An answer can be found in traditional forms of advocacy which effectively absorbed Russia's new legal profession. Prior to the Great Reforms, any subject of the empire, not expressly forbidden to do so by law, had the right to represent clients in court. The unofficial 'street advocates' who operated in the post-reform period thus belonged to a tradition of legal practitioners dating backto the reign of Peter the Great. Generally of low birth, the street advocates nevertheless included in their ranks nobles with higher education and, after 1864, qualified attorneys who chose not to join the bar.[45] In 1874 the government adopted measures that should have eliminated the illicit practitioners. 'Private attorneys', regardless of education, became eligible to practise law by purchasing licenses and registering with local courts; however, lax enforcement meant that registered attorneys continued to work with unregistered street advocates. Private and sworn attorneys pleaded cases in court for the street advocates and relied on them in return to refer clients. Although accused of corruption and incompetence, the street advocates not only survived but also provided a crucial link between formal judicial institutions and ordinary people.
In the fields of education and medicine, uncertified specialists performed a similar social function. The central government and local elites did not commit significant resources to universal primary education before the mid- 1890s, yet already in the seventeenth century and continuing throughout the imperial period, unofficial schools taught basic literacy to ordinary people. In 1882, limited funding, a shortage of teachers and the tendency of peasants to leave school after acquiring minimal literacy and numeracy led to the legalisation of village schools where uncertified teachers taught reading, writing and counting.[46] By adapting education to the needs and expectations of peasant parents, less-educated rural schoolteachers, many of whom came from the peasantry, provided a meaningful link between the countryside and translocal civil society. Medical orderlies (fel'dshery) did likewise by working with traditional village healers to deliver methods of treatment acceptable to peasants. In the process, they also carried scientific knowledge to the countryside. Although formally trained physicians denounced the orderlies and other practitioners for performing illegal operations and prescribing inappropriate treatments - services for which they were not properly trained - they nonetheless relied on their less-educated associates to offset shortages of funding and certified personnel.[47] Once again, the much-maligned protoprofessionals and paraprofessionals connected the general population to the elite world of Russia's modern professions.
Of course, qualified professionals became dismayed when labouring people failed to distinguish street advocates from registered attorneys or physicians from witches, sorcerers and faith healers. They were likewise angered by the lack of political and organisational freedom before 1905 and by continuing governmental hostility and bureaucratic interference after the introduction of constitutional monarchy in 1906. Their frustrations, their dual alienation from the people and the government, pushed an activist minority into political opposition and identification with the intelligentsia. It was not, however, the ideologically articulate professional elites who represented the development of a politically effective Russian civil society. In contrast to the intelligentsia, whose condescension toward 'the people' and identification with the methods, if not the policies, of the state continues to this day, rank-and-file professionals together with their paraprofessional and uncertified associates served the everyday needs of real Russians.[48] Aside from the obvious practical benefits that accrued, their relationships with ordinary people linked local communities to translocal society without the mediation of government. In these independent relationships and in the independent relationships of the capitalist market economy, not in the identities and ideological movements of the intelligentsia, a Russian civil society distinct from official society came to life.
Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century: portrait of a city
CATHERINE EVTUHOV
To the present-day observer, standing on the mansion-lined embankment overlooking the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, or wandering through the restored and freshly painted central streets of the city, Nizhnii Novgorod does not look so different from the provincial town it was a century ago. The massive automobile factory, the military installations and large-scale industry of the Soviet city of Gorky - all of which closed the area to foreigners until 1991 - sprouted around the edges while leaving the city centre intact. Only the cupolas which once studded the streets like points of gold have vanished, victims of the 1929 eradication of churches. Nizhnii Novgorod boasts all the features of the most lovely of Russian provincial towns: perched picturesquely atop a network of ravines, it nevertheless follows a strictly Petersburgian layout with the three straight avenues radiating from the central kremlin. The above- mentioned observer can walk to the edge of the promenade to look out over the Oka at the old fairgrounds and the massive nineteenth-century Alexander Nevsky cathedral on the promontory. Across the Volga, in the meantime, forests still stretch north as far as one can see, past the pilgrimage site of Lake Svetloiar, whose depths conceal the lost city of Kitezh, and the historical refuge of the Old Belief.
Topography
The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central government, local authorities and the town population itself. The history of urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with Catherine the Great's 1785 Charter to the Towns, which not only bestowed certain privileges upon town dwellers, but converted frontier outposts and administrative centres into 'proper' imperial cities with regular street plans and municipal institutions.1 Yet Catherine's quest for the well-ordered city had achieved only partial realisation at the time of Nicholas I's visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1834 - an event that immediately entered local lore and whose story continues to be told to this day. Stopping in Nizhnii on his tour of the realm, the tsar expressed horror and dismay at how little it resembled a real city. In defiance of the regularised city plan on paper, the buildings along even the main streets jutted out unevenly and at irregular intervals, resembling an assemblage of manors (usad'by) merely more tightly spaced than they would have been in the countryside. Not only had residents obliviously built their houses along the lovely Volga embankment with their backs to the river, but they used the gentle slope of the bluff itself as a garbage dump. Nicholas's solution both typified his mania for discipline (one of his passions was the planning of prison buildings) and his desire to bring the vast imperial reaches under central control.2 An 1836 decree gave property owners three years to erect a wooden house on any vacant lots in the city centre, or five for a stone one, under the supervision of an architectural commission that was in turn subject to the Department of Military Colonies in St Petersburg. Noncompliance meant simply that the empty lot would be auctioned off.3 The riverbank houses were turned around. In this fashion the central government enlisted the co-operation of the town residents, twisting their arms into conforming to its vision.4 At the end of the nineteenth century, though, a glance at detailed street plans reveals that Nizhnii's streets remained lined not with single buildings as in a European or American city, but with whole manors: a main house and several outbuildings grouped around a courtyard - much as Belinsky had described Moscow at mid-century.5
45
W E. Pomeranz, 'Justice from the Underground: The History of the Underground
46
J. Brooks, 'The Zemstvo and the Education of the People', in Emmons and Vucinich,
47
S. C. Ramer, 'The Zemstvo and Public Health', in Emmons and Vucinich,
48
For a recent account that stresses the necessity of intelligentsia and state leadership, see B. N. Mironov