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