The story of Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin can be told in very different ways. There is the narrative that starts with the man of integrity who distinguished himself as governor of Grodno and later Saratov provinces before suddenly, in April 1906, making a leap up the career ladder that surprised everyone (not least of all himself) to the post of Minister of Internal Affairs. This promotion was soon followed by an appointment to chair the Council of Ministers that July. Stolypin worked tirelessly to bring peace and prosperity to the country, castigating the adversarial Duma with the words, “You need great upheaval, we need a great Russia.”
He saw his most important task as reconciling the country after the revolution of 1905 and was therefore unbending in his pursuit of revolutionaries, who responded with hatred and a bombing of his Aptekarsky Island dacha on August 12, 1906 that injured dozens and left one of his daughters permanently disabled. This attack led to the institution of military field courts that meted out harsh justice to terrorists.
In November 1906, Stolypin began his famous agrarian reform. He lifted restrictions that prevented peasants from leaving their rural communities (общины), proclaiming that he was relying “On the strong and the prosperous rather than the weak and drunk.” He went on to institute a far-reaching resettlement policy that offered Siberian lands to those willing to develop them.
These moves spurred the rapid development of capitalism in the agricultural sector, enabled the emergence of a rather large class of well-to-do peasants with ties to the market, and jump-started the development of agriculture in Siberia. Stolypin also strove to conduct a variety of liberal reforms, in particular the expansion of the zemstvo system of local self-government to new areas and the granting of equal rights to Jews.
The second, very different, narrative portrays Stolypin as an advocate of strong-armed policies and oppressive governmental control. In July 1906, soon after being appointed Prime Minister, he dissolved the first Duma, prompting an outcry by liberals. A year later, the second Duma was dissolved, after which electoral law was illegally changed, allotting more seats in parliament to the nobility and the bourgeoisie at the expense of the more disadvantaged segments of society.
The military field courts that Stolypin introduced were empowered to hand down death sentences, and these sentences were carried out within 24 hours, to prevent the Duma from having time to issue amnesties. By twentieth century standards, not that many people were executed – approximately 3,000. But for Russia, which had abolished the death penalty in the eighteenth century, this number was simply shocking. Society was appalled at what Stolypin was doing. The hangman’s noose was given the nickname, “Stolypin’s necktie,” and Lev Tolstoy wrote a famous article, “I Cannot Be Silent,” expressing his indignation at the country’s increasing use of executions.
This second narrative also emphasizes the failures of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms. They were not accepted by most peasants, and many homes belonging to those who dared to leave their community were burned to the ground by indignant neighbors. There are no definitive figures to tell us what proportion of peasants wanted to remain in their communities, but it is clear that for many the reform was a shock. The community, which was designed to keep its members more or less equal, could no longer prevent the more industrious from growing rich or others from becoming impoverished.
There were also failings of the Siberian colonization policy, since those moving east often encountered a host of bureaucratic snags and had a hard time eking out a living on their new land, forcing some to return. Lenin could hardly conceal the delight he took in calling Stolypin’s reform “the last valve” preventing Russia’s boiler from bursting and predicting an impending explosion since, it seemed to him, this valve was not working.
Furthermore, although Stolypin himself was clearly no anti-Semite, his tenure as prime minister was accompanied by a strong anti-Semitic mood in the country, and local authorities often not only failed to prevent pogroms, but even provoked them. Dmitry Bogrov, the young Jew who killed Stolypin in Kiev in September 1911, stated that he wanted to exact retribution for Jewish pogroms.
Odd as it may seem, both of these narratives are correct. Or rather, each represents a part of the truth, and to understand Stolypin you have to bring together these two halves and recognize that Stolypin was neither the grim executioner the Soviets made him out to be nor the angel we hear of today. He was a smart, willful, interesting reformer who, alas, enjoyed the support of only a small portion of the population.
But what would have happened if Stolypin had not been killed?
Stolypin said that he needed 20 years to turn Russia into a flourishing country. If we begin counting from the year of his agrarian reforms, 1906, that would mean 1926. Over those two decades Russia was roiled by the First World War, the February Revolution overthrowing the tsar, the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Civil War, and War Communism, after which Stalin started to devise the first Five Year Plan. By then, the world had been utterly transformed.
What if, in 1911, Bogrov had been prevented from making his way to the Kiev Opera House and had therefore not fired a shot at Stolypin as he stood near the stage during intermission?
Of course it is likely that the tsar himself would have dismissed the premier after a few years. Nicholas II did not like to surround himself with brilliance, and Stolypin, as a personality, surely outshone the rather unimpressive tsar. But at the same time Nicholas fully appreciated how devoted Stolypin was to him and how much benefit he was bringing to the country.
If Stolypin had remained in his post, there is a chance that Russia would not have entered the First World War, since Pyotr Arkadyevich was clearly an advocate for concentrating on domestic issues and would have been in a position to make war less likely in the first place. Furthermore, even if the war had broken out, the assertive and systematic Stolypin would have had a much firmer and wiser hand on the helm than the long line of ministers that came and went at the whim of Rasputin or the empress during the final years of the Russian empire.
Stolypin’s agrarian reforms would have continued. Passions would have gradually subsided and those who did not like seeing their neighbors enriching themselves would have gradually made peace with the inevitable and set out to find work in the city and might even have tried their hand at entrepreneurship. In fact there were far more people interested in leaving the community and starting their own farm or business than those who actually left – the usual bureaucratic red tape got in the way. Anyone in business in today’s Russia understands what this means. And with time, all those who wanted to leave the community would have gotten the piece of land to which they were entitled and gone into business for themselves.
A population of independent farmers would have emerged, but the system of noble estates would also have been preserved. It is entirely possible that the lands of the bankrupt nobility would, over time, have passed into the hands of prosperous peasants, but this process would have occurred not as a result of bloody clashes and the land seizures of the revolution, but gradually, as a natural consequence of economic changes.
The revolutionaries would of course have kept up their subversion, but if the majority of peasants were satisfied with their lives, they simply would not have had an audience. Who knows? Russia might have actually been able to avoid the “great upheavals” of the early twentieth century and would have ceased to rely on the “weak and the drunk.”
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