s had their
grievances. They cared nothing and understood less of the political
theories which the revolutionaries assiduously preached among them, but
they pricked up their ears when the agitators began to talk about land and
taxation. Up to 1861 the peasants had been serfs, the property, with the
land on which they lived, of the landowner. At their emancipation it was
necessary to provide them with land of their own; the State, therefore,
bought what was considered sufficient for the purpose from the landowners,
handed it over to the peasants, and recouped itself by imposing a land-tax
on the peasants to expire after a period of forty-nine years. This tax was
felt to be exceedingly onerous, and in addition to this by the beginning of
the twentieth century it became clear that the land acquired in 1861 was
not nearly enough to support a growing population. These factors, together
with the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, which revealed an appalling state
of corruption and incompetency in the government of the country, furnished
the revolutionaries with an opportunity which was not to be missed. A rapid
series of military and naval mutinies, agrarian disorders, assassinations
of obnoxious officials, socialist risings in the towns, during the
year 1905, culminating in the universal strike of October, brought the
Government to its knees, and on the 17th of the same month the Tsar issued
his manifesto granting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a
representative assembly. The revolution had, apparently, won on the
constitutional issue.

Yet what looked like the end of bureaucratic absolutism proved to be
the destruction of the revolutionary party. Had the reformers of 1905
concentrated their energies upon the task of turning the new legislature
into an adequate check upon the bureaucratic system, there is little doubt
they would have succeeded. As it was their success in this direction was
only partial. It is true that a Duma still sits at the Taurida Palace
at Petrograd, but it is elected on a narrow property franchise, and
its relations with the bureaucracy are as yet not properly defined; it
criticises but it possesses no real control. This failure of the revolution
was almost wholly due to the revolutionaries themselves, who, instead of
confining their attacks to the Government machine, sought to undermine the
entire structure of society and to overthrow the moral and religious ideals
of the nation. Moreover, the