but he had something that Russia in those days needed far more than deep or original ideas: character. It was Stolypin who, in the teeth of criticism both from the left and from the reactionaries, gave Russian peasants the right to withdraw from the village communes and to own their own land — the most fundamental social reform since the emancipation of the serfs. By 1914 nearly 9,000,000 peasant families were tilling their own fields in Russia, and the embers of revolution were fast dying out in the countryside. If anyone could have saved the Russian monarchy after 1905 it was Stolypin.
Peter stolypin
