ACTIVITIES BEFORE THE WAR 39 
school teachers became a very prominent feature of the work. These 
conventions were held under the auspices of the district zemstvo 
boards, were organized by experienced teachers, and discussed all 
questions pertaining to school life. Summer courses, both of a 
strictly professional and more general character, were now held 
every year under the auspices of provincial zemstvos for the benefit 
of the elementary school teachers. Nine provincial zemstvos (Vyatka, 
Ekaterinoslav, Kaluga, Kursk, Poltava, Smolensk, Tambov, and 
Taurida) maintained exhibitions of up-to-date school equipment. 
These institutions also supplied the teachers of the elementary 
schools with equipment, besides teaching the making of such equip- 
ment. Special workshops devoted to this purpose existed at some of 
these exhibitions, and that of the provincial zemstvo of Vyatka, 
which supplied schools practically throughout the Empire, became 
justly famous. 
In the out-of-school educational field the zemstvos also developed 
a vigorous and extensive activity. During the winter months the dis- 
trict zemstvos generally organized popular lectures, with lantern 
slides, on various branches of knowledge, and in many places the 
schools established evening classes for adults. During the years im- 
mediately before the War several district zemstvos in the provinces 
of Nizhni-Novgorod and Samara had taken the initiative in opening 
social halls in the rural centers. 
Library work, likewise, developed rapidly. An inquiry conducted 
in 1914 by the Society for Library Study in thirty-five out of the 
forty-three zemstvo provinces brought out the fact that there were 
then in existence 12,627 public libraries in the villages. This figure, 
to be sure, is not very impressive when compared with those relating 
to western Europe or America. However, when we consider the low 
educational level of the Russian peasantry, illiterate almost to a man 
only fifty years ago, and when we consider, furthermore, the fact 
that those provinces which had no zemstvos did practically nothing 
for out-of-school education, we shall have to admit that the achieve- 
ment of the zemstvos in this domain was truly remarkable. The same 
inquiry established the fact that the sums spent on out-of-school 
education by the provincial zemstvos in these thirty-five provinces in 
1914 amounted to 1,020,000 rubles and the sums spent for the same 
purpose by the district zemstvos to 1,639,000 rubles, or a total of 
2,659,000 rubles.