Narratives within numbers: Women, crime and judicial statistics in imperial Russia, 1834-1913

Russian Review

Volumn 55, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 541-566

  Frank, Stephen P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 39449115222     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/131864     Document Type: Review

References (125)

1. In addition to secondary works cited throughout this article see also Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989)
2. and no. 3 (1893): 111-40
3. and Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym (1872-1913), 43 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1874-1916)
4. Helen Boritch and John Hagan, "A Century of Crime in Toronto: Gender, Class, and Patterns of Social Control, 1859-1955," Criminology, 28, 4 (1990), 567-99
5. Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991)
6. To date, there are virtually no historical studies of women and crime in Russia. On prostitution see Laurie Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1995)
7. Infanticide is treated in David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988)
8. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), examines representations of women criminals by Russian professionals
9. See also Louise Shelley, "Female Criminality in the 1920s: A Consequence of Inadvertent and Deliberate Change," Russian History, 9, 2-3 (1982): 265-84
10. Of the few published works see P. Mullov, "Zhenshchina kak podsudimaia i prestupnitsa po russkomu zakonodatel'stvu," Zhurnal Ministerstva Iustitsii (ZhMIu), no. 3 (1861): 540-86
11. M. Filippov, "Kharakter spetsificheskikh zhenskikh prestuplenii i nakazanii," Russkoe slovo, no. 5 (1863): 1-36
12. I.Ia. Foinitskii, "Zhenshchina-prestupnitsa," Severnyi vestnik, no. 2 (1893): 123-44
13. and "Vmesto vodki," Volzhskii vestnik, no. 58 (1892): 3
14. and Tarnovskii, "Kazennaia prodazha vina i dvizhenie prestupnosti v 4 vostochnykh guberniiakh i v S-Peterburge," Trudy kommissii po voprosu ob alkogolizme, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1901), pt. 2, 819-27
15. I. Ozerov, "Sravnitel'naia prestupnost' polov v zavisimosti ot nekotorykh faktorov," Zhurnal iuridicheskogo obshchestva pri Imperatorskom S.-Peterburgskom Universitete, no. 4 (1896): 54-83
16. Among many examples see "Prestupleniia i prestupniki Arkhangel'skoi gubernii," Izvestiia Arkhangel'skogo Obshchestva izucheniia Russkogo Severa, 4, (1912): 387
17. M. Ratov, Zhenshchina pered sudom prisiazhnykh (Moscow, 1899)
18. and Vladimir Kopiatkevich, "Prestupnost' v Olonetskoi gubernii za piatnadtsatiletie 1897-1911 g.g.," Izvestiia Obshchestva izucheniia Olonetskoi gubernii, no. 5-6 (1913): 108-11
19. Nikolai Zeland, Zhenskaia prestupnost' (St. Petersburg, 1899)
20. On jurisdiction see Aristov, Volostnoi sud, 56
21. P.N. Tarnovskaia, "Zhenskaia prestupnost' v sviazi s rannimi brakami," Severnyi vestnik, no. 5 (1898): 133-49
22. On infanticide among servants see David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988); chap. 8
23. idem, "Vorovki," Zhurnal russkogo obshchestva okhraneniia narodnogo zdraviia, no. 5 (1891): 1-67
24. Regina Schulte, The Village in Court (Cambridge, 1994), 79-118
25. and no. 6-7 (1891): 73-83
26. and Otto Ulbricht, "Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Germany," in The German Underworld, ed. R. J. Evans (London, 1988), 108-40
27. idem, Zhenshchiny-ubiitsy (St. Petersburg, 1902)
28. It was not professional criminals who swelled nineteenth-century court records, Gatrell argues, but "'ordinary' men and women whose depredations upon each other had been built into an immemorial way of life and survival, and whose depredations upon their betters, when these were possible, were in their eyes legitimized by the brutal facts of existence." Many were "people in employment who supplemented their income with theft." See Gatrell, "The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England," in Crime and the Law, ed. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (London, 1980), 265
29. and N. Davydov, Zhenshchina pered ugolovnym sudom (Moscow, 1906)
30. See also Douglas Hay, "Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England," in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 2, ed. Norval Morris and Michael Tonry (Chicago, 1980), 70-71
31. All data in this article are drawn from Otchet Ministerstva Iustitsii (1834-68), 35 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1835-71)
32. The only long-term study from this period is E. N. Tarnovskii, Itogo russkoi ugolovnoi statistiki za 20 let (1874-1894 gg.) (St. Petersburg, 1899)
33. which can be supplemented by his "Dvizhenie prestupnosti v Rossiiskoi imperii za 1899-1908 gg.," ZhMIu, no. 9 (1909): 52-99
34. For various calculations of growth rates see, for example, Tarnovskii, "Dvizhenie prestupnosti v Evropeiskoi Rossii za 1874-94 gg.," ZhMIu, no. 3 (1899): 123, 125-26, 129
35. idem, "Dvizhenie prestupnosti . . . za 1899-1908," 77, 82-83, 94-95
36. and Richard C. Sutton, "Crime and Social Change in Russia after the Great Reforms: Laws, Courts, and Criminals, 1874-1894" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1984), 58-59
37. Oddly enough, Tarnovskii was the only contemporary to note that the addition of new courts skewed the statistics, though he, too, used aggregate numbers in most of his studies ("Dvizhenie prestupnosti . . . za 1874-94 gg.," 115-16)
38. On implementation of the judicial reforms see B. V. Vilenskii, Sudebnaia reforma i kontrreforma v Rossii (Saratov, 1969), 199-219
39. and N. N. Efremova, Ministerstvo iustitsii rossiiskoi imperii 1802-1917 gg. (Moscow, 1983), 87-109
40. Ratov, Zhenshchina pered sudom prisiazhnykh, 40-41
41. E. Anuchin, Issledovaniia o protsente ssylaemykh v Sibir' v period 1827-1846 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1873), 40
42. Tarnovskii, "Prestupleniia protiv zhizni po polam, vozrastam i semeinomu sostoianiiu," Iuridicheskii vestnik, no. 10 (1886): 280-81
43. idem, "Ocherki razvitiia prestuplenii protiv zhizni v sviazi s formami obshchestvennykh otnoshenii," Russkaia mysl', no. 4 (1887): pt. 2, 1-13
44. Tarnovskaia, "Zhenskaia prestupnost'," 137, 141-44
45. For modern variants of the "masculinity thesis" see Freda Adler, Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (New York, 1975)
46. and critiques in Rita J. Simon and Jean Landis, The Crimes Women Commit, the Punishments They Receive (Lexington, MA, 1991), 1-2
47. and Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, eds., Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill, 1994), esp. 1-22
48. Anuchin, Issledovaniia, 40
49. Foitnitskii, "Zhenshchina-prestupnitsa," no. 2, 133, 137-38
50. See also Filippov, "Kharakter," 20
51. Dmitrii A. Dril', Prestupnost' i prestupniki (St. Petersburg, 1895), 268-69
52. and Mikhail Gernet, Sotsial'nye faktory prestupnosti (Moscow, 1905), 124-35
53. Foinitskii was wrong about felonies in the north, for Arkhangel', Novgorod and St. Petersburg provinces all registered below-average percentages of women among their convict populations. For criticism of the long assumed linkage between urbanization and crime see, most recently, E. A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871-1914 (Cambridge, 1995)
54. Foinitskii, "Zhenshchina-prestupnitsa," no. 2, 127-28
55. Compare Joly, Le Crime: Étude sociale (Paris, 1888), 265-66
56. Lucia Zedner, "Women, Crime, and Penal Response: A Historical Account," in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 14, ed. Michael Tonry (Chicago, 1991), 311-12, 335-36, argues persuasively that the European "shift in criminological understanding from the 'moral' to the 'medical' . . . was less marked than has been thought. For, in relation to female criminality at least, the questions, methods, and . . . findings of the new medical and psychiatric approaches to crime remained bound by the traditional moral framework." Indeed, these interpretations were so successful "for the very reason that they appeared to provide 'scientific' confirmation of existing assumptions about 'normal' and 'deviant' women."
57. See also Zedner, Women, Crime, and Custody, chap. 2
58. Malcolm M. Feeley and Deborah L. Little, "The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912," Law and Society Review, 25, 4 (1991): 719-57
59. In 1916, women accounted for 15.5 percent of persons tried, and 14.7 percent during the period 1922-28. See M. N. Gernet, Prestupnost' i samoubiistva vo vremia voiny i posle nee (Moscow, 1927)
60. and idem, Prestupnost' za granitsei i v SSSR (Moscow, 1931), 141
61. F. Pokrovskii, "O semeinom polozhenii krest'ianskoi zhenshchiny v odnoi iz mestnostei Kostromskoi gubernii po dannym volostnogo suda," Zhivaia starina, 6, 3-4 (1896): 459
62. Feeley and Little, "Vanishing Female," 741
63. See also Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal (Cambridge, 1990), esp. 129-31
64. E. S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989)
65. David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, CT, 1973)
66. and C. A. Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence (Philadelphia, 1991), chaps. 6-7
67. In 1897, Russia had only twenty-seven juvenile institutions with 1,414 inmates. See Tarnovskii, "Prestupnost'," in Rossiia v kontse XIX veka, ed. V. I. Kovalevskii (St. Petersburg, 1900), 935
68. On moral reform movements see Stephen P. Frank, "Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and Its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia," in Cultures in Flux, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, 1994), 74-107
69. and Joseph R. Gusfield, "Moral Passage: The Symbolic Process in Public Designations of Deviance," Social Problems, 15 (1976), 175-88
70. As for the use of "home remedies," on 12 March 1907 a woman appeared at the first police precinct of St. Petersburg's Liteinaia quarter to demand that her "depraved" fourteen-year-old daughter, who had just been arrested at a bath house for clandestine prostitution, be whipped. The officers complied with her wishes, bringing birch rods and holding the girl down while her mother administered punishment ("Sechenie v uchastke," Golos [Iaroslavl'], no. 17 [1909]: 4)
71. S. Budzinskii, Zakon 18 maia 1882 g. o krazhe (Warsaw, 1886)
72. E. Frantsesson, "Po povodu zakona 18-go maia 1882 goda 'o nakazaniiakh za krazhu so vzlomom,'" Sudebnaia gazeta, 3, 12 (1884): 12-15
73. I. N. Aristov, comp., Volostnoi sud po zakonu 12-go iulia 1889 goda (Kazan', 1893), 56-60
74. In France, women's declining representation among felonies stemmed from an identical shift of property crimes to lower courts as well as changing prosecutions for forest infractions. See Michelle Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nineteenth-Century France," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. R. Forster and O. Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), 220-21
75. On England see Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London, 1987), 24-25
76. P. Anan'ev, "Po povodu otmeny 994 st. ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh," ZhMIu, 9, 6 (1903): pt. 2, chap. 10, sec. 3, pp. 154-68
77. A. Popov, Sud i nakazaniia za prestupleniia protiv very i nravstvennosti po russkomu pravu (Kazan', 1904), 397-407
78. Compare Martha Knisely Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil (New Brunswick, 1985), esp. 84-88
79. David V. Trotman, Crime in Trinidad (Knoxville, 1986)
80. and Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1992), chaps. 4-5
81. Attesting to the continued mixture of sin and illegality within Russia's reformed judicial system, Church penance was the only punishment imposed for fornication. See Svod zakonov ugolovnykh, pt. 1, Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh (St. Petersburg, 1885), 200
82. Sereda, "O liubodeianii po russkomu zakonodatel'stvu," Sudebnyi zhurnal, vol. 17, no. 5-6 (1875): 1-24
83. and no. 7-8 (1875): 25-58
84. V. Volzhin, "O protivozakonnom sozhitii," Iuridicheskii vestnik, 22 (1890), 646-63
85. and Ia. Orovich [Ia. A. Kantorovich], Zhenshchina v prave, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1896), 131
86. Sel'skii vestnik, no. 2 (1895): 13. "Illegal cohabitation" also represented a protest against the high fees charged by local clergy to perform marriages; a growing number of peasants either could not afford or simply refused to pay the required fee
87. See "Volostnye sudy Vitebskoi gubernii," Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, no. 187 (1865): 2
88. I. S. Belliustin, "Nezamuzhnitsy v narode," Nedelia, 6, 10 (1873): 379-83
89. "Sl. Orlovka. (Braki u popa-rasstrigi)" Nizhegorodskii listok, no. 243 (1896): 3
90. On free marriages see, for example, I. Orshanskii, "Narodnyi sud i narodnoe pravo," Vestnik prava, no. 3 (1875): 103-4
91. N. Kostrov, Iuridicheskie obychai krest'ian-starozhilov Tomskoi gubernii (Tomsk, 1876), 77-79
92. E. Nagibin, "Na volostnom sude," Permskie gubernskie vedomosti, no. 88 (1884): 3
93. and "G. Ufa," Volzhskii vestnik, no. 27 (1899): 3
94. D. N. Zhbankov, "Polovaia prestupnost'," Sovremennyi mir, no. 7 (1909): 54-91
95. The powerful element of sexual control in nineteenth-century moral reform crusades is already well known in European and American studies, but has yet to be examined for Russia, where contemporaries simply assumed a "meteoric rise" of sexual offenses. For further discussion see Stephen Frank, "Cultural Conflict and Criminality in Rural Russia, 1861-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1987), chap. 3. Compare Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 99
96. citing Sutton, "Crime and Social Change in Russia," esp. 232-33
97. Among numerous Western examples see Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto, 1991)
98. Elissa D. Gelfand, Imagination in Confinement: Women's Writings from French Prisons (Ithaca, 1983), 44-46
99. and Odem, Delinquent Daughters, passim
100. See, for example, Tarnovskii, "Raspredelenie prestupnosti po professiiam," no. 9, 58-59, claiming that "urban women [steal] twice as much as rural women
101. " and Foinitskii, "Zhenshchina-prestupnitsa," no. 3, 121-23, noting the "extremely high number of bloody crimes" among peasant women, despite having pointed out in a footnote that the low level of property offenses was attributed to the volost' courts' jurisdiction over most of these cases
102. "Karachev," Orlovskii vestnik, no. 5 (1888): 2-3
103. "Permskii okruzhnyi sud. Otravlenie muzha," Pravo, no. 33 (1900): 1656-57
104. "Iz zaly suda," Riazanskaia zhizn', no. 9 (1911): 4, for examples. Russia's women accounted for 43.8 percent of all person tried and 39.3 percent of those convicted for spousal homicide between 1874 and 1913, though they were not exceptional in this regard
105. Compare Margo I. Wilson and Martin Daly, "Who Kills Whom in Spouse Killings? On the Exceptional Sex Ratio of Spousal Homicides in the United States," Criminology, 30, 2 (1992): 189-215
106. Tarnovskii, "Prestupleniia protiv zhizni i usloviia obshchestvennogo byta," Iuridicheskii vestnik, no. 8 (1887): 506
107. "Protsessy zhenshchin-muzheubiits i ikh obshchestvennoe znachenie," Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 4 (1888), sec., 143-45
108. I. P. Kupchinov, Krest'ianskoe samoupravlenie, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1905), 20
109. Identical tactics were used in European infanticide trials, but acquittal rates were far higher in Russia. See Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 206, 211-14
110. Alexander K. Afanas'ev, "Jurors and Jury Trials in Imperial Russia, 1866-1885," in Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington, 1994), 214-30
111. Compare James M. Donovan, "Justice Unblind: The Juries and the Criminal Classes in France, 1825-1914," Journal of Social History, 15, 1 (1981): 89-107
112. In Europe and the United States, too, periods of rapid social change and heightened anxiety over disorder and immorality witnessed sharp increases in prosecutions. See Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995)
113. V. A. C. Gatrell, "The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England," in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe, ed. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (London, 1980), 255
114. Emsley, Crime and Society, 28-32
115. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 257-307
116. and Perrot, "Delinquency," 220, 223-25
117. See, for example, Otchet Ministerstva Iustitsii za 1866 g. (St. Petersburg, 1869), 14-16
118. D. A. Liapunov, Pervoe desiatiletie Tverskikh mirovykh sudebnykh uchrezhdenii 1866-1876 (Tver', 1876)
119. and M. I. Pokrovskaia, "O zhenskoi prestupnosti," Zhenskii vestnik, 1, 10 (1905): 294
120. Urban-rural ratios remained similar at least into the late 1920s, with urban crimes accounting for an even larger proportion of recorded female offenses. See M. N. Gernet, "Statistika gorodskoi i sel'skoi prestupnosti," Problemy prestupnosti, no. 2 (1927): 15-24
121. This point is discussed in N. V. Davydov and N. N. Polianskii, eds., Sudebnaia reforma, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1915), 47-53
122. Afanas'ev, "Jurors and Jury Trials," 228
123. William G. Wagner, "Tsarist Legal Policies at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Inconsistencies," Slavonic and East European Review, 54, 3 (1976): 381-82
124. John W. Atwell, Jr., "The Jury System and Its Role in Russia's Legal, Social, and Political Development from 1857 to 1914" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1970), 137-47
125. and idem, "The Russian Jury," Slavonic and East European Review, 53, 130 (1975): 44-61