ONE LOCAL VOTE AT A TIME: ELECTORAL PRACTICES OF KAZAN PROVINCE, 1766-1916 A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Rita S. Guenther, M.A. Washington, DC November 4, 2011 Copyright 2011 by Rita S. Guenther All Rights Reserved ii ONE LOCAL VOTE AT A TIME: ELECTORAL PRACTICES OF KAZAN PROVINCE, 1766-1916 Rita S. Guenther, M.A. Dissertation Advisor: Catherine Evtuhov, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Local elections in the Russian Empire were conducted long before the Great Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century, the point from which many scholars have traditionally dated them; and gradually became a routine part of local life. Such practices were founded on the provincial reforms initiated by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and were further solidified by the electoral procedures adopted for the 1766 elections to Catherine the Great’s Legislative Commission as well as by her local reforms. Through a series of case studies of local elections in the ethnically and religiously diverse Kazan province, this dissertation analyzes how local elections expanded into the early twentieth century, across a host of institutions, and suggests possible ways that future scholarship may place the electoral activity in the Russian Empire in a larger comparative context. The goals of this dissertation are to examine: 1) how people of various religious, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds participated in the governance of Kazan province through elected institutions; 2) how elections served as a mechanism for negotiating life amidst such diversity of people, balancing the demands of the imperial government with the realities of the local context; and, 3) how local elections created experiences and practices that contributed to evolving notions of rights, participation, and representation as expressed in the words of voters themselves. Research findings indicate that the habits of electoral practice served as ready experience and knowledge when the dynamic changes of the mid-nineteenth century ended serfdom and iii reformed provincial administration, ushering in an era of greater self-government, more direct representation of individuals and interests, and more deliberate expression of political notions. These foundational habits of electoral practice served as a well-spring of experience that fed calls for fuller participation in the political decisions of the Russian Empire through elected delegates to a partially representative parliament. When this call was heeded in response to the 1905 revolution, the bedrock of practical electoral knowledge and experience held by Russia’s diverse peoples was already there, laid inadvertently by the processes initially implemented by the central government in need of more efficient local administration. iv The research and writing of this dissertation is dedicated to ML, EBK. I am grateful to Professors Catherine Evtuhov, Harley Balzer, David Goldfrank, and Eric Lohr for their insights and encouragement over many years and through many iterations of this project. I am also appreciative of the long-term support provided by the Department of History at Georgetown University and the U.S. National Academies. Funding for research and writing was provided by the U.S. Department of Education. With sincere thanks, RITA S. GUENTHER v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………. 1 Elections in the Russian Empire…………………………………………..….… 2 Electing Locally: Kazan Province and Challenges of Imperial Governance...… 4 Sources for This Study……………………………………………….…..……... 11 Plan of This Study……………………………………………….……………… 23 CHAPTER I: ENLIGHTENMENT-INSPIRED ELECTIONS: THE LEGISLATIVE COMMISSION, PROVINCIAL REFORM, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ENDURING ELECTORAL PROCEDURES…… 30 Laying the Foundations of Electoral Procedures: The Manifesto of December 14, 1766…………………….…………………………………..…… 32 Initial Foundations of Local Elected Institutions: Peter the Great’s Provincial Reforms………………………………………………………….……….…...… 66 Catherine the Great’s Local Reforms: Provincial Reorganization and Local Administration…………………………..,…………………………..………..... 70 Local Institutions Adapt: The Example of the Tatarskaia Ratusha……………. 80 Conclusion…………………………………………………………..……….…. 88 CHAPTER II: ELECTORAL PROCESSES AND THE PROVINCIAL ELECTORAL NETWORK: BUREAUCRACY AND ELECTED POSITIONS EXPAND….............................................................................….. 90 Form and Substance: With Expanded Bureaucracy Came More Elections…..... 95 Who Elected Whom? The Elected Offices of Kazan Province.……………...… 98 Electing More than Administrators and Bureaucrats: Electoral Procedures of the Local Russian Orthodox Church..………………………….…..………….. 136 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..…. 138 CHAPTER III: GREAT REFORMS BROADEN ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION: ELECTORAL PROCEDURES FOR NEW INSTITUTIONS ROOTED IN PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE……….…...…. 144 Electoral Culture and Kazan’s Zemstvos: Modifying Previous Electoral Principles, Maintaining Existing Procedures.…………………...……………… 147 The City Dumas of Kazan Province: Modified Electoral Practices Within Existing Institutions………...……………………………………………….….. 189 Conclusion………………………………………….……………….……….…. 212 CHAPTER IV: LOCAL ELECTIONS CONTINUE THROUGOUT GREAT REFORM PERIOD: ELECTORAL CULTURE EVOLVES IN EXISTING INSTITUTIONS……………………………………………….... 216 Continuing Elections to Estate Assemblies..….………...……………………… 217 Sacred Parallels Secular: Elections in the Local Russian Orthodox Church...… 249 Elections and Old Belivers………………………………………………..……. 252 Elections to Other Local Administrative Positions: Specific Cases…………… 257 Conclusion……………………...…………………………………………….… 268 vi CHAPTER V: THE 1905 REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL ELECTIONS: ELECTORAL PRACTICES REFLECT NEW POLITICAL REALITIES. 271 Accumulated Change: Elections Reflect the Great Reforms and the First Russian Revolution……………….……………..……………………………… 273 National Campaigns and Elections in Local Context: Electing Kazan’s State Duma Deputies……………………………...………………………..…….…… 283 Concurrent With National Electoral Politics: Specific Cases of Complaint from Local Elections………………………………….…..…………..………... 301 Elections as Common Phenomena: Practices and Processes as a Routine Part of Urban Administration, Examples from the Cities of Spassk and Tetiushi...... 324 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………… 336 CONCLUSION: ELECTIONS BEFORE DEMOCRACY: RUSSIA’S IMPERIAL ELECTORAL EXPERIENCE IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT…..…………………………………………………………………. 339 Points of Departure for Further Comparative Research: Electoral Experiences of Latin America, China, and the Ottoman Empire………………..…………… 343 One Local Vote at a Time: Evolving Local Electoral Culture in Kazan Province………………………………………………………………………… 352 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………… 355 vii LIST OF TABLES Table I: Ethnic composition of Kazan province based on the 1897 census……..….. 7 Table II: Religious beliefs of populations of Kazan province as recorded in the 1897 census…………………………………………………………………….… 7 Table III: Ethnicity of the population of Kazan province, correlated with Religion as recorded in the 1897 census…………………………………… 8 Table IV: Number of Inovertsy and Newly-baptized and Iasak Peasant Deputies from Kazan Province…….……………………………………….. 56 Table V: Demographic Composition of Delegates from Kazan Province to State Dumas……………………...…………………………….…………… 299 viii INTRODUCTION A dispute arose from the participation of two merchants’ sons, one Tatar and one Russian, in the Kazan merchant elections for members of the orphans court in 1896. Had a mistake been made in allowing them to cast votes? Should their votes be disqualified and the elections be considered invalid? Yes, believed one member of the city’s powerful merchantry, Karl Ivanov1 Shtiben, who filed a formal complaint with the provincial governor’s office arguing that since these two were the sons of merchants and did not own property individually, they should not have been allowed to participate in the elections, and the elections should therefore be invalidated and rerun – without the participation of the two “offenders.” As routinely as the merchant elections had been conducted for decades, the governor’s office investigated Shtiben’s complaint, providing a ruling that was as telling as it was logical: while there were no clear legal statutes specifically addressing whether or not the sons of merchants could act as proxies for their parents and vote in elections of the merchant society, there seemed to be an accepted means of reasoning out whether or not they should have been allowed to participate.2 The governor’s office determined that the legal statutes regarding official proxy voters for one estate (soslovie), the gentry, should be applied to another estate, in this case the merchantry, since the relevant legal statutes had what the governor described as “a general character.”3 In interpreting the statutes on proxy voters’ participation in elections for one estate as applicable to other estates, the governor drew on accumulated experience in overseeing 1 Patronymic names in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at times written with the modern Russian endings (e.g., “-ich”), and at times, were written without them (e.g., ending with “-in” or “-ov”). This indicates that these rules were not standardized in practice as they are in modern Russian. 2 Proxies were officially designated, and later officially certified, persons who could