The biggest political question facing the Russian old regime at the beginning of the twentieth century was whether these two rival world views could be reconciled. Stolypin's appointment as minister of internal affairs in April 1906, and his assumption of the additional office of prime minister in July, offered a glimmer of hope to those who believed that they might be. No man was more closely associated with the restoration of order than Stolypin, who had impressed the tsar since 1903 as governor of the notoriously turbulent province of Saratov. However, although his unflinching resort to force in the face of revolutionary unrest had given his name to the hangman's noose, the progenitor of 'Stolypin's necktie' was no ordinary reactionary. In fact, he was not a reactionary at all. Close to his fortieth birthday in 1902, he had become the empire's youngest provincial governor in Grodno on the strength of his innovative solutions to some of Russia's most intransigent social and economic problems. Born in the year after the serfs were freed, he had studied natural sciences at the University of St Petersburg - an unusual choice for a young nobleman - and eighteen months after starting work at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1885 had volunteered for the Ministry of Agriculture's Department of Statistics, where he developed his interest in private farming. In 1889, at the point when he might have launched a conventional bureaucratic career in the capital, he opted instead to return to his native Kovno province (present-day Kaunas in Lithuania), where he learned to manage his own expanding estates, to resolve complex land disputes as chairman of the local peace arbitrators, and to consider wider political questions first as district marshal of the nobility and ultimately as provincial marshal. Presiding at a banquet to commemorate the emancipation in February 1911, Stolypin could plausibly claim that he had been dealing with the institutions of peasant government for most of his conscious life. Here, it seemed, was exactly the sort of dynamic agrarian technocrat dreamed of by those who yearned for a Russian Bismarck.6
There were, nevertheless, significant underlying differences between the tsar and his new prime minister that helped to destabilise their relationship.7 Whereas Nicholas II believed in the divinely consecrated union of tsar and people, Stolypin wanted to make the impersonal state the focus of national unity. This ambition led him to seek to reconcile the two westernised social groups that the tsar distrusted most: the bureaucracy and 'educated society' (obshchestvennost) - publicly engaged professionals who had benefited from the civic freedoms granted by Alexander II and who now saw an unprecedented opportunity for political influence in the Duma, the elective chamber created in response to the revolution of 1905.8 In the cause of national unity, Stolypin also strove to dissolve the boundaries between the congeries of ethnic groups that made up the multinational Russian Empire and between the social estates (sosloviia) into which most of the empire's subjects had been legally ascribed at birth.
Of these estates, Stolypin regarded the immiserated peasantry as the Russian nation's weakest link. He had been convinced by his experiences in Saratov, where the peasantry was especially poor and the link between poverty and insurrection inescapable, that if the common people were ever to form a reliable bedrock for the tsarist regime, then they must be enriched by the spread of private property and must be granted the political freedom denied to them by the terms of the emancipation of 1861. This had isolated peasants from most of the new civic institutions that governed the rest of Russian society by keeping them tied to the commune. The cornerstone of Stolypin's programme as prime minister was therefore the decision to permit heads of peasant households to leave the commune at any time under the terms of the agrarian reform of 9 November 1906. In the following year, local Land Settlement Commissions were created to make it easier for peasants to consolidate into private farms their share of the narrow strips of land hitherto widely distributed across their villages under communal cultivation. There was also a significant political dimension to this fundamental economic change. In addition to offering favourable terms in the form of easier credit from the Peasant Land Bank, Stolypin repeatedly justified his policies by stressing that peasant prosperity was inseparable from enlightenment and freedom. So his agrarian reform was flanked by legislation to allow peasants to escape the supervisory institutions he knew so well from Kovno and Grodno, and to gain unprecedented legal independence and freedom of movement.
These provisions alone were sufficient to disconcert Nicholas II, and tensions between him and Stolypin were clearly apparent by the time that the imperial suite travelled to Kiev. For Nicholas, such provincial visits served to signal his detachment from the alien values he associated with cosmopolitan St Petersburg and to emphasise his spiritual closeness to the common people. Kiev was particularly receptive territory for such a strategy because an exceptionally well-organised nationalist movement had developed there, divided though not debilitated by splits between the elite Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists and the populist Union of Russian People (URP), two groups who competed in their efforts to host the tsar.9 For Stolypin, by contrast, the highlight of the visit was a gathering of deputies from the empire's six western provinces, where, expressly against the wishes of the tsar and the State Council, he had insisted in spring 1911 on the establishment of zemstvos - the elective local authorities created by Alexander II in 1864, but hitherto kept out of the western borderlands in case they became dominated by Polish landowners.
Stolypin had no truck with Polish influence. Indeed, his proposed electoral law incorporated a complex system of ethnic voting blocs designed to emasculate it. Had he been certain of finding a way to ensure Russian dominance there, the zemstvos would also have been extended to three more provinces in his native north-west: Vitebsk, Grodno and Kovno. Nevertheless, his scheme remained suspect in the eyes of Russian noble landowners because the prime minister's way of counteracting the Polish elite was to enfranchise large numbers of Russian peasants - an unprecedentedly democratic scheme that Stolypin evidently intended as a Trojan horse for the further democra- tisation of local government elsewhere in the empire.