Supervising the Supervisors: Bureaucracy, Personality and Rule of Law in Kazan Province at the Start of the 20th Century
Supervising the Supervisors: Bureaucracy, Personality and Rule of Law in Kazan Province at the Start of the 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: For seven weeks beginning in mid-August 1909, Nikolai Vasil’evich Smirnov, a member of Kazan province’s board of supervisors for peasant matters, was on the road or on a boat. Smirnov, who held the rank of Collegiate Secretary,1 traveled over the three eastern counties of Kazan province to inspect the region’s zemskie nachal’niki, officials charged with overseeing the administration of the rural population. This tour may recall Gogol’s famous play, The Inspector General, but let us remember that we are catching a glimpse of an inspection at another time and place—Kazan province in the early twentieth century. And we are not in a town with its urban pretensions but out in the countryside, in what some would call “the sticks,” (glush’), where officials might with justice complain of their isolation. This inspector’s task was to review how the zemskie nachal’niki were carrying out one of the empire’s most vital and least glamorous governing functions—supervising the legal and economic affairs of the local peasants.

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