The Russian Revolution полностью

The most urgent task confronting Stolypin was the restoration of public order. This he accomplished by harsh measures which earned him odium among the intelligentsia.

The immediate justification for launching a campaign of counterterror was a nearly successful attempt on his life.

After moving to St. Petersburg, Stolypin maintained the gubernatorial custom of keeping on Sundays open house for petitioners. He insisted on this practice despite warnings from the police. In the afternoon of August 12, 1906, three Maximalists, two disguised as gendarmes, sought admission to his villa on Aptekarskii Island. When a suspicious guard tried to detain them, they threw briefcases, loaded with explosives, into the building.⁴⁰ A frightful carnage ensued: twenty-seven petitioners and guards, as well as the terrorists themselves, were torn to pieces by the explosion and thirty-two people suffered wounds. Stolypin miraculously escaped harm but both his children were injured. Reacting with characteristic coolness, he directed the removal of the victims.

The assault on Stolypin was only the most sensational manifestation of terrorism which continued to hold the country in its bloody grip. The commander of the Black Sea Fleet and the governors of Warsaw and Saratov fell victim to it. Hardly a day passed without a police official losing his life. To make matters worse, monarchists, emulating revolutionary tactics, resorted to counterterror, and on July 18 murdered the Jewish deputy, Michael Gertsenshtein, who had presented to the Duma the Kadet land program with a demand for compulsory expropriations.* No government in the world could have remained passive in the face of such violence. Since a new Duma had not yet been elected, Stolypin had recourse to Article 87. He subsequently made frequent use of this clause: during the half year that elapsed between the dissolution of the First Duma and the convocation of the Second, Russia was in effect administered by decree. Because he believed in the rule of law, he regretted having to do so, but he saw no alternative: such procedures were “a deplorable necessity,” justified on the grounds that at times the interests of the state took precedence.⁴¹

Since 1905, a good part of Russia had been placed under martial law: in August 1906, eighty-two of the Empire’s eighty-seven provinces were under “Reinforced Safeguard.”⁴² These measures proved insufficient, and under strong pressure from the Court, Stolypin resorted to summary justice. On August 19—one week after the failed attempt on his life—he introduced, under Article 87, field courts for civilians.⁴³ The law provided that in areas placed under either martial law or Extraordinary Safeguard, the governors and commandants of the military districts could turn over to military courts persons whose guilt was so obvious as to require no further investigation. The personnel of these courts were to be appointed by local commanders and to consist of five officers. Hearings were to take place behind closed doors: defendants were allowed no lawyer but could call on witnesses. The field courts had to convene within twenty-four hours of the crime and reach a verdict in forty-eight hours. There was no appeal from their sentences, which were to be carried out within twenty-four hours.

This law remained in force for eight months, expiring in April 1907. It is estimated that Stolypin’s field courts meted out up to 1,000 death sentences.⁴⁴ Subsequently, terrorists and other persons accused of violent political crimes were tried by ordinary courts. A contemporary source estimates that in 1908 and 1909 the courts convicted for political crimes and armed assault 16,440 persons, 3,682 of them to death and 4,517 to hard labor.⁴⁵

Stolypin’s repressive measures evoked cries of outrage from public circles which displayed considerable tolerance for revolutionary terror. The Kadets, who ignored SR murders, spared no words of condemnation for the quasi-juridical procedures employed by Stolypin to prevent them: one of their spokesmen, Fedor Rodichev, referred to the gallows used by the field courts as “Stolypin’s neckties” and the name stuck. In July 1908, Tolstoy wrote Ne mogu molchat’!—I Cannot Keep Silent!—in which he argued that government violence was a hundredfold worse than criminal and terrorist violence because it was perpetrated in cold blood. His recipe for ending revolutionary terrorism was abolishing private property in land. The issue was so divisive that Guchkov’s defense of Stolypin’s field courts as a “cruel necessity”⁴⁶ split the Octobrist Party and led to the resignation of Shipov, one of its most respected figures.

But public order was eventually restored, enabling Stolypin to launch his program of economic and political reforms.