Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914 by Stephen P. s> Frank (review)

Abstract

538 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 Frank, Stephen P. Crime, Cultural Conflict, andJusticeinRuralRussia,I856-I9I 4. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 3 I. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 1999. xxii + 352 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. IN this new and extensively researched monograph Stephen P. Frank draws revealing comparisons between the tsarist and colonial legal systems. He shows how official statistics under-counted the offences committed by and against ordinary farming peasants, notably intra-class property offences, and thus reinforced outsiders' misleading preconceptions of a violent and uncultured countryside. Stereotypes of the peasant 'other' could be useful to both sides, but the elite belief that peasants had a weak sense of private property further helped to ensure that tackling crimes against their property remained, for officials, a low priority. The system failed in peasant eyes firstly, then, because it did not live up to its own values. Chronically under-resourced, physically remote from the villages and concentrating its efforts on fighting the demons that haunted the dominant social groups, it had a very limited ability to shield the villages. The system's escaped convicts and exiles plagued communities. Protection rackets and networks of horse thieves often bought off local legal functionaries. The masses had, increasingly, 'to fend for themselves as their government sought to stave off the weakening of its foundations' (p. 82). The second reason for failure was that the cultural gulf got worse. State justice modernized away from the peasantry. It was no longer possible to try sorcery as a crime, for example, so peasants were forced to take direct action against suspected witches. 'During the I905-o7 Revolution and again in 1917', concludes Frank, 'Russian peasants demonstrated with no uncertainty that the distance separating state and popular values had not been bridged since emancipation. Indeed, that gap actually widened over the last decades of the old regime' (p. 307). The very vigour with which the author locates his study within a larger narrative of increasing social and political instability inevitably provokes questions. Building on Frank's own evidence, others might have put more stress on how the dashing of popular expectations and aspirations, rather than that allegedly unbridgeable 'cultural conflict, weakened the regime. There is much here to suggest a peasantry going beyond the reluctant need just to 'accommodate' state law (p. 215) and employ it 'selectively' (p. 93); take the willingness of villagers to report crime or the growth in prosecutions for abuse of public office (table, p. 74). Might not rural areas have shared more of the state's concern about public order offences? With the statistics convincingly deconstructed, illustrative cases from different decades and regions must prov-eFrank's contention that peasants themselves perceived those crimes that most concerned them to be an increasingly intolerable problem. His examples are copious (and backed up by even more footnoted instances). Yet, when reading the discussion on homicide (pp. I 66-75) or on the use of superstitious proofs (pp. I87-93), the reader might wonder whether Frank himself risks reproducing an adjusted version of the elite's old narrative, based on numerous but ultimately untypical instances (many of which come from the REVIEWS 539 sensation-seekingpress or end with officialintervention. Some were reported to the authoritiesby the peasants themselves, which suggests a diverse range of village attitudestowardsofficiallegality). Frankallows for internal differences along lines of generation or gender (e.g. pp. IOO-OI, 295-96), but he could have moved further from what remains too monolithic a view of the 'peasantry'. There is no detailed considerationof the typicalityof Riazan, the province fromwhich most of the archivalexamples come. The I892 famine and the I905 revolutionin itsmost cataclysmic incarnation set the mood of doom in Frank's late tsarist countryside.Suchwiderdevelopmentsasthegrowthofthe railways,education and the popular press, consumerism, migration, military service and the zemstva make only marginal appearances. Any bigger conclusions about the legal systemin the countrysideremainprematurewithoutconsiderationof the whole area of civillaw (especiallyregardingland). Frankprovidesa lot of new evidence about the volost'court but while, in places, he seems to accept its importance, elsewherehe reports seeminglywith more enthusiasm -that the peasantsavoided it (comparepp. 56-57, 63-64, 72 with...