A "Provincial" Forum
- A "Provincial" Forum
In this issue, Kritika offers a forum that takes a somewhat unusual shape. In 2008, Russian scholars in Samara and Izhevsk initiated an online discussion addressing the historical problem of regional and local administration in late imperial Russia. Initially focused on the Volga-Ural region, the enterprise eventually attracted scholars of other parts of the empire, thus encompassing diverse and far-flung areas of Russia. The project went through two major stages that are described in greater detail in Sergei Liubichankovskii's essay. The results of the project were published in 2010, and that volume serves as the basis for the forum that follows.1
The principal moderator of the online discussion was Sergei Valentinovich Liubichankovskii of the Orenburg State Pedagogical University. It was he, together with two colleagues from Samara and Izhevsk, who edited and prepared the published materials. Liubichankovskii also wrote an introduction to the volume, summarizing some of its central findings, and a revised version of that introduction is printed here as the lead article in the forum. We follow Liubichankovskii's essay with two critical reviews of the 2010 volume, written by leading specialists on provincial life and local administration in the United States and Germany: Catherine Evtuhov (Georgetown University), author of an insightful portrait of Nizhnii Novgorod province in the 19th century; and Susanne Schattenberg (Universität Bremen), author of a penetrating analysis of Russian provincial officialdom and its structures of patronage in the same period.2 Both works seek to debunk pervasive myths about the Russian [End Page 859] provinces, and these scholars accordingly offer valuable critical insights on the nature of local and regional administration in imperial Russia. Aside from acquainting readers of Kritika with this unusual scholarly venture originating beyond Russia's capitals, the forum makes a key contribution to addressing a central question of the historiography on the tsarist period: how, precisely, was Russia governed? [End Page 860]
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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werthp@unlv.nevada.edu
Paul W. Werth is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an editor of Kritika. He is working on a study of confessional diversity and religious freedom in the Russian Empire.
Footnotes
1. Sergei Valentinovich Liubichankovskii et al., eds., Mestnoe upravlenie v poreformennoi Rossii:Mekhanizmy vlasti i ikh effektivnost´. Svodnye materialy zaochnoi diskussii (Ekaterinburg and Izhevsk: Udmurtskii institut istorii, iazyka i literatury i Ural´skoe otdelenie RAN, 2010).
2. Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Susanne Schattenberg, Die korrupte Provinz? Russische Beamte im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008). The latter work is reviewed, with others, by Alexander M. Martin in "History, Memory, and the Modernization of 19th-Century Urban Russia," Kritika 11, 4 (2010): 837-70. See also the recent overview of literature by Susan Smith-Peter in "Bringing the Provinces into Focus: Subnational Spaces in the Recent Historiography of Russia," Kritika 12, 4 (2011): 835-48.
