Administration and institutions
Since at least the local government reform of Catherine II, the provincial capital (gubernskii gorod) signified the extension, down to the provincial level, of the state administrative apparatus.[79] By definition, the provincial and district capitals were distinguished from other types of settlements by the presence of governmental offices - even though the non-administrative (zashtatnyi) town, the Cossack village (stanitsa), or the industrial village might have a larger population and every appearance of a city. The administration and institutions of every provincial capital were thus very nearly identical. Before the 1860s, these were limited to the governor and his staff, the Gentry Assembly, and the Merchant Guilds; the post office, the local Statistical Committee (1840s) and tax and customs officials completed the picture. The Great Reforms wrought deep and immediate changes in provincial administration, creating a new institution, the zemstvo, conceived by the monarchy (it was originally Nicholas I's idea) essentially as an organ for the more efficient collection and disbursement of taxes;[80] setting up a court system; and granting the provincial capitals a city council (1870). In the last third of the century, Nizhnii Novgorod housed the provincial zemstvo, the district zemstvo, the city duma and various offices of the government bureaucracy. Overlapping jurisdictions provoked frequent complaints.
Yet the importance of these institutions lies above all in the uses to which they were put, locally. Nizhnii Novgorod had a tradition of liberal governors that included Mikhail Urusov (1843-55), the ex-Decembrist Alexander Muravev (1856-61) and the beloved Aleksei Odintsov, whose illustrious governorship (1861-73) set the tone for the reform era in Nizhnii Novgorod. Odintsov, who, in a humorous farewell speech in 1873, characterised his tenure as 'proof- and this is my main achievement - that the province could do perfectly well without a governor for ten years',[81] in fact presided over the elections of the first zemstvo and the municipal duma, and managed the peaceful transition to new landlord-peasant relations. The conservative politics of his successor, Count Pavel Kutaisov (great-grandson of one of Paul I's henchmen) sat so ill with local society that they managed to squeeze him out of power and replace him briefly with the local marshal of the nobility, S. S. Zybin, until the appointment of a new and once again liberal governor, Nikolai Baranov, in 1882. One of the most potentially influential posts one could have on the governor's staff was that of'official for special assignments' (chinovnik osohykhporuchenii): both P. I. Melnikov and A. S. Gatsiskii held this position, compiling some of their most important statistical and ethnographic studies under its auspices.
The Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo was one of the most dynamic among the thirty-four such institutions. In the first elections to the district zemstvos, the delegates numbered 402: 189 representing the landlords, 38 city-dwellers and 175 from the peasant communes. The zemstvos had a dual mandate: the 'obligatory' functions included oversight of peasant affairs, land redistribution, local administration (police, courts, statistics), transportation, and property taxes; and 'non-obligatory' responsibility for medicine, veterinary medicine, education, pensions, railways, commerce, welfare, agricultural credit and insurance. The 1864 law gave the zemstvos the right to collect and spend their own taxes; a good deal of decision-making power thus devolved on to this local institution. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo built schools, hospitals, roads, sanitation, lighting, and provided fire insurance. Some of its most significant initiatives included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Trans- Siberian railroad, 'restoring the old natural route through Nizhnii Novgorod province to Siberia and Central Asia';[82] a constant struggle against the epidemics that periodically wound their way up the Volga; and an extremely sophisticated local cadaster (i880s-90s), funded by the zemstvo and executed by scientists from St Petersburg, intended to create an absolutely equitable system of land taxation and distribution.[83]
The city duma was dominated by local merchants.[84] The influential mayor's post attracted some of the most visible municipal figures. Fedor Blinov, in the 1860s, became a sort of shadow mayor: elected by an overwhelming majority, he nevertheless, as an Old Believer, could not officially occupy the position.[85]If, prior to 1870, participation in municipal government was considered an onerous duty to be avoided by all available means - medical excuses, declaration of capital in other cities, or, in one case, serving a twenty-day prison term, the council, whose mandate was basically to ensure the absence of basic disorder, managed to achieve some limited goals. It was their decision that resulted in the construction of a water-supply system in 1847.[86] The reformed duma of 1870, headed by Mayor A. M. Gubin, included members of all estates but still a preponderance of merchants. Apart from routine management, they continued to make improvements in the water supply and initiated measures to institute gas lighting.
Secular regional administration functioned alongside a parallel ecclesiastical administration. Nizhnii Novgorod diocesan history was linked from the beginning (1672) with the struggle against Old Belief. Peter I's appointee Pitirim (1719-38) became renowned for his merciless campaigns against the regime's opponents.[87] In Catherine II's reign, Ioann Damaskin (1783-94) made his reputation in a different fashion, making converts among the Finnic and Turkic peoples of the region and compiling grammars of Mordvinian and other local languages. Catherine's secularisation of church lands had a profound effect on landholding patterns: the two major monasteries on the outskirts of the city, as well as Makariev monastery downriver, monasteries and a convent in Arzamas, all lost substantial holdings in the region. The ecclesiastical hierarchy extended down to the parish level, where local initiative had, until the 1880s, a means for expression through the elected blagochinnye. The Nizh- nii Novgorod Seminary was one of the most visible and active institutions in the city landscape, situated just across the square from the kremlin and the Alma Mater of Nikolai Dobroliubov and other less iconoclastic priests' sons. The effort to increase 'bottom-up' participation emblematised by the Gubernskie vedomosti found an echo in the Eparkhial'nye vedomosti, established throughout the empire in the 1860s and in 1864 in Nizhnii Novgorod. In general, the i860s witnessed remarkable social activism in clerical circles - the founding of rural schools, sometimes with just a few students; clerical participation in various scientific observations and educational experiments; and the centrally engineered effort, in the wake of the Emancipation which after all was to a large degree implemented by the Church, to add inspirational sermons to the highly ritualised liturgy. Ironically, this last effort backfired significantly in Nizhnii Novgorod, where parishioners complained that they came to church to hear the eternal wisdom of the Fathers of the Church, not some kind of off-the-cuff musings by their local priest.[88] In the 1880s, as Kon- stantin Pobedonostsev increasingly took the parish-school movement under his wing, the activities of the Nizhnii Novgorod Brotherhood of Saint Gurii (modelled after the seventeenth-century Ukrainian religious brotherhoods) intensified in the promotion of ecclesiastically sponsored education.
79
The central government's arm reached one level further, to the province's districts, and stopped there. The introduction of the zemskii nachal'nik in 1889 signalled the government's first intrusion into local jurisdiction.
80
See M. Polievktov,
81
V G. Korolenko, 'Pamiati A. S. Gatsiskogo', in K. D. Aleksandrov (ed.),
82
83
See N. F. Annenskii, 'Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika',
pp. i7-44.
84
A. Savelev,
87
Compare the policies ofhis near-contemporary: GeorgMichels, 'Rescuing the Orthodox: The Church Policies ofArchbishop Afanasii ofKholmogory, i682-i702', in Robert Geraci andMichaelKhodarkovsky(eds.),