Ripples Spread: To the Village, the Law, and the Arts

The public spectacle of revolutionary power, exhibited by the masses and educated society alike, made manifest the changes that had occurred in Russian society in the previous decades. The organized assault of liberal forces on the autocracy demonstrated the existence in Russia of a “public sphere,” a space for civil society to develop a public discourse and public opinion (implicitly a plurality of opinions) independent of the government, which in turn allowed society to effect democratic political change.¹ But the evolution of a public sphere had concrete visual and physical effects as well as social and political ones. The sudden