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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.48: The Death of Reform

Last week we talked about the heyday of the Stolypin reform era, which lasted from about 1907 to about 1909. This was no small project. Stolypin was aiming for a complete reorganization of property relations, a restructuring of the imperial administration, and a general social transformation from a society of lords and subjects to a society of equal citizens. It was a total re-imagining of the Russian Empire, carried out through a program of enlightened despotism, imposing and forcing changes from the top down in order to rejuvenate and modernize the tsarist system before it collapsed under the weight of its plainly evident backward contradictions. But though Stolypin was trying to reform the system in order to save it, he was surrounded by people who believed he was trying to reform the system in order to destroy it. Or, at least destroy the parts of the system they liked best, the parts of the system they benefited from. So I think it’s fair to say that the biggest threats to Stolypin’s project were not radicals or socialists or revolutionaries, but the entrenched interests in powers that formed a conservative bulwark who tried to undermine Stolypin at every turn. We’re talking about nobles, both at court and out in the countryside, the leadership of the conservative Orthodox Church, Russian nationalists, who formed that proto-fascist union of the Russian people and their paramilitary Black Hundreds groups, police officers, gendarmes, and Okhrana agents who were afraid they might be subjected to oversight, patriarchal village elders who didn’t want anything to change because they would lose their own little dominion of power and influence. These various groups opposed some or all of Stolypin’s reforms each for their own reasons, and they became linked in both formal and informal alliances to hamper the prime minister, whether at the local level or in the halls of the Winter Palace.

Things might have gone differently if Tsar Nicholas had truly supported what Stolypin was trying to do, but he really did not. Nicholas went along with all of this because he felt he had to. After the Revolution of 1905, the situation was too dire for him to do what he really wanted to do, which was nothing. He still believed with every fiber of his being that he was the divinely ordained autocrat of all of the Russias. He was the father. Everyone else were his children. No one should stand between a father and his children, certainly not constitutions or dumas or prime ministers. It was also clear that Stolypin’s reforms aimed to supplant the sovereignty of the tsar with the sovereignty of the state. And in this new system, the tsar would be reduced to being merely an executive functionary, still exalted and rich and powerful, but under the overarching constitutional state just like everyone else. Nicholas not only found this idea personally degrading, but also a sin against god. Because when you get up to that level, it’s not just that he felt his rights were being taken away, it’s that he believed that this was literally blasphemy against the will of god.

So Stolypin had always carried his brief to implement reform because of the upheavals of 1905, and because people around Nicholas convinced the tsar if he didn’t go along with it that the revolution would come back. But Stolypin was never operating in a world where the tsar was like, yes, I see what you’re doing. And I like it. Because he didn’t like it. He hated it. And only fear of revolution trumped his hatred of reform. But as I said last week, things seem to be getting a little better with each passing year. Economic conditions improved, and the political danger receded further into the rear view mirror. Agricultural yields increased, foreign investment continued to flow, business and industry enjoyed a little reflourishing. It led Nicholas to listen to those who fed his own instinctive desire to go back to the way things were. To listen to the people who said the danger is passed. We don’t need Stolypin or his reforms anymore.

With hindsight, we can see that the firm conservative pushback was already well underway by 1909, and we can see it working over an otherwise obscure fight over the naval budget. The Russians were still just a few years removed from losing basically their entire navy to the Japanese. The reputation of the Russian military had obviously taken a big hit, and one thing many leaders on all sides of all aisles agreed on was the need to rearm, rebuild, and return Russia to its former state as a great military power. And that included liberals and Octobrists in the Duma, who represented a tradition going back to the end of the Crimean War, that one of the major reasons to have reform and modernization was to ensure Russia remained a great power that could win big wars.

Now, as I’ve said before, there is nothing that liberal nationalists hate more than, than a poorly run war. So while the Octobrists supported the idea of rebuilding the military in theory, they believed that significant strings had to go along with increased appropriations. And the final autopsy report on the Russo-Japanese War laid a lot of justified blame at the tsar’s feet, because of his exclusive control of the military and the general staff. Strategy, tactics, and logistics had been handled not by professional experts, but by friends of the tsar. So when a bill came forward to build four new dreadnoughts for the Baltic Fleet, the Octobrist dominated Duma indicated that they would approve the money only if the naval general staff was put under government oversight. The tsar could not just do whatever he wanted; the admirals and their staffs would answer to the government.

Now, this was a clear expression of the core promise at the heart of the October Manifesto, that confidence in the tsarist system would only prevail if it was understood that people other than the tsar actually ran the day-to-day operations of the empire. That was the whole reason there was now a prime minister and a government, rather than everything running through the Romanov family. Dividing sovereignty from government was key, and they now wanted to extend this to the military. But this ran right into Nicholas’s most deeply held beliefs. He believed he had a divine right if nothing else to be the supreme commander in chief of the Russian military. If anything ought to be the personal purview of the tsar, it was this. They had already taken away so much from him and now they wanted to take away his army and his navy too. So he resisted, even though Stolypin, the government, and the Duma all supported the measure, Nicholas dug in his heels and refused to go along with it. And the tsar won this fight. The bill died. Stolypin was upset enough about the tsar’s opposition that he tendered his resignation, but Nicholas refused to accept it. He was feeling more self-confident, but not so self-confident that he thought he could get along without Stolypin. At least, not yet. But Nicholas was thrilled to discover he could hold the line, and maybe, bit by bit, he could start to reclaim what he believed had been unjustly taken away from him.

Shortly after the naval budget fight, we get to the next big legislative showdown: the western zemstvo bill. When the zemstvo were first created back in the 1860s, they were not created in the most westernly provinces of the Russian Empire, those territories that had been annexed from Poland. And this was for a pretty good reason: the Polish population had recently risen in revolt, and it did not seem wise to the Russian administrators to give the land owning Polish nobility an elected forum in which to make more trouble. But now, as part of his broader administrative reforms, Stolypin wanted to introduce the zemstvo to six western provinces.

But to be very clear, this was not about Polish rights or national equality or local autonomy or any such nonsense. These new zemstvos were in fact designed with quite the opposite goal in mind. Suffrage, voting procedures, and other qualifications were meant to heavily favor the Russian land owners in these provinces. It was meant to elevate Russian voices and interests and strengthen the Russian character of the administration of the Polish provinces. Support for the bill in the Duma came not from the liberals necessarily or Poles, but conservative, Russian nationalists who wanted to ensure the Russian Empire remained the Russian Empire. Thanks to the support of these nationalist groups, when the bill was introduced in the Duma in May 1910, it was passed, and then it got kicked up to the upper house, the state council, for consideration and debate and final approval. The slow moving wheels of the legislative process meant that the state council was not ready to take up the bill until early 1911. And it turned out that there were objections to creating new zemstvo. Some didn’t like that it seemed to undermine the traditional status of the local Polish nobility, because even though they were Polish, they were still nobles, and nobles in the state council didn’t want to see their brother and have their rights taken away. Others just didn’t like the idea of extending the zemstvo at all. They wanted such a democratic institution to shrink and disappear, not expand and grow.

But opposition truly coalesced around a much more particular and petty idea: Stolypin wanted it. And if his enemies could torpedo the western zemstvo bill, they might just be able to torpedo Stolypin along with it.

As the vote in the state council approached in March 1911, several of Stolypin’s enemies at court went behind the prime minister’s back straight to Tsar Nicholas and encouraged Nicholas to suspect the worst both about the bill and his prime minister. They leaned on Nicholas to withdraw his support for the bill and, crucially, not tell uStolypin what he was doing lest,the wily prime minister evade the trap. Nicholas went along with all of this and on the eve of the vote, surreptitiously informed the state councilors looking to him for instructions and guidance that they ought to vote their conscience, which was taken as a clear sign he did not support the bill, or he would have said vote for the bill.

Stolypin was not aware of any of this, nor did he have reason to suspect the bill might be in trouble. Final approval seemed to be a foregone conclusion, and Stolypin did not even bother to attend the final debates on the assumption that it was all in the bag. But when he came down to the state council on March the fourth to witness the final vote on one of the key provisions, he was shocked when it was voted down. He was stunned, he stormed out in an angry huff under the entirely correct assumption that this was a direct attack on his authority. It was a vote of no confidence engineered by his enemies at court. So the very next day, Stolypin went to the tsar and again, submitted his resignation. This apparently spooked the tsar into realizing maybe he had been pushed into doing something he ought not have done. Yes, he wanted independence from Stolypin, and yes, he wanted to reassert his old privileges, but he still feared cutting out on Stolypin entirely, and accidentally inviting back revolution. So Nicholas said, look, if you re-introduce the bill, I will tell the members of the state council to support it .But sensing he could regain the upper hand and wanting to prove to everyone he could not be pushed around, Stolypin made a big mistake. He said, no. There will not be a next bill or another bill. I want you to put through this bill, despite the state council’s rejection. He demanded the tsar temporarily recess the Duma and the state council, and then, when they were officially out of session, promulgate the western zemstvo bill using Article 87, that was the emergency law that allowed for such decrees when the Duma and state council were not technically in session. Stolypin also demanded that the court favorites who had been identified as the ones behind the plot be exiled from St. Petersburg. If the tsar did not agree, Stolypin’s said he would resign and walk away for good.

It took the terminally indecisive tsar a few days to figure out what to do, because he was trying to balance all these various forces, pulling him in different directions, as well as his own hopes and fears and resentments, and he was trying to put it all on top of a spine made completely of jelly, and it just didn’t seem to ever want to hold. So he collapsed back into the place he had been for the last few years: he let his fear of revolution trump his hatred of reform. On March the 12th, he sent the two chambers into recess, and then exiled the offending court favorites. Then on March 14th, the tsar promulgated the western zemstvo bill by arbitrary decree.

To call this a phyrric victory for Stolypin would be an understatement. He stood victorious all right, but he stood completely alone. The conservatives now hated his guts more than ever, not just for dodging their attempt to bury him, but for exiling their friends from court. Liberals hated the abrupt usage of Article 87 to get his way, once again blatantly showing that Stolypin would never let a little thing like the constitution get in his way. It drove the Octobrists, once willing partners in the Duma, permanently into opposition to Stolypin and his government. Stolypin was also attacked in society and in the presses for his high handed arrogance. The tsar, meanwhile, was left feeling personally humiliated, and he was furious about it. Everyone knew he had buckled under an ultimatum that made Stolypin seem much stronger than Nicholas. Whatever lingering flame of personal attachment remained between the two men was snuffed out. Their relationship died of hypothermia. Stolypin could not even enjoy his own success, and colleagues noted the after the spring of 1911, he went from being grandly self-confident to moody and bitter.

Stolypin went in to the summer of 1911, unhappy with everyone and with everyone unhappy with him, it is extremely plausible, bordering on a certainty, that if what is about to happen had not happened. Stolypin would have been ejected from power and ejected from our story anyway. That he would have followed in the footsteps of Sergei Witte and wound up writing pointed critiques of his successors that nobody paid any attention to while maybe sort of hoping the tsar would come to his senses and recall him. But instead, what’s about to happen did happen, and so Stolypin’s departure from our story is far more abrupt and far more permanent.

Stolypin lived for years, knowing that he was the prime target for assassination. All Russian officials were targets for assassination. The SR terrorists had made it very clear long before even the revolution of 1905 that anybody who worked with the tsar was a viable target. This was not a theoretical or a hypothetical threat. This was very real. Stolypin had already escaped one bombing already in the summer of 1906. He went around wearing bulletproof vests and always surrounded by bodyguards. Because of all this, Stolypin seems to have had a fatalistic assumption about his own demise. In his will, that he rewrote in 1906, he stated that he wished to be buried close to wherever he was murdered. It’s hard to tell exactly what his state of mind was in the summer of 1911, and how much he had literally developed a death wish, but he certainly did everything in his power to not avoid getting assassinated.

In late August, 1911, the imperial court journeyed to Kiev to celebrate the unveiling of a statue to the Tsar Liberator Alexander the Second. Preceding this trip, the police informs to leap in that they had picked up chatter about an active plot to assassinate him. They advised the prime minister to keep his head down and stay away from public places during the trip. Instead, Stolypin left his bulletproof vest and his personal bodyguards behind, and entrusted a lock box full of papers to a close friend, telling that friend to burn them if he didn’t come back. Then, off to Kiev he went. And he did not come back. The last few days of August 1911 make it pretty clear how damaged the relationship between the tsar and prime minister now was. Though Stolypin was in Kiev, he was thoroughly snubbed by the court. The imperial family did not invite him to their various soirees and ceremonies, and he was always a pointed and obvious absence. Stolypin’s also ignore the advice of the police and regularly walked around in public. He visited horse races at the hippodrome, and took walks in the park. This brazen disregard for his own safety at the very least indicates Stolypin was not desperate to stay alive at all costs. Whether or not he was actually suicidally depressed is beyond any historian’s ability to diagnose.

The great confusing irony of all of this is that though Stolypin was walking around Kiev brazenly disregarding the threat of assassination, and though there really was a threat of assassination that he was brazenly disregarding, it was not the assassination threat that the police had warned Stolypin not to brazenly disregard. That threat, the threat that Stolypin thought he was brazenly disregarding, was completely made up. It was imaginary. But, it was made up to throw the police off the scent of the real threat of assassination. In fact, the real assassin was the very same person who had warned the police about the fake assassination plot that didn’t actually exist. This is all very confusing, so let us start at the beginning

24-year-old Dmitry Grigoriyevich Bogrov was the son of a wealthy Ukrainian Jewish family. He had gone off to university and emerged as a lawyer, but also emerged as an SR revolutionary, because during his days at university, he fell in with student radicals. But young Bogrov was as interested in gambling and partying as being a revolutionary, and he was frequently blowing through all his cash and turning back to his family for more money. It would appear, however, that sometime around 1907, he secured his own stable financial situation by becoming a paid police informant. For the next three years. Bogrov reliably passed information along to the police, thrwarting various plots and leading to the arrest of his supposed comrades. He was considered by the Kiev police to be one of their most trusted and reliable sources of information. Now over time, his comrades grew suspicious of wherever Bogrov was getting his income and at first they thought he was embezzling from the party. But over the course of a secret investigation, they turned over a few rocks and discovered the far worse truth: that he was a paid police spy.

Rather than just whack Bogrov, they decided to use him. In mid August 1911, his erstwhile comrades confronted him with undeniable evidence and they gave him a stark ultimatum. They said, we know what you’ve done, we could kill you right now and be done with it if we wanted to, but we’re going to give you one chance to live. You must kill somebody important by September the fifth or we’re going to execute you. And then, they cut him loose, to either figure out how to kill somebody important, or get whacked himself.

At first, Bogrov was going to kill the head of the Kiev police, the guy he had been informing for all these years, but Bogrov chickened out when he went to meet the police chief and was treated so warmly that he just couldn’t go through with it. He also apparently considered assassinating the tsar himself, but decided that if a Ukrainian Jew assassinated Tsar Nicholas that would lead directly to a violent anti-Semitic backlash, and so he abandoned that idea as well. Stolypin was thus selected as a target for no other reason than Bogrov had to kill somebody important and other potential targets had too many complications. To give himself some breathing room, Bogrov went to the police and told them, there’s a plot against Stolypin’s life. He then invented two fictitious SR assassins, and said they are going to use my apartment as a home base. So, I’m gonna clear out of there, but you should keep that apartment under surveillance. Since he had been such a reliable source all these years, the police took this seriously. They devoted resources and attention and manpower to monitoring the apartment, but not Bogrov, who they trusted, and who proceeded to spend the next few days stalking Prime Minister Stolypin.

On September the first, Bogrov found out the tsar and much of the court would attend a theatrical performance, and Stolypin would be there. Continuing to feed his police handlers misinformation. Bogrov told them that the assassins would surely be catchable at his apartment that very night, and he begged for a ticket to the theatrical performance to provide Bogrov with a clean alibi. Just one hour before the performance was set to begin, he received the ticket from his police handlers. And that is how he gained access to the theater that night.

The tsar was seated in the front row near the orchestra with his four daughters. Stolypin was nearby, though the two men did not interact. Around 10:00 PM, during the second intermission, Stolypin stood chatting with a few of his neighbors. Bogrov, dressed in formal coat tails, approached with a pistol hidden under his program. As soon as he got close, he pulled out the pistol and fired two shots into the prime minister. One hit Stolypin’s hand and ricocheted and wounded a musician. The other hit him in the chest, deflected off of a medal Stolypin was wearing for the occasion, and lodged in his liver. Bogrov was jumped, apprehended, and beaten into submission.

Now, according to witnesses, Stolypin at first staggered in shocked confusion, and did not exactly understand what had just happened to him. But then he opened up his coat and saw blood pouring out everywhere and realized he had been shot. He collapsed into a chair, and in the commotion shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, I am happy to die for the tsar. Stolypin was rushed out to the theater to a nearby hospital, and it’s entirely possible that with today’s medicine he would have lived, because at first the wound did not seem fatal. But his recovery in the hospital over the next few days took a sharp and fatal turn when the wound became infected. And it was the infection, rather than the bullet, that killed him. On September the fifth, 1911, Pyotr Stolypin died.

Stolypin loomed like a giant over a very particular moment of Russian history. And for a long time, there was a general story, at least among Western historians, and especially during the Cold War, that his life and reforms represented the great path not taken. That he was carrying out the great reforms that had been exposed as necessary by the revolution of 1905, and those reforms were cut short by his untimely death. Had he lived, he could have kept going and reinvented and re-imagined the empire and thus avoided the whole second Revolution of 1917. But every book you read nowadays pretty much agrees that this wasn’t not the case. That his death here in 1911 actually came after his reforms started to stall and fail. He was already cut off and estranged from the tsar, and politically he was dead man walking. Every instinct in the tsar’s body was to turn away and reject land reform and administrative reform and social reforms. And the conservative defenders of the old order were winning the argument by September 1911. As we talked about last week, the land reforms, the vaunted land reforms, were already limited and mostly resisted at every level.

The proposed administrative and political reforms were never carried out. They would have taken years to accomplish anyway, but by the time Stolypin was dead, they were already being slow walked until the tsar could just get rid of them. Stolypin was despised enough by conservatives that given Bogrov’s connection to the police, there was immediate suspicions the hit was ordered not by the SR revolutionaries, but high placed conservative reactionaries.

In truth, Stolypin was trying to impose his vision onto Russia, which for all we know might have worked, had he been able to impose it. But he did not have any support from the tsar, and he was acting on behalf of no real organic community out there in the provinces or the villages or the cities or really anywhere. And he was trying to do it with a bureaucracy that was too weak, too disorganized, and too incoherent to carry it out. So, as I said, had he not been assassinated here in 1911, the story probably would have gone that he winds up drafting bitter memoirs about how everybody should have listened to him, rather than him carrying all this to a successful conclusion and avoiding any future Russian revolutions. That’s my read on it anyway. But his death does helpfully coincide with the death of reform, bringing to an end a brief period opened by the emergency of 1905, but which was dead, dead, dead, whether metaphorically or bodily, by 1911. After Stolypin’s death, no one anywhere near the levers of power would ever again try anything so bold or so challenging to the existing order. Because Nicholas his court, his family, and his friends promptly retreated to their old habits, believing the worst was behind them.

But obviously, the worst is yet to come.

Next week, we will follow our story back to the inner sanctum of the imperial court, as Nicholas and Alexandra reasserted their own personal power over the empire that they believed god had given them to run. This means that it’s finally time to introduce one of the most infamous characters in all of Russian history, and you all know who I’m talking about, so I don’t even have to dramatically end this episode by saying his name.