Spawned by Enlightenment era thought, experts began to emerge in nineteenth century Russia and became a source of authority in the realm of knowledge. As they gained credibility, these experts began to assert their authority by creating a “public opinion” in regards to property, identifying what the public deemed valuable, and thus forming a “public domain” (14). As Pravilova demonstrates, the idea of public property was new in Russia. Many of these experts believed that their new role would opened up an avenue to power in a society that they hoped would be governed by a professional elite. Yet, tensions would rise among property owners who, since Catherine the Great, saw individual property as an absolute right. Owners felt that their omnipotence “was undermined when… property came to be seen as a public thing” (13). Experts were able to combat private owners by showing the functionality of items. For example, experts argued that “forests saved water, rivers produced electricity, monuments crystallized memory [and] literature made people into citizens” (268). In the struggle between property owners and experts, it appeared that experts would come out on top.
In spite of their rising authority, the limitations of the government would prove to unravel the agenda of the experts. According to Pravilova, “the Russian system of property was inflexible and clumsy,” and was “blamed for many of Russia’s misfortunes” (90, 128). Although experts of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries envisioned property based “not on the grounds of social origin but on the grounds of knowledge,” their conception of the state “was quite distant from the existing bureaucratic structures of the tsarist administration” (92, 128). This point became particularly poignant with the emancipation of peasants, which demonstrated that “governing a society of private owners was so monumental a task that the Russian state could not handle it” (78). Despite pushes for reforms and the autocratic regime’s acknowledgement of the authority of the experts, the government refused to do more than take questions of property on at a case-by-case basis. To put it concisely, although the role of experts increased in Imperial Russia during the nineteenth century, the impact of these experts, along with their desire to transfer items from the private sphere into that of the public, was restrained by how willing and able the tsar’s government was to take on the role of property manager.
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A Great Book for Learning About the Emergence of the Idea of Public Property and of an Intellectual Class in Imperial Russia
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 31, 2016
