Modern Russian history began with the Great Reforms of 1861-4 which emancipated the serfs and introduced public self-government to assist the state in managing rural administration and change. In this capacity, peasant and zemstvo self-government, established partly on the basis of Western administrative theory, was important to the solvency of the entire state, autocracy's political evolution, and the fate of the rural gentry, peasants, and townspeople. This book is the first full-scale account of the development of rural self-government from the Great Reforms to its bureaucratization in the counterreforms of 1889-90 and their implementation during the following decade. Drawing on a wide range of archival material in Moscow and Leningrad, Pearson pinpoints the concrete problems that Russian officials experienced in introducing rural self-government, and shows that the land captain and zemstvo counterreforms, like the earlier Great Reforms, resulted from practical statist considerations.