I feel that most of the rich peasants still got rich by their own hard work, they put more effort into the land, they turned the soil more diligently, they applied fertilizer more reasonably, and they were more active in weeding and watering.

But the more honest the person who uses his strength in the land, the less tactful he is. The elders who used to manage the countryside were more sociable. So they told the peasants, who were rapidly impoverished, that it was unfair that the kulaks were rich because their land was more fertile. Good land should be distributed among the families in turn, and they advocated the redistribution of the land of the rich peasant families in accordance with the customary law of the village community.

After all, the rich peasants were in the minority, and they had fought against those drunkards and gamblers who had been instigated by the sinister elders.

Speransky discovered a phenomenon in which a large number of village communities, after dividing private land, returned to the old way of redistributing land.

What Speransky didn't know was that he encountered the same situation as his reserve Stolypin, who had implemented privatization after the Russo-Japanese War, and also encountered this situation, when the village community opposed privatization and violently resisted, Stolypin constantly hanged his instigators, and the gallows were planted all over the Russian land, and the noose was called Stolypin's tie.

Speransky was frightened, and he was faced with two choices, one was to abandon the reforms, and let these elders, who had been dependent on the aristocracy, continue to control the countryside, and let them continue to deceive and fool the peasants, so that the peasants would change from being oppressed by the nobility in the past to being oppressed by the elders.

He was reminded of the Chinese emperor's policy in the countryside, which on the one hand strictly protected the armor system, regarded the peasants as potential threats, and relied on the rural landlords and wealthy clans to act as guarantors to maintain the system. Concentrate the land in the hands of these rural magnates, and make the peasants more and more destitute.

Speransky, who was braver than the Chinese emperor, said no to these old forces in the countryside. He decided to support the kulaks, those who had created more wealth than others by relying mainly on hard work. Therefore, the court ruled that the repossession of the rich peasants' land was unlawful, and the village community had no right to redistribute the land. The land is privately owned and its use is protected.

A large number of rich peasants took back their land, but they were ostracized everywhere in the village community, discriminated against, said that they had no morality, no sympathy, greed, selfishness, only thought of their own advantage, not the people, these people were isolated in the village community, and some even began to abandon the life in the village community and go to the city to earn a living. There were also some kulaks who succumbed and gave up ownership of the land, allowing other peasants to redistribute the land, and they spontaneously returned to the era of serfdom.

These situations are not subject to human will, and Speransky has no choice but to choose the path for everyone. He was very scared at this time, he was not afraid of death, he was not young anymore, death was no longer a thing to be afraid of, what he was afraid of was that as soon as he died, these policies would probably be abandoned.

He thought of discussing the reform of serfdom with the emperor of China countless times, and the reform of serfdom in China may have to be pushed back to the Shang Dynasty reform in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Communal ownership of well fields was abolished, and land was privatized.

The record in the book is not detailed enough, but it does account that during the reform of the law, Shang Ying killed many people, and those people are probably the opponents represented by the elders today.

Shang Ying later also died, a miserable death, but his reforms succeeded. Speransky felt that he would probably not die a good death in the future, he had offended too many people, offended the elite, and now even the elders were offended, and indirectly offended the vast majority of ordinary peasants who were not accustomed to privatization.

He chooses to challenge the old order head-on, but he needs to find the right way. He thought of the analysis of the Chinese emperor, who believed that the success of the Shang Dynasty reform was not only to conform to the trend of the times but also to enhance the national strength. All reforms are in line with the trend and are aimed at enhancing national strength, and many reforms have indeed accumulated strong national strength, but in the end they have failed. The reason is not whether the original intention of the reform is good enough, or whether the reform method is peaceful or radical, but whether a vested interest group has been formed after the reform.

This is very dark, and in the end, good intentions for reform still need to be maintained by the interest strata. The path of the idealist requires the realist to follow. What an irony!

But this is the reality, the Shang Dynasty reform has cultivated a new class of elites who have been knighted for military merits, and the old royal ministers are no longer a monopoly ruling class, but have been replaced by a new bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy has replaced the model of ruling the serfs by the elites. In the end, success will not be determined by the will of the yeoman peasants or the serfs, but whether the bureaucracy can suppress the elite.

So Speransky understands that his desire for reform is good, but it may need to be accomplished by less rosy means, and he needs to cultivate a new interest group that may be different from his own philosophy, but which is consistent with his own reformed interests. This interest group can hate him, but it cannot detach itself from the direction of his reforms.

So he began to implement a policy of appointing the highest tax-paying man as the elder in the village community, and he wanted to make all the rich peasants who worked hard or were more intelligent than others to become the new ruling class of the villages. Once these people surpass the old class, they will certainly have the power to maintain private ownership of land in the future.

Rural reform is a top priority, but other reforms are also underway.

Even if the old class did not like him, or even hated him, Speransky supported the old class, not because they were restored to power, but because they were financially profitable. He issued a large number of monopoly licenses, and even lobbied the prestigious nobles to invest in industry and commerce. Let these people be the emerging group, and not the rentiers of the land, who will certainly protect the new system in the future.

For this reason, he formulated a policy that was somewhat unfair, in addition to giving these elites the right to monopolize their operations, but also subsidizing them with the funds of the National Bank and helping them with state contracts.

Of course, a group of industrial and commercial classes had already formed in Russia, which was also the focus of his courtship. These people who have established themselves in industry and commerce, they do not lack wealth, they do not support serfdom, but they have no position before. Speransky gave them status and canonized new nobles, whether because they paid more taxes or because they had contributed to new industries, they could be rewarded by the tsar as they had done in the past. He also focused on the children of big capitalist families, whose children were more likely to enter the government, especially those who had studied abroad, and were allowed to enter the government without passing the examination and being guaranteed by other officials. The biggest guarantor is Speranski.

At the same time, in order to cultivate the new class in Russia, Speransky also rejected foreign investment, except for the forced return of the iron ore in Kursk and the Petersburg and Volga railways to China, and authorized them to build railways to Europe, he tried his best to exclude other foreign investment, and greatly increased tariffs to protect Russian industry and commerce.

He didn't want the Russian industrial and commercial bloc to be developed and large, he needed this class to be large enough, he needed this class to be large enough to suppress the old elites.

In foreign relations, Speransky valued relations with Britain and China, borrowing heavily from both Britain and China, but squeezing out Chinese and British goods from Russia, preferring to go into debt rather than to invest that could not bring him to the emerging classes.

In order to gain understanding, he corresponded with the Chinese emperor, explaining to him some of the difficulties he had encountered in reform, and did not hesitate to seek sympathy in the hope of sympathy.

The Chinese emperor was benevolent, understood Speransky's situation, and sincerely helped him. However, different views were put forward on some of his policies. He told Speransky that the reforms were too strong and that they should rely on the village elders, who were the easiest to win over. This can be done by delegating some authority to the village community, such as the power to redistribute land. As long as the village community does not restrict the freedom of the peasants, the village may be allowed to govern itself under customary law.

The emperor insisted on the idea that the future of a country lies in industry and commerce, and told Speransky that only the industrial and commercial class can drive the development of the country, which Speransky was right, and he was also right to refuse to exclude foreign investment.

Speransky felt that perhaps the Chinese emperor was also right, that the village community was not the core issue, who controlled the power of the village community, and how the countryside operated, were not the core issues, and if he could live as long as the Chinese emperor, he could consider the principle of rural autonomy and cultivate a new class through subtle ways. But his health was getting worse and worse, and he couldn't afford to wait, so he was going to quickly put those kulaks in power.

Speransky also shot the kulaks, making them tyrants of the countryside.

But Speransky was emotionally sympathetic to the kulaks, and he knew that not every kulak was rich through hard work, some through cleverness, some through opportunism, some cheating and even gambling to deceive those who were more stupid. He also knew that some kulaks, when they became rich, began to exploit the poor, imitating the aristocracy of the past. They lend money to other farmers and charge high interest rates. Some even secretly annexed the land of other peasants and bought the land of these peasants cheaply when the land was scarce. Then make these farmers tenant farmers and help them work.

But Speransky is to support these people, these people are bad, but these people are the future. Human nature is like this!

After the kulaks were shot, the situation in the countryside became even worse, and the kulaks began to become more unscrupulous, from the persecutors of the past, to a large number of perpetrators, to embezzle the land of the poor, to drive out those who opposed them from the village communities, to act as a prestige in the village communities, and to rule the villages instead of the old aristocracy.

These people are bastards, hooligans, bastards, but these people are Speransky's supporters.

Speransky had to not only support them, but also help them, suppressing the revolts against the kulaks again and again.

Speransky does not remember how many Hui village rebellions he suppressed, 3,000 or 4,000, or how many peasants he exiled, 500,000 or 600,000.

But he knew that Russia was rapidly stabilizing, that tax revenues were steadily increasing, and that administrative efficiency was greatly improving.

The only hidden danger is the army.

He single-handedly formed the army, selected prisoners who did not have an aristocratic background, and he gave new status to the officers, giving them status, but there were still those who opposed him because they did not agree with his policies.

In his exile there were no less than ten officers and officers who rebelled in the army, and the number exceeded 10,000.

His army was stable, so it was naturally impossible to use troops abroad, but at this time the Tsar summoned him and told Speransky that he hoped to recruit troops and go to Austria to fight, because the Austrian Emperor asked the Tsar for help.

The tsar said that this was a good opportunity, and Austria promised to return the previously occupied Russian territories and was willing to return Bessarabia to Russia.

Speranski was silent for a long time, this is a good opportunity, but it could also be his end. The army was already unstable, and those officers who had been promoted by themselves, after seeing the tragedy of the reform, actually colluded with the old aristocracy and staged coups again and again, trying to overthrow him.

Now that the army is being mobilized on a large scale, and the tsar has to go out in person, will the tsar take advantage of the situation to launch a coup d'état and depose himself?

But this is really a good opportunity, and if it does not take advantage of this opportunity, Russia will pay a thousandfold price to recover those territories.

But Speranski may personally have to pay a huge price, take a huge risk, and he must come back a thousandfold.

So he replied to the Tsar: "No, Your Majesty. Not to help Austria, but to take revenge on Austria! ”