Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884
Autor Sergei Antonoven Limba Engleză Hardback – 21 iul 2026
In this book, lawyer and historian Sergei Antonov examines the largest and most prominent criminal cases following the landmark judicial reform of 1864 that introduced the public jury trial. Each case involved elite defendants or victims: nobles, officials, and wealthy merchants. Their crimes ranged from murder and arson to fraud, forgery, and embezzlement.
Antonov argues that, far from a reluctant concession of little consequence within Russia’s autocratic regime, the new courts were a crucial instrument through which the tsar and his government maintained a fragile political and social equilibrium. The new courts punished wayward elites and admonished the rest, teaching them about the limits of permissible violence, the exercise of power, and profit seeking. For the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair.
Moreover, for the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent—not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780300253177
ISBN-10: 0300253176
Pagini: 416
Ilustrații: 28 b-w illus.
Dimensiuni: 156 x 235 mm
Editura: Yale University Press
Colecția Yale University Press
ISBN-10: 0300253176
Pagini: 416
Ilustrații: 28 b-w illus.
Dimensiuni: 156 x 235 mm
Editura: Yale University Press
Colecția Yale University Press
Recenzii
“This superb study of law in late Imperial Russia questions Russia’s divergence from ‘the West’ and demonstrates instead the similarity of Russia’s legal realm to similar spheres in Europe and America. Antonov documents the emergence of the legal sphere as a key feature of Russian public life. The book is a tour de force. I recommend it with enthusiasm.”—Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks
“Russia’s Rogue Masters is a major revisionist contribution to the legal history of imperial Russia and to the understanding of the dynamics of power and legality in the era of the Great Reforms, throwing into sharp relief an intriguing combination of liberalism and elitism in reformed courts. In addition to the outstanding merits of scholarship, Antonov’s granular, elegantly written analytical accounts of an array of criminal trials make this study a gripping read.”—Mikhail Dolbilov, University of Maryland, College Park
“Russia’s Rogue Masters examines how mid-nineteenth-century Russia navigated the transition to the modern world, with the introduction of modern jury trials and the rise of a modern press. Well argued and well researched, Antonov’s book has much to say to those interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the emergence of modernity; legal history; and modern Russian history and Russia’s broader place in European history.”—Peter Holquist, author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921
“Russia’s Rogue Masters is a major revisionist contribution to the legal history of imperial Russia and to the understanding of the dynamics of power and legality in the era of the Great Reforms, throwing into sharp relief an intriguing combination of liberalism and elitism in reformed courts. In addition to the outstanding merits of scholarship, Antonov’s granular, elegantly written analytical accounts of an array of criminal trials make this study a gripping read.”—Mikhail Dolbilov, University of Maryland, College Park
“Russia’s Rogue Masters examines how mid-nineteenth-century Russia navigated the transition to the modern world, with the introduction of modern jury trials and the rise of a modern press. Well argued and well researched, Antonov’s book has much to say to those interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the emergence of modernity; legal history; and modern Russian history and Russia’s broader place in European history.”—Peter Holquist, author of Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921
Notă biografică
Sergei Antonov is associate professor of history at Yale University. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize.