------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (July 2007)

Stephen F. Williams, _Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The 
Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906-1915_. Stanford, CA: 
Hoover Institution Press, 2006. xiv + 320 pp. $15 (paperback), ISBN: 
0-8179-4722-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Steven Nafziger, Department of Economics, 
Williams College.


_Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime_, by Stephen F. Williams, is 
an interesting, interdisciplinary study of one of the largest 
property rights reforms in European history -- the famed Stolypin 
reforms of late-Tsarist Russia. Initiated in the wake of the first 
Russian revolution of 1905-6, the Stolypin reforms (named for their 
guiding personality and then presiding Prime Minister, Petr Stolypin) 
aimed to help alleviate the backwardness and inefficiency of peasant 
agriculture through land titling and the consolidation of scattered 
plots into unified farms. Williams, a retired Federal Appeals court 
judge (DC Circuit) and former law professor at the University of 
Colorado, offers an interpretation of the reforms that draws heavily 
on political science, law and economics, and the economics of 
institutions.

_Liberal Reform_ argues that the measures taken under Stolypin failed 
to truly modernize Russia's economy because they were undertaken by a 
fundamentally _illiberal_ regime that did not guarantee the 
enforcement of property rights or allow markets (especially in land) 
to freely function. Broadly comparative, especially to property 
rights issues in the modern developing world, the book implicitly and 
explicitly compares the Stolypin reforms under Tsar Nicholas II to 
recent reform efforts (or the lack thereof) in Russia under Vladimir 
Putin. As such, Williams's analysis will appeal to scholars 
interested in property rights, land reforms, and the political 
implications of both, especially in authoritarian states. However, 
economic historians with an interest in Russian development are 
unlikely to be persuaded by the structure of the argument or the 
evidence brought to bear.

After 1905, Stolypin and his allies in the administration and the 
Duma passed a series of decrees and statutes aimed at transforming 
the prevailing regime of peasant property rights, thereby improving 
production incentives and the allocation of resources. This effort 
was motivated by the perceived inefficiencies of open-field 
agriculture and the communal organization of rural society. Since the 
reforms of the 1860s, which emancipated the peasants and endowed them 
with collective property rights (typically at the village level), 
Russian peasant agriculture appeared increasingly backward in 
comparison to the best practices in Western Europe and North America. 
The reforms were meant to spark technological modernization by 
enabling peasant households to shift from communal property rights 
and practices towards individualized farming and land tenure. This 
meant the establishment of individual title to land that was 
previously under collective community control and consolidations of 
scattered, open-field holdings into unified farms. The reforms set 
forth administrative and financial support for the millions of 
farmers and thousands of entire villages that undertook one of a menu 
of possible changes: from full enclosures of villages under 
individualized titles, to exchanges of intermingled fields among 
neighboring villages, to the resettlement of interested households in 
Siberia.[1] Alongside these changes in land-holdings and property 
rights, the reforms ended collective responsibility for tax and land 
obligations, forgave arrears on existing obligations, and officially 
did away with many other juridical limitations on peasant civil 
rights.

Given the epic scale of the reforms, historians have long argued over 
whether Stolypin's efforts mattered (or would have, if not for World 
War I and the Bolsheviks) for Russian economic development. To 
Alexander Gerschenkron (1965), establishing private property rights 
and ending the commune's hold on peasant initiative enabled Tsarist 
Russia's belated turn towards modern economic growth.[2] In contrast, 
Williams argues that any productivity benefits, as well as peasant 
"freedoms" (Chapter 1) more generally, were undermined and ultimately 
failed to take root because they were enacted by a non-democratic, 
non-liberal state. He builds his study around a thematic question: is 
it possible for fundamental grass-roots reforms (enabling "freedom" 
and "liberal democracy" in his view) to take place under a 
centralized and "illiberal" regime such as Tsarist Russia. Williams 
eventually answers this potentially interesting query, recently 
investigated by economists such as Acemoglu and Robinson (2006), in 
the negative, but he bases his conclusions on theoretical musings and 
secondary sources, rather than any detailed analysis of available 
documents or official statistics.

After introducing the reforms and instrumental concepts such as 
"liberalism" in Chapter 1, Williams describes the agricultural and 
social context of pre-1905 Russia in Chapters 2 and 3. Overall, his 
review of a vast literature is well-done, but problems do emerge here 
that spill over the rest of the study. In several places, the book 
exhibits small but significant lapses when either describing 
historical developments or applying economic theory to explain them. 
For example, in Chapter 3 (pp. 104-06), a puzzling discussion of the 
positive correlation between grain and land prices puts much of the 
blame for high land prices on the Peasant Land Bank -- a fairly 
limited institution that definitely did not have market power when it 
came to credit or land. Moreover, although Williams acknowledges that 
practices of collective fiscal responsibility and land management 
were fairly flexible, he eventually accepts Gerschenkron's 
association of the commune with agricultural backwardness and labor 
immobility. In contrast, recent studies (see Nafziger, 2006) have 
drawn on archival and statistical evidence to question these 
interpretations by econometrically testing for linkages between 
communal practices and economic inefficiencies. Finally, Williams 
refrains from discussing or analyzing his sources -- both secondary 
and primary -- in much depth. This allows him to either brush aside 
contradictory evidence or to qualify his conclusions to such a degree 
that the argument of the book becomes difficult to maintain and, 
eventually, to prove.

In Chapter 4, Williams describes the political context of the efforts 
by Stolypin and his supporters to enact property rights reforms. This 
chapter usefully outlines the views of the main political groups at 
the time (the nobility, the various parties of the left, the liberal 
Kadets, etc.) regarding land reforms, but these synopses exist in 
something of a vacuum, without much historical context to help the 
reader. Moreover, this chapter, along with Chapter 1, focuses almost 
exclusively on politics at the highest levels, often through the 
allusions to the personality and decisions of Stolypin, himself. The 
resulting depiction of events is rife with many quasi-counterfactual 
statements regarding what the reformers might have done differently, 
but little documentary evidence is analyzed beyond public speeches 
and memoirs to explain exactly how and why various choices were made.

This birds-eye focus on the mechanics of reform continues in Chapter 
5, where Williams describes the particulars of the statutes and 
decrees and the take-up of different options by peasants and 
villages. The account is complemented by data at the provincial 
level, but the micro-level process of the reform process is left as a 
black box. In Chapter 6, which returns to the issues of reform 
design, the exclusive focus on legislation and decrees contrasts 
sharply with Pallot's (1999) impressive study of the enactment of the 
Stolypin reforms. In her work, Pallot puts the emphasis squarely on 
how peasants encountered the reform through their interaction with 
surveyors, administrators, and each other. Unlike Williams, she views 
the failures of the Stolypin reforms to revolutionize rural society 
and economy as the outcome of peasants rationally choosing to retain 
communal practices and to resist certain aspects of the reforms. At 
the end of the day, this reviewer is much more convinced by Pallot's 
careful study of the reform process based on archival and primary 
evidence, than by Williams's analysis.

In Chapter 7, Williams concludes by studying the effects of the 
reforms, both immediate and long-term. Likening the Stolypin reforms 
to the English enclosure movement (although misinterpreting the state 
of the literature regarding productivity benefits of enclosure), 
Williams jumps from noting the lack of evidence on _positive_ 
productivity gains to asserting that the reforms must have not gone 
far enough in liberalizing land markets or privatizing land 
holdings.[3] Besides this logical leap, Williams puzzlingly points to 
state support of the cooperative movement in the 1900s and 1910s as 
additional evidence that the regime was not really committed to 
becoming a liberal capitalist democracy (really now?). This leads him 
to conclude that although the intent of the reforms was very much 
"liberal" (p. 250), the "illiberalism" of the Tsarist state 
undermined Stolypin's laudatory goals. The book ends with a 
consideration of property rights and liberal reforms in Putin's 
Russia that is overly brief and highly conjectural. As a result, the 
book ends rather abruptly, without adequately summarizing what the 
reader should take away.

Overall, _Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime_ is a significant 
contribution to our understanding of a critical moment in Russian 
economic and social history. Stephen Williams offers an impressive 
distillation of a large amount of secondary literature on the 
Stolypin reforms. He sheds deserved attention on the political 
context of what ended up being the last chance for the Tsarist regime 
to effect modernization in rural Russia before the October 
Revolution. Unfortunately, the limited use of original sources, 
several conceptual difficulties arising from not delving deep enough 
into the reforms' context or process, and the polemical undertones of 
the study (published by Hoover Press) detract from this book's 
usefulness as either an introduction to the Stolypin reforms or as a 
specialized study of the political implications of enclosing and 
privatizing communal land-holdings.

Notes:

1. The "take-up" of the reforms did involve millions of households 
and a large number of villages. However, these totals still only 
included a minority of the vast Russian peasant population. Pallot 
(1999, pp. 190-192) and Williams (2006, Chapter 5) review the 
relevant numbers. 2. This "Gerscheknronian" view has recently been 
questioned by Gregory (1994) and Nafziger (2006), based on aggregate 
and micro-evidence, respectively. 3. Surprisingly, Williams does not 
mention the only work this reviewer is aware of which "tests" for 
positive agricultural productivity effects of the Stolpyin reforms. 
The empirical work in Toumanoff (1984) is limited by significant 
identification problems, but it could have usefully served as a 
starting point for Williams's research.

References:

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. _Economic Origins of 
Dictatorship and Democracy_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2006.

Alexander Gerschenkron. "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 
Russia 1861-1917." _The Cambridge Economic History of Europe_. Vol. 
VI, Part II. Ed. H. J. Habakkuk and M. Postan. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1965. 706-800.

Paul R. Gregory. _Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from 
Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 1994.

Steven Nafziger. "Communal Institutions, Resource Allocation, and 
Russian Economic Development: 1861-1905." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale 
University. 2006.

Judith Pallot. _Land Reform in Russia 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to 
Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation_. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
1999.

Peter Toumanoff. "Some Effects of Land Tenure Reforms on Russian 
Agricultural Productivity, 1901-1913." _Economic Development and 
Cultural Change_ 32, 4 (1984): 861-72.


Steven Nafziger is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams 
College. His research focuses on institutions and economic 
development in Imperial Russia before 1917.

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