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II. 1905 in the Rural Districts of Kursk Province
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CHAPTER II 1905 in the Rural Districts of Kursk Province The accounts of incidents of rural unrest in 1905–1906 in Kursk Province that follow are drawn from a narrow complex of official documents, published in anniversary collections (among these documentation from the State Historical Archive of the Kursk Region)1 or abstracted from the repositories of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (of the Department of Police , Special Section, and of the Land Section) and of the Ministry of Justice .2 In almost all cases, the site, the nature of the incidents of unrest, the estate and the name of the owner and the immediate measures taken by the authorities were observed in these materials. Dates of incidents are either directly indicated or could be established with reasonable certainty by the date and content of the document in which they were noted. The documents were far less reliable in terms of numbers of persons taking part or of the organization of actions, especially during phases in which unrest was most intense. Information regarding local outcomes of unrest was absent or appeared randomly. Out of 403 questionnaires,3 332 inci1 Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii. Dokumenty i materialy; Revoliutsionnye sobytiia 1905–1907 gg. v Kurskoi gubernii. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, hereinafter RSKG. 2 The State Archive of the Russian Federation (formerly known as the Central State Archive of the October Revolution), hereinafter rendered as GARF, fond 102 (Ministry of Internal Affairs, Department of Police), the Russian State Historical Archive (formerly the Central State Historical Archive of the USSR), hereinafter RGIA, fond 1291 (Ministry of Internal Affairs, Land Section), fond 1405 (Ministry of Justice, II Criminal Division ). See the bibliographical appendix for specific folder titles. 3 From our preliminary experience in reviewing the documents and the example of the method employed by Boris Grigor’evich Litvak (Opyt izuchenie), the author produced a form according to which data were abstracted from each document under the following rubrics: date of document, type of document (letter, report, telegram), site of the action described, family name and social estate of the owner who was the object of the action, possible time frame (month, date) between beginning and end of action, number of par- 138 Rural Unrest during the First Russian Revolution dents were deemed to have been distinguished with that sufficient clarity by time, site and nature that gave them an individual character: 195 in the calendar year 1905, 128 in 1906 and 9 in 1907. We define actions as “single ” incidents even when “objects” were multiple at identical times or could not be “parsed” into separate sites. Thus in the course of 19 February 1905, villagers of Romanovo, Glamazdinskaia Parish, Dmitriev District , set upon three noble estates, the holding of a peasant and the property of a local priest. On 4 November 1905, at the settlement of Kon’shino, Ol’shanskaia Parish, in Novyi Oskol’ District, parties of villagers attacked the estates of nine local landowners. Conversely, during the events of December 1905 in Putivl’ District, a cable from General N. P. Rudov (chief of the provincial gendarmerie in Chernigov Province) was to note that “many villages of Putivl’ District, in particular those that border on Konotop District, have been seized by unrest.” Further reporting will note specific settlements in this locale that played a part in events, but the sense from documents pertaining to this group of incidents is that the movement was broader in its scale. Disorders at the same site, involving the same object, might appear as separate incidents: holdings of Marshal of the Nobility of Novyi Oskol’ District Vladimir Petrovich Miatlev at Golubina (Prigorodniaia Parish) were attacked on both the 2nd and the 5th of November 1905, each incident made separate by a clear hiatus in time. Materials in this body of sources reflect the obligation of local authorities on several levels to keep central institutions abreast of major events taking place in their jurisdictions, especially those demanding police and military operations. Originating for the most part in a narrow circle of officials in the police and judicial bureaucracies, these documents were also distinctive in employing a certain uniformity of language with regard to incidents of unrest—something that was itself useful to our analysis. Yet reliance on central ministerial instances, even supplemented by published local sources, had several problematic aspects. First, our collection must be seen as a sample and cannot be considered to be complete. Specific forms of peasant collective actions, particularly tax boycotts and official efforts to...