Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

8. Solving the Agrarian Crisis: The Famine of 1891-1892 and the Zemstvo

The Battle for the Zemstvo It is textbook knowledge that the famine of – marked a milestone in the evolution of the public sphere in Russia.1 After a series of localized crop failures in  and , a broader one struck sixteen of Russia’s European provinces in the autumn of .2 Reports about rural conditions reinforced the moral imperative to question development policies. As the extent of the crop failure became apparent towards the end of  and it became clear that its scale would cause starvation, the din of criticism grew. In its twenty-fifth year by this time, the Herald of Europe was ready to do battle, for which it had prepared by cutting its teeth on its critique of Tsar Alexander III’s counter-reforms. As long as the state’s economic reforms coincided with political reaction under Alexander III, the intelligentsia’s dissatisfaction aimed at the whole without distinguishing its parts. This combination sustained disillusioned but unvanquished Populist sensibilities and simultaneously provided fertile soil from which Russian Marxism drew its strength. The volatile mixture of political conservatism, accelerating economic development, and liberal opposition boiled under reaction’s lid until the famine provided an excuse to vocalize the discontent and to debate economic policies openly. As the events of – demonstrated, the state had ignored the enormous potential that the zemstvos provided to soften the side effects of modernization, which most people believed was responsible for the conditions that led to the famine. For the Herald, the famine provided a chance once again to urge the public and the state to cooperate. Instead of allocating blame, the journal focused on   ‫ﱟﱞﱝ‬ Solving the Agrarian Crisis The Famine of – and the Zemstvo famine prevention, but emphasized economic empowerment over political liberalization. The tragic famine sparked the debate that sharpened liberalism ’s language and clarified its aims by questioning the ultimate aim of modernization and the role of the zemstvo in this process. Some modern scholars have reevaluated the state’s intentions behind the zemstvo reform of  by exploring the limited extent to which the government allowed or wished to encourage a genuine decentralization or devolution of power to the local level.3 Economists and statisticians were aware of the government’s distrust of the zemstvos at the time and the debate slowly gathered momentum as the nineteenth century drew to a close. At its root was the fundamental issue of the relationship between local self-government and modernization. On the one hand, the zemstvos and town councils could stimulate corporate identity, urban self-confidence, and economic and cultural progress across all sectors of society, including the peasantry. On the other hand, the state’s strained relationship with local self-government was often symbolic of the failure, or unwillingness, of the tsarist regime to adapt to change and to establish an effective rapport with society. The state took the issue very seriously—the two statutes on local self-government of  and  comprised  and  articles respectively. Arsen’ev treated the zemstvo as a barometer of social reactions to state policies. The weakening of the pulse of zemstvo life in the s was symptomatic of alienation from the state, he argued, which allowed revolutionary groups to siphon off the energy and talent that should have served local selfgovernment instead. Russian society and the press became almost indifferent to the role of local self-government until , when conservative encroachments on it galvanized a counter-reaction.4 The state crowned its infringement on local autonomy in  with the introduction of the land captains— centrally appointed officials who monitored and approved zemstvo decisions. By the Statute of , the government changed the election rules to favor the gentry, made all administrative posts appointed, and allowed governors to block zemstvo decisions. Although few instances of actual encroachments on local self-government took place, the law made administrative arbitrariness possible. Instead of laying the foundation for a form of economic democracy through the zemstvos, the state turned them into administrative extensions. In order to save money, the state had outsourced administrative functions to provincial and urban self-government in  and thereby encouraged the development of provincial society, but it also wanted to control local institutions Solving the Agrarian Crisis  and ensure above all that they perceived state obligations as greater priorities than local needs. The center feared the independence of local officials and subordinated them to appointed representatives and to ministries in...