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Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2018

Donald W. Treadgold
Donald W. Treadgold*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Extract

The most outstanding statesman during the reign of Nicholas II of Russia was Peter Arkad'evič Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911. It is generally recognized that Stolypin, like his revolutionary opponents including Lenin, took serious account of the course of the Revolution of 1905, and especially of the fact that the peasantry had stood aside from the struggle in the cities, coming to the aid of neither the revolutionaries nor the Government, and conducting their own rural struggle more or less independently. It was, therefore, the objective of both Government and revolutionaries during the period from 1906 to 1917 to win the political support of the peasants, whom both had assumed to be on their side.

Stolypin described his agrarian policy, which he regarded as fundamental to all of his objectives, as “a wager, not on the wretched and drunken, but on the sound and strong.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1955 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1955

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Footnotes

1

This article was written in conjunction with a study undertaken by the author as a member of the Russia in Asia Project at the University of Washington.

References

2 Harcave, Sidney, Russia: a History (New York, 1952), p. 401 Google Scholar.

3 Mazour, Anatole G., Russia: Past and Present (New York, 1951), pp. 378-79Google Scholar.

4 Palmer, R. R., A History of the Modern World (New York, 1950), pp. 718-19Google Scholar.

5 Hugh Seton-Watson's review of Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, in Slavonic and East European Review, XXXI, No. 77, 571 Google Scholar.

6 Tentatively entitled Peasant Migration to Siberia, 1861-1914.

7 Gosudarstvennaja duma. Vtoroj sozyv. Stenografičeskie otčëty. 1907 god. Sessija vtoraja (St. Petersburg, 1907), II, pp. 434-46.

8 Ibid., Tretij sozyv. 1908 god. Sessija vtoraja. Čast’ I (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 2279-83. See also Stolypin's two short speeches of November 16, 1907, in Ibid. Sessija pervaja. Čast’ I (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 309 and 352-53.

9 The Russian is untranslatable: Rasrešit’ etogo voprosa nel'zja, ego nado razrešat'. The former is the perfective form of the infinitive, the latter the imperfective: the distinction is between an action achieved in one moment and one which is not.

10 Lit., “the blacksmith of his happiness.”

11 See Robinson, Geroid T., Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1949), Chap. XI Google Scholar, in which the three chief laws in question are discussed. In investigating the question of which peasants left the commune as a result of the operation of these laws, Robinson notes that the evidence is “vague and hazy in the last degree—yet one must at least conclude that the individualist movement was not confined to any one economic level of the peasantry” (p. 323).

12 Letter of Stolypin to Nicholas II protesting appointment of a Slavophile nominee to the Imperial Council, quoted in Pokrovskij, M. N., A Brief History of Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1933), II, 291 Google Scholar.

13 Bok, M. P., Vospominanija o moem otse P. A. Stolypine (New York, 1953), p. 204 Google Scholar.

14 Wolfe, Bertram D., Three Who Made a Revolution (New York, 1948), pp. 360-61Google Scholar.

15 Bok, , op. cit., p. 206.Google Scholar

16 See my article, “The Populists Refurbished,” Russian Review, July, 1951, pp. 185-96.

17 Gurko, V. I., Features and Figures of the Past. Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford, 1939), p. 171 Google Scholar.

18 Lenin, V. I., Sočinenija, 4th ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), XIII, 216 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., pp. 144-54.

20 Ibid., XIII, 219.

21 Ibid., XIX, 165, 169, see also XV, 30.

22 See Pavlovsky, George, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of the Revolution (London, 1930)Google Scholar, and Robinson, op. cit.

23 Minister of the Interior from 1882 to 1889.

24 Space is lacking to cite the full evidence for this assertion here. It appears to this writer, however, that the criterion of who was to be treated as a kulak, which was most often employed in Soviet practice, was the one openly voiced by Tito in 1949, namely, that the test of being a kulak was not the size of a man's holding, but whether he was for “socialism” or against it (The Times of London, August 9, 1949). By that criterion, of course, the number of kulaks in Russia must be reckoned as very large indeed.

25 The Octobrists were a “Center” party who supported constitutionalism in the sense of the October Manifesto of 1905. They included many landlords.

26 Maklakov, V. A., Vtoraja gosudarstvennaja duma (Paris, n.d.), pp. 36–37 Google Scholar.

27 Idem.

28 Pokrovskij, , op. cit., II, 289-90Google Scholar.

29 Ljaščenko, P. I., Istorija narodnogo khozjajstva SSSR, 2 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1948), II, 268 Google Scholar.