Date: 1922
Source: ru:PSS/v54

“ELECTIONS TO THE IV DUMA”590 

The state coup of June 3 (16), 1907, ushered in an era of counterrevolution in Russia.591 It is well known what judicial and administrative arbitrariness, what persecutions and tortures meted out to those condemned to hard labor accompanied this triumph of autocracy. 

The upper strata of the bourgeoisie, frightened by the revolution, rallied behind the counterrevolutionary nobility. The tsarist regime was confident that it would find support and backing among the counterrevolutionary elements of both the bourgeoisie and the landed gentry. 

The electoral law of June 3 (16), 1907, stands as a blatant example of brazen falsification. Consider the following data characterizing this law: 

The population was divided into “curiae”: landowners, urban residents of the first and second classes, peasants, Cossacks, and workers. Voters, elected separately by curia—sometimes not directly, but through proxies—were grouped by the government into provincial electoral assemblies, which in turn elected deputies to the Duma! 

The law allocated the number of electors in such a way that, in advance, landowners alone secured a majority in the electoral assemblies of 28 out of 50 provinces, while in the remaining provinces, voters from the first urban curia—namely, the large capitalists—held sway. 

The overall picture is as follows: 200,000 nobles sent 2,594 electors to the electoral assemblies of 53 provinces, accounting for 49.4% of the total number of electors; roughly two million—or thereabouts—capitalists belonging to the first urban curia controlled 788 electors (15%); approximately 8 million urban residents of the second urban curia dispatched 590 electors (11.2%); roughly 70 million peasants and Cossacks held 1,168 electors (22.2%), while around 12 million workers were represented by just 112 electors (2.1%). 

It is hardly surprising that such an electoral law produced a “black,” counterrevolutionary Duma—indeed, a Duma that was… 

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