7. The Duma and the Wager on the Strong

In early May 1906 as he jettisoned Witte for the second and last time, Nicholas II provided his interpretation of the October Manifesto by issuing a new version of Russia’s Fundamental Laws. The document was a tremendous disappointment to most liberals and even to many moderates. The czar, while giving significant ground where he had no choice, dug in his heels wherever he could. He made his attitude unmistakably clear by retaining the old formula, “To the Emperor of All the Russias belongs supreme autocratic power.” Only the words “and unlimited” had been cut from the old wording, a minor change that provided little comfort to those who hoped Russia would become a genuine constitutional monarchy.

The czar in fact retained the great majority of his traditional powers: He still appointed all ministers, kept complete control over foreign policy and the military part of the budget, and could veto any legislation. He would appoint half the members of the upper house of parliament. The lower house, the Duma, would be elected under a weighted system that favored the propertied and conservative classes. The czar could also dismiss the Duma and call for new elections at any time and, under article 87, could issue emergency laws while the Duma was not in session, although those laws required the Duma’s approval to remain in force.

Still, Russia had made progress. The Duma did have real legislative powers, which it proceeded to use. During its 11-year history – there were four elections during that period – it included representatives from archreactionaries on the right to liberals and moderates in the center to revolutionaries – SRs, Mensheviks, and even Bolsheviks – on the left. Between 1906 and the start of World War I in 1914, the Duma enacted important legislation that, among other things, improved the condition of the peasantry, expanded primary and secondary education, and provided the factory working class with minimal protections.

The Duma did not make Russia a constitutional monarchy comparable to Great Britain, but its existence belied the claim in the Fundamental Laws that Nicholas II was still a “supreme autocrat.”

Nor was Russia’s progress limited to political change. Industrial growth, while less than what was achieved under Witte, continued at an impressive rate, and by the outbreak of World War I Russia ranked as the world’s fi fth-largest industrial power in terms of overall output. The most dramatic changes were in agriculture, where government policy took a new direction in mid-1906 under Prime Minister Peter Stolypin.

Stolypin called his policy the “wager on the strong,” by which he meant those peasants capable of achieving prosperity if given the chance. The “wager” was that if millions of peasants were freed from the restrictions imposed by their communes and other anachronistic limits left over from the emancipation, they would succeed and become property owners with something to lose. They would then turn into conservative supporters of the established order, much like peasants in western Europe tended to be. Freed from the inherent inefficiencies of communal ownership, they would also become far more productive and enrich Russia as they prospered. Stolypin’s program released peasants from obligatory membership in their communes, allowed them to claim their communal allotments as private property, and, finally, permitted them to consolidate their scattered strips of land into a single plot.

When his program began in 1906, Stolypin said Russia needed 20 years of peace to transform the countryside. Indeed, after only 10 years the results were visible and impressive. By 1916, about half of all peasant households had left their communes and owned their land privately, and about 10 percent had consolidated their holdings into a single plot. But by then Stolypin’s program and everything else in Russia was under a dark cloud. One problem was that Stolypin, the guiding force behind the “wager on the strong,” was dead, the victim in 1911 of a revolutionary assassin’s bullet. Even worse, Russia was no longer at peace. Since 1914 the empire had been a belligerent in World War I, and it was beginning to buckle under a strain that even the most advanced European powers were finding hard to bear.