Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod 0822961717, 9780822961710

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Maps, Figures, Tables
Preface
List of Abbreviations
1. Imagining the Russian Provinces
2. Soil, Forest, River: The Ecology of Provincial Life
3. Urban Topography
4. Rhythms: The Local Economy
5. An Artisanal Case Study: The Southeast
6. Social Space: Numbers, Images, Biographies
7. Managing the Province: Local Administration
8. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the Zemstvo
9. Church and Religion
10. Provincial Cultural Nests
11. The Idea of Province
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PORTR AIT OF A RUSSIAN PROVINCE

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris, Editor

 PORTR AIT OF A 

Russian Province Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod

CATHERINE EVTUHOV

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2011, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6171-0 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6171-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evtuhov, Catherine.  Portrait of a Russian province : economy, society, and civilization in nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novgorod / Catherine Evtuhov.       p. cm. —  (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-6171-0 (paper : acid-free paper)  ISBN-10: 0-8229-6171-7 (paper : acid-free paper) 1.  Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia)—Civilization—19th century. 2.  Country life—Russia (Federation)—Nizhnii Novgorod—History—19th century. 3.  Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia)— Economic conditions—19th century. 4.  Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia)—Social conditions—19th century. 5.  Nizhnii Novgorod (Russia)—Intellectual life—19th century.  I. Title.  DK651.G6E94 2011  947’.4107—dc23                                                            2011021066

Thus economy is the struggle of humanity with the elemental forces of nature with the aim of protecting and widening life, conquering and humanizing nature, transforming it into a potential human organism. ­—Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy (1912)

CONTENTS

List of Maps, Figures, Tables • ix Preface • xi List of Abbreviations • xv 1. Imagining the Russian Provinces • 3 2. Soil, Forest, River: The Ecology of Provincial Life • 23 3. Urban Topography • 45 4. Rhythms: The Local Economy • 57 5. An Artisanal Case Study: The Southeast • 81 6. Social Space: Numbers, Images, Biographies • 100 7. Managing the Province: Local Administration • 133 8. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the Zemstvo • 165 9. Church and Religion • 182 10. Provincial Cultural Nests • 206 11. The Idea of Province • 228 Notes • 251 Selected Bibliography • 293 Index • 309

vii

MAPS, FIGURES, TABLES

Color Maps • following page 80 Plate 1.  Soil map of Balakhna district Plate 2.  V. V. Dokuchaev’s soil map of Nizhnii Novgorod province Plate 3.  City map of Nizhnii Novgorod Plate 4.  Soil map of Gorbatov district Plate 5.  Gorbatov soil map detail Plate 6.  Soil map of Semënov district Figures 1.1.  P. I. Mel’nikov • 16 1.2.  A. S. Gatsiskii • 16 1.3.  A. O. Karelin • 16 1.4.  V. V. Dokuchaev • 16 2.1.  River systems • 33 2.2.  The Volga in local perspective • 35 2.3.  Ravine depositing silt in river • 39 3.1.  Plan of Kniaginin district capital • 54 3.2.  Main street in Bol’shoe Murashkino • 56 4.1.  Land transference, Kniaginin district • 63 4.2.  Land transference, Gorbatov district • 64 4.3.  Land transference, Semënov district • 65 5.1.  Artisanal production in southeast of Nizhnii Novgorod province • 85 6.1.  Karelin photo, “Family in a Suite of Rooms” • 116 ix

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maps, figures, tables 6.2.  Karelin photo, “Scene at the Window” • 117 6.3.  Karelin and Shishkin photo, “Gorbatov Meshchanka” • 118 6.4.  Karelin and Shishkin photo, “Mordvinians from Sergach” • 118 6.5.  Karelin photo, “Tatar Couple” • 119 10.1.  Page from the Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti • 212 Tables 2.1.  Forests and people • 28 4.1.  Types of workers in the Pavlovo iron enterprises • 71 6.1.  Artisans in Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas • 108–109 6.2.  Community specialization • 110 6.3.  Soslovie in Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas • 111 7.1.  Zemstvo expenditures for medical care • 150 7.2.  Zemstvo expenditures for education • 155

PREFACE

For many years, the study of nineteenth-century Russian history was motivated by the twin questions: what went wrong? and, why was there a revolution? These questions have not lost their importance and urgency. At the same time, the transformations in contemporary Russian society after the August Revolution of 1991 and the search for new organizing principles have brought historians to examine the past in a different quest. For the first time, we have turned to the pre-revolutionary years with an eye to a “usable past”—elements in Russian society itself that may provide guidance or examples for today. In addition, the present inevitably illuminates the past in new ways, and what can be more exciting for the historian than to live through an era of intensive change and to watch the pieces of the past shift into new configurations as they are filtered through the changing prism of the present? It is in this latter spirit that my study of the Russian provinces has been conceived. This book originated in two complementary impulses. The first was the possibly naïve wish simply to travel to the interior and look around, to see what there was to be seen in the previously off-limits depths of Russia outside of the two capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. While many of my colleagues were attracted to the ethnically and religiously complex borderlands of the Russian Empire, for me the apparently banal and even drab provinces of European Russia exercised a greater pull. And, in my summers in Nizhnii Novgorod, I discovered a new world, a Russia with distinctive features that became more and more compelling as I came to know them better. The second impulse was quite different. I had previously spent many years studying the cultural explosion of the early twentieth century—the Russian Silver Age—as a historical phenomenon. I was intrigued by the provincial origins of many members of the highly refined elite intelligentsia that created Silver Age culture and even more so by the broad swaths of provincial intelligentsia represented in the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918. Thus, I turned to the Russian provinces in a search not for the roots of revolution but for the roots of a historical phenomenon that xi

xii  preface

“didn’t happen”—a Russian Reformation whose actual realization became the vibrant cultural milieu of the Silver Age.1 Again and again in my research on the pre-revolutionary period, I have seen the imprint of a nascent society that seemed irrelevant in Soviet times and had disappeared completely from view— and yet that, after a century’s hiatus, seems to speak directly to us in terms we understand. The resulting portrait of a Russian province unquestionably has its idiosyncrasies. Total history even in a small place by definition leaves things out, sometimes important ones. I have been primarily concerned with interactions and interconnections, trying to see how the different aspects of life in Nizhnii Novgorod—economic activity, society, cultural organization—fit together. In general, I have emphasized factors to which historians have paid relatively less attention and yet which, within the new context of “usable past,” turn out to be quite important. Thus, readers will find considerable emphasis on the lower middle class and provincial bourgeois culture and much less on peasant society and popular culture. Another difficult decision involves phenomena that are at once local and universal, most notably law and religion. I have chosen to include a chapter on religion but not on law. For the latter—which, perhaps more than any other topic, would require its own book—I refer the reader to the outstanding recent and older studies by Jane Burbank, Richard Wortman, and others.2 In the 1870s, Nizhnii Novgorod, like other regions of central Russia, experienced a movement “to the people” by intellectuals and students from Moscow and St. Petersburg. But decades of overemphasis on this phenomenon in Soviet historiography, not to mention a current wave of rediscovery of populists and terrorists, have instead stimulated my interest in reconstructing the “mainstream” society in which the radicals occupied a marginal position. Despite these acknowledged gaps, I hope to have created a tactile picture of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod that will encourage others to pursue similar investigations both in “my” province and elsewhere. There are different ways to read any book. I would like to follow the example of one of my greatest teachers, John Rawls, who in the preface to A Theory of Justice gives precise instructions as to which sections should be read by those who do not wish to follow all the intricacies of his thought process. I have consciously constructed this book in an inductive fashion, proceeding from the details of the natural environment through social and economic activities and structures to culture and ideas. I am afraid that, in order to understand my argument, it may indeed be necessary to read carefully. However I can offer a shortcut: the impatient reader is welcome to start with chapter 7, “Managing the Province,” or chapter 11, “The Idea of Province,” and then choose which of the earlier chapters seem attractive. My greatest debt, and the one it gives me greatest pleasure to acknowledge, is to the many individuals in Nizhnii Novgorod who embraced this project with immense enthusiasm and helped me at every step along the way—and in several

preface  x iii cases became close friends in the process: Tatiana Pavlovna Vinogradova, Aleksandr Kornilov, O. A. Kolobov, Valerii Pavlovich Makarikhin, S. A. Volokhov, and Iu. G. Galai. Special thanks to Elena Semënovna Poluektova for her warm hospitality. In the Nizhnii Novgorod archive, the director, Viktor Alekseevich Kharlamov, as well as Galina Ivanovna Rassadina and other members of the staff went out of their way to welcome me. I am also grateful to Alla Tikhonovna Naberezhneva, who tolerated my long presence in the nowdefunct zemstvo collection at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, and as always to Serafima Igorevna Varekhova, who was still at the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg when I worked there in 1997. This book owes more than usual to a good deal of help from my close friends and colleagues, ranging from late-night conversations to careful readings. I would have to write another book to detail the ways in which I am grateful to Maria Amelina, Alain Blum, Alon Confino, Boris Gasparov, Bob Geraci, David Goldfrank, Andrzej Kaminski, Francisco LaRubia-Prado, John McNeill, David Moon, Susan Morrissey, Aviel Roshwald, Alessandro Stanziani, Richard Stites, and Galina Ulianova. This book would not have been the same without my most critical readers, the students in my Russian history seminar: Mariya Amelicheva, John Corcoran, Rita Guenther, Björn Hofmeister, Lisa Khachaturian, Anita Kondoyanidi, Curtis Murphy, Christina Petrides, Andrew Robarts, and Dan Scarborough. I am grateful to Beth Kerley for her editorial eye and to John Corcoran for making several of the tables. In the final stages, I was fortunate to have readings by my Georgetown University History Department colleagues: John Tutino, Roger Chickering, James Collins, Carol Benedict, Adam Rothman, and Chandra Manning. I also benefited from the expert advice of my Polish colleagues Andrzej Nowak and Adam Kożuchowski in the Warsaw and Cracow colloquium, “Remembering Forgotten History,” in June 2010. Much of this research was made possible by a string of summer grants from Georgetown University as well as a short-term grant from IREX. I have had the chance to present parts of my work at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Universität zu Köln, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) Paris, the Columbia University Russian History Workshop, the Russian History Workshop of Washington, DC, Sarah Lawrence College, Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania Russian History Workshop, the University of Virginia History Workshop, and the International Summer Seminars at Smolensk and Kazan in 1993 and 1994. My warm thanks to Peter Kracht and Jonathan Harris for their enthusiasm; to Deborah Meade at the University of Pittsburgh Press for seeing the project through; and to Maureen Creamer Bemko for her sensitive and patient editing. In a Fedorovian spirit, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents: Regina Edmundovna (1913–1977) and Boris Alekseevich Filippov (1910–1986), Petr Leont’evich (1909–1994) and Muza Mikhailovna

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Evtuhov (who, happily, at ninety-nine is still with us), and Elena Edmundovna (1911–1995) and Valentin Ivanovich Krasny (1905–1995). And to my first teacher of Russian history, Nikolai Iul’ianovich Pushkarsky (1898–1998), who was so proud to have been born in the nineteenth century and who until the end of his days embodied the provincial ideal in the very, very distant province of Hollywood, California.

ABBREVIATIONS

B. Murashkino Bol’shoe Murashkino d. desiatina, one-tenth of a square verst (approximately a hectare, or 2.7 acres) ESBE Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona GANO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv nizhegorodskoi oblasti Governor’s report “Vsepoddanneishii otchet Nachal’nika Nizhegorodskoi gubernii” GPIB Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, Moscow GUAK Gubernskie uchenye arkhivnye komissii IVEO Imperatorskoe vol’noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo LNP Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia NEV Nizhegorodskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti NGUAK Nizhegorodskaia gubernskaia uchenaia arkhivnaia komissiia NGV Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti NGZ Nizhegorodskoe gubernskoe zemstvo NS Nizhegorodskii sbornik PSZ Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg RGVIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow RNB Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, St. Petersburg SPNZ Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo zemstva xv

PORTR AIT OF A RUSSIAN PROVINCE

19th century border of Nizhnii Novgorod province Modern oblast borders

Gorky Reservoir created in 1955

Semënov

N

1 Balakhna

Nizhnii Novgorod Oka River

Gorbatov

Vo lg

Pavlovo

Makar’ev Vasil’Lyskovo Sursk a R iv er

B. Murashkino 2 Oka Riv er

Sergach Arzamas Vyksa Ardatov Lukoianov 3 Pochinki Current republics 1 Mari-El 2 Chuvash 3 Mordovian

3

0 0

10 20

20

30 40

40 60

50 mi 80 km

Nizhnii Novgorod province in the nineteenth century, with modern oblast borders superimposed. The Mari, Chuvash, and Mordovian autonomous regions and then republics of the USSR were carved out along the eastern and southern borders in the 1920s and 1930s. Sources: ESBE, s.v. “Nizhegorodskaia guberniia”; and Malyi atlas SSSR (Moscow, 1973). Map by Bill Nelson, http://www.esva.net/~billnelsonmaps/.

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1 Imagining the Russian Provinces

I

n 1928, Nikolai Piksanov—a well-known philologist close to the Russian  Formalists—predicted that the study of provincial culture and local history would become the wave of the future. Historians, art historians, literary scholars, archivists, and economists would join forces in a series of seminars and research projects to uncover the richness of Russia’s regional past; this knowledge, in turn, would shape the formation and development of the many regions of the recently established Soviet state.1 Ironically, Piksanov proposed this project on the eve of the final purge of the discipline of local history or kraevedenie. Instead, over most of the twentieth century, Moscow exercised an almost demonic centripetal pull over the Soviet Union. Not only political power and material goods but also information and scientific study gravitated inexorably to the capital; local historians were relegated to an increasingly pathetic function of minor record-keeping and pious enthusiasm for such events as Alexander Pushkin’s fleeting visit to “our region” (nash krai). Piksanov’s own fate was characteristic in the very absence of drama: he lived quietly until the 1970s, occupying himself with innocuous researches, while the Soviet writers’ encyclopedia commented drily, “Marxist literary studies does not deny the necessity of taking into account these local characteristics, but, proceeding from the general premises of dialectical materialism, accords this principle a secondary position.”2 Eighty years later, because of this discontinuity in the historiographical tradition, the historian’s foray into the Russian provinces has the feel of a voyage 3

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imagining the russian provinces

of discovery, one in which we find ourselves reconstructing the fragments of a world that Piksanov’s unrealized projects might perhaps have presented to us in a coherent picture. The pages that follow are the result of one such voyage, which began for me in 1992, when I caught the train from Moscow to Nizhnii Novgorod—an apparently simple act that would have been inconceivable just a year earlier, when Nizhnii Novgorod was still the closed city of Gorky—to begin an investigation of the universe of the Russian provinces in the nineteenth century. It was not long before my reading, in the regional library and the Nizhnii Novgorod State Regional Archive (GANO), took on a life of its own. The Great Reforms of the 1860s transformed the Russian countryside. They did so, however, not only in the ways we are accustomed to thinking about them: a series of centrally legislated measures to emancipate the peasantry and construct a legal system and a mechanism for self-government. Rather, they created new spaces for people in provincial Russia—the areas most directly affected by the reforms—to shape the world they lived in. The peasant emancipation created a variety of new needs on the local level: everything from the crafting of the contracts between landlords and communes to the providing of essential health care and education required a mobilization of skills and energies.3 Lawyers, physicians, scientists, teachers, and journalists were all in high demand. We can argue forever (and people have) whether the peasants were “truly” liberated or not. But it is unquestionable that individuals with the knowledge and training needed for the implementation of the reforms gained a good deal of room for maneuver; it was a process that continued unchecked until it culminated in the Revolution of 1905. The reforms, and the social change they brought about, provoked a wave of fascination, in Russian educated society, with the most minute details of local environment and local life, ranging from geological formations to ethnic and religious interactions to local history. Knowing one’s environment can result in the capacity to shape it, and educated people in the provinces in the postreform era went about the pursuit of such knowledge with relentless energy. It was with some surprise that I found myself being confidently guided by my nineteenth-century interlocutors along the presumably opaque byways of Nizhnii Novgorod province, as they showed me the most obscure corners of each district, explained to me the practices that produced felt boots and wooden spoons, proudly celebrated their city’s national role in the Time of Troubles, and led me inside the Old Believer sketes deep in the forests north of the Volga. This book has a double purpose. I would like, first, to take advantage of the extraordinary production of published documents on the nineteenthcentury provinces, and Nizhnii Novgorod in particular, in order to reconstruct my own portrait of the province. Researchers in the post-reform era collected and published data about every imaginable topic: meteorology, ethnography, topography, criminality, education, social insurance, rural medicine, religion, local history; these materials are an archive unto themselves, distinguished



imagining the russian provinces

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from a “real” archive primarily by their greater legibility.4 The documents are not easy reading and look, at first glance, like a collection of meaninglessly detailed information. With some patience and analysis, however, the dry pages of statistical and ethnographic studies begin to come alive, revealing a vibrant commercial world in constant motion; a focused campaign to improve local infrastructure through control over taxation; and an active scientific, musical, and literary community. The detail and clarity of the nineteenth-century materials make the process akin to a physician’s insertion of a scope into the patient’s body: a careful reading permits us to discern the outlines of the province’s inner workings.5 By definition, this methodology cannot lay claim to completeness. I have been guided, throughout, by a desire to understand and illuminate not what is unique to one province alone but rather what is generalizable. This is thus a portrait in a very specific sense: one that, by focusing on the particular, brings out features shared by the provinces of the Russian “metropole” to one degree or another. This book’s underlying premise is that it is as important to understand the central regions of European Russia as it is to understand the borderlands and “peripheral” regions, which have become the object of intensive study in recent years, and even that the mechanisms of governance and local participation in the Russian provinces can shed new light on variations of such mechanisms in the border regions. My second purpose is to show that the very process of apprehension of the details of the material environment and of local life contributed, over time, to the emergence of a local consciousness that was most coherently articulated as an “idea of province.” From a passive object of the observations of travelers and scientists, the province, through the process of knowing itself, became transformed into a subject and creator of its own identity. The agents of this transformation were the provincial intelligentsia—people like Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii, head of the Nizhnii Novgorod Statistical Committee— who both collected the data and used them to promote the provincial idea. Gatsiskii was typical of a generation that came into its own in the 1860s— priests, teachers, physicians, statisticians, agronomists, lawyers who trained in the spirit of the reform era and who made a conscious choice to dedicate their professional lives to their respective provinces. This study pivots on these individuals: their picture of the province forms its point of departure, while their collective portrait should emerge, gradually, from the chapters that follow. They are the mediators between us and the world that becomes visible through their painstaking gathering of material. It is essential, of course, to avoid the double pitfall of either becoming their prisoner (blindly accepting the nineteenth-century categories and thus literally re-creating their image of the world) or becoming so absorbed in analyzing the collectors that the data themselves vanish from view.6 Rather, the intent here is to capture the intimate mutual interdependence between the province’s concrete reality and the manner in which its interpreters eventually conceptualized it as a “provincial idea.”7

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Space, Region, Historiography In a recent article, Karl Schlögel writes, “It is surprising to what degree Russian and Soviet history have thus far been studied outside the realm of space. There are but a few works in which the Russian Empire is seriously perceived in spatial terms, and which discuss distance, transport and communication, and means of transmission of cultural objects and values.”8 It seems almost painfully obvious to state that Russia was (and is) a very big country. It is all the more ironic, then, that much smaller countries, like France, Spain, Italy, or Germany, have developed a rich tradition of regional and local studies, revealing the diverse fabric and “lumpiness” of the national unit, whereas the discipline of Russian history has, for the most part, remained oddly indifferent to the concept of geographical space and to the spatial as well as temporal dimensions of historical events. The “biggest country”—famously, one-sixth of the world’s surface—has remained largely confined to a flattened, homogenized, centralized perspective.9 My approach in this book is entirely place-specific. Unlike Richard Hellie, who tries to assess material culture for seventeenth-century Muscovy as a whole, or even Fernand Braudel, whose approach has in other ways inspired this research yet who insists on a global rather than a localized perspective, I operate on the premise that the most basic of human beings’ activities play out in entirely concrete surroundings and that we must first understand specific, locally circumscribed interactions before proceeding to analysis in terms of sociological categories (class, status, civil society) or generalized historical processes (industrialization, modernization, urbanization).10 Moreover, even the study of such apparently “immobile” material as geological structures may, given a local perspective rather than a bird’s-eye view, begin to appear much more subject to change and flux than we might expect. There then arises the question of the specific unit of analysis and of how we can define the parameters of the local. “Province,” to me, is quite an inclusive concept. In the most literal sense, “province” is simply the English translation of the administrative term guberniia. On this level, “Nizhnii Novgorod province” is merely a technical, administrative designation. Next, however, provintsiia, in Russian as in English, denotes the opposite of “capital” or “center.” “Province” can thus refer to every space that is not one of the two capital cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow (although, as we will see, even those cities can potentially contain “provincial” aspects). The term, naturally, may have a pejorative aspect, but it also became imbued with positive content. It is essential to note that I am not overly concerned with the distinction between “province” and “region,” and I frequently use the terms interchangeably.11 This is because what is important to me is to take a slice—any slice, let it be arbitrary—of the local and to see how interactions work out within that space. I find it helpful to think of the “province” as a complex system—a set of shifting relationships and interactions that together make up a larger whole.12 The province, in addition,



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is porous: commercial, intellectual, and political activities transcend any given geographical boundaries. To repeat, then, when I speak of “province” I am concerned with human beings’ interactions with each other and with their surrounding environment on a territory not limited to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Fortunately for the present study, since my first journey to Nizhnii Novgorod and the several subsequent sojourns that followed, the literature on regions, provinces, and local history has experienced a resurgence. Until the 1990s, the sole article explicitly addressing such issues remained Carsten Goehrke’s “The Problem of Regionalism in Russian History” (1978).13 Since then, historians in different countries—most notably Germany, the United States, and Russia—have developed different approaches to local history in Russia.14 The American literature has experienced something of an obsession, in the last fifteen years, with problems of empire. While the production is too vast to review here, one result is that, to the degree that specifically local or regional issues are addressed, they usually focus on borderlands, peripheries, and “non-Russian nationalities.”15 Most relevant to the present undertaking are investigations of specific areas, such as Robert Geraci’s work on Kazan or Willard Sunderland’s on colonization and migration in South Russia.16 The problem of empire has also generated a plethora of international conferences, where problems of regions have been addressed in a variety of contexts.17 In Germany, while the imperial focus has produced some extremely important work—most notably Andreas Kappeler’s Rußland als Vielvölkerreich—the issue of regionalism has tended to be linked, in addition, to investigations of the middle class. Thus, significant studies, especially by Lutz Häfner and Guido Hausmann, have grown out of Jürgen Kocka’s massive project on the European Bürgertum (bourgeoisie). Hausmann and Häfner propose to envision society as a local project (the difficult-to-translate Veranstaltung), turning their attention to associations, self-management, and sociability in provincial towns.18 The most interesting historiographical developments, however, have taken place within Russia itself, in part because the relation between the center and the regions (the “subjects of the federation,” as they became known in political discourse) has occupied a major place in the transformations of the Soviet Union and Russia since 1989. Nizhnii Novgorod has been more emblematic of these changes than most other provincial cities or regions. If the Soviet city of Gorky stood at once for military might, industrial production, and political repression (the site, most famously, of Andrei Sakharov’s exile), in the early 1990s it became, in a carnivalesque inversion, the symbol of regional autonomy, a nascent democratic movement, and a passionate rediscovery of the local past. Local intellectuals saw the Soviet Union’s collapse as the final and inevitable result of the subjugation of the regions to Moscow’s tyranny.19 Boris Nemtsov became the first among the Russian Federation’s rebellious and civically active regional governors, while the future leader of the democratic Iabloko

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caucus, Grigorii Iavlinskii, sought to create a prototype of a new democratic Russia precisely in the Nizhnii Novgorod region.20 Architects and amateur historians, in the meantime, turned an obsessive eye to the cityscape, carefully reconstructing its center in accordance with nineteenth-century blueprints (albeit in a postmodern purple and yellow color scheme). It was an era that came to a close recently, as President Vladimir Putin in 2005 mandated central appointment of regional governors, while regional success and prosperity have moved into direct correlation to the production and processing of oil.21 In historiography, I would characterize the trend as a shift away from the narrow concerns of kraevedenie typical of the late Soviet period—in which local historians painstakingly avoided any larger implications of their cultivation of minutiae. If the American and German literature links regional history to problems of empire and to the development of the middle classes, respectively, within Russia the concept of “province” (provintsiia) has come to play an increasingly important role. Here, as well, Nizhnii Novgorod occupies a special place. A harbinger of the new orientation was V. P. Makarikhin’s published doctoral dissertation on the provincial archival commissions, a field of study that has subsequently flourished under the direction of S. O. Schmidt in Moscow.22 Another publication, The Russian Provinces: Myth—Text—Reality, marked the culmination of interdisciplinary investigation, from the perspective of philologists and anthropologists, of the world of the Russian provinces.23 A plethora of papers and articles dealing with the issues of “capitals and provinces” has appeared at conferences and in journals. Detailed investigations of local history have become a staple of international conferences dedicated to nineteenth-century history.24 I would like to single out two books that seem to me particularly impor­ tant. The first is Tatiana Vinogradova’s Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsia: vokrug N. A. Dobroliubova (The Nizhnii Novgorod Intelligentsia: Around N. A. Dobroliubov).25 Vinogradova, a structural engineer by profession, traces her own roots (her grandmother was Dobroliubov’s cousin) to recreate a remarkable picture of an upright, sometimes prosperous middle-class clerical family against whose background the most famous member, the radical Nikolai Dobroliubov, looks like a black sheep. In the process she successfully portrays the local intelligentsia—physicians, priests, bureaucrats, middling urban property-owners—who formed the backbone of nineteenth-century provincial society. The second is Viktor Berdinskikh’s book, Uezdnye istoriki (2004), specifically dedicated to provincial historiography.26 Animated by a desire to “elevate local material to a national [rossiiskii] level,” Berdinskikh’s book unites his doctoral dissertation on the provincial statistical committees and the development of a provincial historiographical tradition with an indepth study (previously published in Kirov in a minute run) of historians in Viatka province.27 Educated in Gorky, where he was a student in the 1970s, and inspired by the same materials that prompted the present study, Berdinskikh



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posits the independence of provincial intellectual life and brings to the forefront the extraordinarily active role of the statistical committees and the originality of the historical investigations they engendered. What is missing, however, is a coherent perspective on the Russian provinces —an approach and a methodology that would permit the deconstruction of nineteenth-century Russia into smaller provincial units, and a subsequent reconstruction that will provide us with a revised vision of the country as a whole. In Susan Smith-Peter’s words, “The local is a window onto Russia. It provides the scholar with a much richer understanding of how the majority of Russians lived, many of them far away from the capitals. After extensive and intensive study of all of Russia’s regions, scholars in both East and West will have a clearer vision of how events and social processes actually unfolded.”28 The purpose of this book is to provide, by working with extremely specific and detailed concrete materials, one possible framework for the study of Russian regions in the nineteenth century. The province needs to be studied not for its own sake (the pursuit of kraevedenie or local history) but as an integral and indispensable part of a larger historical narrative.

Nizhnii Novgorod Province in Historical Perspective Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century—like every other individual province—was unique, special, and unusual. The province covered a territory of some 250 square versts—about the size, the 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka pointed out with some pride, of the Papal States, Switzerland, the kingdoms of the Netherlands, Belgium, Hannover, Württemberg, or Greece. The population of 1.2 million had increased to 1.5 million by 1900. The guberniia was divided into two unequal parts (north and south) by the flow of the Volga: the only black soil was in the southeastern corner (Lukoianov and Kniaginin districts). The city of Nizhnii Novgorod itself, with a population of some 40,000, perched picturesquely (as it still does) on the cliffs at the confluence of the Volga and its tributary, the Oka; the forests north of the Volga still stretch as far as one can see if one stands along the mansion-lined embankment. Smaller towns like the ancient Gorodets or Balakhna appear along the banks as one travels up the Volga. Official estimates counted some 32,000 Old Believers and members of edinoverie, or “united faith” (a figure that, as we shall see, is likely far too low), and 37,000 Muslims.29 The major local ethnic groups were Tatars, Mordva, and Mari (known in the nineteenth century as Cheremiss). Nonresidents knew the area best for its yearly fair—a colorful summertime convergence of East and West where China tea merchants, Astrakhan fish peddlers, Russian textile producers, and European visitors came together to exchange goods. From its beginnings in sixteenth-century Muscovy, the Makar’ev Fair—named after its original site by the monastery at Makar’ev— expanded to become the largest trade fair in Europe, larger even than that of Leipzig. Apart from its purely commercial function, the fair naturally attracted

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a variety of entertainments and activities—including “Parisian” magic lantern slides, theatrical shows, taverns, and brothels, as well as a thriving hotel and restaurant business. Even at midcentury the fair attracted more than a million visitors, dwarfing the provincial capital’s year-round population of thirty-five thousand.30 Nizhnii Novgorod’s significance as a commercial hub was perhaps the most obvious, but certainly not the only, distinctive feature of the province. Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov (pseud. Andrei Pecherskii), a native of the region, in the 1870s crafted a powerful and influential depiction in his diptych novels, In the Forests and On the Hills. Like no other writer, he captured on paper the rough, tough world of the rich Old Believer merchants (known as “thousanders” or even “millioners”), and the mysterious life of the female-dominated monasteries (sketes) deep in the forests beyond the Volga. Nizhnii Novgorod province was distinguished from other places by the prevalence of the Old Belief. The seventeenth-century group known as the Zealots of Piety—Ivan Neronov, the archpriest Avvakum, and the eventual patriarch Nikon—were from the province and held their early discussions there. After their cataclysmic falling out, and Nikon’s condemnation of his erstwhile fellows at the 1666 All-Russian Council of the Orthodox Church, Avvakum and his followers returned to the trans-Volga forests, taking refuge from persecution. Except for its fertile southeast corner, Nizhnii Novgorod province was characterized by relatively poor soil. Artisanal production—known as kustar— prevailed, and the region became famous for the production of knives, locks, scissors, and other metal products; leather goods; and wooden dishes and implements of all kinds (known to present-day consumers as khokhloma, named after the village). Iron ore was mined and processed at the metallurgical plants in the southwest corner of the province—notably, located well outside any urban center. One of the major enterprises of the industrial age, specializing in metallurgy and shipbuilding, was located at Sormovo in Balakhna district (now inside the city of Nizhnii Novgorod). Some of the earliest workers’ communities—eventually the subject of Maksim Gorky’s novels—grew up in Sormovo in the 1840s.31 Nizhnii Novgorod also formed part of a larger universe, constituted together with the other provinces, each with its own unique characteristics. The provincial world followed its own chronology, at once distinct from and intersecting with that of the center. In the late eighteenth century, the province emerged as the object of administrative recrafting, territorial measurement, travel description, and religious conversion. Catherine II’s provincial reform, in 1775, fragmented the old administrative units (namestnichestva) into fifty regular, and rather arbitrary, provinces (gubernii), each with ten districts and an evenly distributed population of about three hundred thousand.32 It was Catherine, as well, who launched the first comprehensive land survey, with teams of surveyors fanning out through the provinces in an effort to systematize information on



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villages and their lands. The survey, which began in 1766, continued well into the nineteenth century.33 The provinces attracted the attention of voyagers as well, most notably the German traveler Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), whose work and travel in the Urals, the Altai, and Transcaucasus under the auspices of Catherine II’s “academic expedition” (1768–1774) remain one of the most useful ethnographic and natural-historical descriptions of the region. Pallas passed through Nizhnii Novgorod on his way east, and his Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des russischen Reichs contains a fascinating description of the leather manufactures at Arzamas (one of the district capitals).34 Not only the central government but also the Orthodox Church demonstrated engagement with the provinces, continuing an old tradition that can be traced at least to Stefan of Perm’, who in the fourteenth century converted the Komi of the Perm’ region. In the Nizhnii Novgorod region, the Petrine period was marked mainly by a vociferous struggle against the Old Belief. By the late eighteenth century, attention had shifted to the Finnic, Turkic, and other peoples of the Volga basin. The erudite Bishop Damaskin (Rudnev) (1783–1794), a graduate of Göttingen University and erstwhile prominent Moscow cleric, oversaw the publication of grammars and Bibles in Mordvinian and Chuvash. From the local perspective, however, the real animation of the provincial scene begins in the 1830s, during the reign of Nicholas I. A key part of the “Nicholas system” was a significant change in the concept of rule: if Alexander had made do with the relatively loose control of administratively appointed governors, rotating from post to post, Nicholas wanted to rule the country in a hands-on way. The monarch himself, following Catherine’s lead, paid a visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1834—a visit that resulted in the complete reorganization and restructuring of the urban landscape through the concerted efforts of local society. A comprehensive local government reform followed in 1837, granting considerable powers to the local governors and also to the city dumas, making the provincial board into an executive rather than a consultative body and strengthening the local police. To Nicholas, the path to total control lay through total knowledge: if all information on every part of the empire could be collected and organized—everything from population to industrial production to indigenous legal codes (including data for Siberia)—the capacity for perfect control would be one step closer. Therefore, such institutions as the Imperial Geographical Society and the Central Statistical Committee, established in Nicholas’s reign, are as essential to his “system” as the more familiar Third Section (the secret police) or the new Code of Law. Local statistical committees (1834) and the Gubernskie vedomosti (Provincial Gazettes)—the first legal locally produced provincial newspaper, established throughout Russia in 1838— delegated responsibility to the local level and became visible harbingers of a local consciousness. At the same time, Minister of Internal Affairs Lev Perovskii’s trusted chinovniki osobykh poruchenii—“agents for special commissions” assigned to the local governors—provided a means for effective governance that

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circumvented the increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy.35 Cadastral descriptions and statistical and ethnographic studies supplemented the earlier, vaguer travelers’ reports. Ironically, this notoriously centralized and bureaucratized reign witnessed an increasing reliance on local institutions, thus posing an essential paradox of nineteenth-century rule: the necessity, for efficient governance, of a significant measure of local autonomy.36 It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Great Reforms for the Russian provinces. Alexander II’s revolution from above transformed and reoriented the force fields that defined people’s daily existence. The reforms affected provincial Russian society as much as, and perhaps more than, they did the emancipated peasantry itself. Emancipation created a whole set of needs for mediation between the state and the peasantry—needs that were filled by the growing numbers of doctors, clergy, statisticians, agronomists, lawyers, and zemstvo politicians. The reforms created a space in which a new kind of person could flourish. The result was, by the 1870s, a renaissance in which provincial cities were transformed from administrative outposts of a powerful central government into local centers with a burgeoning local press, an explosion of commerce, an active scientific and literary life, a steadily increasing prosperity, and a growing consciousness of their own local identity and potential political weight. From the vantage point of Nizhnii Novgorod, Frederick Starr’s assertion that 1870 marked an end to decentralization looks nothing short of absurd and signals the peculiarity of a central approach to local issues: if indeed the central government ceased to promote “the local” in its legislation, this was because the initiative had passed to the provinces. By 1870, individuals and institutions on the local level had taken matters into their own hands, managing economic affairs, creating infrastructure (such as water supply and public transportation), organizing health care and education, and working out taxation mechanisms that bypassed entirely the domain of the central government. The flowering of the provinces continued unabated until the Revolution of 1905 and beyond. The crucial institution here was the zemstvo. The zemstvos, when they were established as a bureaucratic measure in 1864, were conceived primarily, if not solely, as a more efficient tax-gathering system (Nicholas I’s bureaucracy had proved incapable of controlling the entire fiscal network from the center).37 Apart from maintaining their own properties and handling their own taxes, the zemstvos, set up at first in thirty-four provinces of European Russia, were supposed to oversee the distribution of goods and food reserves in case of poor harvest; maintain roads and bridges; manage social welfare, insurance, and church construction; provide for health and education; stimulate animal husbandry and agronomy; regulate the postal service and the military draft; manage finances coming from the central government and from the local population; and serve as a channel of communication between local society and the center. The most important of these functions, especially at the beginning, proved to be education and medicine. An entire network of zemstvo-run schools



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was created under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, whose function was to teach basic literacy to the children of the new free peasants. The zemstvos established what was virtually a socialized health care system, with the character of the rural physician becoming a major new figure in the post-emancipation countryside—and in literature as well. Second, this was the first institution in modern Russia that brought the different classes together, instead of segregating them in organizations for separate estates (soslovie) like the gentry assembly (dating to the era of Catherine II). Whatever the limitations on suffrage—and they were standard for most of the European world in the second half of the nineteenth century— Russia’s population over the course of the four decades between 1864 and the establishment of a national representative government in 1905 grew accustomed to the process of going to the polls and making a choice of political representation. The Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo was one of the most dynamic among the thirty-four such institutions. The zemstvos’ functions included oversight of peasant affairs, land redistribution, local administration (police, courts, statistics), transportation, and property taxes. Responsibility for medicine, veterinary medicine, education, pensions, railroads, commerce, welfare, agricultural credit, and insurance gradually emerged as some of the zemstvos’ top priorities. The 1864 law gave the zemstvos the right to collect and spend their own taxes; a good deal of decision-making power thus devolved onto this local institution. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo built schools, hospitals, and roads, set up sanitation and lighting systems, and provided fire insurance. Some of its most significant initiatives included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Trans-Siberian Railroad, “restoring the old natural route through Nizhnii Novgorod province to Siberia and Central Asia”; a constant struggle against the epidemics that periodically wound their way up the Volga; and an extremely sophisticated local cadaster (1880s–1890s), funded by the zemstvo, executed by scientists from St. Petersburg, and intended to create an absolutely equitable system of land taxation and distribution.38 Two modifications need to be made to the traditional perspective on the zemstvo. First, we need to go more local, because much real activity took place on the district rather than the provincial level. Second, we need to move outward from the local back to the national and international, examining links and interactions. The last third of the nineteenth century was the “Age of Congresses.” Every action of the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo became inscribed in larger efforts. While the oldest and best-known civic institutions remained the Free Economic Society and the Russian Technical Society, a plethora of ad hoc or regular meetings appeared, from the bottom up, in every profession and organization.39 Thus, the National Statistical Congress in 1870, followed by the St. Petersburg International Congress two years later; the Ninth Congress of Naturalists and Physicians in the 1890s, and so on, became particularly significant for working out local agendas. A network of “invisible threads”

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linked the provinces to each other and to the nation as a whole, providing a mechanism for coordinating strategies of management. Only the legislative function was missing, prompting the classic complaint of a “building without a cupola” and the call for a zemstvo council (zemskii sobor). An extensive “cryptoparliamentary” system introduced issues of national concern, while their resolution was limited to the local level.40 Taking my cue from the provinces themselves, I have focused on the period 1840–1900 or, more accurately, the mid-1830s through the mid-1890s. The administrative integration of the provinces (1837) or, in cultural terms, the establishment of the Gubernskie vedomosti (1838) marks the starting point. I have chosen to stop in the 1890s, because the realignments and mobilization of social forces with the approach of revolution in 1904–1907 create a whole new set of questions. These questions surely need to be investigated from a provincial perspective as well, but my primary purpose here is to establish the very existence of the provincial universe as a necessary “first step.”41 Thus, the bulk of my materials belongs to the initial major upswing in the Russian provinces, from the 1870s and onward. The traditional cycle of “reform” and “counter-reform,” so influential in the historiography, is of very little relevance from a provincial perspective.

Purveyors of the Province We still think of the 1870s as the era of “going to the people.” Young people flocked to the countryside, heeding the call of Bakunin or Lavrov—who, respectively, urged them to foment revolution or bring enlightenment to the peasant population.42 The populist intelligentsia felt a pervasive sense of responsibility for the plight of the narod (people) and believed that they had a monopoly on understanding them. At one point they caused the poet and conservative Afanasii Fet to retreat to his country estate, complaining of a dual autocracy—the official state on one hand, and the populist intelligentsia on the other. It is rare that one group of people, however disparate they may be, has succeeded for so long in imposing its particular vision of society on its own and subsequent generations. The populist intelligentsia, apart from the vehemence with which they pursued their political quest, also created a powerful and nearly indelible picture of a refined and possibly “critically thinking” elite intelligently confronting the benighted peasant masses and nudging them onto the path of progress; images of Russian backwardness, insuperable gaps between the intelligentsia and the people, an inert and unresponsive autocracy, as well as the possibility of “skipping a stage” and avoiding the pitfalls of capitalism and industrialization are a few of the tropes that the populists, broadly speaking, bequeathed to the future. This legacy received a new lease on life through its appropriation by Soviet ideology, of which it formed a significant component. It was populism, as well, that constructed a particular chronology of the



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post-reform period. The history of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century has long had its accepted chronology. The “parting of the ways” between state and educated society in the reign of Nicholas I was followed by a moment of consensus on the eve of reform, when even Alexander Herzen praised his royal namesake: “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!” According to the classic picture bequeathed to us by the radical intelligentsia themselves, the upswing of “going to the people” in the 1870s was followed by a lull in the 1880s when “politics” broke off, to be resumed only in the wake of famine in 1891. There is a thread that runs counter to this narrative that I would like to trace by turning to the history of the intelligentsia from a local perspective. Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Nechaev, and other figures familiar from the history of Russian thought—and, it might be added, the revolutionary tradition—do not tell the whole tale of “critically thinking individuals” in Russian society nor do they exhaust the potential for the creation of “social values” by such individuals. The life stories and ideas of Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov, Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii, Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev, and Andrei Osipovich Karelin are closely intertwined with the history of Nizhnii Novgorod province. Their evolution points at once to a different chronology as well as to the existence of a provincial intelligentsia whose passionate engagement with things local provides a significant counterpoint to the apparent progression of Russian thought over the nineteenth century. They may each have had a different mission, but they were extremely conscious of their own calling to convey their vision, particularly in opposition to that of populists. The latter, to those who had dedicated their entire lives to immersion in the local, looked like naïve urban dwellers, with unrealistic and unusable ideas about “the people.” The provincial intelligentsia crafted their image of the province through “boring” means—statistics, record keeping, detailed ethnographic studies—rather than radical ideological positions or quasi-religious calls to arms. Like nationalism, which, it has been argued, began in nineteenth-century central Europe with movements of intellectuals, Russian provincialism was a creation of an intelligentsia. In Nizhnii Novgorod alone one can count at least a half dozen of the most visible such individuals and tens of other minor figures. Here, however, I am interested not merely in the “provincial activist” (provintsial’nyi deiatel’), of whom there were hundreds or even thousands throughout Russia, but in particular persons whose goal was to depict, describe, conceptualize, present, and promote the province. It is through them that the Nizhnii Novgorod–Volga region speaks to us across more than a century of revolutionary change and turmoil. I have called these individuals “purveyors of the province,” for they were entirely self-conscious about doing precisely that, whether for their own contemporaries or for future generations—including future historians. This book could not have been written without the purveyors. I would like to introduce here those four who are most significant for this book.

Fig. 1.1. P. I. Mel’nikov.

Fig. 1.2. A. S. Gatsiskii.

From V. F. Timm, Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok (St. Petersburg, 1859).

From K. D. Aleksandrov, ed., A. S. Gatsiskii (1838–1938) (Gorky, 1939).

Fig. 1.3. A. O. Karelin.

Fig. 1.4. V. V. Dokuchaev.

From A. O. Karelin, Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

From http://taina.kz/dic.nsf/ ruwiki/904179. 16



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Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov (1819–1883) The son of a minor landowner in the remote and densely forested Semënov district and a graduate of Kazan University, Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov made his mark as editor of the recently established Gubernskie vedomosti, which he transformed from a terse compendium of governmental directives into a vibrant annal of local life and history.43 He also made his mark as an ethnographer, one who, while occupying a series of positions in the state bureaucracy, compiled an abundance of materials on the region’s inhabitants, particularly the Old Believers. Mel’nikov is an archetypal character of the Nicholaevan period: appointed agent for special commissions to the military governor, Prince Urusov, under the patronage of Lev Perovskii in 1847, Mel’nikov distinguished himself by the extraordinary zeal with which he performed his duties to the state.44 His secret report on the Old Belief, commissioned by the government, provided a wealth of detail accessible only to a true insider, including not just accurate statistics on population but also, for example, precise places of residence, migratory patterns, linguistic codes, and the workings of the “Old Believer mail,” including the exact names of the “postmasters.” The report was published only in 1911, under the auspices of the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Archival Commission; in its unpublished version, however, its recommendation “to destroy the sketes completely, never again allowing any building on their site,” decisively shaped the Nicholaevan project of extermination of the Old Belief and gave the government the necessary tools to do that by providing excruciatingly precise information.45 With respect to the Gorodets chapel, for example, Mel’nikov advised, if it were not judged prudent to destroy it completely, at least to wreck all buildings around it, dig a moat around the cemetery, and remove the cross and all liturgical implements; so well did Mel’nikov know his subject that he could even recommend filling the hole in which baptismal water was poured and destroying the two rooms adjacent to the chapel, where truant Orthodox priests heard confessions.46 Paradoxically, these researches bore fruit in Mel’nikov’s extraordinarily rich and basically sympathetic two-volume fictional account of Old Believer life, In the Forests and On the Hills, composed under the pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii in the 1870s. Apparently, Mel’nikov’s saga originated in the tales he recounted to the subsequently deceased heir to the throne, Nicholas, in the course of a voyage down the Volga in 1861.47 It is hard to imagine a reader who would be immune to the adventures of Chapurin, Dunia Smolokurova and Samokvasov, Flënushka, and Mother Manefa, the colorful descriptions of food and drink, the sagas of Siberian gold hunting, the pervasive sexuality, the sectarian passions, the materiality of the Old Believer faith, and the near-photographic depictions of “material culture”—peasant huts, merchant houses, feasts and rituals, marriage by abduction, the barges carrying Astrakhan fish up the Volga, the life of the wooden-spoon makers.48 Me’lnikov is a purveyor avant la lettre—a

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loyal state servitor, he immersed himself in the local through his appointments at the Gubernskie vedomosti and as state functionary and transmitted its content to his readers, to the government, and, finally, to us, both as historians and as an avid reading public.49

Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii (1838–1893) The purveyor par excellence is Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii. Gatsiskii came to Nizhnii from Riazan’ at the age of nine and eventually dedicated his life to things local—as he jokingly put it, to “Nizhnii Novgorod knowing” and “Nizhnii Novgorod doing” (nizhegorodovedenie and nizhegorododelanie) from the moment of his return from a brief stint at St. Petersburg University in the crucial year, 1861. Gatsiskii’s curriculum vitae is a whirlwind of local activity: founder of the local statistical committee and editor of its papers, president of the local provincial archival commission, member of the zemstvo (at moments when he was able to meet the property qualification) and at one time its president, and author of some four hundred articles on local history, popular religion, archaeology, ethnography, and statistics. Gatsiskii entered the national limelight in the 1870s as the defender of the “provincial idea”—the notion, in part inspired by populist thinker and historian Afanasii Shchapov’s (1830–1876) regionalism (oblastnichestvo)—that Russia’s provinces had a crucial role to play in national development.50 He represented his province at national statistical congresses, festivals, and meetings of the archival commissions. At moments when Gatsiskii was not studying the local, he was conveying it to others. His profile is characterized by an extraordinary self-consciousness, to the point of being quite well aware of the uses of his materials by future historians. It is his voice that has shaped parts of this book more than anyone else’s.51 Andrei Osipovich Karelin (1837–1906) Occupying a special place in this list is a St. Petersburg photographer who came to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1866 for health reasons. Andrei Osipovich Karelin was first of all an artist.52 Yet, the particular medium in which he worked had unusual potential for the purveying function. Karelin actually took his camera inside the bourgeois household, capturing on film images of families, ladies distributing charity, girls in conversation, loving couples, and other domestic scenes. Trained as an icon painter in his youth in his native Tambov province, Karelin received his academic education at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts; it was there that he discovered photography, or “light-writing” (svetopis’). His studio in Nizhnii Novgorod produced, of course, the requisite cartes-de-visite and portraits of local notables (some of which won prizes in Paris, Philadelphia, and Edinburgh); the repertoire included ethnographic subjects, landscapes, and a plethora of views of Nizhnii Novgorod and the fair. The photographs included in one of his albums of the 1870s, Art Photography of Life Subjects, are among his most ambitious as art. Instead of merely relying on circumstantial evidence—



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the books, journals, and newspapers they read, the theatrical performances they attended, the musical and scientific societies they founded—we here have access to the provincial middle classes themselves, productively mediated by the artistic imagination of the photographer. Karelin as an artist is a purveyor of the provincial bourgeoisie, combining representation of the subjects with a carefully orchestrated portrayal of their domestic environment and providing them with an aesthetic language through which to speak for themselves. Mostly, Karelin’s contribution was through photographic images, but his social persona was also exemplary of a provincial activist. A member of the local zemstvo and of the archival commission (it was his job to take pictures of ethnographic objects), he was present everywhere the cream of Nizhnii Novgorod society gathered. Furthermore, he joined others in the province in providing international exposure: his prize-winning expositions brought the most intimate details of provincial culture to an international audience.

Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev (1846–1903) A scientist now known as the founder of the discipline of soil science, Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev holds a no less special place in the pantheon of Nizhnii Novgorod purveyors.53 Dokuchaev was a popovich—the son of a provincial priest in Smolensk.54 A graduate of the Smolensk seminary, he came to Petersburg to study at the Theological Academy at the height of the reform era, in 1867. A mere three weeks spent frequenting the public lectures of St. Petersburg University professors in the shopping arcade off Nevsky Prospect brought about an abrupt shift in Dokuchaev’s intellectual orientation: he abandoned his theological studies in favor of natural history at the university. By 1870, his successes in geology and mineralogy earned him an appointment as curator of the Geological Collection at St. Petersburg University—a post he retained for a number of years as he progressed, with stellar success, up the academic ladder to appointments as associate (dotsent) and then professor at the university. In the post-reform period, the passion for scientific exploration turned inward, to the provinces of the Russian Empire, as well as outward, to its more exotic peripheries.55 This provincial version of expeditionary science was, if anything, more productive or at least more systematic than its more far-flung equivalent; relative proximity to the laboratories and universities of the capitals, the absence of physical danger, and familiarity of language and custom facilitated a kind of “thick description” of some Russian provinces, in geological and biological terms, that Przheval’skii or Semënov Tian-Shanskii could only have envied.56 Dokuchaev’s fate became linked to Nizhnii Novgorod as he worked on the book that established his professional reputation, The Russian Chernozem (1883). Responding to an invitation by the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo, Dokuchaev, accompanied by three student assistants, arrived on the scene in the summer of 1882 to begin a three-year intensive survey of the local soils. The expedition was also sponsored, at various points, by the

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St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, the Mineralogical Society, the Congress of Naturalists and Physicians, the Imperial Department of Forestry, and the Free Economic Society. The team members spent their days combing the province, describing every stream and forested glade, every field and every ravine. The result was an exhaustive description, published in fourteen volumes, not only of the soil itself but also of aspects of the flora and fauna; such content made it an invaluable resource and a first step on the path to Dokuchaev’s dream of reconstructing “all three Kingdoms of Nature in all their diversity.”57 In the Nizhnii Novgorod studies, Dokuchaev shows himself as an important founder of environmental studies as well as of soil science tout court.58 Dokuchaev’s work thus becomes for us an extraordinary repository of information about the provincial environment, as well as about aspects of local material culture.59 Although Dokuchaev was not a native Nizhnii Novgorodian, he formed a part of the provincial milieu that was home to Gatsiskii and Karelin as well. Inspired by a similar wish to go “to the interior,” he was equally inspired by the ideal of scientific education.60 Among his socially oriented projects were the founding of agricultural institutes, meteorological stations, and a network of natural history museums that would conserve, study, and publicize at the same time. These four characters by no means exhaust the list of local actors who speak to us through their activism and recording of local life. Close upon their heels follow, for example, Vladimir Korolenko, whose Pavlovo Sketches and memoir accounts of the 1891 famine in Lukoianov district provide a literary sketch of Nizhnii Novgorod material culture; such figures as A. A. Savel’ev, V. I. Snezhnevskii, and A. I. Zvezdin, who were Gatsiskii’s colleagues and successors in the archival commissions and elsewhere; the zemstvo statistician N. F. Annenskii, whose socioeconomic study supplemented Dokuchaev’s investigation of the soil; Dokuchaev’s student N. M. Sibirtsev, who remained in Nizhnii Novgorod and became an avid local activist; the priest L. Borisovskii, whose lovely sketch of Semënov woodworking captured on paper an entire way of life; Makarii, a bishop and the author of a history of the Nizhnii Novgorod ecclesiastical hierarchy; not to mention counterparts in neighboring provinces, such as N. Ia. Agafonov in Kazan, A. A. Dmitriev in Perm’, A. V. Smirnov in Vladimir, or the nameless dozens of researchers—some of them priests, teachers, and lawyers—who contributed vast materials to the statistical, meteorological, ethnographic, and historical researches initiated by the statistical committees, local museums, and archival commissions. Mel’nikov, Gatsiskii, Karelin, and Dokuchaev, like dozens mentioned and hundreds unmentioned in this book, helped create nineteenth-century knowledge and culture in Nizhnii Novgorod.

Structure of the Book Throughout this study, I have tried to avoid viewing the province in isolation—and thus avoid ascribing an artificial autonomy—and instead to see it in



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interaction with other regions and with the center. The structure of the book reflects this effort. The first six chapters together re-create the “organic province,” proceeding from a detailed investigation of the local environment, through the ways in which local residents coexisted with the natural world, and concluding in an effort to penetrate—through numbers, images, and biographies—the social universe of the Nizhnii Novgorod region. Even here, we observe a constant counterpoint between the observed natural environment and its observers— the nineteenth-century scientists and ethnographers who provide us with their data. The remaining chapters turn to the ways in which the province was inscribed in national patterns, identifying “structures”—largely given by the central administration—and the “visions,” sometimes overpowering the original central impetus, with which individuals and institutions responded on the local level. Specifically, these chapters deal with administration and politics, ecclesiastical structures, and aspects of cultural history. The final chapter, “The Idea of Province,” examines elements of a provincial identity as it emerged through the understanding of the local environment and the construction of a local past. Throughout the book, I have interspersed relatively general overviews with extremely specific case studies. Thus, the investigation of artisanal production illuminates an example of provincial economic life on a level of detail that, according to my general methodology, is the only possible means of truly apprehending and achieving a tactile understanding of “proto-industrial” manufacture. The chapter on the zemstvo cadaster, likewise, illustrates an aspect of local administration and permits us to see the precise manner in which zemstvo institutions, specifically in Nizhnii Novgorod, were given, and then arrogated to themselves, financial and allocational functions that in many other states remained the preserve of the central government. Only by understanding the very specific can we proceed back to new generalizations and a new apprehension of the Russian nineteenth century.  If, in our usual conception, nineteenth-century Russia appears as a vast, uniform, centralized state, socially and economically polarized, and primarily agrarian and resistant to change, the picture that emerges from the present study is quite different. Strategies of survival in an environment that was characterized by a constant slow flux produced a variety of occupations and social divisions completely impenetrable to official categories: instead of only peasants and landlords, we see a countryside peopled by wooden-spoon makers, fishnet weavers, itinerant icon sellers, and the middlemen and creditors who maintained this subsistence economy. Some forms of artisanal activity—notably sheepskin processing, steel products, and wooden implements—were successful enough to compete with factory production. Even within the province of Nizhnii Novgorod, we see stark local divisions and an exchange economy in which the rich southeastern black-soil provinces supplied the infertile northern forest areas with grain, while the latter kept the south provided with timber and wood

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products. Instead of a centrally administered state, we see the predominance of local initiative in the crafting of a cadaster, on an extremely high scientific level, in order to orchestrate the fair and equitable distribution of local taxes—an important function of the zemstvo. Moreover, the flourishing of local statistics, the collection of documents of local history, and the promotion of a local culture brought the province of Nizhnii Novgorod (itself the size of Württemberg in the newly unified German Reich) into synchrony with precisely analogous developments in regions of other European countries. Once we break Russia down into smaller entities, it starts to resemble its European counterparts in unexpected ways. Inevitably, the question of Russia’s place in the European nineteenth century then arises. Was it a “proto-industrial” society resembling that of other societies before the Industrial Revolution (and thus a society that was “lagging behind”)? Did its mode of organization point to a “third way” or special path? Or was it doomed to disaster, which then followed in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution? I have sought to free myself from these questions that haunted my own early acquaintance with Russian history. Yet, in doing so, there is a sort of answer: my goal has been quite simply to ask what was there, rather than what was not or what went wrong. Without denying that Russia remained more dependent upon its agrarian economy than its European counterparts, I propose that agrarian reform—as well as industrial revolution—can result in intensive social change and specifically in the emergence of groups of people who then work to further economic growth. Artisanal production and the scattering of factories throughout the countryside in Russia probably resembled pre-industrial France or England more than they did the landscapes described by Zola or Lawrence. But at the same time, many of the problems faced and the solutions proposed by people in the Russian provinces were synchronous with those encountered by their European contemporaries. As we will see, administrative structures, scientific advances, musical performances, and literary endeavors partook fully in the process of European culture in the midnineteenth century and not at some earlier time. Neither was Russia following an alternative path, nor was it doomed to disaster. Rather, the Russian province presents one variant, one particular combination of similar factors, in a general and diverse European pattern.

2 Soil, Forest, River THE ECOLOGY OF PROVINCIAL LIFE

O

n a summer day in 1847, the columnist of the Nizhnii Novgorod Gubernskie vedomosti observed as the major event of the week the sudden disappearance from the Volga’s mainstream of a large island that had been there as long as anyone could remember. Ensuing historical researches uncovered references to that same island, in the same place, at the time of the Razin rebellion and even in the Time of Troubles (the early seventeenth century).1 For experienced observers of the physical geography of the Volga basin, the length of this particular island’s lifespan may have occasioned more surprise than its spontaneous melting away; navigators of the Volga’s fairway were only too aware of the shifting location of shallow waters and changing patterns in the current itself.2 The image of the disappearing island can serve as a window on the shifting nature of the local ecology. That the island one day vanished from the middle of the Volga was symptomatic of an ecological system in constant slow flux, where sediments and shoals disappeared from one place only to reappear in the next, where a perfectly good piece of farmland could over a few years become crisscrossed by gullies, where spontaneous or anthropogenic fires could turn swaths of forest into steppe. In this chapter, I investigate the particular conditions of the human enterprise of “protecting and widening life” in a specific space-time dimension (what Mikhail Bakhtin would call a chronotope): the region roughly corresponding to the administrative boundaries of Nizhnii

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Novgorod province, in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century. In so doing, I hope to show that the exploration of specifically local ecology can pose serious challenges to some of the ways in which we are accustomed to think about the Russian economy, and Russian life in general. A bird’seye view surveys the central Eurasian plain in its vastness and uniformity and perceives Russia as (historians never tire of repeating) a “predominantly agrarian country.” But this classic statement would mean very little to many residents of Nizhnii Novgorod province: while most of the southeast corner was indeed agricultural, the environment in other parts of the province was rather favorable to trade and industry, especially handicrafts, and in many places grain had to be imported.3 It is worth reminding ourselves that people, in the end, live and function within a circumscribed environment, in constant interaction, alternately harmonious and conflictual, not with mythological constructions but with a perfectly concrete natural setting. We can think of the parameters of this interaction, in the Nizhnii Novgorod region, as defined by the trinity of soil, forest, and river.

Intersections The natural contours of areas and regions on the Eurasian plains are shaped by the flow of rivers and the orographic systems they sketch together with their tributaries.4 Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia is unevenly bifurcated by the Volga, which, upon joining with the Oka, flows directly east toward Kazan, where the current shifts abruptly and continues due south all the way to Astrakhan. Local residents traditionally thought of their region as divided into the “forests,” the famous trans-Volga woods (zavolzhskie lesa) north of the river, and the “hills,” the right-bank cliffs on which the city of Nizhnii Novgorod itself perches.5 This popular, and quite accurate, division found its way into the imagination of the reading public at large through the two parts of P. I. Mel’nikov-Pecherskii’s saga. If we take into account a further parameter—soil quality—we see that in fact the Volga carves out three distinct natural environments, all part of larger systems (plate 2). The region lies at the intersection of the forest and steppe zones and the black-soil and non-black-soil regions. Thus, the entire area north of the Volga (the Semënov, Makar’ev, and Vasil’ districts and part of Balakhna) plugs into the forests that stretch into Perm’ province and north and east into Siberia and the far northern territories. The southeastern corner (roughly corresponding to Kniaginin, Lukoianov, and Sergach districts) belongs to the central black-soil region that includes lands from Moscow to Briansk to Ukraine. The southwest, including Ardatov, Arzamas, and Gorbatov, as well as Nizhnii Novgorod district itself, belongs to the characteristic middle-Russian type that combines relatively poor soil with sparse forestation and resembles the neighboring Vladimir, Riazan’, and Tambov provinces.



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Soil Vasilii Dokuchaev’s monumental study, The Russian Chernozem (1883), proposed the classifications and analyses of soil types used by geographers and soil scientists to this day.6 The book, which definitively established Dokuchaev’s professional reputation, appeared midway through a three-year expedition, financed by the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo, to investigate in painstaking detail the soils and geological structures of that province; thus, it was Nizhnii Novgorod in particular that provided the most exhaustive material base for the discipline of soil science.7 The expedition produced fourteen volumes of data. Its most important result, however, was a soil map of the province, whose compactness and clarity led Dokuchaev to claim that “it must be considered perfectly usable and accessible practically even to a man of the people.”8 Thomas Kuhn has accustomed us to think of scientific revolutions in terms of a paradigm shift.9 Dokuchaev’s revolution in soil science is not one of the more glamorous of the nineteenth century, having been overshadowed even by the achievements of his internationally famous contemporary, Dmitrii Mendeleev. Still, it fits Kuhn’s pattern quite nicely: if, in previous descriptions of Nizhnii Novgorod’s soil contours, observers limited themselves to a rather primitive black-soil versus non-black-soil division, with a further tripartite division of each into good, medium, and poor, Dokuchaev was able to introduce a new methodological principle that, united with intensive fieldwork and laboratory analysis, yielded a vastly more nuanced and sophisticated portrait of the entire province and opened up the possibility of similar descriptions for the country— indeed any country—as a whole.10 This fundamental principle, articulated repeatedly, saw the soil “as an independent natural-historical body, resulting from the collective influence of a) subsoils, b) climate, c) flora and fauna, d) geological age, and e) relief of the locality.”11 The soil, in other words, lay at the intersection of a variety of apparently external factors; studying it seriously required bringing into play insights from mineralogy, geology, chemistry, physics, meteorology, biology, and geography. If it is possible to speak of a definitive result of this manylayered and complex approach, it would be multiplicity and variability. The rich examples of The Russian Chernozem would convince the reader “that each of the above-mentioned soil-fashioners (a–e) represents an endless series of degrees, variations, peculiarities etc., and in addition all of these differences and degrees are related to each other (separately of course for each soil-fashioner) through exceedingly refined and barely perceptible transitions.”12 Since all of these different factors—what Dokuchaev calls soil-fashioners—operated not in isolation but simultaneously, the resulting spectrum would be virtually infinite. Ultimately, a perfected science of the soil would be capable of arranging all existing soils in a continuous series, broken down by these five factors.

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In the meantime, on a practical level, Dokuchaev’s methodology resulted in a remarkably rich description of the particular province of Nizhnii Novgorod, in terms of the factors a, b, c, and e (geological age was held to be constant). Thus, to take just one example, on the territory just east of the district town of Kniaginin, one finds a remarkable alternation of heavy and middling loams, as well as strips of “valley” (dolinnyi) chernozem punctuated by islands of light loamy soils (suglinki) and bordered, farther away, by the richest soil in the region—“plateau” chernozem. Classification of the soils involved chemical analysis and calculation of the amount of organic material—humus—in the earth. Meandering rivers thread their way through this varied landscape, creating wide strips of floodland (poimennye pochvy). Dokuchaev’s team was further able to establish a novel and significant factor, namely, the relation between topsoils and subsoils. Thus, “normal” soils were the ones that had developed in an organic relation with their subsoils of clays, loess, or loam; “abnormal,” or alluvial, soils had been washed away from their original location to be deposited on alien subsoils. It was Dokuchaev’s contention that the lack of a genetic connection with the layers of earth underlying such soils produced an unhealthy combination: dark and beautiful chernozem looked the same even if it had been unhappily deposited on pure quartz sands or naked rocks, but it could not perform the same agricultural function.13 To take a radically different example: the most monotonous part of the province, in terms of soil alone, undoubtedly lies in Semënov and Makar’ev districts. Here one finds a broad swath of clay sands and quartz sands, with almost equally broad expanses of swampland, interrupted only by the flow of the Kerzhenets River with its shifting bed of floodlands. Even here, though, the team was able to locate occasional small patches of light loamy soils— information that would doubtless be of use to local agriculturists. What is interesting about all of this is that, though one might expect this endless diversity to create an excessively complex and hence unmanageable schema of local soil conditions, once all this information had been drafted on the map it took on a remarkable clarity and coherence. The map established clearly the three regions I have mentioned above and provided just enough detail and variation to prove helpful in soil management. The varied and fertile black earths of the southeast corner made this the richest agricultural district, middling soils in the west indicated a similar milieu to the subsistence agriculture of Tambov or Riazan’, while sands and bogs to the north implied an entirely different means of existence, for a relatively sparse population, in the trans-Volga forests. Unfortunately, insights into the real connections between quality of soil and type of agriculture are rare and need further investigation. Dokuchaev noted immediately that farming on sandy soil could, depending on a variety of other factors, be significantly more productive than on the best of black soils. A few anecdotal observations are even more fascinating. For example, the



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team observed that peasants typically planted summer, as opposed to winter, wheat on floodlands (poimennye luga): while they were subject to flooding in the spring, which would thus destroy winter crops, the moist soil in combination with sunshine provided an excellent environment for summer wheat.14 In Semënov, dominated by sandy soils, peasants were wont to say that boulders “grew” on their land: no matter how thoroughly they were removed, they would grow back within a few years, as the fragile topsoils were eroded.15 One final anecdotal observation: Dokuchaev’s group observed that residents inevitably spoke of the “best” lands in their particular district in the southeast; the sandiest and poorest were always in the northwest.16 This prompted the scientists to take local informants’ data with a grain of salt—a lesson that could well be applied to the government as well, with its remarkable propensity to trust landowneradministered questionnaires.17 A constant theme that emerges from this extraordinary investigation of local soil conditions, however, is the incessant mutability of the environment. In speaking of floodlands in particular, Dokuchaev summed up his perceptions of this world in flux: Let us not forget that if, through hundreds and thousands of analyses, we succeed in determining a precise evaluation of particular fragments of, say, one of the Volga’s water meadows [poima], even this exhaustive investigation will have meaning only for that particular moment, for that given year. Perhaps, next spring, and surely in a few years, where there were once sands we will find clays; where there was a swamp or lake there may be dry land; where there was a multitude of pits and hills there may be level territory; today’s most fertile water meadows will tomorrow be covered by flying sands, and so on.18

Dokuchaev cited the same sort of reasoning in justifying his initial hesitation in taking up the difficult task of investigating the Nizhnii Novgorod soils: “from many years of experience I was only too well aware that the investigation of soils and their subsoils is one of the most difficult tasks of geology: at every step you take you encounter a multitude of changes; with every observation comes a multitude of exceptions, requiring a vast amount of data from the most diverse fields of natural science to explain them.”19

Forest Romantic poets and positivist naturalists alike liked to speak of primordial forests that, in a distant era barely accessible to our imagination, covered virtually all the earth’s land masses (or, at the very least, Europe and America). In their own world, however, the same natural scientists and geographers observed, and carefully classified, five distinct natural “belts” of vegetation in Eurasia, moving from north to south—tundra, forest, forest-steppe, steppe, and desert. Conceptualizing these belts was one of Dokuchaev’s major achievements; they permit-

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ted a global view of ecology, identifying, for example, the Russian steppes and the Kansas prairies as part of the same general system.20 On a “micro” level, folk tradition confirmed the geographers’ classification by identifying a sharp division in the Nizhnii Novgorod region—which, according to the schema, lay precisely at the juncture of forest and steppe—between the “forests” stretching endlessly north of the Volga and the “hills” on the Volga’s right bank. Forests, however, are organic and highly susceptible to the effects of human activity; they are also among the earliest targets of exploitation for any human society. The rigid divisions of positivist science conceal a much more fluid transition between forest and steppe zones as well as a constant interaction between humans and forests that is as important as anything else in defining the zones’ boundaries. In practice, in other words, the structure of the Eurasian forests themselves was by the nineteenth century barely distinguishable from the effects of human interaction with them.21 The relation between people and forests in Russia was defined by two parameters: property and type of industry. The latter in particular represents a process of mutual determination, as people adapted their work to local conditions, while forests responded sharply (and sometimes permanently) to what people did with them. The vast expanse of northern pine forest that formed a great green swath across the vegetation map of nineteenth-century Eurasia came to an end right in the middle of Nizhnii Novgorod province. Thus, the northern districts of Semënov and Makar’ev, and to a lesser degree Balakhna, shared the thick coniferous forestation of Viatka, Vologda, Olonetsk, Perm’, and Arkhangel’sk provinces. Tangled undergrowth and treacherous bogs made the area barely accessible even at the height of summer or in deep winter. The relatively pristine Table 2.1. Forests and people District Ardatov Arzamas Balakhna Vasil’ Gorbatov Kniaginin Lukoianov Makar’ev Nizhnii Novgorod Semënov Sergach

Area (square versts) 5,288 3,307 3,689 3,366 3,190 2,596 5,128 6,568 3,208 5,889 2,808

Population (thousands) 134 142 108 120 119 114 188 98 193 99 155

Forested area Ownership: (thousands of Ownership: Ownership: peasant desiatinas) state private communes 260.2 72.9 179.9 7.4 87.3 35.7 38.1 13.5 162.8 37.4 106.8 18.6 75.8 11.7 52.3 11.8 81.3 8.8 62.3 10.2 28.1 0.2 21.1 6.8 148.6 78.2 33.6 36.8 472.6 311.0 142.1 19.5 62.1 300.0 34.7

0.2 197.1 5.5

48.6 69.2 20.3

13.3 33.7 8.9



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state of this region was reinforced by the fact that 80 percent of its forests (the figure is from 1890) were state owned.22 This meant that the forests were essentially “national park” territory, subject to an extensive series of regulatory measures passed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Forests were classified into commercial (korabel’nye: literally, shipbuilding) and nature reserves (zapovednye). Nicholas I’s regime established the Department of Forestry as a subdivision of the Ministry of State Property in 1837 and created the corpus of foresters; they were made responsible for districts, lesnichestva, that overlapped and intersected with the structure of the administrative districts proper.23 Thus, forests, which in the Petrine period were a matter primarily of military concern, passed into the sphere of civil regulation after a debate in which putting them under military jurisdiction was considered. Not surprisingly, Semënov and Makar’ev districts were quite sparsely populated. In 1890, with a total surface of 5,889 square versts, 300,000 desiatinas of them forested, Semënov had a population of just 99,000; Makar’ev, at 472,600 desiatinas of forest for a total of 6,568 square versts, was inhabited by 98,000 people (see table 2.1).24 The lives of those who did make their homes there were closely intertwined with the forest. Sandy soil and especially bogs made agriculture all but impossible; both districts were net importers of bread. Had residents been informed, however, that as denizens of a “predominantly agricultural country” they should feel impoverished and inadequate because of their low productivity, they would probably have been surprised. Mel’nikovPecherskii paints a vivid picture (as usual reproducing popular self-images) of the relative prosperity of trans-Volga (zavolzhskie) houses, their occupants’ pride in their cleanliness and disdain for the messy huts across the river, their leather boots (as opposed to birchbark lapti) and Sunday meat dinners, and the abundance of “thousanders” (though no “millioners”) in the region.25 As intelligentsia observers never tired of repeating, “Here the forest feeds the people.”26 Virtually all forms of industry in these northern districts were directly related to the forest itself. The Kerzhenets and Vetluga Rivers in Makar’ev district were deep enough to be used for floating timber, which was cut down for local use and for export. The rivers were also used to float tar and leather. Local kustar craftsmen made carriages, wheels, coffins, barrels, troughs, spoons and dishes, and shovels; they manufactured wood coal and turpentine.27 The town of Makar’ev itself was famous for the wooden trunks that more than one hundred local craftsmen then marketed at the fair, particularly to Armenian and Bukharan merchants. Semënov’s main product was painted wooden spoons, closely seconded by leather rosaries (lestovki) and boots and by the products of ironsmiths. Spoon manufacturing was equally important throughout the Semënov district, where in 1865 it entirely occupied the residents of twelve villages; wooden dishes, iron nails, and felt hats, boots, and galoshes followed.28 Already in the 1860s manufactures using wood were declining as forests became

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less immediately available. The kustar spoon-makers apparently posed a particular danger: the spoons required wood with a special grain pattern that only occurs near the root of the tree—so cutting down trees for this purpose damaged roots and soil irreparably.29 Such manufactures were accompanied by active trade and commerce, facilitated by the proximity both of the Volga itself and the annual “Makar’ev” Fair; the villages of Voskresenskoe and Gorodets were local trade centers.30 There were no significant factories in Makar’ev district with the exception of one state-owned distillery, while state peasants owned and operated two ironcutting plants in Semënov district. While various forms of wood manufacture undoubtedly caused the deep forests to recede, prompting “old-timers” to remark constantly on how much deeper and broader the forests had been in the first half of the century, such damage was relative: the Dokuchaev expedition in the 1880s calculated that 60 to 70 percent of this territory was still forested.31 Nizhnii Novgorod region, with the exception of Sergach and Kniaginin districts, was exempted from the 1888 forest protection law, since the forests were considered to be in relatively healthy condition. Relations between the forests and their human inhabitants were not nearly so felicitous south of the Volga. Here, anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of forests were privately owned. This meant that, over the course of the nineteenth century, the government had had no jurisdiction and no regulatory capacity with respect to forested property. Instead, in the reign of Nicholas I, private landowners had become the target of a campaign of persuasion. The Society for the Improvement of Forest Management, founded in 1832, was intended by “our benign Government,” in contrast to foreign governments that “constricted” and regulated private landowners, to implement “means of persuasion and encouragement to preserve forests.”32 The society, whose journal was eventually published under the auspices of the Free Economic Society, provided a forum for “enlightened” landowners to exchange experience on reforestation.33 It nevertheless became a commonplace that privately owned forests were more vulnerable to extinction than government-protected ones, but this axiom was not necessarily always accurate.34 Dokuchaev and his colleagues, for example, noted that the only extensive groves preserved in Kniaginin district were those belonging to the largest landowner, a Mr. Baryshnikov, who evidently appreciated their value.35 In any case, the government passed no legislation affecting privately owned forests until well after the Great Reforms, that is, after much such territory had changed hands. The Statute on the Preservation of Forests (1888) forbade landowners to cut down forests and instructed them to make plans for their conservation and replacement.36 Destructive forms of industry—which, apparently, do not require so­ phisticated technology—had begun at a very early date in some parts of the



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region. Already in the seventeenth century the area around Arzamas had become a center for potash manufacture, to be used, in turn, for making soap and glass. The process, which involved a two-stage burning of trees—first their reduction to ash, followed by spreading other trees with the resulting paste, and then burning those trees—permanently annihilated large stretches of forest. Such damage was extensive, since the region was a major exporter of potash.37 By the end of the eighteenth century, when the German scientist Peter Simon Pallas visited the region on an expedition commissioned by Catherine II, certain methods of potash manufacture had been made illegal.38 These potash plants, as well as those for tar manufacture, left their mark in the shape of barren stretches called maidan, reflected in local toponymy—Tol’skii Maidan, Vasil’ev Maidan, and so forth (the Turkic word meydan means “square”). The most systematically damaging form of activity for the forest, however, was agriculture. Thus, a survey of the state of forests in Nizhnii Novgorod province reported in 1836 that, in Arzamas, Lukoianov, Ardatov, Sergach, Kniaginin, and the south Volga segments of Makar’ev and Vasil’, “the forests can be considered to have been destroyed, with few exceptions”; the same report noted that residents of Nizhnii Novgorod district itself were forced to buy wood not only for construction but even for heating.39 The report, however, seems to have been a bit of an exaggeration, since measurements a half-century later still showed Ardatov district with more than 50 percent of its land forested.40 The 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka described the same district as heavily forested. Nonetheless, in the southeast corner of the province, which included Lukoianov, Sergach, and Kniaginin districts—the only region where agriculture predominated—deforestation was indeed quite serious by century’s end. The Dokuchaev expedition reported a complete lack of forests in the northern parts of Lukoianov and severe deforestation in Sergach, though they attributed the latter to activity in only the previous thirty to forty years; they assessed Kniaginin as completely deforested, with only tiny groves remaining on individual owners’ land.41 Official policy reflected this evaluation by designating Kniaginin and Sergach as the only districts in the region subject to the 1888 forest preservation law. Even so, Dokuchaev and his team waxed poetic (“the horses’ bells echoed, lonely, through the forest”) in their description of the southwestern part of Lukoianov, and along the left bank of the Alatyr’ River: here they still found uninterrupted (sploshnoi) forest, the remnants of the oncefamous ship groves, where eventually the road became impassable because of the undergrowth and they felt that they were leaving human habitation behind.42 Not all deforestation, of course, resulted from human agency. Most notably, fires periodically destroyed large sections of forest. One fire raged through Penza and the south of Nizhnii Novgorod province in 1840; and there was some effort to blame the 1891 famine on fires the preceding summer.43 In Nizhnii Novgorod, as in the neighboring central Russian provinces of Riazan’, Tambov, Voronezh,

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and Saratov, fires could be frequent and all-consuming; there were more than one thousand conflagrations reported in 1883.44 It is difficult to trace the effects of forest conservation efforts in anything but an anecdotal manner. Thus, in Vasil’ district, statisticians in 1865 reported that forest-related industries such as wood carving and potash and tar manufacture had experienced a decline because of landowners’ (among them one of the largest, the Sheremetevs) restrictions on the use of forests.45 Prince Kochubei apparently experimented with the deliberate planting of pine trees and even oak in Lukoianov district, but with little success.46 The Forestry Journal reported reforestation projects in Kamenskaia dacha and in the Chernoretsk forest just south of the town of Nizhnii Novgorod.47 Perhaps the most interesting of such efforts was the engineer A. A. Kassel’s successful project to overcome the formation of ravines on his property, between Arzamas and Kniaginin districts, by planting trees along their banks.48 As a consequence of the 1888 law, landowners in Kniaginin and Sergach were required to plant trees on their property.49 My point here is not to show that the standard division of Nizhnii Novgorod province into “forests” and “hills” or, indeed, the geographer’s postulation of distinct vegetation “belts” that broke along the middle of the province is incorrect. Rather, these divisions, accurate in themselves, are in part the result of a more fluid process of constant interaction and mutual shaping of human activity and the life of the forest. If a hypothetical “pre-cultural” forest might have progressed gradually, moving northward, from steppelands to dense pine forests, the actual forest, sharply divided by the flow of the Volga, reflected (as well as shaped) the structure of property rights (state versus private) and, even more importantly, the types of industry (kustar versus agriculture, potash manufacture, etc.) that dominated in particular regions. Thus, the layout of the forest itself corresponded exactly to the divisions of human enterprise: thick and healthy in the scantily populated monastic refuges and kustar areas of the north; devastated, by 1900, in the heavily agricultural region in the southeast; and mixed in the “middling” districts of Nizhnii Novgorod, Ardatov, and the southwest generally.

River According to nineteenth-century geographical science, river systems were the key to defining the contours of natural regions or environments. Thus, the hypsometric map of A. Tillo from the 1880s charted river basins and elevation levels, captured new fieldwork on river mouths and deltas, and depicted a sophisticated system of watersheds and divides.50 At about the same time, Dokuchaev and his team also placed “oro- and hydrographic systems” at the center of their investigation of Nizhnii Novgorod province; indeed, it was practical considerations, and the insistence of the zemstvo, that forced them to reformulate their study district by district, instead of according to the natural



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Fig. 2.1. River systems: the Vetluga and tributaries. From V. V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949–1961).

boundaries sketched by river systems.51 If the Nizhnii Novgorod region taken as a whole fit into the large expanse of territory known to geographers as the Volga Basin, the approximately 157 smaller rivers and streams inside the province defined a plurality of micro-environments that differed from each other in soil, vegetation, and contour. The two major rivers in the north, the Kerzhenets and Vetluga, flowed directly, if crookedly, from north to south into the Volga; the smaller Uzola and Linda, to their west, followed a similar trajectory. All four, as well as the many smaller rivers in the region, were fed mostly by the estimated one thousand

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square versts of bogs (as opposed to just one hundred on the “hilly” side) and the many lakes that covered much of the region’s sandy soil with a permanent layer of water.52 The Kerzhenets and Vetluga, whose very names evoked the deep, barely accessible forests through which they flowed, were navigable and used to float timber and transport pelts and furs. The picture on the “hilly” south side was different, and a good deal more complicated. Here, the larger rivers—among them the Kud’ma, Sundovik, Imza, Serëzha, Tesha, P’iana, and Alatyr’—tended to flow east or west, parallel to the confluence of the Volga and Oka. The relief in the landscape, although lacking any really large hills, contributed to the rivers’ circuitous, meandering pattern. The most interesting example was the river P’iana in Sergach and Lukoianov districts, which flowed both east and west, abruptly changing direction around its own watershed just about as it entered Arzamas district. Its name, incidentally, reflects local evaluation of this behavior; P’iana means “tipsy” in English.53 The Dokuchaev expedition identified the major watersheds in the southeast of the province: (1) Alatyr’-Tesha-P’iana, (2) Volga-P’iana, and (3) P’iana-P’iana; they were echoed by a variety of smaller divides where the flow of streams and small rivers diverged. The rivers and their watersheds sketched distinct micro-environments: the stretch south of the west-flowing branch of the P’iana, for example, could be described as a broad, gentle slope descending from south to north and blending with the springtime riverbed; parts of it formed a plateau that was the watershed, with the Alatyr’ River to the south. The area in between the river’s two opposite-flowing branches formed a high plateau with the watershed bisecting it closer to the south; one side sloped down abruptly to the north, forming the rough cliffs of the P’iana’s northern fork, while the southern slope was wavy but also ended in clifflike banks. North of the entire river was a large, wavy, slightly raised segment that descended gently to the water.54 All of the larger rivers, in the province as a whole, had at least double riverbeds: the broad banks carved by the high water of springtime (polovodie), which turned into meadows (poimennye luga) during the rest of the year, and the narrower path of late summer and autumn, which, however, might vary from year to year as the river settled back into a different pattern in the soft soil. The banks themselves, which tended to be uneven—high cliffs on one side and low meadowland on the other—could also be terraced, reflecting varying water levels at different times. The meandering, slow-flowing Russian rivers almost inevitably have one high bank (the right) and one low one; the nineteenth-century naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer explained this phenomenon by relating the current of longitudinal rivers to the earth’s rotation.55 In addition to the large rivers, an innumerable number of tributaries formed a vast natural irrigation system in the region. These smaller streams and rivers were even more unpredictable than the larger ones, choosing different paths in different



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Fig. 2.2. The Volga in local perspective.

From V. V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949–1961).

years; many of the smaller ones dried up altogether in summertime. This volatility prompted observers to note the blurring of the distinction, in Russian conditions, between a river and a ravine or gully.56 In the local context, the Volga itself looks rather less like the mighty current of song and legend, pushing forward all the way to the Caspian, and more like an enlarged version of the uncertain, meandering streams and rivers on which it depended for its sustenance. The disappearing island with which this chapter began was integral to the river’s ecological system, in which mudslides, silt and sand deposits, and a generally very high sediment load in the water created a constantly shifting pattern of uncertain land masses and eddying currents. The Volga’s current eroded the high right bank, creating mudslides and islands that, in turn, pushed it back to the left until obstacles encountered sent the current cross-river again; this happened even where the river flowed from west to east, thus contradicting Baer’s law that only longitudinally flowing rivers could shift in relation to the earth’s rotation. Repetition of this pattern—the formation of islands and shoals alongside the right bank—could result in the gradual alienation of the riverbed from the right-bank heights where towns tended to be located: Saratov, Simbirsk, and to some degree Tsaritsyn had already suffered this undesirable fate.57 Mudslides along the Volga’s right bank in Nizhnii

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Novgorod had caused the entire Pecherskii Monastery to slip into the river in 1596, while one of the kremlin churches suffered a similar fate in 1845. Mostly, however, the formation of islands resulted from the confluence of two rivers—most notably, in Nizhnii Novgorod province, the Volga and the Oka, a river so mighty that Viktor Ragozin adduced very serious arguments that, below Nizhnii, the Volga was the Oka: in other words, the Volga was the Oka’s tributary and not the other way around.58 In either case, their meeting produced formidable enough sedimentary deposits to form three islands—Borovskii, Kozii or Podnovskii (famous for excellent pickles exported to other areas, along with the cabbage grown there), and Pecherskii.59 The island mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, across from the Siberian wharf, had once formed a fourth; Ragozin traced its history further, remarking that the vanished island had reappeared farther downstream, to be washed away again in the early 1860s. Human intervention—the reinforcement of the wharf on the spit—artificially redirected the current, and, in 1868, yet another island gradually appeared in the meadows across the river, so that, just one year later, not only adult but also adolescent bathers could wade across to the shoals. By the 1880s, a sandy beach covered what had once been a navigable channel.60 Farther downstream, just beyond the Oka, islands deposited next to each other consistently over time formed grivy (literally, “manes”), creating the expansive Artem’ev meadows along the Volga’s right bank; in a different pattern, the river Kud’ma flowed parallel to the Volga before merging with it, depositing a triangular delta at its mouth. Partial islands and less clearly shaped sedimentary deposits created an entire lexicon: pobochiny were shallows parallel to the river’s flow, an oseredok was a sandy deposit in the middle of the river, and an island could have an ukhvost’e (an end following the direction of the current) and a priverkh (which faced into the current). Along with island formation and erosion, a second peculiarity of the Volga, as of many rivers, was the seasonal variation in water level. “We are too accustomed,” wrote the climatologist and geographer A. I. Voeikov in 1884, “to our spring high waters [polovodie] to appreciate their significance; whereas it is without doubt immense in its scale, in its regularity, and in its influence on popular life.”61 Voeikov pinpointed the consistency of the spring waters, dependent on the melting of snow, as the distinguishing feature of Russian rivers that set them apart from European and North American rivers such as the Rhine or the Mississippi.62 According to the classification system Voeikov devised, the Volga was the type of river with “spring high waters as a result of melting snow in spring or early summer, in which at the same time a significant amount of water is provided by rain.”63 The implications were that May measurements of water level in Nizhnii Novgorod yielded an extremely sharp spike, with levels dropping rapidly within a month. This pattern differed radically from the patterns of European rivers like the Rhine or Tiber, which showed more or less consistent water levels throughout the year. Thus, the Volga



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possessed at least two and sometimes a plurality of riverbeds, representing its water level in different seasons. A significant and often underestimated result, also noted by Voeikov, was the virtual absence of destructive floods in Russia: the extreme regularity and predictability of high waters made it quite simple to avoid construction or farming in areas subject to flooding, or at least to forestall major damage. Astrakhan on the Volga’s Caspian delta, for example, could receive flood warnings, by telegraph, two weeks in advance.64 The Volga’s multiple riverbeds yielded a whole vocabulary of physical concepts describing this volatility and changeability within established limits (marked in green on Dokuchaev’s map; see plate 2) and amplifying the fluvial lexicon established above. Polovodie designated the regular flooding that occurred in May—as opposed to mezhen’, which referred to the opposite extreme of low waters.65 A poima (literally, from the verb poimat’, meaning “to catch”) “caught” expanding waters in its pouch-like shape in springtime, forming lowland meadows or expanses alongside the river’s course.66 These resulting meadows were frequently referred to as poimennye luga. Dokuchaev also identified multiple terraces in the segment of the river he studied. In one location he noted three such levels: the level of the poima itself—the first terrace; a second terrace above the meadow (nadlugovaia terrasa); and the base of the old riverbank (drevnii bereg) that formed a third terrace.67 The most fascinating and unusual formation, however, was the staritsa, whose romantic-sounding name designated the previous or “ancient” course of the river, now abandoned.68 Particularly common on the lower left bank of Russian rivers, the staritsy filled up with water in the spring flooding—thus, incidentally, serving as natural and very rich fish traps.69 A zaton was a quiet spot abandoned by the current; a prorva was formed when the current broke through back to its old riverbed; a volozhok (“little Volga”) was a dead-end arm off the main river; and a log was a mini-lake. A iar was an unexpectedly steep part of the lower bank created by erosion; a rynok was a peninsular projection into the river. A cross-section of the Volga, taken, for example, in a slice between the villages of Iurkino and Isady in Makar’ev district (where the fair was located before the grounds burned down in 1817), yields a remarkable and very un-grandiose pattern of bends, false starts, branches, pockets, and archaic beds.70 Much of the land within the poima could be used, with caution, for agricultural purposes. Thus, the theme of constant flux characterizes the river environment even more than it does the soil, and the disappearing island translates from image into quite literal reality. The implications, in this case, were of course for navigation. In the case of smaller rivers, this meant only seasonal navigability, while charting the Volga’s fairway was a task of formidable difficulty and necessitated constant attention to change. A map prepared by Ragozin for his book was ready to go to press when, in the spring of 1880, it became clear that island formations at Nizhnii had changed so much that it had to be completely

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redrawn.71 Anne Fitzpatrick noted that shoals and periodic low water levels were in part responsible for delays of as much as two years in the transit of goods for the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair.72 Still, it was the river economy that transcended the narrow boundaries of the province itself and transformed Nizhnii Novgorod into a link between Europe and Asia. Locally, rivers were the backbone of a rich and productive fishing industry, the smaller rivers provided a local outlet for kustar industry, while the appalling institution of burlachestvo (human-powered barge-hauling) was a source of income for a local work force.73 The famous Sormovo shipyards—a by-product of the river economy—already employed large numbers of workers by the 1840s. But through year-round commerce, exploding in the summer months with the influx of merchants and traders from all of Eurasia to the internationally renowned Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, the Oka (heavier in commercial trade) and the Volga were responsible for imprinting the province on the national consciousness as “Russia’s pocket”—the third hypostasis along with St. Petersburg’s “mind” and Moscow’s “heart.”74

Ravines The mystery of the vanishing island with which this chapter opened has thus far been only partially solved: if the island—now successfully deiconologized— provided an emblem for the ecological processes characteristic of the provincial landscape, the key to its spontaneous disappearance (as well as its formation) lies in another ecological occurrence. This is the ravine or gully—a phenomenon even more omnipresent on the Eurasian plain.75 We might think of ravines as the crucial environmental formation linking the natural worlds of soil, forest, and river. To the casual traveler through European Russia, the gullies and ravines that everywhere carve paths through the soft slopes of the landscape might seem a mere picturesque detail. In the classic image of a Russian provincial town or village, houses nestle along the banks of a ravine rather than being laid out along a flat surface; sometimes, a regularly planned town seems to spill over its borders into surrounding gullies. Nineteenth-century naturalists, however, with their passion for precise observation and description, not only created an exhaustive picture of the fine network of ravines that crisscrossed territories like Nizhnii Novgorod province but also pinpointed their critical significance for a peculiarly Russian ecology—for the relation, in other words, between human beings and this particular environment.76 Ravines can form when a stream of water meets even the smallest crack or indentation in the earth’s surface; once the initial path has been carved, the process continues almost automatically as new streams of water are attracted to the existing bed.77 The ravine might “crawl backward,” digging its way progressively deeper into a river- or streambank, or spill down an incline from a bog or pond.78 Scientists agreed that Russia provided a remarkable convergence



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Fig. 2.3. Ravine depositing silt in a river.

From E. E. Kern, Ovragi, ikh zakreplenie, oblesenie i zapruzhivanie, 5th ed. (St. Petersburg, 1913).

of factors favorable to the formation and development of ravines: once covered by the immense Scandinavian-Russian ice sheet, the territories of central Russia were characterized by soft, loose soil and gently sloping hills. In addition, there was a tendency for the top layer of diluvial soil to consist of clay and the layer just below it, of sand—which contributed to the ravines’ rapid expansion. The “continental” climate—the sharp contrast between summer heat and winter cold, together with massive spring flooding—provided an additional stimulus.79 The ravine, sometimes alone and sometimes as part of a “system” rather like the tributaries of a river, formed a remarkable link among otherwise distinct segments of the environment. In time of rainfall, it served as a funnel for loose topsoil and sand, which it washed off and deposited at its mouth, forming a soft mound. If the mouth opened into a river, the soil or sand could create deltas that sometimes evolved into islands, thus changing the flow of the river itself. The ravine interacted as intensively with the forest: the constant erosion of the soil stopped as soon as the ravine grew over with trees and undergrowth, developing into a gully (balka); conversely, deforestation facilitated the mobility of the soil and the concomitant erosion of the landscape. The implications of this natural phenomenon for the human economy were immense. On one hand, human cultivation of the soil became an integral part of the natural drama of ravine formation. So far as nature was concerned, there was no difference between a spontaneously appearing crack in the earth and, for example, a furrow plowed by human hands. Thus, scientists hypothesized that the southern steppes had indeed reached an equilibrium in which the formation

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of gullies and ravines had come to a standstill—until intensive cultivation opened the process up anew.80 Among the types of human activity that E. E. Kern cited as tending to facilitate the expansion of ravines were cutting down forests and removing stumps along the banks of ravines for cultivation, plowing steep slopes, tracing dividing furrows between parcels of land, digging ditches, pasturing cattle on slopes, plowing up small “saucer-like” pits that sometimes occurred in cultivated fields, laying rails, creating inclines for harvesting logs, and general carelessness attributed to peasant agriculturalists.81 Almost anything people did, in other words, to “expand and widen life,” as Bulgakov put it, had the paradoxical effect of contributing to the life of ravines. On the other hand, the ravines, in turn, seemed bent on constricting the life of humans. They carried away fertile topsoil, drained off rainwater necessary for irrigation and replenishing underground water sources, increased the earth surface susceptible to evaporation, dumped sand onto arable land, and cut across and destroyed roads.82 Houses were constructed inside the gullies themselves not to create a pretty picture for the above-mentioned casual traveler but in a desperate attempt to free up level territory for plowlands; the ravines were not a pleasant place to live, often doubling as garbage dumps and subject to frequent mudslides. Many such settlements still have no plumbing. The destructive effects of ravines led residents of provincial Russia to anthropomorphize them, seeing in them an implacable enemy to agriculture. The title of Vladimir Soloviev’s ecologically conscious essay, “Vrag s Vostoka” (The Enemy from the East), written after the 1891 famine and lamenting invasion by destructive sands, gives this popular perception literary form with a pun: the word vrag means “enemy” but was also the folk name for ravine (ovrag).83 The larger ones were called, for example, Zadnii Vrag and Vostochnyi Vrag. By about 1900, the literature on how to halt the formation of ravines was extensive: Kern’s book about ravines went through five editions by 1913, joining numerous similar publications.84 Such preventive measures were generally based on some combination of constructing dams and planting trees.85 The point of ravine control may have been not to interfere too much with this natural process because it was essential to the shifting nature of landscape and would wreck the balance of soil, forest, and river. Ravines were prevalent in the hilly right-bank part of Nizhnii Novgorod province. V. I. Meller, traveling between Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas in the 1870s, described several deep gullies that, in the space of nine years, managed to traverse and entirely cut off the local postal road.86 Sometimes, ravines could disappear as rapidly as they formed: the Dokuchaev expedition in Lukoianov district in 1882 expected to find a big ravine by the name Zadnii Vrag, noted by Meller just seven years earlier. By the time they arrived, however, it had entirely filled and was covered in vegetation. They were obliged to turn for their soil samples to a large nearby ravine that measured eight sazhens in depth or about



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seventeen meters.87 In Kniaginin district the ravines tended to be extremely deep (fifteen to twenty sazhens, or potentially more than forty meters) and narrow, with steep sides and overhangs. Their upper reaches usually had several branches, all of which grew so quickly that they intruded deeply onto agricultural land, forcing the peasants to secure them artificially. Along the P’iana-Volga divide, the banks of ravines were uneven: one side was flat, shady, and covered with growth, while the other—generally the side facing south— was steep and bathed in sunlight, making it subject to cracking and slides. The sides of ravines were virtually the only place where wildflowers remained in the heavily exploited district.88 In Sergach, ravines were shallower and tended to congregate along steep riverbanks; in areas of varied soil they might reach a depth of ten sazhens and tended to grow very quickly, while Jurassic-period soils (which were usually clayey and relatively impermeable) were more conducive to wide, shallow, overgrown gullies constantly broadened by collapsing sides.89 The most remarkable ravine observed by the Dokuchaev expedition, however, was the huge Iavleika, just north of the town of Sergach. It was twenty-five to thirty sazhens in depth with very gently sloping sides that were overgrown with forest. Its explorers were particularly struck by one of the vast mudslides along its banks—a veritable flow of earth in waves, with no cracks at all, “reminding us perfectly of those avalanches of snow that sometimes form in the spring on flat roofs and on the soft slopes of hills.”90 Similar slides, according to local residents, had become increasingly frequent as a result of deforestation; they masked the geological layers of sand and clay deposits on top and the rocky yellow, pink, blue, and black Jurassic clays underneath. A second ravine crawled through the very center of Sergach itself.91 In the province at large, Dokuchaev classified three types of ravines. The first, to which the Iavleika belonged, were deep but with gently sloping sides and lined with slides, with an active streambed only at the very bottom; these generally occurred in the eastern parts of divides, in Jurassic-period soils. The second, forced to carve a path in harder soils and even rock of diverse origin, were deep and narrow, with terraced banks, and they tended to form in the western portions of the same water divide. Finally, a third type occurred in sandy soils and were shallow, with gentle banks covered in undergrowth; these were more likely to become overgrown with trees and disappear than to deepen and expand.92  Ravines stood at the crux of the ecological balance in Nizhnii Novgorod province, just as they did in much of European Russia. The damage they were capable of wreaking prompted agriculturists to try to secure them, cover them with forest, or build preventive dams along their floors. Yet their function was far from purely negative. Ravines were a fact of life and force of nature: they were in fact responsible for the very shape of the Russian countryside, for redistributing

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soils and minerals, and even, it was argued, for creating beds in which rivers would later flow. They were an essential part of the continually shifting landscape, carving contours in the earth only to be covered up once more a decade later, or deepening and growing branches, occasionally even joining together formerly separate rivers or streams. The omnipresence of ravines signified a particular approach to economy by the humans who inhabited their territory: one needed to work with them, restrain their destructive capacity, and try not to stimulate their formation artificially, while accepting their inevitability in a landscape that depended on them for its constant modification and recontouring. This implied a careful, relatively small-scale and mobile agriculture that could, like the ravines themselves, change its locus as the contours of the earth shifted.  I have tried here to conceptualize the local ecology in terms of two images—the “disappearing island” and the ravine. When superimposed on the soil, forest, and river, they help us, in our cognitive process, to see not just trees, rocks, and streams but to appreciate their interrelation and mutability over time. Time, in this particular setting, is neither the longue durée of Braudelian geologic history nor a catastrophic flash but something in between. A year, or several years, might be enough for a ravine to damage irreparably a given plot of land or for an island to alter the course of a steamboat plying the Volga. Both the island and the ravine, of course, are more than just heuristic images; I have tried to show that they were the symbolic, and can be thought of as the material, crux of the local ecological system. They result from and represent the shifting, changing nature of the environment. In constructing this picture I have found myself drawing heavily upon the researches of nineteenth-century scientists. Thus, this chapter has been not only about the environment itself but about the fascinating and wideranging contemporary perceptions of it. While the relatively low profile of soil and atmospheric science has meant that Dokuchaev and Voeikov have not yet made it into the international canon of “great names” as did, for example, their contemporaries Mendeleev or Pavlov, their work was part of a conceptual revolution in geographically related sciences that might be described as the explosion of rigid categories and the discovery of multiplicity, changeability, and infinity in the natural environment. In this sense, their work was at once premodern(ist)—in its expansion ad infinitum of the scientific capacity for cataloguing and classification—and what we would call postmodern. Dokuchaev’s introduction of a single principle that could yield an infinite multiplicity of soil types resembles remarkably the conceptualizing possibilities of fractal geometry or chaos theory. Both figures became icons of Soviet culture, with its obsession with the transformation of nature (for the wrong reasons, from today’s perspective).



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Most significant, though, is the incipient picture of human interaction with the natural environment that emerges from this brief study. Each of the categories I have explored was connected with a particular type of economic activity: if the soil was associated with agriculture, and the forest with kustar and manufacture, the rivers were a natural artery for trade and fishing.93 Nizhnii Novgorod province more than fulfilled its promise in the last category: its famous fair brought merchants from neighboring provinces as well as from lands as distant as Bukhara, Armenia, Persia, and China in a yearly colorful confluence of East and West. The next question would be: how does economy (oikonomia, khoziaistvo) emerge from the interaction of people with the environment? I will leave to succeeding chapters the task of exploring some of the multiple implications of local ecology for economic history. Still, it is possible to propose a few preliminary observations and to demarcate some areas for future investigation. First, the present study yields some insight into the nature of Russian agriculture itself. While we are accustomed to thinking that private property is the key foundation of a healthy society—the corollary being that the Stolypin reforms were Russia’s future—in living with ravines for a while, we might begin to understand the potential rationality of communal agriculture. The ever-present risk of erosion of one’s entire piece of land would naturally make the possibility of exchange (peredel) highly desirable from the perspective of the small peasant agriculturalist.94 The dynamic character of ravines, erosion, and landslides periodically redistributed soil, and peasant communes, in turn, periodically redistributed land. Second, what is fascinating here is the harmonious balance between three very different types of economic activity that defined the region. Examined in a local dimension, the classic statement about Russia as above all an agrarian country loses any precision of meaning. While agriculture did predominate in the southeast corner, trade and industry and especially handicrafts evolved naturally in the north and southwest; in fact, the heavily forested northern districts had to import grain while exporting manufactured goods. Neither kustar nor “real” industry—such as the famous Sormovo shipyards, which housed some of the first workers’ communities in Russia (1840s)—can possibly be considered as “auxiliary” to a mythically primary activity of agriculture: for many people, the high levels of skill and technique required for all kinds of leather, wood, and metal manufactures were the source of professional pride as well as a dominant source of income.95 The same, of course, goes for trade: it barely needs mentioning, in the home of the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, that Nizhnii Novgorod’s mercantile infrastructure was extremely sophisticated. To the outside eye, the city came alive from June to September; yet in the life of the province, the merchant estate set the terms and the tone, year round. The fantastically decorated mansions lining the Volga (Oka?) embankment, the

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sophisticated charity networks, the key voices in the city duma (composed, as in the rest of Russia, of the urban estates—that is, merchants and meshchanstvo), and the professional connections that sealed the deals on Astrakhan dried fish and Kiakhta tea, were all the making of local traders—some of them, even millionaires, still listed by the government as peasants.96 Everything in Nizhnii was about trade, from lavish balls to itinerant Old Believer icon sellers.97

3 Urban Topography

W

hat was the relationship between urban settlements and the landscape in which they were inscribed? The question of the nature and essence of Russian cities continues to elicit a lively discussion. According to A. N. Zorin, historians tend to emphasize one or another key characteristic: the “picturesque” or the “regular.”1 Physical appearance, of course, reflects the function and historical origins of the particular settlement. These various functions and raisons d’être could include military, commercial, religious, or purely administrative elements. Within Nizhnii Novgorod province, it seems most productive, echoing Zorin, to group towns and similar agglomerations along two axes: organic, or historical, on one hand; and planned, or created, on the other. Thus, the provincial capital itself, as well as Arzamas, Balakhna, and Vasil’-Sursk, evolved historically and also were designated provincial and district capitals under Catherine II. The remainder of the officially appointed district capitals— Ardatov, Lukoianov, Sergach, Kniaginin, Makar’ev, Semënov, and Gorbatov (as well as the “nonadministrative” towns of Perevoz and Pochinki)—were legislated into existence more or less out of thin air in 1779.2 Meanwhile, a half dozen or so towns, with every appearance of a city—most notably Gorodets, Lyskovo, Pavlovo, Murashkino, Sormovo—were never honored with that title and hence represent the “organic” principle, unadulterated with administrative functions.3 It is important to note that the word city (gorod) has a very particular meaning in the Russian Empire.4 The word legally denoted only provincial and district 45

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capitals—settlements, in other words, with an administrative function—and a few “nonadministrative” towns. But such prosperous and populous “settled areas” as Lyskovo or Murashkino were designated as “villages.” The implications for measuring urbanization are clear: counting only inhabitants of officially designated cities neglects the significant numbers of individuals who lived in vibrant commercial centers with, say, a bustling port or a main street lined with mansions, while some recognized “cities” might in fact comprise nothing but a couple of desolate administrative buildings. The division I propose in this chapter—organic/historical, planned/created, and mixed—is meant to create a more nuanced picture of the setting in which provincial residents’ lives unfolded.

The Provincial Capital The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central government, local authorities, and the town population itself. The history of urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with Catherine the Great’s Charter to the Towns (1785), which not only bestowed certain privileges upon town dwellers but also converted frontier outposts and administrative centers into “proper” imperial cities with regular street plans and municipal institutions.5 Yet Catherine’s quest for the well-ordered city had achieved only partial realization by the time of Nicholas I’s visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1834—an event that immediately entered into local lore and whose story continues to be told to this day. Stopping in Nizhnii on his tour of the realm, the tsar expressed horror and dismay at how little it resembled a real city. In defiance of the regularized city plan on paper, the buildings along even the main streets jutted out unevenly and at irregular intervals, resembling an assemblage of manors (usad’by) merely more tightly spaced than they would have been in the countryside.6 Not only had residents obliviously built their houses along the lovely Volga embankment with their backs to the river, but they also used the gentle slope of the bluff itself as a garbage dump. Nicholas’s solution both typified his mania for discipline and symmetry (one of his passions was the planning of prison buildings) and his desire to bring the vast imperial reaches under central control.7 An 1836 decree gave property owners three years to erect a wooden house on any vacant lots in the city center, or five for a stone one, under the supervision of an architectural commission that was in turn subject to the Department of Military Colonies in St. Petersburg. Noncompliance meant simply that the empty lot would be auctioned off.8 The riverbank houses were physically turned around and arranged in a straight line. In this fashion the central government enlisted the cooperation of the town residents, twisting their arms into conforming to its vision.9 At the end of the nineteenth century, though, a glance at detailed street plans reveals that Nizhnii’s streets remained



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lined not with single buildings, as in a European or American city, but with whole manors: a main house and several outbuildings grouped around a courtyard—much as the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) had described Moscow at midcentury.10 The regular city plan required a victory not only over the undisciplined residents but over nature itself. The central part of Nizhnii Novgorod was located on the quite substantial hill that was created by the intersecting currents of the Oka and the Volga. Even in this felicitous location—and the provincial capital occupied pride of place—residents were hardly immune to the risk of mudslides and the omnipresent gullies and ravines. The construction of Nizhnii Novgorod involved a combination of careful coexistence with, and struggle against, the ravines: some were stabilized and lined with houses, while others, including in the very center of the city, had to be filled in or bridged with dams (plate 3). In about 1860, Nizhnii Novgorod was divided into four sections, each with a distinctive flavor and way of life. Atop the bluff lay the two kremlin sections, radiating out from the fifteenth-century kremlin located exactly at the intersection of the two rivers. The formidable fortress, constructed as Muscovy’s defense against the Tatars, eventually served as the jumping-off point for the conquest of Kazan in 1552. Nizhnii Novgorod witnessed military action only once, when a stray Tatar murza’s bullet aimed at the walls landed along the Oka embankment and was commemorated by the construction of the small but lovely Church of the Assumption, which, curiously, Soviet-era urban developers merely concealed behind a prestigious apartment building bearing the slogan, “Peace to the World!” (Miru—mir!).11 The expansive square around the kremlin accommodated the city’s most majestic institutions: the Church of the Annunciation (currently a park), the theological seminary, the city duma, and, just behind, the Alexander Boys’ High School. Pokrovskaia Street, universally known as Pokrovka, was Nizhnii’s answer to Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect. Walking up the busy shop-lined thoroughfare from the kremlin, one would pass the houses of the most distinguished citizens and soon reach the city theater—for many years the sole focus of local cultural life—as well as the governor’s residence and the national bank. The richest merchants built their elaborate stucco-embellished mansions along the embankment overlooking the Volga. But more intriguing was the quieter Pecherskaia Street just behind the Volga embankment. In the 1840s, the ethnographer and lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ and Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov lived next door to each other on this street. Dal’ drew heavily on local materials for his dictionary, while Mel’nikov’s pseudonym, Andrei Pecherskii, was taken from the street name. The pedantic record-keeping of the nineteenth century makes it possible to trace owners of every house until 1917. The documents show that the social status of residents declined with distance from the center.12 Il’inskaia Street—one of the three Petersburgian radial arteries—attracted

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well-to-do merchants and housed the stock exchange. The city’s limits were symbolically marked by the whitewashed building, rather charming to the contemporary eye, that housed the municipal prison. Yet, while the typical provincial town would stop there, multifaceted Nizhnii Novgorod boasted two more neighborhoods. The Makar’ev section was perhaps the most dynamic part of the city. Nestled under the Oka bluff, it was Nizhnii’s true commercial heart: here was the wharf, where goods from ships and barges coming from as far as Astrakhan or as close as Rybinsk or Kostroma were unloaded; here was a second “main street” with its wholesale warehouses and commercial enterprises; here was the fantastically ornate early-eighteenthcentury Rozhdestvenskaia church, a remarkable example of Naryshkin baroque. Finally, the fair section across the river—there was no permanent bridge until the 1890s—displayed the immense permanent Fair House, constructed in the 1820s, the temporary “rows” (riady) of retail outlets, and the exquisite Alexandrine Fair Cathedral (now serving as Nizhnii’s primary house of worship), which, replete with grail motifs, pyramids with all-seeing eyes, and a Pantheon-like vault, resembles a Masonic temple as much as a church.13 The Kunavino suburb outside the fairgrounds completed the ensemble. Urban infrastructure up to the 1890s—what Soviet social science in the 1970s and 1980s labeled “life-supporting systems”—remained limited.14 The city’s position, high up on the hill at a significant distance from the river, began to pose serious water supply problems by the 1830s. The first water main was constructed in 1846 by the engineer Delvig, to be supplemented by a water tower and, more than thirty years later in 1880, second set of pipes. (The water was chlorinated in 1918 after a typhus outbreak.15) As late as 1904, the provincial capital was the only city in the province with a water supply system. Only eight cities in the central and southern parts of European Russia region had a sewage system by that same date; Nizhnii Novgorod was not one of them. Waste was addressed by physical removal (vyvozka) in each of the district capitals.16 The volume of waste carted out of the provincial capital in 1890 totaled more than two hundred thousand barrels, distributed among municipal authorities, freelance trash collectors, and two private farm-owners.17 By 1904, many of Nizhnii Novgorod’s streets were paved (72.3 percent), placing it after Riazan’ (100 percent), Moscow (93 percent), and Simbirsk (73.3 percent) and just ahead of Vladimir (69.2 percent).18 A relatively high percentage of mixed wooden and stone houses (19 percent) made the capital resemble Moscow and Kursk in this aspect of its appearance.19 One might think of nocturnal illumination radiating out from the central Russian provinces at midcentury; Nizhnii Novgorod functioned here as an outer periphery. The capital city, and also the fairgrounds, were lit with lights bright enough in the 1860s and 1870s that “one might recognize passersby.”20 Nizhnii Novgorod was one of the best illuminated provincial capitals, with a streetlight every 14.2 sazhens, but the lights were fueled with kerosene rather than powered



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by electricity.21 Illumination, however, was a privilege of the capital, and not a single district center lived in anything but darkness, in contrast to several central gubernii such as Orel, Smolensk, and Tambov, where quite a few district capitals had lighting. Trams and electricity made their first appearance with the advent of the All-Russian Exhibition in 1896; two original tramlines made a loop around the main city, brought visitors down the slope and across the Oka to the fairgrounds and the railway station, and dropped them off at the exhibition.22

Story of a Street It is no secret that “urbanization” was a process characteristic of the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century. Yet the concept remains an agentless abstraction unless we have a chance to glimpse its workings on the level of individual cities: Did it mean the expansion of the urban population? The reconstruction of city plans to conform more closely to a European urban model? Changes in the way of life of urban dwellers? The examination of a single street in Nizhnii Novgorod can provide some insights into changes in the life of the city over the course of the nineteenth century. Bol’shaia Pecherskaia Street—known to locals as Pechorka—was neither one of the Petersburgian radial lines—of which Pokrovka formed the main axis—nor so architecturally ambitious as the Volga embankment. Set back from the latter and parallel to it, Pechorka led a quieter existence yet functioned as one of Nizhnii’s most characteristic neighborhoods. Removed from the intense traffic of the central square and Pokrovskaia Street, yet completely central, the mostly wooden houses of Pechorka—which led, eventually, to the Pecherskii Monastery on the town’s outskirts—were an attractive place to live. Changes in home ownership and utilization in this tiny microcosm provide an indication of the evolution of the urban landscape. In the 1830s, residents and tax assessors viewed the origin, or source, of Pechorka at the lumpy wooden theater constructed by the local magnate, Prince Shakhovskoi, in 1811.23 The theater, located precisely at the intersection of Malaia and Bol’shaia Pecherskaia, formed a hub of provincial cultural life until it moved to Pokrovka in 1855. Continuously from the early nineteenth century until the 1860s and 1870s, the area at the center housed the most prestigious inhabitants, measured mostly by rank but sometimes by wealth. Privy Councilor Sheremetev owned two houses, at numbers two and four, along the left side of the street as one faced away from the theater. In the pre-reform period, the houses at the top of the street were occupied by the local intelligentsia; thus, Sheremetev and the prominent Moscow actor, V. I. Zhivokini, whose name remained associated with the street for most of the century, were neighbors.24 Names of high-ranking noble civil servants and wealthy merchants such as von Puteren, Bashkirov, and Rukavishnikov appear on the list of owners, rubbing shoulders with less prominent Smirnovs, Bubnovs, and Shishalovs, and after 1860 even one peasant, Vodop’ianov. The social diversity of the street is telling

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and perhaps surprising. High- and middle-level state servitors, merchants, and meshchane lived in close proximity.25 The numbering system was haphazard until the 1850s: clusters of houses were numbered consecutively, regardless of the side of the street they were on, and no one paid much attention anyway, since houses were known by the names of their owners. These changes in the numbers—which were regularized and then remained the same through the revolution—make it difficult to follow with complete precision the history of any particular house across the reform period. Still, it is clear that quite a few families retained the same house over the decades. It is also remarkable that many of the owners were women, clearly holding their own in the world of real estate. Changes from 1830 to 1865 or even 1874 were a question of quantity gradually mutating into quality: we can observe more houses and the introduction of a systematization of numbering. But by 1900, it was another world. None of the old gentry and few of the merchant names remain; in the few cases where the same person owned the house in both 1874 and 1900 (Sapozhnikova, Bashkirova, Gushchina, Troshchenikov) they were nouveaux arrivés—meshchane. Even more dramatic, however, was the change in the street’s physical aspect. From a quiet residential area, it became a vibrant commercial center. Dramatic changes transpired between 1874 and 1900: instead of houses of those with higher rank at the street’s origin, that part became primarily commercial. A grocery, shoe repair shop, bar, wine shops, and smithies were followed by offices of doctors and midwives and a pharmacy. Food stores dotted the street all the way to its end, where they were joined by several taverns (traktiry) (at numbers 48, 51, 55, 69). There were two more cobblers at numbers 50 and 51. While it is difficult to determine the precise social status of Pecherskaia’s “new people,” it is clear that owners were mostly leasing property to commercial enterprises. The story of Pecherskaia Street is of course the story of only one street. Yet the perusal of the tax documents for this microcosm of Nizhnii Novgorod society already points to some preliminary conclusions: the relative continuity in home ownership between the 1830s and 1870s; the concentration of “high society,” based on status, wealth, and/or culture, at the city center; the increasing penetration of other social groups, and particularly meshchane, in the last quarter of the century; and the dramatic shift in the profile of homeowners and the increasing prevalence of retail trade on the street, also in the last quarter of the century. On the level of a single street, the tale remains necessarily impressionistic. Yet it invites a deeper and comprehensive investigation. A systematic database, bringing together material on every street in the city, including the owners, their social status, and the nature of commercial and other enterprises, would indeed provide a full portrait of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod.26



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Historical District Centers: Arzamas, Balakhna, and Vasil’ According to the legislation on local government promulgated during the reign of Catherine II, districts (subdivisions of the province) were to number 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants; administrative institutions would be housed in the district centers. While Nizhnii Novgorod’s provincial capital coincided with the historical center of the province, a significant measure of imagination was required in order to create the next tier of capitals. Indeed, of thirteen designated districts in 1775, nine capitals did not exist at all; and even Makar’ev—then the site of the Great Fair—numbered only 246 male souls.27 Urban planning thus became a creative enterprise. The province’s “second” city was Arzamas—in terms of age, population, and architectural sophistication. Originally the capital of the Mordvinian tribes who were the region’s early inhabitants (and from one of which, the Erzia, it takes its name), Arzamas presents an exquisitely beautiful exterior even today. Built into the hills and ravines themselves, the town has an organic structure that flows over the edges of the topographical high point—from which the immense classical Cathedral of the Resurrection dominates the surrounding landscape. The cathedral was built in 1814–1842 by the Ardatov architect (and codesigner of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg) M. P. Korinfskii to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon. The administrative offices were also located at the top of the hill, as were monasteries (conspicuous in the very center), churches (an impressive total of thirty for the town), and the private houses of prosperous local gentry and merchants. The town bears the unmistakable imprint of Pushkin’s era, during which it gave its name to one of the most significant literary societies in Russian cultural history.28 Descending to the east, the contemporary visitor simply gasps at the main street, at the base of the hill, whose short row of one- and two-story houses and an arcade (gostinyi dvor), comfortably meandering at the base of the slope, looks manifestly the same as in the 1820s—quite a surprise for an obscure and virtually inaccessible small town whose name today is associated with the nearby Arzamas-16 nuclear facility. City planners imposed the inevitable Petersburgian rays on the lower part of the city, but to little effect. A recent historian counts a total of forty streets in the nineteenth century.29 In terms of the semiotics of Russian provincial cityscapes, it is significant that, downhill from the cathedral to the southwest and on the left bank of the Shamka River, sprawled a mass of settlements called simply Suburb (Vyezdnaia sloboda)—a lively urban excrescence analogous to Kunavino, outside Nizhnii, and connected to the city center by a bridge.30 Balakhna, up the Volga from Nizhnii and very much a river town, was famous for its salt industry, which flourished in the eighteenth century and drew on the local salt springs to supply some eighty saltworks (down to only six by 1860). Originally (in 1474) a settlement for exiled Novgorodians, Balakhna

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served as a fortress against Kazan (1536), the site of Prince Pozharskii’s military palace (1612), and a lumberyard where boats (strugi) were constructed for Peter I’s Azov campaign (1695).31 The legacy of the last was a powerful shipbuilding industry, which provided barges for Volga commerce and schooners for the Caspian Sea and in 1845 began to produce steamships.32 Topographically, Balakhna was clustered around a church at the top of the hilly right bank, with outlying buildings scattered farther afield, and another ensemble (like Nizhnii’s Makar’evo section) at the foot of the hill. The riverbank in this particular location was relatively low, and much of the town was subject to floods at high water. Vasil’, or Vasil’-Sursk (describing its situation on the Sura River), pre­sents a remarkable illustration of the interplay—in this case, particularly unsuc­ cessful—of the planned versus organic principles. With a population of only 3,000 by 1890, Vasil’ thwarted every effort on the part of the central government to legislate it into administrative and commercial significance or to impose a rational city plan. Vasil’ was founded in 1523, and named in honor of the reigning tsar, Vasilii Ivanovich, as a base for combating the continuous incursions from the Kazan khanate but was eclipsed by Sviiazhsk on the eve of the conquest of Kazan. The town (which numbered 223 residents in 1646, including a tailor, a smith, two police officers, a shepherd, and four paupers) was situated on a slope that was constantly—and particularly in summer—subject to landslides. A plan to remove the residents to the top of the hill resulted merely in the construction of the prison in that more felicitous location, as the population resisted removal from the water and from the market square. Resembling a port city in the spring, when caravans of boats and barges gathered there en route to Rybinsk, Vasil’ would likely fall into the category of “picturesque”—a characterization augmented by the oak grove (according to legend, planted by Peter the Great) situated on its outskirts. It was Vasil’ that was originally supposed to be the site of the fair, according to the decree of the Grand Prince, who forbade trade at the Kazan market, but commercial activity eventually migrated to the more attractive and populous territory of the monastery at Makar’ev.33 The juxtaposition of Vasil’ and Makar’ev shows the fragility of the administrative title of district capital: Makar’ev was “created” while Vasil’ was “historical”— yet Makar’ev exercised greater pull because it was an ecclesiastical center. And, of course, if one goes back in time far enough, Vasil’ was also a creation of the state, though for military and commercial, rather than administrative, reasons. The city plan shows the sharp disjuncture between the utopian city plan and the actual situation—entirely haphazard and irregular, not to mention alongside the river instead of up the hill—of the town’s buildings. It is striking that—other than the mere fact of historical longevity—these three district capitals indeed had little in common. An ancient Mordvinian capital, a fifteenth-century penal colony and saltworks, and a military outpost



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against Kazan: such were the varied origins of the three provincial towns that in the nineteenth century functioned as local administrative centers.

Planned versus Organic: Invented Capitals and “Nonadministrative” Settlements During the last quarter of the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth century, plans were drawn up for the regularization of the district towns. Their juxtaposition with existing reality provides a remarkable example of utopian thinking. The urban plan for Ardatov from 1781, for example, displays an elegant emanation of Petersburgian rays, converging on the local church and punctuated by a rhombus-shaped park in the center. Existing structures, in the meantime, are designated with light dotted lines and manifestly present a cluster of haphazardly structured buildings nestled along the river’s edge, in no particular order. An 1817 plan was far more ambitious, duplicating the rays on the river’s other bank as well and connecting the two halves with bridges. Balakhna and Gorbatov, likewise, were “historical” towns—that is, with an existence prior to creation by decree—while Kniaginin echoes Ardatov. Planners gave the former a virtually identical regular structure superimposed on a half dozen scattered and lopsided existing wooden buildings. In the case of Makar’ev, the idea was clearly to move utilitarian buildings from the poimennye meadows, where tradition had placed them and where they were subject to routine flooding, to a safer location beyond the Holy Lake of the Yellow Waters, from which the monastery took its name. While the monastery and the fairgrounds clearly constituted the focus of the “old” Makar’ev, in its new incarnation the town was also to house official buildings, in both stone and wood, stables, and suburbs (slobody) in which residents could live at a comfortable distance from the spring waters. Little about Makar’ev’s layout resembles classic or European ideas of urban structure. Two final interesting examples are Semënov, which was to be transformed into a magnificent pattern (reminiscent of Savannah, Georgia) of squares and triangles arranged around the central church, and Sergach, where a long single street was supposed to morph into a proper arrangement of city blocks. These artificially invented city centers came to inhabit their own space by the late nineteenth century. Obligatory components of a district capital were government buildings, churches, taverns, a few retail stores, and frequently a wharf or local fairgrounds.34 Except for such historically significant district capitals as Arzamas, Balakhna, and Gorbatov, the official cities were frequently eclipsed by the “nonadministrative” towns—agglomerations that could outstrip the administrative centers in population and significance for commercial and in some cases religious life. Nizhnii Novgorod province counted quite a few such famous towns, among them Gorodets, Pochinki, Lyskovo, Pavlovo, Katunki, and Bol’shoe Murashkino. Gorodets was the oldest town in the province,

54

Russian National Library (RNB), St. Petersburg.

Fig. 3.1. Plan of Kniaginin district capital. Existing buildings are indicated by dotted lines.



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predating the provincial capital (1170s) and the site of Alexander Nevsky’s death on the journey back from Sarai. While the contemporary observer is most struck by a delicate stil’ modern building nestled among eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury edifices on the single main street, a nineteenth-century traveler would have been overwhelmed by a density of cupolas, jostling each other in a crowded agglomeration on the approach, by boat, upriver from Nizhnii. Gorodets and Pochinki were major trading centers, while Katunki in Gorbatov district figures as the most distant outpost of the Russian Bible Society in the period of Alexander I.35 Lyskovo was a fascinating and unusual place—a sort of shadow capital to the virtually nonexistent official district center of Makar’ev. Makar’ev, with a population of just 1,778 in 1864 (and an overwhelming preponderance of meshchane, who numbered 1,300), was described by the statisticians as “quite possibly the most pathetic [samyi plokhon’kii] of district towns in all of Russia, more like a village than a city.”36 It was dysfunctional to the point that organs of local administration, with the exception of the municipal board, migrated across and upriver five versts to Lyskovo. A completely organic and natural phenomenon, Lyskovo owed its fame as a rich industrial center to proximity to the erstwhile fairgrounds (directly across the river); until their removal to the provincial capital in 1817, Lyskovo had served as their primary port, while local smiths and lockmakers profited from the accessibility of a huge sales outlet. By the end of the century, despite the fair’s migration upriver, Lyskovo’s remaining 1,189 households prospered from the grain trade, of which it remained the undisputed center, while local artisanal crafts continued to flourish. Lyskovo served as a collection point for grain from the agricultural districts of Nizhnii Novgorod, as well as parts of neighboring provinces (Kazan and Simbirsk). In the spring of 1863, 120,000 chetverts of rye alone had been brought to Lyskovo.37 That rye, along with wheat, was worth a sum of 800,000 silver rubles. The grain was dispatched from there farther upriver to Rybinsk, on sail- and steamboats.38 After the fair moved to Nizhnii Novgorod, Makar’ev had no fairs or markets of any sort. All of this commercial activity displaced to Lyskovo, and Makar’ev residents were forced to make a weekly expedition to stock up on food.39 Bol’shoe Murashkino was equally unusual: originally a Mordvinian settlement, it had been overtaken by the Russians most likely in the first half of the thirteenth century. By the time of the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich (1645– 1676), who granted the village to Boris Ivanovich Morozov, B. Murashkino had become a flourishing market town, sporting stalls for boots, silver, paints, emporium goods, vegetables, bread, meat, gloves, hats, icons, salt, and fish. Having changed hands a number of times, the town came to resemble a city, except that it lacked that administrative status by the post-reform period. With a population of 1,828 men and 2,252 women, or 669 households, it had a scattering of representatives of various estates and nine churches (though, as the researcher diplomatically put it, few parishioners could be found who crossed

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Fig. 3.2. Main street in the “village” of Bol’shoe Murashkino. Author’s photo, 2007.

themselves using three fingers).40 Murashkino’s resemblance to a city was sealed by a crucial circumstance: not then or in recorded memory had residents engaged in agricultural pursuits. By the nineteenth century, its business was almost exclusively in furs, pelts, and leather products of all possible varieties.  Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford spoke of a city as a “container,” a closed space where the intensification of human contact produced vibrant internal communication networks permitting, among other things, the conservation of memory. “Through its concentration of physical and cultural power, the city heightened the tempo of human intercourse and translated its products into forms that could be stored and reproduced.”41 Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas can unquestionably be seen as “proper” cities in this sense, as their churches, monasteries, municipal buildings, and museums amply testify. But which was more “urban,” the “village” of Bol’shoe Murashkino or the district capital of Makar’ev? If the latter embodies a failed Petersburgian ideal—the pure administrative center—Lyskovo, Pavlovo, and Bol’shoe Murashkino resemble Mumford’s anthills: a parallel organic development, with hierarchical structures and division of labor that, if they created no conscious monuments, preserved historical memory through the production of material culture.42 Either way, their (unregistered) presence begins to undermine any image of rural uniformity.

4 Rhythms THE LOCAL ECONOMY

I

n his magisterial study of Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon takes as his point of departure the impossibility of isolating the city from the surrounding countryside. He then seeks to break down the boundary our imagination has erected between the urban and the rural worlds: “A city’s history must also be the history of its human countryside, and of the natural world within which city and country are both located.”1 This approach is at least as productive in application to Nizhnii Novgorod. Boris Mironov has recently suggested that the separation between city and countryside in Russia remained partial even up to the early nineteenth century.2 Life in Nizhnii Novgorod pulsed to the rhythms of the surrounding countryside, as well as the rhythms of commercial enterprise and those created by the religious calendar. In a climate that school geography textbooks described as “sharply continental,” trade, transport, agriculture, and industrial production were all subject to dramatic seasonal variations. Nizhnii Novgorod functioned as a magnet for the thousands of artisans—many of them doubling as farmers—working throughout the province. A synthetic picture of the provincial economy emerges from the informationpacked local guidebooks (pamiatnye knizhki) that proliferated in the nineteenth century. Other sources permit us to examine agrarian structures; the famous “proto-industrial” manufactures of steel at Pavlovo and wooden spoons at Semënov; mechanisms of exchange; and, finally, interrelations of religion and economic activity. Two points are critical here: the multiplicity and diversity 57

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of economic structures and activities on the territory of this single province and the constant, active interchange and motion within the province. Rhythms include the interdependence of city and countryside and subjection to seasonal fluctuation, the demands of internal trade, and the religious calendar.

The Pamiatnye knizhki: What They Tell Us about Local Economy Economic historians take more or less for granted the basic distinctions between agriculture, industry, trade, and commerce. In individual experience, particularly in the world of the nineteenth-century province, these manifestly different forms of activity intersected, forming, if not a coherent unity, at least an infinitely interconnected continuity. Aggregate production statistics and growth rates tell us little about the concrete universe in which particular residents of provincial Russia lived and worked. In the meantime, the pamiatnye knizhki, at their best, captured precisely the multiplicity and interchangeability of various forms of economic activity, thus permitting us to reconstruct a snapshot of the province in its economic dimension.3 A. Smirnov, who compiled a survey of the province’s industry and trade for the 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka, emphasized the region’s diversity: “Nizhnii Novgorod province belongs to the most diverse in terms of industry, trade, and economy. People engage in the most different activities.” Parts of the province were entirely industrial, others partially agricultural, some land-scant and some land-rich, and so on; commerce at this crossroads of Europe and Asia played a central role: “Trades [promysly] here are as diverse as the circumstances that produced them.”4 Nizhnii Novgorod province straddled three types of economic space, roughly coinciding with the ecological regions outlined in chapter 2. From the southwest it bordered on, and was partially included in, the central industrial region that surrounded Moscow. The thick forests beyond the Volga created a second space, where agriculture was virtually impossible and where timber and fishing industries predominated. The southeast corner was predominantly agricultural—a final extension of the rich black-soil belt stretching up from southern Russia. The five semi-industrial districts—Balakhna, Gorbatov, Nizhnii Novgorod, Arzamas, and Ardatov—themselves presented a rich and varied picture. Abundant forests and major rivers made Balakhna almost entirely industrial. It was the river that fed the town: shipbuilding dominated, and this natural artery supported a lively trade in everything from locally manufactured lace and tile—exported to the fair and thence to the two capital cities—to salt (plentiful in the local soil), bricks, leather (for which Katunki village was famous), and a broad variety of handmade wooden products. Residents of the district town of Gorbatov “farmed” the river rather than the land, weaving fishnets and catching and salting fish for local consumption and for export. The proximity of the surrounding district to the Oka River and the Nizhnii Novgorod fair stimulated industry, and the towns of Pavlovo, Vorsma, Shcherbinino, Bogorodskoe, and

rhythms  59 others produced a large volume of steel and iron products, locks, knives, scissors, razors, medical tools, daggers, axes, sickles, plows, anvils, and other tools and instruments, employing more than seven thousand workers.5 Steel, soap, and leather were the main industrial products. Neither Balakhna nor Gorbatov was able to feed itself through local agriculture and instead relied on grain imports. Nizhnii Novgorod district naturally presented something of a special case. The town boasted five major factories: the merchant Kolchin and British citizen Jones owned the two mechanical-shipbuilding plants, while merchants Blinov, Klimov, and Shchegolev, respectively, owned a salt-grinding plant, a sawmill, and a tobacco factory; the town’s main trade was in metal, which it exported, particularly to Semënov and Gorbatov. The city provided a source of income for migrant workers who came in springtime to hire themselves out on ships and barges, as stevedores, or in carpenters’ or stonemasons’ cooperatives; urban transportation was also big business, with as many as eight hundred cabmen (izvozchiki) materializing as soon as the snow became passable. Nizhnii Novgorod was home not only to the annual fair—which allowed residents of adjacent suburbs to rent out their property as hotels, restaurants, and bars—but to two trade annual congresses: one for wood products, held at Epiphany (6–7 January), and a big horse fair, held on the feast of St. John the Baptist (24 June). Nizhnii Novgorod district itself was primarily agricultural—producing rye, wheat, barley, oats, buckwheat, millet, peas, flax, hemp, potatoes—except for the village of Bezvodnoe, where wire products were the specialty. Two suburbs of Nizhnii Novgorod, Pechery and Podnov’e, were renowned for their gardens and orchards. Apples, cherries, raspberries, currants, and strawberries made their way, in the form of jams bearing the unlikely label of “Kievan,” to the fair and thence downriver; more than two hundred desiatinas were planted in cabbage and cucumbers, which could then be processed and sold to the whole province and up and down the Volga. The richly marinated podnovskie pickles, marketed at the fair, were well known in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Otherwise, fishing and fishnets, woodworking, bast shoes, potash, bricks, and metal were some of the most visible of the many different activities in the district. Most materials for the one steel and one glass factory could be purchased at the fair. Arzamas and Ardatov produced just enough agricultural goods—hemp, flax, cabbages, potatoes, cucumbers, onions—to provide for local needs. Arzamas continued to specialize—as in the times of Peter Simon Pallas— in leather manufactures, particularly the fine Russia leather (iuft’) in red and black sold at the fair for shipment to Moscow and St. Petersburg and for European export. Arzamas woodworkers prided themselves on their gold-leafed iconostases, which adorned the abundance of local churches.6 Arzamas was also a major market town, with nineteen merchant-owned factories—most making leather but also including one for copper, which made, for example, firehoses to be sold in other provinces. Ardatov was the most humble of the districts. It had a failing ironworks, which the Shepelëv family had let lapse in the 1840s; engaged

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in the manufacture of flaxseed and hemp oil and processed hemp; and exported labor for masonry, carpentry, and burlachestvo (barge hauling). The north and southeast were, each in its way, more uniform. The forests and sandy or rocky soils of the north made agriculture secondary; the town of Vasil’ and the entire districts of Makar’ev and Semënov imported grain. The most remarkable district was the completely nonagricultural Semënov, which specialized in the manufacture of brightly colored wooden spoons (known today as khokhloma, after one of the local villages). Sales in 1862 amounted to fifty thousand rubles in the town of Semënov alone. In the deeply forested region of Krasnaia Ramen’, villagers crafted nails, brackets, and other metal objects in their smithies or produced felt boots (valenki), hats, and coats. Residents of Vasil’-Sursk, strategically located on the confluence of the Sura and Volga, made their income by fishing, netting sterlet, sturgeon, sheat-fish, and some pike-perch, bream, and ide. The surrounding territories of Vasil’ district resembled more closely the neighboring black-soil region, combining agriculture with small-scale artisanal activity. Makar’ev residents were known for their production of wooden trunks, which they marketed at the fair, while inhabitants of the remote and mysterious nether regions of the district (vetluzhskii krai) focused their energies on timber and wood products—to the detriment of the forests, which already in the 1860s were failing to sustain the intensity of exploitation.7 Cheremiss (Mari) hunted animals and birds and sold furs on the spot at local markets. Most of the residents of the towns in the southeast corner were state peasants.8 In Kniaginin, Lukoianov, and Sergach districts, agriculture—with surplus sold locally or at the Lyskovo port—predominated, with the exception of the town of Kniaginin (famous for its hat manufacture) and Murashkino (which specialized in sheepskins). Only Lukoianov housed any factories at all: two landowners’ textile plants, ten alcohol refineries, one brewery, and one glassworks. The rich, fertile Sergach district sold grain and tobacco at Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas, while importing, by land, virtually everything else, from wheels and cups to stockings, cast iron skillets, and salt fish. The Sergach region also made inroads into the entertainment business: some fifty people in two Russian villages and four Tatar ones raised and trained bears and took them on the road.9

Agrarian Structures One of the thorniest issues in the transition from a serf economy is the question of land—its distribution and possible redistribution. A key distinguishing feature of the Russian reform was precisely this decision to liberate the serfs with land; the architects of the Russian peasant emancipation chose to place the land question at the forefront, constructing an elaborate mechanism by means of which peasants should have been able to purchase the land they farmed over the course of nearly half a century.10 In studying the emancipation, historians

rhythms  61 have tended to focus on the social implications of the reform, and especially for the peasantry, asking, for example, how real the supposed changes were in the actual process of peasant economy and whether the “temporarily obligated” status did not simply extend the essential characteristics of serfdom while calling them by another name. Professor P. A. Zaionchkovsky, perhaps the most influential historian of the reforms in both the Soviet Union and in American scholarship—to adduce one example—carefully studied the title deeds (ustavnye gramoty) not so much to see what exactly the new land tenure arrangements were but to assess how satisfied or dissatisfied the peasants were with the documents they were signing.11 The social-historical approach has yielded a plethora of important studies of the Russian peasantry, ranging from investigations of household economy to marriage patterns to cultural practices and much more.12 Here, however, I would like to focus not so much on the peasantry as on agrarian structures more generally by examining data on land ownership and transference for particular districts within Nizhnii Novgorod province.13 A highly sophisticated study (in scientific terms) commissioned by the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo and published under the title “Materials toward Land Assessment in Nizhnii Novgorod Province” (Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii) in the 1890s provides us with a richness of data concerning the agricultural patterns and land tenure structures throughout the post-reform period. This study will itself become an object of our concern in later chapters; in the meantime, it provides us with insights into the changes in agrarian structures in various districts of the province over the 1840–1900 period. Eventually, a juxtaposition with the descriptive sections of the pamiatnye knizhki can produce a full portrait characterizing each district. The following discussion is based on data from seven of the eleven districts of Nizhnii Novgorod province: Sergach and Kniaginin (southeast); Nizhnii Novgorod and Gorbatov (southwest); Semënov, Makar’ev, and Vasil’ (north). The statistical portrait of Kniaginin and Sergach corroborates the more impressionistic image that was presented by the pamiatnye knizhki and was present in the popular consciousness. The lands in this black-soil region were 74 percent agricultural (with 10 percent meadows, 2 percent pastures, 9 percent forests, 3 percent scrub) and relied predominantly (though not exclusively) on a threefield crop rotation system to produce wheat, flax, legumes, oats, buckwheat, and lentils.14 But it is the material on land ownership and transference that gives us the most insight into changing agrarian structures in the post-reform years. In Sergach district, landed property in 1890 was divided into three categories. Peasant lands in the process of redemption (nadel’nye zemli) accounted for 172,391 desiatinas (d.), and 112,558 d. were private property.15 Of this quantity, 75,957 d. belonged to the hereditary gentry and 24,059 to individual peasants. The rest was partitioned among chinovniki or state functionaries (1,255), merchants (6,291), meshchane (1,577), peasant communes (860), and “others” (2,557). Finally, 9,893

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d. belonged to institutions, including the state (4,681) and the church (3,218). All this added up to 294,842 d., of which 3,297, primarily church property, were not taxable. Thus, of 291,545 d. of taxable property, 59 percent consisted of peasant allotments (nadely); 26 percent belonged to gentry landowners; and 8 percent was held by private peasant landholders. Another possibility would be to focus on private property alone, which reveals 67 percent gentry ownership and 21 percent individual peasant ownership. While gentry expropriation was one of the most widely promulgated slogans of the 1905 revolution (it was even part of the agrarian program of the “moderate” Kadet Party), it is useful to remember the advanced degree to which this process had in fact progressed by the beginning of the new century. If the peasant nadely were not really theirs, they no longer really belonged to the landlords either.16 Private property merits a closer look. The zemstvo statisticians’ data tabulating distribution of private property by estate, property size, and function do not show anything surprising; if half of gentry property was divided in domains ranging from 100 to 1,000 desiatinas, peasant landholdings tended to be small, 100 d. or less. Domains under 10 d. numbered 3,024, with 2,982 of them belonging to peasants.17 More interesting are the data on land transference. A remarkable investigation traced the sales of land, both by title deed and by auction, every year from 1869 until 1890, within and among soslovie groups. Over the course of the entire twenty-year investigation, 759 pieces of property were exchanged by title deed and 166 by auction. What is striking is that gentry landholders sold a total of 255 (+10) properties to nongentry buyers, resulting in a net loss of 25,134 (-2,029) desiatinas. This amounts to one-third of total gentry property in 1890 (74,147 d.) or one-fourth of what they presumably possessed in 1860. Peasants, on the other hand, within the category of individual private property only, registered a net gain of 15,446 (-1,510) d., or three-fifths of what the gentry lost. Merchants, meshchane, and others also showed a net acquisition of property but on a much smaller scale.18 In neighboring Kniaginin district, “other” estate groups scored even lower while, once again, land lost by the gentry went primarily to peasant buyers.19 Here, again focusing on private property, 1,055 deals (involving 55,521 desiatinas) were sealed by title deed. Total gentry losses amounted to 29,145 d. Raznochintsy— the so-called “people of various ranks”—interestingly, also showed a net loss, in the amount of 563 d. The buyers were merchants and meshchane, who registered a gain of 457 d., and peasants, whose holdings increased by 29,251 d.—more than what the gentry lost. A glance at the chronological distribution reveals particularly high activity in 1873 and 1882: in each of those years, gentry sold more than 4,000 d. to nongentry buyers. In addition, a redistribution occurred within the gentry estate: 57 pieces of property amounting to 13,712 d. were sold to other gentry.20 In the epilogue to his monumental study of the pre-reform period, Michael Confino notes that “every piece of research is at best a marker in a chain of

rhythms  63 Land Sales by Soslovie, Kniaginin District, 1869–1886

Nobility

Merchants and meshchane

Land Purchases by Soslovie, Kniaginin District, 1869–1886

Raznochintsy

Peasants

Fig. 4.1. Land transference, Kniaginin district, 1869–1886.

Compiled from Materialy k otsenke zemel’: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

experiments and efforts to reconstitute the past and . . . as has frequently been observed, the contributions of these efforts lie above all in the problems raised, destined to be taken up and deepened by other researchers.”21 With this comforting thought in mind, we might suggest that a thorough investigation of rural agrarian structures would proceed from this starting point and inquire, among other things, as to how these changes in land ownership patterns might have actually influenced, or at least correlated with, changes in the actual process of production. Did the new owners farm in new ways? Did they choose to concentrate their efforts on particular kinds of crops? Were there changes in the quality of the land itself, due to methods of exploitation? Such a study of these two southeastern districts would be more than welcome. For the moment, even the raw numbers on land distribution and transference are sufficient to illustrate the deep changes—of unambiguous direction, namely gradual gentry dispossession—that constituted a quiet revolution in at least this one area of Nizhnii Novgorod province. In the districts that we have designated as belonging to the Central Industrial Region, land redistribution followed patterns similar to those in the black-soil area. In Gorbatov district, 155,222 desiatinas fell under the category of peasant nadely: 154,933 d. were marked as private property, with 110,880 belonging to gentry, 14,368 to peasant cooperatives, and 10,771 to individual peasants; 15,886 were institutional (mostly state); and only 3,337 (mostly church lands) were not taxable. The larger proportion of gentry lands ranged from 100 to 1,000 d. Gorbatov peasants seem to have been slightly richer than those in Sergach, owning as much land (or a good deal more, if cooperatives are included)

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Land Sales by Soslovie, Gorbatov District, 1869–1886

Nobility

Merchants and meshchane

Land Purchases by Soslovie, Gorbatov District, 1869–1886

Raznochintsy

Peasants

Fig. 4.2. Land transference, Gorbatov district, 1869–1886.

Compiled from data in Materialy k otsenke zemel’: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

in the 10 to 100 d. range as in the below 10 d. category. The gentry as a group in Gorbatov lost a total of 16,710 (+3,781 = 20,491) d. to nongentry buyers from 1869 to 1889, while peasants gained 13,761 (+21). Gentry thus lost 18 percent of their 1889 ownership levels, or 16 percent of the 1860 figure.22 These figures are replicated with remarkable precision in Nizhnii Novgorod district, even though it includes the provincial capital. Nadel’nye zemli accounted for 200,480 desiatinas, private property for 115,007, and institutions for 9,503. Gentry owned 75,038 d., peasant cooperatives 23,700, and individual peasants 8,476. Of a total of 324,990 d., 5,010 were nontaxable. Gentry experienced a net loss of 22,395 d., while peasants gained 16,362.23 Thus, proportions resembled those of the southeastern area quite closely, with net gentry losses totaling 23 percent of 1860 levels. Lest we be lulled into thinking local variation a chimera, Semënov district, that most obscure and densely wooded retreat of Old Believers, presents a radically different picture. In 1888, the 584,878 desiatinas of Semënov district were divided into 247,632 belonging to the peasant nadely, 131,254 to private owners, and 260,818 to institutions, of which 5,173 were nontaxable. The remarkable weight of the state (with 194,670 d.) in this schema is of course accounted for by the abundance of forests, which became government property. More interesting for our purposes—tracing patterns of diversity in the province—is the sharply different pattern of redistribution that followed the reforms when we look at private property, itself only 51 percent of total domains. Of the 131,254 d. of private land, 48,633 belonged to gentry landowners, 11,051 to chinovniki, 35,861 to merchants, 10,877 to meshchane, 690 to “others,” 11,488

rhythms  65 Land Sales by Soslovie, Semënov District, 1869–1886

Nobility

Merchants and meshchane

Land Purchases by Soslovie, Semënov District, 1869–1886

Raznochintsy

Peasants

Fig. 4.3. Land transference, Semënov district, 1869–1886.

Compiled from Materialy k otsenke zemel’: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

to peasant communes, 4,479 to peasant cooperatives, and 8,215 to individual peasants. What is strikingly different here is the passage of land not to peasants but to various representatives of the “middle classes,” with merchants leading the way. In fact, by century’s end, merchants, chinovniki, and meshchane taken together accounted for more land (57,789 d.) than the gentry. While the bulk of gentry landholdings still fell between 10 and 1,000 d., they totaled only 40 pieces of property, while merchants possessed 20, chinovniki 14, and meshchane 23. Seven gentry landowners had more than 1,000 d., adding up to 36,195 in large domains, closely seconded by merchants, with seven holding a total of 28,395 d. The largest domains (with more than 5,000 d.) in the district were owned by six families—three gentry, one chinovnik, and two merchants—for a total of 52,050 d.; the large merchant and gentry domains were clearly equivalent in size. A glance at land transference figures confirms this interesting picture. Gentry lost a total of 55,970 d. over twenty years, which was in fact more than they ended up possessing at the close of the period in question; in other words, they lost 54 percent of their property. Unlike in other districts, it was not the peasants who gained at gentry expense; they acquired a mere 9,647 d., while it was the merchants and meshchane who made the real gains, totaling 33,352 d. In addition, the process was quite rapid, with much of the real property changing hands in the course of the 1870s; 1875 and 1880 were particularly profitable years for the merchant class, when they acquired 9,345 and 8,465 d., respectively. What might explain this divergence from the pattern of the other four districts? The factor that comes immediately to mind is the stake (familial and religious) that Old Believer merchants had in the Semënov district in particular.

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What appears to have happened is that, unlike the central Russian provinces, where peasants had a hard time getting enough money to buy land, Old Believer merchants who were already both rich and educated moved in immediately— once legal barriers were lifted—to buy up fertile land in their native district. They were, so to speak, waiting in the wings, squeezing out the relatively poor gentry landowners of this distant forested region and staging a thorough takeover of the local real estate market. In this example we can see the entirely unexpected consequences of a state-initiated reform: here the results were clearly less significant for the peasants, whose steps toward becoming private landowners were limited, than for an affluent merchant and business class, for whose acquisition of landed property the reforms opened the floodgates. One might expect a similar pattern in Makar’ev district, whose fundamental characteristics—low population density, predominance of forests, poor soils, and limited agricultural activity—resembled those of Semënov. A comparison with agricultural Kniaginin provides a striking contrast: if in the latter, 74 percent of land was agricultural, in Makar’ev it was a mere 20 percent (67 percent forest), while neighboring Vasil’ was 52 percent agricultural and 29 percent forest.24 And indeed, in conformity with expectation, the data for Makar’ev indicate the commercial and middle classes had a net gain of 30,812 desiatinas (4,866 of those to raznochintsy), and peasants gained 22,115 d. A relatively trivial amount of land was exchanged by auction, but here too the numbers are interesting: a net loss by merchants and meshchane of 3,896 d., a net gain of 1,388 by raznochintsy, and a gain of just 1,396 by peasants. In Vasil’ district, the amount of land exchanged was itself rather small: only 36,836 d. While the gentry lost 11,172 d., the gain for merchants and meshchane was 2,200, for raznochintsy 718, and for peasants 8,742. Most exchanges occurred within estate groups, with 11,586 d. changing hands among gentry. The figure was 10,008 d. within the merchant and meshchane estates. The middle classes throughout the northern districts played a dominant role. What the above discussion suggests is the affirmation and amplification of diversity in the post-reform decades. Communes and individual peasants gained property in the northwest and southeast even before the establishment of the Peasant Land Bank, while merchants were the primary beneficiaries of gentry dispossession in the forest regions. The distinctive social patterns of Semënov district in particular acquired a material foundation once nongentry persons were permitted to purchase and own land. The three sub-regions of Nizhnii Novgorod province already presented marked differences before the reforms; the processes of land transference accentuated these differences and introduced new variations. One could even suggest the hypothesis that, as more rigid administrative control and russification characterized rule over the borderlands of the empire (shaped, by the way, by local colonial governors), the lands of the metropole became more colorful and distinct from one another. In the meantime, an agenda for further research presents itself quite clearly: What

rhythms  67 impact might these changes and differences have had upon production? What were the consequences for social stratification?

Industry and “Proto-industry” Arcadius Kahan perceives the “essence” of the economic process over the entire 1860–1913 period as “the growth of the market economy, an industrial sector, and a more efficient use of the physical and human resources.”25 In local context, however, it is difficult to separate “real” industry from artisanal production; in fact, the Russian terms (promysel, promyshlennost’) blur the distinction.26 Thus, the 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka reported forest products as the province’s number one industry (dominated by Balakhna, Semënov, Makar’ev, and partly by Vasil’), followed by metal work (Gorbatov, especially Pavlovo and Vorsma), leather production (Arzamas, Murashkino, Katunki, Bogorodskoe), and felt manufacture. There was no automatic link between urban centers and major industrial production. Nizhnii Novgorod’s two shipbuilding factories and the salt-processing plant, sawmill, and tobacco factory did well but ceded first place to establishments such as the renowned steel and iron manufacturers at Pavlovo (nicknamed the “Russian Sheffield”), the enormous Sormovo shipbuilding plant, or the venerable leather producers in Arzamas.27 The three dominant industrial centers of the province represent three completely different types of production. The manufacture of wooden dishes, particularly spoons, at Semënov (the capital of Semënov district) was kustar industry par excellence, replacing agriculture and employing a majority of the district’s residents yet never moving outside the model of in-home labor. Pavlovo (Gorbatov district) presents a fascinating example: although the village and the surrounding region functioned with the intensity of a large factory, producing a variety of metal products such as knives, locks, and scissors, the producers were scattered over an extended territory and worked in small workshops rather than being concentrated in a cluster of factory buildings. Finally, the Sormovo shipbuilding factory (Balakhna district), established in the 1840s as one of the country’s earliest large-scale industrial enterprises, fits the pattern of a company town, grouping a large workers’ settlement (the setting for a number of Maksim Gorky’s novels) around a single industrial complex. Not one of them operated in an urban setting.28 Let us turn our attention, then, to these particularly characteristic and significant loci of industry and manufacture at Semënov, Pavlovo, and Sormovo. The wood- and steel-working industries of Gorbatov and Semënov districts not only made it into the national investigation of handicrafts compiled in the 1870s but also fired the literary imagination of their observers.29 A monograph on spoon making by the local priest L. Borisovskii soon became famous and an example for subsequent researchers; it reads as much like a literary sketch as a scientific study. Borisovskii’s investigation focused on the process of spoon making itself, including materials and instruments; sketched its history; related

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it to agricultural practices in the area; described working conditions; traced marketing strategies; contextualized spoon making in the household microeconomy; and looked at the cultural surroundings and the potential for future development.30 The approach, in other words, was anthropological rather than strictly economic.

Semënov In Orthodox teaching, the family constitutes a church in miniature. Borisov­ skii’s depiction of wooden-spoon manufacture made it sound like a process of harmonious and productive familial interaction. In the most general possible terms, spoon manufacture was divided, in Borisovskii’s account, into two distinct phases involving two distinct categories of spoon makers: the blocking out, carried out mostly by independent workers in certain villages who then sold the roughed-out spoons at the Semënov market; and the finishing process, undertaken mostly in the village of D’iakovo and the town of Semënov. The first phase, according to Borisovskii, could be broken down into five steps. First, children seven to nine years in age split the wood block (baklusha) into pieces and blocked out a spoon shape. Second, ten-to-fifteen-year-olds shaped the bowl of the spoon (teslit’). Third, the spoons went to an adult, who whittled and refined the inner contours and outer edges of the spoon, sometimes carving a two-fingered sign of the cross on the handle (such spoons, not surprisingly, were very popular among Old Believers).31 Fourth, the lady of the house whittled the spoon to even out the roughness, at which point the process ended, unless there was a sixteen-to-twenty-year-old daughter in the house. In this fifth step, the daughter applied her gentle virgin touch: “With her girlish hand she traced flowers, birds, houses, bell towers, etc., on the spoon with ink or glue paints, from red lead [surik] and green chrome. It is also young girls who decorate, at the rate of 20 kopeks per thousand, the so-called ‘khlystovka,’ tracing rowan-tree sprigs with a chicken-feather quill dipped in kvas-based dye [mumië].”32 The spoons were then loaded into a box that could hold five hundred to one thousand and, on Thursday, taken to market at Semënov. To Borisovskii, the instruments and techniques used in spoon manufacture were primitive, simple, and cheap—a knife, axe, trimmer, cutter, lathe, tray, and a box in which to dry the spoons. Poverty and ignorance kept the spoon maker in a state resembling that of “his distant forefather, the primordial spoon maker.”33 He had learned the art of the axe and knife from childhood, until it became second nature; there was no point speaking of improved techniques. The most common material was birch and sometimes aspen, alder, or rowan. Palm and maple were the best but also the most expensive and available only at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair and from particular villages in Samara, Kaluga, and Smolensk. Palm and maple took much longer to make into spoons because the wood needed to be boiled first; children were not allowed to touch this valuable material. Even with the simpler kinds of wood, the spoon makers had the

rhythms  69 resources to buy only what they needed for a week’s work, with a standard pace of processing 150 spoons in a day, or up to 25,000 in a season, equaling about twenty to twenty-five weekly loads of birch. Middlemen, or skupshchiki, entered this picture at critical junctures. They bought up materials on location because the poor spoon makers could not afford the steep prices. In addition, only the skupshchiki possessed the necessary storage space for larger quantities of material or, for that matter, finished spoons. Borisovskii counted fifteen skupshchiki in operation, buying up materials and finished spoons from distant villages. The crucial moment came on market day at Semënov: the spoon makers gathered on the central square to wait for the skupshchiki. Borisovskii described their arrival: Cheerful, like the merchants of the provincial center, and one even with a cigar in his teeth and wearing glasses, they walk grandly and in silence down the rows of spoon makers, of whom there might be as many as 150, acknowledging their low bows as due to them. Having surveyed everyone and everything, one of them comes up to a spoon maker and asks him laconically, “Take seven?” (that is, for a thousand spoons). “If you please Mr. X, that’s awfully low,” answers the spoon maker. That’s the end of the conversation. The merchant walks on; he only mutters to himself: “still sated, the little beast.”34

For Borisovskii, the middlemen were the embodiment of exploitation: it was their fault that the artisans could not progress beyond a mere subsistence level of production and earnings, as well as a minimal aesthetic standard: “In current circumstances, given lack of other promysly, and given the oppression of the kustar by the kulak-middleman, greater perfection is nearly impossible. This difficult labor, requiring so much sweat, effort, and care brings profit but not to the producer.”35 The spoons sold at market were of ten types (including Siberian, Old Believer, Jewish, and children’s).36 Prices ranged from 3 rubles 50 kopeks to 4 r. 50 k. per hundred, and upwards of 35 million, of varying quality, were sold every year. Some skupshchiki hired women in D’iakovo and Semënov to paint the spoons, adding two additional steps of carving and coloring to the original process. The materials for varnish, particularly that known as olifa, were, at 10 rubles per pood (equal to 16.3 kilograms, or 36 pounds), too expensive (olifa took thirty or forty weeks to make) for the spoon makers to buy themselves; thus, the highest-quality spoons were finished in fulfillment of the skupshchiks’ orders. Borisovskii’s observations, as the discussion above already makes clear, were not devoid of a moral element. It comes to the surface even more when he describes the conditions and context of wooden spoon manufacture. The spoon maker “lives both black and dirty.”37 The visitor, upon entering his hut, would be struck by stuffy, unhealthy air, dirt, and paint and varnish on the doors;

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the noxious paint affected the eyes as well as the lungs.38 Working hours were long—no less than nineteen a day, with Sundays and holidays off, but in their “spare” time women workers had to see to the household and various domestic chores. In Borisovskii’s assessment, spoon makers could barely manage to break even: an entire family earning between 50 and 150 rubles per year was hard pressed to meet even a minimum tax payment of 60 kopeks, although taxes could range as high as 12 rubles; moreover, they were focused on their single skill from such an early age that other employment paths were not open to them.39 Borisovskii wrote that “the spoon maker sits and crafts his spoons, not wishing to know anything else, because the spoon feeds him. But even by means of the spoon he is only half-fed; and the spoon—his provider—not only doesn’t grant him security, but does not even satisfy his most basic needs. This is why he is ignorant, dull, downtrodden.”40 Any income went immediately to food and clothing. There could be no question of capital or credit: new production depended directly on immediate sales of the previous batch of spoons. Borisovskii, in short, painted a picture that was to become classic in studies of artisanal production: on one hand, spoon making did not present prospects for future stable and prosperous development; on the other, there were no indications of any real threat to its continued existence. It was not extinction but constant extreme poverty that constituted the gravest danger.41 Wooden-spoon production was the very essence of a subsistence economy.42

Pavlovo Pavlovo generated practically an entire literary genre, but of a very different ideological orientation. Vladimir Korolenko and Petr Boborykin penned (stylistically quite mediocre) literary sketches, while a plethora of more journalistically or social-scientifically inclined observers produced feuilletons and statistical studies.43 Among the latter were the prominent provincial statisticians N. F. Annenskii and O. E. Shmidt.44 The steelworks of Pavlovo and Vorsma had their own origin myth, which doubles as historical mythology and as a metaphor for the structure of this dispersed “proto-industrial” enterprise. It is told best by Korolenko, who attributes it to local locksmith Aver’ian Shchetinkin: Count Sheremetev is supposed to have built an iron factory whose working conditions were so dreadful that the shocked landlord ordered its immediate destruction: “They demolished the factory, they extinguished the furnace, but sparks from the furnace had already flown out from the Semënov hill, all around Pavlovo. Hammers began to sound in the huts, files began to screech, soldering irons began to hiss, and the trade bubbled up and spread like a fire all over the region.”45 The tale of the sparks need not reflect the industry’s actual historical origins, which in fact date to the eighteenth century, when Count Sheremetev set up a metal-working shop on his estate.46 But it does give a sense of the unique organization of production: eventually, a whole complex of villages, each with a specific function, which together made up a sort of virtual factory. Both the

rhythms  71 intensity and level of production were as high as in a “real” factory, but, instead of being concentrated in one building or set of buildings, the labor process was distributed among the houses in which the workers also lived. “Pavlovo” actually comprised a whole region dominated by a spectrum of related industries, overflowing into neighboring Vladimir province: Vachi village in Murom district (Vladimir) produced knives for table and artisanal use.47 Pavlovo itself specialized in locks, Vorsma made pocketknives, Vitkula and Makasov in Sosnovo volost’ manufactured files, and Tumbotino volost’, working for Pavlovo and Vorsma, made scissors. Most remarkable was, as noted above, the complex structure of regional industry, ranging from family enterprise to mechanized, steam-powered factories.48 A German visitor described the domestic organization in terms reminiscent of Borisovskii: “Women mostly perform the easier work, which requires less strength. . . . Usually in preparing locks the men cut the iron and give it the necessary form, while women and children do the smoothing and filing, and attach the pieces with resin. Likewise, the man shapes steel into knife shapes while the children take care of the remaining work with easier pieces.”49 In Pavlovo, however, this domestic aspect was most frequently integrated into a complex hierarchy: if indeed in 1889 48 percent of producers worked for themselves, then the proportion steadily decreased thereafter (see Klaus Gestwa’s interesting data in table 4.1). Numbers confirm the origins myth: from 1858 to 1895, 75 percent of the workers in the four largest firms (Varypaev, Zav’ialov, Kondratov, Kaliakin) performed their tasks at home.50 This traditional Pavlovo structure proved remarkably resistant to change, assimilating mechanization and various efforts at factory organization while maintaining a stability of traditional forms: the Frenchman Canaplé, for example, failed in his efforts to create his own factory, instead leaving his mark by improving techniques for table- and pocketknife production that lasted up through the 1880s.51 Pavlovo smiths sold their products at the Pavlovo market itself, then in Moscow, at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair, in Kharkov, and in Irbit.52 The Pavlovo region had an unusually well-developed network of credit institutions, and it proved a fertile field for experimentation in mutual aid, cooperative organizations, education, and artisanal museums. The Pavlovo Artisanal Cooperative flourished at the turn of the century, with a turnover Table 4.1. Types of workers in the Pavlovo iron enterprises Self-employed master artisans Affiliated producers (working at home) Wage workers*

1889 48% 43%  9%

1901 36% 51% 13%

1912 30% 47% 23%

*Wage workers were primarily employed in factories. Source: Klaus Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung in Rußland: Wirtschaft, Herrschaft und Kultur in Ivanovo und Pavlovo 1741–1932 (Göttingen, 1999), table 16, 126.

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rising from less than 20,000 rubles in 1893 to 150,000 rubles in 1907.53 Business experienced another brief upturn during World War I.54

Sormovo Nowhere in his lively and detailed guidebook to Nizhnii Novgorod’s past and present did A. S. Gatsiskii find space even to mention the ironworks and shipbuilding factory at Sormovo, ten versts from the city. The Sormovo shipbuilding plant, dating back to the 1840s and giving rise to one of the earliest workingclass communities in Russia, employed 10,748 workers in 1899 (up from 2,000 only five years earlier).55 While Sormovo today is fully integrated into greater Nizhnii Novgorod and was one of Gorky’s highlights in the Soviet period, in the nineteenth century it presented yet another example of non-urban industry and functioned as a part of Balakhna district rather than of the provincial capital. Yet Sormovo was a major landmark and a world unto itself. The industrial complex had by 1899 grown to a town with a population of 33,000 (21,753 men and 11,247 women), of whom nearly 30,000 were temporary residents. The combination of mechanical, iron-smelting, shipbuilding, and railroad-engine manufacturing and the steel factory’s 8,500 workers made it one of Russia’s largest, on the scale of the Putilov works in St. Petersburg or factories in the Donbass region. Income for the year 1898 was more than six million rubles.56 The original factory was primarily the creation of an industrialist of Greek origin, D. E. Benardaki, who took over from his codirectors Kochubei and Men’shikov and built his business through intensive technological innovation (including a Martin furnace) and careful management until his death in 1870.57 Structurally, Sormovo fit the type of a company town. A church (built in 1882), a sanatorium (1884), schools (1887 for women, 1892 for men), a canteen (1897), a Sunday school and library, and a hospital were among the services provided, funded in part by a kopek-per-ruble’s-wages voluntary contribution.58 Not surprisingly, Sormovo became the scene of significant strikes beginning in the 1880s; the factory attracted social democratic propagandists like a magnet in the 1890s and witnessed some of the earliest and most intense revolutionary activity in the buildup to the revolution of 1904–1907.59 Once again, Nizhnii Novgorod industry found resonance in literature: Gorky’s Mother (first published, in English, in 1906) was for Sormovo what Sons and Lovers (1913) became for D. H. Lawrence’s home town of Nottingham. The fate of these three emblematic enterprises in the twentieth century could not have been more different, and each embodied a conscious decision by the state. The wooden spoons of Semënov district were elevated to the rank of official folk art, and, under the rubric of khokhloma, became second only to the matrioshka in the souvenir trade. The once-renowned knives, locks, and scissors of the “Russian Sheffield” experienced a tragic fate as, after a brief revival in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, the workshops and smithies of Pavlovo and Vorsma were entirely shut down during the collectivization drive. “Krasnoe

rhythms  73 Sormovo” in the meantime underwent a second major period of expansion, as it became one of the showpieces of Soviet industrialization, producing ships, railway cars, and armaments through the 1970s. But all of this is another story.

Mechanisms of Exchange The great fair at Nizhnii Novgorod—the largest in Europe—brought together East and West: merchants from Bukhara and China rubbed shoulders with Armenian traders, Old Believer icon peddlers, Astrakhan fishmongers, and central Russian textile manufacturers. More Europeans and especially Americans came to look around.60 Yet, the fair simultaneously represented the culmination of a multitude of local and regional trade networks, a great festival that transformed the city on the Volga and Oka for two months every summer. These two levels naturally fed off and reinforced each other: the presence of the international fair stimulated local industry, while the dense infrastructure of commercial life in turn facilitated the operations of the market. As a governor’s report from the 1870s noted, “Even independently of the fair, permanent trade in Nizhnii is achieving significant proportions because it is not limited to the fulfillment of local needs alone, but continues throughout the year, most notably in the form of wholesale trade in grain, salt, metals, fish, and felt.”61 Trade in the Nizhnii Novgorod region ran the full gamut, from fishnet exchange to the biggest fair in the empire. Retail outlets—a concomitant of factory industry—were virtually nonexistent outside the provincial capital, whose main streets by 1900 had become lined with shops, restaurants, and hotels.62 Exchange of goods took place, instead, through a pyramid of fairs, whose calendars set the rhythm of production as well as sales. Trade in grain formed an integral part of market exchanges because, as mentioned earlier, the province unevenly exported (southeast) or imported (north) grain. Lyskovo, just across the river from the old Makar’ev trade fair, the ancient town of Gorodets upriver in Balakhna, and the village of Vorotynts housed the major grain markets in the province. A plethora of trading stations concentrated “imported” grain shipments for distribution in the grain-poor northwestern segment. In Gorbatov district, Pavlovo, Vorsma, Bogorodskoe, and Gorbatov collected grain from Arzamas and southern Nizhnii Novgorod districts; grain shipped upriver was gathered in Balakhna at Vasil’ev-Sloboda, Gorodets, Balakhna, and Bor; Gorodets and Voskresenskoe (Makar’ev district) distributed grain to Khokhloma and Semënov.63 Lyskovo and Vorotynts, in the meantime, served mainly as way stations for grain exports headed for Murom and especially Rybinsk, upriver, from within the province and from neighboring Simbirsk, Penza, Tambov, and Kazan.64 Prices were subject to significant variation. For example, the price of rye in 1871 was between 5 rubles 20 kopeks and 5 r. 45 k. per bag (nine poods) at the beginning of navigation, fell 6 percent by the early days of the fair, and then started to rise steadily after 20 August, when news of demand on the Petersburg stock market began to spread.65

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Markets for other products dotted the province, with each market having its particular specialization depending, of course, on local manufactures. The Marov fair in the village of Chernukha in Makariev district was second in trade volume only to that of Nizhnii Novgorod, and it formed the focal point for trade in cattle, wax, honey, down, feathers, rags, and hops.66 In the southeast, such points of commerce included Lukoianov (processed hemp, wood, sleighs and wheels, woodworking tools, buckets); the villages of Vyezdnovo, Maresovo, Gagino (sleighs and wheels), Bol’shoe Murashkino (goat hair and of course all varieties of sheepskin and finished coats). On Thursdays, one could buy and sell buckets, wagons, bast, and bast mats at Pochinki, and loom parts were sold at Khilkovo. The Nizhnii Novgorod fair played a critical role in manufactures, raising the quality and prestige of local goods; the Kniaginin hat and cap makers could not have obtained the factory-stamped parts that ensured the fashionability of their products had they not been available at the fair, and Murashkino sheepskin manufacturers were able to buy the top-of-the-line Moldavian and Persian lambskin and Riga sheepskin during the summer months of the fair. Here, too, local spoon makers could buy the palm and maple required to make the most exquisite spoons.67 More mundane items such as steel from the Demidov manufacturing plants in the Urals, used in sickle manufacture, and the kettles essential for boiling felt boots entered the local trade network through the great fair as well. Conversely, Pavlovo locks, knives, razors and surgical instruments, fine “Russia leather” gloves from Krasnaia Ramen’, and even local jams and pickles found their way to Moscow, Petersburg, and European consumers via the great fair.68 Residents of Kunavino by the fairgrounds made good money by renting out their property for use as hotels, restaurants, and taverns.69 Economic and religious rhythms overlapped to a large extent, as must be the case where the church calendar is the most reliable tool for calculating the passage of time. As we have seen, the two major trade congresses in Nizhnii Novgorod were timed to coincide with Epiphany (6–7 January) and the feast of St. John the Baptist (24 June), respectively. Artisans’ work seasons often began and ended on religious holidays; wheel makers, for example, ended their labors on the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, when they returned to the land. The seven-week Lenten season regularly wreaked disaster in the lives of small-scale producers and factory workers, leaving them without employment and thus severing the fine thread that linked them to solvency.70 For two months every summer, Nizhnii Novgorod metamorphosed from a relatively quiet provincial town into a major international center. The fair had a yearly turnover of 200 million rubles and annual attendance of 1.5 million; the greatest volume of trade was in tea, cotton, fish, and metal.71 But aggregate trade statistics capture only a fraction of the life of the Nizhnii Novgorod fair, which had moved upriver from its old site at Makar’ev following the fire there in 1817.72 No commodities exchange existed until late in the century, so that—

rhythms  75 in stark contrast to the commodities market in Chicago, for example (in some ways Nizhnii Novgorod’s American equivalent)—goods had to be physically transported in order to be saleable.73 Transactions took place (until a new generation took over) through an elaborate informal network of friendships, marriages, and deals sealed in smoky riverfront taverns. In his history of the daily life of the fair, A. P. Mel’nikov describes the Madeira-lubricated rituals by which a debtor, unable to meet his obligations, would appease his creditor.74 An 1877 guidebook directs visitors toward the Siberian Wharf, where they could sample teas for hours; the multimillion-ruble Iron Line; the malodorous Greben’ Wharf, piled high with dried fish; and the Grain Wharf. Paperweights made from Urals minerals, silver pistols from the Caucasus, exquisite Ferghana and Khorasan carpets, Tula samovars, books typeset in Old Russian, icons, crosses, gingerbread, sheepskin coats, felt boots, lace, and Tatar soap vied for the visitor’s attention. Equally usefully, the guidebook counseled visitors to avoid the pseudo-Asian ornamentation of the Chinese Row, where no one from China had ever traded; the Fashion Lane, housing a number of brand-name establishments, including the “inevitable” Salzfisch; and the variety of theaters, circuses, zoos, and freak shows that held no surprises for the sophisticated Western traveler.75 A special section on the Nizhnii Novgorod fair in the 1871 governor’s report gives some of the flavor of commercial exchange. That year, the fair opened rather quietly on 15 July, got going in force by the end of the month, and ran late, until 10 September. Turnover was 158,407,000 rubles, up 14,520,500 from 1870. Wholesale trade was good but caught up in previous debts, which made for payment delays. The amount of paper sold for promissory notes and loans was 39,129 r. 65 k.; credit was up to 52.3 million r. (down 2.7 million from 1870). The total value of goods bought amounted to 157,563,000 r., while 132,470,800 r. worth were sold. Of this aggregate amount, Russian goods of course tallied by far the highest rate of exchange, accounting for 129,038,000 r. bought and 105,852,000 r. sold. These goods were primarily wool, linen, hemp products, gold and lace, furs, leather, iron and metalwork, glass, ceramics, and crystal. In the 5 million to 7 million ruble range for purchases, and 4 million to 6 million range for sales, were European and colonial items (down by one-third), chandlery goods (indigo paint and dye were sold at prices 5 percent lower than in Moscow), followed by Chinese items and then by goods from Bukhara and Khiva, Persia, and the Transcaucasus—all at around 3 million. Silk did well, as did fur products (though mostly on credit), while paper, honey, dried fish, drinks, raw potash (shadrik), and sugar fared badly. All Kiakhta tea sold easily and well: “In 1871 samples of a new tea known as Hang Kow, purchased by Russian traders in China, were brought to the fair via the Suez Canal and Odessa. According to Moscow tea wholesalers its quality was far higher than Canton tea and not much inferior to Kiakhta tea. None of the 25,000 cartons of this tea, or 2 million pounds, made it to the fair in time;

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instead it was sent directly from Odessa to the Moscow warehouse customs.”76 In the meantime, the Asian trade suffered losses, except for grocery goods. Merchants from Bukhara, Tashkent, and Persia all experienced net losses, but they had been expecting such an outcome—they were at the fair to buy, not sell. Fair taxes amounted to 192,077 r. 90 k. In the local context, the Nizhnii Novgorod fair acquires a new dimension: a “megamarket” for small-scale traders as well as a wholesale outlet for merchants with a national or international reputation. It represents the peak of a local commercial infrastructure and a necessary link between local producers and the larger world of industry and trade.

Credit and Commercial Networks: Religious Dimensions In the provincial context, the greatest obstacle to the expansion of industrial enterprise was the absence of organized and accessible loan-granting institutions, whether banks, credit associations, or mutual funds. To the extent that they operated in the countryside, banks functioned on an estate basis and had a specifically agricultural function: the Gentry Land Bank and the Peasant Land Bank (1880s) issued credit to clients at entirely different rates of interest and had no mandate to issue loans for small business. The National Bank, in its imposing art nouveau building on Pokrovskaia Street, opened its offices only in 1913. Private banks, in the meantime, operated primarily in an urban setting and particularly in the capital cities, while a serious and ambitious effort in the immediate post-reform period to set up a zemstvo bank (1860s) was fruitless, primarily for lack of a proper legal framework. Contemporary investigators repeatedly stressed the impossibility of accumulating primitive capital as the primary reason for the subsistence-level operation of artisanal production; the graphic and unsympathetic portrayal of middlemen and skupshchiki in the literary sketches discussed earlier immediately ties in to this larger problem of credit. An unexpected source sheds at least partial light on the workings of credit, in Nizhnii Novgorod province specifically: this is the report compiled by P. I. Me’lnikov in 1854 (though not published until 1910) on the Old Belief in Nizhnii Novgorod. It has become a commonplace of Russian historical studies that—in accordance with Max Weber’s famous thesis—there existed a concrete connection between the Old Belief and commercial activity and that an Old Believer ethic facilitated the emergence of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.77 It was Mel’nikov who advanced a refined and completely specific explanation of why such a connection might exist; the answer lay in the workings of financial credit particularly and commercial networks more generally. In the section that follows, I present Mel’nikov’s vision of the connection of finance and Old Belief; it is his interpretation only but seems to me sufficiently interesting to warrant exposition here. According to Mel’nikov, informal networks, and above all those generated by adherence to the Old Belief, could play a decisive role in commercial

rhythms  77 transactions. Mel’nikov describes the mechanisms, involving first of all mutual aid as a shield against misfortune: “The Old Believer brotherhood rests solidly on mutual aid. Peasant life is characterized by fear of: fire, poor harvest, livestock plague, robbery and litigation. The Old Believer fears none of these things, for the brotherhood will always reimburse, with interest, his financial loss and, on top of this, will use their connections among the most powerful in quarters where an Orthodox peasant would not dare to tread. This is why there are no paupers or even poor peasants among the Old Believers.” The religious connection functioned as financial insurance, extending not just to natural disaster but indigence and infelicitous business dealings: “The Old Believer merchant does not fear ill circumstance in commercial matters: he will not go bankrupt given the strong support of his rich brothers, and even if he does, then with their help he will soon right himself and trade better than ever.”78 The Old Belief, in other words, provided a security network and a reliable source of financial support in difficult moments. Mel’nikov goes further to claim that the concepts “wealthy man” and “Old Believer” had become coterminous and that conversion to the Old Belief was a matter of financial (and not at all spiritual) salvation: “New sectarians primarily convert to the schism not through reflection or inner conviction, but for mercenary purposes and by calculation of material benefit. In the lower classes of certain regions, such as Nizhnii Novgorod province, the concept wealthy man has become inseparable from the concept—Old Believer.”79 The inextricability of these two apparently independent identities was solidly anchored in the dynamics of material acquisition: “We could adduce an infinite number of examples of poor Orthodox becoming rich from the moment of their apostasy, while there has not yet been a single example of a poor Old Believer prospering after conversion to Orthodoxy; rich Old Believers who abandon their erroneous ways and thus lose the support of the brotherhood frequently fall into poverty. The schismatics explain this by the apparent grace of God, while the financial decline of those who convert to Orthodoxy is seen as the manifestation of God’s wrath for their betrayal.”80 The Old Believer ethos and its commercial consequences, furthermore, were reflected in the day-to-day workings of the provincial market. Unlike in the cities, provincial commerce fell largely under the jurisdiction of influential Old Believer merchants: “[The equivalence of wealth and Old Belief] results because the schismatics have here monopolized many branches of trade and industry, and accept into their trade organizations only those who already belong, or show good prospects for joining, the religious brotherhood. It is worth noting that the Nizhnii Novgorod Old Believers have taken control not of urban trade, but trade in local artisanal products, by which means they hold about one-tenth of the local population in their hands.”81 Specifically, according to Mel’nikov, the Old Believers had exclusive control in the trans-Volga region over sales of wooden dishes, felt boots, lambs’-wool felt (poiarkovye) hats, nails, beams for

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scales, bast, bast mats, tar, resin, and wood products, thereby stimulating the conversion of the producers of these items in Balakhna, Semënov, and Makar’ev districts. All of them were either open or secret Old Believers. In Ardatov and Arzamas, the businesses implicated were butter and hemp: their buyers were exclusively Old Believers, as, in consequence, were the butter churners and hemp processors. The same applied to Gorbatov metalworkers (that is the whole of Pavlovo industry), Vasil’ and Kniaginin leatherworkers, Lukoianov potash manufacturers, Nizhnii Novgorod district fishnet weavers, and more. The market was the locus and also the essence of the process of conversion: “In a word, the Old Believer sermon is preached in the marketplace, in the factories to the pounding of hammers and axes, and in this sermon there is not a word about faith. Silently, the commercial Old Believer draws the innocent crowds into the nets of apostasy and fanaticism, appealing to the peasant’s self-esteem and his desire for material gain.”82 This type of “sermon,” Mel’nikov writes, was much more convincing than the lame preachings of provincial Orthodox priests who, with their seminary education, had no idea how to appeal to their listeners. Mel’nikov, as is by now apparent, was hardly an impartial researcher, and his arguments are shaped by his wish to demonstrate the perfidious and subversive implications of the Old Belief to his government employers. Yet, his concrete observations are based on a profound and extraordinary acquaintance with the on-the-ground workings of his subjects and merit our careful attention, given adequate compensation for his agenda. He makes two further points that, to my knowledge, have not been stressed in contemporary studies of the Old Belief. First, according to Mel’nikov, Old Believer entrepreneurs’ superiority was sealed by an ability to please everyone, including the local bureaucracy, to whose interests their pursuits conformed. The landowners were happy because Old Believers were inevitably subject to quitrent (obrok), and they were never in arrears with their payments (a rare phenomenon indeed). The police liked them because Old Believers paid them special dues. Tax collectors liked them because they paid their taxes on time. The higher ranks in the provincial government liked them because criminality among them (or at least acknowledged crimes) were few and far between, thus reducing the amount of paperwork in the province.83 In other words, financial success made the Old Believers desirable neighbors. Second, and this is a point worth emphasizing, the actual mechanisms of inheritance departed from the norm for “mainstream” Russia. In contrast to traditions in Orthodox families, where property and goods were partitioned equally among heirs, Old Believers practiced primogeniture and thus consolidated their wealth: Remarkably, among the Old Believers engaging in commerce and owning factories, industrial plants, and other forms of capital, this capital is never divided, but remains at the disposition of an eldest person—not only the

rhythms  79 father, but a brother, uncle, aunt, and so forth. This state of affairs gives the Old Believers the opportunity to conduct trade on a larger scale, and to make bigger profits, while at the same time maintaining the hold of the Old Belief within the family. Should a younger member of such a family be tempted to quit the Old Belief, he is restrained by his lack of independent capital; he does not wish to become indigent.84

In summary, the practices of the Old Believers in Mel’nikov’s interpretation facilitated their worldly success, beginning with credit networks in the marketplace and ending with social influence—if through unconventional channels. Old Believers largely controlled trade and industry and thus won the respect of the population, including the Orthodox. They could dictate the financial success of others by making Old Believer networks the exclusive means of negotiating business deals. In fact (again according to Mel’nikov), the very restrictions against holding elective office empowered them in more subtle ways by concentrating all of their ample energy on generating wealth, while the practice of primogeniture further consolidated their gains and guaranteed the transmission of the Old Belief through the generations.85 While the above discussion should be treated as a stimulus for further exploration of these possible connections and not the last word, Mel’nikov’s interpretation coincides with views current among present-day economic historians. Thus, B. V. Anan’ich in particular has suggested that adherents to Judaism and Islam were able to create economic networks by building on religious ties.86 In a provincial context, in the case of Nizhnii Novgorod province, the social structures of the Old Belief stepped in where commercial banking failed, providing credit for small business ventures and an economic incentive for religious conversion. In a non-urban setting, religious and economic allegiances proved difficult to separate and accounted in part for the tenaciousness of a faith that had for three centuries been subject to persecution. It is particularly outside the capital cities that networks of this sort became essential to economic development.  The provincial economy, in the picture that emerges from the efforts of our purveyors, amends standard assumptions in a number of significant ways. Land transference, when examined in a local perspective, occurred at a relatively rapid rate and, if it sometimes led to the consolidation of a middle class, always eroded the position of the gentry. “Proto-industry,” as Jonathan Mogul and especially Klaus Gestwa have noted, resembled “real” factory production more than we might initially suspect; indeed, small-scale producers and employees of larger ventures set the tone of economic activity in the province. The fair, while unquestionably a major national and imperial event, played an equally important role in the development of the specifically local economy, thus consolidating an infrastructure of production and exchange. Finally, Mel’nikov has given us

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a few insights into the vexed question of small-scale credit, at least for this region, where the Old Belief figured prominently in commercial ventures. Yet our sources permit a micro-analysis on a still more localized level: what follows is an in-depth look at artisanal production, and its vagaries, in the southeastern corner of the province.

Plate 1. Soil map of Balakhna district.

From Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

Plate 2. V. V. Dokuchaev’s soil map of Nizhnii Novgorod province. From V. V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949–1961).

Plate 3. City map of Nizhnii Novgorod.

Note the significant presence of ravines. Russian National Library (RNB), St. Petersburg.

Plate 4. Soil map of Gorbatov district.

From Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

Plate 5. Gorbatov soil map detail.

Plate 6. Soil map of Semënov district.

From Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’ (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888–1900).

5 An Artisanal Case Study THE SOUTHEAST

T

oward the close of the nineteenth century, artisanal production—or kustar industry—stood at the crux of debates on Russian economic development. In a world where the spectacular successes of industry in the West provided an incontrovertible model for growth, Russian economic thinkers turned their attention to aspects of their own economy that might set Russia apart and create a different model or a variation on the general theme.1 This was a political point rather than an economic one: artisanal production was of course not at all uniquely Russian, yet it could play a role similar to that of the peasant commune in earlier debates by posing as such. In this question as in many others, the twentieth century (worldwide) adopted the most radical of solutions. The path to modernization was unique and depended on the wholesale privileging of industry.2 Until very recently, historiography bearing the indelible imprint of Gerschenkronian modernization theory followed modernity’s own lead. No major study of Russian economic history did more than nod in the direction of handicrafts, focusing rather on large-scale industrial production and the push of the 1890s and thus creating the inevitable tableau of backwardness, with its “advantages” and disadvantages.3 The terms of this debate, however, have changed in recent years, as historians increasingly realize that a high degree of industrialization can be achieved without, or prior to, an industrial revolution.4 The point of this chapter is not so much to take a position in the old debate—a sort of historiographic 81

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recapitulation of the economic discussions of the 1890s—as to pursue the late-nineteenth-century fascination with handicrafts to a different end, with the hope of understanding provincial production in its own terms. Artisanal production (like virtually every aspect of measurable activity, given the mania for statistics) became the focus of concerted studies beginning in the 1850s; a national investigation was launched in the 1870s. Yet, if for many regions the work ended there, in Nizhnii Novgorod the task was picked up by local statisticians under the auspices of the local statistical committee and largely at the initiative of A. S. Gatsiskii, who, as it happens, had completed his dissertation at Kazan University on the subject of leather production in central Europe. The materials were published as four volumes (7–10) of the serial Nizhegorodskii sbornik. They present a remarkable and perhaps even unique opportunity to observe aspects of local economic life that necessarily escape statistical surveys conducted by the central administration or even by zemstvo statisticians; they represent a painstaking, careful, and even loving re-creation of the life of the province in its quotidian dimension. The investigation of kustar industry thus functions, for us, as a prism through which to observe the interaction of humans and their environment without being manipulated by the categories beloved by nineteenth-century statisticians and twentieth-century historians. It should shed new light, eventually, on those very categories—industrialization, backwardness, and the predominance of agriculture.5

Sources: Provincial Intelligentsia and Local Description Social historians, in their effort to apprehend the complexities of post-reform “social flux” compounded by state-sponsored industrialization, have, perhaps naturally, evinced a strong urge to have immediate recourse to “the archives,” to search amid the volumes of untapped resources for data on class formation, industrial progress, family life, and so on. Yet in this eager race to the archival fondy, we sometimes look past what should be most obvious to the naked eye. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a veritable whirlwind of publication, a passion for information gathering that coincided with an explosive expansion of the publishing business. And if administrative statistics on one hand—continuing the Nicholaevan state’s appetite for information—and zemstvo statistics on the other created parallel social and economic universes while observing the same phenomena, the descriptive and statistical investigations conducted by the local intelligentsia themselves add a remarkable and little-studied dimension to our understanding of provincial life.6 Their researches are all the more valuable in that they deliberately set themselves goals that coincide precisely with the intentions of contemporary social historians: to escape from the hard inevitability of industrial progress and modernization, with its concomitant focus on particular types of groups and individuals (industrialists, middle classes—missing or otherwise—administrators, workers), and



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to try to re-create a more nuanced picture that captures the multiplicity of types and behaviors that animated the nineteenth-century landscape.7 Historical knowledge is always mediated—by the intentions of the original investigators, by the categories employed in official documents, by the sheer distance between the historian and the period studied. Is a source more distant because it is published? No, but the mechanisms of mediation are different. Nizhegorodskii sbornik was the official publication of the local statistical committee. Like the Gubernskie vedomosti in P. I. Mel’nikov’s hands, however, under Gatsiskii’s devoted guidance it blossomed into a richness of local description with a unique capacity to delve into the depths of provincial life. The Sbornik’s epistemological manifesto, reiterated in the volume introducing the study of artisanal production, proclaimed, We consider the fundamental task of the Nizhegorodskii sbornik to be, as before, the investigation of all aspects of popular life in the Nizhnii Novgorod Volga region in its past and present, and at the same time not from some sort of temporary or personal point of view, but from an eternal and comprehensive perspective—by means of publishing materials to help [us] understand it. . . . The researches of the Nizhegorodskii sbornik are of a descriptive nature and have principally to do with micro-phenomena, because this is the characteristic that is most appealing to us, the most understandable, that corresponds to our capacities and—most important—is realizable. We reject exclusively numerical official material because we do not believe in its reliability; we stand for the study of micro-phenomena because only the thorough investigation of the smallest component parts leads to a more valuable comprehension of the whole; and finally, because we personally . . . are interested in the physiognomy of each small local cell in all of its manifestations.8

The methodology anticipates the efforts of contemporary micro-history.9 The local statisticians sought to circumvent the predetermined outcome of centralized statistical investigations by valuing qualitative description more than quantitative results and consciously rejecting the aggregation of data in favor of individualized or idiographic representation. The study of handicrafts began as a national undertaking, with the establishment of the Commission for the Study of Kustar Industry, in the 1870s. The Nizhnii Novgorod statistical committee took matters into its own hands in the 1880s, only to find its efforts subverted by the national debate on capitalism and agriculture following the 1891 famine. Contemporaries and historians alike have turned their attention to the “famous” handicrafts industries of the Nizhnii Novgorod region—in or outside the local context. Thus, the wooden-spoon makers of Semënov province were the object of Borisovskii’s monograph, which was well known for its literary

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as well as scientific qualities.10 The knife, lock, and tool-making industry of Pavlovo—the offspring of an eighteenth-century factory on the Sheremetev estate—generated scientific investigations, journalistic articles, and belletristic essays (most notably by Korolenko), imprinting the image of kustar life on the imagination of the educated public. These two dominant industries have also recently attracted the attention of historians researching such phenomena as proto-industrialization and the relation of peasant manufactures to large-scale industrial production.11 Nizhegorodskii sbornik, for this very reason, focused on those districts that had not been studied elsewhere, by the same token creating an invaluable source for the reconstruction of a local economy. This relative disregard for the “utility” of the study for the ongoing discussion of capitalism or the agrarian crisis situates these four volumes in the tradition of local description, more than the discussion of kustar industry itself: for the researchers, the hat makers of Kniaginin or the fishnet weavers of Nizhnii Novgorod were an end in themselves, whether or not their activities were inscribed in national mechanisms of agriculture, industry, or trade. Nizhegorodskii sbornik, in other words, continued and deepened the fascination with the local that began with the local schoolteacher Mikhail Dukhovskii’s Statisticheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii in 1827, was picked up by the Gubernskie vedomosti, and culminated in the pamiatnye knizhki, address calendars, and guidebooks that sprouted like mushrooms in the post-reform period.

Artisanal Production in the Black-Soil Districts The southeast corner of Nizhnii Novgorod province is perhaps most “representative,” at least for central Russia.12 In contrast to Semënov or Balakhna districts, with their nationally (and eventually universally) famous products, kustar in Kniaginin, Lukoianov, and Sergach functioned as a supplement to agriculture. Peasants frequently farmed about three desiatinas of land. Still, considerable variation in the status of handicrafts within the peasant economy makes it productive to situate these industries along two axes: profitability (ranging from barely sustainable to potentially lucrative) and breadth of sales (ranging from purely local to regional or even national). Residents of Kniaginin, Lukoianov, and Sergach produced a number of items that neither sold widely nor yielded significant income yet filled a consistent need in the local community. At this lowest end of the spectrum were ropes, saddle straps, buckets and tubs, sleighs and wheels, and felt boots. Each was the specialized product of a particular village. Ropes, which included reins, harnesses, and straps, were made in Malaia Luk’ianovka, just outside of the district capital of Lukoianov, by twenty producers. They required little initial investment: a spinning wheel and block were pretty much the whole apparatus, which could be set up in one’s own house; the sole material was processed hemp, purchased in Lukoianov. Ropes were sold at local markets, including one in the town of Lukoianov and sometimes farther; cable sold for fifty to sixty



an artisanal case study Plows & rakes

Sheepskin Tailoring

Hemp

Sickles

Loom parts

Bast mats PROFITABILITY

Icons

Bricks Agricultural machinery

Wagons

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Hats Wooden spoons

Sleighs & wheels Glue, rags

Felt boots Buckets & tubs Saddle straps Ropes Local

Reeds

Fishnets RANGE OF SALES

Distant

Fig. 5.1. Artisanal production in southeast of Nizhnii Novgorod province. Schematic representation of the materials discussed in chapter 5, arranged along two axes: profitability to the producer and range of sales. Data from A. S. Gatsiskii, ed., Nizhegorodskii sbornik, vols. 7–10 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1887–1890).

kopeks, reins for twenty-five to thirty, mechanical belts for twenty, straps for ten. Half the district relied on this manufacture for their needs, yet income was uncertain or, as practitioners put it, “anything can happen” (vsiako sluchaetsia). The researcher points out an indelible impression of poverty from the strawthatched “black” huts scattered irregularly on a slope; one year’s bad harvest could seriously affect producers’ capacity to buy the necessary material, leading to diminished production and hence lower income.13 Almost equally precarious was the manufacture of sleighs and wheels (known as the “wagon [telezhnyi] business”), the domain of five villages in the northwest section of Lukoianov—Silino, Silinskii Maidan, Poia, Kirliaika, and Gremiachka. There, 234 craftsmen, using ordinary woodworking tools, steamed and bent wood into blades and wheels using oak, birch, and ash purchased for cash in various places, including Lukoianov, and from a certain landowner, Bogatyrëv, in Penza. Quality was solid but rough, intended for peasant use only. The sleighs and wheels were sold at rural markets in Lukoianov, Arzamas, Vyezdnovo, Maresevo, and Gagino; one manufacturer would sell four sleighs at a time, up to two thousand per year. Profits could be as high as forty to fifty rubles, the difficulty being an intrinsic elasticity of demand. For sleigh and wheel makers, a poor harvest year not only hindered their own purchase of materials (and wood was extremely expensive) but also prompted customers to

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think twice before buying. Symptoms of poverty were unmistakable, if only in the local diet, which consisted of cabbage soup, kvas, onions, bread, potatoes, and milk for children; infant mortality was high.14 Saddle straps were the specialty of a village in Kniaginin district called Kazach’ia Sloboda—a Cossack settlement of fifty-nine clean and well-kept houses on the outskirts of the town of Bol’shoe Murashkino. Here, despite a regular income from agriculture (four desiatinas was the average allotment), 106 women wove saddle straps from goat hair between late September and June. Tools were primitive—fork, hook, and scissors—and the sole material was white, brown, or gray goat hair bought from sheepskin merchants in Murashkino in the fall. They produced a thick, wide strap that narrowed at the ends; it came in three widths—seven-stripe, ninestripe, or full size—and went to market locally, particularly in Murashkino.15 Buckets and tubs (cooper crafts) were subject to vagaries similar to those of wheels and sleighs. Specific to the village of Kudeiarovo, buckets—made from the wood that was once abundant and now had to be bought at market— provided a much-needed supplement to an agricultural economy so poor that peasants actually had to purchase supplementary grain. About seventy-five coopers practiced the craft in winter and twenty to twenty-five worked year round. Woodworking tools came from smiths (particularly from the village of Silino) at the Lukoianov market; still, virtually no capital (only five rubles) was required to begin work. The buckets’ steel rims were frequently prepared in the same stoves where food was cooked. The process itself, however, had its rules: one kustar, Fedor Kurakin, counted twenty steps required for the proper production of a bucket. They were sold at local markets such as those in Lukoianov and Pochinki, as well as, occasionally, to professional salesmen. But it was perfectly possible to make do with old buckets in case of need; hence, once again, both manufactures and sales depended heavily upon the quality of the harvest. Part of Kudeiarovo producers’ difficulties were of their own making: the peasant societies there practiced mandatory yearly repartition of the land, with the result that no one bothered with fertilizer, productivity went down, and the unhappy producers retreated to the tavern, garnering a reputation for laziness, drunkenness, cheating, and partying. When their own tavern was destroyed, they were resourceful enough to travel to town (Lukoianov) instead. Their tub-making counterparts in Durakovo—some fifty households practiced the craft—fared somewhat better, sometimes making up to fifty rubles in profits. Yet they too, like the two or three coopers that could be found in almost every village, suffered from the ever-increasing price of wood.16 Felt boots might be seen as the archetypal product in the local, low-profit category. Valenki (the term comes from the processing of wool by rolling, valiat’) were a basic necessity throughout Russia; the method of manufacture was very specific and quite sophisticated, as well as labor intensive. In our southeast corner, felt boots were produced in the village of Suneevo, in the southwest corner of Kniaginin, in eight establishments run by twelve artisans. Production



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required two special buildings: a workshop with a stove for drying wool, a shelf for rolling it out, and another one for beating it; and a laundry with a furnace and a kettle that could hold ten to forty pails of water, a laundry shelf with a smaller kettle, and tools (rubtsy, cheburok) for shaping and decorating the final product. Kettles came from Arzamas, where local peasants traveled to sell the rye flour that was their main product, or from the Nizhnii Novgorod fair. They bought wool in the village of Bogorodskoe or in Arzamas; it was classified in three levels—the cheap, rust-colored ordynskaia (priced at 3 to 4 rubles per pood), cow’s hair (from 4 r. 30 k. to 5 r.), or sheep’s wool proper (known as poiarok) at 12 to 13 r. Pumice, black sandalwood, and green vitriol completed the list of ingredients. The process itself was quite remarkable, for it involved a near-metaphysical transformation of raw material into something entirely different: the wool was beaten (so that one pood of ordynskaia was reduced to twenty pounds), wetted, and shaped into huge, hairy boot shapes that were boiled in the large kettles for twelve hours. Then they were rubbed down to fit a last (kolodka) placed inside, polished with pumice, colored with paints made from the sandalwood and vitriol, and dried. One worker could barely make one pair of boots in a day; in addition, the process was quite harmful to one’s health since it involved not just physical labor but breathing in a good deal of hair and dust and moving in and out between the two buildings from heat to cold and back again. Boot makers bore visible signs of their profession, looking “lifeless.” Boots came in six sizes: men’s, women’s, in-between (for ages sixteen to eighteen), adolescent (for those twelve or thirteen), juvenile (seven to eight), and children’s (three to four).17 They sold at local markets (1 to 3 r. apiece for men’s and so on down the scale), or directly to consumers, though occasionally entrepreneurs bought them up in bulk, at a 10 percent discount, to sell at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair. The researcher’s calculation of an average final income yielded the figure 14 r. 26.5 k. Necessity dictated that boots were much less volatile in price than such products as buckets or sleighs; stability, however, could be attained only on the level of bare subsistence.18 Yet, production for strictly local consumption did not necessarily imply such an uncomfortably low income. The four producers of plows and rakes— items of obvious urgency in an agricultural region—in the village of Iablonka, southeast of Kniaginin, had a relatively high standard of living, particularly in conjunction with their three desiatinas apiece of arable land. Each type of wood had its specific designation: linden for the crossbars of the plow, oak for its teeth, aspen for handles, maple for rake prongs. Rakes and plows (two workers could make 5 rakes in a day, or 125 plows and 50 rakes in a season) sold well to the local peasants who used them and assured their producers a pre-dues (but post-purchase of materials) income of 59 rubles.19 Sixty wagon makers in the village of Vasil’evka, in southeast Lukoianov district, did equally well, so long as they were able to overcome occasional fluctuations from poor harvests. They sold their goods at Pochinki and other local markets.20 Hemp processing (pen’ka)

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likewise occupied a comfortable niche. The village of Guliaevo, near Pochinki, constituted an exception to the single dominant activity in the immediate vicinity—bast processing. Hemp was bought on the side in sheaves, brought home, and mashed by the female population for sale at Pochinki. Guliaevo peasants had a corner on the market, and profits could reach 70 to 170 rubles, without any noticeable detriment to agriculture. High demand and good profits naturally meant that hemp processing attracted willing practitioners.21 A number of crafts occupied an intermediate range, where their fame—and sales—could reach throughout the entire province and sometimes well beyond; while by no means lucrative, they were well established and relatively reliable if, as always, demanding a certain adaptability from their practitioners. The most locally oriented of these was bast processing, characteristic of the entire eastern half of Lukoianov district and centered in the town of Pochinki. The village of Kochkurovo counted the largest numbers of bast producers: 982, with 150 more in Pochinki and 565 in Baikovo. Some villages combined this primary craft with others, such as working with hemp or making hats. The process involved buying up large quantities of timber, usually linden—either whole groves, or already prepared as a wood mass (mochalo) to be pounded into mats. These mats subsequently formed the raw material for weaving bast shoes (lapti), baskets, sacks, and floor coverings. Kochkurovo bast mats were famous throughout the province, and some of the most expert producers, such as Petr Aleksandrovich Tsykin, Ivan Il’ich Lavrent’ev, and Semën Stepanovich Sliuniaev, had earned a reputation among local consumers. The mats were sold at market at Pochinki; if some remained from the supply at the end of the day, they would go up for sale once again the following Thursday—market day.22 Producers of sickles, parts for looms, wooden spoons, hats, and tailors, in the meantime, pushed the boundaries of the local. Sickles—the product of twenty smithies in the town of Kniaginin and its suburbs—sold in rural markets not just within Nizhnii Novgorod but in the neighboring “low” (that is, right-bank) provinces. The smiths built special smithies out of “airy brick” (clay mixed with straw), and each contained up to five furnaces. They bought tools, iron, and Demidov steel at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair and wooden handles from across the Volga. A single smithy with three workers needed 60 poods (978 kilograms) of iron (at 1 r. 65/75 k. per pood), 12 (196 kilograms) of steel (4 r. 50/60 k.), and 5,000 handles (2 r. per thousand) for a season. The smiths stretched the metal out in a long process—two workers could make only 120 a day, and the sickles were then serrated.23 The manufacture of parts for looms (berda) in the village of Khilkovo, although its practitioners referred to their business as “fussy” (meshkotnyi) and “empty” (pustiachnyi), in fact contributed significantly to household income and served a market beginning with neighboring Simbirsk and extending as far as Kazan and Siberia. The entire village—up to 120 individuals—engaged in this craft, producing three to five parts a day and up to fifty thousand in a season. Most of the necessary tools—axe, knife, vise,



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and last could be made at home; only the whittling stick (strogalka) had to be purchased, and it lasted for five years. They used pine for the sides and birch for the spokes, resulting in a high quality, durable product. One hundred parts cost from 8 r. 50 k. to 9 r. in Khilkovo itself, and 12 to 15 r. outside. Profits could reach 70 r., but craftsmen’s increasing tendency to travel reflected elastic demand and the difficulties of local sales. Craftsmen peddling their wares far from home paid fifteen kopeks for a night’s lodging.24 Tailors also were among the itinerant. The sartorial business predominated, curiously, among the province’s Mordvinian population—in the interpretation of the local statisticians, because they had a tendency to laziness and inactivity and thus chose a light and sedentary form of industry. They counted 352 residents of Chirgushi and Novoselki, and also Pandas, Shandrovo, and Nikulino, all in Lukoianov district, who made the sewing and repairing of clothes their primary side activity. Tailors flourished, piecing together peasant clothing of various kinds: sheepskin coats and jackets (tulupy, polushubki), fur coats (shuby), different grades of caftans (peasant chapany, kaftany), jackets (kurtki), and traveling as far as Simbirsk and Saratov to live, temporarily, with the families of their clients.25 One-third of the residents of the village of V’iushkino engaged in this business as well, as did some 200 tailors in Pela Khovanskaia. Tailors usually traveled in groups of two or three—the master and his apprentices—and were famous for their songs (“Ty shvets— portnoi, / Golubchik moi! / Ty zdes’ posh’esh’ / Kuda poidesh’? / V tosku— Moskvu, / V pechal’—Astrakhan’”). They had a reputation for a poor moral character because of their constant movement, and sometimes the songs were less than proper. Still, they were not big drinkers, and “the freedom and liberty associated with a significant income and profitability attracted young people to the tailor’s craft, and they therefore willingly follow the masters.”26 Wooden spoons—in contrast to the renowned and sometimes quite decorative objects that constituted Semënov’s main source of income—were in Lukoianov crafted only in one village, Monastyrka (alternatively known as Maloe Silino), but by virtually all 150 inhabitants. Made from maple or birch, the spoons—crafted with the aid of knife, axe, trimmer, cutter, rasp, chisel, and file—were a rough and ready product (“the craftsmanship was too hasty and not at all thorough”) and not even colored.27 Only three or four houses actually “finished” the spoons rather than just tossing them off. Three houses in the village were wealthy, and one craftsman, Stepan Sergeev, owned a stone house. Sales went beyond the local exclusively because middlemen bought them up (they did not do well at local markets) and peddled them in Penza, Tambov, and the Tatar steppe.28 Hats were another matter. Their transcendence of local boundaries rested on fame and fashion. Seventy artisans and 250 workers crafted hats each year from September to February, and caps from February to July. Vladimir Dal’, whose most productive years of work on the dictionary were spent in this particular region (he wrote up to the letter “O” while there), adduces as the example for

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the word kartuz (cap): “V Kniaginine sh’iut kartuzy na ves’ krai” (Caps for the whole region are made in Kniaginin). Hat and cap makers worked at home; they bought materials and instruments at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair. Unlike some of the technically more primitive handicrafts, the hat business required a serious investment: sewing machines by Popov, Singer, or Blok could cost between forty and eighty rubles; blocks (bolvany), an iron, scissors, thimbles, measures, and needles, as well as a variety of materials and fabrics—sheepskin, wool (drap), broadcloth (sukno), velveteen (plis), corduroy, and so forth—added up to a total initial expenditure of eighty-five rubles. Hats and caps could be considered partial products, because essential parts—crowns for hats and also for caps—were bought at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair or in Moscow; this was for reasons of prestige as well as difficulty of manufacture: the crucial segments bore a much-coveted stamp of the city factories, making the final product that much more valuable. The types of hats also reflected fashion rather than practicality. There were nine types: Moscow, buttoned, Polish, round, semiround, boyar, Tatar, Slavic, and Persian.29 True to the example given by Dal’, the most prosperous artisans traveled as far as the Krestovskaia fair in Siberia, while others frequented the southern provinces and of course the Nizhnii Novgorod fair; only fifteen to twenty of them stayed home, though sales at Kniaginin and neighboring rural and urban markets flourished. Thirty families lived entirely elsewhere, maintaining their connection to Kniaginin only through their official papers.30 Just a few products stood out among the others as simultaneously profitable and boasting wide sales. Sheepskin and every possible means of processing and using it formed the primary activity of the town of Bol’shoe Murashkino in Kniaginin. Sheepskin was big business in Murashkino: 885 people processed it, while the subsidiary industries of sheepskin rags (loskut), leather goods, and glue manufacture provided employment for many more. The sheepskin business (ovchinno-merlushchatoe proizvodstvo) had two components: processing (the primary activity) and the sewing of jackets, coats, and furs from the result. Manufacture required a special hut equipped with furnaces and chimney, wooden vats, molds, old sickles, metal hooks, scissors, brushes, rods, combs, sharpeners, and an apparatus (pravíla) for stretching the sheepskin. The primary material was the skins themselves, known as merlushka (lambskin) if they were small and ovchina (sheepskin) if large. The skins came in many varieties, ranging from Russian merlushka, which could be bought, ready for processing, at the Murashkino market, the village of Spasskoe, in Penza, or in Kazan, to Moldavian and Persian merlushka and Riga ovchina, all of which could conveniently be purchased at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair. The procedure for preparing the skins was naturally quite elaborate, involving cleaning, stretching, combing, coloring, rinsing, pickling, and stretching again, with various repetitions along the way. Once skins had been sewed into coats—also of many types—the products were laid out to “dew” (rosit’), that is, to gather moisture



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in the meadow for a period lasting from ninety minutes up to four hours. Both processed skins and ready-made coats sold not only at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair but also in Moscow, Kazan, Samara, Berdichev, Kremenchug, and many other places, at a potential profit of one hundred rubles per five hundred. The initial capital required was quite high in relation to other forms of production, ranging from forty to six hundred rubles. Subsidiary industries, in the meantime, remained closer to the usual pattern. Practically all the women (up to twelve hundred) in B. Murashkino participated in the rag business, making coats, furs, sleeves, and “Tatar” hats from black, brown, or white sheepskin pieces, bought at Nizhnii Novgorod or in Murashkino, to sell at local markets or the fair, sometimes making up to fifty rubles in a season. Six houses made leather goods for sale almost exclusively at local markets, and five factories made lowquality glue from the leftovers from sheepskin, to sell at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair (spring production) or in Moscow (for the autumn yield).31 The second form of activity that combined wide sales with high profitability could not have been more different from sheepskin manufacture: icon peddling. About forty-five sellers, some permanent and others temporary, from the villages of Nikolai-Dar (or, Skopino—the site of an icon workshop) and Tol’skii Maidan traveled the region pushing their wares. These included pictures, books, copper and bone crosses, ribbons with inscriptions, threads and needles, as well as five sorts of icons, priced according to the size and number of figures portrayed. Sometimes, the sellers took the icons—definitely the primary item of sales, accounting for perhaps 250 rubles where other items were only 50— on credit, planning to pay the workshops only after sales had been concluded. Icons could sell individually or by tens—ten small ones priced at 3 r., large or high quality ones as high as 14 r. Books sold for prices ranging from 30 k. to 3 r., lubok pictures for 60 to 70 k. per hundred, lithographs for 4 r. per hundred, and chromolithographs for 5 r. More and more people tended to engage in this activity, for it was quite lucrative—pure profit amounting to 75 to 120 r.—and relatively painless; the sellers needed only to feed themselves and the horse on which each traveled, though individuals worked hard and skipped holidays. Icon peddling was a winter activity, and practitioners returned to the fields in summer.32 Fishnets, in the meantime, occupied a category entirely their own. Weaving fishnets or, as the jargon went, “tangling” (putat’) them, was a business on a par with the lowliest forms of economic activity. About eight hundred people, mainly females (sixty to seventy were men), wove the nets on the western edge of Kniaginin district. The business, unlike most others in the vicinity, was completely dependent on orders, and weavers were paid by the piece. The process involved little more than attaching a hook to an ordinary shelf and threading hemp rope through a succession of loops to form rows. Materials—primarily hemp, which sold for ten to fifteen kopeks at local markets—were provided by the middlemen. Nets came in four types, depending on the size of the holes:

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one-finger (a whole day’s work, and sold to the middleman for five kopeks), two-finger, three-finger, and palm-sized. Middlemen reaped a huge profit: they bought the two-finger variety at three kopeks and sold them for fifty; the palmsized nets could be purchased from the weavers for one kopek and sold for forty at market. For the weavers themselves, their craft was little more than a way to pass the time in winter, contributing virtually nothing to household income, yet their products sold not only at local markets and at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair but also (for the biggest nets) as far away as Astrakhan and the Don region. Fishnets represented a peculiar synthesis of extremely low profitability (for the weavers) and extremely wide sales.33

Structural Variants: Workplace Organization Obviously, kustar industry by no means constituted a uniform means of production. The organization of the various forms of production divides, quite neatly, into three basic categories. Practitioners might operate entirely independently, as individuals; they might work as a household, with a division of labor among family members; and, finally, a few businesses were organized along nearly industrial lines, with full-blown factories and hired workers with no stake of their own in the enterprise. Icon sellers, loom parts makers, rope weavers, and wagon, sleigh, and wheel makers were in business entirely for themselves, with no workers and no women involved. Children aged seven (for wheels), ten (for ropes), or twelve (for loom parts) could begin to learn their fathers’ craft. Work began early—at five, six, or seven in the morning, and ended late—from nine in the evening until midnight, with an average workday of thirteen or fourteen hours. Only the loom parts makers and rope weavers worked year round (with a high point in June and July for the latter); sleighs were made in fall and winter, and wheels in summer.34 On the opposite end of the spectrum, sheepskin and brick manufacture resembled nothing so much as factory production. Berezinskaia Sloboda in the town of Pochinki housed fifty brick factories with three hundred employees, including women and adolescents. Even this good-sized business, which earned twenty thousand rubles at five to ten rubles per thousand in 1879–1880, was closely linked to agricultural yields: poor harvests meant poor trade, and bricks basically served to facilitate quitrent payments.35 In the meantime, the class structure of the entire town of B. Murashkino was linked to sheepskin. Entrepreneurs functioned in three ways: independently, that is, buying their own materials and making and selling their own products; by order, that is, filling demands of customers or middlemen; or for hire. What is fascinating is that this classification was so fluid that a single individual could, in the course of a single season, fill different roles: “The whole difficulty in this case arises from [these categories’] inconstancy, their easy and frequent mutability; as a result, the same individual could in the course of a year end up in all three classes:



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independent, working on order, and hired worker.”36 Thus, the researcher found more useful a division according to material well-being. The first group comprised big producers (krupnaia ruka) who did real factory work on a large scale with capital of 100 to 600 rubles and functioned year round (with a slowdown at Lent). There were 20 such producers, 7 of them the biggest in Murashkino, making 50,000 to 60,000 rubles; the others made 10,000 to 40,000. The second group consisted of mid-sized producers (sredniaia ruka) were also independent, but smaller, with 60 to 200 rubles in capital and only 3 to 7 workers; they functioned from April to August. Seventy proprietors had capital of 1,000 to 10,000 rubles. They all relied on credit to run their business. The third and final group comprised small producers (melkaia ruka). Their operations most resembled the other forms of activity described here: “its industry constitutes the kustar variant of the production described here and is characterized by its inconstant, ill-defined nature.”37 Some had small factories at 40 to 80 rubles, others just had a hut. Some 500 families counting 750 workers fit here; they were said to “dirty themselves” (pachkat’sia) year round, with very low funds. The existence of the small producers was emblematic of the whole of kustar production: “His business is quite simple. If he has 25–50 rubles he goes out to market, buys some goods, works it, and shows up at the market again a week or two later—now in the capacity of salesman. Having collected his money, he again buys up raw materials and goes through the same operation, trying to make it once again in time for market.”38 Somewhere in between one might place sickles, bast, hats, felt boots, and tailoring, all of which employed some hired labor. The 20 smithies making sickles in Kniaginin, for example, employed 60 independent workers who received fifty to one hundred rubles in wages and room and board.39 Up to 50 bast manufacturers in Kochkurovo employed some workers. Seventy proprietors of hat manufactures in Kniaginin employed 250 workers—poor meshchane and peasants—of whom 135 were men—also at a fifty-to-one-hundred-ruble wage. Of 8 felt-boot manufactures in Kniaginin only one had up to 10 workers (who curiously worked only during Lent), while most producers worked in their own houses. Tailoring workshops could range from 15 to 150 employees.40 Most interesting, however, are the activities that made full use of the entire household: usually, this meant heavy reliance on women, and thus maximum efficiency in the deployment of all available labor. Certain enterprises, as mentioned earlier, fell exclusively in the women’s domain. The “tangling” of a fishnet was constantly interrupted by the need to care for livestock and children; sometimes children and grandmothers participated in the craft. Work with sheepskin rags was a painstaking process, requiring, for best results, the careful matching of patterns on each scrap so that the final product would look as though it were sewn from a single sheepskin.41 Practically all the women in Bol’shoe Murashkino engaged in this craft, with smaller, more manageable tasks (such as

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making sleeves) delegated to girls and old women. A curious connection existed between sheepskin rags and the goat-hair saddle straps that were the specialty of neighboring Kazach’ia Sloboda. When, after the reforms, it became possible for young men from the Cossack settlement to marry girls from B. Murashkino, the migrating young women brought their traditional sheepskin rag business with them. Both forms of activity were affected: because the inhabitants of the suburb, unlike the town dwellers, engaged in agriculture, rags became an eightmonths-a-year craft instead of, as in town, a year-round pursuit; some local women, when goat-hair straps began to experience competition from machinemade saddle straps, followed the example of their new neighbors and switched to rags.42 Women also played a crucial—though not exclusive—role in hemp manufacture. It was their participation in the mashing of freshly bought hemp and other aspects of the process that made this a successful enterprise: “The permanent [that is, year-round] engagement in this industry takes no time away from the kustar and doesn’t take him away from work in the field, for it requires no particular skills; it’s easily performed even by women and girls, who can always stay home and not participate in work in the field.”43 Engagement by the whole household in these activities could make the difference between bare subsistence and a bit of profit. Practically all the promysly in which women were involved were year-round pursuits.

A Diachronic Perspective Origins The origins of most forms of handicrafts were shrouded in mystery: when asked when their village began to engage in a particular kind of production, practitioners’ responses were frequently “since time immemorial” (s nezapamiatnykh vremen). Such were time spans for the making of bricks in the clay-rich hills of Berezinskaia Sloboda, bast in eastern Lukoianov district and Guliaevo, fishnets in western Kniaginin (lands that had, until the 1760s, belonged to the Pecherskii Monastery); leather processing in B. Murashkino, wooden spoons in Monastyrka, and ropes near Lukoianov. On the other hand, glue manufacture in B. Murashkino had been around only since the 1850s or 1860s, while the manufacture of plows and rakes had come to Iablonka village through the efforts of a local peasant in the first half of the nineteenth century.44 Evolution Some of the bigger industries had experienced a documentable evolution over the course of their existence. In 1624, Zubov described the market stalls at B. Murashkino: “Lyskovo cloth, Kerzhenets wooden dishes, hats and felt boots from across the Volga, Murashkino mittens, jackets [tulupy], and hats were the first goods to be brought in abundance to this marketplace.”45 The sheepskin industry, so highly developed by the last third of the nineteenth century, had



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achieved its exclusive status by displacing the previously significant coppersmelting industry—a victim of factory competition—and mitten manufacture, which was left to some homeless old men after a huge fire in 1823 wiped it out. Individual peasant entrepreneurs had contributed to the process, beginning to import raw materials from Kharkov, from Kishinev in the 1830s, and from the Baltic lands in the 1870s, and the peasant Blinov had brought dyes from Siberia, where he had been exiled.46 In cases where industries were not doing well in the 1880s, the most frequent reasons cited were poor harvests and lack of wood. Such was the case for wagon, sleigh, wheel, and brick manufacturing.47

Migration If hats for the Makar’ev trade fair had constituted one of the Murashkino staples as far back as the seventeenth century, by the nineteenth their manufacture had migrated to Kniaginin (the reasons in this case are unclear); hat makers added caps to their repertoire only in the 1850s, when they became fashionable.48 Likewise, felt boot manufacture migrated to Suneevo from Semënov across the Volga, following the peasants who used to go there to earn income on the side; the business flourished in the 1860s and 1870s, operating year round, only to falter with the proliferation of boot-making establishments (valial’nye zavedeniia) and the influx of itinerant boot-makers (valial’shchiki) from Kostroma.49 The particular case of sheepskin rags and saddle straps in Kazach’ia Sloboda of B. Murashkino has already been mentioned, when girls from the village brought their skills with them when they married outsiders. Saddle straps themselves had experienced an evolution over time, initially arising alongside wool stockings and gloves in the second half of the eighteenth century and eventually displacing them because there was no outlet for the latter; one eighty-five-yearold man in the 1880s remembered that his grandmother had originally knitted stockings but then switched to saddle straps.50 Effects of Reforms The reforms of the 1860s cannot be said to have exercised a uniform effect on handicraft industries; in some cases, however, their consequences were profound. It became easier for bast processors to market their wares after the reforms; still, the competition from canvas or burlap sacks and the scarcity of wood combined to portend a bleak future.51 Traveling industries also benefited. Tailors’ business blossomed after 1861 thanks to the new freedom of movement combined with a constant demand for clothes; the number of tailors in Novoselki doubled in just seven years.52 Loom parts manufacture also flourished, despite poor harvests: the ability to travel and sell wares far afield was a positive factor, as was the greater amount of free time available when one did not need to be in the fields.53 Sleigh and wheel manufacture in northwestern Lukoianov, while initiated by enterprising landlords, took off in earnest only after Emancipation, when peasants were able to put more effort into their promysly.54 The reforms

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affected the structure of the fishnet business as middlemen proliferated.55 Sometimes the effects could be negative. Makers of buckets and tubs in western Lukoianov claimed that their business had begun to suffer, but for reasons auxiliary to the activity itself: namely, since the Emancipation the peasants, all of whom had previously worked for a landlord, had established yearly repartition, thus damaging the agricultural economy, which in turn adversely affected manufactures.56 The statisticians give the example of an agricultural machinery enterprise that was unable to grow beyond a certain point because of the lack of credit. Still, one would think that there are plenty of cases of the organic growth of “real” industry out of artisanal production, mostly notably the shipbuilding plant at Sormovo or the sheepskin trade at Murashkino. This was an issue that engaged economists at the time: Tugan-Baranovsky in particular noted that “large-scale production can arise from kustar industry itself by way of its own natural evolution,” adducing the Pavlovo knife factories as an example.57

Credit and Middlemen Provincial Russia was a world in motion. Absent developed lending institutions and commodity exchanges, commerce depended on the physical displacement of goods. Even the Nizhnii Novgorod fair had no stock exchange until the very end of the nineteenth century, so products were brought in bulk rather than in smaller representative quantities.58 The exchange of artisanal products gave rise to its own peculiar universe. Some producers—most notably here, Mordvinian tailors and icon peddlers—themselves adopted an itinerant lifestyle. Necessity, however, more frequently dictated a reliance on middlemen. Their presence, indeed, was so tangible that it occasioned a variety of literary images, from Nekrasov’s korobeiniki (perhaps relatives of the icon peddlers) to Korolenko’s infamous skupshchiki, robbing the Pavlovo smiths of their already meager and hard-earned income.59 The richness of the vocabulary itself points to the importance of such characters in the provincial landscape: korobeinik, ofenia (both terms for peddlers), skupshchik, kulak. As post-Soviet experience makes abundantly clear, reliable credit institu­ tions are at the crux of commercial development: without banks from which one can withdraw and deposit funds, without long-term savings and lending institutions or commercial exchanges, any advance beyond a natural economy is not possible.60 Economic historians agree that “Russian internal trade suffered from a relative shortage of capital and credit.” Commercial banks began operations only after the reforms; even so, “bank credit was available either to wholesalers or to owners of large stores, but not directly to the great mass of petty traders who continued to use private credit.”61 Clearly, the issue of credit, which ultimately led to the formation of mutual assistance societies, was of paramount importance for small-scale enterprise like that of the Nizhnii Novgorod artisans.62



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The 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka lists the following credit institutions for the province as a whole: the Bureau for Social Welfare (Prikaz obshchestvennogo prizreniia), which included a savings bank opened in 1849 in response to an Interior Ministry decree; the Alexander Gentry Bank (in existence since 1843); and a private bank, Podsosov & Zaiashnikov, in Arzamas, created with funds donated by the second-guild merchant and a female honorary citizen by those names. In addition, the Department of State Property sponsored twenty loan and sixteen savings institutions while the Private Property Department set up rural banks in each of its seven branches (prikazy); some peasant societies had already established their own financial institutions for grants, deposits, military recruitment, loans, aid to orphans, insurance, and tax payments.63 All of these institutions, with the exception of the Arzamas bank (whose capital amounted to only 23,642 rubles), had a soslovie basis, and a very particular designation. Their utility for small enterprise by peasants or meshchane was limited, and artisans in general relied on the tight and high-interest loans available from local small-scale capitalists. The issue of credit in the reports of the statisticians must be treated with special care, since it is here that a political agenda becomes unavoidable. Still, our survey of the southeast region points to some fairly unsurprising and probably reliable results. Those artisanal activities that remained “closest to the ground,” functioning on a small scale and on a subsistence level, and requiring almost no capital investment—like the making of buckets and tubs, weaving utensils, and wooden spoons or tailoring—were remarkably durable if not susceptible to expansion. Materials were purchased with cash, and any profits reinvested in the enterprise. The question of credit arose where there was some potential for growth. Icon peddlers, who might require an initial capital investment of one hundred to five hundred rubles, had one solution—often simply “borrowing” their goods “on trust.”64 Hat makers, who might need eighty-five rubles to start business (which, as mentioned above, required expensive inputs, such as a sewing machine), were dependent on credit, available to them over six months at 10 percent interest.65 The initial threshold for hats, in other words, was relatively high, and not just anyone could take up the craft. In the Murashkino sheepskin business, it was the “middle hand” that was caught in a debt cycle: if the twenty large producers were wealthy enough to provide their own capital and to hire workers, the seventy middling proprietors needed to borrow money to start production and attract labor.66 According to the researchers, sleigh and wagon manufacture, for example, was prevented from taking off by the unavailability of credit.67 The Kil’diashev brothers’ agricultural machinery enterprise in Shutilovo village (Lukoianov district), in the meantime, was a textbook illustration of the difficulties of a startup company lacking adequate credit institutions: an initial success story in the 1870s thanks to the remarkable industry and scientific curiosity of its self-educated founders, the workshop ran into competition from a Penza landowner, Kabanov, at the end of the decade

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and was forced to shut its doors. When Kabanov’s workshop, in turn, failed, the Lukoianov enterprise revived, though on a much smaller scale, with only the four brothers, two smiths, and two plumbers; even so, the purchase of necessary machinery was impossible and the business was floundering.68 If in the hat business the credit issue created a high threshold, in the agricultural machinery case it resulted in a low ceiling: any private business requiring substantial investment could not grow beyond a certain point. An article published in Niva in 1913, following up on the second national kustar production fair (the first had been in 1902), repeated forcefully the oft-quoted wisdom, “It is not the factory and the machine that oppress the kustar, but an economic kabal—the economic dependence on the middleman [skupshchik].”69 By 1913, this image had imprinted itself indelibly on the consciousness of the educated public. Middlemen, who had played a crucial role in Russian economic life before the reforms in the person of the peddler traveling to transfer goods to and from the hands of the peasants who were physically bound to their villages, proliferated in the post-reform period as well.70 The classic case here is the fishnets, where true profits landed in the pockets of the buyers, who, in fact, controlled the entire manufacturing system: they provided the materials, purchased the products, and sold them at many times the price they paid the women weavers. Jonathan Mogul reconstructs the picture of sales at Pavlovo, with the manufacturers trying desperately to engage the powerful and impassive buyers.71 According to our local study, middlemen played a decisive role in sales of felt boots, sickles, wooden spoons (where the middlemen were responsible for sales as far as Penza, Tambov, and the Tatar steppe), hats, leather rags (Murashkino entrepreneurs took them to the fair), and sometimes buckets. Yet the question remains: Was the role of the middlemen as exploitative as the intelligentsia investigators would have us believe, or were they merely a necessary cog in a commercial network—depicted negatively for purely cultural reasons? Was, in other words, a negative assessment embedded in the study if not openly expressed?  As if in concert with the flux of the environment itself, artisanal production in Nizhnii Novgorod province evinced a mutability and adaptability to local conditions. At a moment when producers had a small sum of money, they would buy materials; if consumers had a small sum of money, the product would sell. Therefore, production of small-scale goods often fluctuated with the harvest: there was, in other words, not a supplementary relation of agriculture and handicrafts, in which the latter would compensate for a bad agricultural season, but a mutual interdependence, in which small capital brought in by successful crops could fund more investment in artisanal production. However, along with this variability, we also observe a certain stability of a very low level—one characteristic of a natural or subsistence economy: certain basic products were made and sold at almost no expense. This stability created a sort of circle that was



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extremely difficult to break. By the same token, for many items there was no natural tendency toward industrialization or “progress.”72 Yet the value of this study of artisanal production is more than purely economic. It offers an unusual glimpse into the daily life of producers. We can see, for example, how makers of felt boots passed their day. It is an unromantic vision that contradicts idealized versions of domestic industry: work was as hard as in a factory, and hours were consistently extremely long. Moreover, the picture we have seen contradicts any assumptions we might still have about “traditional peasant society” or exclusive engagement in agricultural pursuits even in these black-soil districts. The easy and regular movement between work on the land and “proto-industrial” manufacture might lead us to question some of the difficulties of transition that have so attracted the attention of historians of the “hyphenated peasants” who, toward the close of the nineteenth century, left their villages for the lure of the city and its factory wages.73 Might not there have been a more natural or organic link between city and countryside, one that continued the customary or traditional interaction between agricultural production and manufacture?

6 Social Space NUMBERS, IMAGES, BIOGRAPHIES

T

he temptation is great, when speaking of “society” or “the social,” to turn immediately to established sociological categories of class, status, profession, organization, party. We feel that we have understood something if, for example, we have described it as “working class” or “bourgeois,” as a “traditional patrimonial structure,” or, frequently in the case of nineteenth- or even twentieth-century Russia, as a “peasant society.”1 Yet, in our own daily practice, we experience “the social” by means of a more fluid and less structured apprehension. Whether in public or private space, at home or in the street, the workplace, a place of worship, a bar, or a concert hall, “the social” may be said to consist in a multiplicity of encounters and intersections, a drama whose actors are friends, family members, strangers, and casual acquaintances.2 It is at once nothing at all—the barely noticeable fabric of quotidian existence—and yet infinite—a total definition of life in the world. How might we penetrate “social space” understood in this less formal, experiential manner? How, in particular, is it possible to enter into a universe that we can no longer see directly, that has not only vanished into the past but has been erased in particularly brutal fashion by a series of catastrophic events that form an apparently insuperable divide between us and our subjects?3 We can try, in keeping with the spirit of this book, to appeal to those who, as we do in our own world, wandered through the spaces of the past and who made a specific effort to record, in one fashion or another, what they saw around 100



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them—who tried to articulate “the social” of their own time in such a way that we too could have access to it, more than a century later. I propose then to enter into these sources, to penetrate the social space of the past by those methods that were most relevant at that time—that is, through numbers (or, more precisely defined, by statistics and ethnography); through images (verbal but also and especially visual); and, finally, through biographies—the stories of individual lives at the local level that permit us to establish specific links and connections. Only after this voyage into the world of the lived province can we slowly return to historians’ categories—to social strata, economic classes, “identities,” adherences, and cohesions.

Numbers: Provincial Statistics Russian provincial statistics occupy a particular place in the laboratory of numbers that was nineteenth-century Europe.4 The “iron century’s” urge to quantify everything from fish species to commercial transactions to criminality was omnipresent and extended to the Russian provinces. From the Catherinian cadastral commissions, through the founding of local statistical commissions, to the establishment of the vastly more sophisticated zemstvo statistics in the post-reform period, data gatherers combed the provinces, compiling not only the all-important numbers on land use and production but also demographic data, natural-historical information, and, later in the century, “moral statistics” fully in keeping with the latest findings of the new discipline of sociology. In Nizhnii Novgorod province, the gathering of statistical data was characterized by a number of features that, while not by any means unique in the nineteenth century, placed a distinctive mark on the materials collected. Among these I would first single out a tendency to conflate numbers with verbal description, with the result that statistical study merged into local ethnography.5 As we have already seen, for example, the work of local researchers for the Nizhegorodskii sbornik included commentary on mores, living conditions, socialization habits, drinking rituals, marriage patterns, and other such social issues of apparently only marginal relevance to the study of artisanal production. The second distinctive feature of the materials is the fact that they were collected by a crosssection of the local intelligentsia, primarily teachers and priests, in addition to officially appointed bureaucrats. The results of this involvement in the data gathering were, on one hand, a certain dilettantism but, on the other, a compensatory enthusiasm and deep “from-within” knowledge of things local. The final noteworthy feature is a shared passion, among both official appointees and informal information gatherers, for local conditions and history that cuts across the divide between zemstvo and administrative statistics.6 In other words, if we shift our focus to the materials themselves rather than the bureaucratic framework in which they were collected, we find a richness of data. These features make nineteenth-century statistical publications an invaluable source for social history. While the value of some aspects of these publications is obvious—such

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as the demographic tables in the pamiatnye knizhki—we can also mine the statistician’s numbers to our own ends, extracting a living human portrait from what looks like dry and irrelevant information, gathered for some purpose far different from our own.  At first glance, the demographic portrait presented by local statistics completely corroborates the stereotypical vision of Russia. In statistics as nowhere else, the shape of the pie depends very much on how you slice it. Russia’s first official census, as is well known, was conducted in 1897. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, local statistical committees evinced a capacity for counting that belies this late date. The first pamiatnaia knizhka was published in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1847 and the second eight years later. The 1865 volume, under A. S. Gatsiskii’s editorship (and, to a significant degree, authorship), boasted a wealth of information on everything from local government offices and train schedules to local history and criminal statistics. From the 1870s, these detailed numerical portraits of the provincial social and economic landscape—now under the title Adres-kalendar’—became as regular a feature in Nizhnii Novgorod as in the other provinces of European (and not only European) Russia: they came out yearly at least until 1900.7 By the turn of the century, they were joined by a variety of quantifying publications, published under zemstvo auspices. What happens if we read them carefully? At midcentury, the population of Nizhnii Novgorod province totaled 1,278,631, with relatively equal distribution between men (614,597) and women (654,034). Like the eventual census takers, local statisticians turned first to soslovie categories, counting 8,976 members of the gentry estate (3,217 of them hereditary); an impressive 20,067 clerics of various denominations and their families; 41,156 townspeople (merchants, honorary citizens, meshchane); 1,136,474 peasants, or nearly 90 percent of the total population (742,112, or two-thirds, in 1865 fell under the rubric of temporary obligation). Of the 61,720 members of the military estates, 34,136 were military wives, daughters, or retirees. Completing the picture were 304 foreigners and 9,934 “others.”8 Three percent of the population (41,543) was attributed to the capital city. The number included 5,085 gentry (1,831 of them hereditary), 2,627 clergy, 16,014 townspeople (merchants, honorary citizens, meshchane), 7,411 peasants, 10,397 military, 207 foreigners, and 782 others.9 When Catherine II established the district capitals at the end of the eighteenth century, several of Nizhnii Novgorod’s had to be created ab ovo.10 In 1865, the breakdown was as follows: Arzamas 12,285, Ardatov 2,714, Balakhna 4,239, Vasil’ 2,220, Gorbatov 2,920, Kniaginin 1,473, Perevoz 640, Lukoianov 2,150, Pochinki 7,550, Makar’ev 1,778, Semënov 2,767, Sergach 3,933. Thus, the general level of urbanization was quite weak—only 7 percent for the province as a whole. In other words, the first impression is of a primarily peasant society, with a very low level of urbanization, a thin layer of elite landowners and some



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townspeople, and virtually entirely Orthodox. Yet if we scratch the surface just a bit, to delve into the richness of local statistical publications, this picture quickly starts to erode and wear thin at the edges. I would suggest that there are a number of ways in which the classic stereotype disintegrates as it comes into contact with the local.

Regional Variation: Social Structures Soviet social science found Nizhnii Novgorod province to be one particularly characterized by large landholding: it ranked eighth among thirty-four provinces, measured by percentage of serfs, or fourth by numbers of serfs per landowner. Of all private serfs, 91.5 percent supposedly belonged to large landowners.11 But this generalization—which itself claims an unusual level of particularity—disintegrates the moment we take a look at the differentiated structures within the province. The discussion that follows is based on a source that is not obvious, namely, the zemstvo-published list of population centers in the province compiled in 1911, which looks like a mere demographic quantification.12 Yet, if read more imaginatively, this document also creates a spatialization, reflecting concentrations of population in particular areas; furthermore, in the early twentieth century, these records still refer to the former owners of souls, thus permitting a remarkably clear reconstruction of social structures before the reforms, and—with allowances for changes in numbers—that continued to exist in the post-reform period. If we look at the examples of just three of the eleven districts, the following picture quickly emerges. In Semënov district itself there was significant variation. The northern part (the heart of the woodworking industry) was populated almost entirely by state peasants, with a few “big-name” landholders thrown in. Only 30 of 308 villages were of mixed ownership, that is, less than 10 percent. In this post–Toleration Edict source, the Komarovskii and Chernushinskii sketes are actually listed. In the southwest, middling landholders predominated, while state peasants and “free agriculturalists,” along with some major estates, characterized the south. The southeast was almost entirely petty landholders. The list of northern Semënov landholders, with nationally famous names italicized, is as follows: Turchaninov, Plotnitskii, Gagarin, Zots, Vrachinskii, Viazmitinova, Mel’nikov, Mel’nikova, Balakirev, Naryshkin, Puskov, Tolstoi, Filippovskaia, Bystritskie, Kablukova, Perepëlkina, Selunskaia, Khomutovy, Korobova, Larion, Fedorovskii, Apraksin, Paradelova, Zvorykin, Pashkova, Tikhov, and Samarina. Kniaginin presented a completely different picture: it was entirely dominated by petty landholders, with the exception of Baryshnikov, and also of course Bol’shoe and Maloe Murashkino. What is interesting about B. Murashkino is not only its industrial character but also the fact that this entrepreneurially successful town was the only part of the district owned by major aristocratic landholders. Its 980 households were divided between Volkonskii and Tolstoi.

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Gorbatov, which otherwise provides a radically different third model, has parallels in that last respect. Namely, the industrial centers of Pavlovo, Vorsma, and Bogorodskoe all belonged to one person: Count Sheremetev. Thus, in contrast to societies in such places as England or Germany, in Russia it is clearly the aristocrats who were the main industrialists and entrepreneurs: they had the funds, the state license, the freedom of movement.13 The context here, however, is that Sheremetev owned practically the entire district, or to put it a bit more precisely, by 1911, more than 12,375 households in Gorbatov were part of the former Sheremetev domain. Another way to look at it is that this figure meant 101 of 274 villages, or 37 percent—except that Sheremetev’s holdings include Pavlovo (1,852 households), Vorsma (856), and Bogorodskoe (2,082), so that the percentage starts to creep up to close to 50. The demographic data may not be 100 percent accurate here, because of course we are projecting numbers back in time. But the general outlines emerge with an incontrovertible clarity. A briefer survey of the remaining eight districts yields the following results: in the southeast, Sergach, in keeping with earlier economic data, really does look like a “bear’s corner,” with, like Kniaginin, exclusively small and obscure landowners; Lukoianov is closer to “civilization,” with the same basic structure but some larger estates owned by families that also had lands elsewhere. The trans-Volga districts of Vasil’ and Makar’ev, as represented in the tables in the zemstvo-published list of population centers, are more strongly marked in their individual characteristics than one might expect and, like Semënov, show considerable variation within the district itself. Thus, the part of Vasil’ that lay beyond the Volga belonged completely to the Sheremetev estates, while the middle region (around the Urga River) combined middle- to large-sized estates with major settlements of crown and state peasants (the village of Spasskoe by 1911 had 679 households); in the southeast we find concentrations of large state peasant settlements and mostly middling landholding. In Makar’ev, the urban agglomeration of Lyskovo (1,189 households in 1911) stands out dramatically amid a pattern of small settlements of mixed state, crown, and private lands; state peasants populated the Volga region, while in the distant reaches on the Vetluga villages were basically all in the range of 30 to 50 households. It is those districts that belonged, like Gorbatov, to the Central Industrial Region that presented the sharpest individual variations. Ardatov’s landowners included Chaadaev, Gagarin, Sabaneev, Lieven, Bludov, Durnovo, Tatishchev, Karamzin, Naryshkin, and Saltykov.14 While its eastern part counted a plethora of small estates intermixed with larger ones, in the middle section entire volosts belonged to Lieven and Durnovo. The western part was primarily industrial, home to the Shepelëv factories and other large workers’ settlements, while large settlements of state peasants and the Tatishchev estates belonged to the forested southern segment. Arzamas was almost exclusively private, with just a couple of larger villages populated by state or crown peasants. (Chernukha, a settlement of state peasants, was the largest among them.) Estates were mostly middle-sized,



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including a few medium properties of big-name landholders: Taneev, Golitsyn, Shakhovskoi, Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, Kutlubitskii, Belozerskii, Stobeus. Balakhna, closer to Gorbatov, was beyond the Volga characterized by tiny villages but exclusively crown lands and super aristocracy—Panin, Volkonskii, Turchaninov, Shevyrëv, Repnin—a pattern that continued to the west up to Andreev volost’, which was more “democratic”; the Volga and Oka areas were populated by middling landholders as well as the major industrial settlements of Sormovo and Gordeevka. The least marked was Nizhnii Novgorod district itself, where we find mostly middling private landholders and the significant artisanal settlement of Bezvodnoe. This diversity of socioeconomic structures belies even the ecological division into three parts suggested by earlier chapters, yielding instead a picture of large estates in the west, petty landholding in the east, state peasants in the north, and major industrial centers at various junctures (the aforementioned Pavlovo, Lyskovo, parts of Ardatov, Sormovo, Bol’shoe Murashkino)—but not necessarily and in fact usually not in “urban” (i.e., administratively urban) locations. Even so, allowances must be made for considerable variation within each district itself. Curiously, this variety produces at the same time a certain social similarity: if the industrial centers (originally owned by aristocratic landholders) were home to a considerable population of workers and entrepreneurs, many of the rural lands belonged to small- and middling landholders (contrary to the figures garnered from big-picture statistics). We might venture to suggest that this district-by-district breakdown begins to resolve into an image of predominantly middle-level commercial activity and equally middle-of-the-road landholding. Pre-reform possession by aristocratic landholders, in other words, as yet says nothing of what the on-the-ground population actually did, or rather the contrary: large-scale landholding and commercial and industrial activity and the social stratification that accompanies it would seem to go hand in hand.

Relative Weight If they did a good job, local statisticians, well acquainted with the terrain, tended to focus on groups of the population who might or might not be numerous but who bore significant weight in local society and gave the region its dominant “flavor.” In the case of Nizhnii Novgorod, we might think that one such group would be merchants—who in fact were highly influential in local life and completely dominated the city duma(s). But this is not the case, and data on the merchantry must be garnered elsewhere.15 Rather, the primary energies of the local statisticians focused, as we have already seen, on artisanal production. Thus, even before the large-scale inquiry launched in Nizhegorodskii sbornik, we come upon an investigation of artisanal activity specifically in the towns, in the 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka. The very choice of topic is clearly influenced by European methods and reflects a basic wish to create the image of a “lower Mittelstand” and thus “proper” cities, deep in the Russian provinces.16

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A major development in the wake of reform, on the provincial level, was the consolidation of the colorful and classification-defying stratum of what Elise Wirtschafter has called the “people of various ranks.” Labeled in a variety of ways—raznochintsy, lower Mittelstand, meshchanstvo—this fluid category, unlike the relatively narrow (numerically) provincial bourgeoisie, swelled in numbers and—again, depending entirely on how you count them—became a major and defining force in local society. Once the “feudal” society, with its rigidly estate-based rights and obligations, had been abolished, many “peasants” mutated almost overnight into petty artisans and tradesmen in the European sense. To their ranks belonged artisans and craftsmen, traders, and service sector workers. According to Gatsiskii’s statistics, this group, together with peasants, displaced gentry and merchants as the dominant inhabitants of urban agglomerations throughout the province.17 We can imagine these “people of various ranks” in significant concentration in particular urban or quasi-urban agglomerations. Even in the predominantly black-soil southeast region we looked at in the previous chapter, for example, none of the inhabitants of the “village” of Bol’shoe Murashkino—669 households in the 1880s and 980 by 1911—engaged in agricultural activity of any kind. Within the class structure described, the “big hand” and “middle hand” were the sorts of relatively successful and stable small businessmen usually expected in a petty bourgeoisie or lower Mittelstand. These were, to repeat, (1) the twenty individuals who did real factory work on a large scale with a capital of one hundred to six hundred rubles and functioned year round, with the seven largest likely even qualifying as a commercial bourgeoisie, and (2) the seventy-odd mid-sized producers who were also independent but smaller and ran their operations only from April to August. Other examples from the same region might be the Kil’diashev brothers, whose small-scale local agricultural machinery shop in Shutilovo prospered for a decade in the 1870s, until competition from a Mr. Kabanov squeezed them out in the mid-1880s; or A. A. Balabanov in Speshnëvo, who, having worked in wool manufacture at S. T. Prokhorov’s factory in Moscow, returned to his native province and became first a plumber, then a manufacturer of wool-combing machines, eventually passing the business on to his son and retiring to sew straps.18 Even the tenuous business of fishnet weaving involved the intervention of small entrepreneurs: these were the zakazchiki—local peasant capitalists, the biggest of whom was Naum Karpov, and twelve more minor ones. These sold the nets at local markets and mostly at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair, while the biggest traveled to Astrakhan and the Don region to peddle their wares.19 From the investigators of kustar, who comment that the area is rural but civilized, we can even gain a bit of information concerning the mores and culture of this local stratum: “In their houses we frequently encounter painted floors, window curtains, flowers, etc., and even attention to certain rules of worldly etiquette and in general a replication of urban manners . . . the zakazchiki represent a sort of local intelligentsia.”20 There



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was no particular problem with alcoholism, despite the presence of a number of bars and two taverns in the village of P’ianskii Perevoz.21 Thus, prosperous peasants (kulaks) might also be counted among those of “various ranks”; their capacity to lend money and to function as middlemen made them an essential part of the artisanal economy. We can imagine, too, a similar appurtenance to this lower-middle social stratum in a place like Lyskovo, on the bank of the Volga in Makar’ev district. The trade in grain, both internal and external to the province, must have employed petty merchants, bookkeepers, and clerks of various sorts. The petty civil servants who worked there rather than in Makar’ev would also fit in this category. It takes somewhat less imagination to envisage “people of various ranks” in the official district capitals, if only because official statistics recorded the basic data regarding their population. Semënov was created by decree in 1775. A century later, the town had a population of just 2,767, including 38 clergy, 155 merchants, 1,772 meshchane, 218 state and temporarily obligated peasants, and some 300 military people. It seems safe to define practically all of these individuals as belonging to the “various ranks”: peasants living in town, poor clergy, and minor merchants might resemble each other more than they resemble others of their juridical estate. As in the black-soil districts, the petty capitalists are easily classed in this group. Borisovskii counted 15 spoon buyers (skupshchiki) in the town of Semënov, of whom he categorized 8 as “capitalists.”22 Arzamas—the most ancient and organic of the district capitals—also presents an engaging example. The 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka states quite simply that “local trade, given the large population relative to other district capitals and the significant number of individuals belonging to the middle class permanently residing in town, is quite extensive and satisfies all the needs of the urban economy. In addition, this town serves as the venue for the sale of leftover grain from surrounding settlements, as well as the import of grain, import of leather for the Arzamas factories, and the sale of many items of district industry.”23 The observer almost casually mentions the significant permanent presence of persons engaged in commerce—a trading middle class—sufficient to maintain the urban economy as an independent unit. As we have already seen, Arzamas was the capital of leather production, and trade in leather, grain, and other products made it a major industrial and commercial center—along with Nizhnii Novgorod, arguably the most “real” of the province’s cities, in a European sense. Likewise, in Pavlovo, where “domestic forms of large-scale industry” (as distinct from “pure” kustar) increasingly predominated, minor industrialists (fabrikanty) and heads of households employing hired hands (more than 11 percent in Pavlovo and Vorsma villages) formed the kernel of a “middling” stratum.24 The bulk of the “rural” population in this entire area, in the meantime, of course consisted of workers and craftsmen. Still, it is in the provincial capital that we find the greatest concentration of the “people of various ranks.” These were the “Bürger” in the literal sense of

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Trade I. Food sector Makers of bread, rolls Pretzel makers Bakers Gingerbread makers Sausage makers Confectioners Subtotal II. Clothing Tailors Boot makers Shoemakers Hat makers Leather workers Furriers Milliners Subtotal III. Household Carpenters Coopers Painters Wallpaper hangers, curtain makers Stovesetters, chimneysweeps Glassworkers Coppersmiths

Nizhnii Novgorod Arzamas Masters Workers Apprentices Masters Workers Apprentices 26 7 14 4 3 3 57

66 34 54 10 4 10 178

7 6 11 8 4 7 43

10

36

5

5 8

12 4

2 2

1 24

1 53

1 10

38 44 15 9 2 2 10 120

133 101 18 27 3 5 42 329

74 45 13 9

40 54 8 6 146

63 68 7 5 330

29 27 4 2 39

25 166

3 257

2 475

3 104

27 7 9

88 39 30

23 7 13

14 5 2

18 7 8

10 5

3

4

3

14 7 11

28 18 22

5 5 14

7 5 5

7 2 5

1

continued

the word—residents of towns. It makes sense to examine Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas—the two most “urban” of towns, according to any definition at all—together. Fortunately, on this occasion our agenda coincides quite precisely with that of our purveyor. Having devoted his doctoral thesis to the study of leather manufacture in Europe, Gatsiskii had an eye for artisans and craftsmen in Nizhnii Novgorod as well. So, finally, here we are working with more than bare estate-based data. The towns of Nizhnii Novgorod province were entirely the domain of the lower-middling ranks; here they were in their element. Nizhnii Novgorod itself, and Arzamas, together stand out as the “real” urban centers. Bakers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, carriage makers, barbers, goldsmiths, photographers, piano makers, and watchmakers



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Table 6.1. continued Trade Blacksmiths Plumbers Coach makers Saddlers Subtotal IV. Other crafts Linen makers Woodworkers Gilders Gold-, silversmiths Printers Organ, piano makers Watchmakers Artists, icon painters Photographers Bookbinders Lithographers, engravers Barbers Farriers Cabmen (carriage & draft horse drivers) Turners Dyers Subtotal TOTAL

Nizhnii Novgorod Arzamas Masters Workers Apprentices Masters Workers Apprentices 343 63 16 29 36 12 9 15 4 3 1 11 70 29 6 21 12 7 13 5 8 11 5 448 390 124 84 116 45 1 1 9 3 4 11 5 6 4

26 1 6 24 2 5 4

3 11 3

9 15

325 2 3 391 1,016

70 4 2 171 1,068

10 2 4 2 1

6 6 5

14 10 11

5 6 4

4 8

1 3

1 2

1

2

2

1

13

2 3

33 366

11

8

3 50 415

7 56 700

4 23 182

all plied their trade in these two towns. Here, the numbers help us to recreate the feeling of urban life. Unfortunately, Gatsiskii did not consider the service sector (bars, restaurants, hotels) to be of equal interest, so we have fewer data on those (table 6.1). In addition to those data shown in table 6.1, the data collectors counted: in Nizhnii Novgorod, thirteen butchers, five gardeners, four vegetable gardeners, five fishermen, two cooks, eighteen sawyers, twelve foresters, ten boat makers, sixteen carpenters, six masons, six plasterers, two bast weavers, one digger, four roofers, one wagon and sleigh maker, two caulkers, two pavers, one box maker, and six cesspool cleaners; in Arzamas, ten butchers, three fishermen, three joiners, two masons, four stonecutters, five plasterers, and six wheel makers.

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social space Table 6.2. Community specialization Town/village Kunavino Arzamas Balakhna Gorbatov Kniaginin Makar’ev

Activity Making nails Leather manufacture Knitting boots Lace making Rope making Millinery Making trunks

Numbers 400 500 men 1,000 women 400 women 500 400 100

In some locations, entire communities engaged in one particular form of production (table 6.2).25 If we juxtapose this picture with more traditional soslovie figures, we can see how the estate categories require modification in order to reflect the actual activities and occupations of the individuals they describe and, specifically, how our “lower Mittelstand” or “various ranks” classification might begin to expand. Shown in boldface type in table 6.3 are the obviously “lower-middle” groups and, in bold italics, those who might most likely have belonged to those groups. My suggestion is, for example, that peasants who live in towns are by virtue of that very fact town dwellers rather than peasants in any meaningful sense. An interesting case is the towns of Sergach, Lukoianov, Pochinki, and Perevoz, the bulk of whose inhabitants were state peasants. The point here is that the defining mass of the provincial population seems to have been this populace (liud) of diverse types. They, much more than the peasants, set the tone of provincial life. True, Nizhnii Novgorod is unusual in the intensity of its commercial and entrepreneurial element. But this vibrant community of exchange and artisanal production is much more characteristic of nineteenth-century Russia than we tend to think.26 Certainly, there can be no more dreadfully inaccurate portrayal of Russia than as characterized exclusively by an agricultural mode of production. Yet, Marxist-Leninist historiography, with its insistence on a persistent “feudal” system, until 1861 portrayed it as such, while Marxist-Leninist ideology itself kept people on the collective farms and explicitly prevented them from engaging in skilled artisanal activity and commerce. Russians, from the medieval period, were a people of trade and small-scale production, and it is to such activities that they immediately turned when freed of the constraints of Soviet enterprise—not only from bare necessity but also in an intuitive reconnection with the skills and pursuits of their craftsoriented grandparents (in the character of the master, or master-artisan). In adhering to the traditional soslovie categories, information gatherers ignored the emergence of significant new social groups, most notably middle classes and workers. To give the statisticians some credit, the perpetual flux of post-emancipation society, in which, for example, the same person could be the



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Table 6.3. Soslovie in Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas Estate Gentry Hereditary Personal Clergy Orthodox white Orthodox monastic “United faith” white Roman Catholic Protestant Muslim Urban Honorary Citizen, hereditary Honorary Citizen, personal Merchants Meshchane Guild “Rural” State peasants Colonists Crown peasants Temporarily obligated T.O. servants Military Army On leave Retirees & wives Children/colonists Foreigners Other TOTAL

Nizhnii Novgorod Men Women

Men

Arzamas Women

847 1,588

991 1,659

79 177

106 198

792 31 3 2 8

522 252 8

470 102

176 761

102 57 1,065 6,258 869

111 47 913 5,829 763

31 1 483 1,351 1,467

36 466 1,604 1,499

954 9 136 3,195 625

456 6 64 1,390 596

300

111

28 372 146

17 203 199

3,480

1,060 21 173

565

98 159 17,353

3 59 6,323

21 5,962

5,370 126 1,380 41 109 623 24,190

9

Note: Boldface indicates the obviously “lower-middle” groups; bold italics indicate those who might also most likely have belonged to those “lower-middle” groups.

employee of a sheepskin manufacturer, an independent entrepreneur in that same line of business, and an agricultural laborer all in the course of a single year, made it virtually impossible to measure status, occupation, and class; the geographical location and employ of many provincial inhabitants was subject to change. A theme that has emerged from the preceding discussion, and one that deserves separate attention, is the need to question the assumptions built into

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social categories and to look for social types in places other than where we expect. For approximately the last twenty-five years, historians of Russia have sought delicately to erode the rigid class categories that Marxist-Leninist historiography tried, with equal determination if less tact, to impose. Thus, from about 1980 we hear increasingly about a “society in flux” (Reginald Zelnik), about the corporative rather than prescriptive nature of soslovie categories (Gregory Freeze), about a “sedimentary society” (Alfred Rieber), and “fragmented, protean social ‘structure’” or even “lack of structure” (Elise Wirt­ schafter).27 Wirtschafter in particular specifies that at virtually all levels of society, economic relationships violated formal social boundaries. The lower-class entrepreneurs who moved with such ease across the vast, diverse reaches of the empire; the unregistered traders, artisans, and laborers who were so visible in the towns; the urban “citizens” who lived illegally in rural villages (and whose presence the peasants opposed); and the economic relationships (legal and illegal) that brought together nobles, merchants, peasants, and raznochintsy—all revealed a society where social boundaries were easily crossed and where nobles of elite or lowly birth need not worry about derogation. Ownership of serfs did not necessarily indicate noble status, registered merchants did not necessarily engage in trade, and peasants were not necessarily farmers.28

Everything, in other words, is not what it seems: this “dynamic, fluid, and infinitely colorful” world is the diametric opposite of the ossified and therefore ultimately conflictual social universe of an earlier historiographical tradition.29 In the present discussion, we have seen in particular that industry was neither urban nor bourgeois, in other words, that factories were most likely located outside the cities and tended to be successful when on aristocratic domains, and that Wirtschafter’s general rubric of “people of various ranks” might be extended to include a broad variety of provincial residents whom official statistics classified in other ways.

What Official Statistics Left Out Finally, we can turn to the local statistical studies for material that state information gathering neglected, sometimes willfully. If the studies were well conducted—and such studies frequently were, given the spirit of bureaucratic enthusiasm—local statisticians could introduce a broad, miscellaneous variety of factors that infused color and life into the bare outlines of numerical analysis, ultimately crafting a more lively and nuanced portrait of the province. These factors included, first, ethnicity and religion. The ethnic composition of the province as a whole was, characteristically for the Middle Volga region, quite diverse, and included Tatars, Mordvinians, Chuvash, and Cheremiss (Mari). However, it was mostly the Old Believers who gave the region its distinctive character. In the 1840s, P. I. Mel’nikov counted 170,506 (as opposed to the mere



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20,000 in the official governor’s report) Old Believers in the province.30 A breakdown of Nizhnii Novgorod’s residents by religion yields the following picture: 39,784 Orthodox, 136 edinovertsy, 260 Old Believers, 1 Armenian-Gregorian, 471 Roman Catholic, 364 Protestant, 354 Jewish, 173 Muslim. They worshiped at forty-seven Orthodox churches and chapels; two major monasteries, Pecherskii and Blagoveshchenskii, both dating back to the thirteenth century, provided an important focal point for local religious life. Two edinovercheskie churches and one each Armenian-Gregorian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant, and one mosque, brought the total number of houses of worship to fifty-five.31 Ethnic groups (“tribes”) are barely mentioned in the Pamiatnaia knizhka, and their numbers appear insignificant: 37,040 Tatars (3 percent of the province’s population), 47,212 Mordvinians (4 percent), and less than 1 percent Cheremiss (Mari, 5,279), Gypsies (Roma, 753), and Jews (548). Yet the statisticians also bring up the once again crucial factor of spatialization, from which we learn that the Tatars were concentrated in Sergach, Vasil’, and Kniaginin districts; Mordvinians, or rather Erzia and Moksha, in Nizhnii Novgorod, Lukoianov, Arzamas, Kniaginin, Sergach, and Ardatov; and Cheremiss in Makariev and Vasil’; while the Jews were almost entirely in military service, that is, practically all those enumerated were males. Then, we can calculate that Tatars constituted 11 percent of the population of those particular districts; Mordvinians 6 percent of theirs; Cheremiss, 3 percent. Thus, in the southern districts, tending toward the east, these various groups made up 10 percent of the population. It is worth noting that, in addition to ethnicity, local researchers introduced the elements of a moral statistics, so popular in other European countries and the United States, and particularly in France. Tables on criminality established a total of 2,221 crimes for 1862, with theft and swindling leading the list at 1,111, followed by illicit tree-cutting (462), horse thievery (168), child abandonment (113), counterfeiting (64), highway robbery (54), and arson (43); there were 7 suicides in the province during that year.32 A later survey found vagrancy to be among the most numerous transgressions.33 As we have seen, the fascination with moral norms took local statisticians into the houses of artisans in the 1880s, thus providing a window into alcoholism, marriage patterns, work hours, child labor, and health hazards.34

Images: Provincial Photography between Art and Ethnography Provincial statistics might be seen as the art of painting with numbers: from the vast production of apparently dry data emerges a vivid portrait of the province’s inhabitants. If the portrait was a conscious creation of the data gatherers, our own reading a century later brings out features and aspects that may or may not coincide with the concerns of the original counters. The close of the nineteenth century witnessed a curious twist in the phenomenon of data collection and mediation, thanks to the increasing sophistication of a new medium: photography. Hovering in the intermediate space between art (the conscious crafting of cre-

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ative images) and science (an ethnographic portrayal of “reality”), photographic images allowed their makers to open a novel window on the world inhabited by their subjects, while at the same time providing us with an unprecedented capacity to view “directly,” so to speak, the artifacts of the past.35 Andrei Osipovich Karelin opened his studio of “Photography and Art” at number 4 Osypnaia Street in 1869, three years after arriving in Nizhnii Novgorod from St. Petersburg, via Kostroma.36 Karelin’s work immediately became intimately linked with his adoptive province. In 1870, he produced, together with Ivan Shishkin, an album titled Nizhnii Novgorod. Throughout the decade he also operated a photographic show-booth (balagan) at the fair. In 1885, Karelin exhibited his art at the Nizhnii Novgorod Artisanal-Industrial Exposition, and, in 1886, he organized the first Nizhnii Novgorod art exhibit. Views of Nizhnii Novgorod was published that same year. There was no civic activity or organization in the province in which Karelin did not play an active role, and his participation sometimes extended to the national level as well. In 1873, he became a member of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, in 1874 of the Nizhnii Novgorod section of the Russian Society of Animal Protection, in 1880 of the photographic division of the Russian Technical Society (RTO), in 1887 of the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Archival Commission. In 1888, he was accepted into the Nizhnii Novgorod Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy (for his work photographing a solar eclipse in Kostroma province), and in 1889, he participated in the fifty-year anniversary of the invention of photography, organized by the Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge, in Moscow. In 1895, Karelin became a founder of the Historical Painting Society, simultaneously opening his own studio to display his collection of antique objects and clothing. He was a member of the Moscowbased Russian Photographic Society. He exhibited his work at the 1896 AllRussian Art and Industrial Fair in Nizhnii Novgorod. In 1897, he was elected a member of the Imperial Society of Amateurs of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography and also an honorary member of the Kazan Photographic Society. In 1898, his studio set to work preparing slides for “magic lanterns” to be used in schools, for popular lectures. In 1901, he was elected a member of the Nizhnii Novgorod Society of Amateurs of Art; in 1902, he showed his work at the Second Nizhnii Novgorod Art Exhibit and went about the city photographing its slums for a Moscow Art Theater production of Gorky’s Lower Depths. Karelin’s early work, in particular, received immediate national and international recognition. His first international exhibition was at Vienna in 1873; three years later he won a silver medal in Paris for his portraits and studies, followed by a bronze medal at the Philadelphia World’s Fair. The Royal Academy granted him a gold medal at Edinburgh in 1876–1877. Subsequently, he became a member of the French National Academy of Arts and received a gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878. The Russian National Academy of Agriculture, Manufacture, and Commerce awarded him an honorary diploma



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in 1879. Later awards included a diploma from the First International Exhibit of the Moscow Art and Photography Society in 1902 and a silver medal at the International Photography Exhibit at St. Petersburg in 1903. Karelin died in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1906.37 In his forty years of work in Nizhnii Novgorod, Karelin produced every possible item of photography’s Victorian repertoire. In terms of historical documentation, however, the most valuable series is the one the Parisian judges noted early on: these were published as Khudozhestvennyi al’bom fotografii s natury (Art Photography of Life Subjects) in the 1870s. It is immediately obvious that the pictures are the opposite of “candid” shots: they are painstakingly planned, carefully posed, and elaborately arranged. The very care with which the photographs are constructed tells us as much, or more, about the provincial world in the late nineteenth century than would a hypothetical spontaneous image. In addition, unlike portraits, whose goal is to capture the specificity of individual traits, these pictures instead portray a situation. They are genre scenes, in which the characters—even though the real-life subjects would naturally recognize themselves—remain anonymous. Karelin works with poses and expressions, clothing, frames, and “attributes”—the paraphernalia surrounding the subjects—to create a nuanced and visually articulate picture of a provincial bourgeoisie. In an important 1995 article—a recapitulation of many years of collective research on the European Bürgertum—Jürgen Kocka proposes that we define the middle classes first relationally and, second, culturally. The middle classes, he suggests, gained identity by setting themselves apart from others, “developing cohesion in opposition to people above and below.”38 This negative definition makes it easier to grasp the makeup of a social group variegated enough potentially to include “merchants, manufacturers, bankers, capitalists, entrepreneurs, and managers, as well as rentiers,” and their families, and also “the families of doctors, lawyers, ministers, scientists and other professionals, professors of universities and secondary schools, intellectuals, men and women of letters, and academics.”39 In addition, the middle classes can be described by their adherence to a common culture. Bourgeois families shared “a respect for individual achievement” and “a positive attitude toward regular work, a propensity for rationality and emotional control, and a fundamental striving for independence.” The patriarchal family itself was a core cultural value, as was education: “scholarly pursuits were respected, as were music, literature, and the arts.”40 Kocka’s double definition coincides with remarkable precision with the qualities expressed in Karelin’s photographs. Compositionally, for example, the effect of “Family in a Suite of Rooms” is linear, from the woman (who may or may not be the mother) and child stretching diagonally back to culminate in the father, who presides caringly over the entire scene, one hand positioned on the back of one of the children’s chairs. The serious expressions, while conventional

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Fig. 6.1. A. O. Karelin, “Family in a Suite of Rooms.” From Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

for the time, indicate more than the usual degree of anxiety: the woman’s face in particular is careworn, while the father’s is concerned. Everyone wears simple and austere clothing, cut from rough cloth. Only the Grecian statue is reminiscent of the knickknacks so typical of the studio photography of the time; and even that statue, like the sewing machine and the book, has symbolic value as a reference to the family’s cultural status. Modern and consummately practical, the sewing machine—quite likely a Singer—replaces the idle art of embroidery, while the book underscores the value of reading and education.41 The image tells us little about the family’s actual status within the soslovie, or estate, system; this may well be a gentry family, but the cultural values expressed are clearly middle class. In “A Scene at the Window,” the girls in crinolines and modest but pretty dresses contrast sharply with the rough faces and worn peasant clothes of the visitors. Two of the girls have their backs to us, but the



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Fig. 6.2. A. O. Karelin, “Scene at the Window.”

From Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

other family members look on with curiosity and perhaps a trace of nervousness. Objects are scarcer here, but the floral-design rug, ornate chair back and table, and decorative lamp are clear marks of a bourgeois household. In Karelin’s work, windows and doorjambs frequently serve as frames, internal to the picture.42 In “Window,” the window itself starkly places the street musicians—framed as if in their own separate photograph—in a world clearly distinct from that of the fastidious family inside. It is practically a literal illustration of Kocka’s point about delineation and delimitation. While the theme of the bourgeois household provided material for numerous other photographs, Karelin’s work contains, in addition, a conscious ethnographic theme.43 In the 1870s, the painter Ivan Shishkin visited Karelin in Nizhnii Novgorod; together they created a series of landscapes and local portraits—essentially, retouched photographs. One of these was the image of

Fig. 6.3 A. O. Karelin and I. I. Shishkin, “Gorbatov Meshchanka.” From Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

Fig. 6.4 A.O. Karelin and I. I. Shishkin, “Mordvinians from Sergach District.”

From Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

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Fig. 6.5. A.O. Karelin, “Tatar Couple.”

From Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990).

a Gorbatov meshchanka. The Volga peoples also became a productive subject; hence the image of Mordvinians in Sergach district. To me, a photograph of a Tatar couple from the Life Subjects album seems, instead, assimilationist. The ethnic difference of the pair is neutralized and deprived of any threatening aspect by portraying them in classically bourgeois terms, like any loving couple: Tatar clothing and decorations form a harmless backdrop.

Biographies The bulk of Aleksandr Gatsiskii’s life and career was dedicated to the pursuit of aggregates: the quantification—though also the qualitative description—of statistical information on the local level. Yet one of his most productive concepts seems to contradict this lifelong concern. In 1887, Gatsiskii published a

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book called Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia (People of the Nizhnii Novgorod Volga Region), a compilation of biographies of individuals, each of whose life and fate were intimately linked to the region.44 Only the first volume was ever published, although its continuation—a series of biographical and autobiographical sketches—subsequently found its way into the papers of the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Archival Commission. The biographies were compiled in keeping with a carefully formulated historiographical principle. In the introduction, Gatsiskii wrote, If it were possible, history should take as its task the detailed biography of each and every person on the earth without exception, because it is difficult to determine what in life belongs independently to each individual, what took seed in him from his contemporaries, what he received from his predecessors, and what from the world outside him in general. But such a task is of course beyond the powers of history, and therefore it must deal only with personalities that are outstanding in one or another respect, whose degree of historical significance is of course not absolute. Humanity has its kind of genius, peoples have another, provinces—still a third type.45

Total history, in other words, would coincide with total biography: only a complete apprehension of every single individual’s life story, arrayed in juxtaposition with every other individual’s, would yield a true picture of the world. Characteristically, Gatsiskii’s principle was a blend of hyperpositivism—history as the totality of individual biographies—with the spirit of the “small deed.” If the ideal of total biography was beyond reach, we could at least chart the path taken by some local personalities. With this inspiration in mind, Gatsiskii collected dozens of biographies of figures like P. O. Bankal’skii, meshchanin, bar owner, petty merchant, and author of two major books that tried to reconcile the claims of religion and science; A. V. Stupin (1776–1861), founder of a well-known iconpainting school in the wilds of Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia; and L. P. Kositskaia (1829–1868), beloved local actress. The significance of Gatsiskii’s historiographical principle for the study of the province becomes apparent when juxtaposed with another of his concepts, formulated in a different context. A decade earlier, Gatsiskii had articulated the notion of province, provintsiia, in the heat of a polemical exchange: “I will say without mincing words: Petersburg, with few exceptions, knows practically nothing of the province. . . . It is a smart but naïve child: show it the province, of whose existence it is ignorant, and it will experience shock, won’t understand anything and will merely open its eyes in awe. . . . We can only hope that, with time, it will understand that the province really exists, and then will try to understand it.”46 The analogies and metaphors multiply: Petersburg without the province is a fashionable hat with no body; the province is “a good, loving mother with large breasts full of healthy milk, obligated only to nourish its infant, Petersburg, and then teach it nothing.”47 Biography, then, can serve as



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the first tool in this process of “knowing the province,” as a means of penetrating the unknown universe that lies outside the boundaries of the capital cities. Given our separation from Gatsiskii’s province in time as well as space, our goals should perhaps be even more modest than his. Still, in keeping with his suggestion, we too can benefit from a biographical apprehension of the provincial universe, drawing in part on his own materials. Thus, I introduce here a handful of individuals whose stories are intimately linked with the history of Nizhnii Novgorod province. The choice of individuals to be featured is of course difficult, since, to be true to Gatsiskii’s program, we should recount at least several hundred life stories. The individuals presented here came from different backgrounds and followed different evolutions across social boundaries. They are united by the fact that their trajectories traversed the period of the Great Reforms, when, historians never cease to remind us, society was “in flux” and “extremely plastic,” resulting in “the difficulty of fitting the life of even a single individual (let alone whole segments of society) into the mold of a neatly delineated social typology.”48 In this critical moment, these personalities all took their lives into their own hands, profoundly shaping their own fate, whether through social engagement or by the pen. They are a hotel proprietor, a prominent Old Believer merchant, a devoted district zemstvo activist, and an inspired female journalist.49 The first two are of originally “peasant” background; the other two belong to the “gentry” classes. All might have been (and some even were) subjects of Karelin’s photographs.

Petr Osipovich Bankal’skii (1832–1891) P. O. Bankal’skii was a nizhegorodskii meshchanin, or member of the urban lowermiddle estate in Nizhnii Novgorod.50 This may not tell us very much about him, but it certainly meant a good deal to him. His father belonged, a little arbitrarily, to the category of “state peasants”—actually, Iosif Fomich had served in the Polish army and had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the campaign of 1812; the vicissitudes of fate had brought him into the service of Prince Gruzinskii of the Nizhnii Novgorod area. Here he was baptized into Orthodoxy, married a Russian citizen, and registered as a state peasant. While the prince was being tried for sheltering runaway serfs, Bankal’skii’s father found work in the office of the state alcohol monopoly, in the city of Nizhnii itself. Here Bankal’skii was born, to return at age three to the village of Lyskovo when the prince came home. Bankal’skii seems to have felt mildly superior to his peasant surroundings from a relatively early age. He learned reading, writing, and arithmetic (which he especially liked) at Prince Gruzinskii’s school; he then finished two grades of the school in Makar’ev district, where he shone, again, in arithmetic, before being taken out by his parents to live, as he described it, “among the peasants” until he was seventeen. In 1849, Bankal’skii struck out on his own, going off to the city to seek

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gainful employment. He worked at the fair and as a grocery clerk until finding his first vocation as a scribe for the local association of the meshchanstvo (meshchanskoe obshchestvo). It was a source of immense pride for him that, in 1854, he himself was able to register as a member of that association, leaving his peasant background behind; looking back many years later, he could say with assurance that this was the best year of his life so far. One year later he married. Partly in response to the inexorable pressures of Russian life, and partly as a result of his own irrepressible energy and enthusiasm, Bankal’skii found himself a man of several trades and spheres of activity: these were public service, commercial enterprise, and philosophy. Bankal’skii’s visibility in Nizhnii Novgorod circles began with the reform of city self-government in 1870. Having already acquired experience on the city census committee in 1870, he was quickly spotted by local activists, and, indeed, he plunged with enthusiasm into a variety of public service activities. Too numerous to list, these endeavors included everything from working out the plan for mutual insurance and separating the city from the zemstvo for taxation purposes, to limiting business activity on holidays (a point of great concern for the Church), to the creation of a permanent sanitation commission for the city.51 By the late 1870s, Bankal’skii had become a much-respected citizen: he was elected speaker of the city duma by the meshchanstvo for several four-year terms in a row and held a number of prestigious appointments—member of the local library board, member of the city board, zemstvo delegate elected from the city association, member of the commercial police. Bankal’skii was noted particularly for his defense of the poorer members of the city population and his extensive efforts to make city institutions a natural part of local life. If Bankal’skii was a meshchanin and active citizen by social standing, by profession he was a small businessman. Curiously, his entry into the world of trade was intimately related to the demands made upon him by the state. His number came up for the draft in December 1855 (less than a year after his marriage); hiring a recruit to replace him put him deeply and inextricably into debt, and he spent the next eight years experimenting with different kinds of trade. He even felt forced to give up government service to devote himself to business full time yet found himself caught in an unending cycle of payments and debts. It was not until 1863 that he hit on the right line of activity to keep himself and his family solvent: he opened a tavern and then moved on to cafeterias on board the many ships that plied the Volga and Oka Rivers along which Nizhnii stands. (Bars seem, indeed, to have been a means of social mobility in the 1870s; many peasants, as they drifted to the provincial urban centers, found a new vocation precisely in this line of business.) During these difficult years, Bankal’skii complained, his busy life left him little time to read anything “edifying” (putnoe), as he put it, to reflect on scientific matters, or to mix with educated people. By 1866, success in business gave him the leisure to do what he really wanted: he sat down behind a desk, got out pen,



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paper, and a book, and began to read. Thus began the third aspect of his career: the pursuit of philosophical knowledge. This process, too, turned out to be less straightforward than he had imagined. As he himself told the story, The first learned book I came upon destroyed many of my previous opinions and I fell into doubt. Before taking leave of my previous conceptions, I turned to the Bible and particularly to the Book of Genesis. In this book I saw, at first, much that was unclear and mystical, yet there was also inside me the conviction that Moses, as a prophet, could not have not known what science has now discovered, for even if he had been writing merely as a learned person, even then he would have had to have a definite point of view, and more so since he was writing according to inspiration from above. For this reason I sought to understand what seemed incomprehensible to me. On the other hand, each new learned book showed me something I hadn’t known, and I tried as much as I could to make sense of this too.52

Unlike Carlo Ginzburg’s now-famous Menocchio, Bankal’skii was neither iconoclastic nor irreverent.53 Instead, his doubts and reflections led him ultimately to a perfectly harmonious reconciliation of the claims of science and religion—a position he elaborated, with a wealth of detail, in two books. The Powers of Nature in Accordance with the Biblical Account of Six-Day Creation was published in Moscow in 1874, and The History of the Origins of the Heavens, the Earth and the Three Kingdoms of Nature: Mineral, Plant and Animal; According to the Revelation of Holy Scripture and According to Scientific Investigations came out in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1889.54 The copy of the latter in the Nizhnii State Library bears an inscription, in Bankal’skii’s proud hand, to Nikolai Mikhailovich Baranov—governor-general of the province. Bankal’skii’s philosophical position—unusual only in his determination to express it systematically—might be summed up as “religious positivism.” His cosmological system was more or less a recounting of the biblical story of Creation, weaving in, as he went, bits and pieces he had picked up from reading Kant, Humboldt, Darwin, and, it appears, contemporary Russian science as well. He could elaborate, for example, on the formation of the earth by describing the oxygenation of silicon to form the earth’s crust, and he could describe the introduction of light in terms of the twenty-four-hour rotation of the planet.55 He was particularly fascinated by key moments of transition: from the “world ether” to its coagulation in the planet Earth—that is, the creation of matter, and from inorganic to organic matter—the creation of life.56 The Creator’s intervention, he believed, was an absolute necessity only at these critical moments: to create the “tiny invisible atoms” of which he, like many of his generation, was enamored, and from which larger bodies could then easily be formed, and to give life to the seeds of plants and to animals. The laws of nature could—and, in fact, had to, in fulfillment of divine design—take care of all further developments.57

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Bankal’skii died peacefully in April 1891. His epitaph—a contribution from “friends”—bears appropriate tribute to the enthusiastic if unimaginative quest he shared with many like him: His life was one of constant labor Labor of the mind, but not a search for glory. He fought and struggled for good with his mind, And his labor was not empty amusement.58

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bugrov (1837–1911) It is impossible to tell Nikolai Bugrov’s story independently of his family’s.59 His grandfather, Petr Egorovich (1785–1859) was born a crown peasant in a remote village in Semënov district. His career began at age sixteen, when he hired himself out as a shepherd in summer and as an apprentice to the prosperous peasant I. A. Prokhorov in winter. Prokhorov’s enterprises included felt hat and boot manufacture, milling, and trading in meat. Petr Egorovich quickly became an expert roller of hats, particularly men’s hats made from delicate lamb’s wool (poiarok) and learned the basics of the miller’s art. His musical talents—he was an accomplished balalaika player—won him success in love but wreaked financial disaster: his patron’s daughter, Anastasia, fell in love with him, they married secretly in the Gorodets Old Believer chapel, and were exiled from the household. Unfortunately, the moment coincided with a crisis in the hat business, when sales were at a record low, and Bugrov the elder was forced to resort to the last of all lines of activity: he became a burlak, selling his labor at the twice-yearly barge haulers’ market in Nizhnii.60 Even in this lowly business he was a visible figure, attracting the attention of the observer Vladimir Dal’, who particularly noted the young man’s omnipresent balalaika along with the emblematic special thick felt hat, with a wooden spoon stuck in the rim, and the leather strap (liamka) worn by other practitioners of the trade. With the advent of steamships on the Volga and consequent decline of the barge haulers’ employ, Petr Egorovich became a stevedore, carrying bags of salt, and then a raftsman in the same business, while in the meantime carrying on his own trade on the side. Such were his successes that he won his father-in-law’s confidence (cemented by the birth of a male child), and from that point his fortune took an upward turn: Prokhorov’s commune in 1810 granted him a piece of land (albeit small and sandy) to build a house.61 He then became an increasingly successful trader of felt hats and particularly boots, marketing them especially to salt workers who needed them to walk on the harsh salt. Steady promotion followed, as he gained a post as head of the Chistopol’ administration (prikaz), with a salary and a special caftan, and became first a contractor in the salt business. He then found his true vocation as a building contractor: he was responsible for the construction of grain storehouses and the Nizhnii Novgorod hospital (under the sponsorship of Dal’ and with the approval of Lev Perovskii, the minister of the



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interior); in the comprehensive town reconstruction of 1836, he took on the massive and difficult engineering project of reinforcing the eroding Volga embankment and also consolidating the slope leading from the city to the river (the “Zelenskii decline”), thus triumphing over the encroaching ravines. His other construction projects included the kremlin towers, local administrative buildings, the Martynov hospital, a school, two prisons, bridges, and buildings on the fairgrounds. In addition, Bugrov the elder bought and built a number of mills on the Linda River, producing primarily rye flour. He thus became the founder of the commercial milling business in the region; he was involved in the grain trade as well. By the end of his life, Petr Egorovich owned several elegant houses in Nizhnii, was a respected leader of the Old Believer community, and traded with the license of a merchant of the first guild; yet he remained officially a peasant, both by passport and, as his biographer notes, in his modest way of life.62 Petr and Anastasia’s son, Aleksandr (1809–1883), inherited his father’s “thousands” at age fifty. He augmented the family fortune through large-scale purchases of forests from—a sign of the times—indigent or merely strapped gentry, beginning with the lands of A. Turchaninov and extending up into Kostroma province. On some of them he built more mills and expanded his production to wheat and oats, complementing his status as a timber baron, while simultaneously trading in salt and consolidating a shipping company. He was one of the sponsors of Nizhnii Novgorod’s second water supply system and engaged in several urban improvement projects; he was repeatedly elected to the city duma and the Balakhna and Semënov district zemstvos (where his mills were located). It was Aleksandr who consolidated his social status through his promotion to merchant of the first guild in the 1880s, though this status remained “temporary.” Aleksandr Bugrov is famous, as well, as the founder of a homeless shelter that provided overnight stays for itinerant traders; originally intended for 500 visitors a night, it serviced 443,785 clients in 1904, and a cap was then put in place.63 The three-generation-long consolidation of capital concluded with Nikolai Aleksandrovich himself. A three-time widower at thirty-six, he poured his energies into the expansion and modernization of the family enterprise, so that Maksim Gorky labeled him an appanage prince. Beginning as a Semënov merchant of the third guild, he became a first-guild Nizhnii Novgorod merchant in due time. Following the international agrarian crisis of 1873 and a particularly sharp drop in grain prices in 1884, Nikolai Bugrov introduced steam kettles and machines (one of whose manufacturers, incidentally, was the mechanic V. I. Kalashnikov). A state-sponsored millers’ congress and the establishment of four five-year millers’ institutes (Odessa, Warsaw, Mitau, Nizhnii Novgorod), which included instruction in languages, geography, and history as well as physics, accounting, and other purely technical subjects, helped to transform the mills into highly efficient enterprises. Among the products was a very finely ground flour. The Bugrov capital provides a textbook example of vertical integration:

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Bugrov owned not only the mills themselves but also the sack manufactures, the shipping company, and the docks—everything that was needed to run the business from beginning to end. Eventually, this chain of ownership included the construction of special railroad lines to connect with the main link between Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow (1862). These were built through agreements with the landlord (Turchaninov) and the peasants who owned the strategically located land. Under Nikolai Bugrov, the mills employed more than two thousand workers, functioning under a local regime of eight-hour days and a company system of pensions and social insurance. If his grandfather had drawn largely on a commune of priestless Old Believers for credit, Nikolai could have resource to the Nicholas City Mutual Bank, founded in 1864 by his fellow merchant F. A. Blinov; the Merchant Bank founded in 1870 by V. I. Ragozin (author of the study of the Volga cited earlier); the Volga-Kama Commercial Bank based in Kazan; and finally in the National Bank. Bugrov became Nizhnii Novgorod’s major real estate owner, with thirty-eight individual houses and offices; it was he who offered the imposing house on the central square to the city duma. Nikolai Bugrov was of course also a visible political figure, winning election to the provincial as well as the Nizhnii Novgorod, Balakhna, and Semënov district zemstvos, and the city duma, where he was a member of the influential Finance Committee. He followed in his father’s footsteps as a major philanthropist, adding a widows’ home and four almshouses to the homeless shelter, and he single-handedly funded the reconstruction of the Gorodets Old Believer chapel when it fell victim to arson in 1893. Concerned, as a childless man, about protecting his fortune after his death, Bugrov consolidated his financial empire into a joint-stock company in the early years of the new century.

N. I. Rusinov (1820–1886) With his usual mild irony, Gatsiskii described Nikolai Rusinov as a local celebrity.64 Indeed, even a cursory perusal of the papers of the provincial and particularly the Lukoianov district zemstvos reveals the high visibility of the longtime zemstvo activist. Rusinov’s biography chronicles the evolution of an unremarkable provincial nobleman into a dedicated public figure who significantly shaped politics on the most local level—the district.65 The key issues of local politics in the post-reform period emerge quite clearly from his concerns and agenda items. Rusinov seemed destined for obscurity in his early years. Born on the family estate of Shutilovo in Lukoianov district, he “learned Russian from the domestic staff, and French from Mme. Letombel.”66 He was sent to the provincial capital at age eight to study, privately, along with Governor Bibikov’s children, with the teachers of the local gymnasium. The School of Artillery in St. Petersburg followed; an episode as a second in a duel delayed his graduation until 1839, when he was appointed sub-ensign to the Suvorov regiment. Only two years



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later he had retired from state service and was back in Shutilovo, tending to his family and his estate, which later declined steadily as a result of his hands-on management. But fate plucked him from a tranquil existence as a result of the organization of the Nizhnii Novgorod militia, dispatched to the Crimean front in 1855. Gatsiskii’s interesting interpretation of this experience—even though the corps made it no farther than Belaia Tserkov’ in then-Kiev province—is that the daily contact with different social strata was transformative: “People returned from the expedition changed, as if reborn—they had grown closer to the muzhik [common man] under the corps’s common cross.”67 Thus, Rusinov sided with the minority in the provincial committee formed in response to the Nazimov rescript. Veterans of the Kievan expedition spearheaded the initiative to do away with serfdom entirely (rather than merely “improve the lot” of the serfs), seconded by the erstwhile Decembrist governor Murav’ev, who famously dispatched a courier to St. Petersburg in the middle of the night, before the gentry had time to change their minds. The implementation of the emancipation (12 March in Nizhnii Novgorod province) became a personal watershed for Rusinov. Elected communal judge in his district, he became responsible for the promulgation, in the villages, of the Emancipation Manifesto—an assignment he later remembered with nostalgia: “Accompanied by the tolling of church bells, I traveled from village to village, where people from around had congregated, and announced the tsar’s manifesto on the emancipation from serfdom. It felt good to be the messenger of good tidings, and the people loved and respected us for that, and trusted us in childlike fashion, calling us the tsar’s emissaries!”68 Rusinov did not serve his full three-year term, despite repeated pleas from Governor Odintsov and the president of the Peasant Affairs Commission; once the land charters in his segment had been concluded, he felt the onset of a “bureaucratic spirit.” But he resurfaced soon enough, as the elected president of the district zemstvo board. Here, too, after only one three-year term “creating the district economy [khoziaistvo],” Rusinov decided not to stand for reelection. The major issue was land assessment: the Petersburg Central Committee chose to ignore a note, authored by Rusinov and V. I. Iashcherov (another district zemstvo member), detailing the structure of Lukoianov district’s soils. According to Rusinov and Iashcherov, the district consisted of two unequal parts: the larger part, toward Pochinki, where the soil was good and featured a number of meadows, and a smaller part near Lukoianov, characterized by gray clay and some sandy soil. Petersburg, however, assigned the entire district to the blacksoil region, thus unfairly taxing those peasants who farmed the poorer lands. Rusinov, feeling his responsibility as manager (khoziain) of the district, compiled a soil map, based on extensive research, and presented it to his colleagues in the zemstvo. The majority of its members were from wealthy black-soil areas and

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thus rejected it.69 Rusinov then refused to go up for a second term, resentfully noting, “Not having found a spirit of equity [spravedlivost’] toward themselves, the assembly would no longer find me at the head of the district economy.”70 From that point onward, Rusinov made inequity of taxes and assessment one of the keys of his research and administrative agenda—an agenda that unfurled in his multiple capacities as member of the Nizhnii Novgorod Statistical Committee, twenty-year district zemstvo member (1865–1885), and president of the district school council (until 1874, when the presidency was legally mandated to the marshal of the nobility). In education, his initiatives included the construction, with his own money, of a building to house the preparatory class of the district school, as well as the establishment of a girls’ school, where his daughter Zinaida was the teacher, and the founding of a public library. In agriculture, he founded and presided over the Lukoianov Agricultural Congress in 1863—renamed the Lukoianov Society of Agriculture and Rural Industry in 1883. Rusinov came to the conclusion that agriculture needed to be organized as a system of voluntary labor on individual farms (khutora); in an anticipation of the national Stolypin reform two decades after Rusinov’s death, Lukoianov district “became covered in farms, and many of them deserve full attention for their organization and productivity.”71 He himself, on the authority of the zemstvo, managed a successful model farm on the erstwhile empty Obukhov lands. Rusinov organized two local agricultural exhibitions and two competitions for agricultural tools. In short, Rusinov treated “his” district as an estate writ large: he repeatedly refers to himself as the district’s khoziain (manager or proprietor), and he was ready to do whatever it took, including contribute his own funds and labor, to make it function properly. When asked to compile a list of his publications, Rusinov came up with thirteen items, including correspondence from Lukoianov in the Moskovskie vedomosti, an unrealized project for the redemption of peasant property (1858), a report on the establishment of an experimental farm (1860), statistical descriptions of Lukoianov district published in the Nizhegorodskii sbornik, and a variety of other reports and brochures. His own words, written on the eve of his death, summed up an ethic remarkably close to that of Bankal’skii’s epitaph: “I elaborate all of this in order to remind [the province’s citizens], one more time, that I seem to have fulfilled the multiple obligations entrusted to me by the gentry and zemstvo in good faith, sparing neither labor, nor time, nor even my own resources.”72

Anna Nikolaevna Shmidt (1851–1905) In contrast to Petr Bankal’skii’s calm and self-possessed, if sometimes ebullient, demeanor, Anna Shmidt was obsessed, inspired, overwhelmed by the immensity of her own visions; she was a woman “with a spark in her eye,” as many of her contemporaries remarked.73 Although Shmidt was born into a gentry family,



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this lineage meant very little in practical terms. She was, it is true, educated at home, but then passed exams at the Nizhnii men’s gymnasium to qualify as a teacher of French at the Mariinskii girls’ gymnasium—a position she held for three years.74 Her father was a not particularly prosperous lawyer who worked, apparently, for the zemstvo in the 1860s (in the village of Voskresenskoe, outside Nizhnii) and then left his family to work in Poland, perhaps as a justice of the peace. He managed to exacerbate his family’s situation by essentially stealing from his sister-in-law (coercing her into signing something), getting caught, and being mercifully exiled to Astrakhan, where his wife and Anna followed him. Unlike the characters of Chekhov’s plays and short stories, Shmidt seemed unconcerned with her increasingly meaningless gentry status. She was addicted to writing (when they went to their dacha in Voskresenskoe her mother insisted she take the room near hers so she could prevent her from writing at night) and soon found her calling—a necessity given the family’s indigence—as a journalist. Following her return from Astrakhan in 1894, she began to work for the Volgar’—one of Nizhnii’s two major newspapers—doing translations, especially from French. She was fortunate enough to find a patron in the newspaper’s editor, A. Umanskii, and penetrating enough to see that she was a talented reporter though journalism was not supposed to be a woman’s job. He took her along when he moved to the Nizhegorodskii listok (Nizhnii Novgorod Bulletin), where her work expanded to chronicling events in the zemstvo, covering zemstvo meetings, and reviewing concerts, opera, and theater. As time went by she became the newspaper’s primary theater critic. If marriage was a woman’s standard path to social status, Shmidt managed to cement her standing by a combination of eccentricity and near-saintliness. She made herself conspicuous by routinely taking out a sandwich in the intermission at theater performances (her busy schedule left her little time to eat), securing disintegrating shoes with a string, wearing house slippers to a formal ball, relying on pins instead of buttons to fasten her dresses, and even absent-mindedly putting on a child’s hat before promenading in the street. These peculiarities were coupled with an extraordinary energy that won her access to the archpriest, the prosecutor, and the police at all hours (once she caught the procurator in his bathrobe) when she needed a story. According to the account of a cousin, Shmidt, at the same time, bore life with her difficult mother with remarkable humility: like Brenda Meehan’s holy women, Shmidt expressed her saintliness through family sacrifice, not even daring to take a piece of bread for herself (when she was forty-five) until her mother gave it to her, fulfilling her mother’s whims and caprices, and kneeling before her and apologizing for hours on end if she did something to displease her.75 Anna Shmidt’s real life, despite her many activities and achievements, lay in spirituality and her inner self. In the mid-1880s, she gathered her scattered, sometimes furtively composed writings and brought them together

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in a volume—her major work—entitled The Third Testament.76 Shmidt was clearly not a feminist in the sense of fighting for social equality of women; her interpretation of Orthodoxy, however, points to doctrinal inadequacies that could not fail to disappoint a devout yet critically thinking feminine believer. Shmidt’s concerns were liturgical and Christological rather than cosmological. She seems to have felt that a new era was coming, one in which there would be an international rather than a national society, and she was the apostle of the new faith. The doctrine of the Third Testament, which she meant to supplement rather than replace or contradict Orthodoxy, constituted a lengthy elaboration of the Nicene Creed. Its main emendations were, first, a perception of the third hypostasis, the Holy Ghost, as feminine, and the Daughter of God alongside Christ the Son; somewhat incestuously, the Daughter was also the Mother of God. In her writings, the Trinity gradually multiplied until it became a sort of bourgeois Holy Family—Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, and Husband.77 Second, and rather more vaguely, she wished to clarify the doctrine of the one holy, apostolic, and conciliar Church—a Church that, she grew to think, she personally incarnated.78 She literally thought of herself as Christ’s bride, experiencing erotic sensations as the chalice was brought out for the Eucharist at the Sunday liturgy.79 More generally, she was concerned with introducing sexuality into theology: according to her theory, angels and spirits, like humans, could be “even” or “odd” (the heavenly equivalent of feminine and masculine) and could reproduce and bear children.80 Shmidt was not interested in keeping her discoveries to herself. She founded a religious-philosophical society in Nizhnii Novgorod, wrote to Gorky (the local star writer), and sent her manuscript, along with a long letter, to John of Kronstadt, the renowned religious writer and spiritual leader in St. Petersburg. The crucial turning point, probably not altogether felicitous, in her life came with her discovery of the great philosopher Vladimir Soloviev in 1900, shortly before his death. His writings struck her as a revelation and as the perfect iteration of her own thoughts. She wrote to him, received a kind answer, and launched on a daily correspondence that ultimately led to a meeting, her very visible presence at his funeral, and a third emendation to the Creed: “And ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father: remaining with undecayed body in heaven, incarnate on earth for a second time in 1853 in human nature, having assumed Divine nature in 1875, upon seeing the Church in Egypt, and who shall come again to judge the living and the dead: of Whose Kingdom there shall be no end.”81 Shmidt was seized upon, after this public appearance, by the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, who were only too happy to see in her the incarnation of Soloviev’s Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; the writers and arbiters of Russian Silver Age culture, Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, published her rather incoherent article, under a male pseudonym, in the fashionable journal, Novyi Put’ (The New Path).82 She more or less stopped writing, devoting herself entirely to Soloviev and translating his La Russie et l’église universelle into Russian.



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While taking notes at a zemstvo meeting in 1905 she felt unwell and died soon afterward from inflammation of the brain.  Four life stories are of course quite far from the “total biography” of Gatsiskii’s dreams. Yet their juxtaposition begins, already, to sketch the social reality that he called “provintsiia.” Perhaps most striking is a common feature of all four biographies: namely, their many-sidedness, the inadequacy of any one of the aspects of their lives I have described—status, profession, intellect—to capture either their personalities or their real place in Russian society. All four engaged in multiple lines of activity, negotiating the complexities of the provincial ecological and economic universe by changing pursuits and professions. This very characteristic multiplicity or “polyvalence” points to the difficulty of applying “monistic” categories of soslovie, profession, or political orientation to late-nineteenth-century society. A second moment is the frequent lack of correspondence between official classification and actual social status and activity: Bugrov grand-père’s status as a crown peasant said as little about his prestige in Nizhnii Novgorod social circles as Anna Shmidt’s gentry background did about her journalistic competence. Bankal’skii’s story, for example, gives a good sense for the function of the meshchanstvo as a corporation, as a sign of status and prestige rather than a description of employment or a definition of relation to the state. The four tales taken together point to the varying utility of the undoubtedly still important sosloviia: gentry would probably qualify as the least meaningful category, as many of its provincial members merged with other groups and faded imperceptibly into a vaguely defined “middling” population. We learn a good deal, in addition, about what members of the provintsiia did when financial stability began to allow them an element of choice: a world of writing and philosophy was one possibility, charity another, and political activism a third. These “leisure activities” of our characters have some specific implications for our understanding of Russia in the early years of the twentieth century: the vibrant Silver Age culture, the dramatic politics of the 1905 revolution, and the opulent world of maecenases and patrons may have had a deeper and much more solid foundation in the concerns and activities of the “middle strata” of society to which people like Bankal’skii, the Bugrov family, Rusinov, and Shmidt belonged than we have been inclined to suspect.83  How might we draw up the balance of this excursion into the social world of the nineteenth-century province? The picture that emerges from contemporaries’ evocations through numbers, images, and biographies confirms our general theme of diversity, variability, and mutability through time and space. Yet, at the same time, we can note a remarkable convergence of all three methods of representation on a particular social stratum that, while not necessarily quantifiable at this point, figures prominently in the provincial consciousness. Indeed, this group coincides remarkably with the stratum that Gatsiskii identified as

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provintsiia—those individuals who were neither aristocrats nor peasants but somewhere in between and who made up the backbone of local society. Through the statisticians’ numbers, we see the significance of the artisans both in the towns and in the countryside; the tendency to small and middling landholding on one hand, and an industrial and commercial middle on the other; the difficulty of drawing a direct link between industrial activity and urban centers; and an ethnic diversity, in one of the central Russian provinces, that belies the apparent simplicity of statistical categories. Through Karelin’s images, we similarly catch a glimpse of a provincial bourgeoisie engaged in the same aesthetic enterprise as their European counterparts. In the biographies presented here, we begin to engage with the individuals—whether successful third-generation merchants, upwardly mobile meshchane, female professionals, or historically minded popovichi (priests’ sons)—who gave life to the provincial environment and who have no place in the stereotypical vision of the wealthy landlords and impoverished peasants of an “agrarian society.” Some years later, Nikolai Piksanov identified the “province” as referring above all to the culture of the raznochintsy. This may be one way to put it, and Elise Wirtschafter echoes his sense of the importance of the raznochintsy layer of society. Our discussion here, however, has pointed to a related but slightly broader definition: I would suggest, based on the previous analysis, that two dominant strata in the world of the Russian province may have been constituted by a variegated lower Mittelstand on one hand—the populace comprising meshchane, state peasants, déclassé gentry, and others—and a highly selfconscious and hard-working provincial bourgeoisie on the other. It is worth investigating further whether the many layers of the middle classes, indeed, set the tone for enterprise and entertainment in the province by the close of the nineteenth century.84

7 Managing the Province LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

T

he nineteenth-century province stood at a crossroads. Spatially, European Russia represented the limits of the comfortable reach of an articulated apparatus of local administration. Temporally, however, the location of the province was more intriguing. The functions of the eighteenth-century state, speaking in ideal-typical terms, might largely be described as limited to communications and the waging of war—with the concomitant duties of tax collection, postal service, road construction and maintenance, and policing. In the twentieth century, by contrast, the hypertrophied state assumed near-complete responsibility for the total well-being of its members: whether in the shape of the welfare or the socialist state, governments administered (for better or for worse) health care, education, labor laws, wages, insurance, pensions, leisure, and—in the Soviet case—the most basic economic functions of production and consumption.1 European states in the nineteenth century occupied an intermediate position: the latter half of the century in particular bore witness to a fascinating variety of experiments with a combination of central control and local initiative. The case of Russian provincial administration is one of the most innovative, in both its distribution of responsibilities and the paradoxically active role of the central state in stimulating local self-management. Oddly, the historical literature on Russian local administration has displayed a remarkable centralist bias. Until the recent spate of local studies within Russia itself, the most significant and valuable investigations have taken 133

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as their subject “the zemstvo” or “decentralization,” as if it were possible to study a local phenomenon in exclusively general terms. The result has been a prevailing focus on legal and administrative dimensions of local institutions.2 Even S. Frederick Starr’s important book, with its now-classic formulation, “Russia’s under-governed provinces,” adopts a chronology (1830–1870) that reflects the crafting of central policy toward the provinces, rather than the burst of local activity that was only beginning where his narrative leaves off and that continued unabated until at least the 1917 revolution and arguably even after.3 The intent of this chapter, then, is to survey the structures of local governance—an overview, but one, I hope, with a few twists—and then to turn to some dimensions of their workings in the province and the districts of Nizhnii Novgorod. Which institutions proved workable in the provincial context and which were a dead letter? Were provincial residents able to make institutions work to their own ends and to embody local social and economic visions? How can we delineate areas of consensus or conflict regarding those spheres of management delegated to the local level? Finally, can we discern a model of state and local interaction that might help us understand the particular functioning of nineteenth-century governance, between military and communications on one hand, and social welfare on the other? In answer to these questions, I hope to highlight a fundamental pattern of central initiative and local response in which government legislation met with local interpretations that sometimes far exceeded the center’s original intentions; more central legislation would then follow in reaction, somewhat haphazardly and sometimes ineptly contravening local developments.

Structures: Legal Framework Any account of Russian local government classically focuses on the Petrine and especially the Catherinian reforms.4 The latter created the basic structure of local administration and institutions for the ensuing century and established the mechanisms for the extension, down to the provincial level, of the state administrative apparatus.5 Every provincial capital (gubernskii gorod) from the late eighteenth century housed the governor and his staff, the Gentry Assembly, and the merchant guilds; the post office, the local statistical committee (1840s), and tax and customs officials completed the picture. The Great Reforms wrought deep and immediate changes in provincial administration: in the last third of the century, state administrative institutions were supplemented by the provincial zemstvo, the district zemstvo, the city duma, courts, and various offices of the government bureaucracy. When seen from a local perspective, however, a different emphasis emerges: from the point of view of the provinces, the era of Nicholas I marked a decisive shift in patterns of local governance and administration, while the zemstvo reform appears, if possible, even more brightly as a moment of profound transformation of provincial public life.



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The 1837 Local Government Reform Recent historians have tended to ignore, or summarily dismiss, the provincial administration reform Nicholas I introduced in 1837. Janet Hartley, for example, takes no notice of the 1837 law; it is not mentioned in Nicholas Riasanovsky’s standard textbook, nor in Gregory Freeze’s or Geoffrey Hosking’s histories, while Hugh Seton-Watson accords it a passing reference.6 Even Starr’s detailed study of local administration gives short shrift to the 1837 reform, dismissing it as a dead letter and unproductive except for generating excess paper.7 While such neglect is understandable in light of the far deeper changes to come, in their own time—and, more importantly, from the perspective of the provinces themselves—Nicholas’s reforming projects of the 1830s had serious consequences for the manner in which provincial affairs were conducted. The late 1830s clearly initiate a new era in the historical chronology, as seen from the provinces.8 The primary thrust of the legislation of 1837 was to strengthen the provincial governors, subjugating the provincial administrative apparatus to their authority but simultaneously making them more accountable to the central government. The ambiguous institution of the governors-general (in which Nizhnii Novgorod and Viatka formed an entirely arbitrary unit)—a sort of middle ground between central power and real local authority—was abolished and replaced with the centrally appointed governorship. The governor became the manager (khoziain) of his province.9 As Polievktov puts it, “In accordance with the Nakaz to the governors of 3 June 1837 the governor is the immediate manager [nachal’nik] of the province with which he is entrusted; all local institutions are subject to him, and he cares for the good and well-being of all denizens of his region. At the same time he is the executor and defender of the law, and as such, may not create new legislation, establish new taxes, change judicial sentences, and so on, but must ensure that existing laws be obeyed, stand up for the oppressed, and transmit offenders to the courts.”10 The provincial administrative organs were made directly responsible to the governor; significantly, the vice-governor now reported directly to the governor. The reform of local government included two other equally important provisions. First, it changed the structure and accountability of the local police.11 Second, it created a new office: this was the district superintendent of police (stanovoi pristav), who was appointed by the provincial management, instead of the previous elected (by the gentry, of course) representatives.12 In addition, each governor was now required to submit a yearly report on the state of the province.13 One of the main pre-revolutionary students of local government, A. D. Gradovskii, came up with a penetrating analysis of the consequences of the 1837 reform. It is significant that Gradovskii—a scion of a Voronezh gentry family— was a provincial figure himself, having received his legal training at Kharkov University. Nicholas I’s reign was notoriously directed against the gentry, of

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whom the tsar remained deeply suspicious given the inauspicious circumstances of his accession to the throne. In Gradovskii’s assessment, an important result of the provincial reform was that it limited the local power of the gentry: “With the establishment of the district superintendent of police, appointed by the provincial government, in 1837, instead of an elected board, the scope of powers allotted to the gentry diminished considerably.”14 Thus, the provincial balance of power shifted as a result of the reform. Authority became focused in the office of the governor; the gentry, while remaining a ruling class (Herrschaftsmittel), was subtly alienated from its influence over the administrative apparatus, and a police force sensitive to central command was in place. All of these measures, apart from their immediate local significance, were to prove essential in the ultimate execution of the Great Reforms a quarter-century later.15 The governors were given full responsibility for the social, economic, administrative, legal, and moral oversight of the province, with full accountability to the senate and to the central government. All matters regarding the management and well-being of the province became the immediate domain of the khoziain—the governor—whether directly or by virtue of an oversight function. Everything that eventually would become the province of the zemstvo was now concentrated in the hands of a single local figure. Again, although this measure has in general been dismissed as reactionary and of little importance, from the local perspective it was decisive. Centrally appointed and answerable to the center, the governors were nonetheless the unquestioned highest authority on the local level; this constitutes a considerable devolution of power onto the provincial head. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the governor became the figure of last resort short of direct appeal to the State Senate. While on one hand this constituted an extension of central authority to the provincial level, on the other hand the shape of the empire could be determined, to a significant degree, within the provinces; the new state of affairs left a good deal of space for local initiative and creativity. A number of significant implications also followed from the reform, namely: the capacity of the governors to implement the eventual reforms of the 1860s—a virtual impossibility without strong local concentration of power; the potential of governors for creative and innovative policy in their region (whether liberal or conservative); and, given a liberal governor, considerable room for implementation of policies regarding significant local matters within the local framework without appeal to central authorities, providing they did not transgress the inviolable boundaries of management (khoziaistvennaia deiatel’nost). The other major observation regarding the 1837 laws (nos. 10303–10307), taken in tandem, is that they are symptomatic of a drive to secure administrative order and unity. The governors, the local organs of government, the zemstvo police, and even the zemstvo postal service were supposed to make things run, rather than express some abstract concept of local self-government.16 In the process, however, this legislation actually established micro-states on the



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provincial level. Functions such as the postal service—normally, since the eighteenth century, the domain of the centralized state—were delegated to the provinces.17 When, in 1864, the right to collect taxes was added, the result was the remarkable creation of thirty-four-plus political sub-units within the polity, each of which behaved very much like a state. It is a unique model of governance, combining extreme decentralization with autocracy. To a significant degree, Nicholas’s measures were motivated by fiscal considerations. The collection of taxes required some degree of local management, and to Nicholas belongs the original idea of delegating this function to local institutions—a plan that was actually implemented with the establishment of the zemstvo in 1864. The local government reform might be seen as part of an administrative package deal. In the historical literature, General Pavel Kiselev’s reform of the state peasantry is generally viewed as a precursor to the much larger emancipation to follow. Yet, in the context of its own time, perhaps Kiselev’s move should be viewed as part of Nicholas’s reforming project: his plan to bring provincial administration under central control. In Nizhnii Novgorod province, state peasants made up about 40 percent of the total population. Thus, this reform was a necessary complement to the administrative measures concerning the governorship, police, and local institutions. Both reforms were implemented in the same year. In addition, as a sort of cultural accompaniment, the first legal organ of the provincial press was established, by decree from the center, in 1838: the gubernskie vedomosti were to become the point of departure for an independent provincial cultural consciousness.

The Zemstvo Reform of 1864 The zemstvo reform established assemblies at the district level and another assembly for the entire province. These bodies met once a year, with a district and a provincial zemstvo board responsible for keeping things going when the entire assembly was not in session. Sessions in the Nizhnii Novgorod districts lasted several days, while the provincial zemstvo sometimes met for as long as three consecutive weeks. Elections were indirect and based on a curial system: each of three groups—gentry, peasantry, and all others—had a right to a specified number of delegates. The 1864 statute defined the zemstvo’s capacities and legitimate spheres of activity with the utmost care and precision. District and provincial zemstvos were assigned the very particular task of managing matters “related to local economic [khoziaistvennye] uses and needs of every province and every district.”18 An accompanying commentary developed this idea further: the point of the new institutions was to endow local society with the capacity to manage the local economy (khoziaistvo obshchestvennoe) on the same bases as individuals might manage their own households (khoziaistvo chastnoe).19 An elaboration of fourteen matters subject to zemstvo jurisdiction followed: control over property,

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capital, and taxes collected by the zemstvo; maintenance of zemstvo buildings and roads; food aid to the population; charity, an end to pauperism, plus aid in church construction; mutual property insurance; stimulation of local trade and commerce; “participation, primarily in economic [khoziaistvennye] terms and[,] within the boundaries set by law,” in popular education, medical care, and prison maintenance; measures against livestock epidemics and locust infestations; military and civil administration and postal services; collection of state taxes; collection and expenditure of local taxes for local needs; information on local affairs to the central administration; management of elections to the zemstvo; and other matters that might eventually be entrusted to the zemstvo by particular laws or statutes. Any departure from these carefully circumscribed activities would be annulled, and the zemstvo institutions were to be held responsible for any violations of their specifically assigned powers. The provincial governor had the right to halt any zemstvo activity that might be contrary to the law or the utility of the state.20 It is thus not entirely accurate, as researchers have frequently assumed (apparently based on subsequent zemstvo definitions), that the law assigned specific “obligatory” and “non-obligatory” functions.21 The principle might more accurately be interpreted as: what is assigned is obligatory, and what is not assigned is forbidden.

Visions: Local Response The texts of these centrally promulgated legislative measures, however, as yet tell us nothing of their actual implementation or, even more importantly, of their resonance on the ground. Indeed, as we have seen, historians have been reluctant to acknowledge any significant effects of the gubernatorial decree, while the statistical committees, the provincial gazettes, and even the zemstvo might well have fallen flat without the active participation of individuals within the provinces themselves. Instead, as we shall see, the opposite came to pass.

Provincial Scenarios of Power: The Governors “The succession of governors in the provinces constitutes an epoch,” wrote Aleksandr Gatsiskii in his biographical sketch of Aleksei Odintsov, whose illustrious governorship (1861–1873) set the tone for the reform era in Nizhnii Novgorod.22 The gubernatorial khoziain could imprint his local scenario on his era in a manner analogous to the way reigning monarchs established their imperial scenarios.23 As the authority of last resort on the regional level, the governor introduced the law, mediated jurisdictional disputes, and functioned as the conduit back to St. Petersburg—except, in a later period, in cases where the zemstvo chose to appeal over his head directly to the Imperial Senate. His personal style of governance profoundly influenced both the actual process of local decision making and the atmosphere in which affairs were conducted. Odintsov, an elite military servitor under Nicholas I, arrived in Nizhnii Novgorod on 6 November 1861 and quickly managed to defuse the nervousness



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of his constituents (the “liberation party,” with its tail between its legs in expectation of an unknown general): “Everyone immediately saw in the new governor a good-heartedness, a boundless simplicity of relations, a fresh and uneroded mind.”24 Odintsov himself best articulated his “scenario” in a humorous farewell speech in 1873, characterizing his tenure as “proof—and this is my main achievement—that the province could do perfectly well without a governor for ten years.”25 In fact, however, he presided over the elections of the first zemstvo and the municipal duma and managed the peaceful transition to new landlord-peasant relations. V. G. Korolenko confirmed this particular style of leadership, speaking admiringly of Odintsov as someone who managed to act as though he wasn’t there: the opposite of “those others who fill local history with their energy and enterprising spirit to such a degree that we start to think that the region itself doesn’t exist, and everything is animated only by the brilliant activities of a single person.”26 Gatsiskii contributed a more straightforward assessment: Odintsov, he says, made the following essential qualities into the foundation of his “exemplary” governorship: “directness, good-heartedness, good sense and firm principles (specifically: principles, and not moods, trends, sympathies and antipathies).”27 Odintsov’s leadership style—a combination of gentle demeanor with absolute firmness—proved highly productive. Thus, in relations with the zemstvo—where the key issue, in terms of administrative distribution of power, was the elected body’s capacity to appeal to the State Senate over the head of the governor when conflict arose—Odintsov, in an incident near the beginning of the zemstvo’s existence, so thoroughly defused the cry, “To the Senate, to the Senate!” that a positive working relationship was established for the rest of his tenure: “The governor saw that the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo was not inclined to ‘play opposition’ no matter what, and the zemstvo became convinced that good-heartedness and gentleness are not equivalent to weakness, and, knowing also that the governor always in principle stood for zemstvo management [khoziaistvovanie], ceased to sulk.”28 Lack of intervention in social matters was for Odintsov a conscious principle. He reflected, “The problem of what is best for a governor—whether to be harshly strict or excessively humane—has not yet been conclusively decided. Only time can tell what might be the positive or negative consequences, for the surrounding environment, of one or another position taken. My limited intervention in social affairs came from my desire, in implementing reforms, to allow the estates and new institutions to evolve naturally. The development of civil society [grazhdanstvennost’] is rarely achieved by administrative decree, and usually remains fragile in such cases. Russia doesn’t need to seek examples of this in other countries.” He was equally conscious of the limitations on his own powers: “Do you know what conclusion I have reached based on my gubernatorial experience? A governor can do as much evil as his heart may desire. . . . But he has virtually no capacity to do good: he must ask permission for everything.”29 Odintsov’s “non-interventionist”

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credo did not prevent decisive interference in moments of crisis; thus, Gatsiskii comments that the municipal library might have perished if left to the mercy of either society, or bureaucracy, alone and that Odintsov’s occasional firm hand played a key role in more important situations, for example, regarding the Nizhnii Novgorod fair.30 The scenarios of Odintsov’s predecessors in the gubernatorial role are less well documented but no less colorful. Thus, Prince Mikhail Urusov, who set the tone in the Nicholaevan period (1843–1854), was known for his combination of few words and many deeds: his regime witnessed the introduction of a watersupply system that skeptics thought impossible, given the hills and ravines on which the provincial capital rested, as well as an ongoing conflict with the powerful marshal of the nobility, S. V. Sheremetev.31 The former minor Decembrist, Aleksandr Murav’ev (1856–1861), oversaw the initial introduction of the peasant emancipation. The conservative politics of Odintsov’s successor, Count Pavel Kutaisov (1873–1880, great-grandson of one of Paul I’s henchmen) sat so ill with local society that they managed to squeeze him out of power and replace him briefly with the local marshal of the nobility, S. S. Zybin, until the appointment of a new and once again liberal governor, Nikolai Baranov, in 1882.32 Baranov (1882–1897), known as a “sailor” and the “hero of the Vesta,” has been called Nizhnii’s most popular governor.33 Vladimir Korolenko provides the following characterization: This was a brilliant man—not deep, but energetic, active, decisive, ready to take any risk if this could attract attention to him, a true gambler by nature who had bet on his own career. He acutely felt that uncertain times were coming, that the autocracy had started to show cracks, and that the soil beneath the “existing order” was unstable. Impatient and nervous, he foresaw that in such times there could be interesting possibilities for gifted people who were willing to take risks, and prepared himself. . . . In his capacity as St. Petersburg mayor he organized the ill-famed “parliament” of homeowners for the purpose of a police investigation. As governor of Arkhangel’sk he convened a “meeting for the enlivening of the northern region” and delivered effective speeches that were later cited in the newspapers, in various modes, along with the name of the “liberal” governor.34

Sergei Witte—whose Volga travels in the time of cholera (1892) brought him to Nizhni Novgorod—concurred, calling Baranov “very smart, clever, articulate, very resourceful” and at the same time “lacking in particularly strong moral qualities.” Still, Witte grudgingly grants that, despite Baranov’s moral deficiencies and careerism, he “was the only governor who truly played an active role in this disaster and influenced the course of the epidemic” and hence was “a truly efficient governor, for which the population treated him with trust and gratitude.”35



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Mechanisms of Mediation: Mel’nikov Nicholas I is famous for bureaucratizing the governance of the Russian Empire—for multiplying the number of functionaries, streamlining educational requirements for state service, tightening police control, and so on. He is equally famous for taking all possible measures to circumvent his own bureaucracy in matters of real importance, by relying on secret committees and trusted individuals to collect information and craft projects of legislation and reform. In Russia’s provinces, the primary executors of information gathering and “real,” hands-on control became the agents for special commissions assigned directly to the governors. Ultimately, the “Nicholas system” depended on the engagement and enthusiasm of individuals on the ground—those whom W. Bruce Lincoln has aptly labeled “zealous servitors.”36 Such, in Nizhnii Novgorod, was Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov. During the first forty-seven years of his life, mostly coinciding with the reign of Nicholas I, Mel’nikov made his career within the confines of Nizhnii Novgorod province, where he was born. Mel’nikov grew up in the impenetrably forested district of Semënov, beyond the Volga, in a family of very petty gentry; his father was chief of police in the provincial capital. Fascinated by history since childhood, Mel’nikov, at fifteen, joined the first generation of students from Nizhnii to float down the Volga to receive a university education at Kazan. The ten subsequent years were spent teaching history and statistics to high school students, first in Perm’ (an exile that resulted from a drunken evening at the university) and then Nizhnii Novgorod. In 1840, his first literary effort appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta: this was a completely disastrous short story— an imitation of Gogol—with the ridiculous title, “Of Elpidifor Perfil’evich, who he was, and what preparations were made in Chernograd for his nameday.”37 (It was supposed to be a spoof on provincial life but was hopelessly lumpy and provincial—this time in the pejorative sense—itself.) Mel’nikov’s enthusiasm for archival work—he became the first to dig around in the hundreds of ancient documents lying untouched in the kremlin tower—led him to a corresponding membership in the Archaeographical Commission in St. Petersburg and, eventually, at age twenty-six, to a post as editor of the Gubernskie vedomosti in 1845–1850. His early life story was thus purely local—something that had only just become possible for an educated person. Mel’nikov became a visible local figure precisely as the government of Nicholas I extended its reach into the provinces: the Central Statistical Committee began its investigation of the empire, cadastral surveys were launched, the Imperial Geographical Society expanded its researches. Mel’nikov’s prodigious appetite for knowledge coincided fully with the government’s information-gathering enterprise and led to his appointment as agent for special commissions to the military governor, Prince Urusov, in 1847, and then to affiliation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg

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by 1850. He received instructions to compile a general statistical survey of the province, a report on the state of the local Mordvinian population, an overview of trade at the Nizhnii Novgorod fair; and his most important study, a secret report (1853–1854) on the contemporary condition of the Old Belief in Nizhnii Novgorod province. In the new reign, Mel’nikov’s bureaucratic career took him to Moscow, where, by 1866, he had entered the employ of the governor-general. Mel’nikov’s status in Nizhnii Novgorod, gained through his three major appointments—as provincial schoolteacher, editor of the Gubernskie vedomosti, and, finally, government bureaucrat—gave him ample opportunity to influence local society. While the rank-and-file of his students evidently disliked him, he managed to provide the first spark of inspiration to the future historians Stepan Eshevskii and K. M. Bestuzhev-Riumin. Here, though, I would like to focus on his role as newspaper editor and as Nicholaevan chinovnik. The vedomosti had been founded in 1838, as part of Nicholas I’s impulse for hands-on control of the far-flung regions of the empire. Until the 1870s, they remained legally the only locally published newspapers. On the very first day of Mel’nikov’s editorship, the newspaper changed. A festive introduction (5 January 1845) announced the new editorial program. Striving to penetrate readers’ souls with the spirit of Russian nationality (“dukhom russkoi narodnosti”), the publication would be dedicated to the “monuments of our [collective] childhood,” while paying equal attention to contemporary life. The rhetoric was of course fully in keeping with Nicholas I’s intentions. Nonetheless, the twopronged formula—history on one hand, “local color” on the other—was real and could be achieved only by genuine local initiative. Initially, Mel’nikov wrote all the articles himself; by 1847, he had nineteen collaborators. What vision of history did Mel’nikov propose in the vedomosti? It was above all local—though on a good scholarly level. Early on, Mel’nikov acquainted his readers with the myth of Nizhnii Novgorod’s origins: the city was founded by the Mordvinian prince Sparrow, who had eighteen wives. The soothsayer, Woodpecker by name, predicted that if Sparrow’s children lived in peace among themselves all would be well; if they quarreled, they would be conquered by the Russians.38 On another occasion, the vedomosti recounted how Dmitrii, the last Nizhnii Novgorod grand prince, in the second half of the fourteenth century, managed to play Moscow off against the Tatar khan while simultaneously keeping the Mordvinians and Bulgars at bay.39 Readers could get an acute sense of Nizhnii’s history as a border outpost against the Kazan khanate; one document recorded the story of three hundred Lithuanian prisoners in the city in 1506 who were promised their freedom if they saved the city from Mehmet Amin.40 A Lithuanian cannon, which locals were not really competent to use, accidentally hit a besieging Nogai murza, thus concluding the only serious military action ever to take place within the city (also in 1506).41 There were plenty of fascinating materials on the local hero, Koz’ma Minin, on Patriarch Nikon’s childhood, and on the literary circles that took refuge in Nizhnii



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Novgorod during Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow and that included Karamzin, Bantysh-Kamenskii, Neledinskii-Meletskii, V.  L. Pushkin, Batiushkov, and others.42 Throughout, not only the material but the spirit was local; thus, despite Mel’nikov’s patriotic introduction, the stories consistently recounted moments of glory in which local figures had been able to hold their own against the powergrasping center. The “origins” myth is particularly telling: this was a Mordvinian tale, in which Russian conquest was presented in negative fashion. It is worth remarking that Mel’nikov was promoting his local vision at the same time that Gogol was doing the same for Malorossiia (fragments of his history of Malorossiia, which he characteristically destroyed, were published in Arabeski). In these years as well, Sergei Soloviev was engaged in writing his voluminous history of Russia with the opposite perspective—the continuous tale of the gathering of the Russian lands and the steady aggrandizement of central power. Thus, the vedomosti were Mel’nikov’s organ for constructing an alternative, decentralized version of Russian history. Mel’nikov’s presence equally infused color and emotion into the vedomosti’s representation of contemporary local life. Statistical tables were replaced by more pointed parcels of information, for example, the names of the sixty local landowners in possession of more than a thousand souls (the largest was the Sheremet’ev family, who collectively owned almost twenty-five thousand), the numbers of merchants by guild and by district, the amount of capital declared by merchants in Nizhnii Novgorod district, and so on.43 Along with learning new home remedies, readers could find out about the causes and incidence of the diseases the treatments were supposed to cure: Mel’nikov’s vedomosti detailed the possible damaging effects of the local environment (for Semënov district: “In springtime the raw air causes catarrhs, rheumatic disorders and recurrent fevers. In summer bile fevers and vomiting. Toward the end of summer diarrhea with chills, tearing, swelling, and bile”), as well as of industrial practices (manufacture of wooden spoons and varnish [olifa] polluted the air and caused cachexy in workers).44 Epidemics were painstakingly documented. When cholera struck in 1847, readers in this strategic trading city to which the disease traveled up the Volga from Astrakhan, were kept constantly informed of its progress. Both in historical writing and in local reporting, then, the vedomosti under Mel’nikov’s editorship began to reflect local themes and interests and even became the forum for a rudimentary effort at local self-definition. Even while he was editor, however, Mel’nikov also wore a second hat—that of loyal state servitor. In this capacity, his main achievement was the secret report on the Old Belief in Nizhnii Novgorod province. An extraordinary accomplishment of ethnographic research, the report definitively established Mel’nikov’s reputation in government circles and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in particular—at least for the duration of Nicholas I’s reign—as the primary authority on issues of Old Belief.45 The report put inept bureaucratic statistics to shame, counting 170,506 Old Believers in the provinces, as opposed

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to the mere 20,000 in the official governor’s report, and localizing them, noting their concentrations in Balakhna, Gorbatov, Kniaginin, and Semënov districts. It analyzed their distribution by soslovie: 755 merchants, 7,034 meshchane and artisans, 159,646 peasants, and 3,071 military; the names of the several gentry Old Believers were also listed. An entire section was devoted to migratory patterns: Old Believers traveled for overtly religious reasons only from Semënov and Balakhna, while in other districts such excursions took on the guise of commercial travel; real commercial voyages originated in the northwestern districts in the direction of Moscow, Saratov, Astrakhan, Kazan, Siberia, and elsewhere; fishing, gold seeking, barge hauling, cab driving, and transhumance also contributed to migration. Mel’nikov described the secret languages used in correspondence: parabolic, in which a note about fish could really concern apostate priests; tarabarskii, in which certain letters stood in for others according to the key (which he also naturally provided); and the special language of the peddlers, developed over 150 years, which operated with invented vocabulary combined with Russian grammar.46 The report also described, in painstaking detail, every one of the remaining sketes (there had been 94 before their destruction by Bishop Pitirim in the early eighteenth century, of which 16 remained by the 1840s), counted all their inhabitants, and revealed hitherto unknown gathering places of Old Believers, including those formed after some were closed in 1853. Mel’nikov recounted the history of the prominent Gorodets chapel, with its 50,000 parishioners, and compiled a fascinating ethnographic account of Old Believer life and rituals, including commerce in old books and icons. The report’s inspiration, however, was far from purely scholarly: its author’s evaluations and recommendations were unambiguous and indeed reminiscent of Mikhail Magnitskii’s rampage at Kazan University a quarter century earlier. His primary recommendation was to destroy the main holy places, including the Gorodets chapel and the sketes themselves, and to convert the inhabitants to edinoverie.47 The full text of his plan for the sketes bears repeating: “for the decisive termination of the temptations for the Orthodox represented by these schismatic gathering places and dens of various immoral kinds—to destroy the sketes completely, never again allowing any building on their site except communities of the edinoverie; to transfer the schismatic inhabitants with families to other villages under state jurisdiction, and those without families— to Semënov, where local police supervision should allow them no movement outside the town.”48 In addition, Mel’nikov proposed that the children of Old Believers, and rich ones in particular, should be recruited into the army, as a stimulus for religious conversion; the same measure should be applied to children of all marriages not consecrated by an Orthodox priest.49 What is significant here is that Melnikov’s intimate knowledge of the Old Belief—possible only through years of coexistence and research—coupled with his genuine enthusiasm and belief in the necessity of conversion to Orthodoxy,



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made him a key player in the unfolding drama of the revitalized state campaign against the Old Belief.50 The repercussions for Nizhnii Novgorod, with its major sketes of Kerzhenets and Semënov and its significant concentration of wealthy and powerful Old Believer merchants, were of course immediate; it is here that Mel’nikov’s presence made an essential difference. On instruction from the government, Mel’nikov launched on an intensive investigation of the way of life in the Old Believer sketes and communities beyond the Volga—an investigation that opened the way to an unprecedented regulation and then closing of many sketes in the 1850s. Mel’nikov personally seems to have been responsible only for two specific actions—the conversion to edinoverie of a skete in 1847 and the removal in 1848 of the icon of the Kazan Mother of God from the Sharpanskii skete to an Orthodox church (a symbolic act that local Old Believers considered a sign of the end of their faith).51 Yet his work was accompanied by the government’s expulsion of many of the sketes’ inhabitants, the destruction of six sketes and of many buildings in the remaining ten, and the closing of a series of Old Believer chapels. Thus, Mel’nikov’s report initiated the final, local act of the Nicholaevan campaign—a campaign that had begun in St. Petersburg, that had met a defiant response along its way, in Austria, Turkey, and Moscow, and that ended with overt state action against the Old Believers of Nizhnii Novgorod. The forests beyond the Volga had decisively entered the sphere of jurisdiction of the central government. The success of the Nicholaevan ideal of control through knowledge depended on the enthusiasm, expertise, and cooperative spirit of purely local figures like Mel’nikov. To all appearances, Mel’nikov promoted two contradictory sets of values: on one hand he stood definitively for local self-definition and selfaffirmation; on the other, he epitomized the loyal and enthusiastic state servitor (revnostnyi chinovnik), contributing to the annihilation of the very diversity he himself, wearing his other hat, sought to encourage.

On the Ground: The Nizhnii Novgorod Zemstvos A half-century after de Tocqueville’s travels in the United States of America popularized the notions of civil society and civic association, the Spanish writer Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, famous for her introduction of the Russian novel into the Spanish-speaking world, waxed equally eloquent on the subject of Russian provincial government: [Among modern institutions] particularly worth of attention is the zemstvo or territorial assembly, analogous to our Provincial Councils, but of a more liberal nature and a healthily decentralizing spirit. . . . All classes have a seat in the assembly. What effect would it produce in one of our provincial councils to see, alongside the frock coats and topcoats, the jacket with engraved silver buttons of an honest peasant? In Russia the emancipated serf debates together with his ex-lord.

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  The format of this sort of local parliament is democratic in the extreme: the cities, the laboring class and the landowners elect their representatives, and the assembly devotes itself to the modest but most interesting practical questions of hygiene, health, security, and public education. A new service for which we have to thank the nobility: the dominant corporation that thinks above all else of the well-being and progress of the humble people, granting physicians to villages abandoned to ignorant quacks, teaching the muzhik to read, and protecting his wooden hut from fire.52

Pardo Bazán had never set foot in Russia, deriving her knowledge from contacts with her more mobile male colleagues and from literature. Still, she put her finger on those features of the Russian zemstvo that made it a unique institution in nineteenth-century Europe.53 Very quickly, a national consensus emerged, prioritizing the functions noted by Pardo Bazán: education and medicine. An entire network of zemstvo-run schools was created under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of National Enlightenment, whose function was to teach basic literacy to the children of the newly free peasants.54 The zemstvos established what was virtually a socialized health care system, with the character of the rural physician becoming a major new figure in the post-emancipation countryside—and in literature as well.55 Fire insurance (Pardo Bazán’s “preservar su choza de madera”) emerged as another key issue in the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvos.56 Crucial to all of these functions was the capacity to collect local taxes; the precise mechanisms of taxing and spending became the foundation on which all other projects depended.57 The new institution by no means began its existence in a vacuum, becoming immediately inscribed in a web of cultural references and inheritances. The very term, zemstvo, had a deep resonance for contemporaries. The term comes from the word zemlia (land). More importantly, the word zemstvo had an archaic sound and evoked images of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite political structure, in which representatives from the land had gathered periodically in a zemskii sobor (council of the land) that advised the tsar. Nizhnii Novgorod’s mayor, V. K. Michurin, reminded the city electoral assembly of these circumstances, praising “Catherine the Great’s great-grandson,” Alexander II, for “resurrecting in the zemstvo institutions that great zemskii sobor convened in Moscow from all ends of Russia under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.”58 Local symbolism was no less rich. At the opening of the provincial zemstvo’s first session on 29 November 1865, Bishop Nektarii—who had presided over the proclamation of emancipation four years earlier—presented the new body with the icon of the Kazan Mother of God, confiscated a decade earlier by Mel’nikov from the Sharpanskii skete, thus representing the appropriation by the zemstvo of the spiritual values once carried by the Old Belief. Nektarii reinterpreted the icon’s symbolism (the reader will recall that its confiscation had previously signified the apocalyptic end of regional Old Belief), observing that the same



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icon had blessed the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo in its mission to salvage the Muscovite state in 1612, had watched over the grave of the local hero Koz’ma Minin, and had accompanied the Nizhnii Novgorod divisions in the difficult last year of the recent Crimean campaign. The icon would now permanently reside with the zemstvo board.59 The zemstvo’s inheritance from the past had another dimension: its meetings took place in the quarters of the old Gentry Assembly, thus underscoring the replacement of estate-based institutions by a more broadly grounded, multi-estate body. Although a property qualification meant that landlords, merchants, and industrialists constituted the bulk of electors, peasant representation hovered somewhere around 40 percent. The difference in representation between the district and the provincial zemstvos in Nizhnii Novgorod was stark. In the districts, of a prescribed number of 213 landlords, 38 city representatives, and 175 from the peasant communes, the first elections in 1865 yielded 189, 38, and 175, respectively, for a total of 402. The provincial zemstvo was more heavily weighted in favor of the privileged classes, counting 54 gentry landowners, 3 clerics, 3 merchants, and 11 peasants on the day it opened.60 In 1890, the new electoral law cut total delegates from 426 to 291, with 167 from the first electoral caucus, 38 from the second, and 86 representatives of the peasant communes.61 It is interesting to note that, in the district assemblies, the presence of a large number of peasant deputies did not automatically translate into their active participation. In the Gorbatov assembly, for example, the minutes are dominated by certain gentry representatives, whose names moreover show up consistently, sometimes over twenty or thirty years. Except on certain subjects—for example, fire insurance, on which peasant delegates took the initiative—the peasant role tended to be passive.62 In one telling case, a certain F. S. Ryzhenkov approached the podium with a request to have a manuscript, which he held rolled up in his hand, read to the assembly. When asked the content to determine its relevance to the particular matter under discussion, he shyly demurred, asking only to have it read. After a good deal of back and forth, Ryzhenkov, in embarrassment, withdrew his request, so the manuscript’s content remains a mystery—but he did present a dissenting opinion when the assembly finally voted.63 It might not have come as a surprise if zemstvo institutions had turned out to be a dead letter: the imposition of yet another unwelcome duty on the local population to meet the goals of the central government. So, at first, it seemed: just as merchants and townspeople had scrupulously avoided service in the city duma in the eighteenth century, so electors found multiple excuses to avoid voting or serving in the first zemstvo elections. Sometimes as few as 18 or 20 percent of eligible voters showed up, and in one case only 5 small landholders of an eligible 216; a report from Sergach in the Gubernskie vedomosti cited old age, family obligations, commercial responsibilities, illness, and other convincing reasons for not participating.64 Yet, it was not long before local residents began

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to see the potential of the new institutions; while reception varied among the districts, and between the district and the provincial zemstvo, it is fair to say that, by about 1870, the zemstvos had succeeded in winning the trust of the population. While taking their cue from the central statute, zemstvo participants quickly began to establish their own interpretations of the law and to carve out a sphere of activity that corresponded more precisely to local needs. What was the interaction between the government’s vision and its local interpretation? From the perspective of the central government, the zemstvo’s primary function was to tend to administrative tasks that were simply too difficult to oversee from a great distance. The center had a sort of administrative action radius that of course grew weaker as distance from St. Petersburg increased. The local organs were a means of breaking it up, of creating local foci of administrative functions. Early efforts to manage local roads resulted in the interesting discovery, for example, that some tracts that were on the books had long since ceased to exist; they permitted taking into account local details such as the seasonal slush (rasputitsa) making travel impossible and the division of fiscal responsibility among different districts. Contemporary stamp collectors have discovered the fascinating institution of the zemstvo post, which minted its own stamps and took responsibility for the delivery of letters, packages, and even monetary sums, both locally and between zemstvos. Local residents no longer needed to make their way to the district center in order to post a letter. The zemstvo billeted government troops among the population and, particularly at the beginning, mediated among various institutions of local administration such as the peasant institutions (including the communal mediators), surveying committees, tax offices, pension bureaus, police, courts of law, the statistical committee, the provincial administration, and military recruitment offices; the zemstvo naturally subscribed to the Gubernskie vedomosti. They took care of the horse stations and managed imposts on apartments and forests. How did the zemstvo conceive of itself? How did it see its aims and its mission? The zemstvo worked out for itself an interim sphere. On one hand, accountability for state responsibilities—road maintenance and postal services, as well as certain military functions and administrative self-maintenance— devolved upon the local institutions. On the other, an entirely new selfconception evolved, one in which the notion of social accountability took first place: the practice of zemstvo management evinced an immediate concern with the welfare of local residents in such essential matters as health care, education, property protection, sanitation, pensions, and credit. If, in theory, pre-reform landlords were supposed to operate in paternalistic fashion, in postreform practice social welfare passed into the hands of the zemstvo institutions. At a time when European countries were just beginning to develop welfare legislation and institutions, the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo presents a unique example of local management of social needs.65 Elena Morozova in 1991 singled out local economy, medicine, and education as the primary fields of activity of



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the Saratov zemstvo.66 While this is basically correct for Nizhnii Novgorod as well, the social welfare function needs not only to be added but also to be seen as emblematic of the zemstvo enterprise in general. The priorities of the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo differed little from those of its counterparts, thus making it perfectly “representative” of the aims of the zemstvo provinces. Certain zemstvos became renowned for their achievements in one or another sphere: Tver’, for example, was known for its liberal and progressive policies, while the Moscow and Chernigov zemstvos were particularly advanced in their statistical techniques, creating two different models for household surveys. Boris Veselovskii, from the highly politicized position of the zemstvo movement, dismissed out of hand the activities of the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo in its “first” period, up to the 1890s, stating unambiguously that it “led an unremarkable existence and was fairly lifeless,” yet this assessment obscures the zemstvo’s work in the sphere of local management.67

Medicine and Health Care One of the first areas of consensus to emerge, perhaps because the need was so acute, was in the domain of rural medicine. The provinces of the Volga region struggled with cholera, plague, syphilis, smallpox, diphtheria, and typhus, as well as nonepidemic diseases. In its early days, the zemstvo found it difficult to respond to the needs of local physicians, which included a project outlining reforms in the provincial hospital, a proposal (submitted by V. A. Khotiaintsev, president of the Arzamas district zemstvo board) to provide a fifty-ruble credit line for doctors in local pharmacies, and complaints that physicians dispatched through regular bureaucratic channels had little chance of arriving in an outof-the way district before a given epidemic had run its natural course.68 Twenty years later, a fairly sophisticated network of communications had taken shape, the provincial zemstvo hospital had evolved into a relatively orderly and efficient institution, and measures for dealing with epidemics had begun to shift from sheer improvisation to preventive and proactive policies. Health care occupied a steadily increasing proportion of expenditures; as the overall budget grew, the zemstvo’s capacities became more real, until in 1900 they were managing a system that provided hospital services at the provincial level while delegating responsibility for most other matters to the districts.69 Infrastructure was the key issue. In the pre-reform period medical care had been considered the responsibility of the landlord.70 Occasional hospitals existed where individual landowners had seen fit to construct them; at the moment when the zemstvo began operating, state peasants paid a three-anda-half-kopek tax specifically designated for medical care.71 The zemstvo thus needed to carve out its own sphere, redirecting any existing cash flow into its own coffers rather than those of the central government. Medical access—a major and consistent concern—devolved largely upon the district zemstvos. In

150

21.8 35.3 24.1 12.6 18.5 22.5 23.5 33.6 21.4 11.1 19.9

16.0 41.2 30.3 17.5 23.6 29.0 29.2 35.7 22.0 19.3 27.0

20.1 33.0 23.1 16.1 13.7 22.1 16.7 31.7 27.0 11.4 18.7

14.3 35.9 29.6 17.9 17.6 25.0 24.0 34.2 28.2 19.8 27.0

23.9 42.5 25.9 24.4 16.1 13.7 20.9 33.0 31.1 22.6 20.4

1895 14.0 36.5 29.7 24.3 18.0 17.6 23.4 31.1 28.4 28.0 24.2

40.6 37.4 26.6 17.8 17.8 35.5 29.5 46.2 30.1 33.8 52.1

20.4 21.4 15.8 11.0 14.7 34.6 23.8 19.8 15.9 35.3 35.6

1900 71.9 60.7 50.2 71.3 32.6 35.1 48.4 58.4 66.7 33.3 47.7

26.7 29.9 32.9 33.0 32.3 29.0 31.8 45.2 35.2 25.1 40.5

1905 18.4 28.7 32.4 25.2 26.5 25.2 23.1 41.7 28.5 19.2 34.4

47.8 113.9 42.0 182.1 29.8 347.5 28.7 467.0

726.0 26.4

90.7 68.1 68.3 111.2 35.3 41.6 42.7 75.7 90.0 39.4 63.1

1910

17.3 26.5 27.2 21.6 19.0 16.0 26.9 26.5 29.4 16.6 22.5 988.9 22.6

113.1 127.8 90.0 132.1 55.1 60.8 73.7 90.1 109.7 42.8 93.8

1913

28.9 148.8 14.6 341.4 34.3 434.4 38.3 574.5 36.3 26.5 516.2 21.0 917.6 33.0 1,160.4 29.9 1,563.3 26.1

10.4 32.2 31.7 21.3 23.6 25.2 28.0 15.8 22.1 12.0 25.3

1890

75.4 44.3 92.3 59.3 89.2 191.6 24.0 257.2 27.7 333.3

12.3 19.9 16.6 15.2 18.5 18.9 18.4 10.8 17.7 6.4 15.2

1885

25.2 367.5 21.4 576.2 32.3

5.3 30.9 31.7 18.3 19.0 23.0 23.8 12.2 16.3 12.3 26.0

1880

116.2 18.5 165.0 21.4 244.1 26.2 233.6 24.9 284.9

4.4 15.6 16.6 8.8 11.0 12.8 12.2 6.0 11.9 6.9 11.7

1875

* The unusually high percentage is apparently because “special resources” were allocated to medicine and not noted in the general account (presumably, a personal donation). Source: V. E. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let zhizni nizhegorodskikh zemstv: ocherk razvitiia zemskogo khoziaistva (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914), 69.

District 1867 1870 Nizhnii Novgorod 1.9 8.4 3.0 3.9 Ardatov 2.0 5.0 3.5 7.4 Arzamas 2.5 12.0 7.8 14.9 Balakhna 5.4 12.1 3.2 7.5 Vasil’ 2.2 6.6 4.1 7.6 Gorbatov 1.1 5.6 6.0 13.0 Kniaginin 2.5 8.0 5.6 13.4 Lukoianov 3.5 8.7 3.8 7.4 Makar’ev 8.7 32.1 9.1 14.6 Semënov 1.6 5.0 4.2 10.4 Sergach 2.7 13.4 3.5 8.0 District 34.2 10.9 53.7 9.7 total Provincial zemstvo 39.8 48.6 55.2 99.1* TOTAL 74.0 18.7 108.9 17.8

Table 7.1. Zemstvo expenditures for medical care (in thousands of rubles and in yearly budget percentages)



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1869, zemstvo-employed medical personnel in Nizhnii Novgorod district, for example, counted one physician, who was in the city, and seven clinics staffed by poorly trained medical assistants. In response to the complaints of peasant delegates to the zemstvo, the number of doctors, staff, and facilities increased steadily if extremely slowly, so that by 1879 there were two doctors, each with a staff comprising a medical assistant, a midwife, and an orderly, and a fourbed clinic; a primitive insurance system designated 1,000 rubles to cover the hospital expenses of patients who could not pay. The number of doctors did not increase to four until 1892 (a third clinic was opened again in response to peasant requests in 1885); by 1895 there were, in addition, three new medical assistant– staffed clinics, a third midwife, and respectable sums allocated to improvement and upkeep of facilities, including pharmacies. The result of this incremental progress, accompanied by a steady growth in the allocation of zemstvo finances, was still a ratio of one doctor to thirty-five thousand residents (or, one doctor per 750 square versts), and one hospital bed per thirty-five hundred residents.72 These data were not significantly different for other districts. Given the intimate level of expenditures involved, micro-management prevailed: the Vasil’ zemstvo assembly, for example, on one occasion dedicated a good part of its session to buying a scale and a microscope and ordering medical journals for the Vasil’ hospital for a total expense of 250 rubles, while also stipulating an increase in midwife Alekseeva’s salary and a housing allowance of 3 rubles per month for the assistants.73 Despite the (barely) subsistence level of these figures, a significant structural shift took place over the course of zemstvo management. Contemporaries conceptualized this shift in terms of a mobile versus a stationary system.74 In the early period, a mobile system predominated. In it, both the doctor and the medical assistants would travel on market days to different parts of the district, receiving patients in the township administrative building or making home visits; gradually, the virtues of a stationary system, with greater numbers of medical staff, became apparent. This involved the subdivision of the district into divisions with permanent staff. By 1890, only one district retained the old ways in pure form, while ten districts had developed some kind of mixed approach.75 In 1871, the provincial zemstvo board appealed to the districts with a proposal to create a provincial physicians’ congress, which would meet periodically to discuss matters of common concern, with travel expenses paid by the zemstvo. Out of eighteen doctors queried, seventeen had a positive response, and the first session was convened 1–9 March 1872. Major matters discussed included smallpox inoculation, to which end two calves were injected with smallpox and a vaccine extracted; police measures to coerce mothers to immunize their children; providing midwifery courses so that a ratio of one midwife per doctor could be attained; and the program of Dr. Ukke, from Samara, for the sanitary study of the province. On this last point the congress met with resistance from

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Tatar mullahs in certain districts who, unlike Orthodox local priests, refused to provide information on birth records, claiming they did not know Russian grammar and had no resources for postal fees.76 A document from the early 1860s lists twenty-five members.77 Despite ambitious plans for twice-yearly meetings, the Physicians’ Congress, overcoming the practical difficulties of gathering so many provincial doctors in one place, managed to meet only four more times before 1914, in 1876, 1890, 1899, and 1910. The Second Congress discussed sanitation, syphilis, smallpox inoculation, measures against epidemics, hygiene in the districts, medical accountability, and standardization of medical care throughout the province. In Nizhnii Novgorod, the congress had high scientific as well as socialscientific ambitions. At their meetings, they presented scientific papers and excerpts from medical journals and specified in their charter the goal of “the scientific elaboration of various branches of medicine and auxiliary fields; the study of local pathological forms and the conditions that cause them; the study of Nizhnii Novgorod province from a meteorological, physical, hygienic etc. perspective; and the compilation of the medical statistics of the province, to the degree that it is applicable to medical knowledge in its current state.”78 Some of the papers presented included Dr. Veindenbaum’s rare case of the cure of an infection of the urethra, Dr. Antonevich’s discussion of cystitis traumatica with significant blood loss, Slavnitskii’s piece on the healing of an amputation wound, Florentinskii’s on a case of difficult swallowing, and so on.79 On another occasion, Karl Lindemann discussed, in tandem with Thury’s “Mémoire sur la loi de production des sexes chez les plantes, les animaux, et l’homme,” the various possible determinations of gender, for example: a male was produced if the egg had a longer time to ripen, or if sperm penetrated the egg when it had already traveled a good part of the way down the Fallopian tubes; the gender of offspring might also reflect the character of its parents.80 Whatever the value of these observations, their author had read the French article almost immediately upon its original publication, in 1864. The physicians’ congresses provide a remarkable example of national cooperation and coordination.81 By the late 1880s, this local network of physicians had begun to link up with the national Pirogov congresses. The local doctor, D. A. Venskii, was Nizhnii Novgorod’s delegate to the Third Physicians’ Congress, held in St. Petersburg in 1889. The local congress took quite seriously the activity of the national one: because the latter put off the issue of zemstvo medicine until the next congress, the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo delayed its own general plans and projects for reforming local structure, instead of using the opportunity to take its own initiatives.82 A list of twenty-eight physicians’ congresses with which the Nizhnii Novgorod group was in contact includes similar groups in the capitals, in Kiev, in Riga, Warsaw, Odessa, Astrakhan, and other cities.83 Rural medicine provides an archetypal case of competing jurisdictions



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among districts, between the districts and the province, and between the zemstvos and the municipal governments. A diphtheria epidemic in Arzamas, for example, brought district representatives running to the provincial zemstvo with outstretched palms, and yielded good results; similarly, an outbreak of typhus in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod evoked a sympathetic response from the provincial zemstvo, particularly because a large proportion of the victims were migrant workers and thus not reasonably the responsibility of the district. Matters became more complicated in the case of the more predictable recurrences of syphilis among prostitutes who worked the fair: the zemstvo hospital’s refusal, after several years of unrequited generosity, to continue to admit them, was considered weighty enough to proceed to the State Senate for adjudication, with the concomitant suggestion of creating a special clinic to treat these cases.84 The question of jurisdictions, moreover, was resolved in structural terms. If, in fact, it was the provincial zemstvo that devoted significant energies and resources to maintenance of the main hospital in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, known as the Martynov Hospital, this responsibility was regularized and codified in 1894 after nearly a decade of discussion. The massive influx of “foreigners” (that is, non-zemstvo taxpayers) to the city flooded the hospital with patients, who were bounced over to the city, while the zemstvo used this opportunity to create specialized departments in the hospital— surgery, gynecology, ophthalmology, ear/nose/throat, neurology, syphilis, and dermatology.85 This redistribution produced the desired result: patients began to come from the various districts of the province, where only general assistance was available, and were able to benefit from the more advanced equipment and techniques of the provincial center.86 Who paid for medical care? In principle, the zemstvos sought to provide free care, as well as prescription medicine, to patients who were unable to pay. This decision was made, separately, from the outset by the district zemstvos; Ardatov, Arzamas, and Sergach led the way, while other districts hired physicians by using their own funds.87 Determining who did or did not have sufficient resources sometimes became a complicated matter. Ailing meshchane, for example, were the responsibility of their corporation; it is a recurring theme that the meshchanskoe obshchestvo, perpetually at a loss for funds, failed to pay the hospital bills of their members—and sometimes those of peasants. The provincial hospital annually struck from its books a loss averaging between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred rubles on the presumption that there was no way to recoup these funds. The literature on Russian rural medicine has shown a tendency to paint a bleak picture—an image confirmed by Chekhov’s literary portraits and populist writings.88 Positive or negative evaluations, however, may not be the only way of posing the question. More interesting is the model that emerges from a look at the operation of the zemstvos on the local level. Remarkably

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for the late nineteenth century, a concept of universal, or at least corporative, health insurance inspired the policies and practice of zemstvo medicine. Through trial and error, the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvos arrived at a notion of medical care that aspired to universal coverage implemented on the local level. The physicians’ congresses, in the meantime, provide a bright example of civic cooperation across provincial boundaries.89

Education How local is local? The decision made early on with respect to education was that requests for establishing schools must proceed from the bottom up. The provincial zemstvo transmitted most education issues to the district level. Peasants themselves were supposed to approach the boards with requests to establish schools. At the same time, one question became quickly inscribed in national debates: should education remain the domain of the church or become that of the state or of local institutions? In the early stages, the zemstvo worked entirely within the existing parochial structures, giving money to existing parish schools and working with clerical teachers. By 1900, parish schools constituted a small portion of such institutions, teacher-training courses had been initiated, and zemstvo schools dotted the countryside. The matter of quality versus quantity was persistently raised: What textbooks were in use? How good were the teachers? Were the graduates literate? Matters were further complicated in the 1880s when Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the incarnation of the secularized church, intervened with his support of the parish school movement. Churchand zemstvo-administered schools entered into competition. At the 1896 AllRussian Industrial and Art Exhibition, the movement was represented by the building of a “church-school,” intended to symbolize the syncretism of spiritual and economic life.90 The example of education provides an opportunity to observe the emergence of consensus over the first twenty years of the zemstvos’ existence. In general, the contours of provincial education took shape through a dialogue between the districts and the province on one hand and the province and the Ministry of Education on the other. A request by the Balakhna district zemstvo in 1866 is characteristic: given that the district zemstvo had taken complete responsibility for funding zemstvo schools, its administrators asked the provincial organ for help with teacher-training courses, permission to teach the gospel in their schools, and the right to accept children from all estates. The response was negative on the first question, a referral to the provincial education committee on the second, and positive (because the practice in question was in accordance with the law) on the third.91 Over time, the question of teacher training became one of the most acute and one of the most illustrative: if, in the early days, the provincial zemstvo had to seek permission from the diocese to enroll its teachers in the ecclesiastical seminary, a subsequent initiative to create a special teachers’ seminary in Nizhnii Novgorod or elsewhere in the province was denied by the

155

6.3 19.2 8.6 101.9

10.6 68.7

12.4 22.1 11.0 141.4

10.7 119.3

9.2 82.7

58.0

29.2 16.6 9.9 16.1 8.9 12.09 10.3 11.4 13.0 6.3 9.8

11.9 19.3 12.6 163.7

38.1 22.9 12.2 19.6 11.2 18.1 12.7 15.3 16.4 9.2 12.2

22.3 19.6 13.5 19.5 12.5 19.5 14.2 14.4 5.0 11.4 14.5

1895 65.2 32.8 22.8 52.9 14.6 25.9 27.1 18.1 23.7 19.2 16.4

7.1 30.4 4.8 64.7 13.5 218.2 12.4 383.4

b

1910

1913

101.3 37.6 237.3 48.3 279.0 42.8 43.3 21.3 58.7 24.7 154.2 31.9 32.7 21.4 37.8 18.0 99.98 30.1 67.1 31.1 171.1 38.9 266.4 43.7 19.6 19.4 24.7 18.5 94.4 32.7 35.1 29.0 51.2 31.1 194.4 51.2 37.4 24.6 41.2 22.2 107.1 38.8 23.3 18.0 30.6 16.9 148.7 43.7 37.8 20.0 93.3 29.5 121.6 32.5 34.8 26.2 72.8 35.3 118.6 46.1 16.8 14.2 23.3 12.8 164.8 39.5

1905

6.4 63.6 14.0 513.0

6.4 49.5 4.4 77.9 4.9 18.5 891.6 23.0 1,827.0 30.7

18.6 449.4 25.2 842.1 30.6 1,749.0 39.8

32.7 18.8 13.6 32.8 12.0 25.2 21.9 7.7 12.5 20.1 11.2

1900

15.4 187.9 16.6 318.7

20.8 17.7 12.7 19.6 11.3 15.9 14.9 12.3 13.5 10.8 14.4

1890

12.8 144.4

19.9 13.9 9.9 19.8 10.1 11.6 11.8 11.3 8.2 9.0 10.7

1885

18.5 27.0 9.9 11.9 8.9 8.0 11.3 14.2 4.6 8.0 7.0 8.9 11.0 9.5 17.9 10.7 8.0 7.9 6.8 5.2 6.6 8.0

1880

17.0 20.3 21.7 3.0 5.9 6.1 3.7 6.8 5.5 4.2 8.7 8.1 2.8 4.7 2.6 3.9 7.0 5.3 2.7 5.2 7.2 7.8 15.8 12.1 6.5 8.8 6.4 2.9 5.2 3.6 3.5 8.0 4.0

1875

The first allocation was made in 1868, rather than 1867. 1869 allocation. In 1871, the allocation was nineteen hundred rubles or 3.4 percent of the budget; there was no allocation in 1870. c 1869 allocation. Source: V. E. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let zhizni nizhegorodskikh zemstv: ocherk razvitiia zemskogo khoziaistva (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914), 106.

a

District 1867 1870 Nizhnii Novgorod 9.5a 30.3 8.5 11.1 Ardatov 1.3 3.1 1.4 2.9 Arzamas 2.2a 6.1 2.6 4.8 Balakhna 2.0 4.4 0.7 1.6 – – Vasil’ 2.0b 3.7 Gorbatov 0.3 1.3 1.3 2.7 Kniaginin 0.2a 0.7 1.0 2.5 Lukoianov 2.0 4.9 2.2 4.2 Makar’ev 0.3a 1.2 0.6 1.0 Semënov 0.4a 1.0 0.7 1.8 Sergach 0.3c 0.7 0.7 1.7 District total 20.3 6.5 19.7 3.5 Provincial zemstvo 0.2 0.2 4.3 7.7 TOTAL 20.5 5.2 24.0 3.9

Table 7.2. Zemstvo expenditures for education (in thousands of rubles and in yearly budget percentages)

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government, which considered the extant national seminaries to be sufficient.92 The provincial zemstvos were instead instructed to assign scholarships to send their students to these institutions. The question refused to go away, however, and by 1882 we see pedagogical courses (if not a seminary proper) established, following the proposal of the Nizhnii Novgorod district zemstvo, at Nizhnii Novgorod, Arzamas, and Lyskovo. The three points were chosen primarily for geographical reasons but also because they were major population centers.93 An even greater disappointment followed a spontaneous initiative to found a school bookstore in each district. In 1872, Pavlovo bookseller Ivan Sherenin, a peasant by soslovie, offered to sell, without remuneration, basic readers to the population. Delighted by this possibility to combat the bad influence of lubok literature marketed by peddlers (ofeni) (the examples given are the tales featuring Bov Korolevich and Frantsil Ventsian), the provincial board backed, to the tune of two thousand rubles, the creation of proper bookstores in the districts.94 Within a year they had acquired 236 titles in 19,875 copies, under the rubrics of religion (Zakon Bozhii, or religious instruction), natural science, geography, history and biography, textbooks, and “other.” In 1874, however, the state’s printing office shut down the stores, and remaining books were donated to the school committees. Likewise, the Ministry of Education in 1867 rejected a provincial zemstvo initiative to introduce the teaching of Russian language in Tatar schools, on the grounds that this, together with other issues related to minority schools, was a matter of national importance demanding resolution. The picture was by no means entirely negative. The need for artisanal schools was recognized at all levels—perhaps in part because of the extensive publications on artisanal production issued by the Nizhnii Novgorod Statistical Committee. The Gorbatov district zemstvo led the way, in 1883 suggesting that such institutions be created—an initiative that the provincial zemstvo palmed off on the districts. At the district level, the Ardatov, Arzamas, Balakhna, and Semënov zemstvos backed the idea, though they complained of lack of funds, while Kniaginin, Lukoianov, and Nizhnii Novgorod supported Gorbatov entirely; Makar’ev denied any such need, while Vasil’ and Sergach argued that residents, rather than the zemstvo, should provide the funds. A majority of thirty-four (with only two opposing—a rare level of unanimity) supported the establishment of artisanal schools by the districts, with additional aid issued on an ad hoc basis by the province. Everything to do with artisanal education met a similarly positive response. A request, for example, from Balakhna for eight hundred rubles to add practical instruction to zemstvo schools was granted in 1885. An agricultural school was set up at Obukhovo at N. I. Rusinov’s prompting, while the Penza apiculture school invited Nizhnii Novgorod students to attend, with the sponsorship of their respective district zemstvos. The most significant measure, however, was the founding of the Kulibin artisanal school—the result of a confluence of individual and zemstvo visions. The hereditary honorary citizen Kalinin-Shushliaev had willed ten thousand



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rubles each to Nizhnii Novgorod and Lyskovo to establish artisanal schools. The interest from this initial capital was insufficient, but the occasion happened to coincide with the celebration, in the All-Estate Club, of the 150-year anniversary of Ivan Kulibin’s birth.95 On the suggestion of the historian Khramtsovskii, the club decided to contribute three hundred rubles a year to the school, while also collecting private funds. Only one school was ultimately established, but it flourished. Interestingly, while the provincial zemstvo pushed agriculturally related trades such as the manufacture of agricultural tools, the district zemstvos promoted a broader spectrum of crafts and trades.96 If the zemstvo legislation provided a strict list of tasks and responsibilities, the ultimate contours of jurisdiction and execution emerged through this process of negotiation, based on specific issues that came up. Who would pay for schools, for example, was a question that needed to be resolved early on. In 1869, gentry delegate V. A. Khotiaintsev proposed a sort of improvised local tax in exchange for educational services. The argumentation is quite arcane, and characteristic: because of the railway, the zemstvo had been able to economize on postal horses and could collect twenty-four kopeks less per capita, but Khotiaintsev suggested that the amount simply be spent on schools instead. His proposal was modified (on the grounds that peasants were “not yet” aware of the value of education and would object to the extra tax) and amended to propose the expenditure of any future budgetary surplus on education.97 Similar mechanisms obtained for matters of secondary and higher education. Practical instruction was a high priority, and the Ministry of Education and the state council enthusiastically approved the 1874 proposal by two provincial zemstvo delegates, M. M. Averkiev and K. N. Sadokov, to establish a technical high school (Realschule) in 1876. The new high school opened its doors in 1877. In the meantime, the Ministry of Education also approved the renaming of the women’s school as a gymnasium, on the grounds that instruction was equivalent to that of the men’s high school. Members of the provincial zemstvo and its board made up the governing committees of the two institutions. On the university level, efforts by the zemstvo to change jurisdiction to the Moscow educational district (from Kazan) met with frustration, and discussion shifted, instead, to a demand to admit Nizhnii Novgorod students to universities other than Kazan without an entrance exam, and to the allocation of stipends. This last issue illustrates particularly well the improvised and case-specific style of zemstvo appropriation. In 1872, the provincial zemstvo was sponsoring four students, all of them on the medical-surgical faculty: Vladimir Pokrovskii, Genrikh Rodzevich, Ivan Arapovskii, and Nikolai Livanov. If, originally, scholarship holders were supposed to work in zemstvo service for six years, Rodzevich’s refusal to accept the ward he was offered resulted in the curtailing of the scholarships: only the two explicitly founded by Emperor Alexander II were retained. Livanov, who worked in Balakhna after he completed his education, was refused retroactive compensation for courses he had taken; requests for

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further scholarships after this point were turned down. On the other hand, a veterinary scholarship was created in 1879 in response to an application by a second-year student, S. Bart, but his fellow student Zhivopisets was turned down the following year because only one could be funded. A request by three scholarship holders for an increased stipend to combat inflationary costs in the capital was also turned down.98 Despite the apparently ad hoc and improvised nature of these decisions, they bespeak the emergence of a structure through the pattern of initiative and response. Each early decision was of precedent-setting significance. The bare bones of zemstvo responsibility were set by the law. However, the contours of educational institutions, in practice, depended on the active engagement of the individuals on the ground.

Social Welfare and Insurance The provincial zemstvo administered, in addition to the hospital, an almshouse and a psychiatric ward. By the late 1880s, zemstvo officials were working to place abandoned babies, whose death rate in 1888 was 86.8 percent, in orphanages or families. The zemstvo provided a channel for private charity: the well-known merchants Blinov and Bugrov made donations through the provincial zemstvo, while the retired General-Major Grigoriev, of Lukoianov district, donated more than two thousand desiatinas of land for a military almshouse to be administered by the zemstvo. Lukoianov’s activist district head, N. I. Rusinov, used these so-called Obukhov lands (after the village, Obukhovka) to establish a model farm. In 1870, Ekaterina Illarionovna Protopopova, with the rank of state counselor, contributed a sum of thirty-nine thousand rubles; merchants P. V. Viakhirev and Kosyrev gave, respectively, sums of one thousand and five hundred rubles to the almshouse and the hospital. Not all charitable efforts had such felicitous results. In 1877, for example, the peasant Matrena Elistratovna Pakhtusova from Gorodets tried to arrange for her house to become an orphanage after her death. The provincial zemstvo, citing an 1868 law on the execution of the zemstvo statute, sent the matter back to the Balakhna district zemstvo, which, citing a different clause of the same law, rejected the property because of its bad condition and then forwarded the question to the peasant obshchestvo, which did not want it either because Pakhtusova was not a member, but felt no qualms about razing the house because it was on their property. By 1881, the affair had proceeded to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which regretfully rejected the offer, citing insufficient funds to realize the project because the house itself was worth only fifty rubles; since the house was on the territory of the peasant commune, its officials could do as they wished.99 Item 5 of the 1864 statute mandated mutual property insurance. Although this never became a major budgetary expense, the zemstvo at the provincial level took this responsibility extremely seriously, working out in great detail a fire insurance program that would provide funds to those who had lost their houses



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in the fires that frequently ravaged the districts and that would implement preemptive measures such as the construction of carpeted roofs and removal of hazardous materials in alleyways and courtyards. The program required a copayment on the part of property owners and put into place an extensive system of property assessment. Peasants notoriously took advantage of their policies to profit from the destruction of their own houses, so assessments had to be carefully regulated.100 In 1893, twenty-seven appeals to the provincial assembly resulted in only three reversals or modifications of the zemstvo board’s original decisions. In one case a peasant, Afanasii Petrov, successfully argued that someone had stolen the property he had failed to report (that is, he had not hidden it); in another, an assessment in the village of Spasskoe needed to be reevaluated; in a third, the assembly approved the board’s endorsement of a claim by Levshin, a Vasil’ev Maidan peasant, that he had a right to a reduced fee. In some of the cases rejected by the assembly, peasants had taken out a private insurance policy from firms like Volga or Rossiia, in addition to the zemstvo assessment, and attempted to collect on both simultaneously, thus reaching a value far higher than that of their property. Fire insurance is significant because it represents a well-established system of social accountability in which premiums are collected and rewards disbursed in organized and competent fashion; local public institutions took on this responsibility and did not leave it all to private firms, although the latter also existed. The debate on voluntary insurance is also significant: for five years it was abolished because it was too great an expense, but popular demand brought it back. The zemstvo approached with the utmost seriousness its mandate to aid and facilitate local commerce, industry, and agriculture. A preliminary count identified some 120 trade fairs in the province, of which only a handful were registered with the central government. The policy was to encourage “real” commercial fairs, so long as they did not interfere with simultaneous bazaars in contiguous areas, but to discourage those that might be set up for “entertainment” purposes only—that is, drunken revelry. The crucial question in this context is credit. From the very beginning, the zemstvo’s ambitions in this sphere were extremely high. In the 1860s, the provincial zemstvo, represented by V. I. Ragozin, drew up a detailed plan for a zemstvo bank. The consensus was that a provincial bank was unnecessary but that each district must have one and that it would be empowered to issue loans to the local population. For reasons that remain dim (perhaps interference by the central government or simply lack of capital), this excellent plan remained unrealized, and, by the 1870s, delegates were discussing the issuance of credit within the framework of the Gentry Land Bank. Still, savings and loan institutions and small credit banks cropped up throughout the districts and played a crucial role in support for artisanal production. Credit for handicrafts became an increasingly large sphere of zemstvo activity until, by the 1890s, it became a special budget item. The zemstvo took over sponsorship of the

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Gatsiskii research project on artisanal production from the state committee, when the latter claimed to have run out of funds for publication. Thus, the thorough investigation of artisanal production was transferred to the local sphere. On the more immediate level, aid to the local economy took the form of direct food delivery or regular direct agricultural subsidies to the districts. Sums were substantial; on the eve of the great famine, the districts received a large amount of money as part of the normal expenditure, but the amounts were higher because harvests had been substandard and weather conditions severe for three years in a row. The sums for each district were: Ardatov, 18,000 rubles; Gorbatov, 20,000; Lukoianov, 60,000; Nizhnii Novgorod, 30,000; Semënov, 5,000; and Sergach, 50,000, for a total of 183,000 rubles. The sums expended in emergency meetings in 1891 were enormous.

A Case Study of Famine in Lukoianov District Natural disasters can, occasionally, become a focal point for the alignment or realignment of political forces on the local and national levels. Unquestionably, the famine that struck Russian provinces in 1891 qualifies as such a politicized catastrophe. Nizhnii Novgorod province, and Lukoianov district in particular, became a center of the national debate.101 Vladimir Korolenko, who traveled through the province as a political correspondent, provides a remarkable picture of the array of local forces and how they mobilized to deal with the crisis. It is a perfect case study of how local institutions, and the individuals that staffed them, made decisions, worked out spheres of jurisdiction, and entered into conflicts, and Korolenko’s observations are particularly useful because he was aware specifically of this local politics dimension. Here is Korolenko’s version of events, in a nutshell. The alarm was initially sounded by the Vasil’ gentry, who noted the first signs of famine in their district. Governor Baranov responded immediately, assigning three hundred thousand rubles to the district—before the zemstvo had a chance to take stock. Baranov then created a “famine parliament”—actually, the ad hoc committee on provisions—consisting of a “colorful” (in Korolenko’s view) array of representatives: bureaucrats answering to the governor; bureaucrats responsible to state ministries; land captains; marshals of the nobility and their candidates; local activists, physicians; and traveling correspondents from the Novoe vremia.102 The zemstvo board was also included. The zemstvo had by this time swung into action; statistics had acquired a tremendous “moral significance.” Thus, the head of the local statistical bureau, N. F. Annenskii, provided the strongest defense. The crisis came to a head when a party of the Lukoianov gentry—a creature that emerged from Baranov’s illegal support in the zemstvo elections— spontaneously announced that there was no famine whatsoever in their district, thus spearheading the formation of a national conservative gentry faction. Baranov, put in this awkward position, became confused, at once complimenting



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Annenskii on his numbers and experiencing severe discomfort at their implications; in the meantime, the zemstvo board was winning the “parliament” over to the statisticians’ side. The Novoe vremia correspondent, S. F. Sharapov, put in his two cents’ worth, indicting the statisticians’ “theory” against the gentry’s “practice.” At a 15 December 1891 meeting, the conflicting sides engaged in a public battle. Obtiazhnov, a Gorbatov land captain, represented “practice,” “land,” and “acquaintance with local conditions” against the zemstvo’s “theory” and scientific research. The issue came down to the settlements of Pavlovo, Bogorodskoe, and Bol’shoe Murashkino: waving Annenskii’s brochure in the air, Obtiazhnov claimed that the statisticians were unaware that the inhabitants did not engage in agriculture and, moreover, that their youthful data gatherers represented a threat to the peace and stability of the region. The answer: in Bogorodskoe, five families did in fact farm land, while in the other places it was correct that they did not. Still, since the study took land rather than persons as its object, the key was that the land was rented out to agriculturalists and was thus productive.103 Korolenko dates the defeat of the Lukoianov gentry and land captains, “called by the monarch to protect the peasants,” and the victory of the zemstvo and its statisticians, to this crucial moment. The Lukoianov gentry budget was rejected, the zemstvo budget accepted, and Korolenko, traveling to Lukoianov on 25 February, found his carriage constantly deflected from the road by carts carrying grain to the devastated district.104 Baranov from that point took the “left” position—ironically, appointing Obtiazhnov president of the district committee on provisions and thereby forcing him to quash his own previous supporters; the administrative powers-that-be were won over by the statisticians’ truth. Korolenko was, of course, on the zemstvo’s side, and his point was to illustrate the importance for a socially responsible decision of precision and accuracy. Whatever one’s political stance, however, his detailed account clearly shows the implementation of policy through the productive interaction of local forces.105 The autonomy of province, district, and governor (as he puts it, “the province entered into conflict with the district”) is striking, as is the fact that the whole issue was resolved within the boundaries of the province. The national dimensions of this political famine emerge only after we make sense of the local story. The famine was less about peasant hunger than about the means of resolving it: the crisis was thus a conflict of the new “scientific” forces of statistics with the traditional estate principle.

A Day in the Life of a District Zemstvo Any one session of a district zemstvo provides an ample illustration of key issues and power relations. The Arzamas district assembly convened as usual for four consecutive days in mid-September 1881. Apart from the president and secretary, between twenty-eight and thirty-six members were in attendance. The meetings took the form of reports from the district board, which in principle

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were distributed in advance, and responses to them. Matters addressed included appeals from other zemstvos and from the provincial zemstvo, state-issued measures, and purely local decisions. Thus, the keynote report was a request from the Moscow provincial zemstvo to raise funds for a memorial and possibly a church dedicated to Tsar Alexander II. This was of course the future Church of the Savior on the Blood, and the request was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm and a commitment of five hundred rubles.106 Not so with less momentous requests from other zemstvos: Penza’s invitation to a fellowship holder to its model apiary, sponsored by the Ministry for State Lands, met with significant skepticism, while the Poltava zemstvo’s fund-raising effort for a school named after Nikolai Gogol was rejected on the grounds that too few constituents would have heard of the accomplishments or even the name of this writer.107 The Provincial Board’s measure mandating a width of thirty sazhens (fifteen meters) for roads on which livestock were herded (peasants had a tendency to convert the paths into arable land) was dismissed as outmoded because cows should be herded in railway cars or ships rather than along roads where they carried plague. It was also considered irrelevant because Arzamas district’s two main tracts—Simbirsk and Saratov—were quite wide enough anyway.108 Dialogue between the central government and the district zemstvo took a more serious form. The major issues at hand, as for the whole of the post-reform period, concerned the micro-management of peasant economy and organization. This particular session debated the nature of new peasant institutions, arguing for the abolition of the township, the integration of peasant issues into the larger zemstvo framework, and establishing a set of rules for village meetings and communications among different levels of local institutions.109 Mediocre harvests and the provision of emergency food supplies also figured high on the list of priorities. In the meantime, the district assembly also dealt with a broad spectrum of purely local issues, ranging from fiscal considerations and the need for precise delimitation of land boundaries (accuracy of measurement) to the housing of local police superintendents to the purely personal. Among the last were a soldier’s wife’s request to dismiss her medical debts of 18 rubles 60 kopeks (granted) and a former soldier’s demand for some kind of employment so he could provide for his three small children (passed on to the district board).110 The assembly sponsored an experiment in improved flax processing (at first resisted by the peasants but ultimately successful) and invited four master craftsmen to use clay to construct buildings that would thus be fireproof. Physicians’ salaries were increased in view of inflation (prices doubled over sixteen years), a boys’ middle school was discussed, and the assembly heard reports on the situation in popular education and health care.111 Relations with the zemstvos were an important litmus test for the provincial governors. In 1867, Governor Odintsov, in his opening address of the yearly session, was already able to praise its achievements in the areas of economy, roads, hospitals, and medical care and to put forward an agenda, including the



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goal of zemstvo insurance, for the immediate future. In addition, he pointed to the importance of fair and equal distribution of tax assessment among the districts, noting that he had approved district assessments only provisionally, in the hope that a fairer system would soon be established. “The division of lands according to their soil quality and productivity,” he added, “can be extremely useful for this purpose.”112 Three years later, he similarly emphasized as a significant issue the abolition of the head tax (actually implemented on the national level in the 1880s) and its replacement by a tax on households and land. In his first address in 1873, Kutaisov, in contrast, admitted his near ignorance of zemstvo affairs, vaguely pointing to medicine and popular education as worthy goals, while missing the point of debates on fire insurance by proposing the planting of trees in alleyways.113 Governor Bezak, Kutaisov’s successor, merely noted his willingness to cooperate, while Baranov, in 1883, more constructively pointed to two key problems: credits for the population’s need for food supplies and the separation of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod from the district zemstvo.114  For nearly a half-century, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have sought to work out the relationship of state versus society, of policy implemented “from above” as opposed to grass-roots initiatives “from below.”115 In its most recent incarnation, this debate (with roots in the protest movements of the 1960s) has drawn extensively on the notion—in Jürgen Habermas’s articulation in particular—of civil society, in which civic organizations and informal groupings would create a mechanism for political activity independent of the imposition of state control. I have suggested here that, in Russian provinces (and Nizhnii Novgorod in particular) in the nineteenth century, the process of governance was characterized at every level by a more or less productive interaction of central initiative and local response—or, more precisely, of centrally designed structures and the articulation, within the framework established by these structures, of local visions. A consensus of the central government and local actors delineated particular spheres of activity in which policy could be implemented and changes accomplished; the primary such area became the management of the local economy, or khoziaistvo. The provincial “household” (individual and communal) became invested with symbolic value, as an expression of political or quasi-political visions. Chronologically, this consensus (which on occasion involved a considerable amount of coercion) emerged in the 1840s, reached an apogee in the 1870s and 1880s, and collapsed in the 1890s— primarily because zemstvo initiative had by then far outdistanced the visionary capacity of the central government and successfully created local units that began to usurp the function of the state. This model, quite clearly, says nothing about the actual content of politics, which might be left or right, progressive or reactionary, depending upon the individuals involved and the particular aims pursued. I have focused here on examples of this mechanism at work on four levels of the administrative

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structure of Nizhnii Novgorod province: the immediate representation of imperial power in the institution of the governorship; mediators—the agents for special commissions—who at critical junctures could play a defining role; local institutions proper, of which the statistical committees, the town dumas, and the provincial and district zemstvos provided the primary locus of central and local interplay; and, finally, corporative and civic organizations. The point is not to create a comprehensive picture of local administration and bureaucracy but to illustrate a particular mechanism of governance at work.116 The most significant and original example, for Nizhnii Novgorod province, of the process outlined above was the creation in the 1880s and 1890s of a “zemstvo cadaster” for purposes of local taxation. On all levels of the administrative process, we can note an interactive, cooperative interchange between the state and the institutions and individuals on which it of necessity depended to make its policies work. This interchange might take the form of “zealous service” by individuals or the consensual creation of common spaces where local institutions might implement policy. The mechanism of governance itself can be schematized: central (largely contentless) initiative prompts avid local response and the local elaboration of the actual mechanisms to bring the initiative to fruition; a process of give and take then follows, in which local visions frequently transgress the boundaries acceptable to the central state; more initiatives follow to curb or redirect this activity—and so on. The process, by its very nature, contains the possibility of direct confrontation, if the enthusiasm of those local actors whose “mission” is to make the state apparatus work outgrows the given framework, blossoming into a social movement (obshchestvennoe dvizhenie) whose energy can become directed against the now insufficiently reactive central governmental machinery. If individuals and institutions made the state apparatus work, they could also contain the seeds of its demise.

8 The Cadastral Map in the Service of the Zemstvo

B

y far the most original and sophisticated undertaking of the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo in particular involved the most basic of all functions stipulated by the 1864 legislation: the capacity of the zemstvo to collect its own taxes. Points 10 and 11 of the zemstvo law mandated, respectively, the collection of state taxes and the collection and expenditure of local taxes for local needs. The clarity of the legislation in this respect, however, concealed an intrinsic complication: how were these taxes to be collected and according to what principle would the appropriate assessment be determined? The multiplicity inherent in the zemstvo institutions themselves created the remarkable scenario of thirty-four distinct bodies (to speak only of the provincial level) scrambling for a method to collect the taxes they were endowed with the right to levy by the 1864 legislation. How would the tax burden be distributed between the provincial and the district zemstvos? Given the remarkable variety in size, quality, and productivity of landholdings—not to mention changes in these factors over time—how could their value be quantified in a rational fashion? It was a task that a number of the Russian zemstvos took extremely seriously, with interesting and diverse results. Land surveys proliferated in the last third of the nineteenth century, and the surveyor and the soil scientist became as frequent and important figures in the provincial landscape as the earlier tax inspector. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo crafted its own solution to the problem at hand, creating in the process a series of scientifically sophisticated and aesthetically 165

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beautiful maps of the region’s soils. I would argue that these maps together constitute a “zemstvo cadaster” and, as such, represent a relatively successful effort on the part of the zemstvo to carve out a sphere of local control. Initiated in response to state legislation, the zemstvo cadaster soon acquired a life of its own and came to embody specifically local visions, eventually concentrating significant power in local hands.

Traditions and Contexts The zemstvo cadaster is located at the intersection of two distinct but related histories: the first is the history of efforts by the central state to catalogue its territories; the second is the specifically local tradition of descriptions of Nizhnii Novgorod province.1

Cadastral Mapping Cadasters imply systematization, orderliness, and usually centralization; historically, some of the most important cadastral projects have been launched by states at the height of their centralizing capacities. In the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tahrir, or provincial survey, was a key instrument in the assimilation of newly acquired territories as well as a means of regulating existing ones, and it provided a record of male population, households, crops and yields, and taxes in money and in kind.2 The famous cadastral survey of Napoleonic France set an example of centralized information gathering for all of Europe.3 The history of cadastral measurement in Russia is unusual. Although the Muscovite state has an almost mythological reputation of extreme centralization, it was missing this key feature of central control. Instead of being commissioned in Moscow and executed systematically in the provinces, the pistsovye knigi—a close equivalent of a cadaster—had a primarily regional nature. The earliest surviving knigi come from fifteenth-century Novgorod; references to previous ones exist, but no examples remain. These records, which a recent researcher has characterized as more sophisticated than contemporary Western European cadasters, contained a practical description of individual landholdings for tax-gathering purposes; they were instructed to “record all those lands and who lives on them and to measure accurately in obeisance to the Tsar all plowlands and fallow lands, and forests in desiatinas, and to measure the desiatinas as eighty sazhens in length and thirty in width, and to measure the plowlands and write them in the books.”4 Particularly interesting was the existence of standardized measures set in Moscow, at a time when the English feudal cadasters, for example, measured plots by simple visual observation, based on interviews. In a significant foreshadowing of the concerns of the nineteenth-century Russian cadasters, the early modern books registered land according to its quality, dividing land into “good, middling, poor, and very poor,” based on detailed interviews with local residents.5 The Catherinian Land Survey was the first effort at a comprehensive and



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systematic cadaster.6 Initiated in June 1766, when parties of surveyors fanned out from Moscow, the investigation covered more than 165,000 blocs of land, comprising 144 million desiatinas, in twenty-two provinces by 1796; it continued under Paul and had covered most of European Russian by the 1840s.7 Isabel de Madariaga observes that the survey, rather than choosing individual estates as the basic unit, measured, described, and allotted land to individual villages, whether serf, state, peasant or odnodvortsy, just as it measured and allocated land to towns, churches, and cathedrals. . . . The importance of labor as distinct from land is reflected in the fact that where vacant land was available, and existing allotments to villages were vague, eight desiatinas of land were to be allotted per male soul. Thus the basic principle was not the property rights of an individual landowner, but the establishment of the amount and the boundaries of the land which belonged to a given village, whether it had one or several owners or belonged to the state.8

De Madariaga notes that the survey had the effect of not only introducing order into the landscape but also eliminating disputes, enlarging the sown area, and intensifying agricultural production.9 The next important moment in the evolution of land assessment belongs to the reign of Nicholas I. The project was headed by P. D. Kiselev, under the auspices of the Ministry of State Property (established in 1837) as part of the preparation for reform. The first cadastral surveys of the Nicholaevan era were initiated in the 1840s and stretched over twenty years; Nizhnii Novgorod was surveyed and catalogued from 1853 to 1856.10 Once again, the initiative in this case belonged to the central government. Members of the cadastral commissions were charged with making inquiries among the landowners and at peasant meetings, as well as collecting their own observations, in order to evaluate land quality and yields, income from artisanal activities, and other factors. The accurate determination of land quality became essential to the eventual compilation of the contracts (ustavnye gramoty) between landlords and peasants in the initial phase of the 1861 emancipation, and, as Vasilii Dokuchaev pointed out in his own study, some if not all of the data collected by the Kiselev commission “is not devoid of value and interest for the zemstvo.”11

Local Description By the 1880s, local description had become a rich and quite self-sufficient genre, beginning with eighteenth-century travelogues and concluding with the advanced researches of the provincial archival commission.12 Peter Simon Pallas’s Puteshestvie po raznym provintsiiam Rossiiskogo gosudarstva (1773–1788) was the first really detailed description of the provinces in terms of landscape, economic activity, cultural practice, language, and everything else.13 The detailed local portraits in the Gubernskie vedomosti of the 1840s and 1850s have been dealt

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with elsewhere.14 They were preceded, however, by a fairly substantive and sophisticated pamphlet compiled by a senior instructor at the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published, in 1827, under the auspices of the Kazan University press.15 The investigation, under the rubric Statisticheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii, sostavlennoe tamoshnei gimnazii starshim uchitelem Mikhailom Dukhovskim, was a sober breakdown of types of industry and agriculture, population, architecture, ethnicity (which noted, among other things, the virtually complete assimilation of indigenous populations), religion, a detailed district-by-district survey, and a good deal of data and also color on the fair.16 Dukhovskii’s opus invites comparison with Marie-Noëlle Bourguet’s study of the French prefects’ statistical investigations of the Napoleonic era, in which she notes, concerning one of the surveys dating from 1808, “The title itself—Statistique du département de l’Ardèche—surprises the twentieth-century reader, who barely finds, in browsing through the volume, the tables of numbers, indices, and graphs that he expects. What then is there of ‘statistics’ in this lengthy description, more literary than numerical, that seems to make up the fabric of the study and whose tone seems closer to a travel account, a learned monograph, or even a tourist guidebook than to an administrative report?”17 Statistical survey and travelogue had not yet parted ways. Dukhovskii’s pamphlet was the moment where, for Nizhnii Novgorod province, travelogue mutated gradually into “real” statistical description. The genre of local description experienced an explosion in the reform era and into the 1870s. On one hand, this transformation was a symptom of the state’s wish to supervise the reform process in hands-on fashion and thus echoed throughout the zemstvo provinces. Insofar as this is true, the new materials were the product of the official local statistical committees set up everywhere by 1860. On the other hand, as in every situation regarding the Russian provinces, the success of this information-gathering and publishing effort depended above all on the initiative and enthusiasm of local officials (chinovniki). Thus, the appointment of Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii as head of the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial statistical committee (as well as editor of the Gubernskie vedomosti) brought with it not only the usual pamiatnye knizhki but also a plethora of publications, including local guidebooks, historical surveys, biographical sketches, and ethnographic and archaeological investigations.18 The pamiatnye knizhki essentially constituted the culmination of the type of local description undertaken by Dukhovskii or P. I. Mel’nikov, complete with histories of the city, the province, and the diocese, as well as an adres-kalendar’ (akin to a telephone directory) including major officials by rank, train and steamboat schedules, postal rates, and other vital information.19 Gatsiskii’s amplifications on the pamiatnye knizhki included above all Nizhegorodka, published in several editions, which adapted the apparently innocent genre of the local guidebook to express a political message the



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authorities found threatening enough to dismiss him from his post. The 1877 edition in particular was a true local history and was at the root of his conflict with the governor, Kutaisov.20 The genre of local description reached its apogee in the 1870s and 1880s with the creation of the Nizhegorodskii sbornik—once again, edited by Gatsiskii and an organ of the official provincial statistical committee—and finally with the establishment of the provincial archival commission in 1882. The former, of which ten volumes were produced over the twenty years after its inception in 1870, still provides an invaluable source on local statistics, ethnography, religion, history, and kustar industry.21 The latter entity was charged with the duty of sifting through the innumerable ancient acts accumulated in the kremlin towers and organizing them into a coherent archive; its publications yielded rich historical materials and, as a definite by-product, a clear sense of local identity, as manifested in the commissionsponsored jubilees and celebrations such as the founding of the city, the victory of the Nizhnii Novgorodians in the Time of Troubles, and the anniversary of Napoleon’s retreat 1812. Thus, when Dokuchaev and Annenskii drafted their respective maps of Nizhnii Novgorod province—as a whole in the first case, and district by district in the second—their efforts became immediately inscribed in this already rich tradition of local description. From this perspective, the two expeditions were first of all a culmination of efforts to conceptualize and record as much as possible about local life. In this context, the Nizhnii Novgorod study that began in 1882 looks like merely the latest and “most perfect” cadastral survey.22 If the archival commissions, ethnographers, and historians captured history, biography, and culture, the soil scientists and statisticians recorded the “deep structures” of the agrarian landscape, providing the very foundation of a “total description” of the province.

Maps and Methods Curiously, then, the task of crafting a cadastral map devolved, in Russia, upon the local level. The task took off in earnest in the 1870s, when the zemstvos began their own process of assessing the land under their jurisdiction.23 This whole process is better known to us under the rubric of zemstvo statistics. The “parting of the ways” between zemstvo and administrative statistics has become a commonplace in the literature. In part, however, it makes sense to remind ourselves that the zemstvo itself—which we usually think of as an institution of selfgovernment—was originally (that is, in Nicholas I’s conception) intended merely as a more efficient tax-gathering mechanism.24 Thus, the devolution of the statistical function upon these two bodies—the provincial statistical committees and the zemstvos—is more logical than might at first appear; it is only subsequently that local figures fixed upon the zemstvo as the locus with more potential for political initiative.25 What is interesting is that—through circumstance

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rather than plan—the more politically significant function of land assessment for tax gathering became the domain of the zemstvo, while “local color”— population, ethnography, kustar, history—fell to the statistical committee.26 Viatka province was the first to undertake such a local investigation, in 1870, followed by Riazan’ (1870), Tver’ (1871), Kherson (1874), Moscow (1875), Chernigov (1875), Perm’ (1876), Novgorod (1879), Tambov (1880), Kharkov (1880), and so forth.27 The techniques of description emerged on an ad hoc basis, with each province working out its own system; they were able to learn from each other, however, with each region providing models and experience for the next. By the 1880s, two distinct methods had emerged, known by the names of the regions where they had originated—Chernigov and Moscow. The Chernigov method focused on the land itself, taking the land allotment (mezhevaia dacha) as the basic unit and involving detailed on-site investigation by a team of researchers; the Moscow method addressed people rather than land, undertaking a complete household-by-household survey and using materials from land transaction records, passport books, and taxation registers, as well as official documents.28 While the two above-mentioned methods remain the best known, the Nizhnii Novgorod solution became arguably the most sophisticated and involved the implementation of the most advanced scientific instruments available at the end of the nineteenth century. The Nizhnii Novgorod method or, as it came to be called, the territorial-cadastral method, drew, in succession, upon the scientific expeditions of two prominent experts: the soil scientist V. V. Dokuchaev (1882–1885) and the statistician N. F. Annenskii (1887–1895). Each expedition produced a voluminous and precise description of the province’s territory. The results were published in two separate sets of fourteen volumes each.29 Together, these two investigations comprise the natural-historical and socioeconomic “halves” of the zemstvo project. A “proper” cadastral map for the province, and eventually for each district, became the fruit of these two in-depth studies. The maps and the concomitant descriptions provided a clear classification of lands based on soil quality on one hand and a combination of social and economic factors on the other, thus enabling the investigators to obtain an accurate real property tax assessment.30

The Dokuchaev Survey and the Provincial Soil Map Dokuchaev’s expedition to Nizhnii Novgorod has not, to date, occupied a prominent place in the annals of Russian history. In fact, even in Alexander Vucinich’s standard book on the history of Russian science, it earns one sentence, which reads as follows: “After 1882, when the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo invited Dokuchaev to help establish a set of objective criteria for the classification of local agricultural land in terms of fertility, research teams visited almost all the regions of European Russia and published an enormous volume of data.”31 There does not seem to be much here to stimulate the historical imagination. The event I am referring to was, to all appearances, merely a



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routine scientific expedition: the prominent Petersburg soil scientist, Vasilii Dokuchaev, with an entourage of students, made the trip to the provinces in order to collect data and conduct a detailed study as an extension of his pioneering work on the qualities of the Russian chernozem. The fourteen volumes of extraordinarily detailed description yielded by the expedition have met a fate, so far as historians are concerned, fully in keeping with this one-sentence description: they have been gathering dust, despite a full Soviet edition in the 1950s that has of course been amply utilized by biologists and geologists. I suggest that we look at this expedition as an episode in a struggle for control over information that characterizes the decade of the 1880s and that, though prosaic, ultimately involves structural changes that may be deeper than the more obvious events of the 1870s or 1890s. First, though, a fuller, moredetailed description of the expedition itself is appropriate.32 The story begins inside the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo. Like every other such institution in the European provinces, the zemstvo had been struggling since the 1860s to come up with a system for collecting the taxes that would fund the many tasks of local government. Only land ownership was subject to direct taxation, and the variation in size, quality, and productivity, not to mention changes in these factors over time, was such that establishing a rational and equitable system of assessment was extremely difficult. Zemstvo officials tried to set up such a system themselves in the late 1860s; the resulting amateurish description of all taxable land in Nizhnii Novgorod province was a document of mind-boggling complexity and serious inaccuracy.33 This background is what lay behind the establishment of a special commission, in 1880, to report to the zemstvo on the problem of land evaluation and assessment. The commission’s main concern was the lack of enough information to allow an equitable comparative assessment of lands in different districts (uezdy). While each district, following the tradition of the Muscovite pistsovye knigi, could indicate roughly which of its lands were good, middling, or poor, there was no mechanism for comparing this information across district boundaries; thus, equity among districts was a central goal. What the commission proposed, and what the zemstvo accepted in 1881, was to issue an invitation to Dokuchaev to conduct a fully scientific, professional, and exhaustive study of the province, district by district, to evaluate the soil quality and potential productivity of absolutely every parcel of land. The commission further proposed, significantly, to allocate ten thousand rubles out of the general zemstvo budget for this purpose.34 In addition, the expedition attracted the attention of the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists (Obshchestvo estestvoispytatelei), whose president, A. N. Beketov, sent three botanists—Aggeenko, Krasnov, and Nidergefer—to the province in 1884 to supplement the expedition with a collection of nine hundred plant species and to investigate the region from a geobotanical perspective.35 The head of the society’s mineralogical and geological division, A. A. Inostrantsev, deployed Amalitskii and Sibirtsev for a geological investigation, while the

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respected agronomist, A. V. Sovetov, of the same society, contributed practical advice and instructions. The expedition had high visibility in scientific circles, as evidenced by the interest and participation of the Dorpat professor and theoretician of soil science, K. Shmidt, and a number of younger researchers and students from St. Petersburg University.36 Thus, the expedition’s sponsorship, while primarily based in the zemstvo, also included financial and intellectual endorsement from a St. Petersburg scientific society. Beginning in 1882, and for three summers running, Dokuchaev and a team of three students arrived on the scene and spent their days combing the province, describing every stream and forested glade, every field and every ravine.37 They were methodical and thorough, dedicating the first summer to the southeast corner of the province (Lukoianov, Sergach, and Kniaginin districts), the second to the central portion of the province (Arzamas, Ardatov, Gorbatov, Nizhnii Novgorod), and concluding in 1884 with the densely forested districts beyond the Volga—the ancient refuge of the Old Belief (Makar’ev, Vasil’, Semënov, and Balakhna). There are some interesting aspects to the procedure itself: each researcher was supposed to keep a detailed daily journal, describing every type of soil, vegetation, and rock formation he came across; they moved volost’ by volost’, in every case accompanied by the village elder—who, it barely needs mentioning, in the absence of written documentation, would prove an extraordinary repository of information about land boundaries, disputes, and changes in the land contours over time. To Dokuchaev himself fell the task of coordination as well as an independent collection of samples. The finds were then catalogued and analyzed in a laboratory back in St. Petersburg, and the results painstakingly recorded on a soil map (pochvennaia karta), thus yielding a full geological and topographical portrait of the entire province. The scientists originally organized their investigation along the natural orographic and hydrographic boundaries of the region—that is, in accordance with riverbeds and geological contours—but were requested by the zemstvo board to recraft the whole study using the artificial, political district boundaries to make the information usable for practical purposes.38

N. F. Annenskii and the District Cadaster Indeed, the Dokuchaev expedition merely laid the “natural-historical” groundwork for a subsequent district-by-district study of economic conditions. This study was begun in 1887 under the direction of the statistician N. F. Annenskii, who headed a specially created statistical division of the zemstvo board (he was replaced in 1895 by O. E. Shmidt).39 The investigation, published in fourteen more volumes as Materialy po otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: ekonomicheskaia chast’, yielded a fantastically detailed description of land quality, land ownership and transfer, precise agricultural yield, prices on agricultural products, timber prices, and even labor invested, local wages, length of workday, days worked per year, and so forth. Ultimately, these parameters were used to create



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a map of each district individually, portraying, in color, a nuanced categorization of soil types (much more advanced than the original Dokuchaev provincial map), and, by means of dotted lines, delineating “value categories”—the result of a complex calculus of these various “economic” factors (plates 1, 4, 5, 6). The area within the dotted line would be taxed according to a single rate. The results were sophisticated enough to earn the Nizhnii Novgorod method its own name in the system of zemstvo statistics—the territorial/cadastral method.40 The basic procedure of the Annenskii expedition was outlined in a preliminary study of Kniaginin district.41 Dokuchaev and Annenskii departed from the earlier descriptions in one essential way: by their introduction, into the density of verbal texture, of the analytic/scientific method for some particular aspect of study. If, for Dokuchaev, this was chemical and physical laboratory analysis of soil composition (as well as isolation of the soil factor), Annenskii’s study applied the methods of scientific statistics. What is interesting here, however, is that these were not abstract mathematical models developed in the seclusion of a university study but that they were intimately intertwined with the material itself. No method was ever applied without verification against the particular case. Doubtless, Annenskii’s experience in Kazan must have given him a pre-existing set of tools for the Nizhnii Novgorod study; the latter itself visibly shaped them in the process of the investigation. The procedure was a sort of agrarian calculus, by means of which individual properties were further differentiated into small parcels based on soil quality, productivity, and other factors adding up to fifteen criteria for peasant households, and eleven (with subcategories) for private households. The criteria were then reintegrated to form categories (razriady), whose boundaries usually coincided with a grouping of several properties (potentially including either peasant or private landholdings, or both) but sometimes did not. Each of these razriady was given a number and recorded, by dotted line, on the detailed soil map of the particular district. To illustrate this approach it makes sense to look at а specific example, such as the general criteria applied to a particular district (Kniaginin), and the different dimensions—verbal description, visual depiction, numerical evaluation—in which it appears in the study. In the Kniaginin volume, the first chapter was an overview of the district’s territory, relying to a large degree on Dokuchaev. Even here, sources varied significantly; the study notes serious discrepancies among Veselovskii’s 1851 map, the cadastral commission maps, Gatsiskii’s agricultural map, and Chaslavskii’s soil map of European Russia, with respect to the northernmost border of the black-soil portion of Kniaginin.42 Essentially, the study amplified Dokuchaev’s findings with a significantly greater level of differentiation and detail: where Dokuchaev sketched the broad swaths of soil types across the province, these district-by-district studies were more concerned with differences within each region.43 What followed was an exhaustive verbal description of all of the district’s subdivisions from a

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geological perspective; these correspond to the coloring on the maps. Within every area (mestnost’) there was broad variability in soil types; thus, each piece was correlated with its equivalents, across area boundaries, to form groupings of uniform value (otsenochnye gruppy). The second chapter of the Kniaginin volume, on property, presented data on the critical issues of types of landholding; a breakdown of communal households by the amount of land they held; and a breakdown of private households by soslovie and property size; in each case, the particular agricultural products were also recorded. This material, which has the virtue of providing the latter-day historian with a glimpse of the district’s social and economic structure, quite apart from the purposes contemporaries had for it, was obtained through a combination of archival research (size of properties) and onthe-spot investigation (crop components of each property).44 The first goal— the compilation of a proper cadaster—turned out to be quite complicated: documents of land transfer could be vague and inaccurate, requiring a check against, first, maps of the individual property and of the whole district and, second, the results of the general land survey from the end of the eighteenth century. In cases where both failed (because, for example, the data in the tax registers [okladnye knigi] no longer coincided with real ownership), the research had to be done anew; for small peasant landholdings in particular, conversations with the owners were necessary. The statisticians complained about how difficult and time-consuming the task was, but it was necessary because the land could not be divided up into units until the precise boundaries of properties had been established.45 The data for each property were recorded on a separate card; a precise verbal description was inscribed in a table for the whole district. In general, there was a close correlation of the data with what appeared in the land survey books; with respect to individual crops, however, data could differ by a good deal, in one case 22.4 percent.46 Kniaginin was a primarily agricultural district, with 73.6 percent of all arable lands being plowlands.47 Its structure qualified as “mixed”: 50.7 percent belonged to peasant communes and 40.5 percent to private landholders (24.3 percent gentry, 12.9 percent peasants, 3.3 percent other), with a slight predominance of large (more than 1,000 desiatinas) landholding (40.9 percent of private property), 28.1 percent middling (100–1,000 d.), and 31 percent small (less than 100 d.). The average size of a property was 79.3 d.48 Peasants routinely practiced two types of land redistribution, one known as pereverstka—the passage of land into other hands, absolutely—and zhereb’evka—consolidation of strips without changing the absolute quantity of land owned by a particular peasant household.49 The subsequent three chapters in the Kniaginin volume dealt, respectively, with three major categories of lands: plowlands, meadows, and gardens and forests. The first, obviously the most important, occupies almost eighty pages of text (and, as mentioned above, three-quarters of the arable land). What is



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fascinating in this discussion is the explicit prevalence of the principle of equity—spravedlivost’.50 In the interest of conformity with the latter, Annenskii’s team found the assessment of land based on rent prices to be entirely inadequate in the particular case of Kniaginin district. A second method proved more fruitful: the calculation of income from agricultural products and their market prices on one hand, and expenditures necessary for the land parcel’s exploitation on the other. A third method, somewhere between the two, could be employed where necessary; gross revenue was calculated by productivity and prices, while “pure” income was considered dependent on “natural rent.”51 The application of the second method resulted in a list of eight value categories (otsenochnye razriady), which could then be superimposed on the soil map.52 It was determined that method 2 was equally applicable to meadows.53 Gardens turned out to be an insignificant portion of Kniaginin lands, while pastures could be assessed on the level of the lowest class of meadows. Deforestation had made its mark on the district; together with Sergach, Kniaginin was one of only two Nizhnii Novgorod districts to be subject to the 1888 forest conservation law.54 The value of forested lands was based on sales of timber as construction material. Perhaps the most difficult problem facing the statisticians was the mutability of not only the environment but also the structure of property ownership. A final chapter in the Kniaginin volume, “Land Prices and Transference of Private Property,” addresses the significant flux in property ownership in the post-reform period. This material, apart from introducing complications into the calculation of land values, is intrinsically interesting. In Kniaginin, gentry land ownership fell by 32 percent from 1869 to 1887, while peasant land ownership increased by a factor of eight; over a twenty-seven-year period, land prices increased 250 percent. Merchants and meshchane were involved almost exclusively as middlemen. The circulation of land within the peasantry was very high.55 It is also remarkable that most land transfers out of gentry hands occurred during the 1873–1882 period (and particularly 1876–1880), at a rate of 2.6 percent of their lands per year. The rate was only 1.2 percent for 1883–1886 and 0.7 percent for the period when temporary obligation was coming to an end, that is, 1869–1872. The central government intervened in 1893, introducing a new law establishing criteria for land assessment.56 Upon first reading, the text of the law looks like a codification of the procedures the zemstvos had, on their own initiative, been developing since 1870: it provides for a bureaucratic institution, the Provincial Assessment Commission, to oversee the process of land evaluation; establishes the basic rules of assessment, including the division of territories according to product and possible subdivision (using Annenskii’s word, razriad) according to soil quality; and provides for the conversion of the results into a tax table. What is significant here is not so much the general principles, which clearly followed zemstvo procedure, but who was going to be doing the evaluating. Participants

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in the new commissions included everybody except the “specialists”— agronomists, soil scientists, meteorologists, and so forth—who had been so essential to the zemstvo efforts: the head of the provincial treasury, the head of the Gentry Land Bank, the member of the peasant affairs commission, the head of the zemstvo board, two members of the zemstvo, the mayor, and the curator of the state lands and local mining industry. There was no provision for expert participation at any stage, although there was also no explicit exclusion; the point was rather to allow the local gentry (the “Second Element”) adequate opportunity for input at any time and to safeguard their interests—measures consistent with government policy in general in the post-reform period. Thus, the results were to be not only published in the local Gubernskie vedomosti but also distributed to landlords in the expectation of a response within a six-week period; provision was made for verification of landlords’ responses through tax books, surveys, data on property prices, insurance assessments, and so forth. The law seems to have provided a far more primitive set of criteria than had originally been applied in the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster. The analogy here is to George Yaney’s analysis of the Stolypin reforms: Stolypin’s genius was to coopt the ideas developed over many years and with a great deal of effort by the “experts” but to do so in the form of a revolution from above. In this form, their own ideas could hardly please the agronomists and statisticians, yet they could hardly reject them either, since the ideas were their own.

Concepts and Values The cadaster was supposed to be an “absolute” description of the territory, independent of ownership, that would render it possible to determine the appropriate amount of taxes to be collected from any person from any estate who farmed or owned the land. Both Dokuchaev and Annenskii were perfectly clear and self-conscious concerning the principles and methodology of their expeditions; both presented these principles in a venue other than the materials of the investigation itself. Dokuchaev outlined his goals and procedures, post factum, in a presentation to the Free Economic Society, “On Normal Soil Assessment in European Russia” (“O normal’noi otsenke pochv evropeiskoi Rossii”), on 19 February 1887. Dokuchaev’s most basic proposition was that a scientific study of the soil must of necessity underlie any attempt at a rational and equitable assessment of land value and that, to this end, the natural qualities of the soil, abstracted from any human activity or intervention, must form the object of independent and primary investigation. As he pointed out, he had already formulated this basic supposition in 1879: “Soils which, together with the climate, and with the growth and productivity of various cultured plants, must naturally influence the well-being and way of life of residents. Further, because they are of varying thickness, composition and structure, and supported by a great variety of subsoils, fertile lands must, of necessity, give rise to different systems of economy, to different methods of working the land, etc. etc. In a word, soil maps



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together with climatic maps must form the basis of any agricultural statistics.”57 Soil quality is the first and most fundamental determinant of land value; it is the most constant and most measurable; it must form the object of accurate scientific study, which in turn can positively influence agricultural production. On occasion, it provides the only truly measurable index of land value; no program of statistical investigation can be adequate unless it is sufficiently grounded in the study of the soil.58 Dokuchaev did not deny the need for further statistical investigation of economic conditions; indeed, he initially proposed that such a study should follow his own. But he did argue against such “pure” statisticians as N. A. Kablukov, in Moscow, who tried to play down the role of natural factors, while, in contrast, endorsing the efforts of the Riazan’, Chernigov, Viatka, Vladimir, Tver’, Saratov, Ufa, Samara, and Kazan zemstvos, which understood the necessity of placing a study of the soil at the foundation of their assessment strategy.59 For the more fundamental principles underlying Annenskii’s investigation, it helps to look at a separate text, one in which Annenskii spells out, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely, its motivations and underpinnings. He delivered his bold and influential paper, “The Zemstvo Cadaster and Zemstvo Statistics,” at the statistical subsection of the Ninth Congress of Naturalists and Physicians in Moscow, held 3–11 January 1894.60 The paper, which proposes general guidelines for the construction of an ideal type of zemstvo cadaster, is in two parts.61 The first, and most interesting, is ostensibly a discussion of the French cadaster as a model. Although Annenskii justifies this exclusive emphasis (as opposed to the Prussian cadaster, which Dokuchaev discusses in more detail) by pointing to lack of space, in fact his choice of the elements he considers essential to the French methodology provides a crucial insight into the principles that guided his own work in Nizhnii Novgorod.62 According to Annenskii, the peculiarity and brilliance of the French example rested on its division of each piece of property into parcels—that is, smaller units within the domain, based on type of cultivation. The example he gives is that, if one part of a domain is plowland and another is hayfields or pastureland, these must be classified as two separate parcels: “In general a parcel is any particular segment of territory of a given commune, belonging to the same owner and having the same economic purpose.”63 Annenskii’s calculations estimated the average parcel as 0.4 hectare, with some 3,423 parcels per commune, or 16 parcels per landowner. The unit of investigation was thus quite small, permitting exactly the sort of detailed analysis Annenskii himself was to undertake in the Nizhnii Novgorod districts. The further procedure, with its two components of measurement and assessment, also sounds remarkably similar to Annenskii’s own: after the parcels were recorded on a map, the combined efforts of a government bureaucrat, an “expert,” and reliable local informants (poniatye or indicateurs) went about the triple process of classification according to category, determination of average income, and distribution of all

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parcels in keeping with the established classification. A glance at Annenskii’s maps indicates absolute conformity with this outlined procedure. An important consideration was that land value not be dependent upon the merits of the individual cultivator but on the land’s intrinsic or “objective” productivity— to which effect Annenskii quotes the instructions for the French cadaster.64 Then, a preliminary price for the land was set, to be made permanent after the ventilation, or verification; the whole process was subject to the supervision of the prefects, as well as transparency: the documents were available for public inspection at the town hall for a month. Annenskii’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the French example are equally telling. Above all, he prized the investigation’s extremely high scientific level, resulting in near perfect accuracy, and the concomitant role of the expert, who, not being from the same canton, would be disinterested and objective. All of this furthered the main goal of equity. The expert “does not assess the property of individual landowners but determines the income capacity of lands of various categories. . . . The main guarantee of equity in this respect is the inner perfection of each expert study and the unity of their overall conception.”65 Publicity and the possibility of cross-canton comparisons were further strengths. On the other hand, Annenskii also saw much to criticize. The French cadaster did not live up to its own expectations of “the greatest perfection humans are capable of” primarily because, despite its analytical sophistication, it failed to address the problem of synthesis, that is, how to move from detailed, individual study of parcels within a canton to the larger picture of all the various cantons and departments working together in a national system.66 There was, in short, insufficient centralized coordination. A sub-aspect of this problem was the lack of consideration of change over time: the study was conducted at different times in different regions, thus making comparisons meaningless; such landscape-transforming projects as railway construction quickly rendered the collected data invalid. In short, the description of the French cadaster provides an absolutely precise sketch of Annenskii’s own principles of measurement and assessment, in the pilot case of Nizhnii Novgorod; perhaps the way to read the article is to substitute, as no doubt his audience could, “Nizhnii Novgorod” for “France.” The second part of the paper addresses the wider application of the outlined principles in the Russian provinces as a whole. Here the tone becomes one of something like hopeful resignation, if that is possible. The problems he sees are lack of funds for the zemstvo cadaster, given that an investigation of the “French” type would cost eight and a half years worth of taxes collected by the zemstvos, and, interestingly, insufficient state intervention (even after the 1893 law): “the organization of accurate registration of land and land assessment, together with the inevitable new measurements and surveys of many properties, can be undertaken only with the active help of the state.”67 As a result, outcomes were flawed: land parcels were not small enough, making the categories



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(razriady) too broad. On the other hand, the preliminary process of gathering and organizing information was much more sophisticated than in the French or Prussian models; the zemstvo cadaster’s potential strengths were: (1) the possibility of “a single elegant general system” for the country as a whole, based on (2) a remarkable accuracy of scientific methods and application of expertise in both “halves” of the investigation—natural-scientific and social-economic.68 Summarizing the types of data collected, Annenskii singles out soil and topography as major natural-scientific factors and identifies population, land ownership and use, agriculture, consumption of agricultural products, and taxes and dues as the subjects of the “social” investigation. Finally, Annenskii outlines the main principles of Russian statistical science, developed in the course of a multiplicity of practical studies, under the rubric of the quantitative statistical method. The crucial distinction here is between average conditions and movement over time, leading to two types of statistics: basic (osnovnaia) and diachronic (tekushchaia)—a distinction that Annenskii attributes primarily to V. I. Orlov.69 This is because such things as meteorological conditions during harvest can be captured only in the moment, while land ownership according to social status, for example, can be calculated only as an average (synchronically). Annenskii concludes with one suggestion for not just collection but also processing of data: namely, to address the importance of ventilation, or comparison of arithmetically calculated potential income from a given parcel of land versus the actual income in real conditions. Thus, an essential distinction arises between households based on a natural economy (peasant households) and those operating with a developed system of hired labor (estates).70 We might see the Nizhnii Novgorod investigation as a sort of ideal type, in which the most advanced scientific methods available resulted in a thorough description of the entire province in both biological-geological and socioeconomic terms.71 What is most fascinating here is what the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster did not register: while land ownership was taken into account as one of many parameters to be considered, property boundaries were not recorded on the map.72 This is extremely unusual, since property ownership is in fact usually the single main criterion used in drafting cadastral maps; in all likelihood, it reflects the limited utility of keeping such a record during a period in which—as the materials themselves amply document—property ownership was very much in flux.73 Thus, the much more difficult task of scientific evaluation of the land was considered more urgent than a simple drawing of property boundaries.74 A couple of observations emerge from the above discussion. First, the principle running like a red thread through all discussions and scientific studies was equity, or spravedlivost’. Calculations and criteria revolved around the fundamental notion of a just assessment or even a higher scientific ideal that transcended any considerations of class or estate. The efforts of soil scientists, statisticians, and zemstvo actors alike converged on a rejection of the state’s

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continued emphasis on (in contemporary jargon) soslovnost’.75 Justice as fairness would adequately describe the primary approach: a temporarily obligated peasant, a member of the gentry, or a merchant should face approximately the same set of economic possibilities.76 Second, the creators of the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster repeatedly expressed their frustration not at the intervention of the central government but the opposite: they felt a pressing need for coordination and state support, which was not forthcoming in the decentralized system that characterized late imperial Russia.  In their wide-ranging analysis of cadastral mapping, Roger Kain and Elizabeth Baigent write, “It is thus power—whether economic, social, or political—which lies at the heart of the history of cadastral mapping. The cadastral map . . . is an instrument of control which both reflects and consolidates the power of those who commission it.”77 In James Scott’s words, “a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.”78 The detailed reading of the landscape inherent in the cadastral map simultaneously reflects and influences the system of landholding it purports to express; the state’s capacity to “read” its territory and populations becomes essential to the degree of control it can exercise over them. The picture that I see emerging is of a cooperation of “high science” and local institutions to create a system of information gathering and its utilization (for taxation) that, in the end, completely bypassed the central administration. What the zemstvos were doing was, in their own way and with their own money, creating the cadastral survey that had ever eluded the state since it began trying in 1838. The Dokuchaev and Annenskii expeditions were part of a cadastral substitute initiated by the zemstvo in order to facilitate its revenue-gathering function. We do not need to be reminded in our post-Foucaultian age that knowledge can equal power. The very complexity of the technique of “total description” undertaken by the zemstvos made it a potent tool in the hands of local authorities yet rendered it virtually unusable by the central authorities confronted by the sheer bulk and diversity of information. The government does not seem to have caught on to what was happening until 1893, when it passed stopgap legislation regulating the assessment of landed property and allocating the laughable sum of two million rubles for that purpose (the zemstvos had collectively spent five million in only the preceding few years).79 It was a struggle between central and local control over information, and the local institutions were winning. A two-part final question remains: what were the consequences of the zemstvo cadaster, and to what use was it put? In Nizhnii Novgorod, the new system of land assessment was finally fully implemented at the provincial level in 1913. The districts, by that time, had made a partial transition to the new methods.80 А sophisticated system of tax collection was thus in place



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and functioning by the time of World War I; a national income tax was introduced in 1916. We can see the outlines of the society that was taking shape as a consequence of concerted efforts during the late nineteenth century and beyond, but it never got a chance to materialize. Much ink has been spilled debating what might have happened had Stolypin’s dramatic agrarian reforms been allowed to come to full fruition. But more prosaic and far less exciting or ideologically stimulating developments such as a functioning and equitable tax structure may in fact have been constituent elements of a real “alternative path.”

9 Church and Religion

I

n his monumental study of another artisanally significant region, Limoges, Alain Corbin found a radical localization of patterns of piety, with districts and provinces evincing sharply divergent degrees of religious faith. The Limousin as a whole was characterized by a steeply progressive dechristianization, accompanied by strong adherence to freemasonry as well as resistance not so much to tradition but to clerical efforts at modernization and revivification of religious activity.1 It is axiomatic that the loss of piety noted in many areas of Europe over the course of the nineteenth century did not take place in Russia. Gregory Freeze writes that “the laity . . . remained intensely pious, manifesting little of the irreligion then threatening churches in the West. . . . The bishops’ annual reports, even to the eve of the 1905 Revolution, consistently stress that ‘ancient piety, reverence, and respect for the Holy Church are preserved in the people.’”2 Vera Shevzov’s major study of Orthodoxy at the close of the nineteenth century confirms the vibrancy of forms of worship.3 Although Nizhnii Novgorod diocese fits this observation precisely, if anything exceeding the norms of piety, the region is at the same time characterized by a diversity reminiscent of Corbin’s Limousin. Nizhnii Novgorod was situated at Orthodoxy’s “margins,” though in a different sense from the neighboring Volga-Kama region.4 Nizhnii Novgorod formed an integral part of the medieval Orthodox world, falling within the jurisdiction of Vladimir-Suzdal’. Still, practitioners of Orthodoxy in Nizhnii Novgorod province rubbed shoulders with Muslims and 182



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especially, of course, Old Believers, while some of the Orthodox themselves were but recent converts from animism or Islam.

The Diocese: Structure and Geography By the nineteenth century, diocesan boundaries coincided with those of the province, creating an impression of rigid uniformity and strict hierarchy. As in each of Russia’s sixty-one Orthodox dioceses, the ecclesiastical administration in Nizhnii Novgorod was headed by the bishop and his staff—the spiritual consistory—with jurisdiction over the monasteries, churches, and parishes of the region.5 Yet, beneath this apparent uniformity, we can easily discern the same sort of particularity and flux that characterized the provincial world in every other sphere. Most of the great religious battles had already been fought by the end of the eighteenth century; however, they left an indelible mark on the region, and the most significant—the encounter with the Old Belief—continued unabated. The formation of the diocese itself reflected the unique status of Nizhnii Novgorod in the Russian spiritual economy. Patriarch Nikon, himself the offspring of a Mordvinian peasant family in the village of Veldemanovo (southwest of Bol’shoe Murashkino) placed the region under his personal control. From 1625 until 1672, the churches and monasteries answered directly to the patriarch—a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent of the state lands—until the intensification of the Schism and revolts in Bogorodskoe, Murashkino, and Lyskovo.6 That unrest prompted a Church Council decision to carve out a diocese to be overseen by a bishop (“v Velikom Kniazhenii Nizovskiia zemli Arkhiereiu byti”).7 The diocese came into its own, however, under the firm hand of Bishop Pitirim (1719–1738), a Petrine appointee. The child of Old Believers, Pitirim knew his enemy from the inside. He staged a highly theatrical exchange of theological questions on the schismatics’ own territory in Balakhna district, where the Old Believers countered his 130 queries with 240 of their own; he proclaimed victory over the poor argumentation of his opponents.8 Pitirim engineered the conversion of entire villages, with the result that, of 94 sketes at the outset of his term, only 2—the Olenevskii and Sharpanskii—remained; during his first three years, the numbers of Old Believers were said to diminish by thirty thousand, from eighty-six thousand to fifty-six thousand.9 The contours of Nizhnii Novgorod diocese were constantly recrafted over the course of the eighteenth century, finally solidifying in 1799 to coincide with the provincial boundaries. Seventeen monasteries were secularized in 1764 and converted to parish churches.10 Soon afterward, Catherinian enlightenment reached Nizhnii Novgorod in the persona of Bishop Damaskin (Rudnev, 1783– 1794), a professor of theology who had studied for six years at Göttingen. On Catherine’s instruction, Damaskin compiled a four-language dictionary in two volumes; organized according to the Russian alphabet, the dictionary provided translations into Tatar, Mordvinian, Chuvash, and Mari.11 The construction

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of churches could be an important tool in the official church’s struggle against sectarianism; by 1888, the diocese counted 1,067 churches and 16 monasteries.12 The bishop of Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas had direct jurisdiction over the Pecherskii Monastery on the outskirts of the modern city. A vicariate was established at Balakhna in 1866. If the province stood at a point where different ecological spheres intersected, the diocese formed a point of encounter among Orthodoxy, Islam, the Old Belief, and the largely defunct animist faiths of the Mordvinians and Mari. Superimposing a religious map on the contours of the province yields the following results: as we have already seen, the Tatars were to be found mostly in the southeastern districts, Mordvinians in the southwest, and Mari in the east, while Old Believers predominated in the northern forests but also in areas of the southeast. Not surprisingly, the most informative sources with respect to religion and ethnicity belong to the eighteenth or first half of the nineteenth centuries, rather than later. Thus, Mikhail Dukhovskii noted the preponderance of Russians (“Rossiianiane” [sic]) of Slavic origin, with an admixture of Lithuanian and German heritage, and added that, while most of them belonged to the Greek-Russian Church, the presence of the Old Believer schism was notable. He counted thirty-six Old Believer chapels in Semënov district alone, and fourteen sketes, including only the most heavily populated ones. According to Dukhovskii, Mordvinians, primarily of the Arza branch, constituted an eighth of the population; he had already noted their high level of assimilation but pointed out a number of peculiarities. Concentrated in the southern parts of the province (Arzamas, of course, owes its name to this group), the Arza were largely converted to Christianity under Elizabeth: They are obedient and docile, but generally uncouth, so that their bodies are frequently covered in sores, and they often become prematurely blind. Gradually becoming accustomed to the order prevailing among the Russians, they still retain their language and many mores. Their clothing is a white canvas shirt, with decorations, usually in red or white thread, around the shoulders. We might add to this that in their facial features they look remarkably unlike the Finnish and other tribes that populate the North of Europe; they are disgusted by the killing of animals but are enthusiastic about eating garlic and onion, as salutary measures; they particularly honor the burial grounds of their ancestors and have the custom of sacrificing oxen, a practice that the Government itself is forced to curtail, as a ritual contrary to the Christian Religion which they have adopted.13

The engineer of the Mordvinians’ conversion was primarily Bishop Dmitrii (Sechenov, 1742–1748), who, already in Kazan province before his appointment to Nizhnii Novgorod, headed a team of thirty young people of the clerical, merchant, and noble estates to construct four schools for the instruction of religious minorities. He was also responsible for the construction of thirty churches



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in Kazan and Nizhnii Novgorod dioceses.14 What Dimitrii left unfinished, Damaskin completed, so that virtually all Mordvinians, Chuvash, and Mari had declared Orthodoxy, taking new names in the process, by the close of the eighteenth century.15 A fascinating example of apostasy occurred in 1808, when Kuz’ka, the “Mordvinian god” as he was dubbed, sought to win his compatriots back to the animism of their forefathers.16 Of the Tatars, concentrated in the eastern parts of the province, Dukhovskii says only that their proportion of the population was 3:17, that they were all Muslims, and that their spiritual and domestic affairs fell under the jurisdiction of their own clergy. Finally, Dukhovskii attributes to the Mari and Chuvash an increasing capacity for industry and a settled mode of existence thanks to their conversion under Catherine II. Their distinguishing features were their small stature and peaceful mores; they were hard working and good at apiculture and agriculture. Dukhovskii was also impressed by the fact that men and women wore identical outer garments (“This must be the only example among the thousands of the world’s tribes”).17 Their musical and literary talents, however, left him cold: “Should anyone desire to know how far their education goes and how advanced their Literature, you need only become acquainted with their national songs, and you will hear one syllable monotonously repeated several hundred or thousand times in various false modes.”18 If the ecological map of Nizhnii Novgorod province filtered out roughly along a north-south divide, the religious watershed ran east-west. Either way, regional diversity was striking. Forests, sandy soils, Old Belief in the north; mixed economy, along with a mixture of Orthodoxy, Old Belief, and converted Mordvinians in the southwest; the southeastern districts not only bordered the rich agricultural economy of the black-soil districts but also constituted the westernmost tip of Eurasian Islam, leading to Kazan, Orenburg, and eventually Samarkand and Bukhara. Diversity was greatest in this southeastern corner, where Orthodox, Old Believers, Muslims, and former animists might dominate in different communities. Authority in the religious landscape emanated both from outside and inside the diocese. If, on one hand, Nizhnii Novgorod looked westward to Vladimir, Moscow, and St. Petersburg as Orthodox centers, the southeastern districts turned to Kazan and Orenburg, while the Rogozhskoe cemetery in Moscow and the seat of the “false” bishopric in Belaia Krinitsa drew the Old Believer population into their orbit. The Synod in St. Petersburg and, from the 1840s, the Theological Academy in Kazan were the highest sources of authority. Inside the diocese, however, we find two more immediate points of concentration: these were of course the bishop’s residence, located, interestingly, in the Old Believer heartland in Balakhna rather than in the capital city, and, increasingly, Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary, which in the absence of a local university doubled as the region’s most advanced center of learning. Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary was founded for the same reason as the

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diocese itself—as a key outpost in the struggle against the Old Belief. It opened in improvised fashion in 1721, in the house of the ardent bishop, Pitirim. The seminary’s historian proposed the following chronology: the first period was 1721–1765, followed by the era of reform in 1765–1818, then 1818 up to the historian’s time (1849). Funds were naturally very low initially, and students had to earn money on the side. The original academic program comprised Russian and Greek grammar, then, in 1738, when there were two hundred students, Latin was included. By 1764 there were already ten “schools”: Philosophy, Rhetoric, Pietics, Greek and French, Syntax, Basic Latin, Elementary and Advanced Grammar, and Analogy.19 At a time when the Kiev Academy still trained most Russian hierarchs, the Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary teachers were Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, while many textbooks were in Latin, Belorussian, or Polish. In the second period (1765–1818), theological disputes became dominant, largely under the supervision of Bishop Damaskin, who also founded a library for serious academic books. Resources began to accumulate, and the year 1775 witnessed the introduction of courses in Russian theology to complement the existing program in philosophy; the two courses eventually were taught separately. Damaskin’s innovations were explication of the catechism and of the Holy Scriptures, as well as history, geography, and German language. Most remarkably, local languages were also taught, “to further conversion.” These included Tatar, Mordvinian, and Chuvash, all of which were specialties of Damaskin himself. In the early nineteenth century, a course in Hebrew was added, along with, interestingly, the study of the Easter calendar (paskhalia) and medicine. In addition, five preparatory schools had been established in the year of Pitirim’s death, 1738. The influence of the Moscow Academy led to famed disputes: “In addition to the disputes between the ‘opponent and respondent,’ from a lectern copied from Göttingen University, the disputes included odes and speeches in Russian, Latin, Greek, German, French, Tatar, Mordvinian, and Chuvash.”20 The Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary’s enthusiastic historian wrote of the mid-nineteenth century curriculum, “Now, in the program leading to a clerical career, the theological, mathematical and historical sciences are all relevant; the program includes the classical reading of the Holy Scripture and the liturgical books, as well as archaeology of the Holy Places, canon law, and patristics,—but also medicine, agriculture, and other related sciences. Now the learned priest can also be a savvy lecturer, an experienced builder, and a competent doctor.”21 The seminary at mid-nineteenth century counted eighteen administrators and teachers and 384 students (88 on full stipend, 33 on half). There were four thousand titles in the library, or twenty thousand volumes. Twenty-one teachers and administrators staffed the preparatory schools at Nizhnii Novgorod, Pechery, and Arzamas, where 1,075 students studied. A new school in Lyskovo



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was added in 1849. Graduates could be found not only in the region or in other parts of Russia but also as far away as Beijing, Vienna, Berlin, and Stuttgart.22

Clergy and Laity Nizhnii Novgorod hierarchs had few complaints about the engagement and moral uprightness of their priests or about the level of piety of their parishioners. Bishop Nektarii, in 1861, reported that the clergy were generally “well behaved [blagonravno] and carried themselves properly and in keeping with their status”: “They carry out their primary tasks, and competently preach the teachings of the Orthodox Church to the flock entrusted to them. The blagochinnye, in reporting to me, in keeping with their assignment and good conscience, sometimes told me about weaknesses and shortcomings in some parishes and perfections and good qualities in others, but rarely, very rarely, have anything bad to say about the priests; rather, they testify to their good life and even exemplary diligence.”23 The laity won praise as well. Consistently, the bishops’ reports over the years paint a picture of piety and even fervor: “The Orthodox people proper are sturdy and steadfast in their faith, zealous toward God’s Church and respectful to clergy. They go to church on Sundays and holidays for the service; perform the Christian duty of confession and the Eucharist yearly; accept from the Church all of its sacraments, with complete faith in their beneficial effects; while on workdays, when there are obstacles to attend Church services, they pray at home.”24 Here, though, the picture was not always quite as rosy. If a primary official index of piety was partaking of the Eucharist—the minimum requirement was but once a year, at Easter—many parishioners, although they attended services, did not actually go to confession and thus were barred from participating in the central spiritual event around which the liturgy is constructed. When questioned why they did not confess, the laity responded that they were “not ready,” did not consider themselves worthy, or did not know how.25 Not all Orthodox had an equally respectful attitude toward the clergy; sometimes parishioners were reluctant to meet with their spiritual advisers, and even their acquaintance with the basics of the Christian faith was sometimes questionable.26 Thus, avid participation in services and processions did not always go along with “true” piety as measured by partaking of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

The Clergy in the World In 1865, 14 percent of the nonpeasant population in Nizhnii Novgorod province belonged to the clerical estate (i.e., 2 percent of the total population); clergy accounted for 6 percent of inhabitants of the provincial capital.27 The nineteenth century posed a number of challenges for the clerical estate. Social reform and the increasing power of science demanded an unprecedented engagement with worldly matters. The initiative here belonged in part to the state, which viewed

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the clergy as necessary agents of its reforming projects, and partly to the priests themselves. A number of points of intersection with the secular universe can be noted here: civic and scientific engagement of the clergy; an ongoing debate, in clerical circles, on the relationship of faith and reason (or religion and science); and a deep involvement in one of the Church’s traditional functions—lay education, including, in the post-reform period, a proliferation of local religious brotherhoods. Nizhnii Novgorod priests were among the earliest and most dedicated observers of the surrounding environmental and social space. Archimandrite Petr Kamenskii, for example, painstakingly recorded every day’s meteorological conditions over the course of 1840–1841, and he had retained some fragmentary weather data from the 1830s. As we have seen, L. Borisovskii, archpriest in the district capital of Semënov, composed one of the most sensitive and literary studies of artisanal production in his home region. Borisovskii’s sketch, apart from vivid and intimately informed ethnographic detail, is suffused with an acute sense of compassion for his subjects. Only the most hard-hearted reader could resist his depiction of the vicious circle of the spoon maker’s existence: intensive labor rewarded by nonexistent returns; the gradual abandonment of agricultural activity and its supplemental income; and, at season’s end, the imperative to seek one’s fortune in the world: “Who of the ‘hillside’ dwellers hasn’t seen the strings of paupers on three-ruble horses, stretching from Semënov district as they set out to seek alms in Lukoianov, Ardatov, Sergach, Arzamas? These are all spoon makers, off to ‘take up collection’ as the Volga freezes over, and until it thaws. They’ve even left their homes behind, and have gone wandering with their entire families to feed themselves by Christ’s name.”28 Priests, along with teachers, proved the most reliable providers of ethnographic and religious data for zemstvo-sponsored surveys. The zemstvo agricultural museum, for example, reported ten priests among its respondents in the early twentieth century.29 In 1893, correspondents contributing to an agricultural survey of the province numbered 251, or 37 percent of total participants.30 Priestly participation in the zemstvo was one of the unsettled questions of that institution’s early days. A priest, Father Sergievskii, argued in a piece in Pravoslavnoe oborzrenie for the importance of clerical participation, not only for historical reasons (noting that the Russian Orthodox clergy had played a greater role in local and state politics than had the Greek Orthodox clerics) but also because the clergy needed to be responsible for the “voice of truth” in the zemstvo meetings and to ensure that the principles of Christianity were in evidence in zemstvo decisions.31 Priests could be much-respected and highly valued members of the civic community. One of the brightest such figures was Ioann Vinogradov. Archpriest of the Blagoveshchenskii Cathedral and editor of the Nizhegorodskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti, he played an active role in the provincial archival commission and in local government; his son, V. I. Vinogradov, following a populist-inspired



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stint in a village school in his youth, eventually became the author of some forty guidebooks and photographic albums dedicated to the Nizhnii Novgorod region.32 Beyond its voluntary dimension, civic engagement of the clergy was also a vital part of the state’s agenda in the reform era. If Freeze has studied the process of reform of the clerical estate itself—presented, like the peasant emancipation, as “improvement in material condition”—less attention has been paid to the role of the clergy as agents of the larger reform program.33 An 1864 article in the Nizhnii Novgorod diocesan journal attributed the peacefulness and success of the peasant reform to the efforts of the local clergy, who were noted as being closest to “the people” and who brought about the “revolution of the mind and spirit” necessary to implement change.34 The manipulation of the clergy by the government was characteristic of the reform process as a whole: “The higher administrative powers absolutely did not act in coercive fashion on this issue; they merely grasped the positive disposition and engagement of the majority of the clergy itself. They merely understood that the rural clergy, too, is beginning to become cognizant of its true vocation and gave it a pretext, an example without which, being indecisive, fearful, and disunited, the clergy could not even begin its task; coercion was exercised only in rare cases.”35 Like the gentry, which “voluntarily” implemented the abolition of serfdom, the clergy, according to this presentation, desired reform: the state merely gave shape to its hitherto formless wishes. The example given of clerical participation was the parish school—perhaps only a smoky hut with one or two students being taught to read by the local priest. Sometimes lessons were conducted clandestinely; often, lower members of the church hierarchy took time off from their tasks to work with children. The Eparkhial’nye vedomosti themselves were a further symptom of the spiritual revival of the 1860s, partly state generated and partly the result of clerical activism. The effort to increase “bottom-up” participation emblematized by the Gubernskie vedomosti found an echo in the new diocesan journals, established throughout the empire in the 1860s and in 1864 in Nizhnii Novgorod. Eparkhial’nye vedomosti were published in eleven dioceses (Viatka, Poltava, Irkutsk, Kherson, Chernigov, Tambov, Podol’sk, Lithuania, Tula, Kaluga, and Nizhnii Novgorod) and were being planned for four more (Orel, Vologda, Smolensk, Vladimir). The locally based publication could become a forum for the propagation of piety and the articulation of a unified Church position on key matters of faith and organization. The vedomosti, however, were but one of a proliferation of spiritual journals in the 1860s, most notably Strannik (St. Petersburg), Pravoslavnoe obozrenie and Dushepoleznoe chtenie (Moscow), Trudy kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii and Rukovodstvo dlia sel’skikh pastyrei (Kiev), and the anti–Old Belief Pravoslavnyi sobesednik (Kazan). Some of these journals, Strannik in particular, topped the list of materials being read in Nizhnii Novgorod province.36 Most dramatic, however, was the centrally generated campaign to encourage

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parish priests to give meaningful sermons. Although Paul Bushkovitch’s investigation of religion and society traces the rise of the sermon in Russian Orthodoxy to the end of the seventeenth century, as a matter of common religious practice sermons did not play an important role in the celebration of the liturgy even in 1850. Normally, the priest was supposed to submit the text of the Sunday sermon to the diocesan bishop in advance, for censorship and approval.37 In fact, this rarely happened (which accounts in part for the dearth of routine sermons in diocesan archives). But the 1860s witnessed the printing of books of sermons, Izbrannye poucheniia, as well as pamphlets explaining the liturgy or the text of the Nicene Creed.38 Sermons could also be printed in the Eparkhial’nye vedomosti, thus providing material that parish priests could draw upon. They also provide a unique window through which a researcher 150 years later can glimpse the quotidian ethics of Orthodoxy, relatively rarely expressed in print. Here is an example: the fourteenth issue of the Eparkhial’nye vedomosti for 1864 contains a text called “A Christian’s Honest Labor,” composed by Archpriest A. Afinov. The message here was the potential for work to become a vehicle for spiritual accomplishment, as well as merely a means of material survival: “A Christian’s labor must conclude not in the artist’s atelier, but in the inner sanctuary of the soul. With what idea or spirit must all labor, however material, be suffused in order to enrich and embellish social responsibility with the higher, immaterial virtues of faith? The Christian’s honest labor must be elevated to the level of a pious Christian act [podvig].”39 In this passage, Afinov further distinguishes two types of labor: labor “in the sweat of one’s face,” the kind necessary for survival and a threat to human pride and self-affirmation, and labor suffused with joy and inspired by the Holy Spirit, the kind engaged in not for the sake of external successes but for the greater glory of God. The latter—which approaches if never replicates the lost ease of “doing” (not working) in Paradise—has as its aim not a simple life of rest and quiet but the continual spiritual work of bringing piety and truth to everything in life. Finally, it is joyfulness that is the aim of Christian work—the joyfulness not of earthly successes but of the Holy Spirit. The sermon constitutes a remarkably clear and concise formulation of an Orthodox ethic; Afinov argues specifically against the importance of the fruits of labor and the accumulation of wealth, favoring instead the process of work itself. Presumably this was the sort of content the higher ecclesiastical authorities had in mind when they encouraged their clergy to give more meaningful sermons.40 The effort to encourage clergy to write their own sermons, relevant to contemporary issues, had mixed results. Bishop Nektarii, in an effort to soften the bitterness of this pill, wrote in his 1861 annual report to the Holy Synod: In many places the truths of Christian Faith and action offered to the parishioners by the clergy had a positive effect, in accordance with the locality



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and level of understanding of the flock; they either exhorted them to perform their Holy obligations, or softened their rude ignorance. But in some rural parishes, inclined to the Old Belief and infected by the Schism, the sermons of the Priests, which they had themselves written, were not exactly accepted by the parishioners with enthusiasm. Here experienced pastors offered the ready-made compositions of the Holy Fathers, shortening them somewhat, or modifying them, and with such sermons were more or less able to affect the hearts of those people who gladly listen to the teachings of the Holy Fathers in Church Slavonic but are prejudiced against sermons in just Russian.41

Nektarii here attributes the lack of attention to “relevant” sermons to backwardness or “infection” by Old Belief. His own words bear witness, however, to a peculiarity of Orthodox piety: the tendency to value tradition and ritual above practicality. The slight edge of the mystical imparted by the not-quite-fully comprehensible Church Slavonic was favored by those who attended church not for an instruction in how they should live in quotidian reality but for the spiritual and aesthetic experience of the liturgy. Often, peasant parishioners preferred to hear the texts of John of Chrysostom or Basil the Great rather than musings by their local priest. Like all Christian churches in the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Church faced the question of the relation of faith to “modernity,” and particularly to science. One of the main figures in this discussion in Russia was Fëdor Bukharev, whose efforts to reconcile Orthodoxy and modern life ultimately ended in his being defrocked. In 1860, the publication of Bukharev’s collection of essays, On Orthodoxy in Relation to the Contemporary World, was greeted by scandal; that collection was followed, in 1865, by On the Contemporary Spiritual Needs of Thought and Life, Russian in Particular. Articles such as “A Conversation of a Priest with a Doctor Concerning Miracles,” “Human Reason and Divine Revelation,” and “On the Hypotheses of Modern Geologists, in Contradiction to Holy Scripture,” peppered the pages of Strannik and other clerical journals. A polemic on the relation of Orthodoxy to contemporary life and to “progress” emerged in the 1860s, focused in particular around the provocateur Viktor Askochenskii and his journal, Domashniaia beseda (founded in 1858).42 The same theme appeared in local discussions as well. Ernest Renan’s life of Jesus attracted a good deal of attention, in Russia as in France (where one correspondent counted fortythree articles in one year). The author of one of the articles, Osinin, found little value in the book, although he argued that it was superior to the work of Strauss because of the historical seriousness with which it treated the New Testament.43 François Guizot’s Meditations on the Christian Religion was reprinted in parts, in support of the proposition that the “book of nature” and the Word of God would one day come to agree in all respects. The book was, among other things, a manifesto of anti-Darwinism, representing the theory of evolution as the

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proposition that man was simply a perfected monkey.44 A sermon delivered at the fairground cathedral on the feast day of St. Macarius focused on the theme, “On the reasons for contemporary unbelief,” once again arguing for the compatibility of faith and science. The priest cites Kepler to illustrate his point that science and enlightenment lead toward faith rather than away from it— ”the purpose of the natural sciences is to lead people to faith through the study of the great book of nature”—and that the loss of faith that can be observed in the contemporary world results not from excess of learning but from excess of pride influenced by sensuality, as well as possibly from a desire to cover up one’s vice-filled lifestyle (including passion, pride, greed, and pleasures of the flesh) with the appearance of scientific rationality.45 Religious brotherhoods originated in Lithuania and Ukraine in the sixteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth, they witnessed a revival on that same territory. An element of the activism of the official Church in the reform decades became the effort to co-opt these spontaneous associations and to plant them, as organs of ecclesiastical control, in the “Great Russian” territories. Such were the Brotherhood of St. Gurii at Kazan and the Brotherhood of St. Georgii at Nizhnii Novgorod. Eventually, the latter became primarily a sponsor of the parish school movement directed by Pobedonostsev. In the 1860s, the Church launched a promotion of lay Orthodox brotherhoods intended to “guard against the Schism and other false teachings.”46 To this end, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on 6 April 1863, promulgated a set of seven rules for the formation of such brotherhoods. They were defined as societies made up of Orthodox people for the needs of the Orthodox Church, to militate against the Schism and nonOrthodox confessions, to build and decorate churches, for Christian charity, and to spread spiritual learning. In addition, they were to be affiliated with a particular church or monastery, with the approval of the diocesan bishop, and they would have their own charter, based, if appropriate, on the history of that particular brotherhood. They were free to craft their own charters but only without impinging on the jurisdiction of the central government; the charters were to be drafted and submitted to the bishop and then to the governor of the province. Modifications to the charter could be made only through these channels.47 Interestingly, the brotherhoods were seen as part of the same government program that created the zemstvos, parish councils, and secular popular schools.48 The brotherhoods were supposed to have potential to implement directed policy that could not be executed by priests: “One strong and influential person from such a brotherhood, acting upon his errant brother in the interests of Orthodoxy, and also using his authority as an influential and strong person in his own circle, and having the right tools at his disposal through his social, business, sometimes friendship and kinship networks, could powerfully sway an entire community of wanderers from the faith through his support of them and their respect for him.”49 An article in the following issue commented once more on the history of the brotherhoods, tracing their origins



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to western and southwestern Russia. The rules for the brotherhoods were confirmed on 8 August 1864.50

Temples and Holy Places Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas boasted some of Russia’s loveliest modern-era churches. The Church of the Savior on the fairgrounds (1817–1825) was designed by Auguste de Montferrand (1786–1858) under the direction of the Spanishturned-Russian statesman, architect, and engineer Agustín de Betancourt, but the magnificent Cathedral of the Resurrection in Arzamas, for example, was conceived by the local architect of Mordvinian origin, Mikhail Korinfskii (1788–1851).51 The Church of the Annunciation dominated the capital city’s central square, while the incredible Stroganov Church of the Nativity (Rozhdestvenskaia)—an example of the most ornate and rambunctious Naryshkin baroque—graced the Lower Bazaar.52 Churches, however, apart from their spiritual and aesthetic value, provided an opportunity for parishioners to display their piety through the buildings’ construction and decoration. Frequent fires destroyed many of the region’s original, wooden churches; the fire of 1715 was particularly devastating. While originally built by Metropolitan Tikhon of Kazan—a pious native of Nizhnii Novgorod—the Church of the Annunciation was opulently reconstructed in 1831 thanks to the prominent local notable, merchant and mayor Fedor Perepletchikov.53 The Church of Metropolitan Alexis passed in 1823 into the hands of its flock, and most visibly the then-vice-governor F. M. Stremoukhov. The “warm” Church of the Purification was reconstructed in 1837 on parishioners’ donations, first among them that of Collegial Councilor Shnitnikov. Honorary citizen N. A. Akifiev replaced the tile roof of the Church of the Ascension with white sheet metal in 1846.54 The commercial class of Nizhnii Novgorod asked permission from the Holy Synod in 1850 to reconstruct the decaying Church of Nicholas the Miracle-Worker; when the project turned out to be more ambitious than expected (the cupola collapsed during the reconstruction), a committee of 128 representatives of honorary citizens, merchants from all three guilds, and meshchane unanimously voted to take up a new collection, recruiting mayor and honorary citizen V. K. Michurin to their cause.55 Nizhnii Novgorod merchant K. M. Michurin (the latter’s father) was responsible for the construction of a refectory in the Church of the Life-Giving Spring in 1830; the matter became a family affair, with his two sons donating a bell-tower and subsequently constructing a pool for the holy water (1848) and eventually rebuilding the “cold” church (1850).56 The merchantry from all over the empire sponsored the construction of the immense Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky on the promontory of the fairgrounds, with the effort beginning in 1867 to mark an imperial visit.57 Workers in Sormovo donated the funds for the new local cathedral in their settlement at the turn of the twentieth century. Modern patrons followed in the footsteps of their predecessors: for example,

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the Church of the Dormition, still standing in the nineteenth century, had been erected by townsman Afanasii Olisovich in 1672; the Church of the Kazan Mother of God by merchant (gost’) A. F. Olisov in 1687; and the Church of John the Baptist by townsman Gavrila Dranishnikov in 1683. Townsman Ivan Obrezkov built the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in 1663.58 Patrons could also donate icons, decorate iconostases, and even exquisitely clothe the clergy—as did, for example, Marshal of the Nobility N. V. Sheremetev for the Church of Nicholas the Miracle-Worker.59 As local lore had it, the exquisite local icons of the Savior and the Mother of God in the Stroganov church were the product of high-level larceny: Grigorii Stroganov had seen the icons, intended for the Trinity Cathedral or Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, fallen in love, and, taking advantage of Peter I’s absence abroad, persuaded the painter Koravak to sell him the icons at a high price.60 Just as urban design followed St. Petersburg’s radial layout in provincial cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, so, at the same time, it became fashionable to replicate the modern (as opposed to traditional “Byzantine”) iconostasis of the St. Petersburg Kazan Cathedral in provincial churches. The central Church of the Annunciation followed this pattern, having a yellow iconostasis with gold trim and faux-marble columns. The iconostases of the Church of Metropolitan Alexis and the Church of John the Baptist on the Lower Bazaar also replicated the model of the Kazan Cathedral.61 There was one Lutheran church in Nizhnii Novgorod, and it was equally dependent on the initiative of parishioners. The small Lutheran community traced its origins to the fifteenth century, when Ivan IV exiled Dorpat Germans from Estland; a Lutheran pastor established permanent residence among them in 1622. In the 1820s, a colonel of Swedish origin, Svyberg, bequeathed twentyfive thousand rubles toward the construction of a church, supplemented by a collection totaling fifteen thousand rubles organized by Actual State Councilor Karl Rebender. The church was built in 1828, and an additional sum of nine thousand rubles was allocated from government funds to build a house for the pastor a few years later.62 The current central mosque in Nizhnii Novgorod, on the outskirts of the city center, was not constructed until after the 1905 Toleration Edict, in 1915, but a stone mosque—one of the first in Russia—was erected on the fairgrounds in 1822. (Both were destroyed in the 1930s; the first was reopened in the 1990s, while a new mosque, as of May 2008, was under construction in Kanavino to replace the second.63) Nizhnii Novgorod diocese was home to several of the oldest and most significant monasteries in Russia. Within the town itself or on its limits were the monasteries of the Annunciation and of the Caves and the Convent of the Cross. Downriver—Macarius of the Yellow Waters (at some point transformed into a convent). In the forests—the Kerzhenets Monastery. A major monastic center was Arzamas, with both a monastery—of the Savior—and a convent—



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St. Nicholas—inside the town, and the pilgrimage destination of the Sarov hermitage to the south. There were also “nonadministrative” monasteries in Nizhnii Novgorod, Arzamas, Balakhna, and Gorbatov districts; convents in Ardatov and in Gorbatov district; and two convents of the “united faith” (edinoverie) in Semënov district. The Pamiatnaia knizhka lists three more women’s religious communities.64 According to William Wagner’s investigation, female monasticism experienced a remarkable renaissance in the post-reform period, attracting large numbers of women from different social classes (among the increasing numbers of peasants); the nonurban convents grew particularly rapidly.65 Male monasticism did not undergo such a dramatic upsurge, but it, too, was on the rise. Holy places need not necessarily be officially consecrated churches. Certain sites existed in an interim space between the officially sanctioned and the sectarian. The most brilliant example is Lake Svetloiar (meaning Luminous Lake; the etymology is Finnic, and järvi means lake in Finnish), deep in the forests beyond Semënov. As the legendary site of the disappearance of the city of Kitezh at the moment of the Mongol conquest, the lake, with indeed exquisitely luminous waters, became a pilgrimage site for believers from all over Russia (and, eventually, a magnet for composers and writers of the Silver Age). Here, as well, pious laymen—the peasants Nikifor Artem’ev and Gavriil Afanas’ev, from the neighboring village of Vladimirskoe—constructed a chapel in 1823 and laid out a cemetery. The wooden structure, fully resembling a church, housed icons of the Ascension and the Vladimir Mother of God; visitors tossed coins through the metal lattices of two small windows. The chapel, and especially the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, attracted up to one thousand persons on holidays. Local police destroyed the chapel in 1844 in an effort to stop these unofficial gatherings, but people continued to come and hold nocturnal services around the lake itself, surrounding it in a ring of candlelight.66

Feasts and Festivals Vera Shevzov counted ninety-three religious holidays in the calendar on the eve of the 1905 Revolution.67 There is no point reiterating her material here. What is worth noting, on the local level, is, first, that there was no such thing as a public event without an accompanying religious ceremony, and, second, that the religious calendar played a determining role in marking the rhythms of economic production. Khramtsovskii, writing in 1859, noted seventeen yearly processions of the cross in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, departing from three main churches: the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross (Proiskhozhdenskii) at the fair, and the Church of the Ascension.68 In addition, a yearly procession celebrated the miracle-working Vladimir Mother of God icon, when it was brought from the Oran Monastery sixty versts from Nizhnii Novgorod on the Saturday after Easter. A day or more earlier, Nizhnii Novgorod

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residents set out toward the monastery, on foot or on horseback, to accompany the icon on its route; crowds from Kunavino, Bor, and Pechery converged on the Convent of the Cross for the actual ceremony, which began with the sighting of the icon from the bell-tower and the tolling of the bells, while the sisters carrying crosses and gonfalons chanted, “Today Nizhnii Novgorod shines in all its beauty, accepting your miraculous icon, O Lady, like thе sun’s dawn.” The icon continued its journey on the following day, again surrounded by crowds, gracing the Cathedral of the Transfiguration and making its gradual way through all of the city’s churches, ending with the station of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, before returning to its home in mid-June. If Easter came early, there was time for a visit to Balakhna and Semënov.69 Some equally festive and vibrant ceremonies, however, were linked to secular events. The 1860s in particular were filled with such holidays, with the promulgation of the emancipation manifesto occupying pride of place. The official promulgation of the 19 February 1861 Emancipation Manifesto was intentionally staggered over the territory of the empire. Prince Shakhovskoi arrived in Nizhnii Novgorod, from Petersburg, bearing the manifesto. At ten o’clock on the morning of 12 March, pealing church bells accompanied residents as they thronged the city’s churches and flag-draped public squares. The focal point of the ceremonies was the diocesan cathedral, inside the kremlin: there, the gentry, merchantry, and honorary citizenry gathered to hear, together with the crowd packing the kremlin grounds, the first words of the manifesto as read by the proto-deacon in full ceremonial dress. A liturgy of thanksgiving, led by Bishop Nektarii, was followed by the reading of the manifesto itself outside, on the central square, by Chief of Police Khval’kovskii, accompanied by Governor Murav’ev and Prince Shakhovskoi, as well as by the vice-governor, marshal of the nobility, and others. An undoubtedly sentimentalized contemporaneous account emphasized the extraordinary silence of the immense crowd.70 A later historian of the event described the entire mass of people as “transformed into a single concentrated listening” and wistfully commented that the scene was worthy of being transmitted to future generations by Daguerre’s “famous invention.” The most moving moment, according to the same eyewitness, was the murmur of prayers and the making of the sign of the cross upon the reading of the words, “Cross yourselves, Orthodox people, and invoke God’s blessing for your free labor— the guarantee of your domestic well-being and of the public good,” followed by a resounding hurrah at the reading of the final words.71 The same ceremony was replicated, simultaneously, at all the city churches and squares and, over the course of the following week, in all of the province’s districts and villages. By 20 March the promulgation was complete. What is interesting about the local accounts is their emphasis on the predominantly religious nature of both the ceremony and the mood that accompanied it: observers remarked upon the similarity to the joyfulness and reverence of the



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Easter holiday. Indeed, even the author of the Emancipation Manifesto itself was a highly prominent religious figure: Filaret (Drozdov), metropolitan of Moscow, earlier an activist in the Russian Bible Society and the author of the Russian translation of the Bible that finally saw the light in 1876. In the village of Vyksa in Ardatov district, and also in the village of Murashkino, Kniaginin district, the peasants took up a collection of fifteen kopeks per person to construct a chapel honoring St. Alexander Nevsky; Murashkino residents also promised to liberate one debtor from prison, yearly, on 30 August.72 While this spiritual mood is doubtless not all there was to the reception of the manifesto, it is nonetheless an aspect that later researchers have largely chosen to neglect.73 Religious celebration was integral to the implementation of reform. Not all festivals were connected to nationwide events. The Church could also introduce holidays at the local level; again, the 1860s were a particularly active time in this respect. The celebration of Georgii Vsevolodovich, prince of Vladimir and Suzdal’ and founder of Nizhnii Novgorod, originated inside the Church, as a holiday on 4 February. In 1864, the bishop of Nizhnii Novgorod was Nektarii; his predecessor, apparently, was Jeremiah (at any rate, he does not appear on the list of bishops up to 1850 in Makarii’s history). It was Jeremiah’s initiative to make this into an official holiday; he even sponsored the establishment of a special church, in the village of Vyskovo, dedicated to Prince Georgii, although, due to construction difficulties, the building was never completed.74 In 1863, however, a chapel was set aside in the diocesan Cathedral of the Transfiguration, as the personal charitable donation of the city mayor, V. K. Michurin, who also provided for a lavish and tasteful iconostasis; the chapel was blessed with all due ceremony by Bishop Nektarii. The following year, the celebration was repeated, being echoed throughout the city’s churches. The event acquired political meaning: it became the occasion for a banquet, sponsored by the local merchantry, inside the city duma building, where Michurin presented a donation, collected in the city, of nine hundred rubles for aid to Russian soldiers wounded in Poland.75 Thus, it was the church hierarchy that originally extracted Georgii from oblivion and chose to craft this particular local hero. How was Georgii presented? First, there was a conscious effort to create specifically local reference points: “All the more valuable is the memory of people who lived or at least acted within the boundaries of that particular land, that soil, on which we are living now—who circulated in that sphere, that milieu, in which each of us lives, breathed the same air, and sowed the seeds whose fruit now grows before our eyes, and which we harvest and of which we partake.”76 Continuity of space, rather than time, was considered important. But essential to the creation of a hero is the construction of his biography. Georgii’s origins turned out to reflect perfectly the nineteenth-century ideal: a father of illustrious genealogy—Vsevolod Big Nest, who was the son of Iurii Dolgorukii, grandson of Vladimir Monomakh, and brother of Andrei Bogoliubskii—and a mother of exemplary piety and kindness, called a “second Olga” by the chroniclers.77

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Georgii’s early life (1189–1212) is supposed to have been distinguished by the twin saintly features of piety and military prowess: he dedicated the church constructed, as part of the Vladimir women’s monastery of the Virgin, by his mother, Maria; subsequently, he won two victories over the Riazan’ princes (1209) and in 1210 marched on Novgorod with his brothers Constantine and Iaroslav, to be greeted by a bloodless capitulation. His accession to the throne of Vladimir, although it subverted the rights of his older brother Constantine, left the purity of his reputation undamaged: it was Vsevolod himself who, in anger, transferred the suzerainty over Vladimir and Rostov to the second son. Here the story breaks off, temporarily.78 If local history was the domain of zealous servitors in the 1840s, and of statistical committees and archival commissions in the 1870s and 1880s, the Church was instrumental during the decade of reform.79 The Church could equally promote new national occasions for com­memora­ tion, by organizing events on the local level. “The Events of 4 April”—the assassination attempt on Alexander II in 1866—provoked an outpouring of sentimental poetry, religious processions, and commemorative speeches. The Eparkhial’nye vedomosti published a poem by meshchanin Nikanor Porfiriev Budilov, while an observer characterized the mood of the public: “Never is the sea so turbulent as when two winds meet, equally determined and forceful. Such is the present mood of the Russian people. It tosses and billows under the influence of two opposite feelings—indignation and joy, and it will be long before these stormy waves, raging in open space, become quiet and settle into their shores.”80 The event became the impetus for a pilgrimage to St. Petersburg. For a brief moment, St. Petersburg became one with Nizhnii Novgorod, as the churches filled with familiar crowds from home: “In a word, all was Nizhnii-Novgorodian and those who found themselves in the Church of St. Panteleimon on the 19th of April could imagine themselves in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, in the kremlin of their home town: the same faces, the same service, the same chants.”81 The pilgrims were impressed by their own procession of the cross, where the city was represented by its most illustrious citizens: The church gonfalons, the cross and candles from the altar were carried by the elders of the peasant communes of various districts of Nizhnii Novgorod province; the artisanal head of Nizhnii Novgorod and guild members carried the icons of the saints celebrated on 4 April; the meshchanstvo elder of Nizhnii Novgorod and the meshchane carried the icon of Alexander Nevsky; while mayor Michurin and first-guild merchant, Commercial Councilor Gubin carried the miracle-working icon of the Savior from the house of Peter the Great. On the spot of the salvation of the Russian state from the terrible calamity, His Holiness Nektarii solemnly performed a service of thanksgiving, on bended knee and proclaiming long life to the Emperor and the ruling house.82



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The Nizhnii Novgorod procession merged with others, for example, the craftsmen and workers of the Alexander machine works, in an all-Russian pilgrimage (vserossiiskoe bogomol’e). Even nature seemed to cooperate in the collective celebration: “The weather was fine—quiet, clear, warm—in Petersburg on the 19th of April, and truly favored the Nizhnii Novgorod ceremony: the magnificent procession through the alleys of the Summer Garden, the brilliant clothes of the many clergy, the sonorous and harmonious singing, the rows of soslovie representatives, and above all of this the fine, clear sky, without a single cloud.”83 The tragic occasion of the tsar’s actual death in 1881 (perhaps a necessity given the fuss around the previous assassination attempt) was naturally experienced even more deeply in Nizhnii Novgorod. A collection (as in other dioceses) contributed to the construction of the commemorative Church of the Savior on the Blood.84 The coincidence of religious and economic rhythms has already been noted. It is worth emphasizing, however, that artisanal production, which frequently fit into a diversified pattern of activities, relied on religious holidays as landmarks in output and sales schedules. Virtually every form of production began and ended its cycle on a festival day. Buckets and wheels, for example, were manufactured from Easter to Shrovetide in Kniaginin, while tubs worked the other way around. Bast operations began on Shrovetide and continued until the first of May. Tailors began their travels at Michaelmas and ended them during Holy Week. The religious calendar on one hand performed a unifying function. Whatever the doctrinal and customary divergences of religious observance, holidays were the same. On the other hand, festivals could also reinforce distrust of the state and its reform measures for those who already considered it to be marked by the Antichrist.

Icons Icons were contested territory in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. The first icon in the local row of the main diocesan Cathedral of the Transfiguration was a work of Semën Ushakov, the Iverskaia Mother of God, painted expressly for this purpose and imported by the region’s first bishop, Filaret, upon his appointment in 1672.85 The symbolic value of this choice is clear: if, as Mel’nikov vehemently argued in his “Pis’ma o raskole” (1860s), Old Believers were by no means iconoclasts, they surely denied the validity of the “new” icons—of which Ushakov’s works are a quintessential example.86 An 1865 investigation of local miracle-working icons revealed a regional diversity: while tales of the miraculous occurred with some regularity in Arzamas, Balakhna, and Gorbatov districts, few unusual workings were ascribed to icons in Semënov or the eastern area. Most miracles were attributed to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries or, more vaguely, “100 years ago.”87 The icon of the Kazan Mother of God in the Monastery of the Savior (Arzamas)

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had miraculously been saved when lightning hit the cupola on 16 June 1732. A Kazan Mother of God in the same region was brought to alleviate drought, and indeed the rain came within three days. One of the most well-known stories concerns a fragment of the True Cross: In the seventeenth century, a brother who was not good at trade but quite pious had a vision in which, “between lemon and peach trees[,] he saw the true tree of the Lord’s cross” on a passing ship docked on the Volga. He took the cross but had no money to pay for it; by the time he came back with money, the ship was gone. A local priest told him to pray and take communion for his sins, at which point the cross began to glow, and the man understood that he could not keep it but should give it to his church, St. Elijah. Then, various miracles happened, for example: “Once the townsmen, the Nasonovs, were passing the Church of St. Elijah, quite late at night. They were amazed by a bright light which they could see inside the church. The light was so bright that it seemed that all the candles were lit in the church. Surprised by what they saw, the Nasonovs climbed down from their droshki and approached the fence surrounding the church; but the closer they came, the more the light diminished and, once they reached the fence, they saw only a weak light from the votive lamp by the icon of the Crucifixion.”88 In June 1847 a woman came with her eight-year-old daughter who had been ill for three years and the child was cured by drinking holy water.89 Sometimes, visions involved the painting of new icons. For example, a Pavlovo priest told the story of the icon of the Savior Not Made by Human Hands, in the stone chapel of the church in Tarka village in Gorbatov district, four versts from Pavlovo. “More than a hundred years ago,” Ivan Ivanov Batyn’kin, a peasant from Pavlovo, was praying when something resembling lightning struck; he was terrified and became very ill. During his illness, he heard a voice telling him to go to Tarka, where he would find two springs. He did this, and at the bottom of one he saw the face of Christ, appearing for ten minutes; he was cured. Then he had three dreams (not at first realizing that they were not just dreams) to go to Shuia and have an icon of this image painted or he would get sick again. So he did, miraculously bumping into the icon painter just when he got there. After fasting, the craftsman made the icon, and it was put in its own chapel. In 1830, it cured a woman; in addition, a peasant woman from Pavlovo, M. V. Shirenina, was struck ill when she laughed at it, after which evidence she believed and venerated it. In 1848, the icon was brought to Pavlovo on the occasion of the cholera epidemic.90 Or, in Kniaginin district, there was a tale of the icon of the Mother of God, Odigitria, in the village of Kemary near Bol’shoe Murashkino. An individual who was ill, Isaiah, in 1706 heard a voice telling him to go to Bol’shoe Murashkino to have an Odigitria icon painted; he was further supposed to place it at a spring in Gremiachee. He followed these instructions, but the icon painter wanted a lot of money, at which point the artist was miraculously lifted up into the air and thrown on the ground, after which he agreed to do the job honestly and at a fair price. This worked, and when the



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icon was brought from B. Murashkino to the spring, Isaiah (whose health had declined in the meanwhile) was cured. The icon worked many more miracles, mostly various cures.91 Arguably the most significant icon in the diocese, however, was one that was not mentioned in the official sources. In general, as Mel’nikov pointed out, it was of course incorrect to label Old Believers “iconoclasts,” as official documents sometimes did.92 It was new icons that they rejected. The Kazan Mother of God in the Sharpanskii skete was charged with symbolic value: according to popular wisdom, the day that it vanished from the skete would be the death knell of the Old Belief; it was Mel’nikov himself who accomplished this in a raid.93

The Shadow World of the Old Belief From its origins as a charismatic sectarian movement, the Old Belief had by the nineteenth century evolved into a full-fledged subculture, with its own quasihierarchical forms of organization and particular social norms. It was a microcosm that eluded official description: since their existence was not acknowledged by the state, Old Believers were simply not counted in the periodic local censuses (revizii), and their society had no chroniclers—except in the top secret reports that the administration, particularly Lev Perovskii, commissioned. (There were four such reports, for different regions, one of them by Vladimir Dal’.94) Yet their presence forms a pervasive substratum in Nizhnii Novgorod province, where their concentration and the intensity of their community life were particularly high. Mel’nikov’s report, in its first sentence, informs us that the Old Believers numbered 170,506 in 1853, or fully 15 percent of a total population of 1,164,010. The number of women among the Old Believers was 97,673 (57 percent). The greatest obstacle, as is well known, to the continuity across generations of the Old Belief was the impossibility of establishing a legitimate hierarchy that could ordain priests and thus provide the essential mechanisms for sanctifying marriage, recording births, and performing all the multiple functions of an established church in the quotidian world—including the most basic function of celebrating the liturgy. These difficulties contributed to the fragmentation of the Old Belief into a plethora of sects. But there were ways around these problems, and by the nineteenth century, mechanisms had been worked out with remarkable success. The Austrian hierarchy was one solution: after 1846, priests were ordained by the Austrian bishops at Belaia Krinitsa, just across the border, and sent quietly back into the Russian Empire; they significantly augmented the number of legitimate Old Believer clergy in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese.95 Under Alexander II, the hierarchy migrated to the Rogozhskoe cemetery in Moscow, where the ordination of priests gained official sanction.96 A second solution was a dominant role, in the communities, for women. Thus, despite the supposed impossibility of any regular organization, in fact, the structure of Old Believer communities mirrored that of their Orthodox counterparts. The center of the faith, not surprisingly, was not in the provincial

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capital but several kilometers upriver, in Balakhna district, in the town of Gorodets. The most ancient settlement in the region, present-day Gorodets boasts an Alexander Nevsky Street in honor of the hero-saint who died there. In the nineteenth century, the town greeted visitors, as they approached by boat, with a symphony of cupolas. This was the site of the famed Old Believer chapel (in the absence, of course, of “proper” churches) where the faithful gathered in daily and weekly observance. The Old Belief had its special sacred sites in Nizhnii Novgorod province. The infrastructure of the Old Believer life was provided, however, primarily by the trans-Volga sketes. While resembling monastic communities in many ways, the sketes also differed from them, mostly in their direct involvement with secular life. They provided a support system for a persecuted subculture, keeping the forms of worship alive but, perhaps as importantly, accepting pupils from wellto-do Old Believer families and thus ensuring continuity across generations. The sketes were an almost entirely female enterprise, with Mel’nikov’s character Mother Manefa being modeled on a historical figure, Margarita, mother superior of the Olenevskii skete.97 The Orthodox archpriest Lebedev commented on the vital role of women in perpetuating the Old Belief, on the level of family life: “Many women read Old Church Slavonic, and even know how to celebrate certain services such as the evening and morning liturgies, and the hours; they all received their education or upbringing in the sketes, and this is why the Schism, relying on them as mothers of families, retains its strength and stability. A male Old Believer might meet on occasion with a Priest, but a female Old Believer is inaccessible to his pastoral conversations and the doors of such houses are closed to him.”98 The superiors of the sketes were women of deep spiritual education, leading their flock in liturgical observance, teaching them to read through the holy texts, and instructing them in handicrafts. The Mel’nikov report describes eight major sketes in detail: Olenevskii, Komarovskii, Ulangerskii, Sharpanskii, Chernushinskii, Bystrenskii, a sub-branch of Osinovskii, and Lipovskii. In addition, new sketes were constantly being founded. The history of the sketes was from the outset intertwined with the history of their persecution. Along with the Onega River in Siberia, the Kerzhenets, in what subsequently became Semënov district, became the site of the first refuge of Old Believers following the 1667 council. Here the Kerzhenskii, Chernoramenskii, and Sharpanskii sketes were founded alongside the pre-existing Olenevskii. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the religious communities numbered ninetyfour and housed adherents of the ancient piety fleeing from the Solovetskii Monastery as well as the central provinces. The primary turning points in the history of the sketes were the reign of Peter I and the intensive campaign against them launched by Bishop Pitirim; the relative harmony under Catherine II, who, even as she assimilated the Uniates, welcomed Old Believers who had escaped abroad, as a result of which the Nizhnii Novgorod sketes received an injection of new blood (fifty-four sketes, eight thousand residents); and the concerted and



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systematic campaign against them initiated by Nicholas I but implemented with unrelenting enthusiasm by his servitor, and native of Semënov district, Pavel Mel’nikov. It is the last which forms the focus of the present story. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sketes—now located exclusively in Semënov district—numbered fifty-four. The largest occupied up to seventy desiatinas of land. Together they housed some two thousand residents, with an overwhelmingly female majority. Characteristically, the communities were divided into a plethora of persuasions, defined by their attitude toward the Orthodox clergy as well as doctrinal matters. The “purest” sect refused to accept any priests who had not been ordained prior to the Nikonian reforms; thus, they were forced for the subsequent 150 years to subsist without any priests at all. The most significant communities grew vegetables and engaged in handicrafts but were not able to support themselves—given the poor soils of the forested district—in terms of grain. Their financial lifeline was wealthy adherents of the Old Belief living in Moscow or elsewhere, who sent presents of money and also ordered services for family members at considerable expense. In part, no doubt, to sustain his harsh suggestion that the sketes needed to be completely extirpated, Mel’nikov painted a graphic picture of loose morals and unsympathetic character traits—particularly sanctimony and hypocrisy. According to Mel’nikov, it was a matter of prestige for a skete dweller (skitnitsa) to bear a child out of wedlock, as witnessed by the enormous number of members with “illegitimate” by their names. This, of course, makes complete sense because marriage in an Orthodox church was, to an Old Believer, a huge misstep. The campaign against them under Nicholas I has several fascinating aspects. It occurred in stages, with initial legislation being passed in the 1820s and 1838 and the key law in 1853. Several points are worth noting. First, the legislation included a bureaucratic measure for the ejection of pasportnitsy, that is, everyone who was not ascribed to the given community according to the census lists (the sketes, by the way, were registered as villages, not religious communities). Second, the new initiatives also addressed specific doctrinal points, namely, the elimination of some but not all icons, some but not all books, and so forth.99 Finally, the laws called for the destruction of physical plant, which seems at least in part to have been Mel’nikov’s initiative. He particularly emphasized the destruction of housing and the large amount of living space per skete dweller. Only if the buildings were physically annihilated could the nuns’ return be prevented. By the time Mel’nikov composed his report, only eight sketes remained; he himself was responsible for converting two to edinoverie, and the number of residents had dwindled to fewer than two hundred, practically all of them females. Was this, indeed, the death knell of the Old Belief? According to Mel’nikov’s own early count, the destruction of the sketes involved the resettlement of their residents, 579 of whom remained inside Nizhnii Novgorod province (444 within

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Semënov district). They founded new, smaller, more secret communities in town, while a few hardy souls returned to the sketes to continue their activities. The Gorodets chapel flourished, as did other holy sites. It is here that we can turn to the bishops’ reports, which until 1900 continue to cite not just the strength of the Old Belief itself but the persuasiveness with which Old Believers pulled Orthodox (through marriage, for example) into their own sphere of influence. Greater integration of the inhabitants of the sketes into the surrounding world did not necessarily signify the weakening of the ancient piety; rather, we see a constant “infection” (the official term) of Orthodoxy with Old Belief. It was the struggle against the Old Belief that permitted a definition of the indices of piety: knowledge of prayers, commandments, and the Creed; attendance at church; respect for the clergy; attitude toward sermons and Church fathers; and, above all else, the willingness to take communion on a regular basis (that is, at least once a year). The spirit of the Old Belief penetrated into the religious observance of the Orthodox, and the practice of Orthodoxy itself evolved in answer to questions posed by the proximate heresy. At the conclusion of his grand saga, in a rare moment of confluence of his bureaucratic and novelistic personae, Mel’nikov has all of his characters convert cheerfully to Orthodoxy; the closing of the sketes in 1853 figures throughout the diptych as a sort of apocalyptic backdrop—the last stand of resistance to the onward march of the state-sponsored faith. As the reemergence of the Old Belief upon the declaration of religious tolerance in 1905 might indicate, the actual story is somewhat more complicated.100 If the sketes flourished until midcentury, their partial destruction in the 1850s led to the penetration of the Old Belief into the world at large—the formation of new, smaller communities; better communication networks and reliance on worldly messengers; and—this is only a hypothesis—the penetration (or, in the bishops’ language, “infection”) of local Orthodoxy, both lay and monastic, with elements of the ancient piety. Emigration was another, more limited, response to the state campaign.  In the religious sphere, Nizhnii Novgorod diocese both conformed to and departed from a general pattern. The prevalence of the Old Belief created a religious tension, and a cultural diversity, that characterized some but not all of Russia’s provinces. Still, the above discussion goes a considerable way toward explaining, at least for this particular region, the continued vitality of Orthodox piety: the incessant encounter with the challenge of the Old Belief, and the resulting constant dialogue, ensured a continuing reexamination of fundamental assumptions of faith; more universally, the interpenetration of secular and sacred moments, from the calendar of artisanal activities to the celebration of feasts and political events, made the religious sphere particularly amenable to local initiative and participation. The local clergy were among the first to participate in the post-reform provincial awakening by setting up parish schools



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and lay Orthodox brotherhoods, and they played a crucial role in the initial articulation of a local consciousness through their crafting of local festivals. Without the context of religious celebration in which all quotidian activities were ultimately inscribed, we inevitably misconstrue aspects of the economic, political, and cultural milieu of the Russian provinces.

10 Provincial Cultural Nests

F

or a few days in 1847, the local Gubernskie vedomosti engaged in a debate over whether or not there was, in fact, anything to do in Nizhnii. The newspaper’s contributor, A. P. Avdeev, took a Gogolian tone, lamenting the boredom and limitations of provincial life: “You cannot imagine how difficult is the situation of a person taking up his pen to write the chronicle of a city, when there are decidedly no events in this city that could possibly deserve attention.”1 Finally, mimicking Gogol directly, he decided to describe theater-goers as they left a performance. The editor, P. I. Mel’nikov, responding with local patriotism, insisted that Nizhnii Novgorod, with its gentry elections, balls, masquerades, plays, and religious processions, was better than most other places, and he exulted in the physical beauty and architecture of the city.2 To what extent is it possible to speak of a provincial culture? Was it merely an extension, or a distant echo, of the cultural life of Russia’s two capitals? Insofar as it existed, was it a purely local phenomenon, that is, particularly characteristic of Nizhnii Novgorod specifically? Or, can we discern some kind of cultural system—what semioticians might describe as a “secondary modeling system”—distinctly attributable to provintsiia as a generalized concept?3 The question has been posed recently on a number of occasions, though, I would submit, more as an opening for discussion than as any kind of definitive theoretical construction.4  206

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The most focused and concrete suggestions for a methodology to examine the workings of a provincial culture still belong to N. M. Piksanov, who, in 1928, not only proposed a set of problems but also provided preliminary topics, with bibliography, and sketched a rough outline of those factors that might define a provincial cultural milieu, applicable to various regions, though with adjustments for local combinations and peculiarities. There is no reason, given the black hole into which his quite penetrating theoretical study vanished (that is, the complete nonaccomplishment of his agenda), not to appeal to it today for useful guidelines. How, asked Piksanov, might we conceptualize the relation of the center and the regions in Russian culture? There was no such thing, he suggested, as “Russian” literature. Rather, the principle of topographical differentiation could begin by distinguishing Great Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian literature, by noting the existence of a peculiar culture in each of the two capitals, and by pushing this line of inquiry further into the regions themselves. For such an investigation to become possible, a theoretical and methodological formulation of the study of “regional cultural nests” and their significance for the national historical process stood on the immediate agenda.5 Piksanov adduces the example of Lomonosov. Contrary to the popular legend of the spontaneous and almost magical appearance, from the northern wastes, of a poor fisherman’s son who became the foremost scholar and writer of the eighteenth century, he actually was rooted in a rich and highly developed regional culture that included material wealth, the profound literary culture sustained by the northern monasteries and by the Old Belief, an original tradition of art and architecture (above all wood carving), and the presence of an educational network. What was important, according to Piksanov, was not the emergence of a single figure from a particular regional center but its capacity to generate a whole cultural milieu. This could take one of two forms: either the region could produce individuals who then went elsewhere to make their mark or these individuals could stimulate the provincial center itself to flourish. Another way to put this (though Piksanov does not) might be that “nests” could nourish, and also be woven. Eventually, regional consciousness might crystallize in oblastnichestvo—a conscious regional self-definition, as opposed to a mere vague concentration of strength in a particular geographical area.6 Most interesting would be if the province, instead of dissolving in the culture of the capitals and thus feeding the phenomenon of centralization, “brought to [the capital] something new and original, created a particular direction in literature, art, ideology.”7 It is important to note here that, while we might at first think of the “provincial nests” as a romanticized notion analogous to the “gentry nest,” Piksanov seems to have had something different—a concrete heuristic concept—in mind. “Nests,” like the linguistic nests introduced by Vladimir Dal’ in his regional dictionary, refer to embedded layers of culture that, intertwined with each other, build up a particular regional environment.8 The Formalist scholar here adumbrates

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the Moscow-Tartu concept of secondary modeling systems by extending the linguistic nesting principle “to the next level”—that of regional culture: “A welltended high school or seminary with gifted teachers, a wealthy public library, a public lecture series in the local university, energetic self-educational circles, the activity of a local scientific society—may form a cultural nest, as a unity, and in their mutual interrelations. . . . Only the coexistence of such elements, unified in living and active individuals, constitutes a cultural nest.”9 Thus, the “nests” that he urges his students to investigate include education, the press, theater, art, and (rather more vaguely) social-economic phenomena. With some modifications introduced by regional peculiarities, this agenda can fruitfully be applied to Nizhnii Novgorod province in the nineteenth century.

University and School One of the key moments in Nizhnii’s cultural and intellectual life took place outside the city and even the province: the founding of Kazan University in 1804 provided a regional centripetal focus and helped to create a local intelligentsia that was able to complete its education without traveling to the capitals, or abroad. Such figures as Stepan Eshevskii, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, and P. I. Mel’nikov wended their way downriver to study at Kazan, attending lectures by Shchapov, Lobachevsky, and other more or less illustrious professors, subsequently returning to teach history, ethnography, mathematics, and other subjects to students at the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium. When Eshevskii finally moved to Moscow in 1862, his first course of lectures there surveyed the provinces of the Roman Empire, proposing as its central thesis the retention of local culture—in the form of language, custom, religion, and even social organization—in the face of the centralizing aims of the Roman state. On the secondary level, the seminary was supplemented by the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium, founded in 1808. Its special pension for the nobility split off in 1844 to form the Alexander Gentry Institute. Entry into the gymnasium in the 1860s was accessible to all boys belonging to the free estates from the age of ten, contingent upon demonstrating literacy, a knowledge of prayers and Christian dogma, and basic arithmetic.10 The program of study included religious instruction, Russian literature, history, geography, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, cosmography, natural science, law, languages (Russian, Slavic, Latin, French, and German), drawing, drafting, handwriting, and solfeggio. From 1849 (i.e., after the Gentry Institute split off), courses in business and accounting were introduced primarily for the children of merchants and meshchane, thus challenging the prevalent distinction between a gymnasium and a Realschule, while boys eligible for state service also needed Greek in order to enter at the fourteenth rank. In 1860, a special two-year program in surveying and land assessment was instituted. The full program took seven years at a cost of fifteen rubles per year; the gymnasium students in 1864 numbered 255.11 An interesting early product of the gymnasium was

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the Statistical Description of Nizhnii Novgorod Province, written by the senior instructor, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published under the auspices of the Kazan University press in 1827.12 The Alexander Gentry Institute, founded upon the initiative of the local gentry, was in actual fact, given the payment of fees and sufficient space, open to children of all estates. Thus, in 1864, of 128 students, only 27 attended in their capacity as nobility. Boarders paying their own way (34) together with dayschool attendees (55) were by far the majority, while 9 students sent by various state institutions and 3 half-boarders made up the balance. The institute was distinguished from the gymnasium by supplementary courses in agriculture, law, and natural history, as well as music (sacred and secular) and dancing, and by the cost, a steep 210 rubles with board. Day students paid only 20 rubles. The most outstanding graduates gained access to Kazan University on scholarships funded by the Nizhnii Novgorod Gentry Bank.13 Beginning in the 1850s, a parallel structure was created for girls as the result of the nationwide initiative of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, whose name graced the new institutions of women’s education. The Mariinskii Institute for Girls of Noble Birth opened its doors, in 1852, to daughters of local hereditary and personal nobility, as well as girls of clerical or merchant station whose families could and wished to pay the fees of two hundred rubles per year. The requirements for entry did not differ from those for boys, although self-financed girls could be as young as eight. The course of study was six years. In the first class, in 1858, 23 girls graduated, followed by 20 in 1860, 30 in 1862, and 19 in 1863. In 1864, the instructors numbered fifteen, for 80 students. The Mariinskii Women’s School of the First Order, intended for day students, was established in 1859. It also included a six-year program comprising religion; Russian language, grammar, and literature; arithmetic and “understanding of dimensionality”; history and geography of Russia and the world; fundamentals of natural history and physics; handwriting; and embroidery. The course of study cost fifteen rubles per year, while an additional ten rubles bought instruction in French; optional dancing lessons were also offered. In the 1863–1864 school year, students numbered 138, of whom 74 were the daughters of nobility and bureaucrats; 4 of clergy; 24 of merchants and honorary citizens; 29 of meshchane and other urban citizens; and 7 of raznochintsy and peasants. Over the course of the year, 29 pupils dropped out and 9 concluded the course.14 In addition, the city of Nizhnii Novgorod counted two more boarding schools—Carolina Goehrke’s for girls, opened in 1858 and counting sixty-six pupils in 1864, and Evfrasiia Segediia’s for boys, with only three students—and two more day schools—Muza Mendeleeva’s coeducational school, opened in 1859 and counting four boys and eighteen girls, and Luisa Firrek’s, opened in 1864, with two boys.15 The transparency itself of the notices in the Pamiatnaia knizhka—including the posting of qualifications for entrance—is an index of the tendency toward recruitment of a broader student body.16

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On-the-ground popular education, however, is associated, as Jeffrey Brooks and Ben Eklof have shown at length, with the zemstvo and also with the church school movements, and its explosion—as well as the increase in numbers of teachers and in their level of enthusiasm—followed the emancipation. Popular education might be seen as the most local of all activities: unless a district or parish school exists in the more or less immediate vicinity of the pupils, it will most likely be a nonstarter. Thus, it makes sense that the popular education movement developed largely at the district (that is, not even at the provincial) level.17

The Provincial Press Educated provincial residents read a good deal. An 1894 survey found that residents subscribed to 110 Russian journals and newspapers, or 4,198 copies. Adolf Marks’s illustrated weekly, Niva, accounted for more than a quarter of all publications purchased. Judging by Niva’s popularity, as well as by the illustrated journals that followed it on the list (Rodina, Zhivopisnoe obozrenie, Sever, Nov’, Vokrug sveta, Sem’ia, Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia, Lug, Priroda i liudi), people wanted to read about, and see images of, exotic travels, family life, art, and nature. Russkaia mysl’ was by far the most widely read of the national thick journals, followed by Russkoe bogatstvo and Vestnik Evropy. Residents subscribed to national daily newspapers as well: Svet, Novoe vremia, and Russkie vedomosti, which by the 1890s had displaced the once-dominant Syn otechestva. A heated polemical exchange gripped both capitals and provinces in 1875– 1876. In 1875, the Petersburg publicist D. L. Mordovtsev (1830–1905) published two articles in the journal Delo, which were collectively titled “The Provincial Press” (Pechat’ v provintsii). Mordovtsev expanded upon Élie Reclus’s biological bon mot—“Big fish strive for big seas, large infusoria—for big glasses”—to argue the centripetal force of the capital cities, which sucked all talents away from the provinces, leaving only the weak behind. Mordovtsev acknowledged the recent explosion in regional publications, surveying eight independent literatures in the Russian Empire: the first was Nizhnii Novgorod, and Gatsiskii the main object of praise, followed by the “Northern,” Siberian, Central Asian, Caucasian, New Russian, “Northwestern,” and Kievan branches. He also claimed to sympathize with their goals—the desire that “the provinces, like the capitals and major centers, will speak with their own independent language, will make their own voices heard in the general forum of the human word, and that this voice will have as decisive a weight in the forum of human ideas as that of the central monopolizers of the printed word.” But he came to the conclusion that these well-meaning efforts would, at this particular historical juncture, come to naught, because an inexorable force, which he pinpointed as intellectual and economic, “increasingly drew humanity away from the peripheries, from the provinces (in the broad sense of the word), toward a few, for some reason beloved, centers.”18

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Mordovstev’s claim—which came, as we retrospectively know, at the precise moment of the blossoming of the provincial press—set off a polemical storm. Not only the major newspapers in the capitals, most notably Mikhailovsky’s Otechestvennye zapiski and Nedelia, took up sides in the debate; provincial newspapers from Voronezhskii telegraf to Sibir’ joined the fray. A year later a major literary collection with a political purpose was published at Kazan: Pervyi shag brought provincial authors together to show the literary power of the provinces. The volume, whose contributions focused mostly on local themes and included poetry, travelogues, and ethnographic essays, was on a high level. The opening drama, P. I. Felonov’s “Innocent but Judged Guilty” (“Bez viny vinovataia”) was the breathtaking tale, from the times of Catherine II, of a Nizhnii Novgorod merchant’s daughter who accidentally suffocated her lover in a featherbed while trying to hide him from her father, who wanted to marry her off to a rich but highly unappealing old man; the plot subsequently became the basis for one of the first Russian feature films, Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter (1913). A lengthy (140 pages) and quite tedious tirade against Mordovtsev by an “ordinary writer” (literator-obyvatel’)—the pen name of the editor, N. Ia. Agafonov—defended the interests of local patriotism and the provincial press against the philistinism of “centralist” writers, proposing that a true Russian literature could exist only if regional literatures, and a regional press, were allowed and encouraged to grow, and if the provincial public were provided with more intellectual and spiritual nourishment than mere statistical and informational pamphlets could furnish. Gatsiskii was one of the most vocal and visible contributors to this debate. The pamphlet he wrote in response to Mordovtsev, Death of the Provinces, or Not?, catapulted him into the national limelight. His first argument was a fairly obvious one—decentralization. Gatsiskii saw an expansion of provincial life and energy occurring simultaneously with the growing force and attraction of the capital cities: “along with the significance of the capital, other, so-called provincial centers, are beginning to have, and therefore will have and should have significance.”19 The provincial press, far from having tried its wings and failed, was only in its early stages. The center was only as strong or weak as the multiplicity of regional centers that made up the notion of “province”; true progress consisted in the infinitely broad dispersal and dissemination of knowledge and intellect, not just concentrated in the “one” but spread throughout the “many.” Gatsiskii’s second point was as simple but more interesting in its implications. The intelligentsia in the capitals (stolichnaia), he argued, had acquired their favorite obsession—the narod—with the help of the provinces. Now this fixation on the narod was making them miss the real point. Hung up on reaching and communicating with the peasants, they looked past what was really important, and what would hit them in the face if they did not willfully make themselves blind: this was provintsiia, the significant and steadily growing “middling” population of Russia’s regional centers and zemstvos that was

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Fig. 10.1. A page from the Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti (unofficial section). From http://www .nounb.sci-nnov .ru/library/ rus/struct/opi/ virtvern/1.php.

becoming the backbone of Russian society and that, Gatsiskii believed, had as good a claim to being the narod as anyone else. The capitals did not see the strength of the provinces for the simple reason that they ignored them. (“Petersburg which, with the help of the provinces, arrived at the necessity of studying the narod, but still hasn’t seen the necessity of studying provintsiia.”20) The debate coincided with the flowering of the provincial press, in Nizhnii Novgorod as elsewhere. If, until the 1870s, the Gubernskie vedomosti had been the sole legal periodical publication in the Russian provinces, lifting the ban resulted in an explosion of provincial publishing. Already in 1880, Nizhnii Novgorod had two major daily newspapers (Volgar’ and the Vedomosti), as well as the Iarmorochnyi listok, which came out when the fair was going on. Other publications came and went. Six private printing presses, three photographic studios, two bookstores, and a public library provided the literary infrastructure.

Theater In the mid-1860s, Gatsiskii could still speak, with some irony, of the provincial theater as “our only temple of the aesthetic,” a haven in an environment where aesthetic impressions remained in the world of fantasy: one could daydream about them “in one’s own study, feeding upon the leftover memories of things heard and seen elsewhere.”21 As in many provincial towns, cultural life in the first half of the nineteenth century revolved around a very small number of institutions: apart from the domestic living room and an occasional ball or concert, the Gentry Assembly and above all the town theater provided a venue

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for social gatherings and entertainment. The Nizhnii Novgorod theater provided the focal point of cultural life. It originated in the immensely successful serf troupe of the landowner Prince Shakhovskoi (Iusupovo, Ardatov district), which, transported to an ugly and unwieldy but permanent building on Pecherskaia Street in 1811, metamorphosed into a public institution.22 Despite its peculiar beginnings—Baron August von Haxthausen wrote with considerable amazement at the fact that the actors were unfree and subject to the whim of the despotic manager—the Nizhnii Novgorod theater had, by the time of the vedomosti article mentioned above, developed the complete infrastructure characteristic of European nineteenth-century theatrical life from the German provinces to the capitals of Paris and London. This infrastructure included the managers, a permanent actors’ troupe with the obligatory heartthrobs and vedettes, an extensive repertoire, a more or less reliable audience of varied social composition, and—with the founding of the Gubernskie vedomosti—the critical mechanism necessary to make theater into a public forum. The physical history of the theater had its vagaries and instabilities, disappearing temporarily as a result of a fire in the theater in 1853 and fading as a magnet for public discussion when eclipsed by the acutely pressing political issues of the 1860s. Nonetheless, the town theater, as well as its equally significant if more ephemeral counterpart on the fairgrounds, provided a point of intersection of local and national or international performance, in the shape of touring guest actors and visiting troupes. The evolution of the theatrical management is telling. Originally owned by the Shakhovskoi brothers, one of whom did it out of love and the other for money, the initial theatrical company might be conceived as an aristocratic caprice, in which household serfs performed as an acquittal of their service obligations. The rigid moral norms enforced among the actors became the stuff of folklore: the strict separation of sexes to the point of not permitting actresses, on stage, to swoon too deep into their male counterparts’ embrace, and punishments by means of a special set of stocks and other such instruments.23 In 1824, after more than a quarter-century, Shakhovskoi died and the theater passed to his less artistically inclined heirs; a period of severe crisis came to a close in 1827 with the theater’s purchase by Rasputin and Klimov. The Rasputin period (1827–1839) worked on different terms, because the actors were asked to obtain an emancipatory document from their landowners and sign a ten-year contract. Performances took place thrice weekly and daily in holiday season; a second theater on the fairgrounds held performances daily in the summer months.24 A Russian and European repertoire—Griboedov, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, alongside Shakespeare, Calderon, and Kotzebue—attracted local audiences and foreign visitors, among them Baron Haxthausen, who in 1843 pronounced the performance of the opera, Askold’s Grave, not bad (“passablement bon”).25 Drama occasionally made an appearance outside the provincial capital as well.26 Thus, for example, on 5 January 1863, the Gubernskie vedomosti issued a wry commentary on a 12 December charity performance of three plays in Balakhna:

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a vaudeville performance called “The Misunderstanding” (“Putanitsa”); a comedy, “The Man with Three Legs” (“Diadiushka o trekh nogakh”), and a “comedy-vaudeville,” “Trouble from a Tender Heart” (“Beda ot nezhnogo serdtsa”). The reviewer introduced his remarks with the observation that plays for charity were so commonplace in St. Petersburg that no one even knew for what purpose they were being performed; in the provinces it was the opposite: no one cared about anything except the cause, and aesthetics were beside the point. Determined nonetheless to write a “real” review, the critic (signed, A. Stein) concluded that N. G. Voznesenskii in the first play could not control his voice, and V. I. Puskov in the third tried too hard, though he had some talent. I. Chicherin, however, was good and calmly amusing, while V. G. Chudakovskaia was also pretty good, and Iu. P. Betling was excellent. The general result was positive, with 170 rubles collected and 30 spent.27

Music Music provides a particularly instructive test case for Piksanov’s theory, because it simply cannot exist without some sort of cultural milieu and transmission of tradition. Even the emergence of an entirely original and independent genre— the brightest example being American jazz—is dependent upon some infiltration into a new environment of particular instruments and techniques, while the performance and composition of “classical” music is impossible without instruction.28 The emergence of a European musical milieu in nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novgorod is inextricably associated with the name of Aleksandr Ulybyshev (1794–1858). A violinist and musicologist as well as a member of the local nobility, Ulybyshev was a “provincial” in the very particular sense of the 1840s. Raised until the age of sixteen in Germany, he had followed with rapt attention the appearance of each of Beethoven’s new works; in St. Petersburg in 1829–1830 he belonged, along with Pushkin and Vladimir Odoevsky, to the society of the Green Lamp, and his reflections on Beethoven’s music find an echo in Odoevsky’s eerie essay on the last quartets in Russian Nights (1843). His sister, Ekaterina Dmitrievna Panova, was the mysterious female addressee of some of Petr Chaadaev’s letters (one of the Chaadaev estates was also in Nizhnii Novgorod province, and inhabited by his brother), while his own career climaxed with the offer of the diplomatic posting to Persia vacated by Griboedov’s death— an offer he declined in 1830 in favor of an early retirement to his family’s Nizhnii Novgorod estate (the Saratov domains went to his brother). Like other visible members of his generation, Ulybyshev was a dedicated and zealous state servitor, combining his service obligations with an equal devotion to culture—in this case, music. His early career advanced rapidly, beginning in the Ministry of Finance in 1812, which was followed by the chancellery of Mines and Saltworks and ended in the Foreign Office. Steady promotions led him from the rank of Court Councilor (seventh in the Table of Ranks) at age

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twenty-four to retirement with the status of Actual State Councilor (fourth, that is, the lowest corresponding to the title of General). From 1812 to 1830, he was also editor in chief of the Journal de St.-Pétersbourg and specialized in Russian-French translations and vice versa. Having decided to abandon the capital, he subsequently divided his time between the secluded estate of Lukino (Balakhna district) and his house in the provincial capital, at the intersection of Bol’shaia and Malaia Pokrovka. His time in Lukino was focused on writing and practicing. It was there that he produced, over a decade, his single major work—a three-volume study of Mozart, written in slightly halting French (the archetype of the proverbial “mixture of French and Nizhnii Novgorodian”).29 Published in Leipzig in 1841, it not only retold the composer’s biography and analyzed his works but also developed an entire philosophy of the history of music, of which, according to Ulybyshev, Mozart was the culmination.30 When in town, however, Ulybyshev became the heart and soul of a musical circle that brought together local musicians to play chamber music, played host to visiting virtuosi, and imported musicians from Moscow to form a symphony orchestra. Yet Ulybyshev was by no means the circle’s sole animator. A constant presence was Karl Karlovich Eisrich, the city’s foremost piano teacher and instructor in vocal music at the Alexander Gentry Institute, of whom Ulybyshev commented that “without him, one might say, there would be no music at all here in Nizhnii.”31 Eisrich’s sixteen-year-old pupil Panova, the daughter of the vice-governor, figures repeatedly in musical chronicles of the 1840s: visiting Polish virtuoso violinist Apollinarius Kontski, himself a student of Paganini, commented of her accompaniment in his performance of Lafont’s Une Larme, “Mademoiselle, vous jouez non pas en amateur, mais en artiste, comme nous autres.”32 Yet if Panova eventually vanishes from the concert world, another of Ulybyshev’s protégés does not. The musical environment proved sufficiently rich to nurture Milii Balakirev (1837–1910) up to the age of sixteen, when, Ulybyshev’s recommendation in hand, he traveled to Moscow to study with Glinka and eventually to become a founder of the “Mighty Five.” In the second half of the century, the musical tradition continued with the founding of a branch of Anton Rubinstein’s Russian Musical Society through the efforts of V. I. Villuan, who came to the town in 1873. Concerts and charitable recitals formed an integral part of cultural life, and musical instruction was available to students at the local schools and institutes.33 Yet it would be inappropriate to limit a discussion of the musical milieu to “urban high culture.” In Nizhnii Novgorod, as everywhere in Europe in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, musical life depended upon a nexus with religious music. Thus, in the province, a strong tradition of choral singing, most notably in the knife- and lock-producing area around Pavlovo, predates the Zirkelkultur of Ulybyshev and Villuan.34

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Meteorology and Astronomy An obsession with the weather might possibly be explained by an awareness of human dependence upon the forces of nature given an agrarian society: harvests, sowings, productivity, prices, as well as, speaking more broadly, health and prosperity, are ultimately contingent upon meteorological conditions. It is also true, however, that weather mania can hold human populations in its grip regardless of their proximity to natural sources of livelihood. Either way, provincial residents evinced a fascination with climatic conditions that in the nineteenth century took on a scientific coloring; amateur and eventually professional meteorology became characteristic of a culture and way of thinking. The local provincial archival commission published, in 1889, the extraordinary meteorological diary of a monk, in which he painstakingly recorded every detail of weather conditions every day over an entire year, in 1840 and 1841. A week’s entries for July 1841, for example, read: 1. Tues. Clear, dry weather. Mercury at 15 at dawn. Fairly strong wind, but the mercury rose to 30 from the heat by noon. Strong winds and rain by evening. Many changes in the air throughout the day. 2. Weds. Sky fairly cloudy, but still. 3. Thurs. In the morning God granted beneficial rain. 4. Fri. Dry, clear weather. Continuing heat. 5. Sat. Dry and quite hot weather. 6. Sun. Dry, hot weather. The harvest has begun and we must suppose that the rye will be hard to grind, and the haymaking mediocre, while the grass has burned up in high places. 7. Mon. Fairly cloudy sky and cool in the morning.35

The pages of the Gubernskie vedomosti were already filled with the meteorological notes of local priests and teachers in the 1840s.36 By 1893, a province-wide network of meteorological stations was established (there were forty-seven by 1912).37 These stations drew on the efforts of the rural intelligentsia to chart average temperatures, precipitation rates, cloud movements, the behavior of snow masses on the ground, and so on. While the Academy of Sciences, which published the Meteorologicheskii sbornik, and later the Imperial Geographical Society (Meteorologicheskii vestnik, beginning in 1890) initiated the establishment of weather stations throughout Russia (two thousand of them by 1892), on the local level the infrastructure was provided by the Astronomy Circle and the Zemstvo Agricultural Museum. By 1907, the museum controlled a network of thirty-two observation points, staffed by eleven peasants, ten clergy, eight teachers, seven doctors, two landlords, one forester, one township scribe, and one gardener charged variously with observing some or all of the above elements. They were evenly distributed among all the eleven districts.38 In 1913, the museum published Materialy po izucheniiu klimata nizhegorodskoi gubernii: svod i obzor meteorologicheskikh nabliudenii za period vremeni s 1897

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goda po 1911 god in honor of the twenty-year anniversary of the zemstvo meteorological network. This publication contained detailed descriptions and data on temperature, precipitation, snow masses, and the sky and winds. The preface noted that the network had grown out of the Dokuchaev expedition (thus, the implantation of scientific investigation and its appropriation by local forces) and particularly from the efforts of one of the students, A. N. Baranovskii. The zemstvo statistical bureau, recognizing the importance of the weather, had promoted these studies, which, under the direction of N. M. Sibirtsev, had resulted in an accurate determination of the causes of the 1891 famine. N. A. Bogoslovskii, the head of the natural-historical museum, had promoted the development of a network of meteorological stations involving a network for measuring rain in fifteen points; the organization of observation of the snow cover; systematization of observations; phenological observations; observation of waters, and so on. The zemstvo funded the original network with a four-hundred-ruble allotment. The rural intelligentsia was provided with instruments to undertake the necessary measurements.39 This concern with the weather found an articulation in the realm of “high science,” particularly in the work of A. I. Voeikov, who was concerned precisely with snow cover and other climatic conditions that were the subject of the onthe-ground measurements of the zemstvo meteorological network. The Nizhnii Novgorod Astronomy Circle, in turn, took note of his most recent publications, for example, his “Voyage through Russia in 1892,” published in the Imperial Geographical Society’s Meteorologicheskii vestnik and noted in A. Mikhailov’s review of the meteorological literature for that year.40 Observation of the heavens was another, related, provincial passion. The Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy was founded in 1888 and flourished up to World War I. They proudly proclaimed Camille Flammarion as one of their honorary members (he actually condescended to send them a letter acknowledging this honor) and counted some 150 ordinary members, including Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, then a resident of Kaluga, by the turn of the century. The circle conducted meteorological observations of their own (peasants and clergy were the most dedicated contributors), held lectures and readings, conducted an active correspondence with learned societies in the capitals and abroad, and collected a very respectable library of scientific works in French and German as well as Russian. At the outset, the circle’s president was P. A. Demidov. At first the group possessed only eighty-seven books and one—significant—journal: Flammarion’s Revue mensuelle d’astronomie populaire. Their equipment included a refractor (Mertz), a globe, a globe of Mars, a planisphere of the sky and one of the moon, transparencies, and a map of the stars. They convened to observe lunar and solar eclipses and to make measurements and observations. They scheduled their yearly ceremonial meeting to coincide with the spring equinox:

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“Today, 10 March, at 10 a.m., the sun crossed the equator, passing from the southern to our northern hemisphere, in order once more to melt the snows and enliven nature. By the protocol of our circle, on this day—the day of spring equinox—we must gather and account for all of our activities over the preceding year.”41 Demidov proceeded to read letters from F. A. Bredikhin, A. D. Putiata, S. P. Gladenko, Flammarion, and A. I. Voeikov.42 Gladenko noted, “The influence of the circle on the cultivation of love for astronomy in Russia can be significant. The sky still awaits investigation: many corners of the universe remain inaccessible to us, many phenomena remain unstudied, and the more observers, the better for science.”43 Flammarion commented on the popularization and spread of science and progress, of which this provincial society was a symptom, while Voeikov encouraged the project of studying water levels in the Volga as an appropriate goal—a suggestion duly executed by Malinin. The circle’s second annual volume of proceedings included an article titled, “The Distance of the Stars and the Speed of Light,” thus illustrating the interests of the circle more generally: the popular/bourgeois cult of science and large numbers and the fascination with distances, stars, and space that underlay the imminent scientific discoveries of the early twentieth century.44 The circle tried, too, with very limited success, to obtain funding on both a provincial and national level, writing letters to Governor Baranov to convince him of the utility of an observatory and appealing to the Central Physical Observatory in St. Petersburg. From the latter followed, however, a strong rejection: while expressing sympathy for the circle’s intentions and affirming the importance of meteorological observations in Nizhnii Novgorod, the Petersburg scientists explained that they needed to oversee the even distribution of stations over the entire empire and were currently expending their resources in the north of European Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia and therefore could not provide full equipment for Nizhnii Novgorod. They did offer a new mercury siphon barometer, which, however, could not be sent by mail.45 The circle, which operated under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, had its proper constitution and was funded by voluntary contributions, members’ fees (five rubles a year), and income from lectures and entry fees to the observatory and museum. Its organization replicated that of the zemstvo, with a general assembly and a governing board.46 The circle itself met up to forty times a year, in various combinations; in 1891–1892, twenty-seven meetings were dedicated to conversations on scientific topics. They were particularly proud of their contacts in the larger scientific world, which included the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the Moscow Society of Naturalists, the Moscow Mathematical Society, the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, and the Russian Entomological Society. They enlisted the cooperation of the editor of Science and Life, M. N. Glubokovskii, and undertook translations of popular-scientific works. On 9 March 1894, the circle staged a jubilee celebration in honor of Nikolai Lobachevsky, with Bishop

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Vladimir, Governor Baranov, Vice-Governor Chaikovsky, Mayor Delvig, members of the zemstvos, and representatives from local schools in attendance. As time went on, the public dimensions of their work came to occupy center stage: their proceedings were published in Nauchnoe obozrenie. Like the Lunar Society (1765–1813) in Birmingham a century earlier, the Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy provided a cultural milieu for the development and reception of scientific ideas; if the earlier group focused on industrialization and the scientific issues of the day (e.g., electricity, steam), our provincial circle addressed the corresponding interests of the late nineteenth century—meteorology, space, relativity, large numbers. Members ranged from K. I. Kaplin-Tezikov, a former domestic servant on the Sheremet’ev estate who taught himself grammar and developed a passion for astronomy while still a serf, moved on to French after the emancipation, and subscribed to the Revue mensuelle d’astronomie populaire (the circle enthusiastically waived the membership fee for this “poet-astronomer”), to V. V. Malinin (1834–1906), who failed to obtain his Magister degree because it took him two to three years to build, from scratch, the necessary equipment to conduct his experiments but nonetheless persevered as a gymnasium teacher of physics and math. The photographer A. O. Karelin was a member, as was his son. Retrospectively, by far the most illustrious member was Tsiolkovskii, whose paper, “Universal Attraction, as the Main Source of World Energy,” was reviewed by I. I. Shenrock in 1893. He spoke, himself, in 1895–1896, on the topic of “pressure inside the sun” and, in 1905–1906, on the “Second Law of the mechanical theory of warmth”; his name appears on lists of members in the 1890s. The general membership of the circle, a total of 144 in 1888–1889, is described as “members of the local intelligentsia, both male and female, of various professions—teachers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, etc.”47 The people they preached to, on the principle of “the necessary democratization of knowledge,” are described as “clerks, salesmen, artisans, workers.”48 One of the circle’s remarkable achievements was to launch a highly successful program—the first outside St. Petersburg—to provide adult education in the form of evening classes for the working citizenry of Nizhnii Novgorod. In 1897–1902, public and also specialized lectures were one of the group’s main activities, as was teaching physics, math, and natural sciences in middle school—for teachers as well as students. The group published an astronomical calendar—the only one in all of Russia—funded in part by the Tenth and Eleventh Congresses of Naturalists. With a circulation of eighteen hundred, the calendar became quite successful. It won a silver medal at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900.49 Circle members were invited to the fifty-year anniversaries of the Central Physical Observatory and the Kazan division of the Russian Geographical Society: “As previously, the circle’s main task was the popularization of physical and mathematical knowledge. With this end in mind,

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the circle continued to organize lectures on mathematics, physics, astronomy, and other aspects of natural science, continued to organize observations of the heavens, and continued to publish the Russian Astronomical Calendar.”50

Archive Commemoration and historical consciousness became transformed into a collective task with the creation of the provincial archival commissions, established (like the Gubernskie vedomosti fifty years earlier) by decree from the central government in 1883.51 The commissions were the brainchild of Senator Nikolai Vasil’evich Kalachov, a native of Vladimir province, whose initiative resulted in the initial establishment of commissions in Orel, Riazan’, Tambov, and Tver’. Minister of the Interior Durnovo’s circular inaugurating the commissions reached Nizhnii’s Governor Baranov in July 1884; Baranov, in turn, recruited a team of eight local notables to form the nucleus of the archival commissions’ local incarnation—the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Scientific Archival Commission (Russian acronym, NGUAK). These were Bishop Makarii, A. L. Mirotvortsev, A. F. Martynov, M. V. Ovchinnikov, A. I. Raevskii, A. A. Savel’ev, F. P. Sollogub, and D. A. Salamykov.52 Extensive preparations, including regular contacts and exchanges of minutes with the earlier commissions, resulted in the opening of the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Archival Commission in 1887. Although the primary aim of the commission was supposed to be to sort and organize the masses of old documents that lay indiscriminately piled in the kremlin tower, the commission, with its regularly published proceedings, soon became the focus of a flurry of archaeological and historical researches and expeditions. Not only did the local provincial archival commission (NGUAK) undertake the daunting task of sifting through mountains of ancient documents accumulated in one of the kremlin towers (in the process, incidentally, destroying a significant amount of materials that did not interest them) but it also launched a plethora of research expeditions, festivals, and historical preservation efforts. Thus, a tiny house where Peter the Great had stayed a few days became a museum; Nizhnii Novgorodians gathered in 1889 to celebrate the birthday of the city’s legendary founder, Prince Georgii Vsevolodovich (1189–1238); and preparations were already well under way in the 1890s for the eventual jubilee of the rescue of Moscow from the Poles, projected to be celebrated in 1912. The commission had published eighteen volumes (forty-six issues) of historical materials by 1914, including contributions by Sergei Platonov, who kept up an active correspondence with commission members as part of his research on the Time of Troubles. In 1903, there were 87 local members and 152 out-of-town members, including such illustrious figures as the Kazan journalist Nikolai Agafonov, statistician Nikolai Annenskii, composer Milii Balakirev, popular historian and textbook author Dmitrii Ilovaiskii, historians Nikolai Kliuchevskii and Pavel Miliukov, populist writer Vladimir Korolenko, Vestnik Evropy editor Nikolai Pypin, and Moscow

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librarian and philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, as well as a number of prominent clerics.53 The circular describing what the provincial archival commissions’ functions would be specified, in typical fashion, a narrowly archival mission that included the establishment of local archives and the ordering of their contents under the auspices of the provincial governor, who was to appoint members with the consent of the director of the national Archaeological Institute in St. Petersburg. Members would choose their own president. The commissions’ responsibilities included the now rather terrifying provision that they should destroy “scientifically uninteresting” documents while delivering the rest to the archive; the compilation of document registers (opisi); and facilitating organization and access for scholarly purposes. The commissions were held accountable to the Archaeological Institute, to whom they were to submit a yearly report; they were allowed to collect new materials not already contained in the archives and were to draw their financial resources from the Archaeological Institute and from local donations.54 In practice, the NGUAK’s (sometimes overlapping) functions quickly became defined as research, organization, preservation, publicity, and commemoration—the last three, in particular, stretching significantly the prescribed boundaries. Moving with alacrity, the provincial statistical committee, headed by the ever-resourceful Gatsiskii, appealed to three reliable sources—the zemstvo board, the municipal duma, and the marshal of the nobility—for funds; two years before the commission actually opened its first session, they already had a budget of thirteen hundred rubles, which, with additional contributions and the accrual of percentage yields, had climbed to nearly three thousand rubles by 1887.

Preservation and Research The commissions’ primary aims were preservation and research. In the NGUAK’s first meeting, members approached with caution the “scientifically un/interesting” criterion, with the initial query raised by the photographer A. O. Karelin: how, he wished to know, would the commission determine the degree of interest ascribed to any particular file? The discussion that followed more or less dismissed this criterion, pointing out that investigations would follow their own logic, while a clerical member suggested that researchers should be left to their own devices, with minimal oversight by the commission.55 A later discussion was even more forthright, determining that the commission’s aim should be to conserve “everything,” on the grounds that it was virtually impossible to determine interest: “on its own any uninteresting file, when related to a group of similar documents, becomes interesting and meaningful, therefore so-called uninteresting files should not be destroyed.”56 In a sense one might think of the NGUAK as the Gubernskie vedomosti writ large. In keeping with prevailing trends, local ethnography and archaeology were

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a dominant concern. Naturally, the Old Belief drew immediate attention, with P. A. Al’bitskii’s report on the Makar’ev sectarians as the first presentation to the commission. The report raised key methodological issues: A. A. Savel’ev noted that Al’bitskii’s level of detail (which essentially made his research into a study rather than a mere opis’ ) could not be sustained for the number of documents that had to be processed.57 Other ethnographic presentations included a piece on the russification of the Mordvinians, while local archaeological finds ranged from the trivial to the profound: a description of an old copy of the New Testament from a local church, descriptions of local burial mounds, an archaeologist’s investigation of folklore at Belaia Gora. Local history, of course, figured prominently in the commission’s activities. Particularly notable, however, was a strong tendency to emphasize extremely recent history. Thus, in an early meeting, the commission decided that one of its primary items of business would be to retain and annotate the extensive papers of the recently abolished district courts.58 V. I. Snezhnevskii made this his special province, devoting large segments of almost every volume of the commission’s proceedings to a detailed description of court cases, largely concerning the local peasantry.59 The lawyer A. A. Savel’ev evinced his finely tuned juridical training, and his fascination with the definition of legal rights, in his researches on “The Nizhnii Novgorod City Duma as a Censor of Morals”— an inquiry fully in keeping with the European interest in moral statistics in the nineteenth century and in his in-depth analysis of the papers of the Balakhna city magistrate. P. A. Al’bitskii proposed on 4 March 1888 that the commission should write down the stories of former serfs, while the detailed description of the actual process of implementing the emancipation (an effort actually realized much later, in a special volume) also was raised as an important agenda item.60 Thus, the commissions quickly became a forum for the provincial intelligentsia’s fascination with serfdom and peasant life. It is interesting that, by the 1890s, the era of serfdom was presented as a distant and almost mythical time, with strange and barbaric customs and mores. This obsession with contemporary history had inevitable political overtones. The more recent the history, the greater the interest in individual personalities. Vladimir Dal’’s curriculum vitae, materials on the biography of Ivan Kulibin, and an irregularly appearing rubric entitled Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia all pointed to the NGUAK’s continuation of Gatsiskii’s biographical principle. The biographies of P.  O. Bankal’skii and V. P. Vakhterov first found their place in the papers of the provincial archival commission. Later in the game, Gatsiskii, Mel’nikov, and Khramtsovskii received their own commemorative volumes, complete with biographical and autobiographical materials, correspondence, and key publications—including the infamous report on the Old Belief, which the commission finally published in 1910.61 Unquestionably, the single most significant “properly” historical topic pursued by the commission was the Time of Troubles, including the role of

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the Nizhnii Novgorod defense of Muscovy. Gatsiskii—as usual—indicated the primacy of this subject early on, even suggesting that the commission’s library should have two primary divisions, one devoted to local history and ethnography, generally speaking, and the second specifically to the Time of Troubles, while a secondary section containing materials of more generalized interest would complete the collection. The most interesting contributions by commission members included efforts to determine Minin’s genealogy (and to find living relatives) and a mission by talented historians from the capitals (among them Polievktov, the future historian of Nicholas I’s reign) to collect crucial materials in Swedish archives. From the very beginning, the commission interpreted its mandate to engage in historical preservation quite broadly: members not only tried to salvage documents but also noted that, “given the concern to take measures preserving various ancient monuments, the archival commission should, among other things, turn its attention to the old houses still to be found in Nizhnii Novgorod.”62

Organization The first priority was to find storage space for the materials to be collected and sorted; gathered pell-mell into one of the kremlin towers, the items were gradually moved to the Dmitriev tower that the commission had requisitioned. Finding a meeting space for the commission itself was no simple matter. Foreshadowing the difficulties of the Second State Duma two decades later, the NGUAK first gathered in a small space, ultimately finding a sympathetic ear in the municipal duma, which provided them with a room where an audience could also gather. True to its mandate, the NGUAK created an archival structure: documents were described in probably excessive detail, catalogued, and then arranged in order according to the institutions that produced them, thus building the skeleton of the structure that remains, despite various Soviet reorganizations, in today’s local archives. While priority was given to governmental institutions, members also pointed out the importance of private archives, mostly of local landowners. A question remaining is the degree to which ecclesiastical documents were integrated into the system. Publicity From the outset, the Nizhnii Novgorod archival commission sought to conduct its business in the most public manner possible. The commission’s meetings were open to the public. Its proceedings were published in the Gubernskie vedomosti, while the provincial statistical committee’s Nizhegorodskii sbornik became the venue for the publication of research. Nizhegorodskii birzhevoi listok also referred to the commission’s activities. All of this was in addition to the publication of the Deistviia proper, where the minutes of the meetings (zhur-

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naly) appeared in full, along with essential papers and materials. Early on, the commission began discussion of a local historical and ethnographic museum, which eventually was indeed established in one of the city’s key local monuments—the house in which Peter I had stayed on his brief visits to the city, in the 1690s and again in 1721. The Petrovskii domik became the object of significant controversy: though generously donated to the NGUAK by its rightful owner, the naval institute (rechnoe uchilishche), the latter eventually needed it back, leaving the commission’s precious collections homeless. A further essential component of publicity was the constant communication with other commissions and with the central Archaeological Institute. The NGUAK did not take even a single step without first carefully studying the journals of the earlier archival commissions; they celebrated their founder’s jubilee with the cooperation of Vladimir province and enlisted a far greater number of nonresident than local members.

Commemoration The commemorative function of the commissions became a particularly high priority for the NGUAK. From the beginning, the core members decided to hold their main yearly meeting, and the one from which the working year was counted, on 22 October—the date when the Nizhnii Novgorod forces had occupied Kitai Gorod in 1612 and one of the few dates from that epoch that could be ascertained with any precision.63 Every single subsequent meeting belonged to the newly christened “Nizhnii Novgorod days” (nizhegorodskie dni); each meeting was thus scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of a historical event of some significance. Subsequent meetings of 1887–1888 were held on 4 February 1888 (this one reflected an earlier mistake: the church calendar erroneously gave 4 February as the date of the death of the city’s founder), 4 March (the correct date), and 30 May (the date of Peter the Great’s visit in 1722). As the years went by, the commission continued to meet on the established October and March days, but no session was ever held without a detailed investigation of that date’s historical meaning. The meeting held on 11 April 1889, for example, commemorated the departure in 1614 from Nizhnii Novgorod of local troops, including five hundred musketeers from Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas along with two hundred more Livonian and Lithuanian soldiers (thus exposing the city itself to potential attacks from Iaroslavl’ cossacks, Nogai invaders, and Tatars) so that Moscow military commanders (voevody), in turn, had to be sent to protect Nizhnii.64 This routine commemoration was accompanied by a heightened awareness of the historical significance of the commission itself—mostly a reflection of Gatsiskii’s concern. The NGUAK’s very first meeting already included a “historical note” on its own founding, with thorough archival documentation.65 But the members were not content to mark important dates only among themselves. In keeping with the urge to publicize their activities, they im­medi­

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ately became involved in the staging of elaborate public celebrations that would bring key local historical events into the consciousness of a larger audience.

Museum If one were to speak of a “provincial culture” distinct from that of the capitals, one of the key loci for its emergence was the museum. For residents of provincial Russia, the notion of a museum evoked not so much an art collection as an assemblage of historical, ethnographic, or natural-scientific artifacts. One of the first natural-historical museums was founded in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1888 by the soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev; its aim was not only the display of soil types, meteorological tables, and examples of handicrafts but also the education of visitors. Eventually, a network of such museums became a means for the dissemination of information and the creation of a local consciousness throughout Russia. In the original statute of the zemstvo-sponsored natural history museum, Dokuchaev—in some sense the author of the project—specified its aims as scientific and practical: “on one hand the study of the province’s natural history and, on the other, the transmission and grafting of natural-historical truths to the local population.”66 He proceeded to elaborate the particulars: collection of soils, flora, fauna, and geological samples; their systematization; the compilation of reports; the introduction of these materials to the public; public lectures; and the publication of cheap and accessible brochures. At the same time, the museum should focus on agriculture, industry, and education, allowing these practical fields of endeavor to guide its tasks; the museum was also to operate as provider of expertise for the zemstvo, especially in such questions as property valuation. Thus, in a slight amplification of these themes, Dokuchaev suggested that the museum’s significance would be as a provider of information (“spravochnaia kontora”—his quotation marks), a purveyor of popular scientific knowledge, and a medium for communication with various scientific societies and particular scientists; the ultimate result would be the shedding of a certain “life and light” upon the local population.67 Eventually, the museum would unify different branches of scientific investigation, including the social sciences—economy, ethnography, and history.68 As evidenced by the subsequent reports of the natural-scientific museum’s activities—which included scientific expeditions along the lines of Dokuchaev’s own but focused on more minute detail, the active monitoring of meteorological data, and the establishment of an entire chain of meteorological stations of a far higher level of sophistication than the amateur efforts of pre-reform days—Dokuchaev’s intentions were realized on a grand scale. The significance of the natural-scientific museum became not merely the presentation of local materials for popular consumption but also the establishment of an independent, local scientific institute that initiated its own scientific investigations and conducted its own relations with the outside world—including correspondence abroad (for example, with the Hungarian

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Academy of Sciences) as well as with other provinces and with the capital cities. The high level of scientific work, in addition, attracted serious scientists, who willingly made Nizhnii Novgorod their base of operations (e.g., Sibirtsev, who as a student was a member of the original expedition and who later became the first director of the museum). The provincial museum became a means for the decentralization of scientific knowledge; by 1900, the zemstvo no longer needed to appeal to St. Petersburg for scientists to execute its tasks.69

Reflections in the National Culture One of the reasons why the Petersburg publicist Mordovtsev had foreseen a bleak literary future for the provinces was that they spoke, as he mockingly put it, a local “patois,” difficult for dwellers of the capitals to understand. Although this was less true by 1900 than in the 1870s, he did have a point: it takes some effort to reconstruct, from their rather awkward words and turns of speech, what provincial patriots were trying to get across. The provincial culture described here, however, also found some more articulate spokesmen on the national scene. Most of all I have in mind the philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), who worked as a teacher of history and geography in a string of provincial towns for fourteen years before becoming the librarian of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow in 1874.70 Fedorov’s “philosophy of the common task” is a virtual encyclopedia of provincial life and provincial culture. Fedorov’s apparently bizarre concepts—concrete objects he tosses around as if they were philosophical categories—become more comprehensible in light of their provincial context. For example, “museum”: “The museum is the collection of everything irrelevant, dead, unusable; but for this very reason it is the hope of our age, for the existence of the museum shows that there are no completed tasks. . . .There is nothing hopeless for the museum, nothing for which a funeral service has already been said, that is impossible to revivify and resurrect; for the museum even the dead are carried from cemeteries, even prehistoric ones; it not only sings and prays like a church, it also works for all the suffering and for all the dead!”71 There was also the primacy Fedorov attributed to astronomy or “the heavenly sciences,” which he believed capable of uniting mechanics, physics, and chemistry: “Knowledge must be proved not only through experiments on a small scale, conducted by a special estate [soslovie] of scientists in physical offices and laboratories, city-style,—knowledge must also be proved countrystyle, through experiments on a natural scale, that is[,] through meteoric and tellurgical regulation, and also through the transformation of the earth from a self-propelling elemental force into an earth-mover [zemnokhod] propelled by the entire human race as navigator.”72 Fedorov’s passion for collecting and cataloguing and his sense of the immense importance of humanity’s “common task” of controlling and regulating nature capture remarkably the flavor of provincial efforts to study and control the environment. Provincial scientific societies and their communications with each other become sanctified, in

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Fedorovian terms, as liturgy, as an impassioned quest to transform nature from a temporary enemy into a permanent friend.73 Fedorov’s larger project, entailing the ultimate resurrection of past generations as a substitute for procreation, was of course his own—but it drew extensively on his deep knowledge of provincial life and culture.74 Once we have this provincial culture in mind, it is difficult not to see traces of it in unexpected places: in Vladimir Soloviev’s ecological ruminations in Vrag s vostoka, in Kliuchevskii’s fascination with the implications of geographical vegetation belts, in the efforts of the Silver Age intelligentsia (many of whom were from the provinces themselves) to reunite with the nation, not by “going to the people” like their populist predecessors but by pilgrimages to Lake Svetloiar or their “discovery” of personalities like Anna Shmidt, who, upon reading Soloviev, decided that she was the incarnation of the Divine Sophia.

11 The Idea of Province

I

n the newly unified German Reich in the last third of the nineteenth century, Germans filtered their sense of national belonging through the prism of the Heimat idea.1 That citizens of Germany should have a strong feeling of regional identity comes as no surprise. What is almost astonishing to the contemporary historian is a virtually identical and quite sophisticated “provincial project” in the supposedly hypercentralized Russian Empire—a project that, furthermore, was not merely an import or graft but deeply rooted in a decades-long process of self-examination and local management.2 In our journey through the forests, hills, and rivers of the Nizhnii Novgorod region, we discern the emerging outlines of a far deeper concept of “province” than the preliminary notions of locality, noncentrality, and administrative division with which we began. The provincial idea achieved expression through practice—through the statistical investigations, ethnographic studies, biographical sketches, museum catalogs, and so on that have formed the material of the preceding chapters. Still, it is possible to extract, from this dense fabric, a crystallization of underlying principles that, by accumulation and implication, begin to sketch an “idea of province.”

Province as Biography: Gatsiskii “Province” meant, first of all, what our purveyors themselves thought it meant; the self-conception of the provincial intelligentsia is worth taking seriously in our own definition of the province. The central, and most self-conscious, figure 228



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in this process of self-definition for Nizhnii Novgorod province was Aleksandr Gatsiskii, whose name has repeatedly graced these pages. We have seen him organizing statistical investigations of artisanal production, publishing guidebooks and local histories, promoting the provincial press, and proposing the principle of “province as total biography.” Elements of his vision have emerged at various junctures of the present study. On one occasion, Gatsiskii referred to himself as a “provincialist (for want of a better term).”3 The psychology of a provincialist was not an easy one, for it combined an acute sense of the extreme modesty of one’s life task (occasionally slipping into a full-blown inferiority complex), together with an equally intense dedication and immense capacity for hard work; moments of inspiration and glimpses of the potential transformative value of this daily labor formed an integral part of the provincial consciousness; an essential self-irony and, last but not least, a sense of humor completed the picture. Gatsiskii himself was not only the primary architect of the provincial idea in Nizhnii Novgorod; he was also its incarnation. His own intellectual biography provides a means of bringing the various fragments of the “idea of province” together in one place. In a humorous autobiographical “obituary” composed on the occasion of his own jubilee (marking thirty years of literary activity), Gatsiskii identified the date of his birth, 30 May 1838, as the year of the initial appearance of the first local periodical—the Nizhnii Novgorod Gubernskie vedomosti, the first year of meteorological observations in Nizhnii Novgorod, the year of the compilation of the Nizhnii Novgorod cadastral register, the year of the establishment of the observatory at Kazan, the six-hundred-year anniversary of the battle on the river Sit’ (1238) marking the Tatar invasion, and so forth, in declining order of relevance.4 Gatsiskii’s father, Serafim (1803–1878?), was a native of Gorodets—the most ancient town in Nizhnii Novgorod province. His origins, however, were Lithuanian: the name Gatsiskii, or Haciski, came from a land grant, Haciszcze Male, acquired by his forefather Hrehory Dachnowicz from Sigismund III Vasa at the close of the sixteenth century, as a reward for his service at Smolensk.5 Serafim Petrovich Dakhnovich-Gatsiskii was a physician, educated at Vilna University, where he was a member of the patriotic Polish Filaret Society; he worked in Ukraine and then, at the time of his son’s birth, in Riazan’, before returning to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1847. Gatsiskii’s mother, Henrietta, was the granddaughter of an émigré from revolutionary France who took refuge in the city of Revel under the name of Swoboda, which he acquired when he purchased a passport from a passing Czech. Gatsiskii was a Lutheran; his close associate, N. Ia. Agafonov, remarked on his friend’s “strict religious upbringing” by his Lutheran mother.6 Brought by his parents to Nizhnii Novgorod when he was nine, Gatsiskii showed early literary inclinations: his archive is full of childhood diaries and short stories.7 He studied at Kazan University, where, he notes in his memoir,

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the boisterous atmosphere made it difficult to learn anything; a brief stint at St. Petersburg University followed. There, he managed to get a short piece called “Notes of an Officer” published in the literary journal, Iskra. After only two years in the capital, however, and some efforts to pursue further studies in Moscow, Gatsiskii returned to Kazan and soon defended his dissertation on leather manufacture, after a summer’s travel to Berlin, Kissingen, Main-amRhein, Paris, Brussels, and Aachen to collect materials. Gatsiskii’s future was determined by the timing of his return to Nizhnii Novgorod: this was the fateful year 1861, when, as he put it, the “era of liberation . . . moved certain people to the forefront. . . . At a time of spiritual uplift, of general energy, strength, and hope, everyone who feels God’s spark in him abandons his reluctantly inhabited hole and gives himself, so far as his strengths and talents allow, to the common enthusiasm.”8 Gatsiskii immediately decided to devote the whole of his energies to the new challenges facing the Russian provinces. An initially unsalaried appointment as agent of special commissions in 1861 and membership in the provincial statistical committee in 1862 provided him with the necessary starting point for his professional life. For the next thirty years, he was and did everything possible in and around the guberniia in which he lived. The first phase of Gatsiskii’s career unfolded under the benign spirit of Governor Odintsov’s tenure. Until 1873, his progress up the Table of Ranks was routine and regular: promotion to Titular Councilor (rank 9) in 1866, Collegiate Assessor (8) in 1869, and Court Councilor (7) in 1873.9 In 1862, after refusing candidacy as a communal mediator, he was appointed to the provincial bureau for peasant affairs. Gatsiskii’s true vocation and passion, however, lay elsewhere: his first task, following in Mel’nikov’s footsteps, was something known at the time as “enlivening” the local Gubernskie vedomosti—that is, adding and augmenting an “unofficial” section to the official government announcements that formed the basis of this sole provincial newspaper. Gatsiskii socialized with well-known writers, drafted projects for a charitable and a legal society, headed the district school council, was elected to the Imperial Geographical Society, traveled to the ethnographic exhibition in Moscow (1867), defended the needy in court cases, became an honorable member of the Nizhnii Novgorod AllEstate Club (and participated, under its auspices, in organizing a cooperative society called “Security”), participated in the first Russian Archaeological Congress, was invited to join the Nizhnii Novgorod club for the encouragement of commerce, and attended the Eighth International Statistical Congress in St. Petersburg (1872). For a brief moment, in 1869, he became so engrossed in the practice of law that he dropped the statistical committee chairmanship, only to resume it a month later. Scattered through Gatsiskii’s publications in this first period we find the glimmer of his provincial idea. The introduction to volume 7 of Nizhegorodskii sbornik, for example (the organ of the Nizhnii Novgorod Statistical Committee,



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which Gatsiskii edited), proclaimed its purpose as “the investigation of all possible aspects of the popular life of the Nizhnii Novgorod Volga region in its past and its present, and, so to speak, from an eternal and all-embracing rather than a temporary perspective—by publishing primarily source materials for its study.”10 This theme appears over and over, for example: “our goal is the publication of all possible materials for the study of this particular locality”; “only having collected a mass of such materials will we be able to judge the physiognomy of the locality; only having collected a mass of such materials on all the different localities of our fatherland will we be able to judge the physiognomy of the country as a whole.”11 As we have repeatedly seen, Gatsiskii and his fellow travelers—local ethnographers, statisticians, archivists, historians—consciously and explicitly rejected theoretical formulations and advanced conceptualizations, instead conceiving of themselves primarily as collectors of scientific raw material. With a characteristic blend of modesty and ambition, Gatsiskii’s aim was the total description of the local environment in all its possible dimensions. This productive and relatively tranquil period of Gatsiskii’s existence came to an abrupt end in 1873, with the accession of the conservative governor Kutaisov. Gatsiskii’s heretofore regular progress up the Table of Ranks now ceased entirely, so that, in the humorous autobiography crafted in 1889, he ironically if not bitterly described himself as Court Councilor with enough service to qualify virtually as Privy (rank 3).12 Gatsiskii’s life in the 1873–1880 period was double edged. On one hand, it was marked by a constant bureaucratic struggle merely to maintain his existence and continue to push through the projects dear to him. On the other, the 1870s were the moment when the “provincial idea” erupted on the national scene. Both aspects are of interest here. The travails of a petty provincial bureaucrat become meaningful in the context of the present study because they illuminate a case in which local initiative came into direct conflict with the gubernatorial powers; in other words, it is a less felicitous example of the mechanisms explored in our discussion of local governance.13 The story was reproduced in a fictionalized account by V. G. Korolenko, thus enabling us to reconstruct the events. Gatsiskii’s first run-in with Kutaisov took place over the local literacy committee, in 1874; a year later, Gatsiskii was removed from the provincial school council. What is interesting about the whole scenario is that it shows how new local institutions were coming into their own and how their jurisdictions intersected. When it became clear that the government apparatus was no longer a comfortable home, someone like Gatsiskii could now take refuge in the zemstvo—as he indeed proceeded to do, being elected as a delegate in 1877 and becoming its head in 1878–1880. He was, in addition, elected to the city duma, ostensibly for four years, but actually until his death. In 1878, he resigned from the chairmanship of the statistical committee, a post he had held dear. This was after unsuccessfully trying to get independent financial support for the Nizhegorodskii sbornik from Baron Stieglitz, in 1876.

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The third force at play was a new local paper (as Korolenko tells the story) that, unlike Gatsiskii’s earlier “Swallow” (Lastochka—most likely a reference to the short-lived Volga-Kama Gazette), managed to hold on. Gatsiskii swallowed his pride and became a contributor but found himself increasingly squeezed out of power until the byline of a certain “Simeon Alebastrov” (in the fictionalized version) replaced his entirely. So what happened was a transfer of the base of operations from state service to locally based and funded institutions: the zemstvo, the city duma, and an independent local press (Korolenko seems to hint that the ostensibly independent organ actually became an instrument in the hands of the political right). The tension between Gatsiskii and the governor became a scandal of major proportions by the close of the decade. One of the main triggers was Gatsiskii’s composition, Nizhegorodka—an overview of the past and present of Nizhnii Novgorod. The first part, historical in nature, was published as a brochure in 1877 and considered for adoption as a school text. That proposal was rejected because of “decentralizing” tendencies. In 1878, Kutaisov entered into an extensive correspondence with the powers in St. Petersburg about Gatsiskii’s political unreliability, decentralizing ideas, association with radicals and revolutionaries, enlistment of suspect characters on his project of investigating kustar industry, and so on. Kutaisov’s letter to Minister of the Interior A. E. Timashev, dating from 15 October 1879, is a remarkable document, listing all of these faults and including an indictment of Gatsiskii’s character (for living “in sin” with Olga Aleksandrova, who was legally married to someone else).14 Gatsiskii in the meantime managed to mobilize influential forces in his own defense in St. Petersburg, and they included Mel’nikov, the historians K. M. Bestuzhev-Riumin and Bogdanovich, Kosachovskii, Semënov, Count Uvarov, and Senator Shumacher; his friends in Kazan organized an offer of the chair of statistics at the university for him. It is not clear whether or not it was this episode that finally brought Kutaisov low. In any case, local forces managed not only to squeeze him out but to replace Kutaisov with the local marshal of the nobility, S. S. Zybin, fresh from a post as president of the zemstvo. This marked the absolute high point of local initiative’s triumph over the central powers: never before had a governor been chosen from local society, having built his power base on local prestige, instead of being appointed from some other post in the central administration and completely unknown to the local public. It is true that Zybin did not last long, either, being replaced by a “normal” governor, Nikolai Bezak, within two months, and then by Nikolai Baranov in 1882 (both with a rank of General-Major). Parallel to this drama, Gatsiskii was becoming a nationally visible figure, precisely in his capacity as a defender of the provincial idea. If the textbook version of the ideological battles of the 1870s reduces to positivist populists on the left and positivist pan-Slavs on the right, the battle in the provinces was, instead, over a different overarching issue: the provincial press. The



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Volga-Kama Gazette, established at Kazan in 1873, became one of the major emblems of the struggle to emancipate journalism from government control and one of the earliest of an explosion of provincial newspapers that gathered steam in the 1880s, 1890s, and into the new century. Although the newspaper was run by Nikolai Agafonov, Gatsiskii was one of the most active of its founders and contributors. It lasted, it is true, only a year (as D. L. Mordovtsev sarcastically commented, “because a bird of paradise finds the Volga climate unsuitable”15). In that short space, however, Gatsiskii provided it with a series of correspondences from the Nizhnii Novgorod Volga region totaling twentytwo articles. As we have seen, Gatsiskii emerged on the national scene in his debate with Mordovtsev. In Smert’ provintsii ili net? he answered Mordovtsev’s modernization argument: “Along with the significance of the capitals, other, socalled provincial centers are beginning to have and hence will have and must have significance.”16 True progress consisted in the dissemination of intelligence as widely as possible; the center was only as strong as the regions that composed it. The future (real progress) lay in the provinces and in the steady development of a local press. Gatsiskii, while a patriot of Nizhnii Novgorod, was an even greater proponent of a more general idea of “province”: provintsiia had a good deal to contribute to and to counterpose that centralized culture that laid monopolistic claims to representing culture as a whole. The “provincial idea” of the 1870s was a secularization of Afanasii Shchapov’s regional coexistence and interaction in “love, unity, and agreement.” In 1881, Gatsiskii was forty-three years old. His entire adult life had unfolded in the atmosphere of the Great Reforms and the turbulent era that followed their implementation. The 1880s, as he admitted when he looked back in 1889, seemed to him stiff and boring by comparison. This statement echoed a common subjective sentiment about the 1880s, one that is affirmed in historians’ vision of the age as one of blind bureaucratization, russification, and counterreform. From the outside, however, and insofar as his own “provincial idea” is concerned, the 1880s look like a time of remarkably productive interaction between state support and local initiative, particularly in the spheres of culture and history. Shchapov’s geographic and colonizing theses, internalized through Russian universities, had found a much sounder and more resonant articulation in the lectures of V. O. Kliuchevskii. In Nizhnii Novgorod, we can discern a dual trend: on one hand, Gatsiskii’s life story becomes submerged in a larger, emerging provincial culture, involving many people and with access to increasingly sophisticated scientific tools, and a much more powerful machine of information gathering and control; on the other, his own idea of province, expressed through action and thought, acquires an engaging and sophisticated form—the meeting point of statistics and biography. In accounts of Gatsiskii’s creative biography, Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia usually appears casually, as a minor and fragmentary effort among his other writings. In terms of the “idea of province,” however, this small book, which appeared in 1887 (though it

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apparently was conceived more than a decade earlier), contains an original and influential formulation. Were one to capture the history of a province, the only way to do it would be to tell the stories of all the people who had ever lived in it. This infinite complexity and multiplicity, when taken to its logical conclusion, would end up where Gatsiskii had started: as a number, that is, with statistics. Gatsiskii’s constant efforts to integrate his own life story into the web of dates of which local history was woven are a symptom of this notion of the inscription of each individual into a larger story. By the time of the jubilee staged in honor of thirty years of his literary activity (from the first story published in 1859), Gatsiskii was a quaint and superannuated figure, emblematic of a bygone and slightly naïve age. The main lines of what remains of his biography are: a consolidation or normalization of Gatsiskii’s double base as head of the statistical commission (which post he regained in 1880) and as zemstvo and city duma activist; and a new position as president of the Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Archival Commission. The issues connected with these lines of activity are the emerging question of “administrative” versus zemstvo statistics, including the zemstvo sponsorship of the Dokuchaev expedition, in which Gatsiskii participated; and the elaboration of a local historical narrative with a much deeper base in documents than ever before, connected with the cultivation of a local identity through festivals, jubilees, and museums. The quasi-ironic dénouement came in 1889, when the celebration of Gatsiskii’s personal achievements coincided with the elaborate celebration of the birthday of the city’s founder, Georgii Vsevolodovich. Gatsiskii predicted the year of his death (aping Bismarck, who rather more conservatively foretold his own death for 1894) as 1918—the hundred-year anniversary of Alexander II’s and Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov’s birth and of Ivan Petrovich Kulibin’s death. But he made it only to 1893. Gatsiskii’s story as recounted here is emblematic of a certain type of person, basically, those individuals whose lives began and ended on the local level (whether or not they were born in the province to which they dedicated their lives). Many provinces had their Gatsiskiis—N. Ia. Agafonov in Kazan, D. D. Smyshliaev in Perm’, A. V. Smirnov in Vladimir, and so on.17 It takes only a glance at the “regional dictionaries” section of I. M. Kaufman’s Russian Biographical and Biobibliographical Dictionaries to ascertain that Gatsiskii’s Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia was neither unique nor remained without resonance.18 By the new century, similar figures had managed to compile biographies of local figures for virtually all regions of Russia; the project of a compendium of “the detailed biography of each and every person on the earth without exception” was well on its way.

Province as Local Economy In his debate with Mordovtsev, one of Gatsiskii’s main points had been that “provintsiia really exists” (deistvitel’no sushchestvuet); it was an idea firmly an-



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chored in reality.19 He rather helplessly made a short list of institutions that proved its existence: the local zemstvo, local administration, schools, local court, “and so on, and so on.”20 There is something to be said for this argument, taken literally, today as in Gatsiskii’s day: go and see for yourself. The list is not hard to amplify. We could simply cite, as general characteristics of Russian development in the second half of the nineteenth century, the growth and expansion of cities, the development of a commercial culture based on retail trade and exchange of services, the emergence of a variety of clubs and organizations that replaced the dvorianskoe sobranie (the only club of the pre-reform era), the richness of provincial theater life and the multiplicity of local newspapers and journals, or the appearance of national journals like Niva that catered to “middling” tastes in city and countryside. In Nizhnii Novgorod, local specifics included the influence of wealthy and respected merchants and, in a province with a particular intensity of religious life, a greater than usual social activism on the part of the local clergy. But a little bit of philosophy can be helpful as well. To the nineteenth-century reader, steeped in the philosophical polemics of the thick journals, “really exists” immediately evoked Hegel, popularized through Belinskii’s famous “reconciliation with reality.”21 Philosophy for Hegel was the understanding of existing reality (nalichnogo i deistvitel’nogo) precisely by means of penetration into the rational and reasonable, rather than an abstract or otherworldly exercise. Reconciliation with reality signified the unity of form and content, “for form in its concrete meaning is reason as cognition through concepts, while content is reason as the substantial essence of morality and natural existence; the conscious identity of both is the philosophical idea.”22 To say that the province “really exists” implied the confluence of form and content, the realization of the potential of province, the actualization of the “acorn” into an “oak with its powerful trunk, its thickly growing branches, its mass of leaves.”23 Indeed, Gatsiskii berated his opponent for being condescending, for underestimating his own (Gatsiskii’s) argument, and hence revealing a lesser degree of “penetration” than might be expected.24 But the “provincial idea” is also more than its nineteenth-century proponents thought it was. For us, a more useful philosophical notion for conceptualizing the dynamic commercial and cultural world of the Russian provinces belongs to the social philosopher Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), who, in his 1912 book Filosofiia khoziaistva, proposed that we see the world as household or as economy (mir kak khoziaistvo).25 Bulgakov spoke of khoziaistvo as “the struggle of humanity with the elemental forces of nature with the aim of protecting and widening life, conquering and humanizing nature, transforming it into a potential human organism.”26 Economy (oikonomia) was conceived as the working, interactive relation of man and nature. For Bulgakov, the essential economic functions were production and consumption: if, on one hand, humanity, as the transcendental collective subject of economy, consumes nature—the object—by eating it, then

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it also, through labor, humanizes and revives an inert and initially unfriendly natural landscape. The economic process itself—inspired by Sophia, the Divine Wisdom—becomes the creative essence of human existence. Science has a particular role in this process, as the contemplative moment to guide action. Using this notion, I propose that we can look at the province as household or local economy (provintsiia kak khoziaistvo, Provinz als Wirtschaft). Bulgakov’s idea can be productively applied to the province in several specific ways. First, “province as local economy” heuristically frames a particular style of management, characteristic above all of the zemstvo. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the government originally conceived of the zemstvo as a more effective tax-gathering system. On the other hand, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the zemstvo movement had counterposed its own conception of the zemstvo as an organ of local self-government. Present-day historians have tended to accept this second conception; thus, studies of the zemstvo deal with subjects such as “decentralization and local self-government,” “zemstvo liberalism,” and so on (fragments of an unrealized democracy). Upon further perusal of the minutes of zemstvo meetings, however, as well as the volumes of separate publications the zemstvos produced, I would suggest that these two ideas of the zemstvo exclude a crucial element: as zemstvo institutions took root (they gained the trust of the population only by about 1870), they became a means of managing the local economy, of running the life of the province (or, administratively speaking, the guberniia) as if it were a large household. The very notion of getting social (as opposed to administrative) services in exchange for taxes was of course a new idea in the nineteenth century. The means and agents for accomplishing the distribution of social goods were a matter for considerable experimentation. At roughly the same time as Bismarck’s famous (or infamous) state-implemented social insurance scheme, the Russian zemstvos were, in rather more improvised fashion, beginning to provide medical services, working to control cholera and syphilis epidemics (particularly frequent in Nizhnii Novgorod because of the fair), constructing elaborate plans for fire insurance, establishing pension plans, trying to conserve forests, and coping with emergencies of various sorts. Almost anything the zemstvo did can serve as an illustration of the “family” style of decision making. To take an arbitrary example, let us open the Sbornik postanovlenii of the Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo to a special meeting called in 1871 to deal with an outbreak of cholera. Clearly, there were no bureaucratic mechanisms in place to deal with such a crisis, so everything was done on a completely ad hoc basis. In the meeting, decisions were made to (1) grant a credit of twelve thousand rubles to the guberniia board specifically for the epidemic; (2) give the board a free hand with the accounts; (3) fix buildings that were needed in caring for the sick; (4) grant hospital workers a bonus of five hundred rubles; (5) thank F. A. Blinov, merchant of the first guild, for his gift of one thousand rubles; and (6) thank the guberniia board itself.27 This is all just routine business and maybe usual for local institutions; what is



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striking is the complete absence of abstract bureaucratic rules, the personal style of making decisions, a way of running local affairs in the way one would run a household. The example is just meant to give the flavor of local management: whether or not to try to get the Siberian railway to pass through Nizhnii (already being discussed in 1869!), how to organize smallpox inoculations, setting up a sanitation system—everything was decided in a similar fashion. In addition, Bulgakov’s concept helps to formulate an essential principle of provincial life, namely, the intrinsic power of khoziaistvo or economic life: on the local level, we can understand economy as politics. The transformation of material existence (byt) is politics or becomes politics. The capacity to organize the material details of one’s own daily existence, from road construction or water management to grain distribution, already constitutes a significant amount of control, particularly when it involves jurisdiction over finances, through an independent right to collect taxes. Furthermore, it is but one step from the management of such daily matters to discussion of them and hence to politics “proper.” As we have seen, the provincial mode of existence in the second half of the nineteenth century (that is, after emancipation) involved the formulation of concrete visions—of credit institutions, a national income tax, plans for railways, organization of museums, and so forth—and their articulation and discussion in zemstvo or organizational meetings. Even in the absence of official political parties, affiliations and preferences naturally emerged and played out in local elections (the case of the Lukoianov gentry is a case in point). Furthermore, khoziaistvo intrinsically has the potential to provide a concrete basis for more extensive organization. And, indeed, congresses, meetings, and umbrella organizations sprouted like mushrooms in the final third of the nineteenth century. Starting from highly specific discussions at the district level, coordination through correspondence and physical reunion followed. Physicians, lawyers, statisticians, agronomists, and others increasingly sought larger forums for mutual consultation. In the chapters here, the following organizations have played a role: National Statistical Congress, International Statistical Congress, Congress of Naturalists and Physicians, St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, Free Economic Society, Russian Technical Society, Imperial Geographical Society, Moscow Mathematical Society, Russian Entomological Society, World’s Fair, international photographic exhibitions, and more.28 This is of course not news; what is useful about the khoziaistvo concept is that it helps us to see how deeply anchored these organizations and congresses were in the intimate details of local problems and issues and hence how very solidly constructed they were, from the bottom up. Science (again in consonance with Bulgakov) here plays a special role: scientists were among the prime movers of an impassioned campaign to “protect and widen life,” to control and conquer nature and bring it within the sphere of human influence and activity. Soil science, meteorology, statistics, hydrology, agronomy, ethnography—all developed in close interaction with the practical

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tasks facing the Russian countryside in the post-reform period.29 If one of the motivations of the Dokuchaev study was to achieve a fair distribution of land by achieving a just relation of size of plot with land quality, another was the belief that, once we knew everything about every parcel of soil, we would know how to irrigate, fertilize, enrich, and cultivate in ways that would obviate the recurrent famines that were the bane of rural life.30 We would, to use Bulgakov’s terminology, “humanize” the earth, making it our friend instead of our enemy. Ecological concerns were also present: the retreat of the forests was a question that worried contemporaries, and “old-timers” constantly remarked on how much deeper and broader the forests had been in the first half of the century. The natural history museums, the Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, the statistical studies published in Nizhegorodskii sbornik, examined in preceding chapters, can all be seen as moments in this “life-widening” enterprise. Finally, khoziaistvo delineates an important area of consensus with the central government and thus turns into a positive mechanism of governance. The central government, both under Nicholas I and in the post-reform era, explicitly sought help from local institutions in administering space. The sphere they willingly designated, as the zemstvo legislation amply illustrates, was the economic-administrative (khoziaistvenno-administrativnaia). So long as local institutions remained within those carefully circumscribed boundaries, the government allowed them free rein. By following the letter of the law with painstaking accuracy, local institutions could gradually carve out for themselves a significant range of autonomy, sometimes far beyond that initially intended by the center. Khoziaistvo thus forms an important element of the “structures and visions” paradigm I have sought to trace: the visions themselves were articulated as khoziaistvo, as economic and administrative goals. Economic management, as zemstvo activists were the first to point out, is not ultimately sufficient. But it is impossible to understand how the Russian Empire functioned—or, for that matter, how cities in Russia today are run—if we underestimate this very essential mechanism and the considerable autonomy it entails.

Province and History The process of political and social self-definition of any group or unit often involves a rereading or recrafting of history, an extension of roots backward in time as a means of establishing legitimacy. Part of the provincial idea, again particularly from the 1870s, was the discovery or creation of a local past. As we have seen, the conscious construction of a local historical narrative began with Mel’nikov’s editorship of the Gubernskie vedomosti in the second half of the 1840s. Viktor Berdinskikh has amply documented the role of the provincial statistical committees in the emergence of a local historical consciousness, particularly in the reform era.31 The first and most comprehensive regional history, inspired by Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, belongs to Nikolai Khramtsovskii (1818–1890), who, as a representative of the Nizhnii Novgorod



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salt bureau, had traveled throughout the country overseeing the transport and sales of this crucial excise commodity. Writing in the wake of the Crimean War (which Khramtsovskii described as “the invasion by twenty peoples with the idea of enslaving Russia”), the historian combines avid patriotism with simple chronography and, most important, “modern” scientific history— drawing on a wealth of primary sources and careful documentation.32 His twovolume Brief Sketch of the History and a Description of Nizhnii Novgorod (the first volume is the history) was published in 1857–1859. Khramtsovskii constructs a special provincial chronology, intertwined with the national narrative but also independent of it.33 Thus, in his narrative, the first high point comes in 1350–1392, which—paradoxically because it was the height of Mongol rule— marks the only moment of Nizhnii Novgorod’s independence. It was during this period that Grand Prince Constantine moved his capital temporarily from Suzdal’ to Nizhnii Novgorod. Yet, the same time, the eve of the Battle of Kulikovo, marked Nizhnii Novgorod’s greatest destruction by the Mongols, in 1377 and again in 1378. Not only Tatars but also Mordvinians rose up and attacked; plague was an equally deadly enemy. Thus, the moment of political self-determination was a period of death and destruction.34 In the ensuing period, which Khramtsovskii identifies as the long era of Moscow’s supremacy (1392–1605), the historian nonetheless points out independent actions by the Nizhnii Novgorod princedom and its role as the crucial frontier outpost of the Muscovite state. It is also interesting to note that Khramtsovskii (like Mel’nikov in the vedomosti) integrates Mordvinian history seamlessly into his story by beginning with that early stage. The second high point in Khramtsovskii’s narrative comes in 1605–1613. This is by far the most passionate chapter. Here he promotes the thesis that, following its support of Vasilii Shuiskii, Nizhnii Novgorod, together with the Trinity St. Sergius Monastery, became one of only two immutable pillars of support for Moscow.35 His hero is Liapunov (who, according to Khramtsovskii, was brave and loyal but merely tactless, whereas Zarutskii and Trubetskoi lacked more essential qualities), while key local figures are Theodosius, archimandrite of the Pecherskii Monastery; Savva, archpriest of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration; the voevoda Aliabiev and the d’iak Semënov. For Khramtsovskii, this was Nizhnii Novgorod’s moment in Russian and in world history: “The same happened in Nizhnii Novgorod as 88 years earlier in Sweden and in the second half [sic] of the fifteenth century in France, only with the difference that the individual [Minin] whose call Nizhnii-Novgorodians answered to rise up and save Moscow and Rus’ was not high-born like Gustav Vasa, and was not acting out of sheer unthinking enthusiasm like Joan of Arc.”36 Khramtsovskii proceeds to describe the street fighting by the Nizhnii Novgorod troops in Moscow, and then the final fourteen-hour battle, in fantastic detail, attributing the triumph to Prince Pozharskii. “And thus concluded this great event,—this is how the idea originating in Nizhnii Novgorod was finally realized!”37

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The second major historiographical effort in Nizhnii Novgorod belongs to the omnipresent Gatsiskii. Gatsiskii’s historical works include an edition of the Nizhnii Novgorod chronicle (a juxtaposition of several medieval chronicles under the title The Nizhnii Novgorod Chronicler), a history of the Nizhnii Novgorod theater, an investigation of the African slave trade on the Black Sea in the medieval period, and a plethora of shorter pieces.38 Yet, from the perspective of local history, his most interesting study is the one masquerading as a local guidebook: the historical chapter in the 1877 edition of Nizhegorodka. That chapter, titled “Before: An Historical Sketch” (“Prezhde [istoricheskii ocherk]”) is, at least in the opening sections, flowingly and engagingly written and presents a vision of history—and, arguably, even the fragments of a political theory—that organizes the historical data. In contrast to Khramtsovskii, whose model was Karamzin, Gatsiskii appeals to the textbook historian Dmitrii Ilovaiskii and the popular historian Zabelin. His reference points are consistently European—the Urals are referred to as “our Alps,” while the reconstruction of the city is termed “Haussmannesque.”39 In the tradition of the chronicles, Gatsiskii inscribes his history of Nizhnii Novgorod in the history of Russia as a whole. The classic geographical stereotype emerges clearly: slowflowing rivers, basic uniformity and expansiveness of the landscape (from Kiev to the Pacific Ocean), ornamented by golden cupolas and emanating quiet and calm. The two overlords of the Russian landscape were sun and frost. For Gatsiskii, Russian social organization could be divided into two types: the steppe, typical of south Russia and Malorossiia, with its rich agriculture and white daub huts, and the forests to the north, where inhabitants built proper cottages (izby). In the steppe, borders and frontiers were fluid, and it was nearly impossible to establish a firm and secure defense against invaders. For that reason, “live” borders were sometimes constructed—of people who spent their lives in military service. The forests, where it was always easy to hide, were more stable. If the careful, industrious, political proprietor was typical of the forests, the steppes were the land of the brave warrior and epic hero (bogatyr’). Steppe dwellers were independent and had no need of each other, while in the forests people were mutually dependent and naturally formed unions and associations. The structure of the rivers also followed this rule, being much more interwoven and interdependent in the north. Moving from the general picture to the specific, Gatsiskii presents a very particular image of the Nizhnii Novgorod region. The intersection of the Volga and Oka, not far from the Bulgar kingdom on the Volga, was characterized by that ethnic mix—Slavic, Ves’, Mer’, Muromy, Meshchery—that was given the name Great Russian (velikorusskii). The economy was essentially artisanal, with working carpenters, masons, smiths, leatherworkers, weavers, spade makers, shoemakers, millers, peddlers (korobeiniki or sunduchniki), horticulturalists, and so on. “In a word,” Gatsiskii notes, “we see here, among the Russian Slavs, something like a particular artisanal and industrial school, where anyone with



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capable hands could learn anything at all.”40 A corollary of this type of economic activity was the emergence of commercial exchange, and thus the population was naturally nomadic in the sense of constantly seeking work outside the village, a practice known as ukhod (the figures adduced for the time of writing are one hundred thousand such nomadic workers every year). Following this characterization to the next step, Gatsiskii asserts that this mode of life made the local population smarter than in other places, and more inclined to order and regulation; the conquests of the Suzdal’ region were the victory of work, industry, and commerce. Here was Russia’s true heartland. In microcosm, it reflected the variety of landscape and industry of the country as a whole.41 Gatsiskii’s tale of necessity draws upon the same basic sources as Khramtsovskii’s, but the emphases are different. Here, the point of departure (which Khramtsovskii downplays) is the founding of the city by Georgii Vsevolodovich—the foundation stone, Gatsiskii comments, of an expansion that would eventually reach the khanate of Khokand.42 The chronology is very similar, with the same attention to the late destruction by the Mongols and the relatively brief period of independence (1350–1392), but with the period of Moscow explicitly labeled “subservience [podchinenie] to Moscow.” The collapse of Blagoveshchenskii Monastery, the construction of the kremlin (1508), the struggle against Tatars, Bulgars, and Mordvinans are all duly recounted. The collapse of the Pecherskii Monastery in 1597 is depicted as an apocalyptic event.43 The Time of Troubles, however, receives only a few pages (on the grounds that it was too well known), and then Gatsiskii indulges in his favorite mode of recounting history—through legends and folk stories. Thus, we learn some of the more dramatic stories: about Mikhail Fedorovich’s bride, Maria Khlopova; tales of the Razin uprising and the first mention of the Old Believers (whereupon Gatsiskii claims that Semënov district was populated virtually entirely by Old Believers, with Balakhna, Gorbatov, and Kniaginin having almost as many); tales of Pitirim and conversion of the Volga peoples.44 Finally, Gatsiskii arrives at the late eighteenth century, when he has a chance to tell, in graphic detail, the story of Osokina (devoting many more pages to it than to the Time of Troubles), followed by the lovely story of the “False Pugachev,” the visit of Emperor Paul, and tales of the Nizhnii Novgorod theater, originally the property of Prince Shakhovskoi.45 Upon arriving in the nineteenth century, we read about the Moscow circles (especially around Karamzin) that emerged in the 1812 evacuation and Speranskii’s brief exile, en route, as it eventually turned out, to Perm’. The next excellent and very long story—totally apocryphal and doubtless having no real relation to the origin of the name—is that of how Kunavino came about: a father and son competing for the attentions for an exquisitely beautiful enchantress, and the ultimate deaths of all four protagonists (including the wife), as they turned into bloody lights floating on the river. The fair and commercial activity get their fair share at the end. Gatsiskii’s story, then, is quite different from Khramtsovskii’s. Instead

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of weaving a coherent chronology in the tradition of national chronicles, Nizhegorodka draws heavily on popular culture—folk tales and legends—to craft a vivid local narrative. These stories and anecdotes, in the hands of the modern nineteenth-century reader of the guidebook (or, if the censors had not intervened, the student in the local school), could easily become the stuff of local pride and local consciousness, creating a quiltlike fabric of regional identification. The last two paragraphs are brave indeed, characterizing the unifying thread of Nizhnii Novgorod history as the cry, “SOS . . . Robbery! [Karaul . . . Grabiat!]”: “If it wasn’t the Mordvinians stealing, then it was the Russian colonizers, the Novgorod river-pirates, or the Tatars; it was either the conflicts of the Nizhnii Novgorod princes, or the intervening hand of Moscow, or the wild freedoms of the Time of Troubles, or Razin and his gang cruising up the Volga, or Pugachev striking fear into the hearts of the peaceful population, or Moscow illuminating with its 1812 fire everything that tied it to the Nizhnii Novgorod lands.”46 This is a truly provincial perspective, in which Moscow’s assertion of power is equated with uprisings by the Mordvinians or by Pugachev; there is no apologia for central power here, and the ultimate good becomes “the relative quiet of the peaceful resident.” Gatsiskii adduces a list of forty-nine sources, including chronicles, national histories, monographic studies, and newspaper articles. Eventually, he compiled his own major source by publishing four essential redactions of the Nizhnii Novgorod chronicle and a parallel translation into modern Russian. In the best tradition of positivist archival work, Nizhegorodskii letopisets (published in book form in 1886 and, before that, serially in the Gubernskie vedomosti) allows the educated reader to make an independent assessment of the events so colorfully described by the two historians. The intention of the author was to ensure the accessibility and prominence of the local past, so that the documents would not end up, as they had following the first historiographical committee set up in 1850, lost in the papers of the provincial food supply commission.47 The publication was supposed to be a sign of progress and the permanent rather than temporary revivification of the province: “Those who know what was written in the early 1870s in the Volga-Kama Gazette concerning our wandering intelligentsia in the provinces will remember the mass of facts that was supposed to prove the inertia of the provinces in part because suddenly the provinces, as a result of the individual forces that were accidentally present, would rouse themselves and then equally suddenly subside.”48 Unquestionably, however, the main instrument for the collective discovery of a local past became the provincial archival commissions, whose Nizhnii Novgorod branch, as we have seen, was founded in 1887. It is important to note that the founding of the commissions coincided with a general revival of historical interest, or even passion, throughout Russia. The popular historical journals Russkii arkhiv and Russkaia starina began publication in 1863 and 1870, respectively. The latter’s circulation reached thirty-five hundred in its



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second year and six thousand thereafter. Adolf Marks’s illustrated weekly, Niva, with a circulation of twenty thousand in the 1870s, published historical articles in abundance, alongside travelogues, exotic adventure stories, and poetry. Thick journals like Russkaia mysl’ and Vestnik Evropy provided a forum for serious historical researches, including doctoral dissertations. Dmitrii Ilovaiskii’s Russian history textbook imprinted its narrative on the minds of several generations of schoolchildren from its first publication in 1860, while Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s famous lectures at Moscow University attracted crowds of fascinated students through the 1880s. The collected works of the popular historical novelist Mikhail Zagoskin (1789–1852) were published in seven volumes in 1889, to the delight of children and adults, and the list continues. In this context, an appreciation of the importance of conserving, publishing, and interpreting historical documents, on the local level as well, came naturally. The NGUAK, with its regularly published proceedings, soon became the focus of a flurry of archaeological and historical researches and expeditions. From the beginning, the NGUAK was distinguished by a heightened consciousness of historical significance and commemoration. By the time the commission convened for the first time, none other than A. S. Gatsiskii had already drawn up a “historical note” documenting the founding of the NGUAK.49 As mentioned previously, the annual meeting was always scheduled for 22 October—the carefully determined date of Nizhnii Novgorod’s moment of glory, when their forces occupied Kitai Gorod in 1612. There were two central events around which Nizhnii Novgorodians organized their past. Instead of choosing to focus on the Pecherskii Monastery—a distant outpost established by the monk Dionysius—or on the ancient town of Gorodets, they singled out the moment when the city itself was founded, by the hero, Prince Georgii Vsevolodovich. True to the principle of “personal” history, the archival commission chose to celebrate the inception of Nizhnii Novgorod by commemorating not the foundation itself but the seven-hundredth anniversary of its founder’s birth, which happened to fall in 1889. Indulging in the latenineteenth-century middle-class fondness for festivals and jubilees, they staged an elaborate celebration that included speeches, readings, and the composition of a good deal of original poetry and even music (one poem was set to a score by Balakirev). The culminating epic poem from this celebration presents Prince Georgii as a sort of miniature Peter the Great, standing at the intersection of the Volga and Oka in a completely obvious imitation of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman: Peredo mnoi schastlivoe stechen’e Before me the happy confluence Dvukh russkikh mnogovodnykh Of two Russian full-watered   rek . . .   rivers . . . Dosel’ ikh vazhnogo znachen’ia Til now their vital importance Ne ponial russkii chelovek! . . . Was not understood by Russians! . . . Bez zhertv naprasnykh i bez boia Without empty sacrifices and wars

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Ia etot ugol za soboiu, Za Rus’iu, ukrepit’ mogu,— I budet etot kholm pribrezhnyi Oplotom ot mordvy miatezhnoi, Otporom russkomu vragu.50

I can take this corner For myself and for Russia— And this hilly bank Will defend against rebellious Mordvinians And repel Russia’s enemies.

The other focus of local history and local pride was, of course, Nizhnii Novgorod’s role in the expulsion of the Poles during the Time of Troubles. The celebrations of Georgii Vsevolodovich had barely subsided when, twentythree years in advance, the provincial archival commissions began to plan a monumental celebration of the three-hundred-year anniversary of the 1612 defense of Moscow. The jubilee (the atmosphere surrounding it is reminiscent of Robert Musil’s tale of preparations for the great Austro-Hungarian jubilee of 1918) was intended to symbolize “brotherly unity as the ideal of national and tribal relations.” Gatsiskii’s vision of the celebration was grandiose indeed: “Without exaggeration, we can be quite sure that a time will come when humanity will be firmly ruled by a colossal organized society, whether it is called a Universal World League or something else—that doesn’t matter. In the meantime we have at our disposal historical jubilees, as a means for clarifying historical facts and their meaning, and for ‘arousing positive feelings.’”51 The jubilee would be a first sketch of the potential world of universal peace.52 Concretely, Gatsiskii proposed that the commission immediately begin collecting funds for this important event, plan an extensive publication of historical documents to be released in 1912 along with popular brochures and histories, and organize pilgrimages in 1911–1912 to key sites of the Time of Troubles. Efforts were to be coordinated with other towns that had participated in the liberation, and Governor Baranov, by acting immediately, would forever associate his august name with this worthy cause. The date would conveniently coincide with the centenary of Napoleon’s expulsion from Russia, thus bringing Nizhnii Novgorod into the national forefront and even sending a message to the French, who could celebrate their own liberation from Napoleon—a direct result of the Russian victory. Richard Wortman has noted that, until the late nineteenth century, “Russian imperial ceremony and symbolism fastidiously ignored the Muscovite past and especially the origins of the dynasty, surrounded as they were by sordid intrigues for popular support.”53 It was precisely the popular aspect that the provincial archival commission wished to emphasize. Although many current (as of 1889) members would no longer be present in 1912, “it is with all the more passion that we must lay the groundwork for the people of 1912 for an appropriate homage to the greatest, most glorious era of Russian history in 1612, when the salvation of the land, through strong ‘council and unity,’” fell to “the clean half of the land, the last people of the Moscow state, indigenous, fundamental people (Soloviev),” embodied in “the orphaned people, for whom all other classes and estates at this point were merely helpers (Zabelin).”54 The



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simple people, undamaged by intrigue and power struggles, had taken history into their own hands in 1612; the jubilee would acknowledge their victory. Naturally, the near quarter-century interval wrought some changes in the commission’s program, and, by 1912, different emphases emerged. When concrete preparations began in earnest, in 1899, the commission decided to downgrade the elaborate program. The celebration, they concluded, ought to be a national one, with its center in Moscow; a local festival would be held in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1911, marking the inception of the popular campaign.55 The projected monument to Minin and Pozharskii in Nizhnii Novgorod, for which the local merchantry had begun raising funds as early as 1865, was discussed, but the decision was made to erect a simple obelisk instead.56 Of the original plans, the portion that was realized in full was the publication project: in 1912, the NGUAK published a special tercentenary volume (volume 9 of the Deistviia) dedicated to the history of the Nizhnii Novgorod movement in the Time of Troubles and the zemstvo defense of 1611–1612. Drawing on a vast research project headed originally by Sergei Platonov (who became a member of the NGUAK in the process) and that involved sending researchers—among them the young M. A. Polievktov—to Russian and Swedish archives to collect materials, the volume contains 182 original documents and 41 literary sources.57 These include interesting correspondence among various towns involved in the movement, Polish decrees, foreigners’ descriptions of their travels during this period, and much more. Platonov himself—by then the author of the standard high school Russian history textbook—came to Nizhnii Novgorod for the 1911 festivities and delivered an address on the Time of Troubles to the ceremonial meeting of the NGUAK. Doubtless appealing to the current sensibility of his listeners, Platonov described the Nizhnii Novgorod movement as “the brightest moment of Russian local initiative [zemskaia samodeiatel’nost’].”58 In this particular version of events, Platonov suggested that the Riazan’ voevoda Prokopii Liapunov, while initially successful in mobilizing the gentry to march on Moscow, had seen his support evaporate relatively quickly. Wisely, Patriarch Hermogen had then appealed to the “last people” (again using Soloviev’s characterization). Inspired by the monk Grigorii’s Nizhnii Novgorod dream, in which God, in brilliantly white garments, descended to earth and exhorted the people to prayer and fasting to achieve salvation from bad times, Nizhnii Novgorodians rallied around Minin to plan their march on Moscow. Platonov ascribes the success of the movement to three factors: first, the highly specific and well-articulated strategy of Minin and Pozharskii; second, the expedition’s competence in economic (khoziaistvennye) matters, as a result of which the troops were brilliantly clothed and fed; third, the ability to recruit from other cities and thus to metamorphose into an allzemstvo, national movement. The Nizhnii Novgorodians “did not appropriate the leadership of the whole zemstvo task, but created a zemstvo council [zemskii sobor] at the first possible opportunity.” At the same time, they “created a

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concrete zemstvo program and Nizhnii Novgorod became the zemstvo center.” This is how they were able to mobilize the forces of society as a whole.59 Sergei Platonov played a similar role in the national festivities that followed soon on the heels of the local celebrations: the Romanov dynasty celebrated its three-hundred-year anniversary in 1913 (the Romanov accession had brought the Time of Troubles to its official end). In “numerous crowded lecture halls,” Platonov “extolled [the election of Mikhail Romanov] as the work of ‘the entire land’ [vsia zemlia], an inspiring feat of political organization accomplished by the people themselves.”60 In a way, Platonov was drawing to its logical national conclusion the ideas promulgated in the Nizhnii Novgorod jubilee: the national celebration of the tercentenary crowned and capped the provincial celebration of history. It is important to note that Platonov appeared to the public here less as “a foremost authority on the seventeenth century,” as Wortman calls him, than as an already known textbook author and public figure.61 While some historians have seen the early-twentieth-century fascination with the Muscovite past as regressive and politically nostalgic, the preceding examination of the broadbased archival and historical movement suggests a more positive interpretation. After several decades of discovering the past through local archives and popular history, Russians found it only natural to celebrate their present by remembering the events of the seventeenth century. When Gatsiskii initially introduced the project of the 1912 celebration at an apparently absurdly early date, he tried to deflect the amused smiles of some of his colleagues by invoking the city duma (in whose meeting rooms the provincial archival commission had convened), which frequently made plans fifty or even a hundred years in advance—for example, constructing stone houses on certain streets. The realization of some key elements of his program came even later, after twists of fate that he could not have imagined. In 2005, Russia celebrated, for the first time, a new “Day of National Unity” on 4 November (22 October on the old calendar)—a date chosen for its proximity to 7 November so as not to disrupt the by-now traditional long weekend marking the October Revolution.62 On 4 November, Patriarch Alexei II was in Nizhnii Novgorod to bless the newly unveiled monument to Minin and Pozharskii—a replica of the Martos sculpture on Red Square created by Zurab Tsereteli. The monument—the dream of the enterprising local merchantry in 1865—is supposed to symbolize the return to Nizhnii Novgorod of the leaders of the popular rising of 1612.63 By the same token, it might—or so one would hope—point to the return of a more interactive relation between center and locality.  Provincial culture meant more than just the fact that cities outside St. Petersburg and Moscow had theaters, too, or that their residents read books and newspapers. Instead, we can see that there were elements of a cultural system within which “provintsiia” lived and of which denizens of the capitals slowly became aware as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The “provincial idea” as I have



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defined it was about individual personalities (like Gatsiskii’s), about life stories that began and ended on the local level and that do not fit very comfortably into standard notions of a privileged elite on one hand and an impoverished peasantry on the other. The “provincial idea” was also about a common task and a common self-consciousness, about an enthusiastic effort to move in to manage the local economy, to perform the tasks of providing social insurance, medicine, sanitation, education, and culture that previously were supposed to be the domain of the landlords (pomeshchiki). The khoziaistvo of the pomeshchik, in other words, was replaced by the khoziaistvo of the zemstvo, club, scientific society, and so forth. Provintsiia was a concept with shifting boundaries: sometimes it coincided with the local administrative unit, the guberniia; sometimes it referred to the geographical region (in the case of Nizhnii Novgorod, Povolzh’e); more elusively, it could also be used to refer to a larger spiritual entity that united provincial people from all over Russia. But for us, looking back into the world of a previous age, I would suggest that “province” has yet another value. Historians have, over the years, developed a virtually automatic tendency to see phenomena such as “liberalism,” “democracy,” “urbanization,” “modernization” (also “secularization”), and (maybe the most confusing of all), the “middle class” as a sort of package deal in which all these elements must come together—or, if they don’t (which happens with remarkable frequency), we need to explain why they don’t. So the goal here has been to focus on “decoupling” or “delinking.” Perhaps, for example, in the search, dnem s ognem so to speak, for a middle class in Russia, historians—because they are drawn, as by a magnet, to cities, entrepreneurs, and industry—have forgotten about a significant stratum (which has appeared here as provintsiia) whose existence has much more to do with agrarian reforms, state and local tax policies, relation to the natural environment, and religion.64 I do not mean to suggest that everyone should drop their current focus and study provintsiia instead. But questions of how the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century worked—in this case, the provinces in their relation to the center and to each other—can be as engaging as the more usual concern with why there was ultimately a revolution. Let me content myself for now by proposing that provintsiia and khoziaistvo (or oikonomia) are at least as useful categories for the study of nineteenth-century Russian society as “class,” “soslovie,” and “civil society.”  The peculiarities of a location, or lived space, are always of interest to its inhabitants. It is possible to become fascinated by intrinsic details of topographical layout, domestic architecture, the ebb and flow of streams, minor adjustments in property boundaries, a neighbor’s family dramas, and issues of insurance legislation or local school reform. At times, the realities of lived experience can seem divorced from grand historical narratives, which fade into irrelevance when confronted with the diversity and multiplicity of daily life. “Local color”

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is a constant of human existence and inevitably poses a challenge to any efforts to schematize or reduce to a common denominator. Fascination with the local for its own sake, the effort to resurrect the details of the local heritage, forms the basis for the discipline—sometimes academic and sometimes amateur—of local history, kraevedenie, Landeskunde. Yet there are also moments when the studied and systematic neglect of local and regional diversity can result in a serious distortion of the larger historical narrative itself. In the nineteenth century, the powerful story of the aggrandizement of the central state advanced by Sergei Soloviev triumphed over competing narratives of regional coexistence and a multiplicity of centers of power. In the twentieth century, the continued respect for the nation-state on one hand, and the universalizing model of Marxist-Leninist historiography on the other, eclipsed or even obliterated local and regional factors. The motivation underlying this book was my sense of a fundamental malady of the historiography. I believe that, in the “normal” process of historical inquiry, historians variously subsume, sublimate, question, integrate their subjective image or feeling for lived local experience into their research. The conscious isolation of the province from historical studies (total relegation to kraevedenie) and the prevalence of abstract schemas and even “laws” of historical development, however, in the case of Russia and the Soviet Union, resulted in the nearly complete absence of such a tactile element in the crafting of history. The present study has been an effort to fill this gap not merely by embroidering with “local color” but by proposing ways in which a provincial vantage point might challenge certain assumptions about Russian economy, society, governance, and culture. Only occasionally do societies undergo such an extreme and dramatic transformation—with a concomitant reevaluation of the construction of the past—as Russia has experienced since 1991. The questions we ask of the nineteenth century have changed radically. I hope to have provided some elements of new answers. How can we describe the fundamental economic and social structures of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century? Twenty years ago, anyone would have immediately responded approximately thus: Russia was a predominantly agrarian society with an unusually low level of urbanization and its countryside was dominated by landlords and peasants, manor estates, and a generally absent or at least politically impotent middle class; there was change and restructuring following the Great Reforms of the 1860s, but the Russian economy remained largely backward in comparison with that of Western Europe. In this book, we have seen, in Nizhnii Novgorod province, a natural environment in constant slow flux and a mobile, adaptable approach to agriculture and small-scale artisanal production. Large estates predominated in the northwestern parts of the province, while the fertile black-soil region was characterized not by latifundia but by petty landholding; state lands in the



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north were completely devoid of agricultural activity and economic activity was concentrated on forest products of various sorts. Land was rapidly changing hands, sometimes in favor of peasants but, in the northern regions, mostly going to prosperous merchants and traders. Factory-type “proto-industrial” enterprises functioned successfully in many areas but were only occasionally located in officially designated cities. Indeed, the largest estates, most notably Sheremetev’s, were also the most significant centers of industry, and there was a correspondingly stratified urban social structure, with poor workers, middling artisans, and successful managers peopling the landscape in places like Pavlovo or Bol’shoe Murashkino—both of which were labeled “villages” in state statistics. Individuals of gentry origin like the journalist Anna Shmidt, or of peasant origin like the innkeeper Petr Bankal’skii, found a place for themselves in the professional and commercial buzz of the provincial capital. How was Russia governed? Again, not so long ago, the answer would have been presented with great clarity: the Russian Empire was a highly centralized, expansionist state, verging on the despotic, with a total absence of democratic institutions and little or no room for initiative from below. The research presented here indicates a more complicated structure and sometimes even the opposite. In the post-reform era and even in the 1840s, local governance proceeded by a frequently productive interaction between central initiative and local response. Relatively vague legislation provided room for interpretation that local actors seized upon with zeal in order to manage their collective “household” to their own tune. Although provincial inhabitants had no national elections in which to vote, they had considerable control over local management, including the key areas of education and medicine. In some respects, Russia was remarkably decentralized. While cadastral mapping has in most societies fallen in the domain of the central state, the Russian cadaster as it finally emerged in the late nineteenth century was the product of a concerted joint initiative on the part of local institutions and “high science.” In this important domain of taxation and “legibility,” initiative belonged firmly to local actors. I do not mean, of course, that there were not multiple problems and frustrations, including efforts by the state to co-opt local activity. But I propose that on the whole it was a viable system. Finally, how did Russians think about themselves? There can be no uniform answer to this question. But I have sought to introduce the notion of “province” as an important category of identity or self-consciousness. Significant numbers of Russians in the Nizhnii Novgorod region, as throughout the empire, dedicated considerable energies to the articulation of a local culture rooted in the provincial press, natural history museums, archival organization, jubilee celebrations, and the construction of a specifically local historical narrative. The idea of province as it emerged by the close of the nineteenth century confirmed rather than contradicted the national idea and represented a relatively healthy

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relation of center and region. Provincial actors were proud to present their region in St. Petersburg (for the Romanov tercentenary) and abroad (at international fairs and congresses). Readers may object that I have taken Nizhnii Novgorod—which is, after all, a very special province—too seriously and have mistaken the part for the whole. I would respond that I have wanted to present a “model” or example for the investigation of Russian regions. I have intentionally formulated my questions for research in terms that might be applied, eventually, to any other region. They will all be distinct. But I hope that, once we study Russia in this way, including provinces of the metropole as well as borderlands, we might put the constituent parts back together. They will ultimately resolve into a picture of Russia far different from the one we are accustomed to seeing through a centralized, horizontally oriented historiography. In this sense, this book represents a beginning as much as an end.

NOTES

Preface 1. See C. Evtuhov, The Cross & the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, 1997). 2. Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Bloomington, IN, 2004); Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976).

Chapter 1. Imagining the Russian Provinces 1. N. K. Piksanov, Oblastnye kul’turnye gnezda (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928). 2. Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, s.v. “Piksanov” (Moscow, 1934), 8:634. 3. The contracts, or ustavnye gramoty, established the individual criteria for redemption payments on the land that the peasant communes received as part of the emancipation settlement. Health care and education were supposed to be the responsibility of the landlords before the reform; their implementation devolved almost entirely upon the zemstvos after emancipation. 4. Also distinguished, one might say, by the variety of interests and especially the focus on social history and ethnography—matters in fact much less present in official archives, with their administrative bias. 5. I thank my colleague John McNeill for the apt analogy of the physician’s scope. 6. See the seminal article by Alain Blum and Maurizio Gribaudi, “Des catégories aux liens individuels: l’analyse statistique de l’espace social,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 6 (November–December 1990): 1365–1402. As the authors caution, “The categories of statistical discourse thus become the object of analysis, as texts in which the ideological configurations that produced them are inscribed. However, such a perspective seems temporarily unable to return to the objects that invoked it in the first place, because the analysis of these texts directs our attention above all to those who produced them: administrators, entrepreneurs and scholars who held the keys in their hands. From this moment, other social groups once again disappear from the stage, once more rendered opaque by a history that passes them by.” Ibid., 1366. It is interesting to note that Blum and Gribaudi’s substantive conclusions, based on data regarding marriage and professional mobility, bring to light a picture of nineteenth-century French society more similar to the one presented here for Russia than we are accustomed to expect: “The cliché of an urban world devouring the rural wears thin, giving way to a more precise image that acknowledges the active role of the province, of the countryside, in the construction and evolution of nineteenth-century society.” Ibid., 1393. In part, this means that artisanal production and industry existed side by side in provincial France, much as they did in provincial Russia. 7. For Italy, Silvana Patriarca also notes the burgeoning of local patriotism precisely in connection with the growing sophistication of local statistics, even though the latter were meant 251

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to, and in some ways did, contribute to the consolidation of the national state. Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 1996), 221–23. 8. Karl Schlögel, “Volzhskie gastroli orkestra Kusevitskogo: nekotorye razmyshleniia ob otnoshenii stolitsy i provintsii na zakate Rossiiskoi Imperii,” paper presented at the conference Kul’tury gorodov rossiiskoi imperii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov [Cultures of the Russian City], Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, June 2004. Schlögel makes the further provocative point that, while history traditionally tends to privilege time (chronology) over space, attention to the latter can in fact become a means of avoiding teleology: “The description of place proceeds by juxtaposition rather than sequence. . . . Spaces are not teleological, they do not follow any teleology.” Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich, 2003), 49. The apprehension of space occurs most productively through juxtaposition, rather than a successive unfolding over time. 9. This tendency is finally being controverted by some recent research, including that of Mark Bassin (e.g., “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50:1 [spring 1991]: 1–17; and “Turner, Soloviev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces,” Journal of Modern History 65 [September 1993]: 473–511); and Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy (Ithaca, 2006). See also Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb, IL, 2010). 10. See Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago, 1999); and the work of Fernand Braudel, whose globalized perspective is most evident in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme: XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1979), though I would argue that it characterizes La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéan à l’époque de Philippe II, 3 vols. (Paris, 1949) as well. My approach echoes that of Blum and Gribaudi, who propose that the actual practice of individual connections and interactions, rather than a priori categories—usually, presuming groups and collectivities—can become the focus of historians’ attention. Blum and Gribaudi, “Des catégories aux liens individuels,” 1398. 11. The provincial intelligentsia in Nizhnii Novgorod most frequently referred to their area as nizhegorodskoe povolzh’e—or the Nizhnii Novgorod–Volga region. 12. “In a complex system . . . the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be fully understood simply by analyzing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organization. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties.” Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Post-Modernism (London, 1998), viii–ix. 13. Carsten Goehrke, “Zum Problem des Regionalismus in der russischen Geschichte. Vorüberlegungen für eine künftige Untersuchung,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 25 (1978): 75–107. 14. For a thorough review of the literature, although already a bit out of date because of the field’s rapid growth, see Guido Hausmann, “Der zweite Frühlung der Regionalgeschichte in Rußland. Der Wolgaraum in der aktuellen Forschung,” in Regionalgeschichte in Europa: Methoden und Erträge der Forschung zum 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2000). See also the discussion by Susan Smith-Peter, “How to Write a Region: Local and Regional Historiography,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5:3 (summer 2004): 527–42. 15. A few prominent examples of this significant literature are Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, IN, 1997); Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, IN, 2002); Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, IL, 1996); Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal, 2002). 16. Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia



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(Ithaca, 2001); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004). 17. To cite, again, just a couple of examples, see C. Evtuhov et al., Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Visions of the Russian Empire (Moscow, 1997); and Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolii Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington, IN, 2007). 18. Guido Hausmann, ed., Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Selbstverwaltung, Assoziierung und Geselligkeit in den Städten des ausgehenden Zarenreiches (Göttingen, 2002); Lutz Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung: die Wolgastädte Kazan’ und Saratov (1870–1914) (Cologne, 2004). See also A. S. Tumanova, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii, 1905–1917 gody (Tambov, 2002). 19. V. P. Makarikhin, Gubernskie uchenye arkhivnye komissii Rossii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1991) (hereafter, GUAK); Viktor Berdinskikh, Uezdnye istoriki: russkaia provintsial’naia istoriografiia (Moscow, 2003). 20. Grigorii Iavlinskii, Nizhegorodskii prolog: ekonomika i politika v Rossii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1992). 21. Moscow Times, end of June 2004. 22. Makarikhin, GUAK. The output under the direction of S. O. Schmidt includes the publication, on microfiche, of the entire contents of many of the papers of the archival commissions, as well as an index. 23. Russkaia provintsiia: mif—tekst—real’nost’ (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2000). 24. For example, Izhevsk, Tomsk, Ekaterinburg, and Saratov were represented at a conference, Kul’tury gorodov rossiskoi imperii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov, organized by the Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, in June 2004. 25. T. P. Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia: vokrug N. A. Dobroliubova (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1992). 26. Berdinskikh, Uezdnye istoriki. 27. Ibid., 8. 28. Smith-Peter, “How to Write a Region,” 541–42. 29. Edinoverie, meaning “united faith,” was a government-devised denomination in which former members of the Old Belief could retain their liturgical rituals while accepting the authority of the Orthodox Holy Synod. Members were known as edinovertsy. 30. For a history of the Makar’ev Fair, see Anne Fitzpatrick, The Great Russian Fair: Nizhnii Novgorod, 1840–90 (New York, 1990); and A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii nizhegorodskoi iarmarki (1817–1917) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1917; reprint, 1993). 31. For a perspective on the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, with a very interesting focus on Sormovo and on the Pecherskii Monastery, see Kristina Küntzel, Von Nižnij Novgorod zu Gor’kij: Metamorphosen einer russischen Provinzstadt (Stuttgart, 2001). 32. On the provincial reform, see esp. Janet Hartley, “Provincial and Local Government,” in Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge, 2006), 2:449–67; and Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, 1981). 33. See De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 109–10. 34. Peter Simon Pallas’s Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des russischen Reichs (St. Petersburg, 1771–1776) was published in Russian as Puteshestvie po raznym provintsiiam Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1770–1809). 35. I am borrowing the translation of chinovniki osobykh poruchenii, a difficult-to-translate term, from W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (DeKalb, IL, 1982). 36. See the pathbreaking study from the 1970s, S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton, 1972). 37. The issue of local taxes, or zemskie povinnosti, had already become an agenda item in Nicholas I’s reign. Special committees (Nicholas’s favorite method of governance) were established in 1827, 1842, and 1847 to address the issue. According to M. Polievktov, the concept of zemstvo taxes was still in flux at this time, oscillating between the collection of local taxes to meet local needs and their collection to meet state needs. However, the question was gradually

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resolved in favor of the former interpretation. For this interesting though brief discussion, see M. Polievktov, Nikolai I: biografiia i obzor tsarstvovaniia (Moscow, 1918), 212–14. 38. The quotation is from Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo zemslogo sobranie, vol. 1, 1865–1886 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888), 490. The Moscow–Nizhnii rail line was one of the earliest in Russia, constructed in accordance with an 1857 decree. On the initiative to create the cadaster, see N. F. Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika,” Trudy podsektsii statistiki IX s’’ezda russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei (Chernigov, 1894), 17–44. 39. The Free Economic Society, founded under Catherine II, brought together “enlightened” landlords and blossomed by the late nineteenth century into a dynamic civic organization and arguably a proto-parliament. The Russian Technical Society was its equivalent for engineers, scientists, and other technical specialists. For a recent discussion, see Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107:4 (October 2002): 1094–1123. 40. Congresses and organizations were only one extra-parliamentary means of consultation and organization. For an examination of, for example, the role of the press and the theaters in this capacity, see Anton Fedyashin, “Autochthonous and Practical Liberals: Vestnik Evropy and Modernization in Late Imperial Russia” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2007); and E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, 2002). 41. I borrow here from N. Ia. Agafonov, the “anonymous” editor of the provincial literary manifesto, Pervyi shag (Kazan, 1876). 42. The best synthetic work on the populist movement remains Franco Venturi’s encyclopedic Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Imperial Russia (New York, 1966). The Soviet-era Russian-language literature is extensive, for example, B. S. Itenberg, Dvizhenie revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva (Moscow, 1965); V. N. Ginev, Narodnicheskoe dvizhenie v Srednem Povolzh’e: 70-e gody XIX v. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1966). See also N. Ia. Kraineva and P. V. Pronina, Narodnichestvo v rabotakh sovetskikh issledovatelei za 1953–1970 gg. (Moscow, 1971); and the pre-revolutionary study, V. Ia. Bogucharskii, Aktivnoe narodnichestvo semidesiatykh godov (Moscow, 1912). 43. C. Evtuhov, “The Gubernskie vedomosti and Local Culture, 1838–1860,” unpublished conference paper, AAASS, Seattle, 1997. 44. On the agents for special commissions, see Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 8ff. 45. P. I. Mel’nikov, Otchet o sovremennom sostoianii raskola v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1910), 156. 46. Ibid., 177–78. 47. Pavel Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov, ego zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’,” in P. I. Mel’nikov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1897), 1:202–3. The story is retold in “Mel’nikov, Pavel Ivanovich,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona, 86 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890–1907; rpt., Moscow, 1992) (hereafter, ESBE), available online at http://www .vehi.net/brokgauz/index.html. 48. See Klaus Heller, “Der Unternehmer als pater familias in der russischen Literatur vor 1917,” in Personenkulte im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen, 2004), for an ethnographic use of the Mel’nikov novels. On two occasions in the 1870s, Mel’nikov was encouraged (in one case by the sovereign) to publish excerpts from In the Forests as a textbook “for the people,” particularly because of the exquisite and simultaneously down-to-earth language, but both endeavors fell through for financial reasons. See Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov,” 297–99, 308. 49. For more on Mel’nikov, see C. Evtuhov, “The Provincial Intelligentsia and Social Values in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1838–1891,” in The Intelligentsias of Russia and Poland, Slavica Lundensia series (Lund University, Sweden), March 2006, 79–98. 50. Ibid. 51. A fuller biography of Gatsiskii is in chap. 11, “The Idea of Province.” 52. On Karelin and photography as art and as document, see C. Evtuhov, “A. O. Karelin and Bourgeois Photography,” in Picturing Russia, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven, 2008), 113–18. 53. Dokuchaev shares this status as soil science’s founder with Eugene Hilgard, a German-



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born American. See C. Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions: Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro-Environmental Issues,” and also Ronald Amundson, “Philosophical Developments in Pedology in the United States: Eugene Hilgard and Milton Whitney,” both in Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History, ed. Benno Warkentin (Amsterdam, 2006), 125–48 and 149–66, respectively. 54. Priests’ sons (popovichi) provided so much of the intellectual energy of the reform era that their secularization and civic enthusiasm became a phenomenon in its own right. Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (De Kalb, IL, 2008). The popovichi included the radicals Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and many scientists and writers. 55. A new era in scientific exploration opened with the founding of the Imperial Geographical Society (known by its Russian acronym RGO) in 1845, upon Middendorf’s return from the Taimyr and Amur regions (see Richard Wortman’s research on exploration). The Russian society was second only to the British organization in size and ambition, with a twentythousand-ruble budget for financing scientific expeditions and publications. The society’s four sections turned their attention to physical geography, mathematical geography, statistics, and ethnography. Much of their energy focused on the exploration of Central Asia and the Russian Far East. Expeditions mounted in 1847–1850 and 1854–1863 covered the northern Urals to the Arctic Sea and eastern Siberia and the Amur, respectively. The society’s long-term secretary and later vice-president (from 1873), Petr Semënov, was also one of its greatest explorers, earning the sobriquet “Tian-Shanskii” from his voyage to the Altai, Tarbagatai, Lake Issyk-Kul, and ultimately the hitherto impenetrable (to Europeans) Tian Shan mountain range. The voyage followed immediately upon his translation of Carl Ritter’s Erdkunde into Russian in 1856. The RGO also sponsored the famous four voyages of Nikolai Przheval’skii. In 1871, Semënov left Beijing for Mongolia and Tibet. A second voyage in 1876 was described in his travel account, “From Kul’dzha beyond Tian-Shan and to Lob-Nor.” The third (1879–1881) was to Tibet, and the fourth (1883–1886) left Kiakhta to penetrate to the sources of the Yellow and Blue Rivers. Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, based on fieldwork in Siberia, was also conceived under the RGO’s aegis. Dokuchaev’s biographer, Igor Krupenikov, also comments on the “to the interior” aspect of the soil scientist’s work—that is, the notion of exploration directed inward. 56. For an interesting point of comparison, see Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA, 2004), esp. chap. 5, “Travel and Fieldwork in the Interior.” 57. The results of the expedition were originally published as Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: estestvenno-istoricheskaia chast’, 14 vols. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1884–1887). The Nizhnii Novgorod materials were subsequently partially republished in volumes 4 and 5 of the Soviet edition of Dokuchaev’s works: V. V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia, 9 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949–1961). The passage quoted here is from Sochineniia, 4:431. 58. For more on this aspect of Dokuchaev’s profile, see Evtuhov, “Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions”; and David Moon, “Were the Steppes Ever Forested? Science, Economic Development, and Identity in the Russian Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” in Dealing with Diversity: 2nd International Conference of the European Society for Environmental History; Proceedings, ed. Laos Jelecek et al. (Prague, 2003), 206–9. 59. For an example of how such materials can be used by contemporary anthropology and biology for a reconstruction of a prior ecological milieu, see esp. the work of Bernd Herrmann on eighteenth-century Prussia: Bernd Herrmann, “Nun blüht es von End’ zu End’ all überall”: die Eindeichung des Nieder-Oderbruches, 1747–1753; umweltgeschichtliche Materialien zum Wandel eines Naturraums (Münster, 1997). 60. Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists.

Chapter 2. Soil, Forest, River 1. Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti (hereafter, NGV), no. 37 (1847): 145. 2. Fairway in Russian is farvater, meaning a river’s navigable channel. The term is borrowed from the Dutch vaarwater. 3. Even in the agricultural southeast there are major exceptions, such as the bustling

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commercial or industrial towns of Lyskovo and Bol’shoe Murashkino; in addition, agriculture was by no means an exclusive occupation. 4. Dokuchaev, Materialy k otsenke, in Sochineniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), 5:10. 5. Dokuchaev, “Geologicheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii” (1886), in Sochineniia, 5:303–4. 6. Dokuchaev, The Russian Chernozem, trans. N. Kaner (1883; rpt., Jerusalem, 1967). The terms chernozem, podzol, etc., entered the international scientific vocabulary through Dokuchaev’s work. 7. The study also drew extensively on field research from all over the black-soil region. 8. Dokuchaev, “Ob’’iasnenie k pochvennoi karte Nizhegorodskoi gubernii” (1887), in Sochineniia, 5:573. 9. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 10. On the tripartite division, see Dokuchaev, “Glavnye momenty v istorii otsenok zemel’ evropeiskoi Rossii” (1884), in Sochineniia, 4:21. 11. Dokuchaev, “O glavneishikh rezul’tatakh pochvennykh issledovanii v Rossii za poslednee vremia,” in Sochineniia, 6:228. Originally published in VIII S’’ezd russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei v Sankt Peterburge ot 28 dekabria 1889 g. do 7 ianvaria 1890 g. (St. Petersburg, 1890), 9–10, otd. 9: Protokoly. 12. Dokuchaev, “Pochvy, rastitel’nost’ i klimat nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” in Sochineniia, 5:467–566; 470–71. 13. Ibid., 561. 14. Dokuchaev, Materialy k otsenke, in Sochineniia, 5:109. 15. Dokuchaev, “Geologicheskoe opisanie Nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” in Sochineniia, 5:366. 16. Dokuchaev, Materialy k otsenke, in Sochineniia, vol. 5. 17. See Alessandro Stanziani, “Statisticiens, zemstva et état dans la Russie des années 1880,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 32:4 (October–December 1991): 445–68. 18. Dokuchaev, “Pochvy, rastitel’nost’ i klimat,” in Sochineniia, 5:467–566; 565. 19. Dokuchaev, Materialy k otsenke, in Sochineniia, 4:10. 20. The theory of the belts in the Northern Hemisphere was formulated later than the chernozem study and the Nizhnii Novgorod project. “K ucheniiu o zonakh prirody. Gorizontal’nye i vertikal’nye pochvennye zony,” in Dokuchaev, Sochineniia, 6:398–414. Originally published as a twenty-eight-page pamphlet (St. Petersburg, 1899). 21. Recently, scholars have begun to turn their attention to the environmental theme in relation to Russian forests in the nineteenth century. See esp. Moon, “Were the Steppes Ever Forested?”; and Jane Costlow, “Imaginations of Destruction: The ‘Forest Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture,” Russian Review 62 (January 2003): 91–118. 22. F. K. Arnol’d, Russkii les, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890–1891), forest map of European Russia, addendum to vol. 1. 23. The Department of Forestry had previously (since 1798) been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. See Stoletie uchrezhdeniia lesnogo departamenta, 1798–1898 (St. Petersburg, 1898). 24. Arnol’d, Russkii les, vol. 1, app. 1. A verst is roughly equivalent to a kilometer; a desiatina is one-tenth of a square verst (i.e., approximately a hectare, or 2.7 acres). 25. P. I. Mel’nikov, V lesakh, in P. I. Mel’nikov (A. Pecherskii), Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1976), 2:8–10. 26. “Les iavliaetsa zdes’ kormil’tsem naroda.” Quoted in E. Kern, “Materialy po voprosu ob oblesenii vyrubok: Kamenskaia kazennaia dacha, Nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 1 (1886): 18. 27. Kustar can be translated as “handicrafts” or “cottage industry.” My preferred translation is “artisanal production.” 28. Pamiatnaia knizhka nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1865 g. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1864), 68–72. 29. Ibid., 69. 30. The Nizhnii Novgorod fair retained the nickname Makar’ev Fair even after moving from its original site by the Makar’ev Monastery of the Yellow Waters in 1817. 31. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia.



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32. “Rassuzhdenie o neobkhodimosti okhraneniia vladel’cheskikh lesov ot istrebleniia i o pol’ze pravil’nogo lesnogo khoziaistva,” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 1 (1833): 52–53. 33. See the discussion of the society and the journal in Costlow, “Imaginations of Destruction,” 94–95. 34. Arnol’d, Russkii les. 35. Dokuchaev, “Kniagininskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:297. 36. “Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov,” appendix to Arnol’d, Russkii les, 2:6–14. 37. Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia, 16–17. 38. Pallas, Puteshestvie po raznym provintsiiam Rossiiskoi imperii, 74. 39. “Svedeniia o lesakh v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 7 (1836): 19. 40. Arnol’d, Russkii les, forest map. 41. Dokuchaev, “Lukoianovskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:110; “Sergachskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:209; “Kniagininskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:297. Originally published as Materialy k otsenke, vyp. 2, 3, 4. 42. Dokuchaev, “Lukoianovskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:111–14. The quotation, “kolokol’chik odinoko zvenel po lesu,” is from ibid., 114. 43. Dokuchaev, “Lukoianovskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:113n2; “V.S.,” “Itogi proshlogo leta (Istreblenie lesa pozharami, buriami i uraganami),” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 5 (1891): 671–80. 44. Cathy Frierson, All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle, 2002), 77. 45. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 61. 46. Dokuchaev, “Lukoianovskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:110n3. 47. Kern, “Materialy po voprosu ob oblesenii vyrubok,” 17–24; “Gonne,” “Nachalo lesorazvedeniia v chernoretskom lesu nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 2 (1887): 91–92. 48. B. Skalov, “Opyt bor’by s ovragami putem lesorazvedeniia,” Lesnoi zhurnal, no. 1 (1900): 147–50. 49. “Polozhenie o sberezhenii lesov,” sec. 2, 17–47. 50. ESBE, s.v. “Tillo.” 51. Dokuchaev, “Vmesto predisloviia,” in Sochineniia, 4:10. 52. Baranovskii’s findings, reported in Dokuchaev, “Geologicheskoe opisanie,” in Sochineniia, 5:305. 53. Ragozin confirms this interpretation, adding that, in contrast, the names of other rivers in the region are all Mordvinian: Vorsma, Kud’ma, Sundovik, Rakhma, Inza, Urga, Alatyr’, Tesha. He also proposes an analogy with the Brahmaputra in India. See Viktor Ragozin, Volga, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1880–1881), 2:181. 54. The particular structure described in this example (gentle slopes, relatively high plateaus), combined with the high quality of the soil, explains why this part of the province was so amenable to agriculture. Dokuchaev, “Sergachskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:117–18. 55. P. E. Beliavskii, “Volga,” in ESBE. See also K. Ber, “Pochemu u nashikh rek, tekushchikh na sever i na iug, pravyi bereg vysok, a levyi nizmen” [Why our north-south flowing rivers have a high right bank and a low left bank], Morskoi sbornik, no. 1 (1857), no. 5 (1858). Baer proposed that rivers in the Northern Hemisphere eroded their right banks, while those in the Southern Hemisphere eroded the left. 56. Dokuchaev suggested that Russian river valleys might have their origins in large ravines. Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia rechnykh dolin Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1878). 57. Beliavskii, “Volga”; Ragozin, Volga, 2:151–52. 58. Ragozin summed up his argument in six points: (1) the Oka is bigger than the Volga; (2) the Oka basin is bigger than the Volga basin; (3) the new river follows the Oka’s eastward flow; (4) the embankment beyond Nizhnii is the Oka’s embankment; (5) the valley beyond Nizhnii is the Oka’s valley; and (6) the Oka is older than the Volga. He also proposed that one could actually see the mixing of the two currents and that this observation favored the Oka. Ragozin, Volga, 2:148. I might add that physical observation, to this day, from the magnificent embankment subjectively confirms Ragozin’s judgment. 59. Islands sometimes eroded, with commercial implications: “On the ‘sands,’ the thin island formed by two branches of the Oka River, stores of Urals iron and mountains of aromatic fish

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from the lower Volga were unloaded and shown to prospective buyers. Initially the ‘sands’ were connected to the fair via a pontoon bridge at its tip, but as the end of the island receded, the iron rows gained access to the fair via another bridge.” Fitzpatrick, Great Russian Fair, 30. 60. Ragozin, Volga, 2:150–51. 61. A. I. Voeikov, Klimaty zemnogo shara (St. Petersburg, 1884), reprinted in Izbrannye sochineniia, 4 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1948–1957), 1:163–677; 589. 62. Ibid., 1:588. 63. Ibid., 1:248. This is Voeikov’s description of a type D river. The other types in his classification system, which established the dependence of river structure on climatic conditions, were: (A) rivers resulting from melting snow on flat land or slopes (Siberian and northern North American rivers); (B) rivers from melting mountain snows (found in Central Asia); (C) rivers from rains and with summertime floods (found in tropical climates, with examples including the Nile and the Ganges); (E) rivers resulting from rainwater, with little seasonal change except slight swelling in the colder months (found in central and western parts of Europe); (F) rivers resulting from rain, with significant seasonal change (found in southern Europe); (G) absence of rivers due to dry climate. 64. Voeikov, Klimaty, in Izbrannye sochineniia, 1:589. Imagine the American Midwest with its yearly devastating floods, even today, by contrast. The use of the telegraph became widespread in Russia by the 1860s; the world’s longest telegraph line (about twelve thousand kilometers) began operating between Moscow and Vladivostok in 1871. 65. Ragozin, Volga, 2:157. 66. Ragozin’s definition is as follows: “poima from the word ponimat’ (to understand), in the sense of zatopliat’ (to flood): hence also poimennye, i.e., meadows subject to flooding.” Ragozin, Volga, 2:160. This etymology sounds extremely dubious to me. See also ESBE, s.v. “Poima.” 67. Dokuchaev, “Geologicheskoe opisanie,” in Sochineniia, 5:311. 68. Before being completely abandoned, the future staritsa still contained fresh river water and was at this point known as an erik, until both ends became covered by sand or silt. ESBE, s.v. “Staritsa.” 69. ESBE, s.v. “Staritsa.” 70. A few more fluvial terms, many of them peculiarly Volgan, cited and defined by Ragozin in Volga: griva (2:152), pobochina (2:156), oseredok (2:162), pleso (2:163), zavod, pronos (2:171), ukhvost’e, priverkh (2:198). 71. Ragozin, Volga, 2:151. 72. Fitzpatrick, Great Russian Fair, 3. 73. For a physicist’s fascinating recent calculation of the actual force required for bargehauling, see S. A. Volokhov, “Tiazhelo li bylo burlakam?” http://emomi.com/situations/ volokhov/burlaki.htm. 74. On the fair itself, I would refer readers to Fitzpatrick’s Great Russian Fair and to A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii nizhegorodskoi iarmarki (1817–1917) (1917; rpt., Nizhnii Novgorod, 1993). 75. See the discussion of ravines in the opening chapters of Kliuchevskii’s course of lectures on Russian history (V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, 5 vols. [Moscow, 1957], 1:72–73) and also in Alexis N. Antsiferov et al., “Russian Rural Economy during the War,” in Russian Agriculture during the War (New Haven, 1930), esp. 81. 76. Dokuchaev cites the observations of earlier naturalist travelers Strangweiss, Murchison, Qualen, and Meller specifically about Nizhnii Novgorod—by consensus one of the territories (extending also into Simbirsk province) with the most ravines in a country generally covered with them. Some other such regions include Orel province, the Pontic steppes in southern Russia, and in general the surroundings of the Don River. Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia, 70. 77. N. Ototskii, “Ovrag,” ESBE; Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia, 57. 78. Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia, 60–61. A third type of ravine, uncharacteristic of Russia, could be formed when underground streams or rivers cause landslides. 79. Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia, 58–59. Dokuchaev’s explanations are adduced in all the subsequent literature (e.g., E. E. Kern, Ovragi, ikh zakreplenie, oblesenie i zapruzhivanie, 5th



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ed. [SPb, 1913], 6) and so far as I can tell have not been replaced. See also Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, 2 vols. (London, 1845). 80. Ototskii, “Ovrag.” 81. Kern, Ovragi, 4–5. 82. Ototskii, “Ovrag.” 83. V. Soloviev, “Vrag s vostoka,” in Sochineniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1988), 2:480–92. 84. Some examples: K. I. Masliannikov, “O bor’be s atmosfernymi vodami, kak prichine poiavleniia ovragov na poliakh,” Sel’skii khoziain (1888); Izmailov, “O bor’be s ovragami,” Khoziain, no. 4 (1895). 85. Ototskii, “Ovrag.” 86. Dokuchaev, Sposoby obrazovaniia, 68. 87. Dokuchaev, “Lukoianovskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:31. A sazhen is just over two meters. 88. Dokuchaev, “Kniagininskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:266–67, 296. 89. Dokuchaev, “Sergachskii uezd,” in Sochineniia, 5:161. 90. Ibid., 145. 91. Ibid., 146. 92. Dokuchaev, “Geologicheskoe opisanie,” in Sochineniia, 5:352–54. 93. It is remarkable that the railway, which reached Nizhnii Novgorod in 1862, had not significantly altered the volume of river trade by 1890. See Ragozin, Volga, 2:23. 94. In actual practice, land redistribution in particular communes depended on a variety of factors, including household size, male/female ratios, and tradition. Communes that practiced repartition commonly existed alongside those that did not; thus, geography was not the only determining feature. But the equitable reapportionment of land according to quality at periodic intervals remained a primary criterion. There has not thus far been a study specifically linking erosion to repartition. Michael Confino discusses the catch-22 involved: redistribution encouraged poor attention to land amelioration and thus resulted in erosion, while erosion resulted in redistribution. In Alexander Radishchev’s words at the end of the eighteenth century, redistribution was “very bad for agriculture, but good for equity.” Quoted in Michael Confino, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole: l’assolement triennal en Russie au XVIII–XIX siècles (Paris, 1969), 295–301. 95. Sormovo, where I was fortunate to live for a summer, is now a quite prosperous workingclass neighborhood, linked continuously to the rest of the city by the Avtozavod and Moskovskii regions. It was also the site of many of Maksim Gorky’s novels about working-class life. 96. On charity networks, see Galina Ulianova, “Entrepreneurs and Philanthropy in Nizhnii Novgorod, from the Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861–1914, ed. W. Brumfield, B. Anan’ich, and Iu. Petrov (Washington, DC, 2001); and G. N. Ulianova, Blagotvoritel’nost’ v Rossiiskoi imperii (XIX-nachalo XX veka) (Moscow, 2005), 365–82. The meshchanstvo was one of five official estate (soslovie) categories in Imperial Russia, along with the gentry, clergy, merchants, and peasants. The virtually untranslatable term refers to the lower middle classes or petty bourgeoisie. 97. It is a long time since Alexander Gerschenkron, Roger Portal, Theodore von Laue, and Jerome Blum “created” (or “re-created,” in the tradition of the legal Marxism of the 1890s) Russia as a backward country. The classic texts are Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Roger Portal, “The Industrialization of Russia,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 6, pt. 2 (Cambridge, 1965); Theodore von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York, 1963); Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961). More recently, many economic historians have worked in directions that would be completely consistent with local and ecological history, including Boris Anan’ich, in works such as Bankirskie doma v Rossii, 1860–1914: ocherki istorii chastnogo predprinimatel ’stva (Leningrad, 1991), and his chapters in Vlast’ i reformy: ot samoderzhavnoi k sovetskoi Rossii, ed. B. V. Anan’ich, R. Sh. Ganelin, and V. M. Paneiakh (St. Petersburg, 1996); Susan McCaffray, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874–1914 (DeKalb, IL, 1996); Muriel Joffe, “Autocracy, Capitalism, and Empire: The Politics of Irrigation,” Russian Review 54:3 (1995):

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365–88; and earlier, Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1989), and The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout (Chicago, 1985).

Chapter 3. Urban Topography 1. See the fascinating discussion in A. N. Zorin, Goroda i posady dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia (Kazan, 2001), 253–66. According to Zorin, G. V. Alferova and V. A. Shkvarikov, among others, represent the “picturesque” school. See also Boris Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1740–1860e gody: demograficheskoe, sotsial’noe, i ekonomicheskoe razvitie (Leningrad, 1990); and Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley, 1990). These topics were addressed at the conference Kul’tury gorodov rossiiskoi imperii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov, Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, June 2004. 2. N. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk istorii i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda, 2 vols. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1859), 1:106. See also De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 288. 3. In this context, the classic Moscow–St. Petersburg dichotomy appears as merely the culmination of the struggle between these two principles. Some of the key texts on this subject are collected in K. G. Iusupov, ed., Moskva-Peterburg: pro et contra (St. Petersburg, 2000). 4. “In prerevolutionary Russia the city was first of all an administrative center, a point of support for [central] power; . . . the economic significance of the city was by no means always taken into account.” Zorin, Goroda i posady, 3. 5. See Albert J. Schmidt, “A New Face for Provincial Russia: Classical Planning and Building under Catherine II and Alexander I” (unpublished manuscript). On her own visit to Nizhnii Novgorod, Catherine II found the place hateful, and she compared it unfavorably to the lowly district center of Cheboksary in Kazan province, which she liked very much. 6. For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon of “urban manors,” with architectural plans and façades, see Zorin, Goroda i posady, pt. 4, “Gorodskie postroiki” [Urban structures]. In general, readers interested in greater detail on city plans, housing construction, infrastructure, and ecology can find rich detail and a nuanced picture of the towns of nearby Kazan province in Zorin’s outstanding study. 7. V. Kostkin, “Poseshchenie Nizhnego Novgoroda Imperatorom Nikolaem I i ego zaboty po blagoustroistvu goroda,” in Deistviia NGUAK, 17:1 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914): 1–14. 8. “Polozhenie ob ustroistve gubernskogo goroda,” Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter, PSZ), no. 9149 (1836). Parallel decrees were issued, in this period, for many other cities, including Elisavetgrad, Kaluga, Iaroslavl’, Saratov, Kharkov, Vladimir, Arkhangel’sk, Tver’, Kazan, Orel, Tiflis, Uman’. 9. For particular cases, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, Moscow (hereafter, RGVIA), f. 405, op. 4 (1826–1859): Departament voennykh poselenii: khoziaistvennoe otdelenie (1835–1843); otdelenie voennykh poselenii (1843–1857). 10. V. Belinskii, “Peterburg i Moskva,” reprinted in Moskva-Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 2000), 190. 11. The construction of a socialist monument in the immediate vicinity of a church (sometimes even in the churchyard itself) was a common alternative to wholesale destruction. 12. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv nizhegorodskoi oblasti (hereafter, GANO), f. 27, op. 638, d. 1046, 1332, 3158, 3888. 13. The architects of the cathedral were Betancourt and Montferrand. 14. For “life-supporting systems,” see Zorin, Goroda i posady, 508. 15. “Istoriia Vodoprovoda v Rossii,” http://ecoflash.narod.ru/likbez_8.htm. Accessed 11 June 2011. 16. Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet MVD, Goroda Rossii v 1904 godu (St. Petersburg, 1906), table III, 190–93. 17. N. Gratsianov, Otchet nizhegorodskoi gorodskoi sanitarnoi kommissii za 1891 g. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1893). 18. Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet MVD, Goroda Rossii, 395. 19. Ibid., 393. 20. Zorin, Goroda i posady, 581.



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21. Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet MVD, Goroda Rossii, 396. There were twelve hundred such lights in Kazan in the 1860s. Zorin, Goroda i posady, 581. 22. See image at “Istoriia nizhegorodskogo tramvaia,” http://ru.wikipedia.org/ (using Cyrillic search terms). It is also interesting to note, running a bit ahead of our time period, that in the early twentieth century the city of Nizhnii Novgorod boasted 539 telephones—and, interestingly, 67 in Sormovo. Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet MVD, Goroda Rossii, 237, table VI. 23. On Shakhovskoi and the Nizhnii Novgorod theater see Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, 2005), 242, 245, 248–50. 24. On Zhivokini’s purchase of the theater see Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 249. 25. The civil service rank or estate of home owners is in most cases clearly marked in the archival documents. GANO, f. 27, op. 638, d. 1332, 1046, etc. 26. Here I am referring to a project by the Nizhnii Novgorod physicist, S. A. Volokhov. It was begun in the 1990s but ceased for lack of funds. 27. De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine, 288. 28. Nicholaevan-era official Dmitrii Bludov, after his trip to Arzamas, described it as one enormous puddle in which fat white geese waded. The name was assumed by the Arzamas Society in contradistinction to the officious splendor of Derzhavin’s Beseda circle and to his gold-and-marble mansion where it convened. They called themselves the Society of Unknown Arzamasians, and their emblem was the white goose, which they ritually consumed at dinners following their meetings. 29. P. V. Eremeev, “Arzamas v period razlozheniia krepostnichestva (1800–1861),” in Ocherki istorii Arzamasa, ed. B. P. Golovanov (Gorky, 1981). 30. ESBE, s.v. “Arzamas.” 31. Regarding the exiled Novgorodians, Ivan III’s final destruction of Novgorod dates to 1477; thus, the elimination of the local elite was a significant part of the campaign. 32. ESBE, s.v. “Balakhna.” 33. ESBE, s.v. “Vasil’-Sursk.” The monastery attracted pilgrims, thus giving it greater commercial potential. 34. It is curious that Nizhnii Novgorod province in fact had a relatively low number of taverns: one for 2,884 residents (data from 1904). Tsentral’nyi statisticheskii komitet MVD, Goroda Rossii, 400. 35. The Katunki division of the Bible society counted seventy-five lay and clerical members in 1820, of whom forty-six were identified as peasants. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (hereafter, RGIA), f. 808, op. 1, d. 141, ll. 3–4. 36. A. S. Gatsiskii, ed., Nizhegorodskii sbornik (hereafter, NS), 10:191. 37. A chetvert was approximately eight hundred liters, or six U.S. bushels. 38. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 70. 39. Gatsiskii, NS, 10:191. 40. This diplomatic way of identifying Old Believers referred to one of the key points of religious conflict in the seventeenth century: the mechanics of making the sign of the cross. The Nikonians used three fingers, while defenders of the Old Belief used two or five. 41. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961; reprint, San Diego, 1989), 569. See also L. N. Bekhtereva, “Zavodskoi poselok Urala kak proobraz industrial’nogo goroda i istoriko-kul’turnyi fenomen,” paper presented at the conference Kul’tury gorodov, St. Petersburg, June 2004. Bekhtereva’s paper focuses on Izhevsk. 42. Mumford, City in History, 6.

Chapter 4. Rhythms 1. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 19. 2. B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999), 1:299. 3. The pamiatnye knizhki first appeared in some provinces in the 1840s and became an independent genre in the post-reform period. Sometimes they were called adres-kalendar’. The simplest versions formed a sort of proto–telephone directory, but they also played the role of local guidebook and even compendium of local lore and local history.

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4. A. Smirnov, “Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” in Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 47. 5. A primary source of iron ore was the nearby Vyksa district in the southwest corner of the province, considered part of the Nizhnii Novgorod Urals region. Founded by the Batashev brothers, Ivan and Andrei, the Vyksa Iron Ore Works was founded in 1765 and comprised fifteen plants some years later. As is well known, Russia was the largest exporter of iron in Europe in the eighteenth century; in turn, the Oka metallurgical district “accounted for 30% of total cast iron production of the European part of Russia” and had enormous military significance. Vykska Steel Works, http://www.vsw.ru/en/town_en/ (accessed 14 March 2011). 6. It would be interesting to juxtapose those iconostases with Tilmann Riemenschneider’s wooden altarpieces in the Würzburg region (late fifteenth to early sixteenth century). See Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1980). 7. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 69. 8. When Catherine II created the districts in 1775, she was forced to resettle serfs in the new district towns and grant them state peasant status, for lack of existing population. See De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine, chap. 18. 9. The tongue-in-cheek tone in which Pamiatnaia knizhka presented this last detail gives one pause: was this perhaps merely an elaborate way of characterizing this remote corner of the province as a “bear’s corner” (medvezhii ugol, the Russian expression indicating an extremely remote, obscure, and probably unenlightened place)? 10. For details see, for example, C. Evtuhov and R. Stites, A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (since 1800) (Boston, 2003), chap. 6. 11. This approach is the essence of Zaionchkovsky’s classic enquiry: P. A. Zaionchkovsky, Provedenie v zhizn’ krest’ianskoi reformy 1861 goda (Moscow, 1958). 12. These works are far too numerous to adduce here. Let me mention some that have been important for me: Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991); Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum, and Irina Troitskaia, “Peasant Marriage in the Nineteenth Century,” Population-E 59:6 (2004): 721–64; David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made (London, 1999); David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb, IL, 1987); Allan Wildman, “The Defining Moment: Land Charters as the Foundation of the Post-Emancipation Agrarian Settlement in Russia, 1861–1863,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1205 (1996); David Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers: Statistics and the Search for a Theory of Peasant Economy in Russia, 1861–1917” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1996). 13. When speaking of “agrarian structures,” I follow the lead of Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle: étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (Paris, 1963), and Confino, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole and, more generally, of the Annales school. 14. Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’, edited by N. F. Annenskii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888), vyp. 4: “Kniagininskii uezd,” 41, 72, 80; vyp. 3: “Sergachskii uezd,” 1. 15. Henceforth, “desiatina” is abbreviated as “d.” 16. Materialy k otsenke zemel’, vyp. 3: “Sergachskii uezd” (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1898), appendices, table I, “Raspredelenie obshchei ploshchadi zemel’ po glavnym kategoriiam vladenii i po vidam ugodii,” 2–3. 17. Ibid., appendices, table III, 6–7. 18. Ibid., table IV, 8–11. 19. According to an independent source, the vast majority of peasant buyers were able to purchase land only with aid from the government. The Nizhnii Novgorod governor’s report for 1871 provides the following data: at that point there were 203,900 temporarily obligated peasants in the province, and 164,516 had terminated the relation of obligation. Of these, 116,839 had bought out their land parcel (nadel) with government help and 14,861 had done so without such assistance. “Vsepoddanneishii otchet Nachal’nika Nizhegorodskoi gubernii za 1871 g.” (hereafter, Governor’s report), manuscript, Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia



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biblioteka, Moscow (hereafter, GPIB). In general, the report (compiled during the tenure of Governor Odintsov)—painted a fairly optimistic picture of the progress of reform by suggesting that the compilation of title deeds would be accomplished four months before the final deadline at the end of 1872. 20. Materialy k otsenke zemel’, vyp. 4: “Kniagininskii uezd,” appendices, table IX, 208–9. The numbering of the issues was artificially constructed to correspond with the volumes of the Dokuchaev expedition (the “natural-historical” part of the investigation). In fact, Kniaginin district was the first to be investigated, and the methodological principles of the entire study are laid out in a preliminary résumé of this first expedition’s results: N. F. Annenskii, Kratkii otchet o khode i obshchikh rezul’tatakh otsenochno-ekonomicheskikh rabot po Kniagininskomu uezdu (n.p., 1887). 21. Confino, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole, 360. 22. Materialy k otsenke zemel’, vyp. 7: “Gorbatovskii uezd,” appendices, tables I–IV, 50–57. See also the text in ibid., 84–85. 23. Materialy k otsenke zemel’, vyp. 8: “Nizhegorodskii uezd,” appendices, tables Ia–v, II, 32–38. 24. Materialy k otsenke zemel’, vyp. 9: “Vasil’skii uezd,” 34. 25. Kahan, Russian Economic History, 2. 26. For a discussion of terminology, see Alessandro Stanziani, “Entre ville et campagne: les ménages et les formes de travail dans les statistiques économiques russes, 1861–1926,” Cahiers du monde russe 44:1 (January–March 2003): 57–92. 27. These data are from the 1860s. 28. The reports of the provincial governors, compiled yearly for submission to the Ministry of the Interior, provide a useful overview of industrial development in the province as a whole. Thus, a sample report from 1871 gives the following picture: in large-scale industry, the province counted 529 factories with a production of 7,661,762 rubles, up 1,189,469 rubles in 1870. This surge was thanks to an increase in the production of leather, steel, distilleries, mineral waters, and steam-powered flour production. The alcohol industry was particularly successful, resulting in the export of wine and spirits to other provinces. Slightly less wine was produced because two factories, in Arzamas and Sergach, were inactive. Steel also did well, despite the travails of the Shepelëv factories in Ardatov, which were in decline because of bad management and financial troubles, making the employees a source of worry for the local administration. There had been hope that the situation would improve with the investment of British capital in 1865, but it did not, and by 1871, the factories were operating only half of each week. One of them, Veletlinskii, was closed completely for five weeks in September; the workers became so impoverished they could neither pay taxes nor even feed their families—a situation exacerbated by the fact that they owned no land. The leather industry prospered because of high demand at the fair, and prices were up by 10 to 15 percent. A positive balance was recorded, in addition, for vodka, malt, cast iron, steel, steel crafts, wooden manufacture, brick, mineral water, and steampowered flour mills, while the following recorded a decline: tallow and candle manufacture, soap, rope, sawmills, treacle, anchors, and saltworks. The following new factories were opened: 7 vodka, 1 sausage, 3 steam flour mills, 1 mechanical shop devoted to the manufacture of mills, 1 glass factory, 1 sawmill in Vasil’ (for a railway car manufacturer in Moscow). Closures were reported for 2 soap factories, 1 treacle manufacturer, 1 wax candle maker, 1 tobacco plant, and 2 salt mills. Most closures occurred because of unprofitability; the saltworks closed because of a failure in supply. Governor’s report, 1871. 29. Some of the other crafts deemed worthy of attention by the commission were carpentry (Semënov, Nizhnii Novgorod), smithing (Arzamas, Nizhnii Novgorod), squirrel pelts (Olonets province), nail manufacture (Tver’), lace manufacture (Moscow province), felt boots (Arzamas), wood products, pottery, metal working, linen and hemp, leather, dyeworks, wool, candles, artwork, musical instruments, tailoring (Iaroslavl’ province), and more. It is also significant that the commission compiled studies of artisanal production in Europe, including, for example, basket weaving in Aachen, paper manufacture in Gladbach and Kleidt, steel in Solingen, toys in the Erzgebirge, and so on. Trudy kommissii po issledovaniiu kustarnoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, vyp. 1–16 (1879–1887).

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30. Compare the summary in Jonathan Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory: Peasant Manufacturing and Russian Industrialization” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 86–88. 31. L. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo v Semënovskom uezde,” in Trudy komissii po issledovaniiu kustarnoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, vyp. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1879), 16. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 12. 34. Ibid., 17. As Borisovskii notes, the prices being quoted were in the old assignat currency, not in silver. 35. “V sovremennykh usloviiakh, pri otsutstvii drugikh promyslov, pri tepereshnem polozhenii kustaria, zadavlennogo kulakom—skupshchikom,—usovershenstvovanie pochti nevozmozhno. Eto trudnoe delo, trebuiushchee tak mnogo pota, staranii i zabor, prinosit pol’zu ne kustariu.” Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 19. 36. The four examples given are sibirka, starovercheskaia, zhidovka, and detskaia. 37. “Black,” of course, refers to the mode of heating peasant huts without a chimney. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 11. 38. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 12. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. “Lozhkar’ s malykh let sidit za vydelkoi lozhki i bol’she nichego ne khochet znat’, potomu chto lozhka ego kormit. No i lozhkoi on syt v polovinu; i ona—kormilitsa—ego ne tol’ko ne obespechivaet, no dazhe ne udovletvoriaet samym nezateilivym ego potrebnostiam. Ottogo on nevezhestvenen, tup, zabit.” Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 25. 41. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 26. 42. In contradiction to this tendency, however, Plotnikov’s 1894 study reported that spoon making was flourishing, attracting increasing numbers of workers and expanding production. M. A. Plotnikov, ed., Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1894), 138–49. 43. V. G. Korolenko, “Pavlovskie ocherki,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1955), 9:7–99; Petr Boborykin, “Russkii Sheffil’d. Ocherki sela Pavlovo,” in Otechestvennye zapiski (1877), 1:71–104, 2:305–46, 3:5–60, 4:345–70. 44. O. E. Shmidt, Pavlovskii staleslesarnyi raion gorbatovskogo uezda, nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sravnitel’nye itogi statisticheskikh issledovanii 1889 i 1901 gg. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1902). Interest in the region began early; see the 1860s study by A. Smirnov, Pavlovo i Vorsma: izvestnye stal’noslesarnym proizvodstvom sela Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1864), and N. Labzin’s Issledovanie promyshlennosti nozhevoi, zamochnoj i drugikh metallicheskikh izdelii v gorbatovskom uezde nizhegorodskoi gubernii i muromskom uezde vladimirskoi gubernii (n.p., 1870). V. N. Grigoriev’s “Kustarnoe zamochno-nozhevoe proizvodstvo pavlovskogo raiona,” Materialy k issledovaniiu kustarnogo promysla volzhskogo basseina, edited by V. Ragozin (n.p., 1881) covered topography, dimensions, techniques, history, and economics, as well as effects on agriculture, well-being, physical health, and mental and moral development. See esp. Klaus Gestwa’s excellent and detailed recent study, Proto-Industrialisierung in Rußland: Wirtschaft, Herrschaft und Kultur in Ivanovo und Pavlovo, 1741–1932 (Göttingen, 1999). 45. This story is retold in Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory,” 65–66. The mythology of scattered sparks is of course not unique to Pavlovo or to Korolenko or his source; rather, it echoes a creation myth with deeper cultural roots, for example in the Kabbalah. See a discussion of this myth in Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Resurrection without Death: The Apocalypses of Fedorov and Soloviev,” paper presented at the AAASS meeting, St. Louis, MO, 18 November 1999. 46. For a more detailed account of the history, see Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 87–93. 47. Knives from Vachi are sold commercially even today. In the nineteenth century, the biggest enterprise (two factories) belonged to the Kondratov family. 48. Plotnikov, Kustarnye promysly, 181. 49. Hermann Roskoschny, Das arme Rußland: ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der wirtschaftlichen Lage des russischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1889), cited in Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 119. 50. Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, table 15, 123. Absolute numbers, of course, grew: in the town of Pavlovo, the number of factory workers increased from 300 in the 1870s to 672 in 1900.



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51. Canaplé’s business venture operated in the 1830s. Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 121. 52. Plotnikov, Kustarnye promysly, 187. 53. Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 138. 54. According to Gestwa, “The Pavlovo artisanal cooperative was thus not a precursor, setting an example for numerous followers, but merely a small shimmer of hope.” Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 143. In local context, however, its significance “in and for itself” (an sich und für sich) is sufficient. 55. Kristina Küntzel, Von Nižnij Novgorod zu Gor’kij: Metamorphosen einer russischen Provinzstadt (Stuttgart, 2001), 94. 56. These data are from ESBE. This overall growth was not without its setbacks: most notably, international economic cycles affected the factory profoundly, with enormous dips in production and profits in 1857 and again in 1883. See discussion in Küntzel, Nižnij Novgorod, 91–94. 57. Both Kochubei and Menshikov, unlike Benardaki, were of highest noble origin (the latter a descendant of Peter I’s favorite). The factory won a bronze medal and other prizes for technological innovation at the St. Petersburg industrial fair. 58. Küntzel, Nižnij Novgorod, 96–97. The other main sources on Sormovo are F. Fadeev, Istoriia Krasnogo Sormova (Moscow, 1969), and A. V. Sedov, “Sormovskii zavod,” in Nizhegorodskii krai: fakty, sobytiia, liudi, ed. N. Filatov and A. Sedov (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1994). 59. There were major demonstrations in 1900, 1902, 1904, and they intenstified through 1905. 60. A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 39. 61. Governor’s report 1871, 19–20. 62. In 1871, 11,791 attestations were granted for retail trade (melochnaia, razvoznaia, raznosnaia). The same report testifies to the weakness of the retail business in the district towns, complaining in particular about Arzamas, which slipped from third to fourth trading class. “Then, in the other district towns of the province, retail and petty trade are practiced for the needs of local residents and neighboring settlements; there is no wholesale or export trade whatsoever.” Governor’s report 1871, 26. 63. The 1871 Governor’s report lists, in addition, Samara, Simbirsk, Khriatsev, Chistopol’, Cheboksary, Kazan, Balokov, Syzran’, Main, Pelian, and Nizhnii Novgorod as destinations of Gorodets commercial transactions, at a rate of more than 900,000 poods and 700,000 rubles; rye, some of which sold locally, also went to Kostroma, Ples, and Kineshma. 64. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865 g., 15–17. The circulation of goods at Lyskovo was more than a million poods. Governor’s report, 1871. 65. Governor’s report, 1871. 66. Ibid. 67. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 14. 68. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 49, 52, 63. 69. Ibid., 48. 70. N. I. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” NS (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1890), 9:234. 71. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 108; Governor’s report, 1871. 72. Rumors of arson abounded after the Makar’ev fire. 73. In an 1822 piece in Otechestvennye zapiski, K. P. Kugushev (writing under the pseudonym “K.K.”) noted that, in contradistinction to the big European fairs at Leipzig and Frankfurt, where goods were exchanged by promissory notes, part of the spectacle of the Nizhnii Novgorod fair was the enormous piles of wares that were there one moment and gone the next hour. According to A. P. Mel’nikov, the difficulties of transportation and slow navigation necessitated such a scenario. By the end of the nineteenth century, these complications had been overcome and it was sufficient to present samples, with the full quantities to be delivered later. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 63–64. 74. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 97–101. The author’s father, Mel’nikov-Pecherskii, imparts a similar flavor in the negotiations between Smolokurov and the fish merchants in On the Hills, as the former, privy to information from St. Petersburg on seal prices, tries to outwit his colleagues.

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75. A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1877), 190–95. 76. Ibid., 34. Hankou (one of three cities comprising present-day Wuhan) is located at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze Rivers. The British concession in the city was established in 1861; Russian, French, German, and Japanese concessions followed suit in the 1890s, well after the date of the 1871 Governor’s report. 77. See the relatively brief discussion in Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 176–84, as well as Roger Portal, “Origines d’une bourgeoisie industrielle en Russie,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 8 (1961): 35–60. For a critique of English-language historiography, see V. V. Kerov, “Staroobriadcheskoe predprinimatel’stvo: mify i legendy anglo-amerikanskoi istoriografii” (1999), www.hist.msu.ru/Labs/Ecohist/OB5/kerov.htm. 78. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 252. In the note on the same page, Mel’nikov gives the example of Guchkov sitting in a restaurant on a fast day eating bear ham and remarking that he needs to be an Old Believer because if the fair burns down he will be all right but would not be if he were Orthodox. 79. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 255. 80. Ibid., 252. 81. Ibid., 255 (emphasis added). 82. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 256. 83. Ibid., 230. 84. Ibid., 285. 85. Ibid., 286. 86. B. V. Anan’ich, “Religious and Nationalist Aspects of Entrepreneurialism in Russia,” in Russia in the European Context, 1789–1914: A Member of the Family, ed. Susan McCaffray and Michael Melancon (New York, 2005).

Chapter 5. An Artisanal Case Study 1. See Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution: le cas russe, 1870–1930 (Paris, 1998). 2. See the discussion of Russia and the Soviet Union in European context in Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union in the Interwar Conjuncture,” in The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991, ed. C. Evtuhov and S. Kotkin (Lanham, MD, 2003), 187–208. 3. See Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory”; Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung; and Stanziani, “Entre ville et campagne,” which finally controvert this tendency. 4. See esp. Jan de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54:2 (June 1994): 249–70. The article formulates in a nutshell the argument further developed in De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). 5. Blum and Gribaudi, in “Des catégories aux liens individuals,” discuss the mechanisms by which statistics create the picture of industrialization. 6. On the administrative versus local statistical observations, see, e.g., Martine Mespoulet, “Personnel et production du bureau statistique de la province de Saratov: histoire d’une professionnalisation interrompue (1880–1930)” (Thèse de doctorat, EHESS, 1999). During the 1990s, these descriptive and statistical investigations (e.g., the pamiatnye knizhki and the papers of the GUAK) became a very popular object of study. Yet they are usually seen as a slightly quaint universe in themselves, a sort of precursor to twentieth-century kraevedenie, rather than as a highly valuable source for social history. 7. I am paraphrasing Blum and Gribaudi, “Des catégories aux liens individuels,” 1365. 8. NS, 7:ii–iii. 9. See, e.g., Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, PA, 1991). 10. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo.” 11. See Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory”; and Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung. Both, with reason, choose to focus specifically on Pavlovo, while Mogul also looks at Semënov. 12. Klaus Gestwa also suggests the need for the study of black-soil regions, less known for their crafts: “Little is known about proto-industrial structures in the Russian black-earth



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areas, which have mostly been seen as regions of agrarian surplus (Überschußregionen) and have not been examined more closely in terms of rural industry. . . . But around 1900, 44 percent of the small producers of European Russia lived in the traditional agrarian regions.” Gestwa, Proto-Industrialisierung, 44. 13. A. I. Zvezdin, “Kanatnyi promysel,” NS, 9:367–74. 14. A. I. Zvezdin, “Kolesnoe proizvodstvo,” NS, 9:345–66. 15. N. I. Runovskii, “Prigotovlenie konskikh podprug,” NS, 9:275–85. 16. Zvezdin, “Bondarnye promysly,” NS, 9:321–43. 17. The category terms were mezheumochnyi, vyrostkovyi, podrostkovyi, malyshkovyi. 18. Runovskii, “Proizvodstvo valenoi obuvi,” NS, 9:199–204. 19. Runovskii, “Proizvodstvo boron i grablei,” NS, 9:205–12. 20. Zvezdin, “Telezhnyi promysel,” NS, 9:415–21. 21. Zvezdin, “Obrabotka pen’ki,” NS, 9:407–14. 22. Zvezdin, “Rogozhnyi promysel,” NS, 9:385–98. 23. Runovskii, “Kuznechnyi promysel,” NS, 9:195–98. 24. Zvezdin, “Vydelka berd,” NS, 9:399–406. 25. The peasant chapan was also known by the “Asian” term aziam. 26. Zvezdin, “Portniazhnyi promysel,” NS, 9:375–84; 383. 27. Zvezdin, “Proizvodstvo dereviannykh lozhek,” NS, 9:307–20; 314. The trimmer, cutter, rasp, chisel, and file are, respectively, the tesalka, rezets, terpug, stameska, and podpilok. 28. Zvezdin, “Proizvodstvo dereviannykh lozhek,” NS, 9:307–20. 29. The types were described as moskovskaia, pod pugovku, po’skaia, sharik, polusharik, boiarochka, tatarskaia, slavianskaia, and persiianka. 30. Runovskii, “Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly,” NS, 9:181–94. 31. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” NS, 9:227–73. 32. Zvezdin, “Torgovlia ikonami,” NS, 9:439–41. 33. Runovskii, “Viazanie rybolovnykh setei,” NS, 9:213–26. It was also remarkably stable. Tugan-Baranovsky specifically noted that “this industry is maintaining itself very tenaciously and is preserving the nature of a typical kustar handicraft.” M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, The Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Levin and Claora S. Levin (Homewood, IL, 1970), 378. 34. Zvezdin, “Vydelka berd,” 399; “Kanatnyi promysel,” 368; “Kolesnoe proizvodstvo,” 347; “Proizvodstvo sanei,” NS, 9:360. 35. Ia. I. Tikhov, “Kirpichnyi promysel v gorode Pochinkakh,” NS, 9:443–72. 36. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” 231. 37. Ibid., 232. 38. Ibid., 233. 39. Runovskii, “Kuznechnyi promysel,” 196. 40. Zvezdin, “Rogozhnyi promysel,” 387–88; Runovskii, “Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly,” 182; Runovskii, “Proizvodstvo valenoi obuvi,” 200; Zvezdin, “Portniazhnyi promysel,” 375. 41. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” 258. 42. Runovskii, “Prigotovlenie konskikh podprug,” 276. 43. Zvezdin, “Obrabotka pen’ki,” 409. 44. These entrepreneurial peasants are an interesting subject. One Bokarev, of Voronezh, is supposed to have discovered, in the 1830s, that sunflowers were good for producing oil. His story is clearly recounted following the prototype of Mikhail Lomonosov, that is, reproducing the myth of a simple person achieving scientific distinction through sheer natural talent. 45. Quoted in Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” 236. 46. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” 236–39. 47. Zvezdin, “Kolesnoe proizvodstvo,” 349; Zvezdin, “Proizvodstvo sanei,” 360; Ia. I. Tikhov, “Kirpichnyi promysel v gorode Pochinkakh,” NS, 9:443–72, 448. 48. Runovskii, “Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly,” 184. 49. Runovskii, “Proizvodstvo valenoi obuvi,” 200. 50. Runovskii, “Prigotovlenie konskikh podprug,” 276, 277–78.

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51. Zvezdin, “Rogozhnyi promysel,” 389. 52. Zvezdin, “Portniazhnyi promysel,” 381. 53. Zvezdin, “Vydelka berd,” 400. 54. Zvezdin, “Kolesnoe proizvodstvo,” 348–49. 55. Runovskii, “Viazanie rybolovnykh setei,” 225. 56. Zvezdin, “Bondarnye promysly,” 324. 57. Tugan-Baranovsky, Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century, 387–88. 58. A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 63. The discussion of commodity exchange in Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, stands in sharp contrast; see esp. its chaps. 3–5 on grain, lumber, and meat, respectively. The transition to large-scale capitalist markets occurred very quickly and dramatically in Chicago. 59. See Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory,” 90–96, for discussion of the Pavlovo market. 60. For a brief discussion of this problem see Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge, 2007), 121–23. 61. Kahan, “The Russian Economy, 1860–1913,” in Russian Economic History, 37. 62. Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution (London, 1904) is doubtless inscribed in this discussion of mutual assistance societies. 63. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 1:31–34. 64. Zvezdin, “Torgovlia ikonami,” 439. 65. Runovskii, “Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly,” 192–93. 66. Runovskii, “Promysly sela Bol’shogo Murashkina,” 232. 67. Zvezdin, “Proizvodstvo sanei,” 365–66. 68. Zvezdin, “Proizvodstvo zemledel’cheskikh mashin i orudii v sele Shutilove,” NS, 9:423–37, esp. 430, 435. 69. N. Denisiuk, “V mire kustarnogo truda,” Niva, no. 24 (1913): 474. 70. A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii, 109. 71. Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory,” 61–108. 72. Here again, the present discussion fits into current discussions of capitalism, in which there is no “natural” tendency for industrialization for anything. See Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010). 73. I am thinking here of Robert Johnson’s peasant-proletarians, but more particularly of the psychological traumas purportedly experienced by Kanatchikov and others of Zelnik’s workers. See R. E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979); and Reginald Zelnik, “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of the Russian Workers Semën Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Review 35:3–4 (1976): 249–89, 417–47.

Chapter 6. Social Space 1. This presumption forms the basis of large-scale historical arguments regarding the Russian Revolution and Soviet society, including some of the most influential. I am thinking, for example, of Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1996); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1982); see also David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, 1994). 2. “If we wish to reach an understanding of the complexities of social terrain and the changes within it, we must completely overturn our perspective, and consider social space not in terms of collectivities and group movements, but in terms of connections and individual trajectories as they emerge in actual practice.” Blum and Gribaudi, “Des catégories aux liens individuels,” 1398. 3. My point here is the danger of assuming any continuity in social categories across the Russian revolutions and the Great Terror, and projecting the social reality of Soviet and post-Soviet space in any fashion upon the nineteenth century. 4. On statistics and “the power of numbers,” see esp. Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood, and Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2000). 5. The emancipation of numbers from text, after all, belongs only to the latter part of the



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nineteenth century. See Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France: la statistique départementale à l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1989), chap. 8, for a discussion of this tendency in the reports of the Napoleonic intendants. 6. From the outset, the historiography on Russian statistics and statisticians has stressed this division, postulating an essential conflict between the aims and methods of state-driven versus zemstvo information gathering. 7. See the list in N. M. Balatskaia and A. I. Razdorskii, eds., Pamiatnye knizhki gubernii i oblastei Rossiiskoi imperii (1836–1917) (St. Petersburg, 1994), 231–35. 8. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 4–5. The local statistical committee’s overall figures did not diverge significantly from those provided in the official report filed yearly by the provincial governor: the 1871 report quotes the total population as 1,279,820. Governor’s report, 1871. 9. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, statistical table 1, p. 116. Both genders are included in the count. 10. Note that local capitals were created in a fashion similar to that used in France—according to Enlightenment principles. For example, the town of Privas in the Ardèche was, in 1790, elevated to the rank of provincial capital, despite its low population and mediocre commercial and industrial status, simply because of its central location. Bourguet comments that this decision reflected “the system of regularity that was then in fashion.” Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France, 267. 11. N. A. Bogoroditskaia, “Organizatsiia pomeshchich’ego khoziaistva v Simbileiskoi votchine gr. Orlovykh-Davydovykh v pervoi polovine XIX v.,” in Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl’ i klassovaia bor’ba v Rossii v XVIII–XIX vv. (Gorky, 1973), 18, citing A. Troinitskii, Krepostnoe naselenie v Rossii po 10-oi narodnoi perepisi (St. Petersburg, 1861). 12. Spisok naselennykh mest nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1911). 13. See the materials on this subject—constraints on freedom of movement, government licenses, etc.—for the eighteenth century in N. N. Firsov, Russkie torgovo-promyshlennye kompanii v pervuiu polovinu XVIII stoletiia (Kazan, 1896), 395. 14. The real-life Glukhovo may have been a partial inspiration for Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin’s fictional hamlet Glupov in Istoriia odnogo goroda. 15. See, e.g., G. N. Ulianova, “Novye podkhody v izuchenii sotsiokul’turnogo oblika rosiiskoi burzhuazii XIX-nachala XX vv. Metodika ‘retrospektivnogo anketirovaniia,’” in Puti poznaniia istorii Rossii: novye podkhody i interpretatsii (Moscow, 2001), 87–96. 16. The definition of the lower Mittelstand has generated a great deal of discussion in the German historical literature. The group includes, among others, small traders, craftworkers, the self-employed, and shopkeepers. A few of the most interesting examinations of this issue for Germany and for Europe are Gustav Schmoller, Was verstehen wir unter dem Mittelstande? Hat er im 19. Jahrhundert zu- oder abgenommen? (Göttingen, 1897); David Blackbourn, “The Mittelstand in German Society and Politics, 1871–1914,” Social History 2:4 (1977): 409–33; Arno J. Mayer, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem,” Journal of Modern History 47:3 (1975): 409–36; Otto Brunner and Werner Conze, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart 1972). The Russian journalist Faddei Bulgarin made a similar link, identifying meshchane as Bürger. Faddei Bulgarin, “Peterburg letom,” Severnaia pchela, 7 July 1839. 17. Here again, the problem is that estate-based statistics did not have the resources behind them to quantify professional activity and thus could not capture the phenomenon, for example, of a single individual engaging in multiple occupations. 18. N. I. Runovskii, “Speshnëvskii master Balabanov,” NS, 9:288. 19. Runovskii, “Viazanie rybolovnykh setei,” 214, 223. 20. “V ikh domakh neredko mozhno vstretit’ krashenye poly, okonnye zanaveski, tsvety i proch., dazhe sobliudenie nekotorykh pravil svetskogo prilichiia i voobshche podobie gorodskoi zhizni . . . zakazchiki predstavliaiut iz sebia kak-by intelligentsiiu zdeshnei mestnosti.” Runovskii, “Viazanie rybolovnykh setei,” 224. 21. Runovskii, “Viazanie rybolovnykh setei,” 225. 22. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 17. 23. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 52 (emphasis added). 24. These characters are discussed in Shmidt, Pavlovskii staleslesarnyi raion, esp. 66–67.

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25. In addition, in the districts, Bezvodnoe (Nizhnii Novgord district) was devoted to wire products; Pechery and Podnov’e to gardening; Vyezdnoe (Arzamas) to shoemaking; Katun volost’ (Balakhna) to woodworking and Katunki to leather; Spasskoe, Kazennyi Vatras, Novaia derevnia, Kozhino (Vasil’) to leather and gloves. Pavlovo, Vorsma, and up to forty other settlements (Gorbatov) engaged in the production of steel goods, including pocketknives, table knives, razors, locks, agricultural tools (axes, scythes, sickles), as well as carpenters’ and plumbers’ tools; Bogorodskoe was devoted to mittens, leather, and saddles; Bol’shoe Murashkino (Kniaginin) to leather goods; and many settlements in Semënov to wooden spoons, nails, and yokes, while almost a third of the district manufactured felt hats and boots. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 181. 26. See, as a starting point, Mogul, “In the Shadow of the Factory,” and Gestwa, ProtoIndustrialisierung, as well as the regional and national investigations of kustar industry conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 27. The works I have in mind in particular are the introduction to Reginald Zelnik, ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986); Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91:1 (spring 1986): 11–36; Alfred Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Imperial Russia, ed. Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West (Princeton, 1991), 343–66; Elise Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (DeKalb, IL, 1994), 37, 148. 28. Wirtschafter, Structures of Society, 33. 29. Ibid. 30. P. I. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 3. 31. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, statistical table 8, p. 158. 32. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 34–35. 33. Gatsiskii, “Opyt ugolovnoi statistiki nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” in Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 101. 34. NS, vols. 8–10. 35. On photography and sociology, see Dona Schwartz, “Visual Ethnography: Using Photography in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Sociology 2:12 (summer 1989): 119–54. 36. The studio migrated several times over the years, ending up in 1905 on the prestigious Bol’shaia Pokrovskaia (and, immediately before that, on the equally central Varvarka). 37. This curriculum vitae is taken from the album, Andrei Osipovich Karelin: tvorcheskoe nasledie (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1990), 270–71. Karelin never actually traveled to any of these places. 38. Jürgen Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” Journal of Modern History 67 (December 1995): 785, 786. 39. Ibid., 784. 40. Ibid., 786–87. 41. This emphasis on “attributes” is particularly reminiscent of Flemish painting, where the subjects are frequently surrounded by objects symbolizing their status or events in their lives. 42. It is worth noting the technical difficulties in working with windows, which admit an intensity of light into the room that conventional photographers generally sought to avoid by closing shutters and drawing curtains. 43. For other photographs from the Life Subjects album, search for “Khudozhestvennyi albom fotografii s natury” in the New York Public Library’s digital gallery at http://digital gallery.nypl.org. 44. A. S. Gatsiskii, Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia: biograficheskie ocherki (hereafter, LNP) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1887). Gatsiskii listed 351 individuals worthy of biographical study, from Avvakum to Iazykov, including Patriarch Nikon, the Kazan khan Ulu-Makhmet, the woman doctor named Suslova, Professor Lobachevsky, as well as local sectarians, priests, lawyers, journalists, and many more. The book itself presented five full biographies: of A. D. Ulybyshev (1794–1858), the musician and musicologist well known for his work on Mozart; the prominent merchant and civic leader F. P. Perepletchikov (1779–1845); actress L. N. Kositskaia (1829–1868); icon painter A. V. Stupin (1776–1861); and the local statistician and investigator of the Old Belief, E. K. Ogorodnikov (1816–1884). It also included more fragmentary materials on major



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local figures of the reform era: M. B. Prutchenko (1833–1886), a member of the local gentry and post-reform civic activist in Nizhnii Novgorod before he became governor of Pskov; A. A. Odintsov (1804–1886), the much-loved liberal governor of Nizhnii Novgorod at the time of the reforms; and N. I. Rusinov (1820–1886). 45. Gatsiskii, LNP, vii–viii. 46. A. S. Gatsiskii, Smert’ provintsii ili net? (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1876), 19. 47. Ibid., 20. 48. Zelnik, introduction to Radical Worker, xxi–xxii. The difficulties of applying traditional categories of soslovie (estate) and class to post-emancipation society are also addressed in Freeze, “Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History.” 49. The biographies of Nikolai Rusinov, Petr Osipovich Bankal’skii, and O. E. Shmidt that I present are my own reconstruction. For the latter two, as well as V. P. Vakhterov, see C. Evtuhov, “Voices from the Provinces: Living and Writing in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1870–1905,” Journal of Popular Culture 31:4 (spring 1998): 33–48. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bugrov’s story is based on a compilation of secondary sources. For more Nizhnii Novgorod biographies, see Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsia; Liubov Nikulina-Kositskaia, “Zapiski” [Autobiography], in Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, ed. Toby Clyman and Judith Vowles (New Haven, 1996), chap. 4; F. A. Seleznev, “D. V. Sirotkin—tip nizhegorodskogo predprinimatelia-staroobriadtsa,” ICEEES, Berlin, 2005; A.V. Sedov, “Zemskii kriazh,” introduction to A. A. Savel’ev, Zemstvo i vlast’: iz istorii mestnogo samoupravleniia v Rossii (Arzamas, 1995). See also Laurie Manchester, “The Commonalities of Modern Political Discourse: Three Divergent Paths of Activism Embedded in Late Imperial Russia’s Alternative Intelligentsia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8:4 (fall 2007): 715–47, on A. V. Smirnov (Gatsiskii’s counterpart in Vladimir province). 50. My materials on Bankal’skii are primarily from the papers of the NGUAK. The Bankal’skii materials, which include a brief autobiography, comments from contemporaries, obituaries, and his epitaph, were originally gathered by Gatsiskii as part of his project to create a collective biography of “everyone” in Nizhnii Novgorod. Bankal’skii, “Pis’mo P. I. Bankal’skogo A. S. Gatsisskomu,” in “Liudi Nizhegorodskogo Povolzh’ia,” Deistviia NGUAK, 12:1 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1912): 6–12. 51. On the issue of business activity and religion, see Robert Geraci, “Sunday Laws and Ethno-Commercial Rivalry in the Russian Empire, 1880s–1914,” NCEEER working paper, 2006, http://www.nceeer.org/Papers/papers.php. 52. Bankal’skii, “Pis’mo,” 8. 53. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1982). 54. P. I. Bankal’skii, Sily prirody v soglasii s bibleiskim skazaniem o shestidnevnom tvorchestve (Moscow, 1874), and Istoriia proiskhozhdeniia neba, zemli i trekh tsarstv prirody mineral’nogo, rastitel’nogo i zhivotnogo. Po otkroveniiu pisaniia i po nauchnym issledovaniiam (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1889). 55. Bankal’skii, Istoriia proiskhozhdeniia, 234, 244–35. 56. Ibid., 248. 57. Ibid., 241. 58. “Vsia zhizn’ ego byla sploshnym trudom / Trudom uma, no ne zhelaniem slavy. / On ratoval, borolsia za dobro svoim umom, / I trud ego ne sostavlial pustoi zabavy.” Deistviia NGUAK, 12:1 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1912): 11. 59. Unlike the other three figures whose sketches are based on primary sources, for Bugrov’s biography I am relying on the detailed archival study by the Nizhnii Novgorod local historian A. V. Sedov: Kerzhaki: istoriia trekh pokolenii kuptsov Bugrovykh (Nizhnii Novgorod, 2005). Bugrov’s life also attracted the attention of Petr Boborykin, Vladimir Korolenko, Maksim Gorky, and, among contemporary historians, G. Ulianova, author of Blagotvoritel’nost’ v Rossiiskoi imperii (XIX–nachalo XX veka) (Moscow, 2005). The family patriarch, Petr Egorovich, served as the model for Mel’nikov-Pecherskii’s main character, the expansive and competent Chapurin.

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60. According to Sedov, citing F. N. Rodin, six hundred thousand barge haulers plied their trade along the entire Volga. Sedov, Kerzhaki, 17. 61. Sedov says that the hill on which the house was located was the origin of the name, Bugrov. Sedov, Kerzhaki, 23. 62. Sedov, Kerzhaki, 56. 63. On the shelter, see Ulianova, Blagotvoritel’nost’, as well as Sedov, Kerzhaki. 64. “Gromkoe imia v nizhegorodskoi gubernii.” Gatsiskii, LNP, 226. 65. We have two sources for Rusinov’s story: his own brief autobiography, published in the papers of the NGUAK, and Gatsiskii’s more interpretive essay (in part based on the autobiographical materials) in Gatsiskii, LNP. 66. Gatsiskii, LNP, 224. 67. Ibid., 226. 68. N. I. Rusinov, “Avtobiografiia sostavlena v 1885 gody,” Deistviia NGUAK, 8 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1910): 83. 69. Ibid., 84; Gatsiskii, LNP, 234. 70. Rusinov, “Avtobiografiia,” 84. 71. Ibid., 85. Rusinov was writing in 1885. 72. Rusinov, “Avtobiografiia,” 86. 73. The Shmidt materials come from a posthumous edition of her works compiled by Sergei Bulgakov, Iz rukopisei A. N. Shmidt (Moscow, 1916) and that include biographical materials, diaries, and letters. Another source is her many articles in Nizhegorodskii listok and mention of her in Gorky’s Collected Works. 74. Beginning in the 1860s, secondary schools for girls under the auspices of Empress Maria and open to all social classes appeared in many Russian cities. They became an alternative to education at home or the institutes for young girls of noble birth (dating to the age of Catherine II). 75. Brenda Meehan, Holy Women of Russia: The Lives of Five Orthodox Women Offer Spiritual Guidance for Today (New York, 1993). 76. A. N. Shmidt, Tretii Zavet, in Bulgakov, Iz rukopisei, 22–239. 77. Ibid., 32–33. 78. Shmidt, “Pis’mo k o. Ioannu Kronshtadtskomu,” in Bulgakov, Iz rukopisei, 241. 79. Shmidt, “Iz dnevnika,” in Bulgakov, Iz rukopisei, 245–46. 80. Shmidt, Tretii Zavet, 65. 81. Shmidt, “Pis’mo k V.A.T.” in Bulgakov, Iz rukopisei, 274. The year 1853 is of course the year of Soloviev’s birth; he had a vision of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, in the Egyptian desert in 1875, which he recorded in the humorous poem, “Tri svidaniia.” 82. “A. Timshevskii,” “O budushchem,” Novyi put’, June 1904. 83. For more on the cultural aspects of this relation, see Evtuhov, “Voices from the Provinces.” 84. This of course is not a new question, and the literature on the subject is expanding rapidly, from Clowes, Kassow, and West, Between Tsar and People, and Harley Balzer, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY, 1996), to many studies on specific professions or activities among Russian historians. But we still do not know where they came from, how they came together in a coherent social formation, how numerous they were, and how they formulated their identity as a social group.

Chapter 7. Managing the Province 1. On the place of the Soviet state on a scale of modern welfare states see Kotkin, “Modern Times.” 2. I am thinking of course of the Emmons and Vucinich volume on the zemstvo but also of Veselovskii’s early-twentieth-century study. Terence Emmons and Wayne Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, 1982); Boris Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za 40 let, 4 vols. (rpt., Cambridge, 1973). The plethora of works on “the professions” also tends to take a horizontal rather than a vertical perspective. Rex Wade and Scott Seregny, eds., Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov, 1590–1917 (Columbus, OH, 1989),



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takes its cue from “mainstream” history, rather than allowing a provincial narrative to structure its own chronology. 3. Starr’s comment is that this was the end of a “local era,” but this is only true for central policy. Starr, Decentralization. 4. See the recent excellent synthesis in Hartley, “Provincial and Local Government.” 5. The central government’s arm reached one level further, to the province’s districts, and stopped there. The introduction of the zemskii nachal’nik in 1889 signaled the government’s first intrusion into local jurisdiction. 6. Hartley, “Provincial and Local Government”; Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (Oxford, 2005); Gregory Freeze, ed., Russia: A History (Oxford, 1997); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford, 1967). 7. Starr, Decentralization, 33–34. The reform features more prominently in Nikolai I, Polievktov’s 1918 account of Nicholas I’s reign, and receives a paragraph in Evtuhov and Stites, History of Russia. 8. An appropriate analogy here is the contemporaneous Ottoman Tanzimat, one of whose professed aims was an extension of control to the provincial level. Comparison with the Tanzimat (1839–1876) in fact allows us to examine Nicholas’s reign as an era of reform, understood, as in the Ottoman case, as administrative and military tightening and extension of bureaucratic control. It would be worth exploring the degree to which both efforts had common roots in the ongoing military confrontation between the two empires and most recently the Treaty of Adrianople/Edirne (1829), which prompted an inward readjustment, similar to the one that happened, more famously, after the Crimean War. It is not clear who was looking to whom at this moment, but it certainly would make sense that Turkish reformers turned to Russia— since Peter the Great was a model for Ottoman modernization—as they crafted legislation that ultimately “restor[ed] the powers [of the governors] while extending control over them in other ways.” Stanford Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge, 1977), 2:84. Possibly, both sought common inspiration in the French (Napoleonic) départements. A useful discussion, for this particular context, is Shaw and Shaw, ibid., 83ff. See also Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton, 1963). 9. A. D. Gradovskii, Nachala russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava, pt. 3 (“Organy mestnogo upravleniia”), in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1904), 9:41. 10. Polievktov, Nikolai I, 211. Perhaps Stolypin had the date of 3 June 1837 in mind. 11. Gradovskii, Nachala, 315. 12. Ibid., 41. 13. These reports, which sometimes provide a rich picture of provincial life, are mostly collected in RGIA, f. 1281. 14. Gradovskii, Nachala, 41. 15. The legislation (no. 10303, 3 June 1837) was 346 paragraphs in length. Here is what it actually said, in very concise summary. The law perceived the governors and the zemstvo police as operating in tandem; its purpose was, first, to streamline the procedures of local government and, second, to improve the operations of the 1775 Statute on Local Government. The law addressed first the responsibilities of the governors in general, which included the defense of autocracy, observance of its laws, and regard for the well-being of the population. Its second focus was on general matters of governance, namely, rapid execution and (this is important) promulgation of laws so that they be publicly known, as well as the proper running of the administrative machine. This meant a sort of caretaker role vis-à-vis all the local chinovniki including just rewards and punishments.Third, and most interesting here, were the specific duties toward the estates. The governors—despite the fact that their increased responsibility and prestige clearly undermined the hitherto unchallenged sway of the gentry—were charged with maintaining their status and protecting their prestige. Duties toward the other estates were similar: the clergy were exempt from taxes (except road maintenance), special care was to be taken with honorary citizens and merchants of the first and second guilds, and assemblies of the municipal community were to take place every three years. The governors were also to ensure the inviolability of the rights of rural dwellers, and there were special provisions for foreigners

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and for the acquisition of Russian citizenship. The governors were also responsible for the maintenance of proper morals among the population, food supply and local economy, оversight of state and local tax payments, medical matters (including quarantine), social welfare, fiscal oversight, oversight of courts and legal matters, relations with the military bureaucracy, administrative order, overview of the province and compilation of reports, and relations with the central bureaucracy. It is in the next law, no. 10304, sec. 86 ff. (O poriadke proizvodstva del v Gubernskikh Pravleniiakh), that the gubernskie vedomosti were established, thus confirming that they were conceived as part and parcel of Nicholas’s general project for the provinces. 16. The zemstvo police were venal, as Melnikov indicates in his report; see Mel’nikov, Otchet. Only a visit from the governor and his agent for special commissions could produce effects. The use of the term zemstvo to refer to various local agencies precedes the establishment of the more familiar formal administrative bodies in 1864; the term itself harkens back to Muscovy. 17. Zemstvo postage stamps remain collectors’ items today. See, e.g., http://web.inter.nl.net/ hcc/Langenberg/Zemstvo.html. 18. PSZ, no. 40457, Polozhenie o gubernskikh i uezdnykh zemskikh uchrezhdeniiakh, chap. 1, sec. 1. 19. V. E. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let zhizni nizhegorodskikh zemstv: ocherk razvitiia zemskogo khoziaistva (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914), 7. 20. No. 40457, sec. 7–9. 21. See Elena N. Morozova, Saratovskoe zemstvo, 1866–1890 (Saratov, 1991), 29, and also Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 10. 22. Gatsiskii, LNP, 206–7. 23. I am referring, of course, to Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1995–2000). See the investigation of Kazan governors, also inspired by Wortman’s book: Alsu Biktasheva, Kazanskie gubernatory v dialogakh vlastei, pervaia polovina XIX veka (Kazan, 2008). 24. Gatsiskii, LNP, 208. Odintsov’s credits included a fourth-degree Order of St. Anne won on the Polish battlefields in 1831. He found his patriotism transformed into civic duty with the advent of the new monarch. His reputation for competence in peasant affairs led to an appointment to the Petersburg provincial committee for the regulation of peasant organization; a year later he was also appointed to His Majesty’s special committee for the prevention of injuries and mutilations among factory workers and for drafting legislation regulating child labor; finally, he joined the Petersburg province temporary commission to work out the implementation of the 1861 emancipation edict. See Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg, 1905), 12:111–12, for the basics of Odintsov’s biography, taken in all likelihood from his official curriculum vitae (formuliarnyi spisok). It is interesting to note that Odintsov appears in Reginald Zelnik’s Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), in his discussion of the “St. Petersburg Commission of 1859,” leading up to the Draft Statute on Industry. Zelnik writes, “Early in 1859, shortly after Ignat’ev had given his views on the workers’ booklets to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a temporary commission was formed by Imperial command to inspect the factories of the city and district of St. Petersburg and then, in accordance with its findings, to draft safety regulations for the use of machinery and other measures aimed at reducing the burden on child laborers. Although details regarding the initial decision to create this commission remain obscure, it is clear that Ignat’ev—under whose immediate authority the commission was to operate (its chairman was his immediate subordinate, General A. A. Odintsov, municipal commandant of St. Petersburg)—was a central figure in its making.” Ibid., 126. The commission distributed questionnaires to all St. Petersburg manufacturers, collected material on the exploitation of minors, and ended with a set of regulations that were not only implemented in Petersburg but also distributed throughout the provinces and that formed the point of departure for the Shtakel’berg proposals three years later. 25. Quoted in V. G. Korolenko, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” in A. S. Gatsiskii, 1838–1938: sbornik posviashchennyi pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo, ed. K. D. Aleksandrov (Gorky, 1939), 10. 26. Korolenko, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” 11. 27. Gatsiskii, LNP, 208. This excellent reputation was reflected both “from below” and “from above.” The city duma elected Odintsov an honorary citizen and established a fellowship bearing his name at the Nizhnii Novgorod technical institute; a second fellowship, to the men’s



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gimnaziia, was designated in 1878 by the general assembly of the ordinary members of the Nizhnii Novgorod All-Estate Club. At the same time, Odintsov not only received a promotion to the rank of lieutenant general, in 1872, but also was awarded the orders of St. Vladimir (second degree) and the White Eagle. See Korolenko, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” 11. 28. Gatsiskii, LNP, 210–11. 29. Ibid., 212. 30. Ibid., 215. 31. The comment about the water-supply system being thought impossible is “Takogo vodoprovoda net nigde v Evrope, kak zhe mozhet byt’ v Nizhnem Novgorode?!” http://www .admcity.nnov.ru/references/Governor/Governor_12.html. This official site of the current Nizhnii Novgorod administration has interesting, though not entirely reliable, thumbnail sketches of the imperial governors. 32. On Kutaisov, see Iu. Galai, “Tsenzurnye mytarstva kraeveda,” Zapiski kraevedov (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1991), 146–53. 33. Korolenko, “V golodnyi god,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 9:109. Baranov was commander of the commercial ship Vesta in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the recipient of the Order of St. George for his successes. Sergei Witte has a delightful passage in his memoirs where he holds Baranov’s exaggeration of the Vesta victory responsible for the second-in-command Rozhdestvenskii’s undeserved authority when he recommended to Nicholas II the disastrous Tsushima expedition in 1905. Sergei Witte, Vospominaniia: detstvo, tsarstvovanie Aleksandra II i Aleksandra III (1849–1894) (Berlin, 1923), 241, online at http://az.lib.ru/w/witte_s_j/text_0010.shtml. 34. Korolenko, “Tretii element,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 8:267–68. The “parliament” of homeowners is a reference to Baranov’s original experiment in local “civic associationism”: he gathered St. Petersburg homeowners and renters together and encouraged them to discuss, as Witte disparagingly remarks, “various issues that hardly fell within police jurisdiction.” He further comments, “This method of managing affairs was not usual for Russia, particularly at that time.” Witte, Vospominaniia, 243. 35. Witte, Vospominaniia, 242, 243. 36. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 9. 37. “O tom, kto takoi byl Elpidifor Perfil’evich, i kakie prigotovleniia delalis’ v Chernograde k ego imeninam.” 38. NGV, no. 3 (20 January 1845): 29–30. 39. NGV, no. 38–39 (29 September 1845): 441–46; no. 45 (10 November): 503–5; no. 46 (17 November): 516–20. 40. NGV, no. 3 (20 January 1845): 30–32. 41. NGV, no. 51 (13 July 1846): 202–3 42. NGV, no. (12 January 1846): 20–21; no. 8–9 (3 March 1846): 95–96. 43. NGV, no. 28 (17 April 1846): 109–11; no. 26 (3 April 1846): 103. 44. NGV, no. 62 (31 August 1846): 245–46; no. 63 (7 September 1846): 249–50. 45. For Mel’nikov’s bureaucratic career, and penetration into government circles in the capital, see Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov.” Mel’nikov’s success lasted until the appointment of Valuev and the predominance of the peasant reform for which he was not considered useful. 46. Meln’ikov provides fascinating examples of actual letters in each sort of language. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 97–99. 47. Edinoverie was the solution invented under Catherine II in which parishes could conserve the familiar ritual while formally uniting with the official church. 48. Mel’nikov, Otchet, 156. 49. Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov,” 90, 91. 50. The larger historical scenario, of course, had nothing to do with Mel’nikov. Nicholas launched a legislative effort in the 1840s to combat the Old Belief by barring Orthodox priests from “defecting” to the Old Belief—the means by which priestless Old Believers (popovtsy) acquired priests for themselves. The effort backfired, culminating in the foundation of the first independent Old Believer bishopric just over the Austrian border in Belaia Krinitsa, with the approval of the Austrian government; thus, Old Believers gained the capacity to produce their own priests. Belaia Krinitsa–appointed priests formed pockets of Old Belief in Austria,

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Moldavia, Wallachia, and Turkey (this last provides an interesting twist on the origins of the Crimean War—one reason why Nicholas would have a particular interest in control over Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire). Although their efforts to return to Russia were thwarted at every step, they managed to do so after Belaia Krinitsa, in Bukovina, was threatened by the 1849 invasion; an Old Believer bishop was subsequently ensconced in Moscow and generated significant numbers of Old Believer priests. This post-1849 influx of Old Believer priests naturally led to a renewed government campaign to restrain them. 51. It is true that the wife of a prominent Old Believer merchant, Aleksei Golovastikov, filed suit against Mel’nikov for the brutal search of her house and premises that involved disturbing her daughter, bedridden after childbirth, and the pillaging of valuable icons, some of them by Andrei Rublev. See the account in Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov,” 120–23. 52. Emilia Pardo Bazán, “La revolución y la novela en Rusia,” in Obras completas, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1973), 3:760–880; 794. 53. The zemstvos have generated a vast literature—especially dissertations—in Russia in recent years. In part, this bounty (too numerous to list here) is thanks to the students of N. M. Pirumova, whose two books on the zemstvo proved highly influential. N. M. Pirumova, Zemskoe liberal’noe dvizhenie (Moscow, 1977); Pirumova, Zemskaia intelligentsiia i ee rol’ v obshchestvennoi bor’be do nachala XX v. (Moscow, 1986). The most significant recent work is A. P. Korelin, N. G. Korolev, and L. F. Pisar’kova, eds., Zemskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii, 1864–1918, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2005). 54. On popular education, see esp. Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley, 1986); and Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985). 55. The main work on Russian physicians in this period is Nancy Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton, 1981). 56. See esp. Frierson, All Russia Is Burning!, and Katya Vladimirov, The World of Provincial Bureaucracy in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Russian Poland (Lewiston, ME, 2004). 57. The issue of local taxes, or zemskie povinnosti, had already become an agenda item during Nicholas I’s reign. Special committees (Nicholas’s favorite method of governance) were established in 1827, 1842, and 1847 to address the issue. According to M. Polievktov, the concept of zemstvo taxes was still in flux at this time, oscillating between the collection of local taxes to meet local needs and their collection to meet state needs—but gradually being resolved in favor of the former interpretation. For this interesting though brief discussion, see Polievktov, Nikolai I, 212–14. 58. Quoted in Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 15. 59. Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo sobraniia za 1865–1886 gg. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1888), 2–3. 60. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 12, 16. 61. Ibid., 25–26. District and provincial elections decidedly merit a separate study. On the eve of the electoral reform, the Nizhnii Novgorod lawyer A. Savel’ev published several important articles in which he discussed the implications of the gentry’s loss of land to other social groups: “The ranks [of the landowners], along with the previous basic groups of gentry and land-owning peasants, have expanded to include colored people [chumazye], merchants, raznochintsy.” Savel’ev argued that the changes in agrarian structures resulted in massive underrepresentation of the former privileged classes, with the ironic consequence that fewer electors showed up at caucuses than the delegates they were allowed to select: “Thus, for example, in Nizhnii Novgorod district in 1886 60 large landowners appear in the list; together with representatives from small landowners they had the right to elect 28 delegates. But only seventeen electors even showed up at the caucus, hence they were the ones who, by the law, became the delegates.” He cites similar situations for Semënov, Makar’ev, and Sergach districts. In the last in particular, 64 of 106 listed landowners were female or underage and thus barred from voting. A. Savel’ev, “Zemlevladenie i zemskie vybory v nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” NGV, no. 12 (1887):2, 4. Before we brand Savel’ev as illiberal, however, it bears noting that his proposed solution was not to limit suffrage, which he saw as a reversion to the pre-reform state of affairs, but to expand it so that people whose strengths were not material could participate.



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62. Savel’ev suggested that peasants inevitably elected communal elders, who were highly susceptible to pressure from the assembly president, who was ex officio, also board president, and a member of the gentry. Savel’ev, “Zemlevladenie,” 5. 63. 11 October 1877, 13th ordinary session of the Gorbatov assembly. Gorbatovskoe uezdnoe zemskoe sobranie: zhurnaly zasedanii, doklady, otchety (Gorbatov, 1866– ). For Ryzhenkov’s complaint see Prilozheniia k sborniku zhurnal’nykh postanovlenii Gorbatovskogo uezdnogo zemskogo sobraniia, 1865–1912 gg. (Gorbatov, 1914), 123–25 (Appendix to A. A. Il’inskii, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Gorbatovskogo uezdnogo zemstva Nizhegorodskoi gubernii [Gorbatov, 1913– ], vol. 1). 64. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 12. 65. For a discussion of social insurance in industrial Russia, compare McCaffray, Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia. McCaffray remarks that “no other country in the Western world had such an extensive social insurance program as the one established” by the 1912 sickness and accident insurance law. Ibid., 224. See also Alice K. Pate, “St. Petersburg Workers and Implementation of the Social Insurance Law of 1912,” in Russia in the European Context, ed. McCaffray and Melancon, 189–201. 66. See Morozova, Saratovskoe zemstvo. 67. B. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, 4 vols. (rpt., Cambridge, 1973), 4:429. 68. Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo zemstva (hereafter, SPNZ) (1865–1886), 1:325f. 69. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, ch. 7–8. 70. Accordingly, the pages of the early Gubernskie vedomosti were rife with home remedies. One could, among other things, learn how to combat hemorrhoids by means of baked apples, become apprised of the latest French methods of curing syphilis (such as feeding cows, goats, and she-asses mercury or iodine and then drinking their milk), or read about how to use Chinese acupuncture of the heart to tell if someone is really dead (as opposed to steeping the body in boiling water or hot sealing wax, or making a cut in its heels). NGV, no. 14 (1839): 58; no. 40 ( 5 October 1838): 140; no. 2 (11 January 1839): 157–58. 71. SPNZ, 1:325. 72. These data were collected by the zemstvo physician S. I. Lavrov in his Ocherk zemskoi meditsiny nizhegorodskogo uezda (1866–1895 gg.) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1896), 12–16. 73. Minutes of the Vasil’ assembly meeting of 4 September 1880, published in Otchet Vasil’skoi uezdnoi zemskoi upravy o prikhode, raskhode i ostatke summ, naznachennykh po smete 1880 goda, na udovletvorenie potrebnostei Vasil’skogo zemstva (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1881), 51. 74. Raz’’ezdnaia versus uchastkovaia. 75. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 58–59. 76. SPNZ, 1:333. 77. GANO, f. 1462, op. 643, d. 4, l. 40. One of the members was Aleksandr Gatsiskii’s father, Serafim Petrovich. The number of German names is striking. 78. GANO, f. 1462, op. 643, d. 1, l. 9. 79. GANO, f. 1462, op. 643, d. 2, l. 23. 80. GANO, f. 1462, op. 643, d. 10. 81. On the congresses in political context, see L. A. Bulgakova, “Meditsina i politika: s’’ezdy vrachei v kontekste russkoi politicheskoi zhizni,” in Vlast’ i nauka, uchenye i vlast’: 1880e – nachalo 1920kh godov, ed. N. Smirnov (St. Petersburg, 2003), 213–34. 82. SPNZ (1887–1893), 92–93. 83. GANO, f. 1462, op. 643, d. 7, l. 7. 84. SPNZ, 2:321. 85. Restructuring was facilitated by residents’ financial contributions, which helped to construct a hospital chapel, set up free hospital beds, and pay for the hospitalization of those who could not afford it themselves. 86. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 71–75. 87. Ibid., 55–56. 88. See, for example, Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (DeKalb, IL, 1991), in which she describes grim conditions in the countryside.

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89. For a recent in-depth study of public health and hygiene with a focus on Nizhnii Novgorod province, see Lisa K. Walker, “Public Health, Hygiene and the Rise of Preventive Medicine in Late Imperial Russia, 1874–1912” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2003). 90. The building included a church on the top floor, four classrooms in the wings, and, on the lower floor, a dormitory, dining room, bedrooms, teachers’ quarters, closets, and a kitchen. The architect, M. T. Preobrazhenskii, worked in a “light Byzantine-Russian style,” with three cupolas, a carved façade, and an icon of Christ the Savior on the pediment. M. Makarevskii, Tserkovnaia shkola na vserossiiskoi vystavke 1896 goda v Nizhnem Novgorode (St. Petersburg, 1897). 91. SPNZ, 1:390–91. 92. Existing programs were the Polivanovo courses in Moscow, the Poretsk Seminary in Simbirsk, and those at Kazan and Samara. SPNZ, 1:414. 93. SPNZ, 1:421–22. Some proposals suggested six such centers, but only the three were ultimately deemed necessary. 94. On the tales of Korolevich and Ventsian, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read. 95. Ivan Kulibin (1735–1818), a Nizhnii Novgorod native, was a famous engineer and inventor, known for, among other things, his invention of the steamship. 96. SPNZ, 1:404ff. 97. SPNZ, 1:393. 98. SPNZ, 1:444–50. 99. SPNZ, 1:987–88. 100. See Frierson, All Russia is Burning!; Vladimirov, World of Provincial Bureaucracy; and Nigel Raab, “A Conservative Public Sphere: Imperial Russian Fire Departments, 1850–1914” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002). 101. See Richard Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis (New York, 1975). 102. This last category is of course sarcastic. 103. In addition, the statisticians made clear that, since Gorbatov district was not the object of their study, which dealt only with the hardest-hit black-soil districts, the offending young men had no relation to their investigation and must have been there for some other reason. 104. Zemstvo allocations were not always more generous than the gentry’s: originally, the statisticians’ careful figures allowed them to allocate only six hundred thousand rubles instead of the enormous sums that so frightened the Lukoianov nobility. 105. The essence of this “administrative” account is contained in the 1913 article, “Tretii element,” rather than in the more widely read “Golodnyi god” (1893–1907), the latter originally published in Russkie vedomosti and then Russkoe bogatstvo. 106. Zhurnaly XVII ocherednogo Arzamasskogo uezdnogo zemskogo sobraniia 1881 goda s prilozheniiami (Arzamas, 1881), 8–9. 107. Ibid., 29–30, 33. 108. Ibid., 17–18, 20. 109. Ibid., 57–87. 110. Ibid., 35, 100. 111. Ibid., 36–37, 38–40, 92, 101, 45–48, 49–56. 112. SPNZ, 20 November 1867, 1:4. 113. SPNZ, 1 December 1873, 1:7. 114. SPNZ, January 1881; SPNZ, 1883, 1:10–11. 115. I am thinking, for example, of Theda Skocpol and Joel Migdal and, specifically for Russia, Michael Confino. 116. More general syntheses of the Russian bureaucracy include Hartley, “Provincial and Local Government”; Hans-Joachim Torke, “Das russische Beamtentum in der ersten Hälfte des 19 Jahrhunderts,” Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 13 (Berlin, 1967); George Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711–1905 (Urbana, IL, 1973); Starr, Decentralization; B. Schalhorn, Lokalverwaltung und Ständerecht unter Nikolaus I (Wiesbaden, 1979); Vladimirov, World of Provincial Bureaucracy.



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Chapter 8. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the Zemstvo 1. The apparently oxymoronic term zemstvo cadaster is used in Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika.” 2. Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (Chicago, 1972), 42–43. 3. See Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France. 4. Quoted in I. A. Krupenikov, Istoriia pochvovedeniia ot vremeni ego zarozhdeniia do nashikh dnei (Moscow, 1981), 74. 5. “Dobruiu, sredniuiu, i dobre khuduiu.” Krupenikov, Istoriia pochvovedeniia, 74–75. 6. See I. E. German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia (Moscow, 1910). 7. De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine, 110. 8. Ibid., 109–10. 9. Ibid., 110. 10. V. V. Dokuchaev, “Glavnye momenty v istorii otsenok zemel’ evropeiskoi Rossii,” in Sochineniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1950), 4:19. Originally published in Dokuchaev, Materialy k otsenke, vyp. 2, 1884. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. The provincial archival commissions were established by central decree in the 1880s. See Makarikhin, GUAK. 13. Pallas, Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des russischen Reichs. Nizhnii Novgorod was on Haxthausen’s and Custine’s itineraries; Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff is set partly in Nizhnii Novgorod. 14. See Evtuhov, “Gubernskie vedomosti.” 15. Mikhail Dukhovskii, Statisticheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii, sostavlennoe tamoshnei gimnazii starshim uchitelem Mikhailom Dukhovskim (Kazan, 1827). 16. The first “real” provincial newspaper in Russia is also traced to Kazan. See, for example, B. I. Esin, Russkaia dorevoliutsionnaia gazeta, 1702–1917 (Moscow, 1971). Such local descriptions, apparently independently conceived, exist for virtually all departments of France, as well. I have before me, for example, François Perrin-Dulac’s Description générale du département de l’Isère (Grenoble, 1806). 17. Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France, 12. 18. The pamiatnye knizhki have deservedly become a very popular genre among researchers in Russia; witness the catalogue published under the auspices of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg (RNB): Balatskaia and Razdorskii, Pamiatnye knizhki gubernii i oblastei Rossiiskoi imperii. Still, I think they have been underexploited as yet. Another figure apart from Gatsiskii active in this genre, noted by Vinogradova, is the priest Vinogradov. See Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia. 19. The listing of chinovniki by rank makes the pamiatnye knizhki a valuable source for study of the bureaucracy. An example of this approach is Vladimirov, World of Provincial Bureaucracy. 20. See Iurii G. Galai, “Tsenzurnye mytarstva kraeveda,” Zapiski kraevedov (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1991), 146–53. 21. Volumes 7 and 8 of the Nizhegorodskii sbornik are entirely dedicated to the topic of kustar industry. 22. It is curious that another cadaster that earned the label “perfect” was the map of the island of Putten, southwest of Rotterdam, drafted in 1617. Like the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster, it was commissioned locally—by the dike reeve and the hoogheemraden (roughly analogous to the zemstvo board) of Putten itself—and drafted by the surveyor Daniel Schillincx. The equitable distribution of taxes was an acute problem in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century because of the need to finance the construction and maintenance of dikes. This particular cadaster was used for tax collection for more than 250 years. Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago, 1992), 13–15. 23. The split and eventual conflict between zemstvo and administrative statistics was addressed in J. Koren, ed., The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries (New York, 1918), and has been reiterated in Darrow, “Politics of Numbers”; Martine Mespoulet, “Personnel et production du bureau statistique de la province de Saratov: histoire d’une professionnalisation interrompue (1880–1930)” (Thèse de doctorat, EHESS, 1999); and

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elsewhere. Much of the history of descriptions of Nizhnii Novgorod (from travelogues to statistical descriptions to guidebooks and histories), on the other hand, remains to be told. 24. See Polievktov, Nikolai I. 25. A case in point is Gatsiskii, who expected the statistical committee (and the Gubernskie vedomosti) to become his platform, but, after his conflict with the new governor, Kutaisov, he ended up chairing the zemstvo instead. 26. Gatsiskii, on different occasions, wore both hats, but the humorous and ironic tone of his autobiography (“nizhegorododelanie”) implies precisely the sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the more serious business of land assessment. 27. ESBE, s.v. “Zemskaia statistika.” See also Darrow, “Politics of Numbers”; Mespoulet, “Personnel et production du bureau statistique”; and Stanziani, “Statisticiens, zemstva et état.” 28. This account follows ESBE, s.v. “Zemskaia statistika.” For more discussion of the Moscow and Chernigov methods, see any of the works on zemstvo statistics cited in the previous note. 29. Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: estestvenno-istoricheskaia chast’, by Dokuchaev [Materials toward a land assessment of Nizhnii Novgorod province: the naturalhistorical dimension] (1884– ); and Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’noekonomicheskaia chast’, edited by Annenskii [Materials toward a land assessment of Nizhnii Novgorod province: the social-economic dimension] (1888–1900). 30. The basic approach of the zemstvo cadaster was quite similar to real property assessment in, for example, the United States in the nineteenth century. Here, too, the intrinsic value of the land and its actual uses were taken into account in determining property taxes by local governments, and the revenue was used to finance local expenditures on “water, irrigation, drainage, roads, parks, libraries, fire protection, health services, gopher control, and scores of other services.” Glenn Fisher, “History of Property Taxes in the United States,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, 30 September 2002, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/fisher.property.tax.history. us. However, the advanced scientific evaluation of the soil and the complex calculus of social and economic factors were unique to Nizhnii Novgorod. In the United States in the twentieth century, income tax gradually squeezed out property taxes as a major source of revenue for local needs. 31. Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1963), 2:408. The expedition earns one line elsewhere, too: “For example, the mineralogist V. V. Dokuchaev became the key figure in the creation of soil science in Russia, his work supported by the Free Economic Society, the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, and various zemstva.” Elizabeth Hachten, “In Service to Science and Society: Russian Scientists and the Public in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Osiris 17 (2002): 195. 32. For an overview of the expedition, see N. O. Osipov, Kratkii ocherk zemskikh statisticheskikh issledovanii (Kazan, 1885), 39–45. See also I. A. Krupenikov, Puteshestviia i ekspeditsii V. V. Dokuchaeva (Moscow, 1949). 33. For a summary of these proceedings, see Dokuchaev, “Glavnye momenty,” 32–95. 34. The report of the commission, from 17 January 1881, is cited in Dokuchaev, “O normal’noi otsenke pochv evropeiskoi Rossii,” in Sochineniia, 4:309–10. N. O. Osipov gives a slightly different figure, placing the original estimated cost at 15,500 rubles, which grew to 17,800 by the time the investigation was complete, and special sums had been designated for the printing of the maps and packaging of soil samples. Osipov, Kratkii ocherk, 112. 35. A. N. Beketov was the grandfather of the poet Alexander Blok. 36. Dokuchaev, “O normal’noi otsenke pochv,” 4:309. The researchers included the master’s candidate in agronomy V. M. Iakovlev and the curator of the St. Petersburg University meteorological cabinets, A. N. Baranovskii. Shmidt undertook a chemical analysis of the soil samples, while Iakovlev’s task was physical properties and Baranovskii’s was a description of the climate. The students included Zaitsev, Burmachevskii, Georgievskii, Timofeev, Shaposhnikov, Mel’tsarek, and Sokolov. 37. Eventually, the students involved were V. P. Amalitskii, P. F. Barakov, P. A. Zemiatchenskii, F. Iu. Levinson-Lessing, N. M. Sibirtsev, and A. R. Ferkhmin. Several of them went on to become well-known scientists. 38. The materials of the expedition were published as Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: estestvenno-istoricheskaia chast’; they are reproduced in their entirety in volumes 4 and



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5 of the Soviet edition of Dokuchaev’s collected works: V. V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia (MoscowLeningrad, 1950). 39. Annenskii came to Nizhnii Novgorod with extensive experience in zemstvo statistics in Kazan province; he was thus truly an expert by the time he began the study of Nizhnii. See D. I. Rikhter, “N. F. Annenskii: zemskii statistik,” in Trudy Vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, 9 (February 1913). It is curious to note that Annenskii’s wife, a radical populist, had no patience whatsoever for this scientific-statistical phase of his career: “Specialists attribute a good deal of significance to his work in this sphere, but I could not find sympathy for it: I saw how much physical and moral energy he must expend on it, and how this intense and bothersome labor sapped his health.” A. Annenskaia, “Iz proshlykh let (Vospominaniia o N. F. Annenskom),” Russkoe bogatstvo (St. Petersburg, 1913), 2:65. 40. See Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr,” 17–44. Annenskii emphasizes the particular importance of expertise and the refinement of scientific methods for the Russian cadaster. He also discusses the Napoleonic cadaster, which clearly served as a model for his own work. On the latter see also Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France. 41. Kniaginin was the first district, chronologically, to be investigated and its volume the first to be published. The numbering of the volumes was adjusted to correspond to those of the Dokuchaev study. The preliminary publication is N. F. Annenskii, Kratkii otchet o khode i obshchikh rezul’tatakh otsenochno-ekonomicheskikh rabot po kniagininskomu uezdu (n.p., 1887). 42. Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’, vyp. 4, “Kniagininskii uezd,” 6. 43. Ibid., 20. 44. Ibid., 27. 45. Ibid., 30, 32–33. 46. In some cases, a suspected difference could not be verified in any way. Ibid., 37, 40. 47. Ibid., 51. 48. Ibid., 40–43. 49. The frequency of distribution varied from commune to commune. 50. Materialy k otsenke zemel’ nizhegorodskoi gubernii: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia chast’, vyp. 4, “Kniagininskii uezd,” 54. 51. There is a summary of the three methods, each of which was considered valid given different circumstances in different regions, in ibid., 51. 52. For a description of each of the eight categories, together with the places where they occur, see ibid., 68–70. 53. The same three methods could be applied here, depending on the uses to which meadowlands were put. Ibid., 127. 54. Ibid., 149, 150. 55. Ibid., 166–67. 56. PSZ, no. 9744, 8 June 1893. 57. Dokuchaev, “O normal’noi otsenke pochv,” 4:291. 58. Ibid., 306. 59. Ibid., 301, 303. Dokuchaev’s most vehement critic was N. O. Osipov, who called his investigation superficial and useless for any practical purposes. See Osipov, Kratkii ocherk zemskikh statisticheskikh issledovanii, chap. 4. 60. Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr.” The paper, like many others presented at the congress, was a response to the 1893 government legislation regulating land assessment. 61. Annenskii wrote that he wanted to present “some general observations on how to organize these investigations, and which fundamental type of zemstvo cadaster (employing this term in the broadest possible sense) should be considered most appropriate for the general conditions of Russian economic life and to the measure of those forces and resources which the zemstvo has at its disposal to carry out the assessments.” Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr,” 17. 62. It is curious that the features Annenskii considers significant are not even mentioned by Bourguet. 63. Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr,” 18–19. 64. Ibid., 21. 65. Ibid., 24.

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66. Annenskii laments the unrealized dream of compiling a “great agrarian book of all of France.” Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr,” 26. 67. Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr,” 29. He goes on to call this insufficient state involvement the weakest aspect of the zemstvo cadaster. 68. Here, once again, Annenskii of course replicates exactly the model of the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster, with its two parts under the same rubric. Annenskii goes out of his way to praise the results of his predecessor’s investigation for theoretical soil science, despite its original practical goals. 69. This distinction is one of the main theoretical achievements of Russian statistical science. Literally, tekushchaia means “current,” but I think “diachronic” in this case captures the sense of movement over time that is the essence of this concept. Adaptability to a changing environment is an important consideration. The formalized division was anticipated by the French prefects: “‘Your work, citizen prefect, is divided in two parts. The first takes as an object the fixed, permanent situation of your department. There we find its topography and population, its agriculture, commerce, etc. These topics must first of all be seen in themselves and independently of the momentary circumstances of war and Revolution. . . . The second part of your work is concerned with monthly and daily changes.’ The French prefects, in other words, were thinking along the same lines as the Russian statisticians, and similarly recognizing the necessity of distinguishing between the ‘basic’ and the ‘diachronic.’” Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France, 68. 70. This is the distinction that David Darrow singles out (it is his own key point) as essential to Annenskii’s argument. He believes that there is an opposition of “cadastral” (identified with the administration) versus “social” (identified with zemstvo statisticians) views of agriculture. In the case of Nizhnii Novgorod, I don’t think this is correct, since Annenskii values the expertise of a “cadastral” approach more than anyone, and he is a zemstvo statistician. What is important is who controls the cadaster—the central government or the zemstvo. 71. Incidentally, a survey of the province’s fauna was also under way, prompting Dokuchaev to speak of Nizhnii Novgorod as the region where the ideal of a complete cataloguing of “all three Kingdoms of Nature” would be realized. Dokuchaev, “O normal’noi otsenke pochv,” in Sochineniia, 4:341. Curiously, the “three Kingdoms,” mineral, vegetable, and animal, were also the object of a special inquiry conducted in Napoleonic France (1812). Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France, 55. 72. Names of peasant villages and estates (pomestiia) alternate on the maps, but their boundaries are not indicated. 73. In the districts I have been able to review, much of the transfer of land was from gentry to peasant communes, except in Semënov, where wealthy merchants bought up most of what was offered, consolidating their status as a local elite with the further attribute of land ownership. 74. In this sense the Nizhnii Novgorod cadaster follows a Russian tradition. Isabel de Madariaga notes regarding the Catherinian Land Survey, launched in 1765, that it also did not delimit individual estates and that it sought to incorporate labor rather than land as a decisive factor: “Thus the basic principle was not the property rights of an individual landowner, but the establishment of the amount and the boundaries of the land which belonged to a given village, whether it had one or several owners or belonged to the state.” De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine, 109–10. 75. Soslovnost’ meant the introduction of the estate principle. An example is the establishment of two separate land banks for gentry and peasants, or separate judicial institutions. 76. There is an interesting potential juxtaposition here with John Rawls’s “R & R” (reasonable and rational) being in the “OP” (original position). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971). See also T. A. Alekseeva, Spravedlivost’: moral’naia i politicheskaia filosofiia Dzhona Roulsa (Moscow, 1992). 77. Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map, 344. 78. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 3. 79. Martine Mespoulet writes that the 8 June 1893 law provided an impulse for more statistical studies. Mespoulet, “Personnel et production,” 45. However, the law, which sought to reestablish bureaucratic control over the process, met heavy criticism from the zemstvo milieu, including Dokuchaev. The statistics subsection of the Ninth Congress of Russian Naturalists



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and Physicians, held 3–11 January 1894 in Chernigov, dedicated a good proportion of its sessions to responses to the legislation. 80. Cheshikhin-Vetrinskii, Piat’desiat let, 172–73.

Chapter 9. Church and Religion 1. Religious brotherhoods and educational activities, for example, met with pointed antagonism, causing despondence among the more dedicated priests. Corbin traces the beginnings of large-scale loss of faith to the 1830 revolution. Alain Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1975; Limoges, 1998), chap. 5. 2. Gregory Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, CounterReform (Princeton, 1983), xxix. 3. Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 4. I am referring to Paul Werth’s study, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, 2002). 5. ESBE, s.v. “Eparkhiia.” 6. The Old Believer archpriest Avvakum’s hometown of Grigorovo is just outside of B. Murashkino. 7. Arkhimandrit Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii (St. Petersburg, 1857; rpt. Nizhnii Novgorod, 1999), 20–23. The Council of 1762 took place in between patriarchs; present were Metropolitan Pitirim, three other metropolitans, two archbishops, and a bishop. One of the metropolitans (the one from Riazan’) was a Nizhnii Novgorod native. Originally designated as the bishopric of Nizhnii Novgorod and Alatyr’, the diocese was redesignated that of Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas in 1799. 8. Pitirim, Prashchitsa protivu voprosov raskol’nicheskikh (St. Petersburg, 1721). See Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 88. 9. Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 99, 107. 10. Ibid., 145n. 11. Ibid., 173–74. 12. Arkhimandrite Makarii, Pamiatniki tserkovnykh drevnostei (St. Petersburg, 1857), in Pamiatniki tserkovnyhkh drevnostei (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1999), 695. 13. The premature blindness he mentions could possibly be a symptom of syphilis. Dukhovskii, Statisticheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii, 12–13. 14. Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 119–20. 15. Ibid., 174. 16. Ibid., 193. See also various articles on this subject in the papers of the NGUAK. 17. Dukhovskii, Statisticheskoe opisanie nizhegorodskoi gubernii, 14. 18. Ibid. 19. The archaic terms are Sintaksimy, Infimy, Grammatiki, Fary, Analogii. 20. Nizhegorodskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti (hereafter, NEV), no. 24 (1866): 905, 906. See also Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 177. 21. NEV, no. 24 (1866): 913. 22. See the various monographic works on the seminary by A. I. Tikhov, including K istorii nizhegorodskoi dukhovnoi seminarii: plan i vnutrenniaia obstanovka seminarskikh zdanii mezhdu 1800–1823 gg. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1900); Nizhegorodskaia dukhovnaia seminariia v 1840–1851 gg. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1903); K istorii Nizhegorodskoi dukhovnoi seminarii XVIII v. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1900); and Kratkaia pamiatnaia istoricheskaia zapiska nizhegorodskoi dukhovnoi seminarii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1905). 23. RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 60, l. 7 rev. Nektarii further commented that he could count only twenty clerics he believed did not really know their business. The blagochinnye were elected supervisors who mediated between the ecclesiastical administration and the laity. 24. RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 181, l. 63. 25. See, e.g., RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 181, l. 65. On one occasion, Bishop Nektarii noted that of 1,174,158 members of the Church, 601,488 took the Eucharist. RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 60, l. 15 rev. 26. RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 104, ll. 16, 30–31.

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27. The clerical estate has often been described as a “caste” because, with only rare exceptions, only sons of priests could become priests. 28. Borisovskii, “Lozhkarstvo,” 26. 29. For more on priests as ethnographers, see Catherine Clay, “Ethos and Empire: The Ethnographic Expedition of the Imperial Russian Naval Ministry, 1855–62” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1989); and Nathaniel Knight, “Constructing the Science of Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1995). 30. Others participating were landowners (48), managers (57), tenants (1), peasants (142), local bureaucrats (e.g., land captains) (6), physicians and assistants (4), foresters (5), township administrators, elders, and scribes (101), teachers (37), and others (17). Sel’sko-khoziaistvennyi obzor Nizhegorodskoi gubernii za 1893 god (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1894), 1:vii. 31. Sergievskii, “Ob uchastii dukhovenstva v zemstve po zakonu 1-go ianvaria 1864 goda,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (Feb. 1864), cited in NEV, no. 23 (1 December 1864): 78. 32. Vinogradova, Nizhegorodskaia intelligentsiia, 192–93. Curiously, Ioann Vinogradov was Nikolai Dobroliubov’s youthful collaborator on the seminary newspaper in the late 1840s. 33. See Freeze, Parish Clergy, chaps. 5–7. 34. “Obzor sobytii v dukhovenstve za proshedshii 1863 god,” NEV, no. 5 (1864): 28–39. 35. Ibid., 31. What was the role of the clergy in the constantly shifting equation defining the relation between tsar and people? Here are two passages addressing this question: “But since our Russian society is still weak, the Government, which for now stands in for society, has quite correctly—in both canonical and historical senses—defined its relation to the clergy, having set itself the task of improving its external circumstances.” Ibid., 34. “As a result of historical circumstances, our clergy has so thoroughly merged with the name of the Church that it has become something inseparable and common with it; this is why, in changing something within the clergy, we must be extremely careful not to make some kind of unintended significant change in the Church as well, and in implementing reform we must beware of contradicting the spirit and character of the Church.” Ibid., 36. On the complications of state manipulation of the clergy, see, e.g., Nadieszda Kizenko, “Confession in Modern Russian Culture,” NCEEER report, June 2007. 36. A digest of the journals for 1864 focused on articles in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie—most notably, a note by Khomiakov on Western Christianity that accounted for the recent Crimean War as the result of the “heresy of Photius” (Catholicism) and complained of the pope’s support of the Poles in the 1863 uprising. The Catholic Church had replaced the principle of love with the principle of cognition in its alteration of the Creed, ultimately resulting in the anarchy of Protestantism, in which any individual diocese could take a stand against the unity of the whole Church. An even greater evil had come about in the effort to counteract this one—namely, the doctrine of papal infallibility. Only the reunion of the churches under the aegis of Orthodoxy could restore the one holy and apostolic church, and the very title, “Orthodoxy,” could then disappear as it became unnecessary. NEV, no. 32 (1864): 71–73. 37. In the late eighteenth century, Bishop Antonii (1773–1782) established the practice of regularly scheduled sermons, cleared through the consistory. Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 155. 38. The publisher A. Kir’iakov in Moscow, at the Synodal printing house, advertised these books and pamphlets in the NEV, no. 21 (1864): 52. 39. “Chestnyi trud khristianina,” NEV, no. 14 (1864): 14. The view expressed is a perfect foreshadowing of Bulgakov’s “ethic of joyful labor” and betrays a spontaneous anti-Romanticism— the artist’s atelier being precisely where labor would end for Novalis or Schlegel. 40. A curious illustration came up several issues later, in the story of a young pastor who was not, at first, well received by his peasant parishioners. When they ascribed their poverty to God’s will, the “ideal type” of the 1860s priest pressed them further: “Weren’t you perhaps lazy, or didn’t you waste your possessions and family bread on drink? Think about how you have been living. Do you labor in the sweat of your face as prescribed by God’s commandments? And so on.” NEV, no. 21 (1864): 39. Labor in the sweat of one’s face is of course not prescribed in any commandments; it is found in Genesis and is the result of the Fall from Eden. 41. RGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 60, l. 14.



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42. This discussion is based on P. Znamenskii, Bogoslovskaia polemika 1860-kh gg. ob otnoshenii pravoslaviia k sovremennoi zhizni (Kazan, 1902). 43. NEV, no. 32 (1864): 74. 44. NEV, no. 23 (1864): 46, 50. 45. “Slovo o prichinakh sovremennogo neveriia,” NEV, no. 21 (1866): 789. 46. NEV, no. 22 (1864): 2. 47. Ibid., 3–4, 21. 48. Ibid., 18. 49. Ibid., 20. 50. NEV, no. 23 (1864): 15–26. 51. Korinfskii is a pseudonym; his real name was Varentsov. Montferrand is best known as the architect of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. 52. Unfortunately, the effect of the Church of the Annunciation dominating the square is one we can only surmise, since this focus of urban religious pageantry was blown up in 1929. Khramtsovskii describes, in detail, twenty-five major churches on the territory of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod but mentions the existence of thirty-three. 53. Perepletchikov’s merchant rank was Commercial Councilor. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:63. 54. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:65, 69, 77. 55. Ibid., 2:87. 56. Ibid., 2:88–89. 57. NEV, no. 22 (1867): 731. 58. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:82, 84, 85, 90. Afanasii Olisovich and A. F. Olisov were probably the same person. 59. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:65, 68, 69, 71. 60. Ibid., 2:94. 61. Ibid., 2:63, 65, 85. 62. Ibid., 2:131–32. 63. http://www.ninn.ru/2007/06/05/nizhegorodskie_musulmane_ustanovjat_pamjatnyjj _znak_na_meste_mecheti_razrushennojj_bolshevikami.html. 64. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 2:44–45. 65. William G. Wagner, “The Transformation of Female Orthodox Monasticism in Nizhegorod [sic] Diocese, 1764–1929, in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Modern History 78:4 (2006): 793–845. 66. NEV, no. 10, (1867): 300–1. 67. See Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, chap. 4, on feasts. 68. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:7–8. 69. “Dnes’ svetlo—krasuetsia Nizhnii Novgorod iako zariu solnechnuiu vospriimshe Vladychitse, chudotvornuiu tvoiu ikonu.” Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 2:8, 129. 70. NGV, no. 12 (1861): 12. 71. A. I. Zvezdin, “K 50-letiiu ob’iavleniia manifesta 19 fevralia 1861 goda v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii,” in Deistviia NGUAK, 10, “Sbornik v pamiat’ 19 fevralia 1861 goda,” 66. 72. Ibid., 67. 73. See Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington, IN, 1994), 40–57. See also Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861 (Cambridge, MA, 1976). 74. NEV, no. 3 (1864): 18n. 75. NEV, no. 3 (1864): 18. 76. “Sviatyi, blagovernyi, velikii kniaz’ Georgii (Iurii) II Vsevolodovich,” NEV, no. 3 (1864): 20. 77. This is perhaps a hagiographical pattern: Avvakum describes his parents in similar fashion, as does Sergei Bulgakov. 78. “Zhizn’ Georgiia Vsevolodovicha do vosshestviia na velikokniazheskii prestol,” NEV, no. 3 (1864): 21–28. 79. Also, issues of the NEV are full of articles on aspects of local history.

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80. NEV, no. 11 (1866): 427. 81. Ibid., 439. 82. Ibid., 439–40. 83. Ibid., 440. See also Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, 2009). 84. See chap. 7, n106. Tiles bearing the insignia of Russian cities adorn the exterior of the church. 85. Makarii, Istoriia nizhegorodskoi ierarkhii, 8. 86. P. I. Mel’nikov, “Pis’ma o raskole,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1976), vol. 8. 87. NEV, no. 3 (1866): 100. 88. NEV, no. 1 (1866): 4–6. 89. Ibid., 6. 90. NEV, no. 3 (1866): 99–103. 91. NEV, no. 4 (1866): 149–55. 92. Mel’nikov, “Pis’ma o raskole.” 93. It is likely that this was the same icon that presided over the opening of the zemstvo. 94. The other three provinces were Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, and Saratov. Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov,” 116. 95. N. I. Subbotin, Istoriia belokrinitskoi ierarkhii (St. Petersburg, 1874). 96. Usov, “Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov.” 97. Ibid., 279n. 98. A. A. Lebedev, Materialy dlia istorii raskola v Povolzh’e (Saratov, 1886), 104. 99. O merakh, predpriniatykh v 50–60 godakh nastoiashchego stoletiia dlia oslableniia raskola v Nizhegorodskoi eparkhii (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1896). 100. On the modern history of the Old Belief, see Roy Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (De Kalb, IL, 1995), and Irina Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, UK, 2003).

Chapter 10. Provincial Cultural Nests 1. NGV, no. 37 (1847): 145. In fact, this was the same article that described the episode of the “disappearing island” with which chapter 2 began. Was that not, after all, an event? 2. NGV, no. 39 (1847): 154. 3. Vtorichnye modeliruiushchie sistemy (secondary modeling systems). The notion became extremely productive in the 1970s and 1980s, when methods of structural linguistics were applied to the “next level”—poetry, music, human behavior—in an enterprise that has come to be known as culturology. See the journal Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Tartu University, 1964 –). 4. Let me mention the working group that produced A. F. Belousov and T. V. Tsivian, eds., Russkaia provintsiia: mif, tekst, real’nost’ (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2000); the theoretical section of Vladimir Abashev’s Perm’ kak tekst (Perm’, 2000); and Susan Smith-Peter’s work on Voronezh and on the eighteenth-century provincial press. On the first, Richard Stites commented on the privileging of myth and text over reality in his Serfdom, Society, and the Arts, 47. Abashev’s beginning—he chooses to apply Boris Gasparov’s linguistic/culturological methodology to his own problematic (see B. Gasparov, Iazyk, pamiat’, obraz: lingvistika iazykovogo sushchestvovaniia [Moscow, 1996])—is promising and the textual analysis is good, but he limits his discussion to literature. It might also be worth including C. Evtuhov et al., Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg in this list, though it represents a “first step” and does not attempt to grapple with theoretical issues except for Mark von Hagen’s article on federalism. The summer conferences at Smolensk and Kazan were the harbingers of a plethora of similar joint undertakings in various Russian provincial cities as well as in more “usual” locations. 5. Piksanov, Oblastnye kul’turnye gnezda, 13, 18–20. 6. Ibid., 33. 7. Ibid., 34. 8. The dictionary compilation procedure used by Dal’ was, in his vast pile of “cards” (slips of paper) with words and their definitions, to group together those that obviously evoked each other and cohered into a field of related meanings. These nests, or clusters, were usually,



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though not always, grouped around a verb. (“How accurately K. S. Aksakov, in examining verbs, grasped this vital, living force of our language! Our verbs are absolutely not subject to the deadening spirit of the sort of grammar that wishes to subjugate them to purely external principles; they demand that we acknowledge their independent spiritual force and, succumbing only to that force, they become subject to its external manifestations, its meaning and sense.” “Kak verno skhvachena byla K. S. Aksakovym, pri rassmotrenii im glagolov, eta zhiznennaia, zhivaia sila nashego iazyka! Glagoly nashi nikak ne poddaiutsia mertviashchemu dukhu takoi grammatiki, kotoraia khochet siloiu podchinit’ ikh odnim vneshnim priznakam; oni trebuiut priznaniia v nikh sily samostoiatel’noi, dikhovnoi, i pokoriaias’ tol’ko ei, podchiniaiutsia razgadannym vneshnim priznakam etoi dukhovnoi sily, svoego znacheniia i smysla.” Vladimir Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, Moscow, 21 April 1862. Published as introduction to V. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo izyka, 4 vols. [Moscow, 1930], 16.) For example, a user in search of the word bania will find it under banit’ and together with such related words as bannik, banit’sia, banen’e, banka, bainia, banishcha, banishche, bannyi, banshchik, baneva, banevka, and more. In addition, each entry contained as many examples as possible of popular uses of words and expressions, so that the dictionary acquired value not only as a lexical tool but as a compendium of proverbs and idioms. In the heyday of Soviet science, the Dal’ principle was dismissed as naïve, but some currents in contemporary lexicography have returned to “nesting” as a useful means of capturing meanings in the Russian language. See esp. R. N. Kleimenova, ed., V. I. Dal’ i Obshchestvo liubitilei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (St. Petersburg, 2002). 9. “K molodym kraevym iskusstvovedam,” in Piksanov, Oblastnye kul’turnye gnezda, 61. So the history of theater, for example, taken in isolation, does not yet comprise a “nest.” 10. Requisite documents were an attestation of status, baptism, good health and smallpox vaccination, nonadherence to youth groups of the merchant or meshchanskoe estate, and, for boarders, a guarantee from a local resident. 11. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 2:1–4. 12. See once again Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France. 13. Pamiatnaia knizhka na 1865, 2:5–7. 14. Ibid., 8–11. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Such postings of rules for entry to educational institutions also occur in the Gubernskie vedomosti. 17. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read; Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools; Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860–1914 (Pittsburgh, 1994). 18. D. L. Mordovtsev, “Pechat’ v provintsii,” Delo, nos. 9–10 (1875): 46–47. Mordovtsev’s argument, in addition, contained a hidden Ukrainian agenda: the author of a multiplicity of stories and novels with Ukrainian subjects (he himself came from a Ukrainian family in the Don Cossack region), he unambiguously gave priority to the last of the regional literatures on his list: of all the branches, it was the “Kievan” that was the most significant and that presumably had a chance to become a true, independent, national literature (“Malorossian literature”). 19. Gatsiskii, Smert’ provintsii ili net? 20. This is practically a direct quotation from Afanasii Shchapov, whose “zemstvo-regional” theory forms a backdrop to Gatsiskii’s own “idea of province.” Here is Shchapov’s version: “We have been so obsessed with the people—an extremely important new element in history—that we have failed to notice a second, equally important and equally new, element: the provinces or regions.” “Velikorusskie oblasti i Smutnoe vremia,” Otechestvennye zapiski, nos. 10–11 (1861). This was originally Shchapov’s first lecture at Kazan University. 21. A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr (1798–1867) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1867), 80. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Everybody discusses this matter of strict behavioral norms, including Gatsiskii and Stites. Initially, part of Shakhovskoi’s immense household staff of three hundred were the actors while the audience comprised an equally captive audience of his other serfs, who, apart from theatrical entertainment, were offered the additional stimulus of a cup of vodka. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr, 13. The troupe’s move to the city signified a distinct shift in the attending public.

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24. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr, 21. 25. Quoted in ibid., 24. 26. There was a short-lived theater on the Vyksa River, in Ardatov district, and one at the Shepelev factories. 27. NGV, no. 1 (5 Jan. 1863): 3–4. 28. This theme runs like a red thread throughout the memoirs of composer Hector Berlioz. It is of course also true that he strained the capacities of any musical milieu with his orchestrations. Beethoven’s deafness was another possible “solution.” 29. The proverbial phrase was originally coined by Griboedov. H. Laroche, in his introduction to the Mozart biography, comments, “It’s clear that the mixture of French and Nizhegorodian in which Mozart is written, is Ulybyshev’s own dialect in all its integrity.” Laroche, introduction to Nouvelle biographie de Mozart, suivie d’un aperçu sur l’histoire générale de la musique et de l’analyse des principales oeuvres de Mozart, by Alexandre Oulibicheff, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1841), 1:2. 30. Oulibicheff, Nouvelle biographie de Mozart. The philosophy of music is in volume 2. The book was translated into Russian by Modest Tchaikovsky in 1890: Novaia biografiia Motsarta (Moscow, 1890). A later and smaller work on Beethoven was written in response to the criticisms of the Moscow musicologist Lenz; according to Ulybyshev’s biographers, this argument was the cause of his illness and ultimately of his death—which, indeed, followed just a year after the Beethoven book’s publication. Alexandre Oulibicheff, Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Leipzig and Paris, 1857). 31. Alexander Ulybyshev, “Vospominaniia o nizhegorodskoi iarmarke, 1851,” in F. Bulgarin, Apollinarii Kontskii, s ego portretom i snimkom s pocherka Paganini (St. Petersburg, 1852), 26. Originally published in Severnaia pchela, no. 224 (1851). 32. Ibid. Earlier, Panova had studied with Henselt in St. Petersburg. 33. V. A. Kollar, Muzykal’naia zhizn’ Nizhnego Novgoroda (Gorky, 1976); Russkoe muzykal’noe obshchestvo, Otchety 1874–1915, unpublished document, Nizhnii Novgorod Public Library. 34. I. I. Driakhlov, Istoriia razvitiia khorovogo peniia v s. Pavlove Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Pavlovo, 1914). 35. A. F. Mozharovskii, “Meteorologicheskii dnevnik arkhimandrita Petra Kamenskogo (dnevnik veden v 1840 i v 1841 g., s otryvkom za 1833 g.),” appendix to meeting of 11 April 1889, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp: 5, 136–51; 147. 36. Even earlier, in 1838, the Gubernskie vedomosti published the results of a series of meteorological observations conducted at the gymnasium during the week of 8–15 May; subsequently this rubric became a regular feature. NGV, no. 21 (25 May 1838): 77. In 1847, an article detailed meteorological observations made since 1835. NGV, no. 35 (7 June 1847): 439–40. See also NGV, no. 1 (1851), NGV, nos. 39 and 42 (1856) (on the moon and weather and the comet expected in 1860). 37. Sel’sko-khoziaistvennyi muzei nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo zemstva, Osen’ 1896 g. v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Nizhnii Novgorod, n.d.). The rubric “Obzor pogody” gives average temperatures in different parts of the province, precipitation, etc. See also Materialy po izucheniiu klimata nizhegorodskoi gubernii: svod i obzor meteorologicheskikh nabliudenii za period vremeni s 1897 goda po 1911 god (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1913), 4. 38. Materialy po izucheniiu klimata, 15–18. 39. Ibid., 1–4. 40. A. A. Mikhailov, Obzor periodicheskoi russkoi literatury po meteorologii za 1892 g. (Moscow, 1893), 37. Voieikov’s article is in Meteorologicheskii vestnik, nos. 11–12 (1892). 41. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok liubitelei fiziki i astronomii, Otchety, 1888–1907, no. 1 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1890): 28. 42. Fedor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin (1831–1904) was a Russian astronomer and a director of the Pulkovo observatory; Aleksandr Dmitrievich Putiata (1828–1899) was a mathematician and astronomer. 43. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, Otchety, no. 1: 29. 44. This article by Demidov (17 March 1891) discussed changing conceptions of the universe and its expanding boundaries as new planets (in this case, Uranus and Neptune, in 1781 and



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1846, respectively) were discovered. The potential for expansion seemed limitless, particularly with the discovery of “our closest neighbor,” Alpha Centauri. The author expresses a warmth and enthusiasm that bear citing: “This is simply incredible. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels, and all human poems that strive to supersede nature itself, fade and disappear before this brilliant reality; they are no more than dust!” Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, Otchety, no. 2 (1891): 25–26. All of human history paled beside these extraordinary new dimensions. The conclusion proclaims: “Actual fact confronts our amazed soul in all its glory. The history of every world, every country, every day, is written with a ray of light, and we must acknowledge the constant visibility of all of creation in eternity. . . . Those who like to study major problems might think about this one; they will change the planet before they can measure its depth. Let them reflect upon the fact that the entire Universe (including living creatures) consists of invisible atoms in constant motion.” Ibid., 34–35 (original emphasis). Other articles worth mentioning include Malinin’s on color photography, on the world ether, and on creation as a scientific fact and Shenrock’s on Lobachevskian geometry. 45. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, Otchety, no. 2 (1891): 15–17. 46. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, “Ustav Nizhegorodskogo kruzhka liubitelei fiziki i astronomii,” Otchety, no. 1 (1890): 2–10. 47. “Spisok chlenov za 1888 i 1889 gg.,” 40–43; Nizhegorodskii kruzhok liubitelei fiziki i astronomii, 1888–1913 (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1913), 3. 48. “Kontorshchiki, prikazchiki, masterovye, rabochie.” Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, 14. 49. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, 12. 50. Nizhegorodskii kruzhok, Otchety, no. 8 (1910): 3. 51. On the provincial archival commissions, see Makarikhin, GUAK. 52. A. S. Gatsiskii, Istoricheskaia zapiska ob uchrezhdenii v Nizhnem Novgorode gubernskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi kommissii (1884–1887) (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1887), 4–5. 53. “Lichnyi sostav Nizhegorodskoi Gubernskoi Uchenoi Arkhivnoi Kommissii na 1 iiunia 1903 g.,” Deistviia NGUAK, 5:79–84. 54. “Tsirkuliarnoe otnoshenie tovarishcha ministra vnutrennikh del senatora I. N. Durnovo, ot 6 maia 1884 goda, za no. 10, na imia nizhegorodskogo gubernatora,” in Gatsiskii, Istoricheskaia zapiska, 21–22. 55. Meeting of 22 October 1887, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 1: 3. 56. Meeting of 4 February 1888, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 2: 11–12. See also S. M. Pariiskii, Nizhegorodskaia uchenaia arkhivnaia kommissiia za 25 let svoego sushchestvovaniia (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1913), 27. Pariiskii notes with regret that this important decision of principle was in fact not systematically applied. 57. Meeting of 4 February 1888, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 2: 9. 58. Meeting of 22 October 1887, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 1: 3. 59. The descriptions of these court cases were published under the rubric, “Opis’ delam uezdnogo suda.” 60. On the former serfs’ stories, see meeting of 4 March 1888, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 2: 19. 61. Mel’nikov, Otchet o sovremennom sostoianii. 62. Meeting of 22 October 1887, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 1: 4. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Meeting of 11 April 1889, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 5: 93. 65. Gatsiskii, Istoricheskaia zapiska; meeting of 17 October 1887, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 1: 1. 66. V. V. Dokuchaev, “Zemskii gubernskii muzei (proekt ustava),” in Dokuchaev, Sochineniia, 7:303–6. The original is an archival document: GANO, f. Nizhegorodskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy, d. 144. The proposal for the museum dates from 1882. See also Dokuchaev, “Ob organizatsii gubernskogo zemskogo estestvennoistoricheskogo muzeia,” in Sochineniia, 7:307–8, originally published in Trudy S.-Peterburgskogo obshchestva estestvoispytatelei, v. 16, vyp. 2, 1885, 115–19. 67. Dokuchaev, “Zemskii gubernskii muzei,” 304–5. 68. Ibid., 306. 69. Some provincial museums had more modest beginnings. In a letter from Nice dated 31 October 1897, Anton Chekhov writes to his fellow Taganrogian, I. F. Iordanov, proposing some

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exhibits for a new local museum and library. Among the displays would be drawings, original letters, a bird-eating spider, drafts of short stories and a portrait of the local writer Shcherbin, a lubok of an artillery attack on Taganrog, and a mediocre painting of the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II in Taganrog (“the painting isn’t great, but will do for the museum; the Loboda family still remembers the name of this local Taganrog artist”). The occasion was the two-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the city. A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1957), 12:187–88. 70. Michael Hagemeister lists the following places (and years) of residence: Lipetsk (1854–1857), Bogorodsk, Moscow province (1858–1864), Uglich (1864–1865), Odoev, Tula province (1865–1866), Borovsk, Kaluga province (1866–1867), and Podol’sk, Moscow province (1867–1868). Fedorov advanced to the rank of tituliarnyi sovetnik (rank 9—this was the rank of Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich) in the course of his career. Michael Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Munich, 1989), 25n41. 71. N. F. Fedorov, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1982), 2:372. 72. Ibid., 240. 73. Ibid., 239. 74. On Fedorov, see Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov; and esp. Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, 1992).

Chapter 11. The Idea of Province 1. I am drawing here on Celia Applegate’s study of the Rhineland-Palatinate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), and Alon Confino’s investigation, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). 2. Vladimir Abashev describes this process as a “creative, constructive reality of cultural energy”: “For, in assimilating the place a person has chosen to live in, s/he not only transforms it in a utilitarian way. Proceeding from the norms of language and culture, the person organizes the new place symbolically and, by the same token, tears it from the hitherto mute landscape and assimilates it into the cultural order. Culture ideally reconstructs physical space, imparts to it structure and meaning. . . . As a result, a new reality of place emerges.” Abashev, Perm’ kak tekst, 5. 3. A. S. Gatsiskii, “Ocherk statisticheskikh s’’ezdov v Rossii,” in A. S. Gatsiskii, ed., Sbornik v pamiat’ pervogo russkogo statistichekogo s’’ezda 1870 goda (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1875), 2:84. 4. A. S. Gatsiskii, “Kratkaia nekrologiia nekoego blagonamerennogo literatora startsa Aleksandra, sochinennaia im samim na vseradostnyi dlia nego den’ 3 iiulia, sluchivshiisia nakanune priezda v Nizhnii Novgorod (4 iiulia 1889 g.) printsa Genrikha Orleanskogo,” in Sbornik v pamiat’ Aleksandra Serafimovicha Gatsiskogo (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1897). 5. For this and more details on Gatsiskii’s biography, see N. Ia. Agafonov, “Vospominaniia ob A. S. Gatsiskom,” in Sbornik v pamiat ‘ Aleksandra Serafimovicha Gatsiskogo, 29–47; and V. Korolenko, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” in A. S. Gatsiskii, 1838–1938, ed. K. D. Aleksandrov (Gorky, 1939), 5–31. 6. Agafonov, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” Deistviia NGUAK (23 April 1903), 73. 7. GANO, f. 765, op. 597. 8. Gatsiskii, LNP, 224. 9. A university diploma automatically conferred rank 10, Collegial Secretary. 10. Quoted in A. A. Saveliev, “Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii, kak istorik i issledovatel’ mestnogo kraia,” Deistviia NGUAK (23 May 1893), appendix, 151. 11. NS I (1867), quoted in Agafonov, “Vospominaniia ob A. S. Gatsiskom,” 44 (first quote); NS, no. 5 (1875), quoted in Gatsiskii, Sbornik v pamiat’ pervogo russkogo statistichekogo s’’ezda, xi (remaining quotes). 12. There was a marked line separating the first four levels of the Table of Ranks from the others: one could reasonably expect to advance up to State Councilor (rank 5) through length of service. The quotation is from Gatsiskii, Sbornik v pamiat’ pervogo russkogo statistichekogo s’’ezda, 5. 13. Korolenko, “Son,” in Aleksandrov, ed., A. S. Gatsiskii, 32–42.



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14. Aleksandrov, ed., A. S. Gatsiskii, 92–94. 15. D. L. Mordovtsev, “Pechat’ v provintsii,” Delo (September–October 1875), 68. 16. Gatsiskii, Smert’ provintsii ili net? 3. 17. Agafonov, “Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo,” 44. 18. I. M. Kaufman, Russkie biograficheskie i biobibliograficheskie slovari (Moscow, 1955). 19. Gatsiskii, Smert’ provintsii ili net? 19. 20. Ibid., 7. 21. Belinskii was, of course, accused of vulgarization to the point of misinterpretation, but that does not affect our story here. 22. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1952). 23. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 6. 24. Gatsiskii, Smert’ provintsii ili net? 9. Gatsiskii’s “penetrating reader” (“pronitsatel’nyi chitatel’”) is of course once more an allusion, this time to Chernyshevsky’s extremely popular novel, What Is to Be Done? in which the author repeatedly appeals to the reader’s ability to reach a “penetrating” judgment. 25. It seems only fair that Russian history, often interpreted through the prism of Marx, Weber, Tocqueville, Mannheim, or, more recently, Habermas and Foucault, should be given the chance to speak through someone acquainted with Russian life. 26. Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans., ed., and intro. Catherine Evtuhov (Moscow, 1912; New Haven, 2000). 27. SPNZ, 1:339. 28. Meetings and congresses proliferated with an even greater intensity after the removal of restrictions by the October Manifesto in 1906; in the decade after the 1905 Revolution they included religious gatherings as well. See L. A. Bulgakova, “Uchastie Rossii v mezhdunarodnykh kongressakh po prizreniiu i blagotvoritel’nosti,” in Blagotvoritel’nost’ v istorii Rossii: novye dokumenty i issledovaniia, ed. L. A. Bulgakova (St. Petersburg, 2008), 343–68; and esp. Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens.” 29. For more on this see Evtuhov, “Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions.” 30. In this context, it becomes clear why the 1891 famine came as such a shock. 31. Berdinskikh, Uezdnye istoriki. 32. Quote from Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 1:127. 33. Khramtsovskii uses the following periodization: (1) 1171–1222, the Mordvinian-Bulgarian period; (2) 1222–1350, when Nizhnii Novgorod was a suburb of Suzdal’, and the Pecherskii Monastery was constructed (1328–1330); (3) 1350–1392, the period of independence; (4) 1392–1605, Muscovite supremacy; (5) 1605–1613, the Time of Troubles; (6) 1613–1779, from the Romanov dynasty to the establishment of the Nizhnii Novgorod administrative region (namestnichestvo); (7) 1779–1856, to Khramtsovskii’s “present day.” 34. Khramtsovskii identifies 1377, 1379, 1408, 1445, and 1505 as the most destructive years. 35. A pathetic passage: “Moskva . . . obrashchala na Nizhnii stradal’cheskie vzory, umoliaia o zashchite.” (Moscow cast a suffering eye upon Nizhnii, beseeching it to come to [the capital’s] defense.) Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 1:68. Nizhnii Novgorod also provided a model and example for other regions. 36. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk, 1:69. 37. Ibid., 1:77. The final two periods are less interesting, though in terms of other parts of Khramtsovskii’s book, chapter 6 (1613–1779) is worth some attention: here, Khramtsovskii draws the reader’s attention to the pistsovye knigi, in part compiled on the initiative of Patriarch Filaret, who “proposed to describe Russia as it is, and by new documentation to affirm the rights of property owners and determine state taxes.” Ibid., 1:85. Thus, we learn that in the seventeenth century Nizhnii Novgorod had thirteen hundred households. There were up to five thousand residents of the town, including Russians, Lithuanians, Germans, and Cossacks; the Russians were divided into six estates. Ibid., 1:86. The more or less contemporary chapter turns—no doubt for fear of saying something wrong—into an anodyne chronicle of imperial visits. 38. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii letopisets (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1886). 39. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka, 2, 127.

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40. “Slovom skazat’, zdes’ dlia russkogo slavianstva obrazovalas’ sama soboiu kak-by osobaia remeslennost’ i promyshlennaia shkola, gde byli-by sposobnye ruki, a vyuchitsia bylo mozhno vsemu na svete.” Ibid., 15. 41. Ibid., 15, 18. 42. Ibid., 25. 43. Ibid., 18, 47, 56. 44. Ibid., 75. 45. Ibid., 89. The Osokina story was told in Agafonov’s volume, Pervyi shag, 50. 46. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodka, 129. 47. Ibid., ix, xii. 48. Ibid., xii. 49. Gatsiskii, Istoricheskaia zapiska. 50. A. I. Zvezdin, meeting of 4 March 1889, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 4: 91–92. The pacific tone (with no unnecessary losses and not even a battle) is worth noting. 51. Gatsiskii, meeting of 11 April 1889, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 5: 94 (both quotations). 52. Gatsiskii elaborates: “In moments of sharp conflict, it is of course necessary even to fan the flames of national enmity, because one can’t just say, ‘Brother! I love you, allow me to stab you’!” Ibid. 53. Richard Wortman, “‘Invisible Threads’: The Historical Imagery of the Romanov Tercentenary,” Russian History 16 (1989): 390. 54. Gatsiskii, meeting of 11 April 1889, Deistviia NGUAK, 1, vyp. 5: 95. The reference to Zabelin is presumably to his 1883 book on Minin and Pozharskii in the Time of Troubles. 55. GANO, f. 1411, op. 822, d. 295, l. 1. 56. GANO, f. 1411, op. 822, d. 295, l. 2. 57. GANO, f. 1411, op. 822, d. 83, ll. 1–5. For undisclosed reasons, Platonov eventually resigned from the editorship and returned the 240 rubles, 73 kopeks, that remained of the 1,100 rubles he initially received in 1903–1904. 58. GANO, f. 1411, op. 822, d. 106a, l. 1. 59. GANO, f. 1411, op. 822, d. 106a, l. 3. 60. Wortman, “’Invisible Threads,’” 390. 61. Ibid. 62. The date was suggested by a member of the Moscow Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, who was from Nizhnii Novgorod. It was of course the key yearly meeting date for the NGUAK. 63. http://lenta.ru/news/2005/11/04/minin/ 64. The expression dnem s ognem means searching for something in daylight using artificial light (a reference to Diogenes).

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INDEX

adres-kalendar’, 102, 168, 261n3. See also pamiatnye knizhki Agafonov, N. Ia., 20, 211, 220, 229, 233, 234, 254n41, 292n45 agents for special commissions, 12, 17, 141, 164, 230, 254n44, 274n16 agricultural machinery, 96, 97–98, 106 agriculture, 57, 58, 60, 168; and artisanal production, 16, 67, 84, 98, 264n44; in cadaster, 179; and capitalism, 83; communal, 43, 248, 259n94; and deforestation, 31; difficulty of, 59, 129; and land redistribution, 259n94; Lukoianov Agricultural Congress, 128; in Malorossiia, 240; Mari and Chuvash, 185; mobile, 248; in museums, 225; predominance of, 82; and ravines, 40, 42; in school curriculum, 186, 209; and soil, 26; in southeastern districts, 32, 86, 88, 94, 256n3, 257n54; and zemstvo, 159 agronomists, 5, 12, 172, 176, 237 Alexei Mikhailovich (tsar), 55, 146 Alexander II (tsar), 12, 146, 157, 162, 198, 201, 234, 290n69 Alexander Boys’ High School. See Alexander Gentry Institute Alexander Gentry Institute, 47, 208–9, 215 Alexander Nevsky, 55, 197, 198, 202 All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition (1896), 49, 154 Amalitskii, V. P., 171, 280n37 animism, 183, 184, 185 Annenskii, N. F.: as statistician, 20, 70, 160, 161, 220; and zemstvo cadaster 169, 170, 172–80, 280n29, 280–81nn39–40, 281nn60–62, 281–82nn66–70 Archaeological Institute (St. Petersburg), 221, 224 archaeology, 18, 186, 221 archives, 4–5, 82, 169, 190, 220–25, 229, 245, 251n4 Ardatov: city, 45, 51, 53, 102; convents in, 195; deforestation in, 31; district, 24, 32, 58, 188; district zemstvo, 153, 156, 160, 213; Dokuchaev expedition in, 172; emancipation in, 197; landholding in, 104, 105; manufactures in, 59–60; Mordvinians in, 113; Old Believers in, 78; Shepelev factories, 263n28, 288n26 artisanal production, 10, 21–22, 67–71, 79–80, 105–14, 248–49; and agriculture, 60; and cadaster, 167;

credit for, 159; in history, 240; and industry, 251n6; kustar, 256n27; in Limoges, 182; in Lyskovo, 55; and Old Belief, 76, 77; in Pavlovo, 265n54; and religion, 188, 199, 204; in southeastern districts, 81–99; study of, 101, 160, 229, 263n29. See also proto-industrialization artisanal schools, 156–57 artisans, 57, 74, 132, 219. See also artisanal production; craftsmen Arzamas: Arzamas Society, 261n28; banks, 97; bishop of Nizhnii Novgorod and, 184, 283n7; churches and monasteries, 193, 194–95; city, 40, 45, 51, 53, 56, 102, 107, 108–9; district, 24, 31, 32, 34, 58, 59, 60, 73, 104–5, 188; district zemstvo, 149, 153, 161–63; Dokuchaev expedition, 172; education, 156; factories and artisanal production, 263nn28–29, 270n25; icons, 199; leather manufacture in, 11, 67; markets in city, 85, 87; and Mordvinians, 113; Old Believers in, 78; seminary preparatory school, 186; in Time of Troubles, 224; trade, 265n62 Astrakhan, 48, 89, 129; and cholera, 143; and commerce, 144; fish trade, 9, 17, 44, 73; fishnet sales, 92, 106; physicians’ congress, 152; Volga delta, 24, 37, 89, 143, 144 Astronomy Circle. See Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy Avvakum (archpriest), 10, 270n44, 283n6, 285n77 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 34, 35, 257n55 Balakhna: city, 9, 45, 51–52, 53, 102, 157; district, 10, 24, 58, 59, 73, 78, 84, 105, 202, 215; district zemstvo, 125, 126, 154, 156, 158; forests in, 28, 67; history, 222; icons in, 199; monasteries, 195, 196; Old Believers in, 144, 172, 183, 185, 241; theater in, 213; vicariate, 184. See also Gorodets; Gorodets chapel; Sormovo Balakirev, Milii, 215, 220, 243 Bankal’skii, P. O., 120, 121–24, 128, 131, 222, 249, 271nn49–50 banks: Alexander (Nizhnii Novgorod) Gentry Bank, 97, 209; credit and, 96–97; Gentry Land Bank, 76, 97, 159, 176, 282n75; Merchant Bank, 126;

309

310  INDEX banks (cont.): National Bank, 47, 76, 126; Nicholas City Mutual Bank, 126; Peasant Land Bank, 66, 76, 282n75; private banks, 76, 79, 96–97, 126, 259n97; Volga-Kama Commercial Bank, 126; zemstvo bank, 76, 159 Baranov, N. M.: and Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, 218–19; Governor, 123, 140, 160, 161, 163, 232; and NGUAK, 220, 244; Witte and, 275nn33–34 Baranovskii, A. N., 217, 257n52, 280n36 barge haulers, 38, 60, 124, 144, 258n73, 272n60 bars, 59, 107, 109, 122 Baryshnikov (Kniaginin landholder), 30, 103 bast: processing, 88, 93, 94, 95, 199; shoes (lapti), 59; trade, 74, 78; weaving, 109 Beketov, A. N., 171, 280n35 Belaia Krinitsa, 185, 201, 275–76n50 Belinsky, Vissarion, 47, 235, 291n21 Benardaki, D. E., 72, 265n57 Berdinskikh, Viktor, 8, 238 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Konstantin, 142, 208, 232 Betancourt, Agustín de, 193, 260n13 Bezak, N. A. (governor), 163, 232 Bezvodnoe (Nizhnii Novgorod district), 59, 105, 270n25 Bible, 11, 55, 123, 197, 261n35 biography (as principle), 120, 131, 169, 197, 222, 271n50. See also individual names Bismarck, Otto von, 234, 236 black soil, 25, 26; central black soil region, 24, 58, 185, 256n7, 266–67n12; Kniaginin, 173; Lukoianov, 127, 278n103; southeastern districts, 9, 21, 60, 61, 63, 99, 106, 107, 248 blagochinnye, 187, 283n23 Blinov, F. A., 59, 126, 158, 236 Boborykin, Petr, 70, 271n59 Bol’shaia Pecherskaia Street, 47, 49–50, 213 Bol’shoe Murashkino, 92–98; and concept of city, 45–46, 53, 55–56, 103, 105, 106, 249, 256n3; and emancipation, 197; and 1891 famine of 1891, 161; and leather production, 67, 270n25; market, 55, 94; miracleworking icons in, 200–1; Old Belief in, 183, 283n6; and sheepskin manufacture, 60, 74, 86, 90–91 Borisovskii, L. (priest), 20, 67–71, 83, 107, 188, 264n34 bourgeoisie (bourgeois): Bürgertum, 7, 115; culture, 218; definition, 115; Holy Family, 130; and industry, 112; and Old Belief, 76; petty, 259n96; and photography, 18–19, 117, 119; provincial, 19, 106, 132; social category, 100. See also middle classes Bourguet, Marie-Noelle, 168, 269n10, 281n62, 282n69, 282n71 Braudel, Fernand, 6, 42, 252n10 Bredikhin, F. A., 218, 288n42 brick manufacture, 58, 59, 88, 92, 94, 95, 263n28 buckets and tubs, 74, 84, 86, 87, 96, 98, 199 Bugrov, N. A., 124–26, 131, 158, 271n49, 271n59 Bukhara, 29, 43, 73, 75, 76, 185 Bukharev, Fedor, 191 Bulgakov, Sergei, 40, 235–38, 272n73, 284n39, 285n77 Bulgars, 142, 240, 241, 291n33 Bürgertum. See bourgeoisie burlachestvo. See barge haulers

cadaster, 13, 21, 22, 164, 165–81, 249; Annenskii and, 254n38, 278n1, 281n40, 281n61, 282nn67–68, 282n70; and Catherinian land survey, 282n74; comparison with United States, 280n30; in Netherlands, 279n22; cadastral mapping, 180, 249. See also maps capitalists, 97, 106, 107, 115, 268n58 Caspian Sea, 35, 37, 52 Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, 193 Cathedral of the Resurrection (Arzamas), 51, 193 Catherine II (empress): Charter to the Towns, 46; conversion of Chuvash and Mari, 185; edinoverie, 275n47; Free Economic Society, 254n39; and gentry assembly, 13; girls’ education, 272n74; land survey, 10–11, 282n74; and languages, 183; and Old Belief, 202; Pallas expedition, 11, 31; provincial reform, 10, 45, 51, 102, 262n8; times of, 211; visit to Nizhnii Novgorod, 260n5 Central Industrial Region, 58, 63, 104 Central Physical Observatory, 218, 219 Central Statistical Committee, 11, 141 Chaadaev, Petr, 214 Charter to the Towns. See Catherine II, Charter to the Towns Chaslavskii, V. I., 173 Chekhov, A. P., 129, 153, 289–90n69 Cheremiss. See Mari Chernigov school. See zemstvo statistics chernozem, 19, 25–26, 171, 256n6, 256n20 China, 9, 43, 73, 75, 255n56 chinovniki osobykh poruchenii. See agents for special commissions cholera, 140, 143, 149, 200, 236 Church of the Annunciation, 47, 193, 194, 285n52 Church of the Savior on the Blood (St. Petersburg), 162, 199 Chuvash, 11, 112, 183, 185, 186 Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, 114, 216, 217–20, 238 city duma: avoidance of service, 147; Bankal’skii as speaker, 122; Bugrov family in, 125, 126; building, 47, 126, 197; Gatsiskii and, 231, 232, 234, 246, 274n27; and Great Reforms, 134; and local government reform, 11, 164; and merchants, 44, 105; and NGUAK, 221, 222, 223; Odintsov and, 139, 274n27 civil society, 6, 139, 145, 163, 247 clergy, 12, 187–93, 199; clothing, 194; and meteorology, 216, 217; Muslim, 185; Old Believer, 201, 203; and reforms, 204; social activism of, 235, 284n35; social category, 102, 107, 209, 259n96; tax exemption of, 273n15. See also popovichi; priests climate belts, 27, 32, 58, 227, 256n20 complex system, 6, 252n12 Congress of Naturalists and Physicians, 13, 20, 177, 237, 283n79 consensus, 15, 134, 146, 149, 154, 159, 163, 238 Corbin, Alain, 182, 283n1 craftsmen, 29, 85, 89, 106, 107, 108, 162, 199, 200. See also artisans, master credit: agricultural, 13; for artisanal production, 21, 96–98; and banks, 126; for food supply, 163; for

INDEX  311 icons, 91; institutions, 237; medicine and, 149, 236; at Nizhnii Novgorod fair, 75; and Old Belief, 76, 79, 126; in Pavlovo, 71; in sheepskin manufacture, 93; small-scale, 80; for spoon production, 70; zemstvo and, 148, 159–60 Crimean War, 127, 147, 239, 273n8, 275–76n50, 284n36 Cronon, William, 57, 268n58 Dal’, Vladimir, 47, 89, 90, 124, 201, 207, 222, 286–87n8 Damaskin (Rudnev, bishop), 11, 183, 185, 186 Darwin (Darwinism), 123, 191 Day of National Unity, 246 decentralization, 12, 134, 137, 211, 226, 236 deforestation, 31, 39, 41, 175, 238 de Madariaga, Isabel, 167, 262n8, 282n74 Demidov, P. A., 217–18, 288n44 Demidov steel, 74, 88 Department of Military Colonies, 46 diphtheria, 149, 153 Dmitrii (Sechenov, bishop), 184 Dokuchaev, V. V.: and climate belts, 256n20; criticism of 1893 law, 282n79; and environmental studies, 255n58; expedition to Nizhnii Novgorod, 30–34, 40, 41, 172, 217, 234, 255n57, 263n20, 280n31; founder of soil science, 254–55n53; and interior exploration, 255n55; and land assessment, 176–77, 238; and natural history museum, 225; as purveyor, 15, 19–20; on ravines, 258–59n79; on rivers, 37, 257n56, 258n76; and soil, 25, 26, 27, 42; soil map, 37, 169, 170–72, 173, 177; soil science terminology, 256n6; study of Nizhnii Novgorod, 281n41, 281n59; and Three Kingdoms of Nature, 282n71; and ustavnye gramoty, 167; and zemstvo cadaster, 180 Dukhovskii, Mikhail, 84, 168, 184–85, 209

post-emancipation society, 271n48; teachers after, 210; and ustavnye gramoty, 167, 251n3 Emancipation Manifesto, 127, 196–97, 274n24 environment: in complex systems, 252n12; in current historiography, 256n21; domestic, 19; flux, 98, 175, 248, 282n69; humans and, 39, 82; knowledge of, 4, 5, 7, 188, 231; micro-environments, 32, 33, 34; natural, 20, 21, 24, 27, 42–43, 143, 247; regulation of, 226; river, 37, 38; social and cultural, 132, 139, 143, 207, 212, 214, 215 Eparkhial’nye vedomosti, 188, 189, 190, 198, 285n79 equity (spravedlivost’), 128, 171, 175, 178, 179, 259n94 Erzia, 51, 113. See also Mordvinians Eshevskii, Stepan, 142, 208 ethnographers, 21, 47; priests as, 188, 284n29 ethnography: Gatsiskii and, 18, 230, 231; Imperial Geographical Society and, 255n55; local, 4–5, 11, 12, 15, 20, 101, 168, 211, 221–25 , 228; Mel’nikov and, 17, 143–44, 208, 254n48; and photography, 19, 114, 117, 270n35; post-reform, 237; sources, 251n4; and statistics, 169, 170 Eucharist, 130, 187, 283n25 “Events of 4 April, 1866,” 198

factories: in Arzamas, 107; in B. Murashkino, 91, 93, 106; labor laws, 274n24; in Lukoianov, 60; in Makar’ev and Semënov, 30; materials for hats, 74, 90; in Moscow, 106; in Nizhnii Novgorod, 59, 67; and Old Belief, 78; outside urban areas, 22, 67; Pavlovo, 70, 71, 84, 96; production, 21, 95, 263n28; and “proto-industry,” 79, 98, 99, 249; and retail, 73; sheepskin and brick, 92; Shepelev, 59, 104, 263n28, 288n26; Sormovo, 72, 265nn56–57 Fair, Nizhnii Novgorod (Makar’ev): in Bankal’skii’s biography, 122; in Bugrov’s biography, 125; ecology: and deforestation, 238; ecological regions, 58, comparison to European fairs, 265n73; description, 105, 184, 185; and economic history, 259–60n97; 9–10; Dukhovskii and, 168; fairground houses of global, 28; historical reconstruction of, 255n59; worship, 192–95; fairgrounds, 48, 49; history of, 241; local, 23, 24, 42, 43, 131; ravines and, 38, 40–41; of international exchange, 43; islands and, 257–58n59; rivers, 35; and urban topography, 260n6; Vladimir local press, 212; and local manufacture, 87, 88, 90; Soloviev and, 40, 227 market for local goods, 29, 30, 58, 59, 60, 68, 71, edinoverie (“united faith”), 9, 144, 145, 195, 203, 253n29, 73–76 , 79, 91, 92, 95, 98, 106, 263n28; Odintsov and, 275n47 140; and photography, 18, 114; P. I. Mel’nikov and, education: adult, 219; and bourgeoisie, 115, 116; clergy 142; prostitution, 153; and river economy, 38; site at and, 188; entry requirements, 287n16; Ministry of Makar’ev Monastery, 37, 51, 52, 53, 55, 256n30; and Education, 218; museum and, 225; N. I. Rusinov stock exchange, 96; syphilis, 236; theater, 213. See and, 128; of Old Believers, 202; popular, 276n54; also trade fairs post-reform, 4; regional, 207, 247; religious, 185, Fedorov, N. F., 221, 226–27, 290n70 283n1; secondary and university, 208–10; scientific, felt boots (valenki): manufacture, 4, 60, 74, 84, 86, 93, 99, 20; seminary, 78; state and, 133; women’s, 272n74; 263n29, 270n25; trade, 75, 77, 94, 98 zemstvo, 12–13, 138, 146, 148, 154–58, 162–63, 249, Filaret (Drozdov, metropolitan), 197 251n3 fire insurance, 13, 146, 147, 158–59, 163, 236 elections: communal judge, 127; gentry, 206; of Mikhail fire, 23, 31–32, 74, 77, 95, 146, 159, 193, 213, 242, 265n72 Romanov, 246; national, 249; zemstvo, 126, 137–38, fire insurance, 13, 146, 147, 158–59, 163, 236 139, 147, 160, 237, 276n61 fish, species of, 101 emancipation: and clerical reform, 189; effects on fishing, 37, 38, 43, 58, 59, 60, 144; trade, 9, 17, 44, 55, 73, artisanal production, 95–96, 110; implementation 74, 75, 257–58n59, 265n74 in Nizhnii Novgorod, 140, 222; in Kaplin-Tezikov’s fishnets: middlemen and, 96, 98, 106; trade, 73; weaving, 21, 58, 59, 78, 84, 91–92, 94; women and, 93 biography, 219; Kiselev reform, 137; and land, 60–61; Flammarion, Camille, 217, 218 and new needs, 4, 12, 237; physicians after, 13, 146;

312  INDEX floodlands, 26, 27 forests, 27–32, 61; Ardatov, 104; Bugrov purchases, 125; and cadaster, 166, 174–75; conservation of, 236; Department of Forestry, 20; and environment, 256n21; and manufacture, 43, 58, 60, 67, 249; monasteries in, 194; Old Believers in, 184, 185, 203; and ravines, 39–41; Semënov, 17, 64, 66, 141, 195; and social organization, 240; taxes on, 148; trans-Volga, 4, 9, 10, 21, 24, 26, 34, 145, 172. See also deforestation Formalists, 3, 207 France: cadastral survey in, 166, 178; comparison with, 6, 22, 191, 239, 251n6, 269n10, 282n71; local description, 279n16; moral statistics in, 113; revolutionary, 229 Free Economic Society (Imperial), 13, 20, 30, 176, 237, 254n30, 280n31 Freeze, Gregory, 112, 135, 182, 189 Gatsiskii, A. S.: agricultural map, 173; and artisans, 108–9, 160; biography, 229–34; and Chernyshevsky, 291n24; editor of 1865 Pamiatnaia knizhka, 102, 106; head of local statistical committee, 82, 83, 106, 168, 221; as historian, 240–43, 244, 246, 247, 287n23; idea of province, 287n20; and NGUAK, 223–24, 244, 246; Nizhegorodka, 168; Nizhegorodskii sbornik, 169; Odintsov biography, 138–40; and principle of biography, 119–21, 222, 247, 270–71n44, 271n50; and provincial intelligentsia, 5; and provincial press, 210–11; and provintsiia, 120, 131, 235; as purveyor, 15, 18, 20; Rusinov biography, 126–27; and Sormovo, 72; and zemstvo, 279–80nn25–26 gentry, 50, 51, 135–36, 259n26; Anna Shmidt’s origins, 128–29, 131, 249; déclassé, 132; education of, 207–9; and elections, 137, 147, 206; emancipation and, 127, 189, 196; in Kniaginin, 174; and land assessment, 176, 180, 189; and land bank, 282n75; landholding, 61–66; land transference and, 79, 125, 175, 276n61, 282n73; and local government reform of 1837, 273n15; in local history, 245; in Lukoianov, 128, 160–61, 237, 278n104; Mel’nikov’s origins, 141; and middle class, 106, 116, 121; and Old Belief, 144, 147; population of, 102; in zemstvo, 157, 277n62 Gentry Assembly, 13, 134, 147, 212 Gentry Land Bank. See banks Georgii Vsevolodovich (prince), 197–98, 220, 234, 241, 243–44 Gestwa, Klaus, 71, 79, 265n54, 266–67n12 Gogol, Nikolai, 141, 143, 162, 206, 290n70 Gorbatov: city, 45, 53, 102; district, 24, 55, 58, 61, 104, 105, 161; district zemstvo, 147, 156, 160, 277n63; in Dokuchaev expedition, 172; in famine of 1891, 278n103; icons in, 199–200; industry and trade in, 58–59, 67, 73, 78, 270n5; land transference in, 63–64; meshchanka, 119; monasteries in, 195; Old Belief in, 144, 241 Gorky (Soviet city), 4, 7, 8, 72 Gorky, Maksim, 10, 67, 72, 114, 125, 130, 259n95, 271n59 Gorodets, 9, 30, 45, 53, 55, 73, 229, 243, 265n63 Gorodets chapel, 17, 124, 126, 144, 158, 202, 204 governors. See provincial governors Gradovskii, A. D., 135–36

grain: Bugrov and, 125; in Chicago, 268n58; distribution, 237; export, 21; and famine, 161; import, 24, 43, 59, 60; in Lukoianov, 86; sketes and, 203; storage, 124; trade, 55, 73, 75, 107 Great Reforms, 4, 12, 30, 121, 134, 136, 233, 248 Griboedov, A. S., 213, 214, 288n29 Gubernskie vedomosti: education, 288n36; established, 11, 14, 220, 274n15; Eparkhial’nye vedomosti parallel, 189; Gatsiskii and, 168, 229, 230, 287n16; home remedies in, 277n70; on islands, 23; and land assessment, 176; and local consciousness, 137, 143; and local culture, 206, 213; and local description, 84, 167; and local history, 142–43, 239, 242; Mel’nikov and, 17, 18, 83, 141–43, 238, 239; and meteorology, 216; and NGUAK, 221, 223; provincial press, 212; and zemstvo, 147, 148 gullies, 23, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47. See also ravines gymnasium, 126, 129, 157, 168, 208–9, 219, 288n36 hats: Bugrov and, 124; manufacture, 29, 60, 88–90, 93, 95, 97, 270n25; “Tatar,” 90, 91; trade, 55, 77, 94, 98 Haxthausen, August von, 213, 279n13 health care, 4, 12, 133; zemstvo and, 13, 146, 148, 149, 162, 251n3 Hegel, G. W. F., 235 Heimat, 228 hemp, 59, 75, 263n29; processing, 60, 74, 78, 84, 87–88, 91, 94 Iaroslavl’, 224, 260n8, 263n29, 286n94 Iavlinskii, Grigorii, 8 icons: in churches, 194–95; at church-school exhibit, 278n90; miracle-working, 196, 199–201; Old Believer, 203, 276n51; painting, 18, 120, 270n44; and religious processions, 196, 198; sales, 21, 44, 55, 73, 75, 91, 92, 96, 97, 144. See also Kazan Mother of God icon Ilovaiskii, D. I., 220, 240, 243 Imperial Academy of Sciences, 216, 218, 226 Imperial Geographical Society, 11, 141, 216, 217, 230, 237, 255n55 industry, 58, 76, 81, 112, 159, 225, 247; and agriculture, 128; Draft Statute on Industry, 274n24; Dukhovskii on, 168; and environmental damage, 31; and forests, 28–30, 32; in history, 241; kustar (artisanal), 24, 38, 92–97, 99, 232, 256n27, 279n21, 280n26; large-scale, 263n28; local, 73; Mari and Chuvash, 185; mining, 176; Mordvinians and, 89; Nizhegorodskii sbornik, 169; non-urban, 249, 251n6; Old Belief and, 76–79; Pavlovo, 70–72–2, 107; “proto-industry,” 67, 267n12; “real” (factory), 43, 73; research of kustar, 82–84; salt, 51; shipbuilding, 52, woodworking, 103 insurance, 12, 13, 97, 133; medical, 151, 154; mutual, 122, 138; Old Belief and, 77; property, 138, 158, 176. See also fire insurance, social insurance intelligentsia, xi, 14–15, 130, 211, 227; local, 106. See also provincial intelligentsia International Statistical Congress, 230, 237 Islam, 79, 183, 184, 185 islands, 23, 35-–39 , 42, 257–58n59, 286n1

INDEX  313 Kablukov, N. A., 177 Kahan, Arcadius, 67 Kalachov, N. V., 220 Kaluga, 68, 189, 217, 260n8, 290n70 Kamenskii, Petr, 188 Karamzin, N. M., 104, 143, 238, 240, 241 Karelin, A. O., 15, 18–19, 20, 114–19, 121, 132, 219, 221, 270n37 Katunki (Gorbatov district), 53, 55, 58, 67, 261n35, 270n25 Kazan, 7, 24; Agafonov in, 20, 211, 220, 234; Annenskii in, 173, 281n39; Bishop Sechenov in, 184–85; Brotherhood of St. Gurii, 192; Catherine II’s visit to, 260n5; educational district, 157; governors, 274n23; khanate, 47, 52, 53, 142, 270n44; Metropolitan Tikhon of, 193; observatory, 229; Photographic Society, 114; Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, 189; Russian Geographical Society in, 219; teachers’ seminary, 278n92; trade, 55, 73, 88, 90, 91, 144, 265n63; urban infrastructure in, 260n6, 260n8, 261n21, 270n44; Volga-Kama Bank, 126; Volga-Kama Gazette, 233, 234, 279n16; zemstvo, 177 Kazan Cathedral (St. Petersburg), 51, 194 Kazan Mother of God icon, 145, 146, 194, 199, 200, 201, 286n93 Kazan Theological Academy, 185 Kazan University, 17, 82, 141, 144, 168, 208, 209, 229–30, 232, 287n20 Kern, E. E., 40 Kerzhenets: monastery, 194; region, 94; river, 26, 29, 33–34, 202; skete, 145, 202 Khokhloma: folk art, 10, 60, 72; village, 73 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 284n36 Khotiaintsev, V. A., 149, 157 khoziain, 127, 128, 135, 136, 138 khoziaistvo, 43, 127, 137, 163, 235, 237–38, 247 Khramtsovskii, N. I., 157, 195, 222, 238–41, 285n52, 291n33, 291n37 Kiev, 49, 127, 152, 186, 189, 210, 240, 287n18 Kil’diashev brothers, 97, 106 Kiselev, P. D., 137, 167 Kitai-Gorod, 224, 243 Kliuchevskii, N. O., 220, 227, 233, 243, 258n75 Kniaginin: agriculture, 66; artisanal production, 84, 86, 87, 88, 199; city, 26, 45, 53, 102; deforestation in, 30, 31, 32, 175; district, 9, 24, 61; district zemstvo, 156; Dokuchaev expedition in, 172; felt boots, 93; fishnets, 91–92, 94; hat manufacture in, 60, 74, 84, 90, 93, 95; landholding, 103, 104; land transference in, 62, 175; leather manufacture, 78; miracleworking icons in, 200; Mordvinians and Tatars, 113; Old Believers in, 144, 241; ravines, 41; zemstvo cadaster pilot study, 173–75, 263n20, 281n41 knives, 10, 59, 67, 71, 72, 74, 264n47, 270n25 Kocka, Jürgen, 7, 115, 117 Korinfskii, Mikhail, 51, 193, 285n51 Korolenko, V. G.: on Bugrov, 271n59; on famine in Lukoianov in 1891, 160–61; on Gatsiskii, 231–32; in NGUAK, 220; on Nizhnii Novgorod governors, 139, 140; on Pavlovo, 20, 70, 84, 96, 264n45

Kositskaia, L. P., 120, 270n44 kraevedenie, 3, 8, 9, 248, 266n6. See also local history kulaks, 69, 96, 107, 264n35 Kulibin, Ivan, 157, 222, 234, 278n95 Kunavino, 48, 51, 74, 196, 241 kustar. See artisanal production Kutaisov, P. I. (governor), 140, 163, 169, 231–32, 279–80n25 land redistribution, 13, 60, 62, 63, 64, 174, 259n94 landholding: gentry, 65; individual, 166; large-scale, 103; middling, 104; small to middling, 132; peasant, 62; petty, 105, 248; private, 173; productivity of, 165; system, 180; types of, 174 Lawrence, D. H., 22, 72 lawyers, 4, 5, 12, 20, 115, 219, 237, 270n44 leather manufacture, 10, 29, 43, 67, 263nn28–29, 270n25; at Arzamas, 11, 107; in Balakhna and Gorbatov, 58–59; at B. Murashkino, 56, 90, 91, 94, 98; Gatsiskii’s dissertation on, 82, 108, 230; history, 240; and Old Belief, 78; “Russia leather” (iuft’), 74; trade, 75 Leipzig, 9, 215, 265n73 Liapunov, Prokopii, 239, 245 lighting, 13, 48–49 Limoges, 182 Lithuania, 142, 184, 189, 192, 224, 229, 291n37 Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia, 120, 222, 233–34, 270n44 Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 208, 218, 270n44 local government, 11–12, 133–34, 163–64; under Catherine II, 51; Emilia Pardo Bazán and, 145–46; and khoziaistvo, 236, 238–46; municipal, 153; offices, 102; reform of 1837, 135–37, 273n15; reform of 1870, 122; Vinogradov and, 188; and zemstvo, 148–49, 159, 162, 171. See also zemstvo local history, 3, 4, 7–9, 22, 248; and church, 198, 285n79; Gatsiskii and, 18, 169, 234, 240; in Gubernskie vedomosti, 17, 142–43 and NGUAK, 222–25, 244; Odintsov and, 139; in pamiatnye knizhki, 102, 261n3 local statistical committees, 138, 148, 164; active role, 9; and artisanal production, 82, 83; Berdinskikh’s study, 238; established 1834, 11, 134, 168; Gatsiskii’s resignation from, 231, 279–80n25; and historical research, 20; and “local color,” 170; and local history, 198; and NGUAK, 221, 223; Nizhegorodskii sbornik, 169; and pamiatnye knizhki, 102, 269n8. See also Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Statistical Committee; provincial statistical committee locks, 10, 55, 59; Pavlovo, 67, 70–72, 74, 84, 215, 270n25 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 207, 267n44 loom parts, 74, 88, 92, 95 Lukoianov: agriculture, 60, 128; artisanal education, 156; city, 45, 102, 110; deforestation in, 31, 32; district, 9, 24, 34; district zemstvo, 126, 160; Dokuchaev expedition in, 40, 172; famine of 1891 in, 20, 160–61; gentry, 161, 237, 278n104; industry, 78, 84–87 , 94–98 , 95; land ownership, 104; model farm, 158; Mordvinians, 113; Semënov spoon-makers in, 188; soil, 127; trade, 74 Lunar Society (Birmingham), 219

314  INDEX Lutheran, 194, 229 Lyskovo: artisanal school, 157; history, 183; manufacture, 94; pedagogical courses, 156; port, 55, 60, 73, 107, 256n3, 265n64; seminary school, 186; town, 45, 46, 53, 55, 56, 104, 105, 121 Magnitskii, Mikhail, 144 Makar’ev: artisanal production, 29, 156; city, 45, 52, 53, 55, 56, 102; district, 24, 26, 37, 61, 74, 104, 121; district zemstvo, 276n61; Fair, 9, 30, 51, 73, 95, 253n30, 256n30, 265n72; forests and deforestation, 28, 31; land transference in, 66; monastery, 9, 52; Old Believers, 78, 172; section of Nizhnii Novgorod city, 48, 52; timber and forest products, 29, 67; trade, 30, 60, 73. See also Lyskovo Makarii (bishop), 20, 197, 220 Makarikhin, V. P., 8 Malinin, V. V., 218, 219, 288–89n44 Malorossiia, 143, 240, 287n18 maps: astronomical, 217; cadastral, 166, 169, 170, 172–80, 249, 279n22, 282n72; ecological, 185; of Eurasia, 28; hypsometric, 32; for Ragozin’s book, 37; religious, 184. See also soil maps Mari (Cheremiss), 9, 60, 112, 113, 183, 184, 185 Mariinskii schools for girls, 129, 209 Marks, Adol’f, 210, 243 marshal of the nobility, 128, 140, 160, 194, 196, 221, 232 Martynov hospital, 125, 153 master (master-craftsman), 89, 100, 162 medical assistant (fel’dsher), 151, 284n30 medicine, 4, 12, 13, 146, 148, 149–54, 163, 186, 247, 249 Meehan, Brenda, 129 Mel’nikov, A. P., 75, 266n78 Mel’nikov, P. I.: biography, 141–45; bureaucratic career, 275n45, 275n50; characters in his books, 202, 204, 265n74, 271n59; editor of Gubernskie vedomostii, 83, 142–43, 206, 230, 238, 239; and Dal’, 47; ethnography, 29, 168, 254n48; and Gatsiskii, 232, 234; in NGUAK, 222; novelist, 10, 24; “Pis’ma o raskole,” 199; as purveyor, 15, 17–18, 20, 24; raid on sketes, 146, 201, 203–4, 276n51; secret report on Old Belief, 76–80, 112, 143–45, 202, 274n16, 275n46; student at Kazan University, 208 Meller, V. I., 40, 258n76 Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 25, 42 Merchant Bank, 126 Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter (film), 211 merchants: and astronomy, 219; Bankal’skii as, 120; banquet, 197; Bashkirov, 211; Blinov, 236; Bugrov, 121, 125, 126, 132; and church construction, 193–94; in city duma, 105; education, 208, 209; and emancipation, 196; estate, 44, 102, 259n96, 273–74n15, 287n10; and equity, 180; at fair, 9, 29, 38, 43, 73, 76, 265n74; as factory owners, 59; guilds, 97, 102, 134, 143; house ownership, 47–51 passim; and land transference, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 175, 249, 276n61; material culture, 17, 38; and middle class, 106, 112, 115; as middlemen, 69, 76; monument to Minin and Pozharskii, 245–46; Old Believer, 10, 77,

144, 145, 276n51; Perepletchikov, 270n44, 285n53; in Semënov, 107, 112, 115; sheepskin, 86; status, 235; and zemstvo, 147, 158, 175, 276n61 Merezhkovsky, Dmitrii, 130 meshchanstvo (meshchane), 44, 50, 55, 102, 106, 132, 259n96; and artisanal production, 93, 97; Bankal’skii, 120, 121, 122; and church construction, 193; as corporation, 131, 153; education, 208, 209, 287n10; Karelin photo, 119; and land transference 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 175; and middle class, 269n16; Old Believers, 144, 153; in religious processions, 198; in Semënov, 107 meshchanskoe obshchestvo, 122, 153 metal: products, 10, 43, 59, 60, 67, 70, 78, 88, 263n29; trade, 59, 73, 74, 75 metallurgy, 10, 43, 262n5 meteorological stations, 20, 216, 217, 225 Michurin, V. K., 146, 193, 197, 198 middle classes, xii, 107, 110, 131, 132, 247, 248; in historiography, 7, 8, 82, 115, 272n84; jubilees, 243; and land transference, 65, 66, 79; meshchanstvo, 259n96; Mittelstand, 269n16; and photography, 19, 116. See also bourgeoisie middlemen, 21, 69, 76, 89, 91, 92, 96, 98, 107, 175 Mighty Five, 215 Mikhailovsky, N. K., 211 Miliukov, P. N., 220 Minin, Koz’ma, 142, 147, 223, 239, 245–46, 292n54 Ministry of Education, 13, 146, 154, 156, 157, 218 Ministry of Internal Affairs, 141, 143, 158, 192, 274n24 Ministry of National Enlightenment. See Ministry of Education Ministry of State Property, 29, 167 Mironov, Boris, 57 Mittelstand, 105, 106, 110, 132, 269n16. See also bourgeoisie; meshchanstvo; middle classes modernization, 6, 82, 125, 182, 233, 247, 273n8; theory, 81 Mogul, Jonathan, 79, 98, 266n11 Moksha, 113. See also Mordvinians monasteries, 183–84, 194–95, 207; in Arzamas, 51, 56, 199; Blagoveshchenskii (Annunciation), 113, 194, 241; Kerzhenets, 194; Makar’ev (Macarius of the Yellow Waters), 9, 52, 53, 194, 256n30, 261n33; Oran, 195–96; and Orthodox brotherhoods, 192; Pecherskii, 36, 49, 94, 113, 184, 239, 241, 243, 253n31, 291n33; sketes, 10; Solovetskii, 202; Trinity St. Sergius, 239 Mongols, 195, 239, 241 Montferrand, Auguste de, 193, 260n13, 285n51 moral statistics, 101, 113, 222 Mordovtsev, D. L., 210–11, 226, 233, 234, 287n18 Mordvinians: Arzamas as capital, 51, 52; B. Murashkino, 55; conversion, 185; Korinfskii’s origins, 193; language, 11, 183, 186, 257n53; in local history, 143, 239, 241, 242, 244, 291n33; Mel’nikov report on, 142; Patriarch Nikon’s origins, 183; russification, 222; in southwestern districts, 112, 113, 119, 184; tailoring, 89, 96 Morozova, Elena, 148

INDEX  315 Moscow: Balabanov’s biography, 106; Bankal’skii’s book published, 123; Belinsky’s description, 47; black-soil region, 24; Catherinian land survey, 167; central industrial region, 58; centralization, 3; Damaskin’s origins, 11; educational district, 157; Eshevskii in, 208; ethnographic exhibition, 230; Fedorov’s biography, 290n70; Filaret (Drozdov), 197; in history, 142; Karelin’s memberships, 114, 115; and local history, 241–42; market for goods, 59, 71, 74, 75, 76, 91; Mel’nikov’s later career, 142; “Moscow” hats, 90; musicians, 215, 288n30; Napoleon’s invasion of, 143; and Old Believers, 144, 145, 185, 186, 201, 203, 275–76n50; parts for artisanal/industrial production, 90, 263nn28–29; paved streets, 48; pistsovye knigi, 166; and province, 4, 7; railway link to Nizhnii Novgorod, 126, 254n38; Rogozhskoe cemetery, 201; Rumiantsev museum, 226; “Russia’s heart,” 38; school of statistics, 149, 170, 177, 280n28; spiritual journals, 189; and St. Petersburg, 260n3; teachers’ seminary, 278n92; telegraph to Vladivostok, 258n64; in Time of Troubles, 220, 224, 239, 244, 245, 291n35; and zemskii sobor, 146; zemstvo and Savior on the Blood, 162; Zhivokini, 49 Moscow Mathematical Society, 218, 234 Moscow school. See zemstvo statistics Moscow Society of Naturalists. See naturalists Moscow University, 243 mosque, 113, 194 Mother Manefa, 17, 202 Mozart, 215, 270n44, 288n29 Mumford, Lewis, 56 municipal duma. See city duma Murav’ev, A., 127, 140, 196 museum, 56; agricultural, 188, 216–18; artisanal, 71; as concept, 225–26; and local identity, 234, 237, 238, 249, 289–90n69; natural history, 20, 289n66; Peter the Great’s house, 220, 224 Musil, Robert, 244 Napoleon: administration, 273n8; cadastral survey, 166, 168, 269n5, 281n40, 282n71; invasion of Russia, 51, 143, 169, 244 narod, 14, 211–12 National Bank. See banks national income tax, 181, 280n30 National Statistical Congress, 13, 18, 237 natural history, 19, 20, 209, 225, 238, 249 naturalists, 27, 34, 38; congresses of, 13, 20, 177, 219, 237, 282n79; Moscow Society of, 218; St. Petersburg Society of, 20, 218, 237, 280n31; travelers, 258n76, 280n31 Nazimov rescript, 127 Nektarii (bishop), 146, 187, 190, 191, 196, 197, 198, 283n23, 283n25 Nemtsov, Boris, 7 Nicholas City Mutual Bank, 126 Nicholas I (tsar): campaign against Old Belief, 203, 276n50; and forests, 29, 30; Gubernskie vedomosti, 142, 274n15; land assessment, 167; local government

reform, 134–37, 273nn7–8; Mel’nikov under, 143; Odintsov under, 138; “parting of the ways,” 15; provincial administration, 238; reign of, 223; “system,” 11, 141; visit to Nizhnii Novgorod, 11, 46; and zemstvo, 12, 169, 253n37, 276n57 Nikon (patriarch), 10, 142, 183, 203, 261n40, 270n44 Niva, 98, 210, 235, 243 Nizhegorodka, 168, 232, 240, 242 Nizhegorodskii birzhevoi listok, 223 Nizhegorodskii listok, 129, 272n73 Nizhegorodskii sbornik, 82, 83, 84, 101, 105, 128, 169, 223, 230, 231, 238 Nizhnii Novgorod All-Estate Club, 157, 230, 275n27 Nizhnii Novgorod Gentry Bank. See banks: Alexander Gentry Bank Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Scientific Archival Commission (NGUAK), 220–25; commemoration, 243–46; established, 279n12; Gatsiskii as president, 18, 234; Liudi nizhegorodskogo povolzh’ia in, 120; and local description, 167, 169; and local history, 242; Karelin in, 19, 114; and meteorology, 216; and purveyors, 20; secret report on Old Belief, 17; Vinogradov in, 188. See also Provincial Archival Commissions (GUAK) Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary, 47, 154, 185–87, 208, 283n22, 284n32 Nizhnii Novgorod Statistical Committee, 5, 18, 83, 128, 148, 156, 230. See also local statistical committees; provincial statistical committee nobility, 146, 196, 208, 209, 214; Lukoianov, 278n104. See also gentry Novoe vremia, 160, 161, 210 oblastnichestvo, 18, 207 obshchestvennoe dvizhenie, 164 Odintsov, A. A. (governor), 127, 138–40, 162, 230, 262–63n19, 270–71n44, 274n24, 274–75n27 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 214 Oka River: and commerce, 38, 48, 49, 58, 122, 262n5; confluence with Volga, 9, 24, 34, 36, 43, 47, 73, 105, 240, 243, 257–58nn58–59; in story of enchantress, 241 Old Belief, 201–4; Avvakum, 283n6; Bugrov, 121, 124, 125, 126; campaign against, 145–46, 186, 189, 275–76nn50–51, 276n51; and commerce, 76–80, 266n78; and edinoverie, 253n29; in far north, 207; and icons, 199, 201; icon sellers, 44, 73; “infection,” 191; in local history, 241; Mel’nikov report, 142–45; Mel’nikov research, 17; and NGUAK, 222; numbers, 9, 112–13, 183; and Orthodoxy, 183–85; prevalence of, 10, 183; in Semënov district, 64, 65, 66; sign of the cross, 261n40; sketes, 4; struggle against, 11; study of, 270n44; in trans-Volga forests, 172; wooden spoons, 68, 69 olifa (varnish), 69, 143 Orthodox brotherhoods, 188, 192–93, 205, 283n1 P’iana (river), 34, 41 Pallas, Peter Simon, 11, 31, 59, 167 pamiatnye knizhki (local guidebooks), 57, 58, 61, 84, 102,

316  INDEX pamiatnye knizhki (local guidebooks) (cont.), 168, 261n3, 266n6, 279n18, 279n19; Pamiatnaia knizhka nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1865 god, 9, 31, 58, 67, 97, 105, 107, 113, 195, 209 Panova, E. D., 214, 215, 288n32 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 145–46 parish schools, 154, 189, 192, 204, 210 Pavlovo, 45, 53, 56, 104, 105, 156, 249; artisanal cooperative, 265n54; choral singing, 215; famine of 1891, 161; in Gestwa, 266n11; grain imports, 73; icons in, 200; industrial organization, 107; knives and locks, 74, 84, 96; sales, 98, 268n59; steel manufactures, 57, 58, 67, 70–72, 78, 104, 105, 270n25 peasant commune: and contracts, 4, 251n3; and economic development, 81; land ownership and purchases, 61, 65, 66, 124, 174, 282n73; and land redistribution, 43, 259n94, 281n49; legal jurisdiction, 158; in religious processions, 198; representation in zemstvo, 147; and zemstvo cadaster, 177 Peasant Land Bank. See banks Pecherskaia Street. See Bol’shaia Pecherskaia Street Pecherskii Monastery, 36, 49, 94, 184, 239, 241, 243, 253n31, 291n33 pensions, 13, 126, 133, 148, 208, 236 Penza, 31, 73, 85, 89, 90, 97, 98, 156, 162 Perm’, 11, 20, 24, 28, 141, 170, 234, 241, 286n4 Perovskii, Lev, 11, 17, 124, 201 Pervyi shag, 211, 254n41 Peter I (tsar), 52, 194, 198, 202, 220, 224, 243, 265n57, 273n8 photography: and biography, 121; international exhibitions, 237; Karelin, 18–19, 113–19, 219; photographers, 108; and sociology, 270n35; studios, 212; techniques, 270n42, 289n44; Vinogradov, 189 physicians: and 1891 famine, 160; and Great Reforms, 4, 8, 13; and meteorology, 284n30; and zemstvo, 146, 149, 151, 152–54, 162, 277n72. See also Congress of Naturalists and Physicians; physicians’ congress physicians’ congress, 151, 152, 154 piety, 182, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 197, 198, 202, 204 Piksanov, N. M., 3, 4, 132, 207, 214 pistsovye knigi, 166, 171, 291n37 Pitirim (bishop), 144, 183, 186, 202, 241 plague, 77, 149, 162, 239 Platonov, Sergei, 220, 245, 246, 292n57 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 154, 192 Pochinki, 127; brick manufacture, 92; “non-administrative” town, 45, 53; population, 102; state peasants in, 110, 127; trade center, 55, 74, 86, 87, 88 Pokrovskaia Street (Pokrovka), 47, 49, 76, 215, 270n36 police: Anna Shmidt and, 129; chief of, 196; commercial, 122; Governor Baranov and, 140, 275n32; and immunization, 151; and local government reform, 11, 135, 136, 137, 273n15; Mel’nikov’s father, 144; Nicholas I and, 141; and Old Believers, 78, 148, 195, 274n16; in Vasil’, 52; and zemstvo, 13, 148, 162 Polievktov, M. A., 135, 223, 245, 253n37, 273n7, 276n57 Poltava, 162, 189 popovichi, 19, 132, 255n54 popular culture, xii, 242 population statistics: Arzamas, 51; B. Murashkino,

55; city of Nizhnii Novgorod, 10; clergy, 187; in Dukhovskii, 168; empire, 11; ethnic composition, 113; female, 88; “legibility,” 180; Makar’ev, 55, 66; male, 166; Mordvinian, 89, 142, 184; in “nonadministrative” towns, 53; Old Believers, 17, 201; province, 9, 102, 103–105–5, 110, 269n10; Semënov, 29, 107; Sormovo, 72; state peasants, 137; statistical committee and, 170; Tatars, 185; in trans-Volga forests, 26; urban, 49; Vasil’, 52; in zemstvo cadaster, 179 postal service: horses, 157; Old Believer, 17; post office, 134; rates, 168; road, 40; and state, 133; zemstvo, 12, 136–37, 138, 148, 274n17 potash, 21, 32, 59, 75, 78 Pozharskii (prince), 52, 239, 245, 246, 292n54 Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, 189, 284n31, 284n36 Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, 189 priests: apostate, 17, 144; archpriests, 129, 239; Avvakum, 10, 283n6; “caste,” 284n27; church schools, 189; and ethnographic and scientific research, 20, 67, 188–89, 216, 284n29; in Limousin, 283n1; as local intelligentsia, 5, 8, 101, 270n44; and miracleworking icons, 200; and Old Belief, 126, 201–3, 275–76n50; pastoral work, 284n40; provincial, 187, 188; as record-keepers, 152; seminary education, 186; sermons of, 78, 190, 191, 192; Vinogradov, 279n18. See also clergy; popovichi professionals, 5, 43, 86, 115, 132, 230, 249, 251n6, 269n17 property, 28; assessment, 159, 170, 225, 280n30, 291n37; boundaries, 247; and cadaster, 167, 177, 178, 179, 180, 282n74; Department (Ministry) of State Property, 29, 97 167; and forests, 30; inheritance, 78–79; insurance, 138, 158; in Kniaginin district, 174–75; landed, 61, 66; ownership, 8, 46, 50, 59, 74; peasant, 128; prices, 176; private, 43, 62, 63, 64, 65; ravines, 32; state v. private, 32; taxes, 13; theater building, 241; voting qualification, 18, 147; zemstvo and, 137, 148 proto-industrialization, 21, 22, 57, 70, 79, 84, 99, 249, 266n12 Provincial Archival Commissions (GUAK), 8, 20, 198, 220, 242, 253n22, 279n112, 289n51. See also Nizhnii Novgorod Provincial Scientific Archival Commission (NGUAK) provincial gazettes. See Gubernskie vedomosti provincial governors, 123, 135, 138, 142, 162, 221, 263n28, 269n8 provincial intelligentsia: and 1917 Church Council, xi; in Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, 219; and idea of province, 5, 228, 252n11; and local description, 82, 98, 101; and meteorology, 216–17; and NGUAK, 222, 242; on Pecherskaia Street, 49; as purveyors, 15, 29; Vinogradova on, 8 provincial statistical committee, 8, 168, 169, 221, 223, 230, 238. See also local statistical committees provincial zemstvo, 13, 19, 134, 137, 146–62 , 170. See also zemstvo provintsiia: and culture, 206; definition, 6, 246, 247; Gatsiskii’s concept of, 120, 131, 132, 233; in historiography, 8; and khoziaistvo, 234, 236; as social stratum, 211–12

INDEX  317 Prussia, 177, 179, 255n59 Przheval’skii, N. M., 19, 255n55 Pushkin, Alexander, 3, 51, 214, 243 Pushkin, V. L., 143 Putiata, A. D., 218, 288n42 Pypin, A. N., 220

salt: in Balakhna district, 51, 52, 58; Bugrov family and, 124, 125; closure of saltworks, 263n28; Khramtsovskii and, 239; processing in city of Nizhnii Novgorod, 59, 67; trade, 55, 73; Ulybyshev and, 214 sanitation, 13, 122, 148, 152, 237, 247 Saratov, 32, 35, 89, 144, 149, 162, 177, 214, 260n8, 286n94 Radishchev, Alexander, 259n94 Savel’ev, A. A., 20, 220, 222, 276n61, 277n62 Ragozin, V. I., 36, 37, 126, 159, 257n53, 258n66 Schlögel, Karl, 6, 252n8 rags, 74, 90, 93, 94, 95, 98 Schmidt, S. O., 8, 253n22 railroads (railway), 13, 157; construction, 178; engines, 72; science: Academy of Sciences, 216, 226; in bookstores, local, 126; Moscow-Nizhnii, 126, 254n38; rails, 40; 156; in Bulgakov’s philosophy, 236–37; expeditionrailway car manufacture, 73, 263n28; railway cars, ary, 19; geographical and meteorological, 32, 42, 217, 162; railway station, 49; and river trade, 259n93; 218; “high,” 180, 249; linguistic, 287n8; positivist, 28; Trans-Siberian, 13, 237 public instruction in, 219–20; religion and, 120, 123, rakes and plows, 87, 94 187, 191, 192; in school curriculum, 208; in seminary ravines, 20, 38–41, 42, 172, 258nn75–76; and agriculture, curriculum, 186; social, 48, 103, 114, 225; soil, 20, 25, 43; in Arzamas, 51; in city of Nizhnii Novgorod, 46, 27, 170, 172, 254n53, 282n68; statistical, 179, 282n69. 47, 125, 140; measures against, 32; and rivers, 35, See also soil science 257n56; typology, 258n78 scissors, 10, 59, 67, 71, 72, 86, 90 Razin rebellion, 23, 241, 242 secondary modeling systems, 206, 208, 286n3 raznochintsy, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 106, 112, 132, 209, 276n61 secret languages, 144 Reclus, Élie, 210 secret report, 17, 142, 143, 201. See also Mel’nikov, P. I.; religious processions, 187, 195, 198, 199, 206 Old Belief Renan, Ernest, 191 Semënov: city, 45, 53, 102, 107; district, 17, 24, 26, 61, 124; restaurants, 10, 59, 73, 74, 109, 266n78 district zemstvo, 125, 126, 156, 276n61; edinoverie, Revolution of 1905, 12, 14, 62, 72, 131, 182, 195, 291n28 195; environment, 143; in famine of 1891, 160; Revue mensuelle d’astronomie populaire, 217, 219 forests, 28, 29; grain imports, 59, 60, 73; icons in, Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 135 199; Lake Svetloiar, 195; landholding, 103; land Riazan’: archival commission in, 220; fires in, 31; transference in, 64–66, 282n73; manufactures, 20, Gatsiskii’s birthplace, 18, 229; history, 198, 245, 30, 67–70, 72, 83, 84, 89, 95, 263n29, 266n11, 270n25; 283n7; paved streets, 48; province, 24, 26; zemstvo, Mel’nikov’s birthplace, 141; Old Belief in, 78, 144, 177; and zemstvo statistics, 170 145, 172, 184, 202, 203–4, 241; priest Borisovskii in, Rieber, Alfred, 112 188; in religious processions, 196; sandy soil, 27. See rivers, 24, 26, 29, 32–38, 240; Alatyr’, 31; in city of also spoons, wooden Nizhnii Novgorod, 48, 125; classification of, 258n63; Semënov (Tian-Shanskii), P. P., 19, 255n55 and commerce, 43, 58–59, 73, 74, 75, 258n93; Don, serfs: and astronomy, 219; and cadaster, 167; emancipa258n76; Han and Yangtze, 266n76; Linda, 125; tion of, 60–61, 127, 189; and NGUAK, 222, 289n60; Mordvinian names, 257n53; and ravines, 39, 41, ownership of, 112; resettlement in towns, 262n8; 42, 257n56, 258n78; Rhine, 36; riverbeds, 172; Sit’, runaway, 121; Soviet statistics, 103; theater, 213, 229; Sura, 52; towns and, 51, 52, 53, 55; uneven 287n23; and zemstvo, 145 banks, 257n55; Urga, 104; Vyksa, 288n26. See also Sergach: agriculture, 60; city, 45, 53, 102; deforestation, Kerzhenets: river; Oka River; P’iana; Vetluga; Volga 31; district, 24; district zemstvo, 147, 153, 156, River 276n61; Dokuchaev expedition in, 172; famine in Rogozhskoe cemetery, 185, 201 1891, 160; and forest protection law, 30, 32, 175; Romanov tercentenary, 245, 246, 250 landholding, 104; land transference in, 61–62; ropes, 84, 92, 94 manufactures, 84, 263n28; ravines in, 41; river Rubinstein, Anton, 215 P’iana, 34; state peasants in, 110; Tatars and Rumiantsev Museum, 226 Mordvinians, 113, 119 Rusinov, N. I., 126–28, 131, 156, 158, 270–71n44, 271n49, sermons, 78, 190, 191, 192, 204, 284n37 272n65 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 135 Russian Astronomical Calendar, 219, 220 Shakhovskoi, N. G. (prince), 49, 196, 213, 241, 261n23, Russian Entomological Society, 218, 237 287n23 Russian Musical Society, 114, 215 Sharpanskii skete, 145, 146, 183, 201, 202 Russian Technical Society, 13, 114, 237, 254n39 Shchapov, Afanasii, 18, 208, 233, 287n20 Ryzhenkov, F. S., 147, 277n63 sheepskin, 21, 60, 74, 75, 86, 89–97 , 111 Shepelev factories, 59, 104, 263n28, 288n26 Sheremetev family, 32, 49, 70, 104, 143; estate, 84, 219, saddle straps, 84, 86, 94, 95 249; S. V. 140; N. V. 194 Sakharov, Andrei, 7

318  INDEX Shevzov, Vera, 182, 195 shipbuilding: in city of Nizhnii Novgorod, 59, 67; forests and, 29, 31; at Sormovo, 10, 38, 43, 52, 58, 67, 72–73, 96 Shishkin, Ivan, 114, 117 Shmidt, A. N., 128–31, 227, 249, 272n73 Shmidt, O. E., 70, 172 Shuiskii, Vasilii, 239 Shutilovo, 97, 106, 126, 127 Sibirtsev, N. M., 20, 171, 217, 226, 280n37 sickles, 59, 74, 88, 90, 93, 98, 270n25 Silver Age, xi–xii, 130, 131, 195, 227 sketes, 4, 10, 103, 184, 202–4; destruction of, 17, 144, 145, 183; Sharpanskii, 146, 201 skupshchiki, 69, 76, 96, 98, 107, 264n35 sleighs and wheels, 74, 84, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 97, 109 smallpox, 149, 151, 152, 237, 287n10 Smirnov, A., 58, 264n44 Smirnov, A. V., 20, 234, 271n49 Smith-Peter, Susan, 9 Smyshliaev, D. D., 234 Snezhnevskii, V. I., 20, 222 social insurance, 4, 126, 236, 247, 277n65 social welfare, 12, 13, 97, 133, 134, 148, 149, 272n1, 273–74n15 Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge, 114 Society for the Improvement of Forest Management, 30 soil, 25–27; and agriculture, 43; Annenskii and, 179; and artisanal production, 30; classification, 25, 42, 174; in flux, 37; Jurassic, 41; Lukoianov district, 127; and museum 225; quality, 10, 24, 66, 163, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 203, 257n54; and ravines, 39, 40; redistribution, 43; and rivers, 33, 34; salt in, 58; samples, 280n34, 280n36; sandy, 29, 34, 41, 60, 185; study of, 177, 238, 280n30; survey of, 19–20; topsoil, 39, 40. See also black soil; soil science; subsoils soil maps, 25, 26, 37, 127, 166, 172, 173, 175, 176, 280n34 soil science: 165, 237; and description of Nizhnii Novgorod province, 170–73, 179; Dokuchaev and, 19, 20, 25, 176–77, 225, 254n53, 255n55, 280n31, 282n68 Soloviev, Sergei, 143, 244, 245, 248 Soloviev, Vladimir, 40, 130, 227, 272n81 Sormovo (Balakhna district), 72–73, 253n31; cathedral, 193; Gorky and, 259n95; industrial settlement, 105; shipyards, 38, 43, 67, 96; telephone in, 261n22; as town, 45, 67, 96; workers’ community, 10 specialists, 176, 254, 281 Speranskii, 241 spoons, wooden: and barge haulers, 124; capital investment, 97; in Lukoianov district, 89, 94; makers, 17, 21, 83, 188; manufacture, 4, 29, 143, 264n42; materials, 30, 74; sales, 98, 107; in Semënov district, 57, 60, 67–70, 270n25; in Soviet period, 72. See also wood products St. Petersburg: administrative radius, 148; adult education, 219; Archaeographical Commission, 141; Baranov as mayor of, 140, 275n34; campaign against Old Belief, 145; capital, xi, 6, 7; Department of Military Colonies, 46; in emancipation, 127; and

Events of 4 April 1866, 198–99; and fair, 265n74; Gatsiskii, 232; industrial fair, 265n57; international statistical congress, 230; John of Kronstadt, 130; Karelin’s biography, 114, 115; market for goods, 59; and Moscow, xii, 260n3; music instruction, 288n32; Odintsov as commandant of, 274n24; physicians’ congress, 152; and provincial governors, 138; Putilov works, 72; radial layout, 51, 194; Romanov tercentenary, 250; Rusinov’s biography, 126; “Russia’s mind,” 38; science in, 226; scientific societies, 171, 172, 218, 221, 237; scientists, 13; spiritual journals, 189; St. Isaac’s Cathedral, 285n51; Synod, 185; Ulybyshev’s biography, 214 St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, 20, 171, 218, 237, 280n31 St. Petersburg University, 18, 19, 172, 230, 280n56 Starr, S. Frederick, 12, 134, 135, 253n36, 273n3 state: administration, 134; and 1866 assassination attempt, 198; bureaucracy, 17; and cadaster, 166, 167, 178, 179, 180, 282n67, 282n74; centralization, 3, 21, 22, 248, 249; and cities, 52; and clergy, 187, 188, 189, 284n35; committee on artisanal production, 160; Department of State Property, 97; distrust of, 199; and education, 154; and estates, 131; factories, 30; forests, 29; functions of, 133, 148, 163; and industry, 72, 82, 104, 125; and information, 112, 269n6; and intelligentsia, 14, 15; Karamzin’s history, 238; and local culture, 233; and local governance, 136–37, 138, 164; and military service, 122; Muscovite, 147, 239, 244; national, 252n7; and Old Believers, 144, 145, 201, 204; and peasantry, 12; printing office, 156; property, 32, 62, 63, 64, 176, 183; and reform, 66, 168; service, 141, 232; servitors/functionaries, 18, 50, 61, 127, 143, 214; and social insurance, 236; taxes, 165, 247, 253n37, 274n15, 276n57, 291n37; welfare state, 272n1; and zemstvo, 162. See also state peasants state peasants: Bankal’skii’s background, 121; Kiselev reform, 137; and medical tax, 149; and middle class, 132; in north of province, 103, 105; resettlement under Catherine II, 262n8; in Semënov, 107; in southeastern district towns, 60, 110; in Vasil’ and Makar’ev, 104 State Senate, 135, 138, 139, 153 statistical committees. See Central Statistical Committee; local statistical committees; provincial statistical committee statisticians: and cadaster, 169, 170, 172–76, 179; and data collection, 231; and ethnicity, 89, 112, 113, 132; famine of 1891, 161, 278n103; and forests, 32; provincial, 70, 82, 83, 102, 105, 132, 270n44; and reforms, 5, 12, 237; as researchers of artisanal production, 89, 96, 97; and soslovie, 110; and urban centers, 55. See also zemstvo statisticians statistics: agricultural, 177; on artisanal production, 82; and biography, 233–34; Blum and Gribaudi on, 266n5; on commerce, 74; diachronic, 179, 282n69; and famine of 1891, 160, 161; Gatsiskii and, 18, 106, 232; in Imperial Geographical Society, 255n55; and law of 1893, 282n79; local, 22, 101, 102, 113, 251n7; and local description, 168, 169; medical, 152; Mel’nikov

INDEX  319 and, 141, 143; official, 58, 105, 107, 112, 249; on Old Believers, 17, 143; provincial intelligentsia and, 15; science of, 173, 237; zemstvo and, 13. See also moral statistics; zemstvo statistics Statute on the Preservation of Forests, 30 steel products: from Demidov factories, 74, 88; in Nizhnii Novgorod province, 263n28; at Pavlovo, 21, 57, 59, 67, 70, 71, 270n25; at Solingen, 263n29; at Sormovo, 72; at Vyksa, 262n5 Stefan of Perm’, 11 steppe, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 39, 89, 98, 240, 258n76 Stolypin, Petr (reform), 43, 128, 176, 273n10 Strannik, 189, 191 Stroganov Church, 193, 194 Stroganov, Grigorii, 194 Stupin, A. V., 120, 270n44 subsoils, 25, 26, 27, 176. See also soil Sunderland, Willard, 7 surveyors, 10, 165, 167, 279n22 Suzdal’, 182, 197, 239, 241, 291n33 Svetloiar (lake), 195, 227 Sviiazhsk, 52 syphilis, 149, 152, 153, 236, 277n70, 283n13 tailors: capital investment, 97; in cities of Nizhnii Novgorod and Arzamas, 108; expansion after Great Reforms, 95; and hired labor, 93; in history, 52; in Iaroslavl’, 263n29; Mordvinian, 89, 96; and religious calendar, 199; in southeastern districts, 88 Tanzimat, 273n8 Tatars, 9, 112; history, 47, 142, 224, 229, 239, 241, 242; Karelin photo, 119; language, 183, 186; and medicine, 152; schools, 156; soap, 75; in southeastern districts, 60, 113, 184, 185; steppe, 89, 98 taxation: and central state, 133; clergy exemption, 273n15; control over, 5; equitable, 163, 181, 279n22; at Fair, 76; governor and, 274n15; and house ownership, 49, 50; “legibility,” 249; local, 247, 253n37, 276n57; and local government reform, 135; for medical care, 149; non-taxable lands, 62, 63, 64; officials, 134; Old Believers and, 78; peasant, 97, 127, 128; property, 280n30, 291n37; and social services, 237; on spoon-makers, 70; tea, 9, 44, 74, 75; on workers, 263n28; and zemstvo, 12, 13, 22, 122, 137, 138, 146, 148, 153, 157, 236; zemstvo cadaster and, 164, 165–81 teachers, 4, 5, 126, 128, 129, 142, 208, 210, 226; in Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, 219; as local researchers, 20, 84, 101, 188, 216, 284n30; music, 215; in Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary, 186, 188; in parish schools, 154 theater: Anna Shmidt and, 129; building, 47, 49; in districts, 288n26; at Fair, 75; history of, 240, 241, 287n9; Moscow Art Theater, 114; owners, 261nn23–24; and politics, 254n40; and provincial cultural scene, 206, 208, 212–14, 235, 246 Tillo, A., 32 Timashev, A. E., 232 Time of Troubles, 23; commemoration, 4, 169, 220,

222–23, 244–46; in local history, 241, 242, 291n33, 292n54 title deeds. See ustavnye gramoty trade fairs, 55, 59, 73, 74, 90, 98, 159, 265n57 tramway, 49 Tsereteli, Zurab, 246 Tsiolkovskii, Konstantin, 217, 219 Tugan-Baranovsky, Mikhail, 96, 267n33 Turchaninov, A., 103, 105, 125, 126 typhus, 48, 149, 153 Ulybyshev, Aleksandr, 214–15, 270n44, 288n29, 388n30 Urals, 11, 74, 75, 240, 255n55, 257–58n59, 262n5 Urusov, Mikhail, 17, 140, 141 ustavnye gramoty (land contracts), 61, 62, 67, 251n3, 262–63n191 Vachi, 71, 264n47 valenki. See felt boots Vasil’: city (Vasil’-Sursk), 45, 52, 102; commerce and industry, 60, 67, 78, 270n25; district, 24, 31, 32, 61, 104; district zemstvo, 151, 156, 277n73; ethnic diversity in, 113; land transference in, 66; Old Belief in, 172 ventilation, 178, 179 Vestnik Evropy, 210, 220, 243 Vetluga (river), 29, 33, 34, 104 Villuan, V. I., 215 Vinogradova, Tatiana, 8 Vladimir (province), 220; city planning, 260n8; comparison, 24; Eparkhial’nye vedomosti, 189; in history, 182, 197–98; and NGUAK, 224; Orthodox center, 185; paved streets, 48; and Pavlovo manufactures, 71; purveyors in, 20, 234, 271n45; and zemstvo statistics, 177 Voeikov, A. I., 36, 37, 42, 217, 218, 258n63 Volga region, 15, 83, 112, 120, 149, 233, 252n11; peoples, 11, 119, 241 Volga River, 9, 30–38; and Balakhna, 51, 105; barge haulers on, 272n60; basin, 11; and commerce, 17, 52, 59, 104; disease and, 13, 140, 143; embankment, 43, 46, 49, 125; and Fair, 73, 258n59; fishing in, 60; fluvial terms, 258n70; frozen, 188; islands in, 23, 42; Lyskovo on, 107; and Oka, 47, 240, 243, 257n58; and P’iana, 41; Ragozin and, 126; Razin and, 242; right bank, 28; riverbed(s), 27; steamships, 122, 124; water levels, 218. See also forests: trans-Volga; Oka River Volga-Kama Commercial Bank. See banks Volgar’, 129, 212 Vorsma, 58, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 104, 107, 257n53, 270n25 Vucinich, Alexander, 170 Vyksa, 197, 262n5, 288n26 waste, 48 water supply, 12, 48, 125, 275n31 Wirtschafter, Elise, 106, 112, 132 Witte, Sergei, 140, 275nn33–34 wood products, 30, 43, 58–60 , 74, 85, 86, 88, 263nn28–29; dishes, 10, 29, 67, 77, 94;

320  INDEX wood products (cont.), in northern forests, 32, 78, 103, 270n25. See also spoons, wooden wool, 75, 77, 86, 87, 90, 95, 106, 124, 263n29 World’s Fair, 114, 219, 237 Wortman, Richard, xii, 244, 246, 255n55, 274n23 Yaney, George, 176 Zagoskin, Mikhail, 243 Zaionchkovsky, P. A., 61, 262n11 zakazchiki, 106, 269n20 Zakon Bozhii, 156 Zealots of Piety, 10 “zealous servitor,” (“zealous service”), 141, 164, 198, 214 Zelnik, Reginald, 112, 268n73, 274n24 zemskii sobor, 14, 146, 245 zemstvo, 12–14, 145–64, 165–81; Anna Shmidt and, 129, 131; Bankal’skii and, 122; Bugrov family and, 125, 126; and Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy, 218, 219; and clergy, 188; and concept of khoziaistvo, 236–37, 238, 247; and Dokuchaev expedition, 19, 25, 32; and education, 210; and famine of 1891, 278n104; Gatsiskii and, 18, 231, 232, 234, 235, 280n25; in history, 245–46; and information, 269n6; Karelin and, 19; and Kazan Mother of God icon, 286n93; khoziaistvo, 236–37, 238, 247–38; literature

on, 276n53; and local control, 21; in legislation of 1864, 134, 136, 137–38; and meteorology, 217; and natural history museum, 225, 226; and NGUAK, 221; Odintsov and, 139; and Orthodox brotherhoods, 192; police, 274n16; and provintsiia, 211; Rusinov and, 121, 126–28; in Shchapov’s theory, 287n20; and statistical publications, 102, 103, 104; and taxation, 22, 61, 253n37, 281n61 Zemstvo Agricultural Museum, 188, 216 zemstvo board: Arzamas district, 149; and “famine parliament,” 160–61; in legislation of 1864, 137; Lukoianov district, 127; provincial, 147, 151, 159, 172, 176, 221, 279n22 zemstvo cadaster, 21, 164, 166, 177–80, 278n1, 280n30, 281n61, 282n67 zemstvo statisticians, 20, 62, 82 zemstvo statistics, 177; v. administrative, 82, 101, 169, 269n6, 279n23, 282n70; Annenskii and, 280n39, 282n70; Chernigov v. Moscow schools, 149, 170, 177, 280n28; and Dokuchaev expedition, 234; territorial/ cadastral method, 173 Zhivokini, V. I., 49, 261n24 Zorin, A. N., 45, 260n6 Zvezdin, A. I., 20 Zybin, S. S., 140, 232