In 1951, and again in 1955, Dr. Fernand Lamaze, a French obstetrician, traveled to the Soviet Union to study “psychoprophylaxis,” a method designed by Soviet psychologists, obstetricians, and neurologists to help women overcome pain and fear during childbirth. The method, which was rooted in the medical use of hypnosis and suggestion to alleviate pain, involved training women to take their minds off uterine contractions by concentrating instead on other bodily functions, such as breathing. Lamaze refined the method and brought it to the West.

Lamaze's account of his indebtedness to Soviet scientists suggests that it may be useful to learn more about Soviet women's experiences during pregnancy and childbirth. Perusal of the literature, however, indicates that, while general descriptions in English of Soviet obstetrical care are available, very little is known about Soviet women's perceptions of and attitudes toward pregnancy and delivery.

Over a decade ago, Georges Duby wrote his account of the development of the European economy between the seventh and twelfth centuries. The essential change he described was the transition from a society ruled by an elite of warriors, accumulating wealth through conquest, booty, and hoarding, to a society ruled by an elite of landholders, accumulating wealth through economic investment in land and places of production and exchange — workshops, markets, and fairs. The social groupings became increasingly complex. The simple societal divisions — between warriors and peasants, and between the free and the slaves — were replaced by complex and fluid structures of lordship and service. The resulting social arrangements and their language varied in different parts of Europe. Poland completed the transition from an economy based on force and warfare to one based on intensive agriculture and craft specialization in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This essay describes the structure of rural services and tributes resulting from this transition in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The first part describes village settlements and division of labor; the second part examines the concept of lordship and in particular the origins of involuntary services rendered by the peasants to the lords — “serfdom” — in Poland during the first decades of the thirteenth century.

Both Western and, sometimes more grudgingly, Soviet historians have praised certain aspects of the Russian judicial reforms of 1864 and their effects. Judicial transformation of the law proved to be an important means both of adapting traditional law to the social and economic changes occurring in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and of fostering and facilitating further change. Moreover, the effects and implications of some of the reforms of civil law introduced by the new courts inevitably drew these institutions into many of the political controversies besetting Russia at this time. These issues surprisingly, however, have attracted little scholarly attention.

This paper seeks to assess the significance of the new courts’ reforming activities and to relate these activities to broader social and political issues by examining the development of property and inheritance law by the Civil Cassation Department of the Senate. As the highest court of appeal for civil actions in the new judicial structure, the Civil Cassation Department rendered definitive interpretations of civil law and exercised tremendous influence over the decisions of lower courts. An examination of its practice therefore would not only reveal the policy of the highest court in the land, but would also provide a fairly accurate picture of the way particular civil laws were interpreted and enforced throughout the empire. While the Civil Cassation Department affected all areas of civil law more or less extensively, a study of its development of property and inheritance law would be especially useful in assessing the extent, nature, and significance of its reformist activity both because of the crucial, multifarious functions of these branches of law in any society and because of particular controversies surrounding them in Russia.