Provincial and local government

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521815291.023

21 - Provincial and local government

from Part V - Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Janet Hartley

Edited by

Dominic Lieven

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Dominic Lieven: Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science

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Summary

Introduction

A study of local government raises several important questions about the nature of the imperial Russian state, the level of development of provincial Russian society and the relationship between government and society in Russia. To what extent did the government allow or wish to encourage a genuine decentralisation or devolution of power to the provinces? Could local government institutions – either corporate institutions or ‘all-class’ institutions – flourish given both the pressures from the centre and the poor economic and cultural levels of rural Russia which inhibited the growth of an educated and politically conscious provincial society? To what extent can we even speak of a structure of local government when a significant proportion of the population – the peasants – were only rarely touched by it, at least until the Emancipation of 1861 and to some extent even thereafter? The status of local government – either as separate from the central bureaucracy or as an integral part of the government structure – was a major debate in Russia in the nineteenth century. At the root of these questions is the fundamental issue of the relationship between local government and the modernisation of the Russian state. On the one hand, local government was potentially a tool to stimulate corporate identity, urban self-confidence and economic and cultural progress across all sectors of society, including the peasantry after 1861. On the other hand, problems in local government could be interpreted as symbolic of the failure, or the unwillingness, of the tsarist regime to adapt to change and to establish an effective relationship between state and society. If the latter has some validity, then we have to ask in addition whether local government contributed to the downfall of the regime which created it.

Keywords

Russian local administration provincial Russian society corporate institutions urban population

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 449 - 467

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521815291.023 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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21 - Provincial and local government

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