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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.42: The Stolypin Reforms

So last time we introduced the first nationally elected duma in Russian history, and it did not go well. There were fundamental disagreements about the role the duma was meant to play in the new post-revolution of 1905 political order, what its relationship with the government and the Tsar would be, the scope of its power and responsibilities, the limits on its power and responsibilities. And we wrapped up last week with the tsar and his advisors concluding that their differences were irreconcilable, and so they dissolve the first duma on July eight, 1906.

Despite tsarist fears and Kadet hopes that this would trigger a renewal of mass revolution, it did not trigger a renewal of mass revolution. And there were lots of different reasons for this. There was a kind of general exhaustion from the last two years, unemployment was a big worker problem at the moment, which made people hesitant to walk off the jobs they would probably immediately lose. It also happened during harvest time so out in the rural areas the peasants were literally physically busy. And also, there was the fact that the duma as an institution had not been abolished. There would be new elections. There would be a second duma. But a big part of the reason there was no revolution of 1906 is the new prime minister of the tsar appointed at the same moment he dissolved the first duma, and that is Pyotr Stolypin.

Pyotr Stolypin was born in April, 1862. The Stolypins has had been prominent nobles in the service of the tsars dating back to the 1500s. His mother was the daughter of a prominent general who later served as governor of Warsaw, his father was an artillery general during the Crimean War, the governor of Eastern Rumelia, and who would later be appointed commandant of the Kremlin Palace guard. Stolypin had extended family scattered throughout the imperial service right up to the inner circle of the court. But though incredibly well connected, Pyotr Stolypin himself would come to the inner circle of power as something of an outsider. He grew up on his rural family estates rather than in the heart of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and he would always be far more attached to manor life out in the country rather than palace life in high society. In 1881, so just after the assassination of the Tsar Liberator, a 19-year-old Stolypin went off to university in St. Petersburg, where he most certainly did not get wrapped up in radical student politics. He was a diligent and intelligent young noble, studying hard so he could one day govern the empire, not overthrow it. While a student, he married a young noblewoman named Olga Borisnova, who was herself, the daughter, sister, cousin, or niece of influential and high ranking members of the imperial apparatus. In 1885, Stolypin graduated and embarked on the same life in state service that his family had lived for four centuries.

In 1889, the now 27-year-old Stolypin was appointed to a position in Kovno, now Kaunus, in Lithuania. He would live and work there with his family for the next 13 years and be steadily promoted up the ranks. While in Kovno, he encountered in microcosm most of the challenges currently facing the Russian Empire: the substandard condition of the peasants, the low productivity of their agricultural system, the poor quality of their administration, the always tense relationship between the Russian administrators and the national minorities. In Kovno, Russians were only about 5% of the population, the peasants were mostly Lithuanian their hereditary lords mostly Polish.

Stolypin’s early formative service in the 1890s also landed right smack in the middle of Sergei Witte’s push for modern industrialization, so Stolypin also encountered the new problems posed by the rising population of an urban working class. So Stolypin personally witnessed a population that was kind of miserable and depressed. Alcoholism was rampant, people were always right on the verge of starvation and destitution, and always right on the verge of rebellion and revolution.

Now during these years in Kovno, Stolypin also observed alternatives to the archaic and anachronistic modes of production he was administering. Kovno was very close to the border with the German Empire, and right on the new rail line that was linking St. Petersburg to Berlin. Stolypin toured German territory and was impressed by what he saw both economically and politically. He saw modern scientific farming techniques and machinery and technology. He saw rationally organized estates. And most especially, he witnessed the role he believed individual ownership played in incentivizing work and increasing agricultural productivity. He observed people who went about their business fitter, happier and more productive. He also observed how this satisfied peasantry in the German empire formed a solid conservative bulwark supporting the kaiser. They were not throwing bombs or burning down estates, at least not that he could see. Stolypin would then come back to the Russian territory and see nothing but backwardness all around him. He desired change and reform. He believed that there was nothing happening in neighboring Germany that could not be brought over to Russia, even if the ultimate Russian version of all of this must be rooted organically in Russian history and culture.

Stolypin spent 13 happy and productive years in Kovno until the tsar appointed him governor of the province of Grodno in May of 1902 in what is today Belarus. Stolypin was only weeks past his 40th birthday, and I can’t tell if he was straight up the youngest governor ever appointed, or if it was just notable how young he was to earn this appointment, but in any case, he was very young to get this job, and it spoke both to the quality of his work and the quality of his connections. The appointment came just as the recession that followed the Witte boom was setting in, and when poor harvests were sparking an agricultural crisis and a wave of peasant unrest in the spring and summer of 1902, and we talked about that unrest in episode 10.30, in the context of the SRs becoming convinced that the peasants were no longer just a docile sack of potatoes, but a potentially viable revolutionary force. And though he sat on the other side of the political lines, Governor Stolypin happened to agree with them. So administering one of the areas that was affected by all this unrest in 1902, Stolypin wrote a detailed report to his superiors describing the situation in his province and recommending potential solutions. Stolypin was not of the opinion that this was just a bunch of crazy people running amuck, nor that it was the result of outside agitators or Jews coming in and stirring up trouble where none would have otherwise existed. There were very real problems out there that the authorities needed to address. The condition of the peasants had to be improved. The land must be made more productive. The people made more prosperous. The state could involve itself in very practical ways by helping the peasants buy more land and buy new equipment. The state should encourage the consolidation of holdings from the ancient strip system, where a family held bits of land scattered all over a commune’s territory, and allow for the consolidation of that property to reduce labor and maximize efficiency.

Stolypin argued that obviously this would have social and economic benefits — the people would become healthier and wealthier — but it would also have political benefits. Those SRs and socialists and anarchists who are being blamed for stirring up all this trouble? Well, no one’s going to listen to them if they are pitching revolution to a bunch of happy peasants with full bellies and a plot of land to call their own. He also recommended a similar attitude towards the new urban workers: improve conditions, increase pay, lower hours, take an actual interest in the quality of their lives, and poof! No more problem with radicals and revolutionaries.

So looking at Stolypin’s report from Grodno, we already see the hallmarks of his coming reform program. His superiors were impressed with his recommendations, especially because they were presented as, how can we make the tsar and his empire stronger and more stable, not how can we turn the world upside down? This too, would be a hallmark of the Stolypin reforms.

So, he was quickly promoted to the governor of Saratov, a bigger, more important, and more difficult job. You may remember Saratov from Episode 10.21, as it was one of the geographic origin points of the SRs. Saratov was a province defined by enormous inequality in the distribution of land, roughly a thousand families owned about half of all of the land, while everyone else owns the other half.

Now Stolypin had just taken over in 1904, when the cascading failures at home and abroad swept the empire towards the Revolution of 1905, and like all other provincial governor Stolypin grappled with worker strikes, peasant rebellions, subversive socialist literature, SR bombers, as well as violent reactionary groups coalescing into what would become the Black Hundreds, all of which blew up massively during the wave of protest following Bloody Sunday in early 1905.

Stolypin navigated the Revolution of 1905 better than most of his colleagues, which was especially noteworthy given that he was governing a province more naturally prone to revolutionary unrest. The revolution of 1905 only strengthened Stolypin’s conviction that all this unrest and rebelliousness and violence was being caused by real material grievances and understandable peasant and worker anger at mistreatment, mismanagement, exploitation, and corruption. Even if the tsar managed to survive these upheavals by beating everyone back into line, that still did not address the underlying social and economic issues. And unless those issues were addressed, this would just keep happening, and Russia would keep descending until it became an embarrassing and chaotic third rate power full of miserable people killing each other and burning each other’s houses down.

But though Stolypin understood that the use of repressive force only addressed the symptoms, not the underlying disease, that did not mean he was against using repressive force against rebels and revolutionaries. Far from it. When the general strike hit in October 1905, Stolypin declared martial law, and promised to meet violence with violence. And he did not personally shrink from a fight. Stolypin was a big dude, physically imposing; he was tall and barrel chested. And as governor he was known to wade into crowds of demonstrating workers, demanding that they remain calm and orderly, apparently unconcerned about his own personal safety. And, as often as necessary, the forces under his command did meet violence with violence. So his combination of strong physical repression and active work addressing grievances meant that by the time the chaotic year of 1905 ended, Stolypin could look back and note with pride that Saratov had not been engulfed by as much revolutionary upheaval as provinces even immediately adjacent to it. This was also noted by his superiors in St. Petersburg, including the tsar, who read Governor Stolypin’s reports with interest and made approving notes in the margins.

By the spring of 1906, Stolypin was 43 years old and a rising star in the imperial government. But though he believed he had a bright future ahead of him, even Stolypin was shocked when the tsar appointed him minister of the interior in April 1906, responsible not just for the administration and security of a single province, but the entire empire. Stolypin very briefly attempted to argue he was too young and inexperienced for the post, but you don’t actually say no to an appointment like that, so he did not.

But he did stand out in the government. He was quite a bit younger than everybody else, and he had also spent his entire career out in the provinces, both doing his job, or living and managing his estates. And he took some pride in this. He said, the fact that I have been a provincial governor for a short time has not made me into a bureaucrat. I am a stranger to the Petersburg official world. I have no past there, no career ties, no links to the court. He believed that he could see what they could not, and he hoped that he could make them do what they must.

Arriving in St. Petersburg on the eve of the First Duma in April, 1906, Stolypin was just settling into his new job when the First Duma earned it moniker as the Duma of National Anger. Now, Stolypin was obviously sympathetic to the need for wide ranging reform. But he disagreed vehemently with the duma on the purpose, the method, and the nature of those reforms. Because we must be very clear here: Stolypin was not a democrat. He was not a constitutional liberal. He may not have been a blithe and reactionary defender of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, but he was there to defend it. That was the alpha and omega of his entire program. So Stolypin detested the Kadets, who wanted to put themselves in charge of a parliamentary democracy and turn the tsar into some figurehead. He did not think such a system could possibly work in Russia, and said it was dangerous madness to try to import such western political ideas, as he put it, to attach a foreign flower to Russian roots. So despite his willingness to import modern farming techniques and technologies, Stolypin was an autocratic russophile. He was not a liberal westernizer. He believed Russia was on its own unique path, with its own unique culture and history, and that any true answer to what ailed the empire was going to have to be imposed by the legitimate power and authority of the tsar. Stolypin was thus, in terms of that fit in with all of the other revolutions that we’ve studied, an agent of enlightened despotism.

But he was fundamentally a practical guy, and Stolypin believed that the new duma did have a role to play in a post-reform empire, just not the role that Kadets envisioned for it. So unlike his colleagues, he made an effort to engage with them, and it quickly became clear that among other things, Stolypin was a remarkably good public speaker, a heretofore completely unnecessary political skill. Stolypin could make himself heard in the sometimes unruly den of the duma.

As we saw last week, he also made a stab at organizing a new compromise government, but his hostility too, the democratic ambitions of the Kadets meant that he did not want Kadets anywhere near the actual levers of power so the talks went nowhere. After 73 days, even the practical Stolypin recommended the tsar dissolve the duma and try again next year. When the government made this momentous recommendation, Prime Minister Goremykin acknowledged the failure of his own approach and he tendered his resignation. The Tsar then turned to young Stolypin and named him prime minister with a brief to do… all of it! All that was necessary, all that could be done. All that must be done.

So Stolypin was young when he was appointed governor and he was young when he was made minister of the interior. And now he was crazy young to be leading the government of the entire Russian empire. But he believed he knew what ailed that empire. Believed that he knew the cure. And he had the energy and talent to administer that cure. So, he got to work.

Stolypin became prime minister at an extraordinarily precarious moment. It was entirely possible the hurricane of revolution was about to whip back up. One of the reasons the tsar trusted Stolypin is he had proven he was not a soft man who could be pushed around, or who thought compromise meant giving away the farm to liberals, democrats, and socialists. And indeed, Stolypin’s attitude was first, they would pacify and suppress all violent antagonism, and then, he would carry out reform. Peace and good order were the essential pre-requisites of imperial renewal. Stolypin assured the tsar that they would prove they were strong and not weak, that that was the first order of business. That their reforms were not coming because they were buckling under pressure, but being delivered from an unassailable position of strength. That it was their choice to do this, not the revolutionaries. And then shortly after becoming prime minister, Stolypin gave an interview for the foreign press where he said, the revolution must be suppressed. And only then will it be possible to establish the definitive and firm basis for the future regime.

And this was not hypothetical. Because though we know from a historical vantage point that there would be no revolution of 1906, Stolypin and his ministers did not know that the revolution wasn’t really starting back up. The Kadet delegate had just called for mass resistance in response to the dissolution of the duma. Mutinies started breaking out in both army and naval units. Union leaders were calling for strikes. And as we briefly discussed last week in May and June and July, peasant unrest had broken out all over the empire. And certainly the most active revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and especially the SRs, were as active as ever. So all through the summer of 1906, local police reported the discovery of homemade bombs and bomb making material. Thousands of pounds of dynamite, thousands of pistols and rifles, hundreds of thousands of cartridges. Political terrorism was alive and well, and anyone who worked for the state, from a police patrolman all the way up to the tsar himself, was the target for assassination. So when I say that the hurricane of mass revolution did not return in the summer of 1906, the sudden tornadoes of revolutionary violence were hitting as regularly as they had for the last decade.

As the new prime minister Stolypin was himself of course now a prime target. And they almost got him, just a few weeks into his tenure in office, the first of a few times they almost got him.

On August 12th, 1906, Stolypin was at one of his summer homes. It was a Saturday afternoon and he spent the morning welcoming petitioners and guests. Three SRs showed up holding suitcases, and they tried to blend in with the crowd. When a guard noticed one of them acting suspicious and asked to inspect his briefcase, the three men shouted some revolutionary slogans, hurled their suitcases on the ground, all three of which were jam packed with bombs, triggering a massive explosion. This explosion killed somewhere between 27 and 32 people, depending on what source you read; the three bombers, now suicide bombers, of course included in that number. The total injured was somewhere between 30 and 70, some by the blast, and some by the later collapse of part of the house. Two of Stolypin’s six children were among the injured, and while you will sometimes see it said that his 15 year old daughter was killed, that is erroneous, she lived through it. The prime minister himself only received some superficial cuts to the face, and after seeing to his own children, he organized a relief effort and response to the wounded. In the end, this attempt on Stolypin’s life only enhanced his reputation for personal coolness and bravery in the press, amongst his fellow ministers, and with the tsar personally, though he did accept an invitation from the tsar to henceforth live with his family in the Winter Palace for all of their safety.

Stolypin did not respond to the bombing and reports of further plan terrorist activity by being chill and cool about it. First pacification, then renewal. On August 19th, Stolypin and his government invoked Article 87 of the revised Fundamental Laws, which allowed the Tsar to rule by decree when the duma was not in session. So they used this to issue a decree establishing a system of field courts marshal to combat terrorists. The idea was to expedite cases where suspects were caught red-handed committing violent crimes or plotting to commit violent crimes. Say someone pulls out a gun and start shooting at a police chief or something, and is immediately wrestled to the ground and arrested. In these cases, the authorities could bypass the normal judicial system. Within twenty-four hours of the arrest, the suspect would be transferred to a military garrison. There, they would face a closed door hearing within 48 hours of that transfer, though this was mostly a sentencing hearing, rather than a trial in any meaningful sense, because their guilt was already established beyond doubt. Within 24 hours of that hearing, the sentence would be carried out. This was all supposed to be over in less than a hundred hours from initial arrest to final punishment. It was purposely designed to be swift and brutal, and over the next eight months, the authorities used these courts marshal to execute about 1100 people, with another thousand or so sent into either exile or imprisonment. As hanging was the mode of execution, the noose soon earned the nickname Stolypin’s necktie.

But this was just one specific and targeted arm of a wider blanket of repression. Huge swaths of the empire still lived under some kind of emergency law, up to and including full-blown martial law. In these areas, all of the decrees and promises and rights and constitutions of the last 18 months were entirely theoretical. Local officials were empowered to act as they saw fit to shut down subversives, search homes and businesses, and arrest people whenever they believed state security or public order were threatened, both conditions kept purposefully vague. At the national level, Stolypin enforce stricter codes of censorship on newspapers and journals, especially targeting those who had printed the manifesto calling for rebellion after the closing of the first duma the rate of book banning rose dramatically, as did searches for subversive material. But this continued to be a never-ending losing battle, as the censorship office, never had the staff to actually handle the flood of material being smuggled into the country on a daily basis.

On the political front, the assemblies and gatherings were closely monitored and broken up anytime they were suspected of being even remotely subversive. Stolypin withdrew legal recognition from the Kadets as an official political party, preventing them from holding congresses and assemblies and meetings. He also issued orders down the chain of bureaucratic command that anyone connected to the Kadets or some other opposition party was to be purged from the bureaucracy. Now this resulted in a few people getting the boot, but mostly it had the chilling effect Stolypin intended: forced to choose between their jobs and associating with liberals and leftists, most chose to keep their jobs.

So that’s the repressive part of Stolypin’s program. He was deadly serious about combating political terrorism as swiftly and as harshly as possible. But at the same time, he did want to avoid truly mass indiscriminate repression, which he thought would be counterproductive, and in a circular letter to his subordinates, he said, the struggle being carried out is not against society, but society’s enemies, therefore indiscriminate repression can not be approved. He hoped to prove this by moving quickly and forcefully to enact political and economic reforms that would release all the existing tension, and he further said in that same letter, the government firmly intends to enable old and unsatisfactory laws to be repealed or amended in a legal manner. The old order will be renewed. So while he had no qualms about distributing Stolypin neckties to political terrorists, for everyone else, he promised renewal, reform, and a brighter future so that in that brighter future, there would be no more need for Stolypin neckties.

So we will end today by looking at the core components of the Stolypin reforms, which started rolling out in the autumn of 1906, all of which were enacted under the same Article 87 that allowed the tsar to rule by decree. There’s a lot to the Stolypin reforms and they unfolded in stages over many years, so I want to focus here on the most notably specific parts of the plan, as well as take some notice of the overarching goals these specific reforms were meant to achieve, the biggest and most important of which without any question was finally solving the land question.

The land question had been lingering since the emancipation of the surfs in 1861. When the peasants were legally freed, not much else changed. The way the communes organized and doled out their land, the farming methods they used, the way that they were still legally and socially a subordinated class; basically the old medieval system remained intact. Huge estates owned by a few nobles, or land owned communally by villages worked archaically inefficiently by peasants given little real motivation to produce more, better, or faster. The only thing that had really changed since 1861 was that the population had increased by about 40%, leaving less land to service and feed almost half again, as many people. It was little wonder there was so much misery famine and revolution. Stolypin believed he had the answer to the land question that had vexed the empire for the last 45 years: he wanted to abolish the old communal villages, and create a new population of respectable and self-confident independent farmers.

On November 9th, 1906 Stolypin’s government issued a momentous decree that created a path to mass individual ownership of land; to make it the rule, rather than the exception. Now the way that land previously had been distributed was village assemblies would assign families in the commune to work various strips of land, purposely doled out in scattered plots so that everyone got equal shares of the good land and the crummy land. Peasant families would now be allowed to take the lands that they currently held, remove it from the commune, and claim it as individual private property. This transformation of communal property to private property was then meant to be a precursor to a process of taking all the scattered strips, swapping them around, so that a family would not own strips scattered here and there, but a unified plot of property. Stolypin was convinced this process of privatization and consolidation would dramatically improve productivity and prosperity. The peasant families would be incentivized to work harder and smarter, because they would directly and personally reap the benefits of their labor and efforts. Stolypin also planned to augment the amount of land available by purchasing property from largest estate owners and making it available for individual families to purchase using affordable lines of credit. And this was just one part of a program to help the peasants make the transition, which would also include programs to promote the adoption of modern techniques and equipment. This was not going to happen overnight, but Stolypin believed that in a generation or two the Russian Empire would be built on a population of independent proprietors working their own land each for their own individual profit. He was convinced this would make them more productive and more prosperous, eliminating material deprivations and social inequalities and psychological resentments that had so badly undermine the legitimacy of the existing regime.

Now such a major restructuring of the economic system of the empire would also require restructuring the political and administrative apparatus, because all those peasant communes Stolypin planned to break up had been totally disconnected from the rest of the political system for centuries. At the hyper-local level villages, were essentially autonomous, and since the vast majority of the population lived in a peasant village, this meant that the vast majority of the population of the empire, for all practical purposes, lived outside the tsarist apparatus. Their lives were controlled mostly by village elders and village councils, and the central imperial apparatus that governed the empire simply did not penetrate that far down. This was not going to cut it in Stolypin’s world of independent and self-confident small farmers, especially because Stolypin recognized as much as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs that prosperous individual landowners would become the leading edge of a democratic revolution if they were denied a political role in the system, or if they were abused by incompetent or corrupt officials without any ability to redress their grievances. So along with the land reform came a restructuring of how local government functioned. And this restructuring was meant to express one of the driving aims of Stolypin’s wider reform project: to eliminate all lingering distinctions between the old medieval estates, the legal and social distinctions between nobles and peasants, privileges for the former, restrictions on the latter, all of that had to be abolished, because if the new class of individual proprietors was left in a state of legal subordination, that would only invite revolution.

So Stolypin planned to end the policy of village autonomy, and instead integrate everyone fully into the larger imperial system of administration. He planned to form hyper local zemstvos to allow his new population of equally dignified, independent farmers a place to air their grievances and debate local issues so that the government could be made aware of those issues and respond to them in a timely manner. This would allow everyone to feel like they were being treated with equal dignity and respect and that their voices were being heard. This would turn the new farmers from sullen and resentful and oppressed peasants into supportive defenders of the political order. Stolypin’s reforms would also eventually include the judicial system, which would be reformed to make everyone equally subject to the same laws and processed by the same courts, which was still not happening. And really, everywhere you look in the Stolypin reforms, it’s all about erasing the distinctions between the old medieval estates, and turning nobles and peasants into equal legal citizens, not living in two separate worlds, but in one unified empire.

So those are the big pieces of the Stolypin reforms, the initial efforts he made to start renewing the empire. And in a way, Stolypin is trying to do the same thing that the socialist he’s fighting against are trying to do: eliminate legal and social and material inequality. But he’s taking a completely different path. Not by collectivizing, but by individualizing. By emphasizing individual property and civic equality as individuals, rather than communal prosperity as a part of a collective. And he believed if he saw his reforms through to the end that he would eliminate all of the revolutionary energy that was coursing through the empire.

He also worked quickly because he was hoping to be able to get all this done before the next election for the Second Duma, which was fast approaching in February, 1907. Stolypin hoped the second batch of delegates would be more cooperative than the first, but as we will see next week, he will be disappointed. And thus, while we have talked about Stolypin’s reforms and Stolypin’s neckties, and the Second Duma is going to end with another bit of Russian history, he gets to take ownership of: Stolypin’s coup.