The appointment of Petr Arkadevich Stolypin as premier of the Russian Empire in 1906 brought with it the promise of reform. Although Stolypin became infamous for his use of political repression to stabilize Russian society in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, he also implemented major initiatives intended to deepen that stabilization. Because Stolypin's assassination in 1911 was followed shortly thereafter by war and revolution, it is impossible to assess the long-term effects of his reforms. Since large numbers of peasants left the commune and formed private farmsteads after 1906, some observers believe the reform was successful; millions of people were dissatisfied with the communal way of life and set out on their own. Yet, as others point out, the majority of Russian peasants did not establish private farms in the period between the implementation of the reforms and 1914. Moreover, when central authority collapsed in 1917, the communal form of land tenure reemerged. The question of whether Stolypin's reforms could have averted revolution and successfully addressed the problems of rural Russia remains central to considerations of the era.

Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, the last great statesman of Imperial Russia, served as premier from 1906 until his assassination in 1911. During that half decade he put forward an ambitious agenda of reforms designed to help the peasantry develop the citizenship skills they needed to become integrated fully into Russia's incipient civil society in accordance with the original intentions of the Great Reforms of 1861, which had abolished serfdom and attempted to establish procedures by which they could become landowners. He thought that this goal could be accomplished only if the zemstvo (rural local self-government) and municipal administrations cooperated closely with the national government. Stolypin believed that government "supervision over the activity of public agencies must be confined predominantly to the observation of the legality of these agencies' activities." The zemstva could thus assist Stolypin in the gradual closure of the cultural and psychological gulf between the two Russia “fronts”: the masses, which still existed in a state of legal segregation, and educated and privileged society.

Stolypin was aware of the tsarist regime's limited social underpinnings and familiar with the zemstva from his tenure as governor of Grodno and Saratov provinces. He envisioned a new social and civic order in the countryside.. His reforms included democratization of elections to the existing uezd (county) zemstva, the reduction of noble influence by replacing the county gentry marshal with an appointed official, and the establishment of all-estate local government at the most basic local level, the peasants' volost' (canton) zemstvo. While no liberal, Stolypin shared the zemtsy's belief that only such fundamental reform of local government could provide vital connections between the village and the state and make Russian peasants into conservative citizens who would support the changing state order. Implicit in this viewpoint was the understanding that such an overhaul of local government would come at the expense of the landholding nobility's traditional dominance.

At the same time, Stolypin's government was sympathetic to the idea of slowly expanding the zemstva into the borderlands, areas of the empire where there were few nobles (and hence where peasants would largely control any new lands) or where the nobility was largely non-Russian (as was the case in the Polish provinces of the empire, for example). As proponents of zemstvo expansion had long argued, the economic and cultural backwardness of Siberia, the Caucasus, and the western provinces (even compared to the Russian heartland) could partly be explained by the absence of elected local governments. In addition to bringing improved health care, better roads, and schools to these regions, zemstvo expansion

also promised to foster the integration of the empire, although such prospects ran against the grain of unsystematic efforts at Russification (the attempt by the last two tsars to stifle the emerging national consciousness of Russia's ethnic minorities by discriminating against their religions and languages) and involved risks related to turning over local self-government to non-elite or non-Russian hands.

Of equal importance was Stolypin's effort to ease the peasant's so-called land shortage by facilitating their resettlement in Siberia. In fact, Russian peasants had more land per capita than other European counterparts; their economic distress was largely the result of their inefficient cultivation techniques and the paralyzing influence of the commune. Their perception of disadvantage, whether grounded in reality or not, was a powerful undercurrent in the countryside that Stolypin knew had to be defused. The tsarist government had formerly discouraged peasant migration to preserve a supply of cheap labor for the nobility, but the overpopulation of the European provinces made it, in Stolypin's words, essential "to relieve the congestion of some provinces in Russia." The plan for resettling peasants in Siberia and the Far East was part of Stolypin's attempt to bring the peasantry into the modern era in both the political and economic sense. He hoped to create a class of rural property holders east and west of the Urals. As with his attempt to break up the commune and replace it with a class of smallholders who would presumably be loyal to the throne, Stolypin did not devise the plan himself. He was the one who forcefully and tenaciously promoted it.

All Stolypin's reforms (especially that of local government) were connected to other projects designed to break down peasant particularism and make peasants into citizens--most notably dismantling the rural commune and achieving universal schooling. During the period of 1906-1911, peasant-oriented zemstvo activity expanded most dramatically since these institutions had been established during the era of the Great Reforms. Zemstvo budgets had unprecedented and steady increases as a result of the expansion of existing programs and the creation of new fields of activity such as agronomy and adult education. State grants increased from 2 million rubles in 1907 to more than 40 million rubles by 1913. The largest share of these grants went to schools (22.7 million in 1913), amounting to about one-quarter of zemstvo spending on education. Zemstvo spending grew at an even faster rate than state subsidies during this time period. By 1914 zemstvo spending on education surpassed spending on medicine for the first time.

Peasants began to pressure the government for more schools and assistance. Despite the undemocratic franchise the zemstvo still embodied the all-estate principle and the public interest at large, factors that marked their transformation into legitimate organs of popular expression. New procedures adopted by decree on 5 October 1906 restored direct peasant voting in zemstvo elections and deprived provincial governors of the right to select peasant zemstvo deputies from lists of candidates chosen by peasant voters, a scheme that had often ensured the installation of peasant officials who were dependent on tutelage from the bureaucracy. An emerging cohort of younger peasants, many of whom were products of the zemstvo schools, played a more assertive role in zemstvo sessions. In other words, despite Stolypin's failure to gain noble acquiescence to the introduction of the canton all-estate zemstvo (which no amount of noble gerrymandering could have prevented the peasants from dominating), the zemstvo touched ever-widening circles of peasants, and within the village there were elements (though still a minority) pressing for wider participation and inclusion in local government.

On the other it could be argued that Premier Stolypin wagered in vain on "the sober and the strong"

because he was essentially betting against the strength of Russian cultural traditions. He looked to the West, where centuries of internal developments had favored private property and paved the way for the development of a bourgeoisie that successfully transformed an agrarian economy into an industrial economy. Historical patterns of Russian landownership differed so substantially from those of the industrialized democracies of the West that Stolypin's reforms, though revolutionary and farsighted, were necessarily stillborn.

Having risen to political prominence as governor of the agricultural province of Saratov, Stolypin understood keenly the extent to which Russian peasantry was economically inefficient. Although he attracted the tsar's attention because of his use of force against peasants who took part in the Revolution of 1905, he made it clear as premier that he had acted decisively to defend private property, not to oppress the peasants further. On the contrary, at the heart of his reforms lay the desire to turn the peasants into individual property owners who--because they would then feel invested in the system--would respect the need for law and order. As Stolypin wrote, "private peasant ownership is a guarantee of order, because each small owner represents the nucleus on which rests the stability of the state." In this sense, Stolypin's plans were as ambitious as the emancipation of the serfs had been in 1861: both sets of reforms were designed to incorporate the peasantry into the empire as productive and supportive subjects, if not quite citizens, of the autocracy.

Like the Great Reformers before him, however, Stolypin could not devise a satisfactory set of means to achieve his ends. He attempted to tackle two problems simultaneously because of their intrinsic connection: hierarchical social relations and unproductive agriculture. As a result of the first reforms in the 1860s, the obshchina (village assembly of male elders) was entrusted with the responsibility of making the payment to the state for the lands procured from the emancipation, which left about two-thirds of Russian farmland in peasant hands. This role gave the obshchina tremendous power over all members of the village commune because it made decisions about the portion of the collective payment for which each family was responsible. Keeping this system in place perpetuated the practice of cultivating land in disaggregated strips, which were worked by different families on a rotating basis. By canceling the collective redemption payments and making it legally possible for individuals to consolidate strips and withdraw from communal land tenure, Stolypin launched a frontal assault on the social institution that had held the overwhelming majority of the population together for hundreds of years.

The other plank in Stolypin's reforms, improving agricultural productivity, also faced an historical political impediment: taking land from the gentry to give to the peasantry. Rural unrest during the Revolution of 1905 had taught many landowners the lessons that their predecessors had failed to learn from centuries of peasant rebellions, and many were eager to sell portions, or all, of their estates to the government, via the Peasant Land Bank, for repurchase by the peasants. Also looking to profit from rapidly rising land prices, the already brisk sale of noble land increased dramatically after 1905. In the first year of Stolypin's reforms, the Peasant Bank purchased almost 183 million acres from noble landowners for redistribution to peasants. Additionally, Stolypin opened up for peasant colonization state-owned lands in the frontiers of Western Siberia, where the communal structure was not embedded. He also increased funds available through the Peasant Bank for the loans necessary to expand and improve cultivated territories.

Initially, more than a million peasant households responded positively to Stolypin's initiatives: 508,000 households petitioned to leave their communes in 1908, and 580,000 in the next year. But after this initial enthusiasm, the numbers began to decline. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, only 20 percent of the peasantry claimed personal ownership of their property, and just 14 percent of peasant-owned agricultural land was no longer held communally. Although they purchased new lands, peasants were dissatisfied with the obligation to pay for land that they had traditionally farmed as serfs or hired laborers; they usually considered the land to be theirs by right. As for Stolypin's dream of creating independent, enclosed farmsteads (as opposed to the disaggregated farming strips)--homes to "the capable, industrious peasant, the salt of the Russian earth"--less than 11 percent of peasant lands had been consolidated in this way by 1916. The so-called Stolypin trains, transporting potential colonizers to the East, had already begun to run less frequently by 1910, when a crop failure in Siberia prompted 20 percent of that year's colonizers to reboard the trains heading back to their homes in the West. Though some have blamed peasant inertia for these poor results and ennobled the commune as an essential form of Russian egalitarianism, much of the failure was the fault of the government. It lacked the will to break up the communes once and for all or to implement a compulsory redistribution of noble land (as, for example, Britain was doing around the same time with government-sponsored financial compensation for the landowners). The government also failed to provide such fundamental necessities as surveyors to oversee the consolidation of strips.

Tellingly, in his attempt to implant the roots of economic liberalism, Stolypin used the illiberal political tactics that autocracy allowed him. Instead of taking his plans to the deliberative legislative body, the State Duma, which began meeting in April 1906, he implemented his reforms by using a loophole clause in the Russian quasi constitution, Article 87, which allowed the tsar to promulgate laws when the Duma was not in session. The high-handedness of this measure did not endear Stolypin to the elected reformers, many of whom advocated more-radical measures. This contradiction exposes Stolypin's fundamental failure: he wanted to change the mentality of others, but not his own.