Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Free Economic Society

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Free Economic Society
Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > Russian History Encyclopedia

The Free Economic Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Husbandry, established in 1765 to consider ways to improve the rural economy of the Russian Empire, became a center of scientific research and practical activities designed to improve agriculture and, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the life of the peasantry. "Free" in the sense that it was not subordinated to any government department or the Academy of Sciences, the society served as a bridge between science, agriculture, and reform until shut down during World War I. It sponsored a wide variety of research in the natural and social sciences as well as essay competitions, publishing reports and essays in Transactions of the Free Economic Society (comprising 280 volumes by 1915), and nine other periodicals.

Founded under the sponsorship of Catherine the Great, who provided funds for a building and library, as well as a reformist agenda influenced by physiocratic ideas, the society brought together noble landowners, government officials, and scholars to study and disseminate information on advanced methods of agriculture and estate management, particularly as practiced abroad. Papers were presented on rural economic activities, new technologies, and economic ideas that could be applied to Russia. Young men were sent abroad to study agronomy. At the initiative of Catherine, the society's first essay competition examined the utility of serfdom for the commonweal, but the winning essay, which opposed serfdom, was ignored.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the society's membership came to include more scientists, professionals, and officials, and fewer landowners. Its work focused on discussion of advanced ideas in agronomy, medicine, and the developing sciences of chemistry and biology. After 1830 the society concentrated on practical applications of technology to agriculture. Among its most important projects were research on the best varieties of plants to grow on Russian soil, efforts to improve crop yields and sanitary measures, and the introduction of smallpox vaccination into rural areas.

After the accession of Alexander II in 1855, the society threw itself into reform efforts and greatly expanded its activities. It offered popular lectures on physics, chemistry, and forestry. It entered the fight against illiteracy and in 1861 established a committee to study popular education. It supported research on soil science, agricultural economics, demography, and rural sociology, and carried out systematic geographic studies. To educate the newly freed peasantry, the society initiated a wide range of activities, mounting agricultural exhibits, establishing experimental farms, encouraging the use of chemical fertilizer and industrial crops, promoting scientific animal husbandry and beekeeping, and expanding its efforts to vaccinate the peasantry against smallpox. As part of its educational mission, the society published popular works on agriculture and distributed millions of pamphlets and books free of charge.

Increasingly, as the society became a forum for progressive economic thought critical of government policy toward the peasantry, its work took on political dimensions. The government revoked its charter in 1899, ordering it to confine its activities to agricultural research. Nonetheless, in 1905 the society supported the election of a constitutional assembly and after 1907 published surveys of peasant opinion on the land reforms proposed by Interior Minister Peter Stolypin that were implicitly critical of government policy. During World War I the tsarist government closed down the society because of its oppositional stance, and the new Soviet government formally abolished it in 1919.

Bibliography

Pratt, Joan Klobe. (1983). "The Russian Free Economic Society, 1765 - 1915." Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri.

Pratt, Joan Klobe. (2002). "The Free Economic Society and the Battle Against Smallpox: A 'Public Sphere' in Action." Russian Review 61:560 - 578.

Vucinich, Alexander. (1963). Science in Russian Culture. Vol. 1: A History to 1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Vucinich, Alexander. (1970). Science in Russian Culture. Vol. 2: 1861 - 1970. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

—CAROL GAYLE

—WILLIAM MOSKOFF<

Search unanswered questions...

Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Wikipedia: Free Economic Society
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
Seal of the Free Economic Society

Free Economic Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Husbandry (Russian: Вольное экономическое общество) was Russia's first learned society which formally did not depend on the government and as such came to be regarded as a bulwark of Russian liberalism.

Contents

18th century

One of the first economic societies in the world, it was established in 1765 in Saint Petersburg by a group of wealthy landowners led by Count Grigory Orlov. With the likes of Arthur Young and Jacques Necker among its honorary members, the Society was "supposed to publicize advanced methods of farming and estate management as practiced in foreign countries."[1]

Despite the Society's self-professed independence, the mastermind behind its early activity was Catherine II of Russia, who viewed agriculture as the mainstay of Russia's economy. She endowed the Society with funds for a library and a building on Palace Square; it was she who secretly suggested a famous essay competition on the subject "What is more beneficial to society — that the peasant should have land as property, or only movable property, and how far should the right of property be extended?"

In this international competition, held in 1766, only five essays out of 160 were in Russian; some entries (including Voltaire's) were singularly conservative; others were too libertine to be printed (e.g., Professor Desnitsky of the Moscow University declared that "worst of all is the serf who could not own even the smallest bit of property"). Encouraged by the success of this venture, the Society subsequently sponsored 243 other essay competitions.

19th century

Nikolay Mordvinov was the Society's president between 1823 and 1840.

Early members of the society — including agriculturist Andrey Bolotov, general Mikhail Kutuzov, admiral Aleksey Senyavin, and poet Gavrila Derzhavin — largely shared the Physiocratic ideals then prevalent in France. They were anxious to spread the cultivation of potatoes in the Russian countryside and hailed the new crop as "ground apples".

During the Napoleonic Wars, attention shifted to agricultural developments in Great Britain. Under the direction of Admiral Mordvinov (1823-40), the Society acquired British agricultural machinery and sought to intervene into traditional farming techniques as practiced by Russian peasants. Mordvinov himself was "an Anglophile so fanatic that he imported the "best" English gravel to cover the roads of his estates."[2]

After Konstantin Kavelin was elected President in 1861, the Free Economic Society concentrated on discussing the future of the Russian village commune (obshchina). The Society gathered statistics about agricultural production in Imperial Russia, compared the economic well-being of various regions, contributed to the mapping of soils in Russia, and published Vasily Dokuchayev's famous monograph on chernozem.

Such luminaries as Dmitry Mendeleyev, Aleksandr Butlerov, Pyotr Semyonov, and Leo Tolstoy were involved in the Society's practical activities, ranging from the advancement of beekeeping (Butlerov) to the enlightenment of peasant children (Tolstoy).

Last decades

In 1895 Count Geiden became the Society's President. Under his guidance, the Society evolved into "an expanded cultural center, in which academics, agricultural experts, journalists, and leading spokesmen of the feuding socialist groups argued rather freely about current economic and political issues"[3] Public debates of Pyotr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky on the precepts of Legal Marxism attracted many non-members (Maksim Gorky, Yevgeny Tarle) to attend the meetings.

Such activities resulted in the liberal institution's being closed down by the authorities in 1900. The Society resumed its activities before long, but non-members would not be admitted to take part in the meetings again. With the outbreak of the Great War, the activity of the Society was suspended; it was finally abolished by the Bolsheviks in 1919. During 154 years of its existence, the Society issued a variety of specialized journals, more than 280 volumes of the Proceedings, and a number of supplements to these.

In 1992, the All-Soviet Economic Society, which had been functioning in the USSR since 1982, assumed the name of the Free Economic Society of Russia, with the Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov as its President.

References

  1. ^ John T. Alexander. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. Oxford University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-19-506162-4. Page 100.
  2. ^ Esther Kingston-Mann. In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development. Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-691-00433-1. Page 66.
  3. ^ Reinhard Bendix. Kings Or People: Power & the Mandate to Rule. University of California Press, 1980. ISBN 0-520-04090-2. Page 542.

Further reading

  • Khodnev A.I. History of the Imperial Free Economic Society from 1765 to 1865. SPb, 1865.
  • Beketov A.N. An Historical Outline of the 25-year Activity of the Free Economic Society (1865-1890). SPb, 1890.
  • Oreshkin V.V. Free Economic Society in Russia (1765-1917). Moscow, 1963.
  • Joan Pratt. The Russian Free Economic Society (Ph.D. diss.). University of Missouri-Columbia, 1983.

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Russian History Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Free Economic Society".  Read more