1913-1914 – A Test of Wills
With the mob baying on their doorstep, the moderate conservative waverers who held the balance in the vote to restore the Brusilov Line shrunk away, falling back in line with the party and movement. Only a handful joined Zalman Bloom in rebelling against the government – allowing the vote to restore Brusilov to pass by 355 votes to 346. News of the victory was greeted by deafening cheers by the huge crowd outside the Duma, turning a riot into a jamboree. Days later a second vote was passed than banned the Grand Turanian Congress from standing candidates in any subsequent Polish election. For the reactionary hardliners of the National Alliance, their restoration was complete.
Gaidar might have hoped to bask in the adulation of the conservative public after these totemic victories. Yet it was Makarov who adopted a new swagger, and increasingly presented himself as the true champion of right – the man who had held the moderate Deputies of the National Alliance to the fire to ensure they did not betray their voters. Finding a new role, it is notable that the Radicals subtly began to de-emphasise their traditional redistributive economic views, as they positioned themselves as the vanguard of the conservative revolution.
The events of 1913 were disturbing to many conservatives, who feared they were losing control of their own political project to the unruly thuggishness of the Radicals. These feelings were not limited to the moderates of the Zalman Bloom mould, or those who had sympathised with him over the Brusilov issue. Indeed, the great Yildilz Kazimzade, serving out his semi-retirement as an octogenarian backbencher in the Agudat Yisrael, took to the press to write a number of influential opinion pieces that described Makarov and the Radicals as dangerous hoodlums who the conservatives, their restoration complete, should abandon post-haste. Makarov dismissed the former premier as a ‘miserable old Turk’, yet opinion in the Alliance was clearly shifting.
The passing of this legislation provoked an almost immediate violent response. In the east, the Brotherhood had largely exhausted its military strength in the Great Turk Rebellion and its aftermath, but still had extensive support and networks of agents through much of the empire. Shifting tactics, they unleashed a campaign of bomb throwing and assassinations, with individual agents and sympathisers launching small scale attacks on agents of the Polish state, military and civilian, as well as Russian settlers in traditionally Tatar areas.
Elsewhere, the socialists took the opportunity to accelerate their paramilitary efforts. Josef Bronstein published an infamous pamphlet ‘Socialism or Tyranny’ in which he claimed that Poland was hurtling towards an extreme right wing dictatorship that the moderate parties were powerless to exist, leaving the responsibility at the feet of the Trudoviks to find salvation. As such, the Red Front took aggressive action against Radicals and conservatives – waging pitched battles against blackshirts, attacked Hasidic communities – seen as the bedrock of reactionary Poland, and attempted to disrupt right wing politicians by all possible means. Most notably, they adopted a strategy of creating ‘reactionary free zones’ – attempting to make any conservative and Radical activity impossible in their areas of greatest strength, most successfully in the sprawling industrial centre of Minsk.
With tensions at boiling point, Poland prepared for a new election campaign in March 1914 to elect a new Duma based on the revised constitution. The right had every expectation of a landslide. Had they replicated their 1912 vote within with the Brusilov Line reimposed, they would secure a dominant position. As such, the result represented a modest swing back from the right’s 1912 high tide. The conservatives were savaged. The National Alliance vote collapsed in many areas. Recording half as many votes as in 1912, and with the great bulk of its support concentrated in the west, its vote share dropped by more than a third across much of European Poland as it lost support in equal weight to both centre and the Radicals. With its share of the Duma dropping from 38 per cent to 18 per cent, the conservatives were reduced to the status of Poland’s third force for the first time in their long history. The largest beneficiaries of the Alliance’s collapse were the Radicals. Winning a shade over a quarter of the vote and emerging as the comfortably the largest faction in the Duma – the far right had achieved great success. However, this victory was not all that it seemed. Their new votes were drawn almost exclusively from the National Alliance – with scores of generational conservative rural seats changing hands – while they party had fallen back slightly in urban areas, with the Trudoviks appearing to benefit. Indeed, across the country Radical candidates scored only slightly higher levels of support than 1912 – making gains only through the collapse of their erstwhile allies. After seeing the socialist vote fall in every election of the twentieth century, the Trudoviks were major winners – seeing a major surge of support that pushed them into second place with more than 100 seats. This was additionally impressive in light of the socialists’ traditionally higher support in the minority-dominated eastern provinces relative to the parties of the right. The liberals largely failed to prosper, their like-for-like vote falling back modestly, although they were still able to elect a phalanx of Deputies, including two Democrats. In the minority areas, the ban on the Grand Turanian Congress naturally drastically altered the electoral calculus – leaving the Hindu-Muslim Block to dominate the Tatar and Mongol vote. Nonetheless, it is notable that a sizeable number of hardline separatist voters chose to boycott the election, suppressing Tatar turnout overall.
The election results were a disaster for Polish moderates of all stripes. Combined, the extremes, the far right Radicals and a Trudovik party now firmly in the grasp of the far left, had a clear Duma majority. Having won a clear plurality, the Radicals assertively demanded their right to form a government – with party members holding victory marches across the empire. Tsar Radoslav IV spoke for many of his subjects when he made clear that he saw neither party as suitable to govern, noting of their leaders Makarov and Bronstein ‘one could not find another pair of wretches so unworthy of the office of Prime Minister in all of Poland’. This was the birth of a grand conspiracy.
The Tsar invited the leaders of the moderate parties to the Boyarka Palace and asked them to come together form a grand coalition, while the Duma was temporarily suspended. In essence, the sovereign hoped the moderate parties would grant a decree of political legitimacy to a palace-led coup. The Democrats, anathema to cooperation with a putsch, walked out almost immediately, while the Hindu-Muslim Block refused to cooperate unless the Tsar promised to restore the pre-1912 constitutional settlement – something that was impossible if he was to retain conservative backing.
Despite these setbacks, the leaderships of the National Alliance, Constitutionalists and Christian Block agreed to come together. With Gaidar discredit as a potential leader of an anti-extremist alliance through his cooperation with the Radicals in the previous parliamentary term, the putschists needed a new leader. The Tsar decided to call upon the wisenly, increasingly frail, old head of Yildilz Kazimzade, a man who had been close to his grandfather Tsar Nikolai, to become Prime Minister for the third time, nominally as an independent. It was hoped that the respect for the grand old man, particularly from those on the right, would dampen the inevitable popular backlash and further increase the legitimacy of the new regime. Indeed, among its ministers, the third Kazimzade administration could count upon three of the last four prime ministers in Ivan Tymoshenko, Jan Sigorski and Ivan Gaidar; and the leaderships of parties that had won around two fifths of the popular vote.
On March 18th, five days after the election, imperial troops entered Kiev and in a series of swift announcements, the Tsar invited Kazimzade to form a government, the conservative-liberal-Christian coalition was unveiled and the temporary suspension of the Duma announced. Almost immediately, things began to unravel. The secret agreements reached in the Boyarka had been made by party leaders alone, and they had clearly failed to read the mood of their grassroots. Large numbers of liberals and moderates were horrified by the attack on Poland’s democratic institutions. The conservative movement was especially divided, with many shocked that the Alliance’s leadership would conspire to overthrow the Duma rather than join together with the Radicals who had, after all, stood should to shoulder with them over the past two years. Indeed, dozens of Alliance Deputies openly denounced the seizure of power and called instead for the reopening of the Duma and a coalition with Makarov. On the left, fearing arrest, Josef Bronstein fled Kiev from Minsk, were he denounced the new government and called for armed resistance – with the Red Front taking effective control of Minsk and most of Northern Ruthenia over the course of the following days.
With Tsar Radoslav’s hopes of a popular coup stillborn upon arrival, the greatest threat came not from the left but the right. Like Bronstein, Makarov had fled Kiev in the midst of the putsch – retreating to one of his areas of greatest strength in the Don Valley, where ethnic Russians were solidly for his party and the blackshirts especially militant. There, he rallied popular anger against the cabal of centrists that had stolen him of his election victory and demanded action. Making use of the press, his party organisation and a flurry of speaking engagements he spread out a call for his followers to descend upon Kiev to bring down the putsch. Soon tens of thousands of blackshirts, Radical supporters and conservative anti-putschists were descending upon the capital.
On March 27th, the first sizeable column of blackshirts, with Makarov at their head, reached Kiev. As they entered the city, the soldiers sent to confront them refused to fire upon them. Founded by the merger of the Radical Labour Party and the Veterans League, the Radical Republicans had deep roots in military circles and, following their Veterans League traditions, had spent their existence advocating for the interests of soldiers and veterans – ingratiating themselves to officers, generals and the common soldiery alike. With many military men already leaning to the right, and often the radical right, the party enjoyed a great well of sympathy among both the common soldiers and military leadership. Makarov had gambled upon these loyalties when he organised his March on Kiev, and this proved to be a master stroke. With blackshirts pouring into the city, and the army either standing aside or at times actively assisting them, the Radicals moved to take power.
As the organs of government fell into Radical hands a grand drama ensued. The Tsar initially attempted to flee from the Boyarka, but saw his car intercepted by blackshirts who returned him to the palace under effective house arrest. While many members of the putschist government fled, Kazimzade had no desire to go on the run at his age and willingly turned himself over to the blackshirts, resigning as Prime Minister. The Duma was reconvened on March 29th with only Radicals and a smattering of fellow-traveller conservatives present to confirm Boris Makarov as Prime Minister – an appointment the Tsar was compelled to consent to from his confinement. With the baubles of legal legitimacy, Makarov pushed for a motion granting him extraordinary powers to restore order to a nation rapidly falling apart.
While the Radicals were capturing control of the state in Kiev, the socialists had expanded their revolt in northern Ruthenia – establishing control over a swathe of, traditionally Trudovik-voting, territory including the cities of Smolensk, Minsk, Warsaw, Gdansk, Vilnius and Riga. Bronstein called for a revolutionary war for the establishment of socialism, overthrow of the Radicals and restoration of democracy. In the east, the Tatar and Mongol majority areas that were already under martial law witnessed a tremendous upsurge of violence. Although, with the Brotherhood of the Wolf still on its knees following the Great Turk Rebellion and the repression that followed, revolt in the region was poorly organised and faced an already intimidating military presence that prevented a more cohesive rebellion taking hold. Finally, the Tsar’s apparent acceptance of Makarov’s ascent had fooled few of his former allies, who believed their sovereign was a prisoner and the new regime in Kiev illegitimate. These Tsarists found popular support among the Christian western and southern peripheries of the empire. As Tymoshenko reached Krakow and formed a continuity putschist government, he established political leadership over an emerging Tsarist revolt. The threats of the socialists and Tatars likely helped to solidify the Radical regime, with many Tsarist sympathisers within the armed forces ultimately shunning rebellion in the name of fighting the reds and Turanists.