If the need for change had not been difficult to recognize, its dimensions and implications had been much less clearly understood. Alexander II, Russia's bureaucratic reformers, and their supporters among the senior statesmen of the empire therefore had all experimented with using public debate about the problems of renovation and reform to clarify their views about the direction in which state policy ought to move. Although they had hoped to shape them around the familiar precepts of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality and use them to build support for state policy, none had been willing to permit such discussions to evolve into open public participation in policy making. Eager to preserve the integrity of the autocratic legislative process that had evolved during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, they had looked to some limited form of glasnost, perhaps what the reform-minded Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich once had called "artificial" glasnost, as a means to consult public opinion without allowing it direct access to the decision-making apparatus in Russia's government. Since the government no longer could bear full responsibility for Russians' welfare as it once had, they also hoped to use glasnost to induce Russia's newly emerging citizens to assume a greater role in shaping their daily lives.

The rigidity of autocracy had conflicted with glasnost too sharply for that to happen. Far too quickly, the expectations of Russia's new citizens had exceeded the willingness of the autocrat and his advisers to satisfy them, and that had produced deeper and sharper tensions between government and obshchestvo, the educated classes destined to become active in the civic life of Russia. [Note the meaning of obshchestvo given here: educated classes] Moderate nobles called for a voice in national affairs while radicals condemned the emancipation as a new form of serfdom designed to replace the old one. The government, the first illegal printed work of the 1860s had warned, was "leading Russia into a pugachevshchina, a massive peasant revolt of the type that had swept the empire in the 1770s. Obshchestvo therefore must "take the conduct of affairs into its own hands and out of the hands of the incompetent government." Only in that way would it be possible to "save the masses from such torment."

During the days after the Emancipation proclamation, such sharp criticism of the government's first major step toward renovation left the limits of glasnost unclear and its future in doubt. Offended and angry at what he considered to be its unwarranted trespass into the sacrosanct preserve of government activity, one senior official already had roundly condemned glasnost as a force that stood "in opposition to the spirit and bases of state institutions, and to Russia's system of administration and legislation." As radicals' criticisms of the emancipation deepened, and as conservative lords who once had stood with the government against all critics demanded a more decisive voice in the decisions affecting the regions in which they lived, other senior officials came to share that uncompromising and bluntly stated view. The obshchestvo that the government had hoped to co-opt during the days when Russians had reveled in their first taste of glasnost now had begun to broaden. As its views became more diverse, it began to disagree more sharply with the government about the limits within which glasnost ought to function. Could glasnost serve the government as a source of public opinion? Should it function independently as a benchmark against which to measure the government's commitment to renovation? Or had it, as a conservative critic wrote, so failed to "conform to our civic order [and] the peculiarities of our national character" that it ought not to function at all?

Among those who believed that glasnost [=publicity] must be preserved if Russia were to rejoin the mainstream of European experience, the men who drafted the Judicial Reform Statutes had insisted that it must serve not only as an antidote to proizvol [=arbitrariness], but also as a guarantor of zakonnost[=legality, or rule of law], the aspiration to lawfulness that held out hope for transforming Russia from a state ruled by the caprice of officials and landowners into a nation in which the law shaped the behavior of its citizens. The Judicial Reform Statutes' institutionalization of glasnost within Russia's new court system in the form of public trials conducted by independent judges thus had guaranteed the survival of glasnost and begun to define the boundaries within which it could function. Government and governed now both faced what the great jurist Aleksandr Koni once called "a judge-man, not an indifferent machine who signed decisions prepared by the chancellery'' in defining the limits that were permissible in law, society, and administration.

Whether Russia's path moved toward the Left or the Right, public trials and independent judges meant that glasnost itself could not be obliterated without shattering the judicial foundations on which the social and institutional renovations of the 1860s and 1870s were being constructed. In time, this process could produce a new basis upon which to build the society in which Russians were destined to live as they entered the industrial revolution and approached the twentieth century. For, if Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality no longer sufficed to unite the Russians, the aspiration to zakonnostÑto make the law's application "swift, just, merciful, and equal for all," as Alexander II had announced in the beginning of the Judicial Reform StatutesÑmight do so. This posed the possibility of re uniting those educated men and women whose diverging visions of Russia's future had forced them to take different directions since at least the end of the eighteenth century into a society that respected the law and allowed it to rule its actions.

Although the aspiration to zakonnost might become a focus around which obshchestvo might one day coalesce, the proizvol zakonnost dichotomy continued to pose major problems for the Russians as the 1860s began to shade toward the 1870s. Partly because the framers of the Great Reform legislation themselves had not begun their work with a clear vision of what the Great Reform society ought to be, and partly because the full meaning of the legislation had yet to be tested and clarified, it remained uncertain where the line between government and governed would be drawn and how the authority of each would be applied. Because proizvol would remain a factor in Russian government and politics so long as autocracy survived and because the aspiration to zakonnost would continue so long as glasnost remained to defend it, the areas in which each could be exercised had to be defined. How paramount state interest ought to be and how far citizens' rights could be extended also had to be considered. To define the parameters of each required that the Great Reforms be tested in the manner of all bodies of social legislation, whose full meaning only could be determined by practical experience. This moved the Great Reforms from the realm of administration into the world of politics and social action. Only after the forces of Left and Right had probed their limits could the boundaries of the Great Reform legislation be clearly established. Between the mid-1870s and the death of Alexander III in 1894, the Great Reforms therefore were tested from the Left and Right as the Russians sought to define the limits within which glasnost, proizvol, and zakonnost could function. Testing from the

Left began almost as soon as the emancipation was decreed as radical Russians pressed the government to broaden the limits of glasnost beyond those that had produced the Emancipation debate itself. In Kolokol [=The Bell], Herzen and Ogarev proclaimed the serfs' liberation to be a fraud, a new form of serfdom, in which the government hoped to convince Russia's peasants "that black was not black and that two plus two does not equal four.'' The people need land and freedom," Ogarev insisted from London that summer, "land, freedom, and education.'' "It is impossible to live this way any longer," Kolokol added that fall, "but things can't get any better so long as power remains in the hands of a Tsar." It was nothing more than "sentimentalism" to expect obshchestvo to provide leadership, the article continued, because its interests and the government's were one and the same. "Obshchestvo will never really oppose the government," Kolokol concluded in mid-September. "And it will never voluntarily give the masses what they need.

Well before the end of 1861, Kolokol had rejected autocracy, bureaucracy, and obshchestvo as instruments for renovation and reform. For radicals who cast their lot with the editors of Kolokol, the masses remained the only hope for true liberation and progress.

Within Russia, the year 1861 saw close to 250 peasant protests, including some that led to violence. At Bezdna, a village to the southeast of Kazan, soldiers massacred some two hundred peasants; at Kandeevka, two companies of infantry faced ten thousand peasants and, although the casualties numbered far fewer than at Bezdna, the sense of unease that the incident stirred was scarcely less intense. In the middle of 1861, such incidents seemed to promise more disorders and young radicals seized upon their elders' forebodings as a starting point for their criticisms of the new course on which their nation had embarked. "Imperial Russia is in dissolution," the manifesto To the Younger Generation proclaimed that fall. "We do not need either a Tsar, an Emperor, the myth of some lord, or the purple which cloaks hereditary incompetence," its authors announced, as they called "the younger generation" to "move boldly forward to the revolution in which a popular republic based on the communal institutions of peasant life would replace Russia's autocracy and bureaucracy.

Although disappointed with the Emancipation and disillusioned with their emperor, most Russian radicals did not choose revolution as their preferred course at first. Certain that "if matters continue along their present course we must expect terrible upheavals," the authors of the first issue of Velikoruss (The Great Russian) summoned obshchestvo to "take matters out of the hands of the inept government." Convinced that even an "all-powerful sovereign" could not withstand the overwhelming force of bureaucratic formalism, intrigue, and deception," Velikoruss concluded that "only a government based upon the free will of the nation can complete those transformations without which Russia will suffer frightful upheavals." For such men, efforts by "the enlightened part of the nation" remained preferable to mass action. The hope still remained that obshchestvo could "curb the government and give it direction.'' Only if that failed would they turn to the masses.

Attempts to call the government to account broadened in 1861 as Russia's university students turned onto a collision course with the authorities. The broadening liberation movement of the later 1850s had thrown the empire's universities into turmoil, and there had been clashes between the garrison and students in Kazan during the fall of 1856 and at Kiev a year later. In 1857, several students at Moscow University had suffered serious in juries in a scuffle with the police, and the next year had seen student protests recur in Moscow and break out anew in Kazan and Kharkov. "The university became especially attractive," one student remembered as he recalled the appeal that radicalism had for him and his comrades in those days. "You were expecting something new, special, bravura. Everyone felt an irresistible longing to show his worth in some desperately courageous, heroic action." There were rumors: rumors of a constitution, rumors of a revolution, rumors that the capital would be moved. That none of them had any real substance made them all the more exciting. Tension mounted in class rooms, student eating houses, and on city streets. "The very air," another student remembered, "seemed alive with the thirst for progress and enlightenment."

The storm burst in the fall of 1861, when, after several months of confrontations, students at the University of St. Petersburg moved into the streets to demonstrate against the authorities. A flood of arrests that filled the cells in the Peter and Paul Fortress and required the use of the nearby Kronstadt naval base for the overflow followed a bloody confrontation between students and police on October 12, and, for a brief moment, it seemed that obshchestvo and the students would coalesce in the cause of Russia's liberation. "The mood of society was extraordinarily elevated," one student recalled. "The main thing was the general expectation that something of enormous significance was going to happen, perhaps even in the very near future." By the end of the year the authorities abandoned any further effort at reconciliation. Although the emperor removed the inept Putiatin from his position as minister of public instruction just before the new year and installed Golovnin in his place, he left the university closed until August 1863, when the rising wave of anti-Polish sentiment that came in the wake of the Polish revolution of that year began, albeit briefly, to reunite obshchestvo and government.

Coupled with the fires of 1862 and the outbreak of revolution in Poland at the beginning of 1863, the university disorders of 1861 narrowed the middle ground on which Russia's government, obshchestvo, and radicals might stand and drove them to ward both extremes of the political spectrum. "What can be smashed should be," the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev wrote in presenting what he called "the ultimatum of our camp" in 1861. "What stands up under the blows," he continued, "is acceptable. What flies into a thousand pieces is trash." Personified in the minds of many by Bazarov, the leading character in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, nihilists began to replace those civic-minded members of obshchestvo who had hoped that "the enlightened part of the nation" could "curb the government and give it direction." The nihilist now became the idol of those who yearned to make their mark by some "desperately courageous, heroic action." As defined by Pisarev in the essay "Bazarov" that he published in Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word) in 1862, nihilism offered no positive vision, no plan for social or political action. Russia's "new man," Pisarev explained, recognized "no governing social force, no moral law, no sanctioning principle outside himself" and sought to act on nothing beyond himself. But the radical youths who in 1862 turned away from tsar, government, obshchestvo, and such aging radicals as Herzen and Ogarev found Pisarev's cold admonitions not to "dream about orange groves and palm trees while standing in snow drifts on frozen tundras" too devoid of positive vision to revive the withered remnants of the dreams they had cherished during the halcyon days of the late 1850s. Seeking a vision of a new society and a plan for its construction, they seized on What Is to Be Done?, the novel that Nikolai Chernyshevskii wrote in the Peter and Paul Fortress during the year after Russia's university disorders. When What Is to Be Done? appeared in 1863, the ascetic, rude, and humorless Chernyshevskii had been the idol of the younger generation for nearly a decade. Now, on the eve of his condemnation to penal servitude in Siberia, he summoned Russia's radical youth to establish artels and other forms of communal organizations to build a revolutionary new society of justice and equality.

While Chernyshevskii's book summoned young Russians to a new world of communal endeavor, other forces pulled the less radical portions of obshchestvo in other directions. During the second half of May 1862, a series of terrible fires had spread through St. Petersburg, striking terror among the lower classes and stirring suspicion among many of the men and women who had cheered the beginnings of reform. Wild rumors circulated about the fires' origins, and the most common belief among both groups was that radical students had set the city ablaze. St. Petersburg's lower classes treated the students as representatives of privileged society whose rude behavior and disdain for authority marked them not as champions in the struggle against the authorities but as ready targets for abuse. As they rejected any sympathy with radicalism, the more moderate segments of obshchestvo treated the students no better. Even Konstantin Kavelin, whose sympathy with the students' cause had led him to resign his position as a professor at St. Petersburg University during the protests of 1861, now concluded that they had set the blazes that had ravaged so much of the city. "Can this be called progress?" he wrote angrily to a friend. "Such progress merits only buckshot and the gallows." Others took an even more rigid stance. "It became improper to talk of reforms," the future anarchist Prince Petr Kropotkin remembered. "The whole atmosphere was laden with a reactionary spirit." Russia had entered a time, he added a fortnight afterward, of "reaction, full speed backwards."

A few months later, the outbreak of a full-fledged revolution in Poland made the authorities and obshchestvo even less tolerant of dissent than Kropotkin had found them during the weeks after the Petersburg fires. To the Poles' declaration of revolution, Russia's statesmen and citizens responded as one, united in a common desire to crush an age-old enemy whose demands continued to stir unrest in the Russian land. The key issue no longer was whether Russia or Poland "will become mightier," wrote the once-progressive journalist Mikhail Katkov. The main question, he now concluded in a statement that heralded his debut as an apostle of Russian chauvinism, had become "which of them will exist.'' As a tidal wave of patriotism swept across Russia, it swallowed the infant revolutionary movement beneath its crest. "Seven years of liberalism had exhausted the whole reserve of radical aspirations," Herzen later confessed sadly. "The force of public opinion, hardly called to life, [now] manifested itself as a savage conservatism."

The wave of reaction that Herzen saw "elbowing the government into the debauchery of terror and persecution" was only one consequence of the Polish revolt. During the 1850s and early 1860s, a shortage of career opportunities had alienated well-educated young Russians from their tsar and government. Now, as the stern regime that Russia imposed on her reconquered Polish lands took shape, numbers of lucrative new government positions helped to entice that recently alienated portion of obshchestvo away from radical idealism and into the imperial establishment by the promise of political prestige and material rewards. Combined with the opportunities for involvement in local affairs offered by the new zemstva and the new professional careers in law, medicine, and applied science that the zemstva and the judicial reform statutes promised to create for educated men and women, a larger portion of obshchestvo began to hope for a better opportunity for positive action within the framework of the established order.

Repeated calls for the abolition of the nobility as a class (and, therefore, an end to its special monopoly over local affairs) strengthened that sense of broader opportunity. In addition to a number of provincial assemblies of the nobility, such prominent aristocrats as Ivan Aksakov and Aleksandr Koshelev urged (to use Aksakov's words) "that the gentry be allowed to perform solemnly and before all Russia, the great act of abolishing itself as a class." Such a summons to self-obliteration provoked opposition, of course. There were many who believed that the nobility already had sacrificed enough by relinquishing control of its serfs and that its members should be compensated as a class with broad political rights. Others, and Kavelin stood prominently among them in the 1860s, saw "the nobility and particularly the provincial nobility" as the "single source for the renovation of Russia. " Yet, men like Kavelin emphasized the importance of Russia's lords as a vital part of obshchestvo, not as members of a privileged class. As educated, able men, Kavelin insisted, the nobility must be integrated into Russia's provincial body politic on a broader, more equal basis. "Political rights for one class without political rights for all others," he stated flatly at one point, "are something unthinkable, something that should encounter unanimous opposition, not only from the government, but from the masses and every enlightened, liberal person in Russia."

Kavelin thus urged Russia's nobles to take a leading role in encouraging the broader participation of obshchestvo in local affairs as an alternative to their former monopoly of corporate district and provincial administration. "Self-government, that treasured dream of every enlightened and liberal person in Russia, can only begin to come true in the provinces with the energetic assistance of the nobility," Kavelin wrote. "In this fertile school," he concluded, "the nobility will prepare itself for those broader political activities which, without such preparation, always will remain nothing but an unrealized fantasy." Only by schooling itself in self-government could obshchestvo provide an alternative to continuing rule by bureaucracy. "I expect absolutely no changes for the better in the central government," Kavelin confessed in 1865. "Without political guarantees, it is impossible, unthinkable." Until a renovation of provincial politics and government took place, Kavelin warned, the bureaucracy would continue to cripple progress in Russia.

This seemed all the more probable because of the imperial government's deep-seated apprehension about the zemstva. "The word zemstvo [=assembly] stirs up fear in high circles," Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna had confessed two years before the zemstvo statutes were promulgated, and the government's tardiness in putting them into effect showed that these reservations had not been put to rest. Certainly Valuev worried about the elected element in the zemstva, and so did many of his colleagues in the Committee of Ministers, State Council, and Senate. "Opposition between local self-government and the central administration or

supreme power is inevitable," the great statesman Witte explained some years later. "The latter is based upon the principle of the single and undivided will of the monarch, while local self-government . . . is based upon the independent activity of representatives elected by the people."

Given imperial statesmen's determination to emphasize form not substance in developing the zemstva, such hopes as Kavelin and his progressive countrymen had expressed for self-government were destined to be realized very slowly. Particularly during the 1860s and early 1870s, when the zemstvo men suffered from inexperience and the number of professionals in their ranks was particularly small, there was a growing sense that local affairs simply did not have much importance. "There was too much unanimity," the Scots observer Donald MacKenzie Wallace remarked when he visited a district zemstvo in Novgorod in 1870, "a fact indicating plainly that the majority of the members did not take a very deep interest in the matters presented to them. " With only the most limited financial resources and no fewer than fourteen different types of responsibilities that ranged from overseeing public health, public education, prisons, and philanthropy to fostering economic and agricultural development as signed to them, the zemstvo had to choose its civic involvements modestly and carefully, especially because it had no enforcement or police power. Both of these key instruments, so vital to the proper conduct of local government everywhere, remained in the hands of the provincial governors and the bureaucrats who served them. To carry out its will, the zemstvo therefore had to rely on the very administration whose work it so often criticized.

Very much in 1864, and even more after a second, reformed zemstvo statute appeared in 1890, Russia's provincial bureaucracy held the zemstvo in a firm grip. This meant that, no matter how committed individual zemstvo boards might be to self-government or how dedicated to civic progress the early zemstvo professionals might become, they all faced the bureaucracy at every turn. "The bureaucracy is a terrible, gigantic force, more powerful than anything else," Kavelin once wrote. "This is a real force, and one has to meet force with force that is equal to it." Such a force would have to emerge from among the Russians themselves, and it would inevitably involve the time-consuming process of changing attitudes, values, and political out looks. "By what miracle could our bureaucracy be better than ourselves?" Kavelin asked in 1865. "How could it be a model of thrift, honesty, enlightenment, self-sacrifice, and patriotism when we ourselves, at all levels, are ignoramuses, rude and stupid spendthrifts and thieves, and think only of the present moment?"

Russia's political climate had begun to turn against any change that might weaken the time-honored principles on which the nation's government had rested for centuries. Not only the popular representation to which Valuev had referred but any extension of glasnost or elevation of zakonnost at the expense of proizvol made Russian statesmen especially wary during the days that separated the Polish revolt from Dmitrii Karakozov's attempt to kill Alexander II outside the Summer Gardens in April 1866. After that, reaction intensified. As Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, a man whose opposition to the Great Reforms had marked him as a statesman who contemplated "no dilution of the central power, no loosening of unity for the empire", took command of the Ministry of Public Instruction, an era of much sterner government control began. "Already nicked by the two-edged sword of education," Allen Sinel wrote some years ago, "the autocracy in 1866 called on Tolstoi to make this weapon safer to handle without destroying its usefulness for the state.'' At the same time, the Ministry of Internal Affairs moved to curb the authority of the zemstva in at least three important areas, all related to the ability of elected officials to assemble the economic resources needed to carry out their agencies' tasks independent of Russia's provincial government. "They have published the new regulations concerning the institutions of local government," Nikitenko noted in his diary in July 1867. "Reaction is making very rapid strides forward."

During the late 1860s and early 1870s, the rising wave of reaction in Russia suppressed the development of the revolutionary movement at the same time as it built a broader base of support for it. Stern men in command of the Ministry of Public Instruction, the Third Section, and the Military Governor Generalship of St. Petersburg made it all but impossible for the handful of young radicals who remained at large even to exchange ideas safely. This was all the more true because Karakozov's shot had indicated that they had committed them selves to a much more revolutionary vision than ever before. No longer satisfied to renovate Russia through a far-reaching program of reform, they now called for a full-fledged transformation of their nation's government and society on principles very different from any that had been a part of the Great Reform debate. Not autocracy, not a renovated autocracy, not even a reformed autocracy had any place in the vision of Russia that the empire's revolutionaries carried into the 1870s. disillusioned and bitter, they now declared war on the autocrat and the institutions that supported him.

The very fact of Karakozov's shot indicated how dramatically the revolutionaries' vision diverged from the principles of reform and renovation that had guided Russians during the first decade of Alexander II's reign. Ever since the Grand Prince of Moscow had risen to rule the Russian land half a millennium before, no commoner had attempted to murder the tsar until Karakozov's single badly aimed shot proclaimed that some Russians had crossed the line that separated radical criticism from revolutionary commitment. Convinced that freedom, social justice, and the destruction of bureaucratic tyranny could not be achieved by obshchestvo working within a framework defined by zakonnost and glasnost, Russia's revolutionaries now vowed to destroy autocracy and its instruments.

A variety of murky visions about how such a full-fledged transformation might be accomplished came to the fore at the beginning of the 1870s as Russia's revolutionary youth struggled to link the obshchestvo and the narod (Russia's peasant masses) after centuries of cultural, social, and political separation. Responding to a series of idealized visions that portrayed the masses as either fertile soil for revolutionary propaganda (Lavrov) or a source of pent-up anger and hatred for established authority that could ignite a revolutionary conflagration (Bakunin), Russia's revolutionary youth went to the people during spring, summer, and fall 1874. As they explored the possibilities for revolutionary action in hundreds of peasant villages scattered across European Russia, they began a final effort to locate the boundaries of the Great Reform legislation on the Left, to determine whether the society that the Great Reforms had envisioned could be reshaped to include the destruction of autocracy and its bureaucratic defenders.

The two waves of the Movement to the People that occurred in 1874 and in 1877-78 showed that the heritage of the masses diverged too far from the aspirations of the radical wing of obshchestvo to allow them to unite for common action. Neither the revolutionary youths committed to the teachings of Lavrov nor those intoxicated by the passionate, impatient urgings of Bakunin found a hearing among Russia's always apathetic, some times hostile peasants. "Scientific socialism, the socialism of the West," one of the narodniki lamented as he recalled the hostile reception he and his comrades had received, "bounces off the Russian masses like a pea off a wall." Nor did those doctrines of recast revolutionary populism that focused more directly on the theme of liberty and land communally held strike a more responsive chord among Russia's masses. "Every peasant, if circumstances permit, will, in the most exemplary fashion, exploit every other," one zemstvo agronomist confessed after working among Russia's rural folk for many years. The cultural and social chasm between obshchestvo and narod remained too vast and the visions too disparate to be bridged so easily. Language, culture, and stereotyped misunderstandings all continued to form an impenetrable wall between them.

Unwilling to abandon belief in the masses or relinquish their deep hope that they would one day become the bearers of revolution in Russia, Russia's revolutionary youth turned from populism to terrorism at the end of the 1870s only to find that the excesses of terrorism reduced the opportunities for useful social and civic enterprises even more surely than populism had. Culminating in their assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the activities of Narodnaia Volia (the Party of the People's Will) therefore narrowed the limits within which the Great Reforms would be shaped and reduced the extent to which the government would seek the participation of obshchestvo in their development. The dual failure of the Movement to the People and the terrorist assault against the autocrat also showed that Russia's revolutionaries could not define the Great Reform legislation in terms of transformation rather than renovation. Unable to replace Russia's twin yokes of autocracy and bureaucracy with some form of socialist-democratic polity, the revolutionaries of the 1870s faced near-paralysis in the conservative political climate that dominated the 1880s.

Perhaps nothing emphasized that fact more forcefully than the programs of General Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, the Armenian Georgian nobleman whose stern suppression of revolutionaries as acting governor-general of Kharkov province won him an appointment as Russia's minister of internal affairs in August 1880. Loris-Melikov knew well the tensions that the glasnost proizvol dichotomy had created in Russia's legislative process, and he sought to end the paralysis of policy that had come in its wake by a series of proposals designed, in Daniel Orlovsky's careful judgment, to "revitalize the ministerial bureaucracy and transform autocratic law-making." Loris-Melikov had sought to accomplish that end by preserving both glasnost and proizvol and by controlling each in its turn. Using proizvol as his instrument, he therefore sought to institutionalize glasnost at the center of Russia's government (in his famous project of January 28, 1881, to which Alexander II gave his approval on the morning of his assassination) by providing for special consultations with representatives chosen from among the most "useful and knowledgeable people." Designed to function much as had the non government "experts" in the special commissions that had drafted the Great Reform legislation, Loris-Melikov's proposed "useful and knowledgeable" representatives had been a carefully calculated response designed to accommodate the desire of the less radical portions of obshchestvo to participate in Russia's national political life.

The foundations of Loris-Melikov's scheme crumbled among the debris left by the terrorists' bombs that took Alexander II's life on March 1, 1881. Beginning in the 1880s, the social and political dimensions of the Great Reforms would be defined from the Right as those conservative forces that had been briefly checked by the development of the Great Reform debate between 1861 and 1874 reasserted themselves. Certainly, the Right had never ceased to challenge the Great Reform legislation and to demand that it be interpreted within very narrow limits. This had been the motivation behind the censor Przhetslavskii's belief that glasnost could be used to reshape Official Nationality into a less repressive form. Public opinion, Przhetslavskii had insisted, needed no direct input in Russia's policy-making process because the loyal servitors of a benevolent autocrat would, by definition, formulate only policies that served the interests of all good and loyal Russians. Moral imperatives therefore ought to shape glasnost in such a manner as to preserve the prerogatives of autocracy but allow the government access to legitimate expressions of public opinion, which Przhetslavskii defined all too readily as public support for government policies.

For defenders of any such moderated version of Official Nationality, good citizens ought first of all to be loyal subjects. Such men and women continued to regard loyalty to the autocrat as the primary requirement of good citizenship because they continued to equate the Russian tsar with the Russian state just as their medieval forebears had. For that reason, when Dmitrii Miliutin had written (in the preamble to the Universal Military Service Statute) that "the defense of the homeland against foreign enemies is the sacred duty of every Russian," Alexander II had insisted that his words be chaged to read, "the defense of the throne and homeland" was the duty of "every Russian subject." For Russia's emperor and the defenders of autocracy, the duties of a subject superseded the responsibilities of a citizen, and, although a citizen might be expected to defend his country, Alexander insisted that the duty of a subject to defend the throne must come first.

*******

For [Dmitrii] Tolstoi, opposition meant not only those who opposed the government but also any who did not share his vision that, although obshchestvo might advise the government, the government should relinquish none of its power in return. The Great Reforms had opened an area between government and obshchestvo in which the sphere of one did not quite directly touch that of the other, and where the division between the two should be drawn had been a subject of considerable debate throughout the 1870s. Alexander III's choice of Tolstoi to rule the Ministry of Internal Affairs now meant that order and autocracy would take precedence over all other concerns. Tolstoi's vision of returning to the central government responsibility for providing local administration and supplying peasant needs without any assistance from Russia's newly emerged peasant citizens made it certain that the space within which grazhdanskoe obshchestvoÑthe citizen society of which civic-minded Russians had begun to speakÑwould be allowed to function was narrowly focused and pragmatically defined. By definition, a good subject would automatically be a good citizen, but not necessarily the other way around.

What underlay this rigidity and narrow pragmatism on the part of Alexander III and his confidants was that the rise of the revolutionary movement and the need to use such extra legal means as the governors-general to suppress opposition and discontent during the political crisis of 1878-82 had shown Russia's central government that it still did not have the resources or the instruments needed to control its provinces. Indeed, the dramatic political crisis, of which the rise of revolutionary terrorism was a major part, had diverted attention from an even more serious economic crisis that was building in the Russian countryside, where mismanaged tax collection had combined with acute shortages of land and grain to produce a massive tax arrears. In a government that took fiscal considerations seriously into account in formulating policy, this had produced genuine apprehension. As reports on rural apathy, rural anarchy, rural hunger, and rural administrative confusion mounted, Russia's statesmen and high officials began to fear that the nation's peasants might lose all respect for authority unless some form of effective supervision could be established at the local level. Some recasting of the self-government institutions that the Great Reforms bestowed on Russia's peasants therefore seemed very much needed.

Work on such a reform actually had begun in August 1880, when Alexander II had appointed four senators to investigate ten key provinces where the tax arrears were the highest and peasant land shortages greatest. Submitted a few months after his death, their reports chronicled a mass of abuses, corruption, and outright indifference, in peasant assemblies on the level of the volost (the territorial unit that constituted each uezd [district]) and in village communes. Clearly, there was a very great distance between the ideal set forth in the legislation of 1861 and 1864 and everyday practice. "Not one matter is decided objectively since there are no assemblies where persuasion with vodka by the interested parties does not occur," one senator wrote. "The peasants are indifferent toward elections, believing that even if a good person were to be elected, he would be corrupted by the office."

Vodka, of course, had been used by state officials to explain peasant recalcitrance, peasant indifference, and peasant corruption for a long time. Even in the 1830s, Zablotskii-Desiatovskii and Prince Vladimir Odoevskii, his colleague in the Ministry of State Domains, had made it a focus of their efforts to educate state peasants in elementary agronomy and the homely virtues of thrift and sobriety. But even though they bore the tradition of peasant drunkenness in mind, the rough reality of village politics, so different from the vision of the reformers of the 1860s, clearly shocked senior officials from St. Petersburg. "This picture of inebriated peasants voting for the desires of their benefactors at the assembly," Thomas Pearson concluded in his impressive recent study of autocracy and local self-government after the Emancipation, "could only dismay officials who, two decades earlier, foresaw the imminent creation of genuine public self-government at the village level."

Drunkenness and illiteracy, neither of them a surprise to men acquainted with life in Russia's countryside, were the chief curses that the senators who had inspected Russia's provinces in 1880 and 1881 had uncovered in the practices of village self-government. An even broader study conducted by the Ministry of

Internal Affairs showed that there were more than four times as many illiterate village elders as there were literate ones, and only a few more volost elders who could read than could not. It was a sad commentary on the visions of the reformers of the 1860s that village education had made so little headway in two decades. It also meant that it had become almost impossible for Russia's central government to communicate with the men responsible for the empire's local administration.

While Russia's village and volost assemblies languished for lack of state supervision, the zemstva had to struggle against the increasing weight of bureaucratic interference. As they found it increasingly difficult to collect the meager tax revenues on which their efforts to improve public health, agronomy, and education depended, the zemstva began to languish. Clearly, the key institutions of the Great Reform legislation of 1861-1864 were not functioning in Russia's countryside. "From the administrator's point of view," George Yaney wrote some years ago, peasant local government in Russia had become "a chaos."

From a regime committed to order and control, "chaos" demanded serious attention. On the recommendation of Count Nikolai Ignat'ev, Tolstoi's predecessor as minister of internal affairs, Alexander III had established a special commission under the chairmanship of Mikhail Kakhanov to study the problems of local self-government and to draft plans for its reform. A former provincial governor and Loris-Melikov's deputy during the last months of the preceding reign, Kakhanov had begun his assignment with the full endorsement of the Committee of Ministers. Glasnost and zakonnost were to be his guiding principles as he and the members of his commission's Special Conference set about translating the vision of the men who had drafted the Great Reforms into a series of village and volost institutions that could function, in Pearson's words, "as truly public organizations." The result, completed in November 1883, was a comprehensive program for making Russians responsible for rural self-government, not as members of antiquated social estates but as full-fledged citizens, with peasants and nobles becoming equal partners in shaping the destiny of the communities in which they lived.

But the atmosphere in which Kakhanov and his Special Conference completed their proposals for reform was very different from that in which they had begun their work. Immediately, and aspirations were not expressed in its decisions. How power should be exercised in this rapidly changing environment, who (or what institutions) should exercise it, and how the new interest groups that were emerging should be accommodated within Russia's institutional, social, and political framework were vital questions that remained unresolved as the empire of the tsars approached the twentieth century. Ironically, these new groups often looked first to Russia's most traditional political and administrative instrumentÑto proizvol exercised by a benevolent autocrat and his chief deputiesÑto represent their interests most effectively.

The conflict between proizvol and zakonnost thus remained unresolved, and both seemed more durable at the end of Alexander III's reign than at its beginning. Certainly, Alexander exercised his autocratic authority in a more unrestrained fashion on some occasions than his father ever had. Yet, even he, the most autocratic sovereign to rule Russia between the Crimean War and the Revolutions of 1917, could not exercise proizvol in the manner of such notable predecessors as Peter the Great and Nicholas I. The very existence of the law and the rapidly developing institutionalized defenses that supported it limited his ability to do so.

from W. Bruce Lincoln. The Great Reforms, (DeKalb, Ill., 1990), 161-188