The 1905 Revolution in reality had lasted for two and a half years. But by the summer of 1907, the last flickering embers of revolt were extinguished. Deprived of a leadership in the towns, the peasant revolt inevitably resolved itself into a series of uncoordinated and aimless uprisings which could be put down one by one. With every reverse of the mass movement, the self-confidence of the regime was reinforced. Finally, on 3 June, convinced of the impotence of the Cadets and the waning of the peasant movement, Stolypin decided to dismiss the second Duma and arrest the Social Democratic fraction. Immediately after the Fifth Congress finished, Stolypin challenged the Duma by demanding the expulsion of the 55 Social Democratic deputies, and the arrest of 16 of them. On the night of 2 June, without waiting for the Duma’s response, he proceeded to carry out the arrests. The next day the Duma itself was suspended. A new electoral law was drafted that was even worse than the previous one. When it finally convened, the Third Duma was the parliament of open reaction. Even Count Witte admitted in his memoirs that:
The new electoral law excluded from the Duma the voice of the people, i.e., the voice of the masses and their representatives, and gave a voice only to the powerful and the obedient.
Kerensky, who was a Trudovik deputy in the Third Duma, comments:
The electoral law of June, 1907, practically eliminated the participation of peasants and workers from the towns and villages. In the provinces the elections were virtually handed over to the moribund gentry, and in the larger towns the right of quasi-universal suffrage was also suppressed; the number of deputies was cut down, and half the seats were assigned under a curial system to an insignificant minority of the property-owning bourgeoisie. Representation of the non-Russian nationalities was reduced. Poland, for example, was allowed to send only 18 deputies to the Third Duma (and the fourth), as opposed to the 53 representatives sent to the first and second Dumas, and the Muslim population of Turkestan was excluded entirely.
The people’s representatives elected under Stolypin’s law were rightly called Russia’s ‘distorting mirror’. The left-wing parties making up the majority in the first and second Dumas practically vanished in the Third Duma of 1907-12, which, moreover, contained only 13 members of the Labour Group (Trudoviks) and 20 Social Democrats. The Social Revolutionaries boycotted the elections. The Cadets, the party of the liberal intellectuals, had dropped from their dominant position to the role of ‘His Majesty’s loyal opposition’, with 54 seats.
Out of 442 members of parliament, the reactionary parties (the Black Hundreds, Octobrists, and Cadets) had 409. The working class had only 19 deputies (Social Democrats) and the Trudoviks, only 14. A vastly different situation to that of the second Duma. Yet, as Lenin pointed out, this reactionary Duma at least had the merit of expressing the real situation in the country. Here was the real face of the Black Hundred autocracy, without its liberal mask.
Fifty seats were taken by the reactionary Union of the Russian People, which was subsidised from special funds available to the secret police and was patronised by the Tsar and Grand Duke Nicholas. These deputies, under the guidance of three very able men – Markov, Purishkevich, and Zamyslovsky – tried to sabotage the Duma from within by incessantly causing trouble. Along with these, 89 seats were given to a completely new party called the Nationalists. They were returned by and large from the western and south-western provinces, which had been torn by feuding between the Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Jewish sections of the population as far back as could be remembered. The gap between the Cadets and the right wing was filled by the 153 Octobrist deputies, of whom there had hardly been any at all in the first two Dumas. They thus comprised slightly more than a third of the total membership of the Duma. (A. Kerensky, Memoirs, pp. 101-2.)
The leading figure in this Duma was the Octobrist Guchkov, a big Moscow industrialist whose party represented the reactionary big bourgeoisie and landowners, but deemed it expedient to distance themselves from the ruling clique:
Guchkov, Khomyakov, Shidlovsky, and the other leaders of the Octobrist Party knew full well the danger to the country of the morbid atmosphere surrounding the Tsar. Well aware that they could not rely on the weak-willed Tsar, they firmly rejected all of Stolypin’s tempting invitations to join the government. They preferred to keep watch on the activity of the official government by applying the statutory rights of the Duma Budget Commission, to support it in the struggle against the irresponsible and powerful influence of the Rasputin clique in court circles, and to try to improve the country’s military and economic position through regular legislation. (A. Kerensky, Memoirs, p. 104.)
The Cadets effectively played the role of second fiddle to the Octobrists in the Third Duma. In turn, Guchkov leaned over backwards to support Stolypin against the court reactionaries, as the lesser evil. For their part, the Mensheviks looked towards the Cadets, also as the lesser evil. However, Stolypin was really the firmest supporter of the autocracy. His reforms were intended to preserve the rule of the Romanovs, while crushing the revolution underfoot. In this way, the ‘lesser evil’ becomes imperceptibly transformed into the greatest evil for the revolutionary cause. Guchkov, the representative of Russian big business, expressed his fervent loyalty to the autocracy by wholeheartedly embracing the cause of imperialism and militarism at a time when the international scene was already darkened by the clouds of impending war. The Duma vied with the government to show who was more patriotic. On 9 June, 1908, speaking in a debate on the army estimates, Guchkov spoke of “our buried military glory”. As a result of this cringing and fawning, the Third Duma was permitted to live out its full term of five years, until the election of the Fourth Duma in 1912.
Paradoxically, Stolypin’s position in the new Duma was no better than before. Playing the role of Bonapartist, manoeuvring between the different classes and parties, he had no firm point of support. Not a single party in the Duma backed him consistently. The strengthening of the right wing weakened him because the conservatives and the court clique hated him as a dangerous radical. The Tsar, not noted either for political acumen or personal gratitude, became increasingly distant from his faithful minister. Although he had concentrated great power in his hands, Stolypin’s life was constantly in danger, and he knew it. He wore a bulletproof vest and was always surrounded by bodyguards, but that did not save him. On the night of 1 September, 1911, Stolypin turned up for a special gala performance of Rimski Korsakov’s opera Tsar Saltan, in Kiev, which the Tsar also attended. During an interval, a young man in evening dress walked up to him and shot him twice. Theatrical to the end, Stolypin made the sign of the cross over Nicholas before collapsing. He died four days later. His last public utterance was “I am happy to die for the Tsar”, which was ironical since, by this time, Nicholas could not stand the sight of him. The student who did the deed was a Social Revolutionary turned police informer called Bogrov. He was executed without delay, and kept incommunicado beforehand, so no questions could be asked. Many people suspected that the assassination was the work of the secret police in cahoots with the court clique who hated Stolypin. This is most probable. The deepening crisis of society reflected itself in splits and clique struggles at the top. In a setup like the tsarist-Rasputin regime, political intrigue and assassination were inseparable travelling companions.
During this period, the fortunes of the revolutionary movement seemed to reach their nadir. Once again, the Party was reduced to difficult and dangerous underground work. Waves of arrests decimated the Party organisations. In the summer of 1907, all the Social Democratic Duma deputies were arrested. The workers were indignant, but by this time had not the strength to react. The reaction flexed its muscles and felt its own strength. For three long years, in 1908-10, it rained blows on the defeated labour movement. “The incessant mass arrests led to the destruction of one Party branch after another, until the Party practically ceased to exist,” writes the Menshevik Eva Broido. “The trade unions, too, suffered havoc; hundreds of their branches were dissolved and the formation of new ones was made extremely difficult.” (E. Broido, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 136.)
As the most militant wing of the RSDLP, the Bolsheviks suffered proportionately greater losses. Their organisations in Petersburg suffered no fewer than 15 mass arrests of leaders in this period. Its leading committee was arrested six times. In Moscow, the area committee was arrested 11 times. The same situation prevailed everywhere. Each time the committees were reorganised, but in ever smaller numbers, and with less experienced people. However, there was at least one advantage. Most of those who stepped into the breach were workers. For the first time the Party committees were genuinely proletarian in composition. These worker cadres kept the illegal Party alive in conditions of extreme adversity. By contrast, many of the intellectuals became demoralised and fell away.
In 1908 Lenin noted in a letter to Gorky:
The significance of the intellectuals in our Party is declining; news comes from all sides that the intelligentsia is fleeing the Party. And a good riddance to these scoundrels. The Party is purging itself from petty-bourgeois dross. The workers are having a bigger say in things. The role of the worker-professionals is increasing. All this is wonderful. (LCW, Letter to Maxim Gorky, 7 February, 1908, vol. 34, p. 379.)
It would appear that Gorky was upset by Lenin’s comments, since in a subsequent letter he hastened to reassure him:
I think that some of the questions you raise about our differences of opinion are a sheer misunderstanding. Never, of course, have I thought of ‘chasing away the intelligentsia’, as the silly syndicalists do, or of denying its necessity for the workers’ movement. There can be no divergence between us on any of these questions. (LCW, To Maxim Gorky, 13 February, 1908, ibid., p. 385.)
Under these conditions, a process of selection was inevitable: unstable intellectuals left in droves, succumbing to the prevailing mood of reaction. By late 1907, the Petersburg Party had only about 3,000 members, not all active. Many of the best leaders were in jail or exile, their place taken by second-line leaders like Stalin, who began to make a name for himself at this time as an organiser. Stalin’s rapid advance to a leading position can easily be explained by the fact that, with the extreme shortage of capable people from Russia, Lenin eagerly pounced on any newcomer who seemed promising. Stalin had a certain flair for organisation, but no more than many other Bolshevik committeemen. Indeed, Stalin was a typical committee-man: tough, practical, and capable of displaying energy under certain conditions, but narrow in outlook. Stalin’s whole political career showed that, without Lenin’s guiding hand, he was devoid of any real political understanding, let alone theoretical depth. This is shown by the fact that Stalin continued to organise expropriations when the revolutionary wave had long ebbed and the counter-revolution was in full swing. Such tactics could have done serious damage to the Party if Lenin had not put a stop to them in time.
The new conditions demonstrated the necessity for combining illegal work with all manner of legal and semi-legal work. Only in this way was the Party able to maintain links with the masses. The forces at its disposal had been seriously depleted. By late 1908, about 900 Party members were abroad. But these numbers do not tell the whole story. Revolution, as Trotsky pointed out, is a mighty devourer of human energy. Many of the most experienced cadres were languishing in tsarist prisons or Siberian exile. Many of those that remained were traumatised, disoriented, mentally and physically exhausted. Cases of suicide were not uncommon, especially among the youth, who believed that the defeat signified the final liquidation of the revolution. Under such circumstances moods of pessimism and despair can quickly find an expression in all manner of ways, from open apostasy and desertion to various forms of political deviation – to the left as well as to the right. Frustration leads to moods of impatience and the search for panaceas and short cuts. This can express itself either in opportunist adaptation to the existing conditions or ultra-left adventures. Such phenomena, apparently extreme opposites, are in fact head and tail of the same coin.
At this time, Lenin found himself in a particularly difficult position. While the Party remained formally united, in practice the two factions functioned independently, a fact that was sharply revealed by the opposing policies pursued by the different factions on the Central Committee. The Menshevik members (Zhordania and Ramishvili) did not conduct underground work, since their entire strategy was to liquidate the underground Party and confine their activities to what was permitted by the tsarist authorities. The work of maintaining the illegal Party organisation inside Russia thus depended on the Bolsheviks on the CC (Dubrovinsky, Goldenberg, Nogin). But the latter were conciliators who by no means agreed with Lenin’s demand for an implacable struggle against the Menshevik CC members.
Under the circumstances, the formation of an organised tendency within the united Party was inevitable. The Bolshevik factional centre was established in 1907. There was nothing in the party rules to stop the publication of factional newspapers, so Lenin decided to go ahead. Despite all difficulties, the Bolshevik ‘centre’ managed to produce its own paper, Proletary (1906-9). Lenin edited the paper, which, among other collaborators, included Maxim Gorky, who also played an important role in raising funds. In the traditions of old Iskra, Proletary maintained correspondence with party organisations in the interior. Because of the problems of illegality, many other titles appeared in order to confuse the censor. There was the Sotsial-Demokrat, and a number of local party papers. At first, Lenin tried to set up an underground headquarters in Finland where the movement for national independence made it more difficult for the Russian authorities to re-establish complete control, but the arm of the Okhrana was long and the Bolshevik leader only narrowly escaped arrest. Once again Lenin had to make plans for exile.