P.A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (review)

P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. By Abraham Ascher (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001) 468 pp. $55.00

Stolypin, Russia's prime minister from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, has always been perceived in contradictory ways: a liberal reformer who was Russia's last, best hope for salvation from threatening revolution; a brutal tyrant, a determined seeker of power who rose to the top with astonishing swiftness; and a public servant selflessly devoted to his country's welfare. Denigrated in Soviet historiography, in post-Soviet Russia he has become for some a hero and martyr. What has never been disputed is that Stolypin was one of only two men (the other was Sergei Witte) with a claim to the title of statesman in imperial Russia's last decades.

Ascher, author of the standard history of the 1905 Revolution, the phenomenon that promoted Stolypin from his provincial governorship to the Council of Ministers, has written the first scholarly study of Stolypin's political career based on broad access to Russian archives.¹ Ascher has no axe to grind. He has examined in depth the available primary sources, unpublished and published, as well as the secondary literature in Russian, English, German, and French. He traces Stolypin's years in power in detail, quoting extensively from Stolypin, his supporters, and his opponents and focusing on the interplay of personalities.

What emerges from Ascher's work is a more complex picture of Stolypin than previously available. A man devoted above all to political and social order and to the principle of monarchical authority, Stolypin was convinced that the avoidance of another round of revolution necessitated such basic reforms as replacing peasant communes with individual peasant proprietors and establishing local government institutions on the basis of property ownership rather than social-estate membership. He accepted Russia's parliament as a useful innovation, but he saw it as the junior partner of the emperor and the government.

Stolypin's record as prime minister was mixed. He succeeded in launching his agrarian reform program, accompanied by the state's commitment to mass education; in extending limited self-government (zemstvo institutions) to six western provinces with populations that were heavily non-Russian; and in integrating Finland more fully into the empire. Some of his successes, however, were accomplished by unconstitutional means. He failed in his attempt to reform government at the subprovincial level. Rigid and uncompromising, he alienated political leaders and groups of both the left and the right. Once the immediate threat of revolution was past, his political position became precarious. He never attempted to form a political base of his own, and his position was wholly dependent on the wavering favor of Nicholas II.

Ascher's masterful account gives the prime minister the credit that he deserves, but it also creates the sad image of a well-intentioned reformer who was the victim of his devotion to the monarchy (so inadequately embodied in Nicholas II), of his own uncompromising nature, and of his readiness to use illegal means to implement reforms. More important, Stolypin was the victim of a quasiparliamentary system dominated by the representatives of 30,000 landed nobles with little interest in reform and by a narrow-minded emperor who never accepted even the modest constraints recently placed on his power. Stolypin's tenure as prime minister testifies to his severely limited capacity to alleviate Russia's dire post-1905 situation.