The fate of agronomists in Russia: Their quantitative dynamics from 1911 to 1916

Russian Review

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 172-200

  Matsuzato, Kimitaka ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0011438012     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/131836     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Haimson, ed. , The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905-1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1979)
2. For examples from Perm Province at the end of the nineteenth century see Trudy soveshchaniia predsedatelei uezdnykh zemskikh uprav i sostava gubernskoi upravy s uchastiem agronomov po voprosu o reorganizatsii zemskogo agronomicheskogo instituta Permskoi gubernii, 20-23 marta 1900g. v. g. Permi (Perm, 1900), 46, 57-58
3. Zemstvo agronomists of Poltava Province, in strong opposition to the confining policy, argued that the role of agricultural elders could not be "mechanical. " However, the endorsement of independent responsibility for them demanded a great deal of exhausting (even if interesting) educational measures. For example, a conference of agricultural elders, held by the Konstantinograd county zemstvo of the province in June 1913, spent no less than eleven hours just for the presentation of reports by twenty elders on their activities from January to May of that year. Nevertheless, it seems that the educational effect of such exhausting conferences was significant since the elders unanimously requested that "such conferences should be held regularly, three or four times a year. " See Poltavskie agronomicheskie izvestiia, 1913, no. 2/3:66
4. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, 1982)
5. and Emmons and Vucinich, The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, Eng. , 1982)
6. The number of zemstvo workers increased from about seventy thousand in 1907 to about one hundred thousand in 1914. See T. P. Prokof'eva, "Moskovskoe zemstvo na rubezhe XIX-XX vekov" (Candidate diss. , Moscow State University 1981), 41-42
7. Scott J. Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chap. 9, focuses mainly on the 1905 Revolution and basically concurs with Haimson's and Manning's opinion about "zemstvo reaction. "
8. However, widening the chronological scope of study to the post-1907 period, Seregny became convinced that "if there had ever been a zemstvo reaction, it had been short-lived. " See his "Russian Teachers, Rural Cooperatives and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1908-1914" (Paper delivered at the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 1993, Honolulu), p. 2
9. Here, it is not important whether his current opinion is correct; more important is that, released from the frame of "zemstvo reaction," his argument obtained a much richer content and unprejudiced flexibility. See also his paper, "Zemstvo, uchitel'stvo i gosudarstvo: Politika narodnogo obrazovaniia, 1908-1914" (Paper delivered at the conference "Istoriia zemstva i perspektivy razvitiia mestnogo samoupravleniia v Rossii," May 1993, Tver)
10. It is useful to quote Seregny's basic understanding of the period: ["Ministry of Education] policy under Kasso was decidedly reactionary and subversive of educational progress. And yet schools were built, pupils taught" ("Russian Teachers, Rural Cooperatives," 3). The development of Seregny's study is a contrapositive example of my opinion that in Western scholarship the five elements mentioned here (the ignorance of zemstvos after 1907, the myth of "zemstvo reaction," the identification of some historians with prerevolutionary left liberalism, their dismissive attitude toward pragmatic values, and their undue fascination for the "volost zemstvo" issue) have been closely interrelated. I argued this historiographical problem in "Za konkretnyi podkhod k revoliutsii 1917 goda," forthcoming in Rossiia v XX veke: Sud'ba istoricheskikh nauk
11. Sel'skokhoziaistvennaia zhizn' (Izdanie Tambovskogo Sel'skokhoziaistvennogo obshchestva), no. 4/5 (1914): 161
12. Kimitaka Matsuzato, "Stolypinskaia reforma i rossiiskaia agrotekhnologicheskaia revoliutsiia," Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1992, no. 6:194-200
13. Iuzhno-russkaia sel'skokhoziaistvennaia gazeta (IuSG), no. 45 (1914): 5
14. For the number of medical districts see Izvestiia Moskovskoigubernskoi zemskoi upravy (IMGZU), 1914, no. 1:4
15. For agronomic districts see Appendix A2. The number of volosts comes from the Census of 1897: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Brokgauz i Efron), vol. 29 (St. Petersburg, 1900), 382-83
16. See my "The Concept of 'Space' in Russian History: Regionalization from the Late Imperial Period to the Present," in Empire and Society: New Approaches to Russian History, ed. T. Hara (forthcoming). According to my calculation based on the Census of 1897 the average radius of volosts in European Russia was 11. 9 km
17. E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country (New York, 1959), 2:295-96
18. D. Shorygin, "Osnovnaia rabota uchastkovoi agronomii," Vestnik sel'skogo khoziaistva (VSKh), no. 1 (1914): 13-15
19. Shorygin debated in this manner at a conference of zemstvo agronomists of the province, held in May 1913. The majority of participants, however, opposed the passive policy, arguing, for example, that "it is improbable that an agronomist, recommending sowing in drills, at the same time doesn't touch the problem of the reorganization of farming. " See Trudy 6-go soveshchaniia zemskikh agronomov Tambovskoi gubernii pri Tambovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi uprave, 16-19 maia 1913 goda (Tambov, 1915)
20. Vestnik Orlovskogo obshchestva sel'skogo khoziaistva (VOOSKh), no. 1 (1914): 18
21. Sel'skoe khoziaistvo i lesovodstvo (Zhurnal glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia), no. 244 (1914): 731-33
22. S. L. Maslov, Zemstvo i ego ekonomicheskaia deiatel'nost' za 50 let sushchestvovaniia (Moscow, 1914), 22-23
23. VSKh, 1914, no. 9:10
24. We can find an excellent example of such a functional change of agricultural warehouses in a report by a warehouse manager in the village of Lopasnia in Serpukhov county, Moscow Province. See IMGZU, 1914, no. 1:45-47
25. Telegram of 19 September 1909, Izvestiia glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (IGUZZ), no. 44 (1909): 979-80
26. IuSG, no. 21 (1914): 10-11
27. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg, 1911), 121
28. "Ob okazanii agronomicheskoi pomoshchi edinolichnym khoziaistvam," Doklad Khar'kovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy gubernskomu zemskomu sobraniiu sessü 1909 goda (Khar'kov, 1909), 10-13
29. Among the eleven provinces where GUZZ had agreed until 1913 to the zemstvos' preeminence in agricultural assistance to individual farmers, we can find only one (Smolensk) where the posts of Land Settlement Commission agronomists were radically curtailed. In the remaining ten provinces the numbers of Land Settlement Commission agronomists were preserved or even increased. Needless to say, in the other twelve provinces where GUZZ did not recognize the preeminence of zemstvos, the number of Land Settlement Commission agronomists increased during the period. Thus, only in a few provinces did GUZZ's general policy of the integration of agronomic organizations result in the actual curtailment of Land Settlement Commission agronomists. On the other hand, county Land Settlement Commissions themselves increased from 420 commissions in 1909 to 463 in 1913, reflecting the expansion of territories designed for land settlement. As a result, agronomists employed by Land Settlement Commissions continued to increase. See GUZZ, Itogi rabot za poslednee piatiletie (1909-1913gg. ) (St. Petersburg, 1914), 22
30. For an example in Moscow Province see Matsuzato, "Stolypinskaia reforma," 197-98
31. Doklady Permskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy Permskomu gubernskomu zemskomu sobraniiu 46-oi ocherednoi sessii (1915), otdel 3: Ekonomicheskie meropriiatiia (Perm, 1916), 41-42
32. Zhurnal Volynskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia 4-oi ocherednoi sessii, 1-3 marta 1917 [N. S. ] (Volyn, 1917), 3
33. Zhurnaly Permskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia 57-oi chrezvychainoi sessii i doklady upravy semu sobraniiu, 25-26 iiulia 1916 g. (Perm, 1916), 34-35
34. A. V. Sedov, "Istoriia organizatsii volostnykh i sel'skikh prodovol'stvennykh komitetov v 1917 godu," in Voprosy istorii sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii i sotsialisticheskogo stroitel'stva v SSSR (Gor'kii, 1974), 40-52
35. This "mechanization" had already become a subject of public debate before World War I. The rapid expansion of zemstvo social services on the eve of the war forced zemstvos to employ workers who were not of sufficient quality or who lacked the devotion that had characterized the zemstvo workers in the previous century. Their contemporaries feared that the attitude of zemstvo workers toward their duties had become "mechanical" (bureaucratic). See VSKh, 1914, no. 9:6
36. Moskovskoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie, Ocherednaia sessiia 1915 g. : Doklad Moskovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy o sodeistvii sel'skomu khoziaistvu (Moscow, 1916), 8
37. GUZZ, Itogi rabot, 8
38. Obzor deistvii Kazanskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy po sei'skokhoziaistvennomu otdelu s 1 sentiabria 1913 po 1 sentiabria 1914 (Kazan, 1914), 5-6, 12-14
39. Obzor deiatel'nosti Kassy melkogo kredita Kazanskogo gubernskogo zemstva po razvitiiu melkikh kreditnykh uchrezhdenii za vremia s 1 sentiabria 1914 po 1 sentiabria 1915 (Kazan, 1915), 68-82
40. PZN, no. 1 (1914): 14-15
41. "Moskovskoe gubernskoe zemskoe sobranie, ocherednaia sessiia 1915 g. : Doklad Moskovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy o rabotakh, proizvedennykh statisticheskim otdeleniem v 1915 g. i namechaemykh na 1916 g. ," 2
42. PZN, no. 3 (1914): 6
43. A. V. Chaianov, Melody izlozheniia predmetov (Moscow, 1916), 6-7. The existence of this pamphlet was made public by Sadamu Kojima
44. Yoshihuru Tsuchiya, "A Note on Working-Class Culture in Late Imperial Russia," in Hara, Empire and Society
45. Obzor deiatel'nosti Kassy melkogo kredita Kazanskogo gubernskogo zemstva, 59-63
46. VSKh, no. 39 (1914): 3-4
47. VOOSKh, no. 21/22 (1914): 39-41
48. IGUZZ, no. 8 (1915): 198
49. VSKh, no. 1 (1917): 3-4
50. Voina i vedomstvo zemledeliia (Kratkii obzor deiatel'nosti za 1914-1916 gg. ) (n. d. ), 15-17
51. "Neobkhodimost' izmeneniia odnogo iz printsipov agronomicheskoi raboty," VSKh, no. 36 (1916): 3
52. V. N. Vargin, O formakh i deiatel'nosti agronomicheskikh organizatsii v sviazi s usloviiami vremeni (Perm, 1917), 3-12
53. A. M. Anfimov, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny, iiul' 1914 - fevral' 1917: Sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad), 1965, 466-512
54. Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel'stva, izdavaemykh pri pravitel'stvuiushchem senate, no. 248 (1914), art. 2348
55. In addition, my analysis of these "peasant protests" leads me to conclude that if peasants ever did protest, they did so against the "unfairness" revealed in the mode of mobilization of their resources, but not against the mobilization itself. In this sense, the peasants' protest did not contradict their "patriotism. " I have discussed this question in an article focusing on Rittikh's food levy, "Prodrazverstka A. A. Rittikha," Acta Slavica Iaponica, no. 13 (forthcoming)