Yet at this very time the first clouds appeared on the horizon. As noted, the constitution had been granted under extreme duress as the only alternative to collapse. The Court and its right-wing supporters viewed it, not as a fundamental and permanent change in Russia’s system of government, but as an emergency measure to tide it over a period of civil unrest. The refusal to admit that Russia even had a constitution and the insistence that the Tsar’s not swearing an oath to the new Fundamental Laws absolved him from having to observe their provisions were not lame excuses, but deeply held convictions. Thus, as the situation in the country improved, and the emergency attenuated, the Court had second thoughts: with public order and rural prosperity restored, did one really need a parliamentary regime and a Prime Minister who played parliamentary politics? Stolypin, who had said of himself that he was “first and foremost a loyal subject of the sovereign and the executor of his designs and commands,” now appeared “a most dangerous revolutionary.”89 The main objection to him was that instead of acting in parliament exclusively as an agent of the Crown he forged there his own political constituency. Stolypin believed that he was putting together a party of “King’s Friends,” not for his own, but for the King’s benefit. The monarchists, however, saw only that his political practices led to a diminution of Imperial authority, or at least such authority as Nicholas and his entourage believed him to be entitled to:
Stolypin would have been the last to admit that his policy tended to weaken the Emperor’s independent power—indeed, he considered the source of his own authority to lie in the fact that it had been entrusted to him by the autocratic monarch. Yet, inevitably, that was the effect of his policy, since he realised that in modern conditions that state could only be strengthened against revolution by increasing in it, through parliament, the influence of the landowning, professional and educated classes. And this could only happen at the expense of the Emperor’s own independent power. It was this undeniable fact which gave the reactionaries’ arguments such force in the mind of the Emperor.90
This was the crux of Stolypin’s difficulties with the Court, the cause of his waning support and ultimate disgrace. After his death, the Tsarina would admonish his successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov, with reference to Stolypin, “not to seek support in political parties.”91 In general, the more successful Stolypin’s policies were, the less were his services required and the greater grew the Court’s antagonism to him. Such was the paradox of Russian politics.
His reforms and reform projects also alienated powerful interests. The agrarian reforms, designed to give Russia a class of peasant landlords, threatened that segment of the rural gentry which saw itself as irreplaceable Kulturträger. His efforts to decentralize the administration and make bureaucrats legally accountable aroused the hostility of the officialdom, while his plans to curb the police gained him no friends in those quarters. His unsuccessful efforts on behalf of Jews infuriated the extreme right.
Nor did he gain in public support what he lost at the Court. The liberals never forgave him for “Stolypin’s neckties” and for the manner in which he abused Article 87 to circumvent the Duma’s legislative power. To the extreme right he was an outsider brought in to extinguish a revolutionary conflagration who abused his position to accumulate independent power. Those who, in Struve’s words, regarded the constitution as “camouflaged rebellion” (zamas-kirovannyi bunt)92 despised him for taking it seriously instead of working to restore autocracy. In the militant atmosphere of Russian politics, with one set of “purist” principles confronting others, equally uncompromising, there was no room for Stolypin’s pragmatic idealism. Assailed from all sides, he began to falter and commit political blunders.
Stolypin’s first conflict with the Third Duma arose over the naval budget of 1909.93 At the beginning of 1908, the government proposed to construct four battleships of the Dreadnought class to protect Russia’s Baltic shores. In the Duma, the Kadets and the Octobrists joined forces to oppose this bill. Guchkov argued that Russia could not afford a large and expensive navy. Miliukov supported him: Russia, he said, already was spending proportionately more on her navy than Germany although she had little sea commerce and no overseas colonies. The two parties preferred the funds designated for the Dreadnoughts to be spent on the army.94 In 1908 and again in 1909 the Duma turned down requests for naval appropriations. Although the passage of the budget by the State Council sufficed to get the naval program underway, the Duma’s rebuff forced Stolypin to seek support from parties to the right of the Octobrists—a shift which led him to pursue a more nationalistic policy.
His most fateful parliamentary crisis came about indirectly because of this shift over the bill to introduce zemstva into the western provinces of the Empire. The bill encountered strong opposition in the upper chamber, where zemstva did not enjoy popularity. Determined to make this issue a test of his ability to administer, Stolypin decided to force it regardless of the cost.
On their creation in 1864, zemstva had not been introduced into nine of the provinces taken from Poland in the Partitions. The elections to the zemstva were heavily skewed in favor of the landowning nobility, and in the western provinces, a high proportion of this nobility were Catholic Poles, who the government feared would exploit the zemstva for their nationalistic ends. (The Polish Rebellion of 1863 had just been crushed.) Intelligent bureaucrats, however, came eventually to realize that given the low cultural level of the Russian element in the borderlands, it was necessary to give non-Russians there a voice in local government.95 Stolypin had spoken of introducing zemstva into the western provinces as early as August 1906, but he first formulated a legislative bill to this effect in 1909. Although it had a liberal aspect in that it gave, for the first time, the ethnic minorities of that area a voice in self-government, the bill was primarily designed to please the right wing, on which Stolypin had now come increasingly to depend: according to Kryzhanovskii, the landed gentry deputies from the western provinces were insistently pressing such a demand on him.96
22. Right-wing Duma deputies. Sitting in front on extreme left, V. Purishkevich, the assassin of Rasputin.
In his bill, Stolypin sought to ensure a preponderant voice in the western zemstva for the Russian landed gentry and peasant proprietors. Because there were virtually no Russian landlords or landowning peasants in Vilno, Kovno, and Grodno, these provinces were excluded from the bill, which applied only to six western provinces (Vitebsk, Volhynia, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev, and Podolia). In the latter provinces, Russian preponderance was to be guaranteed by a complicated voting procedure employing electoral chambers. Jewish citizens were to be entirely disenfranchised.97
The Duma opened discussion on the western zemstvo bill on May 7, 1910. In a speech urging passage, Stolypin asserted that its main purpose was to ensure that the western provinces remained “forever Russian”: this required protecting the Russian minority from the Polish Catholic majority. The bill, supported by the Nationalists and other deputies of the right, passed on May 29, after heated debate and with amendments, on a close vote.