All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia

Cathy A. Frierson. All Russia is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2002. 318 pp. $45.00, cloth.In this insightful study, Cathy Frierson thoroughly analyzes peasants' relationship to fire, in both its constructive, contained forms and its destructive, unbridled manifestations. Drawing on a wide array of archival and published sources and situating her work within the fields of Russian history and disaster studies, Frierson explores the material and symbolic significance of fires to the peasantry. Offering a nuanced corrective to conceptions of peasants as powerless primitives whose inability to control conflagrations marked their backwardness, Frierson portrays peasants as active agents who understood how to manipulate blazes to their own ends, even if their capacity to control fires was imperfect. While Frierson concurs that fires constituted a major hazard and had a deleterious impact on the countryside's development, she challenges the notion that the peasants were to blame for the frequency of blazes and the havoc wreaked by them and lays it instead on the autocracy, which declined to invest properly in the rural sector. Whereas the government impeded modernization, Frierson persuasively demonstrates that peasants were modern, rational subjects who chose how to use and fight fires.Frierson's opening section draws on ethnographic and anthropological materials to depict how fires enabled denizens of rural European Russia to survive an unrelentingly cold, dark, and harsh climate. She convincingly argues that it was logical for peasants to invest the flame with sacred powers. Understanding that fires cured and destroyed, fertilized and terrorized, wanned homes and threatened to ignite them, peasants treated blazes due respect.In the second part, Frierson challenges the traditional interpretation advanced by Soviet and Western historians that arson was indicative of nascent class conflict in the countryside and shows that a closer examination of blazes intentionally set by peasants illuminates the multiple tensions pervading rural Russia. Some peasants did set fire to property owned by exploitative members of the gentry and merchant class who restricted access to forests and inflated grain prices. Yet peasants also unleashed the 'red rooster' on other peasants, targeting those whom they perceived as greedy, against whom they sought revenge, or upon whom they wished to impose control for violating communal or moral norms. Moreover, peasants seeking financial benefit set their own property aflame; the compulsory extension of insurance in the countryside was one reason for the increase in the reporting of arson in late imperial Russia. At all junctures, cautions Frierson, rural arson constituted a discursive system, the rules and limits of which were understood by villagers. Whereas urban elites read arson as indicative of peasants' unenlightened tendencies, Frierson, who resists romanticizing peasant arson, nevertheless deems it proof of rural Russians' capacity to make informed decisions.The third part focuses on efforts to protect the countryside from fire's ravages. Presuming that peasants were disorderly and fatalistic, elites and zemstvo activists felt that rural residents had to be coerced into stamping out fire hazards. Yet they also conceived of some male peasants as potential partners in modernization. Activists sought to transform rural habits by establishing compulsory property insurance, rationally planning villages, using flame retardant construction materials, and forming fire fighting brigades that embodied disciplined masculinity. …

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