarly, they received

some support from the conservatives in exchange for support of the candidacy of Prince S. D. Urusov, a former assistant minister of internal

affairs who ran as an independent ‘“‘progressist” and was generally considered to be close to the Octobrists.7? These arrangements were by all

appearances carried out without any formal agreements, the product of

320 The First National Elections some rather elaborate ad hoc compromises in finding candidates who would

be acceptable to enough electors—Kadets, peasants, and conservative landowners—to get elected. In Kharkov and Kaluga, therefore, the circumstances of the elections were not radically different from some of those in which the Kadets had

split the deputies’ seats with the peasants. The virtual absence of a “democratic intelligentsia” group among the electors is noticeable in both assemblies, as is the relatively strong showing of center and right groups, a circumstance undoubtedly reflected in the inclusion among the deputies in each case of a politically moderate large landowner.

In the Don and Saratov quite different and special circumstances produced a relative victory for the Kadets. In the Don Oblast, and there alone perhaps, the Cossacks played a decisive role in the outcome of the elections. With nearly half the population of the territory in the Cossack

voiska, the delegates from the stanitsy far outnumbered the peasant delegates (79:14) and constituted nearly half (45 percent) of the entire assembly. Almost all of them were nonparty, and together with sizable contingents of nonparty electors from the other curiae, they brought the count of nonparty electors to about 138 of the total of 182 electors. The small contingent of Kadet electors, almost entirely from the urban

curia, constituted no more than 10 percent of the total and were at least matched in number by electors of the center bloc, primarily those from the landowners’ curia and members of the PLO. It was not clear which of these

political rivals, if either, would secure the cooperation of the Cossack delegates, although both had been appealing intensely for their support throughout the campaign.”* In the end, the Cossacks, who were unable to command a majority vote for strictly Cossack candidates, cooperated with those who promised most for the improvement of their special situation as Cossacks, the Kadets. On their side, the Kadets were obliged to put forward the candidacies of party members of Cossack background and to avoid Jewish candidates altogether, despite the important role played by Jewish intelligentsia in the Don party organization. As in the preelection campaign, the Kadets had to defend themselves against the charge of being a Jewish organization, while hammering away at the land question, military service,

taxes, and other questions known to be of compelling interest to the Cossacks.”° In Kadet-arranged meetings held over three days immediately preceding

the opening of the assembly (April 14), discussion was devoted almost entirely to these Cossack issues. Here the Cossacks came forward with a list of specific demands on the land question, which were presented by Fedor Kriukov who, though later a Kadet, was at that time an independent leftist “intelligent of Cossack origin” who had been elected in his home stanitsa. The Cossacks were not satisfied with the Kadets’ response to these demands but were unable to obtain more favorable gestures from the Kadets’ rivals to

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 321 their right. The electors thus entered the assembly without having formed any alliances.”°

At the opening of the assembly the Cossacks broke up into groups according to the districts (okrugy) from which they came and proceeded to compete against one another.’’ The first day of balloting accordingly took them off guard, and three popular electors of Cossack origin, two of them Kadets and the third a center-bloc candidate, were voted in (in addition to the Cossacks’ and peasants’ separate deputies; one of them was a Kadet and

the other was nonparty).

On the second day the Cossacks began to try to organize among themselves in order to support Cossack-curia candidates, and apparently

entered an agreement with the center bloc that would have given the remaining six places to four Cossacks and two center candidates from the landowners’ curia. This deal fell through, however (presumably for lack of discipline among the Cossack electors), and the Kadets picked up most of the remaining seats by supporting the candidacies of party members of Cossack origin.”® In the end, the assembly had elected to the plenary seats

three Kadet intelligenty of Cossack origin, V. A. Kharlamov, M. P. Arkantsev, and Kriukov;?” one Kadet priest, K. I. Afanasev; three nonparty Cossacks, I. M. Vasilev, M. I. Kulikov, and M. N. Sevastianov;!°° and two center-bloc landowners, I. N. Efremov (elected on the first day) and A. M.

Skasyrskii. All the successful candidates, except the center bloc’s, were supported by the Kadets. All the deputies were of Cossack background without exception.'?? In the Saratov provincial assembly the Kadets’ principal rival was the Union of Laboring Men. Here, where there was more than one seat to be contested, no compromise between the two parties was forthcoming, as had been the case in the special city elections, although several of the successful

candidates were supported by both of them. The Saratov assembly was different from most other assemblies of the

zemstvo area in the extraordinarily high level of political mobilization

obtaining among the electors, which was undoubtedly related to the extraordinarily intense level of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence in the province throughout 1905, and especially since October; there were only a few nonparty electors among the peasant delegates (and virtually none in the other curiae), although the political orientation of

many of the peasant electors must have been imprecise and uncertain. According to Saratovskii listok, the peasants and urban voters sent up primarily “leftists” (that is, Kadets and further left), and the landowners’

curia sent up mostly “rightists,” for a total of 102 “leftists” and 35 “rightists” out of approximately 150 electors putting in an appearance./°” On the “‘left,’’ the Union of Laboring Men enjoyed more support than the Kadets, although no precise division of the total group between them is possible; one count gave 80 adherents to the ULM, but a good many of

322 The First National Elections these from the peasant curia were probably only supporters and their discipline in voting was open to doubt. The ULM leader Anikin later claimed 69 electors for the union, as compared to 45 for the Kadets and 36

for the “black party”; 14 remained outside the parties.'°° Three groups met separately on the eve of the assembly opening: the Union of Laboring Men; the Kadets; and the Octobrist bloc. After debate about whether or not, and under what conditions, to cooperate with the Kadets, the ULM committee, chaired by the future Trudovik leader I. V. Zhilkin, proposed a deal to the Kadets: two seats for the Kadets and the remaining eight seats for the candidates of the ULM. The Kadets countered

with a demand for half the seats, no agreement was reached, and both parties put up their separate lists of ten candidates, although half of the names were the same on both lists.'° In the end, the two leading ULM candidates, Zhilkin and S. I. Bondarev

(both urban electors from the town of Volsk); the two leading KD candidates, N. N. Lvov and S. A. Kotliarevskii; three men whose candidacies were supported by both parties, M. I. Litvinov, G. K. Ulianov, and Ia. E. Dits (Dietz); and two other candidates who were not on the original party lists, P. V. Kalianov, a member of the ULM, and N. I. Semenov, a

nonparty leftist supported by the Kadets, were elected to the Duma, in addition to the separate peasant deputy, S. V. Anikin. Thus neither the full union list nor that of the Kadets was elected, although the majority of the deputies stood to the left of the Kadets. Ultimately the Saratov elections produced only two Kadets for the Duma—Lvov and Kotliarevskii; the other

eight all joined the Trudovik fraction in the first Duma.’ A crucial factor in the outcome of the Saratov elections was the consolidation in the provincial assembly of the Union of Laboring Men, or Union of Labor as it was also known (Trudovoi Souiz). With its leadership of “democratic intelligentsia” (of peasant or other nonnoble origin) and eclectic leftist program, the union was able to successfully challenge the Kadets for support among the peasant electors. The establishment of the

union shortly before the elections by the radical intelligenty Anikin, a zemstvo teacher of Mordvinian peasant background, and Zhilkin, a raznochinets journalist and employee of Nasha zhizn’, was the first step toward the emergence in the first Duma of the Trudovik fraction, which apparently took its name directly from the Saratov organization.'°° The elections in the other five provinces of this group, where the Kadets succeeded in taking no more than a modest minority of the deputies’ seats, provide instructive contrasts with those assemblies where they did considerably better. Kherson was one of the few zemstvo provinces where the peasant curia did not have at least a plurality in the provincial assembly: of Kherson’s 154 electors, 50 were peasant delegates, 69 were from the landowners’ curia, 31 were urban electors, and 4 were workers’ delegates. Because only about 40

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 323 of the landowners’ electors were gentry and the urban curia was almost exclusively represented by Kadets, a fairly close balance emerged between the three main groups in the assembly: nonparty peasants, Kadets and their

adherents from the urban curia, and conservative gentry landowners. A fourth group of 22 German colonists was made up in about equal parts of delegates from the peasant and the landowners’ curiae (smallholders).'°’

As in many other provinces the Kadets attempted to gain the cooperation of the peasant electors (and the workers) in a series of preelection meetings. The peasants, in a separate meeting, had resolved to take half the deputies’ seats (five) for peasant candidates, and the Kadets were able to come to an agreement with them on that basis: four of the plenary seats, in addition to the separate peasant seat, would go to peasants, one would go to a worker, and the remaining four would go to Kadet party members. The peasants and the Kadets each provided their lists of five candidates, and the initial election by the peasants of their separate deputy

showed that they were capable of voting discipline: their agreed-upon candidate, A. M. Borisov, received forty-seven of the forty-eight votes recorded.

The agreement between the Kadets and the peasants held up in the initial plenary balloting, with all the Kadet candidates getting very nearly the same number of votes (approximately seventy-five). In the second

balloting, however, one of the Kadet candidates failed to place, an indication that some of the peasants were breaking discipline. The Kadets and the leaders of the peasant group then agreed to vote down the next peasant candidate in order to restore discipline among the peasant electors who were party to the agreement. The next Kadet candidate and peasant

candidate then passed, but following those two votes, the moderate conservative landowner S.T. Varun-Sekret received an absolute majority (seventy-six votes), and the following candidate, another conservative, missed a majority by only two votes. By this time eight deputies had been elected by absolute majorities, of whom only two were from the Kadet’s list of party-member candidates. The Kadets then decided (probably correctly) that the peasants had abandoned their agreement in order to get more peasants elected than the agreement called for, and they proceeded to vote down the remainder of the candidates so that the candidacy of their two unsuccessful candidates, Iaichkov and Temkin, could be reintroduced on the next ballot. This tactic worked until the end of the list of candidates had nearly been reached, on the second day, when the conservative candidate, the zemskii nachal’nik N. M. Baidak, suddenly received a majority. Thus all but one of the deputies’ seats had been filled. Candidacies for the single remaining seat were then resubmitted for a new balloting. At this point the conservatives proceeded to agitate among the peasants to reject the Kadet candidates, promising to support any peasant candidate

324 The First National Elections as an alternative. The Kadet candidates accordingly failed to secure a majority, whereas the next peasant candidate was given a majority. Before the balloting was over, however, the German colonist J. Kh. Minkh (J. Ch.

Miinch), a moderate, received more votes than the peasant—over one hundred, indicating that the Kadets and their supporters had voted for him to block the peasant—and took the final deputyship. Thus the peasants got their four seats but no more, the worker (the SD, M. A. Ilin) got his, and the Kadets only two of theirs. The remaining two plenary seats went to the conservative landowner Varun-Sekret and to the German colonist Minkh. All the peasants elected were cultivators and were generally described as progressive or moderate in their views. The outcome of the elections—the relatively poor showing of the Kadets, the failure of the peasants to get more seats than they did, and the election of the large landowner and the German colonist—was due to the collapse of the Kadetpeasant alliance and a fairly close balance in the voting strength of the three principal groups.'°° In Novgorod only one of the six deputies’ seats went to a Kadet, and only two went to peasants from the peasant curia, even though more than

half of the electors were allotted to that curia (including the peasant smallholders from the landowners’ curia and two workers of peasant background who voted with the other peasants).'°” The poor showing of the Kadets in the Novgorod election was in part due to the generally low level of party agitation and organization in the province during the campaign period and to the fact that an extremely small number of the electors—perhaps no more than six—were Kadets.'?° The outcome for the peasants is less easy to explain.

According to the newspaper account of the elections, the peasants entered the assembly from preliminary meetings in a solid front, intent on electing five peasants and one nobleman to the Duma, the latter evidently as a convoy as in Orel, Pskov, and Vologda. During the preliminary meetings they had been impervious to wooing from any other factions and generally distrustful of the “gospoda” irrespective of their political orientation. For reasons not made clear in the newspaper account, this scheme was replaced in the assembly itself, after much arguing among the peasant electors, by

one that distributed the deputies’ seats between two peasants from the peasant curia, two peasant smallholders from the landowners’ curia, and two noblemen.'** The decision to formally divide the seats between peasant-curia and

smallholders’ representatives appears to have lain in differing interests within the two groups and generally reflected the size and influence of the smallholders in the assembly: there were sixteen of them, as compared to

thirty-one curial delegates.'‘* The motive for increasing the number of noblemen in the Duma delegation to two seems to have come from a split among the peasants on regional lines: those from the northern districts of

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 325 Belozersk, Cherepovets, and Kirilov were said to be inclined toward selecting a Kadet as the noble deputy, whereas those of the southern provinces were apparently inclined toward an Octobrist. The designation of

two seats to noblemen allowed both groups of peasants to have their way.113

In any event, the revised division of the seats was carried through: four

nonparty peasants—two from each curia—were elected to the Duma, together with one nobleman from the landowners’ curia, N. F. Rumiantsev (a politically moderate zemets close to the Octobrists), whose candidacy was put forward by the Octobrists, and the Kadet I. A. Korsakov (also a zemets, and a wealthy land- and factory owner). Korsakov, a conservative Kadet who seems to have been nearly as close to the Octobrists as to the

mainstream of the Kadet party in philosophy, was the Novgorod party group’s third choice. The first two party leaders’ candidacies were withdrawn after they failed to get more than a few votes each, and Korsakov finally emerged as the party candidate acceptable to enough of the peasants

and landowners’ electors to gain a majority vote./‘4 In neighboring Nizhnii Novgorod province an assembly of about the

same size and distribution of electors among the curiae!’? produced formally identical results: four peasants and two noble landowners, one an

Octobrist (A. A. Astafev, chairman of the Nizhnii Novgorod district zemstvo board), and the other a Kadet (I. A. Zubkov, chairman of the Balakhna district zemstvo board).''© Although there were few details in the press about the assembly’s activity, it is known that the elections in Nizhnii Novgorod occupied three full days because the peasant majority could not agree on a candidates’ list, voting at first for themselves individually and then for representatives of their own districts. It is not clear how the final choices emerged.'?” A similar pattern of behavior among the peasant electors prevailed in the northern province of Olonets, where the assembly finally elected to the

Duma at the end of the third day one Kadet professional man and two peasants, the voting being stalemated until then by the general unpreparedness and the widespread desire to get elected among the peasant majority (at least twenty-eight of the forty-seven participating electors). The

Kadet, the engineer A. V. Afrikantov, was elected by drawing lots after receiving the same number of votes as two other candidates.!1® The political

orientation of the one nonpeasant deputy may thus have been a largely fortuitous matter, although it appears likely that here as elsewhere the presence of a nonpeasant in the delegation was not accidental. Conditions in

Olonets seem to have differed little from those in Vologda, the other northern “peasant zemstvo” province. The Kadet party organization in Olonets was, if anything, less significant than in Vologda: it is not known

how many, if any, of the electors apart from Afrikantov were party members.

326 The First National Elections Two of the eight deputies elected in the Bessarabian provincial assembly were Kadets: V. V. Ianovskii and K. F. Kazimir, both noble landowners and

longtime zemstvo activists;''? two other deputies were also from the landowners’ curia: an Octobrist, the German colonist A. A. Vidmer, and a

conservative, A. K. Demianovich;'?° and three were nonparty peasant delegates: A. F. Popov, F. A. Seffer, and P. I. Bogach.'! The final deputy was a village priest, V. 1. Guma, who apparently had no party affiliation. It is impossible to determine the character of support for the nonpeasant candidates, for no details on the activities of the Bessarabian assembly could

be found. More than half of the electors were either nonparty or of unknown political orientation. There were at least 18 Kadets in the assembly, drawn in about equal numbers from the large landowners’ curia (with 56 of 120 electors) and the urban curia. There is some indication that

the Kadet candidacies were supported by an informal “progressiveOrthodox” bloc that united Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian electors, including electors from the peasant curia who were susceptible to being mobilized on a confessional basis for nonconservative landowners. !* In only four provincial elections—in Moscow, Riazan, Perm, and Tula—did the Kadets lose out entirely. In these elections the deputies’ seats were shared between nonpeasants to the right of the Kadets and predomi-

nantly nonparty peasants.'*? In two of these provinces—Moscow and Riazan—the Kadets lost to coalitions between the center and right parties and peasants; in the other two, quite particular circumstances prevailed. The outcome of the Moscow elections is easy to understand, given the

structure of curial representation and the political orientations of the electors, but it would have been impossible to predict, since no single political orientation prevailed in the Moscow assembly. More than half of the electors were from the urban curia (63 out of 109),!** and as noted earlier, the urban curial elections were dominated by the Octobrist-TIP

bloc. There were in addition only 16 peasant, 13 landowners’, and 17 workers’ delegates, and in none of these curiae were the Kadets well represented: they had only the 2 electors from Moscow district in the landowners’ curia, whereas three fourths of the peasants adhered to the center or right parties, and most of the workers’ delegates were SDs. The

most generous reckoning of Kadet strength gave the Kadets and their supporters forty-seven votes, while the center had thirty-five and the right, twenty-six. The number of nonparty electors was very small.'*°? According to Moskovskie vedomosti,'*® the electors were divided among the parties as follows:

SD 10 (all workers)

KD 27 (19 urban, 2 landowners, 3 peasants, 3 workers) Octobrists 19 (9 urban, 4 landowners, 6 peasants)

TIP 24 (22 urban, 1 landowner, 1 worker)

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 327 Monarchists 20 (9 urban, 5 landowners, 6 peasants)

Nonparty 7 (4 urban, 3 workers)

Total 107

Narodnaia gazeta had a slightly different count:'*’

SD 10 KD 28

Octobrists 12 TIP 26 Moderates 6 Monarchists 19

Nonparty 8 Total 109 The elections in Moscow were a victory for a coalition of the center bloc and the right, which was engineered at the last moment on the initiative

of the Trade-Industry party leaders against the wishes of the Octobrist leaders Shipov and Chetverikov. According to this agreement, the deputies’ seats were to go to the center-bloc candidates, V. S. Barshev (TIP) and Baron A. A. Krudener-Struve (Octobrist), the Monarchist Count P. S. Sheremetev, the Monarchist-oriented peasant Ia. V. Ilin, and a nonleftist worker, whose name was to be provided by the TIP. (The place for a worker-deputy was

insisted on by the TIP in order to live up to its claim of representing the interests of industry as a whole. The workers’ delegates constituted the second largest curia group in the assembly, and there was the danger that a ticket lacking a worker could be attacked to advantage by the Kadets, who had in mind including two workers on their ticket and were making room for a worker among their candidates in the Moscow city elections.) The first candidates to pass were Barshev and Krudener-Struve, by sixty-one and fifty-eight votes respectively, just about equal to the number of electors adhering to the center and right together.'2® The candidacy of the

Monarchist candidate, Count Sheremetev, was then balloted and failed to pass. Then the peasant Ilin passed by a vote of fifty-six to fifty-two, and finally Prince G. G. Gagarin, a right-wing Octobrist, was elected by a vote of

fifty-nine to forty-nine.'7? Sheremetev’s candidacy failed because the Octobrist electors, led by

Shipov and Chetverikov, withheld votes, in this way manifesting their objection to the arrangement with the Monarchists (they would not go so far as to support Kadet candidates). It is not clear why the Monarchists supported Gagarin’s candidacy after the center’s failure to uphold its part of the bargain. Perhaps they realized that he was the best they could hope for.

The workers’ seat went to V. N. Churiukov, a worker from the Klin Machine Works. He was apparently the TIP’s candidate, although he was

328 The First National Elections described in a contemporary account as being quite close to the Kadets in

his views and received votes from outside the center-right bloc: with seventy-eight votes, he was the most popular candidate of those elected.1°° In Riazan nearly half the electors attending the assembly (54:116) were peasant delegates, but they were totally unorganized, with the result that the elections were dragged out to the third day while peasant candidacies were narrowed down by the drawing of lots. Among the nonpeasant electors, the Kadets had a modest contingent of 12-14 electors drawn mainly from the

urban curia;'*’ the Octobrists had a somewhat larger contingent, drawn mostly from the landowners’ curia; and the Monarchists had a small group of 8 or 9, not counting some peasants to whom conservative views were ascribed in the press.'?? The contest, in rather more typical fashion than in Moscow, was then primarily between the Kadets and the Octobrists for the cooperation of the bulk of nonparty peasant electors. The peasants on their side entertained the idea (undoubtedly implanted by the parties’ competition for their support) of carrying the elections for peasant candidates alone, despite their inability to agree on their identity. Two days of preelection meetings were devoted mainly to Kadet and Octobrist explications of the agrarian question. They

appeared to have yielded a Kadet-peasant alliance, following a private meeting by the peasants at which a large majority evidently decided for cooperation with the Kadets because of their agrarian program. The alliance was broken, however, by the Octobrists, who had a final meeting with at least part of the peasant group on the eve of the elections, where, according to the report in Nasha zhizn’, they assured the peasants that it would be possible for them to receive additional lands free of charge,

rather than for the redemption stipulated in the Kadet program.'%? This move apparently split up such peasant solidarity as had existed and yielded a majority vote for two Octobrist leaders, Prince N. $. Volkonskii, a wellknown zemstvo man, and A. V. Eropkin, a ranking civil servant. Also elected were V. K. Fedorovskii, a political independent, but with views close

to the Kadets; N. N. Iartsev, the mayor of Zaraisk, a conservative Monarchist; three nonparty peasants, I. V. Arsenov, G. M. Vorsobin, and B. I. Chernikov (the peasants’ own deputy); and one nonparty worker, D. G. Gostev.'** In this voting the Octobrists, the nonpeasant conservatives, and

part of the peasant delegates cooperated. The political orientations of the

peasant candidates (and that of the worker as well) may have been incidental, given the drawing of lots along the way.'*> The election of lartsev was presumably the price paid by the Octobrists for the support of the right-wing nonpeasant electors.

The unusual failure of the Kadets to win this rather standard

competition for peasant support may be attributed, if the available account of the elections can be accepted, to the Octobrists’ uncommon flexibility,

and in particular to their willingness to make assurances about the land

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 329 question of a sort Octobrists were not ordinarily willing to make. The flexibility of the Riazan Octobrists was also demonstrated by their having contemplated a bloc with the Kadets when it seemed the peasants might carry the elections alone.'%° In Tula the kind of alliance between Octobrists and Kadets that had been contemplated in Riazan actually came into being, even though the Octobrists were the sole beneficiaries of it (no Kadets succeeded in being elected). In Riazan the Octobrists had pondered an alliance with the Kadets in order to assure the election of some nonpeasant “‘intelligenty,”’ that is, an alliance against the peasant electors; in Tula the aim of the Kadet-Octobrist bloc was to keep out the candidates of the right-wing For Tsar and Order party. As in Riazan, the peasants had close to an absolute majority in the Tula assembly. The Kadet group was very small, numbering perhaps no more than eight out of seventy-four participating electors; the Octobrists were only slightly more numerous, with perhaps as many as twelve electors

(mainly from the landowners’ curia); and some twenty-three of the nonpeasant deputies were members of the right-wing Monarchist party. The Kadets typically tried to form a separate alliance with the peasants, offering

at preliminary meetings to split the four plenary seats with them, but this effort came to nothing because many of the peasants arrived too late to participate in these meetings. In the end the Kadets and Octobrists cooperated to get two of the seats for their candidates, both zemtsy landowners and members of the Octobrist party: M. S. Sukhotin and A. A. Gvozdeev. The remaining two deputies

were both peasants, whose names the completely unorganized peasant electors had drawn by lots: D. S$. Kulikov and M. A. Petrukhin.'” It is not clear why the Kadets were unable to take one of the two nonpeasant places for a candidate from their party; it may be that only Octobrist candidates could draw enough votes from the landowners’ curia to get elected.'?* The solution, in other words, may have been essentially like the one arrived at in the Novgorod elections. Elements of the circumstances that had conspired to defeat the Kadets

entirely in the elections of Moscow and Riazan, and to a large extent in Saratov, were present in the Perm elections. The elections there particularly resembled the Saratov elections, with the basic difference that in Perm it was a party to the right of the Kadets, rather than to their left, that succeeded in cooperating with a large plurality of peasant electors to get a fair portion of

the deputies’ seats for its own candidates. The party in question was the Constitutional-Liberal party, organized by the lawyers Pavlov and Belousov early in the campaign. The Constitutional Liberals stood somewhere between the Kadets and the Octobrists on programmatic issues: they were against any kind of constituent functions for the Duma, they were apparently satisfied with the suffrage system, they

330 The First National Elections were strongly opposed to the Kadet nationalities program (especially in regard to Polish autonomy), and in general they placed more emphasis on the role of the state than did the Kadets.'%? Attempts had been made early in

the campaign to establish an alliance between the Constitutional Liberals and the Kadets, the overtures being made mainly by the latter. These failed,

at least partly because of irreconcilable programs, and the two parties fought throughout the campaign. A final attempt to cooperate, on the eve of the elections, broke down over the identification of Duma candidates.!*°

Three groups took shape at the preliminary meetings in Perm: the peasants, including smallholders from the landowners’ curia, who numbered in all about 115 (86 peasant delegates and about 30 smallholders) and

constituted an absolute majority of the 202 participating electors; the Kadets, numbering 25—27, almost exclusively from the urban curia; and a

“progressive bloc” led by the Constitutional-Liberal party and also including a few representatives of the center parties (the Octobrists and the TIP) and of the right, and numbering in all about 35. Its membership was

drawn from both the urban curia and the gentry minority of the landowners’ curia.**! The peasants at first tried to sweep the elections for peasant candidates,

but this failed because only about eighty of them could be made to coordinate their votes.'*2 The way was then open for an alliance between the organized peasants and one of the nonpeasant groups. Both the Kadets and the progressive bloc had appealed to the peasants in the preliminary meetings and had proposed lists of candidates: the Kadets offered a complex scheme involving a choice of six out of eight Kadet party members, two of four workers, and four of ten peasants; and the progressive bloc proposed a

list with five nonpeasant candidates, distributed among its constituent elements (a Constitutional Liberal, an Octobrist, a member of the TIP, a nonparty candidate, and one worker), and seven places for the peasants, to be filled at their discretion. This scheme understandably appealed more to the peasants, and a list consisting of the bloc’s five candidates and seven peasants was elected.'*° Both the failure to come to terms with the Constitutional Liberals in identifying candidates and the terms offered to the peasants seem to indicate that the Perm Kadets were overconfident of their ability to get the peasants behind them, as their counterparts had already succeeded in doing in so many zemstvo provinces (the Perm elections were two weeks later than in most zemstvo provinces). They apparently acted with unusual condescen-

sion toward the peasant delegates, and were answered with uncommon hostility. It should also be noted that the peasant delegation to the Perm assembly did not run to the rank-and-file cultivators of the sort that were the dominant element in many of the more strictly agricultural provinces. Many of the Perm peasant electors were involved in trade, and they appear to have been fairly well-off as a lot.'** Officeholders in peasant administra-

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 331 tion were numerous among them. All these things probably worked to the advantage of the Kadets’ rivals. !*° The failure of the Kadet “peasant strategy” in the Perm assembly points

up the conditions on which its success usually depended: a politically inexperienced and relatively undifferentiated group of peasant electors, and other nonpeasant electors who were for the most part compromised in the eyes of the peasant electors by their links to gentry landholding and the local

political “‘establishment.” In Perm, by contrast, gentry landholding accounted for only a modest proportion of the total land fund, most of that belonged to absentee landlords, and the institutions of local self-government

had traditionally been in the hand of well-off peasants, peasant entrepreneurs, and raznochintsy of various sorts.'*° It is difficult to generalize about this group of assemblies as a whole, disparate as they were in many ways. They did have in common, however, a below-average proportion of peasants among the electors and, in general, a rather closer balance among the three principal curiae than obtained in most of the other assemblies discussed in previous sections. It appears that this

relative balance of curial strength provided a necessary condition for election outcomes so different from those in the other provinces.'*” Another

noticeable characteristic of the group of assemblies as a whole (Saratov principally excepted) was the relatively low level of awareness of political-

party issues and ability to act in concert prevailing among the peasant delegates, or, in the cases of Moscow and Perm, their relative conservatism. This situation was reflected in the characteristics of the peasants elected to

the Duma from these provinces: available information shows a lower percentage of peasant deputies from these provinces in the “left of Kadet”’ or “‘progressive” categories (combined percentage: 51.2) than was the case

either in the assemblies electing predominantly peasant deputies (55 percent) or, especially, in those that yielded Duma delegations shared between Kadets and peasants (78.5 percent).*° (It is likely that in the latter

case, peasant deputies tended to adopt or to have ascribed to them the political credentials of the opposition.) This characteristic naturally tended to militate against Kadet success and to increase the chances of their rivals on the right, where these were sufficiently numerous and well organized to

take advantage of the situation.

The Assemblies of the Western Borderlands: Classes, Confessions, and Nationalities The transition, in political terms, between the interior provinces and those

of the western borderlands was not abrupt: the displacement of party politics by nationalist or confessional politics was nowhere complete, and class/estate differences continued everywhere to play a role, especially in the

332 The First National Elections behavior of peasant electors vis-a-vis the representatives of large landhold-

ing. Nevertheless, throughout the Southwest, the West, and the Baltic provinces there existed a peculiar mixture of nationalities and confessions among the curiae, a generally low level of “‘Russian’”’ representation, and a much reduced, at times nonexistent, presence of the major “all-Russian” political parties.

The Southwest: Kiev, Podolia, Volynia The elections in Kiev clearly reflected the borderline character of the province, which stood between the zemstvo provinces of the east-bank Ukraine, where independent Kadet organization was relatively strong and the nationalities played a subdued role in the opposition bloc, and the other nonzemstvo provinces of the extreme Southwest, where independent party

organization and the Russian element that generally supported it were insignificant. The Kadets did play an independent role in the Kiev provincial assembly—thanks primarily to the urban curia elections—as the head of the bloc formed during the campaign with Ukrainian-Democratic and Jewish

activists from the urban curia and Polish electors from the landowners’ curia. With the sporadic support of peasant delegates, they put through eleven of the fifteen deputies; the remainder went to peasant-curia electors. The bloc’s candidates were a mixed lot, predominantly Russians and Ukrainians, but they also included two Jews (both medical doctors from the urban curia) and two Poles (both landowners). The Russian and Ukrainian deputies supported by the bloe included at least three peasants, one or two

workers, and three of the four Kadet party regulars: N. F. Beliashevskii, director of the Kiev Museum; A. G. Viazlov, a justice of the peace; and E. V.

Shalp, a district court judge (S. R. Frenkel, one of the Jewish Union candidates, was also a party regular and remained in the party Duma fraction).!4? There are no precise figures available on the distribution of support for the bloc’s candidates among the 234 electors, who were divided

almost equally among the three principal curiae; it probably consisted of most of the 71 urban electors, the 9 workers’ delegates, and some of the landowners’ electors and peasant delegates. According to liberal press reports, eight deputies were elected during the first two days of balloting, when an absolute majority of votes was required for election; the six remaining deputies were elected on the third day by the bloc with the help of a small group of peasants who agreed to support five of the bloc’s candidates in return for one of theirs.’°° According to the conservative Kiev newspaper Kievlianin, this deal with the peasant delegates was put together after the original bloc majority broke up over a

dispute between the Polish and Jewish partners in it concerning their respective candidates for the contested seats.'>? As in many other provinces the Kiev elections yielded a deputation that

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 333 consisted primarily of urban professionals and peasants. The former included fewer Kadet regulars than in the interior provinces where similar distributions of deputies’ seats occurred—due in large part to the observance there of proportional representation of national groups—although the contrast in this respect with some of the east-bank provinces and the zemstvo South was not great.'°* Support for the Kadet bloc from Poles in the landowners’ curia was a peculiarly “‘western’”’ phenomenon. Podolia was one of the three provinces of European Russia to send exclusively peasant deputies to the Duma: all thirteen of the deputies’ seats from the Podolia assembly were filled by delegates from the peasant curia. This result obtained despite the fact that the peasant curia provided only 82 of the 199 electors in the assembly and that even with another 10 peasant smallholders from the landowners’ curia, peasants constituted less than half the assembly (46 percent).

According to the account published in Kievlianin, the extraordinary outcome of the Podolia elections occurred in the following way: the Polish-

Catholic landowners, who disposed of forty-five votes, and the Jewish

urban electors, with twenty-eight, formed a bloc in advance of the assembly’s opening to support the candidacies of five Poles and three Jews;

they apparently intended to leave the remaining places to the peasants. When the Ukrainian-Orthodox peasant electors learned of this alliance, they resolved to vote down all candidates of the Polish-Jewish bloc, which they consistently did, and to support their own candidates, who, as the vote

shows, received the votes of most of the other “Russians” (that is, Orthodox) in the assembly as well: the fifteen non-Polish large landowners, the ten peasant smallholders and six Orthodox priests from the landowners’

curia, plus a few urban electors.'°? With the exception of the peasants’ separately elected deputy, I. K.

Zabolotnyi, all the Podolia deputies were rank-and-file peasants of indefinite political views; at least several of them were illiterate. The credit for organizing the peasant strategy in the Podolia assembly and in enforcing discipline among the partly illiterate and politically inexperienced peasant delegates seems to have belonged almost entirely to Zabolotnyi, who was

one of the more singular representatives of the “intelligentsia from the people”’ to emerge in the election process. Born a peasant, he had graduated

from a gymnasium and from St. Vladimir’s University in Kiev, and (like Guchkov) had fought as a volunteer against the English in the Boer War. At the time of the elections Zabolotnyi was working as an assistant barrister in Zhitomir. He was also an inventor, and had apparently applied for a patent on a submarine! During the campaign he advertised himself as a progressive defender of peasant interests; and in some press accounts he was described

as a left Kadet. In the Duma Zabolotnyi joined the Trudoviki.'°* The Polish and Jewish electors protested the elections to the provincial electoral commission on the grounds of various irregularities, including the

334 The First National Elections isolation of the peasant electors from the other electors (they apparently did

cast their votes separately) and their manipulation by Zabolotnyi, whom they accused of employing improper means (unspecified) to persuade the peasants to vote only for peasant candidates. Zabolotnyi’s influence over the peasants was undoubtedly great, but he was not in fact guilty of the latter charge, for he had supported the candidacies of three “progressive” urban electors and a priest in addition to peasant candidates, evidently with the intention that they should act as the latters’ leaders in the Duma. In a newspaper interview Zabolotnyi blamed the exclusively peasant composition of the Duma delegation on the action of the Polish-Jewish bloc, which,

in trying to take most of the seats for itself, had alienated the peasants against the electors from the other curiae, making election of nonpeasants impossible. !>°>

It is particularly interesting to compare the Podolia elections to those in

neighboring Volynia, where the distribution of votes by curia and along national-confessional lines was very similar.'°° In Podolia an attempt by the

Polish-Catholic majority of large landowners and the almost exclusively Jewish urban electors to carry the elections had provoked a reaction among the peasants, with whom the remaining Orthodox electors then joined to sweep all the deputies’ places for Orthodox peasant candidates. In Volynia, by contrast, the Polish-Catholic and Russian-Orthodox large landowners

entered the assembly united to compete against the urban electors— predominantly members of the Jewish Union adhering to the Kadet national

program—for the support of the peasant delegates.!°” The landowners succeeded in their strategy, and the landowner-peasant

coalition elected deputies in accordance with an apportionment system worked out several days before the assembly by a committee of Polish and

Russian landowners’ electors. Two Orthodox and three Catholic large landowners, seven peasants, and one Orthodox priest were selected. Both

the landowners’ candidates, the priest, and the peasant deputies were generally described as nonparty, holding moderate or progressive political views. '>®

According to liberal press accounts of the Volynia elections, the landowners won the support of the peasant electors by controlling exclusive

access to them before the assembly opened. They were housed in the Orthodox monastery, whose abbot, Father Vitalii, cooperated with the landowners’ bloc and, according to the same sources, stirred up anti-Semitic sentiments among the peasants. It was claimed that he had threatened them

with excommunication if they voted for the “‘yids.”!°? The government newspaper also mentioned “‘encouragement” by Father Vitalii and the Orthodox clergy but made no mention of any specifically anti-Semitic content.'®° According to the liberal press account, all participants to the voting agreement were required to promise in writing to support the PolishRussian committee’s candidates without regard to religion, nationality, or

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 335 political views, and not to enter into any contrary agreements. The peasants,

it was claimed, were made to swear an oath on the cross to support the agreement. !©!

The urban electors registered a complaint against the improper behavior of their opponents and called for annulment of the elections, but

their complaint was not acted upon.'© The Volynia elections were unique in the western borderlands in being

dominated by cooperation between the large landowners’ electors as a group and the peasant delegates. Although there were elements of coopera-

tion between landowners and peasants elsewhere, this almost always occurred as a protest by Orthodox landowners and peasants against attempted domination of the elections by a Catholic landowner-urban alliance, or as a matter of Catholic solidarity. And nowhere else were Polish-

Catholic large landowners allied with predominantly Orthodox peasant electors. Generally, the Orthodox peasants of the borderlands were willing

to cooperate with any group of electors except the szlachta.'® What accounts for the different outcome of the elections in these two

neighboring provinces with very similar distribution of nationalconfessional and class representation in their assemblies? A crucial factor was the Polish landowners’ attempt in Podolia to come to an agreement with the urban electors in order to take the elections for their candidates. Why had not the Poles in the Volynia assembly tried the same tactic?!®4 Perhaps the urban electors were not cooperative, and perhaps both the Jews and the Poles in Volynia drew a lesson from the Podolia elections, which took place two weeks earlier: alliance with the peasants was the only way to

avoid provoking an Orthodox alliance and to get at least part of the deputies’ seats. The willingness of the peasants to cooperate with Polish landowners in

the Volynia assembly seems in large measure to have been due to the initiative of the Orthodox church. The presence of a sizable proportion of Orthodox electors in the landowners’ group probably made the alliance

easier; and the alliance could in any case be counted on to produce a predominantly Orthodox delegation to the Duma.'®

The West: Mogilev, Minsk, Vitebsk, Kovno, Grodno, and Vilno. Two characteristics distinguish the assemblies of the West as a whole from those of the Southwest: the virtual monopoly of the landowners’ curia by

Polish-Catholic large landowners; and the diversity in the confessional allegiances of the peasant delegates (also in national identities, to the extent

that the two were distinct), ranging from predominantly Orthodox (and Ukrainian) in the southern parts of the region to predominantly Catholic (Belorussian and Lithuanian) in the northwestern extremities. The former characteristic ruled out in most of the Northwest the kind of cleavages

336 The First National Elections within the landowners’ curia that had played an important part in the Kiev and Podolia elections; the latter sometimes facilitated cooperation across

estate-curia lines. The urban curia in the Northwest was even more exclusively dominated by Jewish professionals and businessmen than in the Southwest. Mogilev was the province in the Northwest where the factors involved

in the assembly elections most nearly resembled those of the Russian interior; in this respect it is comparable to Kiev in the Southwest. An alliance between the liberal bloc and the peasants prevailed, with Kadet party members playing a prominent role in the bloc, which was made up of electors from both nonpeasant curiae. The Kadets were able to command about twenty-five votes directly in

the Mogilev assembly. These included virtually all the small number (sixteen) of urban electors, thanks to a bloc with the Jewish Union; the remainder came from the landowners’ curia (total electors: fifty-three), which was fragmented along both political and national lines. There was a

significant Russian representation among the large landowners in the Mogilev assembly, alone in the Northwest; Russians constituted a majority of large landowners in the province. Most of the forty peasant electors were without political affiliations. The Kadets thus had nearly a quarter of the votes, but they were offset by a comparable number of conservative electors from the landowners’ curia.'©° With this balance of forces, the price paid by the Kadets for the cooperation of the peasants came high: only two of the

seven deputies’ seats went to Kadets the remaining deputies-elect were literate peasants, plus one salaried employee of peasant origin who was apparently a supporter of the SDs.'°’ In view of the fact that the urban Jews

and Polish landowners provided the bulk of Kadet representation in the assembly, it is noteworthy that both the Kadet deputies were landowners and retired civil servants of Russian Orthodox background; it may well be that the candidacy of a Jew or a Pole would not have been supported by the Belorussian Orthodox peasant delegates.

The elections in Minsk were more representative of the region as a whole. At the assembly the electors (seventy-four landowners, forty-one peasants, twenty urban electors, and two workers) formed three distinct groups: one urban group, predominantly consisting of Jews; and two rural groups—one consisting mainly of Polish landowners, but joined by a few other Polish-Catholic electors from the other curiae, and numbering altogether fifty-seven electors,'°® and the other, mainly peasant and Orthodox, totaling sixty-three electors.'©’ Since neither of the nearly equal rural groups commanded a majority vote in the assembly, the question was, with which of them would the Jews from the urban curia ally to make a majority and take the eight seats being contested? This question was settled in preliminary meetings between the urban electors and the Polish group. According to the agreement worked out there, the Poles would take seven of

the seats and the eighth would go to a Jew from the urban curia.

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 337 When the assembly opened, most of the peasant delegates, accompanied by some of the Orthodox electors from the landowners’ curia (mostly smallholders, but also including two pomeshchiki and a priest) demonstratively quit the assembly, leaving behind a declaration about the injustice of an electoral law that allowed the representatives of 400,000 Poles and Jews to have all the deputies, and those of 2 million “Russians” none.'’° The declaration prefigured the revisions in the electoral system implemented by Stolypin in 1907. In terms of political orientation, the urban-landowner alliance essentially embraced the liberal bloc that had emerged during the campaign; it included Kadets tout court, Polish National Democrats, Polish Independents, the urban Preelection Committee of Russian, Jewish, and Polish Voters, and the Belorussian-Lithuanian party. The Jewish deputy-elect, the

lawyer S. Ia. Rozenbaum, and three of the Poles—A. R. Lednitskii (Lednicki), a Moscow lawyer and Minsk landowner, V. O. lIanchevskii (Janciewski), a Minsk lawyer, and E. I. Liubanskii (Ljubanski), a wealthy landowner—were all established members of the Kadet party and remained with the fraction in the first Duma. The other four deputies, all landowners (one also a professional philosopher), were Polish National Democrats or Independents who did not join the Kadet Duma fraction, but adhered to the Autonomist fraction.!”! Thus a combination of national-confessional and class divisions contributed to the liberal victory in Minsk through an urbanlandowner alliance rather than through the urban-peasant alliance that was commonly the basis for Kadet-bloc election success in the central provinces.

In Vitebsk the same kind of bloc between the urban, predominantly Jewish electors and the almost exclusively Polish-Catholic landowners’ electors easily carried the elections.‘7* Two of the plenary seats went to Kadets from the urban curia, and the remaining three went to Polish Constitutional Catholics from the landowners’ curia, a division of seats proportional to curial representation (twenty urban and thirty-nine landowners). Both groups supported the Kadet national program.'”° Thus in Minsk and Vitebsk, urban and landowners’ electors cooperated

at the expense of the peasants. In Grodno and Kovno provinces urban electors and peasants combined at the landowners’ expense. Of the 107 electors in the Grodno assembly, 43 were from the peasant curia, 36 from the landowners’, 26 from the urban curia, and 2 were factory delegates. The urban and landowners’ curiae were dominated, respectively, by Jews aligned with the Jewish Union and by Polish Catholics. The Polish vote in the assembly was somewhat larger than the number of landowners’

electors—about 44—due mainly to support from the peasant curia. The peasant curia included 30 Belorussians, 10 Ukrainians, and 3 Poles; 13 of them were Catholics.'”4 The Poles, with their forty-four votes, hoped to take at least four of the six plenary seats for themselves, and were prepared to make an alliance

either with the Jews from the urban curia or with the peasants. The less

338 The First National Elections numerous Jews, on their side, favored a scheme for equal representation of the major groups participating in the assembly: two Jews, two Poles, and

two “Russians” (that is, Orthodox). Two days before the opening of the assembly, with the peasants as yet unorganized, the Poles and the Jews came

to a tentative agreement, according to which two seats would go to candidates of the Jewish Union (M. Ia. Ostrogorskii and V. R. Iakubson), but this agreement broke down when the Poles informed their putative partners that they wanted all the other seats to go to Polish candidates, excluding the ‘‘Russians.”” This was unacceptable to the Jews, who insisted

that at least one Orthodox deputy be elected by the Grodno assembly, apparently because they feared that election of a Duma delegation that included no Orthodox member would be exploited to incite the local Orthodox population to pogroms against Jews.’”° Following the breakdown of the Polish-Jewish agreement, both groups set about trying to ally with the peasants, who in the meantime had begun to get organized. In the end, a Jewish-peasant alliance emerged on the eve of the assembly opening (March 26) with an agreement to elect four peasants (including the separate peasant deputy), one Orthodox landowners’ elector,

and the two Jewish candidates.'’© The election results followed this agreement fairly closely: three peasants, M. M. Zhukovskii, S. P. Kondrashuk, and A. V. Kuropatskii; one Orthodox pomeshchik, M. M. Erogin, the Belostok marshal of nobility and large landowner of Brest district; the two Jewish Union candidates, Ostrogorskii and Iakubson (Ostrogorskii,

who actually lived in Petersburg, was a high official in the Ministry of Justice; Iakubson was a local lawyer); and a Catholic priest, A. N. Sangaillo

(Songailo), were elected. The election of Sangaillo instead of a fourth peasant appears to have been made possible by a fairly close and unsteady balance in the voting (the result of some of the peasant electors breaking

discipline), which gave the Polish-Catholic group in the assembly the opportunity to put through a Catholic candidate with the help of some of

the Catholic peasants and a few of the urban electors. Sangaillo, a Lithuanian by nationality with a populist reputation, was probably not the Poles’ first choice, but he was popular with the peasants.'””

The role of the Kadet party in the Grodno elections was evidently minimal. None of the deputies-elect remained with the Kadet fraction in the Duma, although both of the Jewish Union candidates were linked through

the union with the Kadet organization. (Iakubson joined the Trudovik fraction in the Duma.) Erogin was at the time reputed to be close to the Kadets, although he did not accept their nationalities program (a “Kadet without autonomy,” in current jargon), but he took up with the right in the Duma.’’® Sangaillo joined the Autonomist fraction in the Duma. Two of the

peasant deputies-elect, Kondrashuk and Kuropatskii, joined the Trudoviki.’”?

The circumstances and outcome of the elections in Kovno province

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 339 were essentially similar to those in Grodno. There was virtually the same distribution of electors by curiae and, within the urban and landowners’ curiae, by nationality. Elected to the Duma were two Kadet-bloc candidates, of whom one, L. M. Bramson, was a lawyer and a leader of the Kovno Jewish electoral committee, and the other, Ch. V. Milvid (Cz. W. Milwid), a Pole, was a lawyer and landowner (Milwid joined the Kadet fraction in the Duma and was associated with the Autonomist group; Bramson became a Trudovik); one Lithuanian Catholic priest, V. P. Iarulaitis (Jarulaitis), and three Lithuanian peasants, L. I. Lopas, I. I. Kubilis, and I. R. Sabalis, all members of the Lithuanian-Democratic party.'®? The makeup of the Kovno

Duma delegation differed from that of Grodno only in the unified nationality and party alignment of the peasant deputies-elect, which directly reflected the different ethnic and confessional characteristics of the peasantry in the two provinces. Indeed, there were no Orthodox among the Kovno deputies-elect.1°" The successful candidacies were supported by an alliance of the urban electors and peasants, which was formed following bargaining for peasant

support by both the landowners and the urban electors. The Polish landowners reportedly wanted four of the six seats for their candidates, whereas the Jewish urban electors, like their counterparts in the Grodno assembly, proposed one candidate from their number and one progressive landowner, in addition to the peasants’ candidates—the two peasants and the priest. '8? The Jewish-peasant agreement was cemented in the preelection meetings, and the assembly in effect merely ratified the decision taken there. It is evident from the votes recorded that the peasant-urban bloc included about fifty-five of the electors—the plenarily elected peasants and Bramson all got very close to that number of votes. As might be expected, two of the bloc’s

candidates—the landowner Milvid and the priest Iarulaitis—drew some votes from the landowners’ electors as well, receiving respectively seventyeight and eighty-nine votes.'*?

The Vilno provincial assembly differed from those of neighboring western provinces in the extremely small size of its urban curia: only seven of ninety-one electors were from that curia, because the city of Vilno, with

160,000 of the province’s total urban population of about 200,000 had been included in the group of cities with special elections. This ruled out the

possibility of the urban group playing the kind of role it did in the other northwestern provinces, although it could theoretically have provided a crucial swing vote, in view of the fact that the rest of the electors were split almost exactly between peasants and large landowners.'** As it happened, the peasants and landowners shared the deputies’ seats evenly. Three men from the peasant curia, all Catholics with some education, were elected:

two Lithuanians, K. K. Aleksandrovich and M. S. Gotovitskii, and one Belorussian, M. N. Grintsevich.!®> And three men from the landowners’

340 The First National Elections curia were elected: the Catholic bishop of Vilno, Baron Ropp, head of the Constitutional-Catholic party; Ch. K. Iankovskii (Cz. K. Jankowski), a large landowner and editor of the Vilno Polish-language newspaper Kurier Polski; and B. A. lalovetskii (Jalowecki), a landowner who was also an engineer, chinovnik, and businessman.‘*° As in Kovno, there were no Orthodox or Russians in the Vilno Duma

delegation. Nor were there any Kadets, although Aleksandrovich was sometimes ascribed Kadet party membership in the contemporary accounts. Once in the Duma, in any case, he joined the Trudoviki.'®’ All three of the

Polish landowners joined the Autonomist fraction. In the Southwest as a whole, the peasant electors seem to have been guided more by class / estate concerns than by national-confessional ones. The latter did enter the picture in a significant way, however, on a variety of

occasions: Orthodox peasants would on occasion exempt minoritarian Russian Orthodox landowners from their general hostility toward large landowners—as demonstrated in the Volynia assembly and, with less important consequences, elsewhere. In Kovno Lithuanian nationalism clearly played a major part in identifying the peasants’ candidates. In Vilno shared Catholic faith appears to have been the main element allowing for cooperation between peasants and landowners in the assembly.

The Catholic peasant-electors of the West were readier than their counterparts in Orthodox areas to elect priests to the Duma. Not only were

populist Catholic priests elected with peasant support from Vitebsk, Grodno, and Kovno, but Vilno province elected its Catholic bishop. Only a very few priests were elected in the Orthodox regions, and most of them were from frontier areas.'®® The division between Russian-Orthodox and Polish-Catholic large

landowners was everywhere clear and distinct. Whereas the Russian pomeshchiki seem generally to have manifested an attitude of defensive conservatism—defense of their social and political privileges vis-a-vis their

Polish counterparts, and of their economic position against the covetous peasants—which often led to association with parties of the moderate or extreme right, the Polish szlachta often compromised defense of established

status and property interests for the sake of advancing their national interests. This brought many of them into contact and cooperation with the Kadet bloc. The urban electors of the West were predominantly representatives of Jewish groups whose main interest in the elections was the attainment of equal rights for Jews in the empire. Most of them were drawn into the Kadet

bloc; indeed, in most of the western provinces they were its chief representatives. Of the eight Jews from the urban curiae of the western borderlands elected to the first Duma, five remained with the Kadet fraction there; two of the three others, Bramson and Iakubson, joined the Trudoviki.

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 341 The Baltic Provinces In the assemblies of the Baltic provinces nationality alignments systematically cut across estate and curial lines. Latvian and Estonian electors in the peasant curia together with their fellow countrymen (but also Jews, Poles, and Russians) in the urban curia stood in virtually unanimous opposition to the Germans in the landowners’ curia. In the case of the latter, of course, nationality did coincide with estate, since the German electors were all large landowners. As noted earlier, the once predominantly rural Latvians and

Estonians had produced sizable native intelligentsias by the turn of the century, and there were numerous intellectuals and professional people among the electors of both the peasant and the urban curiae in the Baltic assemblies. '°? It is characteristic of the region that the Latvian and Estonian deputies elected by the Baltic assemblies were all of “peasant” origin;'”° at the same time, they were all educated men and, with a single exception, they

were all urban professionals.'7' All the deputies elected from the Baltic were members of the nationaldemocratic parties and groups that cooperated in the elections to defeat the German landowners; the Latvian and Estonian parties were predominant, but an important role was played by representatives of other nationalities in the urban curia because of the small size of the peasant curia and the large size of the landowners’ curia in all three provincial assemblies.

The Kurland assembly elected two Latvians—lIa. K. Kreitsberg, a newspaper editor, and J. Kh. Chakste, a Moscow University graduate and a lawyer—and one Jew, N. I. Katsenelson, director of a Jewish bank and a

member of the Kadet party and of the provincial Jewish electoral committee. In Livland the deputies’ seats were divided equally between Latvian and

Estonian candidates, in correspondence with the nationalities structure of the province’s population. Elected were A. O. Bremer, an educated Latvian

farmer; K. Ja. Ozolin, a Latvian lawyer; O. I. Riutli, an Estonian businessman and lawyer; and Tenisson, leader of the Estonian Peoples’ party. 19

In Estland the three deputies’ seats went to the “Estonian-Russian

Union,” two of them to Estonians—K. P. Gellat, a law graduate of Petersburg University and municipal judge; and A. Ia. Lubbi, a schoolteacher—and the third to the Russian judge P. $. Papchinskii. The election process in Estland was characteristic of the region, although the very small size of the peasant curia and the particularly large number of landowners’

electors gave more weight in the nationalities bloc to representatives of

minority nationalities in the urban curia than in the other two Baltic provinces. The union had a slight but consistent edge over the German landowners’ electors, with twenty-six votes (ten from the peasant curia, fourteen from the urban curia, and two from the workers) to the Germans’

342 The First National Elections twenty-one. The two bloc candidates for the plenary election had been identified beforehand in a general meeting of the twenty-six non-German electors, and both were elected by all twenty-six votes, despite an attempt by the Germans to break up the majority by proposing a worker’s candidacy in

opposition to Papchinskii. When this tactic failed, the Germans simply withdrew. Three obligations were imposed on the candidates selected at the preassembly meeting of non-German electors: (1) the deputies were obliged to accept the Kadet program as the minimum program for their activities in the Duma; (2) they had to cooperate with other Baltic representatives in the Duma; and (3) the resolutions taken at the preelection meeting (unspecified in the newspaper accounts) were to be mandatory for the deputies-elect.'”° Of the ten Duma deputies elected in the Baltic provinces (not counting Grosvald, the Latvian deputy from the Riga special elections), there were

four Latvians, four Estonians, one Jew, and one Russian. Eight of them adhered to the Kadet fraction in the first Duma, several belonged to their own national fractions or the Union of Autonomists as well.'74 If one were to distribute the twelve western-borderland elections among the four basic types of elections discussed earlier, the three Baltic provinces and Minsk could be ranked with those in which the Kadet bloc took most of

the deputies’ seats (although the independent role of the Kadet party organization in these western elections was of course much less significant and in some cases nonexistent); the two borderline provinces of Kiev and Mogilev could be ranked with those provinces in which the deputies’ seats were divided between Kadet-bloc and peasant electors; Podolia could be counted among those in which the peasants carried the elections alone; and the remaining provinces—Vilno, Vitebsk, Volynia, Grodno, and Kovno— would belong to the group of assemblies that produced complex deputations, although with the exception of Volynia these were all assemblies in which the liberal-nationalities blocs played a decisive role.

The area as a whole yielded thirty-five Kadet-bloc deputies to the Duma,!”° out of a total of ninety-three deputies elected there; the total proportion of liberal-nationalities deputies probably reached half. The remainder were peasants. Of the thirty-five bloc deputies, twenty-five adhered to the Kadet fraction in the first Duma. Most of them were also members of nationalities groups at the time of their election. In addition to party regulars, those that remained with the Kadet fraction were predominantly representatives of Jewish groups, for the Jews from these groups, true to their original limited goals, formed no separate fraction in the Duma. Another group of deputies with a high proportion adhering to the Kadet fraction in the Duma were the representatives of the Baltic nationalities. Greatest attrition, in this sense, was among the Polish deputies elected by the bloc, who tended to join the Autonomist fraction in the Duma, which consisted overwhelmingly of Polish Catholics, although a few of them were simultaneously adherents of the Kadet fraction.

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 343 Conclusion On March 28, two days after the assemblies had opened in a majority of the

provinces, Minister of Internal Affairs Durnovo sent out a confidential telegram to the governors of these provinces, inquiring after the reasons for

the victory of the “extreme parties” in the elections.!7° The ministerial inquiry specifically asked whether this victory lay in the electoral system itself, and if so what aspects of it; in the indifference of the “moderate classes of society” and the energetic propaganda of the extreme parties; or in other circumstances. The governors were also asked to give their opinions

about various aspects of the behavior of the political parties during the campaign and the extent of their influence on the outcome of the elections. Finally, they were asked to determine, if possible, the degree to which the Kadets’ success could be attributed to the measures taken by the administra-

tion for the maintenance of public order. In best bureaucratic tradition, the terms of the inquiry largely determined the character of the responses to it. In particular, one can clearly see

that the governors by and large took the question about the influence of “measures for the establishment and maintenance of public order” as a source of possible accusations of excesses on their part, and they as a rule accordingly denied that these measures had in any way helped the extreme

parties in their territories. For this and several other reasons, including generous doses of strong prejudice and plain ignorance, the amount of insight about the elections to be obtained from most of the governors’ reports 1s not very great. Several, however, showed a perception of the fundamental circum-

stances involved in the victory of the “left.” The system of curial apportionment had given predominant weight in the assemblies to the peasants. The rules governing the elections had excluded proportional representation, which allowed the Kadets to dominate the urban elections

and thereby acquire “disproportionate” representation in most of the assemblies, and in the assemblies themselves these rules had tended to give all the deputies’ seats to groups or coalitions either exclusively of the “‘left’’ or in combination with the peasants, thanks to the general disposition of the latter and the willingness of the Kadets to promise the peasants what they wanted to hear. Finally, organized groups to the right of the Kadets were generally either small and weak or absent altogether in the assemblies.!?’ By and large, the Kadets had a good chance of taking about half, if not

more, of the deputies’ seats in those assemblies where there was a fair balance among the curiae and a respectable minority of electors was made up of party members, usually between 15 and 25 percent.'”® As a rule, the

higher the proportion of electors from the urban curia, the larger the proportion of Kadets among the deputies-elect. Variations in the strength of that correlation often depended on the presence or absence of rivals capable

344 The First National Elections of competing with the Kadets for support or coalition with the peasant delegates, and occasionally on uncharacteristic weakness or divisiveness within the Kadet group itself. The Kadets took most of the deputies’ seats in provinces where Kadet Organization was strong and was spread across more than one curia, and where the curial balance was such as to allow Kadet candidates to be elected without having to depend on a majority of nonparty peasants. Most of these assemblies—those of St. Petersburg and of the provinces of the central industrial region—were in areas of particularly high urban and industrial-

commercial development; it was in such areas that nonpeasant Kadets tended to be especially numerous in the assemblies and the proportion of nonparty peasants tended to be lowest, a fact certainly related to the peasants’ high level of involvement, through a variety of economic relations, with urban life in general and their exposure to political-party agitation in particular. (The Kadets had been successful in recruiting peasant member-

ship for the most part in such areas, particularly in the central industrial region and around Petersburg.) Kadets shared deputies’ seats with peasants where the peasant curia was

significantly larger than the others and populated by predominantly nonparty peasants, who were, however, sufficiently organized among themselves to sustain a coalition with the Kadets. For many of these assemblies, and for virtually all of those where a formal alliance between the two groups—Kadets and peasants—was struck, there is evidence that the peasants were provided with some leadership and direction by intelligentsia electors who were themselves often delegates in the peasant curia. Many of these were assemblies in predominantly agricultural regions of the country,

outside the central agricultural region, where the peasant movement had been particularly intense in recent months and elements of organization and contact with intelligentsia agitators were unusually developed, particularly in the form of the Peasant Union—in the east-bank and southern Ukraine, along the Volga and in the Urals. In several of the eastern provinces Muslim

solidarity was a major factor in the coordination of the peasant votes.'”” Predominantly peasant deputations were elected in five provinces (not counting the western border province of Podolia) where nonparty peasants constituted a sizable majority of the assemblies, where Kadet representation

was uncommonly weak, and where, for the most part, peasant isolation from other social groups was still unusually complete. It seems significant

that two of the provinces—Tambov and Orel—were in the central agricultural region, where the most traditional forms of Russian peasant community life and subsistence agriculture still held sway; and two others—

Vologda and Stavropol—were located at the northern and southern extremities of European Russia respectively, in areas where neither urban development nor extensive contact with other social groups through the

zemstvo institutions (absent altogether in Stavropol) seem to have encroached much on peasant isolation.

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 345 The provinces yielding more complex groups of deputies in terms of

their political affiliations for the most part had assemblies with a fair balance among the curiae. In several of these assemblies the outcome differed from elections in which the Kadets had shared the seats exclusively with peasants only by the inclusion of a single center-party deputy from the landowners’ curia. In a few others the Kadets remained the dominant group

among the deputies-elect, but the remainder were no longer exclusively peasants, on account of diverse local conditions, such as the dominance of

Cossack deputies in the Don or an unusually high level of political mobilization among the peasant delegates, as in Saratov. Finally, in the rare assemblies where the Kadets lost out entirely and the

deputies’ seats were shared for the most part between peasants and nonpeasant electors who were politically to the right of the Kadets, one finds a combination of unusually aggressive and flexible maneuvering on the

right and either an unusual lack of coordination among the peasant delegates or a significant proportion of conservatively inclined peasants. With the exception of Moscow, with its majoritarian urban curia dominated by the center and right, these were assemblies with large peasant curiae and unusually small urban curiae. The disproportionate success of the Kadets within the general limits set by curial representations and the voting system depended on two factors especially, apart from the Kadets’ own strength and skill: the low level of political-party awareness and the inability to organize independently that prevailed among the mass of peasant delegates, who formed a plurality of electors in many provinces and an absolute majority in nearly a third of them (counting only the delegates in the peasant curia); and the absence, with few exceptions, of other parties or groups among the nonpeasant electors capable of effectively competing with the Kadets for alliance with the nonparty peasants. The Kadets profited in the first elections both from Russia’s political development and from its lack thereof; or, to put it in different terms, they engaged successfully in two kinds of election politics:

in the largest urban centers and their surrounding areas where a high proportion of the population was mobilized, the Kadets owed their success to the large-scale public campaigning for which they were uniquely suited.

In the predominantly rural provinces, relatively small groups of Kadet electors (for the most part belonging to the urban curia, where they had emerged from political contests more or less resembling those of the large cities) engaged in a sort of “‘estate” or curial politics in and around the provincial assemblies, from which they often emerged in victorious coalitions, usually with peasant electors. Given the general policy of boycotting the elections pursued by the

major parties to the left of the Kadets and the social makeup of the assemblies, perhaps the most notable feature of the elections in respect to the lack of serious competition for the Kadets was the absence, with very

few exceptions, of significant political consolidation among the large

346 The First National Elections landowners’ electors. Despite shared social and economic status (in the perspective of the overall framework of the estate system and property ownership) and the threat to them they confronted in every assembly, the large landowners’ electors were politically fragmented. A sizable minority of them were Kadets or “‘progressives”’ (the latter coming particularly from the

Polish-dominated western curiae), while the majority to the right of the Kadets were divided between center and right-wing monarchist orientations. For the most part these latter failed to cooperate in the assemblies, as they had failed to cooperate in the preliminary stages of the elections with fateful results for large-landowning representation in the provincial assemblies. Of course, in many and perhaps in a majority of the assemblies, the

likely rewards of cooperation were not great, given the weight and disposition of the electors from the other curiae; under such circumstances, the perceived need on either side to compromise with principles was not pressing. At least for the time of the first national elections, the evidence does not support the notion—current on the contemporary left (up to and including the Kadets) and in much of subsequent writing on the period— that the moderate constitutional-monarchist center and the conservative monarchist right constituted a single political camp in any sense useful for concrete historical analysis.

The Problem of the Peasants in the Provincial Assemblies Repeated reference has been made here to regional differences in the political attitudes and behavior of the peasants in the first national elections. The most striking differences were between the Great Russian interior and

the western borderlands, particularly the Baltic provinces, where mass literacy and a sense of national and confessional community had contributed to widespread political mobilization of the rural population, with results in the provincial assemblies that were essentially different from those

prevailing in the bulk of the Russian provinces.*°° In the predominantly Russian-Orthodox heartland of European Russia, by contrast, regional differences in the behavior of the peasant electors were in some respects linked to regional variations in socioeconomic conditions. The unusual tendency of the peasants in the north-Russian assemblies to cooperate with nonpeasant electors was rather clearly related to the fact that there was little

gentry-owned land in the region. Most important in this regard were conditions affecting the extent of peasant contact with urban society and political culture, particularly the proximity of large cities and peasant participation in the urban labor market. Although this kind of contact tended to be greatest in the central industrial region and the Petersburg area, it was considerable in some other areas as well. In general, the results of the

provincial elections do not follow any clear patterns conforming to basic economic-geographic regions as do, for example, the forms of peasant

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 347 action in the agrarian disorders of 1905-1906.*°" Such regional differences as existed cannot obscure the impression of widespread homogeneity of peasant political attitudes and behavior manifested in the election process

throughout this vast territory. By and large the peasant electors in the provincial assemblies were true to the milieu from which they came: the same affinities, antipathies, and concerns prevailed among them as had predominated among the peasants who participated in the preliminary stages of the elections.*°* There is no reason to think that for most of the peasant delegates the elections and the institution of the Duma were seen in a radically different light than they were by the peasants at large; that is, as a means of pursuing economic security and justice in the form of a radical land redistribution in favor of the peasantry. Most of them were not associated with any political parties,

and to the extent that they took any interest in the parties whose representatives they confronted in the assemblies, it was for the most part limited to those parties’ agrarian programs. Along with this concern, of course, went hostility toward the landowners’ electors by and large. Cooperation with them was minimal; with few exceptions, groups of landowners’ electors standing politically to the right of the Kadet party were unable to persuade peasant delegates that they were participating in the elections for any purpose other than the defense of gentry landholding and privilege. In at least a few cases peasant electors rejected overtures from this quarter even when they involved nothing more than an offer to support peasant candidacies in order to block rivals on the

left.2°? Only Kadets among landowners’ electors were to some extent exempted from this generalized mistrust; this was due, one suspects, not only to the Kadets’ agrarian program but also to the fact that these gentry liberals were usually part of a predominantly urban, nonlandowning group of electors. All the same, peasant hostility generally extended beyond the landowners alone to “gentlemen’”’ of all sorts, to all those electors, in their ‘““German dress,” “‘jackets,” or kaloshy, who represented for the peasants the alien culture of the Europeanized elite. The inclination of the peasant electors to send up to the Duma only their own kind was in evidence in many more provincial assemblies than those few in which they were actually able to carry through with that inclination successfully. (It is instructive in

this regard to look through the portrait gallery of first-Duma deputies: virtually all the intelligentsia deputies who owed their election to the peasants and adhered to the Trudovik fraction in the Duma eschewed ‘“German dress” in the halls of the Tauride Palace, whereas most of the members of the regular political parties—including peasants—adopted rio ae

The hostility generally manifested toward the Orthodox clergy in the preliminary stages of the elections remained clearly in evidence in the

348 The First National Elections provincial assemblies. Nothing comparable to the role of the Catholic clergy in the Northwest in mobilizing peasant support for the national-democratic parties or the Constitutional-Catholic party was to be seen in the Orthodox interior: aside from the case of Volynia, a borderland province itself, there is

no evidence of the Orthodox church having played a significant part in mobilizing peasant electors.”°° It is true that the Orthodox hierarchy did not systematically mobilize the clergy for the first elections, but it is doubtful that the situation can be ascribed only to default on the part of the clergy.*°° More directly indicative of the prevailing peasant attitude toward the clergy was the fact that only six Orthodox priests were elected to the Duma from all of European Russia and only two of these came from assemblies with

heavy representation of Great Russian peasants. Moreover, half of them (including the two just referred to) were members of the Kadet party.*°’ In addition to the six Orthodox priests, four Catholic clerics from the Northwest, all involved in national-autonomy movements (they comprised two Lithuanians, one Latvian, and one Pole), and one mullah were elected to the Duma in European Russia, and two more Catholic priests were elected to the Duma in the Kingdom of Poland. Of fourteen clerics elected to the first Duma by mid-May, the Orthodox clergy constituted a minority.*°°

By and large, peasant delegates from the peasant curia and peasant smallholders from the landowners’ curia constituted a single group in the provincial assemblies. The peasant smallholders in most assemblies appear

to have behaved like their allotment-holding counterparts and are not distinguishable in the accounts of assembly activities as a separate element:

where the peasant voting showed some signs of coordination, the smallholders generally voted with the others, very significantly adding to the weight of the peasant vote in quite a few assemblies, sometimes with a decisive influence on the outcome of the elections.?°” All this was in keeping

with the behavior of the smallholders in the preliminary elections. If “‘solidarity”’ is too strong a term to apply to peasant behavior in the assemblies, since in many of them even the majority of volost delegates proved incapable of sustained concerted action, general similarity of views and responses did prevail among peasants in both curial groups. The record of the provincial assemblies testifies to a considerable degree of social and psychological homogeneity still prevailing in the early twentieth century

among the mass of the Russian peasantry—including those who had acquired some private land outside the communes—at least in regard to relations with nonpeasants and the problem of land. Most of these peasant landowners, it should be remembered, retainied their communal allotments and were members of the same village communities as the rest of the

peasants; they were all still linked together by the institutions of the commune and peasant administration and by their position in the general agrarian situation: a population undergoing rapid demographic expansion in a rural economy incapable of extensive growth. And their perception of

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 349 the solution to this situation was one—the “black repartition” (chernyi peredel).*'° It is particularly interesting to look at the ensemble of deputies sent up to the Duma from the peasant curia, both those elected by the assemblies at

large and those elected by the peasants separately. About 180 (or 47 percent) of the 384 deputies elected to the Duma by the provincial assemblies of European Russia came from the peasant curia.7!’ As previously noted, a little less than two thirds of these deputies were landworking peasants and about another 10 percent devoted at least part of their time to working their land.*'* The 33 percent of non-land-working peasants (fifty-nine) elected from the peasant curia represented a number of occupations, including principally the following:

Village 12 Small schoolteachers tradesmen 11

Craftsmen Volost scribes 6 3 “Intelligenty”’ Employees of private firms3 3

Zemstvo employees (third element) 9 Manufacturers (2 of them sawmill operators) 3

(In addition, one person represented another nine occupations, ranging from factory worker to professor.) Just over half of these (thirty-two) might be considered intelligentsia occupations; the remainder involved trade and business (pursuit of such occupations did not necessarily exclude possession of “intelligentsia” characteristics, of course). Virtually all the “peasant” deputies were literate. Most had attended at

least a primary—zemstvo or parish—school, and the intelligentsia and some of those engaged in business had received at least some secondary schooling. The most common form of secondary education among the peasant deputies was the teachers’ seminary.*'” Among the deputies elected separately by the peasants, less than half (twenty-one) seem to have been engaged exclusively in agriculture. Of the

remaining majority of twenty-eight, eighteen belonged to the group of peasant intelligentsia just accounted for, comprising eight schoolteachers, three lawyers, three zemstvo employees, an agronomist, two intelligenty of

undetermined profession, and a volost scribe. The remaining ten were mainly engaged in trade and crafts (six of the eleven tradesmen came from the separately elected group).*!*

The proportion of non-land-working peasants in general and of intelligenty in particular was thus considerably higher among the separately elected deputies than among those deputies elected from the peasant curia by the assemblies at large.7!° These figures suggest that when acting alone in

350 The First National Elections selecting a deputy, the peasant electors put a high premium on literacy and activities that involved contact with the nonpeasant world. The presence among the peasant-curia deputies of men with these attributes was not due primarily to the influence of nonpeasant electors. Indeed, the much higher proportion of lesser-educated, “‘greyer’’ peasants among those elected by the assemblies at large suggests that overall the participation by nonpeasant electors in the selection of peasant deputies operated in the other direction. A sizable contribution to this result may have been made by conservative large landowners, who tended to attribute a greater potential for political conservatism, or at least tolerable inactivism, to the “greyer’’ peasants.

And they had reason to do so: the political center of gravity of the separately elected deputies in the Duma was much further to the left than that of the peasant group elected by the assemblies at large. At least thirtysix of the fifty-one curially elected deputies joined Duma fractions from the Kadets leftward (at least twenty-six became Trudoviki, nine were Kadets,

and one was an Autonomist), while as few as eleven remained in the conservatively oriented nonparty group, and only one joined the Octobrist

bloc. Of those who remained in the nonparty group, all but two were exclusively cultivators.**°

Although it seems clear that most of the better-educated, non-landworking deputies from the peasant curia were familiar with a variety of political issues and situated themselves somewhere in the political-party spectrum (mostly on the left, as indicated) even at the time of the assembly meetings,”!” it is also clear that the peasant electors, by and large, did not choose their deputies on the basis of political-party labels or anticipated groupings in the Duma. The outlook of the mass of peasant electors, and

probably a majority of the deputies elected from their midst, was not oriented toward political parties and few among them seem to have thought

of the Duma as a permanent legislative institution, as opposed to a gathering of representatives of the land for the presentation of petitions to

the tsar. There is some evidence, to be sure, that groups of radicals occasionally succeeded in mobilizing peasant votes for “‘left-of-Kadet” or “progressive” candidates in a number of provinces. But nowhere, with the possible exception of the Saratov assembly, was this mobilization carried on in terms of party programs and party recruitment. Rather, appeals focused essentially on the agrarian question and other peasant-estate issues; that is, tactics of the same sort employed by the Kadets and other “‘gentlemen.”’

The characteristics of the peasant-deputies reveal the qualities the peasants found desirable in those who were to represent their interests in the

alien culture of Petersburg: literacy and experience in dealing with outsiders. Outstanding war records were not neglected in this regard either—a perusal of the Duma portrait gallery reveals a considerable number of St. George’s Crosses on the chests of peasant deputies.”!® It was

Phase II: The Provincial Elections 351 not unreasonable to think that decorated veterans could command attention

and respect in Petersburg, perhaps even from the tsar. One might reasonably ask whether the argument for the broad identity of outlook prevailing among the peasant electors in the Russian provinces is not contradicted, after all, by the evidence of their voting behavior in the

assemblies; namely, by their failure to get a great many more peasants elected to the Duma than actually were elected, considering the system of voting in force and the distribution of electors among the curiae. With an absolute majority of votes for the peasant curia alone in fifteen provinces, in several more for peasants from both curiae, and a solid plurality in many others, consistent cooperation by a fair majority of the peasant delegates could have yielded exclusively peasant Duma delegations in a majority of the provinces and predominantly peasant delegations in most of the others. Instead, there were exclusively peasant delegations in only three provinces and a total proportion of peasants among the plenarily elected deputies of all provinces of only 42 percent.*’? As the discussion of the assembly elections should have made clear, the contradiction is only apparent; homogeneity of outlook does not automat-

ically yield a system of electoral tactics and voting solidarity. On the contrary, the very conditions that permitted the prevalence of shared attitudes among the peasants—of which the absence of widespread political mobilization was an essential characteristic—tended to preclude extensive discipline and coordination among the peasant electors. They came to the provincial capitals strangers, unprepared for any kind of electoral politics.

In most cases there were no persons among them widely known to any significant number of their group before the preliminary meetings, and very

often right up to the time balloting began; and there were no generally familiar party programs or platforms to substitute for the absence of wellknown personalities in the business of identifying candidates. (Another factor tending to retard the identification of agreed-upon candidates was, of course, widespread competition among individual peasant electors for the

honor and the ten-ruble per diem that went with a deputy’s seat; in a number of assemblies all the peasant-curia delegates put their own names on the first ballot.) Confronted with this situation, the peasant delegates often resorted to drawing lots in order to identify candidates and, in at least a few

cases, that method was even used for electing their deputies. Under these circumstances the discipline required for sweeping the elections by the coordination of a potential peasant majority or by holding out for election by plurality on the third day’s balloting was, with very few exceptions, not forthcoming. In most cases the stimulant for organizing the

peasant vote came from without, from organized groups of nonpeasant electors, and it came at a price in the form of deputies’ seats. These groups

were most often associated with the Kadet party. Even the more or less

352 The First National Elections organized groups of rural intelligentsia operating in the peasant curia of some assemblies independently of the Kadets were generally able only to help muster the coordination necessary to form a coalition with the Kadets and to influence the choice of peasant candidates in the direction of the more politically aware and left-oriented among them. The initiative position enjoyed by the Kadet groups vis-a-vis the peasant

delegations stood them in good stead, and probably alone explains much about their ability to take a share of the deputies’ seats for the party’s candidates quite out of proportion to its representation among the electors at large. The peasants’ acceptance of an arrangement that more often than not gave them only about half the deputies’ seats, even though balked at on a number of occasions, also suggests that the concept of proportional

representation—that is, representation based on the number of votes controlled by the respective partners in the alliance—was not a compelling one for them. At the same time peasant behavior in this regard underlines the coalitional character of the arrangement: it was a matter of striking a

deal between two independent partners, not a matter of converting the peasants to the program of the Kadet or any other party. Along with hostility and mistrust, there coexisted an element of deference in the behavior of the peasant electors toward the nonpeasant electors that showed up in these arrangements with the Kadets, but also, and most obviously, in the cases in which the peasants went out of their way

to include a barin in the Duma deputation.?*° Whether this apparently paradoxical situation was due to a rational calculation of the need of an escort into the other culture and the world of officialdom, to an unconscious

inability to imagine a world without leadership, however resented, in the form of a local notable, to a sense of equity, or to some combination of such

elements, it would be impossible to say on the basis of the retrievable evidence. The phenomenon of peasants seeking their leaders—not only for parliamentary delegations but even for mass manifestations and revolts— among the representatives of the order they sought to overthrow in any case is no stranger to European history: “Réflexe fréquent des rebelles rustiques de l’Ancien Régime: les bonnets rouges de Bretagne contraignent des nobles

a se mettre a leur téte, aprés leur avoir, de force, passé des habits de paysans.” (“‘A frequent reflex of the rustic rebels of the Old Regime: the red bonnets of Brittany compel the nobles to become their leaders, after having forced them to don peasant clothing.’’)?7! Count Geiden and his counterparts were not obliged to don peasant smocks, but they do appear to have

been required to demonstrate in some way that they were not mere selfinterested pomeshchiki.**

Results and Prospects For when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number,

troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end. Aristotle

Historically no case exists of a peaceful direct shift from absolute monarchy to an electoral regime, with a government responsible to parliament, and a king who reigned but did not rule... Contemporary modern constitutional monarchies almost invariably developed out of feudal rather than centralized traditional polities. S. P. Huntington

The First Duma In estate terms the first Duma was dominated by peasants and nobles, with 231 and 180 deputies respectively out of a total of just under 500. Better than half the nobles were landowners, although many of these had other occupations as well, and not quite half the peasants were cultivators: there

were just over 100 in each group. Representatives of the intelligentsia professions, mostly deputies from those same estate categories, were present

in about the same number (108). In descending order, men in trade and industry (67), salaried employees (45), workers (25), and clergy (17) constituted most of the remaining deputies. Table 16 gives a composite breakdown of the first Duma members by occupational categories and estates.

Just under 60 percent of the deputies (265 of the 448 respondents to Borodin’s questionnaire) were Great Russians. The next most numerous ethnic-national groups were the Ukrainians, with 13.8 percent (62) of the deputies, and the Poles, with 11.3 percent (51). No other nationalities provided more than 3 percent of the deputies. By confession, 75.6 percent of

the deputies were identified as Russian Orthodox, and 14 percent as Catholics.! In terms of political affiliations, the first Duma was in a constant state of flux from its first day to its dissolution seventy-two days later on July 9 as

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members, and then shrank to just over 100; about 80 percent of the members were of peasant origin, but only some 40 percent were peasant cultivators.° Although there was a considerable variety of political orientations and related differences over such concrete issues as the agrarian and nationalities

questions among the Trudoviki, it was the populist Peasant Union group that took the lead and generally set the tone of the fraction.’ Virtually identical in size to the Trudovik group was the nonparty group, which was not really a disciplined fraction but a kind of political way station. One hundred five deputies, nearly two thirds of them Russian landworking peasants, identified themselves as nonparty for the May question-

naire. Some of them appear to have been sympathetic toward the Kadets and other parties of the opposition but stayed out of the fractions for fear of retaliation from local authorities.2 The remainder were mostly Russian nobles from the landowners’ curia who were generally conservative in their views but apparently did not wish to associate themselves openly in the Duma with the defeated monarchist organizations.”

The next largest formation to take shape in the Duma was the Autonomist group, to which sixty-three deputies without other party affiliations belonged at the time of the May questionnaire; these were predominantly Poles from the Kingdom of Poland and the western provinces.’° The Autonomists soon formed into two distinct groups: the

larger Polish Circle (Koto), consisting of the thirty-four NationalDemocratic deputies from the Kingdom of Poland; and the smaller group of ‘“Nonparty Autonomists,” mostly Poles from the western provinces who

stayed out of the Kolo to avoid accusations of having abandoned the interests of their multinational constituencies for the cause of Polish separatism.

The other western nationalities did not organize separate fractions in the first Duma. With the consolidation of the Polish groups, whose members

numbered together about forty-five, the remaining deputies who had initially identified themselves as Autonomists joined one or another of the large fractions, primarily the Kadets or the Trudoviki; a few remained in the

nonparty group." There were no other groups of comparable size in the first Duma, although an interesting attempt was made there to consolidate a large centrist fraction by bringing together the few Octobrists, right-wing Kadet deputies, and peasants. The upshot of this attempt was the disappearance of a separate Octobrist fraction and the formation of the Peaceful Renewal

358 Results and Prospects group (PR), which eventually grew to twenty-six members, the same number that had entered the Duma as candidates of the Octobrist bloc. It included most of the original Octobrist-bloc deputies, two right-wing Kadets, one member of the Party of Democratic Reforms, and one of the two Trade-Industry party members who had been elected to the Duma. All but one of them were landowners.'* The new fraction was formed on the initiative of the Octobrist deputies Count Geiden and M. M. Stakhovich,

who persuaded their fellow Octobrists in the Duma to abandon the Octobrist label and endorse a more radical program of land reform, which in its essentials differed little from the Kadet program.'* Their proclaimed long-range aim (whence came their justification for dropping the unpopular name and changing the agrarian program) was to create a party based on cooperation between the landowning gentry and the peasants.'* Geiden and his colleagues were hoping to get the Octobrist organization as a whole to adopt these changes, thereby laying the foundations for an eventual center-constitutionalist majority in the Duma that would occupy a position essentially midway between the Octobrists and the Kadets: a party with firmer reform commitments, especially in regard to the agrarian question, than the Octobrists, but less rigid in its opposition to the government than the Kadets. Their démarche led to a crisis in the Octobrist party. Following the Duma’s dismissal and the Vyborg appeal by many of the Kadet and left deputies, which was condemned by Peaceful Renewal, Shipov

emerged from inactivity once again, now to lend his support to Peaceful Renewal and its aim of forming a grand center coalition. He arranged meetings for this purpose in late July between leading Octobrists, the PR leaders, and Kadets (Maklakov and Struve among them) who were critical

of their party’s Vyborg tactic. Shortly after these negotiations came Guchkov’s public expression of support, on August 24, for the government’s introduction of field courts-martial and other new measures of repression introduced following the assassination attempt on the life of the new prime minister, P. A. Stolypin. Geiden and the other PR leaders then resigned from the Union of October 17, as did Shipov, who now entered the PR. The new party elected a temporary central committee in September,

chaired by Geiden, and, following an initial refusal, it was legalized in October. The appearance of Peaceful Renewal was a test of the cohesiveness of

both the Octobrist and Kadet organizations, and both withstood the test without major losses. The Octobrist organization remained by and large with Guchkov, approving his tactic of supporting the government’s actions for the restoration of order without repudiating the union’s constitutionalist commitment in principle. And the Kadet organization survived the crisis caused in its ranks by the Vyborg appeal through the efforts of Miliukov and other centrist leaders who arranged a compromise position for the party

on Vyborg: approving the manifesto condemning the government for

Results and Prospects 359 having dissolved the Duma, but abstaining from implementation of its call for acts of civil disobedience.’° With the arrival of the five Caucasian deputies who had been elected as

candidates of the SD party (Mensheviks), and in keeping with the Menshevik-sponsored resolution taken at the SD congress in late April, a separate Social-Democratic fraction was formed in the first Duma. The

Caucasian SDs were joined by another late-arriving SD deputy from Akmolinsk and by deputies already present, mostly workers from a special workers’ group in the Trudovik fraction. Together they brought the fraction to a total membership of seventeen or eighteen. The three or four successful candidates of the business parties joined after mid-May with another eight or nine deputies in a “‘progressive group,” which Borodin described as the “extreme right” of the Duma.'’ The smallest fraction in the first Duma at the time of its dissolution, with six members, was the Party of Democratic Reforms led by M. M. Kovalevskii and V. D. Kuzmin-Karavaev. In most respects the Democratic Reform fraction operated as an appendage of the

Kadet party in the first Duma. The overall effect of the Kadets’ unexpected success in the elections was

to reenforce substantially their commitment to the tactical resolutions on the Duma that had been adopted at the second party congress in January and, more generally, to heighten the anticipation that the Duma would

become an “organ of struggle’ with the government over the still unresolved issue of whether or not Russia was to be transformed into a proper parliamentary regime. This commitment was made even stronger at

the third party congress, which was held on the eve of the Duma’s convocation. There was much heavier representation at the third congress than in the previous congresses from radically oriented provincial groups, whose delegates appeared flush with victory in the elections, irritated with their conflicts with the local bureaucracy, and little informed about the situation in Petersburg. Feeling was widespread at the congress that the party had ridden to victory on a wave of popular revolutionary sentiment; that the party’s deputies-elect accordingly had the responsibility of repre-

senting not only the party but this general revolutionary mood.'® The prevailing combative mood was further reenforced by the regime’s recent efforts to forestall “‘constituent”’ action by the Duma: the promulgation of

the statutes on the Duma and the State Council on February 20. The government’s floating of a large loan from France in order to withstand

financial pressure from the Duma further reenforced anticipation of confrontation.

There was much indecisive debate at the Kadet congress over programmiatic issues, especially the agrarian question. The constituency of the

congress and the heightened atmosphere in which it was working made consensus on specific programmatic issues even less likely than at the second

360 Results and Prospects congress. In the end, the third congress passed the issues on, in the form of

the recommendations of the several program committees, to the party’s

parliamentary delegation. There may have been cool heads present, especially among the central committee members,’” but the debates on

tactics tended to be over whether to adopt radical or more radical resolutions: the concluding statement of the resolution on Duma tactics proposed by the central committee, which enjoined the Kadet deputies to defend “‘the people’s demands as formulated by the party...even to the point of an open break with the government,” or that introduced by the radical leader of the Viatka party group, I. N. Ovchinnikov, which asserted

that the “progressive majority” of the Duma would uncompromisingly fulfill the people’s will and would turn directly to the people for support if they were to run into obstacles set by the “dying regime, in the form either of the bureaucratic government or the State Council.” After two inconclusive ballotings on these versions, a third gave a majority of 119 to 73 for the central committee’s text.7°

The unanticipated publication of the Fundamental Laws on the penultimate day of the congress only increased the sense of righteous outrage and made conflict seem more likely than before.*’ A special resolution was issued, condemning that act as a violation of the rights of the

people, an attempt to transform the Duma into “‘the handmaiden of the

bureaucratic government,” and ending with the declaration that “no obstacles set up by the government shall restrain the people’s representatives from carrying out the tasks set them by the people.”** “This was already the style of the first Duma,” Miliukov recalled in his memoirs, “‘the conflict had,

in reality, begun before it opened.””° There were differences of opinion in party councils and within the Kadet Duma delegation, but the prevailing view on the eve of the Duma’s convocation was that the party’s chances of winning the struggle for shifting

the center of political power from bureaucracy to parliament were good, that the government would not dare withstand the Duma. Thirty-three years later, Miliukov ruefully recalled the stormy applause that had greeted Kizevetter’s ringing words at the third congress: “If they dissolve the Duma, that will be the government’s last act, after which it will cease to exist.”’**

The party’s tactic for the first Duma, elaborated as usual mainly by Miliukov, endorsed by the central committee, and accepted essentially intact by the third party congress, was to confine the conflict with the regime insofar as possible to the Duma, to keep the struggle for power, as Miliukov characteristically put it, “‘within civilized limits,” and to let the burden of breaking those limits, should things come to that, lie with the government.”°

This tactic required accepting the institutional framework created by the February 20 statutes on the Duma and the State Council. Work could be done within that framework, in the Duma, on the two fundamental popular mandates expressed in the elections and already embodied in the second

Results and Prospects 361 party congress resolutions: revision of the electoral law to universal suffrage, and agrarian reform including expropriation of private land.*® The first order of work in the Duma was to introduce bills on these subjects. The formal resolutions adopted by the third congress added as subjects for early

legislative initiative the issues of civil rights, national rights, political

amnesty, and the abolition of capital punishment. It also called for appointment of a parliamentary committee for investigation of illegal actions committed by government officials since October 17.*” The stance taken by the Kadets in the first Duma was influenced by their need to maintain a coalition with the Trudoviki, whom they by and large recognized as representing the mood of the masses (even if they did not

know how to properly defend the masses’ interests in parliament) and without whose support the Kadets could not have maintained a reliable majority in the Duma.*® In any case, for the Kadets, who for the most part controlled the first Duma’s procedures, as much as for the Trudoviki leaders and the Social Democrats to their left, the first Duma was first and foremost the scene of a struggle with the government for political power; its aim, as Petrunkevich put it, was to “break the power of the bureaucracy.”’ Many of the speeches made by Kadets on the floor of the Duma left nothing in their

stridency and radicalism to those of the most fiery SD and Trudovik leaders.?? The distinction between themselves and the far left on which the

Kadet leaders insisted—that the Kadets were committed to waging the struggle in parliament and generally within the bounds of the Fundamental Laws and that the Duma was “‘more than just a means to them,” whereas the leftists looked on the Duma purely as a means for discrediting the regime and appealing for popular support°??—must have been small comfort to the

government under attack, although some members of it were certainly aware of these differences and had hopes of splitting the Kadets away from

the opposition by coopting them into the government. The atmosphere of conflict led in short order to a state of paralysis in the relations between the Duma and the Goremykin government. Following the emperor’s greeting to the members of the Duma and the State Council, the Duma, on the initiative of the Kadets, produced a reply to the speech from the throne (as they chose to interpret Nicholas’s greeting), in which the general goals of the Duma majority were laid out—both those principal goals that could be advanced by legislative initiative in the Duma and those that would demand exercise of the royal prerogative under the Fundamental Laws.°! The reply, which contained in generally stated terms all the points of the Kadet tactical program, was adopted unanimously by the Duma, with

Count Geiden and ten other moderates absenting themselves from the chambers during the roll call. The emperor refused to receive the Duma delegation selected to present

the reply, and on May 13, Prime Minister Goremykin delivered the government’s answer to the reply, which rejected all its points out of hand,

362 Results and Prospects making no distinction between questions on which the Duma had the right

to prepare legislation and those that required exercise of the royal prerogative. The rejection of the Duma’s agrarian-reform plan, and of its provision for expropriation in particular, was given especially detailed refutation.** The response was taken as an outrage by the Duma majority; the minister’s anticipatory rejection of the measures within the Duma’s competence was declared a violation of the constitution; and a formal vote of nonconfidence and a demand for the government’s resignation was passed by a large majority in the Duma.

At this point relations between the government and the Duma essentially broke down. On the government side, the ministers ceased attending Duma sessions, generally sending their assistants to answer Duma

interpellations (if responding at all), and during the first month of the Duma’s existence they presented no legislation for the Duma’s consideration, with the exception of two bills prepared in the Ministry of Enlightenment concerning the establishment of certain private courses of instruction and funds for construction of a greenhouse and a laundry at Iurev University. Demands for the Duma’s dismissal were being made in the Council of Ministers even before the Duma’s formal adoption of its reply, and the view was widespread there that cooperation with the Duma was out of the question; it would have to be dismissed and the electoral law revised

to produce a Duma not dominated by the opposition. It was decided, however, to await an appropriate occasion: immediate dismissal without sufficient provocation would probably produce repercussions in the country

(reports that the Duma had wide popular support, that great hopes were attached to it, and that the provincial governmental institutions were widely

discredited were coming in from the governors and were being communicated to the tsar by Stolypin and Goremykin).°° The Duma, on its side, proceeded directly to the preparation of its own

legislative bills, principally based on the drafts that the Kadet central committee subcommittees had been at work on since their second congress,

ignoring in the process the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fundamental Laws.°** The first area of substantive legislation begun by the Duma was agrarian reform, with draft bills sent to committee by the Kadets and by the Trudovik fraction. Both, of course, provided for large-scale expropriation of private estates, with the Trudovik plan going considerably further in that regard than that of the Kadets.*° Although it may be an exaggeration to say that the Duma simply ignored the bills of some substance that began to be submitted to it by the ministries in June, it is true that most of them were never put on the agenda, let alone sent to committee, before the Duma’s dissolution, and only one, a bill for supplementary famine relief funds, was approved by the first Duma.°*°

At the same time, the Duma used its right of interpellation very extensively in order to carry on a running inquiry into current administra-

Results and Prospects 363 tive practices, including an inquiry into complicity by government officials in the Belostok pogrom, which occurred while the Duma was in session. Special investigating committees for inquiries in the field were appointed, and a general Duma committee for the investigation of criminal actions by government officials after October 17 was set up at the end of May. In all, there were nearly 400 interpellations introduced in the two months of the

Duma’s existence, and on the few occasions when ministry officials appeared to respond to them, they were often booed and insulted from the

floor and, on at least one occasion, not even allowed to speak.°’ Faced with the hostility of the Duma and yet reluctant to dismiss it, a

number of highly placed persons, including several ministers in the Goremykin government, explored over the second half of June various combinations for altering the composition of the government so as to make coexistence with the Duma possible. One of the combinations proposed, the only one that could have succeeded in significantly altering relations with the Duma, was the creation of a Kadet ministry; that is, a government de

facto responsible to the Duma majority. Although none of the more powerful ministers in the Goremykin government supported this solution, which would have entailed their removal from power, it was given serious consideration in circles near the throne and, apparently, by Nicholas II himself.2° This solution would have been acceptable to the Kadet leaders, several of whom (principally Miliukov and Muromtsev) were approached

by administration figures at the time, and it is clear that some of them, including Miliukov, believed for a time that there was a strong possibility of their being summoned to power.°” rd

It is not clear when the alternative of forming a ministry from the

parliamentary majority was ruled out in government circles by the consolidation against it of the principal ministers and other officials who would have been the first to lose their positions in the event.*° In any case, the campaign for dissolving the Duma and creating a new but entirely “bureaucratic” ministry under his leadership was decisively joined by the energetic minister of internal affairs, P. A. Stolypin, toward the end of June. It appears that Goremykin took the decision to proceed directly to dissolve

the Duma on July 2, and in the next two or three days the plan was elaborated and sanctioned in principle by the tsar. Sometime between July 3 and July 5, the final decision was taken by the tsar to dissolve the Duma on

July 9 and to replace Goremykin by Stolypin, whose decisiveness in the preparations for dissolution had apparently convinced Nicholas that he was the man to take charge under the new political conditions.** The occasion for dismissal presented itself to Stolypin in the “‘Declaration to the People”’ issued by the Duma in response to a public communiqué

of June 20 by the Council of Ministers on the agrarian question. This communiqué, which laid out the government’s alternative to the agrarian reforms proposed by the Duma majority, was apparently made in anticipa-

364 Results and Prospects tion of the impending dissolution of the Duma. According to the advice given the tsar by one of the most persistent advocates of dissolution, State

Comptroller P. K. Shvanebakh, a move against the Duma should be preceded by a proclamation for the peasants, “explaining the complete impracticality of the Duma’s agrarian projects and laying out the ensemble of the government’s measures for meeting the peasants’ needs.”** The aim was to combat the idea that the Duma had been martyred for its defense of peasant interests, and it was executed with rather impressive demagogic skill.4°

In the Duma the government communiqué was generally taken as a threat to the Duma’s legislative authority, and it was soon decided (on the proposal of the moderate Kuzmin-Karavaev) to answer with the Duma’s own public statement on the agrarian question. Following stormy debate a declaration restating the Duma’s agrarian-reform plans, pointing out that the government communiqué did not have the force of law, and calling on the population to wait for solution of the agrarian problem by the Duma was passed by the Kadets alone on July 6: the other fractions to right and left either abstaining or voting against it for their several reasons. As Miliukov remarked in his memoirs, the Kadets were put in the unenviable position of simultaneously taking the step that would serve as the pretext

for the Duma’s dissolution and revealing that they could not in fact command the solid majority on which a Kadet ministry could rely.** In the early hours of Sunday, July 9, the doors of the Tauride Palace were locked, a guard mounted, and the imperial order dissolving the Duma and calling for new elections and convening of a new Duma in seven months

was posted on the doors. Led by the Kadets, about a third of the deputies repaired to Vyborg just across the Finnish border, where they proceeded to sign and publish the next day a manifesto “‘to the citizens of all Russia.” The

Vyborg manifesto described the dissolution of the Duma as a violation of the people’s right of representation,* explained the government’s action as

the result of its wish to stop the Duma from carrying out its reform program, particularly the agrarian reform, and warned that the government would act arbitrarily in the seven months intervening before the summoning of a new Duma, using all means at its disposal to acquire election of a servile

Duma (implied here was an arbitrary revision of the electoral law), and might not reconvene the Duma at all. In its second part the manifesto called

on the people to engage in passive resistance or civil disobedience—by refusing to pay taxes or submit to military recruitment—in order to compel

the government to summon a new Duma promptly.*° The Kadet chronicler of the Vyborg manifesto would later claim that it had accomplished its main aim: the next Duma was called on schedule and was elected under the same suffrage law as the first Duma.*’ But the fact was that neither the dissolution of the Duma nor the Vyborg appeal elicited any significant response among the population. One of the casualties of this

Results and Prospects 365 experience was any illusions entertained in the Kadet leadership about the utility of the party network they had built up around the country for any purpose other than competing in elections. It had in fact become clear to the Kadet leaders very early that the party groups that had sprung up around

the country to take part in the first elections did not constitute a stable network of political communication. As already noted, many of these groups never bothered to respond to central committee inquiries, and the party secretariat’s repeated efforts to collect the minimal dues that were a formal condition of membership were almost entirely unsuccessful: from the beginning the expenses of the central party organs and the capital press were met by contributions from a few wealthy members. And despite the

party leader’s earnest injunctions to local delegates at the third party congress to go on working at building up the party in the postelection period precisely in anticipation of the need to mobilize popular support for the Duma in its struggle with the government, central committee inquiries showed that many party groups had vanished by the second half of 1906. The absence of solid organization was particularly felt in the wake of the Vyborg appeal, when the party leaders tried to mobilize local party groups to effect its implementation: not only the public at large, but the party itself failed to respond to the manifesto.*® During the course of the summer the Kadets retreated from the idea of trying to implement the second part of the Vyborg manifesto and turned toward preparing for the next elections. In his tactical speech to the fourth party congress (September 24-28, 1906) Miliukov relegated the manifesto

to the status of a “historical document.”*”? This marked the end of the party’s uncharacteristic venture into illegal action.

The Elections to the Second Duma The revival of party activity in the second election campaign confirmed that a good deal of Kadet party organization consisted essentially of temporary election-campaign committees. The second elections also prove, however,

that the Kadets’ strong showing in the first elections was not a fluke, not merely the result, as it is usually explained, of the revolutionary parties’ boycott of the first elections, which left the Kadets as the most radical party in the elections amidst a radically minded electorate. To be sure, the Kadets’

strength was considerably diminished in the second Duma, but they remained the largest party in the Duma, and an analysis of the second elections, held in February 1907, shows that reduced representation in the Duma was not the result of a dramatic shift of voter support away from the Kadets to the left parties, which were all now participating in the elections. Although there are difficulties in comparing party-affiliation figures for the two Dumas, Table 20 provides a reasonably accurate picture of the

366 Results and Prospects Table 20 Political Affiliations of Deputies, First and Second Dumas.

Number in Number in Parties First Duma Second Duma Socialists (SD, SR, PSP) Wi Le, Other left (including Trudoviki) 94 98 Kadets (with adherents) 185 108 Progressives (including Peaceful Renewal) 25 35

Polish National Democrats 32 32

Octobrists (with other moderates) 13 31 Extreme right — 72 Nonpartisans 21 Total 478112 474

SouRCE: Adapted from the table in Rech’, 2/15/06. Although the table fails to account for all deputies in either Duma and distorts somewhat the reality of political groupings, it does reflect clearly enough the shift in political orientations. For a more complete picture of party affiliations in the second Duma, see Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo 2-iu Gosudarstvennuiu

Dumu (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 250-251, and Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Ukazatel’ k stenograficheskim otchetam. Vtoroi sozyv. 1907 god. Zasedaniia 1-53 (20 fevralia-2 iiunia 1907 g.) (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 27-33.

general redistribution that took place. The table shows a remarkable swelling of the two extremes of the political spectrum in the Duma. This shift took

place only partially at the expense, so to speak, of the center, and of the Kadets in particular, for the greatest dislocation was out of the nonparty groups. (It should be noted, however, that the figures on the Kadets in the table conceal the fact that the proportion of “‘adherents” in the total was much larger in the second than in the first Duma; the effective drop in Kadet representation was on the order of 40 percent.)°° The data on the political orientation of provincial electors in European Russia demonstrate that by and large the gains of the extreme parties in the

Duma, and of the left in particular, did not take place as a result of the Kadets’ having lost ground numerically among the electors in the provincial

assemblies. As Table 21 shows, Kadet representation among peasant delegates, although remaining modest, was actually larger than it had been in the first two elections. In the landowners’ curia Kadet representation was reduced noticeably (from 11.5 to 8.9 percent), but in the urban curia the

Kadets accounted for considerably more of the electors than in the first elections (this is partly attributable to the highly incomplete character of the

data on the first elections; but even if one compares the data of the two elections in strictly proportional terms, Kadet representation falls by only a fraction of a percent). As a percentage function of total provincial electors accounted for in each election, the Kadets actually increased their strength

slightly: from 14.1 percent to 14.3 percent.

Results and Prospects 367

Elections. :

Table 21 Political Orientations of Electors, First and Second Duma

First Duma Second Duma

Curiae Number Percent Number Percent Peasants (total 2,262) (total 2,258)

Progressives 25:7Jf10.5 561 4.6 24.8 Kadets 84 103 Octobrists1,807 18 0.8 43 1.9 Nonpartisan 79.9 248 11 Right 116 S41 $63 25

Left — — $82 25.8 Landowners (total 1,760) (total 1,726)

Progressives 14.5154 185 10.7 Kadets 202) Be 11.5 8.9

Octobrists 146 8.3 312 18 Nonpartisan 854 48.5 81 4.7 Right 291 16.5 814 47.2

Left — — 82 4.8

City (total 1,115) (total 1,302)

Progressives 158 14.2 283 5 Kadets 437 39.2 $01 38.5

Octobrists 60 5.4 55 4.2 Nonpartisan 350 31 21 1.6

Right 68 6.1 11623.9 8.9 Left —— — 311 Total for all curiae (total 5,137) (total 5,286)

Progressives 12.7758 1,02914.3 19.5 Kadets 72365014.1

Octobrists 224 4.4 410 7.8 Nonpartisan 3,011 58.6 360 6.8

Right 475 a2 1,493 282 Left — — 975 18.4

SOURCE: Figures for the first Duma are from Vestnik PNS, no. 6 (1906): appendix. Figures for the second Duma are from no. 6 (1907): appendix. The totals for the Trade-Industry party have been left out of the first Duma tally, and the “moderate” entry has been left out of the second Duma total statistics. This table was compiled by Bertrand Patenaude.

368 Results and Prospects The most striking thing about the figures on the political orientation of the provincial electors is the rise of the extreme right in both the peasants’

and the landowners’ curiae, and of the left as well in the former, accompanied by the virtual disappearance of nonparty electors among the landowners and their truly astonishing attrition, from nearly 80 percent to 11 percent, among peasant electors. This phenomenon was obviously a reflection of the continuing political mobilization in the country. Among the landowners’ electors the dramatic shift rightward may have been in some measure attributable to the decline in the number among them of peasant

smallholders’ delegates brought about by the Senate “clarification” of October 7, 1906,°! but it appears mainly to have reflected increased mobilization and consolidation rightward in the political orientation of large landowners in response to the experience of the first Duma, whose public confrontation with the government over the issue of forced expropri-

ation of noble estate-lands was closely watched in gentry circles. In the absence of special research on the subject, one can only speculate about the meaning of the attrition of the nonparty group in the tabulations on peasant electors. It seems doubtful that it reflected extensive mobilization among the peasantry at large. The especially marked increase of peasant electors on the far left was probably related to the more or less aggressive activity for the first time in the provincial assemblies of representatives of the parties of the populist and Marxist left.°” The essential difference, then, in the provincial elections to the second

Duma lay not in the strength of the Kadets in the provincial assemblies (although there were a few assemblies with considerable changes in this regard),°°> but in the much higher degree of political mobilization and polarization now obtaining among the other electors. This is not to say that there was no attrition in the popular vote for the Kadets. That there was attrition is clear from an examination of the returns in the urban curia, which had been and remained the main source of Kadet strength. And here the attrition was mainly to the benefit of the socialist parties, as was made particularly clear in the cities with special elections, where the correspondence between the popular vote and the party affiliation of the Duma deputies elected was closest. This time Kadets were elected in only nine instead of nineteen of these special elections in European Russia, and took fifteen instead of twenty-six deputies there.°* As nearly as can be

judged, about 58 percent of the electors chosen in these elections were Kadets, as compared to 83 percent in the first elections; the remainder were split almost evenly between electors to the left of the Kadets and those to their right.>° Where the Kadets ran alone in the second elections—in about half the

urban elections, apparently—they generally collected about as many popular votes as the parties to their left and right combined. Of 307,733

Results and Prospects 369 popular votes accounted for in sixteen towns (including the capitals), the Kadets took 138,039, or about 45 percent. Where left, right, and center all ran separate candidates, the Octobrists did nearly as well, in the ensemble, as the socialist parties in collecting popular votes, and together with the extreme right generally attracted more popular votes than did the parties to the left of the Kadets.°®

The Kadets emerged victorious once again in both capitals, now running alone, and although their recorded popular vote was lower than in 1906 (more noticeably so, as might have been expected, in Petersburg than in Moscow), the Kadets showed altogether impressive strength, considering that their vote was now much more nearly a truly partisan one than in the bloc voting of 1906. In Petersburg the number of votes cast in 1906 for the Kadet bloc in the twelve precincts had been 39,657; in 1907 it was 28,698. A precinct-by-precinct count shows that in most cases the number of votes lost by the Kadets was quite close to the number of votes taken by the left

bloc (SDs, SRs, PSP, and Trudoviki; in all, the left bloc took about 25 percent of the popular vote).°” In Moscow, attrition of the Kadet popular vote was on the order of 10 percent (from about 65 percent to 55 percent); correspondingly, the left bloc there took about 13 percent of the vote. (The vote to the right of the Kadets was about one third the total in Moscow; about 20 percent in Petersburg.)°®

In view of the more competitive atmosphere prevailing in the provincial

assemblies in the second elections, it is not surprising that there were considerably fewer Kadets in the deputations sent to the second Duma from

those provincial assemblies where they had earlier either dominated the

elections or shared the deputies’ seats with predominantly nonparty peasants.” In the first case, this result suggests that in those provinces where there was already a high level of mobilized opposition in the first elections, and the right was weak, the end of the boycott by the socialist parties gave vent to the expression of political sympathies that had been blocked in the

first elections. The supporters of the left in these provinces made their weight felt. In the second case, the results were more complex. In Viatka the left bloc took all the seats, and Kadet weight was seriously undercut by the left in Samara and Ekaterinoslav provinces, although what they essentially

meant in several of these provinces was that the formerly nonpartisan peasant partners in the coalition had in the meantime acquired leftist political labels. And in two such provinces—Poltava and Smolensk—what appears to have happened is that the nonpeasant Kadets were displaced by nonpeasant deputies politically to their right.°° There were some dramatic changes in the assemblies that had sent up politically mixed delegations to the first Duma, but the Kadets held their own in this group (the Kadets now sent twenty-four deputies to the Duma,

370 Results and Prospects as compared to the twenty-five they had sent to the first Duma). Losses were

mainly to the right, through the landowners’ curia, but the dissipation of Kadet strength by the left in the urban curia was also a significant factor. Kadet attrition was proportionally greatest in the West, except for the Baltic provinces, where the returns remained virtually identical to those in 1906.°! The number of Kadet-bloc deputies from the western provinces (the

Baltic excluded) fell from twenty-five to five. With the exception of the contribution of the Kiev assembly—which, as could have been expected

from the strength of the left and the generally high level of political mobilization obtaining already at the time of the first elections, produced a predominantly left-oriented and almost exclusively peasant delegation to the second Duma—the Kadet losses in the West were mostly to the right. They were displaced by Polish National Democrats in the Vitebsk elections;

by Octobrists and Monarchists in Minsk; by one Monarchist and two “progressives” in Grodno; and by Monarchists in Mogilev. With the

exception of one or two “progressives,” these were landowners or professional men, mostly Russian, elected together with peasants who were

also mostly on the right according to the press reports.°* Moderate or conservative landowners and peasants now predominated where liberal Jewish-urban, Polish-landowner, and nonparty peasant coalitions had earlier been victorious: in Minsk the Jewish-Polish coalition was replaced by

one of “Russian” landowners and peasants, the groups that had demonstrated against them in the first elections; in Mogilev the Jewish-Polishpeasant bloc which had been dominated by peasants was replaced by a conservative landowner-peasant coalition in which the landowners predominated; essentially the same pattern prevailed in Vitebsk; and in Grodno

the Jewish-peasant delegation was replaced by one of “‘Russians”’ and peasants. Only in Kovno in the Northwest did the Jewish-peasant bloc

apparently survive, electing three peasant adherents of the ‘JewishLithuanian party” and two Jewish lawyers—both Kadets—to the Duma. The Vilno elections were dominated by the Polish National Democrats. Conservative mobilization of landowners was a major factor in the second elections especially in those western borderland areas where Russian landowners must have felt particularly vulnerable to threats to their status

but still were able to carry heavy weight in the provincial assemblies. In several provinces the independent consolidation of the Polish vote behind the National Democrats also contributed to the breakdown of the Kadet bloc. The National Democrats were more conservative than the Kadets in

social policy, and in particular objected to the opposition’s plans for expropriation of estate lands. The elections to the second Duma demonstrated that the Constitutional

Democrats could attract a considerable vote in their own right in competition with the socialist left, particularly among the urban population.

This urban support came not only from professional and intelligentsia

Results and Prospects 371 elements but extended fairly deeply into the ranks of salaried employees, shopkeepers, and the like: the “‘petty bourgeoisie.”” Much of this support, of course (as party leaders were the first to recognize), did not extend beyond

the ballot box,®? but it proved to be remarkably stable.° From the perspective of the second elections it can be seen that the Kadets’ strength in the first Duma, which was quite out of proportion to

their popular support or even their representation in the provincial assemblies, was the product of a particular historical moment, two of the most salient features of which were the relatively low degree of political mobilization still obtaining among the electorate, especially the peasantry, and of the structure of the electoral system. The importance of the electoral system may be judged by the fact that the Kadets still did extremely well in the second elections. Would they have done as well had the first elections been held on the basis of universal, direct suffrage, as the Kadets and all parties to their left wish 7? Ironically, the answer is almost certainly not. It is not easy to imagine how elections by universal, direct suffrage would have functioned at that time, given the state of literacy and communications prevailing in the

country, and specifically in the absence of a system for the preliminary identification of a limited number of candidates by generally known political labels, but, because of these very conditions, it is extremely unlikely

that any single party could have taken more than a small minority of the

Duma seats. It is more likely that the Duma would have been quite variegated politically, with a considerable number of deputies being associated with the local cadre or patronage parties that had sprung up in profusion before the first elections.©

Implications of the First Two Elections for Later Political Developments Without entering into a detailed discussion of the coup d’état of June 3, 1907, it can be seen how the character of the first two elections contributed

to that momentous event in the history of the Russian state and were reflected in it. The circumstances of the Kadets’ remarkable success in the elections explain a great deal about their behavior in the first two Dumas, the subject of much mutual recrimination between former party members after 1917 which has been carried over into the historical literature. More generally speaking, these circumstances explain much about the conflict between the Duma and the government that issued in the coup d’état of June 3. The Kadets’ dependence on peasant support reinforced the populist sentiments that ran deep in party circles, and with them their commitment to a program

372 Results and Prospects of radical land reform that could not be accommodated to the government’s

emerging plan for conservative agrarian reform, based on dissolution of communal tenure and encouragement of small private farming, which was introduced as interim legislation in November 1906. In the background lay the paramount issues of the nature of the new order and the distribution of power in it; but in the foreground, as the most important substantive issue at stake in the conflict that led to the ‘“‘Third of June System,” lay the agrarian question.°° By the same token, the Kadets found their most reliable support in the Dumas, particularly in the second Duma, among the national minority groups. Some of them, like the large Polish delegation, were not enthusiastic

about the Kadet agrarian program but supported it because of the party’s nationalities program. In this way the agrarian and nationalities questions were inseparably intertwined in the first two Dumas. It was hardly accidental that the two groups whose representation was most drastically undercut by the revision of the electoral law of June 3, 1907, were precisely the peasants and the Poles (along with diverse other national minorities).°” June 3 marked the real end of the “Revolution of 1905.” With the waning of the mass movement, agents of the imperial bureaucracy led by Stolypin were gearing up for sweeping reforms (most of them elaborated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs even before 1905). The

regime was moving into a pattern of response to threats to its power and stability that had been repeated several times over in the nearly two hundred years of the empire’s existence; the situation bore particular similarities to the period of great reforms that followed the Russian defeat in the Crimean

War sixty years earlier. The Duma, whose plans for agrarian and _ political-administrative reforms were far more radical than the government’s, stood in the way; therefore the Duma, as a broadly representative assembly, was removed. This act was at once a dramatic reassertion of the government’s authority and an admission that the reforming bureaucracy’s plans were incompatible with more or less democratic public representation. The two main aims of the electoral law promulgated on June 3, 1907, were to increase the weight of the propertied strata, especially the large landowners, and to increase representation of the “‘Russian element”: the new Duma, declared Stolypin’s manifesto of June 3, would become “Russian in spirit.”©? The most important feature of the new electoral law was its radical redistribution of the weight of the curiae in the provincial assemblies. As Table 22 shows, the landowners’ curia, now largely purged of peasant smallholders (the Senate clarification of October 7, 1906, was enlarged upon in several ways, making it impossible for any member of a peasant village community to vote in that curia), was greatly increased in weight. Now the landowners would enjoy

an absolute majority in twenty-seven of European Russia’s fifty-one provinces, half the vote in four others, and a plurality closely approaching half almost everywhere else.

Results and Prospects 373 Table 22 Distribution of Electors by Curiae in European Russia According

to the Laws of December 11, 1905, and June 3, 1907 (in percentages).

Curiae 1905 1907

Landowners S27 49.6?

Peasants 42.3 ZAz7 Urban 225 26.2

Workers 235 2.3

Source: N. I. Lazarevskii, ed., Zakonodatel’nye akty perekhodnogo vremeni 1904— 1906gg., 2d. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 366-402; Samuel N. Harper, The New Electoral Law for the Russian Duma (Chicago, 1908).

a. For the empire as a whole, the landowners’ electors slightly exceeded half (50.4 percent).

The additional weight of the landowners came primarily at the expense of peasant representation, which was halved in the aggregate. The peasant curia no longer enjoyed a majority or plurality in any provincial assembly. Aside from the arithmetic adjustment of the curiae, other restrictions were placed on the peasant curia, beginning with the incorporation of the Senate clarification restricting voting to actual heads of peasant households and

ending with the removal of the peasants’ earlier exclusive privilege of electing a separate deputy in each provincial assembly: now seats were also

set aside for landowners and urban electors in virtually all the provinces, and for a variety of other categories in a few, with the result that 194 of the 442 deputies’ seats were predetermined so far as curia was concerned; and all were to be elected by the provincial assemblies at large. This scheme meant that in most provinces the large landowners could greatly influence, if

not dictate, the identity of the peasant-curia deputy.’° Although the aggregate weight of urban representation in the provincial

assemblies was not reduced (it was in fact very slightly increased), the character of that representation was significantly affected by the new law. In the first place, the privilege of separate representation was removed from all

but seven cities of the empire: Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Riga, Kiev, Warsaw, and Lodz. Second, the urban electorate was subdivided into two curiae, with a very small part of the electorate, possessors of sizable business

enterprises or other urban property, grouped into a first urban curia with more than half of the electors allotted to it; and the remainder, the vast majority of the urban electorate, in the second.”! Finally, the law drastically curtailed representation for Russia’s borderlands: the total number of deputies from the borderlands was halved, while

separate representation for the Orothodox population in these areas was markedly increased. The overall decrease in the statutory number of Duma

deputies from 524 to 442 came almost entirely at the expense of the borderlands.’”2

374 Results and Prospects In general, the results of the third elections must have been encouraging

to the government, especially since the illegal promulgation of the new electoral law produced no untoward public reaction. Although there are as usual no firm figures on the political orientations of the Duma deputies, it is clear that the opposition had been more than halved, from more than two thirds to less than one third. S. N. Harper gave the following figures (the labels are his):7°

Extreme rightists 76

Rightists 40 Octobrists 155

Progressivists 32 Constitutional Democrats 46 Leftists (including the

national groups) 35

Extreme leftists and

socialists 28

And A. Ia. Avrekh used the following figures in his work:”

Rights 50

Moderate right and , National group a7.

Octobrists and adherents 154

Progressives 28 Kadets 54 Muslim group 8 Polish Kolo 18

Trudoviki 13 Social Democrats 20 As can be seen, the familiar party groups (with the exception of the Russian

National group) are still there,”> but in radically changed proportions. It appeared that Stolypin had found the kind of representative system he

needed in order to proceed with his reforms:’° one that would not only desist from open confrontation with the government but would provide support for his program against its numerous opponents in the bureaucracy,

at court, and in noble circles.’” As in Prussia in 1849, it appeared that monarchy and aristocracy had combined successfully to defeat the democratic revolution. History, however, is full of paradoxes and unintended consequences. By the commencement of the Duma’s third session, some fifteen months after its initial convocation, Stolypin’s Octobrist-led majority was beginning to disintegrate and it had become clear that all his ministry’s major reform

plans, with the exception of the agrarian legislation, were confronting powerful resistance.’*> Eventually—during the fourth Duma session in

Results and Prospects 375 November 1913—the Octobrist fraction would collapse entirely, splitting into three separate groups;’” and well before his death at an assassin’s hand in the Kiev Opera House on September 1, 1911, Stolypin had been forced to

abandon virtually all the main elements of his reform plans except the agrarian legislation.®°

With regard to the system of representation, the “Third of June System,” as it came to be called, was in the first place a wager on the provincial nobility; it involved a wager on the strong yeoman peasant only as a matter of political futures. This short-term gamble on the nobility was

linked to a long-term strategy based to a considerable extent on the conclusion that the role of the nobility in local affairs had already declined and would continue to do so, necessitating the cultivation of new bases of support in rural Russia.®! The nobility, in effect, was being asked to use its

newly acquired voice in affairs at the center in order to assist in the emasculation of its established status and authority in the provinces. Therein lay the basis for the conflict between Stolypin and the noble organizations and the main social dimension of the struggle that ensued over the implementation of the bureaucratic reform program.®* Although there is little direct evidence that would demonstrate a decisive role for the groups representing conversative noble interests in the defeat of Stolypin’s local-reform plans, their actions undoubtedly tended to reenforce opposition to his policies in the imperial bureaucracy and at court. At the very least, it is clear that Stolypin failed to find among the noble landowners whose voting power he had so generously increased the kind of support he needed for success. One of the most ominous developments for the fortunes of Russian constitutionalism in the period after June 3 was the rapid disintegration of

the extraparliamentry organizations of the two major constitutionalist parties, the Kadets and the Octobrists. The atrophy of the Kadet party network cannot be measured precisely, but it is clearly reflected in the records of its central committee. By 1908 party leaders were talking of having to start the entire process of party building over again, beginning with the old network of zemstvo acquaintances.®* A central-committee survey in early 1908 revealed that Kadet committees were still active in only eight provinces and had completely disbanded in all but twelve others; and

theses adopted at a party conference in November 1909 explicitly recognized “‘the isolation of the party from the population.” With the collapse of the party network in the country came a reduction in the activities of the party’s central organs: in 1910 the Petersburg and Moscow branches of the Kadet central committee met only five times each, and not a single plenary session was held.** The failure of the Kadets to build a strong organization left them ill-prepared to engage in the politics of mass mobilization in 1917.

What was responsible for this failure? To some extent it can be explained by the success, in the heyday of the first campaign period, of the

376 Results and Prospects party’s ouverture a gauche, which brought into the party an unstable, radical-intelligentsia element that would leave the party as other political

alternatives presented themselves and the prospects of parliamentary politics diminished. Many local party committees had been set up in those early days by intelligentsia groups that were considerably to the left of the

central party leadership. There was also erosion on the right among the

zemstvo gentry who had come into the party on the wave of gentry opposition that broke even as the party was being set up. These disaffections were in the long run perhaps less important than the political culture shared by the professional and zemstvo men who continued to sympathize with the political ideas of the Kadet party. Until 1905 the politics they had known

had been the occasional politics of the zemstvos, which were in some respects more like gentlemen’s clubs than public bodies. Politics as a profession was unknown to them, especially the kind of politics that involved agitation among the masses and confrontation with the rabblerousers of the revolutionary left, who had taken every opportunity to use the public meetings arranged by the Kadets in the first election campaign to

denounce the Kadets in the most vociferous terms as the party of the bourgeoisie and the gentry masters. This spectacle had probably been more than enough exposure to the politics of the street for many Kadets, although there were those, even in the party leadership, who did not shun the street, and from time to time through the war years and into 1917, appeals were

heard in party councils to turn to the politics of mass agitation, in full awareness of the programmatic implications of such a démarche in a rapidly

polarizing society. But these appeals did not prevail.®° For all their aspirations to create a mass party the Kadets remained, in many respects, a cadre party.

Attrition in Octobrist ranks, like the developing crisis in the party’s Duma fraction, was closely linked to the “‘left-Octobrist’’ leadership’s support for Stolypin’s reform program, especially that part of it that would have ended gentry predominance in the zemstvos and in local administration generally. This policy led to widespread tension between the rank-andfile Octobrist “membership” and the party leadership, and to widespread

defection, either rightward or out of national politics altogether. To the extent that Stolypin’s “‘system”’ depended on cooperation with an Octobrist

majority in the Duma, which in turn depended on the gentry vote, the undermining of that majority led to the demise of the system; it also led to

the collapse of Guchkov’s ‘‘zemstvo strategy” for building a strong moderate-constitutionalist party.*° The Russian political scene before World War I did not bode well for

Russian political evolution along the lines of either West European or Central European models. The movement to shift the center of political power from Crown and bureaucracy to parliament that was mounted in the

years between 1904 and 1907 had failed, and its instruments, the con-

Results and Prospects 377 stitutionalist parties, were subjected to rapid attrition in succeeding years. In

its turn, the conservative reformism of the Stolypin ministry proved incapable of building a firm foundation of support and acceptance in the new legislative institutions, in the government bureaucracy, or at court.®” When the monarchy collapsed in 1917, conditions in the country were far less propitious for either of these alternatives than during the days of their prewar ascendancy. In Russian politics the ‘“‘cercle fatal,” cited in the epigraph to this book from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, had by that time been drawn extremely tight. In historical perspective, the coup d’ état of June 3 appears to have put paid to the Kadet strategy of continuing the political struggle but containing

it within the bounds of the representative institutions, and thereby to a reasonable chance of attaining a peaceful transition from autocracy to constitutional democracy. The Kadets were caught in a veritable dilemma after the dissolution of the first Duma: in order to “preserve the Duma,”’ the

Kadets would probably have had to repudiate their own program, particularly their agrarian program.®® From the perspective of the outcome of the Revolution of 1917, Kadet politics seem to have been ambivalent, if not quixotic. Given the intransigence of the regime on the one side and the

Kadets’ isolation from the masses on the other, why did they not either break off with the regime altogether so as to be in a position to gain real popular support, or else allow themselves to be coopted by the regime and become responsible conservatives working for change?®? The answer to this question lies in the very nature of the party, an organization created to weld together the two fairly distinct tendencies in Russian obshchestvo that Miliukov had identified in his opening speech to the first party congress with the two halves of the new party’s name: the “constitutionalists”’ and the ‘“‘democrats.”’ In the rather awkward English of

his American lectures, Miliukov had predicted before the party’s creation that “‘the possibility of a peaceful outcome for the Russian political unrest depends entirely upon the circumstance whether or not it will be possible for this political group to influence the government without becoming untrue to the public opinion which is the only source of its power.””° Miliukov was

raising here the central question of whether united pressure from civil society alone was capable of compelling the regime to submit to substantial political reforms. Most of the Kadet leaders did indeed “‘fear the masses,’’ an accusation regularly leveled at them by their more radical contemporaries, by Soviet

historiography as a whole, and by a considerable number of Western historians. The point would seem to be not to contest that issue but to understand the perceptions that lay behind the Kadets’ position. These perceptions are implicit in the words of Miliukov just quoted: he and his colleagues understood that the prospects for a constitutionalist solution to the crisis of the old order in Russia were not great. Given the weakness of

378 Results and Prospects the institutional and cultural underpinnings for a constitutional order, the small size of civil society, the maximalist aspirations of the peasantry and a considerable part of the working class, and the existence of a developed revolutionary movement prepared to encourage those aspirations—given, in short, the backwardness of Russian society and the lateness of the old regime’s crisis—they feared that a revolutionary mass movement, once

under way, would be unlikely to lead to a moderate constitutionalist solution to the political crisis. Subsequent history shows that this was not an unreasonable perception.

The Kadet strategy amounted to finessing political reform ‘from above” by bringing pressure to bear on the regime from obshchestvo, short of revolutionary violence. Reform would lead to an order in which people like themselves (and some of the Kadet leaders had quite specific ideas in this regard) would be invested with political authority. Its legitimacy would be grounded in both the popular vote and the tradition of the monarchy. Although the Kadets subscribed to the principle of universal, direct suffrage, they did not do so out of a belief in the “political wisdom of the masses.” For them, political wisdom lay with the educated, Westernized elite, the “bourgeois intelligentsia” to which they belonged. Was the Kadet strategy realistic? It was for a time, in the sense that the kind of order they sought seemed a reasonable possibility. Serious informal

negotiations were carried on between the government and the constitutionalist opposition throughout the period extending from October 17, 1905, through the duration of the first two Dumas.”? If during that time

both sides had been somewhat more willing to compromise, a modus vivendi might have been found. It cannot be denied, however, that there were deep-seated structural impediments to compromise on both sides: on

the side of the government were the tsar’s well-known convictions, ingrained bureaucratic mistrust of public participation in governance, interministerial and interpersonal rivalries, and partially institutionalized pressure from conservative aristocratic groups; and on the side of the Kadets were the political experience and perceptions of the party’s leaders,

the basic strategy shaped by them, and the character of the party’s membership and support. With the reassertion of the regime’s intransigence in 1907, the liberals were left to face the fundamental dilemma arising from the incompatibility of their moderate solutions with mass mobilization. In the years following 1907 their strategy became increasingly unrealistic, as the government steadfastly held to its virtual monopoly on political authority and as the ongoing polarization of political attitudes characteristic of these years steadily undermined the Kadets’ claim to speak even for “public opinion” as

a whole. Increasingly bitter controversy over tactics within the party leadership ensued. By 1913 it appeared to Miliukov, at least, that the party might at last split up, and after a brief respite at the beginning of the war the

Results and Prospects 379 intraparty controversy continued and deepened over the question of the party’s proper stance vis-a-vis the regime in wartime. And yet the party, or at least the established party leadership, held

together, through the conciliatory efforts of the center group led by Miliukov, the chief broker of party unity from start to finish. Indeed, from his point of view and that of his closest collaborators, such as Kokoshkin, Vinaver, and Nabokov, the necessity of maintaining party unity grew as the prospect of establishing a mass following receded from view, for they still hoped to receive power from above. Their hopes were actually increased toward the end by the anticipation that the war would expose weaknesses

and needs to the regime that would compel it to call in the Kadet ministériables.??

When they at last succeeded to ministerial posts in the provisional government in February 1917, they were not granted real power by the tsar (despite Miliukov’s earnest efforts to obtain the element of legitimacy that continuity would have given the new government) but were handed a vague semblance of power by the Petrograd Soviet. Neither the political circumstances of the country in February 1917 nor the party’s own condition and

traditions boded well for its emerging as a major political force in the Russian Revolution.”*

Blank page

Abbreviations Appendix

A Note on Literature and Sources Notes Index

Abbreviations GIM Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei (State Historical Museum), Moscow

MV ‘““Materialy Vitte po vyboram v pervuiu gosudarstvennuiu dumu” (Witte materials on the elections to the first state Duma), ROPB, f. 1072, vols. 1-15 ORLB Otdel rukopisei Leninskoi Biblioteki (Manuscript division of the Lenin Library), Moscow ROPB Rukopisnyi otdel Publichnoi Biblioteki im. Saltykova-Shchedrina (Manuscript division of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library), Leningrad TsGAOR Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, vysshikh organov gosudarstvennoi vlasti i gosudarstvennogo upravleniia SSSR (Central state archive of the October Revolution, the higher organs of state authority and state administration of the USSR), Moscow TsGIA Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Central state historical archive), Leningrad

E Fond (Archival collection)

d. Delo or edinitsa khraneniia (Basic unit within archival collection) op. Opis’ (Inventory reference to archival unit)

ch. chast’ (Part of archival unit) Norte: All place references to archival material have been given in terms of the conventional English “p.” (page), to avoid confusion between the Russian abbreviation for “Sheet” (“1.”) and the number “1.”

APPENDIX

Party Alignments of Zemstvo Activists in 1905 and 1906 The following congresses of zemstvo and town duma representatives took place:

(1) November 6-9, 1904 (2) April 24-25, 1905

(3) May 24-25, 1905 . (4) July 6—8, 1905 (5) September 12—15, 1905 (6) November 6—13, 1905

These are keyed 1-6 in the table below, under the column “Congresses attended.” The positions of the officials who attended the congresses, indicated in the adjacent column, are keyed as follows: c.d.b. = chairman, district zemstvo board c.p.d. = chairman, provincial zemstvo board d.b. = member, district zemstvo board d.d. = district zemstvo deputy d.m. = district marshal of nobility o.b. = member of the organizing bureau for the congresses p.b. = member, provincial zemstvo board p.d. = provincial zemstvo deputy t.d. = town duma deputy

In a few cases these positions are attributed to persons who no longer occupied the offices at the time they attended the congress(es).

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