Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (review)

Williams sets out to test North's theory regarding the impossibility of liberal reform in an illiberal regime from the perspective of the modern law and economics movement.¹ As his case study, he has chosen the Stolypin agrarian reforms, which he sees as a government attempt to establish a private-property regime in Russia, and which, if true, would, according to theory, provide the basis for the development of a liberal, democratic society. Meantime, in the course of this work, Williams destroys, with a precision appropriate for one trained in the law, some of the most enduring myths of late imperial Russian history, with special reference to the peasantry. In particular, he rejects the long-prevailing consensus that Russian peasants lived in a closed and more or less autarkic and egalitarian society and opposed the changes associated with the market in the interest of preserving its traditional culture. Rather, and joining with an emerging historiography, he adopts a less deterministic view that regards the peasantry as open to change, adaptable to new opportunities, and willing to participate in the developing money economy. Of particular note is his close analysis of the reform legislation and his conclusion that not only did the government show little coercive intent; "no absolutely neutral resolution [of the conflicting interests] was possible" (223).

The one weakness of this work is its over-reliance on theory and its oversimplification of the importance of deeply embedded cultural assumptions within Russia's elites and the imperatives of the bureaucratic political process. Contrary to his claim, the establishment of a private-property regime as a solution to Russia's peasant/agrarian problem was never among the government's goals. Rather, what the imperial government sought, as it had since at least the time of Peter the Great, was to stimulate and encourage the population to assume more responsibility for their own social and economic affairs and to become more deeply involved in matters of local administration—that is, the creation of a civil society, though not necessarily based on private property.

In the end, however, although Williams does not consider the reforms to be an exception to North's theory, in that no relinquishment of power took place, he views them as economically successful (though, in this reviewer's opinion, five years was too short a time span to permit definitive conclusions) and finds that they had potential for encouraging the development of a liberal/democratic society. Thus, his conclusions, perhaps inadvertently, undermine any necessary or causal link between the ownership of private property and liberal democracy. The volume concludes with a brief analysis of Russia's current agrarian reforms, which seem considerably worse than their predecessors a century ago, though, in this case, a private-property regime was the goal of the "Washington consensus" rather than of the Russian government.

This work is not based on original research, but it utilizes a wide range of secondary studies in both English and Russian. Notwithstanding the inevitable dryness of analyses of legislation, it is a well written contribution to the field and both easy and enjoyable to read.