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

Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914. By Stephen P. Frank (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999) 352 pp. $55.00.

The author's central contention in this remarkable study of justice in rural Russia after the emancipation of the serfs is that because of the government's inability and unwillingness to enforce common standards of justice for the empire's entire population, peasants were driven to reject and eventually subvert the state's law. An understaffed, and often embattled, official system of social control focused its efforts on tax collection, smuggling, bootlegging, and attacks on administrative authority, while leaving peasants largely on their own to find ways to cope with the staggering amount of crime among themselves. The peasants in their attempts to control attacks on property, community well-being, and individuals, fell back on judicial norms and practices that had their roots deep in the serf era.

The author demonstrates that contemporary criminal statistics did not reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of depredations on property and persons in Russia were directed against peasants. A more accurate picture emerges from the author's wide-ranging research in local police archives, in the published and unpublished records of the local peasant courts established at the time of the emancipation (the volost courts), and in the extensive contemporary literature examining the operation of Russia's justice system, particularly its rural branch.

Since the police had no presence in the villages, peasants were forced to protect themselves from criminal assaults, often by extralegal means. Peasants often answered the violence inflicted on them with violence of their own. Such traditional practices as public humiliation and such community service as sweeping village streets were not among the punishments listed in the regulations governing the volost courts. Moreover, the range of punishments authorized for these peasant courts fell far short of the death penalty, but horse thieves, arsonists, and members of organized bands of brigands were often beaten to death by community action. The persistence and growth of such practices (samosud--judgement of one's own affairs) was, in the author's view, a strong indicator of the state's failure to bring its law, justice, and civic values to the countryside in an effective way.

Evidence adduced by the author offers a rich and detailed picture of village life, intra-peasant strife, and relations between peasants and landlords and state officials. It also provides a rarely available bottom-up view of the central authority. Officially, resort by peasants to unorthodox methods to control crime in the countryside, as well as their inability to easily resolve conflicts within the village, was explained by citing the peasants' mythic simplicity and ignorance, and the collapse of patriarchal values. This explanation became a rationalization for harshly treating behavior regarded as a threat to the social order, while largely ignoring peasant on peasant violence. This violence, especially when directed against non-peasants, reinforced elites' stereotypes of the peasants as depraved and dangerous, and was regarded as a threat to the social order and punished severely. The author concludes his study with the persuasive argument that the 1880s, not the period from 1905 to 1907, marked a turning point in the relations between classes; it was the time when law and order began gradually to break down.

Beyond the rich material from Russian archives and secondary literature, the book offers comparative observations on the basis of materials drawn from Europe, Africa, and Latin America. From these observations in particular, the author introduces the notion of a colonial mentality as part of the outlook of Russia's elites at the turn of the century, helping to make this book the most extensively researched and best written work available in English about the Russian pre-revolution peasantry.

Peter Czap, Jr.
Amherst College

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