The Russian Revolution полностью

Stolypin, who would serve as Prime Minister from July 1906 until his death in September 1911, was arguably the most outstanding statesman of Imperial Russia. For all their remarkable gifts, his only possible rivals—Speranskii and Witte—lacked his combination of the statesman’s vision and the politician’s skills. Not an original thinker—most of his measures had been anticipated by others—he impressed Russians and foreigners alike with his strength of character and integrity: Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Ambassador to Russia, thought him simply the “most remarkable figure in Europe.”³¹ In his actions he was guided by the ideas of the liberal bureaucracy, believing that Russia required firm authority but that under modern conditions such authority could not be exercised without popular support. The dvorianstvo, in his view, was a vanishing class: the monarchy should rely on an independent yeomanry, the creation of which was one of his principal objectives. Parliament was indispensable. He was virtually the only Russian Premier to address representatives of the nation as equals and partners. At the same time he did not believe that parliament could run the country. Like Bismarck, whom he in many ways emulated, he envisioned it as an auxiliary institution.* That he failed in his endeavors demonstrates how irreconcilable were the divisions in Russia and how unlikely it was that the country would escape violent collapse.

Born in 1862 in Germany, Stolypin descended from a dvorianstvo family which had served the tsars since the sixteenth century: Struve described him as a typical “servitor in the medieval sense, instinctively loyal to the Imperial sovereign.”³² His father was an artillery general who had distinguished himself in the Crimean War; his mother was related to Alexander Gorchakov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs under Alexander II. Stolypin would probably also have followed a military career were it not for a physical disability incurred in childhood. After attending secondary school in Vilno, he enrolled at the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of St. Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1885 with the Highest Honors and a Candidate’s Degree (the Russian equivalent of an American Ph.D.) for a dissertation on agriculture. A highly cultivated man (he is said to have spoken three foreign languages), he liked to think of himself as an intellectual rather than a bureaucrat, a feeling the St. Petersburg officialdom reciprocated by treating him as an outsider even after he had reached the topmost rung of the bureaucratic ladder.³³

After completing his studies, Stolypin joined the Ministry of the Interior. In 1889 he was sent to Kovno, in what used to be Polish-Lithuanian territory, where his wife, the socially prominent O. B. Neidgardt, owned property. Here he spent thirteen years (1889–1902), serving as Marshal of the Nobility (an appointed office in this area), devoting his spare time to the improvement of his wife’s estate and studies of agriculture.

21. P. A. Stolypin: 1909.

The years which he spent in Kovno were to exert a decisive influence on Stolypin’s thinking. In the western provinces of Russia communal landholding was unknown: here peasant households held their land as outright property. Comparing the superior condition of the rural population in this region with that of central Russia, Stolypin came to agree with those who saw in the peasant commune the main impediment to rural progress; and because he considered rural prosperity a precondition of national stability, he concluded that the preservation in Russia of law and order demanded the gradual elimination of the commune. The commune inhibited improvement in the peasant’s economic condition in several ways. The periodic redistribution of land deprived the peasant of incentives to improve the soil since it was not his property; at the same time, it ensured him of the minimum needed to survive. It also encouraged the enterprising and industrious peasant to engage in usury. Stolypin believed that Russia needed a large class of independent, landowning peasants to replace the decaying dvorianstvo and provide a model for the rest of the rural population.³⁴