Untitled - OUDL Home

odies, the provincial and municipal councils. But thegreat majority of the Duma had been extremelyconservative, and the councils were narrow in theircomposition. The principle and practice of electiveinstitutions had a history in Russia, but it was thin,disconnected, and almost wholly subordinate to thehistory of the central power. Consider first the historyof local self-government, then that of national representation.Local government, right down to the great reforms ofthe eighteen-sixties, had been overwhelmingly controlledby the central authority. Efforts had been made fromtime to time, e.g. by Ivan the Terrible (1549-50, 1555)and Catherine the Great (1775, 1785), to combat thegross abuses of tax-farming and render government andjustice more effective by some reliance on locally electedofficials and bodies, or to infuse into the towns someelement of autonomy. But the response had been feeble:responsibility was a charge to be evaded if possible, andthe state having to impose service virtually killed organizedlocal initiative or self-dependence, except to some extentin the peasant communes. Justice and administrationfor the most part remained undivided in the same hands.In so far as local affairs were not caught up into thecentral mesh, the general tendency was to leave mattersto the separate classes of landowners, clergy, merchanttraders,and some sections of the peasantry, organized ona local not a national basis and acting in isolation fromeach other. Catherine the Great especially, by hercharter to the landowners (1785), gave a new basis totheir provincial and district assemblies and createdsubstantially an 'estate' of the nobility and gentry.Yet these assemblies did not develop into vital institutions,and the separation of classes, always encouragedfor fiscal purposes by the state in its perpetual effort toregiment its subjects into accessible pigeonholes, hadthe fatal effect of still further sundering from each otherthe various elements that went to make up Russiansociety.The great reforms (1861-70) under Alexander II wereprimarily the achievement of the progressive section in76