All Russia Is Burning!: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia

Introduction

Introduction In 1865, upon taking his oath as heir to the throne of Russia, the future tsar Alexander III issued an official rescript to the minister of the interior, P. A. Valuev. To mark the momentous occasion and show his concern for the people who would fall under his care, Alexander offered financial assistance to victims of two enduring disasters in rural Russia: famine and fires. 1 Famine has loomed large in studies oflate imperial Russia. Starving peasants, government assistance programs, and renewed civic activism through famine reliefwere major features of the late nineteenth century and have been subjects of historical debate.2 Rural fires have made spot appearances as well. In histories of "peasant Russia," fires always earn a brief mention as one of the catastrophes that could destroy peasant households' well-being.3 In the historiography of"peasant movements," especially those of the period 1905-1907, acts of arson by peasants against landowners have been employed to illustrate popular political consciousness.4 But nowhere in the study of late imperial Russia have fires, in and of themselves, received a level of scholarly scrutiny that would make the young Alexander Ill's choice immediately comprehensible. Unlike him, historians have not placed the "burned-out village" as centrally in the Russian landscape as the "hungry village ."S Rural conflagrations, both accidental and intentionally set, were more constant events in late imperial Russia than was famine, and more resistant to efforts at mitigating their effects on the rural population. Between 1860, when annual fire statistics became a regular feature of the work of the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of the Interior, and 1904, on the eve of Russia's first revolution of the twentieth century, fires destroyed almost three billion rubles' worth of property across the empire. Rural fires caused almost 90 percent of these losses and were thus one of the countryside's most consistently damaging experiences. As such, they captured the attention of educated observers, who quickly placed the "fire question" at the center of their effort to evaluate Russia's position in modern Europe. By focusing on rural fires in his first step toward formal governance, Alexander III was very much a man of his time, a time when the conviction was gathering that Russia was in fire's unwavering grip.6 Fires, in turn, came to signifY Russia's imprisonment in premodern rural systems. They were the stigmata of backwardness on the body of European Russia. In the forty years following Alexander Ill's rescript, fire and arson in the countryside carried intense symbolic and material meaning as part of Russia's search for a modern identity. When Russia joined the European experience of "high modernism," uncontained fire in the hands of recently emancipated peasants came into view for educated Russians and became an object of the campaign against Russia's developmental delay behind the West? James Scott's recent definition captures the essence of the "high modernist" impulse in countries across the northern and western hemispheres in the nineteenth century: "It is best conceived as a strong ... version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress ... the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design ofsocial order commensurate with the scientific understanding of II "8 natura aws. Those in the thrall of high modernist views both rejected stasis and negated history as embodied in tradition. The rejection of the status quo in the context of rural fire in Russia meant a new consciousness of and revulsion against a perpetual feature of villages across European Russia. The negation of tradition led to a narrowed, simplified vision of fire and the peasants who continued to employ it. Russia's rural fire culture came to represent the antithesis of a rational and modern society founded on the conquest of natural forces. Within that vision, peasant women emerged as the most backward and pernicious obstacles to a modern Russia, whereas the proposed solutions were masculine schemata, most fully embodied in the volunteer firefighting movement. By 1904, fire and arson as features of Russia's rural condition had generated literary, governmental, and social responses that illuminated not only fire's place in the late imperial countryside but also Russia's bedeviled combination of persistent poverty, official stinginess in social welfare programs, failure to integrate formal law into rural society, genuine civic potential within local organizations, and misogynism at all levels of discussion. This study of fire and arson focuses on fire's material reality...