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If the situation is addressed more generally, it makes sense to say that the politics of the Third (and Fourth) Duma regularly presented the Octobrists, now the pivotal party in the Duma, with the same choice: either to turn rightward to co-operate with the Nationalists (essentially a pro-government and Stolypinoriented coalition), or to turn leftward to the Kadets (essentially an oppositionist coalition, though moderate in tone and ‘loyal’ in content). In most respects the Duma’s extreme right and extreme left were irrelevant to these coalitions, neither being truly committed to the compromise politics of a parliament, preferring the direct-action politics of the street. As a result, the other major players in this political drama were the government (Stolypin’s, and later Kokovtsev’s, cabinet) and the State Council, consistently dominated by a conservative-to-reactionary majority that either favoured the government or criticized its policies from the perspective of the respectable right. Since all laws had to be approved by both houses, the State Council could sabotage any serious liberal legislative initiative that the Duma promoted (as it did on occasion).

Problems of the Pre-War Period: 1912–1914

By the time the Fourth Duma was elected in 1912, some evidence had accumulated that the system erected by Stolypin was starting to work, but there also was plenty of evidence that it could not—hence the unending historiographical debate between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. For the latter, the most dramatic evidence was the assassination of Stolypin himself in September 1911 by an SR, probably one of Russia’s ubiquitous double agents. Although none of Stolypin’s successors had comparable abilities, historians have suggested that even had Stolypin lived he was well on his way to dismissal. Relations with his erstwhile Octobrist allies had hit an all-time low, almost driving the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov (sometime chairman of the Duma and in a sense the first of the ‘pessimists’) to despair. Stolypin’s Duma calculus had shifted from Octobrists to the more narrowly based Nationalists. Stolypin was distrusted by the State Council’s conservative majority, his own cabinet, and courtiers close to the very tsar who had appointed him. Other ‘pessimist’ evidence may be adduced, including renewed unrest in the universities: by 1910–11, especially in Moscow, professors and students (among them, since 1905, a substantial number of women) protested against government efforts to rescind the concessions made to them in 1905; they were now in a virtual state of war with the Minister of Education, Lev Kasso.

Even before the Fourth Duma had convened, Stolypin’s successors faced yet another alarming problem: the resuscitation of a militant labour movement in the capital and elsewhere. The trigger was news that government troops had massacred over a hundred striking miners at the Lena goldfields in March 1912. The explosion of strikes and demonstrations led to stunning Bolshevik victories, at the expense of the more moderate Mensheviks, in elections to the Duma, union governing boards, and newly organized workers’ insurance boards. This revitalized unrest continued to intensify right up to the outbreak of war in 1914, providing the most persuasive evidence for the pessimist school.

On the ‘positive’ side of the ledger, optimists can cite evidence, if not of great achievements, then at least of some stabilization in the political and social status quo. Duma factionalism and wrangling had failed to pose a successful challenge to government authority; the opposition parties were bitterly divided and in disarray; revolutionary activity was virtually dormant for several years; even some of the radical intelligentsia questioned their own past values; and the Third Duma had made some progress in certain areas, especially in elementary education. Most tellingly, the agrarian reform, if by no means a proven success at this early stage, had finally received the Duma’s blessing and was in the process of being implemented without provoking significant peasant unrest (for a while turning even Lenin, in a peculiar sense, into an unwilling ‘optimist’).