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100,000 officials with some police responsibility at all levels in Russia.12 Despite the amount of legislation devoted to local administration the conclusion has to be that Russia was underrather than over-governed throughout the imperial period.13

The operation of local administration

The problems outlined above made smooth and complete implementation of government legislation impossible to achieve. Local administration was further weakened by the exclusion of large sections of the population from its control. Before the reforms of the 1860s, many of the matters relating to the everyday concerns of peasants – state peasants and serfs – were dealt with by peasants themselves through the commune. The commune not only distributed state obligations such as taxation and the recruit levy but also acted as a peasant court of first instance, using customary law and ‘peasant justice’ for civil matters and minor criminal offences. The Statute of Administration of 1775 established a structure of courts for state peasants, but serfs only participated in the state legal system when they were accused of major criminal offences or when they were litigants in cases involving other social estates (which could happen in disputes in town courts involving so-called ‘trading peasants’). After emancipation and the reforms of 1864, exclusively peasant institutions were retained, as in the case of the commune, or created, in the case of volost’ peasant courts where customary law continued to be applied, so that peasants were deliberately treated differently from other members of society, separately and outside the reformed state court structure.14 This suggested that the reforms of 1864, like those of 1775, were primarily urban, and were of relevance to towns but not to the countryside, where, of course, the majority of the population lived. Industrial workers before the 1860s in the

12J. W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia 1 866–1 905 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 9. Weissman quotes a much lower figure of 47,866 police at the beginning of the twentieth century from a Police Department report: N. Weissman, ‘Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900–1914’, RR 44, 1 (1985): 47. The figures are difficult to interpret as it is not clear whether several categories, such as night watchmen and other patrolmen, are included.

13Velychenko has recently challenged the view that Russia was ‘undergoverned’ by arguing that valid comparisons should be made between the levels of staffing in Russia with European colonies rather than with West European states, but his argument, although stimulating, cannot disguise the serious undermanning of institutions and of police forces in European Russia or in towns in the empire which can legitimately be compared with towns elsewhere in Europe: S. Velychenko, ‘The Size of the Imperial Russian Bureaucracy and Army in Comparative Perspective’, JfGO 49, 3 (2001): 346–62.

14S. F. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia 1 85 6–1 91 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 36–40.

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large privately owned enterprises mainly comprised assigned, or possessional, serfs who were also outside the jurisdiction of local administration. The army, the clergy and several national and religious groups were also governed by a separate jurisdiction (although conflicts within towns between the Church and urban institutions, which was common in the seventeenth century, declined in the eighteenth century, particularly after the secularisation of Church land in 1764). These anomalies and the continuation of ‘legal separateness’ point to a fundamental problem in local administration, namely whether administration should be centred on soslovie, or social ‘estate’, reflecting corporate interests (such as urban institutions of self-government and noble assemblies), or whether administration should, or could be, ‘all-class’ or ‘all-estate’ (which was partly the case with some of the 1775 institutions, which excluded serfs but not state peasants, and fully the case with the zemstvos). An analysis of the functioning of both types of institution illustrates some of the dilemmas facing local administration during the imperial period.

Corporate institutions

The universal obligations of state service for individuals in Russia from the reign of Peter I – service for nobles (formal until 1762 and informal thereafter), dues and conscription for townspeople and peasants – combined with the government’s deliberate choice of ‘collective responsibility’ as a means by which villages and towns (at least until the urban tax reform of 1775) met these obligations – inhibited the development of independent, corporate bodies which could defend the interests of their members against the government. This is not to say that corporate institutions could not become a pervasive and essential part of the life of the Russian people – the peasant commune for all categories of peasants is testimony to this – but it goes some way to explain the failure of the urban population or the nobility to develop powerful ‘Western’ or Central European-style corporate institutions.

The tsars – from Peter to Nicholas II – legislated at length on the structures of urban self-government and on the composition, responsibilities and privileges of the urban population. It has been seen above that government hoped through legislation to ‘Westernise’ or modernise Russian towns by the introduction of Western-style guilds, the creation, and then re-creation, of categories of urban citizens and the development of corporate institutions. The impracticability of this legislation in itself damaged the ability of corporate institutions to function in the way envisaged in the legislation, and only worsened from the late nineteenth century when the influx of new urban residents

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was not matched by an attempt to change the nature of urban representation. Further damage was inflicted by the inadequacies of the legislation itself, in particular: the confusion over administrative and judicial functions in Peter I’s ratushy (town councils) in 1699 and magistraty or magistracies, established in 1721, which were not fully resolved by the re-definition of the magistracies as urban courts in Catherine II’s legislation of 1775; the overlapping jurisdictions of the strata of town dumas established after 1775 and overlapping between the dumas and the urban courts and the urban police force; the ambiguous role of the governor in urban affairs (especially after the Municipal Statute of 1892); the relationship between urban government and the Ministry of Internal Affairs; the vast amount of paperwork which passed through institutions (Mironov has estimated that some 100, 000 documents passed through the St Petersburg city duma from 1838 to 1840);15 the lack of clarity over the rights of the towns to raise local taxes for local needs; inadequate control over urban budgets, at least until the 1840s. The constant competition from an overwhelming peasant population in an overwhelmingly rural country in itself was always going to militate against the importance of towns and townspeople.

In the late eighteenth century there is some limited evidence to suggest that despite these inadequacies of legislation Catherine’s 1785 Charter to the Towns did have some positive effects, quite possibly linked with the attempts in her reign to modernise and beautify towns by building schemes and town planning. The attempt to dignify urban office not only by financial rewards but by social recognition made at least the highest urban posts more attractive. Urban institutions began to play some part in the economic life of the cities which went beyond mere tax collectors for the state. Indeed, the physical inability of the centre to control the activities of local administrators enabled the towns to circumvent the legislation and make institutions more responsive to genuine urban needs. Urban posts became the preserve of a small number of prominent families, which, while it reflects poorly on the democratic nature of urban institutions, at least demonstrates that urban administration was considered to be of importance. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, absenteeism increased in urban institutions while urban government became more chaotic and disorderly.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the large cities had to face far greater challenges in terms of housing, law and order, education, transport, health and sanitation as rural labourers flooded into the towns to seek employment in the

15B. Mironov, ‘Bureaucratic or Self-Government: The Early Nineteenth Century Russian City’, SR 52, 2 (1993): 249.

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newly established factories without an effective administration or adequate financial base. The need for more effective urban government which could address the economic, cultural and physical needs of the population had been partly recognised in the municipal reform of St Petersburg in 1846 and Moscow (and Odessa) in 1862, followed by the municipal statute of 1870, and seems to have encouraged the development of what can be termed a ‘civil society’ in the larger towns such as St Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa.16 This development was, however, deliberately undermined by restrictions being placed on the urban franchise and on the independence of towns from the governor in the municipal statute of 1892. In Moscow, where there was a more established and stable urban class and where a sense of ‘civic responsibility’ seems to have developed, these issues were addressed to an extent. In St Petersburg, however, where the needs of the court, the central bureaucracy and the wealthy noble residents outweighed those of the merchantry and industrialists, these issues remained unresolved, with the inevitable consequence of the aggravation of social tensions within the city.17 In Odessa, municipal government declined in effectiveness after the restrictions imposed on its activities in 1892 and lost the support of the professional classes,18 whilst it deliberately neglected the needs of the new wave of urban poor employed in the factories. In this respect it can be said that corporate administration in the towns failed to respond to the needs of a rapidly changing urban population.

Catherine established the corporate institution for the nobility – noble assemblies – originally in 1766 to elect deputies for the Legislative Commission, although their functions were more fully defined in the Statute of Provincial Administration of 1775 and then in the Charter to the Nobles in 1785. The assemblies were supposed to fulfil state needs, namely to conduct the threeyearly election of nobles to posts in the new institutions of local administration established in 1775, but were also designed to stimulate a sense of local corporate responsibility by keeping records of nobles and to consider and act collectively to address local needs in the wake of the abolition of compulsory noble service to the state in 1762 and the beginnings of a settled provincial

16Well described in M. F. Hamm (ed.), The City in the Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), especially in the chapters on Kiev by Hamm and Odessa by F. W. Skinner. See also M. F. Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1 800–1 91 7 (Princeton University Press, 1993) and V. A. Nardova, ‘Municipal Self-Government after the 1870 Reform’, in B. Eklof, J. Bushnell and L. Zakharova, Russia’s Great Reforms, 1 85 5 –1 881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 181–96.

17J. H. Bater, ‘Some Dimensions of Urbanization and the Response of Municipal Government: Moscow and St Petersburg’, RH 5, 1 (1978): 46–63.

18Skinner, ‘Odessa and the Problem of Urban Modernization’, in The City in Late Imperial Russia, p. 236.

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