Peter Stolypin: Progressive Statesman

Abstract

Forty years ago the bullet of an assassin ended the life and work of one of Russia's greatest statesmen. Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, was mortally wounded in the evening of September 14, 1911, by two bullets fired by a Jewish revolutionary, Mordka Bogrov, who also served as a secret agent of the Russian police. Stolypin died four days later. The assassination took place while he was attending a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tsar Saltan in Kiev in the presence of the Emperor and members of the Imperial family. Before he slumped into his chair he turned toward the Imperial box and made the sign of the cross in its direction, thus imparting his blessing upon the Sovereign to whom he was devoted, but who by then did not understand any more, nor trust, the one man who could have saved the Russian monarchy from the catastrophe which was to come. The forces of revolution and of reaction rejoiced alike at Stolypin's death, because his progressive constitutionalism and enlightened statesmanship were hated and feared by both extremes. Lenin called him “super-hangman” and “organizer of pogroms” in his article “Stolypin and the Revolution” written one month after Stolypin's death. The reactionary newspaper the Russian Banner echoed the words it had printed several years before: “Some time a day will come, and this will be soon, when we shall not permit the drugging of Russian citizens with promises of an overseas constitution.” Such venomous attacks from both the extreme left and the extreme right, whose leaders were aware that the success of Stolypin's policies would have completely transformed Russia into a free capitalistic country and thus doomed both revolution and reaction, pursued him all his life, but they merely strengthened his conviction that he was following the right path.