*
The man who shot Stolypin was D. G. Bogrov, a student-revolutionary turned police informer through financial need. Nobody ever managed to discover which side Bogrov was working for — the Right or the Left — and in a sense that is the real point. For Stolypin had many enemies on either side. Long before Bogrov’s bullet killed him, he was politically dead.
Stolypin’s political demise must be explained by his failure as a politician. Had he been better versed in ‘the art of the possible’, perhaps he could have gained more time for himself and his reforms. Stolypin had said that he needed twenty years to transform Russia. But partly through his own fault he had only five. He adhered so rigidly to his own aims and principles that he lost sight of the need to negotiate and compromise with his opponents. He antagonized the old political élites by riding roughshod over their traditional privileges and lost the support of the liberals by suppressing the Duma whenever it stood in his way. This political inflexibility stemmed from his narrow bureaucratic outlook. He acted as if everything had to be subordinated to the interests of the state, as these were defined by his reforms, and believed that this placed him above the need to involve himself in the dirty business of party manæuvring. He thought he could get his reforms by administrative fiat, and never moved outside the bureacracy to mobilize a broader base of support. Although he acknowledged that the key to his programme was the creation of a conservative peasant landowning class, he never considered the idea of sponsoring the foundation of a smallholders’ party. There was a Stolypin but no Stolypinites. And so when Stolypin died his reforms died with him.
According to some historians, the tsarist regime’s last real hope was wiped out by the assassin’s bullets. Stolypin’s reforms, they argue, were its one real chance to reform itself on Western lines. If only they had been given more time, instead of being disrupted by the First World War, then perhaps the Revolution of 1917 would not have taken place. This optimistic view rests on two assumptions: that Stolypin’s reforms were succeeding in their aims; and that they were capable of stabilizing Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905. Both assumptions are patently false.
First, the reforms made relatively little headway in moving Russia towards a constitutional parliamentary order. Indeed some of Stolypin’s own methods — such as the coup d’étât of June 1907 and his tactics over the Western Zemstvo Bill — were a flagrant abuse of that system’s ideals. True, there were some gains in civil liberties, in the freedom of the press, and in the fact that the Duma itself continued to exist, if only as a symbol and a school for the new culture of constitutionalism, between 1906 and 1914.fn3 But this hardly meant that tsarist Russia was necessarily moving towards some sort of Western liberal normality. The nature of the tsarist regime was the single biggest guarantee of its own political irreformability. The Muscovite ideology of patrimonial autocracy which Nicholas and the Rightists increasingly favoured was deeply hostile to the Western constitutional vision entailed in Stolypin’s programme of reforms; and the entrenched powers of the court, together with the vested interests of the Church and the provincial nobility, were quite strong enough to prevent that programme from ever being realized. Once the revolutionary crisis of 1905–7 had passed, the monarchy no longer needed the protection of Stolypin, and increasingly detached itself from his government, paralysed its programme, and began to pursue its own separate agenda, based increasingly after 1912 on the use of Russian nationalism to rally ‘the loyal people’ behind the throne.
Second, by 1912, if not before, it had already become clear that no package of political reforms could ever resolve the profound social crisis that had caused the first crack in the system during 1905. True, for a while, largely as a result of government repressions, the labour movement subsided and showed signs of greater moderation, enough to give grounds for the Menshevik hope that it might evolve on European lines. But in the two years after 1912 there was a dramatic increase in both the number of industrial strikes and in their level of militancy, culminating in July 1914 with a general strike in St Petersburg, where in the midst of a state visit by the French President there was street fighting and barricades. The workers of the capital cities, according to Leo Haimson’s seminal work of thirty years ago, were rapidly turning away from all the democratic parties — including even the Mensheviks — which advocated the adoption of constitutional or gradualist methods, and were moving over to the Bolsheviks, who encouraged direct workers’ action and a violent struggle against the regime.22 Despite all the efforts at political reform, urban Russia on the eve of the First World War found itself on the brink of a new and potentially more violent revolution than the ‘dress rehearsal’ of 1905.
iii The Wager on the Strong
The exiled peasant returned to his village on a cold April morning in 1908. It had taken him nearly three days by train, horse and cart to travel the one hundred miles from Moscow, and as he neared his birthplace his hopes of finding some improvement made during his two years of absence increased. But the village of Andreevskoe had never been a dynamic sort of place. The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sights of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay. The black strips of ploughed land seemed narrower and more ragged than ever, the tussocks in the meadow had grown to the size of small bushes, the woods had been cut down, the cattle allowed to roam freely over the gardens, and weeds sprouted in the main village street. Semenov’s neighbour, once a hard-working peasant, had taken to the bottle, while his eight children went without shoes. But what depressed Semenov most was to learn that the elders of the village were the same old patriarchs who had been there when he left. For they would now have even more reason to regard his plans for reform with hostility and mistrust.23
Chief among the elders was Grigorii Maliutin, a heavy-built and heavy-drinking septuagenarian, with a big red-blistered face and a long white beard, who had been the dominant elder for as long as anyone could remember. Maliutin was the richest peasant in Andreevskoe, living partly on the profits from his son’s soap factory near Moscow, and for his age he was surprisingly strong. Vain and jealous of his power, he was a strict disciplinarian, a village despot of the old school, who still beat his elderly wife and, as the elder of the village, flogged any peasant found guilty of a crime. Most of the villagers lived in fear of him. Maliutin’s main ally was another relic from the days of serfdom, Yefim Stepanov, who over the years had made himself rich by scrimping and saving like a miser. He always wore the same old dirty clothes, fed his animals only just enough to keep them alive, and never once gave anything to the beggars outside church. Both men were illiterate Old Believers, and they were united by their fear of change. Their power over the village depended on keeping it sealed off from the modern world. Maliutin made a habit of denouncing every new invention, from the samovar to the sowing machine, as ruinously wasteful. Even to think of them caused him pain.24
What could be worse, then, than for them to see the return of their arch-rival Sergei Semenov. Semenov had been born in 1868 into a poor peasant family in Andreevskoe. Like Semen Kanatchikov, whose village of Gusevo was in the same district of Volokolamsk, he was sent out as a young boy to earn his own living in Moscow. His father, like Kanatchikov’s, was an alcoholic, and his mother did most of the work on the farm, which did not yield enough to support him. Between the ages of ten and eighteen Semenov roamed from factory to factory, at first in Moscow and then in Petersburg, Poltava and Ekaterinoslav, sending money home to his family and returning to the village at harvest time. He taught himself to read and at the age of eighteen began to write stories of village life. One day he turned up on Tolstoy’s doorstep at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy admired Semenov’s tales — here was his ideal of the ‘peasant writer’ — and the two men became lifelong friends. Semenov was a quiet and a modest man. ‘Small and thin, with a red goatee beard, a sad intelligent face, and a sensitive, almost child-like, shyness, he always dressed like a peasant in a tunic and’, according to one of his Moscow friends, ‘looked more like a village clerk than a littérateur.’ Unlike Kanatchikov, he never hankered for the bright lights of the city. At the age of twenty he returned to Andreevskoe, married a local village girl, and took over the running of his father’s farm. His bitter childhood had turned him into a firm believer in reform. ‘I was always driven by a burning desire to improve the life of my village, to end its dark and backward ways,’ he later wrote. This belief in progress was the source of his commitment to the revolution and — closely connected — to his own self-improvement. He gave up drink and saved up to buy handbooks on agriculture. The Volokolamsk district was fast becoming a major centre of flax cultivation — perhaps the most important form of intensification on the Russian peasant farm — and handsome profits could be made from it. Semenov was in the forefront of this movement. He rented extra land from a nearby squire and grew not only flax but a variety of other market crops with the latest farming methods. He began to campaign for land reform in Andreevskoe, and so came into bitter conflict with Maliutin.25