THE ZEMSTVOS DURING THE WAR
Finance to the State Council and receive the final sanction of the
Emperor.
Although the competence of these committees differed but little
from that of the zemstvos to be established later, local life remained
for many years in the same stagnant condition. Hospitals, with rare
exceptions, were to be found only in the chief cities of the province,
but even these were kept in such a state that the population showed
the utmost reluctance to undergo hospital treatment. Roads, which
used to be mended exclusively by corvée labor, would become abso-
lutely impassable during the spring and autumn rains, and as far as
agronomic assistance to the peasantry was concerned, there was not
even a trace of it anywhere. As for education, which, incidentally,
was not within the competence of the local organs, it was practically
non-existent. Here and there, in the settlements of the crown peas-
ants, a governmental primary school might be found; but the edu-
cation of the serfs was left wholly to the discretion of their masters,
and only a few of these opened schools at their own expense.
16
The Reform of 1864.
Such had been the state of local life previous to the zemstvo re-
form of 1864. This was merely a link in the chain of the Great Re-
forms inaugurated by Alexander II in the first years of his reign,
and all of these reforms were founded upon the Act of February
19, 1861, by which the serfs were emancipated.
The freed serf was now a citizen among citizens and was there-
fore entitled to his share in local government. It was not by a mere
coincidence that only three days after the Emancipation Manifesto
had been signed a commission was formed at St. Petersburg to work
out the principles of a new rural government organization. But it
must be borne in mind that the zemstvo government was not estab-
lished under a constitutional and democratic régime, but under an
absolute monarchy, upon a basis of bureaucratic class rule. This is
why the zemstvo reform of 1864, although it was an immense ad-
vance on the path of democracy, had all the marks of a compromise
between the traditional views on government and the new ideas.
The zemstvos were introduced in only thirty-four of the central
2 All dates in this monograph are given in accordance with the Russian
calendar.
