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Hello everybody and welcome back to new books in Russian and Eurasian Studies. I'm the host of the channel Samantha Lam, and today we'll be talking to Professor Susan Smith-Peter about her new book, Imagining Russian Regions, Subnational Identity and Civil Society in 19th Century Russia. Hello Susan and thank you for joining us. Hi Sam, thanks for having me.
Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, sure. I'm an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, which is part of the City University of New York. And I'm a specialist in 19th Century Russia.
And this is the culmination, the book is a culmination of a long period of work where I've been interested in regional identity. And at College of Staten Island, I teach Russian history and other kinds of European history. And I've been involved in a wide variety of projects with New York Public Library and in other places as well. So this is a big thing though, getting the book out.
So I'm really glad to be talking to you. Well congratulations on your book. And would you like to tell us how you got interested in this particular project? I was attracted to it because I was struck by a contradiction of a certain sort because one often hears about the era of Nicholas I in the first half of the 19th Century as this time of sort of repression as if things are all kind of negative.
And yet at the same time, it's the golden age of Russian literature. And that intrigued me. I was thinking, well, why is that? I mean, how can you have this golden age of literature at this time when supposedly everything else is so tightly controlled?
And that drew me to it. And then also I had gone to Tüffle-Diemer and I had just traveled there when I was really an undergraduate. And I was fascinated by the place. And so when it came time to think about where I could work, that is one of the places where I was drawn to.
And it is in terms of archives and absolutely extraordinarily rich place to work. So let's talk a little bit about this idea of everything being very tightly controlled under Nicholas I. It seems like actually your argument is the opposite that things were poorly controlled. And that is why the Tsar reached out to civil society, correct?
Yes, exactly. We have to remember that Russia was, is the largest country in the world. And at this time, they were quite under governed. Even though the idea was that one man was in charge, in reality, it was just so large that they had to reach out to society.
And Catherine the Great had done it, Peter the Great had done it, even his own father had done it. Now that was just two individuals. But there was still up until the Great Reforms, there was still this idea that the state should reach out, not necessarily to civil society, because I'm arguing that that is a term that comes into being during this time, but it should reach out to people outside of the bureaucracy and ask them for information, because the state structure itself was just simply incapable of providing all of the information that was needed, even for the basic running of the state, such as to say, who gets taxed? What factories are out there?
What kind of economic objects are there to use this kind of technological term? And how successful are they? And therefore, how are they going to be taxed? And society's input was necessary, even for this fundamental level of state survival as it were.
Visit the idea of civil society. I do work mainly on the Soviet period, the Stalinist era. I talk about Soviet civil society and the Constitution. I know many people are skeptical that civil society ever existed in Russia in general.
And you talk about several different ideas about developing civil society. Maybe you would like to talk about how civil society got started and the different forms that it took? Yeah, I think the idea of civil society is one of these things where the definition is absolutely crucial. So when we're talking about civil society, we really do need to define it.
What we see here, what I decided to do, actually, in this book was to work with the ideas of civil society that were already present in Russia at this time. So I didn't want to come and just sort of put it in on top of the evidence. I wanted it to arise from the evidence itself. And what fun things actually is that Russia had a long engagement with the idea of civil society in my book.
I write about how the first instance of the use of civil society as a term was in 1703, so that's in the Petrine era. And that is drawing on Aristotle's idea of civil society. Now that, he made no distinction between the state and society. For him, civil society was different from uncivilized society.
And then, Adam Smith in the 1760s comes up with this idea of the fourth stage development of human society. The idea that one must, every society must shift from an agrarian society, what we would now call feudalism, to a commercial or civil society. And a commercial or civil society, those two kind of connected ideas, commercial society, means market agriculture, the market in general, and people, the propensity to tropping barter. Civil society means more polished manners, less sort of militarism, more kind of interest in each other, the role of women in society as well, all of that, this idea of a more polished society.
And he believed that the second civil society was necessary for commercial society, and he very much closely connected them. And Nicholas I was actually very influenced by this idea. He had a tutor who had taught him this. So he was very open to the idea of encouraging a smithian civil society.
Now, that's different from our idea of civil society, but it's still a concept that has a lot of affiliations with our concept of civil society. And then, by the 1840s, through Moscow University, you get the spread of an idea of civil society, which comes from Hegel, from the famous philosopher, Joan of the Lost River, Hegel. And Hegel is really important because he's the first one to say that civil society is separate from the state. It's a sphere that's between the state and the family.
And really, it's much closer to our idea of civil society, but it's also much harder for the state to accept, because when people are arguing for their rights as part of civil society, they are separating themselves out from the state, and they're making claims, and those claims include political claims, and the state is very concerned about that. So, and all of this is happening within Russia, and these are the terms that are being used. And then, I argue that in 1861, civil society did emerge, right? So these were more like concepts in pre-history, and the civil society did emerge, and that it did exist, right?
Because you have a lot of voluntary associations, you have a lot of people that feel that they are separate from the state, and that they are making claims on behalf of a civil society, but it is a problematic kind of structure of civil society, because it is separate in many ways from the peasantry, and the government, even though the predecessors had done so much, like Catherine the Great, had done very much to encourage the development of a society that could respond to the needs of the state, the state, once it finally had brought the civil society to fruition, kind of rejected it. I argue that they fathered and then rejected civil society, and this sense that it is a tragedy. So, I would like to know why Smithian civil society was so well accepted by the autocracy, Nicholas I, in particular. What about it was appealing to him?
If you're not a crowd, you want to have more taxes. This is just a fundamental need of a state to increase taxes, and if you can stimulate the economy and encourage, from the Smithian point of view, there are these productive classes, right? So, the productive classes are merchants and peasants, basically. Unproductive classes are, by the way, nobles and clergy.
So, you can see why some nobles weren't exactly thrilled with this idea, but if you're not able to tax nobles, which is the case, right, in this period, and you're taxing merchants and you're taxing peasants, then if you're told, look, here is this sort of toolbox that we can use, and in other countries, this has led to economic growth, sometimes even industrial revolution, and if we do this, the tax revenues will go up quite a bit. And also, we need to understand that Nicholas I, I think, had a reign that was very similar to both Alexander I and Alexander II's in that, it had a more reforming, earlier part, and then a much more conservative, later part. So, oftentimes, we kind of think about Nicholas as being from the later conservative part, whereas this time, where he's very open to Smithian ideas, is from this earlier part, what I call the era of small reforms, which is, of course, taking off on the idea of the era of great reforms, just hand-puffins in the 1860s. The era of small reforms is in that earlier reforming part of his reign, where he is interested in doing things, especially to stimulate the economy.
That's really what this is coming from. It's not that he's like, hey, let's create society. No, it's more like, let's create a commercial society, or let's very least stimulate a commercial society, so that the economy will do better, and therefore, tax collection can increase. And so, let's talk about some of Nicholas's smaller forms.
You mentioned statistical committees, provincial newspapers. How did these things develop, and how important do you think they were for creating this provincial identity? They were tremendously important for creating a provincial identity. I'll just start with that.
I mean, one of the things that's fascinating is that when I'm both in Vladimir, I did have quite a bit of time working with the people who are dealing with things having to do with local history. And so, it was just so striking to me to see the direct line between the provincial newspapers and local history today, also the statistical committees and local history today. And even though, in the Soviet period, there was an attempt to have a more sort of Soviet-style local history, in the end, that was not what really took. It was this moment in the 1830s that really set the parameters of local history, even up until today, which is surprising, but certainly does seem to be the case.
So, the idea of the statistical committees was that individuals in the provinces, and they ended up usually being pre-sons or merchants, especially old believer merchants, sometimes towns, people, these people would collect information. They would collect information about factories, sometimes their own factories. They would go out and count the, say, for example, the number of factories in their town, the number of various taxable objects in their town, even though it usually wasn't performed in such a bald, sort of white taxable objects. And they would write up these reports, and these reports would be sent into the statistical committee.
Most of the statistical committees in the 1830s didn't have a very long life, but they were reinvigorated in 1851 as part of a reform of tax collection. And that reform was an earlier forerunner of the Zimsa, which was a later form of local self-government. So, the statistical committees, even though they kind of declined in the 1830s, they came back in the 1850s, and then they were pretty much in all cases active from then until 1917. The provincial newspapers hadn't even stronger sort of situation, because in most cases they started in 1838.
Now, in Siberia, they were not allowed to have their own provincial newspapers until the late 1850s. But in the provinces of European Russia, they all were created with these statistical, not statistical, but provincial newspapers. And that was really important, because these provinces, most of it did not really have a provincial identity before this time. There would be sort of municipal identity.
You would feel that you belonged to this particular town. But the provincial identity was not yet there. Even though the term provincial, for example, was not really used in speech, and before the 1830s, and it was Alexander Pushkin, who was the one who really introduced that with our understanding of what that means today for Russia. So, the provincial newspapers really helped to create the sense of, hey, there's a province, it has history, there's a lot of history in the provincial newspapers.
It has this economic activity that's going on. And as you write into the newspaper, you find out about other people in other parts of the province, which could be quite large, actually. You were interested in some of the things. And as you start to describe the province, you start to also begin to feel that you are part of a province.
And this is something that happened even at the national level. I mean, Benedict Anderson writes about this very crucial role that newspapers played in the creation of national identities in colonial situations before they were independent nations and newspapers played a role like that as well. So, Vladimir developed a strong sort of cry of H.S.C. tradition?
Yes, they're strong. And that's strong up until this time. It is a lot of stuff as being published. There are many people that are working on that on this sort of local history kind of material.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And in the 1920s, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on. And then once it could be revived later on, indeed. That's interesting because we have a strong cry of H.S.C.
tradition in Vyap Kekirov as well. The Hurtson Museum, for example, has an entire cry of H.S.C. at the Linyan. We were told that that was one of the few institutions that successfully kept cry of H.S.C.
studies going through the Soviet period. Oh, actually, if they had managed to do it under Stalin, that would be impressive. Because in most cases, there was a break. In most cases, in 1930, there was a repression of the Academy of Sciences, especially of those people who were involved in these topics.
In many cases, there was a break between 1930 and around the late 1950s. So if they were actually able to continue, that would be, indeed, impressive. But there's such an affiliation from the later period to the earlier period that you can see a through line. I do believe they continued without a break because the head of the library ended up being the former S.R.
revolutionary Turousian. And he seems to have kept the tradition, the library, and the cry of H.S.C. at the Linyan, safe from repression somehow. Yeah.
Part of it is Vyotka is relatively small, unimportant, and people sort of ignore us. It was, of course, a place of exile under the Tsars, and that leads me to H.S.C himself. So let's talk about maybe the role that H.S.C.C. played in creating a provincial identity, because he was certainly active here in Vyotka, and then, of course, he moved to a less horrible exile in Vladimir.
I know he hated Vyotka. So we built a giant statue of him as an old man, as revenge, I guess. So the role of Harrison, you know, the role of Harrison is really kind of fascinating because most of the noble estate until much later, until the late 1850s, was so inward looking. And that's really because in some ways they were doing what they had been told to do by Catherine the Great.
Catherine the Great had created the noble assembly, not as a general kind of way to administer or have local government, but for the noble estate to administer itself. And in many, many ways, most nobles continue to do that. So their interest was in the good kind of status of other nobles, whereas Harrison, almost alone, is the noble in the era of the smaller forms, in Vladimir, who says no. The nobility needs to lead society as a whole.
The nobility ought to take this role because they have better education, because they have a deeper understanding. They ought to bring in the rest of society, the rest of the people outside the state, as it were, into knowledge. And he even talked about bringing the peasants into knowledge. The peasants also should be educated.
And this is just way outside of what any other nobles were talking about. I mean, he even discusses the importance of the political role of the Russian nobility in the provincial level, and how this is both a male and a female sphere, and how that makes Russia more advanced than Europe, because in Europe, the political sphere was only a male sphere, obviously. And so he is just sort of way ahead of all the other nobles at that time. And in a way, it shows the problem of the nobility, because one of the things that struck me when I reread my book, I was like, was that there was such a hard time in finding a public space, because the nobility had the noble assembly.
But there were all these attempts to have the public library, to have a provincial museum, to have a private library, and the nobility had a tendency to sort of say, well, wait, we don't like that. We want to have this space just for nobles. And it's a real shame. And Kherson is the one who said, hey, wait, maybe we need to take the leading role here and create a public that's more than just us, more than just this very small fraction of the total.
And unfortunately, it took quite a while for many nobles to get on board. And in the end, as we know, the ability was not able to really be integrated after the 17th, so probably not how they... So, yes. I liked what you were talking about with women's rights.
I hadn't necessarily thought it was odd until I remember it was the 1860s, and women weren't considered people in much of the rest of the world. I think it's interesting the way you talked about how women were very active in at least the noble civic space. But then you talk about sort of the development of a new paternalism and how that sort of sought to dampen the role of women. Why did this develop?
You know, this new paternalism is quite odd. It's a paternalism that is a paternalism of a very anxious father. It's a father that is really not 100% convinced that he's needed in the home. And he's absolutely sure that the woman is needed in the home.
And Kate and Tona thought that has written about this as well. There is this... In some ways, the paternalism is a reassertion of the idea of being a landlord, an actual resident landlord, as being something worthy of a masculine kind of identity. That this is something that's actually worthy of a nobleman.
That is, yes, it's paternalism, but it's a little bit different than just saying, well, men are in charge and they have been in charge. No, it's sort of saying, yeah, and this is worthy of men. And of course, women are doing it and women have done it. And they're the queen bee, but there's this king bee too.
I mean, this is Chikitrol, who's this fascinating eccentric person who lived in Lydia More province and Kate and Tona goes right about that. And as she notes, there's no king bee. It's just queen bee. So, yes, even though men are certain they're right, there is this little bit of a nervousness there.
For another example, there's this particular fascinating person who is a cactole. He's a member of the Uro agricultural society. And he's saying, you know, women should be in the home and I'm making sure that my peasant women are serfs, right? Don't have to work outside the home.
And my wife is working as a doctor in a hospital. I go for her and it's sort of like, I feel like raising my hand and saying, you do know that your wife working as a doctor in a hospital, but you go for her is not the same as staying in the home, right? But that doesn't seem to be completely clear to him. And I think that that's because of this long history of what noblemen ought to do is be serving the state.
So, they should not be on their state. This is traditional, right, back in the 18th century. So, yeah, you do have this paternalism, but it's a new sort of thing. It's an adaptation of ideas from the West.
And there's a lot of having to make sure that women have this role in there that's different from the way it was, let's just say in bourgeois, the United Kingdom, for example. Well, let's talk about the role of paternalism and serfdom. Because serfdom is sort of the elephant in the room in this time period, is it not? Yeah, yeah.
This is also interesting because in the 1840s, this is when this idea of paternalism comes in. And of course, paternalism in Western Europe, serfdom had been gone for many, many hundreds of years, whereas in Russia, paternalism is received at this moment where you have serfdom. So, there's this idea that, yes, serfs are children, and they have to be taught how to do everything. And of course, that also tends to buttress the importance of the noblemen on the estate, because if the idea was before, oh, you can always have a landlord, who's at the tea, and the steward can take care of it, then you would not need to have any kind of oversight really at all.
You're not even on the estate, so what are you overseeing? But with paternalism, there's this idea that, okay, now we really have to teach the peasants how to eat cabbage soup, how to eat buckwheat roots, which is kind of absurd, because these are the staples of the peasant diet. But people in agricultural societies, these noblemen in agricultural societies, are actually making these assertions that peasants have to be taught to do even the most basic sort of things. But again, when we understand that the noblemen are kind of worried about, maybe what I'm doing is sort of not really masculine.
Maybe what I'm doing is something that my wife could just as easily do. Then we start to understand that these assertions about peasants needing so much control are also about this kind of need to masterize the role of the resident landlord. Do you think paternalism also plays a part in the formation of these agricultural societies? Because it seems to me that there was a real pedagogical function behind their existence to teach people how to do the best agricultural practices.
Absolutely, absolutely. There is a paternalism there without a doubt. Now the agricultural societies were all controlled by noblemen. There's no doubt about that.
In some later cases in the late 1850s, you do get some merchants who were brought in. But I can talk about that later, because that's closer to the part about the great reforms. Yes, it's absolutely part of what I call agrarian Smithianism. So the the ideas of Adam Smith were received among nobles in Russia, so not people in the state, but nobles in Russia through Germany.
And through Germany, the idea was that change would be long. It would be a long period. It would not be the sort of sharp industrial revolution, but there would be this conservative long period of change, which is by the way part of the reason why Kniff was the first felt comfortable with this idea, because of the way it was received. And so what the noblemen did, and this is in the 1840s, when there's a whole bunch of agricultural societies that are founded, and these are voluntary associations, is they felt that they, through their own sort of small deeds, as it were, could improve society by improving their own estate, by, for example, using improved tools, improved techniques, teaching the peasants to use crops that could be sold on the market.
One of the things I've argued is that even though we always hear about the failures in Russian literature, we hear about the failures of this, in many cases there were successes, and there were things that were introduced. So, yes, these societies did indeed use the ideas of Smith to introduce this new agricultural kind of technology, and they hoped that the peasants would implement it. Then in the 1840s, so they started the 1830s, and by the 1840s they started to realize that these technological changes were not enough, that there were structural problems, and those of course structural problems are really pretty structural problem, which is serfdom. And that's when you start to get a shift of what I call abolitionist Smithianism, which is a much stronger argument that Smith did argue that free labor is more productive and efficient than slave labor.
The earlier Smithians had known that, but they didn't emphasize it. If you would ask them directly, they would have said, yeah, that's true, but we have other things we have to worry about first, whereas the abolitionist Smithians are saying, yeah, we have to get rid of serfdom. That is the most important thing, because serfdom is the obstacle, and if you get rid of serfdom, then I could finally start making a profit. So, yes.
I noticed that when you talked about Vladimir and committees about how to get rid of serfdom and different ideas that were flooded. And then there was a large conservative pushback that either favored a landless emancipation or some sort of weird continuation of serfdom under a different name. How popular were these conservative ideas? And at what point did the balance of Vladimir chip to support emancipation?
Yeah, that's a good question. What happened is that most of the nobles were not, as they would say, quote unquote, enlightened. Most of the nobles were not Smithian. Most of them are not studied agriculture.
But there was a core of nobles about 50 who were Smithians and who did believe that serfdom had to go. And they had this theory behind this belief. It wasn't just simply a humanitarian thing, but there was also the sense of if we can get rid of serfdom, we will finally give them money. It's true that the majority were indeed conservative because in many cases, it's only a small number of people who have received these ideas.
For example, you're a noble to think of a university. You probably would not have been exposed to the ideas of Adam Smith. But what starts to happen is that by the late 1850s, now 1859 in particular, the central government has become so centralizing, has decided to take back so much of the power of dealing with the emancipation. You see what happened is earlier, within the states, there were different points of view.
Earlier, there was this provincial point of view, provincialist point of view. So this is like 1857 or so. And those people argue that each province should legislate for itself. So that would mean that the nobles of the province would get together and they would decide pretty much what the settlement would look like.
Then by round, roughly 1859, a much more centralizing point of view came in and that was Modu-Tin and he argued in the Ministry of State Administration and the Affairs that the government had to take control. And there had to be one central kind of emancipation that serfdom will be abolished in generally the same way everywhere. And that there might be certain changes or tweaks in particular provinces, but that those would not be fundamentally different. So that process in many ways made it very irritating for the nobles because at first they're asked to legislate for the province.
They're told to get together and to make these plans and proposals and they do that and they argue and they debate and delegates go into St. Petersburg. And then they're told, well, we pretty much have it under control and we don't really need your input anymore, which means that many of the people who have been conservative were like, hey, wait, we already did this and we made this argument and you wanted to know our opinion and now you want to know our opinion. So that's the moment where many of them start to go over to a more kind of anti-serfdom stance.
I mean, it makes sense from a legislative point of view to have standard statutes on the abolition of serfdom throughout all of Russia. I can only imagine the nightmare that a patchwork quilt of abolitionist statute, emancipation statutes would have actually been. But you seem to argue that this is part of the government rejecting the new assertiveness of these nobles in particular, nobles that had taken up a sort of Hegelian philosophy on property ownership, correct? Yes, that's right.
Yes, in certain ways it would have been very difficult to have radically different decisions regarding emancipation in different parts of the country. It's true. But the process didn't have to be quite as centralized as it ended up being because by the time the state by which I really knew Newton decided how it was going to go down, they no longer really interested in getting lots of input from the provinces. And at this time, people, especially the particular person in Polsky's from Thierp, he had been a Hegelian.
So he believed, hey, one of the things he argued in addition to society between the family and the state was that property was the ground of freedom. So when you make money, you oftentimes invest in property, and the property doesn't have rights and if it isn't preserved, then freedom doesn't have a real economic foundation as it were. So if you're a Hegelian, property rights are absolutely foundational. And so what in Polsky and others who are Hegelians are arguing is that going forward, the former masters and the former serfs have to be equally protected in their property.
And that is very difficult for the government to accept because the idea was this is going back to Catherine the Great's time and Catherine the Perdilova has written about this. The idea was that Catherine the Great had given the ability private property as a gift. So as a personal gift from the proper self, they have received this property. And now the nobles are trying to argue that in a way the nobles should be giving the peasants this property.
And the state is just completely unwilling to allow that. And from their point of view, they would much prefer to just cut out the nobles entirely and work with the peasants directly, which is part of a larger shift, I argue, from co-optation, which is how the work, you know, from very early periods, when light and terrible on, you just sort of co-opt the people you have conquered to direct mobilization where the state is actually dealing with individuals and directly mobilizing them. And so as a result, the nobility is starting to realize that if they are not there to mediate between the government and the state, I mean, the peasants, what is their role? Their role is being eroded severely and taken away from them.
And that's part of the reason why more of these conservative noblemen start going over to a more egalitarian point of view because they start to see what happens if we don't have a role. What are we going to do? What is our place going to be? Can we just be excluded from the body politic?
And of course the answer after 1917 is yes, pretty much. So yes, this is part of this larger transition that's happening during this time. It seems to me like a lot of these different adaptations of different philosophies participating in things like provincial newspapers or on these agricultural societies seems to be a way to create a place in society for the nobles. But you would also talk about the fact that non-nobles use things like provincial newspapers to create a place for themselves in society which the nobles weren't necessarily happy about.
Did they weigh in on the issue of emancipation? That's a good question. Yes. So yes, in the 1830s and 1840s that era of small reforms, the provincial identity that arises then is really fundamentally a non-noble identity.
It's an identity that is grounded in the work of pre-sons, many of whom are bureaucrats, merchants, townspeople, even some state peasants. These are the people who are writing into the newspaper. These are the editors of the newspaper and who are in charge of the provincial statistical committees. One of the things I argue is that the Goghul, the Goghul's dead souls, is partly a reaction to this very emergence of a non-noble provincial identity because the structure of that book is actually in some ways reminiscent of the structure of my own book because the first part of dead souls is about him going to the provincial town.
I find the provincial town very interesting and there are a lot of things that are happening, but what's happening there is a lot of non-nobles asserting a right to a public space. And that's something that is not always comfortable to nobles. The second part of dead souls is set in the district. And the district is a space where the nobles kind of push back against that non-noble provincial identity and create this noble only district identity.
So the district is more than just the land of the states. The whole network of the land of the states and the district is sort of the same level, where there's a American county. So most of the nobles in that district would have known each other and could have traveled to each other's states and they would go to the district capital. So yes, there is this non-noble public that's formed in the 1830s and 1840s that the nobles don't really like.
And we do see this in that conflict of a public space like the nobles don't like that there are non-nobles in the noble assembly. And they do their best to close down those things that are there. But then by the late 1850s, there's this moment where the nobility is more and more realizing that the state is saying, hey, we don't need you anymore. And so they're starting to look around for allies.
And so at that moment, at least in Vladimir, we do see this reaching out to merchants in particular. And that makes a lot of sense because the nobles were realizing we have to actually start to at some point deal with higher labor and the merchants have dealt with higher labor for a long time. So why don't we reach out to them and start to get as a best practices to use this term from them. And so there is this shift.
And so you start with this non-noble public in 1830s, a reaction. So the antithesis of that, which is the noble only district public in the 1840s. And then by the late 1850s, we get the synthesis of a multi-estate provincial identity where the nobility is indeed reaching out to, especially to the merchantry. But the problem there is when pre-sons criticize the nobles, the nobles, and this isn't Vladimir.
They're two different examples where this happens. The nobles react very harshly. And basically they make sure to run those critics out of their jobs and indeed out of the province. So you do see a limit to what the nobles are willing to accept.
There's not really a sense of we should have debate and there should be a wide variety of ideas that are discussed. Instead, because they have received this ideal of a harmonious society from earlier conservative ideas, tracing back early to German romanticism, there isn't this validation of debate and interest roots, even within civil society, which is of course. So speaking of romanticism, I wonder how much of a romantic thought played in Emancipation. You talked about, for example, Gogo and how he saw the village as sort of an empty dark place, and this was sort of an enlightened view of the village.
But then you have romanticism come along with these particularly peasants as sort of the core of a national identity. They're folk traditions, the folk language, the customs, the food, as being sort of the essence of the nation. Does this development of sort of a romantic idea of the peasants, slavafelia, and this basically idealization of the commune play any sort of role in debate about emancipation? Yeah, it plays a very, very important role, absolutely crucial role in this.
Gogo, he saw the provincial town as an authentic. That was what he saw as an authentic. He saw the countryside as the authentic sort of thing. But the people who were very influenced by romanticism, there are the slavafelles.
The slavafelles that I work on particularly are liberal slavafelles. So these are people who are smithians or later become hagalians, for example. And they have not been as worked on as many of the other slavafelles that want to think so, and we think of politically conservative slavafelles. So the slavafelles, yes, they do idealize the peasantry, but they don't, the little slavafelles, they don't idealize them in this idea that they should be fixed in time and frozen.
There is very much this idea that the peasantry must receive property rights, and that the peasantry must be joined together with the nobility as a property-only group. Now, the government and the Romanops, they have a different view of the peasants, which is deeply, deeply influenced by romanticism. And this is the idea of the commune, and there was this German author, Hoxausen, who quote unquote discovered the commune, and he wrote about, well, all that we know about all of our vision of the commune is pretty much from the school. And the Romanops believed that, and they then created a commune.
So even though we don't know for sure that there were communes in all parts of Russia that was run by peasants that were settled by peasants before 1861, there were after 1861, because he was instituted by the government. And there was this idea, this very romantic idea, capital are romantic and not very realistic, that the peasants would always be a bulwark for the Romanops' regime, and that the peasants would always love the zars, and so therefore they shouldn't really be able to do it. Therefore, they shouldn't really be integrated into the larger society. So as a result, they created the state created a peasant-only sub-district court.
So the peasants, I argue, were rational actors, and they were perfectly capable of being fully fledged human beings, but over the course of decades, they came to work within a judicial sphere, certainly, where there was really just them and the townspeople. They did not really have to deal with the nobility or with the merchantry. So even though many of them did go to court and they were connected to the government in that sense, their vision of the body politic was not one that included the merchantry. So then when the Bolsheviks come and have a similar view of the body politic, the peasants are not, so if I can, what about the merchantry?
What about the nobility? They have already, ironically enough, been, as it were, almost habituated by the institutional structure that the Romanops created. That the state created to see the body politic in those terms. So it's a very, it's a very deeply iconic sort of situation there where romanticism creates this deeply divided society.
But there were roles envisioned in provincial government for the peasants, right, in what would become zemstvus, correct? I know in Viatka, the peasants run a lot of the zemstvus. Part of that is because there was basically no nobility in Viatka, as Harrison points out, there was very little serfdom at all. So the peasants were used to having their own autonomous institutions here.
But they did envision a role of peasants participating in sort of a multi-estate provincial government, right? I mean, there are sort of the separate curia for them and they are, yes, it's true. It's true. But in terms of the bulk of the peasantry, right, what are most of the peasantry interacting with?
Most of the peasantry are interacting with these lower level bodies, right? The sub-district judicial courts, for example. And Jane Burbank has written about this, so the very high numbers of peasants are going through that. So it is true that there are some instances and there are peasants who are working, who are taking part in, you know, zemstvus, there's.
But in terms of, almost as a word, the everyday experience of most peasants, that's, it's not quite there. And also, many peasants were educated, but it was not a kind of centralized education as it were. So there wasn't an attempt to create a mass society from within the peasantry, despite there being many, many different individual kind of small deed schools and that sort of thing. So as a result, unlike in France, you don't have a more standardized kind of curriculum that's being brought.
And so peasants don't all come into an understanding of what the Russian Empire has done for them. So you do have, in these different levels, a kind of disconnect. It seems like that both the peasants and the nobility were losers in the emancipation deal. Would you say that is correct?
It's hard to say blanket. I mean, to a certain extent, the nobility, yes. Certainly, politically, the nobility came out weaker. And this is part of the reason why there's so much great literature that's written after 1861 is because the nobility is searching for some kind of role in society.
I mean, before, there was a very clear reason why they were there. What was their function? The function was to be between the czar and the peasants. And even if the nobleman wasn't on to Sussini, that was still a clear function.
Afterwards, you don't have that same kind of clear role of what is the noble role in society. And so a lot of great literature and plays and art come out of that. The peasants is not as clear. In some cases, the peasants did pretty well.
At the same time, though, there was a real hunger for land. And you can see that in the uptick in the number of lawsuits that are put forward after the Silesven reforms, where peasants are making claims that they should receive land. And the peasants, also with the peasants, if you were an older man, if you were an elder and you were in charge of the commune after the emancipation, in some ways, you were doing pretty well because you were given a lot of power. But if you were a younger man, of course, you survived, or if you were a woman, you would have fewer rights.
And there's of course where the two groups of the Bolsheviks appealed to most were young peasant men and women. Correct. Correct. Yes, that's right.
So the commune, yes, it does definitely benefit most of all the older men. And so you do see a reason why the Bolsheviks would have been appealing, because if you're a younger man and you want land now and you want power now, it makes it more appealing to be full. Yeah, you can do this right now. Or if you keep the old system, you just have to wait 50 years.
I don't know, which one sounds better. So yes, there is that difference. But we're talking about peasants. There's so many variations.
And I'm glad that you brought about Vyaka, because the situation in Vyaka is really quite different because there isn't serfdom. And when you look at places in the Russian North, the peasant tree experience of the peasant tree both before and after the abolition of serfdom, is really quite different. So there's a lot of variations. But there were many peasants who were dissatisfied.
We can definitely say that, who were dissatisfied with the result of serfdom. Yeah. So I think we're taking a lot of your time. Is there something you would like to sum up for us?
Anything maybe we missed? Let's see. Yeah, I mean, I think the main point really of the book is to say that there was a lot going on in the provinces. And that when we study the provinces, we get a much better understanding of the empire as a whole.
Because especially when we look at the process of emancipation, which is really something that's been so, so deeply studied, and many, many different times and places and by Russians and by Americans, when we look at the provincial level, we can start to see the role of the agricultural societies in this process. And that's something that has not attracted hardly any attention at all. And that is something that could lead to really new understandings of the emancipation, because there are these massive archival collections out there for the agricultural societies that have not been looked at for the question of the abolition of serfdom. Also, when we look at the question of politics, the idea of politics itself for the Russian Empire was not usually at the imperial level.
It was at the provincial level. So looking at the provincial level in terms of what the people actually do, how the people who administer themselves is absolutely crucial, because if you don't look there, you will not be able to get that point of view. So I do think that this scope is very important for going forward in Russian history. Oh, I totally agree with you.
I do a lot of micro history myself. And it's a great way to sort of decentralize of you and see how people were actually actors, how much agency they had, and how little control the state actually has at the local level. Yeah, and I think that's a really important thing. In some ways, a book isn't applied into electoral history.
The idea is not just that there are ideas that, you know, I'm always writing about, but that these are ideas that get out into society and that are put to use and that change people's lives, change right into people's lives, and are part of the fabric of society. And when you look at this level, you can really see that. You can see that ideas are not just ideas, but they're part of life itself. So one last question for you, Susan.
Are you working on anything new and interesting now? Yes, I have another project, a second project, which is completely different, actually. It is on the purchase of Alaska, because the purchase of Alaska is one of these wonderful topics because you've got the Russian side, you've got the American side, and you can bring in all these sources on both of those. And I'm looking at the role of American exploration in the purchase of Alaska, and in particular this Western Union Telegraph expedition that went up to Russian America in 1865 to 1867, and that I'm arguing was part of a larger process to the United States to find out what were the resources of Alaska, what was up there.
And the results of that expedition were used to convince Congress. So I'm looking at that in more of a transnational kind of way. Both the Russian point of view, why was Russian America? It was called then Seoul.
Why did the United States want to buy it? And then looking at this case study of the expedition itself as the means by which this really was taken place, the information gathering was taken place. Well, thank you very much for your interesting interview. I think that's all the time we have.
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