THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1907. THE RUSSIAN DUMA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13421, 25 February 1907, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1907. THE RUSSIAN DUMA.

The sficond Russian Duma has been elected after a year of unprecedented anarchism and terrorism and under conditions which were intended to make certain the return of Government candidates. The result is a startling impeachment of the Tsarocracy. In spite of all the powerful official influences brought to bear upon the various elective bodies and of the wholesale coercion exercised in every pari of Hip Empire, threefourths of the members elected are opposed to the Government. The immediate fall in Russian stocks which followed in Paris upon the announcement of the results shows the impression which the elections have made among those who are interested solely in the security of their investments. It. is the more noticeable because the sympathies of Western Europe are strongly with the Russian reformers, in France as in England, so that the uneasiness in the stock market is in no way caused by any sentimental antagonism to the reform movement. Its sources lie in the positive conviction that the Tsarocracy will not yield its powers, privileges, and prerogatives without a struggle, and in the proof afforded that the great mass of the Russian people are more determined than ever to demand radi-

cal concessions. Of the seriousness of the situation there can be no doubt, nor is it any the less serious, because it is quite incomprehensible to the Western mind. For a year and more the Russian Government has been straining its energies to stifle the reform movement and to overawe the revolutionary parties : while at the same time the revolutionists have hesitated at no violence which might strike terror into the heart of every Government official By the one side, wholesale massacres have been committed upon the slightest provocation, and often upon manufactured provocation ; the hangman and the firing party have been constantly, busy ; the gaols and prisons have been crammed to overflowing with suspected persons ; and the sorrowful road to Northern Siberia has never been move closely thronged. By the other side, assassination has been heaped upon assassination with amazing rapidity and recklessness ; organised robbery has been made to fill the revolutionary coffers, where illegal levies failed to supply the required funds ; bomb, pistol, dagger, and poison have been indiscriminately resorted to ; no official has been too high and none too low for revolutionary vengeance ; and no place has been a sure refuge for any against whom the popular wrath has turned. Yet in the midst of this astounding anarchy the Russian State lias managed to exist, thanks to its primitive and barbaric type of organisation. In some way or other, without order in its towns and with famine racking its agricultural districts, the vast. empire of the Tsar has been kept together. It is still possible to travel by train, still possible to post a letter, and still necessary to pay taxes. Troops are still mustered, warships still manoeuvred, prisoners still held, at the order of the Tsar. But though revolt has been stamped out with grape and bullet and Cossack whip wherever it lifted head, it. was beyond the power of the. Russian Government to so coerce enough of the limited number of electors as to secure even a bare majority in the new Duma. Russia, is certainly a most wonderful and incomprehensible country.

From the first Duma the civilised world expected too much, as has been evident since its dissolution. From the second Duma it possibly expects too little, as the tide of events may prove to us. It. was thought, of course, that the first Duma would have much the same standing with heterogeneous peoples, white and yellow, civilised and savage, European and Asiatic, who constitute the Russian Empire, as the National Assembly had in revolutionary France, as the Long Parliament had in the dawn of the Great Rebellion. It was imagined that mutineering seamen and discontented soldiers, city manufacturers and their workmen, country professional men and peasants, the Teutons of Finland and the Slavs of Poland, and the Tartars of the steppes, would find in the first, Duma a centre round which to rally in a great uprising against the Tsar. The Government evidently thought otherwise, or the Duma would never have been summoned ; it was believed that the power which had created the Duma could dissolve it. and events justified this belief and disillusioned Western Europe. Rut that the Government itself hardly realised its own Russia the fact (hat a second Duma was summoned demonstrates. It would have been much easier and simpler to continue the undisguised absolutism than to be encumbered by an antagonistic representative Chamber. The Government intended to obtain a submissive Duma, and imagined itself able to do so. This is beyond question. In spile of all its efforts, of its imprisonments, its death sentences, its assassinations—for the revolutionists are not the only assassins—its briberies and its disfranchisements, the new Duma upon whoso composition it relied is found to be hardly less antagonistic than the old one. And what may bo the outcome of this? Judging by the results of the past two or three years we might say that it implies nothing move than a continuance of the existing conditions, which would destroy any civilised Stale in twenty-four hours, but may apparently exist in Russia for as many years without preventing its ambassadors from holding a prominent place in international diplomacy or its delegate from being president of The Hague Conference. Rut this hesitation to anticipate any coining solution of this Russian problem is due to the apparent failure of the first Duma to affect the Russian political organisation. There may easily lie profound effects working below the stormy surface of Russian politics, and oT this the re-election of a revolutionary majority to the new Duma may be a. sign. The Government, and the reformers have been, at close grips for months, and still the reformers can show a great majority in all the bodies concerned in the election oT a Duma member. They at least have not been terorised by the bureaucracy, and they may represent not merely the national determination to demand reforms, but an increasing national determination to enforce them.