Government Actions and Peasant Reactions During the Stolypin Reforms

Abstract

Historical interest in the Stolypin reforms has traditionally focused on their economic, juridical, and administrative results, as measured primarily by governmental and local statistical studies.¹ Unfortunately, tsarism’s revolutionary outcome has dictated a generally negative evaluation of the reforms’ impact in the countryside among both Western and Soviet historians. Such evaluations have been reinforced by the studies of a number of Soviet historians who, like S. M. Dubrovskii, have argued that the use of force to implement the reforms was widespread and was even condoned by the government in pursuit of its supposed goal of ‘abolishing’ the commune.² Evaluating such charges is a complex process and is made even more difficult in that Dubrovskii provides little supporting evidence, while attempts to follow up his archival references have either proved inconclusive or failed to confirm his interpretation. However, what seems to be the case is that this traditional charge is based less on the nature of the reform process itself than on the use of the police and the army as well as the criminal and administrative justice systems to preserve, maintain, and, of course, restore the government’s conception of order in the post-revolutionary countryside. Regardless, Dubrovskii’s own argument concerning the reforms’ failure is based not on such political factors but on the self-contradictory nature of the reforms themselves and the direct link that he saw between their social and economic results and the origins of the revolutions of 1917.³

‘It is impossible to organise people, and therefore they should not be organised, but it is possible and necessary to help them organise themselves’.

I. A. Stebut, agronomist