The Fate of Agronomists in Russia: Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911 to 1916

Abstract

This article is aimed at clarifying a critically important aspect of rural public administration in late Imperial Russia, by analyzing the quantitative dynamics of agronomists in thirty-four old provinces between 1911 and 1916. A significant number of professional intellectuals in rural Russia were employees, so it is natural that the historiography of Russian rural intellectuals has been closely connected with that of the zemstvos. Western historiography of the reached a turning point between 1979 and 1982 with the publication of The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905-1914 (1979), edited by Leopold Haimson, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia (1982), by Roberta Manning, and The Zemstvo in Russia (1982), edited by Terence Emmons and Wayne Vucinich.I The authors of these works have much in common in their understanding of reformism and its periodization. They argue that reformism was prompted by the famine of 1891, culminated in the 1905 Revolution, and ceased after the zemstvo reaction, when Octobrists displaced left liberals in the leadership. Given such periodization, it is natural that these works mention the after 1907 almost exclusively in the context of reaction. Since I do not belong to the same academic community as the aforementioned historians, I cannot judge the extent of their influence. Nevertheless, it seems that American historians of Russia have given much less attention to the post-1907 than the pre1905 one.