Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/39



"The Duma is dead; long live the Duma!"

I wonder whether you know, ladies and gentlemen, just when this historic phrase was pronounced by the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Some members of the first Russian Legislative Assembly had just come to London in July, 1906, as representatives attending the Inter-parliamentary Union for Arbitration, when they learnt that the assembly they represented was dissolved. The Duma—the first Russian Duma—was dead. It died while attempting to regenerate the political and social life of Russia on a completely new and largely democratic basis. Autocracy and landed nobility, the two chief agencies of historical Russian life, though decaying, had proved too strong for the newly born national representation. The conflict between the new and the old did not even last long. The important work performed by the first Duma was done by it in an existence of only seventy-three days. Then the Government, in order to have a more subservient chamber, used all their power in influencing the elections for the second Duma. The result was just the opposite of what they expected. Instead of a strongly constitutional Duma, with a constitutional