Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii, 1905-1917 gody (review)

Published by a regional university press in a small print run of 550, Anastasiia Tumanova's monograph has received little notice. This is most unfortunate, because the book deserves to become required reading for historians and anyone else interested in the evolution of civil liberties and civil society in Russia. It is the first in-depth examination of the Temporary Rules on Societies and Unions of 4 March 1906, Russia's first comprehensive law on the right of association.¹ The author of a 1999 study of voluntary associations in the provincial capital of Tambov, Tumanova painstakingly reconstructs the creation of the Rules during the turmoil of revolution, analyzes their implementation, and explains why the autocracy failed to produce a permanent statute guaranteeing the freedom of association promised in the October Manifesto.²

On the surface, this would appear to be another chapter in the familiar story of the autocracy versus society, played against the backdrop of the hopes and violence of the 1905 Revolution. As told from the viewpoint of the opposition, the story usually depicts a suspicious autocracy betraying the promises of October to obstruct the legal political parties, trade unions, and progressive social organizations permitted under the new rules. By contrast, Tumanova examines the late imperial "boom" in voluntary associations primarily from the government's perspective. Her research reveals a considerably more complex story of struggle by and within the government to implement the promise of civil liberties in the face of a radicalized, hostile public. A defensive, vulnerable autocracy, riddled with inter- and intra-departmental divisions and bereft of effective leadership after Stolypin's assassination, nevertheless was able to conceive and implement a fundamental reform in the legal status and socio-political roles granted to voluntary associations. For all their flaws, she argues, the 1906 Rules enabled public initiative and social activism to flourish as never before, and as they would not again for decades.

Tumanova employs a wide range of archival sources, supplemented by memoirs and periodical literature, which give her deep insight into the priorities and mentalities of the authorities that dealt with civil society, from the Council of Ministers and State Council to governors and gradonachal´niki. Particularly notable is her use of the archives of the two major departments of the Ministry of the Interior, the Departament obshchikh del (Department of General Affairs) in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) and the Departament Politsii (Department of Police) in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Indeed, the book is a painful reminder of the kind of pioneering research that now cannot be done, since RGIA is closed. Tumanova's knowledge of the history of the right of association in Europe also enables her to make informed comparisons between European and Russian law. Viewing the 1906 Rules from a European perspective, she argues, reveals that they were not exceptionally repressive, while Russian voluntary associations even enjoyed a few freedoms that associations in other European nations did not.

The book consists of an introduction, five lengthy chapters, a short conclusion and four appendices, including the text of the 1906 Rules. In her introduction Tumanova justifies her assertion that the rapid growth of voluntarism (samodeiatel´nost´) is one of the most important trends in late imperial history. Voluntary associations were the earliest element of civil society to develop in Russia, and the one most tolerated by the state, which vacillated between a desire to support constructive social endeavors and fear, often not groundless, that such activism would become a vehicle of opposition. Proliferating rapidly from the late 19th century on, they contributed significantly to material, cultural, scientific, and technological progress, "prepared deep changes in the self-consciousness of Russians, enabling their transformation from subjects into citizens," and broke "the...