The article deals with the issues that were posed in the latest monograph by M.A. Davydov “Teorema Stolypina”. The book offers a very special, innovative view of the socio-economic processes in Russia in the 19th century. Usually, the authors focus on political, social, financial institutions, government policy and global conjuncture. M.A. Davydov has a very special research “optics”. He analyzes the modernization processes in Russia in the 19th-20th centuries in the context of social thought of that time, the categorical apparatus of Russian intellectuals. It allows the author to imagine an invisible passageway of possibilities in which the government operated until the First Russian Revolution. The traditionalist style of thinking, shared by supporters of various views, was the most important obstacle to dynamic economic development. That circumstance emphasizes the importance of Stolypin’s reforms, which were not a continuation of the previous course, but a direct break with it. The concept presented by the author finally makes it possible to tie together the intellectual, political, and economic processes in Russia on the eve of the great upheavals of the early 20th century.