Provincial Legal Culture of the Northern Peasantry in the Context of the Implementation of Bourgeois Reforms of the Second Half of the XIX Century in Russia

Sosnina Mariya Aleksandrovna Senior lecturer, Department of Theory and History of State and Law, Northern (Arctic) Federal University 58 Lomonosov Ave., office 106, Arkhangelsk region, 163002, Russia SosninaAGTU@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Despite the rather extensive historiography devoted to the legal culture of peasants who emerged from serfdom in 1861, the problem of historical and legal research of the level of legal culture of state peasants is a gap in the historiography of bourgeois reforms of the second half of the XIX century. The relevance of the study is justified by the fact that the state (state-owned) village occupied a special place in the socio-economic structure of the Russian Empire.

Discussions on the level of legal culture began in the historiography of the pre-revolutionary period. Such authors as S. V. Pakhman, I. G. Orshansky, P. Skorobogaty, A. A. Leontiev, G. A. Dashkevich, A. A. Charushin, believed that peasants were not ready to be included in the general legal field of post-reform Russia, since they were carriers of a unique legal culture incompatible with official legislation that did not regulate the main issues of peasant legal relations.

Among the most significant works of the modern period, it is necessary to note the works of V. B. Bezgin, L. I. Zemtsov, A.V. Kirillin, B. N. Mironov, T. A. Tarabanova, T. V. Shatkovskaya, I. N. Skuratova, M.A. Melnichuk, etc. The dominant point of view in pre-revolutionary and modern historiography about the low level of legal culture of the peasantry is increasingly being refuted in connection with regional archival studies of documents of volost boards, namely decisions of volost courts. Thus, the study of the post–reform village, taking into account its social and regional heterogeneity, is an important step towards the formation of a conceptual approach to this issue.

Since there is currently no research on the legal culture of the former state peasants of the post-reform period of Russian history, the purpose of this article is to analyze its qualitative state and external manifestation through the prism of bourgeois reforms carried out in the second half of the XIX century. The object of scientific work was the state village, and the subject of research was the legal culture of the northern peasantry of post-reform Russia in the period from 1861 to 1917. The study uses a formal legal method, as well as a multidimensional statistical analysis by identifying, interpreting the content and interrelationships of semantic units of protocols of parish courts, regulatory legal acts, norms of customary law.

The chronological framework of the study includes 1861 – 1917. The choice of the period is connected, first of all, with the beginning of the functioning of official peasant courts not only in the state village (according to the reform of 1837-1841 by P.D. Kiselyov), but also in connection with their extension to former landowner peasants during the peasant reform of 1861. The geographical scope includes the territory of the distribution of the system of volost courts of the Russian Empire in terms of legislative regulation in the post-reform period. To explain the specifics of the problems of this study in terms of the legal culture of the northern peasantry in the unique conditions of the volost justice of the former state village, the materials of the Arkhangelsk province within the boundaries of 1861-1917 are taken. The originality of the historical and legal development of the Arkhangelsk province, consisting in the absence of private feudal dependence, regional aspects of the peasant community, unique land use conditions, the later introduction of justice of the peace and the absence of a jury, determined the features of the provincial legal culture of northern peasants.  

The present study complements the generalizations already available in historical and legal science to recreate the mechanism for implementing the most important state transformations of the era, allows us to determine what is common and special in the process of bourgeois reforms in various regions of the country, especially since the specifics of customary law and the regulatory framework provided for these differences.

The history of the Russian Empire of the second half of the XIX century is associated with an attempt to transform the estate of Russian society into a wordless society. Of course, the bourgeois reforms initiated by Alexander II were aimed at achieving a quick result. Judicial reform, for example, was supposed to be implemented within four years, but in practice the process of implementing one of the key reforms dragged on for forty years. Zemstvo reform, to the great regret of provincial governors, was not implemented in provinces remote from the center, although the urgent need for the introduction of zemstvos was repeatedly reported to the Ministry of Internal Affairs by local authorities ^{[14; p. 264],[7; p. 10-11]}. The abolition of serfdom laid an unbearable burden on the shoulders of the Russian peasantry, and the process of including the latter in civil society was not completed until 1917. This state of affairs can be explained by several features of the development of the state-legal and social system of the Russian Empire.

Firstly, the state of Russian society for a fairly long period (from the beginning of the XVIII century to the beginning of the bourgeois reforms) must be assessed as polar, with two class poles – the nobility and the peasantry, whose social relations were regulated by legislation and custom, respectively.

Secondly, the vast territory of the Russian Empire was by no means characterized by uniform development due to the geographical, economic, social and cultural characteristics of the regions. Moreover, the composition of the peasantry was also characterized by heterogeneity within the group. By the beginning of the peasant reform, there were three main groups of peasants: serfs, state and specific. Their management was in the patrimonial jurisdiction or in the hands of officials of different departments, which also caused the spread of acts of peasant reform to former serfs, state and specific peasants at different times.              

 Thirdly, it is impossible not to dwell on the reasons of a political nature. The implementation of bourgeois reforms was accompanied by sharp political discussions between representatives of different socio-political trends. On the one hand, liberals considered it quite timely to carry out bourgeois reforms in Russia, while conservatives considered them premature. Apart from the "modernists" and "protectors" in this dispute were the "people's" authors, who were in the position of carrying out liberal reforms, taking into account the identity of the legal culture of the peasant class.

      Legal culture is a multifaceted and multidimensional concept. In modern legal literature, there are several approaches to the definition of this concept: anthropological, sociological (value), philosophical. However, the value approach is opposed to the activity approach, and the activity approach is opposed to the consideration of legal culture as a qualitative state of society's life. All together, the above approaches create a holistic view of the legal culture as:

1.                 The totality of legal values accumulated by society at a certain stage of its development;

2.                 The method of human activity (existence) in the legal sphere;

3.                 The qualitative state of the legal life of society ^{[6; p. 8]}. 

At the same time, the legal culture of the whole society can be concretized with the help of a social group, a method of activity, a person's legal consciousness, a region of development and the historical period of its existence. In this aspect, it seems possible to single out as a type the legal culture of the peasant community of the second half of the XIX century, namely the legal culture of the northern peasantry, since the absence of private feudal dependence in the Arkhangelsk, Olonets, partly Vologda and Vyatka provinces formed a special type of legal relations of state peasants. According to the eighth revision, the number of state peasants in the Russian Empire as a whole in the middle of the XIX century was 36.12% of the population (this is more than 9 million souls) ^{[3; pp. 59 – 168]}. 

The qualitative state of the provincial legal culture of the Northern peasantry was influenced by several important factors: the history of settlement of the European North, occupation, climatic and socio-economic conditions of existence, as well as state regulation of the peasant community. 

The appearance of the Russian population in the European North was associated with the spread of extensive land ownership and fishing activities.  For these reasons, the population was formed in the North to the greatest extent, which was forced to adapt to special natural and climatic conditions that influenced everyday culture, economic activity, social ties, archaic traditions were preserved here longer, the Russian cultural tradition was reproduced ^{[5; p. 305]}.

The desire to control the peasant community and the fiscal interest of the state in relation to the state–owned village became the reasons for the reform of Count P.D. Kiselyov (1837-1841), carried out within the framework of the Ministry of State Property. First of all, the changes affected the system of governance and judicial proceedings (in the form of rural and volost reprisals), and the norms of peasant behavior, which were based on religious and moral principles characteristic of traditional societies, were not left aside. The legislative basis for the reform of the state village were three main acts: "Institution on the management of state property in the provinces", "Rural Police Charter" and the "Rural Judicial Charter" for state peasants. The creation of a legislative framework for state peasants became a prototype of normative legal acts in relation to the serf peasantry ^{[12; pp. 17-25]}.

The reform of 1861 for peasants who came out of serfdom also introduced self–government bodies and a special court - the volost, which could be guided by local custom when making decisions. The volost court has become a unique way of legal activity of peasants.  He "snatched" custom from the mass of other social norms and solved minor criminal offenses and civil disputes on the basis of a customary legal norm. Rationalized by the power of the court, local customs became part of customary law, and at the same time part of the peasant legal culture, recognized for the first time at the state level. The law "On the Transformation of public Administration of State peasants and on the transfer of these peasants to the jurisdiction of general provincial and county, as well as local institutions for peasant affairs" ^[10] of 1866 extended the administrative transformations of the reform of 1861 to the population of the state village, thereby eliminating the results of the reform of P.D. Kiselyov.

The judicial reform of 1864, which changed the Russian justice system, preserved the volost court: "judicial power... peasant courts are determined by special resolutions on them" (note of Article 2 of the Institution of Judicial institutions) ^[16]. The Statute of Criminal proceedings in Article 34 contained a norm according to which cases of "rural inhabitants" subordinated to their own courts were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of magistrates ^[15]. By courts for rural inhabitants, they mean the volost courts provided for in Article 101 of the "General Regulations on Peasants who have emerged from serfdom" ^[9].  With the introduction of the General Regulation, the volost courts were granted the right to make decisions either on the basis of transactions and obligations declared in the volost board, or on the basis of local customs and rules adopted in peasant life (Article 107).

Legal customs are an important part of the legal culture of the peasant community. They regulated the existence of common family property, family divisions, guardianship, inheritance issues and artels. The law gave local customs legal force, thereby making them the basis for the decisions of the volost court. The opinion is considered traditional for Russian pre-revolutionary and post-Soviet historiography that the level of peasant legal culture did not allow volost judges to use the norms of legislation when making decisions. For example, S.V. Pakhman, based on the Works of the commission on the transformation of parish courts, did not find a connection between the decisions of the parish courts and the rule of law due to the illiteracy of judges. "In one locality (meaning Samara province – M.A. Sosnina), it was explicitly stated that judges never decide according to the law, because they are dark people, they do not understand the law" ^{[11; p. 123]}. We consider this statement to be true only in relation to former serfs.  

Modern archival research increasingly refutes the prevailing point of view in historiography about the low legal culture of the peasantry. For example, the American J. Burbank justified her position not by ethnographic research, but by archival documents of the volost courts of the Moscow province from 1905 to 1917 and came to the conclusion that the decisions of the volost courts "were based strictly on the written law set out in the "General Regulations on Peasants" and "The Statute on Punishments imposed by Magistrates"" ^{[17, p. 248]}.

V. B. Bezgin comes to similar conclusions and believes that the period of the second half of the XIX century – the beginning of the XX century. "it became a time of active law-making, which went in the direction of convergence of custom and law, drew peasants into the scope of official legislation and contributed to the growth of the legal culture of rural residents" ^{[1, p. 1379]}. We emphasize that these studies and conclusions relate to former serfs.

To characterize the level of legal culture of the northern peasantry, the protocols of the volost courts of post–reform Russia, the largest of all the northern provinces - Arkhangelsk, were analyzed. The study of the protocols allows us to come to the conclusion that a direct mention of the peasant custom when making a decision is very rare. Of the 1,082 protocols studied, the local custom is mentioned only in 28 cases. The existence of peasant self–government bodies created during the reform of the state village in 1837-1841. (in the form of rural and volost reprisals) led to the fact that more than half of the decisions of the volost courts are based on the norms of the "Rural Police Statute" and the "Rural Judicial Statute" for state peasants, forming a complex synthesis of the acts of two reforms, the reform of the state village and the peasant 1861. 

Zemstvo reform was also supposed to contribute to raising the level of legal culture of the peasant community in the second half of the XIX century. The "Regulations on Provincial and County Zemstvo institutions" of 1864 ^[8] left the provincial north outside the zemstvo reform. Zemstvo business was based on three basic elements: 1) a territory suitable for exploitation; 2) a population capable of social activity; 3) a developed economic and industrial life. Despite the urgent need for zemstvos, the Government denied the presence of these elements in the Russian North, adding another negative circumstance – large state land ownership ^{[4; pp. 50-54]}. In the provinces of Olonets and Vyatka, which were close in social composition and economic development, zemstvos were introduced in 1867, Vologda – in 1870, and in Arkhangelsk – only in 1917.

The main obstacle to the establishment of zemstvos in the northern provinces, according to the Government, was the shortage of human resources, since due to the absence of serfdom there were no landlords, and the peasant and urban population was considered "dark" and "ignorant" ^{[7; p. 5]}. With such a view of the population of the Arkhangelsk, for example, province, local authors did not agree: "With deep conviction, I express the opinion that the population of the Arkhangelsk province is by no means darker than any of the other northern ones adjacent to it – Olonets, Vologda, Vyatka... But the "gray" population and most of the central provinces have hardly gone far ahead of the population of the Arkhangelsk province?" ^{[7; p. 6]}.    

The settlement of the north by the strongest representatives of the Novgorod freemen, the openness of ways abroad, and at the same time constant communication with foreigners and knowledge of foreign languages (especially Norwegian), the unique Pomor sailing fleet, permanent stay at sea, the sawmill industry created "in the far north of European Russia a type of intelligent, thoughtful, energetic and smart Pomor" ^{[7; p. 6-7]}. "The peasants are also forced by natural conditions to constantly move both in their own and in neighboring provinces, Vologda and Olonets. Local crafts – timber rafting, logging and sawing, fishing, hunting, - latrine crafts, - mainly to St. Petersburg, - have long since driven the age-old darkness from the Arkhangelsk peasant" ^{[7; p. 9]}. In line with this trend, the situation also developed in the northern provinces ^{[13; p. 780]}, this was the reason that peasants spent most of their time outside the community, actively entering into legal relations regulated by law. 

Discussions on the level of legal culture of peasants, which began in pre-revolutionary historiography, have taken a significant place in modern historical and legal studies thanks to regional archival studies of documents of the volost justice. In order to draw the right conclusions, it is necessary to clearly identify the object of research – the former state village – separating it from the former serf. The specifics of the historical and legal conditions for the formation of two groups of the peasantry – state and serfs – caused the uneven development of the legal culture of the peasants.

The theoretical conclusions and conclusions made during the monitoring of archival documents of the Arkhangelsk province can be extrapolated to a post-reform state village inhabited by free rural inhabitants - natives of state peasants, due to the similarity of social composition and legislative regulation (in particular, the absence of private feudal dependence and zemstvos).

The peculiarity of the organizational and legal regulation of volost justice in the former state village is that the categories of cases and sanctions correspond not only to the legislative acts of the peasant and subsequent reforms of the local court, but also to the normative legal acts of the reform of the state village of P.D. Kiselev 1837-1841. More than half of the decisions of the volost courts are based on the norms of the Rural Judicial and Police charters, which are an integral part of the Charter on Improvement in state-owned villages, forming a complex synthesis of the acts of the two reforms.

In the course of this study, the thesis was refuted that the peasants did not know and did not apply the laws in the courts. The longer existence of peasant self-government in the state village affected the legal consciousness of state peasants in terms of resolving cases in the volost courts in the post-reform period. The volost courts, applying the norms of official legislation, formed the progressive legal consciousness of the peasants, bringing them closer to the common legal field and equal justice for all, taking into account the customs and principles of customary law.

Thus, a fairly high level of legal culture of the Northern peasantry, which has developed due to the unique conditions of the European North, as well as a significant amount of volost judicial practice, reliably testified to the readiness of the peasants of the European North for bourgeois reforms. Through the new post-reform state-legal institutions (volost court and zemstvos), peasants had to gradually be included in the legal culture of Russian society common to all estates. However, the contradictory nature of the reforms and their uneven implementation have slowed down democratic processes and violated the principle of equality of all before the law.

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