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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