Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Russian society, law and economy
In current popular and scholarly usage, it often seems as if almost any edu-
cated or self-educated individual in Russia in the nineteenth or early twentieth
century can be identified as an intelligent (pl. intelligenty), a member of the intel-
ligentsia. But to warrant inclusion in the intelligentsia, a person also needed
to possess a critical mind, a secular code of ethics, a commitment to social
justice, a strong sense of individual dignity and cultural refinement or, as in
the case of the nihilists of the 1860s, a distinctive lifestyle. An educated person
who did not become a social radical or political oppositionist still could take
an active interest in the reform of government and the welfare of the empire’s
population. Possessed of social conscience and political awareness, such a per-
son might be called an intelligent and placed in the ranks of the intelligentsia.
Membership in the intelligentsia is perhaps best represented as a sociocultural
ideal or identity that encouraged the individual to define personal morality
and personal interests in social terms. The intelligent worked for the better-
ment of society, whether or not this effort served the needs of his or her family
and immediate community. To be an intelligent did not require adherence to
any particular political movement, but it did imply a critical attitude toward
conditions in society and government. Equally crucial, it implied a desire to
change those conditions.
19
Such an amorphous, value-laden definition of the intelligentsia can make
concrete historical analysis difficult. A member of the intelligentsia could
belong to or originate from a broad range of social, occupational and pro-
fessional groups, including nobles and factory workers, officials and revolu-
tionaries. He or she could embrace almost any political ideology or party,
from monarchist to liberal to anarchist, and be a religious believer or an
atheist, a nationalist or an internationalist. The intelligent also could repre-
sent almost any artistic movement or school of scholarly inquiry. Historians
struggle valiantly to understand the intelligentsia in sociological, ideological
and cultural terms. Not only do they seek to connect specific ideas to iden-
tifiable subcultures or social environments; their definitions also move back
and forth between the intelligentsia as a ‘subjective’ state of mind and the
intelligentsia as an ‘objective’ social stratum. Precisely because no single social
circle, political movement or cultural current can contain the concept or real-
ity of the intelligentsia, scholars end up distinguishing multiple intelligentsias:
the noble intelligentsia, the ‘democratic’ (non-noble) intelligentsia, the lib-
eral intelligentsia, the radical intelligentsia, the revolutionary intelligentsia,
19 M. Confino, ‘On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century Russia’, Daedalus 101 (1972): 117–49.
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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
the worker intelligentsia, the peasant intelligentsia and so on. True to the
very traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, historians are unable to avoid
subjective judgements when trying to determine membership in the ‘real’
intelligentsia.
20
Given the social and political diversity of the intelligentsia, even those histo-
rians who rely on subjective factors to define the group are reluctant to equate
membership with a specific set of principles, beliefs or attitudes. Instead of
compiling a laundry list of social, political and moral traits, they represent the
intelligentsia as a form of individual or collective self-definition. Self-declared
members of the intelligentsia assumed a d
´
eclass
´
e position in Russian society by
claiming to be above the interests and concerns of any particular social group
or territorial community. Ironically, intelligenty propagated a myth of the intel-
ligentsia that echoed the myth of the monarchy so many of them sought to
oppose. Like the monarchy, members of the intelligentsia presented them-
selves as transcendent in the sense of being ‘above class interests’, though
in contrast to the monarchy, they lacked concrete powers of intervention.
Nor could the intelligentsia claim God-given or sacred authority; their moral
authority remained strictly secular, sometimes even atheistic. Through educa-
tion and personal behaviour, not election by God, individuals achieved social
recognition as members of the intelligentsia.
21
Whether one chooses to define the intelligentsia as myth, sociocultural
self-image, political concept or sociological subculture, it remains necessary
to explain how such a group arose in Russia and how it relates to the ‘groups
between’. Despite years of debate, argument and counter-argument, it is
impossible to escape the conclusion that the Russian intelligentsia had its
origins in the Enlightenment culture of the educated nobility or educated
service classes of the late eighteenth century. By that time, elite Russia pos-
sessed all the trappings of European fashionable society, including a small
commercialised print culture organised around private publishing, journal-
ism, the book trade and public theatre (with permanent buildings and paid
entry). The producers and promoters of this culture included eminent per-
sonages with close ties to the court and highest social circles, in addition to
individuals from the foreign community and lesser service classes.
22
Among
consumers – for example, public theatre audiences and purchasers of popular
20 Burbank, ‘Russian Intelligenty’, p. 101.
21 Like raznochintsy, intelligentsia also became a derogatory political label. See Muller,
Intelligencija.
22 G. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); G. Marker, ‘The Creation of Journals and
the Profession of Letters in the Eighteenth Century’, in Deborah A. Martinsen (ed.),
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Russian society, law and economy
prints and chapbooks – a humbler clientele also could be seen.
23
Consumers
from the labouring, commercial and lesser service classes did not necessar-
ily identify with Enlightenment ideas or become self-conscious creators of a
literary product, but clearly they participated in a public culture where high
and low forms of art, literature and sociability inevitably overlapped. Nobles
purchased chapbooks, and Enlightenment themes entered ‘popular’ culture.
Lower-class people (chern’) and petty bureaucrats attended the theatre, and
among the authors of literary plays, one finds the serf M. A. Matinskii (1759–
1829) alongside Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96). In principle at least,
to be a participant in the cosmopolitan, pan-European Enlightenment required
not noble status, but noble behaviour.
24
Ironically, however, the social diversity of Russia’s lived Enlightenment did
not produce a corresponding cultural or ideological pluralism. When com-
pared with the educated classes of the nineteenth century, those of the eigh-
teenth articulated a uniform brand of Enlightenment thought barely distin-
guishable from that of the court. Prior to 1800, Russia’s governing classes,
cultural luminaries and everyday consumers of print culture and the arts
belonged overwhelmingly to the urban service milieu. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, numerical growth and further social diversification produced educated
classes of more varied ideological hues, yet the elite Enlightenment culture of
the preceding century remained integral to the intelligentsia’s understanding
of justice, equality and progress. Despite the emergence of new cultural cre-
dos and organised political opposition, the government and educated classes
continued to employ common categories of thought. Irrespective of political
ideology, educated Russians defined themselves in relation to a contemporary
European culture which they chose either to reject or to emulate. Perhaps
more important, officials and self-proclaimed members of the intelligentsia,
following the lead of the eighteenth-century educated service classes, also
posed as carriers of civilisation and enlightenment to a presumably backward
Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 11–
33; E. K. Wirtschafter, The Playof Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2003), chapters 1–2. On the greater degree of commercialisation
further west, see J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth
Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); James Van Horn Melton, The Rise
of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23 On theatre audiences, see the brief treatment in Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas, chapter
1. On the consumers of popular prints and chapbooks, see D. E. Farrell, ‘Popular Prints
in the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century Russia’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980), pp. 34–41.
24 In practice, most participants in the Russian Enlightenment originated from the nobility,
but the principle of social pluralism remained.
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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
and benighted Russian people.
25
In so far as nineteenth-century educated Rus-
sians identified with a broader ‘society’, they claimed to embody its essential
aspirations and beliefs. Social progress corresponded to their understanding
of social progress, and Russia’s future became theirs to imagine.
That the eighteenth-century educated nobility or educated service classes
representedthe cultural origins of the Russian intelligentsia may help to explain
why the intelligentsia so often can be seen as a creation or creature of the state.
But clearly the concept of the intelligentsia, with its suggestion of morally
autonomous political opposition and social criticism, did not simply represent
an extension of enlightened bureaucracy or the societal obverse of the gov-
ernment.
26
The intelligentsia may have lacked strong ties to a broad audience
or public, yet in social reach and influence it moved beyond the eighteenth-
century educated classes. Indeed, early in the nineteenth century, a ‘parting
of ways’ between the government and educated classes started to change the
social and political landscape of Imperial Russia.
27
The self-conscious arrival of
the intelligentsia in the 1860s showed that the ‘parting of ways’ had developed
into ideological and social identity. In the concept of the intelligentsia, the
educated classes resolutely declared their independence from the educated
service classes at a time when social, professional and cultural elites in Russia
still lacked the autonomous institutions of a politically organised civil society.
Across Europe, the modern concept of civil society has its origins in G. W. F.
Hegel’s definition of civil society as the realm of free market relations beyond
the family and distinct from government. But prior to Hegel, theorists such as
John Locke, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and various French Enlightenment
figures concerned with the problem of making society civil used ‘civil society’
as a synonym for the political state.
28
Echoing this definition, historians of
eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe see in the activities of con-
stituted bodies – diets, provincial estates, parlements, Estates General and the
English Parliament – the appearance of a ‘new politics’ of open contestation in
25 C. A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century
Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
26 W. B. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982); W. B. Lincoln, The Great Reforms:
Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1990); R. S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Con-
sciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
27 N. Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
28 For an overview, see M. Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, b
¨
urgerliche’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and
R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen
Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1972–97), vol. II, pp. 719–800.
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Russian society, law and economy
which the corporate institutions of ‘absolute monarchy’ became absorbed into
an emergent ‘public sphere’ situated between the private sphere of the house-
hold and the sphere of public/political authority represented by the state.
29
In
the public sphere, sometimes termed ‘bourgeois’ because of its roots in the
capitalist market economy, the freedom and openness of relationships within
the private household expanded into the arena of public/political authority.
Throughthedevelopment of autonomous civicorganisations,the commercial-
isation of print culture, and the formation of communities structured around
sites of sociability, the public sphere effectively limited the ‘absolute’ power
of the state to the point where public/political authority became the com-
mon domain of society and government. The public sphere thus provided
the setting for the emergence of a new kind of civil society organisationally
independent of and more readily opposed to the political state.
30
In broad outline, the development of Russiancivil society followed the famil-
iar European pattern. But in Russia,prior to the mid- or even the late nineteenth
century, it would be misleading to speak of a politically organised civil soci-
ety independent of the state. A realm of free market relations (Hegel’s civil
society) did exist, though often illicitly and without legal protections (remem-
ber the life of serf entrepreneur Nikolai Shipov), as did a pre-political literary
public sphere grounded in print culture, learned and philanthropic societies,
social clubs, commercial associations and masonic lodges. At the same time,
however, the Russian reading public remained minuscule, and throughout the
eighteenth century, Russian elites understood civic engagement as service in
military and administrative bodies, including elective bodies and offices, which
nevertheless were created, defined and regulated by state prescription. Nor did
29 With reference to the eighteenth century, ‘absolutism’ means not the ‘absolute’ power
of a centralised state but a set of political institutions and relationships presided over by
a monarch whose authority was assumed to be God-given and hence absolute. As the
elected of God, the monarch presided over the implementation of God’s laws in order
to protect the people over whom he or she exercised sovereignty. Failure to live up to
this obligation violated God’s trust and already in the Middle Ages could be grounds for
removal of the monarch. On these issues, see James Collins, The State in Early Modern
France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. W. Merrick, The Desacralization
of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1990); F. Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages: I. The Divine Right of Kings and
the Right of Resistance in the Early Middle Ages. II. Law and Constitution in the Middle Ages.
Studies by Fritz Kern, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939).
30 On the ‘public sphere’, see J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
AnInquiryinto a Category ofBourgeoisSociety, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). On the ‘new politics’ of open contestation, see K. M. Baker,
Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For recent discussion of the relationship
between the ‘new politics’, the Habermasian public sphere and the emergence of civil
society, see Melton, Rise of the Public.
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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
the ownership of serfs and landed property carry legal-administrative author-
ity beyond the family estate. When enlightened officials and educated Russians
of the late eighteenth century called for civic engagement and worked to build
civic institutions, they continued to equate social progress with personal moral
reformation. Their calls for justice implied not open-ended social and political
transformation but the restoration of God-given natural order. Only in the
nineteenth century would their moral consciousness become a form of social
identity to be affirmed by political means.
In Russia, the evolution from late-eighteenth-century ‘civic society’ to late-
nineteenth-century ‘civil society’ can be traced through the provincial noble
assemblies established in the reign of Catherine the Great. Although historians
have devotedscant attention to these assemblies, there is no evidenceto suggest
that they played, or even aspired to play, a significant political role before the
1850s. On the contrary, the noble assemblies extended state administration into
rural localities and provided a channel of communication between local nobles
and the monarch in St Petersburg.
31
Governors appointed by the sovereign
supervised the assemblies, and the cultural, educational and philanthropic
activities they sponsored tended to result from official mandates. In general,
judging from fragmentary and passing references, the assemblies served the
social needs of local nobles by addressing genealogical, inheritance and welfare
claims. Such a narrow particularistic orientation can hardly be equated with
contested politics within an institutionalised public sphere.
But conditions changed in the era of the Great Reforms. Local nobles organ-
ised in provincial assemblies began to play a translocal political role not, as in
the past, by serving in the army and bureaucracy, but by representing the
interests of noble society in relation to the state and other social groups.
32
The
turning point came in 1858, when at the behest of the central government,
provincial committees met to draw up projects for the impending emanci-
pation of the serfs.
33
The projects were locally conceived and generally non-
political; however, the landed nobility appeared almost universally united in
refusing to endorse the government’s vision of the emancipation settlement.
Not surprisingly, officials in St Petersburg roundly rejected the noble projects,
a move that led some provincial assemblies to call for open debate and societal
31 How the noble assemblies used this channel of communication is a fascinating topic in
need of study.
32 Based on local histories of 1812, I suspect that a shift may be discernible at the time of the
Napoleonic invasion, though here too the formation of militias and the contribution of
supplies and monies could have been imposed from above using administrative means.
33 T. Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1968).
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Russian society, law and economy
representation in an on-going process of reform. The government had con-
sulted with noble representatives on a matter of national importance but then
completely ignored their views and silenced their voices, opting instead for
emancipation by bureaucratic fiat.
34
Relations between the landed nobility
and the monarchy would be changed forever. From this point onward, noble
landowners would comprise a distinct social and political interest. Russia’s
pre-political literary public sphere, grounded in print culture and sociability,
had evolved into a politically organised public sphere, grounded in legally and
historically constituted institutions. The articulation of noble interests in oppo-
sition to official policy heralded the birth of Russian civil society independent
of the state.
Of course, most Russian nobles remained loyal subjects of the monarchy.
Still, the political and social agitation surrounding the peasant emancipation
represented an early, if narrow, assertion of politically organised civil society.
A more permanent locus of political action, one rooted in an institution of
self-government rather than a particular policy decision, arose with the estab-
lishment of zemstvo (local elected council) assemblies in 1864.
35
Following the
peasant emancipation, locally elected, multiclass zemstvos helped to fill the
vacuum created by the removal of seignorial authority. The zemstvos enjoyed
limited powers of taxation, which they used to finance meaningful social ser-
vices, though always with the permission of the provincial governor or officials
in St Petersburg. Local nobles dominated the ranks of private landowners and
thus controlled the zemstvos; however, representatives of the peasant and
urban classes also sat in the assemblies. Equally important for the develop-
ment of a broad-based political society in Russia, zemstvo responsibility for
infrastructure, education, public health and social welfare increasingly tied
local self-government to the national political arena. Although Russia had no
elected legislative body before 1906, zemstvo functions drew significant num-
bers of Russians into direct involvement with issues of empire-wide impor-
tance. This political experience, framed by an institution designed to meet the
needs of diverse localities and social groups, provided a solid foundation for
the emergence of modern civil society.
34 For the bureaucratic side of the story, see D. Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and
Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–61 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
35 On the zemstvos, see T. Emmons and W. S. Vucinich (eds.), The Zemstvo in Russia: An
Experiment in Local Self-Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); N. M.
Pirumova, Zemskaia intelligentsiia i ee rol’ v obshchestvennoi bor’be (Moscow: Nauka, 1986);
N. M. Pirumova, Zemskoe liberal’noe dvizhenie: Sotsial’nye korni i evoliutsiia do nachala XX
veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977); R. Robbins Jr., Famine in Russia, 1891–1892: The Imperial
Government Responds to a Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
In functional and organisational terms, the zemstvo assemblies can be called
institutions of the state and society. To a significant degree, the zemstvos, like
the noble assemblies,representedan arm of government. Theydeliveredpublic
health services and elementary education, built roads and bridges and even
provided famine relief. The zemstvos also remained subject to bureaucratic
oversight, and they possessed no independent legislative authority. At the same
time, however, the state–society relationship that the zemstvos made possible
clearly contributed to the emergence of Russian civil society. If a politically
organised civil society were to flourish in late Imperial Russia, the people
of the empire needed to be incorporated into the everyday operations of
government. They needed to be linked in a positive relationship to political
authority. In contrast to what the intelligentsia ethos might suggest, effective
civil societies limit the power of government not by disengaging from or
opposing constituted authority but by sharing in its exercise, and if need be
challenging specific policies, from a position of institutional autonomy. The
zemstvos surely represented this potential, embodying both society’s struggle
for independent authority within the Russian polity and the integration of
politically organised society into institutions of government.
If the raznochintsy revealed the capacity of ordinary Russians to fashion
economic and social relationships outside official controls, and if identifica-
tion with the intelligentsia effectively distinguished the educated classes from
the educated service classes, the professions created a social environment in
which the educated classes became connected to the needs of everyday life and
ordinary people. Given the absence of autonomous guild structures in Russia,
the professions originated in government-directed occupational training and
specialisation.
36
Traditionally, teachers, physicians, midwives, medical order-
lies, statisticians, agronomists, veterinarians, architects and engineers worked
as state servicemen under military or civil administration. Yet as in so many
areas of Russian life, conditions changed following the peasant emancipation.
The establishment of the zemstvos allowed a significant number of profes-
sionals to find employment outside state institutions. This relative autonomy
encouraged them to see in professional work a form of service to the nation
rather than the government. Armed with scientific knowledge and techni-
cal expertise, professionals began to claim authority over the organisation
of training and services. A small group of activists – a group that straddled
the intelligentsia – joined professional organisations and became socially delin-
eated from their rank-and-file colleagues. When the government disappointed
36 This discussion of the professions is adapted from Wirtschafter, Social Identity,pp.86–96.
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Russian society, law and economy
the expectations of these activists, denying them a role as expert consultants
to policy-makers, they joined zemstvo and business leaders in open political
opposition.
37
The experience of public sector physicians (in the late nineteenth century
about three-quarters of all physicians) illustrates the pattern.
38
Prior to the
Great Reforms, physicians belonged to an official medical soslovie educated
and employed by the state; however, beginning in the 1860s, the establish-
ment of medical organisations and the articulation of a service ethic her-
alded the emergence of a distinct professional identity. Increasingly, physi-
cians claimed authority over public health, and increasingly they felt frus-
trated by bureaucratic interference and popular indifference. By 1902, physi-
cians and other medical professionals entered the political opposition with
demands for social reform and broad civil rights. But like other professionals
and paraprofessionals in the revolutionary era, physicians proved unable to
sustain a unified political challenge or achieve control over licensing, medi-
cal ethics, education, employment and association. Lacking significant social
recognition, the politicised among them joined the liberal or radical intel-
ligentsia, while the majority lapsed into political apathy or avoided politics
altogether.
When a national political movement appeared among professionals in
August 1903, leading to the formation of a Union of Unions in early 1905,an
activist minority became involved in the organisation of local unions and all-
Russiancongresses that demandedsocial and politicalchange. Still, throughout
the revolutionary crisis of 1905–7, political oppositionists never predominated
in any of the professions. At the height of its influence in 1905–6, the All-
Russian Teachers Union had no more than 14,000 members, and many of
these neglected to pay their dues. Membership in the Union of All-Russian
Medical Personnel peaked in August 1905 with a total of no more than 25,000
members out of close to 79,000 certified medical practitioners.
39
Geographic
37 For broad treatment that includes a range of professional groups, see H. Balzer (ed.),
Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
1996); E. Clowes, S. Kassow and J. L. West (eds.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society
and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991); Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii.
38 N. M. Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
39 Wirtschafter, Social Identity,pp.91–2. The data on union membership come from
S. Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); J. F. Hutchinson, ‘Society, Corporation,
or Union? Russian Physicians and the Struggle for Professional Unity (1890–1913)’, JfGO
30 (1982): 37–53.
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Raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
distance, inadequate communications and outright poverty made it difficult
for rural schoolteachers and medical practitioners – groups that directly served
the Russian people – to maintain translocal organisational ties or provide basic
professional services. The lack of professional unity, at the very moment when
concessions from the monarchy allowed activists to organise in an unprece-
dented manner, provided telling evidence of the social and political fragmen-
tation in Russian educated society.
Political repression surely played a role in weakening organisational ties,
even after 1905; however, the fragility of professional bonds also resulted from
the gap between highly educated, socially elite professionals on the one hand
and uncertified protoprofessionals or less educated paraprofessionals on the
other. In the most visible professions of the late nineteenth century – medicine,
teaching and law – non-politicised and less educated specialists, working in
local communities, could be difficult to distinguish from the populations they
served. Over the objections of activist elites, these rank-and-file professionals
were also more likely to co-operate with uncertified practitioners, a relation-
ship that blurred the boundary between professional and non-professional
services. Such practices generated conflict among professionals and between
the professions and the government; however, they are most noteworthy for
exposing popular disregard for the enlightened guardianship and expert knowl-
edge that professionals (and officials) sought to deliver to ordinary people.
Indeed, the widely recognised achievements of late imperial public health,
education and justice would have been far less effective without the mediation
of protoprofessional and paraprofessional groups.
Following the judicial reforms of 1864, the most autonomous and insti-
tutionally secure Russian professionals were the university-educated sworn
attorneys organised in formal bar associations. In 1874, when the government
suspended the establishment of new bar councils for thirty years, only three
had come into existence – in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kharkov. Russia’s
modern legal profession, the pride and joy of Westernised liberal reformers,
occupied a narrow field of action. But the limited social reach of the sworn
attorneys is deceiving. Russians from all walks of life had participated in formal
judicial proceedings since Muscovite times, and after 1861 the impact of official
courts, including peasant courts, became massive.
40
How did a broad-based
legal culture encompassing nearly the whole of Russian society flourish when
40 J. Burbank, ‘Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence: Perspectives from
the Early Twentieth Century’, in P. H. Solomon Jr. (ed.), Reforming Justice in Russia,
1864–1 996 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 82–106; J. Burbank, ‘A Question of Dignity:
Peasant Legal Culture in Late Imperial Russia’, Continuity and Change 10 (1995): 391–404.
261