American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia by William G. WagnerReview by: Lee A. FarrowThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 640-641Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309127 .

Accessed: 09/06/2014 17:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Mon, 9 Jun 2014 17:04:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

640 Slavic and East European Journal

and vulnerable segment of society deserves our sympathy, but I put down this book suspecting that a number of these women had more fun and greater personal satisfaction than the doctors and caseworkers who recorded their miseries were in any position to concede.

Louise McReynolds, University of Hawaii

William G. Wagner. Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 413 pp., $59.00 (cloth).

William Wagner's new book offers a welcome discussion of the Russian judicial reform of 1864, presenting a rich and fascinating portrait of the interaction between law and society in late Ihiperial Russia. The reform significantly transformed the character of civil procedure in Russia, creating an independent judicial structure staffed by trained legal officials and estab- lishing the power of judicial interpretation. It also created a forum for the articulation of competing conceptions of Russian social and political life. Because the tsarist regime imposed significant limitations on political discourse and action, civil law became an important medium for the expression and realization of different ideological views. Family, property, and inheri- tance law were particularly important in this respect because of their centrality to Russian social and economic life. Moreover, these issues had larger implications for the continuing validity and general acceptance of the patrimonial character of Russian law and society. Wagner's book provides a thorough examination of the ways in which these difficult questions were treated within the new judicial structure which emerged after 1864.

Whereas previous studies of judicial reform have focused on the reform process and the role of the new courts within the tsarist government, Wagner examines "the regular activities of the new courts and their impact on areas of the law that significantly affected the daily lives of Imperial Russian subjects" (2). The first half of his study looks at the debates over family law that arose in the post-reform years. Traditionally, Russian family law had upheld the principle of patriarchal authority in marriage and family alike, mirroring in many ways the arbitrary and personal nature of tsarist social and administrative institutions and of the autocratic political system as a whole. By the late 1850s, largely in response to an expanding education system that brought a growing number of Russians into contact with Western ideas of individualism and the Romantic emphasis on affective familial ties, the educated strata of society began to challenge the pre-eminence of patriarchal authority in family law. Following the judicial reform these debates moved into the arena of civil law, and two competing views of the family emerged among jurists, each with different implications for the tsarist political and social order. Conservatives, who sought to preserve the traditional family, argued that central areas of family law, such as divorce, should remain in the hands of the church. Reformers, moved by the affective ideal of the family, stressed the importance of the conjugal family and its stronger emphasis on individualism, and challenged the patriarchal influence of the church in family matters. The result was a conflict which brought to the fore not only questions of family law, but also questions of individualism, women's and children's rights and the roles of men and women in the family and in society.

Debates surrounding property and inheritance law are the focus of the second part of Wagner's book. As in family law, there was a patrimonial principle underlying Imperial property and inheritance law. For example, the law made a distinction between patrimonial and acquired property. Patrimonial property was defined as "any immovable property inher- ited by a member of the patrilineal kin-group of the deceased owner or bequeathed by an owner to his or her direct legal heirs" (228). Acquired property was that which one acquired in his or her own lifetime. According to Russian law, however, once acquired land was passed on

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Mon, 9 Jun 2014 17:04:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews 641

to the next generation it became patrimonial. Patrimonial property was subject to strict inheritance laws that required its transference to the heirs specified by law. Thus a land- owner's power to dispose of his property was limited by rules which favored the family over the individual. Many jurists prior to the 1850s had defended the law of patrimonial property as necessary for the good of the family and the social order. In the second half of the century, however, some began to argue that the laws were outdated and no longer met the needs of Russia's changing society. Pro-reform jurists criticized the ideas of paternalism and sexual discrimination that were embodied in Russia's property laws and declared that restrictions on property disposal discouraged investment and trade and stifled individual initiative. Conserva- tive jurists, on the other hand, responded that such restrictions on property disposal were essential in order to protect the family. Moreover, they believed that reformers, in their eagerness for change, had failed to consider the applicability of their ideas to Russia's condi- tions. As with the questions of family law, then, debates over inheritance and property law in the late Imperial period were closely tied to greater social, political and ideological questions.

Wagner's book is a significant contribution to the study of late Imperial Russia. Drawing heavily on archival sources, law codes and records of legislative and governmental bodies, it provides a thorough and extremely valuable examination of Russian civil law in the reform era. It also, however, goes beyond the specialized field of legal history to reveal much about the ideas and values which were of the greatest concern in Imperial Russia. Questions of family, paternalism and individual rights had long been of central importance to Russian social and political life, a truth often reflected in Russian literature. Thus, Wagner's book addresses not only the changes which were occurring in Russian law, but also the changes which were confronting Russian society. Wagner's skillful and elegant integration of legal and social history demonstrates the way in which legal debates embodied various ideological perspec- tives and served as a medium for the articulation and discussion of these different and conflict- ing views.

Lee A. Farrow, Tulane University

Anna Geifman. Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 376 pp., $39.50 (cloth).

Students and historians of the Russian revolution are undoubtedly aware of the extreme violence with which political battles were fought in that country throughout the final decades of the old regime. The assassination of Alexander II by the notorious "Narodnaia volia" ("People's Will") group in 1881, and the murder of Prime Minister Stolypin by Dmitri Bogrov in 1911, are two fairly well-known instances of "propaganda by the deed" practiced by terror- ists during the pre-October years. Perhaps less familiar, however, is the sharp escalation of terrorist violence in the wake of Bloody Sunday on January 9, 1905 (22), when government troops fired upon hundreds of peaceful demonstrators near the Winter Palace. According to the author's estimates in Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917, between 1905 and 1907 terrorists killed or injured nearly 4,500 state officials and 4,700 private individuals, and expropriated millions of rubles from both state and private institutions. Geifman concludes that the influence exerted on the course of political events by extreme methods of "revolutionary terrorism" during this period appears to have been as great, if not greater, than the effects of the many strikes, demonstrations, uprisings and similar mass movements that are more frequently discussed in scholarship on the Russian revolutionary movement.

By demonstrating the extent and significance of terrorist activity during the first decade of

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Mon, 9 Jun 2014 17:04:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions