Law and the Russian State: Russia's Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin by William E. Pomeranz (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 557 intelligentsia of beleaguered Belarus. Costing less than £20 it deserves to be on the shelves of all libraries and all those with an amateur or professional interest in the history of an important European territory from earliest times through the rich culture of the middle ages to the present day. London Arnold McMillin Pomeranz, William E. Law and the Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. x + 228 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. ThisisthefourthvolumeinapromisingnewseriesinauguratedbyBloomsbury Academic, one of which already has been devoted to crime and punishment. ‘Modern’ means from the Petrine period onwards and is a series periodization which for law might have been more plausibly commenced from 1649, as Dr William E. Pomeranz acknowledges at the outset of this study. It is no small feat to encapsulate major points of 350 years of legal history into 169 pages of text, and this is done fluently, with good balance among the salient subperiods . Dominantoverall,asonemightexpectwithastudycommencinginthePetrine era, is the ‘Statist’ dimension of Russian law: the emergence and consolidation of Muscovy facilitated by the adoption and printing of the Sobornoe ulozhenie and printing of the Kormchaia kniga from 1649 to 1651; the accession in Peter the Great of an individual determined to accelerate the modernization of Russia, including via legal means; the multiplicity of legal systems operating on Russian territory from the very origins of Kievan Rus down to the present day; the imposition (Tatar) or borrowing of foreign legal experience and rules from neighbours near and far (Byzantium, Poland, Lithuania, Islam, western Europe, including England and Scotland, among others) and the distinctive eclectic Russian mix and adaptation with Slavic law and custom that emerged; the role of Catherine II as a sovereign of foreign origin in drawing upon foreign legal principles and institutions (Nakaz, Blackstone) the impact of Marxism as a Western import and superimposition upon Russian circumstances; the sundry versions of pre-socialist and socialist law under the Soviet regime; and what the author perceives as the reform-minded chaos of the El´tsin era and return to what is perceived as a more classical statist model of rule under the Putin/Medvedev/Putin models. The author, a leading authority on the development of the Advokatura in Imperial Russia, handles that body of material and its larger implications for law reform, including judicial reform, adeptly. He also asks questions that any SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 558 legal historian should ask, but too often are overlooked. Sources of law, for example: what they are conceived to be, their hierarchy, their accessibility. The publication of normative legal acts has yet to be fully examined for its role in establishing the centralization of political authority in Russia, promoting legal consciousness, improving the quality of State administration, enhancing legal education, and strengthening the legal profession. The book is a contribution to an approach to Russian law which emphasizes the so-called ‘duality of Russian law’ — that the overwhelmingly dominant theme in Western writing about Russia is the ‘politicization’ of the system, the absenceorweaknessofdemocraticinstitutions,thepresumptionthatthecourts serve primarily political ends in the interests of the State and its influential actors. While not denying these aspects of Russian law, the ‘everyday law’ is believed to operate independently and transparently and to operate most of the time, in most of the cases, for most of the people. Pomeranz believes that the ‘duality of law remains a consistent feature of the Russian legal system, with major implications for how people engage with the law’ (p. 7). Hesuggestsanalternativebenchmark.Insteadofthe‘ruleoflaw’—astandard reached by no society known to us in human history — ‘legality’ is proposed: the effort of the State and its rulers to persuade or coerce the population into abiding by the law as it is in order to encourage order, discipline, economic development, cohesion, and the like. It is an alternative ‘test’, one which favours positivism in eras when natural law (whatever its source) often sought to mitigate the abuses of Statism. The real problem with the ‘everyday law’ approach is that it may concede too much in its effort to redress the dominant popular...