Reflections on Customary Law and Post-Reform Peasant Russia

Abstract

Professor Lewin's discussion of customary law and the functioning of Russian peasant society in the post-reform period is a welcome introduction to an important subject that has largely been ignored by modern scholars. Given the intensity of the debate that the subject fostered among nineteenthand early twentieth-century jurists, historians, and ethnographers, his discussion is long overdue.1 Lewin's contention that post-reform Russian peasant society was a coherent system with rhythms of its own is a valid one. Peasant societies, by definition, are built on relations that are firmly tied to the land. Land generally provides the means of existence, and various institutions, in turn, develop around that foundation to ensure the perpetuation of the community. The rhythms of peasant life are, however, at the mercy of external factors and shaped, in part, by them. It is difficult to ignore, for example, the effects of serf-landlord relations on pre-emancipation Russian peasant society. 2 The legacy of serfdom continued to shape the cultural pattern of Russian peasant life long after 1861; the peasantry remained a separate soslovie governed by traditional institutions, the functions of which were extended to compensate for the abolition of the landowners' authority. How does the historian come to an understanding of the mechanisms and customs of Russian peasant society? One can sympathize with the lament of N. Astyrev, a volost' scribe in Dem'ianovskaia