All Russia Is Burning!

Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late imperial Russia, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive study. Destroying almost three billion rubles’ worth of property in European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted as a brake on Russia’s economic development while subjecting peasants to perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who came to perceived it as a key obstacle to Russia’s becoming a modern society in the European model.Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of "self-help" law or plain spite.Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern world. Fire insurance, building codes, "scientific" village layouts, and volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing the number of fires each year.More than anything else, this history of fire and arson in rural European Russia is a history of their cultural meanings in the late imperial campaign for modernity. Frierson shows the special associations of women with fire in rural life and in elite understanding of fire in the Russian countryside. Her study of the fire question demonstrates both peasant agency in fighting fire and educated Russians' hardening conviction that peasants stood in the way of Russia's advent into the company of prosperous, rational, civilized nations.

This monumental study is the fruit of meticulous research in St. Petersburg central archives as well as Smolensk, Novogorod, and Vologda regional archives. Frierson examines not only educated society's perceptions of fire and of the peasantry it associated with village conflagrations but also fire's multiple realities. In doing so, she grapples with such fundamental issues as late imperial Russia's undergovernment, insufficient judicial system, economic backwardness, nascent civil society, misogyny, peasant culture, and interclass relationships. A must read for all historians of Russia and developing nations, this book persuasively argues that fire holds the key to explaining Russia's economic poverty in the modern era and illuminates the ways in which educated and barely literature members of Russian society were able to join forces to fight a scourge that repeatedly devastated the countryside's resources., The history of fire in Russia is such a splendid topic that one can only feel surprised that no one has previously attempted to write it. Cathy Frierson is to be congratulated not only for her inspired choice of theme but also for her accomplished execution of the task..A superb and innovative piece of scholarship., [Frierson's] wide-ranging and thoughtful analysis, with implications that extend into the realms of economic development, gender relations, and rural daily life, offers the reader an abundance of vivid evidence as well as thought-provoking conclusions., An excellent study which provides thought-provoking insights into post-Emancipation Russia through a fascinating analysis of the history of fire. The enthusiasm and interest Frierson shows toward her subject is reflected in the engaging writing style and the wide range of materials she uses to produce a multi-layered examination of an issue that affected all strata of Russian society. . . . While Frierson's focus on Russia is sharp and incisive, one is also able to see the country through an impressive theoretical and historical framework that provides a blueprint for new approaches to the study of Russian history.

Cathy A. Frierson is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Peasant Icons: Representation of Rural People in Late Imperial Russia and Alexander Nikolaevich Engelgardt's Letters from the Country, 1872-1887.