Semenov’s determination to cut through all these obstacles was quite extraordinary. Most peasants were deterred by far less difficulty, and the enclosure movement lost much of its impetus as a result. The rate of consolidations, after a strong initial spurt, fell sharply after 1909–10. Between 1906 and the eve of the revolution something in the region of 15 per cent of all the peasant households in European Russia consolidated their land as private plots, either in groups or individually, bringing the total of peasant farms in hereditary tenure to somewhere between 27 and 33 per cent.34 Yet for every household that enclosed its land there was another that had tried and failed, either because of communal resistance or bureaucratic delays, with the result that they lost interest. Most of the separations took place in the west, the south and south-east of the country, where the market was most developed. The separators tended to be either the more market-oriented farmers or, conversely, the poorest peasants, who quickly sold up their private plots and often moved into the cities. The mass of the peasants in the central region of Russia — precisely those who would lead the agrarian revolution of 1917 — were not affected. Stolypin’s reform had failed to alter their communal way of life.
In the end, after more than two years of wrangling, the land surveyors arrived in Andreevskoe with armed bodyguards and the final details of the land consolidation were completed. Of the forty-five households which had originally applied to consolidate their strips along with Semenov, only eight remained. To appease their opponents they were forced to make do with a piece of poor scrubland on the edge of the village. Since it had no suitable pasture, they remained dependent on the village commune’s permission to graze their cattle on its land. Such compromises were a fact of life. Most of the peasant separators preferred to keep one foot in the village, as they could do if they held an otrub (which gave them rights of access to the communal pastures and the woods), rather than run the risks of setting up an enclosed but dangerously isolated khutor on their own. The vast majority of Stolypin’s land enclosures were consolidations of otruba; and the government, despite its preference for khutora, had little choice but to give them its blessing.
Despite the continued opposition of the communal peasants, who occasionally vandalized their property, Semenov and his fellow separators gradually turned their scrubland into model private farms. They introduced big square fields with advanced crop rotations, sorted seed, chemical fertilizers and modern tools. Their cereal and flax yields increased by nearly half. They built winter sheds for their cows, imported better livestock breeds from Europe, exported milk to Moscow and established a dairy farmers’ union. They also grew fruit and vegetables, which they took by train for sale in Moscow every Saturday. ‘My experience over the past three years’, Semenov wrote in 1913, ‘has convinced me that a bright new future lies ahead of the peasants.’35 And these newly enclosed farmers were the pioneers of a brief agricultural revolution in Russia before the First World War. To a large extent it was they who accounted for the marked rise in peasant living standards noted by recent historians. The khutor farmers, who were generally the strongest of the strong, had three or four horses and perhaps a dozen cows, compared with one of each for most of the communal peasants. They hired labour, bought more land from the gentry and began to set up in business. Here were the winners of the ‘wager on the strong’.
But there were others, especially among the otrubniki, who failed to make it on their own. Many of their otruba were actually smaller than the neighbouring communal allotments, suggesting that they belonged to the weaker peasant households. No doubt some of them had set up on their own with the aim of selling the land and moving into the cities: over one million peasants did just that between 1908 and 1915. But others did attempt to cultivate their enclosed plots, believing that once they were free of the commune they too could become successful farmers. The truth was, of course, that farming an enclosed plot entailed many more costs and risks than the peasants had faced within the village commune, and that trying to do it with inadequate means was bound to end in disaster. The separators had to pay interest on loans from the bank and invest in roads, fencing and water. They also had to provide their own means of transport, tools, timber, pasture and stocks of seed and grain, some of which they would previously have shared with their communal neighbours. The range of communal services which had always made the village the centre of the peasant’s life — the church, the school, the shops and small trades, as well as the personal networks between neighbours — was now closed to them, at least partly. By 1917, many of the private farmers had fallen into desperate poverty and were only too ready to liquidate their farms in order to rejoin the commune and share in the division of spoils as it renewed its war on the gentry’s estates.
The majority of Western historians have tended to assume — often more on the basis of their own ideological prejudices than empirical evidence — that Stolypin’s land reform ‘must have been’ a success. It is argued that were it not for the First World War, which brought the separations to a halt, the reform might have averted the agrarian revolution by converting the peasants into a class of yeoman landowners. This fits with the view of those historians who stress that tsarist Russia after 1905 was becoming stabilized and strengthened as a result of its evolution towards a modern society and that, if it had not been for the war, the revolution would never have happened. The bad old days of autocracy were receding, a parliamentary order was taking shape, and Russia, so the argument goes, was fast becoming a real industrial power with a peasantry that not merely fed itself but, thanks to Stolypin’s reforms, was able to export food as well.
In fact, long before 1914, Stolypin’s land reforms had ground to a halt. Stolypin had claimed that they would need at least twenty years to transform rural Russia. But even if they had continued at the same rate as they had been progressing before the First World War, it would have taken the best part of a century for the regime to create the strong agrarian bourgeoisie on which it had evidently decided to stake its future. The land enclosure movement, like every other reform of the tsarist regime, came too late.
Part of the problem was the lack of an adequate bureaucratic structure to implement the reforms, so that they suffered endless delays. The government was attempting to transform the peasantry’s way of life without any real political leverage in the countryside. Most of the gentry, from the provincial governors down to the local land captains, opposed the reforms and did their best to stop them. Meanwhile, at village level there was no state administration at all, although Stolypin, to be fair, had tried to create a volost zemstvo dominated by the new peasant landowners and it was only the political opposition of the gentry, defending their traditional hegemony over local government, which buried his proposals. The peasant pioneers, like Semenov, thus had no political authority of their own to which they could turn in their uphill struggle to break away from the commune and unless, like him, they showed extraordinary perseverance they had very little hope of succeeding. Without the democratization of local government Stolypin’s reforms were doomed to fail.
Perhaps above all the reforms were fated by their sheer ambition. It turned out to be much harder to impose foreign capitalist ways on the backward Russian countryside than the senior bureaucrats, sitting in their offices in St Petersburg, had been prepared to acknowledge. The village commune was an old institution, in many ways quite defunct, but in others still responsive to the basic needs of the peasants, living as they did on the margins of poverty, afraid of taking risks, suspicious of change and hostile to outsiders. Stolypin assumed that the peasants were poor because they had the commune: by getting them to break from it he could improve their lives. But the reverse was closer to the truth: the commune existed because the peasants were poor, it served to distribute the burden of their poverty, and as long as they were poor there would be little incentive for them to leave it. For better or worse, the commune’s egalitarian customs had come to embody the peasantry’s basic notions of social justice and, as the events of 1917 would prove, these were ideals for which they would fight long and hard.