Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late
imperial Russia, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive
study. Destroying almost three billion rubles' worth of property in
European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted
as a brake on Russia's economic development while subjecting peasants to
perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire
question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who
came to perceived it as a key obstacle to Russia's becoming a modern
society in the European model.
Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper
articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates
the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To
peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a
destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of
wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used
arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those
who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority
of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts
of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of "self-help" law or plain
spite.
Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire
question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern
world. Fire insurance, building codes, "scientific" village layouts, and
volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings
consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing
the number of fires each year.
More than anything else, this history of fire and arson in rural
European Russia is a history of their cultural meanings in the late
imperial campaign for modernity. Frierson shows the special associations
of women with fire in rural life and in elite understanding of fire in
the Russian countryside. Her study of the fire question demonstrates
both peasant agency in fighting fire and educated Russians' hardening
conviction that peasants stood in the way of Russia's advent into the
company of prosperous, rational, civilized nations.
