Stolypin vs Solzhenitsyn
The saddest part of the story however, is that not even Satan manages to save August Iе)!4. As Solzhenitsyn the novelist painstakingly shows, Bogrov's bullets wounded a political corpse By September 1911, Stolypin had long been finished as a key public figure.
As with the military disaster of August 1914, the West, the 'iberals, the Jews and Satan were none of them to blame for the political catastrophe that befell Stolypin — that is, of course, unless one considers Grigorii Rasputin to be a liberal or a Westernizer. Solzhenitsyn notes that he once 'offered to the governor of Ni/.hn.i Novgorod province the post of minister of internal affaiis' — that is, Stolypin's job, while he still held it Six months before Stolypm was shot, 'sensitive court noses recognized thai his Majesty had irreversibly cooled and even become hostile toward Stolypin. And <n upper circles an atmosphere of being finished had started to form around Stolypin';2" 'somewhere behind the scenes and without u being declared, his Majesty had already repudiated the chairman of his cabinct 10
Already by spring of 1911, in the State Council where Kurlov, who was rumoured to succeed Stolypin as minister of internal affairs (Stolypin's second post), had many supporters, 'it was openly said that [Stolypin] was living out his last weeks, if not days, and he would be moved over nto some kind of useless honorary position 11 Moreover, 'the chairman had obviously become so insignificant . . . that it was almost a humiliation for Kurlov to break with the general tone and take serious cognizance of his former chief 32 'Kurlov looked astonished and .ndeed was, at how the chairman of the cabinet had utterly lost his importance. On the journey to Chernigov, he [Stolypin] had even had to ask Kurlov for a place in his railway carriage.
What, you mean your Excellency doesn't have a place on the tsar's train?
I was not invited.
The ultimate sign ol humiliation and ungraciousness! Yes, in a few short days he was to lose his post.3'
Was it really the case then that Bogrov pierced the very 'heart of the state'? Is it true that he murdered 'not only the prime minister, but a whole state program'? Is it true that his shot 'altered the course of history of a people 170-million strong'? No, it is not, and Stolypin knew this better than his latter-day apologist. Solzhenitsyn asserts,
Russia was recovering — irreversibly.' Stolypin corrects him: 'They can go on a few more years yet on the reserves I have built up, like a camel living off the fat he has saved up, but after that it will all fall apart.'34 And, in contrast to Solzhenitsyn, Stolypin doesn't blame eh her the liberals, the terrorists or the West for the impending collapse.
The two Peters
Solzhenitsyn writes as though Stolypin were the first Russian reformist leader whose bold programme to restructure the state fell through. Before Stolyp.n, however, there was Alexander II, whose plans were overturned by the counter-reform of another Orthodox monarch, Alexander III. Before him there was Alexander 1, whose reformist attempts were succeeded at first by political stagnation and later by the soul-destroy :ng despotism of yet another Orthodox monarch, Nicholas I. Also after Stolypin there were reformist leaders who arrived on the Russian political scene: Kerenskii, Bukharin and, most recently, Khrushchev. Their attempts at reform, however, resulted in the same way as earlier efforts made by the emperors and their prime ministers. They were all followed by either counter-reform or political stagnation. Russia's political h;story, as we have already noted, is in effect a tragic series of failed and reversed reforms.
But let us return to Stolypin. For the Left he has gone down in history as a tsarist satrap who put down the revolution and dispersed the Duma. The Right remembers him as a 'traitor' and 'revolutionary'. Neither h > contemporaries nor his successors properly understood him. Had Solzhenitsyn tried to recreate Stolypin s true role in history, that would have been a noble endeavour. Solzhenitsyn, however, has wr ten an apology, a biography of the holy saint Peter. This hagiolatry does a dissen ze to the memory of Stolypin. 'Just as it is impossible for a believer to accomplish anything serious at all saying and think] ig that he is doing it by his own power rather than by the grace of God,' says Solzhenitsyn's Stolypin, 'so a monarchist cannot pursue great deeds for the motherland outside the bounds of devotion to the monarchy,'35 Thus Solzhenitsyn transforms Stolypin into a trivial restorer of the Orthodox monarchy, whereas in reality he was one of its leading destroyers — which it understood quite well and therefore devoured him. By comparing Stolypin with Peter I, one of the main pillars of 'soul-destroying despotism' (who was responsible for the dual slavery of the Russian peasantry — to the landlords and to the commune), Solzhenitsyn insults the memory ot Stolypin whose efforts were directed at wiping this slavery out. The two belong not only to different, but to mortally opposed, Russian political traditions, Peter was the father of one of the most terrible counter-reforms in Russia's history, which brought the country, even in the opinion of his closest collaborators, 'to the edge of final extinction Stolypin, on the other handjfcdespite his suppression of revolution and dispersal of the Duma, was a reformer.
It is hard to put in a few words what sets these two Peters apart, when their mortal opposition to each other began so long ago — before there were emperors, or prune ministers, or, moreover, secretaries of the Central Committee. It started with a filteenth- century Stolypin, the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III, who undertook the first Russian reform, and with his grandson, Ivan IV. who a few decades later responded to his grandfather's challenge with a crushing counter-reform In short, whereas the reformers have always tried to destroy Russia's medieval political system, the counter- reformers have sought to perpetuate ii In Europe, the main means of dismantling a medieval political system has always been the creation of a strong mddle class The only way to prevent this from happening has been to prevent the emergence of that middle class (we said this earlier and will discuss it further .n the conclusion).
As European history shows, the creation of a strong middle class depends, in the first instance, on the differentiation of the peasantry, and it is this that had to be forcibly stopped Serfdom, the peasant commune, and the collectivization of agriculture were all different means of arl lficially keeping the peasantry in ts medieval state, m other words, the nstitutionalization of Russian counter-reform. It is the trad'tion of Orthodox monarchy, according to which, Solzhenitsyn says, 'consciously or unconsciously, the whole ruling class trembled and greed ly clung to 4s lands — gentry lands, grand ducal lands, crown lands, at the first sign of any kind of movement for [peasant] land ownership — [they shout] oh, what if it should be our turn next! '36
Over the course of centuries the Orthodox monarchy has resolutely held out against the middle class and peasant differentiation. The political 'deal of its builders has been a powerful military empire, for which a strong m'ddle class would have been an obstacle, a potential rival to the ruling military antl bureaucratic elites This empire was created for the purpose of war, not to encourage a flourishing society. 1 heir goal and chief claim to fame was not the well-being of their subjects, but imperial expansion and domination over other nations.