Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
The Duma convened on the date set, and then was witnessed the remarkable spectacle of the conservative members denouncing the Government with the fiery oratory of Socialist agitators.
Not that anybody will believe him. But it is not policy at this moment. Public opinion is highly inflamed." "I agree. Of course, nobody will believe him. Yet he is dangerous, and if he denounces us in the Duma it will come as a bombshell. I called upon Anna Vyrubova early this morning, and she has gone to the palace," said Protopopoff.
And the bourgeois elements greeted this peril with unconcealed malicious joy. The former President of the Duma, Rodzyanko, openly said again and again that the surrender of debauched Petrograd to the Germans would not be a great misfortune.
In full consciousness of the responsibility of its decision, the Provisional Committee expresses its trust that the population and the army will help it in the difficult task of creating a new government which will comply with the wishes of the population, and be able to enjoy its confidence. MICHAIL RODZIANKO, Speaker of the Imperial Duma. February 27, 1917.
It was overwhelmingly a progressive parliament that had been elected. The Constitutional Democrats, upon a radical program, had elected the largest number of members, 178. Next came the representatives of the peasants' organizations, with a program of moderate Socialism, numbering 116. This group became known in the Duma as the Labor Group.
A body of 186 Representatives, including the Constitutional and Conservative members of the Duma, immediately reassembled at Viborg in Finland, where, in the few hours before their forcible dispersion by a body of military, they prepared an address to "The Citizens of All Russia."
It is not the emancipated serf, but it is rural Russia which the Duma represented, and the vastness of the area covered by that term is realized when one learns that of the 450 members constituting that body only eighteen were from cities.
A man of education, wise in leadership and a brilliant orator, his leadership of the Socialist Group in the Second Duma had marked him as one of the truly great men of Russia.
These men were not Socialists, most of them belonging to the party of the Constitutional Democrats, but they issued an appeal to the people to meet the dissolution of the Imperial Duma by a firm refusal to pay taxes, furnish recruits for the army, or sanction the legality of any loans to the government.
At the first meeting of the Duma after the opening of hostilities the Labour Party declared its opinion that "through the agony of the battlefield the brotherhood of the Russian people will be strengthened and a common desire created to free the land from its terrible internal troubles."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking