In enacting the Land Captain and Zemstvo statutes of 1889 and 1890, the government formally concluded more than twelve years of systematic work on rural self-government reform. Likewise, the legislation closed a chapter in postreform Russian history that saw the introduction of self-government in the countryside in the early 1860s and the first serious state efforts to reorganize it over the next quarter century. During this period and increasingly in the 1890s, the Russian government faced a rural crisis marked by acute land and grain shortages, the breakup of traditional patriarchal ties, and the rapid swelling of tax and redemption arrears; in the latter case, direct tax arrears rose from 22 percent of the anticipated collection in 1876–80 to 119 percent in the years 1896–1900, and in 1903 redemption dues arrears hit 138 percent. Amid these developments, Russian officialdom exhibited many characteristics of a government in crisis as it grappled with the problem of local self-government and other matters connected with state penetration of the provinces. Overwhelmed by the many tasks of rural administration and development and short of personnel and funds, the government nevertheless distrusted the self-governing institutions that it had created to assist it. Seeking an ideology of administration that could provide the right combination of local initiative and political control, the state repeatedly sought to reorganize local self-government. Yet each time its efforts at institutional renovation became bogged down in interest group politics, particularly when the debates reached the highest circles in St. Petersburg.