The Icon and the Axe

The zemstvos aided the central government in both enterprises but ' sought to exact a price for their aid in the form of a constitution that would protect them from "terrorism from above" as well as "terrorism from; below." Many joined the informal organization of zemstvo constitutionalists organized by Ivan Petrunkevich in 1878-9 and seconded his call for a constitutional assembly. When the new Tsar once more restricted zemstvo activities during the reaction of the early eighties, zemstvo liberals acquired a voice abroad in the journal Free Word, published by the "Society of Zemstvo Union and Self-Government." Although this society proved shortlived and nationwide political agitation by the zemstvos was drastically curtailed after the assassination of Alexander II, the zemstvos continued to! grow in importance because of the great increase in their non-aristocraticj) professional staffs (the so-called third element, after the government-appointed and locally elected elements). There were nearly 70,000 zemstvo employees by the late nineties. The zemstvo ceased being an exclusively aristocratic preserve, and the two key organizations of constitutional liberalism at the turn of the century each included professional along with aristocratic "elements": the Moscow discussion group, "the Symposium," and the emigre journal Liberation.

The new generation of educated professional men in the cities provided the real cement for the emerging liberal movement. The growth of professional competence in an increasingly educated and diversified society created

a growing fund of exasperation with what seemed to them an outmoded and irrational legal system. Prophet of this new no-nonsense professionalism / was Vladimir Bezobrazov, an imaginative followerjof gaint-^?? who organized a series-of "economic dinners" to discuss various hypothetical patterns of future development for Russia. Following his French teacher, he urged the replacement of the old aristocracy of privilege by a new aristocracy of talent. He believed that the hope for Russia lay in the development of a practical, professional attitude toward the solution of its economic problems and attached particular importance to his own Saint-Simonian plan for a network of canals inside Russia. As early as 1867 he argued that the zemstvos were the natural organ for developing in Russia this thirst for "practical results" {prakticheskie rezul'taty), and that the growing professionalism of the zemstvos must be protected both from the traditionalism of the local aristocracy and the "bureaucratism" of the central government.2,1

Increased confidence in the "practical results" being achieved by the [ various professions in Russia led to an increased desire for political and. social recognition. The static political and social system of Imperial Russia offered little place for the new professional groups that formed in the late nineteenth century: sJaadefltjmiojisJ_c^fflmjjl±ees on illiteracy, doctors and lawyers associations, and so on. These associations tended to be second only to the zemstvos as a recruiting ground for the future Constitutional Democratic Party.

Russian liberalism was-more than any other current of ideas in f nineteenth-century Russia-the work of college professors. The most in- * fluential university professors tended to sympathize with liberalism from the time when Professor Granovskyfirst tried to present some of its salient ideas in his lectures at Moscow University in the 1840's. Granovsky, the1; spiritual father of the original Westernizers, was the first to lecture in detail to Russians on the historical development of laws and liberties in the democratic West.25 He suggested that this pattern of development was preferable to that of Russia-without raising Utopian hopes that it could be duplicated overnight on Russian soil. Although the radicals of the sixties soon overshadowed and disregarded their more moderate liberal professors, the latter were largely responsible for some of the most important liberalizing reforms of the sixties: the introduction of trial by jury and the extension of higher educational rights to women (well before such rights were recognized in the liberal democratic United States).

Chicherin, who became mayor of Moscow and outlived his friend Granovsky by* nearly half a century, was the prototype of the moderate Rechtsstaat liberal.20 In his lectures as professor of law at Moscow, he

stressed the importance of rational laws rather than of parliamentary bodies I as an effective limitation on arbitrary autocratic power.