Nor did he gain in public support what he lost at the Court. The liberals never forgave him for “Stolypin’s neckties” and for the manner in which he abused Article 87 to circumvent the Duma’s legislative power. To the extreme right he was an outsider brought in to extinguish a revolutionary conflagration who abused his position to accumulate independent power. Those who, in Struve’s words, regarded the constitution as “camouflaged rebellion” (zamas-kirovannyi bunt)92 despised him for taking it seriously instead of working to restore autocracy. In the militant atmosphere of Russian politics, with one set of “purist” principles confronting others, equally uncompromising, there was no room for Stolypin’s pragmatic idealism. Assailed from all sides, he began to falter and commit political blunders.
Stolypin’s first conflict with the Third Duma arose over the naval budget of 1909.93 At the beginning of 1908, the government proposed to construct four battleships of the Dreadnought class to protect Russia’s Baltic shores. In the Duma, the Kadets and the Octobrists joined forces to oppose this bill. Guchkov argued that Russia could not afford a large and expensive navy. Miliukov supported him: Russia, he said, already was spending proportionately more on her navy than Germany although she had little sea commerce and no overseas colonies. The two parties preferred the funds designated for the Dreadnoughts to be spent on the army.94 In 1908 and again in 1909 the Duma turned down requests for naval appropriations. Although the passage of the budget by the State Council sufficed to get the naval program underway, the Duma’s rebuff forced Stolypin to seek support from parties to the right of the Octobrists—a shift which led him to pursue a more nationalistic policy.
His most fateful parliamentary crisis came about indirectly because of this shift over the bill to introduce zemstva into the western provinces of the Empire. The bill encountered strong opposition in the upper chamber, where zemstva did not enjoy popularity. Determined to make this issue a test of his ability to administer, Stolypin decided to force it regardless of the cost.
On their creation in 1864, zemstva had not been introduced into nine of the provinces taken from Poland in the Partitions. The elections to the zemstva were heavily skewed in favor of the landowning nobility, and in the western provinces, a high proportion of this nobility were Catholic Poles, who the government feared would exploit the zemstva for their nationalistic ends. (The Polish Rebellion of 1863 had just been crushed.) Intelligent bureaucrats, however, came eventually to realize that given the low cultural level of the Russian element in the borderlands, it was necessary to give non-Russians there a voice in local government.95 Stolypin had spoken of introducing zemstva into the western provinces as early as August 1906, but he first formulated a legislative bill to this effect in 1909. Although it had a liberal aspect in that it gave, for the first time, the ethnic minorities of that area a voice in self-government, the bill was primarily designed to please the right wing, on which Stolypin had now come increasingly to depend: according to Kryzhanovskii, the landed gentry deputies from the western provinces were insistently pressing such a demand on him.96
22. Right-wing Duma deputies. Sitting in front on extreme left, V. Purishkevich, the assassin of Rasputin.
In his bill, Stolypin sought to ensure a preponderant voice in the western zemstva for the Russian landed gentry and peasant proprietors. Because there were virtually no Russian landlords or landowning peasants in Vilno, Kovno, and Grodno, these provinces were excluded from the bill, which applied only to six western provinces (Vitebsk, Volhynia, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev, and Podolia). In the latter provinces, Russian preponderance was to be guaranteed by a complicated voting procedure employing electoral chambers. Jewish citizens were to be entirely disenfranchised.97
The Duma opened discussion on the western zemstvo bill on May 7, 1910. In a speech urging passage, Stolypin asserted that its main purpose was to ensure that the western provinces remained “forever Russian”: this required protecting the Russian minority from the Polish Catholic majority. The bill, supported by the Nationalists and other deputies of the right, passed on May 29, after heated debate and with amendments, on a close vote.
In January 1911 the revised bill went before the upper chamber. Given its nationalistic tenor, passage seemed a foregone conclusion. Stolypin felt so confident that he did not even bother to attend the discussions in the State Council, since a commission of that body had approved the bill.98
