Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911) was a Russian politician who served as prime minister to Tsar Nicholas II (reign 1894-1917). Stolypin ruthlessly quashed anti-Tsarist rebellions after the Russian Revolution of 1905 but was also responsible for economic, social, and land reforms during his tenure from 1906 to 1911. The Stolypin reforms helped modernise Russia's backward agriculture and education sectors. The reforms were only partially successful and failed to prevent the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Revolution
Tsar Nicholas II had reigned over the Russian Empire since 1894, but his absolute rule faced a major challenge with the January revolution of 1905, when workers, peasants, and elements of the military all called for political, social, and economic changes and a new representative system of government. The economic slump of 1901 to 1905 and Russia's loss in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) added to the woes of those who called for change and further dented the tsar's prestige. On 9 January, a demonstration at the Winter Palace was fired upon, leading to the incident becoming known as Bloody Sunday of 1905. A general strike followed in St. Petersburg. On 4 February, the tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, governor-general of Moscow, was assassinated. Peasant revolts followed. In June, sailors of the battleship Potemkin staged a mutiny at Odessa. More strikes followed in October. The result of the Russian Revolution in 1905 was that the tsar was obliged to offer a more constitutional approach to governance, which he presented in his October Manifesto.
Stolypin as Prime Minister
Nicholas created a new parliament which consisted of the Council of State (upper house) and the Duma (lower house). Half of the upper house members were nominated, and the rest came from the upper classes. Members of the Duma were elected by the general population, although most of the voters would do so indirectly. In reality, Nicholas' parliament, which first met in April 1906, did not offer very much by way of an independent political body since ministers were directly responsible to the tsar, and their powers concerning finance were limited. The largest party in the Duma was the Constitutional Democratic Party, often called the Kadets. The Kadets called for land reforms and did not approve of the prime minister Ivan Goremykin (1839-1917). The tsar then appointed Stolypin the new prime minister (President of the Council of Ministers). Stolypin had relevant experience since he had served as governor of the province of Saratov, a hotbed of anti-Tsarist feelings. Significantly for his future reform programme, Stolypin also had practical experience in estate management. The new prime minister was not popular with a large number of other Duma members, who stoked up several minor peasant revolts and military mutinies, not to mention the odd assassination.
Stolypin responded to the crisis of discontent by ruthlessly quashing revolts across the state. He declared martial law in August 1906, rounded up rebels, and had them tried in military courts where appeals were forbidden. Over 37,000 people were found guilty of political crimes; 683 death sentences were dished out on the prime troublemakers by April 1907. The hangman's noose became a common sight in local communities and was widely referred to as the 'Stolypin necktie'. That August, Stolypin survived an assassination attempt, although his children were injured in the attack. The crackdown was intensified, and many revolutionaries left Russia until Stolypin's wrath eased.
New elections were held for the Duma in February 1907, with the result that the Kadets lost seats at the expense of the far right and left parties. Stolypin accused the Social Democratic party of plotting to assassinate the Tsar and dissolved this second Duma in June 1907. With electoral rights altered to favour "the landed nobility and the wealthy urban classes at the expense of the peasants and workers" (Wood, 35), a new, third Duma was formed in November 1907. This was a much more "conservative and compliant assembly" (ibid), so much so that the circumstances of its creation became known as 'Stolypin's coup'. The trick worked since this Duma endured much longer than its predecessors, lasting until 1912, the maximum period permitted by the constitution. It became known as 'Stolypin's Duma' or, more unkindly, 'Duma of the Lords and Lackeys' since it ensured the landed gentry, who were more likely to be pro-Tsarist than any other social group, "gained vastly disproportionate electoral rights" (Freeze, 261).
Tensions remained. Most left and liberal Duma members saw Stolypin as someone only interested in facilitating the tsar's watering down of the concessions he had promised the revolutionaries of 1905. The prime minister did wish to reform Russia, though, and he set about implementing an impressive series of measures that he hoped would drag Russia into the 20th century and help it catch up with other major European powers.
Russian Society
In the early 20th century, Russia remained a semi-feudal society, even if serfdom had been abolished in 1861. A national census conducted in 1897 revealed that over 85% of the population were peasants, that is, 97 million out of 110 million of the tsar's subjects belonged to the peasantry. The Russian population had increased 300% between 1815 and 1900, thanks to an increase in birth rate (although, conversely, the death rate increased in this period). By 1905, the population had risen to 130 million.
Peasants were small-scale farmers who worked land held by the local commune (mir or obshchina) or landless agricultural labourers who worked for their local community or local gentry. Peasants remained tied to their local commune, which was run by village elders, and its common-field cultivation. In the commune, land was either inherited or repartitioned based on a family's size. Each peasant family owned a kitchen garden while the pastures and forests were used by all members of the commune. "The typical commune had about 100 households and 2000 acres of land" (Shukman, 19).
Russian society was rigid. There was an official classification since the government insisted that, by law, every person belonged to one of four groups: the nobility, gentry, townspeople, and peasantry. By the end of the 19th century, some movement from the group one was born into became possible, but it was rare. There were other groups, for example, factory workers in the increasingly industrialised cities, university students, and middle-class professionals, but these were not yet considered worthy of separate categorisation by the state.
The Russian peasantry suffered from heavy taxes, poor farming methods, antiquated equipment, and, above all, a shortage of land. Peasants also had to pay unpopular 'redemption dues', that is, compensation to the nobles who had been stripped of their serfs back in 1861 in the form of an annual cash payment to the government. Many peasants wanted change, in particular, more land, freedom of movement, fewer taxes, and more political rights. In 1902-3, there were massive peasant revolts in two southern provinces, and, as noted above, more trouble broke out for the tsar in 1905. Stolypin began his term as prime minister with ruthless repression, but he knew that longer-term success required deep reforms in Russian society. Change would not be easy to achieve, and Stolypin devoted "a good deal of attention to public relations, cultivating the press…and prefacing new laws with explanatory preambles which he drafted himself" (Hosking, 431).
Stolypin's Reform Programme
Stolypin's tenure as prime minister witnessed a series of significant and lasting economic and social reforms, starting from November 1906. District assemblies (zemstvos) were charged with improving and extending health services at a local level. In 1908, Stolypin created the ambition that there would be compulsory universal education within ten years. By 1914, this ambition was becoming a reality with the creation of new universities, new secondary schools, and 50,000 new primary schools.
Land reform remained the prime minister's priority. New laws reformed the way land was distributed as Stolypin realised that "if revolutionary disturbances were not going to be repeated, there had to be a new agrarian policy to foster the emergence of a class of yeoman farmers" (Service, 12). For this reason, Stolypin's reforms were really aimed at the better-off peasants, the so-called kulaks. As Stolypin himself said, his reforms were for the "sturdy and strong" (Wood, 40). The idea was that if more peasants had property of their own, they would be less likely to want to overthrow the system they were benefiting from.
There was much talk of taking land from the nobility's vast estates and redistributing parcels for peasants to farm, but the debate became bogged down over whether there should be compensation or not, and nothing much ever occurred in practice. Instead, Stolypin focused on land held by local communes, and here, he was more successful. Following Stolypin's reforms, peasants could rearrange the land they worked from their local commune so that, rather than the separated strips they often worked, now they could consolidate these into a single and more efficient farm. Stolypin cancelled redemption payments and improved the legal status of peasants. Land shortages remained a chronic problem despite Stolypin's efforts to facilitate loans so that better-off peasants could buy parcels of land and the encouragement given to peasants to migrate to unfarmed yet rich agricultural areas in western and southern Siberia (they were even given cheap train tickets to get there). This migration was permitted by a new law in October 1906, which meant peasants were no longer tied to their local commune and could receive a passport. In short, peasants were now permitted to move and live wherever they wished. Loans were also designed to help farmers acquire better agricultural equipment and so increase the nation's productivity, which was some way behind that of many European states.
Impact of the Reforms
The agrarian reforms took time to see practical results because there were reams of bureaucratic red tape to cut through and many legal impediments to overcome. Despite the difficulties, the reforms did begin to show tangible results. Landowning peasants increased from 20% (in 1905) to 50% (in 1915) of the total peasantry. However, 61% of the peasantry remained within the commune system by 1916 (Hosking, 435), and there were some bitter rivalries between those who stayed and those who left the commune but remained in the same village.
Agricultural production, thanks to improved equipment and techniques, rose from 45.9 million tonnes in 1906 to 61.7 million tonnes in 1913. Over 3.5 million peasants did relocate to Siberia, and 80% of these stayed permanently (Bunce, 32). In the cities, meanwhile, industrialisation continued at pace. The economy grew: "Between 1861 and 1913, the average annual growth rate was almost 6 per cent" (Todd, 16).
Stolypin's reforms marked a step forward for Russia, but they fell short of significantly improving the lives of Russia's poorer peasants or creating the "yeoman class" he had hoped for. As he had described it, Stolypin's "wager on the strong" (Freeze, 259) did not reap the winnings he expected. Neither did the reforms touch those who worked on the lands of the nobility, nor solve the problem of land shortage for a rapidly growing population. 'Optimists' claim that had Stolypin continued in office beyond 1911, his reforms might have borne more fruit. In contrast, 'pessimists' claim that the changes had not gone far enough since "in economic terms, the direct results of the Stolypin land reforms were quite modest" (Suny, 389), and, further, they "failed to demonstrate that newly enclosed private farms were significantly more or less productive or profitable than communes" (ibid, 416). As the historian A. Todd summarises:
Though they [peasants] experienced no marked improvement in their economic position from 1875 to 1914, they did not suffer any significant deterioration either. However, many continued to suffer from heavy burdens of debt, and their tradition of subdividing their holdings did nothing to reduce the pressure of land-shortages. (16)
Stolypin's Assassination
Stolypin had an uneasy relationship with the tsar. Nicholas liked people who agreed with him, but Stolypin was vocal about, for example, his disapproval of reactionary groups like the Union of the Russian People, which committed atrocities against Jewish people in a series of pogroms. When Stolypin attempted to bring the worst perpetrators to justice, the tsar refused to accept the judicial verdicts. Stolypin had also shown via an enquiry that rumours that Jewish groups were plotting to take over Russia were nonsense, an idea the tsar was keen to believe in. Stolypin, as part of his desire for greater religious toleration, had even wanted to give Jewish people Russian citizenship, but the tsar vetoed the proposal. Another wedge between the tsar and his prime minister was Stolypin's ignored advice that Nicholas remove from the court the decidedly odd 'monk' and faith healer Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916), around whom all manner of outrageous rumours swirled.
By 1911, Stolypin's political career was in demise, not only because of his increasingly tense relationship with the tsar but, ironically, because he was suspected by radicals of helping the tsar avoid fulfilling the promises he had made to end the revolution in 1905. Stolypin was, therefore, caught between two camps: radicals who thought he was not doing enough to change Russia and conservatives who saw him as too powerful and determined to undermine the traditional authority of the tsar. Stolypin was assassinated on 1 September 1911 by Dmitrii Bogrov (1887-1911), a Socialist Revolutionary and police agent. Bogrov fatally shot Stolypin twice when he attended a theatre performance in Kiev (Kyiv). Tsar Nicholas was present that night, and he had heard the shots, but he did not heed the bells of warning such a bold assassination rang. Bogrov was hanged ten days later.
Revolution and unrest continued to blight the tsar's autocratic reign. The catastrophic effects of the First World War (1914-18) caused further woes for the Russian agricultural sector and economy in general. Once again, Nicholas was exposed as an incompetent war leader. The ultimate result of all of this strife was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which finally toppled the tsar. Soviet Russia was established, with Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) as its leader. Nicholas II and his family were executed in July 1918. Stolypin's reforms turned out to be a brief blip in the communal farming normality of the Russian peasantry as the Communist Bolsheviks rejected the idea that individual land-owning farmers could bring greater prosperity for everyone.
