An Essay · Open Questions
Solzhenitsyn makes Stolypin Russia's last, best hope. The record supports a reformer — and a hangman, and a man who rebuilt the Duma to get his laws.
On the afternoon of 25 August 1906 (12 August, by the calendar Russia then used), three Maximalist revolutionaries attacked the prime minister's dacha on Aptekarsky Island in St. Petersburg, setting off a bomb on his public reception day. Somewhere between two dozen and thirty people died — petitioners, servants, the attackers themselves. The prime minister walked out with minor injuries. His teenage daughter did not; she was maimed for life. Within weeks Pyotr Stolypin had field courts-martial hanging revolutionaries on drumhead trials. Within three months he had used an emergency decree to begin dismantling the Russian village commune. The same man, in the same year, did both, and that is the difficulty with the question a reader of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 comes away asking: was Stolypin a reformer?
Solzhenitsyn's answer, in the long Stolypin chapters of the expanded August 1914, is an emphatic yes — a statesman who is, in the words of the editors of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, "the last best hope for Russia's salvation," holding off the revolutionary left and the reactionary right alike, giving the peasant a stake in the land and the village a self-government it could run for itself. It is a moving portrait and it is not a fantasy. But it is also a portrait painted by a man who spent his old age arguing that Russia's recovery had to begin at the bottom, in local self-government on zemstvo lines, and who therefore had reasons to find his own program in the last minister who tried something like it. The honest answer is yes, with three qualifications large enough to change the meaning of the word.
Start with what he actually changed. In October 1906 a decree removed a set of legal disabilities that had kept the peasant a separate and lesser kind of subject — the ex-serf, forty-five years after emancipation, was still bound to his commune and to legal disabilities no other Russian faced. On 9 November (22 November in the West) came the decree that mattered most: any head of a household in a repartitional commune could demand to have his share of the land fixed as his private property, and could later demand it be gathered into one plot. The Duma turned the decree into law in 1910, and a further land-settlement law followed in 1911. Around it he built the machinery: the Peasant Land Bank (founded in 1882, and now expanded and redirected to finance peasant purchases); agronomists and land-settlement commissions; a vast program of resettlement to Siberia, which moved some three million people between 1906 and 1914, on the railway that Witte had built.
The reform's logic was stated in a line that has followed him ever since. The government, he told the Duma in 1907 (as the line is usually quoted), was placing its wager "not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdy and the strong." The peasant who owned his land would defend the order that protected it; the peasant in the commune, with strips redistributed and no reason to improve them, would burn the manor at the next opportunity, as 1905 had shown. That is a reform with a theory, a mechanism, and an enemy.
It was also broader than land. Stolypin pressed for expanded rights for Old Believers and other religious dissenters and for Jews — Nicholas II, to whom he sent a bill easing Jewish disabilities, refused it, writing that an "inner voice" told him not to. He pursued universal primary education, and Stephen Williams's study of the reform period finds state spending on primary schools rising nearly fourfold between 1908 and 1913. Most important for Solzhenitsyn's version of him, he tried to reshape local government: to lower the property qualifications for voting in the zemstvos, and to create a new, lowest rung — a zemstvo at the level of the volost, the peasant township, open to all estates. Abraham Ascher, his most thorough biographer, and Alexander Zenkovsky argue that he had a larger program in reserve when he died; a reformer, on this reading, is simply a man whose list was longer than his time.
Now the qualifications. The first is that this reformer was also, in the plainest sense, the man who governed by exception. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 allowed the government to legislate by decree when the Duma was not sitting, if the matter was urgent — Article 87. The land decree of 1906 went out under it. So, at the other end of his career, did the western zemstvo bill of 1911. Alongside the first of them came the courts-martial: field tribunals of military officers, trial in a day or two, no appeal, sentences carried out within hours. They lapsed in April 1907 without the Duma's confirmation, and by then hundreds had been hanged — one count gives 683 executions by then, and others put the executions above a thousand, depending on the source and on what is counted — and by 1909, across all military tribunals, the total is usually put above three thousand, with some estimates higher. A liberal deputy, Fyodor Rodichev, gave the gallows its name in the Duma in November 1907: "Stolypin's necktie."
The second concerns the Duma itself. In June 1907, when the Second Duma proved unmanageable, Stolypin accused the Social Democratic deputies of plotting against the state, demanded that their immunity be lifted, and — the Duma hesitating — the Tsar dissolved it on 3 June (16 June in the West). The same day a new electoral law went out, in plain violation of the rule that the law could not be changed without the Duma's consent. It cut the seats from 524 to 442 and weighted the vote toward landowners and the urban rich, and toward Great Russians over the empire's other peoples. The Third Duma, which resulted, was the first to sit its full term, and it passed the land laws — but it did so because the electorate that would have refused them had been redrawn. A reformer who reforms the legislature until it agrees with him is a reformer of a specific and uncomfortable kind.
The third is that his vision of a stronger Russia was a Russian one. Mary Schaeffer Conroy's summary of him is careful on this: he supported the rights of religious dissenters and of Jews, but he regarded Finns, Poles, Ukrainians and others as subjects of the empire and opposed their separatist tendencies. His western zemstvo bill — the zemstvo measure that became his last great fight — gave the western provinces self-government with voting weighted by nationality, precisely so that Polish landowners would not dominate Russian and other peasants. It was a self-government measure and a nationalizing measure in the same sentence.
The land reform is where the argument is hottest, and where the evidence is most modest. Counting is difficult, because there are applications, approvals, titled holdings, and consolidated holdings, and the literature counts different things. But the shape is consistent. On one standard count, roughly a fifth of peasant households had secured title by the end of 1916; official claims ran considerably higher, because the 1910 law converted many holdings automatically. On the measure that matters most — households that actually gathered their land into one consolidated plot — Pallot finds only eight to ten percent. Peasant ownership of the land as a whole did rise sharply — Williams puts the peasants' share of agricultural land near seventy percent by 1914, largely through purchases of gentry land, many of them financed by the Land Bank — but that is not the same as the commune's dissolution, and a large majority of the peasantry — perhaps three fifths on one count — was still in it when the war began. Siberian settlement was arguably the reform's clearest success, though a substantial minority of settlers turned back. And grain output rose across the period, but the historians who study it — R. G. Suny among them — find the direct results modest, and the evidence on whether the enclosed farms were more productive is contested: older historians found the gains unproven, while recent econometric work (Castañeda Dower and Markevich) finds a net positive effect on productivity.
Then came 1917. The peasants, given the chance, took the estates and, in many places, took back the land of the Stolypin farmers too; the commune, so far from dying, was re-established across much of the countryside. Judith Pallot, whose study of the peasants' responses is the standard one, reads the record pessimistically. some surveys of the historiography, Christopher Read's among them, lean toward a verdict of, in effect, "not proven": too little time, too little data, a war in the middle.
Solzhenitsyn's emphasis on the zemstvo is, then, well placed, and worth pressing on. The volost zemstvo would have given the peasant, for the first time, a public body of his own, open to all estates and answerable to those who elected it. Stolypin wanted it. The bill was delayed in the Duma, as Conroy notes, and did not become law in his lifetime.
What became of the western zemstvo bill is the sharper lesson. The Duma passed it; in March 1911 the State Council, the conservative upper house, threw out its key clauses by 92 votes to 68; Stolypin offered his resignation; and the Tsar, instead of accepting it, briefly prorogued both houses and had the bill enacted under Article 87 — after Stolypin had also demanded that the two leaders of the council's right wing, Durnovo and Trepov, be sent away from the capital. Stolypin won the measure and lost nearly everything else. The Octobrists, who had been his allies in the Duma, were furious at what they saw as a violation of the constitution; the court right, who had never liked him, were furious that he had forced the Tsar's hand; and the Tsar, for his part, had been made to overrule his own conservative advisers for a servant who now looked more necessary than agreeable. By the summer his standing at court was, by most accounts, badly damaged. In September he was shot — in circumstances the next essay describes.
That is the tension the essay comes down to. A self-governing countryside was the point of the reform, and it was to be brought in by emergency decree, by a minister who had rebuilt the legislature to get his votes and had a court-martial system in reserve for anyone who resisted. Whether self-government can be granted from above in that fashion is a real question, not a rhetorical one; Stolypin never resolved it, and his death gave him no chance to.
Yes — by intent, by a handful of laws that outlasted him, and by the size of the list he left unfinished. But "reformer" does not mean liberal, and it does not mean democrat, and it does not mean "his reforms succeeded." Ascher's subtitle, The Search for Stability, is the most exact phrase in the literature. Stolypin wanted a stronger state, a stronger monarchy, and a stronger peasant, in that order, and he was willing to hang men and remake an electorate to get them. His reforms were, in the first place, a security policy: the owner as a barrier against the mob. Historians have read the same facts in five ways. Lenin called it the "Prussian path" — capitalism in the countryside built by the landlords and the state, at the peasants' expense — and Soviet historians followed him. The early Western writers, Pares and Seton-Watson among them, saw the autocracy's best hope frustrated by the court. Ascher, Peter Waldron and Williams write of a serious, limited, and partly successful program in a political box he had not built. George Yaney reads the reform as an episode in the bureaucracy's long effort to administer the village rather than a program of peasant freedom. Pallot and Suny weigh the results and find little.
The site has already argued, in Was Dictatorship Russia's Only Option?, that the New Economic Policy was a road not taken. Stolypin's is the other one. Between 1906 and 1914 Russia had a government trying, badly and unfairly and at terrible cost, to build a countryside of owners and an empire of law; between 1921 and 1928, a different government did something else that worked. The war ended the first experiment and Stalin ended the second. What Solzhenitsyn asks the reader to feel, in the Stolypin chapters, is the loss of that first road, and it is a real loss. What the record asks is that we do not mistake the man who might have walked it for a friend of everything we admire in reform — and that we remember how many people he had hanged on the way.
Which brings up his death, and a question the novel also insists on: how did an informant get to the prime minister in a crowded opera house, on the police's own ticket? That is the subject of The Ticket to Kiev.
Further reading: Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2001); Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (1998); Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford, 1999); David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (1987); George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–1930 (1982); Stephen F. Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (Hoover, 2006); Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy; Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution; and, on the other side of the question, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (the expanded Red Wheel edition, tr. H. T. Willetts) and Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals.
A note on certainty: the decrees and laws named here, the courts-martial and the June 1907 electoral law, the western zemstvo crisis of 1911, and Stolypin's death are firmly documented. The numbers are not: executions under the courts-martial, the share of households with title or consolidated plots, and the Siberian totals all vary with the source and with what is counted, and this essay gives orders of magnitude, not statistics. The figures attributed to Williams (peasant land share, school spending) were taken from an excerpt of his book, and Williams is the most sympathetic of the scholars cited; the Suny and Read characterizations come from secondary summaries. "Stolypin's necktie" and "the wager on the strong" are quoted here as they are usually reported; the wording of the "twenty years of peace" line varies from source to source, and it is best read as an attributed sentiment. The one-line summaries of Yaney and of the early Western historians are the likeliest to need refinement. The claim that Solzhenitsyn's zemstvo emphasis reflects his own later program is this essay's argument, not a documented influence; the description of his Stolypin chapters comes from the reading and from published summaries of the novel, not from a page-by-page check. Where historians disagree — on whether the reform could have worked, and on how much of Stolypin's program was real — the essay names the disagreement without settling it. This piece was drafted with Claude's help from the secondary literature above and has not been checked against every book on the list.
Reads alongside The Ticket to Kiev, on the man who shot him; Was Dictatorship Russia's Only Option?; and The Fourteen Rungs, on an earlier reform that strengthened the state that made it. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.