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95 As a teenager travelling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Fedor Dostoevsky witnessed what he later recalled as a “disgusting scene,” involving a stout government courier who was changing carriages at the station house across the street from the inn where Dostoevsky’s family had paused for refreshment: [A] new troika of fresh, spirited horses rolled up to the station and the coachman, a young lad of twenty or so, wearing a red shirt and carrying his coat on his arm, jumped onto the seat. The courier at once flew out of the inn, ran down the steps, and got into the carriage. Before the coachman could even start the horses, the courier stood up and, silently, without any word whatsoever, raised his huge right fist and dealt a painful blow straight down on the back of the coachman’s neck. The coachman jolted forward, raised his whip, and lashed the shaft horse with all his might. The horses started off in a rush, but this did nothing to appease the courier. He was not angry; he was acting according to his own plan, from something preconceived and tested through many years of experience; and the terrible fist was raised again, and again it struck the coachman’s neck, and then again and again; and so it continued until the troika disappeared from sight. Naturally the coachman, who could barely hold on because of the blows, kept lashing the horses every second like one gone mad; and at last his blows made the horses fly off as if possessed.1 6H theBOdyOftheBeAst Animal Protection and Anticruelty Legislation in Imperial Russia amy nelson costlow nelson text4.indd 95 6/23/10 8:40 AM 96————Amy nelsOn Grim, but hardly extraordinary, this incident exemplifies the pervasive, almost casual, and highly visible social violence that presents itself as a perennial concern of Russian history.2 Focusing on the social and political hierarchies underpinning this brutal encounter, Dostoevsky’s biographer, Joseph Frank, identifies the beating of the coachman as a formative experience for the aspiring author. It motivated Dostoevsky’s political radicalism in the 1840s, when the uniformed courier served as a symbol of the “brutal , oppressive government that he served—a government whose domination over an enslaved peasantry by naked force incited all the violence and harshness of peasant life.”3 Frank does not mention that Dostoevsky’s published recollections of this scene were prompted by a newspaper article commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPA), Rossiiskoe obshchestvo pokrovitel’stva zhivotnym (ROPZh), in 1876. Reflecting on the work of this organization, Dostoevsky sympathized with the cause of animal protection but expressed concern that efforts to thwart cruelty to animals not trump the more urgent imperative to confront abusive behavior toward other people. He acknowledged that it was cruel for the coachman to whip his horses so harshly but insisted that the coachman was the primary victim of this encounter, asking rhetorically, “could any member of the Society for the Protection of Animals resolve to bring charges against that peasant for cruel and inhumane treatment of his horses?”4 Given the political oppression and regime of violence that supported the system of serfdom and autocratic rule before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the restrictions on human rights that persisted after the Great Reforms, it is understandable that organized animal protection met an ambivalent response at the time and has attracted little attention from scholars.5 Yet Dostoevsky’s brutal vignette testifies to the pervasive violence enacted on animal bodies in public spaces that was ubiquitous, not just in Russia, but throughout much of the world in the nineteenth century. It also provides a dramatic illustration of the ways in which violence inflicted by humans on each other can be connected to human brutality toward animals . In Russia, as in other European countries and the United States, animal protection organizations emerged as the community consensus about the permissibility of at least some forms of violent behavior toward animals shifted and began to break down.6 Inspired by similar activities in Western Europe, Russian reformers came together in midcentury to found animal protection societies and establish legal penalties for treating animals cruelly. By considering the origins of the animal protection movement and the institution of anticruelty legislation in Imperial Russia, we recover an important component of costlow nelson text4.indd 96 6/23/10 8:40 AM [3.139.81.58] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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