This is a comprehensive biography of Russia's leading statesman in the period following the Revolution of 1905. Prime Minister and Minister of Internal Affairs from 1906 to 1911, when he was assassinated, P. A. Stolypin aroused deep passions among his contemporaries as well as with subsequent historians. In the twilight of Nicholas II's reign he was virtually the only man who seemed to have a clear notion of how to reform the socioeconomic and political system of the empire. His efforts in that direction - in agriculture, local administration, religious freedom, social legislation, the legal system - were radical new departures for the Russian state. This book - on the basis of extensive Russian archival documentation only recently available to historians - seeks to provide a balanced portrait of Stolypin that encompasses the complex, even divergent, impulses that motivated him.