Civic freedom was not yet a fact.  It seemed, as a reality, to be as far away as ever.  Meetings were 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  The terms of the Manifesto of October 17th—­Absolutism’s solemn covenant with the nation—­had not been repealed, and the nation knew that the government did not dare to repeal it.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 the October Manifesto.  On the other hand, there was the possibility that the Duma might be captured and made a safe ally.  The suffrage upon which the elections were to be based was most undemocratic and unjust, giving to the landlords and the prosperous peasants, together with the wealthy classes in the cities, an enormous preponderance in the electorate.  By using the Black Hundreds to work among the electors—­bribing, cajoling, threatening, and coercing, as the occasion might require—­it might be possible to bring about the election of a Duma which would be a pliant and ready tool of the government.