Stolypin Reform

The Stolypin reform was a series of changes to agriculture in Imperial Russia carried out between 1906 and 1917 under Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, intended to dismantle the traditional peasant commune, or mir, and allow individual peasants to claim private ownership of their land allotments. Stolypin, a conservative reformer, hoped the changes would create a class of prosperous, land-owning peasant farmers who would form a politically stable, conservative counterweight to the radicalism that had driven the Revolution of 1905, while also removing legal restrictions that had barred peasants from ordinary judicial procedures and representation. The reform remained incomplete and contested at the time of Stolypin' s assassination in 1911 and was overtaken entirely by the Russian Revolution and the sweeping collectivization that followed under Soviet rule.