The agrarian unrest of 1905–6 had two consequences. It ended, once and for all, the peasantry’s traditional pro-monarchic sentiments. Henceforth, the muzhik no longer looked to the Tsar to give him the land he coveted, but to the Duma and the liberal and radical parties. Second, the peasants of central Russia succeeded in “smoking out” many landlords, who, frightened of the assaults on their properties, disposed of their estates and cleared out. These developments accelerated the liquidation of landlord agriculture which had begun with the Emancipation Edict and would be completed in 1917. After 1905, the peasantry was the largest purchaser (37–40 percent) of land that appeared on the market. Landlords, who in 1863–72 had bought 51.6 percent of the land, in 1906–9 accounted for only 15.2 percent of the purchasers.
The peasant jacquerie was exacerbated by the Socialist-Revolutionary campaign of political terror.25 The world had never known anything like it: a wave of murder which soon gripped hundreds if not thousands of young men and women in a collective psychosis—murder as an end in itself, its ostensible objective having long been lost sight of. Although the declared targets were government officials, notably policemen, in practice the terror could be quite indiscriminate. As is usual, it shaded into ordinary criminality, some of its perpetrators extorting money and intimidating court witnesses. The majority of the terrorists were youths—two-thirds of them twenty-two or younger—for whom the daring, often suicidal operations turned into a kind of rite of passage into manhood. The most rabid element among the terrorists, the Maximalists, killed for the sake of killing, in order to speed the collapse of the social order. The effects of SR terror extended beyond the lives it extinguished and the repressive countermeasures it provoked. It lowered still further the already low level of political life in Russia, demoralizing those actively engaged in politics and making resort to violence a normal way of dealing with difficult problems.
The Socialists-Revolutionaries decided on a massive terror campaign in January 1906—that is, after the country had been promised a constitution. The scope of the campaign was staggering. Stolypin told the Duma in June 1906 that in the preceding eight months there had occurred 827 assaults with the intent to kill against officials of the Ministry of the Interior (which included the police and the gendarmerie), as a consequence of which 288 persons lost their lives and 383 suffered injuries.26 The director of the Police Department informed the Duma a year later that in the two Baltic provinces of Livonia and Courland there had taken place 1,148 terrorist acts, which resulted in the loss of 324 lives, the majority of the victims being policemen and soldiers.27 It has been estimated that in the course of 1906 and 1907 terrorists killed or maimed in the Russian Empire 4,500 officials.28 If private persons are added, the total number of the victims of left-wing terror in the years 1905–7 rises to over 9,000.29
The government’s hope that the Duma would help it deal with these outrages were not realized. Even the Constitutional-Democrats refused to condemn them on the grounds that the revolutionary terror was a natural reaction to governmental terror. When a Duma deputy ventured to declare that in a constitutional regime there was no place for terror, he was attacked by his colleagues as a “provocateur” and the resolution which he moved received only thirty votes.30
In these difficult circumstances—a rebellious parliament, rural violence, and nationwide terror—the monarchy turned to a “strong man,” the governor of Saratov, Peter Arkadevich Stolypin.
