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S usan S mith -P eter . Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia .

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 124; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/rhz208

1937-5239

John Randolph,

Chinese history and philosophy

In the eighteenth century, the Romanov dynasty cut its vast empire into new provincial subdivisions. These provinces remained the basic territorial units of the Russian Empire until its collapse in 1917, and they were associated with a variety of ambitions. Russia’s rulers wanted their provincial offices to maintain order, gather information, mobilize resources, and answer commands from the throne. Yet at times the provinces were also imagined as places where local forms of civilian society might emerge, including populations that not only responded to autocratic government but actively worked with it to build Russian power and civilization. In this thoughtful new study Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Susan Smith-Peter examines this project and aims to revise our understanding of its nature and evolution. Historians of Russian liberalism—and more recently Habermasian investigations of public life—have long debated this experience. Did the effort to create civic life in the provinces mark the creation of a modern form of civil society in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s (and the end of serfdom)? Smith-Peter innovates within this debate by refocusing our vision chronologically and empirically. She centers her attention not on its eighteenth-century origins, nor on the Great Reforms, but rather on the period 1825–1860. This allows her to look at civilian society as a daily practice, as worked out in provincial towns and rural districts, at a time when the provinces were no longer new. Smith-Peter encourages us to look beyond the formal civic institutions established in the Catherinean era—the noble assemblies, the boards of welfare, and the local courts—to consider activities that occurred, with increasing intensity, under their ambit: the creation of libraries, museums, newspapers, and statistical committees. In particular, Smith-Peter stresses the importance of provincial agricultural societies. These organizations—whose records can be found in Vladimir, Iaroslavl’, Tver’, and Moscow—became, as she shows, lively spaces for the production of elaborate and rival understandings of what civil society in the Russian Empire might be.