A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Few figures in Russian history have aroused so much controversy as Petr Arkadev-ich Stolypin (1862—1911), Russia's Prime Minister from 1906 until his assassination five years later. The socialists condemned him as one of the last bloody defenders of the tsarist order. He gave his name to the hangman's noose ('Stolypin's neckties') administered by the military field courts to quell the peasant revolution on the land. The railway cars that were used to carry the 'politicals' to Siberia were called 'Stolypin carriages' (as they still were when they went to the Gulags). After 1917 the most hardened followers of the Tsar would come to denounce Stolypin as an upstart bureaucrat whose dangerous reform policies had only served to undermine the sacred principles of autocracy. But to his admirers — and there are many of them in post-Soviet Russia — Stolypin was the greatest statesman Russia ever had, the one man who could have saved the country from the revolution and the civil war. His reforms, they argue, given enough time, would have transformed Russia into a liberal capitalist society, but they were cut short by his death and the war. A popular tale relates that when the Tsar was signing his abdication order he said that if Stolypin had still been alive, this would never have come about. But this of course is a very big 'if'. Could one man have saved the Tsar? The truth is that Nicholas himself

* Lvov was taken ill on the way to Vyborg and had to return to St Petersburg. So he never signed the Manifesto, although he clearly sympathized with it.

had been sympathetic to Stolypin's opponents on the Right; and, frustrated by this royalist reaction, his reforms were doomed long before his death.

Stolypin's fate had in it much that was tragic. Yet his failure had as much to do with the weaknesses of his own personality as it did with the opposition he encountered from both the Left and the Right in Russia. His story is in many ways similar to that of Mikhail Gorbachev. Both were brave, intelligent and single-minded statesmen committed to the liberal reform of an old and decaying authoritarian system of which they themselves were products. Both trod a narrow path between the powerful vested interests of the old ruling elites and the radical opposition of the democrats. They failed in their different ways to see that the two opposing sides were set on a collision course, and that trying to mediate between them could only create enemies in both camps whilst winning few friends. Trained in the monolithic world of bureaucratic politics, both men failed to appreciate that their reforms could only succeed if they gained the support of a mass-based party or some other broad community of interests. They tried to impose their reforms from above, bureaucratically, without attempting to build a popular base, and that, more than anything else, is the key to their political demise.

In his appearance and background Stolypin was typical of that charmed circle of aristocrats that dominated the imperial bureaucracy. Tall, bearded and distinguished, he had considerable personal charm. The Englishman Bernard Pares compared him to 'a big naive friendly bear'.¹⁰ Stolypin came from an ancient noble family which had served the tsars since the sixteenth century and, as a reward for their service, had accumulated huge estates in several provinces. Stolypin's great-aunt was related to Lermontov and his parents were friends of Gogol and Tolstoy. During his childhood the family had travelled extensively in Europe, and he himself was fluent in French, German and English by the time he enrolled, in 1881, at the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of St Petersburg University.

In one important respect, however, Stolypin was different from the rest of the ruling elite: he had not made his way up the ranks of the St Petersburg bureaucracy but had been appointed head of the government directly from the provinces. This was to become a dangerous source of friction with his rivals. Stolypin's political outlook was directly shaped by his provincial experience. Even as Prime Minister he remained in essence a country squire, whose primary interest was in agriculture and local administration. His first thirteen years in office (1889—1902) had been spent as Marshal of the Kovno Nobility, a Polish-Lithuanian province where his wife, O. B. Neidgardt, owned an estate. It was here that Stolypin first became preoccupied with the problems of Russian peasant farming. The Kovno region, like most of the west of the Russian Empire, had never experienced the communal system. The peasants owned their plots of land