Into the future. Gender, sexuality, and minority matters in Russian imperial history

As my time as an LHB blogger is coming to an end, I wanted to mention a few things that, for various reasons, have not received the attention they deserve in my research on law in late imperial Russia. I would count the issues of gender, sexuality, comparisons with other empires, and changes in the early twentieth century among them. At least in some of these cases, help is nigh.

First, while the experience of women is, in some ways, all over “The Lawful Empire (Cambridge 2019)”, coming up in numerous court cases in both Crimea and Kazan, it is not addressed in a systematic manner. Sex and gender clearly led to different experiences of legal culture after the Great Reforms, partly because of the way they were legally framed at the macro level, and partly because of the way they were embedded in social expectations shaped by religion, estate, and many other factors at the micro level of society. Most of the sources I consulted for my research remain silent on the subject, though, or treat it only in passing, which means that this gap is not easily filled. I feel encouraged by the fact that one of my students at Humboldt University recently decided to write their thesis on gender and law in late tsarist Russia and has already discovered a wealth of intriguing material.

Second, sexuality as a factor shaping legal experience is even more difficult to grasp. Granted, in the regions I focus on, Crimea and Kazan, I came across a substantial number of court cases dealing with “sodomy” (muzhelozhstvo) - a “crime” that could only be committed by men. While these cases did not make it into the final version of my recent book, they contain much fascinating detail. For example, in virtually all of the cases I saw, the defendants – Tatar, Russian, or other – were acquitted by the jury courts because they invariably argued that they had been drunk beyond all belief when performing the sexual act, in which they were caught on beaches, in forests, and public bathhouses. Apparently, the vodka argument easily swayed Russian juries. That said, as interesting as this may sound, I did not feel comfortable approaching sexual diversity exclusively as a criminal act, which is why I have not addressed it more prominently so far. While I have no reason to believe that nineteenth-century society was any less diverse than current society, this diversity is not easily captured.

Third, the fate of Russia’s “lawful empire” in the early twentieth century must be subjected to further scrutiny. What did the new legal situation after the 1905/06 revolution and constitution mean for the courts, and for ethnic and religious minorities therein, in particular? An analysis of this cannot limit itself to a discussion of new legislation and institutions at the center, but must take a close look at how these changes played out in the regions. While the records of the Kazan and Crimean courts are very patchy for this period (I explained the reasons here), other regional court archives may have more substantial collections. Either way, a focus on this period will also allow me to include contemporary contributions in languages other than Russian in the discussion (not least, the rich Tatar press), which mushroomed after 1905.

Finally, and this is currently the most concrete project I am pursuing, the Russian case gives plenty of grounds for inter-imperial comparison. I touched upon such questions in earlier work (“One Law for All?”, 2012), and Lauren Benton and Richard Ross (“Empires and Legal Pluralism”, 2013), among others, have started a more focused conversation on how different imperial formations treated cultural diversity and enshrined it in law and legal procedure. Yet, there is still much to be done. I am therefore in the middle of developing a volume with 20 specialists of different empires addressing similar and pressing questions on “minorities in imperial space”. The work has only just begun.

 

-- Stefan Kirmse 

The Skariatin Code. Legal History Research on Imperial Russia

„By order of the Highest Manifesto, promulgated on May 15, the case against the former Kazan governor Skariatin, processed by the Criminal Cassation Department of the Governing Senate, has been closed and will not be heard.“

At first sight, this sober piece of news may not strike you as very important or exciting. But when I first came across these lines in the reading room of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I was moved and relieved. It must have been May 2012. It was an odd and rather special moment during the research that went into my book The Lawful Empire (Cambridge 2019). Let me explain why.

The short note published somewhere towards the end of the Novoe Vremia (New Time) newspaper on July 13, 1883, was not an eye-catcher. I had almost moved on to the next page, and I had to read it several times before I believed it. I had spent the last few weeks going through every available newspaper published in St. Petersburg in the first half of 1883. What on earth had happened to governor Skariatin? Between 1879 and early 1883, the fate of this governor – revered by some, despised by others – had kept large parts of the Russian press occupied. But something must have happened in 1883 that made his name disappear from the headlines. It was almost like he had vanished into thin air.

Nikolai Iakovlevich Skariatin was the protagonist and anti-hero of my book’s final chapter. Thoroughly unlikeable in many respects (not least because of his racism, penchant for violence, and disrespect for the law), in a bizarre way, he had also grown on me. Perhaps it was the fact that I had spent so much time piecing together the trajectory and impact of this man, whose life had gone almost completely unnoticed by biographers and historians. As the governor of Kazan Province from 1866 to 1880, he was the kind of mid-level imperial administrator who did not leave many traces. Back in November 2011, I had given a talk in DC (and shortly afterwards, another one in Berlin) on Skariatin’s inglorious role in the Tatar riots of 1878, and while I had been able to show how this over-ambitious governor had been sacked and put on trial for using excessive violence when putting down an uprising, I had not been able to answer questions on what happened to him in the end. It was vexing.

 

Playing detective

In many historical studies, we are now concerned with offering new perspectives on established material. We develop "mental maps" or use transregional or global history approaches, and we follow the spatial, performative, or emotional turns (among a dizzying array of other turns) to gain new insights from our material. And there’s nothing wrong with this. Most of the time, though, we already know what happened. It’s more a question of new interpretations and challenging, or deconstructing, old narratives. In legal history, though, the situation is different. Once you move beyond key historical cases that caused public outcry or major legal and political debate, you often enter the unknown. Dozens of legal cases in my research on Russian imperial history had not been addressed by other researchers (also evidenced by the archival registers in Crimea and Kazan, which showed that many files I ordered were completely untouched). It would then take me weeks or even months to gather all the details (as the handwritten files for ordinary criminal and civil cases could be hundreds of pages long). I remember moments at the Kazan archive when I suddenly felt like Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code, as yet another detail had just emerged from a new file and given things a completely new twist. Historical research can be surprisingly suspenseful. It certainly was in the Skariatin case. 

Prophets and pardons

The case of the governor was also a prime example of a journey into the unknown. Admittedly, bits and pieces of the story had been told before. A highly authoritarian governor had subjected several Muslim Tatar villages to severe corporal punishment in reaction to their alleged rebellion; in what almost sounded like a caricature of a Russian conservative, different sources confirmed that he had moved through rows of Tatars, tied down and birched by his soldiers, and with every lash he reportedly shouted things like “This is for Muhammad!” and “This is for the Qur’an!” To make matters worse, some of the victims were even taken to court for resisting the authorities. What had received far less, if any, attention in the literature was the second part of the story: that about two years after the incident, complaints about Skariatin’s cruelty had reached the highest level of the empire’s judiciary, which proceeded to dismiss the governor and press criminal charges against him. In a protracted, two-year judicial process he was eventually put under house arrest and scheduled to be tried by a jury. By this time, a virtual war was raging in the Russian press on Skariatin's alleged guilt, on the merits of the jury courts, and on appropriate policies towards Muslim "fanatics". 

While it had taken me over a year to make sense of all the details belonging to the second part of the Skariatin story (his gradual fall from grace), I still had no answer to the question of what happened to him in the end. This is when I discovered the lines mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. The simple truth was that Skariatin had been pardoned by the tsar, and so there was not much point in the press continuing the debate about his virtues and vices. But let’s be clear about this. When you look at the actual manifesto mentioned by Novoe Vremia, you will not find any names in it. The category of crime the former governor was accused of, “serious beatings”, was among those selected for broad pardons on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander III. In other words, the crime was pardoned, not the person.

In a way, and given the extraordinary circumstances and cultural implications of Skariatin's brutal actions, this was a soundless and somewhat unsatisfactory end to the final chapter. And yet, it also reflected the ambiguities and unpredictability of legal culture in reform-era Russia. 

-- Stefan Kirmse

An Archive's Tale. Law and Empire in Tsarist Russia

The story behind my research on law and legal practice in late imperial Russia is also a story about archives. For me, as someone who had mainly worked with anthropological methods before, the extensive archival research that went into "The Lawful Empire" (for details, click here) was a major change, a change that greatly enhanced my respect for historical work due to the finite nature of sources. In the past, when in doubt, I had returned to the field for more participant observation or focus group interviews and I could always be sure that this would lead to fascinating new data. With archival research, life turned out to be a lot less predictable. Sometimes you discover that one document that (you think) will change the world, only to realize later that its contribution is a lot more modest; and sometimes, you simply don’t find the documents you need. Or you find them with considerable delay, as I will discuss next week in a blog entry on my book’s final chapter.

Research between Kazan, Crimea, and St. Petersburg

What made matters more challenging in my recent project, which documents legal reform and court practice on two of the Russian Empire’s interior peripheries, Crimea and the Volga-Kama region, is that the relevant archives are geographically scattered across the vast Eurasian landmass. The bulk of the research was carried out at the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART) in Kazan, about 600km east of Moscow, and at the State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (GAARK) in Simferopol on the Black Sea peninsula, which during my archival research (2010-2013) was not only de iure but also de facto part of Ukraine. Trips to the two locations were not easily combined; and as it turned out, whenever I entered the field, I stayed in either Kazan or Crimea, never in both. However, as the years passed and the project’s focus became more refined, it also became clear that this regional, bottom-up perspective, as rewarding and innovative as it was, had to be complemented by work at the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St Petersburg, where the ministry of justice and other key institutions held their records. The point was not so much that this central archive offered a top-down perspective but that its documentation also contained many local voices (either because locals had written to St. Petersburg or because central investigators had conducted enquiries in the regions and taken their results back with them).

Doing a project in three locations that are thousands of kilometers apart from each other is logistically difficult (and expensive), but also very satisfying because every location and every archive comes with its own challenges and rewards (not to mention quirks). The same is true for the specialized libraries that I used for their collections of newspapers, journals, and other publications, especially the Slavonic Library in Helsinki (priceless because many publications from imperial Russia, to which Finland belonged, are on the shelves and thus easily accessible) and the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (with far easier work conditions than the Russian State Library). Last but not least, the library of Kazan University with its extensive collection of imperial newspapers and its department of ‘rare books’ proved to be incredibly rich. That some of its newspapers were part of heavy folders that no library assistant felt comfortable to lift led me into the basement of the Kazan library stacks, and left alone among those endless shelves of dusty old papers, you could not help but feel excited (I’m an explorer!) and appalled (how on earth did my life end up in this basement?) at the same time. In archives, you quite literally dig deep.

I should add that I have the terrible habit of arriving unannounced, the first reason being that local archives, libraries, and museums tend not to send you away if you are already there (as opposed to telling you by email that they have nothing of interest for your project, which is not always true), and the second and probably more crucial reason being that I am simply not organized enough for doing things differently. I avoid travelling in July and August – when many Eurasian archives are closed – but other than that, I tend to just go and play things by ear. 

When I first arrived at the Crimean archive in April 2010, I found the front door locked. An ominous sign told me of a "technical break until further notice". As it turned out, they were rearranging their collections inside, an understandable and necessary endeavor. The following six weeks were still incredibly productive because once I had got hold of an employee and explained the purpose of my stay, they were extremely welcoming and had no objections to me being the only person in the reading room while they were going through their files. In fact, the person in charge of this room, a Crimean Tatar, and I enjoyed countless conversations over the next few weeks, sometimes jointly brooding over old files, sometimes discussing aspects of local history. That the Crimean archive always closed at 1.30pm on Fridays for the entire weekend was a blessing in disguise, for it enabled, in fact encouraged, me to explore this small peninsula and its geography on foot in considerable detail. When the Karaite prayer houses in Evpatoriia on the peninsula’s western shore, the khan’s palace at Bakhchisaray, or the pass across the coastal mountains and the small vineyards and orchards between Alupka and Yalta, exalted by so many nineteenth-century writers, suddenly become alive, you begin to develop a very different relationship with your written sources.

 

Handwriting, photography, and being back in school

Back at the archive (in both Crimea and Kazan), nineteenth-century handwriting proved to be a particular headache. It was rarely an issue when local litigants or court officials wrote their requests or reports to institutions higher up because they invariably wanted to make a good impression. The response from the center was often far less ceremonious and more difficult to make sense of; it tended to look like scrap paper with indistinct scribbles on them. In both regional archives I therefore spent many hours with the local archivists comparing and identifying individual letters and words, gradually developing a more trained eye for reading such correspondence. I certainly learned never to underestimate how much work you spend on deciphering, rather than just reading files.

Another lesson was always to expect the unexpected. Once the person usually in charge of the Crimean reading room had other business to attend to, and so someone from the administration replaced her for a day. It was a day to remember. “YOU UNPLUG THAT LAPTOP OF YOURS RIGHT NOW, DO YOU HEAR ME?!” was the new supervisor’s way of introducing herself to me. Her face was trembling with anger while I was still trying to work out what the issue was. Then she turned at everyone else in the room. “AND YOU LOT AS WELL! PULL THOSE PLUGS OUT! NOW! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH WE PAY FOR ELECTRICITY?” Actually, we did, as many archives charge you for the use of laptops in Russia and Ukraine. The Crimean archive didn’t. But rather than kindly ask us to make contributions, the administration decided to go for a good old verbal thrashing (which continued for the rest of the day). At 35 years of age, I felt odd to sit there again like a schoolboy. Still, I kept telling myself that at least it wasn’t as tough as Saratov on the Volga River. A colleague of mine had done research there in the middle of February in what turned out to be a tiny archive with very few seats, which forced her to wait in line every day at 7am in minus 20 degrees Celsius to secure a desk. That’s real dedication! And perhaps a good reason for focusing on Russian ties with Africa or Latin America in the next project. 

A final note on the conditions that archives offer when it comes to photography. Given the logistical challenges outlined earlier, photography played a crucial role in my project. While the first trips to the different locations were more exploratory and focused on getting an overview of the kinds of sources that existed, follow-up trips tended to be far shorter and more focused. This was facilitated by the fact that both the Crimean and the Kazan archives allowed you to take as many pictures of archival documents as necessary (provided you told them which ones you needed and paid a small fee). From one trip I returned with 1,200 pictures; from another with 800. It was an arrangement that helped foreign researchers, who are more dependent on the visual material you can gather in shorter periods of time. Things were far more regulated (and expensive!) at the central archive in St. Petersburg, where taking time-consuming notes turned out to be the only feasible option. Unfortunately, by now, local rules have also become stricter, with high fees and new rules introduced for photography in Crimea and Kazan. I am not sure that these new rules protect the historical material any better; they certainly impose constraints on researchers who are not constantly in the area. 

On the whole, then, my research in "The Lawful Empire" not only offers a snapshot of life and legal practice in late nineteenth-century Crimea and Kazan, but it is itself a snapshot of how historical research was possible in these two regions roughly between 2009 and 2015.

-- Stefan Kirmse