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7 Thinking Like an Empire: Estate, Law, and Rights in the Early Twentieth Century Jane Burbank In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian emperors and ruling elites strove to apply contemporary European strategies of governance to their expansive realm. Attempting to standardize authority within Russia’s borders, Catherine the Great divided territory into provinces, each with its governor, its districts, and, in theory, its clearly de¤ned place in the administrative hierarchy of the polity.1 European models were also emulated in the borderlands. In the mid-nineteenth century, of¤cials of the Russian General Staff applied lessons from the French military’s experience in Algeria to Russian campaigns in the Caucasus and Central Asia.2 In social policies as well, Russia’s rulers undertook initiatives in education, health, and law that corresponded to concerns of their rivals in Western Europe. But a central achievement of the revolutionary era in Western Europe, the abolition of legal estates, was never attempted by the Russian imperial government . Only after the fall of the Romanov monarchy was the legal category of estate abolished. In March 1917, the liberal Kadets who dominated the Provisional Government achieved their long-held goal of ending the soslovie system. The abolition of status as source of particular rights in and particular obligations toward the state did not last long in Russia. As Mark Vishniak, a Socialist Revolutionary, observed in 1920, the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia reintroduced the estate principle by making class membership a source of rights, duties, and claims upon the state.3 Essays in this volume address imperial ways of thinking that were carried into the Soviet period, and one effect of the long retention of soslovie in tsarist Russia may have been to privilege the idea of group-based rights, and penalties ,in the Soviet Union.4 In this article, I raise a different question: What were the effects of the soslovie system and, more generally, of governance based on group-held rights and duties upon the prospects for social and political reform of the old regime? How did this central element of imperial rule—the division of the governed into status and other groups with particular rights and duties—affect efforts to construct inclusionary and equal citizenship in Russia, a project that began in full force in the 1860s and continued by ¤ts and starts until the collapse of the tsarist imperial system? More speci¤cally, did the soslovie system structure the ways that members of the largest estate of the realm—peasants—imagined their place in the polity, both in the present and the future? One setting for the examination of these questions, and for study of people’s relation to the state and to each other, is the court. In this article, I draw upon the history of the most local and most used judicial instance in the empire, the township court, to investigate the attitudes of rural people toward imperial law and legal reform. I begin with an overview of the soslovie system, its place in late imperial public discourse and its signi ¤cance for subjects of the empire. I then turn to the history of the township courts, an estate-based instance introduced for peasants by imperial reformers in the 1860s. I conclude with a consideration of the reception of a 1917 reform intended to establish non–estate-based governance of the countryside. Soslovie as an Imperial Category Soslovie was a typical strategy of Russian imperial rule, one of the several registers through which the polity was governed. The vast majority of the population in the mid-nineteenth century belonged to the noble, church, merchant, townsperson, or peasant estates; these legal status groups were cross-cut by other classi¤cations and af¤liations. The most important of these other categories were de¤ned by religious confession, ethnicity (nationality), geographical-political units, and state service. Each of these attributes could become the source of claims upon the state, or of obligations placed upon the subject. These collective designations were not all mutually exclusive, or at least not at all times; individuals could manipulate their group identi¤cations to assert various rights, defeat rivals, avoid duties, or undertake any number of other actions.5 Confusion, rather than clarity, about who and what comprised the nation was characteristic of late imperial discourse. To take one example, a 1912 compilation of statistics on the empire was titled Russia in Numbers: Thinking Like an Empire 197 [3.128.198.21] Project MUSE (2024...

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