Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod by Catherine Evtuhov (review)

Social and economic histories of tsarist Russia are frequently told at a macro-level with occasional allusions to events in the capital cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, such perspectives tend to miss much of the rich socio-economic variation that was evident across the vast Empire. In this impressive and wide-ranging book, Evtuhov offers an important corrective to several strands of the historical literature about Russia that tend to overemphasize the aggregate story at the expense of local nuance. Her focus is the province of Nizhnii Novgorod during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The province, which lies along the Volga River roughly 250 miles east of Moscow, offers a rich arena for examining how the cultural, political, economic, and social influences of the absolutist center were countered, accommodated, or ignored by the local population. In drawing on archival documents, government records, and the writings of provincial intellectuals, Evtuhov goes beyond a standard history of Nizhnii Novgorod to evoke multiple dimensions of provincial life in striking ways. In this enterprise, she engages with, but also goes well beyond, the noble tradition of local history (kraevedenie) in Russia.

The starting point of Evtuhov's analysis is geographical. Variation in soil conditions, access to transportation, and availability of natural resources drove communities to specialize in different occupations—agriculture, fishing, handicraft and protoindustrial production, resource extraction, or modern industrial employment. The province of Nizhnii Novgorod possessed rich black soil in the southeastern agricultural districts, close ties to the industrial networks of Vladimir and Moscow provinces in the eastern districts, and poor soils and heavy forests in the districts north of the Volga. Geography not only affected local economic activity but, according to Evtuhov's account, it also influenced the structure of social interactions, religious life, politics, and even culture in the province. In chapters about topics ranging from economic conditions to local government and religion, this book explores the ways in which geography (both at the micro- and the macro-levels) helped to define Nizhnii Novgorod within the broader Empire. This exercise produces a particularly vivid portrait of the zemstvo—a newly created tax authority and arena for enacting local public policies—as the fulcrum around which district and provincial intellectual, political, and economic life revolved.

Evtuhov's study not only brings this corner of tsarist Russia into sharper focus; it also makes a strong case for the value of local publications—newspapers, journals, government reports, etc.—as important complements to archival documentation in reconstructing provincial life. The stories behind the work of the Nizhnii Novgorod Archival Commission, the first local newspaper (the Nizhegorodskie Gubernskie Vedomisti), literary investigations into local handicrafts and Old Believer communities, and the compilation of a massive report on land values under the auspices of the zemstvo form much of the backbone of Evtuhov's thematic narrative. The focus on these local efforts shows how provincial intellectuals and authorities conceptualized their relationship with the central regime and constructed a new "Idea of Province" (Chapter 11).

Although Evtuhov's effort largely succeeds in bringing nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novogorod province to life, her approach and her analysis are sometimes questionable. Foremost is the limited emphasis that she places on the peasant majority. Evtuhov is intent on uncovering the intellectual, political, and social thought of the local gentry, urban classes, merchants, and other people of "various ranks" (raznochintsy) as the basis for an identifiable provincial culture. Although she considers peasant religious beliefs (at least among the Old Believers) and economic activities to some extent, Evtuhov pays little attention to other areas of peasant culture that may have been unique or changing during the period. More problematically, her book says almost nothing about how local institutions of peasant self-government—communes, townships (volosti), and courts—interacted with the new zemstvo or with agents and offices of the central government. This lapse is surprising, since archival and...