From Speransky to Stolypin: Peasant Reform and the Problem of Land Management

Abstract

This article analyzes peasant land management in relation to the tax and property system from the early 1830s to the beginning of the 20th century.

The three large-scale agrarian reforms initiated and carried out by the Russian autocracy in the 19th and early 20th centuries—reforms in the state village related to P.D. Kiselev, the abolition of serfdom, and the Stolypin reform—had much in common. All of them were aimed at giving a new impetus to the development of the Russian countryside and the country as a whole; all were transformations from above, aimed at evolutionary development that were typical for Russia. Of course, the similarities between them do not end there. At the same time, although they can be seen to be similar in some ways, in a number of other ways they differed significantly. Thus, while the Kiselev and Stolypin’s projects significantly increased administrative interference in the life of the peasants, the “Statutes of February 19, 1861,” by and large, followed the opposite strategy of natural development. It is not surprising that the reformers and historians have always differed on whether these major transformations in the agrarian sphere can be built into one continuous reform or whether each subsequent reform was a reaction of repulsion from the previous one.

Judgments on this issue primarily take into account, on the one hand, the subjective goals of the reforms in the form in which they were formulated by their authors and the content of the legislative acts, and, on the other hand, their objective socioeconomic consequences. The mechanism for implementing transformations is analyzed much less. As a result, it is sometimes unclear whether, in fact, the adopted laws had a chance to work. It is clear that in public policy, the implementation of any intentions depends on the availability of the effective management technologies, as well as the legal and administrative infrastructure. In relation to the traditionally under-governed Russian village, this general consideration has always been especially relevant. In the XVIII, XIX, and at the beginning of the XX centuries, attempts to restructure and regulate the life of the peasants, or at least the sphere of their interaction with the state, again and again brought to the fore the same problems, primarily related to the inability of the state to penetrate the lower levels of the social structure and impose the new rules on the peasant communities.

This ineffectiveness of the authorities was especially noticeable in the sphere of land management and taxation: the most technologically complex aspects of the agrarian issue in any society. Autocrats and ministers succeeded each other, progressives triumphed over reactionaries (and vice versa), but the archaic systems of land use, registration of land rights, and distribution of the tax burden successfully resisted any attempts to change them. Perhaps this is why historians paid so little attention to these attempts themselves? However, after all, simple logic requires the opposite: apparently, it is here that one should look for a stumbling block in the implementation of various attempts to modernize the Russian countryside. It is, in my opinion, impossible to understand agrarian transformations without studying the technologies of land surveys, cadastre, and taxation.

It is all the more surprising that only the Stolypin reform, which proclaimed the rationalization of land management as its goal, was systematically analyzed in this aspect.¹ Very little has been written about Kiselev’s land management and tax initiatives;² in relation to the course taken by the government between the late 1850s and the first Russian revolution of 1905 to 1907, this topic remains largely unexplored. This article, without setting itself the task of exhaustively elucidating these subjects, is an attempt to analyze the state of peasant land management in relation to the tax policy at the start of preparations for the abolition of serfdom in the late 1850s and how it developed after the adoption of the Statutes of 19 February.

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The well-known prerevolutionary specialist in land surveying and land management, I.E. Herman singled out four interrelated aspects in this area: (1) determination of the value or profitability of land for the correct allocation of taxes (cadastre); (2) geodetic description and legal registration of property (surveying); (3) land management to improve agricultural land use (for example, the consolidation of strip plots); and (4) legal registration of land ownership rights (land registers).³ It is curious that Herman’s book, published in 1913, when Stolypin’s land management had long been in full swing, is full of lamentations about the extreme backwardness of Russia in all kinds of “land affairs.” The author convincingly argued that it was the lack of a cadastre in the country and the unreliability of official and private land plans that made it impossible to both correct land taxation and introduce a reliable system for registering land rights. In turn, without these conditions, a major improvement in agricultural technology remained wishful thinking. Even in relation to privately owned lands, Herman pointed out, credit organizations, given the risks related to the unreliability of data on their areas and boundaries, reduced mortgage loans to 60% of the assessed value of the land, while in Western Europe it was kept at the level of 90%.

Note that, compared to the peasant allotments, the tradition of regulating and accounting for private land ownership was much older in Russia. By the middle of the XIX century, there was a cumbersome system of registering land ownership. Like many other things in Russian law, its norms were formed historically, and the later principles did not supplant the previous ones, but were built on top of them, making the whole system look like a layer cake.⁴ It was based on the principles and institutions of the General Land Survey of the 1760s.⁵ Usually it is associated with Catherine II, although attempts at a general delimitation of land ownership also took place under Elizabeth Petrovna, and the process initiated by Catherine in the 1760s continued until the middle of the 19th century.

General land surveying did not so much register as create modern (in the sense of conformity with the canons of the modern era) land ownership: one that would have a calculable size, tangible boundaries, and a transparent legal status. Historically, manorial landownership was largely formed on an informal basis, through the seizure of “no one’s” lands. Practically none of the landowners could document the boundaries of ownership. And unlike the experiments that preceded it, Catherine’s land surveying developed successfully solely because its procedure did not require landowners to prove the legality of their possessions and thereby allowed them to legalize large-scale seizures of state lands.

However, the General Land Survey only, as it were, drew a certain “grid,” a coordinate system for the subsequent clearer definition of ownership rights. In the first half of the XIX century, various rules of the so-called special land surveying were added to its principles by trial and error. This was the next step in giving landed property a modern character. Its goal was to allocate thousands of estates located in various places in common and mixed ownership, i.e., such estates, each of which belonged to different private owners (sometimes numerous owners), and almost always indivisibly, even without a clear definition of the share belonging to each of them. This shared private land property should not be confused with peasant communal tenure: the latter arose in the process of land redistribution in the commune or the division of household plots, while the former took shape over centuries in the process of “assignments” of servants and the subsequent division of estates during exchanges, inheritance, etc. It was much more difficult to regulate than the peasant estate, since any coercive measures that were easily enforceable against the peasants seemed unthinkable against the “noble class.” It is not surprising that the special land survey dragged on for many decades and, in fact, was never completed. In addition, at the beginning of the XIX century, the treasury took care of registering and protecting its own share of lands. However, the officials of the Ministry of Finance, who administered state property until the end of the 1830s, were not particularly interested in fighting for the land with private owners (through corruption, they were often more interested in the opposite). The shortcomings of the local bureaucracy forced the government to delegate the protection of state property to the state peasants themselves, who even received the right to act as a party in these cases in lawsuits.⁶

It is clear that under such conditions there could be no question of any serious land management of state peasants. In the landowner’s village, it was limited to a few rationalization attempts by advanced owners or their managers, who, with varying success, tried to introduce advanced agronomic practices in peasant life.⁷ Moreover, this was despite the fact that the belief in the beneficial nature of the transfer of peasant farms to rational forms of economic and social organization in the first third of the 19th century was typical for a fairly wide range of representatives of the bureaucratic and landowning elite. This was based on the same idea that many years later formed the foundation of the Stolypin reform: economic growth was inextricably linked with the development of individual (private) property. In accordance with the liberal ideas that came to Russia under Catherine II (and largely due to her), hereditary and individual peasant land use is much more effective than communal land use.⁸ Accordingly, not only property but also use were considered correct only when they had a permanent character and distinct boundaries.⁹

Note that the zigzags of the internal political course did not particularly affect the spread of these ideas: neither the reaction at the end of the Alexander era nor the restrained conservatism of the first two decades of the reign of Nicholas I, led, as one might expect, to a radical revision of this view (say, in the name of “historical values”). The fact is that private property individualism not only corresponded to the interests of the landlords but also seemed to be a convincing theoretical response to socialist utopias and therefore enjoyed considerable trust at the higher levels of the government.¹⁰ Paradoxically, it not only coexisted quite peacefully with the paternalism inherent in the autocracy and the Cameralist tradition of “reforms from above” but even fed them: it turned out that it was the concern for the “common welfare” of their subjects that forced the authorities to impose new and reasonable forms of life.

Why, despite this, did both the state and the landlords prefer not to interfere in the traditional peasant land use norms? There were several reasons for this. Firstly, any such intervention required the creation of an appropriate infrastructure: the development of surveying techniques and the formation of a large staff of land surveyors (the General Land Survey was carried out mainly by amateurs), the determination of the status of peasant land in the state and (scarily) landlord villages, multiplying the number of officials to register millions of land units and settle disputes among not only the educated elite (which was also not an easy task) but also the illiterate peasantry.

The second obstacle was the indivisible relationship between land management and taxation. Repartitions, egalitarian distribution of land, and other characteristic features of the Russian commune of the 18th–19th centuries were primarily a way of distributing land in accordance with the “economic capacity” of family farms. A flexible, self-regulating communal mechanism for distributing the burden of the state duties (and for private serfs also private duties) allowed the government (and landowners) to delegate many tasks to the community with its collective responsibility that in the modern era were considered the prerogative and duty of the state. Therefore, any attempt to rationalize the peasant economy rested on the need for a radical reform of the tax system. Conversely, the transformation of the system of direct taxes, among other things, required the replacement of extensive communal land use by more modern methods of management. Thus, land management was transformed from a purely technical enterprise into a complex set of problems, whose numerous agronomic and cultural aspects were intertwined with legal, financial, and political problems.

It cannot be said that this complexity was not recognized at the at the higher state level. At the same time, the depth and nature of these problems and the ways of their possible solution were understood in different ways. Moreover, their interpretation reveals important patterns that make it possible to shed new light on key problems for the imperial period of the country’s history such as the degree of controllability of rural Russia, the limits of possible state intervention in the economy, and the role of ideological doctrines in shaping the political course.

Systematically, peasant land management began to be discussed in the government in the 1820s and 1830s, in relationship with the reform of the state village. The authors of many well-known projects of that time proposed more or less actively establishing family farms and farmsteads in the state village. According to all the rules of classical political economy, the transition to them was linked with the rationalization of taxation: the egalitarian per capita principle was to be replaced by a differentiated land principle. Admittedly, the abolition of the poll tax, common to all taxable estates, was then still considered to be premature. However, in relation to the feudal rent paid by state peasants, the government was more determined. It was at this time that they began to be considered not as a state duty but as a form of land rent paid by the user to the owner (treasury). Therefore, the idea of the need to link the amount of dues with the size and quality of allotments, and ideally, with the income of each peasant farm individually, became justifiable. In addition, it was planned to take into account and regulate the management of state property in general: land surveying, description, agronomic improvements, etc. All this was supposed to sharply increase the profitability of state property and at the same time convince the landlords that the transition to a rational regulation of relations with serfs could increase their profits. According to the European fashion of the time, the overall valuation of real estate in the country (cadastre) was seen as an important prerequisite for a “correct” state economy,¹¹ since the private economy was conceived as a state economy in miniature, and the same rationalization and regulation were considered absolutely necessary for it as well.

The most ambitious and radical of such projects (1824) belonged to the former Minister of Finance, Count D.A. Guriev, and was compiled with the direct participation of M.A. Balugyansky, a well-known lawyer and a longtime associate and collaborator of M.M. Speransky. This project involved the widespread consolidation of estates and allotments of state peasants in the possession of individual householders, who were given the broadest possible rights to dispose of them (including selling them to the fellow peasants).¹² A more modest and cautious project by Speransky himself, dating from 1830, was also based on the idea of a transition to land taxation and family plots; the “redundant” peasants were supposed to be resettled in the peripheral provinces.¹³ Like Guriev, Speransky considered social stratification in the peasant environment (in his terminology “separation into masters and workers”)¹⁴ not only natural but also useful for the state economy, associating it with the future economic growth and civic development of the peasants.

In contrast, Guriev’s successor as Minister of Finance, E.F. Kankrin, was very skeptical about large-scale government intervention in the life of the peasants. Although he opposed any drastic changes, he remained in principle a supporter of individual landownership, but was wary of the social and political consequences of the abolition of the commune: peasant unrest, a sharp increase in the number of landless peasants, and especially the growth of public spending, which was inevitable with such a large-scale transformation. Kankrin also spoke out against a general land survey and appraisal of state property as the base of the tax reform in the state village. In his opinion, the cadastral procedure itself would turn out to be too long and costly, and the country simply did not have a sufficient number of trained specialists (primarily land surveyors) for it.¹⁵ For quite a long time, Kankrin managed to block any attempts at internal, “organic” reforms in the state village (the well-known historian N.M. Druzhinin even qualified his position as a “policy of organized sabotage” of these reforms). Instead, he considered it possible to limit himself to improving the administrative apparatus of the Ministry of Finance, which was then in charge of state property, for the paternalistic “defence and protection” of state peasants. This position was dictated primarily by the unwillingness to get involved in a case that was obscure to him.

However, Kankrin’s pragmatic approach, in this case, turned out clearly not to correspond to the position of Nicholas I. The emperor’s focus on broad transformations, first in the state, and then according to its model, in the private village, as we know, led to the transfer of state peasants to the jurisdiction first of The Firth Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery (H.I.M.O.C.) and then to the specially created Ministry of State Property (MSP). In 1836, in a conversation with the first head of the MSP, count Kiselev, Nicholas I insisted that the reform should begin with boundary and cadastral surveys (which Kankrin resisted most of all), and in every possible way recommended Kiselev to use the advice and recommendations of Speransky.¹⁶

Speransky’s program, as far as can be judged from the surviving rather lapidary data, was based at that time on the idea of a general regulation of the rights of the treasury, landowners, and peasants. The relations of the three parties were supposed to be placed in the legal field and clearly regulated by law, and Speransky saw the key to this matter in land management. Thus, in the note “On the special survey of St. Petersburg province,” speaking of “three parts of the special survey: technical, judicial, and economic,” Speransky emphasized that they “are inextricably linked and must be subordinate to one authority.” Further, he formulated the purpose of surveying: “As soon as the amount and value of land on state and landowner estates is known, it will be possible … to determine what … peasant work should consist of and exactly what amount of land for this work should be allotted to the peasant … In this way all the duties and dues of the peasants are transferred from people to the land. The surplus of land, if any, will be given to them by voluntary rent. In this way, the peasant will be attached to land; i.e., his true legal position will be restored.” At the same time, serfs should be given the opportunity to buy their servitude, after which they “pass from serfdom to freedom.”¹⁷ Thus, land surveying and land valuation turned out to be not only a tool for the rationalization of land use and taxation of peasants but also a necessary condition for the abolition of serfdom.

In 1836, Speransky insisted that the new management of state property should be introduced gradually, as land surveys are carried out in one or another province.¹⁸ He reasonably feared that the large-scale creation of a new department would overshadow the main goal of the reform: to gradually put an end to the legal and economic uncertainty that reigned in the relationship between the Crown and state peasants and that was depriving the government of the opportunity to influence the landlord village.

In agreement with the Tsar and Speransky, Kiselev initially outlined seven main principles of transformation: (1) the transfer of the dues from people to the land and trade; (2) introduction of family inheritance of land use; (3) allotment of land to the poor; (4) allotment and protection of peasant forests; (5) improvement of rural and volost management; (6) the cessation of improper taxes and harassment; and (7) increase in income from dues.¹⁹ It is easy to see that the first four points dealt with land management as a means of raising the welfare of the peasants, and only the 5th and 6th points provided administrative support for the reform. It is all the more surprising that even before that, just a week after his memorable conversation with the tsar, Kiselev, in a note “Considerations on a note on the organization of state peasants and state property in general,” outlined a completely different vision of the reform: “If the ultimate goal of the whole thing is to organize state peasants, then the transfer of dues from people to the land is, of course, an important subject, but not the only one, and therefore economic land surveying is only part of the proposed organization … State peasants are obviously getting poorer… Such impoverishment does not occur only from the nondelimitation of the lands. The reason for this is the absence, firstly, of patronage, and secondly, of supervision. From lack of patronage, the peasants are burdened with illegal fees… From lack of observation, debauchery and drunkenness”.²⁰

The same approach was expressed even more clearly later in Kiselev’s comments on the proposal of his subordinate E.E. von Lode to move from the community to indivisible family plots. “The current order,” wrote Kiselev, “is not as bad as generally believed: it is entirely egalitarian in the villages, and … it is only desirable to convince the peasants to reduce the number of striped plots.” Here, in the spirit of Kankrin, Kiselev expresses fears that the collapse of the commune will entail the emergence of “an extensive class of landless peasants, which should not be allowed for political reasons.” The logical outcome of this approach was the idea that “the allocation, demarcation, and evaluation of land should be done by rural secular societies with the provision of their own distribution of per capita plots and the expansion of duties on them,” so that “the life of the peasants would not suddenly be disturbed.”²¹ However, this meant that the reform would stop just where, according to Speransky, it should have begun. Adhering to the strategy of egalitarian taxation within communities and between them, Kiselev proposed to transfer it to the level of accounting, changing not the principles of taxation but only the methods of distributing taxes. Technically, his approach was much easier to implement; however, most importantly, in the event of slippage, suspension, and even complete failure of the entire enterprise, the treasury did not risk anything.

Was such a rapid change in Kiselev’s position explained by his inherent political opportunism? It is difficult to answer this question unambiguously. Probably, like Kankrin, Kiselev preferred not to take risks, making the fate of his department directly dependent on the case, the nuances of which were completely unclear to him. Subsequently, it turned out that the new ministry was indeed unable to either rationalize the land use of state peasants, or fundamentally change the tax system. At the same time, all the land management initiatives of the MSP rested not only on the lack of the necessary resources but also on the deep doubts of Kiselev (and, ultimately, Nicholas I himself) about the possibility and need to change the foundations of everyday life for the peasants. As a result, the implementation of the most ambitious-sounding ideas, which may seem akin to the Stolypin program—on establishing family and hereditary land tenure and large-scale resettlement on vacant land—was reduced to emphatically modest experimental projects.²² Summing up their results in 1857, Kiselev explained their failure by the fact that among the peasantry there was little sympathy for the idea of hereditary family land use and “on the contrary, a continuous desire to accept division per capita.”²³ Perhaps this was the case, but the minister’s indecision played no less important.²⁴

Those undertakings that were carried out with greater perseverance, for example, the transfer of quitrent payments from people on the land, despite colossal costs and many years of effort, ended in nothing. As K.I. Domontovich, a former employee of Kiselev, not at all inclined to sweeping criticisms, later wrote: “The officials who made up the former evaluation commissions were not at all familiar with either this case or the life of the peasants; most of them have never seen the field… The main task, apparently, was to ensure that the cadastre was prepared as fast as possible … It was believed that the only, or at least the main, difficulty would be to measure the land.”²⁵ In fact, it turned out that the difficulties in assessing the allotments and incomes of state peasants were connected primarily with the nonmarket, subsistence nature of peasant farms. Applying concepts from the arsenal of classical political economy (income, profit, rent, etc.) to the communal economy turned out to be much more difficult than it seemed at first. In addition, according to the ironic observation of Domontovich, “zealous officials were constantly inventing something,” and all the more confused the whole matter, which required strict consistency.²⁶

However, despite these failures and the hesitations of the minister himself, some of his employees were still ready to resolutely impose rationalized forms of farming. This fact is all the more important because later many of them became members of the Editorial Commissions that prepared the Statutes on February 19, 1861. One of the prominent representatives of this cohort of officials, A.P. Zablotsky-Desyatovsky, in the early 1850s, when the transfer of dues to the land was already in full swing in the state village, presciently emphasized that this measure in itself would lead to nothing without changes in the “economic structure of the peasants,” primarily in the “way of owning land.” Moreover, the extensive growth of plowing without rationalization of land use can only lead to the impoverishment of the peasants. At one time, it was the General Land Survey, he insisted, that caused a sharp increase in agricultural production. However, it “provided only a solid foundation for the property of large landowners. The attitudes towards the land of the peasants remained the same. The farms and family plots planted by the MSP will only be oases in the sea of communal use, which the government "has so far not touched for fear of changing an age-old custom,” although “the peasants themselves, in most cases, even if not clearly aware [of the harm of the commune], they clearly feel it.” Based on this, Zablotsky proposed to prohibit the redistribution of land in the communes of state peasants, limiting the reform to partial equalization of allotments based on the results of each revision.²⁷

As we can see, as far as motivations were concerned, Zablotsky sounded almost like Stolypin. However, his modest initiative, like others like it, had no consequences. Moreover, in this very note of one of Kiselev’s most advanced employees, the same ambivalence is noticeable, which is easy to trace in the activities of the MSP in general. Until the end of the 1850s, the leaders of this department could not decide whether they want to equalize and compensate the economic situation of the peasants, or, conversely, encourage property stratification among them in the hope that it entails a general rise in farms and, accordingly, an increase in their capacity to pay taxes. Speransky leaned towards the latter approach, as shown above. In the late 1850s, M.N. Muravyev, Kiselev’s successor and persistent rival, was also close to him.

The period of Muravyev’s tenure as minister (1857–1861) fell in the years of the preparation and begining of implementation of the abolition of serfdom, and he himself, in addition to the MSP, also headed the Land Survey Department and the Department of the Crown Domains, thereby concentrating in his hands the leadership of all departments that were then related to peasant land management. If we recall that as a former director of the Department of Taxes and Duties of the Ministry of Finance, he was intimately familiar with tax problems, and it has to be admitted that it was Muravyev who was to become one of the key figures in the development of the government’s land management policy both in the state and in the landlord village. This is exactly what he himself thought, trying to promote a number of large projects.²⁸ Ultimately, however, none of his endeavors were successful.

Famous for his exuberant energy, the new minister still clearly did not keep up with the events, which occurred not at his ministry, but in a competing department, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and then at the Editorial Commission, a nondepartmental body that consisted not of dignitaries of the first rank but of people of the new generation, which irritated him. Muravyev lost the political battle on the peasant reform and less than a year after the abolition of serfdom he was dismissed. The land management projects he had started were stopped. Regardless of the general assessment of the Great Reform, it was clear that land management and taxation were its most poorly developed aspects. Let us try to figure out what could have been done in this area and why it was not possible to do this.

The following problems could be solved through land management: (1) based on the conditions of each locality, determine the normal size of the allotment to provide for the daily life of the peasants; (2) calculate the amount of duties (and, accordingly, the redemption loan) for this allotment based on its real value; (3) carry out a general allocation of land, separating the peasant allotment from the land remaining with the landowner and recording this procedure in special boundary plans; (4) regulate usufruct rights; (5) rationalize peasant land use (through the transition to the farm and allotment system). It may seem that these tasks were formulated somewhat abstractly. However, that was not the case. By the end of the 1850s, all of them had been repeatedly discussed at the highest levels of the administration in relation to each other. In fact the program formulated by Speransky was centered around these tasks.

The most important result of the implementation of such a program would be the individualization not only of peasant land tenure (to which Stolypin’s reform was later reduced) but also, no less importantly, the relations of peasants with the state. Both before and after the abolition of serfdom, the administration dealt almost exclusively with the volost and commune, which personified the peasant world, which was closed both to the authorities and to the educated elite as a whole. The rationalization of this world urgently required the destruction of the almost impenetrable border and the intrusion of agents of the authorities into the previously self-regulating life of traditional communities.

The materials of the Editorial Commissions contain considerable evidence that a rationalistic view of the future agrarian system and, accordingly, an idea of the enormous role of land management in the reform were taken for granted. Thus, in May 1859, the head of the commissions Ya.I. Rostovtsev predicted huge demand for land surveyors in the implementation of the reform. “Only with the rational development of long-term farming can we expect real success in our agriculture,” which was in line with the general opinion prevalent at that time²⁹. The “Note on land surveying means for enforcing the peasant situation,” written at about the same time, preserved in the archives related to Prince V.A. Cherkassky’s book, one of the main authors of the Statutes of February 19, considered the “compulsory participation of the government” in “defining private land property by permanent boundaries” useful and concluded that the implementation of the reform should be inextricably linked with the procedure for mandatory special land surveys of all landowners’ estates.³⁰ However, when it came to the implementation of these general ideas, it turned out that the obstacles that stood in their way were practically insurmountable. First, the government had neither the funds nor the time for complex and time-consuming land management procedures; secondly, the peasants themselves were not ready for them. It was easiest to reject the idea that the duties of the former serfs should correspond to the value of the land: this would ruin the landowners in many places “where the land is cheap.”³¹

The relative failure of the long-term, albeit, rather timid, attempts to established farms argued against the individualization of peasant land use. Note that in June 1857, Minister of the Interior S.S. Lanskoy (the Ministry of Internal Affairs was then the main engine of the reform), in one of his notes, was skeptical about the law of 1803 on free cultivators, because it involved dividing peasant land into parcels and drawing them in the boundary plans: “This rule is completely inconvenient to enforce and was drawn up with the apparent intention of introducing foreign farming … And what kind of costs does such a distribution of land mean for the landowner? .. As for the peasants, it can be said that they do not understand this order, they rightly fear it and, therefore, oppose it.”³² The editorial commissions later spoke out on this issue even more sharply, stating that “everyone knows the blind, sometimes even unreasonable aversion of the peasants to any change in land ownership."³³ Coupled with the generally recognized lack of trained surveyors, this meant that the allotment of land to households was out of the question.

Similarly, the commissions came to the conclusion that “the artificial determination of the allotment norm in each locality presents extreme difficulties and can be considered a completely unrealizable undertaking.” However, even if such a norm is calculated, it will be impossible to enforce it “everywhere and quickly” “due to the lack of surveying and cadastral means.” Of course, “these funds are also needed to establish the existing allotment for the peasants … but only to an incomparably lesser extent.”³⁴ Later, the Economic Department went even further, recognizing that making the redemption of peasant and landowner lands a condition for the redemption of allotments would simply mean “preventing their redemption.”³⁵

This largely a priori line was partly contradicted by the attempts of the commissions themselves to figure out how many land surveyors and topographers there were in the state service (no one tried to count the number of private practitioners). It turned out that there were many: 1054 people were registered in the Land Survey Department; 382, in the MSP; 223, in the Forestry Department; and another 113, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As a result, it was concluded that these funds were “quite sufficient” for the implementation of the reform³⁶ (by that time, however, the commission had abandoned any large-scale projects such as general land surveying).

One way or another, the land management aspect of the abolition of serfdom was reduced in the “Regulations” to the separation of peasant allotments from the lands remaining with the landowner. This involved the following operations: (1) initial approval of the allotment (its designation and then verification when it was approved by the arbitrator; (2) the final delimitation of allotments³⁷ with the inevitable exchange of land; and (3) relocation of peasants’ houses. There were virtually no technical requirements for the first operation: the initial allocation could be done without any measurement, approximately, while the verification measurement was allowed only in case of disputes; it was optional, and furthermore, it could be done by domestic instruments (using a pole and a chain or roughly according to the volume of sown grain and cut grass). Clearly these measurements could not be considered accurate. Another six years were allotted for the “final delimitation”; however, it was not compulsory and was not associated with the transition to buying the land.³⁸

As we can see, even within the framework of a narrow understanding of land management as a definition of mutual land rights of landowners and peasants, the requirements of the law for it were extremely limited, at best. This was even more so for the ambitious land management tasks. The actual refusal of the authors of the “Regulations” to attempt to solve or even to place them in the context of the abolition of serfdom clearly cannot be explained only by the weakness of the available land survey funds. More fundamental reasons included the lack of time and lack of confidence in the efficiency of the bureaucratic machine, which proved unreliable during Kiselev’s experiments. This is despite the fact that it would have required enormous administrative resources to resolve tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of disputed cases (which, for example, would have been necessarily resulted from more stringent deployment requirements).

The fashionable decentralizing ideology, demanding that the government minimize the “petty regulation” of local life, also played its role. Thus, the Administrative Department of the Editorial Commissions insisted on “possibly greater elimination of the influence of government administration on communal affairs,”³⁹ and it was this view that formed the base of the peasant self-government created by the reform. In unison with this rather contradictory theory of “bureaucratic decentralization,” Slavophile ideas about the inadmissibility of “forced interference” in the “natural” life of peasant communities were also heard in this case.

However, perhaps, the most important reason that allowed progressive officials to reconcile, on the one hand, the bureaucrats, who were not at all inclined to unconditionally reject everything that they learned at the MSP and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and on the other hand, Slavophiles (Yu.F. Samarin and Cherkassky), was the common desire for both of them to secure an allotment land fund for the peasantry. To do this, it was necessary to minimize the possibility of encroachment not only by the landowners and the state but also by the peasants (who, as soon as the allotments were individualized, could voluntarily or involuntarily lose them). The purpose of the commissions was to protect rural communities as much as possible from various influences, including those that, in theory, seemed beneficial to many supporters of rational forms of land use. Thus, remaining in an indivisible, consolidated state and having an indefinite status in civil law, the communal lands played the role of a symbol of a peasant “settlement” and hence of social.

Quite visibly, this approach manifested itself, in particular, in a later note on the impossibility of regulating the “fragmentation of landed peasant property”, drawn up in the second half of the 1860s in the Main Committee for the Peasant Affairs. “With communal ownership, even an insignificant per capita allotment, when combined into a common holding, represents a significant landowning unit, which, on the one hand, can take an equal place with a large property in economic terms, and on the other hand, for each family represents a solid base for meeting their immediate needs. The same dacha, divided into many small plots, loses most of its value. In general, most of the plots formed from the division of communal holdings will be so insignificant that they will not satisfy the existing requirement of each plot to serve as a provision for a working family.”⁴⁰ Thus, the whole (community) appeared to be clearly greater than the sum of its parts. Note that the same logic underlay the idea of a cooperative. The obvious difference between the community and the cooperative was that the latter had to be a voluntary association, freed from fiscal and administrative functions.⁴¹

Thus, the reform as a complex process of settling the peasants and “divorcing” them from the landowners was transferred to the level of rural communities and estates (charters and redemption documents were often drawn up for several villages of the same owner). This approach made it possible to reduce the volume of office work by an order of magnitude, to rely on the existing rich (although not entirely positive) experience of using peasant self-government for tax, statistical, and administrative purposes, and to postpone the solution of many land management and also legal problems related to the status of peasant lands. As a result, the former serfs were endowed with the title of “peasant owners” not from the moment the redemption operation was completed, when the land, in theory, should have become their property, but from the moment the redemption transaction was concluded. This was despite the fact that the legal status of the lands of such owners remained extremely uncertain for several reasons. First, until the redemption loan is paid, the land remained mortgaged to the state that issued the loan; secondly, in the redemption documents and in the charters, the rural communities and not the households figured as the subject of the land tenure and counterparty of the landowner and the state; thirdly, even in the case of household posession, the household plots were interspersed and did not have boundaries registered in any documents.

Although minimized in the February 19 Statutes, the expected volume of land management work initially frightened both the central and local authorities. Therefore, their requirements had to be further simplified. On July 27, 1861, a new Regulation of the Main Committee “On the procedure for land surveying” was approved for implementing the statutes of February 19, which explicitly stated that “the delimitation of peasant lands through instrumental land surveying is not a necessary condition for allocating land to peasants for use or for purchase” and can be “produced subsequently.”⁴²

Under serfdom, landlords very rarely cared about the internal surveying of estates; however, when a massive need arose to determine the size and boundaries of peasant allotments to draw up statutory certificates (the Statue allowed only two years for the introduction of the certificates), the demand for state land surveyors at first greatly exceeded their number. In vain, the Ministry of Internal Affairs explained that during the initial allocation of allotments, no official “verification actions are expected,” and therefore private land surveyors would be sufficient to draw up the statutory allotment certificates. There were also few of the latter, and they did not enjoy the trust of either the peasants or the owners, both because of their low professionalism and because the plans they drew up were not an official document.⁴³

However, the demand for land surveyors fell sharply in 1862. As a result, for example, topographers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were released from their main duties and seconded to the provincial presences on peasant affairs, and in some places were left without work at all. A completely paradoxical, seemingly incredible situation had developed: the implementation of the reform was in full swing and the land issue was the most important part of this reform; however, it was somehow solved without measuring the land itself. The local authorities reported that many landowners, especially small ones, “refuse to invite land surveyors due to a lack of funds.” In the common and interspersed estates, it was generally not possible to measure peasant lands before the land was demarcated between the owners.⁴⁴ However, these circumstances do not fully explain the surprising passivity of both the landlords and the peasants, who, apparently, did not particularly strive for a “civilized land divorce.”

Why? Since this was not required by law, both sides preferred not to get involved in complex boundary operations. Theoretically, both of them should have been interested in a clear designation of their land and consolidating it into one dacha; moreover, the landlords were interested in this as much as the peasants. Suffice it to say that when selling privately owned land, a certificate was required that it was not included in the peasant allotment, which was sometimes difficult to obtain without formal surveyng.⁴⁵ However, in practice, this process itself meant inevitable disputes, costs, and an unclear result, where the drawbacks could easily outweigh the advantages. It was not an inviting task to untie the knot and only the state could cut it. However, the state did not dare take drastic measures.

As a result, according to the Ministry of Justice, by 1877 the following picture was observed in terms of the redemption of peasant lands from the landowners: out of a total of 80 957 approved redemption transactions (over 25.3 million acres), only 13 956 (17.2%) were completed. However, out of this small number, the government approved plans for only 2812 transactions (another 1236 were recognized as correct and were in the process of being approved). Plans for 4172 transactions were found to be incorrect; plans for 3709 transactions, had still not been certified; and plans for 2027 transactions, “could not be executed.” The latter meant that the borders indicated in the text of the redemption agreement and/or on the plan attached to it did not correspond to the real situation to such an extent that attempts to link one with the other led state topographers to a dead end.⁴⁶ One of the reasons for the enormous percentage of failures (more than 60%) was the unprofessionalism of the private land surveyors involved in the preparation of charters and redemption acts.⁴⁷ Another, no less important, reason lay in the excessive formalism of those legal procedures that, according to the law, had to be observed when demarcating any land holdings.

There is every reason to believe that the percentage of developed estates, where the peasants did not reach the redemption agreement with their former owner, was even lower. In any case, in the late 1880s, one of the official documents stated that “at present, only about 13% of the total number” of peasant plots have been formally delimited, and documents on the delimitations made are extremely unreliable.⁴⁸ In fact, in the late 1860s, the expansion process stopped both quantitatively and qualitatively. A particularly acute situation developed in the South Western Region (Ukraine), where not communal but household peasant land ownership was predominant, and there were great difficulties with the liquidation of the usufruct rights. According to D. Beauvois, by 1870 (the six-year period set for redistribution at the request of the parties expired in 1869) 80.4% of the estates in the Kyiv, Podolsk, and Volyn provinces were still not demarcated; moreover, this was largely due to the fact that “the authorities were afraid of possible conflicts.”⁴⁹

Thanks to the materials of the senatorial revision of A.A. Polovtsov (1880), we have the opportunity to judge how the process of demarcation took place here in the 1870s. In Kyiv province, by 1870, 1536 undemarcated estates remained (out of a total of 2057). Over the next ten years, the procedure (it was carried out by private land surveyors) affected only 129 new estates. However, “when examining all the cases received, the provincial drawing office found it possible to approve only 3 estates with the state seal.” The demarcation work had to be redone at public expense. By 1880, out of 512 disputed cases that had arisen since 1861, 186 had been resolved, but by that time the development in the region had to be stopped due to mass peasant unrest. The local peasants believed that land surveying was a type of conspiracy among landowners to deprive them of the right to the additional allotment of land, rumors about which circulated throughout Ukraine.⁵⁰ As a result, conservative public opinion began to look at the demarcation as a means to put an end to hopes for a “Black Repartition”: “Only intensified land surveying, and, moreover, general, continuous, in a strictly circular order … so that the population sees in it a government order, and not the satisfaction of landlords’ requests, as it were through hired surveyors … can put an end to the unrealizable hopes that have arisen about the redistribution of land.”⁵¹

It is worth noting that from the end of the 1860s the zemstvos actively petitioned for general and mandatory state measurement and delimitation of all lands. Again, at a new level, a deep connection between land management and taxation was revealed. Faced with colossal difficulties in the vital task of taxing agricultural land (land taxes accounted for the bulk of zemstvo revenues), the local self-government tried to measure, survey, and tax land on its own, but quickly became convinced that this was unrealistic without centralized measures.⁵² However, until the end of the 1880s, the government systematically denied all applications to this effect.⁵³ As early as 1866, Muravyev’s successor in charge of the Land Survey Department, I.M. Gedeonov, categorically stated that “verification of the quality and quantity of land has nothing to do with the purpose of state land surveying” and “concerning only the private goals of the zemstvo, should be carried out by private means.”⁵⁴ Formally, he was right, although the desire to preserve the outdated procedures of the General and Special Land Surveys in the 1860s appeared to be an incredible anachronism.⁵⁵ Admittedly, while rejecting zemstvo petitions, the government nevertheless had to try to organize the collection of information about the quantity and quality of land itself. The corresponding project was developed in 1872 at the Ministry of Finance, but became stuck at the departmental approval stage. A second attempt to resolve this issue in 1882 again revealed the glaring imperfection of the existing system (for example, in Kharkov province alone, according to the allotment books, there were 2 million fewer acres of land than according to the topographic survey). But this time, too, the discussion came to a standstill, because it was not clear who and at whose expense should produce the cadastre. Only in 1893 were the rules for the production of appraisal work in the zemstvo provinces adopted, which gave local self-government significant autonomy in this matter. However, the cadastre at the provincial level again turned out to be a utopia due to the inconsistency of the rules and approaches, as well as lack of funding. As a result, in 1913, a specially created interdepartmental meeting stated that “the evaluation work is still very far from completion.”⁵⁶ Ironically, the works were planned to be finished by 1917… This was the sad result of the prerevolutionary land cadastre.

The land survey department was also well aware of the shortcomings of the organization of “land affairs” in the empire. The first postreform attempt to modernize the principles and institutions of land surveying took place in the 1860s. Officials of the Land Survey Department rightly believed that the liberation of the peasants and the allocation of land to them further “complicated and extremely confused” the difficult rules of land surveying.⁵⁷ However, they did not dare to insist on any radical measures for the unification of land management procedures, proposing only to somewhat simplify and harmonize the existing norms. However, these proposals were also criticized.⁵⁸ The head of the Second Department of H.I.M.O.C. and Secretary of State, Prince S.N. Urusov, insisted that the obsolete “principle of guardianship” should be completely eliminated in land boundary cases, extending to them the “principle of private initiative.” In practice, this meant the absence of nationwide measures and serious funding.

The impotence of the government was clearly manifested, for example, in Gedeonov’s frank, to the point of naivety, conclusion on the demarcation of landowners’ and peasants’ lands in common and interspersed estates (see above). Having figured out how best to solve this puzzling problem within the framework of existing laws, he wrote in despair: “Any attempt to resolve this issue in a definitive way will complicate and confuse it even more … and any precisely defined measure … can cause new difficulties that otherwise might never have arisen … The most fundamental thing is to leave the solution to the passage of time and the natural course of circumstances, which should remove in a practical way obstacles that are insurmountable for legislation.” This strange laissez faire and laissez passer manifesto ended with an even stranger and wilder conclusion from the head of the land surveying department: “The peasants will not be offended. When the survey takes place, they, as owners of their own land, for which they paid money, will take it in full; and therefore attention should not be paid to the accuracy, formality, or immutability of documents on the size of allotments.”⁵⁹ By 1917, land surveying never reached many villages, and the peasants in the end really “took it in full”: both theirs’ and others’ …

Few in the higher administration levels were as outspoken as Gideonov. However, delving into the government’s position on peasant land management, one involuntarily comes to the conclusion that it was based on the “principle of non-action” formulated by him. It got to the point that from the Code of Laws of 1876, by decision of the Main Committee on Peasant Affairs, the rules for land surveying were excluded at all (although no one canceled them).⁶⁰ In 1880, the Ministry of Justice recognized that the delimitation of peasant allotments “constitutes not only the final completion of the peasant reform but also a pressing demand of practical life.” However, the new rules drafted in in 1880–1883 were never approved: the recent peasant unrest and the change in the domestic political course did not favor the solution of painful issues. However, this project, while recognizing that land management was not a private but a public matter, and as a general and mandatory measure, it “would be very useful and would prevent many difficulties in the future,” still left it as optional.⁶¹ As a result, until the end of the century, the rules and norms excluded from the Code of Laws, approved as early as 1861 and clearly outdated, were considered valid. To be sure, the landowners themselves often opposed redistribution, fearing that it would provoke new peasant protests, and called for maintaining the status quo.⁶²

However, compared to the 1860s–1870s, in the subsequent 20 years, there was a clear change in the approach to the meaning of peasant land management. If previously peasant allotments were recognized, albeit, purely theoretically, as the same object of land management as privately owned lands, at this point in time, an almost insurmountable abyss had opened up between the two categories of lands in the view of the higher state administration.

In official documents, it was admitted as a matter of course that “the concept of personal property is completely alien to the conditions of life of the indigenous rural population,” and “communal ownership … represents such features that have nothing to do with those forms of land ownership and the conditions for its acquisition which are established by the general civil laws.”⁶³

Rationalistic ideas about “land matters,” which had been struggling to make their way for more than a century, suddenly turned out to be inapplicable to millions of peasants. However, by that time it was clear that the specificity of these cases made it pointless to introduce them only on privately owned lands, without affecting peasant allotments. This meant that the general land management in the Russian countryside, which had already stalled, would actually be stopped.

The next (and last in the prerevolutionary era) attack on it took place in the course of the Stolypin reform. It is characteristic, however, that land management tasks, according to George Yaney and K. Matsuzato (see note 1), were clearly not a priority in the Stolypin program at first. The ultimate goal of the reform was in the realm of politics (the transformation of the peasant masses from being a threat into a support of the existing regime), and not in law, economics, or administration. It was not immediately apparent during the implementation of the initial program that general land management, rather than the destruction of the community and the “farmization of the whole country,” was the necessary condition for its success and the core of the new agrarian course. However, even after that, the peasant allotment fund continued to be the main object of land management procedures. It can be said that the Stolypin reform remained a peasant reform without becoming agrarian.

The question that so often arises today as to why political priorities constantly push infrastructural reforms into the background in Russia can be considered rhetorical. However, the question why the ruling elites see a threat to their existence in anything but archaic infrastructure is a more interesting one. The answer to it, as the materials analyzed in this article show, is apparently worth looking for primarily in the social stereotypes inherent in these elites and their ideas about the tasks of power. The latter have never reached that degree of rationalistic impersonality, which would allow them to see the most important factor of social stability in the development of legal and administrative technologies.