Stephen P. Frank is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coeditor, with Ben Eklof, of The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society (1990) and, with Mark Steinberg, of Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (1994).

Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914

By Stephen P. Frank

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Stephen P. Frank
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520213416
Colonial Perspectives:
Representations and Realities of Rural Crime and Justice

The collapse of the peasants' economic life began the moment they received the ability to be completely and freely in charge of both their persons and their property, when outside supervision was removed from them, and above all when they were granted broad self-government. As the supervisory authority in the villages weakens, so their impoverishment is more and more noticeable. . . . The twenty-five-year life of the peasants [since emancipation] . . . testifies sufficiently to the fact that the population cannot improve its material situation without the help offar-sighted, intelligent, and concerned local authorities who can constantly guide them . . .
GOVERNOR'S ANNUAL REPORT, RIAZAN' PROVINCE, 1886

In the summer of 1864, barely three years after the start of Russia's serf emancipation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) instructed the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province to investigate an alarming rise in rural crime. Felony statistics, the ministry claimed, had registered remarkable increases between 1854 and 1863. Cases of murder in this province grew by 54 percent over these ten years, arson by 61, theft by 179, and robbery by a frightening 274 percent.1 As the chief agency for maintaining security and order in the countryside, it is little wonder that such figures proved unsettling to the MVD. When combined with growing press coverage of crime and lawlessness among the newly freed peasant population, however, concerns over public order spread far beyond the walls of a single government ministry. They also bolstered worries within important segments of educated

A. S. Gatsiskii, "Materialy dlia ugolovnoi statistiki Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," Nizhegorodskii sbornik 1, part 1 (1867), 12125. The source for these figures was not given, although published statistics show a 33.9 percent increase in total crimes for the years in question. Otchet Ministerstva Iustitsii [hereafter: Otchety ] vols. 2331 (SPb, 185866). See also Gatsiskii, "Opyt ugolovnoi statistiki Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," Pamiatnaia knizhka Nizhegorodskoi gubernii na 1865 g. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1864), 94111. Governors of some central provinces, such as Riazan', however, reported insignificant increases or even drops in the number of crimes during these years. See, e.g., GARO, f. 5, st. 1, op. 2, d. 1028 (1861), ll. 390b40.

societyparticularly local administrative and police officialsthat emancipation may have come at a serious cost to social tranquillity, justifying preexisting fears over the destabilizing consequences of unsupervised peasant freedom.

By 1865, Nizhnii Novgorod provincial councilor A. P. Smirnov had compiled a survey of opinions on the causes of rural crime from district court judges, prosecutors, police commandants, peace mediators, marshals of the nobility, parish priests, and others.2 A few respondents questioned the MVD's data and suppositions with good reason, pointing out that the statistical increase did not stem from a crime wave but resulted largely from the fact that seigneurial peasants, who had been tried by their masters for most infractions prior to emancipation, were now coming before state courts and swelling the judicial record, creating the impression of a vast upsurge in the number of offenses committed.3 Yet if they were aware of this fact, most who answered the survey ignored it, expressing instead a dual anxiety about the moral state of emancipated peasants and the apparent inability of either police orjudicial agencies to exercise control over them. These opinions offer significant insight into the attitudes of provincial officialdom toward rural criminality and the peasantry in generalan important starting point, for the beliefs they expressed changed little during the remaining decades of the old regime.

The primarily noble respondents voiced general agreement with a peace mediator's claim that the increase in crime was a direct result of emancipation, "because [peasants] lost the careful supervision over them which is required due to the coarseness of their morals." Hearkening back to pre-reform times, some greatly exaggerated the efficiency of estate regimes. As one official wrote:

During the era of serfdom, landowners or their stewards . . . insured that farmers worked and fulfilled all labor obligations. They also curtailed drunkenness. This served as a basis for mutual benefit and common satisfaction. Un-

Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 12526. Created in 1861 and empowered with police and judicial functions, peace mediators served as local agents to oversee the emancipation and resolve disputes between peasants and their owners during the redemption process. K. A. Sofronenko, comp., Krest'ianskaia reforma v Rossii 1861 goda: sbornik zakonodatel'nykh aktov (Moscow, 1954), 14142; Jerman Walter Rose, "The Russian Peasant Emancipation and the Problem of Rural Administration: The Institution of the Mirovoi Posrednik" (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1976), 6970.

"The growth in the number of theft cases does not at all attest to the actual number of crimes," one peace mediator argued. "With the abolition of serfdom, a large number of thefts that previously remained unknown and were punished by the serfowner now became public and subject to [official] investigation." Another mediator made much the same point, noting that after emancipation "the influence of the serfowner's court and punishment came to an end, and all cases now come before the regular judicial administration." Gatsiskii, "Materialy," 13940.

der serfdom, estate police existed in each settlement, so that not a single peasant had the right to absent himself without the knowledge of estate officials; hence serfs remained under constant and vigilant supervision and, as a result, were kept from committing crimes. Above all, they were restrained from criminal activity by the fear that, even if they did not receive punishment from a court, the landowner could send them off to military service, subject them to corporal punishment or exile them to Siberia.4

Others said much the same. "One of the chief reasons for the increase in crime is the rapid transition of peasants from serfdom to complete freedom," declared a marshal of the nobility. "In earlier times, estate owners supervised their peasants' morality and therefore . . . legal order was maintained."5 But owing to this freedom that they did not yet understand, one police commandant added, "our peasantsor at least 99 percent of themare not aware that a person is obliged to be honest and to recognize his duty to obey government orders and lead a patriarchal family life." Instead, wrote a peace mediator, once liberated from the strict supervision of his owner, "the former serf completely surrendered himself to his unbridled passions."6

Nearly all respondents found morality to be in a woeful state of decline after emancipation, as shown by the spread of taverns, drunkenness, smoking, and other vices. Claimed one noble administrator, "Crimes are committed by peasants primarily...