Abstracts History

Government and parliament: the development of accountability in Russian politcs in 1905 and 1906

by O'Leary, Matthew Lawrence

Tsar Nicholas II responded to unprecedented revolutionary upheaval and social organization in 1905 by laying constitutional foundations for parliamentary monarchy in Russia. The most far reaching of the reforms was his establishment in 1905 of a representative State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia Duma), which enjoyed limited legislative functions, and his subsequent promulgation of Russia's first Constitution in 1906. This period of the Duma monarchy would last until the tsar's abdication in 1917. These eleven years enveloped Russia's brief constitutional experiment, which by all interpretations failed, when the Romanonv dynasty collapsed in 1917, and the Duma failed to fill the subsequent power vacuum. Historians have uniformly taken the view that the seeds for failure were sewn early on, during the turbulent years of 1905 to 1907, when Russian authorities treated the reforms insincerely and the Duma contemptuously, while Russian political figures manipulated the system irresponsibly.This dissertation evaluates the constitutional reforms of 1905 and 1906 and their initial implementation in Russia's First State Duma, and argues that the reforms were more deeply rooted than historians have generally appreciated, and that the performance of the short-lived First Duma gives evidence that the reforms were a significant step toward establishing government accountability to the representatives of the Russian people, thereby strengthening democratic roots in the process. Although the constitutional system lasted only eleven years, and the First Duma served a mere seventy-two days, these reforms, and this first meeting of government and society, did much to overcome the heritage of centuries of the unlimited arbitrary rule of an autocrat.Examination-of the motives for specific reforms and the internal debates surrounding their adoption demonstrates that the tsar and the majority of his ministers were far from uniformly insincere toward the evolving constitutional system, and that they understood the full ramifications of the constitutional reforms. For the most part the Russian government consciously made concessions to organized society and accepted the ramifications, albeit uneasily at times. This view is strengthened by considering the actions of some senior officials who attempted to work with the system and reform it even further, but were frustrated by the vacillations of an anxious monarch and the arrogance and imprudence of the chairman of the Council of Ministers.The First State Duma also deserves reappraisal. The Duma was established by the manifesto of 17 October 1905, and was to be elected by males from among the peasantry, merchants, landowners, laborers, townsmen, and clergy, in a relatively broad, but indirect, franchise. The rights and duties of the Duma were set forth the following year in the Statutes of 20 February and the Fundamental Laws of 23 April. No law was to come into effect without the Duma's approval, though it shared power nominally with an upper house, the State Council ( Gosudarstvennyi Sovet)…