ABSTRACT
Once the excitement of elections was over, the fierce political energy of competing actors in the countryside and the sheer enormity of the task at hand dampened the idealistic notions of the new arbitrators somewhat. The feared crisis of authority which had inspired the creation of the peace arbitrator was in full bloom by early 1861. Peasant disorders continued to rage in every province across the empire, and noble assemblies were openly calling for representative institutions. All looked to the new officials with a mixture of hope, despair, pride, and outrage. Until the arrival of the arbitrators in the field, the local police and marshals of the nobility could do little beyond forcing public order at bayonet point. “Now the state’s mistake is clear,” wrote a state member to the Novgorod Provincial Office, “in announcing the emancipation of the peasants before the organization of the new local administration, by means of which Russia could have escaped a great number of misunderstandings, disputes, riots, and even more serious matters.”1 The arbitrators, in taking up their posts in June, would be late arrivals to a dangerous political scene with four long months of development already behind it. Their position would be a delicate one, inserted as they were “between the peasants, who often do not comprehend the new situation, and the landlords, who often do not want to comprehend it.”2