Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia Daniel Beer David Feest, Ordnung schaffen: Bäuerliche Selbstverwaltung und Obrigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich (1834–1889) (Making Order: Peasant Self-Administration and the Authorities in Late Tsarist Russia). 358 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. ISBN-13 978-3447107228. €49.90. Stefan B. Kirmse, The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia. 341 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108499439. $105.00. Vanessa Rampton, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution. 229 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108483735. $105.00. No less than by revolution, Russian history is haunted by the specter of roads not taken. Historians of late imperial Russia might seek to avoid teleological shadows cast by 1917, but the denouement of revolutionary collapse and violent civil war inevitably looms on the horizon of all attempts to explain what became of the Great Reforms. Why did the 1860s apparently fail to deliver the promise, cherished by Russian liberals, of a law-bound, constitutional order underpinned by individual rights and representative government, which would integrate the peasantry and the non-Russians into a cohesive and stable society and withstand the dislocations of rapid modernization and ultimately of World War I? And what did liberals themselves make of the opportunities afforded to them during the turbulent decades before 1917? Were they the hapless victims of historical forces beyond their control or the authors of their own political failure? Taken together, David Feest's Ordnung schaffen, Stefan B. Kirmse's [End Page 412] The Lawful Empire, and Vanessa Rampton's Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia offer a series of fresh yet interlocking perspectives on the prospects for social and political stability and constitutionalism in late imperial Russia. ________ Feest's Ordnung schaffen traces the impact of attempts by governmental and landowning elites to modernize the Russian countryside by removing practices they saw as "contradictory and irrational" (2). Central to this endeavor was the production of new forms of knowledge about peasant society that would facilitate the integration of the peasantry into the wider administration and economy of the empire. Feest scrutinizes the interplay among peasants, landowners, and state officials in Riazan Province from the 1830s to the 1890s. Tapping an impressive range of regional archives, legal publications, and administrative reports, he paints a somber picture of how the bid to break down intermediary barriers between the peasantry and the state, and to rationalize rural life, failed in the decades that spanned the emancipation of the serfs. At the heart of Feest's account lies the ambiguous nature of the peasant commune itself: part institution of self-governance; part adjunct of state power. While some historians have argued that the village communes remained fundamentally autonomous and resistant to state-led change, others have emphasized that they did acquire the characteristics of state institutions, not least in the ways they were recognized as legal bodies.1 Ordnung schaffen challenges the implied binary posited by these views of the commune and argues for the need to acknowledge that both characteristics and roles of the village commune "existed in parallel, competing with each other or assuming different forms of symbiosis" (34). The result was that the commune in both the pre- and (especially) post-emancipation era was a highly ambiguous institution into which different actors—state officials, landowners, and the peasantry themselves—all inscribed their [End Page 413] own agendas. These agendas conflicted because they were premised on incommensurate ideas of rationality; reformers strove for universal standards and a statistical "capture" of information that would facilitate policy-making. The peasantry, by contrast, prized local knowledge and was wary of emissaries from the central government instructing them how to manage their affairs—and with good reason. Feest argues that elite visions of the peasantry were shot through with fixed assumptions about the peasant commune that paid scant regard to the highly diverse manifestations of the institution. Even within Riazan Province, which Feest takes as a case study broadly representative of European Russia, the communes differed enormously, from the heavily forested regions to the north of the River Oka in which the peasants lived...