According to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, adopted in 1993, local autonomy is one of the fundamental principles of the constitutional system. The Politics of Local Government in Russia aims to provide a dedicated and comprehensive discussion of the pursuit of local self-government in contemporary Russia where "local" refers to the third tier of government beyond federal and regional governments. Some of the ablest scholars in the field focus on the existing institutional and social climate for municipal and district level government in Russia while placing recent reforms in a comparative and historical perspective.

Modern Russian history began with the "Great Reforms" of 1861-4 which emancipated the serfs and introduced public self-government to assist the state in managing rural administration and change. In this capacity, peasant and zemstvo self-government, established partly on the basis of Western administrative theory, was important to the solvency of the entire state, autocracy's political evolution, and the fate of the rural gentry, peasants, and townspeople. This book is the first full-scale account of the development of rural self-government from the "Great Reforms" to its bureaucratization in the counterreforms of 1889-90 and their implementation during the following decade. Drawing on a wide range of archival material in Moscow and Leningrad, Pearson pinpoints the concrete problems that Russian officials experienced in introducing rural self-government, and shows that the land captain and zemstvo counterreforms, like the earlier "Great Reforms," resulted from practical statist considerations.

Modern Russian history began with the "Great Reforms" of 1861-4 which emancipated the serfs and introduced public self-government to assist the state in managing rural administration and change. In this capacity, peasant and zemstvo self-government, established partly on the basis of Western administrative theory, was important to the solvency of the entire state, autocracy's political evolution, and the fate of the rural gentry, peasants, and townspeople. This book is the first full-scale account of the development of rural self-government from the "Great Reforms" to its bureaucratization in the counterreforms of 1889-90 and their implementation during the following decade. Drawing on a wide range of archival material in Moscow and Leningrad, Pearson pinpoints the concrete problems that Russian officials experienced in introducing rural self-government, and shows that the land captain and zemstvo counterreforms, like the earlier "Great Reforms," resulted from practical statist considerations.