AbstractIn the period between the Emancipation of 1861 and the Stolypin Reforms of 1906, educated Russians sought to make use of Western models as a basis for Russian strategies for rural development. Marxists and reforming officials of the tsarist regime looked particularly to England, and to the universal economic benefits which private property systems and ‘men of property’ contributed to England's agricultural and industrial revolutions. In contrast, Russia's leading economists and statisticians looked as well to the economic example of Denmark and Germany, and proposed more pluralistic approaches to the dilemmas of developm