The paper will examine the early history of applied entomology in Russia from the time when some branches of the Russian civil service began collecting field data on insect pests till the moment when the first professional positions for agricultural entomologists were established in some regions of the Russian empire. Little or no attention has so far been paid to these efforts by historians of science who studied the 19th century research in applied entomology, since their perspective has been traditionally framed by the history of the discipline’s institutionalisation. The paper aspires to show that as early as in the 1840s, much effort was applied to accumulating data on the outbreaks of insect pests in the Russian empire. These efforts were initiated and supervised by civil servants, who were able to rely on expertise of prominent naturalists, both in Russia and abroad. However the nature of the project required mass field observations that could be carried out only by people with basic skills of entomological research. It was precisely this problem of converting local knowledge into the data matching scientific criteria that proved to be most difficult to solve, or even to comprehend its scope. Yet in the 1840s – early 1850s some branches of the Russian civil service aided by a few scholars at the Imperial Academy of Sciences were able to improve the quality of field data produced by their personnel and voluntary assistants in the provinces by providing detailed instructions and publishing reference literature on insect pests. However this mode of interaction among the Russian civil service, a few leading naturalists of imperial and international reputation and provincial correspondents did not survive the middle decades of the century when a whole series of political, social and economic reforms had had serious repercussion for academic research and public life in the capital and in the provinces. The paper will explore in details the reasons that prompted both the Russian entomological society at St. Petersburg and those branches of the civil service that had been engaged in collecting data on insect pests to withdraw from this field, thus ceding the initiative to local authorities and professional naturalists in the southern Russia, who in the next few decades would become the primary force behind the institutionalisation of applied entomology.