The military catastrophe stirred the liberals out of their state of inertia. Under growing pressure, the Tsar finally agreed to recall the Duma on 19 July, 1915. Here was an opportunity to seize the reins of power from the shaky grasp of the ruling clique without a revolution! The regime was riven with splits. The Progressive Bloc was formed in the late summer, when Russia was already in the throes of a deep crisis. It ranged all the way from the moderate Nationalists and Octobrists to the Cadets and had a clear majority in the Duma – 241 votes of a total of 407. “Since 1915 we patriots had almost become Cadets because the Cadets had almost become patriots,” this was how Sulgin, a Nationalist deputy, put it. In the more conservative-minded upper house, the state council, it only had 89 votes out of a total of 196. “Only a strong, firm and active authority can lead the fatherland to victory,” declared the bloc’s first manifesto.
The Mensheviks and Trudoviks – though formally outside the bloc – supported the bourgeois liberals. Once again, Chkheidze tried to frighten the bourgeoisie into taking power with the threat of the masses. For its part, the autocracy, which had originally given some concessions to the bourgeois (reshuffling certain ministers and changing a few generals) then moved away again. But all this ‘palace politics’ with its constant game of parliamentary musical chairs was by now quite irrelevant. It is interesting to note that, while all this was going on, against the will of the bourgeoisie, the Tsar had secretly entered into contact with Berlin with the aim of concluding a separate peace with Germany. This was no accident. The situation was getting serious: crisis and splits at the top; military defeats at the front; strikes and demonstrations and bourgeois opposition at home. Even the thick-headed Nicholas could now feel the ground shake under his feet. The Tsar had no intention of ‘sharing power’ with the bourgeois liberals, who were by this time toying with the idea of a palace coup to put Nicholas’ brother Mikhail on the throne. But this plan, like all the other schemes of the liberals, came to nothing.
The bourgeoisie, while striving for a place in the sun and bristling at the rule of a corrupt and incompetent autocracy, nevertheless lived in fear of revolution and constantly looked over its shoulder at the ‘dark masses’. Lionel Kochan quotes the comments of the director of the Police Department that the strike outbreak had acted “in a chilling manner” on the tactics of the Cadets. Fully aware of the impotence of the liberals, the government treated them with undisguised and well-merited contempt. Sazonov (Minister of Foreign Affairs) contemptuously told his fellow ministers that if the Cadets were offered some crumbs they would be the first to come to an agreement with the government. “Milyukov is the greatest bourgeois of all and fears a social revolution more than anything else,” he continued. “Yes, and the majority of the Cadets are trembling for their investments.” If only Sazonov had trembled for his investments…
“Shulgin defined the bloc’s aim in purely static terms – as an attempt ‘to calm the masses’.”
The Cadets’ dilemma – to see the need for action, yet to fear to act – was graphically illuminated in VA Maklakov’s famous article A Tragic Situation. He compared Russia to an automobile entrusted to a chauffeur, so incapable that he is taking the vehicle to inevitable disaster. Those in the vehicle who are able to drive dare not interfere – not for one second must the car be left without a driver or else it will fly into the abyss. The chauffeur knows this and that is why he can make merry over the alarm and impotence of his passengers.
The bloc, therefore, petrified by fear lest it inadvertently admit the masses to its private quarrel with the Tsar, spent its time in discussion that did not lead to action. Like so many Oblomovs, it discussed, negatively and positively, the growing despair in the country, the fear of revolution, the need for another 11 March, the railway crisis, the fuel crisis… In retrospect, Milyukov identified the autumn of 1915 as “the precise moment” when the revolution became inevitable. (L. Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p. 184, p. 185 and p. 186.)
The proposal of a parliamentary government responsible to the Duma was put forward by the left-wing Cadets and Kerensky. This was supported by the Mensheviks, but Milyukov, the Cadet leader and principal architect of the Bloc, would not hear of it. The Cadets bent over backwards to make their proposals acceptable to the Tsar. But all this moderation was in vain. The Tsarina and the Rasputin clique had far more influence over Nicholas than the ‘moderates’ could ever aspire to. “‘Show your fist,’ the tsarina had urged her weak-willed husband. ‘You are the Autocrat and they dare not forget it’.” (O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 276.) Nicholas responded accordingly. On 3 September the Tsar ordered the dissolution of the Duma until November and began dismissing ministers he thought insufficiently trustworthy. At the beginning of October, the acting Minister of the Interior, Shcherbatov, was replaced by the reactionary Alexei N. Khvostov. Kerensky wrote bitterly:
The Tsar’s co-ruler, the Tsarina, was thus giving notice to the entire nation that there was to be no more vacillation in the defence of the time-honoured principles of Russian autocracy. All hopes of an agreement with the Crown were crushed – that much the leaders of the Progressive Bloc now realised. What were they to do? (A. Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, p. 142.)
What could they do? The only way to remove the regime was by mobilising the masses for a direct onslaught. But the very thought filled these gentlemen with terror. The workers responded to the dissolution of the Duma with a protest general strike. But the slogan was not ‘Convene the Duma’, but ‘Down with the government!’ The strike was to have continued for three days, but when General Frolov issued an order for the strikers to be brought before field court-martials, and so on, the Petersburg Committee resolved to strike for one more day to demonstrate that the workers were not ending the strike on the general’s orders. The Liquidators were against this and their supporters returned to work; the Bolshevik workers returned to work one day later, as had been decided. Altogether, 150,000 went on strike in Petersburg, 25,000 in Nizhny Novgorod (where they struck for only one day); there were big strikes in Moscow, Kharkov, and Yekaterinoslav. “After these strikes,” reported Sotsial Demokrat, “the liberals went on a concerted ‘pacification’ drive, but the workers were not about to be pacified at all. The repression carried out against them, the incredible rise of inflation, and so on, heightened the revolutionary mood.” (Quoted in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International)
This strike served notice that the proletariat had recovered from the earlier setbacks and was on the move again. Such a prospect filled the liberals with dread. Far better to knuckle under to the autocracy than have another 1905! The fear of the masses ensured that the liberals’ response to the arbitrary action of the Tsar would be non-existent. Prince Lvov was elected to lead a delegation to plead with the Tsar to “place the heavy burden of power upon the shoulders of men made strong by the nation’s confidence”. But Nicholas refused to receive them. They were summoned instead to the Ministry of the Interior where they were told that their “intrusion into state politics” had been presumptuous.
The dissolution of the Duma cruelly exposed the liberals’ impotence. Power lay firmly in the hands of the Romanov-Rasputin regime. The liberals were becoming desperate.
“I am afraid”, one Cadet leader told his colleagues in the autumn of 1916, “that the policy of the government will lead to a situation in which the Duma will be powerless to do anything for the pacification of the masses”.
On 1 November, when the Duma reassembled, even the moderate Milyukov finally understood that time was running out for the policy of cooperation with the government. In his opening speech to the Duma, he launched an attack on the government’s abuses of power, one after another, and asking the question: “Is this folly or treason?” Of course, Milyukov had no intention of stirring up revolution – merely to frighten the autocracy into making concessions in order to save itself. But in the charged atmosphere of the times, his words had an altogether different effect – much to its author’s discomfort. Since the law prohibited its publication, the speech was copied and distributed by illegal means. The workers made use of its contents to denounce the autocracy, its ministers and all its works.
“My speech acquired the reputation of a storm-signal for the revolution,” a bemused Milyukov later recalled. “Such was not my intention. But the prevailing mood in the country served as a megaphone for my words”. (O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 285 and p. 287.)