by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] On August 25 (August 12, Old Style), 1906, a landau pulled up to the dacha of Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of the Interior, on Aptekarsky Island near St. Petersburg. Three people emerged from the light, open-topped carriage: a man in civilian clothes carrying a briefcase and two men in gendarme uniforms.
He appeared to be an official with an urgent message and a bodyguard. It was common for the imperial prime minister to receive visitors at his dacha. "These receptions usually attracted a large crowd—people of all walks of life, positions, and circumstances. This was the case this time," recalled Stolypin's eldest daughter, Maria.
But the visitors immediately aroused the suspicion of the doorman on duty, who himself had served in the gendarmerie. The helmets were of an outdated design. This oddity was also noticed by Lieutenant General Alexander Zamyatin, Stolypin's adjutant and chief of security.
The guests moved decisively through the first reception area, pushing aside the doorman. Zamyatin rushed to intercept them. At that moment, a man with a briefcase shouted, "Long live the revolution!" and threw the vanity case under the door of the second, inner reception area. An explosion echoed, audible for several blocks.
The police and paramedics who arrived at the scene confirmed that 27 people had been killed—ordinary petitioners, rank-and-file officials, security guards, and three suicide bombers. The police recorded the victims' names: "Nikolai Evdokimov, a postal service courier... Olga Vladimirovna Istomina and her young son, Vladimir... An unidentified woman, eight months pregnant..."
Thirty-three people were injured. Two of Stolypin's children were injured: 15-year-old Natalya and Arkady, who was barely three years old. The prime minister's son and daughter were on the balcony, along with Arkady's nanny. The blast threw the children onto the pavement. Fortunately, the little one was barely injured, but Natasha was seriously wounded, and her leg bones were shattered.
The target of the bombers' "action," Prime Minister of the Russian Empire Pyotr Stolypin, was unharmed; he was protected by an oak desk. The head of the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs gave orders and heard his daughter screaming in pain in the next room.
Simultaneously with the orders to launch an investigation into the assassination attempt, Stolypin conveyed his wishes to the doctors—to do everything possible to prevent Natasha from becoming crippled. The surgeons performed a miracle: not only did the girl not lose her legs (despite the doctors' initial belief), but she also remained paralyzed and was able to walk within a few months.
CAIN AND THE STORMY PETREL
The St. Petersburg cell of the Union of Socialist Revolutionary Maximalists was responsible for the assassination attempt on the Prime Minister.
The organizer of the "action," which claimed nearly fifty ordinary people's lives, was a recent figure in the December uprising in Moscow, the head of the Krasnaya Presnya combat committee, Socialist Revolutionary Mikhail Sokolov —aka Cain, aka Bear.
The police also identified the militants who carried out the attack. They were comrades Tipunkov (nicknamed Grisha), Zabelshansky (aka Frenchman), and Ivanov (aka Fedya).
The money for the share was obtained from the "ex" - the robbery of the Moscow Mutual Credit Society in the spring of that same year, 1906.
The preparation of the terrorist attack was the result of the coordination of revolutionaries: the maximalist Vladimir Lichtenshtadt prepared the "infernal machine" in the explosive devices workshop of the Bolshevik Combat Technical Group, which was led by Vladimir Lenin's closest ally, engineer Leonid Krasin.
The assembly center for explosive devices was located in the apartment of the “stormy petrel of the revolution” Maxim Gorky, who was close to the Bolsheviks.
The assassination attempt on August 25, 1906, was not the first attempt to settle scores with Russia's second-in-command after Emperor Nicholas II. This third attack was distinguished only by its scale, brutality, and senselessness—the fighters for the "liberation of the people" killed and maimed several dozen members of the people, but failed to achieve their goal.
There were about ten such unsuccessful attempts.
The eleventh "action" achieved its goal: on September 25, 1911, Stolypin was assassinated in the Kiev Opera House. No revolutionary party was behind the murder—the shooter was a lone anarchist, an "eccentric neurasthenic," and informant for the Security Department, Dmitry Bogrov. This event paved the way for the great upheavals that culminated in the revolution long talked about by Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats of various stripes.
"POWER CANNOT BE POWERLESS."
The first two assassination attempts occurred at the height of the revolution, in 1905. Stolypin was then governor of Saratov, one of the local leaders who successfully contained the chaos. It's no surprise that Pyotr Arkadyevich was summoned to St. Petersburg. Stolypin recalled a conversation with the emperor, which Maria Petrovna recounted in her memoirs.
Nicholas proposed that the Saratov governor accept the post of head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—in modern parlance, the overseer of law enforcement agencies and domestic policy. The Tsar said:
- Pyotr Arkadyevich, I kindly ask you to accept this post.
- Your Majesty, I can’t, it would be against my conscience.
- Then I order you to do this.
“ My father had no choice but to bow to the will of his sovereign, expressed in such a form, and he returned to Saratov only for a very short time to hand over the affairs of the province,” wrote Maria Stolypina.
What made Stolypin different from other figures who led the country's government? He made his career not in the offices of St. Petersburg, but in the provinces where he was a landowner—Kovno, Grodno, and Saratov. Thus, he was well acquainted with the local situation and the people he was tasked with leading.
In addition, he possessed personal courage and was ready to take decisive action when the situation demanded it.
And the "situation," which became unpredictable after the bloody incident of January 9, 1905, caught the authorities and law enforcement off guard. "In terms of technical means for combating riots, our police were backward," Arkady Petrovich Stolypin wrote about his father's work.
The Saratov governor fought against violations as far as possible, regardless of party affiliation. For example, he suppressed both a riot inspired by the Socialist Revolutionaries and attempts by the Black Hundreds to disrupt a congress of zemstvo doctors, whom the ultra-right viewed as "liberals and rebels."
Having become a minister and then prime minister, Stolypin acted according to the principle he himself formulated: “ First, calm down, and then reforms.”
In post-revolutionary literature, the tsarist prime minister was accused of unleashing government terror. But Stolypin acted based on the logic of the emergency—strike, burning of estates, pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, and massacres in the Transcaucasian provinces. The revolution, it should be remembered, erupted against the backdrop of the unfinished Russo-Japanese War.
The Prime Minister wrote:
“When Kronstadt was in turmoil just a few miles from the capital and the royal residence, when treason had broken into Sveaborg (the naval base in Finland), when the Baltic region was ablaze, when the revolutionary wave had spread to Poland, when horror and terror began to reign: then the government had to either step aside and give way to the revolution, forgetting that power is the guardian of the state and the integrity of the Russian people, or act and defend what had been entrusted to it.”
It was from this “extraordinary” logic that military courts emerged.
In 1906–1907, these bodies issued 1,102 death sentences against terrorists and riot organizers. However, the death penalty was applied in only 683 cases; the remaining 419 were spared. By comparison, in 1905–1907, more than 9,000 people died in terrorist attacks, clashes with police, and other riots.
By order of the Prime Minister, emergency measures were accompanied by explanatory work “on the ground”.
"Power is a means of preserving life, peace, and order; therefore, while condemning tyranny and autocracy in every possible way, one cannot help but consider anarchy dangerous," Stolypin explained his policy.
DIDN'T HEAR
However, not all even moderate politicians shared this (seemingly obvious) view. For example, Joseph Gessen, a liberal member of the Cadet Party Central Committee and deputy of the Second Duma, developed an entire theory at the time that terror was a manifestation of "internecine guerrilla warfare" in which "persons armed with real government authority" were killed.
The Prime Minister tried to explain who the “tsarist regime” was fighting against.
"Gentlemen, familiarize yourself with revolutionary literature, "Stolypin recommended in 1909, in correspondence with deputies of the Third Duma." Read the lines that teach how to fight through terror, through bombs, and it is recommended that these bombs be made of cast iron, to create more fragments, or that they be filled with nails. Familiarize yourself with the preaching of regicide."
But the explanations seemed to have no effect on most of the people's representatives. Gessen himself condemned the retaliation against the bombers as an attack on people without power, equating it with the actions of the Black Hundreds. And far from being a radical, another Cadet, Fyodor Rodichev (dubbed the "first tenor" of Russian liberalism), launched what would now be called a meme: "Stolypin ties."
When, after the calm had subsided, reforms began – primarily agrarian reforms, the renewal of the judicial system, and the resettlement program – progressive circles also received them with hostility.
The leftists—the heirs of the Narodniks—saw Stolypin's attempt to strengthen the prosperous peasantry as a blow to the rural "mir," and thus to the chance of Russian communal socialism. The Cadets and other liberals, on the contrary, accused the prime minister of attempting to preserve large estates and prevent the development of Russian farming. Duma members more or less close to Stolypin—the Octobrists and rightists—were dissatisfied with the prime minister's circumvention of parliament. Better to replace the "dictatorship" with a responsible government.
Politicians in the final years of the Russian Empire might have believed they were right: after all, in October 1905, the Emperor granted freedom to everyone, "from anarchists to monarchists," and there could be no talk of any self-restraint.
Stolypin's famous phrase from an interview with the editor of the Volga newspaper, Nikolai Garvey, in October 1909 is well known: "Give the state 20 years of peace, internal and external, and you will not recognize today's Russia."
Less well-known is another statement from the same conversation: "Friendly, common work, based on mutual trust—that's the motto for all of us Russians." This is what Russian society lacked at the beginning of the 20th century—and it is what is helping modern Russia overcome its current great upheavals.
But back then, more than a century ago, society seemed unaware of the cataclysms that internal disunity and the lack of unifying goals could bring.
After Stolypin's death in 1911, government chaos began amid the ongoing standoff between Duma members and the tsar's entourage. Any long-term policy was no longer in the cards—and then the Great War began. Zemstvo leaders, professors, and progressive journalists welcomed the February Revolution of 1917—but by October, many began to regret the "reaction."
Those who justified the murders of "servants of Tsarism" in 1905-07 learned what it meant (in Lenin's words) to "exert energy and mass character in terror against counterrevolutionaries." This "mass character" also affected all factions of the Socialist Revolutionaries, from the right to the maximalists. As for Stolypin's children, almost all (except his daughter Olga, who died in Ukraine in 1920) were lucky to escape.
Daughter Natalia, a victim of the terrorist attack on August 25, 1906, married Prince Yuri Volkonsky and outlived Stalin, dying in 1954. Her youngest son, Arkady, participated in the French Resistance during World War II, married the daughter of the former French ambassador, and fathered three children. He died in 1990.
True, one can hardly call a long life in emigration happy.