ABSTRACT
The state’s gamble on the peace arbitrators could be successful only so long as it was in charge of defining the rules of the game. The policy of co-optation meant encouraging public activism, but only so long as this energy could be directed in ways suitable to state purposes. Thus while the state incessantly gave lip service to the ideals of election, independence, and glasnost' embedded in the institution of peace arbitrator, it never intended to allow the development of the institution or its principles beyond what was necessary for getting past the temporary and extraordinary moment of implementation. In the fields beyond St. Petersburg, the arbitrators were already straining against this limitation by spearheading the construction of horizontal bonds between the rural estates. This was a key moment in the development of a “public,” forged of what had been two distinct and isolated estates. The state was quick to recognize the danger the arbitrators posed in this regard, and it set about bringing to heel those arbitrators who embraced the idea of a public most explicitly and openly. Accompanying this tentative social transformation, however, was a still
more subtle change in the theoretical and the cultural realm that was beyond the ability of the state to fully control. As the institutional centerpiece of the state’s emancipation plan, the peace arbitrator was subjected to the most careful scrutiny by the educated public, in the press and in imaginative literature. Observers brought to their assessment of the institution the overlapping and contradictory political beliefs and programs developed in factional debates of the previous half-century. Nearly all of educated society agreed that the peace arbitrators should be guided in their actions by public needs, but there was no consensus on who the institution represented or should represent, what public needs might be or even who the public was. In part this disagreement was occasioned by the mixed nature of the institution of peace arbitrator itself. The peace arbitrator was a hybrid of bureaucratic, noble, and genuinely public principles. Just as in the parable of the blind man and the elephant, observers could emphasize one or another of these parts in accordance with their overarching visions of how the public might best be represented. E. Vatson contributed a letter to Moskovskie vedomosti
after undertaking a journey to the provinces, in which he described the heart of the disagreement:
Everyone sees in the new legislation not the meaning that it contains, which any impartial person would see in it, but how they want to see it. … Correspondingly, these gentlemen … demand from the peace arbitrator a precise fulfillment of the legislation created by them. … 1
Beneath these apparently irreconcilable differences, however, a fundamental point of agreement began to gel. The principles upon which the institution of peace arbitrator was founded – all-estate elections, administrative independence, and glasnost' – immediately caught the imagination of society’s intellectual elite, and finally began to claim its allegiance. Never mind that the state had constructed the institution of peace arbitrator on these theoretical foundations only as a lure to capture the best of Russian society into its co-optative net. Intellectuals and literati perceived that the principles embodied in the institution of peace arbitrator, though raw, should and now could be shaped into the pediment for a genuinely public sphere. No matter what their individual opinions on the emancipation legislation or on political reform in general, members of educated society believed that the institution of peace arbitrator was the first to set the terms by which a new public and its relationship to the state would be defined. It was this development, joined to the social transformation taking shape in the countryside, that finally spelled the failure of the state’s gamble on co-optation, though it would be two generations before the implications of this failure would be made plain to the autocratic state.
