To navigate a consistent course between such incompatible lobbies required greater powers of persuasion and flexibility than Stolypin could readily muster. Though conscious of the need to mobilise public opinion behind his reforms, he was fundamentally a bureaucrat rather than a politician. Using subsidies granted by Stolypin's own government, extremists on the right proved to be masters ofthe sensationalist tabloid journalism that did much to undermine him. More conventional political parties, profiting from the relaxation of censorship after 1905, could each count on the support of sophisticated broadsheet newspapers. Stolypin, by contrast, conceived the press largely as an organ of government information and never contemplated the creation of a party of his own. That was only one of the many ways in which he differed from Mussolini: he was the opposite of a charismatic leader. His prose was disfigured by the strangulated constructions of Russian 'officialese'. Neither was he a good speaker: his voice was too metallic and his body language awkward. After hearing Stolypin address the Duma, one of Russia's most influential and idiosyncratic columnists, Vasily Rozanov, commented that it was like watching 'a catfish swim through jam'.16
Temperamentally ill-equipped to cope with the onset of mass politics, Stolypin was particularly bemused by extra-parliamentary agitation. The charismatic young monk, Iliodor (Trufanov), danced rings around him, denouncing the prime minister as Pontius Pilate at the Fourth Monarchist Congress in 1907 and in 1911 leading a populist crusade on the Volga that dominated the national headlines between the anniversary ofthe emancipation and Stolypin's assassination. When Iliodor began a widely publicised hunger strike in Tsaritsyn, surrounded by thousands of female admirers, Stolypin responded by besieging his monastery with troops.17 The same authoritarian instincts were still more fatal to his dealings with the Duma and the State Council. Even his two most significant measures - the agrarian reform of 9 November 1906 and the Western Zemstvo legislation of 1911 - had to be pushed through under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws promulgated on 23 April 1906, a provision intended to be used only in extremis. The dissolution of the second Duma in May 1907 and the promulgation of the electoral law of 7 June were equally flagrant violations of the principle that all new laws must be subject to prior approval by parliament.
In the eyes of even the most respectful of elite liberals, Stolypin's repeated willingness to flout basic constitutional conventions deprived him of all authority. Count Ivan Tolstoy, the only member of Witte's cabinet who had supported full toleration for the Jews in 1905, 'completely refused' to recognise Stolypin as 'a "talented" statesman'. 'For me,' he wrote shortly after the prime minister's assassination, 'he always was, and will always remain, a favourite, i.e. a careerist, with all the shortcomings that brings.' Stolypin's energy and decisiveness therefore had to be set against 'incomparably more serious shortcomings: the absence of a critical mind, narrowness of political outlook'. Such a verdict may catch Stolypin's streak of ambition, but it surely underestimates his independence of mind and the sophistication of his grasp, unrivalled by any contemporary, of the interplay between society, economics and politics. Nevertheless, Tolstoy's hostility indicates the depth of the Kadets' resentment of the prime minister's equally unrelenting contempt for them. Tolstoy was surely not the only liberal who believed that if Stolypin's successors chose to continue his policies, which had allegedly benefited only 'spongers' and 'scoundrels', they would succeed merely in restoring the discredited 'template' of the era before 1905. Nothing could be worse than that.18
While liberals were alienated by Stolypin's increasingly desperate attempts to woo the right by supporting chauvinist nationalism, the right itself, and particularly its more radical elements such as the rabble- rousing URP, thought that he had betrayed the tsar by consorting with an illegitimate parliamentary regime. The controversial archbishop of Volhynia, Antony (Khrapovitsky) - a URP sympathiser who liked to rhyme 'constitution' with 'prostitution' - could never trust Stolypin because, for all his many conflicts with the Duma, he persisted in regarding it as an integral part of the Russian legislative process. Doubts on the right set in early. The St Petersburg salon hostess Alexandra Bog- danovich was convinced of Stolypin's duplicity as soon as he became a minister. 'Apparently,' she noted on 29 April 1906, 'Stolypin is both on our side and on yours; in the morning, he is liberal, and in the evening - the opposite.'19 Over the next five years, a galaxy of disgruntled rightist leaders trooped through her salon to denounce Stolypin as 'two-faced'. Even the veteran general Alexander Kireev, who had more respect for him than most, rapidly lost confidence. At their first meeting in May 1906, the newly appointed minister of internal affairs 'made a fine impression' - 'sober-minded, favourably disposed, understands the state of affairs ... Our opinions are very close.'20 Six months later, Stolypin still struck Kireev as 'a real gentleman. (And that is important!)' But there was no longer a meeting of minds. The following exchange, recorded in the general's diary shortly before the promulgation of the agricultural reform, reveals a chasm that was to separate the prime minister from many of his potential supporters on the right, obsessed as they were by the spectre ofJewish speculators:
S[tolypin]: Do you rebuke me for the rights given to the schismatics and Old Believers?
Me [Kireev]: No, not at all. I rebuke you for the destruction of communal agriculture.
S: It is impossible not to abolish it! I have seen it, I know - and I know, too, the difference between it and landholding by khutor. Russia will immediately become richer.
Me: You have forgotten that it is not only a question of finances,
but of politics (you are creating a mass of agricultural proletarians).
All the peasants' land will be bought up by Jews.
S: So long as I am in post, that will not happen. The pale of
settlement will not be abolished.
Me: Are you eternal, then?21
Stolypin was not eternal. Indeed, as Alexander Guchkov remarked, his political death long preceded his assassination. As the scion of a prominent Old Believer dynasty, the Octobrist leader had good reason to admire Stolypin's promotion of civil rights for religious dissenters. Guchkov became the prime minister's closest parliamentary ally, at least until the crisis over the Western Zemstvos in March 1911 when the Octobrists finally lost confidence in him and he came to rely almost entirely on the Nationalist Party. Already in 1909, Stolypin's growing alignment with the Nationalists, a group committed to the protection of Russian interests in the imperial borderlands, had signalled a shift away from his earlier emphasis on economic and political reform. Neither the Octobrists nor the Nationalists offered a sufficiently stable foundation on which to build the wider consensus required for fundamental change. Virulent personal animosities made it more difficult still. As a provincial 'outsider', Stolypin had always aroused resentment and suspicion in St Petersburg. Pyotr Durnovo, his predecessor as minister of internal affairs, hated him from the start; Witte - brilliant, arrogant and permanently embittered by the circumstances of his resignation as prime minister in 1906 - pursued a relentless vendetta against his successor that reached its zenith in 1911 during the State Council debacle over the Western Zemstvos. Characteristic of the increasingly fetid atmosphere of Russian high politics, enmities such as these served primarily to unsettle Stolypin's relationship with the man who mattered more than any other: the tsar.
It was Nicholas II who did most to undermine his own prime minister. While Stolypin's reforms might have strengthened the Russian monarchy, the tsar rightly saw them as a threat to his own autocratic status - a status that he was determined, against all odds, to preserve. Ministers could stomach the idea of autocracy if it meant only that the tsar was divinely sanctioned. But for Nicholas it signalled nothing less than his own undivided sovereignty. So, while educated society greeted the October Manifesto as the dawn of a new constitutional era, the tsar himself regarded it as a personal (and far from inalienable) grant to his people. By the same token, he saw the Duma promised in the Manifesto as an extension of his own autocratic will. Consistently mistrustful of strong ministers, Nicholas ensured that neither Witte nor Stolypin ever became a Russian Bismarck. Instead, the tsar preferred to rely on informal advice from a variety of shadowy figures at court - above all from the empress, who shared his political instincts and was capable of articulating them in a way that he could not, and through her from Rasputin, the antithesis of a westernised official and the incarnation of the idealised Russian peasant who haunted her husband's mind. It was the tsar - egged on by Rasputin and the URP, and more subtly influenced by Pyotr Kurlov - who ensured that the insubordinate monk Iliodor repeatedly escaped censure, humiliating Stolypin in the process. Guchkov believed that by the time of the visit to Kiev in August 1911, Nicholas's support for the fanatical Iliodor had driven Stolypin to contemplate resignation.