As he examines administrative reform of Russian rural local
government between the abolition of serfdom and World War I,
Francis William Wcislo takes as his theme the repeated attempts of
tsarist statesmen to restructure the most critical mediating link
between the autocratic state and a rapidly modernizing agrarian
society. His broader objective, however, is to use the issue of
autocratic politics to probe the character and evolution of
bureaucratic mentalit in this period.
Wcislo links the social, psychological, ideological, and
institutional nexus of the bureaucracy with its social
underpinnings in rural society and lays bare the connections of the
bureaucratic world with its traditional social base among the
service nobility and the peasantry. Placing the conflicting views
of officials within the context of the two political cultures of
old regime society, he shows how bureaucratic reformers anxious to
promote civic culture were undermined by defenders of traditional
autocracy and the society of service estates (soslovie) with which
that autocracy had coexisted. This defense of tradition and the
resulting failure of reformist initiatives were fundamental to the
crisis of Russia in the early twentieth century.
Originally published in 1990.
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