bach. Schwanebach had occupied a number of important positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy in the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century. He was, successively, Assistant Director of the Credit Chancellery, Deputy Director of the State Bank, member of the Council of the Ministry of Finance, Deputy Minister, and Minister of Agriculture.1 In all of these posts he violently opposed the financial policies of S. lu. Witte.2 When Witte returned to power as Russia's first premier, in the aftermath of a lost war and of revolution, Schwanebach and his good friend Baron Alois von Aehrenthal, the Austrian ambassador to Russia, mounted a fervent campaign in Russia, and especially abroad, to assist in the destruction of Witte's position.3 Schwanebach never hid his disdain for representative or parliamentary institutions. As Minister of Agriculture, he had participated in the deliberations on the Bulygin draft and in these sessions gave vent to his fears that concessions might be made to dangerous elements of the population. Once he realized that some sort of assembly was inevitable, he advocated a franchise law which would result in the largest possible representation of peasant elements in it. Such a peasant preponderance, he hoped, would constitute a valuable ballast. It would give the duma *The Central University Research Fund of the University of New Hampshire and the Social Science Research Council have given financial support to this study. All unpublished German Foreign Office documents cited below are on microfilm. Their citation is followed by their microfilm classification. Unpublished Austrian documents stem from the files of the Haus, Hofund Staatsarchiv in Vienna. 1 / Entsiklopedicheskii Slovaf (St. Petersburg, 1903), Lxxvn, p. 242; P. Kh. von Schwanebach, Zapiski sanovnika; politika P. A. Stolypina i vtoraia gosudarstvennaia duma, Golos Minuvshego, i-m (vi), (1918), 115, n. 1. 2 / V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past; Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford/ London, 1939), pp. 169, 232. o i nans nenoronner, An Annwine uipiomatic conspiracy, iyU5-iyut>: ine Schwanebach Memorandum, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, XIV, 3 (Sept. 1966), 347-61.