him to the attention of Nicholas II, and figured in his appointment as Minister of Internal Affairs, on the eve of the opening of the First State Duma in April 1906. When the tsar dissolved the assembly that July and ordered new elections, he also appointed Stolypin to chair the Council of Mnisters, a position that made him the de facto prime minister of the Russian Empire.
His tenure from 1906 through 1911 was tumultuous. Typically, historians have assessed it in terms of a balance between the conflicting imperatives of order and reform. Ironically enough, contemporary opponents of Stolypin’s policies, most notably moderate liberals and social democrats who pilloried Stolypin for sacrificing the possibilities of constitutional monarchy and democratic reform to preserve social order, offered opinions of his politics that found their way, however circuitously, into Soviet-era historiography. In this view, Stolypin favored punitive force, police power, clandestine financing of the press, and a general negli1482 gence of the law to dominate political opponents and assert the preeminence of a superficially reformed monarchy. Hence, in August 1906, he established military field court-martials to suppress domestic disorder. More drastically, he undertook the so-called coup d’?tat of June 3, 1907, dissolving what was deemed an excessively radical Second State Duma and, in clear violation of the law, issuing a new electoral statute designed to reduce the representation of peasants, ethnic minorities, and leftist political parties.
A second view, shared by a minority of his contemporaries but a majority of historians, accepted that Stolypin never entirely could have escaped the authoritarian impulses widespread in tsarist culture and especially pronounced among those upon whom Stolypin’s own influence most depended- moderate public opinion; the hereditary nobility, the imperial court; and ultimately the tsar, Nicholas II. Given such circumstances, without order the far-reaching “renovation” (obnovlenie) of the economic, cultural, and political institutions of the Empire envisioned by Stolypin would have been politically impossible. Of central importance to this interpretation was the Stolypin land reform, first issued by administrative decree in 1906 and approved by the State Duma in 1911. This major legislative accomplishment aimed to transform what was deemed to be an economically unproductive, politically destabilizing peasant repartitional land commune (obshchina) and eventually replace it with family based hereditary smallholdings. Yet, the reform initiatives of these years were not limited only to this “wager on the strong,” but extended into every important arena of national life: local, rural, and urban government; insurance for industrial workers; religious toleration; the income tax; universal primary education; university autonomy; and the conduct of foreign policy.
In September 1911, Stolypin’s career was cut short when Dmitry Bogrov assassinated him in Kiev. Once a secret police informant, Bogrov’s background spawned persistent rumors of right-wing complicity in the murder of Russia’s last great reformer, but by all authoritative accounts the assassin acted alone. Some scholars argue that Stolypin’s political influence, and especially his personal relationship with Nicholas II, was waning well before his death, in large measure as a result of the western zemstvo crisis of March 1911. Yet, Abraham Ascher, Stolypin’s most authoritative biographer, credits the claims of Alexander Zenkovsky that Stoylpin was contemplating further substanENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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tive reforms of the empire’s administrative and territorial structures in the last months of his life. Stolypin’s historical reputation continues to be the subject of scholarly debate, the character and consequences of his policies intertwined with larger debates about the stability and longevity of the tsarist regime. See also: AGRARIAN REFORMS; DUMA; ECONOMY, TSARIST; NICHOLAS II
Ascher, Abraham. (2001). P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. (1976). Peter Arkad’evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Imperial Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Macey, David A. J. (1987). Government and Peasant in Russia, 1881-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Von Bock, Maria Petrovna. (1970). Reminiscences of My Father Peter A. Stolypin, tr. and ed. Margaret Patoski. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Waldron, Peter. (1998). Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia. London: UCL. Wcislo, Francis W. (1990). Reforming Rural Russia. State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855- 1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zenkovsky, Alexander. (1986). Stolypin: Russia’s Last Great Reformer, tr. Margaret Patoski. Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press.
FRANCIS W. WCISLO
From 1712 until 1918, St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. Peter I (the Great) began the construction of the city as his “Window on the West” in 1703. During the subsequent three centuries, St. Petersburg was identified with the three major forces shaping Russian history: Westernization, industrialization, and revolution. The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, because it sounded less German, was then named Leningrad after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and again became St. Petersburg in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Confusingly, the surrounding region (oblast) is still known as Leningrad. In the early twenty-first century, with a metropolitan population of 4.8 million people, St. Petersburg is the second-largest city in Russia and the fourth-largest in Europe (behind Moscow, London, and Berlin). It is also Russia’s second-most important industrial center, having benefited from Soviet investment in heavy industry, research and development, military-industrial production, and military basing and training. The city is a major international port and tourist destination, with tourists flocking there in May and June for the legendary “White Nights,” during which the sun seems to never set.
CAPITAL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Peter the Great seized control over the confluence of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland from Sweden in 1703. Inspired by a visit to Amsterdam, he decided to build a major city on this barren marshland to better integrate Russia into Western Europe and secure a Baltic port. Thousands of peasants and prisoners-of-war were pressed into service to build the city’s numerous canals and palaces. When the harsh climate combined with malaria to kill tens of thousands of them, their bodies were dumped into the construction sites, leading to St. Petersburg’s nickname as the “city built on bones.” Construction was hampered by floods, which also ravaged the city in 1777, 1824, 1924, and 1955.
Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, improved upon her father’s vision by commissioning European architects such as Bartolomeo Rastrelli to construct baroque landmarks, including Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the palaces of Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine II (the Great) subsequently purchased the paintings, drawings, and other priceless artworks that are now the core of the Hermitage Museum’s holdings. She also established the Russian Academy of Arts to further aesthetic production, and she commissioned the Pavlovsk Palace, the Hermitage, and the Tauride Palace, later the meeting place of the first Duma and the Provisional Government.
The city’s remarkable transformation from swamp to showcase paralleled the emergence of Russia as a major European power, from Peter’s 1709 victory over the Swedes at Poltava to Alexander I’s 1814 arrival in Paris. The city came to represent precisely this change from isolation to European integration. Petersburg’s growing symbolic dominance preoccupied the country’s intelligentsia and nobility alike, with Tsar Nicholas I
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An eighteenth-century engraving of Peter the Great supervising the construction of St. Petersburg. © BETTMANN/CORBIS complaining that “Petersburg is Russian but it is not Russia.”
During the imperial era, Russia’s leading politicians, intellectuals, and cultural figures were brought together by the major institutions based in St. Petersburg to generate events that vitally affected the life of every member of Russian society. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 culminated in Senate (now Decembrist) Square. In January 1905, Father Gapon led a peaceful march of workers and their families to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar; the resulting slaughter is remembered as Bloody Sunday. Following that tragedy, the workers of St. Petersburg became increasingly militant. Forced to live and work in squalor due to Russia’s rapid forced industrialization, they began to protest and strike for improved conditions.
