What Was the Stolypin Reform?

On 9 November 1906, in the Throne Room of the Winter Palace, Tsar Nicholas II signed the new agrarian law of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. The law gave every peasant household the right to leave the village commune without the consent of the village assembly, abolished the periodic redistribution of land, and offered the consolidating household a state loan to fence and improve its new holding. The reform was the most far-reaching attempt at land reform in Russian history, and the last such attempt of the imperial period. By 1914 about 2.5 million households, some 12 million people, had taken their land into hereditary tenure; about 3 million had been resettled in Siberia; and about 1.5 million had left the commune altogether. The reform was interrupted by Stolypin’s assassination in September 1911 and the war in 1914, and was effectively reversed by the revolution of 1917 (see Kotsonis, States of Obligation, 2010; Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 2001).

The background of the reform

The reform was the long-term project of the October Manifesto, which had promised the people of Russia a series of civil and political reforms, and the short-term project of the post-1905 coalition government. The years 1905-1907 had seen the largest wave of peasant unrest in the imperial period: more than 6,000 incidents of arson, murder, and forcible seizure of landlord land were recorded in 1905-1906. The Stolypin reform was the government’s response to the agrarian problem — the single most powerful political issue in the empire.

Stolypin was an unusual prime minister: a large landowner from the Penza region, a graduate of the St Petersburg University, a former governor of Saratov province where he had personally directed the suppression of the 1905 peasant uprising. He was convinced that the commune was the principal political obstacle to a stable Russia. As he put it to the Second Duma in May 1907, “the commune, with its compulsory solidarity, is a hotbed of sedition, of idleness, and of theft” (Stolypin’s own words, recorded in the Duma Stenogramm). The reform was, in effect, an attempt to dismantle the commune and to create a class of independent peasant landowners who would, in Stolypin’s phrase, be the “natural pillar of the autocracy” (Ascher, 2001).

The main provisions

The Ukaz of 9 November 1906, ratified by the Third Duma on 21 June 1910, did five things:

It gave every peasant household the right to leave the commune at any time and to convert its allotment to private hereditary tenure.
It abolished the periodic redistribution of land (peredel) and the collective responsibility (krugovaya poruka) of the village.
It authorised the consolidation of strips into a single holding, the otryad, to be fenced, drained, and improved with state loans.
It created the Resettlement Administration to organise the movement of peasant households to Siberia and to the Central Asian steppe.
It set up a network of zemskie agronomicheskie (zemstvo agricultural officers) to advise the consolidating peasants and to provide veterinary, seed, and credit services.

The implementation

The reform was carried out by the Ministry of the Interior and the local land captains (zemskii nachal’nik), and the largest share of its work was done by the new Resettlement Administration. By 1914, 2,475,595 households, about 12 million people, had taken their land into hereditary tenure. A further 1,481,375 households had left the commune entirely, without yet consolidating their holdings. The Peasant Land Bank, established in 1882, was reorganised in 1907 and by 1914 had made loans of more than 1.3 billion rubles to about 1.4 million households.

The most controversial provision was the Siberian resettlement. By 1914 about 3 million people had been resettled in Siberia, but the resettlement was poorly managed. The settlers, mostly from the central Russian and Ukrainian provinces, found that the good land in the Kazakh Steppe and in the Altai had been given to Cossack and Cossack-descended peasants, and that the new settlements were often too small and the climate too harsh for European-style agriculture. The 1911 famine in the new settlements was a warning; the 1929 Soviet collectivisation was, in some respects, a more thorough version of the same project (Ascher, 2001).

The end of the reform

The reform was killed by the death of its architect. Stolypin was shot by the revolutionary and police informer Dmitry Bogrov on 14 September 1911 in the Kiev Opera House, in the presence of the Tsar. His successors were not committed to the reform, and the war in 1914 effectively ended it: the resettlement was stopped, the new funds for the zemskie agronomicheskie were diverted, and the consolidation of strips slowed. By 1917 the 1897 census categories were still the most reliable record of the reform’s effect.

The commune, however, was the basic institution of the Russian village until the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin’s Decree on the Land of 26 October 1917 (8 November new style) abolished private property in land and the consolidation decrees, and it returned the village to a system of redistribution that the Bolsheviks would formalise in 1918-1919 (Kotsonis, 2010).

The legacy

Stolypin’s reform is the principal counter-factual of late-imperial Russian history. Some historians have argued that the reform, if it had not been interrupted by the war, would have created a Russian peasant bourgeoisie and a stable basis for the autocracy. Other historians have argued that the reform was already in trouble by 1914, and that the otryad was a paper construct that the peasant had not really accepted. The debate is unresolved; it is one of the most-cited questions in Russian historiography, and it has shaped policy in post-Soviet Russia as well (Ascher, 2001).