... A new cry arose for boycott of the Duma.  The Social Revolutionary Party reverted to boycott, while Lenin’s faction overwhelmed him once more.  This was a "cardboard, comic-opera Duma," they cried, and the Constitution was now a mere fraud.  What self-respecting revolutionary could so humiliate himself and so deceive the masses as to participate in such undemocratic elections, play a role in such a farce, pretend that anything could be accomplished in such a travesty on the idea of popular representation ?

But Lenin knew no finical pride as to the kind of institution in which he would work if he could thereby serve the revolution.  “In a pig-sty if necessary,” he told his comrades.  Moreover, he had been studying Stolypin and his maneuvers with increasing respect.  Here was an opponent worthy of his steel, a man who, with opposite intentions, but from similar premises, was doing much what Lenin would have done had he been a champion of the existing order and an enemy of the revolution.

Stolypin’s policy as Premier combined measures to diminish the franchise of "unreliable elements" and to repress open revolutionary activity, with a series of bold positive schemes for modernizing Russian life, reforming agriculture, and stabilizing the tsarist régime.  As if he had studied Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia and all Lenin’s writings on the agrarian question, Stolypin proceeded now to foster capitalism in agriculture, to promote class differentiation in the village, to break down the communal mir, to secrete out a new class of property-minded individual peasant proprietors as a rural support for the existing order.  ("I put my wager not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdy and the strong.")

The trouble with the Emancipation of 1861, reasoned Stolypin, was that it actually preserved and fostered the peasant commune instead of setting up a class of individual proprietors.  Each communal village had received the entire area of land allotted to its members as a communal holding under a system of collective responsibility for the redemption payments of all its members.  The commune itself then divided the land for tilling among its members according to the size of the families, fresh subdivision taking place every few years to keep up with population changes.  Hence there was no inducement to improve the land, and no sense of private ownership such as characterized Western farmers and tended to make them socially conservative.  The system conserved communal or corporate ideology.  It preserved the memory of serfdom, and reminded the former serfs that they had gotten on the average only half of the land they had tilled for their lords before emancipation.  Thus it kept alive the idea that the halfway job might be completed by adding the rest of the land of the big landowner to the communal village land fund.

Now Stolypin set about to create in Russia a class of individual small proprietors.  He abolished the zemski nachalnik who kept the village in tutelage; he instituted equal rights for peasants with the rest of the population; he inaugurated a series of land and loan laws which would encourage all the more energetic to withdraw from the communes and become individual owners of their share of the land.  "The natural counterweight to the communal principle," he said, "is individual ownership; the small owner is the nucleus on which rests all stable order in the state." In short, he tried to create the conservative, property-minded class that the Marxists had wrongly imagined the Russian peasant to be.  This was sound reactionary politics, Lenin told himself with ungrudging admiration.

And no less sound was Stolypin’s ukaz limiting the voting power of elements opposed to the regime while he enlarged the voting power of its supporters.  So Lenin, too, would act in 1918, when he made a worker’s vote equal to that of five peasants.

Between 1907 and 1914, under the Stolypin land reform laws, 2,000,000 peasant families seceded from the village mir and became individual proprietors.  All through the war the movement continued, so that by January 1, 1916, 6,200,000 families, out of approximately 10,000,000 eligible, had made application for separation.  Lenin saw the matter as a race with time between Stolypin’s reforms, and the next upheaval.  Should an upheaval be postponed for a couple of decades, the new land measures would so transform the countryside that it would no longer be a revolutionary force.  How near Lenin came to losing that race is proved by the fact that in 1917, when he called upon the peasants to "take the land", they already owned more than three-fourths of it.  According to Nicholas S. Timasheff, "the increase in the area tilled by the peasants (after the revolution) did not exceed 8 per cent; for an additional 8 per cent, the peasants no longer had to pay rent.  The rest was not arable land." (The Great Retreat, p. 107.)

Thus the two men had opposing purposes, but in premises, in analysis of the possibilities, in tactical methods, they understood each other.  It almost seemed as if Premier Peter Arkadyevich were addressing Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich directly when, from the rostrum of the Duma, he made his famous declaration:

"What you want is upheavals, what we want is a great fatherland."

Would a fresh upheaval come before the new régime could complete its self-reform and consolidate its new foundations? "I do not expect to live to see the revolution," said Lenin several times toward the close of the Stolypin period.

But the dark forces which Plehve had created and which Stolypin continued to use to spy upon the revolutionary movement were the very forces which struck him down.  On September 14, 1911, in the presence of the Tsar and Tsarina at a gala performance in the best theater in Kiev, an assassin’s bullet put an end to the career of Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin.  The murderer was a Jewish lawyer named Dmitri Bogrov, who seems to have been simultaneously an agent of the police and of the terrorist wing of the Anarchist movement.  The assassination was never fully cleared up.  Circumstances pointed to the possible complicity of the Department of the Interior, whose secret police were guarding the Tsar, or, at the very least, to the guilty negligence of the Kiev police authorities.  The specter of the agents provocateurs Azev and Malinovsky must have haunted Stolypin as he lay dying.  The Tsar and Tsarina did not mourn the loss of the man who had tried so hard to save them.  They never even understood what he was doing.  The great state that he had hoped to reinforce and modernize by the combination of police force, legislative manipulation, and enlightened economic and political measures, was taken over increasingly thenceforward by the dark and backward forces around Rasputin.  Yet so well had Stolypin done his work, that the agrarian reform continued to develop after his death.  It was the sudden coming of war, and not the failure of his plans, which brought the fresh upheaval in time for Lenin.

...  The year 1912 saw the enactment of an insurance law against sickness and accident, providing two-thirds to three-quarters pay, covering virtually all industrial workers.  The workingmen themselves elected their delegates to the insurance councils.

The year 1913 saw a general amnesty for political offenders in connection with the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.  Martov, Dan, Kamenev returned to Russia to live there openly and legally.  If Lenin did not, it is because he did not choose to.  Trotsky and Stalin were ineligible because they had escaped from Siberia and had unfilled terms to serve.

In short, the Stolypin constitution, as Lenin assured his romantic ultra-Leftist followers was a moderate, but "by no means a cardboard or comic opera constitution," and Stolypin was really bent on reforming and transforming Russia in accordance with his vision of a modern state.  It has become a conventional legend since to pronounce this time a period of unalloyed reaction, but all signs pointed to a peaceful, if leaden-footed, progress.

All signs, that is, except the war clouds over the Balkans and the creeping degeneration at the summit of society :  the Court.  There, after Stolypin’s assassination, ever more doddering and incompetent advisers were brought in, under the influence of the camarilla around the strong-willed, narrow-visioned Tsarina and her Man of God, Rasputin.  But Lenin could not count on war, though he fearfully hoped he might, nor was he aware of the progressive paresis in the palace.