The Stolypin Reaction¶
Core Argument¶
The Stolypin reaction, inaugurated in August 1906 with field courts martial that executed hundreds and imprisoned tens of thousands, combined savage repression with a calculated agrarian reform designed to stabilise tsarism by creating a new social base in the countryside. The chapter argues that Stolypin’s land reform represented a reactionary bourgeois solution to the agrarian question, forcibly breaking up the village commune (obshchina) to the advantage of a minority of wealthy peasants, the kulaks. The law, issued in late 1906 and enacted on 14 June 1910, gave peasants the right to leave the commune, but in practice only the well-to-do could exercise this right, receiving the best plots and state loans. By January 1915, only about 22–24 per cent of peasant land had become private property. The chapter draws on Kerensky’s memoirs to show that the majority of peasants viewed the reform with hostility, unwilling to enrich themselves at their neighbours’ expense. The reform, Kerensky concluded, “threw the brand of civil war into the Russian countryside.”
The chapter situates this policy within the broader context of Russian agrarian backwardness: 120,000 village communes, subsistence economy, remnants of feudalism, and deep land hunger. Lenin’s advocacy of a revolutionary settling of accounts with the landlords is contrasted with Stolypin’s “wager on the sturdy and the strong.” The reaction also devastated the workers’ movement: 500 trade unions were shut down between 1906 and 1910, membership fell from 246,000 to 13,000, the working day lengthened to 12–15 hours, and mass unemployment, partly due to a world economic crisis, crushed militancy.
The political defeat provoked splits across the left. The SRs fractured into right-wing Popular Socialists and left Maximalists, while their leading terrorist, Evno Azef, was unmasked as a police provocateur. Within the RSDLP, the Menshevik right wing advocated a deal with the Cadets and proposed a non-party ‘labour congress’—the germs of liquidationism. Plekhanov called on workers to support the liberal bourgeoisie; the Menshevik Basilev proposed fusing Social Democrats with SRs and Cadets, which Lenin denounced as the “Mont Blanc of opportunism.”
The chapter’s central polemic is directed against sectarianism and the boycott tactic. Lenin, having concluded that boycotting the first Duma was a mistake, argued that in a period of retreat the party must utilise every legal arena. To boycott when there is no realistic prospect of replacing parliament is to boycott oneself. The chapter quotes Trotsky’s 1935 characterisation of sectarianism as the “direct negation of dialectical materialism,” hostile to the actual development of the working class. Lenin advocated flexible tactics: electoral blocs with the Trudoviks and SRs against the right and the liberals, while maintaining absolute independence and freedom to criticise petty-bourgeois inconsistencies. The aim was to drive a wedge between the petty bourgeoisie and the Cadets, fighting for proletarian hegemony over the peasantry—a strategy vindicated in October 1917.
The Tammerfors Conference of November 1906 was a defining moment: Lenin’s position against blocs with the Cadets won 65 per cent support, but he avoided a split, confident that events would clarify the disputed questions. The elections to the Second Duma in February 1907 returned 65 Social Democrats, 104 Trudoviks, and 37 SRs, with the Cadets reduced from 184 to 98. The chapter notes the paradox that the Duma’s leftward composition was a symptom of the revolution’s decline, not its rise: the masses voted left but could no longer mount an insurrection. The agrarian question dominated the Duma’s deliberations, and peasant uprisings escalated from 131 incidents in March to 216 in June 1907, the bonfires of revolt illuminating the debates in the Tauride Palace.