Old Russia in the dock

Abstract

In 1874, one of the most spectacular criminal court cases in the postreform Russian Empire took place at the Moscow district court. This was the trial against the abbess Mitrofaniia, mother superior of the Serpukhovskii-Vladichnyi convent, head of several charitable sisterhoods, born Baroness Praskov’ia Grigor’evna Rozen and lady-in-waiting of Empress Aleksandra Fëdorovna before taking the veil. Accused of having deceived and blackmailed wealthy merchants, she was sentenced by the jury and finally convicted to several years of exile. The article argues that this was a show trial, staged through the joint action of different institutions and social actors (the imperial family, ambitious jurists and journalists, enlightened bureaucrats). Through the trial, they were aiming at establishing the principles of the judicial reform of 1864, dispersing doubts about the efficiency of the new public courts with trial by jury, anchoring new forms of generally binding legal norms and proceedings in the consciousness of contemporaries, suppressing traditional informal clientele ties, restricting the privileges of the church and the high nobility, and finally, at strengthening the autocratic state’s capacity to rule. The article also shows that behind this unanimity, particularistic interests and very different ideas of how a legal system should function and in which way society and the state should be governed were articulated. It also points at the fragility of the concepts of tradition and modernity to adequately describe the actions and mental worlds of the persons involved in the court proceedings.