Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial RussiaNorthern Illinois University Press, 2007 - 271 頁 Who ruled the countryside in late Imperial Russia? On the rare occasions that tsarist administrators dared pose the question so boldly, they reluctantly answered that the peasants ruled. Historians have largely echoed this assessment, pointing to the state's failure to penetrate rural society as a key reason for the tsarist government's collapse. Ruling Peasants challenges this dominant paradigm of the closed village by investigating the ways peasants engaged tsarist laws and the local institutions that were created in a series of contradictory legal, administrative, and agrarian reforms from the late 1880s to the eve of World War I. Gaudin's analysis of the practices of village assemblies, local courts, and elected peasant elders reveals a society riven by dissension. As villagers argued among themselves in terms defined by government, the peasants and their communities were transformed. Key concepts such as "custom," "commune," "property," and "fairness" were forged in such dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. By the end of the nineteenth century, the framework of dialogue between the peasants and the state no longer worked. The more peasants used the institutions and laws available to them, the more they solicited the authorities, and the greater the obstacles to communication grew. Villagers' rising expectations for assistance foundered in the face of inconsistent state policies and arbitrary legal responses. Ironically, the success of often contradictory reforms--a success unrecognized by administrators themselves--contributed to undermining the state's legitimacy. |
搜尋書籍內容
... Russian Peasants Go to Court : Legal Culture in the Countryside , 1905-1917 ( Bloomington , IN , 2004 ) . On the limits and contradictions of acculturation : see Neuberger . Also Gareth Popkins , one of the few historians to examine ...
... Russian Peasants Go to Court , 129–44 . Robert Shoemaker , in a study of insult and defamation in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , has suggested that an increase in litigation reflects the first stages of decline of ...
... ( Russian Peasants Go to Court , 259 ) is correct to point out that legality can exist without codification . But codification is only one tool for structuring legal actions . Another , perhaps more relevant to state systems giving a ...
內容
Ideologies of Authority and Institutional Settings | 14 |
Land Captains Peasant Officials and the Experience of Local Authority | 47 |
Volost Courts and the Dilemmas of Legal Acculturation | 85 |
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