Piotr Arkadevich Stolypin

Piotr Arkadevich Stolypin , 1862-1911, Russian premier and minister of the interior (1906-11) for Czar Nicholas II. He sought to fight the revolutionary movement with both severe repression and social reform. He instituted a regime of courts-martial to suppress revolutionary terrorism and peasant disorders, and hundreds were executed in 1906 and 1907. To stem peasant unrest Stolypin attempted to create a class of peasant landowners that would be conservative and loyal to the czar. The roots of unrest lay partly in the Edict of Emancipation of 1861 (see Emancipation, Edict of ), which had given land to the village communes, instead of individually to the newly freed serfs. The commune usually distributed scattered strips to provide families with generally equal allotments. Stolypin's land reforms of 1906 gave the peasant communes the right to dissolve themselves, entitled each peasant to own and consolidate the strips given him by the commune, and provided financial aid to peasants who wished to buy more land. The land reform was designed to transform the peasants gradually into landowners without hurting the interests of the large landowners. At the same time it enabled peasants to seek industrial employment in the cities if they wished to leave the land. It was opposed by the leftist majority in the first duma , which favored extensive expropriation of the land. The first and second Dumas were dissolved, and Stolypin made sure of a conservative majority in the third Duma by altering (1907) the election laws. Some of Stolypin's measures were opposed by the Socialists and liberals, others by the extreme reactionaries. His agrarian reform came too late to conciliate the peasantry as a body. When the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out, the number of small holdings had increased but not sufficiently to create a conservative peasant class. His attempt to extend the government's policy of Russification to Finland, where he restricted (1910) the authority of the diet, met with wide opposition. While his secret police continued their repressive activities, the government took no action against the anti-Jewish pogroms organized by extreme reactionary societies. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary terrorist who was also a police agent.

Stolypin, Piort Arkadevich (1862–1911) Russian statesman. The last effective statesman of the Russian empire, he was Premier (1906–11). He was hated for his ruthless punishment of activists in the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION of 1905, for his disregard of the DUMAS, and for his treatment of Jews. His constructive work lay in his agricultural reforms. Believing that a contented peasantry would check revolution, he allowed peasants (KULAKS) to have their land in one holding instead of strips that were periodically re-allocated within the peasant commune. Those taking advantage of this became prosperous, but were not powerful enough to stem the revolutionary tide. He was assassinated in a Kiev theatre.

Stolypin, Piotr Arkadievich (b. 14 Apr. 1862, d. 18 Sept. 1911). Prime Minister of Russia 1906–11 Born in the German city of Dresden, he joined the Russian bureaucracy and worked in the Ministry of Interior from 1884. In 1903, he became governor of the Saratov province, where he commended himself through his repression of the local peasant uprisings in the 1905 Russian Revolution. He was called back to Moscow and became Prime Minister. The outstanding statesman of the last decade of the Tsarist era, he quelled the revolution and re-established government control in the cities as well as the countryside. In a further, deeply controversial move, he changed the electoral laws to produce a more conservative and docile Duma in 1907. At the same time, his land reforms after 1906 undermined peasant communal land tenure through both the transfer of title into individual ownership and the consolidation of landholdings, thus creating the foundation of greater agricultural efficiency. He was assassinated by left-wing revolutionaries.

Kulak