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Originally Posted by nikimcbee
AFAIR, Nicholas didn't trust him (subverting his power), and imprisoned him or killed him off.  |
Stolypin was assassinated by a left-wing radical, but a lot of historical accounts point to the Tsarist secret police having knowledge and approval of the plot. Stolypin was a good politician, although far from a straightforward figure - in some ways he was very progressive, in others he was pretty conservative. What's true is that he was pretty practical and, no doubt, his marginalization then assassination was a loss of an important voice. He could've played a key role in keeping Russia liberal after the March revolution of 1917, where one of the problems faced by the provisional government was lack of practical, assertive leaders.
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Question: Did your relative suffer under the Tsar? Where were they from in Russia? I think you've mentioned it before, but I forget.
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My family history is extremely mixed! (and this is probably true of a lot of Russians). On my dad's side, a large portion of my ancestry were Germans and primarily nobles - some of them high nobles, others lowly immigrants seeking new opportunities or courtiers who fell out of favour. Most of them had a favourable view of the Tsar, although not all of them had good fortunes. Some of them were, in fact, his relatives. Two of the noble families I was related to just flat-out fell out of favour during the conservative Alexander III's (Nicholas II's father's) rule because of their association with his liberal, idealist predecessor Alexander II. Another was a lowly noble from Saxony who moved to the Ukraine, where he owned some land but was never happy or successful. He lived with a Ukrainian woman whom he couldn't marry because the Orthodox church prohibited it.
One of my great-great-grandfathers was born in a Jewish family in Odessa, and was an extremely talented artist. He was hired by the Tsar to teach art at his own private academy in Tsarskoye Selo, and the Tsar's family also commissioned a number of his paintings and mosaics, for some of which he was paid as much as 3000 roubles a piece (an astronomical sum in those times!). However his family was always quite poor. Why? Well, the reason was that the money he was making was largely going to fund the Bolshevik party! My great-great-grandfather was bitter that being able to move to St. Petersburg and work as an artist (for the Tsar), he was forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity, was disowned by his Jewish parents, and was still denied opportunities and advancement because of his origins. Another ugly fact of the "lost Russia" - it was viciously (and often violently) anti-Semitic at the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather firmly and genuinely believed in radical revolutionary ideals, because he wanted to change Russia into a place where people had equal opportunities - so he poured all his savings into the cause. After the revolution, however, his work was increasingly political rather than artistic, which is unfortunate because art was his real talent. Even more unfortunate because I don't think he really knew what he was starting. In 1923, he was sent on a political assignment to help establish the Soviet government in Belarus, where he contracted typhoid fever and died. Ironically, this is probably one reason that I'm here today - an old Bolshevik with Jewish ancestry would have been a dead man in Stalin's time. His family would've done no better, but instead luckily faded into obscurity (and crushing poverty). Had he lived to see what his revolutionary idealism helped create, I think he would've been absolutely horrified.
A couple of my great-great (and great-) grandparents lived out in the countryside. Those that were primarily of Northern (Finnish, really) stock were indifferent and largely independent from the Tsarist regime. They were equally uninterested when Archangelsk, where they were living, was invaded during the brief Western intervention in the civil war. I think they just wanted to be left alone. Elsewhere, my peasant ancestors in the Novgorod region cautiously took up the Soviet cause in the civil war, but seemed to hold no particular bitterness against the Tsar. Their lives did, as I understand, improve after the revolution. Stalin's repressions didn't reach them. It was only WWII that was really devastating to their livelihood in the end.
Under both the Tsarist and the Soviet regime though, my family was really lucky. Some had close calls, both with the Tsarist authorities and with the NKVD. That's why even my living relatives ended up with extremely mixed backgrounds and different experiences. Some embraced communism and stood firmly for it (oddly, this applies equally to those that descended from peasants, and those that descended from the German nobles); others turned to dissent, whether progressive (Western-oriented, liberal) or conservative (Orthodox, nationalist). In the end, nobody in my family cashed in on anything - they all got burned about equally by the Tzarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, but luckily not too harshly. Everybody wound up a bit poor, a bit bitter, and really disappointed that things didn't work out as they hoped. Though I guess that's probably a common story for a lot of Russians!