The Okhrana, in possession of information supplied by Bogrov, recommended to the Prime Minister that he not appear in public unattended, but he disregarded this warning. He behaved like a man reconciled to his fate, a man who had nothing left to live for, who may have even courted martyrdom.
For Bogrov, time was running out: his last opportunity might very well be the evening of September 1 during the performance at the Municipal Theater. Tickets were hard to come by because of tight security precautions and public demand. Bogrov told the police that he feared for his safety if the terrorists whom he had identified were apprehended and he could not produce a satisfactory alibi. He had to have a ticket to the theater. This was delivered to him only one hour before the beginning of the performance.
On September 9, after a week of questioning, Bogrov was turned over to the Kiev Military Court, which sentenced him to death. He was hanged during the night of September 10–11, in the presence of witnesses who wanted to make sure that an ordinary convict was not substituted for Bogrov, whose police connections had become public knowledge by then.
As soon as it became known that Bogrov had entered the theater on a police pass, rumors spread that he had acted on behalf of the government. These rumors have not died to this day. The leading suspect was and remains General P. G. Kurlov, the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, who took charge of Kievan security during the Imperial visit and was known to have had bureaucratic differences with the Prime Minister.111 This theory, however, rests on very slender evidence. The inability of the police to prevent the murder of the Prime Minister appears rather the result of a not uncommon failure of the technique of using double agents: after all, the greatest double agent of all, Evno Azef, also occasionally had had to betray his employers in order to maintain credibility with the terrorists—to the point of arranging for the murder of his chief, Plehve. As for the fact that the police gave Bogrov an admission ticket to the theater, that, too, makes good sense in view of the scenario which he had managed to foist on them. In his memoirs, Kurlov recalled that five years earlier, under similar circumstances, the Kiev Okhrana had allowed a double agent into the Municipal Theater to forestall a terrorist attack on the governor-general.112 On closer scrutiny, the conspiratorial theories of Stolypin’s death do not hold up. Since it was widely believed that he would soon be dismissed, his enemies had no need to resort to murder to be rid of him, the more so in view of the fact that the prime suspect of the crime, the gendarmerie, had no assurance that Bogrov, acting in self-defense, would not betray its involvement. That the tsarist authorities could have been suspected of instigating the murder of the Prime Minister tells more about the poisoned political atmosphere of late Imperial Russia than about the facts of the case.
An assessment of Stolypin has to distinguish the man from his achievement.
He towered over the Russian statesmen of his era: to appreciate his stature, one only needs to compare him with his successors, mostly nonentities, sometimes incompetents, selected on the criterion of personal loyalty to the Crown and dedicated to serving its interests, not those of the nation. He gave Russia, traumatized by the Revolution of 1905, a sense of national purpose and hope. He elevated politics above both partisanship and utopianism.
To admit his personal greatness, however, is not to concede that had he lived Stolypin would have prevented a revolution. To steer the country toward stability, he required unfailing backing from the Crown and at least some measure of support from liberal and conservative parties. He had neither. His grand project of political and social reform remained largely on paper and his main accomplishment, the agrarian reform, was wiped out in 1917 by the spontaneous action of communal peasants. By the time he died, he was politically finished: as Guchkov put it, Stolypin “had died politically long before his physical death.”113
Nothing illustrates better the hopelessness of Stolypin’s endeavors than the indifference with which the Imperial couple reacted to his murder. Ten days after the Prime Minister had been shot, Nicholas wrote his mother an account of the visit to Kiev. In it, he treated Stolypin’s death as a mere episode in the round of receptions, parades, and other diversions. When he communicated the news of Stolypin’s death to his wife, he wrote, “she took the news rather calmly.”114 Indeed, when not long afterward Alexandra discussed the event with Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor, she chided him for being too much affected by Stolypin’s death:
