Stephen Lovell1; 1 King's College London, Department of History, UK
Discussion
This paper will take another look at the ways the Russian Empire incorporated its newly annexed territories by focusing on the institution and practice of elections. The case study of Bessarabia offers a full spectrum of electoral experience: from voting in the noble assemblies of the late 1810s onwards through to the zemstvo and the municipal dumas of the reform era and the State Duma in the early twentieth century. How did elections serve the purposes of the Russian imperial administration? What were their broader social and political ramifications?
