zemstvo

thumb|300px|A Provincial Zemstvo Assembly. Konstantin Trutovsky, 1868

A zemstvo (, , , zemstva) was an institution of local government set up in consequence of the emancipation reform of 1861 of Imperial Russia by Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Nikolay Milyutin elaborated the idea of the zemstvo, and the first zemstvo laws went into effect in 1864. After the October Revolution of 1917 the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced with a multilevel system of workers' and peasants' councils ("soviets").