For all these reasons, the further we move forward from 1911, the more hazardous predictions become. Even in the short term, they are necessarily hedged about with an alarming range of 'ifs' and 'buts'. Pointing to Stolypin's consistent emphasis on Russia's need for peace, his American biographer, Abraham Ascher, speculates reasonably enough that he would have tried to prevent Russia from going to war in July 1914.12 Whether war would thereby have been aborted is another matter. Growing international rivalries pointed increasingly towards a major European conflict, and since all the great powers knew from their intelligence gatherers that the military reforms spearheaded by Sukhomlinov after the Russo-Japanese War were due to be completed by 1917, Russia's rivals had every incentive to pounce before then. Whenever war broke out, Russia would still have faced the geopolitical difficulties it had experienced in all its armed conflicts with the West since the seventeenth century, when the sheer distances involved in mobilising its troops had repeatedly caused the tsar's armies to start slowly and unsuccessfully. Here, one might think, is a classic case where the power of any single 'great man' to influence events was almost certain to be limited.
As it happens, however, there is no need to speculate, because there is ample evidence to show that Stolypin's political capital had already been exhausted long before his assassination. The crucial question is therefore not what might have happened between 1911 and 1914, but what did happen between 1906 and 1911.
In the first place, peasants themselves never showed much enthusiasm for Stolypin's reforms.13 Except to the extent that land consolidation on the part of even a small number of households sometimes generated a domino effect for a larger range of neighbours, the decision to privatise was voluntary. Only in the Baltic provinces, where German influence ran deep, and in neighbouring parts of Stolypin's north-western stamping ground, did significant numbers of households opt to establish the khutora that he envisaged as his ideaclass="underline" small private farmsteads, no more than three times as long as they were wide, owned by a single head of household, and comprising a single parcel of land surrounding the farm buildings. There was wider support for the otruba - a compromise between communal and private tenure in which the farmhouse was separated from its consolidated landholding. But none of these choices necessarily signalled that the peasantry shared Stolypin's commitment either to individual landownership or to the wider responsibilities and opportunities that came with it. Resourceful as ever, many peasants simply exploited his legislation as a means of settling old scores either with their own relatives or with members of rival families. So, although Stolypin's admirers can point to the fact that during the first decade of his agricultural reform some two and a half million peasant households (rather more than a fifth of the total in 1916) received title deeds to land that they had formerly held communally, critics retort that the rate of privatisation had already slowed significantly even before the reform retrospectively passed the Duma in summer 1910. Furthermore, over half the land sold through the agency of the Peasant Land Bank was bought not by individual heads of household but by village communes and cooperatives. In 1916, 61 per cent of all households still held their land in communal tenure and, given a choice in 1917, over 95 per cent of peasants opted to return to it - clear testimony to the resilience of the small-scale collectivist ideal in Russian peasant culture.
A second level of problems arose in the arena of national politics when Stolypin attempted to legislate for the wider consequences of his agrarian reforms. There was no hope of collaboration between government and parliament so long as the first two Dumas remained dominated by two parties on the centre-left. One was the liberal Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), who had been a thorn in Stolypin's side in Saratov province, where they formed an unusually strong alliance with the radical intelligentsia. The other was the Trudoviks (Labourers), whose electoral success exposed the hollowness of the tsar's expectations of a loyalist peasantry. Initially, therefore, Stolypin relied largely on the repressive methods that had served him well in Saratov.
The prospects of more peaceful reform revived only when he engineered a new franchise via the electoral law of 7 June 1907. The third Duma, which met for the first time on 1 November, was dominated by 154 conservative Octobrists (a threefold increase at 35 per cent of the total) and 147 rightists of various degrees of extremism. Kadet representation was halved and Trudovik numbers plummeted to a tenth of their former strength.14 Yet even from this superficially more pliable constellation of forces, generated almost entirely by his own gerrymandering, Stolypin was unable to secure a working majority. That was partly because the Octobrists and rightists were less politically cohesive than their numbers imply, but mainly because each of the prime minister's projected reforms offended a variety of powerful interest groups who had more to lose than they had to gain from a state governed by the rule of law and from the creation of a new class of peasant smallholders.
Religious reform was a striking case in point. Toleration for the avowedly conservative Old Believers had been under discussion since the late 1850s and was in theory confirmed in the toleration edict of 17 April 1905: a symbolic date, Easter Sunday. For the first time in Russian history, this made confessional allegiance a matter of individual conscience. However, Stolypin's efforts to confirm the concession once the threat of revolution had abated were virulently opposed by Orthodox bishops in the State Council. Other measures proved equally controversial, not so much because they were new - like the religious reforms, most of them had been under discussion for some years - but because Stolypin's drive and determination threatened to shape them into unprecedentedly subversive constellations. Nobles derailed his proposed changes to local government, fearing that their own influence would be squeezed between that of a growing peasant democracy and enhanced powers for the provincial governor. By preventing peasant democratisation, the nobility effectively slowed down the whole process of land reform. The prospect of new local courts with jurisdiction over the whole population, including the peasantry, was equally unpalatable to nobles alarmed by the prospect of judges drawn from the liberal intelligentsia: in the end, the State Council approved a purely peasant court, with peasant judges, to deal with the peasantry, ensuring that they remained as isolated as ever from mainstream institutions of government and justice. Any attempt to conciliate the landowners nevertheless risked opposition from industrialists who were themselves determined to frustrate Stolypin's attempts to introduce accident and sickness insurance for factory workers: the legislation that finally emerged on this subject was not only delayed (in the case of sickness insurance until after the prime minister's assassination), but a good deal more expensive for the consumer than he had intended.15