Stolypin then enforced military rule by setting up militia courts whereby people could be executed on the spot. This became known as Stolypins' noose.
The freedom of speech noted in the October manifesto didn't exist. Political newspapers were banned and anything found to be against the Tsar was considered to be treason even political jokes.
However some things did get better in Russia, between 1906 and 1914 there was an industrial boom in Russia thanks to the Dumas. They rose to become an economic superpower with the 4th largest steel, coal, oil and pig iron in the world. This led to jobs becoming available to the peasants.
The Stolypin and Kokovtsov Governments
In 1907 Stolypin instituted a series of major reforms. In June 1907, he dissolved the Second Dumas and promulgated a new electoral law, which vastly reduced the electoral weight of lower-class and non-Russian voters and increased the weight of the nobility. This political coup had the desired short-term result of restoring order. New elections in the fall returned a more conservative Third Dumas, which Octobrists dominated. Even these Dumas quarrelled with the government over a variety of issues, however, including the composition of the naval staff, the autonomous status of Finland, the introduction of zemstva in the western provinces, the reform of the peasant court system, and the establishment of workers' insurance organizations under police supervision. In these disputes, the Dumas, with its appointed aristocratic-bureaucratic upper house, was sometimes more conservative than the government, and at other times it was more constitutionally minded. The Fourth Dumas, elected in 1912, was similar in composition to the third, but a progressive faction of Octobrists split from the right and joined the political centre.
Stolypin's boldest measure was his peasant reform program. It allowed, and sometimes forced, the break-up of communes as well as the establishment of full private property. Stolypin hoped that the reform program would create a class of conservative landowning farmers loyal to the tsar. Most peasants did not want to lose the safety of the commune or to permit outsiders to buy village land, however. By 1914 only about 10 percent of all peasant communes had been dissolved. Nevertheless, the economy recovered and grew impressively from 1907 to 1914, both quantitatively and through the formation of rural cooperatives and banks and the generation of domestic capital. By 1914 Russian steel production equalled that of France and Austria-Hungary, and Russia's economic growth rate was one of the highest in the world. Although external debt was very high, it was declining as a percentage of the gross national product (GNP--see Glossary), and the empire's overall trade balance was favourable.
