Lenin's rule. The German order in Europe that would have emerged from victory might well have avoided a second world war and would probably have spared Europe from Hitler. But it would probably not have spared the Russians from Stalin.
Like all counterfactual arguments this conclusion is no more than informed guesswork. Counterfactual debates are to some extent just an amusing possibility to give flight to the imagination but they do also have more serious uses. Nothing is more fatal than belief that history's course was inevitable. Not only is this untrue, it is also an invitation to moral abdication and political inaction. In this chapter, I have addressed a number of counterfactuals in the international arena that might have radically changed both Russian and European history in the era of the Russian Revolution. This exercise is of special value because it illustrates the manner in which the history of Russia and that of Europe were tightly entangled. The struggle to become and remain a European great power was probably the single most important factor driving the evolution of imperial Russia. At the same time one cannot understand European or global history if one ignores imperial Russia's vital impact on both. At no time was the connection between Russia's fate and that of Europe more closely entwined than in the years 1900-1920.
THE ASSASSINATION OF STOLYPIN
September 1911 simon dixon
E
ver since pyotr arkadyevich stolypin was shot at the Kiev Municipal Theatre on 1 September 1911, his assassination has provoked debate. Among the few aspects ofthe case that remain beyond dispute is the identity of the prime minister's killer. Dmitry Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer on the fringes of the Socialist Revolutionary movement, fired twice at Stolypin from point-blank range. But why did he do it? Was the assassination an exculpatory gesture of loyalty demanded by fellow terrorists, shocked that he had betrayed them to the police in order to repay his student gambling debts? Or was he still a double agent in the pay of shadowy forces on the right who despised Stolypin's land reforms as a sell-out to Jewish speculators? Was Bogrov on the contrary defending his own Jewish family's interests in the face of Stolypin's increasingly strident Great Russian nationalism, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested in his fictionalised treatment of the assassination in The Red Wheel? More fundamentally still, posterity has wondered whether history could have turned out differently had Stolypin lived. Might his ambitious programme of reform have averted the revolutions of 1917? Could his celebrated 'wager on the strong' - an attempt to transform the impoverished Russian peasantry into a flourishing agrarian bourgeoisie - have laid the foundations for the stable era of peace and prosperity that so cruelly eluded the Bolsheviks?
The obvious ideological significance of such questions has helped to give them lasting contemporary relevance. In the West, Stolypin's reputation first became a political punchball during the Cold War, when it divided the minority of historians unsympathetic to the left. While a handful of so-called optimists argued that revolution had been far from inevitable in Russia, a larger number of sceptics - including some of those who advised Margaret Thatcher in advance of her meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in spring 1987 - insisted that Stolypin was a transient figure whose failure demonstrated just how impervious Russia could prove to root-and-branch reform.1 In Russia itself, it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that converted Stolypin's legacy into a prominent part of the search for a useable political past. Since 1991, he has been rehabilitated as the progenitor of the sort of patriotic, conservative consensus yearned for by many Russians in the early twenty-first century: an economically plausible way of restoring national pride without resorting to the atrocities associated with Stalin. In an opinion poll to find the greatest Russian in history - organised by the state-controlled television station Rossiya in December 2008 and answered by more than fifty million people - Stolypin came second only to the medieval warrior, Prince Alexander Nevsky. Stalin was pushed into third place; Pushkin, Peter the Great and Lenin also ran.
How did a tsarist prime minister, ignored and reviled for much of the Soviet period, suddenly come to be so widely admired? Some small part of the answer may lie in the flood of documents, biographies and monographs published by historians over the course of the last twenty-five years.2 Present-minded concerns certainly seem to lie close to the surface of many scholarly attempts to portray Stolypin as a consensual conservative moderate rather than the Bonapartist counter-revolutionary denounced by Lenin or the precursor of Mussolini admired by self-styled Russian Fascists in the 1920s. Still, even the herculean efforts of the academic Stolypin industry can hardly have generated the level of popular adulation registered by the 2008 opinion poll, in which Stolypin garnered 523,766 votes. Neither can such widespread acclaim be attributed to debates in the public sphere, extensive as they have been, for these too have been targeted primarily at the intelligentsia. Not all contemporary Russian commentators have looked favourably on Stolypin's legacy. Indeed, Sergei Kara-Murza, an idiosyncratic critic of progress in both its Marxist and liberal capitalist guises, believes that his reforms had a fatally destabilising effect. First published in 2002, Kara-Murza's Stolypin: Father of the Russian Revolution was re-issued at the centenary of the assassination under a still more explicit title: Stolypin's Mistake: The Prime Minister who Overturned Russia.3 His, however, is a minority view. A far greater weight of opinion has come down in favour of Stolypin's prophetic abilities in the manner of a monk at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery at Sergiev Posad whose brief popular biography, published in 2013, presents Stol- ypin as the victim of 'dark forces' who 'hated' him: 'orphaned' by his assassination, Russia fell 'into the hands of the destroyers' - 'only he knew what had to be done for the prosperity of Russia'.4
Like the occasional note of dissent, much of this popular support can be traced to the consistent self-identification with Stolypin of another self-styled man of destiny: Vladimir Putin. Keen to burnish his own image as a conservative moderniser, and no less anxious to underplay Stolypin's authoritarian instincts, Mr Putin reportedly keeps a picture of the former prime minister on his office wall (Angela Merkel apparently prefers Catherine the Great) and has repeatedly underlined his respect for Stolypin's patriotism, stamina and sense of responsibility. Already in 2000, during his first term as president of the Russian Federation, Putin drew explicit parallels between his own aspirations towards stable economic development and Stolypin's attempts to reconcile civil liberties and political democratisation with the virtues of a strong national state. This was no passing fancy. When plans were afoot to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Stolypin's birth in 2012, Putin exhorted every member of his government to donate at least a month's salary in support of a memorial to be placed outside the Russian Parliament building. So it is not merely an intellectual parlour game to wonder what might have transpired had Stolypin's reforms succeeded, and to consider their chances of success had he survived Dmitry Bogrov's attempt on his life.
Stolypin travelled to Kiev at the end of August 1911 to attend the inauguration of a statue to Alexander II (r. 1855-81) by his grandson, Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917). Superficially, such a ceremony might seem unremarkable, and indeed at one level it was merely the latest in a series of commemorations held in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the emancipation of Russia's serfs on 19 February. At a deeper level, however, it was no easy matter for Nicholas II to celebrate the legacy of the 'tsar-liberator', whose vision of national greatness varied sharply from his own. In an attempt to recover from the humiliation inflicted on the Romanov dynasty by the Crimean War, Alexander II had taken Russia down the path of Western-inspired reform based on Western- style institutions such as trial by jury. But hopes for the peaceful growth ofcivic nationalism in Russia were blown to smithereens along with the tsar himself, when terrorists, disillusioned by the slow pace of change, assassinated him on 1 March 1881. Nicholas II stubbornly maintained a very different set of values incorporated in the Muscovite revival begun by his father, Alexander III (r. 1881-1894). After 1881, Russia's last two tsars not surprisingly insisted on the maintenance of order, a virtue instilled into each of them by their tutor, K. P. Pobedonostsev. But Nicholas went further than Alexander III by insisting on the restoration of pure autocracy, sanctioned directly by God and underpinned by a vision of Russian history that reached back beyond the European- ised empire launched by Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) to venerate the Muscovite tsardom that had gone before. Visual representations highlighted the contrast. At the costume ball to celebrate the bicentenary of St Petersburg in 1903, Nicholas II dressed not as the new capital's irreverent westernising founder, but as his pious Muscovite father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Indeed, had he not been deterred by the expense, Nicholas would have abandoned Western-style uniforms altogether and clothed his whole court permanently in Muscovite costume.5