Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/188

172 was assailed from two sides. The gentry launched in their press organs a violent attack upon the Prime Minister, calling him the "slayer of the gentry," and inciting against him the Court camarilla. On the other hand the revolutionaries, both at home and abroad, conducted an agitation against Stolypin, rightly apprehensive that the abolition of the communal peasant proprietorship and the creation of peasant-bourgeois would postpone revolution in Russia for many years to come.

Stolypln did his best to impress the landed gentry with the imperative necessity of granting concessions. To his representations of the horrors of the future revolution, the landowners had but one reply: "Do not try to frighten us! You have the Cossacks, the gendarmes, and the army to suppress any revolution!"

The gentry endeavoured to dissuade the Tsar from the bold schemes of the Premier, and, having failed, they intensified their attacks in the press, at the same time operating with the usual Russian methods of provocation, denunciation, and conspiracy. The willing executors of the plotters' designs were found in two men standing nearest to Stolypin as Minister of the Interior; they were the Chief of the Gendarmes, General Kurlov, and the Director of the Department of Police, Bieletski These two dignitaries set to work through the agents of the secret police, who, at the same time, were members of the revolutionary party. The fighting terrorist-revolutionary organisations re-