1906-1908 – Life Beyond the Line
Poland’s first elections after the abolition of the Brusilov Line dramatically reordered her politics – leaving the Duma more splintered than ever before, as no party or faction secured as much as a quarter of the popular vote. With turnout surging to its highest level in many years, nearly 37,000,000 Poles cast their ballots. It was remarkably only 21 years since the empire had had its first election with more than a million votes.
With all eyes were fixed on how the multitudes of the east would vote, the greatest victors of the night were the Grand Turanian Congress. While the Congress had enjoyed a slight swing in its favour among the Tatars of the west, in near enough swept the board, securing crushing margins over Hindu-Muslim Block competitors throughout the densely populated and largely mono-ethnic Tatar provinces between the Volga and Urals. While many Tatars and Mongols in the west hoped to find themselves a place within Polish society, in the east they wanted nothing to do with Kiev. Indeed, of the new seats it gained, the Block secured more new Deputies among the Arabs and Persians than its core Tatar and Mongol constituencies.
Although all the national parties lost voteshare and gained seats, there were clear winners and losers. The Trudoviks faired particularly poorly – struggling to find many new voters in the more rural east, and losing support in the western provinces. Worse, they were overtaken by the National Alliance as the empire’s leading political force. The right had ample reason to be happy – finding a receptive new electorate among the Siberian Russians, many of whom had brought the conservative instincts of rural Poland with them to their new homes. The liberals of the Democratic and Constitutional parties performed particularly well – seeing their voteshares drop more gradually than the socialists and conservatives and enjoying solid seat gains.
On the radical right, the Veterans League, who had fizzed in 1902, lost eight of their ten seats, while Boris Makarov’s Radical Labour Party successfully defended the seats of its five founding Deputies and secured a not unimpressive one and half million votes – building areas of strength among Russians living in the ethnically mixed areas of Muscovy, the Don Valley and Lower Volga.
Left to Right: Daniil Chernov and Ivan Tymoshenko
With such a fractured Duma, whose third largest faction in the Turanists were untouchable for the mainstream parties, there was no clear winner. The progressive coalition of socialists, liberals and minority parties that had provided the government with its support in the previous parliamentary session had retained its majority, and Daniil Chernov was eager to keep this alliance together and continue in government. Yet the Trudoviks’ poor showing at the polls had left the party humbled, while the Constitutionalists were emboldened – demanding large concessions to support Chernov for another term.
As the liberals and socialists haggled, the leaders of the National Alliance approached the Constitutionalists with an offer they could not refuse. In exchange for breaking with Chernov, the conservatives would make the Constitutionalist leader Ivan Tymoshenko Prime Minister – forging a new centre-right coalition of conservatives, liberals and the minority parties. The liberals accepted this offer, bringing to an end Poland’s longest continuous premiership since Mikhail Brusilov.
This realignment represented the culmination of an effort by members of the rightwing elite to find a new role for the conservative movement in the post-Brusilov and post-Kazimzade world. They would agree to a truce with liberals and minority parties on the cultural issues that once defined them, uniting behind a desire to limit the rapid expansion of state power over the economy driven by the socialists. The alliance left the outgoing Prime Minister with a tremendous sense of betrayal, and his rage would leave aggressively combative leader of the opposition, limiting Tymoshenko’s freedom of manoeuvre in the Duma.
The development of Tatar politics over the course of the decade from the turn of the century had been deeply alarming to outsiders and moderates alike. Separatism was already growing rapidly in strength before the Great War, yet had risen to assume a dominant position within the community – with the Grand Turanian Congress enjoying a degree of popular support within its constituency that the national parties could only dream of. It had the power to rally millions to the polls and flood the streets from Irkutsk to Moscow on a whim. Yet was truly terrified the political establishment was its developing relationship with violence. Prior to the Great War, Turanism, at an elite level at the very least, had been a largely peaceful and democratic movement. The Congress’ leadership remained adamant that it had no connections to the Brotherhood of the Wolf and their long running insurgency, yet pointedly refused to condemn them for their violence – laying the blame for any destruction at the feet of the Polish state that had failed to acquiesce to the national aspirations of the Turanian peoples. At a grassroots level, the picture was rather murkier. Local party associations frequently conducted fundraising on the behalf of guerilla groups, offering them shelter, supplies and valuable connections. Members and even some hotheaded Deputies were happy to lionise rebel leaders – helping to create a romantic image of the Brotherhood as folk heroes across much of Eurasia. This intertwining of separatism and violence only further distanced the Congress from Poland’s other parties, leaving a great oppositional bulwark in the Duma and Polish society at large.
The years after 1906 Poland’s radical right develop rapidly organisationally and ideologically. The emergence of Makarov’s movement had clearly taken the wind out of the sails of the Veterans League – poaching a large part of its electorate. The two groups therefore agreed to unite into a single party late in 1906 – forming the Radical Republican Party. One of the key outcomes of this merger was the introduction of the Radicals to the Free Corps. Prior to 1906 these had been essentially little more than clubs for disgruntled Great War veterans associated with the League, that frequently became involved in marches and street brawls. Under the RRP’s direction they would develop into the physical force street-arm of the Polish Radicalism – developing an infamous blackshirt uniform and attempting to violently engage Turanists, socialists and liberals in an effort to physically dominate the empire’s public places.
Conscious of the novelty of his movement and the wide array of, often unconventional, ideas held by his supporters. Makarov made a significant effort to give his party a clear ideological expression through the publication of what amounted to the core political manifesto of Radicalism. In ‘The Decline of the Slavs’, Makarov outlined his reading of history: describing how at the moment of the Polish state’s pinnacle of power at the close of the Great War, the nation was betrayed by a corrupt, effete, liberal elite who stabbed the millions who had sacrificed their lives in the back by selling the Russian nation out to the minorities. In order to save the Russian people from degeneracy and, ultimately, destruction, a national revolution was required that would sweep away Polish Tsardom and establish a new Russian Republic, that would restore the virility and power of the Slavs and ensure their mastery of all the lands between the Oder and the Pacific, and with it, the world. The Decline of the Slavs quickly became an unexpected sensation – outselling any other political text in Polish history to that point.
Within the Duma, the government stood on very unstable ground. With the Trudoviks happy in an oppositional mood, there was little hope for crossbench alliances, while the Turanist Deputies were happy to frustrated the government at every turn. Within the governing alliance, finding common ground among pious Jews, conservatives, secular liberals, Christians and Muslims was not easy task. The wider conservative movement in particular was thrown into existential crisis by its participation. In order to keep the minority parties on side, and in line with the Constitutionalists’ liberal beliefs, the government had offered a number of concessions – offering investments in minority areas, promising parity in funding for Jewish and non-Jewish schools and appointing members of the Christian and Hindu-Muslim Blocks to prominent government posts. These policies split the parties of the National Alliance. The National Liberals, whose original raison d’etre had disappeared with the fall of the Brusilov Line, were strong supporters of the Prime Minister, while the Agudah Yisrael were aghast at being party to a government that seemed to be continuing the process of dismantling Jewish power, having little interest in the centre-right economic consensus with the liberals. In between, the National Conservatives were internally divided between sceptics and supporters of Tymoshenko’s administration. All this caused frequent parliamentary rebellions, leaving a government often paralysed to act.
On September 8th 1907 Tsar Nikolai passed away after an incredible sixty years on the throne, aged eighty four. During his long reign he had overseen Poland’s development into a mass democracy, and its transformation from a backward agrarian state to one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Crucially, his willingness to step back and allow the Duma to exercise political power, outwith a handful of sometimes controversial interventions, had been crucial to the development of a democratic culture. His death was widely mourned across the political spectrum, and robbed the Tsardom of the intangible authority attached to long-lived monarchs as his thirty three year old grandson Radoslav IV ascended to the throne.
Economically, by 1907, Poland’s postwar boom appeared to be slowing down. With German economy showing the early signs of recovery, Poland’s industries started to face competition from Europe once more while some investors that had sought refuge in Poland over the past decade drifted back to Europe. More concerningly, many of the industries that had been formed or expanded during the preceding years were not producing the level of returns that had been hoped for during the exuberant years of the boom.
In 1908 international affairs intervened to upset Poland’s already unstable political balance. Since the end of the Great War the Holy Roman Empire had been in a sorry state of instability and poverty as it struggled to rebuild. In 1907 a rightwing national conservative government came to power on the promise of restoring order and national pride. While they had successfully ended the street violence that had plagued Germany for years, their next target was the issue of war reparations. These payments had crippling effect on the Imperial economy – weighing down its budget and sending the nation’s wealth streaming out of the nation in torrents. In May 1908, the Imperial government took the bold step of unilaterally rescinding all reparation payments.
Across Europe governments were up in arms, with the Papacy calling for military action to force the Germans’ hand. Within Poland, the issue was explosive. The RRP led rallied mass demonstrations demanding war in retribution for German insolence. Yet the cabinet was split. Tymoshenko, a government minister during the Great War, was extremely dovish. While the Polish state had invested in a great many things since 1902, its armed forces were not one of them. Indeed, the Polish army was smaller in 1908 than at any point since the 1880s and its weapons had not been updated since then. While Poland could certainly defeat the Germans, an invasion might not prove as easy as many assumed. Furthermore, while far right opinion might have been pro-war, Tymoshenko sensed a pacifist majority that had no interest in seeing another generation lost for the sake of money.
The Prime Minister’s commitment to a diplomatic solution clashed violently with one of the key members of his coalition – the Agudah Yisrael. The staunchly conservative party had been straining under the terms of the coalition for years – frustrated to be supporting a government that appeared uninterested in supporting religious interests and undermined the dwindling Judeao-Russian power. In truth, this national outrage offered the Israelites the excuse they had been searching for since the early days of the coalition to break with the liberals and force their more moderate conservative allies into a new approach. As Tymoshenko rejected the call to war, the Agudah Yisrael left the government – depriving it of its majority.
This action left the National Conservatives in a perilous position. If they remained in the government they could conceivably muddle on as a minority, maintaining their alliance with the liberals and their broader realigment to the centre ground. Yet if they did so they would almost certainly divide the alliance between Israelites and moderate conservatives that had been at the centre of Polish conservatism since the 1870s. The National Conservatives chose to keep the ideological family together, ditching Tymoshenko, going into opposition and joining with the Agudah Yisrael in a motion of no confidence.
As Tymoshenko scrambled to try to avoid the collapse of his ministry he was forced to turn to the man he had betrayed in order to seize the premiership in 1906 – Daniil Chernov. The former prime minister was happy to bring his Trudoviks back into the government, yet he refused to play second fiddle. Chernov would have to be restored as premier, and the socialists as the government’s leading force. Unwilling to capitulate, Tymoshenko therefore chose to dissolve the Duma and call for new elections.
