Table Of ContentImagining Russian Regions
Russian History and Culture
Editors-in-Chief
Jeffrey P. Brooks (The Johns Hopkins University)
Christina Lodder (University of Kent)
Volume 19
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc
Imagining Russian Regions
Subnational Identity and Civil Society in
Nineteenth-Century Russia
By
Susan Smith-Peter
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: “Vladimir on the Kliazma” by Andrei Martynov, in his Zhivopisnoe puteshestvie ot Moskvy
do kitaiskoi granitsy [Picturesque Voyage from Moscow to the Chinese Border.] St. Petersburg, 1819. Courtesy
of The New York Public Library.
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LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017033472
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ISSN 1877-7791
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Maps ix
Maps x
Introduction: Imagining Russian Regions 1
1 The Imperial Logic of Russian Space 23
2 The Era of Small Reforms: The Rise of a Non-Noble Provincial Identity
under Nicholas I 60
3 What Should Rural Russia Be?: The Shift from Paternalism to
Abolitionism among the Russian Nobility, 1830s–50s 135
4 Former Serfs and Masters United by Shared Property Rights:
Hegel and the Case for a New Rural Civil Society 174
5 Centralization and Its Discontents: The Clash between the State
and the Followers of the Hegelian Idea of Civil Society 219
Conclusion: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-
Century Russia 284
Bibliography 291
Index 314
Acknowledgments
Like civil society in Russia, this book has had a long gestation period. It has
thus incurred many debts. I received funding to do the original research in
Vladimir from IREX and Fulbright-Hays, and I am particularly grateful for these
programs providing me with an extended time in the archives in Vladimir.
Other funding sources for this research came from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Rutgers University, several PSC-CUNY Research Awards,
and a Fulbright Research Award. At various times, the Rutgers Center for
Historical Analysis, and the Institute for Research on Women, both at Rutgers
University, and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study
of Russia provided me with a place to write and engaging intellectual circles.
I am grateful to the staff at the State Historical Archive of Vladimir Region,
particularly Nina Ivanovna Diatlova, Natalia Maksimova, the late Georgii
Ovchinnikov, and Tatiana Pugina. Their friendship and mentoring means
a great deal to me. In addition, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kozvun, of the
Vladimir regional library, has been a wonderful source of local knowledge.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I benefited from having
Mark Steinberg and Diane Koenker as my advisors and from the incredibly rich
resources of the library there, along with the excellent librarians such as Helen
Sullivan and Larry Miller and my fellow graduate students.
David Moon was an ideal reader of this manuscript and his patient and
kind support was crucial to its completion. Eric Ivison has helped me to revise
the manuscript and has been an outstanding colleague and friend. Alexander
Martin also provided encouragement and a critical eye. Katherine Pickering
Antonova and Sergei Antonov have been good friends and readers of the
manuscript. Anne Lounsbery has shared her own work and our discussions
have helped me shape my own. Yanni Kotsonis helped me to see the big pic-
ture of how my work fits into the larger field. I would also like to thank the
participants at the Russian History Workshop at Columbia and the Columbia
Seminar in Slavic History and Culture for comments on drafts of this work,
particularly Richard Wortman, Nathaniel Knight, Jane Burbank, Cynthia
Whittaker, Elizabeth Valkenier and Irina Reyfman. David Lutzer provided sup-
port and encouragement.
At the College of Staten Island, I would like to thank my colleagues and office
staff. The college has provided an intellectual home for me and has supported
my work. Former Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Nan Sussman pro-
vided me with financial support that was important for finishing the revisions
of the book. I would also like to thank Jeff Brooks, series editor of the Russian
viii acknowledgments
History and Culture, for his encouragement of this project, as well as Brill’s
subject editor for Slavic studies Ivo Romein and the anonymous reviewers
of this manuscript. Madeleine Adams and Jan Nichols were excellent editors
of my work as well.
Passages from some of my published articles appear in chapters one to
three. Permission has been granted by the editors and publishers of Canadian-
American Slavic Studies, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European
Studies, History of Science, Library History (now Library and Information
History), Vestnik MGGU im. M.A. Sholokhova: Seriia Istoriia i Politologiia,
Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie. (Full references to the articles may be found in
the relevant chapters.) Susan Smith-Peter, “Defining the Russian People:
Konstantin Arsen’ev and Russian Statistics before 1861, History of Science 45, 1
(2007): 47–64. Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications. Reprinted by permission of
SAGE Publications, http://journals.sagepub.com/home/hosa.
I would like to thank my family—my father, mother, sister and nephew—for
everything.
List of Maps
1 The Russian Empire in 1825 [after Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and
Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930
(Bloomington, IN, 2007), p. xiv with additions.] x
2 Provinces of European Russia [after Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian
Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford, 1967), p. 769 with additions.] xi
3 Vladimir province in the nineteenth century [after Katherine Pickering
Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in
Provincial Russia (Oxford, 2013), p. xviii with additions.] xii
4 Vladimir town map in the nineteenth century [after T.P. Timofeeva
and V.P. Mashkovtsev, Dnes’ svetlo krasuetsia: Vladimir v staroi otkrytke
(Vladimir, 1993), 14–15 with additions.] xiii
5 Iur’ev-Pol’skii town map in 1806 [after G.G. Mozgova et al., Gorod Sv.
Georgiia: Iur’ev-Pol’skii v staroi otkrytke (Vladimir, 2002), 254 with
additions.] xiv
