Zemstvo and Revolution: The Onset of the Gentry Reaction, 1905–1907

ROBERTA THOMPSON MANNING

Gentry^* liberalism was one of the more distinctive attributes of the political life of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Throughout the nineteenth century, from the generation of the Decembrists to the Revolution of 1905, the voices of liberal noblemen were repeatedly raised in defense of political liberty and the rights of “society” at large. Nowhere was this apparent anomaly more evident than in the local elective institutions of self-government, the zemstvos, for these so-called classless assemblies were in reality the political preserve of the landowning gentry.¹ With the foundation of the zemstvos, gentry liberalism found an institutionalized political base. The new assemblies rapidly attracted the more liberal and public-spirited of the landed nobility, offering these formerly superfluous men of Russian society a practical outlet for their energies and commitment, a legal counterpart of the contemporary populist movement. While the liberals were never more than a small minority within the zemstvos, they played a highly prominent and respected role far out of proportion to their numbers by virtue of their dedication to the zemstvo cause and their capacity for hard work.

Providing much of the manpower for the “small deeds” of daily zemstvo life, the liberals also contributed substantially to the gradual politicization of these institutions. Around the turn of the century, as the landed gentry was increasingly estranged from the Russian government by the mounting bureaucratic assault on zemstvo autonomy and Witte’s deliberate policy of industrializing the country at the expense of the agricultural sector, the liberals within the zemstvos scored striking success in convincing the more conservative and passive rank-and-file deputies that the local institutions of self-government could serve as a potent weapon in the gentry’s political struggle with the central authorities. At the same time, the zemstvos as never before or since attempted to strengthen their hand in this conflict by speaking out in the name of Russian “society” and actively seeking political allies among their own third element intelligentsia employees and the local peasant masses. These developments, of course, culminated in 1904–1905, when a rising tide of liberal sentiments within the zemstvos spilled over into the well-known series of congresses, which, in short order, presented the state with an escalating sequence of political demands—for a national legislative assembly in November 1904,² for “four-tail” suffrage (universal, equal, secret, and direct manhood franchise) in April 1905,³ and for a broad range of social reforms by the following autumn, including the compulsory expropriation of private landholdings in favor of the land-hungry peasantry.⁴

When a national assembly did finally convene, however, in the form of the first two State Dumas, support for the new institution was not forthcoming from the zemstvos. Confronted with the conflict between the First Duma and the government over the prerogatives of the national assembly, the zemstvos maintained a pointed silence, although they had previously favored legislative powers for the new representative body.⁵ Meanwhile quite a few zemstvo deputies were involved as individuals in the organization of the United Nobility,⁶ an association that was conceived from the very first by its founders as a conservative counterweight to the Duma.⁷ In the end, not a single provincial zemstvo assembly and very few county (uezd) bodies bothered to protest against the dissolution of the Duma whose calling they had formerly so fervently desired.⁸

During the brief existence of the Second State Duma, the zemstvos, abetted by the United Nobility, devoted considerable time and energy to the organization of the last, now largely forgotten 1907 Zemstvo Congress.⁹ Putting forth the slogan, “Is not the opinion of five hundred zemstvos worth more than that of five hundred Duma deputies?” the organizers of this congress publicly challenged the authority of the Duma to reform local government, including the zemstvos;¹⁰ and some of them privately hoped that the congress would spark a constitutional crisis and thereby hasten the dismissal of the Duma.¹¹ Meeting at last on June 10, the morrow of the Stolypin coup d’état, the participants in the 1907 Zemstvo Congress readily sanctioned that event by their tribute to its authors—Nicholas II and Stolypin¹²—and by their advocacy of an electoral system for the zemstvos strikingly similar to the new June 3 Duma Election Law, a far cry from the four tails of 1905.¹³

The prevailing interpretation of the liberal outburst of these years, advanced among others by the right Kadet Vasilii Maklakov,¹⁴ seems at first glance to account for this political about-face on the part of the zemstvos. Seeking to explain the relative radicalism of Russian liberals in 1905, Maklakov maintained that the leadership of the liberal movement had recently been captured by dogmatic, doctrinaire “intellectuals,” who ousted the moderate gentry zemstvo men of yesteryear. Hence, the 1905 congresses were not at all indicative of the opinions of the gentry rank and file of the zemstvos. But the Maklakov thesis taken at face value rapidly breaks down when applied to the zemstvo movement of 1905. In the first place, the participants in the zemstvo congresses were not newcomers or outsiders. Rather, with few exceptions, the delegates from the very first were noble landowners of considerable property, and all of them were current zemstvo deputies with long histories of public service in local elective offices.¹⁵ Roughly a third of the more than one hundred men attending the initial ad hoc gathering of November 1904 held the important post of chairman of a provincial zemstvo board (uprava), an elective position that required administrative confirmation and, hence, was generally restricted to the more moderate of the leading activists. Subsequently, almost all the zemstvo delegates attending the congresses were actually elected for this purpose in the provinces. Because of strong administrative pressures, zemstvo representatives were usually selected in private conferences of deputies, not official zemstvo sessions; but the electoral procedures utilized went unchallenged until the very end of the year, when the mood in the localities had changed substantially.¹⁶

Also, initially, persons outside the zemstvo movement were not welcome at the congresses even as observers. The highly influential Union of Liberation leader, the historian P. N. Miliukov, for all his close personal and political ties with the leaders of the congresses, had to watch the proceedings of the April 1905 meeting from an adjoining room through a half-closed door so that he could not possibly influence the deliberations of the zemstvo men.¹⁷ It is true that in the second half of the year such precautions were abandoned when, in preparation for the coming Duma elections, representatives of first the city dumas and then the nonzemstvo provinces were added to the congresses, and Miliukov himself came to play a rather active role. But until the end the leadership remained in the hands of zemstvo men of long standing, who continued to dominate the debates and proceedings of these meetings and to control the influential organizing bureau of the congresses. Besides, long before that time, the basic political program of the congress had already been adopted.

Yet Maklakov’s allegations are not entirely without foundation, for the 1905 congresses cannot be considered truly representative of the zemstvos as a whole. Composed exclusively of the members of zemstvo executive boards and the more active and committed deputies, these national conclaves consisted from their very inception of men who were generally better educated, more public-spirited, more politically conscious—and far more inclined to liberal, even democratic views—than the zemstvo rank and file, not to mention the general gentry electorate of these institutions. For the routine conduct of daily zemstvo business rendered the national zemstvo leaders acutely aware of the poverty and sufferings of the local peasant population, while exposing them directly to the influences and democratic aspirations of the third element intelligentsia employees—the doctors, school teachers, agronomists, etc., who staffed the many, expanding enterprises of the local zemstvo assemblies and who tended to sympathize quite openly with the revolutionary parties of the left, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and, to a lesser extent, the Social Democrats. At the same time, the zemstvo leaders, by virtue of their very activism, were far more likely to have experienced directly the arbitrariness and obscurantism of the local bureaucracy. The bureaucratic offensive against zemstvo autonomy in these years was all too often directed against the projects and persons of the more active and committed deputies, increasing substantially the oppositional propensities of many formerly moderate, even somewhat conservative men.

The resulting disparity between the political outlook of the national zemstvo leaders and that of their political base in the localities was enhanced by the existence of deep-seated social differences between the two groups. These differencs were most striking in the case of the militant constitutionalists, who dominated the 1904–1905 congresses and their organizing counsels, and who were to join the Kadet party in large numbers at the end of the year.¹⁸ By and large the men of the zemstvo right and center, who subsequently filled the ranks of the “progressive,” Octobrist, or right-wing parties had received an upbringing and education, fairly typical of the landed gentry at large, i.e., they had tended to conclude their formal schooling with graduation from one of the military Cadet Corps that were established in the eighteenth century to prepare the offspring of the noble estate for traditional careers in the armed forces. Those among them who had gone on to the university had majored overwhelmingly in law, the traditional academic major of the contemporary European elite, including the upper strata of the Russian service nobility. Members of the zemstvo left, on the other hand, were far more likely to have received at least some higher education and to have majored in “nongentry” fields, especially those related to the natural sciences—the science-mathematics faculty, engineering, agronomy, and medicine (see table 1), all fields that the Imperial Russian government tended to regard as potentially “subversive.”

Not surprisingly, the most common occupation among the national zemstvo leaders, irrespective of political tendency, was agriculture, since almost all the delegates to the zemstvo congresses owned rather substantial amounts of land (between 1100 and 1700 desiatiny on the average).¹⁹ The future Kadets, however, despite their often extensive landholdings, were more prone than either moderate or conservative elements to practice one of the free professions at some point of their careers and to be somewhat less concerned with the management of their family estates,²⁰ while the latter were inclined to bow to parental pressures or family traditions and to enter state service for a brief period before settling down to a life of agriculture and public service in the localities (see tables 2 and 3). In this way, the career patterns—and life styles—of the dominant element in the 1904–1905 zemstvo congresses resembled not so much those of their own gentry constituents as those of the radical intelligentsia, that broad, amorphous social grouping that cut across all classes and estates of pre-Revolutionary Russian society to include all professionally trained men and women estranged from the existing political order and concerned with the sufferings of “the people.”²¹

TABLE 1

Educational backgrounds of the participants in the 1905 and 1907 zemstvo congresses. (Data was available for 142 of the 267 participants in the 1905 and 1907 congresses.)

TABLE 2

Occupations of the participants in the 1905 and 1907 zemstvo congresses (insofar as possible as stated by the delegates themselves; data was available for 97 out of 267 participants).

TABLE 3

Involvement of participants in the 1905 and 1907 zemstvo congress in state service, either military or civilian, for terms of five years or more.^* (Data was available for 142 of the 267 participants.)

In fact, the zemstvo left was largely composed of what can only be called a “gentry intelligentsia,” an intermediate social grouping that combined many of the key attributes and attitudes of both the gentry and the intelligentsia at large. Of course, such a social category had existed in some form since the very inception of the intelligentsia in Russia. It is common knowledge that the overwhelming bulk of the first generations of the intelligentsia, from Radichev through Herzen, were men of noble origins. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, however, such noble intelligenty were estranged from their social milieu no less than from the existing political order. Only with the abolition of serfdom and the creation of the zemstvo institutions did educated noblemen of an oppositional bent choose to direct their political efforts toward the landed gentry of the provinces, who proved increasingly receptive to the political appeals of the liberals. For the half century separating the abolition of serfdom from the outbreak of the Revolution of 1905 had witnessed the transformation of the landed nobility from the favored child of the Russian autocracy into a social group engulfed in crisis, both economic and political.

Traditionally a social category based on a combination of landownership and state service, the hereditary landed nobility now found both its time-honored functions in the Russian social-political order undermined by the forces of modernization and change. The unprecedented loss of noble landholdings in the second half of the nineteenth century is common knowledge, as are the causes of this development—the inability of many noble proprietors to adjust to the post-Emancipation order, the long depression in the price of grain at the end of the nineteenth century, and the industrialization policies of the Russian government.²² Less well known, however, is the fact that increasing numbers of noble landowners did not passively accept the loss of the last cherry orchard but actively struggled against their economic fate by turning to the land and involving themselves as never before in the daily management and direction of their family estates. By the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, such efforts managed to slow considerably the previously precipitous economic decline of the landed nobility as a whole.²³ But the economic position of most surviving landowners remained extremely precarious, and life on the land was almost always a harsh, continuous, rather ungentlemanly struggle for existence, which engendered many social tensions contributing to the rise of the Liberation Movement among the landed gentry in 1905.²⁴

At the same time that the hereditary landed nobility was suddenly confronted with an economic crisis of major proportions, its traditional political, i.e., service, role was being ever more rapidly assumed by an increasingly well-educated and professionalized bureaucracy, composed largely of landless men of non-noble origins.²⁵ By 1897, only 51 percent of the military officer corps and 30 percent of all civilian officials were noblemen by birth; and overwhelmingly these new officials, even the most highly placed among them, failed to establish any but the most casual contact with the land.²⁸

Under these conditions it is not surprising that record numbers of gentry landowners in 1904 and 1905 were swept into the opposition to the old political order, which was organized and led in large part by the liberal Union of Liberation and its allies among the zemstvo constitutionalists. Consequently the basic political platform of the national zemstvo congresses was reflected, although somewhat belatedly and not always completely, in the addresses and resolutions of the local zemstvos and noble corporations. For example, in the winter of 1904–1905, notwithstanding the immediate, overwhelming swell of sentiment in favor of the establishment of some form of representative government,²⁷ less than half of the provincial zemstvos (fourteen of the thirty-four assemblies) endorsed in full the constitutionalist program of the November Congress majority for the foundation of a national assembly with legislative powers, i.e., a body that would limit the authority of the autocratic tsar.²⁸ But by the summer over three-fifths of all provincial assemblies (twenty-one zemstvos) had embraced such views,²⁹ and by the opening months of 1906 clearly constitutionalist revolutions had been adopted by almost three-quarters of the provincial zemstvos (twenty-five assemblies),³⁰ including at least four of the half-dozen-odd assemblies that had originally explicitly insisted on the preservation of the autocracy in the course of 1905 (see table 4).³¹

A similar evolution occurred in regard to the electoral system. Less than a third of all provincial zemstvos (ten assemblies) ever accepted four-tail suffrage at any one time,³² since many zemstvo men honestly believed that direct elections could not be rapidly organized in a country with a largely illiterate population (see table 5). But at least three of the “tails” (universal, equal, and secret franchise) were favored by half of the provincial zemstvos meeting in the summer of 1905,³³ and by two-thirds of them (twenty-four assemblies) by the winter of 1906.³⁴ Only eleven assemblies at most explicitly rejected direct elections,³⁵ and these were clearly offset by the zemstvos favoring the fourth “tail.” The remaining zemstvos were simply unable to reach a conclusion on the subject of direct elections, although they were well aware that four-tail suffrage was a key plank in the political platform of the national zemstvo congresses.

TABLE 4

The political evolution of the provincial zemstvo assemblies on the question of the powers of the national assembly.

TABLE 5

The political evolution of the provincial zemstvo assemblies in regard to the electoral system for the national assembly.

The leftward revision of the political program of the local zemstvos was accompanied by an escalation in tactics as well. After the demands of a June 6 deputation of zemstvo leaders to the tsar for the immediate convocation of a national assembly elected by universal suffrage failed to obtain any tangible political results, the provincial zemstvos began to promote the political mobilization of the peasant masses in hopes of forcing reforms on the recalcitrant autocracy. With this goal, zemstvo assemblies and their executive organs openly engaged in political propaganda, distributing leaflets and brochures and sponsoring public meetings and discussions. Many of them expanded the zemstvo economic councils, the organs responsible for the formulation of zemstvo agricultural policies, to include representatives of the peasantry, who immediately utilized this new forum to voice far-reaching demands for the expropriation of gentry lands. The Saratov provincial zemstvo and the Petrovskii uezd assembly, as well as individual zemstvo deputies throughout the country, actually went so far as to encourage the organization of local chapters of the Peasants Union to enable the neighboring peasantry to defend their own group interests.³⁶

The political initiatives of the zemstvo men, despite their increasingly radical nature, were apparently not at all unwelcome to the rank-and-file gentry landowners of the provinces, for the traditionally conservative provincial noble assemblies and their elective officials, the marshals of the nobility, soon joined the zemstvos in the opposition movement. This, indeed, was an unexpected development. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the zemstvos by and large tended to represent only the more civic-minded and involved of the local gentry, men willing to forego some personal sacrifices of both time and money for the public weal, since even minimal participation in zemstvo elections and meetings, not to speak of committee work, required periodic visits to the county or provincial capitals, journeys financed entirely at the expense of the voters or deputies themselves.³⁷ In contrast, the provincial noble societies embraced much—if not all—of the potential electorate of the zemstvos. Under law, all noble landowners possessing the minimum property requirement for voting in the first (nobles’) curia of the zemstvos were able to participate directly in the assemblies of the nobility so that these conclaves, which rarely convened more frequently than at three-year intervals, and which were marked by a flurry of provincial social activity, attracted many of the more politically indifferent—and generally conservative—of the gentry rank and file as well as some absentee magnates and high officials who usually did not deign to participate in zemstvo affairs.³⁸

Yet in the winter of 1904–1905, the regular triannual assemblies of the nobility overcame the innate conservative bias of their membership and openly defied an 1865 regulation prohibiting them from discussing affairs of state,³⁹ thereby engaging in political activity for the first time since the emancipation of the serfs. At that time, the noble assemblies of over half of the zemstvo provinces convened with a record turnout of local nobles and embarked on a campaign of political addresses and petitions similar to that previously launched by the zemstvo men.⁴⁰ Over two-thirds of these assemblies—a proportion not much inferior to that of the concurrent winter sessions of the provincial zemstvos—called for the establishment of some sort of national representative assembly.⁴¹ Although most of the noble societies, unlike the zemstvos, continued to insist on the preservation of the autocratic powers of the tsar,⁴² a good third of them followed the precedent set by the zemstvo men and eliminated even the traditional salutation “Autocrat” from their addresses and appeals to the monarch,⁴³ while a majority of these assemblies specifically stipulated that the new elective assembly should represent the entire nation, not just the nobility.⁴⁴ Hence, it is not at all surprising that the political program of the noble corporations, like the zemstvos before them, evolved steadily to the left throughout the year (see table 6). By the following winter (1905–1906) all but one of the noble assemblies that managed to meet and discuss politics omitted all references to the autocracy from their political addresses and endorsed the new order established by the October Manifesto, urging only the speedy convocation of the new national assembly—the State Duma.⁴⁵

Meanwhile the chief elective officials of these assemblies—the provincial marshals of the nobility—also emerged to echo, although faintly at first, the political program of the zemstvo men. To be sure, the first in a series of national conferences of marshals of the nobility, which convened at the end of 1904, repudiated the political program of the recent November 1904 Zemstvo Congress by explicitly endorsing the preservation of the autocracy, while timidly limiting its call for popular representation to a demand for the addition of elected representatives from the zemstvos, city dumas, and corporate organizations of the various estates (the nobility, merchantry, and peasantry) to the State Council, an organ of the higher bureaucracy that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had come to draft the final version of all legislative proposals.⁴⁶ But by the early summer of 1905, under the pressure of the persistent Russian defeats in the war with Japan and repeated bureaucratic delays in the implementation of basic reforms which were now demanded by the entire nation, the marshals made an abrupt political about-face and sent an official delegation to the tsar in support of the most recent zemstvo congress, which had demanded a broad-powered national assembly elected by universal and equal suffrage. By then, the habitually cautious and highly loyal marshals, themselves influential officials who occupied responsible positions in local administration, had become so estranged from the existing political order that they openly declared that “the government has come to represent something alien, hostile, and unbearable.”⁴⁷ In an unprecedented move, they pointedly dropped the autocratic title from their political petitions to the tsar, and their national leader, the usually mild-mannered and proper Prince P. N. Trubetskoi of Moscow, forgot all vestiges of court etiquette in his political fervor, taking advantage of his reception by the monarch to remind Nicholas II rather curtly of his personal shortcomings as a national leader: “Here today you have the mercy to receive us and to agree with us, but tomorrow you will receive Count Dorrer [the marshal of Kursk province, currently politically isolated on the extreme right wing of the provincial gentry] and you will agree with him.”⁴⁸

TABLE 6

The political evolution of the provincial noble assemblies in 1905.

Trubetskoi’s breach of manners was no personal aberration but yet another dramatic sign of the political agitation gripping the most moderate and traditionally minded gentry political activists by midyear. For we must remember that the marshals of the nobility, by virtue of their key administrative role in the localities and the fact that this office was generally considered a good starting point for a career in the Ministry of the Interior, were far more closely bound to state service than most other prominent gentry activists of the time, occupying some shady ground between official servants of the central government and genuinely independent representatives of local landed interests.⁴⁹ In addition to the marshals, the far right of the gentry political spectrum—the Patriotic Union, the Union of Russian Men (soiuz russkikh liudei), and the June 24 Deputation, elements from which the basic leadership cadre of the future United Nobility was to emerge—responded to the oppositional upsurge among the landed gentry in the summer of 1905 by adding their voice to the clamor for popular representation in national affairs. Only they sought vainly to limit the scope of the coming reforms by calling for autocracy and a “zemskii sobor,” a representative institution of vague authority and duration, elected by the basic estates of the Russian Empire.⁵⁰

Of course, the emergence of a united oppositional front among the landed gentry was not a spontaneous development but the result of considerable organizational work on the part of the liberals. Everywhere the prime impetus to political action in the local zemstvos and noble societies came from the zemstvo congress delegates, aided by ad hoc constitutionalist caucuses that had arisen among gentry activists in recent years and were loosely affiliated with the Union of Liberation, the leading liberal organization in 1905, through a national organization of zemstvo constitutionalists. As a result, the more militant and liberal deputies usually arrived at the 1905 meetings of the zemstvo and noble societies with completed draft projects of political addresses already in hand, while the more conservative elements were quite often taken by surprise, unorganized and unprepared. Yet one cannot simply dismiss the oppositional upsurge among the landed gentry in 1904 and 1905 as a largely artificial phenomenon conjured out of thin air by the machinations of the liberals. For the political addresses and resolutions of this period were almost always adopted unanimously or by crushing majorities after thorough discussion in assemblies that were marked by record attendance on the part of official delegates as well as the general public. Moreover, in order to engage in political activity at all, many of these assemblies had first to abandon past practices and to defy openly the orders and regulations of the local administration, which attempted to stifle all manifestations of the Liberation Movement. In the process the 1905 sessions of the local zemstvos became the most turbulent and rebellious in the entire history of these institutions.⁵¹

Nonetheless, the leftward drift of gentry politics halted abruptly by the years’ end, as an all-pervasive, rapidly spreading rank-and-file revolt against the old liberal leadership of the zemstvo movement swept through the local assemblies in the course of the regular winter sessions of the provincial zemstvos. Almost overnight large numbers of zemstvos repudiated the leadership of the 1905 congresses, denying the authority of these assemblies to speak out in the name of the zemstvos of all Russia.⁵² Simultaneously, hastily organized coalitions of moderate and conservative elements, led by men who had previously supported the Liberation Movement, arose to challenge the authority of the most enthusiastic supporters of the zemstvo congress in the localities—the more liberal members of the provincial zemstvo executive boards, who had provided both a disproportionately large share of congress delegates and the nuclei of the constitutionalist caucuses that had operated so successfully in the local assemblies throughout 1905. In January and February 1906, 40 percent of the provincial zemstvos currently meeting administered official reproofs to their executive boards; and significantly all but one of the men thus censured were closely connected with the new liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, the direct political heir of the Union of Liberation and the 1905 zemstvo congresses.⁵³

The turnabout in zemstvo politics was in many ways a product of the times, for by the end of 1905 several important developments had intervened to temper the oppositional fervor of the zemstvos’ gentry constituency and to turn them against the leadership of the Liberation Movement. First, the government at long last moved to remedy the most pressing grievances of the gentry by putting an end to the disastrous war with Japan and accepting substantial political reforms in the form of the Bulygin Ukaz of August 6, 1905, and then the October Manifesto. The government’s concessions were soon followed by the outbreak of major peasant disorders on the estates of the gentry rivaling in scope and intensity the great Pugachev Rebellion of the eighteenth century. Throughout much of the Black Soil Center in a wide belt stretching from Kursk and Chernigov to the Volga, the agrarian movement not infrequently approached full-scale countywide revolts, characterized by vast property damage as the enraged peasants attempted to “burn out” gentry landowners and prevent their return to the soil.⁵⁴ However, the 1905 peasant disorders, unlike the previous serf rebellions or the agrarian movement of 1917, was directed primarily against the property, not the person, of the landowner. Consequently few noblemen, if any, perished at the hands of the peasants in 1905, and a large proportion of the disorders reported were confined to meadow and forest lands, most of which had remained in gentry hands after Emancipation, leaving the peasants without adequate amounts of firewood or pasture lands. Nevertheless, the disorders set off a “Great Fear,” a wave of mass hysteria among the landed gentry of the provinces, reminiscent of the opening days of the French Revolution of 1789, as large numbers of noble proprietors fled the Russian countryside⁵⁵ and attempted to divest themselves of their estates by engaging in mass panic land sales that ultimately resulted in the loss of 10 percent of all remaining noble landholdings during a brief two-year period, 1906–1908.⁵⁶

The impact of the agrarian disorders on zemstvo politics was felt almost immediately, particularly in the Central Agricultural Region and along the Volga, where the disorders were largely concentrated.⁵⁷ To be sure, gentry activists did not waver in their support of representative government. On the contrary, ever large numbers of local zemstvos, convinced that only the immediate convocation of a broadly based national assembly could curb popular discontent, went on to embrace legislative powers and the three tails at this time (see tables 6 and 7). Yet the landed gentry’s newfound concern for the security of their property was already beginning to overshadow many of their previous political commitments, as demonstrated by the sudden waning of zemstvo concern for the civil liberties of citizens, which had figured prominently in all the addresses and resolutions of 1905. In the winter of 1905–1906, the zemstvos generally remained silent in the face of widespread administrative arrests and other violations of individual rights by the government in an attempt to curb the spreading revolution, prompting the governor of Smolensk province to report with some satisfaction that “those measures undertaken by the government to pacify the country and restore the necessary order, which a year ago would have called forth mass protests in the zemstvo, are presently approved by a majority of the assembly as inevitable and sad necessities.”⁵⁸ Meanwhile over a third of all provincial zemstvos (twelve assemblies) actively endorsed such measures, petitioning the government to delay the introduction of the “freedoms” promised by the October Manifesto and to continue to rule by martial law until “law and order” had been restored in Russia.⁵⁹

Simultaneously, many assemblies contributed directly to the repressive atmosphere of the times by launching their own political purges of left-wing zemstvo employees, who were held personally responsible for the outbreak of the agrarian revolution. Charging that zemstvo employees had neglected zemstvo business to engage in “revolutionary agitation,” the provincial zemstvos began to dismiss dozens of old-time zemstvo employees and to shut down entire areas of vital zemstvo activities. Although the current budgetary problems of the zemstvos were often cited as the reason for this move, the services and personnel eliminated and the geographic incidence of the cutbacks belie these claims.⁶⁰ For example, in Saratov, Tula, and Voronezh, the schools closed down in the name of “economy” were precisely the ones that had recently experienced student strikes,⁶¹ while mass firings of zemstvo employees—as opposed to individual dismissals—were inevitably confined to the provinces reporting the highest concentration of peasant disorders at the end of 1905 (Kursk, Saratov, Voronezh, Chernigov, Poltava, Ekaterinoslav, and Simbirsk).⁶² At the same time, in spite of the universal concern for “thrift,” funding for apolitical services like roads and bridges was not affected by the cutbacks, while money could always be found for conservative or patriotic causes dear to the hearts of the zemstvo men. In Tula, where basic zemstvo services were among the most drastically reduced in all Russia, the provincial zemstvo assembly allocated 25,000 roubles for armed Cossack guards to protect the estates of local landowners.⁶³ Likewise, the Kharkov zemstvo, which was “forced” to eliminate eight of the eleven zemstvo doctors in the province right after a major cholera scare, still found 10,000 roubles in surplus funds to erect a monument to the defenders of Port Arthur, the site of a major Russian defeat in the Japanese War.⁶⁴

Finally, the agrarian disorders also sparked the rank-and-file revolt against the zemstvo leadership of 1905 by bringing the latent social differences within the zemstvo movement to the surface of zemstvo politics. In general the zemstvo leaders, particularly those associated with the new Kadet party, did not respond to the peasant disorders in the same way as their provincial following. Instead the Kadets, who tended to be the most professionally oriented of the zemstvo leaders—and the least involved with agriculture—attempted to utilize the peasant unrest in order to strengthen their hand in their ongoing conflict with the government, insisting that the sacrifice of part of the gentry’s remaining lands was “a small price to pay” for political liberty. As a result, the last two of the 1905 zemstvo congresses—September and November—barely tempered their opposition to the now seemingly conciliatory state, beset on all sides by the expanding revolution; and in hopes of attracting the peasant vote in the coming Duma elections and capturing a majority of seats in the national assembly, they went on to espouse the compulsory expropriation of private landholdings⁶⁵ at a time when local gentry activists were beginning to stress the sanctity of private property and to call for more police protection in the countryside.⁶⁶ Consequently it is not surprising that a small group of moderate zemstvo men, who subsequently provided the organizing nucleus of the Octobrist Party, withdrew from the national zemstvo congress of November 1905 in protest against recent policies, taking their case to the provinces with striking success.⁶⁷ For, in the eyes of their fellow noblemen, the agrarian uprisings had transformed the Kadets from outspoken critics of the bureaucratic state into outright traitors to the noble estate, who were collaborating with the local intelligentsia to politicize the peasant masses and turn them against the landed gentry. Everywhere the most damning charge leveled against the censured Kadet-dominated executive boards was the liberals’ close, often personal relationships with the “revolutionary” third element intelligentsia employees of the zemstvos.⁶⁸

Although the position of the Kadets within the zemstvo movement was severely shaken by the outbreak of peasant disorders at the end of 1905, the fate of zemstvo liberalism was not sealed until the experiences of the first two State Dumas had been fully assimilated by the local gentry. For when the long-awaited national assembly finally convened, it was clear that the peasants, aided by the vagaries of the election law and an unexpected display of estate solidarity, had managed to elect a peasant-dominated chamber, in which even the deputies of noble origins, whose ranks included many former leading lights of the zemstvo movement, were committed to the far-reaching—and possibly unlimited—compulsory expropriation of private lands.⁶⁹ At the same time, the convocation of a national assembly, contrary to the expectations of gentry political circles, did not pacify the rebellious population. Rather, the agrarian debates in the Duma merely set off a new round of peasant disorders.⁷⁰ The gentry’s political travails did not end with the untimely dissolution of the First Duma. Quite the opposite, the elections to the Second Duma essentially repeated the experiences of the first elections in spite of greater efforts on the part of moderate and conservative parties and a minor rightward revision of the election law.⁷¹ The new and even more radical Duma seemed likely to enact compulsory expropriation into law and to reform local government, including the zemstvos, in a manner that would radically undermine the political hegemony of the gentry in the provinces.

The unexpected peasant victories in the Duma elections not only threatened the livelihood, way of life, and very existence of the gentry constituency of the zemstvos. It fundamentally challenged both aspects of their new and rather precarious personal and social identities. By the outbreak of the Revolution of 1905, the basic cadre of zemstvo activists tended to come from that growing stratum of the noble estate that had responded to the economic dislocations of Emancipation and the worldwide depression in grain prices by becoming more and more personally involved with agriculture and the daily management of their family estates. Yet prompted by a lingering “service psychology,”⁷² instilled in noble landowners by centuries of gentry education and upbringing and by the legal training received by many of them in the universities, the public service performed by these men was no less important to them and their new social identities than their agricultural concerns. As late as the Third and Fourth State Dumas—1908 and 1912—approximately half of the deputies of noble origins, whose career patterns showed a similar dual involvement with agriculture and provincial affairs, listed “agriculture” as their profession, while an identical proportion considered their occupation to be that of “public activist” (obshchestvennyi deiatel’), a broad, almost untranslatable term that was generally applied to all those active in elective offices or philanthropic work outside the confines of the ruling bureaucracy.⁷³

The political activity of the local zemstvos and noble societies was deeply rooted in this dual identity of their landowning constituency in the provinces. The new national assembly that was universally demanded by gentry spokesmen in 1905 was intended to provide the landed nobility with both an institutionalized voice in the affairs of state, which were increasingly dominated by a largely landless bureaucracy that did not hesitate to intervene in purely local zemstvo matters, and a political base from which they could fight the current Witte economic system, which greatly hindered, if not actually harmed, their agricultural pursuits. Even though the bulk of gentry activists throughout the course of 1905 had carefully couched their public political appeals in the name of Russian “society” at large, few of them privately doubted that the landed gentry, as the most educated and politically experienced social group in the country, would play a highly prominent, if not dominant, role in the new national assembly even under a three- or four-tail franchise. Indeed, this was also the opinion of the government, which took special pains in preparing the Duma electoral law to secure the representation of the peasantry from the probable political incursions of the gentry.⁷⁴

These assumptions were reinforced in the minds of many zemstvo activists by the paternalistic, often patronizing, attitude toward the peasant masses that had permeated the Liberation Movement among the landed gentry from its very inception. Gentry activists of all political complexions failed to regard peasants as an autonomous group. Consequently, the zemstvo leadership made no attempt to involve the peasantry in the opposition movement until the summer of 1905, when all hopes for reforms from above had obviously floundered on the intransigence of Nicholas II, and the lower classes had already moved into political action on their own, engaging in increasingly widespread agrarian uprisings and urban rebellions. Even then the prime aim of the liberal gentry in this regard was to harness the energies of the Russian people to their own political ends and to direct the mass movement into more pacific channels.⁷⁵

The appearance of large-scale agrarian disorders at the end of 1905 obviously failed to change the landed gentry’s general view of the peasant masses and their future political role. From the first the gentry rank and file tended to regard the 1905–1906 agrarian disorders as a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake. The peasant participants were regarded not as conscious human beings acting in their own self-interest but as a wild, unconscious mob, a physical force no more responsible for its actions than a winter’s blizzard or a summer thunderstorm. In this way, many of the more conservative gentry activists readily exonerated the peasantry and increasingly tended to discount economic factors like peasant poverty or legitimate land hunger as the cause of the peasant unrest, preferring to seek a scapegoat for the agrarian revolution in the third element employees of the zemstvos and their liberal, usually Kadet, patrons on the zemstvo executive boards. Other gentry activists, especially those in the liberal camp—not only Kadets but initially many Octobrists as well—championed a limited form of expropriation, hoping to barter a part of the gentry’s remaining landholdings for continued gentry “political hegemony over the peasant masses.”⁷⁶

Hence, the peasant sweep of the first two Duma elections came as an enormous surprise to gentry activists of all political camps, striking a direct blow at gentry political pretensions from which the noble landowners of the provinces never fully recovered. Instead of the much desired national assembly that would watch over the economic interests of the landed gentry, the new State Duma threatened the property of private landowners much more drastically than the Witte System at its very worst. Moreover, the unusual group solidarity that the peasants displayed in both the Duma elections and the 1906–1907 zemstvo elections that soon followed⁷⁷ threatened to exclude gentry landowners from a meaningful political role not only in the national assembly but also in the localities, as soon as the government’s far-reaching projects of zemstvo reform would be adopted by the Duma. As a result, the sudden, totally unexpected advent of the peasantry on the Russian political scene prompted a major relignment of zemstvo politics, transforming institutions that had traditionally served as a liberal, liberalizing force within the Russian social-political order into a highly conservative force, one of the bastions of a widespread and rapidly growing gentry reaction.

The gentry reaction took several forms. Perhaps the most dramatic was the zemstvos’ total repudiation of their former liberal leaders, including many men whose names previously had been virtually synonymous with the zemstvo movement. The nationwide campaign against the old left-wing leadership of the zemstvo movement did not subside at the end of the 1905–1906 winter sessions but continued unabated, contributing to the disastrous liberal rout in the zemstvo elections of 1906–1907, when liberalism of the Kadet variety lost once and for all its political base in the zemstvos.⁷⁸ The Kadets were cast out of the zemstvo movement at this time because their actions in the first two Dumas in support of compulsory expropriation of private lands revealed once again that they were willing to subordinate the legitimate concerns of the landed gentry to their own political ambitions to emerge the leading political force in these peasant-dominated chambers.

Yet the gentry reaction did not stop with the expulsion of the Kadets from the zemstvos. The zemstvo elections of 1906–1907 marked a decisive and fateful watershed in the history of these institutions. Despite considerable efforts expended by the old “zemstvo majority” of 1905 in alliance with other “progressive” zemstvo men, the liberals were never to regain their previous influence in the zemstvos.⁷⁹ On the contrary, subsequent elections resulted in an even greater political setback for the progressive cause, which was irreversibly identified with the immediate results of the Liberation Movement—the peasant disorders and the gentry’s minority status in the first two State Dumas. In 1909 and again in 1912 a number of left Octobrists, including D. N. Shipov, the leader of the moderate zemstvo minority at the 1905 congresses and once the most highly venerated zemstvo man in all Russia, suffered the same fate as the 1905 majority before them, going down to a decisive defeat at the hands of a new generation of self-professed “apolitical” zemstvo men who did not deign to affiliate themselves with any of the new national political parties.⁸⁰ As a result of these developments, when the right Kadet and future head of the Provisional Government of 1917, Prince G. E. Lvov, the Tula board chairman of 1905 and the national director of zemstvo war relief work during the Russo-Japanese War, was advanced at the beginning of the First World War through a complicated political maneuver on the part of the Kadets to head the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos, he had not served as a zemstvo deputy, even on the county level, for well over four years.⁸¹

The gentry reaction also entailed a major revision of the political program of the zemstvos. Now realizing that even the limited franchise of the October Manifesto, much less a political order based on full human equality, would entail the loss of their property and political position, the large majority of gentry activists in the localities began to opt for exclusory measures to preserve artificially the political preponderance of the numerically insignificant landed nobility. The change in zemstvo opinion in this regard first appeared in the winter sessions of 1905–1906, when the specter of peasant land hunger prompted a few assemblies to revise their notions of precisely who should constitute the political nation. At that time, the Riazan and Tula zemstvos, both of which had advocated “a broad suffrage” in the summer of 1905,⁸² rejected universal and equal elections, accepting the arguments of the Octobrist leader Prince N. S. Volkonskii that “such a system is feasible, but it is scarcely possible to count on positive results from it in view of the present misunderstandings over the land. We would risk that all landowners would be thrown overboard from the state administration; the interests of the minority would not be guaranteed.”⁸³

In the spring of 1907, after the elections to the first two Dumas had amply borne out Volkonskii’s dire predictions, such considerations were made even more explicit by spokesmen for the zemstvo congress, like the Octobrist State Council representative from the Tula zemstvo, M. D. Ershov, a leading member of the United Nobility and of the Organizing Bureau of the 1907 Zemstvo Congress. In 1905 Ershov, as a member of the moderate Shipov minority within the zemstvo congresses, had supported a form of three-tail suffrage—the election of representatives to the national assembly by the local zemstvos, which would first have been reformed according to “democratic principles.”⁸⁴ By the eve of the 1907 Congress, however, he had substantially amended his earlier views. While Ershov still insisted on the selection of Duma deputies by zemstvos reformed along nonestate lines, he wanted these bodies to be restructured in such a manner as to leave them in the hands of “the present zemstvo men,” who would provide the “unconscious” electorate with “an existing cadre of leaders.”⁸⁵ Ershov’s more conservative associate on the congress bureau, the future Nationalist leader P. V. Krupenskii of Bessarabia, stated the issue even more bluntly, declaring that “One hundred thirty million peasants should not lead us; rather we should lead them.”⁸⁶

The turnabout in zemstvo opinion on the electorate system was not as drastic as it might seem. Zemstvo commitment to universal and equal suffrage had never been as unambiguous as the many resolutions in favor of such measures might suggest. In fact, the zemstvo gentry had always subordinated the principle of universal suffrage to their own political ambitions. Even in 1904–1905 most zemstvos openly opposed the application of universal suffrage to local self-government, espousing instead a return to the 1864 zemstvo election law, a system weighted in favor of large landed property,⁸⁷ while the far more liberal zemstvo congress did not go much beyond a denunciation of the estate-based 1890 electoral law, calling for a type of zemstvo reform that would involve in zemstvo work “the best forces of the local population,” a euphemism for the more educated segments of provincial society.⁸⁸ Even the reluctance of many local zemstvo assemblies to accept all four of the “tails” demanded by the national zemstvo congress for Duma elections apparently stemmed from a deep-seated, although not entirely conscious fear on the part of many gentry activists that such a franchise might very well deprive noble landowners of their “rightful” share of political influence in national affairs. After all, the argument most frequently advanced by the advocates of three-tail suffrage, which was overwhelmingly preferred by the local zemstvos, was that direct elections (the fourth tail) could not produce “conscious results” since the large electoral districts required by Russian geography would prevent the participants in the political process from being acquainted with one another. What many of these men actually meant by this was that the peasant masses, unlike their elective leaders (the village and volost elders and peasant zemstvo men, who were likely to emerge as electors under any sort of indirect system), would not necessarily recognize or accept as local representatives gentry leaders of the zemstvo of whom they might not even have heard. Instead the peasant masses, in contrast to their leaders who quite often were little more than clients of prominent local noblemen or high administrative figures, might very well respond to the radical programmatic appeals of the revolutionary parties.⁸⁹

The most important manifestation of the gentry reaction, however, was the political organization of the gentry right. The newly mobilized conservative elements among the landed gentry did not stop with revising the political program of the zemstvo movement and effectively eliminating the liberals from provincial politics. They soon adapted the tactics of the Liberation Movement to their own ends, creating a series of political pressure groups and countervailing authorities in the form of the United Nobility and the 1907 Zemstvo Congresses, which emulated the 1905 congresses and attempted quite successfully to mobilize the local zemstvos and noble societies behind a common political program. These organizations contributed to the coming of the June 3, 1907, coup d’état by encouraging the government to dissolve the first two peasant-dominated Dumas and by agitating for a curtailment of the franchise.⁹⁰ They also played the major role in blocking the attempts of the reformist Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin to expand the role of propertied elements other than the nobility in local self-government, thus achieving a necessary political counterpart to his well-known agrarian reforms.⁹¹ The result of these activities was the Third of June System, an extremely inflexible—and hence potentially unstable—political order in which virtually all elective institutions, on both the national and local levels, were dominated by the numerically small and once more rapidly declining gentry.⁹²

The defeat of the First Russian Revolution—and the role played by gentry landowners in this process—gives rise to a perplexing question: why did the liberals expend so much time and energy in mobilizing the landed gentry, a social group inherently inimical to the liberal cause? For the collapse of the liberal gentry opposition of 1905 and the emergence of the gentry reaction were probably foregone conclusions. The gentry opposition of the early twentieth century was never a unitary political movement but rather a strange, Janus-faced amalgam of progressive and retrogressive elements. While the gentry left, particularly the Kadets among them, were motivated by a desire to transform the superannuated autocracy into a modern political society, based on popular sovereignty and the equality of all citizens before the law, the typical provincial landowner was attracted to the Liberation Movement by a desire to regain his lost political influence in the counsels of state.

Nevertheless the future Kadets directed a considerable part of their organizational efforts toward the landed gentry in the early part of the twentieth century because the political—and social—differences within the gentry were not clearly perceived before 1905 and because the landed gentry offered the liberals definite organizational advantages over all other social groupings. Not only was the liberals’ approach to the gentry greatly facilitated by the fact that many liberal leaders came from—and continued to operate politically in—this social milieu. But before 1905 the landed gentry alone of all existing social groups possessed an institutionalized political base in the form of the corporations of the nobility and the far more important zemstvo assemblies, the only elective bodies currently purporting at least in theory to represent all the traditional estates of the Russian population. Thus the liberals could simply direct much of their political energies toward these existing institutions without having first to establish an elaborate organizational framework in which to operate. This situation facilitated political work at a time when all independent political associations were strictly prohibited by law, since the so-called classless zemstvos, by virtue of their elective character and all-class composition, could if necessary speak out in the name of Russian society as a whole.

However, the facility of the liberals’ approach to the gentry does not provide us with the full answer to our question. A complete explanation of the liberals’ concern with the political mobilization of the gentry must take into account fundamental characteristics of the Kadet party and Russian society in general. Because of the enormous social, cultural, and economic chasm that separated the privileged from the people under the Old Regime, the liberals, who overwhelmingly came from the upper strata of Russian society, simply felt more comfortable in directing their political appeals to their own kind. All too many gentry liberals, like their conservative counterparts, tended to regard the worker and peasant masses as little more than childlike creatures, moved mainly by irrational passions and desires.⁹³ This patronizing attitude toward the masses of the Russian people, which after 1905 would often be tinged with fear and distrust, was the prime reason why Russian liberalism failed to fulfill “the historic task” that many have rightly or wrongly attributed to it, and why the Kadet party did not long outlast the old political order that it so fervently opposed.

NOTES

* The term gentry is used here to refer to that segment of the landed nobility involved with agriculture and public affairs in the localities.

1. Under the original 1864 Zemstvo Law, the landed nobility provided 42.4 percent of all zemstvo deputies on the uezd level and 81.6 percent on the provincial level. The estate-based 1890 Election Law merely incorporated de facto gentry hegemony within the zemstvo institutions into law, giving noble landowners 89.5 percent of all seats in the provincial zemstvos and 55.2 percent in the uezd assemblies. The proportion of noble deputies would, no doubt, be even greater had the Viatka, Vologda, Olonets, and Perm zemstvos been excluded from these estimates, since almost no noble landowners lived in these provinces. B. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let’ (St. Petersburg, 1909–1911), vol. Ill, pp.680–82.

2. Listok osvobozhdenie, no. 18, pp.1–2.

3. For the full text of the April resolution, see Postanovleniia kostromskago chrezvychainago zemskago sobraniia s 30 maia po 11-ii iiunia 1905 g. (Kostroma, 1905), pp.16–30.

4. Russkiia vedomosti, no. 251, Sept. 15, 1905, p.3.

5. Only the “peasant zemstvos” of Viatka and Olonets sent greetings to the First State Duma. Novoe vremia, no. 10901, Jul. 20/Aug. 2, 1906, p.4; Russia. Gosudarstvennaia duma. Stenograficheskie otchety 1906 god sessiia pervaia (St. Petersburg, 1906), vol. I, pp.6–7, 33, 37-8, 253, 587; and Veselovskii, Istoriia, IV, pp.38–39.

6. Virtually all the delegates to the First Congress of the United Nobility for whom detailed biographical data are available participated in zemstvo affairs. Among the 133 elected representatives to the First Congress were fifty-eight zemstvo deputies, forty-one uezd marshals of the nobility and twenty-two provincial marshals (the marshals of the nobility chaired the local zemstvo assemblies ex officio). For a list of congress participants see TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 5/4, 1906, pp.278–82. Biographical information on gentry political activists has been derived largely from the sources listed in table 1 below.

7. See TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 1/2, 1906, pp.121–31, 10-12, and Kruzhok dvorian vernykh prisiago otchet s”ezda 22-25 aprelia 1906 goda (Moscow, 1906), esp. pp.14–15.

8. At most only a half dozen of the 359 uezd zemstvos in the country objected to the dismissal of the Duma. Veselovskii, Istoriia, IV, pp.38–39.

9. For the relationship of the United Nobility to the June 1907 Zemstvo Congress, see TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 75, 1906/07, pp.76–124, delo 10/38, 1906/07, p.169, and delo 77/307, 1907, pp.1–3.

10. See the statements of the prime organizers of the congress, Counts A. A. Uvarov and D. A. Olsuf’ev of the Saratov zemstvo, in Zhurnal chrez-vychainago vologodskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 29 maia 1907 goda (Vologda, 1907), pp.7–9 and Count D. A. Olsuf’ev, Ob uchastii zemtsy 0 obsuzhenii zemskoi reformy (St. Petersburg, 1907), esp. pp.14–15.

11. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 76, 1906/07, p.96, and Zhurnal zasedanii chernigovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia chrezvychainoi sessii 1907 goda (Chernigov, 1907), p.8.

12. Novoe vremia, no. 11224, Jun. 13/26, 1907, p.2, and Golos Moskovy no. 135, Jun. 12, 1907, p.2.

13. Stenograficheskie otchety 1-go vserossiskago s”ezda zemskikh deiatelei V Moskve zasedanii 10-15 iiunia 1907 g. (Moscow, 1907) and Zhurnaly i postanovleniia vserossiiskago s”ezda zemskikh deiatelei v Moskve s 10 po 15 iiunia 1907 goda (Moscow, 1907).

14. Vasilii Maklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’ na zakate staroi Rossii (Paris, 1936), and The First State Duma (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964). For western adaptations of the Maklakov thesis, see Viktor Leontowitsch, Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland (Frankfurt am Main, 1957); George Fischer, Russian Liberalism: from Gentry to Intelligentsia (Cambridge, 1958); and Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900–1905 (Cambridge, 1973). In a recent article Gregory Freeze has questioned the applicability of the Maklakov thesis to the period immediately preceding the Revolution of 1905, maintaining that the radicalization of the liberal program was prompted not by a change in the social composition of the liberal movement but by the need to create an all-class coalition against the autocracy. See Gregory Freeze, “A National Liberation Movement and the Shift in Russian Liberalism, 1901-03,” Slavic Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 1 (Mar. 1969).

15. For a list of the men attending the November 1904 Zemstvo Congress, see Listok osvobozhdenie, no. 18, pp.1–2. The elected delegates to the subsequent congresses are listed in TSGAOR fond 102, opis 5, delo 1000/1905, pp.43–46. Biographical information for the congress participants has been derived in the main from the proceedings of the provincial zemstvo assemblies, the Ukazateli to all’four State Dumas (contained in the stenographic proceedings), and Vsia Rossiia (St. Petersburg, 1903, 1912). The only delegates of non-noble origins at the November 1904 Congress—besides the representatives of the so-called peasant provinces who played a very minor role in the national congresses—were V. M. Khizniakov of Chernigov and P. A. Safonov of Kostroma. The noble delegates for whom biographical data was available—over half the total number—owned approximately 1500 de-siatiny of land on the average, with a median holding of around 1000 desiatiny.

16. Even the Kursk zemstvo, the most conservative assembly in the country, did not venture to criticize the way in which zemstvo representatives to the congresses were selected until the end of the year, although the subject was discussed in the assembly in the summer of 1905. At that time, however, M. Ia. Govorukho-Otrok, soon to be a leading activist in the United Nobility and a successful right wing candidate for board chairman, attacked the government for refusing to allow the Kursk zemstvo to elect their representatives to the congress in an official session. Zhurnaly zasedanii ekstrennago kurskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 10-11 iiunia 1905 goda (Kursk, 1905), p.18.

17. Paul Miliukov, Political Memoirs, 1905–1917 (Ann Arbor, 1967), p.19.

18. The constitutionalists held a two-to-one majority at the November 1904 Congress. Of the congress participants whose future political affiliation can be determined with any precision, thirty-seven subsequently joined the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party; fifteen the Octobrists; and one the far right, while eleven more adhered to the miniscule “progressive parties” that were to sit between the Kadets and the Octobrists in the State Dumas. In addition, the future Kadets occupied all but one of the seats on the original Organizing Bureau of the Zemstvo Congress. These proportions were to hold for future congresses as well. Listok osvobozhdenie no. 18 (Nov. 20/Dec. 3, 1905), pp.1–2 and TSGAOR fond 102, opis 5, delo 1000/1905, pp.43–46 and the sources listed in table 1.

19. Roberta Thompson Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry in Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1905-07,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975), p.95.

20. For example, the Tver “estate” of Ivan I. Petrunkevich was a bog, purchased in order to acquire the minimum property requirement to participate in the first curia of the zemstvo elections. Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi of Iaroslavl sold the considerable holdings that he had inherited from his parents in order to “spare” his children of the noxious influences of growing up in “a pomeshchik’s milieu,” while F. I. Rodichev was considered little more than “a gentleman farmer.” The relative indifference of the Kadets to agriculture should not be unduly exaggerated, for a number of prominent Kadets—D. D. Protopopov of Samara, Prince Pavel Dolgorukov of Moscow, and Prince G. E. L’vov of Tula—were actively involved with the management of their family estates in the years before the Revolution of 1905. However, L’vov and Protopopov both turned away from agricultural concerns after 1905 (L’vov, to sell scrap metal in the city) while Dolgorukov appears to have been more a timber merchant engaged in a large-scale lumber business rather than an ordinary gentry farmer. 1.1. Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok obshchestvennago deiatelia vospominaniia,” Arkhiv russkoi revoliu-tsii, vol. XXI (Berlin, 1934); A. Tyrkova-Vil’iams, Na putakh k svobode (New York, 1952), pp.110–11; Peter B. Struve, “My Contacts with Rodichev,” Slavonic and East European Review XII (1933/4), pp.360–61; T. I. Polner, Zhizhennyi put Kniazia Georgiia Evgenievicha L’vova (Paris, 1932), esp. pp.24–33; Prince P. D. Dolgorukov, Velikaia razrukha (Madrid, 1964), pp.32122; and D. D. Protopopov, “Iz nedavniago proshlago (Samara v 1904-05 gg),” Russkaia Mysl XXVIII no. 11 (November, 1907), pp.16–35.

21. This, indeed, was how their fellow noblemen tended to perceive them. For example the marshal of the nobility of Tambov province, V. M. Andre-evskii, described the Kadets in his memoirs as a group of “lawyers, professors, doctors, etc.” V. M. Andreevskii, “Vospominaniia i dr. materialy Vladimir Mikhailovich Andreevskago v chlena Gos. soveta” (Mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), p.55.

22. See Terence Emmons, “The Russian Landed Gentry and Politics,” The Russian Review, vol. XXXIII, no. 3 (July 1974); Geroid T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (New York, 1932), pp.129–37; and Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York, 1963), pp.28, 109-10, 168-69.

23. For a discussion of this development, see Manning, “The Provincial Gentry,” pp.19–56.

24. The influential marshal of the nobility of Moscow province, Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, estimated that as many as four-fifths of all noble landowners were unable by the turn of the century to support their families adequately on their earnings from agriculture alone. TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1-1902, delo 87, pp.11–12. For a good description of the difficulties confronting an individual noble proprietor, see N. A. Pavlov, Zapiska zemlevla-del’tsa (Petrograd, 1915).

25. Although this process was well under way in the civil service by the early nineteenth century, it seems to have proceeded particularly rapidly in the wake of the abolition of serfdom as the economic conditions of the post-Emancipation era forced many noble proprietors to direct their energies away from the central government toward their estates in the provinces. Marc Raeff, The Origins of the Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth Century Nobility (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966), pp.107–10; Walter M. Pintner, “The Social Characteristics of the Early Nineteenth Century Bureaucracy,” Slavic Review, vol. 29 (September 1970), pp.435–38; Walter M. Pintner, “The Russian Higher Civil Service on the Eve of the ‘Great Reforms,’ ” Journal of Social History, Spring 1975, pp.55–68; A. P. Korelin, “Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (1861–1904 gg.),” Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 87, pp.91–173; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, “Soslovnyi sostav ofitserskogo korpusa na ru-bezhe XIX-XX vekov,” Istoriia SSSR, 1973, no. 1 (January-February), pp.148–54; and N. Rubakin, Rossiia v tsifrakh opyt statisticheskoi kharateristiki soslovno-klassovago sostava naselenie russkago gosudarstva (St. Petersburg, 1912), esp. pp.60–66.

26. By 1905, half of all noble families owned no land at all (compared to 15 percent in 1861), while over two-thirds of the highest officials in the land—the occupants of the first four grades of the state service—held less than 100 desiatiny apiece, enough for a sizable summer retreat or even several of them but scarcely a sufficient quantity of land for any serious economic undertaking given the current lew level of intensity of Russian agriculture. The remaining third of these high officials clearly belonged to the landed aristocracy, owning on the average more than 14,000 desiatiny of land. Thus little room was left at the top of the state service for the average noble landowner who currently held 495 desiatiny of land. A. P. Korelin, “Rossisskoe dvorianstvo i ego soslovnaia organizatsia (1861–1904 gg.),” Istoriia SSSR, 1971, no. 5, pp.59–60.

27. During the regular winter sessions of 1904–1905, four-fifths of all provincial zemstvos (twenty-eight assemblies) demanded the establishment of a national representative assembly in the face of immense administrative pressures to prevent any political discussions in the zemstvos.

28. The zemstvos concerned were the assemblies of Bessarabia, Viatka, Voronezh, Kostroma, Moscow, Poltava, Samara, Saratov, Smolensk, Tauride, Ufa, Kharkov and Vladimir. Doklady bessarabskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy gubernskomu zemskomu sobraniiu XXXVI ocherednoi sessii v 1904 godu i zhurnaly zasedanii sobraniia (Bessarabia, 1905), part ii, pp.25–27; Zhurnaly viatskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia XXXVIII-i ocherednoi sessii (zasedanii 1-16 dekabria 1904 goda) (Viatka, 1905), pp.123–27, 143-45, 230; Zhurnal voronezhskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 2-15 ianvaria 1905 g. (Voronezh, 1905), pp.6–7; Postanovleniia ekaterino-slavskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia XXXIX ocherednoi 1904 goda sessii (Ekaterinoslav, 1905), pp.157–60; Postanovleniia kostromskago ocherednogo gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1904 goda (Kostroma, 1905), pp.27–29, 49; Postanovleniia moskovskago gubernskago sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 1904 goda (Moscow, 1905), p.5; Zhurnaly poltavskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 40 ocherednogo sozyva 1904 goda (Poltava, 1905), pp.7–8; A. N. Naumov, Iz utselevshikh vospominaniia 1868–1917 (New York, 1954), vol. I, pp.359–62; D. D. Protopopov, “Iz nedavniago proshlago (Samara v 1904–1905 gg.),” Russkaia mysl’ XXVIII (November 1907), part ii, pp.26–29; Zemstvo i politicheskaia svoboda: zhurnal kommis-sii-sobraniia saratovskago gubernskago zemstva (Paris, 1905), pp.9–30, 57; Zhurnaly XXXIX ocherednogo saratovskago zemskago sobraniia 9-19 ianvaria 1905 goda (Saratov, 1905), pp.7–9, 14; “Adresa i zaiavleniia zemskikh sobranii,” Osvobozhdenie, no. 63, January 20 (7), 1905, pp.11–12, and no. 65, February 9 (January 27), 1905, p.255; Zhurnaly zasedanii tavricheskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia XXXIX ocherednoi sessii s 9 po 18 ianvaria 1905 goda (Tauride, 1905), pp.11–12; Zhurnaly tverskago ocherednogo gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1904 goda zasedanii 30 ianvaria-12 fevralia 1905 g. (Tver, 1905), pp.8–9; Sbornik postanovlenii ufimskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s prilozheniiami XXX ocherednoe sobranie i XXVI chrezvychainoe sobranie 1905 goda (Ufa, 1905), pp.2–4; Zhurnaly XL ocherednogo khar’kovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 1905 goda (Kharkov, 1905), p.6; Zhurnaly ekstrennykh vladimirskikh gubernskikh zemskikh sobranii 11-go maia i 11-go avgusta 1905 goda (Vladimir, 1905), p.42.

29. In addition to the zemstvos listed in note 28, the Vologda, Novgorod, Riazan, Simbirsk, Chernigov, and St. Petersburg zemstvos had come to endorse legislative powers. Zhurnaly vologdskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii s 19 maia po 5 iiunia 1905 goda (Vologda, 1905), p.71; Sbornik postanovlenii zemskikh sobranii novgorodskoi gubernii za 1905 goda (Novgorod, 1906), pp.30–40; XXXV chrezvychainoe riazanskoe gubernskoe zem-skoe sobranie 1905 goda 27, 28 iiunia (Riazan, 1905), prilozheniia 21; Ruskiia vedomosti No. 209 August 4, 1905, p.2; Zhurnaly zasedanii cherni-govskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia ekstrennoi sessii 15–23 maia 1905 goda (Chernigov, 1905), pp.73–74 and prilozheniia 355; and Zhurnaly zasedanii chrezvychainago S-Petersburgskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 16, 18, i 19 maia 1905 goda (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp.28–29 and prilozheniia p.141.

30. At this time, the Kaluga, Olonets, Orel, and Pskov zemstvos joined those listed in notes 28 and 29 by adhering in full to the political program of the November 1905 Zemstvo Congress minority, which essentially regarded the October manifesto as a constitution that established a legislative assembly limiting the autocratic powers of the tsar. Zhurnaly XLII ocherednogo kaluzhskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s i dekabria 1905 g. (Kaluga, 1906), pp.43–45; Zhurnaly olonetskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii XXXIX-i ocherednoi 19 noiabria-17 dekabria 1905 g. i chrez-vychainykh 21-23 marta i 16-17 maia 1906 goda (Petrozavodsk, 1905); TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, pp.98, 26-27, 83-84, 97; and “Tele-gramy,” Novoe vremia, no. 10678, December 6/19, 1905, p.2.

31. At the beginning of 1905, the Kazan, Perm, Riazan, Simbirsk, Olonets, and Kursk zemstvos insisted on the preservation of the autocratic powers of the tsar. But by the summer none of the above-mentioned zemstvos that met were using the autocratic title, although the Orel zemstvo, which had favored a consultative assembly the previous winter, now called for the preservation of the autocracy. Before the year was out, however, three of these assemblies—the Riazan, Simbirsk, and Orel zemstvos—had rallied to the cause of legislative powers for the national assembly. Postanovleniia ka-zanskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 40 ocherednoi sessii (Kazan, 1905), part i, p.33; Zhurnaly permskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia XXXV ocherednoi sessii i doklady kommissii semu sobraniiu (Perm, 1905), p.187; XL ocherednoe riazanskoe gubernskago zemskago sobranie 1904 g. noiabria-dekabria (Riazan, 1905), p.125; Zhurnaly simbirskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 1904 g. (Simbirsk, 1905), p.xiii; Zhurnaly zasedanii XL ocherednoi kurskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 1905 g. (Kursk, 1905), p. 102; and Zhurnaly chrezvychainago orlovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia zasedanii 24, 25 iiunia i 20 avgusta 1905 goda (Orel, 1905), pp.3–16.

32. In the summer of 1905, four-tail suffrage was advocated by the Vologda, Novgorod, Saratov, Simbirsk, Tver, Ufa, Chernigov, Kostroma, Moscow, and Iaroslavl zemstvos. In the autumn they were joined by the Vladimir assembly but by then the Vologda zemstvo had repudiated the fourth tail-direct suffrage.

33. Of the assemblies concerned, the Vologda, Novgorod, Saratov, Simbirsk, Tver, Ufa, Chernigov, Kostroma, and Moscow zemstvos favored a four-tail electoral system, while the Orel and Tauride assemblies supported three tails and the Voronezh, Smolensk, and Kharkov zemstvos recognized four tails as “ideal” but recommended three-tail suffrage for the first elections. Zhurnaly vologodskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii s 19 maia po 5 iiunia 1905 goda (Vologda, 1905), pp.71–72; and prilozheniia pp.787–88; Sbornik postanovlenii zemskikh sobranii novgorod-skoi gubernii za 1905 goda, vol. I, pp.30–40; Zhurnaly tverskago ocherednogo gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1904 goda zasedanii 10 ian-varia-12 fevralia 1905 g. i chrezvychainago sobraniia 7–9 iiunia 1905 g, p.1107; Sbornik postanovleniia ufimskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s prilozheniiam XXX ocherednoe sobranie i XXXVI chrezvychainoe sobranie 1905 goda, p.1096; Zhurnaly zasedanii chernigovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia ekstrennoi sessii 15–23 maia 1905 goda, pp.227–28; Postanovleniia kostromskago chrezvychainago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s 30 maia po 1 iiunia 1905 g. i ocherednogo gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1905 g., pp.35–41; Zhurnaly voronezhskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia chrezvychainoi sessii 1–3 iiulia 1905 goda (Voronezh, 1905), pp.1322; Zhurnaly chrezvychainago khar–kovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 12 iiunia 1905 goda (Khar’kov, 1905), p.84; Zhurnaly chrezvychainago orlovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 24–25 iiunia i 20 avgusta 1905 goda, pp.20–35; Zhurnaly zasedanii tavricheskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia chrezvychainoi sessii s 7 po 8 iiunia 1905 goda (Tauride, 1905), p.11; and Russkiia vedomosti, no. 163, June 19, 1905; no. 194, July 20, 1905; and no. 209, August 4, 1905.

34. In addition to the zemstvos listed in note 33, the Kaluga, Olonets, Poltava, Pskov, Vladimir, Iaroslavl, Perm, Orel, and St. Petersburg zemstvos had come to support three-tail suffrage while the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo now supported universal suffrage. Zhurnaly XLII ocherednogo kaluzh-skago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s 1 dekabria po 11 dekabria 1905 g., pp.43–45; Zhurnaly ochered. vladimirskago gub. zem. sobraniia ochered. ses. 1905 g. (Iaroslavl, 1906), p.199; Zhurnaly permskago gub. zem. sobraniia XXXVI ochered. ses. (Perm, 1906), p.78; Zhurnaly olonetskago gub. zem. sobraniia ses. XXXIX-i ochered. 19 noiabria—17 dekabria 1905 g., p.122; TSGIA fond 1288, opis 1, delo 76-1906, p.98; Zhurnaly poltavskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 41 ochered. sozyva 1905 goda (Poltava, 1906), p.15; Zhurnaly zasedanii S-Petersburgskago gub. zem. sobraniia sorokovoi ochered. ses. 1-21 dekabria 1905 goda (St. Petersburg, 1905), p.27; and Novoe vremia, no. 10678, December 6/19, 1905, p.2.

35. The assemblies concerned were the Vologda, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kaluga, Olonets, Orel, Penza, Poltava, Pskov, St. Petersburg, and Tauride zemstvos.

36. Russkiia vedomosti, no. 199, July 25, 1905, p.2, and P. P. Maslov, Agrarnyi vopros (St. Petersburg, 1908), vol. II, pp.198–201.

37. It is true that the chairmen and members of the zemstvo executive boards did receive a salary for their efforts. See Terence Emmons, “The Beseda Circle, 1899–1905,” Slavic Review, September 1973, p.468. Emmons has estimated that the salary of a provincial board chairman compared favorably with those of state officials, university professors and physicians; however, it is not clear whether the much lower salaries paid to the members of zemstvo boards and to uezd board chairmen were as generous. V. F. Shlippe, the chairman of the Vereisk uezd zemstvo board (Moscow province) maintained in his memoirs that his salary as chairman did not cover the extensive amount of travelling that the post required. V. F. Shlippe, untitled memoirs (Mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), pp.86–87.

38. For a perceptive discussion of the differences in the social composition of the zemstvos and noble societies, see V. F. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Stanford, 1939), pp.204–205.

39. A. P. Korelin, “Rossiskoe dvorianstvo i ego soslovnaia organizatsiia (1861–1904 gg.),” Istoriia S.S.S.R., 1971, no. 5, pp.75–76.

40. At that time, the noble assemblies of seventeen of the thirty-four zemstvo provinces with elected marshals (the societies of Bessarabia, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kaluga, Kostroma, Kursk, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Novgorod, Orel, Pskov, Riazan, Samara, St. Petersburg, Tver, Ufa, and Iaroslavl) met and only a single one of them—Ekaterinoslav—neglected to adopt a political resolution. For summaries of these meetings and the addresses adopted by them, see TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1, delo 19 (1905), pp.1–2, 8-9, 15-16, 63-64, 119; Novoe vremia, no. 10346, December 18/31, 1904, p.2; no. 10348, December 20, 1904/January 2, 1905, p.2; no. 10371, January 19/February 1, 1905, p.13; no. 10375, January 23/February 5, 1905, p.3; no. 10378, January 26/February 8, 1905, p.14; no. 10382, January 30/Febru-ary 12, 1905, p.6; no. 10384, February 1/14, 1905, p.5; no. 10387, February 4/17, 1905, p.5; no. 10414, March 3/16, 1905, p.1; Russkiia vedomosti, no. 340, December 7, 1904, p.3; no. 20, January 22, 1905, p.3; no. 22, January 24, 1905, p.1; no. 25, January 27, 1905, p.2; no. 50, February 21, 1905, p.3; Grazhdanin, XXXIX, no. 8, January 27, 1905, p.20; Khoziainin, no. 6, February 10, 1905, pp.226–27; and Pravital’stvennyi vestnik, December 15, 1904, p.3.

41. The noble societies concerned were Bessarabia, Kazan, Kaluga, Kostroma, Kursk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Novgorod, Pskov, St. Petersburg, Samara, Tver, Ufa, and Iaroslavl.

42. 58.5 percent of the noble societies meeting in the winter of 1904–1905 (ten assemblies) called for the retention of the autocracy. The assemblies concerned were the Kazan, Kursk, Moscow, Novgorod, Orel, Riazan, Samara, St. Petersburg, Tver and Ufa nobilities.

43. In the winter of 1904–1905 the omission of the title “Autocrat” from many of these addresses and petitions should be regarded more as the result of a political compromise between various factions within a given noble assembly rather than as a conscious desire on the part of the majority of the assembly to limit the powers of the tsar. However, the neglect of this title was no trivial matter. As late as the mid-nineties, when the Tver zemstvo presented Nicholas II with an address that did not contain this salutation, the monarch was so outraged that the political rights of its author, F. I. Rodichev, were abrogated for over a decade.

44. Only the nobilities of Samara and Kursk wished to limit the national representative body to delegates of the nobility.

45. At that time, little more than nine noble assemblies located in zemstvo provinces were able to meet because of the revolutionary conditions prevailing in many provinces. The assemblies concerned were the Vladimir, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kursk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Orel, Tambov, Tula, and Iaroslavl nobilities. Of these only the Vladimir assembly used the autocratic title and only Kursk neglected to endorse the October Manifesto. The latter, however, for the first time that year made no reference to the autocracy. See TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1-1906, delo 15, pp.2, 8-9, delo 12 (1906), pp.14–15, and delo 11 (1905), p.48; TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 3/3, pp.32–33; Novoe vremia, no. 10728, Jan. 25/Feb. 7, 1906, p.1; no. 10757, Feb. 24/Mar. 9, 1906, p.5; and no. 10769, Mar. 8/21, 1906, p.2; Russkiia vedomosti, no. 33, Feb. 3, 1906, and no. 65, Mar. 8, 1906, p.3; and Rossiia, no. 16, Jan. 19, 1906, p.1.

46. TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1, delo 19 (1905), pp.23–27; Osvobozhdenie, no. 63, Jan. 20/7, 1905, pp.222–23; and Princess Olga Trubetskaia, Kniaz S.N. Trubetskoi (Vospominaniia sestry) (New York, 1953), pp.90–91.

47. TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1, delo 19 (1905), pp.149–54, and Osvobozhdenie, no. 75, Aug. 16/3, 1905, pp.431–32.

48. Trubetskaia, p.149.

49. For a discussion of the role and duties of the marshals of the nobility, see M. A. Katkov, Rol’ uezdnykh predvoditelei dvorianstva v gosudarstven-nom upravlenie Rossii K voprosu o reforme uezdnogo upravlenie (Moscow, 1914), and Count Constantine Benckendorff, Half a Life: Reminiscences of a Russian Gentleman (London, 1954), p.124.

50. Novoe vremia, no. 10529, Jun. 26/Jul. 9, 1905, p.1, and Russkiia vedomosti, no. 170, Jun. 26, 1905, p.2.

51. A number of assemblies at this time undertook “zemstvo strikes,” the interruption or termination of a zemstvo meeting as a form of political protest. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.120–26.

52. At this time only one provincial zemstvo assembly—that of Kostroma—gave the November 1905 congress majority its unqualified support, and it did so by a very narrow margin, while fifteen of the thirty-four provincial zemstvo assemblies explicitly denied the authority or the representative nature of the congress. TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906.

53. Five of the nine board chairmen censured by their assemblies at this time were actual members of the Kadet Party (Prince G. E. L’vov of Tula, V. P. Obninskii of Kaluga, F. A. Golovin of Moscow, A. D. Iumatov of Saratov and S. M. Barataev of Simbirsk), and a sixth (A. K. Paramonov of Kherson) later supported the Kadets in the First Duma. Two others (Baron A. F. Stuart of Bessarabia and N. V. Raevskii) were considered “progressives,” but they were closely associated with the zemstvo majority throughout 1905. Only in Poltava was the chairman of a censured board affiliated with the Octobrist Party. Yet the case of Poltava appears to be the exception that proves the rule since the object of the assembly’s attacks was not so much the Octobrist chairman, F. A. Lizogub, as the board member V. Ia. Golovnia, the editor of a local Kadet-oriented newspaper, Poltovshchina. For after the board resigned under the pressure of the assembly, all members except Golovnia were immediately reelected by large majorities. TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, pp.252, 157; Novoe vremia, no. 10731, Jan. 28/Feb. 10, 1906, p.4; Chrezvychainoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie 28 iiunia 1905 goda. Doklady Bessarabskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy gubernskomu zem-skomu XXXVIII ocherednoi sessii v 1905 goda i zhurnaly zasedaniia sobranii chrezvychainoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie 25 marta 1906 goda (Kishnev, 1906), vol. II, pp.180–98, 68-79, 91-113, 174-75, 239; Zhurnaly poltav-skago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 41 ocherednogo sozyva 1905 goda (Poltava, 1906), pp.9–10; Zhurnaly ocherednogo saratovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1905 goda (Saratov, 1906), pp.383–534; Zhurnaly zasedanii XLII ocherednogo kaluzhskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia s 1 dek. po 11 dek. 1905 g. (Kaluga, 1906), pp.52–62; Postanovleniia moskovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia chrezvychainoi sessii 1906 goda 17–28 fevralia i 10 aprelia 1906 goda (Moscow, 1906), pp.50–86; Zhurnaly chrezvychainago tul’skago gubernskago zemskago sostoiashagosia 20-28 fevralia 1906 goda vmesto ne razreshennago g. ministrom vnutrennikh del XLI ocherednogo (Tula, 1906), pp.40–44, 122; Zhurnaly simbirskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 1905 goda (Simbirsk, 1906), pp.cviii—cii, 180; Khersonskoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie chrezvychainoi sessii 21-23 fevralia 1906 goda i doklady komissii (Kherson, 1906), pp.125–30.

54. See S. M. Dubrovskii, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v revoliutsii 1905-07 g.g. (Moscow, 1956); “Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1905-06 g.g.,” Trudy vol’nogo ekonomicheskago obshchestva 1908, nos. 3-5, and Novoe vremia for October, November, and December, 1905.

55. See, for example, Novoe vremia, no. 10673, Dec. 1/14, 1905, p.6 and no. 10676, Dec. 4/17, 1905, p.6.

56. I. G. Drozhdov, Sud’by dvorianskago zemlevladeniia v Rossii i ten-dentsii k ego mobilizatsii (Petrograd, 1917), pp.25–29, 64-68.

57. Most of the zemstvos cited by the Ministry of the Interior as persisting in their “radicalism” were located in regions that did not experience major peasant disturbances. See TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, p.245.

58. TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, p.197. At this time only the Vladimir and Kharkov provincial zemstvos objected to the mass arrests of local public activists. Zhurnaly ocherednogo vladimirskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 1905 goda, pp.46–47, and Zhurnaly khar–kovskago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia chrezvychainykh sessii 18 marta i 18 aprelia 1906 goda (Kharkov, 1906), pp.37–40.

59. The assemblies concerned were the Vologda, Kaluga, Olonets, Orel, Poltava, Pskov, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, Perm, and Smolensk zemstvos. Only two provincial zemstvos—Ufa and Kazan—demanded the immediate introduction of the civil freedoms promised by the October Manifesto.

60. See V. Golubev, “Zemskaia reaktsiia,” Bez zaglaviia 1906, no. 4, pp.137–38, for the most concise analysis of the financial problems of the zemstvos at this time. See also TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, pp.251–52, 11-12, 21-29, 79–90, 166-68, 180-84, 197-216, 226, 238, 244-50; Russkaia mysl, Mar. 1906, p.224; “Zemskoe obozrenii,” Samoupravlenie, no. 1 and no. 2 (Nov. 10, 1906, and Dec. 15, 1906); and B. B. Veselovskii, “Koe shto o nastroeniakh zemlevladel’tsev,” Obrazovanie, April 1906.

61. Bez zaglaviia, 1906, no. 4, p.138 and TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 76-1906, pp.11–12.

62. Bez zaglaviiai, 1906, no. 4, p.138; TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 761906, pp.252, 28; Novoe vremia, no. 10726, Jan. 23/Feb. 5, 1906, p.5 and no. 10710, Jan. 7/20, 1906, p.5.

63. Zhurnaly chrezvychainago tul’skago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sostaishagosia 20–28 fevralia 1906 goda (Tula, 1906), pp.21–26, 68, 73, 39-40.

64. Russkiia vedomosti, no. 21, Jan. 22, 1906, p.2.

65. Ibid., no. 251, Sept. 15, 1905, p.3; no. 254, Sept. 18, 1905, pp.3–4; and Novoe vremia, no. 10609, Sept. 14/27, 1905, p.2; no. 10051, Nov. 9/22, 1905. p.5.

66. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.314–36.

67. To be sure, the Octobrist leaders also initially endorsed a limited form of compulsory expropriation, breaking with the Kadets over their attitude toward the government. However, the men who flocked to support the Octobrists in their campaign against the old zemstvo leadership did not accept this part of the Octobrist program. Consequently provincial pressure forced the party to revise its agrarian program drastically at the Second Octobrist Party Congress in February 1906. Novoe vremia, no. 10730, Jan. 27/Feb. 9, 1906, p.2, and D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom (Moscow, 1918), pp.421–22.

68. Novoe vremia, no. 10755, Feb. 22/Mar. 7, 1906, p.4.

69. Approximately half of the deputies to the first two State Dumas were members of the peasant estate, while only a third of the deputies came from the nobility. Warren B. Walsh, “The Composition of the Dumas,” The Russian Review, vol. 8, no. 2 (1949), pp.111–16. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.362–63, 514-15.

70. Dubrovskii, pp.42–57.

71. Aleksei Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo 2-ii gosudarstvennuiu dumy (St. Petersburg, 1907).

72. The phrase is that of the Saratov landowner and gentry activist N. A. Pavlov. Pavlov, p.79.

73. Of the 216 persons of noble origins in the Third State Duma, approximately one-quarter (fifty-four persons) described their occupation as that of “agriculture,” while forty-four described their vocation as “public activists.” The proportions remained roughly the same for the Fourth Duma. Of the 210 nobles in that assembly, fifty-three cited agriculture as their profession, while thirty-five called themselves public activists. It is indicative of the confused social consciousness of the times that yet another quarter of the noble deputies who possessed virtually identical career patterns did not apply either of these terms to themselves and failed to list a profession. See Russia. Gosudarstvennaia duma. Tretei sozyv gosudarstvennoi dumy. Por-trety, biografii i avtobiografii (St. Petersburg, 1910), and Chetvertyi sozyv gosudarstvennoi dumy. Khodozhestvennyi fototipicheskii al’bom s portretami i biografiiami (St. Petersburg, 1913).

74. Petrunkevich, pp.386–87 and Petergofskoe soveshchanie 0 proekte gosudarstvennoi dumy (Berlin, no date), cited in Gilbert S. Doctorow, “Institutional Reform, 1905-07” (Columbia University seminar paper, 1970), p.26.

75. For the leading zemstvo activists’ attitudes toward the peasantry, see the debates on the July 1905 Zemstvo Congress’s Appeal to the People in Osvobozhdenie, no. 76, and TSGAOR fond 102, opis 5, delo 1000/1905.

76. See, for example, the article by Prince D. I. Shakovskoi in Prince P. D. Dolgorukov and 1.1. Petrunkevich (eds.), Agrarnyi vopros (Moscow, 1905), vol. I.

77. TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2-1907, pp.19–20, 26, 31-32, 38; Samouprav-lenie, no. 27, Jul. 14, 1907, p.17; and B. B. Veselovskii, “Zemskoe nastroeniia (po povodu sessii uezdnykh sobranii),” Obrazovanie, XV, no. 11 (Nov. 1906), part ii, pp.52–53.

78. TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 2-1907, pp.2–52, and Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, p.58.

79. For examples of such attempts, see TSGAOR fond 102, opis 9, delo 35/108, pp.4–6, 24-27, 261-66, and Shipov, pp.519–31.

80. Ruth Delia MacNaughton, “The Provincial Nobility and Political Trends in the Zemstvo, 1906–1910” (Columbia University M.A. essay, 1972), p.114.

81. Like Shipov’, L’vov was defeated in the 1909-10 elections in his home uezd of Aleksinsk (Tula), seat of his family estate. However, he had not served in the provincial zemstvo since 1907, when he was ousted as board chairman and provincial deputy. Shlippe, pp.154–59 and T. I. Polner, Zhiznennyi put Kniazia Georgiia Evgenievicha L’vova (Paris, 1932), pp.175–77, 127.

82. XXXV chrezvychainoe riazanskoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie 1905 goda 27, 28 iiunia (Riazan, 1905), pp.21–22; Zhurnaly chrezvychainago tul’-skago gubernskago zemskago sobraniia 16–17 iiunia 1905 goda; Zhurnal chrezvychainago tul’skago gubernskago zemskago zasedaniia 5 noiabria 1905 (Tula, 1905), pp.3–4.

83. 41 ocherednoe riazanskoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie 1905 g., pp.125–28, and Russkiia vedomosti no. 309, Nov. 23, 1905, p.1.

84. Shipov, pp.312–13.

85. M. D. Ershov, Zemskaia reforma v sviaze s gosudarstvennym izbiria-tel’nym zakonom (St. Petersburg, 1907).

86. Stenograficheskie otchety 1-go vserossiiskago s”ezda zemskikh deiatelei v Moskve zasedanii 10-15 iiunia 1907 g. (Moscow, 1907), p.32. The reader must not assume, however, that gentry activists in 1907 agreed on the means by which they could assure their political preponderance over those “one hundred thirty million peasants.” The Octobrist leadership, including Ershov, tended to favor an electoral system based on the amount of zemstvo taxes paid, weighted toward the wealthier taxpayers, while the gentry right preferred elections by estates. Most moderates—including many rank-and-file Octobrists—wanted the electoral system to be based on landownership, maintaining that the tax system favored by the Octobrist leaders would unduly favor the owners of commercial and industrial property over the gentry. The 1907 Zemstvo Congress adhered to the moderate position, while the more conservative United Nobility opted for a compromise between elections by estates and a system based on landownership. Nevertheless, the main concern of all the gentry activists involved was to insure the position of the landed nobility within the new political order. Ibid., pp.12–54, 66143, 155-213. Zhurnal i postanovleniia vserossiiskago s”ezda zemskikh deiatelei v Moskve s 10 po 15 iiunia 1907 goda (Moscow, 1907), pp.52–59, and 6-i material po voprosu o mestnoi reforme postanovleniia chrezvychainykh i ocherednykh gubernskikh dvorianskikh sobranii po voprosu o mestnoi reforme (St. Petersburg, 1908).

87. In the course of 1904–1905 virtually all the provincial zemstvos demanded the repeal of the 1890 estate-based election law; but only the Vladimir zemstvo assembly wished to replace it with four-tail suffrage. Most of the others espoused a return to the 1864 franchise, based on landed property, or a system founded on the amount of zemstvo taxes paid. For examples of these resolutions, see Pravo, nos. 26 and 27 (June, 1904), and the sources listed in notes 27-30.

88. Listok osvobozhdenie no. 18, p.1.

89. However, the elections to the first two Dumas demonstrated that the gentry moderates’ wager on indirect elections alone was rather misplaced.

90. For a detailed discussion of these events, see Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.514–609.

91. V. S. Diakin, “Stolypin i dvorianstvo (proval mestnoi reformy),” Problemy krest’ianskogo zemlevladenie i vnutrennoi politiki Rossii Dookiabr’-skoi period (Leningrad, 1972), pp.231–74.

92. The only elective institutions in the Third of June System that remained outside the domination of the landed gentry were the city dumas. See the paper by MacNaughton and Manning, this volume, p.185.

93. The best examples of such attitudes can be found in the proceedings of the July, September, and November 1905 Zemstvo Congresses as well as the more conservative 1907 Zemstvo Congresses. See Osvobozhdenie, no. 76, Sept. 1612, 1905; TSGAOR fond 102, opis 1, delo 1000/1905, Ch. I to 4; Novoe Vremia, no. 10651, Nov. 9/12, 1905; Russkiia vedomosti, XLII, nos. 295-96, Nov. 9-10, 1905, and no. 302, Nov. 16, 1905; N. Stroev Istoriche-skii moment I. Moskovskii s”ezd zemskii i gorodskikh deiatelia (St. Petersburg, 1906), and Stenografichskie otchety 1-go vserossiskago s”ezda zemskikh deiatelei v Moskve zasedanii 10-15 iiunia 1907 g. passim.