CHAPTER 1
ORIGIN AND ORGANIZATION OF ZEMSTYVO
INSTITUTIONS:
Local Government before the Reform of 1861.
“THE best judges of the most convenient method of performing
communal duties are the inhabitants themselves, because they know
best what one may do either. with money, or in person, with one’s
own hands or horse, and where it can be done.”
In this rather naive form, Nicholas I, in one of his orders issued
while serfdom was still in force (1851), gave expression to the idea
that there was need of local self-government. But it was, of course,
impossible to expect that genuine self-government could be intro-
duced in Russia as long as the conditions of serfdom were in exist-
ence. No doubt, as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury the local budgets were made independent of the national
budget, and under the laws of 1851 delegates representing the no-
bility and the towns had seats, together with the higher officials of
the provincial administration, in the “Provincial Committees on
Communal Duties,” which were presided over by the governors of
the respective provinces. At best, however, we can regard these
bureaucratic class institutions as feeble beginnings of local govern-
ment.
These committees drew up the local budgets and assessed taxes
and personal service duties (corvée) for three years in advance. The
Government, however, hesitated to grant complete autonomy in the
task of making up the local budgets even to these preponderantly
bureaucratic institutions, and it required that the budgets, after be-
ing drawn up locally, should be submitted through the Ministry of
! The zemstvos were institutions of local government outside the urban
areas. The term zemstvo is derived from the Russian word zemlya, land, and
is traditionally associated with organizations of social groups connected with
land, the landed gentry, and the farmers. A discussion of the municipal gov-
ernment by N. J. Astrov will be found in the volume The War and the Rus-
sian Government (Yale University Press, 1929) in this series of the Eco-
nomic and Social History of the World War.
