Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (review)

This important monograph examines the dynamics behind marital breakdown in late imperial Russia, as well as the state’s response. It draws mainly on the archive of the Chancellery for the Receipt of Petitions Addressed to the Emperor, established in 1884 to institutionalize the autocrat’s claim to dispense “extra-legal” justice. The Chancellery handled a variety of matters, including petitions (mostly from women and from St. Petersburg and Moscow) seeking protection from marital discord and a passport for separate residence. Although each religious organization had control over marriage and divorce, the Chancellery had the authority to grant legal separation—a practical solution when religious authorities (above all, the Russian Orthodox Church) adamantly opposed divorce.

This study presents a close, sensitive reading of these Chancellery files, supplemented by printed and archival materials. Its main contribution is the close analysis of official policy and the attitudes of plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses as embedded in petitions and depositions. Engel demonstrates that the Chancellery displayed flexibility and, even if disposed to defend male prerogatives, tended to intercede in defense of wives who had been demonstrably wronged. That shift reflected the professionalization of the upper officialdom (the higher, especially legal, educational, and attendant liberal values that reshaped the Chancellery), as well as the sentiments of the emperor in whose name it acted (Nicholas II [1894–1917], who showed far more empathy than his father Alexander III [1881–1894]).

Engel devotes much attention to the exegesis of individual cases, the goal being to elucidate and explain changes in values and identities. For example, she shows the unexpected influence of the “cult of domesticity” (which served more to redefine masculinity than to determine women’s roles), the transformative power of extrafamilial employment for women, and the gradual evolution of law and policy regarding such matters as internal passports, spousal property rights, and child custody. She contextualizes all of this material in a comparative framework that reveals how Russia followed or deviated from analogous processes unfolding in Europe and America.

Methodologically, the source base raises some questions. First, although Engel’s study consulted 260 files from the Chancellery, relying mainly on 122 of them (6 percent of the extant holdings), it is unclear how Engel chose these particular files, evidently not by random sampling. Nor has history been kind to this Chancellery archive: Approximately 95 percent of the original holdings have been lost (for unknown reasons). Since the effect of these losses is indeterminable, it is difficult to make statistical inferences about frequency and patterns. Second, the Chancellery dealt only with contested separation. Amicable separations (which involved millions of people who left the village—and left their spouses—in favor of the city) had no need of the Chancellery. The Chancellery processed about 1,000 cases per year—a minuscule fraction of the millions of migrant workers, female as well as male, who obtained passports and traveled freely.¹ In a word, one cannot assume that these files reveal much about the magnitude and dynamics of “marital breakdown” in late imperial Russia.

Nonetheless, this study of extant texts affords rich insights into official thinking and the attitudes of those seeking imperial intercession. The result is a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of the changes that transformed the family in late imperial Russia.