ABSTRACT
A significant aspect of “modernization” has been the development of representative institutions, such as the English Parliament and the American Congress, that make laws and act as a check on the executive and judicial branches of government. From 1906 to 1917, a representative institution such as this called the Duma convened in Russia. But earlier, in the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals, seeking evidence of representative institutions in Russian history, focused on the activities of the Assembly of the Land (Zemskii sobor).1 Their aim was to show that Russia previously had a representative assembly similar to those of European countries of the time and that Russia should once again have one to bring its government closer in form to the contemporary governments of western Europe and the United States. The hypothesis of this paper is that the Assembly of the Land was a representative institution but not of the European type contemporaneous with it. Furthermore, trying to interpret the conduct and composition of the Assembly of the Land in European terms has led to a distortion of the historical understanding of its role and function in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
