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Updated: May 21, 2025
When the Duma assembled On November 14, 1916 new style the approaching doom of Czar Nicholas II was already manifest. Why the Revolution did not occur at that time is a puzzle not easy to solve. Perhaps the mere fact that the Duma was assembling served to postpone resort to drastic measures. The nation waited for the Duma to lead.
But I couldn't help my joy, which was stronger than myself.... "It must have been early afternoon, so long had I been on the road, when I came at last to the Duma. You saw yourself, Ivan Andreievitch, that all that week the crowd outside the Duma was truly a sea of people with the motor lorries that bristled with rifles for sea-monsters and the gun-carriages for ships. And such a babel!
I am compromised enough already," said Rouletabille, laughing. "Au revoir, and good luck! Get to work interviewing the President of the Duma," added Koupriane knowingly, with a great laugh. But Rouletabille was already gone. "That lad," said the Chief of Police aloud to himself, "hasn't told me a bit of what he knows."
Therefore, two days later, he delivered from the tribune of the Duma some terrible allegations against the camarilla. Meanwhile Rasputin had been active, and, with Stürmer's aid, had got hold of a man named Dubrovin, the leader of "the Black Hundred" and a close associate of the "dark forces."
That afternoon the Duma selected a temporary committee to restore order. The committee, called the Duma Committee of Safety, consisted of twelve members, representing all the parties and groups in the Duma.
Goremykin refused even to discuss the program. Instead, he hurried to the czar to get his signature to a decree proroguing the Duma, in which he succeeded. The result was that the whole population rose in threatening revolution, and this time the threat was not from the revolutionary elements. Even former leaders of the Black Hundreds were among the protestants.
Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that great struggle. The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James Bryce.
He dismissed one Duma after another, he created an upper house to act as a brake, he juggled with the electoral laws so that whereas according to the law of December 24, 1905 the working classes and the peasants were entitled to 68 per cent of the Duma's representation, by the law of June 14, 1907 they were allowed only 36 per cent, Poland's delegation was cut down from 37 to 12 per cent, Caucasus' from 29 to 9, Siberia's from 21 to 14, and Central Asia's from 23 to 1.
One was the occasion when, in defiance of all reactionary forces, he exclaimed, "La Duma est morte! Vive la Duma!"
It was a speech which might as well have been made by the first Czar Nicholas. But there was no need of words to tell what was in the mind of Nicholas II; that had been made quite evident by the new laws and the new Ministry. Before the Duma lay the heavy task of continuing the Revolution, despite the fact that the revolutionary army had been scattered as chaff is scattered before the winds.
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