century. Russia needed heavy artillery, not more elegant Horseguards. In this conviction
Guchkov was supported by the 'military professionals', such as General Brusilov and Stolypin's own Assistant Minister of War, A.A. Polivanov. Guchkov was Chairman of the Duma's Committee of Imperial Defence, which had a veto over the military budget, and he used this position to launch an attack on the court's supreme command. In 1909 the Duma threatened to refuse the navy credits unless its strategic planning agency, the Naval General Staff, came under the control of the Ministry rather than the court. Nicholas was furious. He saw in this ultimatum a brazen attempt by the Duma to wrest military command from the crown, and used his veto to block its Naval General Staff Bill. The fact that Stolypin and his Council of Ministers had supported the bill made matters worse, since now there was a fundamental conflict of interests, with the government taking the view that it should control the armed forces and the court and its allies insisting that this was the sole right of the Tsar. Stolypin offered to resign, and Nicholas was pressed by his more reactionary allies to accept his resignation. But at this moment, having restored the country to a kind of order, Stolypin was indispensable and the royalists had to be satisfied with the lesser triumph of forcing him to reconfirm the Tsar's exclusive prerogatives in the military sphere.17
Beneath the technicalities of the naval staff crisis lay a fundamental problem that was to undermine Stolypin's efforts to save the tsarist system by reforming it. As far as the Tsar was concerned, Stolypin's political programme threatened to shift the balance of power from the court to the state institutions. The Naval General Staff Bill was an obvious signal of this intention. Stolypin stood foursquare in the Petrine tradition of bureaucratic modernization so detested by Nicholas. Everything in his Prime Minister's conduct was intended to break with the old patrimonial system. Whereas previous chief ministers had been treated as little more than household servants by the Tsar, Stolypin deliberately avoided the court and preferred to spend his weekends at home with his family, as a Western Prime Minister would, rather than on hunting parties with the Tsar and his lackeys. Stolypin viewed the state as a neutral and universal agent of reform and modernization which would protect Russia's imperial interests. In his view, the state stood above the interests of the aristocracy — even above the dynasty itself — which negated the notion of a social order based on the old estate rankings. Everyone, from the peasant to the prince, was a citizen (so long as he owned property). This essentially Western view of the state was a direct challenge to the Muscovite ideology so favoured by the Tsar and his courtiers, who imagined the autocracy as a steep and mystically sanctioned pyramid of patrimonial power based on a strict social hierarchy headed by the nobility. If Stolypin's reforms were allowed to succeed, then the Tsar's personal rule would be overshadowed by the institutions of his state, while the traditional social order would be undermined.
Such fears were fuelled by the old elite groups who all had their own reasons to oppose Stolypin's reforms and who now rallied to the defence of the Tsar's autocratic prerogatives. This legitimist bloc was brought together by the naval staff crisis, which presented an obvious threat to the crowns traditional rights. It had powerful institutional support within court circles, the State Council, the United Nobility, the Orthodox Church, the Union of the Russian People, the police and certain sections of the bureaucracy and, although it operated through informal channels, was strong enough to defeat virtually all Stolypin's political innovations.
His proposal to expand the state system of primary education was defeated by reactionaries in the Church, who had their own interest in the schools. The same fate awaited his legislation to ease discrimination against religious minorities, the Old Believers and the Jews in particular. His efforts to curb the illegal behaviour of the bureaucracy and the police were doomed, since he never had full control of either. The provincial governors, with their family ties at court, constantly sabotaged his reforms, while senior bureaucrats in St Petersburg intrigued against him. As for the actual control of the police, Stolypin was virtually powerless. The Empress's own candidate, General P. G. Kurlov, was appointed chief of the secret police, over Stolypin's protests. Kurlov used his position to divert large sums of government money to extremist Rightist groups and newspapers. He placed Stolypin himself under surveillance, intercepted his mail, and kept the Empress informed about his intentions, especially with regard to her favourite Rasputin. When Stolypin was finally assassinated, in August 1911, rumours immediately began to circulate that Kurlov had commissioned the murder. To this day, the rumours have never been proved. But they tell us a good deal about the public perception of the relations between Stolypin and his enemies on the Right.
The United Nobility was by far the most vociferous of these groups. It had been formed in the wake of the 1905 Revolution to defend the gentry's property rights and its domination of rural politics. Stolypin's local government reforms threatened the latter by giving the peasants, as landowners, representation in the zemstvos equal to that of the nobles. They also proposed to abolish the peasant-class courts, bringing the peasants fully into the system of civil law. Stolypin saw these reforms as essential for the success of his land reform programme (see pages 232-41). The new class of conservative peasant landowners which he hoped to create would not support the existing order unless they were made citizens with equal political and legal rights to those enjoyed by other estates. 'First of all,' Stolypin said, 'we have to create a citizen, a small landowner, and then the peasant problem will be solved.'
The provincial gentry, however, interpreted this inclusive gesture as a threat to their own privileged position in the rural social and political order.
Stolypin was proposing to establish a new tier of zemstvo representation at the volost level, in which the franchise would be based on property rather than birth. He was also planning to increase the powers of the zemstvos and abolish the land captains, who had previously ruled the roost in the countryside. The effect of all this, as the outraged squires pointed out, would be to end their ancient domination of the system of rural government. The local zemstvos would be transformed from gentry into peasant organs, since for every squire at the volost level there would be several hundred newly-enfranchised peasant smallholders. The squires accused Stolypin of trying to undermine 'provincial society' (i.e. themselves) through bureaucratic centralization, and on this basis rallied their forces against him in the Duma, the State Council, the United Nobility and among their allies at court. Too vain to suffer certain defeat, Stolypin gave up the battle. The system of rural administration, by far the weakest link in the tsarist state, stayed in the hands of 20,000 nobles, a tiny and outdated social group which, thanks to its supporters in high places, was able to fend off all reform in defence of its own narrow interests. Had Stolypin succeeded in broadening the social base of local government in the countryside, then perhaps in 1917 it would not have collapsed so disastrously and Soviet power might never have filled the subsequent political vacuum as successfully as it did.
Much the same clash of interests lay behind the famous western zemstvo crisis of 1911, which marked Stolypin's final demise. With the decline of the Octobrists, as a result of the naval staff crisis and the rightward shift of the landowning squires, Stolypin was obliged to tailor his policies to the other main government party in the Duma, the Nationalists, which had been established in 1909 with strong support among the Russian landowners of the nine Polish provinces. The party, in the words of its historian Robert Edelman, was 'not so much a party of nationalism as a party of the dominant Russian nationality in a multinational Empire'.18 The zemstvos had never been established in these western provinces, since most of the landowners were Poles and the Polish Rebellion of 1863 was still fresh in the memory of Alexander II. But the Nationalist Party campaigned for a western zemstvo bill, arguing that Russia's imperial interests in these crucial borderlands could be guaranteed by a complex voting procedure based on nationality as well as property. Stolypin knew this western region from his days in Kovno. The peasant smallholders, who were mainly Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, were among the most advanced in the Empire and he expected them to develop rapidly into yeoman farmers under his agrarian reforms. If they were given the largest share of the vote in the zemstvos, as planned by the lower property franchise of his Western Zemstvo Bill, they might become the model yeoman-citizens of the Russian imperial state.
An area formerly dominated by Polish landowners would be ruled by Russians,* albeit of peasant origin.
The bill was passed by the Duma but defeated in the State Council, where the gentry's fundamentalists were unwilling to see the privileges of the noble estate (even its Polish element) sacrificed to ensure the domination of Russian interests; the fact that the Poles were aristocrats should in their view take precedence over the fact that the peasants were Russian. Their opposition was encouraged by Trepov and Durnovo, favourites at court, who sought to use this opportunity to bring down their rival. They ensured the bill's defeat by persuading the Tsar to go behind Stolypin's back and issue a statement encouraging the deputies to vote as their 'conscience' dictated (i.e.
