Zemstvo - System of Local Self-Government in the Russian Empire

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Description

Teodor Shanin:

"the institution of zemstvo (a system of local self-government in the Russian Empire, which existed from the 1860s until the October Revolution of 1917 – translator’s note), which begot the institution of farming. And it was in Russia where this happened. Zemstvo as an institution of civil society laid the foundation and formed a series of statistical instruments for the scientific estimation of social stratification and its causes. In zemstvos, there was the so-called ‘third element’ – this is the code of a certain social group. The first element was represented by civil servants; the second by landowners and nobility; and the third by intelligentsia – doctors, teachers, priests, retired military personnel. In this environment, a new understanding of the economic and social reality was maturing. It was them who estimated and calculated how the rich grow richer, and the poor, if nothing is changed, are doomed to marginality. This was an entire stratum of Russian scholars, who created and developed a series of methods for evaluating social polarisation – they called this ‘dynamic studies’. Their level has not been attained in most countries of the world even today.

It was Chayanov and Russian agricultural economists who, based on the example of the organisation of living in rural communities, realised that a rational economy moving away from overconsumption and excessive production was the future. Such an approach was organically taking shape in small rural communities – zemstvos – which gradually developed into solid kulak (independent, affluent peasant farmers in the later Russian Empire – translator’s note) farms, and in the USSR into a no less powerful cooperative movement." (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-11-18/farmers-and-a-degrowth-economy-in-russia/?)