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millionaires). Donald Raleigh estimated for another provincial town, Saratov, that the professional and commercial middle classes made up 25 per cent of the urban population.41

Administration and institutions

Since at least the local government reform of Catherine II, the provincial capital (gubernskii gorod) signified the extension, down to the provincial level, of the state administrative apparatus.42 By definition, the provincial and district capitals were distinguished from other types of settlements by the presence of governmental offices – even though the non-administrative (zashtatnyi) town, the Cossack village (stanitsa), or the industrial village might have a larger population and every appearance of a city. The administration and institutions of every provincial capital were thus very nearly identical. Before the 1860s, these were limited to 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, creating a new institution, the zemstvo, conceived by the monarchy (it was originally Nicholas I’s idea) essentially as an organ for the more efficient collection and disbursement of taxes;43 setting up a court system; and granting the provincial capitals a city council (1870). In the last third of the century, Nizhnii Novgorod housed the provincial zemstvo, the district zemstvo, the city duma and various offices of the government bureaucracy. Overlapping jurisdictions provoked frequent complaints.

Yet the importance of these institutions lies above all in the uses to which they were put, locally. Nizhnii Novgorod had a tradition of liberal governors that included Mikhail Urusov (1843–55), the ex-Decembrist Alexander Muravev (1856–61) and the beloved Aleksei Odintsov, whose illustrious governorship (1861–73) set the tone for the reform era in Nizhnii Novgorod. Odintsov, who, in a humorous farewell speech in 1873, characterised his tenure as

41D. Raleigh, ‘The Impact of World War I on Saratov and its revolutionary movement’, in Rex Wade and Scott Seregny (eds.), Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov,

1 5 90–1 91 7 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 258.

42The 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 signalled the government’s first intrusion into local jurisdiction.

43See M. Polievktov, Nikolai I: biografiia i obzor tsarstvovaniia (Moscow: Izd. M. i S. Sabashnikovykh, 1918), pp. 212–13. Special commmittees set up in 1827, 1842 and 1847 raised the possibility of satisfying local needs by both collecting and spending taxes locally.

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‘proof – and this is my main achievement – that the province could do perfectly well without a governor for ten years’,44 in fact presided over the elections of the first zemstvo and the municipal duma, and managed the peaceful transition to new landlord-peasant relations. The conservative politics of his successor, Count Pavel Kutaisov (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. One of the most potentially influential posts one could have on the governor’s staff was that of ‘official for special assignments’ (chinovnik osobykh poruchenii): both P. I. Melnikov and A. S. Gatsiskii held this position, compiling some of their most important statistical and ethnographic studies under its auspices.

The Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo was one of the most dynamic among the thirty-four such institutions. In the first elections to the district zemstvos, the delegates numbered 402: 189 representing the landlords, 38 city-dwellers and 175 from the peasant communes. The zemstvos had a dual mandate: the ‘obligatory’ functions included oversight of peasant affairs, land redistribution, local administration (police, courts, statistics), transportation, and property taxes; and ‘non-obligatory’ responsibility for medicine, veterinary medicine, education, pensions, railways, commerce, welfare, agricultural credit and insurance. The 1864 law gave the zemstvos the right to collect and spend their own taxes; a good deal of decision-making power thus devolved on to this local institution. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo built schools, hospitals, roads, sanitation, lighting, and provided fire insurance. Some of its most significant initiatives included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the TransSiberian railroad, ‘restoring the old natural route through Nizhnii Novgorod province to Siberia and Central Asia’;45 a constant struggle against the epidemics that periodically wound their way up the Volga; and an extremely sophisticated local cadaster (1880s–90s), funded by the zemstvo and executed by scientists from St Petersburg, intended to create an absolutely equitable system of land taxation and distribution.46

44V. G. Korolenko, ‘Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo’, in K. D. Aleksandrov (ed.), A. S. Gatsiskii,

1 83 8–1 93 8: sbornik posviashchennyi pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo (Gorky: Gor’kovskoe oblastnoe izd., 1939), p. 10.

45Sbornik postanovlenii nizhegorodskogo zemstva, 1 865 –1 886 (NN: Tip. I. Sokolenkova, 1888),

p.490. The Moscow–Nizhnii line was one of the earliest in Russia, constructed in accordance with an 1857 decree.

46See N. F. Annenskii, ‘Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika’, Trudy podsektsii statistiki IX s’ezda russkikh estestvo¨ıspytatelei i vrachei (Chernigov: Tip. gubernskogo zemstva, 1894),

pp.17–44.

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The city duma was dominated by local merchants.47 The influential mayor’s post attracted some of the most visible municipal figures. Fedor Blinov, in the 1860s, became a sort of shadow mayor: elected by an overwhelming majority, he nevertheless, as an Old Believer, could not officially occupy the position.48 If, prior to 1870, participation in municipal government was considered an onerous duty to be avoided by all available means – medical excuses, declaration of capital in other cities, or, in one case, serving a twenty-day prison term, the council, whose mandate was basically to ensure the absence of basic disorder, managed to achieve some limited goals. It was their decision that resulted in the construction of a water-supply system in 1847.49 The reformed duma of 1870, headed by Mayor A. M. Gubin, included members of all estates but still a preponderance of merchants. Apart from routine management, they continued to make improvements in the water supply and initiated measures to institute gas lighting.

Secular regional administration functioned alongside a parallel ecclesiastical administration. Nizhnii Novgorod diocesan history was linked from the beginning (1672) with the struggle against Old Belief. Peter I’s appointee Pitirim (1719–38) became renowned for his merciless campaigns against the regime’s opponents.50 In Catherine II’s reign, Ioann Damaskin (1783–94) made his reputation in a different fashion, making converts among the Finnic and Turkic peoples of the region and compiling grammars of Mordvinian and other local languages. Catherine’s secularisation of church lands had a profound effect on landholding patterns: the two major monasteries on the outskirts of the city, as well as Makariev monastery downriver, monasteries and a convent in Arzamas, all lost substantial holdings in the region. The ecclesiastical hierarchy extended down to the parish level, where local initiative had, until the 1880s, a means for expression through the elected blagochinnye. The Nizhnii Novgorod Seminary was one of the most visible and active institutions in the city landscape, situated just across the square from the kremlin and the Alma Mater of Nikolai Dobroliubov and other less iconoclastic priests’ sons. The effort to increase ‘bottom-up’ participation emblematised by the

Gubernskie vedomosti found an echo in the Eparkhial’nye vedomosti, established

47A. Savelev, Stoletie gorodskogo samoupravleniia v Nizhnem Novgorode, 1 7 85 –1 885 (NN: Tip. Roiskogo i Dushina, 1885), p. 31.

48Savelev, Stoletie, p. 24.

49Savelev, Stoletie, p. 24.

50Compare the policies of his near-contemporary: Georg Michels, ‘Rescuing the Orthodox: The Church Policies of Archbishop Afanasii of Kholmogory, 1682–1702’, in Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 19–37.

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throughout the empire in the 1860s and in 1864 in Nizhnii Novgorod. In general, the 1860s witnessed remarkable social activism in clerical circles – the founding of rural schools, sometimes with just a few students; clerical participation in various scientific observations and educational experiments; and the centrally engineered effort, in the wake of the Emancipation which after all was to a large degree implemented by the Church, to add inspirational sermons to the highly ritualised liturgy. Ironically, this last effort backfired significantly in Nizhnii Novgorod, where parishioners complained that they came to church to hear the eternal wisdom of the Fathers of the Church, not some kind of off-the-cuff musings by their local priest.51 In the 1880s, as Konstantin Pobedonostsev increasingly took the parish-school movement under his wing, the activities of the Nizhnii Novgorod Brotherhood of Saint Gurii (modelled after the seventeenth-century Ukrainian religious brotherhoods) intensified in the promotion of ecclesiastically sponsored education.

This ‘official’ religious life found a constant shadow and counterpoint across the river, in the sketes and communities of the Old Belief. This universe, where priests were a rarity and needed, if at all, to be imported from Old Believer communities at Belaia Krinitsa in Austria, was run by powerful female religious figures and funded by wealthy male merchants. Hundreds of thousands of faithful, from merchants’ daughters sent to the sketes for a convent education to peddlers of icons and ‘old-print’ (i.e. Slavonic) books, found a home or a touchstone in the powerful communities, even after Nicholas I’s (with Melnikov’s critical help) massive campaign shut many of them down in the 1850s. Melnikov’s unforgettable portrayal of this universe inspired a whole movement in art, music and literature, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Invisible City of Kitezh, Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Mikhail Nesterov’s

Taking the Veil, and Andrei Bely’s Silver Dove.

Civic and cultural life

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 theatre provided a venue for social gatherings and entertainment. For a few days in 1847, the local Gubernskie vedomosti engaged in a debate over whether there was, in fact, anything to do in Nizhnii, or not. The newspaper’s contributor A. P. Avdeev took a Gogolian tone, lamenting the

51 RGIA, diocesan reports, Fond 796, d. 60, l. 14.

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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’).52 Finally, mimicking Gogol directly, he decided to describe theatre-goers as they left a performance. The editor, P. I. Melnikov, responding with local patriotism, insisted that Nizhnii Novgorod with its gentry elections, balls, masquerades, plays and religious processions, was better than most other places,53 and exalted the physical beauty and architecture of the city. The Nizhnii Novgorod theatre provided the focal point of cultural life. It originated in the immensely successful serf troupe of the landowner Prince Shakhovskoi which, transported to an ugly and unwieldy but permanent building on the Pecherskaia Street in 1811, metamorphosed into a public institution.54 Performances took place thrice weekly, and daily in holiday season; a second theatre on the fairgrounds played daily in the summer months.55 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’).56

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 travelling to the capitals, or abroad. Such figures as Stepan Eshevskii, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, and Melnikov wended their way downriver to study at Kazan, attending lectures by Shchapov, Lobachevskii 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 removed 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 organisation – in the face of the centralising aims of the Roman state. An interesting early product of the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium is the Statistical Description of Nizhnii Novgorod Province written by the senior instructor, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published under the auspices of the Kazan

52Nizhegorodskie gubernskie vedomosti (NN) 1847, #37, p. 145.

53NGV 1847, #39, p. 154.

54A. S. Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr (1 7 98–1 867 ) (NN: Tip. nizhegorodskogo gubernskogo pravleniia, 1867), p. 15.

55Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr, p. 21.

56Gatsiskii, Nizhegorodskii teatr, p. 24.

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University Press in 1827. Although the pamphlet bears little resemblance to our notion of statistics, it comprises 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 colour on the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair.57 An added, if serendipitous, impetus, to local cultural activity resulted from the temporary exile of Moscow literary circles specifically to the city in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Nikolai Karamzin, S. N. Glinka and Konstantin Batiushkov found temporary refuge in Nizhnii’s wilds, where their salons and gatherings doubtless fuelled the proverbial ‘mixture of French with Nizhegorodian’.58 Finally, the abovementioned Gubernskie vedomosti – established by decree throughout European Russia beginning in 1838 – became itself a crucial agent in stimulating local historical, scientific and aesthetic interests. Particularly under Melnikov’s editorship in 1845–50, the Vedomosti became an organ for the construction of a local, non-state-centred, narrative of Russian history, as well as for conveying useful local meteorological, statistical and ethnographic material.59

Still, the blossoming of provincial culture and civic life unquestionably belongs to the post-reform period. The new institutions – the zemstvo, the courts, the municipal duma – as well as some old ones – merchant guilds, corporations, the gentry assembly – were invested with real power to make decisions on a local level. Elections to the zemstvos, controversial court cases and important decisions on urban infrastructure – electric lighting, sanitation, transportation – became the stuff of animated public discussion. Nine full-fledged lawyers resided in town in 1877, as well as twenty-five persons authorised to intervene for other parties in the circuit or communal courts. Private societies and brotherhoods operating in the city in the 1870s included: a commercial club, a military club, a hunting society, societies for co-operation with industry and trade, a mutual insurance fund in case of shipwreck, a mutual aid society for the private service sector, a literacy society, a local physicians’ society, a branch of the Russian Musical Society, the brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius, and the ubiquitous all-estate club; there were twenty in all. As the

57 Marie-Noelle¨ Bourguet also notes the descriptive nature of the ‘statistics’ of the Napoleonic period. M.-N. Bourguet, Dechiffrer´ la France: la statistique departementale´ a` l’epoque´ napoleonienne´ (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1989), p. 12.

58See Smirnov, Nizhegorodskie, pp. 390–4 and probably also N. Khramtsovskii, Kratkii ocherk istorii i opisanie Nizhnego Novgoroda (NN: Izd. V. K. Michurina, 1857–59).

59C. Evtuhov, ‘The Gubernskie vedomosti and Local Culture, 1838–1860’, paper presented at American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Seattle, 1997 (unpublished manuscript).

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century drew to an end, the old soslovie organisations – merchant guilds and the meshchanstvo society in particular – began to function as corporations, providing social standing to small-scale entrepreneurs and creating a forum for commercial transactions. Some of the most prosperous merchants became known for their service to charity, among them Nikolai Bugrov (1837–1911), major industrialist and banker who became famous for his aid to Old Believer communities and for founding a homeless shelter (1880) that made it onto the pages of Maxim Gorky’s novels.60

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. The questions of the potential civic role of the provincial press triggered a nationwide debate in the mid-1870s, that raised much deeper issues of the relation of the centre and the provinces. In response to the claim of the Petersburg publicist, D. L. Mordovtsev, that the capitals necessarily exercised a gravitational pull, extracting all true talent from the provinces, Aleksandr Gatsiskii argued that the centre could only be as strong as its constituent parts. The same year, a Kazan-based publication, Pervyi shag, brought together provincial authors to demonstrate the provinces’ literary power. (One of the stories later provided material for one of the first Russian feature movies, Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter, 1913.) Already in 1880, Nizhnii Novgorod had two major daily newspapers (Volgar’ and the Vedomosti), as well as the Iarmorochnyi Listok which came out in fairtime. Other publications came and went. Six private printing presses, three photographic studios, two bookstores and a public library provided the literary infrastructure.

Provincial residents read a good deal. An 1894 survey found that residents subscribed to 110 Russian journals and newspapers, or 4,198 copies. Adolf Marx’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 by the 1890s displaced the once-dominant Syn Otechestva.

Nizhegorodians had a particular penchant for music and science. In the 1840s the violinist and musicologist (and member of the local nobility) Aleksandr Uly-

60 Ulianova, ‘Entrepreneurs’, p. 102.

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byshev – author of a two-volume biography of Mozart published in Leipzig – founded a musical circle at his house at the intersection of Bol’shaia and Malaia Pokrovka, playing chamber music, and importing musicians for a symphony orchestra from Moscow. 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 travelled 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. The region also nourished a strong tradition of choral singing, most notably in the knifeand lock-producing area around Pavlovo.

Observation of the heavens was another local passion. If, in the 1840s, the pages of the Gubernskie vedomosti were already filled with the meteorological notes of local priests and teachers, by 1893 a province-wide network of meteorological stations was established (there were forty-seven by 1912); they drew on the efforts of the rural intelligentsia to chart average temperatures, precipitation rates, cloud movements, the behaviour of snow masses on the ground and so on. The Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy was founded in 1888 and flourished up to the First World War. They proudly proclaimed Camille Flammarion as one of their honorary members (he actually condescended to send them a letter acknowledging this honour), and counted some 150 real members, including Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, then a resident of Kaluga, by the turn of the century. The circle conducted meteorological observations of their own (here, peasants and clergy were their most dedicated contributors), as well as holding lectures and readings, conducting an active correspondence with learned societies in the capitals and abroad, and collecting a very respectable library of scientific works in French and German as well as Russian.

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 artefacts. 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, examples of handicrafts, but also the education of visitors. Eventually, a network of such museums became a means for the

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dissemination of information and creation of a local consciousness throughout Russia. The major instrument for fostering historical consciousness became the Provincial Archival Commissions, established (like the Gubernskie vedomosti fifty years earlier) by decree from the central government in 1883.61 Not only did the Archival Commissions (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 they 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; Nizhegorodians 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 Archival Commissions had published eighteen volumes (46 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.

Two themes emerge from the above discussion. First, it is clear that there was nothing ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ about Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century. Like every other provincial town, it pulsated to its own rhythms, drawing on a richness of local environmental and social circumstances to create an individual personality. A thriving commercial life, the civic prominence of the merchant estate, the distinct cultural flavour of the Old Belief were but some of the particular characteristics of ‘Russia’s pocket’ – as popular wisdom dubbed Nizhnii. A second theme is the importance of the Great Reforms for provincial Russia. A demographic upsurge, the creation of entirely new institutions like the zemstvo and the infusion of new energy into old ones, and a burgeoning press and musical, scientific, and historical societies marked the last third of the nineteenth century. The All-Russian Fair, held in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1896, presented to the public not only the products of Russian industry, commerce and agriculture, but a bustling and growing city poised to enter the twentieth century with considerable pride, optimism, and energy.

61On the Archival Commissions, see V. P. Makarikhin, Gubernskie uchenye arkhivnye komissii Rossii (NN: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1991).

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