MIKH. MOGILYANSKY
THE FIRST STATE DUMA
La Douma est morte, vive la Douma!
S.-PETERBURG
PUBLISHED BY M.V. PIROZHKOV
1907
Translated by Irina Efimov
PREFACE
The First State Duma is already history…
However, a truthful and impartial, unprejudiced history of the Duma will not soon be written and we, the contemporaries of the first popular national government in Russia, will not write it. We — its contemporaries, like those who through election were honoured with the rank of our first popular representatives, that is the members of the Duma, as well as those who worked for and contributed to its development in the broadest sense of these terms, i.e. everyone who supported and committed themselves to the first electoral campaign: those who voted and those who did not, journalists and observers and, finally, members of the public, average citizens, all of us, regardless of whether we held out great hope for the Duma or were sceptical about its role in the progressive development of our country, even negative — all of us still stand at the spring, the very source of all political and social, national and class longing, in the centre of a struggle with no end in sight, granting neither victory to one side, nor defeat to another… Our given role is more that of chroniclers than historians… From our chronicles, future historians will extract material that is indispensable to their work…
But we cannot and should not make ourselves out to be like those chroniclers who calmly observe “the righteous and the guilty”,
“Considering good and evil with indifference, knowing neither pity nor wrath”…
We can leave this type of ideal chronicle to the stenographers. However, a single, dry, photographic stenographer’s record will not be enough for future historians; they will have need of our pity and our wrath, as living evidence of the impressions and influences that the Duma had on its contemporaries…
But in collecting our observations and notes and offering them in this book, it was not our goal to give the future historian of the First State Duma even a particle of material. These notes are too incidental, short, and fleeting for that. But they are all unified by a single, general feeling, a single, general mood which was not only felt by us, personally, but by the entire nation - a feeling now gone and never to be repeated, like the fascination of first love… The First State Duma was the dawn of popular representation in Russia…
And it is not that we should forget the truth, that —
“Nothing is freely given, Fate demands sacrificial offerings.”
But the Russian people have already made so many heavy, dreadful sacrificial offerings that one wants to believe the first results of these sacrifices have already been realized and firmly assimilated!…
The sudden ending of these hopes, pinned on the Duma, has not reduced us to despair and has not persuaded us that we were wrong to have put so much effort and energy into the creation of this Duma through participation in the electoral contest, in lively debate and in print, through the taking up of new arms, bloodless and peaceful — electoral pamphlets… La Douma est morte, vive la Douma! The future history of Russia proceeds from the First State Duma. For those who consider this, it will appear so natural to want to strengthen that frame of mind which the Duma witnessed during its first steps, its successes and failures, its joys and anxieties, its colossal work for the benefit of the country and its people… Researchers who revert to the volumes of stenographers’ reports, hoping to resurrect an image of the State Duma in their minds, may perhaps find it in these fleeting notes. Along with this, in supporting a certain political tactic, offering notes on its practical application and its struggle with other political methods, we popularize it. In accounts of the past, we safeguard the slogans of the future…
Our first-hand observations of the Duma began on the day it opened, that is from 27 April to 9 June, inclusively. The first section of the book (“In the Duma”) is made up of cursory sketches based on our impressions of the Duma, written as if keeping a Duma diary. We did not compile detailed notes on the meetings of the Duma. We recorded an account of our own impressions, an account that was typically jotted down quickly under the clamour and murmur of voices somewhere in the corridors of the Duma, or in the reading room of the Peoples’ Freedom Party, for whom the question of the State Duma’s political role stood above all others… Also included in this section are several newspaper articles that we wrote at that time, dictated by developments within the Duma, defending certain positions while calling others into question. The thoughts and theories in these articles are inseparably linked with our impressions of the Duma…
On 10 June, I needed to leave Petersburg to spend some time in several provincial towns for the duration of the Duma’s life and influence. Other business filled up my time but, while carefully following developments in the Duma as reported in the press, I occasionally wrote articles, by and large for provincial newspapers, regarding what was occurring in the Duma, or concerning questions that were linked with the Duma’s activities. The majority of these articles have been included in the second section of this book (“About the Duma”).
I returned to Petersburg on the morning of 9 July…
Notes and sketches written under the immediate impact of the Duma’s dissolution and events that followed make up the third section of this book (“The Dissolution of the Duma. After the Duma”). Here, a number of newspaper articles are also included that address events closely linked with the “national disaster” — the dissolution of the Duma and the work of the Stolypin cabinet, baptized by “the government of dissolution”…
In preparing this book for publication, we organized the chosen materials in chronological order. These materials come from the Petersburg newspapers “Duma” and “Rech’”, from the weekly journal “Ukrainskiy Vestnik” and from the provincial papers “Desna” (Chernigov) and “Volyn” (Zhitomir).
Spb., 10 November 1906. Mikh. Mogliyansky
P. S.
The publication of this book was nearing completion when it occurred to us that, in a book about the First State Duma, it made sense to preface it with some notes concerning the electoral campaign. These notes might characterize the political conditions and mood that existed at the time the elections to the First Duma were held. We were personally involved in the electoral campaign through membership in the Kiev-Regional Committee of the People’s Freedom Party, working in the city of Kiev as well as in the Gorodnya region of the province of Chernigov. If, however, we decided to offer a picture of the electoral campaign from personal impressions and observations, it would have long postponed the appearance of this book. Therefore, this approach needed to be rejected. But, in hopes of fulfilling this purpose to some extent, we added a fourth section to the book — “Notes on the Moods of the Peasants”. (By our reckoning, this section belongs at the beginning and we recommend that it be read first.) These “Notes” extend a little beyond the frame of a particular electoral campaign: in addition, the reader will find selected observations and excerpts from the findings of the Zemstvo, and short sketches of agrarian court cases in which the author was given the opportunity to act as legal counsel for the defence. For us, the grounds for including these notes are that they are relevant, under the circumstances, in that each was written in its time with the aim of characterizing the political conditions and moods of the peasants and, if they do not belong entirely to the period in question, they are close enough.
This fourth section further extends the amount of varied material in our book on the State Duma. We admit this, but in the circumstances in which the book was created, a certain diversity in its content was inevitable… We believe, however, that this variety will not prevent us from reaching the goals we set out to achieve.
Spb. 12 December M. M.