Читаем Russia. A History полностью

Did all this mean that Russia now had a ‘constitution’? Historians who have argued over this word have really been arguing about something else: the likelihood of Russia’s non-violent evolution into a liberal polity between 1906 and 1914 (when the disruptions of war thoroughly changed the terms of debate), a question to which we will return. For brevity’s sake, Western historians sometimes subsume this debate under the catch-phrase ‘optimism’ (no revolution) versus ‘pessimism’ (inevitability of revolution). Suffice it to say that, insofar as ‘constitution’ means a set of fundamental laws that are meant to be binding on the government as well as the people, Russia formally acquired such a system on 23 April 1906. But the more important issue is not the formal definition of this system but its durability, stability, and capacity to function.

One source of instability was formal: the infamous Article 87, which empowered the tsar to dissolve the Duma and promulgate new laws in the interval between elections. Because the same article also required that, for such laws to be valid, the next Duma must approve them within two months, Article 87 by itself did not directly undermine the new order, but it did create a situation where an insecure or embattled regime could promulgate a law to change the Fundamental Laws themselves, and thereby alter the composition of the next Duma. Such an action was illegal, tantamount to a coup d’état, which was precisely the term employed when the ‘Prime Minister’, Peter Stolypin, did just that on 3 June 1907. There was yet another formal source of instability; the Fundamental Laws invested the tsar (still called ‘autocrat’) and his appointed ministers with what appeared to be full power over diplomacy and war, but made any increase in the military budget contingent on the approval of the Duma.

The Stolypin Reform

No less important than the contradictions inherent in the Fundamental Laws were the political and social challenges that brought these problems to the surface. Foreign policy questions had saturated domestic politics from 1890 to 1905, and they continued to do so in the post-revolutionary years. Despite or perhaps because of Russia’s recent military defeat, the aspiration to renewed great-power status and to participation in Weltpolitik continued unabated. Russia’s military position, however, was weaker than ever, especially in the light of losses suffered in the Russo-Japanese War. The consequent growth of the deficit made the costs of rearmament very difficult to meet. If this deficit was ever to be overcome, the economy had to recover and social stability had to be restored.

First and foremost this meant seeking a fresh solution to the peasant land problem. The question, in the new post-1905 context, was whether the solution to land hunger, so vehemently expressed by peasant insurgency in 1905 (and there was much more to come in 1906), should be attained by the compulsory redistribution of gentry land, and if so, whether with compensation (the liberal or Kadet position) or without (the radical position).

No one, whether in or out of government, could fail to see that the agrarian status quo was no longer tenable, as the termination of redemption payments even before 1905 bears witness. But the post-1905 government, and the extremely astute Stolypin in particular (first as head of the Ministry of Interior, but soon thereafter as Russia’s third ‘Prime Minister’—following Witte and the less than competent Ivan Goremykin)—had a solution, indeed one that Witte himself had advocated earlier. The central idea was to reallocate not gentry lands but communal lands, and to transfer them to individual peasant proprietors in the form of compact, enclosed, self-standing farmsteads. The reform was promulgated without Duma approval in November 1906, but was later approved and extended by the conservative Third Duma. This complex approach, Stolypin’s so-called ‘wager on the strong’, was intended to create a productive class of hard-working, individualistic, free farmers (‘yeomen’ if one likes them, ‘kulaks’ if one does not), a new class of property owners with a strong stake in the existing system, men whose legal personalities and citizenship status in contrast to the peasants emancipated in the 1860s and their descendants—would cease to differ from those of other landowners.