Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/214

188 The history of the duma suffrage shows what the absolutist administration was capable of. It suffices in this connection to compare the first and second dumas with the third, or to read a report of the doings of the government in individual elections.

The electoral law of June 16, 1907, was issued by arbitrary decree, although in the state fundamental law it is expressly stated in several paragraphs that the tsar is competent to promulgate laws only in conjunction with the duma (and the council of state). In the relevant section (87), which is modelled upon § 14 in the Austrian constitution, the regulation of the suffrage is expressly removed from the tsar's competence, but the coup d'état was carried out in defiance of this specification.

The electoral law, with its electoral geometry, may in the political field be compared in the artistic and the aesthetic field with the Moscow Vasilii Blažennyi (the cathedral of St. Basil, built in the reign of John the Terrible).

A pamphlet exists recording all prosecutions instituted against deputies to the first duma. The members of almost all the parties were prosecuted for one reason or another. Similar prosecutions were initiated against the liberal deputies of the second and third dumas. Even the octobrists were too "red" for the police!

Reports concerning the "white terror" constitute a permanent rubric of the daily press from 1906 onwards. The white terror began with the suppression of the December revolt (1905), which in Moscow was characterised by fierce barricade fighting. The "days of freedom" of October and November had passed away. Not merely was the revolution suppressed, but in most of the larger towns (eighty-five are enumerated) with the connivance of the police there occurred the well-known pogroms directed against the Jews, but in some cases also (as in Tver and Tomsk) against the intelligentsia.

My pen is reluctant to describe the infamies of this reign of terror. In actual fact, everyone in Russia is still [1913] an outlaw. It may be said without exaggeration that during the white terror the fear of death ceased to exist. It had been driven away by pogroms; by the death sentences of courts martial and field courts martial; by arrest and martyrisations in the prisons and on the road to Siberia; by the extremities of cruelty and torture; by the frequency of suicide in the prisons; by illness, epidemic disease, and famine. During