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noble society. Noble assembles, however, suffered from the same failure of the government to recognise the reality of provincial life which had adversely affected urban corporate institutions established by Peter I and Catherine II. In practice, the wealthy and most educated nobility preferred to live away from their estates, and in the remoter parts of Russia the resident nobility tended to be impoverished, to the extent that few met the qualifications (which were based on income and service rank) to vote or take elective office.19

Although the assemblies did serve to fill posts, which in turn provided some much needed income for some of the poorer provincial nobles, and although the elections generated equally welcome social activity which broke the tedium of life in the provincial backwaters, their significance for the development of a corporate mentality was limited. Even by the end of Catherine II’s reign, absenteeism in assemblies at election time was rife. The prestige of the assemblies was undermined further by Paul I, who abolished assemblies at provincial level. Although Alexander I restored the provincial assemblies, the damage was done and the power of the governor grew over their conduct of affairs. The property qualifications for active participation – that is, voting – were further restricted in the reign of Nicholas I. Indeed, the noble assemblies were almost moribund when they were artificially revived during the debates on local administration in the wake of the Emancipation. This debate led to a not entirely welcome participation by the assemblies, in particular because six noble assemblies requested the establishment of a national parliament. The assemblies continued to coexist alongside the zemstvos after 1864. The intense political activity in the years 1904 to 1905 also affected the assemblies, although they tended to be more moderate than the zemstvos. There is no doubt that a corporate sense of shared interests and, not least, shared fears developed within the provincial gentry in the early years of the twentieth century as their land-ownership diminished. But the fact that this manifested itself far more within the zemstvos – that is, within ‘all-estate’ bodies – than within the noble assemblies was a reflection of the limited power and importance of this corporate institution for the nobility.

‘All-estate’ institutions

A limited attempt to create ‘all-estate’ institutions was made by Catherine II in 1775 when she established alongside the corporate institutions for the towns and nobles (her draft Charter for the State Peasantry was never promulgated)

19The operation of noble assemblies is described in Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, pp. 92–6.

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an elaborate local government structure of courts and institutions for preserving law and order and for welfare in which members of three estates – nobles, townspeople and state peasants – participated, but which excluded serfs. Courts were segregated by the estate of the litigant in the first two instances and members of each of the three estates elected members of these courts (although state peasants only elected assessors and not the judges). But, at least in principle, nobles and state peasants sat together in the two institutions set up in 1775 whose functions are most imprecise: the conscience court (sovestnyi sud), a court which was set up to handle cases which fell outside the normal scope of civil and criminal offences (and which included a rather vague provision for habeus corpus, a concept acquired by Catherine from her reading of Blackstone in French translation);20 the lower land court (nizhnii zemskii sud) whose activities are largely unrecorded, but which was supposed to handle rural police matters and petty crimes. All three estates also participated in the boards of social welfare (prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia) which were given an initial capital of 15,000 roubles each and which had responsibilities for a whole range of welfare institutions, including national schools, hospitals, almshouses, asylums, houses of correction, workhouses and orphanages. There is no record of the way in which representatives of different estates worked in this body. At least in some provinces the board was extremely active, although it was not always possible to set up the full range of institutions envisaged; reports in the 1780s found that the institutions were almost complete in the provinces of central Russia but that in Olonets province only a hospital had been opened.21 Progress in establishing national schools was impressive given that the boards were operating almost from scratch; by 1792 there were 302 national schools teaching 16,322 boys and 1,178 girls.22 Some boards also acted quite effectively as provincial banks by lending out its original capital at interest.23

A more comprehensive attempt to create an ‘all-estate’ institution occurred in 1864, with the establishment of zemstvos at the provincial and district level. This statute followed the Emancipation of the Serfs, and the consequent need

20 For the operation of this court see J. M. Hartley, ‘Catherine’s Conscience Court: An English Equity Court?’, in A. Cross (ed.), Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century

(Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), pp. 306–18.

21Sankt-Peterburg Filial Instituta russkoi istorii, St Petersburg, Fond 36, d. 478, f. 16, report by A. R. Vorontsov from Olonets guberniia; also cited in J. M. Hartley, ‘Philanthropy in the Reign of Catherine the Great: Aims and Realities’, in R. Bartlett and J. M. Hartley (eds.),

Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1990), p. 181.

22Hartley, A Social History of Russia, p. 138.

23J. M. Hartley, ‘The Boards of Social Welfare and the Financing of Catherine II’s State Schools’, SEER 67, 2 (1989): 211–27.

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to create a substitute to handle the many administrative functions handled by the serf-owning nobleman, although the zemstvo legislation drew heavily on past experience of corporate institutions, including the peasant commune as much as urban and noble organs and the boards of social welfare.24 Zemstvos at both levels had an assembly, to which nobles, townspeople and peasants’ representatives were elected, and a board, with executive power, which was elected from the assemblies. But from the start the ‘estate’ nature of the elections to the assemblies were ambiguous, and the assumption that ‘estates’ were equal in any way was completely absent. In 1864 the three categories, or curia, were defined by their ownership of property – private landed, urban and collective land – rather than strictly by social estate (although merchants with ‘certificates’ were also eligible), which meant that peasants could participate in the first curia alongside nobles if they purchased sufficient land. The land qualification ensured that noble deputies would be in majority. In 1890, this principle of land-ownership as a franchise qualification was changed and became ‘estate’ based, with the peasants eligible to vote only in the third curia, a change inspired in part by the increase in land purchased by peasants at the expense of the rural nobility.25 At the same time the rural property qualifications for nobles were lowered and certified merchants lost their automatic right to vote which served to increase the noble franchise at the expense of other social groups (including Jews and clergy). It also increased their representation on both district and provincial level assemblies, but most particularly at the district level (where it increased from 42.4 per cent in the period 1883–6 to 55.2 per cent in 1890)26 and became even more prominent at the board level, which they had always dominated. In the last years of the imperial regime peasants regained some seats in the zemstvos, particularly at district level, as landowners but remained under-represented on zemstvo boards.

In addition, the zemstvo led to the employment of large numbers of zemstvo employees – teachers, agronomists, doctors, surveyors – of various social origins, which cut across the ‘estate’ character of the zemstvos. These whitecollar workers were termed the ‘Third Element’ and became more politically minded and more radicalised than most zemstvo leaders. By the turn of the century the size and potential power of this group was a source of concern to the government; there were some 70,000 zemstvo employees in the thirty-four

24S. F. Starr, ‘Local Initiative in Russia before the Zemstvo’, in Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia, pp. 5–30.

25A process most clearly described in K. E. McKenzie, ‘Zemstvo Organization and Role within the Administrative Structure’, in Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia, pp. 31–78.

26McKenzie, ‘Zemstvo Organization’, p. 44.

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provinces where zemstvos had so far been set up, that is, some fifty members of the ‘Third Element’ to each elected member of the zemstvo board.27

The establishment of the zemstvos did not displace the existing corporate institutions. Urban institutions of self-government and noble assemblies continued to exist. Urban participation in the zemstvos was limited and did not diminish the significance of urban institutions of self-government. Peasants – both serf and state – had more direct experience, however, of self-government through the peasant communes than ordinary townspeople or the nobles collectively. Peasants continued to govern many of their own affairs outside the competence of the zemstvo, or any other institution, through the commune and the peasant, volost’, courts, although the introduction of land captains (zemskie nachal’niki) in 1889, with the intention of imposing greater supervision over peasant institutions, created another link between the peasant village and provincial administration. Peasant experience of commune administration was reflected in their attitudes towards the zemstvo, which, along with the dominance of the nobles and the weakness of urban participation, inhibited the growth of any sense of the zemsvtos representing ‘all-estate’ interests. Peasants’ resentment against the zemstvo paralleled their resentment of other state institutions and officials which oppressed them in return for few benefits. In particular peasants resented what they regarded as ‘unnecessary’ taxes imposed by the zemstvos, particularly tax on land which fell disproportionately on peasant allotment land, but they also shunned the, largely urban, welfare institutions – schools, hospitals, etc. – established by the zemstvos.28 While other distinctive features of peasant obligation and non-privilege gradually came to an end – the poll tax, mutual responsibility for taxes, corporal punishment, etc. – peasant distinctiveness in local administration was retained. The increase in tax burdens by the zemstvo after 1890 as peasant representation declined only reinforced their negative perception of the ‘all-estate’ zemstvo as yet another burden imposed by the state and as an institution which served the interests of only one class, the nobility. The success of the provincial nobility in blocking Stolypin’s attempts after 1907 to reform the zemstvos by increasing non-noble members only confirmed these views.

The zemstvos suffered from the same ambiguities in legislation as Petrine or Catherinian corporate institutions, which inhibited their opportunities to function effectively in the provinces. Some of this was due to ambiguous wording (such as ‘participation’ or ‘co-operation’ in certain activities) in some parts

27Galai, The Liberation Movement, p. 32.

28The relationship is described most fully in D. Atkinson, ‘The Zemstvo and the Peasantry’, in Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia, pp. 79–132.

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of 1864 statute.29 More seriously, the areas of competence of the zemstvos potentially brought them into conflict with the governor, local officials, police and/or the central bureaucracy. Zemstvos (in the statutes of 1864 and 1890) had to address local needs (economic, administrative, educational, humanitarian) whilst implementing the demands of the local civil and military administration. It has already been noted that the main conflict of interest arose over the extent of the zemstvo rights to raise taxes for local needs as well as fulfilling state fiscal obligations – taxes, of course, which were largely paid by peasants and townspeople rather than by the nobles who dominated the zemstvo boards. Nevertheless, the zemstvos did make some advances in the provision of healthcare and primary education, which has been described as ‘the area of greatest zemstvo achievement’30 (by the turn of the century the zemstvo was supporting almost 20,000 elementary schools,31 a number which had risen to over 40,000 by 1914),32 and played some role in stimulating agricultural modernisation.33 Zemstvos took over welfare functions which had previously been performed by the state through the boards of public welfare and, in the case of education, by the Church.

After 1890 the governor’s powers to block zemstvo enactments and to supervise its operations were clarified and increased, but the zemstvos continued to provide and extend local services. But the conservative gentry reaction after the 1905 Revolution made the zemstvos far less receptive to reform; in their last decade zemstvos hindered the implementation of the Stolypin land reforms and blocked attempts to reform local administration, including the establishment of a zemstvo at the lowest, volost’ level which was intended to make the peasants truly ‘full members of Russian society’.34 At the same time, the increase in state funding for primary schools at the expense of the zemstvos

29McKenzie, ‘Zemstvo Organization’, p. 45.

30J. Brooks, ‘The Zemstvo and the Education of the People’, in Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia, p. 243.

31N. B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia. The State Bureacracy and Local Government, 1 900– 1 91 4 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), p. 32.

32Brooks, ‘The Zemstvo and the Education of the People’, p. 249.

33Recent research on one province has supported this view: G. Weldhen, ‘The Zemstvo, Agricultural Societies and Agricultural Innovation in Viatka Guberniia in the 1890s and

1900s’, in V. E. Musikhin (ed.), Viatskomu Zemstvu 1 3 0 let. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii

(Kirov, 1997), pp. 25–31.

34This process is described by R. Manning in ‘Zemstvo and Revolution: The Onset of Gentry Reaction, 1905–07’ and R. D. MacNaughton and R. T. Manning, ‘The Crisis of the Third of June System and Political Trends in the Zemstvos, 1907–14’, in L. H. Haimson, The Politics of Rural Russia 1 905 –1 91 4 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 30–66, 184–218. On the fate of Stolypin’s proposed reforms after 1906 see P. Waldron,

Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London: University College Press, 1998), pp. 77–99.

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