forbidden by officials and broken up by
soldiers and police; newspapers were suppressed, as of old; labor-unions,
and even the unions of the Intellectuals, were ruthlessly persecuted and
treated as conspiracies against the state. All this and more was true and
discouraging. Yet there was substantial gain: civic freedom as a practical
fact did not exist, but civic freedom as a lawful right lived in the minds
of millions of people--the greatest fact in Russia. The terms of the
Manifesto of October 17th--Absolutism's solemn covenant with the
nation--had not been repealed, and the nation knew that the government did
not dare to repeal it. Not all the Czar's armies and Black Hundreds could
destroy that consciousness of the lawful right to civic freedom. Nothing
could restore the old condition. Whereas in the past the government, in
suppressing the press and popular assemblages, could say to the people, "We
uphold the law!" now when the government attempted these things, the people
defiantly cried out, "You break the law!" Absolutism was no longer a thing
of law.

Nicholas II and all his bureaucrats could not return the chicken to the egg
from which it had been hatched. They could not unsay the fateful words
which called into being the Imperial Duma. The Revolution had put into
their souls a terrible fear of the wrath of the people. The Czar and his
government had to permit the election of the Duma to proceed, and yet,
conscious of the fact that the success of the Duma inevitably meant the end
of the old regime, they were bound, in self-protection, to attempt to kill
the Duma in the hope that thereby they would kill, or at least paralyze,
the Revolution itself. Thus it was, while not daring to forbid the
elections for the Duma to proceed, the government adopted a Machiavellian
policy.

The essentials of that policy were these: on the one hand, the Duma was not
to be seriously considered at all, when it should assemble. It would be
ignored, if possible, and no attention paid to any of its deliberations or
attempts to legislate. A certain amount of latitude would be given to it
as a debating society, a sort of safety-valve, but that was all. If this
policy could not be carried out in its entirety, if, for example, it should
prove impossible to completely ignore the Duma, it would be easy enough to
devise a mass of hampering restrictions and regulations which would render
it impotent, and yet necessitate no formal repudiation of