Provincial and local government

Janet Hartley

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521815291.023

21 - Provincial and local government

from Part V - Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Janet Hartley

Edited by

Dominic Lieven

Show author details

Dominic Lieven: Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science

Book contents

Get access

Summary

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.

Keywords

Russian local administration provincial Russian society corporate institutions urban population

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 449 - 467

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521815291.023 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baklanova, E. N., Krest’ianskii dvor i obshchina na russkom severe: konets XVII-nachalo XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).

Bater, S. N., ‘Some Dimensions of Urbanization and the Response of Municipal Government: Moscow and St Petersburg’, RH 5, 1 (1978).

Brown, S. N., ‘S. E. Desnitsky, Adam Smith and the Nakaz of Catherine II’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, NS, 7 (1974).

Dan, F. I., The Origins of Bolshevism, trans Carmichael, J. (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1964).

Eklof, B., Bushnell, J., and Zakharova, L. (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms 1855–1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

Emmons, T., and Vucinich, W. (eds.), The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Frank, S. N., Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Galai, S., The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Haimson, L., (ed.), The Politics of Rural Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

Hamburg, G., ‘Portrait of an Elite: Russian Marshals of the Nobility 1861–1971’, SR 40, 4 (1981).

Hamm, M. (ed.), The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

Hamm, M., Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Hartley, S. N., A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1 825 (London and New York: Longman, 1999).

Hartley, S. N., ‘Governing the City: St Petersburg and Catherine II’s reforms’, in Cross, A. (ed.), St Petersburg, 1703–1 825 (London: Palgrave, 2003).

Hartley, S. N., ‘Catherine’s Conscience Court: An English Equity Court?’, in Cross, A. (ed.), Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983).

Hartley, S. N., ‘The Boards of Social Welfare and the Financing of Catherine II’s State Schools’, SEER 67, 2 (1989).

Hartley, S. N., ‘Bribery and Justice in the Provinces in the Reign of Catherine II’, in Lovell, S., Ledeneva, A. and Rogachevskii, A. (eds.), Bribery and Blat in Russia. Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

Hartley, S. N., ‘Russia and Napoleon: State, Society and the Nation’, in Rowe, M. (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–181 5 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).

Hartley, J., A Social History of the Russian Empire (London: Longman, 1999).

Jones, R. E., The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762–1785 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Keep, J., ‘Light and Shade in the History of the Russian Administration’, Canadian Slavic Studies 6, 1 (1972).

Macey, D. A. J., ‘The Land Captains: A Note on the Social Composition 1889–1913’, RH 16 (1989).Google Scholar

Mironov, B., ‘Bureaucratic or Self-Government: The Early Nineteenth Century Russian City’, SR 52, 2 (1993).

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

Musikhin, V. E. (ed.), Viatskomu Zemstvu 130 let. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii (Kirov, 1997).

Pintner, W., and Rowney, D. (eds.), Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratisation of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1980).

Polner, S. N., Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930).

Porter, S. N., The Zemstvo and the Emergence of Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia 1864–1917 (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991).

Robbins, S. N., ‘Choosing the Russian Governors: The Professionalisation of the Gubernatorial Corps’, SEER 58, 4 (1980).

Robbins, R., The Tsar’s Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

Starr, S. F., Decentralisation and Self-Government in Russia. 1830–70 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

Velychenko, S., ‘The Size of the ImperialRussian Bureaucracy and Army in Comparative Perspective’, JfGO 49, 3 (2001).Google Scholar

Waldron, P., Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London: University College Press, 1998).

Weissman, N., ‘Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900–1914’, RR 44, 1 (1985).

Weissman, N. B., Reform in Tsarist Russia. The State Bureacracy and Local Government, 1900–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

Book contents

21 - Provincial and local government

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive