An imperial rights regime: Law and citizenship in the Russian empire

Kritika

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 397-431

  Burbank, Jane ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 47849097328     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2006.0031     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. Bourdieu's category works well to describe the unrecognized, self-reproducing, and adjusting field of practiced empire. For the classic statement, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72-95
2. For a seminal introduction to the enormous and now much expanded literature on this theme, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
3. Even the concept of the "center" in Russia remained ill-defined well into the 19th century, see Leonid Gorizontov, "Representations of 'Internal Russia' from the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatoly Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming)
4. Before 1991, the endemic politicization of the Soviet field prevented many Western historians from even taking up topics that Soviet citizens cared deeply about; see my article "Controversies over Stalinism: Searching for a Soviet Society," Politics and Society 19, 3 (1991): 325-40
5. For discussion of a similar problem concerning the uncritical transmission of late 19th-century ethnographic assumptions, see Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 5-9, 257-60.
6. On Russian expansion and geography, see John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially 7-8 on a "forward policy."
7. On the principles of Muscovite conquest, see Boris Nolde, La Formation de l'Empire russe: Etudes, notes et documents, 2 vols. (Paris: Institut d'études slaves, 1952), vol. 1, 63-76
8. See Nancy Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)
9. and Valerie Kivelson, "Muscovite 'Citizenship': Rights without Freedom," Journal of Modern History 74, 3 (2002): 465-89
10. Cited in Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2001), 70.
11. As in Dagestan in 1840 when the Russian authorities for a short time attempted to replace shari'a and adat courts with Russian courts; see B. V. Bobrovnikov, "Sud po adatu v dorevo-liutsionnom Dagestane (1860-1917)," Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 2 (1999): 31-32
12. For an example, see Yuri Slezkine's discussion of Russian administration of northern natives in his Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 29-31
13. On the superior claim of law, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, "Legal Identity and the Possession of Serfs in Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History 70, 3 (1998): 561-63.
14. See the discussions in Baudouin Dupret, Maurits Berger, and Laila al-Zwaini, eds., Legal Pluralism in the Arab World (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999), particularly vii-xviii and 3-40
15. Cited in Kevin Tyner Thomas, "Collecting the Fatherland: Early-Nineteenth-Century Proposals for a Russian National Museum," in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 97. The quotation is from a proposal drawn up by Burckhard von Wichmann and published in 1821
16. See the huge literature on colonialism of the bourgeois empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. The notion that difference and otherness were essential, formative, constructing aspects, even agents, of West European colonialism and that the maintenance of boundaries between culturally superior Europeans and inferior indigenous people structured selves both in the colonies and the métropole is argued strongly by Ann Laura Stoler; see her Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 95-136, and her "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198-237
17. On 18th-century views of peoples, see Yuri Slezkine, "Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity," Representations 47 (Summer 1994): 170-95.
18. On the multiplicity of imperial registers, see Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen, "Coming into the Territory: Uncertainty and Empire," in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev
19. On federalist projects for Russia, see Mark von Hagen, "Federalisms and Pan-Movements as Reformist Re-imaginings in/of the Russian Empire," in ibid
20. Nathaniel Knight, "Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnogtaphy in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1855," in Imperial Russia, ed. Burbank and Ransel, 124-29
21. John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
22. and Dominic Lieven, Russian Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1-26.
23. Lieven, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime, 48-49. By non-Russian, Lieven means families who had not become Russian before 1600, a description that sees becoming Russian as a long-term process. Lieven emphasizes the dominance of old landed families in the late ruling elite
24. For examples, see the codes regulating the non-Orthodox churches, "Ustavy dukhovnykh del inostrannykh ispovedanii," Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter SZ) vol. 11, sts. 1-1702
25. In this code, rights and duties are linked in the heading for statutes governing the Armenian-Gregorian Church (sts. 1109-16) and for the Karaim clergy (non-Talmudic Jewish sect, sts. 1277-92), but not in the regulations governing other Jews, other Armenian churches, Muslim clergy, and so on. The code for the rural estate is almost entirely about rights, plus some obligations; the few l'goty in this code concern payments for services or conditions applying to arrears: Polozhenie o sel'skom sostoianii (SZ, vol. 9). SZ references are based on I. D. Mordukhai-Boltovskii, ed., Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Deiatel', 1912). This unofficial - intended for use by legal professionals - version of the Collected Laws includes changes made according to the 1906 "continuation," including the Fundamental Laws declared that year
26. In theory, an atheist might have found a way to marry legally, if he or she were part of an atheist "tribe" or "nation." But such a concept would be outside the government's notion of historically established communities with their cultural traditions, and establishing a new religious collectivity was a perilous endeavor in the late empire: see Paul Werth, "Big Candles and 'Internal Conversion': The Mari Pagan Reformation and Its Russian Appropriations," in Of Religion and Identity: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in the Russian Empire, ed. Michael Khodarkovsky and Robert Geraci (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 144-72
27. The question of intermarriage was a delicate area, in part because it challenged the principle that people belonged to collectives and would follow their rules. On the sensitive question of marriage between pagans and Muslims, see Paul Werth, "Tsarist Categories, Orthodox Intervention, and Islamic Conversion in a Pagan Udmurt Village, 1870s-1890s," in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, ed. Anke von Kügelgen, Michael Kemper, and Allen J. Frank, vol. 2 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1998), 390
28. On the question of "mixed marriages," see V. Shein, "K istorii voprosa o smeshannykh brakakh," Zhurnal Ministerstva iustitsii 1907: 231-73
29. See Wetth, "Tsarist Categories, Orthodox Interventions, and Islamic Conversion," 385-415.
30. In other areas of Russian law, judicial revision took place at the higher level of cassation review. I argue here that for customary practices, law could in effect be made at a very local level. On judicial revision, see William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 206-23
31. For studies of these various kinds of courts, see on the Caucasus: N. M. Agishev and V. D. Bushen, eds., Materialy po obozreniiu gorskikh i narodnykh sudov kavkazkogo kraia (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1912)
32. V. O. Bobrovnikov, Musul'mane Severnogo Kavkaza: Obychai, pravo, nasilie. Ocherki po istorii etnografii i prava nagornogo Dagestana (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2002), 98-204
33. Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain People and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 89-109
34. Irina Babich, Evoliutsiia pravovoi kul'tury adygov (1860-1990-e gody) (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii, RAN), 31-137
35. on nomad steppe courts, see Virginia Martin, "Barimta: Nomadic Custom, Imperial Crime," in Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 254-57
36. and on township courts, Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court. Jersild's and Bobrovnikov's monographs were reviewed in Kritika 7, 1 (2006): 111-22
37. Bobrovnikov, Musul'mane Severnogo Kavkaza, 162. These were the terms of the Dagestan rural courts as reformed in the 1860s
38. On court procedures, see for Russian township courts OPK, st. 113-25, 132-39
39. On the size of townships, see S. Latyshev, "Volost'," in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', ed. F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, 51 vols. (St. Petersburg: I. A. Efron, 1890-1907), vol. 13, 95
40. See Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 57-58.
41. On appeals from township courts, see Gareth Popkins, "Peasant Experiences of the Late Tsarist State: District Congresses of Land Captains, Provincial Boards, and the Legal Appeals Process," Slavonic and East European Review 78, 1 (2000): 90-114.
42. On the multiplicity of court systems and the tiers of appeals, see Martin, "Barimta," 255-57
43. and Bobrovnikov, "Sud po adatu," 32-33.
44. For the Russian township courts and their appeals ladder, see N. P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 4th rev. ed. (Moscow: Tretii Rim, 1997), 213-14
45. and Popkins, "Peasant Experiences. "
46. The endurance of the regime of differentiated rights accords with Gregory Freeze's pioneering article about the estate system and its ongoing, if not growing, force in society in the same period: "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91, 1 (1986): 11-36.
47. See the description of this conflict in V. N. Latkin, Lektsii po istorii russkogo prava (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia S.-Peterburgskoi odinochnoi tiur'my, 1912), 342-43
48. On the history of administrative law in imperial Russia, see E. A. Pravilova, Zakonnost' i prava lichnosti: Administrativnaia iustitsiia v Rossi: (vtoraia polovina XIXv.-oktiabr' 1917 g.) (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie-kul'tura, 2000)
49. On law, personal power, and legal culture in Russia, see Jane Burbank, "Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence: Perspectives from the Early Twentieth Century," in Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864-1994: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order, ed. Peter H. Solomon, Jr. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 82-85
50. On corporate behavior among professionals, see Jane Burbank, "Discipline and Punish in the Moscow Bar Association," Russian Review 54, 1 (1995): 44-64.
51. For an intriguing analysis of group formation among intellectuals, see Barbara Walker, "Kruzhok Culture and the Meaning of Patronage in the Early Soviet Literary World," Contemporary European History 2, 1 (2002): 107-23.
52. In 1730, a proposal for a noble council that would set limits on the autocrat was defeated by other nobles; see Valerie Kivelson, "Kinship Politics, Autocratic Politics: A Reconsideration of Early-Eighteenth-Century Political Culture," in Imperial Russia, ed. Burbank and Ransel, 5-31. The Duma's turbulent history from 1906 to 1917 displays the extreme challenges that a new kind of representational politics posed to both officials and representatives
53. For descriptions of the institutions of Russia's central government, see Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 67-276.
54. N. G. Ustrialov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie tsarstvovaniia gosudaria Nikolaia I (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ekspeditsii zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag, 1847), 167
55. This passage is cited by Willard Sunderland in his Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 126-27.
56. For a dramatic example of the autocracy's unwillingness to take a stand for Orthodoxy and against separate Muslim schools, see Robert P. Geraci, "Russian Orientalism at an Impasse: Tsarist Education Policy and the 1910 Conference on Islam," in Russia's Orient, ed. Brower and Lazzerini, 138-61
57. On Russian policy toward natives in the Volga regions, see Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)
58. and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Missions, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)
59. On the formula and its significance, see B. E. Nol'de, "Edinstvo i nerazdel'nost' Rossii," in his Ocherki russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava (St. Petersburg: Pravda, 1911), 223-554
60. Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
61. Banditry as applied to Caucasian people is an old term, related to the long-term battle for control in this area. See Vladimir Bobrovnikov, "Bandits and the State: Designing a 'Traditional' Culture of Violence in the Russian Caucasus," in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev
62. On policymakers' opinions, see Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, 32-48
63. The idea that legal divisions of society provided everyone with a field to play on is developed by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
64. Redemption dues were finally abolished in 1907. On the Emancipation's aftermath, see David A. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987)
65. Paul Werth argues that the more frequent usage of the untranslatable word inorodets-a person of other origin-reflects a shift in imperial thinking in the mid-19th century from primarily religious to primarily ethnic kinds of identification systems: "Changing Conceptions of Difference, Assimilation, and Faith in the Volga-Kama Region, 1740-1870," in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev
66. See also John W. Slocum, "Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?. The Evolution of the Category of'Aliens' in Imperial Russia," Russian Review 57, 2 (1998): 173-90
67. for a discussion of the category in legal, informal, and jurists' usages. I use the translation "native aliens," suggesting comparisons with American usages. A term used in the same period in the United States for native Americans is "resident foreign nations." See D. W. Meining, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2: Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 179
68. Here I make a distinction between calls for democracy-very common, but defined differently and selectively by various political actors-and the lack of concern for institutions that would empower all citizens equally. For a Russian perspective on this issue, see Mark Vishniak's discussion of the weak interest in calling a constituent assembly to found a new political order: M. V. Vishniak, "Ideia uchreditel'nogo sobraniia," Griadushchaia Rossiia, no. 1 (1920): 270-92
69. On this issue, see Burbank, "Legal Culture, Citizenship, and Peasant Jurisprudence," 85-94
70. and Cathy A. Frierson, "Rural Justice in Public Opinion: The Volost' Court Debate," Slavonic and East European Review 64, 4 (1986): 526-45
71. Trudy Imperatorskogo vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva 2, kn. 4-5 (1904): 96-97. I am grateful to Joseph Bradley for drawing my attention to this source
72. On the battles for mestnyi sud, see P. N. Zyrianov, "Tret'ia duma i vopros o mestnogo suda i volostnogo upravleniia," Istoriia SSSR, no. 6 (1969): 45-62
73. E. S. Kots, Mestnyi sud i ego reforma (St. Petersburg: Zemledelets, 1913)
74. M. M. Mogilianskii, "Zemstvo i mestnyi sud," in Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik 1864-1914 (St. Petersburg: O. N. Popova, 1914), 86-92
75. and N. Rudin, Zakon 14 iiunia 1912 g. o preobrazovanii mestnogo suda (St. Petersburg: Sotrudnik, 1912)
76. For the texts of civil rights and local court decrees, see Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, 3 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), vol. 1, 226-38
77. Browder and Kerensky, eds. , Provisional Government, vol. 1, 234-35
78. Browder and Kerensky, eds. , Russian Provisional Government, vol. 1,236. Translated from Russkie vedomosti, no. 106 (13 May 1917): 3
79. Volostnoe zemstvo, no. 3 (1917): 83
80. One example was an early 19th-century attempt to organize Russian peasants in military colonies; see George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 164
81. See the fascinating discussion of distant rulership in Morgan Liu, "Recognizing the Khan: Authority, Space, and Political Imagination among Uzbek Men in Post-Soviet Osh, Kyrgyzstan" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2002)
82. This was a theme of my study of the Russian intelligentsia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution: Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
83. On the autocracy's attempts to undermine national representation in the Duma, see Rustem Tsiunchuk, "Peoples, Regions, and Electoral Policy: The State Duma and the Constitution of New National Elites (1906-17)," in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev
84. On a popular political imaginary, see Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, "Entre le mythe et la parole: L'action Naissance de la conception politique du pouvoir en Russia," Annales, histoire, sciences sociales, no. 4 (1996): 733-57