"Standing firmly in favour of reform”: Public Debates on Urban Governance Reform in the Baltic Provinces of the 1860s-1870s as Part of the New Public Sphere in the Late Russian Empire

• In Event: Civic, Imperial, and Ethnic Histories in the Baltic Region, 1860-1950s

Abstract

This paper analyzes the formation of the new public sphere and public regimes in the context of a discussion of the preparation and implementation of urban government reform in the cities of the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in 1860-1870. Combining two methodological perspectives – analysis of texts, concepts and speech acts (Q. Skinner and J. Pocock), and the analysis of the public sphere and publicity regimes – it becomes possible to show that news and rumors about the reform became a catalyst for the formation of new forms and mechanisms of civic society. Public speech and discourses associated with the broad political context of the concepts of autonomy/integration, traditions/reforms, antiquity/modernity. The concept of “reform” in those years became not just a tool or object for the statements, but a direct actor that influenced on the construction of speech acts and the formation of new communication models within the urban societies of the Baltic and in the empire. This became an essential part of the formation of local civic identity within the public sphere.

The main agents and creators of the public sphere around the reform of urban government in the Baltic provinces were leading local and imperial newspapers. Published in the form of editorials, feuilletons and extended essays, they created a new model of communication within society, including shaping the local “civic identity” of residents of the Baltic cities.

Short Bio

Ph.D. candidate and visiting research scholar, Cologne University

Author

• Denis Smetanin, Historisches Institut Abteilung für Osteuropäische Geschichte, University of Cologne