Members of the compositions of the 1st through the 4th State Duma (which operated respectively in 1906, 1907, 1907–1912, and 1912–1917), the lower chamber of the parliament of the Russian Empire, presented a total of 483 bills of draft legislation. Nearly 30, in other words more than 6%, of these were draft legislation on Baltic themes (these directly affected the governorates of Estland, Livland, and Courland). At the same time, the government presented nearly 5,500 draft bills, of which around a hundred were on Baltic themes. Twenty-three interpellation requests were submitted to the Duma requiring explanations from the government regarding ‘illegal’ repressions. The signatures of at least 30 members of the Duma were required to initiate the presentation of draft legislation or interpellation requests. The number of Duma members elected from the three Baltic governorates (Estonians, Latvians, Germans, Jews, and Russians) was 11+11+12+12 respectively for each of the first four compositions of the Duma. For this reason, they had to seek allies in order to assemble the 30 supporters required by the constitution. Their primary allies and the main supporters of nationalist-democratic legislators were their faction companions. Baltic members of the Duma belonged to the leftist-liberal Kadets faction, the somewhat more moderate faction of the Progressists, the rightist-liberal Octobrists faction, and the faction of Revolutionary Social Democrats. Their allies were coalition partners from the leftist-radical wing: the Trudoviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Social Democrats (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), the Popular Socialists, radicals who did not belong to any political party, and nationalist factions and groups, including the Polish Kolo, the Polish-Lithuanian-Byelorussian group, and Moslems. The central themes of the draft legislation related to Baltic matters that was introduced by Duma members were civil rights and liberties (including the universal right to vote, equality of peoples and confessions), autonomy and the democratisation of local governments within the framework of general state reform, the restriction of large landholdings (until their liquidation) and doing away with the privileges of manor lords, and the reformation in the spirit of liberalism of schools (teaching pupils in their own mother tongue), court procedure (jury, language used in court), taxation policy, and the rules for administering the church (doing away with the rights of manor lords to church patronage, the self-administration of congregations). The absolute majority of draft legislation on Baltic themes did not proceed beyond the Duma: they were not granted forwarding at general meetings, they were not reviewed, they were rejected, or they became bogged down in commissions. The government consistently refused to take up responsibility for drawing up the kind of legislation that would include the expansion of the rights of non-Russian mother tongues (Estonian, Latvian, and German in the Baltic lands) in school and in public administration, universal voting rights in rural local governments, or the forcible expropriation of manor lands.