Feeling perfectly secure, the government, while promising the election of another Duma, carried on a policy of vigorous repression of all radical and revolutionary agitation and organization.  Executions without trial were almost daily commonplaces.  Prisoners were mercilessly tortured, and, in many cases, flogged to death.  Hundreds of persons, of both sexes, many of them simple bourgeois-liberals and not revolutionists in any sense of the word, were exiled to Siberia.  The revolutionary organizations of the workers were filled with spies and provocateurs, an old and effective method of destroying their morale.  In all the provinces of Russia field court martial was proclaimed.  Field court martial is more drastic than ordinary court martial and practically amounts to condemnation without trial, for trials under it are simply farcical, since neither defense nor appeal is granted.  Nearly five hundred revolutionists were put to death under this system, many of them without even the pretense of a trial.

The Black Hundreds were more active than ever, goaded on by the Holy Synod.  Goremykin resigned as Premier and his place was taken by the unspeakably cruel and bloodthirsty Stolypin, whose “hemp neckties,” as the grim jest of the masses went, circled the necks of scores of revolutionists swinging from as many gallows.  There were many resorts to terrorism on the part of the revolutionists during the summer of 1906, many officials paying for the infamies of the government with their lives.  How many of these “executions” were genuine revolutionary protests, and how many simple murders instigated or committed by provocative agents for the purpose of discrediting the revolutionists and affording the government excuses for fresh infamies, will perhaps never be known.  Certainly, in many cases, there was no authorization by any revolutionary body.

In February, 1907, the elections for the Second Duma were held under a reign of terror.  The bureaucracy was determined to have a “safe and sane” body this time, and resorted to every possible nefarious device to attain that end.  Whole masses of electors whose right to vote had been established at the previous election were arbitrarily disfranchised.  While every facility was given to candidates openly favoring the government, including the Octobrists, every possible obstacle was placed in the way of radical candidates, especially Socialists.  The meetings of the latter were, in hundreds of cases, prohibited; in other hundreds of cases they were broken up by the Black Hundreds and the police.  Many of the most popular candidates were arrested and imprisoned without trial, as were members of their campaign committees.  Yet, notwithstanding all these things, the Second Duma was, from the standpoint of the government, worse than the first.  The Socialists, adopting the tactics of Plechanov, against the advice of Lenine, his former pupil and disciple, had decided not to boycott the elections this time,