Russian Peasant Wills in the Decisions of the Ruling Senate, 1861–1906

Abstract

This article investigates the law of testation as it applied to the peasantry of late Imperial Russia. After a summary of the main features of the written law of wills, there follows an outline of the special position of the villagers. They had distinctive rights over property, granted as part of the emancipation legislation 1861, and also access to a simplified procedure for making a will. The investigation then turns to the case law of the high court or ‘Ruling Senate’. It emerges that Senate decisions generally emphasised and reinforced the distinctiveness of the peasantry's legal position. However, it is also clear that the ambiguity inherent in the status of the post-emancipation peasants meant that their use of wills became a cause of controversy in the village, in the courts, and amongst academic lawyers. While comparative jurists will be interested in the description of tsarist laws on inheritance, wills, the peasant estate, and the court system per se, the subject is also of wider historical relevance on several counts.