Conclusion: Observations on the Politics of the Russian Countryside (1905-14)

LEOPOLD H. HAIMSON

I have repeatedly referred in the introduction to this volume to the dual, Janus-like character of the sense of identity that the Russian landowning nobility drew from its historical origins and brought into the twentieth century. The first dimension of this self-image—and of the realities on which it rested—was the often suppressed but never wholly extinguished sense of being a particularistic group in the body politic, which this nobility maintained even as Russia painfully and slowly evolved from a society of sosloviia into a society of classes: particularistic in the specificity of its political, social, and economic interests, and in the contradiction between these interests and those of other groups in society; particularistic too—especially in the setting of the countryside—in the relatively hermetic character of its culture, its values, its style of life. The other dimension of this self-image was a broader and even more deep-seated identification with the state power; the sense of being first and foremost a service class, whose raison d’être rested in its service in peace, and especially in war, to a state that was itself viewed as a superordinate authority—arching over Russia’s deeply divided society—the only spokesman for general, as against particular, interests.

It was by virtue of this sense of identification with the state, and the realities of service on which it rested, even after the emancipation of the nobility in 1762 from compulsory service; it was also by virtue of the special qualities of honor, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice, which this service ostensibly entailed, that the Russian landowning nobility had traditionally justified its special privileges, and especially its claim to rule—in the name of the Tsar, of the State, and of the Fatherland. This identification with the state and with its sovereign had provided an essential element of the landowning nobility’s sense of self-worth and self-justification—of its “ideology”—one that it almost invariably had brought, in reflex fashion, to the fore, whenever in the history of post-Petrine Russia its superior and privileged position had been challenged by other groups in society, or even by the Autocrat himself.

This had been the central element not only in the Russian nobility’s rhetoric but also in its own sense of moral justification, and therefore in its psychological capacity to resist the attempted encroachments on its privileges by representatives of other estates in the Commission of 1767; the banner around which its spokesmen had rallied against the half-hearted attempts by Alexander I and some of his officials to reform, if not eliminate, the institution of serfdom; the mechanism of defense mobilized by the most obdurate of its spokesmen in the final and decisive debates over Emancipation.

This dual sense of identity of the Russian landowning nobility was never fully eradicated. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, its constituent elements—its chemistry—had been substantially modified, if not transformed. Reference was already made in the introduction to this volume, and especially in Roberta Manning’s essay, to some of the catalytic factors in this significant, if subtle, transformation. On one hand, there was the increasingly important factor of the growth and transformation of the bureaucratic state and of its increasing encroachments on the position of the landowning nobility, as the state regularized its procedures, sought to impose them on the noble or noble-dominated organs of local self-government, and followed economic policies seemingly inimical to the interests of the landowning nobility. By the end of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, this sense of encroachment was all the more deeply felt because the state pursued and implemented these policies through a bureaucracy, which even in its higher reaches was increasingly recruited from members of other estates, or men who, even though they held noble titles, demonstrated in their day-to-day behavior a growing difference of interests, outlook, and life style from those of the provincial landowning nobility. The other major element in this dynamic was the return, under the pressure of economic necessity, of much of the Russian provincial nobility to the land in the 1880s and nineties, at least in the most agricultural regions of the empire (the Central Agricultural Region, the Volga, the Ukraine).

In studying the growing rift between the landowning nobility and the central bureaucracy, which eventuated as a result of these two factors, we should not lay excessive stress on the processes of economic modernization of noble-run agriculture and on their effects on the social and political psychology of the Russian landowning nobility, even if we are prepared to recognize that those who were involved in such processes of economic modernization played a role disproportionate to their numbers in the politics of the landowning nobility, especially after 1905. The essential factor, I believe, was the return to the land per se, for both the few who actually engaged in such a modernization of their estates (let alone were successful in such efforts), and the many who did not. By virtue of their new or renewed engagement in the administration of their estates, of their concomitant absorption or reabsorption in the affairs of their local corporate organizations and organs of local self-government; by virtue of the new or renewed ties that they forged with one another in these local institutions, and in their social contacts on their estates as well as in the salons, the clubs, and the boulevards of their county towns and provincial capitals, these noble landowners established, really for the first time in modern Russian history, a truly provincial society. A relatively closed society, to be sure, but one that, by the same token, was all the more harmonious, integral, and capable of upholding and defending interests and values that it now considered more genuinely its own.

Thus it was, precisely as these new values and style of life crystallized and came into conflict with the growing bureaucratic state and its faceless officials, that the members of this new provincial society also came to feel, in their confrontation of this increasingly impersonal state power, the sense of “we” and “they” that already animated other elements in society—most importantly, of course, the Russian intelligentsia. The psychological change, to be sure, was one of degree-such responses having occasionally been evoked in earlier periods of Russian history—but, however relatively so, it made for a political phenomenon that was novel, at least in its scope and depth, and that was duly exploited after the turn of the century by the leadership of the Liberation Movement, and especially its noble elements.

In accounting for the ultimate fragility of the Liberation Movement, we must, to be sure, recognize that the leaders of this movement, who, so successfully at first, exacerbated and manipulated the disaffection of the landowning nobility—gave it political shape, as well as eventual organization—were, in significant respects, men of a different stamp than their would-be constituents in this provincial noble society. It is true that many of them were themselves noble landowners, indeed originating for the most part from landowning families that were wealthier, as well as socially more prominent and distinguished, than their followers. But the outlook and the adult values of these leaders of the Liberation Movement had been shaped, at least in part, in a quite different environment: that of the universities, the cities, and even more precisely, of the cosmopolitan culture—both Russian and European—in which they travelled so freely and were now so fully absorbed.

In fact, if not in theory, these men were members of the intelligentsia—of an intelligentsia that, as Marc Raeff has reminded us,¹ had itself drawn many of its psychological and social features from its nobiliar origins, but that in the course of its nineteenth-century travails had also substantially transformed them. Of course, even as Russia entered the twentieth century, some of the most militant and liberal, if not radical, spokesmen of this noble intelligentsia—the Dolgorukovs and the Shakhovskois, if not the Petrunkeviches and the Potresovs—continued to draw, however subtly, part of their sense of mission from their nobiliar origins: their desire to serve the people, or more precisely by this time, the nation, if not the state; their implicit claim to lead, if not to rule it; their sense of their own political importance, as well as their willingness to sacrifice. But in the social and psychological melting pot of intelligentsia life, this sense of mission had by now been translated by this noble intelligentsia into an image of themselves as members of a group, which in its own psychological as well as social makeup had effectively bridged the divisions among Russian social classes and estates, and which, precisely by virtue of its unique noncaste and nonclass social characteristics, as well as its equally special, if universalistic, political and moral values, was now entitled to shape and mobilize the new nation it now saw in the making against an obscurantist state.

Still, notwithstanding these psychological as well as social differences between leaders and led, and the admittedly manipulative character of the activities of the Liberation Movement, we should recognize the genuineness of the echoes that the appeals of its intelligentsia leadership were able to evoke by 1905 among the rank and file of the Russian provincial landowning nobility and take due note of the psychological and social sources of this response.

First and foremost, the collective self-affirmation against the state power that the leaders of the Liberation Movement sought to rouse among the landowning nobility found a genuine reflection in the sense of collective autonomy that these nobles had gradually developed, as we have seen, as their own provincial society had coalesced and crystallized. It also found a political base and a locus of political expression in their now vitalized corporate organizations and local organs of self-government. These new social bonds, and the sense of solidarity and rootedness that they fostered, thus provided the grounds for the psychological changes that the provincial nobility underwent in the process of their political liberalization in 1904, and especially in 1905.

This process bore at least some superficial similarities to the political evolution, described so well for us by Namier and others, of the English gentry in the eighteenth century.² It was originally marked by the emergence of a sense—genuine if ultimately delusory—among many of these Russian provincial nobles that they were identified with the values and interests of their localities, more precisely with the general interest of the population of these localities—nobles and peasants alike—and that by virtue of this identity of interests and values, they were genuinely entitled to represent them. And from this sense of representing their localities, there was but a step, if a long step, to the emergence of the sense of truly representing a nation, a nation entitled to govern itself, rather than being led by the nose by an increasingly “blind,” “inept,” and above all “alien,” bureaucracy.

In her essay, Manning has described the sweeping and genuine character of the psychological leap that the Russian landowning nobility made in 1905—a leap that admittedly occurred against the background of humiliating military defeats borne by the state power, as well as of the growing internal paralysis, if not collapse, of its bureaucracy—in substance, in the face of the seeming inability of the state power and its agents to fulfill their primal, most elementary, functions: to preserve some semblance of domestic order and maintain the integrity of the empire. Be that as it may—against this background of disorder, confusion, and yes, inebriation (characteristic, after all, of all revolutionary situations)—many, if not most, of these Russian provincial noble landowners made an immense psychological jump, especially during the summer months of 1905. They now appeared genuinely to respond to the appeals of liberal leaders not only for representative government but also for universal and equal suffrage, and even in a remarkable number of cases for the voluntary relinquishment of the special privileges of their noble estate.

To be sure, such a willingness to sacrifice had already been evidenced, if only by a relatively small minority of the Russian landowning nobility, in earlier political crises of modern Russian history. Already on these earlier occasions—during the debates preceding and following the issuance of the Edict of Emancipation, and again during the political crisis of the late 1870s and eighties—it had been characteristic of many of those assemblies of nobility and/or zemstvo assemblies that had issued the most sweeping claims for unfettered local self-government, and even for a national constitutional representation, to couple these demands with a proclaimed willingness to abolish all special soslovie privileges and discriminations: to recognize that all members of the new body politic, nobles and peasants alike, should be equal before the law.³

But in the summer of 1905 such sentiments were voiced, or at least silently accepted, by Russian provincial noble landowners on a much more sweeping scale. Indeed, there was an inherent logic in the giant step that these nobles now took. Qua separate, even if ruling, soslovie, qua particularistic culture—separated from other groups by legal discriminations, as well as sharp differences and conflicts of interests and values—the Russian landowning nobility could not have psychologically and politically afforded to assert itself so sharply against the state power, and above all to claim genuinely to represent, in this confrontation, their own localities, if not a united nation. If they were now to transfer their traditional allegiance from the state power to a newborn nation-state, they could feel capable and entitled to do so only on the basis of the assertion of a community of values and interests with other social groups to which they had to be prepared to give institutional expression.

It may well be argued that this discovery of a community of values was shaky, if not skin-deep, even during this heady summer of 1905, and especially that it was never extended beyond the bounds of rural Russia—beyond the vision of an essentially agrarian society. But however flimsy, this vision was truly a precondition for the conversion of so many of this landowning nobility to constitutional government, and especially to a vision of a national representation based on equality before the law. One should concede even more readily that this new bucolic vision of rural Russia never entailed, for those noble landowners who temporarily grasped for it, the abandonment of their continued expectation, if not explicit claim, to rule it. Manning has wisely emphasized the significance of the political fact that even during the tumultuous, disorienting, intoxicating, and ultimately frightening summer of 1905—when so many of them became almost literally unhinged, as they would later woefully recall—most of the noble landowners at tending the county and provincial zemstvo assemblies never pronounced themselves in favor of four-tail suffrage. Almost all of them voted, or were prepared to vote, for universal, and even equal and secret, suffrage; but most of them did not express themselves in favor of direct suffrage.

This pervasive, if often muted, opposition to direct suffrage was variously justified, on those occasions when it was in fact articulated: direct suffrage would open the door to irresponsible party politics, conducted by irresponsible intelligentsia demagogues; in contrast, indirect elections were the only way to insure, especially in the light of the political immaturity of the peasants, that the latter would in fact elect deserving and responsible representatives, whom they personally knew to be experienced in local affairs and sensitive to the real need of their localities. Underlying these formulations, of course, was the expectation on the part of the members of the landowning nobility who voiced them that it was to them that the voters of their localities—peasants and nonpeasants alike—would entrust the safeguard of their interests and the promotion of their aspirations.

The discovery that this was not the case—the brutal realization, in the course of the elections to the first two Dumas, that their peasants would under almost no circumstances select them to represent their interests—however well-intentioned and “enlightened” they might be—was a profoundly traumatic experience for the vast majority of Russian noble provincial landowners. As traumatic as the burning of their manors and poplar trees, the Kadets’ sweeping proposals for the partial expropriation of their land, or, even more broadly, the betrayal, so they felt, by the liberal noble intelligentsia of their duties to their sovereign, to the empire, and to their own kind. And the psychological trauma created by this political repudiation—in word and deed—by their local peasantry, contributed greatly to the scope and the depth of the reaction among the Russian landowning nobility, which has been the chief object of our attention in this volume.

But it is also extremely significant, and suggestive of the persistent features of the political psychology of these noble landowners, that the flag under which this reaction began—the first major rallying point for those who emerged as the leaders, at least on the national level, of their confused, if embittered, ranks—was provided not by the various conflicts of interest that had now been so nakedly exposed between them and their peasants, or even between them and urban Russia, but by the principle of the “integrity of the empire,” now threatened, so these leaders of the nobility claimed, by the demands for autonomy for the Kingdom of Poland, and the support for this demand among the liberal and radical parties.

There was, admittedly, some discrepancy, even at this stage, between the national leadership of this gentry reaction (which was largely provided by those who soon emerged as the leaders of the Octobrist party) and the rank and file of the provincial nobility, which often rallied around local parties (partii pravogo poriadka) more candid in their espousal of the restoration of law and order. Yet the fact remains that this was the original rhetoric—the ideology in a Marxist sense—that the national spokesmen for the landed nobility advanced against the leaders of the Liberation Movement whom they now so sweepingly repudiated. And in this, as in other instances, ideology was important: now that they had been compelled by bitter experience to give up their vision of a united nation, and especially of their claim to represent it, it was psychologically important, if not imperative, for these spokesmen for the Russian nobility to do so, at least at first, not on the basis of selfish interests of caste or class, but rather in the name of their traditional allegiance to the empire, to the monarch, to the state.

To be sure, the rediscovery of a sense of loyalty to the state on the part of the Russian landowning nobility remained circumscribed, especially during the Stolypin era. In part, this was because during these early years of reaction, the memory was still too vivid among them of the many instances in which, during the period of revolutionary upheaval, officials of the state bureaucracy—from governors to ministers and even premiers—had become paralyzed, or even evidenced in their panic a willingness to sell them down the river, especially on the land question, if only, so these bureaucrats argued, for the sake of saving the state and the monarchy. During the early years of Stolypin’s premiership, as some of the essays in this volume have shown, there was the added irritant of the central bureaucracy’s velleities for reforms whose effect would have been to undermine some of the institutional props through which this provincial nobility was now firmly intent—especially after all they had been through—to maintain its ruling position in the Russian land.

Thus it was that, even through the period of reaction, the Russian landowning nobility was by no means averse to using the dominant position in Russia’s new representative institutions that the political “constitution” afforded it, especially after June 1907, to defend their interests against the encroachments of the bureaucratic state as well as those of other groups in society. Indeed, these noble landowners were at first willing to do so under a politically more experienced leadership, which included constitutionally minded, if more conservative, spokesmen, and they repudiated these spokesmen only when the latter themselves displayed excessive zeal in collaborating with reforming bureaucrats on schemes that would have undermined the landowning nobility’s position in the countryside.

One of the significant contributions of this volume, it seems to me, has been to suggest that the deepening of the gentry reaction between 1907 and 1911—the weakening of the political base of the Left Octobrists, the emergence and consolidation of the bloc of moderate rights and Nationalists, and more importantly the mobilization of much of the provincial landowning gentry around their more conservative provincial marshals, as well as in support of such reactionary organizations as the United Nobility—occurred, not so much over such well-publicized symbolic issues as the Naval General Staff bill as over the much more tangible and basic threat presented to the position of the landowning nobility by the government’s Octobrist-supported projects of reform of local government.

Be that as it may, we should not reach the end of this survey of the evolution of attitudes of the Russian landed nobility until the war with the image of a still visibly alarmed, militant, mobilized gentry reaction. By 1914, as this volume has shown, the state bureaucracy’s reforming impulses were now strictly contained, if not entirely exhausted; rural Russia was quiet, and social and political unrest still tightly contained in urban and industrial Russia. Under these circumstances, most of the members of the landowning nobility could afford to relax, and did so, most visibly. The available evidence on the elections to the Fourth Duma (just as that on the zemstvo elections in 1912-13, as we have seen) provides many signs of this relaxation among the rank and file of the Russian provincial nobility, which stand in dramatic contrast to the often compulsive efforts of the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to tighten their control and intensify their manipulation of all phases of the electoral process.

What sentiments typically appeared to animate most of the thirty-thousand Russian nobles who qualified for full census in the landowners’ curia in these, the last, Duma elections held before the outbreak of the war?⁴ The picture we draw from various reports is that by this time most of these noble landowners still regarded themselves as defenders of the ordre établi, upholders of sound, conservative, moral, religious, social, and political values and institutions—for themselves and especially for the peasants over whom they ruled. In this broad sense, most of them viewed themselves as “rightists,” pravye, but by no means as reactionaries. For now that their hold over their estates, over local life, and over the body politic as a whole appeared to have been fully restored, they no longer felt enraged: indeed, they had lost much of their zeal to purge or to punish those who, on minor issues or in minor ways, appeared occasionally to stray from their ranks. Most of these Russian provincial landowners now felt contemptuous not only of such “low-class,” rabble-rousing organizations as the Union of the Russian People, but also of the deputies of the extreme right in the Duma—the Purishkeviches and Markovs II—who made such unseemly scenes during Duma sessions and generally engaged so nakedly in political demagoguery. By and large, they now saw it as their task to elect honorable and responsible gentlemen to the State Duma and the State Council—gentlemen who, whenever they could, would loyally cooperate with the government, but who, when necessary, would also prove capable of holding it and its bureaucracy in check.

Actually, now that their grip on Russia’s representative institutions appeared so fully secure, most of these provincial noble landowners were no longer deeply interested in the State Duma and its activities, and under the circumstances, many of them did not even bother to vote. But the most typical and general feature of the political attitudes of these Russian provincial nobles by the eve of the war is that they saw themselves as above the party system, which had now sunk such deep roots in the political culture of urban industrial Russia, and which the government was now seeking to introduce, however haphazardly, into rural Russia itself (largely through the promotion of the Nationalist Union). By and large, the picture we draw is that these men were now indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, party organizations (which by this time had almost entirely disappeared from rural Russia); contemptuous of notions of party discipline; indifferent to, if not ignorant of, most of the details of party platforms; indeed contemptuous, in most cases, of the concept of parties per se, which—like the English country gentlemen in the House of Commons of George III—most of them now regarded as political factions or cabals, pursuing and promoting selfish political ends.

Most Russian provincial noble landowners now appeared content to assert and organize their political values and interests through their corporate organizations of nobility as well as through the county and provincial zemstvos, which they now so securely dominated. And the politics in which they engaged continued to be marked by, or had now reverted back to, a more traditional and personal style: that of the relations maintained within their narrow and coherent political culture between one worthy, self-respecting, autonomous noble landowning family and another; as well as, on occasion, that of the dependence of less wealthy and less socially prominent families on the wealthier and more distinguished, a pattern of relationships that occasionally smacked of those of clients to patrons, superficially reminding us once again of eighteenth-century England, although in the earlier age of the great Whig families.

This last reference is of some importance, for notwithstanding the identification of political parties with cabals to which I have referred, personal ambitions, animus, group loyalties and conflicts, were by no means absent in this traditional noble political culture. Such sentiments and the political behavior to which they gave rise were occasionally displayed in the elections to the Fourth Duma, not so much in the selection of provincial electors, for which the competition was not so keen, as in the eventual selection of Duma deputies by noble electors of the landowners’ curia at the provincial electoral assemblies. As often as not, these electors could not readily agree on whom to elect, and under these circumstances one occasionally witnessed at the provincial electoral assemblies infights among veritable cabals of noble landowners, which were sometimes exploited by opposition electors from other curiae (much to the chagrin of government officials) to elect some of their own members to the Duma. In this fashion, not infrequently, the best-laid plans of provincial governors were laid low, in scenes of almost total bedlam at the provincial electoral assemblies, about which these governors eventually had to report woefully to their government superiors.

To be sure, such spectacles tended to be the exception rather than the rule. Judging from official reports, most Russian provincial landowners were not drawn even to these more traditional forms of “party” politics. The majority of them appeared content to select, first as electors, and eventually as deputies, the more prominent and active members of their provincial society, those who had displayed over the years the greatest will as well as willingness to serve, whether in the assemblies of nobility or the zemstvos.

By the same token, most of these Russian provincial landowners were reluctant to join in the occasional efforts of especially zealous officials to purge Left Octobrist candidates who had offended the government by their excessive constitutionalist zeal. Indeed, even though, more often than not, they did not themselves espouse such constitutionalist sentiments, these rank-and-file nobles, and even their provincial marshals, often shared the indignation and sense of personal affront felt by those Left Octobrist noblemen who were called upon by lowly officials, on the instructions of their superiors, to withdraw their candidacies. They shared the feeling that such injunctions constituted an infringement on the nobility’s corporate rights, and indeed on their collective honor and dignity as the first servants of the tsar and of the state. Most self-respecting noble landowners would not join in the efforts to purge such distinguished and honorable men of their own estate from the body politic, and in their efforts to get rid of Left Octobrist candidates, government officials had to resort to the support of members of the clergy.

This, by and large, appears to have been the general pattern of political sentiment and behavior among the Russian provincial landowning nobility on the eve of the First World War—the picture that we draw both from the Fourth Duma elections and the elections to zemstvo assemblies in 1912-13, which Manning and MacNaughton have discussed in their essay. When we survey the various counties and provinces of European Russia, we find but few exceptions to this general pattern. Robert Edelman has described one significant regional deviation, but it is an exception that confirms the rule. In the southwest, especially in Kiev province, which provided during the prewar period the only substantial grass-roots support for the Nationalist Union, Russian noble landowners had traditionally lacked the institutional framework available to Russian nobles in other areas for the maintenance of their grip on the countryside. They had specifically lacked elected zemstvo institutions, and they had been confronted in their corporative organizations by the formidable presence of generally wealthier Polish noble landowners—for them an essentially alien culture, animated by quite different national, religious, as well as social and political values. As Edelman has described, it is under these conditions—in the absence of the institutional props available to them elsewhere, and in the face of the political threat posed by their simultaneous confrontation with the peasants under their rule and with this alien element in their own ranks—as well as under the stimulus and the challenge of an urban culture, in which they were now much more firmly implanted than the Russian noble landowners of other provinces—that the Russian noble landowners of Kiev province developed, however superficially, a more modern political culture and a more modern sense of party.

But elsewhere, particularly in central European Russia, the gentry provincial culture that we have described at such length appeared still firmly in place, its cohesion unmarred by such divisions of nationality, religion, or political sentiment, and its control over the countryside, through its traditional corporate organizations and organs of self-government, largely unchallenged from any quarter. Under the circumstances, Russian noble landowners did not need to develop even a bare facsimile of a more modern political culture, and one encountered even vague semblances of party sentiments and organization among them only in those rare areas of Great Russia in which nobles still appeared especially scarred by the memory of bitter divisions within their own ranks during the great upheavals of 1905–1907. (Kursk guberniia is a case in point, the only province in Great Russia in which the Union of the Russian People was still effectively functioning in 1912 with the support of the landowning nobility.) Almost everywhere else, Russian provincial landowners recoiled from such political phenomena and were content to select their representatives through the more traditional forms of politics that we have discussed.

One of the major political consequences of this more traditional and personal style of politics among the Russian provincial nobility was that it worked greatly to the benefit of the loose political association that the Union of 17 October represented in both the Third and Fourth Dumas. As the contributions of Michael Brainerd and Robert Edelman have suggested, the representation of the Octobrists—the number of Duma seats that they won in both the Third and Fourth Duma elections—vastly exceeded the extent of their actual support, or more precisely of the sense of identification with their party, among voters in the landowners’ curia. The swollen representation of the Octobrists in the Duma resulted in part from the Octobrists’ nominal position at the center of the political spectrum of the electorate (as defined and weighted under the System of the Third of June), a position that enabled Octobrist electors to coalesce at the various provincial electoral assemblies, now with the right, now with the left, depending largely on the basis of political expediency. In and of itself, this flexibility helped swell the numbers of Octobrist deputies well beyond the actual percentage of their political sympathizers among the electors at the various provincial electoral assemblies.⁵ But a more basic factor underlay the Octobrists’ successes in these elections, and indeed accounted in part precisely for the effectiveness of such political maneuvers: it was the ultimately quite loose sense of political, and especially party, identification, which we already noted among the voters and electors of the landowners’ curia who dominated the electoral process. Although we lack the evidence to demonstrate the fact statistically, there is little question in my mind that, by and large, Octobrist, or more precisely “moderate,” vyborshchiki were themselves elected to the provincial electoral assemblies in both the Third and Fourth Duma elections, as well as in contemporary elections to provincial zemstvo assemblies, in numbers far exceeding the actual proportion of supporters for this party among the voters in the landowners’ curia. In part, this was because of the relative lack of competition that generally characterized these elections, given the shrinking number of landowners with full census and the rate of political absenteeism among them (well over 40 percent).⁶ But this rate of absenteeism and the lack of political competition that it reflected, just as the number of votes that Octobrist candidates actually garnered, rested on a sense of political equanimity among noble landowners that made them willing to select their representatives on the basis of the more personal and traditional criteria that we have discussed (criteria that, by the eve of the war, stood in such glaring contrast to the more modern forms of political partisanship evident in urban Russia). It was this style of politics, and the serenity that underlay it, that accounted in good measure for the willingness of noble landowners to support Octobrist candidates, if only because they were such distinguished and honorable men.

But lest we be deceived by this bucolic picture, we need to remind ourselves that the political tolerance that the noble landowners of provincial Russia so proudly displayed even as the war approached had very stringent limits—limits that had been clearly set in the wake of Russia’s First Revolution. Most of these noble landowners might have recovered from the successive traumas that they had experienced during these years, but they had by no means forgotten them. At no point during these immediate prewar years did these Russian provincial noble landowners display the slightest willingness to vote in support of the few remaining Kadet or Kadet sympathizers in their ranks—this notwithstanding the Kadets’ years of good behavior in the Third Duma, and the deliberately moderate and responsible tone of their electoral campaign to the Fourth Duma. It would take the great turmoil of the war years, and the displays of Kadet patriotism during these years, to make a dent finally in these unforgiving attitudes.

Neither had most noble provincial landowners forgiven or forgotten their peasants’ behavior during the great upheavals of 1905–1907, and even though their peasants had now relapsed into political quiescence and by and large appeared to heed obediently the orders and injunctions of their superiors, most noble landowners were still prone to discern in their visages, if not in their words, a suppressed but still pervasive yearning for their landed estates.

Fundamentally, these Russian provincial nobles had come out of the nightmares of the Revolution of 1905 and the challenges to their position during the Stolypin era with their traditional, Janus-like, dual visage altered, but also reinforced. More than ever before, they now constituted and sought to maintain a particularistic culture in the countryside, and in the body politic as a whole. It was not merely that the more rooted provincial society that they had sought to establish by the turn of the century had emerged from Russia’s First Revolution with a more acute sense of its differences of interests and values from other groups in national life, but also that their consequent sense of social isolation was now becoming ever more profound, and their claim to exclusiveness ever more rigid, as their numbers dwindled and their economic fortunes declined.

By the same token, however, in their efforts to hold on to their tight, hermetic, if steadily contracting, provincial society, to hold the rest of the world at bay, even while persisting in their claim to rule it, they were now also more dependent than ever before on the support of the state power. They were economically dependent on the official salaries and emoluments, the subsidies and loads, that they received from the state in order to slow down, if not halt, the process of economic decline, which all but the wealthiest and most enterprising of them continued to experience, given their inability—indeed, their unwillingness—to adapt to the economic requirements of the modern age. They were politically dependent on the continued support of the state and its officials to maintain their grip over the countryside, and over the body politic as a whole. But also, and above all, they were psychologically dependent on their identification with the state, and especially with the monarch, the Gosudar, to provide the justification—the only possible justification that they could offer others, but also themselves—for their claim to continued supremacy over the Russian land.

As pomeshchiki, seeking to maintain their exclusive grip on rural Russia and to hold urban Russia at bay, they could not possibly view their interests as more than particular interests: in conflict with, or at best complementary to, those of other groups in national life. And by the same token, the only way in which they could deny the charge of soslovnost’, of caste egoism and exclusivism, that was now leveled at them, and justify their claim to rule was by reasserting, more than ever before, their historic role as servants of the state.

Indeed, we should note that as Russia continued, however slowly, to evolve into a society of classes, many of these noble landowners and their elected representatives no longer advertised themselves as a soslovie, as they sought to defend their particular identity and values, their particular way of life, in this generally moving and evolving society. It was not merely that they knew that in this society (and especially in urban Russia) the mere title of nobleman—no more than any other soslovie title—was any longer an index of what an individual did or of the way he lived, let alone of the reliability of his political attitudes and behavior. More importantly, the very term soslovie had now undergone, especially in political discourse, a fundamental change in meaning. Once, deep in the historical past, it had signified over and above all the notion of a department or compartment of the state that these nobles had served, from which they had drawn their duties and privileges, and their very sense of identity. By now, however, the term—or more precisely, its derivative, soslovnost—was coming to be widely used by their accusers and indeed by those noble landowners themselves, in the political debates in Russia’s representative institutions, but also in these nobles’ more private exchanges with officials, to suggest a particular and special interest, in conflict not only with other particular and special interests but also with the general interest, represented by the state, if not the nation.

Because of this, to distinguish in public discourse the particular society that they represented, and its particular interests, life style, and values, the spokesmen of the landed nobility now frequently used in preference to soslovie the term kulturno-bytovaia gruppa. By this term, so close in meaning to the term culture (in the modern anthropological sense), they meant in part to distinguish the values and the way of life of the island of civilization that more than ever they felt they represented in the otherwise still dark, savage, and ever potentially wild countryside. But the term also suggested a more incontrovertible reality. It was that as Russia evolved from a society of sosloviia into a class society, the Russian provincial landowning nobility had itself turned into a socioeconomic group distinguished, as we have seen, by a whole series of characteristics, which were becoming even more selective as they became manifold.

The tragedy was that precisely as a result of this ever-narrowing process of selection, the members of this kulturno-bytovaia gruppa now were—and saw themselves as—more separate than ever before from other groups, an isolated and self-isolated island in the body politic. Notwithstanding the appeals of their more modern-minded representatives—the Golitsyns, the Shidlovskys, the Meyendorffs—to induce them to develop and manifest politically a broader and more flexible sense of class, a mental gulf continued to separate them from the commercial-industrial class of the cities and towns, and indeed from many of the noble property owners who had been absorbed in urban life, the very groups whom the authors of the June 1907 coup d’état had sought to make the other, if lesser, pillar of the System of the Third of June. And, as some of the essays in this volume have shown, even in the countryside such a mental gulf continued to separate them not only from their peasants but also from the growing number of other landowners of non-nobiliar origin, with whom even some of their more conservative members urged them to combine for the promotion of common economic, if not political, interests.

As we have noted, this persistently rigid particularism of their provincial culture made these noble landowners more dependent than ever for their claim to rule on the support of the state power. As a result, when early in the Stolypin era the dominant position they occupied in the institutional framework of rural Russia was challenged by reforming bureaucrats in the debates over the new projects of local reforms, it was their symbiotic relationship with the state that the provincial marshals of nobility reasserted most powerfully in response to the charge of soslovnost’. In no way was their opposition to these projects motivated by soslovnost’—by caste egoism and exclusiveness—they asserted time and again as these debates droned on.⁷ The provincial landed nobility that they represented did constitute a kulturno-bytovaia gruppa, a distinct cultural and socioeconomic group, which it would be folly for the government to undermine, since it also constituted the only island of stability and progress in the countryside. But above all, they and the nobles for whom they spoke remained what they had always been—since the very formation of the Muscovite state—a true service class, animated solely by its sense of honor and fidelity to the interests of the state and of the monarch.

Of course, this term, service, sluzhba, on which these formidable provincial marshals elaborated in the debates, in insistent tones more reminiscent of the seventeenth and early eighteenth than of the twentieth century, now hardly corresponded to the provincial landed nobility’s actual relationship to the state power. But its reassertion in their political language, with its ancient references and allusions—to the sluzhilie liudi of the Muscovite state, if not to the slavelike slugi pod dvortsem of an even earlier age—reflected, even more than they knew, the reemergence, in the face of their isolation in the body politic, of an almost archaic sense of dependence on the state and on the monarch.

Indeed, one comes away with the impression that under the stresses of these debates, and of the changes in Russian society that they reflected, the concept of soslovie, on which the more conservative members of the Russian landed nobility had once anchored their sense of identity, had at least temporarily been split into two even more distinct, and mutually contradictory, components. To draw on an only partially far-fetched historical analogy, to the late sixteenth century and the time of Ivan the Terrible, it was as if in the visages they alternately assumed in these debates—in their assertions that they represented a kulturno-bytovaia gruppa, a particular and distinct culture deeply rooted in the Russian countryside, and yet also a service class, indistinguishable from the general interest represented by the state and the monarch—the persona, or at least the language, of these provincial marshals had undergone a deep, schizophrenic, historical regression. As if, under the impact of their collective traumas of 1905 and of the new and psychologically even more difficult challenge issued to them by the state’s reforming bureaucrats, they were seeking to enact the ghosts of a zemshchina and oprichnina, to represent phantom boiars and oprichniki, at one and the same time.

Even when the pressure that they were under was removed and relative complacency restored in their ranks, neither of the basic psychological features of the Russian landowning nobility that these debates had so glaringly brought out—its particularism in the body politic and the obverse side of this particularism, its dependence on, and identification with, the state and the monarch—was conducive to firm attitudes about representative, let alone constitutional, government.

By 1912 the typical Russian pomeshchik could pride himself on being autonomous and nonpartisan, but he could hardly be induced to follow those who called on him, in the name of his ostensible common interests with other groups in the body politic, to engage in a true constitutionalist confrontation with state power: he could not do so, because he could not afford to. And this is what the leaders of the Union of 17 October, or more precisely the constitutionalist Left Octobrists in their midst, ultimately discovered, much to their sorrow. We suggested earlier in this discussion that the diffuse character of the Union of 17 October, and the even more diffuse nature of its political support among Russian provincial noble landowners, enabled the Octobrist party to win far more votes in the elections to the Third and even the Fourth Duma than was warranted by the degree of actual identification among the landowning nobility with the “principles” that Octobrist, especially Left Octobrist, leaders espoused within the walls of the Taurus Palace. As Michael Brainerd has suggested in his contribution to this volume, this diffuseness ultimately proved to be a fatal source of political weakness for the Octobrist party. During the Third Duma period, this political weakness was partially contained by Guchkov’s device of keeping the deputies of the Octobrist parliamentary faction as insulated as possible from their constituents. But when, in the fall and winter of 1913-14, the moment of truth came—in the face of the political and social crisis boiling up in urban Russia—and the leaders of the Union of 17 October finally steeled themselves to assume a posture of “declarative” opposition to the state power, these party activists proved to be leaders without followers. The party split at the seams, and only twenty-two out of one hundred Octobrist deputies joined the ranks of the Duma opposition. The vast majority of the remaining Octobrist deputies, who eventually formed a new parliamentary group of zemstvo Octobrists, as well as the few who were recruited into the even more conservative center party, probably acted in accord with their own feelings, but more importantly with those of their constituents.

Even at this critical moment, most of these constituents undoubtedly did not feel the gravity of the political crisis from which their representatives had not recoiled. For even by 1914 most Russian provincial noble landowners continued to be confirmed in their political equanimity by all the dimensions of their immediate experience, and the bounds of their political culture remained sufficiently hermetic to make urban Russia seem far away.

A crucial source of this sense of equanimity that these pomeshchiki preserved, even as the roof was about to fall upon them, was, of course, the political passivity of their peasants. In his analysis of voting patterns in the peasant curia in the elections to the Fourth Duma, Eugene Vinogradoff has laid great emphasis on the massive political apathy that Russian peasants displayed during these elections in most provinces of European Russia. The picture he has drawn of those strata of the Russian peasantry that he has categorized as “estate peasants” is generally congruent with official reports on the Fourth Duma elections, including the detailed accounts submitted to the Ministry of Internal Affairs by the various provincial governors and their subordinates about the successive stages of the electoral process in the peasant curia.⁸

These official reports almost invariably stressed the massive indifference that most Russian peasants, especially in Great Russia, were now displaying toward political parties and the very institution of the State Duma. Indeed, they usually noted that the only members of the peasants’ district and county assemblies who evidenced the slightest interest in the electoral process were those who wanted to get elected to the Duma—if only because of the big zhalovanie, the substantial financial emolument that Duma deputies received. Under the circumstances, most if not all of the peasant electors who attended the provincial electoral assemblies sought to advance their own candidacies to the Duma. And in the ensuing scramble, few of the peasant deputies of the Third Duma were reelected, since—by the standards of peasant justice—these incumbents had already had their chance to feed at the public trough. “Ony dostatochno zhraly”; it was time to give others a chance.⁹

Finally, official reports generally concur with Vinogradoff’s observation that this plethora of peasant candidates was by and large all too willing to assume the conservative (or on occasion, “moderate” Octobrist) political garb most likely to promote their chances for support among the electors of the landowning gentry and of the clergy—in whose hands their individual fortunes usually rested. The only deviation from this pattern allegedly occurred in those instances when peasant electors found it more expedient to promote their personal ambitions by aligning themselves with opposition electors from other curiae (generally when the electors of the landowners’ curia split into rival factions, and for this reason lost control of the proceedings of the provincial electoral assemblies).

This is the picture usually drawn in the various official reports of peasant political behavior in the Fourth Duma elections, and it is generally in accord with available statistical data, including the rough correlation that it suggests between the distribution of “rightist” and “moderate” peasant electors in different provinces of Great Russia and the political distribution in these same areas of their actual or potential patrons among the nobles and clergymen of the landowners’ curia.

What is far more difficult to establish, it seems to me, is the relative importance we should assign to the variety of factors that may have underlain these patterns of political behavior. Specifically to be weighed in the balance is the relative significance of the political conditions under which peasants had to vote by the time of the Fourth Duma elections, including the various alterations that had been imposed in the electoral system, as against that of some of the more enduring features of peasant attitudes and political culture. Obviously, to draw even the most tentative impression of the relative significance of these two sets of factors, one has to survey the political behavior of the Russian peasantry over a much longer time period than Vinogradoff was able to use in his article—a period that ideally should stretch from the agrarian disorders of Russia’s First Revolution and the elections to the first two Dumas through the elections to the Constituent Assembly in the fall of 1917.

From this much broader time perspective, I feel most comfortable with the ideal type of political culture of “estate peasants” that Vinogradoff has drawn, as well as with the explanatory scheme that, however tentatively, he has presented to account for it, with respect to one particular group of the Russian peasantry of the empire, that of the peasants of the Central Agricultural Region, especially in those areas of this region most removed from urban centers. It is these areas of the C.A.R., of course, which, more than any others in the empire, maintained into the twentieth century the combination of objective characteristics that Vinogradoff and others have emphasized in their analyses of the traditional agrarian system of the Russian peasantry: communal tenure, a three-field agrarian system relatively unmodified by the influence of a market economy, a growing land pressure aggravated by the deterioration of the land as well as by the absence of the safety valve of opportunities for urban and industrial employment, and finally, what is perhaps most important from a social and political point of view, the almost total isolation of peasant communities from urban, commercial, industrial centers, and indeed from one other. The evidence appears to me overwhelming that in these isolated and overpopulated areas of the C.A.R., the members of peasant communes displayed both in the agrarian disorders of 1905–1907 and in the elections to the first two Dumas the single-minded preoccupation with the land question, and particularly with the repartition of noble estates, which Vinogradoff has so strongly emphasized as an explanatory principle for peasant political behavior. The available data clearly suggest that in these areas the agrarian disorders of 1905–1907 were almost exclusively against noble estates; and especially at the occupation of the meadow and forest lands of these estates, of which the peasants of C.A.R., under the pressures of their three-field system, were by this time so grievously short. And it also appears that in the seizure of these gentry lands, individual peasant communities in this region often acted not only in isolation from, but even in competition with, one another.¹⁰

Vinogradoff also seems to me on very firm ground in his insistence that in both the First and Second Duma elections, the peasant electorate of these areas displayed above all the same insistent concern with the land question. In the First Duma elections, they selected a great many provincial electors and eventually peasant deputies who were originally unaffiliated with any political parties. Many of these nonparty deputies eventually joined the new trudovik parliamentary group, which was formed after the First Duma convened; some of them did not. But whether they did or not, almost all of these peasant deputies displayed throughout the deliberations of the First Duma a single-minded preoccupation with the expropriation of gentry lands. In the elections to the Second Duma, this pattern changed only superficially. The peasants of the C.A.R. now elected a far more substantial number of electors and deputies who were formally affiliated with political parties and parliamentary groups: trudoviki, but also narodnye sotsia-listy, and even SR’s; but in the nakazy, the cahiers that they issued for their guidance, they often gave these peasant deputies the specific instructions that they should not allow themselves to be diverted in the Duma’s deliberations by “extraneous” political issues, and that they dare not come back to them without a land settlement in hand.¹¹

In these respects, as we shall see, the political behavior of the peasants in the C.A.R. was distinctive from that of other peasants, in degree if not in kind. Yet we should note that even the voters of some of the more remote peasant communities of the C.A.R. also displayed, in the first two Duma elections, certain patterns of political behavior more congruent with those of peasants in less isolated areas. The first of these was a remarkably high degree of political cohesion in at least one fundamental respect: that of seeking to elect to the Duma as many representatives as possible of their own estate, and of rejecting in this process the candidacies of noble landowners, almost irrespective of the latter’s political affiliation, or even presumed sympathies for the peasant estate. To be sure, a number of noble Kadet landowners were elected to the First Duma with the support of peasant votes. But it is my impression that, more often than not, they won this peasant support not by their liberal stand, even on the land question, but by engaging in coalition politics with peasant electors, which guaranteed the peasants, when they needed this reassurance, a generous quota of Duma seats.¹²

The second pattern of political behavior that the peasants of the C.A.R. displayed in common with those of other areas was often to bring—or more precisely, to allow to come—to the fore the most politically sophisticated members of their own peasant estate; those who, in one fashion or another, had been more exposed to the breezes of a larger political culture and environment: members of their peasant intelligentsia (village teachers, bookkeepers, statisticians, doctors’ assistants, and the like); also peasants who had worked in cities, or in industry, or who had been in the army; and above all, peasants who were among the most literate members of their communities, and who were therefore assumed to be best able to cope with the strange outer world that they would now have to face.

To be sure, in the First and even the Second Duma elections, the peasants of the C.A.R. also selected from their ranks, as electors and eventually deputies, a good many representatives who were far more typical of the average “grey” (serye) peasants of the area. In part, the election of such “greys” was often motivated by attitudes we already noted in connection with the Third and Fourth Duma elections—the greed and mutual jealousies of peasant electors competing for the salaries attached to Duma seats and ultimately settling, because of their mutual jealousies, on such lackluster representatives. On occasion, however, this betting on the “greys” apparently derived from the rationale that they were more likely to remain faithful to the basic concerns of the average peasants—less likely to be deflected by the rhetoric of the “gentlemen,” the gospoda, from the goal of obtaining their lands for the peasant estate.¹³

Yet the fact remains that in both the First and Second Duma elections, peasants of the C.A.R., under the spur of the quite different rationale that I outlined earlier, also selected, in disproportionate numbers, more sophisticated and literate spokesmen, many of them unusually young for such hitherto tradition-bound communities. In some areas of the C.A.R., interestingly enough, this phenomenon was more characteristic of peasant behavior in the initial, rather than the later, phases of these peasant communities’ political revolt and mobilization against the gospoda—pomeshchik masters and officials alike—but presumably also against the traditional hierarchies of their peasant communities, which these gospoda had supported and controlled. (Tambov, one of the most disturbed provinces of the C.A.R., provided a striking example of this phenomenon in the period of agrarian disorders of 1905–1907—in which young peasants played an unusually prominent role—and also in the First Duma elections, only to revert by the time of the Second Duma elections to the leadership of older and more traditional representatives of its peasant communities.)¹⁴

The pattern of selecting more sophisticated and literate representatives was more sharply characteristic, especially in the Second Duma elections, of peasants in regions of European Russia outside the C.A.R.: the Lake region, certain provinces of the C.I.R. and Little Russia; and especially New Russia, the Central and Lower Volga, and the Urals. As has often been noted, this made for a group of peasant deputies in the Second Duma that on the average was remarkably young, and included an equally remarkable proportion of representatives from the peasant intelligentsia: zemstvo and village clerks, statisticians, veterinarians, occasional journalists, and especially school teachers. (And to the best that one can determine, this pattern appears to have been characteristic, if to a lesser degree, of the earlier, just as of the later, stages of the elections in the peasant curia.)¹⁵

However, in both the First and Second Duma elections, there were some notable differences between the political behavior of the peasants of these other areas of the empire and those of the C.A.R. In many of these other areas, peasant voters, or at least peasant electors, appeared animated by a concern over a much broader range of political issues than just the land question—even if, admittedly, these other issues remain largely identified in their minds with the specific interests of the peasant estate: a concern for the elimination of all legal discriminations against peasants; for a more equitable tax system; for the democratization of organs of local self-government; and especially for the abolition of the position of the hated Land Captains (zemskie nachal’niki), who hovered over these peasants’ daily lives and the functioning of their institutions. And in some cases, peasant electors outside the C.A.R. even displayed an interest in such broad national issues as the abolition of the State Council and establishment of a unicameral legislature—elected by four-tail suffrage and endowed with full powers—which would at last give the peasants a voice in the body politic equal to that of other estates (Tver province is a striking case in point, even in the First Duma elections).

In some areas of the country, especially the Volga and the Urals, this broader range of political concerns among Russian peasants was even reflected in a sense (albeit a tenuous one) of identification with such political formations as the Peasant Union and the P.S.R. In others, it created some programmatic grounds for peasants to engage in coalition politics, at their various provincial electoral assemblies, with oppositionally minded electors from other estates (especially from the urban curiae) animated by similar if not identical concerns. (I emphasize this term “coalition politics,” rather than a full sense of identification with national parties and their platforms for society as a whole, as generally characteristic of the degree of involvement of Russian peasants in national politics, even during this period.)

Finally, it does not appear to me by any means clear that in those areas of European Russia in which peasants had by this time accumulated especially significant holdings in private tenure, and where, by the same token, landownership and especially management of their estates by nobles had undergone an especially precipitous decline, differences in economic interests among Russian peasants did not in fact surface, at least in some degree, in what Vinogradoff has termed “class” patterns of political behavior. (However sparse and hard to extricate from the electoral returns, the available evidence suggests that certain areas of the C.I.R., especially Kostroma and Tver provinces, deserve further investigation on this point.)

The coup d’état of June 1907—the arbitrary dissolution of the Second Duma; the restoration of order, often achieved by brute force; the substitution for any form of expropriation of gentry lands of the Stolypin land legislation; and last but not least, the imposition of the various changes incorporated by fiat in the new electoral law—did bring, almost immediately, to many, if not most, Russian peasants the realization that the new Duma elections, called for the fall of 1907, would inevitably return a legislature dominated by pomeshchiki from whom little attention, and even fewer concessions to the interests of the peasant estate could be expected.

Even so, when one scrutinizes carefully the returns from the peasant curia available on the Third Duma elections, it is notable (especially from the official statistics available about peasant provincial electors) that the traces of the peculiar brand of political activism and radicalism that peasant voters had displayed in the first two Duma elections had, even by this time, by no means been erased.¹⁶

Admittedly, the opposition political leanings that official statistics still attributed to many peasant electors in Great, Little, and New Russia were not usually reflected in the profiles of the peasant deputies ultimately selected from these areas, except in the Urals, where peasants were still able to combine forces, even in the Third Duma elections, with the subversive electors whom the clergy of the area continued to bring forth in the landowners’ curia. But this very qualification suggests that the general absence of opposition deputies from the peasant curia in most provinces of European Russia was mainly dictated by the new balance of forces that the electoral law of June 1907 had created in the various provincial electoral assemblies concerned—a balance that made it practically impossible to mobilize at these assemblies the support from other curiae needed to elect peasant candidates identified with the opposition. Given the new electoral law, the only circumstance under which such opposition peasant deputies could have been elected (at least to the curial seats still reserved for the peasantry) would have been, as Vinogradoff has noted, for all the peasant electors in attendance at these assemblies to display monolithic unity. Such behavior was admittedly absent among peasant electors (in contrast to the quite extraordinary degree of unity and fidelity that electors of the workers’ curia usually displayed to each other and to their workers’ party). But the fact remains that it was not until the elections to the Fourth Duma that the traces of peasant radicalism in the voting behavior of the curia of the communal peasantry were largely eliminated.

Given these facts, in accounting for the major changes in peasant voting behavior between the First, Second, and even Third Duma elections, and those to the Fourth Duma, I would assign very considerable importance to the various formal and informal restrictions and pressures that the regime inflicted on the Russian peasantry in the intervening years to achieve their political subdual. Vinogradoff has summarized quite adequately the various changes that the electoral law of June 1907 imposed on the character of the peasant electorate and on its role in the electoral process. But let us consider more fully the political implications of these changes in light of the political experience of the first two Duma elections.

We should first take note of the political effect of the restriction of the suffrage among voters in the peasant curia to heads of households, in possession of, and permanently involved in the cultivation of, allotment lands—a provision that had already been officially established on the eve of the Second Duma elections but that was not fully and systematically applied by local officials until the Third and especially the Fourth Duma elections. This restriction of the suffrage virtually eliminated from participation in the electoral process precisely those elements of the peasant estate which, as we have seen, had played the most prominent part in the first two Duma elections in the mobilization and especially the articulation of radical tendencies in the peasant curia: the peasant intelligentsia; peasants whose life experience outside the village had subjected them to the subversive political influence of life and work in urban and industrial centers; and last but not least, the younger and more literate strata of the peasant population.

The new electoral law also eliminated, it will be recalled, the requirement that members of the volostnyé skhody (the peasant district assemblies) themselves be elected anew in the first stage of Duma elections in the peasant curia. Again, we should note that this requirement had already been dropped on the eve of the Third Duma elections, but it seems altogether likely that the full effect of this change was not felt until the elections to the Fourth Duma. By that time, local authorities (especially the ever watchful Land Captains, whose charge it was to preside over these assemblies at election time) had had ample opportunity, over a five-year period, to seek to eliminate from the membership of these assemblies any peasant representatives whom they considered in the least politically unreliable or suspect. (It is partly for this reason, I think, that the proportion of peasants with official posts selected by these peasants’ district assemblies to represent them was even greater in the Fourth than in the Third Duma elections.)

Finally, the most important effect of the new electoral law was undoubtedly the direct, as well as indirect, impact (on the peasants’ political morale) of the dramatic reallocation of provincial electors, imposed upon the peasant and landowners’ curiae. It will be recalled that this reallocation of political power was especially drastic in precisely those provinces in which the peasants had dominated the transactions of the provincial electoral assemblies in the first two Duma elections and had exercised this domination most fully for the purpose of electing peasant deputies animated by radical sentiments, at least on the land question. Given the almost universally conservative complexion of the provincial electors selected by the landowners’ curia in both the Third and Fourth Duma elections (whether nobles or priests), as well as the sprinkling of conservative electors that could still be collected in the urban curiae of most provinces, the possibility for peasant electors to elect opposition deputies by forming coalitions at the provincial electoral assemblies with opposition-minded electors from other curiae was, by this time, drastically reduced if not altogether eliminated. By and large, in the Fourth Duma elections such opportunities arose, at least in Great Russia, only in those relatively rare instances where Russian noble landowners split into bitterly divided rival factions, usually, as we have seen, on the basis of individual and group loyalties rather than broader political grounds. And in these relatively rare instances, peasant electors did, more often than not, exploit such opportunities for maneuver, when they arose, at least to elect a larger number of deputies from their own ranks.

As this illustration suggests, for the political controls over peasant political behavior to be maximally effective presupposed a number of political conditions. It required, in the first place, that noble landowners be present in adequate numbers on their estates to maintain a firm hold over peasant life. It also presupposed that this impact not be contained or diluted by differences of nationality or religion among these noble landowners, or between them, local officials, and the local Orthodox church hierarchy. Last but not least, it presupposed the absence of such religious and/or national barriers between these various figures of authority and the peasants whom they sought to control.

To be sure, even in the partial absence of these conditions, in the west and southwest, for example, Russian local officials and noble landowners did succeed—with a major assist of the local Orthodox clergy—in rallying the Russian peasants of their localities against both Polish landowners and the predominantly Jewish opposition voters of local cities and towns, but they managed to do so only on significantly different political terms. Specifically, the peasants of these areas, especially those of the southwest, managed to elect from their own ranks a much greater proportion of the at-large deputies assigned to their provinces than was the case in the rest of European Russia, and in many instances these at-large peasant deputies appear to have had notably different social as well as political profiles from those deputies elected in Great Russia.¹⁷

This last illustration about the Fourth Duma elections in the peasant curia brings me to the broad and vexing question of the relative weight to be assigned in these changing and varying patterns of peasant voting behavior (when we consider them in the perspective of the elections to all four Dumas) to the more basic and enduring features of the attitudes of Russian peasants toward the political process, the party system, and the very concept of political representation.

In his contribution to this volume, Vinogradoff has laid great emphasis on the differences in political culture to be observed between the peasants of the Baltic provinces (especially those of Lifland and Estland) and the Russian peasantry, even in those areas populated by Russian peasants that he had singled out as exceptional (such as Siberia and the north). The available evidence suggests that the contrast is indeed dramatic, and I would even extend this contrast in political attitudes and behavior to non-Russian peasants of other border regions of the empire such as Poles, Lithuanians, Georgians, and the like. What we witness in most of these border areas after 1905 is the emergence of political parties that, to a considerable degree, appear to transcend the mental barriers between city and country—whether on the basis of a sense of common cultural, if not national, identity between rural and urban voters; of perceived common socioeconomic interests among certain categories of these voters; or more usually, of a subtle and complex combination of the two. And the peasants who vote for these more truly national parties do indeed appear to develop a far firmer sense of identification with them (with their programs and platforms, as well as with their candidates) than is generally characteristic of Russian peasants.¹⁸

One should, however, be wary of attributing these dramatic contrasts in political behavior solely to differences in the nature of agrarian systems. It appears obvious to me that differences of nationality and religion, exacerbated by the discriminations that the Regime of the Third of June imposed on national minorities, greatly contributed to the differences in political behavior between non-Russian and Russian peasants, as well as to the capacity of the parties that emerged among the national minorities of the empire to transcend at least some of the cultural boundaries between city and country.

This is not entirely to dismiss the political significance of differences in agrarian systems between these border areas of the empire and Great Russia in the development among their peasants of more modern political cultures. To the degree that the agrarian systems in existence in these border areas did contribute to the emergence of stable patterns of economic differentiation among the local peasantry, and especially to the development of closer market relations between city and country, they undoubtedly provided a major stimulus to the mutual integration of their urban and rural political cultures and, by the same token, to the emergence among their peasants of more modern forms of political consciousness.

Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that, at least to a limited degree, the same phenomenon also occurred among Russian peasants. As Vinogradoff has noted in his Ph.D. dissertation, Russian peasants in close proximity to major metropolitan centers such as St. Petersburg and Moscow, who in many cases engaged in more complex forms of multicrop agriculture (or handicrafts) for the large urban markets within their reach, appear to have displayed in both the Third and Fourth Duma elections some sense of connection with the voters, the electors, and even the parties of the urban, oppositionally minded curiae with whom their economic lives brought them into contact.

It was precisely such a sense of identification with national parties, and the prerequisite for it—a sense of community of interests and values with other groups in society—that was so lacking among the vast majority of other Russian peasants. What these peasants expected of political parties, and of the institutions in which these parties sought representation (even in those areas in which peasants had them identified in their minds) was, above all, that these parties should satisfy the interests and aspirations of the peasant estate. And when political parties as well as the national representative institutions in which they competed were unwilling, or unable, to satisfy these peasant concerns, the interest in them on the part of most Russian peasants dramatically waned.

This political particularism, and the sense of—if not the preference for—psychological isolation from other social groups, to which so many aspects of their life continued to contribute even by the eve of the war, would maintain a persistent psychological grip over the political attitudes and behavior of much of the Russian peasantry well beyond the period of Russian history that we are considering in this volume.

The one-day proceedings of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, themselves the product of the freest elections ever held in the Russian land, offer us a striking example of the persistence of this particularistic mentality. As will be recalled, by the time the Assembly met in January 1918, all the political parties and factions represented in it—including the by then warring factions of the left and right SR’s—were maneuvering to find the most suitable grounds on which to join their now irreconcilable conflict. Yet, well into the proceedings of this single if interminable session, well after the leaders of the left SR’s, just as the Bolsheviks, had already irrevocably decided to leave the Assembly demonstratively, one witnesses the spectacle of a peasant spokesman of the left SR’s (Sorokin) climbing to the rostrum to read the belligerent and adamant official statement of his party, only to conclude “with a few words of [his] own,” reminding his fellow peasant deputies that “many millions of peasants have sent us here to gain for them ‘land and freedom,’ ” and calling on them, regardless of faction, not to disperse without having passed legislation on the land question.¹⁹

This personal statement, which was greeted with dismay by the leaders of Sorokin’s own party—and with cheers and applause by their opponents in the center and right rows of the Taurus Palace—is a particularly telling example of the stubborn political particularism that, even at this late date, the Russian peasantry continued to display. And as the example also suggests, this particularism made—even under these most critical and dramatic of circumstances—for a most tenuous sense of identification with the political parties that competed for the support of the Russian peasantry, including those parties which these peasants had favored with their votes.

Even the peasants of northern Russia and Siberia, whom Vinogradoff has singled out for our attention, were not immune to this political particularism. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, these peasants, like those of so many other regions outside the C.I.R., voted overwhelmingly for the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries—the party that had always idealized them, and to which, in however more modulated a fashion, they now returned the compliment. But after the Assembly was dissolved, and the Bolsheviks, with their decree on the land, stole the SRs’ thunder away from them, the peasants of Siberia and northern Russia displayed as little zeal as those of the Urals and the Volga to give any effective support to the PSR, now that they had achieved possession of the land. They failed to do so even in eastern Russia during the period of the SR-dominated Directory, and indeed most of them remained largely bystanders in the civil war that eventually raged over the whole Russian land, except when the warring factions in this bitter and drawn-out conflict interfered directly with the pattern of their immediate existence.

To return to our immediate concerns, the psychological isolation of the Russian peasantry from other groups in the body politic unquestionably made them more vulnerable—once political order was restored after the great turmoils of 1905–1907—to the political restrictions, pressures, and alterations in the rules of the political game to which they were subjected by the Regime of the Third of June. Yet, as I have indicated, it would be erroneous to regard these Russian peasants, even during the years of reaction, as relapsing into political apathy simply by virtue of the features of their political culture that we have discussed, and regardless of the political conditions to which they were immediately subjected, regardless of the specific political framework within which they had to operate, and of the opportunities, or lack of opportunities, that this particular framework afforded them to promote their individual and group interests.

For example, Vinogradoff has drawn our attention to the fact that even in the elections to the Fourth Duma, some Russian peasants, specifically those of Arkhangel and Siberia, displayed significantly different political behavior from most other Russian peasants, and indeed selected even at this time peasant provincial electors and deputies who eventually lined up with opposition parties. What appears to me most distinctive and politically significant about these areas was the total absence in them of a landowners’ curia, as well as the presence in their urban curiae of a significant number of oppositionally minded electors. By virute of this combination of circumstances, the Russian peasants of Arkhangel and Siberia, unlike those in other provinces, still had, even in the Fourth Duma elections, a genuine opportunity to engage successfully in coalition politics with voters and electors of other curiae to select candidates of their own choosing. Many of these peasant candidates and electors may have been radicalized in the course of the electoral process by their partners in these politics of coalition, but the more basic point, it seems to me, is that they were free to develop these radical tendencies, and still have the opportunity to get elected, under the specific political conditions obtaining at their respective provincial electoral assemblies. Under the new electoral system, Russian peasants in other areas (with the partial exception of the west and southwest) substantially lacked this objective possibility to engage successfully in coalition politics²⁰—to select representatives who would be free to articulate the interests of their own estate.

This last point brings me back to one of our major emphases at the opening of this discussion: the degree to which the electoral system established after the coup d’état of June 1907 rested on the domination of the body politic by a now overwhelmingly conservative landowners’ curia—a political stranglehold that Russian pomeshchiki holding full census in this curia were usually able to maintain by their own resources, but when necessary, with a vigorous assist by representatives of the Orthodox clergy.

As I suggested earlier, the centrality of the political role exercised in the System of the Third of June by this remarkably small, if cohesive, group of Russian society becomes even more apparent when we stretch our vision beyond the electoral system governing Duma elections to a view of the functioning of the political system as a whole: when we observe the even tighter grip that this group maintained over the reorganized State Council through their elected representatives as well as many of the Council’s appointed members; when we consider the additional pressures that they were able to exercise on the Court and the government through their now much better organized formal and informal corporate organizations, including the United Nobility (pressures that proved especially formidable in such organs as the Council of Local Economy). And our sense of the formidable political clout of these thirty-odd-thousand families is even further reinforced when we shift our gaze from the national scene to the vast stretches of the Russian countryside: to its organs of local self-government, in which, as Manning has reminded us, their domination appeared by the eve of the war, secure and even unchallenged by a now seemingly apathetic peasantry; to the whole structure of local bureaucratic administration, from the county level down to the village, which, now that these nobles had successfully resisted Stolypin’s projects of local reforms, they appeared to dominate with equal ease through their county marshals and their various local agents. And our sense of the power of these noble landowners is even further magnified when we consider the variety of informal socioeconomic as well as political pressures and controls that they were still able to apply, individually and collectively, to the peasants who leased or worked their lands, and to the peasant representatives who were elected or appointed to administer peasant affairs.

It bears repeating that the political culture of the noble Russian landowners that we have sought to describe emerged from the travails of 1905 more powerful, as well as more sophisticated, than ever before. Indeed, by the eve of the war, the tsarist regime appeared more dependent on the Russian landed nobility, and the Russian landed nobility, in turn, more dependent on the state—their respective political fates appeared more inextricably joined—than at any time since the Pugachev Rebellion of the late eighteenth century, which had so frightened Catherine and her nobles.

Both sides in this union remained true to each other almost to the last. It was not until very late, until the fall and winter of 1916, and only under the pressure of military defeats, pervasive if false rumors of treason, as well as total incompetence in the highest offices of the land, that most of the member organizations of the United Nobility (to cite an admittedly extreme example) finally turned against the government and their own leadership and sided with the Progressive bloc. But while the support among the Russian landed nobility for the Regime of the Third of June still seemed secure and unwavering on the eve of the war, even as discontent and turmoil were surfacing in almost all of urban-commercial-industrial Russia, this base of political support was, of course, extraordinarily narrow and fragile, making it extremely difficult for the regime to adapt to, and ultimately cope with, the pressures for political and social change from that other—new, growing, and more dynamic—Russia.

It was not merely that the political base of the System of the Third of June only consisted of the thirty thousand families of Russian noble landowners on which we have focused attention. Or even that these families were in fact playing in the country’s economic, social, and cultural development a role of steadily decreasing importance. Even more glaring was the fact that, quite literally, the socioeconomic and political culture of which these families were members—the culture that now supported the whole existing political and administrative structure of the country—was well on its way to physical extinction.

With every passing month, as more of them sold their estates and moved to the city or to other occupations, there were less and less members of this group available to vote in their county assemblies, in numbers sufficient even to fill the number of electoral seats allocated to their curia; less of them to participate in the affairs of local self-government, supervise local administration, and keep a watchful eye over the peasantry.

Even the government had been aware of this during the premierships of Witte and Stolypin, and this realization on its part had provided one of the major spurs for the efforts to reform local administration, which have repeatedly been referred to in this volume. Indeed, a number of these reforming bureaucrats had come fully to the realization, which they expressed at times with considerable eloquence, that the old society of sosloviia was inextricably dying even before their eyes, and that a new and different society of classes was now growing even in the Russian countryside. In their statements to the Duma and eventually to the Council of Local Economy, these bureaucrats had urged that the census requirements for participation in local organs of self-government be modified to allow more room in local affairs for representatives of the commercial-industrial class, or at the very least (when they were forced to retreat under fire) for non-noble land proprietors. They had pleaded, in this connection, that at least some account be taken of economic realities: that census requirements, for example, be calculated on the basis of the profitability—the market value rather than the sheer size—of landed estates. They had pressed simultaneously for the extension, at long last in Russian history, of the facsimile of a modern bureaucratic system to the localities—to the county if not the district level—and had called, in this connection, for the replacement, as the administrative heads of the counties, of the county marshals of nobility by appointed officials (uezdnye nachal’niki), directly accountable to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But at every step along the way, during both the Witte and Stolypin eras, these reforming bureaucrats had run into the ultimately immovable resistance of the corporate organizations of the Russian landed nobility, headed by their formidable provincial marshals.

In these confrontations, especially in the Council of Local Economy, the spokesmen of the landed nobility had unleashed, usually with considerable skill and eloquence, a veritable torrent of rhetoric—appealing alternatively to sentiment, to fear, and even to sweet reason:²¹ the reforms for which the government was calling were unnecessary, ill-conceived, or at least premature—given the period of turmoil from which the country had now barely emerged. The government was proposing to impose the likes of French prefects upon the aged heads of its faithful nobility, and generally to treat them like Frenchmen. If only in the light of the Russian nobility’s long tradition of honorable service to their sovereign and to the state, they did not deserve this humiliation. Besides, even if reform was indicated, the government should not seek to impose it from above, in the way that the French had periodically done, with political and social consequences that had been demonstrated all too dramatically in the course of France’s strifetorn historical experience. Rather, Russia should follow the historical example of Britain, where local government had evolved as a result of an organic process: slowly, peacefully, harmoniously. Finally, what is most important, as we have noted, is that these spokesmen of the landed nobility had vehemently rejected the charge that in their administration of the Russian countryside, and in their objections to the changes now being proposed, they were animated by any narrow and selfish caste considerations.

As they found themselves increasingly pressed against the wall, the government’s spokesmen feebly responded to these harangues that all that the marshals of nobility were arguing might well be true, but that already at this moment there were too few noble landowners available to discharge their various responsibilities—too few of them even to provide suitable candidates for the positions of county marshals, which they so zealously sought to guard—and that with every passing year, the scarcity of their numbers was leaving at the base of Russia’s administrative system a greater and greater vacuum.

It was at this point in these interminable and repetitious colloquies (in the committee discussions of the Council on Local Economy, as well as at the plenary sessions devoted to this issue) that the speeches of some of these provincial marshals clearly sounded their most sincere, if not most eloquent, notes. It was unfortunately true, some of them acknowledged, that with the passage of time there were indeed less and less of them to fill their charge, and possibly even true that the days of the culture that they represented were now numbered. But even if this were so, the government owed it to them, because of their past services to the monarch and to the state, to allow their culture to die a natural death, and not to bury it, as it was now seeking to do, by administrative fiat.

As we have seen, the provincial marshals largely got their way. Almost all the vast projects of local reform were allowed to die. And indeed, after the death of Stolypin, no more challenges to the power that they insisted on maintaining to the very last would effectively be mobilized until the Revolution. Their grip and that of their constituents over the administration and politics of the countryside now appeared secure and unchallenged, and through it their stranglehold over the body politic as a whole. But precisely because of this fact, the basic contradictions that were now all too apparent between city and country—between the increasingly restless, if divided, constituent groups of the new and growing political cultures of urban, commercial, industrial Russia and those of the still largely tranquil countryside—were allowed to build up to an explosive point, with no outlet really available for their peaceful resolution.

And by the same token, it was this fundamental cleavage in political cultures between rural and urban Russia—along with the growing social and political conflicts within urban Russia itself—that made for the torturously slow and halting character of the second Russian prerevolution, for the full dimensions of the crisis that Russian liberalism experienced as this prerevolution painfully unfolded, and ultimately for the acuteness of the convulsions that would afflict the Russian body politic in 1917 and its Civil War aftermath.

NOTES

1. See particularly Marc Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility, New York, 1966.

2. See “Country Gentlemen in Parliament, 1756-84,” in Sir Lewis Namier, Crossroads of Power, New York, 1962.

3. For a most recent and authoritative treatment of this problem, focusing particularly on the Tver nobility, see Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, Cambridge, England, 1968.

4. Particularly the reports submitted by, and under the direction of, the various provincial governors to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, deposited in TSGIA, fond 1327, opis 2.

5. On the eve of the convocation of the Third Duma, 110 of the elected Duma deputies described themselves as Octobrists (24.9 percent of the total), and 29 as “moderates” (6.6 percent); altogether, 31.5 percent of the Duma’s membership. After the Duma was convoked, 155 (35.1 percent) joined the parliamentary fraction of the Gruppa Soiuza 17 Oktiabria i primykaiushchikh. By comparison, the number of provincial electors categorized as “moderates” by the Electoral Commission (the label usually applied to Octobrists and Octobrist sympathizers) was 1,046, or 20 percent of the total of 5,150 provincial electors in the 51 provinces of European Russia. In the landowners’ curia, as we have seen, the number of electors classified as “moderates” was 585, or 23 percent of the total of 2,542 electors allocated to this curia in these 51 provinces. See M. V. D. (Ministerstvo vnu-trennykh del), Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu Tret’ego Sozyva. Statisti-cheskii otchet Osobogo Deloproizvodstvo, St. Petersburg, 1911.

6. See note 13 to the introduction of this volume.

7. The records of the discussions of the various commissions and plenary sessions of the Council of Local Economy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs are deposited in TSGIA, fond 1288. The most revealing and eloquent debates about the position of the landed nobility, and the general issue of soslovie organization, are those that unfolded in 1908–1909 over the government’s project for reform of county administration (uezdnoe upravlenie), and in particular, over the proposal to replace, as heads of the administrative apparatus of the counties, the county marshals of nobility by uezdnye nachal’niki, bureaucratic officials appointed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

8. These detailed reports, for each province of the empire, are in TSGIA, fond 1327, opis 2.

9. We should note parenthetically that this massive peasant indifference was not reflected in the contemporary percentage of voter absenteeism in the peasant curia. The district assemblies (volostnye skhodi) to which the electorate of the peasant curia had been confined since the Third Duma elections, and which by the time of the elections of the Fourth Duma, consisted even more overwhelmingly than ever before of peasant-elected officials (village and especially district elders, chairmen of peasant district courts, peasant members of Land Consolidation Commissions, and the like) duly met in most cases, if only in response to the injunctions of their members’bureaucratic superiors. (In the Third Duma elections, the rate of attendance at these district assemblies in the 51 provinces of European Russia was officially reported as 65 percent, 972,639 out of 1,494,751. In the Fourth Duma elections, for which we lack adequate figures, it was probably even higher.) For the Third Duma election figures, see M. V. D., op. cit., p.100.

10. The best survey of the agrarian disorders of 1905–1906 is still the study conducted by the Free Economic Society, on the basis of questionnaires sent out in 1907 to various local institutions and individual correspondents. See III Otdelenie Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva, Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii 1905–1906 gg., Ottisk iz trudov I. V. E. Obshchestva, St. Petersburg, 1908.

11. The more recent Soviet publications that scrutinize the mood of voters and elected representatives of the peasantry during the period of the First and Second Dumas include N. P. Pershin, Agrarnaia Revoliutsiia v Rossii, Moscow, 1966, vol. 1, annd two interesting articles by D. A. Kolesnichenko, “Vozniknovenie i deiatel’nost’ Trudovoi gruppy,” Istoriia SSSR, vol. 11, no. 4, and “Agrarnye proekty Trudovoi gruppy v I Gosudarstvennoi Dume,” in Istoricheskie Zapiski, vol. 82 (1968). Maslov’s article, “Narodnicheskie partii,” in Martov et al. (eds.), Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX veka, vol. 3, St. Petersburg, 1909-12, is still useful. Information on the peasant deputies elected to the various Dumas may be found in a variety of sources. On the First Duma deputies, see, inter alia, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Literaturno-khudozhestvennoe izdanie, pod red. N. Pruzhan-skogo, St. Petersburg, 1906; Predstaviteli Gosudarstvennoi Dumy 27 aprelia-8 iiulia, 1906 g. Red. G. V. Malakhovskii, St. Petersburg, n.d.; and Gosudarstvennaia Duma v portretakh, 27/IV—8/VII, 1906, Izdanie K. A. Fisher, Moscow, n.d.; and Trudovaia gruppa v Gosudarstvennoi Dume, sostavil V. Sh., St. Petersburg, n.d. On the deputies to the Second Duma, see Chleny 2-oi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Biografii. Sravnitel’naia kharakteristika chlenov l-oi i 2-oi Dumy, St. Petersburg, 1907. On the deputies to the Third and Fourth Dumas, see the various lichnye ukazateli to the Stenograficheskie otchety of the Third and Fourth Duma sessions. See also 3-yi sozyv Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Portrety. Biografii, Aftografii, red. N. Olchanskii, St. Petersburg, 1910, and 4-yi sozyv Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Khudozhestven-nyi fotokopicheskii al’bom s portretami i biografiiami. Izdanie N. Olchan-skago, St. Petersburg, 1913. The articles “Gosudarstvennaia Duma” and “Osoboe prilozhenie: Chleny Gosudarstvennoi Dumy” in F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, eds., Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar, St. Petersburg, n.d., vol. 14, pp.405–12 and II-LXXI, also contain useful information.

12. A recent case study of the First Duma elections, with special attention to the electoral process in the peasant curia, is Daniel S. Vanderheide, “The Elections to the First Duma” (M.A. Essay, Columbia University, 1977).

13. I am indebted to Professor Terence Emmons for this valuable observation.

14. On First Duma elections, see Daniel Vanderheide, op. cit. For Second Duma election returns, see volumes listed in note 15.

15. The most detailed study of the elections to the Second Duma is still Aleksei Smirnov (ed.), Kak proshli vybory vo 2-iu Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu, St. Petersburg, 1907. For an analysis of the biographical information about the members of the Second Duma, flawed by methodological errors, see Chleny 2-oi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, op. cit. Both works have a Kadet bias, but contain useful information.

16. We find in these statistics indications of substantial political opposition among voters of the peasant curia, not only in the north and in Siberia, but also in the Lake region (especially Novgorod and St. Petersburg provinces, the C.I.R. (Moscow and Tver), Little Russia (particularly the historically strife-prone province of Poltava); and especially New Russia (Don oblast, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, and Taurus provinces), the Middle and Lower Volga (Kazan, Saratov, Samara), and the Urals (Viatka, Orenburg, Perm), where the roots of peasant radicalism proved especially hardy.

See M. V. D., Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu tret’iago sozyva.

17. As Vinogradoff has noted in his Ph.D. dissertation, the peasant deputies from Volynia, in particular, were notably younger than other peasant deputies, and were considered by local officials to be totally unreliable on the land question, notwithstanding their ostensibly conservative affiliations.

18. One dramatic illustration of this point will suffice. In Vilno province, which Vinogradoff has used to illustrate the differences in political culture that he emphasized, the peasant curia in both the Third and Fourth Duma elections was divided into two subcuriae: one reserved for the Russian Orthodox peasant minority of this province; the other, for the majority of non-Russian, Catholic peasants. In the Third Duma elections, for which I have detailed breakdowns, the Russian peasants of this province, spurred by their local Orthodox clergy against the Polish landowners of the area, selected exclusively “rightist” electors to represent them at the provincial electoral assembly; the Catholic peasants of Vilno province elected none.

See M. V. D., Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu tret’iago sozyva.

19. The relevant section of Sorokin’s speech reads:

I will say a few words of my own. Many millions of peasants have sent us here. We are under the obligation to work for this peasantry without laying down our hands. We must give this deprived, forgotten, hungry, cold peasantry land and freedom. All of us came here with the order and instructions not to return to the countryside without this.

Therefore, comrade peasants, I am appealing to all of you without exception, whatever faction you belong to: we will obtain this land and freedom and only then, freely, with a clear conscience, return to our countryside [Applause]. And then the peasantry will greet us with open arms. If we fail to do so, the peasantry will be entitled to hold us in contempt and to hate us. [Voices: “Correct!” Applause in center and right of the hall, i.e. among the opponents of the Left SR’s in the Taurus Palace.] I hope, comrade peasants, that we shall fulfill our mission to the end. [Noise from the left: “Sabotage!”]

In this respect, there are no differences among us peasants [Extended applause in center and right]. We are all alike here, rights and lefts. [“Correct!” Prolonged applause on center and right]. My last request to you, peasants, is that we fulfill precisely these commands and requests. [Applause.]

Uchreditel’noe sobranie. Stenograficheskii otchet, Petrograd, 1918, pp.56–57.

20. Even the contrast that Vinogradoff has drawn for us between the voting behavior of peasants in two neighboring provinces of northern Russia, Arkhangel and Vologda, appears to me to dramatize the point in the most glaring manner. It is of course true that noble landowners were scarce in Vologda. But they were still present in sufficient number (in contrast to Arkhangel) to justify (if only by the government’s political standards) the creation in this province of a landowners’ curia.

This curia was arbitrarily assigned thirty out of the total of seventy electors allocated to Vologda province. In fact, in the elections to the Third Duma, because of the scarcity of noble landowners in this province, only six of these thirty electors turned out to be noble landowners, while twenty-one were representatives of the clergy, mobilized by their hierarchy to elect appropriately conservative candidates. The point remains that none of the thirty electors selected from the landowners’ curia in Vologda province, in the Third Duma elections, were listed as supporters of opposition parties. To be sure, these thirty electors did not constitute, by themselves, an absolute majority at the provincial electoral assembly. But they did constitute such a majority in combination with the electors of the first urban curia, who in this particularly backward province were all “rightists.” Thus, the peasants of Vologda, whose curia was assigned but nineteen electors, could under no circumstances have contributed to the formation of an opposition majority at their provincial electoral assembly. By contrast, in Arkhangel province (as in Siberia), where there was no landowners’ curia and where both urban curiae elected a substantial number of opposition electors, peasant voters and electors, in combination with electors from other curiae, could form such opposition majorities at their provincial electoral assemblies, and they did so. See M. V. D., Vybory v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu tret’iago sozyva.

21. As I have noted earlier, the records of these confrontations have been preserved in TSGIA, fond 1288. Especially striking are the various dela of this fond in which are recorded the debates that unfolded over the projects of reform of uezd administration, both in commission and plenary sessions. Some of these discussions are summarized in V. S. Diakin’s article, “Stolypin i dvorianstvo (Proval mestnoi reformy),” in Institut istorii ANSSSR (Leningrad), Problemy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia i vnutrennei politiki Rossii, Leningrad, 1972.