Society, law and economy in Russian empire from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 2

Orthodoxy in the Russian prerevolution

The revolution of 1905-7 had a profound impact on Russian Orthodoxy. Most dramatically, it unleashed the pent-up discontent long percolating among the parish clergy, who, individually and collectively, embraced a range of liberal and even radical movements. To the horror of state officials, priests all across the empire proved receptive to the calls ofthe 'Liberation Movement' and used the occasion to press their own demands - for better material support, for the right of self-organisation, for a reduction in 'episcopal rule' and a greater role in diocesan administration. But others took up the needs of the disprivileged. Thus the clergy of one deanship in Viatka diocese, for example, urged the State Duma (parliament) to resolve 'the agrarian question according to the wishes of the people'.[140] And in numerous cases the local priest, whether from fear or conviction, became embroiled in the revolution itself, delivered incendiary sermons, performed requiems for fallen revolutionaries, and in sundry other ways supported his rebellious parishioners.[141]

It was not only a matter of radical priests: conservative prelates found themselves locked in a struggle with a regime fighting for survival. The decisive trigger to Church-State conflict was the emperor's Manifesto on the Freedom of Conscience (17 April 1905), an attempt to mollify disaffected religious and ethnic minorities by decriminalising apostasy and legalising conversion from Orthodoxy. The result, as the prelates feared, was a tidal wave of declarations to leave the Church.⁶² The manifesto did not reconcile minorities, of course, but it did enrage churchmen - who saw it as a crass betrayal of the Church's vital interests.

Like the rest of Russian society, the clergy responded to the revolutionary crisis by pressing for reform. Their principal goal was to convene a church council - the first in more than two centuries - to address the Church's many problems and needs. And such seemed a realisable dream, as the regime acqui­esced and authorised preparations for a church council. After first collecting the opinions of diocesan authorities, the Synod created a special pre-conciliar commission to analyse the opinions and draft proposals which bore the liberal stamp of these revolutionary ears. All that, however, came to naught: as the revolution receded, the emperor decided to defer the church council until more 'propitious' times.

The 'Duma Monarchy' of the inter-revolutionary years - that marked by the Third (i907-i2) and Fourth (i9i2-i7) Dumas - did nothing to solve problems or reduce tensions. At the very minimum, church authorities were aghast at the prospect of the multi-confessional Duma intervening in church affairs, as indeed soon became the case (with respect to salaries for the clergy, parish schools and a host of other issues).⁶³ Apart from seeking to influence from within (by promotingthe election of clerical deputies),⁶⁴ the Church adamantly rejected the Duma's competence in most ecclesiastical affairs. Thus, in i908, the chief procurator conveyed the Synod's rejection of attempts by the Duma (as a 'non-confessional legislative institution') to meddle in church business and to sponsor new laws on religious tolerance.⁶⁵ Similar sentiments were later voiced at a conference of prelates from central Russian dioceses, who

Church and Clerical Political Dissent in Late Imperial Russia, 1905-14', unpublished PhD dissertation, Georgetown University (2000).

62 For data on 1905-9, see RGIA, Fond 797, op. 79, otd. 2, st. 3, d. 494, ll. 36-8.

63 For the fullest account, though based only on printed sources, see Vladimir Rozhkov Tserkovnye voprosy v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (Rome: Pontificium inst. orient. Studiorum,

i975).

64 See, for example, the Synod decree of 14 July 1912 urging active clerical involvement in elections to the Fourth Duma, in RGIA, Fond 796, op. 194, g. 1912, d. 1207,1.10-10 ob.

65 See the chief procurator's memorandum to the Council of Ministers (dated 10.9.1908) in RGIA, Fond 797, op. 78, otd. 2, st. 3, d. 122/b, l. 53.

demanded the 'complete removal of church legislation from the purview of a non-confessional State Duma'.[142] Archbishop Stefan of Kursk expressed prevailing sentiment in the episcopate when he wrote that 'it is an empty and idle dream to count on the bureaucrats renouncing their coercion of the Church. It is a vain, futile hope to count on the Duma giving us the opportunity to free ourselves from the enslavement and to build the Church on "conciliar principles" as the canons require.'[143]

All this unfolded against the backdrop of growing anxiety about the moral- religious state of the Church. Among the folk themselves, piety seemed to be recovering, with high rates of religious observance, but it was clear that the 'simple folk' were no longer so simple: patterns of religious observance were complex, driven not so much by dissent and apostasy as by broader pat­terns of social and cultural change (migrant labour, the rebellion of youth and the like).[144] Publicly, the Church suffered enormously from the infa­mous 'Rasputinshchina', as Grigorii Rasputin, the self-appointed lay 'elder' (starets), gained extraordinary influence and compromised crown and altar in the process. Although public perception greatly exaggerated Rasputin's role, he nonetheless elicited fierce enmity among the ranking churchmen, espe­cially after Rasputin's influence became public in 1912. As a police report from 1912 attested: According to public opinion, the ecclesiastical domain experi­enced a kind of revolutionary movement in 1912.'[145] Even extreme conservatives like Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) waxed indignant about the cancerous influences on the Church.[146]

The First World War inspired the Church, like most of Russia, to respond with patriotic support for what would quickly prove an unmitigated military catastrophe. The Church itself mobilised substantial resources to assist in the war, converted facilities to serve as military hospitals, raised funds for the war victims and campaigned to sustain the fighting morale of the troops and the home front. In that respect, it differed little from churches of the other combatants. But the context was different: far sooner than elsewhere, the Rus­sian Empire was swept by an intense tide of anti-war sentiment. Hence the Church's identification with the 'imperialist war' did much to create a young generation of anti-religious veterans, the future Red Army men who would be particularly hostile to the Church. But the Church itself had grievances,[147] suf­fered mightily from the inflation and dislocation of war and had grown increas­ingly alienated from a crown irreparably besmirched by Rasputinism. Indeed, amidst the military crisis of 1915, with the country reeling from defeat, the Church suffered yet another scandal associated with Rasputin, as his protege, the bishop of Tobolsk, conducted a hasty canonisation against the express orders of the Synod. The public resonance could hardly have been greater, and the damage to the Synod more ruinous. Little wonder that, when the autocracy appealed to the Church for support on 27 February 1917, in its criti­cal hour, even the conservative Synod summarily refused.[148]

Russian Orthodoxy did not vanish after the Petrine reforms, but it cer­tainly changed. Most striking was the resilience of popular faith; while the prerevolution brought and accelerated undeniable anti-religious tendencies, the vast majority remained faithful and, indeed, demanded a greater role for the Church and for themselves in the Church. But Orthodoxy was no longer part of the infamous 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality' trilogy of official politics; it had excised the middle term and, increasingly, identified with the people, not with a secular state that had plundered its assets and failed to protect its vital interests.Women, the family and public life

BARBARA ALPERN ENGEL

It is difficult to generalise about the women of Russia, so much did their identity and experience vary according to their legally defined social status, religion and ethnicity, among other variables. To be sure, gender shaped key aspects of women's lives. Until well into the nineteenth century, if not later, most shared virtually an identical lot in life: learning women's duties at their mother's knee, a marriage arranged by others, then childbearing, childrearing and the labour of maintaining the home and provisioning the family. Changes that began in the reign of Peter the Great nevertheless affected the ways that women understood and fulfilled those family responsibilities; while developments in the final decades of the nineteenth century challenged the family order that governed most women's lives, and expanded and diversified alternative ways of living. Even so, beneath the developments traced in this chapter, fundamental continuities remained.

The Petrine revolution and its consequences

The period properly begins with the reign of Peter the Great, who brought a thoroughgoing revolution to aristocratic women's lives and initiated eco­nomic, social and legal changes that touched the lives of many of the rest. As part of his Westernising project, and in order to mobilise his subjects to suit his needs, Peter the Great endeavoured to transform Russia's traditional family regime. From the elites, he required new women, suitable consorts for the new men of the service elite and likewise modelled along Western lines. 'Upper-class Muscovite women were driven from the seclusion of the terem, or women's quarters, divested of their old-fashioned robes, squeezed into Western corsets and low-cut gowns and transformed into suitable compan­ions for their "decent beardless" spouses.'¹ Only elite women were required to

1 L. Hughes, 'Peter the Great's Two Weddings: Changing Images of Women in a Transi­tional Age', in R. Marsh (ed.), Women in Russia and the Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 31.

appear at social gatherings and display the requisite social skills; however, even women lower down on the social hierarchy became subject to the require­ment that Russian women don European dress. The law of 1701 mandating German clothes, hats and footwear applied to the wives and children of men of all ranks of the service nobility, as well as of leading merchants, military personnel and inhabitants of Moscow and others towns; only clergy and peas­ants were exempted. Henceforward, such women who failed to wear dresses, German overskirts, petticoats and shoes risked a fine.[149]

Westernisation of elites began in the new capital, St Petersburg, and pro­ceeded only gradually elsewhere. In the decades following Peter's death, increasing numbers of noble families sought to provide their daughters with at least a rudimentary education, and some aspired to more, hiring foreign gov­ernesses and tutors to instruct their daughters at home. In addition to a good dowry, a virtuous and submissive character, and competence in household management, educated men increasingly sought brides who could read and write and converse in foreign tongues. The well-educated Anna and Alexan­dra Panina, renowned for their knowledge and intelligence at mid-century, had no difficulty making excellent marriages.[150] During the reign of Elizabeth a few private boarding schools opened; such schools proliferated in the reign of Catherine the Great. By the close of the eighteenth century, there were over a dozen in Moscow and St Petersburg and more in provincial cities, invariably run by foreigners. Catherine made noblewomen's education the responsibility of the state. Her goal: to further the Westernisation of Russia's manners and morals by training mothers to become the moral educators of their young. In 1764, Catherine established Russia's first school for noble girls. Called the Soci­ety for the Training of Well-Born Girls (better known as Smolnyi Institute), the school admitted primarily daughters of servitors from the elite as well as middling-level ranks of military and civil service. The school graduated 70 students in its first year and about 900 women altogether during Catherine's reign. About twenty other institutes, organised along lines similar to Smolnyi, were opened in Russia's major cities and towns in the years after its found- ing.[151] Whether acquired at school or at home, the impact of education on elite women's literacy rates was substantial by the end of the century: Michelle Marrese has calculated that in the middle of the eighteenth century, only a small fraction (4 to 26 per cent) of noblewomen dwelling in the provinces were literate; a quarter of a century later, the proportion was closer to half. Thereafter, women's literacy rates rose dramatically, to roughly 92 per cent at the start of the nineteenth century.[152]

By then, cultivation characterised women of the cream of Russia's elite. Judging by the women's dress, their hairdos, the dances that they performed and the language that they spoke - almost invariably French - they were virtually indistinguishable from their Western European counterparts. The artist Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, who visited Russia in the 1790s, returned to Paris impressed by what she saw: 'There were innumerable balls, concerts and theatrical performances and I thoroughly enjoyed these gatherings, where I found all the urbanity, all the grace of French company.' She believed, in particular, that it wouldbe impossible 'to exceed Russian ladies in the urbanities of good society'.[153] Some ofthese cultivated women also developed independent intellectual interests and enthusiastically pursued them; the erudition of a few rivalled that of their European counterparts. Catherine the Great herself was an enormously prolific writer, founding Russia's first satirical journal and authoring works in a wide variety of genres. Princess Catherine Dashkova (1743-1810), nee Vorontsova, wrote numerous plays and articles and in 1783 became one of the first Russians to edit a journal, The Companion of Lovers of the Russian Word. That same year, Dashkova became one of the first women in Europe to hold public office, appointed by Catherine the Great as Director of the Academy of Sciences. Increasing numbers of women found their way into print, translating from foreign languages or writing prose and, more commonly, poetry of their own.[154]

Peter also attempted to transform private life, reforming marriage practices and bringing the state more intimately than ever before into the lives of his subjects. The aim was to raise the birth-rate by enhancing conjugal felicity, but also to weaken the ability ofelite parents or elders to use marital alliances for political purposes. A decree of 1702 altered the Muscovite custom wherein marriages were contracted by the parents, or if they were dead, by close rel­atives of the bride and groom, who usually saw each other for the first time only after the wedding ceremony. The decree required a six-week betrothal period before the wedding, enabling the couple to meet and get to know one another. Should they decide against marriage, either party gained the right to terminate the engagement, the betrothed as well as their parents. A decree of 1722 (rescinded in 1775) explicitly forbade forced marriages, including those arranged for 'slaves' by their masters, and required both bride and groom to take an oath indicating that they consented freely to their union. The two decrees may also have reflected Peter's own, more individualised, attitude towards conjugal life, which differed substantially from the official morality of his time, shaped by Russian Orthodoxy. The Church regarded the goal of marriage as reproduction and social stability, and condemned sexual enjoy­ment as sinful. Peter's second marriage to a woman he loved passionately and deeply introduced a new conjugal ideal that affirmed individual affection and the pleasures of life on earth. It was celebrated in public and disseminated in portraits of Peter, Catherine and their children.[155]

The fundamentally patriarchal character of Russian society nevertheless remained unaltered. Grounds for divorce did not include wife-beating; in Peter's day, husbands could rid themselves of unwanted wives by deposit­ing them in a nunnery, as Peter did with his first wife Evdoksia. For the crime of adultery, wives were sentenced to forced labour, whereas men who killed their wives were merely flogged with the knout. Making it more difficult for women to avoid family life by entering a convent, in 1722 Peter raised the age at which women could take the veil to sixty.[156] Developments after Peter's death further buttressed the patriarchal family. The laws governing marriage permitted husbands and fathers to exercise virtually unlimited power over other family members, and required a wife to submit to her husband as head of the household and to live with him in love, respect and 'unlimited obedi- ence'.[157] The strictures on marital dissolution tightened. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church steadily increased its authority over marriage and divorce, emphasising more than ever before the sacramental and indissoluble nature of marriage. The Church made divorce virtually inaccessible to the Russian Orthodox faithful, the majority of the population. Grounds for annulling a marriage also narrowed and were even more narrowly applied.[158] It became much more difficult for a woman to escape an abusive or unsatisfactory marriage by obtaining a divorce; the law strictly forbade marital separation.

Yet in the final decades of the eighteenth century, literature imported from the West introduced new ways of thinking about marriage and the family. Conduct books and education manuals celebrated motherhood's sanctity, and instructed mothers to be the moral and spiritual guides of their children.[159]Sentimental literature elevated woman's role, presenting her as sensitive and emotional, a friend to the man whom she married.[160] Even Russian Ortho­dox views of marriage were affected by these trends: the Church placed new emphasis on the affective ties of spouses and their reciprocal responsibilities towards one another, while downplaying - although not eradicating - the patriarchal and misogynist elements of its previous stance.[161] In the reign of Nicholas I, a modified patriarchal ideal became the model of imperial rule. The private life of the tsar was staged so as to portray him as a loving and devoted husband and caring father, while the empress provided a model of maternal love and tenderness - a family idyll that was disseminated in paintings and engravings to a broad audience as well as to the elite. The new imagery dramatised a 'sharp division of sexual spheres' that mirrored developments in other European courts.[162]

Although arranged marriages continued to be the norm well into the nine­teenth century, there is evidence that by the reign of Nicholas I, a portion of the nobility had embraced the new affective ideal of marriage and come to value intimate and loving family relations. 'Can a marriage be stable and happy, when it is not based on feelings of mutual respect and the most tender love?' rhetorically inquired the governor of Nizhegorod province in 1828.[163] How­ever, it is questionable whether Nicholas's ideology of separate spheres had a broad popular basis in Russia, as it had in Great Britain and France.[164] While the 'domestic' was defined as women's proper sphere, as it was elsewhere, for Rus­sian noblewomen the domestic extended well beyond the confines of home and housekeeping. Women's subordinate status in law coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with their legal right to own and manage immovable property, which Russian wives, as well as single women and widows, enjoyed. Even married women could buy and sell and enter contracts, a status that was unique in Europe. Noblewomen's activities as property managers often tookprecedence over childrearing and brought such women into contact with local and central authorities and with the legal process.¹⁸ Given the lawlessness of provincial life and noblewomen's control of human chattel, estate management could require determination, even ruthlessness, rather than the gentleness usually associated with domesticity.

Outside the circle of privilege

The changes introduced by Peter and his eighteenth-century successors affected women of Russia's tax-paying population, townspeople as well as peasants, primarily in negative ways. The most significant change derived from the practice of conscription that Peter introduced. Conscription created a new social category, the soldier's wife (soldatka). If a peasant, conscription put the soldatka in the most marginal position by freeing her and her children from serfdom, thereby depriving her of her husband's share of the communal land and other benefits. Because they represented an extra mouth to feed and a potential threat to the other women ofthe household and community, soldatki might be driven from the village. Such women became highly vulnerable. The cities to which many migrated offered them little in the way of respectable employment and large numbers of men prepared to pay for sexual compan­ionship. Some women took up petty trade, many more hired out as domestic servants. However, enough turned to prostitution as a temporary or perma­nent expedient that soldiers' wives acquired an unsavory reputation. They also figured prominently among the mothers of illegitimate children. In the course of the eighteenth century, illegitimacy and infanticide became much more visible than they had been previously, and perhaps more commonplace as well. These social problems moved the state to action. Initially, concern to increase the population prompted Peter the Great to establish hospitals where mothers could deposit their illegitimate children in secret (in 1712, and again

Press, 1990), vol. IV pp. 134-5; Catherine Hall, 'The Sweet Delights of Home', in Perrot,

A History, p. 49.

18 Marrese, A Woman's Kingdom.

in 1714 and 1715). After his death, the shelters were dismantled. In the reign of Catherine the Great, foundling homes were established in Moscow (in 1764) and St Petersburg (1771), with the aim not only of preserving the lives of ille­gitimate children, but equally important, of creating an enlightened citizenry, capable of promoting the welfare of the country. The homes failed to achieve these goals.[165]

At the same time, the state moved to exert greater control over women's sexuality. A decree of 26 July 1721 stated that women and girls convicted of 'loose behaviour' were to be handed over to the College of Mines and Manufac­tures and given as workers to industrialists or sent to Moscow. In 1736 Empress Anna ordered all 'debauched' women to be beaten with a cat-of-nine-tails and thrown out of their homes. In 1762 Catherine the Great designated a hospital in St Petersburg for the confinement of women of 'debauched behaviour'. In 1800 Emperor Paul I sentenced to forced labour in Siberian factories all women who 'have turned to drunkenness, indecency and a dissolute life'.[166] The law also enjoined the police to pick up 'vagrant maids' of dubious character who belonged to 'the poorest and most disreputable classes' if they might be har­bouring venereal disease.[167] Finally, in 1843, followingthe example ofthe French, the Russians moved to subject prostitutes to regulation. Illicit sexual behaviour would henceforward be tolerated, but only within the boundaries set by the state. A woman who 'traded in vice' could either enter a licensed brothel or register as an independent prostitute, carrying a 'yellow' ticket that attested to the state of her health. Both were required to undergo regular examinations for venereal disease. The policy clearly targeted lower-class women who lived outside the boundaries of the patriarchal family.

In many ways, the new emphasis on culture and education increased dif­ferences between elites and others. Only a tiny minority of non-elite women enjoyed access to education. Attached to Smolnyi institute was a school that admitted daughters of townsmen, although by 1791 nobles so inundated it that they outnumbered commoners. In 1786 Catherine established state primary and high schools that admitted girls and educated them for free. Alexander I extended her work, establishing parish schools at the base of the educational system. Some non-elite parents came to value education for daughters. During his childhood, recalled the clergyman Dmitrii Rostislavov, born in a provincial town in 1809, 'many clergymen, townspeople, and even rich peasants saw a need to teach reading... to their daughters'.[168] A few were even willing to pay: in Anna Virt's private school in Moscow, daughters of townsmen and a priest studied together with the offspring of officials, military officers and foreign­ers in 1818-20. Some merchants sent their daughters to school; Old Believers encouraged the literacy of daughters as well as sons. The overall number of women students remained tiny, however. Altogether, there were 1,178 female pupils in Russia by 1792, and 2,007 by 1802 (of a total of 24,064 pupils). In 1824, it was calculated that there were 338 girls in district schools and 3,420 in pri­vate schools; most female students undoubtedly derived from the nobility.[169]Literacy rates for Russia's population remained very low: in I834, only I of208 Russians could read and write; in 1856,1 of 143, the overwhelming majority of them male. In response to clerical concerns about lagging behind educated society and complaints about uneducated wives, in 1843 the Russian Orthodox Church opened a special school for daughters of the clergy, with the goal of preparing them for marriage.[170] While accessible to only a few, education and culture had become another measure of elite status for women as well as men.

The reform era

Women's subordinate social status became a burning issue in the middle of the nineteenth century, as educated Russians began to subject every traditional institution to re-evaluation, the patriarchal family included.[171] In the opinion of those on the left of Russia's emergent political spectrum, authoritarian family relations reproduced and reinforced the social and political hierarchy. In order to foster the democratisation of society, family relations would have to be democratised, too. Social critics intended women to play a vital role in creating a new social order, but they disagreed about the character of that role. Was women's primary responsibility to devote themselves to the family and to appropriate mothering of future citizens? Or did the broader society need women's energies, too? As substantial numbers of women and men sought to answer these questions for themselves and others, the 'woman question' emerged as one of the central issues of the day.

The debate unfolded in 1856, when Nikolai Pirogov (1810-81), the surgeon and educator, published an essay entitled 'Questions of Life' that posed explic­itly the question of women's social role. Pirogov had just returned from the Crimean War (1854-6), where he had supervised some one hundred and sixty women who had volunteered as nurses. The women had served without pay and working right at the front, faced many of the same dangers and hardships as soldiers. To Pirogov, the women's exemplary work demonstrated that 'up to now, we have completely ignored the marvelous gifts of our women'.[172] To his mind, those gifts were mainly applicable in the family. To prepare women better to perform the role of mother to future male citizens and true compan­ion to their husbands, capable of sharing fully in men's concerns and struggles, Pirogov advocated improvements in women's education.[173]

This was a goal that the new tsar could also embrace. In 1858 Alexander II approved a proposal for secondary schools for girls. The purpose: to improve the quality of public life by providing that 'religious, moral and mental edu­cation which is required of every woman, and especially, of future mothers'.[174]The new schools, called gimnaziia, were to be day schools, offering a six- year course of study that included Russian language, religion, arithmetic and a smattering of science. Progimnazia were opened the same year, offering a three-year course of training and a similar curriculum, exclusive of science. The schools were only partially subsidised; to cover the remaining costs, they depended on public support, which emerged only slowly. By 1865 there were 29 gimnazia and 75 progimnaziia in all of Russia; by 1883, there were 100 and 185 of each respectively, with an enrolment of roughly 50,000 students. Open to girls of all estates, gimnaziia and progimnaziia helped to encourage a blurring of social boundaries: over the next forty years, the proportion of well-born female students diminished, while that of peasants and townspeople grew.[175]In 1876 a supplementary year of pedagogical training became available to gim- nazia students, qualifying graduates for employment as a domestic teacher or tutor, and as a teacher in elementary schools and the first four classes of girls' secondary schools.

Some social critics adopted a more radical approach to the 'woman ques­tion'. For the critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, writing in 1856, the family was a 'Realm of Darkness', in which 'despotism' bore most heavily on women. Although his essay by that title focused on the merchant milieu as depicted by the playwright Alexander Ostrovskii, in Dobroliubov's view family despo­tism was more widespread. Almost everywhere, he contended, 'women have about as much value as parasites'.[176] A new concern with women's rights in the family prompted critiques of the patriarchal character of family law. There can be no true Christian love or hatred of vice in a family where despotism, arbitrariness and coercion reign and 'wives are given over in slavery to their husband' contended the liberal jurist Mikhail Filippov in 1861.[177] The eman­cipation of the serfs added an economic dimension to the woman question, depriving many nobles of their livelihood and forcing their daughters to sup­port themselves. Equally important, young people of this era who espoused 'new ideas' rejected the elite culture that they associated with serfdom - a life of idleness and luxury, supported by the toil of others. For some women, even dependence on a husband became unacceptable. The more radical were convinced that whether married or single, a woman must never 'hang on the neck of a man'.[178]

Encouraged by the attention of the press, elite women began to express their shared interest and identity as women. In 1859 noblewomen in the province of Vologda established separate meetings at gatherings of the provincial nobility. To minimise distinctions of wealth, they required participants to wear simple dress.[179] That same year, Russia's first woman-oriented association emerged, the Society for Inexpensive Lodgings, with the goal of providing decent housing and otherwise assisting needy gentlewomen. Three well-educated women from elite backgrounds took the lead: Anna Filosofova (1837-1912), the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat; Nadezhda Stasova (1822-?), the daughter of a court architect and godchild of Alexander I, and Maria Trubnikova, (1835-97), the daughter of an exiled Decembrist (Vasilii Ivashev). To the charitable activities that had long comprised part of propertied women's role, the three brought the democratic spirit of the new era, providing employment for the residents of their housing, daycare for the children and a communal kitchen to prepare meals. Thus began a movement for expanding the rights of women.

Other women took action on their own behalf. In 1859 womenbegan to audit university lectures, which had just been reopened to the public. Within a year, women's presence during university lectures had become almost common­place. In 1861 several scientists at the St Peterburg Medical Surgery Academy opened their laboratories to women. Among those who audited medical lec­tures was Nadezhda Suslova, the daughter of a serf. Suslova completed her medical studies in Zurich, where she earned the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1867, the first woman to receive such a degree from a European university. Her success inspired hundreds of other women to follow her example. In the cities, some young women openly flouted conventional gender expectations. They cropped their hair, dispensed with crinolines and simplified their dress; they smoked in public, went about the streets without an escort, and wore blue-tinted glasses. A few even donned the clothing of men in order to enjoy greater freedom. Young rebels became known to their critics as nihilists (nig- ilistki) because of their rejection of 'the stagnant past and all tradition'. Some came to regard intimate relations and family life as an obstacle to women's freedom and sought to reject them altogether. Their views can be heard in the credo of Lelenka, the heroine of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's novella The Boarding School Girl (published i860). Lelenka proclaims that she 'will never fall in love, never . . . On the contrary, I say to everyone, do as I have done. Liberate yourselves, all you people with hands and a strong will! Live alone. Work, knowledge, freedom - that's what life is all about.'[180]

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's enormously influential novel, What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat'? 1862), offered a different solution to the 'woman question', one that sought to create a balance between public and private life and granted men a central role. Freed from an oppressive family situation by marriage to a medical student, a 'new man', the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, enjoys a room of her own and the freedom to love another, as well as meaningful, socially use­ful work. She organises a sewing workshop according to collective principles; eventually, she becomes a physician, each stage of her development facilitated by her husband. By depicting the personal and productive relations that would constitute the socialist future, Chernyshevsky's novel linked women's libera­tion with the more sweeping goals of social transformation and revolution. The book became a key work in shaping the outlook of this and subsequent generations.

Among conservative officials, however, the radical implications of women's liberation aroused concern about threats to the political order. Although few women were involved, conservatives connected women students with the stu­dent unrest ofthe early 1860s. InJuly 1863, the Ministry of Education closed uni­versity doors to women. A year later, the Medical Surgery Academy expelled women, too. Conservative fears complicated but failed to halt efforts by advo­cates of women's rights to expand their educational opportunities. Advanced secondary courses for women opened in 1869 (the Alarchinskii courses), as did university preparatory courses (the Liubianskii courses); three years later, courses that prepared women for secondary-school teaching became available (the Guerrier courses). Thanks to the support of Dmitrii Miliutin, minister of war, that same year the government established Courses for Learned Mid- wives in St Petersburg. In 1876 an additional year was added to the four-year programme and the courses renamed Women's Medical Courses, qualifying graduates to work as physicians. That same year, the government sanctioned the opening of 'higher courses' for women, essentially, women's universities that awarded no degree. Kazan University became the first to take advantage of the opportunity; in 1878, Kiev and St Petersburg followed. The St Petersburg courses, known as the Bestuzhev courses, became the most well-known and long-lasting. Graduates of women's courses found employment as midwives, medical assistants (fel'dshery), pharmacists, physicians, journalists and most commonly of all, teachers. The profession of teaching became increasingly feminised: the proportion of women teaching in rural schools in European Russia almost doubled between 1880 and 1894, growing from 20.6 to 38.6 per cent of the total. By 1911 women constituted well over half rural teachers. Ini­tially drawn primarily from among the privileged, by the pre-war period over 40 per cent of women teachers in rural schools derived from the peasantry or were townswomen; indeed, the most striking fact about such teachers was their social diversity.[181]

A minority of educated women, however, viewed Russia's social inequities as far more important than educational or career opportunities. Precisely as conservative officials had feared, some women students came to oppose the social and political order. Hundreds of young women, most of privileged background, became involved in the populist movement of the 1870s and went 'to the people' to educate or rouse them to revolution. Many wound up in prison. In January 1878, Vera Zasulich, the daughter of an impoverished noble family, initiated the terrorist phase of the populist movement by shooting General Trepov, the city governor of St Petersburg, before a room full of witnesses in retaliation for his beating of a radical prisoner. A jury acquitted her. Women played a prominent role in the People's Will, the organisation that emerged when the populist movement divided over the use of violence. On i March 1881, Sofia Perovskaia, the daughter of a former governor-general of St Petersburg, directed the successful assault on Tsar Alexander II, becoming the first Russian woman to be executed for a political crime.

The death of Tsar Alexander II at the hands of populist terrorists and the ascension to the throne of his son, Alexander III (r. 1881-94) brought significant efforts to restore the pre-reform gender order. Blaming higher education for women's political radicalism, conservative officials attempted to render it off limits. In 1882 the Women's Medical Courses ceased to accept new students, and in 1887 ceased operation. Admissions to all other women's courses ended in 1886, while the government pondered its next moves. Although the Bestuzhev courses were permitted to continue, their programmes were narrowed and enrolment was restricted, with a 3 per cent quota for non-Christians (meaning Jews). At the same time, the government sought to reinforce the patriarchal family. Regarding his own family as a 'sacred personal sphere' and himself as the 'guardian of the sanctity and steadfastness of the family principle', Tsar Alexander III strove to secure the inviolability of the marital bond.[182] The efforts of liberal jurists to reform Russia's patriarchal marital laws foundered on the rock of conservative resistance, led by Konstantin Pobedonostsev and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Nevertheless, reactionaries failedto turnbackthe clock, inlargepart because of the modernising changes that the government itself unleashed, which affected even some peasant women, although to a lesser extent than men. Between 1856 and 1896, the number of pupils in primary schools grew from roughly 450,000 to approximately 3.8 million, while the proportion of girls among them increased from 8.2 to 21.3 per cent.[183] While less than 10 per cent of peasant women were considered literate at the close of the nineteenth cen­tury according to the minimal standards of tsarist census-takers, even this low rate represented an advance over earlier years, and rates were rising among the younger age groups. Women's access to secondary education grew as well. During the reign of Alexander III, girls' gymnaziia almost doubled in number. Pressures to expand higher education for women intensified after his death.

In I895 the new tsar Nicholas II approved the St Petersburg Women's Medi­cal Institute. Enrolment in the Bestuzhev courses expanded and the Moscow Higher Women's Courses (the Guerrier courses) re-opened in 1900-1. In 1903 a special pedagogical institute for women opened in Odessa, enrolling 600 hundred students in the first two years. Over time, the social background of students in higher educational institutions grew more diverse. Although impoverished students were far the less likely to complete the courses, in lecture halls and reading rooms, young women from clerical, merchant and artisan, even peasant backgrounds took their places beside the daughters of privileged elites.[184]

Economic developments in the post-reform period had somewhat broader repercussions forpeasant women. The expansion ofthe cash economy affected their consumption patterns. Manufactured clothing and urban-style fashion increasingly became a mark of prestige in the countryside. But long-standing peasant practices often mediated women's interaction with the marketplace. Frequently, men rather than women took advantage of opportunities to earn money elsewhere, leaving women and the aged to tend the land. If a house­hold needed the cash, women were more likely to labour at home. Offering a limitless reserve of inexpensive labour, in the hinterlands of Moscow tens of thousands wound cotton thread on bobbins for a factory or sewed kid gloves or rolled hollow tubes for cigarettes from materials distributed by an entrepreneur, who paid them for their work and sold the finished product. Their modest financial contributions did little to enhance women's status at home.[185] Connected to the market by virtue of their income-producing activi­ties, women nevertheless worked within the traditional patriarchal household. Many of the tens of thousands of peasant women who earned wages in nearby factories likewise acted as members of a family economy rather than as inde­pendent labourers. Women moved in and out of the labour force in response to their household's needs.

Other circumstances narrowed the horizons of the growing numbers of women who laboured far from home. As industrialisation proceeded, women's proportion in the burgeoning factory labour force grew: from about one in every five workers in 1885 to about one in every three by 1914. Still larger numbers of migrant women found positions in domestic service. Although spinsters and widows, the first to migrate, often left for good, marriageable women usually migrated temporarily, in order to feed themselves, assemble a trousseau and, if possible, contribute to their family economy. Most migrant women experienced demoralising working and living conditions. They lived in factory dormitories, where dozens crowded together in a single large room, or they rented a corner just big enough for their bed in an apartment shared with others. Domestic servants often lacked even the modest room of their own available to their servant sisters to the West. The servant's wage was low, her position generally insecure and work never-ending. Women factory workers had lower rates of literacy than men and received a fraction of men's wages. Earning barely enough for subsistence, many survived on a diet of bread and cucumbers. Their gender barred women from the drinking estab­lishments where men socialised and exchanged ideas. Domestic servants, who enjoyed little or no free time, were even more isolated and vulnerable than the woman worker. Perhaps as a result, domestic servants were disproportion­ately represented among both registered prostitutes and the 8-9,000 women who abandoned their illegitimate children to foundling homes every year in Moscow and St Petersburg.[186]

Even so, cities offered opportunities to women migrants. Wage in hand, women could extend their horizons and alter their fates in a manner unthink­able in the village. Aspiring to emulate the appearance of their social betters, single women workers sometimes spent their wages on urban-style fashions, skimping on food in order to afford a pair of boots or an attractive dress. In their free time, they found inexpensive entertainments at urban fairs and plea­sure gardens or in the amateur workers' theatres, all of which proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century. By enabling migrant women to dress and amuse themselves in ways similar to women of other classes, city life could erode social boundaries and make social distinctions seem both less relevant and more burdensome.

The burgeoning marketplace also fostered such trends, by encouraging the desire for individual pleasure and gratification. Advertising enticed women of all classes to consume the items displayed in department store windows and on the pages ofpopular magazines and to employ beauty aides to decorate the self. Advicebooks on appropriate dress and deportment proliferated. Newpastimes such as bicycling enhanced women's mobility and personal independence. Consumer culture tended to promote individual indulgence over family values.

Anastasia Vial'tseva vividly personified the new trend. Born a peasant in 1871, at the turn of the century Vial'tseva sang bitter-sweet romances about sexual desire, attracting hordes of worshipping fans and earning fabulous sums of money, which she spent lavishly and conspicuously on herself.[187]

As the century drew to a close, women assumed more visible roles in pub­lic life. Particularly in rural areas, women's religious communities provided charity to the poor, education to the young and care to the sick even during the worst of the reaction, and the number of such communities expanded dra­matically towards the end of the century, part of a broader religious revival.[188]As restrictions eased in the early 1890s, unprecedented opportunities became available for women to contribute to and define the public welfare. In 1894 Municipal Guardianships for the poor, a form of welfare organisation, were established in all major cities. Private charitable organisations proliferated, offering a broad range of services. Women directed charitable organisations, served on governing and advisory boards, and worked for charitable establish­ments either as volunteers or as salaried employees, influencing their goals and orientation. Interestingly, Russia's charitable organisations eschewed the maternalist and domestic-oriented discourse that dominated such endeavours in the West, emphasising instead the importance of childcare institutions such as nurseries and asylums, and the role of women as workers.[189]

Women's new opportunities and enhanced sense of self left many dis­satisfied with the limitations on their lives. When in a decree of 1897, the St Petersburg city government forbade women teachers to marry, women teachers protested. The marriage ban limited their personal freedom, argued Nadezhda Rumiantseva at a conference of teachers.[190] Responding to conde­scending treatment by university officials and male students, at the turn of the century women students increasingly framed their demands for change 'in terms of the individual right to self-expression and self-determination'.[191] By 1904 roughly a thousand working women had joined the separate women's section of Gapon's Assembly of Russian Factory Workers that Vera Karelina organised in St Petersburg. Karelina's most effective organising tool was a story that she read aloud, describing the humiliating body searches by male personnel that women workers were forced to undergo.[192]

1905 and after

During the revolution of I905, women across the social spectrum mobilised in enormous numbers to demand an expansion of political rights and greater social justice. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, pharmacists, pro­fessionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autocracy and a representative form ofgovernment. Labouring women oftenparticipated in the burgeoning strike movement in ways connected to their family roles. In factories where women predominated, the textile industry in particular, strike demands clearly reflected their presence. Factory after factory demanded day care, maternity leave, nursing breaks and protection of women workers. Even as they demonstrated new assertiveness, such demands reinforced a gender division of labour by touching on women's role as mother and not on their actual working conditions. Peasant women also participated actively in rural unrest primarily in their family roles.[193] However, the intense politicisation and pervasive use of a language of rights stimulated other women, primarily the educated, to speak on their own behalf and to claim their place in the expanding public sphere.

Feminist organisations emerged to promote women's interests. The most significant and the first to try to speak on behalf of all of Russia's women was the All-Russian Union for Women's Equality (Women's Union). The union's platform, adopted in May 1905, called for the equality of the sexes before the law; equal rights to the land for peasant women; laws providing for the wel­fare, protection and insurance of women workers; the abolition of regulated prostitution; co-education at all levels of schooling; and women's suffrage. Although its membership was primarily middle class, the Women's Union worked to forge alliances across the social divide and encourage lower-class women to speak for themselves, inviting 'women of the toiling classes' to formulate their own demands and pledging to support them.[194] Feminists also tried to reach out to peasant women, joining the Peasant Union, and convincing it to adopt the plank of women's suffrage.[195] Feminist efforts to expand their social base bore some fruit. Women domestic servants in Moscow and St Petersburg joined feminist-organised unions; they attended feminist- sponsored clubs. Women workers added their signatures to petitions favour­ing women's suffrage. A number of peasant women's groups were formed and some petitions signed by peasant men took up the demand for women's suffrage.

Nevertheless, 1905 brought feminists very little in the way of measurable gains. To be sure, the granting of civil liberties, however limited, allowed more scope for organising. The revolution also marked a watershed in the history of women's education. The curriculum of women's higher courses expanded and between 1906 and 1910, new women's courses opened in many provin­cial cities. In addition, a number of private co-educational universities were established, offering new curricula and electives. The enrolment of women students increased exponentially: in 1900-1, there were 2,588 women students enrolled in higher education in Russia; by 1915-16, the number was 44,017. Nevertheless, the status of women's education remained insecure and career options limited, leaving an enormous gap between education and employment opportunities.[196]

Moreover, the October Manifesto enfranchised only men. The liberal Kadet party divided over the issue of women's suffrage, while parties to the left, although staunch advocates of women's rights, were with the exception of the Trudovik party suspicious of and reluctant to support 'bourgeois femi­nism'. Further, the evidence suggests that working-class and peasant women felt more affinity with the men of their class than they did with middle-class feminists. Even when feminists succeeded in organising women workers, they had trouble retaining their loyalty. As one feminist lamented, it was rela­tively easy to establish circles among labouring women, but as soon as their political consciousness was raised, they wanted to work with the men of their class. As a result, the Women's Union 'acted as a kind of preparation for party work'.[197] The social divisions that weakened opposition to autoc­racy divided the women's movement as well. After 1907, membership in the women's movement sharply declined, as it did in radical political parties in general.

In the aftermath of i905, other issues, especially 'the sexual question', absorbed the public's attention. Commercial culture flourished. Advertise­ments encouraged women to develop more beautiful busts; they offered cures for sexual troubles; they touted contraceptives. On the back pages of news­papers, 'models' boasting 'attractive bodies' offered to pose for a fee.[198] The 'new woman' symbolised the new era. Freed from the constraints of conven­tional morality, she dominated the imagination of the reading public. The immensely popular boulevard novel, Anastasia Verbitskaia's The Keys to Hap­piness (Kliuchi schast'ia, published 1908-13) was one of the bestselling works of the time. The novel addressed women of all classes who felt stifled by societal and professional restraints, and emphasised their right to sexual adventure and professional achievement.[199] Non-readers might encounter the 'new woman' on the silver screen.

Yet more restrictive ways of regarding women continued, and drew new life from the fears that revolution evoked. This can be seen in the debate over abortion, which Russian law penalised as a form of murder. Supposedly, its incidence had escalated dramatically following the revolution of i905. Pro­gressive physicians sought, unsuccessfully, to decriminalise the procedure and at professional meetings, women physicians spoke vociferously on behalf of reproductive freedom. Amongthe most vocal was the feminist physician Maria Pokrovskaia, who denounced Russia's punitive abortion laws as unwarranted restrictions on female autonomy. Invoking the concept of voluntary mother­hood, she claimed that only women were in a position to know their own needs. To proponents of decriminalisation such as she, abortion symbolised women's autonomy. To others, however, abortion symbolised women's sex­ual licence and underscored the dangerous aspects of women's emancipation. Even those who approved of women's freedom from legal and career restraints condemned women's sexual liberation.[200]

However controversial she might be, by the outbreak of the First World War, the 'new woman' had apparently come to stay. She was very much a product ofthe changes that had swept Russia in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The expansion of women's education, the growth of the market economy and the increased emphasis on the self and its gratification contributed more to undermining the patriarchal family than had the radical critiques of the 1860s. Significantly, wifehood and motherhood played a minimal role in the woman- related discourse ofthe early twentieth century, although those themes gained more prominence following 1905. Yet the 'new woman' remained a minority phenomenon, swimming against a conservative tide. Patriarchal relations con­tinued to serve as both metaphor and model for Russia's political order, upheld by the law and by the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast majority of Russia's population. Wifehood and motherhood, not the pleasures and freedoms of new womanhood, remained the aspiration of countless num­bers of Russia's women. Although the nature of social divides had changed, they remained almost as unbridgeable on the eve of the First World War as they had been 200 years before.

Gender and the legal order in Imperial Russia

MICHELLE LAMARCHE MARRESE

This chapter will explore a single but significant dimension of women's expe­rience in Imperial Russia: the transformation of their legal status from the Petrine reforms to the eve of the 1917 Revolution. It has become a truism among scholars that law codes both mirror and produce gender difference and hierarchies.[201] In this regard, Russian legal culture proved no exception: normative law drew marked distinctions between women and men, as well as distinguishing between individuals on the basis of social standing. When applied to women, the juridical system in Imperial Russia was also notewor­thy for tensions and inconsistencies that intensified with the elaboration of women's status in written law. This essay will investigate the origins of com­peting definitions of gender in the realms of property, family and criminal law. In the pre-reform era, the clarification of women's civil status elevated noblewomen's standing in the patriarchal family by extending their rights over property, yet simultaneously institutionalised their subordination to their hus­bands. The legal regime that emerged after the Great Reforms of the 1860s placed a novel emphasis on female vulnerability and the assignment of women to the domestic sphere, at the very moment that unprecedented numbers of peasant women were making their way into the urban marketplace.[202] As I will argue in the following pages, if the legal order in eighteenth-century Russia minimised sexual difference in many respects, nineteenth-century innovations in the law highlighted gender distinctions to an unprecedented degree.

Noblewomen, inheritance, and the control of property

The pre-Petrine law of property was characterised by unequal inheritance for sons and daughters and limitations on women's use and control of landed estates. For all that Muscovite law codes allowed women a surprising degree of independence in matters judicial,[203] elite Russian women shared many legal disabilities with their European counterparts. The reforms of Peter the Great, however, initiated an era of profound cultural and legal change for Russian noblewomen. Most notably, the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual expansion of women's rights to property. Innovations in female inheritance were less dramatic than advances in women's control of their fortunes, yet the elevation of women's inheritance rights and married women's acquisition of the right to manage and alienate their estates were emblematic of a larger process of legal change: the trend toward individualised rather than familial property rights among the nobility in the eighteenth century, and the efforts of the elite to clarify their standing in the law of property in relation to other family members and the state. Significantly, noblewomen took active part in the extension of their property rights and went on to make ample use of their legal prerogatives.[204]

From the middle of the nineteenth century, inspired by debates over the 'woman question', Russian historians and jurists wrote extensively on the topic of women's property rights. Russian scholars issued extravagant pronounce­ments about the legal status of their female compatriots, declaring them the most fortunate women in Europe with regard to control of property but the most disadvantaged in the domain of inheritance.[205] Both generalisations were overstated, yet it cannot be denied that from the eighteenth century the evo­lution of Russian women's legal status diverged significantly from that of their

European equivalents. In Western Europe, differential control of property sharply distinguished the sexes, associating men with real estate and women with personality, while - as often as not - subjecting married women's property to control of their husbands.⁶

In regard to female inheritance, Russian law displayed only marginal superi­ority over European legal codes. The post-Petrine law of inheritance continued to favour male heirs, while failing to elucidate the claims of married daugh­ters and the legal status of the dowry vis-a-vis inheritance. After decades of debate, imperial legislators guaranteed daughters, regardless ofmarital status, a statutory share of one-fourteenth, or 7 per cent, of their parents' immove- able property, as well as one-eighth of their personal assets, after which their brothers received equal shares ofthe estate. When no male offspring survived, daughters divided their parents' holdings equally. By the nineteenth century, intestate inheritance law was in dire need of revision, as European states began to equalise the inheritance rights of sons and daughters. Nonetheless, the revised rules of succession at the end of the eighteenth century represented a genuine achievement for noblewomen, who had won greater security in the law of inheritance and the right to litigate for a statutory share of family assets.⁷

It was in the realm of control of property, however, that Russian noble­women made their most striking advance vis-a-vis their European counter­parts. From 1753 Russian noblewomen enjoyed the right to alienate and man­age their property during marriage.⁸ Noblewomen's control of their assets, whether acquired as dowry, purchased or inherited, inspired foreign observers to remark on this curious exception to Russian women's legal servitude. 'You must know that every Woman has the right over her Fortune totally indepen­dent of her Husband and he is as independent of his wife', Catherine Wilmot marvelled in a letter from Russia to her sister Harriet in 1806. 'Marriage there­fore is no union of interests whatsoever, and the Wife if she has a large Estate and happens to marry a poor man is still consider'd rich . . . This gives a curi­ous sort of hue to the conversations of the Russian Matrons which to a meek English Woman appears prodigious independence in the midst of a Despotic Government!'⁹ In his account of Russia in the 1840s, August von Haxthausen

6 A vast literature exists on the topic of women and property For a detailed overview of this literature, see Marrese, A Woman's Kingdom.

7 M. L. Marrese, 'From Maintenance to Entitlement: Defining the Dowry in Eighteenth- Century Russia', in W Rosslyn (ed.), Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 209-26.

8 PSZ, vol. 13, no. 10.111 (14.06.1753). M. L. Marrese, 'The Enigma of Married Women's Control of Property in Eighteenth-Century Russia', RR 58, 3 (July 1999): 380-95.

9 Martha Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, 1803-1808, ed. and intro. Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 234.

also observed, 'In Russia the female sex occupies a different position from its counterpart in the rest of Europe.' He went on to relate that 'A large part of the real estate is...in the hands of women', adding that 'it is easy to understand what a great influence women enjoy in society as a result'.[206]

Noblewomen's control of their estates was, moreover, an active concept, rather than a mere legal convention in many families. Greater equality in the law of property translated into women's acquisition of estates and into striking similarities between women and men in regard to use of their assets: noblewomen became enthusiastic participants in the market for land and serfs, as well as urban real estate. Women as a group engaged in the same range of property transactions as men, and the size of women's estates was com­mensurate with that of their male counterparts. Indeed, the scale of women's holdings grew dramatically from the middle of the eighteenth century: by the nineteenth century, noblewomen controlled as much as one-third of the land and serfs in private hands. The presence of married women as both sellers and investors in property after 1750 increased steadily, while the participation of widows and unmarried women dwindled.[207] Married women engaged in busi­ness in their own names, were present at property transactions and assumed responsibility for managing the family estate. Noblewomen's legal and eco­nomic autonomy, coupled with the frequent absences of their husbands on state service, ensured that significant numbers of women in Imperial Russia were as likely to concern themselves with investment decisions and large-scale management as with the supervision of house serfs and other domestic tasks.

Gender conventions and the law of property in the eighteenth century

Russian law-makers stopped short of establishing complete parity between the sexes in regard to property, particularly in their failure to equalise inheritance rights. Yet the contention of this work is that, for noblewomen, from the mid­dle of the eighteenth century, gender difference in Russia was muted in the law of property.[208] Once law-makers granted women the right to control their fortunes, they gradually withdrew legal provisions designed to protect wives from husbands who tried to defraud them of their assets. Far from being afforded special treatment, property-owning women assumed all the respon­sibilities of male proprietors. They were expected to defend their holdings against the encroachments of husbands, kin and neighbouring proprietors. Nor were noblewomen absolved of responsibility for their own, or their chil­dren's, financial affairs by virtue of their sex. Writing early in the nineteenth century, the memoirist F. F. Vigel criticised Princess Gargarina for neglecting her estate: 'Like all the nobility in our country, not only women, but also men, she did not think about her business affairs, which were in a sorry state.'¹³ Like many of his contemporaries, Vigel all but prescribed an active role for women in estate administration.

With the extension of noblewomen's property rights, however, a fundamen­tal contradiction characterised married women's legal status in Russia. At the heart of this contradiction lay the tension between married women's station in family law and their standing in the law of property. Custom, family law and religious ideology unanimously prescribed women's personal subjugation to their husbands. At the same time, from 1753 the law of property defined mar­ried women as autonomous agents and guaranteed them full control over any property in their possession. It should come as no surprise that these principles could clash, and often at the expense of female autonomy. Or, as one observer of Russian social customs remarked, 'Tho a married Woman has compleat power over her Fortune she has not over her person.'¹⁴

The tension between property and family law was an eighteenth-century innovation. Although Russian law acknowledged separate property and mar­ried women's ownership of the dowry long before 1753, the administration of marital property was traditionally a joint venture¹⁵ and married women sold or mortgaged their estates only with their husbands' consent, if not at their behest.¹⁶ Yet as rights of property came to be invested in (noble) individuals, rather than families, and women gained control of their estates, maintaining the boundary between the property of husband and wife created a host of dilemmas for Russian legal authorities. In particular, determining serf owner­ship when peasants who belonged to spouses married and produced children

and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, p. 371.

13 F. F. Vigel, Zapiski (Moscow: 1928), p. 26.

14 Bradford, The Russian Journals, p. 232.

15 Akty iuridicheskie, ili sobranieform starinnogo deloproizvodstva (St Petersburg: 1838), no. 71, X; no. 357.

16 Marrese, A Woman's Kingdom, pp. 52-4.

repeatedly drew the attention of the courts. The debates over serf ownership exemplify the problems inherent in maintaining separate estates in marriage on a day-to-day basis. A series of legal conventions, including the registration of dowry villages in the name of the bride, made husbands and wives acutely aware of the separation of their assets and undermined marriage, in the words of Catherine Wilmot, as a 'union of interests'. To be sure, many noblewomen trusted their husbands to administer their holdings for their mutual bene­fit, as well as in the interests of their children. Yet this arrangement by no means worked to the advantage of women or their heirs if the presumption of common interests broke down. Women's failure to keep close watch on their holdings could lead to considerable loss for themselves or, ifthey predeceased their husbands and the latter remarried, for their children.[209] In order to reap the benefits of separate property, noblewomen were compelled to patrol the legal boundaries between their own estates and those of their husbands.

Serf women, particularly house serfs, comprised an important part of a Russian bride's dowry, along with other goods she would need to set up her household. As a result, marriages frequently took place between serfs belonging to married couples. Such arrangements disturbed no one while the serf owners' marriage endured; when one spouse died, however, a serious complication arose. The Ulozhenie, or Law Code, of 1649 forbade serf owners to separate wives from their husbands. Since married serfs could not be parted, the surviving serf owner confronted an awkward dilemma: which spouse was the owner of the serf couple and their offspring?

The widow Akulina Voeikova insisted that she was the rightful owner when she brought a suit before the Land College in 1737. Following her husband's death in 1735, Voeikova entered into a lengthy inheritance dispute with her son-in-law, Prince Nikanor Meshcherskii. Voeikova did not contest her daugh­ter's right to inherit her father's estate, but she insisted on her full widow's entitlement of one-seventh of her husband's immoveable property, as well as the return of her dowry. According to Voeikova, Meshcherskii had left her with less than one-tenth of her husband's assets, and included in her daugh­ter's share all of Voeikova's serf women, whom her husband had married to peasants in his own villages.

Voeikova pursued her case to the Senate in 1744, after the Land College ruled that her dowry serfs would be returned to her, but their husbands and children would be considered part of her entitlement, thus diminishing the portion she would inherit from her husband's estate. In contrast, the Senate found that the ruling of the Land College contradicted an article in the Ulozhenie, which stipulated that when a woman died without issue, her serf women should be returned to her natal family. If these serfs had been given in marriage, the husbands must accompany their wives, regardless of their original ownership. Voeikova therefore was entitled to claim her serf women and their families as part of her original dowry, the Senate decreed, in addition to her statutory share of one-seventh of her husband's property.[210]

Similar disputes over the inheritance of married serfs recurred throughout the eighteenth century.[211] Until mid-century, noble widows clearly benefited from the courts' assertion of their right to reclaim their serf women, along with their families. This state of affairs proved much less satisfactory to men who felt they or their heirs had been short-changed. In 1767 noble deputies to the Legislative Commission brought their complaints to the attention of Catherine II, arguing that under the present rules men suffered a loss in serf ownership and that the proprietor of the serf husband, rather than the owner of the wife, should claim the entire family when a division of property took place.[212]

Members ofthe Senate echoed the logic ofthe nobility in subsequent rulings on inheritance. During the secondhalf ofthe eighteenth century, as law-makers revised their conception of women's relation to property, they also withdrew much of the protection they had previously offered propertied wives. Legal authorities acknowledged that, despite the formal separation of property in marriage before 1753, in practice married men made no distinction between their own and their wives' property. Thus, a decree in 1740 allowed for recruits to be levied from the villages of an officer's wife as well as from his own, 'since husbands use their wives' villages as they use their own, and for this reason they are required, upon retirement, to declare openly their own as well as their wives' villages'.[213] Having invested women with full rights of ownership in 1753, however, the Senate acknowledged the necessity of re-examining the problem of serf ownership by married couples.

As it reviewed a case presented in 1799, the General Session of the Senate discussed the principles that guided previous decisions on serf ownership in 1744 and 1762. The Senate had ruled in favour of the wife in 1744 because 'in previous times the dowry estate was registered not only in the name of the woman who was marrying, but in the name of her husband, and for this reason the husband, considering himself the owner of his wife's estate, could give her women serfs in marriage to his serfs'. To prevent the loss of property to the wife and her clan, the Senate had decreed that serf women and their offspring were to be returned to the wife and her family. But after 1744, the Senate continued, new customs governed the registration of dowries. Men could no longer appropriate their wives' estates now that officials registered the dowry in the name of the wife alone and women administered their prop­erty without their husbands' permission. Consequently, the Senate argued, it was unjust to replace one serf woman with an entire family, and they offered new guidelines to regulate the future division of assets. When husbands and wives agreed to marry their serfs to one another, the following principle was to apply: henceforth, the serf family belonged to the owner of the serf husband. If a husband married his serf women to his wife's peasants, the wife would be considered the owner, and vice versa.[214] Yet in their discussion the Senate failed to acknowledge that brides were far more likely to bring serf women to mar­riage, thus placing female proprietors at a disadvantage. In short, once women acquired the right to control their estates, they also took on the burden - willingly or not - of protecting their fortunes from their husbands.

Transactions between husband and wife

Determining serf ownership was not the only quandary the courts confronted in regulating property relations between husband and wife. In keeping with the convenient assumption that women could now determine how they would use their assets, law-makers gradually withdrew the protection they had once extended to wives who were coerced to part with their fortunes. Having spelled out the consequences for spouses who chose to marry their serfs to one another, the courts then struggled with the question of whether spouses might sell and mortgage property to each other. Their dilemma derived from women's obligation to obey their husbands - a duty that was originally a tenet of ecclesiastical law and later articulated as well in civil codes. With good reason the courts initially expressed apprehension that husbands would exploit their wives' weakness and force the latter to part with their assets on unfavourable terms. By the nineteenth century, however, official solicitude for vulnerable wives gave way to a firm conviction that married women were responsible for the defence of their property rights.

Since the Muscovite era, the courts had been sensitive to the potential for forced sales of land by abused wives. In order to minimise this danger, sellers of both sexes were examined in court when they executed deeds of purchase, mortgaged property or registered wills.[215] Yet it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century, after noblewomen had gained control of their assets, that the legality of transactions between spouses loomed large in debates within the Senate. The first debate in the Senate on transactions between spouses took place in 1763. The summary of the case dwelled primarily on the right of members of one clan to sell property to another; however, the Senate finally ruled that conveyances between husband and wife were unacceptable on the basis of a 1748 edict which forbade spouses to claim their entitlement of one-seventh of the other's estate during the other's lifetime. The sale of property by wives to husbands was more objectionable still, the senators reasoned, since a woman could not dispute her husband's decision and might relinquish her property at his insistence.[216]

In subsequent rulings legislators focused at times on the murky legal sta­tus of property transactions between spouses, while on other occasions they highlighted the necessity of protecting wives from greedy husbands.[217] As the Senate debated the legal niceties of allowing spouses to engage in business, however, sales and mortgages continued to take place between husbands and wives. Finding it impossible to stop the practice, the Senate reversed its earlier decisions on the grounds that the resolution of the 1763 dispute represented a ruling on a particular case, not a general principle. The final debate took place in the Senate in 1825 between the minister of justice and members of the Committee on the Codification of Law. In their discussion, most of the senators skirted the problem of men's authority over their wives altogether and focused on the status of the 1763 edict. The minister of justice argued that the Land College had set forth its opinion in 1763 as a guide for ruling on future transactions between spouses. Committee members countered the minister's reservations with their own interpretation: the issue was not, they maintained, whether the sale of property between spouses was beneficial or harmful to the parties involved, but whether any principle in Russian law existed to pro­hibit these transactions. Having reviewed the regulations in the Ulozhenie and the 1785 Charter to the Nobility, the committee concluded that no rationale could be found for preventing the transfer of property between spouses. After lengthy debate, with virtually no reference to feminine vulnerability, three of the four senators at the General Session agreed that transactions between husbands and wives should be permitted.[218]

Keeping in mind that previous decisions had rested, at least in part, on the conviction that propertied wives should be protected from abusive husbands, this was an ironic conclusion. As divorce petitions reveal, noblewomen contin­ued to be the victims of beatings by husbands who wished to seize control of their estates.[219] Yet the ruling was consistent with the general tone of Russian property law in extending minimal protection to women. From the middle of the eighteenth century the law made few distinctions between men and women's use of their assets. Placing an equal burden on both sexes to safe­guard their interests was the logical corollary of equalising women's status in the law of property. Thus, in the early nineteenth century Russian officials confronted a paradox that bedevils law-makers to this day: gender neutrality in the law by no means translated into a guarantee that women could fully realise their legal rights.

Unlimited obedience: women and family law

During the decades when Russian lawmakers elevated noblewomen's stand­ing in the law of property, two noteworthy trends emerged in ecclesiastical and family law. First, from the middle of the eighteenth century, grounds for dissolving marriage in the Orthodox Church dwindled dramatically, making divorce virtually impossible. Second, although wives had always been expected to be subservient to their husbands, a woman's responsibility to obey her hus­band was for the first time articulated in civil law, in Catherine II's Statute on Public Order (Ustav blagochiniia) of 1782 and transformed into an obliga­tion to demonstrate 'unlimited obedience' in the 1832 Digest of Laws (Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The contradiction between women's economic lib­erty and their personal dependence soon drew the attention of legal scholars and became the subject of on-going controversy in the nineteenth century.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, laymen and parish priests 'made and unmade marriage' with relative ease.[220] The tenuous nature of matrimonial vows before mid-century was also a feature of the pre-Petrine era:[221] not only did the Orthodox Church in early-modern Russia lackthe means to enforce its authority over marriage, but ecclesiastical authorities accepted a broad range of grounds for divorce. Until 1730, parish priests granted divorce certificates when spouses agreed to separate - and despite the prohibition on voluntary divorce after 1730, the practice continued until the middle of the eighteenth century.[222] In subsequent decades, however, the Church not only stepped up its supervision of clergy and laity, but imposed far more rigid regulations for the dissolution of marriage.

Even as the grounds for divorce contracted, unhappy spouses continued to petition the Holy Synod for permission to end their union. Overwhelmingly, both sexes appealed in vain, since the Orthodox Church was reluctant to accept adultery as grounds for divorce and rejected severe physical mistreatment as sufficient reason for terminating marriage. Indeed, by and large the Church sanctioned divorce only when separation had, de facto, taken place: namely, in cases of desertion and Siberian exile.[223] Ironically, although ecclesiastical courts refused to grant women divorce even when extreme physical abuse could not be denied, the civil courts displayed far less tolerance for husbands who sold their wives' property or spent their dowry funds. Noblewomen thus discovered that crimes against their property were more likely to elicit the sympathy of the courts than violations against their persons.[224]

While the bonds of matrimony tightened in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women's subservience to their husbands became the subject of civil law. The rules for conduct in marriage, articulated in the 1782 Statute on Public Order, instructed husbands to live with their wives in love and harmony, to protect them, forgive their shortcomings, sustain them in their infirmity and provide for their support. For their part, wives were to abide with their husbands in love, respect and obedience.[225] The emphasis on affective ties and feminine frailty in these strictures, as well as the demar­cation of male and female responsibilities, betrayed the growing influence of Western domestic ideals on Russian gender conventions.[226] The impact of the

Church on civil law was also apparent in an 1819 State Council ruling,[227] which prohibited spouses from living apart.[228] While this ruling did not put an end to informal separations, it prevented women - who relied on their husbands to obtain a passport, which was necessary for residence or employment - from fleeing an abusive or unhappy marriage without the latter's collusion.

Legal specialists hotly debated whether women's economic privileges ame­liorated their submission to their husbands, or if the constraint of 'unlimited obedience' effectively undermined their rights as proprietors. The statutes that drew the ire of proponents of women's property rights were contained in the 1832 Digest of Laws, the first Russian law code since the Ulozhenie of 1649. The task of legal codification had eluded eighteenth-century monarchs, despite their sporadic efforts to rationalise the law. It was only in 1830 that Nicholas I successfully appointed a commission to collect all decrees issued after the Ulozhenie, to reconcile their contradictions and produce a new legal code. Among the articles in Volume X were a series of regulations governing marriage which were clearly at variance with women's economic autonomy. Article 103 codified the obligation of spouses to live together and decreed that wives must follow their husbands in cases of resettlement or when they embarked on state service. Article 107 expanded upon the 1782 instructions to wives, stating that A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family, abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience (v neogranichennom poslushanii) and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of the house.' The following article added that a wife's submission to her hus­band's will did not free her from her obligations to her parents. The Statute on Public Order also provided the foundation for Article 106, which set forth the duties of husbands: A husband shall love his wife as his own body and live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her short­comings, and ease her infirmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and support to the best of his ability.'[229] Thus, the articles of the Digest of Laws not only institutionalised feminine weakness and reinforced gender hierarchies, but 'dramatized the sharp division of sexual spheres, between the public and the private, that was underway in Europe in these years'.[230]

The articles ofthe Digest of Laws graphically illustrated the tension between noblewomen's proprietary power and their subservient role in the patriarchal family. The publication of the new code also initiated lively debate over women's ability to realise their economic prerogatives. The historian Nikolai Karamzin maintained that foreign influence had inspired the new emphasis on women's subjugation in Russian law, and accused the statesman Mikhail Speranskii of imitating the Napoleonic Code when he introduced the provi­sion on wives' obedience in the Digest of Laws.[231] Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, the scholar N. V Reingardt declared that since the authority of husbands over wives was unlimited, women's economic indepen­dence was 'only a fiction'.[232] Similarly, K. D. Kavelin believed that the article mandating feminine obedience was not a mere recommendation but carried the force of law.[233]

By contrast, in his influential survey M. F. Vladimirskii-Budanov argued that eighteenth-century Russian law was noteworthy precisely for the absence of statutes concerning the relation of husband to wife, which belonged to the realm of religious ideology. He remarked that the 1782 Statute on Public Order was the first ruling to prescribe feminine obedience in civil law; furthermore, it was only in 1830 that the compilers of the Digest of Laws specified that women's obedience to their husbands must be unlimited. If this provision were implemented, he concluded, it would impinge not only upon women's financial autonomy but also on the prerogative of wives to file suit against their husbands. At no time, however, had Russian law restricted women's rights in this regard. In fact, Vladimirskii-Budanov observed, the 'recognition of equal rights for men and women' was 'the distinguishing feature of Russian law'.[234]

The glaring discrepancy between married women's personal and property rights in Russian law failed to recede as the imperial era drew to a close. Members of a commission for a new codification of Russian law in the 1880s discussed the troubling contradictions in women's legal status at length, and the majority spoke in favour of limiting the authority of husbands over their wives. According to one participant, marriage in Russia was still governed by the oppressive principles laid out in the Domostroi in the sixteenth cen­tury, which precluded married women's active control over their property. Another member of the commission maintained that although property law guaranteed women independent ownership of their fortunes, when disputes between spouses arose, it was not uncommon for legal authorities to distort the law and declare that husbands were the custodians of their wives' dowry during marriage.[235] Despite ample archival evidence that the courts upheld the property rights of women across the social spectrum,[236] the prevailing view among legal scholars and officials was that married women stood little chance of administering their assets unless their husbands permitted them to do so.

Gender in criminal law

Criminal law, as well as the law of property, made few concessions to female weakness in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in cases of adultery or spousal murder, the law displayed far less leniency for women than for men.[237] Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, as Russian legal reformers became increasingly familiar with Western European law, notions of sexual difference intensified. The progressive legal order that evolved after 1861 emphasised female dependence and associated women with the domestic sphere to an extent never before witnessed in Russian law. As Laura Engelstein argues, although women could be tried in court and were subject to the rule of law, as late as 1903 they 'remained the objects of. . . custodial solicitude . . . Like children and the mentally incompetent, women continued to be marked by special disabilities in relation to the law.'[238]

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, legal authorities made virtually no distinctions between women and men, meting out similar punishments regardless of sex. Prompted by the confession of a fourteen-year- old peasant girl to the axe-murder of two children, a decree of 1742 set the age of criminal accountability at seventeen years for offenders of both sexes, making them liable to exile, corporal punishment, and the death penalty.[239]Women were flogged in public and subject to torture under interrogation, sometimes so severely that they died in the process.[240] Nor were noblewomen exempt from brutal treatment when they dabbled in political intrigue: Empress

Elizabeth ordered Countess Natalia Lopukhina to have her tongue cut out and then exiled to Siberia when she indulged in subversive gossip.[241] Peter the Great took the step of exempting pregnant women from torture until giving birth - for the sake of the child, however, rather than the accused. The sole advantage female convicts enjoyed after 1754 was freedom from being branded and having their nostrils slit when transported to hard labour. Empress Elizabeth and the Senate did not revise the law on grounds of female weakness, however, but because they believed that women were less likely to flee exile than men.[242]

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in keeping with the Euro­pean 'discovery of the sexes',[243] legal authorities demonstrated new concern with sexual difference in the context of criminal law. The growing significance of motherhood in official and public discourse prompted officials to spare pregnant women and nursing mothers from corporal punishment until their children could be weaned. In the 1830s, the Senate decreed that children should not be separated from exiled mothers. Special arrangements were to be made for mothers during transport to exile or who were in prison.[244] For their part, contemporaries greeted these innovations with approbation, singling out for praise provisions that made allowances for the 'sensitivity' of the female sex.[245]

Well into the nineteenth century, exemption from corporal punishment hinged on social rank and standing in the family, rather than gender: thus, noblewomen, along with their husbands, were freed from corporal punish­ment in the 1785 Charter to the Nobility; wives of merchants of the first and second guilds received similar immunity in Catherine II's Charter to the Towns.[246] The wives and widows of priests and deacons were granted exemp­tion in 1808, seven years after their husbands received this privilege, while their children gained immunity only in 1835.[247] By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, appeals were heard in the Senate that all women should be spared corporal punishment by virtue of their weakness, both physical and mental, relative to men. These arguments portrayed women as infirm and pas­sive, hence incapable ofbearing severe floggings. Moreover, critics of corporal punishment argued that women were incapable of governing their emotions and thus less accountable than men for the crimes they committed. Some authorities objected to the display of women's naked bodies being flogged in public: the sight of a woman naked and bleeding evoked sympathy in witnesses to her ordeal and was potentially subversive of the social order. According to other reformers, because women were inherently more virtuous than men, they were less likely to commit crimes in general and they suffered more than the men from the public display of their humiliation.

Ultimately, the significance of sexual difference was accentuated to a new extreme in criminal law. Women were portrayed as fragile, passionate, and even prone to insanity, yet with a highly developed sense of virtue lacking in their male counterparts.[248] Officials also reaffirmed the bond between women and the domestic sphere, arguing that the subjection of women to corpo­ral punishment violated female modesty and subverted the familial order and pointing out that the vast majority of crimes committed by women - infanticide, homicide and prostitution - took place in the private realm.[249]Conversely, criminal law depicted men not only as capable of bearing physical suffering, but also able to govern their emotions and assume accountability for their actions.

An edict in 1863 finally pronounced all women, with the exception of female exiles, exempt from corporal punishment. Female exiles waited until 1893 for immunity from floggings, while male peasants remained subject to beatings as late as 1904.[250] Legal reformers, along with the educated public, perceived the end of corporal punishment for women as a symptom of progress, since 'respect' for the female sex was the hallmark of 'every educated society'.[251]Women's liberation from physical punishment was not, however, necessarily a mark of special favour. As Engelstein observes, 'The edict of 1863 did not mean that peasant women had been admitted to a higher status than men of their class... Women's exemption functioned, in fact, as a mark of the peasant male's improved standing, constituting the family as his inviolable domain and reinforcing the wife's 'private' status.'[252] The intrusion of Western European legal norms and gender conventions thus laid the foundation in Russia for a social order that prescribed increasingly rigid gender roles for both sexes and intensified male domination in the family.[253]

In short, by exempting women from corporal punishment, authorities deemed them incapable of responsibility for their actions and, by implication, undermined their potential for full citizenship. Although reformers acted out of a genuine desire to protect women from abuse, they also deprived women of agency, reinforcing their subordination to their husbands and excluding them from the civic order. By contrast, a far more even-handed and inclusive approach to gender difference persisted in the law of property. During debates over the introduction of the income tax at the turn of the century, members of the State Council argued that women, as owners of property and wage earn­ers, should be taxed along with their male counterparts. Taxation, by treating women as individuals, would serve as their 'introduction to civic life'.[254]

Conclusion

Over the course ofthe imperial era, Russian women's legal status continued to be distinguished far more by disabilities than privileges. In the law of property, women's standing remained secure. Lawmakers persevered in their defence of women's control of their fortunes, insisting that 'not only does the property of a wife not become the property of her husband, but he does not even acquire through marriage the right to use or manage it'. Yet gender neutrality proved an elusive goal even in property law. Early in the twentieth century, members of a commission for a new codification of the law reiterated the responsibility of men to provide for their wives, while stating that a wife 'is not obligated to seek independent earnings to support [her] husband'. Legal reformers also fell short of granting women equal inheritance rights in the revised law of succession in 1912.[255] In other respects as well, the position of women failed to improve or even deteriorated. Until 1917 women remained personally subject to male authority: the Orthodox Church resisted attempts on the part of the state to introduce more liberal divorce legislation, although growing numbers of women gained separation from their husbands through the office of the

Imperial Chancellery for the Receipt of Petitions, which granted separate passports to women at the emperor's discretion.[256]

Most striking, however, was the trend in legal codes to highlight gender difference and to locate women firmly in the domestic sphere. Although legis­lators did not succeed completely in abolishing sexual asymmetry in property relations, the distinction between women and men in the law of property remained minimal. Women continued to control their fortunes independently, to litigate against kin and neighbours, and were afforded little protection on the grounds of 'feminine weakness'. At the same time, gender hierarchies in family and criminal law became increasingly pronounced. From the end of the eighteenth century, women's 'unlimited obedience' to their husbands was enshrined in written law, while women's dependence on their husbands for the right to work or travel and for sustenance was articulated in legal codes. Even the willingness oflegal reformers to support marital separation was predicated on the 'presumed natural weakness of a wife', since the courts made separation contingent upon a husband's failure to fulfil his marital obligations.[257] Finally, criminal law accentuated sexual difference to the greatest degree, making con­cessions to female frailty, but at the same time situating women on the margins of civic life. In short, far from fostering women's equality with men, the efforts of imperial authorities to create a more progressive legal order served only to underscore women's precarious standing in the law.

Law, the judicial system and the legal profession

JORG BABEROWSKI

Reform

The 1864 judicial reform created Russia's first constitution. When Alexander II signed the decree for the introduction of the judicial reform in November 1864, he delivered the death-blow to the autocracy. Although the tsar did not immediately recognise these consequences, educated public opinion certainly entertained no doubts in this regard. The judicial reform limited the author­ity of the monarch, since it separated the judiciary from the legislative and executive institutions, and confirmed the principle of judicial independence and tenure as a matter of law. But the reform of course went even further. It broke with the estate-based system of justice, as it had been promulgated by Catharine II at the end of the eighteenth century and set forth the equality of all subjects before the law. At least dejure, Russia was transformed into a state under the rule of law on the European model. For nothing remained either of the secret and inquisitorial methods which had been practised by lay judges in the estate-based courts.¹ The long-familiar practices of Western Europe now came to Russia as well. No one was any longer to be punished for an action which the Criminal Code did not identify as a crime ('nullum crimen sine lege'), and in civil proceedings, the principle of 'where there is no plaintiff, neither shall there be a judge' thenceforth applied.

Not the least of the evils of the old system of justice was the secret and inquisi­torial procedure which accorded no rights to the accused. The judges delivered

1 On the justice system before the reforms, see N. M. Kolmakov 'Staryi sud', Russkaia Starina 52, 12 (1886): 511-44; V Bochkarev 'Doreformennyi sud', in N. V Davydov, and N. N. Polianskii (eds.), Sudehnaia reforma (Moscow: Ob'edinenie, 1915), vol. I, pp. 205-41; I. A. Blinov, 'Sudebnyi stroi i sudebnye poriadki pered reformoi 1864 goda', in Sudehnye ustavy 20 noiabria iS64g,zapiat'desiatlet (Petrograd, 1914), vol. I, pp. 3-101J. LeDonne, 'The Judicial Reform of 1775 in Central Russia', JfGO 21 (1973): 29-45; J. Baberowski, Autokratie undJustiz. Zum Verhaltnis vonROckstandigkeitundRechtsstaatlichkeitim ausgehenden Zarenre- ich 1864-1914 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), pp. 11-38; F. B. Kaiser, DieRussische Justizreform von 1864. Zur Geschichte der russischenJustiz von Katharina II his 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 1-89.

their verdicts on the basis of police investigation files and in the absence of the defendant. And because the official evidentiary proceedings demanded that confessions be forced, the police could use physical and emotional pressure at their own discretion. Winning in civil proceedings depended on the ability to bribe the chambers clerks who drew up the final verdicts and presented them to the judges for their signatures. In order to remedy this evil, the reformed rules of procedure stipulated oral argumentation and public trials. What the police had determined in their inquiries had to be proven once more in open court. The burden of proof no longer lay with the defendant but with the state prosecutor, who had to publicly prove the correctness ofhis accusations. Thus was the criminal proceeding transformed from a dialogue between the police and the judges into a dispute between the prosecutor and the defendant. This conflict had to be decided by an impartial court, for the protection of society from crime could only succeed if the rights of the individuals who constituted society were not violated. In the Judiciary Statutes the reformers therefore not only confirmed the independence of the judges, but also introduced the participation of lawyers into criminal and civil proceedings.

In the view of the reformers, the reformed court was primarily a societal court in which not only the judges of the Crown, but also the subjects decided on the application of law. For this reason, they introduced the office of justice of the peace (mirovoi sud'ia) on the British model, for the trial of trivial offences. This officer was elected by the local self-government for the duration of three years. The declared belief in 'democratic' justice was demonstrated by the adoption of trial by jury as the standard procedure in the District Court, in other words the first judicial instance (okruzhnyi sud), and the participation of estate representatives (soslovnye predstaviteli) in proceedings against 'state criminals', which were conducted in the Judicial Chambers (sudebnaia palata). Verdicts of the justices of the peace and the district jury courts were final, for the voice of the people was to have the last word in judgement. Such verdicts could only be contested by way of a complaint to the Cassation Department of the Senate. The Senate then ruled not on the essence of the matter at issue, but only examined the verdicts of the first instance for procedural errors. If the senators found such errors, they referred the civil or criminal case back to the court of first instance.

The symbolic meaning of these innovations could hardly have been greater, for when had there ever before been an attempt in Russia not only to pro­tect subjects from the arbitrariness of the authorities, but also to let them decide on their own destiny? Unlike in some European states, the principle of the separation of powers did not regulate only the relationship between the judiciary and the administration. It was even established within the judi­ciary itself: judges were freed from the influence of the minister of justice, and lawyers were given a self-administration of their own, independent of the courts.

With the judicial reforms, the functions of the prosecuting attorney's office, the 'eyes and ears of the Tsar', also changed. As officials of the Ministry of Justice, the public prosecutors (prokurory) lost their directive authority over judges and attorneys but received control over the preliminary proceedings of the police. The law nevertheless did not restrict the activity of the public prosecutors to the presentation of the charges. It also assigned to them the legal supervision over the administration; the Ministry of Justice thus grew into the role of a supervisory authority which monitored the compliance of the ministries with the laws of the empire. At least dejure, the autocracy had gone out of existence.² Contemporaries, too, now understood that the court statutes of 1864 were more than an attempt to replace the system of estate- based justice by modern methods of jurisprudence. The culture within which rulers and subjects operated was shaken. No one saw this more clearly than the liberal jurist Vladimir Nabokov, when in 1914 he recalled the beginnings of the judicial reform. Nowhere in Europe, he wrote, had the discussion about the legal system kindled such passions as in Russia. While some had idolised the legislation, others had abhorred it.³ Admittedly such passions could only be ignited because supporters and opponents of the judicial reform alike held an instrumental attitude towards the law. For them, the law was primarily an instrument of social and cultural change. What issued from the courts was, in their view, not only justice, but also the 'spirit of the people'. And since the omnipotence ofthe tsar had not formally been limited, the courts assumed the function of substitute parliaments, in which liberals and conservatives debated Russia's political future.⁴

However, the reformed judicial system was not only a political anomaly; it was a stillbirth, because it expressed neither the executive needs of the

2 For the text of the judiciary statutes (sudebnye ustavy), see B. V Vilenskii (ed.), Sudeb- naia reforma. Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo X-XX vekov (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1991), vol. IX. For the results of the judicial reform, see Baberowski, Autokratie, pp. 61-93; I. Ia. Foinitskii, Kurs ugolovnogo sudoproizvodstva (St Petersburg: Al'fa, 1996; orig. St Petersburg 1910), vol. I, pp. 59-44; F. Gredinger, 'Prokurorskii nadzor za piat'desiat let, istekshikh so vremeni ego preobrazovaniia po Sudebnym Ustavam Imperatora Aleksan- dra II', in Sudebnye ustavy, vol. II, pp. 197-249; S. M. Kazantsev, Istoriia tsarskoi prokuratury (St Petersburg: Izd. SPbu, 1993).

3 V Nabokov, 'Raboty po sostavleniiu sudebnykh organov', in Davydov and Polianskii, Sudebnaia reforma, pp. 344-5.

4 Perceptive contemporaries already observed this: B. Kistiakovskii, 'Vzashchitu prava', in Vekhi. Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Moscow: Sablin, 1909), pp. 125-55.

administration nor the feeling of justice of the population. Certainly, Zarud- nyi and other reformers referred continually to 'Russian' traditions and the will of the autocrat, in order to convince the political elite of their plans for restructuring the judicial system. Viewed by daylight, however, the 'traditions' also drew upon the imaginations of a Europeanised elite which, while it spoke constantly of the will of the people, had no idea what that will might be. The reformed judicial system and the spirit from which it emerged were rooted in the realm of the European enlightenment, where the reformers dwelt, but their subjects did not. In this realm, faith in the power of reason held sway.[258]

The old system of justice had reflected the heterogeneity of the empire; the new one was designed to overcome it. To this end, the reformers took the latest achievements of European jurisprudence and its application techniques, in order to achieve by procedural means what reality would not deliver. 'A reasonable law can never cause evil' - so spoke the spiritus rector of judicial reform, Zarudnyi.[259] For the reform commission of the State Chancellery, which was appointed by the tsar in October 1861 to reorganise the judicial system, it thus remained only to design such laws as corresponded to the reasoned concepts of enlightened officials. This is also the reason why the reformers needed only a few months to complete their legislative draft. Once they had convinced the tsar of the necessity of the reform, there was no one left who could have impeded the fulfilment of their plans.[260]

The task of the judicial reform was to make universal the legal consciousness of the enlightened officials. Another way of putting it would be: the European rule of law as the reformers understood it amounted to the levelling of the empire and its cultures. It was to transform a multiethnic society based on estates into a society of European citizens, and to transform peasants into law-abiding subjects. Europe's present was to be Russia's future. And as a late-comer, the empire could learn from the mistakes of Europe.[261]

In matters of law, in its institutions and in symbolic remarks, the tsarist elites represented themselves as conquerors arriving from afar and forcing a strange culture of discourse upon the people. However, the striving for homogeneity under the law was to remain an unfulfilled ideal. Justice which does not arise by consensus can be imposed, but it cannot be permanently installed. Russian law was imported from abroad, with no consideration taken for home-grown traditions. Its concepts addressed judges and officials, but not the population, for whom the law was either unattainable or impossible to understand. What the reformers considered modern was, in the experience of the population, a negation of their habits. It was deadly. To persist, under these circumstances, in maintaining the validity of standards which could not be fulfilled meant to undermine respect for the law.[262]

The judicial reform reinforced the legal dualism which separated the elites from their subjects, ratherthanovercomingit, as the programme ofthe reform­ers had intended. Why? Because it was unable to produce any uniform system of laws. For the ordering function of law consists in imparting knowledge of what one can expect of others and of oneself, and which expectations will win societal support and which will not. As Niklas Luhmann has put it, uncertainty of expectation is much more unbearable than the experience of surprises.[263]Wherever the state's writ runs, its standards must be unconditionally accessi­ble and enforceable; the legal claims of the state and the expectations of justice on the part of the population must converge, for justice to prevail. If the law is no longer respected or implemented, it will be replaced by immediate forms of confidence confirmation. And so it was everywhere in the empire, wher­ever varying possibilities of providing meaning for one's life did not come into touch with one another, wherever the state's law and its system of justice either were not articulated or else were rejected. In short, the judicial reform met the expectations of the urban upper strata but had nothing to say to the lower classes of the empire.

The reformed judicial system and the peasants

The creators ofthe judicial reform believed in the power of institutions. There was no doubt that good institutions would develop the appreciation of law and order in the people. No institution embodied the hopes of the reformers as thoroughly as did trial by jury (sud prisiazhnykh). The jury court was, they believed, a characteristic of 'civilised nations', an 'ornament' (ukrashenie) of the court system. It was the 'palladium of the personal liberty and political independence of the people', as the legal scholar Ivan Foinitskii formulated it in his textbook on the law of criminal proceedings published in 1910.[264] The Russian reformers too had devoted themselves to this ideal of political liberalism. The jury court was, they believed, a vehicle for the political mobilisation of the subjects. Wherever citizens sat in judgement over their peers, they set limits to the capriciousness of the absolutist state. Jury courts and democracy were synonymous. In Russia, however, the jury court was primarily an instrument for educating and civilising the peasants. The reformers dreamt of overcoming the cultural dualism which characterised the system of serfdom. Now, former serfs should not only share the jury box with their former lords, they were to be allowed to sit in judgement over them in court as well. 'All were to serve a common cause, both the poor and the rich': thus Senator Berendts recalled the first steps of the new courts. Anatolii Koni, Russia's most well-known jurist, saw the jury court as a place where the upper strata would not only come into contact with the peasants, that 'mysterious unknown', but where the peasants too would learn to respect the rights of their fellow men and the laws of the state.[265] This was primarily of importance because the government had left the handling of trivial civil and criminal cases in the hands of rural village justice. The reformers hoped that the juryman would carry enlightened justice even to the village, and so contribute to the disappearance of legal dualism from Russian reality. In short: the ideal of the jury court, like that of the conscript army, was to turn peasants into citizens.

At first, the expectations of the reformers seemed to be fulfilled in the large towns, not least perhaps because the urban population actually did assemble in the jury boxes. However, beyond the major cities, the peasants remained among their peers, because the educated and those of means declined civic duties. For being called to jury duty meant being present in court until the end of the proceeding, which might drag on for as long as two weeks. However, by holding its sessions in remote provincial towns, in dilapidated buildings with unbearable hygienic conditions, the court placed an unreasonable imposition on members of the higher strata, which they tried to escape at all costs. Such shirking of duty was admittedly only possible because the autonomous local administration did not prevent it. On the contrary: the zemstvo (local elected assembly) commissions responsible for drawing up the jury registers released many privileged persons from the rosters, while others were not entered on them in the first place. The zemstvo usually left the preparation of the lists to the clerks of the marshals of the nobility. These did their best to 'free, as far as possible, the most highly developed and most educated persons from the practice of jury duty', as Minister of Justice Dmitrii Nabokov reported indignantly to the State Council in 1884.[266] Thus it came about that numer­ous mentally ill people, 'dead souls', blind men, deaf-mutes and foreigners appeared in the juror lists in the District of St Petersburg at the end of the 1870s. In one district of Tver, the autonomous local administration did not even shrink from entering persons onto the lists who had already died in 1858, eight years before the opening of the first courts. And because the privileged classes turned a deaf ear to the call of the courts, the peasants were forced to shoulder the entire burden of this civic duty. In the rural regions, the jury courts became peasant assemblies, with 85 per cent of the jurors illiterate. To hope for an 'enlightening effect' of jurisprudence was in effect to trust in the peasants to 'civilise' themselves in the courts.[267]

Yet to be called to jury duty was to be pressed into corvee service - or so at any rate it seemed to the peasants, who were unable to escape the civic duty which the reformers demanded of them. Although the district courts 'travelled' from one district town to another to reduce the sizes of the areas covered, this was cold comfort for the peasants, who still had to trudge as much as 50 kilometres, or even more, to reach the town where the court was located. There, their real problems started, for the impover­ished peasants could usually pay neither for their accommodation nor for their food. In some places, they would take jobs as woodcutters, construction workers or gardeners during court session recesses, they would beg in the streets for alms, and if the judges did not provide them with accommoda­tions, sleep in the open. Often judges were forced to release emaciated jurors from their duties, especially ifthe sessions ofthe court coincided with harvest time.[268]

But it was not only the poverty of the peasants which was a heavy burden on the jury courts. Different worlds met in court - that of the jury and that of the jurists. Public prosecutors, lawyers and judges spoke a language which the rural jury did not understand. They understood nothing, and yet were to decide everything: not only the question of whether the defendant had committed the deed, but also whether he was to be found guilty as charged. The public prosecutor of the Kherson District Court complained about this as early as 1869, immediately after the introduction of the reformed judicial system in that province. The jurors, he wrote, were not only incapable of judging the evidence, they could not even understand 'what was going on in their presence before the court'.[269] As a result, rural juries acquitted defendants if they were unsure whether they had understood the facts correctly, or if they had fallen asleep in the courtroom from exhaustion. And where they had to share the jury box with members of the privileged classes, they usually did what these asked of them. At the Moscow District Court, a professor regularly forced the rural jurors with whom he sat in the jury box to find the defendants guilty; otherwise, he threatened the peasants, the court would inflict 'terrible punishments' on them. The rural jurors stated that they had 'been afraid of the uniformed jurists and of the gentlemen' who had sat in the jury box with them. They had, a municipal juror recalled, viewed the call of the court not as a service of honour, but as forced recruitment.[270]

Wherever the peasants composed the entire jury, rural customary law pre­vailed. From the jury boxes of the tsarist courts, the rural jurors waged a legal battle against the law of the state. They not only rejected the written laws and thus paralysed the execution of jurisprudence, but also raised customary law to the level of the standard of justice. The state laws, to them, expressed an understanding of conflict resolution of a strange world to which they did not want to submit. The law of the peasants was personalised, not abstract; it referred to the morals, not to the deeds, of the perpetrator. The social status of a perpetrator, his past and its way of life often were of greater importance to the peasants than the crime itself. In judging an offence, they distinguished between sins, for which only God's punishment would apply, and crimes. Thus the takeover of manor land which was not cultivated by its owners was a sin; theft of peasant property however, was a crime. Where state law punished such sins, it met with disapproval in the villages. Peasants and officials perceived different crimes; hence they also had different concepts of law. It was also important in the village to mete out punishment in such a manner that vic­tims and perpetrators could continue to live together. Rural common law was therefore oriented towards compensation, whereas the state required punish­ment. The village communities usually did not even approve ofstate sanctions if they were convinced that a criminal offence required punishment. They hid the criminal offences from the state's investigating magistrates whenever pos­sible and administered punishment on their own, informally, by beatings or other forms of humiliation. Ultimately, the reintegration of the perpetrator was always the ultimate goal, for who in the community ultimately really had an interest in throwing indispensable workers into prison? The peasants only turned to extreme measures when criminals threatened their existence - if robbers, arsonists or horse thieves attacked their villages and took their per­sonal belongings. In some areas, such as in Siberia, gangs of runaway prisoners terrorised the population without the police authorities' being able to put a stop to them. And because the authorities could not control crime, and the reg­ular justice system punished robbery and theft with relatively mild sentences, the peasants turned to lynch-law for robbers and horse thieves. If the local state authorities learned of people thus taking the law into their own hands, they would have the ringleaders arrested and brought to trial. Obviously, this destroyed any respect for state law, which was thus proven to be a blunt sword against robbers and professional criminals, but an uncompromisingly tough weapon against the peasants' informal justice.[271]

That, too was the case of violent village crime, which in the perception of educated public opinion gained in intensity after the end of the nineteenth century, because it became visible to the elites with the immigration of peas­ants to the large cities. The seasonal workers from the villages were crowded together in the small spaces of the workers' barracks, factories and bars, which became the scenes of a kind of violent crime which was unknown to the edu­cated citydwellers: ritualised mass fights, brawls between drunken peasants, rape and manslaughter - all that was being brought in from the village to the city. Where there were no hospitals, doctors, police or civil servants, the village and the urban workers' housing estates were left to their own devices. Vio­lence became a cultural resource available to all. Moreover, belief in witches and magicians, miracles and conspiracies also survived in this environment. How else could murderous deeds have been justified by the claim that the victim was a witch or a magician, if the peasants had not been convinced that supernatural forces ruled their lives? In short, the violent exorcism of devils from human bodies, the killing ofhorse thieves, robbers and witches, the theft of property and the everyday practice of physical violence was, in the view of the peasants, not criminal, at least as long as such acts could be fitted into their view of the world.[272] And it was the jury courts which lent expression to this situation of legal turmoil which separated the elites and the people from one another.

The jury courts did not overcome the traditional legal dualism; they pro­claimed it. The peasants in any event had no concept of the enlightened legal ideas of the judicial officers, and their decisions as jury-members of the state courts were no different than they would have been at a village assembly. Thus, while sectarians, blasphemers or robbers and thieves who had stolen peasant property could hope for no mercy from such juries, killers, rapists, hooligans and those accused by the authorities of having cut wood in the forests of the nobility or resisted the orders of state authorities were acquitted in a large numbers, sometimes even after they had confessed their guilt. In no other country did juries acquit more frequently than in Russia. In 1883, 45.5 per cent of all defendants brought before jury courts in the tsarist empire were acquitted; in the juridical districts of Odessa and Kherson, the figure for that year was 55 per cent.[273] And since the defendant's fate depended on the venue and social composition of the jury, the capriciousness which had been believed to have been overcome returned to the justice system. Jury verdicts were final, no appeal was possible. They could only be contested through a cassation complaint at the Criminal Cassation Department of the Senate, if the public prosecutor or the attorney claimed that procedural errors had occurred.[274]

This popular justice contradicted the elites' concept of justice. The reform­ers who dreamt of a self-civilising process of the peasantry in the jury box could not ignore this fact. 'Instead of a state court with participation by rep­resentatives of the people, we have got a people's court with participation by representatives of the state.' Thus the public prosecutor of the St Petersburg Judicial Chamber, V F. Deitrikh, described the dilemma of the Russian judicial

reform.[275]

Like the jury courts, the justices of the peace too were to have been an example to the peasants. Justices of the peace were officials elected by the local self-administration. As such, they served not only state law, but also the interests of the 'society' in whose name they administered justice. For the reformers, it was important that the local justice system impose mild punishments and issue verdicts in civilian and criminal proceedings which fitted in with the common law of the rural population. For this reason, the legislation also therefore assigned to the justices of the peace the authority to solve conflicts by an arbitration procedure.[276] In the cities, the justices of the peace quickly won the confidence of the population by adjudicating in a way which publicly demonstrated their indispensability. The first justices of the peace came from the ranks of the reformers and conveyed a feeling of legal fairness to the municipal population without which society cannot continue to function.[277] In the rural regions, however, the reformers failed to achieve their goal of changing the legal consciousness of the peasants through the institution of the justice of the peace. Although the number of the trials rose steadily, too, in the provinces, and although wherever urban fashions and attitudes enriched rural life the institution of local justice was no longer suspected of being an instrument of state arrogation of power, the peasants nonetheless usually avoided the justice of the peace. As elected officials of the local self- administration, justices of the peace were considered to represent the will of the majority group in the zemstvo, and thus to serve the interests of influential landowners. However, local justice was not only at the service of influential interest groups in the province. It often remained unapproachable to the peasants, at least in the larger provinces, because its venue was generally located in the district town. The originally planned deformalisation of the proceedings, too, remained nothing more than an unredeemed promise. It could not be realised, simply because the legal constitution not only allowed appeals or cassation complaints against verdicts ofthe justices ofthe peace at the Assembly ofJustices ofthe Peace (s"ezd mirovykh sudei), but also assigned to the Senate the competence of ruling on cassation complaints against verdicts ofthe assemblies in the last instance. In this way, the rights of the subjects were to be protected, the capriciousness of the judges restricted. But cassation presupposed that the justices of the peace observed the formal regulations and kept court records of all stages of the proceedings. Complying with the formal procedures was the only way to win such an appeal. One had to justify the complaint, in writing and with reference to the legal stipulations upon which it was based. However, the peasants were hardly ever capable of doing so. They had to call on the help of so-called 'underground lawyers' (podpol'nye advokaty) who formulated complaints in their names, and also substantiated them. However, the peasants only seldom gained from such services. It was on the contrary the underground lawyers who profited from the written-complaint-based system. They persuaded the peasants to make hopeless complaints and had themselves paid princely sums for their 'help'.[278]

With the separation of powers, which was thoroughly implemented even at the local level, competing state offices mushroomed in the districts and battled each other for influence. The peasants, of course, had no idea what the concept of separation of powers meant. They were sure it meant no protection of their rights, but rather a weakening of those authorities who knew how to ensure them those rights. Nobody respected a judge who might be able to deliver a verdict, but could neither arrest nor punish, and whose verdicts might be annulled by a higher authority. For the peasants, the important thing was that their complaints be accepted and decided upon at one place and by one person. That fact provided the basis for Minister of the Interior Dmitrii Tolstoi's argument, in 1887, before the State Council, to abolish the institution of justice of the peace.[279] If a peasant had something he or she wanted to get done, the peasant called on the 'powers' for help. Those 'powers' included the local police chief (ispravnik), the landowners and the governors, but not the justices of the peace. And even the emperor in far-off St Petersburg received petitions from all regions of the empire in which peasants requested the help of their ruler. In view of the conditions under which the villagers lived, this behaviour was rational. But that did not help the reputation of the judicial system.

Justice and empire

The administrative and judicial reforms of the 1860s years were based on the conviction that the modern state under the rule of law would remain incomplete without a generally binding system of laws. It was therefore only logical for it to spread rapidly beyond European Russia to encompass the peripheral regions. Initially, the new institutions were established only in the central Russian regions of the empire. They were introduced in 1866 in the districts ofthe Moscow and St PetersburgJudicial Chambers, andbetween 1867 and 1871 in the equivalent judicial districts of Kharkov, Tiflis, Odessa, Kazan and Saratov. The judicial reform also came to Poland in 1875, and the govern­ment opened court chambers in Kiev and Vilna between 1880 and 1883, and in the Baltic provinces in 1889. In the Asian regions of the empire the reformed courts were set up only later. Although they were already established in Trans­caucasia in 1867, they did not spread to Siberia, to the steppe regions or to Turkestan until the 1890s. With the opening of a Judicial Chamber in Tashkent in 1899, the introduction of the reformed judicial system was completed in the

empire. [280]

The judicial reform was an ambitious attempt to subject the empire to a uniform system of laws and thus to remove all estate-based and special religious law systems which still existed. That happened in the 1880s for the first time, when the judicial reform was introduced in right-bank Ukraine,

Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic provinces. But the new courts, the separation of powers and the public and verbal proceedings were not only a death knell for the old estate-basedjudicial system, the reformedjudicial system also expanded the rights of the rural population vis-a-vis the land-owning and urban elites, and broke the supremacy ofthe Baltic-German and Polish elites in the western areas of the empire. Along with the courts and Russian law, Russian judges and judicial officials also came to the western periphery, primarily lawyers and their assistants who settled in the larger towns in Poland and the Baltic region. And because a complaint in court now required knowledge of the Russian language and of Russian law, the services of the jurists brought in from the outside became indispensable. For the native elites, these changes brought loss of control and power which could not be compensated even if they returned as trained jurists to the judicial offices. For the new judges were in the service of the law and did not issue judgements in the name of the estate to which they belonged. Thus, the former elites were transformed into mere ethnic minorities.[281]

Jury courts were established only in the judicial district of Kiev, but the government refrained from instituting the participation of the people in the judicial system in Poland and the Baltic provinces. The introduction ofthe jury courts in the Western Provinces was hampered not only by the general ignorance of the Russian language, but also because it was feared that ethnic conflicts might be carried out before the jury courts.[282] The central government wanted to avoid this at all costs.

Similar problems arose in the Caucasus, where the judicial reform had already been introduced in 1867, and in Siberia and Turkestan. The courts fol­lowed the Russian settlers into the Asian parts of the empire as they emigrated to Siberia and Turkestan in large numbers at the end ofthe nineteenth century. But the new courts were only established in the larger towns and the junctions where the railroads brought people from distant regions together. Under these circumstances, jury courts could not be introduced even where the popula­tion could speak the administrative language, as in Siberia. Extreme distances and a low population density, and especially in Turkestan the multiethnicity of the population, gave the reformers little room for action. Here justices of the peace were appointed by the minister of justice, because there was no local self-government which might have elected them, and the functions of justices of the peace and of the examining magistrate were combined. These were, of course, not the only obstacles which the justice system faced in the Asian periphery. A major one was the unwillingness oftalented jurists to serve in Tashkent, Ashkhabad or the crime capital Baku, where they might expect nothing but deprivation.[283]

As in Poland and the Baltic provinces, the judicial reform forced the local elites out of their administrative functions. With the jurists from the centre, new laws and procedures came to the periphery, which were displayed in an alien language and in alien symbols. Russian law could be mediated neither linguistically nor symbolically in the Muslim regions, and, because the judges were primarily from European Russia, could only be expressed at all via inter­preters. Even in Tiflis and Baku, the melting-pots of the Caucasus, judges and examining magistrates could express themselves only in Russian. Thus neither the defendants nor the judges understood what the other really wanted. This reflected not only linguistic and symbolic misunderstandings.

As the chief procurator of the Senate, Reinke, who was sent to inspect judicial institutions in Tiflis in 1910, put it, proceedings in the courts in Central Asia and in Caucasus were like 'a cultural drama'. In trials before the Caucasian courts, 'two civilisations, two world-views, which were mutually exclusive', collided.[284] For Russian law punished what was not seen as criminal in the view of the natives: the bearing of daggers and guns, or murder and manslaughter arising from a blood feud. Where nomads stole the cattle of a clan with whom they were quarrelling to force negotiations about a dispute, tsarist justice imposed prison sentences against the robbers, and in so doing prevented a reconciliation between the parties to the quarrel in a way which would have reflected their own legal traditions. It criminalised what nomads considered the law.[285]

Under these circumstances, however, there could be no rapprochement between the two legal spheres. The natives boycotted the Russian courts: by targeted false testimony, designed primarily to lead the examining magistrates astray, and by violent resistance. If they resorted to the Russian courts at all, they instrumentalised them for their own purposes without respecting their authority. In the Caucasus and also in Turkestan, there were de facto two systems of laws which were not connected with each other. At least in Turkestan and in the steppe areas, the government therefore moved away from its plan to subject the population completely to its laws. Although the law stipulated the responsibility of Russian courts in cases of murder, homicide and serious robbery, it left all other cases to the jurisdiction of the local tribal or sharia courts. In Transcaucasia, however, where the administration insisted on imposingits laws but could not in fact do so, the courts succeeded in completely destroyingtheir own authority. As a result, the governors ultimately fellbackon the stipulations of the Emergency Laws enacted in 1881, which permitted them to punish by administrative measures what they considered deviant behaviour. As the governor-general of the Caucasus, Dondukov-Korsakov, wrote in 1890, the 'wildness of the customs' left the authorities no choice but to use military justice against the natives.[286] To sum up, the idea of the European rule of law was led ad ahsurdum under the conditions ofthe multiethnic empire, because it set the indigenous elites against the Russian administration without ensuring any homogenisation or 'civilisation' of legal views. There was no mediation of ruling power.

The reform of the reform

From its inception, the reformed judicial system was showered with harsh criticism. The conservative Moskovskie vedomosti and its editor-in-chiefMikhail Katkov described the ministers of justice as 'prime ministers of the judicial republic'. Conservative writers slandered the jury courts as 'mob justice', some even demanded the restoration of the obsolete estate-based system of justice. But it was not only conservative ideologues who criticised the justice system. At the beginning of the 1880s, the conclusion that the reform would not survive without in turn being reformed grew, even among jurists. These included, prominently, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod and mentor of Alexander III, Pobedonostsev, who had once been on the side of the liberal judicial reformers.[287] During the late 1880s, this led ministers of justice to pro­pose several amendments to the law, designed primarily to cure the disfunction- ality of the jury courts. They reformed the jury roster system, subordinating it to the control of the public prosecutors, and forbade the authorities to enter illiterates on to the rosters. Still, the abolition of lay participation in court judgements, which conservative critics had recommended with reference to the German and Italian experience, was not carried out. The jury courts lasted until the end of Imperial Russia, although none of the expectations which the reformers had once placed in them were fulfilled, even after the turn of the century. Not even the independence ofthe judiciary and ofthe bar, or the pub­lic and verbal nature of the proceedings, were ever really called into question. This was demonstrated in the disciplinary proceedings forjudges introduced in 1885 by Minister of Justice Dmitrii Nabokov, which confirmed the liberal principle of judicial independence.[288]

The conservatives in the government were able to score only one vic­tory, when they succeeded in 1889 with the support of the emperor in abol­ishing the justices of the peace and substituting for them so-called land captains (zemskie nachal'niki), against the resistance of the ministry of jus­tice and its jurists. The land captains were usually recruited from the same circles as the justices of the peace had been, but combined administra­tive and judicative functions in one hand. Although the land captains de- formalised and simplified procedures, they had a bad reputation among liberal jurists, who considered them uncontrollable despots who made no contribution to the 'civilisation' of the peasants but rather removed them from the blessings of justice under the rule of law instead of bringing them closer to it. In 1912 the government not only returned to justice-of-the-peace adjudication, it also combined it with the volost system of peasant justice in one procedural instance.[289]

The fact that the core ofthe reformed judicial system remained unchanged, although Alexander III detested the 'jurist blatherers' like 'castor oil', was to no small extent due to the growing influence of jurists in the higher eche­lons of the administration. For during the 1870s, jurists had conquered the key positions of power in the tsarist bureaucracy: they occupied the most important positions in the State Council and in the State Chancellery, and had moved into the Ministries of the Interior and Finance. There were even jurists in the secret police, the okhrana, and after the 1880s, former public prosecutors occupied the leading positions in the St Petersburg police depart­ment. Jurists monopolised the drafting and interpretation of the laws, for they had abilities which made them irreplaceable. This is also the reason that the ministers of justice gradually grew into the role of supervisors who oversaw the legality of the administration. All ministers of justice, even the conserva­tive Ivan Shcheglovitov (i906-i5), considered themselves proponents of the concepts of an independent judiciary and of the rule of law. They therefore resisted any proposals for implementing changes which would have called their own indispensability into question. Even such an uncompromising advocate of autocracy as Alexander III ultimately had to submit to the practical constraints which the bureaucracy imposed on him.[290] This was shown in the inability of the monarch to find a minister of justice who would submit to his will. The ministers of justice Dmitrii Nabokov (1879-85) and Nikolai Manasein (1885­94) were dismissed because they would not bow to Alexander's desire to rein in the justice system. Even with the conservative minister Nikolai Murav'ev, who remained in office until 1905, the monarchy failed to find happiness. In 1894 Alexander III directed him to form a commission which would place the system of justice on a new basis and homogenise it, but would above all abolish the independence of the judiciary. Murav'ev failed, because he neither fulfilled the desire of the conservatives to end the independence of the judges and abolish the jury courts, nor that of the liberals to expand the competence of the independent judiciary. No one, however, suffered a greater defeat than the monarchs themselves, who ultimately had to capitulate to the power of the jurists.[291]

The justice system as a substitute constitution

The judicial reform embodied the impetuousness and the fresh-start atmo­sphere of the 1860s. It was the symbol of the attempt to change radically and to Europeanise the legal system. The rule of law was a bill of exchange on a liberal constitution and a forerunner of modern democracy - that was the view of the reformers and their disciples inside and outside the state bureau­cracy. Judges and lawyers had embarked on a crusade for the fulfilment of their ideals of a state under the rule of law. 'It was an activity which seized the soul, a calling, a mission', wrote Koni in his recollections of those years. The Judicial Statutes were therefore his 'first love'. During the 1860s and 1870s, court proceedings were celebrated like 'sacred rituals', for here, not only was justice delivered, but the political maturity of the subjects was demonstrated. In these trials, judges and public prosecutors presented themselves to society as incorruptible guardians and advocates of the law, who brought light to the benighted provinces. To the educated public, they no longer appeared as rep­resentatives of the regime, but as advocates of society. Those with reputations as liberal critics of autocracy chose the judge's profession, for to be a judge meant no longer to have to obey the orders of the state administration. The study of law came into fashion primarily for those who recognised the polit­ical significance of the legal professions. These jurists of the 1860s were the ones who turned the courts into strongholds of liberalism. That was the real dilemma of the autocratic reforms: that with the reorganisation of the state, they at the same time brought an opposition into being.[292]

No profession had a greater share in this than did the bar. Attorneys not only enjoyed their own self-administration, the Council of Sworn Attorneys (sovet prisiazhnykh poverennykh) which independently and without state supervision handled all questions regarding the education and discipline ofthe advocates. In court, they had the privilege of free speech, to which no one else in the empire was entitled. The free, self-administered bar was an anomaly in a country which was formally still ruled by an autocrat. No one saw this more clearly than the lawyers themselves. They were, wrote the prominent lawyer M. M. Vinaver about the bar, members of a 'sacred order', charged with fulfilling a 'sacred mission'. The first lawyers considered themselves spokesman of society and defenders of liberty. Advocatus Miles - 'lawyer-soldiers' - was the title of a textbook for defence counsels published in 1911, and no slogan could more clearly have epitomised the self-conception of most attorneys.[293] However, not only liberals moved into the legal profession. From the outset, it also attracted radical opponents of the tsarist order, and after the turn of the century, leftist extremists. It was surely no coincidence that such revolutionaries as Kerenskii and Lenin had started their political career as lawyers. The extremists among the attorneys tried to change the profession into an association of political struggle, and in some towns they even managed, during the revolution of 1905, to seize power in the bar associations. For the radical political defence counsellors, the courtroom was primarily a platform for the proclamation of the revolutionary world-view. Not only the defendant's rights, but also his views were defended here. Such attorneys no longer had any conception of law and its function.[294]

The uncompromising attitude of some lawyers was not due only to the political possibilities which their profession opened up for them. Jurists who came into conflict with the state had no other path open to them but to become courtroom attorneys. And no other alternatives were open, either, to the numerous Jewish jurists, because the government did not allow them into the civil service or on to the bench. Thus, the profession of trial lawyer ultimately became an asylum for unemployed Jewish jurists. Their number increased so dramatically that the government in 1889 introduced a quota system into the legal profession as well. Jewish 'candidate lawyers' (pomoshchniki prisiazhnykh poverennykh) could henceforthbe admittedto the profession of sworn attorneys only with the consent of the minister of justice. And since the ministers gave their consent in only a few cases before 1905, most Jewish jurists remained in the status of candidates. Is it any wonder under such circumstances, that numerous Jewish candidates became spokesmen of the radical defence counsels who argued against the autocratic order in the political trials after the turn of the century? One might say that circumstances threw them into the political opposition. At the same time, these circumstances were responsible for the fact that when there was nothing to defend, lawyers turned into blatant profiteers. For lawyers who saw the law merely as an instrument of struggle had no sufficient concept of its formal significance.⁴²

Although the professional standards of the bar deteriorated from the 1880s, and the political conflicts between the attorneys and the administration gained in intensity, the government undertook only moderate interventions. After 1875 the Ministry of Justice refused the authorisation of additional bar associ­ations and assigned the disciplinary oversight of the attorneys in newly estab­lished judicial districts to the courts. But in i904, the government moved away from this position again as well. In view of the radicalism which lawyers exhibited during the political trials during the first Russian revolution, it was undoubtedly strange for the government to impose such a constraining struc­ture upon itself.⁴³

The conflicts caused by the anomaly of an independent judiciary in an auto­cratic state already appeared immediately after the introduction of the new courts, when judges contested the right of police officers and governors to interfere in judicial matters and went so far as to publicly express their disdain for the power of the state. When political cases were tried, there was open dispute between judges and the administration. This happened for the first time in 1871, when in the trial of the anarchist Sergei Nechaev, the St Peters­burg Judicial Chamber acquitted numerous defendants, although the police and the minister of the interior had insisted that all those accused be con- victed.⁴⁴ The presiding judge of the Judicial Chamber, who had not suppressed the political speeches of the lawyers in the courtroom, remained in office, but the emperor forced the minister of justice to turn over the prosecution

42 J. Baberowski, 'Juden und Antisemiten in der russischen Rechtsanwaltschaft 1864-1917', JfGO 43 (1995): 493-518.

43 Ministerstvo iustitsii zasto let 1802-1902 (St Petersburg: Senatskaia tip., 1902), pp. 133-4; Gessen, Advokatura, p. 229, pp. 442-7; J. Burbank, 'Discipline and Punish in the Moscow Bar Association', RR 54 (i995): 44-64.

44 Nechaev i Nechaevtsy, Sbornik materialov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), pp. 159-86; N. A. Troitskii, TsarskiesudyprotivrevoliutsionnoiRossii (Saratov: Izd. Saratovskogo universiteta, 1976), pp. 129-32; V D. Spasovich, Sochineniia, 10 vols. (St Petersburg: Knizhnyi Magazin brat'ev Rymovich, 1889-1902), vol. V pp. 136-9,148-54,186.

of political crimes to the Special Tribunal of the Senate (Osoboe Prisutstvie) in future. The conservatives in the government hoped for more severe verdicts from it. This hope seemed justified at first. Several dozen revolutionary stu­dents who had participated in the 'Going to the People' to provoke a peasants' uprising were sentenced to long prison sentences. But even in the Senate, spec­tacular cases of dropping of charges and of acquittals occurred at the end of the 1870s, primarily in the so-called 'Trial of the 193', when the senators refused to comply with government demands for severe punishments. More than half of the accused students were acquitted by the senators in January 1877. The political dispute between the justice system and the administration reached its climax when the jury of the St Petersburg District Court acquitted the revolu­tionary Vera Zasulich, who had shot the city governor (Gradonachal'nik) Trepov and injured him seriously. In this case, too, Presiding Judge Koni remained in office, but the government transferred the trial venue for terrorist crimes of violence to military courts which, since they administered justice on the basis of the Military Criminal Code, could impose death sentences against terror­ists. The military courts made use of this power on several occasions during the early 1880s, although the military jurists who sat on these courts obeyed the government demand for the penalty only reluctantly.[295]

In August 1881, several months after the murder of Alexander II by terrorists of the Narodnaia Volia (People's Will), the government issued an ordinance for the protection of state order which enabled it to declare a state of emergency and to impose administrative punishments against troublemakers in the areas where this state of emergency had been established. There were two variants of the state of emergency: 'reinforced protection' (usilennaia okhrana), and 'extraordinary protection' (chrezvychainaia okhrana). 'Reinforced protection' made it possible for the governors to issue decrees for the maintenance of public order and to keep persons who opposed these orders in custody for up to three months. In regions where the Committee of Ministers had imposed 'extraordinary protection', governors-general were appointed, who received the right to remove office-holders from their positions and to hand terrorists over to courts martial. Above all, the emergency laws made it possible for the state administration to mete out extrajudicial punishment. It gave the governors-general the right to have troublemakers expelled from the area, or exiled to Siberia for up to five years. A'Special Committee' (osoboesoveshchanie) of the Committee of Ministers, consisting of two representatives each of the ministries of justice and the interior, made the final decision on exile. Unlike penal offenders sentenced by civil courts, these administrative exiles were not deprived of their rights. This made it possible for them to lead a normal life at their places of exile. Thus, lawyers who had been banished to Siberia by the 'Special Committee' could continue to practise their professions in exile. To prevent this, the civil courts would have had not only to deprive them of their civil rights, but also to sentence them to more severe punishments in such cases. In this way the authorities avoided a disproportionality of punishment in political cases during states of emergency, which was provided by the Criminal

Code.[296]

Originally the Emergency Laws of 1881 were to apply only for a period of three years, but they were repeatedly extended after expiry, and thus remained in force until the Revolution. They attained real significance during 1905-7, when the government declared a state of emergency in the entire empire to check terrorism and violence. Between the summer of 1906 and the beginning of 1907, Prime Minister Stolypin used the powers which the Emergency Laws gave him to have more than one thousand terrorists sentenced to death by drumhead courts martial (voennyepolevye sudy).[297]

This, however, did not exhaust the possibilities of the state of emergency. It gave the administration the instruments it needed to assert itself against hooligans, pogrom instigators, bands of robbers and rebellious peasants. It was no coincidence that they were first used against peasants and workers in 1882 who had participated in pogroms against the Jews in the province of Ekaterinoslav. The justice system was powerless in such cases, because its task was to prove individual guilt. It could not safeguard public order. The Emergency Laws gave the administration the ability to take vigorous action quickly against troublemakers without having to impose the severe punishments in every case which the Criminal Code provided. In Asian regions of the empire, where the government was waging war against robbers and rebellious tribes, they replaced the regular justice system.

An imperial decree of 12 December 1904 re-established the jurisdiction ofthe civil justice system in cases of political crimes. Between May 1905 and March 1906, a 'Special Commission' met in St Petersburg under the chairmanship of Count A. P. Ignat'ev to consider the fate of the Emergency Laws in constitu­tional Russia. It resolved in favour of the restoration of the regular procedures of criminal justice. However, it did not advocate the abolition of the Emer­gency Laws, stating that the state must be given the possibility ofmaintaining order at all times and at all costs. If 'special dangers' threatened, it must be able to repel them. To this end, the authority of the state must be provided with 'extraordinary powers', such as those with which 'Western states' were also for the most part provided.[298] The case could be made that the Emergency Laws were all that made possible the very survival of the reformed judicial system in the first place, for there is no system of order which can be applied to a state of chaos. It may seem paradoxical, but the Emergency Laws were an indication of the transformation towards the rule of law which had by then been effected in the tsarist empire. The government needed a law to suspend the existing legal order, and it mandated itself and its subordinate authorities to observe the procedural rules. It could not simply ignore the system of laws and justify itself by invoking the will of the monarch. Thus, what happened in August 1881 would have been inconceivable without the changes which the judicial reform of 1864 had introduced into Russia.

The government held fast to the principles of judicial reform and saw no reason to revise its attitude, even in 1905, when the judiciary openly took sides against the regime's power. It renewed its adherence to the principle of the separation of powers after 1905, and it also reaffirmed the independence of the bench and the bar and defended the jury courts against their conservative critics to the end. How can such an attitude be explained? The ministers and higher officials of the emperor were convinced that only a state under the rule of law by European standards was modern, even if its implications might have the effect of destroying order. On the other hand, after 1905, the debate over Russia's political future shifted from the courts to other public platforms: the parliament, the parties and the press. No one any longer needed a courtroom to proclaim his world-views. At that time, the atmosphere changed amongthe jurists, too. With the constitution of 1906, judges and liberal lawyers had achieved what they had argued for. They lost interest in fundamental radical changes and made their peace with the new order, which had after all protected them from the anger of the people during the revolution. The legal professions 'normalised' themselves and became a mirror of 'society'. Conservatives were now to be found both among the judges and among the attorneys who wanted nothing more to do with the liberalism of earlier years. This normalisation also improved the relationship between the judicial authorities and the government. In brief, the system of laws of the late tsarist empire met the demands of the elites and the urban public for procedures in accordance with the rule of law. Therefore, nobody ever questioned it. But this system of laws remained nothing more than an unredeemed promise until the end of the empire, because it did not know how to communicate with the 'other Russia', the lower classes of the centre and the periphery. The rule of law, local self-government and parliamentarism remained a phenomenon of the cities in the European part of the multiethnic empire. They did not strike any roots outside this civil biotope. The bureaucracy tried to dominate the country with instruments which did not correspond to the realities of Russia. All it therefore achieved was that power remained unmediated. The revolution of i9i7 was a revolt of the lower classes against the programme for a modern system of order of the tsarist elites. And, as Nikolai Sukhanov recalled in his notes about the revolution, what had been built over the course of three centuries disappeared within 'three days'.[299]

i8

Peasants and agriculture

DAVID MOON

Imperial Russia had an overwhelmingly peasant population and its economy was largely agricultural. The Russian Empire was not able to compete eco­nomically and militarily with the more 'developed' states of north-western Europe, North America and Japan in the last few decades of its existence. Over the preceding two or three centuries, however, Russia's autocratic state had been able successfully to exploit its peasant population and agricultural economy to generate the resources, in particular tax revenues and military conscripts, to consolidate and maintain its power at home and build a vast empire that came to dominate eastern Europe and northern Asia. Imperial Russia's peasants were, thus, at the bottom of an exploitative social order. For much of the period, moreover, between a third and a half were the serfs of noble landowners in a system of bonded labour that emerged in the late sixteenth century and lasted until its abolition in 1861. Most of the rest of the peasantry lived on state lands and were subjected to slightly less onerous restrictions and demands. The subordinate and exploited status of all Impe­rial Russia's peasants is one of the wider contexts in which their ways of life can be examined. Another wider context is the natural environment in which they lived and worked. In the northern half of Russia, which was covered in forests, the soils were not very fertile, and the winters long and cold. In the southern half, in contrast, the black earth of the steppes was very fertile, the climate warmer, but the rainfall was low and unreliable. In spite of the burdens imposed by exploitation and the constraints as well as opportunities afforded by the environment, the numbers of peasants in the Russian Empire grew considerably between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the result of both natural increase and the acquisition of new territories with peasant populations. This chapter will seek to explain the endurance of the peasantry of Imperial Russia in these wider contexts by examining their ways of life, to wit: their largely, but not exclusively, agricultural economy; the ways they managed their labour and land in their households and village communities; and their attempts to reduce the demands made on them through protest.

The practices and customs that made up the peasantry's ways of life varied over time and by region. The time covered in this chapter will be divided into three periods. It is necessary to pay some attention to the hundred years prior to the late seventeenth century. This earlier period saw the consolidation of the autocracy (interrupted by the Time of Troubles of 1598-1613), corresponding increases in the state's demands on the peasantry for taxes and conscripts, and the emergence and consolidation of serfdom. The main focus of this chapter, however, is on the period between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. This second period was the high-point of Imperial Russia and its autocratic government. It was in these two centuries, moreover, that exploitation of the peasantry by the state and nobles reached its zenith. It is significant that it was in this period that the ways of life of much of the Russian peasantry had what are often assumed to be their 'classic', or even timeless, forms: the three-field system of arable farming; large, extended households; and communal land tenure. The third period covered in this chapter is the last decades of Imperial Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these decades the peasantry's relationship with the state and nobles was transformed by a series of'Great Reforms', including the abolition of serfdom and major changes in conscription and taxation. These reforms led in time to a reduction in exploitation. Over the same period, peasants were affected by, and took part in, the social, economic, cultural and eventually political changes that were beginning to transform many aspects of life in Imperial Russia.

The ways oflife ofthepeasantry of Imperial Russia also variedby region. The main focus of this chapter is on the approximate territory of the Russian state in the middle of the seventeenth century, prior to the annexations of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic region in the west, and before the later imperial conquests in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East. The territory of the Russian state at this time contained significant groups of Finnic and Tatar peasants in the north, east and south-east, some other Slavs in the west and south-west, but the largest part of the peasant population of this territory was Russian. This territory can be divided in two ways. The first division is between the central regions (Central Non-Black Earth, North-west, Central Black Earth and Mid-Volga) and outlying regions (the North, Northern and Southern Urals, Lower-Volga and Don, and Siberia). This division reflects the degree of control and exploitation of the peasantry by the state and nobles, which were greater in the centre than the periphery, and the centre of gravity of the population, most of whom lived in the central regions. Over the period, both the power of the state and nobility and the peasant population spread fromthe centre into outlying regions. The second division ofthe mainterritory covered in this chapter reflects differences in the environment between the less fertile, forested lands of north-central and northern Russia (Central Non- Black Earth, North-west, the North, Northern Urals and most of Siberia) and the more fertile, black-earth regions of the transitional forest-steppe and open steppe of south-central and south-eastern Russia (Central Black Earth, Mid- Volga, Lower-Volga and Don, Southern Urals and a small part of southern Siberia).[300]

***

The peasants' ways of life evolved in the different regions and over the three time periods in processes of interaction with the nobles and state authorities that exploited them and the environments in which they lived. The peasants' ways of life were also affected by the size and growth of the population, especially in relation to the land.

Exploitation was a major influence on the peasants' ways of life. Peasants owed obligations to the owners of the land they lived on. Over the two or two and half centuries prior to 1861, between a third and a half of the peasantry lived on nobles' estates as serfs. Their obligations took the forms of labour (barshchina) or cash or kind (obrok). Serfdom had originated in the central regions in the late sixteenth century and later spread to some parts of the outlying regions (but not Siberia). The legislation of 1861 set in motion a gradual process of abolishing serfdom, during which the freed serfs' obligations to the nobles were, in time, converted into 'redemption payments' for part of the land. Most of the rest of the peasantry lived on state lands, but some lived on the estates of the tsars' family and, until they were taken over by the state in 1762-4, the Russian Orthodox Church. By the nineteenth century most non- serf peasants paid their dues to their landowners in cash. In the late nineteenth century, like the freed serfs, these dues were converted into payments for their land.

All peasants had further obligations to the state. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the main direct tax was a land tax. The amount peasants paid varied with the quantity and quality of land they cultivated (and were unable to conceal from the tax assessors). In 1645-78 the unit of assessment was changed in two stages from land to households, and households were charged a fixed rate. Peter the Great replaced the household tax with a poll tax in 1719-24, which was levied at a single rate on all males of the lower orders, of which the peasantry was by far the largest part. The poll tax lasted until the 1880s. In addition, the state demanded men for its armed forces. Levies of conscripts were raised from the lower orders for short-term service in wartime in the seventeenth century. Peter the Great reformed and intensified the obligation by introducing annual levies for lifetime service from 1705. The term of service was reduced to twenty-five years in 1793, and levies were not always raised in peacetime. Nevertheless, conscription was a heavy burden on the peasantry. Between 1720 and 1867 over 7 million men were conscripted, the overwhelming majority of whom were peasants.[301] The burden was reduced by the military service reform of 1874. It is important to note that peasant communities were held jointly responsible for all their obligations to their landowners and the state. If some peasants or households failed to fulfil their share, then their neighbours were expected to make up the shortfall. Joint responsibility had its origins in pre-Petrine Russia and lasted until 1903.

Peasants did not passively accept their subordinate and exploited status, but sought to reduce the burdens imposed on them by a variety of forms of protest. Nevertheless, the level of exploitation by landowners and the state combined was very high. From the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, it is likely that Russian peasants were compelled to hand over around half of the product of their labour. State peasants may have had slightly lower burdens than serfs. In both the earlier and later periods, peasants' total obligations were lower. Levels of exploitation also varied in the short term and were highest dur­ing Imperial Russia's frequent wars. In addition, there were regional variations: peasants' obligations were higher in the central than outlying regions.[302] The peasantry's relationship with the state and nobles was a reciprocal one. In return for their obligations, peasants received access to allotments of land, and some assistance in times of dearth. The balance of exchange was uneven, how­ever, and peasants' obligations far outweighed what they received in return.

A further influence on the ways peasants organised their lives was the environment. From the point of view of peasant agriculture, the important variables were soil fertility, heat and moisture. Forest soils, which were not very fertile, predominated in northern and north-central Russia. In the forested- steppe and open-steppe regions of south-central and south-eastern Russia, however, the soil was very fertile black earth (chernozem). To the north and north-east, the winters were long and harsh, leaving a short growing season of only four to five months. The growing season was longer to the south and south-east as the winters were shorter and milder. The available moisture, how­ever, decreased from the north-west to the south-east, and the steppe regions suffered from periodic droughts. Thus, and this was of crucial importance for peasant agriculture, adequate and reliable heat and moisture coincided with fertile soils only on the forest-steppe of south-central Russia (the Central Black Earth and Mid-Volga regions), where they created very good conditions for farming. Peasants in much of the rest of Russia had to struggle with poor soil, long winters and the threat of untimely frosts, or with fertile soil, low rainfall and prospect of drought.

Many historians have stressed the impact ofthe environment on the Russian peasantry, in particular on the majority who, into the nineteenth century, lived in north-central and northern Russia. A recent study, which followed in the 'environmental-determinist' tradition of nineteenth-century historians such as Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii, argued that due to the 'perfidious role of our step­mother nature' the peasants of the non-black earth regions were condemned to backbreaking labour in their struggle to extract a meagre living from the land. It was further argued that the 'low surplus product' of agriculture in such conditions gave rise to 'compensatory mechanisms of survival', in particular the village commune, serfdom and the autocracy, and also caused the late development of capitalism and industry in Russia.[303] The relationship between peasants and the environment, however, was not just one way. Peasants also had an impact on the environment. Over the centuries, they chopped down or burned enormous swathes of forest and cleared vast areas of steppe grasses to prepare land for cultivation. The destruction of the natural vegetation cover exacerbated the problem of soil erosion and, it was believed by some scien­tists, led to climate change, making the rainfall in the steppe regions even less reliable.[304]

A third factor influencing the ways of life of the Russian peasantry was the size and growth of the peasant population. The numbers of peasants grew considerably over the whole period, especially from the middle of the eighteenth century, and most quickly in the last decades of Imperial Russia. Inside the borders ofthe Russian state ofthe middle ofthe seventeenth century, the peasant population, both male and female, grew from around 9 million in 1678 to over 20 million in 1795, 32 million in 1857 and, most dramatically, to over 90 million by 1914-17. This was a result of natural increase, not territorial expansion or immigration. The growth of the peasant population of Imperial Russia as a whole was even greater due to the annexation of large territories to the west inhabited by Ukrainian, Belorussian and Baltic peasants. The total population of the expanding empire, 80-90 per cent of whom were peasants, increased from around 11 million in 1678 to almost 172 million in 1917.⁶

The natural increase in the peasant population was a direct result of prac­tices, in particular near-universal and early marriage, which were encouraged by peasant households and communities in order to promote high birth-rates. Peasants did this for a number of reasons. One of the most important was the need to compensate for the very high death-rates, especially infant and child­hood mortality, so that they could ensure new generations of labourers for their households and villages. Noble landowners also encouraged high fertility to increase the numbers of serfs they owned.⁷ A further reason to promote high birth-rates was the abundance of land, relative to the population, that was available for cultivation in much of Russia until at least the late eighteenth century, but thereafter only in more outlying regions. Parallel to population growth was peasant migration. For the most part, peasants seem to have pre­ferred to increase agricultural production to feed their growing numbers by extensification, i.e. bringing new land into cultivation, rather than intensifying production by adopting new methods. The main direction of migration from the early seventeenth century was south and south-east from the non-black- earth regions of north-central Russia to the more fertile, black-earth regions of the forest-steppe and, from the middle of the eighteenth century, to the open steppe. Peasants in time largely displaced the nomadic pastoralists who had lived on the steppe for millennia. In addition, growing numbers of peasants moved east, across the Ural mountains, to Siberia and, from the late nine­teenth century, to parts of Central Asia and the Far East. From the middle of the nineteenth century, moreover, peasants moved in increasing numbers to the empire's growing cities. Migration to outlying areas throughout the period

6 See Moon, Russian Peasantry, p. 21; Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii v kontse XVII-nachale XVIII veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 192; V M. Kabuzan, 'O dostovernosti ucheta nase- leniia Rossii (1858-1917 gg.)', in Istochnikovedenie otechestvennoi istorii 1981 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), p. 115.

7 P. Czap, 'Marriage and the Peasant Joint Family in the Era of Serfdom', in D. L. Ransel (ed.), The Family in Imperial Russia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 103-23; B. N. Mironov, 'Traditsionnoe demograficheskoe povedenie krest'ian v XIX-nachale XX v.' in A.G. Vishnevskii (ed.), Brachnost', rozhdaemost', smertnost'vRossii i v SSSR (Moscow: Statistika, 1977), pp. 83-105.

and to urban areas towards the end siphoned off only part of the growth in the peasant population. The ever-increasing numbers of peasants in the central regions put ever more pressure on the land.[305]

In order to support their growing numbers, cope with the environmental conditions and meet the demands of the state and landowners, Russia's peas­ants, sometimes in collaboration with landowners or the state authorities, developed practices and customs to ensure their subsistence and livelihoods in the present and the foreseeable future. The following discussion will con­sider, in turn, the peasantry's ways of life in: central Russia in the hundred years prior to the late seventeenth century; central Russia between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries; the outlying regions over this sec­ond period; and Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

***

Peasants in much of central Russia in the first period engaged in a variety of economic activities that were suitable for the environment of the non- black earth regions of north-central Russia where the majority still lived. The mainstay of the peasant economy was arable farming. The main crops were rye and oats: cereals that could grow in the forest soils and were hardy enough to survive all but the most extreme fluctuations in the climate. Peasants began to adopt the three-field system of crop rotation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but many still used two-field rotations or long-fallow systems, such as 'slash and burn' farming in the vast forests. Half the land farmed under two- field rotations was left uncultivated each year to allow it to recover its fertility. In long-fallow systems, fields were cleared and cultivated for a fewyears before being abandoned for longer periods. Peasants thus made very extensive use of land which, due to the relatively low population, was still in abundance in central Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Extensive systems of farming the forested and later steppe lands of the outlying regions, where population densities remained low, were widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The harvests achieved by peasant-farmers in central Russia in the earlier period fluctuated dramatically. In bad years, for example 1601-3, cold, wet summers and frosts in the late spring and early autumn destroyed the crops, leading to famine. At the other extreme, grain sown in the ashes of trees which had been 'slashed and burned' could yield bumper harvests for a year or two. On average, however, harvests returned about three times the amount of seed sown. As well as arable farming, peasants kept livestock, which they grazed on pastures and in the woods in the summer, and fed on hay and oats over the long winters. Rearing animals required around ten times as much land to produce the same quantity of food, measured in calories, as growing grain. Owing to the relatively low population densities, it played a large part in the peasant economy in central Russia before the late seventeenth century and in more outlying regions in later centuries. Peasants supplemented their diets by hunting game and gathering nuts, berries and mushrooms in the forests that surrounded their villages. Peasants were also involved in small-scale handicraft production, especially items made from wood, and in trade. But, the peasant economy in this early period was largely self-sufficient, and geared towards subsistence and meeting unavoidable obligations to landowners and the state.[306]

The basic unit of the peasant economy, and indeed peasant life as a whole, was the household. Investigations into tax registers have suggested that many peasant households in central Russia prior to the middle of the seventeenth century were small in size, typically five or six members, and simple in struc­ture, i.e. they were nuclear families. This was because most sons left their parents' households and set up on their own when or shortly after they mar­ried. From the point of view of analysing household structures, the important point is that the typical pattern for household divisions was that sons left their natal households before the deaths of their fathers. Most young women left their parents' households to live with their husbands when they married. Almost all peasants married, moreover, and most did so in their late teens or very early twenties. As a result of these practices, there were large propor­tions of small, simple households.[307] Not all historians agree that small, simple households were prevalent in Russia in this period. Private deeds and legisla­tive documents indicate that there were also larger households with more complex structures.[308] To the extent that small, simple households did prevail, it suggests either that heads of households could see no reason to prevent their adult children from breaking away, or that they lacked the means to keep young adults under their control in their households. There were similar cus­toms regarding marriage and household divisions in many outlying regions, for example Siberia, throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and consequently many small, simple households. There were also some larger households.[309]

Most peasant households were grouped in villages. Village communities organised themselves to manage relations between their members and with the outside world. In this period, village communes in central Russia did not generally hold their arable land in common, as became widespread in the later period, but it was held by individual households. When heads of households died, all their property, including the land, was divided up between their heirs. Male heirs usually took precedence, but widows and daughters could inherit property. The customs of household land tenure and partible inheritance, and the possibility of women inheriting property, persisted in many outlying regions well into the nineteenth century. There seems to have been a connection between the practice of holding land in household tenure and the relatively low levels of exploitation and population density in central Russia in the earlier period and in outlying regions in the subsequent two centuries.

A fourth aspect of the strategies peasants adopted was occasional acts of protest against the landowners and state authorities who oppressed and exploited them. Some peasants who engaged in protest in the central regions before the late seventeenth century were prepared to use extreme methods, including mass violence. Some, moreover, seem to have had radical objectives. Peasants fled in large numbers from the central regions, where serfdom was developing and the control and demands of the state were increasing, to seek better and freer lives in the borderlands, where serfdom was absent and state control limited. Many fugitives joined the Cossack communities that lived along and beyond the southern frontier. From the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, large-scale peasant flight continued only from peripheral parts of the central regions and from outlying regions further from the centre of noble and state power. There was a religious dimension to some peasant flight. Peasants who rejected the reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church of the i65os-6os, and became known as Old Believers, sought refuge from persecution in outlying regions.[310] Some peasants resorted to more active forms of protest. Russian peasants took part in four great revolts in the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of the rebels articulated their aims by claiming to support a 'good' tsar or a pretender, who claimed to be on the side of the oppressed and exploited.¹⁴ The revolts began in outlying areas among Cossack communities and also involved townspeople and non-Russians. Each successive revolt, however, began further from the centre of Russia, and rebel activities were increasingly restricted to outlying regions. In 1606-7 the rebels led by Bolotnikov (among whom there were few peasants) reached Moscow, but this was the last time the old capital was threatened by a revolt from outside the city. There were peasant uprisings and mass murder of noble landowners in the mid-Volga region, 400 miles east of Moscow, during final stages of the Razin and Pugachev revolts in 1670-1 and 1773-4. The Don Cossack rebellion led by Bulavin in 1707-8 sparked off some peasant revolts in adjoining parts of southern Russia, but was mostly a Cossack affair. Old Believers who lived in outlying regions figured among the rebels under Razin, Bulavin and Pugachev. Ukrainian peasants also joined with Cossacks in massive revolts in 1648 and 1768. All the revolts, especially that lead by Pugachev, provoked considerable alarm and panic among the nobility and state authorities, but all were put down by military force and mass repression. By the end of the seventeenth century, and certainly after the suppression of the Pugachev revolt, most peasants in central Russia recognised the futility of mass violence.¹⁵

The practices and customs employed by peasants in the central regions in the period prior to the late seventeenth century were developed in the contexts of population densities and levels of exploitation that were lower than those in much of central Russia in the subsequent two centuries, and in the envi­ronment of the non-black-earth forested regions where most Russian peasants lived. Some of these practices and customs continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in more outlying regions, where population densities and

levels of exploitation remained relatively low.

***

The ways of life of the peasants of central Russia began slowly to change, leading to the emergence of new customs and practices that persisted until the late nineteenth century and beyond. Between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, peasants altered or replaced the practices and customs

14 See M. Perrie, 'Popular Monarchism: The Myth of the Ruler from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin', in G. Hosking and R. Service (eds), ReinterpretingRussia (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 156-69.

15 See P. Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600-1800 (New York: Norton, 1972); M. Khodarkovsky 'The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was it a "Peasant War"?', JfGO, 42 (1994): 1-19; M. Raeff, 'Pugachev's Rebellion', in R. Forster and J. P. Greene (eds.), Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 169-202; V A. Markina and V V Krizhanovskaia, 'Krest'iane Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine v bor'be za zemliu i voliu (vtoraia polovina XVII-XVIII v.)', VI (1992), no.i: 156-60.

that had been used by previous generations to ensure their subsistence and livelihoods. This was the period when many peasants in central Russia adopted the practices of farming using the three-field crop rotation, living in large, complex households, and holding their land in communal and repartitional landtenure. Most peasants, moreover, resorted only to limitedforms ofprotest. It seems likely that peasants in central Russia developed and adopted these practices in response to the growing restrictions and demands made on them as a result of the development of serfdom and the state's increasing demands, which Peter the Great consolidated into the poll tax and regular levies of conscripts in the early eighteenth century. The increase in exploitation was most marked in central Russia where landowner and state control over the peasants was greatest. From the middle of the eighteenth century, moreover, the growing peasant population began to put pressure on the land in the central regions. As before, the natural environment influenced the strategies peasants devised. Regional variations became more pronounced as ever larger numbers of peasants migrated to the fertile black-earth regions of south-central Russia.

Agriculture, especially growing grain, remained the mainstay of the peas­ant economy in much of central Russia throughout the period between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. Already prior to the late sev­enteenth century, peasants in the central regions had begun to adopt the three-field system of crop rotation. In the 'textbook' version ofthe system, the arable land around a village was divided into three fields. Peasants sowed a winter grain, usually rye, in the first field, a spring crop, often oats or wheat, in the second field, and left the third field fallow to recover its fertility. The next year, the crops were rotated, thus the first field was sown with spring grain and so on in a three-year cycle of winter crop, spring crop, fallow in each field. In comparison with the two-field and long-fallow systems it supplanted, the three-field system made more intensive use of the land. It was adopted to make the land more productive partly in response to increased demands on peasants. Indeed, landowners sometimes initiated the transition to the three-field system to enable their peasants to produce more to meet higher obligations. The new system was introduced also partly as a reaction to the pressure of population increase that rendered more extensive and less productive systems obsolete.[311]The spread of the 'textbook' three-field system may have been exaggerated. It is likely that it coexisted with older two-field and long-fallow systems in parts of central Russia into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the forested regions of north-central Russia, many peasants practised a com­bination of the three-field and long-fallow systems. Fields were periodically left fallow not for one year, which was insufficient to allow the forest soil to recover its fertility, but for several years. The abandoned fields were replaced in the crop rotation with new fields cleared from the forests, which still existed in large enough quantities in the vicinity of many villages into the late eighteenth century. In the fertile black-earth regions of south-central Russia, where the main problem for arable farmers was the struggle with weeds rather than soil exhaustion, some peasants practised a four-field rotation: virgin land, spring grain, winter grain, short or long fallow.[312]