The 3 June Coup¶
Core Argument¶
The 3 June 1907 coup marked the definitive termination of the 1905 Revolution, extinguishing its last embers. Convinced of the impotence of the Cadets and the waning peasant movement, Stolypin dismissed the second Duma and arrested its Social Democratic fraction without waiting for a parliamentary response. A new electoral law was drafted, which, as Count Witte admitted, excluded the voice of the masses and gave voice only to the powerful and obedient. Kerensky’s account confirms that the law practically eliminated peasant and worker participation, handed elections to the moribund gentry, suppressed universal suffrage in larger towns, and reduced non-Russian representation drastically — Poland, for instance, fell from 53 deputies to 18. The resulting Third Duma was a ‘distorting mirror’: out of 442 members, reactionary parties held 409. The working class had only 19 Social Democratic deputies. Lenin noted that this reactionary Duma at least had the merit of expressing the real situation — the Black Hundred autocracy without its liberal mask. Fifty seats went to the Union of the Russian People, subsidised by the secret police and patronised by the Tsar. The Octobrists, led by Guchkov, formed the largest bloc with 153 seats, representing the reactionary big bourgeoisie who distanced themselves from the ruling clique but supported Stolypin as the lesser evil. The Cadets played second fiddle. The Mensheviks looked towards the Cadets, also as the lesser evil. The chapter argues that this logic transforms the lesser evil into the greatest evil for the revolutionary cause. Stolypin’s own position remained precarious: manoeuvring as a Bonapartist between classes and parties, he had no firm support. The court clique hated him as a dangerous radical. He was assassinated in September 1911 by a Social Revolutionary turned police informer, Bogrov, in circumstances that strongly suggest the secret police and court clique were complicit. The revolutionary movement reached its nadir. Waves of arrests decimated Party organisations. The Bolsheviks suffered proportionately greater losses as the most militant wing. However, the purge of demoralised intellectuals had a compensating advantage: those who stepped into the breach were workers, making Party committees genuinely proletarian for the first time. Lenin welcomed this, writing to Gorky that the Party was purging itself of petty-bourgeois dross. Under these conditions, second-line leaders like Stalin began to advance. The chapter notes Stalin was a typical committee-man, tough and practical but narrow, and that he continued organising expropriations after the revolutionary wave had ebbed — tactics that could have damaged the Party had Lenin not stopped them. The new conditions demanded combining illegal work with legal and semi-legal activity. The chapter polemicises against the Mensheviks, whose entire strategy was to liquidate the underground Party, and against conciliators within the Bolshevik Central Committee who refused to wage implacable struggle against Menshevik members. Lenin’s response was to establish a Bolshevik factional centre and produce the paper Proletary, maintaining the traditions of the old Iskra.