The Russian Revolution

Mirskii was not overjoyed by Nicholas’s offer. Considerations of personal safety played a part in his hesitation: on his retirement half a year later, he would toast his good fortune in having survived so dangerous an assignment.²⁷ But he also did not think that someone holding his views could work with the Court. To prevent misunderstandings, he laid out before Nicholas his political credo:

You know little of me and perhaps think that I share the opinions of the two preceding ministers. But, on the contrary, I hold directly opposite views. After all, in spite of my friendship with Sipiagin, I had to quit as Deputy Minister because I disagreed with his politics. The situation has become so acute that one can consider the government to be at odds with Russia. It is imperative to make peace, or else Russia will soon be divided into those who carry out surveillance and those who are under surveillance, and then what?²⁸

He advised Nicholas that it was necessary to introduce religious tolerance, to broaden the competence of self-government (he referred to himself as a “zemstvo

man”), to confine the concept of political crime to acts of terror and incitement to terror, to improve the treatment of the minorities, to ease censorship, and to invite zemstvo representatives for consultations. Nicholas, whose upbringing precluded open disagreement, seemed to approve of everything Mirskii told him.²⁹

Mirskii’s appointment to the most important administrative post in Russia was very favorably received. As an experienced official with a broad base of popular support, he seemed the ideal man to resolve the political crisis. His main shortcomings were softness of character and lack of decisiveness which caused him to send signals that encouraged the opposition in the belief the government was prepared to make greater concessions than was the case.

Mirskii immediately went to work to win public support. He abolished corporal punishment, relaxed censorship, and restored to their posts a number of prominent zemtsy whom Plehve had exiled. He further expressed the intention of lifting the disabilities of the Old Believers and easing the lot of the Jews. He made a strong impression with an address to the officials of the Ministry of the Interior, published in the press, in which he said that experience had taught him that government had to have a “genuinely well-meaning and genuinely trustful attitude toward civic and estate institutions and the population at large.”³⁰

A new era seemed to be dawning. The zemtsy

read in Mirskii’s remarks an invitation to hold a national congress. They had held one such gathering in 1902, but surreptitiously because it was illegal. The idea of a public zemstvo congress emerged in late August 1904, immediately after Mirskii’s appointment, and quickly gained the endorsement of both the liberal (constitutionalist) and conservative (Slavophile) wings of the movement. Initially, the planners intended to confine the agenda to zemstvo affairs. But having learned of Mirskii’s remarks, they concluded that the government would welcome their views on national issues and expanded the agenda accordingly. The zemtsy

felt it was essential to institutionalize the latest changes in government policy: Mirskii, after all, could prove merely a tool of the “dark forces”—the Court camarilla, above all—to be discarded as soon as he had served his purpose by pacifying the country. In the words of Dmitrii Shipov, the most prominent among the conservative zemtsy, many of his associates felt

that so far, trust in society had been expressed only by the individual placed at the head of the Ministry of the Interior … it was necessary for that one official’s sense of trust to be assimilated by the entire government and clothed in legal form, protected by safeguards, which would preclude shifts in the government’s attitude to society being dependent on such happenstance as the change of personnel at the head of government offices. It was further said that it had become an urgent need to make proper arrangements for legislative activity and to grant a national representative body participation in it.³¹

These sentiments spelled constitution and a legislative parliament. Some conservative zemtsy thought this went too far, but persuaded that the government wanted to hear the whole range of opinions, they agreed to place constitutional proposals on the agenda of the forthcoming congress, scheduled for early November.