Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917

Couverture
Indiana University Press, 16 sept. 2004 - 400 pages

"... will challenge (and should transform) existing interpretations of late Imperial Russian governance, peasant studies, and Russian legal history." -- Cathy A. Frierson

"... a major contribution to our understanding both of the dynamic of change within the peasantry and of legal development in late Imperial Russia." -- William G. Wagner

Russian Peasants Go to Court brings into focus the legal practice of Russian peasants in the township courts of the Russian empire from 1905 through 1917. Contrary to prevailing conceptions of peasants as backward, drunken, and ignorant, and as mistrustful of the state, Jane Burbank's study of court records reveals engaged rural citizens who valued order in their communities and made use of state courts to seek justice and to enforce and protect order. Through narrative studies of individual cases and statistical analysis of a large body of court records, Burbank demonstrates that Russian peasants made effective use of legal opportunities to settle disputes over economic resources, to assert personal dignity, and to address the bane of small crimes in their communities. The text is enhanced by contemporary photographs and lively accounts of individual court cases.

 

Pages sélectionnées

Table des matières

The Peasant Question and the Law
1
A Litigious Person and Her Possibilities
32
A Day at Court
49
All Sorts of Suits and Disputes
82
Small Crime and Punishment
119
Peasant Jurisprudence
166
Legal Recourse in a Time of Troubles
202
A Different Justice?
245
Misdemeanors to Be Adjudicated at Township Courts
279
Glossary
287
Note on Sources
289
Abbreviations
293
Notes
295
Bibliography
341
Index
355
Droits d'auteur

Information on Data Sets
273

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À propos de l'auteur (2004)

Jane Burbank is Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. She is author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917--1922 and co-editor (with David L. Ransel) of Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (IUP, 1998).

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