The Duma opened on April 27th, at the Taurida Palace.  St. Petersburg was a vast armed camp that day.  Tens of thousands of soldiers, fully armed, were massed at different points in readiness to suppress any demonstrations by the populace.  It was said that provocateurs moved among the people, trying to stir an uprising which would afford a pretext for action by the soldiers.  The members of the Duma were first received by the Czar at the Winter Palace and addressed by him in a pompous speech which carefully avoided all the vital questions in which the Russian people were so keenly interested.  It was a speech which might as well have been made by the first Czar Nicholas.  But there was no need of words to tell what was in the mind of Nicholas II; that had been made quite evident by the new laws and the new Ministry.  Before the Duma lay the heavy task of continuing the Revolution, despite the fact that the revolutionary army had been scattered as chaff is scattered before the winds.

The first formal act of the Duma, after the opening ceremonies were finished, was to demand amnesty for all the political prisoners.  The members of the Duma had come to the Taurida Palace that day through streets crowded with people who chanted in monotonous chorus the word “Amnesty.”  The oldest man in the assembly, I.I.  Petrunkevitch, was cheered again and again as he voiced the popular demand on behalf of “those who have sacrificed their freedom to free our dear fatherland.”  There were some seventy-five thousand political prisoners in Russia at that time, the flower of Russian manhood and womanhood, treated as common criminals and, in many instances, subject to terrible torture.  Well might Petrunkevitch proclaim:  “All the prisons of our country are full.  Thousands of hands are being stretched out to us in hope and supplication, and I think that the duty of our conscience compels us to use all the influence our position gives us to see that the freedom that Russia has won costs no more sacrifices ...  I think, gentlemen ... we cannot refrain just now from expressing our deepest feelings, the cry of our heart—­that free Russia demands the liberation of all prisoners.”  At the end of the eloquent appeal there was an answering cry of:  “Amnesty!” “Amnesty!” The chorus of the streets was echoed in the Duma itself.

There was no lack of courage in the Duma.  One of its first acts was the adoption of an address in response to the speech delivered by the Czar to the members at the reception at the Winter Palace.  The address was in reality a statement of the objects and needs of the Russian people, their program.  It was a radical document, but moderately couched.  It demanded full political freedom; amnesty for all who had been imprisoned for political reasons or for violations of laws in restriction of religious liberty; the abolition of martial law and other extraordinary measures; abolition of capital punishment; the abolition of the Imperial Council and democratization of the