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

None of the innovations during Russia’s era of great reforms has been so ignored by historians as the special peasant courts created in the wake of the emancipation of 1861. Stephen P. Frank addresses this lacuna and seeks to characterize the experience of rural Russia with the new judicial system. He describes the “competing definitions of criminality and claims of justice” (p. 3) that he believes distinguished peasants’ views from those of the “middle- or upper-class.” (p. 5). He argues that the courts failed rural people, that “justice did not serve the common person’s interests” (p.306), and that “Law proved incapable of conquering the turmoil that beset Russian society in the modern era” (p. 308). He thus sketches a pre-revolutionary antecedent to the legal chaos and lawlessness of today’s Russia.

Frank borrows his theoretical approach from Subaltern Studies. Thus he is primarily concerned with power and culture in a context in which he perceives little common ground between peasants and officials. The latter he likens to foreign colonial administrators and groups together with “substantial segments of educated society” (p.307).

This book is divided into two unequal parts. The first contains two chapters. One concerns the workings of the judicial system and statistics on crime. The other focuses on views of rural crime held by the authorities and the educated minority. Part two addresses the peasants’ understanding of the law, types of crimes and punishments, and the situation in the early twentieth century.

In the first chapter (“Colonial Perspectives”) the author cites commentaries on crime by officials, nobles, clergy, and others. In chapter two, he summarizes statistics on rural crime, but does not offer his own taxonomy beyond separating the crimes of property from the crimes against persons. This simple division does not work very well, since it leads the author to link such crimes as woodcutting with horse stealing, and personal insults with murder. His main point in the chapter, however, is that the judicial system failed to protect the property of farming peasants. Although this is plausible, the evidence is largely anecdotal. There is no counting or sampling of cases anywhere in the book.

In the second part of the book, Frank treats the peasants’ sense of the law and provides more information on property crimes and crimes against persons. There is an interesting section on the struggle over forests, and the author argues that peasants distinguished between divine and secular law and did not see the use of a rich outsider’s property as a crime. Frank concludes that peasants felt their efforts to secure justice were frustrated. This may well have been true, but peasants nevertheless continued to turn to the courts.

Frank’s grouping of everything from slander to murder in a single chapter is puzzling. So too is his decision to consider an insult to a fellow villager such as calling someone a slut under the same rubric as an insult to the tsar (pp. 152–53). One concerns honor within a peer group and the other the prestige of the state. The author does not reference the large literature on honor.

Chapters seven and eight concern varieties of official and unofficial punishment. Chapter seven is perhaps the best in the book, and the author stresses the indignity peasants suffered when subjected to the corporal punishment administered by the special peasant courts. He also describes the use of banishment, a penalty which did not work well in his view. His discussion of unofficial justice, which ranges from public mockery to lynching, is less stisfying since he provides little evidence as to the frequency of these practices. In the final chapter, he takes his story into the twentieth century, suggesting that rural crime increased marketdly as did cases of vigilante justice. The peasants, he asserts, rejected the courts, and elites bacame further obsessed with rural crime. Although this seems reasonable, the evidence offered is scanty.

Frank...