The Idea of Welfare by Robert Pinker

Author:Robert Pinker [Pinker, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780429614316
Google: qRu_DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-20T03:49:58+00:00

Local government reform and voluntary effort

The more able of the Tsar’s ministers were fully aware of the long-standing administrative inadequacies of the regime. They recognized that emancipation would in time weaken the traditional systems of local control. One of the Tsar’s most competent and liberal administrators, N. A. Miliutin, was appointed chairman of a new commission charged with the preparation of a draft plan for local government reform. Miliutin was dismissed before the plan had been completed but not before he had exercised a considerable influence on its design. The law of 1864 created a new system of zemstvos, assemblies at both provincial and district levels, which owed much to Miliutin’s original scheme. In the villages the mir became the basis of local political assembly from which the heads of households elected delegates to a new local government unit, the volost, which was responsible for a small group of neighbouring villages. The volost members, in turn, selected an electoral assembly which nominated delegates to a district zemstvo. At this level of local administration the zemstvo was composed of landowners, townspeople and peasant representatives, each separately chosen by a complex system of indirect elections and a property-based suffrage. At the third level of local government were the provincial zemstvos, whose members were also chosen by a similarly complicated electoral procedure. In practice the peasants could rarely afford to attend the annual meetings of the provincial assemblies.

These new zemstvos, or assemblies, were made responsible for the provision of a wide range of local public and social services, including poor relief, hospitals, elementary education, the encouragement of voluntary aid, public sanitation, roads and the promotion of better agriculture. They were financed by a local rate levied primarily on the land.35 Wallace describes the zemstvos as ‘a kind of local administration which supplements the actions of the rural communes, and takes cognisance of those higher public wants which individual communes cannot possibly satisfy’.36 Although the nobility dominated almost every aspect of the new system, apart from the internal affairs of the mir, a remarkable degree of harmony appears to have prevailed in many districts between the nobles and peasants who served as delegates.

A complementary reform of municipal administration in the larger towns was introduced during 1870. The members of the new town councils were indirectly elected through a system of class voting based on the taxation register. Wealthier householders enjoyed a disproportionately generous representation. The duties of these new town councils were very similar to those of the zemstvos but were far less conscientiously discharged. In 1892 this system of municipal government virtually reverted to a more direct form of central control. Councillors were thereafter compelled by law to attend meetings once they had agreed to serve.

It is difficult to obtain reliable information concerning the welfare activities of the local zemstvos. Wallace thought that by the end of the century the better local assemblies had done much to improve medical services. He noted that Tn the towns there are public hospitals, which generally are — or at least seem to an unprofessional eye — in a very satisfactory condition.

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