The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

per household, in Olonetsk 185

  desiatiny

  , and in Archangel as much as 1,309

  desiatiny

  . At the same time, in fourteen other provinces there would not be enough land to give each household 15

  desiatiny

  , while in Poltava there would be only 9 and in Podolia less than 8. This is due to the extremely uneven distribution in the various provinces not only of State and Crown lands but also of lands held in private ownership. One-fourth of the privately held land happens to be located in those twelve provinces which have communal allotments in excess of 15

  desiatiny

  per household, whereas only one-seventh of it lies in the ten provinces with the smallest allotments of 7

  desiatiny

  per household. It must be noted that these figures include all the land of all the owners—that is, not only that of the 107,000

  dvoriane

  but also that of 490,000 peasants who have purchased land on their own account, as well as that belonging to 85,000 burghers—the latter two categories accounting for up to 17 million

  desiatiny

  . From this it follows that the division of all the land on a per capita basis can hardly remedy local land shortages. It will be necessary to have recourse to the measure proposed by the government—namely, resettlement. One will have to give up the idea of ensuring land for the entire toiling population and [instead] divert from that group a certain proportion to other occupations.

  This is also confirmed by other figures which indicate the population growth over a ten-year period in the fifty provinces of European Russia. Russia, gentlemen, is not dying out. Her population increase exceeds that of all the other countries in the world, attaining an annual rate of 15.1 per 1,000. Thus, in the fifty provinces of European Russia, the natural population growth adds each year 1,625,000 people: assuming five persons per family, this represents 341,000 families. If we allow 10

  desiatiny

  per household, we will require annually 3.5 million

  desiatiny

  to provide with land only that population which is added each year.

  Clearly, gentlemen, the land question cannot be solved by the device of expropriating and distributing private lands. This [method] is tantamount to putting a plaster on an infected wound.

  *

  Stolypin next turned to his favorite subject, the need to privatize agriculture in order to improve productivity:

  But apart from the aforementioned material results, what will this method do to the country, what will it accomplish from the moral point of view? The picture which we now observe in our rural communities—the need of all to subordinate themselves to a single method of pursuing agriculture, the requirement of constant repartitions, the impossibility for a farmer with initiative to apply to the land temporarily at his disposal his inclination toward a particular branch of economy—all that will spread throughout Russia. All and each will be equal, and land will become as common as water and air. But neither water nor air benefit from the application of human hands, neither is improved by labor, or else the improved air and water undoubtedly would fetch a price, they would become subject to the right of property. I suggest that the land which would be distributed among citizens, alienated from some and offered to local Social-Democratic bureaus, would soon acquire the same qualities as water and air. It would be exploited, but no one would improve it, no one would apply to it his labor in order to have someone else benefit from it.… As a result, the cultural level of the country will decline. A good farmer, an inventive farmer, will be deprived by the very force of things of the opportunity to apply his knowledge to the land. One is driven to the conclusion that such conditions would lead to a new upheaval, and that the talented, strong, forceful man would restore his right to property, to the fruit of his labor. After all, gentlemen, property has always had as its basis force, behind which stood also moral law.

  51

  Stolypin well realized the hold which the commune had on the Great Russian peasant and had no illusion that he could dissolve it by government fiat. He rather wanted to achieve this end by example, setting up alongside the communes a parallel system of privately held farms. All the land turned over by the Crown and the State to the Peasant Land Bank was to be used for this purpose; to augment this reserve, he was not averse to a limited expropriation of large private estates. The critical issue to him was that the land turned over to the peasants be kept out of the hands of the communes in order to create enclaves of prosperous, independent farmsteads which in time, he hoped, would exert an irresistible attraction on peasants and encourage them to give up communal landholding. To the same end he also favored legislation that would make it easy for peasants to withdraw from the commune and claim title to their allotments.

  Such a program was for Stolypin a precondition of economic improvement, which, in turn, would provide the foundations of national stability and grandeur. (“They,” he concluded his May 1907 speech, referring to the revolutionary parties, “need great upheavals. We need a Great Russia!”) But the dissolution of the commune was to him also an essential means for raising the level of citizenship in Russia. He fully shared Witte’s dismay over the peasantry’s low cultural level.52 In his view, Russia’s greatest need was for civic education, which meant, first and foremost, inculcating in the rural population a sense of law and respect for private property. His agrarian reforms were meant, therefore, ultimately to serve a political purpose—namely, to provide a school of citizenship.

  The principles of Stolypin’s agrarian reform were by no means original, having been the subject of frequent discussions in government circles since the end of the nineteenth century.53 In February 1906, the Imperial Government discussed proposals to enable peasants to leave the commune and consolidate their holdings. A few days before he left office in April 1906, Witte had submitted a similar plan.54 The idea of dissolving the commune and promoting resettlement in Siberia now found favor even with some of the most conservative landlords, who saw in such measures a way of avoiding expropriations. The All-Russian Union of Landowners as well as the United Nobility had favored such a policy before Stolypin appeared on the scene. Stolypin’s deputy, Kryzhanovskii, says these reforms had become so urgent that if not Stolypin then some other minister would have carried them out, even the archconservative Durnovo.55 Nevertheless, as it was Stolypin who put these ideas into practice, they are indissolubly bound up with his name.

  The keystone of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms was the law of November 9, 1906: its importance becomes apparent when one considers that the communes to which it applied comprised 77.2 percent of European Russia’s rural households.56 The law freed communal peasants from the obligation of remaining in the commune. The law’s critical clause provided that “any head of a household who holds a land allotment by virtue of communal right may at any time demand to have it deeded to him as private property”—insofar as practicable, in a single, enclosed parcel. To leave the commune, peasants no longer required the concurrence of the majority of members; the decision was theirs. Having gone through the required formalities, a peasant household had the choice of claiming property title to its allotment and remaining in the village or selling out and moving away. In communes which had not practiced repartition since 1861, the allotments automatically became the property of the cultivators. Since the government concurrently annulled all remaining arrears on redemption payments (as of January 1, 1907), and one desiatina of arable land at the time fetched well over 100 rubles, the typical household of ten desiatiny could lay claim to an allotment worth over 1,000 rubles. On November 15, 1906, the Peasant Land Bank was instructed to make loans available to help peasants desiring to leave the commune.57

  The law made possible, for the first time in modern history, the emergence in central Russia of an independent peasantry of a Western type.* But it also had a deeper and more revolutionary significance in that it challenged the peasants’ deeply held conviction t
hat the land belonged to no one: it introduced the idea of the “supremacy of the fact of ownership over the juridical fact of use.”58 It is typical of late Imperial Russia that such a radical transformation of Russian agrarian conditions was promulgated under Article 87—that is, as an emergency measure: the Duma approved it only on June 14, 1910, three and a half years after it had gone into effect.

  How successful were Stolypin’s agrarian reforms? The matter is the subject of considerable controversy. One school of historians claims that they led to rapid changes in the village which would have prevented revolution were it not for Stolypin’s death and the disruptions of World War I. Another school dismisses them as a reform foisted upon unwilling peasants and undone by them immediately after the collapse of the Imperial regime.59

  The facts of the case are as follows.60 In 1905, the fifty provinces of European Russia had 12.3 million peasant households cultivating 125 million desiatiny; 77.2 percent of these households and 83.4 percent of this land were under a communal regime. In the Great Russian provinces, communal land-holding embraced 97–100 percent of the households and land. Notwithstanding claims of the opponents of the commune that repartition was falling into disuse, in central Russia it was universally practiced.

  Between 1906 and 1916, 2.5 million (or 22 percent) of the communal households, with 14.5 percent of the acreage, filed petitions to take title to their allotments. As these figures indicate, those who availed themselves of the new legislation were the poorer peasants, usually with small families, who had difficulty making ends meet: whereas the average household allotment in European Russia was around ten desiatiny, the households that withdrew from the commune averaged only three desiatiny.61

  In sum, slightly more than one communal household in five took advantage of the law of November 9. But this statistic ignores one important fact and, by doing so, makes the reform appear still more successful than it actually was. The economic drawback of the commune lay not only in the practice of repartition but also in that of strip farming, or cherespolositsa, which was an essential corollary of communal organization. Economists criticized this practice on the grounds that it forced the peasant to waste much time moving with his equipment from strip to strip and precluded intensive cultivation. Stolypin, well aware of the disadvantages of cherespolositsa, was eager to do away with it, and to this end inserted in the law a clause authorizing peasants wishing to withdraw from the commune to demand that their holdings be consolidated (enclosed). The communes, however, ignored this provision: the evidence indicates that three-quarters of the households which took title to their allotments under the Stolypin law had to accept them in scattered strips.62 Such properties were known as otruba; khutora, independent farmsteads with enclosed land, which Stolypin wanted to encourage, existed mainly in the borderlands. Thus, the pernicious practice of strip farming was little affected by the Stolypin legislation. On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, a decade after Stolypin’s reforms had gone into effect, only 10 percent of Russian peasant households operated as khutora; the remaining 90 percent continued as before to pursue strip farming.63

  On balance, therefore, the results of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms must be judged as exceedingly modest. No “agrarian revolution” occurred and no Russian yeomanry emerged. When asked why they claimed title to their allotments, one-half of the respondents said that they did so in order to sell and get out of the village: only 18.7 percent took title in order to farm more efficiently. In effect, the reform encouraged the exodus of the poorer communal elements: the better-off peasants remained in the commune, often with enlarged allotments, and nearly every peasant, communal or not, continued to practice strip farming.

  Overwhelmingly, Russian peasants rejected the very premise of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms. Surveys conducted after the reforms had been introduced show that they resented those of their neighbors who pulled out of the commune to set up private farms. Communal peasants were unshakable in the belief that the only solution to their economic difficulties lay in communal appropriation of all privately held lands. They opposed the Stolypin legislation from fear that withdrawals would worsen communal land shortages and in some cases refused to allow them, in contravention of the law.64 In the eyes of their neighbors, those who availed themselves of the Stolypin reform ceased to be peasants: indeed, under the terms of the electoral law of June 3, 1907, peasants owning 2.5 or more desiatiny qualified as “landlords.” They lived, therefore, on borrowed time. In 1917, once the old regime broke down, the otruba and khutora would be the very first objects of peasant assault: they were in no time swept away and dissolved in the communal sea like sand castles.

  Even so, significant changes did occur in Russian agriculture during and after Stolypin’s ministry, although not in consequence of his legislation.

  The gentry, having lost “taste for the land,” continued to abandon the countryside. Between 1905 and 1914, gentry landholding in European Russia declined by 12.6 percent, from 47.9 to 41.8 million desiatiny. Most of the land which the landlords sold was acquired by peasants either communally or privately. As a result, on the eve of the Revolution Russia was more than ever a country of small, self-sufficient cultivators.

  During this time, agricultural yields improved:

  C

  EREAL

  Y

  IELDS IN

  47 P

  ROVINCES OF

  E

  UROPEAN

  R

  USSIA

  65

  (kilograms per desiatina)

  Rye

  Wheat

  1891–1895

  701

  662

  1896–1900

  760

  596

  1901–1905

  794

  727

  1906–1910

  733

  672

  1911–1915

  868

  726

  Russian yields were still the lowest in Europe, bringing in one-third or less of the crops harvested in the Low Countries, Britain, and Germany—the result of unfavorable natural conditions, the virtual absence of chemical fertilizers, and the communal system. Improved yields made possible increased exports of foodstuffs: in 1911, Russia sold abroad a record 13.5 million tons of cereals.66

  Stolypin’s vision of “Great Russia” required, in addition to the restoration of public order and changes in agricultural practices, political and social reforms. As with agrarian measures, his political reforms grew out of projects formulated by the Ministry of the Interior before his arrival on the scene: a good part had been anticipated in Witte’s proposals to Nicholas II.67 Stolypin adopted and expanded these ideas, whose purpose was to modernize and Westernize Russia. Very little of this program was realized: Stolypin declared that he required twenty years to change Russia and he was given a mere five. Even so, its provisions are of interest because they indicate what the liberal bureaucracy, which was far better informed than either the Court or the intelligentsia, saw as the country’s most pressing needs. As formulated in public addresses, notably his Duma speech of March 6, 1907, and the program which he dictated privately in May 1911.* Stolypin intended the following:

  Civil rights: Protection of citizens from arbitrary arrest; abolition of administrative exile; bringing to trial officials guilty of criminal abuse of authority.

  Police: Abolition of the Corps of Gendarmes as a separate entity and its merger with the regular police; gendarmes to be deprived of the authority to conduct political investigations; an end to the practice of employing agents provocateurs to infiltrate revolutionary movements.

  Administration: Creation of a Ministry of Self-government; replacing the peasant volost’ with an all-estate, self-governing unit whose officials would combine administrative and police functions; major reform of zemstva which would endow them with powers comparable to those enjoyed by state governments in the United States; elections to zemstva to be based on a democratic franchise; the bureaucracy’s authority
over zemstva to be confined to ensuring the legality of their actions; the introduction of zemstva into the western provinces of the empire.

  Ethnic minorities: Creating a Ministry of Nationalities; full equality for all citizens regardless of nationality and religion; administrative decentralization in the areas populated largely by non-Russians to allow the latter a greater voice in running their affairs; elimination of the Pale of Settlement and other discriminatory laws against the Jews.

  Social legislation: Formation of ministries of Social Security, of Health, and of Labor; compulsory elementary schooling; state insurance for the aged and disabled; a national health program; full legalization of trade unions.

  To carry out this program Stolypin required the powers of a Peter the Great, or, barring that, at least the unstinting support of the Crown. He enjoyed neither, and hence only a small part of his reform agenda saw the light of day.

  The difficulties he faced are illustrated by his unsuccessful effort to improve the status of Russia’s Jews. High bureaucratic circles had recognized for years that something had to be done about the medieval legislation regulating Jewish subjects. This sense was inspired less by humanitarian than by political considerations. The security police had been aware for some time of the disproportionate number of Jewish youths in the revolutionary movement, and although many of its members believed that Jews were a sinister race bent on subverting and destroying Christian society, more intelligent police officials attributed the young Jews’ radicalism to the obstacles which Russian laws placed in the way of their career opportunities. There were also powerful financial reasons for abolishing Jewish disabilities. The director of the Banc de Paris et Pays Bas expressed a view prevalent among foreign financiers when he advised Kokovtsov, the Finance Minister, that it would benefit Russia’s international standing if she granted her Jewish subjects civil equality.68 Russia’s treatment of Jews poisoned relations with the United States, which objected repeatedly to the refusal of the Russian authorities to grant entry visas to American citizens of Jewish faith. In December 1911, the U.S. Senate, on the recommendation of President Taft, would unanimously renounce the U.S. Russian treaty of 1832 on these grounds.*