A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia [Course Book ed.] 9781400850266

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. Res Publica in the Imperial State
Part I. Whose Nature?
1. The Meanings of Property
2. Forests, Minerals, and the Controversy over Property in Post-Emancipation Russia
3. Nationalizing Rivers, Expropriating Lands
Part II. The Treasures of the Fatherland
4. Inventing National Patrimony
5. Private Possessions and National Art
Part III. “Estates on Parnassus”
6. Writers and the Audience
7. The Private Letters of National Literature
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Citation preview

A Public Empire

A Public Empire Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia

Ekaterina Pravilova

Princeton University Press  •  Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket illustration: Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, Troitskii most, 1903, Poland. © 2014 The State Russian Museum. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pravilova, E. A. (Ekaterina Anatol’evna), author. A public empire : property and the quest for the common good in imperial Russia / Ekaterina Pravilova. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-15905-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Public domain—Russia—History. 2. Right of property—Russia—History. 3. Government ownership—Russia—History. 4. Russia—History—1613–1917. I. Title. KLA3040.P73 2014 333.10947’09034—dc23  2013028580 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro Printed on acid-­free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Abbreviationsxi Introduction: Res Publica in the Imperial State

1

part i Whose Nature? Environmentalism, Industrialization, and the Politics of Property

19

1. The Meanings of Property

21

2. Forests, Minerals, and the Controversy over Property in Post-­Emancipation Russia

55

3. Nationalizing Rivers, Expropriating Lands

93

part ii The Treasures of the Fatherland

129

4. Inventing National Patrimony

131

5. Private Possessions and National Art

178

part iii “Estates on Parnassus”: Literary Property and Cultural Reform

213

6. Writers and the Audience: Legal Provisions and Public Discourse

215

7. The Private Letters of National Literature

241

Epilogue270 Notes291 Index403

Acknowledgments

“One can’t undo a knot with one hand,” says an old Russian proverb attesting to the vanity of solitary work, and this is certainly true about my work on this book. Many hands (and minds) have joined together to help me untangle the knot and sort out the complexities of Russian thinking about property, and I am deeply indebted to everyone who has assisted me with their encouragement, assistance, and friendly critique. The idea for this book originated with a paper that I delivered at a workshop on the “Materiality of Res Publica” hosted by the European University in St. Petersburg in 2007. I am grateful to all the workshop participants and especially to Professors Oleg Kharkhordin and Quentin Skinner for the initial inspiration to explore the world of “public things” in the Russian context. In addition to this, I presented earlier versions of what have now become a number of the book’s chapters at a variety of academic venues and in each case greatly benefited from the advice of numerous colleagues—­in particular, the organizers of and participants in the Russian kruzhok at Princeton University; the Russian history workshop at Columbia University; the workshops on Russian and Soviet History and Culture and Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania; the Russian History Workshop at the Center of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan; and the Russian workshop at Georgetown University. Numerous friends and colleagues then helped me once I began work on the manuscript: Zhanna Kormina helped me untangle the particulars of Orthodox ritual; Edyta Bojanowska, Caryl Emerson, Serguei Oushakine, William Mills Todd III, and Michael Wachtel opened my eyes to the politics of literary property in the imperial era; and Tatiana Borisova, Yanni Kotsonis, Alberto Masoero, and Paul Werth each read individual chapters in a number of different incarnations, offering me suggestions that helped me to greatly improve my argument. I also shamelessly abused the generosity of Peter Holquist, who introduced me to numerous references and research materials, commented on multiple papers and articles, and kindly read the manuscript both as a whole as well as piece by piece. Last, I am endlessly grateful to Jane Burbank, Michael Gordin, Stephen Kotkin, Philip Nord, and Willard Sunderland, who generously took on reading the entire manuscript and shared comments

viii  | Acknowledgments and criticisms that always pushed me to write the best book I could. Any of the shortcomings that remain are all my own. The Department of History at Princeton has been my intellectual home since I began work on this project. Conversations over the years with Jeremy Adelman, Molly Greene, Hendrik Hartog, Yair Mintzker, Rebecca Rix, and Martha Sandweiss have helped me to look at the issues of property in a broader context. I am also deeply indebted to my teacher and academic advisor Boris Vasilievich Ananich for everything to date that I have been able to produce as a historian. Boris Vasilievich has taught me the subtleties of the historian’s craft and has constantly supported me in all my academic endeavors. A number of institutions provided the critical financial and logistical support that I needed to complete my project. A Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies gave me much needed support for research and writing, while Princeton University’s Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences generously sponsored several years of research trips to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine. In 2010–­2011, I had the good fortune to spend a year working on my manuscript at the New Economic School (NES) in Moscow. One cannot imagine a better place than the NES to write a book, and I am endlessly grateful to Sergei Guriev, Igor Fedyukin, and Konstantin Sonin for inviting me to the school and to all my colleagues there for their enduring friendship and support. Anne O’Donnell has edited numerous versions of this text: I am deeply grateful to her for her efforts to add smoothness and elegance to my nonnative English. Margarita Emelina and Tatiana Voronina have been wonderful research assistants: their work made a huge difference for my work in Russian libraries and archives. I have also benefited from the kind assistance of numerous Russian academic institutions and repositories, though I owe special thanks to Irina Zolotinkina and Vera Kessenich of the Russian Museum, Natalya Andreevna Belova of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, and Anna Gorskaia of the Museum of Art and History in Murom. I am grateful to the editors of Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History and Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales for allowing me to use the portions of articles that have appeared in these editions as “The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 353–­386, and “Les res publicae russes: Discours sur la propriété pu­ blique à la fin de l’Empire,” Annales HSS, vol. 64, no. 3 (2009), pp. 579–­609, © Ehess, Paris. Chapters 1 and 3 incorporate these materials in revised form. By now, my husband, Igor, knows by heart all my stories about forests and icons; over the years, he has been both my most engaged critic and my foremost fan. I am deeply grateful for all he has done to help me. My father, Anatolii Mikhailovich, a scientist and himself an author, knows all too well the joys and hardships of academic writing; his relentless nagging to make sure I met my

Acknowledgments  |  ix

deadlines gave me the motivation to keep moving forward. My mother, Natalya Vasilievna, took care of my children during several archival trips and traveled across the Atlantic to babysit while I was struggling to finish the last chapters. Zhenia and Liza do not know much yet about the intricacies of property—­ except perhaps for their claims to toys and computer games. However, they will be glad to know that this particular property book is over.

Abbreviations

Archives CHA Georgia GEA IIMK Arkhiv NCM OR GRM

Central Historical Archive, Tbilisi, Georgia Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh, Arkhiv, St. Petersburg, Russia Institut Istorii Materialnoi Kultury, Arkhiv, St. Petersburg National Center of Manuscripts, Tbilisi, Georgia Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo Russkogo Muzeia, St. Petersburg RGIA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv, St. Petersburg TGA Tretyakovskaia Galereia, Arkhiv, Moscow, Russia TsGA NTD Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Nauchno-­Tekhnicheskoi Dokumentatsii, St. Petersburg TsGIA SPb Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-­ Peterburga, St. Petersburg TsGIA Ukraine Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Ukrainy, Kiev, Ukraine TsIAM Tsentralnyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy, Moscow VA GRM Vedomstvennyi Arkhiv Gosudarstvennogo Russkogo Muzeia, St. Petersburg

Publications ChOIDR LZh PSZ RS SG ZhGUP ZhMIu

Chteniia v Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh Lesnoi Zhurnal Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (series I, II, III) Russkoe sudokhodstvo Starye Gody Zhurnal Grazhdanskogo i Ugolovnogo Prava Zhurnal Ministerstva Iustitsii

Introduction Res Publica In The Imperial State

State, Liberalism, and Reforms: Russia in the European Context Europe’s long nineteenth century (1789–­1914) was rich with bold innovations and great disappointments. The rise of nationalism, the “social question,” feminism, and new models of public administration and economic policy were accompanied by the demise of well-­established concepts. Such was the fate of individualism, defined by Anthony Arblaster as the “metaphysical and ontological core” of classical liberalism.1 Individualism and its corollary—­the principle of inalienable private property—­had been seen as the greatest conceptual achievement of post-­revolutionary Europe. Yet by the end of the century, this crowning jewel of the liberal order found itself widely criticized and discredited in favor of more community-­oriented, state-­sympathetic, and social-­ minded doctrines. This ideological shift both reflected and contributed to a profound transformation of the state. The new state that evolved as a result is much more familiar to us than the “state as watchdog” ideal popularized by early-­nineteenth-­century liberals. Contrary to early liberal beliefs, government powers steadily increased over the nineteenth century, developing internally through the rationalization of the state apparatus, the professionalization of bureaucracies, and the influx of experts and technocrats. States also assumed new functions in the areas of welfare and social protection, economic regulation, and cultural guidance, while at the same time transferring many of their tasks to public organizations. As a result, government became at once more visible and transparent and more intrusive.2 The state was not, indeed, the only beneficiary of the decline in individualism: one of the most important and visible consequences of this development was the growth of the “public” domain at the expense of private properties. Many objects and resources that had previously made up the bulk of the private wealth of Old Regime and post-­revolutionary Europe changed hands and became regulated either by state agencies or by public organizations. Private ownership of publicly important things was restricted by multiple conditions drawn up by experts on the basis of “scientifically” established principles and enforced by the government. In the second half of the nineteenth century,

2  | Introduction one saw the development of public trusts owning erstwhile private estates now cherished as historical monuments. Acting on behalf of the nation, the state introduced new rules that limited the disposal of privately owned forests; wealthy landowners could not hunt on their own estates if the law designated their potential prey as protected species. Private owners had to agree to the ubiquitous taking of their properties for the construction of “public” places—­new streets, avenues, and squares, as well as publicly important railways and other means of communication. Liberals, however, did not perceive this growing intrusion as a threat to private freedoms: inalienable private property ceased to be the main and unconditional attribute of personal liberty, whereas the possibility to construct spaces for public life came to be seen as the prerequisite of the society’s collective freedom. This process culminated in the impressive mobilization of material and human resources during World War I, the temporary nationalization of resources and curtailing of free markets. It is hard to imagine how the states involved in the total war, first of all Britain and France, could have persuaded citizens to give up their freedoms and sacrifice their possessions had the neo-­liberal and state-­tolerant ideology not made such spectacular progress in the decades preceding the outbreak of the conflict. Giving up one’s possessions for the needs of war came to be seen as an “essential ingredient of Republican virtue,” just as much a part of the war effort as military mobilization.3 Nationalism alone could not have kept the tremendous strain of the war from breaking into social conflict: the idea of a common cause that was superior to private wealth thus contributed, at least indirectly, to the success of mobilization. This book explores the development of the public sphere in the Russian Empire. It examines the shifting boundaries—­in terms of concepts and actual legal practices—­of property in Russia from the time of Catherine the Great to World War I and the Revolutions of 1917 to show the emergence of a new vision of society and new practices of treating “public things”—­rivers, forests, historical monuments, art objects, and literary masterpieces. The main object of my inquiry is a phenomenon that was never institutionalized in Russian laws but nevertheless existed in people’s imagination, rhetoric, and politics—­the concept of “public property,” the res publica—­a world of things to be owned by the public yet managed by the state on the public’s behalf. This vision in its general contours resembled the ideas of neo-­liberals in Britain, the social philosophy of French solidaristes, and the legal concepts of late-­nineteenth-­century German and Austrian jurisprudence and sociology. Russian proponents of the idea of res publica belonged to different ideological and political strands, professional communities, and cultural milieu; some of them persistently refused to identify themselves with specific political parties or currents due to their desire to stay away from politics, especially electoral politics. This desire betrayed their aversion to the rigidity of political labels often noted by contemporary historians.4 However, in this book, I will define this worldview and the project of res publica as liberal with an important

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  3

condition that we understand the term “liberalism” broadly and refer to its fin-­ de-­siècle reincarnation. The critical difference between the classical and new liberalism was in the nuances of the attitudes to the state, private property, and the balance of individual/public values. The core of liberal ideology remained unchanged: liberalism preserved its firm commitment to the idea of freedom and the limitation of state’s rights, with corresponding enlargement of its functions and obligations. Russian liberal intellectuals also remained faithful to the concept of private property, although their understanding of property substantially differed from the early-­nineteenth-­century version. These intellectuals sought not to strengthen private property, as—­compared to other civil rights in Russia—­property was already fairly well protected, but rather to reconceptualize property by changing its very essence. The concept of property, they believed, must be shifted to represent not just the private or personal but also the public responsibilities and commitments of the owner. This new vision of property introduced the public as a subject of rights—­in its essence, it was a liberal, although not individualistic, vision. The liberal idea of public domain proved to be very appealing and versatile, and earned support from many nonliberal moderate politicians and technocrats in the government. However, much less was achieved in Russia in terms of practical policy and legal reforms, which necessitated fundamental transformation of the state. Russian liberal-­minded intellectuals never witnessed the full embodiment of their ideas in policy but, nevertheless, tried to implement them in their professional practices as engineers, foresters, lawyers, literary critics, or architects. The unfinished process of building public property in Russia cannot be considered as a total failure or as another sign of Russia’s exceptionality. At least the “otherness” revealed itself differently in the development of Russian liberal ideology, practices of property relations, and the transformation of state institutions. This book explains the reasons for Russia’s particularities and highlights the country’s points of convergence with European trends. One may wonder why instead of addressing the persistent problem of Russian history and contemporary politics—­the vulnerability of private property—­I explore the development of ideas and institutions that were opposite and even inimical to private ownership. Wasn’t private ownership the vitally important and tragically missing element that precluded Russian economic growth and political development? This book explains that the obsessive focus on the issue of private property in Russia reduces the complexity of alternative regimes of ownership evolving in parallel to private ownership. It demonstrates why private property in Russia, which turned out to be overdeveloped in some areas while indeed remaining underdeveloped and vulnerable in others, proved to be not always the most just and the most efficient form of holding and managing things. This book argues that property can take many forms and acquire different meanings, and that historical analysis should concentrate on

4  | Introduction how these forms emerge and how the meanings of property change under the influence of cultural, economic, and social transformations. The study of the formation of public domain in imperial Russia continues recent trends in the historiography while at the same time offering important revisions. It is no exaggeration to say that recent historiography has tended to undermine the meaning of private property as the key concept of industrial society and the foundational institution of modernity. Recent historical accounts have refuted the narratives of the triumphal development of private property, and, instead, described the multilayered systems of ownership and possession in land and other resources, while criticizing the government’s efforts to simplify these relations by squeezing them into the narrow schema of private ownership.5 Private property in modern historiography has come to be symbolically associated with state coercion and prescriptive rules (as opposed to flexible customs), and with colonialism and its strivings to create uniformity. Thus, paradoxically, in modern narratives, the development of private property appears often not as a corollary of liberation and the symbol of freedom, but as the outcome of the state’s obsessive urge to improve “human conditions.”6 Nowadays, one could hardly find a single book that claims to show the unambiguous success of private property in the modern world, and the few studies that pursue this task base their historical justification for private property on the principle of contradictio in contrarium by referring to the failure of early socialist experiments or the bankruptcy of the Soviet model as proof for the advantages of private ownership.7 Modern studies of property assert the complexity of forms, the relative political and social value of private property, and suggest employing different methods of anthropological inquiry, micro-­history, and economic analysis in order to re-­create and explain the evolution of property relations.8 Property appears a “paradoxical” phenomenon in modern history that defies easy explanation.9 Indeed, the modern historiography of property is itself a remarkable phenomenon that reveals much about current visions of social order, wealth, and virtue. My study of the emergence of the public domain does not juxtapose “egotistical” private property and the “virtuous” public form, or draw clear lines between “liberal” private property versus the public counterpart favored by “authoritarian” regimes. Instead, I attempt to answer the question of why the rule of private property, initially established in certain spheres of economy and social relations, yielded to other forms. What circumstances and processes led to changes in the understanding and application of property rights, and what were the consequences of such reforms? These questions have particular importance for the historiography of imperial Russia. Paradoxically, the history of property in imperial Russia has never been a part of a global, European, or comparative history of property, and (both for better and for worse) has remained immune to the relativist (and sometimes even anti-­private-­property) spirit of recent works. Since Richard

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  5

Pipes’s influential account10 that unambiguously paired private property with political freedom and criticized Russian autocracy for precluding the development of both elements, most historians, even while arguing against Pipes’s vision, have worked within the “private property” paradigm—­an opposite to the one that has dominated European and American historiography for the past twenty years. The predominance of this vision in Russian historiography is understandable given the limited development of property rights and absence of freedom in the Soviet Union. At the same time, it underscores the historians’ preoccupation with the abnormalities of Russia’s development, and the search for the institutions of private property revealed their desire to overcome the “special path” paradigm. A great number of important and interesting works about property in imperial Russia have been written. Martina Winkler11 and Dmitrii Timofeev12 have shown the passionate perseverance of Russian intellectuals and politicians to the idea of private property in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Richard Wortman has offered a thought-­provoking and sophisticated analysis of why, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian thinkers had lost interest in the idea of private property and why they failed to identify this institution with civil rights.13 Michelle Marrese, Lee Farrow, and William Wagner have traced the development of family property rights from the time of Peter the Great to the early twentieth century.14 Numerous studies on agrarian reforms have analyzed public debates on the flaws and benefits of communal and private landholding, as well as the government’s attempt to regulate the use of land by peasants. Eric Lohr has analyzed the impact of World War I and nationalism on property rights in his book about the campaign against enemy-­aliens in Russia.15 These and other works have created a context within which I develop my argument. However, my book shifts the focus of attention from the debate over whether or not private property existed in Russia to a more productive discussion about how and why private ownership of certain resources, things, and capital (tangible and intangible) has evolved, and why private property can appear in varying contexts as either an appropriate or an inappropriate form of ownership. In other words, the key questions that interest me center on the limits of private property and the various ways in which it is either established or not established as a social institution, the conditions that are essential for the institution to function effectively, and the ways in which property forms, private property included, have changed over time. To address these questions, my book moves in a number of directions, combining discussions relating to the history of Russian liberalism and legal thought, the culture and practice of ownership, state reformism, and the competition to establish authority over resources and people. An inquisitive reader may still question whether even posing these questions is entirely appropriate for Russia. Am I not simply imposing premises drawn from studies of nineteenth-­century European politics on the Russian

6  | Introduction case? European liberals, one could argue, were spoiled by their relative freedom and highly individualistic culture, and thus had the luxury to insist on better recognition for public interests. But Russia had no freedom, and individualism there was less pronounced. Why then should we expect European conditions to apply?16 The comparison of Russian legal and intellectual development with various European trends would seem less problematic if we denounce the premise of sequential reforms (first constitutionalism, private property, and freedoms, and then public interests and social politics). Problems similar to those that had evolved in European countries decades or even centuries before—­such as the transformation of the Russian political system—­overlapped with modern issues that other countries were tackling at the same time.17 If we give up the linear vision of development, then Russian liberalism does not appear as great a departure from the European tradition as one might think. European liberalism was itself quite diverse, such that there was, in fact, no single European norm to deviate from. Also, despite the government’s attempts to stop the influx of subversive ideas, educated Russians had access to European culture and eagerly consumed European intellectual exports. As a result, Russian social thought experienced the same crises as its counterparts in Europe and faced similar challenges. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge Russian particularities. Historians of Russian political thought have struggled to define the idiosyncratic political worldviews of Russian thinkers,18 who earnestly attempted to combine concepts like personal liberty with communitarianism, producing ideas that seemed oxymoronic for their European counterparts. The British-­French classical liberal worldview in Russia competed with cameralist theories coming from Germany, and, as a result, Russian social thought never fully embraced the idea of legal individualism and always reflected populist influences. One of the main differences between Russian liberalism before the early twentieth century and its French and British counterparts is that the Russian version was less alienated from the state, as witnessed by the existence of “liberal bureaucrats” in the government, the main agents of the “liberal reforms” in the mid-­nineteenth century. German moderate liberalism, with its striving to reconcile the public/ state divide, appeared much more sympathetic to many Russian liberal intellectuals. Dedicated to transforming the state without shaking the fundamental principles of autocracy, these liberals concentrated their efforts on nonpolitical reforms that they hoped would improve the efficacy of government and restore social peace. The statist-­liberal ethos of the “rule of law” penetrated deeply into tsarist bureaucracy, living on even after the era of the Great Reforms.19 At the same time, the professionalization of government led to the rise of well-­trained technocrats, whose views, as Peter Holquist has shown, are difficult to define as either liberal or conservative.20 The ideology that guided their work was that of

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  7

state efficiency, an idea that they shared, in fact, with various liberal experts in the so-­called free professions. My analysis of the reforms of property rights (projected and implemented) thus unites two historiographical narratives that otherwise rarely meet—­of the Russian state, on the one hand, and of liberalism and professional expertise, on the other. As I argue, the development of the state in Russia should be portrayed in tandem with the transformation of liberal ideology and professional knowledge that played such a visible role in the political history of nineteenth-­ century Europe. The state represented arguably the trickiest element in the reformist agenda: liberals and experts wanted the state to be powerful and at the same time nonintrusive—­big, yet efficient. The reality proved far from the ideal, however: the Russian autocracy in fact limited the state’s expansion into new areas of activity and impeded its assumption of modern tasks and functions. Despite its interventionism and fixation on the idea of total tutelage, especially in the countryside, the Russian state remained a delinquent parent to its subjects. By the late nineteenth century, the government shifted course somewhat and began developing multiple projects of social reform. Following 1905, it even went so far as to stake its political survival on the “mobilization” of the peasants,21 which meant effectively liberating them from the tutelage of their communes and the local nobility, and providing them with abundant state assistance. Yet by the time of its collapse in 1917, the government seemed to have fallen short on all counts. To many contemporaries, the state appeared at once annoyingly omnipresent and hopelessly impotent. The creation of the public domain targeted precisely this problem: by transforming the state and making it both larger and more efficient, while also reorienting its role, the proponents of property rights reform strove to create the material foundation for a strong and independent society. To Russia’s liberal reformers, the state was to function as the manager of the country rather than as its owner—­a provider of services to society rather than an embodiment of power. The central requirement of this agenda was the creation of a “public domain.” Given the autocratic context in which the proponents of the public domain were working, this vision had tremendous political importance. Rather than subverting or ignoring the autocracy, they would use the idea of the public domain to change it from within. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, as events unfolded, the “state” part of this reformist agenda did not work very well; indeed, the failure of mobilization during World War I demonstrated all the political and managerial weaknesses of the autocratic order. There was yet another point of convergence between Russian and European fin-­de-­siècle liberalism: its gradual professionalization. In the late nineteenth century, the reformist agenda attracted numerous representatives from among the professional elites—­engineers, lawyers, scientists, and scholars—­whose vision of what society should look like came to play a vital role in shaping the

8  | Introduction agenda of liberal reform.22 Due to the constrained field of political activity, the professionals tried to implement their progressive agenda in the areas of their expert knowledge—­a fact that explains the prominence of specialists among Russian liberals.23 Under the influence of new social theories, Russian liberals of the day, like their counterparts in Europe, experienced a “turn” from liberal individualism to social liberalism, albeit with less of a sense of rupture. Indeed, social liberalism simply added yet another layer to the goals of liberal politicians in fin-­de-­siècle Russia, inspiring them to seek not only European-­style constitutional reform and civil freedom but also state modernization and social transformation. As this book will claim, these reform-­minded experts were responsible for the turn away from an individualistic vision of the social order to models that were more social-­minded and state-­friendly. As Daniel Beer has shown in his study of human sciences in fin-­de-­siècle Russia, liberals shared the belief that society was a project, an artifact that could be remade and transformed.24 This vision of society presupposed the subordination of individual rights “to the rights of an abstract . . . community.”25 As my research demonstrates, experts in diverse fields, such as engineers, foresters, art historians, and literary critics, exhibited remarkably similar views on the ideal social order, with the result that the new agenda of liberal reform shifted from an emphasis on individual personal freedom to the freedom and rights of society. Society, or “the public,” along with the individual, was to become the bearer of rights, including the right to own property.

Property and the Social Order The idea of building a public domain provides a remarkable example of how the reform of property rights was imagined as having the power to transform the entire social order, including such fundamental concepts as personal freedom, public interest, state power, and the state-­society relationship. Russia was not unique in this regard, however: the ambivalent nature of property as both an essentially personal attribute and at the same time an institution of the social order had long fueled debates among economists, philosophers, and political theorists in Europe and elsewhere. And the contradictions were obvious from the start. From its very inception, the modern idea of property was closely linked to understandings of individual freedom; yet no other freedom was so tightly circumscribed by rules and social commitments in favor of the public and the state. The dilemma of property and poverty, the ambiguity of a God-­granted right that at the same time produced misery and inequality, the tensions between the mutually exclusive private freedom of owners and public needs—­all of these seemingly basic qualities of property appeared so great as to be almost irreconcilable. Consequently, much of the energy that went into

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  9

thinking about property was directed toward trying to align or balance the “absolute” right of property with the needs of social justice and the public interest, all of which led to a variety of both utopian and pragmatic projects for reforming the social order. The outcome of the debates over property in Europe is well known: the golden age of classical liberalism was still ongoing when the first projects proposing the end to private property appeared. Indeed, the orthodoxy of the absolute good of private property came under attack from all angles: socialists wanted justice, traditionalists argued for preserving collective institutions,26 and government officials and scholars who experimented with establishing private property in colonial settings raised doubts about the universal applicability of the institution. The demise of classical liberalism, challenged by the new realities of mass politics, democracy, and nationalism, drove the evolution of the theory, law, and practice of property rights to a new stage. The new liberalism of the late nineteenth century thus offered a vision of property that was checked in the name of the common good. The right to property was never absolute, even when the majority tended to think it was, but the scale of the constraints placed on it steadily increased, as the public domain expanded at the expense of private owners. The development of the state and of professional experts also played a role in the development of property,27 which was neither linear nor straightforward. While strengthening the security of private property, the state at the same time introduced multiple mechanisms subjecting private ownership to its own control. Private property was to be recorded, registered, and taxed, functions the state was increasingly able to perform with ever greater precision. This increased “visibility”28 of property was ambiguous: it allowed a private owner to turn to the state if another individual contested his or her rights, yet it also made private property less “private.” Major private and public enterprises required the expropriation of private properties, and although well-­elaborated laws on expropriation afforded far greater protection to private owners than did the old practices of seizure, the scale of state intervention inexorably grew. In the nineteenth century, professional experts discovered new methods to manage and preserve “publicly important” or exhaustible resources. Since these tasks could succeed only with the help of the state or public organizations, they advanced the enlargement of the public domain. Though it continued to function, the institution of private property no longer appeared to be the most robust or effective form of property ownership. The development of private property in Russia appears extremely compressed and eventful: both the triumph and the demise of the idea of property were swift and intense. Quite characteristically for Russia in the eighteenth century, where the state was the main agent of reforms, the first person to introduce and popularize the concept of property was Catherine the Great. It was the empress who did the most to underscore the linkage between freedom and

10  | Introduction property, although, as we will see, she applied it inconsistently. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, the concept of property was initially interpreted in Russia with great emphasis on individualism and far less on property’s social meanings. At the same time, though the empress was the undeniable inventor of this key “liberal” institution, her vision of property was nonetheless quite limited and conservative. Thus, for all their “individualistic” spirit, Catherine’s property reforms emphasized the right to property as a gift granted by the monarch to his or her nobles and therefore tended to reinforce the noble landowners’ subordination to the throne, just as the empress, a talented social engineer and politician, had so craftily intended. Challenges to Catherine’s individualized concept of property appeared simultaneously from several directions, with the first signs of the concept’s erosion appearing just a few decades after her initial reforms. In the late 1820s and 1830s, European ideas of rationalizing the use of natural resources had made their way to Russia, spurring a debate on the obligations of forest owners vis-­à-­ vis the public—­an imagined collectivity of people inhabiting the country, composed of current and future generations. At the same time, prodded by the pleas of Russian writers and artists, the government composed laws on literary property and confronted the problem of mediating between the private (material) and public (cultural) benefits of literary works. The first law on literary property (1828) defined the writer and “the public” (or the audience) as two agents in a common cultural exchange, each entitled to a share of the final product—­ that is, the literary work, which was seen as an expression both of individual creativity and of the nation’s cultural development. From the mid-­nineteenth century, the process of reconsidering old property relations and rebalancing private and public interests led to frequent collisions between the interests of private owners and the public over environmental protection (forests and water), the economic exploitation of natural resources (rivers and minerals), historical preservation, and artistic property. As a result, many objects that had fallen under the mantle of private ownership in the late eighteenth century now came to be seen as public goods. The meaning of “private property” had thus changed: from its original condition as an “absolute” domain and an exclusive right (although in practice it was never absolute nor exclusive), private property had become a much more restricted affair, weighed down with multiple commitments and constrained by public interests. The juxtaposition of Catherine’s obsession with the idea of private property and the efforts of fin-­de-­siècle liberals to find an alternative to it suggests that individualism is not the exclusive attribute of liberal ideology. Moreover, since both Catherine and the later intellectuals took the inspiration for their thinking about property from the West, the ambivalent attitude toward individualism is not a Russian peculiarity. Instead, there were multiple varieties of “individualisms” (romantic-­conservative, as well as what we might call “liberal” or possessive), and, hence, flowing from this, there were also different varieties of

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  11

“private property” that then became invested with diverse social and cultural meanings. Consequently, it is wrong to suggest that all liberals see private property as an absolute virtue, just as it is an oversimplification to argue that anti-­ liberals see it as an absolute sin. Instead, the meanings of property(ies) have been historically diverse and changing, and a key goal of this book is to trace the reasons, circumstances, and moving forces that created these changes in the Russian context. What interests me most is not the well-­worn story of the gradual limitation of individual freedom to own things, but rather the emergence of the “public” as a bearer of rights and liberties—­both in practical terms as well as in the arena of rhetoric and the imagination. The establishment of a public domain required both the limitation of individual property rights and the reform of the state. It revealed that the model of absolute private property supported by the monarchical state on the basis of an unwritten contract of loyalty, with no space left for society, was essentially an anti-­liberal construct. The Russian liberals who advanced this critique were not working alone: Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1899 that “individualism developed in history at the same pace as statism.”29 Léon Duguit, expanding on this idea, claimed that the state should be viewed not as the quintessence of public power but rather as an agent of public services, the “immediate realization of the public interest.”30 Not surprisingly, the writings of Durkheim and Duguit and the concept of restoring the “public” as a legal and political subject became immensely popular in Russia. Russian liberals went even further in their critique of individualism and the state, however, arguing that the state in its then present form had become an obstacle to the formation of the nation and was undermining social cohesion. Rather than the two-­dimensional (individual-­state) order, they advanced the concept of a three-­dimensional polity (individual-­society-­state) and condemned reckless individualism as a deviation from the authentic (Lockean) liberalism, as much as they criticized excessive state interventionism. Pavel Miliukov, the leader of Russia’s main liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats, expressed this idea clearly in his article on the freedom of speech (1905).31 His vision of freedom was far more constrained and attuned to public interests than that of early-­nineteenth-­century liberal ideals. According to Miliukov, both excessive individualism and overweening state control (or censorship, in the case of the press) tore at the fabric of society, destroying the social and cultural ties between individuals as well as between successive generations. At the same time, it is worth pointing out that the proponents of this new view of property did not see themselves as undermining or reducing the value of individual freedom per se. Bogdan Kistiakovskii, in his essay “In Defense of Law” (1909), famously stressed that freedom and order were two sides of the same coin of law, and he lamented the absence of “the ideal of a legal person” in the Russian tradition, despite the Russian intelligentsia’s fixation on the self.32 The alternative concept of personhood that Kistiakovskii and others seemed

12  | Introduction to be proposing assumed instead a combination of internal spiritual freedom, civic maturity, and self-­discipline.33 Celebrating the revival of the idealistic vision of personality,34 Russian liberals condemned individualism as its extreme and perverted embodiment. In other words, as Michael Freeden writes of the legal philosophy of late-­nineteenth-­century British liberals, “Individuality . . . replaced Individualism.”35 Indeed, many Russian philosophers before Kistiakovskii and Miliukov, most famously the Slavophiles and populists, condemned private property and individualism altogether. However, the liberals whose ideas I analyze offered a different vision that sought not to eliminate private property but rather to transform it, stripping it of its individualist traits. How was this possible? How did they imagine private property without individualism, and what were the political and cultural implications of such a vision? Considered from the perspective of classical liberal doctrine, the whole idea that there might be a way to separate the concept of private property from individualism seems impossible since property was regarded as the chief quality of an individual and a primary symbol of citizenship.36 Ever since the seventeenth century, property had been cast as a basic foundation of civic virtue, thus providing a powerful justification for the institution and offering a useful means for reconciling moral exigencies and material interests.37 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the seemingly straightforward relationship between virtue and property had started to come under question, and the mere fact that one was a property owner appeared to some critics to be an insufficient measure of good citizenship.38 To these critics, property was not what in early modern philosophy “qualif[ied] the individual for citizenship.”39 Instead, being an owner required possessing specific qualifications: the possession of knowledge (sometimes a very specific form of expertise, or the ability to hire a professional to manage one’s estate), a sense of civil responsibility, and the appreciation of the existence of a greater public interest and the willingness to yield to this interest when needed. The opposite vision—­that property was somehow itself powerful enough to create good citizens—­still figured in the government’s reformist agenda, and was prominently represented in Petr Stolypin’s utopia of creating a new social and political order through the individualization of peasant landholding.40 Nevertheless, as Yanni Kotsonis has demonstrated, Russian reformers of the late imperial era, many of whom were “professionals” employed by the state, had doubts as to whether peasants were mature enough to perform as private landowners, and eventually downgraded the property they could own from “private property” to the euphemistic “individual property.”41 As my research suggests, the proponents of property reform offered extending expert control to the exercise of proprietary power (when dealing with the ownership of publicly important things) to all categories of owners, disputing the inherent virtue of individual possession. Later, the Bolsheviks would go on to reject doubts about

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  13

the omnipotence of institutions that had been characteristic of fin-­de-­siècle liberalism, thereby ironically adhering to the early classical liberal faith in the transformative power of property. As they saw it, the renunciation of private property appeared powerful enough to change not only the political order but also people themselves. The meaning of “property reform” in prerevolutionary Russia was also understood broadly: not just as a set of legal innovations but also as a change in the practice of creating value in both public and private life. In other words, the proponents of the public domain strove to change the attitudes of owners, lawmakers, and the general public toward particular kinds of things. It is thus no coincidence that property found itself at the center of the debate about what constituted sociability and the public, and not just the ownership of any property but rather of those things perceived to have public value, such as natural resources, historical monuments, and ideas. As anthropologists studying the social relations of property have suggested, transactions involving material and intangible objects of ownership operate on two levels: the first dominated by short-­term transactions within the arena of individual competition, and the second, a long-­term order focused on the production of social values.42 The process by which a wide variety of things accrued new value as objects of use, ownership, and protection shares this dualistic character. In terms of mundane property exchange, forests served as sources of material wealth, measured in acres of timber; while the mansions of eighteenth-­century aristocrats were treated as real estate, measured in desiatinas and assessed in rubles; and literary works were seen as objects of trade between publishers and writers. Yet as bearers of moral values, forests came to be seen as evocative of the supposed uniqueness of Russia’s natural environment; familial estates loomed as treasures of national culture and bearers of cultural memory; and literary works acquired new value as tools for building the nation. Society, or the “public,” as a subject of property rights was seen as a main participant of exchange on the level of cultural values. As this book demonstrates, the emergence of the new vision of property relations was initially prompted by the conceptualization of abstract entities such as “nature,” “historical monuments,” “art,” and “literature.” Attaching one of these labels to an object of property meant elevating it from the arena of mundane economic transactions to the realm of “public property,” where regular economic rules no longer applied. The omnipotence of a private owner was undermined when his or her property came to be seen as a public thing. The “temporary” status of private property held by individuals seemed secondary, even insignificant, when compared to the “eternal” public property of multiple generations whose claims to ownership existed in a sense outside of time, with links to both the past and the future. Considering the politics of property in imperial Russia in this light allows us to bring new actors into the narrative of reform—­forestry experts, engineers,

14  | Introduction economists, and specialists in historical preservation, art history, and textual and literary criticism. All of these groups asserted their authority to create a “public opinion” with regard to objects,43 thus elevating their power to define the value of things and, eventually, create a public domain. The experts’ choice of the necessary criteria for defining what constituted a historical monument, for example, carried significant consequences, since it was their expertise that determined whether a given object was subject to public ownership or suitable for private appropriation. When Russian art historians decided that icons were indeed pieces of art in the early 1890s, they precipitated a bitter struggle with the icons’ nominal owner, the Orthodox Church, with the art historians insisting on the expropriation of icons as objects of art and their relocation from churches to public museums, and the Church resisting. Meanwhile, literary critics debated the definition of a literary work as they attempted to draw up plans to reform copyright laws. If a letter written by a deceased writer counted as a piece of literature, then the public should have the right to read it, they determined, notwithstanding the proprietary and moral interests of the writer’s family. Similarly, foresters, hydrologists, and many other experts debated what kind of natural resources (and which species of animals) should be put under public protection and thereby elevated to the status of “public things.”44 The dilemma of “private interest versus public property” was not confined to the sphere of political debates and legal reasoning. A great many individuals confronted this choice in their personal experience. The stories of Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the famous art collection in Moscow; his collaborator, Ilya Ostroukhov; and Praskovia Uvarova, the leader of the Moscow Archaeological Society—­a ll individuals who found different ways of balancing their personal interest in art collecting with the defense of a national “public” art—­represent examples of how the ideology of the public domain shaped individual lives. Disputes over how best to protect historical monuments even resulted in court cases—­such as the case involving Princess Maria Tenisheva, a passionate amateur collector of old Russian art, and another that ultimately led to the prominent master of icon restoration, Evgenii Briagin, going to prison. In the literary domain, the root of the conflict was the tension between the essentially private, intimate nature of creativity and the fact that the product of this deeply personal experience acquired value only through the exposure to the public and the book market. The stories of Alexander Pushkin’s struggle to protect his work from plagiarism and illegal reproduction exemplified the desire not only to secure his income, but also to safeguard his private literary domain from total appropriation by the audience. A few decades later, Lev Tolstoy condemned the privatization of literary works, but his attempt to make the public his legal heir and owner of his literary property failed. This failure raised doubt regarding the possibility that the public might become a legal subject in

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  15

an autocratic state. A similar issue—­that of who became the owner of natural resources once they were nationalized—­arose when groups of entrepreneurs initiated—­almost simultaneously—­a campaign against the private owners of rivers and mineral resources. The experience of engineers confronting the resistance of landed aristocrats (the famous Vorontsov-­Dashkovs, among others) and the stories of peasants who chanced to own coal deposits in Donets Basin also reflect the human dimension of the politics of property reform. The idea of building a public domain touched on various projects of political, social, and cultural transformation. For most experts, work on these questions represented a path to power, since the imagined public domain was to be governed by a professional elite—­that is, by people like them. The establishment of the authority of knowledge in a modern state, already the subject of many studies, features prominently in my story too, although in a slightly different mode. Some proponents of the public domain pursued an agenda of cultural transformation in the belief that by making things public, they would eventually create a mass of educated people responsive to liberal political ideas. One can interpret this politics as an attempt to build a much-­desired “civil society” by providing it with a shared material foundation, an object of common care and shared use. At the same time, other advocates on behalf of public property had more prosaic interests and aspired to derive economic benefits by liberating natural resources from the monopoly of private owners. Although the idea of public property remained politically unacceptable and alien to the autocracy, a few bureaucrats in the government (the previously mentioned technocrats) also tried to make use of it. For instance, the concept of water as res publica served as the main justification for the establishment of state control over water resources in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Indeed, the authors of these first Russian laws on the use of water creatively interpreted the liberal concept of public property in favor of the colonial government, substituting the “state” for the “public.” The contours of the new order of property relations also remained blurred: some, like the forestry experts, expressed their unconditional belief in the (reformed) state as the best manager of public resources; others remained highly skeptical and insisted on the complete removal of state institutions from the management of the public domain. Common to these projects of state reform was an impulse to transform the huge and poorly governed world of the state property—­the possession of the tsarist bureaucracy—­into a modern public domain, administered either by public institutions or by state agencies on behalf of the public. In other words, what these reformers sought was the deindividualization of the state, and for it to be deprived of its status as a private owner. The variety of opinions as to how to institutionalize the public domain originated in the inherent tension surrounding the project: the autocratic regime denied society the status of a political or legal entity with representation. Who, then, would serve as the agent of this noninstitutionalized public? Who

16  | Introduction would manage public resources on behalf of the nation? In the absence of institutions representing the public and vested with its trust, these questions acquired special political importance. The constitutional reform of 1906 did not change the situation: the government continued to deny the existence of society as a sovereign subject outside the state, while the proponents of public property, in turn, refused to accept the Duma as the political embodiment of the public. In Europe, the idea of the public domain rarely acquired such fraught political meaning. As Carol Rose has shown, the existence of “inherently public property,” lying outside purely private property and government-­controlled “public property” had been recognized in common law since the Middle Ages. The establishment of a liberal economic order in England and the United States left the sphere of public things “collectively ‘owned’ and ‘managed’ by society at large” intact: roads, streets, rivers, and public recreational places preserved their status, sanctified by tradition. The courts came to recognize the proprietary rights of an “unorganized public” despite some initial difficulties in framing the argument in favor of an invisible owner.45 More importantly, the constitutional regime of governance made the distinction between “public” and “state,” if not totally meaningless, then at least not politically important. In continental Europe, the process of building a public domain separate from both private and state possession was pushed forward by the French Revolution, which proclaimed the sovereignty of the nation, supported by its power to dispose of public things. The Roman res publica was cited as the origin for this legal model, thus giving it a more legitimate and universal appearance. By the end of the century, almost all European law codes acknowledged the existence of a public domain that kept growing and included many objects formerly considered private. In Russia, by contrast, many of these conditions for the development of a public domain were missing: “inherently public things” were enclosed by private landowners, while the revolutionary changes in civil law that spread across continental Europe did not have much of an impact on Russian autocratic practices. Yet the idea of the public domain nonetheless had an impact. The creation of a public domain, its supporters hoped, would substitute for the missing element of popular sovereignty, thus creating the material foundations for the emergence of a civil society and helping to strengthen the bonds of a society split up in multiple estate-­based and cultural clusters. Carol Rose reminds current lawyers and policy-­makers that “the chief lesson from the nineteenth-­ century doctrines” was that public things are essential for sociability; without public property, “the public” turns into “a shapeless mob.”46 Russian intellectuals, struggling for the freedom of society to own its public things, embraced an agenda that was similar but even more ambitious. They assumed that one could create the nation by giving it a material foundation. This agenda in effect offered

Res Publica in the Imperial State  |  17

an alternative to the radical political doctrines that eventually featured in the Russian Revolution. The idea of a public domain aimed to cure the illnesses of the world, built on the foundation of private property, without eliminating this property altogether. On the contrary, private property was essential for the construction of a new system encompassing a variety of forms of ownership. The structure of this book reflects the complexity of the problem I am tackling. I begin with an introductory chapter that maps the development of the idea of property in Russia from Peter the Great to the Great Reforms. More specifically, I focus on the dilemma of balancing private interests with state and public needs and trace how the idea of sociability penetrated into the discourse of property between the 1820s and the 1840s. This chapter also introduces, as an example, the first “confrontation” between the liberal theory of property rights and the idea of protecting nature. The main body of the book is divided in three parts: the first deals with natural resources, the second with historical and artistic monuments, and the third with the issue of copyright. Each part consists of chapters focused either on different objects of debate—­forests, water, minerals, icons, archaeological sites—­or on special issues such as the construction of public spaces as sites of preserving national heritage, the right of writers’ heirs to control the fate of their inheritance, and the issue of protecting the authorial rights of foreigners. This objects-­and issues-­based structure introduces various participants in the debate, and shows how the same idea evolved independently (and simultan­ ously) in different spheres. Anticipating objections to the comparison of such seemingly distant fields as mining, forestry, preservation, and publishing, I would stress that the idea of the public domain straddled each of these different arenas. The reader will see a striking similarity in the questions raised in discussions on the preservation of forests and icons, in debates on the “freedom of mining” and the “freedom of translation.” Indeed, we would rarely notice “personal” ties among these distinct spheres—­the red thread running through Carl Schorske’s Fin-­de-­siècle Vienna, an exemplary analysis of synchronic shifts in various branches of the cultural domain and politics. After all, foresters were hardly likely to meet literary critics in cafés. They belonged to different groups in Russia’s fragmented professional elite. However, the consonance of their ideas, or, as Schorske put it, the “general and rather sudden transformation of thought and values,”47 the synchronism of changes in the views of property exhibited in different areas, suggest the existence of a common trend and shared concerns about the formation of a public domain. The book ends with a short epilogue, providing a glimpse into the history of property rights and the fate of the idea of public property during the Soviet period. Quite characteristically, the idea of a public domain was rejected in 1917 and then enjoyed a short revival in the 1920s. Eventually, it proved to be incompatible with the socialist order. However, although they were inherently

18  | Abbreviations adverse to socialism, prerevolutionary projects to create a public domain very much anticipated the reforms later conducted by the Bolshevik government, including the expropriation of publicly important resources. The idea of the collective freedom of society proved to be both controversial and ambivalent, subject to opposing interpretations—­one liberal, the other totalitarian.

Part I Ӫ

Whose Nature? Environmentalism, Industrialization, and the Politics of Property

1 The Meanings of Property In early 1802, a few months after Alexander I’s accession to the throne, the Privy Council—­an unofficial government consisting of the young emperor’s liberal friends—­met to discuss an unusual issue: the alienation of lands at the mouth of the Emba River in the Astrakhan province and the fate of a fishing monopoly on the Caspian Sea in this area. The Emba River was itself a mystery: flowing down from the Mugodzar Hills in the Ural Mountains, the river was famous for its fickle course; its riverbed often moved, and only during high water in the spring did it reach the Caspian Sea, in all other seasons disappearing in marshes. During its high-­water period, however, the Emba was rich with its renowned sturgeon, which made the fishing monopoly in this region a lucrative enterprise. The river was also sometimes (mistakenly) considered a borderline between Asia and Europe. Quite symbolically, in 1799 Paul I granted lands with an attached fishing monopoly at the mouth of the Emba River to Count Ivan Kutaisov, a Turkish captive (in 1770, he was taken as a ten-­year-­old boy by the Russian Army during the siege of Bendery and sent as a gift-­trophy to Catherine the Great) and Paul’s former barber and valet whom he made a baron and a count and then promoted to the rank of Chief of the Tsar’s Hunt. The tsar’s gift to Kutaisov was more than arbitrary, it was illegal—­according to the empire’s laws, seashores, unlike rivers, could not be held in private possession. After Paul’s death, the outrageous seizure of the public fishing rights at the Emba River came up for the consideration of Alexander I’s Privy Council. After a few sessions, the council elaborated three versions of its decision, none of which earned adequate support. At this point, Alexander’s advisor, the anglophile Nikolai Mordvinov, stepped in with a memo that earned him a reputation as a thoroughgoing liberal. The emperor, wrote Mordvinov, could have declared his father’s grant illegal: “The unlimited will of one monarch granted these waters to a private person; the unlimited will of another monarch . . . can take them back. [He can] determine a compensation for them, larger or smaller, or [he can] determine not to compensate at all, it all depends on his wish. There can be no question of justice or injustice,” continued Mordvinov, imagining how a despotic ruler would have resolved the question.1 Alexander I, however, claimed a different role—­the defender of the rule of law and property. Thus, wrote Mordvinov about this case,

22  |  Chapter 1 the government must acknowledge the property rights given to Kutaisov by law (that is, the tsar’s will), however arbitrary and outrageous the grant was. “The law of property is considered in Russia unshakeable; thus, the property of count Kutaisov must be inalienable.” “In Russia the state has no more right to lay down a claim to private property than any private person. . . . Consequently, however harmful for the common good the absolute possession of a certain estate may seem, it may not be taken in common use, for there is no law that private people can be deprived of their property for the public good, and I do not know where such a law would be tolerable and useful: for the common good never rests on the ravaging of the private,” wrote Mordvinov, quoting almost word for word (without reference) from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.2 Mordvinov strongly insisted on obtaining Kutaisov’s consent to the alienation of the seashore with appropriate compensation. Should Kutaisov deliberately request an exorbitant fee for the alienation, the government must satisfy his wish. Envisioning the objection against such an injustice, Mordvinov claimed that the benefit to society from the preservation of property rights would exceed the state’s financial losses.3 The government and the tsar supported Mordvinov’s opinion. Count Kutaisov—­a bugaboo of Russian high society despised by everyone—received 150,000 rubles in compensation for the waters of the Caspian Sea that were declared open for “public use”; the private monopoly on fishing was condemned as “harmful not only for this region, but for the entire state.”4 Mordvinov’s memorandum on fishing in the Emba River—­a powerful pamphlet in defense of private property—­enjoyed immense popularity: it circulated in handwritten copies and continued to be read decades later. In 1859, Alexander Herzen published this memorandum in his free-­press edition in London among other documents that he considered crucial for Russian history, including the project of the “Constitutional Charter” of 1819 and materials on the enigmatic birth of Paul I.5 Nikolai Mordvinov continued his career as an unofficial member of Alexander I’s “reform team,”6 while at the same time enjoying the status of land-­ and serf-­owner. Asserting the immorality of possessing serfs in his memos, he preferred to see serfdom as an institution of public governance. As often happened, the progressive management of Mordvinov’s own estate and his nonpossessive authority over peasants turned into an even harsher burden for serfs than the patriarchal paternalism of less progressive nobles.7 Such was the irony of early Russian liberalism, striving to inculcate in servile and autocratic Russia the lofty ideas taken from the West. The case of the Emba River can be interpreted in several different ways: as a remarkable example of Alexander I’s “liberal beginning,” and as a manifestation of the growing popularity of economic liberalism of which Mordvinov was the most dedicated follower. Indeed, it symbolized a departure from the early-­eighteenth-­century tradition of Russian autocracy, when each coup d’état, or simply a political change in the tsar’s court—­a fall into disgrace of once

The Meanings of Property  |  23

influential favorites—­was accompanied by a partition of their wealth between the winners of a political intrigue. Russian autocracy, in the words of Mordvinov, chose to identify itself with adherence to the principle of private property, and denial of the despotic practices of the past. The decision of Alexander I’s Privy Council, however, revealed the shifts that had occurred in the ideology of Russian autocracy a few decades before, during the reign of Catherine the Great and on her own initiative. How did Russian rulers come to respect private property as a bulwark of autocracy? What did this respect for property mean in the context of Russian monarchal rule?

Catherine the Great and the Invention of an Absolute Private Domain While historians differ over aspects of the history of property relations in pre-­ Petrine and Petrine Russia, they all agree that the modern history of property begins with the reign of Catherine the Great, who assured the liberation of nobles from compulsory service and established the inviolability of private property as their special monopoly and privilege.8 Whatever the foundations of property might have been in Russia, Catherine claimed to have created property anew. Indeed, the idea of “property as freedom,” and the word “property” (sobstvennost’) in its new meaning, made their first appearance in Russia during her “enlightened” reign.9 The extent of Russia’s intellectual openness to European influences, especially during the first years of Catherine’s rule, makes it hard to imagine that the idea of property, so celebrated in mid-­eighteenth-­century Europe,10 would not have found some sort of response in Russia. All across Europe, philosophers and economists of every faith and political persuasion unanimously acknowledged the importance of property for the political, social, and economic well-­being of the nation. Not surprisingly, Russian intellectuals, including the empress herself, seconded this view. However, Catherine II was well known for very selective borrowing of European ideas—­a practice that raised doubts about the sincerity of the empress’s commitment to the ideals of Enlightenment. Among the variety of the political and social visions of property on offer from the West, the empress carefully chose a few as most suitable for Russia; these concepts of property, like other borrowings, underwent significant transformation in the process of adaptation to Russian conditions. Catherine’s ideas about property were most vigorously expressed in her celebrated Nakaz, or “Instruction for the Legislative Commission,” which she wrote to give direction to a commission she convened in 1767 to develop a new law code for the empire. This document, which amounts to a compilation of the works of European thinkers that Catherine adapted to Russian conditions

24  |  Chapter 1 as she saw them, represents the quintessence of her vision of property as she expected it to function in the autocratic state. The Nakaz proclaimed the importance of private property, identifying “honor, property, life, and the freedom of citizens” as one set of linked values (article 115). In a different document—­a special Instruction given to the “Marshal” of the Legislative Commission (“General-­procurator’s Instruction,” 176711)—­Catherine quotes almost word for word from Montesquieu’s Esprits des lois12 to stress the inviolability of property, stating that in cases where the state finds itself bound to take someone’s land for public needs, it nonetheless should proceed on the basis of “motherly feelings toward its subject” and compensate him or her fairly rather than simply coldly imposing “the full severity of law.” One of the most important innovations of the general-­procurator’s instruction to the Legislative Commission was a simple change of terms. In the introduction to the document, the word “property” appears as sobstvennost’ rather than the vague and ambivalent terms that were commonly used before, such as imenie (a noun from the verb “to have,” imet’, which was used to define the object of ownership, bogatstvo (“wealth”), or svoe sobstvennoe (“someone’s own”), which the empress herself had used in her Nakaz.13 Indeed, Catherine legitimized the use of the word sobstvennost’—­property—­as a legal institution and a personal right, and the term soon entered Russia’s legal vocabulary.14 The context in which the term “property” was used in the general-­procurator’s instruction emphasized at once its general legal meaning and its political value, warning, for example, against confusing public and private law (gosudarstvennoe pravo and grazhdanskoe pravo). The former supported “freedom” (vol’nost), while the second protected property (sobstvennost’). In her brief undated memorandum “On Property” (“O sobstvennosti”),15 Catherine added the adjective lichnaia (“personal property”), although in the Nakaz she used the expression “property (or wealth) [belonging to] private [chastnye] people.”16 The Legislative Commission of 1767 that was supposed to compile Russia’s first modern property code never completed its work.17 Yet the idea of unrestricted private property expressed in the Nakaz and reiterated in the work of the Commission nonetheless surfaced in practice a few years after the Commission’s closure. In 1782, Catherine extended the property rights of nobles not only to the surface of their lands and their products but also to any natural objects or features found on or beneath the surface, such as rivers, lakes, minerals, and forests. As a result, Russian nobles acquired property rights that were more expansive than anywhere else in Europe, with the exception of Britain, though the results of this change were contradictory.18 Lofty ideas of the freedom of property in Russia coexisted with the existence of a servile order that enslaved millions of peasants and put the burden of administering them on the nobility. Thus the autocratic system offered a poor environment for the realization of property rights. Nevertheless, the effects of Catherine’s reforms were tremendous, especially in the long run. Many of the laws introduced during

The Meanings of Property  |  25

her reign—­in particular, those relating to ownership over resources (except forests, where the laws were reformed in 1888)—­remained almost untouched until 1917. Catherine’s deliberate intention to invest nobles with power over all natural resources may seem unusual. However, such freedom to dispose of natural riches had special symbolic and, of course, economic meaning. (It was not a coincidence that Kutaisov’s case concerned his ownership of riverbanks and seashores.) In Old Regime Europe, ownership over natural resources symbolized seigniorial privileges, which were abolished after the French Revolution. The status of forests and rivers became indicative of the nature of a country’s political regime. Russia was not an exception, although the development of property rights and ownership over nature followed a somewhat different direction. While in continental Europe private possession of natural resources was a feature of the feudal past, in Russia the late introduction of private ownership in regard to forests, rivers, and minerals was presented as the benevolent gesture of a reformist monarch, an acknowledgment of nobles’ freedoms. In continental Europe, private possession of nature was either eliminated or severely restricted under the influence of political reforms (France) or cameralist rationalization (Germany), while in Russia the regime of private property rights survived for decades. Thus, the “invention” of private property in the mid-­eighteenth century led to the enclosure of natural resources. The privatization of forests, rivers, and subterranean riches eventually sharpened the contradiction between individual and common interests, and sharply posed “Mordvinov’s question”—­ that is, what brings more benefit to society, the preservation of private property or opening natural resources to common use? On June 28, 1782, the twentieth anniversary of Catherine’s reign, the empress signed a manifesto that proclaimed the right of private owners to dispose of waters and mineral deposits on their lands as they wished. Catherine expressed her desire to celebrate the jubilee with a benevolent act that, she claimed, was the culmination of her policy toward the liberalization of trade and industry.19 The Manifesto prohibited “establishing [mining] plants anywhere other than on one’s own land,” thereby terminating the practice of “free mining”—­one of the most colorful manifestations of Peter the Great’s pragmatic attitude to the properties of his subjects. In 1700, Peter granted the freedom to search for minerals and “ores” on both state and private lands and made concealing open deposits of minerals a crime.20 Indeed, the “freedom to mine” (gornaia svoboda)—­that is, the right to search and extract minerals regardless of who owned the land—­ was such a broad power that it could, in fact, enslave unwilling landowners to mine the riches of their lands for their own and the state’s benefit even if they themselves did not want to do so. As the law stated, landowners were to respect the tsar’s intention that “the blessings that God has placed beneath the earth are not to remain buried away.”21 Peter’s law, along with other protectionist and

26  |  Chapter 1 yet arbitrary measures, was said to ensure the growth of industry; however, it also produced discontent. Catherine decided that freedom to own would be a better incentive to economic activity than the freedom to mine on someone else’s lands. Needless to say, neither Catherine’s rejection of Peter’s principle of mining freedom nor the subsequent criticism of Catherine’s reform was based on empirical evidence. Even now, we cannot judge the economic consequences of Peter’s “freedom” and Catherine’s privatization, as neither have been studied. What is true is that Catherine’s Manifesto acquired new importance in the next century, when Russia began to fall behind the more technologically advanced Europeans and lost its position as Europe’s leading iron producer. Although the structure of property rights was hardly among the main initial reasons of that fall, it came to be seen as such a few decades later. In the late nineteenth century, when the idea that inspired Catherine—­that is, the idea that private property is the main catalyst for economic activity—­was abandoned along with faith in the inherent economic rationality of human beings, the nobles’ monopoly over mineral resources came in for sharp criticism as the supposed cause of the backwardness of Russian heavy industry. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, ownership over mineral resources was automatically extended to the new nominal owners of the land—­the peasant communes, who with one stroke of the pen became the holders of hidden treasures. However, as we will see later, due to the communal structure of landholding and tight bureaucratic control, peasants had no real power to dispose of their lands and resources, and the subterranean riches of peasants’ lands were made inaccessible. In fact, peasants often sold their rights to exploit minerals to producers, but the form and methods that they employed were quite irrational due to the limitation on their disposal of lands. Thus, private property, when introduced into a social system based on serfdom and communal landholding, the economy of which lacked a labor market and free circulation of lands and goods, produced results quite opposite of Catherine’s initial intentions. Catherine’s law on mining was a time bomb, one that exploded only several decades later, when Russia entered a period of rapid industrialization. An additional unforeseen consequence of the law on minerals was that in the early nineteenth century, the law on subterranean riches was interpreted in a way that encompassed all objects buried beneath the surface, including hidden treasure troves and archaeological monuments. The practice of applying the law on minerals to subterranean monuments originated from one particular case considered by the Senate in 1803: the case of the governor of Tver’, Ivan Ukhtomskii, accused of having ordered the police to seek alleged treasures (a chest with “seventy five thousand rubles in silver coins”) on the land of the noblewoman Karmanaleeva.22 The case resulted in the imprisonment of the person who spread the rumor about the treasure and a reprimand to governor Ukhtomskii for violating the property rights of Karmanaleeva over the deposits

The Meanings of Property  |  27

of her land, proclaimed by the law on mineral riches of 1782. The Senate emphasized the proprietary aspect of the case apparently because the reference to the laws on property was the most direct means of defending the rights of the noblewoman. Fifty years earlier, Ukhtomskii’s efforts would have been rewarded and appreciated: a centuries-­long administrative practice, although not institutionalized in laws, assumed that it was the local officials’ responsibility to investigate all rumors of treasure troves, no matter where they were found, on the tsar’s land or on private estates. The “investigations of treasure troves” (sysknye dela po kladam) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made many people unwilling or unable to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasures on the torture racks or under the knouts of police authorities.23 In contrast to the medieval and early modern legal practices of European countries, which repeatedly asserted the royal privilege to obtain all hidden riches—­even those found on private lands—­no Russian law explicitly asserted the tsar’s ownership of treasures. Nevertheless, it went without saying that concealing a treasure was a crime. Peter the Great’s decree of 1723 was the first to explicitly state that if someone informed the authorities “in time, and without concealing anything” about the whereabouts of a treasure trove, he “could be” rewarded by the tsar.24 Interestingly, this decree mentioned treasure troves along with the unknown sources of “ores,” which apparently included precious metals. The Senate’s decision in Governor Ukhtomskii’s case symbolized a drastic reversal from the previous practice, and the acknowledgment of private property rights to either material or historical treasures. Treasure troves were not mentioned in the laws on property rights, but, as we can see in Peter the Great’s order encouraging the search for ores and treasures, they were considered similar to the gifts from the earth. Because treasures are usually found below the land surface, the Senate in its decision classified them as subterranean private property.25 Later, the decision on the case of the alleged treasures in Tver’ province, qualified as a law,26 got into the Civil Code, in an article on prohibiting anyone, including governmental authorities, from seeking treasures on private lands27 with reference to Catherine’s law on mineral riches. The Senate’s decision of 1803 remained the only law on treasure troves in Russian imperial legislation. Paradoxically, and, as many experts believed, detrimentally for the development of archaeology, it also became the most important law regulating access to all archaeological riches in the country since it rendered almost impossible the state-­led exploration of archaeological sites on private lands. A more immediate effect of Catherine’s law was felt with regards to waterways. Generously handing out lands replete with peasants, forests, and lakes, Catherine also doled out huge estates along Russian rivers to her favorites, which then allowed lucky descendants such as Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-­Dashkov to claim in 1900 that their dannaia (“title”) gave them ownership over their own “private” Dnepr28 (a property privilege claimed in

28  |  Chapter 1 order to prevent the construction of hydropower stations on the river). In this benevolent move, Catherine II also went against the intention of her predecessor Peter I, whose policy of developing waterways entailed significant restrictions for private landowners, who were made to respect the state’s right to open waterways and were required to remove any obstacle that might interfere with the passage of boats and ships, including watermills, fishing weirs, and other structures.29 The freedom to use water resources proclaimed by Catherine II contradicted not only Peter’s policy of centralization but also Catherine’s own attempts to limit the privatization of rivers in support of commerce and the unobstructed travel of rivercraft. Catherine was eager to render her support to the merchants—­the main victims of the arbitrariness of the private landowners who, as merchants complained, neglected the rules on towpaths, did not let the barge-­haulers pass along the riverbanks, and in the case of a shipwreck, either did not let merchants disembark with their wares, or seized the goods of crashed vessels and extorted huge sums for their return.30 However, Catherine’s policy toward the nobility and especially the Manifesto of 1782 on private ownership of rivers and minerals instead introduced greater confusion. Catherine’s ambivalent measures—­centralizing the management of resources while at the same time supporting noble rights to ownership—­epitomizes the contradiction between the centralizing political goals of the monarchy on the one hand and its wish to support economic rationality, localism, and individual rights on the other. From this time on, the government tried to find a way to reconcile these conflicting interests and the visions of rivers as private or public goods. Perhaps most significant was the rupture between Peter’s policy of state control over the use of forest resources, and Catherine’s all-­embracing privatization of forests. To provide material for Peter’s shipbuilding agenda, numerous state decrees banned tree-­cutting in “protected” zones along riverbanks and prohibited the use of certain kinds of valuable timber for private needs.31 In fact, the most valuable sorts of timber (such as oak) were the property of the state. The tsar also placed the management of the country’s forests under the control of the Admiralty, the main consumer of timber in the empire. Catherine II deliberately terminated the regime that had regulated access to forests since the time of Peter the Great: three months after declaring the nobles’ rights to ownership over minerals and rivers, Catherine’s Manifesto of September 22, 1782, swept away all the restrictions that, as the Manifesto put it, appeared to do greater injury to the wealth of the empire’s subjects than it did good for the interests of the Admiralty. Responding to multiple complaints about the restrictiveness of the old regulations, Catherine turned the forests over to the “free exploitation” of landowners and forbade any encroachment upon their property rights. In so doing, she hoped to satisfy the needs of the state economy by encouraging the development of the timber market. The Manifesto also expressed Catherine’s faith in the rationality of her noble subjects who, as she saw it, “would make efforts to protect forests from useless extermination . . . for their own benefit and

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the benefit of their offspring.”32 As an anonymous official from the Ministry of State Domains caustically remarked a century later, “in this hope, the empress was sadly mistaken.”33 Indeed, in her policy on forests, Catherine even disregarded the cameralist principles of her time, which advised rulers to exert careful control over forest resources.34 The projected Code on Forests that would have regulated the exploitation of timber never became law, and both private and public forests were left without adequate oversight. As most nineteenth-­ century experts agreed, the new policy opened the door to the wholesale destruction of the empire’s forests. (Empirical data compiled in 1950 has proved, however, that the results of the reform were no so disastrous—­forest area continued to shrink at the same rate as before the reform.35) How can we explain Catherine’s fixation on the privatization of natural resources? There might have been practical reasons for so deliberate a policy of handing forests, rivers, and minerals to nobles, apart from a simple desire to please them. It seems that the privatization of natural riches amounted to a formal recognition of the fact that the state lacked the power to manage resources, and this measure was supposed to ease the state’s burden. After all, Peter the Great’s attempts to centralize the management of waterways and forests were largely ineffective. The state’s authority remained weak, even invisible, at the local level, and the tsar’s faith in the paramount importance of the “common good” seems to have had few supporters in the rural economy. Watermills and bridges torn down by tsarist decree were rebuilt and continued to hinder navigation, while shipowners continued to fall victim to local officers, tax-­farmers, landowners, and peasants.36 Similarly, Peter’s policy of regulating the use of timber could not be upheld by violence alone (such as instituting the death penalty for the poaching of protected forests) and required the creation of an entirely new system of management and control. In the debates on property rights that unfolded in the late nineteenth century, the Petrine experiment was often held up as an ideal moment, suggesting the desirability of a model of greater state intervention. What the participants in these debates failed to note, however, was that much of what Peter put down in his decrees was never actually carried out. In fact, Peter’s vision of a state monopoly over resources required a machinery of regulation and enforcement well beyond what the country possessed. The inability of the state to prevent the privatization of rivers underscores the utopian character of Peter’s plans: the state presumed a role that it could not actually perform. Catherine’s privatization was a solution to this issue: the state tried to get rid of what it could not manage. Similarly, she handed out newly acquired state lands on borderlands to Russian nobles and foreign settlers.37 As Robert Jones claims, Catherine’s unfortunate husband Peter III in 1762 proclaimed the nobles’ freedom from compulsory service with the goal of reducing the government’s spending on their payroll.38 Catherine also tried to present privatization, which was in fact a necessity, as a benevolent gift. As we will see later, in

30  |  Chapter 1 the nineteenth century the government was quite reluctant to take upon itself the management of public resources, referring to the inviolability of private property and Catherine II’s grant. However, one of the main reasons for this reluctance was the lack of administrative resources: the bureaucratic machine could hardly handle the management of the existing state domain (the treasury’s property). The longevity of serfdom was yet another sign of the scarcity of government’s administrative and financial resources: serfdom—­the privatization of public authority—­allowed the state to rely on seigniorial administration, thus reducing the state’s spending and obligations. Even so, there was a flaw in Catherine’s practical calculations: the reforms of privatization also required structural changes and innovations. To make the system work, the government tried to create an appropriate institutional infrastructure. Three years after her accession to the throne, in 1765, Catherine initiated the General Land Survey—­Generalnoe Mezhevanie Zemel. Thousands of “land surveyors” (usually literate people with no special training) armed with measuring chains and astrolabes were dispatched to fix the boundaries of the nobles’ holdings (dacha). This state-­led inventory of private possessions represented an example of cameralist policy and the supposedly benevolent intervention of the state into the private domain. The survey fit well with Catherine’s generally gentle policy toward the nobility, since most nobles enlarged their property at the expense of the state.39 One clear shortcoming of the survey, however, was that it dragged on for decades and in fact impeded the realization of property rights reforms. For instance, Catherine declared the “freedom of forests” while the land survey was still ongoing, and, as a result, many areas still had no landmarks clearly indicating the boundaries between private and state forests. Due to the sedimentary structure of Russian landholding, which supported many different types of ownership and property relations, land and forests were very hard to map, divide, and order, with the result that one-­fifth of the total area subjected to land measurement remained in “common” or disputed ownership, and the question of ownership of those lands was left to be resolved by the “special” land survey that began only in the 1840s.40 This uncertainty proved to be most detrimental for forests: woods on those “common” lands always fell first under the axes of competing owners, nobles, or peasant societies: common ownership of forests, asserted I. Gershman, “was an important factor in the destruction of forests in Russia.”41 State forests also fell victim to “undetermined property rights”: Petr Kokh, a member of the Free Economic Society, wrote in 1809 that state forests were regarded as “belonging to everybody”;42 nobles cut timber in treasury forests as well as in their own woods,43 while local officials failed to enforce state property rights. The absence of clear-­cut borders between properties was one of multiple flaws in the institutional infrastructure that hindered the development of property rights in their practical implementation. Again, private property was

The Meanings of Property  |  31

introduced into an economy that worked on the basis of old rules and customs. The laws on property (and the ideology of property rights) raced far ahead of the mechanisms of enforcement, effectively undercutting the state’s power to manage its resources effectively. It seems, however, that ideological and political rationales for strengthening nobles’ property rights mattered even more than economic concerns: this explains Catherine’s persistence in inculcating the idea of property into Russian society. Russia was peculiar in that the first person to write about property and advance it politically and intellectually was the empire’s ruler. Yet, of course, Catherine was neither a philosopher nor a lawyer. She intuitively captured the main features of the contemporary vision of property while certainly (and, perhaps, intentionally) overlooking differences in interpretations. Borrowing from foreign sources, Catherine created her own political model of property rights that was compatible with and expedient for the autocracy. In Catherine the Great’s time, thinkers and politicians of every stripe celebrated the idea of property, but the meanings of this concept were numerous. Which of them best fit Catherine’s goals? In some features, Catherine’s emphasis on the absolute character of property resembled the “fanatical,”44 as Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese has called it, defense of proprietary freedoms by the French Physiocrats, who proclaimed the virtues of economic individualism while at the same time denouncing the connection between ownership and political identity as established by earlier theorists. As Fox-­Genovese has put it, the Physiocrats tried to “strip property of all political trappings,”45 envisioning property as an ideal foundation for a hierarchical social order. This vision of “propertied individualism” that “left little room for common social terrain”46 contrasted sharply with the preceding and contemporary theories of property strongly anchored in the theory of society. At the same time, private property was a key concept of the natural law doctrine that constituted the ethical foundation of early economic liberalism. Istvan Hont’s analysis of Adam Smith’s writings has demonstrated that Smith, following his predecessors in the tradition of natural law—­Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke—­denounced the Physiocrats’ atomized vision of property as antihuman and technical in essence, as it turned private property into the “chief weapon” of the state.47 The fundamental proposition of natural law that “everyone must limit his freedom so as to permit the freedom of others”48 underscored the inherently limited character of private property. In contrast to the Physiocracy, the early liberal writings on property were very much preoccupied with the issues of justice, morality, and virtue.49 At that time, the debates about property revolved around the issue of hunger and poverty, which left proponents of unconditional private ownership uneasy. In Russia, this problem was less crucially important, partly because peasants were supposed to be protected from the vicissitudes of nature by their landlords (or the state). Thus, the “moral” aspect

32  |  Chapter 1 in thinking about private property was much less acute for Russians. Private property—­as Catherine seems to have perceived it—­was a gift, not a responsibility, a granted privilege as opposed to a natural right. The doctrines of early conservatism present quite a different (from natural law) account of the implications of the idea of property. As Jerry Z. Muller asserts, the values that the early conservatives professed—­“human reason,” “private property,” and “freedom”—­were identical to those of the Enlightened philosophers.50 However, the meanings of these terms differed. Justus Möser, the most prolific of the conservative writers in eighteenth-­century Germany, praised the sanctity of property and perceived it—­much like his liberal counterparts—­as the marker of individuality. However, his sense of individualism, as well as the meaning of property, originated from a “medieval” vision of social order, as Muller puts it, one strictly structured along estates and ranks, separated not only by the markers of wealth but also by hereditary rights. Möser’s “freedom” was identical to honor, and property was unconditionally linked to it. Property, in his vision, was also associated with power, political freedom, and the paternalistic authority of landlords. Defending property, Möser asserted the civic responsibility imputed to property, but that was the paternal responsibility of seigniors to servants and serfs. Möser’s theory may seem very similar to that of his more liberal contemporaries or predecessors. He envisioned property as the condition of citizenship, and, like the adherents of the natural right doctrine, considered it to be the embodiment of a contract in society. The essential divergence was buried, therefore, in nuances and rhetoric. The contract that Möser had in mind was a contract between a ruler and property-­holders. Möser’s writings, as we will see, shaped the peculiar conservative vision of property, permeated by romanticized notions of honor and personhood, and the idealized attachment to the objects of possession. In contrast to a more flexible liberal notion of property, Möser asserted its absolute character and warned against its violation. This brief analysis of the debates around property in the eighteenth century does not exhaust the variety of meanings and definitions concealed behind the notions of “freedom and property” that Catherine the Great used abundantly, without explanation. Catherine could have drawn ideas from any of those numerous sources. As we know, the empress borrowed phrases from Charles Montesquieu to describe the benefits of private property for the economy in her Nakaz. Semen Desnitskii, one of two Russian disciples of Adam Smith to attend his lectures in Glasgow, was said to have participated in drafting Catherine’s Nakaz, and during his lifetime remained a devoted promoter of Smith’s ideas.51 Nikolai Mordvinov—­the author of the famous memo on the Emba River—­also began his career under Catherine the Great with a trip to England, and came back a devoted follower of British political economy. The empress read Blackstone’s Commentaries, although she skipped large sections on property.52 John Locke’s political works, although not welcomed in Russia, could have reached

The Meanings of Property  |  33

her in multiple interpretations, as well as the treatises of other theoreticians of property. It is very difficult to reconstruct the multiple sources of the empress’s views on this issue: the intellectual landscape of Enlightenment Europe was kaleidoscopically complex, and it is nearly impossible to position Catherine the Great within it. It is also possible that the empress juggled different meanings of property borrowed from various sources: one was supposed to normalize Russia’s image in Europe; another, to earn the nobles’ support and resolve the problems of economic management. Politically and rhetorically, proclaiming the inviolability of property was a very effective step, and a relatively safe one since the patriarchal order of Russia’s servile economy imputed almost no social risk to privatizing resources. No matter what served as the main source of inspiration for the Russian empress, it is important to stress that the establishment of private property rights in Russia was not a manifestation of libertarian thinking, because in the eighteenth (as well as in the nineteenth) century the idea of private property remained a shared asset of early “liberals” and “conservatives.” Property could be understood as a hereditary estate privilege, or a natural right of the individual; it was seen as emanating from the monarchal authority of the ruler or as originating from the contract between members of society. Although historians have attributed the laws on property to the influence of the Physiocrats,53 it seems that Catherine the Great’s understanding of property and freedom was also very close to the ideas of Möser, who recapitulated the German theoretical development in his ideas of civil liberties associated with the power of the state. According to that view, as Leonard Krieger has put it, “the monarchical state was the . . . agency of freedom as well as of order.”54 In eighteenth-­century Russia, both “freedom and property” were inseparable from the ruler’s authority.55 “It is impossible to understand the right of property without [understanding] freedom,”56 wrote Catherine the Great, autocrat of a country made up of millions of people bound either to the land or to their masters and thus denied both of the key terms of this formula. Of course, Catherine’s reforms of property formed a part of her liberation project: by asserting nobles’ freedom from compulsory service, she stripped the notion of property from any conditions and commitments.57 Peter the Great could not establish private property in the way that the term was understood in late-­eighteenth-­century Russia because all of the emperor’s subjects—­from the lowliest peasant to the loftiest nobleman—­were unfree in one way or another; therefore, none of them possessed unlimited proprietary power over the items or people they owned. The pyramidal structure of eighteenth-­century Russian society prevented the nobility from strengthening and expanding the institution of serfdom in a way that would have enlarged their own proprietary power. Serf peasants in the early eighteenth century possessed lands and buildings (a practice that was strictly prohibited in 1730), with the result that the nobles’ proprietary power over

34  |  Chapter 1 populated villages was limited both from below (insofar as peasants retained control over some land and other resources) and from above (insofar as the nobility’s own power over land derived from its obligation to serve). Strengthening the property rights of nobles unavoidably solidified serfdom. The abolition of compulsory service for the nobility, as the nineteenth-­century historian of the peasantry Ivan Belyaev observed, helped to dismantle the pyramidal structure that supported the empire’s patrimonial system of property.58 With the abolition of the nobles’ conditional ownership of land, the state effectively lost its claim to supreme ownership, thereby allowing peasants to be transformed into the property of their masters.59 Thus, the new freedom of property ownership accorded to nobles helped reconfirm the unfreedom of others. Russia was not unique in this sense: the introduction of private ownership in regard to land was usually accompanied by the simplification of rules, standardization of practices, eradication of unwritten norms, and other measures that usually played against the interests of peasants.60 Catherine’s reforms aligned Russia’s system of property with general European norms, which were themselves based largely on Roman law. Thus, Catherine in effect Romanized the Russian legal landscape, which presumed in the first order that the country’s laws would now be standardized since Roman laws were valued most of all for their elegance and facility.61 The empress’s interest in aligning Russian with European law has been analyzed by a number of observers. Some have argued that her introduction of absolute and exclusive property rights unduly simplified the complex relationships between the state, the nobles, and the peasants in regards to land.62 Indeed, as Valerie Kivelson has shown, the multilayered system of attitudes toward land in seventeenth-­ century Russia allowed peasants and lords alike to be seen as owners of the land, even the very same land. “Ownership of land was not conceived of as single, unambiguous, unencumbered, individual right. In their testimony, peasants expressed their concept of multiple, overlapping, and simultaneous degrees of ownership.” When describing their claims to fields and pastures, peasants used the same “verb of proprietorship and control (vladet’) that they used in describing landlord’s relationship to the land.”63 In this sense, Catherine’s introduction of the term sobstvennost’ (“property”) and the insistence that it was superior to vladenie (that is, “possession,” which came to be considered either as the physical state of detention or the defendable right of occupancy without title) established a hierarchy of proprietary relations in which noble landowners occupied the top and nonowning peasants sat at the bottom. In this sense, Catherine’s reform of property was the reform of renaming, which, as Yurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii have claimed, was the key element of all cultural and political reforms in eighteenth-­to early-­nineteenth-­century Russia.64 The word “property” replaced an entire vocabulary of words describing various nuanced forms of relationship,65 and took on instead an immensely important meaning: property became synonymous with power—­a quality that

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the previous multiple words and expressions did not have.66 One may argue, following E. P. Thompson’s powerful denunciation of enclosures, that the rationalization of property relations simplifies the flexible system of customs. However, Catherine, living and legislating in the age of cameralism, neoclassicism, and overall rationalization, hardly had a choice. Simplification and unification were seen as virtues, while diversity and the rule of indigenous traditions were seen as the signs of backwardness.

Private Property, Public Good, and the Dilemma of Expropriation Let us now come back to the story of the Emba River, and Nikolai Mordvinov’s passionate defense of private property. One could see in Mordvinov’s words the triumph of Catherine’s ideas: her reforms opened the way to debates on property and invited Russian intellectuals into the discussion. Thinking through the “advantages of property,” the historical development of property, and its functioning in agrarian and industrial society,67 Russian writers unanimously concluded that, as Denis Fonvizin put it, “freedom and property” (volnost’ i sobstvennost’) were “the greatest benefit of states and nations, and the true intention of all systems of legislation.”68 The enormous popularity of economic and legal liberalism in the early nineteenth century, and the intellectual proximity to Europe, especially during the first years of Alexander I’s reign, all contributed to the flourishing of the idea of private property. Having declared the continuity between his policies and those of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and setting off his liberal regime against the despotism of his father, Paul I, Alexander I extended the benefits of private property to all social estates except serf peasants.69 Nikolai Mordvinov, who initiated the abolition of the nobles’ monopoly over the ownership of immovable property (real estate),70 welcomed Alexander’s manifesto of 1801 as “the law of true popular freedom, a cornerstone institution for the entire Russian people, the Great Charter of Russia, our Magna Carta.”71 The extension and affirmation of property rights was supposed to foster the development of the market and agriculture, to encourage the economic exploration of the vast land resources of the Russian Empire. However, the discussion of Kutaisov’s property rights on the Emba River was not only indicative of the triumph of private property, it was also the first case when the proclaimed inviolability of property came into conflict with public interests, and the government had to alienate private possession in order to protect the interests of others (since the ownership of a seashore was seen as harmful). As it turned out, no procedure for expropriating private property existed. Although Catherine deserves praise for introducing a modern understanding of property and for putting this understanding into practice, she failed to define the respective attitudes between private owners and communities,

36  |  Chapter 1 and to create mechanisms for settling disputes with the state. The borders of the state domain remained poorly demarcated, as did the state’s power to take someone’s property for public needs. If in particular situations the government dared to encroach upon the sanctity of ownership, it took much longer to acknowledge the necessity of elaborating general rules on expropriation.72 Expropriation, as the flipside of the institution of property, made its appearance in European legal theory and practice at precisely the same time as the concept of ownership.73 In the Middle Ages and under the Old Regime, expropriation had been conceived of as the sovereign’s privilege to act on behalf of the res publica; in the nineteenth century, expropriation was transformed into a tool to reconcile conflicting interests between the state, society, and individuals. The mechanisms for expropriating properties were simplified and increasingly provided greater protection of owners. Before the French Revolution, the seizure of property and compensation were arranged either through the monarch’s direct order or by an administrative decision. After the revolution, expropriation evolved into a legal issue resolved by courts. Thus, as the French lawyer Henry Berthélemy summed it the early twentieth century, expropriation in Europe had ceased to be a sacrifice and became rather a privilege.74 The seizure of private properties, even when lavishly compensated and justified by the common good, remained a controversial issue, but it was impossible to imagine the development of infrastructure, railroad construction in England or Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, without the massive expropriation of private wealth. As another prominent lawyer asserted, expropriation was “one of the greatest forces of the modern State.”75 In Russia, expropriation was fully institutionalized only in the 1830s, although the possibility of compensated seizure was first raised in 1809. Of course, Russian rulers seized their subjects’ possessions before the institutionalization of this practice in law, and even before Catherine’s new notion of property came into existence. Usually, owners received compensation for the losses this seizure incurred. However, until the early nineteenth century, these cases were resolved by rulers on an ad hoc basis without theoretical deliberations. The case of the fishing monopoly on the Emba River was one of the first instances when the government discussed alienation (along with the legal or illegal character of possession), in which property rights were understood in terms of a conflict between public and private interests. Mordvinov, as we have seen, understood public wealth as the sum of private wealth, insofar as society consisted of individuals. Consequently, it was to the public’s benefit to respect the rights of all its members. But this idea was impossible to put into practice—­the untrammeled exercise of the proprietary power of private owners too often brought significant losses to their neighbors and to the national economy as well. Natural resources—­rivers most of all—­proved to be the most contested objects in private possession; consequently, multiple disputes over access to rivers as means of communication and sources of water for irrigation raised

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numerous doubts as to the “absolutist” nature of private proprietary power. In this sphere, Catherine II’s construction of the absolute private domain began to malfunction. In 1806, the government encountered a contradiction between private and public interests when the governor of St. Petersburg reported multiple complaints about coastal landowners hampering navigation by merchants bringing goods to the capital. The Senate, considering the case, admitted that “according to the spirit of laws, the right of landowning has to be limited, and thus, it must yield where the public good is concerned.”76 This admission was critical. In contrast to the totalizing declaration of the sanctity of property in Catherine’s Manifestos and Mordvinov’s memorandum, the Senate decision signified a shift toward a more pragmatic understanding of property. The Senate instructed the Department of Waterways, when it considered opening new rivers for navigation, to weigh the “public profit” (obshchuiu polzu) against the possible losses of private landowners.77 In the early nineteenth century, inviolability was nevertheless considered a necessary element of private property. Limiting private property in favor of public interests was seen as abnormal—­at the very least, such limitations were not to be institutionalized in law. In 1809, Mikhail Speranskii, the most gifted statesman, lawyer, and economist of the early nineteenth century, attempted to introduce the first rule on expropriation into the new project for the Civil Code, which in its general features, as well as in its interpretation of property rights, followed the model of Napoleon’s law on expropriation (1807). Speranskii’s intention was to normalize expropriations of private property and establish firm principles for compensation. His suggestion was rejected on the pretext that by prescribing how the state should negotiate with stubborn landowners over the alienation of their property, the government offended the feelings of its “faithful subjects” and, on behalf of people who denied the existence of “public interests,” encroached upon the sanctity of private property.78 Ironically, the French law on expropriation, which Speranskii took as the basis for his law, was seen as fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) that established both the rights of the public to take someone’s property for common need and the right of citizen to receive just and appropriation compensation.79 Yet, if in Europe the institutionalization of expropriation served as a compromise between state and private interests and in fact protected private property from illegal seizures, in Russia it was seen as an encroachment upon the right of private property. The proposed code never became a law: Speranskii fell into disgrace (his Francophilism was the ostensible cause), went into exile, and was able to return to his project of codifying laws only in 1826. In 1810, the State Council was entrusted with the consideration of cases dealing with expropriation, but it lacked a procedure for settling conflicts and defining the amount of compensation to be provided for alienated property. In 1821, the issue of expropriation was raised again when the Committee of Ministers considered the alienation of a watermill on the Oka River:80 the

38  |  Chapter 1 watermill hampered navigation, and the Ministry of Transportation wanted to remove it and widen the river—­a very typical case for the time. The owners of the watermill, a merchant’s wife, Kon’kova, and her son, trying to keep their mill, requested a high price for their property. To settle the conflict between the Ministry of Transportation and the Kon’kovs, the Committee of Ministers summoned a commission to appraise the property. While considering the case, the committee decided to compose special rules on what, when, and how the government could seize private property for public purposes, and how to protect the rights of private owners in such cases. However, the Minister of Justice Prince Dmitrii Lobanov-­Rostovskii—­a critical figure in the shaping of legal procedures at the time—­strongly objected to the normalization of the practice of expropriation, which, he feared, would “diminish the rights given by the Monarch.” He condemned the intransigence of the private owners who, “disregarding the public good, sought to keep their watermill,” and believed in the “loyalty” of the empire’s subjects, which would ensure that cases of forced alienation would be rare and, hence, would not require special legislation and could be decided by the ruler on a case-­by-­case basis.81 From this passage, and the rhetoric of Lobanov-­Rostovskii’s memorandum, it is clear that he understood the right of private property as a contract, a tie between the ruler and his or her subjects. A person received the right of private property from the monarch, who in turn guaranteed its inviolability (thus, there could be no law on expropriation). The monarch’s faithful subject promised to render the property to the state in the case of public need. Alexander Shishkov, a romantic conservative who ultimately replaced his enemy Speranskii as State Secretary, also opposed the law on expropriation.82 He wrote a memorandum depicting the foundation of the Russian state order as resting on two pillars: first, the power of autocracy, and second, the inviolability of property. “These two laws [which] are as essential for the public good as they are opposed to each other, can only be brought into agreement when the first is a strictest guard of the second, and when the second unquestionably obeys the first.”83 The law on expropriation for public needs would have created an imbalance between those two principles: the owner refused to admit the priority of autocracy, while the autocrat neglected his obligation to “care about the preservation of property.” The second argument against a law on expropriation was the impossibility of determining how to appraise property: bureaucratic expertise would inevitably fail to account for the true value of property and the losses of its owner—­material and nonmaterial. “Would he [a valuator] include in the price his [the owner’s] love for his native estate, where one might find, perhaps, . . . the remains of his father, mother, or children? Would he be able to give a value to his natural attachment to his forest, or to the garden, which he might have planted, cared for, and grown by his own hands?” Voluntary sacrifice for public needs, thought Shishkov, would offend the owner of an alienated estate less

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than unfair monetary compensation. Moreover, Shishkov warned against the temptation to abuse permissions to expropriate for “public needs” while the sphere of these needs in the future was impossible to foresee. Therefore, the seizure of property could occur only by the will of the tsar, as the supreme judge and the protector of property. Let us now take a look at this logic—­did it contradict the idea of property as expressed in Catherine’s legislation? Not really, for Catherine herself spoke of the “motherly feelings of [the government] toward its subject” as the guiding rule in cases of expropriation. In the first half of the eighteenth century, property, just like the lives of its noble owners, was subject to the caprices of rulers; Catherine declared property inviolable, and promised not to interfere in the sphere of private domain. In the early nineteenth century, the inviolability of property was still a recently acquired privilege for the nobility, and, as such, it tended to be considered as a gift of the ruler rather than a nobleman’s natural right and a legal institution. As we have seen, such fixation on the inviolability of private property betrayed Catherine’s desire to establish firm ties between the throne and her subjects, replacing the connections of service that had existed before. More to the point, property, in the absence of other “personal rights,” took on a symbolic power as the marker of personhood, perhaps even one of its inherent characteristics. For Shishkov, property was personal, nonfungible.84 Just like Justus Möser, he viewed property as “a reciprocal relationship between an object and a particular person (or family)—­a relationship that included values, sentiments, and attitudes of a nonmonetary, nontransferrable kind.”85 Speranskii, by contrast, applied a strictly utilitarian model, treating any and all property as a fungible asset. He perceived property as an abstract right, whereas for Shishkov, a conservative traditionalist, the inviolability of property was still a matter of the relations between the people and the tsar. The rhetoric of the intimacy86 of property (first, of course, nobles’ property) suggested that it would be inappropriate to subject it to bureaucratic valuation and was used in the defense of private property against restrictions well into the early twentieth century.87 Interestingly, Shiskov’s view found support from the staunch liberal (and, ironically, Shishkov’s best friend88) Nikolai Mordvinov, who, as we know, had recommended himself as a defender of inviolable property rights. His reasoning, although it also referred to the principles of autocracy, presented rather a different vision of relations between private owners and the ruler. Mordvinov emphasized that the public good originates from the private goods of all citizens; the autocratic power binds private wills together, hence “the right of private ownership and the right of supreme power are inseparable.” In nonautocratic countries (“in free governments”), where the law, and not the will of the autocrat, protects the sanctity of property, the reasons and the procedure of expropriation can be codified in a special charter. In an autocratic country, by

40  |  Chapter 1 contrast, the ruler knows the nature of the public good, hence, there is no need for codification—­the resolution of property disputes should depend solely on his judgment.89 It is quite symbolic that even the most famous of Russia’s first liberals, Nikolai Mordvinov, in his virile defense of private owners, tended to align property not with the natural right of a person, but with political power of autocracy. Indeed, there was a difference in stress in the conservative and liberal arguments, but both, while asserting the value of propertied individualism, in fact argued for the preservation of the existing civil and political order. Thus, private property in both romantic-­conservative and liberal-­utilitarian interpretations was to play into the hands of the monarch and his loyal subjects while strengthening the social hierarchy of estates. Given the ideological power of the principle of private property (so strong was the pull that Shishkov aligned it with the principle of autocracy!), it was difficult to imagine how to reconcile the inviolability of property with expropriation, and Russian lawgivers were not alone in wrestling with this difficulty. The specificity of the Russian case lay in the perceived incompatibility of expropriation and autocracy and in the particular ethical meaning ascribed to property. What in Europe was seen as a legal mechanism allowing the reconciliation of conflicting public and private interests, in Russia was presented as a sacrifice or a violation of the contract between the ruler and his subjects. In the previously mentioned case of Kon’kova’s watermill (1821), Alexander I took the side of the Minister of Justice, who argued against introducing general rules on expropriation. Why did this attempt to normalize expropriation (and thereby to normalize property) fail? One can identify various mutually enforcing reasons for this failure. First, private property in Russia was a right given from above and, consequently, could not have had an ideological meaning similar to the meanings of property in nonautocratic Europe—­a “natural” right, acquired through belonging to a community and not by virtue of being an emperor’s subject. Another reason was the ill-­defined meaning of the “public good.” While the notion of “public good” was used abundantly in this period, it had a rather abstract meaning. Yurii Lotman in his study of the ethical and behavioral patterns of noble society in the early nineteenth century describes the altruistic spirit of civic duty and service that eventually played an important role in the formation of the ideology of the Decembrists movement.90 A distorted echo of that attitude could be heard even in the rhetoric of the opposition to the institutionalization of expropriation: a loyal citizen would give up his share without bargaining and enforcement. Certainly, the ideal public good was difficult to reduce to a fixed set of demands surrounding navigation, the construction of fortresses or railroads; it was also hard to decide who could act on behalf of the public. Are the state’s needs equivalent to the needs of the public? Is the public good always equivalent to the state interest? The answer to this question

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depended on the definition of state and society as proprietors and counterparts of private owners in economic relations. The issue of expropriation, however narrow and specific it may appear, reveals various features of Russia’s system of governance and the relationship between the state and its subjects. From the mid-­nineteenth century, the state fell back on this measure more and more often, establishing its power to alienate private properties. Ultimately, expropriation came to embody the material and even the political relationship between the authority of the state and its subjects. For example, the emancipation of peasants in 1861 has often (and incorrectly) been presented as an instance of expropriation, of peasants’ labor and land, by the state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as disputes over the nature of public things became widespread, expropriation was often advanced as the only way to cut the tangle of contradictions between private interests and the public good. By the end of the nineteenth century, expropriation had come to be considered a means of disciplining careless owners of publicly important things (forests and historical monuments), of liberating the works of deceased authors from the captivity of their heirs, and of releasing underground resources from the control of landowners unwilling to exploit them. Without expropriation, one could never accomplish any large-­scale technological project, such as a railroad or an irrigational canal. I will come back to the discussion of expropriation in the analysis of property and economic development, historical preservation, and even literary property. It is important to point out at this juncture that the use of the mechanism of expropriation is not merely an indicator of the security (or insecurity) of property: the ability to apply this mechanism efficiently is also indicative of the government’s managerial capabilities and strength. It may sound paradoxical, given the historiographical obsession with the problem of insecurity of Russia’s private property, that the Russian state was often very reluctant to use expropriation. One of the reasons for this reluctance was the indefinite status of the state domain.

The State’s Share In Catherine’s attempts to endow nobles with possessive privileges, she failed to specify the scope and the legal status of state possessions; in no small part, this was because neither Catherine, nor any of her servants, knew just what the state possessed.91 It seems that the state’s share was defined negatively: everything that did not belong to private owners and institutions was the state’s property. For Catherine, this question did not carry political and practical importance. However, in the long run the indefinite status of the state domain grew into a big issue, both in practical meaning, because the management of an amorphous household was difficult and inefficient, as well as in political sense, especially in

42  |  Chapter 1 the context of late-­nineteenth-­to early-­twentieth-­century debates on the development of public property outside the state’s domain. After all, just as the proprietary rights of individuals reflected upon their social and legal statuses, so too the material domain of the state was a reflection of its political essence, the nature of its authority and even its structure of government. Therefore, it may seem a paradox that until the fall of the monarchy, the government had no clear vision of how much the state owned—­neither in legal terms, nor in numbers, since the measurement and cadastre of state properties was not completed by this time.92 It is also quite revealing that historians of Imperial Russia, preoccupied with the development of private proprietary rights, have paid virtually no attention to the development of state properties, indicative of the state’s political and economic capabilities. The changing status of the state domain was a reflection of the political transformation of the monarchy. One of the consequences of Peter the Great’s reforms was that in the early eighteenth century, the rhetoric of power as property was replaced by a modern definition of the state as a sovereign political entity. The changes in the monarch’s role (from that of a private figure—­the tsar as owner of the state—­to that of a ruler93), the birth of a professional state service, the transformation of the administrative apparatus, and many other accompanying reforms led to the emergence of a notion of the state’s possessions as distinct from the property of the ruler and his family.94 In 1797, with the creation of the Department (later, Ministry) of the Emperor’s Domains (Departament Udelov), the monarch’s and the state’s shares were finally and clearly separated with the establishment of an asset of immovable property that provided income for the emperor’s family.95 In the early nineteenth century, new laws specified the procedures and rules for protecting the state’s (or treasury’s) property (kazennye or gosudarstvennye imushchestva) while the new ministries assumed the responsibility of governing the state’s belongings. Thus, the state (or, “treasury,” which represented its fiscal authority) became an owner with proprietary rights similar to private owners. Although the rhetoric of patrimonialism survived until the fall of the monarchy (Nicholas II called himself “A master [khoziain] of the Russian Land”), and the Code of Laws contained a passage about the supreme proprietary right of the monarch, this was a tribute to tradition rather than a reflection of legal reality. The tsars ceased to be the owners of the country, but what of the absolutist state? How far did its powers extend? What was its attitude to the property of its subjects? Contemporary European theory offered two major theoretical models to explain the proprietary status of the state. The first (“patrimonial”) model, embodied in the Old Regime states of continental Europe and still propagated in the nineteenth century by conservative politicians, asserted that the state’s power encompassed both imperium and dominium—­that is, its political authority emanated from possession. The second concept, advanced in its most radical form by Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, presented “the people” as the owners of

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the country, limiting the state’s role with regard to property to its responsibility for protecting the national wealth.96 Rousseau’s political works were immensely popular in Russia and widely cited and interpreted by European97 and Russian writers alike.98 Alexander Kunitsyn, professor of law and philosophy at the famous Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo and St. Petersburg University, applied Rousseau’s vision of the polity in his treatise on “Natural Law” (Pravo estestvennoe), published between 1818 and 1820. Kunitsyn saw the people (narod) as a bearer of sovereignty and ultimately the owner of the country’s resources. “Lands and things acquired by the people are its property [prinadlezhat v ego sobstvennost’]; they depend upon the supreme power of the people and cannot be used or taken without his permission.” According to Kunitsyn, the “people’s property” consisted of two parts: “public property” (publichnaia sobstvennost’) and the private property of its citizens, but the power of the people over private property assumed merely the “right to protect things belonging to its members against the claims and offences of other people.” Hence, this power bore only public (imperium), rather than proprietary (dominium), meaning, and rested on the unanimous contract that brought into the existence the civil state.99 All one thousand copies of Kunitsyn’s book were banned upon publication; even the teaching of natural law was prohibited until 1835. Indeed, the authorities saw Kunitsyn’s concept of the relationship between the people and individuals as sufficiently radical that they stripped him of his professorship at St. Petersburg University and limited him to teaching only at the School of Cadets. He returned to prominence only in 1828–­1829 and was finally allowed to join the Codification Commission when it resumed its work on the making of Russia’s first modern Code of Laws under the leadership of Mikhail Speranskii. Nevertheless, the seemingly theoretical question of the state’s proprietary status needed to be answered, all the more so that in the 1820s the government resumed its work on the codification of laws. At that time, all of continental Europe voluntarily or forcefully (thanks to Napoleon’s armies) fell under the influence of French civil law, and national legislatures in various forms reproduced the main principles of property rights established by the French Revolution and codified in Napoleon’s celebrated Code Civil of 1804. An example of legal rationalism balanced with post-­revolutionary ideology, the code relied heavily on an idealized version of Roman law. Proclaiming the absolute character of private property, the code, however, did not extend it to the things of common use and public value, such as rivers, lakes, roads, and streets. All public things—­ res publicae—­passed to the sphere of domaine public. Neither individuals nor the state as fiscus could privately own rivers, large water reservoirs, or roads and streets: they belonged to everybody, to the “people,” the “nation” that symbolized national sovereignty.100 Here is the point that produced confusion among Russian lawyers who in 1826 under the guidance of Mikhail Speranskii—­now returned from exile—­ prepared to compile the Code of Russian Civil Laws. The Napoleonic Code

44  |  Chapter 1 divided things into two categories: private domain and national domain. The latter was further split into domaine public (public property) and domaine de l’État (state property).101 Was it possible to find an equivalent in Russian laws? If the domaine de l’État corresponded to the treasury or state property (gosudarstvennye imushchestva), what would constitute the domaine public, or res publica, and who would be the subject of property rights to it? Could “the people” (narod) serve as the counterpart of the French “nation”?102 These questions came up for the first time in the preparation of the first Russian Civil Code, between 1826 and 1832, and they persisted, as we will see, well into the early twentieth century in the debates around the revision of this code. In fact, the discussion around the limits of state property posed the question of the nature of autocratic state—­an issue that Yanni Kotsonis identifies as the choice between the “limited” and “encompassing” (or inclusive) understandings of the state (the first depicts the state as an independent actor, while the latter presents the state as including society).103 How did Speranskii—­the head of the Codification Commission and the author of the Civil Code (volume X of the Code of Laws)—­translate the ambiguity of state/public property into Russian? The possibilities for borrowing from the French Code Civil were limited by two factors: first, the proclamation by Catherine the Great validating private ownership of things of public use, and second, the political regime of autocracy. While the first hindered Speranskii from declaring rivers, lakes, and other res publicae free from private ownership, the second blocked him from asserting the power of the nation over objects of public use. Thus, these objects formally remained private possessions: if a river crossed someone’s land, the owner of that land had the full right to use that river’s water; if his land bordered upon a river, he would possess a half of it; he could cut trees, mine (or abandon mines), hunt, fish, or dig archaeological sites on his property without the state’s supervision.104 In an attempt to combine theory and pragmatism with the letter of Russian law, Speranskii introduced the elements of public power over natural resources into an article on state property. Having given the rights of “full” ownership of land, rivers, lakes, and roads to the landowner, Speranskii at the same time listed the same objects as belonging to the state. The formulation of the article on the state property (article 406) nicely illustrated this confusion: it claimed that “all things [imushestvo] not owned by anyone in particular . . . belonged to the domain of the state; namely: state lands populated and unpopulated, vacant and wild fields, forests, quitrent incomes, seashores, lakes, navigable rivers and their banks, big roads, buildings public and official, factories and the like. [Note] State properties under the jurisdiction of the treasury are also called the Treasury’s [properties].”105 This article later provoked a great deal of controversy: first, it remained unclear who, in the end, was the owner of great Russian rivers like the Volga or the Dnepr: private landowners or the state? The second point of conflict

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surrounded the article’s use of two different terms to describe the state’s attitude toward its possessions—­referring to itself alternately as “the state” and “the treasury”—­while at the same time stopping short of clearly distinguishing the objects of these two kinds of possession and not describing the nature of state property as opposed (if indeed it was opposed) to the property of the treasury. The impact of the fuzziness of Russian laws on state property was tremendous, and as time wore on, especially by the early twentieth century, the uncertainty of property relations gave way to multiple controversies over the scope of the state’s rights.106 Indeed, this fuzziness can be attributed not only to the indecisiveness of the legislators but also to the difficulty of defining the status of the “state” in an autocratic empire. What was the state—­a bureaucratic machine with the tsar at the top or a community of people ruled by the monarch? Was the state a manager or an owner?107 Of course, the supreme power of the Russian state as defined by the Code of Laws was not equal to the French domaine public,108 which is not surprising given the disparity of political regimes: the power of the French state over the public domain—­the right to manage public resources on behalf109 of the people—­rested on the notion of the political nation.110 At that time, and afterward, the idea of national sovereignty remained inherently alien to the Russian autocracy. Alexander Kunitsyn’s radical views on “the people” as the owner of its country had limited circulation in legal thought. However, if we look slightly beyond the textbooks on civil law, we see that the concept of “public property” did come into use in precisely this period. The claims of “public ownership” of forests or literary works were used to circumscribe the arbitrary power of private owners. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the formation and impressively fast evolution of the institutions of civil society in Russia—­ from aristocratic salons to literary circles, scientific societies, and associations. Society started claiming its right to possess things of public value or, at least, to exert control over their use. In this sense, the idea of public property enjoyed growing popularity. The example of European legislation also played its role in the promotion of the concept of public property: it comes as no surprise that in 1847 Alexander Butovskii, one of the first Russian political economists, offered a classification of state property based not on the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, but on Roman terminology and French classification: he divided state property into “public property” (obshchestvennaia sobstvennost’) or ager publicus, and dominia, or domaine de l’État.111 Unfortunately, he did not explain how this system of property rights would work on Russian soil. Theoretical ambivalence of the notion of “state property” was only one of many stumbling blocks for the definition of the state’s domain. Even more confusion arose from the fact that state peasants inhabited almost half of the “state lands.” The social estate of state peasants created by Peter the Great through the agglomeration of many categories of the free rural population was very heterogeneous, and the state’s attitude to those lands remained ill-­defined:

46  |  Chapter 1 peasants had owned and lived on them for centuries, but did that make their claims to these lands legitimate? During the eighteenth century, the government repeatedly forbade the treatment of these lands as the peasants’ property, but sometimes it was forced to yield to the pressure of nobles who would purchase the lands and sanction deeds dividing it up among peasant societies and landowners.112 The practice of giving out or selling lands populated by state peasants to nobles meant that the government treated those lands as its own alienable property. However, there remained a great deal of uncertainty about the status of populated lands,113 which eventually led to disputes over projects for the reform of “state villages.” A number of projects compiled in the 1820s–­ 1830s aimed to grant state peasants civil rights appropriate to the status of free citizens and the right of permanent hereditary tenure of lands. Pavel Kiselev, the first Minister of the State Domains (1837–­1856), when he commented on one of those projects, argued that it confused the status of the treasury’s lands with the status of lands open for public use.114 Kiselev’s own reform of the “state village” (1837) rested on the concept of unquestionable state ownership of all peasants’ lands,115 although the legal attitude of peasants to the lands that they made use of remained very unclear (in essence, however, this attitude was deemed unimportant, because the state intended to take care of the most urgent needs of rural inhabitants). It is not a coincidence that the final institutionalization of state property and the creation of the Ministry of State Domains immediately followed the codification of Russian laws (1832), which (although not without contradiction) set the limits of private and state domains. The first Russian Civil Code defined the right of property in detail and described the nuances of the transfer of property rights.116 Property, thus, was institutionalized, and at least partly (also, due to the anti-­liberal economic ideology of Nicholas I’s rule) lost its halo of sanctity and intimacy. This “normalization” of property allowed Speranskii to institutionalize the practice of expropriation and stipulate the right of the state to alienate property for public needs. The rules on expropriation came out just in time: In 1834, the government began construction of Russia’s first railroad from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, which required the alienation of lands.117 Starting from the 1830s, the government invoked this mechanism of seizure with growing frequency. The Code of Laws was an important landmark in the development of property; however, as with any law, it began to grow obsolete very fast. Among other changes that affected the system of property rights, perhaps the most significant was the shift in the border between the private and public spheres. Under the influence of multiple factors—­economic development, the growing popularity of natural sciences, nationalism—­society began to lay claim to resources that had been reserved by Catherine the Great’s manifestos and subsequent legislation for the private domain. The corrosion of the concept of absolute and inalienable property became especially swift after the emancipation of peasants

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in 1861. However, the first hesitant and feeble attacks against private property were noted as early as the 1830s. The idea of private property, which seemed so irrefutable, began to fall from its pedestal.

The First Assaults against Private Property: The “Forest Question” in the 1830s–­1840s It is not a coincidence that the first attempts to introduce the notion of “public property” concerned Russia’s natural treasures, such as the forests granted by Catherine the Great into the unlimited ownership of the nobles. The anxiety about the fate of Russian forests, inspired by German debates on this issue, gave rise to doubts about the inherent virtues of private ownership. Starting in the 1830s, people trained in Russian and European schools of forestry began to attack the private ownership of forests. The first assaults against private property in Russia appeared at precisely the moment that socialists in Europe unfolded their radical critique of private ownership, but in Russia, the sources of this assault were located within the state-­trained professional elite. “Enlightened absolutism created freedom while the constitutional state created forest slavery; the first proceeded from a rational consideration of the necessity of emancipating the population, while the second proceeded from practical necessity, from the goals of utilitarian policy for the sake of the great future of the same population.”118 This description of the development of the forestry law, by Nikolai Faleev, a professor of law at the Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg and later the author of the first Soviet laws on forestry, aptly represents the evolution of property rights over forests in Europe and Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Although Russia fell behind Europe in its movement toward constitutional government, it proceeded successfully on the road toward “forest slavery”—­that is, the protection of forests that implied significant constraints for private property. The status of forests in Europe endured significant fluctuations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The French Revolution eliminated the king’s huge forest domain and raised the question of the compatibility of private ownership of forests with the people’s rule: at this juncture, the dilemma was resolved in favor of private proprietors. In the early nineteenth century, the move toward the privatization of forests was noticeable in all European countries (though slower in Prussia). In the 1820s, the French government recognized the need to preserve forests from overly intensive exploitation, and in 1827 instituted a law that required obtaining permission for clear-­cutting, followed by further restrictions on the free use of forests. By the mid-­nineteenth century, almost all European countries introduced various restrictions on the private ownership of forests, and in the following decades this so-­called forest slavery was strengthened and spread in scale. Government policy rested on the

48  |  Chapter 1 authority of experts and preservationists. The propaganda of professional foresters who accused uneducated locals of destroying natural barriers for floods and landslides in mountains, and the campaign of intellectuals—­mainly writers and painters—­against the decay of nature both contributed to the establishment of the vision of the forest as the “legitimate subject of state intervention.”119 Unlike other spheres of the economy that yielded to the influence of new ideas of private property and economic individualism, the economics of forestry retained its “state” cameralist spirit.120 Europe was surprisingly homogenous in this movement toward state control of forest management, with the exception of Great Britain, which joined the movement only after a delay. Certainly, the respective dangers of deforestation faced by Sweden and by France, for instance, differed, as well as the practices and economics of timber usage and the structure of property rights; nevertheless, the compilers of protective forest legislation in these various countries demonstrated unanimity in their adherence to the ideas of ensuring the renewable exploitation of forest resources, the centralization of forest management, and shared a distrust of private and local initiative. How does the development of forest property in Russia compare when seen against this background? Given its enormous expanses of forested land, the problem of deforestation in Russia was not as acute as it was in Central Europe. And yet Russia, too, developed an ideology of preservation, originating not from the real danger of deforestation but from the import of European science. Starting in the 1830s, the government sent the graduates of the Forest Institute to the Berlin Forest Academy and schools of forestry in Prussia and Saxony to continue their education and visit the best forested areas.121 Germany was seen as an acclaimed leader in forestry in Europe, and Russia was not the only country to fall under the influence of German sylviculture.122 German professors taught the first generation of Russian foresters and their works translated into Russian served as the main textbooks and the sources for Russian manuals. European scientific forestry and public discourse on the forest had a deep but uneven impact on Russian thought and management. Scientific knowledge and technical skills acquired abroad were indispensable, as many Russian foresters acknowledged later. In addition to this special expert knowledge, Russian foresters, lacking any experience of domestic forest management in the first stages of their career, brought from Europe a profound fear of deforestation—­ Waldsterben,123 or the death of forests. In the 1830s–­1840s, Russian publicists and scientists started expressing their concern over the fate of Russian forests,124 often referring to the terrifying pictures of the bald French Alps or deforested German valleys and predicting similar futures for Russia. Echoing European foresters, they criticized private landowners for their careless treatment of forests, which could lead to nationwide deforestation. Indeed, forest preservation was an urgent task for Russia, which had the largest area of woodlands in Europe and the largest area totally lacking trees—­the notorious steppes

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(in steppe regions, the percentage of forest was less than one).125 Nevertheless, the fear of deforestation in Russia did not rest on firm statistical data, which were very hard to obtain. Ludwig Tengoborskii (Ludwik Tęgoborsky), a Russian economist and statesman of Polish origin, and the author of the famous statistical description of the Russian Empire published in the early 1850s, noted that the complaints about deforestation in Russia were “exaggerated.”126 However, creating the myth of deforestation was an important rhetorical maneuver in the attempt to establish the authority of foresters and the state, and to compel Russian private landowners to use their forests wisely. Indeed, even as the area of forestlands continued to shrink, there was also movement in the opposite direction. The level of forest management depended on the wealth and education of landowners and, in general, reflected the level of economic culture in the Russian countryside. Those few “enlightened seigniors”127 who read magazines on agriculture and forestry also ordered the most advanced machines and mechanisms from Europe, cultivated new sorts of grains or vegetables, and usually took good care of their serf peasants and their forests. They hired professional foresters to manage their woods, sent their serfs to study forestry in forest schools in Russia and even in German universities (that was the career of Alexander Teploukhov, a serf of the Stroganov family and, later, a prominent forester and author of the first manuals on forestry128), or themselves studied the subtleties of forestry and tested out the principles in practice. The success of private initiatives was especially astonishing in the southern steppes: landowners, with the support of the local Agricultural Society of Southern Russia, managed to grow woods on sandy soil in the highly unfriendly climatic conditions of the Kherson and Kharkov provinces. Vasilii Lomikovskii, a forester and landowner in Poltava province, and one of the “pioneers” of steppe foresting, was the first to use forest barriers to protect his arable fields in the steppes from drought and sands. According to the historian of Russian forest science Ivan Melekhov, Nikolai Gogol portrayed Vasilii Lomikovskii in the second volume of his Dead Souls, in the figure of Konstantin Konstanzhoglo, an exemplary householder.129 Perhaps foresters sounded the alarm prematurely. Why, then, did private ownership of forests fall victim to such an ardent critique? The answer to this question forces us to refer to the bigger debate about the limits of property and power. The establishment of the principle of absolute private property in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries evoked the temptation to use the rhetoric of property to justify the unlimited power of landowners over all humans and nonhumans in their control. At the same time, however, this reasoning about the status and meaning of property also produced the opposite conclusions. In a number of projects and notes on the fate of serfdom, Russian lawyers and economists tried to refute the opinion that serfs belonged to their lords as part of their property rights. Criticizing the practice of purchasing peasants without land (1821), Nikolai Mordvinov—­as

50  |  Chapter 1 we know, an ardent defender of private property—­pointed out the essential difference between the possession of material objects, and the “limited” power of landlords over their serfs, which he argued should be described by the term “dependency” rather than “property.”130 Peasants were not property like other objects;131 and it was here that we can find a certain similarity with the arguments for the preservation of forests. Certainly, nobody questioned that landowners “owned” their forests, but due to the specific nature of forests (unlike other material objects, they grow slowly and need care) and their importance for the national identity, forests had to be separated from other objects of movable and immovable property. In this sense, the criticism of the arbitrary treatment of forests echoed the criticism of serfdom; later, the emancipation of serfs raised the issue of the protection of forests. Let us listen to the arguments in favor of the reconsideration of ownership rights to forests as they were cast in the 1830s. In the opening article of the first issue of the Forestry Review, the official magazine of the Society for the Encouragement of Forest Economy established in 1832,132 Count Alexander Kushelev-­ Bezborodko, an extraordinarily wealthy aristocrat, a brilliant statesman, and a patron of education, proved that the ownership rights of landowners over forests were inherently limited. His brief description of the emergence of property rights with regard to forests, an event that, he argued, coincided with the gradual destruction by men of the initial natural abundance of forests, pointed out the nonhuman origin of forests as a resource. Deforestation called into existence the art of foresting; consequently, the right to own forests could be classified not only by the subject of ownership (a private landowner or the state) but also according to the origin of forests: forests that grew “without [human] labor or care” must be separated from forests that were “renewed or planted” by men. The first category of “natural” forests is “public property, the property of not only current owners, but of the entire posterity [obshchestvennaia sobstvennost’, dostoianie ne tokmo vremennykh vladeltsev, no i vsego potomstva],” while the second constitutes the private property of a landowner who “can enjoy the right to dispose independently only of those forests that he has planted or renewed.”133 Therefore, in Kushelev-­Bezborodko’s interpretation, the public, or a nation, as a legitimate owner of “natural” forests, emerged as a sum of generations: the temporality of human existence was the mark of private property, while the longevity of a nation was a quality of public property. This motif—­the responsibility to future generations as a ground for the limitation of private property—­came up many times in the preservationist rhetoric of foresters and, later, archaeologists and architects. Another argument—­that the right of private property is limited to the products of human labor while all “natural” objects are public—­was also often employed in the debates on property rights with regard to forests, rivers, and even literary property. For instance, in 1838, the Department of Waterways justified its position that public waterways must be kept open and navigable with the

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argument that rivers, in their natural state, had existed from prehistoric times and predated the appearance of property rights in society.134 Rivers, as the creation of nature, could not be subjected to the “arbitrariness of coastal landowners,” argued the department’s memo. In essence, it was a reversed Lockean concept of private property that justified private appropriation of natural riches by human labor. Used in a positive way, for instance, it asserted the right of writers to their works; being put negatively (in relation to private owners), it established the authority of society over natural resources—­forests and rivers—­or, in the case of literary works, society’s right to own literary works upon the expiration of copyright, in acknowledgement of the role of national heritage and culture in the formation of a writer’s skills, style, and ideas. In his “Reflections on the Need for the Preservation of Private Forests from Destruction and on the Profit of Rational Forest Management,” Kushelev-­ Bezborodko depicted the consequences of deforestation in Europe and pointed out that governments of foreign countries had already taken steps toward the limitation of private ownership rights, while the benevolent Russian authority still “uses the methods of persuasion and encouragement.” The example of foreign countries proved that the discourse on the “moral” (nravstvennyi) right to use natural resources “moderately” could be directly applied to actual legislation, and the restrictions that would follow could be quite burdensome. To avoid such consequences, landowners must introduce rational principles of forest management that included mapping forests, protecting them from abuse, and facilitating the turnover of timber in the country. Forests grow slowly, and if a landowner planted trees, he might not enjoy the fruits of his labor; if he felled trees, he would immediately profit but deprive the next generation of the same benefit and possibly cause damage to the environment. The consequences of deforestation were not limited to one locality because the forest shaped the climate. “Forests  .  .  . protect from storms and winds, inhale harmful elements in air and freshen it, strengthen mountains and [river]banks, moderate the Northern frost and midday heat, fill springs and streams with water.”135 Such was the vision of the forest presented in Kushelev-­ Bezbordko’s essay. Readers were to believe that forests were not property like other objects, even land. The specificity of the forest as an object of possession was not limited to its natural characteristics; forests also needed special treatment. Rational forest management started with the description of the forest: mapping and valuation. Indeed, private owners could employ these methods in their households: textbooks and manuals taught landowners how to draw maps of their forests without knowledge of geometry or topography; described how to distinguish oak from birch, ash, or larch; and even provided colorful templates of plans and maps. Unsophisticated methods of forest management could maintain proper balance in one estate, but what about the country as a whole? The maintenance of balance in the nation’s forests was a difficult task. Only the state had the

52  |  Chapter 1 unique ability to see the entire country and distribute forests according to the needs of the population and the economy: to cut woods where arable lands were in great need and to save (or plant) trees in deforested areas. The lawyer and economist Nikolai Rozhdestvenskii in his Principles of State Governance published in 1840 claimed that rational management of forests required planning that encompassed the current and the future visions of the economy. “Private individuals are not capable of the arrangement of plans of this sort,”136 concluded Rozhdestvenskii, asserting the necessity of centralized state management.137 This argument—­the necessity of centralized planning based on countrywide measurement and mapping of forests—­was a main weapon in the arsenal of the adherents of state control from the 1830s to the 1910s. The content of the argument and the context in which it was employed changed: in the early twentieth century, the accent was on the necessity of state regulation of the flows of migration and the distribution of the labor force, but the contours of the argument remained the same. What was most surprising about the defense of state intervention into private forestry is that, contrary to Rozhdestvenskii’s argument, the Russian state in the mid-­nineteenth century was incapable of mapping and managing even its own land and forest domain, not to mention the forests of private owners. Only in the 1830s did the imperial government make its first significant steps toward the organization of its property and enforcing proprietary rights. In 1837, a new Ministry of State Domains assumed the responsibility of governing state property and state villages; its head, Count Pavel Kiselev, vigorously tackled the management of the empire’s wealth. Facing the deplorable shape of the state domain, Kiselev decided to limit the sphere of the ministry’s management to only lands and forests. “In theory,” wrote the minister, “ . . . all state immovable property should have been subjected to the management of the Ministry of State Domains,” including mines, plants, factories, salt-­works, and so on, but that would have been too great a shift in state governance. So, it was decided to postpone this transformation and leave this property in the management of other ministries. Kiselev’s first task was to assemble state properties and strengthen the government’s power over them. “State lands and forests, poorly protected, formed a sort of a common property,”138 wrote Kiselev about the economy of state domain before the creation of the ministry. The main prerequisite of Kiselev’s reform of state villages was to assure the state’s ownership of the lands of peasants and other assets.139 The second step in this strategy of reform was to measure, count, and map state belongings and create local agencies for the management of state domains. In 1837, when Kiselev assumed the position, there were only eighty land surveyors in the state service for the entire Russian Empire. With the creation of the ministry, Kiselev increased this number to 1419,140 and that was still not enough. The ministry initiated large-­scale measuring and description

The Meanings of Property  |  53

of its domain: three and a half million desiatinas of land were measured yearly, from 1837 to 1856, with the result that during Kiselev’s term three-­fourths of the total land area (forest excluded) in European Russia was measured. This measurement “discovered” an extra three and a half million desiatinas of lands previously omitted in plans and maps.141 A similar strategy of managing the state domain was applied to forests. Kiselev, a pragmatic manager, set modest goals for his forest management: first, to enforce the state’s property rights; second, to map and count. In 1838, a new military Corps of Foresters was created to protect state forests. Fedor Arnold, a prominent Russian expert on forestry who started his career at the Ministry of State Domains in the 1840s, recalled the discussions about the organization of forest management in Russia among the officers of the Corps of Foresters. Arnold, like many of his colleagues, spent a few years in Germany after graduation from the Forest Institute, and, understandably, wanted to model the management of forests in Russia on the Prussian example. However, the area under the responsibility of one Russian forester exceeded that of a Prussian Oberfoerster many times over. The management of such a huge domain seemed impossible, and Russian foresters assumed first of all the task of protection.142 The rules on forestry defined the status of foresters as “revisors,” or guardians, and the whole system of education was shaped on the principles of military schools (which was not surprising in Nicholas I’s Russia, where almost everyone wore a uniform). State foresters in Russia until the mid-­nineteenth century had to learn how to shoot and march. Students of the Forest Institute were named “cadets,” to the great distress of certain “liberal” fellows.143 Only in the 1860s did the system of education and state forest service lose its military organization, a transformation that changed the spirit of the corporation of foresters. The enforcement of state property rights was the priority of the Ministry of State Domains; equally important was the description of the state’s belongings. The Land Survey School (Mezhevoe Uchilishche), created in 1832, was in 1847 transformed into a new department of the Forest Institute. Its graduates outnumbered those of the forest department.144 Special “detachments of forest-­ arrangers” were sent to map and count state woods; in 1842, only 100,000 desiatinas of forestland out of 120 million were mapped; by 1849, the government had at its disposal the maps of 2.456 million desiatinas of forestland.145 Mapping woods was a tremendously difficult enterprise given the lack of specialists and the amount of forests located in unreachable areas. The measurement and description of northern forests began only in 1894. In the early twentieth century, with the beginning of its resettlement campaign, the government started mapping its Siberian forests, but the largest part of them remained unmapped until the fall of the empire.146 Thus, to a great extent the state did not know what it possessed. Getting to know what the state governed was, perhaps, the most difficult time-­and resource-­consuming part of management. In these circumstances, requests to transfer the management of forests from private hands to

54  |  Chapter 1 the state were naive. Economic reasoning factored minimally in consideration of whether private or state ownership was better for the preservation of forests. Instead, arguments for or against tended to be made on the basis of examples drawn from the study of other European countries, on the data of scientific research, or on the generalized authoritative claims of the community of scientists and forestry specialists. Things become “public” not only because they were to be better managed and preserved by the state or society: the conceptualization of forests as a public good demonstrates that a shift in the perception of things as liable or nonliable for private appropriation may occur in spite of economic rationale or on the basis of invented and constructed economic theory. As the subsequent analysis of the transformation of property during the era of industrialization will show, economic absentmindedness was not always a factor. After the emancipation of the peasants in 1861, the process of reconsidering property rights with regard to natural resources returned with renewed intensity. Economic development required a more flexible property system, one that was responsive to the new needs and tendencies of the age.

2 Forests, Minerals, and the Controversy over Property in Post-­Emancipation Russia The idea of private property, borrowed by Catherine the Great from Europe, was transplanted into an economic order based on serfdom and hierarchical patrimonial relations. The combined ideologies of autocracy and propertied individualism stripped the notion of private property of its political connotations. Moreover, the degree of autonomy granted to private owners was interpreted in romantic terms of intimacy and nontransferability of property. The façade of private property concealed the web of lord–­peasants relations based on customs, traditions, and unwritten rules, while the connection between owners and the monarch also implied an unwritten contract of loyalty in return for the protection of wealth. Although Catherine the Great had initially planned to abolish serfdom, she likely did not calculate how the model of property relations she had created would or would not function under the conditions of a nonservile economy. The concept of property came to be closely linked to serfdom, since nobles understood their rights as both imperium (that is, the wielding of public power over their peasants) and dominium (as private owners of their peasants). Peasants were seen as being attached to land—­along with rivers, forests, and whatever else this land might contain on and beneath its surface.1 This chapter will trace the transformation of property rights set off by the reforms of the 1860s and, most importantly, the emancipation of the serfs, through the analysis of two acute issues in the Russian economy—­the preservation of forests and the exploitation of mineral resources. It will analyze how the emancipation of peasants in 1861 affected the system of property rights designed in different economic conditions. Through this, we will see which elements of Catherine’s vision of property survived through the reform, and how Catherine’s legacy affected the post-­emancipation vision, practice, and politics of property. The emancipation of peasants in 1861 was by far the greatest transformation of property rights in Russia, enabling a series of subsequent reforms. In light of the attitude toward private property that dominated in the first half of the

56  |  Chapter 2 nineteenth century and the government’s fear of destabilizing the system of property rights, its decisiveness in taking away what was, perhaps, the nobles’ most valuable resource—­the peasants’ labor force and payments—­and alienating their lands in favor of peasant households, was impressive. In this way, the question posed by Daniel Field,2 “How did this reform emerge from that regime? ” takes on a different meaning: How did this government dare abandon its policy of strict preservation of property rights, an institution that symbolized the trust and intimate ties between private landowners and the ruler? How did it overcome its fear of undermining private property as a shield against subversive ideas? The earlier development of the concept of property shaped the way Russian society accepted (or did not accept) the very idea of property as subject to restrictions. It is not a coincidence that in the process of elaborating the reform, the emancipation of the peasants together with the land was often presented as being similar to the expropriation of property for public needs, such as railway construction. As Mikhail Dolbilov has shown, a significant portion of the Russian nobility expected the state to take on the burden of settling the emancipated peasants on land purchased from the nobles themselves. As many nobles expected, the Russian state, desirous of protecting its image as a strong government, would assume the obligation of finding the money or resources to compensate nobles for the expropriation of their lands.3 Merely going along with the bureaucratic procedures and rules laid out to achieve the steady emancipation of peasants under state supervision appeared unjust and inconvenient, restricting the nobles’ ownership rights to a much greater extent than the swift alienation of land for peasants’ allotments in one fell swoop.4 The nobles’ vision of the just path toward emancipation,5 based on the perception of property as the embodiment of contractual and at the same time intimate relations between the throne and nobility, was that the government should either grant full and unrestricted ownership rights to land or expropriate it. The state, however, found an alternative route that forced peasants to redeem their lands and gave the landowners the choice of either postponing the redemption or ridding themselves of the peasants’ lands immediately. In this sense, the effect of the emancipation on the conceptualization of property was highly ambivalent: on one hand, emancipation corrupted the idea of inalienable property, but on the other, the state did arrange for the nobles to be compensated for their alienated property by making peasants pay for it. Consequently, in the debates on subsequent reforms that touched upon the issue of property, participants highlighted either the first or the second aspect of the emancipation to suit their ends, presenting it as either the destruction or the affirmation of nobles’ proprietary rights. The emancipation of peasants deeply affected the scale of state involvement in the regulation of property rights. While designing the emancipation, reformers had to reconcile the ideals of liberal economy and freedom with the

The Controversy over Property  |  57

necessity of state intervention. Several decades later, in the 1880s, a distorted interpretation of emancipation as expropriation in the service of public needs appeared when the government retreated from reform, claiming that the state had alienated nobles’ lands and granted them to the former serfs so that they would pay land taxes and support themselves—­that is, the expropriation was performed for “the supreme interest of the state” that required “proper organization” of the peasant population.6 (Consequently, peasants were not allowed to sell “their” lands, as the notorious law of 1893 on “the inalienability of peasant allotments” proclaimed.7) The emancipation of peasants left the state face to face with millions of people and new proprietors, who before the reform had been placed under the administration of their landlords. The state had to assume new administrative and legal responsibilities, but it lacked the administrative resources to create a new system of governance and dispute resolution from scratch. The vacuum of power in the countryside—­a perennial problem for the Russian state after the reform of 1861—­led to numerous tensions and conflicts between the old and newly created owners. In fact, this power vacuum was to a great extent responsible for the critique that emerged against private property: private property appeared to be a defective system because Russia lacked the infrastructure and institutions that reduce the friction of property relations.8 The effects of the emancipation were most visible in the economy of the so-­called commons—­forests and water. Before the emancipation, customs and traditions, rather than special legislation, regulated peasants’ access to forests on landowners’ estates. Some landowners limited the use of their forests—­for instance, by not letting peasants cut the most valuable kinds of timber, but in general, as I. Gershman claimed, peasants enjoyed free use of landowners’ forests.9 The emancipation replaced customs and traditions with property relations,10 a substitution that produced problems on both sides: peasants lost access to forests, while landowners could not enforce their ownership rights over forests that, as peasants believed, belonged to everybody.11 The state had to step in and prescribe rules for the exploitation of forests. As the next chapter will show, similar problems arose in the use of water: digging canals for irrigation or drainage had always been a matter of negotiation between landowners and peasants. The conflicts between landowners and water-­owners often had social connotations: often noble landowners had to seek consent to dig canals across the lands of their former serf peasants. But the opposite situation was also common, and the local committees “on the needs of agriculture” begged to free both peasant societies and landowners from this mutual “water” dependency.12 The government, preoccupied with the issue of the rural economy’s productivity, worried that allowing water to be private property endangered the future of agriculture in Russia, and the problem of water disputes between peasant socie­ ties and landowners was cast as a clash between the “idea of the public interest” and “the rights of private individuals.”13

58  |  Chapter 2 The disputes over the use of resources of public value—­forests, water, and minerals—­eventually brought to light the issue of state reform. The state, lacking resources for the management of its own domains, was reluctant to take up the more difficult task of settling disputes between property owners and society. As a result, discussions on the issue of property sometimes looked like a bizarre dialogue between “society” (more concretely, professional experts and the spokespersons of professional unions and business associations), which called upon the state to intervene and assume the role of manager or mediator, and the government. While arguing so, the experts often referred to the example of the peasant emancipation; the government, for its part, used the trope of private property to justify its reluctance to intercede.

State Property under Question: The Agrarian Reform in State Villages The debates surrounding the management of the “commons” perfectly illustrated the absence of a precise definition of state and state property. What was the state to do to regulate property relations in the private and state domains? What was its attitude to the land populated by free peasants? These questions were raised many times in the course of reforms—­especially during the preparation of the land reform in state villages that took place five years after the emancipation of seigniorial peasants. A major factor driving the reappraisal of the role of the state as a manager and landowner was the “awakening” of society and the emergence of the idea of obshchestvennost’ (“society”), which was understood as a separate and autonomous entity, primarily as a community of educated people located in the social landscape somewhere between the tsar and the peasant mass.14 “Society” was supposed to replace bureaucrats in zemstvos and courts, to take upon itself the management of many local issues such as medicine, statistics, and education. Consequently, the emergence of an autonomous society drew new attention to the possible limits of state power and, in particular, its proprietary rights. Many, especially Slavophiles, assumed that state ownership of land ceased to exist in its original form: the people were to become the owners of lands and resources. The debates on the status of “state land” that was held in the possession of state peasants made clear the expectations of Russian intellectuals. In the early 1860s, rumors began to spread about plans for reforming the land of state peasants. The government, it was said, wanted to make peasants pay for land they had used for centuries. Critics of the rumored plan unambiguously blamed the state for the seizure of peasants’ lands and questioned the legitimacy of the government’s vision of state lands as its own private domain. “What is the state property? What is the government: is it a landowner [pomeshchik] or is its attitude to land different?” asked Slavophile thinker and publicist Ivan Aksakov

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in his polemical article criticizing the plans for reform in state villages. “State property is the property of the people, i.e., the ownership of all Russian land,” while the state is just the machine for the disposal of that property, asserted Aksakov.15 The state was presented here as a secondary superstructure, while the “people” and the “land” had superior value. In the rhetoric of Russian populists, the state was an abstract “geographical” term while the nation represented the real “living body” of the country. “Therefore,” wrote Nikolai Ogarev, the socialist and populist writer, “state ownership of land was impossible and had to be replaced by either common or public [zemskaia, obshchestvennaia] property.”16 Moreover, if the state had no proprietary rights over the lands of state peasants, it could not make them redeem that land or pay the state a quitrent.17 In 1866, the government announced land reform for state villages. While private landowners lost their property irrevocably once the redemption operations began, the state officially retained its ownership rights over land. The laws on the emancipation of serfs in 1861 defined the land rights of emancipated peasants before they began redeeming their duties as “permanent possession,” and once the redemption process was under way, as “property.” By contrast, the transition within the concept of property rights that accompanied the land reform for state peasants in 1866 was described as an upgrade from the right of “use” (pol’zovanie) to one of “possession” (vladenie) with the corresponding right of “disposal” (rasporiazhenie) and the obligation to pay state quitrent (obrok)—­that is, rent for land that belonged to the state. This system revealed the indefinite status of the lands that were used by state peasants, a situation that continued for several decades as the government postponed the resolution of the question, “what is state property?” Only in 1886 did the State Council approve a reform that changed the status and financial obligations of former state peasants in the Russian core provinces: state peasants, who since 1866 had been obliged to pay “state quitrent” for land in their possession, were declared to be private owners of their allotments with the corresponding obligation to redeem their lands. The meaning of the reform was ambiguous: on the one hand, one could applaud the government’s decision to grant peasants the right of ownership. The minister of finance, Nikolai Bunge, who initiated the reform, was attempting to bring to life his dream of peasant private owners.18 On the other hand, the reform retroactively established the state’s ownership of the lands and made peasants redeem the lands that they had been using for ages and had long considered to be their own. To conclude, the emancipation of peasants in 1861 and the reform of state villages in 1866 shook up the entire system of property rights. These events shifted the border between private and public by asserting that the freedom and well-­being of one social estate was a public good, they proved that private property was liable to state intervention, they led to the reappraisal of the state’s role as a regulator of property relations, and they called into question the status of state property. The liberation of peasants dramatically complicated the old

60  |  Chapter 2 principles of property relations, while raising a number of questions that the government was unable to resolve at once and continued to deal with for a few decades.

“Forest Question” after Emancipation As I have argued earlier, the issues of serfdom and forest preservation turned out to be closely connected: before the emancipation, the private ownership of peasants (and forests) was often regarded as a necessary and temporary evil. The emancipation of the peasants, a great reform initiated and managed by the state, necessitated a reconsideration of the ownership of forests. It took more than twenty years, however, for the government to prepare this “second emancipation.” Both peasants and nobles gained new incentives to clear land of forests after the emancipation. Peasants stole timber from the nobles’ estates, while nobles, not being able to protect their property, started massively to cut timber.19 For former state peasants who, unlike the former serfs of private landowners, received forest allotments, clearing forests was a means of compensating for their land shortages and a source of additional income;20 similarly, for landowners, chopping down wood was the easiest way of covering their income losses after the emancipation—­arable land earned much more income than forests. Peasants and nobles thus demonstrated a striking similarity in their careless use of forests.21 Mikhail Tsvetkov’s calculations of the rate of deforestation have shown that the area of annual woodlands’ clear-­cutting increased from 164 hectares in 1797–­1861 to 902 hectares in 1862–­1888.22 In just twenty years, from 1868 to 1887, Russia lost 5 percent of its forests—­they fell the most immediate victim of the “great” peasant reform. The emancipation set a new tone in the government’s policy toward both the noble and the peasant economies. The Ministry of State Domains started to influence the pace of the development in the private sector as early as in 1830s–­1840s, but that influence had only an indirect character. After the reform, the government’s involvement deepened, addressing, among other issues, the problem of deforestation. The government first became aware of the massive forest destruction a few months after the declaration of the Emancipation Act: in March 1862, the local agencies of the state Forest Department in many provinces reported their inability to sell timber from the “treasury’s forests” because the market was overflowing with cheap timber from nobles’ estates.23 Nobles “tried to sell (their forests) without any consideration of basic economic reason and even the real value of the resources.”24 To prevent the swift and total destruction of forests, the government decided to help nobles protect their property against wood theft; this was to be a first step, a prerequisite for the regulation of the private forest economy.25 In 1864, the Ministry of Interior, with

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Petr Valuev, an experienced bureaucrat and an active participant in the Great Reforms, at the helm, compiled the first project for a law encompassing these two goals: protecting forests against peasants’ illegal woodcutting, and restricting the nobles’ right to dispose of forests in the areas where they were scarce or their maintenance was essential. This second part of the project echoed the recent emancipation reform and received a rather hostile response from private landowners. Aspiring to draw public support to the project, the ministry asked for opinions from the local self-­governments. All zemstvos unanimously supported the state’s initiative to protect the nobles’ forests and with the same zeal criticized the second part of the project, which required adherence to new rules of proper forest management. The state’s “intrusion” into the private economy of noble landowners was an “unfair” encroachment on the right of private property, wrote the representatives from Kostroma, Novgorod, Yaroslavl’, Riazan’, Kharkov, Kaluga, Orlov, Smolensk, Ekaterinoslav, and other provinces.26 It was all the more unjust because forests often represented the last hope for impoverished nobles to make both ends meet, while the “proper management of forests” (mapping forests, calculating their growth, and elaborating a plan for harvesting timber) required significant investments and knowledge. Ideologically, they continued, this reform would mean the total devaluation of the right of property,27 and thus it would not only lead to the destruction of forests but could even “shake the foundation of the state order.”28 Facing so strong a resistance from the nobility, the government dropped the second part of the project. In May 1867, it issued a law on the protection of private forests that enabled landowners to hire armed forest guards endowed with the authority of state officials and strengthened accountability for wood theft. This measure, perhaps, scared peasants off nobles’ forests, but it did not slow the destruction of forests by the landowners themselves. A few years later, the Ministry of State Domain pessimistically observed that nobles continued the massive clearing of forests and there was no hope that this would stop without the state’s intervention in the nearest future. Nobles simply did not know how to manage their estates: “acquiring this knowledge, learning the skills and habits (of rational economy) would take long time,” and during this period, logging would serve the immediate needs of the nobility.29 To save forests, the government had either to buy them or to regulate the disposal of private forest resources. The second of these two options, however, meant more than just the establishment of state control over certain types of land and the limitation of property rights. The reform of forestry, in fact, required significant social and cultural transformations. It assumed that nobles—­as the ministry observed—­ would return to the countryside, settle down on their estates instead of wasting money in the capitals, and learn how to handle their household economies. Very few Russian nobles, inspired by the ideas of local self-­government and the true vocations of the nobility to improve the rural economy, came back home. In 1867, Prince Viktor Illarionovich Vasilchikov—­general, statesman,

62  |  Chapter 2 and a former deputy war minister—­returned to his estate in the black-­soil Tambov province, which had always been considered a land of plenty. The picture of devastation in the area struck him deeply. In the 1840s, when Vasilchikov first visited the place, woods surrounded his estate. Thirty years later, the landscape had changed enormously: “If one could fly now on a balloon, like Gambetta, above my estate, one would see this area as a vast and homogenous valley, cut in different directions by ravines and hollows with a group of my forests in the middle, the forests that are carefully protected and secured.” Ravines indicated the routes of rivers that had dried out, the bridges over these ravines and hollows were used only during the time of high-­water; the names of the villages—­ “Springs”—­recalled the existence of streams that had disappeared. “What awaits us in the future? Drought!”—­exclaimed Vasilchikov. Vasilchikov’s attempts to speak about deforestation in zemstvo assemblies, noble societies, and the congresses of agriculturalists met resistance and were condemned as communist propaganda against private property. He still hoped to find support among the readers of the popular magazine Notes of the Fatherland (Oteche­stvennye zapiski): “Why should we silently watch the complete destruction of all forests if the consequence of such an implementation of property rights would be the death not just of one city or village, but of the whole country?”30 Vasilchikov’s appeal was heard by a few of his fellow noblemen (Yuri Samarin, having read this article, “could not fall asleep, [he] dreamt of a terrifying picture of dry and forestless desert”),31 but the majority of nobles did not share his selfless drive to devote money and energy for the preservation of nature. Faced with two options—­either to care for the woods, being forbidden from selling them, or to sell them to the state, the landowners preferred the second. The nobles’ unwillingness to run their estates under state supervision and the readiness to give up their property rather than submit to restrictions on its disposal played an important role in the propagation of the idea of forests’ expropriation. From the very beginning, the main question in the discussion on protecting forests was cast as an alternative between “expropriation” and “state tutelage,”32 which was assumed to entail the “limitation of the right of private ownership of forests by the state for the provision of public interests”—­that is, the imposition of mandatory rules on foresting (at the expense of landowners) and limits on woodcutting. For landowners, the possibility of losing their incomes and being subjected to external control appeared threatening. The Congress of Agriculturalists summoned in December 1870 rejected the idea of state tutelage by a significant majority because it would have limited their property rights. Instead, they supported the idea of expropriation.33 The government, however, did not seriously consider large-­scale expropriation34: state forests already constituted around 60 percent of the country’s total forested area, and the state simply did not have the money for a “second emancipation.” The newly projected “Law on the Protection of Forests of State Value”

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(1875) (Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov, imeiuschikh gosudarstvennoe znachenie) prefigured the introduction of an array of prohibitive rules concerning woodcutting. The Ministry of State Domains, which compiled the project, was aware that the introduction of measures restricting private property rights would inevitably raise objections among the landowners. To “avoid censures,” Petr Va­ luev (now the Minister of State Domains) decided to charge the elective local zemstvo authorities with the unpleasant duty of enforcing the law. This government project to protect forests merits attention as the first test of the ideas and rhetoric supporting the government’s right of coercion in the sphere of private property rights. Its title, referring to “forests of state value,” indicates that the government initially intended to adjust the law to the principles of expropriation, but the project did not offer expropriation as an alternative to tutelage. In the next project for the forestry law (1877), the designation of “state value” disappeared. Instead, this project spoke about “protected forests” (there was a pun in the designation of the categories of “protected forests,” which referred to forests performing “protective” functions—­ preventing erosion, protecting water reservoirs—­as well as forests whose extinction could lead to “undesirable changes of climate and soil”). The projected law banned woodcutting in these forests and their clearing for agricultural purposes. Valuev hoped that the fifteen years separating the emancipation of peasants from the forestry law would muffle any unpleasant continuities between the two. He was mistaken: the discussions around forestry laws in many ways echoed the debates that preceded the emancipation. Representatives from the landowners traveled from different provinces to discuss the projected law before the Commission on Forestry, and their discussion followed a familiar route. Although the owners of small and midsize estates supported the government’s intention to limit landowners’ rights for the sake of public needs,35 the aristocrats—­those who had acquired the skills of political discussion during the era of emancipation and felt obliged to counter further limitations to private property—­adopted the opposite stance. The members of the so-­called aristocratic opposition to the Great Reforms,36 including Count Sergei Sheremetev, Count Petr Shuvalov, Prince Nikolai Lobanov-­ Rostovskii, Count Illarion Vorontsov-­Dashkov, and Count Alexei Bobrinskii, vigorously objected to these attempts at placing the burden of forest protection on landowners’ shoulders; all unanimously declared that the state had to take upon itself this responsibility and “if the protection of forests is necessary to state wealth, then the state must buy them [forests].” “This is a kind of an expropriation for public needs in which the state must cover all losses; otherwise, one of the main foundations of the state—­the right of property—­will be violated,” declared Prince Lobanov-­Rostovskii.37 Count Vorontsov-­Dashkov accused the government of inventing a new kind of limited property that fit none of the definitions in the Code of Laws.38 Count Bobrinskii, the head of the Moscow provincial assembly of nobility, declared that “any compulsory forestry protection would mean the

64  |  Chapter 2 confiscation of a part of the property of forest owners” and referred to the experience of peasant emancipation, in which the state eventually found a way to compensate landowners for their losses.”39 This reference to the emancipation of peasants as an example of fair “expropriation” became a common point in the rhetoric of nobles speaking against limitations on property rights. Needless to say, it perverted the logic of the peasant reform because peasants themselves, not the state, bore the burden of compensating nobles for alienated lands; this compensation was not immediate nor was it, as many believed, fair (nobles received state bonds that rapidly lost their market value; yet peasants continued to pay fixed redemption fees directly to the state, making the latter the only participant in the reform that did not lose in the long run). In face of new reforms to property rights, the myth of emancipation figured as an embellished story of the “great” reform. To be fair to the “aristocrats” who opposed state control of private forests, it must be said that their forests were usually properly maintained: the experts on scientific forestry mentioned the estates of the Sheremetevs and the Vorontsov-­ Dashkovs among the examples of rational (and expensive) forest management.40 However, speaking on behalf of their social estate, they argued that the introduction of mandatory rules of forestry was an unjust limitation of their property rights; only expropriation appeared fair and legitimate. The Third Congress of Forest Owners, which met in Riga in August 1876, unanimously recognized expropriation as the “most rational means of forest protection” and criticized the idea of state surveillance.41 In 1886, the Sixth Congress repeated this argument, claiming that “expropriation is not a violation of private property,” and the state, having used its power and resources to redeem peasants’ lands and lands for railroad construction, ought to take this approach again for the sake of the common good and private property.42 As an observer from the opposite camp sarcastically reported, the provincial assemblies of nobility and forest owners, “in a burst of legal ecstasy, cried about respect for private property, which is so strongly developed in Russia that a minor attempt to constrain it . . . would harshly contradict the spirit and the consciousness of our people.”43 It is important to note at this juncture that the project for the forest law did not even mention the word “property”: it spoke about administrative regulations of forests’ use. Russian “police” legislation contained numerous examples of similar regulations aimed to preserve “public safety”: one could not use his or her property to the detriment of others, or in violation of tranquility and order. Property came to be also associated with numerous obligations: for instance, the laws and administrative regulations issued by city self-­governing institutions after 1870 obliged owners to clean streets and maintain pavement. However, the “forests” case appeared drastically different. Perhaps the memory of Catherine’s gift to the nobility, or the cultural symbolism of forests as an important element of estate economies, facilitated this migration of the dialogue between nobility and the state about forests to the sphere of debates on

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property rather than the discussion on public order and police. Needless to say, for aristocrats, private property was a metaphor for the relationship between the throne and the nobility and the issues of trust, mutual support, and privileges that were so deeply shaken by the emancipation. At first glance, the divergence of opinions on forestry protection recalled the well-­known combinations of political interests during the Great Reforms (liberal or progressive versus aristocratic or conservative). Conservative newspapers opposed the projected forest rules, while liberal journals supported the government’s intention to limit landowners’ property rights.44 Petr Zhudra, a forester and an active contributor to the Forestry Review (Lesnoi Zhurnal), claimed that “the state has the right to become the guardian of forests and must do so, to prevent their extermination through the power of its authority. We are sure that all right-­minded people will express their sympathy for this intervention by state authority; the authority, which through all Great Reforms of our epoch, carried the banner of progress, justice and common good with firmness and dignity.”45 The post-­Reforms’ étatist rhetoric, as expressed in this passage, combined the liberal concept of “progress, justice and common good” with the image of a “protective state”—­the image that rejected the laissez-­faire ideology of noninterference. Quite characteristically, Petr Zhudra, one of the most ardent critics of private ownership of forests, recalled in his memoirs that during his student years in the Forest Institute, he was “absorbed” by the political economy of John Stuart Mill.46 The popularity of Mill’s writings did not contradict the professional étatist beliefs of foresters. Moreover, there was nothing unique in the étatism of Russian foresters: in Germany, the homeland of European sylviculture, forestry was also considered the state’s business. As Franz Heske observed, “many otherwise radical free-­traders considered forestry an exception and admitted the necessity for, or even demanded, state supervision of this branch of national economy.”47 As those who supported the regulation of forestry argued, the central point of contention between private landowners and the state concerned a broad disagreement about the essence of property rights. Liberal, bureaucratic, and “professional” perceptions of property rested on abstract legal principles that asserted the limited nature of individual ownership rights. Arguing in favor of the limitation of property rights, the entrepreneur and liberal Slavophile publicist Alexander Koshelev recalled that land ownership had always been subjected to various restrictions: “We pay more or less high taxes on land, it (land) can be taken for the construction of roads, digging of canals, for other publicly needed enterprises; in cities and even in villages our right to erect buildings is subjected to various restrictions; the owners of watermills may not keep water beyond a certain level, while on rivers, the right to build dams is restricted in favor of navigation and timber rafting. Land property is limited everywhere, and it cannot be unlimited. It is unlimited only on unpopulated islands and in the steppes, i.e., where it (property) does not exist.” Progress and development

66  |  Chapter 2 would bring new limitations on ownership, claimed Koshelev, and “we may only wish” these limitations to be just and reasonable.48 Most liberals readily admitted the necessity of restricting private property for the sake of common interests, but, as the popular Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) observed, Russian society did not understand the inherently limited character of private property rights. “Sensible concepts about the character and limits of the right to property are so rare here, that the proclamations about the violation [of that right] can easily find fertile soil; naïve people could believe that the necessary protection of forests constitutes an encroachment on private property, and crafty people could take advantage of their gullibility.”49 Nobles who resisted government interference in the management of their wealth refused to admit that their property rights could be limited, especially when land and its produce were concerned. In this respect, the discussion on forestry brightly reveals the contradiction between the conservative-­aristocratic and “bourgeois” concepts of property, as described by Karl Mannheim (and revealed in the opinion of Alexander Shishkov quoted earlier). For the aristocrats, “genuine property” was bound up with its owner in an entirely different way: it was “closely bound up with his personal honor and so in a sense is inalienable.” The “old” attitude to possessions reveals a special “intimacy” between property and owner that obviously forbids the possibility of intervention or intrusion.50 Despite the ostensibly clear-­cut division of interests—­conservative noble aristocrats versus liberals and professional experts—­there were “deviationists,” at least in the liberal camp. It is true that Russian liberal thought in the 1870s and 1880s, with its accent on private property and individual rights, distanced itself from the classical laissez-­faire liberalism. It fell instead under the influence of German political and legal thought, with its idea of the subjugation of individual interests to the common good. But even among liberals, there still remained defenders of individual liberties. An outstanding political theorist and historian, Boris Chicherin in his “State and Property,” published in 1881, criticized the betrayal of the values of private property. He claimed that limiting owners’ rights to dispose of their forests as they wished should be considered an abnormal violation of individual rights, tolerated only as a “provisional evil.”51 The liberal Herald of Europe put Chicherin’s opinion in the category of “worldly and scientific prejudices” that obstructed the progressive movement toward the limitation of private interests.52 In the government, too, the idea of state control over private forestry did not find full support. The codification department (the Second Department of the Emperor’s Chancellery), staffed with experienced jurists, found the projects for the forestry laws53 unacceptable because they “violated the established principle of property rights without an insistent need.”54 In creating a rhetoric to support the limitation of property rights, the bureaucrats of the Ministry of State Domains drew upon both the progressive rhetoric of liberals, who wholeheartedly supported the state’s initiative and lamented only its indecisiveness, as well

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as the monarchist arguments, which sharply contrasted with the progressives’ liberal spirit. Two drafts of an “explanatory note” composed within the ministry demonstrated this ideological indeterminacy or, rather, the absence of a concrete ideology. Both memos tried to prove that property was not a constant institution, untouchable and unchangeable. One of them analyzed recent developments in Russia’s economy and society that had transformed ownership, both liberating it from old constraints and imposing new limits upon it, mainly in the spheres of waterway and railway construction. These multiple constraints and limitations eventually balanced each other out. Concessions in the sphere of property rights were reciprocal: “Constraints that one person bears for the benefit of others are compensated by the constraints that they bear for the benefit of that individual.”55 In contrast to this sociological analysis of the mutual benefits of reciprocal concessions, the second memo relied on the rhetoric of power and autocracy. The author, having analyzed various restrictions imposed on forests owners in Europe, concluded: “Nothing similar can be found in our forest legislation.” The lack of state control over the use of forests in Russia “is all the more strange” given that in the monarchal Russian Empire, “the state, in essence, has supreme power that stands above individual rights.” The government must resort to this power “in the interests of the common good . . . and direct private activity of different sorts required in the interests of the national well-­being, for present and future generations . . . isn’t it strange that in Russia, with its unlimited monarchal rule, this principle of state law is not applied in so important a sphere of the national economy as forestry?”56 The author applauded the government for recent reforms that relied on the power of its supreme ownership by referring to the same sphere of state economy as the first memo: railroads. He mentioned the state regulation of tariffs on private railroads as an example of using the government’s authority for the sake of public interests, national trade, and industry. Although neither of these two memos reached the top levels of the whirlpool of bureaucratic documents, they demonstrate that the issue of property rights sometimes blurred the lines demarcating “liberal” and “conservative.” While liberals found themselves advocating for a reform that would have been anathema to preceding generations of liberal thinkers, conservatives came to argue for the inalienability of private property and individualism, while the government, for its part, mixed ideas of social responsibility and the common good into its arguments in support of patrimonialism and monarchism. In the meantime, society grew more agitated by the fear of deforestation. Jane Costlow’s analysis of the content of “thick magazines” of the 1860s–­1880s demonstrates how Russian publicists and foresters employed the “rhetoric of catastrophe” to depict deforestation as “national calamity.” As Costlow observes, most of these depictions did not rely on statistic data and could not document the rate of destruction. Nevertheless, the picture of decaying nature penetrated

68  |  Chapter 2 deep into the public consciousness and was reflected in works of painting, poetry, and fiction.57 The growing popularity of the natural sciences contributed to the construction of this myth: scientists plunged into the debates on the influence of forests on rivers and the climate.58 Torn between the necessity of quieting the defenders of property rights and putting a halt to timber poaching and thereby satisfying the demands of foresters, the government set aside the proposed forestry law for a few years.59 Meanwhile, rumors about the projected reform fostered the destruction of forests: landowners rushed to sell their woods as the price of forests continued to fall and banks refused to give credit on the security of forest lands.60 In the absence of general rules, various small restrictions were imposed at the local level. An official from the Ministry of State Domains reported that a ban had been put in place on cutting birch branches for the Trinity Day feast,61 which encroached upon an ancient Russian tradition; he suggested going even further and prohibiting chopping down trees for Christmas.62 The final project for the law on forest protections that came to light after twenty years of bureaucratic discussions (in 1888)63 rested upon the rhetoric of “state and public good” and placed the so-­called protected forests, “whose conservation is necessary for state and public utility,” under state regulation. This meant that landowners would be obligated to submit plans for forest estate development to local administrators and follow their recommendations for forest cutting and renewal. The law alleviated the pressure of state regulation by offering the landowners a choice between following these rules, which would obviously require financial investments and losses, and expropriation. Article 800 of the new Forestry Code stipulated that the state may not oblige private forest owners to protect forests at their own expense, but at the same time, the next article classified expropriation as a right of the Ministry of State Domains to redeem the forests of careless owners who “do not agree to bear costs” for forest protection.64 Thus, the administration could decide whether to purchase forests or not. In fact, however, this rule was virtually useless because the Forestry Department never received funding for the purchase of private forests.65 From the government’s point of view, the forest reform had one important side effect: it enabled the state to increase significantly its knowledge about the situation of the private forest economy. According to prereform forest legislation, state foresters were not even allowed to approach private forests without a sufficient reason and must be always accompanied by local police. As a result, state officials could not collect information about the rate and speed of deforestation efficiently.66 How could the state perform the function of “mapping” forests and their distribution within the country’s landscape without proper mechanisms of gathering information about the private forest economy? The reform removed these restrictions and allowed local forest authorities to collect data and plans for the protected forests, if not all the private ones. As the

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ministry’s official report asserted, it created a foundation for the systematic collection of statistical data.67 Achieving the main goal of the forestry reform—­protecting private forests—­ encountered multiple problems—­first, in the enforcement of new rules and the definition of the areas that needed protection. The law left the assessment of the necessity of protective measures to foresters’ discretion, and even the Instruction given to the officials of the local forest committees (1888) acknowledged that “due to the variety of local conditions,” it was “difficult to point out which data exactly” were to be taken into account in this assessment.68 Many local officials of the Forest Department proved corruptible, which meant that permission for wood clear-­cutting could be obtained for a bribe.69 The authority of foresters did not suffice to enforce the rules on woodcutting. In 1890–­ 1895, the Forest Department sanctioned the clear-­cutting of 36,000 desiatinas in Chernigov province, while 21,000 desiatinas were cleared without permission.70 The indefinite wording of the law encouraged corruption: many terms, starting from the basic definition of “forest” and “protected forest” to the crucially important “clear-­cutting” of forest land (raschistka, which required official permission), were not specified, and multiple complaints brought to the Ministry of State Domains and the Senate proved that the law lacked both flexibility and precision.71 The economics of noble estates and peasant communes hindered the implementation of protective norms. The government did its best to support and encourage rational management of noble’s forests: it even allowed the foresters of the Forest Department to continue their service in private estates while still being state employees (in 1891, 193 state foresters worked on private estates72); in 1885, the government obliged the Noble Land Bank to give credit on the security of forests with the condition that forests deposited to the bank were mapped and managed by state foresters at the state’s expense.73 The laws of 1899 and 1904 shifted the burden of forest renewal (and protection) from the owners of forests and the state to the consumers: those who bought forests on the market were obliged to plant trees, otherwise their “foresting” deposit, which they had to pay as a provision of this requirement, was ceded to the budget of the local forest administration.74 Despite all these efforts, in the early 1900s, the government had to acknowledge that it had failed to bridge the gap between the advanced ideology of the forestry law, which had been borrowed from Europe, and the reality of the backward rural economy. More to the point, in the early 1900s, the economic support of the impoverished nobility was pronounced as the political goal and moral responsibility of the monarchy.75 The restrictive policy in the “forest question” contradicted the political aims of the monarchy seeking the support of the noble estate. The Forest Department’s memo on the “release of the inconvenient consequences produced by the implementation of the forest protection

70  |  Chapter 2 law for landowners” (approximately 1902) suggested only one possible solution to the problem: the state purchase of private forests.76 Although the restrictive rules of forestry law directly concerned a relatively small number of noble landowners, its symbolic meaning was often compared to the effect of emancipation. The state interfered in the intimate sphere of noble life by sending a state-­appointed forester to map and measure private forests in estates and even set the regime of woodcutting. The next reform, which logically followed the limitation of cutting down forests, bore even greater symbolic meaning: in 1892, the government imposed limits on hunting on private estates, encroaching upon a key cultural symbol of the aristocratic lifestyle encoded by Russian nineteenth-­century literature. Landowners who, just thirty years ago, had wielded a virtually free hand over the lives of their peasants, were now forbidden from shooting wild animals without the state’s permission (as well as paying a special fee), in the name of the common good.77 Hunting was indeed their right, privilege, and even a symbol of patrimonial power and protection of peasants’ wealth from predators.78 Thus, the concept of protecting animals from the excessive power of owners went against two commonly accepted views of wild animals as a resource adjunct to land, and enemies to be exterminated.79 The law on hunting suggested an utterly opposite vision: animals belonged to nature, while the latter was a common patrimony of the nation. Consequently, it was up to the state to decide when, where, and how to hunt in order to preserve natural balance in fauna. Some of those who supported the protection of wildlife wanted either to ban hunting totally for a few years,80 or to declare certain kinds of rare animals the objects of state property, thus removing them from the sphere of private claims,81 while others defended the state’s monopoly on hunting.82 The law on hunting of 1892 resembled the forestry law at many points, especially in the categorization of animals according to their supposed “public value,” a term defined according to the principles of utility. Animals were divided into two groups: predatory animals (and birds of prey) and nonpredators. Nonpredators were subject to protection: hunting in the spring was forbidden, as was the hunting of females of any kind; nor could the nearly extinct bison be hunted under any circumstances. In this aspect, Russian law on hunting went ahead of other legislations for the first time offering protection to endangered species.83 As for the predators (wolves, white and brown bears, foxes and polar foxes, all kinds of rodents, tigers, cheetahs, and so on) and birds of prey (eagles, falcons, owls, and so on), hunters were allowed to shoot both adult and young animals of both sexes at any time of the year and to destroy birds’ nests.84 Thus, the law curiously combined two opposite approaches to wildlife: in regard to nonpredators, it appeared surprisingly progressive. As for other “harmful” animals, the law, in Ian Helfant’s words, codified the “collective cultural animus” against predators. The progressive policy in this area was measured by other

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standards—­the success of predator control or eradication in which Russia, as the experts on hunting observed, fell behind European nations.85 Interestingly enough, the category of “predators” was extended to include anything that damaged husbandry or agriculture but was not dangerous for people (gophers, squirrels, sparrows, magpies, and crows), while the group of “protected animals” did not include even vanishing species among the beasts of prey. This was because animals were classified as protected according to their perceived utility, just as forests had been,86 rather than according to abstract environmental concerns. In 1901, the list of “harmful” animals or “predators” was even increased, and the new project of the law on hunting sanctioned the near-­ total extermination of foxes.87 Indeed, the notion of utility in the rural Russia of the late nineteenth century differed drastically from modern representations, and it was more grounded in the tally of human victims and economic losses in man’s encounter with the wild. In 1896, predators killed 1,193 people and domestic animals worth 4.3 million rubles in 88 provinces of Russia; in 1897, 1,315 people and numerous domestic animals were killed, causing the loss of 4.9 million rubles.88 For peasants, hunting was both an important part of the economy and a means of protecting their lives and households. The law on hunting applied only in the European provinces of Russia, and all borderlands, despite their vulnerable and rapidly perishing fauna, were excluded from the area of protection. As a result, many species of predatory animals were nearly extinct after just a few years (for instance, the ounce, or snow leopard, the dhole, and the Siberian tiger), and a few (such as the Caspian tiger) disappeared completely. In 1913, due to the rapid disappearance of sables, the government introduced a five-­year moratorium on sable hunting: this was the first acknowledgement of the imbalance in the state’s protective regime.89 The analysis of the policy on hunting demonstrates that the importance of the law on the protection of forests lay not only in the limits it placed on timber poaching: ideologically, it opened the way for further regulation of the use of natural resources and, consequently, the restriction of property rights. The regulation of hunting was the first step in this direction; next came the protection of rivers and waterways. Russian society from time to time grew agitated by the real or imagined fear that its rivers and lakes would dry up, and that seas and forests would vanish. As David Blackbourn points out, the issue of changing environmental conditions was starting to be raised in several countries in the 1850s and 1860s: French, Austrian, British, and German scientists wondered whether their native lands were “drying out.”90 In Russia, the drought and famine of 1891–­1892 confirmed an already-­existing fear of environmental catastrophe,91 and produced a shock sufficient to convince many that the usage of forests and natural resources had to be regulated by the state, according to scientific principles. Drought and famine added new arguments for the preservation of forests; they also revealed the necessity of elaborating special rules protecting water from abusive exploitation and pollution. In the 1890s, the

72  |  Chapter 2 argument of “ecological bankruptcy”92 came to the forefront in public debates on a water law93 that was never issued: the devastation of water turned out to be less frightening for Russian nature-­minded educated public than deforestation. Forests were singled out as something special, requiring exclusive care by the state and educated society. What was the reason for such disparity? Were rivers less endangered than forests? Apparently, the actual state of natural resources, even if it could be measured and assessed appropriately, played a secondary role in the development of the discourses of protection and legislation. Forests had a powerful agent to speak on their behalf: the professional corporation of foresters brought up in state schools and European universities, united by the spirit of common cause that was cultivated by professional journals and associations. While the study of hydrology made significant progress in mid-­and late-­nineteenth-­century Russia, it did not result in the emergence of an expert community. In the 1890s–­1900s, the groups of hydroengineers interested in the development of hydropower production advanced the idea of turning rivers into national property. However, their pragmatic rhetoric of unlocking the power of rivers contrasted the environmentalist discourse of foresters and the concept of nature as national patrimony. Interest in environmental studies, climatology, and biology also coincided with the growth of nationalist feelings.94 If in the 1870s and 1880s the elaboration of the forestry law and discussion around it was driven primarily by economic concerns, by the 1900s attitudes to forests had significantly changed, and the rhetoric of preserving a “national treasure” and cultural symbol of the nation had come to dominate the discussion. From a purely economic and legal standpoint, forest protection had turned into a moral and political issue. It is not a coincidence that the Special Congress of Forest Owners and Foresters (1911) suggested a new classification for forests requiring protection: in addition to the forests of shelter belts, the Congress identified “public parks” and forests bearing “aesthetic value.” The status of forests as public goods was undeniably growing beyond the purely economic and pragmatic. The growth of “national parks” in the United States and Europe together with the popularization of “monuments of nature” played an important role in the aesthetization of forests in Russia.95 As a result, concerns about the preservation of nature and the preservation of historical monuments and architecture came to be intertwined. One of the projects on the preservation of historical monuments, drawing from the German concept of landscape preservation, included Naturdenkmäler—­ the monuments of nature—­in the category of protected objects.96 The ideas of natural and historical preservation intersected at several junctures. Culture and nature shared the same enemy: the private owner, who had by now lost his “social” status connotation. The “private proprietor,” just a few decades earlier exclusively a noblemen and an aristocrat, could now be a peasant or a bourgeois. The political and social opposition between a pro-­reform bureaucracy

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and anti-­reform nobility that had so dominated the debates on forestry of the 1870s and 1880s had completely lost its meaning by the beginning of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the forests continued to disappear: between 1888 and 1905, twenty-­three out of fifty European provinces lost from 6 to 37 percent of their forested areas.97 Thanks to the law of 1888, the annual rate of clearing woodlands decreased from 902 hectares in 1862–­1888 to 440 hectares in 1888–­ 1914. Still, in 1888–­1914 European Russia lost 2.5 percent of its forest.98 These numbers were all the more lamentable against the backdrop of the success of German forestry—­the point of reference for European and Russian experts. In Germany, from 1878 to 1913 the forested area increased by 865,600 acres due to the massive afforestation.99 The majority of experts observed that the law of 1888 failed to stop timber poaching and did not stimulate effective forestry management. At the same time, from the perspective of landownership and economy the law turned out to be very “constraining.”100 The law, in other words, did not resolve the contradiction between industrial and agricultural development, on the one hand, and the necessity of natural resources conservation, on the other. Even more, the government’s path toward satisfying peasant land hunger would inevitably lead to the further extermination of forests in certain areas. Arable land was by far a more profitable and scarce resource than woodlands, and after the promulgation of the Stolypin laws of 1906, which stimulated the transfer of land from noble landowners to the peasantry via the Peasant Land Bank, landowners had taken to clearing lands in order to put them on the market. Therefore, forests could fall victim to the redistribution of land and the policy of privatization.101 Again, as in 1861, the socially and politically urgent reform of the rural economy indirectly threatened the preservation of forests. In light of the growing threat of deforestation, experts and industrialists continued to insist on the expropriation of private forests. Again, the state in this discussion stepped forward as the only effective guardian of “public property”: only the state could safeguard it for future generations. Brian Bonhomme, in his study of forest legislation, points out that the belief in state control as the only solution to the forest problem was “the single most consensual general aspect to pre-­Revolutionary forest protection debate,” and the idea of state ownership of forests received strong support among foresters.102 The state in this debate was envisioned as a householder, supplied with special knowledge and a unique vision of his estate (the country), distributing resources among its parts and among various landholders; the state was expected to reach a balance between arable land and woodlands across the empire by deploying the mechanisms of expropriation/purchase/exchange. According to a widespread hypothesis about the influence of forests on the climate, a certain calculated amount of forests (protsent lesistosti) was required in all areas of the country, and these “mandatory” woods would belong to the state.103 Hence, the belief in

74  |  Chapter 2 the state as administrator rested in this case on new scientific knowledge about global environmental processes, which could be seen and regulated only “from the top.” The previously mentioned popular argument about scientific forestry as based on nationwide planning and the state as a gardener of the country’s landscape, widely used in discussion in the early nineteenth century, was still in force. Leonid Khodskii in his textbook The Principles of State Economy, repeated this argument in a slightly different vein: state ownership of forests allowed the government to regulate the migration of the labor force in the country.104 Thus, the cameralist arguments in favor of state forest ownership were revived in the early twentieth century, with protectionist policies and the decay of economic liberalism contributing to their popularity.105 Very few foresters attempted to balance the idea of state control and private property. The president of the Congress of Foresters and Forest Owners held in St. Petersburg in 1911, Vladimir Kovalevskii, declared its goal to be finding the proper “dividing line between the state principle [gosudarstvennost’] and private legal interests” in forestry. “State power, as it suppresses private initiative and entrepreneurship, is as harmful as the uncurbed classical Roman right of private ownership of things of state and public importance.”106 A balanced forestry policy, Kovalevskii argued, consisted of a combination of state intervention and enlarged state forests together with state support for private foresting. Nevertheless, the majority of the Congress participants advocated for state control of the forestry business107 and tended to conclude that private forestry “did not have a serious future.”108 This total and unanimous distrust of private forestry was all the more surprising in that nobody questioned the rationality of private land ownership per se, even though the cases of rational land management were perhaps as rare as examples of rational foresting. Why did nobody speak about the preservation of the famous Russian chernozem—­or black soil—­with the same vigor? What about the pollution of water sources? Moreover, examples of rational forestry could certainly be found in Russian provinces: many wealthy landowners invited professional foresters to draw maps, plans, and schemes of wood exploitation,109 and reports about exemplary forest management ran parallel to the chronicles of vandalism on the pages of the Forestry Review.110 In Nizhnii Novgorod province, as the famous Russian soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev and his colleagues had noted, the best forests were those belonging to the largest landowner Baryshnikov.111 In spite of economic theories that refused to acknowledge the rationality of individuals in their treatment of exhaustible resources, those industrialists whose business depended on timber often demonstrated the best examples of rational forest management. The famous Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev was surprised by the perfect organization of forests in the mining areas of the Ural Mountains. The mining industrialists spared no expense for the preservation of forests and their management: “Obviously, the steel plants improved the state of forests,” concluded Mendeleev.112 As an

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example of noneconomic motivation for the rational organization of forests, it is worth mentioning the well-­known forest estates of Count Aleksei Sergeevich Uvarov, a founder of the Moscow Archaeological Society and the pioneer of the movement for historical preservation, who will be discussed later.113 In 1853, Uvarov hired Karl Frantsevich Turmer, a prominent scientist, to manage his forests; he later described his fifty-­year experiment in growing woods at the “Poretzkaia dacha” on Uvarov’s estate.114 “Poretskaia dacha” came to be seen as the standard of artificial foresting; Uvarov received two gold medals and public gratitude that, in view of some of his ambivalent experiences in archaeology (as some modern archaeologists suggest, he unintentionally destroyed important archaeological monuments115), was likely greater than any he received for his professional activity. Whatever the successes of private forestry, however, they did not affect the common belief in the necessity of state control, nor increase faith in private initiative. That the idea of state-­led forest expropriation grew popular might seem astonishing given the widespread distrust of the Russian bureaucracy’s managerial abilities.116 The Forestry Department no less than other bureaus was quite often the target of criticism from experts and economists. The area of forests under the management of the Forest Department grew while the Russian Empire enlarged its territory and centralized the management of resources. From 1868 to 1898, it increased from 139 to 264 million desiatinas, including forests in the Polish provinces (1 million), the Caucasus (5 million), Western Siberia (107 million), and the Irkutsk and Yenisey provinces (12 million); the unmapped forestland in Asia still remained in the management of local authorities and subject to free use by the population. Twenty percent of the state-­held forest area lay in the northern forests called the “tundra”—­a terra incognita only slightly touched by human economic activity. Between 1909 and 1915, the Ministry of Agriculture, led by Alexander Krivoshein, undertook a massive cadastral mapping of forests in Siberia with the goal of preparing lands for resettlement. It hoped to finish the cadastral description of forests in European Russia within ten years, and within twenty to secure the management of forests across the whole empire, including its Asiatic areas. Krivoshein, who was also a chief ideologue of resettlement, dispatched a thousand experts to measure, map, and explore the woods. The results were impressive: from 1909 to 1915, the ministry mapped 106 million desiatinas of forested land (compared to only 7.6 million desiatinas mapped from 1868 to 1898); only the war prevented the completion of Krivoshein’s crusade.117 Nevertheless, the Forest Department, with its modest funding, could hardly handle the management of the vast forestland. The forest area managed by one forester in 1893 ranged from 34,000 desiatinas to 5 million desiatinas in Vologda province.118 A total of 761 foresters controlled the use of more than 220 million desiatinas of forests, with the help of almost thirty thousand peasants and guards. The state was not always a good entrepreneur either: in 1900, about

76  |  Chapter 2 three-­fifths of timber intended for sale was not sold; the state, as well as many nobles, usually sold forests at auction as standing timber, and less than 10 percent came to the market as produce, although this would have been much more profitable.119 Despite the ineffective use of state forest resources, the profitability of the forest economy continued to grow as the price on timber climbed: in 1866, forests earned 4.3 million rubles; in 1898, forest income reached 42.1 million rubles. Forest income grew faster than other kinds of revenue: in the 1890s, the state’s income from the most lucrative spirit monopoly increased by 14.2 percent, custom duties grew by 87.9 percent, the sugar excise grew by 84.3 percent, while the growth of forest income constituted 149.3 percent,120 amounting to tenth place in the list of state incomes. It is, however, unlikely that the successes or failures of state forest management influenced the beliefs of foresters when it came to the perceived advantages of state control. As Nikolai Faleev—­a professor of law at the Forest Institute in Petrograd—­wrote about the axiomatic professional étatism of foresters, it had no rational justification; it was rather “a mysticism, a religion, a credo, a romantic irradiation of the state idea.”121 Paradoxically, the étatism of foresters did not contradict their leftist beliefs. In the late nineteenth century, foresters and the students of the Forest Institute, specifically, were often seen as “red.” The most well-­known of the forester-­revolutionaries was, indeed, Nikolai Shelgunov (1824–­1891). A graduate of the Forestry Institute, he worked for several years at the Forestry Department, studying and teaching courses on the history of forestry legislation while simultaneously supporting friendly connections with the revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevskii and publishing in literary journal The Contemporary (Sovremennik). After his resignation from the Forestry Department in 1862, he went through the stages of a revolutionary career: an imprisonment at Peter and Paul Fortress (1862–­1864) and then exile. Those foresters who were not involved in revolutionary activity perceived their vocation not as a bureaucratic or state service, but rather as a work for public cause. Georgii Morozov (1867–­1920), a prominent expert in the field and a “scientific radical,” as Stephen Brain has called him, first became famous for having graduated from a military school with the rank of officer and then resigning from service to enter the Forest Institute—­this step was perceived as a conversion to a different faith or religion and severed his relations with his family.122 We must also note that new ideas in scientific forestry contributed to the development of new approaches in the treatment of forests:123 Georgii Morozov, who served as an editor of the leading journal the Forestry Review from 1904 to 1918, popularized a new direction that he called “social biology,” based on the similarity between forests and the social community. “The science of forestry is a bio-­social science,”124 asserted Morozov; following the principles of scientific research established by the founder of soil science Vasilii Dokuchaev, he applied a holistic approach to the analysis of nature and used the vocabulary of sociology to analyze the development of the community of trees and plants.

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This “socialization” of forestry science might have also added some weight to the critique of man’s arbitrary treatment of forests. Anyway, forests were much more than just timber or an adjunct to land, as they used to be seen in the late eighteenth century: forests came to be seen as a living organism, as Russia’s patrimony, an eternal resource of wealth for many generations. The contradiction between the abstract faith in the state and the critical attitude toward its representatives points us to the inherently nonpolitical reasons that led most people to support the idea of state ownership of forests. First, the state, of which Russian foresters spoke and wrote so emphatically, was an idea that yet had to be embodied, and that had no connection to the existing political institutions. Second, the idea of state ownership, expropriation, and the nationalization of forests found justification (both rhetorically and theoretically), in the peculiar character of the forest as an object of ownership: it was a social (public, national) treasure or good (blago). “The forest is considered a social good per se, notwithstanding whom it belongs to. This is the main premise that affects the whole construction of the right to own forests. If the forest is a social good, then the entire country is interested in its existence; and . . . it is easy to imagine that in the immediate future, forestry regulations will become the object of not only national legislation, but also international agreements and treaties,” wrote Nikolai Faleev in a textbook, Forestry Law. According to Faleev, the limitations to private property rights were based on “clear proofs of the social importance of forestry.” The government, armed with the “scientific facts,” need not hesitate to lower “the idea of untouchable private property from its high pedestal.”125 The “protected” status of forests meant that they “perform an important social function” and, consequently, belong to the category of “public property” (obshchee dostoianie). Hence, protected forests, ideally, should belong only to someone with the right of “supreme possession”—­that is, to the state, acting as a sovereign (not as a treasury). The expropriation of forests was a legitimate way of pursuing public interests, it was argued, meaning that it was more fair and reasonable to expropriate private forests with public value than it was to force their owners to pursue “social goals” at their own expense.126 The emphatic stress on the rhetoric of common good in the discourse of natural protection produced some uneasiness and even resistance. In modern political and cultural environment, so many things acquired public value and so many new restrictions were placed on individual property rights and liberties that it was impossible to avoid questioning the relative value of public goods. “Forests under regulation! What is this? Why is there no regulation of meadows, marshes, steppes?” wrote Georgii Vysotskii,127 an acknowledged specialist in forestry and soil science, and a participant in Vasilii Dokuchaev’s celebrated steppe expeditions. Vysotskii shared Dokuchaev’s vision of nature in which all elements—­forests, steppes, soil, and climate—­are intertwined, and protection of forests alone made little sense. More important than the object of

78  |  Chapter 2 care, however, was the contradiction between the public good of social justice and material prosperity (for peasants, in particular) and the public good of natural protection. Veniamin Kliuchnikov, speaking at the Congress of Foresters and Forest Owners in 1911, argued that the rhetorical defense of the public good was insufficient justification for the tremendous economic losses caused by the implementation of the forestry laws. The proposition that the “forest is a [public] good” (les—­blago), he argued, was based on the “misleading assumption that forests are essential to life.” Kliuchnikov suggested that timber can and should be replaced by other materials (as a material for construction, fuel, joinery, and so on). The vision of forests as a national good was based on the stereotype that “Russia from ancient times had been wooden,” although it was well known that “wooden Russia burns down once every 20 to 50 years.” Thus, the reasons and limits imposed by forest protection had to be carefully thought out. Kliuchnikov argued against the subjugation of all private forests to state regulation and against so drastic a limitation of property rights: “The forestry law, as any law, has to protect not only the interests of the whole state but also those of its individual citizens”; hence, if the government believed that forests needed protection, the only option was for the state to expropriate the forests. Only expropriation would prevent the state from imposing unprofitable methods of forest exploitation on private owners and seeking “to achieve the public good at the expense of individuals rather than the state itself.”128 The twists and turns of the debates surrounding forestry tempt one to conclude that economic rationales were rarely taken into account or, at the very least, the costs and benefits of the different forms of forest ownership were rarely carefully measured or estimated. One could even suggest that the dissatisfaction with private property was a product of abstract reasoning, the construction of new values by experts genuinely interested in elevating their own status through the establishment of public forestry. This is, of course, not true: the deforestation in Russia, especially after 1861, was not totally a myth, while the mechanisms of private property in Russia proved to be not perfectly working. Why did private ownership of forests and other resources turn out to be inefficient? What contributed to the growing dissatisfaction with the idea that had been celebrated by many Russian intellectuals in the early nineteenth century? The awkwardness of absolute private ownership of natural resources was already noted in the 1830s–­1840s, but it attracted new attention after the emancipation of peasants, which multiplied the number of property owners and, releasing human and economic resources, in the long run fostered economic growth. The creation of an estate of free agriculturalists and the development of private ownership of land was a dream come true for many reformers in the first half of the nineteenth century, but, paradoxically, it turned out that governing a society of private owners was so monumental a task that the Russian

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state could not handle it. For noble landowners, the elimination of state tutelage and simultaneous development of multiple restrictions on private ownership brought new challenges and fewer benefits: nobles who used to perceive private property as a privilege and a grant from the monarchy could not absorb the idea of ownership bound by obligations and commitments. For peasants, the emancipation and the declaration of peasant private property complicated things enormously: rules replaced customs, litigations in court came in place of informal negotiations with landlords. The emancipation also rendered new opportunities, since the gifts of nature granted by benevolent Catherine the Great to nobility after 1861 automatically became the property of peasant communes. The emancipation of peasants thus revealed that if absolute private property is not supplied with the appropriate mechanisms of easy and hassle-­free transfers (expropriation, lease, purchase, or alienation), it could turn into a brake, rather than an engine, of progress. Facing the difficulties of governing the society of private owners, the state attempted to postpone the expansion of private ownership: it preserved different intermediate institutions, such as peasant communes, that facilitated governance and helped the state avoid “face-­to-­face” contact with property holders.129 There was another problem that made the operation of property so burdensome: Russian society was atomized into multiple clusters with little trust or social ties among them, and this lack of social cohesion made the negotiations around the transfer and use of resources difficult and frustrating. The government believed that the estate-­based composition of society was a crucial condition for the stability of autocracy, and by all means supported and deepened the clash between estates. Experts and producers, for their part, believed that the problem of property lay in institutions, and largely overlooked the lack of trust and connections among social groups. From the 1860s to the 1900s, Russian scientists, lawyers, economists, and industrialists plunged into the debates on property and worked out different models of ownership of natural resources, ranging from allowing the expropriation of resources for public needs to their total nationalization. The debates on forestry demonstrate that the issue of property rights came to be closely intertwined with cultural and social issues: deforestation appeared as a symptom and corollary of the demise of the noble economy and the backwardness of the peasant population. Nevertheless, the Russian government repeatedly failed to connect the malfunctioning of the property system with flaws in the estate structure. Similarly, while designing the reform of the agrarian and social order, it often failed to anticipate the effects of reform on other spheres of the economy. This failure to analyze the system of property rights in its entirety was all the more striking in view of the similarity of the problems continually arising in various spheres. One of the most revealing parallels lay in the comparison between forestry and mining, both of which were challenged by the transformation of the system of property rights.

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Peasants against Industrialization? As we have seen, the liberation of serfs created multiple problems for the management of forests. Even more tensions arose in the areas where peasants turned out to be the owners of mineral riches—­coal, ores, clay, and others (most oil fields, luckily for the state, were located on peasant lands in the Caucasus, which the state considered its own domain). Likely due to the modest scale of coal and ore production in the 1860s, the potential value of resources hidden under the surface of peasant lands was not taken into consideration during the elaboration of the emancipation laws.130 The compilers of the laws on emancipation could not predict the future of the market for minerals. The emancipation and the economic ideology surrounding the agrarian reforms of the 1860s set the pace for the development of private property rights: more and more people were supposed to become private landowners, with all the corresponding rights of property granted by Catherine the Great. In 1875, the Ministry of Interior confirmed the right of former state peasants to dispose of mineral deposits on their lands as they wished. With this ruling, the resources of 116 million desiatinas of land (excluding the Baltic provinces and the lands of the Don Cossacks) were transferred into the hands of the peasant population. “This entire huge area  .  .  . [became] unavailable for the mining industry, paralyzed by unrestricted private owners and their petty land allotments,”131 wrote Victor Mylov in 1892. Industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s ensured an ever-­growing demand for coal and ore in European Russia, while access to new fields and deposits depended on the whims of a handful of fortunate owners. The structure of land ownership in Russia—­large territories concentrated in the hands of a few rich landowners, alongside millions of small peasant allotments grouped in peasant communes—­made it even more difficult to overcome legal obstacles. The future of Russia’s richest ore deposit in Krivoi Rog (modern Ukraine) depended on the willingness of two or three peasant societies and seven or eight individual landowners to renew short-­term rent agreements (twelve years was the maximum term allowed by Russian legislation). This group of landowners dictated ore prices for the whole region. In the 1890s, during the period of the so-­called ore-­rush, prices nearly doubled, and rents consumed from 30 to 50 percent of the final cost of the product. The situation was all the more frustrating because the future of the mining industry depended on the “dark peasant masses.”132 The industrialists complained that it was especially difficult to negotiate with peasants who insisted on absurd conditions and then violated them. For instance, one peasant society in Krivoi Rog prohibited building a railway for the delivery of coal and demanded that people use instead their cartage services at unbelievably high prices.133 The Company for the Production of Mercury, A. Auerbach and Co, purchased 500 desiatinas of land in Ekaterinoslav

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province from the peasant society of village Zaitsevo, for 350,000 rubles; paying 700 rubles for one desiatina of land, while the normal price in the area did not exceed 60 rubles.134 Extortions, combined with the “unlimited dissoluteness” of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of rural authorities, and the negligence of the local administration, created insurmountable roadblocks to the development of mining, complained engineers and entrepreneurs. Many producers saw only one means of resolving this dilemma: the return to Peter the Great’s principles of “free mining.” No one even tried to figure out why the negotiations with the peasants devolved into such an impossible enterprise. The government, however, approached the problem from another point of view. In 1890 and 1891, the governor of the Ekaterinoslav province,Vladimir Karlovich von Shlippe, providing evidence of the peasants’ inability to dispose of the mineral riches hidden in their lands, suggested introducing strict “surveillance” over the peasant economy. Peasants, testified von Shlippe, spoiled earth deposits by their barbarian methods of exploitation: digging small “holes” (iamki) that made impossible further use of proper mechanisms and methods, they “disfigured the land surface turning arable land into useless desert.”135 Peasants often had to sell coal or ore to speculators who credited them in the spring, when they needed money so badly, for the obligation to deliver coal and ore that they would dig in the fall or winter. Neither could peasants lease their lands on normal conditions due to limited period of rent allowed; drunkenness and arrears evidenced their inability to manage the money they earned on renting lands to entrepreneurs. Therefore, peasants must not be allowed to dispose of the mineral deposits on their own lands as they wished. While considering the problem of peasant ownership of minerals, the central government put the issue more generally. To support the limitation of property rights over mineral deposits, the Ministry of State Domains provided a detailed analysis of the state’s “duty” in regard to private property: it mentioned the government’s obligation to control hunting in private woods, and regulate woodcutting in order to preserve resources for future generations. Both wild animals and forests are “renewable resources,” while minerals are not, said the ministry’s report. Hence, the state’s prior duty was to protect mineral deposits from “barbarian exploitation.”136 How could the government apply this strategy to the use of mineral resources? While it was relatively easy give a more or less precise definition of “poaching” or “forest vandalism,” the “barbarian exploitation” of minerals, or, as the government put it once, “Asiatic methods to use the gifts of nature” deposited in land, was almost impossible to define. Nevertheless, the government decided to intervene and elaborate different methods of control over the use of minerals, depending on the social status of land owners. Private owners, under threat of fines, were obliged to follow “the rules of the art of mining” and pre­ sent plans for mines to the local offices of the Department of Mining. The rules for peasant societies (even for those who had already redeemed their lands and

82  |  Chapter 2 become full owners of their allotments) differed substantially. In addition to the general rules of exploitation that subjected their economy to the control of local offices of the Department of Mining, peasants were restricted in their rights to lease lands for mining.137 Most importantly, peasants could not receive the rent for their lands entirely: only one-­third of the money could go to the “society’s treasury” (mirskoi kapital), while two-­thirds had to be deposited in state bonds to the State Bank, with the provision that the peasant society could use this money only for the purchase of immovable common property (real estate), having received special permission from the Ministers of both the Interior and Finances.138 This is how the government perceived its task of taking care of peasants’ well-­being: the new order of mining on peasants’ land corresponded to the policy of preserving peasants’ social isolation and was a logical continuation of the previously mentioned law of 1893 prohibiting the sale of peasant lands. In these circumstances, peasants were, of course, tempted to request even higher rents and, since they would not get access to two-­thirds of the sum, to introduce additional requirements. Not the rent, but the opportunity to earn on the construction of mines often was the main point of negotiations between producers and peasants. The copies of agreements found in the archival papers of the Department of Mining prove this convincingly: the renters were to pay, along with rent for lands, a certain amount for every pood (16.38 kilograms) or voz (cartload) of the product (iron ore, clay, and so on); they were obliged to hire only peasants from that village for the mining works, loading, hauling, carting, or, if their labor force did not suffice, the wages for “locals” must always exceed the wages for outsiders.139 Therefore, the previously mentioned case of the peasant society prohibiting the building of a railway for the delivery of coal and foisting their cartage service on the entrepreneur was quite common and very understandable. The burdensome conditions of renting lands with minerals resulted from restrictive rules of mining on peasants’ land that made peasants resort to various roundabout ways to extract revenues from their proprietary rights. The government’s policy of preserving the special status of peasants’ lands and saving mineral riches from “barbarous exploitation” turned out to be bad for industrialists, too. The government based its claims not only on its right to “take measures against the abuses of underground property,” but on the specific status of peasant land “granted [by the state] for the provision of their [peasants’] existence.”140 (Here again we see a recognition of the fact the peasants had no property right to land that they legally “owned” after 1861.) In 1904, the minister of interior Viacheslav Plehve offered to extend the rules constraining the renting of peasant lands not only to the communal fields but also to lands in the individual use of peasant families (nadelnye zemli).141 Although this measure was approved, the course of the government’s policy toward peasantry

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very soon began to change, and these changes brought new challenges for the mining industry. The revolution of 1905 laid bare the urgency of the land question in Russia’s countryside: to cure the land hunger and avoid the expropriation of nobles’ lands for the needs of peasants, the government forced the privatization of communal lands and peasants’ resettlement to the underpopulated areas of the empire. The promulgation of Stolypin’s celebrated agrarian laws in 1906, which forced the separation of communal lands and rearrangement of land use, further underscored the tension between the government’s policies, aimed at the consolidation of private land ownership, and the aspirations of the industrial community to free lands for geological exploration. Stolypin’s fixation on promoting peasant landownership and breaking apart the peasant commune blinded him to several important side effects of his reform. For mining industrialists, Stolypin’s law was a catastrophe: before the reform, they had dealt with a handful of peasant society patriarchs, some compliant, some stubborn; after the communes were disassembled, they would have to conclude agreements with millions of individual peasants. The strategy of satisfying land hunger included furnishing peasants with state lands: a huge portion of state lands, once open for free mining, were supposed to pass into the hands of new individual landholders (via Peasant Land Bank), which would automatically mean the peasant privatization of state mineral deposits. As Vladimir Strukgov pointed out, the more productive the activity of the Peasant Land Bank, the worse off mining industrialists would be.142 The Russian business community immediately reacted to the threats created by the new agrarian order. The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers solicited the government’s attention to its industrial needs and asked that the new agrarian laws be reconsidered, and that property rights to the surface of land and deposits within land be separated. They asked the state to retain its ownership of minerals when distributing state lands to the peasants and to retain peasant communes as the owners of minerals, regardless of the privatization of individual land allotments.143 After long consultations, the government allowed this reconfiguration: ownership of land was split into two parts—­subterranean property and the ownership of land surface. The law of June 14, 1910, clarified that peasants were to receive ownership only of the surface of their lands, while the “peasant society” retained the rights to minerals. If a mineral deposit was discovered, each member of the community would receive an equal monetary share of the compensation for the alienation or the use of lands in the community, while the owner of that particular parcel of land (in addition to his share) would be compensated for any losses caused by the mining operations.144 This decision seemed fair because many peasant communes, before Stolypin’s reform, periodically reapportioned their lands in

84  |  Chapter 2 the interests of equalizing the opportunities and burdens of their members. The reform ended this practice; henceforth, all members of a commune had an equal right to benefit from what was recently a common resource. At the same time, after the elimination of the peasant commune as a juridical person and landowner, the peasant society became the new administrative unit for a given locality. The peasant society retained the commune’s multiple administrative and judicial functions, including its role as local representative in negotiations with industrialists. This outcome, surely, was little more than palliative, since it did not resolve the conflict between the landowners and the capitalists; it was also hard to imagine how the rule of equal compensation for individual parcels of land would work in practice.

Unlocking Hidden Resources: Minerals as “Public Property” Both the government and the industrial community found the property regime of mineral resources awkward and harmful to national economic development. Russia kept falling behind European countries in the production of iron, and this lag was often attributed to the inappropriate regime of property rights.145 Even the boom of railway construction did not stimulate production, as happened in other countries: quite the contrary, to the great shame of Russian producers, at the foot of an ore-­bearing mountain with the characteristic name “Grace” (Blagodat’) in the Urals lay imported railroad ties.146 The issue of restoring “mining freedom” was raised as early as the mid-­ 1860s. One of the first arguments in favor of the reform of property rights came from the Russian part of Poland, which had a similar regime of access to minerals, and after the emancipation of peasants in 1864 encountered the same problems in settling disputes between the industrialists and the owners of land, whose number increased from ten to five hundred thousand. In 1867, the prominent Russian geologist Alexei Antipov submitted a report that compared the production of coal in Prussia and Poland. Both Prussian and Polish mines extracted coal from the same geological bed, with identical conditions. However, the level of production differed drastically: the bed appeared to have “a randomly drawn line on the surface of land—­the border” that “cut the mineral riches altogether,” wrote the geologist. In Poland, “the layers of coal . . . come out on the surface of land, so that the railroad line that brings up to 10 billion poods of Prussian coal yearly for the needs of the Polish economy lay precisely on these layers.”147 This picture of the Polish economy thrown into decay by improper legal conditions appeared very convincing, and in 1868 Alexander II approved a memorandum allowing free mining in the Polish provinces.148 The introduction of a new law on Polish mining in 1870 based on European (German and French) models sparked a movement to limit the property rights of

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Russian noble and peasant landowners—­which gained strength at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Polish coal industry began to surpass Russian coal production. In 1870, the Polish coal industry produced around 20 billion poods of coal; in 1878, it produced 55 billion poods; the production of cast iron, iron, and zinc also increased immensely.149 For its part, the government demonstrated its decisiveness to open state resources for private exploitation: in 1887, it introduced free mining on unoccupied state land. Anyone who discovered a natural mineral deposit on treasury lands could claim the right to its exploitation. The new order facilitated access to mineral riches, and during its first years, produced great enthusiasm.150 Nevertheless, unencumbered mining on treasury lands did little to change the situation dramatically—­except to further spur debates about private property. The rhetoric of a public good more important than private concerns came to dominate discussion about mining and property rights at the fin-­de-­siècle, spurred on by dissatisfaction with Russia’s economic position in the burgeoning world economy and the example of new legislation in other industries. In spite of the high customs duties imposed in the 1890s, the Russian iron industry could neither satisfy the needs of the domestic economy nor compete on the world market. American cans filled with meat cost far less in London stores, wrote the Russian economist Anton Radzig, than did Russian cans that were empty.151 Meanwhile the law on forestry issued in 1888 gave further encouragement to those who sought to limit the privileges of landowners in favor of the public good. Instead of caving to the complaints of the nobility, the government pressed forward with its program to limit the freedoms of private property owners, signifying an important first step in the reconsideration of the balance between public and private interests. Experts on the mining industry considered the state’s recognition of the public importance of forestry as a turning point, the beginning of a new stage in state policy.152 Those in favor of limiting private property strengthened their arguments by contextualizing mineral deposits as one in a broader array of natural resources, supported by the legislation on forestry, railway construction, and other similar issues.153 Defending Russia’s natural riches from destructive exploitation by unprofessional and unregulated property owners was one of the main arguments for the reconsideration of property rights. Metaphorically, mineral resources were often compared to other exhaustible and explicitly national fruits of nature: expendable coal or ore deposits acquired the same public value as vanishing forests; underground reservoirs of oil were compared to water streams. Additional arguments for the limitation of property rights were based on the idea of the “ national economy” (narodnoe khoziaistvo).154 The concept of the national economy, which became the cornerstone of economic policy in the 1890s, justified the increase in state regulation of the market economy. As one official paper on mining law pointed out in the late 1890s, the time of the free trade economy, with its emphasis on the protection of private property, had

86  |  Chapter 2 passed. The social and economic policy of the 1880s and 1890s—­characterized by protectionism, the expropriation of private property for railway construction, forestry laws, and laws on hunting, fishing, and labor policy—­had formed a new system of relationships between the state and society. The state “could not afford anymore to stop at the inviolability of property rights” when public interests were concerned.155 Thus, the state was supposed to interfere in relations between coal producers and landowners and to resolve the knotty question of “to whom natural riches belonged.” Conflicts around property issues eventually called into question the long-­established vision of the Russian state; paradoxically, it was Russian industrialists—­the proponents of “free mining”—­who asked the state to interfere. Even so, there was no unified vision of the state’s role in property relations. The position of producers in the debate on subterranean property largely depended on their origins, the character of their business, and their political affiliation. While the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers argued for limiting property rights, the representative of the Ural industry vigorously defended private property.156 Dmitrii Karnitskii, speaking on behalf of the Ural mining industrialists, objected to the suggestions of Kharkov’s Congresses because any violation of private property (leaving minerals at the state’s disposal) contradicted the spirit of Russian laws.157 The leading organ of the All-­Russian Congress of Industry and Trade (Industry and Trade) published his article with the comment that “The editorial board does not share the author’s opinion about the advantages of private ownership of minerals.”158 The structure of land property in the Ural region differed from that of the Donbass region: Ural ore deposits were located on the vast lands of Bashkir peasant societies, Cossack and treasury lands, and the abundant estates of a few mining magnates, whose holdings dated back to gifts from Peter the Great. By the end of the nineteenth century, a few aristocrats (the Stroganovs, Abamelek-­Lazarevs, and Sheremetevs) owned estates of a size comparable to the territories of some European states; they fiercely opposed changes to the current property regime and did not want to share their monopoly with a new bourgeoisie, or engage with its presumably very different political agenda. The industrious aristocrats spoke against any changes in the regime of property rights to minerals. Politically and socially, they imagined themselves to be English landlords and frequently referred to England, where “free mining” did not exist and private property remained untouchable. Prince Semen Abamelek-­Lazarev, an industrialist from the Urals, a king of the mining industry and by that time the owner of almost one million desiatinas of land and a beautiful palace in St. Petersburg, represented the “aristocratic opposition” to the reform of property: he spoke against the introduction of “free mining” and the restriction of landowners’ property rights.159 (Echoing the rhetoric of the “aristocratic opposition” to forestry law in the 1870s–­1880s, Semen Abamelek-­Lazarev drew a parallel between the emancipation of peasants in 1861 and the expropriation of minerals: in 1861, the

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state guaranteed the redemption of nobles’ lands; and so now, it would have to pay for the expropriation of property rights over minerals.) Thus, the coal producers from different regions strove to push decisions favorable to them through the government, with the result that the meetings of the government’s Council on Mining demonstrated strikingly diverse attitudes to the problems of mining and ownership of natural riches:160 some people argued for the abolition of private ownership of minerals, and others for their inviolability. At the heart of the debate about the ownership of minerals lay a question—­ who would own natural resources once they had been deprivatized? While some industrialists argued that mineral deposits, once expropriated, would pass directly into the hands of the government, others claimed that no one, not even the government as a private owner, could possess the treasures of nature. In this reading, minerals were by definition public, and as such, they seemed to require the invention of a new kind of property—­public property. Some experts thought that in the near future, all minerals would be transferred into the category of state (government) property.161 But the experience of the oil industrialists demonstrated that the “governmentalization” of resources in fact meant their privatization by the treasury, as the state did not distinguish between the public domain and possessions of the treasury.162 The state as an entrepreneur lost its credentials in the eyes of Russian industrialists: the difficulties associated with the access to state-­owned oilfields and impudent corruption damaged the relationship between industrial community and the state. Thus, producers argued for a change in the state’s role—­from the state as a proprietor and a householder to the state as an external mediator and distributor of the public wealth, which was to legally belong to the “nation.” They argued in favor of depriving landowners of their ownership rights and recognizing minerals as national (public) property.163 Minerals, as well as air and water, wrote the lawyer Abel Yanovskii, “are the gifts of nature.”164 The disposal of these gifts of nature had to be transferred to the hands of the state, as the nation’s representative; “this does not mean, however, that they should belong to the treasury, but under no circumstances should they belong to the owner of the surface of land,” concluded Yanovskii.165 Indeed, the concept of “public property” offered as an alternative to private property, raised many doubts in terms of practical implementation, not to mention the political consequences of expropriation. First, the mechanism of “compulsory alienation” assumed “just” compensation of the costs of expropriated property. In the case of minerals, it was hardly possible to compensate owners for the cost of both their land and all of its deposits, since the greater part of lands had never been geologically explored. “What will the nation possess and what possession will it be defending if we don’t even know the content of our land deposits?” asked Vsevolod Udintsev in his book on the new field of legal studies, mining law.166 Despite the fast advancement of the earth sciences in Russia, its mineral riches still remained largely unexplored. Only in

88  |  Chapter 2 the 1880s did the government begin its work on the drawing of the empire’s first geological map, and the process of mapping mineral resources in the immense territory of the country was far from being complete.167 Udintsev’s question drew near to the opinion expressed by some proponents of free mining: minerals do not belong to anyone, as it is impossible to possess something invisible and indefinable (in size, price, and so on). Thus, “free mining” need not mean expropriation—­rather, it assumed the limitation of property rights to the surface of land, with the attendant obligation to open that surface up for geological exploration. When deposits were found during the exploration, a landowner should receive privileges in the exploitation of fields or deposits. In order to make the scheme workable, some experts suggested separating property rights to the surface of land from the right to exploit its deposits. This solution appeared very convenient, all the more so when in 1902 the Senate decided to allow the selling of mining rights, separate from the surface of land. In 1902, the Ruling Senate considered the case of landowner Kozhin, who sold the right to extract iron ores and other minerals from his land to a group of Belgian entrepreneurs. The Senate approved the deal as legal and classified the transfer of the right to extract minerals as the sale of movable property. For many entrepreneurs, this decision opened “a new era” in the development of the mining industry by removing many restrictions to the access to mineral deposits: for instance, joint-­stock companies and Jews who were not allowed to buy land now could buy “minerals” (that is, the right of exploitation), qualified as movable property.168 This rule did not work for peasant societies whose contracts were carefully reviewed by local administration; however, almost 200 companies used a new loophole in the legislation opened by the Senate’s decision and concluded contracts for the exploitation of their land’s deposits.169 The separation of the ownership of minerals from the ownership of land exemplified the strategy of making private property flexible and compliant to the changes in the economic environment without subjecting property rights to any restriction. This model had precedents in European law: the Imperial Petroleum Law issued in Austria in 1884, which resulted from long debates on the issue of private or state ownership of minerals, introduced a special, as Alison Frank has called it, “intermediate” status for mineral rights “between the poles of landowners’ absolute sovereignty and outright Crown control.”170 This law established new units of ownership—­“oil fields,” separated from the ownership of land. In essence, Kozhin’s ownership of underground minerals represented exactly the same category of property. While continuing the struggle for “the freedom of mining,” Russian industrialists also worked to adapt private property to the needs of industry: they urged the government to extend the time limits of lease agreements to ninety years,171 to secure the rights of leasers and legislatively confirm the permission to buy below-­ground property without land. The short terms of leases and the

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lack of guarantees led industrialists to use the cheapest tools and methods of exploitation, which often left mines in a condition that did not allow further exploitation, argued the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers.172 Entrepreneurs did not take the risk of investing money in building concrete constructions and used timber instead, they did not dig deep mines because it was costly, and the effectiveness of their production often did not exceed 30 percent.173 Thus, the defects of the property rights regime were as harmful for mineral riches as they were for forests. While the government expressed its firm disapproval of the “freedom of mining” on private lands, the strategy of changing the rules for the access to subterranean property was the only realistic path to reform. The government discussed new rules regulating the access to the land deposits between 1911 and 1915, until the deficit of fuel exacerbated by the war forced it to take a few steps in the direction of greater control over the use and distribution of minerals. However, the issues of property rights and mechanisms facilitating the exploitation of resources remained unresolved.

Property and Economy The development of a rational timber industry and the production of coal and steel were all held back by similar problems in the regulation of property rights. This was not a coincidence: these areas of production were strongly connected to each other. The abundance of forests accounted for Russia’s brief industrial triumph in the eighteenth century; but when other countries switched from timber to coal, Russian heavy industry revealed its technological backwardness and proved unable to catch up to the innovations of other countries. Although the ore-­bearing lands of Krivoi Rog were felicitously located close to the coalfields of Donetsk, their production could not satisfy the needs of the enormous empire. Locomotives on Russian railways continued to burn timber (in 1880, timber amounted to 49 percent of train fuel174), thus contributing to deforestation. Similarly, metalworking plants in the Urals represented a unique example of heavy industry based exclusively on the consumption of timber.175 The coal mines of the Russian south and west (Poland) were located fairly close to big cities, but even there, the lack of a transportation network made delivery unbelievably expensive. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the government accounted for its inability to build waterways connecting the areas of energy production to the main areas of consumption by pointing to the inviolability of ownership rights around rivers, while industrialists failed to negotiate with water-­owners and construct hydropower stations to replace expensive coal. Indeed, the production of mineral fuel and steel grew very fast, especially in 1910–­1913, but the needs of industry and cities grew at an even greater rate. Even before the beginning of the World War I, Russia suffered from a chronic “fuel hunger”: in 1913, the government was forced to cancel

90  |  Chapter 2 duties on the import of foreign coal.176 After 1914, the fuel deficit reached such unprecedented levels that in 1916 the government approved a law on the requisition of coal. Was private property to blame for hampering industrialization in Russia or not? Certainly, the structure of property rights was only one of many factors for the delay; the technological lag was perhaps the most important among them. Moreover, this analysis of the debates about property and the practice of settling disputes has proved that the form of property—­private, state, or communal—­ was far from the only or even the primary condition of economic productivity. Nor was the dilemma of rational property and economic progress unique to Russia: Max Weber was puzzled by the question of how England, notorious for the clumsiness and uncertainty of its laws on property, became the leader of industrialization, while Germany with its perfectly rational, Roman-­law-­based system of law did not demonstrate similar achievements.177 Joshua Getzler, in his analysis of the dependency between property and development, has proved that Weber, while focusing on the institutional structures of property rights, overlooked many additional factors that helped the English legal system adjust to new economic needs, whereas the German model of “absolute property often impeded the swift movement and deployment of resources and responsibilities necessary for development and modernization.” Getzler suggests that Weber’s rationalism (in relation to property) “was a conservative force” in comparison to the “relativist system such as England’s.”178 The case of England often came up in the debates on property in Russia: in England, as in Russia, private owners held absolute rights to minerals and other natural resources. However, the Russian economy depended on coal imports from England, while at the same time coal producers blamed the system of property rights for industrial underdevelopment.179 Therefore, Getzler’s argument appears plausible: not the form of property, but rather the constellation of subtle mechanisms that govern property relations, and the social and cultural conditions in which property is nested, can turn a property system into either a brake or an engine of industrial development.180 The Russian system of property was inflexible and clumsy: it did not allow for the easy and cheap transfer of property. This awkwardness of laws was not compensated for by the flexibility of legal and administrative practice. It suffices to mention the underdevelopment of the institution of rent. As we already know, land property could be leased for a term of twelve years or less, with a few exceptions allowing longer leasing terms.181 The reconsideration of the laws on land rent was raised a few times: in 1835, the minister of finance Georg [Egor] Kankrin suggested extending the term up to fifty years (his suggestion was rejected); the question of rent came up again during the preparation of the emancipation, which required opening new possibilities for land transfers.182 Finally, in the late 1890s, Anatolii Kulomzin, the head of the committees on the Siberian railroad and land reform in the Far East, once

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again—­w ithout success—­suggested extending the terms of rent as a means of fostering the colonization of Siberia. The state did not allow landowners and renters to settle leasing conditions independently, mostly because it favored the surveillance and tutelage that control offered: the government explained the short term of rent by citing the need to protect the interests of contractors, their potential creditors, or heirs.183 Allowing longer terms of private land lease could have resolved multiple financial, social, and economic problems; however, nothing was done to ease the access to state and private land resources. Along with the social and economic development of the country inevitably grew a tension between the desire to safeguard private property rights and the need to free natural resources from the strictures of these rights. It might seem natural that the producers argued for reform; what remains unclear, however, is why many of them chose such a radical route for reform, favoring the limitation of private property, expropriation or nationalization. For the adherents of “free mining,” political and economic “freedom” meant opening private lands for business initiative. The rhetoric of economic freedom (which also meant the growth of state intrusion) in the mouths of the leaders of Russian industry sounded more like the language of socialists: “Mineral riches,” wrote the head of the Moscow Society of Manufacturers and Plants’ Owners (1907–­1917) Yulii Guzhon, “have to be excluded from use by private persons and moved under state control, for more appropriate and expedient use in the interests of all the popular masses [v interesakh vsei narodnoi massy].”184 “In a free country, the free access to minerals [svoboda na nedra zemli] has to triumph” over private interests, providing all interested parties with the right to “explore, mine and use mineral riches, without asking the landowner’s permission.”185 To distance his plans from radical land expropriation and nationalization programs, Guzhon pointed out that while the constitutional democrats and socialists advocated the expropriation of lands from one social class for the benefit of another (the peasantry), his program of free mining established minerals as the property “of the state and the whole nation.”186 The rhetoric of free and open access to public/national goods dominated propaganda for the “freedom of mining.” “Unsympathetic at first sight, the seizure [of property] leads to unexpectedly salutary consequences,” wrote the law professor Vladimir Strukgov. The “strong and powerful” voice of the state would restrain the “private arbitrariness of certain landowners, with their principle of ‘I do whatever I want.’ ” In the future, state ownership of minerals would even encourage the development of private initiative because the state, having charted a path toward the application of new knowledge, techniques, and capital, would ultimately transfer the task of mining to private concessions. “Free mining  .  .  . is the noble child of the likely ugly idea, the initial usurpation of power,” concluded Strukgov, calling his compatriots to endorse expropriation.187

92  |  Chapter 2 It might seem paradoxical that the coal and steel producers, whom Susan MacCaffray has portrayed as people “aspiring to create an industrial Russia with a liberal face,”188 called for the dismantling of private property—­a symbol of classical liberalism. It is also surprising to see them criticizing “state socialism”—­the governmental policy based on the surveillance and distrust of private business—­while at the same time advocating state regulation of property relations. Ruth Roosa has explained this contradiction as resulting from the theoretical belief in the importance of centralized planning for the industrial development and the dissatisfaction and fear of administrative tutelage and abusive state intervention: this inconsistency eventually gave “rise to protestations among academic economists against ‘the manifest illogic’ of its position.”189 At the same time, the discrepancy between the striving for independence from bureaucratic tutelage and the aspiration for a stronger state will not appear so dramatic if we take into account the transformation of liberal ideology and the new vision of the state that emerged in the result of this transformation. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the “idea” of the state, cherished by experts and businessmen, was quite distant from the existing bureaucratic structures of tsarist administration. The reform of property rights was both a trigger and a means for the large-­scale state reform.

3 Nationalizing Rivers, Expropriating Lands The story of fisheries on the Emba River, discussed in chapter 1, had an interesting ending. In 1802, the government ruled to expropriate Count Ivan Kutaisov’s lands and his monopoly of fishing on the Caspian seashore, and, notwithstanding the illegality of this acquisition, generously compensated the owner for the loss of property. In 1842, it decided to “nationalize” the Caspian fishing resources and to provide free public access to the sea, bought the entire seacoast, one versta (1.06 kilometers) deep: for the expropriation of the entire Caspian coast, the treasury paid 1,005,146 rubles. The government addressed the issue very thoroughly: in 1853–­1856, to ensure proper regulation on public fishing, it dispatched an expedition led by the famous naturalist Karl Maksimovich Baer (Karl Ernst von Baer) to explore the fauna of the sea, and on the basis of its conclusions, elaborated rules for access to fishing resources (1865).1 The Caspian Sea with all its treasures became a “state” property. The purchase of the Caspian seashore represented a unique example of the state using its authority to declare an object of nature free from private ownership. The sea is by definition “public” and not liable to private appropriation. However, the principle of “inherently public (or private)” character that defines the status of a thing had no such value in nineteenth-­century legal thinking. Private ownership of big rivers seems equally absurd and economically irrational to us today as the ownership of seas, but it was not obvious for everyone in the nineteenth century. In the legal mindset of that time, the inviolability of property given by a ruler took precedence over economic reasons. The opposite point of view suggesting that the system of property must adapt to changing economic needs and conditions slowly carved its way in legal imagination. The main proponents of that view supported the idea of nationalizing rivers, or expropriating the rights of the owners to use water resources of streams for various purposes such as irrigation and the production of electric energy. The realization of these proposals was blocked by the unwillingness and inability of the state to take upon itself the realization of this reform. Only the state, the “monopolist of expropriation,” as the famous Russian lawyer Nikolai Korkunov had called it,2 could use its power to seize private properties for public needs. However, the Russian state proved to be very reluctant in using this capacity,

94  |  Chapter 3 thereby provoking discontent and criticism of its “weakness” among lawyers, economists, scientists, and engineers. The capacity of the state is often measured by its ability to enforce the security of property.3 In theory, a “stronger” state provides better guarantees for property holders than a “weaker” one. It would be reasonable to suggest that the strong state would also more often interfere in the sphere of private ownership by regulating the use of property and combating the abuses of property rights, establishing restrictions, monitoring the amount of wealth accumulated by its subjects or citizens, and levying and collecting taxes. A “strong” state may also resort more often than a “weak” state to its power to expropriate properties (even with fair compensation) for the realization of its public projects. In this sphere, the ambivalence of state power in regard to private property becomes explicit. The efficiency of state institutions and the state’s commitment to modernization may contradict its adherence to the principles of liberal governance. It is not a coincidence that the greatest infrastructural and construction projects were conducted under the auspices of regimes that were criticized for their illiberal policies. Of course, autocratic and dictatorial regimes were more inclined to express their greatness through grandiose endeavors. It is also true that they were more likely to use state power to seize private possessions and lands to realize their initiatives. Modern democracies have resolved this controversy between the needs of modernization and the allegiance to the rule of law, the power of the state, and the principles of noninterference through well-­elaborated mechanisms of compensation and dispute resolution. Still, the correlation between a state’s capacity and the functioning of its property rights system opens a useful path to the analysis of the state and its relations with society and individuals. A firm definition of a state’s strength or weakness is elusive.4 How should we measure this strength—­in the number of state officials per square mile or per capita? By the size of the state budget? Or in the amount of property held and managed by state institutions? The criteria of assessment are multiple, and some of them have no numerical expressions. Nevertheless, experts and analysts—­and nineteenth-­century Russian intellectuals were not an exception—­often expressed their vision of the state in terms of strength, weakness, and abilities. As we have seen in the discussion on forests and minerals, Russian professional and industrial elites were quite unhappy with the state’s passivity and its reluctance to take on the management of common resources. The government explained its withdrawal from this sphere as an expression of its allegiance to the principle of private property. In this chapter, I will try to analyze how the Russian state used its power to regulate the use of one publicly important resource—­rivers, which had been rendered into the private ownership of nobles by Catherine the Great’s manifesto of 1782. A comparison of the treatment of rivers with other spheres of expropriation,

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across diverse geographical areas, including the Russian southern colonies, will show when and why the state was eager to seize private properties, when it refused to do so, and why.

Contested Rivers Tensions around water grew dramatically after the peasant emancipation, while the main issue—­which rivers should be exempted from the power of private ownership and opened to public use—­remained unresolved. Vague wordings of the law—­t hat the ownership rights of water in “navigable” rivers (a status that was to be granted by the State Council’s decision) was limited by the “servitude of common use”—left both landowners and their counterparts (shipowners, industrialists, fishermen, city authorities, and the state itself) confused.5 Thousands of ships and rafts traversed the waters of small and big rivers in Russia, and no “register” of navigable rivers was thought to be complete.6 The policy of opening rivers for navigation lacked consistency; meanwhile, the value of the contested resources was very high. Lands along riverbanks were very valuable—­and sometimes, as in the case of water meadows, better than other lands on an estate. Water was indispensable for certain kinds of industrial production as well, and to build a new factory or a mill, an industrialist had to buy land on both sides of a river (or negotiate with the owner of the opposite bank) and be sure that the river was not and would never be declared navigable. At the same time, private landowners often ignored rules on towpaths, and peasants’ fishing “barriers” (zaslony) on rivers, buildings, vegetable gardens, and holes left after the extraction of sand or clay on towpaths made the passage of ships impossible. The question of reconsidering property rights on the waters of navigable and nonnavigable rivers was raised many times, but after the emancipation of peasants, and the subsequent development of industry and trade in the 1870s–­1880s, the reform seemed to be especially urgent. In the late 1870s, the Ministry of Transportation made an attempt to nationalize navigable rivers, and though this project ultimately failed, it makes clear the extent to which the example of the peasant reform of 1861 made certain officials believe in the possibility of big shifts in the system of property rights. The ministry in its projected law on navigable rivers (1878) claimed its right to declare certain rivers of national importance exempt from private ownership and subject to state power and management—­in other words, to nationalize rivers; other waterways could remain in the possession of private owners or institutions whose lands these rivers traversed, but their power of ownership would be limited by the “rights of common use” officially declared by central or local self-­government authorities (zemstvos).7

96  |  Chapter 3 Here is the point that deserves our special attention as a “sign of the times” in post-­emancipation Russia: tsarist bureaucrats believed that the declaration of navigable rivers as rivers of national importance was not just a police regulation (as Peter the Great would have surely believed), but a transfer of property, equal to expropriation, and the state must compensate coastal landowners for the loss of their rights and incomes—­either actual or potential.8 The emancipation demonstrated that the state could subject private interests to public needs, but also that it may not do so without appropriate payment. Ironically, in this way, the relations between the state and its subjects took on a sort of mercenary spirit. Thus, again, the issue of administrative power was expressed in the language of property. The bureaucrats expressed the belief in the inviolability of private property so eagerly9 that no one even doubted the fact that the state must pay for its right to manage national waterways. This principle, shared by everyone in the government, eventually ruined the entire project, due to the unimaginable cost of expropriating water and other belongings.10 Nobody could possibly approximate the value of navigable rivers and all watermills and houses built on their banks, or predict which rivers would become navigable or too shallow for the passage of ships. While it was seen as possible to calculate the price of the coasts of the Caspian Sea, or—­moreover—­to calculate the capitalized price of peasant quitrent or labor obligations (barshchina) alienated during the emancipation,11 similar operations for all the rivers of the Russian Empire seemed unthinkable. Indeed, both the price of the Caspian seacoast and peasants’ obligations were highly approximate. However, while land and peasants had been bought and sold on market for ages, rivers were not considered a marketable commodity. No one could buy or sell a river without land; hence, it had no value. Later, in the early twentieth century, people started selling waterstreams—­primarily, waterfalls for the production of hydropower. But at this moment, the alienation of rivers seemed impossible. Perhaps the high and unimaginable cost of expropriation was only a pretext for the rejection of this law, though still important as an example of bureaucratic rhetoric that so often resorted to the idea of property; maybe, the real reason for the failure of this reform was the absence of political forces lobbying for the transformation of property rights. In the 1870s–­1880s, waterways were pushed to the background by the rapid development of railways. In 1887, the State Council, considering the waterway reform project, decided to postpone the resolution of this vexed question: navigable rivers were left open for common use, and their status was to be defined “naturally” by the physical possibility of navigation; no special governmental decision was needed and no compensation for landowners would follow if one day, thanks to natural changes or technological innovation, a nonnavigable stream became navigable.12

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Benevolent Expropriation The story of the failed attempt to nationalize rivers throws light on an important feature of the Russian vision of property: a belief that the change in the regime of property was almost a universal tool for resolving various social and economic issues. After peasant emancipation, expropriation appeared as one of the main mechanisms of reforms. However, in practice, the government used this mechanism selectively, only for very specific purposes identified as “public needs.” The critics of governmental policy pointed out that the government’s perception of what is the “public good” lacked consistency and did not correspond to the most vital needs of society. Starting in the 1830s, the state had sanctioned the alienation of thousands desiatinas of lands for the construction of railways. In the beginning of the railroad construction boom, the decision of how and where to build a railroad line did not depend on the costs and proprietary status of land. An anecdote about how Nicholas I, with a ruler and pencil in hands, drew a straight line on a map to designate the location of the railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow (the emperor’s finger, jutting out from the ruler, was said to explain the only curve in the railway’s path: in fact, it was the landscape that required this curve) confirms that the price and status of lands on the way from one capital to the other was not taken into account. The expropriation of lands was not an issue when the state itself paid for the construction: it could alienate land for its needs—­as it did even earlier, for the construction of canals and fortresses. Out of 74 billion rubles spent on the St. Petersburg–­Moscow railroad, only 1.15 billion rubles went to the alienation of land.13 However, the government did not intend to monopolize the railroad business: in 1845–­1855, the Special Committee on Railroads considered and approved dozens of applications from private companies (although none of the approved projects was realized). While discussing these projects, the committee determined certain principles regarding the rights and requirements for alienation. Alienation of lands was considered the state’s privilege, and only those companies that intended to build a railroad of “state importance” could be granted the corresponding status of “state works” (kazennye raboty). Granting the right of alienation was not automatic, at least during the first years of railroad planning: in 1846, while considering the projected St. Petersburg– ­Kronstadt railroad,14 a few members of the committee expressed their doubts of the “state importance” of the planned line and, consequently, of the legitimacy of granting the right of expropriation: “It is better to forbid such a whimsical construction than to allow an injustice against someone’s property.”15 Not granting the right of expropriation meant not allowing the railway to be built.

98  |  Chapter 3 In the 1860s–­1880s, the state opened wide the possibilities of private railroad construction. Forty-­three joint-­stock companies received concessions for the construction of fifty-­three railroads of a total length of 15,000 versts.16 The government’s concessions assumed corresponding privileges to alienate lands. While denying expropriation for other purposes, the government continued to consider railway construction a business of extraordinary state importance. In fact, railroads were responsible for more than 90 percent of all land alienations and were the only enterprise qualified as pursuing the “public good” (the remaining 10 percent of alienated lands were intended for the construction of city streets, cemeteries, and military objects). In the 1870s and 1880s, land was relatively cheap, and the majority of owners ceded their holdings without objection.17 Starting from the late 1880s, land prices rose, while the construction process picked up speed, too. In the 1870s, the majority of expropriation cases ended with amicable agreements, but in the 1880s and 1890s such agreements grew rare.18 As a result, owners complained that sometimes it took many years to receive compensation for alienated possessions since the railways could take up possession of the lands with the emperor’s sanction before the valuation procedure took place.19 Railway entrepreneurs lamented that red tape brought significant losses and allowed landowners to make fantastic demands.20 Peasant societies asked for 12,000 rubles for one desiatina of poor arable land, and the owners of miserable shacks in cities demanded 1,000 rubles from railway entrepreneurs for their lots.21 As contemporaries observed, in the majority of cases, local administrative valuation commissions tended to support even the excessive demands of private owners.22 The prices paid for lands expropriated for railways exceeded normal market prices by as much as four times on average.23 The owners of expropriated lands found the system of expropriation just as unfair as entrepreneurs did,24 but the complaints of the industrialists, who blamed the state for its inability to clamp down on impudent landowners, outnumbered those filed by private landowners. As a result, the intransigent resistance of private landowners and their greedy demands came to be viewed as the chief obstacle to progress. The rigidity of private property as an institution was cast as the problem, while a freer expropriation process would become the engine of economic development. In a brochure published in 1914, an anonymous author referred to the example of the Ottoman Empire, where “the state authority lacks the real right of expropriation for public needs,” with the consequence that “no serious economic development” was possible there. Unable to force private owners to cede their lands to European entrepreneurs for railroad construction, the state instead had to deal with helter-­skelter railway lines.25 Despite the annoying red tape and other difficulties associated with alienation of lands in Russia, railroads enjoyed the privilege of state protection. Why was the government so eager to render its support in expropriating lands for railroad construction while refusing to back up other claims? Why did

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the project of expropriating rivers fail? First, railroad construction in all industrial countries was accompanied by large alienations of lands, and Russia, indeed, followed their examples. Second, the government perceived railroads to be strategically vital for state security, while rivers were eternal resources whose ability to carry ships did not depend to the same extent on the state’s intervention. And, most importantly, a mighty lobby of powerful industrialists, courtiers, and bureaucrats who benefited from the “railroad fever” supported railroad construction: in other cases—­like the case of navigable rivers or the development of hydropower production—­that crucial support was missing. Cities were the second, after the railroads, “expropriators” of properties. The status of public streets—­somewhat resembling railroads—­allowed cities to initiate the alienation of lands beyond the “red lines” that marked streets on city plans. Cities, as well as industrialists, lamented the intractability of private owners, the rise of speculation, and the lack of power for fast and simple expropriation. Approving projects and applying for the right to expropriate often took years; in the meantime, new buildings mushroomed on streets that were projected for reconstruction, and the city board could not refuse landowners the right to build houses. From 1893 to 1899, the city board of St. Petersburg developed a reconstruction project for Kamennoostrovskii Avenue—­one of the most active areas for new construction in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, but the completion of two new buildings on the avenue in the summer of 1899 blocked its realization.26 As a result, architect Leontii Benois lamented, Kamennoostrovskii Avenue, which was to become the Russian “avenue de Bois de Boulogne,” turned into “one of the most impossible [for passage] streets in our city.”27 (The avenue was 21.3 meters wide, including sidewalks and tramways; in winter, the traffic way was no wider than 3.5 meters.) The costs of expropriation constituted a significant part of city budgets. For instance, in 1900 Moscow spent 65,000 rubles on expropriation; by 1905 the sum had risen to 165,000 rubles, and the costs of regulation kept growing. Moscow’s plan of regulation (1886–­1899) assumed the construction of 32 new streets and the lengthening of 16 streets; from 1900 to 1915, the number of streets increased from 391 to 404, and 41 more streets were planned for the future.28 In the majority of cases, the area of alienated land was small but crucial to the reconstruction of streets: in 1880, the Moscow city board purchased 36 square meters for the enormous sum of 2,000 rubles in order to straighten Kuznetskii Most Street.29 In 1911, the Moscow city board discussed the alienation of 251 square meters to enlarge Petrovka Street and Kuznetskii Street: the special commission on evaluation valued the lot at 1,140 rubles for one square sazhen’ (4.53 square meters), while the city did not want to pay more than 700 rubles. As a result, the owner, who had already opened a sidewalk on his land for pedestrians, closed it again with a fence and planted a small fake garden.30 The city boards of both St. Petersburg and Moscow addressed the government with requests to facilitate expropriation and give them the powers that had allowed Haussmann

100  |  Chapter 3 to rebuild Paris:31 they were unsuccessful. Expropriation remained the privilege of the central power. Given the popularity of the ideas of expropriation, it is not surprising that in the early twentieth century expropriation emerged as a means of resolving the most urgent social questions threatening the empire’s stability, including the problem of peasant land hunger.32 Several times, the government itself considered putting an end to peasant land hunger by expropriating “surplus” noble lands.33 Nicholas II rejected the project of expropriation with the declaration that “private property has to be inviolable.”34 However, in 1906, the party of Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) came up again with the project of using the state power of eminent domain to cure the deficit of arable land in countryside. The Cadets’ agrarian program35 called for the creation of a state land fund for the liquidation of peasant land hunger via the alienation of state, church, and crown lands and the expropriation of a certain part of private lands for compensation based on “just (nonmarket) valuation.”36 The lands from this fund were to be granted in permanent tenure (not as property) to peasants without the right of alienation.37 The premise of the Cadets’ agrarian program perpetuated the logic of expropriation developed with regard to other goods, such as forests, minerals, and railways, extending it to agrarian relations.38 It would be natural to suggest that if the preservation of forests and historical monuments (of which we will talk later), and the development of national industry were deemed sufficient grounds for a departure from the ideal of inalienable property, then the most urgent need of Russia’s social and economic life—­peasant land hunger—­would also merit a departure from the strictures of private property. “The idea of compulsory alienation of land in principle cannot now be met with any objections because the modern state renounces the idea of sacred and untouchable property. It interferes with all property relations for the sake of the public good and this interference tends to expand,”39 said Mikhail Gertsenstein, the main Cadet speaker on the agrarian question. As an ultimate proof of the compatibility between private property and expropriation, the liberals referred to the emancipation of serfs. In this context, the peasant emancipation of 1861 was interpreted as “the largest expropriation” of the century.40 In these and other statements, Cadet lawyers vividly expressed the idea that the defense of human rights (for labor, as in the case of landless peasants) is a superior public good. “Modern legal consciousness places the rights of human beings above the right of property, and the requirements of human dignity and freedom trump the idea of inviolability of property,”41 declared the prominent lawyer and philosopher Pavel Novgorodtsev. The government’s conception of property rights as inviolable, according to the Cadets, was in principle false. Leon Petrazhitskii, another distinguished legal expert, argued that “in every textbook on civil law one can find an explanation that the inviolability of

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property means not an absolute inalienability, but rather . . . is fully compatible with compulsory alienation with just compensation, if it is necessary for public or state needs.” Thus, the Cadets argued, this mechanism could be used for large-­scale agrarian reform, and “all modern legislation, especially to do with the agrarian question, was permeated by the idea of compulsory alienation.”42 The agrarian reform seemed to be a sufficient “public” reason for alienation.43 The agrarian initiative of the Constitutional Democrats was not successful. The government chose to cure the problems of agrarian development in a different way, staked on the privatization of peasant communal lands instead of the expropriation of noble properties. This episode, however, demonstrated that stretching the notion of the “public good” to include the values of social peace and the economic well-­being of all members of society resulted in heightened expectations of the state. The state, as liberals envisioned it, was bound to apply its unique power of expropriation to resolve the most complex issues. If the “public good” required someone to yield his or her right for the benefit of others, the state must interfere and provide just compensation for the loss of property. The government saw the problem differently, largely because the peculiar hierarchy of “public goods” in the bureaucratic imagination differed from that of liberal theory. Railways held unquestionable priority in the bureaucratic mind as geopolitically important objects. Other “goods,” even of relatively similar meaning and importance, were not seen as sufficiently “public.” The priorities of government policy were brightly reflected in its use of expropriation. For instance, in 1886 the government granted the local Council of the Orthodox Popular Schools in the Baltic provinces the right to alienate lands for the construction of Orthodox churches, cathedrals, chapels, Sunday schools, and other buildings for newly organized Orthodox parishes.44 (In central provinces, Orthodox parishes had to buy land for these purposes from their own funds.) Apparently, the promotion of Orthodoxy in Russia’s western borderlands was reason enough to apply the status of a “public good” to such projects in the government’s opinion. These differences in the hierarchy of values explain why the government resisted projects to nationalize rivers or use its power to expropriate specific waterways for the purpose of land amelioration or other industrial projects. Only a trigger as powerful as the famine of 1891 made the government reconsider its priorities and modestly limit the power of private owners over rivers. Years of public and bureaucratic debates resulted in issuing a law that allowed the expropriation of lands for irrigation and drainage canals. Other attempts to claim the “public value” of water—­as a source of electric power and means of communication—­were less successful. Only in 1913 did the government plan a law recognizing electric energy as a “public good,” similar to the “good” of railway transportation.

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Water for Agriculture The emancipation of peasants introduced new challenges to the entire system of Russia’s rural economy and drew new awareness to the issue of its productivity. It was not enough to proclaim the freedom of peasants and lands: after the reform, the government had to take on a new set of problems dealing with the development of agriculture. Starting in the 1870s, the Ministry of State Domains initiated a number of land-­ameliorating projects that involved draining wetlands and irrigating the steppes. Encouraging private and local initiative in amelioration, the government anticipated the rise of conflicts between coastal landowners and their neighbors, whose lands were situated upstream of the river, who wanted to dig canals to irrigate or drain their lands. New local bodies of self-­government vigorously tackled the introduction of new agricultural technologies, but they also faced the resistance of landowners. In the 1870s, the government received numerous petitions from zemstvos and provincial administrations in Novgorod, Kurlandia, Liflandia, Pskov, Tambov, Ekaterinoslav, and other regions asking it to issue a new law or grant permission to rule in conflicts between land-­and water-­owners.45 Numerous disputes were brought to courtrooms in provinces and eventually reached the Senate, which acknowledged that the law did not define the respective rights of landowners and “ameliorators.”46 We have seen that the inability to measure the value of navigable rivers blocked the project that would have declared rivers national property. Similar reasons were cited for the rejection of the projected law on irrigation and drainage in the empire’s European provinces. In 1878, the Ministry of State Domains prepared a project that allowed the owners of land located farther from the banks of rivers or lakes to dig irrigation or drainage canals across the lands of coastal landowners.47 Legislators rejected the project for its encroachment upon the right of private property because although the projected law required compensation for land that would be taken up by canals and other losses, it failed to provide compensation for water taken from rivers or lakes.48 The head of the Law Department at the State Council, Baron Alexander Nikolaii, noted that irrigational water “can not be res communes” because it brings profit (in the form of additional harvest) and, hence, has monetary value. “Water . . . is property,” equal to all other kinds of immovable property, asserted Nikolaii, and no one can dispose of this property without the owner’s consent. In 1887, the State Council rejected the law on irrigation that intended to make waters public—­ together with the rejected project on navigable rivers.49 Thus, the specific status of water—­the commodity whose value could not be counted—­was responsible for the delay in the resolution of the issue of water ownership. The discussion of the status of rivers reveals an interesting detail that turned out to be important in the conceptualization of ownership rights of resources:

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the role of the mechanisms of measurement and assessment. Catherine the Great’s law on property considered rivers to be an attribute of land: consequently, rivers had been measured “flatly” on their surface—­as land allotments, that is, in desiatinas. This approach to measurement can be attributed to the limited use of rivers in Catherine’s time—­as a means of communication and a source of fish, sand, ice, and other extracted products. Coastal landowners on opposite banks of one river divided their property accordingly: an imagined line halved the water in two parts. In Russia, this demarcation made sense: for instance, ice, removed from rivers in winter, was used for refrigeration and, consequently, was a marketable good. In 1906, the Senate considered the dispute between the city of St. Petersburg and Prince Beloselskii-­Belozerskii—­the owner of Krestovskii Island on the Neva. The city wanted to charge Beloselskii-­ Belozerskii for the ice that his employees had taken from Neva: the city considered itself the sole proprietor of the river. However, the Senate recognized Beloselskii-­Belozerskii as the legitimate owner of half of the river along the bank of his island, and, consequently, the owner of all ice up to the imagined dividing line.50 The development of agricultural techniques and land amelioration required the invention of new mechanisms for the regulation of access to water and, consequently, new methods of its measurement and value assessment. Old laws that considered rivers as adjuncts to land proved to be moot in the areas where water was scarce and served mainly for irrigation. Frozen rivers were more or less easy to measure; it was also possible to calculate the price of extracted ice, but no rules prescribed how to part running water and calculate its value (by contrast, in arid Transcaucasia and Turkestan, such rules had existed for centuries). For instance, it was impossible to regulate the use of water by landowners whose lands were traversed by a single body of water. Landowners, especially peasant societies, often directly applied equivocal wordings in the Code of Laws that allowed them to “own” water and claimed their rights to the entire mass of water in water streams. In 1875, peasants of the villages of Elshanki and Zaryklei dammed the Tereshka River in Saratov province and directed it into a new irrigation canal. The Senate’s decision on this case—­often quoted in the interpretation of confusing laws—­declared that proprietary power over water was not absolute because “the flow of river represents a consistent exchange of watery parts [obmen vodianykh chastei]” and it is physically impossible to own all of them.51 It may seem strange that the principle that the river is not intended for the use of one owner required such elaborated explanation. However, that was the consequence of the “flat” vision of rivers as the parts of one’s land. As discussed later, the possibility of using water for hydropower production brought dramatic changes to the vision of water as a resource and value. Electricity became a commodity, engineers designed mechanisms to measure current strength that allowed electricity to be sold to consumers; similarly, rivers, as the sources of energy, acquired new attributes—­the power of falling water

104  |  Chapter 3 measured as horsepower (or the equivalent—­the weight of coal burned for the production of an equal amount of energy). In 1909, the Ministry of Transportation initiated the “cadastre of hydropower” produced by Russian rivers: thus, rivers that had always been measured by length, width, or depth now received a “fourth” dimension. The analysis of the mechanisms of measuring and assessing the value of water nicely illustrates the shifts in the perception of things, their role in human life and economy, and, consequently, their proprietary status. The drought and hunger of 1891 was the single most important factor in eventually making possible the reform of the water law. The unprecedented drought proved how feeble humans were in the face of nature’s power and raised a whole series of issues, including the deterioration of the environment, the reform of the state management of agriculture, and the development of soil science and climatology, which brought new perspectives into the discussion of the water law. Famine also modified the political disposition of forces within the government, strengthening the position of the Ministry of State Domains, which could now claim that the rural economy must become the government’s top priority. The ministry transformed in 1894 into a Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains with a newly created Department of Land Amelioration, which fostered the policy of improving conditions for agriculture. The agency had grand ambitions: in the late nineteenth century, Russian ameliorators believed in the possibility of transforming Russia’s severe climate and land, and accommodating it to the needs of the national economy. The new ideology of this generation of ameliorators was aptly expressed by Iosif Zhilinskii, a famous hydrologist, the head of the Southern Irrigational Expedition,52 who explained the goal of its activity as establishing the “management of waters, power over them, their subjugation to the will of man, his good and needs.”53 In 1893, Zhilinskii submitted a plan of ameliorating works, including the irrigation and drainage of 100 million desiatinas of land.54 In 1894–­1896, the ministry dispatched several scientific expeditions to investigate the reasons for the drought, to explore the water regime of Russian rivers and find new methods for the effective exploitation and preservation of water resources. Unsurprisingly, the expeditions came to similar conclusions concerning the urgency of a water law that could force landowners to yield their lands and waters for the construction of an ameliorating system. Vasilii Dokuchaev, a soil scientist, wrote in his report on the expedition to the steppes (1892–­1893) that “the development and testing of different methods of the regulation of rivers and . . . the use of their waters for irrigational purposes is closely connected to the questions of reform of water laws and coastal rights” because the fate of irrigational projects quite often fell into the hands of just a handful of landowners. Any serious hydrotechnical operation that could turn empty steppes into arable lands would be “unthinkable” in the

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absence of special rules and regulations on water use and property rights.55 Other expeditions undertaken by the Ministry of State Domains confirmed the danger: a Western Expedition for the Drainage of Marshes reported that landowners extorted sums ten times exceeding the market price of their lands for permission to dig canals across them;56 the Northern Drainage Expedition had to cancel some its projects because of the intractability of landowners;57 the Southern Expedition for Irrigation elicited similar complaints.58 In 1896, a new initiative of the Ministry of State Domains allowed zemstvos, peasant societies, and private landowners to receive special credits for land amelioration,59 but the obstruction of land-­and water-­owners made the realization of this project almost impossible.60 In the same year, the ministry renewed its work on the rules for irrigation and at first, much as in the 1880s, it faced resistance from the conservative sections of the government, which feared that the reform would destroy the economy of peasant societies. From the point of view of state needs, the stability of peasant landholding was more important than, as the conservative minister of justice Nikolai Muraviev put it, the “improvement of agriculture in certain private households.”61 This time, the State Council—­Russia’s main legislative body, and the last stage in the process of law making—­ignored the warnings of conservatives and approached the issue from the point of view of public interests. The state did not possess adequate resources to tackle a nationwide land-­ameliorating project alone, and relied on the cumulative effect of local private initiative in agriculture that, it was believed, would eventually stimulate economic growth and could even improve the climate in certain areas.62 That was a sufficient reason for passing the law on the “Piping of Water and Digging Canals across Other Owners’ Land for Drainage, Irrigation, and Watering” (1902). The law of 1902 was a timely measure: local committees “On the Needs of Agriculture” created in 1901 at Sergei Witte’s instigation to collect information about the rural economy63 unanimously called upon the government to lead the struggle against “disorder in the water economy” and systemize a plan of ameliorating works.64 A new law allowed the creation of hydrotechnical systems even in the absence of the landowner’s consent: to settle the conflicts between landowners and ameliorators, special commissions were to be created in each district and province. While providing this option for overcoming the resistance of coastal landowners,65 the law also guaranteed the protection of their interests and compensation for their losses. More importantly for our story, the law of 1902 on irrigation in the European provinces of Russia concluded that rivers and their waters could not be reserved exclusively for the needs of private landowners. Rivers remained private, but people could now use their waters, notwithstanding rivers’ proprietary status, and the state emerged as an arbiter in the relationship between land-­and water-­owners.

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Property and Hydropower A variety of initiatives between the 1870s and 1890s, both failed and successful, to reconsider the status of rivers and lakes as waterways, sources of water for agriculture, and, finally, as natural treasure, attested to the growing importance of water in the economy and the inadequate system of property rights that regulated access to water resources. The law of 1902 had a limited sphere of application—­it concerned only the rural economy, while for the many other branches of the economy based on the use of water, the omnipotence of coastal landowners was an annoying and often insurmountable obstacle. By the end of the century, the issue of water use began to evolve, most often in urban areas. Growing cities needed water and energy, and engineers complained that private property paralyzed the realization of certain schemes of urban water supply. A participant of the Sixth All-­Russian Congress on Water Supply, M. Volkov, reported that the city Simbirsk wasted money on expensive filtering and cleaning of water from Sviiaga River when just 15–­20 kilometers away there was a clean source of water that, unfortunately, belonged to a private owner. Volkov was absolutely convinced that in situations such as this one, private owners must yield their property to the community. At Volkov’s instigation, the Congress addressed the government with a petition to expropriate water resources; the Ministry of Interior rejected this initiative “because of its incompatibility with the notion of property rights.”66 The issue of nationalization of water received its greatest publicity in the late 1890s to early 1900s, at the peak of Russian industrialization. The boom of railroad construction overshadowed the issue of waterways for a while, but soon it became obvious that railroads were unable to satisfy the needs of trade and connect the areas of resource production (for instance, coal mines in Donbass) with the regions of industrial production and big cities.67 The engineer Nestor Puzyrevskii compared the transportation capacity of railways in Russia with the blood vessels of a rabbit in the body of an elephant, and argued that only waterways could satisfy Russia’s needs.68 Puzyrevskii suggested a project to build several networks of waterways connected into a unified system that required reversing Siberian rivers, building canals between the Azov, Caspian, and Aral seas, and many other fantastic endeavors. Various plans designed by Russian engineers aimed to transform Russia’s landscape beyond recognition. Grandiose canals built in the 1880–­1900s in Europe and elsewhere enhanced their creativity: in 1895, Emperor Wilhelm II opened a new canal that connected the Baltic and Northern seas; in 1894, the Manchester Ship Canal began its operation; in 1904, the American government began the construction of the Panama Canal, while numerous other fantastic plans of European and American engineers remained on paper. The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was marked by decisive actions aimed to “conquer nature.” Hydraulic engineers

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built dams and dug canals trying to reverse the flows of rivers: these men, as David Blackbourn remarks, belonged to a “buoyant, expanding profession” and claimed to be not “merely purveyors of hardware.” They perceived their technical works and writings as “cultural works,”69 and aspired to the transformation of the material world as well as the social world. Most Russian engineers (many received training abroad) belonged to this growing international community and shared its ideals. In the late 1890s, the Russian Ministry of Transportation began the elaboration of projects aimed to connect seas and rivers. The most cherished among them was the creation of a waterway linking the city Kherson, on the Black Sea, with Riga, on the Baltic, via the Dnepr and Western Dvina rivers—­a project that revived the idea of the legendary trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks.70 This project required making the Dnepr navigable in its entirety, although the famous Dnepr’s rapids divided the trade route in two parts. The project also pursued a strategic goal: to allow the passage of battleships from the southern theater of war to the northwestern theater (later, that project was rejected as unrealistic).71 In the 1890s, when the power of falling water was already tamed in Europe and the United States, almost every project combined the amelioration of waterways with the production of energy, so that the grandiose plans of overcoming natural obstacles for navigation on the Dnepr assumed the construction of hydropower stations. The question of whom water belonged to acquired new practical and political meaning as soon as Russian entrepreneurs discovered ways of using water for profit, in the form of hydroenergy. Technological imagination offered fantastic prospects of using electric power for the production of nitric acid for use as fertilizer and in the production of smokeless gunpowder,72 hydrogen for balloons (produced by the decomposition of air),73 calcium carbide and acetylene for lighting, and other useful chemicals.74 Another project that received attention from engineers and politicians aimed to provide cheap electric energy for St. Petersburg from hydropower stations built on the Volkhov and Vuoksa rivers in Finland and the Narova in Russia.75 As the author of those projects, the engineer Veniamin Fedorovich Dobrotvorskii, noted, St. Petersburg was “fortunately surrounded” by waterfalls,76 and the idea of using their energy instead of expensive coal imported from England77 seemed obvious. This idea also had strategic meaning: in case of war, Russia’s capital, which depended on British coal, could be subjected to the danger of energy starvation (getting coal to St. Petersburg from the Donbass was unbelievably expensive—­to the extent that British coal brought by sea to the port in the capital was much cheaper). St. Petersburg required energy for the realization of new projects, including the construction of electric tramlines, and the idea of opening new sources of power arrived just in time. On the national level, the construction of hydropower stations could save millions of rubles spent yearly for the purchase of coal and liberate Russia from this dependency. A special governmental commission was set up to calculate the amount

108  |  Chapter 3 of “white coal” in Russia, and the data that it produced captivated engineers: the rivers of European Russia could give an amount of energy equivalent to the energy produced by burning 245 million poods of coal (4,013 million tons) per year. The exploitation of the rivers in northwestern Russia alone could cut the need for British coal in half.78 In the mid-­1890s, a few groups of entrepreneurs submitted projects for exploiting water power on the Dnepr,79 Vuoksa, Narova, and Volkhov.80 The industrialists sought to receive permission from the government to use state lands and alienate private lands for the building of hydropower stations, and promised to return all constructions to the government after the expiration of the concession agreement.81 The first projects initially received support from the government, which, obviously, simply overlooked the issue of property rights with regard to water.82 Industrialists hoped to use the same rules on land expropriation that widely applied to railroads and canal construction, but they did not intend to expropriate water.83 They also thought that the special status of navigable rivers would guarantee that the expropriation would go smoothly. The government approved Dobrotvorskii’s project for the establishment of the joint-­stock company Society for the Electro-­transmission of the Power of Waterfalls84 and gave permission to Nikolai Falberg to build a hydropower station on the Dnepr. The next year, in 1897, Vera Malama, an owner of land along the Dnepr, presented her titles for both the lands and waters of the river Dnepr, given to her ancestors by Catherine the Great, and the Ministry of Transportation had to explain that the permission it had granted to Falberg concerned only the technical possibility, not the legal dimensions of this project.85 In 1899, the Ministry of Transportation approved George Wilson’s application for a concession on the Dnepr. The powerful minister of finance Witte actively supported the establishment of the enterprise: it could realize the idea of building a waterway from the Black to the Baltic Sea, for which the Ministry of Finances, as Witte’s deputy Vladimir Kokovtsov remarked, did not and would never have enough funding.86 In a document that accompanied the papers of the joint-­ stock company, submitted for the State Council’s approval, Witte argued that the Dnepr as a navigable river belonged to the state, and landowners could not claim a right to use the power of falling water. However, in 1900, a petition from the Dnepr landowners, now led by Elizaveta Andreevna Vorontsova-­ Dashkova, the wife of the former minister of the Imperial Court and member of the State Council, Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-­Dashkov, and an influential representative of Russian aristocracy and high society, whose ancestors also received lands on the bank of Dnepr from Catherine, forced Witte to withdraw the project of concession. Vorontsova-­Dashkova’s letter, referring to the by now well-­known articles of the Russian Civil Code, argued that the right of the state to navigable rivers was limited to the management of navigation and did not assume any other proprietary power: “It is equally indisputable that water as a means of communication is state property, and water as power [that

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is, the power of falling water] is the property of private owners.”87 The Ministries of Transportation and Finance did not agree with that viewpoint but had to retreat. In the face of such an insurmountable legal obstacle as the Russian system of property rights, the industrialists and shipowners initiated the elaboration of a new project for a water law in the European provinces of Russia. A water law proposed by a Special Commission of the Russian Imperial Society of Navigation “On the Limits of the State’s Right to Navigable Rivers” (1900) recognized the public character of large rivers. The society’s commission, it should be noted, was nongovernmental, and consisted of experts (engineers, lawyers) and entrepreneurs. Drafting laws had never been the society’s main goal and intention; however, the impossibility of realizing some of their most ambitous plans made shipowners and engineers call for lawyers’ assistance and plunge into the casuistics of legal debates. They wanted not only to deprivatize water but also to ascribe it a special legal status: while undermining the principle of private ownership, they did not want to cede all water rights to the state and argued that the state could not be an efficient owner and manager of this enterprise.88 Thus, the commission insisted on demarcating public interests from state ownership and raised a broader question of creating a new definition for “state property” “as a special legal attitude to the things of common use, when the state is not an owner but just a manager of things [who acts] in the interests of public use” (emphasis added).89 Senator Iosif Karnitskii,90 an invited member of the Commission on water rights and the head of the special Commission for the elaboration of a new Civil Code, claimed that rivers and water resources had to be considered as dominium publicum and used in the common interest. The state’s attitude to public things carried “public” (as opposite to “civil”) meaning (publichno-­pravovoi, as opposed to chastno-­pravovoi), which required that neither the state nor private owners possess natural resources as property.91 That “public” status would make rivers accessible to private industrialists under the government’s control and at the same time protect against the monopolization of their resources. The discussion of the status of rivers received additional impetus from outside: between 1898 and 1902, the Senate of the Grand Duchy of Finland approved a set of new laws that simplified the process of expropriation (beginning with the law on expropriation, July 14, 1898), regulated the construction of hydropower stations (the law on hydropower enterprises, April 11, 1901), and clarified the ownership of rivers (Water Law of July 10, 1902).92 The excitement provoked by the Finnish water laws threw the conservatism of Russian imperial legislation into greater relief, drawing attention to the absence of viable expropriation laws.93 Along with offers from industrialists to build hydropower stations on Russian rivers, the government received petitions from academic and entrepreneurial communities urging it to reconsider water rights and expropriation laws.94 Both the government and industrialists were interested in

110  |  Chapter 3 the resolution of this question: the state could not tackle expensive projects of connecting rivers (for instance, the estimated price of the Black Sea–­Baltic Sea waterway was 200 million rubles) and counted on private money;95 private owners expected to get access to lucrative business. The efforts of shipowners and engineers to gain concessions for building hydroelectric power stations on the Dnepr, improving its navigation conditions and electrifying St. Petersburg, came to naught, as did the Ministry of Transportation attempts to push through bureaucratic offices a new project of the water law that reserved the state’s privilege to use the falling water.96 According to the editor of a leading journal of Russian shipowners, Nikolai Zhankol’, these attempts floundered against “insurmountable” resistance from other high governmental bodies, which “stubbornly” upheld the principle of private property.97 What is striking in the logic and rhetoric of both sides in the debate on private and public ownership of water is the similarity of their sources and methods of argumentation. Both sides got mired in the uncertainty of Russian laws, trying to find the most “correct” interpretation of their extremely unclear wordings. Sometimes adherents of the reform drew upon Western legislation, but these arguments were quite weak and worked mostly in those cases when European and Russian laws displayed common origins (as in the case of France). Only once, the commission “on the exploitation of the power of falling water” suggested leading the discussion away from this vicious circle of debates on the meaning of laws because new relations had to be regulated by new rules (that was the logic that allowed for the Great Reforms and especially the emancipation of serfs in 1861). However, instead of offering new economic and social principles on which the water law was to be based, the commission addressed the historical development of practices and rules of water use preceding the codification of 1832 and Catherine the Great’s manifestos on property. Three authors of that report98 referred to the cadastral instructions of 1684 and 1766 and the Code of 1649 to prove that the state had always been an owner of rivers.99 It seems that in the discussions on property rights—­and these were not limited to the issue of water—­the historical argument (along with the references to Roman law)—­emerged as the only alternative to casuistic legal analysis, and the argument that the law may be wrong and must be changed never came up. It is also interesting that legal arguments almost always triumphed over economic reasoning: the question of what was better for the economy—­private ownership or public property—­was raised rarely, often indirectly and never in abstraction, although this question was always hanging “in the air.” More often, the participants referred to general notions of “justice” (spravedlivost’), arguing either the unfairness of expropriation or the opposite, the unfairness of ownership of things that belong to everybody by nature. That latter became a leitmotif of a public campaign against the private ownership of national wealth.

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Basic rationality was expressed in laments that because of the uncertainty of laws, water, “a national wealth worth of millions of rubles . . . speeds away to the seas.”100 Engineers, unlike lawyers, offered more exotic arguments in support of the publicness of water based on the natural characteristics of the object of possession. Engineer K. P. Litovchenko, opposing the claims of private landowners to river power, made up a formula to calculate the share of energy in the possession of each coastal landowner on the whole length of a river and proved that their share was close to nothing.101 The discussion on the issue of property rights over water revealed multiple points of contradiction, not limited to the opposition of the defenders of private property to the adherents of nationalization.102 Hydropower was a relatively recent discovery, and engineers warned that the state could give up water before it fully explored the possibilities for its exploitation.103 The pleas for nationalization of water also came from local communities afraid of the monopolization of resources by capitalists: in this case, as they believed, local societies would gain nothing or even lose their rights to use water for agricultural purposes and fishing.104 Thus, the debate on whom water should belong to received another dimension: the nationalization of resources and the strengthening of state control over the access to rivers appeared attractive to local cottage (kustar) industry, which sought protection from the monopolization of rivers by big enterprises105 and municipalities. Orel’s provincial committee on the needs of agriculture (its opinion is especially interesting because that local community, located far from the Dnepr, unlike the zemstvos of Kherson, Kiev, or Ekaterinoslav provinces, was not involved in the political struggle for the access to this big river) expressed a naive belief that the discovery of new ways of hydropower production would save kustar industry from the decay into which it was thrown by the invention of the steam engine. By keeping waters in its hands and taking control over the new wave of industrialization, the government would give Russia a chance to “avoid all the troubles of capitalist development.”106 The idea of the municipalization of energy suggested by the delegates from Orel province gained a great deal of support among members of city self-­governmental bodies, because cities were main consumers of electric energy. In 1904–­1905, the St. Petersburg city Duma discussed the purchase of waterfalls for the electrification of tramlines,107 and only the Russo-­Japanese War and subsequent financial difficulties foiled these plans.

Reforming Russian Civil Code It seemed that neither the government nor the entrepreneurs could cut the knot of contradictions surrounding the question of water rights. The government did not want to violate the rights of private property, for fear of shaking the

112  |  Chapter 3 regime’s already precarious social foundation. But neither could it agree to cede this valuable resource to the indefinite “public.” Most industrialists simply refused to allow the state to seize water rights and strove to gain access to private waters. The weakest point in the idea of public ownership of water resources was the definition of who would be the agent of these rights. French lawyers resolved this dilemma by recognizing that “public property” was a conventional term designating in fact the absence of property rights when it came to “public things.”108 The state, therefore, was entrusted with the performance of certain functions, mainly the protection of things of public value. For certain Russian lawyers, this concept of “things not belonging to anyone” appeared highly dubious. An interesting debate in the early 1890s illustrates the search for the specific legal status of public things. In 1893, the Moscow society of lawyers discussed a paper on the “Legal and Civil Aspects of a Policy for the Amelioration of Environmental Conditions in European Russia.” The author, Ivan Bazanov, favored acknowledging water resources as “public property of the people [obshchestvennoe dostoianie], open to use by all citizens under the supreme supervision of the state.” A recognized leader among Russian experts on administrative law, Ivan Tarasov, suggested replacing the awkward term obobshchestvlenie, by which Bazanov meant giving water a public status, with a more convenient term ogosudarstvlenie (“governmentalization”). He suggested a parallel between the state’s regulation of water use “for common interests” and the state management of railroads, which by the 1890s had been largely bought up from private owners by the state treasury. Tarasov, a faithful follower of German Polizeiwissenschaft, urged the renunciation of sophisticated arguments about the public status of water in favor of recognizing it as the rightful property of the government.109 This discussion represents an expressive prelude to further debates on the state’s attitude to public resources. It reveals a sticking point in the conceptualization of public property: who was the subject of public property, and who was the owner of public things? Experts gave different answers to this question, and often their opinions depended on their political sympathies. Petr Kazanskii, a professor of international law who later became a prominent member of nationalist and right monarchist movements, offered a theoretical conceptualization of property rights in his two-­volume monograph on water rights written in 1895. Kazanskii, unlike Ivan Bazanov, justified the nationalization of water and suggested handing over the ownership of water to the state. “The slogan of our time is the governmentalisation [ogosudarstvlenie] of navigable rivers. One can imagine that in the near future, expropriation will concern . . . perhaps all streams of water.”110 One point in Kazanskii’s essay deserves special attention: Kazanskii used the term “expropriation” as a synonym for the restoration of “public interests,” but he also clearly explained that he was not going to distinguish between the state as a private proprietor and the state as a manager acting on behalf of the nation (as many European lawyers did).111 Kazanskii carped at

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the attempts to “present the people, the society as a proprietor of public things.” For Kazanskii, the unorganized public did not represent a subject of property rights: “Society taken apart from the state ceased to be a subject of law, rather the state is society.”112 But there was one theoretical solution to the problem: the creation of a multilevel structure of ownership for water, combining the restricted rights of private ownership with the paramount principle of public property as a form of public use (without assuming direct possessive authority). This formula for reconciliation was embodied in the new project for a Civil Code drafted by a group of prominent Russian lawyers.113 The Commission for the Civil Code tackled the issues of property rights just as (1901–­1903) public opinion focused on the Dnepr affair. The project transformed the description of “state property,” as it was written in Speranskii’s Civil Code, by removing some dubious objects included in the lists of state possessions. The projected code distinguished between two kinds of property: state property (together with kazennaia [treasury’s] in one category) and a new category of “public property” (publichnaia). Article 52 of the new code asserted that “Those things which are disposed by or the property of the state, cities, zemstvos or estate communities, vested to common use for all and everybody, are called public, namely: land-­and waterways of communication, streets and squares in cities and villages, and water in rivers and all other reservoirs open to everybody. Things of that type, as long as they keep their public meaning, cannot be objects of any transaction, deal or command that would violate the right of common use established by the law.”114 The comment to this article clarifies the meaning of the new term. It admits that “these things are sometimes confused with state or the treasury’s [gosudarstvennye ili kazennye] property, but they should be demarcated” from them. The essence of this kind of property, according to the commission’s explanation, lay not in the nature of the possessor, but in the public importance and common-­use value of the thing possessed. This argument eliminated the previous questions about the “subject” of public property (who owned it): everybody has the right to use public things, and the state, thus, has limited administrative authority to control the accessibility of public resources. The projected code undeniably limited the sphere of private ownership of water: only small reservoirs within the borders of one land allotment (ponds, small streams) could be considered private. The code, thereby, eliminated the grounds for private claims to the water of the Dnepr, Volkhov, and other rivers—­those claims that had impeded the realization of hydropower projects. It seems that the notion of “public property” introduced by the commission at that time found support neither in the government nor among certain public experts.115 The projected code raised objections from people on opposite “sides” of the property question. Government officials commenting on the draft of the Civil Code assessed this characterization of the ownership of “public

114  |  Chapter 3 things” as limiting the state’s proprietary privileges in favor of the “public.” The head of the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domain, Alexei Ermolov, pointed out that the Commission deprived the government of “those very few guarantees of its firm right to manage certain categories of properties which it had had before”—­namely, to big rivers. Other critics of the draft Civil Code focused on the code’s overly modest defense of the public interest. Publicist Mikhail Slonimskii accused the commission of indulgence toward individualism in property: the commission’s decision to retain the limited “coastal rights” of landowners (as well as their rights to minerals) was seen to symbolize its adherence to outdated political and legal doctrines.116 The government never adopted the projected Civil Code (its draft did not even reach legislative chambers); nevertheless, the doctrine of public property it introduced resounded in later discussions. Georgii Guins later referred to the commission’s concept in his project for a water law in Turkestan.117 The same model of property rights was used in a draft water law written by another working group at the initiative of the Ministries of Justice and Agriculture in 1907.118

Nationalizing Energy Despite insurmountable legal obstacles for the construction of hydropower stations, the Ministry of Transportation did not give up. Moreover, it intensified the exploration of Russian rivers,119 and in 1909 began the cadastral survey of “electric-­hydro-­power in Russia”120 that intended to explore seven “areas” of the “bedding of white coal.” In 1914, the ministry submitted for the State Duma’s approval a new project for the improvement of navigation on the Dnepr121 and construction of a small hydropower plant, while the alternative project designed by the prominent engineer (and later, after the February Revolution, Russia’s ambassador to the United States) Boris Bakhmetev for the syndicate of three banks led by the millionaire Alexei Putilov and A. Davidov offered a much more effective scheme of hydropower production.122 However, the project’s main advantage, as the industrialists claimed, was in its compliance with property rights: Putilov and Davidov finally bought the right of exploitation of the power of falling water from the group of landowners (Count I. I. Vorontsov-­Dashkov, V. I. Malama, Count I. V. Stenbock-­Fermor, and General A. N. Sinelnikov, who a few years before opposed the construction of the hydropower station).123 Entrepreneurs in other regions also eventually started buying up lands surrounding rivers in order to legitimize their claims to water (for instance, the “St. Petersburg (later Petrograd) Society for the Transfer of the Power of Waterfalls” spent 6 million rubles on the purchase of four waterfalls: three on the Vuoksa in Finland and “a waterfall estate” on the Volkhov),124 and struggled to win concessions for electrification125: as we will see, these monies were wasted because the government had already prepared the law for the expropriation

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of waterfalls. In the meanwhile, a few small hydropower stations appeared on Russian rivers that “belonged” to the owners of enterprises; still, Russia with its fifteen small hydropower stations fell very much behind most European countries and the United States.126 In response to the ministry’s request for funding for the Dnepr project, a State Duma commission approved the allocation of 3 million rubles from the state budget and unconditionally supported the ministry’s decision to retain management of waterways and waterpower.127 More to the point, the Duma commission found it necessary to assert a state monopoly on hydropower and the exploitation of water resources, while at the same time recognizing that individual projects might be launched by private entrepreneurs.128 It may seem that the problem of use of waterpower was in the end resolved successfully, if in an ad hoc fashion, lacking the theoretical legal framework that was so long debated. In fact, the government still planned to legalize access to water power: in 1914, the Ministry of Transportation submitted a draft law with a long and sophisticated title “On Declaring the Focal Point of Falling Water or Certain Areas of Water Streams Appropriate for the Creation of Such Focal Points as Objects of Public Importance” (or the Law on Waterfalls). The draft law asserted the “public importance” of hydraulic enterprises and the expropriation of water streams appropriate for the production of hydropower.129 The logic of the argumentation followed a familiar course: the ministry proved again that water, according to Roman law, was res omnium communes; it could not belong to a single proprietor since it flowed into streams from the large area of a river basin: water was a common good. The authors of that draft referred to previous cases declaring natural resources exempted from private power—­most importantly, the law on forest protection of 1888.130 Considered by Russian legislative bodies only in 1916, the law could have opened the way for many hydropower projects under government control, but it came too late and was in fact not even discussed by the Duma commission.131 The energy crisis and the deficit of fuel triggered by the outbreak of World War I made the government consider extraordinary measures, including the nationalization of electric energy. However, it was impossible to unfold the entire branch of industry in a few months. The development of hydropower production in imperial Russia was a story of unfulfilled dreams and unfinished projects.

The Russian State: A Reluctant Owner? The story of the development of water law in Russia owes a great deal to the conservatism and rigidity of imperial property law, which yielded to the need of reform only in cases of emergency, such as famine and war. It also reveals the constraints on any potential reform of property rights: the Russian government feared that an encroachment on private property would destroy the social

116  |  Chapter 3 foundation of the monarchy. At the same time, however, it was also reluctant to take upon itself the responsibility of regulating access to water and settling conflicts among multiple categories of land (and water) owners. The zeal of the Russian police state in the spheres of political control and censorship contrasted sharply with its absentee behavior in areas where property rights were involved. One of the multiple commissions set up to elaborate a new water code suggested setting aside the issue of ownership of water and focusing instead on the administrative rules for the public use of water, which is to say, what did it matter whom water belongs to if this property was limited by public interest?132 Management and regulation could have substituted for a painful reform of property rights, but the government feared above all else the prospect of using its power to regulate another’s possessions. It used this power rarely and at random (as in the case of forests); in all other cases, the initiatives to strengthen state control over the use of public resources came close to realization only on the eve of the revolution, under the threat of war. Why was the state unable to conduct the reform of the water law? Why did it remain aloof to the pleas for the “nationalization” of water, which, as it might seem, corresponded to the political logic of an omnipotent autocratic state? First, the government feared social dislocation, to the point of becoming obsessed with the idea of untouchability of private property: it considered peasants and nobles to be the social foundation of the autocratic regime, and did not want to lose their loyalty by violating their property rights. This explains why the government could not take over the property of recalcitrant landowners in the Dnepr valley for the sake of common needs. Moreover, this obsession grew stronger as the political foundations of the monarchy grew more unsteady. For contemporaries, this fixation on the inviolability of private property “seemed to be very logical and fair” but nevertheless, outdated, archaic, and ultimately, an impediment to industrial activity.133 Experts and industrialists perceived the government’s inability to negotiate with private owners as a sign of the state’s weakness and inflexibility. At the same time, one may wonder why industrialists preferred to rely on the state instead of working within existing legal conditions (as some of them ultimately did)—­that is, buying private rivers and the rights for the exploitation of hydropower. It seems that this attitude was an echo of the concept of property inculcated by the state (property was seen as a gift from above), which received tacit confirmation through the peasant emancipation. The expectation of industrialists and experts who wanted the state to interfere and cut the cord of contradictions surrounding the use of rivers parodoxically coincided with their desire to see the state merely as a manager, not an owner of wealth. Why did the government remain aloof to these ideas? The projects of introducing “public property” in Russia, advanced by lawyers, experts, and industrialists, offered nothing to the government itself, while the benefits of

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maintaining political loyalty of landowners overweighed the potential advantages of industrial development. One can find the best evidence of this approach in the comparison between the government’s policy in regulating water rights in Russia and its southern colonies, Transcaucasia and Turkestan. Controlling water usage was a key to political power, so when the government decided to take on the political, economic, and social assimilation of the regions, it started with the reform of water law. In the 1890s–­1900s, Russia began a program of peasant resettlement that was hoped to “Russianize” the turbulent borderlands while at the same time releasing the pressure of land hunger in Russian central provinces. To implement this project, the state needed to take control over the sources of water by declaring all rivers and water streams exempted from private ownership. Here on the borderlands, the government felt free from obligations to preserve the property of Russian nobles or follow the laws of their ancestors, and no commitments of maintaining private property tied its hands. The analysis of the water law in Transcaucasia and Turkestan returns us to the issue of the state and the nature of its proprietary rights. We have seen that the government hesitated to apply the patrimonial concept of power to the property of its subjects in European provinces. In the colonies, the heritage of the “Asiatic” states allowed the state to interpret its power in broader terms.134 Colonial administrators presented Islamic laws as granting supreme power over land and resources to the ruler and denying any right of private property. Russian administrators in the colonies attempted to use that doctrine to justify state ownership of water in Transcaucasia, but eventually they chose to rely on the European legal vocabulary and the concept of public property, although in perverted interpretation. The colonial water law for Turkestan turned out to be the first law on water that sanctioned its status as a public good. The exigencies of colonial policy proved to be more powerful than the needs of Russian industry yearning for new sources of energy.

Water and Power in Transcaucasia The question of water rights in the Caucasus receded into the background during several decades of persistent warfare in the region. When the government in the mid-­1850s finally decided to tackle water relations there, it could do nothing more than reinforce existing rules and the power of local tradition.135 For decades, the state did not change the regime of water use in Transcaucasia, which prevented it from initiating any large-­scale irrigation projects. In the 1860s and 1870s, the government turned down a number of proposals to build irrigation systems in the region,136 but it was clear that the future of the region depended on irrigation, and the concept of irrigation (whether private or state) depended on the form of water ownership.

118  |  Chapter 3 In the early 1880s, the civil administration of the Caucasus and the central government underwent a round of dramatic transformations in scope and procedures, as the imperial regime grew more interested in the possibilities of economic exploitation offered by its colonial holdings. The reform of local administration (the abolition of the office of viceroy) aimed to centralize management of the colony, and the regional branch of the Ministry of State Domains headed by Ivan Tikheev eagerly tackled the derelict Caucasian state economy. Ivan Ivanovich Tikheev (1837–­ 1902)—­ a graduate of the Konstantinovskii Mezhevoi Institute (The Institute of Land Measurement)—­an experienced manager who had served a few years in Western provinces before coming to Tiflis, belonged to the early generation of “technocrats” from the Ministry of State Domains137 (from 1894 to 1905, the Ministry of State Domains and Agriculture; from 1905 to 1915, the Central Administration of Land Arrangement and Agriculture), whose professional ethics and principles have been analyzed in Peter Holquist’s masterful study.138 These professionals, alien to social sensitivities and populism, demonstrated brilliant expertise in both the theory and practice of law. They were also staunch étatists and vigorously protected the state’s interests and proprietary rights. Most of them perceived the borderlands as the state’s legitimate trophies and considered state proprietary power to be the key precondition of successful colonization and appropriation of new lands. In 1884, Tikheev started a campaign for objects of state ownership to be transferred from the Caucasus’s regional and military authorities to the Ministry of State Domains, on the pretext that state property needed to be protected from plundering. Lands, forests, and waters had to be mapped, counted, registered, and subjected to strict governmental control.139 Tikheev skewered the policy of local authorities that had squandered state resources and severely criticized the government’s unreasonable trust in indigenous knowledge, the sizable influence of local traditions, and especially the decision to leave water management in the hands of “local experts,” which he claimed resulted in a chaotic power vacuum. He portrayed the history of irrigation in the Caucasus as a narrative of decline, from an age of “flourishing agriculture” under the “despotic rule” of khans, to the period of “fast decay” under Russian rule, when the government remained aloof from the management of water relations.140 “After the fall of the experienced and despotic power of the sardars and khans, which was not replaced by a law defending the interests of the population, brutal forces, seizures and arbitrary power ruled the distribution of water.” “The persistent and bloody struggle for water is caused mainly by the lack of water legislation,”141 concluded Tikheev. His implicit parallel between the mighty power of Eastern rulers over water and the potential for Russian authorities, armed with new techniques and a trained bureaucracy, made clear the task at hand for the new local administration—­to take over the distribution of water resources in the region.

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This agenda presupposed new approaches to the definition of water rights—­ the monopolization of water resources by the state and the elimination of any civil transactions with water. Tikheev’s main idea sharply conflicted with the spirit of Russian water legislation based on the priority of private property rights to water. To legalize this discrepancy, Tikheev appealed to local tradition and old laws. In his interpretation, both Georgian legislation (Tsar Vakhtang’s Code) and Shari’a prohibited private ownership of water, which he claimed could belong only to a ruler, to the state. Hence, he argued, “water as state property in free use by the entire population of the region could not be privatized or communalized.”142 His project reserved for private use only small reservoirs within the territory of a single land allotment, while all other waters were considered “state property.” The innovative point in Tikheev’s reasoning was his definition of state property. At the time of his project, the Russian Civil Code and its commentaries offered only one explanation of the term: state property was the private property belonging to the government, represented by the treasury. Nevertheless, when he claimed that no one could possess water, Tikheev did not make an exception for the state, or, in Russian legal terminology, kazna (treasury), as a private owner of the state domain. Water, he claimed, was nobody’s property, and the state should treat it not as an object of ownership but as an object of public management: “The state does not acquire possessive rights to water and the very name of ‘state water’ is given not as a symbol of its belonging but in the sense of the state’s power to govern,” argued Tikheev. The goal of the law was, thus, “not to grant the state any exclusive rights to [state] water . . . but merely to retain the government’s rights to manage water for the advantage of the entire population.”143 Besides, this power varied depending on the category of water: water in private use or the use of communities was to be subjected to governmental control; while “free waters” could be disposed of by the Ministry of State Domains, but not as a state domain per se and thus a source of state revenue, or a commodity. State water had to become a resource for agricultural development and to satisfy “common” needs. The government would decide which “enterprises” would be granted the use of these “free” waters—­according to their “utility” for the region. This resolution to the vexed question of water rights did not find unanimous support even among the members of Tikheev’s commission.144 But somehow Tikheev managed to persuade the majority of the minister’s council to retain his formula, and the new “governmental” concept of water rights came up for consideration by the central ministries and the State Council. But apparently at this stage (at the Minister’s council), the title of the law was changed: longstanding work on the law previously titled “On Property Rights to Water and the Order of Irrigation of Lands in Transcaucasia” resulted in the elaboration of the law “On the Use of Water for the Irrigation of Lands.”

120  |  Chapter 3 How did the central authorities react to Tikheev’s idea to introduce a new model of state property rights? In the State Council, the project faced strong resistance from the key ministers in the Russian government—­Interior145 and Justice. They did not like how Tikheev treated the law and interpreted the state’s attitude to resources. The minister of justice Dmitrii Nabokov declared that water could not be both “state property” and at the same time not belong to the state. The central idea of the project—­that water did not belong to anyone—­ contradicted Russian laws, Nabokov claimed, which did not allow the existence of property in abeyance: “All properties not belonging to anyone in particular . . . belonged to the state domain,” ­argued Nabokov. If the state lacked legal ground to claim its right to own water, then it should not monopolize it. Nabokov, obviously, did not recognize the “public” approach of Tikheev’s project and interpreted the sometimes-­dubious proclamations of Russian laws in just one way, such that state property—­that is, objects constituting the state domain—­ belonged to the treasury. The State Council took Nabokov’s side in this dispute and eliminated the first article of Tikheev’s project, which had read, “All waters of Transcaucasia independent of whose lands they are located on, do not belong to anyone, are at the disposal of the government and . . . are called the state [waters].”146 The new article did not say who owned water, but merely proclaimed that this ownership was subject to restrictions: “The rights of a [land] owner to water, if it [the waterstream] extends beyond the limits of one land allotment, are restricted by the right of other [land]owners to use water for irrigation and other means.”147 Thus, the law approved by the State Council and signed by Alexander III on December 3, 1890, simply specified and strengthened the limitations on private property rights imposed on landowners by the Russian Civil Code. The term “state water,” which Tikheev emphatically used in every section of his projected law, vanished: the state appeared in this law not as a proprietor of water, but as an administrator. Nevertheless, although the State Council radically changed the rhetoric of Tikheev’s project where it contradicted the terminology of the Russian Civil Code, it kept its positive administrative “content.” The law created a large network of institutions for the management of irrigation (local elected officials and the functionaries of the Ministry of State Domain) and the settlement of disputes among users of water resources. It roughly limited the proprietary rights of landowners to running water. Those who owned land adjacent to a river (even if a river crossed someone’s land) not only did not “possess” the water of that river, but they could not even use this water without special permission from the state. The right to use water could be granted and denied by appointed officials and elected representatives of local communities, as well as Russian experts and administrators (engineers, inspector of waters, lawyers). Thus, almost all water in Transcaucasia in fact became “state” water, as Tikheev had planned. Still, the term “private” water survived in this law for the description of small lakes and streams located in one land allotment (later,

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in 1916, even those small inner streams and lakes in Turkestan would lose their private status). The law of 1890 could have been considered as just another reform that created a new branch of administrative organs, had it not touched upon (for the first time) more general and crucial questions—­the essence and limits of property rights, both private and of the state; the flexibility of the Russian legal lexicon; and its compatibility with other systems of law. Through the debate on water law, Russian administrators and lawyers uncovered a deficit in the terminology describing proprietary relations in the Russian Civil Code: it turned out that there was no expression to describe the state’s attitude to “public” things held in individual use or possession. The Russian Civil Code rested on the idea of absolute and exclusive property rights. If someone owned land or water, then no one else, including the state, could claim possessive rights to it. The opposite also held true: state property assumed full and exclusive ownership by the treasury. In the sphere of water rights, if private and public interests collided, the system of exclusive rights seemed inappropriate. The government in this situation could not suggest an alternative (to full ownership) description of the state’s attitude to water that would fit both the concept of the Russian Civil Code and satisfy the needs of the local economy. The attempts to disentangle private and public (or state) interests on the basis of the Islamic concept of supreme state property lacked support in the government. As a result, the law of 1890 avoided using the words “property” and “ownership,” replaced by “use,” “disposal,” and “administration.”

Water Law in Central Asia The work on the water law for Turkestan began almost twenty years after the reform in Transcaucasia. During this time, much was changed: most importantly, the government started an active resettlement campaign, and if the law for Transcaucasia was not overtly intended to prepare lands for Russian settlers, in Turkestan the main task was to meet the needs of Russian colonization. Georgii Guins, who participated in the work on this project of law, later described its purpose as “to secure the government’s right to use water resources for irrigation to increase the area prepared for new Russian settlements.”148 The work began in the spring of 1909, when Georgii Guins, a twenty-­two-­ year-­old law student at St. Petersburg University, was sent to Central Asia in the capacity of a temporary hydrotechnical agent of the Resettlement Administration, with the task of studying water relations in the region. Georgii Guins (1887–­1902), a disciple of Leon Petrazhitskii, unlike Tikheev, demonstrated an inclination toward the theory of law, but his memoirs about his service at the Administration (Ministry) of Agriculture prove that he also understood the subtleties of bureaucratic practice. Guins’s role in the preparation of the water

122  |  Chapter 3 law for Turkestan was limited to expertise: he was one of those many young intellectuals in the offices of the ministry who did research, wrote expert memos and reports, prepared theoretical foundation for projected laws, and popularized the activity of the ministry. Guins authored a number of brochures propagating and explaining the goals of water reform in Central Asia, while the other officials composed drafts of the law. On his way to Semirechie and Turkestan, Guins made a stop in Tiflis to study the practices of water use and the application of the law of 1890, of which, as Guins (perhaps mistakenly) asserted, none of the officials at the Resettlement Administration had any knowledge. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Guins prepared a report, an enlarged version of which was published subsequently.149 After passing his exams at the university, Guins joined the staff of the Resettlement Administration and participated in the elaboration of the water law for Turkestan.150 The law for Turkestan, unlike the Transcaucasian law, which was made up “on the spot” in Tiflis, was composed in St. Petersburg, by a renowned expert on water law, the jurist and hydrotechnician David Samsonovich Fleksor. Discussed in a commission with representatives of the ministries, it was sent to Tashkent only for formal approval. Despite certain objections of the regional administration to the very concept of the law, it was nevertheless approved by imperial authorities in 1916. The proposed water law for Turkestan rested on extensive studies of doctrines and, more importantly, local visions and practices of water use. While in the 1880s, bureaucrats in Tiflis and St. Petersburg could refer only to a few Russian and European theoretical accounts of Muslim law, now they had at their disposal detailed information about the practices of water use from districts of each of the five Turkestan provinces. These materials demonstrated a great variety in visions of ownership rights of water, which by no means could be reduced to one uniform “Muslim water law.” According to the experts, the majority opinion among local “Muslim scholars” was that the state’s right was limited to the water of large rivers and canals built at state expense. This conclusion sharply contradicted the widespread (among Russian bureaucrats) idea that in the Muslim world, water belonged only to the ruler. Water derived from big rivers ceased to belong to the state: it belonged either to individuals or to collectives. Moreover, tax commissions surveying land property in Turkestan came across waqf certificates claiming water (without land) as an object of waqf endowment and, consequently, qualified water as an alienable object of property.151 Thus, the compilers of the water law for Turkestan, unlike their predecessors, could not rely on a certain “Muslim law” and had to invent the new “Europeanized” justification for the state monopolization of water. Georgii Guins developed a theoretical basis for the governmentalization of water in Turke­stan, and the creation of public property on the European model. Guins claimed that the modern concept of water rights in Europe rested on the Roman law

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regime of the common use of res publicae—­whereby “the state does not manifest its proprietorial claims on water.”152 In his interpretation, all waters were public, but landowners (private landowners, communities, and the state) could keep their right of usufruct.153 This was the major difference between the law for Transcaucasia, which prevented the state from accessing water reservoirs located on private land allotments, and the law for Turkestan, in which there was no recognition of “private” waters at all, regardless of their location.154 In the final version of the draft law, elaborated by a special commission, Guins’s “public ownership” of water was replaced by the “supreme command of the state”—­similar to the wording of the Transcaucasian law. Nevertheless, Guins claimed that even in this formula the public power of the Russian state over water resources corresponded to the European models of public property (Öffentliches Gut of the Austrian Civil Code and domaine public of the French Code Civil).155 The discussion that took place at the commission’s meeting in St. Petersburg confirms this suggestion. A delegate from Tashkent proposed replacing the words “supreme command of the state” with the simpler “state property,” but his idea faced strong objections.156 The lawyer Mikhail Butovskii argued that the recognition of the state ownership of water was “dangerous” since it assumed its power to expropriate water and did not secure water rights for the local population.157 The head of the Turkestan regional branch of the Ministry of Agriculture Aleksei Uspenskii confirmed that the definition of the state’s attitude to water corresponded to the principles of the water law established by Iosif Karnitskii’s Commission for the Elaboration of the Water Law for Russia (1907–­1909), and that the authors intentionally included this statement to demonstrate the consistency of this colonial law with the projected water law for the whole empire.158 Answering the question of why that definition had not been used in the Transcaucasian law, the Administration of Agriculture’s officials blamed the stubbornness of the minister of justice Dmitrii Nabokov, who did not allow the new definition to be passed.159 Thus, the circuit was closed: the idea of establishing a new form of state property–­managerial property, limited by the rights of regulation and governance, appeared in the draft of Turke­ stan’s water law. The state, according to Uspenskii’s statement, ought to appear in Central Asia not as an owner, but as a “defender of public interests.”160 This contested definition of state power and attitude to water raised certain objections in Tashkent: some local administrators asserted (perhaps correctly) that the population would not understand the meaning of this sophisticated term, but the majority eventually agreed with the idea that “the state does not need possessive rights to water because in this case it emerges as a supreme representative of public interests.”161 The idea of state supremacy and its legitimation by the common good modestly enunciated in Transcaucasia received a fuller treatment in the law for Turkestan. The rhetoric of the projected law differed sharply from its predecessor: the arguments became more vigorous, deliberate, and theoretically thought

124  |  Chapter 3 out. Another distinctive feature of the law was its preference for “modern” argumentation in the spirit of the “common good,” at the expense of references to the Muslim legal tradition.162 The official commentary on the projected law argued that the elimination of ownership rights of water logically followed from the subordination of private possessive interests to the idea of common good. The rhetoric of common good supported the pivotal principles of the law: as the official commentary explained, “given the special value of water in Turkestan, the state, standing guard over common interests, cannot allow water, as the object of common good, to be wasted.”163 We should not, however, fall under the charms of these lofty words: as Guins clearly stated in his memoirs, the government did not even try to conceal that the law was designed with the goal to prepare free ground for Russian colonization. Thus the “common good” embraced only a limited group of beneficiaries of Russia’s colonial policy. The sophisticated rhetoric of res publica was used for propaganda purposes, as Peter Holquist has remarked, to win “the public over” to the cause of the ministry.164 The rhetoric of Russian colonial water laws demonstrates how in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the doctrine of “common good” reemerged in the political imagination of Russian bureacrats. The Russian monarchy returned to an old and proven means of legitimizing, in this case, the immense growth of the state’s role and new ways of claiming rights to its resources. Early-­twentieth-­century “common good” doctrine rested mostly on a negative anti-­individualistic spirit and positive étatism. As Yanni Kotsonis’s study of Russian agronomy and the politics of land reform suggests, government experts suspicious of private property insisted on the use of state compulsion toward private owners in order to prevent “the obstructive consequences of property rights.”165 David Fleksor, the compiler of the water law for Turke­ stan, repeatedly and on various occasions spoke for the subordination of private property to the common good of land amelioration in the European provinces of Russia.166 Similarly, the explanatory note to the projected law for Turkestan submitted in 1913 for the State Duma’s consideration immodestly claimed that “retaining the regulation of water in Turkestan on the basis of private property would certainly impede the realization of the government’s projects”—­“the cultivation of empty lands and their colonization by Russian settlers.”167 Thus, the introduction of a new form of property relations—­“public property” in Georgii Guins’s wording—­and the corresponding “supreme command of the state” in the water law aspired first to open new possibilities for state intervention, widening the scope of activity prescribed by the proprietary state. The government’s irrigation policy proves this conclusion. All the efforts of Russian cotton manufacturers to get concessions for the irrigation of new lands in Turkestan came to naught. The government did not want to give up any plot of land and water for more than a few years, for fear of losing its monopoly. Fixated on the idea of resettling Russian peasants to the Central Asian steppes, the

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government preferred to postpone its irrigation projects to the indefinite future (since it had no financial resources) rather than allowing private entrepreneurs to outpace it.168 The policy of managing and distributing land and water resources in Turkestan also confirms our observations on the social meaning of property rights reforms in Russia. By keeping “public” water under its strict control, the government tried to preserve a specific form of economy in the region: peasant economy based on small individual households organized through the state-­ led policy of resettlement. The industrialists’ “public” water assumed the state’s withdrawal, and the development of investments, market, and competition. Two different understandings of property regime reflected two various visions of Russian economic development: one staked on peasant and noble landownership, another on the emergence of new models of landholding and the use of resources. The experience of Russian industrialists vainly trying to tackle the exploitation of “public” water in Turkestan highlights the utopianism of claims for the “nationalization” of the Dnepr and other European rivers. The government’s vision of “public property,” although its contours roughly corresponded to the liberal ideal advanced in the debates on rivers and the project of Civil Code, assumed a rather different implication.

State, Property, and the Evolution of Russian Liberalism The analysis of colonial water laws has revealed the gap between two different interpretations of the state’s role in the new order of property, the first advanced by nongovernment liberal-­minded experts, the second by technocrats in the government. Both shared a distrust of propertied individualism and a belief in the managerial capacities of the state. The liberal concept, however, entrusted the state with a rather modest role of mediator and manager, while the second assumed its “supreme” authority over natural resources. Nevertheless, the government’s vision of the state’s role departed from the archaic patrimonial concept that identified power with ownership: it was considered as simply inapplicable and useless. The establishment of “supreme control” promised more benefits than just the proclamation of ownership that could provoke discontent among the indigenous population. This distinction would not, perhaps, have any practical meaning, but it signified an important ideological shift. Even more interesting and important for our analysis is a remarkable similarity of the liberal visions of the state that evolved in various debates on ownership. Foresters, hydroengineers, and industrialists, as we have seen, advocated the growth of the state’s role in regulating property relations while at the same time prompting the state to give up its claims for direct ownership. The concept of “public property” of the projected Civil Code suggested similar interpretation. Finally, the vision of the state as an impartial manager of land, similar to

126  |  Chapter 3 its role in other spheres of public importance, appeared in the Constitutional Democrats’ project of agrarian reforms discussed earlier. The state, as the project suggested, was supposed to be a guardian of the state land fund formed through the expropriation of private lands. Liberals, in the unusual for them capacity of the defenders of the state, claimed that the interference of the state was much less harmful than the arbitrariness of landlords. “Some people say . . . what can be worse than bureaucrats [chinovniki]? I don’t think that a bureaucrat would be more dangerous than any other rural predator,” argued Mikhail Gertsenstein, the Cadets’ speaker on agrarian questions.169 At the same time, state interference was seen to have a limited and provisional character: in no way should the state become an “owner and a master” (khoziain-­rasporiaditel’) of lands, rather it should perform the “legislative coordination” of agrarian relations.170 State ownership of land was in essence incompatible with the liberal ideology: “making the state a unique owner of land gives the state power and importance that in the modern conditions would have an extremely dangerous and threatening character for the development of civil freedom in the country.”171 Thus, the Cadets’ project of agrarian reform suggested a new form of state ownership, one that differed from the model of “treasury property” stipulated by the Code of Law. In essence, it was similar to the model of public ownership of water and minerals that lawyers and capitalists sought at the time. The debates on the agrarian project and property rights to natural resources offer, perhaps, the best illustration of the reversal of values—­both in liberal and nonliberal ideology. In their statements, liberal experts vividly expressed the new credo of early-­twentieth-­century liberal thought—­the “socialization of law”172—­which assumed a break between liberal ideology and the ideas of individualism. In fin-­de-­siècle Russian and European legal thought, individualistic ideas of civil rights and freedom took a backseat to the values of social justice; état de droit yielded to solidarité; private interests to public goods. The demise of political values supporting the sanctity of private property eventually led Russian intellectuals to search for other kinds of property relations. Hence, the new nonindividualistic concepts of property originated from a “social” vision of law and the demise of the authority of legal individualistic liberalism. This tendency toward the “socialization of law” can be seen in the growing interest in the moral aspects of law: the problems of civil responsibility173 and altruism174 both came to the fore in contemporary legal debates. Quite the contrary, in the 1860s and 1870s (as we have seen in the debates on forestry), and again from 1905 to 1907, the idea of private property galvanized adherents of the old social order. “Aristocratic” and “conservative” ideologies understood the freedom to possess as the main civil freedom to be defended. In this sense, as Richard Wortman has observed, property in post-­emancipation Russia was seen as an attribute of privilege and came to be symbolically connected with despotism, arbitrariness, and oppression.175 Liberal thinkers and politicians, as well as the “professionals,” argued for the limitation of private

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property and in fact greater interpenetration of state and society. The freedom of possession ceased to be the main liberal idea and yielded to more “socially” meaningful freedoms and rights. Opposing the Cadets’ expropriation projects, the government’s representatives argued that the limitation of land property (via the introduction of a maximum size for land holdings) was “the most despotic limitation of human economic freedom.”176 Paradoxically, the autocratic government spoke in the language of “freedom,” while the liberal opposition referred to “justice.” The political evolution of Russian and European liberalisms coincided with the shift in the development of the social sciences. Early liberalism rested on the scientific study of the economy, while the liberalism of fin-­de-­siècle Russia was the domain of social scientists of a new breed—­sociologist and lawyers—­ who joined their efforts to create a new theory of society and the state. In fact, the issue of property became one of the central points in the new agenda of social studies. New theoretical accounts of property rights envisioned an inherent degree of constraint as the essential quality of individual property—­in compliance with the vision of individual liberties and virtues as socially achieved goods.177 Individual property was seen as embedded within a complex system of property relations in society. Lawyers claimed that it was not possible to disentangle individual property rights from those of the public and collective, due to the intrusion of the “great idea of public interests” in all spheres of human activity.178 This new theoretical assumption obviously led to the reconsideration of the role of the state in the provision of social goods179 and maintaining balance between the spheres of the public and the individual. Liberals argued not for the retreat of the state, but for the creation of a new state—­powerful and skillful, but nonetheless not overwhelming. Having started with the birth of the modern concept of property, we arrived at the attempts to solve social, economic, and cultural tensions evolving from this configuration of property and to remodel the property system. Catherine the Great’s concept of property as the exclusive right and privilege of one social estate, codified in Russian law, a hundred years later was deemed dysfunctional. The concept of private property was said to fail to take into account the social costs of such unlimited freedom and the reconciliation of private interests with public goods. During the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, the government and the representatives of professional and business communities attempted to realign the distribution of things between the contiguous areas of public and private domains. First and foremost, it paid new attention to natural resources and land. The exploitation of natural resources revealed two main problems: the difficulty of getting access to subterranean minerals and waters, and the gradual exhaustion of natural resources resulting from their intensive exploitation. The existing system of land ownership came to be seen as socially unfair, politically

128  |  Chapter 3 dangerous, and economically ineffective. Industrialists and engineers explained Russia’s technological backwardness by making reference to its defective system of natural resource distribution; scientists interpreted drought, hunger, and other environmental problems as the consequence of human activity that needed to be regulated. Politicians argued for balancing the distribution of land resources to provide peasants with a living. Therefore, property—­as a metaphor for the existing social and economic order—­was blamed for many of Russia’s misfortunes. Consequently, the reform of property rights was seen as the ultimate solution for nearly all of Russia’s problems, whereas alternative measures—­economic and institutional—­were neglected. Among many alternatives—­such as the regulation of timber consumption or the financial and technological support of peasant households—­the government and experts chose the reconfiguration of property. In this sense, Catherine the Great succeeded: property became the quintessence of political relations between the throne and society, the pillar of the social order and a central element of its cultural worldview. The evolution of property rights also reflected deep changes in Russian culture and the economy. The natural world took on new value: forests once seen as timber came to symbolize a uniquely Russian nature; subterranean riches came to be seen as not just a source of income for local residents, but as an engine of national economic growth. Technological evolution and industrial growth, the development of science that opened new perspectives onto how nature should be put to work—­all these factors contributed to the emergence of a new system of property. New schemes for distributing natural resources that emerged in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century were based not on the grounds of social origin but on the grounds of knowledge, the ability to use resources effectively, and the exigencies of social justice presented as public good. The state was called to take on the role of regulator of access to natural resources, while the nation appeared as a nominal owner of public goods. Professional experts and industrialists masterfully employed the rhetoric of the public good to their own ends. They aspired to get the upper hand in the management of public property. The idea of res publica turned out to be fairly ambivalent: it went against the principles of autocratic rule by installing the sovereignty of the nation, and at the same time it assumed the dictatorship of “experts”—­those who were to decide what was private and what was not.

Part II Ӫ

The Treasures of the Fatherland

4 Inventing National Patrimony The previous chapter traced the emergence of the notion of “public things” and “public property” applied to natural resources whose value had changed as a result of the growing demand for new sources of energy, the rise of the market, and the appearance of interest groups, experts, and industrialists. The idea of the public domain was being created: various actors, led mostly by scientists and professional experts, discursively founded this domain on Russian soil. For experts, creating the public domain was a path to power: theirs was the privilege to establish the rules of access, scientifically defined norms, and criteria for public or private appropriation. The following chapters continue to chart the formation of the public domain, analyzing the attempts of art historians, archaeologists, artists, and architects to create a notion of national patrimony through the treatment of objects of art and architecture and to impose this notion onto the property of many kinds of owners—­the Orthodox Church, municipalities, and private subjects, as well as the ruler and the ruling dynasty. In essence, the formation of the “artistic” public domain was synonymous with the establishing the notion of “art.” Things that had not been considered as artistic creations (for instance, churches and icons, noble mansions in provincial estates and their interior decoration) came to be seen as having this quality. Another impetus came from historians: they asserted the importance of old things as material witnesses of historical events, themselves able to preserve memory and stir patriotic feelings. Thus, the objects of possession—­icons, city walls, buildings, paintings, old books, and manuscripts—­acquired nonmaterial artistic (or historical) and public meaning and value. The vision and the notion of the “artistic domain” arose during the nineteenth century and continued to change and grow; it encompassed “monuments” of art and history both of national (Russian) and foreign (European) or non-­Russian (from Russia’s areas of Caucasus and Central Asia) origins. What is important for our analysis is that since the mid-­nineteenth century, the “artistic” domain was seen as inherently “public,” and experts asserting the importance of “monuments” intentionally or unintentionally interfered in the sphere of politics and civil law. The key role of experts and professional organizations of archaeologists, artists, and architects in the definition of monuments invested them with significant power over the market of land and real

132  |  Chapter 4 estate, art and antique trade. The artistic concepts evolving in the professional milieu exerted direct influence on the proprietary status of the objects of art and architecture. This formation of the definition of “art,” “heritage” (nasledie), or “patrimony” (dostoianie),1 encompassing the monuments of culture and history, went hand in hand with (and resulted from) the professionalization of the history of art, the history of architecture, and archaeology. In its general features, the process of building an academic professional community in art and history resembled—­ both in its timeline and major organizational steps—­the professionalization of the sciences (including forestry) and engineering. The authority of imperial academic institutions patronized by rulers and administered by the Ministry of Imperial Court—­the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the Imperial Academy of Arts, and the Imperial Archaeological Commission, as well as other government-­sponsored institutions (like the Forest Institute and the Archaeological Institute in Moscow), and certain universities—­vested the experts with the power to set standards and criteria of expertise. The growth of nongovernmental organizations that mushroomed during and after the Great Reforms of the 1850s–­1870s—­academic societies with different sorts and scales of activity, scopes of available resources and specializations—­undermined the monopoly of “imperial” and governmental institutions.2 Public academic organizations occupied their special niches, focusing on popularizing knowledge and stimulating public debates on socially important issues. However, unlike in forestry, hydrology, and other natural sciences, in the field of art, archaeology, and history, the notion of expertise remained extremely blurred. To be a forester, for example, one had to receive training in a special school (in Russia or abroad) and a state-­recognized diploma. In art, history, and archaeology, education was important, but not an indispensable criterion of expertise. Many “dilettantes”—­ private collectors, connoisseurs of art, and amateur archaeologists—­achieved formal and informal recognition of professional organizations. The official “recognition” was in fact required to perform some types of activities—­renovating an old church protected as a monument, or conducting archaeological excavations on public lands—­while establishing the criteria of “professionalism” was left to the discretion of experts from the Imperial Archaeological Commission. The novelty of many areas of research increased uncertainty: the history of art and architecture were not institutionalized as special disciplines until the early twentieth century, while archaeology fully branched off from philology, paleography, and history only by the end of the nineteenth century. In addition, the declining authority of “imperial” schools—­first, the conservative Imperial Academy of Arts, and the crisis of its outdated “classical” artistic canon—­opened the way for the advance of dilettantes. In fin-­de-­siècle Russia, the “expert” opinions in the areas of art criticism and historical preservation were often most powerfully voiced by nonprofessional experts—­the authors and editors of the World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), The Bygone Years (Starye Gody),

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Appolon, and other journals. At that time, artistic dilettantism was even welcomed as a sign of true passion and genuine interest.3 It did not, however, mean that expertise lost its role and meaning in shaping the borders of artistic public domain. Quite to the contrary, the competition for academic authority was especially fierce and intense:4 “imperial” (governmental) organizations attempted to support their upper hand in managing artistic and historical domain and resisted the attempts of nonprofessional organizations to encroach upon their power. Metropolitan societies and institutions tried to control the activity of provincial and local organizations. At stake was the fate of the materiality of Russian art and history: experts claimed to have a decisive role in defining the value of monuments, which, unlike the value of forests, could not be measured according to prescribed standards. They resolved the questions of restoration and demolition of buildings and established the principles of urban planning. They also wanted to prescribe how to build houses and even paint icons. These debates over patrimony evoked discussions on more general aesthetical issues: What is art? What is beauty?5 What is history and its value for modern world? In the modernist culture of fin-­de-­siècle Russia, where such notions were in constant flux, the creation of artistic patrimony was subject to conflicts, political and professional disagreements. Another difference between the institutionalization of Russia’s common “natural” heritage and cultural patrimony—­two otherwise very similar processes—­was the role of European models. We have seen that Russian forestry developed under strong influence of German sylviculture, with the result that Russian experts contracted the anxiety about the decay of nature from their European teachers. European romantic nationalism and sentimentalism that stimulated the search for historical roots of national culture also stirred the interests of Russian elites in the materiality of Russian past.6 (The zeal to construct Russian historical tradition produced unease: Alexander Herzen expressed his skepticism regarding “our monuments” that “had been invented on the basis of a conviction that every decent state must have its own historical monuments.”7) Later in the nineteenth century, the ideas of historical preservation popularized in France and Britain came to play a similar role in Russians’ growing interests in their cultural heritage and folklore. Italian and Greek legislation on the preservation of antiquities inspired Russian experts and lawgivers working on the rules for historical preservation. Nevertheless, the application of European models to the objects of Russian artistic patrimony produced ambiguous results—­national art was both to satisfy the criteria of “originality” (samobytnost) and, at the same time, comply with the European “standards” of art. For decades, the analysis of architectural heritage was centered on the problem of borrowing.8 The dominant opinion about the “imported,” unoriginal character of Russian architecture, which, it was said, emerged under the influence of Byzantium, ascribed it but a secondary value. In the mid-­nineteenth

134  |  Chapter 4 century, art historians continued to search for a peculiar “Russian style”: it was established that only in the sixteenth century—­with the appearance of a unique model of steepled churches (shatrovyi stil)—­did Russian architecture overcome the influence of Byzantium. Consequently, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to be seen as the culmination of the development of an original Russian architectural style that was followed by another period of cultural borrowing—­that is, decline. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—­periods of intensive “Westernization,” the burgeoning of Baroque and Classicist architecture, the construction of St. Petersburg—­seemed not worthy of preservation. Because originality served as the main tool for valuation, all buildings and objects of art produced during the period of Westernization were initially excluded from the category of historical monuments. The official “Note for the Survey of Russian Antiquities” (1851) set 1700 as the time line that separated historical “monuments” from regular objects of art and architecture.9 Similarly, other objects of art—­painting, sculpture, and applied art—­were subjected to scrutiny for the purpose of establishing their national originality. Ironically, due to the application of this criterion, not only the newest, but also the oldest objects were seen as not deserving the status of artistic or historical monument. Until the “discovery” of Russian iconography in the 1890s to early 1900s, Russian medieval religious art had been seen as the unfortunate result of cultural borrowing from late Byzantium, which had shared with Russia the remnants of her decaying artistic culture.10 The perplexity of defining the criteria of patrimony through age and nationality led some experts to suggest that all products of human creativity deserved protection if they represented certain artistic interest. The projected law on historical preservation compiled in 1876 by a special commission under the auspices of the Ministry of Public Education suggested applying protective measures to all monuments of artistic and historical value, notwithstanding their age: “any monument, even recently erected . . . has historical importance and its place in the history of the arts.” However, the implementation of this broad approach to the definition of monuments, while allowing flexibility, put too much weight on academic expertise; it would have required the creation of a network of expert agencies, and, in this sense, was hardly realistic. The project of 1876 never became a law, and in practice, archaeologists applied strictly chronological criteria to define monuments: the artistic value of monuments was usually not taken into account, and any “old” object was seen as deserving of care. This archaeological relativism produced a plethora of problems and conflicts when the professional organizations of archaeologists were entrusted with authorizing the demolition and renovation of all old buildings. Old churches, fallen into disrepair and threatening to collapse at any moment, often unremarkable or even ugly, were preserved for the sake of their age, to the great distress of the local priesthood, parishioners, and city authorities.

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The experts’ varied visions of patrimony contrasted sharply with a common perception of monuments. Both assumptions of experts—­first, that an object originally intended to serve the needs of its owner (either spiritual—­for praying, or material—­for living and consumption) can represent an object of art, and second, that a material object that witnessed historical events or lived through past historical periods is itself a historical monument by virtue of its age or events associated with it, very slowly carved its way into people’s minds. In 1826, the Ministry of Interior ordered provincial governors to report back to the central government about all “monuments of architecture” located in their provinces, to commission plans drawn by provincial architects of the façades of ancient buildings, with a corresponding ban on their demolition.11 The first survey of historical monuments initiated by the Ministry of Interior failed: many governors reported the absence of any monuments, while others sent images of memorial statues and tombstones,12 understanding the word “monument” literally—­as intentional monuments erected in commemoration of historical events or people.13 Of course, the very idea of making local administrators report on “monuments” was unfortunate: the government approached the issue of preservation in the same way as it surveyed arable lands or peasant households, with the result that the number of registered monuments was as opaque as a statistic of forestry and landholding, and any other economic indicator in the mid-­nineteenth century. The outcomes of the survey also signaled the reluctance of governors to reveal monuments to the state, as they would almost certainly become troublesome objects, requiring care and expense. Seventy-­five years later, the government repeated its request, but in a more complicated form. In 1901, the Ministry of Interior again sent out a questionnaire asking governors to report on the number of “ancient monuments, buildings and constructions” and the number of “historical monuments.” The results of this survey demonstrated how arbitrary this classification was: the governor of Elizavetpol province reported about 45 “ancient” buildings and only one historical monument; in Kazan, there were 15 ancient and 41 historical monuments, in Kiev province, the number of “ancient” monuments was equal to historical (19) and, surprisingly, many fewer than in Kars province (113 and 11; the intensive archaeological exploration in the Kars region acquired from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 might have been the reason for this great number). In total, the Ministry of Interior received information about 2,456 ancient and 1,652 historical monuments,14 but the methods of defining the historical value of monuments remained unclear; therefore, the proposed law on the preservation of monuments compiled by the Ministry of Interior in 1905 fell back on a purely chronological definition: all buildings and objects aged 150 years or more were to be automatically subjected to the protective power of the state. The 150-­year qualification left without defense all monuments of the second half of the eighteenth century: the heyday of Catherinian architecture,

136  |  Chapter 4 the masterpieces of Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Charles Cameron, Giacomo Quarenghi, and others. In fact, almost the entire architectural ensemble of St. Petersburg, in theory, could be subject to demolition. Naturally, these limits were met with criticism: most participants of the debates on the ministry’s project argued against setting any chronological limits, or at least suggested more recent time markers. The aesthetic thought of Silver Age Russia moved away from the nationalistic trends that dominated in the 1870s–­1880s toward pro-­Western neoclassicism. Eighteenth-­century and especially early-­ nineteenth-­century architecture came into fashion,15 and even those architects who continued considering Russian architecture of that period as “senseless aping and perverted simplification”16 of Western models argued in favor of including all monuments of that period in the protected category.17 This was the recognition of the absence of an “absolute art-­value” for historical monuments of different epochs.18 The development of art history and archaeology, and swiftly changing artistic tastes, suggested that something not valued now could become priceless a few years later. The indefinite criteria of expertise in these fields also made people fearful of fatal mistakes all the more, as architects and archaeologists believed that the true treasures of Russia had not yet been discovered. As the protection of natural resources had set the agenda for studying, measuring, and mapping forests, rivers, and subterranean riches, the building of the artistic domain began with the attempts to map the cultural treasures of the Fatherland. Indeed, the large-­scale architectural and artistic exploration of the Russian provinces began only in the 1880s (the architect Vladimir Suslov, who in the 1870s–­1880s set out for a trip to the Russian North, recalled his expedition as a lonely enterprise that did not receive much support from the Academy of Arts19), but in the early 1900s it turned into a true crusade. In addition to the activity of local historians, metropolitan archaeological organizations—­such as the Imperial Academy of Arts, Imperial Archaeological Commission, Moscow Archaeological Society, and others—­dispatched their members to describe and photograph churches and the treasures of their sacristies, private mansions and estates, city walls, and fortresses. Petr Pokryshkin reported that from 1903 to 1913, he spent 3 years and 2 months on the road, covered 166,318 versta, and took 13,512 photos.20 Still, Pokryshkin thought that the exploration of old Russian monuments was far from complete (“Who is that magician who could make . . . lists of all the monuments in our immense country if we don’t even have lists of all the settlements and exact geographical maps? Indeed, we need centuries to make them.”21) and strongly objected to classifying historical monuments in categories of primary and secondary value, as one of the proposals for the law on preservation suggested. Therefore, Pokryshkin, like many of his colleagues, thought that the principle of preservation should be applied blindly, to all old monuments altogether.22 “Definitely all ancient monuments should be taken under protection . . . ; before the description and exploration of all

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churches have been completed, it is impossible to say which of them are especially important for science and culture,” said Alexander Spitsyn at the meeting of the commission on architectural restoration at the Moscow Archaeological Society.23 His words expressed the motto of professional archaeologists in the early 1900s, and also revealed an extreme lack of confidence in the current stage of expert knowledge. The registration of monuments in many respects resembled the zealous efforts of Russian foresters to map woods and the geological description of subterranean riches. The obsession with mapping, measuring, and surveying was based on the conviction that one cannot preserve an unknown object. However, registering monuments assumed not only describing their appearance: it required technical knowledge and equipment, because architects measured monuments, drew plans, and took detailed photographs.24 A team of professional photographers employed by the Imperial Archaeological Commission accompanied architects on their trip to Russia’s provinces and borderlands: by 1914, as The Bygone Years reported, the library of the Imperial Archaeological Commission contained more than 13,500 pictures. Still, the registration activity of the Imperial Archaeological Commission was limited mainly to a few provinces of the Russian North and Central Asia; the Moscow Archaeological Society focused on the surrounding region, and a number of provincial archival commissions joined the efforts of the metropolitan organizations.25 An example of the obsession with registration is the activity of the Society for the Defense and Preservation of Monuments of Art and History in Russia. In 1912, the society formed a special commission that aimed to register all movable and immovable monuments in St. Petersburg province.26 By March 1914, it had completed the survey of two (out of eight) districts, having taken 2,000 pictures,27 and the work was far from complete.28 The process of registration encompassed not only architectural riches but also numerous objects of decorative art and iconography. Pavel Muratov described the “remarkable” five years, from 1909 to 1914, when the academic and artistic interest in Russian iconography reached its culmination, as a continuous journey in the search for precious icons. The geography of that exploration, as he noted, differed drastically from the conventional vision of Russia’s landscape: Moscow turned out to be on the margin of the country, whereas the true centers of Russian medieval art were located in remote northern areas.29 Mapping the development of iconography, however, did not suffice for the “registration” of monuments: in the case of icons, the “accumulation” of material necessitated clearing ancient icons of the latest “painting over” and layers of dark oil varnish.30 It also required the establishment of the history and origin of every object, its “place of birth” and age. Finally, registering monuments and preserving them from oblivion assumed either displaying them in museums or publishing the images and photographs of monuments. The early twentieth century saw the proliferation of both museums and illustrated editions. One of

138  |  Chapter 4 them—­the periodical Khudozhestvennye Sokrovishcha Rossii (The Artistic Treasures of Russia), edited by Alexander Benois—­declared its goal as the creation of a “corpus of precise photographs of the most significant artistic treasures located in Russia.”31 In essence, Khudozhestvennye Sokrovishcha was a gallery in print, as were numerous other editions that spent the lion’s share of their budgets on the publication of multiple pictures of outstanding quality.32 Archaeologists believed that “Russia is a terra incognita with regard to its monuments of the olden times,” and urged professional institutions and organizations to send their students, professors, and specialists to the remote places of the country to map, measure, and photograph.33 Taking pictures and drawing plans were the only available methods of cataloguing historical monuments in private possession protected by law from intrusion: unable to prevent the destruction of private mansions or palaces in nobles’ estates, architects begged their owners to notify them of planned demolitions at least a few days in advance and allow them to describe monuments slated for destruction. Of course, the architects’ obsession with registration did not immediately succeed in preserving monuments, and, consequently, provoked some skepticism.34 However, in Russia, registration was nevertheless the sine qua non of protection. The faith in the necessity of count and register was deeply inbuilt in the administrative ethos of the bureaucracy: unregistered objects do not exist and no action could be taken on their behalf. For instance, when in 1916 archaeological societies and the members of the State Council petitioned the Ministry of Interior to stop the export of historical monuments, which reached an unprecedented scale after the war began, and to declare all monuments the property of the state, the ministry responded that such legal actions would be impossible due to the absence of a legally established definition of “monument” and a completed register of these objects. Registration, pronounced the ministry’s report, must precede nationalization.35 Two years later, the Soviet government declared all monuments of art and history to be the state’s property: its strategy was quite the opposite—­first to seize, and then to count. The comparison between the natural scientists’ and archaeologists’ zeal at mapping the public domain confirms that both processes—­the making of Russian artistic heritage and national nature “public”—­belonged to one ongoing reformist project. The realization of these initiatives raised similar legal issues of property and its limits, and the power of experts to violate the privacy of ownership. Experts presented the program of revealing, registering, and describing monuments, mapping, and at the same time, creating the national cultural domain as an essentially modernizing and progressive idea, able to mobilize the cultural resources of the nation. They tried to institutionalize the cultural value of monuments through laws and force the owners of monuments to acknowledge the special status of their possessions as the objects of national heritage. Andreas Schönle has recently remarked: “Heritage implies some form of

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collective ownership, symbolically if not legally, and thus calls into existence a collectivity or community”; it “affirms values that transcend private ownership” and “gives rise to civil groups that mobilize to defend valuable objects.”36 As we have seen in the analysis of the preservation of nature, the idea of making things public necessitated both symbolic and legal changes, and the attempts at its implementation produced political and juridical disputes. More often than not, the ascription of any of the “added” cultural values to an object, either artistic and historical, incurred losses rather than benefits for its owners, since it implied limitations on the use of the property, often in contradiction with its originally intended purpose, or relocating works of art from their original homes into new museums and galleries. Consequently, building national patrimony provoked the resistance of owners, just like the attempts at protecting national nature. The clash between the proponents of “national art” and the owners of art objects was all the more fierce and irreconcilable in that the overwhelming majority of “old” monuments belonged to the Orthodox Church—­in experts’ eyes, an embodiment of conservatism, and the enemy of enlightenment. In addition to the difference of cultural and political worldviews, art experts and Church authorities (who claimed to speak on behalf of all Orthodox believers) exhibited different attitudes to things under question. The distinction between the visions of experts and their rivals existed not in the opposition between the old, “materialistic” attitude of owners (the Church) and the highly “spiritual” treatment of the same objects by art experts, nor the religious attachment of believers to their shrines and the pragmatic and secular approach of specialists. The analysis of the debates and conflicts over artistic and historical patrimony offers a much more complex picture of where the modern “spiritual” and ideological meanings of things replaced the older ones, no less symbolic and spiritual, while the material value was also subject to changes. As Laura Engelstein has written, art is always modern,37 and its modernism becomes recognizable through the comparison with religious cults. Similarly, the care for historical patrimony is a distinctively modern phenomenon that also produces a modern cult of things as opposed to religious awe. The appropriation of certain objects into the virtual realm of patrimony signified the recognition of their new meaning and new place in modern culture. Paradoxically, the rejection of the political and cultural past often elevated the materiality of this past to the status of artistic and historical patrimony through its alienation, aging, and even obsolescence. It is not a coincidence that the first measures aimed to protect historical monuments were taken in the early eighteenth century, the time of Russia’s intensive modernization. The denial of the intrinsic value of starina (“the olden times”) as a template for cultural and political reforms highlighted the otherness of the physical forms in which the past—­ starina—­was embodied.38 Similarly, the debate over whether icons represented objects of art or not that had dragged on for years was finally resolved in 1918,

140  |  Chapter 4 when the Bolsheviks proclaimed their intention to preserve the masterpieces of art and the monuments of history. The alienation of religion from politics allowed such upgrades in the meaning of religious art. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ secular “sacralization” of religious art in the new status of “people’s patrimony” did not concern all objects that had been considered as monuments before the revolution. New criteria for the public artistic domain selectively adopted the principles elaborated by imperial experts. The aesthetic value and ideological usefulness of objects that were subjected to the protection of the Soviet state (through nationalization) revealed the shifting borders of the artistic and historical patrimony. The goal of my analysis is the interpretation of these moves and shifts, the processes of ascribing new meanings and values (spiritual and material) to objects by appropriating them into the realm of artistic and historical patrimony. I will first focus on the most revealing example: the campaign for the preservation of religious architecture and art that began in the 1830s and reached its culmination in the 1880s–­1900s. One of the main intrigues of this campaign was that the objects of contestation—­churches and icons—­were supposed to be by definition alien to an essentially secular liberal ideology of public domain. And yet, in fin-­de-­siècle Russia, religious art “discovered anew”39 became a tool of both mobilizing and modernizing society. By making Russian religious art less religious and more aesthetic through the discursive and factual (legal, by nationalization) alienation of churches and their belongings, the proponents of preservation strove to create common cultural ground for the people and the elite. They prescribed new rules of how to treat sacred images and churches that went against centuries-­long traditions, just as they had tried to impose “correct” rules of icon painting.40 The campaign was based rhetorically on the opposition between the parochial interests of the parishioners and the Church, on one hand, and the public needs of the nation, on the other, between the archaic idolatry of believers and the supreme, modern, and all-­encompassing meaning of art. This struggle against the owner of religious objects—­the Orthodox Church—­brought experts in conflict not only with the ecclesiastical authorities, but also with local communities and, more importantly, the government that did not welcome the experts’ activity. Religious art and architecture, despite their seeming incompatibility with the values of liberal ideology, nevertheless came to be seen as a perfect material for national patrimony: religious art was mostly anonymous and consequently, essentially deindividualized and common. However, it turned out that the objects of religious cult were inscribed into an even more complex system of ownership, which could not even be described in habitual legal terms. In the ecclesiastical sphere, the notions of ownership and belonging, alienation, and appropriation worked differently from the secular sphere, reflecting upon a peculiar vision of the functions and values of things. Some of these notions came from the norms of the canon laws; others originated from traditions. The

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complexity of the rules, the impossibility of squeezing them into a conventional system of private–­public relations produced multiple points of conflicts and disagreements.

The Dilemma of Sacred Property The church named for Saints Koz’ma and Damian in Murom, built in 1564 on the bank of the Oka River41—­a beautiful example of sixteenth-­century steepled churches, whose construction (mistakenly) was often attributed to the mythical builder of Saint Basil Cathedral on the Red Square, Postnik Yakovlev—­by the mid-­nineteenth century had fallen into disrepair. In April 1868, its unique and masterfully decorated 32-­angle peaked roof collapsed, and in 1877, the waters of the Oka River came so close to the church that they threatened to ruin the remnants of its walls. After the collapse of the tent, all services (and icons) for the local parish of 190 people were moved to another church, and the Koz’ma and Damian church was abandoned.42 The priests of the new church saw no need to restore the old cathedral that, as they claimed, had been located so inconveniently, on a hill.43 The city council of Murom did not want to take care of the church, either, and ruled only to replace the flat wooden roof that covered the hole left after the catastrophe with an iron one.44 The authorities of the Vladimir province (to which the city of Murom belonged) vetoed this decision, with a reminder that the city was responsible for protecting historical buildings and the “maintenance of monuments.” In 1898, the city authorities of Murom brought the case to the Senate. The story about a “nobody’s church” is remarkable in many respects. First, it reveals the precariousness of the definition of “monument” that entered Russian laws in the mid-­nineteenth century. The church of Koz’ma and Damian was a “monument” of history by virtue of its age and the historical legends associated with its name. However, the governmental regulations prescribing the preservation of historical and artistic monuments did not specify who becomes an owner of a building once it acquires this status, and who has to pay for its preservation or restoration. The idea of patrimony as something that everyone is interested in preserving turned out to be unappealing for the priests and laity of Murom. The city of Murom did not want to consider the church as a monument because it belonged, as the city authority believed, to the ecclesiastical domain. The ecclesiastical authorities, however, did not consider the church as theirs because after the termination of liturgical services, the church lost its meaning as a religious temple and, from this point of view, was no longer a church. In the ecclesiastical domain, ownership was defined not through possession, but by the function that the building (or another object) performed in communication between the realms of divine and terrestrial. As we will see later in the discussion of icons and other “movable” objects of art, the religious

142  |  Chapter 4 function of things determined their proprietary status as alienable or inalienable objects. The erstwhile parishioners who bore the financial burden of maintaining the new church had no incentive to care for the old church, because they already had another place of worship—­this view revealed their remarkable religious pragmatism. Another participant in this story, although not directly involved in litigation, was the Moscow Archaeological Society, which expressed keen interest in the renovation of the church and initiated the preparation of projects for its restoration. However, the Society had no money to sponsor this endeavor. The Senate’s decision obliged the city to take on this task, but the decision remained on paper. The church stood without its magnificent tent until 2007: none of the projects for its restoration raised enough money to be realized. The story of the Koz’ma and Damian church was indeed unusual, given the importance of the monument and the reluctance of the church and the city to preserve this relic associated with the name of the tsar, but at the same time, it is rather typical. It is possible that hundreds of churches collapsed in provincial Russia—­no one cared enough to either claim possession for themselves or to assign it to somebody else, and their destruction went unnoticed. Among multiple reasons that led to such results, two factors played the most important role: first, the proprietary status of churches, which itself reflected the peculiar social and legal organization of Russian Orthodox community, and second, the clash between religious and artistic attitudes toward the monuments of architecture and art. The proprietary status of the Orthodox Church remained unclear for Russian lawyers, and, as it turned out, for the authorities, too. The Code of Laws located church property in a special category of “property belonging to different institutions,” along with the property of schools, state credit institutions, and charitable institutions (what united these different subjects was their ambivalent status: not public, but not properly belonging to the state, either). The paragraph on “church property” (tserkovnye imushchestva) specified who exactly was the owner of movable and immovable property: churches, monasteries, and the offices of bishops (arkhiereiskie doma). That definition produced a great deal of confusion and debate: the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Protestant Church, did not acknowledge the legal status of parish communities, so the “church” was understood primarily as an institution and a building. Priests, with status similar to that of state officials, could not be considered the owners of wealth, either. Because the number of parishes and clergymen was in constant flux, in 1884 the Synod designated churches (the buildings) as property owners: the Synod explained that the church-­building was a more stable unit than a church as a community of parishioners led by clergy.45 In 1892, the Synod ruled that all deposits made by parishioners in the name of priests in the State Bank were to be transferred to the name of the churches where they performed their duties.46 Granting proprietary rights and the status of a legal

Figure 1. Church of Sts. Koz’ma and Damian, drawing by K. Zvorykin (1863), from Nikolai Dobrynkin, Drevniaia Kozmodamianovskaia tserkov v gorode Murome (Vladimir, 1883).

Figure 2. Church of Sts. Koz’ma and Damian in Murom. Postcard (early 1900s).

144  |  Chapter 4 entity to a building contradicted Russian laws and common sense, all the more so given that the church buildings themselves could belong to different owners.47 After the religious “death” of a church (or “abolition,” in the official language of documents), the building of a former church that hosted no services stood as a body abandoned by its soul. The peculiar financial organization of parishes contributed both to the destruction of churches and the proliferation of destructive restoration.48 The state sponsored the construction of diocesan cathedrals in big cities, while the Synod provided regular funding for the building of new parish churches according to its own plan (for instance, special funds were accumulated for the construction of churches in Western provinces—­the terrain of the Orthodox Church’s battle against Catholicism). However, the maintenance, renovation, and restoration of old churches in central provinces were left to parishioners, which meant that the so-­called nonparish churches (besprikhodnye tserkvi) in towns abandoned by their inhabitants or left without sufficient number of parishioners were often simply doomed to slow destruction. The budget of parishes often did not suffice for professional restoration and maintenance of old buildings.49 Even when an old church was preserved, changing its original design was often a necessity—­for instance, parishioners could not find enough money to restore a high-­hipped roof or domes (again, just like the extremely complex 32-­angle dome of the Koz’ma and Damian church) and replaced them with flat roofs, cheap and simple. Many contemporaries believed that the disorder in the management of church properties originated in the bureaucratization of the church, which had lost its initial “public” and communitarian character.50 Existing legislation treated Orthodox parishes not as active subjects, but as groups of people “attached to the church,”51 not entrusted with any rights to own and dispose of property. Starting in the 1880s, the issue of the reform of the parish was raised several times. The debates became especially vigorous after the declaration of religious freedom in 1906 that granted Old Believers and sectarians the rights to institutionalize their religious communities. One of the concepts advanced in these debates on the Orthodox parish suggested establishing the parish as a community of believers with the rights of a legal entity.52 The Orthodox Church emerged as the “supreme owner” of all church property, and assumed the proprietary rights to churches when parishes folded. The opponents criticized this plan as an attempt at the “protestantization” of Orthodoxy, and the discord that remained ultimately postponed all attempts at reform. Yet the limited legal capacities of Orthodox parish communities paradoxically corresponded to their surprising autonomy and lack of outside expert control over the maintenance and restoration of churches, be that the famous medieval temples or recent constructions. Since parishioners bore the financial burden of managing churches, they met the attempts of outsiders—­experts in art

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history and archaeology, who tried to instruct the flock as how to deal with their churches—­with jealousy and aversion. Experts, supported by the government in their claims, insisted on the preservation of the historical and artistic integrity of “monuments” or their restoration according to the contemporaneous principles, which were also subject to change. Priests and parishioners pursued their spiritual goals of expressing piety, strengthening and enlarging the Christian community. For the clergy and parishioners, the application of the status of “monument” to their churches, icons, and objects of rituals was, if not blasphemous, then at least inappropriate. Priests and parishioners saw cathedrals as places of worship and icons as gateways to a holy world, while archaeologists considered them as the material monuments of art, history, and painting. The antinomy of piety and artistic integrity revealed itself as early as the 1830s, when the government alighted on the problem of historical preservation and invested in implanting the “Russian-­style” in architecture and the visual representation of the autocracy, while society plunged into the exploration of its national roots in literature and art.53 Artists and historians assailed priests and Church authorities for disfiguring old churches with renovated frescoes and other new constructions.54 Ridiculous annexes were attached to the ancient walls of medieval churches, which had become too small for the growing population of parishes, maladroit paintings of local craftsmen or priests offended the aesthetic sensibilities of nation-­minded intelligentsia: historian Ivan Snegirev compared the churches that had been victims of restoration with “old women with make-­up, dressed in the costumes of different epochs.”55 Architect Alexei Gornostaev lamented that in medieval cathedrals one could find, instead of sacred images of saints and scenes from Scriptures, “coarsely painted pilasters imitating yellow marble, with pathetic Corinthian capitals.”56 The religious diligence of parishioners and priests did not meet the goals of preserving the original style of churches: in response to a request from the historian Mikhail Pogodin to save the old frescoes of St. Cyril-­Belozersk Monastery, archimandrite Raphail declared: “You, historians, . . . like antiquities, but they [the worshippers] consider them [evidence of] the negligence of the superiors.”57 The gap between the experts’ approach to the preservation of monuments and the views of religious communities kept growing in parallel to the changes in the principles of artistic restoration that became less and less intrusive. The principles of artistic restoration of the 1850s–­1860s, which assumed the inherent artistic value of the old style, in practice, required the restoration of the “initial integrity” and the original form of monuments. Indeed, as historians of restoration now observe, the return to the original shape and appearance of a monument did not necessarily entail preserving the original thing itself, the “materiality” of a monument.58 The form of a monument was the bearer of its historical meaning, while all later “layers” were a priori considered worthless,

146  |  Chapter 4 and to return the original shape of a monument, those latest strata were to be removed and destroyed. But starting in the 1860s, a new concept of restoration began slowly to carve its way: the new method rejected the imitation of the old style and denied the inherent value of “integrity.” Thus, even those “layers” of time and history that had replaced the original details or shape of the monument came to be seen as deserving protection.59 For architects and art historians, the remnants of old frescoes with multiple lacunae were more precious than the work of contemporary artists, but the liturgical principles of Orthodoxy required complete visual representation of saints and biblical stories.60 In this sense, the Church and the parishioners preserved their belief in the value of the sacred name and place, not the original body. Moreover, the accuracy and richness of decoration was supposed to demonstrate devotion: the originality and age of buildings had secondary value. Architects and archaeologists, for their part, believed in the intrinsic value of “age” that may or may not have corresponded to the artistic importance of objects. With time, this contradiction between different visions and approaches to the treatment of “monuments” of art and history grew more pronounced: art historians and archaeologists objected even to the centuries-­old tradition of framing icons in metal frames (oklady) with precious stones. Often, these frames covered the entire painting, leaving open only the face and the hands of saints. Many mountings themselves represented masterpieces of decorative arts, but some were rather graceless and unskillful. For parishioners, covering icons with precious metals and stones was a way of conspicuously expressing their piety. For artists, hiding beautiful icons under metal frames, even richly decorated, was a crime against aesthetics, all the more that the mountings, fastened with nails to the icons, did not allow them to “breathe,” collected moisture, and thereby ruined precious paintings.61 In 1911, the delegates of the First Congress of Artists petitioned the Synod to advise priests not to allow solid mountings that were both detrimental to the icons and uncanonical. However, as Alexander Anisimov acknowledged, it was hardly possible to struggle against “popular tastes that required ‘lordly’ [barskie, that is, “rich”] icons”: “making the people, the masses, change their opinion about beauty and the beautiful, would be a waste of time.”62 Icon framing is just one in a multiplicity of cases that could illustrate the clash between two visions of “sacred” property—­religious and secular, popular and professional. Parishioners eager to show their devotion could not understand why tiled covering or the green color of a church’s roof was better suited to the “style” of ancient cathedrals than splendid gilding.63 This artistic clash often grew into a legal conflict, involving issues of control, power, and property. According to the Synod’s instructions of 1878, which were reiterated in the tsar’s decree of 1889, the Imperial Archaeological Commission was granted authority to approve restoration projects, and similar authority was given to the Moscow Archaeological Society. No renovations of churches could take

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place without permission from the archaeological institutions. As a result, the Imperial Archaeological Commission and the Moscow Archaeological Society were flooded by requests from the provinces. Most of them contained requests for permission to demolish old churches—­lopsided, rotting, and threatening to fall on the heads of worshippers—­and build new churches in the same place. The parishioners of the wooden Varvarinskaia church in the village of Yandomozero, Petrozavodskii district, Olonetskaia province, complained that the dome of their church squeaked and shook, scaring the worshippers below. The church was built in 1656, however, which made it a valuable architectural specimen, and therefore, the Archaeological Commission declined the request and recommended that the congregants “put measures in place for the restoration of the cathedral.”64 Dozens of similar requests, to the sorrow of priests and parishioners, awaited the same fate. In the majority of cases, parishes planned to build new churches on the place of old ones because they did not have land for new construction or money for the purchase of land, or, as the archaeologists often suggested, for the relocation of the old cathedrals. In small peasant parishes, the remnants of old cathedrals were to be used in the construction of new churches because parishes lacked money for new construction materials. Peasants of the village Peski, in the Lubeskii district in Poltava province, sold a part of their pastureland and levied on themselves an additional “prayer” tax (ispovednyi nalog) to collect money for a new church. The Imperial Archaeological Commission, however, turned down their request to dismantle the old church of 1788. In response to that decision, the district marshal of the nobility Ivan Leontovich approached the commission with a request to compensate peasants for those 18,000 rubles that they had collected with such effort and take upon itself the maintenance of the old church. “If the preservation of a certain monument of art is needed for the sake of science or art, then the state must purchase and maintain this monument,”65 claimed Leontovich, an assertion reminiscent of similar requests from the nobility to purchase “protected forests.” The architect Alexei Shchusev responded to the reprimand of local enthusiasts, calling their vigor for demolition and reconstruction “blindness.”66 The commission did not change its mind and retained this interesting example of wooden southern architecture for posterity (the church still exists). Parishioners and priests often considered the restoration of old churches to be a waste of money, for the old churches were too small; however, permission for the restoration and enlargement of cathedrals was also difficult to obtain. The Church of the Transfiguration in the village of Sivkovo, Mozhaiski district, Moscow province, with a total area of 90 square meters, served 2,310 parishioners. The priest complained that on Sunday, March 12, 1906, women brought fifty screaming infants and that praying was generally impossible in the cramped, stuffy space. The parish’s request for approval to rebuild the church languished on the desks of the Moscow Archaeological Society and Imperial

148  |  Chapter 4 Archaeological Commission for six years, and eventually it was decided to remove all the internal walls in the building to improve the space and flow.67 Adding side-­altars could be another means of enlarging a church too small for the growing population of a parish, but procuring permission for such reconstruction was impossible. For their part, architects suspected priests and benefactors of greedy intentions: new side-­altars allowed the church to host more patronal festivals, which brought additional revenues, while the churchwardens could earn “medals” from diocesan authorities for the donations to restoration.68 Indeed, in many cases the decision to preserve old churches, some of which, as archaeologists admitted, did not carry specific importance,69 was based on the assumption of the inherent value of old buildings, or de bene esse. Such was the case of a small wooden church in Chakolskii parish, Pinezhskii district, Arkhangel province: In 1857, the building began to collapse, and all services were transferred to another church. In 1884, the church was declared “abolished,” meaning that the Orthodox Church did not consider it a place of worship anymore, while the building still stood on the same spot. In 1910, the ceiling fell, and in 1912 the consistory petitioned the Imperial Archaeological Commission for permission to dismantle the church. According to the official description of the church compiled in the consistory, the church could not be restored and, more importantly, did not deserve restoration. As the report said, its icons were “painted in a stupid, old-­fashioned, old-­believer style, disgusting, useless; they should be consigned to flames”; “The icons are like boards; it’s impossible to see who is depicted on them, even if you use binoculars.” For archaeologists and architects, though, the wooden churches of Russian North were thought to be a unique feature of Russian Orthodoxy that had no parallel in the West, and, by definition, deserved preservation. Thus, the perceptions of the value of the church originated from two different assumptions: for the official Church, the Old Believers churches and icons represented no value; for experts, the pre-­mid-­seventeenth century buildings and icons were the most valuable objects. The Imperial Archaeological Commission turned down the request for demolition, although the question of who would restore or maintain the church remained open. Neither the Imperial Archaeological Commission nor the Moscow Archaeological Society had authority and funding to provide parishes with financial support, and the obligation to maintain old churches along with the building of new ones fell squarely on the shoulders of parishioners or, in the case of monasteries, monastic fraternities. Quite understandably, the refusal to authorize restorations, reconstruction, or demolition of cathedrals led to severe conflicts between the priesthood and archaeologists. “No one destroys our ancient monuments with such rigor and impunity as the priesthood, especially those ignorant priests which are so plentiful in our provinces and villages,”70 concluded architects. Countess Praskovia Uvarova (after the death of her husband, Alexei Uvarov, in 1884, she replaced him as head of the Moscow Archaeological

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Society) accused “barbarous monks” of destroying important monuments, while the priests compared the experts’ zeal with “idolatry,” worshipping “of every old brick and every architectural embellishment” that did not let the church satisfy the needs of its flock. Indeed, the experts’ orders to build a new church were often naive, “for there was neither a place nor the money” to do so. The father superior of the Novospasskii Monastery, Archimandrite Makarii, asked for a reconsideration of the authority of experts, and specifically, for the imposition of standards that were “based not only on the dead admiration of the olden times, but the superior lively needs of religious and church life.”71 In 1915, the Synod finally decided to liberate itself from the burdensome control of the experts: a special commission considered how to “remove hindrances to the reconstruction and restoration of churches that have archaeological importance,” while retaining the necessity to receive permission from the Imperial Archaeological Commission. The Synod asserted the priority of the “spiritual needs of flock” that required that monuments of history be accommodated for religious services, and reserved its right to overrule decisions of the Imperial Archaeological Commission that prohibited restorations, through direct appeal to the monarch.72 The Commission attempted to protest (“In Russia, the number of monuments subjected to protection must be not decreased but extended; and the veto to the destruction of churches, must be strengthened, not weakened”73), but in fact never needed to do so, as the new rules on restoration never took effect.

Orthodox Icons: Res Publicae or Res Divinae? When it came to movable “monuments”—­manuscripts, icons, church tools, and decorations—­archaeologists wanted to do more than protect these objects from destruction or unskillful restoration. They believed that the most precious items should not be used in rituals at all, or kept in church sacristies, and instead suggested moving them to special depositories and museums. The idea of nationalizing art found its first expression in the struggle between Church authorities and archaeologists for the right to keep and restore religious art. In the mid-­nineteenth century, when this competition first surfaced, public museums were very few; by the turn of the century, however, dozens of private collectors and a number of public museums of Russian art and history competed for the limited market of religious art, as the Orthodox Church tried to preserve its monopoly of keeping and displaying the relics of ancient art and religion. The Church’s claims made some sense, insofar as in pre-­Petrine Russia, monasteries were indeed superior depositories for old documents and valuables than state coffers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the Church began to lose its right to dispose of its material heritage as it wished. In 1853, rumors that the treasures of Moscow monasteries had been

150  |  Chapter 4 squandered reached St. Petersburg, and Nicholas I ordered the ober-­procurator of the Synod Count Nikolai Protasov to conduct a survey of all churches’ inventories and monasteries. The survey revealed chaos and disorder in the churches’ sacristies, which undermined the Church’s authority as a custodian of the material objects of historical memory, initiating an open conflict between secular and Church authorities, led by the powerful metropolitan of Moscow, Filaret Drozdov,74 over who should protect the relics of faith and history, and how. “It is unpleasant to see in the hands of a secular person an old object, the appearance of which makes us think that its legitimate place was either in a church, or in a monastery; and one is tempted to ask, ‘why is it not there?’ ” wrote Filaret.75 According to Filaret, the Church was not to blame for the disappearance of relics: the government and secular experts (“archaeologists”) shared responsibility for their disappearance. Peter the Great, he claimed, struck the first blow against the tradition of Orthodox scholarship and education; his order to copy manuscripts (1720) in fact led to their theft—­Filaret suspected that many manuscripts collected by the Synod could now be found in private collections. Russian monarchs and aristocrats gathered an abundant harvest of old books and treasures from monasteries and churches that lost their precious relics: this is how Filaret presented, for instance, the fate of the oldest Ostromirovo Gospel taken by Count Alexei Musin-­Pushkin from the Novgorod St. Sophia Cathedral. The famous historian Nikolai Karamzin borrowed manuscripts for the preparation of his The History of the Russian State: all perished in the fire of 1812. Innocent monks and priests gullibly opened the doors of libraries for archaeologists with the result that marvelous miniatures and manuscripts perished. Therefore, not the Church, but scholars turned out to be the enemies of the treasures of the past.76 Filaret’s memo was supposed to prove that the Church must preserve its monopoly over old things, of both secular and religious importance. He introduced a new system of cataloguing and surveying Church treasures (which, however, did not extend to the content of churches’ sacristies—­out of use old icons and tools, which often turned out to be the most precious items in the church’s possession). Filaret’s defense of Church autonomy did not convince Nicholas I: having approved Filaret’s rules on the preservation of old objects and manuscripts, he, nevertheless, advised the ober-­procurator of the Synod Protasov to find out which of the manuscripts and documents could be taken “without producing grumbles” and which secular objects (that is, those not used in the liturgy) could be transferred from churches and monasteries to special “depositories” under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church.77 This order did not concern religious objects used in rituals. In fact, the relocation of church objects from altars and sacristies to museum showcases was not only problematic, it was canonically forbidden. According to canon law, neither sacred objects such as crosses, tabernacles, and

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corporals nor objects sanctified by divine services such as icons, liturgical books, chasubles, and fonts could be sold or alienated.78 Secular figures were not even allowed to take them out of cathedrals (in practice, this rule could not be observed: lay people performed various duties, cleaning icons and other “sacred objects”; they also participated in various ceremonies—­for example, carrying icons during Cross processions). The nontransferrable status of icons and objects from churches confirmed their value as “inalienable” possessions, enhancing, indeed, the sacral meaning of the churches themselves.79 In practice, priests often burned old “excess” icons, buried them in earth, or piously “lowered [them] into water” (spuskat’ na vodu) and sent them down a river. The prohibition to take icons and other items out of churches serves as another evidence of the peculiar hierarchy of things and their values in the ecclesiastical domain. In iconography, as well as in religious decorative art, the artist was obliged to follow established canons and rules in painting or crafting sacred images and symbols. Iconographical scripts providing the templates for artists were also supposed to help a believer to recognize the saint. Notwithstanding the difference in the artistic qualities of paintings, the “spiritual content” of icons and their copies was not identical—­it was precisely the same, because as Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florenskii expressed the meaning of devotion, icons were not the images of God, but God himself shown through these “windows.”80 Of course, the existence of rules and the sameness of the spiritual content did not suppress artists’ creativity, but it assumed the anonymity of creation. The only name found on an icon was the name of the depicted saint, not the artist. Still, despite the proliferation of the practice of copying (spiski) the most revered icons, no icon was exactly like another (excluding the mass-­ produced printed or metal-­stamped icons). At the same time, since most icons, crosses, and other items bore no mark of having an owner, it must have been difficult to distinguish which icons had actually been used in religious services and which had been kept in homes. Some objects of ritual could be used in religious services only; big icons from iconostases were not usually kept in homes, either. Priests were obliged to register all belongings in inventory books that facilitated establishing the ownership, and sometimes donors left their dedication to monasteries or churches on the back of icons, which “personalized” an icon designating the place it belonged to. But what if there was no such inscription? How could an icon (for instance, a small icon not belonging to the iconostasis) or a cross taken away from a church be distinguished from others? The practices of ownership in the secular world assume the necessity of marking or registering possessions.81 The hierarchy of objects in the ecclesiastical domain (as prescribed by the canon laws) is built on different assumptions: the invisible quality of an object involved in church sacraments elevated these things to a level far above other identical objects that had never “participated” in church rituals.82

152  |  Chapter 4 Of course, nothing could completely shield the Church and its priesthood from the material world, and due to the persistent financial problems, Church authorities had to rely on the market to improve its economic situation. According to the rules many times reiterated by the Holy Synod, diocesan authorities were allowed to sell church utensils (not used in sacraments, though), many of which were made of valuable materials (usually silver or gold) and sometimes had artistic value. Nevertheless, poverty and greed often made ordinary priests and churchwardens sell and exchange icons, church tools, and books, in violation of rules, and until the beginning of the campaign for the preservation of monuments in the late nineteenth century, the market for “sacred property” remained almost uncontrolled. If the Synod winked at the selling of religious items to speculators, it expressed quite a different attitude to the attempts of experts to use churches and their belongings for their academic and popularizing purposes. Ecclesiastical rules offered a good pretext for the Church to avoid any official contacts with “experts”: in 1865, the Academy of Arts petitioned the Synod to issue permission for a researcher to “examine” the artistic décor of churches. The Synod turned down the request, referring to the twenty-­first ruling of the Council of Laodicea (AD 363–­364) that prohibited nonclerics from touching sanctified objects.83 This decision set a precedent that made the study, acquisition, and preservation of historical monuments belonging to the ecclesiastical domain difficult and sometimes impossible. Did public depositories offer an alternative to the churches’ sacristies as spaces for keeping and preserving valuable antiques? In the 1850s, the few existing public museums could hardly compete with the Church in the preservation of relics. Until the mid-­nineteenth century, old icons were accumulated mainly in the clandestine praying houses of Old Believers; private collecting of old icons, out of interest and curiosity, was the hobby of a handful of enthusiasts. Starting in the 1850–­1860s, interest in iconography began to grow. In 1856, the Imperial Academy of Arts opened an exhibit of Old Russian art; in 1862, the Rumiantsev Museum displayed its collection of icons.84 In the subsequent decades, icons came into fashion, and the methods of icon restoration advanced, as did knowledge about the development of Russian iconography. In the early 1880s, the Historical Museum in Moscow and, in 1898, the Russian Museum of Alexander III in Saint Petersburg entered the competition for the right to preserve the national artistic heritage. Icons and other objects of religious art became a valued commodity, but despite the development of an entirely new market of antiques, procuring “prayerful” (namolennye, “having been in use”) objects from churches was especially difficult. The rise of interest in iconography and Old Russian art coincided with the true museum boom: historians estimate the number of museums established by the beginning of World War I at two hundred,85 and that number did not

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include numerous local and institutional museums. The establishment of the politics of preservation and the emergence of museum culture and infrastructure developed as two parallel and mutually reenforcing processes. Protecting historical and artistic monuments necessitated the creation of depositories for the most valuable historical monuments.86 Despite the absence of “legal” ways to purchase icons and other objects of religious art, experts still sought to open official channels for exchange: in 1882, the president of the Imperial Academy of Arts Grand Duke Vladimir asked the ober-­procurator of the Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev to allow artists and architects commissioned by the Academy of Arts to examine and register old and artistically valuable objects that were no longer in religious use and, if appropriate, to relocate them from church sacristies to the Academy’s museum.87 Pobedonostsev refused, pointing to the rulings of the Council of Laodicea and the fact that the Orthodox Church had its own museums in Kiev and St. Petersburg that could offer a better home to ancient objects of religious art.88 In April 1890, the Moscow Archaeological Society, which remained the unofficial patron of the Historical Museum, asked Pobedonostsev to instruct clergy to send old icons, vestments, and tools to the Historical Museum for purchase instead of burning them or selling them to speculators;89 Pobenonostsev responded with the same reference to the inappropriateness of putting sacred items on display, and the existence of special depositories of religious arts in dioceses.90 In his eyes, archaeologists were encroaching upon the property of the church in the form of its material and spiritual assets. A few months later, the society again petitioned the Synod with the request that it be allowed to collect old icons and ritual items for a temporary exhibit of Old Religious Art in Moscow. Pobedonostsev rejected this demand because displaying religious objects for the observance of “curious people, even with scientific purposes, would not correspond the feelings of awe and veneration” expressed by believers.91 In 1891, the Moscow Archaeological Society asked the Synod to give it the old icons from the cathedral at the Onezhskii Monastery in Archangelsk, which during renovations had been replaced.92 The struggle between the Orthodox Church and archaeologists did bring some “victories” for the latter. Praskovia Uvarova recalled in her memoirs one of the more revealing cases in the history of this competition for control over historical treasures. She proudly told the story of how she “saved” an Orthodox relic, the Gospel of Prince Mstislav (Mstislavovo Evangelie, ca. 1117), which after being restored by Ivan the Terrible in 1551 stood at the altar of the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow’s Kremlin. In 1893, Uvarova learned that a fire had broken out inside the cathedral: I raced over to the Kremlin and, entering the cathedral, I asked the clergyman there to bring me the Gospel of Prince Mstislav, which was supposed to be kept in the cathedral. At first in their haste they didn’t recognize me

154  |  Chapter 4 and rudely refused me, but when I raised my voice and told them who I was, the deacon hurried off to get the priest and brought me the precious item I requested, surprised at my insistence and my concern for the Gospel. It turned out that it was being kept (unfortunately, one cannot say “well kept”) on a simple rickety wooden bookcase at the altar, and, as the clergy were not aware of its rare value, it was constantly handled by the Old Believers and had a poor appearance. By the time Uvarova arrived at the cathedral, the fire had been put out, so she could not remove the relic: “I called for . . . the head deacon, informed him of the Gospel’s importance for research, requested that it be covered for better preservation and that the church officials not be allowed to give it to the Old Believers who wipe their dirty hands across not only the text but the miniatures.”93 At the meeting of the Moscow Archaeological Society held immediately after the accident, Uvarova suggested petitioning Alexander III with a plea to relocate the manuscript from the cathedral, where it had been kept for four centuries, to the Historical Museum. The petition led to a clash between Uvarova and the ober-­procurator of the Synod Pobedonostsev, who accused the countess of trying to “deprive God’s temples of their treasures.” Uvarova did not get the manuscript to the Historical Museum, but in 1893 the most precious relics from the sacristy of the Archangel Cathedral, including the Prince Mstislav Gospel, were transferred to the Patriarch’s Library.94 Nikodim Kondakov later acknowledged that the Gospel’s relocation from the Archangel Cathedral had saved it from destruction.95 Uvarova’s zeal to secure the Gospel for the collection of the Historical Museum is understandable: due to the intractability of Church authorities, procuring objects for the museum’s exhibitions was extremely difficult, especially for the Historical Museum in Moscow (founded in 1872), whose development followed a preestablished plan meant to reflect different epochs in Russian history.96 The museum’s growth progressed slowly: this, at least, is how it appeared to Moscow’s general-­governor Vladimir Dolgorukov, who remarked in 1885 to Ivan Zabelin, curator (and later, director) of the Historical Museum, that in the West museums were built to house already collected objects, while in Russia they were formed around a building, often yet to be constructed, that in turn remained empty for years to come (“they built a museum, and there is nothing to put in it”).97 Similar issues arose after the Russian Museum was founded in 1898: as it turned out, building up a collection of Russian art that comprehensively traced its development from the dawn of the Russian state to the Silver Age was a challenging task. During the first years of its existence, the museum’s collection earned more criticism than praise. However, in 1909 the new curator of the Russian Museum Petr Neradovskii changed the policy of collecting and displaying items; he also managed to attract investments and donations and to

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purchase unique collections of religious art, which resulted in the opening of a new division of Old Russian Art, in 1914.98 The dilemma of where icons belonged—­in a church or in a museum?—­did not have a simple answer, from an ethical or a legal perspective, or even from the researchers’ point of view. Merely registering dirty icons doomed to perish in “god-­forsaken dark village churches” did not benefit historical research; neither did the well-­preserved pieces of art held in private collections.99 At the same time, using icons for their intended purpose inevitably endangered them—­even some priests recognized it. Iosif, the bishop Uglichskii, reported to the Imperial Archaeological Commission that the revered Bogoliubskaia Icon of Theotokos from the village church in Filimonovo-­Goriainovykh, Ro­ stovskii district, had endured the popular tradition of water being poured upon the image: parishioners used the sacred water that had passed over the miraculous icon to cure the sick, but the icon itself had grown swollen and rotten and had lost its color. The tradition of hosting the most venerated icons in homes100 was no less dangerous: peasants often dropped the icons or banged them on doorposts.101 Of course, church authorities at the highest level no less than archaeologists understood the necessity of preserving religious treasures. The Synod, trying to secure its autonomy in the preservation and restoration of religious antiquities, developed a parallel network of archives and depositories, church-­academic societies, and archaeological expertise; new disciplines, including “Christian archaeology,” entered the curricula of spiritual academies, and some bishops—­ for instance, the bishop of Novrogod Arsenii102—­earned their reputations as enthusiasts of archaeology and art history. Creating its own system of preservation allowed the Synod to claim its independence from expert control: when the issue of creating a centralized institution for the protection, preservation, and control of historical monuments was raised in the proposed law on historical preservation in 1905, the Synod strongly objected to the perceived subjugation of churches and their property to secular institutions. However, repeated cases of squandering the collections of church-­archaeological museums and sacristies added more weight to the requests of academic community, private collectors, and “preservationists.” One of the most famous cases—­the fate of the church-­archaeological museum in Smolensk—­acquired huge publicity, and turned out to be decisive in establishing the inability of churches to control the preservation of relics. However, this case deserves our special attention not as a proof of the diligence or lack thereof on the part of religious authorities but as an illustration of the public hysteria that developed around the issue of preservation. It demonstrates the wide variety of ideological settings, biases, and visions of preserving “sacred property” that would be brought to bear in the many debates on issues of public preservation, private collecting,

156  |  Chapter 4 and church property that echoed long after the “Smolensk affair” had drawn to a close.

The Smolensk Affair In June 1907, The Historic Herald (Istoricheskii vestnik) published an article by Alexander Zhirkevich, a former military lawyer, amateur archaeologist, and writer, under the title “One More Archaeological Corpse” (“Esche odin archaeological pokoinik”). The article depicted the plunder of a church-­cum-­ archaeological museum in Smolensk. Zhirkevich sent the off-­prints of his article to a number of important persons, including Praskovia Uvarova, who forwarded it to the ober-­procurator of the Synod Petr Izvolskii. The Synod began an official investigation that revealed that in 1898 bishop of Smolensk Petr disassembled the museum, which had been created in 1896 by one of his predecessors, bishop Nikanor.103 Petr moved the collection from the Timofeevskie chambers to an unheated corridor between the Dormition Cathedral and the former museum. One part of the collection, including icons and certain church tools, returned to the cathedral; the numismatic collection, significantly reduced in size, moved to the apartment of the local seminary’s director; manuscripts were transferred to a wooden cabinet with broken glass in a former kitchen; the whereabouts of other objects could not be established. Archaeologist Andrei Titov from the Imperial Archaeological Commission and a representative from the Synod’s archive, Brodskii, witnessed the deplorable shape of the museum’s former building, now occupied by the bishop’s nephews. The church, which housed the burial-­vault of Smolensk church hierarchs, was littered with cigarette stubs, and many precious objects registered in the inventory were missing. All of these losses were documented in photographs taken by investigators.104 They also confirmed that a private collector, Princess Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva, purchased a few precious things from the church sacristy for her museum, The Russian Antiquity (Russkaia Starina). Bishop Petr, trying to prove his innocence, called the exhibits “a handful of crocks,” and accused experts of faking the value of things, which, he claimed, in fact cost nothing.105 In July–­August 1907, Zhirkevich published a series of articles in the local Smolensk News (Smolenskie vedomosti) and St. Petersburg’s The New Time (Novoe vremia), but the focus of his attack shifted from the diocesan authorities to Princess Tenisheva, who, with the help of her agent and co-­worker Ivan Barshchevskii, bought for a song a number of precious objects from the sacristies of the Smolensk cathedral and the bishop’s residence (arkhiereiskii dom), including the alleged mitre of patriarch Nikon decorated with precious stones, two silver plates from the seventeenth century, a seventeenth-­century German

Figure 3. Maria Tenisheva’s museum, The Russian Antiquity, Smolensk. Postcard (early 1900s).

Figure 4. Maria Tenisheva’s museum, The Russian Antiquity, Smolensk. Interior. Postcard (early 1900s).

158  |  Chapter 4 silver cup donated to the cathedral, and decorated tippets, and carried the whole lot away to France.106 Indeed, Tenisheva was at that time in Paris, displaying her collection at the gallery of the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. Ivan Barshchevskii, a star of Russian architectural photography,107 was awarded a Palm Branch of the French Academy (second degree) as the curator of Tenisheva’s collection.108 Tenisheva’s exhibit enjoyed tremendous success: crafts and ethnic art were all the rage in Europe, and more than 78,000 visitors attended her exhibit, which was more or less the first of its kind. A year earlier, Sergei Diaghilev, a famous patron of arts and cultural entrepreneur, displayed Russian art in Paris, but his exhibit was composed only of icons and paintings.109 Zhirkevich’s attack came as a surprise to Tenisheva, as they were both members of the Smolensk Archaeological Society.110 Accused by Zhirkevich of plundering the relics of Russian Orthodoxy, Tenisheva responded with her version of the story. Maria Tenisheva was a star of the Russian artistic beau-­monde. An amateur singer, artist, archaeologist, and patron of arts (she financed—­with her husband’s money—­the publication of the legendary World of Art), she was also a passionate collector of modern and ancient art, and the founder of artistic workshops on her estate “Talashkino” that aimed to revive Russian popular decorative art and crafts.111 In October 1905, the year she opened her Russian Antiquity Museum in Smolensk,112 Tenisheva received an invitation to purchase objects that “His Eminence [bishop Petr] wanted to get rid of,” as she recalled in her memoirs, from the cathedral’s sacristy. Tenisheva rushed over, but as the dictates of Russian Orthodoxy prohibited women from entering the altar, church guards carried old plates and vestments from the sacristy and threw them toward her on the floor. Tenisheva, as she recalled, determined to buy all of the objects offered to her, simply because she could not stand to see sacred objects blasphemously trodden under foot. She picked up a few things, including a mitre, which, as she claimed, was neither old, nor especially valuable: Tenisheva bought it because of a few enamels decorating it. She was not the only participant in the deal: two Jews, specializing in the antiques trade (one of them was the well-­known antiques dealer from Kiev Moisei Zolotnitskii), and two silversmiths, were also involved, who turned out to be frequent buyers of the cathedral’s treasures. The presence of the silversmiths indicated that many objects were bought by weight and melted.113 Shortly after the purchase, Tenisheva fled Smolensk—­as she explained, to save her collection from revolutionary “hooligans.”114 In response to the attack, started by Zhirkevich and supported by the right-­ wing publicist Nikolai Engelhard under the headline, “The Plunder of National Shrines,”115 Tenisheva disputed their central argument, presenting her purchase, and the entire enterprise of collecting religious art, not as a robbery, but a rescue of treasures. “The purchase of Orthodox antiques for the sake of their preservation—­is this a blasphemy? If it is, I would like to know how, and

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of what materials have the collections of Moscow Historical Museum, the Museum of Alexander III [the Russian Museum], the Tretyakov gallery (division of icons), the Stroganov’s, Shchukin’s museums in Moscow been completed. . . . Are not they getting their objects from the same sacristies and churches, whose guards do not value and take care of the old art?”116 Aligning her museums with the famous metropolitan collections, Tenisheva claimed to have “won over” thousands of artistic objects from the hands of kulaks (“speculators”), who buy “national treasures in order to resell them for scrapping, and amateurs who collect them out of curiosity, without specific goals or, on the contrary, with the goal of selling their collections at a profit.”117 Nikolai Roerich, a famous Russian artist and Tenisheva’s friend, described the princess’s activity as “the Golgotha of art,” confirming her altruistic intention to build a museum, which Tenisheva, following the example of Tretyakov and other patrons of art, had planned to give to the city of Smolensk.118 To avoid further accusations, Tenisheva sent the mitre back to Smolensk, but the diocesan authorities refused to accept it and return the payment of about 4,000 rubles they had received for it, which had been already spent.119 Indeed, the sale was to a significant extent a forced step: for example, the German silver vessel was sold to Tenisheva for 400 rubles to repair the church’s leaking roof. In fact, selling this vessel, which was never used in Orthodox rituals, was absolutely legal; moreover, the diocesan authorities were allowed to get rid of old vestments and tools without the Synod’s approval (they were also entrusted to permit the sale of objects from local churches). Neither was the export of private antiques prohibited: anyone could take away “historical monuments” and sell them abroad. Therefore, the case had an exclusively ideological and ethical aspect. And whatever were the misdeeds of diocesan authorities, they could not be established because the museum burned to the ground one night in October 1907, in the midst of the investigation.120 Bishop Petr lost his position, and the new bishop Feodosii was instructed to restore order to the sacristies of Smolensk. Zhirkevich sued Tenisheva for slander, and this case reached the Senate, which eventually found the princess innocent. Tenisheva came back to Smolensk in 1908 and started looking for a new home for her museum. The negotiations with the Russian Museum of Alexander III in St. Petersburg failed, and in 1911 she donated the entire collection to the Moscow Archaeological Institute (although the museum stayed in Smolensk), from which she graduated five years later with a diploma in archaeology.121 The story of the Smolensk Museum and sacristy received, perhaps unexpectedly for its participants, a political continuation. The public discussion of the case continued until 1910 and involved quite a few participants. As we know, Praskovia Uvarova, who was also a member of the Smolensk Archaeological Society, took part in the affair, constantly working to attract the attention of the highest authorities: the Synod, and, eventually, the emperor. Bishop Petr,

160  |  Chapter 4 perhaps not without reason, suspected Uvarova of pursuing her own interests: he recalled that a few years before the scandal, Uvarova had visited the museum and had found nothing of interest there except one ancient shroud of Christ (plashchanitsa). Petr, seeing her interest, responded that the shrine must be returned to the cathedral and had been placed in the church museum mistakenly. However, upon her return to Moscow, Uvarova approached the Smolensk diocesan authorities with a request that they donate the relic to the Historical Museum, and referred to the wish of Moscow’s governor Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. The bishop turned down the request, to the great displeasure of the countess.122 Perhaps the stubbornness of the Smolensk diocesan authorities prompted Uvarova to take on the case; more likely, however, the publicity surrounding the closure of the museum offered a good opportunity for archaeologists to raise their profile. On April 5, 1908, Uvarova asked ober-­procurator Izvolskii to prohibit the alienation of valuables from church sacristies: Uvarova referred to the plunder of the Smolensk museum and the position of bishop Petr, who, as Uvarova claimed, considered all antiques and modern donations to the church to be the property of clergy.123 Five days later, Uvarova petitioned Nicholas II directly, asking that he declare all icons, icon frameworks, and other valuables of the church sacristies to be “state property” that could not be sold or alienated.124 Nicholas II brought the issue before the consideration of the government. However, the Council of Ministers found that this suggestion contradicted property laws since the church was subject to the same articles of the Civil Code as other property holders.125 In fact, the reference to the principle of the “inalienability of private property” was incorrect, for the Orthodox Church had a specific proprietary status, not equivalent to private owners,126 but for the Council of Ministers those subtleties were unimportant: it concluded that depriving church authorities of the right to sell their treasures would “turn them from owners of valuables into unpaid caregivers” of monuments and, consequently, would incur material losses.127 Thus, the government considered historical monuments as important assets of the church, while archaeologists wanted them to become res extra commercium. The Smolensk affair perfectly reveals numerous tensions that arose due to the increasing activity of private collectors and public museums in the sphere of religious art. The main conflict between the church and the artistic community was triggered by growing competition among different groups of experts. The notion of expertise, especially in the sphere of art and archaeology, as it has been already said, remained quite blurred. Uvarova received home education, but her teachers were the most distinguished artists and scholars of that time, Alexei Savrasov and Fedor Buslaev. Tenisheva studied painting at l’Académie Julian in Paris; later, she founded a few educational institutions for young artists in Russia. Perhaps, the desire to prove her professionalism in

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a kindred area drove Tenisheva to pursue a diploma in archaeology at the age of fifty-­eight. Both women were encouraged in their passions for collecting by their husbands—­Alexei Uvarov, the founder of the Archaeological Society and the Historical Museum, and Viacheslav Tenishev, whose ethnographical collection formed the foundation of the first museum of Russian ethnography.128 Nevertheless, Uvarova and Tenisheva belonged to two different generations of academic and cultural traditions. Born Princess Shcherbatova and claiming to be the prototype for Lev Tolstoy’s Kitty Shcherbatskaia, Countess Uvarova represented the older generation of Moscow aristocracy—­people whose knowledge of art and history and passion for collecting old objects formed part of their estate code of virtues. She was indeed a character of Tolstoy’s story.129 In her activity as an archaeologist and preservationist, Uvarova never confused the hard science of archaeology with aesthetics; she never played with modernist tendencies. In comparison to Uvarova, Tenisheva was a parvenue in Russian high society; she was also of a different generation and artistic experience, exemplifying the appropriation of old religious art into a highly modernist canon. Jefferson Gatrall outlined this transition, writing about Russian icons, which from the 1880s to the 1930s “was transformed from a parochial craftwork into a world of masterpiece, from an antiquarian curio into an avant-­garde aesthetic model, and from a medieval cult object into a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.”130 Tenisheva certainly belonged to this movement: the famous Church of Holy Spirit that she designed in collaboration with Sergei Maliutin and Ivan Barshchevskii, and the Russian fairy-­tale style “Teremok” (also built by Maliutin) on her Talashkino estate have often been cited as the quintessential examples of Russian art nouveau, drawing inspiration from the Old Russian art and folk traditions. Her artistic workshops, which revived the crafts of Old Russia, as well as her attempts to popularize Russian decorative and religious art by displaying the items from church sacristies in her museum in Smolensk sharply contrasted with Uvarova’s attitude to the materiality of the Russian past. Another interesting detail of the Smolensk affair is the paradoxical reversal in the debate on the inalienability of religious property. As we know, the Holy Synod had referred many times to the letter of canon laws proving that the property of churches could not be subjected to ordinary transactions and secular norms regulating ownership, and these claims were directed against the experts’ growing intervention. However, with the development of the antique trade and the black market of icons in the early 1900s, uninhibited export of icons and other items of Old Russian art that came into fashion in Europe and the United States made archaeologists and artists switch sides and support the claim for inalienability and even “nationalization” of Church property, which meant that the state would take upon itself the protection of riches kept in churches. Apparently, they hoped that public museums would be exempted from this rule, though this belief, as we will see later, was mistaken. To turn

162  |  Chapter 4 the ban against speculators, and not against experts and museums, would have required unconditional support from the government, the centralization of the preservation authority, responsible for relocating icons from churches to museums (similar to the Bolsheviks’ Museum Fund), and, of course, the unanimity of different expert agencies involved in the preservation movement. No such unanimity existed: neither among archaeologists nor between experts and the government. At the same time, the Church, supported by the government, refused to observe the limitation on selling religious art and claimed the right to dispose of their properties. The experts’ intention to arrange a legal and state-­protected flow between the two domains of “inalienable possessions”—­ one, represented by the Church, and the other, national patrimony embodied in public museums—­was therefore threatened by the growing intrusion of the market and the unwillingness of the official church to cooperate with experts. The story of the Smolensk Museum, although it did not receive legal outcome, produced an effect: the idea of the “nationalization” of historical monuments acquired more and more support. In 1908, the Fourteenth Archaeological Congress submitted principles for the protection of monuments that gave the government the right to expropriate immovable monuments, to restrict the freedom of disposal of historical monuments by private owners on penalty of fees and even imprisonment.131 The new commission set for the elaboration of the law on preservation of monuments under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior (1909) declared as its prime principle the extension of state protection to all monuments “even those in the possession and disposal of private owners, institutions and organizations.”132 The head of the Imperial Archaeological Commission Count Alexei Bobrinskii, speaking in 1909 at the first session of the committee for drafting the laws on historical preservation, described the program of preservation as consisting of “the census” (perepis’) of all monuments in the country that, once the census was completed, must be declared “state property.”133 The application of this principle would unavoidably subject the proprietary rights of private owners to significant limitations (we will come back to the debate on private property later); it also assumed the subjugation of Church authorities to the control of secular experts. Despite all its efforts (in 1906–­1911, the Synod worked on the elaboration of new statutes for central and diocesan church-­archaeological committees), the Orthodox Church could not restore its credentials as a good caregiver for historical monuments. The case of the Koz’ma and Damian church in Murom, abandoned by the ecclesiastical authorities, the plunder of religious antiques from Murom’s other cathedral of the Mother of God in 1905,134 and the Smolensk affair once and for all ruined its reputation. The conflicts between preservationists and Church authorities over access to religious art culminated after 1910, when the new administration of the Russian Museum of Alexander III started a campaign for the formation of the largest collection of Russian religious art. The campaign brought impressive results:

Figure 5. Princess Maria Tenisheva. Portrait with an inscription to Sergei Maliutin, 1900. RGALI, f. 2023, оp. 2, d. 133. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Figure 6. Countess Praskovia Uvarova. Yekaterinoslavl, August 1905. Photograph by Brodnitskii. Courtesy of the Museum of Art and History, Murom.

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the new ideology of a “national” public museum (as opposed to the “Imperial” Hermitage) drew a flurry of donations. For instance, in 1912, the museum acquired more than 200,000 rubles worth of gifts, bequeathed items, and objects purchased on donated money: this was almost seven times the museum’s regular budget allocated for purchases. After the acquisition of Nikolai Likhachev’s famous collection of icons in 1913 (an event sponsored by Nicholas II), the museum’s Christian division became one of the richest in Europe.135 Still, developing the museum collection was extremely difficult: the memoirs of the museum’s main curator Petr Neradovskii—­himself a good painter and well known in the artistic circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg—­describe his attempts to obtain objects for the collection, the competition with private collectors and speculators who earned fortunes on the “icon rush,” and even opposition from overzealous protectors of religious art, such as the omnipresent Praskovia Uvarova.136 Still, the reluctance of the Church authorities to open sacristies to artists and archaeologists represented by far the most serious obstacle: neither the status of the museum nor the public recognition of its role helped overcome the opposition of the Church. The tsar’s mediation sometimes allowed archaeologists to secure a few outstanding objects for display.137 The emperor’s patronage was an extraordinary lever, and yet it did not always work. In the absence of legal ways to obtain exhibition pieces, curators often decided to go to churches and, in violation of canon laws, buy objects from church sacristies. The archival documents of the Russian Museum confirm the fact of these purchases, in the form of curatorial reports detailing purchases from various church storerooms.138 Museum officials preferred to buy objects that had never been registered in inventories, which allowed the deal to go more smoothly.139 In addition, the Russian Museum had to resort to the assistance of private icon traders, which was not always safe. Neradovskii, being well connected in the small world of icon collecting and trade, relied on personal ties and many purchases were made thanks to these connections, often the most efficient way of acquiring truly unique pieces. But one case almost ruined the entire extra-­ official system of purchasing art for the main National Museum of Art.

The Briagin Affair Acquiring an icon was only half the work: even more important was the task of cleaning it, removing the layers and layers of paint used to retouch it and the varnish used to protect it. Only a few specialists could recognize a real masterpiece when it was covered by thick layers of paint, oil, and dust and reveal the original underneath. The technique of cleaning icons developed fairly late, so that the “discovery” of Russian iconography in the early twentieth century was twofold—­in the broad sense of revealing the artistic importance of icons, and more specifically, the elaboration of techniques for uncovering originals. Prior to this second discovery, the specialist on Russian and Byzantine iconography

166  |  Chapter 4 Nikodim Kondakov observed, “we studied oil varnish, and never even suspected what the real thing was.”140 Evgenii Briagin was one of three brothers, all ikonniki, or masters of iconography and restoration, who supplied and restored objects for Russia’s best art collections (Nicholas II was numbered among his customers141) and for exhibits at the Russian Museum.142 The Briagin brothers came from the famous village of Mstera in Vladimirskaia province, the traditional center of icon painting. The booming icon trade opened up new possibilities for Mstera’s peasants, who bought old icons in churches for a song, restored them, and then sold them with high margins to collectors. Briagin’s “patron,” Ilya Ostrouk­hov, was a talented painter and connoisseur of art, Pavel Tretyakov’s relative, and Neradovskii’s friend, and, most importantly, was himself the owner of an outstanding collection of icons. In 1912, Ostroukhov arranged a deal between Briagin and the Russian Museum, in which the Museum acquired the fifteenth-­century (at that moment, attributed as sixteenth-­century) Illuminated Gospel, or the Earthly Life of Christ (Litsevoe Evangelie, ili Zemnaia Zhizn’ Khrista) that Briagin had worked on restoring for a year and a half, removing three layers of paint to reveal seventy-­nine small squares depicting the scenes of Passions against a light, ivory-­colored background.143 As Nikodim Kondakov suggested, the icon, unique in its composition and style, belonged to the “Novgorod monastery school of iconography [monastyrskoe pis’mo Novgorodskoi oblasti]” and “preserved the precious evidence of the bygone freedom of thought and artistic feeling” intrinsic to the religious culture of the Russian North.144 In May 1912, the Russian Museum paid 2,000 rubles for this icon—­an unusually high price (Petr Neradovskii wrote to Ostroukhov: “Everybody is happy and delighted, especially by the icon of the Gospel”).145 A year and a half later, the museum’s administration found itself reporting the circumstances of the deal to criminal investigators. It turned out that this icon was one of fifteen sold out of an old wooden church named after Thomas’s Assurance in the Resurrection of Christ [tserkov Voskresenia Khristova Uverenia Fomy] built in 1634 in village of Zaborovie near Tver’. In 1910, the old church stopped holding services every day—­most of the parishioners by now attended service in the new stone church, and abandoned the icons in the old church. In 1910, Evgenii Briagin paid the priest Vasilii Riabov and the churchwarden Timofei Kovrukov 500 rubles for all the icons in the church, wrapped them in bast (coarse fabric), and took off for the railway station. Later, at the request of the priest, he brought new icons, which closely resembled the ones that he had taken from the church—­except for the icon meant to replace the Illuminated Gospel, which was slightly smaller than the original. The icons taken from the abandoned Zaborovie church, now beautifully restored, found new homes in the best collections of religious art in Russia: the art patron Pavel Kharitonenko purchased nine icons for his new church-­museum, built by the famous and fashionable architect Alexei Shchusev in the village of Natalievka; another icon bought by Kharitonenko

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eventually fell into the hands of the head of Nizhnii Novrogod’s city government, the wealthy merchant and Old Believer Dmitrii Sirotkin, who put it in a newly constructed Church of Dormition for Old Believers (built in 1914 by architect Nikolai Veshniakov); the well-­known artist and collector Viktor Vasnetsov purchased the icon of Vladimirskaia Mother of God; and Ostroukhov bought one icon for himself. The most precious one of the lot, as we know, went to the Russian Museum, after being restored by Briagin. The relocation of icons—­from an old wooden church abandoned by its parishioners to the new art nouveau and neo-­Russian-­style churches and the most famous collections of Old Russian art—­perfectly exemplified the tendency described by art historians as the appropriation of icons into modernist artistic domain. Nobody in Zaborovie noticed the absence of the icons, and it was only two years later, in August 1912, that rumors spread about the plunder of the old church’s shrines.146 The peasants of Zaborovie gathered at a meeting (selskii skhod) and asked the priest to open up the church. At first, none of the icons was found missing, except the big icon depicting the Passions—­the one that Briagin brought to replace it stood on the altar floor. When it was hung in the place of the old icon, stripes of faded paint remained visible on the wall—­the new icon was too small.147 The village elders established that not only this icon, but all the other icons in the old church were not the originals. Peasants complained, the story got into provincial newspapers, and the diocese of Tver’ had to start an investigation. The priest and the churchwarden finally admitted to selling the icons to Briagin: they claimed to have used the money for the construction of a heating system in the new church.148 In May 1913, the diocesan authorities turned the case over to a criminal investigator, and the priest and the churchwarden were arrested and put in jail. Briagin was first brought to court as a witness, and then in March 1915 he was also accused in the “blasphemous sale of sacred property” and went to prison. Religious crimes, even after the edict on tolerance of 1905, remained among the most severely prosecuted: six to eight years of hard labor (katorga)149 was the sentence for the purchase of icons from a cathedral—­that is, religious objects “sanctified” by divine service. The case had no precedents—­none of the icon traders had ever been brought to court for buying and restoring icons. Therefore, a case that began as a local scandal exploded into a big issue: the prosecution of Briagin, Riabov, and Kovrukov could have ruined the entire religious art trade and closed the supply channels for both national museums and private collectors. Briagin’s arrest made waves in the world of art collecting. Pavel Muratov, the editor of a new magazine The Russian Icon (Russkaia Ikona), wrote to Ostroukhov: “What will happen to our ‘ikonniki’? Briagin is in prison, Yukin [another famous master of icon restoration]—­at war.”150 Briagin spent two weeks in jail and was released for 15,000 rubles bail,151 and this only at the request of the Synod’s former ober-­procurator and member of the State Council Prince Alexei Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov. Before his arrest, Briagin had started work on

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Figure 7. The Church of Thomas’s Assurance in the Resurrection of Christ in Zaborovie. (Sketch by the church’s priest, Mikhail Rubtsov, in 1887, for the questionnaire sent by the Imperial Archaeological Commission.) Courtesy of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Archive, St. Petersburg (IIMK, RIII, no. 6802).

the restoration of frescoes in the Dormition Cathedral in Kremlin. Shirinskii-­ Shikhmatov, who was in charge of the restoration, wrote that Briagin was absolutely indispensable to the work under way in the main cathedral of the whole empire.152 Briagin was freed, but, nevertheless, the accusation hung like a sword of Damocles over his head. The machinery of the criminal investigation, once begun, was hard to stop: Ilya Ostroukhov did his utmost to rescue Briagin and, ultimately, the entire

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Figure 8. Litsevoe Evangelie (Illuminated Gospel), fifteenth century, Tver’. © Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.

“icon” cause. He petitioned Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich, a nominal director of the Russian Museum, asking him to intervene. Ostroukhov’s rhetoric very much resembled that of Nikolai Roerich—­the unofficial attorney of Tenisheva in the Smolensk scandal. Briagin, according to Ostroukhov, was not a criminal, but a hero, who saved the treasures of Russia’s religious art from destruction and oblivion. The description of the old church in Zaborovie served as the main argument of defense (which nobody could verify, as the church—­ like the museum in Smolensk—­burned in May 1914153). Ostroukhov described the church’s leaking roof, the birds nesting in a iconostasis, the icons blackened, ruined by exposure to the elements, soiled with bird droppings and left to “die” in the old church by the erstwhile parishioners. “A sad, and, unfortunately, ubiquitous situation,” commented Ostroukhov, accusing the parishioners and priest of neglect after they failed to notice the absence of the “revered”

170  |  Chapter 4 icons for two years! Ostroukhov testified that he saw the “miracle-­working” icon of the Passions when it arrived from Zaborovie, swollen and covered by blisters and bird droppings.154 Briagin’s conviction, argued Ostroukhov, would strike a horrible blow to the cause of preserving and discovering Old Russia. Icons would fall victim to priests’ ignorance and poverty. Unable to keep old icons in good conditions, priests would try to rid themselves of monuments of religious art. Ikonniki like Briagin in fact handled a task that the government could not take upon itself: the preservation of art. The government on its own would never find enough talented and devoted experts to travel to remote corners of the North and Siberia to search for diamonds in piles of trash. Ostroukhov’s defense of private icon traders rested on a shaky ground: he advocated freedom for an icon trade that preservationists actively worked to control. “So, what should we do? Let churches sell the treasures of our culture to just anybody? Does that mean that anyone can buy any item by claiming to deliver it to a museum or private collection? Of course not.” The property of churches that took good care of their treasures must be left untouched. However, saving icons “from the attics of bell-­towers, barns and cellars,” taking historical monuments “out of piles of dust and bird excrement,” and bringing them to perpetual asylum in national and private museums—­this was the noble task of people who did not deserve imprisonment or hard labor. Thus, it should be up to the experts to decide which churches could and could not keep their property, and which objects were simple ritual items and which represented Russia’s cultural heritage.155 Ostroukhov’s memo produced an effect that he likely did not quite expect. Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich saw the chief danger posed by Briagin’s case not exactly where Ostroukhov did: Briagin’s accusation threatened the museum’s collection, because the origins of most of the 3,000 icons and 6,100 other items of religious art kept in the Christian division156 could not be established. Most of these objects had been purchased in the same “illegal” ways—­that is, without the permission of diocesan authorities, from icon traders, private collectors, and restorers. Therefore, the museum could lose its exhibits because it was unable to protect its property rights. Addressing the emperor, Georgii Mikhailovich emphasized this side of the case. Nicholas II ordered that the case be considered thoroughly, meaning it was sent to the minister of justice himself, the staunch conservative Igor Shcheglovitov. As Shcheglovitov’s understood the Zaborovie case, not only the priest and the churchwarden were aware that the deal was illegal, Briagin knew too. The activity of people like Briagin, wrote Shcheglovitov, was especially harmful because it kept schismatics (by which he meant Old Believer Sirotkin, who, among others, bought the icons from Zaborovie) supplied with icons from Orthodox churches (apparently, Shcheglovitov did not recognize the edict on tolerance that legalized Old Belief). The replacement of the old icons with

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newly painted ones, claimed Shcheglovitov, proved that Briagin had planned a cynical forgery. Moreover, although the investigation did not establish who was responsible for the arson of the Zaborovie church, Shcheglovitov claimed that the main goal of the arsonists was to destroy the new icons, which were the most important evidence of the crime.157 Although not explicitly stated, Shcheglovitov’s main attack was aimed not at Briagin but at the experts who tried to shut down the case. He denied the validity of the difference between icons as ritual objects in the possession of the church and icons as masterpieces of religious art. Under no circumstances, he claimed, could icons—­even shabby or neglected ones—­be taken from churches. “The defense of church property from criminals,” especially when it concerned objects “sanctified by religious services,” was the supreme task of the state: “destabilizing this principle in the interests of collecting objects of religious art in museums” could not be tolerated. Shcheglovitov advised that the request of the Russian Museum be refused: the icon of Illuminated Gospel, as evidence of the crime, would return to the Tver’ diocese after the termination of the affair. Indeed, formally Shcheglovitov was right: Briagin consciously violated the law, as did all of the other people who bought icons from churches. At the same time, the farfetchedness of the whole affair was difficult to overlook: before the sale of icons to Briagin, two other icons from the same church went to the city museum in Tver’. More to the point, the official Church itself did not express any interest in the restoration of the “shrine.” In fact, from the canonical point of view, the Illuminated Gospel could not even be counted as an icon because of its apocryphal character (or, as Kondakov described it, “free folk account of the Earthly life of the Savior”).158 The archbishop of Tver’ and Kashin Serafim wrote the procurator of the Synod’s Moscow office, Filipp Stepanov: “Of course, this icon is valuable as a curious thing, but not for its iconography, and it is more suitable for a museum than a church.”159 Even the criminal investigator of the Moscow court, V. I. Gromov, found it difficult to charge Briagin: his report to the procurator presented Briagin as a typical craftsman, one of many who buy icons to restore and sell. The appearance of Briagin’s line of work, argued Gromov, was to be attributed to the “specific condition of the Russian people’s life,” with its irreverent attitude to old icons and the disrespectful treatment of antiquities. Thus, only those who, being entrusted to protect religious treasures, allowed the sale of the icons, should answer for the crime.160 Gromov’s report, submitted to the court, was not decisive: apparently, Briagin’s trial was supposed to be a show-­trial, as the minister of justice anticipated. Helpless to find legal ways to avoid Briagin’s conviction, Ostroukhov tried to act via personal connections; he bombarded Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich and the Russian Museum’s acting director Dmitrii Tolstoy with letters, arranged meetings with the powerful minister of agriculture (and a de facto prime minister) Alexander Krivoshein, who promised to talk to the emperor about the case.

172  |  Chapter 4 Nicholas II, however, preferred not to interfere and left the sides to negotiate. Finally, in March and May 1916, the specially organized Committee for the Elaboration of Laws on the Preservation of the Old-­Russian Iconography met to discuss two issues: how to prevent the plunder of church property and, at the same time, how to protect the collection of the Russian Museum.161 The meeting of the committee was held in the midst of a war that was marked by the unprecedented plunder of Old Russian art and hitherto unseen mobilization of the artistic and archaeological community for the protection of Russia’s cultural riches. Accusing Briagin and aligning him with enemies, smugglers, and plunderers would have critically undermined the legitimacy of the experts’ campaign against the destruction and the unauthorized export of art objects. In fact, the committee did not even discuss Briagin’s case, though it had been the stated reason for calling the meeting. Ostroukhov’s efforts—­he arranged a formidable line of defense, bringing the stars of Russian art history and preservation, Nikolai Likhachev, Nikodim Kondakov, and Alexei Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov, to speak on behalf of Briagin—­were all for naught. As Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov reported, Likhachev and Kondakov tried to speak about the case and its meaning, but the representatives of the Ministry of Justice responded that the experts’ opinion about the icon and the entire affair “had no value,” and it was up to the court to decide the fate of the accused. “The Themis [the Ministry of Justice] is up in arms,” concluded Shirinskii-­ Shikhmatov, assuming the intractability of the government, and advised Ostroukhov to think about the arguments for the court defense.162 Kondakov claimed that Briagin, the priest, and the churchwarden were eventually acquitted. However, we have no evidence of the verdict or other record from the court session.163 After 1917, Briagin continued to work for the Russian Museum until his death in 1943. The case of the icons from Zaborovie demonstrates the complexity of the issue of “sacred property.” What struck the world of art during Russia’s Silver Age was the vulnerability of the results of their preservation activity and ultimately, the entire project of “modernizing” Old Russian art and the creation of a patrimony that could be ruined in just one stroke by the application of canon laws. Interestingly, the Orthodox Church was reluctant to initiate an investigation and took a rather passive role in the process, which led the government to quite unexpectedly emerge as a main defender of the Church’s domain. In the course of investigation, it became clear that the case of Zaborovie served as a means of combating the attempts of the community of art experts to seize authority and establish a special legal regime for the treatment of the “national heritage.” The case demonstrated that, in the absence of laws recognizing the special legal status of the “national patrimony,” the experts’ efforts to construct this patrimony remained purely theoretical. Icons remained primarily the property of the Church and the objects of ritual: attempts to impose another meaning—­as

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monuments of national art and culture—­proved unsuccessful. “National heritage” existed as a mental construct, not as a legal entity. The case also contributed to the establishment of the position of the small expert community in regard to sacred property. A memo written, presumably, by Dmitrii Tolstoy for the Commission on Briagin’s affair, discussed icons from churches as “state property,” which the Russian Museum, as a state institution, could take from their original places for the sake of making them available to thousands of visitors and preserving them for posterity. No legitimate order for transferring out-­of-­use icons to museums existed, and the memo insisted that the state should help museums “rescue ancient monuments from destruction”—­that is, by confirming experts’ power to seize icons.164 Another anonymous memo contained a project for the creation of a committee of experts entrusted “to observe icons without hindrances,” to “receive them for studying and copying” and “upon negotiation with diocesan authorities . . . to keep them for distribution among museums,” inclusive of the objects of religious art from all state and communal institutions and, certainly, churches and cathedrals.165 In its general features, this project resembled the Bolsheviks’ Museum Fund—­a depository of artistic treasures expropriated from private collections and taken from public museums for redistribution among provincial and central museums. Why should the state have given such authority to experts? Why should icons and other artistic objects have been exempted from the power of laws on property? Artists and archaeologists could hardly offer original argumentation: their references to a special responsibility for posterity and the need for expertise in the treatment of monuments very much resembled the arguments used to defend the importance of preservation for other common things. For instance, arguing for the special status of icons, the first memo compared them with humans: “Icons, like sick people, need the closest and continuous care (icons suffered from organic and contagious diseases  .  .  .).” We have already seen this argument used with regard to forests. Indeed, icons were not property like other objects, and not every owner (or church) would treat them appropriately: only state museums—­much like hospitals or asylums—­offered proper conditions for the preservation of monuments. Another remarkable detail that underscored the meaning of Briagin’s case is that just at the same time, the Church slowly began to yield to the public interest, perhaps recognizing that the process of secularizing religious art, in the sense of opening its nonreligious meaning, was impossible to stop. One of the main events celebrated by contemporaries and interpreted by historians as a sign of the new period in the process of discovering iconography was a famous exhibition of icons organized by the Moscow Archaeological Institute at the showrooms of Delovoi Dvor.166 However, this exhibition displayed masterpieces from private collections (the collections of Stepan Riabushinskii, Ilya Ostrou­ khov, Dmitrii Silin, Nikolai Likhachev, and others) and the academic collections

174  |  Chapter 4 of public institutions.167 None of the icons displayed in Delovoi Dvor was taken from a church. More important for our story was another exhibition that took place the same year, although it attracted less publicity. On the occasion of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty (1913), the Synod’s “Jubilee” commission organized an exhibition of the gifts (vklady) made by the first Romanovs to the monasteries and churches of Moscow’s region: for the first time, the Church opened the sacristies and presented the masterpieces of seventeenth-­century Russian art (the exhibition was held in Chudov Monastery—­not a secular museum).168 In 1915, another exhibition, organized by the Committee for the Help of the Victims of War under the auspices of Grand Princess Tatiana Niko­laevna, opened in the halls of Baron Stieglitz’s Museums in Petrograd, revealing to the public the treasures of the sacristies of the church of the Winter Palace, the Lavra of Alexander Nevskii, Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and other depositaries and private collections.169 Apparently, the grand princess’s patronage was crucial for obtaining the exhibits from churches; perhaps the war atmosphere also played a role in this partial reconciliation between the Church and the museums’ domain. Both exhibitions evoked ambivalent feelings in the artistic community, both amazement and jealousy. After the exhibitions closed, all the items were destined to return to their “old places” and become once again “unreachable to history and science.”170 Nikolai Makarenko, writing about the 1915 exhibition, expressed bitter regrets about the fate of the masterpieces buried in church sacristies. “But the objects of sacristies are the state patrimony, not the private property [of churches], and that is why their place must be in a museum. There they would be of benefit to the country and science.”171 The idea of icons as “public” and “state” property apparently came to be generally accepted among artists. Why did the issue of relocating icons from church sacristies to museum showcases produce so much debate and tension, which is especially surprising when compared with the rather passive position of the government in regard to the export of icons or the destruction of architectural heritage? It seems that despite multiple incompatibilities of artistic and religious views, the similarity between their attitudes to icons was remarkable, and it made the transition from one sphere to the other quite problematic. The religious cult of believers and the aesthetic cult of artists and preservationists had a lot in common. Jefferson Gatrall has pointed out the similarity of “rituals of preservation” performed in museums, the secular “sacralization” of icons that intended to set them “apart from the profane circulation of everyday goods.”172 The similarity of museum rooms and churches was explicitly and consciously supported. The famous Alexei Shchusev designed the interior of the Russian Museum’s Christian exhibition, which, according to Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra’s wishes, was supposed to resemble a church or a church sacristy.173 Both believers and artists perceived their acquisitions as symbolic “inalienable possessions”

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(using Annette Weiner’s concept) and tried to keep them away from the realm of commodities. In the case of the icon from Zaborovie, both the church and the museum attempted to protect their possessions by declaring them legally “inalienable.” The life trajectory of icons174 should have ideally skipped the stages associated with market and proceeded slowly from the altars or sacristies of churches, through the workshops of restorers, and to the museum. Church authorities often accused architects and archaeologists of godlessness. An anonymous author from the Synod wrote that for them, “there are no holy old churches and chapels, no holy crosses, no . . . miracle-­working icons, and other holy objects: these are all just monuments of architecture, painting and art; they must be preserved and taken out of use lest they be subjected to destruction.” Speaking about the experts entrusted to decide the fate of the monuments, he lamented that the confession of those judges was not established: “be you a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Jew, a Muslim, . . . —­go surely to the Orthodox cathedral, take to the museum everything you like, and rule there as a power.”175

Figure 9. “Novgorodskaia palata” [The Novgorod Chamber] of the Christian Division at the Russian Museum of Alexander III. Architect Alexei Shchusev (1914). Courtesy of Gerold Ivanovich Vzdornov.

176  |  Chapter 4 Was this accusation fair? Strictly speaking, we can establish no direct connection between religious convictions and professional ethics, and the attitude to the Church’s policy had nothing in common with personal beliefs—­many archaeologists and preservationists were devoted Christians.176 It seems that an affinity for religious devotion and experts’ worship of artistic treasures was more important. Nikodim Kondakov, a renowned historian of Russian medieval and Byzantine icon paintings, confessed in his memoirs that he had turned away from Christianity during his university years: “in my soul I am not a Christian and do not profess Christianity.”177 At the same time, he called himself a deeply religious person. Apparently, Kondakov’s attitude to Christianity had rather a cognitive meaning: he admired the German school of scholarly analysis and critical interpretation of the Gospel. In his own research on the iconography of Mary, Kondakov established the principles of such an approach toward the study of Christian art. Kondakov was one of the organizers of the Committee for the Revival of Icon Painting set up in 1901 under Nicholas II’s patronage, which was supposed to combat the widespread tendency to replace traditionally hand-­painted icons with cheap tin and printed substitutes.178 The committee’s goal was to support iconographical schools and workshops in traditional centers of icon painting, and, at the same time, to set artistic standards: one result of the society’s activity was the publication of a volume, Illustrated Iconographical Script (Litsevoi ikonopisnyi podlinnik), with stencils of images based on old Russian and Byzantine models.179 The overlapping contours of religious and artistic domains, the similarity of the rhetoric and principles put into the foundation of the realm of Church and artistic patrimony, both separated from the world of the profane, must have produced uneasiness and anxiety. The Church authorities and the government, which tried to support the moral power of the Orthodox Church, looked at the artists’ appropriation of their shrines with fear. The project that the experts had offered appealed to a greater audience thereby suggesting a replacement for the religious community by a secular community kept together by common heritage. The opposition between the “private” Church and “public” museum voiced in the previously quoted Makarenko’s reportage about the exhibition of icons, is in itself remarkable: it made plain the failure of the Church to create a sense of community among believers in a country where the overwhelming majority were Orthodox and Orthodoxy continued to be the empire’s official religion. A museum—­its legal status notwithstanding—­was thought of as an inherently public institution. In the early twentieth century, the official Church struggled with challenges of sweeping political, social, and cultural transformations and largely failed to adapt to new conditions. The secularization of religious art represented another threat for the weakened institution. As Laura Engelstein has remarked, in Russia, the transition from the “era of images” to the “era of art,” described by Hans Belting, began only when “holy images” were transformed into the “objects of

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aesthetic contemplation”180—­that is, in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries—­and this transition overlapped with and was also triggered by a number of other powerful shifts and movements. In this situation, the idea of a national patrimony that embraced Russian religious art, as well the artistic heritage of other nationalities and confessions (including the Old Belief), could derive its energy from a variety of sources—­nationalism, patriotism, artistic modernism, and the ideas of social solidarity and the common good. It could have become a powerful tool in the hands of artists, archaeologists, historians, and other intellectuals.

5 Private Possessions and National Art The story of how icons were transformed into Russia’s national patrimony and came to symbolize its artistic heritage at first seems to suggest the exceptionality of the Russian case against the backdrop of the European historical preservation movement: the “aestheticization” of religious art occurred much later in Russia than in Europe, overlapping with artistic modernism. The relative youth of Russian painting meant that those searching for national artistic symbols turned naturally to icons. This celebration of religious art did not mean, however, that religion itself predominated as a theme in the formation of the cultural patrimony. Icons and churches were appropriated into a secular artistic domain, one that also encompassed the monuments of civil architecture, painting, and archaeological monuments. In this sense, the agenda of Russian preservationists, the theory and methods that they employed, very much resembled the campaign for the preservation of monuments in Europe. As this chapter will demonstrate, the ambitions of artists, preservationists, and archaeologists extended far and wide, encountering the resistance of private collectors and city authorities, landowners, and the imperial court. While dealing with the owners of artistic wealth and historical monuments, these zealots of the national patrimony pursued various objectives. With regard to private owners, they strove to control the practices of owning, displaying, and exchanging artistic objects, banning independent archaeological excavations on private land in the countryside, and attempting to regulate development and construction in the cities. Aspiring to turn imperial palaces into museums, they sought to separate the emperor’s private living space from the public space of the museum. The scale of the experts’ activity is striking, but even more remarkable is the growth of the domain of cultural patrimony they imagined, along with the development of scholarship, the establishment of the informal authority of expertise, and the rise of artistic criticism. While analyzing the politics and intellectual debates on the issues of historical preservation, it is important to keep in mind that archaeologists and art experts operated within the same legal environment as foresters, mining engineers, and hydrologists. Russian laws on property originated from one point: Catherine the Great’s decision to grant the country’s most important riches to the nobility. The claims of experts that objects under their care were unique

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and therefore deserved special treatment and to be exempted from “regular” property rules rested on common ideological and political ground, and eventually led not to the differentiation of legal regimes according to the objects’ type, but to the (rhetorical and ideological) formation of one seemingly solid public domain. At the same time, as this chapter will show, the notion of “public domain” remained quite blurred and implied no clear answer to the question of which objects of art and historical heritage should be nationalized, and where they should be placed to ensure their accessibility for the public and the preservation for future generations. Despite the previously mentioned exchanges of ideas and contacts with European scholars, European legal models could not be simply applied on Russian soil. The experience of the Ottoman Empire, a point of comparison for the Russian case, that in the nineteenth century became the ground of large-­scale privatization and export of historical treasures, also demonstrated that changing the letter of laws is not sufficient if the political regime and the practice of treating ancient things remain the same. Similarly, in Russia, preserving national heritage necessitated multiple reforms: the reform of property law stood among them as the initial impetus and a prerequisite.

Unearthing the Past: Underground Treasures and Property Rights The link between the sphere of nature and art is not merely metaphorical: as we know, thanks to Catherine the Great’s law on minerals, the status of archaeological treasures was rendered identical to that of coal, iron, and other mineral deposits. In the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, professional archaeology in Russia did not exist, and hidden treasures left by ancestors—­ treasure troves (by treasure troves, people often meant ancient burials with treasures)—­were valued exclusively as precious material assets—­that is, literally, as gold, silver, or precious stones buried in land not by nature, but by a human being. Because treasures are usually found below the land’s surface, the law classified them as subterranean property. The establishment of the analogy between mineral riches and subterranean treasures, “iron chests” with gold and silver, ancient kurgans, or the remnants of old settlements revealed an utterly pragmatic attitude to the material remnants of the past. The economic and legal regime of property rights came to be unconditionally and without any reservations applied to the domain of things, which a few decades later came to be seen as cultural treasures that had to be exempted from the process of commoditization. It’s worth noting that in Russia, the appreciation of the value of antiquity and the reform of private property happened almost simultaneously. Both antiquarianism and the cult of private property were imported from the

180  |  Chapter 5 West. The advancement of the ideas of the Enlightenment raised the epistemological value of historical research, while the eighteenth century’s neoclassicism shaped the tastes and artistic preferences of Russian elite. The victories in the Russo-­Turkish wars endowed Russia with its own piece of Greek antiquity on the northern coast of the Black Sea and Crimea, and possessing the materiality of the classical epoch acquired tremendous symbolic and cultural meaning for the empire. At the same time, Catherine the Great introduced the concept of inviolable private property into the pantheon of political ideas. At that moment, the contradiction between these two equally important components of Catherine’s enlightened autocracy and her project of Westernization did not appear so glaring: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, no one could claim that the protection of archaeological monuments was a sufficient excuse for the violation of the sacred right of property. In the nineteenth century, when the archaeological exploration of Russia began, the power of private landowners over archaeological treasures turned into a nightmare for historians and archaeologists, who blamed Catherine’s law on minerals for allowing the plunder of the national heritage. Entire pages in the history of the nationalities populating the Russian Empire turned out to be in the hands of private landowners, who did not and indeed could not know about the nonmaterial value of their property. The borders of private possessions that run across historical landscapes with the traces of ancient settlements underscored that property was a rather recent human invention, and, therefore, should not be treated as sacrosanct and inviolable. However, in politics and practice, these borders delineated the spheres of the state and archaeologists’ research and preservationist activity from the areas of owners’ free or arbitrary rule. As early as in 1805, the curator of the Imperial Hermitage collection Egor (Heinrich Karl Ernst) Köhler reported to Alexander I that he had made magnificent findings in Crimea and on Taman’ peninsula; in response to that, Alexander I prohibited “private travelers from visiting New-­Russian provinces to gather and collect antiquities.” This ban, however, referred to state lands only: “as for private lands, this depends upon the landowners and on private property rights, whether or not to prohibit travelers from making use of everything that is deposited in these lands.”1 Later, major prohibitions issued to protect historical monuments of Greek and Genoese colonies in Crimea were accompanied by special comments advising to observe the rights of private property.2 The rise of academic interest in “Russian” antiquity spurred the development of the market of antiquities and lands replete with the material remnants of the past. Along with coins and other things, an archaeologist could “buy” from a private landowner a permission to dig an ancient “private” tumulus for as little as 50 rubles.3 To save subterranean monuments from destruction, the Imperial Archaeological Commission negotiated with owners, bought out whole tracts of land, and conducted “preventive” archaeological exploration on the spots of planned construction.4 Predictably, in many cases

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archaeologists failed to reach agreements with stubborn landowners.5 The success of archaeological exploration depended on the willingness of landowners to allow their lands to be searched,6 while at the same time, landowners were legally free to dig up their land on their own, without expert oversight, thus imperiling the proper exploration of archaeological treasures. The omnipotence of private owners was a particular obstacle in the Kherson province—­Russia’s main archaeological terrain, and the home of Pontic Olbia, an ancient Greek colony. Pontic Olbia rested almost entirely on the land of count Alexei Musin-­ Pushkin, an amateur archaeologist who wanted to dig the site on his own. After thirty years of negotiations, he eventually agreed to collaborate with the Imperial Archaeological Commission in 1902, concluding an agreement with the commission that would give all the unique objects discovered in the dig to the commission, compensating Musin-­Pushkin for half of their total value, and splitting the rest of the objects between the two parties.7 Though better than nothing, a significant portion of findings (including marble statues from the fifth century BC) nevertheless remained in the hands of a private landowner.8 As a symbolic sign of the private ownership of kurgans, some of them bore the names of their owners, for example, the Mordvinov kurgan, a Scythian burial excavated in 1912. The evolution of archaeology in Russia strongly affected the political rhetoric of the campaign against the omnipotence of private owners, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become more “nationalistic.” In the early nineteenth century, archaeology in Russia was occupied merely with the materiality of classical antiquity, but the “discovery” of Russia’s medieval past and the prehistorical cultures on Russian territory in the mid-­nineteenth century helped define the historical materiality of the country in very broad cultural terms. “The Russian Antiquities,” as described by the prominent art historian Nikodim Kondakov and numismatist Ivan Tolstoy, included the material objects of various origins:9 Russian, Byzantine, Scythian, and others. In the late nineteenth century, the area that archaeological excavations covered spread all over the territory of the vast empire. However, this extension of the research area was not accompanied by the extension of the experts’ authority. The development of archaeology could not keep up with the spread of “treasure-­ hunting” and amateur archaeology. The author of a book on “treasure troves” in Kherson province reported about dozens of ancient kurgans “opened” by peasants in pursuit of mysterious troves.10 In most instances, the unfortunate treasure hunters found only skeletons and crocks, while irretrievably destroying the monuments. In certain regions, like Viatka, treasure hunting became a new industry for peasants: after the discover of Ananian culture (eighth to third centuries BC) in 1858, the local population eagerly excavated tumuli and searched for other treasures.11 The Imperial Archaeological Commission periodically addressed local administrations and rural inhabitants with pleas for information about any interesting objects found during plowing and promised

182  |  Chapter 5 to pay lucrative rewards “not on the basis of the price of metal (gold, silver) but according to the real value of the thing.”12 Between the 1860s and 1890s, objects excavated from Viatka and other provinces arrived in St. Petersburg and were displayed at the Imperial Hermitage and other museums. Nevertheless, unauthorized digs on state lands grew increasingly common, and the Imperial Archaeological Commission, with limited funding at its disposal, was unable to block the activity of the professional hunters, nicknamed schastlivchiki (“the favorites”).13 And even if a lucky finder of an ancient treasure trove offered his findings for sale, the Imperial Commission could not always compete with private collectors: many “treasures”—­such as the collection of the Ukrainian archaeologist Vikentii Khvoiko, purchased by Mikhail Botkin—­fell into private hands because the Imperial Archaeological Commission could not afford to purchase them.14 In 1887, members of Imperial Archaeological Commission submitted a series of reports depicting the destruction of archaeological sites that suffered both from treasure hunting and from the vigor of local unprofessional archaeologists.15 The reports threatened that archaeological science in Russia, now in its infancy, would have to deal with the “disfigured remains” of material culture when it reached maturity.16 The members of the commission—­all renowned archaeologists and art historians17—­saw the only hope of preventing the destruction of historical monuments in confirming the monopoly of the Imperial Archaeological Commission as the only state institution of professional archaeologists and art historians to conduct exploration and approve the research applications of other archaeologists. In a different report on this matter, the commission argued that establishing a monopoly over archaeological research would demonstrate that “the government considered Russian historical monuments [drevnosti] to be the state patrimony [gosudarstvennoe dostoianie], requiring the application of a strict scientific approach and governmental protection.”18 The commission’s reports demonstrated that claims for dominance in the professional exploration and restoration of historical monuments were based on the rhetoric of property (that is, that state ownership of land must promote the centralization of archaeological research), accompanied by the rhetoric of national historical memory and alarmism. This combination proved convincing, for, as count Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, one of the initiators of this campaign, reported with pleasure, Alexander III not only agreed with the suggestion but also suggested severe punishments for the unauthorized exploration and smuggling of antiquities (in this case, the emperor was mistaken, as the law did not prohibit the export of antiquities).19 On March 11, 1889, the emperor signed a decree that gave the Imperial Archaeological Commission a monopoly on conducting archaeological explorations on state and communal peasant lands and obliged all local societies and individuals to obtain permissions for excavations from them, then submitting all findings to the commission’s expert review.20

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The decree also gave the commission the power to authorize restoration and renovation of historical monuments located on state and communal lands as well as on the lands of “ public institutions” (a term that included the lands of Church, zemstvo, and cities). The only area excluded from the commission’s control, and the power of the state, was the land of private owners. On private lands, owners could dig, restore, or demolish historical monuments freely. In some regions, the preponderance of private land ownership led to massive destruction of monuments. For example, in the areas of particular archaeological interest like Crimea (the Taurida province) and the Kherson province on the northern coast of the Black Sea, the state land possessions were rather modest. In 1877, 54 percent of the lands in the Kherson province belonged to private owners, 34.6 percent were in the peasants’ possession, and 11.4 percent belonged to the state. In Crimea, 52 percent of the lands were private, 37.5 percent owned by peasants, and 10.5 percent belonged to the state.21 The dilemma of private ownership of publicly important archaeological objects had many solutions, but none of them seemed to balance conflicting private and public interests. One of the most popular was the idea of applying the mechanism of the expropriation of property for public needs, which was widely used in the construction of railways, public roads, streets, and military objects.22 After all, “If the expropriation of private property for public utility is allowed, it is not fair to limit the application of this rule by material needs only,” wrote the The Juridical Herald (Iuridicheskii vestnik) in 1880.23 Stretching the notion of “state and public needs” from purely pragmatic goals, such as railway construction, to its more general meaning, including the preservation of the national historical heritage, seemed to be appropriate. The idea of expropriation of artistic and historical property hung heavily in the air: in 1909, the commission set up by the Ministry of Interior included the article on expropriation in the projected legislation on historical preservation. From the very beginning of its work, the special commission at the Ministry of Interior24 split up in three groups: the first discussed the preservation of monuments of “primordial” history, the second dealt with monuments of art, while the third discussed the preservation of archives and manuscripts. The most ardent debates on property rights flared up in the group on archaeological monuments. The initial suggestion of the archaeologist Nikolai Veselovskii (he became famous for the excavation of Scythian “gold” kurgans)—­to declare all archaeological monuments state property—­was rejected as “theoretically beautiful but unrealistic,” as well as potentially frightening to landowners, leading them to destroy archaeological sites.25 Another suggestion was to give the state (that is, state archaeological institutions) the right to conduct research anywhere should such an intrusion be necessary in the interests of science. Others proposed allowing the state to expropriate the most valuable archaeological sites—­ such as Pontic Olbia (the property of Musin-­Pushkin), tumuli, and the sites of ancient settlements, or, as Boris Khanenko, a private collector and himself

184  |  Chapter 5 the fortunate owner of precious troves, suggested, giving the state the right to expropriate the most valuable findings [with appropriate compensation to the landowners] while leaving the sites themselves alone, held by private landowners.26 As a concession to private owners, archaeologists were prepared to leave to their disposal all “accidental” findings and even to allow independent excavations under the control of experts. The art historian and archaeologist Boris Farmakovskii defended this moderate approach: if the state was interested in the preservation of monuments and the development of science, it should not be greedy. After all, Farmakovskii remarked, “it is important to describe and study a monument; who it belongs to and where it is kept, this is a secondary issue.”27 Negotiations, instead of a “radical change in legislation”—­such as the nationalization of monuments—­this was his vision for the future law. The debates on the issue of ownership of monuments proved that setting rules for the treatment of archaeological discoveries was extremely difficult. Experts had to take into account the archaeological illiteracy of peasants and other private owners; they did not want to scare away private owners of historical sites and strove to encourage them to cede voluntarily their archaeological findings. As a result of long discussions, the Ministry of Interior commission decided to insist on the state’s monopoly over excavation, and obliged private owners to open their lands for state-­led archaeological research. The state was given the right to expropriate all findings with compensation to the landowner on whose property they were found. All objects found accidentally were to be reported to local authorities. The export of ancient objects without the government’s permission was to be forbidden.28 However, when the draft of law got to the State Duma, all articles encroaching upon the right of private property disappeared: the Duma exempted all monuments in private possession, including archaeological sites, from protective measures and removed limitations on the export of antiquities.29 The only projected measure that survived from the initial draft was the state’s right to expropriate the most valuable monuments. The entire project eventually got stuck in the legislative bodies and only the danger of mass destruction and theft of art during the war forced the government to return to the issue in April 1916 and consider the total nationalization of all historical monuments.30 However, even at that stage the government rejected the project of nationalization as not compatible with the principle of private property. The contradiction between the legal principles of property rights and the exigencies of preserving archaeological monuments was not uniquely a Russian problem. The legal regime of treating “historical monuments” ranged from imposing constraints on the treatment of monuments by their owners, which assumed the state’s right to interfere if the owner failed to provide appropriate care to the object of “public” interest, to the total nationalization of historical and artistic treasures. Italy and Greece were the first to adopt a series of measures to protect their national patrimonies, prohibiting the export of

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antiquities and establishing national museums as the custodians of the state’s artistic treasures. Among the European states, Great Britain was a latecomer: the British laws were similar to the Russian laws, allowing the extension of private property under the land surface, but the notorious traditionalism of the British legal regime helped constrain the abuse of proprietary power by owners. For instance, while most countries departed from the principle of regality, which declared the state’s, or ruler’s, rights to all treasure troves (many of them were also historical treasures), Britain preserved this royal privilege. In the mid-­nineteenth century, this privilege to obtain all hidden treasures was successfully accommodated to the needs of historical preservation, and the state began to use the law on treasure troves for the purpose of state acquisition of antiquities.31 The Crown claimed all treasures discovered on private lands if their owner had intentionally hidden them, and his or her name could not be established. Thanks to this privilege, the Crown became a regular supplier of the British Museum, which replaced the treasury as the main claimant of any treasure finds.32 Indeed, not all archaeological findings qualified to be named “treasure troves” (numerous cases on this matter were heard in courts), and in the 1870s, British archaeologists started a campaign for the extension of protection to all other archaeological monuments. However, in Britain “the attempts to protect physical monuments ran aground on the same rock of the sanctity of private property”:33 the law on monuments issued in 1882 had “no power over proprietors of ancient monuments.”34 Only in 1913 did the state introduce the compulsory regime of protecting monuments in private possession, though in Russia, no such law was passed. John Carman has described the confrontation over the laws on antiquities in Great Britain as a political competition between the rising community of professional liberal archaeologists and aristocratic landowners and antiquarians. He presents the campaign for the preservation of monuments in the context of a general “massive expansion of the public domain at the expense of the private” that touched upon various spheres, including education, public health, labor regulation, and housing.35 In Russia, as we know, the campaign for the preservation of archaeological monuments also went in parallel to the movements for the preservation of forests and the “freedom of mining” aimed at the “liberation” of subterranean natural resources from the power of private owners. The anti-­proprietary rhetoric of these campaigns echoed the slogans of European “new” liberals, although anti-­aristocratic stances of archaeologists were not so explicit. There was, however, a difference between the claims for the nationalization of antiquities in Britain and Russia. In the first case, the question of who would own the deprivatized antiquities did not evoke a lot of discussion: the British Museum, founded by an Act of Parliament and supported by public funds, acted as the state’s representative and a custodian of artistic treasures.36 In Russia, most archaeological acquisitions filled up the collection of the Hermitage

186  |  Chapter 5 Museum; however, the status of that collection was not equivalent to the status of the British Museum or the Louvre. The Imperial Hermitage with all its archaeological artifacts, paintings, and furniture remained a property of a ruling family, and, along with numerous other palaces, was run by the Ministry of Imperial Court (see the next section of this chapter). Thus, the difference of status—­state (national, public) or royal—­was especially important for countries with absent or limited political representation. In this context, the regime of res publica appeared as a marker of inviolability and inalienability of the historical heritage, which could not fall victim to rulers’ whims, political upheavals or economic crises. The issue of “public” versus “private” and “royal” ownership of antiquities acquired particular meaning in the countries that were the homes to the greatest monuments of ancient history—­the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. In Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the monuments fell victim not only to the local population’s practical attitude toward the stones of pyramids as the sources for construction, and the government’s reckless treatment, they also suffered from the abundant attention of European scholars who tried to carry their findings home with them. The first law on the protection of antiquities in Egypt (1835) prohibited the export of archaeological treasures; however, it proclaimed that the protection of historical monuments was the royal prerogative, as Muhammad Ali Pasha unboundedly used sphinxes and obelisks as foreign currency, authorizing the export of antiquities to support friendly relationships with European countries.37 Only with the establishment of Antiquities Services under the leadership of French Egyptologist August Mariette, the de facto founder of the Museum of Antiquities, were the state’s, and Mariette’s, monopoly on excavation and the ban on the export of antiquities duly enforced.38 The law of 1883 proclaimed all antiquities—­those that had already been deposited at the Museum of Antiquities and those that were yet to be found—­“public property.” The French term taken from the Code Civil and used to designate the status of these objects—­ “propriétés du Domaine Public de l’État”—­assumed that even the state institutions could not dispose of them freely: this was “public” property (res publica), as opposed to the property of the state and a ruler. The Egyptian antiquities were to become “inaliénables, insaisissables et imprescriptibles” (inalienable, untouchable, and imprescriptible).39 Antoine Khater has described the transformation in the status of monuments fostered by the law of 1883 as “the abandonment of royal prerogatives in favor of the Nation.”40 In its essence, the Egyptian law on antiquities embodied the dreams of Russian preservationists and archaeologists who vainly endeavored to nationalize archaeological monuments. The practice of implementing the regime of protecting monuments might have differed substantially from the ideas of the law, and precious artifacts continued to leave the country, though it became much more difficult to export antiquities from Egypt than from the Ottoman Empire.41

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Until 1884, the Ottoman imperial authorities left enough freedom for private (mostly European) archaeologists for digging and disposing of archaeological riches. The sultan’s nominal power over all lands in the country42 did not extend beneath the land surface.43 Private landowners could claim one-­ third of the archaeological findings, while the second third of the find went to the excavator, and the last part belonged to the state. Using this rule, the Europeans bought lands with archaeological sites, procuring at least two-­thirds of the loot, and then negotiated the purchase of the last third with Ottoman authorities. In 1884, the Ottoman government passed a law on the protection of antiquities, which, as Suzanne Marchand explains, “followed closely on the heels of several major European expropriations, including that of the Pergamon Altar.”44 In contrast to the previous regulation, the law of 1884 established the state’s ownership of all antiquities yet to be discovered on the Ottoman soil (or underneath it).45 Since all antiquities belonged to the ruler, no one could export them without a permit; at the same time, the sultan’s privilege secured the possibility of obtaining a permit through diplomatic negotiations.46 The export of antiquities continued after 1884, and even after the passing of another law in 1906, which with perfect clarity and precision reiterated the government’s ownership of all monuments. The law, almost ideal in theory,47 was successfully circumvented through the mechanisms of “archaeological diplomacy.” A number of international archaeological institutions operated on Turkish territory, and each attempted to secure its findings with the help of diplomats and carry them away. The Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople was no exception: among other findings, Russian Byzantinists arranged the export of the famous Palmyra’s stone with the engraved customs tariff in Greek and Aramaic.48 The geopolitical and military vulnerability of the Ottoman Empire was perhaps the main reason for the failure of the Ottoman intellectuals and nationalists to protect their patrimony, which was quite apparent when compared to the relative success of Egypt and Italy.49 Nevertheless, the political and legal regime, as well as the peculiarity of Ottoman nationalism, also had direct influence on the fate of historical objects: they did not allow the nation to become the true owner of its heritage. The state, the nominal owner of antiquities, was embodied in the figure of the sultan, who disposed of the empire’s treasures as he saw fit: the principle of “state property” proclaimed by the Ottoman laws on antiquities was not equivalent to “public property” in other nations: artifacts remained the sultan’s assets which he could trade for political loyalty and diplomatic support. It did not mean that Ottoman intellectuals or officials remained unaware of the ideological and cultural meaning of archaeological artifacts: national treasures were carefully collected and displayed in imperial museums. However, the government considered archaeological artifacts as movable wealth, or alienable commodities whose value was not inherent and incalculable, but was being created in the process of exchange.

188  |  Chapter 5 As we have seen in the previous analysis of the debate on public property in Russia, the idea of the “nationalization” of monuments in Russia (this term was often used in discussions to designate the “public” status of objects) was antithetic to private, royal, and even to a certain extent, state ownership, since the state that the liberally thinking experts had in mind differed from the imperial state of the autocratic Russia. It would not be an exaggeration to describe the archaeologists’ and artists’ views as “étatist,” although the ideal state was imagined as a custodian, not an owner, of the nation’s treasures. Similarly, most experts had nothing against the benevolent patronage of the ruler—­such as Nicholas II’s generous funding of the purchase of several collections from his personal funds—­but they could not tolerate the dependency upon the institutions of the imperial court and bureaucrats. More importantly, personal protection of the emperor was necessary and indispensable precisely because of the royal status of Russia’s main artistic collections and museums. The issue of the limits of royal privileges extended to the nation’s cultural treasures, inevitably arose in the debates on the future of Russian artistic and historical heritage. First, artists, historians, and preservationists questioned the tsar’s right in regard to the artistic collection of the Hermitage Museum and imperial palaces.

His Majesty’s Domain The notion of a cultural patrimony, permeated by nationalist sentiment, extended dramatically in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, though it remained limited to the sphere of the public imagination rather than imperial law. Artists and patrons of art, such as Alexander Benois and Sergei Diaghilev (who were both graduates of the Law Department), often spoke about great works of art as “ours”—­regardless of who was their real owner. Writing about the palaces and magnificent park of Peterhof—­a suburban residence built for the imperial family in the eighteenth century but subsequently abandoned—­ Alexander Benois characterized the estate as “a historical and national monument, and, consequently, “public property” (obshchestvennaia sobstvennost’), along with other suburban palaces—­Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, Strelna, and Oranienbaum.50 In fact, whereas the parks of Peterhof and other residences were open to the public, none of the palaces run by the Ministry of the Imperial Court became a museum before the revolution of 1917. Hardly anyone could insist on turning imperial palaces into museums at that time, but the idea of relocating artistic masterpieces from palaces to museums grew popular at the turn of the century, especially after the creation of the Russian Museum.51 Not surprisingly, Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), with its retrospective-­looking agenda and the cult of Russian classicism it promoted, was one of the first to support this move. Sergei Diaghilev, in an article published in one of the magazine’s issues in 1901, suggested gathering all paintings

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of Russia’s most famous eighteenth-­century artists, Dmitrii Levitskii and Vladimir Borovikovskii, from palaces and state offices and transferring them to their legitimate place—­the national Russian Museum.52 “Our palaces are so endlessly rich,” exclaimed Diaghilev.53 However, it was not surprising that the idea of national museums came to be rhetorically connected with the deprivatization of artistic treasures from royal and aristocratic palaces. In 1900, World of Art published an essay by the German director of the Munich Glyptothek, Adolf Furtwängler, that narrated the development of museums in Europe as a process of the nationalization of art and gradual acknowledgment of the right of “popular masses” to participate in the spiritual life of the nation and, more generally, mankind.54 Many of the European national art museums had grown out of royal collections: it was natural to expect that in Russia, the Imperial Hermitage would also turn into a national public museum of world art, a twin of the Russian Museum, and that the artistic riches of the dynasty would be available for everyone’s enjoyment. Unlike the treasures of the Louvre or the collections of the British Museum, the Imperial Hermitage’s paintings, sculptures, and decoration, along with all the furniture and equipment, belonged to the emperor, as well as the riches of other imperial palaces. Paul I, the successor of Catherine the Great, who founded the collection, moved it from the Winter Palace to the Mikhailovskii Castle: the Imperial Hermitage ceased to be the ruler’s exclusively personal collection but remained the property of the emperor.55 The relocation of the Hermitage collection to the building of the New Hermitage in 1852 allowed the complete separation of the residential part from the exhibits, and facilitated the opening of the museum to the public. Nevertheless, the Imperial Hermitage retained its status as the ruler’s artistic asset. Imperial involvement in the management of the museum differed, but all main acquisitions were made only with the emperors’ permission.56 The Hermitage was still considered a palace, and was used according to the needs of the Imperial Court. Later, the Hermitage’s director Dmitrii Tolstoy bitterly complained about the dependency of the museum’s administration on the “marshal of the court administration” (gofmarshalskaia chast’), which managed the palace. “Courtiers” kept the keys to all the Hermitage’s rooms. They used the “suites” of the Hermitage building for accommodating those guests whose status was too high to place them in the Hotel d’Europe, but too low to accommodate in the Winter Palace—­mainly, the rulers of Russia’s vassals in Central Asia and nonsovereign European countries.57 Moreover, the Ministry of the Court often “lent” the Hermitage’s paintings to other agencies for the decoration of ministers’ apartments, offices, and other buildings. In fact, the Hermitage’s artistic treasures could not be considered the tsar’s property entirely. The ruler’s power to dispose of his artistic domain had limits: palaces and lands in the emperor’s patrimony including the Winter Palace, Tsarskoe Selo, and Peterhof could not be sold or alienated by a ruling emperor,

190  |  Chapter 5 and after the ruler’s death passed automatically to the successor. They represented the property of the throne rather than the person who occupied it. Other palaces and lands, such as the palaces at Pavlovsk and Gatchina, belonged to the tsars and the members of the imperial family and could be split or alienated without restriction.58 There existed, then, an important legal difference in the proprietary statuses of Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof on the one hand, and Pa­ vlovsk and Gatchina on the other. Consequently, the artistic treasures of those palaces were also split in two groups: the inalienable property of the dynasty, and the private property of tsars. However, the strict legal separation between the emperor’s private property and the inalienable property of the imperial family was observed only until the mid-­nineteenth century when it came to the purchase of art and paintings for palaces. Starting from the rule of Alexander III, the administration of the Hermitage and imperial palaces registered most purchases in one inventory (instead of two different accounts) while omitting many objects altogether. The Hermitage’s limited financial means also supported its “private” character: the government allocated only 5,000 rubles for new acquisitions from the 17 million ruble budget of the Ministry of the Imperial Court. The entire budget of the museum was set at 175,000 rubles, less than half the budget of His Majesty’s Hunt.59 Dmitrii Tolstoy, who served as a director of two of Russia’s main museums between 1909 and 1917, remarked that life at the Hermitage was “dull and monotonous,” compared to the growing Russian Museum, because of the limited funding.60 Nevertheless, between 1893 and 1908 the museum spent 206,000 rubles on purchases. In 1914, the Hermitage bought Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with a Flower61 for 150,000 rubles, purchased out of the emperor’s own funds.62 Every time the museum wanted to buy something new, it had to petition the emperor for a donation, and this significantly slowed the process. The precious collections of many Russian owners found European homes due to the fact that the Hermitage was unable to secure timely permission to make purchases before they were put up for auction abroad.63 Most of Russia’s emperors were generous patrons—­especially when it concerned Russian art. Alexander III was reputed to be a connoisseur of Russian contemporary art; Nicholas II continued his father’s policy of patronage—­he bought the entire collection of Nikolai Likhachev for the Russian Museum using his personal capital (at the price of 300,000 rubles).64 In addition, he allocated 30,000 rubles annually from his personal budget for the development of the Christian department of the Russian Museum.65 The Russian Museum’s “regular” budget allocated 30,000 rubles for development of its entire art collection and 40,000 for the department of ethnography. Though this was still much more than the Hermitage’s budget, the emperor’s gift was an important contribution. However, it remained unclear why the regular budget of the national museums was so tiny that they required such significant support from the emperor.66

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In part, this was because the patronage of the arts and sciences was considered to be the emperor’s business. The Ministry of the Imperial Court officially managed the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Arts, the Imperial Theaters, the Imperial Archaeological Commission, and, of course, the Hermitage. In fact, the Ministry of the Imperial Court was a precursor to the Ministry of Culture, created after the Bolshevik Revolution. (The idea of creating an Imperial Ministry of Fine Arts circulated in the 1910s, but it did not receive serious support, mainly because there was nothing left to do that the Ministry of the Imperial Court was not already doing.67) Members of the emperor’s family directed the Academy of Arts and the Russian Museum.68 This financial and administrative dependency directly influenced the proprietary status of the Museum’s possessions. Who owned the imperial collections—­the tsar or the state? In the nineteenth century, this question might have seemed purely theoretical: rulers disposed of the treasures of the Hermitage as their own. Most notoriously, Nicholas I sold dozens of masterpieces from the Hermitage collection at auction; numerous paintings were destroyed simply because they did not fit the emperor’s taste or reminded him of unpleasant events in his rule—­the Decembrists Revolt and the Polish uprising.69 However, at the turn of the century the question of property acquired more significant political meaning. Characteristically, the Statute of the Russian Museum (1897) avoided this tricky subject while stipulating that all exhibits placed in the museum’s display rooms must be considered “its property” (rather than the state’s or the emperor’s)—­with the result that, as we know, between 1913 and 1916 the museum faced difficulties in securing its right to the icon from Zaborovie. The experienced minister of the court Baron Vladimir Frederiks pointed out the need to stipulate that both the Mikhailovskii Palace (the purchase of which, from the heirs of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, was covered by the state budget) that hosted the collection and the museum itself belonged to the emperor’s domain:70 for unknown reasons, this was not done. Perhaps the indefinite status of the Russian Museum affected its status in the public mind (although the museum’s administration policy was crucial to the transformation of its image from a conservative institution run by the elders from the Imperial Academy of Arts to a truly public place). The previously mentioned influx of private donations perfectly reflected public recognition of the museum as a “national institution.” Alexander Benois explained the generosity of people of various social origins as the desire to earn “cultural capital” by depositing their “family pride” in the national museum. The growth of donations was a symptom of rising interest in national art, in particular. However, noted Benois, one should not expect similar public zeal with regard to the Hermitage. “In the first case—­in the [Russian] Museum—­we are dealing with the national property, in the second—­with the personal property of the monarchs.” A donor willing to make a contribution to Russia’s most famous depository of European art could not ask to have his name indicated on the painting’s

192  |  Chapter 5 plate: this restriction also originated from the Hermitage’s peculiar status (one of the Hermitage’s potential donors refused to make donations because of this condition).71 Of course, the issue of the Hermitage’s legal status (as well as the fate of all the paintings from royal palaces registered to the Hermitage’s account) had not only artistic and public meaning. In November 1905, at the peak of revolution, the Ministry of the Court addressed the Hermitage’s administration with a “confidential” question: whether all items kept in the museum must be considered the Hermitage’s property, or whether there were objects that belonged to the emperor personally.72 The museums’ chief curator Andrei Somov (father of the famous artist and member of the World of Art group Konstantin Somov) responded that “paintings and other of the Hermitage’s riches had constituted, along with the [paintings] that decorate imperial palaces, from the time of Catherine II, the property of ruling emperors.”73 We do not know why this inquiry was made (perhaps, in the elaboration of the new Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, the Statute of the Imperial Family required clarification), but even the fact that this question emerged in the government was symptomatic of the growing concerns about the status of artistic treasures. Given the precarious political position of the monarchy in the midst of the revolution, this inquiry might have suggested parallels with the fate of royal domains in Europe. The issue came up again when Count Dmitrii Tolstoy—­already the acting director of the Russian Museum—­assumed the management of the Hermitage (1909).74 The revision of the Hermitage inventory that started in 1908 revealed chaos and disorder and, more importantly, the total confusion of the tsar’s personal things with purchases made on the accounts of palaces and the museum.75 As Tolstoy claimed, the assets of the ruling family must be separated from the “national, people’s property,” and pointed out the necessity of establishing the legal rights to every single item in the collection.76 To support his assertion, Tolstoy pointed out that the issue of ownership of the museum’s collections had been raised repeatedly in the Russian press. The memory of the revolution of 1905–­1907 was still very fresh, with its reminders of the fate of royal artistic domains in Europe. In this context, an article from The Stock-­ Exchange Bulletin (Birzhevye viedomosti), attached to Tolstoy’s report, sounded a warning: the Belgian parliament questioned King Leopold regarding the sale of some objects from palaces that constituted the patrimoine national. The king, as the article explained, was only allowed the use of these things to perform his functions and support the prestige and splendor of the court.77 Of course, the Russian constitutional order was far from that of Belgium, but the rhetoric of “national property” was in wide use in Russia, too. Tolstoy’s initiative to separate the emperor’s assets from the museum’s property was not well-­received: the Ministry of the Imperial Court asserted that the treasures of the Hermitage had the same status as furniture and decoration in

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palaces, and belonged to the emperor.78 The requests to relocate artistic treasure from imperial palaces to public museums were not heard, either: Levitskii’s paintings—­the most desirable objects—­moved to the Russian Museum only after the abdication of Nicholas II.79 Nevertheless, the attitude toward the Hermitage as “national property,” although not supported in law, entered into the rhetoric of debates on museums. Characteristically, in 1911, a commission of the same Ministry of the Imperial Court, entrusted with the elaboration of new security measures in museums, grounded its report on the assumption that “museums constitute national property [obshchegosudarstvennoe dostoianie], which has to be protected by all citizens.”80 Perhaps it was a slip of the pen, but it still suggests that the rhetoric of the ongoing debates on the preservation of “national heritage” influenced the politics of museum reform. Tolstoy’s attempt to determine ownership rights over the Hermitage’s treasures proved far-­sighted: in March 1917, just two weeks after Nicholas II’s abdication, he received an inquiry from the Provisional Government. The new authority wanted to know which objects from the Hermitage must be considered the state’s, and which were the property of the now-­defunct imperial family. The Hermitage inventory contained proof of personal property rights for only two objects: a small vase with enamels and a gilt tableware set that belonged to the empress Alexandra Fedorovna. Property rights over other objects, responded Tolstoy, could not be established because of the guiding principle of the preceding decades that all objects registered in the Hermitage’s inventory belonged to the Hermitage.81 After October 1917, all personal items of the emperor’s family ended up in museums.82

Private Museums and National Art The debates about the legal status of imperial artistic collections were stirred by the spectacular development of antiquarianism and private art collecting in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Certainly, donations and purchases provided a link for exchange between the two domains—­imperial and private. Donations boomed as the idea of the “national heritage” gained in recognition. However, even more apparently fierce competition grew between official art, on one side, and private and “national,” on another. The competition famously appeared in the mid-­nineteenth century with the revolt of the “Itinerants” against the monopoly of the Imperial Academy of Arts in setting canons for artistic language and, more importantly, in displaying and selling artworks. The Itinerants’ know-­how was in the creation of an independent arena for presenting their “realist” paintings in traveling exhibits, and selling them to numerous public and private museums in Russian big cities as well as small provincial towns.83 About at the same time as the Itinerants began their campaign, Russian wealthy people started purchasing contemporary works of Russian art

194  |  Chapter 5 and collecting paintings of their predecessors. The new ethos of art collecting that emerged in mid-­nineteenth century, in contrast to the collecting zeal of eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century Russian aristocracy,84 was marked with an anti-­“academic” (assuming the official Imperial Academy of Arts) and anti-­bureaucratic spirit. These new collections were built as much for the personal enjoyment of their owners, as the public cause of gathering and displaying national art, while the “public” aspect certainly prevailed. The most famous private patron of art, Pavel Tretyakov, started buying the paintings of contemporary Russian artists in 1856; in his first will written in 1860, he bequeathed his collection to the city of Moscow on the condition that after his death a “private” society (“not from the government, and, more importantly, without state officials”) would assume management of the “national” or “people’s” gallery “without the government’s interference.”85 In 1892, upon the death of his brother Sergei, who also pledged his collection to Moscow, Pavel Tretyakov offered the Moscow city administration his splendid gallery of Russian art. Collecting art and antiques began as a craze among merchants and aristocrats in Moscow in the 1860s; in the 1890s, bequeathing private collections to a community of co-­citizens was seen as an indispensable element of the collecting ethos. (One of the donors, Ivan Linnichenko, leaving his archaeological collection to the Historical Museum in Kiev, declared: “Every private collection sooner or later must become public property.”86) In the early twentieth century, private collectors were expected either to sell under special conditions or to donate their property to the public: Russia’s First Preliminary Museum Congress held in 1912 promised support to private museums on the condition that the collection later be donated to the “state, city or society.”87 Pavel Tretyakov had many followers: Petr Shchukin planned to give his collection to the city, but in 1905 donated it to the Historical Museum;88 Koz’ma Soldatenkov bequeathed his collection to the Rumiantsev museum in Moscow; Ivan Tsvetkov donated his collection with a two-­story house to the city of Moscow in 1909. The Moscow city government did not always welcome this civic enthusiasm: it did not accept the donation of Alexei Bakhrushin, a creator of the first Russian theatrical museum, explaining that managing the gifts of Soldatenkov and Tretyakov had become a huge hassle.89 The popularity of the idea of “municipalization” of art collections is not surprising: after all, cities possessed certain administrative autonomy and elective institutions; their property legally constituted res publica, in contrast to the enclosed royal domains of the museums in capitals. What may seem surprising is that the movement toward the “municipalization” of art concentrated on Moscow, while remaining rare in St. Petersburg. The differences between the ethic of private collecting in “official” St. Petersburg and “merchant” Moscow, which boasted its “liberal” city government and artistic independence, explained why Moscow received so many gifts.90

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Why did the idea of donating grow so popular among elites? It is possible that the epidemic of donations in Europe somehow inspired Russian donors. Vanity also drove some private donors, but not all of them: others were attracted to idea of deprivatizing art, influenced by the work of Nikolai Fedorov, who was said to have inspired Lev Tolstoy to renounce his right of literary property. Fedorov, an ascetic and philosopher, was also a librarian at the Rumiantsev museum (originally a private museum bequeathed by its owner to the state in 1826); he also wrote a number of works dedicated to “the philosophy of common cause” and vigorously denounced private property in the realm of art and culture. In keeping with his criticism of copyright, Fedorov called upon private book collectors to catalogue their holdings and open them to the public.91 His vision of a museum as a “synod,” or community, the people’s “communion” of knowledge and common memory, exemplified Fedorov’s lofty ideal of restoring fraternal social and cultural ties in the nation: a museum was supposed to be a material quintessence of the res fratria and an essential element of working for the “common cause.”92 Fedorov’s imagined museum overcame the borders of disciplines and encompassed books and art, any products of human cultural activity and the memory of generations. However unique and, perhaps, utopian Fedorov’s idea of a universal museum may have sounded, it echoed the mood of the Russian artistic community: Alexander Benois also referred to the museum as a temple, as opposed to a laboratory or an archive.93 In the 1900–­1910s, the concept of a museum as a public cause united many devotees—­experts, donors and sponsors. The voluntary municipalization or nationalization of private collections reflected the search for a model of a national depositary of art, an artistic res publica. Although Tretyakov’s devotion to the idea of a national museum needs no proof beyond the hallowed museum bearing his name, one can find indirect evidence of his attitude in his admonition to Ilya Efimovich Repin, who suffered from an unfortunate habit of repainting elements in his canvases, and ruined more than one masterpiece along the way. Reprimanding Repin, Tretyakov said: “These are not my paintings, this is national property, and you may not touch them, although you are their author.”94 Indeed, not all private collectors shared Tretyakov’s commitment to the public nature of his collection, but the concept of art as having a specific proprietary status, outside the codes of law, found frequent expression among Russian patrons of art. The idea of nationalizing art and monuments appealed not only to Russian philanthropists, but also to many politicians. Between 1906 and 1914, the deputies of the State Duma and public organizations launched a number of initiatives for the state purchase of private collections in order to guarantee their preservation, and that they would stay in Russia.95 Artists lamented the absence of a special state fund to use for this purpose, and mourned every “missed” collection or object bought by foreigners and taken out of the country. One

196  |  Chapter 5 of the biggest disappointments was the purchase of a collection of Byzantine enamels of the ninth to eleventh centuries, known as Alexander Zvenigorod­ skii’s collection. After his death, Zvenigorodskii’s sister put the collection up for sale, and the government formed a commission to consider the purchase. Experts including Nikolai Porkovskii and Nikodim Kondakov (the author of a magnificent catalogue of the collection published in 1892) all spoke in favor of the purchase, although, as Kondakov asserted, the enamels had been illegally obtained from churches and monasteries in Georgia and, therefore, should be considered the property of the Georgian Church.96 But the deal between Zvenigorodskii’s sister and the government did not work out, and in 1910 the collection was acquired by Pierpont Morgan through the mediation of Mikhail Botkin and Morgan’s agent, Jacques Seligman, acting with the help of his son, Germain. Germain Seligman later described his trip to the “barbarian” St. Petersburg in his memoirs; most characteristically, he noted the absence of any custom regulations prohibiting the “movement of works of art or gold” across the border.97 Despite the widespread “public” ethos of Russian art collectors, private ownership did not guarantee the preservation of artworks and keeping them in the country. Frequent cases of selling and exporting paintings by their owners often provoked public outcry. The same year that the enamels left Russia, one of the wealthiest Russian collectors, Pavel Delarov, sold a Rembrandt from his collection of Western art.98 This deal was labeled as unpatriotic and produced another wave of debates on the regulation of the art trade. The St. Petersburg Leaflet (Peterburgskii listok) published a series of articles documenting the squandering of Russia’s artistic riches. In response to this critique, Delarov defended his freedom to sell whatever paintings he wanted, asserting that blocking the sale would have been an “unfair violation of the right of private property. If such a law [prohibiting free sales] had been issued in Russia, I would have sold my painting collection immediately.” Instead of prohibiting private trade, Delarov suggested, the state should create a special commission at the Hermitage or another state museum to consider how to handle the purchases of arts from private owners which they could address before bringing their collections to European auctions.99 In a bitter irony, after his death in 1913, Delarov’s collection of Western art was stolen. After investigation and the recovery of some pieces, Delarov’s widow offered the collection at auction in Paris.100 Nikolai Vrangel commented on this sale as proof of Russian ignorance and barbarism, the absence of any consistent policy in the development of public depositaries of art and ridiculously low budgets of state museums.101 The campaign against the export of art objects continued the policy of Russian archaeologists who, starting from the 1880s, attempted to establish their monopoly on archaeological excavations and prohibit the relocation of antiques. The export of paintings and antiquities from Russia never reached the scale of the plunder from the Ottoman Empire, and Russia never impeded the

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trafficking of archaeological findings. However, several times Russian archaeologists alerted the government to the activity of their German colleagues in Crimea102 and especially on the Caucasus. In the 1880s, German and Austrian archaeologists searching for the alternative routes of European civilization grew very interested in excavating and exploring the material culture of the Caucasus.103 Rudolf Virhow’s work on the Kuban bronze culture (1880) spurred the enthusiasm of German archaeologists while also stirring nationalist hysteria among Russian historians and archaeologists. The news about the alleged expeditions aimed at “providing foreign museums with Caucasian monuments,”104 and bronze and gold artifacts exported to Berlin and Vienna spread quickly. In response to the demands of Countess Praskovia Uvarova and other archaeologists to prohibit the activity of foreign archaeologists in Russia, the government prescribed local administrative authorities to make sure that all excavations on state lands had official authorizations, but it could not prevent foreigners from working on private lands. At the same time, as the head of the Imperial Archaeological Commission Alexei Bobrinskii remarked, prohibiting German archaeologists working on the archaeology of the Caucasus would be “unworthy” and unfair: German scholars pioneered in the historical exploration of this region, and in fact discovered the antiquity of the Caucasus for the Russians.105 For the government, the ban on export was inappropriate from political and legal points of view: prohibiting the relocation of antiques would require considerable limitations to property rights. For that reason, the proposed law on preservation elaborated by a special commission of the Ministry of Interior (1909–­1911) underwent numerous rewrites.106 The State Duma replaced an article allowing the export of art and antiques with official permission certifying that the government was not interested in buying them, with an unbinding recommendation to the Committee on Preservation that it “find ways to prevent the export” of the monuments of art and history. As the Duma report explained, limiting private property rights would not stop smuggling: it would only discourage private collecting and thereby would not support the policy of preservation.107 The Duma’s observation points to the ubiquitous dilemma of private property: private ownership symbolizes freedom, autonomy, and initiative, while at the same time entails the danger of arbitrariness. Private collectors became the leaders in certain areas of art collecting (first, it concerned contemporary Russian and Western art) and thereby enlarged nation’s collective artistic assets; they went much ahead of royal museums in popularization of art, making it public and accessible. However, total freedom in disposing of artistic properties and the inability to control it sometimes resulted in intended or unintended destruction of the objects of art. Collectors, despite their passion and devotion, did not always keep their own collections up to optimal standards. Delarov was notorious for keeping his paintings in the most inappropriate places, such as the kitchen, corridors, children’s nurseries, and even lavatories;108 Henri

198  |  Chapter 5 (Andrei Afanasievich) Brocard, the owner of Russia’s first cosmetic factory in Moscow, had a hobby of “correcting” the paintings in his collection. Alexei Bakhrushin recalled how the unfortunate amateur had his own “restorer” (two of whom lived in his house) paint over a dog in a work by Sergei Gribkov, and increase a woman’s breast in another.109 A famous collector of French modern art, Sergei Shchukin, painted over the genitals of a flutist in Henri Matisse’s canvas The Music to preserve the moral chastity of two little girls who lived in his house—­fortunately, the damage was not severe.110 There was nothing illegal in the curiosity of landowners excavating kurgans on their own estates; nobody could object to privately owned paintings being cut into pieces. The attacks of preservationists monitoring the treatment of private collections were bound to be limited to moral condemnation and critique. Objecting to the voluntarism of private collectors promised even less success than combating the intransigence of ecclesiastical authorities. After all, the Church, despite losing its authority in people’s minds, was by definition a communal institution. In addition, the Church’s proprietary status remained quite uncertain. Approaching private owners with the requirements to surrender their wealth to the public might have appeared both legally impossible and ethically unjust. However, the spirit of anti-­individualism added some moral weight to the claims of preservationists, while the campaign for the preservation of private forests seemed to legitimize the attempts to preserve Russia’s cultural assets in private possession. Ultimately, the idea of private property as essentially limited and bound by commitments arose in the debates on the preservation of historical monuments just as in the sphere of natural resources. The fate of paintings in private galleries and archaeological sites often remained unknown and invisible for outsiders: the borders of private property protected their owners and concealed the destruction of the objects of art and history. At the same time, the most private and intimate of private possessions—­ the houses and private estates of Russian nobility—­were publicly exposed, and reflected their owners’ ability to maintain historical buildings and preserve them for future generations. Thus, while visible in the debates on private archaeology, art collecting, and artistic export, the issue of private property in the art world emerged even more prominently in discussions on the preservation of architecture and private estates.

Russian Noble Culture and the Campaign for Historical Preservation The critique of private owners in the realm of ancient monuments and art followed the logic that we have already seen in the campaign to preserve forests. Private landowners were the occasional possessors of archaeological treasures that had been created long ago and hidden under the soil, where they were

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preserved for future generations. Similarly, the age of paintings that were older than their possessors, and their transcendent beauty, threw into sharp relief the transience of ownership. We have seen how Kushelev-­Bezborodko argued for the preservation of “natural forests,” in contrast to trees planted by men, and in so doing, contrasted the temporality of private property to the perpetual character of national property. Much the same, archaeological sites and artistic masterpieces were seen as unsuitable for private appropriation by the virtue of their age and origin. The opposition between private as temporal and public/national as perpetual threatened many dimensions of private property, such as the principles of inheritance. From the artists’ point of view, preservationists argued, the right of inheritance had to be earned through adherence to the principles of preservation. That the current generation of owners was unable or unwilling to preserve what they received from their ancestors was not a new or unusual belief. Two specific features made these claims important in the context of historical preservation: for the early-twentieth-century preservation movement, the Golden Era of culture was the heyday of aristocracy during the time of Catherine the Great (thus, the artistic ideas of preservationists betrayed their political sympathies). Second, in the face of the inability of mere mortal men to preserve their heritage, the state, a perpetual bearer of memory, had to take on ownership of monuments. Thus emerged the idea of expropriation and nationalization. The decadent rhetoric of preservationism extended the critique of private property even to such fully legitimate objects as houses and noble estates, with all their artistic treasures. Preservationists presented the decay of the Russian noble estate, as portrayed in Anton Chekhov’s famous Cherry Orchard (1903), with hopelessness and frustration: if in the case of churches’ unauthorized restoration, preservationists could at least complain to the Synod or make the state intervene, no one could stop the demolition or slow decay of private estates. Nikolai Vrangel—­a key contributor to the preservationists’ Bygone Years, a young star in art history, and, what his peers most admired, a talented writer for general audiences111—­described the destruction of preemancipation “Noble Russia” (Pomeshchichia Rossiia) with nostalgia: Potemkin’s fantastical palaces, the estates of Prince Zubov, Zavadskii’s palace, Dmitriev-­Mamontov’s Novoe near Moscow, the palaces of Empress Elizabeth’s favorites the Razumovskiis—­all of this has been lost. The grand homes with their antique porticos withered and crumbled, the churches on the grounds fell apart, the “cherry orchards” were cut down. Countless riches of the favorites of the Russian empresses were burned, smashed, stripped, stolen, and sold off, including paintings, bronzes, furniture, porcelain, and thousands of other wonders. The Russian people did everything possible to abuse, destroy, and sweep away the traces of the old culture. With criminal

200  |  Chapter 5 neglect, intentional laziness, and ardent vandalism, a few generations were able to reduce to nothing everything their forefathers had created.112 Vrangel’s description of the “cultural decay” of the Russian nobility and the material destruction of their habitat perfectly echoed Chekhov’s story: emancipation brought the advancement of the village kulaks and the proliferation of vulgar dacha life113 (a diagnosis surprisingly similar to that of deforestation!). Nobles, flush with their redemption payments, abandoned their estates and plunged into urban debauchery, while their family homes passed into the hands of new entrepreneurs and former peasants.114 As another sign of the vandalism of noble offspring, Vrangel documented the deplorable condition of cemeteries with beautiful sculptures on the graves of the late Kurakins, Stroganovs, and Urusovs: the descendants of eighteenth-­century aristocracy abandoned the graves just as they had abandoned the memory of their ancestors.115 The resemblance of the two campaigns—­for the preservation of forests and monuments—­is striking, not only because of the common rhetoric of the current generation’s responsibility for their ancestral heritage. The details and language of the preservationist defense in the two realms were nearly the same: foresters reported on the vandalisms perpetrated by private owners destroying woods (Petr Zhudra coined a name for the enemies of forests: “the predators of land”116), while preservationists led the “chronicle of vandalisms” in cities and rural estates. Another similarity was, of course, in the social connotation of the critique: both environmentalists and preservationists lamented the decay of Russia’s true aristocracy—­the cultural elite of Russian society.117 In the early twentieth century, the estates of the Russian nobility were discovered anew as an artistic phenomenon (Russian iconography was discovered at the same time): leading artistic magazines published multiple articles on the architecture and history of estates. The “estate” issue of Bygone Years, with the publication of Nikolai Vrangel’s article,118 despite its exorbitant price at the newsstand, earned the recognition of the Academy of Arts and an award of a Pushkin gold medal to the editor.119 Artists and architects studying the art of Imperial Russia—­like their colleagues who researched medieval religious art—­arranged trips to the provinces to photograph, register, and describe privately held monuments of art and history. The burgeoning interest in the habitat of Russian landowners was a new phenomenon: landowners were used to answering the government’s questionnaires about the productivity of their estates and the price of their land, but until the beginning of the preservation boom in the early twentieth century, nobody had been interested in nobles’ houses or their contents. But it was precisely the private life that took place on nobles’ estates that elicited the close attention of architects and archaeologists. The preliminary committee of the Fifteenth Archaeological Congress held in Novgorod sent out a questionnaire to the landowners of the Novgorod province asking them to report about the

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“material monuments of the olden times.” More importantly, the committee wanted to know “which noble families have stayed to live and lead economy in their homes”: thus, the interest of archaeologists went further than the antiques. The hereditary owners of estates were themselves viewed as the bearers of memory and history, the attributes of the monuments. Those indigenous owners and inhabitants of estates who turned out to be the best guardians of the materiality of the old life were very few: most estates had changed hands many times. With the “extinction of the entire branches of noble families,” wrote the survey’s compiler Ivan Anichkov, perished the materiality of the “olden times”: “it disappeared in the flame of fires,” was “left for the mercy of fate by the new owners,” “sold out by speculators” or, in the best case scenario, “moved to the city.”120 The rural estates of Russian aristocrats were perishing, their city residences turning into vulgar rental apartment houses—­such was the dystopian narrative of decline reproduced by the leading artistic magazines. The mouthpiece of the St. Petersburg Society for the Preservation and Restoration of the Monuments of Art and History in Russia, Bygone Years could not hide its anti-­proprietary zeal, especially in the periodically published “chronicles of vandalism.” Vandalism, even on private property, had to be punished, claimed the art historian Igor Grabar’. “You can call me a vandal thousands of times,” Grabar’ complained, assuming the persona of a wealthy collector, “but . . . I still have a right to laugh at you and I will turn my mansion built by [Bartolommeo] Rastrelli on Nevskii Prospect into a six-­floor hotel of the most vulgar style.” “Everybody knows that if I have a painting by Rembrandt, for which I paid a hundred thousand of my own money at auction,” he continued, “I can do whatever I want with it. Even if I want to cut it into pieces, nobody can stop me.” Here Grabar’ referred to the case of the mad prince Gagarin, who used the paintings of the Dutch masters to make snuff-­boxes, and whitewashed the original murals in his palace. “There is only one way to salvation: the law on state expropriation of the most valuable objects of art that are at risk of being destroyed,”121 Grabar’ concluded. Grabar’s proposition revealed a stunning paradox: preservationists lamented the decay of aristocratic Russia—­the Russia of the old Golitsyns, Sheremetevs, or Zavadovskiis and Zubovs, in other words, Catherine’s Russia, the heyday of nobility built largely on the freedom of property (assuming the freedom to own peasants and not to serve for the state)—­which Grabar’, through his attitude to private property, sought so vigorously to destroy. To continue Grabar’s thought, one was supposed to conclude that if the eighteenth century was the century of nobility, the coming age was to be the age of the state. Or, perhaps, the century of experts—­the new aristocrats of knowledge who knew how to treat valuable monuments, and, relying on the power of the state, would take under their control the disposal of artistic assets. At least two things made the idea of expropriation, voiced by Grabar’, unrealistic: first, there was a problem of authority. Who would decide which paintings

202  |  Chapter 5 from private collections or whose mansions were to be subjected to the restrictive rules? Given the lack of unanimity in the definition of monuments—­by age or historical or artistic importance—­the expert community of archaeologists, artists, and architects would bear the responsibility for limiting someone’s proprietary rights. However, the community of “experts” was tiny, and, in addition to that, split into multiple competing factions. Archaeologists from St. Petersburg did not get along with archaeologists from Moscow; the circle of Bygone Years also had competitors (Appolon), not to mention the rebellious World of Art. Each of those groups had their own ideals of beauty and perfection that might coincide at major points, but differed in multiple details. Second, there was a problem of money. The government put off the approval of the laws on preservation partly for financial reasons: preservation and expropriation were very expensive and not as vital as other needs.122 The “public” that claimed to become the owner of the national heritage, meanwhile, could hardly offer any substantial material support. It may seem surprising that in face of the state’s inability to take upon itself the difficult task of preservation, the idea of public preservation did not find greater support. Indeed, there were cases of independent preservationist and restoration activity: in St. Petersburg, for instance, the Society for the Defense and Preservation of the Monuments of Art and History in Russia restored and maintained a few architectural monuments using its own funds (the money came from registration fees, donations, and theatrical performances). However, nothing similar to the British public trust companies that bought out historical sites and private estates existed in Russia.123 The idea of public fundraising for preservation did crop up: in 1911, the artist Nikolai Roerich, speaking at the Fourth Congress of Russian Architects, called for the creation of a public “fund of Olden Rus’,” raising money from a public lottery, public subscription, and an “all-­Russia ecclesiastic tax.”124 At the next Congress of Architects held in 1913, the architect Alexei Shchusev suggested creating a national fund for the preservation and restoration of monuments in the Russian North: Shchusev planned to collect money from the so-­called mug tax—­small donations left by parishioners in churches.125 Indeed, as one of the delegates of Fourth Congress commented, such measures would hardly be of any help, given the indifference of the Russian population to the protection of monuments.126 Comparison with the politics of preservation in Britain reveals a certain pattern: Russian zealots of preservation (as well as engineers and industrialists), instead of trying to work within the existing legal regime—­for instance, buying off historical estates and artistic objects—­preferred to wait until the state interfered and cut the knot through overall expropriation or another radical reform of property. Since the state did not want to stop the destruction of historical monuments by their private owners, and the public was unable to do so, the campaign for historical preservation was reduced to either palliative

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measures or passive critique and lamentation. For example, the Moscow Archaeological Society requested that it be informed about the demolition of private mansions so that architects could take photographs and measure them before they perished. Old Moscow was doomed to disappear, and the task of architects was to “save it for descendants in images, at least partly in an appearance that we used to know  .  .  . and love,” Yakov Pashkov said at the society’s meeting.127 The municipal authorities turned down this request on the grounds that they could not delay the demolition of private houses, because it would violate owners’ property rights.128 In March 1913, the society’s head, Countess Praskovia Uvarova, published a note in The New Time (Novoe Vremia) begging the amateurs of “old Russia” to buy a particular old house in Moscow that had been built in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Its owner planned to demolish it and erect a new apartment building on the spot. Uvarova hoped to find a rich citizen eager to purchase the house for the sake of its preservation, as there was no other way to save the monument.129 In St. Petersburg, the Society for the Defense and Preservation of Monuments made another attempt to discourage private owners from demolishing their buildings, which usually were much less profitable than multistoried apartment houses. In 1913, the society addressed the minister of finance Vladimir Kokovtsov with a request to exempt those ancient estates and houses that could qualify as monuments of history and art from paying city real estate taxes. According to the new and, undeniably, more effective and fair law on property tax (June 6, 1910), private owners were assessed based on the profitability of their property. However, for those properties that earned no profit—­ for instance, private residences—­the tax was to be levied according to their value. Thus, eighteenth-­century city residences of Russian aristocrats with large squares and parks on their lots could become a burden for their owners. The new law, claimed the society, encouraged owners either to build new houses in place of parks, or to divide their estates into parcels, selling them separately to make them profitable. The society argued that the new order was responsible for the development of the Leontiev-­Zubov residence on Granatnyi Lane in Moscow and the garden of Sheremetev residence on the Fontanka in St. Petersburg (the famous Fontannyi Dom).130 The society’s request to exempt the wealthiest families from taxation sounded, perhaps, bizarre: as Kokovtsov responded, exemption from taxes could hardly compel estate owners to keep their properties intact.131 It seems that Kokovtsov was right: the practice of dismembering, selling, and developing eighteenth-­century aristocratic family seats began before the introduction of the new law. Take, for instance, the much-­lamented reconstruction of Stroganov’s dacha (1794–­1795) on Aptekarskii Island in 1908—­an architectural masterpiece of the classicist architect Andrei Voronikhin, turned into a rental house.132

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Cities: Preservation and Change “Old Russia” had many faces: medieval cathedrals and icons, ancient kurgans, and baroque palaces. It had many owners, too. According to the preservationists’ accounts, none of the present owners could handle the task of keeping this heritage intact. City authorities and zemstvos were blamed just as severely for their role in the destruction of the national heritage as the Orthodox Church and the nobility. There was a bitter irony in the fact that Russia’s elected institutions of self-­government—­zemstvos and cities, in which Russian liberal intelligentsia and politicians put so many hopes—turned out to be, as the architect and preservationist Petr Pokryshkin pointed out, “the most ardent destroyers of the materiality of history.”133 This attitude of architects and archaeologists also contrasted with the municipal patriotism of art collectors who followed Tretyakov and entrusted cities with the preservation and management of their collections. From a legal point of view, municipal property represented the only true res publica, in a pure legal sense. Until the reform of 1870, cities were merely the tenants of state lands. The reform of self-­government created these communities of inhabitants as legal entities, and turned them into owners. The proprietary power of municipal government with regard to “public things”—­streets, squares, parks, city walls—­was limited. The city government could not sell public lands, rent for long terms, or limit public access: urban res publicae belonged to the community of inhabitants and taxpayers. Thus, city property was not only an asset—­it was an obligation that often brought no income and instead incurred expenses. Monuments were exactly that kind of an awkward asset. The government many times reiterated its requests that cities maintain monuments at their own expense and only in the cases of extreme need ask for state assistance. Again, the story of the Koz’ma and Damian Church in Murom perfectly illustrated the reluctance and the inability of many cities to handle this task.134 Perhaps the most burdensome of historical monuments in cities were ancient walls. Unlike Europe, Russia did not undergo the process of defortification in the eighteenth century.135 Therefore, many ancient cities entered the nineteenth century with their walls, which had withstood the test of time. The temptation to get rid of them was very strong. City walls, often situated in the midst of new neighborhoods, were useless and very expensive to maintain. Dismantling them would create an additional source of material for new buildings or the renovation of other monuments: such was the fate of the Kremlin in Mozhaisk, demolished in 1802, whose stones were used in the construction of a cathedral.136 A number of requests for permission to remove the remnants of city walls were sent to the Ministry of Transportation and the Committee of Ministries, where they were rejected, forcing local governments to preserve them. The walls of Kolomna, Novgorod, Kamenets-­Podolsk, Pskov, Kitai-­gorod in Moscow, and other cities escaped destruction;137 the cities were obliged to

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sponsor the restoration of ancient monuments and only in the cases of “unavailability” of funds would the state treasury promise to render support.138 However, pleas to allow the destruction of city walls continued to trickle in; and in certain cases, the government, with the sanction of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, allowed the deconstruction of ruined portions, with the requirement that plans and pictures of the monuments be made before they were taken apart. Between the 1880s and 1910s, archaeologists succeeded in their campaign for the defense of city walls in Pskov,139 Smolensk, and Novodvinsk and participated in their restoration.140 When addressing the issues of preservation in cities, the claims of preservationists went further than in the case of private estates, churches, or archaeological sites. They argued for the preservation of entire architectural ensembles—­aspiring to get supreme control over the development of cities and the land market. For instance, the attempts to defend the ancient ensemble of medieval Novgorod threatened by the construction of a railway line produced a new concept of “national protected domain” (natsionalnoe zapovednoe uro­ chishche),141 a kind of a historical preserve that would shield the entire landscape against private and public initiatives of any sort. The fact that cities were unable to provide appropriate care for monuments and preserve their integrity justified the intrusion of experts and the state. The state represented the superior layer of authority; it could stand above different owners and maintain the wholeness of urban architectural ensembles (an idea that appeared in the state forestry policy as well). Part of the problem with preservation in cities originated from the multitude of owners—­a natural consequence of urban growth. For instance, the architectural ensemble of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, with Isaac Square and the monument of Nicholas I on one side, and Senate Square with the Bronze Horseman on the other side, was split between four different owners: the monument of Nicholas I belonged to the Ministry of the Imperial Court; the St. Isaac Cathedral was the property of the Ministry of Interior and the Synod; while the city possessed the statute of the Bronze Horseman. As the official architect of the St. Isaac Cathedral Mikhail Preobrazhenskii remarked, scattering monuments among different agencies and owners led to the destruction of the city’s architectural integrity.142 Every owner had the power to dispose of his part of the ensemble as he saw fit. As Preobrazhenskii pointed out, expressing the general opinion of architects and preservationists, the government had to take in hand the centralized preservation of all monuments in all areas and regions of the vast country.143 The annals of the preservation movement contained quite a few stories about the detrimental influence of the uncontrolled land market and construction in cities. In 1875–­1878, the Naval Ministry, the owner of the Admiralty Building located on the quay of Neva between Senate Square and the Winter Palace, sold a piece of land between two wings of the U-­shaped Admiralty Building.

206  |  Chapter 5 As a result, a number of new buildings, including Panaev’s theater, the most notorious and vulgar among them, appeared in the midst of the baroque and classicist landscape, hiding the view of the Admiralty’s tower from Neva.144 For the defenders of the “old Saint Petersburg,” the development of the Admiralty area became a symbol of destruction and the lack of coordination between preservation and the regulation of new construction. Every piece of news about the prospective sale of the city’s properties to developers produced a wave of critique and worries.145 Different visions of the future of localities produced multiple conflicts: zemstvos and city authorities strove to modernize infrastructure, and their activity often conflicted with the politics of preserving the “olden times,” and attempts to widen narrow streets that would have required cutting off the bell-­towers and chapels of cathedrals,146 or the projects to build a subway in Moscow147 faced strong resistance from archaeologists and architects. The city government of St. Petersburg became by far the main object of attacks. However, the attacks against city authorities should not be understood to mean that the agenda of the preservationist was dedicated only to conservation. As Katerina Clark’s superb analysis of the preservation movement in St. Petersburg has demonstrated, preservationists’ policy aimed at the transformation of the city’s landscape according to the strictly set standards. In St. Petersburg, it assumed the return to classical forms, the creation of a “static and monumental landscape”148 in an effort to continue Peter the Great’s plan for the city. In a political sense, preservationists’ initiatives required strengthening state and expert control over private construction and city development. Experts insisted on controlling the process of city planning and required city authorities to consult them on any changes in city plans. In this sense, the preservationists’ claims went against the principles of self-­government and private initiative; they betrayed, in Clark’s words, their utopian aspiration for “dictatorship by an elite.” The ideal of early-­twentieth-­century city planners—­a strictly planned, geometrically regular city—­left no room for private endeavors. Neoclassicist architects and city planners, arguing in favor of the revival of Old Petersburg, dreamed about the power and authority granted by Napoleon to Baron Haussmann for the reconstruction of Paris; they worshipped, using Spiro Kostof ’s expression, “His Majesty the Pick,”149 that would raze to the ground the ugly possessions of private householders. Paradoxically, the neoclassical plans for the reconstruction of St. Petersburg advocated by preservationists required the demolition of certain historical ensembles and buildings that they otherwise tried to preserve. In 1908, Leontii Benois—­Alexander Benois’s older brother, a famous architect and member of the Imperial Academy of Arts—­presented a radical project of city reconstruction that in addition to many changes in the transportation network suggested building new streets parallel to Nevskii Prospect, which by the turn of the century was already mired in traffic jams. Benois was also

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notorious for his uncompromising and rigorous critique of city government and its planned development policies (or more exactly, the lack thereof): he insisted on the interference of the Imperial Academy of Arts in the process of planning, while the city responded to his claims with reprimands that he was stifling private initiative. In 1908, the city board turned down Benois’s project,150 but returned to the project of building a street parallel to Nevskii Prospect in 1914, when the owner of one of the lots assigned for expropriation announced plans for the construction of a new house that would increase the cost of expropriation. According to the project, the new street151 went through (“perforated”) the estate of Count Sergei Sheremetev on the Fontanka; it required the alienation of a part of Sheremetev’s possessions and the demolition or transportation to another place of the wooden church of Saint Barbara and other buildings, including the museum of the Society of Old Russian Language Culture Enthusiasts.152 Paradoxically, just around the same time preservationists criticized Sheremetev—­himself the head of the Committee for the Revival of Iconography in Russia, and the head of the Imperial Archeographical Commission and multiple historical societies—­for developing the lands of his estate and demolishing the old wall with gates.153 Sheremetev flatly refused to sell his property, which had been given to his ancestor, the field-­marshal Boris Sheremetev, by Peter the Great in 1712. The members of the city council unanimously accused Sheremetev of egoism. Commenting on Sheremetev’s refusal, P. S. Chistiakov exclaimed: “It turned out that even the most indigenous, the most important inhabitants of St. Petersburg who have owned property here for more than two hundred years, do not understand the needs of the city; they think that their petty egoism is above the needs and the most vital necessities of St. Petersburg.”154 Thus, Sheremetev became the target of attacks by the zealots of Old Petersburg from two sides: the adherents of noble estate culture criticized him for destroying his hereditary estate, a cultural asset of the nation, while the supporters of Leontii Benois’s project of neoclassical reconstruction accused him of egoism that blocked the project for urban development. “Preservationism, its purist aesthetic stance notwithstanding, was also about power and control,” writes Katerina Clark about the movement for the revival of Old Petersburg.155 As we have seen, the claims for power and control reached into a variety of different domains—­ecclesiastical and secular, public and private. Different “Old Russias”—­Kievan or Muscovite, the Russia of Catherine the Great or Alexander I, Moscow’s Russia, or St. Petersburg—­had different groups of defenders. What they shared was a faith in the necessity of expertise and control, the intervention of the state and distrust of owners—­churches, private owners, or cities. In the early twentieth century, a time of economic growth and, consequently, a construction boom, Russia’s most famous and distinguished architects became, perhaps, the most ardent critics of both legal and artistic individualisms. The tasteless edifices of private owners, old or recently built, were said to disfigure

208  |  Chapter 5 the city, and impeded the realization of their great projects of reconstruction. Anti-­individualism appeared in laments about the decay of noble estates or the commercialization of housing that, indeed, affected historical monuments, in criticism of the bad taste of the new owners of architectural masterpieces and the reconstruction of historical buildings. At first, it might have seemed odd to limit the disposal of private possessions on the pretext that someone’s hereditary palace was so beautiful and remarkable that its owner had to yield to the public interest, and was thus forbidden from painting its walls or adding a pair of columns on the façade. This idea developed in the early twentieth century under the influence of a new artistic and philosophical vision that united the cult of beauty with anti-­individualism (especially peculiar for the artistic ideology of neoclassicism) and étatism, in the belief that the state alone could create architectural miracles (like the miracle of St. Petersburg), preserve the cultural heritage, and educate its subjects in artistic taste. This new faith led artists and architects to beg for state intervention in the chaotic processes of renovation in fin-­de-­siècle Russia. No less than Alexander Benois celebrated the “command and order” of “official art” (kazennoe iskusstvo), the “grandiosity of officialdom” that was capable not only of “great but also beautiful deeds”156 and blamed the “individualistic heresies” that made art faceless and led to chaos.157 The neoclassical style in architecture and the adoration of eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century styles bore in itself a strong anti-­individualistic and even dehumanizing message. Georgii Lukomskii imagined the ideal (and lost) St. Petersburg of the Alexandrian period as a depopulated city with “striped poles . . . sheared alleys, vast empty squares, rectilinear streets.”158 The original neoclassical projects of city construction159 anticipated Stalinist classicism and left little place for architectural creativity and individualism.160 A belief in the mightiness of the state, shared by the leading representatives of the artistic community, in many ways resembles the “axiomatic étatism of foresters.” It was, perhaps, peculiar to professional communities that were dubious of the abilities of individual, uneducated owners (who also happened to be of different social origins). Both the environmentalists and the art experts expressed an expectation that the state would take responsibility for settling conflicts between private and public interests, and their visions of the “grandiosity of officialdom” coincided at this point. At the same time, the mightiness of the state had to rest upon the expert knowledge of the professional communities. This brief sketch of the history of the elaboration of laws on monuments demonstrates that public professional organizations played a crucial role in this process. Moreover, these organizations staked their claims as the key agents of oversight, and in fact they received certain exclusive rights, such as a monopoly on archaeological excavations on state lands and approving architectural restorations. A common refrain in their attacks on church authorities and private owners concerned the danger of ignorance; hence, the knowledge, educated taste, and professional vision of how things should look gave them the unique

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right to instruct private owners in their disposal of objects of public value. Together, the discourses of the “preservation” of public things—­be it a forest, or a church—­worked to change the general understanding of property. As a result, in the early twentieth century one could hardly argue that property must be inalienable and unlimited. Moreover, the identity between property and freedom, established by Catherine the Great, proved to be unworkable, because property came to be understood as binding and obliging, and not only permitting. The politics of creating a national patrimony reveals the ambivalence built into the relationship between experts and the state. The nineteenth-­century administrative “revolution” in European governments marked a transition from laissez-­faire individualism to the policies of collectivism. This revolution contributed to the spectacular growth of the administrative apparatus, which was both triggered and accompanied by the influx of experts into state service. As a historian of British administration has observed, experts were “conscious agents of change and perpetrators of state involvement.”161 In Britain, the development of expert knowledge was fostered primarily among scientists and engineers. In Russia, even in the realm of overtly scientific expertise, collaboration between scholars/scientists and the government was weak and, by British standards, delayed; the Russian state remained cautious in forming a relationship with specialists who aspired to both academic independence and political recognition. In the sphere of artistic and historical preservation, the relationship between the expert community and the government proved even more complicated, as the government’s demand for expertise depended less on exterior factors and necessities,162 and more on the ideology professed by the current ruler, his personal tastes and interests. Russian emperors’ active engagement with the past would seem to make for a favorable environment for the growth of the preservation movement and the establishment of a national patrimony. Scholarly findings were immediately utilized to re-­create the pre-­Petrine style of architecture and pageantry. At the same time, the ideological preferences of Russian rulers presupposed a limited sphere for artists’ activity and archaeologists’ involvement. Richard Wortman’s seminal study Scenarios of Power163 has demonstrated the rather monotonous and unimaginative artistic demands of Russia’s last two tsars, whose ideological fixations on the political culture of Muscovy benefited the restoration and the revival of pseudo-­Byzantine and pseudo-­ Russian styles in architecture.164 Preservation activity, however, especially when it concerned monuments from epochs other than the Muscovite, found but weak support in the ideologies of the monarchs. Russian experts in archaeology and architecture aspired to recognition by the state, and more importantly, the authority to enforce the rules for the proper treatment of monuments and limitations on private property. As we have seen, the government authorized a limited scope of activities aimed at the creation of the patrimony: professional archaeologists from the

210  |  Chapter 5 state-­funded Imperial Archaeological Commission were entrusted with granting permissions to restore old churches, but they could not prohibit priests of the same churches from burning or repainting icons; neither were they allowed to take the most precious “movable monuments” out of ecclesiastical buildings. Experts could prohibit archaeological excavations on the treasury’s lands, but could not approach a private owner with the same demand. They solicited the financial support of the tsar for the purchase of new items for the Hermitage Museum, which belonged to the emperor himself, and at the same time claimed the treasures of imperial palaces as part of their “own” common heritage. They blamed the Imperial Academy of Arts for its conservative policies of purchasing art for the Russian Museum and its failure to control the architectural development of St. Petersburg at the same time as they lamented the academy’s waning influence. The ambivalent role of artistic experts, critical of the state’s activity and proud of their independence from it even as they aspired to inclusion within the system of its authority (much like “red” foresters discussed in chapter 2), underscores the experts’ idealized vision of the state. Crafting a new state was both important to and virtually synonymous with the process of creating an artistic public domain. Why then did the project of cultural patrimony not receive full recognition from the government? We started the analysis of this process with the comparison of different perceptions of artistic values held by experts, parishioners, priests, and private owners. While each of these groups contained a plethora of diverse opinions within it, we can nevertheless identify common trends, or more accurately, distinct gaps separating the perceptions of the past held by one group or another, allowing us to distinguish that of the experts, for example, from that of the imperial court and the government. The court’s view was manifested, as Katerina Clark has brilliantly shown, in the tasteless pageantry of the 1913 celebration,165 which was followed chronologically by Briagin’s imprisonment for the purchase of icons from a church, sanctioned and approved by the government. While exhibiting sympathy for the beauty of the past, supporting the preservationist activity of the Imperial Archaeological Commission and sponsoring some its projects and endeavors, the court and the government did not accept the experts’ methods of appropriating history and art. There could be no imperial Ministry of Art and Culture to host all the protagonists of our story—­artists, collectors, architects, and art critics—­but there could be, as it turned out, a People’s Commissariat. Many of Russia’s artistic experts found the institutional homes they had so longed for after the revolution. The ambivalence of experts’ attitude to the state and the differences of their artistic and political worldviews suggest the unavoidable inaccuracy (even impossibility) of describing their activity in political terms, such as “liberalism,” “populism,” or “conservatism.” As the reader has probably noticed, people purposefully or unintentionally involved in the construction of common artistic domain held very different and even incompatible artistic tastes and political

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views: Maria Tenisheva and Praskovia Uvarova, Sergei Diaghilev and Petr Pokryshkin belonged to different generations and social milieu. Sometimes, as in the case of Pavel Tretyakov, the radicalism of innovations in the artistic domain coincided with political conservatism, which Tretyakov’s populist and liberal admirers often overlooked.166 Does this fuzziness of political ideologies refute our initial premise that the concept of public domain was essentially liberal? No. Of course, there was nothing politically liberal in protecting churches from destruction (as well as in preserving forests), or in attempts to stop the export of antiques (as well as in rendering waters available for industrial exploitation). However, the idea of making art the property of the nation undermined royal privileges, while the concept of making the state work for cultural development, rather than owning culture itself, accorded with the ideas of new liberalism.167 The debates on the issues of artistic property and national heritage evoked in common consciousness the idea of a nation as an entity separate from the state, the nation as a bearer of rights and freedoms, and the owner of its cultural assets. Finally, the reform of property rights, initiated by the projects of nationalizing art, had a liberal core, and, as the next chapter will show, in the early twentieth century, liberal politicians eagerly joined the campaign of rendering cultural (literary as well as artistic) riches to the public.

Part III Ӫ

“Estates on Parnassus” Literary Property and Cultural Reform

6 Writers and the Audience Legal Provisions and Public Discourse When it comes to art and culture, conventional legal notions are often moot. Objects of true art, although they have material value as things, take on additional significance, often discernable only to experts and connoisseurs, that makes them “special” and requires the invention of specific legal regulations for their treatment and transfer. No one is free in the disposal of his or her property if it relates to history or art, and the more valuable one’s possession is, the more responsibility it entails. “National heritage” is a relatively recent concept: the understanding of the “special” value of cultural objects was the fruit of the Enlightenment and the subsequent development of history, archaeology, and art criticism. During the nineteenth century, Russian archaeologists and art historians became involved in discussions of the legal issues concerning the treatment of objects of cultural importance. The special status of national heritage was said to spring from the perceived extra-­temporality of artistic and historical objects passed on to posterity from earlier generations. The notion of cultural development as an cumulative process led to a reappraisal of the materiality of culture and history and their public value, while a new socially minded political ideology challenged the ideas of possessive individualism. An individual was thought to relate to society as one generation relates to the history of a nation. This two-­dimensional perspective of looking at the value of things—­the products of human labor (private–­public, momentary–­eternal)—­came to be especially important in debates on the ownership of intangible things (literature and music) and art. What did originality mean in belles-­lettres, painting, or science—­if an author or an artist was himself a product of the cultural development of a nation? Could an author be an exclusive owner of his ideas? In the nineteenth century, the Golden Age of Russian literature, the question of mutual dependency between creator and society seemed to imply legal consequences: debates on the nature of artistic creativity were closely interwoven with discussions of the legal provision for literary property. The specifics of the Russian case lay in the density of the development: the notion of authorship,

216  |  Chapter 6 artistic originality, and professional literature (and art) appeared in the full sense in the late eighteenth century and already in the 1820s was beginning to be analyzed through the prism of society’s contribution. The legal institution of literary property and authorial rights arose in tandem with an understanding of society’s share in the product of artistic labor. In this sense, literary and artistic property, unlike the ownership of more tangible things (which was thought to rest in the owner’s absolute and exclusive power), was always seen as inherently limited. This chapter does not present an exhaustive analysis of the development of copyright in Russia. It focuses on one aspect of the debates—­the balance of the private interests of the author (as a producer of material and immaterial values) and the interests of society.1 These debates involved people of different professions—­lawyers, journalists, economists, publishers, and literary critics—­and encompassed a wide range of problems—­cultural reform and Russia’s backwardness, the role of intellectual capital in social development, the value of individual freedom, the state’s role in the provision of cultural goods, and, indeed, the importance and protection of private property. As I will show, Russian discussions of copyright often masked attempts to provoke significant political and cultural shifts.

Property and Artistic Originality Pre-­Petrine Russian artistic tradition did not recognize the value of novelty. In iconography, there was no place for a distinction between originals and their copies: both original and nonoriginal images of saints could be miracle working, and sometimes the copy turned out to be even more revered than the original.2 Until the late seventeenth century, books were not perceived as products of individual efforts and creativity. The overwhelming majority of books had religious content, and an individual figure only rarely appeared as the protagonist in religious stories. In most cases, no one claimed authorial rights to stories retold in books. “Collective creativity” did not assume the possessive character of authorship: books were considered to be “common property,” in both the material and idealistic (knowledge-­based) sense.3 In literature, the concept of an individual author arose only after the appearance of secular genres in the seventeenth century.4 The advance of Western-­oriented culture did not change the value of originality dramatically—­neither in art nor in literature. European works assumed the role of models for imitation, and the artist’s talent was to be found not in the invention of something new, but in masterful repetition. The very term that corresponds to today’s “visual art” originally designated the “art of imitation,”5 and assumed that the artist’s task was in the most precise illustration of nature, God’s “original” creation. Only architecture, according to Russian

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eighteenth-­century aesthetic theory, required originality and creativity. The imitative character of art (in relation to nature) had no negative connotation; this tolerant attitude was extended to the imitation of other artistic genres. The quality of paintings was assessed in terms of their compliance with recognized ideals. The practice of replicating popular images and the principles of artistic education (consisting to a large extent in copying) in turn contributed to the proliferation of copies. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, artists knew how to distinguish a copy from an original and preferred the original, but nevertheless found nothing to be ashamed of in copying great paintings and selling them.6 Grigorii Gukovskii noted a similar attitude to imitation in the work of eighteenth-­century Russian poets. “Imitation becomes the main principle of creativity,” wrote Gukovskii about Russian literature in the epoch of neoclassicism (the second half of the eighteenth century). Poets did not compete for originality: plots, motifs, and ideas represented the “literary commons” (lite­ raturnoe obshchee)7—­they “migrated” from one work to another, and the poet’s talent lay in his ability to add new elements to an earlier creation, to improve and perfect it. The result was multiple translations of classical authors (sometimes even competitions for the best translation),8 “adaptations” of Russian poets’ works that, due to the rapid development of literary language, had become outdated, and magazines that published literary works without indicating the names of their authors. “Originality was neither a value, nor a virtue,” asserts Caryl Emerson. “Reason and human nature were presumed to be universal.”9 In fact, literature had not yet become a profession: poets and writers either combined writing with service or enjoyed the patronage of rulers (or both) if the revenues from their estates did not cover their needs.10 The state itself offered protection only to publishers, by issuing rights for printing. The initial impetus for the development of the book trade and, ultimately, for turning the products of literary labor into property, was the abolition of printing privileges in 1783,11 which deprived the Academy of Sciences, the Holy Synod, and other institutions of their publishing monopoly and gave individuals the right to own and operate presses without grants or privileges.12 By the end of the eighteenth century, the right to publish had become transferrable: authors (or, more often, translators) sold their works to publishers and booksellers, and these transactions were registered by special contracts and agreements.13 However, the state did not recognize copyright as a specific kind of property right, and authors could not defend themselves against pirating on the basis of existing civil laws. As Marcus Levitt has shown, Alexander Sumarokov’s attempt to protect his reputation and works from abuse led to a great debacle.14 In the early nineteenth century, book printing and trade became a relatively profitable business: publishers started to compete for a mass audience and were ready to pay lucrative royalties to authors. Commercialization began to slowly penetrate the full range of literature, from the level of mass-­printed popular books and illustrated editions to “high” literature.15 The impressive development

218  |  Chapter 6 of the literary language, the changing attitude toward artistic and literary creativity, the proliferation of publishing activity and the relatively mild censorship created a unique cultural atmosphere in the early nineteenth century and changed the role of the author and the economic conditions of his labor. The idea of property, which at that time acquired its highest authority, came to be applied to products of literary and artistic creativity. Authors and publishers grew accustomed to looking at literary works as commodities, while the example of European countries inspired Russian authors and artists to speak about their works in the language of possession. Literature became a profession:16 the competition for public recognition encouraged writers to take an interest in the distribution of their works. Russian writers, most remarkably Alexander Pushkin, started to make their living from public sale of their works17 and did not want to tolerate the violation of their rights to “literary property.” Alexander Pushkin was one of the first Russian authors to fight against the unauthorized publication of his work and to challenge the legal vulnerability of the Russian author. In 1824, when Pushkin was in exile and could not protest effectively against pirated editions of his work, Evstaphii Oldekop received permission from the censor to publish Pushkin’s “The Captive of the Caucasus” in the St. Petersburgische Zeitschrift18 without the author’s consent.19 All the efforts of Pushkin’s father, Sergei Pushkin, and Pushkin’s friend, patron, publisher, and legal representative Petr Viazemskii to stop the circulation of the unauthorized copies failed. In response to Sergei Pushkin’s petition to protect his son’s rights, the Committee on Censorship claimed that it was unable to intervene since there was “no law” that ordered the government to “consider the rights of publishers and translators of books.” The committee promised in the future not to allow the publication of Pushkin’s works in original or translation without his permission, but refused to prosecute Oldekop. In a few months, all the copies of Oldekop’s edition were sold out, and Pushkin could do nothing but “spit on him.” The poet estimated his loss at 3,000 rubles.20 Dishonest publishers mercilessly abused the popularity of Russia’s most famous poet, and Pushkin had to defend both his revenues and reputation: in 1829, he complained about the publication of certain “idyllic nonsense” under his name and the unauthorized publication of early works that he had no intention of putting before the public (moreover, the editor had replaced original passages that would never have passed the censor with lines of his own devising).21 The famous Pushkin-­Oldekop affair showed that the rhetoric of property rights extended to the domain of intangible objects—­ideas, words, and images.22 It is even more striking that in the mid-­1820s, the concept of literary property, which had not even existed a few years earlier, suddenly acquired widespread recognition. The sweeping commercialization of literature and art explain this phenomenon only partly.23 The fashions of political economy were another significant factor: between 1802 and 1812, thirteen original textbooks on political economy appeared in Russia.24 The most popular among them was

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Christian Ludwig von Schlözer’s The Basic Foundations of Political Economy (1805)25—­a textbook used in the public schools.26 Joachim Zweynert claims that Schlözer was not simply Russia’s first professional academic economist. He was also the first among classical liberal economists to show the equal value of material and human cultural capital (“internal capital,” as he called it) as an individual asset and a part of national economic development. Moreover, Schlözer applied the principle of managing material capital to “internal” spiritual resources (talent, education): for instance, he compared the employment of an artist with the rent of material assets, and even invented a scheme for calculating the artist’s interest on his “internal capital” (Kunstkapitalrente).27 The spread of new political-­economic theories in the early nineteenth century encouraged writers and artists to speak in the language of law and economy and to identify their rights as authors with possessive rights and material assets.28 In 1826, Petr Keppen, a Russian scholar of German origin as well as the publisher of Russia’s first bibliographical periodical Leaflets of Bibliography (Bibliographicheskiie listy, 1825–­1826), wrote a brochure on “The Benefits and Rights of Russian Writers”29 in which he asserted that “literary works constitute property as inviolable as any other movable or immovable possession. Its defense, at least upon the expiration of a certain period, is the task of the government, and the literary predator, no less than any other thief, must be prosecuted by the police.” Referring to the defense of Pushkin’s property rights (Keppen did not mention Pushkin’s name and mistakenly—or ­perhaps intentionally—­ asserted that the “authorities” prohibited the distribution of the unauthorized German edition), Keppen praised the government for its “respect for literary property.” Perhaps such praise was meant to highlight the lack of firm rules and norms protecting authors’ rights and encourage the government to proceed quickly with the preparation of the law. In fact, the first project of a law defining the rights of authors, translators, publishers, and their heirs and assignees had been already drafted in the Ministry of Public Education.30 In the early 1820s, with the law on literary and artistic property under way, authors and writers, aware of their proprietary rights, strove to defend their income and reputations. Authors unquestionably equated literary works with ownership rights of movable and immovable property: Pushkin’s friend Petr Viazemskii ironically called Pushkin’s works his “estate on Parnassus.”31 Like many others, Pushkin expected the state to step in and protect the property of writers and artists. However, despite semantic similarity between the two kinds of property (tangible and intangible), the specifics of literary and artistic property made problematic the direct application of property laws. Literary and artistic property, unlike any other kind of possession, acquired meaning only through the existence of the audience—­the public, the third subject of relations, along with the author and the state. Thus, the rules on literary and artistic property were to define respective attitudes not only between authors and publishers, but, more importantly, between authors and the public. In this

220  |  Chapter 6 sphere, where no fence could separate the personal from the common, the issue of balancing private and public came to the forefront. There would have been nothing surprising if the idea of society or the public as a full-­fledged participant in the process of intellectual exchange had appeared in Russian legislation during the Alexander I’s reign, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The law on censorship of 1804—­one of the most well-­received fruits of Alexander’s early liberalism—­spoke about censorship as the task of considering books “intended for public use” with the goal of “providing society with books and works that encourage the genuine enlightenment of intellect and the education of mores.” Quite contrary to that approach, Nicholas I’s law on censorship of 1826, an immediate response to the Decembrists Revolt (and nicknamed the “cast-­iron law”), did not mention “society” as a consumer of literary works: the goal of censorship was to maintain order and render literature “innocuous” for the state.32 The cast-­iron law, as it turned out, was nearly impossible to apply;33 in 1827, the government began its work on a new censorship law that appeared in April 1828. This law, omitting the emphasis on prohibition, retained the overall spirit of policing and protecting the state from subversive ideas. Surprisingly, it was the first to contain rules on copyright and to define the respective relations between authors and “the public.”34 Ironically, the work on a legal provision for literary property that began during the liberal reign of Alexander I came to fruition in the illiberal regime of Nicholas I. The law on censorship declared an author’s rights to be equal to ownership rights: writers and their heirs enjoyed incomes from the publication of texts just as landowners used their lands. Twenty-­five years after the death of author, his published works were to become “public property” (sobstvennost’ publiki)—­ open for free publication. Importantly, the rules on literary property took effect when the work at hand was submitted to the censor for approval: unapproved, potentially subversive writings were not recognized as a legitimate object of possession. In this sense, the Russian case (perhaps better than the examples of other European countries) perfectly fit the paradigm described by Michel Foucault in his famous article, “What Is an Author?” That is to say, ownership of literary texts (authorship as ownership) was established only “when the author became subject to punishment.”35 The government linked the act of surveillance to the act of appropriation; potentially “transgressive” writings, to borrow Foucault’s term, were denied recognition. For instance, when the tutor of Adam Mickiewicz’s (1798–­1855) six children petitioned Alexander II to legitimize their property rights to those works of the rebellious Polish poet that had no political content, the tsar acquiesced, but reiterated the prohibition on publishing “liberal-­revolutionary” verse.36 The “police” character of the copyright system was unique to Russia: unlike other European legislation, Russian laws on copyright formed a part of the censorship regulation and only in 1887 finally entered the Civil Code.37 Alexander Pushkin, explaining the system of laws on literary property in Russia to the French ambassador (the prominent

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historian and politician Baron de Barante), observed the ambivalence of the state’s tutelage: “the question of literary property is very simple in Russia, where no one can submit a manuscript for censorship without indicating his name and thereby submitting himself to the immediate protection of the state.”38 Against that background, the appearance of the “public” as a legitimate counterpart to authors on the literary market may seem surprising. Apparently, the expression “the property of the public” that entered the law on censorship came from French domaine public—­a legal entity that had no analogy in Russian law. In its translation to Russian, this expression used the possessive case (literally, “the property of the public”) and assumed the existence of a certain “public” that became the owner of literary works upon the expiration of private property rights. How could the potentially subversive idea of an autonomous public as a legal entity, in no way compliant with autocracy, enter Russian law? The dichotomy of the public and private nature of the ownership of ideas was borrowed from abroad: as Carla Hesse has masterfully shown, it appeared for the first time in the debates on the laws on authorship in prerevolutionary France and reflected Enlightenment epistemological theories—­one emphasizing the role of an individual author as a creator of knowledge, and another asserting the objective and natural origin of ideas.39 The revolution ultimately changed the balance in favor of the public concept: the progress of enlightenment came to be seen as “depending upon public access, rather than private claims to ideas.” Hence, the limitation of literary property and the establishment of a ten-­year term of posthumous protection in the law of 1793 allowed for the free circulation of Rousseau and Voltaire, Racine and Molière unimpeded by the caprice of their heirs and the greed of publishers: the great books of the Enlightenment so dear to the cause of the new order entered the domaine public—­that is, they became the property of the nation. It was not so much the law of 1793 itself, but the rhetoric of debates around it that created a template for the discussions of the legal provision of authorship in Russia for a century onward. Claims that the public had a right “to own great works,”40 the idea of the author as a “hero” and “public servant,” and, of course, the opposition between the egoism of private owners (authors, heirs, and publishers) and public goods of progress and enlightenment were coined for the first time in revolutionary France, and they persisted in subsequent discussions in France and beyond. Directly or not, Russian legislators responded to these debates: both concepts—­pro-­and anti-­proprietary, one emphasizing the virtue of enlightenment, the other the value of private property as a public good—appeared in the process of the elaboration of Russia’s first law on authorship. Very little is known about the first Russian law on literary property: documents reflecting legislative work at the Ministry of Public Education and the Committee on Censorship have been preserved only in fragmentary form. An anonymous memo “On Intellectual Property” (1828)41 that was sent by the Committee on Censorship for expert review to the Academy of Sciences and

222  |  Chapter 6 the experts’ response shed some light on the origin of this doctrine, the different views on the essence of literary property, and the relationship between authors (writers, artists and composers) and their audience. This memo considered “intellectual property” (uchenaia sobstvennost’) to be the product of authors’ “work and talents,” equal to any other acquired property. However, the act of publishing assumed the termination of that right: all published works automatically became “public property” (obshchestvennaia sobstvennost’). The act of publication was “nothing other than an author’s donation for the benefit of the society to which he owes his education and citizenship [grazhdanstvo].” In recognition of such a gift, society grants the author the privilege to publish and sell his works during a certain period of time, but after the expiration of the author’s privilege, all works return to the public domain. The memo presented the system of copyright as resting on the intellectual exchange between the author (quite unusually for official documents of Nicholas’s Russia, it used the word “citizen”) and society. “Civil societies” (grazhdanskie obshchestva) depend on writers for “the dissemination of useful knowledge, the discovery of truth, opening new sources of pure morality and the highest intellectual pleasures that lead to the perfection of the intellect, taste and mores.”42 The memo compared the act of writing (and publishing) with heroic deeds of explorers departing to the distant lands of America or Australia to bring new seeds of useful and precious fruits. In other words, the act of publication was a voluntary gift, given under certain conditions, and the rules on literary property were to set the details of that “agreement”43 between society and an author. Society, recognizing the author’s gift, should not, however, renounce its right to ideas entirely: the perpetual monopoly of authors and their heirs would be harmful and constraining for society’s development.44 The project intended to be generous to authors, yet it undoubtedly gave preference to society. Writers were supposed to secure a lifelong monopoly for publishing their works and pass it to their heirs for a term of fifty years (in England the term of copyright was twenty-­eight years, in France for the author’s lifetime plus twenty posthumous years); the project considered this privilege an exemption from the property rights of the public, which remained the legitimate owner of all published works. Society possessed all products of intellectual labor that had appeared before the issuing of the law—­in fact, the project, anticipating the ideas of preservationists, declared public ownership over the national heritage: “works of ancient classics, books published abroad and manuscripts preserved in public libraries, statues, paintings”; works of “foreign artists” in public museums; as well as “Russian antiquities,” folksongs, and stories. Holy Scripture and laws also fell into this category.45 Respectful of society’s right to know more about the development of literature and art, the project suggested that writers even accede to the publication of their personal correspondence in periodicals without their permission (if the person with whom the presumably famous author was corresponding allowed such publication).46 The overall

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picture of the relationship between creators and the public left no doubt as to the priority given to public needs. Interestingly, the project envisioned only a limited role for the state, which was given the modest task of registering the works of authors47 and enforcing the prohibition of plagiarism. In this sense, a project that in its institutional intentions provided a comprehensive system of rules had little chance to be applied in practice. The anonymous project was one of the first attempts to draft rules on copyright, and its ideological radicalism could be explained both by the novelty of the issue and, even more, by foreign influences.48 To demonstrate the diversity of opinions in this question, let us compare it with one of the commentaries on this project, compiled at the Academy of Sciences. The commentary was signed by the Academy of Science member Carl Fedorovich German (Carl Theodore Herrmann)—­an ultra-­liberal economist and the founder of statistics in Russia49—­who offered a radically different vision of copyright as based on economic exchange between writers, publishers, and consumers, with the state standing at the center as mediator and regulator. Herrmann voiced the economists’ opinion about the nature of literary property: literary work was an investment made by the author of his cultural capital, and an effort that must be rewarded. At this point, Herrmann, a disciple of Christian Ludwig von Schlözer, reproduced his teacher’s concept of “internal capital,” which consisted of knowledge and skills acquired in the process of education. Herrmann applied this scheme to a writer’s labor and from there derived the legitimacy of “interests.” Similarly, book printing was an investment of publishers’ monetary capital that should earn profit. A writer sells the “exposition of ideas” (izlozhenie myslei) to a publisher in a written form that in turn would be permitted or prohibited by the state. Hence, there is no sacrifice, no donation, no gift—­no public that owns ideas. In fact, Herrmann claimed, no ownership of immaterial ideas could possibly exist. The law on copyright was supposed to protect the rights of publishers by securing their privilege to publish literary works that they paid for, to support authors in their relationship with publishers and provide writers with a source of income. There was only one significant flaw in the economic system of literary production: the market failed to provide professional writers50 with an appropriate reward. Being left at the mercy of a public “alien to thoughtful works,” writers had to satisfy the low taste of the audience and the greed of publishers who were also reluctant to print and sell “classical works.” The fifty years of posthumous copyright monopoly, wrote Herrmann, would not suffice for the support of writers and their families (rather, publishers would benefit from it). In addition to this legal provision, then, the state must financially support those writers who educate an ungrateful society. The development of public education would ultimately increase the writers’ audience and, consequently, improve the condition of the book market, and the privilege of copyright would become writers’ main support. Until then, however, the state had to employ other means for

224  |  Chapter 6 the development of literature. To provide true writers with a source of income, the commentary suggested establishing a special governmental Committee for the Analysis of Intellectual Works (Komitet dlia issledovaniia uchenykh tvorenii) that would print works deserving of publication at the government’s expense and even support the families of deceased writers whose works had not been appreciated by society.51 Herrmann’s essay, despite its rather radical solution, voiced the main concerns of Russian intellectuals debating the issue of literary property. Characteristically, Herrmann emphasized the educational and transformational role of “classical literature, including, apparently, not only the works of the ancients, but also the creations of his contemporaries. The notion of “classical,” high literature as opposed to popular was still in the process of formation. As Herr­ mann’s essay shows, classical literature was characterized as the main weapon of the Enlightenment. All subsequent debates on literary property concerned exactly that sphere of literary culture: for the opponents of literary property, classical literature was the first candidate to enter the public domain. Herr­ mann suggested the opposite: to reward the producers of high literature with the rights of inalienable property and additional governmental support. The most puzzling detail in Herrmann’s account is the centrality of the state in his market-­based vision of literature and publishing. Herrmann, more than anyone, had no reason to trust the state and in particular its institutions dealing with the press and education. He was famous for being persecuted by the authorities and in 1821 was indeed dismissed from St. Petersburg University for spreading ideas subversive to the state order. The only explanation for his vision of literary property as cultural capital can be found in the mainstream ideas current within Russian liberal political economy in the early nineteenth century. As Joachim Zweynert convincingly argues, the specificity of the Russian “version” of classical liberal economics was its emphasis on the role of human cultural capital in economic development. Christian Schlözer, Henrich von Storch,52 and, later, Alexander Butovskii blamed Russia’s delayed development on its lack of culture and education.53 Consequently, they emphasized the role of these assets for the development of the national economy and individual well-­being. Alexander Butovskii dedicated a chapter in his Treatise on National Wealth (Opyt o narodnom bogatstve) to “The disproportion between the income of scholars and the [public] benefit of their work,” including a special section dealing with literary property. Butovskii described the fate of a scientist who “dedicates himself to the search for truth that society needs but does not ask for.” Butovskii, like Herrmann a few years earlier, emphasized this paradox: the demand for the products of intellectual labor is smaller exactly where it is needed most. This spoke to the need for state-­supported education. In view of the precarious conditions of literary labor, society had no moral or legal ground for limiting literary property to a certain term. Literary property, based on the natural right of an individual to the product of his labor, had no

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temporal limits, just like any other kind of property. The limitation of literary property in the service of public needs was the same as stealing: even “public profit does not excuse theft,” asserted Butovskii. “For literary works, as for all others, the law is the same: society may not obtain them for free, and it has to pay when it wants them.”54 That was the liberal economists’ point of view, which combined the concept of the inviolability of property with the exigencies of state protectionism. The anonymous memo detailing the project for a law on literary property, found among the papers of the Committee on Censorship, and the expert opinion of the economist from the Academy of Sciences presented two competing visions of the essence of intellectual labor, literary property, and the state’s role in the promotion of education and the arts. The first claimed that the public owned ideas, with the writer as a temporary holder; the second did not recognize the role of the public in the production of intellectual goods. Both visions were utopian in their extremity, but they aptly represent the split of opinions between “romantics” and “economists.” More importantly, this split reveals a growing competition for the authority of literature. Since the birth of professional literature and literary studies, literary critics—­the “experts” on literature who, in Caryl Emerson’s words, claimed to “supervise artistic creativity and instruct the nation’s readership”55—­resorted to the rhetoric of moral obligations, cultural exchange between writers and audience, and public needs to prove society’s right to own literature; populist-­minded politicians also protested the privatization of art and literary creations. Writers and publishers who held copyrights to the works of popular authors obviously tended toward the “economic” concept with its emphasis on the proprietary aspect of copyright;56 however, while vigorously protecting their rights in courts,57 they refrained from public discussion of literary property and authors’ rights. Compared to the proliferation of public activity among writers in Europe, including multiple congresses and unions, Russian writers displayed surprising apathy and, as publicist Petr Boborykin observed, remarkable “lack of concern for their economic conditions.”58 An anonymous “literary worker” signed the only published essay on copyright written on behalf of writers.59 The main focus of the activity of writers (as well as composers) and public organizations representing their interests (such as the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Composers, founded in 1870) was on regulating their relations with business counterparts—­publishers, theaters, entrepreneurs, and performers. The question of literary property had meaning not limited to—­or, perhaps, not even directly related to—­literature. Whether speaking about writers, novels, or poetry, the issues that concerned economists, literary critics, publishers, and politicians were those of power, property, the competition of private and public interests, the role of intellectuals and the state in the promotion of knowledge, and the nation’s “cultural capital.” The question of literary

226  |  Chapter 6 property acquired remarkable political and ideological importance partly because it was consonant with the problem of cultural reform and enlightenment. For many intellectuals, the enclosure of moral capital appeared dangerous: it threatened to interrupt cultural ties that linked generations and kept national cultural traditions alive. This fear even delayed the appearance of the law on artistic property. Drafted as part of the law on the rights of authors,60 it was dropped at the request of the Academy of Arts (1828). The academy’s council declared that the prohibition against the reproduction of registered artworks would hinder the development of visual art in Russia,61 because artistic training depended on copying (while the sale of copies, apparently, constituted a source of income for the academy).62 In its later protests (1843) against the protection of artistic property, the academy’s council suggested at least considering artistic works in “imperial galleries and churches” as “common property of the public” (thus, ironically, anticipating the ideas of preservationists)63—­that is, as not protected by copyright. The Imperial Academy of Arts remained a staunch critic of the application of private property to art: as ultimate proof, it claimed that art attained its greatest heights in the period when no laws protected artistic property (in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe), while contemporary European artists, protected by the law, could hardly boast of similar successes.64 Here again, the form of property was said to explain the rise and the fall of the arts. However, the functioning of the artistic market proved that the academy’s point of view did not hold true: most successful artists in Russia were among the first to request protection for their works and, in the absence of laws on artistic property (the law appeared only in 1846), they had to seek personal protection from the ruler.65 The laws on literary, artistic, and musical property cut both ways: while encouraging writers and artists to produce public goods, they also prevented their dissemination. Artists and composers complained about their vulnerability.66 At the same time, excessive constraints on public performances would be counterproductive. For instance, the proposed requirement that all public performances of published musical scores be authorized by the composer made the performance of new works impossible if the composer (or the holder of the property rights) could not be reached.67 In mid-­nineteenth-­and late-­ nineteenth-­century Russia, classical music—­no less than classical literature—­ was thought to have significant educational potential, while property laws created new hindrances for its popularization.68 The arguments in support of or against the protection of an author’s rights kept changing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The participants resorted to different explanations of the nature of creativity, talent, and genius, drawing on the process of invention or literary writing to prove the independent character of creative labor or, on the contrary, the author’s embeddedness in a cultural milieu and his consequent indebtedness to the cultural assets of the nation. Separating the “individual” element from the “communal”

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in artistic labor appeared to be crucial for the establishment of mutual relations between the author and the public, yet much more difficult than dividing up neighboring land allotments. In 1862, Nikolai Shelgunov—­a literary critic, radical writer, and professional forester (see chapter 2)—­published an article refuting the idea of private artistic property. Shelgunov proved the impossibility of disentangling the author’s original contribution from the common cultural capital of the nation and humanity. Artistic and literary creativity cannot exist in a vacuum, claimed Shelgunov: an author draws inspiration and “impressions” from the outside world. An architect, for instance, uses well-­known elements to assemble a new façade: there is nothing new in his creation. Moreover, an architect becomes a professional only by the study of Greek and Arabic architecture, the Mauritanian style, and the buildings of Babylon: “other people’s ideas made him into an architect.” Where should the line be drawn between one’s own contribution and common property? The same thing could be said about literature that represented a nation’s commonality, “the agglomeration of all intellectual creations expressed in words and existing not for one’s material use, but for the common exchange of ideas and concepts.”69 In Russia, the problem of originality of literary work acquired tremendous importance, primarily due to the special value ascribed to the intergenerational continuity in literature and the concentration of talent (in terms of both time and space—­the development of literature was condensed in time and located almost exclusively in Russia’s two capitals), which facilitated rapid succession within the literary tradition, both via texts and personal connections.70 The emergence of “realism” in mid-­nineteenth-­century Russian literature and painting questioned the significance of the author’s imagination: writers’ works were declared (as the Ministry of Justice memo on copyright [1908] pronounced) to be “the reflection of public ideals and the social milieu.” Protesting the application of this concept to music, the composer and pianist Petr Shenk claimed that “a composer draws the material for his inspiration not from the life that surrounds him, but from his own spiritual world. A truly inspired composer creates in a trance; a musical idea arises inside of him independently, and he only tries to reflect on paper what he hears inside of him, what comes to him from another world—­the world of sounds, feelings and sensations.”71 Similarly, P. Miller some thirty years before Shenk wrote about the distinctiveness of the process of composing: unlike other creative processes, the writing of music is often “unconscious”; while composing, the author becomes “completely insane, and can never explain how it happened and why a certain musical phrase or a melody poured out of him.” All of this suggested that music was “not the reflection of life.”72 Similar debates on the relative value of originality arose in different spheres: science, art, literature, architecture, and, later, photography. Architects tried to prove that their work consisted of more than assembling different elements invented by the ancient Greeks: the departure from the canons of classicism and the development of eclectic and modernist styles in

228  |  Chapter 6 architecture added weight to these claims.73 The task of photographers turned out to be even more difficult: they had to prove that the images they created did not simply reflect the surrounding world, but also conveyed their own artistic vision and imagination—­that is, that they were individual and creative. To prove the creative character of photography, the representatives of the societies of photographers organized an exhibit for the members of the State Duma and the State Council who were discussing the projected law on artistic property (1908). The exhibit was intended to show that “photography is an art” that required the same terms of copyright protection as painting did.74 Thus, working out the criteria of originality had a double meaning: the criteria were to be applied not only for the protection of individual works from plagiarism,75 but—­ more importantly—­for the establishing a borderline that would separate artists’ private “assets” from the public domain.

The Republic of Letters The debates on the essence of literary property centered on the relationship between an author and the public, who after 1828 were both declared subjects of law: no other sphere of Russian legislation allowed for the existence of society as an actor separate from the state. The law on copyright was in fact designed to comply with existing principles of governance: the government did not intend to endow “the public” with any proprietary rights. This abstract and, on first sight, awkward term was supposed to designate only the termination of copyright. Nevertheless, the appearance of the “public” as a potentially legitimate subject of property rights acquired tremendous political and ideological importance. Did the public, institutionalized in law, really exist in Russia as an entity? Writers, lawyers, and literary critics had different opinions on this subject. “For a poet of the early 1820s, ‘the public’ was a bugaboo; he always wrote for very few,” pointed out Grigorii Gukovskii, “there was no need for a printing press: [the poems] were distributed among friends.”76 This was not true a decade or two later: the changing market altered the position of the writer who could now appeal to a general audience instead of a narrow circle of habitués of aristocratic salons.77 The newly fashionable literary journals and almanacs published reviews of recently released books and claimed to express the “public’s” opinion; the professionalization of literature brought with it professional literary criticism that juxtaposed writers and their audience. Writers began to care about their professional reputation78 because it could make them not only famous but also prosperous. For writers, the growing power of the public was both a blessing and a curse. Pushkin, the first Russian writer whose livelihood depended on the sale of his works, was deeply troubled by the consequences of exposing his literary gift to the public. Аccording to Pushkin, accepting the “title” of poet was “the most

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bitter and most unbearable” aspect of the profession. “The public looks at the poet as its own property; she thinks that the poet was born for her good and pleasure,” wrote Pushkin.79 The “she” pronoun is not only a reflection of the grammatical gender of the word “public” in Russian: comparing the public to a fretful and dull-­witted woman was common in Russian journalism in the 1820s–­1830s.80 “In her wishes, the public is always a fool [dura],” complained Gogol, likewise using a noun of feminine gender.81 All the more painful was the necessity of presenting his works before the “assessing gaze of an audience” whom he despised. He perceived its influence to be not simply annoying, but also, as Anne Lounsberry has put it, “morally and creatively debilitating.” Gogol’s almost paranoic distaste for the public was expressed most clearly in “The Portrait”—­a story of a gifted artist whose talent is ruined by the “fatuous public” and commercialism.82 However, as Lounsberry asserts, both “The Portrait” and Gogol’s essay “On the Development of Periodical Literature” suggest the reciprocity of the relationship between the public and the artist. True art could transform the audience, as the public could be educated through reading.83 Knowledge and taste were perceived as the markers of a true audience, which differed from “the mob.”84 The literary critic Vissarion Belinskii, herald and spokesman of the new generation of Russian writers, made this distinction very clear. For him, the emergence of the public was evidence of a new kind of literature. Belinskii depicted the evolution in this sphere of national culture as a transition from “written culture” (slovesnost’) to literature: “slovesnost’ is a treasure buried in the soil; literature is a common property [obshchee dostoianie]”85 of the public. What is the public? The public is not only a number of people who buy and read books; and literature is more than just a certain mass of published books. For the public, literature is not “relaxation from life’s cares, not a sweet slumber in a soft armchair after a rich dinner, . . . but a res publica, great and important, a source of lofty moral enjoyment and live ecstasy.”86 Belinskii thought that in the 1840s, Russian literature was still in the process of maturation and that the real public had not yet separated itself from the mob. Designating literature as the res publica of society, he tried to create metaphorically a community of readers that was responsible for and committed to the common cause.87 The development of the public meant its maturation and growth. Broadening the literary audience required access to published books, but the institution of literary private property made editions of Russian writers unaffordable for the majority of the reading public. The works of living or recently deceased authors cost too much because writers’ and the heirs’ honorariums constituted a significant share of the price. For instance, for the collected works of Pushkin a reader had to pay from 10 to 20 rubles (to compare: Akakii Akakievich from Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” received an annual salary of 400 rubles). In the 1830s, when the new copyright law came into effect, only the works of late-­ eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century poets could be printed without copyright holders’ consent. In 1836, Dmitrii Tolstoy, Grigorii Esipov, and Mikhail

230  |  Chapter 6 Iazykov started the publication of a new series of “Russian classics that had already become the property of the public [sobstvennost’ publiki].”88 The series began with four-­volume edition of Antiokh Kantemir’s poetry. The list of subsequent editions included Mikhail Lomonosov, Mikhail Kheraskov, Alexander Sumarokov, Vasilii Trediakovskii, Denis Fonvizin, and so on—­all authors who had died more than twenty years earlier and who wrote in a different literary language, barely accessible and certainly not enjoyable to the mass reader of Pushkin and Gogol’s generation. This case points to the ambivalence of the term “property of the public”: it designated both the legal status and cultural value of literary works. Another example of this kind: in 1833, Ksenofont Polevoi welcomed the first publication of Alexander Griboedov’s play “Woe from Wit,” but noted that it would not add to the popularity of this comedy, which had already become the “property of the public,” since it had circulated in numerous handwritten copies.89 From a purely juridical point of view, this was not true, however: the copyright to Griboedov’s works expired only in 1854—­twenty-­five years after his murder in Tehran. The abundance of handwritten copies (some of them containing numerous mistakes and distortions) resulted from the legal uncertainty regarding the ownership of Griboedov’s works.90 In 1854, when the term of posthumous protection came to the end, “Woe from Wit” appeared in eight different editions. In the meantime, the legislation moved against the aspirations of the growing public. In 1856, five years before the termination of the twenty-­five year period of hereditary property rights over Pushkin’s works, his remarried widow, Natalya Lanskaia, petitioned Nicholas I (via the minister of education Avraam Norov) for the extension of the family’s property rights until the death of Pushkin’s two sons;91 Nicholas I found the extension contradictory to the law on author’s rights and forwarded the case to Dmitrii Bludov, the head of the Second Department of Imperial Chancellery, which dealt with legislative questions.92 Norov and Bludov were both in favor of the extension; both thought that the twenty-­five-­year term of posthumous copyright was too short to provide families with income appropriate to the contribution of their distinguished relatives. Bludov, in his memo on the case, argued that literary works constituted a special object of property, and that the public should not be deprived of the “benefit and pleasure” of purchasing “good writings” for a reasonable price. The contradiction between the principles of private property and the common good had not been yet resolved in theory, and most European legislation reconciled the conflicting interests of heirs and the public by limiting the term of posthumous copyright protection. (Bludov also mentioned the idea of expropriation, but added that in Russia the application of this principle was hardly possible.) Russian law established terms of copyright protection similar to the European ones. But “special” Russian conditions—­the “narrow audience, the lack of entrepreneurial spirit and, sometimes, [the lack] of taste and knowledge

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among booksellers, the difficulty of communication and, consequently, distributing books in different parts of the country, and the growing, year after year, habit [of the audience] of limiting oneself by reading just newspapers and magazines”—­made the business of literary writing in Russia difficult and unprofitable, compared to European countries. Hence, in Russia, authors and their families had to be rewarded by longer terms of copyright. Bludov did not support Natalya Lanskaia’s claim for indefinite protection of her sons’ property rights to Pushkin’s writings but instead suggested legislatively extending the term of posthumous protection of literary works up to fifty years.93 Nicholas I approved Bludov’s suggestion, and on March 18, 1857, the State Council introduced new terms of posthumous copyright. Pushkin’s writings remained the property of his family until 1887; the heirs of other Russian writers also received the right to draw income from their “estates on Parnassus.” Russia offered the families of its writers the longest term of protection: in 1857, only Spain demonstrated similar generosity.94 Later, the opponents of private literary property blamed Natalya Lanskaia for her avarice, which they believed was fatal for the future of Russian literature. The fifty-­year copyright monopoly introduced in 1857 shrunk the sphere of the “public domain” enormously and split the book market into two parts: expensive editions protected by copyright and cheap editions with expired copyright. For some authors, the fifty-­year monopoly resulted in their works falling into oblivion, especially if they had no relatives (or the relatives were not known).95 Usually, the heirs of deceased authors did not manage to publish the works in their possession: most of them sold the copyright to publishers, so that the law of 1857 unintentionally enriched not the poor widows and orphans of talented writers who had sold their copyrights, often for a song, but the prosperous bourgeois.96 The prices of literary estates were enormous: in 1881, the St. Petersburg publisher Maurycy Wolf planned to print a collection of works of great Russian writers (excluding works that had been already sold to other publishers—­Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov), but he could not accumulate enough money to purchase copyrights from the writers’ relatives.97 Certain publishing houses, such as Ivan Sytin’s firm, “specialized” in the publication of copyright-­free works.98 Alexei Suvorin, the publisher of the “Cheap Library” of Russian classics, also preferred the works of authors deceased more than fifty years: the joke went that Suvorin “made profit from the dead.”99 The expiration of copyright and entrance into the public domain usually resulted in a number of new editions printed by different publishing houses simultaneously. In 1887, fifty years after Pushkin’s death, publishers issued 163 different editions of his works with a total number of copies close to 1.5 million.100 The two most popular ten-­volume editions printed by Alexei Suvorin and Florentii Pavlenkov cost only 1 ruble 50 kopeks.101 January 30, 1887, was to be commemorated as the fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s death: in St. Petersburg and

232  |  Chapter 6 Moscow, crowds of people stormed Suvorin’s shops, and six thousand copies of cheap Pushkin were sold in St. Petersburg alone.102 The public often welcomed the expiration of copyright as a “liberation.” In 1891, fifty years after Mikhail Lermontov’s (1814–­1841) fatal duel, seventeen editions of Lermontov’s works appeared in bookstores: on the day the copyright expired (July 15), booksellers sold 16,000 copies.103 In 1894, Russian publishers printed several editions of Evgenii Boratynskii’s poems (1800–­1844); in 1892, three editions of Alexei Kol’tsov, after the expiration of Kozma Soldatenkov’s and Nikolai Schepkin’s monopoly. Soldatenkov and Schepkin also held the copyright to Vissarion Belinskii’s works until it expired in 1898: in 1898, Mikhail Stasiulevich, taking advantage of the legal accessibility of Belinskii’s works, published the most complete prerevolutionary twelve-­volume edition of his writings.104 In 1902, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Gogol’s death, the number of his works’ editions doubled that of the previous twenty years combined; as Stephen Moeller-­Sally has observed, it drove the prices down to the level of lubok prints. Anticipating the reduction of prices, the copyright holder of Gogol’s works, Adolf Marx, cut the prices by 60 to 70 percent a few months before the expiration of his monopoly.105 It was a common strategy of publishers striving to retain control over the market: Glazunov, who held the copyright to Vasilii Zhukovskii’s (1783–­1852) works, released the first cheap complete edition one year before the expiration of his monopoly rights in order to keep the market in his hands.106 The works of other great nineteenth-­century writers—­Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–­1881), Ivan Turgenev (1818–­1883), and others—­were held by publishers until the Revolution of 1917.107 In 1911, The Book Herald (Knizhnyi Vestnik) published a list of writers with the dates of their death to facilitate the search for works available for republication. This catalogue reflected how large the public domain was, “the property of the public.” The number of editions appearing after the expiration of copyright as well as the difference in prices between copyright and noncopyright editions were often cited as proof of the harmful influence of literary property on the progress of enlightenment. The adherents of public domain spoke on behalf of the “people” for the mass accessibility of national cultural heritage; they claimed that the removal of copyright protection would enrich home libraries of poor but literate workers or peasants. However, this populist rhetoric hardly corresponded to the state of readership in Russia with its “minuscule public for imaginative literature”108 and the enlightenment agenda of those Russian writers who, following Lev Tolstoy, separated the “classical” literature from “popular literature” and wrote specifically for that reader. Neither did this rhetoric respond to the actual demands of the extremely limited mass reading audience. The lawyer Vladimir Sergeevich, among others, pointed out the naïveté of the populist claims for accessibility of literature. Sergeevich actually checked the baskets of rural book peddlars: instead of the cheap editions of Pushkin’s poetry available for 2, 3, 5, or 10 kopeks (such were, for instance, the editions of

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the committees on literacy), they contained religious literature and books on hygiene and medicine that sold at a much higher price.109 Mass editions printed by commercial publishers specializing in the popular market filled the Russian countryside: the style, the language, and even the morality of these books often did not fit the “high canon” of classical literature,110 although, ironically, the plots of some of those books were stolen from “classical” literature and were thus offered to the mass reader in a peculiar interpretation. The scarcity of readership could be interpreted both as an argument for the enforcement of copyright (Russian authors could not count on big audiences) and against it (low reading culture needed additional impetus for development). Indeed, adherents of the movement to combat illiteracy called for the annihilation of literary property or the reduction of its term.111 At any rate, popular enlightenment and literacy came to be seen as a public good, no less important than the construction of railways or the preservation of forests. K. A. Richter, speaking at the Congress of Lawyers held in 1875, declared that the state must recognize the freedom of intellectual production and reward authors for their labor. He recalled the emancipation of the serfs as an example of the state’s interference in property relations (once again we see that recurring parallel); he also mentioned the expropriation of lands for railway construction. Similarly, he expected the state to intervene and take upon itself the provision of public goods. The products of intellectual activity corresponded better than the products of physical labor to the definition of the public good: a piece of bread would be eaten, while a book or an idea “would become the property of the mass of people” for an “indefinite time period.”112 Similarly to Herrmann’s position in 1828, Richter concluded that market mechanisms were moot in the sphere of enlightenment: a school student would pick up a romance novel rather than a textbook, a young musician would prefer Johann Strauss’s waltzes to exercises in counterpoint. The public must be led, and the nationalization of intellectual property was the best means for that. Richter’s colleagues did not support his plea: the idea of total nationalization remained marginal.

Lev Tolstoy: Can the Public Be an Heir? Perhaps the call of public enlightenment sounded attractive to populist politicians, but not to writers. Cases of voluntary surrender of copyright were rare113 and remained largely unknown, with the significant exception of Lev Tolstoy.114 Tolstoy thought private land ownership was a sin; similarly, he denied the right of authors to get income for “telling the truth.” The semantic parallel between land and literary work was ubiquitous: both were seen as the most unnatural forms of property, so that Tolstoy’s refusal of his rights to a land estate and literary income were closely connected and almost simultaneous.115 Yet it is nonetheless possible that the debates on literary property in Russia and the critique

234  |  Chapter 6 of the privatization of cultural heritage also played a role in the formation of Tolstoy’s attitude to literary “estates.” On September 16, 1891, Tolstoy sent his open letter to the editors of two newspapers, The Russian Bulletin (Russkie vedomosti) and The New Time (Novoe vremia),116 declaring that anyone could publish in Russia and abroad, in Russian and in translations, and stage in theaters any of Tolstoy’s works written after 1881 and published in the twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the most recent edition. Many newspapers republished this announcement with comments. The reaction of most of them was rather cynical:117 newspapers presented Tolstoy’s initiative as falling short of its goal of making his works widely available. The Daily News (Novosti Dnia) sarcastically remarked: “Now to the free gifts of nature—­air and water—­the works of Lev Tolstoy have been added.”118 Indeed, the journalists jeered at the very principle of his partial denunciation: after all, Tolstoy’s most popular writings (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and others) remained under the protection of copyright. The twelfth and the thirteenth volumes contained his philosophical writings, moralizing fairy tales for the people, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the play “The Power of Darkness,” and other recent works.119 In any case, observers regretted that the public would not benefit from such a benevolent act because the denunciation of copyright would enrich publishers instead of readers.120 The unwillingness to circumscribe the transfer of works into public domain by rules and conditions that could help avoid speculation turned out to be most disappointing: “What is the good in unselfishness if it results from insensibility, laxity and civil indifference,” wrote The Daily News. Why did Tolstoy not use the income from his works for hunger relief,121 or for the assistance of poor writers, as did the poet Semen Nadson (1862–­1887), who had bequeathed the income from his posthumous publications to the Literary Fund?122 It turned out that it was not enough to grant literary works to the public: in the absence of the institutional embodiment of the public, such a move was thought to be useless. Critics of Tolstoy’s benevolent but clumsy act predicted that in the absence of any conditions and rules regarding the publication of works that entered the public domain, the quality of copyright-­free editions would inevitably deteriorate.123 Tolstoy’s denunciation of copyright, an idea he had cherished for years,124 was a sincere but ill-­considered step. Tolstoy announced his decision in the middle of the anti-­famine campaign, and this move might have seemed inappropriate. The announcement appeared in newspapers together with the obituary of Ivan Goncharov (who died on September 15) and the discussion of that writer’s peculiar literary testament (discussed later). Tolstoy surely was not thinking about the public effect of his refusal—­and he later dealt with the mockery he faced on this account with resignation. He was consumed by an internal struggle between his sense that it was immoral to sell his writings and his awareness that by refusing to do so, he would deprive his family of their

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means of survival. Apparently, Tolstoy was not certain about literary or artistic property as an absolute evil: in 1886, he argued with Nikolai Ozmidov, one of his followers who vigorously insisted that one should not receive money for literary work. At that time, Tolstoy was trying to arrange the publication of an album of Nikolai Ge’s125 paintings in two editions—­one for “the people,” and another for the rich—­to help him make some money: “The old man needs to pay the rent,” said Tolstoy.126 Tolstoy’s family drama is too well known to require detailed discussion here; suffice it to say that his wife’s aversion to his plan to give up literary income and her concern for the well-­being of their large family was one of the reasons behind the compromise solution. Later, Tolstoy explained why he had chosen 1881 as a dividing line: he argued that he arrived at the conclusion that “a Christian may not possess property” in 1880. “[I] relinquished [my property] as if I had died.127 Consequently, all my family members received what was due to them by the right of succession, what they counted on and had the right to count on.”128 After the denunciation of 1891, Sofia Andreevna Tolstaia continued vigorously defending Tolstoy’s authorial rights: she sued publishers for printing Tolstoy’s early works in reading textbooks in a print run that exceeded the norm allowed for educational literature;129 she also received (on Tolstoy’s behalf and contrary to his famous proclamation) royalties for staging plays that appeared after 1881 (“The Living Corpse” and “The Fruits of Enlightenment”).130 It seems that Tolstoy knew about her activities: as he explained to a visitor, the Japanese novelist Tokutomi Roka, “They [the theaters] say to me that if I don’t take it [the money] they would spend it on ballet.” Roka recalled: “Tolstoy continued, half-­explaining, half-­justifying himself: ‘People often scold me for because my life does not correspond my convictions. Let them do so, I must bear this as a Christian.’ ”131 Despite hesitations, Tolstoy remained firm in his decision not to allow any monopoly on the publication of his works, and he turned down all offers from foreign publishers asking him to authorize their editions.132 In 1895, attempting to draft his last will in a diary, Tolstoy asked his heirs to “pass to society” the rights of literary property on his work.133 Nevertheless, so informally expressed, this will could not provide sufficient guarantees against the heirs’ claims and the privatization of Tolstoy’s writings—­so thought Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s editor and friend, who published the copyright-­free Posrednik and became the absolute leader of Tolstoyism.134≠ Chertkov insisted on preparing a formal testament that could help spread Tolstoy’s word as widely as possible and preserve his heritage for posterity. As it turned out, however, Russian civil law did not allow Tolstoy, or anyone else, to bequeath property to no one: “society”—­the public—­could not inherit Tolstoy’s property rights. Despite the institutionalization of the “property of the public” in the law on literary property, a writer still could not renounce his property rights before the expiration of the copyright term: at the very least, this act could be disputed by heirs and no one would be

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Figure 10. Lev Tolstoy, from Complete Works, vol. 28, illustrated cabinet edition, Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1912, frontispiece.

able defend the public’s right of ownership. The first version of the formal testament (signed on September 18, 1909) declared Tolstoy’s will for all his works, created before and after 1881, to “not become . . . anyone’s property, and to be freely published and republished by anyone who wants.”135 Fearing that such a formulation could be contested, however, at Chertkov’s insistence, Tolstoy bequeathed property rights to his daughter Alexandra, who was supposed to execute his “real” will entirely and make all his works open to the public.136 (Tolstoy signed an additional note explaining the “conditional” [formalnyi]

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character of Alexandra’s property rights—­this note, however, did not have any legal value.137) Alexandra Tolstaia and Vladimir Chertkov, to whom Tolstoy entrusted editing his manuscripts, became the “mediators” between the writer and the public. In fact, such a solution allowed Chertkov and the Committee on the Publication of Tolstoy’s Works, after the writer’s death, to sell the copyright to the complete edition of Tolstoy’s works to the publisher Ivan Sytin for 300,000 rubles:138 this sum was supposed to be used for the purchase of land in Yasnaia Poliana for peasants from the Tolstoy’s family and for the formation of a special publishing fund.139 The story of Tolstoy’s renunciation of ownership of his literary works, of course, says much about his personal search for the balance between private

Figure 11. Frontispiece of first posthumous edition of complete works of Lev Tolstoy, with a message from Alexandra Tolstaia. Acknowledging her father’s decision to make his works open for free republication, Tolstaia asks publishers to “wait a little” with their editions and allow her to raise money for the realization of Tolstoy’s last will (to redeem the lands of Tolstoy’s estates and give them to the peasants).

238  |  Chapter 6 and public, his quest for social justice and peace in society in general, and, more specifically, in his own family. At the same time, Tolstoy’s renunciation also belongs to the history of authorial rights and literary property in Russia; yet, paradoxically, it also stands apart as an exception. As we have seen, the immediate reaction to Tolstoy’s move was rather negative—­despite the widespread conviction that the benefits of literary property as an institution were at least ambivalent. More importantly, however, it went almost unnoticed by the participants in the debates on literary property. Such zealous defenders of extending public property to literary works as Anatolii Koni or Pavel Miliukov never mentioned the case of Tolstoy. His name appears only once in the Duma’s discussion on the copyright law—­again in a negative sense, as a proof that only those writers who marginalized themselves in a social and cultural sense could deny their property rights.140 Nevertheless, one important aspect of Tolstoy’s story did not go unnoticed, at least for some lawyers: his case revealed that Russian law contained no provisions for the renunciation of literary property and that the law failed to specify rules for the public domain. Private art galleries or museums could be bequeathed to cities or other nongovernmental institutions. In theory, these bodies could also assume the management of literary domains, had the law provided such an option. As Alexei Beliaev’s textbook on Civil Law (1911) interpreted the Tolstoy case, the author’s renunciation of his authorial rights ultimately made his works the “property of the public.”141 However, the lack of institutions that could represent the public as a juridical body, and, even more importantly, the absence of special legal rules protecting the public’s rights, made such transfer juridically vulnerable. In any case, due to the absence of special rules and institutions embodying the public, after the expiration of the normal fifty-­year term of posthumous literary property, literary works indeed became no one’s property—­res nullius. In fact, the issue of the agency in regard to public literary domain was raised for the first time long before Tolstoy—­as early as 1860, on the occasion of the foundation of the Russian Literary Fund. This organization aimed to provide financial support for writers and their families and, as the fund’s Charter said, to “facilitate the publication of useful literary works.”142 However, the aspirations of this society went much further. As one anonymous contributor to The Russian World (Russkii Mir) suggested, the Literary Fund could become the manager and the successor for “escheated” literary property (if there was no heir or the heir failed to publish their benefactor’s works) and even the tutor for those authors, who, as a result of their mental or ideological transformations, kept their earlier works out of the public view. The right of property, like any right, was associated with a number of obligations—first of all, t­ he obligation to deliver literary works to the public. “An unlimited, arbitrary right to use this property is anti-­social,” and, hence, the inability to cope with this obligation gave

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sufficient reason for intervention. The Literary Fund as an organization uniting the representatives of the literary and artistic world, the publishing business and the book trade, would enforce the obligation of authors and their heirs to publish literary works and, if they failed to do so, take this task upon itself.143 This was essentially the expropriation of the literary estate: careless “owners” would continue to receive incomes, while the power over domain would pass into society’s hands. The publication of literary works did not become the Literary Fund’s main goal:144 it could not serve as a representative of the public, whose interests were often opposed to those of the writers and their heirs. Thus, the problem of the agency remained unresolved: no one could serve on behalf of the public to defend its rights. The longevity of the posthumous copyright term and the value of “enclosed” riches made noticeable the absence of such an institution representing the public. In 1887, when the expiration of Pushkin’s copyright made clear the amount of “contribution” paid to the copyright holder, some enthusiasts decided to review the terms of copyrights on many of Russia’s great writers.145 It turned out, for instance, that the rights held by Alexander Glazunov’s publishing house to the literary estate of Mikhail Lermontov were very doubtful: Pavel Viskovatov, a historian of literature, an editor, and Lermontov’s biographer, accused Glazunov of illegally seizing the poet’s works. Whatever the rights of Glazunov’s firm to Lermontov’s literary estate,146 it was impossible to wrest them away and turn them over to the public in court because of the absence of a legal representative of society. “Our legislation does not recognize the actio popularis that enabled every Roman citizen to defend a violated right,” commented the newspaper editor, lawyer and historian Grigorii Dzhanshiev.147 In the early twentieth century, forty years after the Literary Fund was established, the public still lacked an institutional body: discussing yet another new project of law on literary property, a member of the Academy of Sciences, botanist Sergei Korzhinskii, suggested that, after an author’s death, the power of publication must pass into the hands of the Academy of Sciences’ Special Commission for Writers’ Assistance, or the Literary Fund, or the Union of Writers. Institutions of that sort would ensure that the public got access to the works of deceased authors while their heirs received income.148 Thus, Korzhinskii again attempted to institutionalize the public—more exactly, its “upper” level: professional unions and institutions were supposed to manage literary estates on behalf of society. Such a model—­very similar to the one we have seen in the debates on natural resources (forests and water)—­produced, naturally, similar objections. “Who is this ‘society,’ that, according to the academician Korzhinkii, holds the right of ownership of the products of literary labor? Until now, there has not been such a juridical person in our legislation,” responded Lev Kasso to Korzhinskii’s memo (Kasso was a lawyer, and later an ultra-­conservative minister of public education).149 Indeed, no special organs existed that could represent the reading public and manage its literary patrimony, but, as experts

240  |  Chapter 6 believed, further development of the “public law” would inevitably lead to the appearance of such institutions. “The copyright law is moving in the direction of strengthening the public element. Perhaps in the not too distant future society will physically come into existence to realize its rights in regard to literary works via its institutions.”150

7 The Private Letters of National Literature

Heirs, Experts, and the Problem of the Author’s “Will” One of the most shocking details in the story of Tolstoy’s will and its execution, analyzed in the previous chapter, was the unrestricted publicity of discussions on the intimate family issue of inheritance. The public was tacitly invited to participate in the debate since it was to become the “primary benefactor” of Tolstoy’s will. It received immediate and almost unlimited access to private documents concerning the will: as William Nickell comments, the public “laid claim” to diaries and letters “as if by eminent domain, and found itself arbitrating the family dispute over Tolstoy’s legacy.”1 Nickell considers these “shocking intrusions intro the realm of the private” as being unprecedented.2 This is indeed true: Tolstoy represented a unique example of a writer who voluntarily doomed himself to the torture of private life devoid of privacy. During his lifetime, the Tolstoy family estate Yasnaia Poliana was turned into a museum; his every step and word were immediately recorded, transmitted by telegraph wires, and divulged by the press.3 His death was watched, commented on, and discussed in newspapers and on the street. Nevertheless, although Tolstoy’s life was subjected to unheard of scrutiny to both admirers and detractors, the issue of a writer’s privacy and his ability to control the public’s access to his life, his unpublished writings or documents was not entirely new. Pushkin’s words about the “public” that considers a writer to be his own property (quoted earlier) could be interpreted in different ways, including the unchecked curiosity of the audience. For Nikolai Gogol, the publicity of the writer’s profession was a source of endless suffering. The unauthorized publication of lithographs from Gogol’s portraits in 1843 in two different almanacs caused him painful embarrassment; he perceived it as a betrayal and the violation of his “property rights.”4 However, if writers could more or less successfully control the access to their images, letters, and manuscripts during their lifetimes, the situation changed drastically after their deaths, when the control over the privacy of life and of professional reputation passed to heirs or copyright holders. The law made no distinction between the material and ethical aspects of copyright: owners of literary estates were granted full

242  |  Chapter 7 authority over things (manuscripts, letters, diaries) and ideas (the right to their publication). The application of traditional legal categories such as “inheritance” and the “transfer” of property right to products of literary genius produced at least two ethical issues: first, the possibility and appropriateness of publishing personal correspondence and other private papers, and, second, the treatment of unpublished manuscripts—­drafts, unfinished works, working materials, and professional correspondence. The law on authorial rights allowed the publication of writers’ private letters on the condition that both the author and his correspondent consented; after the author’s death, heirs could authorize or prohibit the publication of private papers. It said nothing about the fate of unpublished works, not intended for publication during the author’s lifetime: although their exclusion from the lifetime collection of works assembled by the author could be interpreted as a sign of the author’s unwillingness to make these works public, the fate of unpublished works (or those published somewhere other than in the author’s collected works) also depended entirely on the will of the copyright holder. The question of whether the audience had a right to read everything written by a great writer provoked heated debates in the nineteenth century, when professional literary criticism, the principles of editorial work, and textual studies began to emerge. Respect for the memory of deceased writers and admiration for their genius led some to suggest that nothing left unpublished by the author himself should come to light after his death. Others argued that the posthumous publication of all unpublished materials would stand as a tribute to the memory of the author. The publication of Mikhail Lermontov’s early poems in 1842 set off a debate on what to do with an author’s work when he died without leaving a final testament concerning his unpublished papers. In the edition of poetry that he himself supervised (published 1840), Lermontov (1814–­1841) did not include any of his works written before 1836. As Boris Eichenbaum noted, Lermontov perceived this year as a border in his work and “found it impossible to publish the works of the earlier period.”5 Only three narrative poems and twenty-­six out of more than four hundred lyric poems6 appeared in this volume. The publication of Lermontov’s earlier work soon after his death (1842) exasperated some of his admirers: Osip Senkovskii—­a literary critic and the editor of the popular Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia)—­ blamed the publisher for violating Lermontov’s “last will,” indirectly expressed in the composition of his 1840 collection. For the sake of “Herostratic fame” and profit, a greedy publisher was ready to “rake out” everything from a writer’s desk and offer for sale not only his “literary sins,” but also love letters and laundry bills,7 wrote Senkovskii. The arguments for protecting the author’s “last will” likewise raised doubts: after all, it was not only the author’s wish, but often the vicissitudes of the publishing business, and especially the pressure of censorship, that prevented the

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publication of certain works or resulted in their abridgements and distortions. Establishing the “authentic” version of a text even for works published during an author’s lifetime required extensive research and was not always possible:8 texts were shaped by the interventions of editors,9 by errors and misprints. Therefore, the “last will of the author,” which Senkovskii (himself notorious for arbitrariness in editing and in disfiguring writers’ texts) vowed to protect, was an abstract notion. On the other hand, the emerging field of literary studies,10 with bibliography as its foundation, placed emphasis on the historical development of poetic work: discovering writers’ manuscripts and tracing the stages of the creative process appeared indispensable; the principle of chronological (rather than genre-­based) systematization of literary works11 also assumed that there should be no omissions. Thus, the commercial interests of publishers to a certain extent coincided with the academic curiosity of scholars and bibliographers. Between 1855 and 1857, Pavel Annenkov prepared the first “critical” edition of Pushkin’s works, including many newly discovered texts and drafts. Nevertheless, Annenkov, who had a unique opportunity to work with Pushkin’s papers, found it inappropriate to publish the poet’s private correspondence and many of his unpublished works. Annenkov’s edition was recognized as a breakthrough: he managed to combine a “scientific” approach to the publication of Pushkin’s works with tact and aesthetic taste. However, subsequent editors of Pushkin’s works focused almost entirely on the discovery of drafts and unknown fragments.12 The zeal of discovering the details of Pushkin’s poetic work and deciphering his manuscripts was not accompanied, however, by deep analysis of the creative process, and as a result these studies sometimes took almost absurd forms.13 For instance, Grigorii Gennadi—­a bibliographer and historian of literature—­in his edition of Pushkin’s works inserted scratched-­ out lines and words from Pushkin’s manuscripts into the texts of well-­known works, separating them from the main body of verses and poems by quotation marks;14 Petr Evremov, another editor of Pushkin’s works, restored entire stanzas in Evgenii Onegin that Pushkin had deleted.15 Moreover—­to the great distress of Pushkin’s admirers—­Evremov’s edition followed a strict chronological organization, mixing the well-­known masterpieces with epigrams and obscene jokes. The public did not appreciate this bibliographer’s assiduous approach: some complained that poems with all the insertions were impossible to read; others protested against the encroachment on the memory of the deceased poet. Pavel Annenkov, in the heat of the argument, declared that the works not intended for publication—­often scabrous and indecent—­should not be mixed in with the works of the “truly great” (nastoiashchii velikii) poet. He even claimed that those works “did not belong” to Pushkin, although they had been written by Pushkin’s hand, as if there were two different Pushkins—­one “who has been unanimously recognized as the educator [vospitatel’] of Russian society, the powerful agent of its development and the interpreter of the

244  |  Chapter 7 people’s spiritual forces,” and another, “second, secondary” (vtoroi, pobochnyi) Pushkin, who did not live up to this name. The public should know only the true Pushkin; everything else must remain carefully sifted out.16 Bibliographers and literary scholars could not agree on how to use materials discovered in writers’ archives. All the same, for the learned public, the establishment of the “authentic text” of poems and the completeness of publication acquired an extraordinary intrinsic value. The same principles of authorial rights that preserved the monopoly of one publisher for fifty years and then allowed the appearance of numerous competing editions after the expiration of the copyright also whipped up a rush for the discovery of the “canonical” Pushkin or “authentic” Lermontov.17 In July 1891, dozens of editions of Lermontov’s works appeared in Russian bookstores commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death and celebrating his liberation from copyright; at least four of these editions claimed to be “complete.” Publishers competed in the thoroughness of texts, commentaries, and biographical introductions offered by their editions: the literary critic and historian Alexander Pypin remarked that the “completeness” of an edition was supposed to serve as “tempting bait” for the advanced reader.18 The public and the press welcomed the appearance of these volumes as significant contributions to the study of Lermontov’s life and legacy. However, the composition of complete collections again raised “indignation” for “digging in the graves” of writers19 and collecting “literary garbage”:20 along with newly discovered masterpieces and early immature works, they contained some utterly obscene poems (dots indicated the abundance of obscenities). It worth noting that those who criticized the publication of Lermontov’s (as well as Pushkin’s) obscene works did not reject them as corrupting mores (in fact, no one ever mentioned any pernicious effects of those works): they emphasized exclusively the morality of violating the author’s will and his privacy. In their view, it was an outrage against the poet’s memory. The protectors of writers’ rights invoked the ghosts of the great poets: what would Lermontov21 (or Pushkin22) have said had he seen every word he ever uttered become public? Editors, for their part, argued that they had to publish such editions for academic purposes, and because it was impossible to filter out a pure version of the classics. Pavel Viskovatov—­ one of the first and most devoted biographers of Lermontov—­anticipated rebukes to his “violation of the author’s will,” responding to his potential critics with the question: “Who will dare to make a choice” between those works that deserve and those that do not deserve the name of the writer? “Who are the judges that dare to dispose arbitrarily of the heritage of a great poet?”23 In Ler­ montov’s time, censorship assumed the role of judges; in the late nineteenth century the control of “academic” editions loosened: the responsibility and the authority of choice fell on the experts’ shoulders. The experts on literature—­ much like their counterparts in historical preservation striving to save every

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old building—­preferred to bring to light everything lest they make a mistake in selection. Even more than the complete editions of writers’ works, it was the publication of Pushkin’s intimate correspondence with his fiancée and then wife, Natalya Goncharova, in 187824 that evoked doubts about the rectitude of posthumous publishing.25 The editor of this publication, Ivan Turgenev, explaining to his readers why he published these letters, justified the interference into the poet’s private life by the value of the source, reflecting the sparkle of Pushkin’s genius, and the remoteness of the events. Time, wrote Turgenev, “covered with its shroud everything that could have appeared too intimate.” However, the majority of the readers did not see what Turgenev saw in these letters, and accused him of injuring the dignity of the poet by exposing his private communications with his wife.26 A few years later, the publication of Turgenev’s own correspondence immediately followed his death (1883) led to similar debates. Ironically, Turgenev’s letters became the public’s assets in two ways: they were opened for the public consumption, and the publication was dedicated to charity—­money raised on the edition was supposed to go to the Literary Fund, to which Turgenev had been an active contributor.27 The publication of his letters (many contained quite sharp words about his fellow writers) did not pass unnoticed: while some welcomed it as an important source for the modern history of Russian literature, others criticized editors for their indiscretion and idle curiosity about the intimate details of the writer’s life. The Soviet literary scholars Nikolai Izmailov and Mikhail Alekseev, who studied the fate of two great Russian writers’ epistolary heritage, observed that Russian society was obsessed with the issue of authorial privacy.28 The public eagerly consumed the most informal and intimate words of writers about their life, works, and their contemporaries, while at the same time felt ashamed of its curiosity. The law on authors’ rights, which required the agreement of both sides for the publication of letters, was almost entirely disregarded. Does the public have a right to read everything ever written by someone who dared to call himself a writer? Does revealing the unknown pages in the life and work of great authors produce anything positive for the writer’s memory and the enlightenment of the public? The debate on the legitimacy of “literary archaeology” reached its culmination in 1889–­1891, when Ivan Goncharov (1812–­1891),29 the author of such popular novels as A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869), published an open letter “The Violation of Will” (Narushenie voli) (1889)—­a testament, and a sweeping attack on the “friends” and relatives of the great authors who rush to publish the personal letters of famous correspondents after their death. Referring to Turgenev’s publication of Pushkin’s correspondence with his wife, Goncharov claimed that even deep respect for the memory of the writer does not confer the right to open his letters: the precious lines of a brilliant poet that “flash with

246  |  Chapter 7 irony and the sweet frolics of his pen” should nevertheless perish lest the will of the writer be violated. Turgenev himself became the victim of human curiosity: much of what he had “whispered in the ear of his friends, came to the surface in front of everybody . . . right after his burial.”30 Nothing personal should appear in print, wrote Goncharov. Fearful of the publication of his own letters, Goncharov requested his correspondents to obtain permission for the publication of his letters31 and burned many others.32 Moreover, after his death, many of his correspondents received their letters back in sealed envelopes, with their names written by Goncharov’s weakened hand (the executor of his will sent them). This “sepulchral mail,”33 as Nikolai Leskov called it, Goncharov’s touching care for his correspondents’ privacy, proved that his manifesto was not an expression of personal ego, but a position based on principles. In Goncharov’s view, not only private letters, but also all drafts and working materials were to remain closed to the public in order to preserve the author’s reputation. Goncharov vigorously protested against the emergence of “literary archaeology”—­the practice of “raking in” drafts, phrases, and words that the author himself had “swept out of his workshop.” Exposing a writer’s working methods would not teach others, while the publication of the residue of that process would destroy the wholeness of the writer’s image. A writer “wanted to appear in front of the public in the festive garments of his artistic maturity, but alongside someone puts his diapers on display, his baby jacket, the scribbles that he drew as a child.” For the satisfaction of the mob’s curiosity, people tear the writer’s image in shreds and spoil his “stately figure.” Goncharov’s testament provoked some sympathy,34 but not uniform support.35 Many saw in the excessive protection of the author’s privacy a violation of the “rights of posterity” to see the true physiognomy of the public’s heroes.36 The Booklets of the Week (Knizhki Nedeli) spitefully remarked that writers had to pay for their “enviable destiny” of being in the public eye—­“let us now see who you really were—­through your public activity, your private and everyday life.”37 The author’s wish was understandable, but it went against the law and did not take into account the existence of an additional participant in literary relations, along with the writer and his heirs—­“posterity,” wrote the newspaper The Week (Neledia). “Goncharov was not a private person, but a public figure. If during his life he belonged to society only partly, after death he becomes society’s property entirely, and it is not within his power to decide what should be done.” While supporting Goncharov’s objections to the publication of his juvenilia (as had happened to Lermontov), The Week asserted that the public had a right to learn about the author’s life from his letters and private papers, all the more so given that the letters, once sent, become the property of the recipients.38 Interestingly, Russian debates on the publicity and privacy of public figures’ lives stirred by the publication of Goncharov’s will coincided with the rise of interest in this issue in the United States. In 1890, one year after the publication

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Figure 12. Ivan Goncharov, from Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, St. Petersburg: Izdanie A. F. Marksa, 1899, vol. 1, frontispiece.

of “The Violation of Will” and a year before Goncharov’s death, two prominent American lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published an essay “The Right to Privacy.” The authors, protesting against the intrusion of the yellow press into the private lives of public figures, suggested the extension of the protection of individuals’ physical property to their nonmaterial interests, feelings, and emotions, including the right “to be let alone.” Warren and Brandeis found legal parallels to the rights of privacy in the right of literary property and the author’s privilege to determine “to what extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others.”39 The tone and rhetoric of Warren and Brandeis’s essay, despite their close attention to juridical details, very much resembled Goncharov’s passionate outcry. The essay was addressed to both Warren and Brandeis’s peers in court and the general public, whose eagerness to consume gossip welcomed unauthorized intrusion into the private sphere.

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Figure 13. The Funeral of Ivan Goncharov, St. Petersburg, September 19, 1891, by M. E. Malyshev. Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia, vol. 1891, no. 1184, p. 221.

Warren and Brandeis asserted that the violation of privacy, while being harmful for individuals, also spoils society and deters its moral development: “Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.”40 Warren and Brandeis’s essay became famous overnight; it launched a long-­ awaited debate on the privacy of public figures and the conflict of public and private interests. While most commentators welcomed and praised the article, many reacted with sharp criticism. However, the main argument against Warren and Brandeis’s defense of privacy centered not on the duties of public figures and the limits of their rights (a theme that dominated the debates in Russia): American zealots of public interest blamed Warren and Brandeis for the neglect of the constitutional rights of free speech. The tension between the right of privacy and freedom of speech, as Stuart Banner suggests, played a leading role in the rejection of the right of privacy in legal practice.41

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In Russia, Goncharov’s claims for privacy were refuted on a different ground: by becoming a writer, he had denounced his right to privacy. The “characteristically Russian” conception of “life and art” that, according to Isaiah Berlin, drastically differed from European patterns, was a commonly shared myth that carried over into the historiography of Russian thought. Isaiah Berlin claimed that Russian men of letters accepted no separation between public and private, their writings and private lives, whereas in France, “the artists’ private life was of no more concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter.”42 In contrast to this vision, Russian writers thought that “Man is indivisible.” “Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public stage, testifying.” Berlin could “think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the alibi that he was one kind of a person as a writer, to be judged, let us say, solely in terms of his novels, and quite another as a private individual.”43 While this vision certainly corresponds to the ideal of the literary profession in Russia, it nevertheless conceals tensions between public expectations regarding writers and their urge for privacy. The attempts of Russian writers to shield themselves from the idle curiosity of society suggests that while accepting their civic duties, Russian writers—­as well as their counterparts in Europe and the United States—­claimed the inviolability of their private sphere. The word “privacy” does not exist in the Russian language. Russian writers (Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, among others) tried to protect their right “to be let alone” and appealed to the audience that did not recognize their claims—­ neither before, nor after the author’s death. The privilege to possess writers’ private letters and materials was for the public alone, wrote lawyer Petr Obninskii, commenting on Goncharov’s testament. The law must be changed, but not by limiting access to a writer’s written heritage: quite the contrary, the law must “provide for the possibility that [an author’s] correspondence could be published in its entirety.” Not only the author’s name, as the Russian proverb says, belongs to history: his identity, in all of its manifestations, both positive and negative, was the public’s property. Private correspondence, memoirs, drafts, outlines, and notes—­all this precious material should be saved. The question of privacy was not applicable to dead people (as another proverb pronounced, mertvye srama ne imut—­“the dead feel no shame”); no law recognized “postmortem will.”44 More to the point, in comparison to posthumous publication, the law on censorship allowed much greater intrusion into the works of living authors: “Public interests” were said to justify the interference of a “strange hand” that insisted on abridgement, which often perverted the idea of a manuscript—­the author’s most valuable prerogative. Obninskii hinted at Goncharov’s service as a censor in the 1850s–­1860s, which significantly damaged his reputation in the literary world.45 The existence of censorship, according to Obninskii, proved that there was no logic in protecting the writer’s personality after death if it was violated during his lifetime; similarly, there was no logic in a law that permitted

250  |  Chapter 7 people who accidentally came to own the author’s material assets to control the national heritage. (Thus, in contrast to the American anti-­privacy rhetoric that rested on the freedom of speech, Russian proponents of public interests referred to the limitation of free speech as the proof that the right of privacy had no ground in Russian law). What about the author’s surviving relatives—­can they protect the heritage of the deceased writer from public abuse? Russian lawyers denied this possibility. “The heirs’ will should not intrude into the spiritual world of a writer. Society is the only heir to that spiritual inheritance because it was the initial source for an author’s inspiration,” wrote another specialist on civil law, Herman Blumenfeld.46 Both Obninskii and Blumenfeld suggested separating the “individual material right” of heirs from public power over artistic property, legislating the abdication of moral rights over written legacies and the creation of an arbitration tribunal to resolve disputes that might arise. The opponents of private literary property argued that the power of heirs over a writer’s property, which was based merely on their legal status, deprived the public of access to cultural treasures. Criticizing the “moral” inheritance of literary property, they suggested disentangling the moral power over ideas—­which in their view belonged to society—­from the material rights of heirs, the ownership of papers and books as material assets, and the income derived from publication. In other words, it was up to society to decide what, when, and how to publish; heirs would receive the money, but they were not to participate in the decision-­making. Thus, the discussion of authorial rights and privacy took on a new dimension: the institutionalization of the public’s “moral” power and ownership of the nation’s cultural capital. At this juncture, the issue of “agency” in the competition between private and public needs came to the forefront, and the problem of expertise arose again. By the end of the nineteenth century, the development of literary scholarship and the attendant principles of textual studies transformed the cause of making texts public into a highly professionalized process. As we have seen, the transcription of manuscripts, establishing a canonical version for every work, dating, systematizing, and commenting on literary works were all thought to require specific knowledge and education. “Publishing” and “editing” became two different sorts of activity47—­the latter was the privilege of editors and a new category of experts on bibliography and tekstologiia ­or textual analysis (which reached its maturity in the Soviet period). Pavel Annenkov (1813–­1887) edited and brought to light unknown works of Pushkin and Ivan Goncharov; his advice was also solicited by Ivan Turgenev while the latter prepared Pushkin’s letters to his wife for publication. Petr Efremov (1830–­1908) served as the editor of Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Radishchev, Alexander Pushkin, and Alexander Griboedov, while Nikolai Ti­ khonravov edited Gogol’s complete works.48 These editors were almost as seminal as the writers themselves: every significant edition of “classics” received

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wide publicity and elicited debate on the appropriate form for a writer’s work. Indeed, the professional interests of the experts often outweighed those of the deceased authors. The “last will” of the author, which initially carried a purely legal meaning, extending the author’s moral power over his works, turned into a technical term applied by “textologists” and meaning the establishment of the canonical version a literary text.49 Ironically, while using this term widely, literary scholars often argued that the real “will” of deceased authors had to be violated. Ivan Goncharov was not alone in prohibiting the publication of works and papers that he had not intended for a general audience: Mikhail Saltykov-­Shchedrin explicitly ordered that nothing left out of his lifetime collection of works should appear after his death. This dictum was, of course, disregarded, just as Dostoevsky’s “renunciation” of his critical works published in The Time (Vremia).50 “We have the right to ignore” these notes, instructed Soviet “textologist” and literary scholar Solomon Reisner, because “the power of a textual critic is not compatible with the role of executor of the last will and testament.”51 Another “professional” factor was important in shaping the attitude to writers’ papers and texts: in the nineteenth century, literary scholarship in Russia developed primarily as a subfield of history. Consequently, the attitude toward documents left behind by great writers was similar to that of historians and archaeologists in their treatment of cultural artifacts. Nineteenth-­century archaeologists and art historians, as we know, strove to preserve even those objects whose value could not be currently assessed. Literary critics exhibited a similar proclivity: the critic Alexander Skabichevskii, while supporting Goncharov’s pleas to respect the privacy of recently deceased authors, asked to preserve in archives the precious historical documents surrounding his life.52 Skabichevskii repeated the question that runs through all debates on how to allocate moral power over texts: who would decide what was worth preserving (publishing) and what was not? It is no wonder that Goncharov’s desire to demarcate which papers among a writer’s legacy were suitable for publication and which were not was hard to put into practice.53 Criteria for determining which literary works were subject to authorial rights had not yet been established. Seventy years later, Michel Foucault observed that the question “What is a work?” (“Qu’est-­ce qu’une oeuvre?”)54 had no answer. “Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work,” noted Foucault. He took the example of Nietzsche to pose a question similar to that asked by Goncharov’s contemporaries: “How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory.”55 In the nineteenth century, delimiting the boundaries of the public domain remained a work-­in-­progress. This uncertainty continued to persist: Foucault, just like Goncharov a few decades before him, prohibited

252  |  Chapter 7 the posthumous publication of his unpublished manuscripts, unfinished works, and correspondence.56 The problem of the author’s “will” revealed the relativism of the notion of property as applied to the sphere of literature. The owner, by virtue of being a writer and a producer of public goods, had to accept significant limitations to his rights. Letters, otherwise considered the material property of their holders (recipients)—­that is, as things—­acquired the status of public goods because of their author’s fame. However, the law on authorial rights did not specify who was the author—­one became an author by selling manuscripts to a publisher. Ivan Goncharov, a civil servant (he worked as a translator, then as a secretary in the Department of Foreign Trade of the Ministry of Finances before becoming a censor), was nevertheless recognized first and foremost as a writer, although much less prolific than some of his colleagues. Consequently, Goncharov’s auto-­da-­fé57 (he consigned most of his personal papers to a fire) appeared similar to the destruction of artistic masterpieces or buildings under private ownership: fully legal, they nevertheless seemed to be a violation of the rules of public life. The dictates of private property (and privacy) were not thought to give an author the moral right to burn his personal papers, provided he had chosen to be an “author” in the first place; the right of privacy retained its legitimacy for a certain period of time after the writer’s death, while public property was eternal. It goes almost without saying today that all works of great “classical” writers, after a certain period of time, must become available to everyone. However, such an attitude toward national heritage, in flagrant contradiction of the idea of an author’s individual rights, established itself slowly. In the early twentieth century, the question of authorial rights migrated from the sphere of professional debates among literary scholars to the sphere of politics. The issue of the author’s will as opposed to the public’s interests touched upon the problem of individual freedom and the public good, private property and its limits. In 1908–­1909, the members of the Third Duma, when considering a new law on copyright, discussed the possibility of violating an author’s personal rights and their heirs’ property rights. The leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Pavel Miliukov, asserted the priority of public needs. Referring to the dramatic transformation in Weltanschauung of Russia’s two great writers—­Nikolai Gogol and Lev Tolstoy—­Miliukov pointed out the theoretical possibility of an author destroying the fruits of his earlier labors or prohibiting their publication. “What would you have said if Gogol had allowed the publication of nothing except his ‘Correspondence with Friends’? I ask you, must society respect such a request?” What if Tolstoy decided “to deprive Russia, Russian society of his works? I ask you, could that be done or not?” Miliukov’s answer was negative: “Published works are public property: if it brings shame to a writer instead of glory, this is his own trouble, but society has the right to know his work.”58 Therefore, the author’s last will prohibiting publication of some of his works must be abrogated,

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as well as the heir’s proprietary rights if they fail to make the writer’s heritage available to the public. (Echoing the ideas of preservationists, Miliukov suggested expropriating the heirs’ copyright over books of public significance if the heirs fail to make them public.) However, such a position was difficult to maintain, both legally and ethically. “What if my dying father asks me to buy up all the copies of his work, but he failed to make a will, and he is interested, in a moral sense, in ensuring that this work never appear again—­would you deprive him of this right and allow strangers to deal with it and bring these works to the market?” asked Osip Pergament, Miliukov’s fellow Cadet party member, who could not tolerate such an encroachment on human rights and property. Miliukov’s suggestion of allowing free publication of those works of deceased writers that had not appeared in print for five years or more, accepted in the first hearing of the law, was overruled by Pergament’s counter-­proposal. Pergament defended a compromise solution that balanced public interests with the personal rights of the author. His “last will” (Pergament died five days before the third hearing) received support from the majority of the Third Duma.59

Russian Liberalism and Literary Property What is more valuable for society—­to secure the personal rights of authors and their relatives or to satisfy the needs of science and public education? Finding the balance between these exigencies was at the center of the debates on copyright in the press and—­when plans for the new law on copyright entered the legislative process—­the Third State Duma, then followed by the State Council.60 Pavel Miliukov thought that the government’s project favored authors, and he called for “restoring the right of society” to the works of its greatest representatives.61 In numerous speeches on the project of the copyright law, Miliukov tried to convey the opinion of experts who, not being writers stricto sensu (although Miliukov called himself a writer), considered literature their main business: literary critics, historians of literature, journalists. Such was, for instance, the composition of the St. Petersburg Literary Society’s Commission on Copyright.62 The society’s report on the project of the law on copyright (1908) manifested in a condensed and somewhat exaggerated form the “public vision” of literature and literary labor: accordingly, literature was not the domain of pure individual creativity. Referring to the favorite metaphor of continuity (“Tolstoy would not have been Tolstoy, if Gogol, Pushkin and others had not written before him; equally, Pushkin would not have been Pushkin if he had not had Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Karamzin and others as predecessors”63), they asserted society’s right to its literary heritage. The monopolization of literary property interrupted the agglomeration of cultural capital and thus hindered

254  |  Chapter 7 the development of science and literature. The members of the Literary Society spoke of authorial rights as an exception to a general rule: in fact, they envisioned society as the owner of literature. Society, interested in the production of literary works, granted authors a monopoly to receive income for their labor during a certain period of time:64 this concept represented a radical departure from Lockean ideas of a man’s natural right to the product of his labor, where the idea of literary property had originated. In fact, the report denied the concept of property altogether: an author’s right was a right sui generis. In this sense, the governmental project for the law on copyright fit the society’s vision: the project drew a line between private proprietors and workers (who had the right to the products of their labor) and writers: a writer is a “public figure” (obshchestvennyi deiatel’), and this status forbade mercenary relations between him and the public. At the same time, the Ministry of Justice, which compiled the project, tried to compensate for the enlargement of the public domain by strengthening the protection of writers’ individual rights, in accordance with contemporaneous European legislation. The Literary Society and the left parties of the State Duma (the Labor Group and some members of the Constitutional Democratic party) called for putting public needs above the private interests of writers and—­more importantly—­the interests of their relatives. The “experts on literature” strove to remove mediation that might prevent the dialogue between author and audience. They saw the greatest danger for the future of Russian literature in the arbitrariness of an author’s relatives. The report of the St. Petersburg Literary Society unambiguously accused Natalya Lanskaia of killing Pushkin twice: first, by putting him before the bullet of Georges-Charles d’Anthès, and second, through her petition to extend the copyright on Pushkin’s works.65 The Literary Society noted the fate of Mikhail Lermontov’s writings: the works of the poet who wrote “I am weary and sad, and there is no one to whom I can stretch out my hand in the hour of my soul’s distress,”66 were handed over after his death in a duel at the age of twenty-­six to a distant relative, and were later sold to Ilya Glazunov and fell into the “publisher’s captivity” for fifty years.67 So blind and automatic a transfer of property was suitable for material objects, but not for literary works. The report suggested granting inheritance rights only to the author’s closest relatives, to whom the author could have felt a spiritual attachment. In the absence of close relatives, such works would directly enter the public domain.68 The opponents of private ownership of literary works often referred to writers’ unhappy relationships with their families as an argument against the inheritance of “spiritual” assets (talent, after all, was not transferrable, as they said). Romantic poetry provided numerous examples of the loneliness felt by authors, along with feelings of being outlawed and abandoned. The biographies of Russian writers who were oppressed or misunderstood by their parents, betrayed by their children and widows seemed to confirm the fact that literary genius was often surrounded by people who could not understand its value. At

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the same time, total renunciation of the family’s right of inheritance seemed unjust and impossible; thus, the rules of inheritance should have been adapted to the specifics of the literary domain. The famous lawyer and a close friend of many writers, Anatolii Koni, raised the question of the relative benefits for the public in the choice of heirs. Koni asserted that wives, although they often failed to render spiritual support to their husbands during life and “often get carried away by the vanity of high life,” are less likely to be totally alien to their husbands’ views. In contrast, parents—­the previous generation—­can hardly understand the works of their creative and sometimes rebellious children. They are more likely to permit their children’s work to fall into oblivion. Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Saltykov-­Shchedrin, Alexei Koltsov, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Vissarion Belinskii—­none of these writers and literary critics enjoyed strong emotional relationships with their parents. The ideological conflict between “fathers” and “sons” in Russia was capable of interrupting the communication between the author and his audience. Therefore, argued Koni, only members of the author’s generation (or the following generation) should inherit writers’ literary estates: for the sake of public accessibility of literary works, he suggested depriving parents of any rights to their children’s works.69 To protect writers’ literary estates from arbitrary treatment, the defenders of the public interest attempted to invent legal schemes to remove heirs from a position where, as Victor Hugo said, there were only two sides—­the writer and the public.70 “The work of an author is a product of the people’s genius,” declared Anatolii Koni. “What has been elicited from the people’s genius must be returned to it in such a way that the work is available for mass use at a moment when it still has its educative meaning and is up-­to-­date in its form.” The long-­term monopoly of copyright deprived society of the most timely creations: Ivan Goncharov’s “The Voyage of the Frigate Pallada,” which depicted the writer’s encounter with the Japanese people, their “endurance and determination,” would have done much more good on the eve of the Russo-­Japanese War than the “shortsighted boasting and vulgar mockery of the Japanese in popular prints.” However, such a profound description of Japan would be available to the general audience only in 1941—­“not before, but 37 years after the declaration of war against Japan!” wrote Koni.71 Using the metaphor of “murder,” Paul Miliukov—­the most active spokesman in the Duma’s discussion on the proposed law on copyright—­compared the publishing monopoly of the author’s relatives with a “second death.” So long a term of copyright, said Miliukov, was identical to “putting a writer in a coffin for so long a period of time that afterwards, even if he comes back to life on a book’s pages, he would find himself in an alien world, and all the reserves of ideas that he had drawn from the society that surrounded him would not be returned to that society.” Miliukov pointed out the “continuity” of communication between an author and his public as having tremendous ideological

256  |  Chapter 7 importance, and warned against creating cultural “impassability” (bezdorozhie) on the roads between writers and the audience.72 Miliukov’s vigor (he spoke ten times at the first hearing on the law and seven times at the second) and his concern with the issues of individual freedom and cultural “communication” in society were not accidental: they reflected his broader attempts to adjust the classical liberal theory of human rights to a new social order in the empire. In 1905, Miliukov published a paper that expressed his theoretical search for a new foundation of liberalism: quite unusually for himself and, perhaps, not totally in tune with the general spirit of the collection of essays “In Defense of the Freedom of Speech” (V zashchitu slova), Miliu­ kov wrote about the social embeddedness of human rights and the fallacy of reckless individualism. He started with an analysis of the Lockean concept of natural rights that, as Miliukov claimed, assumed that human rights appeared not in the state of wilderness, but sprang from the “social state” of man (“natural” meant natural for a human—­that is, social). The original theory of natural rights was not individualistic: individualism appeared as a result of subsequent transformations. The individualization of the theory of human rights by French philosophers made it more accessible, but at the same time debased the original idea: “From a precious ore discovered by a British genius, French philosophers of the second half of the eighteenth century coined the entire capital of shiny coins and put them into the circulation of the whole civilized world.”73 The side effect of this debasement of the theory of the rights of an individual was the antagonism between the individual, on one side, and state and society, on the other: individual rights came to be seen as not originating from, but inherently opposed to the public. The new individualistic theory did not recognize the “creative work of society” and derived human consciousness not from an “endless chain of psychological interaction,” but from a man’s own nature. The ultimate goal of Miliukov’s critique of individualism was to prove that the argument for the freedom of speech cannot be derived from the concept of individual freedom: rather, the violation of the right to free expression breaks the network of human interaction so essential for cultural development. We can easily imagine how Miliukov applied this concept to the critique of literary property: excessive protection of individual copyright—­just as excessive censorship—­would interrupt human interaction, the chain of intellectual exchange. A staunch defense of writers’ rights was based on a faulty perception of the nature of human rights and the denial of their social nature. The parallel between censorship and authorial rights was not accidental: the Duma commission, in its commentary on the Ministry of Justice’s proposed law on copyright, pointed out that the reform of copyright occurred side by side with the reform of the laws on the freedom of the press. Osip Pergament recalled that until 1887, the law on literary and artistic property constituted a part of the code on censorship, and then passed to the domain of property laws. Still, however, it bore a few birthmarks displaying this origin, which were to be removed.74

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Thus, the discussion of copyright for people like Miliukov, politicians and publicists, economists and historians, was in fact a debate about the nature of individual freedom and the place of state and society in liberal doctrine. In the early twentieth century, Russian liberalism underwent a dramatic ideological transformation that led to the reappraisal of the value of individualism, the nature of property, private interests, and public needs. Addressing the issue of cultural backwardness, early-­twentieth-­century liberals employed the terminology of their predecessors—­for instance, speaking about literary heritage, Miliukov used economic metaphors and called for a return “into circulation of the intellectual capital that is now being wasted.”75 Like the liberals of the first half of the nineteenth century (Herrmann), Miliukov advocated a “literary protectionism” that corresponded better to the condition of Russia’s culturally backward society than to the free-­trade regime imposed on Russia by France—­a country that specialized in the export of literature. However, “literary protectionism” addressed not the producers of knowledge, but their consumers; not the individual, but society. Russian intellectuals saw literature as a “nation-­builder,”76 perhaps exaggerating its influence upon people’s mind and politics.77 Apollon Grigoriev’s aphorism “Pushkin is our everything” (Pushkin—­eto nashe vse) (1859) conveyed the essence of that “possessive” attitude of society to its writers. The writer was seen as more than the producer of texts—­he was the producer of meaning, the mouthpiece of the nation, and therefore could not afford to be let alone; neither could his works belong to someone on the basis of private property rights. Literary texts—­despite changes in the legal doctrine—­continued to be interpreted as property, but property of a special sort: both sides of the debate, those who defended the author’s rights and those who argued for literary public property, emphasized the intimate ties between a text and its possessor—­be it a writer or a reader. The “special” role ascribed to literature becomes even more apparent when compared to the development of patent law. In Europe, the legitimacy of intellectual property was called into question in the 1850s–­1860s. Many suggested ultimately eliminating privileges to inventions.78 European debates on patents found almost no resonance in Russia79—­mainly due to low interest in inventions (as reflected in the minuscule number of privileges granted annually).80 More to the point, Russian legislation offered rather restrictive conditions for inventors (with the terms of the privilege limited to three, five, or ten years, and the obligation to pay a high fee), so that when the question of patents was raised in the 1870s, the further development of patent law was cast as strengthening private property. A number of articles and brochures arguing that the protection of inventions was fair and legal appeared between the 1870s and the 1900s: their authors, mainly concerned with combating Western anti-­proprietary ideas, essentially struggled to break through an open door, as in Russia no one

258  |  Chapter 7 had argued that private ownership of inventions threatened either public enlightenment or economic development.81 Indeed, against the European background, Russian patent law was quite favorable to the public82 and the state. For instance, the law of 1896 allowed the expropriation of privileges for state and public needs, a clause for which the adherents of public literary property argued strongly. In view of such public agitation around the issue of the ownership of literary works, the government’s unwillingness to expropriate them appeared strange. The question was not, indeed, about money: the public subscription for the monument to Pushkin in Moscow (the famous work of Alexander Opekushin) helped raise 106,000 rubles,83 while the copyright to Pushkin’s works had been sold to the publisher Yakov Isakov for a much smaller sum. Echoing the discussion about the free publication of Pushkin’s works (1872), Mikhail Katkov pointed out a glaring contradiction: people collected money for a monument to a poet whose works remained in captivity. “Let the people or the government liberate [obelit’] the works that constitute the pride of the nation. Let the works that are of any worth for the public be liberated from private ownership and given to society.”84 Katkov suggested expropriating literary estates: a solution quite familiar to his contemporaries.85 The practice of expropriating literary estates was introduced later in Italy (1882) and England (1911): for instance, the law on expropriation allowed Italy to nationalize the works of Pushkin’s contemporary, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–­1837).86 In Russia, none of the literary estates was ever bought out or expropriated by the state, although the government spared no expense on the purchase of land estates. In 1899, the government bought for 150,000 rubles the Mikhailovskoe village in Pskov province, a family seat of the Pushkin family;87 in 1910, it paid 30,000 rubles for the village of Boldino in Nizhegorodskaia province,88 another of Pushkin’s memorial places, thus confirming the contradiction that Katkov pointed out a few years before—­the materiality of memory was easier to deal with than the intangible.89

Russian Resentment and the Freedom of Translation Russian society’s fascination with literature was nowhere better on display than in its engagement with international copyright protection. The prideful discourse about Russia’s national literary heritage was accompanied by deep feelings of resentment90 concerning the place of Russian literature in the world. Russia’s cultural—­or more precisely, literary—­backwardness when compared to other literary nations, such as France, Germany, or England, served as the main reason to deny foreigners the right to control and earn money from translations of Russian works.

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Aside from anxieties about the cultural patrimony, the principle of “free translation” shared its origins with the discourse surrounding other national assets, such as “free mining”: both assumed the right to exploit an individual’s literary or land estates without obtaining the owner’s consent. In both cases, a certain “public good”—­the good of enlightenment or the development of industry—­justified encroachment upon private property rights. Much like the discourse on environmental protection, historical preservation, and economic development, discussions around the “freedom of translation” centered on the extent to which the development of these national assets was said to be held back by the institution of private property. But the problem of translation also added some new overtones. Russia’s attitude to international literary conventions reveals how the specificity of the Russian system of (literary) property was understood alongside the international development of literary property as an institution. The main question that Russian intellectuals and the government faced was whether Russia should adhere to the international standards established by new European conventions or whether they should continue to translate freely, in legal isolation. The former approach would protect Russian literary property but complicate the importation of new European literature, whereas the latter would encourage cultural Westernization. In the nineteenth century, Russian writers competed for the empire’s limited reading public with their European counterparts: Russian nobles read French, English, and German novels in the original, while numerous literary magazines offered the most popular of these novels in translation. The share of foreign works was even greater in the nonfiction market, particularly in the social and natural sciences and textbooks. Despite heavy-­handed censorship, Russia was an active importer of books, ideas, and knowledge. The law on authorial rights (1828) offered no protections to foreigners; moreover, the authorial rights of Russian writers did not entitle them to a monopoly on the translation of their own works.91 Russian poets freely translated the masterpieces of European poetry, thus creating their own original interpretations92 of classic works. When it came to the popular novels of European writers, the work of translators, sometimes hackneyed,93 sometimes skillful, may have been seen as ignoble, but certainly not illegal. The Russian state began to receive numerous requests from the European literary community to protect literary works from unauthorized and illegal translation in the 1850s—­just after the termination of the inglorious Crimean War. The Russo-­French treaty on trade and navigation (1857) obliged the Russian government to follow the example of Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, the German states, and Sardinia and provide conditions for the protection of French literature and publishing. Later, the government explained that it was the Crimean debacle that forced Russia to accede to these uncomfortable demands

260  |  Chapter 7 and violate the goals of its cultural development. The Russian government consistently tried to avoid the most restrictive conditions of the agreement, and limited the terms of protection to prohibitions against unauthorized reprinting of original works. The Russo-­French convention of 1861 (much like the similar Russo-­Belgian agreement of 1862) did not eliminate the freedom of translation, and any work of any French writer could be published in translation without permission.94 Both sides agreed to observe the terms of the convention for six years with the possibility of renewal, but as soon as the term of the agreement came to the end, Russian publishers energetically fought against its extension.95 Nevertheless, the convention remained in effect until 1885, when the Russian government finally decided to nullify the agreement. Russian publishers’ commercial interests notwithstanding, the aversion to the idea of protecting foreign authors’ control over translations of their own works and getting paid for the results was based on the firm conviction that Russian literature alone could not satisfy the needs of Russian readers and that eliminating the freedom of translation would deprive the public of access to the treasures of European culture. In comparison to French literature, which represented “inexhaustible treasures in all spheres of human knowledge,” Russian literature appeared decidedly “poor.”96 Considering the proposed version of the Russo-­French convention in 1858, the minister of public education Avraam Norov declared that payment to European authors for permission to translate their books would amount to a new tax on a Russian reader:97 the metaphor of a “tax on enlightenment” became ubiquitous in the debates on international copyright. For the sake of its cultural development, Russia, with its nascent literary culture and underdeveloped sciences, depended on the freedom to translate foreign books;98 property rights (when they concerned foreigners) had to yield to the exigencies of enlightenment.99 Thus, paradoxically, the Westernizing agenda of the Russian government and of intellectuals threatened to leave Russia isolated amid the flurry of international literary agreements concluded among the European powers. In a speech at the Literary Congress in Paris (1878), Ivan Turgenev, one of the few Russian writers whose works were already popular abroad, proudly announced that Russian literature, a field that had not existed two centuries earlier, “has now acquired the rights of citizenship in Europe.” “A hundred years ago we were your disciples, now you welcome us as your comrades,” he declared.100 However, while asserting Russia’s membership in the European literary community, Turgenev defended its special right to translate European books without limitations.101 Turgenev argued that in Russia, translators were not “predators”—­in fact, “they have been the pioneers of civilization; they followed the example of Peter the Great, by introducing Russia to the West, and its science and culture.”102 Without translators, stated Lev Polonskii (another Russian participant at the Congress), the majority of the Russians would not have been able to read the masterpieces of European literature.103 Needless to say, the

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Russian participants’ claims for a special status and their insistence on special treatment bewildered their European colleagues.104 As a result, Russia gained a reputation as a nation of pirates. The dilemma surrounding the freedom of translation very much resembled that concerning literary property: the benefits of free translations had to be weighed against the loss of prestige, the deteriorating quality of translations, and the lack of reciprocal protection for Russian authors whose works came into fashion in Europe during the 1870–­1880s. According to Fedor Martens, a well-­known Russian lawyer and an expert on international law, the refusal to accept the conventions for the protection of literary property marginalized Russia’s role in European cultural development. The system of bilateral conventions that safeguarded literary property helped create a European cultural community. “The national borders that divided the states and designated the limits of their territorial power and law have lost their meaning in regard to literary property.”105 Russia (and the United States) remained outside this new space. Thus, the freedom of translation in fact made Russia an outsider, rather than encouraging its Europeanization.106 “One can hardly consider a such state of affairs normal and worthy of Russia. People abroad will not stop calling it ‘scandalous’ until we agree to recognize and respect the rights that have become part of the legal consciousness in all civilized nations.”107 In 1886, the representatives of eleven countries gathered in Berne to conclude the first international convention for the protection of literary and artistic works, which was supposed to replace bilateral agreements.108 Russia refused all invitations to participate: just a year earlier, the imperial government had freed Russian publishers from even those modest and poorly enforced provisions against unauthorized editions stipulated by the Russo-­French and Russo-­ Belgian conventions. The Berne convention and the series of international meetings preceding it were widely publicized in Russian newspapers. Russia’s unwillingness to participate in the formalization of the European literary community was viewed as possibly disgraceful109 and at the very least awkward, particularly in light of the growing rapprochement between France and Russia in the early 1890s. At the same time, the imbalance between literary imports and exports decreased significantly. Due to the absence of any rules obliging European publishers to obtain permission from Russian writers,110 many Russian works appeared in the West in disfigured form, abridged, or under various titles. This was precisely what had been happening to the works of European writers and scientists in Russia. (Emile Zola complained that his novel The Debacle appeared in fourteen translations within a year after its publication in France, and that the quality of most translations was unacceptable.) Finally, in 1891 those who supported freedom of translation lost one of their most important crutches: the U.S. Congress approved a new law that promised foreign authors literary rights on the same grounds as national authors.111 At this point, Russia remained the only outsider among the important literary nations.

262  |  Chapter 7 In 1894, Emile Zola—­perhaps the most popular French writer in Russia at the time—­addressed Russian intellectuals and publishers with a plea to respect the rights of French authors.112 His petition, popularized by a fellow member of the French Society of the gens de lettres, the translator Ilya Halperine-­ Kaminskii, provoked another round of discussions on the matter in Russia.113 A number of Russian lawyers spoke in favor of the convention,114 which, as Zola and Halperine-­Kaminskii argued, could liberate Russia from the influx of low-­quality literature and bad translations that stifled the development of Russian national literary culture. Moreover, it would defend the rights of Russian authors in Europe. However, their opponents, whose ideas carried strong leftist and/or populist overtones, appeared more appealing to the general public.115 The idea of paying for the translation of a book was presented as inherently alien to Russian culture. Ivan Yanzhul, a well-­known economist and statistician, emphasized the difference in the approaches to copyright in Western Europe and Russia. While Zola, according to Yanzhul, identified the private interests of French authors with the public interests of the French nation, in Russia this syllogism ran in the opposite direction: “What is useful and corresponds to the interests of our society and our people must be good and sufficient for the Russian writer, publisher, and journal editor.”116 Yanzhul accused the defenders of international copyright of attempting to levy a notorious “tax on public education” and claimed that Russia could not afford to join the convention, due to its poor cultural development and low per capita income (the lowest in Europe, as Yanzhul asserted).117 “Salus populi—­suprema lex!” (“ the health of the populace is the highest law”), concluded Yanzhul. The irony was that both the supporters of the convention and their antagonists staked their case on the “salus populi,” but they saw different paths to its attainment. Both sides often referred to statistics, the cost and amount (in pages) of literature imported and exported between Europe and Russia, the proportion of translated works in Russian magazines, and the requests from Russian readers (and library-­goers) for original and translated works. These data often proved contradictory, much like the conclusions derived from them.118 Similarly, each side had a different vision of Russia’s backwardness—­ and whether it was primarily cultural or legal. For instance, Zola, while speaking on Russian backwardness in his interview to the Russian newspaper Daily News (Novosti Dnia), took issue not with the state of Russian literature (which he called “young” rather than backward), but with the government’s commitment to European legal notions. Zola pointed out the contradiction between Russia’s demands for status as a great power, a member of the club of civilized nations and a patron for other countries, and its pleas for special treatment with regard to literary property.119 Zola and his Russian opponents spoke in different languages: his was the voice of legal rationality, whereas for his Russian opponents, the application

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of legal norms to literature simply appeared inappropriate. Zola’s position, his opponents explained, was destined to fail in Russia, precisely because he understood literary work as individual property. “Zola’s requirements are too narrow and egoistical. He thinks as a private proprietor rather than as a l’homme de lettres or a citizen of his country. Such requests based on practical reasons have never found a sympathetic response in the Russian press and Russian pubic opinion,” declared The News and the Exchange Gazette (Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta).120 The philosopher and librarian Nikolai Fedorov saw in Zola’s declaration the signs of the coming “epoch of senselessness and aimlessness” (epokha utraty smysla i tseli), “the time of prodigal sons”: he imagined a dystopian image of the world split into castes of learned and unlearned, where those who have knowledge sell their thoughts and words for money, and the chain of verbal and existential exchange between generations is broken.121 Paradoxically, the majority of Russian writers—­themselves staunch defenders of their authorial rights in Russia—­joined the attack against Zola and his adherents. Anton Chekhov, interviewed by Nikolai Rakshanin, the correspondent of the Russian Daily News (Novosti Dnia), admitted, in principle, the fairness of the international convention. Chekhov’s interview (as it appeared in the newspaper) conveyed the feeling of ressentiment shared by many Russian writers: they valued the ability to be read in Europe more than the possibility of earning money from the translation of their work. The objections of Russian readers and writers in regard to the convention were similar: “A reader will be deprived of the best works of foreign literature, while a writer would lose the pleasant feeling of being read abroad.” Chekhov’s works had by that time been translated into almost all European languages, yet he spoke of himself as being “honoured by European publishers”: Please, they only translate us because they don’t have to pay for it. The publisher pays a pittance for the actual work of translation—­and there you are, you’ve got a book that isn’t completely without interest. But ask him to go beyond that and actually pay the author and he’ll balk. And he’s right to do so. If the publisher pays, he might end up with a “European” author. After all, our writings still come across as odd to the foreign reader. They might be fashionable in one country, or enjoy a burst of interest as something new and unusual in another. But that’s all. It’s all quite fleeting. But if the publisher actually pays the writer, then he is going to look for writers with a more lasting, a more established sort of success. We haven’t had that kind of success yet with the foreign markets, and therefore they’d simply drop us the first time we ask them for a payment.122 Quite characteristically and in tune with Zola’s remark about Russian treatment of literary property,123 Chekhov referred to the notorious Russian skepticism about property rights:

264  |  Chapter 7 It probably seems strange from a European perspective, but we do not have a clear sense that “creative property” is in fact property at all. It’s simply not in our mindset. Please don’t think I’m putting on airs, but I personally still feel somewhat strange every time I am paid for my writing. . . . As if I’m doing something I shouldn’t. Given this, how are we then to feel about being paid for our supposed “property” [by our publishers] abroad! They promise us mountains of gold, but we refuse. If it is indeed true that they love to read us in Europe, then all the better for them: let Europe read us for free. We Russian writers might not be especially well-­off, but, given our special conditions, we decline the payment that the foreigners so kindly extend to us.124 Chekhov was indeed putting on airs: one of the first true professional writers for whom writing was the main source of income and social status, he carefully managed the publishing of his books, and he participated in the activities of the Society of Dramatic Writers and Composers, which enforced authorial rights. In a letter to his wife, he even complained that European publishers did not pay royalties: “You ask me why I do not take payment for the translation of my books. Because they [publishers] don’t pay.”125 There was, of course, a bit of boasting in Russian writers’ alleged refusal to accept royalties from Europe,126 as well as their “modesty.” Many writers, most notably Fedor Dostoevsky, believed that Russian literary language was not translatable, and Russian literature remained inconceivable to foreigners.127 Others, according to Ivan Yanzhul, regretted that “foreigners translate so few Russian books and so rarely,” with the result that many discoveries by Russian scientists remained unknown in Europe. To bring their achievement to the European audience, Russian scientists invested their own money in the publication of their works abroad, which made the obligations imposed by the convention even more unfair.128 The most authoritative among Zola’s critics was Lev Tolstoy. His interview with the Russian Daily News nevertheless conveyed a sense of uncertainty about his position.129 Tolstoy was against literary property in principle, and journalists picked up his “do not sell wisdom” line as a motto of the anti-­convention campaign. However, Tolstoy’s interview with a Daily News correspondent in 1894 revealed a certain hesitation: “There is nothing more repugnant than this sale. Solomon said long ago: ‘buy wisdom, but don’t sell it.’ ” Lev Nikolaevich said this very quickly, with visible agitation. His eyes appeared at this moment especially expressive. “There cannot be two opinions on this question,” Lev Nikolaevich began after a short pause. “But here too there are certain unavoidable compromises and deviations. The question of a literary honorarium is after all the same as the question of an honorarium for doctors. It is disgusting, it would seem, that a doctor, able to help a sick person, would say to him: ‘I will help you,

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but only on the condition that you pay me three rubles.’ It is no less disgusting when a writer, having something to say to the masses, says the same thing to them: ‘I will open the truth to you, but only in the case that you pay me three rubles.’ It is difficult to imagine something more abnormal. But on the other hand, if one thinks about how this doctor or writer might have an aging mother, a sick wife, or a child who needs to be fed, clothed, and given something to drink.” . . . “It might seem to you that there is an obvious contradiction in this, but from my point of view, there is none. Compromises and deviations from the ideal are unavoidable in life. What is important is that the ideal is clear to a person, and that he firmly and sincerely strives for it. Life itself renders unavoidable these deviations from the straight path toward the ideal. The conditions of life are stronger than the strivings of the strongest personality toward perfection. Is that clear to you? It is important to be imbued with the idea that wisdom cannot be sold, while making peace with the thought that an author who needs an honorarium receives it.”130

Literary Property and Nationalism In the 1890s, Russian public opinion was still strongly opposed to the idea of the international literary convention: borrowing from the West (and not paying for it) appeared to be one of the most crucial tools for moving forward. As ultimate proof of the necessity of unrestricted translation of foreign works, some referred to the fate of the “nascent” literatures of Russia’s multiple nationalities: the convention would “slaughter” Armenian, Georgian, or Tatar literatures, asserted an anounymous author interviewed by a journalist from the Daily News. Thus, the freedom to translate the works of Russian writers into the languages of national minorities turned into a benevolent “patronage” of the Russian state toward “youthful non-­Russian literatures.” “These literatures are taking their first bashful steps. They can’t do so without the help of a foreign culture.”131 The protection of national literatures, which otherwise did not attract significant attention or sympathy, became one of the ubiqutous arguments against the convention.132 The value of private property was weighed against much more significant goods: for instance, a representative of the Russian Medical Society claimed that the freedom of translation (of books on medicine) was essential for saving human lives, and joining the convention would contradict the Hippocratic Oath.133 The Imperial Academy of Sciences, the most vigorous and consistent critic of the convention, insisted on the freedom of translation as a prerequisite for the development of Russian science. In tune with the general attitude on the issue, the commission entrusted with compiling the new Civil Code (the

266  |  Chapter 7 one that introduced “public property” into the projected code—­see chapter 3), while reserving Russian authors’ monopoly on translation for a term of ten years, decided to maintain the unrestricted freedom of translation of books published abroad (1898).134 Change finally came not from the intellectual milieu, but from political pressure. In 1904, Russia was forced to conclude a disadvantageous trade agreement with Germany that, among other things, obliged both sides to sign a convention protecting literary and artistic property for a term of three years. This agreement inevitably forced Russia to conclude similar agreements with other countries.135 The Ministry of Trade and Industry, interested in the improvement of Russia’s image in the eyes of its European counterparts, launched a discussion on the best ways to fulfill these obligations. The question, therefore, was how to avoid the most unpleasant and binding conditions: either by signing the International Berne Convention or by concluding separate bilateral agreements. Being aware of the “moral” commitments of the Russian Empire to conclude an agreement, the principled opponents of the convention—­the representatives of the Ministry of Justice, the Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Geographical Society—­suggested cautiously defining spheres of literary activity, so as to avoid applying the norms of the literary convention to the sciences.136 However, to sign the necessary agreements, Russia first had to change its national legislation on literary property so as to provide equal conditions for foreign and Russian authors. Thus, the issue of the freedom of translation came up again when public organizations and the State Duma reviewed the government’s proposed law on copyright, which, while not expressly prohibiting free translations of foreign books, allowed the signing of international agreements that obliged Russia to observe foreign copyrights. The question of whether Russia would win or lose from joining the convention, which in principle had been already resolved by the government, was raised again by the supporters of unrestricted translation, as if nothing, not even Great Power politics, could force Russia to go against the cultural interests of its people. The St. Petersburg Literary Society rejected all arguments in favor of the convention advanced in the Ministry of Justice’s project of law (which, characteristically, followed Zola’s letters almost verbatim). Was it good or bad that Lermontov, unconstrained by any convention, translated Henrich Heine’s Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam (1827) in order to write his original masterpiece Na severe dikom stoit odinoko (1841)? Did Karl Marx or Russian society lose anything from the appearance of three competing translations of his Capital, offered by three generations of Russian socialists—­German Lopatin, Petr Struve, and the group of translators who worked with Alexander Bogdanov, Ivan Skvortsov-­Stepanov, and Vladimir Bazarov? These questions needed no answer. Limiting the freedom of translation was presented as being no less detrimental to the spread of Western ideas than censorship. The publication of Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus was permitted in Russia forty years after its

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publication in French: had Russia joined the convention at the time of Renan’s French edition (1863), while removing all censorship requirements, the fate of this work might have been exactly the same.137 The choice of examples proving the benefits of freedom (Lermontov excluded) pointed to a peculiar meaning of “Westernization,” as the representatives of the Literary Society understood it. Russian liberal and socialist movements were to a great extent inspired by the West, while Russian audiences vigorously consumed almost all the significant Western works on social sciences. Most politicians could agree with liberals on the question of the convention because the discourse of public enlightenment, especially when opposed to the profit of foreigners, appealed to nationalists of different political stripes. Consequently, political sympathies did not play the decisive role in resolving the question of the convention. The majority of the Third Duma responded to Pavel Miliukov’s powerful argumentation that limiting the freedom to translate foreign books was “against Russian national interests,”138 and the Duma removed the clause on international agreement from the proposed copyright law.139 The decision to “legalize literary theft,” as the journalist and Ministry of Trade and Industry representative Nikolai Notovich characterized the Duma vote, “injured our young assembly of people’s representatives in the eyes of civilized nations.” Miliukov imagined Russia’s pursuit of cultural development as a paramount task to which such values as the protection of private property or Russia’s international prestige had to give way. He also understood that only this strategy could win over public support of the Russian electorate. After 1905, the era of mass politics began in Russia, with the result that the press came to play an important role in shaping public opinion, especially concerning “tender spots” such as public education and nationalism. The freedom of translation was among those hot topics in newspapers that always caught the readers’ attention. The Russian press remained rather skeptical with regard to the “tax on enlightenment,” and even the opinion of leading lawyers could not change this opinion. Politicians and Russian liberals had to take into account the public antipathy toward the convention, all the more so given that the idea of widely available literary products—­either domestic or foreign—­corresponded to their rather populist agenda, which included, among others things, the expropriation of private lands and the nationalization of natural resources. It is striking that Russian intellectuals, in the debates on literary property, returned to such a prosaic and sometimes even primitive rhetoric in defending their stance. Endless quotations from Pushkin, Lermontov, and Nekrasov, meant to prove that literature is a public good, in most cases were arbitrarily taken out of context and speculatively interpreted. Examples and passages proving the potential influence of literary texts on the public mind, or the indebtedness of individual authors to the “cultural capital” of the nation and their dependency on the “milieu” were indeed a bit flat, just as the belief in the

268  |  Chapter 7 reformist influence of translated books was naive. Such a fixation on interpreting the interactions between writer and society was all the more strange given the abundance of new works and theories explaining the psychological and epistemological foundations of artistic creativity offered by the latest Russian “literary science.”140 Similarly, the representation of the development of Russian literature as a linear process, the accumulation of capital that began with an initial impetus from below, then moved progressively to Pushkin and Tolstoy, paled against the background of various historical doctrines interpreting the development of literary culture in Russia and the world as a complex and mutually enriching evolutionary process.141 The arguments used by Russian opponents of literary property in the early twentieth century, ironically, often repeated word for word the rhetoric of debates in post-­revolutionary France:142 the Russian defenders of the public interest rested their case on the availability of Tolstoy or Goncharov, just as their predecessors argued for open access to Voltaire. This adherence to the rhetoric of the Enlightenment pointed up the similarity of the problems faced by both Russian liberals and French revolutionaries: the formation of a nation, bound by a common literary culture. In fact, the Russians were continuing to pursue Belinskii’s stance of making of literature a common cause—­a Russian res publica. Such an instrumentalist approach to literature explains the way Russian liberals treated literature: the supporters of public property needed to show its functionality in order to prove that it was a public good similar to monuments, forests, and rivers. Forests saved water, rivers produced electricity, monuments crystallized memory, literature made people into citizens: all these things, taken together and owned collectively, helped create a self-­conscious nation. Consequently, a writer became, in this discourse, a “public figure” (obshchestvennyi deiatel’), rather than a creator and an individual; hence, the lionization of literature143 and the attempts to separate the “true” Pushkin from his naughty twins. Alexander Evlakhov (a disciple of Alexander Veselovskii and member of the so-­called psychological school in literary studies) equated such an emphasis on the “social-­mindedness” of writers with the “expropriation” of their individuality.144 Paradoxically, the discourse of literature as a public good brought with it a rather primitive understanding of literature itself. Russian liberals of the early twentieth century thought that “high” literature, when it became a mass product available to all, would be a means of transforming society, by making it more responsive to the ideology of the liberal intelligentsia. This resulted in the practice of making the “people’s” writers into Russian classics, even while perverting their words and debasing the actual value of their works. The campaign against private literary property was essentially a campaign against elitism in readership: it began in the nineteenth century and reached its culmination under Soviet rule. We have seen how experts—­most remarkably in the fields of archaeology, forestry, and engineering—­worked on making private things public. In the

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development of literary property, their role was less prominent but nevertheless significant: theirs was the authority to select, edit, and bring texts to an audience. However, not all academic and artistic issues were ultimately taken into account. Historical preservation turned out to be associated with an anti-­ individualistic philosophy and tended artistically toward neoclassicism at the expense of other modernist currents in visual art and architecture. Similarly, the trend in literary criticism linked to the campaign for the deprivatization of Russian classical literature represented just one in an array of currents and schools. Aesthetically, the idea of public literary property in the early twentieth century focused almost exclusively on “classical literature,” leaving everything else behind.145 As a result, the question of literary property came to be intertwined with issues of aesthetics and ideology.146 Just as the neoclassical landscape designed by early-­twentieth-­century architects predated Stalinist architectural patterns, so too the imagined volume of Pushkin on every peasant bookshelf foreshadowed the ideas of Soviet cultural policy. There was, of course, a significant difference between the liberal idea of public literary domain advanced by Russian intellectuals prior to the revolution and Bolshevik literary policy. Russian liberals anticipated the retreat of the state from the realm of literature (via the elimination of censorship) as well as the limitation of private property rights that would restore, as Miliukov put it, cultural communication between writers and the masses. In the imagined public literary domain, the role of the state was reduced to the registration of property rights and their judicial protection. In this sense, their vision perfectly fit a concept of public property that assumed not a change in the subject of property (from private individuals to the state), but essentially the transformation of the very institution of property, from absolute property to one restricted by social commitments and obligations.147 The project of limiting literary property and enlarging the public literary domain was, indeed, ambivalent in its meaning, much like the idea of public property itself: it aimed to cure the injustices of private property while inevitably constraining individual rights. To function properly, it required an abundance of rules and norms; otherwise, it threatened individual freedoms. Writers’ protests against the violation of their privacy and moral rights exemplified the consequences of the lack of norms protecting “owners” and the absence of institutions managing the public domain. Like other res publica in the imperial state, the literary public domain remained a no-­man’s land because no institution represented the public as a juridical figure—­this was another proof of the incompatibility of this model with an autocratically governed society.

Epilogue The causes for the sweeping political transformations of 1914–­19211 were deep and manifold, and it was not the malfunctions of property rights that led to the fall of the Old Regime and the emergence of a new order. Rather, in the crisis of war and revolution, the existing fractures in the system of property rights grew enlarged as through a magnifying glass. The experience of war exposed weaknesses and exacerbated problems that had been revealed in the debates on the reform of property decades before; the Bolshevik policy of nationalization in 1918–­1921 was to a certain extent a perverted solution to these long-­standing issues. World War I enabled the realization of projects that had been held up in the government for years, and the nationalization of public things became a central point on the wartime agenda. However, both the imperial government, which remained reluctant to seize private possessions of its ethnically Russian subjects, and the Provisional Government could not perform this task quickly and successfully. The nationalization of “public” resources (fuel, forests, and historical monuments) failed, whereas the property of many private owners (identified as enemy aliens) fell victim to unrestrained plunder, which the government was unable to prevent. The war was thus a touchstone that revealed the inability of the state to act efficiently in the management of national resources and its unwillingness to relinquish what it held, which was already witnessed in the debates on property for decades, and now came out explicitly. It was hoped, especially in expert circles, that the revolution in February 1917 would solve the problem of government inefficiency, but it did not accomplish that goal. It was the Bolshevik government that, having proclaimed the wholesale nationalization of resources and “public things,” including the objects of national heritage, staked its survival on building a huge bureaucratic machine for the management of the state household. In the process of building the Soviet state, the government (or rather the Soviet lawyers speaking on its behalf)—­just like its imperial predecessor—­returned to previous attempts to define its proprietary status. In this context, the idea of “public property” once again came up in legal debates. The Bolshevik government also faced the problem of defining what could remain “private” (or individual) and what should belong to the people—­ that is, to the state. The contours of the Soviet “public domain” in some points resembled the sketches of prerevolutionary experts; however, there were fundamental differences between the progressive dreams and the Bolsheviks’ project. In the final section of this book, I will chart the trajectory of this development —­from the attempts to nationalize resources vitally needed for Russia’s war

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economy between 1914 and 1917 to the Bolshevik nationalization of 1918–­ 1921, concluding with the “normalization” of the property rights regime in the 1920s. The experience of other belligerent powers will serve as a counterpoint for comparative analysis, which demonstrates that the success of mobilization in Britain and France was to a certain extent prepared by the preceding development of forces and ideas that also led to the growth of the “public domain.” A spirit of collectivity and a firm idea of the “public good” as superior to private interests, both of which had deep roots in the political rhetoric of prewar liberalism, helped these governments concentrate resources under their control. German corporatist ideology also contributed to a relatively successful economic mobilization, but the political mobilization failed, as Richard Bessel has put it, “in a most damaging manner.”2 Russia’s performance was closer to the experience of Germany than that of Britain or France. In Russia, as we have seen, the idea of the “public good” enjoyed a great deal of support. However, the same factors that precluded the formation of public property in Russia—­the distrust between state and society, the lack of consensus on the issue of what the public good was, and the weakness of state power—­prevented the concept of the public good from successfully mobilizing society during the war. Thus, as the development of property rights in prewar imperial Russia helps explain the failures of mobilization in 1914–­1917, so the experience of the war opens a window onto Soviet nationalization.3

Mission Unaccomplished: War, Mobilization, and the Nationalization of Resources in Russia What may strike the reader of numerous works published in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the World War I is a strange feeling of nostalgia—­not for the horrors, pain, and misfortune of wartime, but for the unique experience of spontaneous civic unification and mobilization for a common cause. E.M.H. Lloyd, who served in the British War Office and the Ministry of Food, wrote about the paradox of war, which “evokes some of the finest qualities of human nature,” such as patriotism and self-­sacrifice. Lloyd felt that World War I was unique in this way: “For the first time in history, the world began to have a vision of what human association, raised to its highest degree, might accomplish.” “Corporate feeling and collective responsibility” triumphed over individualism, and this transition amounted to a “moral revolution” and a tremendous change in social relations.4 Everyone interpreted the past war in his or her own way: socialists celebrated the war as “a wonderful example of collective action” that had launched the march toward socialism;5 left neo-­liberals valued the experience of nationalization as “a triumph of common sense and practical work over doctrinaire Individualism.”6 Economists and managers from the state apparatus remembered the unique experience of collaboration

272  | Epilogue between business and the government, and the emergence of new models and innovative techniques of administrative mobilization and management.7 Despite these differences in the accounts of war events in France and Britain, one common theme prevailed: amazement at how such impressive mobilization and voluntary subjugation to the totalitarian governance of the state became possible in countries that had been known for their commitment to the values of civil liberties, property, and free trade. German experience of mobilization and planning, by contrast, resulted in a “spectacular failure” just because planners overestimated the willingness of people and the capacity of the system to sustain the pressure, pushing society “beyond the realm of the possible”8 and destroying the crucial balance between coercion and consent.9 Nevertheless, the German experience of economic planning, as George Yaney has put it, “continued to astound the world until the war ended,” and even after the debacle, it inspired many “imitators.”10 Of course, this fascination with the miracles of mobilization evaporated very quickly—­as quickly as the state returned to a size if not identical then close to the prewar standards. The aspirations of those who saw the war as a unique opportunity to get rid of the vices of individualized capitalism went much further than the governments could afford and were able to accomplish.11 Many historians even criticized the “slowness of the government in appreciating the need for large-­scale state intervention and co-­ordination when fighting a total war.”12 Still, it is hard to deny that the state increased sensationally—­in some countries more than in others, but as the common feature of all governments in the belligerent states. It replaced the market, limited civil freedoms and the rights of property, and assumed new functions of public services and social control. It grew numerically13 and transformed structurally. These transformations temporarily reshuffled the structure of property rights: many things that had been private before the war became public, while publicly owned resources fell under the most rigorous control of the state: first, these measures concerned the production and distribution of fuel and grain. War collectivism, the rationalization of state apparatus, and the provisional renunciation of the values of free trade and individualism would hardly have been thinkable if the ideas of state control, social justice, public good, and anti-­ individualist sentiments had not made such progress in the decades preceding the war. Moreover, the advancement of the neo-­liberal doctrine with its ideas of a bigger state, social responsibility, and public domain was important for securing the basic principles of capitalist order in the state of crisis. In prewar Russia, as the preceding chapters have shown, the idea of the “public good” made spectacular progress, and the evolution of liberalism to its more socially oriented version closely resembled European trends. However, the link between the evolution of public opinion and the development of the state was missing. The problem of mutual distrust became especially acute when the war broke out. Russia conspicuously failed to build a “strong” state: society did not trust the

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state enough to give up its meager rights and freedoms, nor did the government allow public organizations to lead the process of mobilization.14 At this point, the two stories of war mobilization and the creation of the public domain meet: the mobilization, as well as the building of the public domain, required a mature society to be able to unite around a common cause and collaborate, as well as a state capable of guiding these common efforts. While the first condition was already present to some extent in Russia, the second was tragically missing. Thus, in Russia, the development of the ideology of the “public good” did not result in the emergence of “war collectivism” (“doctrineless” collectivism, as R. H. Tawney called it15) and the unification of the state’s efforts with those of society. This does not suggest, of course, that Russian society did not perceive national defense as the common cause. In fact, patriotism and civic nationalism added new value to the idea of public goods and “national” treasures—­natural, cultural, and historical. The war intensified the campaign for the preservation of national riches. After the beginning of the war, Russian historians, archaeologists, and preservationists departed to various areas of military operations with the goal of protecting historical monuments on both Russian and non-­Russian territories (Constantinople, Armenia, Bukovina, Galicia, among others).16 Scientists plunged into the exploration of natural resources, attempting to resolve within a few months the persistent problem of revealing, mapping, and describing Russia’s hidden reserves—­the “white coal” of Russian rivers, the electric power of wind, forest resources, natural gases, chemicals, ores, and so on.17 The scientists’ efforts at “mobililizing” nature’s hidden forces could not, of course, immediately compensate for the shortage of resources, which, as we know, was rather of institutional and political origin. The energy of Russian rivers remained unused due to the inability of industrialists and the state to negotiate with private owners; as a result, industrial centers depended completely on the imported coal, whereas the coal from Donets Basin could not reach the areas of industrial production because of underdeveloped means of transportation via railways and canals. The inefficient system of property rights in regard to mineral deposits also precluded the development of fuel production. The fuel deficit was already palpable on the eve of the war; when the war broke out, the Petrograd region was left virtually without energy due to the blockade of the Baltic Sea, which cut Petrograd off from its British suppliers. The loss of the Dombrowa Basin exacerbated the crisis. In 1915, the deficit forced the government to address the fuel hunger head-­on: in September, the Special Council for Fuel proposed the introduction of a state monopoly over the coal trade, a logical and indispensable measure in these conditions. The representatives of mine owners and coal producers, however, opposed this proposal, as well as the similar suggestion to develop state production and monopolize the sale of oil. The industrialists perceived the increase of the economic power of the imperial state as an increase of its political power, and refused to cooperate.18 Unable to nationalize scarce resources, the Russian government relied extensively on ad

274  | Epilogue hoc requisitions,19 a practice used by other Great Powers only as “the threat, the potential sanction, which gave teeth to the rest of the government’s program of restrictions.”20 In Russia, as the economist Semen Zagorsky observed, large-­scale requisitions of coal “were applied to such an extent and with such absence of system, that they threw the market into still greater disorganization,”21 which encouraged delinquency among coal producers.22 In fact, these requisitions undermined the security of private property more than the projected nationalization. Only after the February Revolution did the Provisional Government enforce the decision to monopolize the fuel trade and regulate the access to privately held coal mines. The government’s policy rested on the premise that in a state of crisis, “private initiative and private property remained secured, but they must surrender to the common interest.”23 Not surprisingly, the government’s measures echoed the ideas of property reform that had circulated in governmental and expert circles during the last decade before the war. “To avoid the catastrophe that can occur due to the unlimited arbitrariness of private owners,” said the government’s memorandum, the government offered to declare the production of coal, anthracite, iron ore, and other minerals in designated regions as “having state importance,” with the consequence that the owners of all mines were obliged to renew their leasing agreement with producers or to conclude new agreements with those contractors who offered the highest rates of production rather than the best conditions of lease.24 In other words, for the sake of the war economy landowners were at last forced to yield to state control. In July 1917, the government finally announced the nationalization of coal: the “nationalization” in this context assumed that the state, represented by a special administrative institution, became the only consumer of all products delivered from manufacturers and distributed these products according to its needs. An important quality of nationalized resources was their “depersonalization” (obezlichenie)25—­that is, the application of general rules and fixed prices notwithstanding the origin (who was the supplier) and even the quality of the product.26 The Provisional Government’s attempt to nationalize the distribution of fuel largely failed, mostly due to the lack of administrative resources. As Boris Sokolov described the situation, “Departmental staff members [of the Department of State Monopoly of the Sale of Donets Fuel], who had no previous business experience,” were suddenly confronted with a problem that appeared to them unsolvable: “they had to arrange for the distribution of fuel produced by over 1,000 collieries and dispatched from 131 stations among 3,000 consumers who received their fuel at more than 2,000 railway depots.”27 During the three months of state monopoly, the government had to rely on previously established commercial connections between producers and consumers, which it lacked the ability to alter. As for the oil monopoly, it never came into effect.

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We lack clear evidence from governmental records, but the famous economist Petr Migulin, usually well-­informed about the current issues of economic policy, mentioned in 1915 that the government had raised the question of initiating a state monopoly on forests.28 During the war, different agencies attempted to nationalize water, as well. In 1914 and 1915, the Ministry of Trade and Industry considered a draft law on electric energy production that was based on the principle of “state monopoly on the transmission and distribution of electric energy” and reserved the state’s right to expropriate property for the needs of energy production.29 In April 1916, the Ministry of Agriculture published a manifesto “On the Issue of White Coal,” asserting that “All waters, no matter on whose lands they are situated, are subjected to the supreme power of the state that establishes the general principles of water economy in the country.”30 The ministry did not have enough time to conduct this initiative. After the fall of the monarchy in May 1917, the Provisional Government asserted the state’s “supreme” right to dispose of the sources of waterpower regardless of who owned the surrounding land.31 It even tried to renew the program of developing hydropower production, but did not have the time and resources to accomplish this endeavor. These measures and others limiting free trade and private property found little support among industrialists. The Provisional Government inspired no more trust than its predecessor: the industrialists criticized the government for its dependency upon the Soviets of workers’ deputies and socialists, and (quite fairly) argued that the government had no resources to implement the policy of control that it had promised. Paradoxically, before and after the revolution in February 1917, Russian industrialists lamented over the burden of “bureaucratic socialism” and asked that business be freed from state interference, while at the same time complaining about the weakness of state power.32 In theory, the government’s opponents believed in strong state intervention, state control, as well as the introduction of state monopolies, but argued that such measures would make sense only in the presence of a “strong state.” The calls for “establishing strong state power” and “restoring the [state] mechanism of enforcement”33 became ubiquitous in the rhetoric of industrialists and liberal politicians. The experience of other belligerent countries inspired optimism in the ability of the state control to handle the problems of war economy. Yet few believed these successes could be applied in Russia. Despite general striving for a “strong state,” it remained unclear where the locus of power should be found. The issue of agency came up to the forefront again: who would wield state power and distribute nationalized resources? Consensus about the limitation of property rights and the extent of other sacrifices is possible only when the legitimacy of government is not in question: the Provisional Government, acting without a Constitution, did not have the luxury of uncontested legitimacy. Instead, in Russia “the weakening state’s vastly

276  | Epilogue increased role”34 proved to be destabilizing. The success of British mobilization has generally been attributed to the state’s skillful and organized interference, while the failure of the German government to mobilize the population has been associated with the “enormous antipathy to state control”35 which turned out to be counterproductive: this antinomy suggests that the state’s interference could be efficient only if the government enjoyed the confidence of its citizens. In Russia, the split between society and government, as Alexander Krivoshein famously put it, between “we and they,” ensured that the state’s efforts were a failure. The Russian government did not have enough “strength”—­that is, administrative resources and legitimacy—­either to nationalize resources or to stop the plunder and to ensure the protection of private property. The government’s policy of treating the private property of its own subjects during the war was said to rest on the firm principles of martial law: the “public good” of national defense justified the requisition and sequestration of industrial enterprises. Representatives of the Union of Cities and the Military-­Industrial Committee wanted the government to count seized property as part of the national debt, and provide guarantees for compensation. Although few of those claims were satisfied in the end, the regime of seizure for military needs more or less accorded with existing Russian civil laws. The same could not be said about the seizure of land, and the sequestration and confiscation (without compensation) of industrial enterprises owned by enemy subjects and even Russian subjects of German origin. The author of an article in The New Times (Novoe vremia), who called himself “Old Lawyer,” pointed out that it would be impossible to find legal justification for the compulsory alienation of the property of enemy aliens; such a measure could be explained only by political reasons.36 After the beginning of the war, the property of foreigners became a target for unpredictable and largely uncontrolled attacks. At first reluctant to seize the property of enemy-­subjects, the government nevertheless followed the public mood, agitated by the press and competitors longing to take over rival businesses.37 As a result, industrial enterprises held or run by foreigners and even Russian subjects of German origin, which often constituted the pillars of entire branches of industry (for instance, electric power production), were seized. Similarly, the government forced Germans to sell or abandon their landholdings. Although the Provisional Government banned the expropriation of lands owned or populated by German settlers (peasants and colonists), it notoriously failed to stop the nationalization of foreign-­owned land. This failure suggested a continuity between the politics of property before and after October 1917: Boris Nolde observed that, “The Bolshevik coup d’état resulted in the extension of the policy of expropriation to all land, irrespective of the nationality of the owner, by means of the revolutionary seizure of the land by the peasants.”38 The campaign against enemy aliens, thoroughly researched by Eric Lohr and Ivan Sobolev, undeniably struck down the ideology of “inalienable” ownership. In addition,

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the war exacerbated the question of nationality and citizenship as the conditions of ownership.39 It was but a short step from taking the property of subjects of a different nationality to seizing the property of a “class” enemy. In this sense, the campaign against “German dominance” paved the way for the plunder of property between 1917 and 1921, as the wartime policy of nationalizing natural resources and lands on occupied territories anticipated further steps to this end taken by the Bolshevik government.40

The “People’s” Property of the Soviet State The idea of nationalization acquired tremendous popularity in Europe during the war. However, as one of the most ardent proponents of this reform, the minister of the British war government Sir Leo Chiozza Money, wrote in 1920, nationalization took many forms.41 The nationalization of resources in the belligerent countries assumed that the state “displaced the market.” However, as Stephen Broadberry has pointed out, it did not necessarily displace business.42 The Provisional Government had similar intentions: to monopolize (provisionally) the distribution of scarce products, without denying the property rights of producers or replacing them. The Bolsheviks’ nationalization, by contrast, signified the lifting of the state’s guarantees of private property, opening the way to the uncontrolled takeover of enterprises by workers and the seizure of land.43 In fact, using the word “nationalization” in regard to the plunder of property in 1917–­1918 is a misnomer: the “state,” or, rather, a crowd of officials and institutions that claimed to represent new authority, participated in boundless expropriation of properties—­movable and immovable. In the absence of other legitimate owners (private property was outlawed), the state de facto became the single possible owner, the main producer of goods, and finally replaced by itself the remnants of what used to be a market. As Lenin put it a few years later, the state became the only capitalist in the country.44 This “nationalization” was spontaneous, unplanned, and uncontrolled. Before the revolution, Russian socialists’ concepts of property demonstrated a remarkable lack of consensus and plan: their suggestions ranged from the total annihilation of property to the “nationalization” of resources—­that is, their appropriation by the state, or “étatization.” The idea of state property advanced by social democrats as a provisional measure was not very appealing, recalling in form the property of the treasury of the imperial state (even the Provisional Government initially tried to abandon this term: declaring the “nationalization” of the crown’s lands, the government used the term “state” [gosudarstvennaia] to describe their new status, indicating in parentheses that it assumed “national” [natsionalnaia)] property45). Socialist-­revolutionaries pointed out the unflattering parallel many times, and although Lenin asserted that the property of the democratic state would be fundamentally different from that of

278  | Epilogue the imperial state, the socialist-­revolutionaries insisted on the full socialization of resources—­that is, the elimination of any kind of ownership of land, either private or state. They also warned that state property was associated with the existence of a “huge bureaucratic apparatus.” Lenin responded to these objections with promises to create new democratic institutions that would replace bureaucracy.46 However, as Thomas Rigby has pointed out, “equipping itself with an effective bureaucracy was in fact the main preoccupation of the Soviet state during its initial phase.”47 In Victor Chernov’s interpretation of the socialist-­revolutionaries’ project, land was to become “the patrimony of the entire people” (obshchenarodnoe do­ stoianie).48 Paradoxically, this idea very much resembled the liberal concept of res publicae. The revolutionary Chernov, like his liberal counterparts, strove to invent a new kind of relationship between the individual and the collective, an alternative to both private and state ownership, which attempted to protect the legal capacities of every citizen from the overwhelming power of the state by embedding them into a new juridical entity, the “all-­people” (obshche-­narod).49 Both the “public property” of liberals and the “all-­people patrimony” of the party of socialists-­revolutionaries appeared as forms of governing public things (land, forests, and other natural resources), rather than ownership. The main similarity between Chernov’s vision of the future order and the quest of liberal lawyers to reform property rights was in the intention to transform the property system and make it essentially different, while the project of nationalization—­ that is, its takeover by the new “proletarian” state—assumed only a change of owner. However, Chernov’s attempts to distance the idea of socialization from the vocabulary of civil law proved unsuccessful. When put into practice, the “socialization” of land was virtually indiscernible from “nationalization.” How can “the people” express and realize its will without the state, asked Alexei Peshekhonov, a socialist of another stripe (his critique recalled the prerevolutionary arguments against “public property”—­there could be no “public” outside the imperial “state). “To say that the power over land must belong to the people is, in essence, to say that it must belong to the state,” wrote Peshekhonov, calling for greater trust in the state.50 The question of state and property proved to be the trickiest: Lenin used the terms “public” (obshchestvennaia), “common” (obshchaia), and “state” (gosudarstvennaia) property interchangeably. Behind this vague rhetoric, there was a vision of the state owning lands and other resources, with peasants holding the rights of “possession”51 and workers enjoying the fruits of common labor in accordance to their needs. Lenin’s rationale for the state ownership of resources was both political and economic. Politically, as Marxist theory suggested, proletarians would use the state as a weapon of class struggle against the owners of the means of production. However, in State and Revolution, Lenin argued that state ownership of the means of production was not only more socially fair, but also more economically effective. The old state proved to be unable to untangle

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the knot of agrarian relations in the countryside, and nationalization by the state appeared to be the only feasible solution, and that, in turn, required the state’s social and political transformation. Thus, the socialist revolution was not only about justice; it was about the state’s efficiency. In this sense, Lenin’s vision of the revolution resembled the claims of liberals, who on the eve of February 1917 unanimously criticized the weakening imperial government’s inability to handle the crisis. Lenin continued the same line, framing his critique of the Provisional Government’s weakness in “class” terms, and blaming it for the inability to do what other belligerent countries had undertaken—­to unite industrial forces under the state’s leadership and control.52 Lenin’s condemnation of anarchists and anarcho-­syndicalists as bourgeois ideologues also assumed that socialist revolution—­“the most authoritarian thing imaginable”53—­brought about the remaking of the state. The nationalization of the means of production was supposed to legitimize the new state’s power. As George Armstrong has pointed out, Lenin “did not consider état-­ization to be the highest form of public ownership, foreseeing that the state would wither away and that the concept of ownership would become obsolete in the higher phase of Communism.” However, Lenin asserted the “unquestionable necessity of a state organization in the transition period,” assuming a preference for nationalization over other forms of collective property.54 The existence of a strong state was vital to its success: for the sake of the state’s efficiency, Lenin insisted on the preservation of the old state apparatus, which performed “an enormous amount of accounting and registration work.”55 The state was supposed to expand and grow, encompassing already existing structures and acquiring new resources.56 The socialist-­revolutionaries’ concept of the “all-­people’s property,” undeniably attractive to the peasant masses, but theoretically weak and utterly unpragmatic, did not fit this vision of socialist state and economy. The Bolshevik government used the rhetoric of “common land” as the basis for the Land Decree issued a few hours after the coup of October 25, 1917, but soon abandoned it in favor of the more robust nationalization, or, using more precise vocabulary, the “statization” or “governmentalization” of land, natural resources,57 historical monuments, art, and public spaces. Unlike the “nationalization” of public things projected before the revolution and advanced by liberal experts seeking the preservation of public domain, which allowed (and required) the existence of private property and, more importantly, assumed the nonpossessive attitude of the state to the nation’s domain, the Bolsheviks’ “nationalization” was supposed to result in the overall seizure of wealth by state agencies.58 However, in 1917–­1918, when most of the “nationalization” decrees appeared, there was no “nation” or “state” in a proper sense; multiple agencies acted on its behalf seizing, expropriating, or “nationalizing” properties. It was an ongoing process that had begun with the outbreak of the war—­the eradication of law and authority, dissolution of property, and expansion of plunder. The nationalization,

280  | Epilogue as William Rosenberg has observed, was to a certain extent inevitable and unavoidable, although rhetorically the Bolsheviks “converted what was difficult or impossible to avert into an extremist virtue.”59 The discrepancies between different visions of nationalization and the actual policies of dispossession explain why many people who supported nationalization before 1917 found themselves in opposition to the regime after it.60 As we know, foresters were among the most faithful supporters of nationalization before the revolution. As Brian Bonhomme points out, in the spring of 1917, “as the collapse of the tsarist regime opened the possibility of sweeping forestry reform, talk was indeed of little else but outright nationalization.”61 The First Congress of Foresters, which took place in April and May 1917, called for the recognition of forests as “state property” (gosudarstvennym dostoianiem), although doubts remained about what form this designation should take—­“state” or “national” (gosudarstvennaia or natsionalnaia).62 The October Revolution resolved this controversy in favor of the state. It might have seemed at first that the prerevolutionary development toward public ownership of natural resources would ensure a smooth transition to the new regime of state property. In 1918, Nikolai Faleev (mentioned earlier as an author of a 1912 textbook for foresters) became the chief of the Forest Department and the principal author of the Bolsheviks’ first forest decree.63 He wrote about the nationalization of forests as the completion of a “natural process in the development of the forest economy.”64 As for the foresters themselves, they did not demonstrate a unanimously positive attitude to the new power; some of them, like Georgii Morozov, the editor of the Forestry Review in 1905–­1918, found themselves in opposition, while others continued their careers in the Soviet Bureau of Forestry, working to combat the threat of deforestation produced by the abolition of private property. Stephen Brain’s study of the revolutionary period in the development of forestry demonstrates that the new model, save for a few similarities with the principles of forestry reform elaborated before 1917, assumed a much more centralized and bureaucratized order of forest management. The “étatism” of prerevolutionary foresters emanated from their faith in the necessity of long-­ term regulation and planning, to which private ownership, with its short-­term outlook, simply did not fit. However, they also believed that forests constituted an important part of the local bio-­community, a vision that assumed significant autonomy for local governmental structures in management. Scientifically, the reformist vision of forestry emphasized sustainability and organic regeneration rather than industrial reproduction. Most importantly, the new order placed expert knowledge at the top of the hierarchy of principles regulating the use of forests. In other words, expert visions of nationalization entailed the management of forests by experts on behalf of the nation and with state support.65 The Soviet model of state forestry management diverged from these expert aspirations. Amidst profound post-­war chaos, centralism seemed to be the only

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approach capable of preventing the destruction of forests. However, struggling to contain the uncontrolled exploitation of common resources by the locals, the government allowed significant autonomy to its bureaucratic structures, with the result that various “people’s commissariats,” each representing the state, competed for the ownership of forests. State ownership of resources proved to be a very abstract model for practical implementation—­a façade that concealed the claims of multiple administrative agencies.66 The role of experts, contrary to their intentions, was reduced to passive consultation: the community of experts in forestry that had formed under tsarist Russia and sustained the turbulent period of 1917–­1918 was eventually dismantled, while the state subjected expert activity to its strict control.67 Brian Bonhomme, who, unlike Stephen Brain, emphasizes continuity rather than rupture in the development of forestry from the late imperial period to the early 1920s, nevertheless considers the “fateful subordination of specialists to politicians” to be the major shift that occurred after October 1917.68 As the previous chapters of this book have shown, experts had been the main proponents of the liberal vision of public domain; their subordination suggested that this type of model would not be viable in the Soviet state. There is no doubt though that the Bolsheviks’ nationalization paved the way for the realization of many ideas that could not have come to pass before the revolution. Lifting the constraints of private property was especially important for the development of hydroelectric power production. In June 1917, the Provisional Government tried to reanimate the project of building a hydroelectric station on the Volkhov River near Petrograd. In 1918, the Bolsheviks picked up this idea and announced the beginning of the construction (in fact, it began in 1921) under the leadership of engineer Genrich Graftio, who had previously participated in the elaboration of Volkhov projects in 1902–­1903, 1909–­1911, and 1914.69 In 1918, the government approved the construction of the hydroelectric station on the Svir River (also planned before the revolution), and in 1921, Soviet engineers started planning a hydroelectric station on the Dnepr River. Its construction began in 1927, almost thirty years after Russian engineers drafted their first projects to dam this river.70 Despite the apparent uniformity of the processes of nationalization in different spheres, these multiple stories cannot be reduced to one streamlined narrative. Some of the earlier intellectual movements and initiatives unexpectedly received full governmental support, and experts in those fields or subfields enjoyed the state’s abundant attention. For instance, the idea of the “monuments of nature,” which was advanced before the revolution but went unheard by the tsarist government, received enthusiastic endorsement by Lenin and was finally embodied in Soviet “nature reserves” and the law on conservation (1921). The prerevolutionary movement of ecologists, as Douglas Weiner has shown, grew rapidly, both organizationally and intellectually, during the early years of Soviet rule before yielding to a more utilitarian and nature-­conquering ideology

282  | Epilogue under Stalin.71 The state was forced to invest in preservation and conservation by the chaos of war, social unrest, and the massive and unrestrained plunder caused by the elimination of private ownership, which threatened to devastate the resources of the young state. The Soviet state needed expert support to resolve the multiple problems of governing public things. The all-­encompassing Soviet state resembled a gigantic, monstrous warehouse:72 due to the expropriation, the new state property grew to such enormity that its actual size and scope was largely unknown.73 As Lenin wrote in May 1918, “only a blind person would not see that we have nationalized, confiscated, broken and destroyed more than we had time to count.” At that point, Lenin distinguished between “nationalization” as the process of taking over property, and social appropriation (obobshchestvlenie—­that is, making things common) that assumed the ability to count and distribute.74 The lack of information on forests, monuments, subterranean riches, and rivers, as we have seen, often worked against the deprivatization of public resources before 1917: the imperial government refused to own objects whose limits and value were impossible to define.75 The Bolshevik government was free from these prejudices, declaring that all things had to be a priori nationalized with measurement to follow, not precede, nationalization. However, the problem of management inevitably emerged, and the government with the help of experts had to design new ways of measuring and governing common things. The problem with revealing and registering the state’s new possessions was especially urgent in regard to historical and artistic monuments, the properties of nationalized imperial palaces (now turned into museums), private mansions, country estates of Russian aristocrats, and private art collections. In Petrograd, during the first three years of nationalization (1918–­1921), 302 private art collections were taken from their owners and put under the protection of the proletarian state. To reveal artistic treasures that could have been sold or stolen during the turbulent years, the members of the new commissions on the preservation of monuments regularly inspected auctions, antique shops, and warehouses: their findings constituted a significant part of the 144,000 “objects of art” nationalized in Petrograd and then transferred to various museums.76 In Moscow, the requisitions from 348 private collections and other sources composed 110,000 “monuments.” State institutions could hardly manage the task of getting to know the full content of its new acquisitions and often relied on the former owners and the “old” experts for help. For instance, the government entrusted private collectors to describe, preserve, and manage their former galleries and collections, which now constituted the property of the state. The “stars” of the imperial world of art collection—­Ilya Ostroukhov, Alexei Morozov, and Dmitrii Shchukin—­got to enjoy this new and unusual role as state employees responsible for the preservation of collections that once belonged to them.77 The prohibition against exporting artistic and historical monuments, unthinkable in imperial Russia due to the state’s

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commitment to the principle of private property, complemented laws on the nationalization of artistic treasures. The “old experts’ ” collaboration with the new authorities helped save what was now “the people’s” property from destruction. Igor Grabar’, Alexander Benois, Pavel Muratov, Vasilii Vereshchagin, Georgii Lukomskii, Petr Porkyshkin, and many other activists of the prerevolutionary movement for the preservation of art and historical monuments now worked in new institutions. The creation of the hierarchy of administrative instances responsible for the preservation of historical monuments led by the central Department of Museums and the Preservation of Monuments (founded in 1918, staffed with old experts, but led by Natalya Trotskaia) realized the old idea of prerevolutionary preservationists, who had long before argued for the nationwide regulation of preservation activity. The nationalization, apart from all the difficulties and dangers that it entailed, also opened new horizons for research. Longing to gain access to ecclesiastical treasures, in 1918 artists rushed to start “cleaning” the murals of the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow, hoping to reveal Andrei Rublev’s frescoes. Next in line were the murals of the Dormition and Arkhangel Cathedrals in the Kremlin.78 Sometimes, professional curiosity and the urge to study what had been forbidden and hidden by the Church for decades outweighed the needs of more rational and appropriate conservation and preservation.79 However, the first few years of Soviet rule are still remembered as a period of the greatest discoveries, especially in iconography.80 But even the exploration of the “depths and basements” of imperial palaces brought to light exceptional findings that otherwise would have perished in obscurity due to the poor administration of imperial riches. Perhaps excessively enthusiastic, Georgii Lukomskii observed that the value of these findings outweighed the losses caused by the revolution.81 Lukomskii, the worshipper of “Imperial St. Petersburg,” valued the opportunity to work in the new museums, housed in the former apartments of the family of the last emperor. The preservationists of “imperial art” employed methods very similar to those used in the restoration of medieval monuments: they strove to reconstruct the “original” appearance of “Peter’s Peterhof ” or “Catherinian Tsarskoe Selo,” removing “extra layers” of tasteless and vulgar décor left by the last occupants of the residences.82 The assessment of early Soviet restoration activity is a very controversial issue;83 however, what stands out in this analysis of early Soviet restoration and preservation is the surge of activity and almost unlimited power of experts restrained only by available funding. Until the early 1920s, the mutually advantageous relationship between Soviet authorities and the expert community of art historians and archaeologists was almost unclouded, up until the financial interests of the government, which initially considered historical monuments and art treasures as both cultural and material assets,84 began to outweigh all other concerns. The beginning of industrialization was marked by an unprecedented selling of art to museums abroad.85 In the 1930s, some of the Old

284  | Epilogue Regime experts—­Petr Neradovskii, Alexander Anisimov, Nikolai Likhachev, and their contemporaries—­were accused of different sorts of anti-­Soviet deeds and plots and found themselves either in exile or in camps.86 In literature, much like in historical preservation, the contours of the “nationalized” domain in general coincided with the classical canon of prerevolutionary literary and musical criticism. Two months after the revolution, the government proclaimed the creation of the State Publishing House (Gos­ izdat),87 invested with the authority of selecting, editing, and publishing the texts of Russian classics—­Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and so on. In February 1918, the People’s Commissariat on Enlightenment announced a list of writers “monopolized” by Gosizdat: violation of this monopoly would be prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal.88 In 1919, the government nationalized all the documents and papers of Russian writers, composers, scientists, and artists that had been preserved in libraries and archives.89 In November 1918, a government decree approved Soviet Russia’s first law on authorial rights, which began with the declaration that “any published or unpublished scientific, literary, musical or artistic work . . . may be declared . . . the property of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.” Living authors whose works became state property could receive a special allowance set according to wage rates, stipulated by the same law: thus, the status of “nationalized” writers was identical to that of other Soviet officials. In accordance with the law on the elimination of inheritance, the law of copyright annihilated posthumous copyright—­relatives were supposed to receive allowance in the amount of a “living wage” and only in cases where the dead writer’s family could demonstrate “need.” The law of 1918 did not eliminate authorial rights entirely: those authors whose writings did not fit the standards of classical or revolutionary literature could still make their living from the publication of their works (on the basis of agreements with publishers) and receive royalties from theaters via professional unions of writers and composers.90 Therefore, the Soviet government’s concern was similar to the concerns of the prerevolutionary supporters of the public domain: the availability of Russian classics. Soviet lawyers defended the necessity of nationalization with the same arguments as their predecessors: the price of editions and the difficulties associated with editorial work.91 (Indeed, editorial practice set exceptionally high standards; after the Formalist school of literary studies was forced to disband, its members found refuge in textology, producing first-­rate editions of classical Russian literature.92) The “nationalization” of literary works was thought to be the greatest honor for an author:93 the fact that someone’s name appeared on the list of nationalized authors, signed by Vladimir Lenin himself, later served as a sign of the highest recognition.94 The side effect of the elimination of private literary property was the monopolization by the state (Vladimir Chertkov tried to persuade officials to observe Tolstoy’s will, which made his works open to republication):95 state monopoly replaced the monopoly of publishers. The government reserved the

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right to publish private papers and those works “not intended” for publication by writers themselves.96 However, the “moral power” of the Russian state over literature went much further: Russian classics were subjected to Soviet censorship, which turned out to be no less intrusive than the tsarist one.97 A proto-­Soviet Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were created: they had to appear politically “progressive” and morally decent. Hence, the full text of Pushkin’s blasphemous Gavriiliad was published for the first time in Russia, but his obscene poetry was censored no less severely than under the tsarist regime. In refusing to observe conventions on literary property, the Soviet government displayed its preference for public enlightenment over the protection of authors’ rights and respect for international commitments. Soviet authors, like their predecessors in imperial Russia, lost the right to oversee translations of their own works: this right allegedly contradicted the policy of enhancing the development of literary cultures in the multinational Soviet state.98 Some arguments explaining this attitude to the right of translation were taken directly (with references) from prerevolutionary manifestos against international conventions (for instance, the report of the St. Petersburg Literary Society). Once again, Lermontov, rather than his more prolific fellow-­poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, served as the example of the benefits of free translation.99 What was gone was the resentment that had constituted the ideological grounds for the campaign against the Berne convention: now Russian literature was said to occupy a “prominent place” in the world. Modestly admitting Russia’s need in technical and scientific areas, Soviet lawyers nevertheless emphasized that the “material interests of foreign authors” were “contemptible” in comparison with the benefit of “being disseminated and used for the enlightenment of the entire population of a great country.”100 This brief overview of the results of nationalization demonstrates how the appropriation of “public things” by the state changed the content of the public domain that now was to be subjected to ideological selection (as useful and compatible with socialist doctrine, or not useful and inappropriate). It also shows that despite some parallels between prerevolutionary concepts of property rights reforms advanced by a liberal segment of the professional community on one hand and the socialist ideas on the other, the actual nationalization, while offering a few opportunities for professional development, curtailed the political aspiration of the professional elite. In the imagined liberal order, where public property was run by a handful of expert organizations, the experts represented the “public” (or the nation), while the role of the state apparatus was merely technical and utilitarian. In the Soviet state, the experts were put in a position that obliged them to represent the state, to register, count, and study “public things” for state needs. Many of those who understood the technical role of “accountants” for the state101 eventually refused to cooperate with the government.

286  | Epilogue What may also strike the reader in the analysis of the nationalization of resources and cultural assets, which legitimized the seizure of power and the creation of the proletarian state, is how unprepared the state was to take on the task of managing this huge domain. The Bolshevik state inherited the remnants of the bureaucratic machine of the old empire, which was weakened by the war, unlike the states of her allies, France and Britain, which had grown stronger and more firmly established. Yet this new Soviet state was to take upon itself an even bigger task. In fact, managing “people’s property” became its main mission, the life goal of the Soviet state. It is natural that the Soviet government did not re-­create the Ministry of State Domains of the tsarist empire:102 the whole economy, the whole market and culture formed the state property, and every clerk, official, and expert employed by the state institution had to participate in managing this tremendous household. In 1921, the government announced the end of the nationalization campaign, releasing some resources for private appropriation. This temporal withdrawal attested to the doubts in the ability of the existing state machine to handle the task successfully.

Res Publica in the Soviet State? In 1927, in the Eastern Siberian city Irkutsk, the Soviet lawyer Nikolai Karadzhe-­Iskrov published a thorough analysis of various theories of res publica in a monograph titled “The Public Things.”103 At precisely the same time, Georgii Guins, the author of the Turkestan water law, a former member of the Kolchak Siberian government (1917–­1920), and at that moment a professor of law in the Russian exile haven, Harbin, wrote his “The Rights to the Things of Public Use.”104 Both authors developed a theory of public property, the first as applied to the socialist order, the latter as applied to a post-­liberal social order under the name of a “solidary state.” Both authors drew inspiration from the same European trends in social sciences and law. While Guins’s return to theorizing public property was not surprising, Karadzhe-­Iskrov’s attempt to chart the progression of a socialist public is more unusual. The suspension of nationalization in 1921, the legitimization of private property during the New Economic Policy (NEP),105 and the loosening of ideological and political control seemed to open the floor to discussions on the nature of property, both private and state. In the 1920s, Soviet lawyers returned to the model of “public property” as a foundation for the new order. They did not question the primacy of state property in the Soviet model or the impossibility of private ownership of land. Instead, they applied the theoretical stances of European and prerevolutionary Russian thinkers to the Soviet model. Echoing European concepts of property as a right loaded with social commitments and responsibilities, Soviet lawyers tried to assert a new

Epilogue  |  287

understanding of ownership rights in the Soviet polity, presenting a new vision of state property as “public property”—­t he Soviet res publica. The transformation of the agrarian order under the NEP gave reason to proclaim that the Soviet state had departed from the possessive character of the state domain. Statistics show that 96 percent of all arable lands were distributed among land users and only the remaining 4 percent of land literally constituted the state’s domain106 (in a sense equivalent to the imperial treasury’s property).107 Lawyers interpreted this distribution between “public” and “private” property as proof of the proletarian state’s “social mission” and an attributive feature of “state” property.108 The lawyer Dmitrii Rosenblum109 accentuated its distinctiveness by claiming that the term “state property” as used in the Civil Code (the word “state” was used as an adjective—­gosudarstvennaia) was not equivalent to the “state’s property” because the Soviet state does not possess, but rather manages resources for the public good.110 What mattered was not who held property rights, but how this property was governed. “State property” appeared as a paramount principle, encompassing various forms of land use and possession as long as they satisfied the criteria of the socialist economy. This “public” interpretation of state property also allowed the resolution of the most debated issue in the 1920s: the distribution of possessive rights between the Soviet Union and the republics, as well as the compliance of “state property” with the principle of self-­determination of nationalities. If “state property” was not equal to ownership, it did not, in fact, matter whether the Union or the republics held and disposed of the land.111 Summing up the characteristics of state property in the Soviet Union, Nikolai Karadzhe-­Iskrov came to the conclusion that Soviet state property was equivalent to “public things” in “bourgeois” law.112 The avoidance of the term “public” in Soviet legislation was “awkward,” especially due to the lack of a strict definition of “state property” in Soviet law and theory, wrote Karadzhe-­Iskrov.113 A number of works dedicated to the discussion of the nature of state property written by distinguished representatives of the old and new schools of legal studies, however, represented no more than a marginal, if curious, product of the short renaissance in Soviet jurisprudence under the NEP. The idea of public property as a paramount regime encompassing various forms of ownership was utterly incompatible with the concept of the planned economy and the corresponding notion of the absolute, indivisible, and inviolable state domain. In 1928, when the NEP was over, the trend in civil and public law that developed this “public” concept of property was condemned as a schism, inspired by the works of Western “legal socialists,” bourgeois sociologists, and lawyers.114 Thus, the brief revival of the res publica in legal theory appears as a vignette in the story of largely unsuccessful attempts to create public domain in an imperial and then Soviet state. Despite the promise to abolish the state as soon as socialism triumphed, the Soviet state persisted and acquired strength. Soviet propaganda and

288  | Epilogue juris­prudence made great efforts to cover up the difference between the “people’s” property and “state” property, proclaiming the latter as the most natural form of ownership under socialism. “State socialist property” was meant to be synonymous with the “people’s patrimony.”115 Unlike other kinds of property (cooperative, personal, and private), the existence of which was eventually acknowledged by Soviet law, state property was exempted from the authority of civil legislation: a citizen could not bring a civil action against the state to dispute, for instance, the seizure of his or her belongings. Moreover, in the case of a property dispute, the decision was, by default, favorable to the state, thanks to the principle of the “presumption of state property” introduced by the Supreme Court.116 State property was inalienable and immune to legal claims of any sort. “The right of state socialist property is not limited by the law because it is up to the Soviet authority itself to cancel any legal or contractual limitation,” wrote the dean of Soviet jurisprudence, Petr Stuchka.117 Even the imperial government did not claim such absolute indemnity. Indeed, Soviet state property was supposed to be the most absolute kind of property that had ever existed in the world, the “sole and despotic dominion” of the socialist state. Against this backdrop, it is unnecessary to prove that the Soviet system of property rights was exactly opposite to the idea of property reform described in this book. Both concepts denied a social system based on “possessive individualism.” However, there were many ways to think about the alternatives to private property; the idea of “public domain” was just one among them, and it differed from the anti-­individualism of socialists and the policies of dispossession and “étatization” in Soviet Russia. Russian proponents of public property in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century wanted the state to be efficient and strong and, at the same time, to cede its possessive claims. Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s metaphor, the liberals wanted the state to serve as the director of the orchestra, showing everyone to their place and ensuring collaboration from a common score, but at the same time making no claim to represent the totality of the orchestra or in any way possess it.118 True, some assumptions about the regimes of dealing with public things were carried over into Soviet times, while the imperial professional elite entered the ranks of Soviet experts; however, their ideas were not enacted by the state in the ways that liberal intellectuals wanted. It would be also senseless to assert that nationalization was a consequence of Russian liberals’ weak commitments to the ideals of private property and freedom. Contrary to widespread opinion, Russian intellectuals were property-­minded, but in contemplating its reform, these intellectuals sought to circumscribe private property by public commitments and social responsibilities, and leave the space for the domain owned by the public—­the new subject in property law. As outlined in the previous chapters, the rise of this vision of property originated from multiple sources: the emergence of a professional elite, the rise of nationalism, and the conceptualization of new values indispensable to its

Epilogue  |  289

development, such as the national environment, economy, heritage, and literature. The new vision of property also reflected deep concerns over the moral issues of individualism and altruism, freedom and civic duties, and the primacy of religion, knowledge, and education. Even the tension between authorial creativity and reliance on tradition, the privacy of authors, and the power of the market found expression in the rhetoric of possession. Therefore, the politics of property reform extended beyond the competition for power over resources among elites; it included active attempts to shape public opinion and impose new “values” through the dissemination of new knowledge and concepts. The study of these new ideologies of property reveals tensions and paradoxes in Russian fin-­de-­siècle thought and politics that would otherwise remain invisible. Does true liberalism demand the inviolable autonomy of every member in society? Can real freedom be achieved within such an individualized assembly of people? Perhaps the ideal of liberty could be better met by strengthening sociability, so as to oblige all people to respect each other’s freedoms and rights. Were personal freedom and the inviolability of private property public goods in themselves or should they rather defer to the superior “public good”? What is the “public good” (if it exists at all), and who defines it? The debates on property in imperial Russia revolved around these and other fundamental issues of liberal ideology. Property mirrored both the existing and the imagined order of social relations and cultural norms. Gabriel Tarde very aptly used this metaphor of property to give his definition of human society: “What is society? . . . [It is] the mutual possession, in different forms, of the whole by everyone.”119 The juxtaposition of the “whole” and its individual parts was, indeed, at the core of thinking about property in modern times. The Russian project of the reform of property represented perhaps the most explicit and at the same time idealistic attempt at balancing public goods and private interests—­an attempt to build a res publica in the imperial state.

Notes

Introduction  Res Publica in the Imperial State 1. Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, p. 15. 2. On this transformation, see, for instance, Oliver MacDonagh’s interpretative essay “The Nineteenth-­century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (1958), pp. 52–­67. On the different modifications of fin-­de-­ siècle “new” (“social”) European liberalism and liberals’ commitment to social reform, see, for example, Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State, Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002; William Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Socialism, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983; James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–­1920, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 3. Gerd Hardach, “Industrial Mobilization in 1914–­1918: Production, Planning, and Ideology,” in The French Home Front, 1914–­1918, edited by Patrick Fridenson, Providence, RI: Berg, 1992, pp. 57–­83. 4. Historians of Russian political thought and intellectual culture often use the term “progressive” to designate this trend, which, certainly, substantially differed from classical liberalism. See, for instance, Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia, Basingstoke, UK/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 (Wagner writes about the “progressive lawyers”); Peter Holquist, “Dilemmas of a Progressive Administrator: Baron Boris Nolde,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 241–­73. 5. As the authors of a recent collection of essays on the development of land property in Europe assert, the misleading paradigm of The Property conceals the “plurality of rights” in land (Contexts of Property in Europe: The Social Embeddedness of Property Rights in Land in Historical Perspective, edited by Rosa Congost and Rui Santos, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010, p. 20). Economists and social historians have combated the cherished myth of classical economics that British industrialization was launched by the privatization of land and have proved that the

292  |  Notes to Introduction  open-­field system (which preceded the privatization of land by enclosure) had its own rationality—­different from the “private property” rationality. (See Carl Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). E. P. Thompson has added a moral ingredient into the criticism of enclosures that appeared as both irrational and unjust (E. P. Thompson, “Custom, Law and Common Right,” Customs in Common, London: Merlin Press, 1991, pp. 97–­184). David Howell has shown how the establishment of property rights in land used by Japanese fishermen eased the process of tax collection while at the same time enhancing the impoverishment and proletarization of those who did not gain from the distribution of previously communal lands (David Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery, Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1995, pp. 93–­118). Historians of colonialism came to identify the reforms of property rights and the replacement of indigenous customs by a rigid model of private ownership with other threats of authoritarian (although, perhaps, enlightened) rule in the colonies (Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996; Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, among other works on this subject). Recent studies into the development of property in the East adhere to this criticism by separating the notions of Eurocentric modernity and private property, and asserting that other forms of nonexclusive and not-­absolute ownership represented the modern alternative to the Western concept (Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, edited by Huri Islamoglu, London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004). Historians of European and American political and legal thought have shifted their attention from the concept of individualism, the market-­based vision of society with “property-­as-­commodity” as its important ingredient, to the idea of public good, and the republican vision of society with “property-­as-­ propriety” at its core. Even the classics of Scottish political economy have been scrutinized to reveal their humanistic visions and the notions of virtue compatible with the free-­market economy (Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-­state in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005; Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The works of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and Carol Rose has offered a theoretical foundation to historical analysis: they refuted the myth about the “Tragedy of Commons” and showed how commons and public things could and should be governed (see, among other works, Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Carol Rose, “The Comedy of Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 53, no. 3 (Summer 1986), pp. 711–­781). 6. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. A notable exception in Russian historiography, Judith Pallot’s work on Petr Stolypin’s reform analyzes the “administrative utopia” of imposing private property in the Russian

Notes to Introduction    |  293 countryside. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–­1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 7. See, for instance, Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 8. Carol M. Rose, “Property as the Keystone Right?,” Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 77 (1996), pp. 329–­369. 9. Robert W. Gordon, “Paradoxical Property,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, edited by John Brewer and Susan Staves, London/New York: Routledge, 1995. 10. Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 11. Martina Winkler, “Eigentum, Heiliges Recht! Seele der Gesellschaft! Adel, Eigentum, und Autocratie in Russland um 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Jenseits der Zarenmacht: Dimensionen des Politischen im Russischen Reich 1800–­1917, edited by Walter Sperling, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008, pp. 71–­97. 12. Dmitrii Timofeev, “Poniatie ‘Sobstvennost’ v Rossii pervoi chetverti XIX veka: opyt rekonstruktsii smyslov,” Rossiiskaia Istoria, vol. 1 (2009), pp. 165–­180. 13. Richard Wortman, “Property, Populism, and Political Culture,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, edited by Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 13–­32. 14. Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–­1861, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002; Lee A. Farrow, Between Clan and Crown: The Struggle to Define Noble Property Rights in Imperial Russia, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004; William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 15. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2003. 16. See the critique of extrapolating European problems on Russian soil in Laura Engelstein’s influential essay “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 13–­32. 17. Laura Engelstein writing about Michel Foucault’s “modalities of power” in the modern world, and Russia’s “combined underdevelopment” that poorly fit Foucault’s model, points out that “the Russian example represents the superimposition of the three models of power chronologically separated . . . in Foucault’s scheme: the so-­called juridical monarchy, the Polizeistaat, and the modern disciplinary regime” (ibid., p. 19). Likewise, we can say that the reformist agenda of Russian liberals encompassed the overlapping goals of combating the remnants of absolutism, the tyranny of Polizeistaat, while at the same time imposing their liberal (and disciplining) vision of society. 18. For the attempts to define the essence of Russian liberalism, see, for example, Marc Raeff, “Some Reflections on Russian Liberalism,” Russian Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (July 1959), pp. 218–­230; Charles E. Timberlake, “Introduction: the Concept of Liberalism in Russia,” in Essays on Russian Liberalism, edited by Charles Timberlake, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972, pp. 1–­17; Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 19. Heide W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-­ reform in Late Imperial Russia, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982.

294  |  Notes to Introduction  20. On the “technocratic” ethos in Russian bureaucracy on the eve on the revolutions, and the technocrats’ view of property, see Peter Holquist, “ ‘In accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 151–­179. 21. George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–­1930, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 22. On the role of the “professional thinkers” in shaping the new liberalism in Britain, see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, p. 3; on the professional networks of French “social liberals,” see Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State, pp. 126–­140. 23. Ilya Gerasimov has characterized this activity of Russian intellectuals of social reformism as “apolitical politics,” a phenomenon contemporaneous and kindred to Transatlantic Progressivism analyzed in Daniel Rogers’s Atlantic Crossings. Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia, Rural Professionals and Self-­Organization, 1905–­1930, Basingstoke, UK/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 18; Daniel T. Rodgers. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Era, Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. On “liberal academic thought” in Russia, see also David Wartenweiler, Civil Society and Academic Debate in Russia, 1905–­1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 24. Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–­1930, Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2008, p. 5. 25. Ibid., p. 7. 26. See, for instance: Paolo Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property: Collective Property in the Juridical Consciousness of the Nineteenth Century, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. 1977; Les propriétés collectives face aux attacques liberales. (1750–­1914). Europe occidentale et Amérique latine, edited by Marie-­Danielle Demélas and Nadine Vivier, Rennes: Press Universitaire de Rennes, 2003. 27. Harold Perkin has pointed out that the development of professional services ultimately resulted in the changes in the visions of property. Harold Perkin, Professionalism, Property and English Society since 1880, Reading, UK: University of Reading, 1981. 28. See Yanni Kotsonis, “ ‘No Place to Go’: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 76 (Summer 2004), p. 531–­577. 29. Quoted from Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France, de 1789 à nos jours, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990, p. 97. 30. Ibid., p. 87. Symptomatically, the idea of replacing the centralized government with a network of state agencies for the administration of public services appeared utterly nonpolitical to Duguit, and thus outside the realm of parliamentary reforms. 31. Pavel Miliukov, “Sub’ektivnoe i sotsiologicheskoe obosnovanie svobody pechati,” V zashitu slova: Sbornik statei, St. Petersburg: Tip. N. N. Klobukova, 1905. 32. In ethical, religious, and political senses and in different philosophical interpretations —­Nietzschean, Stirnerian, and anarchist. Bogdan Kistiakovskii, “V zashchitu prava,” in Vekhi. Intelligentsia v Rossii. Sborniki statei 1909–­1910, Moscow: Molodaia

Notes to Introduction    |  295 gvardia, 1991, p. 115. For a slightly different interpretation of Kistiakovskii’s vision, see Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment,” p. 19. 33. Raffaella Faggionato describes an intrinsically similar conception of freedom without individualism “recovered” by Russian Rosicrucians in the late eighteenth century—­a conception “very different from the individualistic version of Western secular culture.” Interestingly, she paralleled this eighteenth-­century vision with Nikolai Berdyaev’s definition of freedom: “Freedom in not individualism. . . . Freedom is not closing yourself; freedom in unfastening yourself and creativity; it is opening the way to the universe within me.” Raffaella Faggionato, A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-­century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2005, p. 154. 34. It suffices to mention that the emergence of this anti-­individualism coincided with the revival of idealism in Russian philosophy exemplified by the publication of the famous collection of essays “The Problems of Idealism” (1902). Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy, translated, edited, and introduced by Randall A. Poole, foreword by Caryl Emerson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. 35. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism, p. 23. See also the similar interpretation of Russian liberalism in Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia, p. 18. 36. This idea has been presented most explicitly in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. 37. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, 20th anniv. ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 38. Michael Freeden has pointed out the ethical concerns of the “new liberals” and their renewed attempts to reestablish the connection between ethics and politics. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism, p. 15. 39. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 376. 40. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–­1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation, ch. 2. 41. Yanni Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 12, no. 1 (2011), pp. 25–­52. As Yanni Kotsonis observes, the bureaucrats at Stolypin’s government aimed to construct a new model of “private property without individual autonomy or the right of free disposition” (p. 29). 42. Jonathan Parry, Maurice Bloch, “Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, edited by J. Parry and M. Bloch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 26–­27. I am thankful to Sergei Oushakine for the reference to this work. On this trend in economic anthropology, see also C. M. Hann, “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Property,” in Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, edited by C. M. Hann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 32–­34. 43. Emile Durkheim described how different things acquire their status as the objects of property: “It is public opinion in every society that makes some objects regarded

296  |  Notes to Chapter 1  as liable to appropriation and others not: it is not their physical nature as natural science might define it, but the form their images take in the public mind. A certain thing which yesterday could not be appropriated, may be so today and vice versa.” Emile Durkheim, “The Nature and Origins of the Right of Property,” in Durkheim and the Law, edited by Steven Lukes and Andrew T. Scull, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 159. 44. Theodore Steinberg has described how renaming things (he writes about natural objects—­rivers, lakes) affects their property status. See “Identity Crisis in Bayou Country,” in Theodore Steinberg, Slide Mountain, or The Folly of Owning Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 52–­81. 45. Carol Rose, “The Comedy of Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property.” 46. Ibid., p. 781. 47. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-­de-­siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Vintage Books, 1981, p. xxvi.

Chapter 1  The Meanings of Property 1. “Mnenie Mordvinova o Embenskikh rybnykh lovliakh,” Arkhiv grafov Mor­ dvinovykh, vol. 3, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Skorohodovykh, 1902, p. 215. On Mordvinov, see Basil Dmytryshyn, “Admiral Nikolai S. Mordvinov: Russia’s Forgotten Liberal,” Russian Review, vol. 30, no. 1 (January 1971), pp. 54–­63; Susan P. McCaffray, “What Should Russia Be? Patriotism and Political Economy in the Thought of N. S. Mordvinov,” Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2000), pp. 572–­596; Helma Repczuk, “Nicholas Mordvinov (1754–­1845): Russia’s Would-­be Reformer,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1962. 2. Compare “In vain may it be urged, that the good of the individual ought to yield to that of the community. . . . Besides, the public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual’s private rights, as modelled by the municipal law,” William Blackstone, “The Rights of Persons,” in Commentaries on the Laws of England, in 4 volumes, Clark, NJ: Law Book Exchange, 2007, vol. 1, pp. 134–­135. 3. “Mnenie Mordvinova o Embenskikh rybnykh lovliakh,” pp. 216–­218. 4. Mordvinov’s belief in the power of private property went so far that he even opposed the deprivatization of fishing on the Caspian Sea. Echoing Adam Smith’s idea about the right of property that turns empty deserts in gardens, Mordvinov insisted on prohibiting private monopoly and the privatization of small estates on the seashore. At this point, the government went against Mordvinov’s recommendation and retained sea waters for public use. See PSZI, vol. XXVII, August 27, 1802, no. 20388. 5. [Alexander I. Herzen], Istoricheskii sbornik volnoi russkoi tipografii v Londone, vol. 2, London: Trubner and Co., 1861, pp. 159–­167. 6. Until his appointment as head of the State Council’s Department of Economy in 1810. 7. Esther Kingston-­Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 66–­67.

Notes to Chapter 1    |  297 8. On the “introduction” of private property to Russia, see Richard Pipes, “Private Property Comes to Russia: The Reign of Catherine II,” in Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk, edited by Zvi Gitelman et al., Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University/Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 431–­442. 9. The word sobstvennost’ had indeed appeared in the Russian language before Catherine the Great. For instance, the Treaty of Peace between the Russian Empire and Sweden (1721) stipulated that the King of Sweden “yield” the lands conquered by Russia to the “absolute, inviolable, eternal possession and the property”(v sover­ shennoe neprekoslovnoe vechnoe vladenie i sobstvennost’) of the Russian tsar. Ukazy blazhennyia i vechnodostoinyia pamiati Gosudaria Imperatora Petra Velikogo samoderzhtsa vserossiiskogo sostoiavshiesia c 1714 po konchinu Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademia Nauk, 1739, p. 333. 10. Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998, p. 100. 11. PSZI, vol. XVIII, July 30, 1767, no. 12950. 12. On Montesquieu’s influence, see Petr Trubetskoi, Ob otchuzhdenii sovstvennosti dlia blaga obschestvennogo po frantsuzskomu zakonodatelstvu, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Departamenta Udelov, 1864, p. 6. 13. The term itself had been used before, but it designated a specific object of possession, a thing, or a characteristic of a certain thing. 14. See, for instance, the systematization of laws by Russia’s first legal theorist, Semen Desnitskii. Desnitskii classified property as a “right.” Semen Desnitskii, “Slovo o priamom i blizhaishem sposobe k naucheniu iurisprudentsii,” in Russkaia filosofiia sobstvennosti XVIII–­XX vv, edited by Konstantin Isupov and I. Savkin, St. Petersburg: “Ganza,” 1993, p. 17. 15. Ekaterina II, Izbrannoe, edited by Galina O. Babkova, Moscow: “Rosspen,” 2010, p. 332. (I am grateful to Galina Babkova for the reference to this memorandum.) 16. As Tom Bethell asserts, in the English-­speaking world, the term “private property” appeared in the nineteenth century—­at the same time Russian lawyers and economists introduced a similar expression. Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph, p. 99. 17. See more on the practical meaning of Catherine’s ideas on property as expressed in the works of the Legislative Commission and its subcommission “On Property” in Oleg A. Omelchenko, Zakonnaiia monarkhiia, Moscow: Iurist, 1993, pp. 178–­179. 18. Oleg Omelchenko, Zakonnaia monarkhiia, p. 213. 19. PSZI, vol. XXI, June 28, 1782, no. 15447. 20. PSZI, vol. IV, November 2, 1700, no. 1815. The law on the establishment of the College of Mines (Berg kollegiia) then further enlarged and affirmed the “freedom to mine.” PSZI, vol. V, December 10, 1719, no. 3464. 21. See also Susan McCaffray, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874–­1914, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996, p. 10. 22. PSZI, vol. XXVII, October 7, 1803, no. 20968. 23. Nikolai N. Ogloblin, “Sysknye dela o kladakh v XVII v.,” Chteniia v istoricheskom obshchestve Nestora Letopistsa, 1893, bk. VII, pp. 117–­154. 24. PSZI, vol. VII, November 15, 1723, no. 4367, art. 3. 25. Russia was the only country in Europe that reserved full ownership of treasure

298  |  Notes to Chapter 1  troves (that is, “iron chests” with money) for the landowners, while other legislations suggested sharing them between the finder and the owner (and sometimes the state, as well). On European legislation, see George Hill, Treasure Trove in Law And Practice from the Earliest Time to the Present Day, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. 26. PSZI, vol. XXVII, October 7, 1803, no. 2096. 27. Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, poveleniem Gosudaria Nikolaia Pavlovicha so­ stavlennyi. Zakony Grazhdanskiie i Mezhevyie, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vtorogo otdeleniia S.E.I.V.K., 1842, vol. X, art. 430. 28. RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d. 8834, l. 148ob.–­149. 29. Istoricheskaia zapiska o sudokhodnykh i splavnykh rekakh po russkomu zakonoda­ telstvu, [b.m., 188?], p. 16. Considering waterways (as well as mineral resources) the state’s property, Peter confiscated all private fisheries and then leased them out to their former owners. Helma Repczuk, Nicholas Mordvinov (1754–­1845): Russia’s Would-­be Reformer, p. 108. 30. Enessa G. Istomina, Vodnye puti Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII–­nachale XIX veka, Moscow: “Nauka,” 1982, p. 34. The Instruction for the General Measurement (1766) ordered that 10 sazhen (21 meter)–­wide towpaths be cut along the banks of navigable rivers, and that rule, although rarely observed, provoked resistance. (Zhurnal Vysochaishe uzhrezhdennoi komissii dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh zakonov o bechevnikakh i o poriadke obiavlienia rek sudokhodnymi i splavnymi, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshchenia, 1878, p. 12.) The government continued its policy of enforcing the right of navigation and responded to numerous complaints from merchants with a series of decrees prohibiting extortion by private landowners and local authorities on rivers, but these measures did little to help. 31. Brian Bonhomme credits Peter the Great for the use of the most advanced practice of woodcutting based on the calculation of the rate of wood’s growth. Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917–­1929, Boulder: East European Monographs, 2005, p. 16. On Peter’s forest legislation, see also A. E. Probst, “Lesnaia i toplivnaia politika Petra I,” in Voprosy ekonomiki, planirovania i statistiki. Sbornik statei, Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1957, pp. 235–­257. 32. PSZI, vol. XXI, September 22, 1782, no. 15518. 33. “O merakh po okhraneniu chastnykh lesov” (around 1887), RGIA, f. 387, op. 28, d. 1916, l. 121. 34. Johann Justi, one of the most popular cameralists in Europe and in Russia, unambiguously pointed out that luxury was the main enemy of the forest: luxury contributes to the economic development of the country when it concerns industrial products, but when it comes to natural resources that constitute a “life necessity,” luxury may cause “great loss to the people’s wealth.” (Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, Osnovanie sily i blagosostoianiia tsarstv, ili podrobnoe nachertanie vsekh znanii, kasaiushchikhsia do gosudarstvennogo blagochiniia, 1st ed., translated by Ivan Bogaevskii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1772. p. 146). Petr Rychkov expressed a similar thought in his essay “On the Preservation and Reproduction of Forests” (1767) criticizing the excessive use of timber for domestic needs: “middling nobles build and maintain houses so spacious that even boiars and

Notes to Chapter 1    |  299 the most distinguished people had nothing like them before.” P[etr] R[ychkov], “O sberezhenii i razmnozhenii lesov,” Trudy Volnogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva, ch. 4, St. Petersburg, 1767, p. 86. 35. The materials of the Land Survey, when compared to later statistics, demonstrate a fairly stable rate of woodcutting before and after the reform. Mikhail Tsvetkov calculated the rate of deforestation in Russia from 1696 until 1914. According to Tsvetkov, from 1796 to 1861 the area of woodland decreased from 44.76 percent to 42.27 percent, with the rate not exceeding the preceding period. To compare: during the following twenty years, from 1868 to 1887, the area shrank from 42.33 percent to 37.38 percent. In the decades following Catherine’s laws on property, the area of woodlands cleared annually for agricultural purposes was even less than it had been earlier. It is hard to say whether the numbers for the eighteenth century are correct because Tsvetkov had to compensate for the lack of information with extrapolations. However, the curve of deforestation clearly demonstrates that the most detrimental influence on forests was the emancipation of the peasants in 1861, not Catherine’s reforms. Mikhail A. Tsvetskov, Izmenenie lesistosti Evropeiskoi Rossii s kontsa 17 stoletia po 1914 god, Moscow: Izdatelstvo AN SSSR, 1957. 36. PSZI, vol. IX, July 5, 1734, no. 6600; Fedor S. Nikolskii, Vody obshchego polzovaniia po russkomu zakonodatelstvu, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva Putei Soobshcheniia, 1883, pp. 13–­14. In 1734, 1741, 1743, and 1748, the government issued repeated prohibitions to hinder the passage of ships, but the rules were rarely observed. 37. Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–­ 1804, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 38. Robert E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–­1785, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 34. 39. Most noble landowners benefited from Catherine’s initiative. Unlike previous efforts under Empresses Anne and Elizabeth that ultimately led to the state taking back lands illegally seized by nobles, Catherine let the nobles keep their lands and allowed the boundaries of their estates to be fixed on the basis of actual possession—­ that is, assuming the land in question was not under dispute. The net result of this approach was that the state ended up sanctioning the transfer to the nobles of millions of desiatina of land (one desiatina equals approximately 2.75 acres). (Milov estimates the amount of lands surrendered by the state to be as high as 50 million desiatinas. Leonid V. Milov, Issledovanie ob “Ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh” k Generalnomu mezhevaniu, Moscow: Izd-­vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1965, p. 18.) The General Measurement also allowed the government to collect valuable information about landholding and the state of the rural economy. The materials of the “Economic appendixes” were not, however, in great demand among the bureaucracy; only historians made significant use of them. On the role of the General Land Survey and further practices of measuring and cadastre mapping of land, see Igor A. Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy. Russkoe krestianstvo v pravitelstvennoi politike do i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830–­1890-­e gg.), Moksva: Sobranie, 2011, pp. 42–­48, 58–­71; Alexei E. Kerimov, Dokuda topor i sokha khodili. Ocherki po istorii zemelnogo i lesnogo kadastra v Rossii XVI—­nachala XX vv, Moscow: Nauka, 2007.

300  |  Notes to Chapter 1  40. I. Gershman, “Ocherk istorii lesovladeniia, lesnoi sobstvennosti i lesnoi politiki v Rossii,” LZh, no. 3 (1911), p. 495. 41. Ibid., p. 503. 42. Petr Kokh, “Kratkie zamechaniia o nachale i uspekhe lesnogo upravleniia v Rossii,” Trudy Volnogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva, vol. XI, St. Petersburg, 1809, p. 30, quoted from Isaak G. Beilin, Ocherki po istorii lesnykh obshchestv dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, Moscow: Goslesbumizdat, 1962, p. 11. 43. A. Bulmering, “Ukazaniia dlia opredelenia tsennosti lesov Evropeiskoi Rosii po deistvitelnoi ikh stoimosti,” LZh, no. 20 (1840), pp. 157–­158, quoted from Isaak G. Beilin, Ocherki po istorii lesnykh obshchestv dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 12. 44. “Physiocracy and Propertied Individualism,” in Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 285. 45. Ibid., p. 284. 46. Ibid., p. 288. 47. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-­State in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 82. Marc Raeff in his influential analysis of the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century ideologies of the police state in Germany and Russia opposed the “communal,” anti-­individualistic and pro-­state concepts of “social rights” that emerged in seventeenth-­century cameralism (and later influenced social legislation in continental Europe), to the possessive individualism of England. (Raeff refers to a detailed and comprehensive study of the emergence of the “social idea” in seventeenth-­to eighteenth-­century Europe: Georges Gurvitch, L’idée du droit social. Notion et système du droit social. Histoire doctrinale depuis 17 sciècle jusqu’a fin de 19 siècle, Paris: Librairie de Recueil Sirey, 1932.) See Marc Raeff, “The Well-­Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­ Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,” American Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 5 (1975), pp. 1221–­1243. It seems, however, that the divide between individualist and communal (or social-­minded) visions did not run along national borders. 48. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition: From Reformation to 1871, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 183. 49. Ibid., pp. 93–­94. Eighteenth-­century historical accounts of the development of property, as Jedediah Purdy reminds us, also nested it firmly in the development of society, interpreting property as the thread connecting people rather than separating them. Jedediah Purdy, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 38–­39. 50. Jerry Z. Muller, “Justus Möser and the Conservative Critique of Early Modern Capitalism,” Central European History, vol. 23. nos. 2–­3 (June to September 1990), pp. 153–­178. 51. Susan P. McCaffray, “What Should Russia Be? Patriotism and Political Economy in the Thought of N. S. Mordvinov,” Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2000), pp. 572–­596.

Notes to Chapter 1    |  301 52. Marc Raeff, “The Empress and the Vinerian Professor: Catherine II’s Projects of Government Reforms and Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n. s., vol. VII, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 18–­41. 53. Richard Pipes, “Private Property Comes to Russia,” p. 432. 54. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, p. 80. 55. Carol M. Rose in her critique of the “modern common-­property-­regime literature,” which suggests a “bottom-­up” trajectory of property rights development starting “from just plain folks,” reminds us about the role of the “enlightened despots” in the affirmation of property regimes in eighteenth-­century Europe (including Russia). The reforms of the enlightened monarchs aimed to increase revenues, not to liberalize economic regime. Rose’s interpretation undermines the traditional libertarian narrative of the emergence of property: in this “top-­domain story, property’s association with liberty is at most accidental.” Carol M. Rose, “Property as the Keystone Right?,” Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 71 (1996), p. 339. 56. “O sobstvennosti. Sobstvennoruchnaia nedatirovannaia zapiska Ekateriny II,” in Ekaterina II. Izbrannoe. 57. On property rights of Russian nobility, see Martina Winkler, “ ‘Eigentum, Heiliges Recht! Seele der Gesellschaft!’ Adel, Eigentum, und Autocratie in Russland um 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert.” 58. The same argument can be found in Richard Pipes, “Private Property comes to Russia.” 59. Quoted from Alexander B. Kamenskii, “Kreshchenaia sobstvennost’ v zakonoda­ telstve XVIII veka,” Predstavleniia o sobstvennosti v rossiiskom obshchestve XV–­ XVIII vv. Problemy sobstvennosti v obshchestvennom soznanii i pravovoi mysli feodalnoi epokhi, Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1998, p. 170. 60. See, for instance, Edward P. Thompson, “Custom, Law and Common Right,” in Customs in Common, London: Merlin Press, 1991, pp. 97–­184. 61. Joshua Getzler, “Roman Ideas of Landownership,” in Land Law: Themes and Perspectives, edited by Susan Bright and John Dewar, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 81–­106. On the “invention” of the concept of absolute and exclusive ownership by nineteenth-­century lawyers, who claimed to derive it from Roman law, see Peter Birks, “The Roman Law Concept of Dominium and the Idea of Absolute Ownership,” in Acta Juridica, 1985, Cape Town: Yuta, 1986, pp. 1–­38. 62. Vasilii Yeliashevich, Istoria prava pozemelnoi sobstvennosti v Rossii, vol. 1, Iuridicheskii stroi pozelemelnykh otnoshenii v 13–­16 vv, Paris: Impr. de Navarre, 1948, p. 383. 63. Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-­century Russia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 84–­85. 64. Yurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, “Mif-­imia-­kultura,” in Boris A. Uspenskii, Izbrannyie trudy, vol. 1, Semiotika istorii, semiotika kultury, Moscow: 1994, p. 30; idem, “ ‘Rol’ dualnykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kultury (do kontza 18 veka),” ibid., p. 235. 65. For the analysis of these terms, see George Weickhardt, “Pre-­Petrine Law of Property,” Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993), pp. 663–­679.

302  |  Notes to Chapter 1  66. The alphabetical index to the First Digest of Laws published in 1830 provides an interesting example of translating power relations into the language of property. Most of the articles given under the word sobstvennost’ described public relations between peasants and their master—­that is, the power of the landowner—­and contained no reference to ownership. However, the compiler of the Digest of Laws considered these articles to describe property relations and categorized them accordingly. See PSZI, “Alfavitnyi ukazatel,” ch. 2, St. Petersburg, 2-­e otdelenie SEIVK, 1830, p. 937, “Sobstvennost’. ” 67. Ivan A. Tretiakov, “Rassuzhdeniia o prichinakh izobiliia i medlitelnogo obogashcheniia gosudarstv kak u drevnikh, tak i u nyneshnikh narodov” (1772), in Russkaia filosofiia sobstvennosti, XVIII–­XX vv., edited by K. Isupov and I. Savkin, St. Petersburg: “SP Ganza,” 1993, pp. 26–­31; Alexei Ia. Polenov, “O krepostnom sostoianii krestian v Rossii”(1776), ibid., pp. 34–­41. 68. Denis I. Fonvizin, “Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennyhk zakonakh” (1780–­1783), ibid., p. 49. 69. Merchants, city dwellers, state peasants, and former serfs released by their masters were granted the right to buy land (with minerals and all other conjoining riches) PSZI, vol. XXVI, December 12, 1801, no. 20075. In 1808, clergy (PSZI, vol. XXVIII, May 14, 1804, no. 21290) and foreigners were also allowed to purchase land (for foreigners, the area was limited to the Crimean provinces [PSZI, vol. XXVIII, March 1, 1804, no. 21192]). 70. Nikolai Mordvinov, “Zapiska o prave priobreteniia zemli,” Arkhiv grafov Mordvi­ novykh, vol. 3, p. 143. 71. Nikolai Mordvinov, “O sile i prostranstve ukaza 12 dekabria,” ibid., p. 187. 72. The idea of the state’s right to take private property for public use appeared in Europe at almost the same time as the modern concept of property. Hugo Grotius invented the term “dominium eminens” to designate the state’s right based on its sovereignty to alienate the property of private owners (1625), and in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries the law of “eminent domain” was gradually established in the legislation of Continental Europe (William McNulty, “Eminent Domain in Continental Europe,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 21, no. 7 [May, 1912], pp. 555–­570). Samuel von Pufendorf, Charles Montesquieu, and Christian Wolf wrote about this aspect of proprietary relations, and the Russian audience was likely familiar with their writings. 73. On the early history of expropriation, see Susan Reynolds, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 74. Henry Berthélemy, Traité de droit administrative (1913), quoted from Jean-­Louis Harouel, “L’expropriation dans l’histoire du droit français,” in L’Expropriation, Deuxième Partie, Moyen Âge et Temps modernes, Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, no. 67, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2000, pp. 39–­77. 75. Yvon Deblicq quoting Nicias-­Gaillard (1855) in “De l’expropriation pour cause d’utilité publique à l’expropriation par zone en Belgique et en France au XIXe siècle,” in L’Expropriation, p. 106. 76. “Po razumu zakonov, pravu zemlevladelcheskomy dolzhny byt’ naznacheny predely, a posemu ono ustupaet tam, gde priblizhaetsia pol’za gosudarstva.” Quoted in

Notes to Chapter 1    |  303 David Fleksor, Deistvuiushchee zakonodatel’stvo po vodnomu pravu. Sistematicheskii sbornik uzakonenii, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1903, p. 423. “Ob otkrytii i naznachenii bechevnikov po rekam v Sankt-­Peterburgskoi gubernii protekaiushchim, po koim proizvoditsia otpravlenie k stolitse lesa, drov, izvesti, kamnia i drugikh pripasov,” PSZI, vol. XXIX, May 28, 1806, no. 22150. 77. Istoricheskaia zapiska o sudokhodnykh i splavnykh rekakh po russkomu zakonodatel’stvu, [b.m., 188?], p. 45. Nevertheless, neither the procedure nor the principles established in this instruction were ever applied in practice: RGIA, F. 1287, op. 7, d. 562, l. 59ob. 78. Arkhiv Gosudarstvennogo Soveta. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet v tsarstvovanie imperatora Alexandra I. Departament Zakonov, vol. IV, ch. 1, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1875, pp. 36–­37. 79. Jean-­ Louis Harouel, “L’expropriation dans l’histoire du droit français,” in L’Expropriation, p. 67. 80. PSZI, vol. XXVII, June 14, 1821, no. 28646. I owe the reference to this case to Dmitrii V.Timofeev. See his “Poniatie ‘Sobstvennost’ ’ v Rossii pervoi chetverti XIX veka: opyt rekonstruktsii smyslov,” Rossiiskaia Istoria, no. 1 (2009), p. 170. 81. Ibid. 82. See also the interesting analysis of Shishkov’s and Nikolai Mordvinov’s opinions in Martina Winkler, “ ‘Eigentum, Heiliges Recht! Seele der Gesellschaft!’ Adel, Eigentum, und Autocratie in Russland um 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” pp. 88–­91. 83. “Mnenie admirala Shishkova o melnitse ponadobivsheisia v kaznu i za kotoruiu vladelets prosit dorogo,” ChOIDR, 1858, bk. 4, p. 134. 84. On the difference between “personal” and “fungible” property, see Margaret Jane Radin, “Property and Personhood,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 34 (1982), pp. 957–­1015. 85. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 328. Möser drew a distinction between “old true” property associated with inheritable ownership, hunt, and the right of representation in the Landtag acquired by virtue of land possession and new property, stripped of these attributes. See Justus Möser, “Von dem echten Eigenthum,” Sämtliche Werke. Neu geordnet und aus dem nachlasse desselben gemehrt durch B.R. Abeken, Berlin: Drittel Theil, Verlag der Nikolaischen Bachhandlung, 1842, pp. 158–­162. 86. Similarly, Adam Müller, another prominent representative of German conservative thought, regarded “possession as extension of the limbs of the human body,” emphasizing the inseparability of person and thing. Karl Mannheim considered the specific, intimate attitude to property as a distinctive feature of the conservative mode of thinking. See Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in From Karl Mannheim, edited with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 162–­163. 87. According to Yanni Kotsonis, Russian bankers advanced similar reasons against the encroachment on their personhood while objecting to the introduction of income tax, which required the thorough investigation of their financial transactions. One banker claimed that his “credit institution is my very self.” Yanni Kotsonis, “ ‘No Place to Go’: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 76 (September 2004), pp. 531–­577.

304  |  Notes to Chapter 1  88. Helma Repczuk, “Nicholas Mordvinov (1754–­1845): Russia’s Would–­be Reformer.” 89. “Mnenie Admirala Mordvinova po sluchaiu preporucheniia Komissii sochineniia zakonov izlozhit’ pravila dlia otobraniia chastnoi sobstvennosti v polzu obshchestvennoi,” ChOIDR, 1858, bk. 4, pp. 137–­138. 90. Iurii Lotman, “The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behaviour as a Historical–­ Psychological Category),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by I. M. Lotman, L. Ia. Ginsburg, and B. A. Uspenskii, edited by A. D. Nahkimovskii and A. S. Nahkimovskii, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 95–­149. 91. Igor A. Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy, p. 48. 92. The first attempts to count and measure state property were made in the early nineteenth century: In 1810, the Ministry of Finances initiated the sale of state property in order to raise money for monetary reform, and many sources of income (meadows, wild-­hive beekeeping farms, shops, and warehouses) were for the first time “discovered” and listed. From this review of state property in 1810, it turned out that the state rented about 4 million desiatinas of land that brought in only 322,147 assignat rubles of income. That year, the Russian state income constituted 125 million rubles, expenditures ran as high as 230 million, and the state owed 577 million rubles to creditors. Iosif S. Bliokh, Finansy Rossii XIX stoletia, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Stasiulevicha, 1882, p. 93. The entire operation of the massive sale of state properties failed, to a great extent due to the deplorable shape of the state domains, and the lack of maps and plans of state lands. Speranskii expected to raise as much as 4.4 million rubles on the sale of property, but the operation brought only one-­fifth of the desired income. Ibid., pp. 100–­101. 93. Cynthia Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth-­century Russia,” Slavic Review, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 77–­98; Lyudmila A. Chernaia, “Ot idei ‘sluzheniia gosudariu’ k ideie ‘sluzheniia otechestvu’ v russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli vtoroi poloviny XVII–­nachala XVIII v,” in Obshchestvennaia mysl. Issledovania i publikatsii, Moscow: Nauka, 1989, pp. 28–­43; Oleg Kharkhordin, “What Is the State? The Russian Concept of Gosudarstvo in the European Context,” History and Theory, vol. 40, no. 2, (May 2001), pp. 219–­222. 94. Catherine the Great in her Nakaz wrote about “the property of the ruler” as it appeared in two different forms: the ruler’s own “lands and things that belong to him as to a certain landowner and a master,” and the “property of the Autocrat, who rules according to the title given by God over all that forms the national treasury.” 95. As the official history of the ministry argued, in Russia, this separation occurred much earlier than in continental monarchies, where rulers had to solicit an allowance from the state budget. Stoletie udelov, 1797–­1897, St. Peterburg: Tipografiia Udelov, 1897, pp. 9, 17. 96. For an overview of these theories, see Lev A. Shalland, Iuridicheskaia priroda territorialnogo verkhovenstva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Trenke i Fiusno, 1903. 97. See, for instance, J.H.H. Justi’s treaty on state governance. One of its chapters, titled “What Are the People [narod], Country [strana], and Immovable Property [nedvi­zhimoe imenie],” told a similar story: “When many private families, having united their wills and forces for the common good, live together, and speak a common language, they are called a people. Every people occupied a certain area of land and consider it their property.” This area is called the country and

Notes to Chapter 1    |  305 constitutes the basis for the formation of the state. “It, the country, inhabited by this people, will always be its common property, although it can be divided in small parts owned by private families; from this evolves property [sobstvennost’] over immovable wealth.” I quoted this excerpt from Justi at length in order to demonstrate that the Russian translator of Justi’s treaty (Ivan Bogaevskii) as early as 1772 could find appropriate language to convey his vision of the emergence of property: the people, not the ruler, were the original owners of the country.— I.H.G. Justi, Osnovanie sily i blagosostoianiia tsarstv, ili podrobnoe nachertanie vsekh znanii, kasaiushchikhsia do gosudarstvennogo blagochiniia, 1st ed., translated by Ivan Bogaevskii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1772, p. 17. 98. On Rousseau’s ideas in Russia, see Alla A. Zlatopolskaia, J. J. Rousseau, Pro et Contra, Moscow: Izdatelstvo Russkoi Khristianskoi Akademii, 2005. 99. Alexander Kunitsyn, “Pravo estestvennoe,” quoted in Russkaia filosofiia sobstvennosti, p. 76. On Kunitsyn’s view of property, see Julia Berest, The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–­1840, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 150–­151, 154. 100. French Code Civil 1804 Art. 538. 101. There are different opinions as to when this separation occurred in theory and legislation. Some authors argued that the compilers of the Napoleonic Code did not intend to separate these things. Nevertheless, this division is already present in the legislation and theory in the 1830–­1840s. See, for instance, Jean-­Baptiste Victor Proudhon’s Traité du domaine public; ou de la distinction des biens considérés principalement par rapport au domaine public, Brussels: Librairie de jurisprudence de H. Tarlier, 1835, vols. 1–­2. 102. Alexei Miller claims that in the early nineteenth century the words narod (“people”) and natsiia (“nation”) were used interchangeably to designate both the political community and ethnicity. Alexei Miller, “Narodnost’ i natsiia v russkom iazyke XIX veka. Podgotovitelnye nabroski k istorii poniatii,” Rossiiskaia Istoriia, no. 1 (2009), p. 152. 103. Yanni Kotsonis, “ ‘No Place to Go’: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 76 (September 2004), pp. 531–­536. 104. Articles 387 and 424 of the Civil Code (Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. X) declared that the “full right to land” presupposed the right to all products of land, its deposits (minerals), and its waterways (rivers, ponds, swamps, lakes, and so on). 105. The negative definition of state property—­everything that does not belong to anyone belongs to the state—­perhaps was a calque of the French article. (Compare: “tous les biens vacans et sans maître . . . appartiennent à la nation.”) Perhaps, at the same time, as Nikolai Faleev argued, this definition also reflected the status of knowledge about the state domain in the early nineteenth century: significant areas of state land, especially on the borderlands, remained unmapped and unexplored (Nikolai Faleev, Lesnoe pravo. Posobie dlia lesnichikh, uchenykh, lesovodov, lesnykh khoziaev, Moscow: Izdatelstvo Sytina, 1912, p. 46). 106. For different theoretical accounts, see Vladimir B. Yeliaschevitch, “K ucheniiu o gosudarstvennykh imuschestvakh v russkom prave (Opyt kommentaria k st. 406 zak. grazhd.)” Pravo, no. 36 (1913), pp. 2047–­2048.

306  |  Notes to Chapter 1  107. Speranskii himself envisioned the state’s property rights as a supreme form of possession (dominium supereminense) based on territorial sovereignty. The state, according to Speranskii, possessed all objects on the country’s territory, including objects in private holding. In his notes to the articles on the “initial acquisition of belongings” Speranskii argued that “the state possesses belongings initially [pervonachalno] on the grounds of its right of supreme possession. Private persons and estates acquire belongings through grants from the supreme power and purchase from the state [Treasury].” (The comment adds self-­made objects of the producers as another source of acquisition.) See his comments on the project of the Civil Code: “The right of ownership of things, when it is conjoined with the sovereign rights [derzhavnoe pravo], droit de souveraineté, forms a special kind of right, called dominium supereminens. Such is the right which belongs to the State to all its things, all lands which it possesses—­the right of supreme possession. This right can be drawn from certain articles of the Fundamental Laws [on governance].” Mikhail Speranskii, “O zakonakh Grazhdanskikh” [On Civil Laws], Arkhiv istoricheskikh i prakticheskikh svedenii izdavaemyi Kalachevym, vol. 2 (1859), p. 11; “Mysli grafa M. M. Speranskogo,” Arkhiv istoricheskikh i prakticheskikh svedenii izdavaemyi Kalachevym, no. 1 (1859), pp. 18–­19. 108. For a similar conclusion, see Boris N. Chicherin, Kurs gosudarstvennoi nauki, vol. 1, Moscow: Kushnerev & Co., 1894, p. 57. 109. “L’État ne possède pas proprietement le domain public; il n’en a que la garde et la police,” Frederic Hubert, De la delimitation du domaine public, Poitiers: Impriméries Blais et Roy, 1901, p. 13. 110. “La propriété comme souveraineté appartiennent à la nation,” Louis Bernard, Droit de propriété de l’ état sur le biens du domaine public, Université D’Aix-­Marseille, 1910, p. 36. 111. As the French Code Civil instructed, the first, according to Butovskii, consisted of the things of common use—­rivers, lakes, seas, forests, city streets, bridges, and squares. The second constituted the sources of state income. Alexander Butovskii, Opyt o narodnom bogatstve ili o nachalakh politicheskoi ekonomii, vol. 3, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vtorogo Otdeleniia SEIVK, 1847, p. 97. 112. Nikolai M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krestiane i reforma P. D. Kiseleva, vol. 2, Moscow/Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk, 1946, pp. 33, 87. 113. Ibid., p. 33. 114. The project was submitted by the minister of finance, Dmitrii Gur’ev. See Obozrenie deiatelnosti MGI po zavedovaniiu gosudarstvennymi kresiatami i iuzhnymi poselianami s 1838 po 1866 god, predstavlennoe Gosudariu Imperatoru v marte 1867 goda ministrom gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Bezobrazova, 1867, p. 10. 115. “Land belongs to the treasury, this is the main condition of the reform [of the living conditions] of 17 million peasants,” wrote Kiselev. Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatelnosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv. 1837–­1887, ch. 2, pt. 2, Pozemelnoe ustroistvo, St. Petersburg, 1888, p. 6. 116. The Code of Laws of 1832 finally presented a fully articulated structure of property rights: it described different kinds of property depending on the subjects of ownership (private owners, state, corporations, and so on) and the character of power (limited or unlimited); it also specified the procedures of acquiring and

Notes to Chapter 1    |  307 transferring property; it stipulated different rights (use, disposal, possession) that, taken together, formed the right of ownership, and offered protection for legitimate users and owners. 117. See the rules for the expropriation of lands in the project for this railroad by Franz Anton von Gerstner, the engineer invited for its construction. “Pravila dlia obra­ shchenia pod zheleznuiu dorogu zemel v kotorykh vstretitsia dlia onoi nadobnost” in F. A. von Gerstner, O vygodakh postroenia zheleznoi dorogi iz St. Peterburga v Tsarskoe selo i Pavlovsk Vysochaishe privilegirovannoi Ego Imperatorskim Veli­chestvom Kompaniei, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1836. 118. Nikolai Faleev, Lesnoe pravo, p. 229. 119. Stephanie Pincetl, “Some Origins of French Environmentalism: An Exploration,” Forest and Conservation History, vol. 37, no. 2 (April 1993), pp. 80–­89. 120. Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heinbron, and Robin E. Rider, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 315–­342. 121. Vasilii T. Sobichevskii, “Komandirovka v tridtsatykh i sorokovykh godakh les­ nichikh v Saksoniiu,” LZh, no. 3 (1903). 122. S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-­Development, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, p. 47. 123. On the phenomenon of “Waldsterben” and the sources of this mythology, see Franz-­Josef Brüggermeier, “The Construction and Deconstruction of Environmental Problem,” in Nature in German History, edited by Christof Mauch, New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, pp. 119–­131. 124. Jane Costlow, “Imaginations of Destruction: The “Forest Question” in Nineteenth-­ century Russian Culture,” Russian Review. vol. 62, no. 1 (January 2003), pp. 91–­118; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-­century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, p. 30. 125. Ludwig Tengoborskii, O proizvoditelnykh silakh Rossii, pt. 1, Moscow: Universitetskaiia tipografiia, 1854, p. 235. 126. Ibid., p. 236. 127. Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seignoralism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750–­ 1830,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 62, no. 4 (December 1990), pp. 675–­708. 128. Archaeology was second—­ after forestry—­ Teploukhov’s passion. Teploukhov founded one of the richest collections of Ural antiquities, later substantially enriched by his son Fedor Teploukhov, a prominent forester, and his grandson, the historian and archaeologist Sergei Teploukhov. The affinity of these two areas of professional and amateur activity is not accidental: as the following chapter demonstrates, the concepts of sustainable forestry and historical preservation of material culture had common origins. 129. Ivan S. Melekhov, Ocherk razvitia nauki o lese v Rossii, Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk, 1957, p. 53. Other scholars (relying on Mikhail Pogodin’s testimonial) suggest that the prototype for Gogol’s Kostanzhoglo was the famous merchant and tax farmer Dmitrii Benardaki. 130. “Mnenie admirala Mordvinova po delu o prodazhe liudei bez zemli,” ChOIDR, no. 2 (1859), pp. 1–­5. Quoted in Dmitrii Timofeev, “Poniatie ‘sobstvennost’ ’ v Rossii

308  |  Notes to Chapter 1  pervoi chetverti XIX veka: opyt rekonstruktsii smyslov,” Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 1 (2009), p. 174. According to Esther Kingston-­Mann, Mordvinov’s contrbution “was to purge the notion of private property rights of any link to peasant freedom,” Esther Kingston-­Mann, In Search of the True West, p. 66. 131. Compare this rhetoric with the pro-­slavery discourse in the Antebellum South. Justifying slavery as a social system grounded on paternal relations between the master and slaves, Antebellum lawyers insisted that slaves should not be considered “fungible property” and chattels. “Slaves were a unique, noncommodified form of property,” and “that property’s central purpose was more than creating personal wealth.” Slaves represented an “anchor of the properly ordered society.” See Gregory Alexander, “Commodifying Humans: Property in the Antebellum Discourse of Slavery,” in Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–­1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 221. 132. Society’s goal was to promote the principles of rational forest management and their spread. It tried to conduct the first survey of private forests (and failed), translated a number of European (mostly German) textbooks on forestry, and published numerous “instructions” for landowners and the works of Russian foresters in the pages of the Forest Review. The activity of the Society for the Encouragement of Forest Economy at many points resembled the attempts of the Russian Free Economic Society to cultivate the rational management of land estates, to attract Russian nobles to rural life and agriculture. See Sergei A. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii doreformennoi Rossii, Moscow: Rosspen, 2002; Colum Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment: The Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-­century Russia, Newark: University of Delaware Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2011. 133. Alexander Kushelev-­Bezborodko, “Rassuzhenia o neobkhodimosti sokharanenia lesov,” LZh, 1833, bk. 1, ch. 1, pp. 51–­52. 134. Fedor S. Nikolskii, Vody obshchego polzovania, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshchenia, 1883, pp. 55–­56. 135. Ibid., p. 60. 136. Nikolai F. Rozhdenstenskii, Osnovaniia gosudarstvennogo blagoustroistva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia N. Grecha, 1840, p. 305. 137. The same argument that connected state property to forests with planning can be found in Ivan Gorlov’s Theory of Finances (1845), in which the author described all the misfortunes associated with the privatization of forests. Ivan Gorlov, Teoriia finansov, 2nd ed., St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Glazunova, 1845, p. 26. 138. Obozrenie deiatelnosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv po zavedovaniiu gosudarstvennymi krestianami i iuzhnymi poselianami s 1838 po 1856 god, predstavlennoe Gosudariu Imperatoru v marte 1867 goda, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Bezobrazova, 1867, p. 24. 139. Izlozhenie glavnykh osnovanii preobrazovaniia upravleniia gosudarstvennymi krestianami i imushchestvami, St. Petersburg, 1838, p. 61; Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatelnosti Ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv. 1837–­1887, ch. 2, otdel 2, Pozemelnoe ustroistvo, St. Petersburg, 1888, p. 6. 140. Ibid., ch. 3, otdel 1, Upravlenie kazennymi zemliami i obrochnymi statiami, p. 15.

Notes to Chapter 2  |  309 141. Ibid., ch. 3, otdel 1, Upravlenie kazennymi zemliami i obrochnymi statiami, p. 10. On the issue of mapping, registering, and describing land (for tax purposes) in the 1830s–­1840s, see Igor Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy, pp. 58–­71. 142. Fedor K.Arnold, “K istorii russkogo gosudarstvennogo lesnogo upravlenia. Vospominaniia iz davno proshedshego,” LZh, no. 9 (1883), p. 461. 143. Petr Zhudra, “Vospominania o lesnom institute kadeta predposlednego vypuska,” LZh, no. 4 (1888), p. 635. 144. According to Fedor Arnold, from 1838 to 1851, they numbered 480 to 356. Fedor K. Arnold, “K istorii russkogo gosudarstvennogo lesnogo upravlenia,” LZh, no. 12 (1883), p. 642. 145. On forest cadastral mapping in the 1840s, see Alexei E. Karimov, Dokuda topor i sokha khodili, Ocherki istorii zemelnogo i lesnogo kadastra v Rossii XV–­nachala XX vekov, Moscow: “Nauka,” 2007, pp. 130–­143. 146. Timofei Nekhroshev, “Lesnoe delo pri A. V. Krivosheine,” LZh, no. 5 (1916), p. 24 and after.

Chapter 2 Forests, Minerals, and the Controversy over Property in Post-­ Emancipation Russia 1. Alexei E. Karimov, Dokuda sokha i topor khodili, p. 218; Igor A. Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy, p. 54. 2. Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–­1861, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 2–­3. 3. Mikhail D. Dolbilov, “Zemelnaia sobstvennost’ i osvobozhdenie krestian,” in Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii: istoria i sovremennost’,” edited by Dmitrii F. Aiatskov, Moscow: Rosspen, 2002, p. 113. 4. Ibid., pp. 112–­113, 115, 119, 150. 5. Alexander Skrebitskii, Krestianskoe delo v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra II. Materialy dlia istorii osvobozhdeniia krestian, Bonn: Tipografiia Krugera, 1862, vol. 2, pp. 145–­146. 6. Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, Zemskii Otdel, “O vospreshchenii krestianam otchuzhdat’ predostavlennye im v nadel zemli,” RGIA, Library. Pechatnaia zapiska no. 936 (May 1884), pp. 50–­51. 7. This law de facto represented another expropriation, since peasant lands, using Michael McKeon’s expression, lost the “quintessential mark of private property”—­ its “unconditional alienability: to own something is to be able to disown it.” Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity. Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, p. 16. 8. On the role of state regulation, see Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, New York: Norton, 1981. 9. I. Gershman, “Ocherk istorii lesovladeniia,” LZh, no. 3–­4 (1911), pp. 508–­509. 10. Stephanie Pincetl describes a similar phenomenon in France after the Revolution of 1789: Stephanie Pincetl, “Some Origins of French Environmentalism: An Exploration,” Forest and Conservation History, vol. 37 (April 1993), p. 81. In certain areas of non-­black-­soil provinces, peasants retained the right to use wood from landowners (see “Polozhenie o krestianakh, vyshedshikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti,” art.

310  |  Notes to Chapter 2 29–­31, in PSZII, vol. XXXVI, pt. 1, February 19, 1861, no. 36657). The conditions of the emancipation in Polish provinces differed: there, peasants were allowed to cut wood for their household as part of their right of servitude. 11. As Brian Bonhomme points out, landowners lost their labor force to carry out “basic forest work,” which had rested on peasant obligations; this, too, contributed to the growth of woodcutting. Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917–­1929. 12. Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoe Osoboe soveshchanie o nuzhdakh selskokhoziaistvennoi promyshlennosti. Vodnoe khoziaistvo. Svod trudov mestnykh komitetov po 49 guberniiam Evropeiskoi Rossii, edited by D. S. Shilkin, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. F. Kirshbauma, 1904, p. 104. 13. Istoricheskaia zapiska o sudokhodnykh i splavnykh rekakh po russkomu zakonodatel’stvu, [b.m., 188?], p. 2. 14. Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 15. “Po povodu proekta obiazatelnogo vykupa gosudarstvennymi krestianami zemli u gosudarstva,” Den’, 11 December 1865; reprinted in Ivan Aksakov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, Moscow: Tipografiia M. G. Volchaninova, 1886, pp. 374–­383. 16. Nikolai Ogarev, “Gosudarstvennaia sobstvennost’ ” [1862], in Izbrannye sotsialno-­ politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedenia, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, vol. 1, 1952, pp. 590–­611; for a similar view, although very much colored by Slavophile rhetoric, see Vasilii N. Leshkov, Russkii narod i gosudarstvo. Istoriia russkogo obshchestvennogo prava do XVIII veka, Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1858. 17. The vision of the state as the legitimate owner of peasants’ lands provoked disagreement even within government circles: a memo signed by count Vladimir Adlerberg, the minister of the Imperial Court and the Tsar’s Domains and a member of the Main Committee on the peasant reform, asserted that peasant communes had a “historical” right to the lands that they occupied on the basis of permanent “public ownership.” The Russian state assumed proprietary power in regard to the lands of free communes under the influence the Mongol yoke, which “affirmed an Asiatic principle that all land belongs to the khan.  .  .  . After the Mongols, the supreme power over all Russian land became the prince’s, and then the tsar’s [power]”—­this is how the lands of free communes acquired the status of state land. However, peasants kept their right of permanent tenure, and the state quitrent paid by peasants was a tax rather than a rent on the land and, in essence, was levied on the peasantry as an obligation that corresponded to noble service. Why should peasants redeem their lands if nobles were freed from compulsory service without redemption? The state, argued this memo, was not a proprietor like other landowners; it “does not have its own private interest separated from the well-­being of the greatest part of population.” Hence, peasants did not owe anything to the state. RGIA, F. 1181, op. 1, t. 15, 1861, d. 4b. On Alderberg’s memo, see more in Igor Khristoforov, Sud’ba Reformy, pp. 232–­234. 18. Valerii L. Stepanov, N. Kh. Bunge. Sud’ba reformatora, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998, p. 54. 19. In practice, Russian forestry was dominated by ineffective techniques: landowners

Notes to Chapter 2  |  311 almost never offered timber as a final product and instead sold “forests on the root” (na korniu) for wholesale cutting and clearing of lands. 20. Richard G. Robbins points out the extensiveness of the peasants’ economy: “Only by bringing more land under the plow could bigger yields be obtained.” (Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891–­1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis, New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1975, p. 9.) This strategy, of course, led to the unavoidable destruction of forests. 21. Golenishchev-­Kutuzov, a landowner from Kharkov province, recalled that state peasants did not benefit from the state’s charity: state forests were sold for nothing, and the money was immediately spent on drinks. Trudy VI s’ezda lesokhoziaev (Kharkov, August 28–­30, 1886), St. Petersburg, 1887, pp. 47–­48. 22. Mikhail A. Tsvetkov, Izmenenie lesistosti, p. 133. 23. RGIA, f. 387, op. 3, d. 24129, l. 2–­2ob. 24. Ibid., l. 20ob–­21. 25. Ibid. 26. See the zemstvos’ responses to the government’s project in RGIA, f. 1291, op. 36, d. 204b. As Roberta Manning observes, noble landowners constituted an overwhelming majority of the zemstvo’s members. Roberta Thompson Manning, “The Zemstvo and Politics, 1864–­1914,” The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-­government, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 143. 27. Yaroslavl zemstvo provincial committee, December 7, 1865, RGIA, f. 1291, op. 36, d. 204b, l. 22 ob. 28. Kaluga zemstvo provincial committee, April 12, 1866, ibid., l. 65–­65ob. 29. RGIA, f. 387, op. 28, d. 958, l. 11ob.–­12. 30. Viktor Vasil’chikov, “Chernozem i ego budushchnost,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 2 (1876), pp. 167–­182. 31. Yurii S.Pivovarov, “Samarin, a ne vashi skitaltsy,” Mir Rossii, no. 1 (1995), p. 183. 32. An interesting example of that approach is provided by a monograph published in 1878 by Sergei Vedrov, “On Forest Protection in Russian Law.” The development of forestry regulation in this narration reflected the evolution of political concepts— from cameralist Polizeistaat to the Kantian concept of Rechtstaat and subsequent theories of European (mainly German) political thinkers of the 1830s through the 1850s. The essential element of the new philosophy of forestry was an idea of the common good that legitimized restrictions on property rights: “We see . . . a deep difference between a restriction imposed for the sake of the absolute power of one person, even if identified with state power, and a restriction imposed by the supreme power of the people, due to the belief of the majority of the people’s representatives that the restriction is necessary.” Sergei Vedrov, O lesookhranenii po russkomu pravu, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Bezobrazova, 1878, pp. 6–­7. 33. “S’ezd selskikh khoziaev v Moskve. Trudy selskokhoziaistvennogo otdeleniia Vtorogo s’ezda sel’skikh khoziaev v Moskve pri Moskovskom obschestve sel’skikh khoziaev,” LZh, August 1871, pp. 35–­43. 34. See the suggestion of the commission for the discussion of means and resources for the protection of forests, December 30, 1872. RGIA, f. 387, op. 28, d. 958, l. 11ob.–­ 12. This commission suggested using income from the sale of state belongings for the purchase of forests.

312  |  Notes to Chapter 2 35. One of the participants pointed out that the state should have issued a law restricting landowners’ rights along with the Emancipation laws and called on the government to “stop the arbitrariness of private proprietors who infringe upon public interests.” Stenograficheskie otchety pokazaniam lits, priglashennykh v Komissiiu dlia rassmotreniia voprosa o merakh k ograzhdeniu lesov ot istreblenia, 1876 [Rossiiskaia natsionalnaia biblioteka], Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Gosudarstvennaia Kantseliariia, Otdelenie zakonov, Materialy, vol. 1, d. 4, “O vozvrashenii ministru gosudarstvenukh imushestv predstavlenia ob okhrane chastnovladelcheskikh lesov ot istreblenia” [hereafter, Stenograficheskie otchety]. 36. On aristocratic opposition, see Igor A. Khristoforov, Aristokraticheskaia oppositsia Velikim reformam, Moscow: Russkoe slovo, 2002. 37. Stenograficheskie otchety, p. 45. 38. Ibid., p. 122. 39. Ibid., p. 129. 40. Mikhail M. Orlov, Ob osnovakh russkogo gosudarstvennogo lesnogo khoziaistva, Petrograd: Deviataia gos. tipografiia, 1918, p. 35. 41. See the critique of the report by Karageorgi, who suggested considering the system of state surveillance. Trudy Tretiego s’ezda lesokhoziaev (Riga, 1876), St. Petersburg, 1876, pp. 53, 69. The experience of European countries­—­first of all, Prussia, which was a model of forest regulation for Russian legislators­—­in the opinion of forest owners, did not suit Russian conditions. 42. Trudy Shestogo s’ezda lesokhoziaev (Kharkov, August 1887), St. Petersburg, 1887, pp. 45, 51–­52, 61. 43. Petr Zhudra, “K voprosu ob otnoshenii gosudarstva k chastnomu lesovladeniiu,” LZh, no. 2 (1876), p. 8. 44. “Proekt okhranenia lesov i chastnaia sobstvennost’,” Russkaia mysl’, 1887, no. 4 (1995), pp. 112–­118. 45. Petr Zhudra, “Po voprosu ob otnoshenii gosudarstva k chastnomy lesovladeniu,” pp. 18–­19. 46. Petr Zhudra, “Vospominania o lesnom institute kadeta predposlednego vypuska,” LZh, no. 4 (1888), p. 643. 47. Franz Heske, German Forestry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938, p. 26. 48. Stenograficheskie otchety, p. 99. 49. “Zakon 4 aprelia o sberezhenii lesov,” Vestnik Evropy, Vnutrennee obozrenie, no. 7 (1888), p. 347. 50. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” From Karl Mannheim, edited with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 162–­163. 51. Boris N. Chicherin, Sobstvennost’ i gosudarstvo, St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Russkoi Khristianskoi Akademii, 2005 (1st ed.,1881), p. 75. 52. “Zakon 4 aprelia o sberezhenii lesov,” Vestnik Evropy, Vnutrennee obozrenie, no. 7 (1888), p. 347. 53. Alternative projects submitted by the Ministry of State Domains and the Special Commission for the Elaboration of Forestry Regulations in 1877. 54. [Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh imuschestv. Spetsialnyi komitet po lesnoi chasti], Obsuzhdenie predlozheniia i proekta zakona o sokhranenii chastnykh lesov, March 1, 1882 [offprint in the National Library of Russia]. This was also the opinion of the “conservative“ Ministry of Interior. RGIA, f. 387, op. 28. d. 1916, l. 31–­31ob.

Notes to Chapter 2  |  313 55. “O merakh po okhraneniu chastnykh lesov,” draft. RGIA, f. 387, op. 28, d. 1916, l. 132ob. 56. (No title), ibid., l. 135–­139ob. 57. Jane Costlow, “Imaginations of Destruction: The ‘Forest Question’ in Nineteenth-­ century Russian Culture,” Russian Review, vol. 62, no. 1 (January 2003), pp. 91–­118. See also the chapter “Geographies of Loss: The ‘Forest Question‘ in Nineteenth-­ century Russia,” in Jane Costlow’s recent monograph, Heart-­Pine Russia: Writing the Nineteenth-­century Forest, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. 58. In 1878–­1879, the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik) published a series of articles by Yakov Veinberg, a teacher and popularizer of science, whose influential “The Forest, Its Role in Nature and the Means for Its Preservation” (Yakov Veinberg, Les: znachenie ego v prirode i mery k ego sokhraneniiu, Moscow: Tipografiia E. Lissner i Iu. Roman, 1884) depicted the consequences of deforestation for the climate and environment. According to E. Kern, his book played important role in the introduction of the law on forest protection in Russia. Eduard Kern, Lesoupravlenie. Konspekt kursa, prochitannogo v Imperatorskom Lesnom Institute v 1910–­1911 g, St. Petersburg: A. A. Lempitskii, 1911, p. 6. Later, the critical role of forests in the fluctuation of the climate was questioned indirectly by Mikhail Bogolepov and Lev Berg, who rebutted the myth of approaching ecological catastrophe. Mikhail Bogolepov, O kolebaniiakh klimata v Evropeiskoi Rossii v istoricheskuiu epokhu, s prilozheniem materialov, izvlechennykh iz russkikh letopisei, Moscow: Tipografiia Kushnerev i Ko, 1908. Bogolepov built his argument on the analysis of Russian medieval chronographs. Lev Berg, Ob izmeneniiakh klimata v istoricheskuiu epokhu, Moscow: Tipografiia Kushnerev i Co, 1911. On this discussion, see also Eduard Kern, Lesoupravlenie, p. 6; Evgenii Palitsyn, Ozero Ilmen’ i reka Volkhov v sviazi s proektom shliuzovaniia i ispolzovaniia energii vody, St. Petersburg: Izdaniie upravleniia vodnykh putei, 1912, p. 265. 59. In 1876, it approved the restriction of private forestry in Crimea, and in 1877 subjected the forests of the Don Cossack Lands owned by stanitsas (Cossack settlements) to the control of the provincial administration. 60. A note signed by “one forest owner from Tambov uezd,” RGIA, f. 387, op. 3, d. 27647, l. 282–­283. 61. On the “harmful” consequences of that tradition, see LZh, no. 1 (1877), no. 3 (1876). 62. Similar suggestions: LZh, no. 1 (1879), no. 2 (1889). 63. In the State Council, the projected law received almost unanimous support. Only ultra-­conservatives Konstantin Pobedonostsev and Nikolai Mansurov objected to the restriction of property rights. See Gosudarstvennyi Sovet v Obshchem Sobranii, 1 i 8 fevralia 1888. RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no. 2785. 64. Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov 4 aprelia 1888 g. Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii izdaniia 1892 goda, vol. VIII, ch. 1, Lesnoi Ustav, bk. 5 [St. Petersburg: Kodifikatsionnyi otdel, 1893]. The owner could redeem expropriated forests during a certain period. 65. Alexander P. Engelgardt, O lesnom khoziaistve v Evropeiskoi Rossii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Kirshbauma, 1904. The former vice-­director of the Forestry Department argued that at least 10 million rubles had to be provided every year for the purchase of forests to stop timber poaching.

314  |  Notes to Chapter 2 66. On forest statistics, see “K statistike lesov Evropeiskoi Rossii,” LZh, no. 4 (1888). 67. Obzor deiatelnosti Ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra III, 1881–­1894, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Kirshbauma, 1901, pp. 22–­23. 68. Nastavlenie lesookhranitelnym komitetam, June 3, 1888. In [Lesnoi Departament] Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov chastnykh i obshchestvennykh s prilozheniem instruktsii i nastavlenii ministra zemledeliia i gosudarstvennykh imushchestv i reshenii Pravitelstvuiushchego Senata, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1900, pp. 36–­38. 69. See the anecdotes about bribery among the officials of the forestry services in Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries, pp. 30–­31. 70. Isaak Beilin, Ocherki po istorii lesnykh obshchestv v Rossii, p. 124. 71. Complaints about the decisions of forest committees: RGIA, f. 387, op. 5, d. 31503 (1889). See also the questionnaire sent by the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains to local forest committees and their responses: Ministerstvo Zemledeliia i Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, Lesookhranitelnym komitetam, July 16, 1895. In [Lesnoi Departament] Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov chastnykh i obshchestvennykh s prilozheniem instruktsii i nastavlenii ministra zemledeliia i gosudarstvennykh imushchestv i reshenii Pravitelstvuiushchego Senata, pp. 1–­23. 72. Obozrenie deiatelnosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv po lesnoi chasti v 1881–­1891 gg., St. Petersburg, 1891, pp. 37–­38. 73. Ibid. 74. Timofei Nekhoroshev, “Lesnoe delo pri A.V. Krivosheine,” LZh, no. 5 (1916), p. 48. 75. In 1897–­1901, a special commission on the needs of the noble estate discussed how to save the nobility from economic and political decay. On the politics and economic status of nobility at that period, see Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; Yurii B. Soloviev, Samoderzhaviie i dvorianstvo v kontse dieviatnadtsatogo veka, Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1973. For the critique of the myth of impoverished nobility, see Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986. 76. In support of this initiative, the memo referred to the experience of European countries that after years of massive privatization of forests (especially in France, and to a lesser extent in Austria and Prussia) resumed the policy of forest nationalization. The memo suggested that a special 4 percent state bond be issued to create a “forest fund” and finance the purchase of forests. “Zapiska, sostavlennaia v Lesnom Departamente po voprosu ob oblegchenii stesnitelnykh dlia zemlevladeltsev posledstvii primeneniia lesookhranitelnogo zakova v sviazi s merami k dalneishemu sberezheniu lesov, imeiushchikh gosudarstvennoe znachenie,” RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no.1056. 77. The initial project for the law suggested securing the monopoly of hunting for owners of big land estates—­that is, the introduction of a land property qualification. Eventually, the government rejected this idea, which would have limited the rights of small landowners and instead regulated the right of hunting for all landowners notwithstanding the size of their land allotment or estates. See the documents on the preparation of this reform in RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no. 2783. 78. See the description of the wolf hunt on General Prince G. F. Boriatinskii’s estate in Ian M. Helfant, “That Savage Gaze: The Contested Portrayal of Wolves in

Notes to Chapter 2  |  315 Nineteenth-­century Russia,” in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History, edited by Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2010, p. 69. 79. Perhaps the best example of the opposite approach to animals could be found in the writings of Lev Tolstoy. In his famous “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse” (“Strider,” 1886), he denounced both private ownership and human cruelty. The horse, a victim of his owners’ whimsical power, told a story of his life full of sorrow and suffering. Indeed, the “status” of domestic animals differed from that of wild beasts. However, this story clearly identified the connection between ownership and cruelty established by Tolstoy, who also spoke virulently against hunting. See Ian Helfant, “That Savage Gaze,” pp. 63–­65; Lev Tostoy, Sobranie sochinenii v dvad­tsati dvukh tomakh, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982, vol. 12, pp. 7–­41. 80. Sergei N. Foltz, “Okhota i okhotniki ‘u nas i po nashemu,’ ” Priroda i okhota, March 1890, p. 96. 81. N. Ermolov, “Neskolko myslei ob okhotnichiem naloge,” Priroda i okhota, August 1891, pp. 11–­25. 82. The Special Commission of the Kursk Society for Hunting suggested the introduction of a state monopoly on hunting on all state, peasant, and private lands that did not exceed 150 desiatinas. If the size of an estate was more than 150 desiatinas, the owner had a choice—­either to pay a special tax or to give up this right to the state. “Zametka Osoboi komissii, izbrannoi godichnym obshchim sobraniem chlenov Kurskogo obshchestva liubitelei okhoty 16 fevralia 1897 g. o zhelatelnykh izmeneniiakh o dopolneniiakh deistvuiushchego zakona ob okhote,” Priroda i okhota, 1897, bk. 8, p. 58–­77. 83. To compare: In Britain, the first laws protecting animals appeared only in the early twentieth century. Until that time, all measures protecting wild animals had aimed to “preserve the shooters’ game,”—­that is, to support a sufficient number of game heads. All “anti-­hunting” bills brought to parliament’s consideration between 1893 and 1912 were turned down by the “sporting MPs.” See Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066, New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 163–­173; Richard H. Thomas, The Politics of Hunting, Aldershot/Hants: Gower, 1983, p. 37. 84. Nikolai V. Turkin, Novye pravila ob okhote i nakazaniia za narusheniia ikh, Moscow: Redaktsia zhurnala “Priroda i okhota,” 1892. 85. Ian M. Helfant, “That Savage Gaze,” p. 69. 86. On the utilitarian vision of forests, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 11–­15. 87. Except the areas where foxes help exterminate rodents. 88. Proekt zakona ob okhote i obiasneniia k nemu osoboi komissii, sostoiashchei pod predsedatelstvom vel. kn. Sergeia Mikhailovicha (1901). RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no. 2783. 89. Nikolai V. Turkin, Okhota i okhotnichie zakonodatelstvo v 300-­letnii period tsarstvo­ vania doma Romanovykh, Moscow: Tipografiia Levenson, 1913, p. 158. 90. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 183.

316  |  Notes to Chapter 2 91. A special commission set up to investigate the causes of this ecological, social, and economic disaster came to the conclusion (later refuted) that the great drought was caused by the changing water regime of great European rivers brought on by the drainage of swamps in the Western provinces of Russia between 1873 and 1898, and more generally by extensive cutting of forests, ploughing of meadows, pollution of springs, and so on, 92. Mikhail M. Reinke, “Proekt zakona ob uporiadochenii vodnogo khoziaistva v Tsentralnykh chernozemnykh guberniiakh Rossii,” ZhMIu, no. 2 (1903), p. 190. 93. In 1894, the government launched a program for the exploration of Russian rivers; part of this program concerned the elaboration of the law on water. The expedition’s preliminary report, titled “On the Protection of Water Riches” (“Ob okhrane vodnykh bogatstv”), established a devastating state of Russian nature, the decay of which became especially fast after the emancipation of peasants (Ob okhrane vodnykh bogatstv. Glavnye resultaty chetyrekhletnikh trudov Ekspeditsii dlia issledovania istochnikov glavneishikh rek Evropeiskoi Rossii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Birkenfelda, 1898, pp. 1, 4, 5). In 1902, the expedition produced a draft of rules on water protection in seven provinces of the Black Soil region (these provinces especially suffered from the drought) that used the same legitimizing principles of state and common good as the law on the protection of forests; the rules imposed on landowners the responsibility of protecting rivers from pollution, and if they failed to perform this task the state would expropriate their water reservoirs. (“Proekt vremennykh pravil o sberezhenii vod,” ZhMIu, no. 2 (1903), pp. 190–­193.) 94. On the role of nature in the construction of national identity, see Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. On the similar role of environmentalism and preservation in the construction of German patriotism, see Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–­1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, ch. 1, pp. 19–­69. 95. On “monuments of nature,” see Igor P. Borodin, Okhrana pamiatnikov prirody, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1914; D. I. Sosnovskii, “Okhrana pamiatnikov prirody na Kavkaze,” Zapiski Kavkazskogo otdela RGO, bk. 28. no. 3, Tiflis, 1913; Dmitrii N. Anuchin, Okhrana pamiatnikov prirody, Moscow: Tipografiia Kushnereva, 1914. On Igor Borodin and the development of the concept, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, ch. 1. 96. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 186, 1901, d. 11a, l. 422. 97. Eduard Kern, “Gosudarstvennaia lesnaia politika,” Novyi economist, no. 23 (1915). 98. Mikhail A. Tsvetkov, Lesistost’ Evropeiskoi Rossii, p. 133. 99. Franz Heske, German Forestry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938, p. 6. 100. On the consequences attending the implementation of this law in Novgorod province (after 1901), see Evgenii Palitsyn, Ozero Ilmen’ i reka Volkhov v sviazi s proektom shliuzovaniia i ispolzovaniia energii vody, pp. 264–­268. 101. In 1908, the Committee of Ministers decided to transfer all forest land purchased by the Peasant Land Bank to the disposal of the Forestry Department. On forestry protection in connection with agrarian law, see A. Chernyi, “K voprosu ob otchu­zhdenii v sobstvennost’ gosudarstva neudobnykh (pustoporozhnikh) zemel’ krestianskikh nadelov i ob ispolzovanii ikh lesorazvedeniem,” Lesopromyshlennyi

Notes to Chapter 2  |  317 vestnik, no. 2, 4 (1907); Mikhail Tsvetkov, “Issledovanie lesov vvidu agrarnoi reformy,” ibid., no. 16–­18 (1907); K. I. Pokaliuk, “Les v agrarnom zakonoproekte kadetov,” ibid., no. 23 (1907); [B. P.] “O vykupe chastnovladelcheskikh lesov kaznoi,” ibid., no. 39 (1907); Georgii Alekhin, Lesookhranitelnyi zakon po otnosheniiu k zemliam, peredavaemym v Krestianskii Bank , St. Petersburg: Tipografiia gradonachalnika, 1911. 102. Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries, pp. 42, 44. 103. “Protokoly zasedania St. Peterburgskogo lesnogo obschestva,” LZh, no. 2 (1907), pp. 223–­224. Later, the climate argument fell out of consideration. See Georgii Vysotskii, “Desiderata svobodoliubivykh lesovladeltsev i Peterburgskii s’ezd 23–­27 ianvaria 1911,” LZh, no. 8 (1913), pp. 1369–­1377; E. A. Palitsyn, Ozero Ilmen’ i reka Volkhov v sviazi s proektom shliuzovaniia i ispolzovaniia energii vody, p. 265. On the discussions around the influence of forests on the climate, see Eduard Kern, Lesoupravlenie. Konspekt kursa, prochitannogo v Imperatorskom Lesnom Institute v 1910–­1911 g., St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Lempitskogo, 1911, pp. 5–­6. 104. Lev Khodskii, Osnovy gosudarstvennogo khoziaistva. Posobie po finansovoi nauke, 2nd ed., St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Stasiulevicha, 1901, pp. 28–­29. 105. To be fair to Russian foresters, I should mention that the same tendency—­a return to the initial principles of forest ownership and management—­could be noted in the economic policy of European countries. While in the mid-­nineteenth century, under the influence of social and economic difficulties, the Prussian state sold a part of its forests, in the 1870s it restored the policy of enlarging the forests of the state domain, and this example was followed by other European countries. Mikhail M. Orlov, Nuzhdy russkogo lesnogo khoziaistva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Frolovoi, 1906, pp. 33–­35. Thus, the idea of a state forest economy imported to Russia together with the basic principles of scientific forestry nicely fit both the professional spirit of foresters and the principles of state political economy. 106. Protokoly vneocherednogo Peterburgskogo s’ezda lesovladeltsev i lesokhoziaev, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia gradonachalnika, 1911, p. 7. 107. Since two-­thirds of state forests were located in the North of Russia, in scarcely populated and poorly industrialized areas, whereas the private forests that most of all suffered from timber poaching were concentrated in the Central and Southern provinces, the experts concluded that “forest protection in Russia meant the protection of private forests”—­obviously, from their owners. Alexei N. Sobolev, Osnovy lesookhraneniia v Rossii (Doklad Vserossiiskomu s’ezdu v St. Peterburge lesovladel’tsev i lesokhoziaev), St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Frolovoi, 1911, pp. 7–­8, 19–­20. Many speakers, again, suggested softening the pressure of state regulation by decentralization and passing enforcement over to local zemstvos. 108. Georgii Vysotskii, “Desiderata svobodoliubivykh lesovladeltsev,” LZh, no. 9–­10 (1913), p. 1427. Many participants at the Congress did not dare include this statement on the list of resolutions, perhaps because the representatives of forest owners and industrialists were nearly absent at this particular meeting, and most participants were either state officials or experts. Protokoly vneocherednogo Peterburgskogo s’ezda lesovladeltsev i lesokhoziaev. Postanovleniia s’ezda, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia gradonachalnika, 1911, pp. 160–­162. The question of total forestry protection was raised again in 1913; see the discussion of the All-­Russian Agricultural Congress in Kiev, 1913. Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo selskokhoziaistvennogo s’ezda v Kieve, 1–­10

318  |  Notes to Chapter 2 sentiabria 1913, no. 7; Zhurnaly zasedanii sektsii lesnogo dela i doklady sektsii, Kiev: Obschestvo selskogo khoziaistva i promyshlennosti, 1914, p. 6. 109. Mikhal Orlov was invited to manage forests on the estates of Leopold Koenig in Kharkov province. Mikhal M. Orlov, Lesnoe khoziaistvo v kharkovskikh imeniakh L. E. Koenig-­Nasledniki, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Kene & Co, 1913. On other examples of rational forest management, see Andrei M. Anfimov, “Chastno­ vladelcheskoe lesnoe khoziaistvo v Rossii v kontse XIX–­nachale XX v.,” Istoricheskie zapiski, Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1958, vol. 63. 110. See a series of publications in the Forestry Review: N. N. Selianin, “Ekskurskii v chastnye lesa,” LZh, no. 5 (1888) (estate of count Ziberg); no. 4 (1889) (Prince N. E. L’vov’s estate); no. 2(1888) (I. I. Shakhovkoi’s estate); no. 3 (1889) (V. L. Naryshkin’s estate), no. 2 (1890) (A. A. Balashov’s estate); and so on. 111. Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-­century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, p. 30. 112. Dmitrii Mendeleev, “Uralskaia zheleznaia promyshlennost’ v 1899 godu.” Quoted from Ivan S. Melekhov, Ocherk razvitia nauki o lese v Rossii, Moscow: Akademia Nauk SSSR, 1957, p. 50. 113. On his estates, see LZh, no. 5–­6 (1876); no. 9 (1876) (Petr Zhudra, pisma iz Moskvy); no. 10–­11 (1882) (A. Vozdvizhenskii, “Lesnaia dacha grafa Uvarova”). 114. Karl F. Turmer, Piat’desiat let lesokhoziaistvennoi praktiki, Moscow: Tipografiia Lissnera i Romana, 1890. 115. Svetlana Ovsiannikova, “Chastnoe kollektsionirovanie v Rossii v poreformennuiu epokhu,” Ocherki muzeinogo dela v Rossii, vol. 2, Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1960, p. 72. 116. There was resistance to the vigorous popularization of the idea of state expropriation and the belief that only state forests are well protected, effectively managed, and profitable. It is worth noting that the same experts on forestry arguing for expropriation admitted that the Forestry Department of the Ministry of State Domains did not run the management properly. Ivan A. Menshikov, K voprosu o kazennom lesnom khoziastve, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Frolovoi, 1908. The most ardent critique came from Dmitrii Karnitskii, who argued that public forests could not be considered the private property of the government. Dmitrii P. Karnitskii, Gibnushie lesa, St. Petersburg: Sovet s’ezda gornopromyshlennikov Urala, 1910. 117. Timofei Nekhoroshev, “Lesnoe delo pri A.V. Krivosheine,” LZh, no. 5 (1916), p. 29. 118. Ministerstvo Zemledelia i Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, Lesnoi Departament, Kratkii obzor deiatelnosti kazennogo lesnogo upravlenia za 1893–­1902 gg., edited by T. V. Nekhoroshev, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Yu.Ya. Rimana, 1903, p. 23. 119. Ministerstvo Zemledelia i Gosudarstvennykh Imuschchestv, Vsemirnaia Parizh­ skaia Vystavka. O lesakh Rossii. Raspredelenie lesov, ikh ekspuatatsiia, vnutrenniaia i vneshniaia lesnaia torgovlia, St. Petersburg: Ekonomicheskaia tipolitografia, 1900, p. 50. 120. Dokhodnost’ kazennykh lesov, sostoiashchikh v vedenii Lesnogo Departamenta, Ottisk iz Izvestii Ministerstva zemledelia i gosudarsvennykh imushchestv, no. 27, 28, 29 (1898). 121. Nikolai Faleev, Otmena lesnoi sobstvennosti, Moscow: Tipografiia Smirnova, 1918, p. 12.

Notes to Chapter 2  |  319 122. M[atreninskii], “Georgii Fedorovich Morozov,” in Georgii F. Morozov, Uchenie o lese, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1925; Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–­1953, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, p. 31. On Morozov, see also Isaak G. Beilin and Vera A. Parnes, Georgii Fedorovich Morozov, 1867–­1920, Moscow: “Nauka,” 1971. 123. Stephen Brain characterizes Morozov’s teaching as a departure from the principles of German forestry aimed at mechanical reproduction of forests for consumption. He considers Morozov’s views as a synthesis of certain principles derived from Western forestry with the Slavophile vision of Russian nature (Stephen Brain, Song of the forest, pp. 27–­53). 124. Georgii Morozov, Uchenie o lese, p. vi. 125. Nikolai Faleev, Lesnoe pravo, pp. 30–­31. 126. At the same time, Faleev warned against the utopian total expropriation of protected forests. He was, perhaps, the only expert to claim that expropriation more than any other limitation of individual freedom could evoke in popular legal consciousness a sense of injustice. “Expropriation has always caused a feeling of discontent with the government” since “it completely eliminates the principle of the sacred inviolability of property.” Nikolai Faleev, Lesnoe pravo, p. 178. 127. Georgii Vysotskii, “Desiderata svobodoliubivykh lesovladeltsev,” LZh, no. 9–­10 (1913), p. 1431. 128. Veniamin F. Kliuchnikov, “Konkretnye zadachi lesookhranenia,” LZh, no. 9–­10 (1911), pp. 1410–­1421. 129. On the shift to a new format of relationships between individuals and the state, see Yanni Kotsonis, “ ‘Face to Face’: The State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation, 1863–­1917,” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 221–­246. 130. Nevertheless, in 1866 a special commission charged with the preparation of the new mining code (which was never produced) suggested separating the two objects of property—­the surface of the land and what lies beneath. The same question was raised by a group of officials discussing the new tax laws two years later. While the majority of the commission on taxes and duties did not dare “to discuss the fundamental civil law on ownership rights of land and minerals,” a minority spoke in favor of reconsidering the relation between private interests and public goals. The minority report set the tone for the discussion: it stressed the present dependence of the state economy and the wealth of society upon the wishes of a handful of private proprietors. The report argued that if private interests impeded the development of national production, then the state had to limit property rights. In other words, the authors called on the state to use its mechanisms of expropriation in those cases where both state and public economic interests were concerned. Alexei A. Keppen, O vzaimnykh otnosheniakh zheleznykh dorog i gornopromyshlennykh predpriatii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Transhelia, 1881, p. 27. 131. Victor Mylov, “K voprosu o prave sobstvennosti na nedra zemnye,” Gornyi Zhurnal, vol. 1, no. 3 (1892), p. 500. 132. Nikolai A. Sokolovskii, K voprosu ob iziatii glavneishikh poleznykh iskopaemykh iz rasporiazheniia chastnykh vladel’tsev zemel, Kharkov: Tipografiia “Iuzhnogo kraia,” 1900, p. 18. 133. Iliador Urbanovich, “K voprosu o vladenii nedrami,” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie, no. 9(1898), pp. 64–­65.

320  |  Notes to Chapter 2 134. Ministry of State Domains, 23 November 1894, “Ob ustanovlenii pravitel’stvennogo nadzora za pravilnostiu razrabotki iskopaemykh bogatstv,” RGIA, f. 1152, op. 1, tom 12, 1895 g., d. 91, l. 7. 135. Ibid., l. 3–­4. 136. Compare the arguments against private ownership of oil in Austrian Galicia: Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire, Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia, Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 66, 71. Alison Frank has described strikingly similar debates on mineral rights. The opponents to the private ownership of oil lamented that that precious commodity was being wasted by unskillful peasants and petty landowners. They opposed state regalia as synonymous with the professional management of oil resources by trained engineers, to the unprofessional, irrational, and speculative treatment by private owners. 137. The decision of the assembly of a peasant society to rent a mine had to be considered by the local land captain (zemskii nachalnik) and submitted for the approval of the local body dealing with the administration of “peasant affairs” (prisutstvie po krestianskim delam) and a mining engineer. These bodies could turn down the application if the price of rent was too low (the law did not mention anything about high prices). 138. PSZIII, vol. XV, May 2, 1895, no. 11626. 139. See various agreements concluded by the peasants of Olonetskaia, Nizhegorod­ skaia, and Moskovskaia provinces in RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 1593, pp. 21–­22, 23–­24, 25–­26, 27–­28, 30–­31, 34–­37. More agreements in f. 37, op. 72, d. 71. 140. RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 1240, l. 23ob–­24. 141. “Po voprosu ob izmenenii i dopolnenii zakona 2 maia 1895 goda o poriadke otdachi krestianskikh nadelnykh zemel v arendu dlia razrabotki iskopaemykh,” ibid., l. 1–­3. 142. Vladimir Strukgov, Obschii obzor materiala imeiushchegosia po voprosu o tak nazyvaemoi “gornoi svobode,” St. Petersburg: Yakor’, 1909. 143. Sovet s’ezda gornopromyshlennikov Iuga Rossii. 31 s’ezd. Doklad sovetu s’ezda po 8-­mu punktu programmy. Obsuzhdenie voprosa o nedrakh v sviazi s agrarnym voprosom i razvitiem gornogo dela voobshche, Kharkov. 1907; K voprosu o gornoi svobode. Kharkov: Tipografiia Bengiz, 1907. See also the materials of 32nd and 38th congresses. 144. “Zakon ob izmenenii i dopolnenii nekotorykh postanovlenii o krestianskom zemlevladenii,” 14 Iunia 1910, Art. 20, Debaty o zemle v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (1906–­1917 gg.), Dokumenty i materialy, edited by V. I. Chernoivanov and V. V. Shelokhaev, Moscow, 1995, p. 352. 145. In 1877, Russia’s largest Donetsk coalfield produced only 49 billion poods of coal, while in 1875 the Liege mines in Belgium, with an area of mining 36 times smaller than the Donbass, produced 200 billion poods of coal. Ocherk mestorozhdenii poleznykh iskopaemykh v Evropeiskoi Rossii i na Urale, St. Petersburg: Izdanie Gornogo Departamenta, 1881, p. 87. 146. Obozrenie deiatelnosti Ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv po gornoi chasti v 1881 godu, St. Petersburg, 1882, p. 4. 147. Ob otvode ploshchadei na chuzhikh zemliakh dlia gornykh rabot v Tsarstve Pol­ skom, 1903. RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 3057, l. 41. 148. Alexei P. Keppen, O neobkhodimosti korennoi reformy zakonodatel’stva na nedra zemli, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia S. Kornatovskogo, 1894.

Notes to Chapter 2  |  321 149. Ocherk mestorozhdenii poleznykh iskopaemykh, pp. 189–­190. 150. Skeptics called this new wave of the mining industry the “post-­industry,” since many businessmen could do nothing more than stake a pole with their name and date. Semen S. Abamelek-­Lazarev, Vopros o nedrakh i razvitiie gornoi promyshlennosti s 1808 po 1908 g., St. Petersburg: “Slovo,” 1910, p. 63. 151. Quote from Ivan Sigov, “O gornoi svobode,” Russkoe bogatstvo, September 1900, p. 11. 152. Petr Saladilov, Vopros o nedrakh v russkom zakonodatel’stve, St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1904, p. 24. 153. See Petr N. Gussakovskii, “Pravo na nedra zemli,” ZhMIu, no. 3 (1903), pp. 170–­171. 154. Gussakovskii intepretated the limitation of private property rights in Europe as a “protection of national economic interests” (narodno-­khoziaistvennye interesy). Petr Gussakovskii, Pravo na nedra zemli, p. 168. 155. Ob izdanii novogo polozhenia o gornom promysle (b.m., b.g.), p. 20. 156. On their critique of the property rights regime, see also Susan McCaffray, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874–­1914, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996, pp. 10–­11. 157. Dmitrii P. Karnitskii, Nashi zakony o nedrakh. Sovet s’ezdov gornopromyshlennikov Urala, St. Peterburg: Tipografiia Stoikovoi, 1909. As mentioned earlier, Karnitskii also criticized the projects for the privatization of forests by the state treasury. 158. Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia, no. 2 (1909), pp. 93–­94. 159. Semen Abamelek-­Lazarev, “Vopros o nedrakh zemli,” in Obmen mysliami po voprosu o nedrakh zemli v zviazi s zakonom 9 noiabria 1906 goda, Moscow: Tipografiia Mamontova, 1907. 160. Vladimir G. Strukgov, Obshchii obzor materialov po voprosu o tak nazyvaemoi “gornoi svobode.” 161. Victor Mylov, “K voprosu o prave sobstvennosti na nedra zemnye,” Gornyi Zhurnal, vol. 1, no. 3 (1892), p. 183. 162. Gukasov’s speech at the Oil Committee of the Council of Congresses of the Representatives of Industry and Trade, Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia, no. 6 (1908), p. 351. 163. For instance, Stepan Gulishambarov argued that minerals, oil, and water were all similar objects of public property, “not belonging to anyone particularly.” Stepan I. Gulishambarov, Zakony, kasaiushchiesia dobychi, khranenia, pererabotki i transportirovki nefti, Tiflis: Tipografiia Mikhelsona, 1884. p. 35. 164. Abel Ye. Yanovskii, Osnovnye nachala gornogo zakonodatelstva i peresmotr ego v Rossii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Kirshbauma, 1900, p. 161. 165. Ibid. 166. Vsevolod Udintsev, Russkoe gornozemelnoe pravo, Kiev: Tipografiia Chokolova, 1909, pp. 72–­73. 167. Obzor deiatelnosti Ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra III. 1881–­1894, pp. 9, 25, 165. 168. Sergei Witte, minister of finance and the ideologue of industrialization in Russia, vigorously welcomed the Senate’s decision as an important shift in the regime of ownership of minerals. Witte claimed that Catherine the Great, while granting property rights to the land’s deposits, did not mean that minerals could not be sold without lands; the “attachment” of minerals to the surface of land was unnatural, illogical, and not known in any other country except Russia. (Ministerstvo Zemledeliia i Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv. Po proektu raz’iasneniia deistvuiushchego zakona

322  |  Notes to Chapter 2 ob otdache chastnymi sobstvennikami svoikh zemel’ pod razrabotku nedr. [1903]). Later, in 1910, the Kozhin case was used as the precedent for the solution to the problem that originated from Stolypin’s reform: the separation of peasants’ rights to land and the commune’s right to the mineral deposits was based on the Senate’s decision of 1902. 169. This practice was, however, terminated by another Senate decision that qualified the right of the exploitation of minerals as a property right to immovable things. That decision threatened the businesses of 186 joint-­stock companies and firms owned by Jews and led the Association of Southern Coal and Steel producers to petition the government. Sovet s’ezda gornopromyshlennikov Iuga Rossii, “O priniatii mer dlia ustraneniia vrednykh posledstvtii neopredelennosti pravovykh osnovanii gornozemelnykh otnoshenii.” RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 1939, pp. 2–­3. 170. Alison Frank, Oil Empire, p. 72. 171. Susan MacCaffray. The Politics of Industrialization, p. 11. 172. See memos and resolutions of the Union of the Southern Coal and Steel Producers in RGIA, f. 37, op. 72, d. 71, ll. 2,19–­24, 293–­293ob. 173. Ministerstvo torgovli i promyshlennosti, “Ob obiavlenii mestorozhdenii iskopaemykh imeiushchimi osoboe gosudartsvennoe znacheniie,” RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 1848, l. 8ob. 174. LZh, no. 4 (1883), pp. 312–­314. 175. Lev B. Kafengauz, Snabzhenie strany mineralnym toplivom vo vremia voiny (ottisk iz Trudov Komissii po izucheniiu dorogovizny pri obshchestve im A. I. Chuprova), Moscow: Gorodskaia Tipografiia, 1915, p. 231. 176. Ibid., pp. 234, 274. 177. Joshua Getzler, “Theories of Property and Economic Development,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 26, no. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 645–­650. 178. Ibid., p. 648. 179. Similarly, Alison Frank compares the private ownership of mineral rights in the United States, which symbolized freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit of American economy, with the private ownership of oil in Austrian Galicia, which evoked criticism for provincialism and backwardness. Alison Frank, Oil Empire, p. 53. 180. Katherine Verdery’s study of the post-­socialist transformation of land property in Romania suggests a similar conclusion. Verdery shows the “fallacy of the assumption that if institutions are created properly, they will function as planned.” Her study of the politics of privatization offers a nuanced vision of property as a cultural symbol, a set of social practices, and a peculiar organization of power. Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2003, p. 28. 181. In 1835, the State Council approved longer terms of lease (up to 30 years) for the building of industrial enterprises. PSZII, vol. 10, October 14, 1835, no. 8476. 182. As a result, the laws on emancipation allowed nobles to lease their lands for 36 years. Anatolii N. Kulomzin, Ob izmenenii predelnykh srokov naima chastnykh nedvizhimykh imushchestv [b.m., b.g.], p. 12. 183. Ibid., p. 13. It is also possible that the government tried to prevent fraudulent rent agreements that would have arranged for the purchase of land: moreover, fees for the registration of deeds constituted an important source of income. In fact, not only contractors, but the state itself suffered from the complexity of the rules of

Notes to Chapter 3  |  323 rent—­for instance, it circumscribed the rent of state lands by peasants with almost insurmountable conditions, and, as a result, peasants suffered from land hunger while state lands remained empty. Only in the mid-­1880s did the government reconsider the terms of renting land to peasants. Obzor deiatelnosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv v tsarstvovanie Alexandra III, 1881–­1894, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. F. Kirshbauma, 1901, pp. 200–­203. 184. Yurii Guzhon, “K voprosu o nedrakh zemli,” Obmen myslei po voprosu o nedrakh zemli v sviazi s zakonom 9 noiabria 1906 goda, Moscow: Tipografiia Mamontova, 1907, p. 9. 185. Ibid., p. 11. 186. Ibid., p. 12. 187. Vladimir Strukgov, O znachenii i razvitii idei gornoi svobody kak normy, stesniaiushchei chastnyi proizvol v interesakh narodnogo bogatstva. Doklad prepodavatelia gornogo prava v Gornom Institute 22 fevralia 1907 g., St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Alexandrova, 1907, pp. 3, 6. 188. Susan P. McCaffray, “The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and the Problems of Industrial Progress in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review, vol. 47, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), p. 464. 189. Ruth Amende Roosa, “Russian Industrialists and ‘State Socialism,’ 1906–­17,” Soviet Studies, vol. 23, no. 3 (January 1972), p. 414.

Chapter 3 Nationalizing Rivers, Expropriating Lands 1. Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatelnosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, ch. 3, otd. 1, “Upravleniie kazennymi imushchestvami i obrochnymi statiami,” p. 53. 2. Quoted from “Otchet o deiatelnosti parlamentskoi fraktsii partii narodnoi svobody vo II Gosudarstvennoi Dume,” S’ezdy i konferentsii konstitutsionno-­demokraticheskoi partii, vol. 1, 1905–­1907, Moscow: “Rosspen,” 1997 [hereafter, CD Congresses], p. 603. 3. See, for instance, Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, New York/London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981 (“A Neoclassical Theory of the State,” pp. 20–­32). 4. See the analysis of the issue of a state’s “strength” and “weakness” in John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–­1783, London/Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp. xix–­xx. 5. In 1884, the Senate considered the case of a man who owned land on both sides of a nonnavigable river that ran through his estate. The landowner, applying his privilege as given by Catherine the Great, thus determined that this waterway was his own, and seized all the wooden rafts floating downstream. The Senate decided that coastal landowners—­even if “their” rivers were not open for “common use”— could not prevent other people from using the “moving force of water.” However, this prohibition, itself quite obscure, could not prevent other abuses of power and the privileges of ownership. Predmetnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’ k Polnomu svodu reshenii Grazhdanskogo kassatsionnogo departamenta Pravitelstvuiushchego Senata za 1866–­1910, edited by L. M. Rotenberg, ch. 1, Ekaterinoslav: 1913, p. 201. See also

324  |  Notes to Chapter 3 ibid., no. 3 (1884), and no. 243 (1878), p. 200; David Fleksor, Deistvuiushchee zakonodatelstvo po vodnomu pravu. Sistematicheskii sbornik uzakonenii, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1903. 6. The number of “navigable” rivers grew along with the development of navigation: In 1799, the Senate listed only 26 rivers; in 1809, the Statute of the Ministry of Transportation indicated 144 rivers, totaling 22,517 versts in length. By the late 1870s, the government declared 193 rivers to be “rivers of common use”—­that is, appropriate for navigation (147 rivers) or timber rafting and, hence, subject to the ministry’s management. Nevertheless, in 1887 it suggested that the status of a river was to be defined by the physical possibility of navigation or floating (see later in this chapter). Zhurnal Vysochaishe uzhrezhdennoi komissii dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh zakonov o bechevnikakh i o poriadke ob’iavlienia rek sudokhodnymi i splavnymi, St. Petersburg, 1878 [hereafter, Zhurnal komissii], p. 27. 7. The ministry supported its claims by comparison with European countries, especially France, whose Civil Code served as a model for the Russian Code; it borrowed from Prussian and British legislation the classifications of rivers as either of national importance (“first class”) that must belong to the state, or local importance (“second class”), and entrusted provincial self-­governing provincial assemblies (zemstvos) to decide which waterways of “local value” should be open to common use. Zhurnal komissii, p. 30. 8. There was nothing especially new in this idea—­for instance, the Austrian water law of 1869 ruled that in the future, the conversion of nonnavigable to navigable rivers would be accompanied by appropriate compensation (all navigable rivers had already belonged to the state by the letter of law). “Vodnye zakonodatelstva. Avstria,” RS, 1903, no. 6, p. 99. 9. Zhurnal komissii, p. 54. 10. See the response to the initiative of the Ministry of Transportation: RGIA, f. 381, op. 20, d.21651, l. 33–­41 (Ministry of State Domains); f. 1287, op. 4, d. 562, ll. 39 (Ministry of Interior), 43 (Ministry of Justice), 11. On the assessment of peasants’ redemption payments, see Stephen Hoch, “Did Russia’s Emancipated Serfs Really Pay Too Much for Too Little Land? Statistical Anomalies and Long-­Tailed Distributions,” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 247–­274. 12. This resolution was confirmed in 1890: PSZIII, vol. X, June 13, 1890, no. 6944. 13. Anna M. Solovieva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 19 veka, Moscow: Nauka, 1975, p. 57. 14. The project assumed the construction of a dam on a shoal near Oranienbaum. 15. Nikolai A. Kislinskii, Nasha zheleznodorozhnaia politika po dokumentam Komiteta Ministrov, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Izdanie Gosudarstvennoi Kantselarii, 1902, p. 47. 16. Anna Solovieva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii, p. 105. 17. There were exceptions: The state’s (built by the Ministry of Transportation) Moscow–­Kursk railroad accumulated hundreds of suits for the alienation of lands. The most “stubborn” of all litigants was the Office of the Tsar’s Domains (Udelnaia kontora Dvortsovogo vedomstva), which requested a price exceeding the norm in the area by 400 percent for lands in Tsaritsyno. Eventually, the Ministry of Transportation had to yield to the requests. Anna Solovieva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii, p. 94.

Notes to Chapter 3  |  325 18. Ob’iasnenia k statiiam o prinuditel’nom otchuzhdenii nedvizhimykh imushchestv, vremennom zaniatii ikh i ustanovlenii prav uchastia v pol’zovanii imi. Prilozhenie k pervoi chasti Proekta o mestnykh dorogakh, St. Petersburg: “Slovo,” 1903, p. 48. 19. The valuation sometimes took many years because the lands were usually never mapped. In addition, an entrepreneur wishing to alienate peasant lands had to receive permission from the local office on peasant affairs and then submit his demand to the ministry of Interior and the State Council. Ibid. 20. One example is especially notorious: In 1891, the railway administration negotiated the purchase of four desiatinas of land from a peasant society for 500 rubles a desiatina. Eight years after the preliminary agreement, the Ministry of Transportation refused to approve the price, which seemed too high. The peasant society refused to yield their lands at the reduced price (400 rubles), and when the railway administration inquired about the purchase of an additional six desiatinas, the society asked for 3000 rubles per desiatina. Ivan A. Shalkevitch, Zametki, kasaiushchiiesia otchuzhdeniia imuschestv dlia nadobnostei zheleznykh dorog, Kaluga: Tipografiia E. G. Arkhangelskoi, 1902, pp. 5–­6. 21. Ibid., p. 12. For other cases of excessive demands, see M. Z-­v, “K voprosu ob otchuzhdeniee zemel’ dlia zheleznykh dorog,” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozreniie, no. 4 (1897), pp. 91–­95. 22. Ob’iasnenia k statiam o prinuditel’nom otchuzhdenii, p. 46. 23. There are no full statistics on the alienation of lands. The only text that attempts such a tabulation is Vladimir Sviatlovskii’s Mobilization of Land Property in Russia, which aggregates the number for 1897–­1904. In 1897, the average price of alienated land was about 200 rubles per desiatina; in 1904, 326 rubles. In 1900, the average cost of alienated land was 239 rubles, while the market price was 67 rubles. Vladimir V. Sviatlovskii, Mobilisatsiia zemelnoi sobstvennosti v Rossii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. O. Tip. dela, 1911, p. 65. 24. See, for instance, a brochure published in defense of the Putilov family against the Ministry of Transportation, which alienated lands for the construction of a commercial harbor. Otsenka zemel’, otchuzhdennykh iz chastnoi zemelnoi sobstvennosti, St. Petersburg [b.g.]. 25. “Vopros ob ispolzovanii sil Imatry,” from Finliandskoi gazety, no. 273–­276 (1914). TsGA NTD, f. 375 (Graftio), op. 3-­1, d. 55, l. 6ob. To facilitate the process of expropriation, the government twice—­in 1872 and 1897—­attempted to draft a new law. The first commission under the leadership of Alexander Obolenskii (1874) suggested the introduction of a judicial procedure for valuation that would give greater protection to the rights of owners. However, the State Council decided that judicial mechanisms borrowed from Western legislation were inappropriate for the Russian setting, because in the case of expropriation, “there can be no dispute over property that is already alienated by the government against the owner’s will.” Thus, the new statute on expropriation (1887) retained the existing rules and administrative order. Another draft of a law on expropriation elaborated by the Ministry of Transportation (the main “expropriator” of lands in the empire) in the early twentieth century also pursued the facilitation of alienation for railroad construction. The emphasis of the proposed law reflected this widespread anti-­ownership zeal: it was supposed to facilitate the alienation of lands such that construction was improved and the prices of land lowered. The special

326  |  Notes to Chapter 3 commission considering the draft law refused to replace administrative procedure with court examination and did not allow owners to appeal the decisions of valuation commissions in courts. “Po proektu novykh pravil o voznagrazhdenii za prinuditelnoe otchuzhdenie imuschestv,” in Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia. Osoboe soveshchanie dlia peresmotra zakona ob ekspropriatsii, St. Petersburg, 1900–­1903. 26. Alexander N. Nikitin, Zadachi Peterburga, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Shredera, 1904, pp. 145–­146. 27. Izvestiia St. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, no. 47 (1908), p. 2316. 28. Alexei N. Petunnikov, Puti soobschenia v gorode Moskve po vysochaishe utverzhdennomu planu regulirovaniia, Moscow: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1915, p. xxiv. 29. Evgenii A. Zviagintsev, Zemelnoe pereustroistvo v gorodakh, Moscow: “Zemlia i volia,” 1917, p. 8. 30. See “Delo ob otchuzhdenii iz vladenia A. S. Khomiakova 55.5 kv. sazhenei zemli dlia rasshirenia ul. Petrovki i Kuznetskogo pereulka,” Izvestia Moskovskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, no. 2 (1911); Matvei G. Dikanskii, Postroika gorodov, Petrograd: Karbasnikov, 1915, p. 25. 31. Izvestiia St. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, no. 17 (1876), p. 1963. 32. In western Europe, expropriation was often used for the resolution of social questions. The British Local Government Act (1894, art. 9) allowed the expropriation of land allotments for workers lodgings; the Elementary Education Act applied compulsory alienation for the construction of schools. A. E. Nolde, “O prinuditel’nom otchuzhdenii nedvizhimostei po angliiskomu pravu,” ZhMIu, no. 2 (1907), pp. 74, 103. The “public threat” of peasant land hunger was to the great extent a product of social construction, like other “public goods.” On the excessive fears of agrarian crisis, see E. Wilbur, “Russia’s Poverty in Theory and Practice: A View from Russia’s ‘Impoverished Center’ at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, edited by E. Kingstonn-­Mann and T. Mixter, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 101–­127; S. G. Wheatcroft, “Crises and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia,” ibid., pp. 128–­172. 33. In 1905, the professor Petr Migulin suggested expropriating between 20 and 25 million desiatinas of private land, beginning with uncultivated lands that were currently rented to local peasant societies. The Council of Ministers rejected this idea, but after another wave of peasant revolts, the head of government Sergei Witte initiated the elaboration of a new project of expropriation. At the end of 1905, the minister of agriculture Nikolai Kutler submitted a project suggesting a milder model of expropriation. 34. Avenir P. Korelin, “Stolypinskaia agrarnaia reforma v aspekte zemelnoi sobstvennosti,” Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii. Istoria i sovremennost’, p. 264. 35. The idea of a state fund of lands composed of state, church, and expropriated private lands appeared for the first time in the discussion on the agrarian question during the third congress of the “Liberation Union”—­the predecessor of the constitutional-­democratic party. The agrarian program of the Cadets was elaborated in October 1905 by a special commission and then approved with some

Notes to Chapter 3  |  327 corrections by the constituent conference. One of the corrections concerned the size of lands expropriated by “necessity” (v potrebnykh kolichestvakh)—­an amendment of the left radical party members. Alexander Kornilov, “Agrarnye zakonoproekty partii narodnoi svobody v sviazi s ee agrarnoi programmoi,” in Zakonodatelnye proekty i predlozhenia Partii Narodnoi Svobody, 1905–­1907, edited by N. I. Astrov, F. F. Kokoshkin, S. A. Muromtsev, P. I. Novgorodtsev, and D. I. Shakhovskoi, St. Petersburg: “Obshchestvennaia pol’za,” 1907, p. 368. 36. This formula assumed that the price of expropriated land would be defined “according to average profitability of land in a given area on the condition of self-­ dependent cultivation [that is, not according to rent profits] excluding the surplus of prices produced by land hunger.” This statement entered the text of the program approved by the third party congress. Ibid., pp. 371–­372. 37. “Proekt osnovnykh polozhenii agrarnoi reformy, vyrabotannyi agrarnoi komissiei,” CD Congresses, pp. 351–­353. 38. Agrarnyi vopros. Sbornik statei, edited by P. D. Dolgorukov and I. I. Petrunkevich, Moscow: “Beseda,” 1905, p. vi. 39. Ibid., p. xxix. 40. Lev A. Kasso, Russkoe pozemelnoe pravo, Moscow: “Pravovedenie,” 1906, p. 151. 41. Pavel I. Novgorodtsev, “Pravo na dostoinoe suschestvovanie,” in Pavel Novgorodtsev and Iosif Pokrovskii, O prave na sushchestvovanie, St. Petersburg/Moscow: M. O. Wolf, 1911, pp. 10–­11. 42. [Mikhail Gertsenstein’s summary of Petrazhitskii’s speech], in Debaty o zemle v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (1906–­1917). Dokumenty i materialy, edited by O. N. Lezhneva, V. I. Chernoivanov, and V. V. Shelokhaev, Moscow: 1995, p. 25. 43. “Iz rechi deputata L. I. Petrazhitskogo, 18 Maia 1906 g.” Ibid., pp. 16–­18. 44. Lev Kasso, Pozemel’noe pravo, p. 150; PSZIII, vol. VI, 1886, no. 3507. 45. “Spravka o polozhenii dela o vyrabotke obshchego vodnogo zakona,” RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 209, l. 8–­9; for governors’ petitions see: f. 426, op. 2, d. 18. 46. Predmetnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel k Polnomu svodu reshenii Grazhdanskogo kassatsionnogo departamenta Pravitelstvuiushchego Senata za 1866–­1910, edited by L. M. Rotenberg, ch. 1, Ekaterinoslav, 1913; no. 243 (1879), p. 200. Judging cases on contested rights to water, the Senate often came to conflicting decisions: in 1873, the Senate ruled that “all water streams not situated within one land estate are the common property” (obshchee dostoianie), but in 1878, protecting the right of landowners whose holdings were along navigable rivers, it pronounced that the law does not require “the transfer” of water in these rivers to the “common use.” Predmetnyi alfavitnyi ukazatel’, no. 200 (1878). 47. The initial project declared all waters that were not situated within one land estate to be the property of the public, but eventually a milder requirement for land-­and water-­owners to yield their rights for the benefits of other landowners and the state (with appropriate compensation) replaced that radical wording: the declaration of the public character of all waters borrowed from European legislation was seen as “new and alien” to Russian laws. “Doklad Komissii dlia rassmotrenia pravil o pol’zovanii vodami pri osushenii i obvodnenii, 1874,” in RGIA, f. 426, op. 2, d. 18, l. 16–­29, 64.

328  |  Notes to Chapter 3 48. Ibid., l. 198. 49. Zhurnal Komissii po vyrabotke obshchego vodnogo zakona dlia tselei osusheniia i orosheniia zemel’ [b.m., b.g.], p. 5. 50. Senat. Grazhdanskii Kassatsionnyi Departament. Resheniia Grazhdanskogo Kassatsionnogo Departamenta Pravitelstvuiushchego Senata za 1906, Ekaterinoslav: Tipografiia L. M. Rotenberga, no. 78 (1913), p. 187. 51. David Fleksor, Deistvuiushchee vodnoe pravo, p. 415. See a similar decision taken in no. 84 (1881), in ibid., pp. 417–­420. 52. At the same time, he was a head of the Western Expedition for the exploration and drainage of the marshes of Polesie (1873–­1903). 53. Ocherk rabot ekspeditsii po orosheniiu na Iuge Rossii i Kavkaze. Sostavlen nachalnikom ekspeditsii general–­leitenantom Zhilinskim, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Bezobrazova, 1892, p. 10. 54. Valentin S. Diakin, Dengi dlia selskogo khoziaistva, 1892–­1914. Agrarnyi kredit v ekonomicheskoi politike tsarisma, St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo SPbGU, 1997, p. 36. 55. Osobaia ekspeditsiia Lesnogo Departamenta po ispytaniiu i uchetu razlichnykh sposobov i priemov lesnogo i vodnogo khoziaistva v stepiakh Rossii. Predvaritelnyi otchet. Obshchii proekt opytnykh rabot ekspeditsii [December 28, 1892], St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 65. 56. Zapadnaia ekspeditsiia po osusheniu bolot. June 10, 1896. RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 209, l. 29ob. 57. Severnaia ekspeditsiia po osusheniiu bolot, September 20, 1896, RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 209, l. 71, 91–­96. 58. Iuzhnaia ekspeditsiia dlia orosheniia Iuga Rossii, RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 209. l. 97–­100. 59. PSZIII, vol. XVI, May 6, 1896, no. 12892. On this credit, see Valentin Diakin, Dengi dlia selskogo khoziaistva, pp. 43–­46. 60. In the 1890s, the zemstvo of Chernigov province initiated the drainage of large marsh called “Trubailo” that required digging canals of 37 versts (39 kilometers) across the lands of private landowners and peasant societies in Chernigov and Poltava provinces. Many private landowners and the zemstvo of neighboring Poltava province refused to negotiate on this project, and the contracts that the Chernigov zemstvo eventually managed to conclude turned out to be extremely vulnerable from the legal point of view because they did not rest on any general regulations. Ivan Miklashevskii, “Vodnoe zakonodatelstvo i pravo v Rossii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1895, bk. 8, pp. 140–­143. 61. RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 209, l. 481ob.–­482; see also the opinion of the Minister of the Interior, ibid., l. 499. 62. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Soedinennye departamenty. Zhurnal. November 17 and 24, 1901, Otchet po deloproizvodstvu Gosudarstvennogo Soveta za sessiiu 1901–­1902, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vtorogo otdelenia, 1903, pp. 394–­395. 63. On these committees, see Marlena S. Simonova, Krizis agrarnoi politiki tsarisma nakanune pervoi russkoi revolutsii, Moscow: Nauka, 1987, 10–­39; George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–­1930, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, 195–­206. 64. “Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoe Osoboe soveshchanie o nuzhdakh selskok­ hoziai­­

Notes to Chapter 3  |  329 stvennoi promyshlennosti,” in Vodnoe khoziaistvo. Svod trudov mestnykh komitetov po 49 guberniiam Evropeiskoi Rossii, edited by D. S. Shilkin, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. F. Kirshbauma, 1904, pp. 122–­133. 65. This rule did not concern water reservoirs located within one land allotment; for those cases, the agreement of the landowner was needed. 66. M. A. Volkov, “Po voprosu o prave utilizatsii zhivogo techeniia rek,” Doklad She­ stomu Vodoprovodnomu s’ezdu, August 1903, RGIA, f. 1293, op. 136, d. 240, ll. 2–­5, 9. 67. Pavel V. Ol’, Russkaia neft’ i ee gosudarstvennoe znachenie, St. Petersburg: “More,” 1905. Ol’ discussed the possibility of replacing British coal with Russian coal from Donetsk delivered from to St. Petersburg. He came to the conclusion that this idea was not economically reasonable, and suggested the construction of an oil pipeline to the capital. Still, the project of delivering the Donetsk’s coal to St. Petersburg was quite popular. 68. Nestor P. Puzyrevskii, Mysli ob ustroistve vodnykh putei v Rossii. S prilozheniem opisania vodnykh putei, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva Putei Soobshcheniia, 1906, pp. i–­ii. 69. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, pp. 192–­194. 70. The existing Berezinskaia system that connected the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea via the Western Dvina and Dnepr was used only for timber rafting. TsGIA Ukraine, f. 692, op. 20, 1910, d. 6; Sergei P. Maksimov, O Chernomorsko-­Baltiiskom vodnom puti, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva Finansov, 1907; Nikolai I. Maksimovich, Chernomosrsko-­Baltiiskii (Deniprovsko-­Zapadno-­Dvinskii) vodnyi put’ (Materialy dlia opisaniia russkikh rek i uluchsheniia ikh sudokhodnykh uslovii, vyp. 9), St. Petersburg: Upr-­e vnutrennikh vodnykh putei, 1905; Alexander A. Rusov, Kratkii ocherk istoricheskogo sudokhodstva po dneprovskim porogam. Materialy dlia statistiko-­ekonomicheskogo obsledovaniia Chernomorsko-­Baltiiskogo vodnogo puti, Kiev: Kievskii okrug putei soobshcheniia, 1912. Other projects elaborated in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries included (1) a waterway connecting the Baltic and White seas (Vsevolod E. Timonov, Vnutrennii russkii glubokii morskoi vodnyi put’ mezhdu Baltiiskim i Belym moriami, St. Peterburg: Min-­vo putei soobshcheniia, 1899; TsGIA SPb, f. 921, op. 95, d. 1193, “Po voprosu o provedenii Severnogo sudokhodnogo kanala soiediniaiushchego St. Peterburg s Severnym Okeanom”); and (2) the connection of Siberian rivers with European waterways—­first, a waterway between Ob’ and Pechora and Kama across the Ural Mountains (M. Smolenskii, O predpolagaemom soobshchenii mezhdu rekami Pechoroi i Obiu, Tobolsk: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1857; Boris V. Bessonov, Vodnyi put’ na Sibir’ po Vologodskoi gubernii, Vologda: Vologodskoe ob-­vo izucheniia severnogo kraia, 1910; N. Gerasimov, “Proekt Trans-­ Uralskogo (Kama-­ Tobolskogo) vodnogo puti,” Russkaia starina, 1911, no. 11), and many others. For a summary of these projects, see Kirill Zavadskii, Vodianye puti soobshcheniia Rossii. Sbornik predpolozhenii i proektov po uuchsheniiu vodianyhk putei Imperii rassmatrivavshikhsia v Glavnom upravlenii putei soobshcheniia i Ministerstve Putei Soobshcheniia so vremeni uchrezhdeniia vedomstva putei soobshcheniia do 1880 goda, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Mini­sterstva putei soobscheniia, 1884; E. F. Gershelman, Istoricheskii ocherk vnutrennikh vodianykh putei soobshchenii, St. Peters­burg: 1892; Franz I. Levandovskii, Nyneshnie i budushchie vnutrennie vodnye

330  |  Notes to Chapter 3 puti Rossii, St. Petersburg: “Russkoe sudokhodstvo,” 1905; Sergei M. Zhitkov, Proekty soedineniia vodnykh putei Rossii, St. Petersburg: Gos. tipografiia, 1908. 71. Vladimir A. Zlatolinskii, Vnutrennie vodnye puti Rossii i Germanii v voennom otnoshenii, St. Petersburg: V. Berezovskii, 1907. 72. A. V. Sapozhnikov, “Azotnaia kislota i selitra iz vozdukha,” Priroda, 1912: September, pp. 1094–­1114; October, pp. 1219–­1234; RGIA, f. 23, op. 17, d. 499 (applications for the construction of hydropower station on rivers Vyg and Kem’ and industrial production of nitric acid and saltpeter, companies “Severnyi belyi ugol’ ” and “Sila vod,” 1915). See also Michael D. Gordin, “A Modernization of ‘Peerless Homogeneity’: The Creation of Russian Smokeless Gunpowder,” Technology and Culture, vol. 44, no. 4 (October 2003), pp. 677–­702. 73. See “Khodataistvo gornopromyshlennika Bobritskogo,” RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d.4061, l. 2. 74. RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, ch. 2, d. 3151, Prosheniie kuptsa Nikolaia Falberga razreshit’ postroiku turbin na Faleevskom (Ekaterininskom) kanale na Nenasytinskom poroge Dnepra dlia proizvodstva kaltsium-­karbida i iz nego atsetilena dlia svetilnikov (1896); later applications: RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d. 4061, Po khodataistvu gornopromyshlennika Bobritskogo o predostavlenii emu v arendu vodopadov Kivach, Bervas i drugikh dlia utilizatsii gidravlicheskoi energii (1913). 75. Veniamin Dobrotvorskii, Snabzhenie St. Peterburga elektricheskoi energiei, peredannoi ot vodopadov Narvskogo i Imatry, Moscow: Tipografiia O. I. Lashkevich, 1895; “Snabzhenie goroda Sankt-­Peterburga elektricheskoi energuiei, peredannoi ot vodopadov “Narvskogo” i “Imatry,” Elektrichestvo, no. 4 (1896), p. 57. 76. Veniamin Dobrotvorskii, Elektroperedacha sily porogov Volkhova, Narovy, Imatry v St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg: Glavnoe Upravlenie Udelov, 1900 (Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo eletrotechnicheskogo s’ezda), p. 29. 77. According to A. A. Troitskii’s estimations, “white coal” of rivers around St. Petersburg could deliver up to 500,000 horsepower, sufficient to replace 120 million poods (1.9 million tons) of English coal imported to the capital. TsGIA SPb, f. 513, op. 56, d. 175, l. 5. 78. Calculations made by the commission on the exploitation of the power of falling water in industrial purposes (1903). V. I. Kovalevskii, “Neskolko slov o belom ugle i ego nuzhdakh,” Trudy Tretiego Vserossiiskogo elektrotekhnicheskogo s’ezda, 1903–­ 1904, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Postoiannyi komitet elektrotechnicheskikh s’ezdov, 1905, p. 121. 79. Nikolai Falberg’s project, RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, ch. 2, d. 3151, Prosheniie kuptsa Nikolaia Falberga razreshit’ postroiku turbin na Faleevskom (Ekaterininskom) kanale na Nenasytinskom poroge Dnepra dlia proizvodstva kaltsium-­karbida i iz nego atsetilena dlia svetilnikov (1896); and the project of British engineer George Wilson, 1898. See the project of concession published in RS, no. 9–­10, pp. 36–­43. 80. Veniamin Dobrotvorskii, 1894, and the project of his competitors, A. Finn and A. A. Kokushkin. See Valentin Diakin, Germanskie kapitaly v Rossii, Leningrad: Nauka, 1971, pp. 45–­46. 81. The period of concession varied from sixty to eighty-­five years. 82. See Ustav Sankt-­Peterburgskogo Obshchestva elektroperedachi sily vodopadov, utverzhden 13 iunia 1897, St. Petersburg, 1912; RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, ch. 2, d. 3151, l.

Notes to Chapter 3  |  331 37. New projects kept trickling in, and in a few years the government received dozens of offers to build hydropower stations on the Dnepr, Volkhov, and other rivers of Russia’s northwest (Karelia), Siberia, and especially in the Caucasus. 83. Thus was the conclusion of the commission created in 1893 by the Ministry of Transportation, which assumed the purchase of lands on the bank of Dnepr. TsGIA Ukraine, f. 692, op. 20, 1910, d. 6. l. 300ob. Engineer Dobrotvorskii, who designed the first project of a hydropower station on the Imatra and Narova, also suggested expropriation of lands. These projects did not take into account the necessity to expropriate water too. 84. See Ustav Sankt-­Peterburgskogo Obshchestva elektroperedachi sily vodopadov, utverzhden 13 iunia 1897, St. Petersburg, 1912. 85. RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, ch. 2, d. 3151, l. 37. 86. Trudy imperatorskogo obshchestva sudokhodstva. Protokoly obshchikh sobranii 19 noiabria i 10 dekabria 1899, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Goldberga, 1900, p. 27. 87. RGIA, f. 597, op. 2, d. 460, l. 243ob. 88. Nikolai V. Gerasimov published a series of papers in which he urged the government to delegate the “exploitation” of water resources to private investors. “Nevygodnost’ kazennoi ekspluatazii Dneprovskikh porogov,” in Po voprosy ob uluchshenii Dneprovskikh porogov, Trudy Obshchestva Sudokhodstva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Goldberga, 1900, pp. 5–­17. 89. Iuridicheskie soobrazheniia o prave gosudarstva na vody i o zhelatelnykh izmene­ niiakh deistvuiushchego zakonodatelstva po semu predmetu, RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d. 8834, l. 82. 90. On Karnitskii, see William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 155. 91. “Materialy dlia zakona o vodakh obschego polzovania, obrabotannye pod redaktsiei chlena komissii M. I. Sveshnikova,” Trudy Komissii po voprosu ob ob’eme prav gosudarstva na sudokhodnye reki. Trudy Imperatorskogo Obshchestva sudokhodstva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Goldberga, 1901. See also Polozhenia, vytekaiushchie iz russkogo zakonodatel’stva po vodnomu pravu. Trudy Imperatorskogo Obshchestva sudokhodstva, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Goldberga, 1900. 92. According to the new rules, landowners could not impede the construction of hydraulic enterprises on their lands. They were only entitled to appropriate compensation, defensible in court. 93. Vopros ob ispolzovanii sil Imatry, in Finliandskoi gazety, no. 273–­276 (1914). TsGA NTD, f. 375 (Graftio), op. 3–­1, d. 55, l. 6ob. 94. Trudy I Vserossiiskogo Elektrotekhnicheskogo s’ezda, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Komitet 1-­go elektrotekhnicheskogo s’ezda, 1901, pp. 200–­201. 95. Franz I. Levandovskii, K voprosu ob ustroistve sudokhodnogo puti v Dneprovskikh porogakh, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Usmanovoi, 1910, p. 6. 96. In 1903, the Ministry of Transportation set up another commission under the leadership of Senator P. A. Fadeev to elaborate the principles of concessions for the construction of hydropower stations. The commission produced a project of law on the exploitation of the water power. See Nikolai Zhankol’, “K voprosu ob ekspluatatsii sily vody v promyshlennykh tseliakh,” RS, no. 1, 24–­26 (1908). Two other ministries—­the Ministry of Finances and the Ministry of Justice—­supported the

332  |  Notes to Chapter 3 idea of changing the status of rivers. See V soveshchanie po vopsosam ob ekspluatatsii sily padenia vody v promyshlennykh tseliakh, RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d. 8834, ll. 221–­234ob. 97. Nikolai Zhankol’, “K voprosu ob ekspluatatsii sily vody v promyshlennykh tseliakh,” RS, no. 12 (1907), p. 63. 98. Rodion Gerngross, Vasilii Nechaev, and Mikhail Sveshnikov. 99. V soveshchanie po vopsosam ob ekspluatatsii sily padenia vody v promyshlennykh tseliakh, RGIA, f. 190, op. 4, d. 8834, ll. 221–­234. 100. Karp P. Litovchenko, Volkhov i kontsessiia na utilizatsiiu ego energii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Iu. N. Erlikh, 1908, p. 1. 101. Karp P. Litovchenko, “O prave gosudarstva na tekuchuiu vodu,” Trudy Tretiego Vserossiiskogo elektrotechnicheskogo s’ezda, 1903–­1904, vol. 2, no. 2, St. Petersburg, 1904, p. 35. Electric power, unlike the power of falling water, came to be considered a “thing.” On ownership of electricity, see V. I. Kovalevskii, “Neskolko slov o belom ugle i ego nuzhdakh,” Trudy Tretiego Vserossiiskogo elektrotechnicheskogo s’ezda, 1903–­1904, vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1905, p. 119. In 1902, the illegal use of electric power for lighting was for the first time qualified as theft (the case of the peasant Nikolai Ivanov). See P. I. Shapirer, “O prave sobstvennosti na elektricheskuiu energiiu,” Trudy Piatogo Vserossiiskogo elektrotechnicheskogo s’ezda, vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1909, p. 63. 102. There were quite a few opponents of the construction, even among industrialists. See, for instance, the protest of the Society for the Promotion of Industry and Trade in Zhankol’, “K voprosu ob ekspluatatsii sily vody,” RS, no. 12 (1907), p. 70. 103. Karp P. Litovchenko, Volkhov i kontsessiia na utilizatsiiu ego energii, p. 4; “Protokol soveshchania pri pravlenii SPb okruga putei soobshcheniia po rassmotreniiu ustava Volkhovskogo obshchestva elektricheskoi energii, July 18, 1907,” TsGIA SpB, f. 921, op. 95, d. 1020, l. 53ob. Considering in 1910 the project of the English entrepreneur Charles Stuart for the construction of a hydropower station on the Terek, the government reduced the term of concession from ninety-­nine to fifty years on this pretext. RGIA, f. 23, op. 12, d. 1302, l. 8ob. 104. See the protest of the Aleksandrovskoe zemstvo in Kiev province: “K voprosu o shliuzovanii Dneprovskikh porogov,” Trudy Imperatorskogo obshchestva sudokhodstva, St. Petersburg, 1902, p. 11. See also the subsequent protest of the Novgorod zemstvo against damming the Volkhov River, on the grounds that damming would hamper the passage of fish and affect the fishing business of the local population. TsGIA SpB, f. 921, op. 93, d. 1113, ll. 1, 28. Novgorodskaia gubernskaia zemskaia uprava nachalniku Petrogradskogo okruga putei soobshchenia, 1915. On the other hand, Kiev city self-­government feared that the government would give up the idea of improving navigation on the rapids and was ready to put up with the “necessary evil” of entrusting this enterprise even to a foreigner (the British engineer Wilson), but for a limited time only (twelve years). At the same time, the Kiev authorities warned of the necessity to purchase (expropriate) the “right to water” from coastal landowners, including the city itself. K voprosu o shliuzovanii Dneprovskikh porogov, p. 15. 105. See the discussion in Trudy imperatorskogo obshchestva sudokhodstva. Protokoly obshchikh sobranii 19 noiabria i 10 dekabria 1899, St. Petersburg, 1900, pp. 9–­27. On monopolization in the Russian electric industry, see Ernest O. Bukhgeim, K

Notes to Chapter 3  |  333 ekonomicheskomu osvobozhdeniiu Rossii putem elektrifikatsii ee territorii, Moscow: Pechatnia Yakovleva, 1915. 106. [Osoboe Soveshchanie o nuzhdakh selskokhoziaistvennoi promyshlennosti], Svod trudov mestnykh komitetov po 49 guberniiam Evropeiskoi Rossii. Vodnoe khoziaistvo, sostavil D. S. Shilkin, St. Peterburg: Tipografiia F. Kirshbauma, 1904, pp. 64–­65. For the same idea on municipalization of electric enterprises, see Ernest O. Bukhgeim, K ekonomicheskomu osvobozhdeniiu Rossii putem elektrifikatsii ee territorii, Moscow: Pechatnia Yakovleva, 1915, p. 32. 107. “Doklad podgotovitelnoi komissii o peredache gidravlicheskoi energii vodopadov reki Vuoksy v Sankt-­Peterburg,” Izvestiia Sankt-­Peterburgskoi Dumy, no. 14 (1905). 108. See Leon Duguit’s analysis of different views on the status of res publicae: Droit Constitutionnel. Quote from Russian translation: Konstitutsionnoe pravo. Obshchaia teoriia gosudarstva, Moscow: Tovarishchestvo Sytina, 1908, pp. 147–­148. 109. “Moskovskoe iuridicheskoe obshchestvo v 1893 godu [Protokol zasedaniia 22 noiabria 1893 g],” Sbornik pravovedeniia i obshchestvennykh znanii. Sbornik Iuridicheskogo obshchestva sostoiashchego pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom universitete, vol. 3, Moscow: Khronika, 1894, pp. 111–­124. 110. Petr Kazanskii, Dogovornye reki. Ocherki istorii i teorii mezhdunarodnogo rechnogo prava, Kazan’: Tipografiia Kazanskogo universiteta, 1895, pp. 99, 101. 111. Kazanskii referred to an essay by Raymond Saleilles (Raymond Saleilles, Le domaine public à Rome et son application en matière artistique, Paris, 1889) on the public domain in Rome that argued that “even in Roman law public things were not res nullis, but the state’s property [gosudarstvennaia sobstvennost’].” Compare with the opposite interpretation given by Vasilii Yeliashevitch in his purely theoretical analysis of Roman res publicae. Vasilii Yeliashevich, Iuridicheskoe litso, ego proiskho­ zhdenie i funktsii v rimskom chastnom prave, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Shredera, 1910, p. 39. In the case of water law, the reliance on Roman tradition was especially important for European legislators. For example, French lawyers until the end of the nineteenth century consulted Roman sources to clarify the status of certain objects of contested public/private possession. Frederic Hubert, De la delimitation du domaine public, p. 3. The developing interest in Roman law at the end of the nineteenth century also contributed to the conceptualization of public property in Russia. On the transformative function of the study of Roman law, see Darrell P. Hammer, “Russia and the Roman Law,” American Slavic and East European Review, vol. 16, no. 1. (February 1957), pp. 1–­13. A good example of referring to the delimitation of private and public spheres in Roman law as a model for imitation is Pavel Sokolovskii, Retseptsia rimskogo grazhdanskogo prava u sovremennykh narodov i ego priamoe znachenie dlia Rossii, Kiev: Tipografiia Universiteta Sv. Vladimira, 1891. 112. Petr Kazanski, Dogovornye reki, p. 109. 113. On this commission and its program of reforming Russian civil law, see more in William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, pp. 149–­169. 114. Grazhdanskoe ulozhenie. Proekt Vysochaische uchrezhdennoi Redakzionnoi Komissii po sostavleniiu Grazhdanskogo Ulozhenia, edited by I. M. Tiutriumov, vol. 1, St, Petersburg: Izdanie knizhnogo magazina “Zakonovedenie,” 1910, p. 70. 115. Comments of the acting minister of Agriculture and State Domain, October 31, 1903. Svod zamechanii na proekt knigi tretiei Grazhdanskogo Ulozhenia o

334  |  Notes to Chapter 3 votchinnom prave, St. Petersburg, 1903, p. 300; a similar opinion was expressed by the minister of war, ibid., p. 34. 116. “In all Western European legislation in modern times, there has been a tendency to place individual property within certain boundaries and to restore the rights of the state and society in that sphere of public rights which in the old days, due to habitual misunderstandings and formalistic interpretations by lawyers, was included in the realm of private rule. This tendency is evoked not by some arbitrary theories and ideas, but by a mighty cultural growth of state and national life, the wide development of international economic relations and connections, and a clear understanding that the public and state sphere serve as a reliable safeguard of the future interests of the nation. Our Commission for the elaboration of the Civil Code follows the opposite path, it narrows the sphere of the public and broadens the sphere of the private and individual, and even attributes to it what had been undoubtedly located outside the market.” (In that last passage, Slonimskii meant the newly introduced right of the landowner to protect the airspace over his or her land.) Ibid., p. 31. 117. Georgii K. Guins, Osnovnye nachala proekta vodnogo zakona dlia Turkestana, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vaisberga i Pershunina, 1912, p. 12. 118. Vysochaishe uchrezhdennaia pri Ministerstve Iustizii osobaia mezhduvedomstvennaia Komissia dlia peresmotra zakonodatelstva po vodnomu pravu, Zhurnal 1, 2, St. Petersburg: 1907, 1909. 119. In 1902–­1917, the ministry published 73 volumes of the “Materials for the Description of Russian Rivers.” 120. [Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia], Trudy komissii po elektrogidravlicheskoi opisi vodnykh sil Rossii, no. 1 (1909–­1910), St. Petersburg, 1911. 121. In 1910, a new project of engineers Alfred Rundo and Dmitrii Iuskevich received experts’ approval, so the main question was how to alienate water for the production of hydropower. Zhurnaly Komissii po voprosu ob uluchshenii Dneprovskikh porogov. 1 fevralia 1910. Materialy dlia opisaniia russkikh rek i uluchshenia ikh sudokhodnykh uslovii, no. 26, pp. 2–­28. The ministry planned to issue special “water” state-­loan bonds (vodianoi zaem), similar to the railroad state loans of the 1880s. Engineer Ivan Rozov reworked this project in 1914. On these and other projects, see Vadim M. Malyshev, Istoriia problemy ispolzovaniia porozhistoi sily Dnepra. VSNKH SSSR. Glavelektro. Gosudarstvennoe Dneprovskoe stroitelstvo. Materialy k proektu I. G. Aleksandrova, no. 2, Moscow: 1925, pp. 93–­127. 122. See also their request for the exploration of Dnepr: TsGIA Ukraine, f. 692, op. 20 (1912), d. 50. 123. RGIA, f. 597, op. 2, d. 460. Materialy sindikata DVD obrazovannogo dlia izyskanii i sostavlania proekta sooruzhenia Dneprovskogo i Volgo-­Donskogo kanala, ll. 121, 234–­236. 124. TsGIA SPb, f. 225. op. 1, d. 6965. Reports for 1915 and 1916. 125. See Valentin Diakin, Germanskie kapitaly v Rossii, Leningrad: Nauka, 1971, pp. 151–­ 183, 243–­249; Timo Myllyntaus, “Electrical Imperialism or Multinational Cooperation? The Role of Big Business in Supplying Light and Power to St. Petersburg Prior to 1917,” Business and Economic History, vol. 26 (Winter 1997), no 2, pp. 540–­549. 126. In 1912, the government approved the concession for the construction of a hydropower station in Transcaucasia. Charles Henry Stuart received permission to build his hydroelectric plant on state land on the Terek River, in Georgia. This project,

Notes to Chapter 3  |  335 however, did not require the expropriation of lands and waters (RGIA, f. 23, op. 12, d. 1302; CHA Georgia, f. 365, op. 1, d. 516). After the approval of Stuart’s concession, the government received dozens of new offers from industrialists. From 1912 to April 1914, the office of the viceroy of the Caucasus considered forty-­three projects (CHA Georgia, f. 365, op. 1, d. 543. Opis del po ispol’zovaniiu vodnoi sily rek Kavkaza). In 1916, the State Council supported another initiative to use state lands on the Rion River (I. N. Urbanovich and S. S. Palashkovskii, Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Vtoroi Departament, Zhurnaly, Sessii 1915–­1916, [Petrograd, 1916], pp. 173–­176). 127. [Gosudarstvennaia Duma, IV sozyv, Ministeristvo putei soobshcheniia], Komissiia dlia rassomtreniia zakonoproekta ob assignovanii kredita na raboty po shliuzovaniu porozhistoi chasti Dnepra. Jan.25, 1914. Doklad komissii, Dokladchik V. Nekrasov, [St. Petersburg, 1914]. 128. Ibid., p. 10. 129. Zakliuchenie iuridicheskoi chasti Upravleniia vnutrennikh vodnykh putei i shos­ seinykh dorog po voprosu o razreshenii predpriatii, imeiushikh sredstvom ispol’zovat’ electricheskuiu energiu na rekakh obshchego pol’zovania, [St. Petersburg, 1912]. 130. RGIA, 426, op. 3, d. 524, Obiasnitelnaia zapiska k proektu zakova ob obiavlenii sredotochii sily padeniia vody ili prostranstv vodnykh techenii prigodnykh dlia obrazovaniia oznachennykh sredotochii imeiushimi godudarstvennoe ili obschestvennoe znachenie, l. 57. See also [Ministerstvo putei soobshchenia], Zakono­proekty, vnesennye MPS v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu Chetvertogo sozyva. Sessia 4, [St. Petersburg, 1916]. Putilov and Davidov might not have known about this projected law—­otherwise, they would not have spent money on the purchase of the Dnepr’s waterpower from landowners. 131. The administration of Transcaucasia elaborated a similar project that was allegedly more suitable for local conditions. CHA Georgia, f. 365, op. 1, d. 275. 132. [Vysochaishe uchrezhdennaia pri Ministerstve Iustitsii osobaia mezhduvedomstvennaia Komissiia dlia peresmotra zakonodatelstva po vodnomu pravu], Zhurnal 1, [St. Petersburg, 1907], pp. 10–­11, Zhurnal 2, [St. Petersburg, 1909], pp. 10, 21. 133. Еvgenii Palitsyn, Ozero Ilmen’ i reka Volkhov v sviazi s proektom shliuzovaniia i ispolzovaniia energii padeniia vody, p. 316. 134. See more in Ekaterina Pravilova, “The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 353–­386. 135. In 1854, it added to the Russian Code of Civil Laws a note saying that in Transcaucasia water relations were governed on the basis of “local traditions.” The incompatibility of water laws and the inability to find common ground for imperial and local rules forced the Russian government to hand control of water management over to experienced locals—­elected water judges and managers (merabes and aryk-­aksakals). 136. For example, one of the most ambitious offers submitted by Baron Tornau in 1864 (Society of Caucasian Industry) assumed that the society would be trading irrigation water “as its property” to private householders, societies, and state institutions. CHA Georgia, f. 241, op. 3, d. 29, l. 27. 137. After his term as the head of Caucasian branch of the Ministry of State Domains, in 1894 Tikheev received an appointment as the director of the Department of Land Properties—­the key position at the ministry. In the late 1890s, he was involved in the ministry’s initiatives on the colonization of Siberia.

336  |  Notes to Chapter 3 138. Peter Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 151–­179. 139. This initiative faced strong resistance from local officials, who declared that no one even knew which forests, lands, and so on belonged to the state domain and which belonged to the population. As a member of the general-­governor’s council pointed out, “the country naturally belonged first of all to its population, as neither the real owners of lands, nor state institutions had documents [confirming ownership] then obviously . . . the question about the property of lands is disputable and the accusations of theft—­doubtful.” “Ob upravlenii gosudarstvennymi imuschestvami na Kav­kaze,” CHA Georgia, f. 12. op. 8, d. 96, l. 4. This was another aspect of the problem: the government knew very little about its properties, especially in the borderlands, and only in the 1880s did it start inventorying its possessions. 140. Ob’iasnitelnaia zapiska k proektu polozhenia o prave na vodu i o poriadke oroshenia zemel’ v Zakavkazie [b.m., b.g.—­offprint in the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia], p. 19. See also CHA Georgia, f. 243, op. 5, d. 3. 141. Vsepoddanneishy doklad Ministra Gosudarstvennykh Imuschestv po poezdke na Kav­kaz v 1883 godu, St. Petersburg, 1884, p. 33. 142. Dokladnaia zapiska Upolnomochennogo ministra gosudarstvennykh imushestv na Kavkaze d.t.s. Tikheeva—­M. N. Ostrovskomu, October 4, 1883, CHA Georgia, f. 243, op. 5, d. 3, l. 43. 143. Ibid., l. 310. 144. Among the strong supporters of Tikheev’s viewpoint in the commission was Victor Dingelstedt: an expert on irrigation, he published a number of works on water law in Russia’s arid borderlands, European countries, and their Asian colonies. Three members of the team spoke out against the total governmentalization of water and impudent expropriation of water rights of landowners. Tikheev’s colleagues at the Ministry of State Domain suggested more moderate wording for the first article: all waters are in common use under the state’s supervision. 145. Dmitrii Tolstoy, the head of the Ministry of Interior, warned against overestimating the role of the government and suggested replacing the expression that water in Transcaucasia is “at the disposal of the government” with the milder “under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Domain.” CHA Georgia, f. 243, op. 5, d. 3, l. 321–­322. 146. Ibid., l. 95. 147. PSZIII, vol. X, 1890, pt. 1, December 3, 1890, no. 7255. 148. George Constantine Guins, Professor and Government Official: Russia, China, and California. An interview conduced by Boris Raymond, Berkeley: University of California, The Bancroft Library, Regional Oral History Office, 1966, p. 82 [hereafter, Guins, Memoirs]. I am very grateful to Peter Holquist who told me about this wonderful source and shared with me his notes and copies from Guins’s memoirs. 149. Georgii K. Guins, Deistvuiushchee vodnoe pravo Turkestana i budushchii vodnyi zakon. Otchet Pereselencheskomu upravleniu o komandirovke letom 1909 goda v Semierchie, St. Petersburg, 1910. 150. Guins, Memoirs, pp. 69, 82. 151. Konstantin K. Pahlen, Otchet po revizii Turkestanskogo kraia, vol. IX, Oroshenie v Turkestane. Prilozhenie: Svedenia ob obychaiakh vodopolzovania, St. Petersburg:

Notes to Chapter 3  |  337 Senatskaia tipografiia, 1910. See also Programma sobirania materialov, obosnovannykh na obychnom prave, neobkhodimykh dlia razrabotki novogo vodnogo zakona, RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 499, l. 252. 152. Georgii Guins, Deistvuiushchee vodnoe pravo Turkestana, p. 11. 153. The draft law accurately described the conditions and procedures for acquiring the user rights. The mechanism of acquisition was based on the principle of corresponding rights between ownership of land and water. 154. Guins argued that in Turkestan land allotments were very small and it was hardly possible to find an example of “inner” water streams and reservoirs. Georgii Guins, Deistvuiushee vodnoe pravo Turkestana, p. 41. 155. Georgii Guins, “Osnovnye nachala vodnogo zakona dlia Turkestana,” Voprosy kolonizatsii, no. 9 (1911), p. 6. 156. Protokol mezhduvedomstvennogo soveshchania po rassmotreniiu proekta “Polozheniia o pol’zovanii vodami dlia orosheniia v Turkestanskom general–­ gubernatorstve,” RGIA, f. 565, op. 7, d. 26816, l. 247. 157. Ibid., l. 247. 158. Ibid., ll. 247, 237. 159. Ibid., l. 247. 160. Ibid., l. 237. 161. Obiasnitelnaia zapiska k proektu “Polozhenia o polzovanii vodami dlia selsko–­ khoziaistvennykh i promyshlenno-­tekhnicheskikh tselei v Turkestanskom general–­ gubernatorstve,” ibid., l. 144. 162. In fact, it turned out that there was no unanimous “Muslim” concept of water ownership allegedly denying private ownership of water. In many regions of “core” Turkestan, with its settled indigenous population (for instance, in the Samarkand province), private water rights were accepted both in practice and in “theory” (in the interpretations of Shari’a). See Konstantin Pahlen, Otchet po revizii Turkestanskogo kraia, vol. IX, Orosheniie. Prilozheniia. Svedeniia ob obychaiakh vodopolzovaniia. 163. Chronicle, “Proekt vodnogo zakona dlia Turkestana,” Zhurnal Ministerstva putei soobsheniia, 1910, bk. VI, p. 143. 164. Peter Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes,” p. 161. 165. Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–­1914, Houndmills, UK: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 119–­122. 166. Ibid., p. 121. 167. Predstavlenie GUZiZ 31 ianvaria 1913 [draft submitted by the Central Department of Agriculture on January 31, 1913], in [Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 4 sozyv. 4 sessiia], Prilozheniia k stenograficheskim otchetam, no. 3, Petrograd, 1916, no. 116, Commission on Agriculture. 168. See more on irrigational policy in Central Asia, Muriel Joffe, “Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire: The Politics of Irrigation,” Russian Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (July 1995, pp. 365–­388. Russian industrialists felt that they would not benefit from the “public” ownership of water and tried to oppose the passage of this law, since the state “supreme command” of water resources, coupled with the restriction of private land holding, signified the monopolization of all resources of Turkestan. “It is hardly possible to imagine a more absolute possession in the world,” said the official

338  |  Notes to Chapter 3 proclamation of the Union of Industry and Trade. Cotton manufacturers compared the water law with the English policies in Egypt, where the state, too, treated water as public property, but at the same time promoted private land property and encouraged private irrigation activity. Another example came from the United States, which also faced the need for large-­scale irrigation. “And for that reason, there is a law that declares water to be public, but not state property.” “Pravitel­stvennaiia orositelnaiia politika i zakonoproekt o pol’zovanii vodami,” RGIA, f. 404 (Cotton Committee), op. 1, d. 5, ll. 6–­7. Only the lessening of state tutelage and state intervention in the economic life of the region could promote the development of the cotton industry, irrigation, and Russian colonization in Turkestan, claimed the manufacturers, even as the water law for Turkestan moved in the opposite direction. 169. Iz rechi deputata Mikhaila Ia. Gertsensteina, 18 Maia 1906. Debaty o zemle v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (1906–­1917). Dokumenty i materialy, edited by V. I. Chernoivanov and V. V. Shelokhaev, Moscow: Rossiiskii nezavisimyi institut sotsialnykh i natsionalnykh problem, 1995, p. 30. 170. CD Congresses, p. 569. 171. Agrarnyi vopros, p. xxv. More to the point, the total nationalization of land would destroy the institute of private property (while expropriation wouldn’t) and burden the state with immense financial expenses. 172. CD Congresses, p. 142. 173. See, for instance, Iosif Pokrovskii’s study “Private Defense of Public Interests in Ancient Rome” (I. A. Pokrovskii, “Chastnaia zaschita obshchestvennykh interesov v drevnem Rime,” in Sbornik statei po istorii prava, posviaschennyi M. F. Vladimirskomu-­Budanovu, Kiev: Tipografiia Kulzhenko, 1904). Pokrovskii analyzes the Roman tradition of private accusation for criminal and state crimes that was based on the premise that an interest becomes public when someone takes the responsibility to defend it. Pokrovskii emphasized that the “greatness” and “beauty” of this idea was in its capacity to reflect the cohesiveness of society and at the same time also to respect the individual. 174. See, for instance, Yurii Gambarov, Dobrovolnaia i bezvozmezdnaia deiiatelnost’ v chuzhom interese, no. 2, Sotsiologicheskoe osnovanie instituta negotorum gestio, Мoscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1880; Iosif Pokrovskii “Prinuditelnyi al’truism. Odin iz noveischikh tsivilisticheskikh eksperimentov. Doklad v Kiev­ skom iuridicheskom obschestve,” Vestnik prava, no. 2 (1902), pp. 1–­31. 175. Richard Wortman, “Property Rights, Populism, and Russian Political Culture,” in Civil Rights in Russia, edited by Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 31. 176. Iz rechi tovarichsha vnutrennikh del V. I. Gurko, 19 maia 1906, Debaty o zemle v Gosudarsvennoi Dume, p. 54. 177. In a review of the “newest theories on property” published in 1904, A. E. Nolde emphasized the rejection of the “absolute” nature of possession. A. E. Nolde, “Obzor noveishikh uchenii o prave sobstvennosti,” Vestnik prava, no. 2 (1904). 178. Taburiesh claimed that “there is nothing less scientifically grounded than the absolute opposition of individual and collective property. Individual property concerns the interests of society at many points and always betrays its more or less distinct collective character. For its part, collective property, too, is always in a certain sense

Notes to Chapter 4  |  339 individual.” Taburiesh, “Poniatie individualnoi i kollectivnoi sobstvennosti,” Russkaia vysshaiia shkola obschestvennykh nauk v Parizhe, edited by Ye. V. de-­Roberti, Yu. Gambarov, and M. M. Kovalevskii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Altshulera, 1905, pp. 395, 398. 179. William Wagner, “Family Law, the Rule of Law, and Liberalism in Late Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Ost Europas, n.s., vol. 1, no. 43 (1995), p. 533.

Chapter 4 Inventing National Patrimony 1. Russian historiography of the historical heritage’s protection is fairly large. See, for instance, Yurii G. Galai, Zemli rodnoi minuvshaia sudba. Okhrana istoriko–­ kulturnogo naslediia v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, Nizhnii Novgorod: Izdatelstvo Nizhegorodskogo gosuniversiteta im N. I. Lobachevskogo, 2008; Irina I. Komarova, Zakonodatelstvo po okhrane pamiatnikov kultury (istoriko–­pravovoi aspect), Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1989; Avram M. Razgon, “Okhrana istoricheskikh pamiatnikov v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii,” Iz istorii muzeinogo dela v SSSR, Moscow: Goskult­ prosvet, 1957, pp. 73–­127; Pamiatniki arkhitektury dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: ocherki istorii arkhitekturnoi restavratsii, edited by Alexander S. Shchenkov, Moscow: “Terra–­Knizhnyi klub,” 2002 [hereafter, Pamiatniki arkhitektury]; Imperatorskaia Arkheologicheskaia Komissiia: 1859–­1917: u istokov otechestvennoi arkheologii i okhrany kul’turnogo naslediia, edited by Alexander E. Musin and Evgenii N. Nosov, St. Petersburg: DB, 2009 [hereafter, IAC], ch. 1, 13. Two recent books approach the history of Russian historical heritage from a cultural perspective. Both, however, deal with the early period: Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, edited by Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Leiden, The Netherlands/Boston: Brill, 2010; Andreas Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. 2. See, among many other works on this subject, Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009; Anastasia Tumanova, Obshchestvennye organizatsii i russkaia publika v nachale XX veka, Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008. 3. On the phenomenon of dilletantism in art criticism and art history, see Irina Zolotinkina, “Sotrudniki zhurnala ‘Starye gody’ i problema diletantizma v otechestvennoi nauke ob iskusstve v nachale XX veka,” Izvestiia RGPU imeni A. I. Herzena. Aspirantskie tetradi, no. 36 (2008), pp. 76–­82. On the relationship between professionals and nonprofessionals in the sphere of art collecting and archaeology in Britain, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional. Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–­1886, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 4. The most notorious was the rivalry between Russia’s two main archaeological institutions—the “public” Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society (founded in 1864), led from 1884 until the revolution by the virulent Countess Praskovia Uvarova and the “governmental” Imperial Archaeological Commission (founded in 1859) in St. Petersburg under the leadership of Count Alexei Bobrinskii (1886–1917): both institutions pursued common goals and applied similar concepts and ideas in the

340  |  Notes to Chapter 4 struggle with the same “enemies.” The third (by importance and the scale of activity) “specialized” institution was the Russian Archaeological Society. The archaeologists from the Imperial Archaeological Commission did not always get along with experts from the Academy of Arts, also involved in preservationist activity. On the activity of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, see Arkheologiche­ skaia Komissiia: 1859–­ 1917: u istokov otechestvennoi arkheologii i okhrany kul’turnogo naslediia. On the competition between the Moscow Archaeological Society and the Imperial Archaeological Commission, see Igor L. Tikhonov, “Kak possorilis’ Sergei Grigorievich i Aleksei Sergeevich” (K voprosu ob istokakh konflikta mezhdu Arkheologicheskoi Komissiei i Moskovskim Arkheologicheskim Obshchestvom), In Situ. K 85-­letiu professora A. D. Stoliara, St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo SPbGU, 2006, pp. 358–­371. On the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society, see Istoria Imperatorskogo Russkogo Arkheologicheskogo Obshchestva za pervoe piatidesiatiletie ego sushchestvovania. 1846–­1896, edited by Nikolai I. Veselovskii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Gl. Upravlenia Udelov, 1900. A similar jubilee edition on the Moscow Archaeological Society is Imperatorskoe Moskov­skoe Arkheologicheskoe Obshchestvo v pervoe piatidesiatiletie ego sushchestvovania (1864–­1914), edited by P. S. Uvarova and N. I. Borozdin, vol. 2, Moscow: Skoropechatnia A. A. Levensona, 1915. On the preservationist activity of the Imperial Academy of Arts, see Vladimir G. Lisovskii, Akademia Khudozhestv i okhrana pamiatnikov zodchestva v Rossii (XIX—­nachalo XX verka), St. Petersburg: Institut imeni Repina, 1993. 5. See, for instance, Leo Tostoy’s influential essay “What Is Art?”: L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v dvad­tsati dvukh tomakh, vol. 15, Moscow: 1983, pp. 41–­221. 6. See Andreas Schönle, “Introduction. Heritage Matters: (De-­)Mobilizing Monuments and (Mis-­)Shaping Identities,” Slavic Review, vol. 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 746, 763–­765. 7. Alexander I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. XX, bk. 1, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960, p. 62, quoted in Alexander Formozov, “Kogda i kak skladyvalis’ sovremennye predstavleniia o pamiatnikakh russkoi istorii,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 10 (1976), p. 207. 8. As the Soviet art historian Tatiana Slavina observed, this method was itself borrowed from comparative linguistics. Tatiana A. Slavina, Issledovateli russkogo zodchestva. Russkaia istoriko–­arkhitekturnaia nauka 18–­nachala 20 vv. Leningrad: Izdatelstvo LGU, 1983, p. 69. 9. Anna V. Suslova and Tatiana A. Slavina, Vladimir Suslov, Leningrad: Stroiizdat, 1978, p. 23. 10. Pavel Muratov, “Otkrytiia drevnerusskogo iskusstva,” in Drevnerusskaia zhivopis’. Istoriia otkrytiia i issledovaniia, Moscow: Airis-­Press, Laguna-­Art, 2005, p. 29. 11. Okhrana pamiatnikov istorii i kul’tury v Rossii XVIII–­nachala XX vv. Sbornik dokumentov, edited by K. M. Peskareva et al., Moscow, 1978 [hereafter, Okhrana], no. 19, p. 39. 12. Petr P. Pokryshkin. V Obshchestvo khudozhnikov arkhitektorov chlena ego P. P. Pokryshkina, 3 October 1905, IIMK Arkhiv, f. 21, op. 1, d. 6, l. 3. 13. Apparently, that was the initial meaning of the word “monument” (pamiatnik). See, for instance, the article on “Historical Monuments in Russia” published in the Russian Herald in 1809 (Russkii vestnik, no. 1 [January 1809], pp. 3–­20). On

Notes to Chapter 4  |  341 the difference between “intentional” and “unintentional” monuments, see Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” Oppositions, vol. 25, no. 2 (Fall 1982), pp. 21–­22. 14. Tsirkuliar MVD gubernatoram 6 sentiabria 1901 g. o dostavlenii svedenii o drevnikh zdaniach i pamiatnikakh stariny, RGIA, f. 789, op. 13, 1904, d. 197. ll. 73ob–­74. 15. See the analysis of that particular interest in the “Petersburg period” of Russian art in Mark Etkind’s biography of Alexander Benois. Mark Etkind, A. N. Benois i russkaia khudozhestvennaia kultura konza XIX–­nachaka XX veka, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1989, pp. 78–­83; on Russian neoclassicism, see Grigorii I. Revzin, Neoklassitsizm v arkhitekture nachala XX veka, Moscow: VNIITAG, 1992; Vladimir G. Lisovskii, Ivan Fomin i metamorfozy russkoi neoklassiki, Sankt-­Peterburg: Kolo, 2008. 16. Vladimir V. Suslov, Nashi potrebnosti po voprosam iskusstva. Dolkad na pervom s’ezde russkikh zodchikh, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Kholmskogo, p. 2. 17. Vladimir V. Suslov, “O sokhranenii pamiatnikov iskusstva v Rossii s poloviny 18 stoletiia do poloviny 19 st.,” Stroitel’, no. 16 (1905); “Zaiavlenie chlena akademii V. V. Suslova o sokhranenii pamiatnikov russkogo iskusstva s poloviny 18 stoletiia do poloviny 19 stoletiia,” April 16, 1899, RGIA, f. 789, op. 12, 1899, “z,” d. 23. Upon Suslov’s suggestion, in 1901 the Academy of Arts set up a commission for the preservation of monuments of Russian architecture from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, ibid., l. 32. 18. For the discussion on the meaning of “art-­value”—­absolute and relative—­see Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” p. 23. 19. “ ‘Ia bezzavetno sluzhil iskusstvu vsiu svoiu zhizn.’ Iz vospominanii akademika arkhitektury V. V. Suslova. Publikatsiia A. K. Bonitenko,” Liudi i sud’by na rubezhe vekov, Vospominaniia, dnevniki, pisma. 1895–­1925, St. Petersburg: “Liki Rossii,” 2002, p. 150. 20. Petr Pokryshkin, “Raport predsedateliu Imperatorskoi Arkheologicheskoi Komissii,” 1913, p. 22. 21. Ibid., p. 1. 22. Ibid., p. 22. 23. Quoted from Vladimir G. Leontovich, O nebkhodimosti sokhraneniia starykh tserkvei, Zhitomir: Volynskaia gubernskaia Tipografiia, 1913, p. 3. 24. Galina V. Dluzhnevskaia, “Fotografy Imperatorskoi Arkheologicheskoi Komissii,” Arkheologicheskie vesti, no. 14 (2007), pp. 245–­258. 25. Georgii Lukomskii, “Pismo v redaktsiiu,” SG, June 1913, p. 71. 26. Otchet o deiatelnosti obshchestva zashchity i sokhraneniia v Rossii pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny za 1912 god, St. Petersburg, 1913, pp. 35–­41. 27. Alexander Rostislavov, “Organizatsiia inspektsii,” SG, March 1914, p. 38. 28. The attempts of Russian scholars to create a photographic inventory of Russian monuments was reminiscent of the activity of French “Mission Héliographique” established in 1851 to preserve “the image of France’s vanishing architectural heritage.” See M. Christine Boyer, “La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003, pp. 21–­54. I thank Devin Fore for the reference to this work.

342  |  Notes to Chapter 4 29. Pavel Muratov, Otkrytiia drevnerusskogo iskusstva, p. 36. 30. For centuries, the traditional practice of “renewing” icons entailed putting another layer or even drawing a new image on the old icon, and covering it with olifa—­oil varnish that darkened with time. 31. Alexander Benois, [Introduction], Khudozhestvennye sokrovishcha Rossii, no. 1 (1901), p. 1. 32. Absolutely all editions of this sort were financially unsustainable. See, for instance, the memoirs of Peter Veiner, the editor of The Bygone Years (Starye Gody): Petr P. Veiner. Bibliograficheskie listki, “Starye Gody.” Ikh istoria i kritika en connaissance de cause (kommentarii), St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2008. 33. Alexander Rostislavov, “O neobkhodimosti registratsii,” SG, March 1913, pp. 48–­49. 34. Georgii Lukomskii, “Obshchestvo zachshity pamiatnikov iskusstva,” Apollon, no. 4 (1913), pp. 48–­49; idem, “Pismo v redaktsiiu,” SG, June 1913, p. 71. See the response to this critique: [P. V.], “Obshchestvo zashchity i registratsiia,” SG, May 1913, pp. 50–­51. 35. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 186, 1901, dela po arkheologii, d. 11“v,” ll. 22, 26ob. 36. Andreas Schönle, “Introduction. Heritage Matters: (De-­)Mobilizing Monuments and (Mis-­)Shaping Identities,” p. 738. 37. Laura Englestein, “Between Art and Icon: Aleksandr Ivanov’s Russian Christ,” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009, p. 155. 38. Pamiatniki arkhitektury, p. 15. Peter the Great was first to ban the demolition of historical monuments. Interestingly, Peter the Great’s first order on the preservation of architectural monuments concerned not medieval Russian churches, but the ruins of Bulgaria—­a medieval Islamic state on the banks of the Volga River (1720). He likewise banned the melting down of gold objects found in old burial mounds in Siberia and ordered that all “curiosities” be sent to St. Petersburg (1720)—­along with the bodies of monstrous animals. In 1720 and 1722, he ordered that ancient Russian manuscripts and chronicles be collected in dioceses and monasteries and sent to the Senate. PSZI, vol. VI, no. 3693 (December 20, 1720); no. 3908 (February 16, 1722). 39. Shirley A. Glade, “A Heritage Discovered Anew: Russia’s Reevaluation of Pre-­ Petrine Icons in the Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Period,” Canadian-­American Slavic Studies, vol. 26, no. 1–­3 (1992), pp. 149–­195. 40. On the attempts at regulating icon painting, see Andrew Jenks, Iconography, Power, and Expertise in Imperial Russia, Seattle: Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 2004. 41. According to local legend, the church was built on Ivan the Terrible’s headquarters during his raid against Kazan in 1552. V. Ya. Chernyshev asserts that the legend was a plot of local folklore. On the early history of the church, see Vladimir Ya. Chernyshev, Shatrovaia tserkov’ Koz’my i Damiana v Murome, Murom: Tipografiia “Novye tekhnologii,” 2008, pp. 4–­5. 42. Ob otkaze Muromskoi gorodskoi dumy priniat’ na sredstva goroda soderzhanie v ispravnosti drevnei Kosmodamianovskoi tserkvi v gorode Murome i ukreplenie berega r. Oki protiv etoi tserkvi, RGIA, f. 797, op. 91 (1898), d. 59, l. 17. 43. Vladimir Chernyshev, Shatrovaia tserkov’ Kozmy i Damiana v Murome, p. 13. 44. Ob otkaze Muromskoi gorodskoi dumy, l. 11.

Notes to Chapter 4  |  343 45. The Synod’s resolution of July 18, 1884, quoted from “Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Tretii sozyv, sessia 5. Zakonodatelnoe predlozhenie 2 iunia 1910 g.,” in Materialy o tserkovnom pravoslavnom prikhode, RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no. 2327. 46. Ilya S. Berdnikov, Kratkii kurs tserkovnogo prava pravoslavnoi tserkvi, Kazan’: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta, 1913, p. 599. 47. Court churches were the property of the monarch, regimental churches and churches in prisons and hospitals belonged to the state, while wealthy citizens could receive permission to open their own “house churches.” In addition, sponsors, initiators, and curators of church constructions (ktirory) retained their proprietary power over churches. 48. Gregory Freeze, Parish Clergy in Nineteenth Century Russia. Crisis, Reform, Counter-­ Reform, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, ch. 2, “The Structure and Economics of Parish Service.” 49. Filaret, mitropolit Moskovskii i Kolomenskii, Donesenie v Synod, 5 May 1843, “O dozvolenii ustroit v Moskovskom Pokrovskom Vasilia Blazhennogo Sobore ikono­ stasy po prilozhennym risunkam,” RGIA, f. 796, op. 123, d. 234, 1842 g., l. 16. 50. Nikolai D. Kuznetsov, K voprosu o tserkovnom imushchestve i otnoshenii gosudarstva k nedvikhimym imeniiam v Rossii, Serguiev Posad: Tipografiia Sviato-­Troitskoi Sergeivoi Lavry, 1907, p. 41. For an excellent treatment of this issue, see Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, ch. 1; on the problem of Church reform in the early twentieth century, see James W. Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905–­1906, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1981. 51. Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, p. 23. 52. Alexander A. Papkov, O blagoustroistve pravoslavnogo prikhoda, s prilozheniem prikhodskogo ustava, St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1907. 53. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, architects would not hesitate to put Mason-­style iconostasis in a medieval or an Early Modern cathedral. See “O predlozhenii ustroit v Moskovskom Pokrovskom Vasiliia Blazhennogo Sobore iko­nostasy po prilozhennym risunkam.” In the 1830s and 1840s, old cathedrals were often rebuilt in classicist or pseudo-­gothic style. However, more architects adhered to the principle of artistic integrity, meaning that painting and décor must correspond to the architectural concept and the style of cathedrals, be original, or originate from the same period. See Pamiatniki arkhitektury, p. 108. 54. However, the theory and practice of restoration did not go so far at that time as to preserve original painting, architecture, or decoration in its current form: the understanding of artistic integrity allowed stylization in the spirit of the old epoch. On the development of theories of restoration, see Pamiatniki arkhitektury, pp. 107–­118; Evgenii V. Mikhailovskii, Restavratsiia pamiatnikov arkhitektury. Razvitie teoreticheskikh kontseptsii, Moscow: Izd-­vo literatury po stroitelstvu, 1971. The Holy Synod advised parish clergy and parishioners, while renovating old cathedrals, to adhere to the examples of Moscow’s Dormition and Archangel Cathedrals. RGIA, f. 796, op. 123, d. 234 (1842), ll. 15–­15ob. 55. Ivan Snegirev, letter to Mikhail Pogodin (1829), quoted from Alexander Formozov, “Russkoe obshchestvo i okhrana pamiatnikov kultury,” in Stranitsy istorii russkoi archaeologii, Moscow: Nauka, 1986, p. 125.

344  |  Notes to Chapter 4 56. Alexei Gornostaev, 1808–­1862, professor at the Academy of Arts; his lectures quoted in “Obiasnitelnaia zapiska k proektu komissii Lobanova–­Rostovskogo” (1876). RGIA, f. 733, op. 142, d. 509, l. 83ob. 57. Quoted from Alexander Formozov, Russkoe obshchestvo i okhrana pamiatnikov kultury, Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990, p. 125. 58. Pamiatniki arkhitektury, p. 162. 59. For instance, G. D. Filimonov expressed the idea of preserving the monuments of the recent past in his critique of the initial project of restoration of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin. Instead of destroying the iconostasis made in 1822 and re-­creating the original iconostasis (which had not preserved) of the sixteenth century, he suggested keeping the authentic work of 1822. Pamiatniki arkhitektury, pp. 238–­241. However, despite the appearance of new ideas in theory, the methods of stylization and reconstruction of the original remained in wide use until the late nineteenth century. For a discussion on the value of “historical layers,” see Pamiatniki arkhitektury, pp. 275–­290; Andreas Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion, pp. 20–­21. 60. Alexander Formozov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi arkheologii, Moscow: Izdatelstvto Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1961, p. 104. 61. Vladimir Georgievskii, [Speech], in Trudy Vtorogo Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov, vol. 2, ch. 5, “Russkaia starina i ee okhrana,” Petrograd, 1914, pp. 140–­142. 62. Alexander Anisimov, “O sudbe starykh icon v Rossii,” ibid., p. 155. 63. On the church of Koz’ma and Damian in Kadashi, Moscow (1656), see Voprosy restavratsii, no. 17, Petrograd, 1916, p. 95 64. Ibid., no. 5, 1910, pp. 11–­12. 65. Ibid., no. 10, 1912, pp. 30–­31. 66. Ibid. 67. Mitropolit Moskovskii Vladimir, letter to the ober-­prokurator of the Synod S. M. Lukianov, 15 Aprelia 1910, RGIA, f. 797, op. 80, 1 otd., 1 stol., d. 55, ll. 17–­18. 68. Mnenie rectora Akademii Khudozhestv A. I. Resanova na predstavlenie A. S. Uvarova, 1873, in “O merakh po okhrane pamiatnikov drevnosti,” RGIA, f. 789, op. 8, 1873 g., d. 130, l. 17ob. 69. See the case of St. Nicholas Cathedral in the village of Novyi Ropsk, Novozybkovskii district, Chernigov province, in Protokoly restravratsionnykh komissii, no. 6, 1910, p. 8. 70. Mnenie rectora Akademii Khudozhestv A. I. Resanova na predstavlenie A. S. Uvarova, 1873, in “O merakh po okhrane pamiatnikov drevnosti,” RGIA, f. 789, op. 8, 1873 g., d. 130, l. 17ob. 71. Voprosy restavratsii, no. 8, 1911, pp. 26–­27. 72. Archive IIMK, f. 1, 1903, d. 50, ll. 346–­346ob. 73. Ibid., 355–­356. 74. On Filaret Drozdov, see Gregory Freeze. Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-­century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-­Reform, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 23–­24. 75. Mitropolit Filaret, O sredstvakh i prepiatstviakh k sokhrannosti tserkovnykh drevnostei i rukopisei v tserkvakh i monastyriakh, RGIA, f. 797, op. 23, 1853 g., d. 14, l. 5. (Also published in Osmnadtsatyi Vek. Istoricheskii sbornik izdavaemyi Petrom Bertenevym, vol. 1, Moscow: 1869, pp. 503–­512.)

Notes to Chapter 4  |  345 76. In 1862, Count Alexei Tolstoy, poet and historian, warned Alexander II about the destruction of architectural masterpieces in Novgorod, Pskov, Izborsk, Moscow, and Old Ladoga. Tolstoy’s accusation that church authorities were allegedly responsible for most of the destruction appeared to be a belated response to Filaret’s memo: “The clergy is, of course, an open enemy of archaeology.” Imagining the Church’s power as represented by Filaret, while the care of religious relics was exemplified in the practices of Old Believers—­at that time, a culturally marginalized community, Tolstoy exclaimed: “Are not sectarians more enlightened than metropolitan Filaret?” See Delo so svedeniami o drevnostiakh Novgorodskikh i drugikh rossiiskikh gorodov, RGIA, f. 207, op. 17, d. 132, l. 33. 77. RGIA, f. 797, op. 23, 1853 g., d. 14, ll. 53–­53ob. The survey of sacristies in churches and monasteries conducted in 1853–­1854 revealed not so much losses as disorder and inconsistency in the description of “sacred” things that highlighted the difference between the perception of material quality and the religious meaning of objects. In Novgorod, the survey of the sacristy resulted in the discovery of an archive hidden in secret storage at St. Sophia Cathedral (it turned out to be the archive of the Pomestnyi Department of the seventeenth–­early eighteenth centuries). (See Vypiska iz opredelenia Sv. Synoda ot 15/18 oktiabria 1854 goda i raporta kollezh­ skogo asessora Lvova ob otkrytykh v stenakh Novgorodskogo Sophiiskogo sobora dvukh potainykh kladovykh, v kotorykh naiden neizvestnyi staryi arkhiv, RGIA, f. 797, op. 23, 1853 g., d. 14, ll. 136–­140.) One of the surveyors, Igumen Makarii reported that some of the objects were registered as ancient relics, and parishioners treated them with piety and devotion. In fact, however, the treasure of St. Avraamii Monastery—­the alleged hat of St. Avraamii, who lived in the eleventh century—was made in the seventeenth century, as was the mitre attributed to St. Euphimy of Suzdal (1316–­1404); coins that were said to have been given by the Apostles Peter and Paul to the St. Prince Peter Muromskii (a legend ascribed to the thirteenth century) in fact had the stamps of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Peter the Great. Makarii, reporting these inconsistencies, suggested that his findings be kept secret (ibid.). Despite the delicate approach to the survey of relics, the audit of sacristies stirred up rumors and anxiety among priests. Many interpreted the audit in the vein of past secularization campaigns, the memory of which was well preserved: in the village of Krasnoe, in the Epiphanievskii district in Tulskaia province, priests tore silver frames from the icons so as to weigh the amount of precious metal, leading a local landowner to ask that the campaign be cancelled, as it led to the destruction of icons and could produce discontent among the population. (Ober-­prokuror Protasov—­to the diocese of Tula, January 7, 1855, ibid., l. 144.) 78. Ilya Berdnikov, Kratkii kurs tserkovnogo prava, p. 644. 79. Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-­While-­Giving, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 23–­43. 80. Pavel Florenskii, “Ikonostas,” Socheneniia v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 2, Moscow: “Mysl’,” 1996, pp. 442–­450. Similarly, Sergei Bulgakov wrote about the icon as the “alter-­being” (inobytie) of an idea. Sergei Bulgakov, “Ikona i ikonopochitanie,” in Pervoobraz i obraz. Sochinenia v dvukh tomakh, Moscow/St. Petersburg: “Iskusstvo,” “Inapress,” 1999, p. 273. 81. Carol Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” in Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994, pp. 11–­23.

346  |  Notes to Chapter 4 82. Similarly, the work of an artist became an icon only after its consecration—­as Sergei Bulgakov interpreted it, through the act of establishing its sameness with the prototype and “naming” of an icon. Sergei Bulgakov, “Ikona i ikonopochitanie,” pp. 289, 291. 83. Po otnosheniiu Presidenta Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv k privedeniiu v izvestnost’ i sokhraneniu russkoi tserkovnoi stariny, Spravka, RGIA, f. 797, op. 52, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 39, l. 6. 84. Shirley A. Glade, “A Heritage Discovered Anew: Russia’s Reevaluation of Pre-­ Petrine Ions in the Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Period,” Canadian-­American Slavic Studies, vol. 26, no. 1–­3 (1992), p. 150. On the development of historical and artistic studies of iconography in Russia, see Gerold Vzdornov, Istoriia otkrytiia i izucheniia russkoi srednevekovoi zhivopisi: XIX vek, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986; Irina Kyzlasova, Istoriia izucheniia vizantiiskogo i russkogo iskusstva v Rossii, Moscow: Izdatelstvo MGU, 1985. 85. Svetlana A. Kasparinskaia, “Muzei Rossii i vlianie gosudarstvennoi politiki na ikh razvitie (XVIII–­nachalo XX vv),” Muzei i vlast’. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, edited by S. A. Kasparinskaia, Moscow: NII Kultury, 1991, p. 76. 86. From the earliest professional archaeological excavations in Russia, the Imperial Hermitage assumed this role, and the Imperial Archaeological Commission created in 1859 became the most regular supplier of exhibits for the Hermitage’s collection. As a result, perhaps due to the competitive zeal between the “official” St. Petersburg and Moscow, or discontent with one-­directional flow of antiques, the leader of the Moscow Archaeological Society, Count Alexei Uvarov, created an alternative center in Russia’s old capital. In 1872, Uvarov received approval for his concept of a new museum representing “the historical development of the past in connection with the history of all peoples who have ever populated the territory of Russia.” After the first project for the law on historical preservation was rejected in 1876, along with the definition of historical monuments and rules for their treatment that it contained, Uvarov attempted to re-­create those norms in the statute for the new museum, allowing it to become a depositary for all historical objects, as well as granting it control over the preservation of immovable relics in situ. These provisions assumed that historical monuments could be expropriated and transferred to the museum’s depots. In the end, however, this project failed to receive approval as well: the government refused to fund the creation of an alternative to the Imperial Archaeological Commission. As a result, the Historical Museum in Moscow grew “naturally”: not through the seizure of ill-­preserved monuments, but by means of steadily collecting objects from archaeological excavations, gifts from private collectors, and fortunate “treasure” finders. See [Gosudarstvennyi Sovet. Soedinennye Departamenty Gosudarstvennoi Ekonomii i Zakonov. 8 maia 1886], Po predstavleniu Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia ob Utverzhdenii ustava i shtata Imperatorskogo Rossiiskogo Istoricheskogo muzeia, [n.p.], pp. 28–­37. 87. Grand Duke Vladimir, letter to ober-­procurator Pobedonostsev, February 5, 1882, RGIA, f. 797, op. 52, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 39, ll. 1–­2ob. 88. Ibid., ll. 6–­6ob., 12–­13. 89. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny v Rossii XVIII–­nachala XX vv, Sbornik dokumentov, edited by V. S. Dediukhin et al., Moscow: Otechestvo, 1997, p. 150.

Notes to Chapter 4  |  347 90. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny, p. 154. 91. Protoierei Ioann Chizhevskii, Tserkovnoe khoziaistvo, Kharkov: Tipografiia “Pechatnoe delo,” 1901, pp. 34–­35. 92. Vypiska iz opredelenia Sv. Synoda ot 18/30 ianvaria 1891, RGIA, g. 797, op. 61, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 40, ll. 3–­4. 93. Praskovia S. Uvarova, Byloe. Davno proshedshie schastlivye dni, Moscow: Izdatelstvo Sabashnikovykh, 2005, pp. 104–­105. Willard Sunderland kindly translated this excerpt at my request. 94. Ibid. The cathedral itself changed hands as a result: experts discovered the poor condition of the monument as it had been maintained by its parishioners and advised that the church be “transferred” from the Synod to the Ministry of the Imperial Court. 95. Nikodim P. Kondakov, Russkie Klady. Issledovanie Drevnostei Velikokniazheskogo Perioda, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Glavnogo Upravleniia Udelov, 1896, p. 73. 96. See Muzei imeni Ego Imperatorskogo Vysochestva Gosudaria naslednika tsesarevicha, St. Petersburg, 1873; Svedenia ob ustroistve muzeia imeni gosudaria naslednika tsesarevicha, Moscow: Sinodalnaia typografia, 1874; Nikolai Shcherbakov, Imperatorskii Rossiiskii Istoricheskii muzei impeni imperatora Alexandra III v Moskve, Kratkii putevoditel’ po muzeiu, Moscow: Skoropechatnia Levinson, 1914. 97. Zabelin remarked that this was not true: he had heard from historian Afanasii Bychkov that in Berlin the museum (perhaps, he meant the Old National Gallery built in 1861) was also empty upon construction, but fifteen years later he saw it full of exhibits. Ivan Zabelin, Dnevniki. Zapisnye knizhki, Moscow: Izdatelstvo imeni Sabashnikovykh, 2011, pp. 132–­133. 98. Liudmila D. Likhacheva, “Kollektsiia drevnerusskogo prikladnogo iskusstva,” Russkii muzei. Iz istorii muzeia. Sbornik statei i publikatsii, St. Petersburg: Gos. Russkii muzei, 1995, p. 94; Vera K. Laurina, “Otdel drevnerusskoi zhivopisi,” ibid., p. 82. 99. Pavel P. Muratov, “Blizhaishie zadachi v dele izuchenia ikonopisi,” Russkaia Ikona, no. 1 (1914), quoted from Muratov, Russkaia zhuvopis’ do serediny 17 stoletiia, St. Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 2008, pp. 227–­228. 100. On the practice of “icon visitations” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the attempts of the Synod to control them, see Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, pp. 183–­190. 101. Iaroslavskaia dukhovnaia konsistoria, 28 noiabria 1916, to the Imperial Archaeological Commission, IIMK Arkhiv, f. 1, 1903, d. 50, l. 365ob. 102. Pavel Muratov, “Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Moskve,” Russkaia zhivopis’ do serediny 17 stoletiia, p. 177. 103. On the formation of this museum, see Mikhail Ivanov, “Drelvekhranilishcha Smolenskogo tserkovno-­arkheologicheskogo komiteta,” Smolenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 2 (1996), pp. 20–­26. 104. Po delu o revizii Smolenskogo tserkovno–­arkheologicheskogo muzeiia, RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 71, ll. 14, 17–­18, 21, 24. 105. Ibid., l. 39ob. 106. Ibid., Smolensksie vedomosti, no. 193 (1907); Smolenskii vestnik, August 28, 1907; Novoe vremia, July 20, 1907. 107. He acquired fame for taking tens of thousands of photographs of Russian

348  |  Notes to Chapter 4 architectural and artistic monuments, which were published in albums and accompanied all major publications on Russian art history. 108. “Ivan Fedorovich Barshchevskii (1851–­1948),” Rossiiskaia muzeinaia entsiklopediia, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress, 2001, p. 58. 109. Larisa S. Zhuravleva, Tenishevskii muzei “Russkaia starina,” Smolensk: 1998, p. 9; C. de Danilowicz, “Art Decoratif Russe Ancien. Collection de la Princesse Marie Tenicheff,” L’art decoratif, April 17, 1907, pp. 136–­145. For more on the response of French audiences to the exhibit, see Alexander P. Serebrennikov, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Gosudarstvennogo Istoriko–­Etnograficheskogo Muzeiia v Smolenske, osnovannogo M. K. Tenishevoi, Smolensk: Smolenskii Gos. Universitet, 1926. 110. In 1905, Zhirkevich offered the princess a gonfalon and a few other things from his own collection; Tenisheva refused, and that refusal, apparently, offended him deeply. 111. On Tenisheva’s workshops, see Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–­1917, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 115–­143. 112. Initially, Tenisheva planned to locate her museum in one of the towers of the Smolensk city wall. As the archaeological and architectural community was at that time debating the fate of the city wall (which the city wanted to demolish), the museum was ultimately not relocated there. The city also refused to give land for the museum, so Tenisheva had to build the museum on her own land and with her own resources. 113. Tenisheva, “Vpechatlenia,” quoted from Talashkino. Sbornik dokumentov, edited by Larisa Zhuravleva, Smolensk: Posol, 1995, pp. 439–­440. 114. Larisa Zhuravleva, Tenishevskii muzei “Russkaia starina,” p. 9. 115. Nikolai Engelhard, “Raskhishchenie narodnykh sviatyn’,” Novoe vremia, no. 11502 (1908); also in Talashkino, Sbornik dokumentov, pp. 456–­457. 116. Tenisheva, “Pismo v redaktsiu,” Smolenskie vedomosti, no. 239 (October 12, 1907). 117. Ibid., Novoe Vremia, April 1, 1908, quoted in RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 71, l. 105ob. Her claims were more or less true, as many objects were literally saved from destruction by Ivan Barshchevskii. Such was, for instance, the fate of the golden gates that Barshchevskii found under snow in the attic of one church in Tikhvin. Alexander P. Serebrennikov, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Gosudarstvennogo Istoriko–­Etnograficheskogo Muzeiia v Smolenske, osnovannogo M. K. Tenishevoi, pp. 350–­351. 118. Nikolai K. Roehrich, “Golgofa iskusstva,” Utro Rossii, no. 3 (1907), quoted in Tala­ shkino, Sbornik dokumentov, pp. 454–­455. 119. Praskovia Uvarova, letter to ober-­procurator Izvolskii, RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 71, l. 101; Bishop Petr, letter to Rogovich, April 2, 1908, ibid., l. 106. 120. It was unknown whether the mitre in the Tenisheva collection was in fact the mitre of patriarch Nikon: Tenisheva claimed that her mitre was not Nikon’s, Bishop Petr claimed that Nikon’s mitre never left the sacristy, but for all intents and purposes, in public opinion, Tenisheva acquired the relic (apparently, this was not patriarch Nikon’s mitre). 121. Tenisheva put an end to the transfer by posing a set of conditions that the Russian Museum could not accept: she wanted to be the curator of her collection, which was supposed to stay in Smolensk. Larisa Zhuravleva, Tenishevskii muzei “Russkaia

Notes to Chapter 4  |  349 starina,” pp. 10–­11; “Tenisheva M. K.,” Rossiiskaia muzeinaia entsiklopediia, vol. 2, pp. 234–­235. 122. Bishop Petr, [report], RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 1 stol., 1 otd., d. 71, l. 87 ob. 123. RGIA, f. 814, op. 1, d. 183, l. 30ob. 124. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny, p. 228. 125. Ibid., pp. 228–­231. 126. On a different occasion, the ministry of Interior discussed the status of ecclesiastical property belonging to non-­Orthodox confessions in the Russian Empire, and concluded that the ecclesiastic domain enjoyed a status similar to the state domain.—­ Paul Werth, “ ‘Spiritual Domains’ and Non-­ Orthodox Ecclesiastical Property in Imperial Russia,” unpublished paper delivered at AAASS, November 2009, p. 20. 127. See also the responses of ober-­procurator Petr I. Izvolskii and minister of justice Ivan G. Shcheglovitov, IIMK Arkhiv, f. 1, 1903, no. 50, ll. 225–­226 and 227–­228. 128. Originally, an enthnographical division of the Russian Museum. 129. A curious sign of Tolstoy’s invisible presence: Alexander Zhirkevich, who initiated the scandal, has been more famous for his notes about his meetings and conversations with Lev Tolstoy. 130. “Introduction,” in Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, edited by Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, p. 3. On the intersection of “past and future,” modernism, and the discovery of Russian art, see also Laura Engelstein, “Between Art and Icon,” pp. 175–­179. 131. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny, p. 233. 132. Zhurnal obrazovannoi pri MVD osoboi mezhduvedomstvennoi komissii dlia pe­ restmotra deistvuiushchikh postanovlenii ob okhranenii pamiatnikov drevnosti, no. 1 (1909), RGIA, f. 814, op. 1, d. 183, l. 156. 133. Ibid., l. 156. 134. Alexander E. Musin, Vopiiushchie kamni. Russkaia tserkov i kulturnoe nasledie Rossii na rubezhe tysiacheletii, St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2006, pp. 40–­41. 135. See the catalogue of Nikolai Likhachev’s collection in Iz kollektsii akademika Li­ khacheva. Katalog vystavki. Gosudarstvennyi Russkii muzei, St. Petersburg: Seda-­S, 1993. 136. In 1912, Neradovskii, in the company of another art collector, set up a trip to old Russian cities—­Yaroslavl’, Rostov, Kostroma and Murom—­with the purpose of exploring the depositaries of old religious art in local churches and purchasing items for the collection of the Russian Museum. In Murom, a city that had already become notorious for misfortunes associated with its monuments, in the sacristy of the Annunciation Cathedral, they found a number of old things, “dumped in the corner with rubbish,” including a chalice given to the monastery by Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich (1613–­1645), with an inscription, a vessel for sacred water that was the gift of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and many other precious objects, mainly of the seventeenth century. The monastery’s archimandrite, having read the letter from the Russian Museum authorizing Neradovskii’s purchases for the museum’s collection, gave his blessing to the exchange, and asked that the goods be taken by the museum for free. Neradovskii omitted one important detail: the archimandrite

350  |  Notes to Chapter 4 Makarii did not let them take the two objects they admired most of all, an ancient shroud and an icon depicting the lives of saints. (See Makarii’s note to the request of Praskovia Uvarova, Drevnosti. Protokoly komissii po sokhraneniu drevnikh pamiatnikov, no. 6, 1915, p. 78 [Protokol 768, 31 avgusta 1912]). Neradovskii made a donation to the monastery and left. However, half an hour later, a police officer detained Neradovskii and Chernogubov at the railway station on the basis of a denunciation. Neradovskii presented his reference letter from the museum, and the officer let them go (Petr Neradovskii, Iz zhizni khudozhnika, Leningrad: “Khudozhnik RSFSR,” 1965, pp. 142–­143). Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Neradovskii learned who had initiated their arrest: Praskovia Uvarova, whose estate was situated on the banks of the Oka River near Murom. A local resident told Uvarova about the two “speculators” looking for old church objects, and Uvarova set out to detain them. After Neradovskii and Chernogubov left, she first sent a complaint to the diocesan bishop, and then another to the acting director of the Russian Museum, Count Dmitrii Ivanovich Tolstoi, asking that the identity of the speculators be verified (P. S. Uvarova, letter to D. I. Tolstoy, August 6, 1912, RGIA, f. 696, op. 1, d. 613, ll. 1–­1ob). Tolstoy explained Neradovskii’s mission and expressed his thanks for Uvarova’s concern about the spread of speculation and the smuggling of Russian religious antiquities; he also reminded the countess that housing “national riches” in a “state institution . . . should be welcomed” as a measure preventing the plunder of historical monuments (P. S. Uvarova, letter to D. I. Tolstoy, August 6, 1912, RGIA, f. 696, op. 1, d. 613, ll. 1–­1ob.). 137. For instance, during his visit to the monastery of the Intercession of the Mother of God in Suzdal in May 1913, Nicholas II, accompanied by the art historian Vasilii Georgievskii, spotted a few old icons, which used to belong to the noble nuns of the monastery. In 1914, forty-­six icons arrived at the Russian Museum (L. D. Li­khacheva, Kollektsiia drevnerusskogo prikladnogo iskusstva, p. 98; VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 558). In 1915, the museum returned one of those icons: on the back side of the icon, curators had discovered an inscription of the donor’s desire (1674) that the icon should never leave the monastery’s cathedral (VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 310, l. 12). 138. VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 561, ll. 1,2. 139. VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 556, l. 116. In this particular case, the deal did not work. 140. TGA, f. 10, d. 324. 141. See, for instance, “Spisok ikon, priobretennykh Nikolaem II dlia Russkogo Muzeia,” OR GRM, f. 127, d. 28, l. 1. The description of this case is based on the documents from the archives of the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Archive of the City of Moscow. See also two files from Ilya Ostroukhov’s collection in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, RGALI, f. 822, op. 1, d. 1173, Delo o prodazhe restavrirovannykh Briaginym E. I. ikon, 1915, 23 ll.; ibid., d. 1064, Kopii postanovlenii suda, perepiska s istsami, sledstvennye materially, pokazaniia svidetelei po delu o pokhi­ shchenii i prodazhe ikon iz starogo khrama sela Zaborovie, 107 ll. 142. See Petr Neradovskii’s correspondence with Briagin, TGA, f. 31, op. 1, d. 185, 187, 188. 143. Zapiska ministra iustitsii I. G. Shcheglovitova, VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 649, l. 19ob.

Notes to Chapter 4  |  351 144. Nikodim Kondakov, Russkaia Ikona (The Russian Icon), Prague: Seminarium Kondakovianum, 1929, pp. 284, 286. 145. TGA, f. 10, op. 1, d. 4768. Petr Neradovskii to Ilya Ostroukhov, May 17, 1912, l.1. 146. Tverskaia gazeta, August 16, 1912, no. 411. 147. Zapiska ministra iustitsii I. G. Shcheglovitova, VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 649, l. 18ob. 148. Apparently, the story of the missing icons fanned by the press in fact mapped onto a conflict between the priest Vasilii Riabov (who had served in this parish for only three years), the elder Timofei Kovrukov (a well-­to-­do peasant or merchant who profited from the sale of timber), and the peasants. It is possible that the problem with financing the heating system of the new church was the source of that scandal: as Riabov claimed in his open letter published in Tverskaia gazeta, the peasants had refused to make a contribution to the new heating system and instead accused the priest and the elder of plunder. See Sviashchennik Vasilii Riabov, “Pismo v redak­ tsiiu,” Tverskaia gazeta, September 4, 1912, no. 418. Apparently, the locals did not know the real value of the icons: multiple articles that appeared in Tverskaia gazeta (Tver’s newspaper), “letters,” and even verses allegedly written by Zaborovie peasants contained almost no information about the main protagonists of the story—­icons from the Zaborovie church (N. Ozerov, “Propazha ikon,” Tverskaia gazeta, October 4, 1912, no. 430; January 31, 1913, no. 478; February 12, 1913, no. 483; March 21, 1913, no. 498; May 19, 1913, no. 519; July 4, 1913, no. 536; October 6, 1913, no. 574). Moreover, even the name of the church was not mentioned. Paradoxically, other materials—­reports and petitions, written in support of Briagin or not—­also omitted the name of the church. I established the real name of Zaborovie’s church only with the help of its “metrics” (descriptions based on the questionnaire of the Imperial Archaeological Commission) prepared in 1887 (see Metrika tserkvi “Vo imia Voskresenia Khristova uverenia Fomy,” selo Zaborovie, Tverskoi uezd, Tverskaia goberniia, IIMK Arkhiv, RIII 6802). 149. Ulozhenie o nakazaniakh, art. 222, in Svod zakonov ugolovnykh, edited by A. L. Saatchian, St. Petersburg: Iuridicheskii magazin Zubkova, 1911, pp. 56–­57. 150. TGA, f. 10, op. 1, d. 4411, Pavel Muratov to Ilya Ostroukhov. 151. To compare: The priest and the elder were jailed for six months and released on a deposit of 500 rubles each. Sledovatel po osobo vazhnym delam V. I. Gromov, Postanovlenie ob osvobozhdenii iz–­pod strazhi Riabova i Kovrukova, July 7, 1915, TsIAM, f. 142, op. 17, d. 1641. Proizvodstvo prokurora okruzhnogo suda po nabliudeniiu za delom o byvshikh sviashchennike tserkvi sela Zaborovie Tverskogo uezda Vasilii Riabove i tserkovnom staroste Kobrukove obviniaemykh v pokhi­ shchenii ikon, l. 7. 152. VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 649, l. 21 ob. See also later letter of support written by Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennaia ispolnitelnaia komissiia po remontu i restavratsii Bolshogo Moskovskogo Uspenskogo Sobora. November 12, 1915, ibid., l. 32 ob. 153. The church’s metrics of 1887 do not mention any damage to the church’s building. Priest Mikhail Rubtsov, who prepared the description, reported that three icons of Prophets and the “Resurrection of Christ” needed restoration. Perhaps Riabov called the “Illuminated Gospel” the icon of “Resurrection.” On Rubtsov’s drawing of 1887, the church looks fairly good, but its condition could have deteriorated

352  |  Notes to Chapter 4 quickly. Everything in the church—­ceilings, floors, and the iconostasis—­were made of wood and required regular maintanance. Metrika, IIMK Arkhiv, RIII 6802. 154. Ilya Ostroukhov to Dmitrii Tolstoy, 29 noiabria 1915, VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 649, l. 34. 155. Ostroukhov, memo (for the Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich), VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 649f l. 6ob.–­7. 156. For numbers, see VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 310, l. 80. 157. He claimed that the church elder arranged the arson, acting through a certain woman and a church guard. 158. Nikodim Kondakov, The Russian Icon, p. 286. 159. Kopia pisma arkhiepiskopa Tverskogo i Kashinskogo Serafima, 21 sentiabria 1915, —­VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 310, l. 23. 160. Sledovatel po osobo vazhnym delam V. I. Gromov, Postanovlenie ob osvobozhdenii iz-­pod strazhi E. Briagina, April 13, 1915, TsIAM, f. 142, op. 17, d. 1641. Proizvodstvo prokurora okruzhnogo suda po nabliudeniiu za delom o byvshikh sviashchennike tserkvi sela Zaborovie Tverskogo uezda Vasilii Riabove i tserkovnom staroste Kobrukove obviniaemykh v pokhishchenii ikon., l. 5ob. 161. Zhurnal zasedanii Osobogo Soveshchania dlia vyrabotki zakonopolozhenia ob okhranenii pamiatnikov drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, 28 marta i 28 maia 1916, VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 683. The Russian Museum, for its part, prepared the project of two new articles, which from a legal point of view sounded naive: they assumed that public museums could hold the monuments of history even if the court established that they had been stolen from their previous owner. The owner, said the project, could get his property back only after providing compensation of all expenses associated with the purchase and the restoration of the museum’s item. Ibid. 162. TGA, f. 10, op. 1, d. 7129, l. 1. A. A. Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov to Ilya Ostroukhov, 19 marta 1916. 163. Nikodim Kondakov, The Russian Icon, p. 284. 164. Draft, not signed, not dated, VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 310, ll. 67–­68. 165. Draft, not signed, not dated, ibid., ll. 22–­22ob. 166. Jefferson Gatrall, “Introduction,” Alter Icons, p. 5. 167. See the catalogue of the exhibition, Vystavka drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Moskve, ustroennaia v 1913 v oznamenovanie chestvovania 300–­letia tsarstvovaniia doma Romanovykh, Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii Arkheologicheskii Institut imeni Imperatora Nikolaia II, 1913. On this exhibition, see Laura Englestein, “Between Art and Icon,” p. 176; Shirley Glade, “Anisimov and the Rediscovery of Old Russian Icons,” in Alter Icons, p. 191. 168. Alexander I. Rechmenskii, Sobranie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny v ozna menovanie trekhsotletia tsarstvovania doma Romanovykh, Moscow: Izdanie tserkovnoi iubileinoi komissii, 1913. 169. Komitet ee imperatorskogo vysochestva velikoi kniazhny Tatiany Nikolaevny dlia okazaniia vremennoi pomoshchi postradavshim ot voennykh bedstvii, Vystavka predmetov tserkovnoi stariny v muzee Shtiglitsa v Petrograde. Perechen’ predmetov, Petrograd, 1915. 170. Vladimir K. Trutovskii, “Romanovskaia” tserkovno-­ arkeologicheskaia vystavka v Moskve (ottisk iz “Starye gody,” June 1913), St. Petersburg: Tipografiia “Sirius,” 1913, p. 8.

Notes to Chapter 4  |  353 171. Nikolai Makarenko, Vystavka tserkovnoi stariny v muzee barona Shtiglitsa (ottisk iz “Starye gody,” July–­August 1915), St. Petersburg: Tipografiia “Sirius,” 1915. p. 60. For Makarenko, it did not matter whether the museum would be religious or secular, but it must be opened to the public and be available for scholarly research. On the occasion of reconstruction in the sacristy of the Kiev-­Pecherskaia Lavra, a journalist from The Bygone Years suggested that all sacristies be given the status of museums, with the corresponding mission of serving as “the seed-­plot of artistic culture and taste in population,” and open their doors for visitors. Ev. K-­n, “Iz Kieva,” SG, June 1914, p. 43. He also made a slight hint at the desirability of bringing precious icons up from the Lavra’s caves—­the cells of the first monks and revered Orthodox shrines, which, while important spaces, offered poor conditions for the preservation of icons. 172. Jefferson Gatrall, “Introduction,” Alter Icons, p. 8. 173. It seems that the initial idea was to build a chapel with sacristy (riznitsa-­ drevlekhranitishche) attached to the Christian division. Anonymous letter to Victor Sabler, ober-­procurator of the Synod, June 25, 1913, VA GRM, GRMI, op. 1, d. 556, ll. 75–­75ob. See also Robert L. Nichols, “Nicholas II and the Russian Icon,” in Alter Icons, p. 75. 174. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 175. Anonymous memo (perhaps written by Konstantin Zdravomyslov, the director of the Synod’s library and archive), without title and date, RGIA, f. 814, op. 1, d. 183, l. 139. 176. For instance, the architect Petr Petrovich Pokryshkin, a prominent member of the Imperial Archaeological Commission and the preservation movement, was also known for his piety. His colleague, Vladimir Suslov, recalled Porkyshkin’s austerity and devotedness, describing him as a “velikopostnik” (that is, the person who strictly observes fasts), an “ascetic and hard-­working person,” who behaved as if he had taken a vow of silence (V. V. Suslov, “Ia bezzavetno sluzhil iskusstvu vsiu zhizn”.” “Iz vospominanii akademika arkhitektury V. V. Suslova,” Publikatsia A. K. Bonitenko, in Liudi i sudby na rubezhe vekov. Vospominania. Dnevniki. Pisma. 1895–­1925, St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2000, pp. 152–­153). In his practice of restoration and his published works (which included a “Concise Manual for the Restoration of the Monuments of the Olden times and Art,” published in 1915 and sent out to all dioceses), Pokryshkin tried to convey to believers an essentially secular notions of patrimony, and to convince his overenthusiastic co-­believers that “the urge toward the preservation of the monuments of the olden times and art is the urge for the preservation of state and national property” (P. P. Pokryshkin, “Kratkie sovety po voprosam remonta pamiatnikov stariny i iskusstva,” Izvestiia IAC, no. 57 [Voprosy restavratsii, no. 15], Petrograd, 1915, p. 179). In 1920, Porkyshkin abandoned his professorship at the Academy of Arts and was ordained to the rank of priest and then archpriest in 1921: in his new capacity, he served at the Lukoianovskii Tikhonovskii monastery until his death from typhus in 1922 (O. V. Degteva, “Sluzhenie Otechestvu i Tserkvi,” Nizhegorodskaia starina, no. 9 [2004]). 177. Nikodim Kondakov, Vospominania i dumy, Moscow: Indrik, 2002, pp. 168–­169. 178. Robert L. Nichols, “The Icon and the Machine in Russia’s Religious Renaissance, 1900–­1909,” in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, edited by William C. Brumfield

354  |  Notes to Chapter 5 and Milos M Velimirovic, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 131–­144; Shirley Glade, “A Heritage Discovered Anew,” pp. 154–­155; Andrew Jenks, Iconography, Power, and Expertise in Imperial Russia, Seattle: Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 2004; Oleg Yu. Tarasov, Ikona i blagochestie. Ocherki ikonnogo dela v Imperatorskoi Rossii, Moscow: “Progress–­Kultura,” 1995, pp. 253–­271. See also Nikodim Kondakov’s memoirs: Nikodim Kondakov, Vospominaniia i dumy, Moscow: Indrik, 2002, pp. 176–­190. 179. Nikodim Kondakov, Litsevoi ikonopisnyi podlinnik, St. Petersburg: Komitet popechitelstva o russkoi ikonopisi, 1905. 180. Laura Engelstein, “Between Art and Icon,” p. 155.

Chapter 5 Private Possessions and National Art 1. Predpisanie Khersonskogo voennogo gubernatora A. E. Richelieu Tavricheskomu gubernatoru D. B. Mertvago, 6 iiunia 1805, Irina V. Tunkina, Russkaia nauka o klassicheskikh drevnostiakh Iuga Rossii (18–­seredina 19 vv), Moscow: Nauka, 2002, pp. 613–­614. 2. Polozhenie Komiteta ministrov o merakh okhrany pamiatnikov drevnosti v Krymu, 4 iulia 1822, Okhrana pamiatnikov istorii i kultury v Rossii XVIII–­nachala XX vv., Moscow: 1978, p. 35 [hereafter, Okhrana pamiatnikov]. 3. Irina Tunkina, Russkaia nauka o klassicheskikh drevnostiakh iuga Rossii, p. 295. 4. IAC, p. 236. 5. See, for instance, Dmitrii V. Mileev, “Vnov’ otkrytaia tserkov’ XI veka v Kieve i polozhenie issledovanii v sviazi s novymi zastroikami goroda,” Trudy IV S’ezda russkikh zodchikh, St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 120–­121. 6. On the struggle between archaeologists and landowners (city authorities and a monastery) in Kerch (the ruins of Panticapaeum), see Iurii Marti, Sto let Kerchenskogo muzeiia (Istoricheskii ocherk), Kerch’: 4-­ia Gostipografiia, 1926, pp. 32, 43; A. V. Shamanaev, “Dokumenty po istorii arkheologicheskikh issledovanii Khersonesa v gosudarstvennom archive goroda Sevastopolia,” Dokument. Arkhiv. Istoria. Sovremennost, no. 4, Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2004, p. 254; IAC, p. 173. On the archaeological exploration of Chersoneses, see IAC, pp. 522–­555; Konstantin E. Grinevich, Sto let Khersonesskikh raskopok, Sevastopol’: Izdanie Khersonesskogo muzeiia, 1927, pp. 33–­34. 7. On these negotiations in 1873 and 1900–­1902, see IAC, pp. 490, 500–­510. 8. Ibid., p. 511. Quoted from the memoirs of Alexei A. Bobrinskii, son of Alexei A. Bobrinskii, the IAC’s director. 9. Ivan Tolstoi and Nikodim Kondakov, Russkie drevnosti v pamiatnikakh iskusstva, vol. 1–­6, St. Petersburg: A. Benke, 1889–­1899; Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 35. 10. Viktor I. Goshkevich, Klady i drevnosti Khersonskoi gubernii, Kherson: Tipografiia Goshkevicha, 1905. 11. On treasure hunting, see Victor Berdinskikh, Istoriia kladoiskatelstva v Rossii, Moscow: “Zakharov,” 2005, pp. 152–­158. 12. Severnaia pochta, no. 36 (1869).

Notes to Chapter 5  |  355 13. See the circular of the ministry of Interior in Okhrana pamiatnikov, no. 52, May 31, 1884, pp. 114–­115. 14. Svetlana M. Novakovskaia-­Bukhman, “Pamiatniki drevnerusskogo prikladnogo iskusstva v sobranii M. P. Botkina,” Sudby muzeinykh kollektsii. Materialy VII Tsarskoselskoi nauchnoi konferentsii, St. Petersburg: “Tsarskoe selo,” 2001, pp. 141–­142. 15. On that Archaeological Commission’s campaign, see more in IAC, pp. 112–­119. 16. Imperial Archaeological Commission, January 21, 1887, IIMK Arkhiv, f. 1, op. 1, d. 69, l. 9. 17. Alexei Bobrinskii, Vladimir Tizenhausen, Nikodim Kondakov, and Ivan Tolstoy. 18. Imperial Archaeological Commission to the Minister of Public Education, November 27, 1887, ibid., l. 29. See also the IAC’s report to Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the president of the Academy of Arts, Okhrana pamiatnikov, no. 54, pp. 118–­122; IAC’s reports to the ministry of Public Education of March 5, 1887, ibid., no. 55, pp. 122–­129. 19. Ivan I. Tolstoy, letter to Dmitrii I. Tolstoy, RGIA, f. 696, op. 1, d. 591, l. 21. 20. PSZIII, no. 5841. See the protocols of negotiations between archaeological socie­ ties and the IAC on the procedures for getting permission for exploration. RGIA, f. 789, op. 11, 1887, d. 66, ll. 23–­35. Against the backdrop of public archaeological enthusiasm, the Imperial Commission’s attempt to monopolize the discovery of the past appeared rather unfriendly, manifesting a tendency toward the centralization of expertise and power in the Imperial capital. Many archaeological societies complained, and the press attacked the commission, which argued in reply that historical monuments on state lands fell victim to scientific enthusiasm primarily because private lands were closed to exploration, and most archaeologists preferred not to deal with private landowners. State lands, on the contrary, were considered to belong to no one, and all treasures residing there were understood to be open to everybody, continued the commission’s report. So, for enthusiasts, membership in archaeological or historical societies gave them carte-­blanche to ransack archaeological sites, both for the sake of science and for the profit of provincial societies and local museums. They did not hesitate even to publish the reports of these organizations, describing their assault on state property as an achievement, said the commission’s report. 21. Tsentralnyi Statisticheskii komitet, Statistika zemlevladeniia v 1905 godu. Svod dannykh po 50–­ti guberniiam Evropeiskoi Rossii, St. Petersburg, 1907, p. 11. 22. In 1905, the ministry of Interior compiled a new project for a law on the preservation of monuments, both movable (manuscripts, paintings, and so on) and immovable. The project described the rules of treatment for historical monuments, but it left open the issue of property, and offered for the discussion of archaeological societies and local archival commissions the question of whether the burdensome conditions of preservation could be imposed on private owners (“Osnovnye polozhenia, vyrabotannye Komissiiei po peresmotru zakonodatelstva ob okhrane istoricheskikh pamiatnikov,” Okhrana pamiatnikov, no. 71, pp. 162–­ 166). In response to the ministry’s questionnaire, all provincial commissions and professional organizations of archaeologists unanimously supported the idea of subjecting private owners to rules and restrictions and applying the mechanism of expropriation to historical monuments. Many reports supported their opinions with examples of monuments destroyed or doomed to destruction by their owners

356  |  Notes to Chapter 5 (Otzyvy gubernskikh uchenykh komissii i archeologicheskikh obshchestv na proekt 1905 g., RGIA, f. 1284, op. 186, 1901 [dela po arkheologii], d. 11b). The provincial historical-­archival commission of Taurida province described the terrible condition of Crimean antiquities: caves with frescoes that served as pastures for sheep and goats, ancient palaces and churches taken to pieces for the construction of houses (ibid., l. 63ob.). The Chernigov commission suggested introducing a category of “national monuments,” all of which must be unconditionally purchased or expropriated (ibid., l. 175). For more, see Nikolai V. Sultanov’s speech on the government’s project of law on preservation: XIV Arkheologicheskii s’ezd v Chernigove, 1909, Trudy, vol. 3, Moscow: Tipografiia obshchestva rasprostranenia poleznykh knig, 1911, p. 76; Dmitrii V. Mileev, “Vnov’ otkrytaia tserkov’ XI veka v Kieve i polozhenie issledovanii v sviazi s novymi zastroikami goroda,” Trudy IV S’ezda russkikh zodchikh, St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 120–­121. 23. He referred to examples of private ownership of ancient caves or places of national historical importance (that is, Dante’s house in Florence) and found that the decisions of local communities to expropriate these objects were absolutely legal. Vasilii Ivanov, “Ekspropriatsiia chastnoi sobstvennosti dlia tselei nravstvennykh, nauchnykh i khudozhestvennykh,” Iuridicheskii vestnik, vol. IX (1880), p. 105. 24. The head of the commission was Ilya Gurliand, an experienced bureaucrat who authored many of Petr Stolypin’s projects and speeches. He was a historian by training. In 1913, the project came before the State Duma, which cut many of its provisions. It never became law, due to multiple contradictions and, more importantly, the beginning of World War I. 25. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 186, 1901, 11 “a.” Zhurnal podkomissii po pervobytnoi drevnosti no 1, l. 275; zhurnal no. 2, l. 301. 26. Ibid., zhurnal no. 3, l. 311 ob. 27. Ibid., zhurnal no. 2, l. 302. 28. Ibid., Doklad podkomissii po vyrabotke zakonoproekta ob okhranenii pamiatnikov pervobytnoi drevnosti, ll. 389–­392. 29. [Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Sozyv III], Komissiia po napravleniu zakonodatelnykh predlozhenii. Doklad po zakonoproektu o merakh po okhraneniu pamiatnikov drevnosti, Dokladchik Baron N. B. Wolf, 6 noiabria 1913, [St. Petersburg, 1913], p. 10. See the critique of that decision in “Khronika. Zakon ob okhrane stariny,” SG, February 1914, pp. 48–­49. 30. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny, p. 300. 31. John Carman, Valuing Ancient Things: Archaeology and Law, London/New York: Leicester University Press, 1996, p. 49. 32. John Carman, Valuing Ancient Things, pp. 54–­55. On one particular controversy involving a Celtic hoard, see Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 54–­64. 33. Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–­1886, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 123. 34. Ibid. 35. John Carman, Valuing Ancient Things, pp. 77–­78.

Notes to Chapter 5  |  357 36. Jordanna Bailkin’s superb analysis of British Neo-­liberalism and art politics suggests that the British Museum fell under attacks of both anarchist protesters and moderate liberal politicians demanding to make the art institutions truly “public” (that is, by opening them on Sunday “so that the workers might visit them more easily). Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property, pp. 9–­10. 37. Ibid., p. 54. 38. Donald M. Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 101. 39. Antoine Khater, Le Régime Juridique des Fouilles et des Antiquités en Egypt, Cairo: Impimerie de L’Institute Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1960, p. 281. 40. Ibid., p. 262. 41. Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–­1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 102. 42. On the peculiarities of the Ottoman landholding, see Huri Islamoglu, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, edited by Roger Owen, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 3–­62; Kemal Karpat, “The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire,” in Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays, Leiden/ Boston/Koeln: Brill, 2002, pp. 327–­351; Halil Inalcik, “Land Problem in Turkish History,” in The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy, London: “Variorum Reprints,” 1978. 43. Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in The Late Ottoman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 90. 44. Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus, p. 201. 45. Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, p. 112. 46. Compare to the Greek constitutional law—­one of the first issued after acquiring independence—­which obliged the governor to take care of the national patrimony, stipulating that “he shall not permit the selling or exporting of antiquities outside the country.” Maria Avgouli, “The First Greek Museums and National Identity,” in Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity, edited by Flora E. S. Kaplan, London/New York: Leicester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 251. 47. Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, p. 130. 48. See, for instance, Fedor Uspenskii, “O perevozke iz Palmiry v Sankt-­Peterburg plity s nadpisiu,” Izvestviia Russkogo Arkheologicheskogo Instituta v Konstantinopole, vol. 13, Prilozhenie 2 k otchetu za 1905 god, Sofia: Derzhavna Pechatnia, 1908. 49. Suzanne Marchand explains the inability to prevent the export of antiquities by the specificity of the Ottoman political system, asserting that “only the advent of Kemal Ataturk would provide the political climate and social basis for an effective campaign against European exploitation.” Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus, pp. 201–­202. Wendy Shaws observes that European archaeologists were more reluctant to admit the Ottomans’ claims for the antiquities because they perceived

358  |  Notes to Chapter 5 the Ottomans as the conquerors of the land replete with the remnants of other civilizations, while in the cases of Egypt and Italy, certain preeminence between the ancient civilizations and the modern state could be established. 50. Alexander Benois, “Peterhof (3[16] Sentiabria 1909),” in Alexander Benois, Khudozhestvennye pisma, 1908–­1917, Gazeta “Rech,” vol. 1, 1908–­1910. Petersburg: “Sad iskusstv,” 2006, pp. 213, 215. 51. See the draft of Mikhail Botkin’s report to Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich about his survey of imperial palaces. Botkin made a list of paintings to take from palaces to museums. None of the most famous paintings (most importantly, Le­ vitskii’s works) ever left the palaces. OR GRM, f. 24, d. 53, l. 11–­13. In the 1880s, the Hermitage director Alexander Vasilchikov achieved the relocation of twenty-­two masterpieces from Peterhof ’s “Mon Plaisir” and Gatchina’s palaces (which held, for instance, a Rembrandt). Vladimir F. Levinson-­Lessing, Istoriia kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha (1764–­1917), Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1985, p. 213. One of the reasons behind the public campaign for the relocation of artistic treasures from imperial palaces to museums was the inability of the administration of the emperor’s domain to maintain appropriate conditions for the preservation of art. Numerous palaces remained empty and uninhabited for years: consequently, most of them (including Peter I’s “Mon Plaisir,” Marli, Peterhof ’s Hermitage, and the Big Peterhof Royal Palace) were unheated. Some paintings spent winters in a heated room, bound in piles on the floor; others were left in unheated buildings. As a result, the canvases at “Mon Plaisir” began to rot; the paint on others cracked and started falling off. The Hermitage curator Stanislav Iskerskii insisted that the paintings be relocated to other depositories with more appropriate conditions. See Iskerskii’s report in the archive of the Hermitage Museum: “Dokladnaia zapiska khranitelia Ermitazha S. K. Iskerskogo,” GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1909, d. 17, l. 35–­41. On the maintenance of palaces and the fate of their art collections, see also Sergei Makovskii, “Sklady razrushenii—­kladbishcha iskusstva,” SG, July–­September 1907, pp. 468–­470. 52. Sergei Diaghilev, “O russkikh muzeiach,” Mir iskusstva, 1901, pp. 168–­170. 53. Ibid., p. 173. 54. [Adolf Furtwängler], “O khudozhestvennykh sokrovishchakh starogo i novogo vremeni,” Mir iskusstva, 1900, no. 1–­2. 55. Vladimir Levinson-­Lessing, Istoriia kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha, p. 124. 56. On Alexander I’s role in the composition of the Hermitage’s collection, see Levinson-­Lessing, Istoria kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha, pp. 136, 138; on Nicholas I’s involvement, see ibid, pp. 170–­192. Nicholas I reserved for himself the privilege of arranging the location of paintings in the museums’ rooms. 57. Doklad o reforme Ermitazha (Dmitrii Tolstoy—­to the Provisional Government. [1917]), GEA, f. 1, оp. 5, 1917, d. 59, l. 17–­18. 58. Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, unofficial edition, edited by I. D. Mordukhai-­ Boltovskii, St. Petersburg: “Deiatel,” 1912, vol. X, art. 412, p. 36. 59. Doklad o reforme Ermitazha, GEA, f. 1, оp. 5, 1917, d. 59, l. 29. 60. Dmitrii Tolstoy, “Avtobiografia,” Diaspora. Novye Materialy, vyp. 5, St. Petersburg/ Paris: Athenaeum–­Fenix, 2003, p. 31; see also the report of one of Tolstoy’s predecessors, Alexander Vasilchikov: Vladimir Levinson-­Lessing, Istoriia kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha, pp. 211–­212.

Notes to Chapter 5  |  359 61. Also known as “Madonna Benois,” named after its owner, Maria Benois (the wife of architect Leontii Benois). 62. Spravka o budzhete Ermitazha, GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1908, d. 35, l. 4. 63. See, for instance, on the sale of Polovtsov’s collection in Paris, Levinson-­Lessing, Istoria kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha, p. 233. 64. VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 556, l. 66–­66ob.; on Nicholas II’s acquisitions for the Russian Museum, see f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 508. In 1913, the emperor funded the purchase of twenty-­two icons and decorative objects at a cost of 39,500 rubles; the same year, he paid 42,000 rubles for thirty-­two icons and veils. 65. VA GRM, F. GRM1, op. 1, d. 556, l. 14. 66. The museums, it seems, were quite happy with the benevolent patronage of the emperor. The interference of the State Duma turned out to be much more unfortunate. The State Duma occasionally initiated the purchase of artistic collections or estates whose value was doubtful. See, for instance, the Duma’s decision to purchase the works of the mediocre artist Alexander Borisov for the Russian Museum. Dmitrii Tolstoy replied that instead of buying worthless work, the Duma should have assisted the museum in the purchase of Alexander Ivanov’s paintings: RGIA, Library, PZ no. 2265. Zakonodatelnoe predlozhenie ob otpuske iz gosudarstvennogo kaznacheistva sredstv na priobretenie kollektsii kartin v kolichestve 80 ekzempliarov raboty khudozhnika A. A. Borisova. The development of the preservation movement also stirred nationalistic feelings among certain politicians. In 1913, Nikolai Likhachev, having agreed to sell his collection of icons to the Russian Museum, insisted on conducting the deal without the participation of “representative bodies” so as to avoid polemics on the fate of Russia’s religious art. See VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 556, l. 66ob. 67. “Ministerstvo iziashchnykh iskusstv (beseda s grafom Dmitriem Tolstym),” Den’, January 17, 1913, no. 15, quoted in GEA, f. 1, оp. 5, 1911, d. 58, Vyrezki iz gazet, l. 267. 68. Polozhenie o Russkom muzee (Sobranie Uzakonenii, 3 maia 1897, no. 44), Sbornik uzakonenii, kasaiushchikhsia Russkogo muzeia imperatora Aleksandra III, Petrograd: “Energiia,” 1915. 69. Nikolai Vrangel, “Iskusstvo i gosudar’ Nikolai Pavlovich,” Svoistva veka. Statii po istorii Russkogo iskusstva barona Nikolaia Nikolaevicha Vrangelia, St. Petersburg: “Letnii Sad,” 2001, pp. 153–­178. Originally published in SG, 1913, July–­September, pp. 53–­64. 70. VA GRM, f. GRM1, op. 1, d. 54, ll. 1–­1ob. 71. Indeed, the Hermitage received a few precious gifts from private collectors (Benois mentioned as the most important the gifts of brothers Grigorii and Pavel Stroganov), but nothing comparing to the public initiative for the Russian Museum. Alexander Benois, “Obnovlenie muzeiia Aleksandra III, Khudozhestvennye pisma,” Rech’, no. 287 (October 19, 1912). Quoted in GEA, f. 1, оp. 5, 1911, d. 58, Vyrezki iz gazet, l. 283. 72. GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1905, d. 21. l. 69. 73. Ibid., l. 71ob. 74. The group of artists around the “retrospective” magazine Starye Gody (Petr Veiner, Alexander Benois, Vasilii Vereshchagin, Nikolai Vrangel, Sergei Makovskii, and Ivan Leman) responded to Dmitrii Tolstoy’s appointment with a program of

360  |  Notes to Chapter 5 reforms that included, along with technical innovations, an increase in the museums’ budgets, changing the attitude to private donations, the relocation of objects from imperial palaces, extending the museums’ space at the expense of services located at the Old Hermitage, opening new divisions, and others. GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1905, d. 21, l. 69. 75. GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1908, d. 28, ch. 1, l. 108–­109, 117–­119. 76. Spravka, 28 Aprelia 1909, RGIA, f. 472, op. 43 (493/2718), d. 137, l. 77. 77. “Sire, prenez garde!,” Birzhevye vedomosti, 25 Maya 1909, quoted from ibid., l. 84. 78. Svetlana A. Ovsiannikova, “Khudozhestvennye muzei Peterburga i Moskvy vtoroi poloviny 19–­nachala 20 vv.,” Vorposy istorii muzeinogo dela v SSSR. Trudy NII muzeevedenia, no. 7, Moscow: 1962, p. 24. 79. The Russian Museum faced competition from the Tretyakov Gallery and the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow for these masterpieces. Dmitrii Tolstoy, “Revoliutsionnoe vremia v Russkom Muzee i v Ermitazhe,” Rossiiskii Arkhiv. II–­III, Moscow: “Trite,” “Rossiiskii Arkhiv,” 2002, p. 346. 80. Svetlana A. Kasparinskaia, “Muzei Rossii i vliianie gosudarstvennoi politiki na ikh razvitie,” in Muzei i vlast’, Moscow: NII Kul’tury, 1991, p. 80. 81. GEA, f. 1, op. 5, 1917, d. 23, ll. 48–­56. 82. See more in Richard Stites, “Cultural Capital and Cultural Heritage: St. Petersburg and the Arts of Imperial Russia,” in Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, edited by Stephen Lowell and Helena Goscilo, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 190. 83. Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 43–­48. 84. See the fact-­packed survey of private collecting in Russia: Svetlana Ovsiannikova, “Chastnoe kollektsionirovanie v Rossii v poreformennuiu epokhu,” in Ocherki muzeinogo dela v Rossii, no. 2, edited by A. M. Razgon, Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1960. 85. Alexandra P. Botkina, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretiakov v zhizni i iskusstve, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1960, pp. 55–­57. 86. Svetlana Ovsiannikova, “Chastnoe kollektsionirovanie v Rossii v poreformennuiu epokhu,” p. 142. 87. Predvaritelnyi s’ezd po ustroistvu Pervogo Vserossiiskogo s’ezda deiatelei muzeev, Moscow: T-­vo skoropechatni A. A. Levenson, 1913, p. 23. 88. Natalya Iu. Semenova, Zhizn’ i kollektsiia Sergeia Shchukina, Moscow: Trelistnik, 2002, p. 33. 89. Nadezhda Polunina and Aleksandr Frolov. Kollektsionery staroi Moskvy, Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1997, p. 42. 90. On the peculiarities of art collecting in St. Petersburg and Moscow, see Abram Efros, “Peterburgskoe i moskovskoe sobiratelstvo (paralleli),” Sredi kollektsionerov, no. 4 (1921), pp. 13–­20. There were, of course, notable exceptions: the collections of Princess Maria Tenisheva, Prince Alexei Lobanov-­Rostovskii, and Prince Grigorii Gagarin constituted a significant part of the Russian Museum’s the initial collection. 91. Vladimir A. Kozhevnikov, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. Opyt izlozhenia ego uchenia po izdannym i neizdannym proizvedeniiam, perepiske i lichnym besedam, ch. 1, Moscow: Tipografiia Imp. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1908, p. 9.

Notes to Chapter 5  |  361 92. Nikolai Fedorov, “Muzei, ego smysl i naznachenie,” Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 2, Moscow: “Progress,” 1995, pp. 370–­430. 93. Alexander Benois, “Priobretenia Ermitazha,” in Alexander Benois, Khudozhestvennye pisma, pp. 219–­220. 94. Nikolai Mudrogel, Piat’desiat vosem’ let v Tretyakovskoi galeree. Vospominania, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1962, p. 74. 95. For a discussion of these initiatives, see “Prodazha Pliushkinskogo sobrania,” SG, October 1912, pp. 34–­35. 96. Zvenigorodskii bought the enamels from a dishonest collector, Sabin–­Gus, who in the early 1880s received permission from the ekzarch (patriarch of Georgian Christian Church) to replace old objects in the sacristies with new ones. In 1889, when rumors of the plunder that had occurred in Georgian churches reached the capitals, Nikodim Kondakov was dispatched to inspect the sacristies and confirmed the fraud. However, the Georgian church did not present any documents that could prove the illegality of the purchase, and except for the public denunciation, as Kondakov asserted, there were no grounds for objecting to the deals. See “Zhurnal Osoboi Komissii dlia rassmotreniia voprosov, sviazannykh s priobreteniem kollektsii vizantiiskikh emalei A. V. Zvenigodorskogo,” RGIA, Library, PZ no. 2265. 97. Germain Seligman, The Merchants of Art: 1880–­1960: Eighty Years of Professional Collecting: NewYork: Appleton-­Century-­Crofts, 1961, p. 68. On the purchase of enamels, see ch. VI, “St. Petersburg, 1910,” pp. 61–­68. 98. Nikolai Vrangel,” “Russkie sokrovishcha za granitsei,” SG, April 1909, p. 207; idem, “Ob auktsionakh i prodazhakh,” SG, December 1909, p. 703. Art historian Vladislav Tolmatskii describes another of Rembrandt’s masterpieces sold from Delarov’s collection to Pierpont Morgan (The Portrait of a Jew): Vladislav Tolmatskii, “Kollek­tsia Pavla Delarova: suzhdenia i fakty,” Antikvarnoe obozrenie, 2004, no. 3, p. 54. 99. Peterburgskaia gazeta, no. 59 (1910); quoted in V. A. Tolmatskii, V. V. Skurlov, and A. N. Ivanov, Antikvarno-­khudozhestvennyi rynok Peterburga, St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2008, pp. 111–­112. Many private owners chose to send old works to museums for purchase: the archive of the Russian Museum contains hundreds of such offers filled out on special printed forms. 100. Most of the items, however, did not find buyers, and returned to Russia to be distributed among various private and public museums. On the fate of Delarov’s collection, see Vladislav Tolmatskii, “Kollektsia Pavla Delarova: suzhdenia i fakty”; Sergei Enrst, “Vystavka russkikh kartin i risunkov iz sobrania P. V. Delarova,” SG, April 1914, pp. 49–­52. 101. Nikolai Vrangel, Prodazha sobrania P. V. Delarova, SG, November 1913, pp. 46–­47. 102. On the export of archaeological treasures from Crimea, see A. V. Shamanaev, “Vyvoz is Khersonesa rossiiskikh kulturnykh tsennostei za rubezh v XIX veke,” Izvestiia Uralskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, ser. 2, Gumanitarnye nauki, vyp. 13, 2007, no. 49, pp. 110–­118. 103. On this ideological current, see Suzanna Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,” History and Theory, vol. 33 (December 1994); on Strzygowski’s studies of Armenian architecture, see also Christina Maranci, Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation, Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2000.

362  |  Notes to Chapter 5 104. NCM, f. 3 (Veidenbaum), d. 679, Pismo Kazimirza Olshewskogo o raskopkakh, predpolagaemykh v 1882 s tseliu snabzheniia zagranichnykh muzeev kavkazskimi drevnostiami, i o merakh borby s takim raskhishcheniem. See also CHA Georgia, f. 13, op. 3, d. 956, Delo s doneseniem karskogo gubernatora o proizvodstve bez nadlezhashchego razresheniia arkheologicheskikh issledovanii dotsentom Berlinskogo universiteta Bagratom Khalatiantsem, 1911. 105. O priniatii mer k okhraneniiu ot raskhishcheniia drevnostei nakhodimykh na Kav­ kaze (1898), RGIA, f. 1284, op. 185, 1898, d. 12, l. 9. 106. The question of putting limits on the export of antiques was raised on many occasions before 1909. In 1886, the ministry of Interior sent out a circular that prescribed making lists of all antiquities offered for public auctions and submitting them to archaeological commissions: this measure, however, required careful expertise and, as the Imperial Archaeological Commission remarked, would limit the rights of private owners (IAC, p. 156). However, the idea of restricting the export of antiquities from Russia continued to gain support: many thought it was reasonable but did not know how to implement it in practice. The project of 1905 suggested a palliative measure: it reserved for the government the right to purchase any “old things”; the export of these things was allowed only after the government declined to buy them. Many commentaries to the project noted this indecisiveness and suggested instead that the export of old things be banned altogether. See Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, Zakonoproekt ob okhrane drevnostei. S popravkami i novym tekstom [b.m., b.g.], art. 34; the Pskov provincial archival commission suggested introducing high duties on the export of antiquities, exceeding the price of the objects by three or four times. See Otzyvy gubernskikh uchenykh komissii, RGIA, 1284, op. 186, 1901 (dela po arkheologii), d. 11b, l. 140; Petr Pokryshkin, comments on the project of law: IIMK Arkhiv, f. 21, op. 1, d. 6, l. 11ob. 107. [Gosudarstvennaia Duma, IV sozyv, sessia 2], Komissiia po napravleniiu zakonodatelnykh predlozhenii. Doklad po zakonoproektu o merakh i okhraneniiu pamiatnikov drevnosti, Dokladchik Baron N. B. Wolf, 6 Noiabria 1913 [St. Petersburg, 1914], pp. 10, 56. For comparison, see, for instance, the survey of European laws prohibiting the export of antiques: Pavel Ettinger, “Zashchita khudozhestvennykh sokrovishch v chastnom vladenii,” SG, July–­September 1909, pp. 489–­490. 108. Tolmatskii, “Kollektsiia Pavla Delarova,” p. 53. 109. Alexei Bakhrushin, Iz zapisnoi knizhki Bakhrushina (Kto chto sobiraet), Moscow: Bukhgeim, 1916, pp. 5–­6. 110. Albert Kostenevich and Natalya Semenova, Matiss v Rossii, Moscow: Avangard, 1993, pp. 32–­33 (see also in English translation: Albert Kostenevich, Natalia Semyonova, Collecting Matisse, Paris: Flammarion, 1993). Only in 1988 did a Soviet restorer remove the gouache paint from the canvas. I am grateful to Ilya Doronchenkov for informing me about this case. 111. On Nikolai Vrangel, see Venok Vrangeliu, Petrograd: 1916; Irina Zolotinkina, Biblio­graficheskie listki, “Starye Gody.” Ikh istoria i kritika en connaissance de cause (kommentarii), edited by Petr Veiner, St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2008; idem, “Nikolai Vrangel,” Nashe Nasledie, no. 69 (2004). 112. Nikolai Vrangel, Pomeshchichiia Rossiia, St. Petetsburg: Kolo, 2007, p. 28.

Notes to Chapter 5  |  363 113. On dachas in fin-­de-­siècle Russia, see Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–­2000, Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2003. 114. In 1909, the IAC considered buying the former Naryshkin estate in Riazanskaia province, allegedly the birthplace of Peter the Great’s mother, Natalya Naryshkina, which had been sold by the Golitsyns to peasants. The peasants agreed to cede the house with all its paintings and park full of venerable lime trees for 10,000 rubles—­but the deal did not work out (Voprosy restavratsii. Protokoly restavratsionnykh komissii, no. 31, St. Petersburg, 1909, pp. 64–­66). There was no proof that the tsaritsa was born on this estate. Another village also claimed to be Natalya’s birthplace. 115. “Zabytye mogily,” ibid., p. 241. First publication, SG, February 1907, pp. 35–­51. 116. Petr Zhudra, “Khishchniki zemli,” LZh, 1883, no. 1, pp. 27–­28. 117. The culture of noble estates is the theme of Priscilla Roosevelt’s splendid monograph, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 118. Nikolai Vrangel, “Pomeshchichia Rossiia,” SG, July–­September 1910. Starye Gody published a number of other works devoted to the art and architecture of noble estates. See, for instance, Sergei Makovskii, “Dve podmoskovnye kniazia S. M. Goli­ tsyna,” SG, January 1910; Igor Grabar’, “Ostankinskii dvorets,” SG, May–­June 1910; Nikolai Makarenko, “Lialichi,” SG, July–­September 1910; and others. 119. Petr Veiner, Bibliograficheskie listki, “Starye gody,” ikh istoria i kritika en connaissence de cause (kommentarii), edited by Irina Zolotinkina, St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2008, p. 100. In 1913, a publication of a new magazine specifically devoted to the estate culture began: Stolitsa i usadba (“The capital and the rural estate”) provided the model of “modern” estate life and helped foment the renaissance of the “estate” culture among Russia’s new aristocracy. On the aristocratic elitist fashion of estate culture, see Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–­2000. Petr Veiner, the editor of Starye Gody, opposed the academic spirit of his edition to the “snobbish” style of Stolitsa i usadba and its nonprofessional, descriptive character. Petr Veiner, Bibliograficheskie listki, p. 146. 120. Ivan Anichkov, Obzor pomeshchichikh usadeb Novgorodskoi gubernii. Otdelnyi ottisk iz II toma Trudov Piatnadtsatogo Arkheologicheskogo s’ezda v Novgorode, Novgorod: Gubernskaia Tipografiia, 1916, pp. 3–­4. Despite these claims, the survey of noble estates demonstrated the richness of private domains: in addition to the ordinary valuables of nobles houses—­sculptures, libraries, family archives, manuscripts, and paintings—­the estates also boasted the relics of Russian medieval history—multiple tumuli and ancient burials (zhalniki or sopki). The tradition of studying the culture of noble estates continued after the revolution with a new mission: with the nationalization of estates and the departure of their owners, nobles’ houses were subjected to the greater threat of total destruction. The Society for the Study of Russian Estates was founded in 1922 and continued its activity until 1930. See Garold D. Zlochevskii, Obshchestvo izuchenia russkoi usadby (1922–­1930), Moscow: “Santa-­Optima,” 2002; V. V. Zgura, Obshchestvo izuchenia russkoi usadby, Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1923. 121. Igor Grabar’, “O predelakh vandalisma,” SG, January 1911, p. 50. 122. The initial project of the law on preservation drafted by the Commission at the Ministry of Interior (1909) assumed the allocation of 163,000 rubles annually,

364  |  Notes to Chapter 5 including 56,000 rubles for local preservation agencies and 50,000 for the restoration and expropriation of monuments from private owners. Later, the total sum was reduced to 55,000 rubles, without the allowance for local agencies, with the modest sum of 25,000 for restoration and 10,000 for expropriation (the expropriation of expensive monuments was to be funded by extraordinary credits). To compare: the restoration of the city wall in Pskov cost 30,000 rubles. Eventually, the State Duma allocated for historical preservation 130,000 for three years, 1915–­1917, or 43,300 rubles annually. Of course, this sum would not suffice for the management of preservation in the empire, not to mention the expropriation or the purchase of monuments, and it was many times smaller than state spending on preservation in European countries. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 186, 1901, d. 11a, ll. 560, 680ob. Ibid., ll. 1187–­1188; [Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Sozyv III], Komissiia po napravleniu zakonodatelnykh predlozhenii. Doklad po zakonoproektu o merakh po okhraneniu pamiatnikov drevnosti. 123. The National Trust, founded in 1895, by 1900 had acquired 180 properties, mostly scenic lands and grand historical buildings. See Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, pp. 14–­16. 124. Nikolai Roerich, “Poiski staroi Rusi,” IV s’ezd russkikh zodchikh (5–­12 ianvaria 1912), Trudy, St. Petersburg, 1911. 125. Alexei Shchusev, “Zashchita i sokhranenie pamiatnikov iskusstva,” Dnevnik Piatogo Vserossiiskogo siezda zodchikh, no. 5, 19 Dekabria 1913, Moscow; S. Detinov, “V Vserossiiskii s’ezd zodchikh,” SG, February 1914, p. 52. 126. V. Mashkov [comments], IV s’ezd russkikh zodchikh (5–­12 ianvaria 1912). Trudy, p. 37. 127. Drevnosti. Trudy Komissii po sokhraneniiu drevnikh pamiatnikov, no. 1, 1907, p. 85; no. 2, 1908, p. 99. 128. Ibid., pp. 102–­103. 129. “Vesti za mesiats,” SG, March 1913, p. 54. 130. “Dokladnaia zapiska ministru finansov po povodu zakona 6 iunia 1910 g. o gosud­ arstvennom naloge s nedvizhimykh imushchestv. 30 marta 1913,” Otchet o deiatelnosti Obshchestva zashchity i sokhranenia v Rossii pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny za 1913 god, Petrograd, 1914, Prilozhenie III. Vladimir Kokovtsov responded that the dissolution of Sheremetev’s ensemble began before the introduction of the new tax order. RGIA, f. 549, op. 1, d. 110, l. 29. 131. Ibid., ll. 28ob.–­29. 132. Alexander Benois, “Obzor khudozhestvennoi zhizni. (1[14] Ianvaria 1909),” Khudozhestvennye pisma, p. 57; commentaries, p. 63. 133. Osnovnye polozhenia, vyrabotannye Komissiiei po peresmotry deistvuiushchikh postanovlenii ob okhranenii drevnikh pamiatnikov i zdanii, 1905. Pokryshkin’s comments are in the margins of printed documents (pencil). IIMK Arkhiv, f. 21, op. 1, d. 6, l. 12. 134. Another illustration of cities’ reluctance to take the task of historical preservation upon themselves was the fate of monuments erected in commemoration of historical events and people. Before the reform of 1870, these monuments had different owners—­the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Transportation and Public Buildings, and the Ministry of the Imperial Court. After the reform of city

Notes to Chapter 5  |  365 administration in 1870, the government attempted to transfer memorial monuments to the cities, sometimes without success. In 1875, the city of St. Petersburg owned only five monuments (the Bronze Horseman and the monuments of A. V. Suvorov, P. A. Rumiantsev, M. I. Kutuzov, and M. B. Barclay de Tolly); all other statues and monuments belonged to different institutions and were maintained at the government’s expense. For instance, the Ministry of Transportation for many years (1875–­1888) tried to get rid of a monument of Catherine the Great in front of the Alexandrinskii Theatre on Nevskii Prospect. The city refused to take care of the empress’s statue without annual compensation for its maintenance and protection, and only in 1889 did the ministry and the city reach an agreement (Izvestia St. Peterburgskoi gorodskoi dumy, 1875, no. 12; 1876, no. 6; 1877, no. 1; 1879, no. 14; 1887, no. 18). In 1909, most of the monuments, many of which had been abandoned and damaged (the rusted monument of Peter the Great in front of the Mikhailovskii Castle had lost a sandal and a huge hole had rusted through the horse’s belly) finally passed into the city’s possession, with the obligation that the state treasury cover the city’s expenses for maintenance and repair (Izvestia St. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, 1909, no. 13, pp. 540–­544; ibid., no. 37; RGIA, f. 1287, op. 30, d. 969. O peredache pamiatnika imperatritsy Ekateriny II v vedenie Sankt-­ Peterburgskogo gorodskogo obshchestvennogo upravlenia). 135. Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–­1866, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 136. Pamiatniki arkhitektury, p. 50. 137. Ibid., pp. 75–­77. 138. See the decision of the Committee of Ministers, which ruled to include the expenses for the restoration of monuments in city budgets. Sokhranenie pamiatnikov tserkovnoi stariny, March 31, 1836, pp. 46–­47; Ustav Stroitelnyi (1857), art. 183, ibid., p. 63. 139. “Otnoshenie Arkheologicheskoi komissii v MVD ob otkaze dat’ rasreshenie na chastichnoe snesenie starinnykh krepostnykh sten g. Pskova. 25 Aprelia 1898, Okhrana pamiatnikov, no. 66, p. 1250. 140. IAC, pp. 952–­966. 141. Alexander Rostislavov, “Gidra, odolevshaia Georgia (Novgorodskaia epopeia),” SG, July–­September 1916, pp. 115–­118. 142. Otchet M. T. Preobrazhenskogo po komandirovke sobraniem Akademii Khudozhestv v mezdhuvedomstvennuiu komissiu po Isaakievskomu soboru dlia vyiasnenia neobkhodimogo remonta po zdaniiu i ischisleniiu potrebnykh na eto sredstv. Dolozheno v Sobranii Akademii Khudozhestv 25 aprelia 1911, RGIA, f. 789, op. 13, 1904, d. 197, l. 19. 143. Otchet M. T. Preobrazhenskogo, l. 23. 144. Nikolai Lansere, “Zakharov i ego Admiralteistvo,” SG, December 1911, p. 49; Otchet M. T. Preobrazhenskogo, l. 20. 145. On the sale of the New Holland and New Admiralty in St. Petersburg, see L. and M. Rudnitskie, “Po povodu prodazhi Novoi Gollandii i Novogo Admiralteistva,” SG, May–­June 1910, pp. 73–­76. 146. See Doklad Moskovskoi gorodskoi upravy ob uregulirovanii proezdov Gorodskoi, Tverskoi, i Miasnitskoi chastei goroda Moskvy, March 31, 1888; Zakliuchenie

366  |  Notes to Chapter 5 Moskovskogo Archeologicheskogo obshchestva, RGIA, f. 1293, op. 119, 1886, d. 28a, ll. 45–­45ob. 147. Moskovskoe arkheologicheskoe obshchestvo—­Ministru Narodnogo Prosveshchenia, June 22, 1911, RGIA, f. 1288, op. 5, 1910, d. 91, ll. 136, 139. 148. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 60. 149. Spiro Kostof, “His Majesty the Pick,” in Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, edited by Zeynep Celilc, Diane Favro, and Richard Ingersoll, Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 9–­22. 150. Izvestia St. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, 1908, no. 47, pp. 2312–­2317; Anna S. Sukhorukova, “Proekty rekonstruktsii Peterburga,” in Peterburgskaia Gorodskaia Duma, 1846–­1918, edited by Valeria A. Nardova, St. Petersburg: “Liki Rossii,” 2005, pp. 242–­245. 151. It began at Zhukovskii Street, crossed the Fontanka River, then continued on Ita­ lianskaia Street to the Moika River and ended on Pevcheskii Bridge near the Palace Square. An alternative project assumed the demolition of the neighboring Ekaterininskii Institute on the Fontanka (architect Giacomo Quarenghi, 1803–­1807). 152. Muzei Imperatorskogo Obshchestva Liubitelei Drevnei Pismennosti. 153. “Vesti za mesiats,” SG, June 1914, pp. 39–­40. 154. Izvestia St. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, 1914, no. 46, pp. 873, 878. The conflict around the Sheremetev estate served as a decisive argument for the facilitation of expropriation for the public needs of cities. Architects and town-­planners claimed that the difficulty of appropriating land in the city was the greatest stumbling block to urban reconstruction. M. G. Dikanskii noted the refusal of Sheremetev to give up land that originated from the particularities of the Russian “political conditions.” If this affair had occurred “in the West, where the historically developed faith in private property does not, however, prevent the recognition of the right of an organized community to expropriate this property for the sake of obvious and vital needs of a human collective,” then it would have taken another turn. Matvei G. Dikanskii, Postroika gorodov. Ikh plan i krasota, Petrograd: Karbasnikov, 1915, p. 25. 155. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, p. 63. 156. Alexander Benois, “Chem mogla by byt’ Akademia khudozhestv v nastoiashee vremia?,” Trudy Vserossiiskogo s’ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde. Dekabr’ 1911–­Ianvar’ 1912, vol. 3, Petrograd, [b.g.] p. 93. 157. Alexander Benois, “Khudozhestvennye eresi,” Zolotoe runo, 1906, no. 2, pp. 80–­81. 158. Georgii Lukomskii, “Mysli o khudozhestvennosti gorodov,” Zodchii, 1910, no. 3, p. 17; Katerina Clark referred to Ostroumova-­Lebedeva’s paintings depicting Petersburg’s landscape where “there are no humans.” Katerina Clark: Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, p. 61. 159. For instance, the “New Petersburg Project.” See Fedor Ye. Yenakiev, Zadachi preobrazovania St. Peterburga, St. Petersburg: Golike i Vilborg, 1912. 160. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, p. 73. 161. Roy MacLeod, “Introduction,” in Government and Expertise. Specialists, administrators, and professionals, 1860–­1919, edited by Roy MacLeod, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 18. 162. Ibid., p. 4; Oliver MacDonagh, “The Nineteenth-­century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (1958), pp. 52–­67.

Notes to Chapter 6  |  367 163. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, vol. 2. 164. Yurii R. Saveliev, Iskusstvo istorizma i gosudarstvennyi zakaz, Moscow: “Sovpadenie,” 2008; Evgeniia M. Kishkinova, “Vyzantiiskoe vozrozhdenie” v arkhitekture Rossii, St. Petersburg: “SPb-­Iskusstvo,” 2007. 165. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, pp. 54–­55. 166. Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, p. 64. 167. My vision of the relationship between culture, property, and new liberalism is quite close to Jordanna Bailkin’s interpretation of the late-­nineteenth-­to early-­twentieth-­ century British liberal policies in regard to cultural properties. Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property, see esp. Introduction and Prelude.

Chapter 6 Writers and the Audience: Legal Provisions and Public Discourse 1. I will not discuss the economic aspects of copyright, the development of the printing industry, and the relationship between authors and publishers. 2. Vladimir A. Davydov, “K voprosu ob istorii kopirovaniia Evropeiskoi zhivopisi v Rossii,” Zarubezhnye khudozhniki i Rossiia, chast’ 1, St. Petersburg: Akademiia Khudozhestv, 1991, p. 40. 3. Petr D. Kalmykov, “O literaturnoi sobstvennosti voobsche i v osobennosti ob istorii prav sochinitelei v Rossii,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, 1851, vol. 72, pt. II, p. 17. 4. Viktor M. Zhivov, “Religioznaia reforma i individual’noe nachalo v russkoi literature XVII veka,” Razyskaniia v oblasti istorii i predystorii russkoi kul’tury, Moscow: Yask, 2002, p. 337. See also, in English, Victor Zhivov, “Religious Reform and the Emergence of the Individual in Russian Seventeenth-­century Literature,” in Religion and culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, edited by Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997. 5. Olga B. Dubova, “Akademicheskaia shkola i teoriia podrazhaniia,” in Russkoe iskusstvo Novogo Vremeni. Issledovania i materialy. Sbornik statei. Vyp. 10. Imperatorskaia Akademiia Khudozhestv. Dela i liudi, Moscow: “Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli,” 2006, pp. 11–­30. See also O. S. Evangulova, “Russkie teoretiki o ‘khudozhestvakh podrazhaniia’ v ikh otnoshenii k nature,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, ser. 8, Istoria, no. 2 (1998), pp. 3–­21. The problem of realism in the arts has been treated in a number of important works, most famously in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1953] 2003. 6. On copying, see Vladimir Davydov, “K voprosu ob istorii kopirovaniia”; Olga S. Evangulova, Izobrazitel’noe iskusstkvo v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka. Pro­ blemy stanovleniia khudozhestvennykh printsipov Novogo Vremeni, Moscow: Izdatelstvo MGU, 1987, pp. 25–­75. 7. Grigorii A. Gukovskii, “O russkom klassitsizme,” Rannie raboty po istorii russkoi poezii XVIII veka, Moscow: “Studia philologica,” 2001, pp. 304, 309. See also his “K voprosu o russkom klassitsizme,” ibid. 8. Maurice Friedberg has pointed out that “Russian translators of the Neoclassical persuasion viewed the originals as their property and thus felt free to do with them

368  |  Notes to Chapter 6 as they pleased.” Maurice Friedberg, Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, p. 31. It would be more correct to say, however, that Russian writers treated literary works as res nullius—­as not belonging to anyone in particular. 9. Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 80. 10. See different opinions on when literary writing became professional in Russia: Marcus Levitt, “The Illegal Staging of Sumarokov’s Sinav i Truvor in 1770 and the Problem of Authorial Status in Eighteenth-­century Russia,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 43, no. 2 (Summer, 1999), p. 7; Teodor Gritz, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia. Knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina, edited by Viktor Shklovskii and Boris Eikhenbaum, Moscow: Agraf, 2001, p. 72. 11. See more in Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–­1800, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, ch. 4, pp. 103–­134. 12. Marcus Levitt, “The Illegal Staging,” p. 306. 13. Abram I. Reitblat, “Stanovlenie avtorskogo prava,” Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: istoriko–­sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kul”ture Pushkinskoi epokhi, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001, p. 110. 14. Marcus Levitt, “The Illegal Staging.” 15. Teodor Gritz, Slovesnost’ i kommertsiia. Knizhnaia lavka A. F. Smirdina, p. 23. 16. William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 17. On the financial aspect of Alexander Pushkin’s literary career, see Sergei Gessen, Knigoizdatel’ Aleksandr Pushkin. Literaturnye dokhody Pushkina, Leningrad, “Akademiia,” 1930. 18. Oldekop published the original text with German translation. St. Petersburgische Zeitschrift, 1824, vol. 14, pp. 121–­122. 19. Yury G. Oksman, “Narushenie avtorskikh prav ssyl’nogo Pushkina v 1824 g. (po neizdannym materialam),” in Pushkin. Stat’i i materialy, Odessa: Odesspoligraf, Tret’ia tipografiia im. Trotskogo, 1925, pp. 6–­11; Sergei Gessen, Knigoizdatel’ Aleksandr Pushkin. Literaturnye dokhody Pushkina, Leningrad: “Akademiia,” 1930, pp. 41–­49; Andre Meynieux, Pouchkine, Homme de lettres, la littérature professionnelle en Russie, Paris: Librairie des Cinq Continents, 1966, pp. 305–­328. 20. Alexander Pushkin, letter to Alexander Benkendorf (draft), 19 Iiulia–­10 Avgusta 1830 g., Alexander Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, Leningrad: Nauka, 1979, p. 498. 21. “ O publikatsii Bestuzheva-­Riumina v “Severnoi Zvezde” ,” ibid., vol. 7, p. 66. 22. In 1827, he addressed the chief of gendarmes, Alexander Benckendorf, asking for the reconsideration of the Oldekop case and seeking the “supreme protection” of his “property.” Benkendorf ’s reply reconfirmed the previous decision. Pushkin, Letter to Benkendorf, 10 sentiabria 1827 g. iz Opochki v Peterburg, ibid., vol. 10, pp. 183–­184. 23. For an analysis of the commercialization, see especially Teodor Gritz, Slovesnost i kommertsiia. 24. Andrei V. Anikin, Muza i Mamona. Sotsial’no-­ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina, Moscow: Mysl’, 1989, pp. 11, 14, 33–­34.

Notes to Chapter 6  |  369 25. Christian Schlözer, Nachal’nye osnovaniia gosudarstvennogo khoziaistva ili nauki o narodnom bogatstve, Moscow: Moskovskii Universitet, 1805. German edition: Christian von Schlözer, Anfangsgründe der Staatswirthschaft, oder die Lehre von dem Nationalreichthume, vol. I, Riga: C.J.G. Hartmen, 1805. 26. Joachim Zweynert, Eine Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens in Russland 1805–­ 1905, Marburg: Metropolis, 2002. Quoted from the Russian edition: Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 1805–­1905, Moscow: GU-­VShE, 2002, pp. 54–­55. 27. Christian von Schlözer, Anfangsgründe der Staatswirthschaft, oder die Lehre von dem Nationalreichthume, pp. 59–­63. Quoted in ibid., p. 59. 28. In 1825, the rules on the administration of imperial theaters, while specifying authors’ financial benefits, spoke about the “right of author’s property” (that was “valid in both capitals,” St. Petersburg and Moscow). Postanovlenie i pravila vnutrennego upravleniia imperatorskoi teatral’noi direktsiei, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia imperatorskikh teatrov, 1825, quoted in [Petr Keppen], O vygodakh i pravakh rossiiskikh pisatelei, 2nd ed., Moscow: Universitetskaia Tipografiia, 1826, p. 9. 29. [Petr Keppen], O vygodakh i pravakh rossiiskikh pisatelei; the first publication of this article appeared in the Moscow Telegraph (Moskovskii telegraf) in 1826. 30. I could not locate this first project in the archives, although many documents indicate its existence. In 1823, the Minister of Education Alexander Golitsyn requested that the Imperial Academy of Arts compile rules for the protection of artistic property, applied to paintings, woodcuts and copper-­plate engravings, maps, musical scores, and other “artistic works.” Apparently, writers and artists knew that the government had drafted a law on copyright: rumors about this work encouraged artists to petition for the extension of the anticipated protective norms to their works. The proliferation of publishing included the visual arts, too: bookstores sold engravings of famous paintings in numerous reproductions, some of very low quality. In 1823, Alexander Orlowsky, a member of the Academy of Arts, complained that unskilled craftsmen “who could hardly handle a pencil” were reproducing his original engravings, either in their entirety or by “extracting different figures from drawings” (RGIA, f. 472, 1823, op. 17 (96/933), d. 2, ll. 5–­5ob.). Requesting a ban on the reproduction of his works for ten years, Orlowsky claimed to care about his reputation rather than his income. To protect the originality of his works, he suggested attaching a seal with the Russian imperial coat of arms: the idea of marking the originals with state seals appeared later in the projects of laws on copyright. Orlowsky was not alone in requesting official protection: in March 1825, George Dawe, a British painter celebrated in Russia for his portrait gallery of the heroes of 1812, asked Alexander I to ban the reproduction of his engravings of the emperor’s portrait. The engraving, commissioned from a certain “British artist” had not yet been done: the request was a precaution, caused by the proliferation of counterfeiting. (For Dawe’s petition, see RGIA, f. 789, op. 1, ch. 2, 1823, d. 237, l. 3.) Needless to say, in the eighteenth century such a request would have been unthinkable: empresses commissioned multiple copies of their portraits by famous artists, while workshops of copyists produced hundreds of rulers’ portraits for sale on streets and in bazaars. The only concern of the authorities was to observe the decency of such paintings (Catherine II, having seen an ugly illustration of herself, ordered that they be bought up and burned—­see Vladimir Davydov, “K voprosu ob istorii kopirovaniia,” pp. 43–­44), not the artists’ artistic property.

370  |  Notes to Chapter 6 31. Petr Viazemsky in a letter to Alexander Turgenev concerning the Oldekop affair (October 27, 1824) quoted in Sergei Gessen, Knigoizdatel’ Alexander Pushkin, p. 46. 32. Ustav o tsenzure 9 Iiuliia 1804; Ustav o tsenzure 10 Iiunia 1826, Sbornik postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii o tsenzure s 1720 po 1862 god, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo vedomstva, 1862, pp. 85, 130–­131. 33. Alexander M. Skabichevskii, Ocherki istorii russkoi tsenzury. St. Petersburg, 1892, p. 220. 34. PSZII, vol. 3, 1828, no. 1979. Eighteen articles of “Rules on the Rights of Authors” issued together with the law on censorship (April 22, 1828) elaborated the general principles of the law. Ibid., no. 1980. 35. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-­ structuralist Criticism, edited and with an introduction by Josué V. Harari, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 141–­160. 36. O predostavlenii literaturnoi sobstvennosti naslednikam Adama Mickiewicza, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 3866, ll. 22–­24ob. 37. While drafting the rules on literary property as part of the law on censorship, the authors observed that the Civil Code would be a more appropriate place for these rules. However, the work on the Civil Code could have delayed issuing the much expected regulations, so it was decided to include them in the laws on censorship (RGIA, f. 1149, op. 1, tom 1, 1828, d. 32, Po proektu ustava o svetskoi tsenzure, l. 7). It is unclear, however, why the new Civil Code of 1832 did not include the laws on literary property. 38. Pushkin, letter to Baron de Barante (Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugière, Baron de Barante), December 16, 1836, in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, 1979, p. 473. In fact, the Committee on Censorship upheld the authorial rights of persons submitting manuscripts and turned down any petition for censorship approval if the edition for which it was requested could “violate someone’s property right.” Delo o vyiasnenii prav literaturnoi sobstvennosti N. R. Sudovshchikova na komediiu I. V. Nekhachina “Neslykhannoe divo ili chestnyi sekretar’ ” (1829–­1830). RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, ch. 1, d. 163, ll. 16–­16ob. 39. Carla Hesse, “Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws on Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–­1793,” Representations, vol. 30 (Spring 1990), p. 117. 40. Mirabeau proposals presented by Isaac-­Rene-­Guy Le Chapelier (1791), ibid., p. 126. 41. Ustav ob uchenoi sobstvennosti, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 50, ll. 2–­61. 42. Ibid., l. 16. 43. Ibid., l. 22. 44. The memo, while using the term “literary property,” nevertheless observed that this term failed to convey the spirit of the author-­public contract relationship and, in fact, could not be used in regard to ideas that—­like the words of an orator—­having being said, became common. The term “copyright” fit better but, apparently, did not have appropriate meaning in Russian laws. 45. Ibid., l. 46. 46. The memo claimed that the addressee was the owner of letters, l. 44–­44ob. 47. This was the role of the committees on censorship, obliged, in addition to their functions, to publish periodically lists of registered books. 48. The memo, especially where concerned with the “contractual” relationship between

Notes to Chapter 6  |  371 authors and society, heavily drew on the work of the French Commission on Literary Property set up by the royal decree of November 20, 1823. The French commission did not produce a new law, but its concept of publishing as an author’s donation to the public need apparently acquired many supporters in France. On this commission, see Robert La Barrois d’Orgeval, La propriété litteraire en France et a l’étranger, Paris: 1868. I used the translation of the excerpt from this work published as “Istoria literaturnoi sobstvennosti vo Frantsii,” translated by I. Golovachevskii, Iuridichesky Vestnik, no. 3 (1872), pp. 49–­73; on this commission, see pp. 66–­69. 49. Joachim Zweynert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 1805–­1905, p. 117. 50. Herrmann drew a distinction between those who write for amusement, scientists who make their living from other sources and do not worry about the profit, “dilettantes,” and professional writers. 51. Zamechaniia na sochinenie: O uchenoi sobstvennosti (perevod), RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 50, ll. 91–­97. 52. The author of a six-­volume course on political economy written specifically for the instruction of the Grand Princes Nicholas (the future Nicholas I) and Michael, he elaborated an entire theory of managing “internal goods”—­“a theory of civilization.” Henri Storch, Cours d’économie politique, ou exposition des principes qui déterminent la prospérité des nations. Ouvrage qui a servi a l’instruction de Leurs Altesses Imperiales, les Grands-­Ducs Nicolas et Michel, vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1815. pp. 46–­47, 110. The fifth volume of this treaty dealt specifically with the management of immaterial goods. On Storch, see also Joachim Zweynert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 1805–­1905, p. 74. 53. Joachim Zweynert, Istoriia ekonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii, 1805–­1905, p. 93. 54. Alexander Butovskii, Opyt o narodnom bogatstve, ili O nachalakh politicheskoi ekonomii, vol. 2, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vtorogo otdeleniia SEIVK, 1847, pp. 508–­529. 55. Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, p. 14. 56. Indeed, writers most of all appreciated the establishment of their proprietary rights: Pushkin, the most zealous among his peers in the protection of his rights and incomes, considered the appearance of the law the symbol of the professionalization of Russian literature. In a letter of 1830 to the chief of the Third Department, Alexander Benckendorf, the poet praised Nicholas I for the “protection of literary property.” Only ten years before, wrote Pushkin, literature was nothing more than a “pleasant honorary exercise” of “amateurs,” the book trade was limited and readers were very few. The law on copyright “livened up” literature and gave it its normal “commercial” direction: “Now it [literature] constitutes a branch of private industry protected by law.” Pushkin, letter to Benckendorf (only a rough draft exists), July 19–­August 10, 1830, in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, 1979, pp. 497–­499. 57. Ya. Kantorovich remarked that since the appearance of the first law on authorial rights in 1828, no more that a dozen and a half cases on this issue reached the Senate. Ya. Kantorovich, “Voprosy avtorskogo prava,” Pravo, no. 18 (1913), p. 1106. At the same time, hundreds of disputes came up for the consideration of the Main Administration on Censorship at the Ministry of Public Education, the Main Administration of Press at the Ministry of Interior, and the St. Petersburg Censorship

372  |  Notes to Chapter 6 Committee. See their collection of cases concerning authorial rights in RGIA, f. 772, op. 1; f. 776, op. 21; f. 777, op. 1. 58. Petr Boborykin, “Avtory, ikh prava i polozhenie (K istorii pervogo mezhdunarodnogo s’ezda literatorov v Parizhe),” Slovo, vol. 1, October 1878), p. 33. 59. Literaturnyi rabochii, “Literaturnaia sobstvennost’,” Iuridicheskii Vestnik, no. 2 (1879), pp. 166–­178. Publishers were not unanimous in their opinions: for owners of big publishing houses, long copyright was the road to prosperity, while small publishers had to be satisfied with the publication of cheap editions and translations. As for the booksellers, the monopoly of copyright holders was not a good thing: in the absence of competition, bookstores could not offer a variety of editions of different quality and price range geared toward different strata of readers. An anonymous “bookseller” argued for the preservation of literary property, but at the same time suggested removing the monopoly on publishing. This assumed that all publishers would pay a certain percentage of profit to the authors or their relatives. Earlier, Victor Hugo had advocated this compromise (the system of domaine public payant). “O literaturnoi sobstvennosti s tochki zreniia knigoprodavtsa,” Rossiiskaia bibliographiia, vol. 78, no. 2 (1881), pp. 38–­40. For a sociological explanation of copyright and the conflict of interests, see Sergei Muromtsev, “Avtorskoe pravo,” Iuridicheskii vestnik, no. 3 (1879). 60. Proekt pravil dlia obespecheniia prav sobstvennosti khudozhnikov, RGIA, f. 789, op. 1, ch. 2, d. 237 (1823), O sostavlenii pravil dlia obespecheniia prav sobstvennosti khudozhnikov s 1823 po 1846, ll. 24–­27ob. 61. Zhurnal zasedaniia soveta Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv, 24 aprelia 1828, ibid., l. 16. 62. The archive of the Hermitage Museum contains hundreds of applications for permission to copy museum paintings. 63. President Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhest, Ministru Imperatorskogo Dvora, 13 Dekabria 1843, RGIA, f. 789, op. 1, ch. 2, d. 237, l. 301. 64. Ibid., ll. 301–­301ob. 65. In addition to George Dawe’s demands, see the requests of Ferdinand-­Victor Perrot and Peter Clodt, ibid., l. 330 ob, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 1344, ll. 131–­131ob. 66. The French composer Adolphe Adam came to Russia to stage his new ballet (most likely L’écumeur des mers [1840]). After just a few performances, bookstores were able offer scores of the most popular mazurkas, quadrilles, and waltzes—­the hungry Russian public longed for this new music for balls and dancing parties, with the result that the official publication of scores made little commercial sense. Sergei Uvarov, [Zapiska] February 1843, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 1344, l. 135. The unauthorized publication of scores of one unpublished musical work by the German composer and pianist Adolph von Henselt ruined his contract with the publisher, who cancelled their contract. [Zapiska] February 1843, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 1344, l. 135. 67. Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, Nikolaiu Ivanovichu Bakhtinu, 9 Oktiabria 1844, RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, d. 1344, l. 263. As a result, the law on musical property (1845) allowed public performances of published works (except dramatic works) unless the author chose to ban public performances and announced his prohibition on the title page of the score. RGIA, f. 472, op. 17(96/933), d. 2, ll. 167–­173. See the debates on composers’ royalties, [Obshchestvo muzykal’nykh pedagogov i drugikh muzykal’nykh deiatelei], Proekt uplaty kompozitoram gonorara za ispolniaemye v

Notes to Chapter 6  |  373 kontsertakh sochineniia, St. Petersburg, 1905; Sergei Yuferov, Materialy po voprosu o vyrabotke novogo polozheniia ob avtorskom muzykal’nom prave, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Senata, 1896; Avgust Gerke, “Proekt zakonopolozhenii ob avtorskikh pravakh na muzykal’nye proizvedeniia” ZhMIu, October 1898; [Glavnaia direk­ tsiia imperatorskogo muzykal’nogo obshchestva], Proekt polozheniia o muzykal’noi sobstvennosti, [St. Petersburg], 1897; Pavel Miller, “Muzykal’naia sobstvennost’ , ” ZhGUP, January 1886, pp. 37–­76. 68. On the professionalization and the emergence of the “classical” canon in music, see Lynn M. Sargeant. Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 69. This anonymous article was mistakenly attributed to Nikolai Chernyshevskii. See “Literaturnaia sobstvennost’,” Sovremennik, no. 3 (1862), quoted in Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, published by M. N. Chernyshevskii, vol. IX, “Sovremennik.” St. Petersburg: Leshtukovskaia parovaia lechatnia, 1906, pp. 162–­163. On the authorship of this article, see Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1939, Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1939, vol. 16, Bibliografiia rabot, p. 811. See also the critique of this article, “Neudavshiisia antagonism,” Vremia, no. 5 (1862), pp. 10–­44. 70. Here I again refer to Caryl Emerson’s magisterial survey, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, p. 13. 71. Petr P. Shenk, Ob avtorskom prave na muzykal’nye proizvedenia. Po povodu odobrennogo Gos. Dumoi zakonoproekta ob avtorskom prave, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Glavnogo upravleniia udelov, 1909, p. 10. According to Shenk, the exchange between the public and the creator of music is not reciprocal: the composer gives more to society than it gets back from it—­hence, he needs more significant protection. 72. Pavel Miller, “Muzykal’naia sobstvennost’ , ”ZhGUP, January 1886, pp. 43–­44. Ironically, many nineteenth-­century writers described their process of writing in similar terms. See a thorough analysis of these statements in Pavel Medvedev’s “In the Writer’s Laboratory” (1933), in V laboratorii pisatelia, Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1971, pp. 11–­170. 73. Aleksei Geine, Avtorskoe pravo na proizvedeniia zodchestva, St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1905, p. 2. See also Matvei G. Dikansky, Avtorskoe pravo v arkhitekture, Petrograd: Tipografiia gradonachalnika, 1916; Yakov Kantorovich, “Voprosy avtorskogo prava. Proizvedeniia zodchestva,” Pravo, no. 19, (1913), pp. 1170–­1174. 74. RGIA, f. 789, op. 12 (1894), 23 “z,” l. 286. On the copyright to photographs, see also Pavel Miller, “Fotograficheskaia sobstvennost’,” ZhGUP, no. 9 (1883), pp. 62–­96. 75. Nikolai Morozov suggested a model of linguistic analysis be applied to uncover plagiarism. N. A. Morozov, Lingvisticheskie spektry. Sredstvo dlia otlicheniia plagiatov ot istinnykh proizvedenii, Petrograd: Imp. Akademiia Nauk, 1916. 76. Grigorii Gukovskii, Realizm Gogolia, Moscow/Leningrad: Gosudarsvtennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959, p. 11. 77. Ivan Goncharov recalled how Vissarion Belinskii spoke favorably about his new novel Obyknovennaia istoriia, with the result that everyone knew about it, “not only in literary circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in the public” (“ne tolko v literaturnykh moskovskikh i peterburgskikh kruzhkakh, no i v publike”). Ivan Goncharov, “Oblomov,” comments, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 20 tomakh, vol. 6, St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2004, p. 718.

374  |  Notes to Chapter 6 78. Abram I. Reitblat, “Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii (O literaturnoi reputatsii Pushkina),” Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii. Istoriko-­sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kulture Pushkinskoi epokhi, Moscow: NLO, 2001, pp. 51–­69. 79. Alexander Pushkin, “Egipetskie nochi,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, Leningrad: Nauka, vol. 6, 1978, p. 244. 80. Anne Lounsberry, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth–­century Russia and America. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 61. 81. Gogol to N. Ya. Prokopovich, May 28, 1843, Munich, Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh, vol. 12, Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1952, p. 187. 82. Anne Lounsberry, Thin Culture, High Art, p. 68. 83. Ibid., pp. 30, 74–­75. See also Anne Lounsberry’s article: “ ‘Russia! What Do You Want of Me?’: The Russian Reading Public in Dead Souls,” Slavic Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 367–­389. 84. See, for instance, “Publika”—­“society, different from the mob [chern’], common people” in the entry in Vladimir Dal’, Dictionary of Russian Language [1868]. Nikolai Gogol under the impression of Pushkin’s death, debased the “public” by equating it with the “mob”—­“I spat upon the despicable mob known by the name of “the public”; only his eternal and immutable word was dear to me,” Nikolai Gogol, letter to Mikhail Pogodin, March 30, 1837, Rome, in Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tomakh, vol. 11, p. 91. 85. Vissarion Belinskii, “Russkaia literature v 1840 godu,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, Moskow: OGIZ, 1948. vol. 1, p. 706. 86. Vissarion Belinskii, “Russkaia literatura v 1840 godu,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow: OGIZ, 1948, p. 715. Quoted (in the author’s translation) from William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 103. An admirer of Gogol’s works, which to the great disappointment of Gogol himself were misunderstood by the majority of readers, Belinskii drew a clear line between the public (who understood the real meaning of Gogol’s sorrowful satire) and the mob (who perceived Gogol’s writings as light humorous reading). Vissarion Belinskii, “Russkaia literatura v 1843 godu,” in N. V. Gogol v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, edited by S. I. Mashinskii, Moscow: Gos. izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952, p. 369. 87. See the chapter on “Literature as a ‘Nation Builder,’ ” in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 88. [L. M. Lotman, B. V. Tomashevskii, G. M. and Friedlender], Kommentarii, in Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, in 14 volumes, Moscow: Izd-­vo AN SSSR, 1937–­1952, vol. 8, 1952, p. 772. 89. Ksenofont Polevoi, “ ‘Gore ot uma,’ komedia v chetyrekh deistviiakh, v stikhakh. Sochinenie A. S. Griboedova,” in Griboedov v russkoe kritike, Collection of Essays, edited by M. A. Gordin, Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1958, p. 78. 90. Apparently, none of Griboedov’s heirs claimed ownership rights to the comedy. If so, the edition of 1833, as well as the one of 1836 with Polevoi’s introductory article about Griboedov, could have been illegal. On this collision, see “Ob ustanovlenii vymorochnogo prava na literaturnuiu sobstvennost’ v pol’zu obshchestva,” Russkii mir, October 19, 1860, no. 81, p. 297.

Notes to Chapter 6  |  375 91. Alexander A. Pushkin (1833–­1914); Grigorii A. Pushkin (1835–­1905). 92. O sroke na pravo literaturnoi sobstvennosti, RGIA, f. 1261, op. 2, 1856, d. 148b, ll. 1–­2. 93. O prodolzhenii sroka literaturnoi i khudozhestvennoi sobstvennosti, RGIA, f. 1149, op. 1, tom 5, 1857, d. 17, ll. 3–­12. Stepan A. Pereselenkov, “Pushkin v istorii zakonopolozhenii ob avtorskom prave v Rossii,” in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki: Materialy i issledovaniia [Komissiia dlia izdaniia sochinenii Pushkina pri Otdelenii russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk], St. Petersburg, 1909, no. 11, pp. 57–­60. 94. At the time, in the German states, France, and Portugal the term was limited to thirty years; in Sweden, Holland, and Belgium—­twenty years; in Britain—­lifelong copyright and seven years of posthumous protection (or forty-­two years after publication); in the United States—­twenty-­eight years after publication with the possibility of extension for another twenty-­four years. 95. Anatolii F. Koni, “Avtorskoe pravo,” Novyi Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-­Efron, 1911, p. 365. Pavel Miliukov complained that he could not find any relatives of Afanasii Schapov, a historian and political thinker, to ask for permission to publish his works. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Sozyv 3, sessia 2, Zasedania 70–­101, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia Tipografiia, 1909, p. 1476. 96. “O sroke prava literaturnoi sobstvennosti,” Golos, 1868, no. 119, quoted in Materialy dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh postanovlenii o tsenzure i pechati, St. Petersburg, 1870, ch. 4. On the transfer of literary property, see, for instance, the story about the sale of copyright to Vissarion Belinsii’s works by his wife in Artur P. Tolstiakov, Liudi mysli i dobra. Russkiie izdateli K. T. Soldatenkov i N. P. Poliakov, Moscow: “Kniga,” 1984, p. 64. Nikolai Gogol’s heirs sold the copyright to his works to V. V. Dumnov for 45,000 rubles. In 1893, Adolf Marx bought Gogol’s works from Dumnov for 150,000 rubles, although in 1902 the copyright expired. More than one million copies of Gogol’s works were published in the year after the copyright expired. Efim A. Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei A. F. Marx, Moscow: Kniga, 1986, pp. 96, 110; Irma P. Viduetskaia, A. P. Chekhov i ego izdatel’ A. F. Marks, Moscow: Nauka, 1977, p. 57; On the purchase of Nikolai Leskov’s works, see Efim Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei A. F. Marx, p. 135. 97. Efim Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei A. F. Marx, pp. 88–­89. 98. The advertisements of Sytin’s firm pointed out that Sytin published “cheap editions of Russian classics free from monopoly rights.” Efim Dinershtein, I. D. Sytin, Moscow: “Kniga,” 1983, p. 115. 99. Iosif E. Barenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg. Tri veka istorii. Ocherki izdatel’skogo dela i knizhnoi torgovli, St. Peterburg: “KultInformPress,” 2003, p. 135. 100. Efim Dinershtein, A. S. Suvorin: Chelovek, sdelavshii karieru, Moscow: “Rosspen,” 1998, p. 149. 101. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad Komissii St. Petersburgskogo Literaturnogo Obshchestva, St. Petersburg: T-­vo Khudozhestvennoi Pechati, 1908, p. 26. 102. Ibid., p. 150; see also Iurii A. Gorbunov, Florentii Pavlenkov, ego zhizn’ i izdatel’skaia deiiatel’nost’, Cheliabinsk: “Ural LTD,” 1999, pp. 138–­140; Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 154–­158.

376  |  Notes to Chapter 6 103. Letopis’ literaturnykh sobytii v Rossii kontsa XIX–­nachala XX verka (1891–­1917), vyp. 1 (1891–­1900), Moscow: IMLI-­RAN, 2002, pp. 32–­33. 104. Evsei I. Ryskin, Osnovnye izdaniia sochinenii russkikh pisatelei. XIX vek, Moscow: Goskul’tsprosvetizdat, 1948, pp. 57, 83, 95. 105. Stephen Moeller-­Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002, p. 90. 106. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad komissii SPb Literaturnogo obshchestva, p. 26. 107. Fedor Dostoevsky’s widow Anna Dostoevskaia sold the copyright to her late husband’s works to Adolf Marx. The most lucrative must have been Glazunov’s purchase of Ivan Turgenev’s copyright from the author just before his death, for 50,000 rubles. The same year, Glazunov printed 6,000 copies of Turgenev’s collected works in ten volumes and then reprinted this edition six times (Evsei Ryskin, Osnovnye izdaniia sochinenii russkikh pisatelei, pp. 113–­114), In the 1850s–­1880s, Turgenev was one of the most popular and commercially successful authors. See the table of Russian writers’ honorariums in Abram Reitblat, “Literaturnyi gonorar kak forma vzaimosviazi pisatelei i publiki,” in Abram Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Balmontu, Moscow: Izdatelstvo MPI, 1991, pp. 88–­89. 108. William Todd III, “Dostoevsky as a Professional Writer,” The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 66. 109. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Stenograficheskie otchety, sessiia VI, zasedanie 4, October 29, 1910, col. 130–­131. 110. On the divergence between the “high canon” and mass-­oriented book production, see Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction, p. 7; Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–­1917, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. 111. See the petition of the Moscow and St. Petersburg committees on literacy for the reduction of copyright term protection: “Khodataistvo Moskovskogo i Sankt-­ Peterburgskogo komitetov gramotnosti o sokrashchenii sroka literaturnoi sobstvennosti,” Russkie vedomosti, 1893, no. 327; St. Peterburgskie vedomosti, 1893, no. 329; similar argument in Ivan Ashkharumov, “Ob avtorskom prave,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, 1896, no. 108, 118; idem, “K voprosu o literaturnoi sobstvennosti,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, 1896. Populist writer Pavel Zasodimskii suggested calculating the reward due to the author for each of his works, and how many copies (and editions) could provide this sum. When this amount had been reached, the price of the book should be comprised of only printing expenses. “Mimokhodom,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, 1894, no. 46. 112. Pervyi Russkii s’ezd iuristov v Moskve v 1875 godu, Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova i Co, 1882, p. 110. 113. For instance, in 1874 Dmitrii Averkiev and Alexander Sukhovo-­Kobylin refused to enter the Society of Russian playwrights under the pretext that they found it inappropriate to take money for literary labor: Novosti dnia, September 21, 1891, no. 2959, p. 2. One of the most powerful defenders of culture’s liberation from the tenets of literary property was Nikolai Fedorov. He repeatedly argued against financial reward for literary labor and criticized the plan to join the international convention for the protection of literary property. Quite characteristically, his disciple’s book about these views appeared with a stamp “not for sale.” (Vladimir A.

Notes to Chapter 6  |  377 Kozhevnikov, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. Opyt izlozheniia ego ucheniia po izdannym i neizdannym proizvedeniiam, perepiske i lichnym besedam, Moscow: Tipografiia Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1908. See also Fedorov’s anti-­copyright writings: “Avtorskoe pravo i avtorskaia obiazannost, ili dolg [k voprosu o lite­raturnoi konventsii],” “Avtorskoe pravo i plata za tsitaty,” Don, 1896, no. 112, 114; “Dolg avtorskii i pravo muzeia-­biblioteki.”) It is very likely that Fedorov’s critique of literary property helped Tolstoy come to the decision to renounce his rights. Despite certain philosophical disagreements, Tolstoy admired Fedorov’s ascetism and devotion. Fedorov’s disciples, however, emphasized the divergence in their views (Nikolai P. Peterson, N. F. Fedorov i ego kniga “Filosofia obshchego dela” v protivopolozhnost’ ucheniiu L. N. Tolstogo “o neprotivlenii” i drugim ideiam nashego vremeni, Vernyi, 1912). For Tolstoy’s favorable opinion of Fedorov’s teaching and his life, see Letter to V. I. Alexeev, November 15–­30, 1881, Lev Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdanie khudozhestvennoi literatury [hereafter, Tolstoy, PSS], 1953, vol. 63, p. 80. 114. The famous story of Lev Tolstoy’s renunciation of his authorial rights has been depicted in various works of fiction (including three movies) and nonfiction; yet, paradoxically, the ideological and legal circumstances of Tolstoy’s decisions and their ambivalent role in the debates on copyright have not received detailed scholarly attention. Indeed, the decision to give up ownership of literary works may seem to need no special explanation: it could simply (and fairly) be considered the consequence of Tolstoy’s general aversion to private property, his interest to the ideas of Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon (whom he met in London in 1861), his enthusiasm for Henry George’s writings, his participation in the populist educational program of the Russian intelligentsia, and his personal family drama. On Proudhon’s influence, see Boris Eichenbaum, Lev Tolstoy. Kniga pervaia. 50-­ e gody, Leningrad: “Priboi,” 1928, p. 383. In 1865, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, “ ‘Le propriete c’est le vol’ will hold true more than the English Constitution until the end of the human race” (Nikolai N. Gusev, Zhizn’ L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo. Tolstoy v rastsvete svoego khudozhestvennogo geniia, Moscow: Tolstovskii muzei, 1928, quoted from ibid.). Perhaps it was a coincidence, but precisely in 1865 Proudhon’s essay with a critique of literary property appeared in Russian translation (“Literary Estates” [Les majorats litteraire], in translation Literaturnye majoraty, translated from the French, St. Petersburg: Izdanie Zhirkevicha i Zubareva, 1865). Reviewed in Otechestvennye zapiski, July 1865, pp. 50–­55; Russkoe slovo, April 1865, pp. 69–­ 75, two years before it was summarized, without mentioning Proudhon’s name, in an article in radical Sovremennik (“Novye issledovaniia po voprosu o literaturnoi sobstvennosti,” Sovremennik, 1863, vol. 98, no. 9–­10, pp. 445–­463). Thirty-­five years later, Tolstoy repeated this phrase in conversation: “Proudhon’s phrase ‘Property is theft’ keeps going through my head” (Vladimir A. Passe, “Tolstoy,” in Tolstoy v vospominaniakh sovremennikov, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978, vol. 2, p. 262). We don’t know whether Tolstoy read Proudhon’s “Les majorats litteraire,” but the consonance of ideas and their critical attitude to the income from literary labor makes it possible that Proudhon influenced Tolstoy’s decision to give up the rights of literary property. On Henry George and Tolstoy, see Nikolai Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: Materialy k biografii s 1881 po 1885 god, Moscow: Nauka, 1970, p. 385; Galina Alexeeva, “Idei Genri Dzhordza v tvorchestve i zhizni L. N. Tolstogo,” in Lev Tolstoy

378  |  Notes to Chapter 6 i mirovaia literatura. Materialy VI Mezhdunarodnoi Nauchnoi Konferentsii, Tula: Izdatelskii dom Iasnaia Poliana, 2010, pp. 67–­74; L. N. Tolstoy i SShA. Perepiska, Moscow: IMLI, 2004, p. 512. Tolstoy read his “Progress and Poverty” in 1885 in English and was immediately captivated by the critique of private property (Gusev, Materialy k biografii, pp. 385–­388). Tolstoy and George were in correspondence, but never met. The influence of Henry George’s ideas on Tolstoy, especially in the 1890s, was enormous: Tolstoy’s library in Iasnaia Poliana contained ten editions of George’s books in English and German; the protagonist of his novel Resurrection, Dmitrii Nekhliudov, follows Henry George’s ideas; in 1894, Tolstoy’s daughter Tatiana L’vovna granted land to the peasants of her estates “according to Henry George” with the obligation to pay a certain fee to the social capital. 115. The memoirs of Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra perfectly depict the sequence of events and dramatic turns in the writer’s life and his spiritual searching in 1890–­ 1891, and convey the domestic atmosphere that led to the division of Tolstoy’s land estates between the members of the family and the renunciation of literary property rights. She points out that ownership was a moral “burden” for Tolstoy. Alexandra Tolstaia, Otets. Zhizn’ L’va Tolstogo, vol. 2, Moscow: Spark, 2001, pp. 100–­107. 116. September 19, 1891, Russkie vedomosti, no. 258, Novoe vremia, no. 5588; L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 66, p. 47. 117. Novosti Dnia, September 26, 1891, no. 2964, p. 3. 118. Kvidam, [no title], Novosti Dnia, September 21, 1891, no. 2959. 119. The renunciation of copyright was also disturbing for the authorities. Tolstoy’s last works represented the most ambivalent and subversive (from the point of view of censorship) pieces of writings. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna, procured Alexander III’s personal permission for the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata in the thirteenth volume of the collected works under the condition that it would not be republished in separate editions. However, the ban on republication of The Kreutzer Sonata remained unofficial and undisclosed. Tolstoy’s declaration forced the government to announce its prohibition to avoid the extensive spread of Tolstoy’s works among the “unenlightened rural masses.” The prohibition on republication of The Kreutzer Sonata only increased its popularity: the Russian public could read this work in a number of “pirated” and handwritten copies. This controversy has been thouroughly analyzed in Peter Ulf Moler, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s, Leiden: Brill, 1988, pp. 82–­91. 120. “Na vstrechu!,” Peterburgskii listok, no. 260 (1891), p. 1; Novosti Dnia, September 21, 1891, no. 2959, p. 2. 121. “Graf Tolstoy,” Moskovskie vedomosti, September 24, 1891, no. 264, p. 5. 122. “Fonogrammy,” Novosti Dnia, September 21, 1891, no. 2959, p. 2; see a similar comment in “Na vstrechu!” (note 120, earlier). 123. Later, Tolstoy had to supplement his announcement with the requirement to submit translations for his approval to verify that the translation had been made from the correct source. L. N. Tolstoy, “Redaktoru inostrannoi gazety,” August 11, 1894, Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 67, p. 188. 124. Tolstoy discussed his plans of renunciation with his wife, Sofia Andreevna, in 1886. In 1887, newspapers published the announcement that all works of Lev Tolstoy that appeared in the editions of “Posrednik” constitute “public property and are free

Notes to Chapter 6  |  379 from any literary property.” He also planned to publish The Kreutzer Sonata anonymously with the announcement that anyone could republish it. Lidiia D. Opulskaia, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Materialy k biografii s 1882 po 1892 god, Leningrad: Nauka, 1979, pp. 106, 64, 173. 125. Nikolai Ge (1831–­1894), Russian artist. Tolstoy, an admirer of his works, also tried to make Pavel Tretiakov purchase Ge’s painting for his gallery. Tretiakov refused. 126. Lidia Opulskaia and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Materialy k biografii s 1886 po 1892 god, p. 17. See also Vladimir G. Korolenko, “Velikii piligrim,” in Tolstoy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, Moscow: 1978, vol. 2, pp. 242–­244. 127. Alexander Goldenveizer recalled how in 1907, Tolstoy, imagining a certain writer who receives an honorarium for his writings, said: “A person enjoyed writing, and now he requests for this enjoyment 25 rubles a page!” (Alexander Gondenveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo, Vospominaniia, Moscow: Zakharov, 2002, p. 162). Such was the honorarium of Tolstoy himself in the 1870s. In the 1890s, publishers were ready to pay the Tolstoy family a much higher price: the honorarium for Tolstoy’s writing reached 50 rubles per page; behind him were Nikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov, who garnered only 25 rubles a page. Abram Reitblat, “Literaturnyi gonorar kak forma vzaimosviazi pisatelei i publiki,” in Ot Bovy k Bal’montu, i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii russkoi literatury, Moscow: NLO, 2009, p. 94. 128. Sergei L. Tolstoy, Ocherki bylogo, Tula: Priokskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1965, p. 242. 129. Po khodataistvu poverennoi grafa L. N. Tolstogo grafini S. A. Tolstoi ob okhranenii prav literaturnoi sobstvennosti ee muzha (po povodu izdanii ego proizvedenii g. Askarkhanovym), RGIA, f. 777, op. 5, 1904, d. 76. 130. O postanovke p’ies L. N. Tolstogo “Zhivoi trup” i “Plody Prosveshcheniia,” RGIA, f. 497, op. 14, d. 210, ll. 18, 22–­23. 131. Tokutomi Roka, “Piat’ dnei v Yasnoi Poliane. Demon v dushe,” in L. N. Tolstoy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, p. 331. 132. George Kennan, “V gostiakh u grafa Tolstogo” in ibid., p. 377. See also the correspondence between Isabel Hapgood (1850–­1928), a translator of Tolstoy’s works, Tolstoy’s daughter, Tatiana L’vovna, and Sofia Andreevna. Hapgood tried to arrange a copyright-­protected publication of Tolstoy’s works in the United States. L. N. Tolstoy i SShA. Perepiska, pp. 107, 153, 226, 228, 231. The French Journal des Debats published Tolstoy’s announcement that he did not write for money and did not give anyone the exclusive right to publish his works in translation. Journal des Debats, March 8, 1894. 133. Lev Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 53, p. 16. 134. Alexander Fodor, The Quest for a Non-­violent Russia: The Partnership of Lev Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989, p. 117. As Alexander Fodor remarks, Chertkov “was determined to obtain control over Tolstoy’s huge literary heritage and place it in the public domain” (p. 138). 135. Dnevnik L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo, 1st ed., edited by V. G. Chertkov, vol. 1, Moscow: Tipografiia Sytina, 1916, p. 245. 136. Zaveshchanie, July 22, 1910. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii, vol. 82, p. 227. 137. Ibid., pp. 260, 261–­262. Despite the irreproachable text of his last will, Tolstoy’s papers were subjected to litigation on the part of his heirs. Sofia Andreevna deposited part of her husband’s archive at the Historical Museum in Moscow. After Tolstoy’s

380  |  Notes to Chapter 6 death, she requested the return of the manuscripts, which she claimed to be her property. Sofia Tolstaia argued that her late husband gave her those papers, and she therefore could hold them as a material asset, whereas Alexandra’s rights assumed only her “moral” power to publish her father’s works. See O rukopisiakh Tolstogo, RGIA, f. 733, op. 201, d. 341; Tolstovskii ezhegodnik, Moscow: Izdanie Obshchestva Tolstovskogo Muzeiia v Peterburge i Tolstovskogo obshchestva v Moskve, 1913, pp. 3–­10. See also the polemics concerning the right to publish Tolstoy’s correspondence, ibid., 1912, pp. 275–­295. 138. In addition to the 300,000 rubles paid for the exclusive rights of publication, Ivan Sytin paid 100,000 to Sofia Andreevna Tolstaia to buy the remaining part of the previous edition. Charles Ruud interpretes this voluntary step as a recognition of the countess’s fair share and as compensation for her losses. Charles Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851–­1934, Montreal/Buffalo, NY: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1990, p. 112. 139. On the negotiations between publishers and Chertkov, see ibid., pp. 110–­114; Efim A. Dinershtein, I. D. Sytin, Moscow: Kniga, 1983, 132–­138. 140. [Karpov], Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskie otchety, Sozyv 3, Sessiia 6, zasedanie 4, October 29, 1910, p. 122. 141. Alexei M. Guliaev, Russkoe grazhdanskoe pravo. Posobie k lektsiiam, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Stasiulevicha, 1911, p. 225. 142. R. K., “Litearturnyi fond,” Literaturnaia entsiklopedia v 11 tomakh, vol. 6, Moscow: OGIZ RSFSR, 1932, p. 474. 143. [G.], “Ob ustanovlenii vymorochnogo prava na literaturnuiu sobstvennost’ v polzu obshchestva posobia literatoram i uchenym,” Russkii Mir, October 19, 1860, no. 81, pp. 295–­298. 144. The Literary Fund published almost exclusively the works bequeathed to it by authors or donated by authors’ heirs: in addition to the most lucrative Nadson estate (fifteen editions of Nadson’s poetry, 6,000 copies each, earned 124,000 rubles), the Literary Fund also publish the works of Vsevolod Garshin, Grigory Dzhanshiev, the historian Nikolai Kostomarov, and the memoirs of Nikolai Belogolovyi. Yubileinyi sbornik Literaturnogo Fonda. 1859–­1909, St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia polza, 1909, pp. 22–­23, 477. 145. Grigorii Dzhanshiev, “K voprosu o prave sobstvennosti na sochineniia Lermontova,” Russkie Vedomosti, February 4, 1887, no. 90, p. 3. 146. See the publication of the debate between Viskovatov and the Glazunov’s firm in “ ‘Russkie vedomosti’: Polemika vokrug izdanii M. Yu. Lermontova,” Literaturnaia ucheba, October 2004, pp. 78–­85. 147. Grigorii Dzhanshiev, “K voprosu o prave sobstvennosti na sochineniia Lermontova,” p. 3. 148. Doklad Komissii Akademii Nauk po voprosu ob avtorskom prave (1899). Osoboe mnenie akademika Korzhinskogo, RGIA, f. 733, op. 143, d. 170, ll. 105–­106. 149. Lev A. Kasso, “Zamechaniia po povodu statei ob avtorskom prave,” in ibid., no pagination. 150. Semen A. Beliatskii, Novoe avtorskoe pravo v ego osnovnykh printsipakh, St. Petersburg: Izdanie Iuridicheskogo knizhnogo sklada “Pravo,” 1912, p. 119.

Notes to Chapter 7  |  381

Chapter 7 The Private Letters of National Literature 1. William Nickell, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010, p. 15. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., pp. 18–­21, 99. 4. Gogol’s testament (1845), quoted in Nikolai G. Mashkovtsev, “Istoriia portreta Gogolia,” in Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. Materialy i issledovaniia, edited by V. V. Gippius and Yu. G. Oksman, Moscow/Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1936, vol. 2, p. 411. Mashkovtsev suggested that one of the reasons for Gogol’s anger was that Alexander Ivanov’s portrait was in fact a sketch for his famous painting The Appearance of Christ before the People. 5. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Iunosheskie stikhi Lermontova,” in Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontov. Opyt istoriko-­literaturnoi otsenki, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1924, p. 22. 6. Lermontov wrote 300 out of 400 poems before 1832, and only around 100 appeared in 1836–­1841, after a three-­year break. Ibid.; see also Vadim Vatsuro, “Izdaniia,” in Lermontovskaia entsiklopediia, AN SSSR, Institut Russkoi Literatury, Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1981, p. 183. I am grateful to William Todd III for the reference to this article and other works on the editions of Russian nineteenth-­ century writers. 7. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Iunosheskie stikhi Lermontova,” pp. 22–­23; [Senkovskii], [review of] “Stikhotvoreniia M. Lermontova, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Glazunova, 1842,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 1843, vol. LVI, ch. 2, pp. 40–­42. 8. See, for instance, Boris Eikhenbaum, “O tekstakh Lermontova,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 19–­21, pp. 485–­501. 9. On editorial practices in mid-­nineteenth century Russia, see “Ocherk istorii tekstologii novoi russkoi literatury,” in Osnovy tekstologii, edited by V. S. Nechaeva, Moscow: Izd-­vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962, pp. 26–­27. 10. On the emergence of literary scholarship in Russia, see Andy Byford, Literary Scholarship in Late Imperial Russia: Rituals of Academic Institutionalization, London: Modern Humanities Research Association; Maney Publishing, 2007. 11. “Ocherk istorii tekstologii novoi russkoi literatury,” p. 28. 12. On the editions of Pushkin’s works and the principles of text study, see Nikolai Izmailov’s indispensable “Tekstologiia,” in Pushkin: Itogi i problemy izuchenia, Moscow/ Leningrad: Nauka, 1966, pp. 555–­610. On the methodology of text study applied to the works of nineteenth-­century writers, see Boris Tomashevskii, Pisatel’ i kniga. Ocherki tekstologii, Moscow: “Priboi,” 1928. See also Tomashevskii’s critique of Annenkov’s edition, ibid., pp. 94–­96. 13. As Vadim Vatsuro observed, “The main task of the editor was to reach absolute completeness of the corpus [of texts], including even drafts and handwritten notes.” Vadim Vatsuro, “Izdania,” p. 185; Nikolai Izmailov, “Tekstologiia,” p. 564. 14. The editions of 1859 and 1869–­1871, publisher Yakov Isakov (Liubov’ Ravich, G. N. Gennadi (1826–­1880), Moscow: 1981, p. 27, quoted from Sergei V. Belov, “Izdatel’

382  |  Notes to Chapter 7 Pushkina Ya. A. Isakov,” Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, AN SSSR, Leningrad: Nauka, 1987, no. 21, pp. 175–­177; see also Nikolai Izmailov, Tekstologia, p. 562. 15. “Ocherk istorii tekstologii novoi russkoi literatury,” p. 47. 16. N. N. [Annenkov P. V.], “Novoe izdanie sochinenii Pushkina,” Vestnik Evropy, 1881, no. 2, pp. 908–­909—­also quoted in “Ocherk istorii tekstologii novoi russkoi literatury.” 17. See, for instance, Il’ynskii’s article “Do We Have an ‘Authentic’ Text of Pushkin’s Works?” (Leonid K. Il’ynskii, “Imeem li my ‘edinyi’ tekst sochinenii Puskina?,” Zhurnal Ministertsva Narodnogo Prosveshchenia, 1910, no. 11). See also the discussion of Pushkin’s texts in Nikolai O. Lerner, “Zamechaniia o tekste vtorogo toma akademicheskogo izdaniia sochinenii Pushkina,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenia, no. 12 (1908), pp. 432–­4 44; on the editor’s arbitrariness, see Pavel E. Shchegolev, “Nenapisannye stikhotvoreniia Pushkina,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1904), pp. 264–­274. The first copyright-­free jubilee editions of Lermontov’s works (1891) offered various versions of the same verses and poems, with subsequent debates about which version was genuine. Arsenii Vvedenskii, “Lermontovskie teksty,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, no. 5 (1904), pp. 64–­108; idem, “Novye izdaniia sochinenii M. Yu. Lermontova,” Novoe vremia, July 20, 1891. no. 5527, p. 3; Innokentii Boldakov, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Russkie vedomosti, September 27, 1891, no. 266, p. 1; P. V. Bykov, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu: Otvet A. I. Vvedenskomu,” Novoe vremia, August 17, 1891, no. 5555, p. 3; Pavel A. Viskovatov, “Po povodu napadok g. Vvedenskogo na novye izdaniia sochinenii Lermontova,” Novoe vremia, July 30, 1891, no. 5537, p. 3. On these polemics, see Larisa V. Korotkova, “Literaturnoe nasledie Lermontova v 1890-­e gody,” unpublished dissertation, Saratovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2003, ch. 2. 18. A. V-­n [A. N. Pypin], “Lermontovskaia literatura v 1891 godu,” Vestnik Evropy, September 1891, p. 341. 19. “Zametka,” Nedelia, September 22, 1891, no. 38, p. 1213. 20. “Literaturnye musorshchiki,” Knizhki Nedeli, October 1891, pp. 256–­258. 21. Ibid., p. 257. 22. N. N. [P. V. Annenkov], “Novoe izdanie sochinenii Pushkina,” p. 908. 23. Quoted from A. V–­n [A. N. Pypin], “Lermontovskaia literatura v 1891 godu,” pp. 346–­347. 24. Pushkin’s youngest daughter, Natalya Aleksandrovna Dubelt-­Merenberg, received the letters from her mother, so she could sell them in case of extreme financial need. After 1869, at which point Merenberg had already unsuccessfully offered the letters for sale to various publishers and journalists, Ivan Turgenev took the publication of the correspondence upon himself in Vestnik Evropy. See the thorough analysis of this story in Nikolai Izmailov, “Turgenev—­izdatel’ pisem Pushkina k N. N. Pushkinoi,” in Turgenevskii sbornik, Materialy k polnomy sobraniiu sochinenii i pisem I. S. Turgeneva, vol. V, edited by M. P. Alexeev, Leningrad: Nauka, 1969, pp. 399–­416. 25. On the debates around the status of “epistolary property” and privacy of correspondence in eighteenth-­century France, see Dena Goodman, “Epistolary Property,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, edited by John Brewer and Susan Staves, London/New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 332–­364. 26. Ibid., p. 414. Moreover, the publication of correspondence was illegal: Turgenev thought that the fifty years that passed since the letters were written had made them

Notes to Chapter 7  |  383 legally publishable, whereas, according to the law, Pushkin’s heirs held the right to the correspondence indefinitely. 27. Pervoe sobranie pisem I. S. Turgeneva 1840–­1883, St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo dlia posobiia nuzhdaiushchimsia literatoram i uchenym, 1884. On the publication of Turgenev’s correspondence and public response to it, see the introduction to the thirteen volumes of his letters (the latest edition of 1982 included eighteen volumes of letters): Mikhail Alexeev, “Pis’ma I. S. Turgeneva,” in Ivan Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vosmi tomakh, Pis’ma v trinadtsati tomakh, vol. 1, Pisma 1831–­1849, Moscow: Nauka, 1961, pp. 15–­144. 28. Nikolai Izmailov, “Turgenev—­izdatel’ pisem Pushkina k N. N. Pushkinoi”; Mikhail Alexeev, “Pisma I. S. Turgeneva.” 29. For more on Goncharov’s life, see Milton Ehre, Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. 30. Ivan Goncharov, “Narushenie voli,” in Sobranie sochinenii v vosmi tomakh, vol. 8, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955, pp. 122–­ 123. First published in Vestnik Evropy, 1889, no. 3. 31. A. Nivin, “O ‘Narushenii voli,’ ” Nedelia, March 11, 1891, no. 44, p. 1401. 32. Immediately after his death, several newspapers published Goncharov’s letters, noting at the same time that the author requested privacy for his correspondence (A. Nivin, “O ‘Narushenii voli,’ ” p. 1402). Anatolii Koni, Goncharov’s close friend, in memoirs that appeared soon after Goncharov’s death, “retold” one of his letters, saying that, out of deference to Goncharov’s will, he would not publish the actual letter (Anatolii Koni, “Pis’mo k redaktoru,” Nedelia, September 22, 1891, no. 38, p. 1194). Indeed, despite ubiquitous violations of Goncharov’s request, his manifesto ultimately did prevent the publication of his personal letters and papers. In the twenty years after his death, only forty-­eight of Goncharov’s letters were published; only in 1911 was a significant portion of his correspondence with M. M. Stasiule­ vich made public, to show “the creator of ‘Oblomov’ in a completely new light” (Lev S. Utevskii, Zhizn’ Goncharova. Vospominania. Pisma, Dnevniki, Moscow: Agraf, 2000, pp. 10–­11. See also Evgenii Liatskii, Goncharov: zhizn’, lichnost’, tvorchestvo, Stockholm: Severnye ogni, 1920, pp. 59–­61; Anatolii Alexeev, “Introduction,” in I. A. Goncharov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, edited by N. K. Piksanov, Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969, p. 16. 33. Nikolai Leskov, “Zamogil’naia pochta Goncharova,” Peterburgskaia gazeta, December 12, 1891, no. 341, p. 4. 34. A. I. Vvedenskii, “Zhurnalnye otgoloski,” Russkie vedomosti, April 2, 1889, no. 90, p. 2; Evgenii M. Garshin, “Literaturnaia beseda,” Birzhevye vedomosti, March 5, 1889, no. 63, p. 2; Yurii N. Govorukha-­Otrok, “Literaturnye zametki,” Yuzhnyi krai, March 18, 1889, no. 2823, p. 2; “Literaturno-­kriticheskii felieton,” Grazhdanin, March 16, 1889, no. 75, p. 4. See also the publication of various responses to Goncharov’s testament in Evgenii Liatskii, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov. Kriticheskie ocherki, St. Petersburg: Energiia, 1904 (Prilozhenie). In the preface to this edition, Liatskii pointed out that, in deference to Goncharov’s will, he would not publish manuscripts and other materials in his disposal. 35. Apparently, many perceived this act as the eccentric decision of a depressed man: an extremely popular writer in the 1850s–­1860s, Goncharov shut himself up in seclusion later, with the result that, as one periodical remarked, the mass audience learned only from his obituary that the author of Oblomov had been alive until just

384  |  Notes to Chapter 7 recently. In literary circles, Goncharov had the reputation of an excessively punctilious person in matters of authorship and originality—­the notorious dispute between Goncharov and Turgenev (in which Goncharov claimed that Turgenev had stolen ideas from his novel) did not add to his popularity. 36. “Prava potomstva,” Nedelia, March 5, 1889, no. 10, pp. 305–­306. 37. “Mneniia iuristov o prave na pis’ma velikikh liudei,” Knizhki Nedeli, December 1891, p. 256. 38. “Zametka,” Nedelia, September 22, 1891, no. 38, p. 1213. See the opposite opinion (in support of Goncharov’s claims) in “Khronika,” Novosti Dnia, September 23, 1891, no. 2961, p. 3. 39. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, vol. IV, no. 5 (December 1890), p. 198. (Many thanks to Rebecca Rix for bringing this to my attention.) David Rosen and Aaron Santesso suggest that Warren and Brandeis drew inspiration from contemporary prose and poetry (David Rosen and Aaron Santesso,“Inviolate Personality and the Literary Roots of the Right to Privacy,” Law and Literature, vol. 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 1–­25). 40. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” p. 196. 41. Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 141. 42. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, New York: Penguin Classics, 2008, p. 146. 43. Ibid., pp. 147, 148. 44. Petr N. Obninskii, “Posmertnoe proiavlenie i preemstvennosti v avtorskom prave,” Iuridicheskii Vestnik, 1889, bk. 5, p. 90. Compare to the similar decision of the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the use of the images of the late philanthropist Mary Hamilton Schuyler: “Whatever right of privacy Mrs. Schuyler had died with her,” Stuart Banner, American Property, p. 41. 45. Petr Obninskii, “Posmertnoe proiavlenie,” p. 96. 46. Herman Blumenfeld, “Nasledovanie v avtorskom prave,” ZhGUP, January 1892, p. 49. 47. Dmitrii Likhachev, Tekstologiia, na materiale russkoi literatury X–­XVII vekov, St. Petersburg: “Aleteia,” 2001, p. 482. On the emergence of professional “editing” (or, rather, the lack of it in the first half of the nineteenth century), see Abram Reitblat, “Vozniknovenie redaktury,” in Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii. Istoriko-­sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi kulture Pushkinskoi epokhi, Moscow: Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001, pp. 117–­127. 48. On Tikhonravov, see Pamiati Nikolaia Savvicha Tikhonravova, Moscow: Pechatnia Snegirevoi, 1894; on his edition of Gogol’s works, see the introductory note in Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow: Nauka, 1940, pp. 11–­14, and Stephen Moeller-­Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife, pp. 101–­103. 49. This term, meaning the latest version of a text approved by the author, entered the professional vocabulary of editors and textual critics. On the principles of establishing the author’s “last will,” see Modest L. Hoffman, Pushkin. Pervaia glava nauki o Pushkine, Petersburg: Atenei, 1922, p. 62. See also “Posledniaia avtorskaia volia,” in Arkadii Mil’chin, Izdatelskii slovar’-­spravochnik, Moscow: “Olma-­press,” 2006, available at http://slovari.yandex.ru (accessed June 19, 2013); Solomon Reiser, Osnovy tekstologii, 2nd ed., Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1978, pp. 13–22. 50. The publication of Anton Chekhov’s feuilletons and short stories not included in the last complete edition during his lifetime also aroused protests among Chekhov’s

Notes to Chapter 7  |  385 admirers: they claimed that the appearance of the writer’s early works—­literary “garbage” that he had thought unworthy of publication—­denigrated his literary reputation (Irma P. Viduetskaia, A. P. Chekhov i ego izdatel’ A. F. Marks, Moscow: Nauka, 1977, pp. 91–­92). 51. Solomon Reiser, Osnovy tekstologii, p. 16. 52. A. Skabichevskii, “Literaturnaia khronika. ‘Narushenie voli,’ stat’ia Goncharova,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, September 3, 1889, no. 67, p. 2. 53. “Prakticheskoe neudobstvo goncharovskogo zaveshchaniia,” Knizhki “Nedeli,” 1892, no. 7, pp. 196–­198. 54. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est–­ce qu’un auteur?,” in Dits et écrits, 1954–­1988, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 794. 55. Hereafter, I quote from the English translation, Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-­structuralist Criticism, edited and with an introduction by Josué V. Harari, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 143–­144. 56. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1926–­1984), Paris: Flammarion, 1989, p. 346. 57. O. A. Demikhovskaia, “O pervoi publikatsii ‘Neobyknovennoi istorii,’ ” in I. A. Goncharov, Novye materialy i issledovania. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 102, Moscow: IMLI RAN, “Nasledie,” 2000, p. 305. 58. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Sessiia 2. Stenograficheskie otchety, ch. 3, Meeting 115, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1909, p. 1572. 59. Ibid., p. 1576. The Pergament “amendment” was to remove Miliukov’s “amendment.” 60. This project ultimately became a law on March 20, 1911. PSZIII, vol. XXXI, March 20, 1911, no. 34935. 61. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Sessiia 2, p. 1472. 62. The economist and journalist Nikolai Annenskii, the literary critic Semen Vengerov (famous among other things for his edition of Pushkin’s works), the leader of the Constitutional Democratic party Pavel Miliukov, the publicist and lawyer Vasilii Vodovozov, the historian and politician Venedikt Miakotin, the historian Pavel Mizhuev, and the journalist and populist politician Evgenii Semenov. 63. Anatolii Koni, one of the adherents of the “public” reform of copyright, presented a similar pedigree for Russian literature: “Turgenev and Goncharov would have been unthinkable if had not been for Gogol’s sincere contemplation and the marvelous language of Pushkin, while the transition to Pushkin from Derzhavin would have been hardly possible without the faithful and elegant prose of Karamzin.” Anatolii Koni, “Avtorskoe pravo,” in Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, V vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Brokgauz i Efron, 1911, p. 361. 64. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad komissii Sankt-­Petersburgskogo Literaturnogo obshchestva, St. Petersburg: Tip. khudozhestvennoi pechati, 1908, p. 52. 65. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad komissii SPb Literaturnogo obshchestva, p. 35. 66. Mikhail Lermontov, “I skuchno, i grustno. I nekomu ruku podat’ . . . ,” translation from Dimitri Obolenskii, The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976, p. 163. 67. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad komissii SPb Literaturnogo obshchestva, p. 36. 68. In juridical language, this meant treating the author’s right as escheat (vymorochnoe pravo). 69. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Stenograficheskie otchety, Sessia VI, zasedanie 3. October 27, 1910, St. Petersburg: Gos. tipografiia, 1911, col. 70–­74. According to the

386  |  Notes to Chapter 7 Russian law on inheritance, wives did not inherit the entire property of their deceased husbands: they could receive only one-­quarter of the movable property and one-­seventh of the immovable property, or real estate (art. 1148, Svod Zakonov Grazhdanskikh, Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, ch. 1, izdanie 1900, St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaia polza, 1910; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, p. 229). Even if there were no other relatives, the rest would be treated as escheat—­that is, inherited by the state. Clearly, this rule could not be applied to literary property: one-­quarter of a novel cost nothing. Consequently, writers’ widows could inherit their husbands’ literary estates entirely, if there were no other heirs. The Russian Civil Code stated that parents, if their offspring died childless, could inherit nonancestral estates (blagopriobretennoe imushchestvo), but their right was not transferrable. Adjusting the laws on inheritance to literary property, the compilers of the law suggested reserving parents’ copyright to the works of deceased writers if they left no spouse, or, if there was a spouse, to share the inheritance in equal parts. 70. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Stenograficheskie otchety, Sessia VI, zasedanie 3. October 27, 1910, col. 111. 71. Anatolii Koni, “Avtorskoe pravo,” p. 362. Characteristically, being a fervent adherent to the public ownership of literary works, Koni argued for greater protection of authors and their heirs’ privacy and personal rights. (Koni was Ivan Goncharov’s close friend and confidant: the writer approached him with a question regarding the right to publish letters a year before the appearance of his “Violation of Will.” See Ivan Goncharov, letter to Anatolii Koni, February 16, 1888, I. A. Goncharov, Novye materialy i issledovania, Moscow: Nasledie, 2000, pp. 517–­519.) He suggested excluding private letters from the transferrable literary property: the author could sell a copyright to a publisher or bequeath it to someone else, but the author’s close relatives (widow and children) must retain control over personal correspondence that may contain information about their lives, even after the expiration of copyright. At the same time, Koni suggested endowing only heirs by will (as opposed to heirs by law) with the right to publish diaries—­the most, as he claimed, intimate products of the writer’s mind: only those people who had a spiritual connection, and not just blood ties, with the deceased author could vouchsafe the diaries’ safe publication. The article in the new law on authorship (1911) concerning writers’ private correspondence resulted from long discussions on who would be a better guardian of the author’s and his family’s private secrets—­the heirs by law or the heirs designated by the last will. Eventually, the legislators agreed to reserve for the heirs (both heirs by law and will, and on both sides—­the author, and the addressee) a fifty-­year posthumous monopoly over correspondence; after that, only the closest relatives of correspondents (spouses and children, if alive) could prohibit the publication of letters (art. 28, quoted in Yurii V. Aleksandrovskii, Avtorskoe pravo. Zakon 20 marta 1911, St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo po izdaniiu novykh zakonov, 1911, pp. 97–­98). As for diaries and other private papers, the law reserved a fifty-­year right to control their publication for the “heirs by law”—­that is, relatives (publishers and other inheritors designated in the last will, if it did not contain special provisions regarding private papers, were, consequently, excluded); and, similarly, after the expiration of this term, only spouses and children retained this right. If there were no close relatives, letters and private papers entered the public domain. By establishing a fifty-­year term for the pro-

Notes to Chapter 7  |  387 tection of private papers and letters, the law of 1911 moved toward public accessibility of the epistolary heritage; the previous law of 1828 (although, rarely observed) considered the right of heirs to be perpetual (on diaries, art. 29, ibid., pp. 100–­101). 72. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Sessiia 2. Stenograficheskii otchet, Zasedaniia 71–­100, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1909, pp. 1471–­1472. 73. Pavel Miliukov, “Sub’ektivnoe i sotsiologicheskoe obosnovanie svobody pechati,” in V zashchitu slova: Sbornik statei, St. Petersburg: Tip. N. N. Klobukova, 1905. 74. Komissiia po sudebnym reformam. Doklad po vnesennomy Ministerstvom Iustitsii zakonproekte ob avtorskom prave, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Sessiia 2. Prilozheniia k stenograficheskim otchetam, vol. 2, no. 220, St. Petersburg: Gos. tipografiia, 1909, p. 2. 75. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskie otchety, Tretii sozyv, Sessiia 2, p. 1569. 76. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, ch. 7. 77. On the “spiritual primacy of the word” in Russia and Eastern Europe (where, according to Andrew Wachtel, “serious literature and those who produce it” have traditionally been “overvalued”), see Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction, p. 23, and Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, quoted in Emerson. 78. Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, vol. X, no. 1 (May 1950), pp. 1–­29. 79. Anneli Aer, Patents in Imperial Russia: A History of the Russian Institution of Invention Privileges under the Old Regime, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedekatemia, 1995, p. 68. See the only two publications informing the Russian audience about these debates: Fedor Chizhov, “Novopodniatyi vopros ob unichtozhenii privilegii,” Vestnik promyshlennosti, 1861, no. 9, pp. 59–­98; V. Veshniakov, Ob unichtozhenii privilegii na izobreteniia, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ekspeditsii zagotovleniia bumag, 1870. 80. See the statistics on patents granted in Russia, Europe, and the United States in ibid., pp. 50–­52, 69. 81. See, for instance, N. N. Salov, Izobreteniia. Kak my smotrim na izobreteniia i kak dolzhny by na nikh smotret’, St. Petersburg: Slavianskaia pechatnia, 1877; idem, Obshchestvennoe i gosudarstvennoe znachenie privilegirovaniia umstvenno–­ tvorcheskikh proizvedenii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia K. K. Retgera, 1881; idem, Teoriia privilegii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. P. Voshchinskogo, 1882. 82. For instance, the publication of the privileged object’s description was a condition for granting the privilege. 83. On the first Pushkin monument and the public campaign for its creation, see Marcus Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. 84. Mikhail Katkov, “Prava literaturnoi sobstvennosti i neobkhodimost’ sdelat’ proizvedeniia Pushkina dostoianiem naroda” [Moscow, 11 ianvaria 1872], in Mikhail Katkov, Zasluga Pushkina. O literatorakh i literature, St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2010, p. 649. 85. V. K. Stukalin offered expropriation as the only compromise to the dilemma of literary property: he suggested that the government buy the copyright for the works of Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Pomialovskii, Fedor Dostoevsky, Alexander Ostrovskii, Nikolai Kostomarov, Mikhail Saltykov-­Shchedrin, and Alexander Levitov. V. K.

388  |  Notes to Chapter 7 Stukalin, Avtorskoe pravo, offprint from “Vitebskie gubernskie vedomosti,” Vitebsk, 1896, p. 21. 86. Evgenii Lozman, “Ob avtorskom prave,” Ezhenedel’nik Sovetskoi Iustitsii, 1923, no. 1, p. 4. 87. Ministerstvo Finansov, January 22, 1907, “O peredache Pskovskomu dvorianstvu imeniia, byvshego Pushkina, pri s. Mikhailovskom, Opochetskogo uezda, Pskov­ skoi gubernii,” RGIA, Library, Pechatnaia zapiska no. 2266. In 1911, a colony for “old writers” was opened on this estate. 88. Ministerstvo Finansov, March 15, 1911, Po khodataistvu poruchika zapasa gvardii L. A. Pushkina o priobretenii v sobstvennost’ gosudarstva imeniia Pushkinykh pri s. Boldino,” ibid. 89. However, the government turned down the Tolstoy family’s request that it purchase “Yasnaia Poliana,” revealing the government’s variable attitudes toward the memorialization of Russia’s greatest writers. Ministerstvo Finansov, September 21, 1911 [on the purchase of Yasnaia Poliana], ibid. 90. On Russia’s attitude to the West and role of ressentiment in the formation of Russian nationalism, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 222–­235. 91. It is revealing that, in the previously mentioned case against Oldekop, Pushkin protested not against the publication of his “Captive of the Caucasus” in German, but against the Russian original accompanying the German translation. 92. The most famous of Russian poet-­translators was Vasilii Zhukovskii. As Yurii Levin has pointed out, “contemporaries believed that Zhukovskii’s translations represented his own original contribution to the development of Russian poetry.” Yurii D. Levin, Russkie perevodchiki deviatnadtsatogo veka i razvitie khudozhestvennogo perevoda, Leningrad: Nauka, 1985, p. 20. 93. Historians of Russian literary and poetic translation trace the influx of massive translations of low quality to the early 1820s. Ibid., p. 122. 94. See the text of the Russo-­French convention (March 25 [April 6] 1861) in Fedor Martens, Sobranie traktatov i konventsii, zakliuchennykh Rossiei i inostrannymi derzhavami (Recueil des Traités et Conventions conclus par la Russie avec les puissances étrangères, publié d’ordre du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères). Traktaty s Frantsiei, 1822–­1906, St. Petersburg: Benke, 1909, pp. 388–­398. 95. Ministerstvo torgovli i promyshlennosti. O zakliuchenii Rossiei s inostrannymi gosudarstvami soglasheniia o vzaimnoi zashchite avtorskogo prava, RGIA, f. 23, op. 1, d. 70, l. 52. 96. See the memo of Modest Korf, the head of the Second (Codification) Department of the Imperial Chancellery, also known for his historical works (1858). O sposobakh obespechenia literaturnoi sobstvennosti., RGIA, f. 1261, op. 2, 1858, d. 93, ll. 4–­5. 97. Kopia s otnoshenia ministra narodnogo prosveshchenia k ministru inostrannykh del. August 8, 1858, O vzaimnom obespechenii literaturnoi i khudozhestvennoi sobstvennosti mezhdu Rossiei i Frantsiei, RGIA, f. 1286, op. 19, d. 14, l. 59. 98. See the response to the inquiry of Elizaveta Akhmatova, the editor of a journal specializing in the publication of foreign novels in translation (1861). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs ascertained that Akhmatova could publish French novels without restrictions. Delo o raz’iasnenii konventsii mezhdu Rossiei i Frantsiei, RGIA, f. 772,

Notes to Chapter 7  |  389 op. 1, ch. 2, d. 5820. See also the discussion on whether the agreement allowed the freedom of translation or not: “Po povodu konventsii 1861 mezhdu Rossiei i Frantsiei,” Sovremennaia letopis’, 1861, no. 38, reprinted in Materialy dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh postanovlenii o tsenzure i pechati, ch. 4, St. Petersburg, 1870, pp. 420–­425. 99. In 1866 and 1870, the imperial government declined the offers of Italy and Germany to conclude agreements for the protection of literary property. See RGIA, f. 776, op. 3, d. 251 (Delo o rassmotrenii proekta konventsii mezhdu Italiei i Rossiei. 1866); f. 776, op. 2, d. 7, ll. 64–­66. (Vypiska iz zhurnala zasedaniia soveta o rassmotrenii proekta literaturnoi konventsii mezhdu Rossiei i Severo–­Germanskim soiuzom). 100. Ivan Turgenev, “Rech’ na mezhdunarodnom kongresse 5(17) iiunia 1878 g.,” in Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 28 tomakh, vol. 15, Moscow/Leningrad: Nauka, 1968, pp. 53–­56. 101. Departing from the existing conventions, Russian participants suggested securing an author’s rights to translation for a period of two years after publication; after that, anyone could enjoy freedom of translation. Lev Polonskii, “Literaturnyi kongress v Parizhe. Pis’ma v redaktsiiu,” Vestnik Evropy, 1878, no. 8, p. 706. 102. Ibid., no. 9, p. 386. 103. Ibid., no. 8, p. 678. 104. Ibid., p. 706. 105. Fedor Martens, “Rossiia i literaturnoe obshchestvo zapadnoevropeiskikh narodov,” Vestnik Evropy, 1881, no. 3, p. 240. 106. Martens believed that this hostility to international conventions was part of the general attitude of the Russian government toward writers and literature: in no other country did the failure to secure the approval of the censor deprive an author of ownership rights over his work, and in no other country did the author have no right to determine the appropriate translation of his works. Consequently, no one in Russia saw stealing from foreigners as illegal: Russian imperial theaters routinely staged plays of French and German authors without paying for the rights, ignoring the protests of European playwrights (ibid., pp. 245, 248). In 1882, the Direction of the Imperial Theaters reached an agreement with the French Society of Playwrights that assumed the obligation to pay 25 francs for every staging of a French play. Later, this sum was increased to 40 francs. 107. Fedor Martens, “Rossiia i literaturnoe obshchestvo zapadnoevropeiskikh narodov,” p. 251. 108. On the international protection of literary and artistic property, see Sam Ricketson and Jane C. Ginsburg, International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond, vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 109. O. Goldovskii, “Mezhdunarodnaia okhrana avtorskogo prava,” Iuridicheskii vestnik, 1888, no. 6–­7, pp. 226–­263; L. Komarovskii, “O zakliuchenii mezhdu Rossiei i Frantsiei literaturnoi konventsii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1887, no. 12. 110. Despite the absence of the convention, many publishers did obtain permissions from Russian authors and even offered honoraria. 111. The Platt Simonds Copyright Act of March 1891. The law, however, offered protection only for books printed in the United States: the so-­called manufacturing clause obliged foreign authors to support the American printing industry.

390  |  Notes to Chapter 7 112. Zola’s letter appeared in Le Temps, December 24, 1894; reprinted in Novoe Vremia, 1894, no. 6394. 113. Ilya Halperine-­Kaminskii, one of the most prolific translators of Russian writers into French and vice versa, published Zola’s letter in his brochure “On the Common Good of Copyright,” which argued for the mutual benefits of international agreements on literary property. Ilya Halperine-­ Kaminskii, Obshchaia pol’za avtorskogo prava, St. Petersburg: Izdanie knizhnogo magazina A. F. Tsinzerlinga, 1894. 114. Alexander Pilenko, Mezhdunarodnye literaturnye konventsii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo ministerstva, 1894, pp. 485–­544; Alexander Borzenko, Pravo avtora na perevod, Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1892. 115. “Khronika vnutrennei zhizni,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 1894, no. 3, p. 143. See also Nikolai Rubakin’s “Essays on the Russian Reading Public” (1895) (Nikolai Rubakin, Izbrannoe, vol. 1, Moscow: Kniga, 1975, p. 48). The convention, claimed Rubakin, would target mainly the “popularization” of science and knowledge. 116. Ivan Yanzhul, “Nuzhna li nam literaturnaia konventsiia,” in Chasy dosuga. Ocherki i kartinki po ekonomicheskim, obshchestvennym i literaturnym voprosam, Moscow: Tipografiia Mamontova, 1896, pp. 200–­223 (first published in Russkie vedomosti, 1891, no. 112; 1893, no. 357). 117. Ivan Yanzhul, “Nalog na narodnoe obrazovanie,” Russkie vedomosti, 1894, no. 14. 118. Compare, for instance, Alexander Pilenko, Mezhdunarodnye literaturnye konven­ tsii, St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo ministerstva, 1894, pp. 516–­523; Yanzhul, “Nuzhna li nam literaturnaia konventsiia.” 119. [N. O. Rakshanin] “Literaturnaia konventsiia,” Novosti Dnia, January 25, 1894, no. 3811, p. 2. 120. “Otvet g-­nu Zola,” Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, December 19, 1897, no. 349. 121. Nikolai Fedorov, “Avtorskoe pravo i avtorskaia obiazannost’ ili dolg (k voprosu o literaturnoi konventsii),” in Nikolai Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-­kh tomakh, vol. 3, Moscow: Traditsiia, 1997, p. 483. See also his “Platy za tsitaty, ili velikaia budushchnost’ literaturnoi sobstvennosti, literaturnogo tovara i avtorskogo prava,” ibid., pp. 487–­488. 122. [N. O. Rakshanin], “Literaturnaia konventsia,” Novosti Dnia, January 3, 1894, no. 3846 (translated by Willard Sunderland), p. 2. 123. Zola pointed to the attitude, generally accepted in Russia, about literary property: “To translate a book, to publish it in Russian at one’s own risk, isn’t it the same as to use the wild bird’s song, . . . the smell of a wild flower spread by the wind? The seeds of intellect belong to humanity and are being transferred across the borders to take root any place the wind brings them” (“Zola o literaturnoi sobstvennosti,” Severnyi vestnik, 1896, no. 5, p. 335). 124. [N. O. Rakshanin], “Literaturnaia konventsia,” Novosti Dnia, January 3, 1894, no. 3846, p. 2. In his letter to Suvorin written a few weeks after the publication of this interview, Chekhov asserted that he had always been “for the convention, but some bastard wrote in the newspapers that I had spoken against it. And he ascribed to me phrases that I cannot even pronounce.” (Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexei Suvorin, March 27, 1894, in Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh. Pisma v 12 tomakh, vol. 5, Moscow: Nauka, 1977, p. 284.) It is nevertheless possible

Notes to Chapter 7  |  391 that Chekhov was trying to please Suvorin, who himself supported joining the convention (and then later changed his opinion) (ibid., Primechaniia, p. 583). The interviews published by Novosti Dnia attracted significant attention and raised so many doubts about their veracity that the correspondent, Nikolai Rakshanin, after the publication of his interview with Tolstoy, had to add a note written by Tolstoy himself confirming that what was said in the text was true. So it is quite possible that Rakshanin was very close to the original when paraphrasing Chekhov’s words. 125. Anton Chekhov, Letter to Olga Knipper-­Chekhova, March 20, 1902, in Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh. Pis’ma v 12 tomakh, vol. 10, Moscow: Nauka, 1981, p. 217. 126. Chekhov’s friend, the novelist Ignatii Potapenko, who was extremely popular at that time but is almost completely forgotten now, admitted that a few of his European translators offered a share of their honoraria, despite the absence of an international agreement obliging them to do so. Potapenko proudly refused to accept the money. “Literaturnaia konventsiia,” Novosti Dnia, February 3, 1894, no. 3847, p. 2. 127. Fedor Dostoevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia, 1873, Po povodu vystavki, 1876. Quoted in Russkie pisateli o perevode. XVIII–­XX vv, edited by Yu. D. Levin and A. V. Fedorov, Leningrad: Sovetskii uchitel’, 1960, pp. 517–­518. 128. Ivan Yanzhul, “Nalog na narodnoe obrazovanie,” Russkie vedomosti, January 14, 1894, no. 14. 129. Tolstoy complimented Halperine-­Kaminskii for his essay on the “Common Good of Convention” (saying it was “not bad”), although he could not agree with the main argument. Halperine-­Kaminskii translated many of Tolstoy’s works into French; he visited the writer in 1894 (during his visit associated with the campaign for the convention), in 1896, 1900, and 1902. Halperine intended to write Tolstoy’s biography. Lidia Opulskaia, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Materialy k biografii, 1892–­ 1899, Moscow: Nauka, 1998, pp. 96–­97. 130. [N. O. Rakshanin], “Literaturnaia konventsiia,” Novosti Dnia, March 3, 1894, no. 3848, p. 2. (translated by Anne O’Donnell). 131. “Literaturnaia konventsiia,” Novosti Dnia, March 15, 1895, no. 3860, p. 2. 132. See, for instance, Doklad komissii [Akademii Nauk] po voprosu ob avtorskom prave (1899), RGIA, f. 733, op. 143, d. 170, l. 37ob.; Paul Miliukov’s speech in the Third Duma, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv, Sessiia 2. Stenograficheskie otchety, Meeting 89, p. 1499. 133. Doctor Gruzenberg referred to Tolstoy’s words about the moral commitments of writers and doctors in the previously mentioned interview. “Zasedaniia obshchestv. Eshche o literaturnoi konventsii,” Novosti i Birzhevaia Gazeta, April 14, 1894, no. 103, p. 2. 134. Proekt statei ob avtorskom prave na literaturnye, muzykal’nye i khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia, St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1898. 135. The trade agreement with France (1905) and Austro-­Hungary (1906) contained similar clauses. Ministerstvo Torgovli i Promyshlennosti. O zakliuchenii Rossiei s inostrannymi gosudarstvami soglasheniia o vzaimnoi zashchite avtorskogo prava, RGIA, f. 23, op. 1, d. 70, l. 53; O prisoedinenii Rossii k mezhdunarodnoi Bernskoi konventsii, RGIA, f. 733, op. 143, d. 422, 1903.

392  |  Notes to Chapter 7 136. As the representative of the ministry of Justice argued, Russia could cede the freedom of translation of “belles lettres” (iziashchnoi literatury), which “is a luxury, not a necessity of life.” Zhurnal Soveshchaniia po voprosu o zakliuchenii Rossiei s Germaniei, Avstro-­Vengriei, i Frantsiei soglasheniia o vzaimnoi zashchite avtorskikh prav na proizvedeniia literatury, khudozhestv i fotografii, RGIA, f. 23, op. 1, d. 71, l. 278. See also the opinion of Sergei Oldenburg, orientologist, the secretary of the Academy of Sciences, ibid., l. 282. 137. Avtorskoe pravo. Doklad komissii S–­Peterburgskogo Literaturnogo Obshchestva, St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo Khudozhestvennoi pechati, 1908, pp. 18–­21. 138. Russian authors could benefit from a monopoly on translation for ten years after the publication of their work, if the author declared his intention to be translated within five years. Miliukov’s speech: Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv, sessiia 2. Stenograficheskie otchety, Meeting 89, p. 1493. 139. The State Council restored this article in the proposed law on copyright. The new law on copyright (1911) allowed Russia to conclude bilateral agreements with France (May 1912), Germany (February 1913), Belgium (January 1915), and Denmark (July 1915). On these agreements, see RGIA, f. 23, op. 8, d. 47; f. 560, op. 26, d. 912—­France; f. 740, op. 45, d. 93; f. 776, op. 22, d. 21—­Germany. 140. See, for instance, the works of Alexander Potebnia and his followers, the representatives of the so-­called psychological school in literary studies. In the 1900s–­ 1910s, the main focus of their works was on the origins and mechanisms of creative thinking. See their publication in the multivolume edition The Issues of the Theory and Psychology of Creativity (especially Dmitrii Ovsianiko-­Kulikovskii, “Iz lektsii ob ‘Osnovakh khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva,’ ” Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva, no. 1, Kharkov: Kharkovskaia gubernskaia tipografiia, 1907, pp. 1–­19; Boris Lezin, “Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo kak osobyi vid ekonomii mysli,” ibid.). On this current in fin-­de-­siècle literary criticism, see Oleg Presniakov, Poetika poznaniia i tvorchestva. Teoriia slovesnosti A. A. Potebni, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980; Akademicheskie shkoly v russkom literaturovedenii, Moscow: Nauka, 1975, pp. 300–­399. 141. Alexander Veselovskii, “Iz vvedeniia v istoricheskuiu poetiku,” Istoricheskaia poetika, edited by V. M. Zhirmunskii, Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1970, p. 53. 142. See Carla Hesse, “Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws on Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–­1793,” Representations, vol. 30 (Spring 1990), pp. 109–­137. 143. Semën Vengerov wrote about the “heroism of Russian literature” (geroicheskii kharakter russkoi literatury), 1911 (reviewed in Arkadii G. Gornfel’d, “Literatura i geroizm,” O russkikh pisateliakh, St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 262–­292. 144. Alexander Evlakhov, Genii-­khudozhnik kak anti-­obshchestvennost’, Warsaw: Tipografiia Varshavskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1909, p. 2. 145. On the perceived role of “classical literature” in popular education, see Jeffrey Brooks, “Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics,” in Nation and Ideology. Essays in Honor of Wayne C. Vucinich, edited by Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman, and Roman Szporluk, Boulder, CO/New York: East European Monographs, 1981, pp. 315–­334.

Notes to Epilogue  |  393 146. Hence the uneasiness with which Russian authors (such as Chekhov in the previously mentioned interview) acknowledged getting paid for their works: the ideological appeal of their works might have contradicted the idea of property. The story of Tolstoy’s renunciation is an example of the attempt to bring the principles of his creative works into accord with the ideas that they conveyed. The works of “populist” writers were the obvious candidates for entry into the “public domain,” but the rule did not always hold. Each writer had his own strategy for dealing with literary property: some of them demonstrated remarkable practical skills. For example, Maxim Gorky, the highest-­paid writer in the early 1900s and the author of the revolutionary novel Mother (1906), was said to print the cover pages of his works in Europe so that they would fall under the protective shield of the Berne Convention. (Gorky spent the money on a number of philanthropic and revolutionary enterprises.) 147. Russian emigrants after the revolution wrote extensively on this alternative to individualized private property and socialist state property. See, for instance, Semën Frank, “Sobstvennost’ i sotsializm,” Russkaia filosofiia sobstvennosti, XVIII–­XX vv, edited by K. Yusupov and I. Savkin, St. Petersburg: SP “Ganza,” 1993, p. 326. Nikolai Alekseev, “Sobstvennost’ i sotsializm. Opyt obosnovaniia sotsial’no-­ ekonomicheskoi programmy evraziistva,” ibid., p. 375.

Epilogue 1. On the historical chronology of Russian war and revolution, see Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–­1921, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 1–­11; idem, “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism: Russia in the Epoch of Violence,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 4, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 627–­652. 2. Richard Bessel, “Mobilizing German Society for War,” in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–­1918, edited by Roger Chickering and Sig Förster, Washington, DC: German Historical Institute; Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 438. 3. This process has not been subjected to close historical scrutiny. It may seem paradoxical that in the sea of publications on the history of Russian war and revolution, there is no work explaining how the transformation of the property rights regime occurred in the period between 1914 and 1921, a work that would connect the diverse issues of the politics of property in different spheres. A few groundbreaking works on the politics of property in this period cannot, however, replace an interpretative study of nationalization. On the nationalization of properties of enemy aliens, see Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; and Ivan Sobolev, Borba s “nemetskim zasiliem” v Rossii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny, St. Petersburg, 2004. On the nationalization of industry, see Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–­1921, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, and multiple publications of Soviet historians, including the publication of documents: Nationalizatsiia promyshlennosti v SSSR. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, 1917–­1920, edited by I. A. Gladkov, Moscow:

394  |  Notes to Epilogue Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1953. For an analysis of the Soviet property law, see George M. Armstrong Jr., The Soviet Law of Property: The Right to Control Property and the Construction of Communism, The Hague/Boston: M. Nijhoff Publishers; Hingham, MA: Kluwer Boston, 1983. Katherine Verdery has published a number of important works that offer an interpretation of socialist property as a specific way and culture of owning things. See, among others, her The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell University Press, 2003. A great number of works deal with the issues of agrarian economy and the nationalization of land in 1917–­1921. See, for instance, Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–­1921, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 4. E.M.H. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control at the War Office and the Ministry of Food, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924, pp. 1–­2. 5. Edgard Milchaud. The March towards Socialism, translated by H. J. Stenning, London: Leonard Parsons, 1920, p. 248. 6. Sir Leo Chiozza Money, The Triumph of Nationalization, London/New York: Cassell and Company, 1920, p. viii. 7. See, for instance, E.M.H. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control at the War Office and the Ministry of Food; Pierre Renouvin, The Forms of War Government in France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1927, and other editions from the series “Economic and Social History of the World War,” published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the 1920s. 8. Richard Bessel, “Mobilizing German Society for War,” pp. 445, 451. 9. Keith Grieves, “Lloyd George and the British War Economy,” in Great War, Total War, pp. 376–­377. 10. George Yaney, The World of the Manager: Food Administration in Berlin during World War I, New York: P. Lang, 1994, p. 3. 11. Contemporary historical accounts of that period emphasize that despite the impressive scale of transformation in the state mechanism, it is important to distinguish between “the actual development of instruments for a more centrally planned economy, and the development of an ideology insisting on cooperation and organization as substitutes for the liberal credo.” Pierre-­Cyrille Hautcoeur, “The Economics of World War I in France,” The Economics of World War I, edited by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 191–­192. 12. Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett, “The United Kingdom during World War I: Business as Usual?,” in The Economics of World War I, p. 230. 13. For instance, the British Ministry of Munition by the end of March 1918 owned over 250 factories, mines, and quarries; superintended the operations of about 20,000 controlled establishments, employed  .  .  . over 2,000 000 workers making munitions of war, together with an office staff of over 65,000.” R. H. Tawney, “The Abolition of Economic Control, 1918–­1921,” Economic History Review, vol. 13, no. 1/2 (1943), p. 2. 14. As Lewis Siegelbaum has observed, among the Great Powers, the process of cooperation—­the inclusion of “social interests and groups previously outside, or even hostile to the state machinery” was “least developed in Russia during the war.” Lewis Siegelmbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–­1917,

Notes to Epilogue  |  395 New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. xi. See also John Horne, “Labor and Labor Movements in World War I,” in The Great War and the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary R. Habeck, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 187–­227. 15. R. H. Tawney, “The Abolition of Economic Control,” p. 7. 16. Petr Pokryshkin became the head of a special commission for the assessment of damages brought by the war to the monuments of architecture. Galina Dluzhnev­ skaia, “Fotografy Imperatorskoi Arkheologicheskoi Komissii,” Arkheologicheskiie vesti, no. 14 (2007), p. 253. 17. Anatolii V. Kol’tsov, Sozdanie i deiatelnost’ Komissii po izucheniiu estestvennykh proizvoditel’nykh sil Rossii 1915–­1930 gg., St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999; Alexei Kozhevnikov, “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,” Science in Context, vol. 15 (2002), pp. 239–­275; Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History, Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2005, pp. 46–­50. 18. Lewis Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–­1917, p. 142. 19. By the end of 1915, 50 percent of collieries in Russia’s major coal basin (Donets Basin) were affected by requisitions; 40 percent of all coal delivered to consumers was received in this way. Boris Sokolov, The Coal-­mining Industry of Russia in 1914–­ 1917, [s.i., s.n.], p. 56. 20. John Godfrey. Capitalism at War: Industrial Policy and Bureaucracy in France, New York: Berg, 1987, p. 150. 21. Semen O. Zagorsky. State Control of Industry in Russia during the War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1928, p. 262. 22. Lewis Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–­1917, p. 136. 23. “Proekt pravitelstvennoi deklaratsii po voprosam ekonomicheskoi politiki. July 8, 1917,” Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune Velikoi Oktiabrskoi Sotsiali­ sticheskoi Revoliutsii, Moscow: AN SSSR, 1957, vol. 1, p. 226. 24. Ob ob’iavlenii mestorozhdenii poleznykh iskopaemykh imeiushchimi gosudarstvennoe znachenie, RGIA, f. 37, op. 65, d. 1848, ll. 3–­24, 41–­42. 25. Compare to Walther Rathenau’s ideas of the “depersonalization” of property, which, however, required more substantial reforms: transforming private enterprises into foundations and giving titles to employees, universities, or administrative authorities. Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 5, no. 2 (1970), p. 27–­61. 26. Pavel V. Volobuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika Vremennogo pravitelstva, Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1962, p. 182. 27. Boris Sokolov, The Coal-­mining Industry of Russia in 1914–­1917, p. 70. 28. Novyi Economist, no. 23 (1915), p. 4. 29. K voprosu ob ustanovlenii poriadka vozniknovenia elektricheskikh ustanovok (predvaritel’nyi doklad A. V. Wulfa), June, 7. 1917, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch, f. 787 (N. O. Graftio), op. 2, d. 16, l. 4. See also: [Ministerstvo Torgovli i Promyshlennosti], Po proektu pravil ob ustroistve i soderzhanii elektroperedach, [1916], Project submitted to the State Duma, December 23, 1916.

396  |  Notes to Epilogue 30. [Ministerstvo zemledelia. Otdel zemelnykh uluchshenii], K voprosu o belom ugle, Petrograd: Tipografiia V. F. Kirshbauma, April 1916. 31. RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 1017, l. 16. Polozhenie ob ispolzovanii sily padenia vody, April 1917, approved on May 5, 1917. Osobyi Zhurnal zasedaniia Vremennogo Pravitelstva no. 6a, ibid., ll. 32–­34 ob. 32. See also William Rosenberg, “Social Mediation and State Construction(s) in Revolutionary Russia,” Social History, vol. 19, no. 2 (May 1994), pp. 181–­186. 33. Pavel Volobuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika Vremennogo pravitelstva, p. 53. 34. William Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 36, no. 2 (April 1994), p. 369. 35. Richard Bessel, “Mobilization and Demobilization in Germany,” in State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 219. 36. Therefore, he called for a halt to this juridical procrastination and for the government to “defend the country from the advance of enemies.” Staryi Iurist, “Kogda zhe nastupit konets iuridicheskoi volokite?,” Novoe Vremia, November 8, 1914, no. 13887, pp. 4, 13. 37. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 61, 71, 77; and Ivan Sobolev, Bor’ba s “nemetskim zasiliem” v Rossii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny, St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsionalnaia biblioteka, 2004. 38. Boris Nolde, Russia in the Economic War, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1928, pp. 114–­115. 39. Of course, as Eric Lohr points out, even before the war, there existed multiple limitations on the acquisition of land and other properties by Russian subjects of Jewish and Polish nationalities, immigrants, and foreigners (Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, p. 94). Russian laws on property were never ethnically and socially neutral: property served as a mark of social maturity for various social and ethnic groups of the population (Alberto Masoero, “Layers of Property in the Tsar’s Settlement Colony: Projects of Land Privatization in Siberia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Central Asian Survey, vol. 29, no. 1 [March 2010], pp. 9–­32, esp. p. 19), while, as we have seen, citizenship and nationality were crucial for obtaining the protection of Russian law on authorial rights. 40. As Peter Holquist has shown, certain models of land management, employed later by the Bolsheviks, had been invented by officials of the Resettlement Administration, who saw the war as a good opportunity to apply their “technocratic” vision of regularized order. Peter Holquist, “ ‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 151–­179. 41. Sir Leo Chiozza Money, The Triumph of Nationalization, London/New York: Cassell and Company, 1920, p. 245. 42. Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett, “The United Kingdom during World War I,” in The Economics of World War I, edited by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 223. 43. William Rosenberg, “Market Relations in Revolutionary Russia,” p. 379.

Notes to Epilogue  |  397 44. Literally: “We recognize only the capitalism of the state” (“my dopuskaem kapi­talism tolko gosudarstva”). Vladimir Lenin, “Zapiska D. I. Kurskomu,” February 20, 1922, Lenin o sotsialisticheskoi sobstvennosti, Moscow: Gos. izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958, p. 292. 45. “Postanovlenie Vremennogo pravitelstva o natsionalizatsii zemelnykh i drugikh imushchestv udelnogo vedomstva i o poriadke upravlenia imi. 16 marta 1917,” in Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii. Dokumenty i materialy, ch. 3, edited by A. L. Sidorov and A. M. Anfimov, Leningrad: Nauka, 1967, p. 207. 46. Vladimir Lenin, “Doklad po agrarnomu voprosu,” 28 aprelia (11 maia) 1917, Lenin o sotialisticheskoi sobstvennosti. 47. T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–­1922. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 14. 48. Victor Chernov, “Sotsializatsiia zemli s iuridicheskoi tochki zrenia,” in Zemlia i Pravo, Petrograd: Tipografiia Soikina, 1917 (first published in 1906), p. 159. On the agrarian program of socialist-­revolutionaries, see Hannu Immonen, The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–­1914, Helsinki: SHS, 1988, ch. 3. 49. Like the theoreticians of “public property” and “national heritage,” Chernov emphasized the unconventional definition of “all-­people” not only as a multitude of citizens but also as a “sequence of generations.” 50. At the same time, he warned against attempts to emphasize civil rights to land use that would inevitably lead to the resurrection of private property. Playing on the well-­known revolutionary formula, he suggested leaving “freedom” to the individual and “land” to the people, as a collectivity. Alexei Peshekhonov, Pravo na zemliu (natsionalizatsia i sotsializatsia), Petrograd: Zadruga, 1917, pp. 13, 21. 51. Vladimir Lenin, “O samochinnom zakhvate zemli,” in Lenin o sotsialisticheskoi sobstvennosti, p. 75. Ironically, Lenin, who dropped out of the legal faculty at Kazan University, employed the schema of “state’s property–­peasants’ possession,” that was so abhorred by the critics of the Russian imperial land regime. 52. Vladimir Lenin, “Groziashchaia katastrofa i kak s nei borot’sia,” Lenin o sotsiali­ sticheskoi sobsvennosti, p. 109. 53. Quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–­1923, Norton and Co.: New York, vol. 1, 1985, p. 238. 54. Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–­1921, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 32. 55. Vladimir Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?,” quoted in ibid., p. 36. 56. On Lenin’s vision of the state, see “Lenin’s Theory of the State,” in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 233–­249. 57. See the first Soviet Constitution of July 10, 1918, which proclaimed that forests, waters, and minerals are “the national property” (natsionalnoe dostoianie). Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, Moscow: Gos. izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957, vol. 3, pp. 550–­551. 58. Initially, industrialists retained their rights of ownership, although the management of enterprises was subjected to the control of workers and local authorities. Until June 1918, nationalization did not follow a plan: it was performed on an ad

398  |  Notes to Epilogue hoc basis, usually on the initiative or under the pressure from below. In November 1920, the government announced an overall nationalization of industry. Malle, The Economic Organization, pp. 49, 64. 59. William Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State,” p. 379. 60. On different visions of nationalization, see also Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–­1953, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2011, pp. 21, 59. 61. Brian Bonhomme, “A Revolution in the Forests? Forest Conservation in Soviet Russia, 1917–­1925,” Environmental History, vol. 7, no. 3, (July 2002), pp. 411–­434. 62. O vserossiiskom s’ezde lesovodov i lesnykh tekhnikov byvshem v Petrograde s 29 aprelia po 2 maia 1917 g., Petrograd, 1917, p. 10. 63. Brian Bonhomme, “A Revolution in the Forests?,” p. 418. Faleev demonstrated enviable flexibility: along with numerous works on law, before the revolution, he published a few short stories, plays, and vaudevilles; after the Bolshevik Revolution, he switched to the genre of revolutionary songs and instructions (“How to Organize a Meeting”). It was, perhaps, less well-­known that immediately after the news of the coup d’état in October 1917, he signed an order condemning the “Bolshevik seizure of power,” but, it seems, he put up with that seizure in the end. E. N. Iurichev, Ocherki istorii lesnogo khoziaistva Vologodskoi oblasti, Vologda: Poligraf-­periodika, 2009, p. 65. 64. Nikolai Faleev, Otmena lesnoi sobstvennosti, Moscow, 1918, p. 7. 65. Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest, p. 59. 66. Ibid., p. 63. 67. Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries, pp. 83, 94–­104. 68. Ibid., p. 225. 69. Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880–­1926, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. p. 87. 70. On the construction of the Dnepr hydroelectric station, see Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 71. Douglas Weiner, The Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. 72. Anne O’Donnell, “Otsenka kak kulturnoe iavlenie,” paper delivered at the European University of St. Petersburg, June 14, 2011. 73. The imperial government and the expert organizations had begun the large-­scale description of natural resources and other public things (monuments) on the eve of the revolution, but this work was far from completion. The economist Mikhail Bogolepov (a university professor in imperial Russia, one of the first to write about economic planning before the revolution; he later worked for fifteen years in Gosplan) observed in 1915 that the absence of a “cadastre of our natural resources” and reliable statistics was one of the impediments for their rational exploitation. Mikhail Bogolepov, “Estestvennye bogatstva Rossii,” Vestnik finansov, promyshlennosti i torgovli, 1915, no. 32, pp. 204–­207. 74. Vladimir Lenin, “O ‘levom’ rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti,” Lenin o sotsiali­ sticheskoi sobstvennosti, p. 206. 75. In 1918, Professor Mikhail Orlov argued for the technical impossibility of

Notes to Epilogue  |  399 nationalizing forests: this enterprise would have required doubling the number of forest specialists just to conduct the measurement, and would take at least a quarter of a century. Mikhail Orlov, Ob osnovakh russkogo gosudarstvennogo khoziaistva, Petrograd: Deviataia Gosudarstvennaia Tipografiia, 1918, p. 92. 76. Iurii Zhukov, Stanovlenie i deiatelnosti sovetskikh organov okhrany pamiatnikov istorii i kultury, 1917–­1920, Moscow: Nauka, 1989, pp. 175–­176. 77. Ibid., p. 146. On the role of the former owners, see Natalya Yu. Semenova, Zhizn’ i kollektsiia Sergeia Shchukina, Moscow: Trilistnik, 2002, pp. 47–­48. 78. Viktor Roslavskii, Stanovlenie uchrezhedii okhrany i restravratsii pamiatnikov iskusstva, Moscow: Polimag, 2004, p. 87. 79. A group of archaeologists from Petrograd criticized the work of their Moscow colleagues, led by Igor Grabar’, for their hasty “cleaning” of ancient monuments, their abandonment of scientific principles of restoration, and their curiosity. Modern historian Viktor Roslavskii supports this critique. (Viktor Roslavskii, Stanovlenie uchrezhedii okhrany i restravratsii pamiatnikov iskusstva, pp. 31, 33, 172–­193.) The competition between two centers of preservation—­Moscow and St. Petersburg—­ continued even after the revolution. See also IAC, p. 1089. 80. See Gerold Vzdornov, “Komissiia po sokhraneniiu i raskrytiiu pamiatnikov drevnei zhivopisi v Rossii,” in Restavratsiia i nauka. Ocherki po istorii otkrytiia i izuchenia drevnerusskoi zhivopisi, Moscow: Indrik, 2006, p. 67. 81. Georgii Lukomskii, Khudozhnik i revoliutsiia. 1917–­ 1923, Berlin: Tipografiia Gutnova, 1923, p. 6. Hundreds of private noble estates were destroyed during the revolution in the countryside. However, the remaining monuments of Russian estate architecture, deserted by their former owners, became the object of intensive exploration in the 1920s. See Garold Zlochevskii, Obshchestvo izuchenia russkoi usadby: ego deiatelnost’ i rukovoditeli (1920-­e gody), Moscow: Institut naslediia, 2011. 82. Alexander Benois, “Dvortsy-­muzei,” in Alexander Benois razmyshliaet . . . (statii, pisma, vyskazyvaniia), Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1968, p. 72. 83. The historiography of early Soviet preservation is dominated by three competing narratives. The first is the portrayal of the government’s heroic efforts to protect art treasures from the chaos of war and private owners seeking to save their assets by selling them to foreigners. Indeed, as émigré philosopher Petr Savitskii acknowledged, the Soviet government, by virtue of centralization and the mobilization of experts, earned for the “Communists” the reputation of “thoughtful custodians of the monuments of art and zealots of the museum movement” during the first ten years of their existence (Petr Savitskii, Razrushaiushchie svoiu rodinu [snos pamiatnikov iskusstva i rasprodazha muzeev SSSR], Paris: Izdanie evraziitsev, 1935, p. 3). Another view suggests a narrative of destruction, the death of churches burnt to the ground and plundered, art objects made of precious metals being melted down. The third is a narrative of the spectacular development of the theory and practice of preservation by the old generation of specialists and the creation of the “Soviet” school of restoration. 84. The existence of two commissariats—­one of “state properties” and another of education, both running the campaign for preservation and protection—­points out

400  |  Notes to Epilogue the ambivalence of these goals. Viktor Roslavskii, Stanovlenie uchrezhedii okhrany i restravratsii pamiatnikov iskusstva, pp. 376–­377. 85. Anne Odom and Wendy R. Salmond, eds. Treasures into Tractors: The Selling of Russia’s Cultural Heritage, 1918–­1938, Washington, DC: Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009; Elena Osokina, Zoloto dlia industrializatsii: Torgsin, Moscow: Rosspen, 2009. 86. Alexander Anisimov was executed in 1937. 87. See the VTsIK decree on Gosizdat, December 29, 1917 (January 11, 1918), Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, vol. 1, pp. 296–­298. 88. Postanovlenie Narodnogo Komissariata po Prosveshcheniiu ob izdanii sochinenii russkikh klassikov, February 14, 1918. Nikolai M. Nikolaev, Zakony o pechati. Sbornik dekretov, postanovlenii, ustavov, instruktsii i rasporiazhenii, ch. 1, Moscow: Gosizdat, [1924], pp. 6–­7. Another of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment decrees, from August 16, 1919, announced a list of “nationalized” composers. Ibid., pp. 17–­18. In 1923, the list of “nationalized” literary classics was updated with the new names. Ibid., pp. 18–­19. 89. Dekret SNK ob otmene prava chastnoi sobstvennosti na arkhivy umershikh russkikh pisatelei, kompositorov, khudozhnikov i uchenykh, khraniashchikhsia v bibliotekakh i muzeiiakh, ibid., pp. 19–­20. 90. The law on authorial rights of 1925, a product of the New Economic Policy, strengthened the protection of literary labor; it also replaced the “nationalization” of literary works with the government right of “expropriation.” See Postanovlenie TsIK i SNK SSSR ob osnovakh avtorskogo prava, January 30, 1925, in Yakov A. Kantorovich, Avtorskoe pravo, Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izd-­vo Narkomiusta, 1926, pp. 122–­126. 91. Evgenii Lozman, “Natsionalizatsiia i ekspropriatsiia v avtorskom prave,” Ezhenedel’nik Sovetskoi Iustitsii, 1923, no. 7–­8, p. 150. 92. Arlen V. Blum, “Russkaia klassika XIX veka pod sovetskoi tsenzuroi (po materialam serkretnykh arkhivov Glavlita 30-­kh godov),” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, no. 32 (1998), p. 435. 93. Nikolai Nikolaev, Zakony o pechati. Sbornik dekretov, postanovlenii, ustavov, instruktsii i rasporiazhenii, p. 31. 94. The author, A. K. Grishunin, of an essay on Alexander Pypin mentioned this fact to prove the authority of Pypin’s works: Akademicheskie shkoly v russkom literaturovedenii, Moscow: Nauka, 1975, p. 137. 95. Lev Osterman, Srazhenie za Tolstogo, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Granat,” 2002, pp. 10, 12. However, the first Soviet edition of Tolstoy’s complete works (the publication began in 1928) contained a statement (in Russian and in French) allowing the republication of Tolstoy’s works without restriction (“Reproduction libre pour tous les pays”—­“Free reproduction for all countries”). 96. Nikolai Nikolaev, Zakony o pechati. Sbornik dekretov, postanovlenii, ustavov, instruktsii i rasporiazhenii, p. 27. 97. Arlen V. Blum, “Russkaia klassika XIX veka po sovetskoi tsenzuroi (po materialam serkretnykh arkhivov Glavlita 30-­kh godov)”; Maurice Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets, New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.

Notes to Epilogue  |  401 98. Yakov A. Kantorovich, Avtorskoe pravo, Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izd-­ vo Narkomiusta, 1926, p. 67. 99. Yakov Kantorovich. Avtorskoe pravo, p. 66; Nikolai Nikolaev, Osnovy avtorskogo prava, Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925, p. 44. 100. Ibid., p. 21. 101. Such was the position of Petr Veiner, the former editor of The Bygone Years magazine. He explained his resignation by his disagreement with the utilitarian concept of Soviet preservationist activity reduced to “accounting for the further requisition.” Roslavskii, Stanovlenie uchrezhdenii okhrany, p. 379. 102. The People’s Commissariat of State Domain existed between December 1917 and July 1918, but its goal and sphere of activity differed from that of the Imperial Ministry of State Domains: the People’s Commissariat managed and protected the properties of the former Ministry of Imperial Court—­the residences of emperors, imperial theaters, and museums—­thus competing with the institutions for the preservation of monuments. 103. Nikolai Karadzhe-­Iskrov, Publichnye veshchi, no. 1, Irkutsk: Izdanie Irskutskoi sek­ tsii nauchnykh rabotnikov, 1927. One of the chapters dealt with water law, which was still the most contested issue in that area of jurisprudence. 104. Georgii Guins, Pravo na predmety obshchego polzovania, vol. 1, Osnovy vodnogo prava; vol. 2, Sovremennoe vodnoe pravo, Harbin: Russko-­Manchzhurskaia knigotorgovlia, 1926–­1928. 105. The New Economic Policy allowed the development of new practices of possession, management, and exchange of products while not violating the principles of state ownership of land and natural resources. The period of unrestrained seizure of private property came to an end: the government’s decree of October 17, 1921, established the principle of compensation for requisitions and restricted the use of confiscation to only a punitive mechanism. N. S. Timashev, “Publichno-­pravovoe polozhenie lichnosti,” in Pravo Sovetskoi Rossii, vol. 1, edited by N. N. Alexeev, A. A. Bogolepov, et al., Prague: “Plamia,” 1925, pp. 177–­178. 106. Semën K. Kavelin, Zemelnoe pravo i zemelnyi process (Dogmaticheskii analiz zemelnogo zakonodatelstva SSSR), Voronezh, 1925, p. 196. 107. B. S. Martynov, “K voprosu o iuridicheskoi kvalifikatsii ustavnogo kapitala gosudarstvennykh trestov,” Promyshlennost’ i pravo, 1926, no. 1, p. 30. 108. Dmitrii Rosenblum, Zemelnoe pravo RSFSR, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1925, p. 7. According to Boris Martynov, “social functionality” constituted the main characteristic of state property and its distinctive feature (B. S. Martynov, “K voprosu o iuridicheskoi kvalifikatsii ustavnogo kapitala gosudarstvennykh trestov,” p. 33); therefore, state property represented a drastically different regime and institution of managing resources, rather than a kind of ownership. 109. Rosenblum was a socialist-­revolutionary, and his theory, not surprisingly, very much resembled Victor Chernov’s views. 110. Dmitrii Rosenblum, “Obshchie nachala zemlepolzovania i zemleustroistva,” Ezhenedelnik Sovetskoi Iustitsii, 1926, no. 24, p. 738. Apparently, Rosenblum drew this idea from Rudolf Jhering’s concept of res publicae as a form of ownership without a subject (owner). 111. Ibid., pp. 739–­740.

402  |  Notes to Epilogue 112. Whereas the sphere of res publicae in Europe was limited to items of public use (like roads and rivers), in the Soviet state, land also constituted “public property,” claimed Karadzhe-­Iskrov. Nikolai Karadzhe-­Iskrov, K voprosu o prave gosudarstva na zemliu, Irkustk, 1928, p. 13. 113. Ibid., pp. 3–­4. 114. A. Stalgevich, “Puti razvitiia sovetskoi pravovoi mysli,” Revolutsiia prava, no. 4 (1928), pp. 34–­61, esp. pp. 56–­60. 115. Petr Stuchka, Kurs Sovetskogo grazhdanskogo prava, vol. 3, Osobennaia chast grazhdan­­skogo prava, Moscow/Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsialno-­ekonomi­ cheskoe izdatelstvo, 1931, p. 29. 116. Ibid., vol. 1, Vvedenie v teoriiu grazhdanskogo prava, p. 162. 117. Ibid., vol. 3, Osobennaia chast grazhdanskogo prava, p. 25. 118. Bruno Latour, “La société comme possession: la ‘preuve par l’orchestre.’ ” available at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/119-DEBAISE-POSSESSION-FR. pdf (accessed June 19, 2013), pp. 2–3. 119. “Qu’est-­ce que la société? On pourrait la définir de notre point de vue: la possession réciproque, sous des formes extrêmement variées, de tous par chacun.” Gabriel Tarde, Monadologie et Sociologie, quoted in ibid., p. 1.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. A. Auerbach and Co (Company for the Production of Mercury), 80–­81 Abamelek-­Lazarev, Semen, 86–­87 Adam, Adolphe, 372n66 Adlerberg, Vladimir, 310n17 Admiralty: forests controlled by, 28; land sold by, 205–­206 aesthetic issues: aestheticization of religious art, 178–­179; approach to, 140–­141; art domains vs. religious art in, 174–­177; changing tastes, 136–­137; copying and repetition, 216–­217, 226; liberal vs. religious views on churches and icons, 139–­141; original Russian and European standards in, 133–­134; parish needs and piety vs. artistic integrity in restorations, 145–­149, 343nn53 and 54; realism, emergence of, 227–­228. See also art agency: in literary domain, 238–­239, 250–­252; state power and questions of, 275–­276 Agricultural Society of Southern Russia, 49 agriculture and agrarian reform: Cadets’ program of, 100–­101, 126, 326–­327n35; Cadets’ program for opposed, 127; cotton manufacturers’ demands for irrigation, 124, 337–­338n168; land amelioration projects, 104–­105; laws and, 58–­60, 83–­84; Soviet NEP transformation of, 287; water needs in, 102–­105. See also irrigation and irrigation canals; land; peasants; rural economy Akhmatova, Elizaveta, 388–­389n98 Aksakov, Ivan, 58–­59 Alekseev, Mikhail, 245 Alexander I (emperor): on archaeological sites, 180; censorship law of, 220; on expropriation, 40; fishing monopoly case and, 21–­23; portrait of, 369n30; private property benefits extended by, 35 Alexander II (emperor), 222, 345n76

Alexander III (emperor): on archaeological sites, 182–­183; archaeologists’ appeal to, 154; art collecting by, 190; Hermitage Museum management and, 190; Lev Tolstoy’s publications and, 378n118; water law of, 120. See also Russian Museum of Alexander III Alexandra Fedorovna (empress), 174, 193 Alexei Mikhailovich (tsar), 345n77, 349–­350n136 alienation. See expropriation “all-­people’s property” (concept), 278–­279, 397n49 All-­Russia Congress (on water), 106 All-­Russia Congress of Industry and Trade, 86 altruism concept, 126 Ananian culture, 181–­182 Andronikov Monastery (Moscow), 283 Anichkov, Ivan, 201 animals, classification, 70–­72 Anisimov, Alexander, 146, 284, 400n86 Anne (empress), 299n39 Annenkov, Pavel, 243–­244, 250 Annenskii, Nikolai, 385n62 Annunciation Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow), 344n59 Annunciation Cathedral (Murom), 349–­350n136 Anthès, Georges Charles d’, 254 Antipov, Alexei, 84 antiquities and antiquarianism: intensified interest in, 181–­182, 193; nationalization of, 185–­186; other countries’ laws on, 133, 184–­185; property reform concomitant with valuation of, 179–­181; property rights and exports of, 195–­198, 362n106; public, private, and royal ownership of, 186–­187; survey of, 134, 136–­137. See also archaeological sites; art works; historical monuments; treasure troves Antiquities Services (Egypt), 186

404  | Index Appolon (journal), 133, 202 Aptekarskii Island (St. Petersburg), 203 Arblaster, Anthony, 1 Archaeological Congresses, 162, 200–­201 Archaeological Institute (Moscow), 132 archaeological sites: finds likened to minerals, 26–­27, 179–­180, 297–­298n25; forestry interests linked to, 307n128; IAC’s monopoly on, 182–­183, 196–­197, 355n20; kurgans as, 179, 181, 183, 198, 204; Peter I’s dictates on, 342n38; property rights and dilemma of, 178, 179–­188, 198, 210; reports and surveys, 138, 180–­182, 363n120. See also historical monuments; treasure troves archaeologists and archaeology: competing institutions of, 339–­340n4; development of, 132–­133, 181–­182; differences among, 202; foreign archaeologists as concern, 196–­197; as godless project, 175–­176; legal context of, 178–­179; municipalization of collections, 194–­196; professionalization and authority of, 146–­149, 182–­183, 355n20; requests to examine icons, 152, 153; on special depositories for movable “monuments,” 149–­150; tensions surrounding church property and collections of, 160–­162, 165, 349n126. See also Imperial Archaeological Commission (IAC) Archangel Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow), 153–­ 154, 283, 347n94 architecture: assumed value of old buildings, 148; borrowing in, 133–­134; conceptualized and elevated to public property, 13, 131–­ 132; criteria for preserving, 134; emergence of Russian style, 134; experts’ role in, 133; historical preservation issues and, 205–­209; increased interest in landowners’, 200–­201; originality possible in, 216–­217, 227–­228; parish needs and piety vs. artistic integrity in restorations, 145–­149, 343nn53 and 54; property rights and preservation of, 198; Soviet restoration efforts, 283; surveys and registration, 135–­138; time limit for, 134, 135–­136. See also churches; estates and mansions; historical monuments; urban planning aristocrats. See art collectors; estates and mansions; landowners; nobility; property (sobstvennost’) Armstrong, George M., Jr., 279 Arnold, Fedor K., 53, 309n144

art: as always modern, 139; copying and repetition in, 216–­217, 226; decorative arts and crafts, encouraged, 158, 161; deprivatization of, 195; discipline of, 132–­133; disputes over canon, 193–­194; experts necessary in preservation of, 170; institutionalizing value of, 138–­141; nationalization of, 149–­156, 195–­196; as national property, 195–­196; “official” (kazennoe iskusstvo), 208; photography as, 228; as public property, 13, 131–­132; religious art appropriated into modernist canon, 161, 167, 172–­174; as state property, 138, 140; tensions over religious art and domains of, 174–­177. See also aesthetic issues; icons; Imperial Academy of Arts; national art (or heritage); religious art art collections: exhibition of icons from, 173–­ 174; experts’ attempts to direct and control, 178–­179; municipalization of, 194–­196; museum acquisitions of, 165; private interest vs. public property dilemma in, 14; private property rights and exports of, 195–­198, 362n106; Soviet nationalization of, 282–­284, 399nn79 and 83; tensions surrounding church property and, 160–­162, 165, 349n126. See also commoditization; museums art collectors: as amateurs and professionals, 132; Byzantine enamels exported by, 196, 361n96; and failure to take care of art, 197–­ 198; municipalization of art by, 194–­196; “national art” proponents vs., 139 The Artistic Treasures of Russia (Khudozhestvennye Sokrovishcha Rossii, journal), 138 artists: appeal for state intervention by, 195–­196, 208; educational institutions for, 160–­161; key role of, 131–­132; protection of work requested by, 226–­228; on religious art and icons, 15, 145–­146, 174; repainting by, 195. See also aesthetic issues; authorship; Imperial Academy of Arts; originality and creativity art works: approach to, 17; artistic property laws as hindrance and protection, 226–­228; art nouveau exemplars, 161; collectors’ “corrections” to, 198; definition and authority on value of, 201–­202; disputes over display and sales of, 193–­194; icons as, 14; institutionalizing value of, 138–­141; mural restoration, 283; Old Russian art, 152–­153, 154, 161–­162, 165; originality in valuation of, 133–­135; public campaign to relocate, 188–­190, 193,

Index  |  405 358n51; as public property, 13, 131–­132; state seals proposed to denote original, 369n30; survey of, 137. See also icons; national art (or heritage); Old Russian art; religious art Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 83, 86, 89, 322n169 Austria: archaeologists from, 197; Imperial Petroleum Law of, 88; private ownership of oil in (Galicia), 320n136; trade agreement with, 391n135; water law of, 324n8 authorial rights: apathy about, 225; context for legal institution of, 215–­216; debates on, 226–­227, 230–­231, 257; disregard for law on, 245; enforcement of, 264; as escheat, 385nn68 and 69; foreigners ignored in law on (1828), 259; Lev Tolstoy’s renunciation of, 195, 233–­238, 377–­378n113, 378nn114 and 118, 393n146; as ownership rights, 220–­221; privacy and publishing of papers in, 241–­250; public “moral” power vs., 250–­253; research and public education vs., 253–­257; as right sui generis, 254–­256; Soviet approach to, 284–­285, 400n90; and translation issues, 258–­267, 389nn101 and 106. See also author-­public relations; copyright; literary property; writers authority of knowledge: establishment of, 13–­16; in forestry management, 48–­54, 61, 64, 74–­77, 132, 318n109, 319n123. See also experts and technocrats author-­public relations: composer’s role in, 373n71; discourse on, 226–­228; economic approach to, 223–­225; influences on ideas about, 370–­371n48; in literary property debates, 51, 220, 221–­223, 229–­230, 252–­253, 268–­269; republic of letters idea and, 228–­ 233; writer as public figure in, 238–­239, 254–­256. See also authorial rights; literary property; literary works; readership; writers authorship: complete, authentic texts and, 243–­245, 381n13; definitions of, 215–­218, 252; discourse on, 226–­228; as ownership, 220–­221. See also authorial rights; correspondence and manuscripts; literary property; literary works; writers autocratic state: Catherine II’s model of property rights and, 31–­33; limitations of, 7–­8, 52; private property aligned with, 23, 39–­41; questions about nature of, 44. See also monarchical state Averkiev, Dmitrii, 376–­377n112

Baer, Karl Maksimovich (Karl Ernst von Baer), 93 Bailkin, Jordanna, 356–­357n36, 367n167 Bakhmetev, Boris, 114 Bakhrushin, Alexei, 194, 198 Baltic provinces, 101 Baltic Sea: wartime blockade of, 273; waterway connection project, 107, 108, 329–­330n70 Banner, Stuart, 248 Baratynskii, Evgenii, 232 Baron Stieglitz’s Museum (Petrograd), 174 Barshchevskii, Ivan, 156, 158, 161, 347–­ 348n107, 348n117 The Basic Foundations of Political Economy (Schlözer), 219 Bazanov, Ivan, 112 Bazarov, Vladimir, 266 Beer, Daniel, 8 Belgium: literary property laws of, 375n93; national patrimony of, 192; Russian agreements with, 260, 392n139 Beliaev, Alexei, 238 Belinskii, Vissarion, 229, 232, 255, 268, 373n77, 374n85, 375n95 Belogolovyi, Nikolai, 380n143 Beloselskii-­Belozerskii (prince), 103 Belting, Hans, 176–­177 Belyaev, Ivan, 34 Benardaki, Dmitrii, 307n129 Benckendorf, Alexander, 368n22, 371n56 “The Benefits and Rights of Russian Writers” (Keppen), 219 Benois, Alexander: as editor, 138; as member of artists’ circle, 359–­360n74; museum ideal of, 195; on museum patrons, 191; “official art” praised by, 208; and rhetoric of ownership, 188; Soviet collaboration of, 283 Benois, Leontii, 99, 206–­207 Benois, Maria, 359n61 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 295n33 Berg, Lev, 313n58 Berlin, Isaiah, 249 Berne Convention, 261, 266, 285, 393n146. See also international copyright protection and agreements Berthélemy, Henry, 36 Bessel, Richard, 271 Bethell, Tom, 297n16 Blackbourn, David, 71, 107 Black Sea: waterway connection project, 107, 108, 329–­330n70

406  | Index Black Soil (chernozem) region, 62, 74, 316n93 Blackstone, William, 22, 32, 296n2 Bludov, Dmitrii, 230–­231 Blumenfeld, Herman, 250 Boborykin, Petr, 225 Bobrinskii, Alexei, 63–­64, 162, 197, 339–­340n4 Bogdanov, Alexander, 266 Bogolepov, Mikhail, 313n58, 398n73 Bogoliubskaia Icon of Theotokos, 155 Bolshevik nationalization: approach to, 270–­271; and art and historical treasures, 282–­284, 399nn79 and 83; characteristics and rhetoric of, 278–­280; compensation for, 401n105; and forests and water, 280–­281, 398–­399n75; implications of, 12–­13; and industry, 397–­398n58; and land, 276–­277; and literary works, 284–­285, 400n90; and nature reserves, 281–­282; process of, 277–­ 278; public domain changes in, 285–­286; social appropriation distinguished from, 282; suspension of, 286–­287. See also Soviet state Bonhomme, Brian, 73, 280, 281, 298n31, 310n11 The Book Herald (Knizhnyi Vestnik), 232 Booklets of the Week (Knizhki Nedeli), 246 booksellers: cheap editions published by, 231–­233; and commercialization, 217–­218; constraints on, 230–­231; and copyright concerns, 372n59; musical scores offered, 372n66. See also literary works; publishers Borisov, Alexander, 359n66 Borovikovskii, Vladimir, 189 Botkin, Mikhail, 182, 196, 358n51 Brain, Stephen, 76, 280, 281, 319n123 Brandeis, Louis, 247–­248, 384n39 British Ministry of Munition, 394n13 British Museum, 185, 186, 189, 356–­357n36 Broadberry, Stephen, 277 Brocard, Henri (Andrei Afanasievich), 198 Bronze Horseman (monument), 205, 365n134 Briagin, Evgenii: arrest and imprisonment of, 14, 167–­168, 210; illegality of icon sale to, 170–­171; Ostroukhov’s defense of, 168–­ 170, 171–­172; Russian Museum deal with, 166–­167 Briagin affair: and arrangement of Russian Museum–­Briagin deal, 166–­167; arrest and imprisonment in, 14, 167–­168, 210; context of, 165–­166, 210, 351n148; defense of private icon traders in, 168–­170, 171–­172; and implications for icons as sacred property,

172–­174; and implications for museum collections, 170–­172; inviolability of property rights upheld in, 165, 172–­173, 175; priest and elder jailed in, 351n151 Bulgakov, Sergei, 345n80, 346n82 Bunge, Nikolai, 59 bureaucratization: administrative resources lacking for, 30; and counting and registration task, 138; European expansion of, 209; of Orthodox Church, 144; “rule of law” in, 6–­7; in Soviet state, 270–­271, 277–­283, 286. See also specific ministries and departments Buslaev, Fedor, 160 Butovskii, Alexander, 45, 224–­225, 306n111 Butovskii, Mikhail, 123 Bychkov, Afanasii, 347n97 The Bygone Years (Starye Gody, journal): anti-­ proprietary rhetoric of, 201; artists’ circle around, 359–­360n74; authority of, 132–­133; competition of, 202; on estate decay and preservation, 200; on historical surveys, 137; memoirs of editor of, 342n32; on sacristies as museums, 353n171 Byzantium: as architectural influence, 133–­ 134; enamels collection from, 196, 361n96; Palmyra’s Stone from, 187. See also Ottoman Empire Cadets. See Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) cameralist policies: on forestry regulation, 29, 48, 74, 298–­299n34, 311n32; German origins of, 6, 25; land survey as example of, 30; social rights in, 300n47 Cameron, Charles, 136 canals: expropriation of land for, 97; nationalization and development of, 106–­107, 329–­330n70. See also drainage and drainage canals; irrigation and irrigation canals Capital (Marx), 266 “The Captive of the Caucasus” (Pushkin), 218, 388n91 Carman, John, 185 Caspian Sea: calculating value of coast of, 96; fishing monopoly case and, 21–­23, 35, 36; nationalization of coast of, 93. See also water and waterways Catherine II (Catherine the Great, empress): Alexander I’s continuity with, 35, 302n69; architecture of, rejected as preservation worthy, 135; breakdown of absolute private domain idea of, 37; Enlightenment ideas

Index  |  407 selectively adopted by, 23–­25, 31–­33; on expropriation, 39; portraits of, 369n30; privatization projects of, 24–­31, 44, 94, 110, 179, 299n39; property concept introduced by, 9–­10, 23, 33–­35, 55, 180; river use under, 103; state’s property and, 41, 304n94; statue of, 365n134. See also state property (or domain) Catherine II, laws and writings of: “General-­ procurator’s Instruction,” 24; Manifesto of June 1782 (minerals and waters), 25–­28, 44; Manifesto of September 1782 (forests), 28–­ 29; Nakaz (“Instruction for the Legislative Commission”), 23–­25, 32–­33, 304n94; “On Property,” 24 Caucasus: German and Austrian archaeologists in, 197; hydropower projects in, 334n126 cemeteries, 200. See also historical monuments censors and censorship: authorial rights linked to, 256–­257; author-­public relations and, 220; complete, authentic texts and, 244–­245; failure to secure approval of, 389n106; laws on, 220–­221; “public interest” rationale in, 249–­250; in Soviet era, 285. See also Committees on Censorship Chekhov, Anton: career and honoraria of, 264, 379n126, 393n146; decay of noble estate depicted by, 199, 200; early works of, published posthumously, 384–­385n50; on literary and property rights, 263–­264, 390–­391n124 Chernov, Victor, 278, 397n49, 401n109 Chernyshev, Vladimir, 342n41 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 76 Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 199, 200 Chertkov, Vladimir, 235–­237, 284, 379n133 Chicherin, Boris, 66 Chudov Monastery, 174 churches: destruction of blamed on Church ignorance, 148–­149, 345n76; fate of under Soviets, 399n83; liberal vs. religious views of, 139–­141; museums’ similarity to, 174–­ 175, 175, 353n173; non-­Church-­owned, 343n47; parish needs and piety vs. artistic integrity in restorations of, 145–­149, 343nn 53, 54; preservation of regardless of condition, 134; Romanov dynasty gifts to, 174; sacristies of as museums, 353n171; state-­sponsored construction of, 144; steepled (shatrovyi stil), 141–­142, 143, 342n41; surveys of, 136–­137. See also icons;

monasteries; religious art; and specific churches Church of Dormition (Nizhnii Novgorod), 167 Church of the Holy Spirit (Talashkino), 161 Church of Thomas’s Assurance in the Resurrection of Christ (Zaborovie): condition and later burning of, 169–­170, 171, 351–­ 352n153, 352n157; and dilemma of sacred property, 172–­174; illegality of sale of icons from, 170–­171; municipality of, 204; selling of religious objects from, 166–­167, 351n148; sketch of, 168 cities and municipal areas: art collections bequeathed to, 194–­195; ecclesiastical domain vs. municipal domain, 141–­142; and expropriation of land for streets, 99–­100; Itinerants’ exhibitions in, 193–­194; land market and uncontrolled development in, 205–­209; preservation and change in, 204–­209; and reluctance to engage in preservation, 204, 364–­365n134; walls and fortifications in, 204–­205; water needs of, 106. See also urban planning; and specific cities citizenship and civic virtue: property as condition of, 12–­13, 32; wartime questions of, 277. See also collectivism and collective responsibility; social order Civil Code. See Code of Russian Civil Laws Civil Law (Beliaev), 238 civil responsibility concept, 126, 338n173 civil societies (grazhdanskie obshchestva), 15, 16–­17, 222–­223. See also society Clark, Katerina, 206, 207, 210, 366n158 coal and ore production: British vs. Russian, 107–­108, 329n67, 330n77; and free mining in Russian part of Poland, 84–­85; and lack of transportation network, 89–­90; liberalism and, 92; and peasants’ ownership of lands, 15, 26, 80–­81; rate of Donetsk coalfield, 320n145; wartime requisitions of, 90, 274, 395n19; “white coal” of rivers compared with, 108, 114, 273, 275, 330n77. See also minerals; mining industry Code of Russian Civil Laws: attempt to reform, 43–­4 4, 113–­114; and church property, 142, 144, 160; and copyright, 220, 370n37; and inheritance beneficiaries, 235–­236, 385–­386n69; and monarch’s proprietary rights, 42; and navigable rivers and property rights, 108–­110; as outdated, 46–­47; and private vs. national domain, 43–­4 4; and property rights, 306–­307n116;

408  | Index Code of Russian Civil Laws (continued) and public power over resources, 44–­45; and state ownership of rivers, 110; and state property, 119, 287, 306n107; and Transcaucasian water issues, 122, 335n135; and translation of works, 265–­266; and water for irrigation, 120–­121. See also law; laws and decrees; and specific areas collectivism and collective responsibility, 271–­ 273. See also citizenship and civic virtue; social order Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 22, 32, 296n2 Commission for the Civil Code, 113–­114 Commission for the Elaboration of the Water Law for Russia, 123 Commission on Forestry, 63–­64 Committee for the Analysis of Intellectual Works (Komitet dlia issledovaniia uchenykh tvorenii, project), 224 Committee for the Elaboration of Laws on the Preservation of the Old-­Russian Iconography, 172, 176 Committee for the Help of the Victims of War, 174 Committee for the Revival of Iconography in Russia, 207 Committee of Ministers, 37–­38, 40, 204–­205 Committee on the Publication of Tolstoy’s Works, 237 Committees on Censorship: on authorial rights, 218, 221–­222, 225, 370n38, 371–­ 372n57; registered book list published by, 370n47. See also censors and censorship commoditization: of antiquities and archeological sites, 180–­181; of books, 217–­218; cultural treasures exempted from, 179–­180; of electricity, 103–­104; of religious art, 161–­ 162, 165. See also art collections; publishers common good. See public good common law, 16, 22, 32, 296n2 commons: use of term, 57–­58. See also forests; minerals; water and waterways A Common Story (Goncharov), 245 communes. See peasant communes Company for the Production of Mercury, 80–­81 Congress of Agriculturalists, 62 Congress of Artists, 146 Congress of Forest Owners and Foresters, 64, 72, 74, 78, 280

Congresses of Russian Architects, 202 conservatism: forest regulations debates and, 65–­67; patrimonialism of, 42; preservation hopes in context of, 210–­211; property idea in, 32, 33, 39, 303nn85 and 86; property right as civil freedom in, 126–­127 “Constitutional Charter” (1819), 22 Constitutional Democrats (Cadets): agrarian program of, 100–­101, 126, 326–­327n35; leadership of, 11; opposition to, 127. See also Miliukov, Pavel The Contemporary (Sovremennik, journal), 76 contract, 32. See also inviolability of property rights; Locke, John copyright: authors’ rights vs. research and public interests, debated, 253–­257; and compliance with existing governance, 228; creation of laws and rules of, 218–­ 223; definitions underlying, 14, 370n44; expropriation proposed as solution to, 258, 387–­388n85; Fedorov’s critique of, 195, 376–­377n112; heirs’ sales of, 375n95; Lev Tolstoy’s renunciation of, 195, 233–­238, 377–­378n113, 378nn114 and 118, 393n146; as no specific kind of property right, 217; “police” character of, 220–­221; privacy and ethical aspects of, 241–­250; terms and expiration of, 51, 220, 221, 222, 230–­231, 239, 376n110. See also authorial rights; international copyright protection and agreements; literary property Corps of Foresters, 53 correspondence and manuscripts: debates about publication of, 241–­250, 382n24, 383n32, 386–­387n71; editors and interests in, 250–­253; as national heritage, 222–­223; Peter I’s dictates on, 150, 342n38; proposed term of copyright protection for, 386–­ 387n71; Soviet nationalization of, 284–­285. See also literary criticism and studies; privacy Costlow, Jane, 67–­68 Council of Laodicea (AD 363–­364), 152, 153 Council of Mining, 87 Council of Ministers, 160, 326n33 Council of the Orthodox Popular Schools, 101 creativity. See originality and creativity Crimea: archaeological sites in, 180; condition of antiquities in, 356n22; German and Austrian archaeologists in, 197; private, state, and peasant lands in, 183

Index  |  409 Crimean War (1853–­1856), 259 criminal activities: illegal use of electricity as, 332n101; prosecution of religious, 167–­168; unauthorized digging of archaeological sites as, 182–­183, 355n20; vandalism of estates as, 201. See also Briagin affair Dahlman, Carl, 291–­292n5 The Daily News (Novosti Dnia): on “do not sell wisdom” (Lev Tolstoy), 264–­265; on property rights, 262–­263, 390–­391n124; on renunciation of copyright, 234 dams, 103, 107, 332n104. See also canals; water and waterways Davidov, A., 114, 335n130 Dawe, George, 369n30 Dead Souls (Gogol), 49 The Debacle (Zola), 261 Decembrists Revolt, 40, 191, 220 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), 37 deforestation: consequences of, 51–­52, 73; fears of, 30, 48–­49, 60–­61, 62, 67–­68, 72, 78; historical preservation campaign and, 199–­200; nobles’ response to, 61–­62; and ownership issues, 48, 49, 50; railroad’s timber use and, 89–­90; rates of, 60, 68, 73; as symptom, 79; Veinberg’s scientific writings on, 313n58. See also “forest question”; forests Delarov, Pavel, 196, 197, 361nn98 and 100 Denmark: Russian agreement with, 392n139 Desnitskii, Semen, 32, 297n14 Diaghilev, Sergei, 158, 188–­189, 211 Dikanskii, Matvei, 366n154 dilettantism, 132–­133 Dingelstedt, Victor, 336n144 Dnepr River: elimination of private claims to, 113; hydropower projects proposed for, 108–­109, 110, 114–­115; and Soviet hydropower construction, 281; state purchase of lands along, 331n83, 335n130; and waterway connection project, 107, 329–­330n70 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 255 Dobrotvorskii, Veniamin, 107, 108, 331n83 Dokuchaev, Vasilii, 74, 76, 77, 104–­105 Dolbilov, Mikhail, 56 Dolgorukov, Vladimir, 154 domains: ecclesiastical vs. municipal, 141–­142; national protected type of, 205. See also public domain; state property; tsar’s domain

Dormition Cathedral (Kremlin, Moscow), 168, 283 Dormition Cathedral (Smolensk), 156, 158–­159 Dostoevskaia, Anna, 376n106 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 232, 251, 264, 285, 376n106, 387–­388n85 drainage and drainage canals: land amelioration projects of, 104–­105, 328n60; law on, 101, 102, 105, 106 drought and famine (1891–­1892), 71–­72, 104–­ 105, 316n91 Dubelt-­Merenberg, Natalya, 382n24 Duguit, Léon, 11, 294n30 Duma. See State Duma Dumnov, V. V., 375n95 Durkheim, Émile, 11, 295–­296n43 Dzhanshiev, Grigorii, 239, 380n143 ecological bankruptcy concept, 72 economic development: adapting property rights to industrial needs in, 88–­89; Catherine II’s privatization and, 24–­31, 299n39; flexible property system in, 54; luxury’s role in, 298–­299n34; private property rights as hampering, 89–­92; property rights extended and affirmed in support of, 35, 302n69. See also energy; industrialization; mining industry; natural resources; railroads and railroad development; transportation economy: arguments for regulation of, 85–­86; of commons, 57–­58; copyright agreements and, 266, 391n133; forest profitability and, 76; national economy (narodnoe khoziaistvo), 85–­86; proposed surveillance over peasant, 81–­82; public property incompatible with planned, 287–­288. See also rural economy education: of artists, 160–­161; of foresters, 48, 49, 52–­54. See also Ministry of Public Education; public education; and specific institutions Efremov, Petr, 250 Egypt: British water law in, 338n168; status of historical monuments in, 186, 187 Eichenbaum, Boris, 242 Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam (Heine), 266 electricity: as commodity, 103–­104; nationalization of proposed, 275; as public good, 101; as “thing” (that could be stolen), 332n101; urban area needs for, 107–­108, 110. See also hydropower

410  | Index Elena Pavlovna (grand duchess), 191 elites. See art collectors; estates and mansions; landowners; nobility; property Elizabeth (empress), 299n39 emancipation of peasants: as expropriation, 41, 56, 100; “forest question” after, 60–­79; property ideas and state impacted by, 46–­47, 54, 55–­58; river disputes after, 95–­96; rural economy challenged in, 102; state ownership rights over land retained in, 59–­60. See also “forest question”; peasants Emba River, 21–­23, 35, 36, 93 Emerson, Caryl, 217, 225 eminent domain, 302n72. See also expropriation energy: call for municipalization of, 111; nationalization of, 114–­115; wartime deficit of, 89–­90, 115, 273–­274. See also coal and ore production; electricity; hydropower Engelhard, Nikolai, 158 Engelstein, Laura, 139, 176–­177, 293n17 Enlightenment ideas: books of, in public domain, 221, 268; and historical and artistic preferences, 180; selective adoption of, 23–­ 25, 31–­33; value of cultural objects in, 215 environmental concerns: climate issues and, 313n58, 317n103; drought and famine underlying, 71–­72, 316n91; nationalism linked to, 72–­73; “state as administrator” based in scientific understanding of, 73–­74. See also natural resources Ermolov, Alexei, 114 Esipov, Grigorii, 229–­230 estates and mansions: Catherine II’s doling out of, 27–­28, 29–­30; conditions of art works in, 358n51; destroyed in revolution, 399n81; journal focused on, 363n119; preservation campaign and private ownership of, 198–­203; survey of, 200–­201, 363n120. See also archaeological sites; architecture; art collections; historical monuments Euphimy of Suzdal (saint), 345n77 Europe: bureaucratization of, 209; canal building in, 106; defortification in, 204; environmental changes in, 71–­72, 316n91; expropriation in, 36, 302n72, 326n32; forests’ status in, 47–­49, 51, 66–­67, 317n105; historical monuments’ status in, 184–­187; hydropower projects in, 107, 115; intellectual property debates in, 257–­258; literary property laws in, 221, 230, 259–­260,

375n93, 393n146; museum development in, 189; nationalization in, 277, 314n76; national park movement in, 72; private ownership of natural resources in, 25; private property rights limited in, 88, 321n154; property ideas in, 23, 286; as provider of natural and cultural heritage models, 133; idea of public domain in, 16; rationalized resource use in, 10; royal rights to treasure in, 27; Russia in context of, 1–­8; Russian law aligned with law in, 34; marginalization of Russian literature’s role in, 260–­261; Russian views of archaeologists from, 197; and social justice critique, 47, 126; theories of proprietary status of the state in, 42–­43; water laws in, 122–­123, 327n47; writers’ public activities in, 225. See also Enlightenment ideas; and specific countries European provinces (Russia): deforestation in, 73; hunting lawin , 71; irrigation and drainage law in, 102, 105; land amelioration in, 124; state power and, 117; water law in, 109 Evgeny Onegin (Pushkin), 243 Evlakhov, Alexander, 268 Evremov, Petr, 243 exhibitions: of archaeological finds, 182; of icons, 173–­174; of Itinerants’ art, 193–­194; of Old Russian art, 152; of photography, 228; of Romanov dynasty gifts, 174. See also museums experts and technocrats: accused of godlessness, 175–­176; agency and, 238–­239, 250–­252; ambivalence in state’s relationship with, 209–­211; attitudes of toward weak state, 94–­95; challenge to private ownership of forests from, 47–­52; competition among different groups of, 160–­161; establishment of, 6–­7, 9, 13–­14, 15–­16; forest management of, 48–­54, 61, 64, 74–­77, 132, 318n109, 319n123; hydraulic engineers as, 72, 106–­ 107, 111; on inviolability of property rights, 96; legal context of, 178–­179; limitations of, 201–­202; Orthodox parishes’ response to, 144–­145; property discussions of, 58, 79; public domain defined by, 14–­15, 131–­138; Soviet nationalization and use of, 280–­286; state’s role in property as viewed by, 116–­ 117, 125–­127; in structure of society, 58–­59; Tikheev and economic exploitation of Transcaucasia, 118–­121, 335n137, 336n144. See also archaeologists and archaeology;

Index  |  411 architecture; art collectors; artists; authority of knowledge; historical monuments; historical preservation; icons; literary criticism and studies; religious art; science and scientific developments expropriation: of archaeological findings, 183–­184; Bolsheviks’ Museum Fund and, 162, 173; codification of, 46; debates about, 37–­41, 91; drafting laws and statutes on, 325–­326n25; emancipation of peasants as, 41, 56, 100; European, 36, 302n72, 326n32; examples of, 21–­23, 35, 36–­37; Finnish law on, 109–­110; of forests, 62–­63, 64, 68–­70, 73–­75; of fortresses, 97; for harbor, 325n24; of historical monuments, 183–­184, 202, 355–­356n22; of icons, 14; impetus for, 199; as injustice, 319n126; for irrigation canals, 41, 93, 101; lack of mechanism for, 35–­36; of literary property, 258, 387–­388n85; of navigable rivers, 96; ownership in aftermath of, 87–­88; of patent privileges, 258; peasant revolts and, 326n33; and problem of authority, 201–­202; of property of enemy aliens, 276; for public good, 97–­101; railroad development and, 46, 97–­98, 307n117, 325n20; scale of state intervention in, 9; state land fund idea and, 100, 326–­327n35; state’s reluctance to pursue, 93–­94; statistics of, 325n23; for streets and sidewalks, 99–­ 100; as synonym for restoration of public interests, 112–­113; total nationalization vs., 338n171; urban conflict over, 207, 366n154; of waterfalls, 115; of writers’ individuality, 268–­269. See also Bolshevik nationalization; nationalization; property reform expropriation, compensation for: court resolution on, 36; in fishing monopoly case, 21–­23, 35, 36, 93; for hydropower development, 331n92; land prices and speed of, 98; of lands on Caspian seacoast, 93; limits of, 64, 87–­88; for members of community, 83–­84; monarch’s decisions on, 21–­22; of peasant allotments taken from landowners, 56; right to, 37; state financial limits and, 202, 363–­364n122; of treasure troves, 181; valuation in, 325n19, 327n36; of waterways in general, 96 Fadeev, P. A., 331n96 Faggionato, Raffaella, 295n33 Falberg, Nikolai, 108

Faleev, Nikolai, 47, 76, 77, 280, 305n105, 319n126, 398n63 famine and drought (1891–­1892), 71–­72, 101, 104–­105, 316n91 Farmakovskii, Boris, 184 Farrow, Lee A., 5 February Revolution, 270, 274. See also Provisional Government Fedorov, Nikolai, 195, 263, 376–­377n112 Field, Daniel, 56 Filaret Drozdov, Metropolitan of Moscow, 150, 345n76 Filimonov, G. D., 344n59 Finland: expropriation and water laws in, 109–­ 110; hydropower projects in, 107, 108, 114 fishing and fisheries: Peter I’s centralization of, 28, 298n29; waterway ownership and, 21–­23, 35, 36, 93. See also water and waterways Fleksor, David, 122, 123 Florenskii, Pavel, 151 Fodor, Alexander, 379n133 Fonvizin, Denis I., 35, 230, 250 “forest question”: “common good” rhetoric in, 68–­69, 72–­73, 77–­78; cultural and social issues connected to, 78–­79; as first challenge to private ownership (1830s–­1840s), 47–­52; and hunting issues, 70–­72; and private property debates, 62–­67; and state management issues, 74–­76; and state’s intrusion into private forest economy, 60–­62, 68–­69. See also deforestation; forest regulations; forests forest regulations: cameralist policies in, 29, 48, 74, 298–­299n34, 311n32; complaints about, 69, 314n71; drought and famine as rationale for, 71–­72, 316n91; as first step to further regulations, 71–­72, 85; hunting law compared to, 70; laws issued as part of, 47, 61, 62–­65, 68–­69. See also deforestation; “forest question”; forests Forestry Department (Ministry of State Domains): forest land transferred to, 316–­ 317n101; forest purchases recommended by, 69–­70, 313n65; limitations of, 68–­69, 75–­76, 318n116; private forest economy and, 60–­62 Forestry Institute (St. Petersburg), 47, 48, 53, 65, 76, 132 Forestry Review (periodical), 50, 65, 74, 76, 280, 308n132

412  | Index forests: absence of clear ownership of, 30–­31; and Berezinskaia system for timber rafting, 329n70; classification of, 72–­73; climate issues and, 313n58, 317n103; expropriation for protection of, 62–­63, 64, 68–­70, 73–­75; government projects to protect, 62–­67; management of, 48–­5 4, 61, 64, 74–­7 7, 132, 318n109, 319n123; nationalization and management of under Soviets, 47, 280–­2 81, 398–­ 399n75; nationalization of, 69–­70, 275, 313n65, 314n76; in northern vs. central and southern areas, 317n107; post-­ emancipation disputes over, 57–­5 8; post-­ emancipation incentives to clear, 60, 61–­62; challenge to private ownership of, 47–­52; privatization vs. central control of, 28–­29; social and moral values of, 13; specific bans in cutting of, 68; support for state ownership of, 77–­78; surveys and mapping of, 29, 53–­5 4, 75, 299n35; warning about utopian total expropriation of, 319n126. See also deforestation; “forest question”; forest regulations Foucault, Michel, 220, 251–­252, 293n17 Fox-­Genovese, Elizabeth, 31 France: Code Civil of, 43–­44, 186, 221, 305n101, 306n111, 324n7; emancipation of peasants in, 309–­310n10; expropriation in, 36, 37; historical preservation in, 133, 341n28; literary property laws in, 221, 261–­263, 371n48, 375n93; Louvre, 158, 189; private lives of artists in, 249; property rights in, 43, 268; public domain in, 16, 45, 221; “public property” in, 112, 333n111; rebuilding of Paris in, 36, 99–­100, 206; Russian agreements with, 259–­260, 391n135, 392n139; exhibit of Russian icons in, 158; state domain in, 45; status of forests in, 47–­ 48; wartime mobilization in, 271–­272. See also French Revolution Frank, Alison, 320n136, 322n179 Frederiks, Vladimir, 191 Freeden, Michael, 12, 295n38 freedom: autocracy’s use of term, 127; “economic,” 91–­92; natural law on, 31–­32; property inextricable from, 8–­10, 33–­35; of speech, 11, 248–­250, 256–­257; without individualism, 11–­12, 295n33 Free Economic Society, 30 free mining concept, 25–­26, 81, 84, 85–­88, 91. See also minerals; mining industry

free translation concept. See copyright; international copyright protection and agreements; translations French Code Civil, 43–­44, 186, 221, 305n101, 306n111, 324n7 French Commission on Literary Property, 371n48 French Revolution: expropriation in and after, 36, 37; forest domain question in, 47–­48; property rights established in, 43; public domain in, 16, 45, 221 French Society of Playwrights, 389n106 Friedberg, Maurice, 367–­368n8 Furtwängler, Adolf, 189 Gagarin, Grigorii, 201, 360n90 Galperine-­Kaminskii, Ilya (Halperine-­ Kaminskii), 262, 390n113, 391n129 Garshin, Vsevolod, 380n143 Gatchina palace, 190, 358n51 Gatrall, Jefferson, 161, 174 Gavriiliad (Pushkin), 285 Ge, Nikolai, 235, 379n124 General Land Survey (Generalnoe Mezhevanie Zemel), 30, 299n39 “General-­procurator’s Instruction” (Catherine II), 24 Gennadi, Grigorii, 243 George, Henry, 377–­378n113 Georgian Christian Church, Byzantine enamels collection of, 196, 361n96 Georgievskii, Vasilii, 350n137 Georgii Mikhailovich (grand duke), 169, 170, 171–­172, 358n51 Gerasimov, Ilya, 294n23 Gerasimov, Nikolai, 331n88 German, Carl Fedorovich (Carl Theodore Herrmann), 223–­224, 233, 257, 371n50 Germany (earlier, German states and Prussia): afforestation in, 73; archaeologists from, 197; Berlin museum, 347n97; canal building in, 106; forest regulation theories of, 311n32, 312n41; forestry training in, 48, 49, 53; forests as state business in, 65, 317n105; international copyright agreement proposed by, 389n99; landscape preservation in, 72, 133; literary property laws in, 375n93; Münich Glyptothek, 189; political/ legal thought in, 6, 66; property laws and industry in, 90; Russian agreements with, 266, 392n139; wartime mobilization in, 271, 272, 276

Index  |  413 Gershman, I., 30, 57 Gerstner, Franz Anton von, 307n117 Gertsenstein, Mikhail, 100, 126 Getzler, Joshua, 90 Glazunov, Alexander, 232, 239, 376n106 Glazunov, Ilya, 254 Gogol, Nikolai: in continuity of literature, 253; costs of works by, 229; editions of, 232; editor of, 250; and heirs’ sale of copyright, 375n95; misunderstandings of works by, 374n85; and possible models for Konstantin Konstanzhoglo, 49, 307n129; on the public, 229, 374nn84 and 85; public interest vs. rights of, 252; Soviet publishing of, 284; testament of, 381n4; unauthorized publication of portraits of, 241–­242 Gogol, Nikolai, works by: Dead Souls, 49; “On the Development of Periodical Literature,” 229; “The Overcoat,” 229; “The Portrait,” 229 Goldenveizer, Alexander, 379n126 Golitsyn, Alexander, 369n30 Goncharov, Ivan: as censor, 249; characteristics of, 383–­384n35; in continuity of literature, 385n63; defense of writers’privacy by, 245–­247, 249–­250, 251, 383n34, 386n71; publication of correspondence of, 383n32; on critic’s review, 373n77; death and will of, 234, 251; editor of, 250; funeral of, 248; identified as writer, 252; portrait of, 247 Goncharov, Ivan, works by: A Common Story, 245; Oblomov, 245; Obyknovennaia istoriia, 373n77; The Precipice, 245; “The Violation of Will” (Narushenie voli), 245–­247, 386n71; “The Voyage of the Frigate Pallada,” 255 Gorky, Maxim, 393n146 Gorlov, Ivan, 308n137 Gornostaev, Alexei, 145 Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 284 Gospel of Prince Mstislav (Mstislavovo Evangelie), 153–­154 Grabar’, Igor, 201, 283, 399n79 Graftio, Genrich, 281 Great Britain: anti-­hunting bills in, 315n83; bureaucratization in, 209; canal building in, 106; expropriation in, 258, 326n32; historical preservation in, 133, 202, 364n123; individuality vs. individualism in, 12; literary property in, 258; privatization and land enclosures in, 291–­292n5; property laws and industry in, 90; public property in, 16; status of forests in, 48; status of historical

monuments in, 185; wartime mobilization in, 271–­272, 276, 394n13; and water law in Egypt, 338n168. See also British Museum Great Reforms. See reforms Greece: antiquities laws in, 133; constitutional law in, 357n46; status of historical monuments in, 184–­185 Gribkov, Sergei, 198 Griboedov, Alexander, 230, 250, 374n89 Grigoriev, Apollon, 257 Grishunin, A. K., 400n94 Gromov, V. I., 171 Grotius, Hugo, 31, 302n72 Guins, Georgii (George Gins), 114, 121–­124, 286, 337n154 Gukovskii, Grigorii, 217, 228 Gulishambarov, Stepan I., 321n163 Gurliand, Ilya, 356n24 Gussakovskii, Petr N., 321n154 Guzhon, Yulii, 91 Halperine-­Kaminskii, Ilya (Galperine-­ Kaminskii), 262, 390n113, 391n129 Hapgood, Isabel, 379n131 harbors, 325n24. See also water and waterways Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène, 36, 99–­100, 206 Heine, Heinrich, 266 Helfant, Ian M., 70–­71 Henselt, Adolph von, 372n66 Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg): archaeological collections of, 182, 185–­186; management of and acquisitions for, 189, 190, 191, 192–­193, 359n71; paintings from palaces relocated to, 358n51; reforms recommended for, 359–­360n74; role of, 346n86; royal patrons of, 190–­191, 210; Russian Museum compared with, 191–­192; tsar’s rights in regard to, 188, 189–­190, 358n56 Herrmann, Carl Theodore (Carl Fedorovich German), 223–­224, 233, 257, 371n50 Herzen, Alexander, 22, 133 Heske, Franz, 65 Hesse, Carla, 221 historical monuments: age as criteria for definition of, 134, 135–­136; approach to, 17; cataloguing system for, 150; cemeteries as, 200; as church assets or res extra commercium, 160; cities’ reluctance to care for, 204, 364–­365n134; city walls as, 204–­205; debates on ownership of and authority over, 179–­188; expropriation of, 183–­184,

414  | Index historical monuments (continued) 202, 355–­356n22; forest preservation compared with, 199–­200; institutionalizing value of, 138–­141; nationalization of, 161–­162, 184, 185–­186, 188, 195–­196; other countries’ laws on, 184–­187; Peter I’s protection of, 342n38; petition to halt export of, 138; photographic inventory of, 136–­137, 341n28, 347–­348n107; preeminence of ancient civilizations and modern state in context of, 357–­358n49; as public property, 13, 131–­132; public subscriptions for, 258; recommendations and criteria regarding, 14, 133, 134, 162, 340–­341n13, 341n17, 355–­356n22; Soviet nationalization of, 282–­284, 399nn79 and 83; steepled church as, 141–­142, 143, 342n41; surveys and registration of, 135–­138; wartime campaign to preserve, 273, 395n16. See also archaeological sites; architecture; churches; historical preservation; museums Historical Museum (Kiev), 194 Historical Museum (Moscow), 152, 153–­154, 160, 194, 346n86 historical preservation: anti-­individualist critique in, 207–­209; changing cities and, 204–­209; cities’ reluctance to engage in, 204, 364–­365n134; competition among groups in, 202; costs of, 141–­142, 148–­149, 159, 202, 363–­364n122; and documentation before destruction, 138; experts’ criteria for, 135; experts necessary in, 170; as godless project, 175–­176; intertwined concerns in, 72–­73, 77–­78; legal context of, 178–­179; parish needs and piety vs. artistic integrity in restorations, 145–­149, 343nn53 and 54; private estates and campaign for, 198–­203; private property rights and art exports in, 195–­198, 362n106; proposed law for, 134, 197, 363–­364n122; unease about, 133; vulnerability of, 172–­174. See also architecture; churches; estates and mansions; historical monuments The Historic Herald (Istoricheskii vestnik, journal), 156 history: institutionalizing value of, 138–­141; literary studies as subfield of, 251–­252; as state property, 138, 140. See also national patrimony The History of the Russian State (Karamzin), 150

Holland, literary property laws of, 375n93 Holquist, Peter, 6, 118, 124, 396n40 Holy Synod. See Russian Orthodox Church Hont, Istvan, 31 Howell, David, 292n5 Hugo, Victor, 255, 372n59 hunting: animal classification and laws on, 70–­ 72; land property qualification considered for, 314n77, 315n82; Lev Tolstoy’s opposition to, 315n79 hydraulic engineers, 72, 106–­107, 111 hydropower: development of, 107–­109, 331n92, 334n121; imposition of state monopoly on, 115; lack of, 89–­90; laws concerning, 105; private land purchased for, 114–­115; property rights system and, 106–­111; proposed projects, 108–­110, 330–­331n82, 331–­332n96, 332n103, 334–­ 335n126; Soviet state property and, 281; streams sold for, 96; valuation of water and, 103–­104; “white coal” for, 108, 114, 273, 275, 330n77. See also electricity IAC. See Imperial Archaeological Commission (IAC) Iazykov, Mikhail, 229–­230 icons: aestheticization of, 178–­179; appropriation of into modernist canon, 161, 167, 172–­174; as art works, 14, 139–­140; cleaning and restoration of, 165–­166, 173–­174; consecration of, 346n82; copying and repetition desired in, 216; destruction of in use, 155; and “discovery” of Russian iconography, 134; exhibition of, 173–­174; framing of, 146–­147; increased interest in, 152–­153; market for, 161–­162, 165; meaning of, 151, 345n80; nontransferrable status of, 150–­151; Ostroukhov’s defense of private traders of, 168–­170, 171–­172; ownership of, 151–­152; as res publicae or res divinae, 149–­156; revival of tradition of, 176; secularization of, 174–­177; Soviet nationalization of, 283; surveys of, 137–­ 138, 349–­350n136. See also Briagin affair; churches; religious art; Smolensk affair ideas: oration vs. writing as, 370n44; property rights extended to, 218–­219; public/private nature of ownership of, 220–­221; as public property, 13. See also authorial rights; Enlightenment ideas; literary works; objects; and specific concepts

Index  |  415 Illuminated Gospel (Litsevoe Evangelie, icon), 166–­167, 169, 171 Illustrated Iconographical Script (Litsevoi ikonopisnyi podlinnik), 176 Imperial Academy of Arts: access to icons requested by, 152, 153; archaeologists and, 340n4; artistic property and, 226, 369n30; critique of, 210; elimination of publishing monopoly of, 217; Itinerants’ revolt against, 193–­194; management of, 191; monuments commission of, 341n17; Old Russian art exhibit of, 152; professionalization of, 132, 133; surveys undertaken by, 136; urban planning and, 206–­207 Imperial Academy of Sciences: freedom of translation supported by, 265–­266; literary property law reviewed by, 221–­222, 223, 225; management of, 191; professionalization of, 132; Writers’ Assistance commission of, 239 Imperial Archaeological Commission (IAC): archaeological site reports of, 180–­182; and its authoritative monopoly on excavations, 182–­183, 196–­197, 355n20; city wall issues and, 205; competition of with Moscow Archaeological Society, 339–­340n4; establishment of the authority of, 146–­149; estate purchase considered by, 363n114; limits on power of, 210; management of, 191; professionalization of, 132, 133; role of, 346n86; Smolensk affair and, 156; surveys undertaken by, 136, 137; urban planning and, 207 Imperial Chancellery, 230–­231 Imperial Hermitage. See Hermitage Museum Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society. See Moscow Archaeological Society Imperial Theaters, 191, 369n28, 389n106 “inalienable property.” See inviolability of property rights individualism: communal vision vs., 300n47; definitions of, 1–­2; experts’ critique of, 125, 126–­127, 207–­209, 256–­257; limited acceptance of legal application of, 6–­7; multiple varieties of, 10–­11; property concept as denial of, 288–­289; provisional renunciation of, 271–­273; Russian liberalism on, 11–­12, 295n33; subordination to community of, 8 industrialization: economic freedom rhetoric and, 91–­92; free mining and, 25–­26, 81; peasants and, 80–­84; property rights and, 88–­89, 116–­117; sales of art works and,

283–­284; Soviet nationalization and, 397–­ 398n58; wartime resistance to interference in, 273–­275; and water, power, and transportation issues, 89–­90, 95, 106–­111, 112. See also mining industry; railroads and railroad development; transportation Industry and Trade (periodical), 86 inheritance principles: authors’ vs. public’s rights in, 253–­257; and the debate on public figures’ papers and privacy, 241–­250; editors, public interest, and, 250–­253; private property as temporal in context of, 199; “public” not recognized as beneficiary, 235–­236; wife’s portion in, 385–­386n69. See also property institutionalization: of expropriation, 41; of “moral” power of the public, 250–­253; necessity of in irrigation, 120–­121; in property regime, 46–­47, 57; of the public as a body, 239–­240; of public domain, 15–­16; of value of art and history, 138–­141. See also museums; and specific institutions intellectual property (uchenaia sobstvennost’): defined, 222; demand less than need for, 224–­225; literary vs. patent, 257–­258. See also authorial rights; copyright; literary property Intercession of the Mother of God Monastery (Suzdal), 350n137 international copyright protection and agreements: appeal for Russian participation in, 262–­263, 390n113; Chekhov on, 263–­264; disregard for in theaters, 389n106; free translation principle and, 258–­259; hostility to, 267, 389n106; proposals for, 389n99; rationale for ignoring, 260–­261, 263; Russia as outsider with regard to, 261–­262; Russian debates on, 265–­267; in Russo-­French treaty, 259–­260; trade agreements linked to, 266, 391n133 inviolability of property rights (gift from monarch to nobility): attempts to exempt objects from, 178–­179; bureaucrats’ belief in, 96; campaign against enemy aliens and end of, 276–­277; Catherine II’s introduction of, 9–­10, 23, 55, 180; as contract, 38, 43; dysfunctional nature of, 127–­128, 209; exports of art and antiquities in context of, 195–­198, 362n106; expropriation dilemma in, 35–­41; forest debates in context of, 64–­ 65; as gift not right, 32; hydropower projects and claims to, 108; literary property and,

416  | Index inviolability of property rights (gift from monarch to nobility) (continued) 224–­225; monarch’s upholding of, 100, 160, 172–­173; religious property and, 161–­162, 165, 172–­173, 175; Sheremetev’s Petersburg property and, 207; state’s fixation on, 115–­ 117. See also property rights Iosif (bishop Uglichskii), 155 iron industry, 85. See also coal and ore production irrigation and irrigation canals: cotton manufacturers’ demands for, 124, 337–­338n168; dam for, 103; disputes concerning, 36–­37; expert publications on, 336n144; expropriation for, 41, 93, 101; institutional management of, 120–­121; as land amelioration project, 104–­105; landowner-­peasant negotiations on, 57; law on, 101, 102, 105, 106; Tornau’s proposal on, 335n136; Transcaucasian need for, 117–­118. See also canals Isakov, Yakov, 258 Iskerskii, Stanislav, 358n51 Italy: antiquities laws in, 133; expropriation in, 258; and international copyright agreement, 389n99; status of historical monuments in, 184–­185, 187, 356n23 Itinerant artists, 193–­194 Iuskevich, Dmitrii, 334n121 Ivanov, Alexander, 359n66, 381n4 Ivan the Terrible, 153, 342n41 Izmailov, Nikolai, 245 Izvolskii, Petr, 156, 160 Jhering, Rudolf, 401n109 Jones, Robert, 29 Journal des Debats (French), 379n131 The Juridical Herald (Iuridicheskii vestnik), 183 Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob, 298n34, 304–­305n97 justice: as key term in property rights debates, 110–­111; liberals’ use of term, 127. See also law; Ministry of Justice Kamenets-­Podolsk, city walls of, 204–­205 Kankrin, Georg [Egor], 90 Kantemir, Antiokh, 230 Kantorovich, Yakov, 371–­372n57 Karadzhe-­Iskrov, Nikolai, 286, 287, 402n112 Karamzin, Nikolai, 150, 253, 385n63 Karnitskii, Dmitrii, 86, 318n116, 321n157 Karnitskii, Iosif, 109, 123 Kasso, Lev, 239

Katkov, Mikhail, 258 Kazanskii, Petr, 112–­113, 333n111 Keppen, Petr, 219 Kern, Eduard, 313n58 Khanenko, Boris, 183–­184 Kharitonenko, Pavel, 166–­167 Khater, Antoine, 186 Kherson province, archaeological sites in, 181, 183 Khodskii, Leonid, 74 “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse” (Tolstoy), 315n79 Khudozhestvennye Sokrovishcha Rossii (The Artistic Treasures of Russia, journal), 138 Khvoiko, Vikentii, 182 Kiev, water and navigation issues in, 332n104 Kiev-­Pechersk Lavra, 353n171 Kingston-­Mann, Esther, 308n130 Kiselev, Pavel, 46, 52–­53, 306n115 Kistiakovskii, Bogdan, 11–­12 Kitai-­gorod, city walls of, 204–­205 Kivelson, Valerie, 34 Kliuchnikov, Veniamin, 78 Köhler, Egor (Heinrich Karl Ernst), 180 Kokh, Petr, 30 Kokovtsov, Vladimir, 108, 203, 364n130 Kolomna: city walls, 204–­205 Kol’tsov, Alexei, 232, 255 Kondakov, Nikodim: on antiquities, 181; Byzantine enamels collection and, 196, 361n96; on Gospel manuscript, 154; on icon restoration, 166; on Illuminated Gospel icon, 166, 171; on preservation, 172; on religious belief, 176 Koni, Anatolii, 238, 255, 383n32, 385n63, 386–­387n71 Korkunov, Nikolai, 93 Korzhinskii, Sergei, 239 Koshelev, Alexander, 65–­66 Kostof, Spiro, 206 Kostomarov, Nikolai, 380n143, 387–­388n85 Kotsonis, Yanni, 12, 44, 124, 295n41, 303n87 Kovalevskii, Vladimir, 74 Kovrukov, Timofei, 166, 167, 351n148 Kozhin (landowner), 88, 322n168 Kremlin: Annunciation Cathedral, 344n59; Archangel Cathedral, 153–­154, 283, 347n94; Dormition Cathedral, 168, 283 The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy), 378n118, 378–­379n123 Krieger, Leonard, 33 Krivoi Rog ore deposit, 80, 89

Index  |  417 Krivoshein, Alexander, 75, 171–­172, 276 Kuban bronze culture, 197 Kulomzin, Anatolii, 90–­91 Kunitsyn, Alexander, 43, 45 Kursk Society for Hunting, 315n82 Kushelev-­Bezborodko, Alexander, 50–­51, 199 Kutaisov, Ivan, 21–­23, 35, 36, 93 Kutler, Nikolai, 326n33 land: Catherine II’s grants of to nobility, 29–­ 30; disposal of and quitrent for, 59; effects of private ownership of, 33–­34; emancipation of peasants and, 55–­56; market for, 205–­206; minorities and acquisition of, 396n39; of peasants, sold to nobles, 45–­46; peasants’ hunger for, 73, 83, 100, 117, 322–­ 323n183, 326n32, 327n36; and proposal for state land fund, 100, 326–­327n35; as public property, 278–­279, 397n49, 402n112; purchased from landowners for hydropower projects, 114–­115, 331n83, 335n130; renting/leasing laws on, 90–­91, 322nn181, 182, and 183; Soviet NEP transformation of, 287; state management of, 52–­54; state ownership rights over, retained in emancipation of peasants, 59–­60, 310n17; and surface vs. subterranean ownership, 83–­84, 86–­89, 319n130, 321–­322n168 (see also minerals); surveys of, 29, 30, 52–­53, 299nn35 and 39; technocratic management models for, 396n40. See also agriculture and agrarian reform; peasants Land Amelioration Department, 104 Land Decree (1917), 279 landowners: building by, in cities, 99–­100; clearcutting of forests by, 61–­62, 311n19; compensation for land alienated from, 56, 98; dilemma of archaeological sites belonging to, 178, 179–­188, 198; and disputes over forests and water, 57–­58, 60–­62, 102–­105; forest protection debates and, 62–­67; hunting restrictions imposed on, 70–­72; liberals’ trust in state vs., 126–­ 127; peasants’ performing forest work for, 310n11; as responsible for waterway protection, 316n93; state’s intrusion into forest economy of, 60–­62, 68–­69; usufruct right to water of, 123, 337n153; vandalism by, 201; water reservoirs within allotment of, 329n65. See also estates and mansions; nobility; peasants

Land Survey School (Mezhevoe Uchilishche), 53 Latour, Bruno, 288 law: common, 16, 22, 32, 296n2; ethnic and social differences in, 396n39; public (in support of freedom) vs. private (property protection), 24; Shari’a, 19, 119, 122, 124, 337n162; socialization of, 126–­127; standardized, 34; uncertainties and interpretations of, 110–­111. See also Code of Russian Civil Laws; French Code Civil; laws and decrees; Roman law and tradition laws and decrees: agrarian, 58–­60, 83–­84; on archaeological sites and findings, 182–­183, 184; on authors’ rights, 226; Catherine II’s instructions on development, 23–­25, 32–­33; on censorship, 220–­221; on conservation, 281; on electric energy, 101; on historical preservation, 162; on hunting, 70–­72; on hydrotechnical systems, 105; on inalienability of peasant allotments, 57, 309n7; on irrigation and drainage canals, 101, 102, 105, 106; on land rent, 90–­91, 322nn181, 182, and 183; on literary and artistic property, 10, 218–­221 (see also literary property); on mineral deposits, 81–­83; on mining, 297n20; on musical property, 226–­228, 372nn66 and 67; on patents, 257–­258; on preservation, proposed, 134, 197, 363–­364n122; on property tax, 203; on protection of state’s property, 42; publishing monopolies eliminated by, 217; on religious tolerance and freedom, 144, 167, 170; seashores made exempt from privatization by, 21; state property (Soviet), 288; on translation, 265–­266; on treasure troves, 27, 179–­180, 297–­298n25. See also Code of Russian Civil Laws; emancipation of peasants; forest regulations; law; reforms; water regulations and laws Legislative Commission, 23–­25, 32–­33 Leman, Ivan, 359–­360n74 Lenin, Vladimir: on democracy and state property, 277–­278; on nationalization vs. social appropriation, 282; nationalized authors list of, 284; on nature reserves, 281; property terminology of, 278–­279; on state as capitalist, 277, 397n44 Leonardo da Vinci, 190 Leontiev-­Zubov residence (Moscow), 203 Leontovich, Ivan, 147 Leopardi, Giacomo, 258

418  | Index Leopold II of Belgium, 192 Lermontov, Mikhail: copyright of, 239; editions of, 231, 232, 382n17; fate of works after death, 242, 254, 381n6; quoted, 267; search for “authentic text” of, 244–­245; Soviet publishing of, 284, 285; translation by, 266 Leskov, Nikolai, 246, 379n126 Levin, Yurii, 388n92 Levitov, Alexander, 387–­388n85 Levitskii, Dmitrii, 189, 193, 358n51 Levitt, Marcus C., 217 Liatskii, Evgenii, 383n34 liberalism: demise of (classical), 8–­9; ethical foundation of, 31; individualism as core of, 1; modernization projects in contradiction to, 94–­95; private property and individualism inextricable in, 12; public spaces and, 2; “rule of law” in, 6–­7. See also individualism; private property; Russian liberalism Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia, Senkovskii), 242 The Life of Christ (Renan), 266–­267 Likhachev, Nikolai, 165, 172, 173–­174, 190, 284, 359n66 Linnichenko, Ivan, 194 literacy campaign, 232–­233, 376n110 Literary Congress, 260 literary criticism and studies: authors’ relatives viewed as threat in, 254–­256; deprivatization of literature fostered in, 268–­269; editing and professionalization in, 250–­253; emergence of discipline of, 242–­243; as subfield of history, 251–­252; psychological and epistemological approaches in, 268, 392n140; search for authentic and complete text in, 243–­245, 381n13; in the Soviet era, 284–­285 Literary Fund, 238–­239, 245, 380n143 literary property: approach to, 14–­17; author and public as subjects of law in, 228–­233; authors’ rights vs. research and public education in debates on, 253–­257; commercialization tied to, 217–­218; competing visions on, 221–­225, 370nn38 and 44; concept of, 215–­216, 217, 252–­253; and debate on public vs. author’s rights and privacy, 241–­250; drafting of law and rules for, 10, 218–­221; economic approach to, 223–­225; editors’, heirs’, and public’s interests in, 250–­253; expropriation proposed as solution to, 258, 387–­388n85; larger political

and ideological importance of, 225–­228; national interests as trumping privacy of, 265–­269; obligations linked to, 238–­239; patent law compared to, 257–­258; private property vs. public good in, 230–­233; property rights rhetoric in, 218–­219; published works as public’s, 51, 220, 221–­223, 229–­230, 252–­253, 268–­269; renunciation and denunciation of, 195, 233–­238, 376–­377n112, 377–­378n113, 378nn114 and 118, 393n146; terms and expiration of, 51, 220, 221, 222, 230–­231, 239, 376n110; wife’s inheritance of, 385–­386n69. See also authorial rights; author-­public relations; authorship; copyright; literary works; writers literary works: agency in context of, 238–­239; censorship committees’ published lists of, 370n47; classical series of, 230, 231–­232; commercialization of trade in, 217–­218; completeness and “authenticity” of, 243–­ 245, 381n13; continuity of, 253–­254, 268, 385n63; copying and repetition desired in, 216–­217; experts’ definition of, 14; importation of, 259; as labor, 224–­225; of minorities in Russia, 265; originality of, 227–­228; on political economy, 218–­219; professionalization of, 371n56; as public property, 13, 51, 220, 221–­223, 229–­230, 252–­253, 268–­269; as res nullius, 238, 367–­368n8; social and moral values of, 13; Soviet nationalization and, 284–­285, 400n90; state’s responsibility toward writers of, 223–­224; “written culture” distinguished from, 229. See also author-­public relations; authorship; booksellers; correspondence and manuscripts; literary property; national literature; publishers; publishing; writers; and specific authors and titles Litovchenko, Karp, 111 Lloyd, E.M.H., 271 Lobanov-­Rostovskii, Alexei, 360n90 Lobanov-­Rostovskii, Dmitrii, 38 Lobanov-­Rostovskii, Nikolai, 63 local cottage (kustar) enterprises, 111 local self-­governments. See zemstvos Locke, John, 31, 32–­33, 51, 256 Lohr, Eric, 5, 276, 396n39 Lomikovskii, Vasilii, 49 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 230 Lopatin, Herman, 266 Lotman, Yurii, 34–­35, 40

Index  |  419 Lounsberry, Anne, 229 Louvre (Paris), 158, 189 Lukomskii, Georgii, 208, 283 Madonna Benois (Madonna with a Flower, Leonardo da Vinci), 190 Makarenko, Nikolai, 174, 176, 353n171 Makarii, Igumen (Archimandrite), 149, 345n77, 350n136 Makovskii, Sergei, 359–­360n74 Malama, V. I., 108, 114 Maliutin, Sergei, 161 Manchester Ship Canal, 106 Manifesto of June 1782 (minerals and waters, Catherine II), 25–­28, 44 Manifesto of September 1782 (forests, Catherine II), 28–­29 Mannheim, Karl, 66, 303n86 Manning, Roberta Thompson, 311n26 Mansurov, Nikolai, 313n63 manuscripts. See correspondence and manuscripts Marchand, Suzanne L., 187, 357n49 Mariette, Auguste, 186 Marrese, Michelle Lamarche, 5 Martens, Fedor, 261, 389n106 Martynov, Boris, 401n108 Marx, Adolf, 232, 375n95, 376n106 Marx, Karl, 266 Marxist theory, 278–­279. See also Soviet state Mashkovtsev, Nikolai, 381n4 Masoero, Alberto, 396n39 Matisse, Henri, 198 McCaffray, Susan P., 92 McKeon, Michael, 309n7 measurement and assessment mechanisms, 102–­105. See also survey and mapping projects medieval past: attempt to preserve ancient ensemble of, 205; chronographs of, 313n58; “discovery” of, 181–­182; estate holdings of relics from, 363n120; failure to preserve churches of, 145, 343n53; religious art of, 134, 137; social order of, 32 Melekhov, Ivan, 49 Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 74 Miakotin, Venedikt, 385n62 Michael Pavlovich (grand duke), 371n52 Mickiewicz, Adam, 220 Migulin, Petr, 275, 326n33 Mikhail Fedorovich (tsar), 349–­350n136

Mikhailovskii Palace, 191. See also Russian Museum of Alexander III military: Corps of Foresters in, 53; waterway connection project for, 107 Military-­Industrial Committee, 276 Miliukov, Pavel, 12, 238, 385n62; on copyright and translation issues, 252–­253, 255–­256, 267, 375n94, 385n59; on individualism, 256–­257; on individual-­society-­state polity, 11; on literary domain, 269 Mill, John Stuart, 65 Miller, Alexei, 305n102 Miller, Pavel, 227 Milov, Leonid, 299n39 minerals: archaeological treasures likened to, 26–­27, 179–­180, 297–­298n25; and land rights vs. rights to subterranean resources, 83–­84, 86–­89, 319n130, 321–­322n168; peasants’ ownership of and rental negotiations, 15, 26, 80–­84, 88, 320n137; as public property, 84–­89; state regulations on, 81–­83. See also coal and ore production; industrialization; mining industry Mining Department, 81–­82 mining industry: access restrictions removed for, 88–­89, 321–­322n168; Catherine II’s privatization of vs. Peter I’s freedom to mine, 25–­27, 297n20; and debates about property rights, 85–­88; forest management by, 74–­75; and “free mining” concept, 25–­26, 81, 84, 85–­88, 91; impact of agrarian laws on, 83–­84; lack of transportation for, 89–­90; negotiations of with multiple landowners, 80–­82; “new wave” of, 321n150. See also coal and ore production; minerals Ministry of Agriculture (earlier Ministry of State Domains): access to mineral deposits and, 81–­82; demise of, 286; establishment of, 46; and forest mapping project, 75; forest protection projects of, 63–­65, 66–­67; private forest economy and, 60–­62, 68–­69; on public property designation, 114; tasks of, 52–­54; transformation and strengthened position of, 104–­105; and “white coal” manifesto, 275. See also Forestry Department; Land Amelioration Department Ministry of Agriculture office in Turkestan, 123 Ministry of Finances, 82, 108, 304n92, 331–­332n96 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 261–­262, 388–­389n98

420  | Index Ministry of Interior: antiquities sales and, 362n106; authorial rights disputes and, 371–­372n57; expropriation and, 183–­184; historical monument preservation and, 138, 162, 355–­356n22; historical preservation law proposed by, 197, 363–­364n122; on mineral deposits, 80, 82; private forest economy and, 60–­61; surveys requested by, 135–­136; water resources and, 106, 120, 336n145 Ministry of Justice: Briagin case and, 172; copyright issues and, 227, 254, 256, 266; water issues and, 38, 40, 120, 123, 331–­332n96 Ministry of Public Education, 134, 219, 221–­ 222, 371–­372n57. See also public education Ministry of State Domains. See Ministry of Agriculture Ministry of State Domains office in Transcaucasia, 118–­121, 335n137, 336n144 Ministry of the Emperor’s Domains (Departament Udelov), 42 Ministry of the Imperial Court: academic professionalization under, 132; budget of, 190; museum and science administration of, 186, 189, 191, 192–­193; palaces run by, 188; Soviet management of, 401n102. See also tsar’s domain Ministry of Trade and Industry, 266, 275, 391n135 Ministry of Transportation: and call for exploitation for hydropower, 331–­332n96; Catherine the Great monument and, 365n134; city wall issues and, 204–­205; compensation decisions by, 325n20; Dnepr land purchase project of, 331n83; on draft expropriation law, 325–­326n25; expropriation for harbor by, 325n24; hydropower proposals and, 108–­109, 110, 114–­115, 330–­331n82; navigable rivers nationalized by, 95–­96; on number of navigable rivers, 324n6; Oka River watermill case and, 38; and waterway connection projects, 107, 329–­330n70. See also transportation Mizhuev, Pavel, 385n62 modernization projects: expropriation in, 100; historical preservation linked to, 139–­140; liberalism in contradiction to, 94–­95; state reformism and public domain in, 15–­16 Moeller-­Sally, Stephen, 232 Molière, 221

monarchical state: absolute private property model of, 10, 11; “common good” rhetoric deployed by, 123–­125; court churches as property of, 343n47; declining power of, 42, 116–­117; inconsistency in centralizing efforts of, 28–­29; museum patronage and, 165; Russian liberal critique of, 11–­12; society’s political or legal status denied by, 15–­16. See also autocratic state; inviolability of property rights; state property; tsar’s domain; and specific rulers monasteries: as keepers of religious art objects, 149–­150, 153, 345n77; mural restoration in, 283; Nicholas II’s visit to, 350n137; Novgorod monastery school of iconography, 166; Romanov dynasty gifts to, 174. See also icons; religious art Money, Leo Chiozza, 277 Montesquieu, Charles-­Louis, 24, 32, 302n72 monument, definition of, 141, 340–­341n13. See also archaeological sites; architecture; historical monuments Mordvinov, Nikolai: British political economic influence on, 32; on fishing monopoly case, 21–­23, 35, 36, 296n4; key question of, 25; on owning objects vs. people, 49–­50, 307–­ 308n130; positions held by, 21, 22, 296n6; on property as inviolable, 39–­40 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 196, 361n98 Morozov, Alexei, 282 Morozov, Georgii, 76–­77, 280, 319n123 Morozov, Nikolai, 373n75 Moscow: Annunciation Cathedral, 344n59; Archangel Cathedral, 153–­154, 283, 347n94; art collections bequeathed to, 194; city walls in, 204–­205; Dormition Cathedral, 168, 283; expropriation costs of, 99–­100; Saint Basil Cathedral, 141; St. Petersburg’s competition with, 194, 346n86, 399n79 Moscow Archaeological Society: access to icons requested by, 153, 154; authority of, 146–­149; competition of with Imperial Archaeological Commission, 339–­340n4; icon exhibition of, 173–­174; leader of, 14, 75, 346n86; Murom’s steepled church and, 142; pre-­demolition documentation proposed by, 203; surveys undertaken by, 136–­137; Tenisheva’s collection held by, 159 Moscow Society of Manufacturers and Plants’ Owners, 91 Möser, Justus, 32, 33, 39, 303n85 Mother (Gorky), 393n146

Index  |  421 Mozhaisk, Kremlin in, 204 Mstera (Vladimirskaia province), as center of icon painting, 166. See also Briagin affair Muhammad Ali (pasha of Egypt), 186 Müller, Adam, 303n86 Muller, Jerry Z., 32 municipalization: of art, 194–­196; of energy, 111. See also cities and municipal areas Muratov, Pavel, 137, 167, 283 Muraviev, Nikolai, 105 Murom: search for icons in, 349–­350n136; steepled church of, 141–­142, 143, 342n41 Museum Congress, 194 museums: budgets of, 165, 190–­191, 196, 359–­360n74; churches’ similarity to, 174–­175, 175, 353n173; as depositories for movable “monuments,” 149–­150, 152–­ 156; development of, 153–­154, 346n86; imperial involvement in management of, 189–­191, 358n56; Itinerants’ exhibitions in, 193–­194; municipalization of collections and, 194–­196; as national and public vs. imperial, 165; number of, 152–­153; “old experts” working in, 282–­283; openness demanded of, 353n171; public campaign to relocate art works to, 188–­190, 193, 358n51; as public cause, 195–­196; of Russian Orthodox Church, 153; secularization of religious art in, 174–­177; tensions surrounding church property and collections of, 158–­159, 160–­162, 165, 349n126. See also archaeological sites; Briagin affair; exhibitions; Smolensk affair; and specific museums The Music (Matisse), 198 musical property laws: as hindrance and protection, 226–­228; on performances, 372–­373n67; unauthorized vs. authorized scores and, 372n66 Musin-­Pushkin, Alexei, 150, 181, 183 Mylov, Victor, 80 Nabokov, Dmitrii, 120, 123 Nadson, Semen, 234, 380n143 Nakaz (“Instruction for the Legislative Commission,” Catherine II), 23–­25, 32–­33, 304n94 Napoleon, 37, 43–­44, 206, 305n101, 306n111 Narova River, 107, 108 Naryshkina, Natalya, 363n114 Na severe dikom stoit odinoko (Lermontov), 266

nation (natsiia): maintaining balance of forests across, 51–­52; people (narod) as interchangeable with, 305n102; public wealth linked to, 87; and rhetoric of historical memory, 182–­183; “state” distinguished from, 59. See also nationalism; nationalization; national patrimony national art (or heritage): categories included in, 222–­223; concept of, 215; Golden Era of, 199; icons as symbol of, 178–­179; Itinerants’ revolt and, 193–­194; literary property laws as threat to, 225–­226; municipalization and ideal of, 194–­196; private estates and campaign for preservation of, 198–­203; property rights and exports of, 195–­198, 362n106; tsar’s domain and, 188–­193. See also antiquities and antiquarianism; archaeological sites; art works; laws and decrees; literary works; national patrimony; treasure troves national economy (narodnoe khoziaistvo), 85–­ 86. See also economy nationalism: environmental concerns linked to, 72–­73; European sentimentalism and romantic version of, 133; private property trumped by cultural development and, 265–­ 269; public good and wartime heightening of, 273 nationalization: of antiquities, 185–­186; of art, 149–­156, 195–­196; of coal, 274; differences in, 271–­272, 277, 279–­280; of energy, 114–­ 115; expropriation vs. total, 338n171; of forests, 69–­70, 313n65, 314n76; of historical monuments, 161–­162, 184, 185–­186, 188, 195–­196; impetus for, 199; marginalized idea of, 233; of navigable rivers, 95–­96; registration as prerequisite for, 138; in support of economic needs, 93; wartime mobilization and, 270–­277; water ownership debates and, 111. See also Bolshevik nationalization; expropriation; public domain national literature: authors’ rights vs. research and public education in, 253–­257; and debate on public figures’ papers and privacy, 241–­250; editors and classical editions of, 250–­253; free translation principle and, 258–­267; marginalization of in Europe, 260–­261; private property trumped by development of, 265–­269; role of, 229, 257–­ 258. See also literary works national patrimony: approach to, 140–­141; concept of, 131–­133; criteria for

422  | Index national patrimony (continued) preservation of, 133–­138; and dilemma of sacred property, 141–­149, 172–­174; and discovery of historical materiality of Russia, 181–­182; and icons as res publicae or res divinae, 149–­156; institutionalizing value of art and history in, 138–­141; limits of state attention to, 209–­211; as mental not legal construct, 172–­174, 188–­189; objectives pursued in, 178–­179; Pokryshkin’s view of, 353n176; as public good or need, 183; surveys and registration of, 135–­137; tensions between religious art and domain of, 174–­177. See also archaeological sites; Briagin affair; historical monuments; historical preservation; medieval past; national art (or heritage); national literature; Smolensk affair national protected domain (natsionalnoe zapovednoe urochishche), 205 national sovereignty concept, 45 National Trust (Britain), 202, 364n123 “Natural Law” (Pravo estestvennoe, Kunitsyn), 43 natural law doctrine, 31–­32, 43 natural resources: approach to, 17; and balance of state control vs. private property, 74; campaign against private owners of, 15; concept of, 13, 14; “depersonalization” of, 274, 395n25; limited knowledge about, 282–­283, 305n105, 336n139, 398n73; luxury goods’ impact on, 298–­299n34; “moral” right to moderate use of, 51; ownership questions relating to, 17, 78–­79, 87–­88; people as owners of, 43; and preservation concerns, 72–­73, 77–­78, 281–­282; privatization of, 24–­31, 44, 94, 299n39; problems in exploitation of, 127–­128; professional management of, 9; public power over, 44–­45; rationalized use of, 10; rhetoric on free open access to, 91–­92; state ownership of under Soviets, 278–­283, 397n57; state’s reluctance to exert control over, 115–­117; surveys of, 29, 30, 299nn35 and 39; wartime development of, 273–­274. See also forests; land; minerals; survey and mapping projects; water and waterways nature: artist’s copying of, 216–­217, 226; holistic approach to, 76–­77, 319n123; increased interests in, 67–­68. See also natural resources Nekrasov, Nikolai, 267

Neradovskii, Petr, 154–­155, 165, 166, 284, 349–­350n136 Netherlands, literary property laws of, 375n93 Neva River, 103 Nevskii, Alexander, 174 New Economic Policy (NEP), 286–­287, 400n90, 401n105 The News and the Exchange Gazette (Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta), 263 The New Time (Novoe Vremia), 156, 203, 234, 276 Nicholas I (emperor): censorship law of, 220; education of, 371n52; inventory of religious objects ordered by, 150, 345n77; literary property laws of, 230–­231, 371n56; monument of, 205; museums’ paintings and, 191, 358n56; railroad planning by, 97 Nicholas II (emperor): abdication of, 193; Briagin case and, 166, 170, 171–­172; icon painting revival fostered by, 176; on inviolability of property rights, 100, 160; monastery visit of, 350n137; as patron of national museums, 165, 174, 188, 190, 359n64 Nickell, William, 241 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 251 Nikolaii, Alexander, 102 Nikon (bishop of Smolensk), 156, 348n120 nobility: Catherine II’s privatization of resources and, 24–­31, 299n39; compulsory service eliminated for, 29, 33, 34; cultural decay of, 199–­202; opposition of to Great Reforms, 63–­64; peasants’ land sold to, 45–­46; preservation campaign and private estates of, 198–­203; on property rights as civil freedom, 126–­127; on property rights to minerals, 86–­87; renaissance of estate culture among, 363n119; serfs and changes in property rights of, 33–­34. See also estates and mansions; inviolability of property rights; landowners Noble Land Bank, 69 “Noble Russia” (Pomeshchichia Rossiia, Vrangel), 199–­200 Nolde, A. E., 338n177 Nolde, Boris, 276 Norov, Avraam, 230, 260 Northern Expedition for the Drainage of Marshes, 105 “Note for the Survey of Russian Antiquities,” 134 Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski), 62 Notovich, Nikolai, 267

Index  |  423 Novgorod: city walls of, 204; medieval architecture of, 205; St. Sophia Cathedral, 150, 345n77 Novgorod Monastery, 166 Novgorodtsev, Pavel, 100 Novodvinsk, city walls of, 205 Novospasskii Monastery, 149 objects: forests as, 51–­52; legal issues of special cultural objects, 215–­216; public opinion on, 14; social values of, 13; status of, 34–­35, 295–­296n43, 296n44. See also art; ideas; literary property; natural resources; values and valuation Oblomov (Goncharov), 245 Obninskii, Petr, 249–­250 Obyknovennaia istoriia (Goncharov), 373n77 October Revolution. See Bolshevik nationalization; Soviet state Office of the Tsar’s Domains, 324–­325n17 Ogarev, Nikolai, 59 Oka River: alienation of watermill on, 37–­38, 40; steepled church on bank of, 141–­142, 143, 342n41 Ol’, Pavel, 329n67 Oldekop, Evstaphii, 218–­219, 368n22, 388n91 Old Russian art, 152–­153, 154, 161–­162, 165. See also medieval past Onezhskii Monastery (Archangelsk), 153 “On Intellectual Property” (memo), 221–­222, 225, 370n44 “On Property” (Catherine II), 24 “On the Common Good of Copyright” (Halperine-­Kaminskii), 390n113, 391n129 “On the Development of Periodical Literature” (Gogol), 229 “On the Issue of White Coal” (brochure), 275 “On the Use of Water for the Irrigation of Lands” (water law), 119–­120 Opekushin, Alexander, 258 originality and creativity: copying and imitation preferred over, 216–­217, 226; emerging explanations of, 268, 392n140; meanings of, 215–­216; property and, 216–­228; valuation based on, 133–­135. See also specific types of works Orlov, Mikhal, 318n109, 398–­399n75 Orlowsky, Alexander, 369n30 Ostrom, Elinor, 292n5 Ostromirovo Gospel, 150 Ostroukhov, Ilya: art collection of, 14, 167, 173–­174, 282; defense of private icon

traders by, 168–­170, 171–­172; Russian Museum–­Briagin deal arranged by, 166–­167 Ostrovskii, Alexander, 387–­388n85 Ottoman Empire: historical monuments’ status in, 186, 187; privatization and export of treasures from, 179, 196, 357–­358n49; lack of state’s expropriation rights in, 98. See also Byzantium “The Overcoat” (Gogol), 229 ownership, 12–­13, 17. See also property Ozmidov, Nikolai, 235 palaces. See estates and mansions; and specific palaces Pallot, Judith, 292–­293n6 Panama Canal, 106 Pashkov, Yakov, 203 patrimonialism, 42, 117. See also architecture; national patrimony Paul I (emperor), 21, 22, 35, 189 Pavlenkov, Florentii, 231–­232 Pavlovsk palace, 188, 190 peasant communes: company’s purchase of land from, 80–­81; effect of agrarian laws on, 83–­84; mineral rights of, 83–­84, 88, 320n137; ownership and, 310n17; protective norms hindered on, 69; railroad land expropriated from, 98, 325n20; water ownership claims of, 103. See also state villages Peasant Land Banks, 73, 83, 316–­317n101 peasants: “all-­people” concept and, 278–­279, 397n49; arable land needs of, 73, 311n20; archaeological digs by, 181; classification and social estate of, 45–­46; debate about landholders’ ownership of, 49–­50, 307–­308n130; and disputes over forests and water, 57–­58; forestry training for, 49; hunting by, 71; industrialization and, 80–­84; land hunger of, 73, 83, 100, 117, 322–­323n183, 326n32, 327n36; landownership promoted for, 83–­84; land of, sold to nobles, 45–­46; land transfer to, 12, 73; mineral deposits owned by, 15, 26, 80–­84, 88, 320n137; progressive management of, 22; property rights and change in status of, 33–­34, 56–­57, 309n7; resettlement of, to borderlands, 117, 121, 124–­125, 396n40; revolts by, 326n33; slaves in U.S. compared with, 308n131; state’s mobilization of, 7. See also agriculture and agrarian reform; emancipation of peasants; land; rural economy; serfdom system; state villages

424  | Index people (narod): Justi on, 304–­305n97; nation (natsiia) as interchangeable with, 305n102; as owners of country, 42–­43, 45. See also the public People’s Commissariat on Enlightenment, 284 Pergament, Osip, 253, 256, 385n59 Perkin, Harold, 294n27 personhood concept, 11–­12. See also individualism Peshekhonov, Alexei, 278, 397n50 Peterhof palace, 188, 189–­190, 283, 358n51 Peter I (Peter the Great, emperor): birthplace of mother of, 363n114; centralization efforts of, 28–­29, 298nn29 and 31; city plan of, 206; historical monuments protected by, 342n38, 345n77; as model for translators, 260; practice of “free mining” established by, 25–­26, 81, 84; property in context of, 33–­34; religious manuscript copies ordered by, 150; social estate of state peasants under, 45–­46; statue of, 205, 365n134; treasure trove decree of, 27; weak authority of, 29, 42, 299n36 Peter III (emperor), 29 Petr (bishop of Smolensk), 156, 158, 159–­160, 348n120 Petrazhitskii, Leon, 100–­101, 121 Petrograd. See St. Petersburg Physiocracy (French), 31, 33 Pincetl, Stephanie, 309–­310n10 Pipes, Richard, 5, 297n8 “Piping of Water and Digging Canals across Other Owners’ Land for Drainage, Irrigation, and Watering” (1902), 105, 106 piracy, 217, 218, 261, 378n118 plagiarism, prohibited, 223, 228. See also authorship; copyright; literary property Platt Simonds Copyright Act (U.S., 1891), 389n111 Plehve, Viacheslav, 82–­83 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 153, 154, 313n63 Pogodin, Mikhail, 145 Pokrovskii, Iosif, 338n173 Pokryshkin, Petr, 136, 204, 211, 283, 353n176, 395n16 Poland: coal industry of, 84–­85; emancipation of peasants in, 310n10 Polevoi, Ksenofont, 230, 374n89 Polish uprising (1830–­1831), 191 political economy: authorial rights and individualism in context of, 256–­257; literary property debates in context of, 223–­225; moral, cultural, and national capital in,

225–­226; Russian particularities in, 6–­7; theories and texts of, 218–­219, 371n52 politics: aversion to, 2–­3; nationalization of art and monuments linked to, 195–­196; and role of press in shaping public opinion, 267 Polonskii, Lev, 260 Pomialovskii, Nikolai, 387–­388n85 Pontic Olbia (ancient Greek colony), 181, 183 Porkovskii, Nikolai, 196 “The Portrait” (Gogol), 229 The Portrait of a Jew (Rembrandt), 361n98 Portugal, literary property laws of, 375n93 Posrednik (publishing house), 235 Potapenko, Ignatii, 391n126 Potebnia, Alexander, 392n140 power: contested definition of, 123–­124; limits of, 49–­50; property as, 34–­35, 302n66; three models of, 293n17; vacuum of, in countryside, 57 The Precipice (Goncharov), 245 Preobrazhenskii, Mikhail, 205 preservationism. See environmental concerns; historical monuments; historical preservation; natural resources: and preservation concerns The Principles of State Economy (Khodskii), 74 Principles of State Governance (Rozhdestvenskii), 52 privacy: Koni’s view of, 386–­387n71; limitations of, 252–­253; national interests vs., 265–­269; of public figures, 241–­250, 383n34, 386n71. See also correspondence and manuscripts private property: archaeological excavations and, 178, 179–­188; conceptual shifts of, 10, 127–­128; critique of, 57; cultural development prioritized over, 265–­269; “depersonalization” of, 274, 395n25; development of, in Russia, 9–­11; economic context of, 26, 55; first assaults against (forests), 47–­52; forest protection in context of, 62–­67; historiographic paradigm of, 3–­6, 291–­292n5; ideological and political rationale for, 31–­33; individualism as corollary of, 1; Kunitsyn’s definition of, 43, 45; Lev Tolstoy’s view of, 195, 233–­238, 377–­378n113; as limited to products of human labor, 50–­51; natural resources as, 24–­31, 78–­79, 81–­88, 299n39; popularity of idea of, and expropriation dilemma, 35–­41; preservationist rhetoric and critique of, 199–­203; public domain and, 11–­12, 17; public good vs., 230–­233; Soviet

Index  |  425 legitimation of, 286–­287; Soviet renunciation of, 12–­13; state’s authority to collect data on (forests), 68–­70; Stolypin’s model of, 295n41; “temporary” status of, 13. See also expropriation; intellectual property; inviolability of property rights; literary property; musical property laws privatization: British land enclosures and, 291–­ 292n5; call for, 331n88; of natural resources, 24–­31, 44, 94, 110, 179, 299n39; of Ottoman treasures, 179, 196, 357–­358n49; seashores exempt from, 21 Problems of Idealism (edited collection), 295n34 professionalization: of art, architecture, and archaeology, 132; of literature and literary studies, 218, 250–­253, 371n56; qualifications and, 160–­161; rhetoric of property in claims of, 182–­183; state functions undertaken, 6–­9. See also experts and technocrats; forests; hydropower; science and scientific developments progressivism, 66–­67, 294n23 property (sobstvennost’): “all-­people’s,” 278–­ 279, 397n49; anti-­individualism and, 288–­289; approach to, 17–­18; artistic originality and, 216–­228; attitude of liberalism toward state’s role in, 3, 125–­127; Catherine II’s introduction of idea of, 9–­10, 23, 33–­35, 55, 180; Catherine II’s vs. Peter I’s laws in relation to, 24–­31, 299n39; as commodity vs. as propriety, 292n5; common law on, 22, 32, 296n2; conservative-­aristocratic concept of vs. “bourgeois” concept of 66; dilemma of religious art as, 141–­149; European context of, 1–­8; expropriation dilemma and, 35–­41; institutionalization of, 46–­47, 57; Lenin’s terminology for, 278–­279; limits of, 49–­50; obligations linked to, 64–­65; opposition of individual and collective, rejected, 127, 338–­339n178; “people’s,” 287–­289; private as temporal vs. public/national as perpetual, 199; and questions of the state’s domain, 41–­47; serfdom linked to, 55; social order in relation to, 8–­17, 115–­116, 125–­127; use of term, 23, 34, 297n9; Witte’s interpretation of, 321–­322n168. See also expropriation; intellectual property; inviolability of property rights; literary property; musical property laws; private property; property reform; property rights; real estate; res publica (public property); state property (or domain); tsar’s domain

property reform: bottom-­up vs. monarch-­led, 301n55; Catherine II and, 33–­35; compared with Chernov’s vision, 278; constraints on, 78–­79, 115–­117; free mining arguments in, 84–­85; goals in, 7–­8, 12; human dimension of, 14–­15; as key solution to most problems, 128; prerevolutionary meaning of, 13; as social and economic reform, 8–­9, 97, 100–­101; valuation of antiquity concomitant with, 179–­181; valuation of art and history in context of, 138–­141. See also expropriation; nationalization; privatization; professionalization; Russian liberalism; state reformism property rights: adaptation of, to needs of industry, 88–­89; archaeological excavations and, 178, 179–­188; Catherine II’s extension to nobility of, 23–­25; changes in understanding and application of, 4–­5, 9; as civil freedom, 126–­127; Code of Laws on, 306–­ 307n116; concept of, in transition in 1860s, 59–­60; debates on limits to, for mineral deposits, 84–­88; economy hampered by, 89–­ 92; emancipation of serfs in context of ideas about, 46–­47, 54, 55–­58; of enemy aliens in wartime, 276; extended and affirmed by Alexander I, 35, 302n69; forest protection in context of, 60–­67; inadequate system of, 49–­ 50, 79, 106–­111; measurement mechanisms in conceptualization of, 102–­105; ownership of, split between surface vs. subterranean, 83–­84, 86–­89, 319n130, 321–­322n168 (see also minerals); political transformations and changes in, 270–­271; rejection of “absolute” nature of, 338n177; rhetoric on, extended to intangibles, 218–­219; strong vs. weak state and, 94–­95; theoretical conceptualization of, 112–­113; water law’s impact on, 121. See also inviolability of property rights; private property Protasov, Nikolai, 150, 345n77 Protestant Church, 142 Proudhon, Pierre-­Joseph, 377–­378n113 Provisional Government: Hermitage Museum holdings and, 193; hydropower project considered by, 281; legitimacy of, contested, 275–­276; limitations of, 270, 276–­277; monopolization efforts of, 274–­275, 277 Prussia. See Germany Pskov, city walls of, 204–­205 the public: defined, 10–­12; forest regulations aimed at safety of, 64–­65; gendered as female,

426  | Index the public (continued) 228–­229; literary rights limited in favor of, 221; mob vs., 374nn84 and 85; “moral” power of, 250–­253; preservation funding and, 202, 363–­364n122; property exchange and, 13; proprietary rights of, 16; republic of letters and, 228–­233; state ownership of forests supported by, 77–­78; wartime mutual distrust between state and, 272–­273, 275–­276; writers’ obligations to, 238–­239. See also author-­public relations; people (narod); public education public domain: absence of institution of, 239–­ 240; approach to study of, 1–­8; art collecting for display in, 193–­194; authors’ and heirs’ rights vs., 253–­257; conceptualization of, 14–­15, 131, 179; constraints on development of, 16–­17; copyright and, 231–­233, 238; goals in creation of, 7–­8; institutionalization of, 15–­16; and the institutionalization of monuments, 138–­141; keys to establishment of, 11–­13; literary works in, 51, 220, 221–­223, 229–­230, 252–­253, 268–­269; secularization of religious art and, 173–­174; size of, in literature, 232–­233; Soviet nationalization and changes in, 285–­289. See also nationalization; national patrimony; natural resources; res publica (public property) public education: artistic and authorial property rights vs., 226–­228, 253–­257; copyright and translation laws as tax on, 262; literature’s role in, 223–­224, 229, 257–­ 258. See also education; Ministry of Public Education public good: archaeological site preservation as, 183–­184; benevolent expropriation for, 97–­101; definitions of, 101; electricity as, 101; “forest question” rhetoric of, 62–­69, 72–­73, 77–­78; free mining concept and, 25–­26, 81, 84, 85–­88, 91; free translation concept and, 258–­267; hunting restrictions as, 70–­72; individualism subordinated to, 8; literary property as private property vs., 230–­233; literature as, 51, 220, 221–­223, 229–­230, 252–­253, 267–­269; museum’s role in, 195–­196; private property rights vs., 85–­88; Senate’s decision for, 37; social and economic well-­being as, 100–­101; wartime examples of, 271, 274; water as, 115, 117, 123–­125. See also expropriation; railroads and railroad development; res publica (public property)

public property (obshchestvennaia sobstvennost’). See res publica (public property) “The Public Things” (Karadzhe-­Iskrov), 286 publisher(s): commercialization and, 217–­218; competition of, over complete editions, 244–­245; copyright concerns of, 372n59; editions by, 231–­233; and failure to respect author’s wishes, 242; Lev Tolstoy’s renunciation of copyright as boon for, 234; rights and privileges of, 223–­224; Soviet state as, 284; and translations of foreign works, 259–­ 260. See also booksellers publishing: as author’s voluntary gift to public, 221–­223; editing distinguished from, 250–­ 252; wider distribution allowed by, 228–­230 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 31, 302n72 Purdy, Jedediah, 300n49 Pushkin, Alexander: in continuity of literature, 253, 385n63; correspondence and papers of, 245, 382nn24 and 26; costs of works by, 229; editions of, 231, 243–­244; editors of, 250, 385n62; family relations of, 255; and family’s literary property rights, 230–­232, 239; fight to protect literary rights of, 14, 218–­219, 254, 368n22, 388n91; on literary property laws, 220–­221, 371n56; memorials to, 258; on the public, 228–­229, 241; public’s possessive attitude toward, 257, 268; quotations from, used in debates on literary property, 267; Soviet monopolization of works by, 284, 285 Pushkin, Alexander, works by: “The Captive of the Caucasus,” 218, 388n91; Evgeny Onegin, 243; Gavriiliad, 285 Pushkin, Sergei, 218 Pushkina, Natalya (born Goncharova, later Lanskaia), 230–­231, 245, 254 Pushkina, Natalya (later Dubelt-­Merenberg), 382n24 Putilov family, 325n24 Putilov, Alexei, 114, 335n130 Puzyrevskii, Nestor, 106 Pypin, Alexander, 244, 400n94 Quarenghi, Giacomo, 136 Racine, Jean, 221 Radishchev, Alexander, 250 Radzig, Anton, 85 Raeff, Marc, 300n47 railroads, specific lines: Moscow–­Kursk, 324–­ 325n17; St. Petersburg–­Kronstadt, 97; St. Petersburg–­Moscow, 97

Index  |  427 railroads and railroad development: expropriation for, 46, 97–­98, 307n117, 325n20; funding for, 334n121; imported ties for construction of, 84; limits of capacity of, 106; preservation vs., 205; rapidity of, 96; state management of, 97, 98–­99, 112; and timber use, 89. See also industrialization Rakshanin, Nikolai, 263, 390–­391n124 Raphail (Archimandrite), 145 Rastrelli, Francesco Bartolomeo, 136, 201 Rathenau, Walther, 395n25 readership: campaign against elitism in, 268–­269; French novels for, 261–­262, 388–­389n98; in Russia vs. Europe, 259–­260; scarcity of, 230–­233. See also author-­public relations real estate: appraisal of, 38; historical preservation vs. development of, 205–­209; as immovable property, 13, 35, 82, 385–­386n69; taxes on, 203. See also estates and mansions; property reforms: aristocratic opposition to, 63–­64; and challenges and complications relating to property, 78–­79; emancipation of serfs as opening for, 55–­58; and hunting law, 70–­72; and institutionalization of the value of monuments, 138–­141; rationale for, 110; renaming as key element in, 34–­35, 296n44; social reformism and, 7–­8, 294n23; in state villages, 58–­60. See also agriculture and agrarian reform; “forest question”; laws and decrees; property reform; state reformism; zemstvos Reisner, Solomon, 251 religious art: aestheticization of, 178–­179; appropriation of, into modernist canon, 161, 167, 172–­174; attempts at preservation of, 140–­141; Bolsheviks’ sacralization of, 140; depositories of, 349–­350n136; inventories of, 150, 151–­152, 345n77; liberal valuation of, 139–­141; market for, 161–­162, 165; nontransferrable status of, 150–­151; as res publicae or res divinae, 149–­156; as sacred property, 141–­149, 172–­174; secularization of, 174–­177; Soviet nationalization of, 283; two visions of, 146–­147. See also churches; icons; Protestant Church; Russian Orthodox Church Rembrandt, 196, 201, 358n51, 361n98 Renan, Ernst, 266–­267 Repin, Ilya, 195 res divinae, icons as, 149–­156

Resettlement Administration, 121–­122, 396n40 res nullius, literary works as, 238, 367–­368n8 resources. See art; historical monuments; historical preservation; literary works; national patrimony; natural resources res publica (public property): ambivalence surrounding idea of, 128; approach to, 1–­5, 17–­18; conceptualization of, 16, 43, 45, 87–­88, 111–­114; dilemma of private interest vs., 8–­17; in European context, 1–­8, 123; expert definitions of, 14–­15; icons as res divinae vs., 149–­156; implications of concept of, 125–­127; institutionalization of, 15–­16; landowners’ loyalty to state vs. benefits to state of, 116–­117; land under Soviets as, 278–­279, 397n49, 402n112; legal definition of, 204; limited knowledge about, 282–­283, 305n105, 336n139, 398n73; peasants’ ownership of land based on, 310n17; rhetoric on, used as propaganda, 123–­125; Soviet debates and theories on, 270–­271, 286–­289; state as only guardian of, 73–­74; state property distinguished from, 113–­114; as symbol of inviolability of heritage, 186. See also archaeological sites; architecture; art; forests; historical monuments; historical preservation; law; literary works; minerals; national patrimony; natural resources; property (sobstvennost’); public good; water and waterways Resurrection (Tolstoy), 378n113 Revolution (1905–­1907), 83–­84, 158, 192 Riabushinskii, Stepan, 173–­174 Richter, K. A., 233 Rigby, Thomas H., 278 rights: of common use, applied to nonationalized rivers, 95–­96; land use and, 397n50; natural, 256; for printing, 217. See also authorial rights; copyright; inviolability of property rights; property rights; translations “The Rights to the Things of Public Use” (Guins), 286 “The Right to Privacy” (Warren and Brandeis), 247–­248, 384n39 rivers and streams: confusion over ownership of, 44–­45; dams on, 103, 107, 332n104; disputes over, 36–­37, 95–­96, 327n46; drinking water from, 106; elimination of private claims to, 113–­114; exploration of, 104–­105, 316n93; and fishing monopoly case, 21–­23, 35, 36, 93; measuring and valuation of, 102–­104;

428  | Index rivers and streams (continued) navigable, 95–­96, 324n6; privatization of, by Catherine II, 25, 27–­28, 94; public status of, debated, 109–­111; Senate ruling on nonnavigable, 323–­324n5; and transport issues for merchants, 28, 298n30; and watermill removal case, 37–­38, 40; “white coal” of, 108, 114, 273, 275, 330n77. See also canals; hydropower; water and waterways; and specific rivers Robbins, Richard G., 311n20 Roerich, Nikolai, 159, 169, 202 Romania, land property in, 322n180 Roman law and tradition: actio popularis in, 239; Napoleon’s Code and, 43; private accusation for crimes in, 338n173; and property rights, 34, 45, 74, 110; res publica in, 16; and water rights, 110, 122–­123, 333n111 Roosa, Ruth Amende, 92 Rose, Carol M., 16, 292n5, 301n55 Rosen, David, 384n39 Rosenberg, William, 280 Rosenblum, Dmitrii, 287, 401nn109 and 110 Roslavskii, Viktor, 399n79 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 42–­43, 221 Rozhdestvenskii, Nikolai, 52 Rozov, Ivan, 334n121 Rubakin, Nikolai, 390n115 Rublev, Andrei, 283 Rubtsov, Mikhail, 168, 351–­352n153 “rule of law,” 6–­7. See also law Rumiantsev Museum (Moscow), 152, 194, 195, 360n79 Rundo, Alfred, 334n121 rural economy: challenges introduced to, 102; drought and famine in, 71–­72, 104–­105, 316n91; forest reform limits in, 69–­70, 73; productivity of, 57–­58; proposed surveillance over, 81–­82; utility principle in, 71; impact of water law on, 105, 106 Russia: colonial government of, 15, 117–­118, 121–­125; drought and famine in, 71–­72, 104–­105, 316n91; perception of, as backward, 26, 35, 69, 79, 89, 128, 216, 257, 258, 262; revolution of 1905–­1907 in, 83–­8 4, 192; Rousseau’s influence in, 43; territorial expansion of, 75. See also Baltic provinces; Caucasus; European provinces (Russia); medieval past; property (sobstvennost’); Provisional Government; Resettlement Administration; res publica (public property); Siberia; Soviet state;

state; Transcaucasia; Turkestan; Westernization Russian Antiquity (Smolensk museum): art objects in, 161; closure of, 159–­160; construction of, 348n112; exterior and interior views of, 157; religious objects in, 156, 158–­ 159. See also Tenisheva, Maria Russian Archaeological Institute (Constantinople), 187 Russian Archaeological Society, 339–­340n4 The Russian Bulletin (Russkie vedomosti), 234 Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik), 313n58 The Russian Icon (Russkaia Ikona, magazine), 167 Russian Imperial Society of Navigation, 109 Russian liberalism: and arguments against private property, 91–­92; and cultural preservation and development, 204, 210–­211; development of, 6–­7; forest regulations debates and, 65–­67; literary property and, 223–­225, 253–­257, 268–­269; monarchical state and individualism critiqued by, 11–­12; orchestra metaphor and, 288; popularity of, 35; professionalization and state reform in tandem with, 7–­8; property redefined by, 3; public domain idea in, 16–­17; res publica linked to, 2–­3; and the state’s role in property, 125–­127; structure of society and, 58–­59; and the treatment of serfs, 22; views of, on churches and icons, 139–­141; weak government critiqued by, 279. See also experts and technocrats; professionalization; reforms; state reformism Russian Literary Fund, 238–­239, 245, 380n143 Russian Medical Society, 265 Russian Museum of Alexander III (St. Petersburg): Briagin’s icon deal with, 166–­167; Briagin’s position at, 172; competition for, 360n79; critique of, 210; development and acquisitions of, 154–­155, 190, 191, 360n90, 361n99; exhibition space design in, 174–­175, 175, 353n173; icon returned by, 350n137; icons and religious art sought by, 152, 162, 165, 173, 348–­349n121, 349–­ 350n136; implications of Briagin case for, 170–­172; indefinite legal status of, 191–­193; public campaign to relocate art works to, 188–­189; rules on icons written by, 352n161 Russian Orthodox Church: and alienation of lands in Baltic provinces, 101; architectural destruction blamed on, 148–­149, 345n76; dilemma of sacred property of, 141–­149,

Index  |  429 172–­174; finances of, 152, 159, 351n148; gender dictates of, 158; icons of, redefined as art objects, 14; preservation system and museums of, 150, 153, 154–­155; proponents of “national art” vs., 139; proprietary status and parish organization of, 142, 144–­145, 198; publishing monopoly of, 217; Romanov dynasty gifts to, 174; and tensions over rights to religious art objects, 149–­156, 160–­162, 165, 174–­177, 345nn76 and 77, 349n126; Zaborovie icons case and, 167, 171, 172–­174; Zhirkevich’s accusations investigated, 156. See also churches; icons; monasteries; religious art The Russian World (Russkii Mir), 238 Russo-­Japanese War (1904–­1905), 111, 255 Russo-­Turkish wars, 180 Ruud, Charles, 380n137 Ryabov, Vasilii, 166, 167, 351nn148 and 153 Rychkov, Petr, 298–­299n34 Saint Basil Cathedral (Moscow), 141 Saleilles, Raymond, 333n111 Saltykov-­Shchedrin, Mikhail, 251, 255, 387–­388n85 Samarin, Yurii, 62 Santesso, Aaron, 384n39 Savitskii, Petr, 399n83 Savrasov, Alexei, 160 Schlözer, Christian Ludwig von, 219, 223, 224 Schönle, Andreas, 138–­139 Schorske, Carl E., 17 Schuyler, Mary Hamilton, 384n44 science and scientific developments: archaeological research necessary to, 183–­184; “common good” linked to, 77–­78; and forestry, 48–­54, 61, 64, 74–­77, 132, 318n109, 319n123; increased popularity of, 67–­68; “state as administrator” based in, 73–­74; and translation issues, 264, 265; wartime resource mobilization in, 273–­274. See also Imperial Academy of Sciences; social sciences; survey and mapping projects seacoast. See Caspian Sea; water and waterways Seligman, Germain, 196 Seligman, Jacques, 196 Semenov, Evgenii, 385n62 Senate: complaints about forest law to, 69; on mineral vs. land rights, 88, 321–­322n168, 322n169; on Murom’s steepled church, 141–­ 142; on number of navigable rivers, 324n6;

on public good and property rights, 37; on river and water disputes, 102, 103, 323–­ 324n5, 327n46; Smolensk affair and, 159; on treasure trove case, 26–­27 Senkovskii, Osip, 242, 243 serfdom system, 24–­25, 30, 55. See also emancipation of peasants; peasants Sergeevich, Aleksei, 75, 340n4 Sergeevich, Vladimir, 232–­233 Sergei Alexandrovich (grand duke), 160 Shari’a law, 19, 119, 122, 124, 337n162 Shaw, Wendy M. K., 357–­358n49 Shchapov, Afanasii, 375n94 Shcheglovitov, Igor, 170–­171 Shchepkin, Nikolai, 232 Shchukin, Dmitrii, 282 Shchukin, Petr, 159, 194 Shchukin, Sergei, 198 Shchusev, Alexei, 147, 166, 174, 175, 202 Shelgunov, Nikolai, 76, 227 Shenk, Petr, 227, 373n71 Sheremetev, Boris, 207 Sheremetev, Sergei, 63, 203, 207, 364n130, 366n154 Sheremetev family: forest management by, 64; St. Petersburg estate (Fontannyi Dom) of, 203, 207, 364n130, 366n154; vastness of estate of, 86 Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov, Alexei, 167–­168, 172 Shishkov, Alexander, 38–­39, 40, 66 Shlippe, Vladimir von, 81 Shuvalov, Petr, 63 Siberia: colonization of, 335n137; gold objects from burials in, 342n38; land rent, 90–­91; mapping of forests in, 75 Siegelbaum, Lewis, 394–­395n14 Silin, Dmitrii, 173–­174 Sinelnikov, A. N., 114 Sirotkin, Dmitrii, 167, 170 Skabichevskii, Alexander, 251 Skvortsov-­Stepanov, Ivan, 266 Slavina, Tatiana, 340n8 Slonimskii, Mikhail, 114, 334n116 Smith, Adam, 31, 32, 296n4 Smolensk, city walls of, 205. See also Russian Antiquity Smolensk affair (1907): accusations in, 156, 158–­159; long-­term effects of, 154–­155; political continuation of, 159–­160; tensions over property revealed by, 160–­162, 165, 349n126 Smolensk Archaeological Society, 158, 159

430  | Index Smolensk Museum, 162, 169 Smolensk News (Smolenskie vedomosti), 156 Snegirev, Ivan, 145 Sobolev, Boris, 276 social appropriation (obobshchestvlenie), 282 social biology concept, 76–­77, 319n123 social goods, 13, 127. See also public good social order: atomization and lack of cohesion of, 79; decay of aristocracy and, 199–­ 202; existing fractures in, exacerbated in wartime, 270–­271; property in relation to, 8–­17, 115–­116, 125–­127; serfdom in, 24–­25, 30, 55. See also citizenship and civic virtue; collectivism and collective responsibility; society social reformism, 7–­8, 294n23 social sciences, 127 society (obshchestvennost’): civil societies (grazhdanskie obshchestva), 15, 16–­17, 222–­223; contract of, 32; development of property embedded in, 300n49; emerging idea of, 58–­59; as project, 8; public things and sociability in, 16–­17; published work as author’s voluntary gift to, 221–­223; Tarde’s definition of, 289; wartime mutual distrust of state and, 272–­273, 275–­276. See also experts and technocrats; the public; social order Society for the Defense and Preservation of Monuments of Art and History in Russia (St. Petersburg), 137, 202, 203 Society for the Electro-­transmission of the Power of Waterfalls, 108 Society for the Encouragement of Forest Economy, 50, 308n132. See also Forestry Review Society for the Study of Russian Estates, 363n120 Society of Dramatic Writers and Composers, 264 Society of Old Russian Language Culture Enthusiasts, 207 Sokolov, Boris, 274 Soldatenkov, Koz’ma, 194, 232 Somov, Andrei, 192 Somov, Konstantin, 192 Southern Expedition for Irrigation, 104, 105 Soviet Bureau of Forestry, 280 Soviet Constitution (1918), 397n57 Soviet state: approach to, 17–­18; art and history as state property under, 138, 140;

artistic institutions founded by, 210; and bureaucratization, 270–­271, 277–­283, 286; forestry laws and management under, 47, 280–­281, 398–­399n75; land management models employed by, 396n40; literary policy of, 269; Ministry of Culture established by, 191; Museum Fund of, 162, 173; New Economic Policy of, 286–­287, 400n90, 401n105; “people’s” property of, 277–­286; public property theories and, 286–­289; and renunciation of private property, 12–­13; study of noble estates and culture by, 363n120. See also Bolshevik nationalization Spain, copyright in, 231 Special Committee on Railroads, 97 Special Council on Fuel, 273–­274 Speranskii, Mikhail: and Codification Commission, 43–­44, 113; expropriation rule introduced by, 37, 38; public power over resources and, 44–­45; and sales of state property, 304n92; on state’s property rights, 306n107; utilitarian model of, 39 Spitsyn, Alexander, 137 Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinist ideology, 208, 269, 282 Starye Gody. See The Bygone Years Stasiulevich, Mikhail, 232 state: definition and role of, 1, 7–­9, 58–­59, 77–­ 78, 109; experts’ belief in power and order of, 207–­209; Justi on, 304–­305n97; limited attention to national patrimony by, 209–­ 211; property, liberalism, and, 125–­127; rationalization of, 271–­273; reluctance of, to reform property law, 115–­117; Russian vs. French-­British liberalism in relation to, 6–­7; as sovereign political entity, 42, 45, 304n95, 306n107; strength vs. weakness of, 94–­95; wartime mutual distrust between public and, 272–­273, 275–­276. See also autocratic state; bureaucratization; monarchical state; Soviet state; state property (or domain); and specific ministries and departments State and Revolution (Lenin), 278–­279 State Council: on copyright issues, 231, 253, 392n139; on exports of historical monuments, 138; on expropriation law draft, 325–­326n25; on forest law, 313n63; on hydropower project, 334n126; on irrigation and drainage canal law, 102; on land rents, 322n181; on peasants as private owners,

Index  |  431 59; photography exhibit for, 228; on water law, 120 State Duma: on art and antiquities exports, 197; art works purchased by, 195–­196, 359n66; and budget for preservation, 363–­364n122; on copyright and translation issues, 252–­253, 254, 256, 267; on expropriation exemptions, 184; on hydropower projects, 115; photography exhibit for, 228; Turkestan water law and, 124 state property (or domain): agrarian reform and, 58–­60; art and history as, 138, 140; Caspian Sea as, 93; changing status of, 41–­ 44; and claims to peasants’ land, 59–­60, 310n17; confusion and ambivalence about, 44–­4 6; debates on minerals and, 87–­88; definitions of, 119, 123, 287, 305n105; enforcement of rights to, 52–­54, 94–­95; forest protection debates and, 62–­67; free mining on, 85, 321n150; institutionalization of, 46–­47; land management of, 52–­54; limited knowledge about, 282–­283, 305n105, 336n139, 398n73; prison and hospital churches as, 343n47; public property distinguished from, 113–­114; railroad as, 324–­325n17; redefined as public property, 109; as separate from ruler’s, 42, 304n94; Soviet theories of, 138, 140, 277–­278, 287–­289; state’s reluctance to assume responsibility for, 115–­117; status of treasures found on, 355n20; timber as, 28. See also Bolshevik nationalization; nationalization; privatization; survey and mapping projects State Publishing House (Gosizdat), 284 state reformism: involvement of, in emancipation of peasants and land, 55–­58; liberalism and professionalization in tandem with, 7–­8; modern public domain as goal in, 15–­16; as prerequisite for public domain, 11–­12; “rule of law” in, 6–­7. See also professionalization; property reform; reforms; Russian liberalism state villages, reform of, 46, 52–­53, 58–­60, 306n115. See also peasant communes; peasants St. Avraamii Monastery, 345n77 St. Cyril-­Belozersk Monastery, 145 Steinberg, Theodore, 296n44 Stenbock-­Fermor, I. V., 114 Stepanov, Filipp, 171 St. Isaac’s Cathedral (St. Petersburg), 205

The Stock-­Exchange Bulletin (Birshevye viedomosti), 192 Stolitsa i usadba (“The capital and the rural estate”), 363n119 Stolypin, Petr, 12, 73, 83, 292–­293n6, 295n41, 356n24 Storch, Henrich von, 224, 371n52 St. Petersburg (later Petrograd): architecture of, 134, 136, 205; city-­owned monuments in, 365n134; Donetsk’s coal and, 329n67; electricity for, 107–­108, 110, 111; expropriation costs in, 99–­100; Forestry Institute of, 47, 48, 53, 65, 76, 132; and hydropower projects, 111, 114; and ice dispute, 103; land market and development in, 205–­209, 210; Moscow’s competition with, 194, 346n86, 399n79; Romanov dynasty gifts exhibited in, 174; Sheremetev estate (Fontannyi Dom) in, 203, 207, 364n130, 366n154; wartime fuel shortage in, 273. See also Hermitage Museum; Russian Museum of Alexander III St. Petersburgische Zeitschrift (periodical), 218 The St. Petersburg Leaflet (Petersburgskii listok), 196 St. Petersburg Literary Society, 253–­254, 266, 267, 285 St. Petersburg province, survey of monuments in, 137 St. Petersburg Society (preservation and restoration), 201 St. Petersburg (later Petrograd) Society for the Transfer of the Power of Waterfalls, 114 Strauss, Johann, 233 Stroganov family, 86, 200, 203, 359n71 Strukgov, Vladimir, 83, 91 Struve, Petr, 266 St. Sophia Cathedral (Novgorod), 150, 345n77 Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral (Petrograd), 174 Stuart, Charles Henry, 332n103, 334–­335n126 Stuchka, Petr, 288 Stukalin, V. K., 387–­388n85 Sukhovo-­Kobylin, Alexander, 376–­377n112 Sumarokov, Alexander, 217, 230 survey and mapping projects: archaeological sites, 138, 180–­182, 363n120; art, icons, antiquities, and historical monuments, 134–­ 138; attempts at, 304n92; estates and mansions, 200–­201, 363n120; imperial palaces, 358n51; natural resources, 29, 30, 52–­54, 75, 87–­88, 299nn35 and 39 Suslov, Vladimir, 136, 341n17, 353n176 Suvorin, Alexei, 231–­232, 390–­391n124

432  | Index Sviiaga River, 106 Svir River, 281 Sweden: literary property laws in, 375n93; status of forests in, 48 Sytin, Ivan, 231, 237, 375n97, 380n137 Taburiesh (scholar), 338–­339n178 Talashkino estate, 161 Taman’ peninsula archaeological sites, 180 Tarasov, Ivan, 112 Tarde, Gabriel, 289 Tatiana Nikolaevna (princess), 174 Tawney, R. H., 273 taxes and taxation: copyright and translation laws as, 260, 262, 267; opposition to, 303n87; on property, 203; to support preservation, 202 Tengoborskii, Ludvig (Ludwik Tęgoborski), 49 Tenishev, Viacheslav, 161 Tenisheva, Maria: attorney of, 169; court case of, 14; education and milieu of, 160–­161, 211; museum and collections of, 156, 157, 158–­159, 348–­3 49n121, 360n90; portrait of, 163; Zhirkevich’s offering of artifact to, 348n110. See also Russian Antiquity Teploukhov, Alexander, 49, 307n128 Teploukhov, Fedor, 307n128 Teploukhov, Sergei, 307n128 Terek River, 332n103, 334–­335n126 Tereshka River, 103 theaters. See Imperial Theaters Thompson, E. P., 35, 292n5 Tikheev, Ivan, 118–­121, 335n137, 336n144 Tikhonravov, Nikolai, 250 The Time (Vremia), 251 Timofeev, Dmitrii, 5 Titov, Andrei, 156 Tokutomi Roka, 235 Tolmatskii, Vladislav, 361n98 Tolstaia, Alexandra, 236–­237, 237, 378n114, 380n136 Tolstaia, Sofia Andreevna: Lev Tolstoy’s authorial rights defended by, 235; Lev Tolstoy’s papers and, 379–­380n136; Lev Tolstoy’s renunciation of copyright and, 378n118, 378–­379n123, 379n131; publisher’s payment to, 380n137 Tolstaia, Tatiana, 378n113, 379n131 Tolstoy, Alexei, 345n76 Tolstoy, Dmitrii: on art speculators, 350n136; Briagin affair and, 171, 173; Hermitage

Museum management of, 189, 190, 192–­ 193; on State Duma’s art purchase, 359n66 Tolstoy, Ivan, 181, 182 Tolstoy, Lev: in continuity of literature, 253; “do not sell wisdom” motto of, 264–­265; family estate of (Yasnaia Poliana), 237, 241, 388n89; on Halperine-­Kaminskii’s essay on copyright, 391n129; honorarium of, 379n126; on hunting, 315n79; as invisible presence, 349n129; Nikolai Ge assisted by, 235, 379n124; papers subjected to litigation after death of, 379–­380n136; portrait of, 236; public interest vs. rights of, 252; public scrutiny of private life of, 241; renunciation of literary rights of, 195, 233–­238, 377–­378n113, 378nn114 and 118, 393n146; separation of classical and populist literature by, 232; Soviet publishing of, 284, 285, 400n95; and struggle to protect literary rights, 14–­15; Stukalin’s proposed expropriation of copyright of, 387–­388n85; and translation issues, 378n122, 379n131; will and testament of, 235–­237, 241 Tolstoy, Lev, works by: Anna Karenina, 234; “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” 234; “The Fruits of Enlightenment,” 235; “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse,” 315n79; The Kreutzer Sonata, 234, 378n118, 378–­379n123; “The Living Corpse,” 235; Posrednik, 235; “The Power of Darkness,” 234; Resurrection, 378n113; War and Peace, 234 Transcaucasia: hydropower project in, 334–­ 335n126; irrigation needs of, 117–­118; water issues and local context in, 117–­121, 122, 123–­124, 335n135, 336nn145 and 146; water measurement and valuation in, 103 translations: authorial rights and, 389n101; freedom of, 258–­267; of French novels, 261–­262, 388–­389n98; Lev Tolstoy and issues in, 378n122, 379n131; low quality of, 388n93; Soviet approach to, 285. See also international copyright protection transportation, inadequacies of, 89–­90, 273–­ 274. See also canals; Ministry of Transportation; railroads and railroad development; water and waterways treasure troves: landowner compensation for, 181; law on minerals applied to, 26–­27, 179–­180, 297–­298n25; professional hunters of (schastlivchiki), 182; suggested expropriation of, 183–­184. See also archaeological sites

Index  |  433 Treatise on National Wealth (Opyt o narodnom bogatstve, Butovskii), 224–­225 Trediakovskii, Vasilii, 230 Tretyakov, Pavel: art collection of, 14, 159, 194, 360n79; family of, 166; Lev Tolstoy’s appeal to, 379n124; as model, 204, 211; national museum idea of, 195 Tretyakov, Sergei, 194 Troitskii, A. A., 330n77 Trotskaia, Natalya, 283 tsar’s domain: and arts and sciences patronage, 190–­191; and imperial palaces survey, 358n51; limited artistic demands and, 209–­ 210; and limited rights over palaces, 189–­ 190; national patrimony ideas and, 188–­189; and ownership of imperial collection, 191–­ 193. See also Hermitage Museum; Ministry of Imperial Court; and specific rulers Tsarskoe Selo, 46, 188, 189–­190, 283 Tsvetkov, Ivan, 194 Tsvetkov, Mikhail, 60, 299n35 Turgenev, Ivan: in continuity of literature, 385n63; editions of, 231, 232; family of, 255; Goncharov’s dispute with, 384n35; publication of correspondence of, 245, 246; purchase of copyright of, 376n106; Pushkin’s papers published by, 245, 250, 382nn24 and 26; Russian literature touted by, 260 Turkestan: Shari’a and water rights in, 337n162; water law in, 114, 117, 121–­125, 338n168; water measurement and valuation in, 103 Turmer, Karl Franzevich, 75 Tverskaia gazeta (newspaper), 351n148 Udintsev, Vsevolod, 87–­88 Ukhtomskii, Ivan, 26–­27 Union of Cities, 276 Union of Industry and Trade, 338n168 Union of Writers, 239 United States: canal building in, 106; definition of public property in, 16; foreign authors’ rights protected in, 261, 389n111; hydropower projects in, 107, 115; literary property laws in, 375n93; mineral rights in, 322n179; national park movement in, 72; rhetoric on slavery in, 308n131; right to privacy of public figures debated in, 246–­2 48, 384nn39 and 44; water law and irrigation needs in, 338n168 urban planning: experts’ role in, 133; historical preservation in context of, 204, 205–­209.

See also cities and municipal areas; real estate Uspenskii, Aleksei, 123 Uspenskii, Boris, 34–­35 Uvarov, Aleksei, 75, 148, 161, 346n86 Uvarova, Praskovia: appeal for preservation made by, 203; archaeological institution under, 339–­340n4; arrest of “speculators” suggested by, 350n136; art collection of, 14, 165; education and milieu of, 160, 161, 211; foreign archaeologists as concern of, 197; portrait of, 164; priests accused by, 148–­149; as prototype for Lev Tolstoy’s Kitty Shcherbatskaia, 161; on saving Orthodox relic, 153–­154; Smolensk affair and, 156, 159–­160 values and valuation: of antiquities, 179–­181; approach to, 13–­14, 215–­216; of art works, 133–­135, 138–­141, 201–­202; of authors’ rights vs. research and public education, 253–­257, 265–­266; in compensation for expropriation, 325n19, 327n36; of complete and authentic texts, 243–­245, 381n13; of forests, 13; of historical monuments, 133, 138–­141; of ideas, 13; of literature vs. “written culture,” 229–­230; of old buildings, 148; of originality in art, 133–­135; utility principle of, 70; of water, 102–­104. See also ideas; objects Valuev, Petr, 61, 63 Vasilchikov, Alexander, 358n51 Vasilchikov, Viktor, 61–­62 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 167 Vatsuro, Vadim, 381n13 Vedrov, Sergei, 311n32 Veinberg, Yakov, 313n58 Veiner, Petr, 342n32, 359–­360n74, 363n119, 401n101 Vengerov, Semen, 385n62, 392n143 Verdery, Katherine, 322n180 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 283, 359–­360n74 Veselovskii, Alexander, 268 Veselovskii, Nikolai, 183 Veshniakov, Nikolai, 167 Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe), 66 Viatka, 181–­182 Viazemskii, Petr, 218, 219 villages. See cities and municipal areas; peasant communes; state villages; zemstvos “The Violation of Will” (Narushenie voli, Goncharov), 245–­247, 386n71

434  | Index Virhow, Rudolf, 197 Viskovatov, Pavel, 239, 244 vladenie (possession), 34 Vladimir Alexandrovich (grand duke), 153 Vladimirskaia Mother of God (icon), 167 Vodovozov, Vasilii, 385n62 Volkhov River: elimination of private claims to, 113; hydropower projects on, 107, 108, 114, 281; protest against damming of, 332n104 Volkov, M., 106 Voltaire, 221 Voronikhin, Andrei, 203 Vorontsov-­Dashkov, Illarion Ivanovich, 27–­28, 63, 114 Vorontsova-­Dashkova, Elizaveta, 108–­109 Vorontsov-­Dashkov family, 15, 64 “The Voyage of the Frigate Pallada” (Goncharov), 255 Vrangel, Nikolai, 196, 199–­200, 359–­360n74 Vuoksa River, 107, 108, 114 Vysotskii, Georgii, 77–­78 Wagner, William G., 5 Warren, Samuel, 247–­248, 384n39 water and waterways: call for privatization of, 331n88; differential views of state’s role in, 125–­127; expropriation of, 101, 325n24; governmental monopolization of, 111, 115, 122–­123, 275; legal prohibitions on private ownership of, 119; measurement and valuation of, 102–­104; merchants and, 28, 37, 298n30; nationalization and management by Soviets of, 281; post-­emancipation disputes over, 57–­58; private property rights claims to, 108–­109; privatization of, by Catherine II, 25, 27–­28, 94; projects to create connections between, 107, 108, 329–­330n70; property rights system inadequate for issues of, 106; as res publica (public property), 15, 50–­51, 327n47; in relation to land allotments, 120–­121, 123, 329n65, 337n154; state as administrator of, 120–­121; usufruct right to, 123, 337n153. See also canals; fishing and fisheries; hydropower; irrigation and irrigation canals; rivers and streams; and specific seas and rivers water regulations and laws: call for reform of, 104–­105; debates on, 71–­72, 113–­114; exploration project linked to, 316n93; relating

to irrigation and drainage canals, 101, 102, 105, 106, 120–­121; and local traditions, 122, 335n135; and nationalization of navigable rivers, 95–­96; property rights and reform of, 109–­111; public status of, 111–­113; and state’s inability to conduct reforms, 115–­ 117; in Transcaucasia, 117–­121, 335n135; in Turkestan, 121–­125 Waterways Department, 50–­51 Weber, Max, 90 The Week (Neledia), 246 Weiner, Annette, 175 Weiner, Douglas, 281–­282 Western Dvina River, 107, 329–­330n70 Western Expedition for the Drainage of Marshes, 105 Westernization: antiquarianism and private property cult in, 179–­180; copying and originality in context of, 216–­217; meanings of, 267; vs. national originality, 134; and translation and copyright issues, 259, 260–­261, 265 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 220 wildlife classification, 70–­72 Wilhelm II (emperor), 106 Wilson, George, 108, 332n104 Winkler, Martina, 5 Winter Palace, 174, 189–­190, 205–­206 Witte, Sergei, 105, 321–­322n168, 326n33 Woe from Wit (Griboedov), 230, 374n89 Wolf, Christian, 302n72 Wolf, Maurycy, 231 World of Art (Mir Iskusstva, journal): authority of, 132–­133; and call to relocate art works, 188–­189; and competing groups, 202; funds for, 158 World War I: energy crisis of, 89–­90, 115, 273–­ 274; mobilization failures in, 271–­277; nationalization of resources for, 270–­271, 277; sacrifice for common cause in, 2; treatment of German and enemy aliens during, 276 Wortman, Richard, 5, 126, 209 writers: in continuity of literature, 253–­254; and debates on public lives vs. privacy, 241–­ 250; defined and categorized, 10, 371n50; editor’s and public’s interest vs. “last will” of, 251–­253; explorers compared with, 222; expropriation of individuality of, 268–­269; and family relationships, 254–­255; honoraria for, 264, 379n126, 389n110, 391n126, 393n146; “internal capital” of, 223–­225; as

Index  |  435 laborers, 224–­225, 254–­256; obligations to public of, 238–­239. See also authorial rights; author-­public relations; authorship; correspondence and manuscripts; literary property; literary works Yakovlev, Postnik (mythical builder), 141 Yaney, George, 272 Yanovskii, Abel, 87 Yanzhul, Ivan, 262, 264 Yeliashevitch, Vasilii, 333n111 Zabelin, Ivan, 154, 347n97 Zaborovie. See Church of Thomas’s Assurance in the Resurrection of Christ Zagorsky, Semen O., 274 Zaitsevo (village), purchase of land from, 80–­81 Zasodimsky, Pavel, 376n110

zemstvos (local self-­governments): and agricultural technologies, 102; and forest protection law, 63, 317n107; and historical preservation issues, 204, 206; and land amelioration projects, 328n60; noble landowners as majority in, 311n26; and state’s intrusion into private forest economy, 61–­62 Zhankol’, Nikolai, 110, 331n96, 332n102 Zhilinskii, Iosif, 104 Zhirkevich, Alexander, 156, 158–­159, 348n110, 349n129 Zhudra, Petr, 65, 200 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 232, 253, 285, 388n92 Zola, Emile, 261–­263, 264, 266, 390n123 Zolotnitskii, Moisei, 158 Zvenigorodskii, Alexander, 196, 361n96 Zvorykin, Konstantin, 143 Zweynert, Joachim, 219, 224