In functional and organisational terms, the zemstvo assemblies can be called institutions of the state and society. To a significant degree, the zemstvos, like the noble assemblies, represented an arm of government. They delivered public health services and elementary education, built roads and bridges and even provided famine relief. The zemstvos also remained subject to bureaucratic oversight, and they possessed no independent legislative authority. At the same time, however, the state-society relationship that the zemstvos made possible clearly contributed to the emergence of Russian civil society. If a politically organised civil society were to flourish in late Imperial Russia, the people of the empire needed to be incorporated into the everyday operations of government. They needed to be linked in a positive relationship to political authority. In contrast to what the intelligentsia ethos might suggest, effective civil societies limit the power of government not by disengaging from or opposing constituted authority but by sharing in its exercise, and if need be challenging specific policies, from a position of institutional autonomy. The zemstvos surely represented this potential, embodying both society's struggle for independent authority within the Russian polity and the integration of politically organised society into institutions of government.
If the raznochintsy revealed the capacity of ordinary Russians to fashion economic and social relationships outside official controls, and if identification with the intelligentsia effectively distinguished the educated classes from the educated service classes, the professions created a social environment in which the educated classes became connected to the needs of everyday life and ordinary people. Given the absence of autonomous guild structures in Russia, the professions originated in government-directed occupational training and specialisation.[41] Traditionally, teachers, physicians, midwives, medical orderlies, statisticians, agronomists, veterinarians, architects and engineers worked as state servicemen under military or civil administration. Yet as in so many areas of Russian life, conditions changed following the peasant emancipation. The establishment of the zemstvos allowed a significant number of professionals to find employment outside state institutions. This relative autonomy encouraged them to see in professional work a form of service to the nation rather than the government. Armed with scientific knowledge and technical expertise, professionals began to claim authority over the organisation of training and services. A small group of activists - a group that straddled the intelligentsia - joined professional organisations and became socially delineated from their rank-and-file colleagues. When the government disappointed the expectations of these activists, denying them a role as expert consultants to policy-makers, they joined zemstvo and business leaders in open political opposition.37
The experience of public sector physicians (in the late nineteenth century about three-quarters of all physicians) illustrates the pattern.[42] Prior to the Great Reforms, physicians belonged to an official medical soslovie educated and employed by the state; however, beginning in the 1860s, the establishment of medical organisations and the articulation of a service ethic heralded the emergence of a distinct professional identity. Increasingly, physicians claimed authority over public health, and increasingly they felt frustrated by bureaucratic interference and popular indifference. By 1902, physicians and other medical professionals entered the political opposition with demands for social reform and broad civil rights. But like other professionals and paraprofessionals in the revolutionary era, physicians proved unable to sustain a unified political challenge or achieve control over licensing, medical ethics, education, employment and association. Lacking significant social recognition, the politicised among them joined the liberal or radical intelligentsia, while the majority lapsed into political apathy or avoided politics altogether.
When a national political movement appeared among professionals in August 1903, leading to the formation of a Union of Unions in early 1905, an activist minority became involved in the organisation of local unions and all- Russian congresses that demanded social andpolitical change. Still, throughout the revolutionary crisis of 1905-7, political oppositionists never predominated in any of the professions. At the height of its influence in 1905-6, the All- Russian Teachers Union had no more than 14,000 members, and many of these neglected to pay their dues. Membership in the Union of All-Russian Medical Personnel peaked in August 1905 with a total of no more than 25,000 members out of close to 79,000 certified medical practitioners.[43] Geographic distance, inadequate communications and outright poverty made it difficult for rural schoolteachers and medical practitioners - groups that directly served the Russian people - to maintain translocal organisational ties or provide basic professional services. The lack of professional unity, at the very moment when concessions from the monarchy allowed activists to organise in an unprecedented manner, provided telling evidence of the social and political fragmentation in Russian educated society.
Political repression surely played a role in weakening organisational ties, even after 1905; however, the fragility of professional bonds also resulted from the gap between highly educated, socially elite professionals on the one hand and uncertified protoprofessionals or less educated paraprofessionals on the other. In the most visible professions ofthe late nineteenth century - medicine, teaching and law - non-politicised and less educated specialists, working in local communities, could be difficult to distinguish from the populations they served. Over the objections of activist elites, these rank-and-file professionals were also more likely to co-operate with uncertified practitioners, a relationship that blurred the boundary between professional and non-professional services. Such practices generated conflict among professionals and between the professions and the government; however, they are most noteworthy for exposingpopular disregard for the enlightened guardianship and expert knowledge that professionals (and officials) sought to deliver to ordinary people. Indeed, the widely recognised achievements of late imperial public health, education and justice would have been far less effective without the mediation of protoprofessional and paraprofessional groups.
Following the judicial reforms of 1864, the most autonomous and institutionally secure Russian professionals were the university-educated sworn attorneys organised in formal bar associations. In 1874, when the government suspended the establishment of new bar councils for thirty years, only three had come into existence - in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kharkov. Russia's modern legal profession, the pride and joy of Westernised liberal reformers, occupied a narrow field of action. But the limited social reach of the sworn attorneys is deceiving. Russians from all walks of life had participated in formal judicial proceedings since Muscovite times, and after 1861 the impact of official courts, including peasant courts, became massive.[44] How did a broad-based legal culture encompassing nearly the whole of Russian society flourish when the legal profession remained so small and the liberal judicial reforms only partially implemented?
41
This discussion ofthe professions is adapted from Wirtschafter,
For broad treatment that includes a range of professional groups, see H. Balzer (ed.),
42
N. M. Frieden,
43
Wirtschafter,
44
J. Burbank, 'Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence: Perspectives from the Early Twentieth Century', in P. H. Solomon Jr. (ed.),