enacted. 120 The ‘sedimentary’ layers of this autocratic society perhaps stemmed from the lack of a central political ideology; the arbitrary laws and sweeping changes did little to instil a unified sense of political direction leading up to the 1905 revolution. Dena Goodman, in writing about the public sphere in eighteenth century France, argued that the most important factor in developing a platform for political criticism and debate was access to various ‘institutions’; coffee shops, salons, academies and masonic lodges. 121 Joseph Bradley argues in Russia that similar ‘free associations’ were no doubt coming into existence, but that the diversity of their interests and contestation for the same political space meant that the developing public sphere was soon hijacked by revolutionaries. 122 These anaemic and sedimentary political cul-de-sacs were unstable and lacked a central ethos, and thus would instead seek their expression in the form of violence in both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. If the middle classes were compartmentalised and the aristocratic bureaucracy were devoid of a political compass, the opposite had occurred in peasant society. Since the Emancipation of 1861, Russia had taken a large step forward in its transition from a medieval feudal society into the modern world. In post-Emancipation rural Russia, peasants owed a sort of debt to the mir (village council) and made payments to offset their former masters’ loss of land; peasants still worked their allotment of land, but were now hired by their former masters to pay this debt. This debt effectively 120 idem. p. 364. 121 Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime” in History and Theory , 31.1, (Feb., 1992), pp. 1-20 p. 6. 122 Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autotracy in Tsarist Russia” in The American Historical Review , 107.4, (October, 2002), pp. 1094-1123, p. 1122.
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