Since 1905, a good part of Russia had been placed under martial law: in August 1906, eighty-two of the Empire’s eighty-seven provinces were under “Reinforced Safeguard.”42 These measures proved insufficient, and under strong pressure from the Court, Stolypin resorted to summary justice. On August 19—one week after the failed attempt on his life—he introduced, under Article 87, field courts for civilians.43 The law provided that in areas placed under either martial law or Extraordinary Safeguard, the governors and commandants of the military districts could turn over to military courts persons whose guilt was so obvious as to require no further investigation. The personnel of these courts were to be appointed by local commanders and to consist of five officers. Hearings were to take place behind closed doors: defendants were allowed no lawyer but could call on witnesses. The field courts had to convene within twenty-four hours of the crime and reach a verdict in forty-eight hours. There was no appeal from their sentences, which were to be carried out within twenty-four hours.
This law remained in force for eight months, expiring in April 1907. It is estimated that Stolypin’s field courts meted out up to 1,000 death sentences.44 Subsequently, terrorists and other persons accused of violent political crimes were tried by ordinary courts. A contemporary source estimates that in 1908 and 1909 the courts convicted for political crimes and armed assault 16,440 persons, 3,682 of them to death and 4,517 to hard labor.45
Stolypin’s repressive measures evoked cries of outrage from public circles which displayed considerable tolerance for revolutionary terror. The Kadets, who ignored SR murders, spared no words of condemnation for the quasi-juridical procedures employed by Stolypin to prevent them: one of their spokesmen, Fedor Rodichev, referred to the gallows used by the field courts as “Stolypin’s neckties” and the name stuck. In July 1908, Tolstoy wrote Ne mogu molchat’!—I Cannot Keep Silent!—in which he argued that government violence was a hundredfold worse than criminal and terrorist violence because it was perpetrated in cold blood. His recipe for ending revolutionary terrorism was abolishing private property in land. The issue was so divisive that Guchkov’s defense of Stolypin’s field courts as a “cruel necessity”46 split the Octobrist Party and led to the resignation of Shipov, one of its most respected figures.
But public order was eventually restored, enabling Stolypin to launch his program of economic and political reforms.
Without awaiting the convocation of the second Duma, Stolypin enacted, again with resort to Article 87, a series of agrarian reforms which he viewed as the key to Russia’s long-term stability.
An initial step in this direction was a law of October 5, 1906, which accorded the Russian peasant, for the first time in history, civil equality with the other estates.47 It removed all restrictions on peasant movement, depriving the communes of the power to refuse members permission to leave. The land commandants could no longer punish peasants. Thus disappeared the last vestiges of serfdom.
Stolypin addressed himself concurrently to the issue of land shortage, increasing the reserve of agricultural land available for purchase by peasants and facilitating access to mortgage money. The Peasant Land Bank, founded in the 1880s, had already in 1905 received broad powers to provide easy credit to help peasants acquire land. Stolypin now made much more land available for this purpose by persuading the Court to offer for peasant purchase Crown and State lands. This was formalized in laws of August 12 and 27, 1906.48 The Crown (udeVnye) lands used for this purpose amounted to 1.8 million desiatiny (2 million hectares) of arable land, and the State lands to 3.6 million (4 million hectares). Approximately the same acreage of woodland was put on the market, for a total of 11 million desiatiny (12 million hectares).49 These properties, augmented with land which the landlords sold after the 1905–6 rural disturbances, considerably increased peasant holdings.
To provide access to these lands it was necessary to organize and finance a large-scale resettlement program to move peasants out of the overcrowded provinces of central Russia. This the government initiated as early as March 1906, before Stolypin had assumed office, in a reversal of previous policy discouraging peasant movement. Under Stolypin, the state-sponsored resettlement program assumed massive proportions, with the peak years being 1908 and 1909. Between 1906 and 1916, 3 million peasants moved to Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia, settling on lands which the government had made available (547,000 of them later returned).50
Russian liberals and socialists considered it axiomatic that the country’s “agrarian question” could be solved only by expropriations of properties belonging to the State, the Crown, the Church, and private landlords. Like Ermolov, Stolypin felt this belief rested on an illusion: there simply was not enough non-peasant land in the Empire to satisfy those who needed it as well as those who were added each year to the rural population from natural growth. In a masterfully reasoned speech to the Duma on May 10, 1907, he argued that the Social-Democratic program of nationalizing land was without merit:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the government accepts [the nationalization of land] as a desirable thing, that it sidesteps the issue of driving to ruin a whole … numerous educated class of landowners, that it reconciles itself to the destruction of the sparse centers of culture in the countryside. What would result? Would this at least solve the material aspect of the agrarian question? Would it or would it not make it possible to satisfy the peasants in the localities where they reside?
These questions can be answered with figures, and the figures, gentlemen, tell the following: If one were to transfer to the peasantry all the privately owned land, without exception, even that located in the neighborhood of cities, then in the province of Vologda the communal land as now constituted, together with that added to it, would provide 147 desiatiny per household, in Olonetsk 185 desiatiny, and in Archangel as much as 1,309 desiatiny. At the same time, in fourteen other provinces there would not be enough land to give each household 15 desiatiny, while in Poltava there would be only 9 and in Podolia less than 8. This is due to the extremely uneven distribution in the various provinces not only of State and Crown lands but also of lands held in private ownership. One-fourth of the privately held land happens to be located in those twelve provinces which have communal allotments in excess of 15 desiatiny per household, whereas only one-seventh of it lies in the ten provinces with the smallest allotments of 7 desiatiny per household. It must be noted that these figures include all the land of all the owners—that is, not only that of the 107,000 dvoriane but also that of 490,000 peasants who have purchased land on their own account, as well as that belonging to 85,000 burghers—the latter two categories accounting for up to 17 million desiatiny. From this it follows that the division of all the land on a per capita basis can hardly remedy local land shortages. It will be necessary to have recourse to the measure proposed by the government—namely, resettlement. One will have to give up the idea of ensuring land for the entire toiling population and [instead] divert from that group a certain proportion to other occupations.