The Socialist Revolutionaries’ leader, Victor Chernov, expressed before a 1908 party conference that another full-scale revolution was a certainty. When one considers this statement, it is more useful not to look at the potential revolutionaries since it is almost certainly the case that they would have continued the fight against Tsarism regardless of other factors, but to look at the power base to be overcome. In this case Nicholas II and the existing constitution. The Third of June electoral rule in 1907 committed rural nobility to the government. As Hans Rogger has pointed out, this was hardly the best environment building a broad-based democratic system or labour movement. This consolidated the Tsar’s power significantly and warned the Mensheviks and SRs that the preconditions for a proletariat revolt did not yet exist. But it also had another effect, pushing the Bolsheviks further towards the Marxist doctrine of the proletariat, heartening Lenin and showing him that the peasantry were a cause to be worked at rather than be reconciled with, and so the embryonic red/white divide emerged. By 1910, the Social Democratic Party saw a declining membership. In 1907 the membership was 150,000, by 1910 it had been reduced to 10,000. The Duma was quickly becoming an organisation that was controlled by the moderates and tsarist Kadets. It is from this point that one may ask how, by 1917, the Duma had been so weak as to render it almost incapable of curtailing a rather latent rise of opinion and political manoeuvre by the Bolsheviks? Part of the reason is that the Dumas were riddled with dysfunction.
The Duma, with its new (limited) constitutional power granted by the Tsar realised its need to safeguard the gains of October. By 1909, the more conservative liberals (Nationalists and Moderate Rightists) had overtaken the more moderate liberals (Kadets and Progressives) as the mediators between state and people. This fundamental disagreement between the left and right ‘whites’ posed a problem to the stability of socialist opposition. The Fundamental Laws guaranteed in October as citizen rights and a basis for constitutional reform at a pan-social level, were already being arbitrarily violated by landowners and businessmen who saw these violations as “regrettable but necessary to stop the revolution”. The leftists, led Miliukov, recognised by 1908 that constitutional reform had not gone deep enough and needed to move Octoberism further towards a guarantee of stability. By 1909, the Octobrists, advocating far-reaching reform and a commitment to representative government, had broken free of the rightists, which had formed themselves into a party called the Russian Nationalists. This had the consequence of bringing Stolypin to rely on these as upholders of agrarian noble privilege. This is important when one considers that if Stolypin had continued to work with the Octobrists, and not insisted on the passing of the unconstitutional Western Zemstvo Bill in violation of the Fundamental Laws, that the centrist claims for a representational democracy could have soon been realised if the Tsar could have been pressured to abdicate. Stolypin’s course of action, however, sealed the polarisation of the liberal forces in the Duma. By the time the Fourth Duma was elected, it held a restricted franchise and was dominated by men of property and privilege. This left the opposition floundering and fractious. Industrial strife exploded after February 1912 as living costs rose exponentially faster than wages. By 1914, the political and economic situation looked menacing.
Was this inevitable? It is quite obvious that the spread of Marxist ideology through the early 1900s was becoming stronger and swifter. Recurring poor harvests and a quickly growing, but poorly funded and under fed, urban sector stood testament to this. To this extent, the action of Stolypin to promote the growth of a ‘kulak’ class in the rural areas was the only hope that the Tsar had for his survival. Equally, the passing of the Fundamental Laws were necessary to balance the October Manifesto’s creation of a political voice, which was, in turn, the only reasonable solution to quelling anti-tsarist trends. In essence, the political situation had to be linked to the peasantry in order for the conservative liberal forces in the government to dominate. This tied the food producing class, and therefore economy, to the Duma, creating a new class of super-peasant. These peasants inevitably acted as quasi-businessmen, withholding much produce from the urban areas, exacerbating urban, and therefore Marxist tensions. In effect, the growth of Marxism was inevitable. Yet this does not explain whether the revolution was necessary, surely the growing Marxist forces could be contained by mediation and compromise whilst maintaining a liberal consensus in the Duma. Here two factors come into play which have an important bearing on the events of 1917:
Firstly, the Fundamental Laws were necessary to keep the absolute sovereignty of the Tsar. The association of the Tsar with a divine providence meant that the Duma was bound to act in the Tsar’s best interests, and therefore the leaders of the Duma were chosen by the Tsar himself; guaranteeing control from the centre. Without the Laws, the Romanovs would quickly have become obsolete; it is not reasonable to expect the Tsar to agree to this, however committed to a constitutional democracy the members of the Duma were, a transference towards a constitutional government in 1906 was simply not going to happen with the victorious Tsar rolling to one side merely as a gesture of goodwill, and giving away control of the army to conservative liberal peasants who wanted rid of Marxism for good. The result of the Fundamental Laws was that rather than be an authoritarian figurehead, the Tsar now had to become a diplomat and politician, and keep the Duma under control, from a centre that was far from politically stable.
The second issue is the First World War. It is debatable whether the First World War was inevitable; there is certainly much evidence to say that it was a cultural and historical certainty. Russia’s involvement in the war was, however, a certainty. To not enter it would have been to show a weak, fractious front and to invite invasion. It was also in Russia’s interest that it fought for lands in Poland, which provided a certain buffer between a hostile Germany and itself. The war had certain consequences in Russia. Whilst it exacerbated nationalist tensions, it also necessitated a huge industrial surge to produce arms. Arms were sent to Marxist centres of influence, notably St Petersburg and Moscow, by the west. In effect, the Marxist support apparatus, the proletariat, grew immeasurably. Added to this was the huge disruption of the rural areas, where peasants called to fight were destroyed in huge numbers on the battlefield due to poor training, creating huge demographic anomalies in Russia and devastating communities by killing the young fit agricultural workers. These communities, whether later affiliated to white causes or red, had their political pretensions transformed from curiosity into anger.
The result of these two factors is obvious. The political tensions that came with a growing industrial class automatically meant an increase in a political ideology, which was excluded to a large extent by an unrepresentative government. At the same time the Tsar had to keep control of an ever more difficult situation. Not least the task of keeping control of a central organisation which is dominated by the peasantry, the most decentralised, unorganised and widespread body in the world, probably at any stage of its development to date. The consequence of this is that the Tsar mattered. His personality, his choice of situation, his diplomatic skill, and his willingness to compromise are all called into question here. His weak handling of the 1905 demonstrations stand testament to his weak control. His statement afterward that he would never be as weak again and refusal to listen to political advisors leaves him comparable to Charles II of England. An ignorance disguising a weakness eventually killed them both. When tensions mounted, as they inevitably would, Nicholas II, like his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm, could not keep control. The February Uprising stood testament to the ease with which Nicholas accepted defeat. His refusal to entertain diplomatic discussion was mixed with an ignorant apathy towards the Duma. The Fundamental Laws were often broken, particularly by Stolypin; the Tsar’s replacement for Witte intended to be a ‘puppet’ but whom until his assassination was effectively ‘puppet master’. This allowed the political tensions to increase whilst constitutional ambiguity clouded the issues. Freedom was allowed the Duma, but tensions had to grasp hold of something, and that was manifest in the wave of anti-Tsarism towards the end of Russia’s involvement in the War. As may be seen here, the Social Democrats themselves did not make a transformation to constitutional government impossible. The Bolsheviks were not an organisation that chose to come into being. The adherence to Marxist doctrine as advocating a ‘place in the sun’ for the working class was an inevitable function, as was the desire to rid the nation of an outdated dynasty, which could no longer provide effective government or sufficient control on undesirable aspects of the nation. A government consensus under the conditions presented to Russia was impossible. Exacerbated tensions were inevitable, The Tsar’s position was inevitably fixed, the Tsar’s control was inevitably doomed to fail, lack of control inevitably begets a search for control.
This is not to say constitutional government was impossible. It was, for a time, the desired option by all parties, including the Bolsheviks. However, it is fairly certain that it could not have come into being without a purge of political tensions, certainly not peacefully, and evolutionary only in the most broad sense of the word. Lenin, by 1920, saw the only solution to Russia’s problems as a ‘proletariat dictatorship’, maybe, by then he was right, the constitutional democratic boat had sailed, the constitutional government had failed in its apathy and lack of formal control. The end of Tsarism left a power vacuum which was ideologically refused by so many groups which had become too far entrenched in their ideology that it was only by the Civil War that they realised ideology had to be compromised for a greater good. In effect, the factious groups of the Duma: the conservative rightist liberals, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, SRs; became so static in their ideology that it was impossible to evolve any sort of system, at least not without a free solo reign, and it was inevitable that one group had to pursue this aim.