The elections to the Fourth Duma were held in the summer of 1912. To begin with the Mensheviks enjoyed many advantages. Apart from their many well-heeled sympathisers, they had obtained a subsidy from the German SPD and put out a daily legal paper, Luch (Sunbeam), demagogically appealing for ‘unity’, for ‘non-factional’ candidates, etc. This got a certain echo among non-party elements. For their part, the bourgeois-liberal Cadets, fearing with some reason defeat at the polls, resorted to deceit in order to get more votes. Their organ Rech’ (Speech) proclaimed on 3 February: “One should not give one’s vote to a party, or to individual candidates, but either for the strengthening of the constitutional layer in Russian society, or against it.” That was an appeal to the electorate to vote for the ‘progressive forces’ against ‘reaction’, the well-known siren song of opportunists in every period, which tries to blackmail the masses with the threat of reaction to vote for ‘the lesser evil’. Lenin fought against this deceit and for class independence and revolutionary policies. Conditions in Russia were still tough. The police made a series of arrests before the elections. The RSDLP’s electoral platform was illegally distributed in all the factories. From exile in Kraków Lenin impatiently followed the party’s election campaign. Watching for the slightest signs of opportunism on the part of the Bolshevik leadership, he remained implacably opposed to the idea of a non-party ‘progressive bloc’.
As Badayev, a Bolshevik candidate in the elections, writes:
The Bolshevik headquarters for the campaign were the editorial offices of Pravda, which became the scene of hard and continuous work. On these premises, meetings were held with the representatives of the districts and of the individual factories and mills. Simultaneously illegal election meetings were organised in the city districts.
Owing to the fact that incessant watch was kept by the police on every ‘suspicious’ worker, we had to resort to all sorts of subterfuges in order to gather together even in small groups. Usually, in order to avoid the attentions of the police, small meetings of not more than ten to twenty people were called. Summer helped us. Under the guise of picnic-parties, groups of workers went to the suburbs, mostly into the forest beyond the Okhta. The forest was the best refuge from police spies, who would not venture beyond the outskirts, for it was easy to escape from them there, and they were afraid of being attacked in some out-of-the-way spot.
At the meetings vehement arguments arose with the Liquidators. Our party called on the workers to enter the elections on the basic unabridged demands and to elect Bolsheviks only as delegates. The Liquidators talked continually about ‘unity’, the necessity of a united front, the necessity of abandoning factional disputes and, of course, of electing their candidates. (A.Y. Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, p. 207.)
And Badayev explains what the attitude of the Bolsheviks was towards the demand for ‘the unity of all progressive forces’:
The Bolsheviks thought it necessary to put up candidates in all workers’ curiae and would not tolerate any agreements with other parties and groups, including the Menshevik-Liquidators.
They also considered it necessary to put up candidates in the so-called ‘second curiae of city electors’ (the first curiae consisted of large property owners and democratic candidates had no chance there at all) and in the elections in the villages, because of the great agitational value of the campaign. But in order to safeguard against the possible victory of reactionary candidates, the Bolsheviks permitted agreements respectively with the bourgeois democrats (Trudoviks, etc.) against the Liberals, and with the Liberals against the government parties during the second ballot for the election of electors in the city curiae. The five big towns (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga, Odessa, and Kiev) had a direct system of elections with second ballot. In these towns the Social Democrats put up independent lists of candidates, and as there was no danger of Black Hundred candidates being elected no agreements were entered into with the Liberal bourgeoisie. The resolutions of the Prague party conference, which established these tactics, emphasised that “election agreements must not involve the adoption of a platform, nor must the agreements bind the Social Democratic candidates by any political obligations whatsoever, or prevent the Social Democracy from resolutely criticising the counter-revolutionary nature of the Liberals and the half-heartedness and inconsistency of the bourgeois democrats”. Hence, the agreements entered into by the Bolsheviks in the second ballots were not in the nature of a bloc of political parties. (Ibid., pp. 24-5.)
On the face of it, there would have been a case for uniting with other forces for the sake of getting a bigger parliamentary representation. The electoral law was, of course, heavily weighted against the working class. Under the rigged tsarist electoral system, the voting was indirect. The workers voted for representatives who, in turn, elected 160 ‘electors’ (vyborshechiki), of which the Social Democrats made up 60 per cent. Together with ‘conciliators’ and diverse sympathisers, this figure would have been something like 83 per cent. The majority of the ‘electors’ from working class areas were Bolsheviks. But in the other curiae, the middle class, bourgeois and landlords predominated. Badayev explains:
The electoral law, passed by the government prior to the elections to the First Duma, was so drafted as to secure a majority for the bourgeoisie and the landlords. The voting was not direct but by a system of stages. Various classes of the population (the landlords, the big property-owners in the towns, the peasants, working men, etc.) had first to elect electors, who in turn elected the deputies from among themselves. For the peasants and working men the system was still more complicated; the workers, for example, first elected delegates, who in their turn elected electors, and only the latter took part in the Gubernia electoral colleges, which elected the deputies. In addition there were a number of property qualifications – for instance in the towns only householders (tenants of apartments) were entitled to vote. (Ibid., p. 22.)
Despite all the difficulties, the workers elected 3,500 representatives in all Russia. Of these, the Social Democrats had 54 per cent but if we include sympathisers, their total share was as much as 80 per cent. This was an outstanding triumph for the Bolsheviks, in difficult conditions, which, more than elections, resembled an obstacle race. Under election laws small workshops of less than 50 workers, which were usually more backward and under the thumb of the bosses, had one representative. But the big factories, which tended to be more militant and pro-Bolshevik, had only one representative for every 1,000 workers. In St. Petersburg, out of a total of 82 representatives, there were 26 Bolsheviks, 15 Mensheviks, and 41 non-party RSDLP sympathisers. The police replied with a series of arrests of workers’ representatives. In some factories where Bolsheviks were elected, the employers demanded reruns.
On 20 October, the Petersburg regional congress of electors elected a Bolshevik M.P., A.Y. Badayev, whose book Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, quoted above, is still the best work on this subject. FN Samoilov was elected in Vladimir, N.R. Shagov in Kostroma, M.N. Muranov in Kharkov, G.I. Petrovsky in Yekaterinoslav, and RV Malinovsky, the agent provocateur, in Moscow. Overall, the Social Democrats presented candidates in 53 towns and won in 32. The Mensheviks got seven of their candidates elected: three in the Caucasus, their traditional stronghold, and one each from the Don, Irkutsk, Tavrichesky, and Ufimsk. Only three were workers. This result marked an amazing triumph for the Bolsheviks, particularly if we bear in mind the fact that their party had only just been established as such and there had been very little time to prepare for the elections. It was a big boost for the organisation.