been in itself a boon to the population of these provinces, but
Stolypin made it an occasion for a renewed humiliation of the
non-Russian nationalities, strongly represented in these dis-
tricts. The project of the Government disfranchised the numer-
ous Jewish population, and drove the Poles into a position of
inferiority by dividing the electorate according to national col-
leges and establishing beforehand the preponderance of the Rus-
sian colleges by means of an artificial scheme of repartition. The
unfairness and political short-sightedness of these restrictions
provoked a strong opposition even in the docile Third Duma.
In the Council of the Empire a coalition between the Rights and the Lefts led to the rejection of the bill. Stolypin did not submit in the face of such an assertion of independence. He prorogued the Duma for three days (May 14-17), and in the interval obtained an Imperial decree promulgating the law as an emergency measure on the strength of Art. 87 of the Organic Laws. In consequence of this snub administered to the Legisla- tive Assemblies, the Octobrist Centre could no longer support the Government ; the leader of the Octobrists, A. Guchkov, re- signed the presidentship of the Duma, and votes of censure on the Government were passed in both Houses on the resumption of their sittings. Stolypin's position was made untenable by these events. His victories meant in truth the breakdown of his programme. The Premier had again to rely exclusively on the goodwill of the autocratic Tsar as against independent public opinion, and he had to strive for that goodwill in the enervating and treacherous surroundings of Court intrigue, in which obse- quious chamberlains were more expert than himself. The con- sciousness of failure was clearly expressed in Stolypin's behaviour after the smashing of the universities and the snubbing of the Legislative Assemblies. He looked worn in July 1911, and alluded repeatedly to his approaching resignation (Prof. Pares, in the Russian Review, 1912).
The coup de grdce came from the midst of the secret police, that had become the mainstay of the Imperial system in its struggle against rebellion. One of the agents of this organization, Bogrov, inflicted a mortal wound on Stolypin at a gala perform- ance in the Kiev Opera House on Sept. 14 1911. The hatred of oppressed nationalities and of the humiliated intellectual class had armed the hand of the assassin, a well-educated Jew.
One part of Stolypin's activity calls for special examination, his land reform, which may be considered as the immediate introduction to the social revolution of 1917.
Defects of the Emancipation. The agrarian revolts of 1905 attracted the attention of the Government and of society to the deplorable condition of the most numerous and important social class, the peasantry. The causes of the growing impoverishment of the peasantry are to be sought primarily in the manner in which the emancipation of 1861 had been carried out. The Emancipation Act of Feb. 19 1861, liberating the peasants from personal serfdom and giving them part of the land on certain conditions, was meant at the same time to achieve two other purposes: it tried to secure the necessary number of workmen for the landowners, who had lost the gratuitous labour of their serfs, and to ensure the collection of taxes and redemption pay- ments. Each peasant received at the emancipation a certain quantity of land from the landowner; he had to pay for it a re- demption price, the amount of which was fixed by the Govern- ment: the payments had to be completed in 45 years. The plot of land which the peasants got as their share on the transaction was called the holding (nadel) : its size varied greatly in different provinces. " Large " holdings ranged between 2\ (about 8 ac.) and 12 dess. (33 ac.), while minimum holdings corresponded to one-half of the maximum ones. The landowner's share com- prised, besides his domain land, from one-third to one-half of the land formerly occupied by the peasants, on the condition that the latter should receive no less than the minimum holding. Besides these two principal types of holdings the Emancipation Act of 1861 established also the " beggarly " or " gratuitous " holding, which was to be no less than one-quarter of the maxi- mum one. The gratuitous holding was established by free agreement between the peasants and the landowner; in this
case the peasants had to pay no redemption, while the land- owner kept all the rest of his land. On the whole the quantity of land held by the peasants had been much reduced.
The following figures for the province of Saratoff may serve as an illustration :
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Peasants
who held
before 1861
after the emancipation
More than the ' From } to I of Less than f of "
' large "
holding .
48-1 35-8 16-1
5-8 per cent 4-8 ' 52-2 '
In 1861 688,826 peasants received beggarly holdings; they held 502,383 dessiatines. In 35 provinces 921,826 souls' were assigned one-half of the large holding each and held 1,530,000, or less than 2 dessiatines per soul.
The peasants' landholdings, which were already whittled down at the time of the Emancipation, were further reduced after it by the increase of the population. A Commission for the investigation of the conditions and needs of the peasantry described the diminution of the peasants' holdings in the following manner: in 1860, 4-8% decrease on the average; in 1880, 3-5 decrease and in 1900 2-6 decrease. Besides a portion of the arable land, the peasant lost at the Emancipation the right of using the landowner's pasturage, of cutting wood in his forest, and some other subsidiary rights important in peasant farming.
The redemption payments were a heavy charge on the peasant's budget. The Agricultural Commission of 1872 found that squires had to spend on taxes less than 14-5 kopeks per dess., while the peasants paid more than 95-5 k. per dess. In addition the peasants had to pay the poll-tax, the amount of which was about 4r. 4sk. per soul. The same Commission states that in 37 provinces the taxes and redemption payments of the former state and appanage peasants comprised 92-75% of their net income from land, the payments of former unfree peasants 198-25 percent. Professor Yanson calculated that in the province of Novgorod the taxation of peasants who got small holdings was, in relation to the net income of their land, 275 % in the case of the peasants who owned their land, and 565 % in the case of those who had to pay the land redemption. This means that the peasants had to find other sources of revenue in order to satisfy the collectors of the land tax. The Government made some attempts to relieve the peasants' tax load. The salt tax was abolished in 1880, the poll-tax in 1882. But these measures could certainly not solve the financial difficulties of the peasantry. Arrears grew rapidly to enormous proportions.
The following figures show the growth of arrears from redemption payments in the province of Tambov :
1871-5 3%
1876-80 5%
1881- 5 16%
1886-90 35%
1891- 5 124%
1896 151%
1897 205%
1898 244%
Driven by land hunger, the peasants farmed on lease a large part of the State's appanages and of squires' land, but this expedient cannot be considered as an effective help in the solu- tion of the land problem. The rent paid by the peasants to the landowners was usually very high. It is important to notice that certain plots of land, the use and possession of which was an essential necessity for the whole community, for example strips bordering on watercourses, remained usually after the Emanci- pation in the hand of the landowner. This gave him the power to require exorbitant rent for such land and keep the peasants in permanent fear of losing these grounds, without which village life was practically impossible. This led to continual collisions. Under such conditions the backward and extensive methods of peasant cultivation proved very difficult to reform.
One of the most important defects of the peasant's landhold- ing before the land settlement of Stolypin was the intermixture of strips in the open fields. The land of a community lay only seldom in a compact block. It was usually divided into a number
1 Persons doing the normal work of a villager.
