ABSTRACT
The development of industry saw the loosening, although not the removal, of traditional estate boundaries and the rise to wealth and importance of merchant-industrialists, especially in Moscow. These families developed private business enterprises independent of the state and used their wealth to finance charitable institutions, to run town councils, and to become patrons of the new nationalist school of artists and architects. In so doing, they encouraged the growth of a civil society with the development of organizations of all kinds, and helped the spread of education and a civic consciousness, not just in Moscow but in towns across the country.
Apart from merchants, professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and teachers, scientists, and clergy, were developing into a ‘middle-class’ and leading the growth of an educated society. The provincial nobility, through their roles in the zemsvos and noble assemblies, were asserting themselves in local government, and turning to liberal ideas of a more Western and constitutional form of government. The hiring by the zemstvos of teachers, doctors, and others as a ‘third element’, led to conflict with the government as bureaucrats, trying to increase central power over local government, saw these groups as opposing the regime.
