More on the Second Most Popular Russian

Like I say, I think P.A. Stolypin is an interesting character, but I still don't get it that he is the second most popular Russian. I remember first running across him in Bertram Wolf's Three Who Made a Revolution (I'm pretty sure--I can't put my fingers on a copy just now). I remember a chapter called "Lenin and Stolypin," drawing a contrast between Stolypin's vision of a nation of smallholders and Lenin's, well, Leninism (aside: it could be fun to run this comparison alongside other "competing visions,"--the brothers Gracchi, say, or Jefferson v. Hamilton). In An Economic History of the USSR, Alex Nove summarizes Stolypin's efforts at "conservative reform" after the abortive revolution of 1905:

Outstanding redemption dues [from the abolition of serfdom], which had been reduced, were finally abolished. Peasants were now free to leave their communities, to consolidate their holdings as their property, to buy land or to sell it, to move to town or to migrate. Stolypin's object was to encourage the emerence of a class of peasant proprietors who would be prosperous, efficient and politically loyal. This was the so-called 'wager of the strong'. Many go-ahead peasants tok advantage of the new opportunities. ... The process of change was slowed down and then halted by the outbreak of the war in 1914. Stolypin himself had been assassinated in 1911. He held the view that his reform, given time, would have provided the emprie with a solid social base.

And the tantalizing closer:

We will never know whether he would have been proved right.

--Alex Nove, An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991 13 (2d ed. 1989, 1993)

There mega-Turtledoves of alternative history there, and it is easy to imagine how he might have made things better (harder, after all, to imagine how things could go worse). But there have always been skeptics who remark on Stolypin's own limitations. Here is Richard Charques in The Twilight of Imperial Russia:

Of commanding presence, a man of strong and in many respects impressive personality, clear-headed and courageous, he was as well fitted for the part as any member of the Russian bureaucracy. Yet it is hard to warm to him except in sympathy with his thankless task in serving so jealous and unresponsive a sovereign. And even sympathy is diluted by a sense of Stolypin's unbridled conviction of his own political virtue. His defects as a conservative statesman ... were that he could not conceive it possaible that he was mistaken, and that he was therefore scarcely ever flexible enough in his approach to persons or to problems. Increasingly he was driven by a rigid sense of state necessity into courses which were innocent of scruple or even violated the law in both letter and spirit.

--Richard Charques The Twilight of Imperial Russia 159-60 (OUP 1958, 1965)

Or not all that different from, in a word, Lenin.