Article
Alison K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia. Oxford, NY, Oxford Univ. Press, 2014. 296 p. Selected Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-19-997817-5.
Review on a new book of the American historian Alison Smith. The pioneer approach to the problem of "estates" in imperial Russia suggested by Smith is analyzed in this review.
The history of domestic violence, let alone domestic homicide, in Russia has yet to be written. This article focuses on the legal attitudes to domestic and especially marital homicide in early modern Russia and explores types of and methods used in spousal killings. The research is based on court records in addition to laws, legal documents and other sources. Its preliminary conclusions include assumptions about scale of domestic violence, gender of perpetrators and victims, main trends in domestic homicide and their connections with available explanatory frameworks. The study reveals that Russian households were violent places accounting for different types of assaults and homicides, but in all these acts women died more frequently than men. Marital homicide occurred in all social groups in Russia. Motives and methods for marital homicides were consistent with gendered theories of power relations. Penal policies also reveal harsher treatment of women than men, pointing to the gendered definitions of power disciplining methods.
Opinions of professors and chairmen of chambers of appeals on the quality of teaching in universities' law schools in imperial Russia in the late 19th - early 20th century are discussed.
The chapter gives an overview of the development of early modern Russian law. During this period, Russian law was undergoing a definite modernization which intensified in the seventeenth and, particularly, in the eighteenth century. The law became more rational, predictable and efficient. Russia actively engaged in codification and systematization of law, and that led to the more regular application of procedure and better lawyering. Russian law quickly adapted to the social, economic and political challenges, as it was under constant revision. Legal rules became more uniform and unvarying in their application. The Russian legal system grew to be hierarchical and bureaucratic, staffed by professionals via either practice or education. Due to these changes, the legal reforms of the nineteenth century allowed the Russian Empire to become a Rechtsstaat, although it was widely criticized and often even denied by contemporaries and scholars.
The article describes and analizes the issue of access to all potential legal sources in late imperial Russia as an important component of legality principle. The author investigates how local features of political and administrative culture and legal professionalism determined the specific practical application of this principle.
This article investigates eighteenth-century Russian legal thought on the criminalisation of sex and sexualities in light of Western European scholarship on the same themes. It reveals the background to and preconditions for the transfer of knowledge and intellectual frameworks that structured societal understandings of sexuality and, at the same time, created the mechanisms of social and legal control over such behaviour. The study shows that the absence of developed Russian legal philosophy did not prevent the development of a criminal law with the same goals as more developed jurisdictions. Commentaries on and classification of sex crimes in Russia followed patterns familiar to Western Europe and used similar definitions rooted in Christian moral philosophy and canon law. The concern with the proper, rational and orderly development of state and society, central to the era, meant that laws relating to the criminalisation of sex and sexuality were not liberalised.