What Was the Zemstvo in Imperial Russia?
The Zemstvos were the elected local-government bodies created by the Statute of 1 January 1864 (13 January new style), the first of the great reforms of Tsar Alexander II. There were two levels: the district (uyezd) zemstvo and the provincial (guberniya) zemstvo, each with an assembly (zemskoye sobranie) elected on a three-curia franchise that gave the nobility, the towns, and the peasant communes separate delegations. The assemblies appointed an executive board (zemskaya uprava) that ran the actual administration. By 1867, the new bodies were functioning in thirty-four provinces; by the end of the century they operated in forty-three of the fifty European-Russian provinces (see Emmons and Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia, 1982).
The pre-reform situation
Before 1864, local administration in the great Russian provinces was a haphazard system of governors, ispravniki (police captains), and the provincial boards of the various ministries. The peasant communes, under the Ministry of State Domains and then the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had a separate administration inherited from the 1837 and 1857 reforms of Paul Kiselev. The towns, after the 1785 Charter to the Towns, had duma institutions that had largely atrophied. The 1864 zemstvo law was the first attempt to give the great Russian provinces a unified, elected local government with a defined set of competences.
Powers and structure
The Zemstvos were given responsibility for matters of “local utility and welfare” — a phrase drafted by Nikolai Milyutin, the deputy minister of internal affairs. The actual list included primary education, public health, the maintenance of roads and bridges, the relief of the poor, the supervision of the food supply, and the licensing of trade fairs. The Zemstvos had no police powers, no authority over the peasant commune, and no power of taxation except the right to impose surcharges on existing state taxes and to levy a zemstvo tax on local property.
The franchise was a property-based one. The first curia, the landowners, elected about 38% of the district assembly; the second curia, the urban taxpayers, elected about 12%; the third curia, the peasant communes, elected the remaining 50% — although in practice the peasant delegates were vetted by the local marshal of the nobility. The provincial assembly was an indirect body: the district assemblies elected the provincial. The provincial assembly, in turn, elected the provincial marshal of the nobility, who sat ex officio on the provincial board (Emmons and Vucinich, 1982).
The achievements of the Zemstvos
The Zemstvos became, almost by accident, the chief vehicle of Russian local reform. They were starved of funds — the typical district zemstvo budget in 1870 was about 5,000 rubles, the typical provincial budget about 25,000 — but they pioneered a long list of practices: a system of rural primary schools (the “zemstvo schools”), a network of district doctors, a veterinary service, a small statistical bureau (the zemskaya statistika), a road programme, a fire service, and the beginnings of mutual credit. By 1900 the Zemstvos employed some 30,000 teachers, 7,500 doctors, and 3,000 sanitary officers. Russian literacy rose from about 10% in the 1860s to about 25% by 1914, and the Zemstvos were the chief reason (Brower, The Russian Road to Modernity, 2003).
Politics
The Zemstvos were the cradle of Russian liberalism. The provincial marshals, many of them landowning professionals, formed a network of personal contacts that became the basis of the Iuzhnoe obshchestvo of the late 1870s and the Soiuz osvobozhdeniia of 1903-1905. The All-Russian Congress of Zemstvos (Bezpartiinoe zemstvo), held in Moscow every few months from 1902, became the chief coordinating body of the liberal movement, and in 1905 it issued a programme of constitutional reform that fed directly into the October Manifesto. After 1906, the Cadet Party drew its activist base from the zemstvo professionals.
The Zemstvos lasted until 1917. The Provisional Government expanded their role; the Bolsheviks abolished them in February 1918. The Soviet government of 1918-1921 re-established a very limited zemstvo as a unit of food-procurement, but the body as it had existed was gone.