Stolypin is a complex, contradictory, and quite fascinating figure in late Russian imperial history. Even though he was assassinated before the onset of the First World War, the events of 1917 caused contemporaries to look back and proclaim him as either the last gasp of the old tsarist order or the last hope for the Romanovs to master modernity. Stolypin's actual reforms were a mixture of very progressive economic initiatives and a very reactionary set of political directives to strengthen tsarist autocracy. As a whole, the overall results of these reforms were quite mixed, in no small measure because they were trying to achieve such contradictory ends.

On purely the short-term level, Stolypin's reforms wanted to arrest the erosion of tsarist political authority that had occurred because of the Revolutions of 1905. This revolution shook most of the autocratic state to its core, but as Minister of the Interior, Stolypin was able to achieve restore a modicum of order throughout the empire. This was achieved often through the use of extralegal violence through field court-martials ("Stolypin necktie" was a slang term for the noose in this period) convened throughout the Russian countryside. Stolypin also used extrajudicial means to try and break the power of the Russian Duma, a parliamentary body Nicholas II was forced to concede in light of the events of 1905. Stolypin was able to force the dissolving of the first two Dumas, which were mostly composed of liberal Kadets (constitutional democrats) through very dodgy legal shenanigans and managed to ram through an electoral law that resulted in a more conservative and Great Russian-centric Duma.

But defanging the Duma as an alternative source of political power was only one part of Stolypin's master plan for a reenergized tsarist state. In marked contrast to most Russian elite, Stolypin staked the Romanov's future upon the Russian peasantry. Here Stolypin departed from a number of his contemporaries who viewed the peasantry as an alien and backwards mass. Conversely, some of the radical-minded elite romanticized the peasantry as a utopian commune that lived apart from the rest of society. In both ethos and form, As Prime Minister, Stolypin's agrarian reforms went against the grain of conservative imperial politics since they were predicated upon giving the peasantry a stake in the political order. But Stolypin believed that a managed reform of the Russian countryside would transform the peasantry into a stable class of yeoman landowners. These agrarian reforms sought to break patterns of communal ownership and set up institutions like the Land Bank that gave the peasantry access to state credit and new technology. These agrarian reforms were not popular even in the conservative third Duma, but Stolypin defended them "a wager on the strong and sober."

The agrarian reforms garnered only mixed results, although the intervention of war certainly did not help their implementation. By 1915, around a quarter of Russian peasants households had elected to leave the commune, but the commune remained a powerful social and political institution inside the Russian countryside. The administrative poverty of the tsarist state made the privatization of land a much more protracted process and a massive backlog of cases inhibited the peasantry from leaving the commune.

Stolypin's attempts to neuter the Duma also were decidedly mixed. Although he engineered a right-wing takeover of the institution, the Russian conservative forces in the Duma, the State Council (the upper chamber), and the imperial court did not relish Stolypin's various reforms. As the events of 1905 receded in immediate memory, consensus among the various conservative factions Stolypin relied upon to push through his legislation splintered and he found the Duma less likely to be a pliant instrument from 1908 onward. Like its German contemporary, the Duma discovered although it lacked many elements of real power, it could use budgetary battles to wring concessions from or weaken executive authority. The 1908 fights and palace intrigues over the establishment and reconstruction of the Russian Navy were particularly fierce and taxed Stolypin's political skills. The agrarian reforms also foundered alongside the vexing national question. Stolypin had hoped that extending the Russian rural institution of the zemstvo to the Western Borderlands, he could simultaneously enact agrarian reform in this region, Russify the region's peasantry, and break the political power of the Polish landowners who were the allies of his enemies in the State Council. In the contentious 1910/11 Duma session, Stolypin's enemies gutted the Western Zemstvo Bill, but even this watered-down bill could not pass muster and Stolypin resigned.

Whether or not Stolypin could have returned to power had he not been assassinated in 1911 is an open question. Although his program of reform was predicated upon preserving the institution of the Romanov autocracy, Nicholas II intensely disliked his Prime Minister and shed little tears when he resigned. His tsarist successors certainly lacked his ambitious vision, but many of Stolypin's reforms were quite impractical for the tsarist state to achieve. Although some anticommunists after 1917, most notably Alexander Gerschenkron, latched onto the idea that Stolypin's reforms could have modernized the empire and achieved the same results as the USSR without the attendant bloodshed and social upheaval. But Stolypin's hostility to any overall diminution of tsarist state power meant that while his agrarian reform was quite progressive, he did not want to radically alter tsarist state structures. The chronic understaffing of the imperial bureaucracy and the autocratic ethos of tsardom created a vast gulf between society and the state. Additionally, a program of vast domestic reform required a degree of international stability, but Stolypin's foreign policy apparatus was chaotic and disorganized and he put little effort in rectifying this lest he denude the tsar of his authority. Stolypin's attempt to make a peasant-based Great Russian nationalism the cornerstone of a twentieth-century tsardom was particularly problematic for an empire in which at best, Great Russians constituted less than 50 percent of the population. So while Stolypin's agenda succeeded in the short-term, these problems would remain a Gordian knot for his successors.

Sources

Ascher, Abraham. P.A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Clowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Lieven, D. C. B. The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution. New York: Viking, 2015.