Socio-economic results of the Stolypin agrarian reform. Assessment of the Stolypin agrarian reform in historiography

The more a person is able to respond to the historical and universal, the broader his nature, the richer his life and the more capable such a person is for progress and development.

F. M. Dostoevsky

Stolypin's agrarian reform, which began in 1906, was due to the realities that took place in the Russian Empire. The country faced massive popular unrest, during which it became absolutely clear that the people did not want to live as before. Moreover, the state itself could not govern the country based on the previous principles. The economic component of the empire's development was in decline. This was especially true in the agrarian complex, where there was a clear decline. As a result, political events, as well as economic events prompted Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin to start carrying out reforms.

Prerequisites and Causes

One of the main reasons that prompted the Russian Empire to start a massive change in the state structure was based on the fact that a large number of ordinary people expressed their dissatisfaction with the government. If until that time the expression of dissatisfaction was limited to one-time peaceful actions, then by 1906 these actions had become much larger, and also bloody. As a result, it became obvious that Russia was struggling not only with obvious economic problems, but also with an obvious revolutionary upsurge.

It is obvious that any victory of the state over the revolution is based not on physical strength, but on spiritual strength. A state with a strong spirit must itself take the lead in reforms.

Petr Arkadievich Stolypin

One of the significant events that prompted the Russian government to start early reforms happened on August 12, 1906. On this day, a terrorist attack took place on the Aptekarsky Island in St. Petersburg. Stolypin lived in this place of the capital, who by that time held the post of chairman of the government. As a result of the thundering explosion, 27 people died and 32 people were injured. Among the wounded were Stolypin's daughter and son. The Prime Minister himself miraculously was not injured. As a result, the country adopted a law on courts martial, where all cases related to terrorist attacks were considered in an expedited manner, within 48 hours.

The explosion that happened once again indicated to Stolypin that the people want radical changes within the country. These changes had to be given to people as soon as possible. That is why the agrarian reform of Stolypin was accelerated, a project which began to advance with giant steps.

The essence of the reform

• The first block called on the citizens of the country to calm down, and also informed about the state of emergency in many regions of the country. Because of the terrorist attacks in a number of regions of Russia, they were forced to declare a state of emergency and military courts.
• The second block announced the convening of the State Duma, in the course of which it was planned to create and implement a complex of agrarian reforms within the country.

Stolypin clearly understood that the implementation of agrarian reforms alone would not allow the population to be pacified and would not allow the Russian Empire to make a qualitative leap in its development. Therefore, along with the changes in agriculture, the Prime Minister spoke about the need to adopt laws on religion, equality among citizens, reforming the system of local self-government, on the rights and life of workers, the need to introduce compulsory primary education, the introduction of an income tax, an increase in teachers' salaries, and so on. In a word, everything that was subsequently implemented by Soviet power was one of the stages of the Stolypin reform.

Of course, it is extremely difficult to start changes of this magnitude in the country. That is why Stolypin decided to start with the agrarian reform. This was due to a number of factors:

• The main driving force behind evolution is the peasant. So it was always and in all countries, so it was in those days in the Russian Empire. Therefore, in order to remove the revolutionary heat, it was necessary to appeal to the bulk of the dissatisfied, offering them qualitative changes in the country.
• The peasants actively expressed their position that the landowners' lands should be redistributed. Often the landowners kept the best land for themselves, allocating non-fertile plots to the peasants.

The first stage of the reform

Stolypin's agrarian reform began with an attempt to destroy the community. Until that moment, the peasants in the villages lived in communities. These were special territorial formations where people lived as a single collective, performing common collective tasks. If you try to give a simpler definition, then the communities are very similar to the collective farms, which were subsequently implemented by the Soviet government. The problem of the communities was that the peasants lived in a close-knit group. They worked for a common goal for the landlords. The peasants, as a rule, did not have their own large plots, and they were not particularly worried about the final result of their work.

On November 9, 1906, the Government of the Russian Empire issued a decree that allowed peasants to freely leave the community. Leaving the community was free. At the same time, the peasant retained all his property, as well as the lands that were allocated to him. Moreover, if land was allocated on different plots, then the peasant could demand that the land be combined into a single allotment. Leaving the community, the peasant received land in the form of a cut or a farm.

Stolypin's agrarian reform map.

Cut This is a piece of land that was allocated to a peasant leaving the community, with the preservation of this peasant's yard in the village.

Khutor This is a land plot that was allocated to a peasant leaving the community, with the resettlement of this peasant from the village to his own plot.

On the one hand, this approach made it possible to implement reforms within the country aimed at changes within the peasant economy. However, on the other hand, the landlord economy remained untouched.

The essence of Stolypin's agrarian reform, according to the plan of the creator himself, boiled down to the following advantages that the country received:

• The peasants living in the community were massively influenced by the revolutionaries. Peasants who live on separate farms are much less accessible to revolutionaries.
• The person who has received the land at his disposal, and who depends on this land, is directly interested in the end result. As a result, a person will not think about the revolution, but about how to increase his harvest and his profit.
• To divert attention from the desire of ordinary people to divide the landlord's land. Stolypin advocated the inviolability of private property, therefore, with the help of his reforms, he tried not only to preserve the landlord's lands, but also to provide the peasants with what they really needed.

To a certain extent, Stolypin's agrarian reform was similar to the creation of advanced farms. A huge number of small and medium-sized landowners should have appeared in the country, who would not be directly dependent on the state, but independently sought to develop their sector. This approach was also expressed in the words of Stolypin himself, who often confirmed that the country in its development focuses on "strong" and "strong" landowners.

At the initial stage of the reform development, few enjoyed the right to leave the community. In fact, only wealthy peasants and poor people left the community. Wealthy peasants left because they had everything for independent work, and they could now work not for the community, but for themselves. The poor went out in order to receive compensation money, thereby raising their financial situation. The poor, as a rule, having lived for some time away from the community and having lost their money, returned back to the community. That is why, at the initial stage of development, very few people left the community for advanced agricultural enterprises.

Official statistics show that only 10% of all established agricultural holdings could claim the title of successful farming. Only these 10% of farms used modern equipment, fertilizers, modern methods of working on the land, and so on. Ultimately, only these 10% of farms operated profitably from an economic point of view. All other farms that were formed in the course of Stolypin's agrarian reform turned out to be unprofitable. This is due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of people leaving the community were poor, who were not interested in the development of the agrarian complex. These figures characterize the first months of the work of Stolypin's ideas.

Resettlement policy as an important stage of reform

One of the significant problems of the Russian Empire at that time was the so-called land hunger. This concept means that the eastern part of Russia was very little developed. As a result, the vast majority of land in these regions was undeveloped. Therefore, Stolypin's agrarian reform set one of the tasks to relocate peasants from the western provinces to the eastern ones. In particular, it was said that the peasants should move beyond the Urals. First of all, these changes were supposed to affect those peasants who did not own their land.

The so-called landless had to move beyond the Urals, where they had to establish their own farm. This process was absolutely voluntary and the government did not force any of the peasants to move to the eastern regions of the violent. Moreover, the resettlement policy was based on providing peasants who decide to move beyond the Urals with maximum benefits and good living conditions. As a result, a person who agreed to such resettlement received the following concessions from the government:

• The peasant's farm was exempt from any taxes for 5 years.
• The peasant received the land as his own. The land was provided at the rate of 15 hectares per farm, as well as 45 hectares for each of the family members.
• Each migrant received a loan on preferential terms. The size of this court depended on the region of resettlement, and in some regions reached up to 400 rubles. This is a lot of money for the Russian Empire. In any region, 200 rubles were given free of charge, and the rest of the money in the form of a loan.
• All men of the resulting farming were exempt from military service.

The significant advantages that the state guaranteed to the peasants led to the fact that in the first years of the implementation of the agrarian reform, a large number of people moved from the western provinces to the eastern ones. However, despite such interest of the population in this program, the number of migrants decreased every year. Moreover, every year the percentage of people who returned back to the southern and western provinces increased. The most striking example is the indicators of the relocation of people to Siberia. In the period from 1906 to 1914, more than 3 million people moved to Siberia. However, the problem was that the government was not ready for such a massive resettlement and did not have time to prepare normal living conditions for people in a particular region. As a result, people came to a new place of residence without any convenience and no devices for a comfortable stay. As a result, about 17% of people returned to their former place of residence from Siberia alone.

Despite this, Stolypin's agrarian reform in terms of resettlement of people gave positive results. Here, the positive results should be considered not in terms of the number of people who moved and returned. The main indicator of the effectiveness of this reform is the development of new lands. If we talk about the same Siberia, the resettlement of people led to the fact that in this region 30 million acres of land was developed, which was previously empty. An even more important advantage was that the new farms were completely cut off from the communities. A man came independently with his family and independently raised his farm. He had no public interest, no neighboring interests. He knew that there was a specific piece of land that belonged to him and that should feed him. That is why the indicators of the effectiveness of the agrarian reform in the eastern regions of Russia are slightly higher than in the western regions. This is despite the fact that the western regions and western provinces are traditionally more funded and traditionally more fertile with cultivated land. It was in the east that it was possible to achieve the creation of strong farms.

The main results of the reform

Stolypin's agrarian reform was of great importance for the Russian Empire. This is the first time a country has begun to implement such a scale within the country. There were obvious positive shifts, but in order for the historical process to give positive dynamics, it needs time. It is no coincidence that Stolypin himself said:

Give the country 20 years of internal and external peace and you will not recognize Russia.

Stolypin Pyotr Arkadevich

This was indeed the case, but, unfortunately, Russia did not have 20 years of silence.

If we talk about the results of the agrarian reform, then its main results, which were achieved by the state in 7 years, can be reduced to the following provisions:

• The sown area was increased by 10% throughout the country.
• In some regions, where peasants left the community en masse, the sown area was increased to 150%.
• Grain exports were increased, accounting for 25% of all world grain exports. In fruitful years this figure increased to 35 - 40%.
• The purchase of agricultural equipment over the years of the reforms has increased 3.5 times.
• The volume of fertilizers used increased 2.5 times.
• The growth of industry in the country went at colossal steps + 8.8% per year, the Russian Empire in this regard came out on top in the world.

These are far from complete indicators of the reform in the Russian Empire in terms of agriculture, but even these figures show that the reform had an unequivocal positive dynamics and an unequivocal positive result for the country. At the same time, it was not possible to achieve the full implementation of the tasks that Stolypin set for the country. The country did not manage to fully sell farms. This was due to the fact that the traditions of collective farming among the peasants were very strong. And the peasants found a way out for themselves in the creation of cooperatives. In addition, artels were created everywhere. The first artel was founded in 1907.

Artel it is an unification of a group of persons who characterize one profession, for the joint work of these persons with the achievement of common results, with the achievement of common income and with common responsibility for the final result.

As a result, we can say that Stolypin's agrarian reform was one of the stages of the massive reform of Russia. This reform was supposed to radically change the country, transferring it to the category of one of the leading world powers, not only in the military sense, but also in the economic sense. The main task of these reforms was to destroy the communities of peasants by creating powerful farms. The government wanted to see strong landowners, who would express not only landowners, but also private farms.

In Russia, the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by a major collapse of the empire and the creation of a state - the Soviet Union. Most of the laws and ideas did not come true, the rest were not destined to last long. One of the reformers at that time was Pyotr Stolypin.

Pyotr Arkadyevich was from a noble family. He served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was awarded by the emperor himself for the successful suppression of a peasant uprising. After the dissolution of the State Duma and the government, the young speaker took over as prime minister. First of all, a list of unimplemented bills was demanded, according to which new procedures for governing the country began to be created. As a result there were several economic solutions, which were called Stolypin.

The laws of Peter Stolypin

Let us dwell on the history of the origin of the plan for the development of the country's economy - the Stolypin agrarian reform.

Prehistory of land relations

Agriculture at that time brought about 60% of the net product and was the main branch of the state's economy. But lands were divided unfairly between classes:

1. The landlords owned most of the sown fields.
2. The state had mainly forest areas.
3. The peasant class got land that was almost unsuitable for cultivation and further sowing.

The peasants began to rally, as a result, new territorial units were formed - rural societieshaving administrative rights and obligations to their members. In the villages that were formed, there were headmen, foremen and even a local court, which considered minor offenses and claims of people against each other. All the highest posts in such communities consisted exclusively of peasants.

Representatives of the upper strata of society living in these villages could become members of the community, but without the right to use land belonging to the village administration, and were obliged to obey the rules of peasant administrations. Consequently, rural officials made it easier for the central authorities of the country.

Most of the land plots belonged to communities, which could redistribute plots among the peasants in an arbitrary form, which led to the emergence of new farms. The size of the plot and taxes varied depending on the number of workers. Often, the land was taken from the elderly and widows, who were unable to fully care for it, and given to young families. If the peasants changed their permanent place of residence - they moved to the city - they had no right to sell their plots. When peasants were dismissed from the rural community, the allotments were automatically transferred to its ownership, so the land was leased.

To somehow equalize the problem of “usefulness” of plots, the board came up with a new way of cultivating the land. For this, all the fields belonging to the society were cut into peculiar strips. Each farm received several such strips located in different parts of the field. This process of cultivating the land began to significantly inhibit the flourishing of agriculture.

Backyard land ownership

In the western parts of the country, conditions were easier for the working class: the peasant community was allocated a plot with the possibility of passing it on by inheritance... And also this land was allowed to be sold, but only to other persons of the working class of society. Only streets and roads belonged to village councils. Peasant associations had the perfect right to buy land through private transactions, being full-fledged owners. Often the acquired plots were divided among community members in proportion to the funds invested, and each looked after his share. It was profitable - the larger the field area, the lower the price.

Peasant unrest

By 1904, meetings on the agrarian issue did not bring any results, despite the fact that rural communities once again spoke out in favor of the nationalization of land belonging to the landowners. A year later, the All-Russian Union of Peasants was created, which supported the same proposals. But this also did not speed up the solution of problems on the country's agrarian question.

The summer of 1905 was marked by a terrible event at that time - the beginning of the revolution... The peasants, who did not have forests on the communal lands, arbitrarily cut down landlord reserves, plowed up their fields and plundered their estates. Sometimes there were cases of violence against representatives of law enforcement agencies and arson of buildings.

Stolypin at that time held the post of governor in the Saratov province. But soon he was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers. Then Pyotr Arkadievich, without waiting for the meeting of the Duma, signed a basic provision allowing the government to make urgent decisions without the consent of the Duma itself. Immediately after that, the ministry put on the agenda a draft law on the agrarian system. Stolypin and his reform were able to peacefully suppress the revolution and give people hope for the best.

Pyotr Arkadievich believed that this the law is the most important goal for the development of the state... This would give a significant increase in the economic and production table. The date of the adoption of the project falls on 1907. It became easier for peasants to leave the community, they had the right to their own land plot. And also the work of the Peasant Bank was resumed, which mediated between the working class and the landowners. The question of the resettlement of peasants, who were provided with many benefits and huge land plots, was raised, which, as a result of Stolypin's agrarian reform, brought a colossal economic growth and the settlement of unpopulated districts like Siberia.

Thus, the Stolypin agrarian reform achieved its intended goal. But, despite the growth of the economy, improvement of ideological and political relations, the adopted bills were under the threat of failure due to mistakes made by Stolypin. When trying to establish social security for the working class of the state, it was necessary to carry out harsh repression against the organizations that contributed to the start of the revolution. And also the rules of the labor code at enterprises, such as insurance against accidents and compliance with the norms of the duration of the work shift, were not followed - people worked overtime for 3-5 hours a day.

September 5, 1911 the great reformer and politician Pyotr Stolypin was killed. Some time after his death, the new board revised all the bills he created.

“The main thing that is necessary when we write a law for the whole country is to keep in mind the reasonable and the strong, not the drinkers and the weak. This saying belongs to one of the most prominent economic and political figures of the early 20th century - Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. In no way should the importance of his reforms in the historical development of Russia and, in particular, the emergence of Russian farming be diminished. But everything is learned in comparison, so you should not close your eyes to the negative consequences of Stolypin's reforms. First of all, it is worth considering the very personality of the reformer.

Stolypin came from a noble noble family, in his character both monarchical views and pronounced patriotism are organically combined. His civic position can be summed up in the following formula: "Calm and reform." Many historical figures spoke of Stolypin as a strong-willed, good-natured man, the master of his word. "The homeland demands its service so sacrificially pure that the slightest thought of personal gain darkens the soul," Stolypin said.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the need to accelerate capitalist development began to manifest itself especially clearly. After the 60s, bourgeois relations developed to the necessary level for matters to come to an open confrontation between the feudal and capitalist systems. Stolypin presented the government's concept of solving the agrarian question. This presentation and the decree that followed it was interpreted as a choice between a peasant - the owner and a peasant-loafer in favor of the former. The main directions of the reform were: permission for peasants to leave the community, encouragement of the formation of farms and cuts, and implementation of a resettlement policy.

I am of the opinion that, in terms of its economic content, it was a liberal bourgeois reform that promoted the development of capitalism in the countryside. Relying on the emerging layer of small proprietors, the authorities tried to push the development of the country's entire economy as a whole. Apparently, the minister took as a basis the argument that the peasants, separating from the community, are turning into consumers of domestic agricultural products, thereby stimulating the development of Russia as an industrial and modernized country. In essence, Peter Arkadyevich tried to combine the American path of development of the capitalist economy with the preservation of the bureaucratic apparatus of the autocracy. Assessing Stolypin's principle objectively, I partially agree with the widespread opinion that it was one of the most brilliant ideas of that government, in terms of the development of capitalism. The agrarian reform was also designed to divert attention from the ideas of the seizure and division of landlord lands, to prevent the revolutionaries from solving their main task - organizing the people to fight against their exploiters.

What are the results of the agricultural course? Unfortunately for the then government, only slightly more than 10% of peasant farms could be called farms. Small successes of the newly-minted farmers often became the cause of hatred, and to get peasants - community members who tried in every possible way to prevent the development of more successful neighbors. There are cases when more prosperous peasants left the community and received the best land plots from the former communal lands. As a result, there was a direct struggle between the community members and farmers. The resettlement policy has clearly demonstrated the results and methods of the reform itself. In my opinion, the implementation of the resettlement policy, in the event of a successful implementation of this plan, was of significant importance in the development of not so much farming as in the development of new, still poorly developed lands. But the resettlement department, in my opinion, was ill-prepared for the transportation and arrangement of a huge mass of peasants. The settlers tried to settle in already inhabited places, rather than engage in the development of deserted areas. In 7 years, 3.5 million people were resettled, and 1 million returned back to the European part of the country, but already without money and hope.

There were also positive results. The volume of grain production increased, the export of products abroad, the amount of purchased agricultural machinery, and the volume of the gross product increased. But the Russian peasant never became an "American farmer." I believe that the Stolypin agrarian reform has a very low, I would call the efficiency. Most of the peasants continued to live in the community. Stolypin made a huge mistake by violently destroying communal traditions. With his agrarian reform, he brought the Russian countryside to a boil, and this predetermined the development of events in 1917, that is, in all further national history. But the peasants tried to find their own, more rational, way to capitalism, creating cooperatives and artels, taking as a basis one of the main principles of communism, as a collective activity. It is in the collective, I think (especially if the collective refers to the entire Russian peasantry) is it possible to create a great industrial power. Despite the fact that there are no subjunctive moods in history, I still allow myself to express my opinion regarding the development of capitalism in the Russian Empire. I do not think that capitalism in our country would lead to the general welfare of the people. After all, tsarist Russia remained a country with a bureaucratic administrative apparatus, in which bureaucratic arbitrariness and corruption reigned. If there were no revolutionary upheavals, a narrow stratum of large owners would have formed in the country, who were the main support of the emperor, in whose hands most of the natural resources and most of the monetary capital were.

In our time, the personality of P.A. Stolypin is gaining popularity in society, especially in the highest circles of the Russian government. In her opinion, the reformer managed to form the foundations of social policy, reorganize state mechanisms, and ensure impressive industrial growth. And in my opinion, the authorities found a certain point of reference from history in Stolypin to look more patriotic. Nevertheless, personally in my mind, P.A. Stolypin still remains an important figure in Russian history, but not a person who can change the course of history itself, unlike many other reformers.

P.A. Stolypin (1862-1911). In 1906-1911. Stolypin - Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Internal Affairs. Principles of activity: calming and reform, - "Give the state 20 years of internal and external peace, and you will not recognize today's Russia", "You need great upheavals, but we need a great Russia." I was betting on the bottoms. Neither the government nor the court understood Stolypin. In 1911 he was killed at a performance at the Kiev opera, where the sovereign was (the murderer - Bagrov: the son of a lawyer, landowner; was associated with the Social Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarcho-communists, but worked for the secret police; was hanged).

Reform of 1861 - the first stage of the transition to the individualization of land tenure and land use. But the abolition of serfdom did not lead to the progress of private property. In the 80-90s, the government sought to plant communal structures in the countryside, which, in the future, contradicted free peasant property. The reforms initiated by P.A. Stolypin could overcome these difficulties. His concept proposed a path for the development of a mixed, multi-structured economy, where state forms of economy had to compete with collective and private ones.

The constituent elements of his program - the transition to farms, the use of cooperation, the development of land reclamation, the introduction of a three-stage agricultural education, the organization of cheap credit for peasants, the formation of an agricultural party that would really represent the interests of the small landowner.

Stolypin puts forward the liberal doctrine of the management of the rural community, the development of private property in the countryside and the achievement, on this basis, of economic growth. With the progress of the peasant farm type, oriented to the market, in the course of the development of relations of purchase and sale of land, a natural reduction in the landlord's land fund should have occurred. The future agrarian system of Russia was presented to the premier in the form of a system of small and medium-sized farms, united by local self-governing and small in size noble estates. On this basis, the integration of two cultures - noble and peasant - was to take place.

Stolypin bets on "strong and strong" peasants... However, it does not require widespread uniformity, unification of forms of land tenure and land use. Where, due to local conditions, the community is economically viable, "it is necessary for the peasant himself to choose the way of using the land that suits him best."

The agrarian reform consisted of a set of consistent and interconnected measures.

Peasant Bank.

The Bank carried out on a grand scale the purchase of land with its subsequent resale to peasants on preferential terms, intermediary operations to increase peasant land use. He increased the credit to the peasants and made it much cheaper, and the bank paid a higher interest on its obligations than the peasants paid him. The difference in payments was covered by subsidies from the budget.

The bank actively influenced the forms of land tenure: for peasants who acquired land in sole ownership, payments were reduced. As a result, if until 1906 the bulk of land buyers were peasant collectives, by 1913 79.7% of buyers were sole peasants.

The destruction of the community and the development of private property.

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 prevalence of the fact of sole ownership of land over the legal right to use. The peasants could now allocate the land that was in actual use from the community, regardless of its will.

Measures were taken to ensure the strength and stability of labor peasant farms. So, in order to avoid speculation in land and concentration of property, the maximum size of individual land tenure was legally limited, and the sale of land to non-peasants was allowed.

The law of June 5, 1912 allowed the issuance of a loan on the security of any allotment land acquired by peasants. The development of various forms of credit: mortgage, land reclamation, agricultural, land management - contributed to the intensification of market relations in the countryside.

In 1907 - 1915. 25% of householders declared about the separation from the community, but 20% actually did stand out - 2008.4 thousand householders. New forms of land tenure have become widespread: farmsteads and cuts. As of January 1, 1916, there were already 1,221.5 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 farms was about one third of all communal households.

Resettlement of peasants to Siberia.

By decree on March 10, 1906, the right to resettle the peasants was granted to all comers without restrictions. The government allocated considerable funds for the costs of settling migrants in new places, for their medical care and public needs, for the construction of roads. In 1906-1913, 2,792.8 thousand people moved beyond the Urals. The scale of this measure also led to difficulties in its implementation. The number of peasants who could not adapt to the new conditions and were forced to return amounted to 12% of the total number of migrants.

The results of the resettlement campaign were as follows. First, during this period a huge leap forward was made in the economic and social development of Siberia. The population of this region during the years of colonization increased by 153%. If before the resettlement to Siberia there was a reduction in sown areas, 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.

Cooperative movement.

Loans from the peasant bank could not fully satisfy the peasant's demand for money goods. Therefore, credit cooperation became widespread, which went through two stages in its movement. At the first stage, administrative forms of regulation of small credit relations prevailed. By creating a qualified cadre of small credit inspectors, and by allocating significant loans through state banks for initial loans to credit partnerships and subsequent loans, the government stimulated the cooperative movement. At the second stage, rural credit partnerships, accumulating their own capital, developed independently.

As a result, a wide network of small peasant credit institutions, savings and loan banks and credit partnerships, serving the money turnover of peasant farms, was created. By January 1, 1914, the number of such institutions exceeded 13 thousand.

Credit relations gave a strong impetus to the development of production, consumer and marketing cooperatives. Peasants on a cooperative basis created artels, agricultural societies, consumer shops, etc.

Agricultural activities.

One of the main obstacles to the economic progress of the village was the low culture of agriculture and the illiteracy of the overwhelming majority of producers, accustomed to working according to a common custom. During the years of reform, peasants were provided with large-scale agro-economic assistance. Agro-industrial services for peasants were specially created, which organized training courses on cattle breeding and dairy production, democratization and the introduction of progressive forms of agricultural production. Much attention was paid to the progress of the out-of-school agricultural education system. If in 1905 the number of students at agricultural courses was 2 thousand people, then in 1912 - 58 thousand, and at agricultural readings - respectively 31.6 thousand and 1046 thousand people.

Results of reforms.

The results of the reform were characterized by a rapid growth in agricultural production, an increase in the capacity of the domestic market, an increase in the export of agricultural products, and Russia's trade balance was becoming more and more active. As a result, it was possible not only to bring agriculture out of the crisis, but also to turn it into a dominant feature of Russia's economic development.

The gross income of all agriculture in 1913 was 52.6% of the total GDP. The income of the entire national economy, due to the increase in the value of products created in agriculture, increased in comparable prices from 1900 to 1913 by 33.8%.

Differentiation of types of agricultural production by regions led to an increase in the marketability of agriculture. Three quarters of all raw materials processed by the industry came from agriculture. The turnover of agricultural products increased by 46% during the reform period.

Exports of agricultural products in the pre-war years increased even more, by 61% compared to 1901-1905. Russia was the largest producer and exporter of bread and flax, a number of livestock products. Thus, in 1910, Russian wheat exports amounted to 36.4% of total world exports.

The above does not mean at all that pre-war Russia should be presented as a "peasant paradise". The problems of hunger and agrarian overpopulation have not been resolved. The country continued to suffer from technical, economic and cultural backwardness. According to the calculations of I.D. Kondratyev in the United States, on average, a farm had a fixed capital of 3900 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 per 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 did not take place on the basis of intensification of production, but due to an increase in the intensity of manual peasant labor. But during the period under review, socio-economic conditions were created for the transition to a new stage of agrarian transformations - to the transformation of agriculture into a capital-intensive technologically progressive sector of the economy.

But a number of external circumstances (Stolypin's death, 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.

Stolypin's reforms are an unsuccessful attempt by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire Pyotr Alekseevich Stolypin (he held a position from 1906 to 1911), which met with resistance from Russian society, to create conditions in Russia for its more powerful economic growth while maintaining the autocracy and the existing political and social order

Stolypin (1862-1911)

Russian statesman, served as governor of Saratov and Grodno provinces, minister of internal affairs, prime minister.

“He was tall, and there was something majestic in his posture: impressive, impeccably dressed, but without any panache, he spoke loudly enough, without tension. His speech somehow floated over the audience. It seemed that it, penetrating through the walls, sounds somewhere in a wide open space. He spoke for Russia. This was very suitable for a man who, if not “sat on the royal throne,” then under certain circumstances would be worthy to occupy it. In a word, the All-Russian dictator shone through in his manner and appearance. However, a dictator of this breed, which was not characterized by rude attacks. (Having headed the government), Stolypin put forward as a program of government action the fight against revolutionary violence, on the one hand, and the fight against inertia, on the other. Resisting the revolution, patronizing evolution - that was his slogan "(V. Shulgin" Years ")

Reasons for Stolypin's reforms

- exposed a lot of problems preventing Russia from becoming a powerful capitalist country
- The revolution gave birth to anarchy that needed to be fought
- The ruling class of Russia had too different understanding of the ways of state development

Problems of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century

• Antediluvian agrarian relations
• Dissatisfaction with their position of workers
• Illiteracy, ignorance of the people
• Weakness, indecision of power
• National question
• The existence of aggressive, extremist organizations

The goal of Stolypin's reforms was to transform Russia in an evolutionary way into a modern, developed, strong, capitalist, power

Stolypin's reforms. Briefly

- Agrarian reform
- Judicial reform
- Local government reform in the Western provinces

The reform of the judiciary was expressed in the establishment of military courts. Stolypin accepted Russia during the turmoil. The state, which was guided by the previous legislation, could not cope with the barrage of murders, robberies, banditry, robberies, terrorist attacks. The Council of Ministers' Regulation on Courts-Martial allowed for expedited proceedings for violations of laws. The court session was held without the participation of a prosecutor, a lawyer, without witnesses for the defense, behind closed doors. The verdict was to be delivered no later than 48 hours later and enforced within 24 hours. Military courts passed 1,102 death sentences, 683 people were executed.

Contemporaries noticed that people whose portraits Repin created, and he was considered a popular portrait painter, immediately left this world. He wrote Mussorgsky - he died, Pirogov - followed Mussorgsky's example, Pisemsky died, the pianist Mercy de Argento, just about to portray Tyutchev, he fell ill and soon died. “Ilya Efimovich! - the writer Aldor once jokingly addressed the artist - please write Stolypin "(from the memoirs of K. Chukovsky)
The reform of local self-government in the Vitebsk, Volyn, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev and Podolsk provinces consisted in dividing the electoral congresses and assemblies into two national branches, the Polish and the Nepolian, so that the Nepolian branch elected a larger number of zemstvo vowels.

The reform drew criticism not only from State Duma deputies, but also from government ministers. Only the emperor supported Stolypin. “Stolypin was unrecognizable. Something in him snapped, his former self-confidence disappeared somewhere. He himself, apparently, felt that everyone around him, silently or openly, was hostile "(V. N. Kokovtsov" From my past ")

Agrarian reform

purpose

• Overcoming patriarchal relations in the Russian countryside that hinder the development of capitalism
• Elimination of social tension in the agricultural sector of the economy
• Increasing the productivity of peasant labor

Methods

• Granting the right of the peasant to leave the peasant community and securing a piece of land for him in private ownership

The peasant community consisted of peasants who previously belonged to one landowner and lived in the same village. All peasant allotment land was owned by the community, which regularly redistributed land between peasant farms depending on the size of families. Meadow, pasture land and forests were not divided between the peasants and were jointly owned by the community. The community could at any time change the size of the plots of peasant families in accordance with the changed number of workers and the ability to pay taxes. The state dealt only with the communities and the amount of taxes and fees collected from the land was also calculated for the community as a whole. All members of the community were bound by mutual responsibility. That is, the community was collectively responsible for the payment of all types of taxes by all of its members.

• Granting the right to a peasant to sell and mortgage his allotments and pass them on by inheritance
• Granting peasants the right to create separate (outside the village) farms (farms)
• Issuance by the Peasant Bank of loans to peasants on the security of land for a period of 55.5 years to buy land from a landowner
• Concessional lending to peasants secured by land
• Resettlement of land-poor peasants to state-owned lands in sparsely populated areas of the Urals and Siberia
• State support for agronomic measures aimed at improving labor and increasing yields

Outcome

• 21% of peasants left the community
• 10% of the peasants tried to stand out in the farms
• 60% of immigrants to Siberia and the Urals quickly returned back to their villages
• To the contradictions between peasants and landowners-landowners were added contradictions between those who left and remained in the community
• The process of class stratification of the peasantry has accelerated
• The increase in the number caused by the withdrawal of peasants from the community
• Growth in the number of kulaks (rural entrepreneurs, bourgeoisie)
• Growth in agricultural production due to the expansion of cultivated areas and the use of technology

Only today Stolypin's actions have been called correct. During his lifetime and during Soviet power, the agrarian reform was criticized, although it was not brought to the end. After all, the reformer himself believed that the result of the reform should be summed up not earlier than after "twenty years of internal and external peace"

Stolypin's reforms in dates

• 1906, July 8 - Stolypin became prime minister
• 1906, August 12 - an attempt on Stolypin's life, organized by the Social Revolutionaries. He was not injured, but 27 people died, two of Stolypin's children were injured
• 1906, 19 August - establishment of military courts
• 1906, August - transfer of appanage and part of state land to the management of the Peasant Bank for sale to peasants
• 1906, October 5 - decree on granting peasants the same rights as other estates in relation to public service, freedom to choose a place of residence
• 1906, October 14 and 15 - decrees expanding the activities of the Peasant Land Bank and facilitating the conditions for the purchase of land by peasants on credit
• 1906, November 9 - a decree allowing peasants to leave the community
• 1907, December - acceleration of the state-encouraged process of resettlement of peasants to Siberia and the Urals
• 1907, May 10 - Stolypin's speech to the Duma deputies with a speech containing a detailed reform program

“The main idea of \u200b\u200bthis document was as follows. There are periods when the state lives a more or less peaceful life. And then the introduction of new laws, caused by new needs, into the thickness of the old age-old legislation is rather painless. But there are periods of a different nature, when, for one reason or another, social thought begins to ferment. At this time, new laws may run counter to old ones, and a lot of stress is required in order not to turn public life into a kind of chaos, anarchy, while rapidly moving forward. It was precisely this period, according to Stolypin, that Russia was going through. To cope with this difficult task, the government had to restrain anarchist principles with one hand, which threatened to wash away all the historical foundations of the state, with the other, to hastily build the forests necessary for the erection of new buildings dictated by urgent needs. In other words, Stolypin put forward as a government action program the fight against revolutionary violence, on the one hand, and the fight against inertia, on the other. Resisting the revolution, patronizing evolution - that was his slogan. Without going deep this time into the complex of measures to combat the revolution, that is, so far without threatening anyone, Stolypin began to outline the reforms proposed by the government in the direction of the evolutionary "(V. Shulgin" Years ")

• 1908, April 10 - Compulsory Primary Education Act, phased in over 10 years
• 1909, May 31 - The Duma adopted a law on strengthening the Russification of Finland
• 1909, October - Russia became the first in the world in the production and export of grain
• 1910, June 14 - The Duma passed a law expanding the opportunities for peasants to leave the community
• 1911 January - student riots, limited university autonomy
• 1911, March 14 - introduction of zemstvos in the western provinces
• 1911, May 29 - a new law that further simplifies the exit of peasants from the community
• 1911, September 11 - Stolypin's death at the hands of a terrorist

“Only in the intermission did I get out of my seat and went to the barrier ... Suddenly there was a sharp crack. The orchestra members jumped up from their seats. The crackling was repeated. I didn’t realize that these were shots. The high school student who stood next to me shouted:
- Look! He sat right on the floor!
- Who?
- Stolypin. Get out! Near the barrier in the orchestra!
I looked there. The theater was unusually quiet. A tall man with a black round beard and a ribbon over his shoulder sat on the floor near the barrier. He fumbled along the barrier with his hands, as if he wanted to grab hold of it and stand up.
It was empty around Stolypin. A young man in a tailcoat walked down the aisle from Stolypin to the exit doors. I did not see his face at that distance. I only noticed that he walked quite calmly, without haste. Someone screamed long. There was a crash. An officer jumped down from the Benoir's box and grabbed the young man by the arm. Immediately a crowd gathered around them.
- Clear gallery! the gendarme officer said behind me.
We were quickly chased into the corridor. The doors to the auditorium were closed. We stood there, not understanding anything. A dull noise came from the auditorium. Then he died down, and the orchestra began to play "God Save the Tsar."
“He killed Stolypin,” Fitsovsky told me in a whisper.
- Don't talk! Leave the theater immediately! shouted the gendarme officer.
By the same dark staircases we came out to the square, brightly lit by lanterns. The square was empty. The chains of horse-drawn policemen drove the crowds standing near the theater into the side streets and continued to press further and further. The horses, backing away, nervously shifted their legs. The rattle of horseshoes was heard throughout the square. The horn sang. An ambulance pulled up to the theater at a sweeping trot. The orderlies with a stretcher jumped out of it and ran into the theater at a run. We left the square slowly. We wanted to see what happens next. The policemen hurried us, but they looked so confused that we did not obey them. We saw how Stolypin was carried out on a stretcher. They were pushed into the carriage, and she rushed along Vladimirskaya Street. Mounted gendarmes galloped along the sides of the carriage. (The terrorist) was called Bagrov. At the trial Bagrov was lazy and calm. When the verdict was read to him, he said: - I absolutely do not care whether I eat another two thousand cutlets in my life or not. "(Paustovsky" Distant Years ")

On July 6, 1906, in the midst of the First Russian Revolution, Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin replaced Ilya Logginovich Goremykin as chairman of the Council of Ministers. Prior to that, on July 6 of the same year, he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire. His figure has become one of the most controversial in the history of Russia, and the most important place in his activities is occupied by internal reforms. The government faced large-scale tasks to modernize the country's agricultural sector, which was of colossal importance for the future of the empire.

VATNIKSTAN prepared an overview of Stolypin's agrarian reform, understood its causes, consequences and influence on further Russian history.

Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin tried to suppress the hotbed of the revolution through economic reforms. He often stated this at meetings in the Second State Duma. It is worth noting that the reformer wanted to eradicate any revolutionary sentiments. So, his government widely used the Regulation on enhanced and emergency protection, introducing its norms in certain regions of the country.

From the beginning of the revolution until July 1909, at least one and a half million people were subjected to repression. By the beginning of 1908, there were about 200 thousand prisoners in prisons. Many publicists, public figures of that time opposed the massive introduction of the death penalty in the Russian Empire, the decree on military courts of 19 August 1906 was criticized. For example, the article by Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko “Everyday phenomenon. Publicist's Notes on the Death Penalty "and Leo Tolstoy's Manifesto" I Can't Be Silent ", which criticized the policy of the tsarist authorities in the suppression of mass uprisings. Trade union organizations were defeated in the country, in total about 350 workers' trade unions were closed.

Stolypin understood that the ruling regime would not withstand the onslaught of revolutionary upheavals, and therefore sought to eliminate the main underlying causes of the struggle against the government. This required economic transformation. He stated:

"Revolution is not an external disease, but an internal one, and you cannot cure it by external means."

Land reform

One of the hottest topics of the early 20th century was the land issue. For the stable functioning of agriculture, it was necessary to endow the peasant with land and turn him into an owner. At the same time, since Stolypin himself had noble roots, he did not encroach on the "holy of holies" of the Russian Empire - the landowners' land. The land was alienated to the peasants at the expense of the community's land fund. The nobility saw in the community a hotbed of rebellious sentiments, so they sought to avert the peasant threat from the landlord's land. Pyotr Stolypin himself spoke sharply negatively about the community:

"Our land community is a rotten anachronism, surviving only thanks to the artificial, groundless sentimentalism of the last half century, contrary to common sense and the most important state needs."

The main problem was that the community made all peasants equal:

"... the Russian peasant has a passion to equalize, to bring everything to the same level ... the best elements of the village should be belittled to understanding, to the aspirations of the worst, inert majority."

At the same time, he believed that further transformation and transformation of the peasant into the middle class, it was required to separate him from the community and allot his own land to form capital. The middle class, in turn, was to become the basis of the new economy. At the same time, according to Stolypin, the reform was not a weakness of the authorities:

“Not the disorderly distribution of land, not pacifying the riot with handouts - the riot is extinguished by force, but the recognition of the inviolability of private property, and as a consequence ... the creation of small personal property, the real right to leave the community and the resolution of issues of improving land use - these are the tasks, the implementation of which the government considers issues the existence of the Russian state ”.

A peasant with children. Ryazan province, 1910

The beginning of the reform was the Decree of November 9, 1906, according to which the peasants were allowed to freely leave the community. According to this document, the community member could get free land on which he was farming - this land was called "cut".

In fact, the community was to be divided into parts by small owners. Despite the fact that the peasant became the personal owner of the land, there were many restrictions on its use. Land could be sold only to a person connected with agriculture, mortgaged - only in the Peasant Land Bank, and bequeathed - only to close relatives. This step contributed to the formation of a prosperous stratum of the peasant population, which was able to buy up neighboring plots of poor community members.

There was also another way to get personal ownership of land. When a peasant left the community, he was given a piece of land that was not associated with the communal territory - a farm. The farmsteads were especially attractive to the reformers. Stolypin himself was an admirer of farms typical of the western and Baltic provinces. At the same time, those farms that appeared after the reform were incomparably poorer and smaller than the 60-dessiatine plots of Kherson German colonists with stone buildings. The freed peasant was returning to his fifty land plot without any infrastructure.

S.A. Korovin, "On the World"

An important issue was the legality of land alienation in communities where redistribution took place relatively recently, and the land could not be considered fully equipped by the land user. Then the State Council introduced an amendment, according to which sole ownership was established in those territories where there had been no redistribution from the moment the land was allotted. On June 14, 1910, the law was approved by the king. An addition to this was the Law on Conducting Land Management Works of May 20, 1911. Under this project, the territories on which the land management work was carried out were transferred to hereditary property. This allowed the authorities to clearly define the boundaries of peasant holdings.

The very process of land management was not clearly worked out by the management, since the size of the land was set the same for each region: the natural and climatic factor, soil fertility, and local infrastructure were not taken into account. Small businesses that had just begun to develop were often not given the necessary benefits. The land management reform itself progressed slowly: there was a shortage of specialists, many disputes arose among the peasants. All this aroused popular discontent with the existing system.

Peasants in festive clothes. Yaroslavl province, 1915

In his first speech as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in the Second State Duma, Stolypin outlined the ways in which peasants can buy land:

“The main department sees a way to eliminate acute shortage of land in preferential, corresponding to the value of the purchased and paying ability of the purchaser, the sale of land to farmers. For this purpose, the government has at its disposal, according to the decrees of August 12 and 27, 1906, 9 million dessiatines and purchased from November 3, 1905. Peasant bank over 2 million dessiatines. But for the success of the business, the increase in peasant land tenure must be associated with the improvement of forms of land use, for which incentive measures and mainly credit are needed. The Main Directorate intends to go in this matter through the wide development and organization of land, land reclamation and resettlement loans ”.

An important role in the functioning of the economic system was assigned to the Peasant Land Bank with its right to buy landowners' land (given in 1895) and issue securities for the entire amount of transactions (added in 1905). In the course of the reforms, the situation on the market threatened to devalue the landlords' lands, so the bank began a massive purchase of noble estates. For 1906-1907. more land was purchased than in the previous 11 years. At the same time, prices rose. This made it difficult for borrowers to purchase further, since the peasants had to pay huge payments, which inevitably led to ruin. Moreover, for the years 1906-1916. the nobles for 4.6 million dessiatines paid about 500 million rubles, and for 1906-1915. up to 570 thousand dessiatines of land were taken from borrowers.

Arrears of clients of the Peasant Land Bank constantly grew, and the number of new borrowers decreased, as the level of trust in the bank among peasants became critically low. Therefore, the most important instrument of the government, the Peasant Land Bank, could not fulfill the main task of developing a new class and creating favorable conditions for the introduction of an economy for the newly-made landowner.

Resettlement policy

An integral part of the agrarian reform is the resettlement policy pursued by the government of Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. By a decree of March 10, 1906, each peasant was granted the right to resettlement to the uninhabited regions of Siberia, the Urals, Turkestan, the Steppe Territory and the Transcaucasus.

Peasants at the Chelyabinsk resettlement point. The beginning of the twentieth century.

The authorities encouraged settlement beyond the Urals, hoping to alleviate land shortages in the European part of the country. The government encouraged resettlement with benefits, allowances and loans. A special carriage was even designed for the settlers. They were given the right to strengthen and freely sell their land plot. The rate of growth of resettlement was really high: since 1906, and especially in 1908-1909, more than 1.3 million people moved to new places. By 1910, about 700 thousand people had accumulated in the Tomsk province alone. The problem was that the peasants did not have the necessary funds to settle on the new land.

According to the calculations of economists, each peasant needed a loan of at least 450 rubles. In reality, however, loans did not exceed 100 rubles (about 61.5% had such money with them). Moreover, if the initial amount was spent not on accommodation, but on food, the peasant lost the right to receive the remainder of the loan. Corruption was another major problem: local officials demanded bribes. All this led to the return of some of the settlers. The total number of settlers in 1906-1916 amounted to more than 3.1 million people, the percentage of those who returned in the first years was 9%, in subsequent years it rose to 31%.

Immigrants near the railway. The beginning of the XX century.

The situation was also difficult for the migrants who moved to Turkestan, the Steppe Territory, and the Transcaucasus. The land was given to the peasants at the expense of the local population - all this led to the hostility of the indigenous people and the newcomers. At the same time, the resettlement was carried out at the level of minimal costs on the part of the state, with an obvious attempt to shift all the burdens of developing new lands, including financial ones, onto the peasants' shoulders. It is surprising that the funds for the reform could well have been enough, but the government, represented by Stolypin, believed that it was more important to invest in support of noble agriculture - the support of the autocracy.

Results of the reform

The results of Pyotr Stolypin's reforms turned out to be rather contradictory. Among the positive ones, one can single out the rapid growth of agricultural production, an increase in the capacity of the domestic market, an increase in the export of agricultural products, and the trade balance of Russia was becoming more and more active. The gross income of all agriculture in 1913 was 52.6% of the total. The income of the entire national economy, due to the increase in the value of products created in agriculture, increased in comparable prices from 1900 to 1913 by 33.8%.

Many regions began to produce agricultural products, which led to an increase in trade and economic ties between different regions of the country. It should be noted that the turnover of agricultural products increased by 46% during the reform period. The export of agricultural products in the pre-war years increased by 61%, compared with 1901-1905. Russia has become the largest producer of bread, flax and a number of animal products. Thus, in 1910, Russian wheat exports amounted to 36.4% of total world exports.

Here is how the Russian public and political figure Pyotr Berngardovich Struve spoke about the reform:

“No matter how you relate to Stolypin's agrarian policy - you can accept it as the greatest evil, you can bless it as a beneficent surgical operation - with this policy he made a huge shift in Russian life. And - the shift is truly revolutionary, both in essence and formally. For there can be no doubt that with the agrarian reform that liquidated the community, only the liberation of the peasants and the construction of railways can be put on a par in the economic development of Russia ”.

At the same time, there were many errors in the reform. The problems of hunger and peasant land shortages were never resolved. The country continued to suffer from technical, economic and cultural backwardness. According to the calculations of Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratyev, a prominent Russian economist, in the United States, on average, a farm had a fixed capital of 3900 rubles, and in European Russia, 900 rubles were allocated to one peasant farm. The per capita national income of the agricultural population in Russia was about 52 rubles per year, and in the United States - 262 rubles.

Distribution of newly formed farmsteads among householders in the village of Belinok, Grodno province. 1909 year

In general, many prominent figures of that time criticized Stolypin's reforms, and this applies not only to the revolutionary-minded strata of society. For example, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, already mentioned in the article, wrote the following:

“... they thought in Russia to calm down the agitated population, both waiting and wanting only one thing: the abolition of the right to land ownership (just as outrageous in our time as the serf right was half a century ago), to calm down the population so that, by destroying the community, to form small land ownership ... The mistake was huge. Instead of taking advantage of the consciousness of the illegality of the right of personal land property still living among the people, a consciousness that converges with the doctrine of the relationship of man to the land of the most advanced people in the world, at the same time, in order to expose this principle to the people, you thought to calm him down in order to entice him to the basest, old, obsolete understanding of man's relationship to the earth, which exists in Europe, to the great regret of all thinking people in this Europe. "

Leo Tolstoy among the peasants at the fair. The village of Lomtsy, Oryol province. 1909 year

The soil fertility of the middle plot of land was comparatively low and the rate of productivity was slow. Economic growth took place not on the basis of an intensification of production, but due to an increase in the intensity of manual peasant labor. The government was never able to destroy the community due to the fact that only wealthy peasants left it, who wanted to acquire more land and stop feeding the community, and poor people who had already lost contact with the community and wanted to get land in order to sell it. The main, middle stratum of peasants remained in the community. Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov) wrote about the failures of Stolypin's reforms, for example:

“Some allegedly attributed to Stolypin a brilliant saving idea of \u200b\u200ban agricultural system, the so-called farm economy. This, in his opinion, should have strengthened the proprietary feelings of the peasant farmers and thus suppressed the revolutionary fermentation ... Then I lived in the village and clearly saw that the people were against her. And the reason was simple. From the existing area it was impossible to endow all the millions of peasants with farms, and they would have to be paid for. This means that a small group of new owners would stand out from the more prosperous peasants, while the masses would remain land-poor. Farms among the people failed. In our district, there were hardly three or four families who moved to the farm. The case froze, it was artificial and abnormal. "

Stolypin stated that it would take him 15–20 years to bring the country to economic prosperity, but the reform stopped in 1913. At the same time, a number of researchers believe that such reforms took at least 50 years. This is the period for the gradual development of large capitalist farms, which, given the short working season in Russian agriculture, could exist only with a significant concentration of equipment and labor at the most important time of the agricultural season. However, these prospects no longer have anything to do with the reforms of Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin. The reforms did not give the desired result, the country did not come out of the crisis, and new shocks were approaching Russia.

When studying the topic “Reforms of P.A. Stolypin "students are offered the point of view:" Historical and journalistic literature contains different, sometimes polar, assessments of Stolypin's transformations. Some authors believe that the reform achieved its intended goals - positive results were obtained in the modernization of peasant farms, increasing their productivity and marketability. Others, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the reform has failed. "

Assignment: using the textbook material and additional information, evaluate the results of the agrarian reform P.A. Stolypin. Find arguments to support both sides of the scholarly debate. What position would you take? Argument your answer.

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The task: using the material of the textbook (pp. 60-62) and additional information, evaluate the results of the agrarian reform of P.A. Stolypin. Find arguments to support both sides of the scholarly debate. What position would you take? Argument your answer.

Write down the answer as follows:

Reform achieved its intended goals	The reform "failed"
1………………………. 2………………………… 3………………………….	1…………………………….. 2…………………………… 3……………………………
Own position:

Additional materials

1. PEASANT BANK

The activity of the Peasant Bank under Stolypin acquired a grandiose scale. In August 1906, appanages (belonging to the royal family) and part of the state lands were transferred to him. The bank was also allocated funds for the purchase of landowners' land so that they could be sold to peasants in small plots on favorable terms. For 1906-1916. the bank bought about 4.7 million dessiatines and sold about 4 million. The creation of cut and farm enterprises was especially encouraged. However, having received land from the bank, the peasant fell into debt dependence on it. Now he had to pay off part of the loan he received every year. For the majority of individual peasants, who could no longer count on the support of the community, these conditions were extremely burdensome, hindering the transformation of their farms into "strong" ones.

RESETTLEMENT POLICY

The resettlement of peasants from densely populated central regions to the outskirts of the Russian Empire was a fairly noticeable phenomenon in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. It intensified especially after the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. From 1896 to 1905 more than a million people moved to Siberia. However, the most widespread resettlement became during the years of the Stolypin reform. According to Stolypin, encouraging the resettlement of peasants, on the one hand, could solve the problem of peasant overpopulation and land shortages in the central provinces, and on the other, it would make it possible to create strong farms in the east of the country, thereby contributing to both an increase in agricultural production and the planned development of regions. Siberia and The Far East... Preferential railway tariffs were set for the migrants. A special type of passenger carriage was even created, which was later called "Stolypin". State land in Siberia was assigned to the peasants for nothing, and a monetary subsidy was paid to those who received plots in remote areas. Due to the resettlement, new villages grew in Siberia, more than 30 million acres of land were developed, the production of bread, butter, meat and other products increased sharply. The profitability of the Trans-Siberian Railway also increased. Nevertheless, a significant part of the migrant peasants faced formidable problems. It was mainly the poorest peasants who left for the East, and it was extremely difficult for them to raise the untapped virgin lands. In total, during the years of reform, more than 3.5 million immigrants turned out to be beyond the Urals (of which about 500 thousand returned back).

Stolypin did not set himself the goal of completely eliminating communal land use, he hoped to create a layer of wealthy peasants, private landowners, who could become a new support for the autocracy. By the beginning of the world war, about 25% of the peasants left the community. Cooperatives began to develop at a rapid pace, which included many peasants who had left the community. So, for example, in Siberia, the Union of Siberian butter-making cooperatives launched a wide activity, exporting oil abroad (mainly to England). By the beginning of 1914, there were more than 31 thousand cooperatives in the country, which were selling goods, supplying peasants with new machines, tools, and everyday items. In 1912, the Moscow Narodny Bank was opened, 85% of whose shareholders were credit cooperatives. This dealt a significant blow to usury in the countryside. The consequence of the stolypisk reform was the intensification of the "de-peasantization". Many peasants, leaving the community, sold their plots and rushed to the city, where they joined the ranks of hired workers in factories and factories.

As a result, the level and volume of agricultural production has increased significantly. In 1909-1911. Russia annually exported bread worth over 750 million rubles. The average annual grain harvest amounted to over 4 billion poods. However, the world war that began in 1914 led to the termination of the reform, which remained unfinished. That is why she was unable to resolve the complex of contradictions in the village, and Stolypin's political goal - to create a strong layer of peasant private owners in the village, who would become a reliable support for the government, was never fully achieved.

Stolypin _ Timeline _ History of Russia - federal portal Istoriya.RF.htm

1. Land reform

One of the key problems of Russian history at the beginning of the 20th century is the inefficiency of the peasant economy, squeezed by archaic norms of the communal way of life. The solution to this issue by P.A. Stolypin saw in the transformation of the peasant into the owner of his land plot. In addition, a person had to be endowed with property rights so that civil and political rights did not remain an empty beech. To implement this task, the government has initiated a whole range of measures. By a decree on November 9, 1906, the peasant received the right to secure his allotment in ownership, which he could not previously sell, mortgage, or lease. Now, being a full-fledged owner of his land plot, he could take out loans from the Peasant Bank, being responsible for fulfilling his obligations with his property. The peasant bank also performed another important function. He bought the lands of the local nobility and resold them to the successful peasantry on favorable terms. In such a natural, peaceful manner, the land fund was redistributed.

A simple change in the legal status of the peasant allotment could not lead to qualitative changes in the peasant economy. The usual allotment was divided into many strips, between which they ran considerable distances. This markedly hampered agricultural work. Thus, the government faced the problem of land management, which would bring together the strips of one allotment. As a result, a cut or a farm would appear (if not only a land plot, but also a farmstead with outbuildings were separated from the community).

One of the principal directions of the agrarian reform is the resettlement policy. The government was forced to solve the problem of overpopulation in the countryside. The surplus of hands in the village gave rise to an obvious land hunger. Accordingly, it became necessary to send the peasant masses to those regions that were in dire need of settlement - Siberia and the North Caucasus. The government allocated preferential loans to migrants, financed their relocation, and even at first transferred state, specific and cabinet lands into their ownership free of charge.

The results of government policy in a relatively short period have been impressive. For 1907-1913. 706 792 petitions were filed to strengthen their allotments into property. A total of 235,351 projects were approved. By 1914, land surveying work was carried out on an area with a total area of \u200b\u200b25 million dess. By 1915, 3738 thousand dessiatins were sold to the peasants from the land funds of the Peasant Bank. In 1906-1914. 3 772 151 people moved beyond the Urals. Of these, about 70% are entrenched in Siberia. Over the years of reforms, expenditures on agronomic assistance to the population have grown almost fourfold, and the consumption of agricultural machinery per tithe of crops has grown threefold. The state carried out large-scale irrigation works in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. In other words, "tectonic" shifts have taken place in the agricultural sector, which affected the majority of the population of Russia.

« Stolypin "carriage

Historical symbol. “Stolypin carriage” is a resettlement carriage with the inscription: “40 people \u003d 8 horses”. Such cars in large numbers then moved along the Transsib.

... the death of the prime minister did not stop the ongoing reforms. The peasantry did not remain indifferent to the ongoing reform. “One of the profound and most important phenomena of the era we are living through in the history of Russia,” wrote the famous Russian economist Professor AV Chayanov in 1916, “is the powerful revival of the Russian countryside, full of youthful energy.<...> Never before has our village experienced such a powerful educational impact that it is experiencing now. " According to him, in 1917, the year traditionally considered the beginning of the “second Russian turmoil,” the peasant-owner dominated the village: “The peasant farm of 1917 is not what the peasant farm of 1905 was ... cattle are kept, peasants sell more, buy more. The peasant cooperatives have covered our village with themselves and reborn it. Our peasant has become more developed and cultured ... "

1. To the 100th anniversary of the Stolypin reform

... ... the agrarian reform on the eve of the 1917 revolution became the final stage of the mass migration of people to Siberia. With the construction of the Siberian highway and the Chelyabinsk - Petropavlovsk - Omsk railway in 1896, the Ishim district became a place of settlement for peasants in the Vitebsk, Oryol, Penza provinces. Our oldest villages are considered Abatskoe (1620), Glubokoe (1680), Armizonskoe (1700), Berdyuzhye (1740). Their founders were peasants from "black-worm Russia", the North-Western province.

The village has a special place in my heartVtoropesyanovo. ….

In 1855, settlers from the Kursk and Vitebsk provinces settled in the village. ……

The peasants lived in small huts built of poles mixed with straw. Half of the hut was occupied by bunks, on which they slept and ate. There were no windows, instead of them there were holes covered with a bull's bubble. The stoves had no chimneys, they fired in black. The inhabitants of this village were mainly engaged in agriculture, sowing wheat - eggs. All the clothes were of their own production and quite simple. Over time, a brick production appeared, a fire tower, blacksmiths, "near-town baths", a pimokatny production, a cream department, and three mills appeared. In the center of the village was the Trinity Church, on the site of which there is now a monument to those who fell during the Great Patriotic War. Near the village there are five lakes rich in fish, But (ravine), Bespyatikha (a small pine forest interspersed with deciduous forest). Residents call themselves Pesyanovo residents, and neighbors call themselves pesyanychiki, shanks, self-propelled vehicles ... The story does not end there ...

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“The main thing that is necessary when we write a law for the whole country is to keep in mind the reasonable and the strong, not the drinkers and the weak. This saying belongs to one of the most prominent economic and political figures of the early 20th century - Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. In no way should the importance of his reforms in the historical development of Russia and, in particular, the emergence of Russian farming be diminished. But everything is learned in comparison, so you should not close your eyes to the negative consequences of Stolypin's reforms. First of all, it is worth considering the very personality of the reformer.

Stolypin came from a noble noble family, in his character both monarchical views and pronounced patriotism are organically combined. His civic position can be summed up in the following formula: "Calm and reform." Many historical figures spoke of Stolypin as a strong-willed, good-natured man, the master of his word. "The homeland demands its service so sacrificially pure that the slightest thought of personal gain darkens the soul," Stolypin said.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the need to accelerate capitalist development began to manifest itself especially clearly. After the 60s, bourgeois relations developed to the necessary level for matters to come to an open confrontation between the feudal and capitalist systems. Stolypin presented the government's concept of solving the agrarian question. This presentation and the decree that followed it was interpreted as a choice between a peasant - the owner and a peasant-loafer in favor of the former. The main directions of the reform were: permission for peasants to leave the community, encouragement of the formation of farms and cuts, and implementation of a resettlement policy.

I am of the opinion that, in terms of its economic content, it was a liberal bourgeois reform that promoted the development of capitalism in the countryside. Relying on the emerging layer of small proprietors, the authorities tried to push the development of the country's entire economy as a whole. Apparently, the minister took as a basis the argument that the peasants, separating from the community, are turning into consumers of domestic agricultural products, thereby stimulating the development of Russia as an industrial and modernized country. In essence, Peter Arkadyevich tried to combine the American path of development of the capitalist economy with the preservation of the bureaucratic apparatus of the autocracy. Assessing Stolypin's principle objectively, I partially agree with the widespread opinion that it was one of the most brilliant ideas of that government, in terms of the development of capitalism. The agrarian reform was also designed to divert attention from the ideas of the seizure and division of landlord lands, to prevent the revolutionaries from solving their main task - organizing the people to fight against their exploiters.

What are the results of the agricultural course? Unfortunately for the then government, only slightly more than 10% of peasant farms could be called farms. Small successes of the newly-minted farmers often became the cause of hatred, and to get peasants - community members who tried in every possible way to prevent the development of more successful neighbors. There are cases when more prosperous peasants left the community and received the best land plots from the former communal lands. As a result, there was a direct struggle between the community members and farmers. The resettlement policy has clearly demonstrated the results and methods of the reform itself. In my opinion, the implementation of the resettlement policy, in the event of a successful implementation of this plan, was of significant importance in the development of not so much farming as in the development of new, still poorly developed lands. But the resettlement department, in my opinion, was ill-prepared for the transportation and arrangement of a huge mass of peasants. The settlers tried to settle in already inhabited places, rather than engage in the development of deserted areas. In 7 years, 3.5 million people were resettled, and 1 million returned back to the European part of the country, but already without money and hope.

There were also positive results. The volume of grain production increased, the export of products abroad, the amount of purchased agricultural machinery, and the volume of the gross product increased. But the Russian peasant never became an "American farmer." I believe that the Stolypin agrarian reform has a very low, I would call the efficiency. Most of the peasants continued to live in the community. Stolypin made a huge mistake by violently destroying communal traditions. With his agrarian reform, he brought the Russian countryside to a boil, and this predetermined the development of events in 1917, that is, in all further national history. But the peasants tried to find their own, more rational, way to capitalism, creating cooperatives and artels, taking as a basis one of the main principles of communism, as a collective activity. It is in the collective, I think (especially if the collective refers to the entire Russian peasantry) is it possible to create a great industrial power. Despite the fact that there are no subjunctive moods in history, I still allow myself to express my opinion regarding the development of capitalism in the Russian Empire. I do not think that capitalism in our country would lead to the general welfare of the people. After all, tsarist Russia remained a country with a bureaucratic administrative apparatus, in which bureaucratic arbitrariness and corruption reigned. If there were no revolutionary upheavals, a narrow stratum of large owners would have formed in the country, who were the main support of the emperor, in whose hands most of the natural resources and most of the monetary capital were.

In our time, the personality of P.A. Stolypin is gaining popularity in society, especially in the highest circles of the Russian government. In her opinion, the reformer managed to form the foundations of social policy, reorganize state mechanisms, and ensure impressive industrial growth. And in my opinion, the authorities found a certain point of reference from history in Stolypin to look more patriotic. Nevertheless, personally in my mind, P.A. Stolypin still remains an important figure in Russian history, but not a person who can change the course of history itself, unlike many other reformers.

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agrarian reform land tenure Stolypin

The results of the reform are characterized by a rapid growth in agricultural production, an increase in the capacity of the domestic market, an increase in the export of agricultural products, and Russia's trade balance was becoming more and more active. As a result, it was possible not only to bring agriculture out of the crisis, but also to turn it into a dominant feature of Russia's economic development. The gross income of all agriculture in 1913 was 52.6% of the total gross income. The income of the entire national economy, due to the increase in the value created in agriculture, increased in comparable prices from 1900 to 1913 by 33.8%.

Differentiation of types of agricultural production by regions led to an increase in the marketability of agriculture. Three quarters of all raw materials processed by the industry came from agriculture. The turnover of agricultural products increased by 46% during the reform period.

Even more, by 61% compared to 1901-1905, the export of agricultural products increased in the pre-war years. Russia was the largest producer and exporter of bread and flax, a number of livestock products. Thus, in 1910, Russian wheat exports amounted to 36.4% of total world exports.

The foregoing does not mean at all that pre-war Russia should be presented as a "peasant paradise". The problems of hunger and agrarian overpopulation have not been resolved. The country still suffered from technical, economic and cultural backwardness. According to the calculations of I.D. Kondratyev in the United States, on average, a farm had 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 per 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 did not take place on the basis of intensification of production, but due to an increase in the intensity of manual peasant labor. But during the period under review, socio-economic conditions were created for the transition to a new stage of agrarian transformations - to the transformation of agriculture into a capital-intensive technologically progressive sector of the economy.

RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM

The community withstood the clash with private land ownership, and after the February Revolution of 1917 launched a decisive offensive. Now the struggle for land again found a way out in the arson of estates and the murders of landlords, which took place with even greater ferocity than in 1905. “Then they didn’t bring the matter to the end, did they stop halfway? - the peasants reasoned. - Well, now we will not stop and we will exterminate all the landowners at the root. "

The results of the Stolypin agrarian reform are expressed in the following figures. By January 1, 1916, 2 million householders left the community for the striped fortification. They owned 14.1 million dess. land. 469 thousand householders living in unrestricted communities received certificates of identification for 2.8 million dessiatins. 1.3 million householders passed to the farm and otrubnoye property (12.7 million dessiatins). In addition, 280 thousand farms and cut enterprises were formed on banking lands - this is a special account. But the other figures given above cannot be added mechanically, since some householders, having strengthened the allotments, then went out to the farms and cuts, while others went to them immediately, without a striped reinforcement. According to rough estimates, about 3 million householders left the community, which is slightly less than a third of their total number in those provinces where the reform was carried out. However, as noted, some of the emigrants actually abandoned agriculture long ago. 22% of the land was withdrawn from the communal turnover. About half of them were sold. Some part returned to the communal cauldron.

During the 11 years of the Stolypin land reform, 26% of the peasants left the community. 85% of the peasant lands remained with the community. In the end, the authorities failed to destroy the community or create a stable and sufficiently massive layer of peasant-owners. So what can be said about the general failure of the Stolypin agrarian reform.

At the same time, it is known that after the end of the revolution and before the beginning of the First World War, the situation in the Russian countryside improved markedly. Of course, besides the reform, there were other factors at work. First, as has already happened, since 1907, the redemption payments, which the peasants had been paying for more than 40 years, were canceled. Second, the global agricultural crisis ended and grain prices began to rise. From this, one must suppose, something fell on ordinary peasants. Thirdly, during the years of the revolution landowners' landownership declined, and in connection with this, enslaving forms of exploitation also decreased. Finally, fourthly, for the entire period there was only one lean year (1911), but two consecutive years (1912-1913) had excellent harvests. As for the agrarian reform, such a large-scale event, which required such a significant land shakeup, could not have a positive effect in the very first years of its implementation. Nevertheless, the activities that accompanied her were good, useful business.

This concerns the provision of greater personal freedom to the peasants, the arrangement of farms and cuts on bank lands, resettlement to Siberia, and some types of land management.

POSITIVE RESULTS OF AGRARIAN REFORM

The positive results of the agrarian reform include:

Up to a quarter of the farms emerged from the community, the stratification of the village increased, the rural elite gave up to half of the market grain,

3 million households moved from European Russia,

4 million acres of communal lands were involved in the market turnover,

The cost of agricultural guns increased from 59 to 83 rubles. one yard,

The consumption of superphosphate fertilizers increased from 8 to 20 million poods,

For 1890-1913 the per capita income of the rural population increased from 22 to 33 rubles. in year,

NEGATIVE RESULTS OF AGRARIAN REFORM

The negative results of the agrarian reform include:

From 70% to 90% of the peasants who left the community, one way or another retained ties with the community, the bulk of the peasants were the labor farms of the community members,

0.5 million migrants returned back to Central Russia,

There were 2-4 tithes per peasant household, with a rate of 7-8 tithes,

The main agricultural tool is a plow (8 million pieces), 58% of farms did not have plows,

Mineral fertilizers were used on 2% of the sown area,

In 1911-1912. the country was struck by a famine that affected 30 million people.