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

This groundbreaking monograph successfully overturns numerous erroneous historiographical assumptions about pre-revolutionary Russia. The Russia that emerges from the pages of this study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod is a Russia few scholars of Russia will recognize. Late Imperial Russia was not, it turns out, predominantly a stagnant, agrarian country populated by nobles and peasants. Capitalism was making inroads in villages, erasing differences between the city and countryside. Social estate identities were no longer firmly entrenched. The Zemstva (the limited self-government institutions created by the Great reforms of the 1860’s, depicted for decades as so beleaguered by attacks from the state that one couldn’t imagine their representatives having the time or energy to devote to social welfare) actually thrived, and served as a means to bring all social estates together into something resembling a local civil society. Russia was characterized, not by uniform backwardness, but by diversity and change. This was possible because the Russian provinces—unlike the borderland provinces that have garnered so much attention from historians following the breakup of Soviet republics into distinct countries—were not rigidly governed by the state. Russia, we learn, was not a centralized country.

Working from the premise that you can’t understand the nation without first studying its localities, Evtuhov proceeds in eleven chapters to provide a social history of what industrialization meant in a Russian province, including an exploration of the “ecology” of its countryside, the topography of its cities, its culture, religion, local administration and inhabitants. What enfolds is a society in flux, with many provincial people engaged in multiple professions. We are introduced to cottage industry and to Russia’s “missing” middle class, which Evtuhov defines relationally and culturally. She further offers a new way of thinking about Russian society by dividing it into two fluid groups: the active, future-orientated bourgeoisie, and the peasants, petty townspeople and declasse gentry. Individuals and institutions which would otherwise remain forgotten emerge in this book: an eccentric woman journalist who would attend the local theater in her bedroom slippers; a homeless shelter; the changing residents of one urban street. We learn how Zemstvo medicine actually functioned. We also discover that statistics—the focus of a generation of scholars interested in studying how a state surveys its subjects—actually didn’t help the state control Nizhnii Novgorod; central officials were unable to penetrate their sheer volume and depth.

Some readers might begin to question the author’s use of Braudel’s “total history” and Geertz’s “thick description” when they find themselves literally bogged down in the soil in one chapter. But then the genius of this book emerges. Not only do the preponderance of here today, gone tomorrow ravines shed new light on why Russian peasants, infamous for their repartitional commune, did not put great stock in private property. The soil is one of the subjects the “purveyors” of province, (educated Russians in the provinces who began to earnestly devote their lives to studying their localities in the late nineteenth century) were preoccupied with, and Evtuhov is following their narrative.

This highly original approach allows the author to recapture what was important to these “purveyors” of province, and her selection of sources allows her to recapture the world of the province as seen through their eyes. Rather than burying herself in the unpublished data available in archives, Evtuhov focused on the archive—the voluminous volumes of primary sources and articles-that these local, many self-educated, scholars created. She defines province as a practice and a consciousness, their consciousness, for, “Russian provincialism was a creation of an intelligentsia” (15). Readers will not learn what the peasants or artisans of Nizhnii thought—given that they left few written sources behind, their thoughts may be forever lost to us--but they will learn a great deal about this intelligentsia. And this is not the intelligentsia historians who have...