The Icon and the Axe

more anxious to gain government support for their developmental projects than to limit governmental interference. The involvement of Jews, Germans, 1 and Armenians in Russian trade and the growing influx of foreign capital made laissez-faire liberalism seem synonymous with turning Russia over to foreign masters. Finally-and in many ways most important-there was an' enduring contempt for the bourgeoisie within the intellectual community. Rooted in the traditional distaste of the intelligentsia for meshchanstvo and nourished by aristocratic aestheticism, this prejudice against the bourgeois form of life was confirmed in the late nineteenth century by a tendency to equate the bleak world of Ibsen's plays with bourgeois society as a whole.22

Despite these practical and psychological difficulties, liberalism (both political and economic) had attracted articulate and at times influential spokesmen inside Russia throughout the nineteenth century. Liberalism in the sense of a constitutional rule of law rather than of men dates back to the time of Catherine. The Decembrists had sought constitutional rule, as had many influential advisers to both Alexander I and Alexander II. The idea of a national assembly on the model of the old zemsky sobors had found many advocates, including Herzen and numerous Slavophiles. Liberalism in ' the Manchesterian sense of freeing the economy from government interference and restraint had also found advocates-particularly in the Free! Economic Society which had been founded by Catherine the Great. Adam Smith was known and studied earlier in Russia than in many other countries; a period of almost complete economic laissez faire was enjoyed during the finance ministry of Count Reutern in the early 1860's; and Manchesterian liberalism gained the support of an influential journal, The Herald of Europe, and an articulate pressure group, The Society for the Promotion of Trade with the Fatherland.

A coherent RussianJiberid tradition began not with aristocratic plans for constitutional rule under Alexander II or arguments advanced for laissez {aire under Alexander II, but with the social and economic changes ! of the 1890's: the beginning of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1891; the i famine and accelerated flight to the cities of 1891-2; the expansion of mining and industry in the Donets Basin; the growth of the Baku oil complex into the largest in the world; and the tremendous general expansion of transportation and communication facilities under the ministry of Count Witte from 1892 to 1903.23

The logic of modernization created the need for uniform laws, of j greater rights for suppressed minorities and nationalities-particularly those with badly needed technical and administrative skills, such as Finns, Baltic Germans, and Jews. Efficiency in economic development required that large I

numbers of people be consulted before embarking on any course of action; and some form of consultative if not legislative body seemed clearly desirable.

Arguments for rational laws and increased popular participation in government were advanced mainly by twjo__rery^different groups in late-nineteenth-century Russia. The first group were those connected with the r£oymda] zemsfvos, the qrgans_of local administtafon^that"Alexander!II had created in 1864" without ever clearly defining their purpose and authority. Through their involvement in such problems as the supervision of local road-building and conservation projects, the zgmstvos^ almost immediately became involved in broad matters of public policy. Already in the sixties, the aristocratic leaders of several of the zemstvos in relatively Westernized regions like Tver and Chernigov sought to convert the zemstvos into organs of self-government as a kind of federative counter to the authoritarianism and bureaucratic^slotii ofjhe^central government. The Jjsar \ placed new restrictions and checks on the zemstvos during the generafreac- I tion of the late sixties, but called them back to life in the seventies to help \ in the mobilization of local resources and opinion first against the Turks and then against terrorism and revolution.