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[revolutionary propaganda]," a peasant said after thepeasant outbreaks of 1902. "I think that if we livedbetter, the little books would not be important, nomatter what was written in them. What's terrible isnot the little books, but this: there isn't anything to eat."Five years later in the Duma a peasant deputy thundered :"Again we are told: property is sacred, inviolable. Inmy opinion it cannot possibly be inviolable; nothing canbe inviolable, once the people will it. . . . Gentlemen ofthe gentry, do you think that we do not know how youstaked us at cards and bartered us for dogs? We knowthat all that was your sacred, inviolable property. . . .You have stolen our land. . . . This is what the peasantswho sent me here said: the land is ours, we have comehere not to buy it, but to take it."Ten years later they did so. In the meantimeStolypin, prime minister from 1906 until his assassinationin 1911, the only man of big calibre, except Witte,to hold a commanding position under Nicholas II,hastened to initiate his agrarian reforms, his "wager,not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdyand the strong," men of the stamp of Lopakhin inChekhov's Cherry Orchard, This policy was the answerto the wave of mass peasant strikes and outbreaks upand down the country during 1905 and 1906, withwidespread burning of country houses and their equipment,which were fiercely suppressed by the army andspecially created military field courts martial. Almostthe whole empire between 1905 and 1908 was beinggoverned under varieties of a ' state of siege.' Between3500 and 4500 persons, not peasants only, are estimatedto have been executed, apart from those killed in theMoscow and other armed uprisings and from 'thepacification' of the Baltic provinces.The growth of a new political consciousness amongsome at least of the peasantry was to be seen in thefrequent conversion of the village communal assembliesinto political meetings and the creation in 1905 of thePeasants' Union, an incipient agrarian party. It wasalso only too evident in the attitude of the peasantdeputies in the first two Dumas, as illustrated in the132