Introduction: The Russian Landed Nobility and the System of the Third of June

LEOPOLD H. HAIMSON

The chief object of the contributions to this volume will be to describe the political role that the Russian countryside—and particularly the remarkably small group of landed nobles who ruled it, with the assistance of the provincial officials of the tsarist bureaucracy—played under the regime that became known, after the coup d’état of June 1907, as the System of the Third of June.

The politics of the Russian countryside have traditionally been assigned a large place in historical accounts of 1905 and its background: after all, it is difficult to ignore the fact that “zemstvo” liberalism and the social and political disaffection among the landed nobility on which it bred, along with the peasants’ agrarian disorders of 1905–1907, were significant factors in Russia’s First Revolution. The politics of rural Russia have also figured, though less prominently, in analyses of the Revolution of 1917 and its Civil War aftermath. But ours may well be the first volume to attempt to consider systematically the weight that the rulers of rural Russia carried in the Russian body politic during the period between these two major revolutions, even though in the absence of such studies it is impossible to determine on what social basis the political system of Imperial Russia actually rested in the critical decade between 1907 and 1917: to establish the sources of its shortterm political resilience, as well as of its eventual dramatic collapse.

The lack of attention to this subject, at least until recent years, is partially explainable by the fact that the events of Russia’s Second Revolution—from March to October 1917—were largely shaped in urban, commercial, industrial Russia, with the countryside appearing, at least in the short run, to fall rather rapidly into line. And it is even true that in the years that followed—as civil war spread to the whole Russian land—it was urban Russia that largely contributed the ideologies and the political and military cadres of the various camps that then fought over the future of the Russian body politic.

It is not, therefore, altogether surprising that since 1917 the attention of most Western as well as Soviet historians has been riveted on the politics of urban Russia, as they have sought to unravel the antecedents and the eventual unfolding of the Russian Revolution. This emphasis is all the more understandable when we consider that most of the analyses that these historians inherited from prerevolutionary political observers were themselves characterized by the same narrow focus of attention. It is in this connection that we come to the heart of our concern: the historiographical problem posed by the assumptions—and more broadly the perceptual set—that we have inherited, by and large unconsciously, from the descriptions of the politics of pre-1917 Russia that were drawn for us by contemporaries. Most of these contemporary descriptions, as well as memoiristic accounts, were recorded by men who, whatever the shades of their politics, were predominantly members of Russia’s urban intelligentsia, or at least representative of its urban culture. Even when they sought to take account of the political facts of rural life, most of these men almost inevitably projected onto it values, perceptions—and a sense of the ultimate significance of phenomena and events—that had been shaped, and continued to the end to be fed, by the dynamics of urban life. Above all, it was almost impossible for these urbanized men not to believe that the politics in which they were involved—the parties of which they were members, the platforms that they supported, and the issues over which they so fervently fought—were not necessarily the politics of all of Russia. And during the long stretch of time in which the countryside appeared dormant, and irresponsive to their pleas, it was even more difficult for them to conceive that its politics, or more precisely what appeared in their eyes to be its lack of politics, could really weigh decisively on Russia’s immediate political destiny, or even provide a significant explanation for its contemporary situation.

Thus it was, for example, that when, after the coup d’état of June 1907, the realization of their political defeat descended on the councils of the Kadet party, it was difficult for many of its leaders, and more generally for the urban intelligentsia from which the party drew most of its members, to believe that they had suffered a truly enduring setback. To be sure, some Kadet observers were quick to attribute their party’s defeat to errors of political judgment on the part of their own leaders as well as of their would-be allies to the left. But by the same token, these critics assumed that since the errors of their own party had been largely responsible for its defeat, this outcome was within their own power to redress: a more moderate, rigorously constitutional stance, a responsible posture of “organic opposition”—the advocacy within and outside the Duma’s walls of tangible, if more limited, reforms and the systematic pursuit of equally moderate, “responsible” political tactics to achieve them—would eventually regain for them the support of a parliamentary majority in the Duma, even under the onerous terms of the new electoral system.

By 1912, buoyed by the signs of mounting opposition in urban Russia, the leaders of the Kadet party believed that their time had come, and they entered the electoral campaign to the Fourth Duma with high hopes, as well as with the firm conviction that the condition for their fulfillment was to maintain throughout the campaign the moderate and responsible political stance that they had assumed since the opening of the Third Duma. And most of the members of the Kadet Central Committee found it hard to believe their ears when the chief author of the strategy, P. N. Miliukov, finally told them, in light of the election returns, that the hopes and the strategy had proven bankrupt. Indeed, it was only on the very eve of the war that most Kadet leaders finally came to realize that within the existing political framework, the path of reform, of peaceful political change—and indeed, the formation of the opposition majority in the Duma without which it could not even be pursued—appeared beyond reach.

In retrospect, the Kadets’ earlier optimism, especially on the eve of the Fourth Duma elections, may well appear astonishing. After all, the leaders of the Kadet party were politically far more sophisticated than they have sometimes been represented (or indeed represented themselves); and they were far from oblivious of the administrative pressures and restrictions under which the elections were to be held, not to speak of the sheer mechanics of an electoral system of which their party had been one of the chief victims in the elections, held five years earlier, to the Third Duma.

The optimism becomes more understandable when we ask ourselves what were the sources of information available by 1912 to Kadet leaders about the politics of rural Russia. As the reports to the Kadet Central Committee indicate, local party organization had by this time withered away even in most provincial towns (so, for that matter, had the local organizations of all other parties, including the Octobrists). Under the circumstances, aside from their readings of a largely urban press, Kadet leaders now gathered their impressions of rural Russia primarily from their periodic lecture tours of provincial cities (especially provincial capitals). It was from their talks with the party activists and sympathizers who attended these lectures that Kadet leaders drew their sense of the mood of provincial society and of the countryside.

Little did the Kadet leaders realize in the course of these conversations that they were really talking to themselves, or more precisely to representatives of a liberal provincial intelligentsia who had become as estranged as they were from the mood of rural Russia. For by 1912, not to speak of the time of the Beilis case, the members of this provincial intelligentsia—journalists, lawyers, doctors, and even many officials (including ones of noble origin)—and those noble landowners who resided at least on a part-time basis in the same provincial cities and towns, moved in almost entirely different worlds, with no genuine points of contact. As one commentator put it,¹ the inhabitants of these two worlds still met—more or less peacefully—at the theater, on the boulevard, in the public park. But they now belonged to different clubs, attended different public lectures, and were no longer welcome at each others’ soirées. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it took the returns of the Fourth Duma elections to make Kadet leaders realize that the mood of the voters of the urban curiae was not necessarily that of rural Russia, and even then they did not admit the full political implications of this fact—so grim were the political alternatives that they raised.

Marxist commentators were quicker to recognize after the Stolypin coup d’état the resiliency, at least in the short run, of the political system it had created. Given their rejection of the path of reform and continued advocacy of revolution, it was easier for them to do so. Most readers will be familiar with the explanatory scheme that Lenin drew to account for this resiliency of the System of the Third of June: the conception of a “Bonapartist” regime, or more precisely of a political and social system seeking to adapt to the requirements of capitalist development—and to the pressures of the social formations that this development fostered—even while continuing to maintain its earlier sources of support among the more traditionally oriented elements of its service class, and among the pomeshchiki, the more traditionally minded noble landowners of the countryside.

Actually, this formulation is but an approximation of Lenin’s thought, for his most characteristic and basic assumption was that all the political, social, and economic dimensions of the System of the Third of June were profoundly distorted by the various remnants of the peculiar historical heritage that it had preserved. The whole body politic—and all the social formations represented in it—constituted, in varying combinations and degrees, amalgams of precapitalist and capitalist elements, reflecting Russia’s current general condition of polukrepost-nichestvo, semiserfdom. Even the groups in national life most closely identified with the dynamics of the new capitalist age—the commercial industrial class of the cities and towns, but also their increasingly “bourgeois” intelligentsia; those landowners of the countryside who were now engaged in the modernization of their estates, but also the kulaks, the class of rich peasants now growing even more rapidly at the expense of the middle and poor peasants under the spur of the Stolypin land reforms—were but grotesque, caricaturized versions of Western capitalist development, profoundly marked in their political psychology and behavior, just as in their socioeconomic situation, by Russia’s cursed heritage of autocracy, arbitrariness, and serfdom.

As Lenin saw it, the political expression of this curious amalgam of past and present in national politics was a regime balancing itself, depending on the nature of the specific policies it sought to pursue, between alternative right-center (i.e., right cum Octobrist) and leftcenter (i.e., Kadet cum Octobrist) majorities in the Duma—a precarious balancing act, to be sure, but one that accounted for the political resiliency now being displayed by the tsarist regime, as well as for its ultimate fragility.

Even this scheme (from which Lenin partially deviated in practice by the eve of the First World War) involved a considerable overestimation of the political support for the Regime of the Third of June among the social groups represented in urban, commercial, industrial Russia, an overestimation that was understandable, to be sure, within the peculiar perspective of Lenin’s own revolutionary goals. Besides, we should note that most of Lenin’s Menshevik opponents (their earlier enthusiasm about a “bourgeois” revolution notwithstanding) also wrestled with some variant of this conception, especially during the depressing years of political quiescence in urban Russia up to the eve of the First World War. In fact, it was even more psychologically imperative for the Mensheviks—more unqualifiedly persuaded, as they were, of the backwardness, the “political idiocy,” of the countryside—to believe that, if the tsarist regime now seemed to have regained a measure of political stability, it was because it had managed, at least temporarily, to win some political base in urban capitalist Russia, especially among its “big” commercial-industrial class. Notwithstanding the hackles that he occasionally raised, the most heterodox of the Menshevik commentators on this subject, Ermansky, was not alone among Menshevik observers in wondering whether, under these circumstances, another “bourgeois” revolution was really in the cards for Russia—or whether, if another revolution did come, it would not from its very outset see the Russian bourgeoisie firmly encamped on the side of reaction.²

What all these various contemporary views of Russia’s political situation and of her likely immediate future basically shared, of course, was the assumption that the Regime of the Third of June could not possibly have won, or maintained, however brief a measure of political stability without staking out some kind of political base in urban as well as rural Russia, without adapting to some degree to the political and social values, and the economic needs and aspirations, of at least some of the constituent groups of this newer, more vital part of the Russian body politic.

It may well be argued that this assumption was negatively confirmed, in the long run, by the dramatic collapse of the tsarist regime. But what is more significant for our purposes is that it profoundly affected and distorted all judgments of immediate realities, and these distortions were passed on, largely unexamined, to later generations of historians. In most contemporary as well as subsequent political analyses of the Regime of the Third of June, this bias was reflected, for example, in a tendency to overestimate the political weight that the “big bourgeoisie,” the commercial-industrial class, carried in the councils of the Union of 17 October, the more moderate of the political formations, which, for a time, provided the Regime of the Third of June with a major share of its political support in “society.”³ It also induced many contemporary as well as subsequent commentators to minimize the degree to which members of the commercial-industrial class, and more generally voters of the more prosperous first curiae of the cities and towns, had in fact moved to the left by the outbreak of the First World War. Finally, and perhaps most important, it caused many observers to minimize the gravity of the political dilemmas that already confronted the councils of Russian liberalism by the eve of the war, and, more broadly, to perceive inadequately the character of the political crisis that was already besetting urban Russia—in its confrontation of the political cultures of rural Russia—even before the guns sounded to open the last chapter in the history of the tsarist regime.

One of the chief purposes of this volume will be to bring out, at least implicitly, the nature of this confrontation by examining at close hand the political attitudes and behavior of the constituent groups of rural Russia, as well as the role that their political cultures actually played in the System of the Third of June. Most of our attention will be focused on a remarkably small and cohesive social group, the Russian landed nobility—or more precisely, those of its male members over twenty-five years of age who possessed and maintained estates large enough to qualify them for full census in elections to the zemstvos, the State Council, and the State Duma.

Historians have readily recognized the significance of the role that this group—essentially, the adult male members of approximately thirty thousand families of the landowning nobility—exercised in the governance and politics of Imperial Russia before 1905: that it was they who effectively ruled over rural Russia by virtue of their preponderant position in local organs of self-government, as well as through the political, social, and economic controls that they maintained, under normal circumstances, over the peasants who leased or worked part of their land. Historians have recognized equally readily that it was these landed nobles who effectively dominated (chiefly through their provincial and county marshals of nobility) the actual workings of a provincial bureaucratic machinery, which, in any event, did not extend its tentacles much beyond the various provincial capitals, and which continued to depend, de facto if not de jure, on representatives of the landed nobility to implement their directives.

This is not to deny the seriousness of the rift that had been exposed by the turn of the century between the government’s central bureaucracy and much of the rank and file of this provincial landed nobility. The crisis of Russian agriculture, which had caused many of these landed nobles to return to their estates in the 1880s and seek, as best they could, to administer them more profitably; a return to the land, which had also caused them to immerse themselves with a new zest and intensity of purpose in the activities of their corporate organizations and of local organs of self-government; the government’s own policies of forced-draft industrialization of the 1890s, to which many of these noble landowners were quick to attribute much of the blame for their current economic difficulties; the administrative tutelage that the government sought to maintain and tighten over organs of local self-government precisely as these nobles’ “involvement” in these organs grew in intensity—all contributed to a genuine disaffection among these provincial nobles, which the liberal movement successfully tapped after the turn of the century for its sources of initial support. One may even explore and test the view, recently expounded by some Soviet as well as Western historians, that as the tsarist bureaucracy grew in importance—drawing into its ranks in steadily larger numbers men from other estates as well as nobles who did not originate from the hereditary landed nobility—a dimension of social and cultural conflict (which had never been entirely absent) between the bureaucracy and the landed nobility was aggravated, and contributed to the severity of the political crisis.⁴

In her contribution to this volume, Roberta Manning has sought to explore these social dimensions of the political conflict between the state power and the landed nobility after the turn of the century. Her essay substantially adds to our sense of the breadth and the depth of the political disaffection that the landed nobility underwent by the summer of 1905. Even more importantly, she has successfully drawn for us a picture of the psychological dynamics that underlay the new image of their potential role in national life to which many of these provincial nobles were genuinely, if temporarily, converted during this period of disaffection; as well as the process of reaction that caused most of them, already by the time of the elections to the First Duma, largely to give up this new self-image, although not entirely to revert to their earlier conception of their relationship to state and society.

Indeed, it bears emphasizing that neither psychologically nor from an institutional point of view did the Regime of the Third of June simply restore a status quo ante. During the premiership of P. A. Stolypin, this regime saw, however briefly, the unleashing of the reforming instincts of part of the state bureaucracy. But precisely in response to these pressures for reforms—and in particular for the “democratization” of the institutions of local self-government, which the nobility had so exclusively dominated since the late eighteenth century, as well as for the extension and rationalization of bureaucratic rule in the countryside—the Stolypin era also witnessed the effective political mobilization of the provincial landowning nobility. No longer willing to entrust its fate to the state power and its officials, this nobility was now also more firmly in a position in the new political framework that had emerged by June 1907 to resist whatever innovative tendencies the bureaucracy was inclined to display whenever such innovations were seen by noble landlords to impinge on their ruling position in the Russian land.

Indeed, here lay a crying contradiction, which the eventual fate of Stolypin’s sweeping projects of local reforms would fully unveil. Even as it sought to reshape the institutional system as well as the agricultural organization of Russia’s countryside in a spirit more in accord with its conception of modernity, the Stolypin regime found itself compelled to concede, willy-nilly, a greater share of political power to the one group in society whose social and economic decline these institutional changes were designed to reflect, if not to accelerate.

In my view, the most significant, if perhaps the most controversial, of the implications of the contributions to this volume will be to suggest that precisely as a result of Russia’s post-1905 political constitution —of the emergence of the reorganized State Council, but also of the State Duma (once the elections to it were revamped by the legislation of June 1907), as well as of that often ignored proto-Duma, the Council of Local Economy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which was revived, partially under the pressure of the landed nobility, after the government’s original projects of local reforms were submitted to the Second Duma)—a minute group of Russian society, amounting to little more than thirty thousand nobles of the countryside, found itself in a better position to resist the government’s administrative and legislative initiatives in the last decade of the tsarist regime than it had been since the late eighteenth century.

One dimension of this domination of the political system by the landed nobility needs to be elaborated here. It is the mechanics of the system that governed elections to the State Duma, and the modifications introduced in it at the time of the Stolypin coup d’état. With some major modifications, the Law of June 3, 1907, left intact the basic structure of the electoral system, which had been drawn up in the summer of 1905 and modified in December 1905 to govern Duma elections. This legislation had divided those males over twenty-five years of age to whom it had given the suffrage into a series of curiae. With the exception of the voters of twenty-five major cities who were granted direct suffrage, the voters of the various curiae into which the body politic was divided were to select separately and by stages (varying in numbers for different curiae) provincial electors (vyborshchiki), who were eventually to gather at their respective provincial electoral assemblies to select the quota of curial and at-large deputies allocated to their particular provinces.

By the time it was issued, the legislation under which the elections to the First Duma were held bore a compromise character reflecting the various conflicting considerations that had been raised during long conferences, in summer and fall of 1905, at which the legislation had been discussed.⁵ In these discussions the argument prevailed that an electoral system resting on the principle of representation by sosloviia (hereditary estates), under which noblemen, peasants, and townsmen would elect separately representatives to the Duma (a principle feebly advocated by a few diehards of the bureaucracy and the landed nobility) would not be politically viable: it would not be acceptable to the masses of the population, especially in Russia’s urban centers; nor, for that matter, did it appear justified by the current political behavior of the landed nobility. So did the argument prevail that no significant segment of the population could be disfranchised, if political tranquility was to be restored (the tsar was particularly insistent on this point). Yet, even while realizing this, the majority of those who participated in these debates ultimately recoiled from the adoption, at least for the moment, of the principle of direct and equal suffrage advocated by liberal spokesmen, for fear of allowing the nizi, the lower strata of Russian society, to overwhelm its more “cultured” and propertied elements.

The solution adopted was to retain the compromise between the property and soslovie criteria of the curial system originally worked out in the summer of 1905 (for the so-called Bulygin Duma), but to broaden the suffrage to allow for some representation of all major groups of the population. As it ultimately emerged on December 11, 1905, the legislation thus reflected an amalgam of long-term as well as short-term considerations about the Russian body politic: about what public opinion would, and would not, stand for at this moment; but also about where the constituent groups of Russian society might be headed politically in Russia’s painful evolution from a society of sosloviia into a society of classes.

The heaviest legacy of the past was reflected in the decision to establish a separate curia for the seventy-odd million members of the communal peasantry. This decision to provide a separate curia for communal peasants could be theoretically justified in a curial system otherwise resting on property criteria on the ground that the land allotments (nadely) that qualified the peasants who held them to vote in this curia could not be freely bought or sold, and thus did not constitute private property, under the complex regulations of the Emancipation and post-Emancipation legislation. (As we shall see, this rationale was given additional conviction under the Law of December 11 by the provision that communal peasants who had acquired land in private title were allowed to vote in the curia that was assigned to landed proprietors.)

In any event, qualified voters of the communal peasantry, or more precisely of these peasants’ selskie obshchestva (the bodies that selected the village communes’ elected officials and helped administer their affairs), were, under the terms of the 1905 legislation, to elect anew, in the first stage of the Duma elections in their curia, their representatives on the volost’nye s”ezdy, these peasants’ organs of selfadministration at the district level. The members of these district assemblies were then to select from their own midst representatives (upol’nomochennye) to county assemblies (uezdnye s”ezdy). And these county assemblies, in turn, were to elect, once again from among their own members, the quota of provincial electors (vyborshchiki) allocated to the curia of the communal peasantry in their respective counties. It was these provincial electors who were eventually to represent the communal peasantry in the transactions of the various provincial electoral assemblies at which deputies to the State Duma were to be selected. (See figure 1.)

In the minds of its authors, this complicated and cumbersome system of separate and indirect elections was clearly intended to segregate as much as possible communal peasants from other categories of voters. But as the records of the conferences at which the system was designed clearly indicate, this decision, as originally conceived, reflected a variety of motives. One of them admittedly was not to allow Duma elections to be swept entirely by a sea of peasant votes. But another equally compelling consideration—which had influenced the character of peasant legislation since Emancipation—was a genuine desire to protect communal peasants from other groups in society as well as from themselves: to safeguard these purportedly politically unsophisticated, if not illiterate, peasants from the wiles of outside political agitators, and indeed from the political pressures of other groups in the countryside, including nobles; to ensure that at every stage in the elections peasants would select representatives known to them, and capable of effectively representing their interests, so that in this fashion the Duma to be convened would include a large body of deputies truly representative of the peasant estate.

Underlying all these arguments, it must be remembered, was the conviction, still widely held in government circles when the Law of December 11 was issued, that, if left to themselves, the masses of the Russian peasantry would elect to the Duma representatives who would prove faithful to their tsar and to the motherland. Indeed, the sincerity of this conviction, and more generally of the desire to ensure a genuine and significant representation of the peasant estate in the Duma to be elected was tangibly reflected in several provisions of the electoral law.

In the first place, the county assemblies of the peasant curia (s”ezdy upol’nomochennykh ot volostei) were assigned 43 percent of the total number of electors allocated to the fifty-one provincial electoral assemblies of European Russia—far from proportional representation, to be sure, but still a greater number than that assigned to any other curia. Another provision specified that the first order of business of each provincial electoral assembly was to be the selection of one peasant curial deputy from among the electors representing the peasant curia. In the legislation of December 1905 the peasant curia was the only one so singled out; all the other deputies allocated to each province, having to be elected at large, by majorities or pluralities of the electors from all curiae attending the provincial electoral assemblies. And the statute as originally drawn further specified that only the electors from the communal peasantry in attendance at the provincial electoral assemblies were to participate in the selection of their curial deputies.

Finally, we should remind the reader of the political role that the 1905 legislation enabled the peasantry to play in the elections of the landowners’ curia by allowing all peasants owning land in private title to vote in this curia. Indeed, the electoral law provided that the landowners’ curia—the second major curia in which voters of the countryside were segregated—was to include all qualified voters owning land in private title, or other immovable property, regardless of their sos-lovnost’, their hereditary estate affiliation.

To be sure, even under the terms of the 1905 legislation, in the landowners’ curia a special weight was assigned in the electoral process to large proprietors (most of whom were in fact nobles), on the grounds of the “exceptional” cultural as well as economic role that they were alleged to play in the countryside. Specifically, all proprietors who qualified for full census in their respective provinces were entitled to participate directly in the county assemblies that selected the quota of provincial electors allocated to the landowners’ curia in their respective counties. But the electoral law also provided that all other land proprietors, however small their holdings, as well as eligible owners of small immovable property in the countryside, were entitled to attend preliminary assemblies (predvaritel’nye s”ezdy) to select representatives (upol’nomochennye), who in turn were allowed to participate, side-by-side with proprietors qualifying for full census, in the transactions of the county assemblies of the landowners’ curia. (See figure 1.)

This is not to deny the ultimate inequity of the legislation, even in its original formulation. The Law of December 1905 allocated some 32 percent of the total number of provincial electors in the fifty-one provinces of European Russia to the landowners’ curia. Of these, a major portion would actually consist of large proprietors with full census, of whom no more than thirty thousand were probably on the rolls of the various county assemblies of this curia, and a much smaller number actually voted. But the fact remains that in the First and even the Second Duma elections (when the electoral rules were already substantially modified), peasant smallholders participating in the county assemblies of the landowners’ curia also managed to elect a good many of their own numbers to the various provincial electoral assemblies. (According to the governors’ reports to the Council of Ministers, 26 percent of the provincial electors of the landowners’ curia selected in the elections to the First Duma were in fact peasant smallholders, and only 46 percent large noble landowners.)⁶

The last major curia defined by the electoral law of December 1905 was established for urban voters outside of the twenty-five major cities that were allowed direct suffrage. Notwithstanding the opposition sentiments that the authors of the legislation undoubtedly expected of them, the county assemblies of these urban voters were assigned a rather generous quota of some 23.5 percent of the total number of provincial electors in the fifty-one provinces of European Russia. It has been estimated that altogether, in these fifty-one provinces, the quota of provincial electors allocated to the landowners’ curia (1,955) amounted to one elector per two thousand landowners; that of the urban curia (1,352) to one per four thousand city-dwellers; that of the curia of the communal peasantry (2,532) to one per thirty thousand peasants; and that of the curia for qualified industrial workers outside the twenty-five major cities to one per ninety thousand.⁷

Thus, even in its 1905 version, this electoral system was a far cry from the one-man-one-vote demanded by the spokesmen of liberal and radical opinion. It discriminated heavily against voters in the peasant curia and very sharply in favor of the thirty thousand large proprietors with full census who were entitled to vote directly in the county assemblies of the landowners’ curia. Yet even under these provisions, the provincial electors of the curia of the communal peasantry were able to elect a near majority of peasant deputies in the elections to the First Duma: partly by combining forces at the provincial electoral assemblies with peasant smallholders elected from the landowners’ curia; partly, when necessary, by engaging in coalition politics with the electors from the urban curia, as well as with the admittedly small number of large landowners who still held on to their liberal and “people-loving” sentiments of the past. The political cohesion displayed by the peasant smallholders of the landowners’ curia and the electors of the curia of the communal peasantry was especially remarkable. Through their alliance, peasant electors managed to gain an absolute majority in twelve provincial electoral assemblies, in addition to the thirteen where they had been assured such a majority by the electoral law, and they used these majorities to elect to the First Duma 210 deputies from their own estate (out of a total of 524).

At first, the government was by no means displeased with the result, as a great many of these peasant deputies of the First Duma (in contrast to the Second Duma’s peasant deputies, who would be largely drawn from the politically suspect peasant intelligentsia) were in fact “serye,” “grey” peasants, truly representative in their social economic profiles of the masses of the Russian peasantry. But the hopes that these rank-and-file peasants would prove politically conservative were quickly dispelled. Because of their burning desire for a radical solution of the land question at the expense of the now sobered-up landowning nobility, the “grey” peasant deputies of the First Duma were irresistibly drawn into the camp of the opposition. The peasants’ clamor for the expropriation of gentry land could not be stilled even after the dissolution of the First Duma and the issuance by decree of the new Stolypin land legislation. And this, more than any other single issue, was the chief catalyst for the Stolypin coup d’état of June 1907—for the forcible dissolution of the Second Duma and the arbitrary imposition of a new law to govern Duma elections.

The new electoral law bluntly and sweepingly sought to achieve its purpose—of returning, at long last, a safe and conservative Duma majority—in a number of ways: by introducing a variety of devices to make the electoral process more susceptible to administrative manipulation; by redefining the criteria of eligibility to the various curiae; and, above all, by drastically reducing the number of electors and deputies that had been allocated to all the groups of the population that had been drawn into the political opposition in the first two Duma elections, while increasing just as drastically the electoral weight of those segments of the electorate that could now be expected to return safe progovernmental majorities.

Many of these new provisions have been adequately discussed elsewhere, and need not detain us unduly.⁸ They included a drastically reduced representation for Russia’s borderlands (by over 50 percent), as well as an increased guaranteed representation for the politically more loyal Russian minorities of their populations. The number of major cities allowed direct suffrage was drastically reduced (from twenty-five to seven), and the remaining urban voters were divided into two curiae (see figure 2): a first urban curia for well-to-do urban voters, who were now expected to vote for conservative or at least moderate candidates; and a second urban curia, which was assigned a smaller quota than the first, for the far more numerous but politically suspect urban voters who did not meet the census requirements for the first curia. (This proved to be one of the few incorrect calculations of the authors of the new electoral law, for in the Third, and especially in the Fourth Duma elections, even the more prosperous voters of the first urban curia voted predominantly for the opposition.)

But the most drastic, and also the most effective, changes in the new electoral law were those that affected the politics of the countryside. The changes imposed on the curia of the communal peasantry included the restriction of the suffrage in it to heads of households permanently residing in their sel’skoe obshchestvo and regularly engaged in the cultivation of their land allotments. (This modification had already been introduced by a “clarification” of the Governing Senate on the eve of the Second Duma elections but had only been applied haphazardly in these elections, and with little political effect.) The new law also eliminated the provision for the reelection of the membership of the peasants’ district assemblies in the first stage of Duma elections in the peasant curia, as well as the requirement that the curial deputies of the peasant curia be selected by the peasant electors alone. (Like the curial deputies who were also assigned by the new electoral law to the landowners’ and urban curiae, they were now to be elected by majorities or pluralities of the electors from all curiae attending the provincial electoral assemblies.)

The political impact of these various changes in the electoral procedures of the peasant curia will be scrutinized later in this volume (see Eugene Vinogradoff’s essay, pp.222–25, and my concluding section, pp.286–88). Suffice it to say at this point that, in my view, they would not have been fully effective in achieving their purpose of ensuring a docile peasant electorate without the drastic alterations that were also imposed in the character and functioning of the landowners’ curia, and especially in the proportion of provincial electors who were now assigned to this curia relative to the peasant curia. It was these alterations that made it apparent to the vast majority of Russian peasants that the new Duma to be elected would be a “barskaia” Duma, one so dominated by large noble landowners that it was hardly likely to be considerate of the aspirations of the peasant estate, and above all of the peasants’ dream of a new Black Partition. The various modifications imposed by the new law did in fact ensure the domination of the electoral process by the large landowners of the countryside.

In the first place, the law drastically restricted the access to the landowners’ curia of the peasant smallholders of private land, who in the First Duma elections, it will be recalled, had managed to gather some 22 percent of the provincial electors in this curia. Clarifications issued by the Governing Senate on the eve of the elections to the Second Duma had already prohibited members of the peasant soslovie holding land in private title from voting in the landowners’ curia if they also held allotment land qualifying them to vote in the curia of the communal peasantry (or even if the land the peasants held in private title had been purchased with the help of mortgages issued by the Peasant Bank). The Law of June 3 now prohibited peasants from voting in the landowners’ curia even if they had bought out their allotment land—simply by virtue of the fact of their still being technically members of a sel’skoe obshchestvo, the administrative unit in which all members of a village commune had to be legally enrolled.⁹ As a result, the only peasant smallholders left on the rolls of the landowners’ curia were small proprietors who had long been completely isolated, socially as well as economically, from other members of the peasant estate, and who, because of this isolation, could be expected not to play any significant part in the political process.

In addition, a number of administrative devices were legalized and widely used by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Third and Fourth Duma elections to minimize further the political role that these isolated peasant proprietors might play in these elections. Preliminary assemblies of small proprietors could themselves be subdivided according to the relative size of the landholdings of the voters on their rolls. Depending upon what opportunity dictated, members of the clergy who qualified as small proprietors by virtue of being wardens of church property could be assigned to separate subcuriae or combined with other small proprietors. Preliminary assemblies were held with little or no advance warning and only in county towns, often far removed from the residences of peasant voters.¹⁰ In substance, everything was done to discourage small peasant proprietors who still qualified from voting in the landowners’ curia, and because of these obstacles as well as political indifference or disillusionment, they no longer bothered to do so. Only some 10 percent of the 275,000 small proprietors still on the rolls actually voted in the elections to the Third Duma, and the percentage was probably even lower in the Fourth Duma elections (by far the lowest rate of participation of any curia or subcuria).¹¹ And the overwhelming majority of these 10 percent were wardens of Orthodox churches and other qualified members of the Orthodox clergy who, pursuant to the government’s instructions, had been mobilized by their church hierarchy to ensure the election of safe conservative majorities.

Despite the noises sounded by the opposition, these representatives of the clergy did not usually exploit the frequent numerical superiority and discipline of their ranks to select provincial electors, and eventually Duma deputies, chiefly from their own midst. Heeding the instructions of their superiors to select whenever possible majorities of conservative noble landowners, they were largely content, both at the county assemblies of landowners and at the provincial electoral assemblies, to elect but a relatively modest proportion of members of the clergy, and to blackball noble proprietors only in those rare instances when they still espoused opposition sentiments.¹² (By the Fourth Duma elections, however, representatives of the Orthodox clergy also sought to blackball with some frequency those noble candidates who had displeased them by their excessive zeal in the promotion of legislation in support of religious toleration and of state control of parish elementary schools.) The net result of the new measures and practices I have described was to ensure, in almost all provinces of the empire, the total domination of the landowners’ curia by the thirty-thousand-odd large proprietors who qualified for full census, and of whom little over ten thousand actually voted in the Third and Fourth Duma elections.¹³

Under the circumstances, only one further measure was required to ensure the domination by large landowners of the whole electoral process, and thereby the return of safe progovernmental majorities to the Duma: to increase drastically the proportion of electors allocated to the landowners’ curia at the various provincial assemblies. This step was unashamedly taken by the authors of the Law of June 3, largely at the expense of voters of the peasant curia. The new law raised the aggregate proportion of electors of the landowners’ curia from 31 percent to 50.4 percent of the total number of electors in the fifty-one provincial electoral assemblies of European Russia, and it reduced the proportion of electors from the curia of the communal peasantry from 43 percent to 22 percent. To be sure, this relative percentage of electors from the landowners’ and peasant curiae was unevenly distributed among the various provincial electoral assemblies. Even so, electors of the landowners’ curia were ensured an absolute majority in thirty-one of the fifty-one provinces of European Russia. And in an effort to eradicate all traces of peasant radicalism from the electoral process, this redistribution was particularly dramatic in those provinces with vast peasant majorities (especially in the Central Agricultural and Volga regions) that had been most heavily beset by agrarian disorders in 1905–1907 and had elected to the first two Dumas especially radically minded deputies, at least on the land question.¹⁴

The sum total of these changes proved, in actual practice, to be a considerable overinsurance. Indeed, as these measures were mechanically applied by lower officials, with little regard for the specific conditions prevalent in each province, the consequent results were often absurd. In many cases, because of the scarcity of large landowners, fewer voters actually appeared at county assemblies of the landowners’ curia than the quota of electors allocated to them, with the result that these assemblies were unable to elect their full complement of electors.¹⁵ To be sure, such absurd cases were the exception rather than the rule (although as a result of the gradual disappearance of large landowners from the countryside, their number, in both zemstvo and Duma elections, steadily increased as the war approached). In the elections to the Third Duma, for example, enough qualified voters did attend the various county assemblies of the landowners’ curia to elect a complement of 2,542 piovincial electors (out of the aggregate of 5,150 assigned to all curiae in fifty-one provinces of European Russia). The statistics compiled by the Electoral Commission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs give us rather precise data on who these 2,542 electors, who now controlled the electoral process, were.¹⁶

By hereditary estate characteristics (soslovnost’), 1,542 were nobles (60.7 percent), and 553 priests (21.8 percent); in combination with the representatives of the clergy, generally subservient to official direction, noble landlords now controlled 82.5 percent of the provincial electors of the landowners’ curia. The figures about the estate characteristics of other electors in this curia are not without interest, however: 117 (4 percent) were Honorary Citizens (pochetnye grazhdane, an honorific title that was bestowed only upon non-nobles); 121 (5 percent) were kuptsy (by estate classification, merchants); 47 (2 percent) were me-shchane (in rough translation, petty bourgeoisie, the term traditionally applied in Russia’s society of sosloviia to the artisans and shopkeepers of Russia’s cities and towns); and finally, 43 (1.7 percent) were of the peasant estate. In and of themselves, these figures clearly suggest the extremely minor political role that, with the exception of the clergy, non-nobles (whether owners of large or small property) now played in the landowners’ curia, and especially how drastically members of the peasant estate had now been eliminated from effective political participation in this curia.

Other data of the Electoral Commission provide us with a more rounded picture of the profiles of these Third Duma provincial electors of the landowners’ curia. The figures on their age distribution and educational backgrounds are noted below,¹⁷ but let us take note here of some other, politically most crucial, indices.

By nationality (natsional’nost’, defined by the electors’ attributed native language): 70 percent were classified as Great Russians; 10 percent as Little Russians (i.e. Ukrainians); 4 percent as White Russians; 7 percent as Germans; 1 percent as Tartars; and two single electors (0.1 percent) as Latvians. By religion: 85 percent were described as Orthodox or Old Believers; 6 percent as Protestants; 7 percent as Catholics; 1 percent as Moslems; and a single lonely elector as Jewish! This exceptionally high percentage of Russian Orthodox electors partly reflected, of course, the effectiveness of the device of subdividing the landowners’ curia by nationality, and in fact religion, whenever indicated, to increase the weight of Russian Orthodox voters in the electoral process.

By occupation (zaniatie), an especially illuminating category when viewed in conjunction with hereditary estate definition: 17 percent were listed, or listed themselves, as engaged in government service; and 16 percent in public service. 37 percent were listed as landowners, and 21 percent as priests. This made up the vast bulk of the occupations of the electors of the landowners’ curia. Of the remaining electors, only 2 percent were listed as engaged in a free profession; 3 percent in some commercial-industrial activity; 3 percent as agriculturalists (zemledel’tsy, in most cases presumably members of the peasant estate); and but two electors (0.08 percent) as engaged in handicrafts or industrial labor.

And finally, by political tendency: 62 percent were classified as “rights”; 23 percent as “moderates”; 8 percent as “lefts”; and 7 percent as “unidentified.” (The political meaning of these terms will be scrutinized later in this volume.)

There are, it seems to me, two striking general features in the occupational statistics I have listed above, especially when we consider them in conjunction with those in other categories. The first is the extraordinarily low percentage not only of private peasant agriculturalists (elected from the preliminary assemblies), but also of members of the free professions (doctors, lawyers, and the like), as well as of electors described as engaged in some form of commercial-industrial activity. In substance, under the new electoral system, the landowners’ curia—and given its majority of provincial electors, the electoral process as a whole—was now altogether dominated by Russian Orthodox noble landowners, with the assist of the Orthodox clergy.

The other notable feature is the persistent display, even in the abstract language of statistics, of the dual collective persona—the dual socioeconomic identity and role—affirmed by these elected spokesmen of the Russian landowning nobility: that of landowners, to be sure, but also that of members of a service class. As we have seen, to qualify in this curia all these noble electors had to be landowners; yet, half of them characterized themselves “by occupation” as engaged in some form of state or public service. To be sure, these nobles now usually exercised this state or public service in their local provinces, if not their local counties; as we shall see, an immensely important political fact. Many, if not most, of them were county or provincial marshals of nobility, chairmen, or at least members, of county and provincial zemstvo boards and the like. Almost all of them were now fully enmeshed in the public activities, and more broadly, in the various dimensions of the collective social, cultural, economic, and political life of the provincial nobility. But the fact remains that it was from this dual, Janus-like self-image—and the reality of present as well as past service (usually in the military)—as much as from their positions as landowners administering their estates that these Russian provincial nobles still drew their system of values, their sense of identity and purpose: their claim to rule, as well as the reality of their power.

Our percentage of electors from the noble estate would be substantially swelled if we took account of other curiae, especially of the two urban curiae. Of the 754 electors representing the 150,000-odd voters on the rolls of the first urban curia in the elections to the Third Duma, 19 percent were listed as nobles (the majority of the electors in this curia being classified by soslovnost’ as Honorary Citizens [18 percent] and merchants [32.5 percent], although by no means all of these electors were actually engaged in commercial-industrial activities). And of the 550 electors selected by the 800,000 urban voters segregated in the second urban curia, an even greater proportion (33.6 percent) were listed as nobles, by far the largest soslovie category among electors in this curia!

However, it would be highly deceptive to draw any political conclusions from the data I have just cited. In the Third Duma elections, for example, the voters of the second urban curia elected a majority of 58 percent of provincial electors who were officially classified as “lefts” (only 15 percent being listed as “rights,” 17 percent as “moderates,” and 10 percent as “unidentified”). While the prosperous voters of the urban first curia, contrary to the government’s expectations, returned in these elections a “leftist” plurality of 34 percent (33 percent being listed as “rights,” 24 percent as “moderates,” and 9 percent as “politically unidentified”).¹⁸ These were completely different returns, as we have seen, from those of the now overwhelmingly conservative landowners’ curia (62 percent “rights,” 23 percent “moderates,” 8 percent “lefts,” and 7 percent “unidentified”).

To be sure, all these statistics are about provincial electors. Even so, they are indicative, at least to some degree, of the social profiles and political inclinations of the voters who actually selected them. What the figures suggest—and the suggestion is confirmed by the less comprehensive data in our possession on the voters themselves—is that in the elections to the Third Duma, and even more so to the Fourth Duma, a nobleman living in a city, educated at a university, engaged in teaching or in a free profession (or by this time, even in government service) was far more likely than not to hold and articulate the same political and social attitudes as a non-noble who otherwise shared the same background and life experience.

It bears repeating that at this point in the painful evolution of Russia’s traditional society of estates, the group of provincial noblemen with which this volume will be largely concerned could be identified not by any single one but rather by a combination—a syndrome—of objective characteristics. Like the provincial electors whom they selected from their midst to their county assemblies, the members of this group were nobles, in most cases hereditary nobles, qualifying for full census in the landowners’ (or noble) curia in elections to the State Duma, the State Council, and the county and provincial zemstvo assemblies. Our data, however impressionistic, allow us to be even more precise than this.¹⁹ Most of them were owners of substantial estates, although smaller on the average than those of the provincial electors whom they selected. By and large, neither the poorest nor the wealthiest noble landowners were really full-fledged members of this tightly knit provincial society: the poorest, even if they barely qualified for full census, because they could not economically afford to partake fully in this society’s corporate life; the richest, the owners of great latifundii (of ten thousand desiatiny or more), because they did not choose to do so, usually preferring to entrust to stewards the administration of their estates in order to participate on a full-time basis in the far more glittering (and politically and economically profitable) life of the Court and the capitals.

Even in their earlier existence, most of the noble “middle” landowners on whom we shall focus our attention had usually followed remarkably similar paths: most of them had graduated from secondary schools, often ones reserved in practice, if not in theory, for nobles; some had also graduated from higher educational establishments, usually of a military or technical character. Only a very few, an even lesser percentage than that of the provincial electors whom they selected (let alone of the deputies who eventually represented them in the Duma), were graduates of universities, institutions that almost invariably stamped those who had attended them with sharper and more articulate political and social attitudes than these rank-and-file voters of the provincial landowning nobility usually displayed.

Just as their provincial electors, most of the rank-and-file members of this provincial landowning nobility had at one time served the state, if, again, in less glamorous and prominent posts than their representatives: most often in the military, but also occasionally in the civil bureaucracy, especially its technical arm. Now retired majors, captains, or even lieutenants, or retired civil servants, they had returned, often by their late thirties or early forties, to manage their estates as best they could, and to partake in the life, the responsibilities, and the honors of their provincial society. Many of them now held residences, at least on a part-time basis, in their county towns, or on occasion in their provincial capitals, but most did spend considerable stretches of their existence on the estate, “administering” the work and life of their peasants, visiting one another, and sharing through their own corporate organizations as well as through the county and provincial zemstvos a common political as well as social life.

In substance, in the picture that we piece together from the various official and unofficial reports available to us about them, this rank and file of the Russian provincial landowning nobility emerges as perhaps duller, greyer, less prosperous, less prominent, and especially less articulate than those whom they selected to represent them at their provincial electoral assemblies. But together with them, they did constitute a tight, almost hermetic, culture, which now, just as before the great peasant disorders of 1905–1907, effectively ruled rural Russia.

By the fall of 1907 the countryside was quiet, and at least on the surface it might well have appeared to a visitor that nothing had ever happened to mar this tranquility. Indeed, as we shall see, in the elections to both the Third and Fourth Dumas, the still qualified voters of the curia of the communal peasantry, heeding the injunctions of their landlords, their land captains, and their priests, duly elected for the most part safe, seemingly conservative, obedient representatives, who by and large contributed to the swelling of the conservative majorities in the various provincial electoral assemblies. We shall later consider how and why they did so. But suffice it to say at this point that this political fact added a further increment to the enormous weight that the representatives of the noble landowners of provincial Russia were now able to exercise in the State Duma, just as in the State Council and the zemstvos.

In the various contributions to this volume, we shall examine how these men actually exercised their political power: the political and social attitudes that they and their representatives displayed, and the various ways in which they made these attitudes felt. And in an effort to understand them more fully, we shall review the tortuous political path that they had followed to reach this point in their political development-including their tumultuous journey through the maelstrom of Russia’s First Revolution—before calm was restored, for however brief a period, in their own ranks as well as among the other inhabitants of the Russian countryside.

Our survey of gentry politics under the Regime of the Third of June will take us to the center of the political stage—to consider the role that the various parties and factions that represented, or purported to represent, the Russian landed nobility during these years played in Russia’s national representative institutions, as well as to examine the influence that some of these noble organizations—most notably the United Nobility—sought to exercise directly over various circles in the government bureaucracy and at the Court, in an effort to influence policies even before they were finally formulated, and/or submitted for legislative approval. But the most notable feature of many of these investigations is that they will seek to relate the movement of national politics to the politics of the countryside, and especially to the attitudes and political culture of the thirty-thousand-odd families of the landed nobility that stubbornly continued to rule it throughout the period on which we shall focus attention.

NOTES

1. S. Elpatevskii, “Zhizn’ idet,” Russkoe Bogatstvo, no. 1 (January), 1914.

2. A candid expression of the doubts of Menshevik leaders on this subject, and more generally of their response to the views expounded by Ermansky, is to be found in the still unpublished correspondence between A. N. Potresov and Iu. O. Martov during this period. This correspondence, consisting of some two hundred letters exchanged between 1908 and 1913, is preserved in the Nikolaevsky Archives at the Hoover Institution.

3. A recent example of this overestimation in Soviet historiography is the work of la. Avrekh. See, inter alia, his Tsarizm i tret’eiiunskaia sistema, Moscow, 1966.

4. Recent Soviet works that, at least implicitly, express this point of view include A. P. Korelin, “Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (1861–1904 gg.),” Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 87, pp.91–173; A. P. Korelin, “Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo i ego soslovnaia organizatsiia (1861–1904 gg.),” Istoriia SSSR, 1971, no. 5, pp.56–81; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia, Moscow, 1970; and particularly Iu. B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka, Leningrad, 1973.

5. The most important and revealing of these conferences were those held at Peterhof from July 19 to July 26, 1905 (prior to the issuance of the Law of August 6 for the so-called Bulygin Duma), as well as at Tsarskoe Selo on December 5 and 7, 1905, prior to the issuance of the Law of December 11, 1905, under which the elections to the First Duma were held. A full transcript of the Peterhof Conference was smuggled out and published by Os-vobozhdenie in the fall of 1905 (Petergofskoe soveshchanie 0 proekte Gosu-darstvennoi Dumy, Berlin, n.d.), and reproduced (Petergovskiia soveshchaniia o proekte Gosudarstvenno Dumy. Kakuiu Dumu khoteli dot’ narodu Nikolai II i ego ministry, Gos. Tip., 1917). A less complete transcript of the December 1905 Conference at Tsarskoe Selo is to be found in Byloe, no. 3, September 1917.

For analyses of these and other discussions and projects leading to the institution of the State Duma and the eventual formulation of the electoral law of December 11, 1905, as well as of the specific provisions of this law, see M. Sidel’nikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ Pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1962; Howard D. Mehlinger and John M. Thompson, Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution, Indiana University Press, 1972; and especially Gilbert S. Doctorow, “The Introduction of Parliamentary Institutions in Russia During the Revolution of 1905–1907” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974).

6. See TSGIA (Central State Historical Archive, Leningrad), fond 1276, opis 2, delo 9a; and Sidel’nikov, table 2, p.136.

7. N. E. Lositskii, Izbiratel’naia sistema Gos. Dumy, St. Petersburg, 1912, quoted in Sidel’nikov, pp.76–77.

8. Western studies include Samuel Harper, The New Electoral Law for the Russian Duma, Chicago, 1908; Marc Szeftel, “The Reform of the Electoral Law to the State Duma on June 3, 1907,” Studies Presented to the International Commission For the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, vol. XXXIII, London, 1968; Alfred Levin, “June 1907: Action and Reaction,” in A. D. Ferguson and A. Levin, eds., Essays in Russian History: A Collection Dedicated to George Vernadsky, Hamden, Connecticut, 1965; and Alfred Levin, The Third Duma, Elections and Profile, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1973. Useful contemporary Russian analyses include V. Vodovozov, Kak proizvodiatsia vybory v gos. dumu po zakonu 3 iiunia 1907 goda, St. Petersburg, 1907; and F. Dan, Novyi izbira-tel’nyi zakon, Metropol’, 1907.

9. The relevant articles of the electoral law of June 3, 1907, were:

Article 62. Persons belonging to village and district [volost’] ob-shchestva of a county are not to be included in the rolls of landowning and urban voters of that county, even if they otherwise meet the requisite census requirements.

Article 63. Possession of peasant or [cossak] station allotment lands, as well as of land subject to restrictions applying to the peasantry [kre-st’ianskoi povinnostnoi zemli] in Lifliand province and on Oesel Island, as well as of peasant household plots [uchastki] in Kurliand province, does not give their owners the right to be enrolled on the electoral rolls of land proprietors, even when these lands have been purchased in private title [vykupleny v sobstvennost’].

The full text of the new electoral law is printed in Ministerstvo vnutren-nykh del, Izvestiia zemskogo otdela, no. 6 (June 1907). The text of the relevant articles is on p.211.

10. Third Duma electoral procedures are discussed at some length in Alfred Levin, The Third Duma, Election and Profile, especially chapters 1, 7, and 8. For my own impressions of the conduct of the Third, as well as Fourth, Duma elections, I have largely drawn on the various official reports preserved in TSGIA, fond 1327 (Deloproizvodstvo po vyboram v Gosudar-stvennuiu Dumu), particularly opis 2.

11. See statistical data recorded in M. V. D. (Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del), Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu Tret’ego Sozyva. Statisticheskii otchet Osobogo Deloproizvodstvo, St. Petersburg, 1911.

12. This is the general impression one draws from the official reports from various provinces in TSGIA, fond 1327, opis 2. This impression is confirmed by the statistics on the provincial electors selected by the various county assemblies of the landowners’ curia.

13. Some thirty-one thousand large landowners were on the rolls on the eve of the Third Duma elections. We do not have precise figures on how many of them actually voted. What we do know is that out of the total of thirty-eight thousand who qualified to vote at the county assemblies of the landowners’ curia, including both large landowners with full census and the representatives elected by the preliminary assemblies of small proprietors (overwhelmingly priests, as we have seen) only some sixteen thousand, or 42 percent, actually appeared on election day. Given the fact that the rate of participation at these county assemblies by representatives of the clergy was generally very high (in response to the injunctions of the church hierarchy), that of the large noble landowners was obviously considerably lower than the overall average of 42 percent, but we do not know precisely how low.

See the aggregate data on voting patterns in the various curiae in M. V. D., op. cit., pp.100–101.

14. In Kursk province, for example, the number of electors of the peasant curia was reduced from seventy-eight to thirty-one, and that of the landowners’ curia raised from fifty-one to sixty-eight. In Saratov and Samara, the numbers of peasant electors were reduced respectively from sixty-four to twenty-seven, and ninety-seven to thirty-three; while those of the electors of the landowners’ curia were raised from fifty-one to sixty-eight, and fifty-two to seventy-six. In Tambov, one of the most troubled provinces of the C.A.R. in 1905–1907, the peasants’ representation was cut from ninety-two to twenty-six, and that of the landowners’ raised from sixty-two to seventy!

See Harper, op. cit., p.43, Table I.

15. In his contemporary study of the Third Duma elections, Samuel Harper has described for us a particular case in point, which I single out from many other such cases to be found in the reports of the electoral commissions on the Third and Fourth Duma returns, only because of its especially graphic character. The example involves Viatka province, a province of the Urals that consisted overwhelmingly of peasants, who, according to the 1905 census, constituted 2,945,000 out of 3,365,000 of the population. Only 10,000 members of the landowning nobility (including women and children) were recorded by the census in this province, and most of these noble landowners were in fact absentee owners (of timberland which did not require them to be in place to administer their estates). Notwithstanding these demographic characteristics, the Law of June 3, 1907, increased the number of electors assigned to the landowners’ curia in Viatka province from thirty-three to fifty, while reducing that of the curia of the communal peasantry from ninety-eight to twenty-three. But to perceive the full impact of this reallocation, let us consider a particular county in this province, Sloboda. Already under the terms of the old electoral law, under which the landowners’ curia of Sloboda county had been assigned four electors, only six voters had in fact appeared at the county assembly of landowners in both the First and Second Duma elections to select the four electors allocated to them. Harper describes these voters as follows: a Mr. Slaiev, a landowner; a Mr. Bogaevsky, the steward of the owner of a local estate deputized by his employer to vote for him; two priests, elected to the county assembly by the Preliminary Assembly of Small Proprietors, and two additional large landowners, the brothers Vakhrushev.

Under the new electoral law of June 1907, the landowners’ curia of Sloboda county was allocated eight instead of four electors. At the same time, the new law disqualified three of the six voters who had attended its county assembly in the first two Duma elections: the two brothers Vakhrushev, because although they owned enough land in private title to qualify them for full census under the old law, they were now technically disqualified as members of a sel’skoe obshchestvo of the communal peasantry; and Mr. Bogaevsky, because the law no longer allowed the steward of an estate to represent his employer. Thus, only Mr. Slaiev and the two priests remained qualified to vote in a county assembly of the landowners’ curia, which was now supposed to select from its own ranks eight electors to the Provincial Electoral Assembly! This, in a county in which the number of electors assigned to the curia of the communal peasantry had now been reduced from seven to two, and that of urban electors from three to two.

See Harper, op. cit., pp.44–47.

16. See statistical table in M. V. D., op. cit., pp.272–73.

17. 3 percent of the electors of the landowners’ curia were classified as being between twenty-five (the minimum legal age) and thirty; 12 percent as between thirty and thirty-five; 35.2 percent as between thirty-five and forty-five; 28.5 percent as between forty-five and fifty-five; and 21 percent as over fifty-five. This was a notably older age distribution than that of the electors of the second urban curia, and especially of the workers’ curia (43 percent of whom were between twenty-five and thirty years of age!); but younger than that of the electors, selected under the Law of June 3 by the peasant curia, and especially by the well-to-do voters of the newly established first urban curia.

By education: 37 percent of the electors of the landowners’ curia were classified as having received some form of higher education (i.e., in theological academies, in the case of the electors from the clergy; usually in some military or technical establishment, in the case of noble landlords). 47 percent were described as having received secondary education; and 16 percent, only elementary or home education. (See M. V. D., ibid.)

18. See M. V. D., ibid.

19. These impressions are partially drawn from the descriptions of, and statistical data on, nobles voting in the landowners’ curia, contained in the official reports from various provinces about the elections to the Third and Fourth Dumas in TSGIA, fond 1327, opis 2.