The St. Petersburg Literacy Committee and Russian Education: Government Tutelage or Public Trust?

The St. Petersburg LiteracyCommittee and RussianEducation: GovernmentTutelage or Public Trust?JOSEPH BRADLEY

There is no reason to restrict the Literacy Committee to a single direction.Rather, the Committee should have discretion to further knowledge amongthe entire peasant estate as it sees fit.

Minister of State Properties A. A. Zelenoi, 1862.

The Literacy Committee is spreading harmful ideas to other educationalsocieties and through a vast network of public libraries, reading rooms, andpublic lectures. It has gratuitously disseminated the works of so-called populistwriters and has tried to turn public education into a weapon of anti-governmentpropaganda.

Secret police report to the Main Directorate of the General Staff, 19045.

Although the relationship between Russian government and society in the nineteenthcentury is often portrayed in terms of conflict, for a long time cooperation was more typicallythe rule. In 1862, Minister of State Properties A. A. Zelenoi cited in the first epigraph,encouraged the activities of a voluntary association dedicated to the pursuit of nationalbetterment and the dissemination of useful knowledge. The interests of state and societyappeared to be shared interests, and on many projects officialdom, while insisting on asupervisory role, was willing to collaborate with individuals and associations. Such commoninterests were especially notable during the Era of the Great Reforms, when the governmentsought to improve state administration and to enlist public commitment to projects of nationalrenewal through the use of state-sanctioned publicity and public discussion (glasnost').One such common interest was education. All over Russia people were talking of

My thanks to Ben Eklof, Chris Ruane, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlierdrafts of this article.

The Russian Review 71 (April 2012): 26794Copyright 2012 The Russian Review

268 Joseph Bradley

education, recalled Peter Kropotkin. As soon as the peace had been concluded in Paris[ending the Crimean War in 1856], and the severity of censorship had been slightly relaxed,educational matters began to be eagerly discussed.1 The Russian state sanctioned andencouraged the involvement of newly created public bodies of local administrationthezemstvos and city councilsas well as voluntary associations in the project to create amore literate nation. During the Era of the Great Reforms, the ministries of education,finance, and war endorsed philanthropic efforts to found schools and libraries, organizepublic lectures and museums, and open Sunday schools. Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy, tocite only the most famous, were engaged in schemes to disseminate education. In additionto the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee, the Imperial Russian Technical Society, theSociety to Disseminate Technical Knowledge, and the Moscow Pedagogical Society wereall founded in the 1860s in order to spread education and facilitate the more productive useof human and material resources. All of these projects gained the support of a newlyvigorous Russian press.2

But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, education became a wedge issue betweenvoluntary associations and the zemstvos, on the one hand, and an increasingly suspiciousofficialdom. Education activists and liberals, many of whom emerged from the hopefulyears at the beginning of the Era of the Great Reforms and from the nonrevolutionarypopulist movement, wanted to expand the scope of their activities and to influence statepolicy, that is, to remove education from government tutelage and entrust it to the public.This, the government, especially the ministries of education and internal affairs and theDepartment of Police, was unwilling to permit. As Kropotkin recalled, the ministry ofeducation was engaged in a continuous passionate struggle against all private persons andall institutionsdistrict and city councils, municipalities, and the likewhich endeavoredto open teachers seminaries or technical schools, or even simple primary schools.3Moreover, in the opinion of a Department of Police report cited in the second epigraphabove, antigovernment views were expressed with the imprimatur of government-sanctionedassociations. By the 1890s, increasing civic activism, coupled with the ensuing governmentreaction, changed the relationship with the authorities of some of Russias most venerablelearned societies from one of cooperation to one of confrontation.

We may chart the trajectory from cooperation to confrontation by using the FreeEconomic Societys involvement in education as a case study. Although the governmentbureaucracy, the zemstvos, and teachers professional organizations have received theattention of historians, less is known about the work of Russias learned societies. Anexamination of a division of the Free Economic Society known as the Literacy Committeewill also provide a case study of the interaction between officialdom (itself often of manyvoices, as the two epigraphs demonstrate), an association, and the broader public as well asan example of the horizontal linkages in society that associations facilitated. Kropotkins

1Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston, 1930), 83.2The Ministry of Education encouraged the establishment in 1860 of the Petersburg Pedagogical

Society, under the leadership of the lawyer and professor P. G. Redkin. On the Pedagogical Society seeChristine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 18601914 (Pittsburgh,1994), 93.

3Kropotkin, Memoirs, 83, 248.

The St. Petersburg Literacy Committee and Russian Education 269

reminiscences illustrate the mixed signals sent by the government in the field of education.Government departments maintained their prerogative to approve the charter and bylawsof societies and to scrutinize their activities. At the same time, associations foundingdocuments accorded certain privileges: the ability to choose new members, to elect officers,to create divisions and branches, and to set their own mission and goals. Such privilegesmeant that associations had an autonomous inner life and were not merely creations of thestate.4 But as the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee expanded its educational projects andchallenged the governments control over education, the initial partnership between stateand society turned into conflict. Thus, we will see how a voluntary association became anagent in the effort to turn Russian education from an object of government tutelage into atrust held by the public.

Russia followed a European pattern, especially in continental countries, where governmentsand established churches controlled popular education. At the same time, Europeanliberal public opinion believed that by making the fruits of the Enlightenment accessibleto those of modest means, education liberated the individual. As Margaret C. Jacob, ahistorian of science and the enlightenment, argues, only literacy, enhanced by access tolearned opinion about books and journals that told what was worth reading, offered fullcitizenship or conferred identity within an autonomous public sphere.5 In nineteenth-century Europe, societies sprang up to facilitate the dissemination of education.6 Forexample, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in Londonin 1825 on the premise that the desire for self-improvement, assumed by many tomotivate working-class behavior, was thwarted by the lack of appropriate books in low-cost editions. The society publicized the ideal of cheap, enlightening literature and actedas a patron, literary agent, publishers reader, and promoter. Although financialproblems led to its demise two decades later, it provided a model for other privateorganizations in Europe to provide sponsored literature to the aspiring and was citedfrequently in the tracts published by Russian education societies.7 Even in statist France,popular education became the object of private initiative during the Restoration. In 1831,Benjamin Constant, Alphonse de Lamartine, and others founded the French Society forElementary Education to raise adult literacy rates and to champion compulsory primary

4For more on the relationship between the state and associations see my Voluntary Associations in TsaristRussia: Science, Patriotism and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

5Margaret C. Jacob, The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (Autumn 1994): 95113, esp. 100. See also Richard Van Dlmen, The Society of theEnlightenment: The Rise of the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany, trans. Anthony Williams(New York, 1992), 2.

6Michael Rose, Culture, Philanthropy, in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and CulturalProduction in Victorian Manchester, ed. Alan Kidd and K. M. Roberts (Manchester, 1995), 112; SanfordElwitt, Social Reform and Social Order in Late Nineteenth-Century France: The Muse Social and Its Friends,French Historical Studies 11 (April 1980): 43151.

7Harold Smith, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 182646: A Social and BibliographicalEvaluation (Halifax, 1974), 56, 9, 2933; Colin A. Russell, Science and Social Change in Britain and Europe,17001900 (New York, 1983), 156.

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education.8 Associations gathered, diffused, and augmented useful knowledge, cataloguedand tested pedagogical and teacher training techniques, and created informal networks offar-flung correspondents who were vital to the creation and exchange of useful information.Associations, such as the Franklin Society in France, also founded a variety of outreachprojects, the vehicles by which elites aimed to reduce access costs to knowledge and tomake useful information publicliteracy classes, technical schools, vocational training,publication and distribution of cheap reading matter, public libraries, and public lectures.Moreover, the organization of philanthropic activity aided professional careers anddemonstrated civic duty and cultural stewardship.9 In the second half of the nineteenthcentury, the needs of a modern economy, the increasing division of labor, and thespecialization of the work force required a greater investment in primary education and inadult and technical training. More and more, states took a more active role in the spread ofeducation for national strength and cohesion, especially in France and Germany.

Throughout the nineteenth century, governments blended both nurture and suspicionof private initiative in popular education. States and established churches with a monopolyin education were suspicious of unsupervised efforts to spread learning, especially to theallegedly impressionable lower classes. The French press law of 1814 and the CarlsbadDecrees of 1819, for example, subjected short books, newspapers, and pamphlets to pre-publication censorship. The French state, the best example of the highly centralized andtutelary state, was the natural protector of intellectual activity and the Ministry of PublicInstruction, according to Franois Guizot, was the natural tutor of learned societies.10Since the movement for universal secular education was synonymous with republicanismand anticlericalism, during the Restoration and Second Empire, the government did notfully trust even those education societies created in the spirit of accord with the governmentand was hostile toward any educational activity outside regular channels. According toKatherine Auspitz, Victor Duruy, minister of education from 1863 to 1869, feared that the

8Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de lenseignement and the Origins of the ThirdRepublic, 18661885 (Cambridge, England, 1982), 6364; Jean-Pierre Chaline, Sociabilit et rudition: Lessocits savants en France XIXXX sicle (Paris, 1995), 169.

9Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), 5, 35,37, 4345, 56, 66, 75, 288; Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of IntellectualChange (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 2526, 382; James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in EnlightenmentEurope (Cambridge, England, 2001), 1047; Auspitz, Radical Bourgeoisie, 70; Geoffrey Sutton, Science for aPolite Society: Gender, Culture and the Demonstration of the Enlightenment (Boulder, 1995), 19296, 214,222, 28890; Donald M. Scott, The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica, in Professions and Professional Ideologies in America, ed. Gerald L. Geison (Chapel Hill, 1983),1228, esp. 1721; J. N. Hays, The London Lecturing Empire, 18001850, in Ian Inskter and Jack Morrell,Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 17801850 (London, 1983), 91119, esp. 94, 9798,110; Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, 1997), 179; Donald M. Scott, The PopularLecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, Journal of American History 66(March 1980): 791809; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of theEnglish Middle Class, 17801850 (Chicago, 1987).

10Quoted in Chaline, Sociabilit, 205. See also Frederick Artz, The Development of Technical Education inFrance, 15001850 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 188; and Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds., The Organizationof Science and Technology in France, 18081914 (Cambridge, England, 1980), 241, 263. On censorship seeRobert J. Goldstein, ed., War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Westport,2000), 914.


emperors enemies would exploit popular education for their own political ends andaccordingly believed that it was dangerous to grant an association extended powers and ageneral character. Because the tendencies displayed by its members necessitated vigilantsurveillance, the French Society for Elementary Education could do little more than discussclassical books, present medals, and hear an annual oration. One such extended power,the establishment of public libraries, came under particular scrutiny. Popular libraries,school libraries, communal libraries, according to the Bishop of Orleans, represented ahorrifying diffusion of skepticism. In 1864 a circular of the French Ministry of theInterior called to the attention of prefects the public libraries sponsored by voluntaryassociations. The local prefects were responsible for selecting or approving the publiclibraries officers as well as examining their catalogues annually to make sure they containedonly useful, professional books, belonging to that body of wholesome literature proper toelevate and educate. As much as it may be appropriate to support and facilitate efforts tomoralize and instruct people, so much is it indispensable to preserve them from the disastrouseffects that antisocial doctrines and troublesome books will produce upon them.11

This occasionally edgy relationship between state and society, especially on theEuropean continent, shows that although governments by and large endorsed efforts todisseminate useful knowledge among the upper registers of the social hierarchy, they viewedunmediated contact with the laboring population as potentially subversive. When placedin a European context, the tutelage of the Russian government is less singular, though at thetime it seemed unique to the Russian intelligentsia, unfamiliar with the tutelage of Europeanstates. The Russian authorities shared with their French counterparts an aversion to privateinitiative in such a sensitive area as education.

THE ST. PETERSBURG LITERACY COMMITTEE ANDTHE FREE ECONOMIC SOCIETY, 1860S1880S

The best-known example of organized private initiative in popular education was the St.Petersburg Literacy Committee, a division of the Imperial Free Economic Society (usuallyabbreviated VEO in its Russian initials), founded in 1765 and Russias oldest voluntaryassociation. From its earliest years the VEO had established a precedent for its involvementin education.12 In 1847, S. S. Lashkarev, an official of the Ministry of State Properties anda member of the VEO proposed, creating a literacy committee to disseminate basic religiousand moral education in St. Petersburg along the model of a literacy committee establishedtwo years earlier by the Moscow Agricultural Society.13 However, on the eve of revolutions

11Cited passages from Auspitz, Radical Bourgeoisie, 59, 64, 66, 7071.12Early efforts in education may be found in A. I. Khodnev, Istoriia Imperatorskogo Vol'nogo

ekonomicheskogo obshchestva s 1765 do 1865 goda (St. Petersburg, 1865), 28190.13S. S. Lashkarev, O pol'ze vvedeniia gramotnosti mezhdu pomeshchich'imi krest'ianami, reprinted in S.

A. Maslov, O vsenarodnom rasprostranenii gramotnosti (Moscow, 1848), 3:23443. On Lashkarev see Russkiibiograficheskii slovar', 25 vols. (St. Petersburg, 18961918), 10:9899; and Sergei Sergeevich Lashkarev,Trudy VEO, no. 1 (1869): 16469. On the Literacy Committee of the Moscow Agricultural Society see Maslov,O vsenarodnom rasprostranenii gramotnosti, 17, 1214, 1719; N. P. Gorbunov, Kratkii obzorpiatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti Moskovskogo obshchestva sel'skogo khoziaistva, 18201870 (Moscow,

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in Europe and in the ensuing crackdown on public activity, the government was unwillingto sanction the institutionalization of private initiative in such a delicate matter as education.A decade later, Lashkarev again brought up the matter in a series of articles in Zhurnalsel'skogo khoziaistva, the flagship publication of the Moscow Agricultural Society. Finally,the Era of the Great Reforms provided a more favorable environment for Lashkarevs project,and the Literacy Committee of the Free Economic Society was approved in 1861.

The movement, if it may be called that, to found the St. Petersburg Literacy Committeeis an example of the partnership between state and society in a conservative pursuit ofnational betterment. Ironically, although by the end of the nineteenth century the Moscowand St. Petersburg literacy committees came to be regarded by officialdom and conservativepublic opinion as bastions of secularism, liberalism, and radicalism, at their inceptioneducation was utilized in support of a conservative and religious agenda; indeed, this wasthe only way for private initiative to get the governments imprimatur. The founders of theSt. Petersburg Literacy Committee such as Lashkarev were not proponents of free labor butof serf labor. They wanted to improve rural life by directing the debate away from the legaland economic plane to that of culture. Lashkarev argued that the bane of rural Russia wasnot serfdom but ignorance (nevezhestvo).14 Moreover, the government had been unwillingto take responsibility for the education of privately owned serfs. Into the vacuum steppedthe literacy committees. Since literacy, allegedly more than free labor, was essential inorder to disseminate useful knowledge about agriculture, Russian agriculture could notimprove, the argument ran, unless its basic human component, the peasant cultivator, becamea literate farmer. At the founding of its Literacy Committee, the officers of the Free EconomicSociety declared that the societys top priority must be to assist the spread of literacy amongthe former serfs.15

The St. Petersburg and Moscow literacy committees, along with new organs of localadministration (zemstvos and city councils), became the vehicle for state-societycollaboration and for the mobilization of private initiative in popular education.16 Theleaders of the VEO provided the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee with what came to becalled in post-Soviet Russia protection (krysha, literally, a roof). As was the case in theanalogous German agricultural societies, association leaders and officialdom regardedcollaboration between the Literacy Committee and the government as the natural state ofaffairs. Members of the imperial family, notables at court, and senior government officialsconferred their patronage of science, agriculture, and industry, mediated by the VEO, astheir predecessors had done for nearly a century, and in the mid-nineteenth century the

1871), 52; and Susan Smith-Peter, Educating Peasant Girls for Motherhood: Religion and Primary Educationin Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia, Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 391405.

14D. D. Protopopov, Istoriia S.-Peterburgskogo Komiteta gramotnosti, 18611895 (St. Petersburg, 1897),78.

15Lashkarev, O pol'ze vvedeniia gramotnosti, 23443; Protopopov, Istoriia, 95.16The standard history of the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee is Protopopov, Istoriia, compiled by its

secretary. Additional material on the precedents and origins of the Committee may be found in K. Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii Komitet gramotnosti: Istoricheskii ocherk, 18611911 (St. Petersburg, 1911); I. A. Gorchakov,Obzor deiatel'nosti Komiteta gramotnosti, Trudy VEO, no. 1 (1894): 28599; and P. Shestakov, Stolichnyekomitety gramotnosti, Russkaia mysl' (May 1896): 10624, (June 1896): 10724, and (October 1896):91102.


VEO continued to enjoy patronage at the court.17 The Council of Ministers approved theSt. Petersburg Literacy Committee as a temporary body, under the condition that theCommittee not discuss or assess government policies, noting that the Board of the VEOmust make sure that the new divisions or committees do not depart from their assignedsphere of activity.18 Despite this restriction, the Committee could choose its activitiesrather than wait to have them chosen by the government. As long as discussion of governmentpolicy was avoided, the nature of the committees activities was vaguely defined andpotentially unlimited in scope; moreover, the government sanctioned them.19 The St.Petersburg Literacy Committees independent ways and involvement in education, aprerogative jealously guarded by the church, the Ministry of Education, and other governmentdepartments, was destined to make its projects a flash point a generation later.

The parent society allowed the new Committee to establish its own rules and proceduresof internal governance, as well as to elect its officers and executive board. To support itswide-ranging activities, the Committee was allowed to have its own budget. Like manyRussian private institutions, the Literacy Committee had little endowment and had to relyon in-kind contributions, membership dues, and donations, including large donations fromMoscow merchants in the early years. The Committees rules and regulations made it moreaccessible to the public than were the other divisions of the Free Economic Society, andCommittee membership was not limited to members of the VEO. At the time of its founding,the Committee advertised its program in several newspapers and provincial bulletins andinvited all persons who support the creation of the Committee and who wish to participatein its efforts to establish contact with the Committee.20 In the first year, 110 new membersfrom 30 provinces of the empire joined the Committee. By the end of the century a largenetwork of correspondents included members of the zemstvo boards and local educationactivists. In addition, the Committee opened its doors to women members, who could beespecially useful in educational matters.21 At a time when membership in most Russianassociations, especially the learned and scientific societies, was a male prerogative, thiswas a major innovation. The Committee empowered itself to create ad hoc commissionsthat later were to review educational materials and to gather data on teacher training, schoolconditions, and rural libraries; non-members with particular expertise could be invited toserve on them. Finally, the Committees general meetings were open to the public, andnon-members could participate in discussions. Thus, unlike most learned societies, eventhose with a philanthropic mission, the Literacy Committee became a quasi-civicorganization.

17Po voprosu o peresmotru ustava Imp. VEO, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f.560 (Ministerstvo finansov), op. 22, d. 232, l. 84; E. D. Kuskova, Rol' Imperatorskogo Vol'nogoekonomicheskogo obshchestva v obshchestvennoi zhizni za poslednie 25 let, Vestnik sel'skogo khoziaistva,no. 5152 (1915): 14.

18RGIA, f. 1275 (Sovet ministrov), op. 1, d. 23, ll. 5657. See also Protopopov, Istoriia, 349.19Protopopov, Istoriia, 357, also 1113, 349. See also Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 89; Joan Klobe

Pratt, The Russian Free Economic Society, 17651915 (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1983), 38993;and Gorchakov, Obzor deiatel'nosti, 28687.

20Khodnev, Istoriia, 358; Shestakov, Stolichnye komitety gramotnosti, 3:98.21Protopopov, Istoriia, xxv. Cited passage in Pratt, Free Economic Society, 391.

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Difficulties in launching its first projects and a certain amount of indifference on thepart of the parent society, coupled with government scrutiny of its activities, caused theLiteracy Committee to maintain a low profile for many years. The ambivalent attitude ofautocracy toward private initiative during the reform era, reflected in its attitude towardzemstvo initiatives in education, coupled with the considerable autonomy to manage theCommittees affairs and the public nature of its operations, created misgivings in officialdom.Like the Sunday schools, the Literacy Committee, in the view of the political police, allegedlywould give ill-intentioned persons the means to corrupt the minds of the lower classes.22According to one members account much later, Clearly the governments attitude towardthe Committee at the very beginning could not help but leave an impression on all itsactivities.23 In the 1870s the Committee for all practical purposes consisted of its board;few members showed up at meetings. For many years its chairman, N. A. Ermakov, alsodirector of the Department of Trade and Industry of the Ministry of Finance, guided theCommittee with great caution and defended it from government scorpions whose stingcould have been fatal. In the judgment of Joan Pratt, the VEO could be circumspect,even obeisant, in its behavior. One of its goals was always to survive.24

We can know the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee better by its works, among whichwere the publication and distribution of books, the founding and administration of publiclibraries, and the gathering of information and pedagogical resources. The Committeefounded book depositories, arranged with publishers to sell books at discounted prices,and distributed free of charge government-approved books and instructional materials toschools and libraries under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, the RussianOrthodox Church, and, later, the zemstvos and city councils.25 This project included thecompilation of a catalogue of approved books; the Ministry of Education alone ordered sixthousand copies. Books (or money to purchase books) were donated to the Committee,and requests to receive books could be sent to the Committee. In the early years of thebook distribution program, that is, in the 1860s and early 1870s, some book donationscame from members of the Committee itself; in 1866, V. A. Aleksandrov donated fiftycopies of his own book on gardening, and substantial donations came from the Moscowbusiness community. When the government closed the Sunday schools in 1862, the editorialboard of Artilleriiskii zhurnal donated 1,018 rubles and 2,647 books no longer needed for

22Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 102 (Departament politsii), 4 d/p (4th Secretariat)(1907), d. 133 (Vol'noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo), vol. 7, l. 49. On the governments ambivalent attitudetoward zemstvo involvement in education see B. B. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, 4 vols. (St.Petersburg, 190911), 1:449; and Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, andPopular Pedagogy, 18611914 (Berkeley, 1986), 5069. On the Sunday schools see Reginald Zelnik, Laborand Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 18551870 (Stanford, 1971), 17399.

23Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 8, 11. On Tolstoy see RBS 20a:4762; Allston, Education and the State,87104; and Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia underCount Dmitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 21452.

24Cited passages from Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 17; and Pratt, Free Economic Society, 196. Seealso Protopopov, Istoriia, 2426; and A. P. Berdyshev, 150 let sluzheniia Otechestvu: Iz istorii Vol'nogoekonomicheskogo obshchestva, 4 vols. (Moscow, 199293), 1:3435, 42.

25Khodnev, Istoriia, 35859; V. Vakhterov, Knizhnye sklady v provintsii, in Chastnyi pochin v delenarodnogo obrazovaniia (Moscow, 1894), 29394, 311.


Sunday schools run by the Ministry of War. The distributions included book donations tohospitals, prisons, and temperance societies, as well as to soldiers during the Russo-TurkishWar, an enterprise that combined education, private initiative, and patriotism. It also includedRussian-language books sent to the borderlands, thereby contributing to Russias imperialproject and to Russification. More than one million books passed through this networkbetween 1861 and 1895.26

Initially, individual requests came largely from the clergy and provincial officials; inthe period 186367, the clergy ran 90 percent of the schools to which the Committee sentbooks. However, the establishment of a network of primary schools soon began to bearfruit. In the 1870s the Committee noticed a change in the requests, a process ofdemocratization, as D. D. Protopopov called it: fewer and fewer requests came from theclergy and ministry officials and more and more came from township officials, zemstvoboards, school boards, librarians, teachers, and peasants themselves. Early requests hadbeen for basic schoolbooks and the grammar books of F. D. Studitskii and V. A. Zolotov, aprominent mid-century educator whose Russkaia azbuka appeared in thirty printings thatemphasized rote learning. However, more and more requests came for K. D. UshinskiisRodnoe slovo, a progressive grammar book that mixed religious and secular texts, writtenby an educator who advocated national, scientific, and child-centered pedagogy.27 Teachersalso wanted textbooks on Russian history, geography, and the natural sciences. The veryform of the requests began to change. In the 1860s and early 1870s, according to Protopopov,provincial officials, clergy, and landlords wrote to the Committee on gray paper, withappalling penmanship, and in awkward language filled with mistakes. In his memoirsCommittee member B. E. Ketrits recalled that a parish superintendent in Kamchatka senthis request written on birch bark. By the 1880s, Ketrits believed, Russia had changed,and the public school was educating people with different needs and interests. Requestsin that unfocused, humiliating, deferential bureaucratic language almost disappeared.Now we see letters and applications written on good paper, most with good penmanship,without mistakes, and infused with a feeling of self-worth. Moreover, according to Ketrits,the teachers and zemstvo officials who requested schoolbooks regard the LiteracyCommittee with trust and not as part of officialdom.28 Like its parent organization, theLiteracy Committee believed it was performing a useful service, in this case assisting officialefforts to make Russia a literate nation. The Literacy Committees book-distribution program

26Spisok knig, odobrennykh Komitetom gramotnosti (St. Petersburg, 1862); Protopopov, Istoriia, 138139.See also N. V. Chekhov, Narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii s 60-kh godov XIX veka (Moscow, 1912); Eklof,Russian Peasant Schools, 114; and Ben Eklof, The Archaeology of Backwardness in Russia: Assessing theAdequacy of Libraries for Rural Audiences in Late Imperial Russia, in The Space of the Book: Print Culturein the Russian Social Imagination, ed. Miranda Remnek (Toronto, 2011), 10841, esp. 11314. By the 1890s,not all members of the Committee, including Protopopov, were proud of the contribution to Russification.Indeed, most members of the Committee favored native-language instruction, especially in Ukraine.

27Protopopov, Istoriia, 13641. On Ushinskii see Ruane, Gender, Class, 25, 180; Eklof, Russian PeasantSchools, 77, 27374; and Alston, Education and the State, 8891. Studnitskii was the author of Azbuka dliakrest'ianskikh detei: Legkii sposob uchit'sia gramote (St. Petersburg, 1860). On Zolotov see RBS 7:44449.

28Cited passages from Protopopov, Istoriia, 14950; and B. E. Ketrits, Vospominaniia, vii. See alsoShestakov, Stolichnye komitety, 113; Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 23; Pratt, The Free Economic Society,391; and Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 18611917 (Princeton,1985), 34142.

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provides an example of the interaction between Russian associations and officialdom aswell as of the horizontal linkages in society that associations facilitated.

The Literacy Committee complemented its distribution network with a publishingventure of its own. As early as 1861 a member reported on the need for the Committee topublish books due to the noticeable awakening of interest in reading.29 Although at firstit lacked the means, beginning in 1880 the Committee organized the publication ofgovernment-approved educational materials and fiction, frequently popular editions ofpreviously published material. In this, the Committee played a culturalist role in theeffort of educated society to provide an alternative to the lubok pulp fiction and to constructa canon of edifying popular literature, mediated by the expertise of educators. Accordingto one of the leading culturalists and author of the Committees history, most of its editionsshowed a striving for truth, a vivid depiction of the condition of the injured and theinsulted, a bold disclosure of lies and injustice, a profound respect for peaceful labor. ...Authentic to lifes truths, the editions published by the Committee depict a somber view ofthe material needs of simple people ... and the unequal struggle of advanced people withthe pressures of reality.30

In its efforts to publish and distribute books, as well as in later efforts to stock publiclibraries, the Literacy Committee ran into the censorship regime, thereby creating frictionbetween it and the Ministry of Education. On May 19, 1869, the Ministry of Educationcreated a special section of the Academic Committee on primary school textbooks withoutwhose approval no school could acquire a book. Unlike the learned publications of theFree Economic Society that were exempt from pre-publication censorship, the LiteracyCommittees publication list, as well as the books to be distributed to schools and libraries,were subject to a second scrutiny or a second censorship. In other words, a book that hadalready passed the censors had to be reviewed again before it could be republished in aninexpensive popular edition, distributed to a school, or sent to a library. However, sincecatalogues of approved and forbidden books were not widely available to the public andwere often out of date, there were numerable delays and ministry decisions that appearedarbitrary to the Literacy Committee.31 Many books that had already been published wereconsidered inappropriate for republication or undesirable for a wide readership. Forexample, Tolstoys Dva starika was rejected because it could provide a pretext for dishonestthinking. A popular edition of Turgenevs Postolialyi dvor was denied because the officialreviewer found obscene passages, prompting D. D. Protopopov, the committees secretary,to quip later that this is the first time the Committee learned of this heretofore unknownfeature of Turgenevs works.32 As Konstantin Pobedonostsev informed Tolstoys wife

29Quoted in Protopopov, Istoriia, 203.30Ibid., 225. See also Gorchakov, Obzor deiatel'nosti, 288; and Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 16. The

Literacy Committee won a silver medal for the display of its publications at the Paris World Exposition of 1889(Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva 3:386).

31Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 131; Mary Stuart, The Ennobling Illusion: The Public Library Movementin Late Imperial Russia, Slavonic and East European Review 76 (July 1998): 40140, esp. 414; Eklof,Archaeology of Backwardness, 131.

32Quoted in Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 25. See also Protopopov, Istoriia, 143, 2078. This was partof Dmitrii Tolstois project to centralize the approval process of school books. See Allen Sinel, The Classroomand the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, MA, 1973),


Sofiia regarding her husbands manuscript of What Then Should Be Done? Everythingthat is passed [by the censors] is considered approved, and these pages can in no waybe approved.33

The Literacy Committees willingness to confront the government revealed a newcivic activism in the 1890s. Some causes of this activism, such as public reaction to thefamine of 1891, greater assertiveness of zemstvo leaders, and increasing support for universaleducation, have been well documented.34 Less well known are the internal causeschangesin membership and the mission of associations themselves. The St. Petersburg LiteracyCommittee shows that increased activism was the result also of important shifts within itsparent organization, the Free Economic Society.

CHANGES IN MEMBERSHIP AND MISSION

Earlier generations of officers and members of the Free Economic Society had approachedtheir activities in the role of patrons of agriculture and industries (remesla). (Indeed, honorarymembership was a way of securing continued patronage.) In this, the VEO, like many ofRussias older associations, defined itself as complementing and assisting the governmentin the pursuit of mutual goalsbringing progress and prosperity to the nation. For morethan a century, the VEO had cultivated close ties with government agencies, from which itsought assistance and received subsidies. In order to complement and assist the governmentmost effectively, the VEO had been accorded certain privileges and independence of action.Members and officialdom alike saw to it that the VEOs privileges were not abused. Althoughits privileges were contained in a charter, the actual conduct of the VEO was governed lessby the charter than by the temperament of its officers.

Beginning in the mid-1880s, a combination of factors changed the leadership andgeneral membership of the VEO, and the increased activism of the Literacy Committeecannot be explained without recognition of these changes. Government officials and highlyplaced notables gave way to public figures (obshchestvennye deiateli); patrons of sciencegave way to public policy activists. From 1869 to 1882, the VEOs president had been thenotable Count A. A. Suvorov-Rymnikskii, a member of the State Council, governor-generalof St. Petersburg (186166), inspector-general of infantry, regarded by D. A. Miliutin as avain and empty man.35 He was succeeded by Konstantin Kavelin. A legal scholarand prominent enlightened bureaucrat during the Era of the Great Reforms, Kavelin hadbeen a member of the Statistical Division of the Russian Geographical Society during itsheyday before Emancipation. Thus, Kavelin was a key bridgeat the topbetween thegeneration of the 1860s and that of the 1880s and 1890s. During his brief tenure as president

6061; and Brooks, When Russian Learned to Read, 3025. On the obstacles facing the Moscow AgriculturalSociety see S. A. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Tsentral'nye nechernozemnyegubernii (Moscow, 2002), 17677.

33L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 192858), 25:75758. See also my TheWriter and the City in Late Imperial Russia, Slavonic and East European Review 64 (July 1986): 31938.

34Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 97119; Allen Sinel, The Campaign for Universal Primary Education inRussia, 18901914, Jahrbcher fr Geshchichte Osteuropas 30 (1982): 481507, esp. 482.

35V. Fedorchenko, Imperatorskii dom: Vydaiushchiesia sanovniki, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2001) 2:413.

278 Joseph Bradley

(188284), Kavelin launched a discussion of the mission and effectiveness of the VEO.Dissatisfied with the Free Economic Societys low level of activity, Kavelin wanted toenliven the society and recalibrate its mission. Believing that new strains of plants, newlivestock breeds, and new agriculture machines would not by themselves improve agriculture,Kavelin argued that the VEO needed to focus more attention on studying the deeper causesof Russian agricultural backwardness.36

Kavelins successors were also public activists. Baron P. L. Korf, president from1885 to 1890, was also St. Petersburg mayor and chair of the provincial zemstvo executiveboard. The economist, statistician, and journalist A. S. Posnikov, the zemstvo activistCount Petr A. Geiden, the botanist and academician Andrei Sergeevich Faminitsyn, and thejurist Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii followed Kavelin and Korf. Geiden, a liberal ofthe English type was an organizer of a series of agricultural congresses held so that zemstvoofficials and landowners could discuss common problems. In 1896 he unsuccessfullyattempted to create an organizational tie between zemstvo leaders and the VEO in the formof a separate division of the VEO for zemstvo board chairmen. Late in life, he was anOctobrist and in October 1906, became president of the Party of Peaceful Renewal, createdby members of the Club of Public Activists.37

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the VEOs rank-and-file membership changed evenmore dramatically, a change that Ekaterina Kuskova later called the democratization ofthe society. Many who had joined the Free Economic Society in the Era of the GreatReforms had left; many of the government officials who were still members had retiredfrom service. From 764 members in 1857, the VEO grew to 969 in 1891; from 1891 to1900, 480 new members joined the Society. Two hundred of these new members joined theDivision of Political Economy, the fastest growing of the VEO; in 1898 alone, 74 of 87new members joined this division. From 116 in 1885 the Literacy Committees membershipspiked to 424 in 1892, and reached 1,025 in 1895. At the very least, there were moremembers to come to the general meetings, to be on the board, to write reports, and to serveon commissionsin short, a critical mass for a more activist society.38

A great influx of writers, public activists, the technical intelligentsia, urban professionalsand zemstvo men were attracted to the VEO. As B. B. Veselovskii points out, this turnoverin personnel paralleled a similar development in the zemstvos, where the non-propertied(netsenzovaia) intelligentsia gravitated to cultural work beginning in the late 1880s. In

36Berdyshev, 150 let sluzheniia Otechestvu 1:3435, 42. On Kavelin see RBS 8:35873; and Daniel Field,Kavelin and Russian Liberalism, Slavic Review 32 (March 1973): 5978. On the statistical division of theRussian Geographical Society see Bradley, Voluntary Associations, 11522.

37Kuskova, Rol', 1415; David Wartenweiler, Civil Society and Academic Debate in Russia, 19051914(Oxford, 1999), 69. On Posnikov see Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Russkogo Bibliograficheskogo InstitutaGranat (ESG), 58 vols. (Moscow, [1910]48), 33:11424. On Faminitsyn see Bibliograficheskii slovar' deiateleiestestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 2 vols. (Moscow, 195859), 2:298. On Kovalevskii see ESG 24:39498. On Korfsee Entskiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona: Biografii (ES Biografii), 12 vols. (Moscow, 1991),6:255. On Geiden see ESG 13:5960.

38From the memoirs of committee member B. E. Ketrits, appended to Protpopov, Istoriia, v; Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 23. See also N. F. Gritsenko, Izmenenie sostava i aktivizatsiia deiatel'nosti Vol'nogoekonomicheskogo obshchestva v kontse XIX v., Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Ser. 8, Istoriia, no. 4(1996): 6778; and Berdyshev, 150 let sluzheniia Otechestvu 1:29. On Kuskova see ES Biografii 6:43940.Remember that not all members of the Literacy Committee were members of the Free Economic Society.


association, young professionals were able to satisfy their humanitarian impulses andexercise a generally suppressed urge to diagnose and treat socioeconomic ills.39 Beginningin 1885 a circle of young professionals known as the Refugees (Priiutintsy) gatheredaround the educators Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kalmykova and Nikolai Rubakin. In thelate 1880s, Kalmykovas circle became members of the Literacy Committee and the Divisionof Political Economy; she became secretary of the Literacy Committee in 1890 and a memberof the Board of the VEO.40

Inextricably connected with the change in membership were changes in ideas. AsEkaterina Kuskova later admitted, the forum of the Free Economic Society was well chosenfor the exposure of new public tendencies.41 In the 1890s Kalmykovas circle within theFree Economic Society became the incubator of what might be called legal liberalism.Indeed, the membership of the Division of Political Economy and of the Literacy Committeein the 1890s reads like a Whos Who of the future Union of Liberation. Its freshmanclass of 1895, included the populist historian V. I. Semevskii, Peter Struve, and MikhailTugan-Baranovskii, all members of the Division of Political Economy. New members ofthe Literacy Committee included Konstantin Arsen'ev, the future editor of the liberal journalVestnik Evropy, zemstvo statisticians such as Konstantin A. Verner, and educators Ia. T.Mikhailovskii, Genrikh Adol'fovich Fal'bork, and Vladimir Ivanovich Charnoluskii. Nowonder, then, that to the Committees secretary, D. D. Protopopov, writing a history of theLiteracy Committee in the mid-1890s, it was as if there were two different societies. Peoplewho believed in the importance of a widespread public education, people who had alreadyworked in this field (former teachers, publishers, people who studied popular literature)began to appear on the Board and on the commissions. ... This was a stormy time for theLiteracy Committee.42

Needless to say, this did not escape the attention of the political police. According toa report of the Special Section of the Department of Police, based on a truly colossalamount of serious information, in the 1890s, liberals, mainly urban professionals, decidedto pursue organized antigovernment agitation and resistance to government policies legally,not by means of revolution. They pressured the government with criticism at meetings,

39Pratt, Free Economic Society, 24647, 45153; Kuskova, Rol', 14; Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, 3:310;Jacob Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Political and Social Institutions underthe Last Three Tsars (New York, 1962), 12540; Klaus Frhlich, The Emergence of Russian Constitutionalism,19001914: The Relationship between Social Mobilization and Political Group Formation in Pre-RevolutionaryRussia (The Hauge, 1981), 2933, 14756.

40Entskiklopedicheskii slovar' (ES), 86 vols. (St. Petersburg: F. A. Brokgauz i I. A. Efron, 18901907),27:64. On Kalmykova see ES Biografii 5:506; Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1890 (St. Petersburg, 1891),2122; and Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1892 (St. Petersburg, 1893), 109.

41Kuskova, Rol', 1415.42Protopopov, Istoriia, 149, 220. The membership of the Division of Political Economy in 1904 comprised

B. V. Avilov, D. N. Borodin, V. A. Vladimirskii, P. A. Vikhliaev, V. M. Vonliarliarskii, P. P. Dzhunkovskii, S. S.Zhilkin, D. E Zhukovskii, A. A. Isaev, A. M. Kalmykova, A. A. Kaufman, V. D. Kuz'min-Karavaev, A. G.Kubliako-Koretskii, A. A. Maslov, P. P. Maslov, P. N. Miliukov, V. A. Muromtsev, V. A. Miakotin, Prince P. S.Obolenskii, Baron F. R. Osten-Saken, M. I. Petrunkevich, V. A. Posse, A. V. Peshekhonov, N. A. Rubakin,V. V. Sviatlovskii, P. P. Semenov, V. Iu. Skalon, G. V. Struve, P. B. Struve, V. O. Totomiants, M. Tugan-Baranovskii, V. I. Charnoluskii, Prince D. I. Shakovskoi, Count P. S. Sheremet'ev, and M. D. Shidlovskii(GARF, f. 102, 4 d/p [1907], d. 133, vol. 1, ll. 18492). I borrow the term freshman class from Pratt, FreeEconomic Society, 247.

280 Joseph Bradley

protests, and petitions in expression of solidarity with all grievances. Needing anorganizedand legalbase in which to bring together urban professionals and zemstvoactivists, otherwise scattered all over Russia, liberals turned to the Free Economic Society.Indeed, because many were already members of the Literacy CommitteeKalmykova,Fal'bork, Charnoluskii, Protopopov, Nikolai Rubakinthey did not have far to turn. At atime when national organizations of zemstvo leaders or of professionals were not allowed,the VEO provided a forum, literally (a meeting hall) and figuratively, for public debate.The police report concluded that among the various divisions of the Free Economic Society,the Literacy Committees oppositionist views were especially destructive.43 Accordingto several confidential government reports, new members entering in the late 1880s formeda young party, allegedly responsible for the wrong turn within the VEO. Though smallin number at first, they recruited others like them. Not unexpectedly, in the eyesof officialdom, public figures were far more suspect than were previous generations ofthe patrons of science, and the young party were at root agitators and orators. Of342 members of the Division of Political Economy in 1900, 192 were listed in police filesas unreliable.44

Charnoluskii and Fal'bork are good examples of the young party. Born into an oldnoble family in Chernigov province in 1865, the son of a government official, Charnoluskiienrolled in the Law Faculty at Moscow University in 1884. He joined one of the manyillegal student circles that discussed public issues, educated themselves, and circulatedpopular literature among peasants. He also worked on the staff of an illegal studentpublication, Svobodnoe slovo. For his involvement in such activity as well as his participationin student demonstrations against police searches at the university, in 1887 Charnoluskiiwas expelled, exiled from Moscow for five years, and placed under covert surveillance.One year later he received permission to enroll in St. Vladimir University in Kiev where hegraduated with a law degree in 1889. In 1890 he became the land captain (!) ofNovozybkovskii county in his home province of Chernigov. His secretary there was Fal'bork.The land captain, an appointee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs charged with supervisingthe local zemstvos, was the linchpin in the counterreforms under Alexander III. One canonly wonder what they were thinking when the ministry appointed a man under policesurveillance to occupy this important post! In the event, it did not take long for the youngofficial to fire off memoranda concerning the misuse of the punishment of exile from thepeasant community and the abuse of corporal punishment. Before the year was over, hewas dismissed for activities unbecoming a representative of the government. In 1891 hemoved to St. Petersburg, where he began to write articles for Russkoe bogatstvo. He joinedboth the Literacy Committee and the VEOs Division of Political Economy. Quickly

43Sekretnaia svodka Departamenta Politsii dlia Glavnogo Upravleniia General'nogo Shtaba ob uvelicheniemchisla oppozitsionno-nastroennykh elementov sredi chlenov Vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva v sviazis rostom revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v 19041905 gg., RGIA, f. 91, op. 1, d. 664 (19045), ll. 13.

44Po voprosu o peresmotre ustava Imperatorskogo Vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, Ministry ofFinance, Uchenyi komitet, to Minister of Finance Witte, May 28, 1899, RGIA, f. 560, op. 22, d. 232, ll. 8485.The report of the Department of Police can be found in GARF, f. 102 (Osobyi otdel) (1914), d. 320, l. 1919ob.Collaboration between an association and officialdom, typically a ministry such as State Properties or Education,of course, did not prevent the Department of Police from keeping files on association members. Protopopovdiscusses the new members in Istoriia, 3, 6. See also Pratt, Free Economic Society, 45153.


demonstrating his capacities for organizational work, Charnoluskii became secretary of theCommittees Board and member of several of its commissions. Representing the populiststrain among education activists, in Mary Stuarts words, Charnoluskii continued a longcareer as an educator, historian of education, prolific author, statistician, professionalorganizer, bibliographer and library activist.45

Fal'bork was born into a noble family of Poltava province in 1865. At St. PetersburgUniversity, he studied statistics under Professor Iu. E. Ianson. After joining the LiteracyCommittee in 1886, he teamed up with Charnoluskii in a variety of projects. In the summerof 1892 he traveled on foot through the famine districts; his article on the famine wasabridged before it could be published in the Proceedings of the Free Economic Society. Hewas a contributor to Russkoe bogatstvo, Russkie vedomosti, Severnyi vestnik, and Vestnikvospitaniia. Fal'bork became chair of the Literacy Committees publishing commission; asdeputy chairman of the board, he spearheaded the movement within the Committee to openpublic libraries, to be discussed below.46

In its attempts to explain the wrong turn of the Free Economic Society, Russianofficialdom was careful to point out that the young party, or radicals as they weresometimes called, were in a minority. These unreliable persons have seized power andclearly contradict by any means the return of the Society to a correct course despite thewishes of the other members.47 Throughout the 1890s the government held hope that theVEO, on its own, could return to its original course. At the same time, while Russiangovernment reports excessively emplot such activities, the gathering of Russianliberalism, and the critical role played by the Free Economic Society, were hardly the productsof hyperimaginative police minds. Looking back on the VEOs activities, Ekaterina Kuskovaadmitted that it was clear that when such people began to act, we would be speaking aboutsomething more than merely patronage of agriculture and industry but about somethingelse, about a different view of the world and about attitudes, qualitatively different fromthose of the past.48

THE LAST YEARS OF THE LITERACY COMMITTEE

The rapid reconfiguration in its membership enlarged and enlivened the Literacy Committee;members of the Free Economic Society and Russian officialdom were in agreement thatthis changed dramatically the committees outlook. A decade earlier the changes suggestedby Kavelin had come from the top down; by the 1890s, calls for increased activism camefrom the bottom up. In 1890 a group of twenty-seven, dissatisfied with the Committeesmodest level of public activity, petitioned the Committees Board to expand its activities,

45Stuart, The Ennobling Illusion, 419. See also ES 75:393; M. Iu. Dedlovskaia, V. I. Charnoluskii:Vidnyi deiatel' rossiiskogo narodnogo obrazovaniia, Voprosy istorii no. 3 (2001): 12127; andPedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia (PE), 4 vols. (Moscow, 196468), 4:64344.

46ES, 69:272; PE 4:46162. Fal'bork and Charnoluskii co-authored the substantial entry on primary educationin the Brokgauz-Efron encyclopedia (ES 40:72870).

47Doklad po Departamentu zemledeliia Ministerstva zemledeliia i gosudarstvennogo imushchestva, ll 14 of Ob izmenenii ustava Imp. Vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, RGIA, f. 381, op. 46, d. 162.

48Kuskova, Rol', 1415.

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thus commencing a a bitter internal struggle for the complete revitalization of theCommittee.49 The Committees increasing activism can be seen in stepped-up efforts todisseminate information, in the public library program, in the greater assertion of policyinitiatives, and in the more public nature of its meetings. Such initiatives in educationalpolicy, as well as the assertiveness with which they were undertaken, aroused governmentopposition: faced with a more assertive association, and with the diminishing efficacy ofgovernment tutelage over education, conservative officials struck back.

The Literacy Committee ventured more and more into the realm of education policy,and information-gathering was the first step. The gathering and dissemination of informationabout nation and empire was one of the most important ways Russias associations, such asthe Free Economic Society, assisted the government to further progress. In 1872 the LiteracyCommittee began to compile data collected from government offices about Russian primaryeducation. Twelve years later the Committee turned to the zemstvos for data on primaryschools. At the same time, utilizing a network of correspondents, the Literacy Committeeconducted its own surveys of textbooks, primary education, and public libraries. In the late1880s, Kalmykova and Rubakin led efforts to undertake reader surveys, to gather data onpopular reading habits, and to review educational materials; and various commissions werecreated to gather data on teacher training, school conditions, and rural libraries. TheCommittee disseminated information on education through publications and papers presentedat its meetings.50

This interest in acquiring knowledge about Russian primary education culminated in1893 in an ambitious program undertaken by the Literacy Committees newly createdCommission to Collect and Analyze Data on Primary Education. Among the statisticiansand education activists on the Commission were Verner, Charnoluskii, Fal'bork, N. A.Okunev, V. I. Pokrovskii, and D. I. Rikhter. Initially, the commission proposed a statisticalyearbook on Russian public education compiled from published sources. However, thepublished data were fragmentary, out-of-date, or unavailable to the public; moreover, therewas little information on the inner life of the school. Accordingly, the commission in 1894decided to undertake its own survey, one that stood out from most other statistical surveysof the time in several ways. First, although zemstvo questionnaires were used as a basis forits own forms, the commission decided to send a preliminary draft to a variety of educationexperts and statisticians for comment. On the basis of this feedback, a revised questionnairewas compiled. Second, the basic unit of investigation was the individual school, ratherthan the district or other jurisdiction. Third, teachers, rather than school administrators,completed the questionnairesapparently, eagerly.51 Thus, in its information-gatheringand in its programs, the Literacy Committee framed a variety of issues of public education

49Ketrits, Vospominaniia, 54.50Best known of the published surveys are S. I. Miropol'skii, Sistematicheskii obzor russkoi narodnouchebnoi

literatury (St.Petersburg, 1878); and G. A. Fal'bork and V. I. Charnoluskii, eds., Nachal'noe narodnoeobrazovanie v Rossii: Statisticheskie issledovaniia, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1900). See also Gorchakov, Obzordeiatel'nosti, 288; Protopopov, Istoriia, 10711; and V Peterburgskii komitet gramotnosti, Russkaia shkola,no. 7 (1890): 175, and no. 1 (1894): 2045.

51On the school survey see Christine Ruane Hinshaw, A Source for the Social History of Late ImperialRussia: The 1895 Primary School Survey Conducted by the Free Economic Society, Cahiers du Monde russeet sovietique 25:4 (1984): 45562.


and pedagogy, and the number of annual requests for information and assistance in the1890s had increased tenfold. Moreover, by reaching schools and teachers directly, theLiteracy Committee promoted horizontal linkages in society that bypassed official channels.

One of the most innovative and complicated projects of the Literacy Committee wasits attempt, beginning in the early 1890s, to establish public libraries, widely viewed inEurope and North America as a means to disseminate useful knowledge and to cultivatecitizenship. As the educator and bibliophile Nikolai Rubakin put it, the public libraryrepresented a weapon of society in the struggle for a better future.52 Although laggingbehind Europe, Russia followed the continental pattern of a mixture of government nurtureand suspicion in the development of public libraries. As early as the 1830s the VEO beganad hoc efforts to assist in the establishment of provincial libraries, and to stock them withcopies of its own publications.53 After the creation of the zemstvos in 1864, the Moscowand St. Petersburg literacy committees cooperated to establish, and stock, school libraries,and by the 1890s Russia had more than one thousand school libraries. In the late 1880s theLiteracy Committee began to agitate for the greater development of public libraries, in partbecause school libraries were limited to titles approved by the Ministry of Education and inpart because the school libraries were of limited use to adults.

As in continental Europe, conservative officialdom rightly feared that politicallyunreliable persons would use free, accessible, and well-stocked libraries to spreadantigovernment and anticlerical ideas to the people, and therefore placed several restrictionson the enterprise. The establishment of libraries depended on the initiative of local governors,and each instance required official approval. In 1882 special rules for public librariesstipulated that requests to open such establishments had to indicate the persons responsible.In addition, the governor could dismiss the staff of the library if he were to find thempolitically unreliable.54 However, even conservative officialdom was not immune to theargument that the greater accessibility of books could facilitate the dissemination of usefulknowledge, and that Russian readers should be proud to read Russian authors. As wasoften the case in continental regimes, some sort of enabling act was a precondition forthe successful realization of public effort. In the Rules of Public Libraries of May 15,1890, the Ministry of Internal Affairs approved the opening of public libraries that had thepermission of the local governor.55

Of course, officialdom, especially in the security organs, continued to supervise theadministration of public libraries. According to a report of the political police, the librariesof some schools have undesirable books that are loaned to workers without the proper

52Quoted in Alfred Erich Senn, Nicholas Rubakin: A Life for Books (Newtonville, MA, 1977), 14.53Khodnev, Istoriia, 28990. On village libraries see V. P. Vakhterov, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie naroda

(Moscow, 1896); and Susan Smith-Peter, Books behind the Altar: Religion, Village Libraries and the MoscowAgricultural Society, Russian History/Histoire Russe 31 (Fall 2004): 21333.

54N. M. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, 6th ed., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 1:473.55Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (PSZ), 3d ser., vol. 10 (St. Petersburg, 1890), no. 52560a.

The Rules are discussed in E. Zviagintsev, Pravovoe polozhenie narodnykh bibliotek za 50 let (Moscow,1916), 1630. I am grateful to Ben Eklof for this source. See also Otchet o deiatel'nosti byvshego S.-Peterburgskogo Komiteta gramotnosti Imperatorskogo Vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1895 god(St. Petersburg, 1896), 74; Protopopov, Istoriia, 175; Stuart, Ennobling Illusion, 414; and Eklof,Archaeology of Backwardness, 11516.

284 Joseph Bradley

authorization.56 Since the Ministry of Education preferred to decide what was appropriateon a case-by-case basis, efforts by the Literacy Committee to standardize the lists of approvedbooks for public libraries were to no avail. The books distributed or published by theLiteracy Committee, while legal (that is, they had passed the second censors), were nowdeemed inappropriate because they undermined faith in the supreme authorities and thegovernment.57 Moreover, the Ministry of Internal Affairs could close libraries or indicatethose publications that should be withdrawn from circulation. In the ensuing regulatorymorass, as one of the Literacy Committees annual reports put it, in 1894 less than 8percent of all published books in the empire were approved for public libraries. Tolstoyand Turgenev were not alone: most Russian writers had works that were deemed, for onereason or another, inappropriate.58

The Literacy Committee played the central coordinating role in the effort to establishpublic libraries, a role that, in the opinion of Stuart, marks the beginning of the publiclibrary movement in Russia and included the zemstvos and other associations such as theRussian Technical Society, the Society to Disseminate Technical Knowledge, and thetemperance societies.59 In 1893 the Literacy Committee, at Fal'borks initiative, launcheda campaign to open one hundred free public libraries all across the empire, as well as toassist local agricultural societies and private persons desiring to open same, as the first stepin an effort to organize a network of public libraries. Despite the 1890 rules, there wasconsiderable confusion regarding the procedures for the creation of public libraries.Accordingly, the Committee printed and distributed fifty thousand brochures containingimportant information for those wishing to establish a public library. It drafted rules andregulations for each library, including provisions that the libraries lend books free of charge,as well as compiled a list of books appropriate for such libraries. According to one authorityon adult education, E. N. Medynskii, such brochures played a tremendous role in thedevelopment of libraries because they opened the eyes of many in the zemstvos andvillage communities to the 1890 Library Rules, which had been completely unknown tothe broader public.60 The Committee also announced and organized a fund drive. Using

56Dokladnaia zapiska popechitelia Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga, GARF, f. 63 (1897), d. 616, l. 13.57Kratkaia kharakteristika revoliutsionnoi deiatel'nosti prosvetitel'nykh obshchestv za poslednie gody v S.-

Peterburge, GARF, f. 102 (Osobyi Otdel) (1906, pt. 2), d. 194, pt. 2, l. 265. See also Charles A. Ruud,Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 18041906 (Toronto, 1982), 37.

58Komitet gramotnosti, RGIA, f. 776, op. 34, d. 17, l. 37; Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1895 (St.Petersburg, 1896), 1013. In the winter of 189091, V. V. Devel', a public school teacher in Helsinki, reportedthe results of an 1889 survey of city and village public libraries; particularly emphasized were governmentrestrictions in book selection. See his Gorodskie i sel'skie biblioteki dlia naroda, po svedeniiam Peterburgskogokomiteta gramotnosti, Russkaia shkola, no. 8 (1890): 21433. See also Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za1895, 7172; Protopopov, Istoriia, 15661; and Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo 1:473.

59Stuart, Ennobling Illiusion, 410; Eklof, Archaeology of Backwardness, 11618. Likewise, accordingto the educator N. V. Chekhov, the entrance of the Petersburg Literacy Committee into this arena in 1893 wasa particularly important moment (Narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii, 134).

60E. Medynskii and I. Lapshov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel' knig i statei po vneshkol'nomu obrazovaniiu(Moscow, 1916). Medynskii was referring to Ukazaniia k ustroistvu chitalen, ukazaniia o bezplatnykhnarodnykh bibliotekakh: Primernyi spiskok knig dlia bezplatnykh narodnykh bibliotekakh ichitalen, dopuskaemykh v nikh pravilami 15 maia 1890 g., 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1895). See alsoV Peterburgskii Komitet gramotnosti, Russkaia shkola no. 56 (1894): 347; and Eklof, Archaeology ofBackwardness, 115.


the privilege of free postage accorded to learned societies, the Committee sent appeals fordonations printed, like those of many charities today, with a detachable form to be returnedwith the contribution. The fund drive also reached the public by advertisements in Russkievedomosti and Russkaia zhizn'. In 1894 and 1895, 35,000 rubles were collectedandcollected in the preferred way of all philanthropies to show widespread commitment: smallamounts from many people, with most contributions coming from provincial donors. Usingits distribution and publishing networks, the Committee arranged for the wholesale purchaseand distribution of start-up sets of the best of Russian and foreign literature and books onscience for each library. Finally, the Committee planned to publish annual catalogues ofthe best books for public libraries. As one of the Committees annual reports put it, onlyunder these conditions can the libraries be a powerful weapon of self-education and satisfythe intellectual demands of their readers.61 By 1917 there were over fourteen thousandpublic libraries across the Russian Empire, clearly too large a number for the governmentto maintain vigilance. Thus, the Literacy Committee was the linchpin in an enterprise thatlinked private donors, publishers and retailers, district and provincial zemstvos, townshipauthorities, and the Ministry of Education to the reading public.62

The committee capitalized on its increased size, the greater professionalization ofmembers, and the greater specialization of tasks. Believing that projects such as the book-distribution program could be best undertaken by local societies and by a growing numberof eager student volunteers, in the 1890s the Literacy Committee turned more and more topolicypublishing manuals, collecting statistics, and publishing reader surveys. Its generalmeetings became a forum for the discussion of educational policy. In addition, in severalinstances the committee petitioned the authorities regarding education policy.63

The issue raised most frequently was compulsory universal education, widely associatedat the time in Europe with republicanism and anticlericalism. In its early years the Committee,in agreement with the Ministry of Education, consistently opposed compulsory educationon the grounds that people themselves should acknowledge the importance of educationand voluntarily send their children to school. As Ben Eklof points out, compulsory education

61Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1895, 84; Uzakoneniia o besplatnykh narodnykh bibliotekakh (chital'niakh)s prilozheniem primernykh ikh ustavov, sostavlennykh Sankt-Peterburgskogo Komiteta gramotnosti (St.Petersburg, 1894); Protopopov, Istoriia, 16469; Chekhov, Narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii, 135; Stuart,Ennobling Illusion, 41011. Veselovskii also credits the Literacy Committee for taking the initiative in thepublic library movement (Istoriia zemstva 1:548).

62V. V. Devel', Gorodskie i sel'skie bibliotekii i chital'nia dlia naroda po svedeniiam Peterburgskogo Komitetagramotnosti (1890; reprint ed. St. Petersburg, 1892); Chto nuzhno chitat', chtoby otkryt' chital'nuiu (St.Petersburg, 1895); V. Devel', K voprosu o vneshkol'nom obrazovanii naroda, Russkoe bogatstvo no. 11(1898): 17897; Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1895, 8182. Estimates of the number of public librarieswere as high as 20,000 in 1914 and 25,000 in 1917 (Stuart, Ennobling Illusion, 413). When not busy withthe library movement, the Literacy Committee advocated popular theaters producing plays of patriotic andmoral content to lure people away from the tavern (Komitet po voprosu o narodnykh teatrakh, Doklad [St.Petersburg, 1870]). The major activities of the Literacy Committee in this area are recounted in a number ofsources. I have relied on B. Ketrits, Vospominaniia o Spb. Komitete Gramotnosti (St. Petersburg, 1911), 5254; Protopopov, Istoriia, 15, 32, 39; Shestakov, Stolichnye komitety; Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 13,16, 21; and Gorchakov, Obzor deiatel'nosti, 288. See also B. Raymond, Libraries and Adult Education: TheRussian Experience, Journal of Library History 16 (Spring, 1981): 394403, esp. 396; and Pratt, FreeEconomic Society.

63Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za 1895, 57; Protopopov, Istoriia, 4445, 77.

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was a difficult issue for liberal educators who favored voluntarism over coercion. Moreover,in the Committees opinion, the condition of the schools, teacher training, and textbookswere not ripe for compulsory education. From the mid-1860s to the late 1880s the LiteracyCommittee was focused on its book-distribution project, and the issue faded from discussion.However, it resurfaced in the 1890s; after the influx of new members the attitude towardcompulsory education began to change. At a meeting of the Moscow Literacy Committeein January 1894, the prominent educator V. P. Vakhterov gave a well-publicized speech inwhich he argued that universal education was feasible and necessary in Russia.64

On December 28, 1894, and January 3, 1895, the St. Petersburg Literacy Committeescheduled meetings to discuss a list of theses drawn up by Fal'bork and Charnoluskii onthe reorganization of the nations public schools. Given the importance of the subject, theboard sent the theses in advance to all Committee members and to many education specialists.Most of the theses presumed the introduction of universal education. The theses stated thatthe goal of primary education should be general education, rather than vocational; that theschool must teach the child to think independently and to become a conscious member ofsociety; that education must be placed under local control; and that the entire educationalsystem should be decentralized. It was widely assumed among liberals at the time thatgeneral public education was one of the preconditions, or means, for the establishment of aconstitutional order. Thus, it is not surprising that the discussion of such touchy subjectswas postponed indefinitely at the insistence of officialdom.65 In its claim to authority in thediscussion of education policy and pedagogy, the Literacy Committee more and more steppedinto areas that the Ministry of Education regarded as its prerogative.

Throughout the 1890s, the government held hope that the Free Economic Societycould return to its original mission of furthering agriculture and economic development.That hope was illusory. The young party brought a more contentious manner to themeetings of the Literacy Committee. Attendance, especially that of nonmembers, at generalmeetings increased, prompting A. F. Petrushevskii, a long-time honorary member of theLiteracy Committee and one of the VEOs old guard, to remark that the street wasinvading the Committee.66 At one meeting in 1893 a report by Committee chair A. N.Strannoliubskii on the sorry state of public education in Russia caused quite a public stir.67At stormy meetings of December 8, 1892, and March 16, 1893, the young party, led byFal'bork and Charnoluskii, accused the Literacy Committee of inaction and ineffectiveness.On April 27, 1893, many new members were elected to the Board of the Literacy Committee.However, the VEO Board called the election invalid on the grounds that the meeting didnot have a chair and no annual report was presented. The Committee decided that a two-thirds majority at its members meeting could change its rules and operating procedureswithout ministerial confirmation. In a letter of May 1893, intercepted by the police on its

64Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 11014; Stuart, Ennobling Illusion, 418. Eklof notes that Vakhterovcompromised on the question of compulsory education by proposing that education not be compulsory forpeasant girls.

65Protopopov, Istoriia, 7783, 8991, 11621, 12730; Wartenweiler, Civil Society, 57.66Quoted in Dikson, S.-Peterburgskii komitet, 23.67Sinel, Campaign for Universal Primary Education, 483; Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 7980.


way to Paris, a witness wrote, We won the elections to the Literacy Committee, so at thehelm of the Board stands the young party.68

The Board appointed more and more nonmembersthe street, in Petrushevskiistaxonomyto serve on the various ad hoc commissions that reviewed educational materialsand gathered data on teacher training, school conditions, and rural libraries. In addition,students began coming to meetings and eagerly did volunteer work. In his long report onadult education at meetings of March 15 and 29, 1894, Fal'bork provoked an agitateddiscussion by pointedly criticizing the red tape required to establish public libraries as wellas the double censorship involved in acquisitions.69 Even more troubling for the Ministryof Education, at public meetings the Literacy Committee discussed opening its own schools.Ordinarily, such initiatives on the part of an association would be submitted to the appropriategovernment agency for approval, as was usually required in an associations charter, anychanges in which also required government approval. In this case, however, the LiteracyCommittee interpreted its by-laws to allow it to establish reading rooms and schools on itsown without requesting permission from the government.

In the space of just a few years, the Literacy Committee had become an assertiveforum for making education a public trust rather than an object of government tutelage.The activities of the Literacy Committee were so extensive that there is hardly a corner ofRussia today that does not know about [them]. Veselovskii noted the synergy between anenlivened Literacy Committee and the enlivened zemstvos, as activists such as Arsen'ev,Shakhovskoi, and Savel'ov brought their agendas of universal education and adult educationwith them to the zemstvos.70 As one activist put it, working with an energy rare in Russia,[the literacy committees] inspired the same energy in the zemstvos, in other societies, andin individuals and summoned all to a concerted battle against ignorance.71

This renown raised the specter of a vast archipelago of unauthorized and unscrutinizedpublic initiative in education; conservative officials could see the states tutelary role slippingaway. Officialdom had always kept a watchful eye over the Literacy Committees manyenterprises; now there was much more to watch. Not only were there more papers atmeetings, there were also more proposals to petition the authorities regarding educationpolicy. More proposals and more petitions meant that the government was forced to reactmore and more to private initiative.

In the early 1890s official displeasure at the expansion of public involvement ineducation, especially on the part of the literacy committees and the zemstvos, was reflectedin a cluster of government reports. In a report to his superiors, the governor of Tver'province complained that school libraries contained too many books not approved by theMinistry of Education.72 In turn, in two circulars to governors, the Ministry of Internal

68Quoted in A. D. Stepanskii and N. P. Eroshkin, Obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii na rubezhe XIXXX vekov (Moscow, 1982), 50. It is not clear whether this was written by a member. The chief of the Departmentof the Police penned onto the letter, Who makes up this party? See also Otchet Komiteta gramotnosti za1893 (St. Petersburg, 1894), 79; Protopopov, Istoriia, 4143; and Deiatel'nost' Peterburgskogo Komitetagramotnosti v 1893, Russkaia shkola, no. 910 (1894): 35364.

69V Peterburgskii Komitet gramotnosti, Russkaia shkola, no. 56 (1894): 347.70Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva 3:38688.71S. R. V., Preemniki stolichykh komitetov gramotnosti, Vestnik vospitaniia, no. 4 (1896): 6472RGIA, f. 776, op. 20, d. 1437 , l. 2525 ob.

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Affairs declared that the draft charters for public libraries drawn up by the LiteracyCommittee were at complete variance with the 1890 Rules on Public Libraries in thatthey inadequately insured supervision of the management of the libraries affairs or of bookacquisition. Worse, the libraries were run not by one person vetted by the government butby a council of an unlimited number of persons of all ranks and age who constituted ashadow library society.73 The Literacy Committees attempt to gather information for theschool surveys directly from the teachers also aroused the suspicion of the authorities. TheHoly Synod and the Ministry of Education sent circulars advising school authorities toignore the questionnaires on the grounds that the Literacy Committee had not sought theauthorization in order to collect information in this manner; moreover, such surveys allegedlyoverburdened the teachers.74

Reports of the Special Section of the Department of Police focused on the politicalreliability of education activists, half of whom were allegedly unreliable.75 From thegovernments point of view, the officers of the VEO were insufficiently vigilantwhen they permitted the Literacy Committee to become a forum for the unrestrainedexpression of anti-government views ... [because] no matter what is written in the bylaws,the young party will abuse them unless the government steps in ... [because] theirmission is to wake up the Free Economic Society.76 In the eyes of officialdom, stormymeetings and battles for control of the Society bespoke passion and politics, allegedlyinappropriate for a learned society. Moreover, the Literacy Committee was spreadingharmful ideas through other educational societies and through a vast network of publiclibraries, reading rooms, and public lectures. It has gratuitously disseminated the works ofso-called populist writers and has tried to turn public education into a weapon ofantigovernment propaganda. Thus, in the eyes of the police, a prestigious, authoritativelearned society began to spread its antigovernment ideas to other urban professionals,zemstvo leaders, and students and to pressure the government on a wide range of policyissues through an organized, planned, and systematic opposition to the government in thespirit of so-called liberation.77

Finally, the conservative press, especially Moskovskie vedomosti, suspicious of publicinvolvement in education, accused, not without reason, the literacy committees and thezemstvos of trying to take over the public schools. Behind the banner of the Committeeshides one of the clearest examples of the ambition of our intelligentsia to seize as muchas possible control over the public school and run it according to its ideals and political

73Delo o deiatel'nosti Osobogo mezhduvedomstvennogo soveshchaniia dlia obsuzhdeniia voprosov operedache Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti v vedenie Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia i opodchinenii pravitel'skomu kontroliu vsekh chastnykh obshchestv, presleduiushchikh tseli narodnogoobrazovaniia, RGIA, f. 776, op. 34, d. 17 (1897), ll. 37, 134. Zviagintsev discusses the complicated supervisoryfunctions of the 1890 Rules. Given the importance of the clergy in the supervision of rural libraries, it is easyto see that the security authorities would regard changes in the supervisory function as anti-clerical (Pravovoepolozhenie, 2123, 2627).

74Protopopov, Istoriia, 25657.75Kratkaia kharakteristika, l. 265.76Po voprosu o peresmotre ustava Imp. VEO, RGIA, f. 560, op. 22, d. 232, ll. 8485.77Sekretnaia svodka, ll. 13. Similar reports may be found in GARF, f. 102 (Osobyi otdel) (1914), d. 320,

ll. 1920; and GARF, f.102, 4 d/p (1907), d. 133, vol. 7, ll. 5051.


goals. ... Let the government take care of the schools and the zemstvo take care ofthe roads.78 Clearly, conservatives in and out of government suffered from LiteracyCommittee fatigue.

Such unauthorized private initiative was anathema to the government. The governmentdeclared that expansion of the activity of the Literacy Committee was inconvenient. Thisundesirable tendency prompted the central authorities to take measures against theCommittee, so that public cooperation in the field of education, of course important in andof itself, would not come under the influence of ill-intentioned persons. The allegedinterference of private persons in this important sphere of government work had becomeuncontrolled and a source for the corruption of the public outlook (narodnoemirovozrenie) and the alienation of the people from Russias sacred traditions.79 In February1894, Minister of Internal Affairs P. N. Durnovo informed Minister of Education I. D.Delianov that closer supervision (nadzor) was necessary in order to staunch theunsupervised (bezkontrol'noe) interference of ill-intentioned private persons and societiesin public education and to protect the populace from the harmful influence of certainkinds of literature. At Delianovs suggestion, a special interagency conference convenedon June 10, 1894, to discuss the matter. The conference is evidence of the difference ofopinion within officialdom that made it harder and harder to formulate coherent governmentpolicy. Initially, the ministries of internal affairs and education proposed that the parentagricultural societies, as well as the newly created Ministry of Agriculture and StateProperties, supervise the Moscow and St. Petersburg literacy committees more carefully.However, A. S. Ermolov, who had recently been appointed to head the new ministry, pointedout that neither the agricultural societies nor his ministry was equipped to supervise theworld of primary education. Moreover, Ermolov observed, since the establishment of theSt. Petersburg Literacy Committee in 1861, government agencies, the zemstvos, and privatesocieties had all greatly expanded their involvement in education. Therefore, he argued,there was no need for a division of an agricultural society to be involved in primary education.The conference concluded with a recommendation to transfer the literacy committees tothe Ministry of Education and to rewrite their charters.80

In 1894 rumors of impending government action against the Literacy Committeereached the members of the Free Economic Society; the reaction among members shows ananalogous difference of opinion outside government. Senior members, such as PresidentA. Bobrinskii, initially favored deference to the government, and the VEO never took

78Moskovskie vedomosti, no. 89 (1896), and no. 48 (1897), quoted in Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva 3: 387,541. See also Protopopov, Istoriia, 77. For an analysis of the interconnected strategies in primary education ofconservatives and liberals, of government and public, see A. P. Romanov, Nachal'noe obrazovanie russkogokrest'ianstva v poslednei chetverti XIXnachale XX vekov: Ofitisal'naia politika i obshchestvennye modeli(Cheliabinsk, 2009). I am grateful to Ben Eklof for bringing this study to my attention.

79Spravka po delu o peresmotre ustava Vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, K istorii Vol'nogoekonomicheskogo obshchestva (St. Petersburg, 1906), no. 64:82. See also Protopopov, Istoriia, 5355.

80Delo o deiatel'nosti Osobogo mezhduvedomstvennogo soveshchaniia dlia obsuzhdeniia voprosov operedache Peterburgskogo komiteta gramotnosti v vedenie Ministerstvo narodnogo prosveshcheniia i opodchinenii pravitel'stvennomu kontroliu vsekh chastnykh obshchestv, prosleduiushchikh tseli narodnogoobrazovaniia, RGIA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 5137 (zhurnal no. 204, March, 10, 1895), ll. 711, and d. 5138 (zhurnalno. 868, November 17, 1895), ll. 4967.

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advantage of its right to petition directly to the emperor. But a vigorous defense wasinstigated from below. In January 1895 a group of members, including the economistsL. V. Khodskii and A. A. Isaev, the lawyer and journalist B. E. Ketrits, and Kalmykova,Protopopov, Charnoluskii, and Arsen'evall among the most active in the Division ofPolitical Economy and in the Literacy Committeeurged Bobrinskii to defend the VEOagainst the mounting accusations by officialdom. Bobrinskii duly protested to Ermolov.Regarded by many as societys representative in government, (ironically, he was anhonorary member of the VEO), Ermolov was a member of the landowning nobility, supportedclose cooperation between government and society in agricultural matters, peasantproprietors, and the integration of peasants into society.81 Trying to reassure Ermolov thatthe VEO had everything under control, and assuming that

Documents

The St. Petersburg Literacy Committee and Russian Education: Government Tutelage or Public Trust?