same time had less land to cultivate for themselves. State peasants, although by no means prosperous, received, on the whole, better terms than did the serfs of private owners.
The financial arrangement proved unrealistic and impossible to execute. Although liberated serfs kept meeting as best they could the heavy redemption payments, which were not related to their current income, the arrears
kept mounting. By the time the redemption payments were finally abolished in 1905, former serfs paid, counting the interest, one and one half billion rubles for the land initially valued at less than a billion. It should be noted that while officially the serfs were to redeem only the land, not their persons, actually the payments included a concealed recompense for the loss of serf labor. Thus, more had to be paid for the first unit of land, the first desiatina, than for the following units. As a whole the landlords of southern Russia received 340 million rubles for land valued at 280 million; those of northern Russia, where obrok prevailed, 340 million rubles for land worth 180 million rubles. The suspect Polish and Polonized landlords of the western provinces constituted an exception, for they were given slightly less money than the just price of their land.
The transfer of land in most areas to peasant communes rather than to individual peasants probably represented another major error, although this is an extremely complex issue. Arguments in favor of the commune ranged from the Slavophile admiration of the moral aspects of that institution to the desire on the part of the government to have taxes and recruits guaranteed by means of communal responsibility and to the assertion that newly liberated peasants would not be able to maintain themselves but could find protection in the commune. While some of these and other similar claims had a certain validity - indeed, as a practical matter the government could hardly have been expected to break up the commune at the same time the serfs were being freed - the disadvantages of the commune outweighed its advantages. Of most importance was the fact that the commune tended to perpetuate backwardness, stagnation, and overpopulation in the countryside precisely when Russian agriculture drastically needed improvement and modernization.
The emancipation reform disappointed Russian radicals, who considered it inadequate, and it also, apparently, failed to satisfy the peasantry, or at least many peasants, for a rash of agrarian disturbances followed the abolition of serfdom, and the misery, despair, and anger in the countryside remained a powerful threat to imperial Russia until the very end of imperial rule.
The emancipation of the serfs made other fundamental changes much more feasible. Alexander II and his assistants turned next to the reform of local government, to the establishment of the so-called zemstvo system. For centuries local government had remained a particularly weak aspect of Russian administration and life. The arrangement that the 'Tsar-Liberator' inherited dated from Catherine the Great's legislation and combined bu-
reaucratic management with some participation by the local gentry; the considerable manorial jurisdiction of the landlords on their estates formed another prominent characteristic of the pre-reform countryside. The new law, enacted in January 1864, represented a strong modernization and democratization of local government, as well as a far-reaching effort on the part of the state to meet the many pressing needs of rural Russia and to do this largely by stimulating local initiative and activity. Institutions of self-government, zemstvo assemblies and boards, were created at both the district and provincial levels - the word zemstvo itself connotes land, country, or people, as distinct from the central government. The electorate of the district zemstvo assemblies consisted of three categories: the towns, the peasant communes, and all individual landowners, including those not from the gentry. Representation was proportional to landownership, with some allowance for the possession of real estate in towns. The elections were indirect. Members of district assemblies, in turn, elected from their own midst, regardless of class, delegates to their provincial assembly. Whereas the district and provincial zemstvo assemblies, in which the zemstvo authority resided, met only once a year to deal with such items as the annual budget and basic policies, they elected zemstvo boards to serve continuously as the executive agencies of the system and to employ professional staffs. A variety of local needs fell under the purview of zemstvo institutions: education, medicine, veterinary service, insurance, roads, the establishment of food reserves for emergency, and many others.
The zemstvo system has legitimately been criticized on a number of counts. For example, for a long time it encompassed only the strictly Russian areas of the empire, some thirty-four provinces, not the borderlands. Also, it possessed a limited, many would say insufficient, right to tax. In broader terms, it represented merely a junior partner to the central government, which retained police and much administrative control in the countryside; a governor could in various ways interfere with the work of a zemstvo, but not vice versa. The smallest zemstvo unit, the district, proved too large for effective and prompt response to many popular needs, and the desirability of further zemstvo subdivision soon became apparent. The democracy of the system too had its obvious limitations: because they owned much land, members of the gentry were very heavily represented in the district assemblies, and even more so in the provincial assemblies and the zemstvo boards, where education, leisure, and means to cover the expenses incurred favored gentry delegates. Thus, according to one count, the gentry generally held 42 per cent of the district assembly seats, 74 per cent of the seats in the provincial assemblies, and 62 per cent of the positions on the zemstvo boards. Yet, even such a system constituted a great step toward democracy for autocratic and bureaucratic Russia. It might be added that
the zemstvo institutions functioned effectively also in those areas, such as large parts of the Russian north, where there were no landlords and where peasants managed the entire system of local self-government.
Yet, in spite of its deficiencies - and it should be noted that most of the above-mentioned criticisms refer in one way or another to the insufficient extent of the reform and not to substantive defects in it - the zemstvo system accomplished much for rural Russia from its establishment in 1864 until its demise in 1917. Especially valuable were its contributions to public education and health. In effect, Russia obtained a kind of socialized medicine through the zemstvo long before other countries, with medical and surgical treatment available free of charge. As G. Fischer and other scholars have indicated, the zemstvo system also served, contrary to the intentions of the government, as a school for radicalism and especially liberalism which found little opportunity for expression on the national, as distinct from local, scene until the events of 1905 and 1906.
In 1870 a municipal reform reorganized town government and applied to towns many of the principles and practices of the zemstvo administration. The new town government, which was 'to take care of and administer urban economy and welfare,' consisted of a town council and a town administrative board elected by the town council. The town council was elected by all property owners or taxpayers; but the election was according to a three-class system, which gave the small group on top that paid a third of the total taxes a third of the total number of delegates, the middle taxpayers another third, and the mass at the bottom that accounted for the last third of taxes the remaining third of delegates.
At the end of 1864, the year that saw the beginning of the zemstvo administration, another major change was enacted into law: the reform of the legal system. The Russian judiciary needed reform probably even more than the local government did. Archaic, bureaucratic, cumbersome, corrupt, based on the class system rather than on the principle of equality before the law, and relying entirely on a written and secret procedure, the old system was thoroughly hated by informed and thinking Russians. Butashe-vich-Petrashevsky and other radicals attached special importance to a reform of the judiciary. A conservative, the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, reminisced: 'The old court! At the mere recollection of it one's hair stands on end and one's flesh begins to creep!' The legislation of 1864 fortunately marked a decisive break with that part of the Russian past.
The most significant single aspect of the reform was the separation of the courts from the administration. Instead of constituting merely a part of the bureaucracy, the judiciary became an independent branch of government. Judges were not to be dismissed or transferred, except by court action. Judicial procedure acquired a largely public and oral character instead of the former bureaucratic secrecy. The contending parties were to present their
cases in court and have adequate legal support. In fact, the reform virtually created the class of lawyers in Russia, who began rapidly to acquire great public prominence. Two legal procedures, the general and the abbreviated one, replaced the chaos of twenty-one alternate ways to conduct a case. Trial by jury was introduced for serious criminal offenses, while justices of the peace were established to deal with minor civil and criminal cases. The courts were organized into a single unified system with the Senate at the apex. All Russians were to be
