This is also confirmed by other figures which indicate the population growth over a ten-year period in the fifty provinces of European Russia. Russia, gentlemen, is not dying out. Her population increase exceeds that of all the other countries in the world, attaining an annual rate of 15.1 per 1,000. Thus, in the fifty provinces of European Russia, the natural population growth adds each year 1,625,000 people: assuming five persons per family, this represents 341,000 families. If we allow 10 desiatiny per household, we will require annually 3.5 million desiatiny to provide with land only that population which is added each year.
Clearly, gentlemen, the land question cannot be solved by the device of expropriating and distributing private lands. This [method] is tantamount to putting a plaster on an infected wound.*
Stolypin next turned to his favorite subject, the need to privatize agriculture in order to improve productivity:
But apart from the aforementioned material results, what will this method do to the country, what will it accomplish from the moral point of view? The picture which we now observe in our rural communities—the need of all to subordinate themselves to a single method of pursuing agriculture, the requirement of constant repartitions, the impossibility for a farmer with initiative to apply to the land temporarily at his disposal his inclination toward a particular branch of economy—all that will spread throughout Russia. All and each will be equal, and land will become as common as water and air. But neither water nor air benefit from the application of human hands, neither is improved by labor, or else the improved air and water undoubtedly would fetch a price, they would become subject to the right of property. I suggest that the land which would be distributed among citizens, alienated from some and offered to local Social-Democratic bureaus, would soon acquire the same qualities as water and air. It would be exploited, but no one would improve it, no one would apply to it his labor in order to have someone else benefit from it.… As a result, the cultural level of the country will decline. A good farmer, an inventive farmer, will be deprived by the very force of things of the opportunity to apply his knowledge to the land. One is driven to the conclusion that such conditions would lead to a new upheaval, and that the talented, strong, forceful man would restore his right to property, to the fruit of his labor. After all, gentlemen, property has always had as its basis force, behind which stood also moral law.51
Stolypin well realized the hold which the commune had on the Great Russian peasant and had no illusion that he could dissolve it by government fiat. He rather wanted to achieve this end by example, setting up alongside the communes a parallel system of privately held farms. All the land turned over by the Crown and the State to the Peasant Land Bank was to be used for this purpose; to augment this reserve, he was not averse to a limited expropriation of large private estates. The critical issue to him was that the land turned over to the peasants be kept out of the hands of the communes in order to create enclaves of prosperous, independent farmsteads which in time, he hoped, would exert an irresistible attraction on peasants and encourage them to give up communal landholding. To the same end he also favored legislation that would make it easy for peasants to withdraw from the commune and claim title to their allotments.
Such a program was for Stolypin a precondition of economic improvement, which, in turn, would provide the foundations of national stability and grandeur. (“They,” he concluded his May 1907 speech, referring to the revolutionary parties, “need great upheavals. We need a Great Russia!”) But the dissolution of the commune was to him also an essential means for raising the level of citizenship in Russia. He fully shared Witte’s dismay over the peasantry’s low cultural level.52 In his view, Russia’s greatest need was for civic education, which meant, first and foremost, inculcating in the rural population a sense of law and respect for private property. His agrarian reforms were meant, therefore, ultimately to serve a political purpose—namely, to provide a school of citizenship.
The principles of Stolypin’s agrarian reform were by no means original, having been the subject of frequent discussions in government circles since the end of the nineteenth century.53 In February 1906, the Imperial Government discussed proposals to enable peasants to leave the commune and consolidate their holdings. A few days before he left office in April 1906, Witte had submitted a similar plan.54 The idea of dissolving the commune and promoting resettlement in Siberia now found favor even with some of the most conservative landlords, who saw in such measures a way of avoiding expropriations. The All-Russian Union of Landowners as well as the United Nobility had favored such a policy before Stolypin appeared on the scene. Stolypin’s deputy, Kryzhanovskii, says these reforms had become so urgent that if not Stolypin then some other minister would have carried them out, even the archconservative Durnovo.55 Nevertheless, as it was Stolypin who put these ideas into practice, they are indissolubly bound up with his name.
The keystone of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms was the law of November 9, 1906: its importance becomes apparent when one considers that the communes to which it applied comprised 77.2 percent of European Russia’s rural households.56 The law freed communal peasants from the obligation of remaining in the commune. The law’s critical clause provided that “any head of a household who holds a land allotment by virtue of communal right may at any time demand to have it deeded to him as private property”—insofar as practicable, in a single, enclosed parcel. To leave the commune, peasants no longer required the concurrence of the majority of members; the decision was theirs. Having gone through the required formalities, a peasant household had the choice of claiming property title to its allotment and remaining in the village or selling out and moving away. In communes which had not practiced repartition since 1861, the allotments automatically became the property of the cultivators. Since the government concurrently annulled all remaining arrears on redemption payments (as of January 1, 1907), and one desiatina of arable land at the time fetched well over 100 rubles, the typical household of ten desiatiny could lay claim to an allotment worth over 1,000 rubles. On November 15, 1906, the Peasant Land Bank was instructed to make loans available to help peasants desiring to leave the commune.57
The law made possible, for the first time in modern history, the emergence in central Russia of an independent peasantry of a Western type.* But it also had a deeper and more revolutionary significance in that it challenged the peasants’ deeply held conviction that the land belonged to no one: it introduced the idea of the “supremacy of the fact of ownership over the juridical fact of use.”58 It is typical of late Imperial Russia that such a radical transformation of Russian agrarian conditions was promulgated under Article 87—that is, as an emergency measure: the Duma approved it only on June 14, 1910, three and a half years after it had gone into effect.