On their creation in 1864, zemstva had not been introduced into nine of the provinces taken from Poland in the Partitions. The elections to the zemstva were heavily skewed in favor of the landowning nobility, and in the western provinces, a high proportion of this nobility were Catholic Poles, who the government feared would exploit the zemstva for their nationalistic ends. (The Polish Rebellion of 1863 had just been crushed.) Intelligent bureaucrats, however, came eventually to realize that given the low cultural level of the Russian element in the borderlands, it was necessary to give non-Russians there a voice in local government.95 Stolypin had spoken of introducing zemstva into the western provinces as early as August 1906, but he first formulated a legislative bill to this effect in 1909. Although it had a liberal aspect in that it gave, for the first time, the ethnic minorities of that area a voice in self-government, the bill was primarily designed to please the right wing, on which Stolypin had now come increasingly to depend: according to Kryzhanovskii, the landed gentry deputies from the western provinces were insistently pressing such a demand on him.96
22. Right-wing Duma deputies. Sitting in front on extreme left, V. Purishkevich, the assassin of Rasputin.
In his bill, Stolypin sought to ensure a preponderant voice in the western zemstva for the Russian landed gentry and peasant proprietors. Because there were virtually no Russian landlords or landowning peasants in Vilno, Kovno, and Grodno, these provinces were excluded from the bill, which applied only to six western provinces (Vitebsk, Volhynia, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev, and Podolia). In the latter provinces, Russian preponderance was to be guaranteed by a complicated voting procedure employing electoral chambers. Jewish citizens were to be entirely disenfranchised.97
The Duma opened discussion on the western zemstvo bill on May 7, 1910. In a speech urging passage, Stolypin asserted that its main purpose was to ensure that the western provinces remained “forever Russian”: this required protecting the Russian minority from the Polish Catholic majority. The bill, supported by the Nationalists and other deputies of the right, passed on May 29, after heated debate and with amendments, on a close vote.
In January 1911 the revised bill went before the upper chamber. Given its nationalistic tenor, passage seemed a foregone conclusion. Stolypin felt so confident that he did not even bother to attend the discussions in the State Council, since a commission of that body had approved the bill.98
Unbeknownst to him, however, a backstage intrigue was set in motion. Several members of the State Council, led by Vladimir Trepov, organized, with the help of Durnovo, opposition to Stolypin. The bill’s opponents charged that by offering the Poles a separate electoral chamber Stolypin institutionalized ethnic particularism, thus violating the traditional “Imperial” character of Russian legislation. Witte, one of the bill’s most vociferous opponents, argued that “under the flag of patriotism they are striving to create in the western land a local oligarchy in place of tsarist authority.”99 But the true purpose of the camarilla was to bring down Stolypin.
Trepov and Durnovo asked for private audiences with the Tsar. After they had laid before him their objections, Nicholas agreed to release the right-wing deputies in the State Council from having to follow the government’s recommendation: they could vote as their conscience dictated.100 In giving them this freedom, Nicholas neither sought the advice of his Prime Minister nor informed him of it. Stolypin, therefore, had no cause for apprehension when he appeared in the State Council on March 4 to witness the final vote on his bill. Many of the deputies who would have voted for it if the Tsar had instructed them to do so now felt free to cast negative ballots. As a consequence, the bill’s key clause, with the controversial proposal for two electoral chambers, one for Russians, the other for Poles and the other ethnic groups, went down in defeat, 92–68. Stunned, Stolypin stalked out of the Council chamber.
He could be under no illusion: the incident was a vote of no confidence in him, ostensibly cast by the upper chamber but in fact engineered by the Imperial Court. Furious, he decided to force the Tsar to reveal his hand. The next day, he submitted his resignation. Nicholas rejected it and urged Stolypin to reconsider. Why not resubmit the bill to the Duma and the State Council, he suggested, implying that on the next round he would ask that it be supported. Stolypin refused. When the Tsar asked what he would like him to do, he requested that both houses be prorogued long enough to allow the bill to be enacted under Article 87.* He further asked that Trepov and Durnovo be exiled from St. Petersburg.
Nicholas pondered Stolypin’s request for four days, and then granted it. On March 12, both chambers were prorogued until March 15. Having learned of this decision, the State Council quickly took a vote on the entire bill, which resulted in its being rejected by the overwhelming majority of 134–23.101 On March 14 the western zemstvo bill was promulgated under Article 87. Durnovo and Trepov had to to leave the capital until the end of the year.†
Stolypin’s precipitate action had disastrous consequences, alienating from him all political parties.102 When he appeared before the Duma to justify his actions, he had virtually no supporters. The press condemned him; so did high society. Guchkov resigned in protest as head of the Octobrist Party: the cooperation between Stolypin and the Octobrists, which had proved so constructive in the first two years of the Third Duma, now came to an end. Last, but not least, Stolypin incurred the enmity of the Tsar, who never forgave anyone for humiliating him: and that Stolypin had done so was clear to public opinion, which realized full well that in proroguing the Duma and exiling Durnovo and Trepov the Tsar had acted under duress.103 In official circles it was said at this time that Nicholas had made up his mind to be rid of Stolypin, and that his days as Prime Minister were numbered.104 Isolated and spurned, he became, in the words of Kokovtsov, “a completely changed man”105—brooding and irritable where he had been supremely self-confident and magnanimous.
The Empress Dowager Marie, the mother of Nicholas II, who had always urged him to come to terms with society and favored liberal officials, shared with Kokovtsov her sense of despair at these developments:
My poor son, how little luck he has with people. Someone turns up whom no one here knew, but who proves to be intelligent and energetic, and manages to restore order after the horrors which we had gone through nearly six years ago. And now this man is being pushed into the abyss. And by whom? By those who claim to love the Tsar and Russia, and in reality are destroying him and the Fatherland.… How dreadful!
106
Stolypin was in virtual disgrace when he departed in late August 1911 for Kiev for celebrations attending the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II. He had long had premonitions of violent death: in his last will, drawn up in 1906, he had requested to be buried near the site of his murder.107 Before leaving, he told Kryzhanovskii that he feared he might not return, and entrusted to him a strongbox with secret papers, which he asked to be destroyed if anything happened to him.* He took no precautions to protect himself, however, leaving behind his bodyguards as well as his bulletproof vest.
In Kiev, he was ignored by the Imperial couple and high dignitaries: the humiliation was unmistakable.
In the evening of September 1, the Kiev Municipal Theater scheduled a performance of Rimskii-Korsakov’s The Story of Tsar Saltan. Nicholas, accompanied by his daughters, occupied the governor’s loge on the orchestra level. Stolypin sat nearby, in the front row. During the second intermission, around 10 p.m., as he stood chatting in front of the orchestra pit with Counts Potocki and Fredericks, a young man in coattails drew near. He pulled a Browning from under the program with which he had concealed it and fired twice at the Prime Minister. Both bullets struck, one in the hand, the other in the chest: the first ricocheted and wounded a musician; the other hit Stolypin’s chest but was deflected by a medal and lodged in the liver. According to an eyewitness, Stolypin at first seemed not to realize what had happened:
He lowered his head and stared at his white tunic, which on the right side, under the che
st, was beginning to stain with blood. With slow and sure motions he put his service hat and gloves on the barrier, unbuttoned the tunic, and seeing the waistcoat thick with blood, made a motion as if to say, “It’s all over.” He then sank into a chair and clearly, distinctly, in a voice audible to all who were nearby, said, “I am happy to die for the Tsar.” On seeing the Tsar enter the loge and stand in front, he lifted his hands motioning him to withdraw. But the Tsar did not move, remaining in place, whereupon Peter Arkadevich, in full view of all, blessed him with a broad sign of the cross.
108
Stolypin was rushed to a hospital. He seemed to be making a good recovery when an infection set in; he died in the evening of September 5.* The next day, the central Kiev railroad terminal teemed with panic-stricken Jews. Thanks to the firm action by the authorities, however, no anti-Jewish violence occurred.
The assassin, who had been caught and pummeled while attempting to flee the scene of the crime, turned out to be a twenty-four-year-old lawyer, Dmitrii Grigorevich Bogrov, the son of a wealthy Jewish Kievan family.109 At home and on his frequent trips abroad he had flitted in and out of SR and anarchist circles. Although well provided for by doting parents, he often ran out of money because of his passion for gambling and it is fairly certain that it was financial need that drove him to become a police agent. According to his testimony, from the middle of 1907 until late 1910 he had served as an informer for the Kiev Okhrana, supplying information that enabled it to apprehend SR and anarchist terrorists.
The revolutionaries grew suspicious of Bogrov. At first they accused him of embezzling party funds, but eventually concluded that he had to be a police agent. On August 16, 1911, Bogrov was visited by a revolutionary who told him that his role as a police informer had been established beyond doubt and that he faced “execution”: he could save himself only by committing a terrorist act, preferably against Colonel N. N. Kuliabko, the chief of the Kiev Okhrana. This had to be done by September 5. Bogrov visited Kuliabko, but he received from him such a warm welcome that he could not go through with his mission. He next considered assassinating the Tsar, due in Kiev in a few days, but gave up this plan for fear of precipitating anti-Jewish pogroms. He finally settled on Stolypin as the “man mainly responsible for the reaction which had established itself in Russia.”†
To divert attention from himself and his plans, Bogrov concocted an imaginary plot against Stolypin and L. A. Kasso, the Minister of Education, by two fictitious terrorists. On August 26, he told Colonel Kuliabko that the pair would come to Kiev during the celebrations and use his apartment as a base of operations. Kuliabko, who is said to have been of a “soft” and “trusting” disposition,110 had no reason to disbelieve Bogrov, since he had proven a reliable informant in the past. He had Bogrov’s apartment house surrounded with agents, giving Bogrov the run of the city. On August 29, Bogrov stalked Stolypin in a park, and on September 1 daytime approached him as he was being photographed in the Hippodrome, but on neither occasion could he get close enough to shoot.
The Okhrana, in possession of information supplied by Bogrov, recommended to the Prime Minister that he not appear in public unattended, but he disregarded this warning. He behaved like a man reconciled to his fate, a man who had nothing left to live for, who may have even courted martyrdom.
For Bogrov, time was running out: his last opportunity might very well be the evening of September 1 during the performance at the Municipal Theater. Tickets were hard to come by because of tight security precautions and public demand. Bogrov told the police that he feared for his safety if the terrorists whom he had identified were apprehended and he could not produce a satisfactory alibi. He had to have a ticket to the theater. This was delivered to him only one hour before the beginning of the performance.
On September 9, after a week of questioning, Bogrov was turned over to the Kiev Military Court, which sentenced him to death. He was hanged during the night of September 10–11, in the presence of witnesses who wanted to make sure that an ordinary convict was not substituted for Bogrov, whose police connections had become public knowledge by then.
As soon as it became known that Bogrov had entered the theater on a police pass, rumors spread that he had acted on behalf of the government. These rumors have not died to this day. The leading suspect was and remains General P. G. Kurlov, the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, who took charge of Kievan security during the Imperial visit and was known to have had bureaucratic differences with the Prime Minister.111 This theory, however, rests on very slender evidence. The inability of the police to prevent the murder of the Prime Minister appears rather the result of a not uncommon failure of the technique of using double agents: after all, the greatest double agent of all, Evno Azef, also occasionally had had to betray his employers in order to maintain credibility with the terrorists—to the point of arranging for the murder of his chief, Plehve. As for the fact that the police gave Bogrov an admission ticket to the theater, that, too, makes good sense in view of the scenario which he had managed to foist on them. In his memoirs, Kurlov recalled that five years earlier, under similar circumstances, the Kiev Okhrana had allowed a double agent into the Municipal Theater to forestall a terrorist attack on the governor-general.112 On closer scrutiny, the conspiratorial theories of Stolypin’s death do not hold up. Since it was widely believed that he would soon be dismissed, his enemies had no need to resort to murder to be rid of him, the more so in view of the fact that the prime suspect of the crime, the gendarmerie, had no assurance that Bogrov, acting in self-defense, would not betray its involvement. That the tsarist authorities could have been suspected of instigating the murder of the Prime Minister tells more about the poisoned political atmosphere of late Imperial Russia than about the facts of the case.
An assessment of Stolypin has to distinguish the man from his achievement.
He towered over the Russian statesmen of his era: to appreciate his stature, one only needs to compare him with his successors, mostly nonentities, sometimes incompetents, selected on the criterion of personal loyalty to the Crown and dedicated to serving its interests, not those of the nation. He gave Russia, traumatized by the Revolution of 1905, a sense of national purpose and hope. He elevated politics above both partisanship and utopianism.
To admit his personal greatness, however, is not to concede that had he lived Stolypin would have prevented a revolution. To steer the country toward stability, he required unfailing backing from the Crown and at least some measure of support from liberal and conservative parties. He had neither. His grand project of political and social reform remained largely on paper and his main accomplishment, the agrarian reform, was wiped out in 1917 by the spontaneous action of communal peasants. By the time he died, he was politically finished: as Guchkov put it, Stolypin “had died politically long before his physical death.”113
Nothing illustrates better the hopelessness of Stolypin’s endeavors than the indifference with which the Imperial couple reacted to his murder. Ten days after the Prime Minister had been shot, Nicholas wrote his mother an account of the visit to Kiev. In it, he treated Stolypin’s death as a mere episode in the round of receptions, parades, and other diversions. When he communicated the news of Stolypin’s death to his wife, he wrote, “she took the news rather calmly.”114 Indeed, when not long afterward Alexandra discussed the event with Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor, she chided him for being too much affected by Stolypin’s death:
It seems that you hold in too high esteem [Stolypin’s] memory and attach too much importance to his activity and person.… One must not feel such sorrow for those who have departed.… Everyone fulfills his role and mission, and when someone no longer is with us it is because he has carried out his task and had to be effaced since he no longer had anything left to do.… I am convinced that Stolypin died to yield his post to you, and that this is for Russia’s good.
115
Although he lost his life to a revolutionary, Stolypin was politically destroyed by the very
people whom he had tried to save.
The three years that separated the death of Stolypin from the outbreak of World War I are difficult to characterize because they were filled with contradictory trends, some of which pointed to stabilization, others to breakdown.
On the surface, Russia’s situation looked promising: an impression confirmed by the renewed flow of foreign investments. Stolypin’s repression, accompanied by economic prosperity, had succeeded in restoring order. Conservatives and radicals agreed, with different emotions, that Russia had weathered the Revolution of 1905. In liberal and revolutionary circles the prevailing mood was one of gloom: the monarchy had once again managed to outwit its opponents by making concessions when in trouble and withdrawing them as soon as its position solidified. Although terrorism did not entirely die out, it never recovered from revelations made in 1908 that the leader of the SR Combat Organization, Azef, was a police agent.
The economy was booming. Agricultural yields in central Russia increased measurably. In 1913 iron production, compared with 1900, grew by 57.8 percent, while coal production more than doubled. In the same period, Russian exports and imports more than doubled as well.116 Thanks to strict controls on the emission of bank notes, the ruble was among the stablest currencies in the world. A French economist forecast in 1912 that if Russia maintained until 1950 the pace of economic growth that she had had since 1900, by the middle of the twentieth century she would dominate Europe politically, economically, and financially.117 Economic growth allowed the Treasury to rely less than before on foreign loans and even to retire some debt: by 1914, after decades of continuous growth, Russia’s state indebtedness finally showed a downward trend.118 The budget also showed a positive course: between 1910 and 1913 it had a surplus three years out of four, with the “extraordinary” part of the budget taken into account.119
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