ABSTRACT
Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, edited by Crisp and Edmundson, which was limited to the study of some civil rights in the nineteenth century and up to 1917. In some countries, for instance England, the definition of some civil rights attached to the individual and their enforcement in law had reached a degree of legal precision at a relatively early date. Most writers, whether nineteenth-century Russian or twentieth-century Western, on the development of the concept of civil rights in Russia have stressed the native emphasis on the collectivity rather than on the individual. In any case, however well acquainted Russian rulers might have been with current political thought, the enactment of civil rights for their subjects were the least of their concerns. Thus the legal definition of a number of civil rights in major legislation did begin in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century.
