ABSTRACT
Vasilii Kozlov, the head of the Culture Department of Vorob’evka, a large village in Voronezh province, has put on five national folk festivals since the early 1990s. The festival, called ‘Singing Rus, Artisanal Rus’, has become a bi-annual affair. Official sponsors of the event in 1998 included the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Russian Zemstvo Movement, headed by Elena Panina, deputy of the State Duma. Panina’s movement, formed in 1993, puts into practice some of the views of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a wellknown proponent of Slavophile ideas. Its name and part of its mission come from the zemstvo organizations established by Alexander II and his advisors in 1864. The reforms called for self-governance through assemblies and boards designed to address the needs of the rural population. Today, the political platform of the Russian Zemstvo Movement includes promotion of ancient Russian and Slavic forms of self-governance and self-organization, lessening of the power of the president and central government, and strengthening of the powers of local elected officials.27 The movement is nationalist in character, with some traits of civic nationalism; however, to a greater extent than the Westernizing civic nationalists, Panina’s organization is interested in native methods of grassroots governance.28
