Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Russian society, law and economy

the monarchs themselves, who ultimately had to capitulate to the power of

the jurists.

The justice system as a substitute constitution

The judicial reform embodied the impetuousness and the fresh-start atmo-

sphere 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 bureau-

cracy. 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 rep-

resentatives 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 polit-

ical 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.

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 regardingthe education and discipline of the 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

38 Baberowski, Autokratie,pp.429–80.

39 Koni, A. F. ‘Novyi sud’, in Koni, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 400; G. Dzhanshiev, Epokha

velikikh reform (St Petersburg, 1907), pp. 428–50; M. F. Gromnitskii, ‘Iz proshlago (Po

lichnym vospominaniiam)’, Russkaia mysl’ (1899), no. 2: 49–71;no.3: 68–88;no.6: 1–33;

no.9: 210–50;no.12: 51–68; V.S. Chevazhevskii, ‘Iz vospominaniio sluzhbe po sudebnomu

vedomstvu’, Russkaia starina 167, 7 (1916): 71–80; Sluchevskii, ‘Iz pervykh let’, 185; Nol’de,

‘Otnosheniia’, 492–531.

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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.

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.

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 henceforth be admitted to the profession of sworn attorneys

40 N. P. Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli (Berlin: Izd. Ol’gi D’iakovoi, 1921), vol. II, p. 15;

M. M. Vinaver, Ocherki ob advokature (St Petersburg: Tip M. M. Stasiulevich, 1902), p. 3;L.

E. Vladimirov, Advocatus Miles. Posobie dlia ugolovnoi zashchity (St Petersburg: Zakonove-

denie, 1911); J. Baberowski, ‘Rechtsanw

alte in Russland, 1866–1914’, in C. McClelland and

S. Merl (eds.), Professionen im modernen Europa (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1995), pp.

29–59.

41 Kistiakovskii, ‘V zashchitu prava’, pp. 125–55; G. B. Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei (Paris:

Imprimerie Pascal, 1933), vol. I, pp. 203–12; N. N. Polianskii, ‘Zashchita i obvinenie po

delam o gosudarstvennykh prestupleniiakh’, Pravo(1910), no.36: 2125; Gessen, Advokatura,

pp. 385–426; Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli,pp.52–3; M. L. Mandel’shtam, 1905

god v politicheskikh protsessakh. Zapiski zashchitnika (Moscow: Izd. Vsesoiuznogo obshch-

estva politkatorzhan, 1931); I. Moshinskii, ‘Politicheskaia zashchita v dorevoliutsionnykh

sudakh’, in V. V. Vilenskii (ed.), Deviatyi val. K desiatiletiiu osvobozhdeniia iz tsarskoi katorgi

i ssylki (Moscow: 1927), pp. 44–71.

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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.

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 associ-

ations and assigned the disciplinary oversight of the attorneys in newly estab-

lished judicial districts to the courts. But in 1904, 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 struc-

ture upon itself.

The conﬂicts caused by the anomaly of an independent judiciary in an auto-

cratic 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 Peters-

burg Judicial Chamber acquitted numerous defendants, although the police

and the minister of the interior had insisted that all those accused be con-

victed.

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 za sto 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 (1995): 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.

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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 stu-

dents 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, spec-

tacular 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 revolu-

tionary Vera Zasulich, whohad 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 terror-

ists. 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.

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

45 A. Iakimova, ‘Bol’shoi protsess ili protsess 193-kh’, Katorga i ssylka 37, 8 (1927): 7–31;

N. S. Tagantsev, Perezhitoe (Petrograd: CTOS tip., 1919), vol. II, pp. 134–51; A. F. Koni,

‘Vospominaniia o dele Very Zasulich’, in Koni, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. II, pp. 24–252;

RGIA, Fond 1405,op.76,d.7352,l.1–6; N. A. Troitskii, ‘Narodnaia volia’ pered tsarskim

sudom 1880–1894 (Saratov: Izd. Saratovskogo universiteta, 1983); Baberowski, Autokratie,

pp. 671–722.

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exiled to Siberia for up to ﬁve years. A ‘Special Committee’ (osoboe soveshchanie)

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.

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 (voennye polevye sudy).

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

46 V. M. Gessen, Iskliuchitel’noe polozhenie (St Petersburg: Pravo, 1908); W. Nabokow, ‘Das

aussergerichtliche Strafverfahren’, in J.Melnik (ed.), Russen

uber Russland.Ein Sammelwerk

(Frankfurt: Rutten and Loening, 1906), pp. 297–315; A. A. Lopukhin, Nastoiashchee i

budushchee russkoi politsii (Moscow: Tip. v. Sablina, 1907); D. Rawson, ‘The Death Penalty

in Late Tsarist Russia’, RH 11 (1984): 29–58; Baberowski, Autokratie,pp.702–7;Daly,

Autocracy,pp.33–40.

47 N.N.Polianskii, Epopeia voenno-polevykh sudov1906–1907 gg. (Moscow: Izd. Vsesoiuznogo

obshchestra politkatorzhan, 1934); W. C. Fuller, Civil–Military Conﬂict in Late Imperial Rus-

sia 1881–1914(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); N. I. Faleev, ‘Shest’mesiatsev

voenno-polevoi iustitsii. Ocherk’, Byloe (1907), no. 14: 43–81.

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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 of the

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 constitu-

tional Russia. It resolved in favour of the restoration of the regular procedures

of criminal justice. However, it did not advocate the abolition of the Emer-

gency Laws, stating that the state must be given the possibility of maintaining

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.

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: theparliament, the parties andthe press.Noone any longer needed a

courtroom to proclaim his world-views. At that time, the atmosphere changed

among the jurists, too. With the constitution of 1906, judges and liberal lawyers

48 RGIA, Fond 1239,op.16, prilozhenie, d. 1,l.627;Daly,Autocracy,pp.36–40; Baberowski,

Autokratie,pp.767–76.

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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 1917 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’.

49 N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii (Moscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1991), vol. I, p.

126.

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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 eco-

nomically 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 Impe-

rial 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

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Russian society, law and economy

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.

Theways of life of thepeasantry of Imperial Russiaalso varied by 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,

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Peasants and agriculture

both the power of the state and nobility and the peasant population spread

from the centre into outlying regions. The second division of the main territory

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).

∗∗∗

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

outlyingregions (butnot Siberia).Thelegislation of 1861 set in motion agradual

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

1 D. Moon, ‘Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia’s Frontiers 1550–1897’, Historical

Journal, 30 (1997): 859–93.

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