Vlast i pomestnoe dvorianstvo Rossii v nachale XX veka, and: Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861-1917 (review)

Despite their rather different topical foci— the landed nobility and peasant religion— both of these studies are concerned, methodologically, with a fundamental historical problem: the relationship between the local or regional, on the one hand, and the central or universal, on the other. Both books also focus on the black-earth region to the south of Moscow, Ekaterina Barinova considering a series of provinces (Voronezh, Kursk, and Orel, as well as Samara) and Chris Chulos focusing on Voronezh province specifically. Effectively deploying centrally and locally gathered source material, each study addresses a set of important questions for understanding the relationship of a rural community to broader social, political, and cultural processes in late imperial Russia. The issue of adaptation to the dictates of a more modern Russian society occupies a central place for both authors.

Concentrating on the local noble societies of the black-earth provinces (as opposed to higher aristocratic and bureaucratic circles in St. Petersburg), Barinova strives to reveal "the content, forms, and methods of interaction of central and local power with the nobility in the context of the crisis situation at the beginning of the 20th century" (21). She draws on material from a range of local repositories in Voronezh, Kursk, Orel, and Samara to construct a detailed profile of local noble interests and aspirations in increasingly dynamic circumstances. Her story is one of the political activization of the landed nobility and its attempts to formulate a concrete economic program as gentry agriculture became increasingly unprofitable and the estate lost an ever-larger portion of its share of the land to non-noble owners. Increased stratification among landed nobles, as well as worries about the estate's numerical decline, produced additional pressures.¹ Ultimately, Barinova writes, "in the context of the modernization of society the nobility was faced with the task of adapting its corporate organization to new social conditions" (75). Landed nobles began to see the need for change, if only to retain their prominent place in society. Faced with economic decline and a state policy favoring industrialization before their immediate interests, the nobility began, by the first years of the 20th century, to use its corporate organization to enter the political arena.

Barinova is careful not to homogenize the landed nobility, who constituted roughly one-third of the noble estate at the beginning of the 20th century. She shows a significant degree of socio-economic differentiation among landed nobles, with growing numbers of lesser nobles beside a much smaller number of large and powerful lords. She also discusses a range of different political orientations (especially before 1905), from gentry liberalism to obscurantist reaction. These political divisions were most clearly evident in the activities of the zemstvos and the committees on the needs of agriculture of 1902–3. The Voronezh district committee offered the most liberal conclusions, going so far as to recommend the nationalization of all land, although this position derived partly from the intensity of peasant unrest in the province (the creation of a "state land fund" struck many delegates, at that particular moment, as the best way to assuage the insurgents). Politically, the liberal program sought to induce the autocracy to share its unlimited power with organs of self-administration led by the nobility. Accused by the government of making "constitutional declarations," however, several committee members were subjected to administrative punishment, and the Voronezh committee's journal was published only in Stuttgart. On the whole, liberal voices were more pronounced at the district level, as the state...