Local Administration in and after the Reform Era: Mechanisms of Authority and Their Efficacy in Russia

The General Task

The local administration of Russia in and after the reform era has long occupied a central place in historical scholarship. Russian historiography on this issue may be conceptualized in terms of a succession of competing approaches: the formal juridical approach characteristic of prerevolutionary historiography gave way to a focus on particular departments of government and Pavel Nikolaevich Zyrianov's conception of "social levels."¹ Both became characteristic of Soviet historiography from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Several new approaches have emerged more recently, focusing on culture and social configurations, on the structural and functional dimensions of administration, on the significance of regions, on informal aspects of governance, and on the idea of systemic crisis in the old order.² The same historical problem began to attract the attention of scholars outside Russia beginning in the 1970s, and they reached contradictory conclusions about the effectiveness of regional administration in Russia. While some asserted that governors were omnipotent, others claimed that their power was weak.³ At present, scholarly attention has embraced all the basic levels of regional administration—from supra-provincial institutions of military governors and governors-general all the way down to township elders (volostnye starshiny). It has covered all the fundamental chronological stages of the reform period and after—the preparation and implementation of the Great Reforms, the conservative turn that followed, the revolutionary era in the early 20th century, and World War I—and analyzed both institutions and personalities.⁴ In short, contemporary scholarship has exhibited a steadfast interest in the history of regional administration in the Russian Empire and in identifying new and diverse sources for its study.

Yet for all this, an integrated picture of the development of the empire's local administration has yet to emerge. In its place we encounter a collection of different and disconnected thematic, chronological, and methodological studies that do not coalesce naturally into a coherent mosaic. The issue here is not the professional competence of these various studies' authors, which is high. The problem instead lies elsewhere. First, for many authors the history of local administration is important but still subordinate to other historical tasks—for example, understanding the country's modernization, its social history, economic policy, and empire building. Second, questions posed by historians of local administration are exceedingly diverse: some focus on the numbers and composition of state servitors, while others look at budgets and institutional structures, the socio-cultural characteristics of office holders, the relationship between central and local organs of power, the links between governmental and public structures, and so on. These are, of course, very important questions, but focusing on them furnishes neither an integrated picture of the system's development across time and space nor a description of its components on a single analytical plane.

The creation of such an integrated picture will occur only when that goal is consciously set, and it will require establishing a logical foundation for its resolution and defining the previously mentioned tasks as components of the larger enterprise. This essay and the larger project that it represents propose that only one question can serve as the central object of research along these lines: the effectiveness of the system's functioning. Although this concept is relatively old, it retains its importance: it is critical to any organ of administration and fundamental, indeed, for justifying its very existence. The structure and personnel of a given administrative institution, the nature of its activity, its relation to elements of civil society—all these areas address specific manifestations of that administration's effectiveness.

In short, historians presently face the need to alter their research agendas with regard to both the history of local administration in Russia and the integration of individual thematic concerns with one another. To begin this work, a specialized discussion was organized under the aegis of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The present essay is designed primarily to acquaint readers with the results of that discussion.

The Discussion and Its Participants

In September...