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Bureaucratic- or Self-Government: The Early Nineteenth Century Russian City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Boris Mironov
Boris Mironov*
Affiliation:
Institute of Russian History (St. Petersburg branch), Russian Academy of Sciences
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Extract

While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

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Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 233 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

I wish to thank the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for the research fellowship that made possible the preparation of this paper.

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