All Russia Is Burning!

Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late imperial Russia. 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. Educated, progressive Russians perceived fire as a key obstacle to Russia's becoming a rational, 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. 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.