Stolypin reforms summary. Power structures and legal proceedings

agrarian question occupied a central position in domestic politics. The beginning of the agrarian reform, the inspirer and developer of which was P.A. Stolypin, put a decree of November 9, 1906.

Stolypin reform

After a very difficult discussion in the State Duma and the State Council, the decree was approved by the tsar as a law from June 14, 1910. An addition to it was the law on land management from May 29, 1911.

The main provision of the Stolypin reform was community destruction. For this, a stake was placed on the development of personal peasant property in the village by granting the peasants the right to leave the community and create farms, cuts.

An important point of the reform: the landowner's ownership of land was preserved intact. This provoked sharp opposition from the peasant deputies in the Duma and from the masses of peasants.

Another measure proposed by Stolypin was supposed to destroy the community: resettlement of peasants. The purpose of this action was twofold. The socio-economic goal is to obtain a land fund, primarily in the central regions of Russia, where the lack of land among the peasants made it difficult to create farms and cuts. In addition, this made it possible to develop new territories, i.e. further development of capitalism, although this oriented it towards an extensive path. The political goal is to defuse social tension in the center of the country. The main areas of resettlement are Siberia, Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. The government allocated funds to the settlers for travel and settling in a new place, but practice has shown that they were clearly not enough.

In the period 1905 - 1916. about 3 million householders left the community, which is approximately 1/3 of their number in the provinces where the reform was carried out. This means that it was not possible to destroy the community, nor to create a stable layer of owners. This conclusion is supplemented by data on the failure of the resettlement policy. In 1908 - 1909. the number of migrants amounted to 1.3 million people, but very soon many of them began to return back. The reasons were different: the bureaucracy of the Russian bureaucracy, the lack of funds for arranging a household, ignorance of local conditions, and the more than reserved attitude of the old-timers towards the settlers. Many died on the way or went bankrupt.

Thus, the social goals set by the government were not achieved. But the reform accelerated the stratification in the countryside - the rural bourgeoisie and the proletariat were formed. It is obvious that the destruction of the community opened the way for capitalist development, since the community was a feudal relic.

P.A. Stolypin first served as Minister of the Interior, after which he was appointed Prime Minister. His reforms were aimed at the development of the country. The revolution that took place in 1905-1907 showed the problems that did not allow Russia to become a strong power. The ruling class could not decide which way to develop the country, faith in the monarchy was undermined. Stolypin wanted to see Russia as a modern, developed and strong country. That is why he carried out his reforms, which in a few years should have yielded results and changed the country for the better.

During Stolypin's lifetime, his reforms were criticized and his proposals met with resistance in ruling circles. Debate about his policies took place during the life of the reformer and for many years after his death. Modern historians consider the course of his actions to be correct. Several assassination attempts were made on Pyotr Arkadyevich. As a result of the assassination attempt in 1906, the children of the Prime Minister, especially the daughter, suffered a severe leg injury. He changed a lot after this assassination attempt. When he was told that earlier he seemed to have reasoned differently, he replied: “Yes, that was before the bombing of Aptekarsky Island. Now I am a different person."

We bring to your attention a table of Stolypin's reforms, which displays their essence and results.

Pyotr Arkadyevich died as a result of an assassination attempt in September 1911. Shortly before his death, he said the following: "After my death, one leg will be pulled out of the swamp - the other will get stuck." The assessment of Stolypin's reforms is ambiguous; they did not materialize, as they were conceived. Someone considers only negative aspects, someone believes that he really could make Russia a powerful, developed state and protect it from subsequent wars. The class of smallholders was never created, but agriculture developed.

In Russian society, the most important issue has always been agrarian. The peasants, who became free in 1861, did not actually receive land as property. They were strangled by land shortages, the community, the landlords, therefore, during the revolution of 1905-1907. Russia's fate was decided in the countryside.

All reforms of P.A. Stolypin, who headed the government in 1906, one way or another were sent to reform the countryside. The most important of them was the land, called "Stolypin", although its project was developed before him. The essence of the reform was that the government abandoned the previous policy of supporting the community and moved on to its violent breaking.

As you know, the community was an organizational and economic association of peasants for the use of a common forest, pasture and watering place, an alliance in relations with the authorities, a kind of social organism that gave villagers small life guarantees. At the same time, communal land tenure delayed the natural process of stratification of the peasantry and placed an obstacle in the way of the formation of a class of small peasant proprietors. The inalienability of allotment lands made it impossible to obtain loans secured by them, and striping and periodic redistribution of land prevented the transition to more productive forms of its use, so giving peasants the right to freely leave the community was a long overdue economic necessity. A feature of the Stolypin agrarian reform was the desire to quickly destroy the community. The main reason for this attitude of the authorities towards the community was the revolutionary events and agrarian riots in 1905–1906.

P.A. Stolypin noted: "A wild, half-naked village, not accustomed to respecting either its own or other people's property, not afraid, acting in peace, no responsibility, will always present hot material, ready to flare up on every occasion." In this regard, another no less important goal of the land reform was the socio-political one, since it was required to create a class of small proprietors as a social support for the autocracy as the main cell of the state, which is opposed to all destructive theories (Scheme 194).

The implementation of the reform was initiated by the tsar's decree of November 9, 1906, under the modest title "On Supplementing Certain Regulations of the Current Law Concerning Peasant Land Ownership", according to which free exit from the community was allowed. The land plots that had been in the use of the peasants since the last redistribution were assigned to the property, regardless of the change in the number of souls in the family. There was an opportunity to sell your allotment, as well as to allocate land in one place - on a farm or a cut. At the same time, all this involved the removal of restrictions on the movement of peasants around the country, the transfer of part of the state and specific lands to the Peasant Land Bank to expand land purchase and sale operations, the organization of a resettlement movement in Siberia in order to provide landless and landless peasants with allotments through the development of vast eastern expanses .

The decree of November 9, 1906 was then transformed into permanent laws adopted on July 14, 1910 and May 19, 1911, which provided for additional measures to speed up the withdrawal of peasants from the community. For example, in the case of land management work to eliminate striping within the community, its members could henceforth be considered the owners of the land, even if they did not ask for it.

Scheme 194

In addition to the agrarian reforms, Stolypin's reforms included changes in other areas, the implementation of which was supposed to bring Russia out of a state of permanent crisis and lead to stability. Among them were:

• the reform of local government and self-government, which involved the abolition of estate management of the peasantry and the introduction of non-estate volost institutions;
• reform in the system of public education, which provided for the widespread construction of rural schools and the transition to compulsory primary education in order to turn the downtrodden and ignorant peasant into a competent landowner;
• measures aimed at improving the situation of workers (creating a system of their insurance, introducing rules on employment, reducing working hours, etc.)

Agrarian reform P.A. Stolypin can be considered incomplete and not entirely successful. By January 1, 1916, 2.5 million owners separated from the community and assigned land allotments to personal ownership, which accounted for 26% of all common households. And, as practice has shown, it was mostly not those who were mainly counted on by the government - strong owners - but the poor and former rural residents who were firmly settled in the city and remembered that they once had land and now it can be sold .

During this period, the country experienced an increase in agricultural production. In 1909–1913 the harvesting of grain and its export abroad increased, but, apparently, the trends towards this (expansion of the area under crops, etc.) could be traced even before the reform. The reform brought the most tangible result in Siberia. After 1905, about 3.7 million people moved beyond the Urals, of which about 1 million returned, 700 thousand dispersed across Siberia, and only 2 million, i.e. a little more than half managed to gain a foothold on the ground. The loan for a resettlement family was 150 rubles. It was here that the sown area for grain increased by 62% and the peasant trade corporation began to develop rapidly.

The implementation of the reformist plans of P.A. Stolypin was hampered by other factors:

Temporary - the reforms required a significant period of time, and not five years, which P.A. Stolypin;

Table 36

The State Duma and the experience of Russian parliamentarism

(1906 – 1917)

• administrative - resistance of a part of the state apparatus;
• socio-political - the struggle of political forces, both right and left, who saw in the reforms of P.A. Stolypin a threat to his influence;
• personal - difficult relationship with Nicholas II and his inner circle.

In conditions of acute political struggle, the work of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, was carried out, the main milestones of whose activities are given in Table. 36.

The reforms carried out in the country under the influence of the revolution of 1905-1907, as was almost always the case in the history of Russia, turned out to be belated and were possible only within the framework that the autocracy agreed to or forced on by the people. In this regard, the idea began to form in the public mind that revolutionary pressure on the government was becoming the preferred means of political struggle in Russia. And the events of 1917 confirmed this.

28. Agrarian reform P.A. Stolypin.

The Stolypin agrarian reform is a generalized name for a wide range of measures in the field of agriculture carried out by the Russian government under the leadership of P. A. Stolypin since 1906. The main directions of the reform were the transfer of allotment lands to the ownership of peasants, the gradual elimination of rural society as a collective owner of land, widespread lending to peasants, the purchase of landlord lands for resale to peasants on preferential terms, and land management, which made it possible to optimize the peasant economy by eliminating striped land.

The reform was a set of measures aimed at two goals: the short-term goal of the reform was to resolve the "agrarian question" as a source of mass discontent (primarily, the cessation of agrarian unrest), the long-term goal was the sustainable prosperity and development of agriculture and the peasantry, the integration of the peasantry into the market economy.

If the first goal was supposed to be achieved immediately (the scale of agrarian unrest in the summer of 1906 was incompatible with the peaceful life of the country and the normal functioning of the economy), then the second goal - prosperity - Stolypin himself considered achievable in a twenty-year perspective.

The reform unfolded in several directions:

Improving the quality of peasants' property rights to land, which consisted, first of all, in replacing the collective and limited land ownership of rural communities with full-fledged private property of individual peasant householders; measures in this direction were of an administrative and legal nature.

The eradication of obsolete class civil law restrictions that impeded the effective economic activity of peasants.

Improving the efficiency of peasant agriculture; government measures consisted primarily in encouraging the allocation of plots “to one place” (cuts, farms) to peasant owners, which required the state to carry out a huge amount of complex and expensive land management work to develop striped communal lands.

Encouraging the purchase of privately owned (primarily landlord) lands by peasants, through various operations of the Peasant Land Bank, was predominantly concessional lending.

Encouraging the buildup of working capital of peasant farms through lending in all forms (bank lending secured by land, loans to members of cooperatives and partnerships).

Expansion of direct subsidizing of the activities of the so-called "agronomic assistance" (agronomic consulting, educational activities, maintenance of experimental and exemplary farms, trade in modern equipment and fertilizers).

Support for cooperatives and peasant associations.

The reform was aimed at improving peasant allotment land use and had little effect on private land ownership. The reform was carried out in 47 provinces of European Russia (all provinces, except for the three provinces of the Ostsee region); the reform did not affect the Cossack land tenure and the land tenure of the Bashkirs.

Decrees were issued in 1906, 1910 and 1911:

each peasant could take ownership of the allotment,

could freely leave the community and choose another place of residence,

move to the Urals in order to receive land (about 15 hectares) and money from the state to improve the economy,

settlers received tax benefits and were exempted from military service.

a) The goals of the reform.

Socio-political goals of the reform.

The main goal was to win wide sections of the peasantry to the side of the regime and prevent a new agrarian war. To do this, it was supposed to contribute to the transformation of the majority of the inhabitants of their native village into a “strong, wealthy peasantry imbued with the idea of ​​property,” which, according to Stolypin, makes it the best bulwark of order and tranquility.” Carrying out the reform, the government did not seek to affect the interests of the landowners. In the post-reform period and at the beginning of the 20th century. The government was unable to protect the landownership of the nobility from reduction, but the large and small landed nobility continued to be the most reliable support for the autocracy. To push him away would be suicidal for the regime.

In addition, noble class organizations, including the council of the united nobility, had a great influence on Nicholas 2 and his entourage. Members of the government, and even more so the Prime Minister, who raises the question of the alienation of landowners' lands, could not remain in his place, much less organize the implementation of such a reform. The reformers also took into account the fact that the landowners' farms produced a significant part of marketable grain. Another goal was the destruction of the rural community in the struggle of 1905-1907. , the reformers understood that the main thing in the peasant movement was the question of land, and did not seek to immediately destroy the administrative organization of the community.

Socio-economic goals were closely related to socio-political ones. It was planned to liquidate the land community, its economic land distribution mechanism, on the one hand, which formed the basis of the social unity of the community, and on the other, hindered the development of agricultural technology. The ultimate economic goal of the reforms was to be the general rise of the country's agriculture, the transformation of the agrarian sector into the economic base of the new Russia.

b) Preparation of reform

The preparation of reform projects before the revolution actually began with the Conference on the needs of the agricultural industry under the leadership of S.Yu. Witte, in 1902-1903. In 1905-1907. The conclusions formulated by the Conference, primarily the idea of ​​the need to destroy the land and turn the peasants into land owners, were reflected in a number of projects of government officials (V.I. Gurko.). With the beginning of the revolution and the active participation of the peasants in the destruction of the landed estates, Nicholas 2, frightened by the agrarian uprisings, changed his attitude towards the landed peasant community.

The Peasant Bank was allowed to issue loans for peasant plots (November 1903), which in fact meant the possibility of alienating communal lands. P.A. Stolypin in 1906, having become prime minister, supported the landlords, who did not affect the interests. Gurko's project formed the basis of the Decree of November 9, 1906, which marked the beginning of the agrarian reform.

c) Fundamentals of the direction of the reform.

The change in the form of ownership of peasant land, the transformation of peasants into full-fledged owners of their allotments, was envisaged by the law of 1910. carried out primarily by "strengthening" allotments into private ownership. In addition, according to the law of 1911, it was allowed to carry out land management (reduction of land into farms and cuts) without “strengthening”, after which the peasants also became landowners.

The peasant could sell the allotment only to the peasant, which limited the right to land ownership.

Organization of farms and cuts. Without land management, technical improvement, economic development of agriculture was impossible in the conditions of peasant striping (23 peasants of the central regions had allotments divided into 6 or more strips in various places of the communal field) and were far away (40% of the peasants of the center should were to walk weekly from their estates to allotments of 5 and more versts). In economic terms, according to Gurko's plan, fortifications without land management did not make sense.

Therefore, the work of state land management commissions was planned to reduce the strips of the peasant allotment into a single area - a cut. If such a cut was far from the village, the estate was transferred there and a farm was formed.

Resettlement of peasants to free lands.

To solve the problem of peasant shortage of land and reduce agrarian overpopulation in the central regions, the resettlement policy was intensified. Funds were allocated to transport those wishing to new places, primarily to Siberia. Special ("Stolypin") passenger cars were built for the settlers. Beyond the Urals, the peasants were given lands free of charge, for raising the economy and landscaping, and loans were issued.

The sale of land to peasants in installments through a peasant bank was also necessary to reduce the lack of land. On the security of allotment land, loans were issued for the purchase of state land transferred to the Bank's fund, and land that was sold by landlords.

The development of agricultural cooperation, both commercial and credit, was given an impetus by the publication in 1908 of an exemplary charter. Credit partnerships received some benefits.

d) Progress of the reform.

1. Legal basis, stages and lessons of the reform.

The legislative basis for the reform was the decree of November 9, 1906, after the adoption of which the implementation of the reform began. The main provisions of the decree were enshrined in a 1910 law approved by the Duma and the State Council. Serious clarifications were introduced into the course of the reform by the law of 1911, which reflected the change in the emphasis of government policy and marked the beginning of the second stage of the reform.

In 1915 -1916. In connection with the war, the reform actually stopped. In June 1917 the reform was officially terminated by the Provisional Government. The reform was carried out by the efforts of the main department of land management and agriculture, headed by A.V.

Krivoshein, and Stolypin's Minister of the Interior.

2. The transformation of peasants into landowners at the first stage (1907-1910), in accordance with the decree of November 9, 1906, proceeded in several ways.

Strengthening striped plots in the property. Over the years, 2 million plots have been strengthened. When the pressure of local authorities ceased, the strengthening process was sharply reduced. In addition, most of the peasants, who only wanted to sell their allotment and not run their own household, have already done this. After 1911, only those who wanted to sell their plot applied. In total, in 1907-1915. 2.5 million people became "fortified" - 26% of the peasants of European Russia (excluding the western provinces and the Trans-Urals), but almost 40% of them sold their plots, most of them moving beyond the Urals, leaving for the city or replenishing the stratum of the rural proletariat.

Land management at the second stage (1911-1916) according to the laws of 1910 and 1911 made it possible to obtain an allotment in the property automatically - after the creation of cuts and farms, without submitting an application for strengthening the property.

In the "old-hearted" communities (communities where there had been no redistribution since 1861), according to the law of 1910, the peasants were automatically recognized as the owners of allotments. Such communities accounted for 30% of their total number. At the same time, only 600,000 of the 3.5 million members of the boundless communities requested documents certifying their property.

The peasants of the western provinces and some areas of the south, where communities did not exist, also automatically became owners. To do this, they did not need to sell special applications. The reform did not formally take place beyond the Urals, but even there the peasants did not know communal property.

3. Land management.

Organization of farms and cuts. In 1907-1910, only 1/10 of the peasants, who strengthened their allotments, formed farms and cuts.

After 1910 the government realized that a strong peasantry could not emerge on multi-lane sections. For this, it was necessary not to formally strengthen the property, but the economic transformation of allotments. The local authorities, who sometimes resorted to coercion of the community members, were no longer recommended to "artificially encourage" the strengthening process. The main direction of the reform was land management, which now in itself turned peasants into private property.

Now the process has accelerated. In total, by 1916, 1.6 million farms and cuts were formed on approximately 1/3 of the peasant allotment (communal and household) land purchased by the peasants from the bank. It was the beginning. It is important that in reality the potential scope of the movement turned out to be wider: another 20% of the peasants of European Russia filed applications for land management, but land management work was suspended by the war and interrupted by the revolution.

4. Resettlement beyond the Urals.

By decree of March 10, 1906, the right to resettle peasants was granted to everyone without restrictions. The government allocated considerable funds for the costs of settling settlers in new places, for their medical care and public needs, and for laying roads.

Having received a loan from the government, 3.3 million people moved to the new lands in “Stolypin” wagons, 2/3 of which were landless or land-poor peasants. 0.5 million returned, many replenished the population of Siberian cities or became agricultural workers. Only a small part of the peasants became farmers in the new place.

The results of the resettlement campaign were as follows. First, during this period, a huge leap was made in the economic and social development of Siberia. Also, the population of this region increased by 153% during the years of colonization. If before resettlement to Siberia there was a reduction in sown areas, then in 1906-1913 they were expanded by 80%, while in the European part of Russia by 6.2%. In terms of the rate of development of animal husbandry, Siberia also overtook the European part of Russia.

5. Destruction of the community.

For the transition to new economic relations, a whole system of economic and legal measures was developed to regulate the agrarian economy. The Decree of November 9, 1906 proclaimed the predominance of the fact of sole ownership of land over the legal right to use it. The peasants could now allocate the land that was in actual use from the community, regardless of its will. The land allotment became the property not of the family, but of an individual householder. Measures were taken to ensure the strength and stability of working peasant farms. So, in order to avoid land speculation and concentration of property, the maximum size of individual land ownership was limited by law, and the sale of land to non-peasants was allowed. The law of June 5, 1912 allowed the issuance of a loan secured by any allotment land acquired by the peasants. The development of various forms of credit - mortgage, reclamation, agricultural, land management - contributed to the intensification of market relations in the countryside.

In 1907 - 1915. 25% of households announced their separation from the community, while 20% - 2008.4 thousand households actually separated. New forms of land tenure became widespread: farms and cuts. As of January 1, 1916, there were already 1221.5 thousand of them. In addition, the law of June 14, 1910 considered it unnecessary for many peasants to leave the community, who were only formally considered community members. The number of such households amounted to about one third of all communal households.

6. Purchase of land by peasants with the help of a peasant bank.

The bank sold 15 million state and landowners' land, of which 30% was bought by installments by peasants. At the same time, special benefits were provided to the owners of farms and cuts, who, unlike others, received a loan in the amount of 100% of the cost of the acquired land at 5% per annum. As a result, if until 1906 the bulk of land buyers were peasant collectives, then by 1913 .7% of buyers were individual peasants.

7. Cooperative movement.

The cooperative movement developed rapidly. In 1905-1915, the number of rural credit partnerships increased from 1680 to 15.5 thousand. The number of production and consumer cooperatives in the countryside increased from 3 thousand. (1908) to 10 thousand (1915)

Many economists came to the conclusion that it is cooperation that represents the most promising direction for the development of the Russian countryside, meeting the needs of modernizing the peasant economy. Credit relations gave a strong impetus to the development of production, consumer and marketing cooperatives. The peasants, on a cooperative basis, created dairy and butter artels, agricultural societies, consumer shops, and even peasant artel dairy factories.

e) Conclusions.

Serious progress is being made in the peasant sector of Russia. Harvest years and fluctuations in world grain prices played an important role in this, but cut-off farms and farms were especially progressing, where new technologies were used to a greater extent. The yield in these areas exceeded similar indicators of communal fields by 30-50%. Even more, by 61% compared with 1901-1905, the export of agricultural products increased in the prewar years. Russia was the largest producer and exporter of bread and flax, a number of livestock products. So, in 1910, the export of Russian wheat amounted to 36.4% of the total world export.

But this does not mean that pre-war Russia should be presented as a "peasant's paradise." The problems of hunger and agrarian overpopulation were not solved. The country still suffered from technical, economic and cultural backwardness. According to calculations

I.D. Kondratiev in the USA, on average, a farm accounted for a fixed capital of 3,900 rubles, while in European Russia the fixed capital of an average peasant farm barely reached 900 rubles. The national income per capita of the agricultural population in Russia was about 52 rubles a year, and in the United States - 262 rubles.

The growth rate of labor productivity in agriculture was relatively slow. While in Russia in 1913 they received 55 poods of bread from one tithe, in the USA they received 68, in France - 89, and in Belgium - 168 poods. Economic growth took place not on the basis of the intensification of production, but by increasing the intensity of manual peasant labor. But in the period under review, socio-economic conditions were created for the transition to a new stage of agrarian transformation - to the transformation of agriculture into a capital-intensive technologically progressive sector of the economy.

But a number of external circumstances (the death of Stolypin, the beginning of the war) interrupted the Stolypin reform. Stolypin himself believed that it would take 15-20 years for the success of his undertakings. But even during the period 1906-1913 a lot was done.

1) Social results of the fate of the community.

The community as a self-governing body of the Russian village was not affected by the reform, but the socio-economic body of the community began to collapse, the number of land communities decreased from 135,000 to 110,000.

At the same time, in the central non-chernozem regions, the disintegration of the community was almost not observed, it was here that there were numerous cases of arson.

2) Socio-political results of the reform.

There was a gradual cessation of peasant uprisings. At the first stage 1907 -1909. with the strengthening of allotments in property, often under pressure from zemstvo chiefs, the number of peasant uprisings began to grow, in 1910 -1000. But after the shift in the emphasis of government policy to land management, the rejection of coercion and some economic successes, peasant unrest almost stopped; to 128. The main political goal was still not achieved. As 1917 showed, the peasantry retained the ability "with the whole world" to oppose the landlords. In 1917, it became obvious that the agrarian reform was 50 years late, but the main reason for the failure was the socio-political half-heartedness of the transformations, which manifested itself in the preservation of the landed estates intact.

RESULTS of the reforms:

The cooperative movement developed.

The number of wealthy peasants increased.

According to the gross harvest of bread, Russia was in 1st place in the world.

The number of livestock increased by 2.5 times.

About 2.5 million people moved to new lands.

Agrarian transformation (briefly - Stolypin's reform) is a generalized name for a whole range of activities that have been carried out in the field of agriculture since 1906. These changes were led by P. A. Stolypin. The main goal of all activities was to create conditions for attracting peasants to work on their land.

In the past, the system of such transformations (the reforms of P. A. Stolypin - briefly) was criticized in every possible way, today it is customary to praise it. At the same time, no one wants to fully understand it. It should also not be forgotten that Stolypin himself was not the author of the agrarian reform, it was only part of the general system of reforms conceived by him.

Stolypin as Minister of the Interior

The relatively young Stolypin came to power without much struggle and labor. His candidacy was nominated in 1905 by Prince A. D. Obolensky, who was his relative and chief prosecutor of the Synod. The opponent of this candidacy was S. Yu. Witte, who saw another person as the Minister of the Interior.

Having come to power, Stolypin failed to change the attitude of the Cabinet of Ministers. Many officials never became his like-minded people. For example, V. N. Kakovo, who held the post of Minister of Finance, was very skeptical about Stolypin's ideas regarding the solution of the agrarian issue - he spared money for this.

In order to protect himself and his family, Stolypin, at the suggestion of the tsar, moved to the Winter Palace, which was reliably guarded.

The most difficult decision for him was the adoption of a decree on courts-martial. He later admitted that he was forced to bear this "heavy cross" against his own will. Stolypin's reforms are described below (briefly).

General description of the modernization program

When the peasant movement began to decline by the autumn of 1906, the government announced its plans regarding the agrarian issue. The so-called Stolypin program began with a decree dated 09.11.1906. Stolypin's agrarian reform followed, briefly described in the article.

While still the governor of Saratov, the future minister wanted to organize assistance for the creation of strong individual farms for peasants on the basis of state lands. Such actions were supposed to show the peasants a new path and encourage them to abandon communal land ownership.

Another official, V. I. Gurko, developed a project whose goal was to create farms on peasant lands, and not on state lands. The difference was significant. But even this Gurko considered not the most important. Its main goal was to secure allotment land in the ownership of the peasants. According to this plan, any member of the peasant community could take away his allotment, and no one had the right to reduce or change it. This would allow the government to split the community. The Stolypin reform (briefly - agrarian) was required by the unfavorable situation in the empire.

The situation in the country on the eve of the reform

In 1905-1907, as part of the revolution, peasant unrest took place in Russia. Together with problems within the country in 1905, Russia lost the war with Japan. All this spoke of serious problems that needed to be addressed.

At the same time, the State Duma begins its work. She gave the go-ahead to the reforms of Witte and Stolypin (briefly - agrarian).

Directions

The transformations were supposed to create strong economic allotments and destroy the collective ownership of land, which hampered further development. It was necessary to eradicate obsolete class restrictions, to encourage the purchase of land from landlords, to increase the turnover for running one's own economy through lending.

Stolypin's agrarian reform, which is briefly described in the article, was aimed at improving allotment land ownership and practically did not concern private property.

Main stages of modernization

By May 1906, a congress of noble societies was held, at which D. I. Pestrzhetsky made a report. He was one of the officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who was developing an agricultural project. His report criticized possible land transformations. It stated that throughout the country the peasants had no problems with a lack of land, and the nobles had no reason to alienate it. Some cases of land shortage were proposed to be solved by buying allotments through a bank and resettlement to the outskirts of the country.

The report caused ambiguous judgments of the nobles on this matter. The views on the reforms of Witte and Stolypin (briefly - agrarian reform) were just as ambiguous. There were also those (Count D. A. Olsufiev) who offered to compromise with the peasants. This meant selling them land, keeping the bulk of it. But such reasoning did not meet with support or even sympathy from the majority of those present.

The only thing on which almost everyone at the congress was unanimous was the negative attitude towards the communities. K. N. Grimm, V. L. Kushelev, A. P. Urusov and others attacked the peasant communities. Regarding them, the phrase was heard that "this is a swamp in which everything that could be in the open gets stuck." The nobles believed that for the benefit of the peasants, the community must be destroyed.

Those who tried to raise the question of the alienation of landowners' lands received no support. Back in 1905, when the manager of land management, N.N. Kutler, suggested that the tsar solve the problem of the lack of land for the peasants in this way, the ruler refused him and dismissed him.

Stolypin was also not an adherent of the forced expropriation of land, believing that everything goes on as usual. Some of the nobles, fearing the revolution, sold their land to the Peasants' Bank, which divided it into small plots and sold it to those peasants who were cramped in the community. This was the main point of Stolypin's reform briefly.

During 1905-1907, the bank bought more than 2.5 million acres of land from the landowners. However, the peasants, fearing the liquidation of private land ownership, practically did not make land purchases. During this time, only 170 thousand acres were sold by the bank. The activities of the bank caused discontent among the nobles. Further, land sales began to increase. The reform began to bear fruit only after 1911.

The results of Stolypin's reforms

Briefly statistics on the results of the agrarian reform:

• more than 6 million households have filed an application for fixing allotments in private ownership;
• by the February Revolution, about 30% of the land was transferred to the ownership of peasants and partnerships;
• with the help of the mediation of the Peasants' Bank, the peasants acquired 9.6 million acres;
• landlord farms lost their significance as a mass phenomenon; by 1916, almost all land sowings were peasants.