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With very little tweaking, this essay can be easily adapted to answer the question: ‘In what ways were the lives of people affected by Stolypin’s policies?’

 

Summary

In 1904, Russia seemed peopled by impoverished and rioting peasants; exploited and striking workers; a despondent and bankrupt nobility; and an exasperated and rebellious political class.  The 1905 Revolution changed their lives. 

As for the peasants, Stolypin’s reforms allowed them to own land individually instead of sharing it in the mir.  Perhaps 2 million became wealthier kulaks, while 2.8million others were helped to colonise Siberia.  The government also ended redemption payments and promised more schools, which improved their lives.  Most peasants remained poor and, in 1917, most turned against the government … but, for the moment, all was quiet.

Workers were different.  They saw little improvement.  Trade unions were allowed, but real wages.  Safety-at-work laws were weak, and only some workers got health insurance.  Many peasants moved to the cities, but instead of a better life, they found low pay and harsh conditions and became embittered.  Stolypin’s necktie suppressed thoughts of striking, but after he was assassinated in 1911, the number of strikes grew, leading to street fights in St Petersburg in 1914. 

The middle class and the nobility were different again.  In 1906 the Tsar broke his October Manifesto promises, limited the Duma’s influence, and Stolypin instituted a fierce Repression which executed or jailed large numbers of revolutionaries, with the rest fleeing into exile.  The middle class however, benefiting from a growing economy, decided to support the system; and the nobility, though unhappy with Stolypin’s reforms, also stayed loyal, so Stolypin was able to work with the Duma to pass reforms. 

The 1913 Tercentenary saw Russia with a weak-but-working parliamentary system, generally quiet, generally increasing in prosperity, and a Tsar who seemed to be loved; for most people (excepting the workers), it must have seemed a completely different place to the Russia of 1904. 

 

 

In what ways were the lives of Russians affected by the 1905 Revolution?

Russia in 1904 had four groups in crisis:

  • The Peasants were impoverished and in revolt – 1903-5 became known as the 'Years of the Red Cockerel' as they drove out the nobles and burned down their houses. 

  • The Workers faced poverty wages and appalling working and living conditions – resulting in 1,765 strikes in the years 1895-1904. 

  • Many nobles, since the abolition of serfdom, had lost their estates to bankruptcy, their local influence to the zemstva, and their sinecures in government and the armed forces to reforms – many felt their time was coming to an end. 

  • The political classes were exasperated and rebellious, oppressed by a secretive Okhrana – some resorted to terrorism. 

The result was the 1905 Revolution, which forced Nicholas to issue the October Manifesto promising “real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and union”.  How did it change people’s lives?

***

The Peasants

Pyotr Stolypin, who took over as Nicholas's Prime Minister in 1906, forced through (by dismissing the Duma and issuing an Imperial Decree) a law abolishing communal ownership of land and forcing the mirs to allow individual peasants to consolidate their strips and buy the land.  He did this to undermine the mirs’ ability to resist the government, but it also allowed the creation of a class of wealthier, ‘middle-class’ farmers (the ‘kulaks’) whom he hoped would support the government. 

Other peasants were encouraged to move to Siberia; 21 million hectares of government land was offered for sale, and settlers were given advice, grants, and loans from the Peasant Land Bank.  Redemption payments were abolished (1907), and the Peasants Land Bank gave loans to help them buy their farms and form cooperatives.  The peasants also benefited from the government’s commitment in 1908 to universal Primary education. 

The lives of those peasants who responded were radically altered – especially the kulaks.  Two million families benefited from Peasant Land Bank loans, and 2.8 million migrants relocated to Siberia 1908-13 – staggering figures. 

Encylopaedia Britannica comments that Stolypin’s reforms had only ‘moderate’ effect on the peasants’ lives.  Two million families in a population of perhaps 100 million peasants is not many, and at most only a tenth of the peasants became kulaks.  Many mirs resisted, and in 1917 peasants everywhere joined in the revolutions and attacked the Stolypin farmers.  Nevertheless, in the years 1906-13, anarchy in the countryside ceased, and living standards improved for all as – Bernard Pares would recollect in 1939 – people stopped revolting and got on with their lives. 

***

The Workers

Trade Unions were legalised in 1905, and were very active in the years 1906-31.  They held their own congresses, which met at the same time as the Dumas, and formed workers’ clubs, educational societies and associations.  However, unlike the peasants, there were few Stolypin reforms for the urban/ factory workers: improved health & accident insurance for a small proportion of the workforce, and (in 1912) factory safety inspectors with limited powers of enforcement.  At a time when the economy was booming, the workers saw wages falling behind inflation, earned less than a third of the average in Western Europe, and per capita income in Russia was a tenth of that in the USA. 

During Stolypin’s time, strikes and urban disturbances were suppressed by fear of arrest, but after his assassination (1911), a massacre by troops of protesting miners at the Lena Goldfields in 1912 unleashed a wave of strikes and protests, including a general strike in St Petersburg in 1914, which was supported by the students, and which involved barricades and street-fighting.  Corin and Fiehn (2015) point out also that some of the peasants who consolidated their plots did not stay to become kulaks – they immediately sold up and moved to the towns, where they became a bitter and disillusioned sub-group of the urban proletariat. 

So the 1905 Revolution had little effect on the workers’ lives, and the affect was that their anger grew. 

***

The Political Classes (the middle class and nobility)

The Tsar had not been converted to constitutional monarchy by the 1905 Revolution; he had only issued the October Manifesto to buy time and fragment the revolutionaries … and in May 1906, before the first Duma had even met, he issued the Fundamental Laws circumventing it. 

The Duma was not going to be a place for revolutionary reform.  The first Duma lasted just 73 days.  Next, after 103 days of chaos, Stolypin – whose judgement of the Deputies was that their “only qualification is that they were active enemies of the government” – closed down the Second Duma, and gave local Governors carte blanche to fix the voting system to return a more pliant house (Lenin labelled this: Stolypin’s ‘coup’). 

At the same time, Stolypin engaged on a time of repression – real Repression, not the incompetent inconveniencing that had marked the attempts of Witte and Plehve.  Military tribunals were set up to try and (if found guilty) execute people on the same day.  1,400 people were executed in 1906 alone; the noose became known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’ and Lenin called Stolypin “the arch-hangman”.  In December 1905 the St Petersburg Soviet had been arrested en masse, and an armed uprising in Moscow brutally crushed.  By the end of 1907 Poland, Finland and two thirds of Russia were under martial law.  The Black Hundreds intimidated and attacked the Tsar's opponents. 

All this had the effect of concentrating the revolutionaries’ minds.  The REAL radicals – the Bolsheviks, SRCOs etc.) who were not executed or in Siberia, fled into exile.  The majority of the political classes, however, decided to stay and make the most of what they had got – not just the Octobrists, but even the Mensheviks.  The middle classes had been doing really well after the Revolution – foreign investment was flooding in, business was booming, and there were few of those pesky human rights to eat away at profits; they decided to comply.  Lenin fumed at “the counter-revolutionary-minded bourgeoisie” who were being “led by the nose” by “the tsar’s gang”:

“all shades of the liberal bourgeoisie, from the Octobrists to the Cadets inclusive, ‘had their eyes riveted on the powers that be’ and ‘turned their backs’ on democracy from the time it became a democratic revolution.”

The nobility too, decided that they should throw in their hand with the Duma.  Unlike the middle classes, they never really benefited from their support for the government, their star continued to decline, and they hated Stolypin’s reforms.  For the moment, however, they were prepared to be a reactionary voice within the Duma and the government, and to undermine Stolypin, in the hope of better days. 

Stolypin never formally espoused the Russian idea of obshchestvennost – civic engagement – and indeed was regarded as its enemy at the time.  But sums up was what he was working towards.  Whilst he was a monarchist and certainly ruled from above, he deemed it appropriate to keep a representative body, and worked with the more conservative Third Duma to pass his legislation.  He expanded the zemstva into the western provinces, seeing them as a way of cementing loyalty to the state, encouraged cooperative trade union engagement, and his idea for the kulaks was to secure their support by giving them a stake in the country.  Whilst he was alive (and, indeed, right up to the February revolution), it worked, and the political classes – the middle classes and the nobility – subsided, and worked with the system. 

***

The People

1913 was the Tercentenary of the Romanov monarchy.  After a week-long celebration in St Petersburg, followed by a tour of the towns of Muscovy, and another huge celebration in Moscow, all to cheering crowds, the Tsar rejoiced: "My people love me", and the British Foreign Office remarked on: “the affection and devotion” to the Emperor. 

Eight years after the 1905 Revolution, it really did seem that it had changed people’s lives for the better effect and happier affect.  The nobility were onside and with the thriving middle classes were developing proper parliamentary parties and procedures within the Duma; the countryside was prospering (compared with previous times) and quiet; the workers were discontented but suppressed; and during the celebrations in Moscow Nicholas himself felt sufficiently safe to ride, alone, 20 yards ahead of his Cossack escort (something that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was unable to do a year later). 

As long as Nicholas did not do anything reckless, there was every chance of a positive future. 

   

   


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