1 The retention of the category ‘peasant’ in contemporary historiography on Russia as well as the widespread treatment of the village as a separate sphere is illustrated by such works as Eklof, Ben, Russian peasant schools: officialdom, village culture, and popular pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar; Kingston-Mann, Esther and Mixter, Timothy eds., Peasant economy, culture, and politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frank, Stephen P. and Steinberg, Mark D. eds., Cultures in flux: lower-class values, practices, and resistance in late imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994).CrossRefGoogle ScholarKingston-Mann, Esther argues for a more integrationist view in her recent work, ‘Breaking the silence: an introduction’, and ‘Peasant communes and economic innovation: a preliminary inquiry’, 3–51, in Kingston-Mann, and Mixter, eds., Peasant economy, but notions of separateness and resistance dominate most of these discussions.Google Scholar

2 See Frierson, C. A., ‘Rural justice in public opinion: the volost' court debate 1861–1912’, Slavonic and East European Review 64, 4 (10, 1986), 526–45.Google Scholar On the peasant question in the nineteenth century, see Petrovich, Michael B., ‘The peasant in nineteenth-century historiography’, in Vucinich, Wayne S. ed., The peasant in nineteenth-century Russia (Stanford, Calif., 1968), 191–230Google Scholar, and Frierson, Cathy, Peasant icons: representations of rural people in late 19th century Russia (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

3 The volost' was the lowest unit of administration for the rural population. One volast' usually encompassed several villages and, in theory, a population of at least 300 and up to 2,000 adult males. See Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', eds. Brokgauz, F. A. and Efron, I. A. (St Petersburg, 1898), vol. 13, pp. 93–8.Google Scholar

4 The controversy over the volost' court has been studied by Cathy Frierson in her article, ‘Rural justice in public opinion’.

5 For Lenin's complex views of Russian peasants and their potential, see Kingston-Mann, Esther, Lenin and the problem of Marxist peasant, revolution (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

6 Lewin's, Moshe article, ‘Customary law and rural society in the postreform era’, in his The making of the Soviet system: essays in the social history of interwar Russia (New York, 1985), 72–87Google Scholar, treats the values of the village as unchanging from the late nineteenth century to the Stalinist collectivization.

7 Chekhov, A. P., Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1961), vol. 3, 180–4.Google Scholar

8 For examples of this approach, see Humphreys, Sally, ‘Law as discourse’, History and Anthropology 1 (1985), 241–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Moore, Sally Falk, Law as process (London, 1978).Google Scholar

9 This argument is developed by Hay, Douglas in his article ‘Property, authority, and the criminal law’, in Hay, Douglas et al. , Albion's fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (New York, 1975), 17–63.Google Scholar

10 For an elegant summary of the history of anti-law thought in Russia, see Walicki's, Andrzej chapter ‘The tradition of the censure of law’, in his Legal philosophies of Russian liberalism (Oxford, 1987), 9–107.Google Scholar

11 For examples, see Gessen, I. V., Advokatura, obshchestvo i gosudarstvo. 1864 20 IX 1914 (Moscow, 1914)Google Scholar, and Koni, A. F., Otsy i deli sudebnoi reformy (K piatidesiatiletiiu Sudebnykh ustavov) (Moscow, 1914).Google Scholar

12 I examined these books from collections held in two Soviet archives: Tsentraľnyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda Moskvy (hereafter TsGIAgM) for Moscow province, and Leningradshii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv for Petersburg and other northern provinces. The record books were prepared by the court scribe for inspection by the local Land Commandant (zemskii nachaľ nik), who was formally assigned the task of reviewing volost' court decisions. The books record each case and its outcome as well as indicating whether the court's decision had been carried out. Presumably the Land Commandant used the books to review and intervene in local justice, although the evidence for active intervention is slight. The books were submitted by the Land Commandant to the central office of the Procuracy, and preserved there. My review is based on volost's for which books survived and were entered in the published archival catalogues available in the late Soviet period. I examined the entire case record for several years in most of these regions. The imperial government's insistence on submitting all cases for administrative supervision is a great boon for the historian, for a reading of the volost' court record books permits a direct viewing of recorded cases as they were entered one after another by the local scribe, rather than of exceptional cases that had been appealed to higher bodies.

13 For examples, see the record books of the Tsaritsynskii volostnoi sud, TsGIAgM, f. 74, op. l, d. 50, for 1914.Google Scholar

14 TsGIAgM, f. 74, op. l, d. 57, ll. 3–4.Google Scholar

15 For example, the records of the volost' court of Nagatino, in Moscow province, in March 1914 showed that insults, beating, threats, and other assaults against individual dignity account for 32 out of 52 criminal cases. The next highest category of crime recorded in Nagatino was property offences, of which there were only 6: TsGIAgM, f. 10, op. l, d. 99.

16 TsGIAgM, f. 10, op. l, d. 91, ll.Google Scholar 353–4; ll. 341–2; ll. 339–40; ll. 167–8; ll. 175–6.

17 In Russian, ‘po vsiakogo roda sporam i iskam’.

18 The state collected detailed statistics on court activity from the volost' regularly; these figures were published in the annual reports prepared by provincial governors; see for an example Obzor Moskovskii gubernii za 1905 (Moscow, 1906).Google Scholar In the instance discussed below, the presiding officer of the regional judicial authority wrote to the volost' court to correct a small number of apparent errors in the court's reporting of its decisions. These reporting errors were primarily incorrect citations of statutes or minor arithmetical flaws. See the letter from the Zvenigorod uezdnyi s”ezd to the Sharapovskii volostnoi sud of 9 February 1911, in TsGIAgM f. 846, op. l, d. 4, ll. 1–4.Google Scholar

19 TsGIAgM, f. 846, op. l, d. 4, ll. 1–5.Google Scholar

20 A pood is approximately 36 pounds.

21 TsGIAgM, f. 74, op. l, d. 52, 11. 241–2.Google Scholar

22 TsGIAgM, f. 74, op. l, dd. 55, 57, 58Google Scholar; see d. 55, ll. 6–60; d. 57, 11. 9–10; and d. 58, ll. 5–6 for the transition to citizenship.