Pyotr Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin (Russian: Пётр Арка́дьевич Столы́пин) (April 14 1862 – September 18 1911) served as Nicholas II's Chairman of the Council of Ministers and was Prime Minister of Russia from 1906 to 1911. His tenure was marked by efforts to repress revolutionary groups and for the institution of noteworthy agrarian reforms. Stolypin hoped, through reform, to stem peasant unrest by creating a class of market-oriented smallholding landowners. He is often cited as one of the last major statesmen of Imperial Russia, with a clearly defined political programme and a determination to undertake major reforms.

Quotes

• You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia.
  • Biography
  • Words on his grave; originally the ending of his Duma speech (24 May 1907)

• People sometimes forget about their national tasks; but such peoples perish, they turn into land, into fertilizer, on which other, stronger nations grow and grow stronger.
  • May 5, 1908; The State Duma; P. A. Stolypin's speech about Finland. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Quotes about

• After 1917 the most hardened followers of the Tsar would come to denounce Stolypin as an upstart bureaucrat whose dangerous reform policies had only served to undermine the sacred principles of autocracy. But to his admirers — and there are many of them in post-Soviet Russia — Stolypin was the greatest statesmen Russia ever had, the one man who could have saved the country from the revolution and the civil war.
  • Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996), p. 221

• Alexandre Soljenitsyne lui rend un vibrant hommage lors de son entretien avec Bernard Pivot : "Au XXème siècle, c'est de loin de plus grand homme d'Etat que nous ayons eu". (Apostrophe, Antenne 2, 1983)