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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.47: The Duma of Lords and Lackeys

We’ve spent the last three episodes with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as they debated revolutionary tactics and strategy under the impression the revolution of 1905 was just going to keep advancing. Today, we will return to where we left things off at the end of Episode 10. 43 with Stolypin’s Coup in the summer of 1907, emphatically slamming the door once and for all on that revolution and sending the socialists tumbling back into emigre obscurity. The immediate future did not belong to the revolutionaries, but rather the reformers. These reformers, centered around Prime Minister Stolypin, spent the next several years riding high, believing that they were carrying out a program that would hew an enlightened line between radical revolutionaries on one side and reactionary conservatives on the other, both of whom were pursuing paths that would surely destroy the Russian Empire, whilst Stolypin and the reformers were setting out to save it.

The optimistic mystic heyday of the Stolypin era was between 1907 and 1911, and it was made possible by a couple of big factors. First, the economic outlook for Russia was starting to improve. Harvests were pretty good. Exports were profitable. The enterprises that had been rocked by slowdowns and shutdowns and strikes returned to a state of something resembling productive growth. Foreign investment, especially from the French continued to come into the empire, propping up both its industrialization efforts and the tsar’s own personal finances. The empire was also of course no longer at war, and the impact of the humiliating defeat to Japan faded. The terms of the peace treaty, for example, were both light and manageable. Peasant upheavals and worker demonstrations diminished year in and year out. And while there was ongoing war between the police authorities and SR Maximalist terrorists, those battles now resembled gang warfare rather than a great social and political revolution. Each day, week, month, and year seem to put the revolution even further in the rearview mirror. And then of course, there’s the person of Stolypin himself. He had vision and drive and ambition and energy, and for the next several years would put motor force to reforms that had been long discussed, but never implemented.

To help him implement these reforms, Stolypin and his government now had an elected Duma they could work with, thanks to the unilateral rewriting of the election laws he did in the summer of 1907. The biggest thing about the new election law was that it just cut out of the electorate all but about the richest third of the eligible population, and practically cut national minorities out of the equation completely by just straight up eliminating a hundred seats from the Third Duma, most of which were drawn from the imperial periphery. So for comparison’s sake, the elections to the first two Dumas roughly broke down to one delegate per 2000 landowners. For the Third Duma, it was now one per 230. Previously, it was one for every 4,000 town dwellers, which was now changed to one for every 1000 of the highest tax paying merchants. Previously, it was one for every 30,000 peasants; that was now one for every 60,000 peasants. And finally, what used to be one for every 90,000 workers was now one delegate for every 125,000 workers.

So the results of the election that were held in October 1907 were pretty predictable. And the large caucuses of Kadets and Trudoviks and socialists who had made the first two Duma so forthrightly combative lost nearly all their seats. The liberal Kadets had started in the first Duma with close to 200 seats. Then they dropped down to a hundred for the second, and now only held about 50. The surprisingly strong showing by the Trudoviks who nobody had even considered before and numbered well over a hundred in the first two Dumas were now down to just 13, meanwhile, outright socialists didn’t do much better: they numbered just 19 in the Third Duma, which was a surprisingly strong showing, given the number of bans and crackdowns and censorships and police raids that were thrown at them.

The flip side of this were the conservative and right-wing nationalist parties. Tiny minorities in the first two Dumas, they now came in to the Third Duma with a heavy slate of delegates, going from somewhere south of 50 to somewhere north of 150, depending on the classifications you use to define what parties these people are in.

The clear winners of the elections to the Third Duma though, were the Octobrists. The Octobrists were the conservative liberals, who had previously been non-entities standing in the shadow of the more radical Kadets, but who now stormed into the Third Duma with 154 seats. They were by far the single largest coherent block of delegates. The Octobrists are drawn straight out of the ranks of the old zemstvo constitutionalists. These guys had briefly held the spotlight way back in episode 10. 32, when we talked about the Zemstvo Congress of November 1904, but they very quickly gave up that spotlight come Bloody Sunday in January 1905, and events just left them in the dust. They were called the Octobrists because their whole ideological platform rested on the idea that the October Manifesto of 1905 represented the thing that the empire needed. More radical liberals and the Kadets didn’t think the October Manifesto went far enough. Meanwhile, conservatives thought it went way too far. The Octobrists were the one who thought it was perfect, it was just right. Legal equality and civil rights — with reasonable restrictions — a representative assembly of educated elite helping craft imperial policy, but not trying to take over the government like the Kadets war. They were cautious constitutional monarchists and very anti-revolutionary. They believe they were the proper and responsible stewards of the empire. Now the Octobers did not have outright majority though, but when they looked for votes to pass various bills, they invariably turned right towards conservatives, rather than left towards liberals and socialists. And because of this, everyone to their left soon dubbed the third Duma, mostly full of rich nobles, the Duma of Lords and Lackeys.

Because of the conservative and cooperative outlook of the Third Duma, they turned out to be the first one to actually finish their five-year term. They would not be dissolved early, they would all sit in their seats until 1912. During this time, they were a very busy little body. They considered more than 2,500 bills and crafted another 200 of their own, all without running afoul of the government or the tsar — at least, not running too afoul. They made a point of working with Stolypin and the government rather than against them, but they also did hold regular hearings interrogating government ministers, and exercising what they saw as a healthy and proper oversight role over the entire administration of the empire. But, the thing that tripped them up during these years was not bomb throwing revolutionaries so much as Tsar Nicholas, and Prince Alexander, and their conservative friends at court, plus an empire’s worth of entrenched power and interest who opposed everything Stolypin was trying to do. And in the end, as we will see next week, those entrenched conservative interests will win, and Stolypin and the reformers will lose.

But for the moment, they didn’t realize they were going to lose. They thought they were embarking on a grand project of reform that was going to save the empire. And today, we are going to talk about two major things they attempted to do that are intertwined and go hand in hand even though we are going to talk about one and then the other, because they are meant to foster and reinforce each other. Now that he had a Duma he could work with and a clear mandate to pursue his policy objectives, Stolypin set out to reform the empire’s dysfunctional administrative apparatus, and finally answer once and for all the land question.

Stolypin had no illusions that this would take place overnight, and he once said that it would probably take 20 years for all of this to take root, but he really hoped that when the Russian Empire came out the other side, that they would be an empire of citizen farmers who were industrious and hardworking, who enjoyed civil, legal, and economic equality, and no longer had to labor under the old estates or feudal political, social, and economic relations. He hoped the reformed empire would have a governing structure more responsive and efficient, and give all these new self-confident citizen farmers a place to participate, and a feeling like they were heard. In general, Stolypin wants to lift the empire out of medieval despotism and turn it into a western style state. Now, if he could have snapped his fingers and just been done with it, maybe it would have worked, and maybe the second Russian revolution never would have happened. But that is not how the real world works.

So first, let’s run down the current administrative apparatus from top to bottom. And folks, it is a mess. It is in fact a lot like the broken regime episode from the French Revolution series. The Russian Empire combined archaic elements that had developed deep in the mists of the medieval period with rationalized elements grafted onto the system over the centuries, by say, Peter, the Great or Catherine the Great, It was defined mostly by overlapping jurisdiction, unclear lines of communication, and jealously guarded, prerogatives. What Stolypin wanted, and what the Third Dumas conservative liberal sentiments agreed with, was a grand project of rationalization. They wanted to reduce the role in the power of the old aristocracy, and mostly eliminate any institution based on the medieval estates. They wanted to open the system to better and more able administrators, establish meaningful supervision and oversight that would coordinate and align different levels of the administrative apparatus, rather than having one of these crazy quilt regimes, full of friction and chaos and inefficiency. And by rationalizing all of that out in the provincial areas, it would lead to greater coordination and alignment with the goals of the central administrators in St. Petersburg.

Now for this project, Stolypin did not have to invent anything. After becoming prime minister, he just appointed a commission to examine and consolidate 40 years worth of proposals and commissions and suggestions and plans that had existed going back to the 1860s, but had never been implemented. The main object of nearly all those proposals was how to address the big question of bringing all the ex-serfs fully into the system, because though serfrdom had been abolished, the old traditional social and political systems out in the countryside remained basically unchanged. And that question had never been answered. Having come up through the provincial administrative system, Stolypin was uniquely able to analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and then take from the grab bag of suggestions that had grown up over the last 40 years the best ideas. Stolypin would spend the rest of his short life trying to implement these reforms.

At its broadest level, russia was divided into governorates. There were more than 60 in total with about 50 inside of great Russia itself. Nearly all of them were defined by boundaries created during the reign of Catherine the Great. The governors of these areas were appointed by the central government, and over the decades had accumulated an overwhelming array of responsibilities that ran through their office, even as they lacked the support staff and budgets necessary to handle all the work. Plus, their alleged ultimate authority over the people and activities in their geographic governorate in practice ran them into jurisdictional conflicts with other parts of the central state. For example, the ministries of railroads or agriculture. Those ministries claimed thematic jurisdiction over their areas of authority, and it was never made clear for example whether railroads running through a particular governorate was under the authority of the governor or agents of the railroad ministry. This of course led to friction, inefficiency, miscommunication, and fruitless, bureaucratic infighting.

The step below the governance only added to this confusing friction. They were all divided into districts, but there was no official executive officer or even designated administrative office running these districts. They were simply managed by a hodgepodge network of committees and groups and associations either formed a locally, or by some central ministry, all of them bumping into each other and irrationally overlapping was zero coordination or communication. The closest thing a district had to an executive was something called the marshal of the nobility who was elected by the local nobles. Over the years, these marshals of the nobility in a given district would take on the role of chairman of this committee or that organization, and bring a lot of different areas under their personal purview, but never in any rational or systematic way. The marshals of the nobility also had zero budget for staff or any kind of official standing councils or committees to help them manage the workload, which was considerable.

Then as we also know, operating inside these governorates were the much discussed zemstvo. These quasi-representative bodies created in the 1860s were tasked with engineering work and infrastructure projects and schools and various other social programs, but they existed completely independently of the regular governor or district officials. In terms of an organizational flow chart, the zemstvo were detached from it completely and just sort of off doing their own thing. They could not overrule a governor, but they also did not work for him. One of the main points of administrative friction and conflict over the past couple of decades was that the ambitious delegates to the zemstvos were hoping to grow their power until they supplanted the existing central apparatus, and become essentially state legislatures of a federal constitutional monarchy. But for the moment they were still just free floating bodies, contributing to the overlap in conflict and jumbled inefficiency of the entire apparatus.

Now all of that though is happening in a pretty high level. The main problem since the 1860s was actually what to do with the emancipated peasantry at the very lowest levels, who continued to live and work and die completely outside the imperial system, which did not penetrate that far down. Villages were run by local elders. They handled local justice and disputes, they collected taxes and assigned land, and could even forbid somebody from leaving the village. For women, this was especially stifling, as their livelihoods and freedom were controlled by patriarchal village elders, and it was why many so desperately sought more emancipated lives in the city, and why they were happy to join the ranks of the working class. It was considered escape from their traditional oppression. The central government left all of this to the local villages. And it’s why, for example, the SRs and the anarchists and more than a few Social-Democrats looked at Russia and were like, well, why don’t we just get rid of the parasitic imperial apparatus and let the self-governing communes do what they’ve always done? Is anybody going to miss an imperial system that basically plays no part in anyone’s lives to begin with? Probably not.

The principal point of contact between the imperial apparatus and the self-governing villages was a much maligned office that was a prime target for the Stolypin reforms, and that is the land captains. Land captains were drawn from the ranks of the local gentry, and they were assigned jurisdiction over the peasants of a rural region called a volost, which were the collection of villages in a roughly 25 square kilometer area. Any issues the villagers may have had to go up through the land captain, and any responses or orders that came from the top down also went through the land captain. Which meant the state only heard what the land captains reported, and the villages only heard what the land captain reported. As you can imagine, a position like this becomes a hotbed of local corruption and abuse. And for the villagers, land captains were the real face of political, economic, and social tyranny. And remember, the peasantry usually thought the tsar was good, and would save them from his corrupt local administrators if he ever found out how much they abused them and double taxed them and lied to them. The myth of the good tsar always went hand in hand with the reality of local abuse.

So what is Stolypin’s plan for all of this? Well, basically he wanted to create a system of federalized centralization, which is a bit of an oxymoron, I know, but just hear me out. Russia was too big and too spread out for the central government to make all the decisions. Pure centralization was just dumb and inefficient. So Stolypin’is plan was to make the provincial governors the foundation of imperial administration. For most things, most of the time, they would be the supreme authority. But they would also be appointed by and answerable to the central government. So it’s not like the provinces would choose their own leaders like in a truly federalized system. To aid the governor, stolypin planned to create a new provincial council composed of local gentry, important economic players, and officials representing other government ministries. This council would also include representatives of the zemstvo, which Stolypin now wanted to integrate formally into the system. He saw the zemstvo playing much the same role at the provincial level that he envisioned the Duma would play at the national level, that is, something like a ministry of raising and debating issues. The zemstvo would provide a degree of representative participation in the system for those who wanted to participate. It would allow them to bring things to the attention of the governor, or raise issues that really ought to be kicked up to the national Duma and the national government for further discussion. But they must always be carefully constrained in the scope of their powers because Stolypin wanted the zemstvo to be the ears of the government or not the mouth of the people.

But the real administrative revolution — I mean, reform — would happen at the local level. The job of land captain would be abolished completely, and the villages would be truly brought into a fully integrated imperial system. The volosts would be retained as an administrative unit, but now run by an appointed official who would have authority over the entire population of the area rather than just the peasantry. Because going hand in hand with all of these administrative reforms was the legal concept of an equal citizenry rather than nobles and peasants. The volosts would also get their own little elected zemstvo, which would further integrate them and emphasize this new concept of legal equality, because participation in those hyper local zemstvo would be based on land ownership rather than social status. The power of these hyperlocal zemstvo would of course be limited, but they would provide an avenue of participation for the new citizen farmers that Stolypin hoped the Russian Empire of the future would be built on, as we’ll talk more about here in a second. These local units be tied back up through the chain of imperial command, creating permanent lines of communication and authority going up and down. So that for the first time governorates of the Russian Empire would be linked from St. Petersburg all the way down to the individual village and back up again.

So that’s the administrative side of things. But if we stay here at the local level, we can pivot from the political administration to economic relationships, and get a handle on the practical implications, the nuts and bolts of Stolypin’s answer to the great land question, which as we know, was not about collectivization and nationalization on the one hand, nor about retaining the old feudal estates on the other. He believed the answer was to create an entirely new class of industrious citizen farmers, whose work would improve the general productivity of the empire, and lead to general prosperity everywhere.

As we discussed it’s a bit back in episode 10.42, the problem of the Russian land question was really two problems. The first was who owned the land, and the second was how it was cultivated. The first was about ownership and property and stewardship and incentive. The second was about the methods and technologies used to actually make the land grow food. Stolypin believed that his land reform plan addressed both questions simultaneously. Across the empire, about 75% of peasant households and about 85% of all of the land were held as communal property in the villages. In the central Russian provinces, this number was borderline 100%. Every household and every scrap of land was held communally.

But the problem of productivity was not just about whether or not it was held as private property or communal property, but specifically how Russian communal property was held. Because it was doled out via this thing called the strip system. The common holdings of a village would be distributed to member households not as single plot of land, but in separated strips. This was meant to spread out good land and bad land and mix up everyone’s burden and rewards equally. But these strips would be spread out all over the place and in some cases be as little as three feet wide, so you couldn’t even use a modern plow to do a single line. So a household might control, let’s say, 30 acres of land. But those 30 acres could be spread out over like 50 different strips, which introduced a couple of major burdens to productivity, first being the time and effort it took to move from strip to strip. Time spent moving from strip to strip was time not spent actually working the land. There was also no ability to plan to cultivate a crop on a rational basis because everybody’s land was just sort of mixed up. Everyone had to do what everyone else was doing in the way that everybody else did it. And of course, with periodic redistribution always a factor, there was very little incentive to improve or invest time and resources into something that might not be yours in a couple years.

To people who said, we need to thus nationalized the land or collectivize and redistribute it on a more rational basis, Stolypin argued that that would not be enough. Because the amount of land was not necessarily the problem, or at least it was a problem, there wasn’t enough of it. The problem was, that it wasn’t productive enough. And he believed that individual profit incentives were the missing ingredient to Russian agriculture. It would be the only thing that would motivate Russians everywhere to get better at what they did, to be smarter about their land use, to think harder about how they grew things and why they grew things. Famously, Stolypin said that he wanted to make his wager not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sober and the strong. That incentivizing industrious hard work, and allowing people to keep the profits from their industrious hard work, would lead farmers to make the qualitative changes necessary to make Russian land more productive in a way that just socialized or nationalized land would not, or god forbid just continuing the strip system, which nobody wanted to do.

To begin the process of completely transforming the nature of Russian agriculture. Stolypin passed that law in November 1906, which stated that henceforth, peasant households could demand their allotment of communal land be withdrawn from the commune and turned into private property. This was something that could be demanded and was not subject to approval by the village elders. As a halfway point, there was a lesser right that could be invoked, where a household would not withdraw from the commune system, but they could demand consolidation of their property into a single plot, which would allow for greater efficiency and productivity.

After this grand pronouncement, there were a bunch of laws and decrees and orders that were put out there especially undertaken during the period of the Third Duma to make this process easier for the so-called separatists who wanted to quit the communal village and strike out on their own as Stolypin’s perfect citizen farmers. In practice, this transformation required a massive amount of effort to carry out. Multiple ministries were involved in it; the state funded surveyors and officials to come around and analyze villages, draw up new property lines, approve applications and loans; they would prevent people from resisting the process. A peasant land bank was created and bankrolled by the state which offered very good terms so that peasants could buy new land and new technologies to work at even better. The government also made tons of state land and crown land and church land available for purchase by these individual separatists household. This process involved hundreds of state officials and thousands of employees, statisticians, and surveyors, and agronomists, and tens of millions of rubles to finance and bankroll everything.

But despite all this energy and assistance and funding, an operation this transformative could not help but run into a massive wall of resistance. The most basic roadblock was that most people just didn’t want to do it. With historical hindsight, we can look back and see that less than 25% of all peasant households ever even filed a petition to separate from their communes, which meant that more than 75% did not. They just wanted no part of it. And that’s only talking about people who filed for a petition; probably one third of those who filed a petition wound up either never separating, or withdrawing the petition before it was processed. Plenty more who successfully separated and claim private title to their land, perhaps a number even as high as 50%, acquired that title just to sell it to a richer neighbor, pocket the immediate cash windfall, and quit the village entirely. They did not separate to go off and become industrious citizen farmers, they did it to sell out and get out as quickly as possible.

Now, the number of people who were quote unquote, willing to separate was also influenced by the fact that there was enormous pressure in the villages not to separate. Because the commune may be inefficient, but in a world constantly on the edge of poverty and famine, the village commune, for all its faults, meant the everyone shared the risk together. And the more people who stayed in the commune, the better everyone’s chances were. So as households contemplated whether or not they wanted to file for separation, they could be pressured in a million big and little ways not to do it. They could be shunned or ostracized, they might face threats of outright violence or even murder. Then there was also the head of the household problem. Because if this was carried out and a household separated, the private property title had to go to somebody, and in Stolypin’s plan, it went to the head of the household. This meant that wives and sisters and younger sons or cousins or other members of the quote-unquote household did not share in the communal system anymore. They were now at the whim of the head of the household who owned the property. So there was enormous pressure inside of families to not quit the commune because of its ramifications on everybody who was not the head of the household.

But this was all internal pressure. Externally, when the surveyors and officials came around to do their work, they faced a lot of the same resistance. They were typically greeted with hostility, and often had to do their work of surveying and mapping or paperwork with bodyguards and even companies of soldiers hanging around to protect them from attack.

Despite all this, some people did successfully complete the path Stolypin laid out. There were definitely success stories. But as the years went by, it took kind of dogged determinism to get there. But if they did, they claimed private property, consolidated their holding, and closed it, built better structures, purchased newer equipment, farmed for profit using modern techniques and then sold excess produce to the cities. They came out ahead. They were the winners of this whole process. It’s not that it didn’t happen, it’s just that statistically and in the aggregate, they were a minority. Because also, plenty of people who tried to walk this path simply failed. There were those who took a real shot at it, but it just didn’t work out. They separated from their commune and tried to become industrious individual farmers, but due to mistakes or fate or just not being good enough or smart enough or lucky enough, they failed. There were a lot of upfront costs and there was a lot of individual risk. They were also often shut out of their traditional support networks in the commune, because they were blacklisted for separating. So these household tried to be strong and sober and independent, and they woke up broke and impoverished. And come 1917, they were more than willing to sell out to anybody or anything and come back into the commune.

So if we trace the course of Stolypin’s land reforms, we see a strong initial burst in 1907 and 1908. But that burst of enthusiasm fell sharply by 1909 and 1910 as resistance set in. By 1911, land privatization was completely stalled out, and by 1914, it just wasn’t happening at all. By the Revolution of 1917, only about 15% of peasant households in European Russia had been converted to private plots and consolidated according to Stolypin’s reform vision. The vast majority of those involved in the rural agrarian part of the 1917 Revolution had not been affected at all by any of this. Things were exactly as they were before 1905. In 1917, 90% of Russian peasants were still doing strip farming under the communal system.

So there is this age old question: was Russia on a path to a full agricultural transformation that would have solved all their problems had it been allowed to continue without the great interruption of World War I? The answer is clearly no. Because by 1914, this was all pretty much a dead letter. And by then, Stolypin himself was pretty much a dead letter. He was gone. And all his reform energy gone with him.

Next week, we will talk more about how it all went wrong, and the ultimate unhappy fate of Stolypin and his reforms. After a promising start, things drifted, and then the great wall of conservative stubbornness held the line and turned him back. The brief window of reform ended due to ignorance, resentment, personality conflicts, and a deep seated protection of the prevailing systems that stretched back hundreds of years. In the end, all Stolypin’s reforms accomplished was exposing just how truly entrenched the existing system was, and how much revolution might in fact be the only the answer.