A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia
Ekaterina Pravilova
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 069115905X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.
The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.
Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.
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pair of columns on the façade. This idea developed in the early twentieth century under the influence of a new artistic and philosophical vision that united the cult of beauty with anti-individualism (especially peculiar for the artistic ideology of neoclassicism) and étatism, in the belief that the state alone could create architectural miracles (like the miracle of St. Petersburg), preserve the cultural heritage, and educate its subjects in artistic taste. This new faith led artists and
Goncharov was not alone in prohibiting the publication of works and papers that he had not intended for a general audience: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin explicitly ordered that nothing left out of his lifetime collection of works should appear after his death. This dictum was, of course, disregarded, just as Dostoevsky’s “renunciation” of his critical works published in The Time (Vremia).50 “We have the right to ignore” these notes, instructed Soviet “textologist” and literary scholar Solomon
zemelnoi sobstvennosti, St. Petersburg [b.g.]. 25. “Vopros ob ispolzovanii sil Imatry,” from Finliandskoi gazety, no. 273–276 (1914). TsGA NTD, f. 375 (Graftio), op. 3-1, d. 55, l. 6ob. To facilitate the process of expropriation, the government twice—in 1872 and 1897—attempted to draft a new law. The first commission under the leadership of Alexander Obolenskii (1874) suggested the introduction of a judicial procedure for valuation that would give greater protection to the rights of owners.
ministry published 73 volumes of the “Materials for the Description of Russian Rivers.” 120. [Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia], Trudy komissii po elektrogidravlicheskoi opisi vodnykh sil Rossii, no. 1 (1909–1910), St. Petersburg, 1911. 121. In 1910, a new project of engineers Alfred Rundo and Dmitrii Iuskevich received experts’ approval, so the main question was how to alienate water for the production of hydropower. Zhurnaly Komissii po voprosu ob uluchshenii Dneprovskikh porogov. 1 fevralia
land deposits between 1911 and 1915, until the deficit of fuel exacerbated by the war forced it to take a few steps in the direction of greater control over the use and distribution of minerals. However, the issues of property rights and mechanisms facilitating the exploitation of resources remained unresolved. Property and Economy The development of a rational timber industry and the production of coal and steel were all held back by similar problems in the regulation of property rights. This