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This is the first work to set one of the great bloodless revolutions of the twentieth century in its proper historical context. John Dunlop pays particular attention to Yeltsin's role in opposing the covert resurgence of Communist interests in post-coup Russia, and faces the possibility that new institutions may not survive long enough to sink roots in a traditionally undemocratic culture.

This ground-breaking work documents Russian efforts to appropriate Western solutions to the problem of economic backwardness since the time of Catherine the Great. Entangled then as now with issues of cultural borrowing, educated Russians searched for Western nations, ideas, and social groups that embodied universal economic truths applicable to their own country. Esther Kingston-Mann describes Russian Westernization--which emphasized German as well as Anglo-U.S. economics--while she raises important questions about core values of Western culture and how cultural values and priorities are determined. This is the first historical account of the significant role played by Russian social scientists in nineteenth-century Western economic and social thought. In an era of rapid Western colonial expansion, the Russian quest for the \"right\" Western economic model became more urgent: Was Russia condemned to the fate of India if it did not become an England? In the 1900s, Russian liberal economists emphasized cultural difference and historical context, while Marxists and prerevolutionary government reformers declared that inexorable economic laws doomed peasants and their \"medieval\" communities. On the eve of 1917, both the tsarist regime and its leading critics agreed that Russia must choose between Western-style progress or \"feudal\" stagnation. And when peasants and communes survived until Stalin's time, he mercilessly destroyed them in the name of progress. Today Russia's painful modernizing traditions shape the policies of contemporary reformers, who seem as certain as their predecessors that economic progress requires wholesale obliteration of the past.

An examination of property rights reforms in Russia before the revolution reveals the advantages and pitfalls of liberal democracy in action--from a government that could be described as neither liberal nor democratic. The author analyzes whether truly liberal reform can be effectively established from above versus from the bottom up--or whether it is simply a product of exceptional historical circumstances.

Introduction. The article examines the attitude of the Russian nobility to the reformatory activity of Chairman of the Council of the Ministers of the Russian Empire P.A. Stolypin. The authors focus on the analysis of the attitude of the conservative wing of the noble elite represented in the State Duma, the State Council, the Council of the United Nobility, the Council for Local Economy under the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the government policy. Methods. In the historiography of the problem three periods are highlighted. It was found that up to 90s of the 20th century negative evaluation of the personality and activity of P.A. Stolypin remained in the scientific literature. Only in the modern period of the Russian historiography development many mythologems were criticized and there appeared scientific works that overcame many stereotypes and dogmatic representations about the last Russian reformer’s life and activity on the basis of the complex of documentary sources. Analysis. The regional nobility sharply criticized the new government agricultural policy, despite the fact that a large part of landowners and nobles reacted positively to implementing Stolypin’s agrarian reform. Stolypin’s program of updating Russia was ambiguously perceived by the elite of the Russian nobility. Such bills as “On the Extension of the Regulation on Zemsky Institutions to Vitebsk, Volyn, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev and Podolsk Provinces”, “On Amending and Supplementing the Existing Laws on Uezd Establishments in the Provinces”, “On Establishing the Main Principles for Organizing Provincial Institutions” were met with hostility and regarded as an encroachment on traditional privileges of the noble class. Other bills of Stolypin did not find much support among the nobility as well. His fall began immediately after the appeasement of the country. Results. His legislative activity, the desire to accelerate the process of Russia’s renewal irritated not only the conservative wing of the noble elite, but also Emperor Nicholas II. The tragedy of the last imperial reformer P.A. Stolpin was that he had no social support either among the ruling elite and the nobility, or in society, that eventually led to his isolation and tragic death.

At the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, the Russian imperial and post-Soviet governments pursued large-scale projects to transform land tenure in the countryside. Based on the belief that people would work harder and more productively on land they themselves owned, both reform programs divided collectively-managed land into individual parcels. Post-Soviet land privatization, consciously modeled on the Stolypin-era reforms conducted in early twentieth-century Russia, resulted in the dispossession of much of the rural population. This article examines privatization in a district of Voronezh oblast’ in Russia's southwest, considering contemporary processes through an historical lens. It shows how successful local efforts to adapt to markets and preserve large-scale agriculture nonetheless resulted in rural dispossession.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).

Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.

Front Cover -- Book Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Tables, Figures, and Maps -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Reform from Above -- Stolypin: the Man behind the Reforms -- This Book's Goals -- Chapter 1 - Creating Private Property, Dispersing Power -- The Gist of the Reforms -- Liberal Democracy -- Property Rights, Civil Society, and Liberal Democracy -- Transitions to Liberal Democracy -- Liberalizing Property Rights in Tsarist Russia -- Chapter 2 - The Property Rights to Be Reformed -- Open Fields -- Repartition -- Family v. Individual Tenure -- The Costs of Open Fields, Repartition, and Family Ownership -- Post-Emancipation Limits on Exit, Sale, or Exchange -- Rule Changes on the Eve of the Stolypin Reforms -- Sociology of the Commune -- Attitudes Toward Law, Property, and Individual Achievement -- Chapter 3 - Peasant Conditions on the Eve of Reform -- Trends in Agricultural Productivity Per Capita -- Peasant Landholdings -- Peasant and Pomeshchik Productivity -- Land and Grain Prices -- the Peasant Land Bank -- Tax Burdens -- A Glimpse of Peasant Life -- Chapter 4 - The Politics of Reform -- Composition of the First Duma -- The Pomeshchiki -- The SRs, the Trudoviki and Other Peasant Representatives -- The Kadets -- Use of Article 87 -- Collateral Reforms -- Chapter 5 - Overview of the Reforms -- Reform Provisions: a Rough Cut -- The Results of the Reforms -- The Flow of Applications Over Time -- Regional Variation -- Variations in Size of Holdings Converted or Consolidated -- Chapter 6 - Purposes and Pressure: Issues of Reform Design -- Red Herrings -- ''Administrative pressure'' -- Biases in Favor of Title Conversion and Consolidation -- Title Conversion as an Impediment to Consolidation -- Government Insistence on Form of Consolidation -- Shortfalls in the Rights Granted -- Chapter 7 - The Long-Term Implications.