Without awaiting the convocation of the second Duma, Stolypin enacted, again with resort to Article 87, a series of agrarian reforms which he viewed as the key to Russia’s long-term stability.
An initial step in this direction was a law of October 5, 1906, which accorded the Russian peasant, for the first time in history, civil equality with the other estates.47 It removed all restrictions on peasant movement, depriving the communes of the power to refuse members permission to leave. The land commandants could no longer punish peasants. Thus disappeared the last vestiges of serfdom.
Stolypin addressed himself concurrently to the issue of land shortage, increasing the reserve of agricultural land available for purchase by peasants and facilitating access to mortgage money. The Peasant Land Bank, founded in the 1880s, had already in 1905 received broad powers to provide easy credit to help peasants acquire land. Stolypin now made much more land available for this purpose by persuading the Court to offer for peasant purchase Crown and State lands. This was formalized in laws of August 12 and 27, 1906.48 The Crown (
To provide access to these lands it was necessary to organize and finance a large-scale resettlement program to move peasants out of the overcrowded provinces of central Russia. This the government initiated as early as March 1906, before Stolypin had assumed office, in a reversal of previous policy discouraging peasant movement. Under Stolypin, the state-sponsored resettlement program assumed massive proportions, with the peak years being 1908 and 1909. Between 1906 and 1916, 3 million peasants moved to Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia, settling on lands which the government had made available (547,000 of them later returned).50
Russian liberals and socialists considered it axiomatic that the country’s “agrarian question” could be solved only by expropriations of properties belonging to the State, the Crown, the Church, and private landlords. Like Ermolov, Stolypin felt this belief rested on an illusion: there simply was not enough non-peasant land in the Empire to satisfy those who needed it as well as those who were added each year to the rural population from natural growth. In a masterfully reasoned speech to the Duma on May 10, 1907, he argued that the Social-Democratic program of nationalizing land was without merit:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the government accepts [the nationalization of land] as a desirable thing, that it sidesteps the issue of driving to ruin a whole … numerous educated class of landowners, that it reconciles itself to the destruction of the sparse centers of culture in the countryside. What would result? Would this at least solve the material aspect of the agrarian question? Would it or would it not make it possible to satisfy the peasants in the localities where they reside?
