ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two subjects ordinarily separated by conventional divisions of historical scholarship, but both critical to the analysis of legal refonn in Russia. The first is Russian legal ideology-definitions of law put forward and sustained by Russian intellectuals and historians of Russia, definitions with a particular genesis and a long life. The second is the legal practice of peasant courts in late imperial Russia. Addressing these topics together permits both a contextualization of well-established assumptions about what law was and could be in Russia and a re-evaluation of the long-tenn effects of the 1860s refonns upon the legal culture of Russian society before 1917. I will describe how Russian ideologies of law obscured, even to interested parties, the expansion of legal consciousness in rural Russia before 1 91 7. And I will suggest a different approach to thinking about law-one that emphasizes historical process and contingency, the intertwining of beliefs and practical outcomes, and the connections between legal practices and the creation of citizenship.
