PROJECTS FOR REFORMING THE PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION 303sense). In turn, this would make it possible for the officials to enforce
the obligations undertaken by both parties and to prosecute violations
on the ground of specific, precise, and publicly stated rules. The most
important long term measures envisioned by Speransky were four: 1.
reform of the status and conditions of the state peasants (an idea
taken up by Count Kiselev in the 1840's); 2. transfer of privately owned
serfs to the same status as the state peasants, i.e. the relations between
landowner and serf would be the same as those between the Treasury
and the state peasants; 3. reorganization of the district and township
administration; 4. improvement of the rules governing the serfs' right
to work in towns and the abolition of all restrictions on peasant move·
ment for this purpose. 1
All the acts just mentioned would take care only of the legal aspects
and the administration of the peasantry. Speransky expected that, along
with changed legal and administrative relations, there would also come
a transformation in the way of life in the villages. The expected trans·
formation was Speransky's clearest statement of what social change he
considered best for Russia. It was perhaps the most influential heritage
he bequeathed to subsequent generations of Russian officials, more
particularly to the reformers in the reign of Alexander II.
An important peasant institution whose fate had to be considered
most carefully, in the first place, was the village commune (obshchina).
By Speransky's time, it had already become the subject of interesting
and lively controversies. In the early part of the 19th century, most
influential Russian writers on political economy were followers of thephysiocrats and of Adam Smith, JB. Say, and the like. Naturally, they
looked at the commune with some disfavor as a survival of more
primitive conditions and as a handicap to Russia's economic progress.
This opinion was held by outstanding and influential economists like
Admiral Mordvinov, Nicholas Turgenev, and the plethora of German
political economists at Russian universities and in government offices.
Speransky, however, in spite of his doctrinaire economic liberalism and
modernism, took a more realistic point of view and refused to be
dogmatic on the question of the role and future of the commune. On
the basis of his first·hand observations of conditions in the village, he
felt that the commune was such an important and aId institution,
1 Ibid., pp. 164-165 - It might be added that individual ideas of Speransky's,
we have just described, had been proposed by various officials previously, for example
Jakob, Storch, Kankrin. But none of these foreign authors had systematized them
in a way that was directly applicable to Russian circumstances. The most complete
exposition of these other suggestions is still V. I. Semevskii's Krest'ianskii vopros v
Rossii.