Between Two Revolutions. Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia

Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions. Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia. London: UCL press, 1998, viii+ 220 pp., L40.00.

THIS IS A SCHOLARLY AND ORIGINAL BOOK that advances debate about the possibilities of reform in tsarist Russia during the period following the 1905 Revolution. Waldron stands firmly with those historians, conventionally labelled pessimists, who hold that Stolypin's reform programme was more or less bound to fail and that the legacy of this failure brought the upheavals of the 1917 Revolution closer. For those who, on the contrary, insist that Stolypin was a great statesman and that his reform programme could have `saved Russia', it is important to recall just how comprehensive was his defeat; of the seven main areas of reform he proposed-peasant land holding, local government, the legal system, civil rights, workers' insurance, education and religious rights-the first alone, the land reform, made the statute books and this only with the help of article 87 of the Fundamental Laws and the `August 1907 coup'. Well before his assassination, Stolypin was politically defeated; he had been forced to drop reform and retreat into the safe refuge of nationalist politics. Such comprehensive defeat does not obviously lend itself to simple explanation and recognition of this fact is one of the principal strengths of Waldron's monograph. Waldron locates Stolypin's failure in the combined effects of the conservative opposition, the institutional weaknesses of the government set up after 1905, Stolypin's shortcomings as a politician, the content...