In this well-conceived exercise in what the author terms “applied intellectual history,” Susan Smith-Peter looks at the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and Georg Hegel on the thinking of educated Russians in the countryside about the future of their country. Using Vladimir province as the principal focus of her study, Smith-Peter ably traces the development of a vibrant public sphere in that region. Smith-Peter shows how this was to some extent the byproduct of the deliberate efforts of the tsarist regime to spur the economic transformation of Russia from an agricultural economy to a market one. To do this information from its under-governed provinces would need be provided by the locals to the center. This gave rise to a multiplicity of voluntary associations, statistical committees, and most importantly, agricultural societies. Smith-Peter not only convincingly demonstrates how the policies of Nicholas I allowed the necessary space for the development of a civil society, she also traces the formation of an imagined regional identity reified through the establishment of a public library, a museum, and a provincial newspaper.

Smith-Peter employs Adam Smith's “stadial theory” to posit that the measures taken to collect statistical and ethnographic information eventually led to the establishment of this civil society. While it remains unclear to what extent rural nobles were actually familiar with these theories, the debates and discussions about the way forward economically and socially show an awareness of broader intellectual trends in the west, and so Smith-Peter provides a welcome correction to accepted notions about rural Russia being a cultural backwater. Another one of the great strengths of this book is the reassessment of Nicholas I's reign through Smith-Peter's tracing of the development of this civil society through the “smaller” reforms before the implementation of the Great Reforms. Smith-Peter details how the policies of Nicholas I did in fact create a civil society but contends that this was later undone as the tsarist regime would eventually come to see these developments as a threat to its primacy and refuse to countenance the idea that educated society could ever be a legitimate partner in Russia's modernization. Thus, for Smith-Peter, the era of “Great Reforms” was not only, as usually depicted, a beginning but also an ending.

This was because state and society had differing ideas about what a civil society in Russia should entail. Smith-Peter contends that the interplay between these differing perceptions led not only to the well-chronicled split between state and society but also to the isolation of the peasantry from the rest of the polity. Here Smith-Peter explores the impact of Hegelianism on Russia's provincial nobles, which is more cogently argued and evidenced than the supposed impact of Smithianism. Hegel believed that a civil society should be based upon property rights, and that those rights then provided for a common interest and ultimately were a guarantee of freedom. Many liberal Russian nobles looked to the establishment of an all-estate local government based on property ownership. Smith-Peter asseverates that the idea of a civil society separate from the state where property rights did not derive from the autocrat was anathema to the regime, and it sought to exclude society from governance and to institutionalize the isolation of the peasantry.

There were, however, also many countervailing factors at work in late imperial Russia. Russia's last great statesman, Piotr Stolypin, expended much political capital on the establishment of the volost΄ (canton) level zemstvos that would empower peasants and lead toward their civic equality. This, combined with his resettlement of peasants in Siberia and the breakup of the commune to allow for private property smallholders, was part of a coherent attempt by the state to bring the peasantry into the modern era in both a political and economic sense as property holders. This would in turn lead to a society where all of Russia's stakeholders would necessarily rise above their estate interests in the Hegelian sense. Thus, the picture Smith-Peter paints of an intransigent bureaucracy zealously guarding autocracy is perhaps just a bit overdrawn.

Quibbles aside, this is an important book and it is highly recommended. It adds to the growing collection of regional case studies that allows specialists in the field to identify significant problems for further analysis or suggest the need for a reappraisal of accepted theories. This book does both.