agrarian reform

The journal Russkaya Mysl’ (Russian Thought) was not a “Cadet monthly” and positioned itself as a journal of the “national Russian culture”. P. A. Stolypin was comprehended on its pages not only as a sharply political and controversial fi gure (P. B. Struve, A. S. Izgoev, A. A. Kizevetter, A. A. Kaufman, etc.), but as a reformer and creator of a new cultural way of life under the battle-cry of building Great Russia.

The image of P. A. Stolypin, who was burdened by the task of agrarian changes in the country, still remains the object of the “arguments of the parties”. As a rule, one of the arguments ‘for’ or ‘against’ Stolypin’s agrarian policy is drawn from the content of L. Tolstoy’s letters of 1907-1909 to the reformer and his only reply. All these letters date to the most intense period of the land “revolution” in the sovereign state, which only started half a century after serfdom had been abolished.