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Abraham Ascher, P.A. Stolypin: The Search For Stability In Late Imperial Russia, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, 468 pp
Western histories about the pre-revolutionary Russia are very rare, and general encyclopaedias or treaties talk very little about this subject by recycling dusty clichés about despotism, regress and under-civilisation. Most times, Russia is considered from a current geopolitical perspective and, as the Western geopolitics almost always requires a quite suspicious view, the end result is a caricature full of prejudices. For example, an atlas containing maps of Russia from various periods, most recently published by a notable publishing house in London, depicts only two representative historical figures on the cover: Stalin and Lenin. No wonder that Alain Besancon, him being also very harsh with Russia's past, bemoaned, in this context, the state of historiography on the great empire of the East.
From this point of view, as well as others, we must mention Abraham Ascher's book dedicated to the last great political figure given by the Tsarist Empire, Piotr Stolypin. Escher, a professor at the University of New York, aims to rediscover the figure of the former Russian Prime Minister, the impact of his policies on Russia and his legacy, although he is aware of the absence of relevant biographies and the difficulty of a historian following the influence of over 70 years of Soviet domination over local sources. Moreover, Stolypin was a nomina odiosa to the Bolsheviks, considered rightfully by Lenin, as the man who impeded the revolution through his reforms and who, if he had not been assassinated in Kiev, would have made it downright impossible. "If Stolypin's policy is continued ...then the agrarian structure of Russia will become completely bourgeois, the stronger peasants will acquire almost all the allotments of land, agriculture will become capitalistic, and any solution of the agrarian problem - radical or otherwise - will become impossible under capitalism", the communists' parent wrote in exile.
Ascher's biography has the merit not only to present the Stolypin's agrarian reform, the cornerstone of its political program, but to highlight the origins, influences and, more importantly, the personality of its initiator, along with other ways of restructuring Russia on a grounded conservative structure.
Thus, the historian manages to make Stolypin a living...