Medicine, Law and the State in Imperial Russia by Elisa M. BeckerReview by: Harley BalzerSlavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (WINTER 2012), pp. 938-939Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.71.4.0938 .

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938 Slavic Review

Thus while the data on ethnic cleansing in this book are excellent, the political arguments betray the authors’ acknowledged lack of area expertise and lack of access to original ma-terials in the local language.

Robert M. Hayden

University of Pittsburgh

Medicine, Law and the State in Imperial Russia. By Elisa M. Becker. Budapest: Central Eu-ropean University Press, 2011. x, 399 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $45.00, hard bound.

Elisa Becker has produced the defi nitive study of forensic medicine in imperial Russia, ex-amining in detail the ways medical and legal professionals interacted to develop a unique set of practices and professional aspirations. This well-written book draws on Becker’s extensive reading and some archival material. When she offers broader generalizations about Russian professions based on one example from the nineteenth century, however, the book is less convincing.

Becker’s fi ve chapters focus on 1) the background from Peter to 1861; 2) scientifi c expertise at the beginning of the Reform Era; 3) the process of drafting and adopting the forensic-medical reform statute and its implications for a professional identity as part of the state apparatus; 4) the consequences of a criminal procedure system in which investi-gation was inquisitorial while court proceedings were adversarial; and 5) implementation of the statute and the debates over revising it and enhancing the professional status of fo-rensic medical specialists. Physicians whose opinions had been accepted without question under the prereform inquisitorial system were not pleased to be confronted by lawyers trained in forensic medicine who questioned their conclusions. Invoking “frenzy” to ex-culpate guilt brought physicians into direct confl ict with government administrators and legal professionals, though Becker also shows the ways medical and legal experts made common cause by the 1890s.

Most of the archival sources deal with the adoption of the legal reforms concern-ing forensic medicine, focusing on the era of Alexander II. The period after 1881, and especially the years of the signifi cant development of Russia’s professional organizations after 1891, get short shrift. Becker’s story emphasizes one group of medical specialists during the early years of reform. Yet she repeatedly talks about “physicians” as if they were involved in forensic medicine as their primary concern.

Members of every profession saw their calling as unique and crucial to Russia’s de-velopment. Even when they managed to make common cause and extract (temporary) concessions from the tsarist regime in 1905, each profession continued to emphasize its special role. But 1905 and the Union of Unions are outside Becker’s scope. Becker dis-misses most existing scholarship on Russian professions as endeavoring to force them into a Procrustean bed of western models. She never explores whether historians have focused on the “liberal” model of professions because they believe in it or because many Russian professionals themselves articulated it.

There was a persistent tension between a profession’s power versus an individual pro-fessional’s power in an autocratic system. It was enormously tempting for lawyers, doctors, and others to seek the ruler’s approval of their actions in the belief that they would thereby be in a position to further the interests of “the profession.” The danger, of course, is that noninstitutionalized infl uence could be curtailed as easily as it could be conferred.

Becker’s account stops in the 1890s, even though much of the older literature she critiques focuses on 1905. Her assertion that, “At the turn of the century, medical and legal reformers jointly sought to enhance their own occupational infl uence, independence and authority” (266), does not strike this reviewer as signifi cantly different from earlier studies of Russian professionals.

How typical is forensic medicine of the Russian medical profession? I vividly remem-ber a good friend who directed the pathology lab at a Leningrad hospital in the early 1980s regaling us with an account of the institution’s party secretary coming to lecture him about

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Book Reviews 939

conducting proper political education work with his patients. He listened for quite a while before pointing out that the only “patients” he saw were deceased.

Becker’s emphasis on Russia’s differences from Europe, much less Britain or America, deserves serious attention. So do the ramifi cations of those differences. Many Russian medical and legal professionals continued to favor the inquisitorial model. In the 1930s, confl icts within epistemic communities turned deadly, producing professional groups with distinctly Soviet approaches. Since 1991, leaders of many of these epistemic communities, due to both their unique knowledge base and their professional self-interest, have resisted internationalization. Examples include insisting that tuberculosis patients be institutional-ized in sanitoria rather than given effective drugs; rejecting substitution therapy for heroin addicts, thereby exacerbating the HIV problem; or emphasizing the value of in-house Russian publications over international peer-reviewed journals in evaluating academic performance. Many Russian professionals continue to favor the inquisitorial model. At some point in the future, Russian professionals may evaluate the costs of continuing to embrace the uniqueness Becker describes.

Harley Balzer

Georgetown University

K. P. Pobedonostsev v obshchestvenno-politicheskoi i dukhovnoi zhizni Rossii. By A. Iu. Polunov. Ed. E. A. Kochanova. Liudi Rossii. Moscow: Izdatel�stvo “Rossiiskaia Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia” (ROSSPEN), 2010. 375 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Plates. Hard bound.

A. Iu. Polunov’s new book on Konstantin Pobedonostsev has three key elements. It looks at his personality and at the possible roots of the most important of his character traits. It studies his ideas on religion, politics, and society. It traces his career, showing how and why his political signifi cance waxed and waned. One of the book’s great strengths is the man-ner in which these three elements are woven together into a single coherent and plausible thread. Another strength is the connection Polunov fi nds between Pobedonostsev’s biog-raphy and wider issues in the religious, intellectual, and political history of Russia.

Polunov knows his man and the context of his life deeply, having devoted most of his scholarly career to this fi eld but also having written a general history of late imperial Rus-sia. The book is based on exhaustive coverage of archival, primary published, and second-ary sources. Polunov is generous to previous scholarly work concerning Pobedonostsev, singling out Robert Byrnes and Gregory Freeze for special notice. But this thoughtful, deeply knowledgable, and fair-minded book is in my opinion now much the best work on Pobedonostsev’s personality, ideas, and impact.

The book is in no sense an apologia for Pobedonostsev. Its overall conclusions are strongly negative. But it does attempt to set out his ideas, place them in the context of the times, and explain why Pobedonostsev could come to hold such views. As Polunov shows, dismay at some of the effects of the Great Reforms was not unnatural and quite widely shared within Russian society. The search for a unique Russian path to development not merely fed a rather common nationalist instinct but also could be rooted in justifi able fears regarding whether west European liberal nostrums about progress could be success-fully adapted to the realities of the Russian empire. Pobedonostsev was fully aware that the era of the masses was at hand and his determination to root the monarchical regime in mass consciousness and loyalty made sense. His support for the commune as a Russian institution preserving peasant property and providing a basic guarantee of welfare was sincere and understandable. So up to a point was his determination to keep the education of the peasantry in the hands of the clergy, putting great effort into the development of church schools.

As Polunov shows, however, in the long run Pobedonostsev’s infl uence was disastrous for the conservative cause. His support for personal rule by the autocrat and his contempt for the bureaucracy contributed to the failure to develop adequate policy-making and coordinating institutions and conventions at the top of Russian government. Though de-

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