Tsarist Rule in Russia, 1905-14 » Stolypin: Repression, Land Reform and the Lena Goldfield Strike

Stolypin and his plan

Pyotr Stolypin had been a tough governor of Saratov, a province with some of the worst peasant violence of 1905. Nicholas made him minister of the interior in spring 1906 and prime minister that July. He held the post until 1911.

Russia was still far from calm. Peasants were burning manor houses, and revolutionaries were killing officials in their hundreds. In August 1906 a bomb at Stolypin's own house killed about 30 people and injured two of his children.

Stolypin's plan had two halves: first restore order by force, then remove the causes of unrest by reform.

Key terms:

• Repression: using force and fear to stop people opposing the government
• Field court-martial: a quick military court, set up on the spot, that tried civilians
• Stolypin's necktie: the nickname for the hangman's noose
• Kulak: a better-off peasant who owned his own farm

Repression: 'Stolypin's necktie'

Soon after the bombing, Stolypin set up field courts-martial, using the Tsar's power to rule by decree.

• Army officers acted as judges. There were no lawyers and the trial was held in secret.
• A case had to be heard within days of the arrest. There was no appeal.
• A death sentence was carried out within 24 hours.

These courts ran until spring 1907. In those eight months they sentenced more than 1,000 people to death, and ordinary military courts hanged many more up to 1909. A Kadet deputy in the Duma called the noose 'Stolypin's necktie', and the name stuck.

Thousands more were sent to prison or to Siberia, and hundreds of newspapers and trade unions were closed.

Land reform: the 'wager on the strong'

Remember that most peasants farmed scattered strips of land shared out by the mir, the village commune. Stolypin thought this kept them poor and angry.

His answer was to create a class of kulaks. A peasant who owned his farm would work harder, grow more food and have something to lose in a revolution. So he would support the Tsar. Stolypin told the Duma in 1908 that the government was betting on 'the sturdy and the strong'.

• November 1906: a decree let any peasant leave the mir, own his strips and join them into one farm.
• Peasants' Land Bank: it gave loans to help peasants buy more land.
• Siberia: peasants were offered cheap land there. About three million had moved east by 1914.

How far did it work? By 1914 around two million households had left the mir, and the harvest of 1913 was a record. These were real gains.

But the limits were clear:

• The great majority of peasants stayed in the mir.
• Only about one household in ten had set up a single joined-up farm.
• Poorer peasants often sold their strips. They became farm labourers or drifted to the crowded cities.
• The nobles' estates were not touched, so the land hunger remained.

Stolypin himself said the reform needed twenty years of peace. It got eight before war came in 1914.

Stolypin's assassination, 1911

In September 1911 Stolypin was shot at the opera house in Kiev, in front of the Tsar. He died a few days later. The killer, Dmitri Bogrov, was a revolutionary who had also worked as an informer for the Okhrana.

By then Stolypin had few friends. Nobles feared his reforms, and Nicholas had begun to lose trust in him. His death still mattered: the Tsar lost his most able minister, and the men who followed kept the repression but dropped the drive for reform.

The Lena Goldfield strike, 1912

The Lena goldfields lay in a remote part of Siberia. Miners worked very long days for low pay, and part of that pay came as coupons for the company shop. In early 1912 they went on strike after rotten meat was sold there. They demanded an eight-hour day and a 30 per cent pay rise.

The strike leaders were arrested. In April 1912, when a large crowd of miners marched to protest, soldiers opened fire. About 270 were killed and around 250 wounded, although counts vary.

The minister of the interior, Makarov, told the Duma: 'So it has been, and so it will be.' It sounded as if the government did not care.

The unrest that followed:

• Protest strikes spread across Russia. There were about 2,000 strikes in 1912, around ten times the number in 1910.
• The numbers kept rising. More than 3,000 strikes were recorded in 1914.
• In July 1914 a general strike in St Petersburg led to barricades and street fighting.
• Many workers turned to the revolutionary parties, above all the Bolsheviks.

Lena showed that repression had only held the workers' anger down.

Exam-style question

Source A: From an article in The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, 8 August 1908. It is commenting on an interview that Stolypin had given to a British journalist.

'The Government of Russia is being carried on. The ordinary functions of the State are not suspended ... This is the description, not of a successful revolution, but of a revolution which, for the time at all events, has failed of its purpose ... States of siege, executions, and "administrative exile" are not the normal accompaniments of free government.'

Source B: From an article by Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, in the newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat, October 1911 (translated).

'Stolypin was the head of the counter-revolutionary government for about five years, from 1906 to 1911 ... Stolypin's policy ended in failure. Stolypin has been assassinated at a moment when a new grave-digger of tsarist autocracy ... is knocking at the door.'

Extract C (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history book)

'By 1914 Stolypin's policies had made the Tsar's rule secure. His courts had broken the revolutionaries, and his land reform was starting to create peasants who were loyal to the Tsar. However, the reform moved slowly, and after 1912 a new wave of strikes showed that the workers' anger had not gone away.'

Study Extract C. Extract C suggests that Stolypin's policies had made the Tsar's rule secure by 1914. How far do you agree with this interpretation? Use Extract C, Sources A and B and your own knowledge to explain your answer. [16 marks]