In an elegantly written monograph bridging the tsarist and early Soviet eras and confronting discourse with practices and varying research focuses, Ilya Gerasimov studies a social group of agronomists forged by the revolution of 1905. Inspired by a Progressivist ethos, 20,000 to 30,000 rural professionals belonging to the milieu of educated society shared identical views on their mediating role between the state and society.^[1] The apolitical type of modernization they promote found its way between tsarist order and revolution, triumphing shortly about 1914, when their expertise was needed to organize the (Great) war effort. After the February revolution, experts became the pillar of the Provisional Government’s political agenda.^[2] It was the Civil War that triggered the group’s disintegration, before its final disappearance in the turmoil of the 1930s.
Three thematic parts of Gerasimov’s study analyze (I) the social structures facilitating the emergence of a new conception of social agenda driven by a renewed intelligentsia; (II) activity of the professionals and their social interactions and confrontations; and (III) their participation in nation-building.
Agriculture became central in the Russian perception of public good after the 1891 famine. The catastrophe stimulated the need for reliable information circulating among a growing nationwide audience that did not trust the government but believed in the technical competence of the zemstvo employees and the sense of obshchestvennost’ articulated in multiplying agro-journals. To transcend the rivalry for legitimacy between the “three elements” of Russian rural society (the government agencies, the elected zemstvo deputies, and the hired specialists in zemstvo service), journals promoted self-organization and rational production by modernizing agricultural planning.
Yet not only specialized publications offered an original formative experience for future agronomists. In addition, agricultural training courses and congresses played a prominent role in professionalization. After 1905, a quickly developing job market and public interest boosted the number of vocations. No longer working for the gentry, agro-professionals entered the zemstvos, and then cooperatives in great numbers. Special technical schools multiplied at various levels, welcoming more and more students – including women. Their model was the Moscow Agricultural Institute (Petrovka) where Alexander Chaianov, Sergei Fridolin, and Ekaterina Sakharova studied. Prosopographic analysis shows that their generation (most of them graduated in 1910) was very active in the formation of the “virtual reality of emotional rapport, cultural affinity and common life experience” (P. 44) that mobilized rural professionals. This bonding spirit compensated in practice for the somewhat theoretical lessons they received in one-way cultural transfer, yet despite their number (in 1915, one-third of them studied at Petrovka), this reviewer doubts that students of peasant origins “brought to higher cultural education their knowledge of peasant life and needs” (P. 37). They mainly tried to perform a new language and behavior, to act professional, urban – or modern. There they built a collective ethos that could support them once back in the countryside, alone among co-villagers.^[3]
While maintaining a sort of monopoly over agronomic knowledge, professionals gained autonomy from the political authorities and consciously tried to organize as a corporatist group identified by its dedication to public service. Many young people joined this group for ideological reasons, but more of them acted pragmatically, as their first goal was to reform the three-field rotation system. In the countryside, Italian-inspired mobile bureaus and precinct agronomists promoted cooperatives and advised peasants on new techniques, quite in vain considering the vectors of social and economic progress.^[4]
When physicians, geographers, and cooperators clashed in their overpoliticized debates,^[5] agronomists managed to play “apolitical politics.” Even in cases when the debate on maintaining the land commune was not finally resolved, “populist-minded social activists, middle-class professionals and wealthy zemstvo bosses” (P. 96) found a common language.
In the second part of the book, the fourth chapter demonstrates how the relationship of the state to rural professionals evolved from suspicious control (Department of Police) to tolerant patronage (Ministry of Agriculture). The Stolypin administration fully adopted the discourse of modernization and systematic action in the countryside, instead of punctual legal intervention. Agronomic institutions ramified and competed with the zemstvos for finances and public trust, practicing, as Gerasimov puts it, “politics of political demobilization” (P. 78). Sometimes the government imitated educational activity by supporting the Russian Grain (created in 1908); however, this association lacked clear goals and support among rural professionals who believed in the virtues of self-organization. The 1911 All-Russian Agronomic Congress openly confronted global statist solutions and centralized control, suppressing the fixation of the zemstvos on local situations and organization from below.
The profession became more diverse and inclusive in the 1910s, and thanks to horizontal and vertical mobility, frequent turnover was the rule. Serving the people, agronomists gained public recognition and earned an average of 1,800 rubles a year (for example, physicians earned 1,500; a worker 264; the peasant minimum of subsistence could be expressed in monetary terms in the sum of about 50 rubles a year): this distinctive community privileged by zemstvos surely must have generated envy on the part of those in other occupations. Thus, positions as cooperative managers attracted more youth because of high salaries, real perquisites, and no special education requirement. Indeed, professional courses offered equal access and there was no restriction on marital status. But did/could these institutions stimulate working mothers and females to sacrifice their personal lives to choose vocations? Were they paid as much as male workers? How did krestianki perceive them in the highly patriarchal local communal societies of the time?
Male or female, young or old, rural modernizers planned to reach the peasantry by organizing lectures and publishing specialized journals where farmers could share their experiences. In the courses offered at the precinct level, the recurrent dialogue built a bridge between professionals and certain peasants who thus found their place in the modernized tsarist society and consciously contributed to the growth of the national economy. Gerasimov’s study could have taught us more about the peasants’ reception. The fact that “in 1913, 1,580,782 peasants attended 43,763 lectures in 11,762 villages” (P. 103) vividly demonstrates the increasing organization of such events and publicity surrounding them, but the statistics do not specify how often any peasants attended or participated, whether all of the venues were free of charge, whether the events were just “sheer entertainment” (P. 275, n. 71) or a sort of propaganda that really impelled peasants to change their traditions. A quoted peasant letter from Elets (P. 106) does not explain why this man went to the agricultural courses; it reveals however that upon his return to the village, he preached in the desert, receiving no external (professional) or internal (communal) help. Gerasimov’s thesis about a broadening equal-to-equal dialogue between experts and peasants, in particular through the efficient school system, finds its limits in the intermittence of experience and ignorance about its results, beyond particular cases highlighted at the time by the professionals.
In the rapidly transforming imperial countryside, cooperatives became the stakes of a power struggle between the intelligentsia willing to impose ideological domination, zemstvos autonomously administrating economics, and peasant families intending to maintain their traditional influence. Confronted with hegemonic and radical discourse of urban ideologists, a new generation of cooperative managers tried to use new tactics: local practitioners organized specialized cooperatives integrated into the regional or village economy. This “fourth element” of self-administration seemed to find larger support among the peasantry.
Gerasimov points out that elected village elders or hired volost scribes were peasant notables; however, some historians do not support this claim.^[6] Who, in fact, ruled the countryside – peasants, experts, or officials? One could bring to this ongoing debate an analysis of agro-journals’ editorial correspondence, where one can find, for instance, criticisms of peasant self-organization, agronomists’ doubts about their real status as effective actors in the village, and even their attempts to transform radically the communal structures by promoting the farm as model.
After 1910, different agro-ethics competed, varying with the actual age of the actors, institution (zemstvo or cooperative), function in the hierarchy, and motivation to enter the profession. Gerasimov convincingly explains the collective identification with the ideology of self-modernization, but one may wonder why an individual, especially from a peasant background, would choose to become engaged as a rural professional: what were his social and political expectations? Did he identify himself as an “outsider” or “insider” (in the corporation? in the village)? That is, how much could a professional, disillusioned in everyday dialogue with the peasantry, tired of intolerant political pressure at the local as well as national levels, and dissatisfied with the growing mechanization of agronomy (railway schools, cinema, tractors) separate himself from the peasantry, the stratum from which he was originally recruited?
Finally, the third part of Gerasimov’s monograph analyzes nation building in four dimensions – patriotic, imperial (ethnocultural), revolutionary, and statist. From 1914 on, agronomic discourse was mobilized for the Motherland, adapted to (rather than by) the peoples of the empire, and redefined after February 1917 from neutrality to direct involvement in governance. This specific intelligentsia progressively “went to the state” but failed to prove itself patriotic during the war: in peacetime, the “national” Russian model was in fact inspired by foreign experiences of modernization and international belief in progress. To avoid the frontlines, individual strategies made them act not as land captains reserved to secure an emptied countryside and drive economic mobilization, but as specialists hired by the institutions organizing the war effort. They privileged their prewar agenda over the nation’s salvation, changing progress to order. Apart from a few experiences (especially in Ukraine), rural professionals did not reach an adequate compromise between modernization, which was considered Russian, and the local particularities. In 1917, as did many elite groups, they also failed to lead the revolutionary movement: not only did professionals face spontaneous “peasantization” by the exclusion of nonpeasants from the villages, but their elitism, their close ideological and institutional ties with power prevented them from representing a new obshchestvennost’.
Gerasimov commendably analyzes the complex interrelations of the tsarist era, yet he presents a quite univocal Bolshevik regime – despite the economic debate on the “peasant question” involving VSNKh, Narkomzem, and the Party. The author points out that rural professionals mainly “executed the unpopular decisions” (P. 201), but local archives show that hundreds of repeat directives were sent to the countryside indicating that executants did not (or could not) fulfill them as wanted “from above.” Moreover, when a centralist decision – allotting “forests of local interest” to peasants in 1924 – generated a movement “from below,” rural professionals appeared on the stage only as middlemen (aiming at a reliable compromise) rather than as state agents (in charge of control and authority).^[7] Remarkably, another key group in the same generation, the statisticians, although victims of the Great Purges, responded throughout the 1920s and 1930s both with a global strategy (as a professional group) and local tactics (as an interest-based group) and proved capable of solidifying their adaptation (or easing their resistance) to the often changing rhythm of political pressure.^[8]
What was the fate of rural professionals – disintegration or reconfiguration, “moral capitulation” (P. 6) or the new, last step of professionalization? In 1917, as Gerasimov claims, “even at the level of field specialists there was no nationwide political solidarity and similarity of ideals” (P. 205). In 1918, teachers united in massive strikes, whereas rural professionals were probably not so closely bound together vertically, both in the cities and villages. Horizontally, this differentiation could explain the spectrum of attitudes toward Soviet power as regime or local institution, as ideology or political actor in the countryside. A majority continued to work after 1921, being promoted as “specialists,” even if they could not no longer consider themselves autonomous “social gardeners” or representatives of an all-Russian public movement. This collective disintegration, typical of the “bourgeois specialists” in the 1920s, opened the way to new men with a radical agenda in mind – not so much the generation that was sacrificed to civil war, as the next group which graduated after 1926, when higher education became unavailable to nonproletarians. In my view, this replacement was not only generational and political: in Soviet times, professionals, having been deprived of their milieu but still forced to fulfill bureaucratic obligations imposed on each state employee, had to concentrate on their too fluid individual careers, which heavily depended on global (war, collectivization) politics and local circumstances.
Despite a less conclusive post-1917 chapter, Gerasimov’s excellent prosopography is exciting to read and undoubtedly offers a valuable reference work on the relationship of the intelligentsia with the state and the people in late imperial and early Soviet Russia.