The October Manifesto, Fundamental Laws and the Dumas, 1905–1914 (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto on 17 October 1905 to end the general strike paralysing Russia

• The Manifesto promised civil liberties, an elected State Duma and a wider franchise, but the wording was deliberately vague

• The Fundamental Laws of April 1906 reasserted the Tsar's autocratic power before the First Duma even met

• Four State Dumas sat between 1906 and 1917, but Pyotr Stolypin's coup of 3 June 1907 rewrote the franchise to favour landowners

• By 1914, repression had restored order, yet strike action was rising sharply and liberal expectations had been disappointed

• Historians debate whether the Dumas preserved autocracy or undermined it by 1914

  • Read argues that few contemporaries saw the regime as genuinely liberalising

  • Hayes argues that the Dumas’ failure strengthened extremists on both ends of the political spectrum

The October Manifesto, 1905: concessions & limitations

Why Nicholas II issued the Manifesto

• Nicholas II issued the Manifesto under duress, not as a planned reform

  • The October general strike had paralysed railways, factories and the postal service

  • Around 800,000 workers had walked out by mid-October 1905

• Sergei Witte drafted the document and pressed the Tsar to sign it

  • Witte's argument to the Tsar was practical, not principled

  • The choice was limited reform or military dictatorship under Grand Duke Nicholas

  • The Grand Duke refused the dictatorship role and backed Witte

  • Nicholas signed the Manifesto on 17 October

    • Nicholas later called it a "moment of weakness"

What the Manifesto promised

• The Manifesto contained three concrete pledges to the Russian people

  • Civil liberties of conscience, speech, assembly and association

  • An elected State Duma with the right to veto legislation

  • A wider franchise extending to classes previously excluded from voting

• Witte's strategic intent was to divide the opposition movement

  • Liberal demands could be met without surrendering autocratic power

  • Workers and peasants could be drawn away from the revolutionary parties

  • These concessions isolated the radical left, making it easier for the regime to repress revolutionary groups

How the opposition reacted

• The Manifesto produced an immediate split among the regime's opponents

  • Liberals welcomed it and formed the Octobrist Party under Alexander Guchkov

  • The Kadets, led by Pavel Milyukov, demanded a full written constitution

  • The St Petersburg Soviet, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the Bolsheviks rejected it outright

• The concessions had clear limitations, even on the day they were granted

  • There was no written constitution or formal bill of rights

  • Ministers remained appointed by the Tsar and answerable only to him

  • Civil liberties were promised in principle but not anchored in law

The Fundamental Laws, 1906: restoring autocratic power

• Tsar Nicholas issued the Fundamental Laws on 23 April 1906

  • This was five days before the First Duma was due to meet

  • It was a unilateral act, made before any deputy had taken their seat

  • The day before, Witte had resigned, believing that the October concession was already lost

What the Fundamental Laws restored to the Tsar

• Article 4 placed supreme autocratic power back with the Tsar

  • The text declared the Tsar's authority a matter of conscience as well as fear

  • The Manifesto's 'rights' were now recast as gifts from the autocrat

  • The political vocabulary of 1906 was preserved, but the substance was not

• The Tsar retained a long list of powers that bypassed the Duma altogether

  • Command of the armed forces and the conduct of foreign policy

  • Sole right to amend the Fundamental Laws themselves

  • A full veto over all legislation passed by the Duma

  • The right to dissolve the Duma at any time

• Article 87 gave the Tsar the power to rule by decree

  • He could issue emergency laws when the Duma was not in session

  • Stolypin used Article 87 repeatedly between 1906 and 1911

A second chamber designed to block the Duma

• A second chamber, the State Council, was placed above the Duma

  • Half of its members were directly appointed by the Tsar

  • The other half were elected by the nobility, the Church and the universities

  • Any Duma bill required State Council approval to become law

• The result was a constitutional monarchy in name only

  • The forms of representative government were now in place

  • Yet every meaningful lever of power remained in the Tsar's hands

The Four Dumas, 1906 – 1917: Russia’s experiment with parliament

Comparing the four Dumas

The First and Second Dumas, 1906 – 1907

• The Tsar's instinct from the start was to dissolve oppositional Dumas

  • The First Duma demanded radical land reform and ministerial responsibility

  • Nicholas dissolved it after 72 days, in July 1906

  • 200 Kadet and other liberal deputies signed the Vyborg Manifesto in protest

    • Signatories were tried, fined and barred from the Second Duma

• The Second Duma was more radical than the first, not less

  • SRs and Social Democrats stood for election instead of boycotting it

  • Stolypin found the chamber unworkable for his reform programme

  • He dissolved it on 3rd June 1907 after only four months

The coup of 3 June 1907

• Stolypin's rewriting of the electoral law was a decisive intervention

  • He changed the law without consulting the Duma

    • This broke the Fundamental Laws, which the Tsar himself imposed

  • The new law weighted votes heavily towards landowners and the urban wealthy

    • The richest 1% gained influence over roughly half the Duma’s seats

    • Peasant and worker representation was sharply reduced

    • Critics nicknamed it the “Duma of Lords and Lackeys”

Stolypin's repressive arm

• Stolypin combined Duma management with severe repression

  • Military field tribunals executed over 1,000 people after 1906

  • The hangman's noose became known as 'Stolypin's necktie'

  • Around 20,000 political opponents were exiled to Siberia

• Revolutionary parties were forced abroad or underground

  • Lenin, Trotsky and other leading figures were in exile by 1914

  • Open revolutionary activity inside Russia was hard to sustain

The Third and Fourth Dumas, 1907 – 1914

• The Third Duma was the regime's tame parliament

  • Octobrists under Guchkov and nationalists dominated the chamber

  • It ran its full five-year term, the only Duma to do so

  • It passed reforms on land, primary education and local government

• Even tame Dumas could not prevent serious political friction

  • Stolypin was assassinated at the Kyiv Opera House in September 1911

    • His replacement, Vladimir Kokovtsov, lacked his political authority

  • The Fourth Duma still functioned in 1914, but many deputies were losing patience with the limits of tsarist constitutional reform

Had Nicholas II restored & maintained autocratic power by 1914?

• By 1914, Nicholas II had survived the 1905 crisis and presided over what appeared to be a functioning constitutional system

  • Whether this meant constitutional power had been substantially restored, or only papered over, remains contested

Autocratic power was substantially restored

• The Fundamental Laws had neutralised the Manifesto's concessions before the First Duma even met

  • Article 4 returned 'supreme autocratic power' to the Tsar

  • The Tsar kept his veto, his power of dissolution and his right to rule by decree

• The coup of 3 June 1907 showed Nicholas would act unilaterally when needed

  • He broke his own Fundamental Laws without serious political cost

  • There was no mass uprising in response, unlike in October 1905

• The Third and Fourth Dumas were politically manageable

  • The Octobrist majority accepted the post-1907 settlement

  • Reform legislation was passed only with the regime's cooperation

• Stolypin's repressive arm had pushed the revolutionary leadership abroad

  • An open revolutionary organisation inside Russia was hard to sustain after 1907

• The regime faced no sustained mass challenge between 1907 and 1914

  • The coup of 3 June 1907 produced no popular response, unlike October 1905

  • Strike levels fell sharply after 1907 and only revived gradually from 1912

Key historian

• Read’s argument is that the constitutional vocabulary of 1905 to 1906 never translated into a genuine erosion of autocratic power

  • Contemporaries on every side recognised that Nicholas had retained, not surrendered, real authority

  • This supports the case that autocracy had been substantially preserved by 1914

Autocratic power was maintained only in appearance

• The 1905 settlement created political expectations that the regime then betrayed

  • Civil liberties promised in October were curtailed by 1907

  • The Fundamental Laws cancelled most of what the Manifesto had granted

• Successive Dumas failed to deliver constitutional progress

  • The First and Second Dumas were dissolved within months

  • The 1907 electoral law made the chamber unrepresentative

  • Liberal hopes for a real parliament had collapsed by 1908

• Strike action returned to revolutionary levels by 1912

  • Over 3,000 strikes were recorded across Russia in the first half of 1914

  • Many of these strikes were political, not purely economic

  • The post-1907 industrial calm proved temporary

• Liberal opinion had survived the 1907 settlement intact

  • The Kadets remained the largest liberal party despite the electoral changes

  • Liberal demands for genuine parliamentary government had not gone away

  • The political class created by 1905 could not be suppressed back into silence

• The post-1905 system of limited constitutional government was running beyond Nicholas’s personal capacity

  • Stolypin's assassination in 1911 removed the last politically capable minister

  • Nicholas had no replacement of equivalent skill

  • The Fourth Duma was already growing impatient with palace politics

Key historian

• Hayes’s argument is that even if autocratic power survived in 1914, it survived at a growing political cost

  • The Dumas had failed in their stated purpose, the regime had no real reformist base left, and revolutionary politics was once again on the rise

  • This supports the case that the 1906 settlement had bought time, not stability