Russia’s first national elections
p. 31-44
Texte intégral
1The basis elements of the representative System called for in the Bulygin Rescript of 18 February 1905, were elaborated in the chancery of Bulygin’s ministry by the same official, S. E. Kryzhanovskii, who had earlier drafted the proposals for Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii that were to hâve gone into the Ukaz of 12 December, 1904, but were struck at the last moment by NicholasII.1 They subsequently went through significant modifications at the hands of the State Council and of the Special Conference designated in the Rescript. Of all parts of the legislation, it was the electora‘ System that was subjected to the most prolonged scrutiny and most extensive changes before taking its place in the « Bulygin Constitution » published on August 6,1905.
2The electoral scheme presented in the Mirskii proposals, representation frorr the provincial zemstvos rather than by spécial élections, did not survive the review of the draft in the ministry; it was rejected by Bulygin on the grounds that it would lead to the politicization of the zemstvos, and that it would be too restrictive of the franchise in regard both to social groups (primarily the peasantry) and territories (the zemstvos existed in only thirty-four of the fifty-one provinces of European Russia).2
3Given acceptance of spécial élections, what should the criteria for suffrage be? Neither of the two extreme possibilities – universal suffrage or election by the traditional estates – was given serious consideration in government: the former was simply too radical a departure, with results impossible to foresee, except that propertied elements would be buried in the popular vote; the latter faced a coalescence of opposition from various viewpoints – one way or another it was generally accepted that the estate System no longer accurately reflected social realities.
4By an inertial process of élimination, the government planners settled on the multi-staged curial System already in use for elections to the zemstvos and town dumas. It would be easy to implement, since the zemstvc and town voter-qualification records could be used, and its results, it was thought, more or less accurately anticipated. As in the original zemstvo System of 1864 (certain changes introduced in 1890 were bypassed), the electorate was divided into three categories: private landowners; a curia of owners of industrial, commercial, and other urban property; and the peasantry living in village communities (sel’skie obshchestva). The System was « class-based », with individual economic status the criterion for enfranchisement, except for the peasants, who qualified simply as heads of households in the villages.
5District assemblies (uezdnye s ’ezdy) for each curia were to designate electors (vyborshchikï); the electors from all the curiae were then to gath61 in a provincial assembly for élection of deputies to the State Duma.
6As in the zemstvo System, holders of a full property qualification in the first 2 curiae could participate personally in the district assemblies, while owners of less than a full cens could gather in preliminary meetings and send one delegate (upolnomochennyf) per full cens to the corresponding district assemblies. Peasant representation was to pass through two stages preliminary to the district assembly: élection by heads of household of the village community of delegates to a volost’ assembly, and élection there of delegates to the district peasant assembly.
7The provincial assembly was to elect by majority vote the number of Duma deputies allotted to the province; a number based on a general population ratio (1: 250,000, whith a higher ratio later introduced for the borderlands [okrainy]).
The distribution of electors’ seats among the curiae in the assembly was to be based on the total value of property held by each curial group.3
Finally, sépara te représentation was to be accorded the largest cities of the Empire.
8The main target of criticism in the ministry’s draft suffrage law was the weight it allotted, respectively, to the landowners and the peasants. Kryzhanovskii and Bulygin had anticipated that the curial System would yield a Duma that looked very much like a provincial zemstvo assembly: a body dominated by noble landowners with an interest in public affairs, and they were concerned to keep peasant representation in the Duma at the lowest possible level commensurate with the foundations of the System. In their view, a Duma with large numbers of unlettered, politically inexperienced peasants would be incapable of serious work.4 Kryzhanovskii accordingly aimed to ensure appropriate composition of the provincial assemblies by having the selection of provincial electors (yyborshchikï) take place in general district assemblies of voters and delegates from all three curiae – the same System that had produced the predominantly noble provincial zemstvo assemblies. The majority of the State Council apparently had no quarrel with Kryzhanovskii’s aim, but it nevertheless struck the provision for general district assemblies, thereby assuring that the distribution of electors by curiae in the provincial assemblies would be fixed. This was essentially a concession to the argument that the ministry plan gave insufficient guarantee of adéquate peasant représentation, although no one but Kryzhanovskii seemed to realize that its resuit would be provincial assembles radically different in composition from the zemstvo assemblies that had served as the ministry’s model.
9In the Special Conference, drawn from a broader and more heterogeneous group of dignitaries than the ministry or State Council, arguments were heard for reviving the estate-principle (soslovnost") so as to yield a Duma with a fixed proportion of deputies from each estate (soslovie). These arguments were rejected, but a compromise was struck in the form of having the peasant electors select a separate deputy from their midst in each of the fifty-one assemblies of European Russia. Curiously, this provision was supported both by advocates of the estates idea, mostly conservative nobles, and by bureaucrats who questioned the loyalty of the nobility to the throne in view of the widespread noble participation in the zemstvo constitutionalist movement in recent months. They believed the rank-and-file peasantry would be more likely to provide conservative support for the regime.5 To keeping with this vision of a « social monarchy, » a litteracy requirement for élection for election to the Duma was also removed
10According to the ministry’s calculations, the relative weight of the curiae in the provincial assemblies would stand in the aggregate at:
curia | percent of provincial electors |
peasant | 43 |
landowners | 34 |
urban | 23 |
Aside trom the highly disproportionate per capita ratios of representation these figures imply, significant social groups would hâve gone entirely unrepresented in this system, including the industrial workers, small private (mostly peasant) landowners, and the great mass of the urban population without significant property or business affairs.6
11Here matters stood until October 17. Point Two of the October Manifeste promised to extend the franchise so as to include « those classes of the population that are now completely deprived of électoral rights. » The issue of electoral reform was engaged immediately by Count Witte, who became the country’s first prime minister on October 19. The basic scheme for carrying out the promise of Point Two was readied in a few days, once again by Kryzhanovskii: it amounted to a mechanical increase in the electorate by significantly lowering qualification levels in the two property-based curiae,7 and the creation of a sephrate workers’ curia, similar to, though much smaller than, the peasant curia.8
12The main aim of the revisions was clearly stated in the conference Witte called shortly after October 17: to satisfy the demands for participation by « those classes of the population which hâve been most aroused by deprivation of électoral rights; namely, the workers and persons living by intellectual labor.9 » It appears that admission to the polls of a much wider group of smallholders in the landowners’ curia and of the petty bourgeoisie in the urban curia flowed more or less automatically from the decision to expand the franchise to the working class and the intelligentsia
13Thus, the Law of December 11 which embodied these changes greatly expanded the size and character of the electorate in the urban and landowners’ curiae. The decision to create a separate workers’ curia was linked to the general System: short of introducing universal suffrage, it was the only way the workers could be given a more or less visible role in the elections; the workers’ delegates were given 2.5 percent of the electors’ seats in the provincial assemblies of European Russia. The other curiae retained essentially thé same proportions noted above. The peasant curia was not affected by the December 11 révisions.
14Of a total of 5,982 electors who were to participate in the provincial assemblies of European Russia, 2,532 (42.3 percent) were to be provided by the peasant curia; 1,956 (32.7 percent) by the landowners’ curia; 1,343 (22.5 percent) by the urban curia; and 151 (2.5 percent) by the workers’ curia.10 The weight of the several curiae varied rather widely from province to province in accordance with differing population and tax structures. Thus, the peasant curia ranged from a high of 74 percent in Viatka province to a low of 12 percent in Poltava; it provided an absolute majority of electors in fifteen provincial assemblies and a plurality in sixteen more. At the other extreme, workers’ electors ranged from a high of 14.8 percent to less than one percent, and in several provinces there were no separate workers’ élections at ail.11 In Minsk and Poltava the landowners had an absolute majority of electors. In Moscow the majority belonged to the urban electors.
15The separate électoral assemblies that convened in the twenty largest cities of European Russia were populated by eighty electors each, except Petersburg and Moscow, which were given double allotments.12
16It would be impossible in a modest paper to describe in detail now the élections actually worked at each level of each curia, or even in the provincial assemblies, each of which had its own political specifics. (I have done this in a large monograph, tentatively entitled The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia). Nevertheless, a few characteristics of the process must be mentioned in order to understand the outcome of the élections, which will be considered at the end of this paper.
17In the peasant-curia élections, the preliminary stages of the elections were not clearly differentiated from the traditional village and volost’ gatherings for the election of elders and other peasant officiais. The district assemblies brought together a variety of peasants and peasant-intelligenty, most of whom were mutually unacquainted. At ail levels of the peasant-curia elections political-party allegiances or even awareness of political parties was rarely to be encountered. This is hardly surprising in view of the low rate of literacy still prevailing among the peasantry in most parts of the country; the illegality of political parties in Russia before October 190513 and the widespread hindrances to such agitation in rural Russia as the nascent parties could muster that were offered by local agents of the imperial administration; and the boycott of the élections by the relatively well-established parties of the revolutionary left, including the peasantophile SRs. As a resuit, most peasant electors who came to the provincial assemblies had no political-party affiliation. What by and large evoked peasant interest and participation in the elections and the institution of the Duma was the prospect of land redistribution, the perennial peasant solution to Malthusian pressures in conditions of technological stagnation.14 Not that peasants were unconcerned with other issues – taxation, legal and administrative disabilities, local administrative reform, and educational opportunities especially – but in the first elections all other issues paled before the land question.15
18For many of the same reasons, there was a large contingent of electors from the landowners’ curia that lacked any defined political orientation. Indeed, perhaps as many as 30 percent of the « large landowners’ electors » were of peasant origin, if not peasants strictly speaking, who had corne up from the preliminary small-holder’s meetings. In the élections these smallholders tended to display the same attitudes as their communal-peasant counterparts (most of them in fact had retained their communal allotments and would therefore participate in the peasant-curia elections as well).16 A principal reason for the heavy représentation of peasant smallholders among the landowners’ electors was the diversity in political orientations prevailing among the large landowners: the center of gravity among them was probably somewhat to the right of the Octobrists in most provinces, but they were by no means uniformly conservative in political orientation.17 If the large landowners had presented a solid phalanx in the district assemblies where they generally constituted a majority, they could hâve sent electors to the provincial assemblies almost cxclusively from their midst, given the voting-rules, which made it possible for any group that could maintain a consistent majority in these assemblies to take ail the positions for itself.18
19Only in the urban curia was more or less extensive political-party agitation possible among the electorate at large: and only in the twenty largest cities with separate representation and in a few other large towns did voters actually cast ballots for slates of party candidates in a one-round election.19 (This modemist departure from standard procedure had been necessitated by the great expansion of the urban electorate that came with the December 11 rules). Consequently, the political orientations of the electors from the urban curia were more sharply defined, the proportion of non-partisan electors much smaller, than in either of the other two significant curiae.20
20The following table sums up the admittedly spotty data available on the political orientations of the electors in the provincial assemblies of European Russia21:

KD =Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaia Partiia
Progressives = Non-KDs to the left of the Octobrists
Octobrists =Soiuz 17-go Oktiabria
TIP = Trade-Industry Party (Torgovo-promyshlennaia partiia)
Monarchist =a collective designation for ail groups to the right of the Octobrists.
21While there were considerable departures in individual provincial assemblies, it was generally the case that no party had more than a modest minority of electors, and that the largest group was of undefined political orientation, mainly peasants. By the same token, no single curia dominated the assemblies, with the several exceptions (mostly peasant) already mentioned. Voting in the provincial assemblies was in plenary session by balloting on lists of candidates from their midst, freely compiled, with no proportional représentation. In practical terms this meant that any group of electors that could control a majority of votes in an assembly could take ail the deputies’ seats if they were cast consistently for the same slate of candidates and against ail others; if two days of ballotting left seats unfilled, a plurality sufficed on the third day.22 In assemblies that usually consisted of more than one hundred electors, most of whom had never seen each other until a few days before the voting at best and had not corne with any party mandate, this was no simple matter.
22How, under these circumstances, were the Kadets (KDs) able to take nearly half the plenarily-elected deputies from the provincial assemblies of European Russia? (The other half consisted mainly of non-party electors from the peasant curia). I will address myself to that question in the remainder of this paper.
23The Kadets’ success in the first elections may be understood in terms of three principal factors:
- their ability, unmatched by any other party, tc set up local groups in virtually all the provinces of European Russia.
- Their program.
- The ability of the Kadets, operating within the structure of the elections described above, to set up coalitions with other groups of electors in the provincial assemblies.
Distribution of Duma deputies by party affiliation23 at the time of their election (51 provinces)
Social-democrats | 6 |
Kadet bloc* | 143 |
Octobrist bloc | 17 |
Right | 6 |
Non-party | 193** |
Other | 19 |
* Including non-member candidates directly supported by the party. ** Including 51 deputies elected separately by the peasant curia.
24 1. Between 150 and 200 political organizations, many calling themselves « parties » (partiia), but also « unions » (soiuz), « conunittees » (komitet), « brotherhoods » (bratstvo), « veche, » and so on, came into existence between October 1905 and the time of the first elections, which were held in March-April, 1906, for the purpose of competing in those élections. Most of them were very small and ephemeral types of what Du verger calls « cadre parties » (partis de cadres)24: they had no aspirations of elaborating programs, recruiting membership, or setting up permanent party networks; they were formed for the sole purpose of supporting a candidate or group of candidates in the elections. A few did not even aspire to put up their own candidates, but aimed to mobilize a articular ethnie or confessional group in support of a party with a program acceptable to them. Most of these organizations were urban: the State of communications, administrative hindrances to political agitation in the countryside, and the structure of the electoral process – ail conspired to make pre-election compaigning an ahnost entirely urban phenomenon.25
25In this vast array of political organizations, only four could claim anything beyond strictly local, or at best regional, status: the Kadets (Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaia Partiia); the Octobrist (Soiuz 17-go Oktiabria); the Trade-Industry Party (Torgovo-promyshlennaia Partiia); and the Party of Legal Order (Partiia Pravovogo Poriadka). Of these four, only the Kadets and the Octobrists had networks, however loosely woven, covering most of European Russia.26 Of the two, the Kadets’ network was considerably denser, with at least two hundred provincial, town, and district committees in place before the elections27; and their membership was far greater: total Kadet membership has been estimàted at about 100,000 by early January, 1906, and it may have reached 120,000 by the eve of the elections. Estimates of total Octobrist membership for the same period range from 10,000 to 24,348.28
26The main institutional antécédents of the Kadet party, which allowed them to set up shop around the country so quickly when open political parties fïrst became possible following the October Manifesto, are well known: the zemstvos, or more precisely the groups of constitutionalist reformers in the zemstvos who had corne together in the so-called Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists in late 1903 and dominated the national zemstvo congresses that met every few months between late 1904 and late 1905; and the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniid), the clandestine organization set up by the libérais who would later emerge as the leaders of the Kadet party in order to mobilize support outside the zemstvos for the transformation of Russia into a parliamentary-constitutionalist régime by peaceful means. The Union held its first national congress in January, 1904, but it had been in the process of formation since 1902.
27The crucial importance of the zemstvos, in particular, in laying the institutional foundations of the Kadet party can hardly be overemphasized.29 The founders of the Union of Liberation were mostly long-time zemstvo activists or professional men with zemstvc connections; the Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists was an important constituent part of the Union; and « Third Element » (tretii element) employées of the zemstvos played an important part in setting up local Liberationist groups in many towns. The geographical distribution of Kadet groups betrays the importance of the zemstvos for the establishment of the Kadet party network: it was densest in the zemstvo provinces. The norm there was a provincial committee in the provincial capital and committees in three or four district towns; in some zemstvo provinces there were committees in every district. Outside zemstvo Russia, the Kadet network was very thin, usually confined to a party group established by Liberationist professional men in the provincial capital.30
28 2. The Kadets’ program was inextricably linked to their over-all strategy as a political party. By the time of the party’s founding in the October days, the Kadet strategists, led by Paul Miliukov, realized that Russia had entered the âge of mass politics; their earlier strategy of mobilizing civil society (obshchestvo) alone would no longer do. They accordingly aspired to build a mass party, and intended to participate actively in the elections not only to ensure the maximum possible number of suitable deputies in the Duma, but as an opportunity for party-building.31 The first target of their recruitment efforts, the most accessible and the indispensable instrument for agitating among the broader masses, was the « democratic » and, they realized, mostly socialist-oriented intelligentsia: the « Third Element », school teachers, technicians, lower civil servants, and so on.
29In this part of their strategy, the Kadets enjoyed considérable early success: the size of their membership rivalled anything the revolutionary left could boast at the time; and the sources of recruitment were those anticipated. If the « local leaders », the cadre groups that set up local committees, tended to be predominantly zemstvo activists and professional men from the Unions, at least in the Russian heartland, the rank and file was predominantly from the lower, « démocratie » intelligentsia, with an admixture of craftsmen, clerks and shopkeepers.32
30To these éléments of their strategy must be added the Kadets’ nationalities strategy. The Kadet leaders were quite aware of the intensive mobilization that had been going on in recent months among the non-Russian nationalities of the Empire. The September 1905 zemstvo congress, the first to be attended by delegaüons from the non-zemstvo provinces, had been bombarded with petitions from Polish Ukrainian, Baltic, and other nationalities groups.33 The Kadet leaders, who were just at that time drawing up their draft party program, added to the bid for support from the broader reaches of the intelligentsia (and through it, eventually perhaps, from the popular masses) the bid for the support of nationalities groups capable of mobilizing considérable followings across class lines over an area of the Empire that accounted for a considerable portion of the Duma’s seats under the electoral law of December 11,1905.34
31The Kadet strategy, together with the compétition with the revolutionary left for the allegiance of the non-party socialist intelligentsia it implied, explains a great deal about the Kadet program, with its agrarian platform calling for large-scale expropriation of gentry estates for distribution among the peasants, a package of other socio-economic reforms remarkably radical for an ostensibly liberal party, and a special article devoted to democratie local self-government and local autonomy, with special reference to Poland and to the restoration of the Finnish constitution.35
32 3. The Kadets profited in the First élections, so to speak, both from Russia’s political development and from its lack thereof; or rather, they engaged successfully in two kinds of électoral politics. Thanks to their organization, program, and energetic campaigning, they emerged as the pre-eminent urban party in the elections. This gave them both twenty-seven of the twenty-eight deputies elected to the Duma in the separate city élections, and about 40 percent of the places in the provincial assemblies from the urban curia. In the provincial assemblies they engaged in a kind of « estate » or curial politics, in which they often emerged in victorious coalitions, usually with peasant electors, although they themselves accounted for only about 14 percent of the electors on the average. The initiative for these alliances with peasant electors ahnost always came from the Kadets. Their main source of appeal to the peasant electors was their agrarian program. In a few cases the Kadets carried the assembly elections almost entirely for party members, especially where the peasant curia was fairly small or uncharacteristically divided.36 But Kadet-peasant coalitions prevailed.
33Outside the Russian heartland, coalitions also prevailed, sometimes with peasants,37 but more often with nationalities groups cutting across curial lines in the assemblies. In the west, independent Kadet organizations were few and far between, and local national-liberal parties that had taken shape in the course of the revolution often took the initiative in associating themselves with the mainstream Kadet Party. For example, the Lithuanian Popular-Democratic Party in Kovno, and the Estonian Progressive Party in Estland played a major role in the elections. Outside the Baltic, the most inlluential regional organization in the west was the Union for Jewish Equality (Soiuz dlia dostizheniia ravnopraviia evreev), which had branches in at least fourteen provinces. The Union had been formed in February 1905 by a group of Vilna business and professional men and was a constituent member of the professional-political Union of Unions (Soiuz Soiuzov). It did not advance its own candidates for the Duma as a party, but rather tried to mobilize Jewish votes for the most acceptable national party; that is, the Kadets, many of whose representatives in the west were also members of the Union, of course. The Union, together with cooperating local groups of Jewish voters, fairly dominated the urban curia élections throughout the Pale of Jewish Settlement (cherta osedlostï).
34The next best organized nationality group in the west after the Jews were the Poles. The biggest Polish organization was the Constitutional-Catholic Party (Konstitutsionno-katolicheskaia partiia), with représentation in at least twelve provinces at élection time. This party had been founded at the beginning of 1906 by the Bishop of Vilna (Baron Edvard von) Ropp for the purpose of uniting ail Catholics of the western provinces, predominantly but not exclusively Poles, behind a liberal program similar to that of the Kadets. In the west as a whole, thirty-five Kadet-bloc deputies were elected to the Duma (out of a total of ninety-three for the area), and twenty-five of these were full-fledged members of the Kadet fraction in the first Duma.
35Outside the western perimeter, the only other significant régional organization in European Russia was based on Muslim/Turkic nationalism. The Muslim National Union (Ittifak) was particularly influential in the elections in the provinces of Kazan, Ufa, and, to a lesser extent, in Perm, although it was active over a much larger area. In the provincial assemblies, members of the Union from the several curiae generally cooperated with the Kadets. The Union, founded in August 1905 by representatives of the Volga Tatar intelligentsia, mostly professional men from Kazan, had adopted a formal resolution in favor of cooperation with the Kadets at its second congress held in mid-January, 1906. Many of its leading figures were members of the Kadet party.38
36In sum, the Kadets, relying on their agrarian and nationalities programs, emerged as the pre-eminent party in the First Duma by sweeping the big-city elections and by forming winning coalitions, in the winner-take-all arrangements of the provincial assembly élections, with non-party peasants and with mobilized nationalities groups. The political conséquences of the first élections lie beyond the scope of this paper. I should like merely to suggest here that the circumstances of the Kadet victory explain a great deal about the conflict between the Duma and the govemment that issued in the coup d’État of June 3, 1907. Their dependence on peasant support reinforced their commitment to a program of radical land reform that could not be accommodated to the govemment’s emerging plan for conservative agrarian reform. The agrarian question was the most important substantive issue at stake in the conflict that led to the Third of June. By the same token, the Kadets found their most reliable support in the Dumas, particularly in the Second Duma, among the national minority groups. Some of these, like the large Polish group (with thirty-four deputies from the Congress Kingdom alone), were not enthusiastic about the Kadet agrarian program, but supported it because of the Kadets’ nationalities program. The agrarian and nationalities questions were in this way inseparably intertwined. It was no accident that the two groups whose représentation was most dramatically undercut by the révision of the électoral law on June 3, 1907, were precisely the peasants and the Poles (along with other national minorities).39
37In standard discussions of the political history of pre-revolutionary Russia, the Kadets’ victory in the first élections, which gave them better than a third of ail deputies’ seats and the dominant position in the opposition majority, is usually explained, if at all, as the resuit of the boycott of the elections by the revoluüonary parties, which left the Kadets as the most radical party contesting the elections amidst a radically-minded electorate. This is at best a half-truth.
38Kadet strength was indeed diminished in the Second Duma, for which elections were held in February, 1907, by as much as 40 percent, although they remained the largest party in the Duma.40 This diminution, however, was not the result of a dramatic shift of popular support away from the Kadets to the left parties, which participated in the second elections: the Kadets actually had slightly more provincial electors in the second elections than in the fïrst.41 The diminution was due to the considerably higher degree of political partisanship and polarization, both leftward and rightward, now prevailing among the provincial electors. This was especially marked in the peasant curia, where the proportion of non-partisan electors fell from 80 percent in the first elections to 11 in the second, to the benefit of both left and right in nearly equal proportions42; but it was also dramatic in the landowners’ curia, where the proportion of non-partisans fell from nearly half to about 5 percent, mostly to the benefit of the right, the product of the mobilization on the right among the gentry that was only getting underway at the time of the first elections; and in the urban curia, a esimilar reduction of the non-partisan group occurred (from 58 to 7 percent), again almost equally to the benefit of left and right.43 This situation greatly reduced the Kadet’s ability to dominate and, in some cases, even to participate in winning coalitions in the provincial assemblies.
39The Kadets success in the first elections, quite out of proportion to the size of their popular following or even their representation in the provincial assemblies was thus the product of a particular historical moment, one of the most salient features of which was the relatively low degree of political mobilization obtaining among the electorate, especially the peasant electorate; and of the structure of the electoral system. The importance of the latter can be judged by the fact that the Kadets still did extremely well in the second élections. Would they hâve done as well had the first elections been held on the basis of universal, direct suffrage, as the Kadets and all parties to their left wished? Ironically, the answer is, almost certainly not. Although it is difficult to imagine how elections held with universal, direct suffrage would have functioned at that time, in the absence of widespread mobilization or a System for the preliminary forwarding of a limited number of candidates identifiable to the electorate at large by generally known political labels, it is, because of those very conditions, extremely unlikely that any single party could hâve taken more than a small minority of the Duma seats. It seems more likely that the Duma would hâve been quite variegated politically, with a considerable number of deputies identified with the local cadre or patronage parties that had sprung up in such profusion before the first élections. Perhaps Dmitri Shipov, that most prominent zemstvo man among the founders of the Octobrist party, had more than half a point when he told Nicholas II at the Tsarskoe Selo conférence called to consider révisions in the électoral law after the October Manifesto that the left would dominate the Duma if the government’s curial project were adopted (as it was on December 11), but that Octobrists would be elected to the Duma under a universal suffrage law.44
Notes de fin
1 D. N. Sipov, Vospominanija i dumy o perelitom, M., 1918, pp. 285-290.
2 S. E. Kryžanovskij, Vospominanija, Berlin, 1938, pp. 36-107. The details of the elaboration of the « Bulygin Constitution » are expertly described in Gilbert Doctorow, Thelntroduction of Parliamentary Institutions in Russia during the Révolution of 1905-1907 (Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1974).
3 To be precise, the distribution was based not directly on property but on the amount of zemstvo taxes paid.
4 Kryžanovskij, op. cit., pp. 42-43.
5 Pobedonoscev, for one, stood firmly for this view of a « social monarchy » at the conference. Althouth he was not at the conference, Witte supported it, too A transcript of the conference discussions held at Peterhof in late July, 1905, was published abroad: Die Peterhofer Beratung. Petergofskoe soveščanie o proekte Gosud. Dumy pod ličnym Ego lmp. Veličestva predsedatel’stvom. Sekretnye protofcoîy, Berlin, n. d.
6 The electoral rules for the borderlands were drawn up separately over the succeeding months.
7 In the process, property in the strict sense in fact ceased to be a prerequisite for qualification in the urban curia; rental of an apartment carried suffrage qualification.
8 Unlike the peasants, however, the workers were not given a separate allotment of deputies in the Duma.
9 As cited in Doctorow, op. cit., p. 181.
10 The number of electors assigned to areas outside European Russia did not substantially affect the proportions of the curiae or even the total size of the elector population. See the Appendix to the August 6 electoral law (Položenie o vyborah v Gosudarstvennuju Dumu). I follow here the texts of the laws and manifestoes of 1905-06 as reproduced in N. I. Lazarevskij, ed., Zakonodatel’nye akty perehodnago vremeni. 1904-1906 gg., 2d ed., SPb., 1907.
11 Bessarabia, Vitebsk, Vologda, Kovno, Olonets, Pskov, Stavropol, and Tauride.
12 Five cities outside European Russia were also accorded special elections
13 In fact, political parties, trade unions, and other voluntary organizations were first legalized only by the rules of March 4, 1906, although they had begun to organize, javočnym porjadkom. ’va the course of 1905.
14 Cf. E. Leroy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, Paris, 1969, p. 209.
15 AU the authors who hâve written about the peasants in the first elections agree on this. See, forexample, M. A. Krol’, Kak proiši vybory v Gosudarstvennuju Dumu, SPb., 1906,passim.
16 An estimate based on the author’s as yet unpublished research. Also see S. M. Sidel’– nikov, Obrazovanie i dejatel’nost’ pervoj Gosudarstvennoj Dumy, M., 1962, p. 136 (table 2).
17 See the tables on the political orientations of electors in Vestnik Partii Narodnoj Svodoby, n- 6 (April 11, 1906), pp. 441-470, with special reference to the provinces of Voronezh, Penza, Riazan, Simbirsk, Tauride, and Kharkov, in ail of which large landowners predominated in the curia.
18 On the second day of ballotting, which was done secretly with balls (Sarikï), a plurality sufficed.
19 These were candidate-electors, but in many of the big–city elections they were preliminarily committed to a spécifie slate of Duma candidates. Printed ballots, often clipped from newspapers, were widely used in these elections.
20 See note 17.
21 Drawn from the source cited in note 17, with certain amendations and corrections of arithmetic errors.
22 The lists were compiled by roll call. Voting was by the same procedure as in the district assemblies described above. Theoretically, an elector could vote for all the candidates. To be sure of success, a group’s adherents had to vote for its candidates and no more. They often failed to do so, and multiple ballottings were commonplace.
23 Author’s compilation from local sources. The deputies £rom the special city election: are not included here.
24 M. Duverger, Les partis politiques, Paris.
25 Administrative hindrances were far more widespread than is usually understood. The novelty of the situation, the still ambiguous status of the parties, the widespread application of the emergency legislation of 1881 and of martial law at this time, and a lack of clear directives from the central government all conspired tc encourage local police and administrators to hew to tradition.
26 The Kadets lacked représentation altogether only in the Baltic provinces of Kurland and Estland (there were local parties affiliated with the Kadets there, however); the Octobrists lacked représentation in the same two provinces, as well as in Viatka and Ufa.
27 From the author’s research on party networks, based on party archives and local newspapers.
28 P. N. Miljukov, « Rokovye gody », Russkie zapiski, 17 May 1939: 108; M. Brainerd, « The Octobrists and the Gentry, 1905-1907: Leaders and Followers? », in L. Haimson, ed., The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905-1914, Bloomington, Ind., 1979, pp. 67-93: 77; E. Birth, Die Oktobristen (1905-1913): Zielvorstellungen und Struktur, Stuttgart, 1974, p. 173.
29 The same of course is true to a large extent of the Octobrist organization, which grew in part out of the minority group that began to take shape in the September, 1905, zemstvo congress, and split with the majority following the October Manifeste.
30 Again, reference is to the author’s unpublished research.
31 This was Miljukov’s defense of participation in the « Bulygin Duma » and it was a constant refrain in early party meetings. There were some in the party leadership, however, who thought in September-October, 1905, that they were founding a temporary coalition for the first elections only, as the minutes of the party’s organizing committee reveal. Central’nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Oktjabr’skoj Revoljucii, M., f. 523 (Konstitucionno-demokratičeskaja partija), op. 1, d. 27.
32 These generalizations are drawn from the author’s manuscript, « The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia ».
33 I. P. Belokonskij, Zemskoe dviženie, M., 1914, pp. 363 ff.
34 The western borderlands alone, not counting Congress Poland, were allotted 93 seats in the Duma.
35 Konstitucionno-demokratičeskaja partija; s” ezd 12-18 oktjabrja 1905 g. (n.p., n.d.).
36 The Kadets swept the assembly élections in 8 provinces: laroslavl, Petersburg, Vladimir, Kostroma, Tver, Arkhangelsk, Simbirsk, and Tauride.
37 As in Kiev and Mogilev.
38 A. Aršaruni and H. Babidullin, Očerkipanislamizma i pantjurkizma v Rossii, M., 1930; G. Ibragimov, Tatary v revoljucii 1905 goda, Kazan’, 1926.
39 Samuel N. Harper, The new electoral law for the Russian Duma, Chicago, 1908.
40 Re/S’, February 15,1906.
41 Or 14,1 percent in the first elections, and 14.3 percent in the second. Compare the tables in Vestnik PNR, n • 6,1906, priloženie, and n • 6,1907, priloženie.
42 See note41.
43 See note41.
44 Šipov, op. cit., ch. 11; and the stenographie record of the Tsarskoe Selo conférence published in Byloe, 1917, n • 3, pp. 238-244.
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