Most, if not all, of these reforms were based on recommendations from a committee known as the "Needs of Agricultural Industry Special Conference," which was held in Russia between 1901 and 1903 during the tenure of Minister of Finance Sergei Witte.
Serfs who had been liberated by the emancipation reform of 1861 lacked the financial ability to leave their new lands, as they owed money to the state for periods of up to 49 years.
Stolypin, as a staunch conservative, also sought to eliminate the commune system — known as the mir — and to reduce radicalism among the peasants, thus preventing further political unrest such as that which occurred during the Revolution of 1905.
Stolypin believed that tying the peasants to their own private land-holdings would produce profit-minded and politically conservative farmers like those living in parts of western Europe.
Stolypin's reforms abolished the obshchina system and replaced it with a capitalist-oriented form highlighting private ownership and consolidated modern farmsteads designed to make peasants conservative instead of radical.
This system was not a command economy like that found in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but rather a continuation of the modified state capitalism program begun under Sergei Witte.