Stolypin Reforms

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Stolypin Reforms

Advantages

  • Authority of teh Mir was reduced
  • Redemption payments ended in 1907
  • Amount of ladn rented increased with peasants paying using money, sharecropping or labour
  • Consolidated holdings appeared
  • Colonisation of Siberia, the Steppes and Central Asia increased. New lands produced wheat, lifestock and dairy products for exports
  • New type of society was created, composed of self-made men
  • Farming methods improved = machinery and artificial fertiliser were used
  • Co-operatives were fromed providing credit and savings facilities, loans to buy livestock, tools, fertilisers and land

Disadvantages

  • Most of land transfer occured between 1908-13 and declined by 1914 - 508 000 households in 1908, 98 000 in 1914
  • Peasants were conservative and did not want to leave the Mir since it provided them with collective protection
  • By 1914 ***** farming still dominated, only 10% of land were consolidated into compact farms, limited by cash and landowners
  • Created a class of alienated, poor and landless peasants

Evaluation

- Shanin: did not have the intended effect of concentrating land lin few hands
- MacKean: 'The agrarian reforms stood little chance of developing, a conservative capitalist peasantry...the premises of teh Stolypin legislation are false.'
- Hugh Senton-Watson: 'The extravagant claims made by some on Stolypin's behalf that he was a statesman who placed Russia on the way to a peaceful happy future from which she was diverted only by war...may be discounted.'

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