The Crisis of the Third of June System and Political Trends in the Zemstovs, 1907–14

RUTH DELIA MacNAUGHTON and ROBERTA THOMPSON MANNING

The Manifesto of October 17, 1905, called into being a new form of political organization in Russia: the legal political party. Historians concerned with Russia’s political evolution in subsequent years have devoted the greater part of their attention to the development of these parties, their functioning in the four State Dumas, and their inability to form a workable majority in opposition to the government.¹ Focusing narrowly on the Duma, political histories of the post-1905 period have generally neglected parallel developments within a predecessor of the Duma as a multiclass elective institution—the zemstvos, the local organs of self-government established in the countryside during the “great reform” era of Alexander II.

In this neglect, historians of the post-1905 period have merely followed in the footsteps of liberal contemporaries, who generally maintained that with the creation of the State Duma, the zemstvos had fulfilled their essential function by contributing to “the crowning of the constitutional edifice” through their participation in the Liberation Movement.² Accordingly, after 1905 the zemstvos were expected to pass unnoticed from the political scene, concentrating their energies and attention on purely routine local matters. Meanwhile, with the convocation of a multiclass Duma, the landed nobility, which effectively dominated the zemstvos under the 1890 estate-based election law, was to be superseded in the national political arena by men of diverse social origins.

Despite liberal expectations, neither the zemstvos nor the landed nobility were reduced to a secondary political role after 1905. On the contrary, with the defeat of the Revolution of 1905–1907 and the adoption of the Third of June electoral law, the landed nobility emerged as the leading social force in the new political order, providing approximately half of the deputies to the Third and Fourth State Dumas³ as well as almost all the elected representatives to the State Council, the upper house of the new Russian parliament.⁴ At the same time, the zemstvos came to exert greater influence on national affairs than ever before. The zemstvos not only elected the largest single block of deputies to the State Council but also provided the bulk of the public representatives on the Ministry of the Interior’s Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy (sovet po delam mestnago khoziaistva). Many contemporary observers considered this unduly neglected body a preparliament or even a third legislative chamber within the post-1907 political order, since it was endowed with the power to review—and hence also to revise—all the government’s legislative proposals relating to local government before such bills were submitted to the Duma.⁵

Consequently, no historical evaluation of the Imperial Russian government and its policies after 1907 is complete without a survey of the political attitudes of the zemstvos and their noble constituency, especially as these attitudes developed during the premiership of P. A. Stolypin, the most creative statesman of the post-1905 period. A study of the zemstvos at this time is all the more warranted because the ultimate collapse of the tsarist regime and the victory of the Russian Revolution are often attributed to the Imperial Russian government’s reluctance to give responsible public forces, especially the zemstvo men, a meaningful voice in national affairs.⁶

This failure was not shared by the Stolypin government.⁷ In the first place, Stolypin was not a career bureaucrat but, rather, a longtime provincial landowner and marshal of the nobility. He left his native Kovno province to serve as governor of Saratov in 1904, only two years before his appointment as Minister of the Interior and Chairman of the Council of Ministers.⁸ He therefore tended quite naturally to identify with the noble landowners of the provinces. Early in the course of the Revolution of 1905, he concluded that Russia needed above all else “the formation of a landed party, rooted in the nation, which opposed a theoretical approach to politics and which might counteract and neutralize what is harmful in the third element [i.e., the intelligentsia].”⁹ Consequently, in the hope of aiding the emergence of such a political formation, he actively cooperated with moderate conservative elements in the legislative chambers.

He also attempted to collaborate with such men in the local zemstvos, consulting with the zemstvos on all legislation that might affect them through the zemstvo representatives in the Council on the Local Economy. In addition, he utilized these institutions to administer key portions of his reform program in the localities, especially in the fields of education and agriculture. In the course of Stolypin’s administration, the zemstvos were encouraged to become actively involved in his land reform program by establishing special programs to improve the economic practices of the new private peasant proprietors who left the land commune under the Stolypin land legislation. In this way, the zemstvos were a vital part of Stolypin’s plans for the future of Russia, and his success or failure as a statesman must be gauged at least in part by political developments in these institutions and his changing relationships with them.

A survey of the political attitudes of the zemstvos at this time can serve other purposes as well. It can provide us with insights into the local roots of the political behavior of the landed nobility, the dominant element within the new post-1907 political order. In the course of our study we will be forced to consider whether the new national political parties, which quite often developed directly out of the zemstvo movement,¹⁰ exerted a reciprocal influence on provincial affairs or whether local politics tended to follow the sound of a different drummer, shaped by concerns other than national political alignments. A study of the political tendencies among the zemstvo nobility can also illuminate the limitations within which Russian statesmen were compelled to operate, on both the national and local levels. For during this period the zemstvos and their noble constituency not only played an unprecedented role in national affairs but also continued to exert a critical influence on precisely those areas of activity upon which Stolypin turned the full force of his reformist zeal: economic relations in the countryside and the expansion of the role of non-noble elements in local elective institutions.¹¹

Of necessity our inquiry will focus heavily on the zemstvo elections of 1909-10, since official returns are most complete for these elections. From these elections we can gauge the political mood of the provincial nobility—and other elements of the population—midway through the Third Duma period. Only a detailed scrutiny of the returns of these elections held near the end of the Stolypin era can reveal whether the political reaction in the zemstvos that set in at the end of 1905¹² was finally reversed after political stability was restored in Russia, allowing liberals and reformers to assume their previous position of preeminence and authority within the zemstvos. A move to the left was quite likely in view of earlier, pre-1905 zemstvo experiences. Time and again in the past, the liberals had suffered setbacks similar to those of 1906–1907 in individual provinces and regions, only to stage a political comeback in subsequent elections.

Before turning to the electoral results, however, we would like to point out that there are considerable problems in evaluating the available statistical data on zemstvo elections. In the first place, given the necessary limitations of this essay and our primary interest in the political evolution of the provincial nobility, four of the thirty-four zemstvo provinces—Vologda, Viatka, Olonets, and Perm—will have to be excluded from our discussion, since relatively few nobles resided in them, and the local zemstvos evolved along different lines from the noble-dominated assemblies.¹³ Furthermore, in order to facilitate our task, the greater part of our attention must be focused on the provincial zemstvo assemblies—one in each of our thirty remaining provinces—rather than on the 322 county assemblies. This approach is also the more useful, since by tradition political tendencies were developed more fully at the provincial level, while parochial interests tended to prevail within the smaller units.

Also, any comparison of the results of the 1909-10 elections with those of 1906–1907 will be hindered by the fact that the official returns of the 1906–1907 elections compiled by the Main Administration on the Affairs of the Local Economy of the Ministry of the Interior are incomplete. For the government gathered information on the political alignment of the zemstvos in the spring of 1907, on the eve of the June 3 coup d’état, midway through the current round of zemstvo elections. At this time only fifteen of the thirty-four provincial zemstvos had been reelected.¹⁴ The resulting gap in official electoral statistics was only partially remedied by B. B. Veselovskii, the well-known expert on zemstvo affairs, in his monumental history of the zemstvos published in 1909-11. In this work Veselovskii analyzed the political trends in the zemstvos after 1905 by comparing the political affiliation of the provincial zemstvo board chairmen elected in 1903–1904 with those elected in 1906–1907.¹⁵ The problem with Veselovskii’s figures is twofold. First, the political affiliation of the board chairman might not necessarily reflect the predominant political tendency prevailing in any given assembly as a whole. While the 190(6-1907 elections were quite probably the most politicized in the entire history of the zemstvos,¹⁶ personal factors, such as bonds of kinship and friendship, which traditionally played a large role in provincial politics among the landed nobility, continued to influence the outcome of the elections no less than purely political considerations.¹⁷

The second difficulty with Veselovskii’s analysis of the elections coincides with the third problem that we encounter in attempting to comprehend the results of the zemstvo elections: the problem of political classification. While Veselovskii discussed political tendencies among the provincial board chairmen largely in terms of affiliation to one or another of the new legal political parties—the Kadets, “progressives,” Octobrists, or “rights”—the Ministry of the Interior both in 1907 and again in 1909-10 classified the political alignment of the local zemstvos according to three more general categories: “rights,” “moderates,” and “lefts.”¹⁸ Such a classification of the outcome of the 1909-10 elections may seem surprising. By 1909-10 the new national legal political parties that had formed in response to the October Manifesto and the establishment of representative government in Russia were no longer novelties. One might thus reasonably expect that the new round of zemstvo elections would reveal even more clear-cut political allegiances than had been displayed three years earlier. But the government was not alone in using this vaguer political classification. The contemporary press, too, used identical terms to describe the results of the 1909-10 elections, while frequently confusing matters even further by adding a fourth category to the government’s three—that of “progressive.”

The terms “right” and “left” present fewer difficulties than the terms “moderate” or “progressive.” In contemporary political literature, with certain qualifications to be discussed later, the term “zemstvo left” was commonly employed as a catchall phrase to refer to Kadets and Kadet sympathizers, as well as to those zemstvo men whose political views might rank them closer to the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries than to the liberals, but we should realize that there were certainly only negligible numbers of this latter group, particularly after 1906–1907. Nor did anyone ever claim that the term “zemstvo rights” was more than a convenient way to refer to anyone who stood to the right of the Octobrists.¹⁹ However, given the general recognition of a strong strain of Octobrism in the post-1905 zemstvo,²⁰ it is reasonable to inquire why the press and the government continued to refer to the center of the zemstvos’ political spectrum as “moderates” rather than “Octobrists.”

On the basis of a survey conducted by its provincial correspondents in the spring of 1909, the liberal Moscow newspaper Russkoe slovo advanced a straightforward answer to this question. “Octobrists as any sort of organized force,” the editors concluded, “do not appear in the provinces even during city duma and zemstvo elections.” Assigned the task of sampling the attitudes of local Octobrists toward the activity of the Duma faction in general and Guchkov in particular, correspondents from Ufa, Odessa, Baku, Smolensk, Kharkov, and other localities reported themselves unable to complete the assignment because of the lack of any bona fide Octobrists to question. Although the official Octobrist organ, Golos moskvy, made a halfhearted, albeit strongly worded, attempt to discredit the survey’s findings, the journal in the end was forced to concede that the party’s work “is concentrated in the parliamentary faction and in the central committee.”²¹

Earlier accounts of attempts by the Kadets as well as the Octobrists to establish provincial branches indicate that the majority of these organizations collapsed almost as soon as they were founded.²² Evidently the conditions of life in the countryside, particularly in those remote areas commonly referred to as “deep in the provinces,” were not conducive to the establishment of formal party organizations. Those seeking to organize party chapters among the landed nobility in these areas did not only have to contend with the primitive condition of transportation and communication and the premodern ties of friendship and blood in all social interactions. They also had to face the all-pervasive authority of the generally highly conservative marshals of the nobility, to whom their fellow noblemen tended traditionally to defer. The marshals, though always important figures, appear to have played a more active role in provincial politics after 1905, taking the lead in ousting the liberals from the zemstvos and dominating the zemstvo contingents in the State Council and the Council on the Local Economy.²³

Hence, it is not surprising that even by 1909-10 the number of zemstvo members who possessed formal party ties was so insignificant that the press and the government had no choice but to resort to less specific terminology to describe the general political inclinations of the provincial nobility. Moreover, those relatively few provincial noblemen who did join political parties apparently did not fully adhere to the views of their representatives in the Duma. Writing in Sovremen-nyi mir, the publicist I. Larskii noted in 1909 that “provincial Octobrists are somewhat more conservative than their counterparts in the capital.”²⁴ In the countryside, political distinctions were blurred, and individuals quite often subscribed to the most unlikely assortment of political tenets.²⁵ Nevertheless, national issues could not help but impinge occasionally on zemstvo life and in 1909-10 the press continued to associate rather broadly the term “zemstvo left” with Kadets and “zemstvo moderates” with the Octobrists as a device of admittedly limited usefulness to group the zemstvo membership according to their attitudes toward the government, the recent national upheaval, the land question, etc.²⁶

This brings us to still another source of confusion in dealing with political terminology. In addition to the new national partisan connotations of these terms, the terms “rights,” “moderates,” and “lefts” continued within the context of the zemstvo to retain their original meanings, which were based primarily on local rather than national issues. To be sure, liberal publicists frequently argued with some justification that local and national issues were inseparable. While “zemstvo rights” traditionally tended to advocate fiscal austerity—and hence lower taxes—out of a sense of their own “class” interests, the “zemstvo lefts” tended to promote the expansion of zemstvo services out of a quasi-populist conviction that “the zemstvo cause is a commitment to satisfying the needs of the lower classes of the population, a commitment to the cultural uplifting and education of the people.”²⁷ Those political observers discussing the “zemstvo lefts” in 1909 and 1910 could hardly have been referring to the Kadets or Kadet sympathizers alone, so few now were their numbers in the zemstvos. Hence, as employed in contemporary political literature, the term “left” or “progressive” clearly had a meaning of its own within the confines of the zemstvo, being applied to any zemstvo man who could be termed an “activist” in promoting the extensive development of the cultural and economic services provided by his zemstvo. Expanded zemstvo programs necessarily entailed higher taxes and the hiring of more zemstvo employees, both of which were likely to provoke opposition from more conservative elements.

In addition, “zemstvo rights” and “zemstvo lefts” also held divergent views of the zemstvos’ immediate priorities. The more right-wing assemblies tended to display a strong interest in such endeavors as road building and the construction of telephone networks while neglecting local medical and education programs.²⁸ One would assume that schools and doctors came well ahead of roads on the peasants’ list of priorities, since the Russian peasantry largely lived in a subsistence, not a market, economy. Certainly telephones, while advantageous for the nobility residing in the countryside, were of no use whatsoever to the peasants.²⁹

Nevertheless, the distinction between the conservatives who swept to power in 1906–1907 and the praktiki of the “old zemstvo” is far from being as clear as contemporary liberal journalists often suggested. At least initially, they were correct in noting that the “new” conservative zemstvo men manifested greater talent for destructive rather than creative work. Yet, like their liberal predecessors, many of the new zemstvo men, at least after immediate political passions had cooled, found a strong sense of personal fulfillment in devoting their energies to “practical” zemstvo work.³⁰ Consequently, by the end of 1908 and early 1909 there were signs that a revival of zemstvo economic and cultural work was well under way. In the course of the regular 19081909 winter sessions of the provincial zemstvo assemblies, many vital zemstvo services eliminated in 1906–1907 were restored or even expanded by the local zemstvos, to the delight of many liberals who had earlier expressed alarm over the enormous budgetary cutbacks of 19061907.³¹ By 1909 most local assemblies were beginning once more to allocate substantial sums to education, agronomy, and medicine, the three fields most drastically curtailed by the zemstvo reaction of 1905–1907; and several of the more conservative assemblies even proceeded to implement a number of projects initiated by liberal zemstvo boards and voted down in 1905–1907.³² Yet in most cases, the resumption or expansion of zemstvo activities was undertaken under the pressure of outside developments, not the spontaneous initiative of the local assemblies concerned.³³

This was certainly true of the dramatic expansion of zemstvo-sponsored educational and agricultural services. These activities were directly stimulated by the Stolypin government, which allocated vast sums to the zemstvos to develop universal primary education and to bolster the faltering economic undertakings of the peasantry, particularly those who had left the land commune under the Stolypin agrarian reform (see, for example, table 1).³⁴ Evidently the government, which had come to depend on the zemstvos to perform a great number of basic services in the localities, must have been deeply concerned about the curtailment of zemstvo activities in 1906–1907, since the proper functioning of zemstvo programs was crucial to Stolypin’s policies of “pacification” in the countryside.

TABLE 1

Government subsidies to zemstvo agricultural enterprises in the prewar years.

SOURCE: V. E. Brunst, “Zemskaia agronomiia,“ in B. B. Veselovskii and Z. G. Frenkel, Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik 1864–1914 (St. Petersburg, 1914), p.328.

As a result, grants from the central government accounted for about 10 percent of the total expenditures of the local zemstvos by 1910, and the ready availability of such funding was stimulating an expansion of zemstvo services every bit as rapid as the great advance of the 1890s.³⁵ In the key area of agriculture, the zemstvos of this period displayed an unprecedented degree of vitality. Indeed, never before in zemstvo history had the agricultural programs of the zemstvo expanded at such a rapid pace as in the years of “reaction” after 1905 (see table 2).

TABLE 2

Number of agronomists employed by the zemstvos, 1877–1909.

Derived from the same source as table 1.

The zemstvos’ recovery, however, even to the extent to which it was self-initiated, did not necessarily indicate that partisan rivalries or political discord had been significantly reduced among zemstvo men. Once undertaken, the restoration of zemstvo programs could itself be a source of continuing and even intensified conflict among zemstvo activists. The construction of an extensive network of new schools, for instance, was hardly a noncontroversial issue: the all-important questions of teacher training and curriculum remained to be decided by the zemstvos in consultation with the government. In an effort to influence zemstvo educational policies, the United Nobility, whose members were quite active in zemstvo affairs, would have a good deal to say throughout this period on “the preparation of a cadre of teachers acceptable to the nobility.”³⁶ Nor was the longstanding controversy over whether the zemstvos should subsidize the parish schools of the Russian Orthodox Church instead of constructing their own educational establishments a dead issue. Secular schools were most likely to be staffed by religiously indifferent, if not outright anticlerical, instructors who might possibly also harbor other types of “subversive” ideas. Therefore, secular education for the peasantry was anathema to the generally highly religious right wing of the landed nobility.³⁷ Bitter disputes over this issue resurfaced during the 1909 sessions and again in 1910, when the government’s—and Duma’s—new educational program, which was based on secular control and direction of the existing parish schools, was the chief topic of discussion.³⁸

Likewise, Stolypin’s appeals to the zemstvos for aid in promoting his land reform schemes aroused strong opposition among the few remaining liberals. Liberal zemstvo men tended to believe that all peasants, whether members of land communes or owners of individual holdings under Stolypin’s land reform law, were equally deserving of zemstvo aid.³⁹ The more conservative zemstvo men, however, generally responded enthusiastically to Stolypin’s proposals.⁴⁰ As always, any discussion of zemstvo aid to agriculture prompted a lively exchange of opinions. Zemstvo men of a quasi-populist slant—and hence usually “lefts” or “progressives”—wanted zemstvo agricultural services in the main to benefit the peasantry, while more conservative zemstvo members were quite often intent on channeling some of the enormous sums allocated to the zemstvos by the government for agriculture in these years to aid their own faltering economic ventures.⁴¹

The revival of zemstvo activities in 1908-10 demonstrated that “zemstvo rights” could be as interested in, and capable of, promoting “practical” zemstvo work as “zemstvo lefts,” particularly if such work could be used to advance their own ideological—and personal—objectives. Still we should keep in mind the tendency of many liberal journalists to associate the “zemstvo left” with superior practical skills when we turn to a discussion of the zemstvo elections of 1909-10, since we are dependent, except for government statistics, on liberal sources. While the zemstvos may have been nonpartisan in terms of official party organizations, they were not apolitical; and the labels “right,” “moderate,” “progressive” and “left” must be understood in terms of both the vague associations with national political parties and also (when we deal with press accounts) the zemstvos’ internal life, for which such classification schemes were still more meaningful.

The special use of the term “left” by the press to include those zemstvo men, regardless of actual political affiliation, most active in expanding zemstvo services, may explain why the liberal press generally concluded that the new round of voting in the zemstvos had merely reinforced the status quo of the past few years.⁴² Official government statistics on the 1909-10 elections displayed an even further shift toward the right, compared to the 190(6-1907 elections. Evidence of further victories for the zemstvo right is unmistakable whether we compare the official results for our thirty noble-dominated provinces with the government’s survey of the political alignment of the provincial zemstvos in the spring of 1907 or with Veselovskii’s contemporary figures on the political affiliation of the board chairmen (see table 3).⁴³ Fourteen of the thirty assemblies appeared to have shifted to the right since the spring of 1907, while the composition of twelve others remained essentially unchanged. In four zemstvos, the political balance was somewhat redressed in favor of the left. The changes appear to have been fairly evenly distributed nationwide, although four of the fourteen assemblies for which there are indications of a shift to the right were located in the Central Agricultural Region, where the shift to the right had already been the most pronounced in the 1906–1907 elections.

To be sure, gains for any one group generally involved small numbers of seats, especially in the provincial assemblies, and the changes usually fell far short of the transformation of zemstvo politics that had occurred three years earlier. One significant exception was Kostroma, the only provincial zemstvo in the Central Industrial Region whose left majority had survived the test of 190(6-1907. In 1910 gains by rights produced an electoral shift in Kostroma similar to that which had taken place in most localities in the previous elections, although the reconstituted assembly still remained in the “moderate” camp.⁴⁴

TABLE 3

Results of the elections to the provincial zemstvo assemblies in the thirty noble-dominated provinces, 1903-10.

The conservative victories in the zemstvo elections of 1909-10 occurred despite renewed attempts on the part of the liberals to redress the political imbalance within the zemstvos in their favor. One might assume that with the foundation of a national representative assembly, liberal political energies and attention would be totally absorbed by the seemingly more significant political struggles under way in the State Duma. But such was not at all the case in the Stolypin period. In the course of 1907 and 1908, the Kadet party, aided by leading activists who formerly had stood on the right wing of the old, pre-1905 zemstvo movement (such as D. N. Shipov and Prince E. N. Trubetskoi), repeatedly called “conferences of progressive zemstvo men.” The purpose of these meetings was to encourage the now miniscule left wing of the landed nobility to remain active in local affairs no matter how “hopeless” the liberal cause currently appeared in the provinces.⁴⁵

Liberal political strategy in the 1909-10 elections was essentially defensive and proceeded along two fronts. First, the liberals quite often did not even attempt to regain control of the zemstvos but threw their support to “Octobrists and moderates” in order to defeat the most offensive “rights.” Although such procedures did result in the defeat of certain individual conservatives, as in the often cited case of Saratov county, even here the composition of the assembly as a whole generally “remained just about the same as before.”⁴⁶ Elsewhere, most notably in Tver and Moscow, the liberals attempted to build electoral alliances with townsmen and peasants who voted in the second and third curiae of the zemstvos. Such efforts, however, were ultimately self-defeating. Under the 1890 electoral law, the limited representation accorded non-noble elements⁴⁷ ensured that even if all the small landowners, townsmen, and peasants elected to the zemstvos were overwhelmingly “progressive,” they were rarely able to provide the margin of difference that would determine the political cast of an assembly’s ruling majority. The weakness of such elements was particularly striking in the provincial zemstvo assemblies. While zemstvo members from the nobility constituted an absolute majority of the deputies in all but a small minority of county (uezd) zemstvos, their rule was virtually unchallenged in the provincial assemblies, where the landed nobility provided 89.5 percent of the deputies nationwide (including the four “peasant” provinces).⁴⁸ Thus, in 1909-10, a number of rightist victories occurred, by our calculations, despite alliances between “progressive” noblemen and voters from other social classes.⁴⁹

To be sure, there were a few scattered liberal victories in the 190910 elections. In individual counties of Moscow, Saratov, Tver, and Novgorod provinces, several famous “old zemstvo men” ousted in 1906–1907 were returned to zemstvo work.⁵⁰ In Novotorzhskii county (Tver), the home of the renowned Bakunin brothers, a group of “progressive” nobles, led by Professor E. V. de Roberti, well known for his radical speeches at the 1905 zemstvo congresses, managed to overturn the rightist majority voted in in 1906, and their victory allowed a lesser known Petrunkevich (Mikhail Ivanovich) to become chairman of the county zemstvo board.⁵¹

Despite these few and highly isolated victories, the elections generally terminated in a further rout of zemstvo liberalism. At this time not only most of the remaining Kadets in the zemstvos but also an unspecified number of “progressives” were voted down in the nobles’ curia. Neither did the zemstvo moderates fare well in the 1909-10 elections.⁵² Even those Octobrists who remained within the zemstvo movement after the elections usually stood “decisively to the right” of their Duma representatives.⁵³ To be sure, given the low turnover rates that prevailed among the noble deputies in 1909-10, the apparent movement to the right in the elections stemmed as much from the growing conservatism of men already in the zemstvos as from the influx of new elements. There were, however, some major upsets in the 1909-10 elections, the most outstanding being, of course, the defeat of the well-known progressive D. N. Shipov, the long-time chairman of the Moscow provincial zemstvo board and the leader of the moderate zemstvo minority in 1905. Even though only twelve voters showed up in the first (nobles’) curia in Shipov’s home county of Volokolamsk (Moscow province) to elect fifteen zemstvo members, Shipov was soundly defeated in the elections. For the grand old man of the pre-1905 zemstvo movement, only recently considered the most outstanding zemstvo leader in all Russia by men of virtually all political factions, was the victim of a remarkably vicious personal vendetta waged by the Volokolamsk nobles and supported, if not actually instigated, by the influential marshal of the nobility of Moscow province, A. D. Samarin.⁵⁴

The ouster of zemstvo progressives like Shipov and the eclipse of the moderates in the zemstvo movement is much more puzzling than the repudiation of the Kadets three years earlier. After all, the Kadets had been purged from the zemstvos for their espousal of the compulsory expropriation of noble landholdings and their political alliance with the peasantry in the first two State Dumas. While progressives like Shipov—and many moderates as well—had participated in the Liberation Movement alongside the Kadets, they surely posed no comparable threat to noble interests four years later. It is possible, however, that the presence of a progressive like Shipov in the zemstvos aroused fears among the extreme right of a possible revival of the Liberation Movement.⁵⁵ For Shipov, after breaking decisively with the Octobrists at the end of the First Duma, attempted to forge an electoral alliance with the Kadets against the zemstvo right in 1908–1909; and he was more than willing to cooperate with the Kadets and Kadet sympathizers in opposing key right-wing political initiatives, like the 1907 Zemstvo Congress.⁵⁶ But most zemstvo moderates, including the Octobrists, had overwhelmingly supported the 1907 Zemstvo Congress. Indeed, they had been among its prime organizers, and the Octobrists had taken the lead in purging the Kadets from the zemstvos at the end of 1905. Since then they had firmly supported the government of P. A. Stolypin in its attempts to promote the far-reaching political and economic reconstruction of Russian society. In fact, the moderates—particularly the Octobrists—had become virtually identified with the policies and program of the Stolypin government, and they actively cooperated with the prime minister not only in the State Duma but in the local zemstvos as well.

Hence, it is in the policies of the Stolypin government that we must seek the reasons for the decline of the influence of the moderates in the zemstvos. For much of the prime minister’s reform program appeared to threaten the provincial nobility’s political control of the countryside, if not a revival of the 1905 disorders. This was particularly true of Stolypin’s attempts to end the political segregation of the peasantry and to expand the role of non-noble elements in local self-government, of his attacks on the extensive powers of the marshals of the nobility, and of his efforts to foster universal primary education among the recently rebellious peasantry through the construction of a network of potentially subversive secular schools. Despite the Prime Minister’s intentions—we have seen that he was quite friendly toward the nobility—his political program would have created a modern secular society in which the landed nobility would have ultimately lost its privileged position.

Consequently, noble elements repeatedly criticized Stolypin’s program in the United Nobility and the Council on the Local Economy, and increasingly such complaints were heard in the legislative chambers as well.⁵⁷ By 1909 some men in both the Duma and the localities were beginning to drift away from the Octobrist party over the party leadership’s firm espousal of such policies,⁵⁸ thus contributing to the decline of moderate forces in the country. In this way, the zemstvo elections of 1909-10 reflected in part growing dissatisfaction with Stolypin’s policies among the provincial nobility, the leading social element in Stolypin’s own Third of June system, which had so recently hailed the prime minister as their salvation from further revolution.⁵⁹ The election results also sharply reduced the prime minister’s influence within his own government. For the move to the right in the zemstvos in the 1909-10 elections heralded a rightward shift in the zemstvo contingents in the State Council and the Council on the Local Economy, institutions that had already proved themselves willing and capable of blocking major legislative initiatives of Stolypin, including his all-important local reforms.

Furthermore the zemstvo elections of 1909-10 revealed much about the changing alignment of social forces in the countryside. Although the results of the elections in the first (nobles’) curia determined to a large extent the assembly’s ultimate political composition, other social groups did participate in the elections, and their political conduct often departed significantly from that of the nobility. Not surprisingly, the percentage of rights elected in thirty-three provinces⁶⁰ from the nobility was higher (56.8 percent) than the corresponding proportions for the third or peasants’ curia (51.98 percent) or for the second curia (40.47 percent). The second curia was composed of an odd assortment of non-noble landowners, urban representatives, and noble proprietors possessing less than the minimum property qualification for voting in the first curia. Even more striking was the discrepancy in the turnover rates among the three curiae. Far more incumbent noble landowners were reelected to the county assemblies (65.24 percent) than townsmen and non-noble landowners (36.8 percent) or peasants (26.06 percent).⁶¹

The turnover rate among noble representatives to the county zemstvos in the 1909-10 elections appears especially low (35 percent) when compared to an overall turnover rate of more than 50 percent in the usually far more stable provincial zemstvo assemblies in the previous elections.⁶² This development reflected the current crisis of noble land-ownership, the precipitous economic decline of the landed nobility that followed the 1905 peasant disorders.⁶³ By 1910-12, mounting land sales by the nobility and corresponding purchases by the peasantry and other social groups had resulted in a growing economic disparity among the three zemstvo curiae, displayed in table 4.

TABLE 4

Landholdings of the three zemstvo curiae in the thirty-four zemstvo provinces, 1890–1910/12.

The loss of noble landholdings—and the concomitant decline in the number of men eligible to vote (and be elected) in the first curia-contributed to a nationwide membership shortage of 14 percent in the provincial and county zemstvos after the 1909-10 elections, with the nobles’ curia accounting for almost all the vacant seats. In some localities the membership shortage reached crisis proportions. For example, in Saratov county, where one hundred noble landowners had qualified to vote in the first curia in 1906, only twenty so qualified in 1909,⁶⁴ while some county zemstvos, like the Nikolaev assembly (Samara province) were actually disbanded at this time because of the lack of nobles qualified to stand for elections.⁶⁵

Given the marked decrease in the number of eligible voters, highly contested first curia elections were the exception rather than the rule in 1909-10, since in most cases, according to Aleksandr A. Savel’ev, the former Kadet chairman of the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo board, “Nearly every eligible noble who wishes can become a zemstvo deputy.”⁶⁶ Under these conditions, the continued exclusion of the zemstvo left and the withering of the influence of the moderates and progressives was all the more remarkable. Evidently, despite the absence of formal party organizations in the countryside, political passions still ran so high among the provincial nobility that in some localities, like Shipov’s Volokolamsk county, noble voters actually preferred to leave some of their allotted seats in the zemstvo assemblies unfilled rather than to allow a political opponent to occupy them.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, in many regions, the nobles displayed a scant interest in the elections, so confident were they of their invulnerability, and voter turnout was generally substantially lower than the record levels set in 1906-1907.⁶⁸

While the shrinkage of the nobles’ curia was a major factor in both the low turnover rate for zemstvo members from the nobility and a corresponding continuity in personnel between the reconstituted assemblies and those elected in 1906–1907, the second and third curiae were prevented by their restrictive representation from exerting a comparable impact on the outcome of the elections. Nonetheless, eligible townsmen, non-noble landowners, and peasants (particularly the latter) were unusually active participants in the new round of voting in the zemstvos.

The heightened interest on the part of the peasantry in the zemstvo elections of 1909-10 was directly related to new electoral procedures established under the Law of October 5, 1906.⁶⁹ This law ensured the independence of peasant elections by abolishing a provision of the 1890 statute requiring all zemstvo members from the third curia to receive gubernatorial confirmation. The old system of indirect voting in two stages was retained, but whereas previously the peasant members of each county zemstvo had been selected by the local governor from among a list of candidates chosen by the district (volost) assemblies, the peasant candidates, like those of other curiae, were now given the right to meet independently and elect zemstvo representatives from their own midst. In addition, the new law permitted peasants who met the specified property requirement to vote in the second curia as small landowners.⁷⁰ Local authorities, of course, remained free to interfere with third curia elections through the traditional devices of voiding them for alleged “irregularities” and occasionally resorting to the arrest of “undesirable” candidates.⁷¹

Still, the new law offered the peasantry the hope, if not always the reality, that their votes would count for more than in the past; and the peasants generally responded by displaying a vivid interest in the elections and by taking advantage of the new law to vote incumbents out of office, thus accounting for the extremely high (75 percent) turnover rates in the third or peasants’ curia. Although the liberal press generally maintained that the large majority of the newly elected peasant deputies were “progressives” or even “lefts,”⁷² government figures present a different picture of the elections, classifying approximately half of the county deputies elected by the peasantry in 1909-10 as “rights,” a little more than a third as “moderates,” and only 10 percent as “lefts.”⁷³ Nonetheless, it seems that these new right-wing or moderate peasant members of zemstvo assemblies tended to be rather independent types, beholden to no local landowners or officials as in the past. For the prime targets of the peasant voters in the 1909-10 elections were the protégés and clients of the local gentry land captains (zemskie nachal’niki), who had traditionally represented the local peasants in the zemstvos under the old electoral system. Occasionally the peasants even replaced such men with peasants who possessed some sort of organizational experience, perhaps in a cooperative, or even with members of the local intelligentsia of peasant origins.⁷⁴ As a result, despite their generally conservative political affiliations, the new peasant representatives in the zemstvos, like their counterparts in the State Duma, were steadfast defenders of peasant group interests, although they, too, lacked the ability to form a cohesive political force on their own.

The inequity of the zemstvo tax burden was one of the major grievances of the peasants in the elections,⁷⁵ although after 1907 they no longer continued the widespread tax boycott of the noble-dominated zemstvo characteristic of the revolutionary period. The new peasant deputies appeared determined that the zemstvo should not continue to be run solely in the interests of the nobility. Instead the zemstvos should face the fact that the peasantry bore a disproportionately large share of the tax burden and provide them at last with a fair share of zemstvo services.⁷⁶ In order to pursue these goals, the new peasant deputies tended to cooperate in the zemstvo assembly with townsmen and the now miniscule left wing of the landed nobility.⁷⁷ Needless to say, the election of independently minded peasant representatives prone to defend peasant interests in the zemstvos in alliance with what remained of a “zemstvo left” was not likely to encourage right-wing noblemen to temper their opposition to zemstvo reform.

In many localities voters in the second curia, although to a lesser degree than the peasants, also displayed an unusually active interest in the zemstvo elections of 1909-10. Possessing the smallest share of the representation, townsmen and non-noble landowners had traditionally been the most indifferent to the elections and proceedings of the zemstvo assemblies.⁷⁸ In 1909-10, as before, absenteeism in the second curia was substantial and even extreme in some regions;⁷⁹ but far more common were cases of “unusually full electoral assemblies” and even examples of an “unprecedented turnout.”⁸⁰ (A major factor promoting such a turnout, as we have indicated, was the addition of new electors from the ranks of private peasant landowners who were given second curia voting rights under the Law of October 5, 1906.)

In 1910, during the second round of the elections, there were scattered indications that growing class consciousness on the part of Russia’s urban population was penetrating zemstvo life. In some counties of Vladimir, Perm, and Ekaterinoslav provinces, and elsewhere in the south (more so than in the north), industrialists and other townsmen banded together at the second curia electoral assemblies in a concerted and ultimately highly successful effort to vote down all or most of the landowners (largely non-nobles) included in this curia. As in the case of the peasantry, the tax question was the major stimulus for the new activity on the part of the townsmen,⁸¹ since urban elements, like the peasants, were always allocated a disproportionate share of zemstvo taxes.⁸²

Within the second curia, the urban elements were apparently taking precedence over the agrarian elements in an effort to seize for their own uses whatever limited influence the group as a whole could command. Yet while the townsmen and industrialists held an increasingly clear perception of their interests, as well as the determination and boldness necessary to defend them, such characteristics were lacking among the small landowners. Zhilkin observed that “among the petty nobles⁸³ and small landowners, class interests are undefined and of little weight.” Such landowners could not help but be intimidated by their position in the zemstvos, a position caught “between two groups with defined, strongly and passionately hostile class interests: the large [landowning] nobility and the peasantry.”⁸⁴

The zemstvo elections of 1909-10 presented a picture of social relations between the various groups included in zemstvo life that differed radically from the vision that had been held by broad layers of society during the early period of the institution’s existence. In the 1860s, there had been widespread expectations that the day-to-day “practical” work of the zemstvo would somehow promote a spirit of harmonious cooperation and even eventually a rapprochement among the various estates (sosloviia) that took part in the zemstvos.⁸⁵ Indeed, for several decades, noble predominance together with the general indifference of other estates had served to minimize incidence of open conflict. By 1909-10, however, the peasantry, merchants, and industrialists were no longer quiescent. Having emerged from the experiences of 1905 with a new awareness of their specific interests, they were increasingly demanding a greater voice in the zemstvos, as well as the concrete satisfaction of their own needs—neither of which the large majority of the noble activists in the countryside were apparently willing to allow them. Consequently, no one by this period was advancing the old argument that class conflict was alien to the principles of the zemstvo, particularly now that its liberal Kadet leadership had been replaced by nobles who clearly made no pretense of sharing their predecessors’ official dedication to an “all-class” point of view.

In this way, the 1909-10 elections in the zemstvo underscored the existence of deep-seated political weaknesses within the political order of the Third of June, which appeared long before the untimely demise of the system’s architect, P. A. Stolypin. First, the elections clearly revealed that the antagonisms among the various strata of the Russian population that had emerged in the course of the Revolution of 1905 were not declining as the prime minister had intended, but, on the contrary, were persisting and—at least in regard to the townsmen’s attitudes toward nobles and other landowners—actually growing stronger. Moreover, the considerable political interest and abilities displayed by both townsmen and peasants in the zemstvo elections could only aggravate these antagonisms by increasing the landed nobility’s already exaggerated fear that any meaningful form of zemstvo reform would ultimately entail its political eclipse in the zemstvos. Such fears not only impeded the prime minister’s efforts to reduce class conflict by integrating peasants and other non-noble elements into local political life but also contributed to the Western Zemstvo crisis of 1911, the major political crisis of the Stolypin period. This crisis was set off when a number of politically moderate zemstvo and noble representatives in the State Council, who normally supported government law projects, joined the far right of the chamber to vote down Stolypin’s bill establishing elected zemstvos in the western provinces of the Russian Empire. Most of these men voted with the right at this time because this bill based electoral curiae not on estates but on national groups and property holdings. At the same time the bill lowered the property qualification for voting in the zemstvos to such a degree that many believed that the landed nobility would be swamped by the peasantry if an electoral system along similar lines were introduced in the old zemstvo provinces of central Russia.⁸⁶

The zemstvo elections of 1909-10 also demonstrated that even after four years of quasi-representative government in Russia, no national political parties had yet emerged that commanded the allegiances and loyalties of the most important social element within the political system—the noble landowners of the central Russian provinces. Since modern legislative chambers rest in the final analysis on the functioning of a well-defined party system, the absence of formal partisan ties to national political groupings among the provincial nobility contributed to the constant political fragmentation of the existing parties that was already well under way by 1909-10. This fragmentation impeded the emergence of a stable working majority within the Duma.⁸⁷

Finally, the zemstvo elections of 1909-10 contributed not a little to an ongoing process that the Soviet historian A. Ia. Avrekh has called “the crisis of the Third of June system.”⁸⁸ This progressive crisis within the Stolypin administration was marked by the gradual breakdown of the tentative political alliance between the prime minister and his hitherto most enthusiastic supporters within the legislative chambers—the Duma faction of the Octobrist party. By the autumn of 1909 the Octobrists began to recognize that their support of Stolypin was a political liability in view of the growing conservatism of the provincial nobility and the growing militancy of Russia’s urban population, as demonstrated by the recent zemstvo elections. At this time, the Octobrist leadership publicly denounced the State Council as an obstacle to further reforms and launched a major drive to persuade the government to push its original reform program—including basic zemstvo reform—far more vigorously than before.⁸⁹

By then, however, Stolypin was scarcely in a position to respond favorably to the initiatives of his erstwhile Octobrist allies. The new round of voting in the zemstvos had greatly eroded Stolypin’s ability to maneuver within the confines of his own constitutional order. For the passage of legislation under the current political system required the approval of both houses of the Russian parliament—the Duma and the far more conservative State Council. By 1909 the latter body had experienced a substantial decline in the numbers and influence of its previously dominant moderate Center Faction, which, like the Octobrists in the Third Duma, had generally supported the reform program of the Stolypin government. In the 1906–1909 period, the number of right-wing members of the State Council had noticeably increased not only among the appointed members of the Council (who were subjected to annual reappointment by the tsar)⁹⁰ but also among the elected half of the Council.⁹¹ This was especially true of the zemstvo representatives returned since 1906 both in by-elections and in the regular triannual State Council elections held in the spring of 1909, well before the start of the new round of zemstvo elections (see table 5).⁹² Admittedly, the changes that took place in the zemstvo contingent in the upper house were not great, but minor shifts in political inclination could prove decisive in a chamber like the State Council, in which a relatively few votes not infrequently provided the margin between defeat and victory for major legislative projects.⁹³ Moreover, the conservative victories in the 1909-10 zemstvo elections, which followed the 1909 State Council elections, ensured the continuation of the political status quo, if not an even greater evolution to the right among the zemstvo members of the Council in the future. Since the State Council had already demonstrated a marked ability to defeat major government-sponsored law projects,⁹⁴ it now seemed clear that the remains of Stolypin’s reform program—and possibly the prime minister’s hold on political power as well—hung in jeopardy. Certainly the shrinking political options available to Stolypin after the 1909 elections contributed to the growing breach between the government and the Octobrists.

Consequently, almost immediately after the completion of the 1909 State Council elections, Stolypin turned away from his previous exclusive reliance on the declining Octobrists to forge new political ties with the emerging Nationalist party, which offered Stolypin several advantages. Not only were the Nationalists from the very first able to enlist—at least in their home base in the western provinces—the support of the local Russian landowners, which the Octobrists clearly failed to elicit.⁹⁵ But the introduction of zemstvo institutions into the western provinces, favored by this group, provided Stolypin with an opportunity to strengthen the declining moderate element in the upper house, thereby increasing his own influence in that chamber.⁹⁶ For the Western Zemstvo Act was expressly designed to replace the Polish landowners, who currently represented the western provinces in the upper house and who generally voted with the small left-wing opposition to the government, with Russian landowners, who presumably would adhere to the relatively moderate Nationalist party.⁹⁷ Both Stolypin and the State Council extreme right considered his attempt to alter the political balance in the upper house so important that the right openly defied government orders and voted against the Western Zemstvo Act, while the prime minister moved willingly to provoke a major constitutional crisis over this issue by resorting to the use of Article 87 of the Basic Law of the Russian Empire in order to enact this bill immediately into law by administrative decree.

TABLE 5

State Council elections from the zemstvos, 1906–1909.

In the end, however, not even the adoption of the Western Zemstvo Act by government fiat was able to salvage the remains of Stolypin’s original political program. Within a few months of the Western Zemstvo Crisis, Stolypin was assassinated under mysterious circumstances. He was replaced by men without his vision and drive, who were content to administer the country on a day-to-day basis without aspiring to any political or social transformations that might alienate established social groups and turn them against the government. Yet even had Stolypin survived, it is doubtful that all his energy and abilities could have saved his program of political reforms. For the introduction of moderate Nationalist representatives from the western provinces in the State Council failed to alter the balance of political power in the upper house of the Russian parliament, which continued to reject—or revise beyond recognition—all major reform efforts of the Duma in the prewar period.

Subsequent zemstvo elections merely reinforced the political status quo in the State Council. To be sure, with the demise of Stolypin, many of the political tensions characteristic of the post-1905 period gradually disappeared from zemstvo life. The Ministry of the Interior, in recording the results of the last zemstvo elections held before the war, those of 1912-13, merely listed the names of the newly elected zemstvo deputies and members of the zemstvo executive boards. No reference whatsoever was made to the political affiliations of these men or to the dominant tendency of the assembly as a whole,⁹⁸ so irrelevant had partisan politics become to the zemstvos. The liberal press, however, hopefully noted that the elections had returned a number of old zemstvo “progressives” of the pre-1905 vintage to the zemstvos.⁹⁹ Yet liberal commentators were the first to maintain that the addition of these individuals did not alter the general conservative character of the post-1905 zemstvo or indicate any developing liberal trend among the zemstvos’ predominantly noble electorate. Rather, the return of some “progressives” in the 1912-13 elections was the result of the interplay of several factors, all of which were contributing to the gradual depoliticization of zemstvo life.

First, the conservatives who took over the zemstvos in 1906–1907 had generally refrained from affiliating themselves with any of the national political parties, being content as country gentlemen merely to represent themselves, their estate (soslovie), and their county. By 1912-13 they no longer felt threatened by the liberals in the zemstvos, so confident were they of their invulnerability under the 1890 election law. Indeed, by then no vestiges of a genuine left-wing alternative remained in the zemstvos. Press accounts of the 1912-13 elections did not even mention a “zemstvo left” in discussing the political tendencies in the zemstvos.¹⁰⁰ Those “progressives” still active in provincial politics among the landed nobility in 1912-13 had definitely abandoned political goals, preferring, like their conservative counterparts, to concentrate their energies on the purely “practical” side of zemstvo work. Hence, the dominant conservative element among the zemstvo nobility no longer feared to allow these few “progressives” who still desired to do so to play a role in zemstvo affairs. The return of the “progressives” to the zemstvos was also facilitated, as we have seen, by the economic decline of the landed nobility after 1905, which greatly reduced the available pool of noble landowners eligible to participate in the first curia of the zemstvos. At the same time, the decline of political tensions in the zemstvos and the disappearance of the zemstvo left resulted in a substantial increase in electoral absenteeism on the part of noble voters. As a result, virtually no first curia elections were contested in 1912-13. In fact, “almost all” the zemstvo members returned by the landed nobility in these elections were actually self-appointed, and an increasing number of seats allotted noble landowners remained unfilled.¹⁰¹

In addition, the political challenge presented to the nobility by other social groups in the 1909-10 elections was not renewed in 1912-13. The new round of voting in the zemstvos was marked by widespread indifference and substantial electoral absenteeism on the part of second and third curiae voters, in marked contrast to the vivid interest and record turnouts of these elements in the previous elections.¹⁰² When pressed to explain the reasons for their absenteeism, abstaining voters in the second and third curiae inevitably pointed to their lack of influence on zemstvo affairs under the current electoral system.¹⁰³ The decline of public interest in the zemstvos was reflected in the press, which significantly curtailed its coverage of the 1912-13 elections compared to previous electoral contests in the zemstvos. Those few journalists still following zemstvo affairs in 1912-13 increasingly limited their comments to a discussion of what was beginning to be called “the crisis of the zemstvo,” i.e., the problems created by the growing inability of the landed nobility to staff the zemstvos and the waning interest of other social groups in these noble-dominated institutions. The only positive note ever sounded in these discussions was a general recognition of the rapidity with which zemstvo services were developing and the growing importance of these services for Russia.

Yet the very fact that so many vital public services were entrusted to an institution dominated by a small and rapidly declining social group indicates the existence of serious weaknesses in the Imperial Russian political order. These weaknesses could not be easily remedied within the confines of the Third of June system. For the zemstvo nobility was able to ward off all attacks on its privileged position in the localities through its inflated political influence in national affairs. All attempts on the part of the Duma to expand the zemstvo electorate in the 1911-14 period ultimately went down to defeat at the hands of the now dominant right wing of the State Council, whose ranks included many representatives of the zemstvo nobility. In this way, the noble-dominated zemstvo survived until the fall of the Old Regime, perpetuating the ongoing crisis of the Third of June system and leaving the country without local institutions capable of commanding the loyalty and allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the population.

NOTES

1. See, for example, A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i tret’ia duma (Moscow, 1968); A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i tret’iiun’skaia sistema (Moscow, 1966); Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma 1907–1914 (Cambridge, 1973); Alfred Levin, The Third Duma: Election and Profile (Hamden, Conn., 1973); Ben Cion Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma 1907–12 (Seattle and London, 1974); Alfred Levin, The Second Duma: A Study of the Social Democratic Party and the Russian Constitutional Experiment (New Haven, 1940); E. D. Chermenskii, Burzhua-ziia i tsarizm v revoliutsii 1905–1907 g.g. (Moscow, 1939 and 1970); and S. N. Sidelnikov, Obrazovanie i deiatel’nost’ pervoi gosudarstvennoi dumy (Moscow, 1962). Two notable recent exceptions to this general tendency are V. S. Diakin, “Stolypin i dvorianstvo (proval mestnoi reformy,” Problemy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia i vnutrennoi politiki Rossii: Dooktiabr’skoi period (Leningrad, 1972), pp.231–74 and Terence Emmons, “The Russian Landed Gentry and Politics,” The Russian Review, XXXIII, No. 3, pp.269283.

2. I. P. Belokonskii, Zemstvo i konstitutsia (Moscow, 1910) and Prince D. Shakhovskoi, “Politicheskie techeniia v russkom zemstve,” in B. B. Veselovskii and Z. G. Frenkel, Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp.466–67.

3. See Warren B. Walsh, “The Composition of the Dumas,” Russian Review, VIII, no. 2 (1949), pp.111–16 and Roberta T. Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry in Revolution and Counter-revolution, 1905–1907” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University 1975), pp.610–613.

4. See the article by Alexandra Shecket-Korros, this volume.

5. For evaluations of this institution and brief summaries of its activities, see Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, pp.122, 150, 160; Diakin, op. cit., N. A. Mel’nikov, 19 let na zemskoi sluzhbe (unpublished mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), pp.334–48, and Reforma mestnago samoupravleniia po rabotam soveta po delam mestnago khoziaistva. Doklad XXXIV ocherednomu ufimskomu gubernskomu sobraniiu pred-stavitelia ufimskago zemstva P. Korapachinskago (Ufa, 1908). The stenographic proceedings of the Council, which ceased to meet after Stolypin’s death, can be found in the personal archives of S. A. Panchulidze. TSGIA fond 1625, delo 5-13.

6. See, for example, George F. Kennan, “The Breakdown of the Tsarist Autocracy,” in Richard Pipes (ed.), Revolutionary Russia (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), pp.7–11.

7. Mel’nikov, pp.158–59, 346-48; Prince A. D. Golitsyn, Vospominaniia (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), pp.290–91; and George L. Yaney, “Social Stability in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: A Critical Note,” Slavic Review, XXIV, no. 3 (Sept. 1965), pp.521–27. Yaney maintains that the expanded role played by the zemstvo men in national affairs after the Revolution of 1905 was an important source of political and social stability for the existing regime. This essay will demonstrate that the increase in the political influence of the zemstvo men was a serious obstacle to the peaceful reform and modernization of the country.

8. Stolypin, to be sure, was an appointed, not an elected, marshal, since elected zemstvo and noble institutions had not yet been introduced in the western guberniia, including his home province, because of the large number of politically active Polish landowners in that region. However, the ethos of such appointed marshals (and many zemskie nachal’niki as well) appears to have been far closer to that of elected public activists than that of persons pursuing a traditional career in the state bureaucracy. Hosking, pp.21–22.

9. Baron A. Meiendorf, A Brief Appreciation of P. Stolypin’s Tenure in Office (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), p.15. See also Bernard Pares, “Conversations with Mr. Stolypin,” Russian Review II, no. 11 (1913), p.106, for an identical comment by the Prime Minister.

10. E. D. Chermenskii, Burzhuaziia i tsarism v revoliutsii 1905–1907 g.g. (Moscow, 1970), pp.158–210.

11. For a discussion of Stolypin’s local reforms, see Diakin, op. cit., and Hosking, 150-77.

12. For a discussion of the post-1905 reaction in the zemstvos, see the essay by Roberta Thompson Manning, this volume.

13. There was no nobles’ curia at all in Viatka, Olonets, or Perm, or in seven of the ten counties of Vologda. See Section 32, Zemstvo Statute of June 12, 1890 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiskoi imperii, sobranie tretee Vol. X otdelenie pervoe no. 6927.

14. These figures were compiled by the government in May 1907, on the eve of the Stolypin coup d’état. TSGIA fond 1288, op. 2, delo 2-1907, pp.1–52.

15. B. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let (St. Petersburg, 190911), vol. IV, 58.

16. V. A. Avevskii, “Zemstvo i zhizn (zapiska predsedatelia zemskoi upravy),” Istoricheskii vestnik CXXVII (Jan. 1912), pp.180–81.

17. A good example of this phenomenon was the moderate M. A. Stakhovich, who served numerous terms as marshal of the nobility of Orel province, although he was far more liberal than the majority of his constituents. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford, 1939), p.210.

18. See TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 2-1907, and delo 46–1909.

19. Indeed, in this case, the term was quite accurate. None of the various monarchist parties, for example, claimed a nationwide following. Even in the Duma, members of the right faction for the most part did not adhere to any political parties but simply called themselves “rights.” Melnikov, p.131.

20. Veselovskii, for one, maintained in 1906 that a majority of the members of the local zemstvos had “gone over to . . . the program of the Union of the Seventeenth of October.” B. B. Veselovskii, “Koe chto o nastroenii zemlevladel’tsev,” Obrazovanie, April, 1906, p.21. This is also the opinion of the future rightist chairman of the Moscow provincial zemstvo board, V. F. Shlippe. V. F. Shlippe, untitled memoirs (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), p.86.

21. In this polemic Russkoe slovo was supported by a number of other provincial newspapers, which also failed to find any Octobrists in their localities. See A. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnutrennei zhizni,” Russkoe ho-gatstvo, August 1909, pp.58–60.

22. See, for example, the experiences of the Kadet D. D. Protopopov in Samara and the Octobrist Count P. A. Geiden in Pskov. D. D. Protopopov, “Iz nedavniago proshlago (Samara v 1904–1905 g.g.),” Russkaia mysl, XXVIII, No. 12 (December 1907), p.5 and V. B., “Opochetskii vospominaniia o gr. P. A. Geidena (Episod iz istorii osvobozhditel’nago dvizheniia v glukhoi provintsii),” in Ibid., XXVIII, no. 11, p.73, and no. 12, p.46.

23. For the powers and influence of the marshals of the nobility, see Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, III, 215-17 and A. P. Korelin, “Rossiskoe dvorianstvo i ego soslovnaia organizatsii (1861–1904 g.g.), Istoriia SSSR, 1971, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct.), pp.56–81; N. N. Kissel-Zagorianskii, Les Mémoires du Général Kissel-Zagorianskii (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), pp.170–71; TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 19/69, 1. 50, and the essay by Alexandra Shecket Korros, this volume.

24. I. Larskii, “Voprosy tekhushchei zhizni: zemskie vybory,” Sovremen-nyi mir, 1909, no. 10, p.89.

25. During one trip through the countryside, the Vestnik evropy correspondent I. Zhilkin even encountered a member of the black hundreds who ardently supported the Kadet demand for a responsible ministry! I. Zhilkin, “Khronika: provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 5 (May, 1909), p.368.

26. The publicists themselves frequently complained about the limitations of the political terms at their disposal. See, for example, V. S. Golubev, “Zemskie vybory,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 31, August 8, 1909, p.7.

27. V. G. Kuzmin-Karavaev, “Oppositsiia i partiinost v zemstvo,” Vestnik evropy, vol. III, no. 5 (May 1909), pp.206–208 and Vas. Golubev, “K zem-skim vyboram,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 24, June 19, 1910, pp.1–4.

28. P. Chizhevskii, “Vliianie sostava zemskikh sobranii na rezultaty zemskoi deiatel’nosti,” Vestnik evropy, August 1909, pp.577–91 and V. N. Lind, “Zemskiia sobraniia tekhushchago goda,” Russkiia mysl, XXX, no. 6 (June 1909), pp.141–42.

29. Quite possibly the interest in road building was stimulated by the spread of automobiles among the more prosperous of the landed nobility at this time. See A. N. Naumov, Iz utselevshikh vospominaniia 1868–1917 (New York, 1954), vol. II, p.54.

30. See, for example, the memoirs of Golitsyn, pp.24–25; Naumov, I, p.309; Shlippe, pp.54–57, 128; Kissel-Zagorianskii, pp.30–31, 39-41, 91-94; Mendeleev, pp.81, 160; Mel’nikov, pp.268–70; and Vladimir Mikhailovich Andreevskii, O moei sel’skom khoziaistve (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive).

31. See, for example, “Iz obshchestvennoi khroniki,” Vestnik evropy, XL, no. 2 (February 1909), pp.898–99; V. N. Lind, “Zemskaia sobraniia tekhushchago goda,” Russkaia mysl, XXX (June 1909), pp.139–40; Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, “K okonchaniiu zemskoi sessii,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik. 1909, no. 4 (January 24), pp.18–20; D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o pere-zhitom (Moscow, 1918), pp.536–37; Vas. Golubev, “Samoupravlenie v Rossii,” Russkaia mysl, XXXI, no. 11 (November 1910), pp.152–53.

32. For example, the Tver zemstvo adopted an insurance program, originally proposed by its former liberal leadership, while the Saratov, Viatka, and Tula zemstvos resumed statistical work only recently eliminated as a “subversive” activity. I. V. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XVIV, no. 5 (May 1909), p.359.

33. For example, the rapid growth in zemstvo medical services at this time was a response to a cholera epidemic that broke out in 1907 and raged uncontrolled over a large part of central Russia until 1911, when most of the medical personnel and services eliminated by the zemstvos in 19061907 had been restored. Ibid., XLI, no. 10 (October 1910), pp.353-67; Z. G. Frenkel, “Osnovnoi nerazreshennyi vopros zemskoi meditsiny,” in B. B. Veselovskii and Z. G. Frenkel (eds.), Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp.412–22; and A. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnutrennoi zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 8 (August 1910), pp.78–81.

34. A good example of the initiative taken by the government in this regard is the telegrams dispatched by Stolypin on the eve of the annual county zemstvo sessions in the autumn of 1909 and again in 1910. In these Stolypin warned the local marshals of the nobility, who chaired all zemstvo meetings ex officio, that “the success or failure” of his land reform depended on “the most rapid development of improved methods of cultivation among the newly organized khutora and otruba [individualized peasant holdings formed under Stolypin’s land reform program].” In this endeavor, he continued, “I have now decided it necessary to turn to aid ... to the zemstvos which have always been so responsive to popular needs.” Text in I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XL, no. 12 (December 1909), p.777. See also his telegram of the following year in I. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnu-trennoi zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, November 1910, p.105.

35. The government law project of February 10, 1907, and the Stolypin-sponsored laws of May 3, 1908, June 10, 1907, and June 14, 1910, attempted to establish compulsory primary education in Russia. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, pp.95–97, 149-50; B. B. Veselovskii, “Vseobshchee obuchenie i zemstvo,” Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik, 391-92; V. E. Brunst in ibid., pp.32728; Vas. Golubev, “Samoupravlenie v Rossii,” Russkaia mysl, XXXI, no. 12 (December 1910), p.164; Golubev, in Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, 1910, no. 24 (June 19), p.3; I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 11 (November 1910), p.338; and “Iz obshchestvennoi khroniki,” ibid., no. 2 (February 1910), pp.888–89.

36. See, for example, Svod postanovleniia I-X s”ezdov upolnomochennykh ob’edinennykh obshchestv 1906–1914 g.g. (Petrograd, 1915); Trudy vi s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchesty 33 gubernii 14 marta po 20 marta 1910 g. (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp.73–93, 376-444; Novoe vremia (nos. 12542–12544), February 10-12, 1911; Trudy vii s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 37 gubernii s 5 marta po 11 marta 1912 g. (St. Petersburg, 1912), pp.45–83; and Trudy x s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchesty 39 gubernii s 2 marta po 6 marta 1914 g. (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp.74–101. No doubt, the United Nobility considered this question repeatedly in an attempt to influence zemstvo opinion on the subject as well as the attitudes of the government and the legislative chambers.

37. The issue of parish schools vs. secular education was one of the main issues dividing nobles who adhered to the Octobrists in the State Dumas from their more conservative colleagues in the national assembly. Although these men otherwise tended to share virtually identical backgrounds of agricultural involvement and public service in the localities, the Octobrists among them tended to serve on secular school boards, while men to the right of the Octobrists were usually members of parish school boards. See Tretyi sozyv gosudarstvennoi dumy, Portrety, biografii i avtobiografii (St. Petersburg, 1910), and Chetvertyi sozyv gosudarstvennoi dumy khodozhe-stvennyi fototipicheskii al’bom s portretami i biografiiami (St. Petersburg, 1913).

38. V. N. Lind, “Zemskiia sobraniia tekhushchago goda,” Russkaia mysl XXX (June 1909), p.153. In 1910 the zemstvos’ interest in this issue quickened as the Duma began debate on a project that would transfer the parish schools from the jurisdiction of the Holy Synod to that of the Ministry of Education, thus ending the role of the Orthodox Church in public education. See “Khronika vnutrennoe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLV, no. 11 (November 1910), pp.359–61.

39. For the zemstvos’ responses to Stolypin’s appeals, see A. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnutrennei zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, November 1910, pp.104-107; Vas. Golubev, “Zemstvo i zemleustroistvo,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 30, July 31, 1910, pp.1–7; I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 12 (December 1909), pp.776–87. Since many liberal journals, especially those inclined towards populism like Russkoe bogatstvo, were highly critical of the Stolypin land reform, one should use these accounts with the utmost caution.

40. I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLV, no. 11 (November 1910), p.333. The United Nobility also enthusiastically supported the Stolypin land reform as an alternative to the compulsory expropriation schemes of the First and Second Dumas. See the paper by Hosking and Manning, this volume.

41. A. N. Anfimov, the leading Soviet expert on Russian agriculture in the early twentieth century, maintains that most of the money allocated to the zemstvos by the government for agricultural services actually went to finance projects that benefited noble agriculture far more than the economies of the local peasantry. A. N. Anfimov, “Krest’ianstvo Rossii v 1907–1914 g.g.” (unpublished paper delivered to the 1971 annual convention of the American Historical Association), p.28.

42. See, for example, B. Veselovskii, “Ocherednyia zemskii zadachii,” So-vremennik, May 1913, p.301; I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 9 (September 1909), p.339; and Vas. Golubev, “Zemskie vybory,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, August 8, 1909, p.8.

43. We have taken the liberty of converting Veselovskii’s political labels of Kadet, progressive, Octobrist, and right into left, moderate-left, moderate, and right so that his figures might be more easily compared with official government statistics on the 1909-10 elections. The discerning reader should remember, however, that Veselovskii is referring to the political affiliation of the board chairman, not the political alignment of the assembly majority as a whole.

44. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, pp.316, 456.

45. TSGAOR fond 102, opis 9, delo 35-1908, pp.4–6, 24-27, 261-66. D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy 0 perezhitom (Moscow, 1918), pp.519–21.

46. Vas. Golubev, “Nakanune zemskikh sobranii,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 34, August 28, 1909, p.4.

47. One searches in vain in the contemporary press for evidence of attempts on the part of dissident zemstvo men to organize like-minded nobles, however few they may be.

48. L. G. Zakharova, Zemskaia kontrreforma 1890 g. (Moscow, 1968), pp.151–61.

49. I. V. Zhilkin, “Khronika—provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 5 (May, 1909), p.360; Vas. Golubev, “K itogam zemskikh vyborov,” Rech, no. 248, September 10, 1909; B. B. Veselovskii (ed.), Istoriche-skii ocherk deiatel’nosti zemskikh uchrezhdenii Tverskoi gubernii (18641913) (Tver, 1914), p.586, and TSGIA fond 1288, opis 2, delo 46-1909.

50. Larskii, op. cit., p.87, and Vas. Golubev in Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 34, August 28, 1909, p.1.

51. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, 571. See also Golubev in Rech, September 10, 1909.

52. Golubev in Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 34, August 28, 1909, p.3; Shipov, pp.537–38; and T. I. Polner, Zhiznennyi put Kniazia Georgiia Evgenievicha L’vova (Paris, 1932), pp.127, 175-77.

53. Larskii, p.89.

54. Shipov received only four votes (including his own) from the twelve noble voters who showed up for the first curia elections. However, he was ultimately reinstated in the zemstvo in February 1910 after a complicated series of maneuvers and appeals. The Volokolamsk zemstvo, meeting as a whole and containing progressive peasants and townsmen, overrode noble opposition and elected Shipov to a nonsalaried post on the county zemstvo board. This appointment allowed him to be elected to the Moscow provincial zemstvo. The local bureaucracy, however, tried to prevent this by denying Shipov administrative confirmation of his new position on the zemstvo board. When this ploy failed, A. D. Samarin filed a protest against Shipov’s election to the provincial zemstvo with a local office of the Ministry of the Interior. As might be expected, that office ruled against Shipov; but this ruling was ultimately overturned in his favor by a decision of the Senate, the supreme court of Old Regime Russia. Shipov, pp.537–38; “Iz obshchestvennoi khro-niki,” Vestnik evropy, VLIV, no. 8 (August 1909), p.877 and Vas. Golubev, “Zemskie vybory,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 31, August 8, 1909, p.8.

55. See, for example, N. A. Pavlov, Zapiska zemlevladel’tsa (Petrograd, 1915), pp.28–29, 35.

56. TSGAOR fond 102, opis 165, delo 49, p.203. We are deeply grateful to Professor E. D. Chermenskii of Moscow State University for kindly allowing one of the authors of this paper to use his notes on this fond. See also Samoupravlenie, no. 22, May 22, 1907, p.18.

57. See the paper by Alexandra Shecket Korros, this volume, and the proceedings of the Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy of the Ministry of the Interior in TSGIA, fond 1288, opis 2-1905, delo 7, and fond 1652, op 1, delo 5-13.

58. Hosking, pp.85–91, 97-104.

59. See, for example, the almost idolatrous attitude toward Stolypin displayed by the delegates to the 1907 Zemstvo Congress and by the local zemstvo assemblies in the summer of 1906. Golos moskvy, no. 135, June 12, 1907, p.2, Novoe vremia, no. 11224, June 13 (26), 1907, p.2 and Hosking, p.30.

60. All except Perm, for which no statistics are available.

61. TSGIA, fond 1288, opis 2, delo 46-1909.

62. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.469–72.

63. See the paper by Roberta Thompson Manning, this volume, p.36.

64. A. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnutrennei zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, August 1909, p.55.

65. When local zemstvos were dissolved for lack of properly qualified candidates for office, existing zemstvo programs were taken over by a board appointed by the local administration. B. Veselovskii, “Ocherednyia zemskiia zadachi,” Sovremennik, May 1913, p.302.

66. Al Savel’ev, “Zemskie vybory v nizhnegorodskoi gubernii,” Rech, September 18, 1910.

67. Four seats allotted to the nobility in the Volokolamsk zemstvo remained unfilled at the time that Shipov was voted down. Shipov, pp.537–38.

68. I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 9 (September 1909), p.333.

69. The electoral reform of October 5, 1906, was promulgated in most provinces for the first time in 1909–10. Only a few provinces were affected by the law in the previous elections.

70. Larskii, op. cit., p.79, and S. Lisenko, “Krest’iane v zemstve (Neko-torye itogi i perspektivy),” Russkaia mysl, XXIX, no. 8 (August 1909), p.111. The impact of the Law of October 5 was, however, significantly reduced by a series of Senate interpretations including one that specifically denied the new second curia voting rights to those peasants who had separated from the land commune and established separate holdings (khutora) under the Stolypin land reform. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, 178.

71. In 1909, for example, circulars from the provincial governors directed the noble land captains (zemskie nachal’niki) to prepare lists of any “undesirable elements” among the peasantry who were seeking election to the zemstvos. Larskii, op. cit., p.79 and Petrishchev in Russkoe bogatstvo, August 1909, p. 53.

72. Vas. Golubev, “K itogam zemskikh vyborov,” Rech, No. 246, September 3, 1909. Golubev also pointed out, however, that the new enthusiasm occasionally produced negative consequences. In a number of counties, each of the peasant electors in the final stage of the elections, wanting to see himself elected, refused to vote for other candidates, resulting in the failure of the assembly to elect the full quota of zemstvo members to which it was entitled.

73. Veselovskii, “Zemskiia nastroeniia,” Obrazovanie, November 1906, P-52.

74. Such as schoolteachers, technicians, etc. Larskii, p.85.

75. The landed nobility, which elected 55 percent of the deputies to the county zemstvo assemblies and provided over 89 percent of the members of the provincial zemstvos, paid only 11 percent of all zemstvo taxes, although nobles eligible to vote in the first curia alone owned 17.3 percent of the land in 1910-12. N. I. Larevskii, “Zemskoe izbiriatel’noe pravo,” in Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik, pp.66–67.

76. Vas. Golubev, “K zemskim vyboram,” Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik 1910, no. 24, June 19, 1910, p.3.

77. For examples of such cooperation, see Mendeleev, pp.170, 177, and Shipov, 538.

78. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, IV, pp.180–82.

79. For example, in Briansk county (Orel), only four of the fifty-three eligible electors appeared, and new elections had to be called. Golubev in Rech, no. 246, September 8, 1909.

80. Ibid.

81. Vas. Golubev, “Samoupravlenie v Rossii,” Russkaia mysl XXXI, no. 11 (November 1910), p.154, and Golubev in Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, no. 24, June 19, 1910, p.4.

82. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, I, pp.13–33. The inequitable distribution of zemstvo taxes accounts in part for the adamant opposition of a considerable part of the landed nobility to Stolypin’s proposals for zemstvo reform, especially his original projects, which attempted to base the property qualification for voting in zemstvo elections on the amount of zemstvo taxes paid.

83. Small noble landowners voted in the second curia if they could not meet the property qualification for voting in the first curia.

84. I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLIV, no. 9 (September 1909), p.339.

85. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, III, pp.57–58.

86. A. A. Bobrinskii, “Dnevnik,” Krasnyi arkhiv, vol. 26 (1928), p.139.

87. Hosking, pp.97–105.

88. Avrekh, Stolypin i tret’ia duma, pp.275–76.

89. The Octobrists were also prompted to move by Stolypin’s failure to deliver his political promises to them, which was most evident in the wake of the tsar’s veto of the Naval General Staffs Bill in the spring of 1909.

90. See the paper by Alexandra Schecket Korros, this volume, p.126. The appointed Council members were usually selected from a list presented the tsar by the extreme right-wing president of the upper house, M. G. Akimov.

91. The large majority of the State Council representatives from the nobility already tended to adhere to the right rather than to the center faction. See Naumov, II, 151, and Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” p.373.

92. We base our calculations of the political affiliations of the State Council representatives elected in 1906 on those which prevailed at the moment of their election. Consequently, our figures differ slightly from those given by Veselovskii in Istoriia zemstva, IV, 36. Veselovskii tended to cite the political tendency of the men concerned as that which prevailed at the time of his writing (1909-10). Many of these representatives had moved substantially to the right since their election to the upper house in 1906.

93. For example, the Naval General Staffs Bill was passed in March 1909 by an eight-vote majority. Hosking, p.85.

94. Ibid., pp.84–85, 151-81.

95. Robert Edelman, “The Russian Nationalist Party and the Political Crisis of 1909,” The Russian Review, Vol. XXXIV, no. 1 (January, 1975), PP.33–53-

96. It is clear that Stolypin was currently very interested in curbing the rightward drift of the State Council from the way that he resolved his conflict with Nicholas II over the Naval General Staffs Crisis. The prime minister essentially agreed to give up his sponsorship of the bill in dispute in return for control of the appointments list of State Council members for the coming year. Ibid., pp.42–43.

97. To ensure such an outcome of these elections, the government decided to confine the introduction of elected zemstvos to only the six southernmost of the nine western provinces. In this way, the new elected zemstvos would be established only in known Nationalist political strongholds, excluding the three northwestern provinces where local Russian landowners generally supported the far right. Ibid., p.49.

98. TSGIA, fond 1288, opis 2, delo 46.

99. Data on the political results of the 1912-13 zemstvo elections is rather sparse. The government failed to record any information on the political leanings of the newly elected assemblies, while the press neglected the 1912-13 elections in the zemstvos. Nonetheless the woefully incomplete press accounts all indicate that “progressives” made some gains in Chernigov, Nizhnii Novgorod, Poltava (especially Krememchug county), and Tambov provinces (in the latter, the “progressives” were especially strong in Kirsanov, Kozlov, Usman, and Tambov counties). They also did well in the Griazovets (Vologda), Nerekhets (Kostroma), and Volkov county zemstvos. I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLVIII, no. 12 (December 1913), pp.385–88, and B. Veselovskii, “Ocherki mestnago sa-moupravleniia,” Sovremennik, November 1913, p.231, and September 1913, p.304.

100. Kadet commentators on the elections were generally so glum that it is difficult to imagine that many of their fellow party members managed to enter the zemstvos under the rubric of “progressive.” Although a few isolated individual Kadets did continue to participate in zemstvo affairs, especially at the county (uezd) level, they ceased to pursue their political goals in the zemstvos. See, for example, A. Shingarev, “Zemskoe i gorodskoe samoupravlenie,” Ezhegodnik gazety Rech na 1914 (St. Petersburg, 1914, esp. pp.224–27).

101. I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLVIII, no. 6 (June, 1913), pp.335–37; A. Petrishchev, “Khronika vnutrennoi zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 12 (December 1913), p.347; B. Veselovskii, “Ochered-nyia zemskiia zadachi,” Sovremennik, May 1913, p.303, and “Ocherki mestnago samoupravleniia,” in ibid., September 1913, p.305.

102. See especially I. Zhilkin, “Provintsial’noe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy, XLVIII, no. 8 (August 1913), pp.333–41. The withdrawal of urban voters from the zemstvos was especially striking in view of the fact that these elements were concomitantly enthusiastically participating in city duma elections, which resulted in the selection of a record number of “politically undesirable” city officials who were promptly denied administrative confirmation by the government. See Veselovskii in Sovremennik, September, October, and November, 1913.

103. Some electoral assemblies in the third (peasants’) curia even passed resolutions in favor of far-reaching zemstvo reform. However, the peasantry was generally unable to unite to resist the very widespread government interference in the elections that occurred in 1912–13. As a result, many more village elders and zemstvo incumbents, i.e., men who were likely to have developed some sort of client-patron relationship with local officials, were elected to the zemstvos in 1912-13 than in 1909-10. Also, an increasing number of electoral assemblies were so divided among themselves that they were unable to select a delegate to represent them in the zemstvos. Hence a rising number of seats allotted to the peasants remained unfilled. Ibid., September 1913, p.305.