ABSTRACT
The call to ‘trust in the law’ that campaigners for reform took as their motto was channelled through a variety of contexts. If the work of commissions to draft new laws or refine existing legislation was the most obvious route for conveying the new message, it was also, as I have argued, the least successful. Indeed, given the rapid erosion of the reform process almost as soon as it was born, failure was virtually inevitable. But to measure advances and setbacks solely in terms of the more visible political pendulum swings between cautious progress and reaction would, of course, be inadequate. Granted, these swings back and forth between reform and counter-reform, so typical of attempts to instigate change ‘from above’, are crucial for understanding Russia’s awkward modernization process, but they arguably lead us to focus unduly on state measures – the ‘above’ precisely – and to ignore the real momentum of social change ‘below’, namely the growing complexity of the ‘public sphere’, which, since the second quarter of the century, had been witnessing, albeit reservedly, the spread of education, urbanization, and professionalization. Indeed, paradoxically, for all the bad press surrounding the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II as ‘the triumph of aggressive Russian nationalism and conservatism’, the dark, inauspicious days of their rule saw some of the most intensive, theoretically based work in the field of criminal law.2
