Known officially as the State Duma, this institution was the lower house of the Russian parliamentary system from 1906 to 1917. In Kievan and Muscovite times, rulers convened a "boyars' duma" of the highest nobles to provide counsel on major policy issues. During the 1600s this institution fell into disuse, but late-nineteenth-century liberals lobbied for establishment of a representative body to help govern Russia. After the Revolution of 1905, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to form an advisory council, the Bulygin Duma of August 1905. However, revolutionary violence increased in the next two months, and in his October 1905 Manifesto the tsar reluctantly gave into the urgings of Sergei Witte to grant an elected representative Duma with full legislative powers.
This promise, plus other proffered reforms, helped split the broad revolutionary movement, winning over a number of moderates and liberals. With violence waning, the tsar weakened the authority of the proposed Duma by linking it with a half-appointed upper house, the State Council; by excluding foreign and military affairs and parts of the state budget from its purview; and by weighting election procedures to favor propertied groups. Moreover, at heart Nicholas never accepted even this watered-down version of the Duma as legitimate, believing it an unwarranted infringement on his divine right to rule. On the other hand many reformers saw the Duma as the first step toward a modern, democratic government and hoped to expand its authority.
First and Second Dumas, 1906 - 1907
Based on universal male suffrage over age twenty-five, elections for the First Duma were on the whole peaceful and orderly, although the indirect system favored nobles and peasants over other groups. The revolutionary Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries boycotted the elections, while the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) conducted the most effective campaign. The latter won a plurality of members, and peasant deputies, though usually unaffiliated with any party, proved anti-government and reformist in their views. Perhaps too rashly, the Cadet deputies pursued a confrontational policy toward the government, demanding radical land reform, extension of the Duma's budgetary authority, and a ministry responsible to the Duma. After three months of bitter stalemate, Nicholas dissolved the Duma.
Elections to the Second Duma in the fall of 1906 worsened the political impasse. Although the Cadets lost ground, radical parties participated and elected several deputies, and the peasants again returned oppositionist representatives. Openly hostile to the government, the Second Duma, like the first, proved unable to find a compromise program and was also dissolved after several months.
Third and Fourth Dumas, 1907 - 1917
Under the Fundamental Laws adopted in 1906 as a semi-constitutional structure for Russia, the tsar could dissolve the Duma and enact emergency legislation in its absence. Using this authority, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin decreed a new electoral system for the Duma on June 3, 1907. He retained indirect voting but increased the weighting in favor of the nobility from 34 to 51 percent and decreased that of the peasantry from 43 to 22 percent. The new law also reduced the number of non-Russian deputies in the Duma by about two-thirds. Stolypin achieved his goal of a more conservative assembly, for the 1907 elections to the Third Duma returned 293 conservative deputies, 78 Cadets and other liberals, 34 leftists, and 16 nonparty deputies, giving the government a comfortable working majority. The Octobrists, a group committed to making the October Manifesto work, emerged as the largest single bloc, with 148 deputies. Consequently, the Third Duma lasted out its full term of five years, from 1907 to 1912.
Until his assassination in 1911, Stolypin succeeded for the most part in cooperating with the Third Duma. The deputies supported an existing agrarian reform program first drawn up by Witte and instituted in 1906 by Stolypin that called for dissolution of the peasant commune and establishment of privately owned peasant plots, a complicated procedure that was only partially completed when World War I interrupted it. The government and the Duma joined hands in planning an expansion of primary education designed to eradicate illiteracy and to have all children complete at least four years of education. Although the State Council blocked this legislation, the Ministry of Education began on its own to implement it. Stolypin, a staunch nationalist, also initiated legislative changes limiting the authority of the autonomous Finnish parliament and establishing zemstvos in western Russia designed to subordinate Polish influence there. Finally, without much success the Third Duma propounded military reform, particularly the improvement of naval administration. By 1912 the Octobrist Party had split, government ministers were at odds, and rightist and nationalist influences dominated at court. Moreover, unrest was growing among the urban population.
Elections to the Fourth Duma in late 1912 returned a slightly more conservative body, but it had hardly begun work when World War I erupted in August 1914. An initial honeymoon between the Duma and the government soon soured as military defeats, administrative chaos, and ministerial incompetence dismayed and irked the deputies. By 1915 a Progressive Bloc, formed under liberal leadership, urged reforms and formation of a ministry of public confidence, but it had little impact on the government or the tsar. Shortly after the February 1917 Revolution broke out, Nicholas dissolved the Duma, but its members reconstituted themselves privately and soon formed a Temporary Committee to help restore order in Petrograd. After the tsar's abdication, this committee appointed the Provisional Government that, though sharing some aspects of power with the Petrograd Soviet, ran the country until the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in the fall of 1917.
The Duma system opened the door to representative government and demonstrated the political potential of an elected parliament. This experience helped legitimize the post-1991 effort to establish democracy in Russia. Yet the four Dumas' record was spotty at best. Useful legislation was discussed and sometimes passed, but divisions among the moderates, the inexperience of many politicians, the reactionary influences of the State Council along with some ministers and the tsar's entourage, and the visceral refusal of Nicholas II to accept an independent legislature made it almost impossible for the Duma to be the engine of reform in old-regime Russia.
Bibliography
Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907 - 14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Pares, Sir Bernard. (1939). The Fall of the Russian Monarchy. London: Jonathan Cape.
Pinchuk, Ben-Cion. (1974). The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907 - 12. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Tokmakoff, George. (1981). P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of Three Major Issues. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
—JOHN M. THOMPSON
