Of the four great European empires that met their demise in World War I, the Russian empire surely had the most traumatic initiation into the twentieth century. Beleaguered by famine, workers' strikes, student unrest, and military defeat, the old regime stumbled into the revolution of 1905 and came perilously close to losing its power. Although many causes lay behind this event, the administrative shortcomings of tsarism in the late nineteenth century were undoubtedly among the most important. These failings were particularly noticeable in the government's policy on local self-government, for here Russia's rulers confronted the centuries-old problem of governing a uniquely huge, underdeveloped empire with inadequate human and economic resources and with largely uneducated social classes who, for various reasons, regarded self-government with indifference.

Russian officialdom from the Petrine era on had grappled with the task of devising an effective system of central control over the Russian countryside without stifling all local development, and this dilemma continues to preoccupy Soviet leaders. Time and time again, they have reorganized the local Communist Party apparatus and government agencies to achieve a balance between party control and local economic initiative. Like their tsarist predecessors, Soviet leaders introducing reform have had to steer an unpredictable course designed to overcome official inertia without arousing overly sanguine expectations among officials and the population concerning the scope and tempo of the reform program. In a broader vein, the problems of Russian local administration discussed in this work have parallels in developing nations undergoing rapid social and economic change.