was allowed to fail; the nationalities and the con-
flict of classes would tear Russia apart. Autocracy
was the only answer to lawlessness and dissolu-
tion. Faced with so much popular opposition,
Witte saw clearly enough that the tsar must either
now resort to repression far more bloody than any
that had preceded or put himself at the head of
the ‘reform’ movement and limit its scope. Above
all the tsar must stop drifting in a sea of indeci-
sion. Witte’s personal inclination was for the
maintenance of undiluted autocracy but he recog-
nised that this was not likely to succeed, and the
tsar had neither the nerve nor the stomach for
total repression. The tsar gave way to those who
argued that a form of constitutionalism should be
introduced. A renewed wave of strikes in October
overcame his final resistance. The outcome was
the October Manifesto of 1905.
In the previous February, Nicholas had declared
that he would call into being a consultative assem-
bly, to be known as the Duma. In August the
complicated method of election was announced
which allowed as little influence as possible to the
disaffected workers. Now the October Manifesto
promised to bring to life a genuinely parliamentary
body with whom the tsar would share power. No
law would be promulgated without the consent of
the Duma.
These promises made no impression on the
workers who had spontaneously formed them-
selves into soviets, or workers’ councils. In St
Petersburg and Moscow they openly called on the
army to come to the side of the revolutionary
movement. But the loyalty of the army to the tsar
was never seriously in doubt, the soviets were dis-
persed, their leaders arrested, and gradually during
1906 in town and country the tide of revolution
passed.
With the need for compromise pressing, the
tsar soon showed his true colours. There were
four meetings of the parliamentary assembly: the
Duma of 1906, the second Duma of 1907, the
third from 1907 to 1912, and the last from 1912
to 1917. In the first Duma, a new party emerged,
the Constitutional Democratic Party, or Kadets as
they were known. They were moderate and liberal
and hoped on the basis of the October Manifesto
to transform Russian autocracy into a genuine
Western parliamentary constitutional govern-
ment. Together with the moderate left, they out-
numbered the revolutionary socialists, who had
mostly boycotted the Duma, and the ultra-
conservatives. But the tsar would have nothing
to do with a constitutional party or their leader
Pavel Miliukov. After the short second Duma,
which saw a strengthening of revolutionary social-
ists, the tsar simply changed the electoral rules,
ensuring tame conservative majorities in the third
and fourth Dumas.
The opportunity of transforming Russia into a
genuinely constitutional state by collaborating
with moderate liberal opinion was spurned by the
tsar. As long as Nicholas II reigned, genuine con-
stitutional change on the Western model was
blocked. In 1917 the liberals as well as autocracy
would be swept away by the forces of revolution.
Yet, before the war the actual hold of the various
revolutionary socialist parties over the urban
workers and the peasants was tenuous. Therein
lies the extent of the lost opportunity to mod-
ernise and transform Russia while avoiding the
terrible violence which after 1917 accompanied
that process.
Despite the undoubted political repression and
reactionary policies of the tsar and his ministers,
there was also a genuine effort made to tackle
some of Russia’s basic problems and so to cut the
ground from under the widespread discontent. In
1906 the tsar entrusted power to a ruthless but
able man, Peter Stolypin, as chairman of the
Council of Ministers, a position he held until his
assassination in 1911. Stolypin lived up to his rep-
utation as a ‘strongman’, and through draconian
measures such as military court martials executed
hundreds and smothered revolutionary agitation.
There were also, of course, revolutionary attacks
on government officials whose victims equally ran
into many hundreds killed and wounded. Stolypin
launched a war on terrorism. He suppressed the
rights of the nationalists; the Jews again particu-
larly suffered, associated as they were in the tsar’s
mind with sedition and socialism.
It took no great discernment to recognise that
something needed to be done to help the peas-
antry. In November 1905 the peasants’ redemp-
tion payments for the land they farmed were