Tensions within the elite could to some extent be masked in Kiev because the pattern ofsuch Russian royal visits, established by Peter the Great and embellished over the course of the following two centuries, prescribed all manner of diverting pomp and circumstance ranging from military manoeuvres to religious ritual. Of all these ceremonial occasions, grand opera was the one on which the imperial party could most readily agree: it bored them rigid. So it was more in the cause of social duty than of artistic anticipation that they trooped into the Kiev Municipal Theatre on the evening of 1 September for a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tale of Tsar Saltan.
Stolypin sat in the front row of the stalls, not far from Baron Fred- eriks, the minister of the court, and General Sukhomlinov, the minister of war. Stretching their legs at the intervals, they stood with their backs to the orchestra, relaxing with their neighbours. Suddenly, in the second interval, a young man whose evening dress stood out against the overwhelmingly uniformed audience walked coolly down the aisle, drew a revolver from his programme and fired twice at the prime minister. One bullet caught his right hand; the other hit him just below the right ribs (though fully aware of being a terrorist target - his daughter had been crippled by the bomb that destroyed their house in August 1906 - he had characteristically refused to wear a bullet-proof vest). Turning to Nicholas II and his daughters, who had returned to their box having heard the shots from a neighbouring reception room, Stolypin made the sign of the cross (some thought he was blessing the tsar) and collapsed into his seat. Tall, strong and resilient, he initially seemed likely to survive: doctors saw no reason to remove the bullet and declared his condition satisfactory; his wife came to visit him at the hospital; so did the minister offinance, Vladimir Kokovtsov, with whom he talked animatedly about government business. But by nightfall on 3 September, an infection had set in and Stolypin's condition deteriorated. In between bouts of hallucination and unconsciousness, the only word heard clearly from his lips was 'Finland' - the borderland grand duchy whose political autonomy he had done most to undermine in the cause of imperial integration. By the evening of 5 September, Stolypin was dead.
First published in a heavily redacted selection as early as 1914, the documents relating to his assassination have recently appeared in a volume covering more than 700 closely printed pages.10 Even so, much of the mystery surrounding the event remains unresolved. Since his guilt was obvious, Bogrov was rapidly tried and hanged. But what was his motive? Solzhenitsyn's insistence on the significance of his Jewish roots is easily dismissed: the Bogrovs were a wealthy Kievan family, long since assimilated into the Russian elite. Rumours of a conspiracy on the right are harder to disprove because Stolypin certainly had enemies in the tsarist regime and one of them, his own deputy as minister of internal affairs, was in charge of security in Kiev. Pyotr Kurlov had been responsible for imperial security since 1909, when the tsar made his first official journey after the 1905 revolution in order to celebrate the bicentenary of Peter the Great's victory over the Swedes at Poltava. As a result, Kiev's governor general, who might traditionally have expected promotion or decoration after a successful imperial visit, was mortified to discover that the sole task entrusted to him was the purchase of a car for out-of-town trips - a commission made all the more humiliating when the allocated budget of 8,000 roubles turned out to be insufficient and he had to draw on emergency local funds. Yet although Kurlov persistently intrigued against Stolypin at court, the balance ofprobabilities points not to a conspiracy but to stunning incompetence on the part of the secret police. Most culpable of all was Colonel N. N. Kulyabko, the head of the Kiev Okhrana (secret police) to whom Bogrov had personally reported as an agent provocateur. The credulous Kulyabko granted Bogrov a ticket for the theatre having believed his promise to identify two (fictional) fellow terrorists, who were themselves allegedly plotting to kill Stolypin. Though subsequent investigations left no doubt of the lapses of Kurlov and Kulyabko, they almost certainly escaped punishment not because the tsar sympathised with their schemes against the prime minister, even if he did, but because it was too embarrassing for Nicholas to publicise their failings.11
It is not difficult to see the attractions of Stolypin's 'wager on the strong' for Russian conservatives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The formation of a prosperous agrarian bourgeoisie in Russia might not have sufficed to dissolve all the underlying tensions between rich and poor peasants a hundred years ago, and rural dwellers would doubtless still have been tempted to hoard grain rather than release it for consumption in the towns. Nevertheless, allowing for the avoidance of extreme shortages and the development of more sophisticated means of distribution in years when the harvest was poor, there would have been no need for the vicious war of peasant against peasant that ravaged the Russian provinces between 1918 and 1920, no need for Stalin's destructive collectivisation of agriculture at the end of the 1920s, and no need for extravagant (and ultimately wasteful) fantasies such as Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign thirty years later. More fundamentally still, there would have been no need for either Stalin or Khrushchev, because a thriving class of yeoman farmers of the sort envisaged by Stolypin might conceivably have been reconciled to the monarchy by being granted a meaningful stake in Russia's government and administration. Had such conservative allegiances solidified consistently over the longer term, it would have been much more obvious in both world wars what the Russian populace were fighting for, rather than merely what they were fighting against. Whether a predominantly agrarian regime could have developed the military resources that stemmed from Stalin's forced industrialisation in the 1930s is naturally a moot point. But provided that its borderlands had been secured by the kind of integrationist policies Stolypin urged in Finland and elsewhere, a politically and economically stable Russian Empire might in any case have presented a much less inviting target to any potential invader than the multinational Soviet Union, where many inhabitants of the western regions were by no means wholly hostile to the Germans in 1941. In short, it is possible to imagine that the realisation of Stolypin's dream could have led to the emergence of a strong, stable, more or less autarkic regime, daunting to its international rivals, and securely entrenched in the huge landmass stretching from the Far East to the German borderlands - a phenomenon not so different in outline from the nirvana envisaged by Eurasian philosophers in the 1920s and by neo-Eurasians in the 1990s, but stripped of their overt hostility to European civilisation.
The problem with such a vision is that social and economic change on the scale envisaged by Stolypin would have taken generations to come to fruition wherever it had been planned, and in Russia the conditions were singularly unpropitious. In a newspaper interview in 1909, Stolypin himself suggested that twenty years of peace would be needed if his reforms were to succeed. Considering the underdeveloped state of Russia's economy and society, that sounds like an underestimate: when Stolypin came into office in 1906, the empire was still reeling from both internal revolution and international humiliation. Thanks to the severity of the climate, no one has ever found it easy to make money out of Russian agriculture. In the imperial period, profits were made largely by exporting grain even in time of famine - not a popular policy among Russian peasants - or by converting grain to vodka, which is less expensive to transport by unit weight. Even twenty years of consistent development was a Utopian prospect in a state whose history has notoriously been characterised by extreme political 'zigzags' of the sort that followed Alexander II's assassination. Although he was not yet fifty at the time of his death, Stolypin can hardly have expected to remain in office for much longer. Already five years long by 1911, his tenure as the tsar's chief minister exceeded that of many of his predecessors. And there was no guarantee that any of his successors would have been sufficiently strong or intelligent to sustain his direction of reform.