American and Russian outback. Two ways of life and thought (observations of a former Zemstvo member)

Abstract

The paper is a comparative analysis of the American and Russian outback at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is based on the works of public figure and writer, landowner of the Tver province P.A. Dementiev. He emigrated to the United States in 1881, lived in different states and was well acquainted with outback of both countries. In his articles published under the pseudonym P.A. Tverskoi in Russian magazines, mainly in Vestnik Evropy, and books, Dementyev, as a former member of the zemstvo, paid special attention to the system of education and local self-government. He examined school education in the states of America and in Russia and came to disappointing conclusions about its state in his fatherland, where a law on compulsory primary education had not been adopted. Equally unfavorable is his view of the role of the zemstvo, which has limited powers. Based on American experience, Dementiev insisted on the need for reforms in these areas, as well as in others, primarily agrarian, proposing to free the peasantry from the oppression of all kinds of payments, which is the basis of the poverty of the province and the illiteracy of its population. The journalist explained the differences between the American and Russian outback by encouraging private initiative in America and its suppression in Russia, calling for the elimination of bureaucratic barriers to the development of “public initiative”.