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Rh the peasants and the army. In the whirl of struggles would perish the dynasty, the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and the educated classes.

Stolypin did not undertake to arrest the flight o revolutionary thought, which continued with growing speed, hastening through the "slow and treacherous time towards the reign of Count Witte," the author of the 1905 revolution. According to Stolypin that revolution was the ballon d'essaie, and the school of a speedy and more powerful upheaval.

But Stolypin intended to weaken its progress through an iron regime In Internal politics, hoping to create within a few years an immense anti-revolutionary army, composed of peasants, who were to be transformed into a new middle class. In conjunction with the Minister of Agriculture, A. W. Krivoshein, Stolypin convoked a meeting of the landed gentry and announced that the Government was obliged to purchase from them a considerable portion of their estates, in order to re-sell it on easy terms to the peasants for the purpose of raising them to the status of small landowners. The Government was to assist the latter to employ modern methods of agriculture. The small landowner-peasant was to be in turn the mainstay of the Government and the foe of anarchistic revolution.

The Emperor Nicholas II approved of this new scheme, but the great landowners were terrified at the prospect of being forced to sell their land, Stolypin