With little prospect of finding support for his reforms, Stolypin had no qualms about dissolving the Duma and changing the electoral law so that when the next assembly convened it would be dominated by conservative elements. The electoral weight of the peasants, the workers and the national minorities was drastically reduced, while the representation of the gentry was even more exaggerated. When the Third Duma assembled in November 1907 the pro-government parties (Octobrists, Rightists and Nationalists) controlled 287 of the 443 seats. The Kadets and the socialists were reduced to small and fragmented minorities. Even Prince Lvov, the mildest of liberals, could not find a seat. This, at last, was a Duma with which Stolypin could do business. It was, he believed, a parliament dominated by ‘responsible’ and ‘statesmanlike’ people, who would be able to see the need for a new and constructive partnership between state and nation for the purpose of gradual reform. The radicals called it a ‘Duma of Lords and Lackeys’.
Yet even this ‘king’s parliament’ proved too hard for Stolypin to manage, as he found himself under growing pressure from both Left and Right. The electoral decree of 3 June was technically an infringement of the Fundamental Laws and the liberals were quick to denounce it as a coup d’étât. Even the Octobrists, the new law’s chief beneficiaries, felt uncomfortable with it and aimed to atone for their ‘illegal’ gains by trying to defend and expand the Duma’s powers.
Alexander Guchkov, their leader, had special ambitions for the Duma in the military field. As an industrialist who had served as a Red Cross official in the war against Japan, he could see both the military need and the economic advantage of a big rearmaments programme. The Octobrists were increasingly committed to a policy of imperial expansion, but in their view this could only be achieved if responsibility for the military was shifted from the court to the institutions of the state. There was no point spending more money on the army without at the same time reforming its command, which was dominated by the aristocracy and the military doctrines of the eighteenth century. Russia needed heavy artillery, not more elegant Horseguards. In this conviction Guchkov was supported by the ‘military professionals’, such as General Brusilov and Stolypin’s own Assistant Minister of War, A.A. Polivanov. Guchkov was Chairman of the Duma’s Committee of Imperial Defence, which had a veto over the military budget, and he used this position to launch an attack on the court’s supreme command. In 1909 the Duma threatened to refuse the navy credits unless its strategic planning agency, the Naval General Staff, came under the control of the Ministry rather than the court. Nicholas was furious. He saw in this ultimatum a brazen attempt by the Duma to wrest military command from the crown, and used his veto to block its Naval General Staff Bill. The fact that Stolypin and his Council of Ministers had supported the bill made matters worse, since now there was a fundamental conflict of interests, with the government taking the view that it should control the armed forces and the court and its allies insisting that this was the sole right of the Tsar. Stolypin offered to resign, and Nicholas was pressed by his more reactionary allies to accept his resignation. But at this moment, having restored the country to a kind of order, Stolypin was indispensable and the royalists had to be satisfied with the lesser triumph of forcing him to reconfirm the Tsar’s exclusive prerogatives in the military sphere.17
Beneath the technicalities of the naval staff crisis lay a fundamental problem that was to undermine Stolypin’s efforts to save the tsarist system by reforming it. As far as the Tsar was concerned, Stolypin’s political programme threatened to shift the balance of power from the court to the state institutions. The Naval General Staff Bill was an obvious signal of this intention. Stolypin stood foursquare in the Petrine tradition of bureaucratic modernization so detested by Nicholas. Everything in his Prime Minister’s conduct was intended to break with the old patrimonial system. Whereas previous chief ministers had been treated as little more than household servants by the Tsar, Stolypin deliberately avoided the court and preferred to spend his weekends at home with his family, as a Western Prime Minister would, rather than on hunting parties with the Tsar and his lackeys. Stolypin viewed the state as a neutral and universal agent of reform and modernization which would protect Russia’s imperial interests. In his view, the state stood above the interests of the aristocracy — even above the dynasty itself — which negated the notion of a social order based on the old estate rankings. Everyone, from the peasant to the prince, was a citizen (so long as he owned property). This essentially Western view of the state was a direct challenge to the Muscovite ideology so favoured by the Tsar and his courtiers, who imagined the autocracy as a steep and mystically sanctioned pyramid of patrimonial power based on a strict social hierarchy headed by the nobility. If Stolypin’s reforms were allowed to succeed, then the Tsar’s personal rule would be overshadowed by the institutions of his state, while the traditional social order would be undermined.
Such fears were fuelled by the old élite groups who all had their own reasons to oppose Stolypin’s reforms and who now rallied to the defence of the Tsar’s autocratic prerogatives. This legitimist bloc was brought together by the naval staff crisis, which presented an obvious threat to the crown’s traditional rights. It had powerful institutional support within court circles, the State Council, the United Nobility, the Orthodox Church, the Union of the Russian People, the police and certain sections of the bureaucracy and, although it operated through informal channels, was strong enough to defeat virtually all Stolypin’s political innovations.
His proposal to expand the state system of primary education was defeated by reactionaries in the Church, who had their own interest in the schools. The same fate awaited his legislation to ease discrimination against religious minorities, the Old Believers and the Jews in particular. His efforts to curb the illegal behaviour of the bureaucracy and the police were doomed, since he never had full control of either. The provincial governors, with their family ties at court, constantly sabotaged his reforms, while senior bureaucrats in St Petersburg intrigued against him. As for the actual control of the police, Stolypin was virtually powerless. The Empress’s own candidate, General P. G. Kurlov, was appointed chief of the secret police, over Stolypin’s protests. Kurlov used his position to divert large sums of government money to extremist Rightist groups and newspapers. He placed Stolypin himself under surveillance, intercepted his mail, and kept the Empress informed about his intentions, especially with regard to her favourite Rasputin. When Stolypin was finally assassinated, in August 1911, rumours immediately began to circulate that Kurlov had commissioned the murder. To this day, the rumours have never been proved. But they tell us a good deal about the public perception of the relations between Stolypin and his enemies on the Right.
The United Nobility was by far the most vociferous of these groups. It had been formed in the wake of the 1905 Revolution to defend the gentry’s property rights and its domination of rural politics. Stolypin’s local government reforms threatened the latter by giving the peasants, as landowners, representation in the zemstvos equal to that of the nobles. They also proposed to abolish the peasant-class courts, bringing the peasants fully into the system of civil law. Stolypin saw these reforms as essential for the success of his land reform programme (see here). The new class of conservative peasant landowners which he hoped to create would not support the existing order unless they were made citizens with equal political and legal rights to those enjoyed by other estates. ‘First of all,’ Stolypin said, ‘we have to create a citizen, a small landowner, and then the peasant problem will be solved.’