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Guardians of the Benighted

Created in December 1837, the Ministry of State Properties played a crucial role in agrarian reform and peasant affairs in Russia for decades thereafter. Armed with a reformist ethos and headed for two decades by Pavel Kiselev, the ministry sought to reorder the lives of state peasants—Russia’s principal non-serf population—by promoting new crops such as the potato, establishing communal grain reserves, and building schools. These and other initiatives heralded a new degree of state intervention into the lives of Russia’s rural population and defined key parameters of Russia’s subsequent efforts to solve its ‘peasant question’. The ministry thus occupies a critical place in Russia’s agrarian history.