A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia - Hardcover

Winner of the 2015 Historia Nova Prize, Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Academic Studies Press Winner of the George L. Mosse Prize 2015, American Historical Association Winner of the 2015 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies Honorable Mention for the 2015 J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, Law and Society Association Longlisted for the 2015 Historia Nova Prize, Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Academic Studies Press "Pravilova provides a nuanced analysis of the shifting nature of debates, concepts, and laws concerning public and private property in the Russian Empire from the late 18th century to the revolutions of 1917... Challenging familiar narratives that couple liberalism with the defense of individual private property rights, she provides abundant evidence of a liberal vision that was not exclusively individualistic."--Choice "Even an extended review cannot do justice to this book's wealth of thought-provoking insights."--Adele Lindenmeyr, Slavic Review "A short review cannot do justice to this fine, meticulously researched, and well-written book. It is essential reading for all historians of imperial and Soviet Russia."--Michelle Lamarche Marrese, Russian Review "[An] engrossing study... These questions are meant as tributes to what is clearly a major and agenda-setting work, whose discussion will greatly sharpen our understanding of Russia's past."--John Randolph, American Historical Review "A lively text that is readily accessible to those with a non-legal history background. This is a rich, ambitious and complex project, which cuts across any number of traditional cultural and political boundaries; Pravilova switches adeptly from irrigation in Central Asia and Transcaucasia, to the preservation of churches in the Russian north, to the public's right to read posthumously published correspondence."--Jennifer Keating, Slavonic and East European Review "In this extremely erudite and comprehensively researched book, Ekaterina Pravilova argues compellingly that attempts in late imperial Russia to reform property law, and specifically to establish in practice as well as the imagination a domain of 'public things' (res publica), were central to efforts to transform the tsarist social and political orders... An extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of late imperial Russia."--William G. Wagner, Journal of Modern History "A short review cannot embrace all the topics that Ekaterina Pravilova's book engages and for which it suggests possibilities for new studies. No doubt this is what makes this book a highly valuable contribution to the so very complicated process of rethinking Russian history."--Alexander Kamenskii, Canadian-American Slavic Studies

"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.