The Russian Revolution

5

The Constitutional Experiment

The October Manifesto provided a framework within which the Russian state and Russian society should have found it possible to reduce the tension dividing them. This it failed to accomplish. A constitutional regime can function properly only if government and opposition accept the rules of the game: in Russia, neither the monarchy nor the intelligentsia was prepared to do so. Each regarded the new order as an obstacle, a deviation from the country’s true system, which for the monarchy was autocracy and for the intelligentsia, a democratic republic. As a result, the constitutional interlude, while not without achievements, was largely wasted—a missed opportunity that would not recur.

In affixing his signature to the manifesto, Nicholas vaguely realized that it meant “constitution,” but neither he nor his advisers were intellectually or psychologically ready to acknowledge that a constitution spelled an end to the autocracy. Although the manifesto pledged that henceforth no law would go into effect without the approval of a popularly elected legislature, the Court seemed unaware that this pledge entailed a constitutional charter. According to Witte, it was only two months later that Trepov broached the need for such a document.¹ And when a constitutional charter was issued in April 1906, its drafters studiously avoided the word “constitution,” designating it as “Fundamental Laws” (Osnovnye zakony), the name traditionally used for the first volume of the Code of Laws.

Nicholas did not regard either the October Manifesto or the new Fundamental Laws as affecting his autocratic prerogatives. In his mind, the Duma was a consultative, not a legislative body (“I created the Duma, not to be directed by it, but to be advised,” he told the Minister of War).² He further felt that in having “granted” the Duma and the Fundamental Laws of his own free will he was not bound by them: and since he had not sworn an oath to uphold the new order, he could also revoke it at will.³ The obvious contradiction between the reality of a constitutional regime and the Court’s insistence that nothing had changed had bewildering consequences. Thus, even Peter Stolypin, the closest Russia had to a genuine parliamentary Prime Minister, in private conversation insisted that Russia had no constitution because such a document had to be the product of agreement between rulers and subjects whereas the Fundamental Laws of 1906 had been granted by the Tsar. In his view Russia’s government was not “constitutional” but “representative” and the only limitations on imperial authority were such as the Tsar saw fit to impose on himself.⁴ And what is one to make of Vladimir Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor, who while addressing the parliament exclaimed, “Thank God, we have as yet no parliament!”⁵ Maurice Baring, an English student of Russia, concluded from personal observation in 1905–6 that ideally Russia’s bureaucracy wanted “parliamentary institutions and autocratic government.” Russians similarly joked that “the Tsar was ready to give a constitution as long as autocracy remained intact.”⁶ To the extent that such contradictory attitudes lend themselves to rational explanation, this is best sought in the tradition of Muscovite consultative bodies called Land Assemblies (Zemskie sobory), convened from time to time to give tsars non-binding advice. But, of course, by the terms of the October Manifesto and the Fundamental Laws of 1906 the Duma was a legislative, not a consultative body, so that the analogy with the past had no relevance except perhaps on the psychological level.

The behavior of the Crown under the constitutional regime cannot be understood without reference to the various monarchist groups which treated the October Manifesto as a trick played on the Tsar by the wily Witte and his alleged Jewish backers. In their view, too, neither the manifesto nor the Fundamental Laws were inviolate: what the Tsar had given, he could take back. These groups, composed largely of landowners (many from the western provinces), right-wing publicists, and Orthodox clergy, backed by lower-middle-class groups, espoused a very simple ideology: autocracy and Russia for the Russians. Increasingly, their outlook reduced itself to a rabid anti-Semitism, which saw in Jews the source of all of Russia’s woes—enemies of Christianity and a race bent on attaining world domination. The most influential of these bodies was the Union of the Russian People, which organized patriotic demonstrations, published virulently anti-Semitic literature, and from time to time arranged for Jewish pogroms, using gangs of urban thugs called “Black Hundreds” (Chërnye sotni). These extreme right-wing groupings, which in many ways anticipated the German National Socialists of the 1920s, in democratic elections would have been unlikely to gain a single seat in the Duma. They owed their disproportionate influence to the identity of their views and interests with those of the Crown and its more reactionary officialdom. It was they who encouraged Nicholas and his wife in the belief that the country remained staunchly loyal to the Romanov dynasty and the ideals of autocracy.⁷

The more liberal bureaucrats were not averse to conceding limited power to a representative body: according to a high official, the idea of a representative institution with which to divide responsibility (if not authority) for governing Russia “grew like grass” in governmental circles.⁸ The rationale behind such sympathies was spelled out by Kaiser Wilhelm II in a letter to the Tsar in August 1905 in connection with the announcement of the so-called Bulygin Duma:

Your manifest directing the formation of the “Duma” made an excellent impression in Europe … you get an excellent insight into the mind of your People and make them carry a part of the responsibility for the future, which it would have probably liked to saddle solely upon you, thereby making a wholesale “critique” and dissatisfaction with deeds done by you alone impossible.⁹

But in the eyes of the bureaucracy these benefits could accrue only if parliament confined itself to largely ceremonial functions. Vasilii Maklakov thus describes the attitude on the eve of the First Duma of Ivan Goremykin, the Tsar’s favorite minister:

As concerned the Duma, it was for him exclusively a factor complicating legislative procedures. This complication seemed to him, at bottom, unnecessary: but once it had been regrettably made, then it had to be reduced to a minimum. This was not difficult. The government’s plan for the Duma was simple. To begin with, it would be sufficient for the deputies to have the honor of being received in audience by the Emperor: then their mandates would be verified and the rules worked out. This would be followed by a recess, brought about as quickly as possible: in this manner, the session would be prorogued until autumn. Next would come the discussion of the budget. The practical exigencies of life would assert themselves, turmoil calmed, order restored, and everything would be as before.¹⁰

Not all Crown ministers thought in these terms: Stolypin, in particular, would try to bring the Duma into a genuine partnership. But Goremykin reflected more accurately the attitudes prevalent at the Court and among its conservative supporters—attitudes which precluded effective parliamentary government at a time when autocratic government had ceased to be feasible. As if to demonstrate his feelings toward the Duma, Nicholas refused to cross its threshold, preferring to receive the deputies in the Winter Palace.*

Later, after the Revolution, some officials of the tsarist regime justified the monarchy’s unwillingness to share power with the Duma with the argument that Russian “society,” as represented by the intelligentsia, would have been incapable of administering the country: introducing parliamentary government in 1906 would merely have served to unleash the anarchy of 1917 that much sooner.¹¹ But these arguments, voiced in emigration, had the benefit of hindsight: a conservative-liberal parliamentary coalition cooperating with the monarchy and its officialdom would certainly have proven more effective than the same coalition turned out to be in March 1917, after the monarchy had abdicated, when it had no alternative but to seek support from the revolutionary intelligentsia.

20. Ivan Goremykin.

Had the Russian intelligentsia been politically more mature—more patient, that is, and more understanding of the mentality of the monarchic establishment—Russia might perhaps have succeeded in making an orderly transition from a semi-constitutional to a genuinely constitutional regime. But these qualities the educated classes sorely lacked. From the day the constitution went into force, they exploited every opportunity to wage war against the monarchy. The radical intellectuals rejected the very principles of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government. Initially they boycotted the Duma elections; later, after concluding that the boycott was a mistake, they ran in the elections but only to disrupt parliamentary proceedings and incite the population to rebellion. The Constitutional-Democratic Party was in this respect only marginally more constructive. While the liberals accepted the principle of constitutional monarchy, they regarded the Fundamental Laws of 1906 as a travesty and did all in their power to deprive the monarchy of effective authority.*

As a result, the traditional conflict between the authorities and the intelligentsia grew more intense rather than less, since it now had a formal arena where to play itself out. Struve, who observed this struggle with a sense of alarm because he believed it was bound to end in catastrophe, wrote that “the Russian Revolution and the Russian reaction somehow hopelessly claw at each other, and from every fresh wound, every drop of blood which they draw, grows the vengeful hatred and untruth of Russian life.”¹²

The experts whom the government charged with drafting the new Fundamental Laws were told to produce a document that would fulfill the promises of the October Manifesto and still preserve most of the traditional prerogatives of the Russian monarchy.¹³ Between December 1905 and April 1906, when the work was completed, they came up with several drafts, which were discussed and revised at cabinet meetings, sometimes chaired by the Tsar. The final product was a conservative constitution—conservative in terms of both the franchise and the powers reserved for the Crown.

The electoral law was worked out at meetings of officials and public representatives. The principal question was whether to provide for an equal and direct vote or a vote organized by estates and cast indirectly, through electoral chambers.¹⁴ Following the recommendation of the bureaucracy, it was decided to adopt a system of indirect voting by estates in order to reduce the weight of constituencies regarded as more likely to elect radical deputies. There were to be four electoral curiae: for the gentry (dvoriane), for burghers (meshchane), for peasants, and for workers, the last-named group now given the vote which the Bulygin project had denied it. The franchise was so contrived that one gentry vote carried the weight of three burgher, fifteen peasant, and forty-five worker votes.¹⁵ Except in the large cities, the voters cast their ballots for electors who, in turn, selected either other electors or the deputies themselves. These electoral provisions rejected the democratic franchise advocated by Russian liberal and socialist parties which called for the “four-tail” vote—universal, direct, equal, and secret. It was the government’s hope that by reducing the urban vote it would ensure a tractable Duma.

While the experts worked on the constitution, the government published laws implementing the pledges of civil rights in the October Manifesto.¹⁶ On November 24, 1905, preliminary censorship of periodical publications was abolished: henceforth newspapers and journals which published what the authorities considered seditious or libelous material could be prosecuted only in court. Although during World War I some preliminary censorship was restored, after 1905 Russia enjoyed full press freedom, which made it possible to criticize the authorities without restrictions. Laws issued on March 4, 1906, guaranteed the rights of assembly and association. Citizens were allowed to hold lawful assemblies, provided they notified the local chief of police seventy-two hours in advance and observed certain provisions when meeting in the open. Forming associations also required prior notification to the authorities: if no objections were raised within two weeks, the organizers were free to proceed. This law made possible the formation of trade unions as well as political parties, although, in practice, in both cases governmental permission would frequently be withheld under one pretext or another.*

These rights and freedoms had no precedent in Russian history. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy found ways of circumventing them by recourse to the provisions of the law of August 14, 1881, authorizing governors to place provinces under “Safeguard,” which remained on the statute books until 1917. Throughout the constitutional period, vast expanses of the Russian Empire would be declared subject to this status, which resulted in the suspension for their inhabitants of civil rights, including those of assembly and association.¹⁷

The new Fundamental Laws, made public on April 26, while the elections to the Duma were in progress, was a curious document. It had been composed in such a way as to depart minimally from the traditional Fundamental Laws, with the main emphasis placed, as before 1905, on the powers and prerogatives of the Crown. The powers and prerogatives of the legislative branch were inserted almost like an embarrassing afterthought. To compound the confusion between the new and old orders, the monarch was still defined as an “autocrat,” using a formula that dated to the reign of Peter the Great:

Article 4: To the Emperor of All the Russias belongs the Supreme Autocratic power. God Himself commands that he be obeyed, not only from fear of God’s wrath, but also for the sake of one’s conscience.¹⁸

Traditionally, the corresponding article had described the Tsar’s powers as both “unlimited” and “autocratic.” The former term was now omitted, but the omission was of little consequence because in modern Russian usage “autocratic,” which in Peter’s time had meant “sovereign”—that is, independent of other powers—had also acquired the sense of authority subject to no limitations.

Russia was given a two-chamber parliament. The lower, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia Duma), was composed entirely of popularly elected representatives, chosen according to the franchise outlined above. The upper chamber, the State Council (Gosudarstvennyi Sovet), was the institution by the same name which had been functioning since 1802 to translate imperial commands into laws. It consisted of appointed officials augmented with representatives of public bodies (the Church, zemstva, Noble Assemblies, and universities). Its purpose was to serve as a brake on the Duma. Because it had not been mentioned in the October Manifesto, liberals saw in its creation a breach of promise.

All bills, in addition to requiring the approval of the Crown, needed the consent of both chambers: the State Council, along with the Tsar, could veto legislative proposals emanating from the lower chamber. In addition, the two chambers had to pass annually on the state budget—a powerful prerogative which in the Western democracies served to control the executive branch. However, in Russia’s case the budgetary powers of the parliament were diluted by a provision which exempted from its scrutiny payments on state debts, expenses of the Imperial household, and “extraordinary credits.”

The parliament enjoyed the right of “interpellation” or formal questioning of ministers. If deputies raised questions about the legality of government actions—and only then—the appropriate minister or ministers had to appear in the Duma to answer questions. Although the legislature had no authority to interrogate ministers on the general conduct of policy, since such a right would have allowed it to pass a no-confidence vote, interpellation served as an important device to keep the Crown and its officials in line.

In some respects, perhaps the single most important prerogative of the new parliament was its members’ right to free speech and parliamentary immunity. From April 1906 until February 1917, the Duma provided a forum for unrestrained and often intemperate criticism of the regime. This probably contributed more to undermining the prestige of the Russian Government in the eyes of the population than all the revolutionary outrages, because it stripped the establishment of the aura of omniscience and omnipotence which it strove so hard to maintain.

To the disappointment of the opposition, the Crown retained the power to appoint ministers. This provision intensely annoyed the liberals, who wanted a parliamentary cabinet made up of their own people: it would prove the most contentious issue in relations between the government and the opposition during the final decade of the monarchy. The liberals refused to compromise on this issue: the government’s willingness in 1915–16 quietly to adopt the American system of nominating ministers acceptable to the parliament met with no response from them. Nicholas, for his part, adamantly refused to grant the Duma the power to appoint ministers because he was certain that they would make a mess of things and then wash their hands of it by resigning.

The Crown retained the right to declare war and make peace.

Last, but not least, the Crown did not fulfill the promise of the October Manifesto to assure those elected by the nation of “an effective opportunity to supervise the legality of the actions” of the administration. Apart from the right of interpellation, which could be used to embarrass the administration but not to influence its policies, parliament had no control over the bureaucracy. Members of the bureaucratic establishment, the police included, remained for all practical purposes immune to legal prosecution. The administrative corps of Imperial Russia remained, as before, a body outside parliamentary supervision and above the law—a “meta-juridical” body, as it were.

Two further provisions of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 call for comment: for although they were also to be found in other European constitutions, in Russia they would be particularly abused. As in Britain, the Duma had a normal term of five years, but it could be dissolved earlier at the monarch’s pleasure. The English Crown in modern times would not have dreamt of dissolving Parliament and calling for elections except on the advice of the leader of the parliamentary majority. In Russia, it was different: the First Duma lasted only 72 days and the Second 105 days, both sent home because the Crown was unhappy with their conduct. Only after June 1907, when it unilaterally and unconstitutionally altered the electoral law to ensure a more tractable Duma, did the Crown allow the lower chamber its normal five-year span.

Even more pernicious was the government’s recourse to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, which authorized it to issue emergency laws when parliament was not in session. Under the terms of this article, such laws lapsed unless approved by parliament within sixty days of reconvening. The authorities made free use of this clause, not so much to deal with emergency situations as to bypass normal legislative procedures, either because they were considered too cumbersome or because parliament was unlikely to act favorably: occasionally, the Duma was deliberately prorogued to enable the government to legislate by decree. Such practices made a mockery of the legislative powers of parliament and undermined respect for the constitution.

The existence of a legislature made it impractical to continue conducting ministerial business in the traditional manner. The Council of Ministers (Sovet Ministrov), previously a body without authority, was now made into a cabinet under a Chairman who was in fact, if not in name, a Prime Minister. In its new guise, it marked a departure from the patrimonial custom of having ministers report individually to the Tsar. Under the new arrangement, decisions taken by the Council were binding on all the ministers.*

Whether one regards the Fundamental Laws of 1906 as a major advance in Russia’s political development or as a deceptive half measure, a “pseudo-constitution” (Scheinkonstitution) as Max Weber called it, depends on one’s criteria. Judged by standards of the advanced industrial democracies, the Russian constitution certainly left a great deal to be desired. But in terms of Russia’s own past, of five hundred years of autocracy, the 1906 charter marked a giant step toward a democratic order. For the first time the government allowed elected representatives of the nation to initiate and veto legislative measures, to scrutinize the budget, to criticize the monarchy and to interrogate its ministers. If the constitutional experiment ultimately failed to bring state and society into partnership, the fault lay not so much in the shortcomings of the constitution as in the unwillingness of Crown and parliament to accept the new arrangement and function responsibly within its provisions.

Once the country had been given a parliament, it was virtually certain that its leadership would fall to the liberals. The 1905 Revolution, of which the October Manifesto had been the main fruit, had two distinct phases, the first successful, the second not. The first phase had been initiated and managed by the Union of Liberation, and reached its climax in the October Manifesto. The second phase, which began the day after the Manifesto had been issued, dissipated itself in brutal pogroms instigated by both the revolutionary and reactionary parties. It was ultimately crushed by the forces of order. As the organizers of the first, successful phase of the Revolution, the liberals were its main beneficiaries. They intended to exploit this advantage to push Russia into a full-fledged parliamentary democracy. The decision of the two principal socialist parties, the Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries, to boycott the Duma elections ensured their victory.

The Constitutional-Democrats adopted an extremely aggressive parliamentary strategy for they saw in the socialists’ boycott a unique opportunity to capture the socialists’ constituency. They insisted on treating the new Fundamental Laws as illegitimate: only the sovereign nation, through its democratically elected representatives, had the right to draw up a constitution. The conservative liberal Vasilii Maklakov thought that the leadership of his party, spellbound by the vision of 1789, would settle for nothing less than a Constituent Assembly:

I recall the indignation of the Congress [of the Kadet Party] over the promulgation of a constitution on the eve of the Duma’s convocation. What made it especially dangerous was the absence of pretense in this indignation. The liberals should have understood that if the Emperor had convened a national representative body without setting for it legal limits, he would have opened the gates to a revolution. They did understand this now and were not frightened by the prospect. On the contrary: they rebelled against the idea that the Duma must work within the framework of rights set forth by the Constitution. Which goes to prove that they did not take this Constitution seriously. According to them, the “national representation” was sovereign and had the right to demolish all the walls which the Constitution had erected around it. One saw the source of their mentality. Their spirits were fired by memories of the Great Revolution. The Duma appeared to them as the Estates-General. Like it, it had to turn into a National Assembly and give the country a true Constitution in place of one which the vigilant Monarchy had surreptitiously granted.¹⁹

To the Kadets, the Duma was a battleground: with appeals to the “masses,” they meant to force the Crown to give up all power. Such doubts as sober-minded liberals may have entertained over the wisdom of a confrontational strategy were stilled by the spectacular victory which the Kadets won in the Duma elections. As the most radical party on the ballot, they attracted much of the vote that would have otherwise gone to the SRs and SDs: this created the illusion that they had become the principal national opposition party. With 179 out of 478 deputies, they emerged as the strongest group in the lower house: owing to the worker votes, they captured all the seats in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even so, they controlled only 37.4 percent of the seats; lacking an absolute majority, they needed allies. They could have sought them on the right, among conservative liberals. But determined to maintain a hold on the peasant and worker electorate, they turned leftward, to the agrarian socialists who had been elected as individual candidates and came to be collectively known as Laborites (Trudoviki).

Drunk with success, believing themselves to be on the eve of a second, decisive Revolution, the Kadets went on the offensive. Under the leadership of Miliukov, they expressed a willingness to join the cabinet but on one condition: that the Tsar agree to convoke a Constituent Assembly. As has been noted, Witte’s negotiations with liberal conservatives (Shipov, Guchkov, and others) also had had no issue.²⁰ The Crown would make several more attempts to bring liberals and liberal-conservatives into the cabinet, to be rebuffed each time. The stage was thus set for a parliamentary confrontation not over policies but over the very nature of Russia’s constitutional regime.

The Crown approached the opening of the Duma with trepidation but without a program. What actually transpired when the Duma convened exceeded its worst fears.

Nicholas had been assured by liberal bureaucrats that elections presented no threat to him because the provisions ensuring the preponderance of peasants would produce a cooperative Duma: it was the same mistake the French monarchy had committed in 1789 when it doubled the representation of the Third Estate in the Estates-General. Not all shared this optimism: Durnovo, the ex-Minister of the Interior and one of the most astute politicians in Russia, had cautioned that the majority of the deputies would be drawn from the radical rural “semi-intelligentsia,” who were eager to solidify their hold on the peasantry.²¹ Indeed, nearly one-half of the deputies to the First Duma were peasants, many of them of this type. And they turned out to be very different from the deferential muzhiki with whom the imagination of Slavophile conservatives populated Russia. Kryzhanovskii thus describes the revulsion that seized official circles at the sight of the hordes of peasant representatives who descended on St. Petersburg in the spring of 1906:

It was enough to take a look at the motley mob of “deputies”—and it was my lot to spend among them entire days in the corridors and the garden of Taurida Palace—to experience horror at the sight of Russia’s first representative body. It was a gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to St. Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and malice. If one were to assume that these individuals really represented the people and its “innermost aspirations,” then one would have been forced to concede that Russia could survive for at least one more century only by the force of external constraint, not by that of inner cohesion, and that enlightened absolutism was for her the sole salutary form of government. The attempt to found the political system on the will of the people was obviously doomed to failure because in this mass any consciousness of statehood, let alone of shared statehood, was totally submerged in social hostility and class envy: more correctly, such consciousness was entirely lacking. It was equally futile to place one’s hope in the intelligentsia and its cultural influence. In the Duma the intelligentsia was relatively weakly represented and it clearly yielded to the seething energy of the dark masses. It believed in the power of good words, it upheld ideals that were entirely alien and unnecessary for the masses, and its only role was to serve as a springboard for the Revolution. It could not act creatively.…

The attitude of the peasant Duma delegates toward their responsibilities was curious in the extreme. They brought with them petitioners on various matters: these they placed in the [deputies’] seats, from which Duma personnel had no little trouble evicting them. On one occasion, the police detained on a street adjacent to Taurida Palace two peasants who were selling entrance tickets to it: both turned out to be Duma deputies, of which fact the Chairman was duly apprised.

Some deputies immediately began to carry on revolutionary propaganda in the factories, to organize street demonstrations, to incite the mobs against the police, and so on. During one such demonstration on Ligovka, the leader of a brawling mob, one Mikhailichenko, a deputy representing the miners of the Urals, was beaten up. He showed up the next day in the Duma and participated in the discussion of this incident with a face so heavily bandaged that only his nose and eyes were visible. Peasant deputies got drunk in taverns and engaged in brawls: when attempts were made to have them arrested, they claimed personal immunity. The police were at first very confused, uncertain what they could and could not do in such cases. In one such incident, the doubts were resolved by an old woman, the tavern owner, who, in response to a drunken deputy’s claim of inviolability, gave him a thrashing, shouting: “For me, you are quite violable, you SOB,” following which she threw him out.… There were grand ceremonies at the burial of one Duma deputy, whose name escapes me, who had died of delirium tremens: in one funeral speech he was referred to as a “fighter fallen on the field of honor.”

Following their arrival [in St. Petersburg], some deputies were sentenced by volost’ and other courts for petty theft and other swindles: one for having stolen a pig, another for purse snatching, etc. Altogether, according to information gathered by the Ministry of the Interior, the number of deputies in the First Duma, mainly peasants, who, owing to the careless makeup of the lists of voters and electors, turned out to have been convicted of pecuniary crimes that disqualified them from participating in the elections, either before they had entered the Duma or within one year after its dissolution, exceeded forty persons—that is, about 8 percent of the Duma’s membership.²²

On the opening day of the Duma, the Tsar received the deputies in a solemn session at the Winter Palace and delivered an address in which he promised to respect the new order. The Duma, on a Kadet motion, responded with a revolutionary challenge, approved by all but five deputies. It demanded the abolition of the upper chamber, the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, compulsory expropriations of certain landed properties, and amnesty for political prisoners, including those sentenced for terrorist crimes. When the Court, having gotten wind of the Duma’s response, refused to receive the Duma deputation sent to present it, the Duma passed with virtual unanimity a vote of no confidence in the cabinet coupled with a demand that it yield to a ministry chosen by itself.²³

This behavior threw the government, accustomed to conducting its affairs with utmost decorum, into disarray. The security services were especially alarmed, fearing the inflammatory effect of Duma rhetoric on the countryside. According to one police official, the very existence of a constitutional regime confused the peasants. Unable to figure out why the authorities allowed Duma deputies to demand changes in the system of government while punishing private persons for making similar demands, they concluded that the Duma’s “revolutionary propaganda was carried out with the approval and even encouragement of the government.”²⁴ Given that the prestige of the government among the peasants had declined anyway from the loss of the war with Japan and its inability to suppress the Socialist-Revolutionary terror, the police had reason to fear losing control of the villages.

In these circumstances, the Court decided on dissolution. As soon as they learned of this decision, the Kadets and other left-of-center deputies wanted to stage a sit-in, but they had to give up this plan because the government had the Duma surrounded by troops. The dissolution order may have violated the spirit of the Fundamental Laws but it was certainly legitimate. Nevertheless, the Kadets and some of their associates saw it as an opportunity to throw down the revolutionary gauntlet. Adjourning to nearby Vyborg, a Finnish city outside the reach of the Russian police, they issued an appeal to the citizens of Russia to refuse paying taxes and providing recruits. The protest was both unconstitutional and futile. The country ignored the Vyborg Manifesto, and its only consequence was to bar the signatories, among whom were many leading liberals, from running in future elections.

Thus, the overconfident liberals lost the opening skirmish in the war they had declared on the constitutional monarchy.

The October Manifesto had mollified the moderate, liberal-conservative opposition, but neither the liberal-radical nor the socialist politicians. The latter regarded it as merely a preliminary concession: the Revolution had to continue until total victory. Under the incitement of left-of-center intellectuals, the violence in the country went on unabated, evoking from the right a counterterror in the form of pogroms against students and Jews.

The agrarian unrest of 1905–6 had two consequences. It ended, once and for all, the peasantry’s traditional pro-monarchic sentiments. Henceforth, the muzhik no longer looked to the Tsar to give him the land he coveted, but to the Duma and the liberal and radical parties. Second, the peasants of central Russia succeeded in “smoking out” many landlords, who, frightened of the assaults on their properties, disposed of their estates and cleared out. These developments accelerated the liquidation of landlord agriculture which had begun with the Emancipation Edict and would be completed in 1917. After 1905, the peasantry was the largest purchaser (37–40 percent) of land that appeared on the market. Landlords, who in 1863–72 had bought 51.6 percent of the land, in 1906–9 accounted for only 15.2 percent of the purchasers.

The peasant jacquerie was exacerbated by the Socialist-Revolutionary campaign of political terror.²⁵ The world had never known anything like it: a wave of murder which soon gripped hundreds if not thousands of young men and women in a collective psychosis—murder as an end in itself, its ostensible objective having long been lost sight of. Although the declared targets were government officials, notably policemen, in practice the terror could be quite indiscriminate. As is usual, it shaded into ordinary criminality, some of its perpetrators extorting money and intimidating court witnesses. The majority of the terrorists were youths—two-thirds of them twenty-two or younger—for whom the daring, often suicidal operations turned into a kind of rite of passage into manhood. The most rabid element among the terrorists, the Maximalists, killed for the sake of killing, in order to speed the collapse of the social order. The effects of SR terror extended beyond the lives it extinguished and the repressive countermeasures it provoked. It lowered still further the already low level of political life in Russia, demoralizing those actively engaged in politics and making resort to violence a normal way of dealing with difficult problems.

The Socialists-Revolutionaries decided on a massive terror campaign in January 1906—that is, after the country had been promised a constitution. The scope of the campaign was staggering. Stolypin told the Duma in June 1906 that in the preceding eight months there had occurred 827 assaults with the intent to kill against officials of the Ministry of the Interior (which included the police and the gendarmerie), as a consequence of which 288 persons lost their lives and 383 suffered injuries.²⁶ The director of the Police Department informed the Duma a year later that in the two Baltic provinces of Livonia and Courland there had taken place 1,148 terrorist acts, which resulted in the loss of 324 lives, the majority of the victims being policemen and soldiers.²⁷ It has been estimated that in the course of 1906 and 1907 terrorists killed or maimed in the Russian Empire 4,500 officials.²⁸ If private persons are added, the total number of the victims of left-wing terror in the years 1905–7 rises to over 9,000.²⁹

The government’s hope that the Duma would help it deal with these outrages were not realized. Even the Constitutional-Democrats refused to condemn them on the grounds that the revolutionary terror was a natural reaction to governmental terror. When a Duma deputy ventured to declare that in a constitutional regime there was no place for terror, he was attacked by his colleagues as a “provocateur” and the resolution which he moved received only thirty votes.³⁰

In these difficult circumstances—a rebellious parliament, rural violence, and nationwide terror—the monarchy turned to a “strong man,” the governor of Saratov, Peter Arkadevich Stolypin.

Stolypin, who would serve as Prime Minister from July 1906 until his death in September 1911, was arguably the most outstanding statesman of Imperial Russia. For all their remarkable gifts, his only possible rivals—Speranskii and Witte—lacked his combination of the statesman’s vision and the politician’s skills. Not an original thinker—most of his measures had been anticipated by others—he impressed Russians and foreigners alike with his strength of character and integrity: Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Ambassador to Russia, thought him simply the “most remarkable figure in Europe.”³¹ In his actions he was guided by the ideas of the liberal bureaucracy, believing that Russia required firm authority but that under modern conditions such authority could not be exercised without popular support. The dvorianstvo, in his view, was a vanishing class: the monarchy should rely on an independent yeomanry, the creation of which was one of his principal objectives. Parliament was indispensable. He was virtually the only Russian Premier to address representatives of the nation as equals and partners. At the same time he did not believe that parliament could run the country. Like Bismarck, whom he in many ways emulated, he envisioned it as an auxiliary institution.* That he failed in his endeavors demonstrates how irreconcilable were the divisions in Russia and how unlikely it was that the country would escape violent collapse.

Born in 1862 in Germany, Stolypin descended from a dvorianstvo family which had served the tsars since the sixteenth century: Struve described him as a typical “servitor in the medieval sense, instinctively loyal to the Imperial sovereign.”³² His father was an artillery general who had distinguished himself in the Crimean War; his mother was related to Alexander Gorchakov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs under Alexander II. Stolypin would probably also have followed a military career were it not for a physical disability incurred in childhood. After attending secondary school in Vilno, he enrolled at the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of St. Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1885 with the Highest Honors and a Candidate’s Degree (the Russian equivalent of an American Ph.D.) for a dissertation on agriculture. A highly cultivated man (he is said to have spoken three foreign languages), he liked to think of himself as an intellectual rather than a bureaucrat, a feeling the St. Petersburg officialdom reciprocated by treating him as an outsider even after he had reached the topmost rung of the bureaucratic ladder.³³

After completing his studies, Stolypin joined the Ministry of the Interior. In 1889 he was sent to Kovno, in what used to be Polish-Lithuanian territory, where his wife, the socially prominent O. B. Neidgardt, owned property. Here he spent thirteen years (1889–1902), serving as Marshal of the Nobility (an appointed office in this area), devoting his spare time to the improvement of his wife’s estate and studies of agriculture.

21. P. A. Stolypin: 1909.

The years which he spent in Kovno were to exert a decisive influence on Stolypin’s thinking. In the western provinces of Russia communal landholding was unknown: here peasant households held their land as outright property. Comparing the superior condition of the rural population in this region with that of central Russia, Stolypin came to agree with those who saw in the peasant commune the main impediment to rural progress; and because he considered rural prosperity a precondition of national stability, he concluded that the preservation in Russia of law and order demanded the gradual elimination of the commune. The commune inhibited improvement in the peasant’s economic condition in several ways. The periodic redistribution of land deprived the peasant of incentives to improve the soil since it was not his property; at the same time, it ensured him of the minimum needed to survive. It also encouraged the enterprising and industrious peasant to engage in usury. Stolypin believed that Russia needed a large class of independent, landowning peasants to replace the decaying dvorianstvo and provide a model for the rest of the rural population.³⁴

In May 1902, impressed with his performance as Marshal of the Nobility, the Ministry of the Interior appointed Stolypin governor of Grodno: at forty, he was the youngest holder of that office in the Empire. After serving less than one year, he was transferred to Saratov, one of the Empire’s most troublesome provinces, with a record of agrarian unrest and a strong SR presence. He is said to have owed this appointment to Plehve, who sought to appease public opinion by selecting officials with a liberal reputation.³⁵ His experience in Saratov strengthened Stolypin’s hostility to the commune, but it also made him aware of the strong hold it exerted on the muzhik, who liked its “leveling” effect. As Stolypin saw it, however, the commune allowed only for “leveling down.” To allow the peasants’ energies to “level up,” he came on the idea of having the government distribute Crown and State lands to independent farmers in order for a significant private peasant sector to emerge alongside the communal.³⁶

Saratov was very turbulent in 1905. Stolypin displayed intelligence and courage in coping with rural unrest. Unlike many governors who reacted to peasant violence by closeting themselves in their offices and leaving the task of pacification to gendarmes and soldiers, he visited the areas of disturbance, spoke with the rebellious peasants, and debated radical agitators. He persisted in this policy despite several attempts on his life, in one of which he was wounded. Such initiatives enabled him to quell the agrarian disorders in Saratov with minimal resort to force. In right-wing circles this earned him a reputation for “softness” and “liberalism” which was not helpful in his subsequent career.

St. Petersburg, however, took notice. His proven administrative abilities, his courage, and his known devotion to the dynasty made him an ideal candidate for ministerial office. On April 26, 1906, following Witte’s resignation, he was offered the portfolio of the Interior in Goremykin’s cabinet. After some hesitation, he accepted the post and moved to the capital. Although favored by the Court for his slavish devotion, the sixty-seven-year-old Goremykin proved entirely unable either to handle the Duma or to quell public disorders. The archetypal bureaucrat-steward, dubbed “His Illustrious Indifference” (Ego Vysokoe Bezrazlichie), he was let go on the day of the First Duma’s dissolution (July 8, 1906). Stolypin now assumed the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers while retaining the portfolio of the Interior.

In approaching his new responsibilities, Stolypin acted on the premise that the October Manifesto had marked a watershed in Russian history: as he told Struve, “there was no possibility of restoring absolutism.”³⁷ This outlook placed him at odds with the Court and its conservative supporters. Stolypin found himself from the outset pursuing a policy that did not enjoy the sympathy of either the Crown or many of his subordinates in the Ministry of the Interior. The latter preferred the traditional repressive measures. Stolypin, albeit with a heavy heart, agreed to repression, to quell disorders, but he thought it futile unless accompanied by reform. He had an ambitious program in mind which centered on administrative decentralization as a device for raising the cultural level of the population.³⁸

In March 1907, he outlined a sweeping program of reforms which called for the expansion of civil liberties (freedom of religion, personal inviolability, civic equality), improvements in agriculture, state insurance for industrial workers, extension of the powers of organs of local self-government, reform of the police, and the introduction of a graduated income tax.³⁹

Determined to carry out his duties with the cooperation of society, he established contact with the leaders of all political parties save those committed to revolution. He also sought to build up in parliament a coalition of supporters, on the example of George Ill’s “King’s Friends” and Bismarck’s Reichsfreunde. He was prepared to go to great lengths to achieve this end, agreeing to legislative compromises and resorting to bribery. His Duma addresses were outstanding examples of parliamentary oratory, by virtue of not only the force of arguments but also their tone: he spoke as a Russian patriot to fellow patriots rather than as a royal steward communicating the master’s wishes. In actions as well as public pronouncements, he took it for granted that the interests of Russia had precedence over all private and partisan interests.

This endeavor met with little response in a country in which the sense of nationhood and statehood was as yet poorly developed. To the opposition Stolypin was a lackey of the despised monarchy; to the monarchy he was an ambitious, self-seeking politician. The bureaucratic establishment never accepted him, because he had not risen through the ranks of the St. Petersburg ministries.

The most urgent task confronting Stolypin was the restoration of public order. This he accomplished by harsh measures which earned him odium among the intelligentsia.

The immediate justification for launching a campaign of counterterror was a nearly successful attempt on his life.

After moving to St. Petersburg, Stolypin maintained the gubernatorial custom of keeping on Sundays open house for petitioners. He insisted on this practice despite warnings from the police. In the afternoon of August 12, 1906, three Maximalists, two disguised as gendarmes, sought admission to his villa on Aptekarskii Island. When a suspicious guard tried to detain them, they threw briefcases, loaded with explosives, into the building.⁴⁰ A frightful carnage ensued: twenty-seven petitioners and guards, as well as the terrorists themselves, were torn to pieces by the explosion and thirty-two people suffered wounds. Stolypin miraculously escaped harm but both his children were injured. Reacting with characteristic coolness, he directed the removal of the victims.

The assault on Stolypin was only the most sensational manifestation of terrorism which continued to hold the country in its bloody grip. The commander of the Black Sea Fleet and the governors of Warsaw and Saratov fell victim to it. Hardly a day passed without a police official losing his life. To make matters worse, monarchists, emulating revolutionary tactics, resorted to counterterror, and on July 18 murdered the Jewish deputy, Michael Gertsenshtein, who had presented to the Duma the Kadet land program with a demand for compulsory expropriations.* No government in the world could have remained passive in the face of such violence. Since a new Duma had not yet been elected, Stolypin had recourse to Article 87. He subsequently made frequent use of this clause: during the half year that elapsed between the dissolution of the First Duma and the convocation of the Second, Russia was in effect administered by decree. Because he believed in the rule of law, he regretted having to do so, but he saw no alternative: such procedures were “a deplorable necessity,” justified on the grounds that at times the interests of the state took precedence.⁴¹

Since 1905, a good part of Russia had been placed under martial law: in August 1906, eighty-two of the Empire’s eighty-seven provinces were under “Reinforced Safeguard.”⁴² These measures proved insufficient, and under strong pressure from the Court, Stolypin resorted to summary justice. On August 19—one week after the failed attempt on his life—he introduced, under Article 87, field courts for civilians.⁴³ The law provided that in areas placed under either martial law or Extraordinary Safeguard, the governors and commandants of the military districts could turn over to military courts persons whose guilt was so obvious as to require no further investigation. The personnel of these courts were to be appointed by local commanders and to consist of five officers. Hearings were to take place behind closed doors: defendants were allowed no lawyer but could call on witnesses. The field courts had to convene within twenty-four hours of the crime and reach a verdict in forty-eight hours. There was no appeal from their sentences, which were to be carried out within twenty-four hours.

This law remained in force for eight months, expiring in April 1907. It is estimated that Stolypin’s field courts meted out up to 1,000 death sentences.⁴⁴ Subsequently, terrorists and other persons accused of violent political crimes were tried by ordinary courts. A contemporary source estimates that in 1908 and 1909 the courts convicted for political crimes and armed assault 16,440 persons, 3,682 of them to death and 4,517 to hard labor.⁴⁵

Stolypin’s repressive measures evoked cries of outrage from public circles which displayed considerable tolerance for revolutionary terror. The Kadets, who ignored SR murders, spared no words of condemnation for the quasi-juridical procedures employed by Stolypin to prevent them: one of their spokesmen, Fedor Rodichev, referred to the gallows used by the field courts as “Stolypin’s neckties” and the name stuck. In July 1908, Tolstoy wrote Ne mogu molchat’!—I Cannot Keep Silent!—in which he argued that government violence was a hundredfold worse than criminal and terrorist violence because it was perpetrated in cold blood. His recipe for ending revolutionary terrorism was abolishing private property in land. The issue was so divisive that Guchkov’s defense of Stolypin’s field courts as a “cruel necessity”⁴⁶ split the Octobrist Party and led to the resignation of Shipov, one of its most respected figures.

But public order was eventually restored, enabling Stolypin to launch his program of economic and political reforms.

Without awaiting the convocation of the second Duma, Stolypin enacted, again with resort to Article 87, a series of agrarian reforms which he viewed as the key to Russia’s long-term stability.

An initial step in this direction was a law of October 5, 1906, which accorded the Russian peasant, for the first time in history, civil equality with the other estates.⁴⁷ It removed all restrictions on peasant movement, depriving the communes of the power to refuse members permission to leave. The land commandants could no longer punish peasants. Thus disappeared the last vestiges of serfdom.

Stolypin addressed himself concurrently to the issue of land shortage, increasing the reserve of agricultural land available for purchase by peasants and facilitating access to mortgage money. The Peasant Land Bank, founded in the 1880s, had already in 1905 received broad powers to provide easy credit to help peasants acquire land. Stolypin now made much more land available for this purpose by persuading the Court to offer for peasant purchase Crown and State lands. This was formalized in laws of August 12 and 27, 1906.⁴⁸ The Crown (udeVnye) lands used for this purpose amounted to 1.8 million desiatiny (2 million hectares) of arable land, and the State lands to 3.6 million (4 million hectares). Approximately the same acreage of woodland was put on the market, for a total of 11 million desiatiny (12 million hectares).⁴⁹ These properties, augmented with land which the landlords sold after the 1905–6 rural disturbances, considerably increased peasant holdings.

To provide access to these lands it was necessary to organize and finance a large-scale resettlement program to move peasants out of the overcrowded provinces of central Russia. This the government initiated as early as March 1906, before Stolypin had assumed office, in a reversal of previous policy discouraging peasant movement. Under Stolypin, the state-sponsored resettlement program assumed massive proportions, with the peak years being 1908 and 1909. Between 1906 and 1916, 3 million peasants moved to Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia, settling on lands which the government had made available (547,000 of them later returned).⁵⁰

Russian liberals and socialists considered it axiomatic that the country’s “agrarian question” could be solved only by expropriations of properties belonging to the State, the Crown, the Church, and private landlords. Like Ermolov, Stolypin felt this belief rested on an illusion: there simply was not enough non-peasant land in the Empire to satisfy those who needed it as well as those who were added each year to the rural population from natural growth. In a masterfully reasoned speech to the Duma on May 10, 1907, he argued that the Social-Democratic program of nationalizing land was without merit:

Let us assume for the sake of argument that the government accepts [the nationalization of land] as a desirable thing, that it sidesteps the issue of driving to ruin a whole … numerous educated class of landowners, that it reconciles itself to the destruction of the sparse centers of culture in the countryside. What would result? Would this at least solve the material aspect of the agrarian question? Would it or would it not make it possible to satisfy the peasants in the localities where they reside?

These questions can be answered with figures, and the figures, gentlemen, tell the following: If one were to transfer to the peasantry all the privately owned land, without exception, even that located in the neighborhood of cities, then in the province of Vologda the communal land as now constituted, together with that added to it, would provide 147 desiatiny per household, in Olonetsk 185 desiatiny, and in Archangel as much as 1,309 desiatiny. At the same time, in fourteen other provinces there would not be enough land to give each household 15 desiatiny, while in Poltava there would be only 9 and in Podolia less than 8. This is due to the extremely uneven distribution in the various provinces not only of State and Crown lands but also of lands held in private ownership. One-fourth of the privately held land happens to be located in those twelve provinces which have communal allotments in excess of 15 desiatiny per household, whereas only one-seventh of it lies in the ten provinces with the smallest allotments of 7 desiatiny per household. It must be noted that these figures include all the land of all the owners—that is, not only that of the 107,000 dvoriane but also that of 490,000 peasants who have purchased land on their own account, as well as that belonging to 85,000 burghers—the latter two categories accounting for up to 17 million desiatiny. From this it follows that the division of all the land on a per capita basis can hardly remedy local land shortages. It will be necessary to have recourse to the measure proposed by the government—namely, resettlement. One will have to give up the idea of ensuring land for the entire toiling population and [instead] divert from that group a certain proportion to other occupations.

This is also confirmed by other figures which indicate the population growth over a ten-year period in the fifty provinces of European Russia. Russia, gentlemen, is not dying out. Her population increase exceeds that of all the other countries in the world, attaining an annual rate of 15.1 per 1,000. Thus, in the fifty provinces of European Russia, the natural population growth adds each year 1,625,000 people: assuming five persons per family, this represents 341,000 families. If we allow 10 desiatiny per household, we will require annually 3.5 million desiatiny to provide with land only that population which is added each year.

Clearly, gentlemen, the land question cannot be solved by the device of expropriating and distributing private lands. This [method] is tantamount to putting a plaster on an infected wound.*

Stolypin next turned to his favorite subject, the need to privatize agriculture in order to improve productivity:

But apart from the aforementioned material results, what will this method do to the country, what will it accomplish from the moral point of view? The picture which we now observe in our rural communities—the need of all to subordinate themselves to a single method of pursuing agriculture, the requirement of constant repartitions, the impossibility for a farmer with initiative to apply to the land temporarily at his disposal his inclination toward a particular branch of economy—all that will spread throughout Russia. All and each will be equal, and land will become as common as water and air. But neither water nor air benefit from the application of human hands, neither is improved by labor, or else the improved air and water undoubtedly would fetch a price, they would become subject to the right of property. I suggest that the land which would be distributed among citizens, alienated from some and offered to local Social-Democratic bureaus, would soon acquire the same qualities as water and air. It would be exploited, but no one would improve it, no one would apply to it his labor in order to have someone else benefit from it.… As a result, the cultural level of the country will decline. A good farmer, an inventive farmer, will be deprived by the very force of things of the opportunity to apply his knowledge to the land. One is driven to the conclusion that such conditions would lead to a new upheaval, and that the talented, strong, forceful man would restore his right to property, to the fruit of his labor. After all, gentlemen, property has always had as its basis force, behind which stood also moral law.⁵¹

Stolypin well realized the hold which the commune had on the Great Russian peasant and had no illusion that he could dissolve it by government fiat. He rather wanted to achieve this end by example, setting up alongside the communes a parallel system of privately held farms. All the land turned over by the Crown and the State to the Peasant Land Bank was to be used for this purpose; to augment this reserve, he was not averse to a limited expropriation of large private estates. The critical issue to him was that the land turned over to the peasants be kept out of the hands of the communes in order to create enclaves of prosperous, independent farmsteads which in time, he hoped, would exert an irresistible attraction on peasants and encourage them to give up communal landholding. To the same end he also favored legislation that would make it easy for peasants to withdraw from the commune and claim title to their allotments.

Such a program was for Stolypin a precondition of economic improvement, which, in turn, would provide the foundations of national stability and grandeur. (“They,” he concluded his May 1907 speech, referring to the revolutionary parties, “need great upheavals. We need a Great Russia!”) But the dissolution of the commune was to him also an essential means for raising the level of citizenship in Russia. He fully shared Witte’s dismay over the peasantry’s low cultural level.⁵² In his view, Russia’s greatest need was for civic education, which meant, first and foremost, inculcating in the rural population a sense of law and respect for private property. His agrarian reforms were meant, therefore, ultimately to serve a political purpose—namely, to provide a school of citizenship.

The principles of Stolypin’s agrarian reform were by no means original, having been the subject of frequent discussions in government circles since the end of the nineteenth century.⁵³ In February 1906, the Imperial Government discussed proposals to enable peasants to leave the commune and consolidate their holdings. A few days before he left office in April 1906, Witte had submitted a similar plan.⁵⁴ The idea of dissolving the commune and promoting resettlement in Siberia now found favor even with some of the most conservative landlords, who saw in such measures a way of avoiding expropriations. The All-Russian Union of Landowners as well as the United Nobility had favored such a policy before Stolypin appeared on the scene. Stolypin’s deputy, Kryzhanovskii, says these reforms had become so urgent that if not Stolypin then some other minister would have carried them out, even the archconservative Durnovo.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, as it was Stolypin who put these ideas into practice, they are indissolubly bound up with his name.

The keystone of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms was the law of November 9, 1906: its importance becomes apparent when one considers that the communes to which it applied comprised 77.2 percent of European Russia’s rural households.⁵⁶ The law freed communal peasants from the obligation of remaining in the commune. The law’s critical clause provided that “any head of a household who holds a land allotment by virtue of communal right may at any time demand to have it deeded to him as private property”—insofar as practicable, in a single, enclosed parcel. To leave the commune, peasants no longer required the concurrence of the majority of members; the decision was theirs. Having gone through the required formalities, a peasant household had the choice of claiming property title to its allotment and remaining in the village or selling out and moving away. In communes which had not practiced repartition since 1861, the allotments automatically became the property of the cultivators. Since the government concurrently annulled all remaining arrears on redemption payments (as of January 1, 1907), and one desiatina of arable land at the time fetched well over 100 rubles, the typical household of ten desiatiny could lay claim to an allotment worth over 1,000 rubles. On November 15, 1906, the Peasant Land Bank was instructed to make loans available to help peasants desiring to leave the commune.⁵⁷

The law made possible, for the first time in modern history, the emergence in central Russia of an independent peasantry of a Western type.* But it also had a deeper and more revolutionary significance in that it challenged the peasants’ deeply held conviction that the land belonged to no one: it introduced the idea of the “supremacy of the fact of ownership over the juridical fact of use.”⁵⁸ It is typical of late Imperial Russia that such a radical transformation of Russian agrarian conditions was promulgated under Article 87—that is, as an emergency measure: the Duma approved it only on June 14, 1910, three and a half years after it had gone into effect.

How successful were Stolypin’s agrarian reforms? The matter is the subject of considerable controversy. One school of historians claims that they led to rapid changes in the village which would have prevented revolution were it not for Stolypin’s death and the disruptions of World War I. Another school dismisses them as a reform foisted upon unwilling peasants and undone by them immediately after the collapse of the Imperial regime.⁵⁹

The facts of the case are as follows.⁶⁰ In 1905, the fifty provinces of European Russia had 12.3 million peasant households cultivating 125 million desiatiny; 77.2 percent of these households and 83.4 percent of this land were under a communal regime. In the Great Russian provinces, communal land-holding embraced 97–100 percent of the households and land. Notwithstanding claims of the opponents of the commune that repartition was falling into disuse, in central Russia it was universally practiced.

Between 1906 and 1916, 2.5 million (or 22 percent) of the communal households, with 14.5 percent of the acreage, filed petitions to take title to their allotments. As these figures indicate, those who availed themselves of the new legislation were the poorer peasants, usually with small families, who had difficulty making ends meet: whereas the average household allotment in European Russia was around ten desiatiny, the households that withdrew from the commune averaged only three desiatiny.⁶¹

In sum, slightly more than one communal household in five took advantage of the law of November 9. But this statistic ignores one important fact and, by doing so, makes the reform appear still more successful than it actually was. The economic drawback of the commune lay not only in the practice of repartition but also in that of strip farming, or cherespolositsa, which was an essential corollary of communal organization. Economists criticized this practice on the grounds that it forced the peasant to waste much time moving with his equipment from strip to strip and precluded intensive cultivation. Stolypin, well aware of the disadvantages of cherespolositsa, was eager to do away with it, and to this end inserted in the law a clause authorizing peasants wishing to withdraw from the commune to demand that their holdings be consolidated (enclosed). The communes, however, ignored this provision: the evidence indicates that three-quarters of the households which took title to their allotments under the Stolypin law had to accept them in scattered strips.⁶² Such properties were known as otruba; khutora, independent farmsteads with enclosed land, which Stolypin wanted to encourage, existed mainly in the borderlands. Thus, the pernicious practice of strip farming was little affected by the Stolypin legislation. On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, a decade after Stolypin’s reforms had gone into effect, only 10 percent of Russian peasant households operated as khutora; the remaining 90 percent continued as before to pursue strip farming.⁶³

On balance, therefore, the results of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms must be judged as exceedingly modest. No “agrarian revolution” occurred and no Russian yeomanry emerged. When asked why they claimed title to their allotments, one-half of the respondents said that they did so in order to sell and get out of the village: only 18.7 percent took title in order to farm more efficiently. In effect, the reform encouraged the exodus of the poorer communal elements: the better-off peasants remained in the commune, often with enlarged allotments, and nearly every peasant, communal or not, continued to practice strip farming.

Overwhelmingly, Russian peasants rejected the very premise of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms. Surveys conducted after the reforms had been introduced show that they resented those of their neighbors who pulled out of the commune to set up private farms. Communal peasants were unshakable in the belief that the only solution to their economic difficulties lay in communal appropriation of all privately held lands. They opposed the Stolypin legislation from fear that withdrawals would worsen communal land shortages and in some cases refused to allow them, in contravention of the law.⁶⁴ In the eyes of their neighbors, those who availed themselves of the Stolypin reform ceased to be peasants: indeed, under the terms of the electoral law of June 3, 1907, peasants owning 2.5 or more desiatiny qualified as “landlords.” They lived, therefore, on borrowed time. In 1917, once the old regime broke down, the otruba and khutora would be the very first objects of peasant assault: they were in no time swept away and dissolved in the communal sea like sand castles.

Even so, significant changes did occur in Russian agriculture during and after Stolypin’s ministry, although not in consequence of his legislation.

The gentry, having lost “taste for the land,” continued to abandon the countryside. Between 1905 and 1914, gentry landholding in European Russia declined by 12.6 percent, from 47.9 to 41.8 million desiatiny. Most of the land which the landlords sold was acquired by peasants either communally or privately. As a result, on the eve of the Revolution Russia was more than ever a country of small, self-sufficient cultivators.

During this time, agricultural yields improved:

CEREAL YIELDS IN 47 PROVINCES OF EUROPEAN RUSSIA⁶⁵ (kilograms per desiatina) Rye Wheat 1891–1895 701 662 1896–1900 760 596 1901–1905 794 727 1906–1910 733 672 1911–1915 868 726

Russian yields were still the lowest in Europe, bringing in one-third or less of the crops harvested in the Low Countries, Britain, and Germany—the result of unfavorable natural conditions, the virtual absence of chemical fertilizers, and the communal system. Improved yields made possible increased exports of foodstuffs: in 1911, Russia sold abroad a record 13.5 million tons of cereals.⁶⁶

Stolypin’s vision of “Great Russia” required, in addition to the restoration of public order and changes in agricultural practices, political and social reforms. As with agrarian measures, his political reforms grew out of projects formulated by the Ministry of the Interior before his arrival on the scene: a good part had been anticipated in Witte’s proposals to Nicholas II.⁶⁷ Stolypin adopted and expanded these ideas, whose purpose was to modernize and Westernize Russia. Very little of this program was realized: Stolypin declared that he required twenty years to change Russia and he was given a mere five. Even so, its provisions are of interest because they indicate what the liberal bureaucracy, which was far better informed than either the Court or the intelligentsia, saw as the country’s most pressing needs. As formulated in public addresses, notably his Duma speech of March 6, 1907, and the program which he dictated privately in May 1911.* Stolypin intended the following:

Civil rights: Protection of citizens from arbitrary arrest; abolition of administrative exile; bringing to trial officials guilty of criminal abuse of authority.

Police: Abolition of the Corps of Gendarmes as a separate entity and its merger with the regular police; gendarmes to be deprived of the authority to conduct political investigations; an end to the practice of employing agents provocateurs to infiltrate revolutionary movements.

Administration: Creation of a Ministry of Self-government; replacing the peasant volost’ with an all-estate, self-governing unit whose officials would combine administrative and police functions; major reform of zemstva which would endow them with powers comparable to those enjoyed by state governments in the United States; elections to zemstva to be based on a democratic franchise; the bureaucracy’s authority over zemstva to be confined to ensuring the legality of their actions; the introduction of zemstva into the western provinces of the empire.

Ethnic minorities: Creating a Ministry of Nationalities; full equality for all citizens regardless of nationality and religion; administrative decentralization in the areas populated largely by non-Russians to allow the latter a greater voice in running their affairs; elimination of the Pale of Settlement and other discriminatory laws against the Jews.

Social legislation: Formation of ministries of Social Security, of Health, and of Labor; compulsory elementary schooling; state insurance for the aged and disabled; a national health program; full legalization of trade unions.

To carry out this program Stolypin required the powers of a Peter the Great, or, barring that, at least the unstinting support of the Crown. He enjoyed neither, and hence only a small part of his reform agenda saw the light of day.

The difficulties he faced are illustrated by his unsuccessful effort to improve the status of Russia’s Jews. High bureaucratic circles had recognized for years that something had to be done about the medieval legislation regulating Jewish subjects. This sense was inspired less by humanitarian than by political considerations. The security police had been aware for some time of the disproportionate number of Jewish youths in the revolutionary movement, and although many of its members believed that Jews were a sinister race bent on subverting and destroying Christian society, more intelligent police officials attributed the young Jews’ radicalism to the obstacles which Russian laws placed in the way of their career opportunities. There were also powerful financial reasons for abolishing Jewish disabilities. The director of the Banc de Paris et Pays Bas expressed a view prevalent among foreign financiers when he advised Kokovtsov, the Finance Minister, that it would benefit Russia’s international standing if she granted her Jewish subjects civil equality.⁶⁸ Russia’s treatment of Jews poisoned relations with the United States, which objected repeatedly to the refusal of the Russian authorities to grant entry visas to American citizens of Jewish faith. In December 1911, the U.S. Senate, on the recommendation of President Taft, would unanimously renounce the U.S. Russian treaty of 1832 on these grounds.*

Stolypin raised the Jewish issue before the Council of Ministers, and secured a solid majority in favor of doing away with many restrictions on Jewish residential and occupational rights. He forwarded a proposal to this effect to the Tsar. Nicholas rejected it on the grounds of “conscience.”⁶⁹ The refusal ended the possibility of Imperial Russia ridding herself of her anachronistic Jewish legislation and ensured the animosity of Jews at home and abroad.

Stolypin was determined not to repeat the mistake of his predecessor, Goremykin, who had no government program with which to attract voters. Having announced his reform program, he involved the government in the electoral campaign by paying subsidies to friendly newspapers and staging spectacles for potential supporters of pro-government candidates. For this purpose he allocated modest sums, such as 10,000 rubles to be spent in Kiev on electoral propaganda, “allowances” for needy voters, and the staging for peasant voters of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. He soon became painfully aware of the paucity of means at the government’s disposal to rally public support. Later he resorted to bribing deputies to vote for government bills.⁷⁰

Stolypin tried, without success, to bring representatives of society into the cabinet.

On assuming office, he engaged in negotiations with Alexander Guchkov and Nicholas Lvov, offering the former the portfolio of Trade and Industry and the latter that of Agriculture. The two made their acceptance conditional on other representatives of society being included in the cabinet. Stolypin next contacted Dmitrii Shipov and Prince George Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government. They posed stiff demands: a government commitment to expropriating some landed property, the abolition of capital punishment, and an end to martial law. These terms may have been acceptable, but the government could not possibly agree to a further demand that a majority of the ministerial portfolios, including that of the Interior, be turned over to non-bureaucrats.⁷¹ Using Kryzhanovskii as intermediary, Stolypin also made approaches to the Kadets with the view of having them join the cabinet, but nothing came of this effort either.⁷² In January 1907, he attempted once more to come to terms with the Kadets, hoping to wean them away from the radical parties. At this time the Kadets had not yet secured status as a legally recognized association. Stolypin offered to grant them such status if they would denounce terrorism. Ivan Petrunkevich, one of the patriarchs of the liberal movement and a member of the Kadet Central Committee, responded that he would rather the party perish than suffer “moral destruction” by acquiescing to this demand. This terminated the discussions.⁷³

To the government’s dismay, the Second Duma, which opened on February 20, 1907, was even more radical than the First, for the SRs and the SDs had now abandoned the boycott. The socialists had 222 deputies (of them, 65 SDs, 37 SRs, 16 Popular Socialists, and 104 Trudoviki, affiliated with the SRs): they outweighed right-wing deputies by a ratio of two to one. The Kadets, tempered by the failure of their previous tactics, were prepared to behave more responsibly, but their representation was cut by nearly one-half (from 179 to 98) and the opposition was dominated by the socialists, who had no intention of pursuing legislative work. The SRs had resolved in November 1906 to participate in the elections in order to “utilize the State Duma for organizing and revolutionizing the masses.”⁷⁴ The Social-Democrats at the Fourth (Stockholm) Congress, held in April 1907, agreed to commit themselves “to exploiting systematically all conflicts between the government and the Duma as well as within the Duma itself for the purpose of broadening and deepening the revolutionary movement.” The congress instructed the Social-Democratic faction to create a mass movement that would topple the existing order by “exposing all the bourgeois parties,” making the masses aware of the futility of the Duma, and insisting on the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.⁷⁵ The socialists thus entered the Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work and disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity.

To make matters still worse from the government’s point of view, Orthodox priests elected to the Duma, usually by peasants, shunned the conservative parties, preferring to sit in the center; several joined the socialists.

The Second Duma had barely begun its deliberations when in high circles it was whispered that the Duma was incapable of constructive work and should be abolished or at least thoroughly revamped. Fedor Golovin, the chairman of the Second Duma, remembered Nicholas speaking to him in this vein in March or April 1907.⁷⁶ The outright abolition of the Duma, however, proved impractical for political as well as economic reasons.

The political argument in favor of retaining a parliamentary body has been mentioned earlier: it was the need of the bureaucracy for a representative body with which to share the blame for the country’s ills.

The economic argument had to do with international banking. A prominent French financier informed Kokovtsov that the dissolution of the First Duma had struck French financial markets like a “bolt of lightning.”⁷⁷ Later, in 1917, Kokovtsov explained the close relationship which had existed under tsarism between parliamentary government and Russia’s standing in international credit markets. The market price of the Russian state loan of 1906 sunk rapidly after the dissolution of the First Duma. When rumors spread that the Second Duma was to suffer a similar fate, Russian obligations with a face value of 100 dropped from 88 to 69, or by 21 percent.⁷⁸ Experience thus strongly suggested that the liquidation of the Duma would have had a disastrous effect on Russia’s ability to raise foreign loans at acceptable interest rates.

Stolypin was prepared to keep on dissolving Dumas and calling for new elections as long as necessary: he confided to a friend that he would emulate the Prussian Crown which had once dissolved parliament seven times in succession to gain its ends.⁷⁹ But this procedure was unacceptable to the Court. Reluctantly giving up its preference for outright abolition of the lower chamber, the Court ordered a revision of the electoral law to ensure a more conservative Duma.

It is known from the recollections of Kryzhanovskii that while the First Duma was still in session, Goremykin had submitted to the Tsar a memorandum complaining of the “failure” of the elections and criticizing the revisions in the franchise originally devised for the Bulygin Duma which had the result of giving the vote to workers and greatly increasing peasant representation. Nicholas shared Goremykin’s view. Early in May 1906, certainly with the Tsar’s authorization, Goremykin requested Kryzhanovskii to draft a new electoral law which, without disenfranchising any one group or altering the basic constitutional functions of the Duma, would make it more cooperative. Kryzhanovskii’s hastily drawn-up proposal was submitted to the Tsar later that month but it had no issue, possibly because the prospect of having Stolypin take over as Prime Minister aroused hopes that he would know how to cope with the second Duma.⁸⁰

Now that these hopes were dashed, Stolypin asked Kryzhanovskii to devise a change in the electoral law which would enhance the representation of “wealthier” and “more cultured” elements.

Although in the eyes of many contemporaries and historians the unilateral change in the franchise announced on June 3, 1907, amounted to nothing less than a coup d’état, in the eyes of the government it represented a compromise, an alternative to the abolition of the Duma. Using the draft which he had prepared for Goremykin, Kryzhanovskii wrote three proposals that substantially altered the franchise as well as certain provisions of the Fundamental Laws for the purpose of ensuring greater legislative authority for the Crown.

The formal pretext for dissolving the Second Duma was the charge that some of its Social-Democratic deputies had plotted to incite mutiny in the St. Petersburg garrison. Stolypin has been accused then and since of provoking the incident, but in fact the conspiracy had been uncovered by police agents who had caught the SDs meeting secretly in the home of one of their deputies with representatives of military and naval units belonging to revolutionary circles.⁸¹ With this evidence in hand, Stolypin appeared before the Duma and requested that the parliamentary immunity of all the SD deputies be lifted so that the accused could be turned over to a court. The Duma agreed to suspend the immunity only of those deputies against whom there existed concrete evidence of sedition. Stolypin would have preferred to dissolve the Duma and order new elections, but he came under irresistible pressure from the Court to revise the Duma’s electoral procedures.* The Second Duma was dissolved on June 2, 1907.

The new electoral law, made public the next day, unquestionably violated the constitution, which forbade using Article 87 to “introduce changes … in the provisions for elections to the [State] Council or Duma.” That much even Kryzhanovskii conceded.⁸² To get around this limitation, the change in the franchise was decreed by Imperial Manifesto, a law issued on matters of urgent state importance. This procedure was justified on the grounds that since the Tsar had not sworn an oath to observe the new Fundamental Laws, he was free to revise them at will.⁸³ The new law favored the propertied classes by using assets rather than legal status as the criterion of franchise. The representation of industrial workers and national minorities was sharply reduced. Disappointed with the behavior of communal peasants in the first two Dumas, the government also cut down their share of the seats. As a result of these changes, the representation of landowners (a category which included many peasant proprietors) increased by one-half while that of communal peasants and workers fell by one-half. The result was a more conservative and ethnically more Great Russian body.

The term “coup d’état,” often applied in the polemical and historical literature to the change of the electoral law on June 3, 1907, is hardly justified. After all, the Duma continued to function, retaining the legislative and budgetary powers granted it in the Fundamental Laws: the Manifesto of June 3 explicitly reconfirmed the Duma’s prerogatives. In the years that followed the Duma would give the government a great deal of trouble. Only the outright abolition of the lower house or the abrogation of its legislative powers would have qualified as a coup. June 3 is more properly viewed as a violation of the constitution. It was in the Russian tradition of integrating every independent political institution into the state system.

The Third Duma, convened on November 1, 1907, was the only one to be permitted the normal five-year span. As intended, the new body was much more conservative than its predecessors: of the 422 deputies, 154 belonged to the Party of the 17th of October, and 147 to right-wing and nationalist groupings. This representation assured the conservatives of a two-thirds majority. The Kadets were whittled down to 54 seats; associated with them were 28 Progressives. The socialists had 32 deputies (19 Social-Democrats and 13 Trudoviki). Although the government could feel much more comfortable with a legislature in which conservatives had such preponderance, it did not enjoy automatic majorities: Stolypin had to engage in a great deal of political maneuvering to secure passage for some of his bills. Ministers were frequently called to account and on occasion the government failed to have its way.

The Octobrists, who dominated the Third Duma as the Kadets had dominated the First and the socialists the Second, were committed to the existing constitutional arrangement. They defined their task as follows:

to create in the Duma a constitutional center, not aiming to seize governmental power, but at the same time, determined to defend the rights of the people’s representative assembly within the limits laid down for it in the Fundamental Laws.⁸⁴

Its guiding philosophy was a state based on law—law equally binding on the administration and society. Alexander Guchkov, the party’s leader, was descended from a prominent Moscow merchant family founded by a serf and had received his education in Western Europe. According to Alexander Kerensky, who described him as “something of a dour loner with an air of mystery,” he had opposed the Liberation Movement.⁸⁵ He had a low opinion of the Russian masses and did not feel comfortable with politicians. A devoted patriot, in temperament and outlook he resembled Stolypin, whom he helped to split the right-wing in the Third Duma, separating from it the more moderate elements; these, organized as the Nationalist faction, together with the Octobrists, formed an absolute majority and helped Stolypin push through many of his legislative bills.⁸⁶ Much of the rank and file of the Octobrist Party had its roots in the zemstvo movement and maintained close links with it.

To gain support for his legislative programs, Stolypin annually assigned 650,000 rubles from secret funds for subsidizing newspapers and bribing influential right-wing deputies.⁸⁷

The Third Duma was an active body: it voted on 2,571 bills introduced by the government, initiated 205 of its own, and questioned or “interpellated” ministers 157 times.⁸⁸ Its commissions dealt with agrarian problems, social legislation, and many other issues. The year 1908 and even more so 1909 were periods of bountiful harvests, declining violence, and renewed industrial development. Stolypin stood at the pinnacle of his career.

Yet at this very time the first clouds appeared on the horizon. As noted, the constitution had been granted under extreme duress as the only alternative to collapse. The Court and its right-wing supporters viewed it, not as a fundamental and permanent change in Russia’s system of government, but as an emergency measure to tide it over a period of civil unrest. The refusal to admit that Russia even had a constitution and the insistence that the Tsar’s not swearing an oath to the new Fundamental Laws absolved him from having to observe their provisions were not lame excuses, but deeply held convictions. Thus, as the situation in the country improved, and the emergency attenuated, the Court had second thoughts: with public order and rural prosperity restored, did one really need a parliamentary regime and a Prime Minister who played parliamentary politics? Stolypin, who had said of himself that he was “first and foremost a loyal subject of the sovereign and the executor of his designs and commands,” now appeared “a most dangerous revolutionary.”⁸⁹ The main objection to him was that instead of acting in parliament exclusively as an agent of the Crown he forged there his own political constituency. Stolypin believed that he was putting together a party of “King’s Friends,” not for his own, but for the King’s benefit. The monarchists, however, saw only that his political practices led to a diminution of Imperial authority, or at least such authority as Nicholas and his entourage believed him to be entitled to:

Stolypin would have been the last to admit that his policy tended to weaken the Emperor’s independent power—indeed, he considered the source of his own authority to lie in the fact that it had been entrusted to him by the autocratic monarch. Yet, inevitably, that was the effect of his policy, since he realised that in modern conditions that state could only be strengthened against revolution by increasing in it, through parliament, the influence of the landowning, professional and educated classes. And this could only happen at the expense of the Emperor’s own independent power. It was this undeniable fact which gave the reactionaries’ arguments such force in the mind of the Emperor.⁹⁰

This was the crux of Stolypin’s difficulties with the Court, the cause of his waning support and ultimate disgrace. After his death, the Tsarina would admonish his successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov, with reference to Stolypin, “not to seek support in political parties.”⁹¹ In general, the more successful Stolypin’s policies were, the less were his services required and the greater grew the Court’s antagonism to him. Such was the paradox of Russian politics.

His reforms and reform projects also alienated powerful interests. The agrarian reforms, designed to give Russia a class of peasant landlords, threatened that segment of the rural gentry which saw itself as irreplaceable Kulturträger. His efforts to decentralize the administration and make bureaucrats legally accountable aroused the hostility of the officialdom, while his plans to curb the police gained him no friends in those quarters. His unsuccessful efforts on behalf of Jews infuriated the extreme right.

Nor did he gain in public support what he lost at the Court. The liberals never forgave him for “Stolypin’s neckties” and for the manner in which he abused Article 87 to circumvent the Duma’s legislative power. To the extreme right he was an outsider brought in to extinguish a revolutionary conflagration who abused his position to accumulate independent power. Those who, in Struve’s words, regarded the constitution as “camouflaged rebellion” (zamas-kirovannyi bunt)⁹² despised him for taking it seriously instead of working to restore autocracy. In the militant atmosphere of Russian politics, with one set of “purist” principles confronting others, equally uncompromising, there was no room for Stolypin’s pragmatic idealism. Assailed from all sides, he began to falter and commit political blunders.

Stolypin’s first conflict with the Third Duma arose over the naval budget of 1909.⁹³ At the beginning of 1908, the government proposed to construct four battleships of the Dreadnought class to protect Russia’s Baltic shores. In the Duma, the Kadets and the Octobrists joined forces to oppose this bill. Guchkov argued that Russia could not afford a large and expensive navy. Miliukov supported him: Russia, he said, already was spending proportionately more on her navy than Germany although she had little sea commerce and no overseas colonies. The two parties preferred the funds designated for the Dreadnoughts to be spent on the army.⁹⁴ In 1908 and again in 1909 the Duma turned down requests for naval appropriations. Although the passage of the budget by the State Council sufficed to get the naval program underway, the Duma’s rebuff forced Stolypin to seek support from parties to the right of the Octobrists—a shift which led him to pursue a more nationalistic policy.

His most fateful parliamentary crisis came about indirectly because of this shift over the bill to introduce zemstva into the western provinces of the Empire. The bill encountered strong opposition in the upper chamber, where zemstva did not enjoy popularity. Determined to make this issue a test of his ability to administer, Stolypin decided to force it regardless of the cost.

On their creation in 1864, zemstva had not been introduced into nine of the provinces taken from Poland in the Partitions. The elections to the zemstva were heavily skewed in favor of the landowning nobility, and in the western provinces, a high proportion of this nobility were Catholic Poles, who the government feared would exploit the zemstva for their nationalistic ends. (The Polish Rebellion of 1863 had just been crushed.) Intelligent bureaucrats, however, came eventually to realize that given the low cultural level of the Russian element in the borderlands, it was necessary to give non-Russians there a voice in local government.⁹⁵ Stolypin had spoken of introducing zemstva into the western provinces as early as August 1906, but he first formulated a legislative bill to this effect in 1909. Although it had a liberal aspect in that it gave, for the first time, the ethnic minorities of that area a voice in self-government, the bill was primarily designed to please the right wing, on which Stolypin had now come increasingly to depend: according to Kryzhanovskii, the landed gentry deputies from the western provinces were insistently pressing such a demand on him.⁹⁶

22. Right-wing Duma deputies. Sitting in front on extreme left, V. Purishkevich, the assassin of Rasputin.

In his bill, Stolypin sought to ensure a preponderant voice in the western zemstva for the Russian landed gentry and peasant proprietors. Because there were virtually no Russian landlords or landowning peasants in Vilno, Kovno, and Grodno, these provinces were excluded from the bill, which applied only to six western provinces (Vitebsk, Volhynia, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev, and Podolia). In the latter provinces, Russian preponderance was to be guaranteed by a complicated voting procedure employing electoral chambers. Jewish citizens were to be entirely disenfranchised.⁹⁷

The Duma opened discussion on the western zemstvo bill on May 7, 1910. In a speech urging passage, Stolypin asserted that its main purpose was to ensure that the western provinces remained “forever Russian”: this required protecting the Russian minority from the Polish Catholic majority. The bill, supported by the Nationalists and other deputies of the right, passed on May 29, after heated debate and with amendments, on a close vote.

In January 1911 the revised bill went before the upper chamber. Given its nationalistic tenor, passage seemed a foregone conclusion. Stolypin felt so confident that he did not even bother to attend the discussions in the State Council, since a commission of that body had approved the bill.⁹⁸

Unbeknownst to him, however, a backstage intrigue was set in motion. Several members of the State Council, led by Vladimir Trepov, organized, with the help of Durnovo, opposition to Stolypin. The bill’s opponents charged that by offering the Poles a separate electoral chamber Stolypin institutionalized ethnic particularism, thus violating the traditional “Imperial” character of Russian legislation. Witte, one of the bill’s most vociferous opponents, argued that “under the flag of patriotism they are striving to create in the western land a local oligarchy in place of tsarist authority.”⁹⁹ But the true purpose of the camarilla was to bring down Stolypin.

Trepov and Durnovo asked for private audiences with the Tsar. After they had laid before him their objections, Nicholas agreed to release the right-wing deputies in the State Council from having to follow the government’s recommendation: they could vote as their conscience dictated.¹⁰⁰ In giving them this freedom, Nicholas neither sought the advice of his Prime Minister nor informed him of it. Stolypin, therefore, had no cause for apprehension when he appeared in the State Council on March 4 to witness the final vote on his bill. Many of the deputies who would have voted for it if the Tsar had instructed them to do so now felt free to cast negative ballots. As a consequence, the bill’s key clause, with the controversial proposal for two electoral chambers, one for Russians, the other for Poles and the other ethnic groups, went down in defeat, 92–68. Stunned, Stolypin stalked out of the Council chamber.

He could be under no illusion: the incident was a vote of no confidence in him, ostensibly cast by the upper chamber but in fact engineered by the Imperial Court. Furious, he decided to force the Tsar to reveal his hand. The next day, he submitted his resignation. Nicholas rejected it and urged Stolypin to reconsider. Why not resubmit the bill to the Duma and the State Council, he suggested, implying that on the next round he would ask that it be supported. Stolypin refused. When the Tsar asked what he would like him to do, he requested that both houses be prorogued long enough to allow the bill to be enacted under Article 87.* He further asked that Trepov and Durnovo be exiled from St. Petersburg.

Nicholas pondered Stolypin’s request for four days, and then granted it. On March 12, both chambers were prorogued until March 15. Having learned of this decision, the State Council quickly took a vote on the entire bill, which resulted in its being rejected by the overwhelming majority of 134–23.¹⁰¹ On March 14 the western zemstvo bill was promulgated under Article 87. Durnovo and Trepov had to to leave the capital until the end of the year.†

Stolypin’s precipitate action had disastrous consequences, alienating from him all political parties.¹⁰² When he appeared before the Duma to justify his actions, he had virtually no supporters. The press condemned him; so did high society. Guchkov resigned in protest as head of the Octobrist Party: the cooperation between Stolypin and the Octobrists, which had proved so constructive in the first two years of the Third Duma, now came to an end. Last, but not least, Stolypin incurred the enmity of the Tsar, who never forgave anyone for humiliating him: and that Stolypin had done so was clear to public opinion, which realized full well that in proroguing the Duma and exiling Durnovo and Trepov the Tsar had acted under duress.¹⁰³ In official circles it was said at this time that Nicholas had made up his mind to be rid of Stolypin, and that his days as Prime Minister were numbered.¹⁰⁴ Isolated and spurned, he became, in the words of Kokovtsov, “a completely changed man”¹⁰⁵—brooding and irritable where he had been supremely self-confident and magnanimous.

The Empress Dowager Marie, the mother of Nicholas II, who had always urged him to come to terms with society and favored liberal officials, shared with Kokovtsov her sense of despair at these developments:

My poor son, how little luck he has with people. Someone turns up whom no one here knew, but who proves to be intelligent and energetic, and manages to restore order after the horrors which we had gone through nearly six years ago. And now this man is being pushed into the abyss. And by whom? By those who claim to love the Tsar and Russia, and in reality are destroying him and the Fatherland.… How dreadful!¹⁰⁶

Stolypin was in virtual disgrace when he departed in late August 1911 for Kiev for celebrations attending the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II. He had long had premonitions of violent death: in his last will, drawn up in 1906, he had requested to be buried near the site of his murder.¹⁰⁷ Before leaving, he told Kryzhanovskii that he feared he might not return, and entrusted to him a strongbox with secret papers, which he asked to be destroyed if anything happened to him.* He took no precautions to protect himself, however, leaving behind his bodyguards as well as his bulletproof vest.

In Kiev, he was ignored by the Imperial couple and high dignitaries: the humiliation was unmistakable.

In the evening of September 1, the Kiev Municipal Theater scheduled a performance of Rimskii-Korsakov’s The Story of Tsar Saltan. Nicholas, accompanied by his daughters, occupied the governor’s loge on the orchestra level. Stolypin sat nearby, in the front row. During the second intermission, around 10 p.m., as he stood chatting in front of the orchestra pit with Counts Potocki and Fredericks, a young man in coattails drew near. He pulled a Browning from under the program with which he had concealed it and fired twice at the Prime Minister. Both bullets struck, one in the hand, the other in the chest: the first ricocheted and wounded a musician; the other hit Stolypin’s chest but was deflected by a medal and lodged in the liver. According to an eyewitness, Stolypin at first seemed not to realize what had happened:

He lowered his head and stared at his white tunic, which on the right side, under the chest, was beginning to stain with blood. With slow and sure motions he put his service hat and gloves on the barrier, unbuttoned the tunic, and seeing the waistcoat thick with blood, made a motion as if to say, “It’s all over.” He then sank into a chair and clearly, distinctly, in a voice audible to all who were nearby, said, “I am happy to die for the Tsar.” On seeing the Tsar enter the loge and stand in front, he lifted his hands motioning him to withdraw. But the Tsar did not move, remaining in place, whereupon Peter Arkadevich, in full view of all, blessed him with a broad sign of the cross.¹⁰⁸

Stolypin was rushed to a hospital. He seemed to be making a good recovery when an infection set in; he died in the evening of September 5.* The next day, the central Kiev railroad terminal teemed with panic-stricken Jews. Thanks to the firm action by the authorities, however, no anti-Jewish violence occurred.

The assassin, who had been caught and pummeled while attempting to flee the scene of the crime, turned out to be a twenty-four-year-old lawyer, Dmitrii Grigorevich Bogrov, the son of a wealthy Jewish Kievan family.¹⁰⁹ At home and on his frequent trips abroad he had flitted in and out of SR and anarchist circles. Although well provided for by doting parents, he often ran out of money because of his passion for gambling and it is fairly certain that it was financial need that drove him to become a police agent. According to his testimony, from the middle of 1907 until late 1910 he had served as an informer for the Kiev Okhrana, supplying information that enabled it to apprehend SR and anarchist terrorists.

The revolutionaries grew suspicious of Bogrov. At first they accused him of embezzling party funds, but eventually concluded that he had to be a police agent. On August 16, 1911, Bogrov was visited by a revolutionary who told him that his role as a police informer had been established beyond doubt and that he faced “execution”: he could save himself only by committing a terrorist act, preferably against Colonel N. N. Kuliabko, the chief of the Kiev Okhrana. This had to be done by September 5. Bogrov visited Kuliabko, but he received from him such a warm welcome that he could not go through with his mission. He next considered assassinating the Tsar, due in Kiev in a few days, but gave up this plan for fear of precipitating anti-Jewish pogroms. He finally settled on Stolypin as the “man mainly responsible for the reaction which had established itself in Russia.”†

To divert attention from himself and his plans, Bogrov concocted an imaginary plot against Stolypin and L. A. Kasso, the Minister of Education, by two fictitious terrorists. On August 26, he told Colonel Kuliabko that the pair would come to Kiev during the celebrations and use his apartment as a base of operations. Kuliabko, who is said to have been of a “soft” and “trusting” disposition,¹¹⁰ had no reason to disbelieve Bogrov, since he had proven a reliable informant in the past. He had Bogrov’s apartment house surrounded with agents, giving Bogrov the run of the city. On August 29, Bogrov stalked Stolypin in a park, and on September 1 daytime approached him as he was being photographed in the Hippodrome, but on neither occasion could he get close enough to shoot.

The Okhrana, in possession of information supplied by Bogrov, recommended to the Prime Minister that he not appear in public unattended, but he disregarded this warning. He behaved like a man reconciled to his fate, a man who had nothing left to live for, who may have even courted martyrdom.

For Bogrov, time was running out: his last opportunity might very well be the evening of September 1 during the performance at the Municipal Theater. Tickets were hard to come by because of tight security precautions and public demand. Bogrov told the police that he feared for his safety if the terrorists whom he had identified were apprehended and he could not produce a satisfactory alibi. He had to have a ticket to the theater. This was delivered to him only one hour before the beginning of the performance.

On September 9, after a week of questioning, Bogrov was turned over to the Kiev Military Court, which sentenced him to death. He was hanged during the night of September 10–11, in the presence of witnesses who wanted to make sure that an ordinary convict was not substituted for Bogrov, whose police connections had become public knowledge by then.

As soon as it became known that Bogrov had entered the theater on a police pass, rumors spread that he had acted on behalf of the government. These rumors have not died to this day. The leading suspect was and remains General P. G. Kurlov, the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, who took charge of Kievan security during the Imperial visit and was known to have had bureaucratic differences with the Prime Minister.¹¹¹ This theory, however, rests on very slender evidence. The inability of the police to prevent the murder of the Prime Minister appears rather the result of a not uncommon failure of the technique of using double agents: after all, the greatest double agent of all, Evno Azef, also occasionally had had to betray his employers in order to maintain credibility with the terrorists—to the point of arranging for the murder of his chief, Plehve. As for the fact that the police gave Bogrov an admission ticket to the theater, that, too, makes good sense in view of the scenario which he had managed to foist on them. In his memoirs, Kurlov recalled that five years earlier, under similar circumstances, the Kiev Okhrana had allowed a double agent into the Municipal Theater to forestall a terrorist attack on the governor-general.¹¹² On closer scrutiny, the conspiratorial theories of Stolypin’s death do not hold up. Since it was widely believed that he would soon be dismissed, his enemies had no need to resort to murder to be rid of him, the more so in view of the fact that the prime suspect of the crime, the gendarmerie, had no assurance that Bogrov, acting in self-defense, would not betray its involvement. That the tsarist authorities could have been suspected of instigating the murder of the Prime Minister tells more about the poisoned political atmosphere of late Imperial Russia than about the facts of the case.

An assessment of Stolypin has to distinguish the man from his achievement.

He towered over the Russian statesmen of his era: to appreciate his stature, one only needs to compare him with his successors, mostly nonentities, sometimes incompetents, selected on the criterion of personal loyalty to the Crown and dedicated to serving its interests, not those of the nation. He gave Russia, traumatized by the Revolution of 1905, a sense of national purpose and hope. He elevated politics above both partisanship and utopianism.

To admit his personal greatness, however, is not to concede that had he lived Stolypin would have prevented a revolution. To steer the country toward stability, he required unfailing backing from the Crown and at least some measure of support from liberal and conservative parties. He had neither. His grand project of political and social reform remained largely on paper and his main accomplishment, the agrarian reform, was wiped out in 1917 by the spontaneous action of communal peasants. By the time he died, he was politically finished: as Guchkov put it, Stolypin “had died politically long before his physical death.”¹¹³

Nothing illustrates better the hopelessness of Stolypin’s endeavors than the indifference with which the Imperial couple reacted to his murder. Ten days after the Prime Minister had been shot, Nicholas wrote his mother an account of the visit to Kiev. In it, he treated Stolypin’s death as a mere episode in the round of receptions, parades, and other diversions. When he communicated the news of Stolypin’s death to his wife, he wrote, “she took the news rather calmly.”¹¹⁴ Indeed, when not long afterward Alexandra discussed the event with Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor, she chided him for being too much affected by Stolypin’s death:

It seems that you hold in too high esteem [Stolypin’s] memory and attach too much importance to his activity and person.… One must not feel such sorrow for those who have departed.… Everyone fulfills his role and mission, and when someone no longer is with us it is because he has carried out his task and had to be effaced since he no longer had anything left to do.… I am convinced that Stolypin died to yield his post to you, and that this is for Russia’s good.¹¹⁵

Although he lost his life to a revolutionary, Stolypin was politically destroyed by the very people whom he had tried to save.

The three years that separated the death of Stolypin from the outbreak of World War I are difficult to characterize because they were filled with contradictory trends, some of which pointed to stabilization, others to breakdown.

On the surface, Russia’s situation looked promising: an impression confirmed by the renewed flow of foreign investments. Stolypin’s repression, accompanied by economic prosperity, had succeeded in restoring order. Conservatives and radicals agreed, with different emotions, that Russia had weathered the Revolution of 1905. In liberal and revolutionary circles the prevailing mood was one of gloom: the monarchy had once again managed to outwit its opponents by making concessions when in trouble and withdrawing them as soon as its position solidified. Although terrorism did not entirely die out, it never recovered from revelations made in 1908 that the leader of the SR Combat Organization, Azef, was a police agent.

The economy was booming. Agricultural yields in central Russia increased measurably. In 1913 iron production, compared with 1900, grew by 57.8 percent, while coal production more than doubled. In the same period, Russian exports and imports more than doubled as well.¹¹⁶ Thanks to strict controls on the emission of bank notes, the ruble was among the stablest currencies in the world. A French economist forecast in 1912 that if Russia maintained until 1950 the pace of economic growth that she had had since 1900, by the middle of the twentieth century she would dominate Europe politically, economically, and financially.¹¹⁷ Economic growth allowed the Treasury to rely less than before on foreign loans and even to retire some debt: by 1914, after decades of continuous growth, Russia’s state indebtedness finally showed a downward trend.¹¹⁸ The budget also showed a positive course: between 1910 and 1913 it had a surplus three years out of four, with the “extraordinary” part of the budget taken into account.¹¹⁹

Stolypin had learned from experience that a prosperous village was a tranquil village. And, indeed, in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, the countryside, benefiting from improved yields, gave the authorities little trouble. But prosperity had a different effect on industrial centers located in the countryside. The massive hiring of new workers, most of them landless or land-poor peasants, injected into the labor force a volatile element. Between January 1910 and July 1914, the number of workers in Russia grew by one-third (from 1.8 to 2.4 million); in mid-1914, more than one-half of the workers of St. Petersburg were newcomers. These employees found even the Mensheviks and SRs too moderate, preferring the simpler, more emotional slogans of the anarchists and Bolsheviks.¹²⁰ Their restlessness and sense of estrangement contributed to the increase in industrial strife on the eve of the war, notably in the first half of 1914.

This said, grounds are lacking for maintaining that Russia in 1914 was less “stable” than at any time since 1900, except for 1905–6, and heading for revolution.¹²¹ This argument, mandatory in Communist histories, rests primarily on evidence of increased strike activity after 1910. It is unconvincing for several reasons:

Industrial strikes do not necessarily signify social instability: more often than not, they accompany the progression of labor to a more advanced economic and social status. Poorly paid, unskilled, and unorganized workers rarely strike. There exists a demonstrated correlation between the formation of trade unions and strike activity.* By legitimizing trade unions, the Imperial Government also legitimized strikes, previously unlawful. Seen in this light, the increase in work stoppages (more than half of them one- or two-day affairs, in any event) may be more correctly interpreted as symptomatic of the maturation of Russian labor, which, judging by the Western experience, was likely in time to lead to greater social stability.

In many Western industrial countries, the period immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I also saw a rise in labor unrest. In the United States, for example, twice as many workers struck in 1910–14 as in the preceding five years: in 1912 and 1913 there were more workers out on strike than at any time in the preceding thirty years.¹²² In Great Britain, too, strike activity showed a dramatic spurt in 1912, in terms of both workers involved and working days lost.¹²³ Yet neither country was destabilized and neither experienced a revolution.

In the final analysis, Russia’s social stability depended on the peasant: radical intellectuals acknowledged that no revolution in Russia was possible as long as the village remained quiet. And it is a demonstrable fact that the Russian village did not stir either immediately before the war or in the first two years after its outbreak. The half a million workers who were on strike in 1912 represented an insignificant minority compared with 100 million peasants who went peacefully about their business.

Nor can much be inferred from instances of political restlessness in the liberal movement, as symbolized by the eccentric offer of A. I. Konovalov, the millionaire textile manufacturer, to provide financial subsidies to Lenin.¹²⁴ This not untypical tactic of Russian liberals to pressure the authorities for political concessions by invoking the specter of revolution cannot be interpreted as signifying a radicalization of liberal opinion. Indeed, the very opposite trend was noticeable in Russia on the eve of the war—namely, a shift to conservatism. There is much evidence to indicate a growth of patriotic sentiment among educated Russians, including university youths.

A similar shift to the right was noticeable in Russian thought and culture. The preoccupation with civic issues and the politicization of Russian life which had set in in the middle of the nineteenth century showed signs of waning even before it drew to a close. With the rise of the Symbolist school in poetry and the triumph of aesthetic standards in criticism, literature and art turned to different means and subjects: poetry replaced the novel as the principal vehicle of creative literature, while painting turned away from realism toward fantasy and abstraction. The challenge issued to artists and composers by Serge Diaghilev, Russia’s foremost impresario—“Astonish me!”—flew in the face of the didactic precepts upheld by the arbiters of Russian taste in the preceding generation. Other manifestations of this change were the preoccupation of novelists with sex and violence and the popularity among socialites of spiritualism and theosophy. Idealism, metaphysics, religion replaced positivism and materialism. Nietzsche was in high fashion.¹²⁵

The intelligentsia was reeling from the assault on it by the symposium Landmarks (Vekhi), brought out in 1909 by a group of liberals and ex-Marxists. A unique succès de scandale in Russian intellectual history, the book was a broadside attack on the Russian intelligentsia, whom it charged with narrow-mindedness, bigotry, lack of true culture, and a multitude of other sins. The book called on it to begin the arduous task of self-cultivation. The traditional intelligentsia, grouped around the socialist and liberal parties, rejected this appeal, as it did the dominant trends in modernist culture. It persisted in its old ways, the custodian of the stultified culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Maxim Gorky was one of the few prominent creative writers to associate himself with this outmoded trend. Other talented writers adopted “Modernism” and in their politics turned increasingly patriotic.

And yet, notwithstanding social peace, economic progress, and the exuberance of her culture, on the eve of World War I Russia was a troubled and anxious country. Neither the violence of 1905 nor the reforms of Stolypin had solved anything: for the socialists the Revolution of 1905 might as well not have occurred, so meager were its results; for the liberals it was unfinished business; for the conservatives its only legacy was confusion. Since there seemed to be no way of peacefully reconciling the divergent interests of Russia’s 150 million inhabitants, another revolution was a distinct possibility. And the fresh memory of the “masses” on the march, sweeping everything before them in their destructive fury, was enough to sow terror in the hearts of all but a small minority.

To the historian of this period, the most striking—and most ominous—impression is the prevalence and intensity of hatred: ideological, ethnic, social. The monarchists despised the liberals and socialists. The radicals hated the “bourgeoisie.” The peasants loathed those who had left the commune to set up private farms. Ukrainians hated Jews, Muslims hated Armenians, the Kazakh nomads hated and wanted to expel the Russians who had settled in their midst under Stolypin. Latvians were ready to pounce on their German landlords. All these passions were held in check only by the forces of order—the army, the gendarmerie, the police—who themselves were under constant assault from the left. Since political institutions and processes capable of peacefully resolving these conflicts had failed to emerge, the chances were that sooner or later resort would again be had to violence, to the physical extermination of those who happened to stand in the way of each of the contending groups.

It was common in those days to speak of Russia living on a “volcano.” In 1908, the poet Alexander Blok used another metaphor when he spoke of a “bomb” ticking in the heart of Russia. Some tried to ignore it, some to run away from it, others yet to disarm it. To no avail:

whether we remember or forget, in all of us sit sensations of malaise, fear, catastrophe, explosion.… We do not know yet precisely what events await us, but in our hearts the needle of the seismograph has already stirred.¹²⁶

*V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm vgodypervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), 169. Nicholas first made a personal appearance in the Duma in February 1916, ten years after the parliament had been established, in the midst of a grave political crisis brought about by Russia’s defeats in World War I.

*There is a striking difference between the deputies to the first two Russian Dumas and those who in 1789–91 ran the French National Assembly. The Russians were overwhelmingly intellectuals without practical experience. The Third Estate, which dominated the Estates-General and the National Assembly, by contrast, consisted of practical lawyers and businessmen, “men of action and men of affairs.” J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1947), 26–27.

*According to M. Szeftel, the tsarist government authorized no oppositional political parties prior to its collapse in 1917 (The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906, Brussels, 1976, 247). They existed and functioned in a legal limbo.

*According to Witte (Vospominaniia, II, Moscow, 1960, 545), this body was deliberately called “Council of Ministers” rather than “cabinet” further to distinguish Russia from Western constitutional states.

*“I am in no sense in favor of absolutist government,” Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1884. “I consider parliamentary cooperation, if properly practiced, necessary and useful, as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible”: Max Klemm, ed., Was sagt Bismarck dazu?, II (Berlin, 1924), 126.

*In March 1907, a worker incited by a right-wing politician named Kazantsev killed Grigorii Iollos, another Kadet Duma deputy, also Jewish. When he realized that Kazantsev had misled him into believing that Iollos was a police agent, the worker lured Kazantsev into a forest and murdered him.

*Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskie Otchëty, 1907 god, II, Vtoroi Sozyv, Sessiia Vtoraia, Zasedanie 36 (St. Petersburg, 1907), 435–36. Stolypin’s statistics were somewhat strained: not all the natural population increase (which was actually higher than he estimated—namely, 18.1 per 1,000) occurred in the rural areas of central Russia. Still, his conclusion was correct, as the results of the agrarian expropriations of 1917 would demonstrate.

*One of the misleading commonplaces in Russian historiography, promoted by Communist historians, is that Stolypin’s agrarian measures were meant to promote a class of kulaks, defined as rural usurers and exploiters. In fact, they had the very opposite purpose: to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury and exploitation.

*The program, which disappeared after his death and was presumed lost, was made public forty-five years later by Stolypin’s secretary, A. V. Zenkovskii, in his Pravda o Stolypine (New York, 1956), 73–113. See further Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 130–32, 137–38, 218.

*The New York Times, December 14, 1911, p. 1. This action was denounced in some Russian circles as intolerable interference in Russia’s internal affairs, and by a German conservative newspaper as reflective of the “parvenu spirit that rules not only American society but American politics”: Ibid., p. 2.

*The SD deputies, tried after the dissolution of the Duma, when their parliamentary immunity had expired, were convicted and sentenced to hard labor: P. G. Kurlov, Gibel’ Imperatorskoi Rossii (Berlin, 1923), 94.

*When told by Kokovtsov that this was an unwise move and that he would do better to accept the Tsar’s suggestions, Stolypin replied that he had no time to fight intrigues against him and was politically finished in any event: V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I (Paris, 1933), 458; A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i TretHa Duma (Moscow, 1968), 338.

†Trepov was taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks and executed along with many other hostages at Kronshtadt on July 22, 1918: Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I, 462. Durnovo died in 1915.

*Kryzhanovskii Archive, Columbia University, Box 2, File 5. Kryzhanovskii carried out Stolypin’s request, saving only his letters to the Tsar: Ibid. Stolypin’s fear of being assassinated in Kiev may have been occasioned by the disinformation which his future killer supplied to the Okhrana, as described below.

*A postmortem revealed that Stolypin’s heart and liver were so diseased that he would probably have died of natural causes before long: G. Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma (Washington, D.C., 1981), 207–8.

†B. Strumillo in KL, No. 1/10 (1924), 230. In his fictional account of these events, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attributes Bogrov’s action to the desire to protect Jewish interests allegedly threatened by Stolypin’s ideal of a “Great Russia.” Solzhenitsyn thus “reconstructs” Bogrov’s thinking: “Stolypin had done nothing directly against the Jews; he has even succeeded in easing their lot somewhat. But this was not sincere. One must know how to identify an enemy of the Jews more deeply than from appearances. Stolypin promotes too insistently, too openly, too provocatively Russian national interests, Russian representation in the Duma, the Russian state. He is building, not a country free to all, but a national monarchy. Thus, the future of Jews in Russia depends on the will of someone who is not their friend. Stolypin’s development does not promise prosperity to Jews.” (A. Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoe koleso, Uzel I: Avgust Chetyrnadtsogo, Part 2, Paris, 1983, 126). There is no evidence to support this interpretation. Quite the contrary. Bogrov, who came from a thoroughly assimilated family (his grandfather had converted to Orthodox Christianity and his father belonged to the Kievan Nobles’ Club), was a Jew only in the biological (“racial”) sense. Even his given name, which Solzhenitsyn chooses to be the Yiddish “Mordko,” was the very Russian Dmitrii. In his depositions to the police, Bogrov stated that he had shot Stolypin because his reactionary policies had brought great harm to Russia. In a farewell letter to his parents written on the day of the murder, he explained that he was unable to lead the normal life which they had expected of him (A. Serebrennikov, Ubiistvo Stolypina: Svidetel’stva i dokumenty (New York, 1986), 161–62). The most likely source of the claim that Bogrov acted as a Jew and on behalf of Jewish interests is a false report in the right-wing daily, Novoe vremia, of September 13, 1911, that prior to his execution Bogrov told a rabbi he had “struggled for the welfare and happiness of the Jewish people” (Serebrennikov, loc.cit., 22). In reality, he had refused to see a rabbi before his execution (Rech’, September 13, 1911, itv Serebrennikov, loccit., 23–24.)

*“Most strikes … arise in organized trades and industries. As trade unionism spreads to previously unorganized industries, it is often accompanied by strike waves”: J. A. Fitch in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIV (New York, 1934), 420. A similar conclusion is drawn, on the basis of U.S. experience, by J. I. Griffin in Strikes (New York, 1939), 98.