Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914 - Couverture rigide

Frank, Stephen P.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520213416 ISBN 13 : 9780520213418

Editeur : University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Stephen P. Frank is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coeditor, with Ben Eklof, of The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society (1990) and, with Mark Steinberg, of Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (1994).

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"The most deeply researched and best written monograph on the pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry in English."—Abbott Gleason, author of Totalitarianism

"None of us has been able to use a particular topic to so fully and broadly illuminate the relationship between the elite and the common people in the Imperial period and also to represent the great watersheds of Russian history in a new and very persuasive way."—Daniel Field, author of Rebels in the Name of the Tsar

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

"The most deeply researched and best written monograph on the pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry in English."—Abbott Gleason, author of Totalitarianism

"None of us has been able to use a particular topic to so fully and broadly illuminate the relationship between the elite and the common people in the Imperial period and also to represent the great watersheds of Russian history in a new and very persuasive way."—Daniel Field, author of Rebels in the Name of the Tsar

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914

By Stephen P. Frank

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Stephen P. Frank
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520213416
Colonial Perspectives:
Representations and Realities of Rural Crime and Justice

The collapse of the peasants' economic life began the moment they received the ability to be completely and freely in charge of both their persons and their property, when outside supervision was removed from them, and above all when they were granted broad self-government. As the supervisory authority in the villages weakens, so their impoverishment is more and more noticeable. . . . The twenty-five-year life of the peasants [since emancipation] . . . testifies sufficiently to the fact that the population cannot improve its material situation without the help offar-sighted, intelligent, and concerned local authorities who can constantly guide them  . . .
GOVERNOR'S ANNUAL REPORT, RIAZAN' PROVINCE, 1886

In the summer of 1864, barely three years after the start of Russia's serf emancipation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) instructed the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province to investigate an alarming rise in rural crime. Felony statistics, the ministry claimed, had registered remarkable increases between 1854 and 1863. Cases of murder in this province grew by 54 percent over these ten years, arson by 61, theft by 179, and robbery by a frightening 274 percent.1 As the chief agency for maintaining security and order in the countryside, it is little wonder that such figures proved unsettling to the MVD. When combined with growing press coverage of crime and lawlessness among the newly freed peasant population, however, concerns over public order spread far beyond the walls of a single government ministry. They also bolstered worries within important segments of educated

A. S. Gatsiskii, "Materialy dlia ugolovnoi statistiki Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," Nizhegorodskii sbornik 1, part 1 (1867), 12125. The source for these figures was not given, although published statistics show a 33.9 percent increase in total crimes for the years in question. Otchet Ministerstva Iustitsii [hereafter: Otchety ] vols. 2331 (SPb, 185866). See also Gatsiskii, "Opyt ugolovnoi statistiki Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," Pamiatnaia knizhka Nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1865 g. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1864), 94111. Governors of some central provinces, such as Riazan', however, reported insignificant increases or even drops in the number of crimes during these years. See, e.g., GARO, f. 5, st. 1, op. 2, d. 1028 (1861), ll. 390b40.

societyparticularly local administrative and police officialsthat emancipation may have come at a serious cost to social tranquillity, justifying preexisting fears over the destabilizing consequences of unsupervised peasant freedom.

By 1865, Nizhnii Novgorod provincial councilor A. P. Smirnov had compiled a survey of opinions on the causes of rural crime from district court judges, prosecutors, police commandants, peace mediators, marshals of the nobility, parish priests, and others.2 A few respondents questioned the MVD's data and suppositions with good reason, pointing out that the statistical increase did not stem from a crime wave but resulted largely from the fact that seigneurial peasants, who had been tried by their masters for most infractions prior to emancipation, were now coming before state courts and swelling the judicial record, creating the impression of a vast upsurge in the number of offenses committed.3 Yet if they were aware of this fact, most who answered the survey ignored it, expressing instead a dual anxiety about the moral state of emancipated peasants and the apparent inability of either police orjudicial agencies to exercise control over them. These opinions offer significant insight into the attitudes of provincial officialdom toward rural criminality and the peasantry in generalan important starting point, for the beliefs they expressed changed little during the remaining decades of the old regime.

The primarily noble respondents voiced general agreement with a peace mediator's claim that the increase in crime was a direct result of emancipation, "because [peasants] lost the careful supervision over them which is required due to the coarseness of their morals." Hearkening back to pre-reform times, some greatly exaggerated the efficiency of estate regimes. As one official wrote:

During the era of serfdom, landowners or their stewards . . . insured that farmers worked and fulfilled all labor obligations. They also curtailed drunkenness. This served as a basis for mutual benefit and common satisfaction. Un-

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 12526. Created in 1861 and empowered with police and judicial functions, peace mediators served as local agents to oversee the emancipation and resolve disputes between peasants and their owners during the redemption process. K. A. Sofronenko, comp., Krest'ianskaia reforma v Rossii 1861 goda: sbornik zakonodatel'nykh aktov (Moscow, 1954), 14142; Jerman Walter Rose, "The Russian Peasant Emancipation and the Problem of Rural Administration: The Institution of the Mirovoi Posrednik" (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1976), 6970.

"The growth in the number of theft cases does not at all attest to the actual number of crimes," one peace mediator argued. "With the abolition of serfdom, a large number of thefts that previously remained unknown and were punished by the serfowner now became public and subject to [official] investigation." Another mediator made much the same point, noting that after emancipation "the influence of the serfowner's court and punishment came to an end, and all cases now come before the regular judicial administration." Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 13940.

der serfdom, estate police existed in each settlement, so that not a single peasant had the right to absent himself without the knowledge of estate officials; hence serfs remained under constant and vigilant supervision and, as a result, were kept from committing crimes. Above all, they were restrained from criminal activity by the fear that, even if they did not receive punishment from a court, the landowner could send them off to military service, subject them to corporal punishment or exile them to Siberia.4

Others said much the same. "One of the chief reasons for the increase in crime is the rapid transition of peasants from serfdom to complete freedom," declared a marshal of the nobility. "In earlier times, estate owners supervised their peasants' morality and therefore . . .  legal order was maintained."5 But owing to this freedom that they did not yet understand, one police commandant added, "our peasantsor at least 99 percent of themare not aware that a person is obliged to be honest and to recognize his duty to obey government orders and lead a patriarchal family life." Instead, wrote a peace mediator, once liberated from the strict supervision of his owner, "the former serf completely surrendered himself to his unbridled passions."6

Nearly all respondents found morality to be in a woeful state of decline after emancipation, as shown by the spread of taverns, drunkenness, smoking, and other vices. Claimed one noble administrator, "Crimes are committed by peasants primarily under the influence of that savage and crude moral condition in which they exist."7 Sounding a theme commonly heard from clerical and other observers long before emancipation (and one that would be echoed again with particular vehemence toward the century's end), respondents worried especially about a marked weakening of deference toward elders. "So soon after emancipation," a police commandant warned, "they are complaining in the villages about young people not obeying or submitting to parental authority." The great increase in rural alcohol consumption that many believed accompanied serfdom's abolition only worsened this problem, for "the drunkard does not understand gray hair, and here is the basis of disrespect toward elders, fathers, mothers, and officials."8 More than any other single factor, drinking was blamed for the

Ibid., 130. Elite commentaries about crime in other postemancipation settings were quite similar to those expressed in Russia, raising the spectre of the increasingly disorderly, criminal, and uncivilized masses. See, e.g., Martha K. Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (New Brunswick, N.J., 1985); David V. Trotman, Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and Control in a Plantation Society, 18381900 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), esp. ch. 4; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York, 1984).

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 142.

Ibid., 127, 131.

Ibid., 137.

Ibid., 127.

peasants' dreadful moral state and the rise of rural criminality. "The growth of this vice is the chief cause of increased thefts and fires," said one official, and another explained that alcohol abuse developed gradually, beginning with the loss of outside supervision, which allowed the peasant "to give himself over to the weakness of excessive drinking." Cheap liquor made the peasant a poor farmer who first neglected his work and family and then, in order to satisfy a growing desire for alcohol, "turns to easy means of acquiring money and begins to steal, first trifles from his neighbors, then finally committing [felonies]." In short, "the rising number of petty offenses fights, rowdiness, swindling, family discord, carelessness with fire, and so onis occurring because of the proliferation of drinking establishments and the excessive cheapness of vodka."9

Ignorance and lack of education, respondents argued, also contributed to the crime wave because peasants did not understand the freedom and self-administration granted to them. In a telling testimony to prereform justice, one district marshal remarked that "simple folk" continued to believe they could commit crimes and avoid punishment by means of bribery, as had been done in the past.10 Others stressed that allowing peasants to elect their own policemen (a practice that actually dated to the eighteenth century) had unwittingly contributed to the growth of crime because villagers choose for these positions people who best suited their needsthose of bad moral character who were submissive, discreet, did not interfere in the peasants' merrymaking and disorders, and did nothing to prevent or investigate offenses.11 Some went further and blamed the reformed legal order itself for encouraging crime because it did not allow for immediate punishment, as under serfdom, but required lengthy investigation and court proceedings. "Before emancipation, punishment did not necessitate the superfluous evidence that is needed today and as a result of which criminals get off with no punishment at all . . . The homespun police measures of pre-emancipation times kept the immorality of the rabble [chern' ] in bounds, whereas the new order of things has led to its increase."12

Ibid., 13132, 133. For various estimates on the extent to which rural drinking establishments were increasing after emancipation, see GARO, f. 5, st. 1, op. 2, d. 953, l. 53; Boris Mironov, "The Russian Peasant Commune after the Reforms of the 1860s," SR 44, no. 3 (1985), 461; Trudy MKNSP, vol. 24: Nizhegorodskaia guberniia (SPb, 1903), 45; vol. 25: Novgorodskaia guberniia (SPb, 1903), 202; and others.

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 137. For a similar opinion, see Bogoslovskii, "Obshchii ocherk obraza zhizni i kharaktera zhitelei Novgorodskoi gubernii," Novgorodskii sbornik, no. 1 (1865), part 1, 78. On bribery both prior to 1861 and after, see N. Davydov, Ugolovnyi sud v Rossii (Moscow, 1918), 18284; A. A. Fet [A. A. Shenshin], Moi vospominaniia, 18481889, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1890), 2:227.

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 128.

Ibid., 14445.

Nobles also implicated rural poverty and an unfathomable yet growing peasant desire for material improvement that drove them to commit crimes in order to fulfill their new materialistic cravings. A rapid expansion of Russia's seasonal and migrant labor market similarly fed the supposed crime wave, for along previously sleepy Volga river towns it swelled the population with thousands of laborers who could easily be tempted once outside the constraints imposed by their families and native villages. Indeed, the free movement of lower-class people throughout the countryside greatly disturbed local officials. Outsiders posed a constant threat to defenseless communities, it was noted, and villagers had to tolerate criminals in their midst because they could not afford the expense incurred by banishing offenders. As one respondent put it, these incorrigible criminals acted as a "moral disease" upon everyone around them.13

Nizhnii Novgorod's parish clergy echoed many of these opinions, stressing the abolition of serfdom and of corporal punishment by state courts as responsible for the spread of crime in their parishes. Drunkenness stood out among the chief factors clerics cited when accounting for rural criminality, as did the presence of "harmful and dangerous people" in villages. Some priests added to this list villagers' declining respect for Church and clergy, the schism, lack of belief in an afterlife and its punishments, the election of village officials "through an appeal to vodka rather than the blessing of God," and the ever greater mobility of their flock, which exposed peasants to the corrupting influences of factory and city through outwork or travel to regional markets. Unlike other respondents, however, individual priests pointed to a lack of moral influence from nonpeasant officials, their unjust and arbitrary conduct, poor harvests, a decline of handicraft industries, begging, inflation, population growth with its resultant land shortage, and the widespread news about crime, which contributed to the perception of its increase.14 At least one provincial lawyer would restate this last point twelve years later: "Not long ago," he wrote, "they were shouting about the

Ibid., 133. Peasant communities were required to pay for an offender's imprisonment prior to exile, as well as for transportation and clothing; see Chapter 7. In other national settings, too, "outsiders" were commonly blamed for bringing crime to otherwise peaceful rural communities. David J. V. Jones, Rebecca's Children: A Study of Rural Society, Crime, and Protest (Oxford, 1989), 162; Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991), 166.

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 149. Unfortunately, the editor chose not to print opinions provided by local clerics, possibly because many were overly critical of the provincial administration and police. Gatsiskii himself, however (15053), also questioned several assertions made by officials, including their linkage of drinking and crime. For additional commentary on declining faith in the Church and clergy, see "Odna iz prichin nedoveriia i nedruzheliubnogo otnosheniia prikhozhan k svoemu pastyriu," RSP, no. 3 (1886), 5361; no. 49, 40413; N. O. Osipov, O prichinakh upadka vliianiia dukhovenstva na narod (SPb, 1900).

constantly growing number of crimes in Russia dating from the time of [emancipation], but subsequently it turned out that it was not the number of crimes that had increased, but only the means for spreading news about crime throughout societyi.e., the press."15

Opinions in the 1864 survey represented no significant shift in attitudes toward the rural population from those of earlier times, and they remained familiar refrains until the fall of the old regime and beyond. A similar sense of uncertainty and crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century took much the same form. What distinguished the atmosphere of 1864 was emancipation itself, which intensified older feelings of fear and hostility toward the peasantry. In 1847, for example, a district marshal of the nobility from Smolensk province had argued that "the ignorance of the peasants, their superstitions, incorrigibility, and irreversible attachment to the old ways, make them incapable of accepting legal statutes and assimilating the consciousness of civil dependency."16 Serfowners and administrators of state peasants voiced endless concern over what they, too, saw as an ever growing incidence of crime, disorder, immorality, drunkenness, and lack of respect for private property. According to an 1826 report from one estate steward in the Skopin district of Riazan' province, peasants of Vysokoe village not only persistently shirked labor duties and disobeyed the authorities; they also deliberately damaged the lord's grain and meadows and surreptitiously cut wood in his forest "both night and day."17 Such complaints are legion in archival and published records, as is evidence about how justice was meted out to peasants who broke local law or estate regulations. On Prince Gagarin's Petrovskoe estate in Tambov province, 424 out of 1,626 serfs (26 percent) were annually subjected to some form of punishment or fine, with the most common offenses being theft of the lord's property, poor work, and pasturing communal livestock on the estate's winter crops.18

V. S. Krotkov, Volch'e stado. Zapiski provintsial'nogo advokata. Tseny i kartiny sel'skogo suda (Moscow, 1876), 10.

Francis W. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 18551914 (Princeton, 1990), 15.

M. A. Rakhmatullin, Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v velikorusskikh guberniiakh v 18261857 gg. (Moscow, 1990), 62. See also Rodney Bohac, "Everyday Forms of Resistance: Serf Opposition to Gentry Exactions, 18001861," in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 18001921 (Princeton, 1991), 23660; and, for a broader discussion, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).

I. D. Koval'chenko, Krest'iane i krepostnoe khoziaistvo Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow, 1959), 168, 241. Judicial statistics for the pre-emancipation years18321861 show that offenses against state and private property (particularly wood theft) proved the most numerous of all crimes for which peasants came to trial. See Otchet Ministerstva Iustitsii, vols. 135, and Chapter 2.

Drawing from his observations around Arkhangel'sk province during the early 1860s, ethnographer Petr S. Efimenko wrote that "respect toward property is being lost little by little, and there are even habitual thieves in some villages." The result, he claimed, was a sizable increase in the number of thefts.19

Officials and members of educated society had long argued that ignorance, immorality, and vice lay at the root of most crimes perpetrated by peasants. As an inspector (revizor ) of state peasant settlements noted in the late 1830s, villagers of both sexes were quite simply being ruined by liquor. "In the bootlegging establishments people . . . gather, drink together, entertain one another . . . and often forget their children, who are left at home without a crust of bread. They drink at all times and everywhere. . . . On holidays these taverns around the villages and along the roads are completely filled."20 Year after year and from one decade to the next, nonpeasant reporters claimed that village drinking and immorality were on the rise. "Drunkenness has, without a doubt, increased among the peasantry," a 1869 study stated. "They drink openly; both rich and poor, village elder and police go to the tavern at any time and drink, as they say, 'out of grief or out of joy.'"21

Most historical studies treating educated Russia's attitudes toward peasants have tended to focus on the idealization of a simple country folk who embodied whatever positive characteristics or hopes a given author or group projected onto them; however, such positive views accounted for only a small if influential portion of those in circulation. Even a cursory examination of contemporary writings provides ample evidence that the "simple folk" imagined in intelligentsia mythology from the 1840s on looked quite different to officialdom at all levels, to many clerics, and influential members of educated society. To them, rural life appeared bru-

P. S. Efimenko, Sbornik narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev Arkhangel'skoi gubernii (Arkhangel'sk, 1869), 225. For a range of complaints by former serfowners, see GARO, f. 694, op. 1, sv. 10, d. 194 (1861), ll. 1245.

N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane i reforma P. D. Kiseleva, 2 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1946, 1958), 1:374. Identical complaints would be voiced by temperance advocates and other social reformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by those seeking the causes of "hooliganism." See Stephen P. Frank, "Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and Its Enemies in Fin-de-Sicle Russia," in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg, eds., Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994), 8085. Compare Gregor Dallas, The Imperfect Peasant Economy: The Loire Country, 18001914 (Cambridge, 1982), 248.

Efimenko, Sbornik, 22728. See also E. Ozenbriuggen, "O sredstvakh k umen'sheniiu prestuplenii," Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 54 (1847), part 2, 127.

tal, coarse, and growing worse, a point emphasized at length in 1869 by populist V. V. Bervi-Flerovskii in his now largely forgotten The Condition of the Working Class in Russia. 22 Many Orthodox priests, before and after emancipation, wrote highly negative appraisals of their rural parishioners, dwelling on the corrupting and ruinous vices, the terrible brutality of family lifewhat they sometimes termed the bestial relations between men and womenand the immorality, ignorance, and deep-rooted superstition so prevalent in peasant communities. Local officials and literate members of provincial society proved no less negative in their assessments.23

One widely shared perception of rural life in 1864 and afterward was that of moral decay and disorder, of growing disrespect for the law, of a population in dire need of renewed supervision as well as education and general enlightenment. This was particularly the viewpoint of officials and administrators who dealt most directly with the peasantry, although they were by no means the sole propagators of that perspective. Nonofficial conservative and traditionalist publicists also called for renewed deference toward the authorities and spoke of the necessity to buttress and protect village society by reimposing strong, paternal authority that peasants would fear and obey. It is not surprising that those who recently lost their nearly absolute power over the rural population should view the postemancipation countryside in such a negative light. Yet similar opinions could be heard not only from former serfowners, rural police, and government ministers but also from the press and the broader sphere of educated society, where news of emancipation had initially been greeted enthusiastically. Liberals and reformers believed the problem to be the emancipation settlement itself. It had freed the peasants but cut them off from the rest of society, governed by a separate body of law and restrictions that perpetuated their underdevelopment by limiting their rights and preventing their integration into society as full citizens.24 Commentaries on the condition of the countryside between the 1860s and 1890s found much the same causes of rural crime and disorder as had been

V. V. Bervi-Flerovskii, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii (SPb, 1869).

For a selection of views, see A. V. Selivanov, "O merakh protiv narodnoi bednosti," GARO, f. 869, op. 1, d. 777 (1872), ll. 2428; V. N. Nazar'ev, "Sovremennaia glush'. Iz vospominanii mirovogo sud'i," VE, no. 2 (1872), 60436; no. 3, 13181; "Pechal'nye iavleniia v domashnem krest'ianskom bytu i otnosheniia k nim prikhodskikh sviashchennikov," RSP, no. 13 (1879), 34248; N. M. Astyrev, "S sil'nym ne boris'! Iz pamiatnoi knizhki byvshego volostnogo pisaria," VE, no. 2 (1886), 50852; L. Bezrodnyi, Ob upadke chuvstva zakonnosti v narode (SPb, 1892); P. I. Novgorodtsev, Krizis sovremennogo pravosoznaniia (Moscow, 1990).

For example, V. P. Meshcherskii, Ocherki nyneshnei obshchestvennoi zhizni v Rossii, vol. 1: Pis'ma iz Srednikh Veliko-Rossiiskikh gubernii za 1867 god (SPb, 1868); N. Selivanov, "Brodiagi, prazdnoshataiushchiesia i nishchie," VestP, no. 3 (1884), 7390; no. 4, 7790; V D. Kuz'min-Karavaev, "Pravovye nuzhdy derevni," Pravo, no. 15 (1903), 107383; no. 16, 115461; no. 17, 120916; S. N. Prokopovich, Mestnye liudi o nuzhdakh Rossii (SPb, 1904); N. M. Druzhinin, Russkaia derevnia na perelome 18611880 gg. (Moscow, 1978), 2528.

noted in 1864 and even earlier, and these were reinforced by a number of government commissions that gathered information on the workings or deficiencies of peasant institutions and the conditions of village life.25

Writers of all political leanings retreated time and again to the ready explanation of cultural deficiency when pronouncing upon the negative aspects of rural life. The anonymous author of Sketches of Peasant Life (1880) declared that "there is more immorality than honesty in the countryside, the causes of which, of course, are underdevelopment, illiteracy, bad examples, bad companionship, disrespect toward the priest, and laziness toward the divine liturgy."26 In 1888 the ethnographer and jurist A. A. Titov likewise saw the primary reasons for a peasant's turn to crime as poor upbringing, bad examples set by parents, poverty, idiocy, and "an unfortunate encounter with passion." Into this causal hodgepodge he also tossed the by-then popular factor of heredity, bringing the harsh, unforgiving gaze of social Darwinism to bear on his subjects. Some families in the village examined by Titov "are known for their criminal inclination that stretches back to their grandfather or great-grandfatherthat is, the venom of criminality is passed on imperceptibly by inheritance."27

This notion of cultural impoverishment served a wide range of purposes, which helps to explain its popularity among persons whose views on most burning issues of their day were often diametrically opposed. For the intelligentsia it proved a useful tool with which to bludgeon the autocracy or a specific branch of government deemed responsible for the peasantry's continued plight. Conservatives used peasant backwardness to promote their argument that villagers had no understanding or respect for the law and were as yet unable to govern themselves. Therefore they required direct tutelage from above as well as stricter measures of law enforcement and punishment by police or judicial authorities.

Others, among them many leading jurists and educators, felt that in addition to schools, the newly reformed court system could, over time, educate villagers about the law by drawing them into the judicial process

George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia 17111905 (Urbana, Ill.,1973); Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 18611930 (Urbana, Ill., 1982); James I. Mandel, "Paternalistic Authority in the Russian Countryside, 18561906" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978); Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia. Materials assembled on volost' court practice in the early 1870s by the Liuboshchinskii Commission, or those gathered a decade later by the Kakhanov Commission concerning peasant administration, for example, provided rich facts for radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike to support their differing analyses of peasant society and administration.

Ocherki krest'ianskoi zhizni (Moscow, 1880), 25.

A. A. Titov, Iuridicheskie obychai sela Nikola-Perevoz, Suslovskoi volosti, Rostovskogo uezda (Iaroslavl', 1888), 94.

through litigation or by serving as jurors in the new circuit courts. Rural justices of the peace were, in fact, instructed to teach peasants the law, although they should also acquaint themselves with local customs in order to win the villagers' trust and respect.28 The court, according to one writer, "is not only a place where each finds satisfaction of his criminal or civil claims; it is also a school for adults where peasants learn about the law and justice, and hear opinions and decisions about which they themselves would never think. " City folk had many means to expand their horizons, but "peasants have none: they have the tavern, where people only drink and become disorderly; they have the school, though not everywhere . . . and they have the court." Indeed, at least some of the framers of the 1864 judicial reforms had conceived of courts as educational bodies that would serve to enlighten the lower classes, and supporters of this view propagated it long thereafter.29

Although the tsarist government did not disagree that popular education and enlightenment, properly regulated, should be supported as a means of fostering respect for the law, its overriding concern was maintaining public order in village communities and ensuring an uninterrupted flow of tax revenues from the countryside. The state's underdeveloped administrative structure outside major towns and cities, however, made this task difficult at best. Lacking a coherent district-level administration and a real or trustworthy government presence at the township or village levels, the MVD relied primarily upon its provincial governors and their local police to enforce the law, supervise tax collection, and perform a host of other duties.30

Furthermore, as William Wagner has recently stressed, the autocracy refused to permit the judicial reforms to place limits on its absolute power and remained committed to a traditional vision of legal paternalism exercised through personalized authority.31 What did this mean for law and order as reports flowed from the provinces with worrisome news of growing crime and peasant hostility to the state's local agents? Suspicious of its own newly

I. M. Tiutriumov, "Ob usloviiakh primeneniia mirovymi sud'iami mestnykh obychaev pri razreshenii grazhdanskikh del," RusRech' no. 3 (1881), 5874. Also published in ZhGUP, no. 4 (1881), 7085.

Ivan Sokolovskii, "Sudebnaia pravda dlia krest'ian," RusM, no. 7 (1899), 218. Italics are mine. On the educational value of courts, see M. Kh. Petrulan, Sel'skaia zhizn' v proshlom i nastoiashem, v iuridicheskom i obshchestvenno-kul'turnom otnoshenii (Vil'no, 1894), 910; M. Plotnikov, "Obshchestvenno-vospitatel'noe znachenie suda," Obrazovanie, no. 12 (1896), 2032; A. A. Leont'ev, Krest'ianskoe pravo. Sistematicheskoe izlozhenie osobennostei zakonodatel'stva o krest'ianakh (SPb, 1909), 11516.

Richard G. Robbins, Jr., The Tsar's Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years of the Empire (Ithaca, 1987), 18399.

William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1994), 37981.

created judicial institutions, the state sought to meet these challenges much as it had in the past, by relying on already overburdened provincial officials and police. Yet without a substantial augmentation of their resources, traditional rural authorities simply could not keep up with the increased demands placed upon them. Instead, they focused their limited energies on criminal activities deemed most dangerous and disruptive. This would be particularly true after 1900, when there was a very real breakdown of order throughout the country. Rarely daring to take the initiative, however, local authorities usually waited for new directives from the MVD that would shift their attention from one sphere of concern to another. The results were, at times, peculiar indeed. In 1916, for instance, with Russia's armies being bled white by their third year of warfare and with discontent and disorders mounting on the home front, provincial governors received an urgent MVD circular concerning the spread of gambling among peasants and the ruinous losses and abuses accompanying such a pastime. Reminding governors that the police should strictly observe that illegal games of chance not take place and that gatherings for such purposes should be dispersed, the MVD turned police attention from its previous crisis over rural hooliganism to the task of seeking out and closing down card games.32

There was, however, one important aspect of "cultural underdevelopment" that made it a useful construct for both state and peasantry in negotiating the hostilities that so often lay just below the surface of their interactions. If peasants perpetrated crimes out of ignorance and superstition or because they had been tempted into vice and immorality, they could be excused from full culpability before a paternal criminal law that allowed for mitigation of punishment in such circumstances. This fact the peasants knew well and, as their testimony before police, judicial investigators, and courts shows, they took advantage of the law's patriarchal forgiveness of their "backwardness." Dissimulation had functioned as an effective defense from state law and retribution in the past, and for many rural criminal defendants it did so after emancipation as well. The autocracy's continued practice of granting clemency through periodic imperial manifestos also helped to preserve the functional value of backwardness, while stressing the paternal magnanimity of an understanding tsar.33 "Ignorance," in short, was

GARO, f. 695, op. 26, sv. 277, d. 32, ll. 11050b. From a more practical perspective, of course, losing money at cards could lead one into tax arrears.

The impact of imperial clemency varied greatly from year to year. In 1841, for example, 27.8 percent of all criminal defendants received pardons. Five years later only 1.7 percent were pardoned, and in 1866, 2.8 percent benefited from an imperial manifesto. Otchety, vols. 10, 15, 35. Such data were not included in publications on reformed courts, but the continued use of pardons can be seen from court documents and published discussions. See SZU, part 1: Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh (SPb, 1885), 34, art. 167.

an historically tested weapon of the weak commonly deployed in the otherwise unequal contests between peasant and state authoritya winking game of sorts that could be used to the mutual advantage of each side.

For the state, the presumed ignorance of its subjects was a protective device from what it would otherwise have been forced to interpret as open disobedience, resistance, or outright rejection of its laws. Cultural underdevelopment thus functioned as a safety valve, much as did the peasant and state-supported myth of "naive monarchism" and the "benevolent tsar."34 It allowed authorities to mitigate punishments under such coded terms as the peasants'"lack of understanding," "ignorance of the law," "terrible superstition," and, as formulated in hundreds of judicial decisions, "the accused's extreme backwardness." Viewed in this light, assaults on noble estates, illegal cutting in state forests, and resistance to police agents during their tax-collecting rounds could all be reworked into far less threatening acts. The palliative of ignorance also performed the highly practical function of allowing a wide range of crimes committed within village communities to be classified as petty misdemeanors and tried before volost' rather than state courts. Property offenses are an excellent example, for the public transcript of educated society and officialdom alike posited that peasants had little or no understanding of the concept of private property. Therefore they looked upon theft leniently, this text read, and to bring such offenses before higher courts for harsh punishment would be unfair to a population sunk in ignorance. On the practical side, such thinking allowed the government to keep its courts from being swamped by tens of thousands of theft cases each year. As we shall see, even with this system in place, higher courts would nevertheless find it difficult to cope with their growing case loads by the 1890s. Lastly, if peasants did not look upon property crime as a serious offense, then rural police could focus on matters of greater concern to the state while village communities policed petty infractions committed by their members. Given the inadequate police forces at the government's disposal and their essential role as state fiscal agents, any lessening of the law enforcement burden served in the short term to relieve an otherwise serious need for augmenting these forces of order with an expenditure of scarce resources.

By far the greatest stumbling block to the maintenance of rural law and order was the state's lack of an effective police force. Like most of Europe, Russia only created its first regular rural police in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and at the start of the 1900s that force remained rudi-

Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1976).

mentary at best. Understaffed, underpaid, and for the most part untrained, it proved incapable of adequately policing the countryside throughout the postemancipation era.35 This predicament is particularly important given a rising crescendo of complaints from villagers across the empire who felt, for the most part, unprotected and at the mercy of criminals because of police inefficiency, corruption, or simple neglect. But many in educated society and in government also believed that the growth of crime would only continue unless the rural police was reformed and enlarged.

To indicate the problem's scope, in 1857 the MVD employed 244 policemen to oversee a population of over 950,000 in the central industrial province of Iaroslavl', 194 (80 percent) of whom were stationed in towns and cities. In rural areas, each district commandant (ispravnik ) had only two captains (sing.: stanovoi pristav ) and one or two other officers to assist him.36 By 1900, the Department of Police counted 47,866 officers for an empire of nearly 127 million, including the force of constables (uriadniki ) introduced in 1878 to assist police captains. In effect, as historian Neil Weissman has argued, primary responsibility for regular law enforcement "remained where it had been placed at the time of emancipation some four decades earlier, in the hands of the peasantry."37 Finally, the creation in 1903 of a new force of 40,000 mounted rural guards (strazhniki ) marked "the first serious attempt by the tsarist state to establish a direct presence in the village." Yet shortly after its formation, this force was deployed to suppress peasant uprisings during the 19051907 agrarian revolution and therefore performed few regular policing functions.38

There is still no study available on the regular police in tsarist Russia, even though historians have paid inordinate attention to the political police. For background, see I. T. Tarasov, "Istoriia russkoi politsii i otnosheniia ee k iustitsii," IuV, no. 2 (1884), 177212; no. 3, 383411 ; no. 4, 55174; no. 11, 41245. On Europe, see David H. Bayley, "The Police and Political Development in Europe," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), 32879.

Robert J. Abbott, "Police Reform in the Russian Province of Iaroslavl, 18561876," SR 32, 2 (1973), 293.

Neil B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 19001914 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 11, 2324; Weissman, "Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 19001914," RR 44, no. 1 (1985), 47, 4950. See also V. K. Antsiferov, "Uriadnik i institut sel'skoi politsii," ZhGUP, no. 1 (1881), 4566; I. T. Tarasov, "Reformy i politsiia," IuV, no. 3 (1885), 47384; Tarasov, "Reforma russkoi politsii," IuV, no. 67 (1885), 22240; no. 8, 61257; no. 9, 2260; no. 11, 394409. On the authority and duties of constables, see N. I. Aref, comp., Instruktsiia politseiskim uriadnikam (SPb, 1894); A. P. Romanovskii, comp., Sistematicheskoe rukovodstvo dlia politseiskikh uriadnikov, 2nd ed. (Kishinev, 1895); V. P. Urusov, comp., Politseiskii uriadnik: sbornik svedenii, neobkhodimykh dlia nizshikh chinov uezdnoipolitsii, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1895); GARO, f. 1298, op. 1, sv. 3, dd. 6466 (1863).

Weissman, "Regular Police," 50, 51; Spravka o chislennom sostavie politsii otdel'nykh mestnostei 50ti gubernii imperii (N.p., 1913); L. Dashkevich, "Sel'skaia politseiskaia strazha," VE, no. 1 (1904), 37377.

A closer look at Riazan' province reveals these shortcomings even more sharply. In 1888 Riazan' district counted four captains and eleven constables to police a territory of 3,719 square kilometers and a population of 174,790, or an average of one constable per 15,890 inhabitants. This distribution proved even less favorable in more rural parts of the province like Kasimov district, where 4,743 square kilometers and 150,908 inhabitants were policed by three captains and ten constables. In seven out of twelve districts for which data remain, sixteen captains and sixty constables were responsible for law enforcement among a population of 965,765 dispersed throughout 139 townshipsa ratio of 1:16,096 for constables, or 1:12,707 if captains are included.39 When the governor queried his district commandants that year concerning the state of their forces, all replied that their greatest need was for additional officers and a reduction in the size of precincts (uchastki ) Ranenburg's district commandant pointed out that each constable required between three and five days to patrol his precinct. Under such conditions, police could rarely apprehend criminals simply because it took them so long to arrive at the scene and conduct an investigation. The growth of railroads had placed even greater burdens on this district's small force, since its duties included patrolling train stations as well as major roads. Worse, the introduction of a state liquor monopoly in 1894 opened a vast new area of criminal activity in the form of bootlegging, which officers were powerless to control because of their small number.40 Some numerical improvements were made during the next twenty years. In 1913, Riazan"s rural police force counted 58 captains and 251 constables, but this increase was largely negated by population growth, which had swelled the number of rural inhabitants to over 2 million.41

The government exacerbated the difficulties of policing by demanding that its officers perform a host of administrative functionsparticularly tax collectionwhich left little time for their regular duties. In 1872, law enforcement accounted for roughly half of all police duties in Iaroslavl' province; 12.5 percent of officers' time was spent at tax collection and another 30 percent carrying out services for government ministries and commissions.42 Thirty years later the empire's police force remained similarly burdened. Weissman notes that in 1908 alone it brought in over 22 million

GARO, f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, d. 2539, ll. 9399. See also A. N. Bskii, "Kvoprosu o reforme sel'skoi politsii," VestP, no. 2 (1901), 78. Concerning the composition of constables and rapid turnover in their ranks, see GARO, f. 4, op. 876, sv. 1, dd. 16, 14, 1718, 23.

GARO, f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, d. 2539, ll. 6190b. On the seriousness of the bootlegging problem, see GARO, f 5, st. 1, op. 2, d. 2794 (1907), ll. 1103.

Spravka o chislennom sostavie politsii.

Abbott, "Police Reform," 298. See also "Reforma uriadnikov," Nedelia, no. 39 (1887), 123738.

rubles in tax arrears, a fact that underscores the continued underdevelopment of state administration. Such service tasks proved particularly distractive "at a time when tsarist police were encountering increasing challenges in fulfilling their primary function of controlling deviance," and they did little to alter the population's view that police were nothing more than intrusive, often brutal government agents concerned primarily if not exclusively with extracting taxes from poor peasants.43

Peasants themselves filled the lowest ranks of rural law enforcement. Each year, villagers elected local policemen known as "tenners" (desiatskie ) and "hundreders" (sotskie ) whose primary charge consisted of overseeing and maintaining order in their communities, protecting state, community, and private property, and carrying out all orders of village and volost' officials as well as the regular police. Hundreders, who at least by law commanded the more numerous tenners, owed direct responsibility to the police captain for whom they served as messengers or errand runners.44 Apart from their numerous administrative assignments, which by most reports they performed grudgingly and poorly, tenners and hundreders were instructed to watch out for criminals. "The moment it becomes known that thieves, military deserters, escapees from exile, and similar persons have appeared in their locality," the law stipulated, they were to report within one day to higher authorities. In particular, they should seize criminals and ensure that they did not flee and "take care that the inhabitants do not commit mob beatings [samosud ] of the suspect."45 In 1888 the 4,633 rural communities of Riazan' province counted 4,414 tenners and 960 hundreders, who were expected to perform all of these duties and more while earning for the year, on average, 3.35 and 32.66 rubles, respectively.46 Although perhaps capable of assisting village elders to maintain general order within their own village, accompany prisoners to the volost' jail, and deliver messages, these elected policemen could do little about serious crime like arson, robbery, and horsetheft, often fearing for their safety or even their lives if they actu-

Weissman, "Regular Police," 57; N. P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1983), 293; Mandel, "Paternalistic Authority," 99.

GARF, f. 586, op. 1, d. 118 (Riazan' province), l. 25; d. 120 (Smolensk province), l. 18; V. Vinogradov, comp., Volostnoe pravlenie, Volostnoe Sud i ikh deloproizvodstvo (SPb, 1904), 20832; N. N. Blinov, comp., Sel'skaia obshchestvennaia sluzhba (SPb, 1882), 11326; Blinov, Tolkovaia knizhka o sel'skom upravlenii, no. 5 (Moscow, 1888); N. K. Brzhevskii, Natural'nye povinnosti krest'ian i mirskie sbory (SPb, 1906), 6970. Among their duties, tenners and hundreders were to be present at all public gatherings, markets, and bazaars, ensure that no merchants cheated customers or sold illegal goods, check weights and measures, protect against fires, and regularly inspect stoves and chimneys in peasant homes.

Blinov, Sel'skaia sluzhba, 118.

GARO, f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, d. 2503, l. 3. See also "Sel'skaia politsiia na gorodskoi lad," Nedelia, no. 20 (1871), 65859.

ally dared to arrest a suspect. At best tenners performed routine village duties and carried out the elder's orders. At worst they disobeyed their superiors, cooperated with criminal gangs, and committed crimes themselves.47

In practice virtually all initiative for everyday law enforcement rested with the village, since routine patrolling on the part of regular police was impossible. Police captains, for instance, only took action after receiving a written report from a peasant hundreder or a formal complaint from a crime victim. Such information might sit for some time because captains were frequently away from their place of residence, and given the cost of having a formal complaint composed, many peasants simply did not report crimes. Instead, when significant offenses like horsetheft occurred, victims more often than not tried to solve and punish the crime themselves, or to gather evidence that might be passed on to the judicial investigator rather than the police.48 Concerned above all with protecting their own communities and property but receiving little if any help from police officials, peasants proved, reasonably enough, uncooperative when captains or constables demanded assistance in matters of greater importance to authorities. As one historian has noted, "Peasants were much more eager to hunt down and punish those who had injured them, particularly arsonists and horsethieves, rather than those who had damaged state or [noble] interests by . . . cutting down trees in state-owned forests, squatting on privately owned land, or selling liquor without a license."49

If Russians of all classes agreed upon anything concerning law and order, it was that the police were not up to their tasks. This proved especially true from the 1890s on, when crime of all sorts appeared to be on the rise throughout the countryside. Nowhere did that opinion find stronger expression than among peasants. When questioned by ethnographers during the late 1890s, usually restrained village respondents sometimes spoke with open contempt of the police. Peasant complaints about criminality and their lack of protection from theft, robbery, arson, and other dangers also

See, e.g., GARO, f. 640, op. 54, sv. 31, d. 80; ibid., f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, dd. 3207, 4774; GARF, f. 586, op. 1, d. 118, l. 27.

K. A., "Nabliudeniia i zametki ob usloviiakh sledstvennoi deiatel'nosti v provintsii," SudZh, no. 5 (1873), 19. As this discussion makes clear, the 1860 introduction of independent judicial investigators led directly to conflict with police commandants, who considered themselves (and, in practice, were) the highest local organ of administrative authority, and who previously had served investigative functions for the criminal courts. Hence the new investigators' demands for information, assistance, and cooperation frequently met with inaction on the part of district police. See also D. Antsiferov, "Nabliudeniia nad ugolovnoi praktikoi nashei provintsial'noi mirovoi iustitsii," IuV, no. 1 (1883), 126; A. F. Koni, "Sudebnye sledovateli," in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1966), 11038; M. G. Korotkikh, Sudebnaia reforma 1864 goda v Rossii (sushchnost' i sotsial'no-pravovoi mekhanizm formirovaniia ) (Voronezh, 1994) 92105; Razvitie russkogo prava vo vtoroi polovine XIXnachale XX veka (Moscow, 1997), 11214.

Mandel, "Paternalistic Authority," 120.

contain veiled or forthright criticism of police inaction. Commandants and captains almost never traveled to villages under their jurisdictions, and on those occasions when they did appear, they came only to oversee tax collections or recruit musters. Villagers regularly spoke of police corruption (which could extend to outright extortion), rudeness, abuse of authority, and brutality. They had least respect for or trust in the rural constables, who, as an 1898 report from Smolensk province noted, accepted all bribes offered to them and pandered to criminals.50 More often than not complaints against police wrongdoing came to naught. A woman from the Riazan' village of Sarai lodged a protest with the governor in 1907 when 100 rubles went missing after a search of her home by a police captain and members of the newly established rural guards. Despite an investigation of her charges (conducted by the precinct commandant), the case was dismissed because of lack of evidence and the plaintiff's "bad reputation."51

Or consider another incident that same year in Troitsa villageone that would later lead to an assault by villagers against police officers and thereby enter the chronicles of the 19051907 revolution. On February 15, the captain of the second precinct, together with one of his constables, the steward, and the distiller of a local landowner, came to the home of one peasant, where they began drinking. When they were already inebriated, the peasant's wife sent for several young women to dance for "the officials." A wild party ensued, during which the women's husbands showed up demanding that their wives stop this shameful activity and return home. In response, the constable ordered them to leave and threatened them with his pistol if they did not obey. From that moment on, young village men sought an opportune moment to take revenge upon the officers involved and did so during Carnival, when this constable appeared alone at the local market. There a crowd surrounded him and started singing a song (obviously composed with this occasion in mind) in which the police captain "threatens us with prison and steals our wives." After extricating himself from the crowd, the frightened and insulted officer reported to his captain that peasant youths at the bazaar had been singing "revolutionary songs." The captain arrived several days later with a detachment of police guards to arrest the culprits.52

GARF, f. 586, op. 1, d. 120, l. 86.

GARO, f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, d. 4777, ll. 110. Compare similar attitudes toward police in rural settings such as Missouri during the 1860s and 1870s, or nineteenth-century England and Wales. David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri (New York, 1986), 1068; Douglas Hay, "Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England," in Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, eds., Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research (Chicago, 1980), esp. 5864; David Jones, "Rural Crime and Protest in the Victorian Era," in G. E. Mingay, ed., The Unquiet Countryside (London, 1989), 11213; Jones, Rebecca's Children: A Study of Rural Society, Crime, and Protest (Oxford, 1989), 15354.

GARO, f. 5, st. 3, op. 4, d. 4517, ll. 311.

The rural police thus served as a force of order mainly in extreme circumstances such as assaults upon noble or state property, local revolts, or rebellion. Otherwise, at least from the village perspective, they appeared among the rural population primarily as tax collectors who could have a devastating impact on individuals and even entire communities by ordering peasant property auctioned off to pay arrears. Despite numerous government directives that essential property such as farming equipment should never be sold for taxes, the practice did not end until tax policy itself was changed early in the twentieth century.53 The hostility of the lower classes to the police in much of nineteenth-century Europe was even greater among Russian peasants not only because police were inattentive to ordinary crimes but also because of the intrusive and often punitive nature of their fiscal duties.

Perhaps the most important of rural Russia's postreform institutions was the court system, which marked the peasantry's legal separateness from other classes and which, in all of its peculiarity, closely mirrored prevailing elite opinions about peasant life. Both past and recent assessments have misunderstood or misrepresented the origins, complexity, organization, functions, and limitations of this judicial structure, the competence and often confused jurisdictions of its administrative organs and courts, and even the bodies of law under which the latter operated. The great majority of Russians who wrote about local justice spoke as though the rural population prior to emancipation had no experience with either courts or laws. With rare exceptions, historians, too, have overlooked the important predecessors of postreform rural courts. Instead they have treated the class courts created for peasants in 1861 as something entirely new and unique to the countryside, ignoring the highly litigious nature of village society under serfdom and the numerous judicial institutionsboth official and unofficialto which peasants had recourse.54 Indeed, one could easily assume from such studies that neither seigneurial serfs nor state peasants ever litigated before courts and, as numerous contemporaries argued throughout the imperial period, had no knowledge of the law. Historians also accept

Ibid., st. 1, op. 2, d. 1652 (1879), ll. 12. For examples of this policy in practice, see ibid., f. 697, op. 1, sv. 6, d. 242; sv. 7, d. 275; f. 709, Op. 1, sv. 2, d. 63; f. 721, op. 14, sv. 18, dd. 37, 55; f. 1298, op. 1, sv. 3, dd. 6466; S. Khrulev, "Mysli provintsiala o provintsii," ZhGUP, no. 1 (1889), 6670.

The litigious character of pre-emancipation villagers has been well documented by Soviet historians, although it still awaits its own study. C. A. Frierson, "Rural Justice in Public Opinion: The Volost' Court Debate, 18611912," SEER 64, no. 4 (1986), 52645, treats the debates that swirled around rural judicial institutions.

that local justice was based upon and operated according to certain norms of customary law, although this notion has never been defined in any writings to date.55

The 1864 judicial reform statutes separated administration from justice, created a bar, introduced a simplified court system and trial by jury, and appointed judges who could only be removed from office for misconduct. Yet in contrast to the principles of judicial independence that underlay the reforms of 1864, rural justice remained linked to administration and police throughout our period. The 1861 emancipation legislation had already established volost' courts (corresponding to the lowest unit of rural administration over which the state maintained some form of supervision) to try petty offenses and hear civil suits between peasants registered within the same township. They were to serve as the lowest level of justice in the countryside. As class courts limited before 1889 to the peasant population and administered through the MVD rather than the Ministry of Justice, they stood apart from the reformed judicial system to which all other classes turned.56

Peasants, howeverand especially state peasantsfound little new in these courts apart from organizational changes and unsuccessful efforts to insulate them from local influences and corruption by placing them outside and above the village administration at the township level. Officially sanctioned judicial institutions, together with various local moots, had for centuries served as arenas of peasant litigation and dispute settlement. The legal scholar A. Kistiakovskii noted that as early as the reigns of Ivan III (14621505) and Ivan IV (15331584), the village commune served as the primary organ of local justice with broad jurisdiction and the right to impose penalties up to and including sentences of death, without participation by outside officials. Villagers selected judges (sudnye muzhi ) from

For examples of such views, see Peter Czap, Jr., "Peasant Class Courts and Peasant Customary Justice in Russia, 18611912," JSH 1, no. 2 (1967), 14978; Moshe Lewin, "Customary Law and Russian Rural Society in the Post Reform Era," RR 44, no. 1 (1985), 119; Michael Confino, "Russian Customary Law and the Study of Peasant Mentalites," RR 44, no. 1 (1985), 3543; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 25, 11427; Jane Burbank, "A Question of Dignity: Peasant Legal Culture in Late Imperial Russia," Continuity and Change 10, no. 3 (1995), 391404; Cathy A. Frierson, "'I Must Always Answer to the Law . . .' Rules and Responses in the Reformed Volost' Court," SEER 75, no. 2 (1997), 30834.

Sofronenko, Krest'ianskaia reforma, 6063. The contemporary literature on volost' courts is vast. An outstanding compilation of sources is E. I. Iakushkin, comp., Obychnoe pravo. Materialy dlia bibliografii obychnogo prava, 4 vols. (Iaroslavl', 18751909). For more recent treatments, see T. A. Tarabanova, "Volostnoi sud v Rossii v pervoe poreformennoe desiatiletie" (Ph.D. diss., Moscow State University, 1993); Corinne Gaudin, "Governing the Village: Peasant Culture and the Problem of Social Transformation in Russia, 19061914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), ch. 6.

among elders and other "good people."57 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the government took measures to regularize rural courts and control widespread peasant efforts to litigate before higher state courts. Legislation from the Catherinian era (17621796) reflected this concern over the number of petty cases being tried by regular courts and spoke of putting a stop to such litigation by peasants "because of the ruin that this often causes them."58 Therefore, between 1764 and 1797 a series of laws allowed nonseigneurial peasants to be judged by their own elected officials in each village. The volost' court traced its earliest predecessor to a 1797 reform dividing state settlements into townships, or volosti, each with an administration and chief who also served as judge and administered punishments in cases of petty disputes.59 Among seigneurial serfs, most criminal offenders as well as civil litigants came before a communal court (mirskii sud ) consisting of elected officials and elders, or the communal assembly (skhod )decisions of which could be overruled by the estate steward.60

During Nicholas I's reign (18251855), Minister of State Domains P. D. Kiselev introduced a series of reforms between 1837 and 1841 that gave state peasants (roughly 45 percent of Russia's peasant population) new judicial institutions. Village courts (sel'skie raspravy ) were created as courts of first instance for minor infractions and civil suits, while volost' courts (volostnye raspravy ) served primarily as a second or appellate instance for cases heard at the village level. Volost' courts were staffed by elected judges and chaired by the volost' chief. Similarly, a village court consisted of two judges (dobrosovestnye ) and the village elder, who was empowered to remove the otherjudges or even arrest them if necessary. Kiselev's legislation explained

A. Kistiakovskii, "Volostnye sudy, ikh istoriia, nastoiashchaia ikh praktika i nastoiashchee ikh polozhenie," in P. P. Chubinskii, ed., Trudy etnografichesko-statisticheskoi ekspeditsii v zapadno-russkii krai vol. 6 (SPb, 1872), 35.

Ibid., 7; E. Kartsev, "Sel'skoe pravosudie. Iz zhizni russkoi derevni," VE, no. 1 (1882), 31921. The laws can be found in PSZ, vol. 16, no. 12075, March 5, 1764; vol. 19, no. 14133, March 5, 1774.

St. Cherniavskii, Narodnyi sud (Kamenets-Podol'sk, 1901), 10; M. I. Zarudnyi, Zakony i zhizn'. Itogi issledovaniia krest'ianskikh sudov (SPb, 1874), 48; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane, 1:54653; Kistiakovskii, "Volostnye sudy," 89. See also N. V. Kalachov, "O volostnykh i sel'skikh sudakh v drevnei i nyneshnei Rossii," Sbornik gosudarstvennykh znanii, no. 8 (1880), 12848; D. Meichik, "Krest'ianskie sudy v starinu," IV no. 3 (1880), 796802; N. M. Kolmakov, "Staryi sud," Russkaia starina, no. 12 (1886), 51114; K. Tur, "Narodnyi sud," Nedelia, no. 38 (1898), 121519.

L. S. Prokof'eva, Krest'ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIIIpervoi polovine XIX v. (na materialakh votchin Sheremetevykh) (Leningrad, 1981), 15762; M. M. Bogoslovskii, Zemskoe samoupravlenie na russkom severe v XVII v., vol. 1 (Moscow, 1909), 220. See also Edgar Melton, "Enlightened Seigneurialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 17501830," JMH 62, no. 4 (1990), 675708.

that participation by the elder was necessary "because of the still insufficient education of our peasants."61 In a more practical sense, because volost' and village elders could be held accountable to higher authorities, their presence on the courts gave at least a pretense of more effective local state control. A rural judicial code (Sel'skii Sudebnyi Ustav ) published in 1839 defined punishments to be imposed by the new courts, and with some modifications it would remain in use until 1917.62 Although village courts were structured and regulated by the Ministry of State Domains, they differed little in practice from the local moots that had long existed among seigneurial and state peasants.

For nearly a century prior to emancipation, then, peasants had recourse to officially sanctioned courts and institutions like the village assembly, which had always served judicial functions. Soviet historians and ethnographers have convincingly demonstrated that state peasants and seigneurial serfs both made ready and regular use of the law to defend their interests.63 Nor should we forget that, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and earlier, higher criminal courts tried tens of thousands of villagers charged with serious offenses. The peasant of 1861, in short, was quite familiar with courts and official law, a fact that should put to rest the often repeated and ahistorical suppositions that only after emancipation did peasants begin to engage in litigation or initiate interaction with the law. One of the unfortunate spinoffs from sociological theories of modernization, as Gareth Stedman Jones noted some time ago, is the historians' temptation to begin with something called "traditional society." They know a great deal about one period, Jones wrote, "which blurs into a relative ignorance of what came before and what came afterwards."64 Whether we have, in fact, a "traditional" baseline against which to analyze Russia's postemancipation rural judicial structure (and other matters as well) and how that baseline is to be defined, understood, and temporally demarcated are questions that are commonly glossed over in historical writings about "change" during the nineteenth century. Rather, given the inordinate influence among Russian historians of binary categories drawn, whether consciously or not, from modernization theories, many have simply contented themselves with an

Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane, 1:55572. In English, see Olga Crisp, "The State Peasants under Nicholas I," in Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (London, 1976), 7395.

Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane, 1:575; Vinogradov, Volostnoe pravlenie, 23348; E. Tikhonov, Volostnoi sud i mirovoi sud'ia v krest'ianskikh seleniiakh (Kovno, 1872).

On this point, see chapter 3.

Gareth Stedman Jones, "Class Expression versus Social Control? A Critique of Recent Trends in the Social History of 'Leisure,'" in Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, eds., Social Control in History and Sociology (New York, 1983), 46.

idealized starting point upon which forces of change and transformation suddenly began to work sometime after the Great Reforms.65

Among its numerous complexities, Russia's 1861 emancipation entailed the replacement of serfowners' judicial authority with institutions presumed capable of administering local justice while assuring the state that rural order would not collapse. In a compromise reached by the legislation's framers, a class court was introduced at the volost' level consisting of four to twelve elected peasant judges empowered to try petty disputes between villagers. Judges were assisted by a hired clerk (pisar' ) (frequently a nonpeasant, especially before the 1880s) whose duties included recording court decisions and explaining the law to illiterate judges and litigants.66 Throughout the court's fifty-eight-year existence, various nonpeasant officials and local administrative organs supervised its activities with broad powers to order that cases be retried, appeals heard, and court decisions reversed; after 1889 land captains selected candidates for judgeships, approved elections of peasant judges, and could remove these judges from office. This system of "self-administration" governed the vast majority of the Russian population through procedures and laws separate from those applied to other classes. It also ensured that, unless peasants committed serious infractions or engaged in suits against nonpeasants, they were largely denied access to the regular system of justice.67 All villagers, of course, still remained subject to state law as exercised by officials with both administrative and judicial powers. The volost' court thus represented a simple con-

On this problem, see Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (New York, 1985), 10; Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: "Customary" Law on Kilimanjaro, 18801980 (New York, 1986), 32022. See also note 54.

Among many descriptions, analyses, and debates surrounding this court "of the people, for the people," see A. Pestrzhetskii, "O sude krest'ian, vyshedshikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti," ZhMIu, no. 7 (1861), 330; F. Voroponov, "Poleznost' volostnogo suda," Nedelia, no. 2324 (1872), 71217; D. "Po voprosu o volostnykh sudakh (Zametki mirovogo posrednika)," SudZh, no. 3 (1873), 126; D. Mordovtsev, "Ne podozhdat'-li otnimat? (Po povodu predpolozhenii o preobrazovanii volostnykh sudov)," Delo, no. 11 (1875), 32360; no. 12, 35374; Vasilii Ivanov, "Krest'ianskii sud i formal'noe pravosudie," RB, no. 12 (1880), 3952; Kartsev, "Sel'skoe pravosudie," no. 1 (1882), 30535, no. 2, 75573; A. A. Leont'ev, Volostnoi sud i iuridicheskie obychai krest'ian (SPb, 1895); M. Stival, "Narodnyi sud i narodnoe pravo," SevV, no. 12 (1896), 99113.

A wave of public debate followed the introduction of land captains and reform of volost' courts in 1889. See, e.g., "Novyi volostnoi sud," Nedelia, no. 36 (1889), 113940; V. Baftalovskii, "Obzor mestnogo upravleniia i suda," Russkoe obozrenie, no. 5 (1895), 37591; Leont'ev, Volostnoi sud, 6787; N. S. Illarionov, "Sudebno-krest'ianskaia reforma Imperatora Aleksandra III-go i sviazannye s nei novye zadachi iuridicheskoi nauki i praktiki," SudG, no. 34 (1897), 34; N. Druzhinin, "Krest'ianskii sud v ego poslednem fazise," Nabliudatel', no. 2 (1892), 21331; no. 3, 23857; no. 4, 26979; no. 5, 25262; Druzhinin, "Preobrazovannyi volostnoi sud," in Druzhinin, Iuridicheskoe polozhenie krest'ian (SPb, 1897), 298370; "Nedostatki volostnykh sudov," Vestnik Iaroslavskogo zemstvo, no. 27 (1906), 35; no. 30, 78.

cession to reality, as Francis Wcislo has rightly noted, "that would relieve overburdened local officials and imperial courts of adjudicating civil and criminal misdemeanors," but this did not mean that the state simply washed its hands of local justice.68 Rather, its insistence on regulating the reformed volost' courts through officials beholden to the MVD, however haphazardly or poorly this task was actually performed, demonstrates that order and control remained uppermost among state concerns.

Cases before volost' courts could be tried either on the basis of law or "existing customs," although important and long ignored qualifications must be recognized here. To begin, custom's jurisdiction reached only into the sphere of civil law; as with justices of the peace, no criminal offenses could be legally decided by peasant judges on the basis of custom. Moreover, there are only two brief references to "custom" in the regulations on emancipation, and the term "customary law" never appears in this legislation. The complete article 38 stipulates that "in carrying out inheritance of property, peasants are permitted to be guided by their local customs," a right already belonging to village assemblies long before 1861.69 Article 107, which has been most widely misinterpreted, issued the following instructions to peasant judges: "During the examination of suits within the volost' court itself, the judges, having heard out the litigants, will strive to reconcile them. . . . If the sides cannot reach a peaceful agreement, then the court decides the case either on the basis of transactions and obligations certified in the volost' administration office, if these were concluded between the disputants, or, in the absence of such transactions, on the basis of local customs and rules that are accepted in peasant life."70

Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 30.

Sofronenko, Krest'ianskaia reforma, 47. To my knowledge, Olga Crisp ("Peasant Land Tenure and Civil Rights Implications before 1906," in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia [New York, 1989], 40) is the only historian who has recognized how narrow was the sphere to which the emancipation edicts limited custom. Indeed, she writes, "the very terms used [concerning custom], dozvoliaetsia ('it is permitted'), ne vospreshchaetsia ('it is not forbidden'), indicate that it was intended that the use of customary law be concessionary rather than obligatory."

Sofronenko, Krest'ianskaia reforma, 62; N. S. Illarionov, Znachenie obychnogo prava v narodnom sude (Khar'kov, 1893), 910. On discussions within the editorial commissions concerning customary law, see N. P. Semenov, Osvobozhdenie krest'ian v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Aleksandra II, vol. 1 (SPb, 1889), 345; vol. 3 (SPb, 1892), part 1, 33839. For later views, see G., "Ob obychnom prave," ZhMIu, no. 8 (1866), 189206; no. 10, 326; I. Orshanskii, "Narodnyi sud i narodnoe pravo (Po povodu voprosa o preobrazovanii volostnykh sudov)," VestP, no. 4 (1875), 140223; no. 5, 60142; A. I. Efimenko, "Odna iz nashikh narodnykh osobennostei," Nedelia, no. 35 (1876), 11622; Efimenko, Issledovaniia narodnoi zhizni, part 1: Obychnoe pravo (Moscow, 1884); L., "Chto schitaet pravom nash narod," RB, no. 8 (1884), 26072; A. V. Filippov, "Sovremennye zapisi obychnogo prava i ikh kharakternye osobennosti," SevV no. 7 (1887), 4563; A. Pakharnaev, Zakon, obychai i volostnoi sud (Perm, 1894); Leon'tev, Volostnoi sud, ch. 5; N., "Narodnye iuridicheskie obychai po ukazaniiam sudebnoi praktiki," in S. V. Pakhman, ed., SbNIuO, vol. 2 (SPb, 1900), 30137; A. A. Bashmakov, "Otnoshenie suda k obychaiu po novomu proektu ustava grazhdanskogo sudoproizvodstva," VestP, no. 2 (1901), 126; Bashmakov, Ocherki prava rodovogo, nasledstvennogo, i obychnogo (SPb, 1911); P. N. Obninskii, "Oproshchennoe sudogovorenie," in Obninskii, Sbornik statei (SPb, 1914), 11341.

However imprecise this latter wording, the emancipation framers left no doubt as to the subordinate position that custom occupied, for no custom could be applied that contravened existing laws.71 Custom was restricted to civil disputes of local interest, such as inheritance, domestic relations, and farming and land division practices, that is, to areas about which the state knew little and over which it had even less control. These remained areas of fundamental importance to the village community, of course, determining access to land and regulating kinship relations, but even such broad realms were allowed only provisional status that left them by no means off limits to administrative and legislative interference. Although unevenly and inconsistently applied, state law and administrative regulation stood as dominant forces in peasant life. This official, unequal relationship established between a largely unknown custom and a more tangible body of state law in 1861, like the larger structures of law and justice created during the reform era, bore a more than passing resemblance to modern colonial legal systems not merely in form but in content, context, and practice. As Sally Falk Moore has succinctly described the colonial vision of law and courts in twentieth-century British Tanganyika, "Local courts were to be run by Africans and would apply African 'customary law' but were to do so in a manner consistent with basic British legal principles and the objectives of colonial administration." The text, in other words, "says repeatedly that Africans are best qualified to know and handle their own business and should do it according to their own rules. The subtext says that the colonial government knows best, and must reserve the power to intervene when Africans fail to deliver 'justice.' The voice that gives legitimacy to African ways speaks again and takes back that recognition by giving it only conditionally."72 By legislating a restricted place for local customs that emphasized their asymmetri-

This would be confirmed by rulings of the Governing Senate's Cassational Department in 1869 (no. 175) and 1870 (no. 380). Pakharnaev, Zakon, obychai i volostnoi sud, 30; I. P. Kupchinov, Krest'ianskoe samoupravlenie: ocherk zakonov, blizkikh k krest'ianskoi zhizni, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1905), 9495.

Sally Falk Moore, "Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers What to Say to Africans about Running 'Their Own' Native Courts," LSR 26, no. 1 (1992), 12, 24. See also Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Perspective (London, 1978), 1322; J. A. Barnes, "The Politics of Law," in Mary Douglas and Phyllis M. Kaberry, eds., Man in Africa (London, 1969), 99118; Sandra B. Burman and Barbara E. HarrellBond, eds., The Imposition of Law (New York, 1979); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 167234.

cal relationship to law, the Russian government (whether wittingly or not) also stressed the archaism of custom, folklorizing it and placing it at the distant end of an evolutionary scale while increasing the gap "between official government conceptions and the realities of local affairs."73

As for contemporary champions of "customary law" who believed that it formed a model of society through which they could come to know the peasantry, their very notion of customary law as representing what anthropologists would more properly term "indigenous law" remains problematic, as some critics at the time rightly noted. Customary law is most commonly defined as the outcome of historical struggles between village elites and their superiors or owners. Far from being a survival of some misty traditional past, custom is "continually renegotiated as conditions change"; hence the very content of customary rules "reflects political and economic circumstances in which they are negotiated."74 This negotiation process and its outcomes in the Russian case remain largely unknown as we await detailed local studies; however, the historical collusion between village elders and estate regimes or government agents to control labor and maintain the authority of household heads should suffice as a reminder that custom itself did not mean the same thing to all. That this latter group continued to define, change, and recreate local customs after emancipation is clear enough from the complaints of those who did not benefit from "tradition" to the extent that ruling elders did. Disgruntled villagers often spoke disparagingly of custom: "Customthat's vodka or the will of the elders [bol'shaki ]." Elders and the wealthy, peasants noted, had direct access to the sources of custom and justice through their participation in the village assembly and relations with judges, priests, and other figures of authority. They not only could offer more substantial bribes, if necessary, but gained even greater influence through their social networks and connections.75

Moore, Social Facts, 319.

June Starr and Jane F. Collier, eds., History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology (Ithaca, 1989), 89. See also V. A. Aleksandrov, Obychnoe pravo krepostnoi derevni Rossii XVIIInachala XIX v. (Moscow, 1984), 23449; Richard A. O'Connor, "Law as Indigenous Social Theory: A Siamese Thai Case," American Ethnologist 8, no. 2 (1981), 22337. There is a wealth of material available for the study of village custom, although to date historians have yet to begin the necessary work of local analysis. Among many source collections, see L. I. Kuchumova, comp., Dokumenty po istorii krest'ianskoi obshchiny 18611880 gg., 2 vols. (Moscow, 198384).

V. Shchochkin, "O primenenii obychnogo prava," SudG, no. 35 (1892), 3. See also A. A. Charushin, "Volostnye sudy v bytovom ikh osveshchenii," IAOiRS 4, no. 21 (1912), 986; A. Redkin, "Zametka o volostnykh sudakh," Nedelia, no. 19 (1881), 64749; and the instructive commentary by a former volost' elder in S. Matveev, "V volostnykh starshinakh," RB, no. 5 (1912), 181. Of the very few local studies available in English, see Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia (Chicago, 1986); Edgar Melton, "Household Economies and Commu-nal Conflicts on a Russian Serf Estate, 18001817," JSH 26, no. 3 (1993), 55986; Rodney D. Bohac, "Family, Property, and Socioeconomic Mobility: Russian Peasants on Manuilovskoe Estate, 18101861" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1982).

Because they determined local rules through the assembly, elders could readily claim that a given decision was based on custom (whether such custom existed or not), using their knowledge of "tradition" as a tool for controldemanding submission, obedience, and respect from young migrant laborers, for instance, or upholding patriarchal authority over women through these same claims to tradition or custom. Moore has also stressed the extent to which abiding by tradition is often the privilege of those who can afford it:

Social reproduction . . . is a luxury. Meeting cultural conventions . . . is something not all can afford. Failure to maintain tradition . . . is also something with which the well-off can belabor the poor. The well to do can be at once more modern and more traditional than their less fortunate relatives. The provision for sons, the payment of generous amounts of bridewealth, the holding of large celebrations for baptisms [and] weddings, . . . the provision of tubs of beer, all these involve substantial economic investments which are less and less possible for poor families. The poor know the techniques of production of all the necessary items of ritual exchange, but they lack the means. The poor cannot afford to be properly traditional and they certainly cannot afford to be modern. How ill conceived are the usual remarks about the nonprogressiveness of peasants.76

An overview of rural justice in Russia from 1861 to 1914 should serve to clarify the peculiar nature of these institutional arrangements (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). Between 1861 and 1868, the emancipation and supplementary legislation established volost' courts for all categories of peasants, modeled after Kiselev's volostnaia rasprava, while taking into account some of the latter's deficiencies. By the legislation's simple omission of previously existing juridical bodies (such as village courts of state peasants), all lower courts were effectively abolishedrelegated to "discovery" by ethnographers and others who would, especially during the 1860s and 1870s, find these "traditional" or "customary" courts still functioning throughout much of the Great Russian countryside. In this process state peasantsthat is, one-half of the peasant populationlost their two-tier court system and, with it, the right of appeal. The only exception was the village assembly, whose judicial authority now contracted to consideration of cases involving inheritance, family division, and similar civil matters; in criminal affairs

Moore, Social Facts, 300. On employing claims of tradition in the exercise of power, see Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 25462.

Figure 1.1.
Russia's Judicial-Prosecutorial System under the 1864 Judicial Code

it retained the right to banish community members by administrative process.77

Volost' court decisions were initially considered final, but new regulations in 1866 permitted cassational hearings of their rulings by the district assembly of peace mediators, which might overturn the sentence, change it, or return the case for retrial. Appeals could not involve the essence of a

Sofronenko. Krest'ianskaia reforma, 4950, art. 51; Cherniavskii, Narodnyi sud, 15; N. M. Druzhinin, "Obshchestvennoe ustroistvo gosudarstvennykh krest'ian po zakonam 18381839 gg., sravnitel'no s ustroistvom krest'ian pomeshchich'ikh po polozheniiam 19 fevralia 1861 g," in Druzhinin, Ocherki krest'ianskoi obshchestvennoi zhizni (SPb, 1905), 23637; A. A. Kornilov, "Krest'ianskoe samoupravlenie po Polozheniiu 19 fevralia," in Velikaia reforma, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1911), 150.

Figure 1.2.
Russia's Judicial-Prosecutorial System after the Law of July 12, 1889

decision but only procedural errors such as when a court exceeded its jurisdiction, imposed punishments beyond those specified in article 102 of the emancipation regulations, or tried a case without summoning all involved parties to the hearing.78 With the abolition of peace mediators in 1874, cassational authority passed to a district board for peasant affairs (uezdnoe po krest'ianskim delam prisutstvie ) whose chairman and permanent member often consisted of a former mediator. Decisions of district boards

Cherniavskii, Narodnyi sud, 22; Igor Tiutriumov, "Krest'ianskii sud i nachala narodnoobychnogo prava," RB, no. 9 (1883), 21421; Druzhinin, Iuridicheskoe polozhenie krest'ian, ch. 11; N. Koliupanov, "Uezdnye krest'ianskie prisutstviia," RusM, no. 12 (1880), 14170; Evgenii Markov, "Uezdnoe upravlenie," RusRech', no. 9 (1881), 266315. In practice, volost' courts regularly did all of these things. See, e.g., GARO, f. 695, op. 6 (1895), sv. 88, d. 474; ibid., f. 697, op. 1, sv. 1, d. 27 (1876); sv. 11 , d. 449; ibid., f. 717, op. 40 (1890), sv. 80, d. 21.

could, in turn, be appealed to the provincial board for peasant affairs (gubernskoe po krest'ianskim delam prisutstvie ).

This structure would be revised yet again in 1889 with the creation of a new office of land captain (zemskii nachal'nik ), whose primary duties involved direct supervision of peasant administration and courts, thereby combining both administrative and judicial authority in one position.79 These MVD-appointed officials not only approved elections of volost' judges, with the right to remove them and other peasant officials from office, but by replacing rural justices of the peace also represented a new court instance that tried a range of criminal offenses perpetrated by peasantsparticularly disputes that arose between villagers and the landowning nobility. Themselves often noble landowners, these powerful new officials could punish villagers with a fine orjail sentence for disobeying their orders and, like the former peace mediators, could bring peasants before the volost' court for prosecutionwhich meant possible corporal punishment, given their influence over judges. Whereas the majority of former peace court cases passed to volost' courts in 1889 (thereby bringing nonpeasant rural inhabitants under this court's jurisdiction as well), land captains would now try serious offenses punishable by up to one year in prison and those crimes of greatest concern to landownerstrespass, illegal wood cutting, and breaking or violating labor contracts by hired agricultural workers.80 In short, through the creation of land captains and abolition of most justices of the peace, the government unburdened its judicial system of the largest portion of "petty" cases and, except for felonious offenses, made the legal isolation of the countryside virtually complete.

A new body called the district assembly (uezdnyi s"ezd ), divided into administrative and judicial sections, would now serve as the appellate instance for volost' court and land captain cases alike, as well as offenses tried in new municipal courts. Chaired by the district marshal of the nobility, the assembly's judicial section consisted of one circuit court representative, land captains, and honorary justices of the peace (where they still existed). Decisions of the district assembly could still be appealed to the provincial board,

There is a substantial historical literature on the land captains. See, e.g., P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Moscow, 1970); Mandel, "Paternalistic Authority," chs. 45; Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, chs. 34; Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 3; Corinne Gaudin, "Les zemskie nachal'niki au village. Coutumes administratives et culture paysanne en Russie 18891914," Cahiers du Monde russe 36, no. 3 (1995), 24972.

See GARO, f. 70, op. 1 (1898), d. 1; ibid., f. 74, op. 25, dd. 4, 9; ibid., f. 81, op. 30 (1902), d. 3; K. Ia. Kozhukhar, "Zemskie nachal'niki," VestP. no. 5 (1905), 9398; Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 198; Mandel, "Paternalistic Authority," 19698; Wcislo, "The Land Captain Reform of 1889 and the Reassertion of Unrestricted Autocratic Authority," Russian History 15, no. 24 (1988), 285326.

also reorganized into administrative and judicial departments and chaired by noble officials without legal training.81

Three aspects of this system exemplify the official definition of authority, its exercise in rural settlements, and the unequal relationship between custom and law, while demonstrating the contradictions that underlay local justice. First, a vast realm of administrative authority continued to influence peasant life in very significant ways. Such power rested not only in the hands of land captains or district and provincial boards, however. Provincial governors, rural police officials, tax inspectors, and volost' and village elders also exercised various levels of semi-judicial and police authority, which gave them the right to punish without turning to the courts, or allowed them to demand that volost' courts sentence accused wrongdoers.82 Alongside and often above regular justice, then, stood what on the surface appeared to be a far more powerful administrative apparatus designed to safeguard state interests, but one whose limited resources could not ensure its effective operation in practice.

Second, although volost' courts could base civil decisions on local custom within a restricted sphere, the institutions established to hear appeals of these decisions usually had little knowledge of custom. Some of the more diligent members of district boards and district assemblies occasionally sought to establish whether a given custom did, in fact, exist; however, the procedure for doing so simply involved sending a police official or land captain to pose this question to the village assembly, where the most influential members, already knowing the circumstances of the case, answered as their interests dictated. For the most part, however, cassational boards and assemblies paid little heed to custom and based their rulings instead on the law.83

Kozhukhar, "Zemskie nachal'niki," no. 5, 10910; S. A. Mikhailovskii, "Sudebno administrativnye uchrezhdeniia Tverskoi gubernii za piatiletie 18921897 godov," Sbornik pravovedeniia i obshchestvennykh znanii, vol. 8 (Moscow, 1898), 15657; D. L., "Neskol'ko slov o gubernskikh po sudebnym delam prisutstviiakh," ZhGUP, no. 10 (1893), ch. 10, 5567. Concerning higher appeals, see "O raz"iasnenie gubernskim po krest'ianskim delam prisutstviiam, chtoby ne predstavliali v pravitel'stvuiushchii senat zhalob po delam, reshennym volostnymi sudami," Vestnik Iaroslavskogo zemstva, no. 12 (1881), 45.

This authority is discussed further in Chapter 7. See Sofronenko, Krest'ianskaia reforma, passim; V. A. Beer, Administrativnyi ustav o nakazaniiakh, nalagaemykh sel'skim starostoi i volostnym starshinoi (SPb, 1899); Khrulev, "Mysli provintsiala o provintsii," 57. On police authority, see I. T. Tarasov, Lichnoe zaderzhanie kak politseiskaia mera bezopasnosti, part 2: Politseiskii arest v Rossii (Kiev, 1886).

Ivanov, "Krest'ianskii sud i formal'noe pravosudie," 4849; "K voprosu o iurisdiktsii volostnogo suda," SudG, no. 34 (1892), 12; Illarionov, Znachenie obychnogo prava, 1011; Illarionov, "Sudebno-krest'ianskaia reforma," 4; Leon'tev, "V poiskakh za obychnym pravom," RB, no. 11 (1894), 16879; A. Grekov, "Obychnoe pravo v delakh volostnykh sudov," SPbVed, no. 264 (1900), 1; Z., "Neustroistvo v krest'ianskikh pravovykh otnosheniiakh," SPbVed, no. 81 (1902), 2; I. M. Tiutriumov, comp., Praktika Pravitel'stvuiushchego Senata po krest'ianskim delam (SPb, 1914), 92648.

Given that these bodies met irregularly and most often with few of their members actually present, large numbers of appeals were decided quickly with no discussion of custom. Between 1892 and 1897 in Tver province, for instance, the provincial board met once per month on average, and during the course of a five-to-seven-hour session decided upwards of 130 appellate cases. With far larger caseloads than the provincial board, district assemblies held an average of twenty-seven sittings per year and resolved as many as 300 appeals in a single session.84 A paradox was thus created between the stated purpose of local justice and the government's ability to undermine peasant institutions by abrogating their decisions or, in appellate instances, by ignoring the use of custom that it had granted.

Certainly the most significant contradiction within the everyday operation of rural justice can be found in the numerous ways that peasants found to circumvent or subvert state regulations on volost' court procedure. Here, too, we see compelling analogies with colonial administrations under which "the local court escapes its designers in a thousand ways."85 Although judicial sessions were conducted orally, Russian law required that township clerks record these proceedings and court decisions in special books to create a written record that would be subject to official inspection. The extent to which such records reflected reality, however, could only be decided by the clerk and other local officials, who, through "irregularities" and recordkeeping "failures," constructed their own version of each case history and thereby determined how information would be presented to higher authorities. Given that they were often the only literate figures within township administrations (especially before the 1890s), volost' clerks exercised substantial authority, and even after literacy rates began to improve among peasant judges and elders, clerks still controlled knowledge of procedure and law and retained great influence over court hearings and decisions.86 Contemporary discussion, however, usually concerned the clerk's real or exaggerated corruption of peasant self-government rather than the ways in which recordkeeping itself was appropriated and used to serve local interests.

State regulations, for example, did not call for the recording of disputes concluded through reconciliation (which some early estimates calculated at

Mikhailovskii, "Sudebno-administrativnye uchrezhdeniia," 15657; D. L., "Neskol'ko slov," 5667.

Moore, "Treating Law as Knowledge," 38.

On the influence of volost' clerks, see, e.g., GARF, f. 586, op. 1, d. 117 (Pskov province), ll. 3334; d. 114 (Orel province), l. 22; d. 120, ll. 54, 61, 89; F. Marichev, "Volostnoi pisar' i volost': po lichnym vospominaniiam i nabliudeniiam," VE, no. 5 (1902), 24072; Ivan Kupchinov, Iz dnevnika volostnogo pisaria (Moscow, 1910); N. M. Astyrev, V volostnykh pisariakh. Ocherki krest'ianskogo samoupravleniia, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1904); Petr Skorobogatyi, "Vliianie starshin i pisarei na otpravlenie volostnoi iustitsii," IuV, no. 12 (1881), 60723; N., "Nashi volostnye pisaria," Nedelia, no. 40 (1876), 12971301; N. Dmitriev, "Pisaria i krest'iane," SV, no. 191 (1913), 23.

50 to 75 percent of all cases coming before volost' courts). The extent to which this fact played a role in village dispute resolution is a question that surely needs to be considered, given that reconciliation ensured that one's conflict and name would not become part of an official record. It also meant that local authorities like village or volost' elders, who encouraged reconciliation, maintained greater control by not allowing disputes (and information) to move into the arena of official knowledge.87 Township record books therefore contain only the most serious conflicts or cases in which judges had been unable to reconcile litigants. Even then, clerks generally wrote down only the bare essentials of disputes, while filling up pages with legally required formalities. Little can be gleaned about the relationships between litigants, background and details of disputes, evidence, testimony, and similarly critical information, and those "facts" that were entered into the record can only be understood in the framework of a conscious decision as to which information would be excluded.88 Therefore, although recorded cases are certainly of value for asking a limited set of questions, they lend themselves neither to generalization nor to in-depth case studies of village dispute resolution precisely because those who controlled recordkeeping frustrated official surveillance through a "carelessness" that outsiders would misinterpret as ignorance or as the peasants' dislike of formalism. The state's inability to exercise strict oversight of rural justice thus allowed communities to retain an important degree of power over their members. More significantly, through its very demand for written records the government provided ordinary peasants and village elites with the means to hinder authorities by taking advantage of the impossibility of "knowing"a weapon available to villagers in the past and readily adapted to changing postemancipation conditions.

Skorobogatyi, "Mirovye sdelki vvolostnom sude," IuV, no. 7 (1881), 42223; Kozhukhar, "Zemskie nachal'niki," no. 11, 63; I. N. Aristov, comp., Volostnoi sudpo zakonu 12-go iiulia 1889 goda (Kazan', 1893), 15. Reconciliation is discussed in Chapter 3.

When recording court decisions, a volost' clerk was required to include the date, the judges' names and those of the litigants or the accused and victim, a short description of the case, and the court's final decision. Aristov, Volostnoi sud, 15; MVD, Sbornik uzakonenii, opredeliaiushchikh prava i obiazannosti volostnykh starshin ipisarei (SPb, 1904), 5962. See also "Narodnoe pravosudie," Nedelia, no. 23 (1888), 728; and the many examples in TsGIAgM, ff. 749, 1943, 1443, and others.

Continues...

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520213416
• ISBN 13: 9780520213418
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
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