THE DISSOLUTION OF THE DUMA
ST. PETERSBURG, _July 25th_.
The dissolution of the Duma, although it had been predicted during the
course of last week, and although the arrival of a large number of
troops in St. Petersburg was known, came as a surprise. During the whole
of yesterday the town was abnormally quiet. I went to the various clubs:
the Labour Party Club, the Cadet Club, the Socialist Club. They were all
deserted. Some of the members had left for Finland; others were holding
meetings in various parts of the town. In the club of the Labour Party,
which is in the Nevsky Prospect, nothing was left except the cold
remains of a supper, a large portrait of the Emperor, a picture of the
Dowager Empress, and a pastel of Spiridonovna. At the Cadet Club I saw
the peasant Nazarenko; he was just starting for Finland. “Things are
bad,” I said. “The life of a State is like the life of a man,” he
replied, philosophically. “If there were no bad there would be no good,
either.” Other visitors arrived and gathered together in knots, speaking
with bated breath, as if they were under the cloud of some huge
calamity. “Does it mean the end of the Monarchy?” I asked one man. “It
means the end of the dynasty, in any case,” he answered.
In the evening I saw some Octobrists and Conservatives, and asked them
their opinion. “The Government may be right in having dissolved the
Duma,” one of them said, “but what is criminal on their part is the way
in which they treated the Duma from the first, trying to discredit it in
every possible way, and doing everything they could to provoke it to
rebellion. Russia is an odd country, and everything is possible; it is
possible that the country may quiet down if liberal reforms are at once
put into practice; but I confess I have little faith in this, and if the
country does not quiet down this Ministry will be directly responsible
for any disasters which may happen.”
Some one else, more Liberal, said to me: “If I lose everything I
possess, if my land is devastated and my house is burnt, I shall never
blame the Cadets; I shall never cease to believe they might have managed
things if they had been empowered to do so early enough—that is to say,
last October.”
A third person, a landlord, said to me yesterday that the step was
inevitable, because no Ministry, even were it composed of geniuses, and
no Duma, even were it composed of angels, would be of the slightest
avail until it was settled whether or no there is to be a new _régime_
in Russia. You cannot, he argued, have the new wine in the old skins. It
was no use having a Duma supposed to be working together with a power
directly opposed to it and working in a diametrically opposite
direction. As matters were, a law, if it passed through the Duma and the
Council of Empire, had to be sanctioned by the x quantity who had the
power in his hands at Court. And if it is said that it is not
constitutional to inquire into the advisers of the Crown, it must be
remembered that whenever in other countries advisers have been
all-powerful, and have acted against the will of the people, the
advisers have been forced to go, failing which the Monarch has been
deposed. Now the question will be settled. Either the Government will
prove it can govern the country and quiet it down—that is to say, it
will prove itself to be strong—or it will prove its weakness and
ultimately come to grief.
All these are opinions I have heard expressed by Russians during the
last two days. I have also heard it said that the dissolution of the
Duma is an excellent step, that the Duma did no good and some harm. I
have also heard all the disaster attributed to the Cadets, some people
saying they were too constitutional, and that it is impossible to be
constitutional during a revolution, others that they did not succeed in
dominating the Left parties, but allowed themselves to be overridden by
them.
In the meantime the new Prime Minister has announced his intention of
carrying out a great Liberal programme of far-reaching reforms on a
large scale, and of maintaining the strictest order throughout the
country, so that the reforms may be realised. This sounds charming. “At
first, of course, you think it’s charming, but very soon it gets
alarming.” The first step taken in the new direction has been to
suppress all the Moderate Liberal newspapers and to introduce a system
of censorship more severe than that which prevailed during the worst
times of Plehve, and to arrest a man who took off his hat to the members
of the Duma at the railway station. To-day, however, the Cadet
newspaper, the _Retch_, has once more made its appearance. The
Government are looking forward to the new elections, which they hope
will return a Conservative majority truly representative of the people.
Among other constitutional matters there is one lesson which they have
not learnt, and probably never will learn, and that is that if you have
a Parliamentary system you must put up with the fact that it will often
return a majority which is distasteful to you. If the elections are
carried out fairly it can safely be predicted that the majority returned
will be ultra-Radical. But I suppose this time those steps will be taken
which the present Ministry so bitterly accuse Count Witte of having
omitted to take, the steps to “arrange” the elections, which, we are
told (several officials told me personally), the Government always take
in England. That is to say, Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, it is
thought, take the necessary steps to prevent the election of Mr. Keir
Hardie and his supporters. It is strange that so far this plan should
have proved unsuccessful. It would be, perhaps, simpler here to pass an
electoral law in virtue of which only policemen could be elected members
of Parliament. This would prove a constitutional measure which the
present Ministry would thoroughly understand.
One sometimes hears it said that the Duma was in too great a hurry, and
that it should have waited patiently and obtained everything by
constitutional means. This was the course the majority were doing their
best to pursue. They had to reckon with a Government which was opposing
them by unconstitutional means. It is certainly not constitutional for a
Government to distribute among the troops proclamations (I have seen
them) inciting the Army against the Parliament, and attacking members of
Parliament with every kind of gross insult and calumny. Nor is it
constitutional for a Minister to request the correspondent of a large
foreign newspaper to state that the Parliament is not a thing to be
reckoned with, but merely a revolutionary body. The answer people made
to these objections is that there is not, and there never has been, a
constitution in Russia, and they are perfectly right.
But, apart from this, I agree with the Russian landlord I have quoted
above, who said that the main question must be decided before one can
talk of a Parliament here. The abscess must be pierced to the core, he
said. It was a pleasing illusion to think the Cadets would obtain a
change of _régime_ by constitutional means. “You must wait, little
pigeon, you must wait,” says a character in a novel by a famous Russian
satirist. “I have done nothing else during my whole life,” is the reply.
And if the Parliament had waited until the Government became
constitutional it could have waited until Doomsday, because, as another
Russian said to me not long ago, “it has less idea of what
_constitutional_ means than the Turks, only the Turks are more competent
and are better governed.”
Of course, if the new Prime Minister succeeds in quieting the country
and carrying out Liberal reforms on a large scale every one will admit
that the Government was right from the first, and that the Duma was
wrong. “But what use are reforms,” said some one to-day, “when the
Government has decided not to give the initial reform which should be
the cause of all the others: namely, a change of _régime_, a
constitution and a system of responsible government?” Besides, in order
to quiet the country the Government must first succeed in recovering the
confidence of the people. At present it has not got the confidence of
any party, any group, or any section of the population.
St. Petersburg is full of troops. A cabman said to me yesterday that
these were not Russian troops, but _Austrians_ in disguise. This is a
curious reflection of the remarks on foreign intervention which were
published on the first page of the semi-official newspaper here last
week, without, of course, the knowledge of the Ministers. I asked the
same man what he expected would happen. “There will be a big _skandal_,”
he answered. “It is impossible that it should be otherwise. They say:
‘Let us have a Duma,’ and then they say, ‘Let us send it away’; there
can only be disorders after that. We, the cabmen, have never yet struck,
but we shall this time when the moment comes.” (I think he thought that
would make all the difference.) “What about the soldiers?” I asked. “The
soldiers oughtn’t to rebel,” he answered, “but they ought to refuse to
fire on the people. They would not be breaking their oath. Their oath
obliges them to fight the enemy, but not their brothers. That is wrong.”
Another cabman said a curious thing to me, as we were driving along the
Quays. “We of ourselves can do nothing,” he said; “but those are the
people who will do it for us,” and he pointed to a student who was
passing by.
The hall porter at the house where I lived told me he had known it all
along. “It is bad,” he said; “very bad.” I think that is really all
there is to be said about the matter. It is bad; very bad—that is to
say, if one looks back and then forward.
_Later._
News has come of the appeal the ex-members of the Duma have made to the
country, urging citizens not to pay taxes and to refuse to serve in the
Army. Everybody is agreed that their action is a fatal mistake, since
they have no means of having any such measures carried out.