The “small deeds liberalism” of the provincial zemstvos was not a challenge to the central state. Indeed, in so far as the crucial weakness of the tsarist system was the under-government of the localities, they were a vital supplement to it. The presence of the state stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals. Neither the district towns nor the volost rural townships had any standing tsarist officials. There was only a series of magistrates who appeared from time to time on some specific mission, usually to sort out local conflicts and then disappear again. The common image of the tsarist regime as omnipresent and all-powerful was largely an invention of the revolutionaries, who spent their lives in fear of it, living in the underground. The reality was different. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only four state officials at the turn of the twentieth century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements scattered across 5,000 square kilometres.
In this space the zemstvos had a huge amount of work to do. They were limited, however, by the taxes they could raise from the local landowners, whose more reactionary members were opposed to paying for the welfare of the peasantry. They also faced increasing opposition from the Ministry of the Interior, which came to see them as a breeding ground for revolutionaries. The main concern was the zemstvo employees (teachers, doctors, statisticians, engineers and agronomists) known as the Third Element. In contrast to the first two elements, the administrators and elected officials, who were mostly landowners, these employees were predominantly from the towns. Many had indeed been exiled to the countryside because of their involvement in student demonstrations and other radical activities. Through their work in the zemstvos they hoped to serve the people’s cause.