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170 heart attacks, strong nervous excitement, and artretism. Then he would send for his old friend, the Polish physician Wolanski, and spend with him the long evenings in endless talk, which was the best medicine for his illness. For what he really suffered from was his heart's longing, bordering on melancholy. He died in the arms of the wife he had worshipped. Before death he handed to her his famous Memoirs, which were several times the object of thievish attempts, since they contained severe and sweeping statements on the reputations of statesmen who bulked large upon the political stage of Imperial Russia.

Peter Stolypin was a provincial Governor on the Volga before he became Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. He rose to the very top of bureaucratic career thanks to his energy, prudence, and profound knowledge of the manifold tendencies pervading the Russian society and nation. He was one of the first Russians who had the courage to foretell openly that Russia was sinking fast into the abyss of anarchy and revolution, and forecast with great precision—as the history of the Empire proved—the immediate fate of his country.

Stolypin maintained that the revolution would be started by the working masses, the bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, and that it would quickly spread to