Coup of June 3, 1907 (Tretyeiyunskiy perevorot)

History

At 5:00 a.m. on 3 June 1907 (O.S.), Nicholas II dissolved the Second State Duma by decree and promulgated a new electoral law at the same time. The Duma had sat 103 days. The pretext was the "soldiers' mandate" carried by a delegation of soldiers of the Petersburg garrison to Social Democratic deputies. On 1 June Stolypin demanded the removal of 55 deputies of the Social Democratic faction from sittings and the lifting of immunity from sixteen of them; the dissolution was carried out without waiting for the Duma's answer. New elections were set for 1 September and the Third Duma was to assemble on 1 November.

The violation of law

The emperor had the prerogative to dissolve the Duma. The problem was that the electoral law was changed at the same time. Under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws the electoral law could not be altered without the consent of the State Duma and the State Council, which is why the combination is recorded as a violation of the Fundamental Laws. The new electoral law was not presented to the legislative institutions. The government defended itself with the ambiguous phrase "in the order of supreme administration" in Article 10.

Content of the new electoral law

The revised franchise expanded the rights of landowners and the big bourgeoisie, who obtained about two-thirds of the total number of electors, while workers and peasants were left about a quarter. The peoples of several borderlands, including Central Asia and Yakutia, were removed from elections altogether. Worker and peasant electors lost the right to choose deputies from among themselves, and that right passed to the general provincial electoral assembly.

Outcomes and examples

The Third Duma produced by the new franchise matched the government's expectations. The Social Democratic faction fell from 65 to 19 deputies, the Trudoviks from 103 to 10, and the Kadets from 98 to 53, while the Union of October 17 rose from 20 to 148. The total number of deputies fell from 518 to 442. Convened on 1 November, the Third Duma was the only one of the four imperial Dumas to serve its full statutory five-year term, and it was dissolved by imperial decree in June 1912.

The repression that followed the dissolution fell on the deputies themselves. When the imperial decree took effect on the night of 2–3 June and their parliamentary immunity lapsed, 37 Duma deputies were arrested. The trial that opened on 22 November 1907 ended on 1 December 1907, when the Special Presence of the Governing Senate convicted 38 defendants: 11 were sentenced to five years' katorga, 15 to four years' katorga and 12 to exile settlement, while eleven were acquitted for insufficient proof. Some Social Democratic deputies were detained for months without trial and without the approval of the Duma, although under the Russian Constitution of 1906 Duma members could not be imprisoned unless their immunity was suspended. Arrests also struck the party's Military Organization at the same time: 51 people were arrested, about half of them soldiers.

The repressive character of the "June Third system" showed itself outside the Duma as well. One instance is the shooting of the Lena goldfields strike of 4 (17) April 1912. The strike, which began on 29 February 1912 over inedible horsemeat, grew into a general strike, and the mining company, closely tied to government circles, called in troops and had the workers shot down. The shooting shook the Russian working masses and provoked a powerful wave of political protest strikes, and Soviet historiography described it as the most striking expression of the "Stolypin regime of pacification."

Distinctions and disputes

Dissolution alone is not a coup. The event is called the "June Third coup" because the electoral law was altered at the same time and unconstitutionally, and for that reason it is considered by many historians to mark the end of the 1905 Revolution. Its legal and political character remains disputed. Mironov, while admitting the defects of the 1907 electoral system, regards the creation of an effectively functioning parliament as the most significant result. Pipes describes the events not as a coup d'état but as an unprincipled violation of the constitution aimed at creating a viable parliament. Zubov wrote that juridically it was a "state coup" but politically the only possibility of saving state order and preserving parliamentary legislative institutions. The Union of October 17 recognized that the new election laws had been enacted unconstitutionally while calling them a "regrettable necessity." The act ultimately failed to preserve the imperial system, which ceased to exist in 1917.

Whether police provocation lay behind the "soldiers' mandate" episode has not been established. Three versions are put forward as equally possible: that the Social Democrats themselves composed the mandate and decided to send the delegation while police informers merely reported it, that the whole episode was instigated by police provocateurs, or that Stolypin directly ordered the police to organize a provocation. There is no direct documentary evidence for any one version, and indirect evidence favours all three, so the question cannot be resolved. By 1911 the extent of police provocation was beginning to emerge: the former police agent Boleslav Brodsky gave a detailed interview to the SR newspaper Budushcheye in July 1911, and on 16 October of that year Kadet deputy Teslenko stated in the Third Duma that the Kizevetter commission had concluded the matter was "not a conspiracy by Social Democrats against the state, but a conspiracy by the St. Petersburg police against the Second State Duma." Witte wrote that the new electoral law excluded "the voice of the people" from the Duma, giving a voice only to the nobility, officialdom and part of the obedient merchants and industrialists, so that the State Duma ceased to express popular wishes.