April 27, 1906. Emperor Nicholas II speaks to the First State Duma
assembled at the Winter Palace's St. George Hall
Sources: webpage and Lunapic
1. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE DUMA 1 AND THE TASKS OF THE PROLETARIAT.
Cast a general glance at the main stages of the great Russian revolution and you will see how the people through experience, step by step, approached the slogan of a Constituent Assembly.
First we have the period of "confidence" at the end of 1904. The liberals are in raptures. They occupy the entire foreground. Some not very steadfast Social-Democrats even speak of the two main forces of the moment: the liberals and the government. But the people become imbued with the idea of "confidence." On Old Style January 9, 1905, the people "confidently" went to the Winter Palace. The period of "confidence" brings to the front a third force, the proletariat, and lays the basis for the people's utter lack of confidence in the autocratic government. The period of "confidence" ends with the people refusing to believe the government's talk about "confidence."
The next stage. The Bulygin Duma is promised [imperial ukase of Old Style February 18, 1905]. Confidence is reaffirmed by action. Representatives of the people are convened. The liberals are in raptures and call for participation in the elections. Liberal professors, as befits these "ideological" lackeys of the bourgeoisie, call upon students to go on with their studies and not meddle with revolution [Prince Trubetskoi]. Some not very steadfast Social-Democrats succumb to the arguments of the liberals. The people appear on the scene. The proletariat sweeps away the Bulygin Duma with the October 1905 strike and seizes liberty, gaining the Manifesto of Old Style October 17th which is quite constitutional in form and content. The people learn by experience that it is not enough to obtain a promise of liberty, one must also have the strength to seize liberty.
Next. The government annuls the liberties in December. The proletariat rises. The first uprising is defeated. But the stubborn and desperate armed fighting in the streets of Moscow makes summoning the Duma unavoidable. The boycott organized by the proletariat fails. The proletariat proves too weak to overthrow the Witte Duma. Cadets fill its benches.2 The representative assembly of the people is an accomplished fact. The Cadets are in raptures. There is no limit to their cries of delight. The proletariat waits sceptically.
The Duma begins to work. The people use the slight extension of liberties ten times more than the Cadets. The Cadet Duma is found at once to be lagging behind the people in spirit and determination. May and June 1906 is a time of greatest success for parties to the Left of the Cadets: Trudoviks 3 outstrip the Cadets in the Duma; the Cadets are censured for their timidity at public meetings; the Social-Democrat and Socialist-Revolutionary press gains ground; the revolutionary peasant movement grows; there is unrest in the Army; the proletariat, exhausted by the events of December 1905, recovers. The term of the first Duma becomes a term of revolutionary ferment. This outcome compels the government to dissolve the Duma. Experience proves that the Cadets are mere "froth." Their strength derives from the strength of the revolution.4
Sergey Muromtsev (1850-1910) was a lawyer and the chairman of the First Duma. After Tsar Nicholas II dissolved it Muromtsev appealed to its members to continue their work in Finland. This act of rebellion cost him several months in jail and a lifetime ban from electoral contests. His funeral on October 7, 1910, was accompanied by a public protest.
Fedor Rodichev (1854-1933) was a defence attorney, noble landowner and Zemstvo president. He went to exile in Switzerland in 1901 and lived there until 1904. He got elected to all four State Dumas. After Uritsky's murder (1918) he was arrested but soon set free. He fled south in the autumn of 1918. In 1920 he returned to Switzerland and died in Lausanne.
Pavel Milyukov (1859-1943) was a historian. On November 14, 1916, he delivered a powerful speech at the Fourth State Duma charging the government with either stupidity or treason in the conduct of the war. His charges ignited revolutionary sentiment that soon surpassed him. He moved to South Russia in November 1917 and emigrated to Paris in April 1921.
Vasily Maklakov (1869-1957) was a trial lawyer and freemason. An admirer of Leo Tolstoy, he defended prosecuted Tolstoyans. He also defended Menahem Mendel Beilis in 1913, a Jew accused of murdering an Orthodox child. The Provisional Government appointed him Ambassador to France just before the October Revolution. Maklakov died in Baden (Switzerland).
Andrei Shingarev (1869-1918) was a physician and freemason. On November 28, 1917, he was jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress by the Bolsheviks. On January 19, 1918, he and a fellow Cadet were transferred to the Mariinskaya Hospital after falling seriously ill. Both were brutally murdered by Baltic sailors the following night.
Peter Struve (1870-1944) was a philosopher and historian. He edited several "legal Marxist" magazines and wrote the 1898 Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He endured internal exile like Lenin. In October 1905 Struve returned from France and co-founded the Cadets. He fled south immediately after the October Revolution and became Wrangel's Foreign Minister in early 1920. With Wrangel's defeat Struve fled to Paris where he died.
3 The Trudoviks (from trud, “labour”) were a group of petty-bourgeois peasant deputies and Narodnik-minded intellectuals who created the Trudovik Group of the First State Duma. They demanded full democracy in Zemstvos and town councils, and universal suffrage for future elections to the Duma. Lenin pointed out that a typical Trudovik is a peasant "not averse to compromise with the monarchy, to settling down quietly on his own plot of land under the bourgeois system; but presently his main efforts are concentrated on the fight against landlords for the land, on the fight against the feudal state for democracy" (Vol. 11, p. 229). The Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats (Chapter 4, Item 2). Bolshevik tactics were to arrive at timely agreements with them in order to form a united front against the Cadets. In 1917 the Trudoviks merged with the Popular Socialist Party and backed the bourgeois Provisional Government. After the October Revolution the Trudoviks sided with the bourgeois counter-revolution.
4 Captious arguments throughout. Lenin cunningly presents himself as a detached observer of the events unfolding in Russia who attributes the undercover initiative of revolutionaries like himself to a wilful struggle of the people. Even as he and others keep stirring the pot Lenin claims the stew is swirling on its own.
2. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE WITTE DUMA.
Finland: The strikes become worrisome. Skirmishes between strikers and police left many workers dead and forty detained.
Poland: Strikers loot shops; several policemen were killed.
Paris: The French government has approved the concession of the Legion of Honour Cross to Dreyfus.
Russia: The agrarian situation worsens; the peasantry commits outrages.
St. Petersburg: The Czar has endorsed the proposal to allot 15,000,000 rubles to relieve the peasants in those provinces where scarcity reigns.
Tokyo: The Russian cruiser Novik, sunk during the Russo-Japanese War, has been refloated.
Paris: The ceremony marking the official return of Dreyfus to the French Army was performed with great solemnity on July 22.
St. Petersburg: The government banned the publication of Socialist newspapers. On July 22 the government published the Imperial ukase dissolving the Duma and convoking a new one for March 5, 1907.
Kronstadt: The conspiracy against the Czar is huge; the soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt have vowed to bombard and burn Peterhof Palace. The dissolution of the Duma has ignited tremendous unease; extremely grave incidents are feared. Several regiments arrived in the capital to protect banks and offices. A state of war has been proclaimed across the Empire. Many families are abandoning St. Petersburgh. The Czar convened the Council of Ministers. Stolypin the Interior Minister replaces Goremykin as Council President. The ukase affirms that the Duma obstructs governmental work and foments turmoil in the countryside.
St. Petersburg: A solemn reunion of Duma deputies accused the Czar of hypocrisy and vowed to stir the provinces to revolt; they also drew up a manifesto addressed to the people. The planned visit of the Czar to the Spanish cruiser Extremadura moored at Krondstat was cancelled for fear of an attempt on the life of the Czar by soldiers and sailors at the base.
Russia: Five armed men assaulted a train and got away with 25,000 rubles.
Finland: The remaining deputies of the dissolved Duma arrived today. The prestige of the Cadets has decreased considerably.
The Russian Revolutionary Committee sentenced the Czar to death yesterday for having dissolved the Duma.
Odessa: The revolutionaries perpetrated a thousand outrages taking advantage of the few troops stationed in the city. Police arrested more than eighty rabble-rousers.
St. Petersburg: A spirit of rebellion propagates in the Russian Army; regiment commanders misdoubt the loyalty of their subordinates. Stolypin is working to put together a liberal unity government. Several new strikes have started in factories.
The country is quieter than expected. The Czar will prosecute the members of the dissolved Duma assembled in Finland.
Odessa: The rabble vents its fury against the Jews, stabbing them; troops look on; it is believed that the garrison will join the revolutionary tide. Police seized 4,500 copies of Rech the Cadets' organ.
Warsaw: A passenger train carrying two Russian generals, a military escort and 16,000 rubles was stormed; the generals and their escort were murdered. The prestige of the Cadets has diminished considerably. Looting and robberies spread as the police looks on.
Jews are banned from Russian military academies henceforth.
Tiflis: The revolutionaries engage in pillage, looting, and set whole towns ablaze.
3. THE EVENTS OF THE DAY.
On the whole we consider that the intensification of guerrilla warfare in Russia after the dissolution of the Duma is a gain. A ruthless guerrilla war of extermination against the government's perpetrators of violence appears to us to be timely and expedient.1
4. LESSONS OF THE MOSCOW UPRISING.
Long ago the Social-Democratic press pointed out that a ruthless extermination of civil and military chiefs was our duty during an uprising.
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