When Nicholas II had summoned him to his Alexander Palace residence in Tsarskoe Selo, just outside St. Petersburg, to inform him of his elevation to the premiership in the capital, Stolypin protested that he was unfit for such a high post and did not know the capital’s elites. The tsar, tears in his eyes, grateful, perhaps, for the professed modesty and deference, grasped Stolypin’s hand with both of his.13 This handclasp has been seen, even more in retrospect than in prospect, as a historic opportunity that might have saved imperial Russia. Stolypin certainly stands out as one of the most commanding officials ever to hold a position of power in Russia: self-confident in a milieu of toadying, an accomplished orator as well as manager, a rare state official with a longer-term perspective. “If the state does not retaliate against evil deeds,” Stolypin stated upon his appointment, “then the very meaning of the state is lost.”14 The provincial proved himself adept at gaining the tsar’s confidence, and he quickly came to overshadow the entire establishment in St. Petersburg.15 But the tasks before him were daunting. The critical keys to unlocking modernity included not just steel output and mass production, which Russia more or less did manage to attain, but also the successful incorporation of the masses into political systems, that is, mass politics.
Stolypin was determined to take full advantage of the new lease on life afforded to the regime by Durnovó’s bravura crackdown, within the new situation created by Witte’s successful urging on Nicholas II of the October Manifesto quasi-constitutionalism. During Stolypin’s premiership (1906–1911), he endeavored, in his way, to reinvent the Russian political system. But Russia’s conservative political establishment, furious at the constitutional autocracy, opposed outright Stolypin’s efforts to conjure into being a polity on their behalf. The left, for different reasons—they were sobered by the defeat of the 1905 uprising and Stolypin’s repression—would fall into despair as well. To be sure, our leftist protagonist Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili would perpetrate his most infamous revolutionary exploits under Stolypin. But whether those incendiary activities amounted to much remains questionable. By contrast, the aims and frustrations of Stolypin’s reform programs, like those of Witte before him, tell us a great deal about the future Stalin’s regime. At the time, viewing the world through a canonical Marxist prism, the future Stalin comprehended next to nothing of what Stolypin went through at the time. Stalin never met the tsarist prime minister, but to a very great extent he would later walk in his shoes.
RUSSIA’S (SECOND) WOULD-BE BISMARCK
Two attributes seemed to define imperial Russia. First, its agriculture fed both Germany and England via exports but remained far from efficient: Russia had the lowest harvest yields in Europe (below Serbia, considered merely a “little brother”); its per-acre grain yields remained less than half those of France or even Austria-Hungary.16 This made the peasants seem like an urgent problem that had to be addressed. Second, Russian political life had become riotous, self-defeating, insane. Many in the elite, not least Nicholas II, had expected the initial 1906 elections to yield a conservative peasant-monarchist Duma. Instead, the Constitutional Democrats enjoyed electoral success, which surprised even the Cadets. Once empowered by the ballot box, Russia’s classical liberals showed no intention of cooperating with the autocracy, and Nicholas II had no intention of compromising with them.17 Moreover, although the socialist parties had boycotted the First Duma elections, they changed their stance and got dozens of deputies elected to the Second Duma (thanks partly to peasant ballots). The okhranka, naturally, kept the deputies under surveillance, using informants and listening in on telephone conversations.18 But the political police had no answer to the political intransigence on all sides. The latter, moreover, was greatly facilitated by the Duma’s abysmal legislative procedures. No mechanisms existed to distinguish major from minor matters, so all were taken up as legislation rather than via mundane government regulations. Also, incredibly, the Duma lacked any fixed timetable for the progression of legislation; populous commissions of deputies would handle bills before they could be brought to the floor, and some commissions would deliberate on a single bill for eighteen months. When the bills did finally move to the next stage, they would be debated in the full Duma again without time limits.19 In such procedural minutiae can institutions founder, especially when opposing political forces prove beyond reconciliation.
From the point of view of the Constitutional Democrats, the problem was that Russia’s constitutional revolution had not removed the autocracy. And indeed, Nicholas II used his prerogative to dismiss the Duma’s first convocation after a mere seventy-three days. The autocrat was able, thanks to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, to issue laws by fiat during legislative recess. (Such laws were in theory supposed to be confirmed when the legislature resumed, but they remained in force while debate proceeded.)20 The Second Duma in 1907, which served even more as a platform of antigovernment speechifying, was tolerated for fewer than ninety days. Then, on June 3, 1907, Stolypin unilaterally narrowed Duma suffrage still further by having Nicholas II employ Article 87 to alter the electoral provisions, a step that the Fundamental Laws expressly forbade.21 “Coup d’etat!” screamed the Constitutional Democrats, one of Stolypin’s two main targets in the maneuver (the other target were those further to the left). It was a coup. But from Stolypin’s point of view, the Cadets were hardly angels: in 1905–7, they colluded in antistate terrorism, condemning it publicly but covertly encouraging it, in order to weaken the autocracy. Many humble tsarist officials were killed in that collusion.22 But whereas the intriguers at court egged on Nicholas II to terminate the Duma “experiment,” Stolypin was trying to work with the legislature in order to root Russia’s suspended-in-the-air government in some kind of political base that was compatible with the autocracy. “We want not professors, but men with roots in the country, the local gentry, and such like,” Stolypin told the professor Bernard Pares, the founder of Russian studies in Britain, in May 1908.23
Stolypin was correct that passing legislation necessitated more than some “mystical union” between tsar and people. He imagined himself, like his very short-lived predecessor, Sergei Witte, as a Russian Bismarck. “I am in no way in favor of an absolutist government,” the Iron Chancellor had told the German Reichstag. “I consider parliamentary cooperation—if properly practiced—necessary and useful, as much as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible.”24 Russia’s prime minister, too, accepted a parliament but not parliamentarism (a government controlled by parliament), and the Russian Duma, like the German Reichstag, was a representative institution that expressly strove not to be representative. To be sure, the German franchise had been much more inclusive: all German males over twenty-five had the right to vote. Moreover, thanks to its June 3, 1907, origins, imperial Russia’s Third Duma would be relentlessly shadowed by predictions of new coups, a source of instability. But in Stolypin’s calculation, all this was a necessary price to pay for acquiring the legal wherewithal to modernize the country.
In Saratov, Stolypin had observed the same injustices the radical young Stalin had observed in the Caucasus: workers suffering frequent trauma and long hours for low pay, nobles owning enormous tracts of land while peasants in rags worked tiny plots. As prime minister, Stolypin embarked on far-reaching social reforms. German industrial workers, thanks to the second plank of Bismarck’s strategy (stealing the thunder of the left), had come to enjoy sickness, accident, and old-age insurance as well as access to subsidized canteens; Stolypin, at a minimum, wanted to introduce workmen’s social insurance.25 Most prominently, though, he wanted to encourage peasants to abandon the repartitional commune and consolidate farm land into more productice units.
Russian elites tended to view peasant society as backward and alien, and shared a determination to transform it.26 (In fact, an observer could have looked at the Russian government as a distinct society alienated from the empire at large, especially from peasant society—the vast majority of the
population.)27 This elite view took on a predominantly economic inflection as the Russian establishment came to believe the peasants were becoming increasingly impoverished; a few officials, like Witte, back in his days as finance minister, had blamed “the poor condition of our peasantry” as the main brake on the Russian state’s industrialization and geopolitical aggrandizement.28 Stolypin went further, treating the peasantry as a regime-defining political problem. Such an analysis was not unique to Russia. In Prussia, reformers in the 1820s, seeking to counter the influence of the French Revolution, had argued that peasant property owners were the only reliable defenders of law and order and the state.29 This was precisely Stolypin’s view as well. Instead of blaming outside “revolutionary agitators” for rural disturbances, Stolypin pinpointed low rural living standards, and further noted that much of the peasant unrest in 1905–6 had been communally organized.30 On the basis of his experience in the communeless western borderlands, moreover, he concluded that a prosperous individualist village was a peaceful village. Thus, his agrarian reforms, enabled by a November 9, 1906, decree, aimed to drive agricultural productivity and remove the basis for peasant unrest by creating an independent property-owning class among the peasants, who, once furnished with state credits and access to technology, would strike out on their own. In other words, Stolypin sought to transform both the physical rural landscape, overcoming the separated communal strips of land with consolidated farms, and the psychology of the rural inhabitant.31
Globally, the period of Stolypin’s premiership was one of heightened striving to enlarge the capacities of the state. From the French Third Republic to the Russian empire, states of all types pursued ambitious projects such as the building of canals, roads, and railroads to integrate their territories and markets. They also promoted the settlement of new lands via subsidizing homesteading, draining marshes, damming rivers, and irrigating fields. Such statist transformationalism—building infrastructure, managing populations and resources—was often tested first in overseas possessions (colonies), then reapplied back home; sometimes it was developed first at home, then taken abroad, or to what were designated as imperial peripheries. Rule-of-law states when governing abroad often implemented many of the social engineering practices characteristic of non-rule-of-law states, but at home liberal orders differed from authoritarian ones in what practices were deemed acceptable or possible.32 What stands out in all cases of state-led social engineering, though, was how the would-be “technocrats” rarely perceived the benefits, let alone the necessity, of converting subjects (domestic or imperial) into citizens. Technocrats generally saw “politics” as a hindrance to efficient administration. In that regard, Stolypin’s idea of incorporating peasants—at least the “strong and the sober” among the peasantry—into the sociopolitical order on equal terms with other subjects was radical. To be sure, he intended property ownership to impart a stake more than a formal voice. Still, one adviser to the prime minister called him a “new phenomenon” on the Russian scene for seeking political support in parts of the wider populace.33
The reform proved to be a flexibly designed experiment, amalgamating years of prior discussion and effort, and allowing for adjustments along the way.34 But both the political boost from newly created loyal yeoman and the full economic takeoff that Stolypin envisioned proved elusive. Of course, in any political system, major reforms are always fraught because institutions are more complex than perceived. Russia’s peasant communes, in practice, were actually more flexible institutions than their critics understood.35 But the commune’s division of land into separated strips required coordination with others in the village, and rendered impossible the sale, lease, mortgage, or legal transfer of land by individuals, while inhibiting investment in lands that might be taken away. Communes did shield peasants from catastrophe in hard times, although that, too, depended on permanently pooling resources, inducing communes to resist any loss of members. With the reform, the formal consent of the commune was no longer required for exit. Exits were still complicated by red tape (court backlogs), as well as social tensions, but a substantial minority, perhaps 20 percent of European Russia’s 13 million peasant households, would manage to leave the commune during the reform. These new small private landowners, however, generally did not escape commune-style strip farming.36 (A single holding could sometimes be divided into forty or fifty strips.) A shortage of land surveyors, among other factors, meant that many peasants who had privatized could not always consolidate.37 Often, the most individually oriented peasants just decamped for Siberia, as the reform’s enhancement of secure property rights significantly spurred migration in search of new land, but that reduced productivity at the farms they left.38 The land question’s complexity could be stupefying. But where privatized or even non-privatized farms were consolidated—the key aim of Stolypin’s economic reforms—productivity rose significantly.39
In the end, however, Stolypin’s economic and other reforms came up against the stubborn limits to structural reform imposed by politics. Stolypin had to initiate his bold agrarian transformation with the Fundamental Law’s emergency Article 87, during a Duma recess, and the changes sparked deep resistance among the propertied establishment. They, as well as others, blocked Stolypin’s related modernization efforts.40
Russia’s prime minister would attempt not just to rearrange peasant landholdings and credit and introduce workers’ accident and sickness insurance, but also to expand local self-government to the empire’s Catholic west, lift juridical restrictions on Jews, broaden civil and religious rights, and overall invent a workable central government and general polity.41 But his government found it had to bribe many of the elected conservative Duma deputies for votes on bills. And even then, Stolypin could not get the votes for his key legislation. Only the agrarian reforms and a watered down version of worker insurance made the statute books. Conservatives circumscribed Stolypin’s room for maneuver. He was partly the victim of his own success: he had garroted the 1905–6 revolution and, the next year, emptied the Duma of many liberals and socialists, thereby making possible a working relationship between the quasi-parliament and the tsar’s appointed government, but the urgency had vanished. At a deeper level, he had miscalculated. In Stolypin’s June 1907 new franchise, the societal groups that had the most to gain from his reform programs were either excluded from the Duma or outnumbered in it by traditional interests—the landholding gentry—that had the most to lose but that Stolypin’s electoral coup had entrenched.42 To put the matter another way, the political interests that most accepted autocracy least accepted modernizing reforms.
RUSSIA’S PROTO-FASCISM
That the Russian autocracy would experience severe difficulties developing a political base is not self-evident. The number of Social Democrats shot up from a mere 3,250 in 1904 to perhaps 80,000 by 1907—a vault, to be sure, but less impressive in relative terms. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party achieved little success among Ukrainian speakers, especially peasants, publishing next to nothing in the Ukrainian language. On the territory of what would become Ukraine, the party had no more than 1,000 members.43 The leftist Jewish Labor Bund drew most of its membership not from the empire’s southwest (Ukraine) but the northwest (Belorussia, tsarist Poland). Be that as it may, even adding the Bund—with whom most Russian Social Democrats did not desire a close relationship—and adding the empire’s separate Polish and Latvian Social Democrat‒equivalent parties as well as the semiautonomous Georgian Social Democrats, the combined Social Democratic strength in imperial Russia probably did not exceed 150,000.44 By comparison, the classical liberal (proprivate property, proparliament) Constitutional Democrats—said to have no real social base in Russia—grew to around 120,000, and another constitutionalist party (Octobrists) just to the right of the Cadets enrolled 25,000 more.45 The Socialist Revolutionaries who aimed to represent the agricultural proletariat, failed to achieve mass peasant support in 1905–7, though the SRs did attract urban workers and
attained a formal membership of at least 50,000.46 Dwarfing them all, however, was the staunchly monarchical and national chauvinist Union of the Russian People, founded in November 1905, with rallies under the roof at the Archangel Michael Riding Academy as a church choir sang “Praise God” and “Tsar Divine”; already by 1906, it had ballooned to perhaps 300,000, with branches across the empire—including in small towns and villages.47
During the revolutionary uprising, in which liberal constitutionalism was pushed to the forefront, while socialism emerged as an empirewide aspiration, the rise of the illiberal Union of the Russian People constituted a remarkable story. Until 1905, self-styled patriotic elements faced legal limitations in expressing themselves publicly, having to be content with religious processionals, military-victory commemorations, imperial funerals and coronations. That revolutionary year, moreover, most conservatives found themselves caught out, unwilling to enter, let alone master, the political arena. But the Union of the Russian People was different.48 As the most prominent of many upstart rightist organizations in Russia, the Union brought together courtiers, professionals, and churchmen—including many from the young Stalin’s old Tiflis seminary—with townspeople, workers, and peasants. Drawing in the disaffected and the disoriented, as well as the patriotic, the Union managed to sweep in the lower orders and middle strata “for Tsar, faith, and fatherland,” stealing a march on the left.49 The tsarist regime, stymied by rightist establishment opposition in the Duma and State Council, appeared to have the option of grassroots mobilization.
The Union of the Russian People helped invent a new style of right-wing politics—novel not just for Russia but for most of the world—a politics in a new key oriented toward the masses, public spaces, and direct action, a fascism avant la lettre.50 The Union’s members and leaders, such as the grandson of a Bessarabian village priest, Vladimir Purishkevich—who liked to exclaim, “To the right of me there is only the wall”—were antiliberal, anticapitalist, and anti-Semitic (the triad being redundant, in their eyes).51 They emphasized the uniqueness of Russia’s historical trajectory, rejected Europe as a model, preached the need for Orthodox primacy over Jews and Catholics (Poles), and demanded “restoration” of Russia’s traditions. The Union disdained the Russian government’s cowardly preoccupation with its own security, which they saw as indicative of a lack of will to crush the liberals (and socialists). The Union also abhorred the modernizing state as tantamount to socialist revolutionaries. Union members held that the autocrat alone must rule, not the bureaucracy, let alone the Duma. Unionists overlapped with right-wing vigilantes known as Black Hundreds, who became notorious for pogroms against the Jews in the Pale of Settlement and for fighting alongside imperial troops in crackdowns against rebellious peasants and workers. Russian rightists of all stripes, after a slow start, mobilized to a stunning degree, widely disseminating pamphlets and newspapers, organizing rallies in the name of defending autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality against Jews and European encroachments such as Western-style constitutionalism.
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