21

Provincial and local government

janet m. hartley

Introduction

A study of local government raises several important questions about the nature of the imperial Russian state, the level of development of provincial Russian society and the relationship between government and society in Russia. To what extent did the government allow or wish to encourage a genuine decentralisation or devolution of power to the provinces? Could local government institutions – either corporate institutions or ‘all-class’ institutions – flourish given both the pressures from the centre and the poor economic and cultural levels of rural Russia which inhibited the growth of an educated and politically conscious provincial society? To what extent can we even speak of a structure of local government when a significant proportion of the population – the peasants – were only rarely touched by it, at least until the Emancipation of 1861 and to some extent even thereafter? The status of local government – either as separate from the central bureaucracy or as an integral part of the government structure – was a major debate in Russia in the nineteenth century. At the root of these questions is the fundamental issue of the relationship between local government and the modernisation of the Russian state. On the one hand, local government was potentially a tool to stimulate corporate identity, urban self-confidence and economic and cultural progress across all sectors of society, including the peasantry after 1861. On the other hand, problems in local government could be interpreted as symbolic of the failure, or the unwillingness, of the tsarist regime to adapt to change and to establish an effective relationship between state and society. If the latter has some validity, then we have to ask in addition whether local government contributed to the downfall of the regime which created it.

Local government was a matter which concerned all the tsars but there were periods of particularly intensive and significant legislative activity, namely: (i) the reign of Peter I (1682–1725) when urban administration was reformed

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(in 1699 and more notably in 1721 when urban magistracies were established) and when, in 1718, the country was re-divided into gubernii (provinces), which were in turn subdivided into provintsii and uezdy (districts); (ii) the reign of Catherine II (1762–96) when three major laws were promulgated – the Statute of Provincial Administration of 1775 and the Charters to the Nobles and the Towns in 1785; (iii) the era of reforms in the decade which followed the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, which saw the introduction of the zemstvos (local elected assemblies) and the re-structuring of the legal system and reform of urban administration; (iv) the 1890s when many of the reforms of the 1860s were modified or curtailed. In addition, legislation which ostensibly only concerned central government – in particular the establishment of the Senate in 1711, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1802 and then the introduction of national representation in the State Duma (Parliament) in 1905 – had a significant impact on the functions of local institutions and their relationship with the centre. This chapter is concerned with Russian local administration but it should be noted that different structures, different traditions and even different law codes applied in many of the non-Russian parts of the empire until well into the nineteenth century and sometimes until 1917. These areas include the Baltic provinces, the lands of former Poland-Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Centre and the provinces

Local government was an issue which spawned extensive, and lengthy, legislation over the whole imperial period (the 1775 Statute of Provincial Administration, for example, comprised 491 articles; the two statutes of 1864 and 1890 on the zemstvos comprised 120 and 138 articles respectively). The provenance and nature of this legislation reflect something of the relationship between the centre and the provinces. For the most part in the first two hundred years of this study, legislation was not stimulated by demands for its introduction from nobles or townspeople or by local officials. This does not mean, however, that these groups had no views on the matter. When they were asked for opinions – as they were in the Legislative Commission of 1767, by N. A. Miliutin in the 1840s in the context of municipal reform of St Petersburg, and in the formulation of what became the zemstvo legislation in the late 1850s and early 1860s – they were prepared to give them and to highlight the inadequacies of current local administration at the same time. But the timing and content of local government legislation was primarily determined by the tsars

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and their advisers and the institutional structures created were often based on Western models (which could be Swedish, Baltic, Prussian, French or English) rather than being drawn from analyses of local needs or the experiences of the provinces.

The ‘dynamic, interventionist and coercive state’, as Marc Raeff characterised Petrine Russia,1 had always assumed that it had the power and the obligation to govern all aspects of the lives of its citizens. This belief was not, of course, unique to the Russian government, either in the eighteenth century or afterwards, but possibly featured most strongly in the Russian case because of the lack of balancing factors such as bodies representing estate interests, welldeveloped urban institutions or a powerful and independent Church hierarchy which existed elsewhere in Europe. A study of the legislation concerning local government, however, is not only central to the understanding of the intentions of central government but also exposes the weakness of the central government and the essential contradictions in tsarist policy. The government wanted to stimulate provincial and urban institutions of self-government and, by extension, stimulate the development of a provincial society, but it needed to control these institutions and ensure above all that they fulfilled state obligations as a greater priority than satisfying local needs. The potential for conflict between provinces and the centre was always there but became more acute after the establishment of the zemstvos in the 1860s. The government also needed the participation of elected, and poorly paid, officials from members of provincial noble and urban society (and also state peasants after 1775 and former serfs after 1864) to staff local institutions (in particular, the lower levels of courts) because it lacked the trained manpower and the financial resources to fill these posts with a professional bureaucracy appointed from the centre. At the same time it feared the independence of these officials and attempted to co-opt them to carry out government policies and subordinated them to appointed representatives of the government and to ministries in the capital.

These dilemmas of the central government can be seen both in the general scope of local government legislation and in relation to the functions given to particular institutions and individuals. The centre determined the boundaries of units of local administration (and re-drew them at various times either to increase efficiency or to incorporate new territorial acquisitions, often with a deliberate neglect of historical territorial division), defined, created and abolished towns (and designed their coats of arms and determined the layouts of

1M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1 600–1 800 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 206.

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the streets and the architectural styles to be employed),2 decided the structure, social composition and areas of competence of all provincial and urban institutions, defined the membership and groupings of urban society, determined and altered the franchise for towns, noble assemblies and zemstvos, and set the fiscal and other obligations of all institutions, including taxation and billeting of troops in civilian houses (that is, state and not local needs). At the same time, local institutions from the time of Peter I were obliged to report and respond to ‘local needs’ and to stimulate the local economy.

The example of urban government in the eighteenth century will illustrate how government legislation could bear little relation to reality. Peter I and Catherine II tried to stimulate the corporate identity of townspeople and the economic development of Russian towns through legislation which deliberately attempted to incorporate ‘Western’ or ‘European’ practices. Both rulers attempted to introduce ‘Western’-style craft guilds and passed regulations on their composition and on the training of apprentices (in 1785 Catherine even stipulated the hours of work for apprentices including the length of meal breaks!).3 Both rulers defined the composition of urban society by law, and in addition divided the merchantry into groups according to their declared capital, and then used these groupings as a basis for the composition of an elaborate structure of urban institutions of self-government based on representatives from each group (six groups in the Charter to the Towns in 1785). These definitions were modified in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I but not fundamentally altered.

This legislation, however, ignored the reality of eighteenth-century urban life. In practice, very few towns outside a few exceptional centres like St Petersburg and Moscow had a sufficiently developed economy or sufficiently wealthy merchants to fill all the social categories of townspeople as defined by Peter and Catherine. In 1786 it was reported that in the province of St Petersburg only the city of St Petersburg itself had representatives of all six urban groups and that only there were merchants divided into three guilds as Catherine had stipulated; the smaller district towns could not fill these social categories.4 Urban government could never therefore function as the legislation envisaged

2R. Jones, ‘Urban Planning and Development of Provincial Towns in Russia during the Reign of Catherine II’, in J. G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 321–44.

3PSZ, vol. 22, no. 16188, article 105, p. 378, The Charter to the Towns, 1785.

4RGADA Moscow, Fond 16, d. 530, ll. 266–66ob, report by N. Saltykov to the Senate, 1786, also quoted in J. M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1 65 0–1 825 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 42. This theme is developed more fully in J. M. Hartley, ‘Governing the City: St Petersburg and Catherine II’s reforms’, in A. Cross (ed.), St Petersburg, 1 7 03 –1 825 (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 99–118.

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in the eighteenth century because representatives of some of the social groups on which the institutional structure was built simply did not exist. Furthermore, Russian towns in this period were overwhelmingly peasant in composition (state and serf ) and these peasants were not only excluded from urban government but could also undercut urban guilds with their own home-made products. The attempt to revitalise urban life whist ignoring the peasant presence in the towns, the competition of peasant craft goods and the impossibility of separating the town from the countryside in an overwhelmingly rural economy made the import of Western-style institutions simply impractical. The dilemma facing local institutions of having to respond to local needs whilst carrying out their obligations to the state can also be seen in the weakness of eighteenth-century urban institutions. Service in urban institutions was unpopular and regarded as yet another state obligation – like billeting and conscription – imposed on a long-suffering and impoverished urban population. Urban institutions had only limited rights to impose taxation for local needs; their main function was to meet state fiscal obligations.

The ambiguity between local and national obligations is even more clearly illustrated by the zemstvos after 1864. Zemstvos were given considerable local rights, including the right to petition the governor directly on local concerns, to manage the local postal system, to have responsibility for local education and health, and to levy taxes for local as well as national needs. But these rights had only been granted after a ministerial struggle (in the centre, not in the provinces) over the merits of self-government versus central control. At the same time the governor was given the right to veto zemstvo activity if it conflicted with state interests. In practice, this meant inevitable conflict between zemstvos and local officials from the start and resulted in the curbing of the zemstvos’ independent sphere of activities in 1890. This curb did nothing to ease relations between the zemstvo and the bureaucracy, and zemstvo radicalism increased after the accession of Nicholas II in 1894. Conflicts at the local level between zemstvo and governor were most heated over the zemstvos’ right of taxation, particularly to raise income to provide education and healthcare, but more acute conflicts arose at the turn of the century between the zemstvos and officials in St Petersburg who by this stage not only opposed the rights of the zemstvo to claim much-needed taxation revenue but also had come to distrust every manifestation of what they regarded as elements of radical opposition to the regime.5

5The relations between zemstvos and the centre are best described in T. Fallows, ‘The Zemstvo and Bureaucracy’, in T. Emmons and W. S. Vucinich (eds.), The Zemstvo in

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The most serious conflict between the zemstvos and the central bureaucracy focused on the scope for inter-zemstvo contact and co-operation, a conflict which became part of the liberal opposition movement to the tsar up to and including the year 1905. Zemstvos were instructed to deal only with matters within the boundaries of their province and district. This restriction was based on the fear that the zemstvos, as representative bodies, albeit not democratic ones, would seek to expand their responsibilities upwards through co-operation with other provincial zemstvos and then ultimately in the ‘crowning edifice’ of a national body. The number of resolutions passed by zemstvos which included constitutional demands shows that this fear was not unfounded. This conflict was won by the zemstvos in the early twentieth century just as their political threat to the government diminished following the establishment of the State Duma and just as many of the provincial nobility who dominated the zemstvos were coming to renounce these liberal views. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and again in the First World War, the government permitted the formation of an all-Russian union of zemstvos for the purpose of war relief.6

A further indication of the potential conflict in state-inspired local government can be seen in the relations between local and central officials. This was a dilemma from the start as Peter I attempted to reduce the influence of powerful voevody (military commanders) in the provinces by introducing governors in 1708. Governors always trod a difficult line, responsible for the conduct of local affairs whilst at the same time they were representatives of both the tsar and the central government. The sheer burden of work imposed by the centre – it has been estimated that governors had to sign over 100,000 papers per year by the 1840s7 – meant that there were practical impediments to devoting time to local affairs. Marshals of the nobility, elected by their fellow nobles, also faced the problem of representing the interests of the provincial nobles whilst being weighed down with bureaucratic functions imposed by the governor and the state.8 The provincial police force suffered from the same divided

Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1982), pp. 177–239. The rise of zemstvo radicalism is described in S. Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1 900–1 905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 7–35.

6T. E. Porter, The Zemstvo and the Emergence of Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia 1 864–1 91 7

(San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991); these activities are described by a contemporary in T. J. Polner, Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930).

7B. N. Mironov, ‘Local Government in Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Provincial Government and Estate Self-Government’, JfGO 42 (1994): 165.

8G. Hamburg, ‘Portrait of an Elite: Russian Marshals of the Nobility 1861–1971’, SR 40, 4

(1981): 585–602.

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loyalties. A rural police officer (called the zemskii komissar in 1719 and the zemskii ispravnik after 1775) was elected from the nobility but was subordinated to the local regiment under Peter and then to the governor under Catherine, and was ultimately responsible to the central government. An urban police force was set up in 1782 whose responsibility extended beyond dealing with petty crimes to the preservation of the wellbeing and morals of the urban population (amongst other things the police had to ensure that the sexes were segregated in the bathhouses). But in 1802 the police force was subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (although land captains, or zemskie nachal’niki, remained responsible to the governor) and their relationship with local government thereby weakened. The establishment of the Third Department in 1826 in the reign of Nicholas I, made responsible for political security, added another layer of a secret police force which was entirely removed from local control.

On the other hand, the ability of the state to interfere in local administration was always curbed by two factors – the problem of communications in the vast empire, and poverty. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century it took forty-four days for a letter from Orenburg province to reach St Petersburg.9 The situation improved only in the 1860s with the introduction of the telegraph. The poignancy and comic effect of Gogol’s Government Inspector (Revizor, written in the 1830s) is based on the fact that inspectors so rarely visited the provinces in person so allowing local officials to act as they wished. Furthermore, the lawlessness of the Russian countryside – whether it be through bands of deserters or brigands or the spontaneous activities of individuals – militated against orderly government of any kind. Poverty meant that the state lacked the funds to staff the provinces in full or to offer high enough salaries to make elective posts attractive. The result was that Russia was seriously under-manned at all levels (with the possible exception of the peasant commune before 1861 which is outside the scope of this chapter). In 1763 Russia employed 16,500 officials in central and local government, while Prussia, with less than 1 per cent of Russia’s land area employed some 14,000 civil servants.10 It has been estimated that in 1796 there were only 6 administrators per 10,000 inhabitants; by 1857 this had only increased to 17 administrators per 10,000 inhabitants.11 One estimate in 1897 was that there were just over

9S. F. Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1 83 0–1 87 0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 45.

10R. E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1 7 62–1 7 85 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 182.

11Mironov, ‘Local Government in Russia’, 200.

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