“Law and Empire in Late Tsarist Russia: Muslim Tatars Go to Court,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 778-801

Law and Empire in Late Tsarist Russia: Muslim Tatars Go to CourtAuthor(s): Stefan B. KirmseSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 4 (WINTER 2013), pp. 778-801Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.72.4.0778 .

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Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013)

ARTICLES ______________________________________________________________________

Law and Empire in Late Tsarist Russia: Muslim Tatars Go to Court

Stefan B. Kirmse

On 4 January 1896 the peasant woman Bibi Fatyma Sabitova, from the Tatar village of Aziiak, 60 miles east of Kazan, was robbed at gunpoint by the peas-ant Sibegatulla Saifullin, on the road between their villages.1 The following day Sabitova went to the closest police station, located in the town of Arsk (a 6-mile walk from the crime scene). The rural police constable (uriadnik) im-mediately rode into the village to detain the suspect, and some of the locals proved co-operative. The peasant Khusain Khasanov testifi ed that Saifullin had asked him to tell the police that he had seen the suspect shooting hares at the time of the crime. Instead of giving his neighbor an alibi, however, Khasanov informed the police of this attempted manipulation.2 Saifullin was seized and scheduled to be tried by the Kazan circuit court in April. Three other peasants paid 150 rubles to have him released on bail. In the end, the man was acquitted, largely because of inconclusive evidence (crucially, the stolen items were never found).

This article tracks numerous court cases similar to this one in order to combine an investigation of legal practice in late tsarist Russia with an analy-sis of imperial rule. It examines the legal sphere as an interactive space in which jurists, police, and ordinary subjects of the empire shaped and experi-enced imperial policy. Yet crucially, by focusing on court use in two regions that were home to large populations of Muslim Tatars, Crimea and Kazan, the article analyzes the legal system as an arena of cultural encounter and examines the degree to which the new courts served to promote the inte-gration of these multiethnic regions with the imperial center. Ultimately, it explores the implications of Tatar legal involvement in state courts for both the empire’s legal reform process and its policies toward ethnic and religious minorities.

In developing this article, I have benefi ted from the thoughtful comments and sugges-tions of several colleagues, especially Michael Khodarkovsky, Jane Burbank, Nathaniel Knight, Mark D. Steinberg, and Slavic Review’s anonymous reviewers, who have drawn my attention to various imbalances and omissions. Special thanks also go to the archival specialists in Crimea and Kazan whose help with fi nding (and sometimes deciphering) old court documents proved invaluable: Asie Zaripova, in Simferopol , and Lialia Khasan-shina, in Kazan. I am equally grateful to Iskander Giliazov in Kazan for his continuing support.

1. Natsional΄nyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstana (NART), f. 390, op. 1, d. 381 (“O Saiful-line, obv. v razboinichem napadenii na Sabitovu,” 1896).

2. Ibid., ll. 7, 7ob.



Muslim Tatars Go to Court 779

Between Diversity and Integration: Imperial Spaces, Minorities, and the Legal System

In the 1860s and 1870s, Tsar Alexander II enacted a series of reforms that changed the nature of Russian autocracy. The Judicial Reform of 1864 was de-signed to endow the empire with a simple and effi cient legal system, or, in the words of Emperor Alexander II, “a quick, just, merciful, and equal court for all our subjects [sud skoryi, pravyi, milostivyi, ravnyi dlia vsekh poddannykh nashikh].”3 To this end, it established a range of new institutions. This article looks at the most important of these, the so-called circuit courts (okruzhnye sudy), which addressed serious crimes and major civil disputes. Unlike their predecessors, these courts were open to the public and used oral procedure; for many cases, they relied on trial by jury.

The new court system was not immediately introduced in all parts of Rus-sia.4 The government was hesitant to launch the new courts in frontier re-gions where Russian authority was tenuous or embattled, such as Poland, the Steppe region, or Turkestan. The reforms were quickly implemented, however, on the Crimean peninsula in 1869 and in Kazan, on the Volga River, in 1870. The inclusion of these regions at this early stage was striking insofar as it brought large numbers of non-Russians, especially Muslim Tatars, under the jurisdiction of the new courts. Both regions had been independent Muslim khanates before they were annexed by the empire—Kazan in 1552 and Crimea in 1783.

Scholars have produced numerous studies of legal practice in Russia’s distant borderlands, where distinctive legal regimes were permitted, modi-fi ed, or even put in place by the Russian authorities.5 These peripheral re-gions, however, represent rather specifi c cases. Only annexed in the course of the nineteenth century, they were not fully integrated into the empire’s civil-administrative structure. Non-Russians had few of the rights and opportuni-ties in these areas that they enjoyed in most of European Russia, and studies of both the Judicial Reform and legal practice in the Russian countryside have neglected ethnic and religious minorities.6

3. “Ob uchrezhdenii sudebnykh ustanovlenii i o Sudebnykh Ustavakh” (20 November 1864), in Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, ser. II (hereaft er PSZ II), vol. 39, pt. 2, no. 41473.

4. On its gradual expansion, see Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Ver-hältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich, 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 339–427.

5. Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond, Surrey, 2001); Austin Jer-sild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Fron-tier, 1845–1917 (Montreal, 2002), esp. chap. 5; Eva-Maria Auch, “Adat, Shari΄a, Zakon: Zur Implementierung russischen Rechts in Kaukasien,” Rechtstheorie 35 (2004): 289–321; and Michael Kemper and Maurus Reinkowski, eds., Rechtspluralismus in der Islamischen Welt (Berlin, 2005).

6. On the former, see Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953); Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976); William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late



780 Slavic Review

The legal interaction between non-Russians and state courts is best explored in intermediate terrains—former frontier zones with histories of independent social, economic, and political organization that, by the mid-nineteenth century, were treated as part of the imperial core. Crimea and Ka-zan count among them, as do other provinces in the Volga-Kama region, the steppes of southern Russia, or most other regions situated along the edges of old Muscovy.7 Despite internal variation, these interior peripheries diff ered from both central Russia and more distant borderlands in their amphibious-ness: while retaining the cultural heterogeneity characteristic of imperial pe-ripheries, they gradually merged with the core in both popular imagination and administrative practice.8

Kazan retained a sense of diff erence and liminality. For Robert Geraci, it was “a microcosmic version of Russia’s hybrid identity”—both “window on the east” and east itself.9 Despite the province’s inclusion in the empire’s ad-ministrative and judicial systems, by the 1880s conservative observers still viewed it as “one of the most diffi cult provinces to govern, given the hetero-geneity [raznorodnost΄] of its mixed population, Muslim fanaticism, and the earlier disorder and neglect there.”10 In a review of state institutions in Ka-zan, Ufa, and Orenburg, even the liberal senator Mikhail Kovalevskii stated, “These provinces deviate by their ethnographic conditions from the general type of Great Russian provinces. . . . I have therefore made every eff ort . . . to distinguish all normal phenomena [normal nye iavleniia] from those cre-ated by local conditions.”11 Along with its neighboring provinces, Kazan was clearly not “normal.”

The region’s sizable Tatar population was partly included in, but partly also excluded from, institutions of the central state. Empires tended to pursue

Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1994). In Autokratie und Justiz, Baberowski limits his discussion of state law among non-Russians to distant borderlands. Studies of rural legal practice include Gareth Popkins, “Code versus Custom? Norms and Tactics in Peasant Volost Court Appeals, 1889–1917,” Russian Review 59, no. 3 (July 2000): 408–24; Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Indianapolis, 2004); and Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2007), chap. 3.

7. For a discussion of the concept of “interior Russia,” see Leonid Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia: Representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolii Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington, 2007), 67–93. The gradual appropriation of former frontier zones by the imperial core is also discussed in Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, 2002); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004); and Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London, 2007).

8. Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia,” 79–80.9. Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist

Russia (Ithaca, 2001), 8.10. “Sovremennaia letopis ,” Russkii vestnik 164, no. 4 (1883): 853.11. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (RGIA), f. 1317,

op. 1, d. 2 (“Izvlechenie iz vsepoddanneishego otcheta chlena Gosudarstennogo Soveta,” 1881), l. 1.




a spectrum of policies between homogenization and the recognition of dif-ference, and the Russian empire was no exception.12 In intermediate terrains the tensions between these policies became particularly obvious.13 On the one hand, following the Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (Digest of Laws, 1832), the settled Tatars were systematically integrated with the estate system of the empire. Instead of being singled out as ethnic or religious others, they came to be categorized as peasants, townspeople (meshchane), or merchants.14 As a result, they no longer stood outside the general laws of the empire, unlike most non-Christian inhabitants of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, who were put into the legal category of “aliens” (inorodtsy).

This integration with the state legal system did not mean an end to legal distinctions, however. Tatars remained largely excluded from local govern-ment. Until the mid-1850s, the Tatar populations of Kazan and Orenburg were encouraged to have all their legal disputes handled by their own, separate administrations. Known as tatarskie ratushi and founded in the 1780s, these administrations employed Islamic judges for cases of civil litigation.15 In fact, in an eff ort to reduce costs, in 1834 Tatars were banned from using city mag-istrates in Kazan and had all their cases transferred to the tatarskaia ratusha, an arrangement that lasted until the abolition of Tatar self-administration in 1855.16

The state also provided its Muslim population with special institutions to deal with religion, family, and inheritance law, namely the Muhammadan Spiritual Assembly in Ufa (established in 1788) and the Muhammadan Spiri-tual Administration in Crimea (1794).17 Over the following decades, these bod-ies were widely used as appellate institutions by those who were dissatisfi ed with the rulings of Islamic judges.18 Thus, the state also promoted the judicial distinctiveness of Tatars, and in so doing, it helped to maintain the specifi city of Crimea and Kazan as intermediate terrains.

This specifi city was partly due to the sheer number of Tatars, who formed about 30 percent of the population in Kazan Province. In Crimea, their share was even higher. The two regions, however, had diff erent demographic tra-jectories. Whereas the percentage of Tatars in Kazan remained stable over

12. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Poli-tics of Diff erence (Princeton, 2010), 12.

13. For the argument that the Volga-Kama region off ers a vantage point from which to analyze the tensions between the empire’s recognition of religious diversity and the promotion of Russian Orthodoxy, see Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, 2002).

14. John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Cat-egory of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 173–90.

15. Rämil Khäyrutdinov, “The Tatar Ratusha of Kazan: National Self-Administration in Autocratic Russia, 1781–1855,” in Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Hisao Komatsu, eds., Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (London, 2001), 27–42.

16. Ibid., 35–36.17. Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II,” Slavic

Review 27, no. 4 (December 1968): 542–53.18. Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia

(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 148, 154.



782 Slavic Review

the following decades, their numbers in Crimea dwindled, mainly because of emigration to the Ottoman empire. That said, even aft er the main waves of emigration, the number of Tatars was still substantial. Statistics gathered by the Crimean administration in the 1880s suggest a Muslim share of 42.7 per-cent.19 Although no more than 18 percent of the urban population, Muslims were still a clear majority in rural areas (64 percent).20 By the census of 1917, though, Muslims had declined to 12 percent in the towns and 42 percent in villages.21

This decrease refl ected Crimea’s gradual integration into the empire’s heartland. Soon aft er its conquest, the peninsula and adjoining territories be-gan to be viewed as a key region where land could be allocated to the Russian gentry and foreign colonists and where peasants from other provinces could be resettled.22 In the course of the nineteenth century, the Crimea was discur-sively appropriated as part of the imperial core, not unlike the Middle Volga region and the steppes of southern Russia.23 That said, it retained its distinc-tive Tatar fl avor, as much of the Tatar cultural landscape—mosques, shrines, and other architectural and historical sites—remained undisturbed.24

When policymakers and jurists submitted their report on the possibility of introducing the reformed courts into Crimea and Kazan in the mid-1860s, it may not even have occurred to them to set special legal rules or institutions for non-Russians. The report did not contain any ethnic or religious consider-ations beyond generic statements that the two regions were culturally hetero-geneous, and the introduction of the circuit courts was recommended without reservations.25

So far, scholars have not paid much attention to the meaning of the es-tablishment of new courts in Crimea and Kazan. Most works on these regions hardly mention the new legal order.26 Yet the adoption of the reformed courts in these regions is striking when viewed against the background of widespread

19. K. A. Werner, ed., Pamiatnaia knizhka Tavricheskoi gubernii (Simferopol , 1889), sec. II, 32–33.

20. Ibid.21. See the fi gures from the archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences presented in

Ia. E. Bodarskii, O. I. Eliseeva, and V. M. Kabuzan, Naselenie Kryma v kontse XVIII–kontse XX vekov: Chislennost , razmeshchenie, etnicheskii sostav (Moscow, 2003), 131.

22. Terry Martin, “The Empire’s New Frontiers: New Russia’s Path from Frontier to Okraina, 1774–1920,” Russian History 19, nos. 1–4 (1992): esp. 183–85; see also Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, esp. 73–95, 123–34.

23. Brian G. Williams, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (Leiden, 2001), 86; Kerstin S. Jobst, Die Perle des Imperiums: Der russische Krim-Diskurs im Zarenreich (Constance, 2007); Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (DeKalb, 2010).

24. Kelly O’Neill, “Constructing Russian Identity in the Imperial Borderland: Ar-chitecture, Islam, and the Transformation of the Crimean Landscape,” Ab imperio, no. 2 (2006): 163–92.

25. See the chapters on Kazan and Taurida in Sudebno-statisticheskie svedeniia i soobrozheniia o vvedenii v deistvie sudebnykh ustavov 20-noiabria 1864 g. (St. Petersburg, 1866).

26. Studies of imperial rule in the Volga-Kama region include: Andreas Kappeler, Rußlands erste Nationalitäten: Das Zarenreich und die Völker der Mittleren Wolga vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1982); Geraci, Window on the East; and Werth, At the Margins




assumptions about Tatars and other Muslims, such as their poor integration into imperial society and adherence to their own set of legal norms. Numerous contemporary investigations and descriptions of legal practice contributed to the folklorization and exoticization of Tatars and other non-Russians as alien “others.”27

The extension of the Judicial Reform to Crimea and Kazan also has impli-cations for the study of the empire’s minority policies, especially debates over internal colonization and “Russifi cation.”28 In this context, the treatment of Muslims has attracted considerable attention. The view expressed by Il΄dus Zagidullin, who holds on to a rigid dichotomy that discusses imperial policy toward the Kazan Tatars in terms of an antagonistic relationship between an imperialist Russian state and an oppressed minority, may be taken here to ex-emplify a line of argument commonly used by contemporary Tatar scholars as well as in older western and (some) Soviet literature.29 For Zagidullin, the post-Reform years were a continuation of the “national and religious oppression” of earlier periods.30 He attributes a key role in upholding the central state’s unrelenting grip to the courts, police, and other state institutions.31 The new courts were little more than tools for the tsarist oppression of minorities.

of Orthodoxy. On imperial Russia’s rule in Crimea, see Alan W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, 1978); Williams, Crimean Tatars; and Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea.

27. Karl Fuks, Kazanskie Tatary v staticheskom i etnografi cheskom otnosheniiakh (Ka-zan, 1844); P. A. Shino, “Volzhskie Tatary,” Sovremennik, nos. 81 and 82 (1860): 255–90 and 121–42; “Tatary,” in Materialy dlia geografi i i statistiki Rossi, Sobranie ofi tserami general΄nogo shtaba, Kazanskaia guberniia, comp. M. Laptev (St. Petersburg, 1861), 214–32; A. F. Rittikh, Materialy dlia etnografi i Rossii: Kazanskaia guberniia, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1870); M. Gol΄denberg, “Krym i krymskie Tatary,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 11 (1883): 67–89. For discussions of civil and criminal law among non-Russians, see N. N-ch, “Narodnye iuridi-cheskie obychai u Tatar Kazanskoi gubernii,” in N. N. Vecheslav, ed., Trudy Kazanskago gubernskago statisticheskago komiteta (Kazan, 1869), 3:21–42; “Iuridicheskie obychai inorodtsev,” Zapiski imperatorskago russkago geografi cheskago obshchestva (po otdele-niiu etnografi i) 8 (1878): sec. 2; E. T. Solov ev, “Prestupleniia i nakazaniia po poniatiam krest΄ian Povol zhiia,” Zapiski 18 (1900): 275–300.

28. Among many others: Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russifi cation in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, 1981); Andreas Kappeler, Rußland als Vielvölkerre-ich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992), 177–202; Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russifi cation on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, 1996); “Forum Reinterpreting Russifi cation in Late Imperial Russia,” with articles by Mikhail Dolbilov, Darius Staliunas, and Andreas Kappeler, Kritika 5, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 245–97; Alexey Miller, “‘Russifi cations’? In Search for Adequate Analyti-cal Categories,” in Guido Hausmann and Angela Rustemeyer, eds., Imperienvergleich: Beispiele und Ansätze aus osteuropäischer Perspektive: Festschrift für Andreas Kappeler (Wiesbaden, 2009), 123–43; and Anatolii Remnev, “Colonization and ‘Russifi cation’ in the Imperial Geography of Asiatic Russia: From the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Cen-turies,” in Tomohiko Uyama, ed., Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and Interna-tional Contexts (London, 2012), 102–28.

29. Broadly similar conclusions are drawn, for example, by N. I. Vorob ev et al., Isto-riia Tatarskoi ASSR (Kazan, 1955), 1:311; Azade-Ayşe Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profi le in National Resilience (Stanford, 1986); V. E. Vozgrin, Istoricheskie sud΄by krymskikh Tatar (Moscow, 1992); and Williams, Crimean Tatars, 111–38.

30. Il΄dus K. Zagidullin, Perepis΄ 1897 goda i tatary Kazanskoi gubernii (Kazan, 2000), 8–9.

31. Ibid., 88, 105–6.



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A dichotomous juxtaposition of an imperialist Russian state and op-pressed minorities, however, obscures a far more complex reality. Geraci’s work on Kazan and Kelly O’Neill’s research on Crimea have demonstrated that nineteenth-century Tatars experienced a wide range of state policies.32 While central and local authorities repeatedly took coercive measures against them and, at other times, helped to preserve Muslim identity, they oft en pur-sued a policy of conscious neglect toward the Tatars in contrast to other non- Russians.33 Both Geraci and Galina Yemelianova have traced the plurality of policies toward minorities to power struggles and diff erences of opinion between and within state and church institutions; Matthew Romaniello has done the same for the early modern period.34 Yemelianova concludes that, overall, the diversity of attitudes led to a more or less balanced state policy toward minorities in the Volga region.35

Moving beyond claims of a changeable yet balanced policy, Robert Crews contends that the government made Islam a pillar of imperial society.36 While he concurs that there was a plurality of opinions toward the empire’s Mus-lims, he contends that those who argued in favor of Islam tended to win out.37 Since at least the reign of Catherine II, Russian rulers cast the empire as an enlightened, multiconfessional state. State-sponsored religious institutions, administrative offi ces, and courts penetrated deeply into local communities where they were used to arbitrate religious and family disputes. Crews con-cludes from this that Muslims not only came to be integrated into the empire’s institutional life, but saw the state as enabling and helping them to live their religious lives.38

To the extent that state courts helped to integrate the Muslim popula-tion into the institutional life of the empire, Crew’s argument holds. To gain a fuller picture of situations in which Tatars decided to go to court, though, it is necessary to introduce the voice of jurists into the debates over the empire’s minority policies. From the perspective of the Ministry of Justice, local judges, and prosecutors, the extension of the new courts to the south and east was not aimed at the integration of Muslims (or any other minority); it was aimed at spreading what was perceived as legal modernization. As residents of the new judicial districts, however, Tatars gained access to a new legal infrastructure, just like the Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Greeks, Armenians, Chuvash, Karaims, and many others.

32. On Kazan, see Geraci, Window on the East; on Crimea, O’Neill, “Constructing Rus-sian Identity.” Many post-Soviet works on “Russifi cation” in other regions come to similar conclusions.

33. Geraci, Window on the East, 84, 348; O’Neill, “Constructing Russian Identity,” 180.34. Geraci, Window on the East; Galina M. Yemelianova, “Volga Tatars, Russians and

the Russian State at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Relationships and Perceptions,” Slavonic and East European Review 77, no. 3 (July 1999): 448–84; Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671 (Madison, 2012).

35. Yemelianova, “Volga Tatars, Russians and the Russian State,” 484.36. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 3.37. Ibid., 20.38. Ibid., 9, 190, 323.




That said, the case of new courts in Crimea and Kazan also refl ects the continuing ambivalence of the position of minorities in the imperial order. Religious affi liation continued to regulate access to particular offi ces and privileges. The legal integration of Tatars in Crimea and Kazan, moreover, contributed to an increasing diff erentiation among Muslims in the empire. Tatars in Ufa, Orenburg, and further east, as well as Muslims in Central Asia did not gain access to the new courts until the 1890s; some Muslims in the North Caucasus never did.

The interplay of diff erent normative orders thus diff ered over time and between regions. In Central Asia, Siberia, and Dagestan, the Russian authori-ties had various customary laws codifi ed and incorporated into the state legal system, oft en by promoting specifi c local courts. Such all-purpose “native” courts, however, were considered archaic for the Southern Caucasus, the Volga-Kama region, or Crimea, where the authorities employed Islamic judges to deal with family and inheritance law. By the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a multiconfessional society with separate rules for diff erent parts of the population was also increasingly challenged by a new ethos of citizenship.39 While it soon became clear that the Russian administrators did not reach any-one beyond local elites in the more remote regions, the plan to spread the rule of law (zakonnost΄) seemed realistic for intermediate terrains such as Crimea, Kazan, and the steppes of southern Russia, which were covered by circuit courts in Kharkov, Voronezh, Saratov, Novocherkassk, and Ust -Medveditsa. Other intermediate regions were initially left untouched by the Judicial Re-form: Orenburg, Ufa, and Astrakhan, for example, were included in the new legal system only in 1894, aft er a 25-year delay, since they were seen as too remote and insuffi ciently penetrated by the central state.

The new courts, a blend of models from England, diff erent German states, and especially France, refl ected the concerns of their creators, a new class of enlightened jurists.40 The number of law faculties and students at Russian universities grew continually from the 1840s on. By the late 1860s, nearly half of Russia’s students were pursuing law degrees, and even in provincial courts, the share of higher judicial offi cials with specialized legal training soon rose to around 70 percent.41

While many lawyers and bureaucrats had little interest in undermin-ing the monarchy, they called for greater legal independence and predict-ability. To further the establishment of a Rechtsstaat, the reform introduced the separation of justice from the empire’s administrative and law enforce-ment organs, adversarial procedure (a radical departure from the previous inquisitorial procedure, which took place behind closed doors), and the pre-

39. Dov Yaroshevski, “Empire and Citizenship,” in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Blooming-ton, 1997), 58–79.

40. Wortman, Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness; W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (DeKalb, 1982).

41. A. G. Nebolsin, ed., Istoriko-statisticheskii ocherk obshchego i spetsial΄nogo ob-razovaniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1883), 50; Wortman, Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 222, 264.



786 Slavic Review

sumption of innocence.42 As the newly independent judiciary constrained autocratic rule, Jörg Baberowski goes so far as to call the Judicial Reform “Russia’s fi rst constitution.”43 The introduction of juries was but one example of Alexander II’s concern with opening his reformed institutions to public involvement.44

The jurists who staff ed the new circuit courts publicly displayed their be-lief in modesty and greater equality: they wore plain black suits—a contrast to the pompous uniforms of other offi cials—and the new rules of procedure, among many other things, required the jurors, many of whom were peasants, to remain seated when talking.45 As these jurors oft en addressed people from higher estates, this was a break with established imperial hierarchies.46

Not surprisingly, the new courts met with opposition, particularly from police and governors.47 Soon the conservative press dismissed them as “courts of the street,” or “courts of paupers.” Since the burden of proof was passed from the accused to the prosecution, convictions were no longer foregone con-clusions. Moreover, as the judiciary was now placed above the police, law enforcement agents could become subject to prosecution themselves.

Admittedly, the courts upheld some imperial hierarchies: for example, those who did not speak the courts’ only offi cial language, Russian, were ex-cluded from many positions, and some responsibilities, such as serving as regular judge, were reserved for Christians. What is more, the new courts continued to rely on the Nicholaevan Civil and Criminal Codes, which con-tained religious specifi cations.48 The persistence of the codes also points to continuity between the old and new legal systems. Indeed, while Tatars in Crimea and Kazan were faced with new court principles, staff , procedures,

42. Vysochaishe uchrezhdennaia kommisiia dlia peresmotra zakonopolozhenii po sudebnoi chasti, Ob΄iasnitel΄naia zapiska: K proektu novoi redaktsii ustava ugolovnago su-doproizvodstva (St. Petersburg, 1900), 3:164–65. On the prereform courts, see also John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (Oxford, 1991), 181–99.

43. Jörg Baberowski, “Law, the judicial system and the legal profession,” in Dominic Lieven, ed., Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), 344.

44. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monar-chy, vol. 2 (Princeton, 2000).

45. V. R. Zavadskii, “V zale zasedanii s prisiazhnymi zasedatel΄iami: Iz otchetov re-vizora,” Zhurnal Ministerstva iustitsii 2, no. 3 (1896): 112–13.

46. For details, see Stefan B. Kirmse, “New Courts in Late Tsarist Russia: On Imperial Representation and Muslim Participation,” Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 2 (May 2013): 243–63.

47. The clash between the new class of bureaucrats and the governors is analyzed in Jörg Baberowski, “Vertrauen durch Anwesenheit: Vormoderne Herrschaft im späten Zaren-reich,” in Jörg Baberowski, David Feest, and Christoph Gumb, eds., Imperiale Herrschaft in der Provinz: Repräsentationen politischer Macht im späten Zarenreich (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 17–37.

48. Examples of special provisions in the Criminal Code included the defi nition of crimes. Blasphemy, sacrilege, apostasy, and proselytism were criminal off enses only when they were carried out at the expense of Russian Orthodoxy (at least until 1905). For a discussion of specifi cations in the Civil Code, see Jane Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika 7, no. 3 (2006): 397–431.




and forms of participation in the 1860s, they found the Nicholaevan organi-zation of legal pluralism and, in particular, the jurisdiction of Islamic judges largely unchanged.

Choice continued to be limited. In criminal law, Tatars could report a crime, or deal with it informally. Neither Islamic judges nor other legal forums had jurisdiction in such cases, unlike in the Caucasus, the Steppe region, and Central Asia. In civil law, the choice was only slightly greater. Most land and property disputes between Tatars were decided by special state commissions or state courts, and so were all cases in which at least one party was not Tatar. Muslims could turn to the Islamic judges employed by the Muslim Spiritual Administrations for “spiritual matters” (dukhovnogo roda dela), such as ques-tions concerning religious institutions and worship, and in cases of family and inheritance law, but only if both parties agreed on this. If one party was unhappy with the ruling of an Islamic judge, it could choose to have the case reopened by an ordinary court.49 Given these clearly demarcated jurisdictions, Tatars had few chances to engage in “forum shopping,” as legal anthropolo-gists have called the litigant practice of moving between diff erent legal fo-rums (religious, administrative, customary, or other).50 Since Tatars had been using state courts for decades, the introduction and use of the circuit courts in Crimea and Kazan is best understood as an expansion, consolidation, and modifi cation of an existing practice.

Tatars acted pragmatically: they turned to state courts whenever it was in their interests to do so. Though empowered by the new system, their use of the courts continued to be shaped by the locally specifi c plural legal order of Crimea and Kazan. For this article, I mainly draw on circuit court records from Kazan and Simferopol , in Crimea. Because the records of many cases have not been preserved—many fi les were destroyed during the Soviet period—I also take the contemporary press coverage into consideration.

The New Courts as Muslim Spaces

Muslim elements were integrated into the new court system without much con-troversy but played a less conspicuous role than Russian Orthodox ones. Fol-lowing Article 714 of the Rules of Criminal Court Procedure (Ustav ugolovnogo sudoproizvodstva), people took their oaths “in accordance with the dogmas and rituals of their faiths [soglasno s dogmatami i obriadami ikh very].” As a result, mullahs were required in court to administer oaths whenever a case involved Muslim litigants, defendants, or witnesses.

Muslim Tatars also held positions of responsibility in the new legal sys-tem, serving as legal practitioners and honorary justices of the peace (an of-fi ce also created by the Judicial Reform).51 More commonly, they served as

49. PSZ II, vol. 6, pt. 2, no. 5033 (“Polozhenie o Tavricheskom Magometanskom Dukhovenstve i podlezhashchikh vedeniiu ego delakh”), 23 December 1831, see esp. pa-ras. 5, 77–78.

50. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, “Forum Shopping and Shopping Forums: Dispute Settlement in a Minangkabau Village in West Sumatra,” Journal of Legal Pluralism 19 (1981): 117–59.

51. For details, see Kirmse, “New Courts.”



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jurors. State revisions of jury lists in the mid-1870s suggest that in various districts of Kazan Province around 20 percent of jurors were Muslims.52 An 1883 request by the Ministry of Justice discovered that in individual districts of Kazan Province non-Christians made up 36 percent of those entered in jury lists; in the district of Simferopol , their share was 31 percent.53

While these fi gures are substantial, they are lower than the non-Christian percentages of the population. The main reason for such underrepresenta-tion in the legal system was structural. This system depended on educated urban elites; in both Crimea and Kazan, however, Muslim Tatars tended to be peasants, merchants, and craft smen. Moreover, Russian language skills were a prerequisite for jury service, which also reduced the number of eligible Tatars.

While Muslim Tatars were barred from becoming regular judges, most lists of honorary justices of the peace in the 1870s contained Tatar names, and in their capacity as justices of the peace, they served as surrogate judges.54 As a juror from Kazan noted about a circuit court session: “Whenever the chair-man was absent, one of the members of the court [chleny suda] took up his place while one of the honorary justices of the peace was invited to take up the seat of the third member of the court. Twice, a justice of the peace from the Tatar population participated, wearing a uniform, the golden chain of the judge, two golden medals around the neck, and a skullcap embroidered with gold.”55

More common than their work as judges, lawyers, and jurors was the Ta-tars’ participation in courts as witnesses, injured parties, defendants, and plaintiff s. The new courts were widely accessible. Contact between court rep-resentatives and local Muslims took place not only in the central court build-ings but also during external sessions (vyezdy). In the cities of Kazan and Sim-feropol , the circuit court met on a regular basis, holding monthly sessions that lasted for eight to twelve days. To expand access, however, the circuit court also traveled to more remote districts. In 1884, for example, the head of the Kazan circuit court informed the Ministry of Justice that in the previ-ous two years, the city of Kazan had seen 20 jury court sessions dealing with criminal cases, whereas the smaller district towns of the province had hosted 65 such sessions.56

The records of the Simferopol΄ circuit court suggest even closer contact between legal representatives and Muslim peasants. In the district of Sim-

52. Alexander K. Afanas ev, “Sostav suda prisiazhnykh v Rossii (1862–1866 gg.),” Vo-prosy istorii 6 (1978): 201.

53. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 73, d. 3656a (“Svedeniia o prisiazhnykh zasedatel΄iakh,” 1884), ll. 175, 192. There are no separate percentages for Muslims. In most of Kazan, however, Muslims formed the vast majority of non-Christians; in Crimea, both Jews and Muslims were strongly represented.

54. See, for example, NART, f. 1, op. 3, d. 1437 (“O vvedenii v Kazanskoi gubernii mirovykh sudebnykh ustanovlenii,” 1868), ll. 41ob., 43, 111; or NART, f. 1. op. 3, d. 1481 (“Ob izbranii mirovykh sudei po Mamadyshskomu uezdu,” 1868), ll. 7–8, 17, 19.

55. “Iz zapisnoi khnizhki prisiazhnogo zasedatel΄ia,” Kamsko-Volzhskaia gazeta, no. 8 (28 January 1872).

56. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 73, d. 3656b (“Svedeniia o prisiazhnykh zasedatel΄iakh,” 1884), l. 351.




feropol , external sessions were regularly held in the merchant towns of Bakhchisarai and Karasubazar, both largely inhabited by Tatars.57 In various districts, regular trips to Tatar villages were recorded, sometimes to several villages on the same day.58 The judge responsible for a particular district used a set phrase in his applications for trips to more remote regions, justifying them “in view of the remoteness of the place of residence of the litigants and witnesses [v vidu otdalennosti mesta zhitel stva storon i svidetelei].”

In cases of burglary or theft , the traveling courts sometimes mediated Ta-tar interests. For example, in the village of Chongurchi in the Crimean district of Evpatoriia, a traveling judge recorded the case of the brothers Aleksei, Mak-sim, and Mikhail Litvinenko, who were accused of breaking into the mill and stealing the property of Matbet Abdulrashid oglu.59 In other cases, the circuit courts were arenas for the resolution of intra-Muslim crime. For example, in a court session in the village of Ak-Mechet, Seliadin Djeliakoi oglu and Emir-Suin Abii-Bulla oglu were tried for stealing the property of Abduraim Menu-mer oglu.60 While no details of these trials are preserved in the records, their very existence suggests that circuit courts were perhaps not always perceived as alien state institutions.

In most criminal and civil cases, moreover, religious or ethnic distinctions hardly mattered. First, circuit court fi les did not specify whether defendants or witnesses were “Tatars” or “Muslims.” Participants were referred to by es-tate, name, and geographical origin (for example, “the peasant [krest΄ianin] Abibullah Gaifullin, from the village of X, district of Y, province of Z”).61 Sec-ond, while the details of cases, in addition to fi rst names and surnames, in-dicate that some people were Tatars, the minutes of court sessions also show the existence of mechanisms for accommodating diversity.62 Many cases in-volving Tatars began with the same procedure: aft er learning that not every-one understood Russian, the judge proposed a person as interpreter for the duration of the trial; this person then had to be approved by all parties. The quotidian nature of this procedure (which always used the same wording) suggests that circuit courts were not only capable of dealing with diversity but designed to do so.

It is impossible to be precise about how many Tatars appeared in court, not only because the records are incomplete (for some years, there are virtually no court cases preserved, especially in Kazan), but also because of the nature of existing statistics. The reports prepared by the circuit courts and the Ministry

57. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv v avtonomnoi respublike Krym, Simferopol΄ (GAARK), f. 376, op. 1, d. 195 (“Perepiski o vyezdakh uezdnykh chlenov suda,” 1901).

58. GAARK, f. 376, op. 1, d. 229 (“O vyezdakh uezdnykh chlenov suda,” 1902), l. 51.59. GAARK, f. 376, op. 1, d. 195, ll. 5–5ob.60. GAARK, f. 376, op. 1, d. 229, l. 45.61. In the Volga-Kama region, Tatar rural inhabitants were classifi ed as krest΄iane

(peasants). In Crimea, most Tatar peasants were referred to as poseliane (settlers)—a broad category that was loosely applied to most residents of the southern steppes. In contrast, the term kolonisty (colonizers) tended to be reserved for foreign settlers and pereselentsy (resettlers) for internal, mostly Slavic migrants.

62. There was usually a note in the document indicating that testimony had been translated from Tatar, or that an oath had been administered by a mullah.



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of Justice only state the religion or ethnicity of convicted criminals. In Kazan, the share of “Muhammadans” (magometane) among the convicted oscillated between 29 percent (in 1880) and 15.4 percent (in 1900).63 At the Simferopol΄ circuit court, the share of Muslim convictions ranged from 21.1 percent (in 1885) to 16.2 percent (in 1900).64 These numbers, however, tell us little about local experiences of circuit courts.

The remainder of this article looks into the reasons for the interaction between these courts and Muslim communities. I address criminal and civil cases in separate sections because there are signifi cant diff erences between the two. In civil cases, plaintiff s on their own decided to go to court, oft en incurring signifi cant expenses. In criminal law, many people were reluctantly drawn into court cases, as victims, witnesses, or defendants. That said, vic-tims oft en chose to report a crime to the police or even approach the courts directly.

Crime and the Search for “Outside” Help

Tatars, like other subjects of the empire, had two options when they fell vic-tim to serious crime. They could try to enlist the support of their local com-munities to catch and punish the criminals themselves. Such cases of self- administered justice (samosud) were widely reported in the Russian empire.65 Alternatively, they could turn to the state, an appealing option for individuals whose support networks were weak.

Let us briefl y return to the case of Sabitova, the peasant woman men-tioned at the start of this article. Her decision to report the crime to the police was interesting since she could have turned back to her village (which was closer than the police station) and mobilized family and friends to get her property back. The attack on Sabitova took place in an area overwhelmingly inhabited by Tatars.66 Yet, she and her kin preferred external mediation to a confrontation with Saifullin and his relatives and neighbors, who posted his bail. As studies from other imperial contexts have shown, state representa-tives were oft en perceived in terms of power and neutrality.67

63. See the following annual reports by the Ministry of Justice: Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, proizvodivshimsia v 1880 godu, pt. 2, 135; and Svod statisti-cheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, proizvodivshimsia v 1900 godu, pt. 2, 194.

64. Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, proizvodivshimsia v 1885 godu, pt. 2, 121; and Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, proizvodivshimsia v 1900 godu, pt. 2, 193.

65. Cathy Frierson, “Crime and Punishment in the Russian Village: Rural Concepts of Criminality at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 55–69; on samosud in Kazan, see also E. T. Solov ev, “Samosudy u krest΄ian Chistopol skogo uezda Kazanskoi gubernii,” Zapiski 8 (1878): 15–17; and Solov ev, “Pre-stupleniia i nakazaniia.”

66. In 1894, the records of the small administrative unit in which the villages of the accused and the victim were located showed 1,153 Russians and 9,809 Tatars: V. Lius-tritskii, Pamiatnaia knizhka Kazanskoi gubernii za 1893–94 gody (Kazan, 1894), 82.

67. A classic study of law enforcement in the Australian colonies explains the author-ity of colonial policemen in terms of their appearance of power and distance. Postcolonial police, who are oft en staff ed with locals and not perceived as neutral, have lost much




Muslim Tatars also turned to the state when they perceived an injury that was not recognized as such by their relatives or community but could be prosecuted as a crime under Russian law. Prominent examples include bride kidnapping and samosud. For example, on 12 March 1896 the Kazan judicial chamber (a court of appeal for circuit court decisions) examined the case of six Tatar peasants who had been convicted of beating their fellow villager Valeeva Kameliutdinova so badly that she nearly died. The case was as fol-lows.68 One day the Tatar peasant Gubaidullin told his fellow villagers that he was secretly meeting Valeeva, a married woman. In response, a village assembly was called at which the elders decided that, in accordance with Is-lamic law, the woman’s husband Kameliutdinov had to divorce his unfaithful wife. Kameliutdinov refused, insisting that the slanderer was telling lies out of spite. Yet the assembly did not listen. Several peasants broke into Kameliut-dinov’s house, dragged his wife out into the street, smeared her face with dirt, and beat her until she fell unconscious. When the husband returned with the local uriadnik, six of the villagers were put on trial. Based on incriminating statements from witnesses, the chamber confi rmed the jail sentences of eight to twelve months passed by the circuit court.

As in the Sabitova case, a Tatar peasant needed external support; this time it was not support against unknown assailants but against his own village authorities. Such samosud was illegal since there were formal rules for deal-ing with adultery: Muslims could ask Islamic scholars to assess the degree of guilt and then have a state court determine and administer the punishment.69 In the given case, however, the village assembly chose not to do this, and as a result, the law enforcement agencies focused on another crime, namely the “infl iction of torture” (prichinenie istiazanii) on the woman.

While Kameliutdinov turned to the police in a moment of desperation, other Tatars who had suff ered at the hands of their relatives or communities turned to the courts aft er more consideration. In May 1873 the prosecutor of the Simferopol΄ circuit court received a letter from four Tatars.70 It stated that Fat΄ma Khanym A., the bride of one of them and close relative of the others, had been married by her parents to another man. The four asked the pros-ecution, supposedly at the request of Fat΄ma Khanym A., to investigate and rescue her. In response, the prosecution sent various offi cials into the village to hear the bride’s account. Realizing that the husband would not let the in-vestigators see his wife, the prosecution had him arrested and the lock on the woman’s quarters forced. Fat΄ma Khanym exclaimed that she no longer wanted to stay with her dreaded husband. Aft erwards, however, Fat΄ma Kha-nym’s uncle, who had come with the court offi cials, said to the prosecutor: “You have rescued an unlucky girl, but you have also ruined her. . . . Who will marry her? According to our customs, she is a lost person [propashchii

of this authority. See Robert J. Gordon and Mervyn J. Meggitt, Law and Order in the New Guinea Highlands: Encounters with Enga (Hanover, N.H., 1985).

68. Kazanskii Telegraf, no. 966 (15 March 1896). The case itself is not preserved in the court archives.

69. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 165.70. For full coverage, see Kamsko-Volzhskaia gazeta, no. 78 (8 July 1873); and Sankt

Peterburgskie vedomosti, no. 179 (2 July 1873).



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chelovek].” The prosecutor replied: “I’ve done my job. [Ia sdelal svoe delo.] Everything else is not my concern.” Luckily, the person who had initiated the investigation intervened at this point and claimed his bride.

As in the case of Kameliutdinov and his allegedly unfaithful wife, a Tatar turned to the Russian authorities in a situation in which local institutions would not have been much use. In theory, he could have turned to an Islamic judge. These judges, locally elected and then appointed by the Russian authori-ties, oversaw most family disputes among Muslims. Yet many religious judges prioritized parental authority. The public prosecutor of the circuit court, by contrast, was concerned about whether a legally proscribed crime had been committed and bride kidnapping could be considered a form of “violent ab-duction” (nasil stvennoe pokhishchenie). State law thus served as a resource for Tatars who felt wronged by parental or communal decisions. It allowed for a degree of forum shopping, in that those unhappy with the actual or antici-pated rulings of Islamic judges could choose to have the matter decided by a state court (provided the case could be prosecuted under the Criminal Code).

Another case of bride abduction demonstrates the risks faced by those who went to court.71 In 1871 the Simferopol΄ circuit court heard the case of Iag΄ia Dzhelial΄ oglu, accused of burglary and the violent abduction of Fat΄ma Abdurazak kyzy. A few months earlier, the father of the abducted girl had informed the court that his window had been broken and his daughter taken along with 25 silver rubles. He told the police that he suspected Iag΄ia Dzhe-lial΄ oglu to be behind the abduction. Shortly aft erwards, however, the father changed his mind. He asked for the investigation to be terminated, explain-ing that Fat΄ma had left the house voluntarily and that nothing had been sto-len. Undoubtedly, he and the “kidnapper” had come to an arrangement out of court. The circuit court, however, could not accommodate such extralegal arrangements. It argued that the renunciation of previously reported crimes could not serve as grounds for the termination of a criminal investigation and insisted on further enquiries.72 This case highlights another quality of the post-Reform courts: their formality and infl exibility. Once you went to a circuit court, there was no easy way back. Informal deals between jurists, or between the sides, were precluded by the formal rules governing the courts.

Regardless of such constraints, Tatars approached the courts directly with written requests. In contrast to the simple report of a crime, written com-plaints implied expenses for having these prepared. Little is known about the informal legal practitioners who made a living by off ering their reading and writing skills to the illiterate.73 There is evidence that some Tatar merchants off ered such services, and in theory any literate local functionary could

71. GAARK, f. 376, op. 6, d. 39 (“O meshchanine Iag΄ia Dzhelial΄ oglu,” 1871).72. Ibid., 1–2. The continuation of the case is not preserved in the records.73. In other imperial contexts, these “legal lubricators,” to borrow a term from Gilbert

Joseph, have become a focus of recent research: Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times (Durham, 2001), 22; Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998); and Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 10, 16–18.




try to earn extra money by drawing up petitions (prosheniia) or complaints (zhaloby).74 The petitions themselves do not state the amount of money that peasants had to pay for them. In any case, in some situations peasants were willing to incur these costs.

In 1884, according to a local newspaper, a Tatar peasant entered the cir-cuit court building in Kazan.75 He lodged a written complaint claiming that his daughter had been raped. The newspaper was mainly concerned with un-covering corruption among junior staff at the court, and the article describes how the porters and junior clerks in the building had set up a lucrative busi-ness: all peasants were told that their petitions were faulty and that they had to pay someone on the second fl oor to fi le a proper lawsuit. When this particu-lar Tatar refused, they dragged him out of the building. The case, however, did not stop there, because the Tatar had another letter written. This time he addressed it to the chairman of the circuit court, denouncing the extortionate practices among his staff , and attached the original complaint. As a result of his letter, several court cases began: both the original rape case and another case against the clerks.

Yet again, this brief episode shows a Tatar peasant approaching a Russian court instead of seeking confl ict resolution in the village. As a serious crime, rape was outside the jurisdiction of local courts or Islamic judges (unlike in the North Caucasus).76 Like the peasant woman Sabitova, this Tatar is likely to have turned to an external arbiter when he realized that he would not be helped locally. More importantly, the case exposes some of the fl aws of the new courts: the ideal of the Rechtsstaat could be eroded at the local level (in this case, by court clerks), which increased the costs of going to court (and thus excluded those who did not have the means). This particular Tatar was persistent; others may not have had the resolve or the resources to have a second letter written.

Unlike written complaints or the launch of a civil case, the simple report of a crime to the rural police or administration did not cost the victims any-thing. Thus peasants also used the imperial court system as a tool in their lo-cal struggles over power and resources. The next case off ers an illustration.

In the village of Ungut, near the town of Feodosiia on the eastern shore of the Crimean peninsula, a haystack was set on fi re in June 1871.77 The injured party, a 29-year-old Tatar peasant by the name of Kara-Kamii oglu, told the administration that he suspected the 50-year-old peasant Mengli Issa Suin

74. RGIA, f. 1356, op. 1, d. 30 (“Po delu kuptsa Sagadeeva,” 1880), l. 4ob. This case concerns the Kazan-based merchant Shamsutdin Sagadeev who prepared numerous peti-tions and complaints on behalf of Tatars. Also see GAARK, f. 376, op. 5, d. 1 (“Po proshe-niiu poverennogo,” 1869) for a case in which an honorary justice of the peace formulates a formal request (in rather basic Russian) and forwards it to the Simferopol΄ circuit court on behalf of a Tatar village.

75. Volzhskii vestnik, no. 99 (23 August 1884).76. On the jurisdictions of courts in the North Caucasus, see Vladimir O. Bobrovnikov,

“Sudebnaia reforma i obychnoe pravo v Dagestane (1860–1917),” in Gennadii V. Mal tsev and D. Iu. Shapsugova, eds., Obychnoe pravo v Rossii: Problemy teorii, istorii i praktiki (Rostov-on-Don, 1999), 167.

77. GAARK, f. 376, op. 6, d. 55 (“O poselianine Mengli Issa Suin oglu,” 1871).



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oglu.78 The case was heard in an external session of the Simferopol΄ circuit court in the town of Feodosiia the following spring. The alleged arsonist was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, but soon fi led an appeal. The court of appeal—the Odessa judicial chamber—then discovered contradictory testi-monies at the Feodosiia trial; it also began to explore the relationship between the two protagonists, discovering that the defendant had served as the village elder and steward of the land adjacent to the victim’s barn, and the two had repeatedly quarreled over land issues. Concluding that the evidence against the accused was insuffi cient, the chamber decided to repeal the verdict.

While it is possible that the steward committed this arson on the land-owner’s orders, as a respected local functionary he is unlikely to have gone to such risks. He was more infl uential than his young opponent. Thus, it is more likely—and the contradictory statements of the witnesses confi rm this—that the injured person set the fi re himself in order to incriminate the steward. Circuit courts, in other words, could be used as tools in local power struggles. Moreover, this criminal dispute, along with several of the cases discussed earlier, illustrates that Tatar villages were not monolithic communities. Some peasants incriminated their neighbors, others cooperated. Not unlike the Russian peasants examined by Jane Burbank, Tatar peasants acted as indi-viduals, or as small networks, but hardly as coherent ethnic groups.79 The analysis of civil disputes at the end of this article off ers further evidence for this point.

The fact that ordinary subjects not only acted as individuals but were also treated as such was a key feature of legal practice aft er 1864. In the afore-mentioned samosud case involving the alleged adulterer, the accused were punished as six identifi able individuals. Cases in which crimes had been com-mitted by crowds, by contrast, did not necessarily lead to convictions. In mob beatings in which the victim was unable to state with precision who had dealt which blow, the circuit courts could do little but acquit the suspects.80

While the Judicial Reform thus protected the population, to a degree, from arbitrary rule, the presumption of innocence, along with the insistence on evidence, rather than confessions, meant more work for the prosecution. As an assistant prosecutor dealing with a case in which 100 Tatar peasants had burnt down the house of a landowner complained in the 1880s, the courts now had to terminate cases whenever it was impossible to prove the suspects’ guilt: “The governor passes the case on to us, to the court. But what can we do with it? There are no culprits. No one confesses. There is no evidence.”81 The new insistence on rules also constrained the work of police offi cers. On 9 August 1871 the police captain (pristav) of Simferopol ’s fi rst police district, Maryshev, submitted a complaint to the circuit court about the following

78. Ibid., ll. 1, 20.79. Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 13.80. For examples, see “Vooruzhennoe soprotivlenie vlasti,” Volzhskii vestnik, no. 56

(15 May 1884); and “Nanesenie tiazhkago uvech΄ia,” Kazanskii Telegraf, no. 1021 (1 June 1896).

81. “Perepiska K. P. Pobedonostseva s preosviashchennym Nikanorom episkopom Ufi mskim,” Russkii arkhiv 53, no. 4 (1915): 91.




incident:82 The city administration had instructed the policeman to clean the city fountain. Yet when he demanded a bucket from the water-carrier Rama-zan Memet oglu, the latter insulted Maryshev by pointing at his genitals and shouting, “You can stick your police captain right here! [Vot tebe pristav!]” The captain then hit Ramazan and took the bucket by force. He also had the in-solent water-carrier arrested and beaten by auxiliary policemen (desiatskie). Maryshev may have thought he deserved praise for his resolute action, but the circuit court thought diff erently. The prosecution argued that the cleaning of fountains was not among the service obligations of police captains, and there-fore the insults infl icted on him did not count as off enses against the admin-istrative order. The court then reprimanded the policeman for transgressing his powers, reminding him that he had no right to demand a bucket, let alone hit or arrest the Tatar.

Some Tatars even used their new powers vis-à-vis the police by bringing them to trial. In Yalta, an external session of the Simferopol΄ circuit court heard one such case in March 1891, in which the uriadnik Sol΄ntsevich was tried for using violence on duty.83 Sol΄ntsevich was walking past a teahouse when he got into an argument with a Tatar, took out his saber, and hit the Tatar on the arm. Shortly aft erwards, the Tatar fi led a complaint against the uriadnik, who was eventually sentenced to a two-week incarceration. The journalist reporting from the courtroom complained that the Russian court system now allowed people to be tried “for nothing” (za pustiaki). Crucially, however, the Tatar did not just accept being hit by the police; he went to court and made sure the uriadnik got his penalty.

Another case from Crimea suggests that the possibilities for going to court helped the legal integration of Tatars. In June 1871 the landowner Esaul Sul-tan Shagan Girey accused a man called Konstantin Samodurov, whom the landowner had hired as a wage laborer, of having insulted his Muslim faith.84 The investigator initially refused to handle the case, arguing that Article 178 of the Criminal Code only covered insults against “the Christian faith or the Orthodox Church.” Yet this objection was not shared by the jurists at the Sim-feropol΄ circuit court. They ruled that while insults against Islam were not mentioned as such in the Criminal Code, by their nature (po priznakam svoim) they should be treated like insults against Orthodoxy.85

It seems, then, that jurists who worked in the new courts could choose to circumvent the relics of religious discrimination in the Criminal Code. In fact, the initiative taken by Tatars like Shagan Girey even spurred them to rule by analogy. The implications are twofold: First, as Sally E. Merry has argued in a diff erent context, the decisions of courts do not necessarily refl ect a dominant ideology but rather the views of those who staff these courts (in this case, the new generation of jurists outlined earlier).86 More important for the case of

82. GAARK, f. 376, op. 6, d. 70 (“O meshchanine Ramazan Memet oglu,” 1872).83. For detailed coverage, see “Iz zala suda,” Krymskii vestnik, no. 74 (3 April 1891).84. GAARK, f. 376, op. 6, d. 49 (“O meshchanine Konstantine Samodurove,” 1871).85. Ibid., l. 2.86. Sally E. Merry, “Courts as Performances: Domestic Violence Hearings in a Hawai’i

Family Court,” in Mindie Lazarus-Black and Susan F. Hirsch, eds., Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance (New York, 1994), 37–38.



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post-Reform Russia, however, legal integration partly resulted from the ongo-ing interaction between jurists and ordinary subjects.

Property and Inheritance Battles: Civil Lawsuits among Muslim Tatars

While civil cases were less numerous at circuit courts than criminal cases, Tatar litigants also used these courts to defend their property rights, gain cer-tain advantages, or solve other kinds of civil disputes within and beyond their local communities.

On 2 May 1878 the Tatar woman Aishe Sherife, married to a peasant by the name of Seit Memet Mulla Osman oglu, fi led a lawsuit against the civil ser-vant Ivan Dimitrievich Godzi with the Simferopol΄ circuit court.87 The previ-ous year, Godzi had taken Sherife’s husband to court because the peasant had failed to pay off debts amounting to 4,000 rubles. To allow Godzi to recover the debt, the court had identifi ed a plot of land near Alushta, on the south Crimean shore, for seizure and sale. On 26 March 1878 the court announced the public auction of the land, which prompted Aishe Sherife to act. In her lawsuit, she claimed that the plot of land was hers rather than her husband’s and could therefore not be seized.

The court responded quickly. On May 12 it put the sale of the land on hold until the issue of ownership was resolved. The case, however, was delayed for fi nancial and logistical reasons: Alushta was an overnight trip from Simfero-pol , across the coastal mountains. The questioning of witnesses was there-fore expensive, and it was only aft er a year’s delay that the court received the money from the two parties for the travel expenses of a member of the court and a land surveyor.88

Nearly all of the witnesses were Muslim peasants who gave their testi-mony in Tatar.89 The court representative was accompanied by a mullah and the Muslim nobleman Mustafa Davidevich, who acted as a Russian-Tatar in-terpreter.90 All witnesses confi rmed that Aishe Sherife received the revenues but had authorized her husband to manage the land. Six of them explained that under Muslim law a woman could have no private property; therefore, she had to authorize her husband to be in control of the land. The court ac-cepted these explanations, concluding that Seit Memet used the revenues “to operate the business in his wife’s name, upon her authorization and on the basis of Muhammadan law, according to which the wife has no right to be in charge of her property.”91

This case illustrates how imperial legal principles and practices pene-trated into Muslim communities. While these communities publicly stressed the importance of Islamic norms, they seemed aware of the fact that some of

87. GAARK, f. 376, op. 5, d. 2808 (“Delo po isku zheny poselianina Aishe Sherifa,” 1878), l. 18.

88. GAARK, f. 376, op. 5, d. 2808 (1878), ll. 7–7ob.89. For the testimony, see ibid., ll. 10–17ob.90. Ibid., l. 12.91. Ibid., ll. 19ob.–20.




their members had adapted to Russian property arrangements, which allowed wives to own land. In this court case nearly all neighbors knew that the dis-puted land was the wife’s rather than the husband’s. In fact, the woman had been active on the property market for some time. As one witness explained, Aishe Sherife had bought the land near Alushta with the revenues of another land sale conducted several years earlier.92 It is therefore hardly surprising that she fi led a lawsuit that guaranteed her ownership and future revenues. The Russian regulation of Tatar aff airs was also refl ected in the fact that Aishe Sherife could not have engaged in forum shopping: the circuit court presented the only legal option for her. She could not have turned to the Spiritual Mus-lim Administration because the jurisdiction of this institution only extended to cases involving Muslim land endowments known as waqf.

Another case, taken from the records of the Simferopol -based lawyer M. A. Freshkop, highlights that while forum shopping was possible in some areas of civil law, there were advantages to using Russian courts. In October 1894 Freshkop fi led a lawsuit with the Simferopol΄ circuit court on behalf of the peasant woman Zeynep.93 The woman had recently been divorced by her husband, Umer Chelebi oglu. According to the lawsuit, she had brought goods amounting to 400 rubles into the marriage, which her husband refused to return to her upon divorce. Referring to the Russian Civil Code, her lawyer ex-plained that the act of marriage did not establish joint ownership of property. Thus, he asked the court to oblige Umer Chelebi oglu to return the goods.

Zeynep’s choice of a Russian court is striking. Article 1399 of the Statutes on Spiritual Matters of Foreign Faiths allowed Crimean Muslims to turn to Islamic judges in cases of property claims resulting from divorce.94 This was only possible, however, if both parties agreed to it. In Zeynep’s case, it is un-derstandable that she preferred to take her claim to a Russian court. Islamic judges were entitled to rule in accordance with “customs,” which tended to en-force patriarchy. Imperial courts, by contrast, relied on the Civil Code, which allowed Zeynep to get her property back. Umer Chelebi oglu’s lawyer insisted on the religious peculiarity of the case, asking the court “to summon one per-son of Muhammadan faith as an expert who can off er a correct interpretation of [marriage] law.”95 The circuit court, however, ignored this request, accepted Freshkop’s line of argument, and had goods whose worth totaled 400 rubles taken away from Zeynep’s ex-husband.96

In short, even in cases in which Muslims could have sought local forms of dispute resolution, they sometimes had good reason for turning to impe-rial courts. At the same time, the two cases discussed above also suggest that going to court entailed substantial costs—for lawyers, travel expenses, and litigation fees. And yet, civil lawsuits were not only initiated by the economi-cally privileged.

On 8 November 1871 two Tatar peasants from Kazan Province, Mukhamet

92. Ibid., l. 12ob.93. GAARK, f. 849, op. 1, d. 17 (“Po isku docheri Khatipa Ubeidully Zeynepe,” 1894).94. Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (1900), vol. 11, pt. 1.95. GAARK, f. 849, op. 1, d. 17, l. 28.96. Ibid., ll. 34, 34ob.



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Sharyp Ziabirov and Mukhamet Galey Sharypov, sued a Russian by the name of Glinskii, who had extorted 170 rubles from them for their failure to deliver fi rewood.97 The promised delivery was based on a formal agreement signed in May 1870.98 Glinskii had taken no legal action against the peasants’ failure to deliver wood, collecting money from them by force instead. The two Tatars, by contrast, went to court, arguing that Glinskii had falsifi ed the conditions of the original agreement.

Ziabirov and Sharypov were ill-prepared for this legal battle, however. While Glinskii was represented by a lawyer, the Tatars took it upon them-selves to argue their case. They failed to attend the fi rst hearing in Kazan on November 26. By the time of the second hearing, on 24 March 1872, one of them had already withdrawn his allegation.99 Most importantly, the peasants ignored a basic rule: litigants were required to provide evidence for their ac-cusation. Ziabirov and Sharypov only reiterated their claim, off ering no evi-dence whatsoever. The hearing thus took a mere twelve minutes, aft er which the court rejected the lawsuit and imposed a fi ne on the two Tatars.100 The case shows that successful legal action in circuit courts required certain re-sources, including funds for legal advisors and travel, or knowledge of formal court procedure. Since Ziabirov and Sharypov commanded none of these, their action backfi red.

A fi nal case suggests that Tatars seemed to be aware of the fact that court cases could be lucrative.101 In 1881 the peasant Abdulla Iuzeev furnished the Kazan-based lawyer M. G. Mering with a power of attorney to represent him in court. They signed a contract, as part of which the lawyer received 100 rubles; soon aft erwards, however, they terminated the contract, and Mering returned the money to Iuzeev. Three years later, the craft y peasant sued his former law-yer, pretending that Mering was still under contract. He knew that Mering had no receipt for the return of the money, and thus he demanded 100 rubles from the lawyer. To prove Mering’s continued obligation to act for him, Iuzeev had forged a document by writing the word copy on an earlier power of attorney. The court, however, ruled against Iuzeev, explaining that the peasant had failed to show the actual contract—a deliberate omission, as Mering argued, since the initial payment and return of the money were both indicated on it. In the end, Iuzeev had to bear the costs of his failed lawsuit.

Any study of court cases poses a twofold methodological challenge. First, since the number of cases is necessarily limited, the study can only make suggestions and focus on legal processes. This is especially pertinent in the case of Tatars because of the limited number of sources. The conclusions are therefore tentative. Second, going to court is always an unusual situation;

97. NART, f. 41, op. 3, d. 46 (“Po sporu o podloge dokumenta,” 1871).98. Ibid., l. 6.99. Ibid., l. 7.100. Ibid., ll. 4–4ob.101. NART, f. 41, op. 1, d. 557 (“Delo . . . o deistviiakh prisiazhnogo poverennogo M. G.

Mering,” 1884).




most injurious experiences do not result in lawsuits.102 Yet, while the report of a crime or the resolution of a civil dispute in court may not be everyday phenomena, these forms of legal action are striking in late imperial Russia, where the masses have oft en been presented as indiff erent or hostile toward state institutions.

Muslim Tatars clearly saw the post-Reform courts as an option for settling their disputes and combating crime. This conclusion is congruent with recent scholarship on township courts, which has shown that peasant litigiousness grew exponentially toward the turn of the century.103 While the cases in this article were about Mengli Issa Suin oglu, Fat΄ma Khanym, or Aishe Sherife, most of them could have featured people called Ivan Petrov. The tensions be-tween locally and state-defi ned norms, between wives and husbands, and between landowners, peasants, and day laborers had innumerable iterations across the empire, as it was more a product of social stratifi cation than of eth-nic or religious diff erence.

The Judicial Reform brought elements of a rule of law modeled on Euro-pean ideals to the empire. It was not directly aimed at the integration of ethnic minorities, but developed spatially as it expanded from the regions around St. Petersburg and Moscow. The resulting legal practice in intermediate ter-rains has implications for both the study of Russia’s legal system and research on the empire’s treatment of minorities. Legal policy remained torn between steps toward greater uniformity and the maintenance of legal particularism. These tensions were pronounced in such intermediate terrains, where eff orts at legal unifi cation were greater than in distant borderlands. Policies toward minorities in general, and Muslim Tatars in particular, were characterized by the simultaneous pursuit of integration and the promotion of diff erence.

Both Crews and Burbank suggest that the Russian empire accommodated its cultural heterogeneity by institutionalizing religious and legal diversity.104 For Burbank, legal unifi cation remained an unfulfi lled concern for liberal elites since, in practice, legal particularism prevailed.105 Yet the spread of the reformed courts to the south and east and the resulting involvement of mi-norities in state courts suggest that the case is not so clear-cut. The role of the circuit courts steadily expanded, and as a result a hesitatingly unifi ed legal space emerged in which ethnic and religious distinctions faded into the background.

Unifi cation, however, proceeded in a context of dynamic, and locally specifi c, plural legal orders. The Tatar use of the circuit courts was shaped

102. J. F. Holleman, “Trouble-Cases and Trouble-Less Cases in the Study of Custom-ary Law and Legal Reform,” Law and Society Review 7, no. 4 (Summer 1973): 592; and William L. F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat, “The Emergence and Transfor-mation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . . ,” Law and Society Review 15, no. 3/4 (1980–81): 651.

103. Among many others, see Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court; Cathy A. Frier-son, All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle, 2002); and Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, 88–90.

104. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar; Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime.”105. Ibid., esp. 418–19, 424.



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by a state-centered form of legal pluralism, which had emerged in the de-cades preceding the Reform. Diff erent legal orders were clearly demarcated but also systematically linked and integrated, as shown, for example, by ap-pellate mechanisms, which allowed ordinary courts to hear appeals against the rulings of the Spiritual Administrations. Options for forum shopping were limited to a few areas of civil law. Additionally, Muslim Tatars sometimes per-ceived benefi ts in adhering to Russian rules, even where forum shopping was possible.

The Reform also drew Tatars in Kazan and Crimea more closely into the state legal system because it enhanced the courts’ appeal. Thanks to institu-tionalized external sessions, the courts became more accessible. Moreover, they sometimes worked at remarkable speed. For example, of all criminal cases closed for lack of evidence in introductory meetings at Kazan circuit court in 1881—a total of 1,099 cases—95.5 percent were heard and closed within one month. Of the 952 cases that were brought to trial in that year, 82.7 percent were decided by the court within six months.106

Some peasants surely favored local forms of confl ict resolution. But like other subjects of the empire, Muslim Tatars could also expect to benefi t from going to court, even if this did not always happen. In criminal cases, the courts served as external arbiters, and the system provided assistance where the community sometimes did little to help, such as in cases of samosud or forced marriage. Crews concludes, perhaps prematurely, that Muslims saw the state as guarantor of their rights and arbiter of their disputes. While the evidence in this article is too tentative and disproportionately based on Rus-sian sources—for lack of Tatar ones on the subject of the new circuit courts—to support such conclusions, it does suggest that Muslim Tatars did not hesitate to turn to state courts whenever local mechanisms were likely to work against them.107

This is not to claim that inequalities disappeared. While Tatars served as jurors, surrogate judges, and legal practitioners, they remained underrepre-sented in all of these positions when compared with their proportion of the population in Crimea and Kazan, mainly because many of them did not meet the educational or linguistic requirements. Financial, geographical, and other barriers also put them at a disadvantage regarding the use of courts.

Outside the legal sphere, Tatars and other minorities experienced more serious pressures and discriminations. With changing intensity, the church continued to target them in its missionary campaigns; educational boards imposed controls and restrictions on Tatar schools and their staff s; and the government continued to deny the Tatar population certain rights, such as the rights to proselytize and have a secular press.108 These pressures increased

106. See Ministry of Justice, Svod statisticheskikh svedenii po delam ugolovnym, proi-zvodivshimsia v 1881 godu, pt. 1, 23.

107. One of the few Tatar sources is the newspaper Tarjuman, published in both Rus-sian and Tatar, which regularly featured reports of circuit court trials from Crimea and Kazan, yet presented these in much the same manner as other press organs.

108. Zagidullin, Perepis΄ 1897 goda, esp. 84–105; Geraci, Window on the East; Wayne Dowler, Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860–1917 (Montreal, 2001); and Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy.




during the reign of Alexander III (1881–1894). Some minorities, especially the Jews, were targeted more than others, but even Tatars became ineligible for certain offi ces of local self-government.109 In the legal sphere, however, changes remained limited. Unlike policymakers and offi cials in the education and religious sectors, the state’s jurists made little eff ort to curtail the role of Tatars.

Legal offi cials thus added an internally diverse yet distinctive voice to the existing spectrum of opinions, proposals, and decisions about minori-ties. Since they tended to view the citizenry in terms of the secular notion of grazhdanstvennost , they included Muslim Tatars in their modern, largely nondiscriminatory system of courts and legal procedure.

While recent research has shown that the gradual integration of new ter-ritories was part of a conscious imperialist policy, there is little to suggest that the reformed courts were designed as tools for establishing control over intermediate terrains.110 They sometimes served this purpose in practice, and some elites were undoubtedly aware of the integrative potential of these courts, but jurists’ discussions focused on practical concerns, such as costs, distances, and the availability of staff and infrastructure in Crimea and Ka-zan.111 The extension of the reformed system to intermediate terrains and the decision to make all local residents subject to the new courts are best seen as part of imperial standardization, aimed at increasing effi ciency.

The analysis of circuit courts thus also off ers further evidence that there was no coherent, systematic policy of oppressing and dispossessing minori-ties in late imperial Russia. The relative equality before the law, however, pro-vides a striking contrast to the continuing lack of basic civil liberties, such as freedom of thought, speech, and faith, and to the direct and indirect forms of discrimination in other spheres; thus, it highlights the contradictions in the empire’s treatment of ethnic and religious diversity.

109. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, “Poles, Jews, and Tartars: Religion, Ethnicity, and Social Structure in Tsarist Nationality Policies,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 2000): esp. 77–78; see also Zagidullin, Perepis΄ 1897 goda, 89–91.

110. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field.111. See the chapters on Taurida and Kazan in Sudebno-statisticheskie svedeniia and

Baberowski’s discussion of debates in the legal reform commission and State Council: Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz, 343–44.



Documents

“Law and Empire in Late Tsarist Russia: Muslim Tatars Go to Court,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 778-801