91 Customary Lawpublication in 1830 of the forty-volume Polnoe sobranie zakonov
Rossiskoi Imperii. Work on the second edition was begun soon after,
and the last volume of the third edition was issued in 1916, just a year
before the collapse of the old regime.^10 Law and its history, Russian
officials believed, not only increased the effectiveness of administra-
tion but also illuminated and glorified the history of the development
of the state. Russia’s administrators feared the implications of the
French Revolution and understood legal codification as a means to
strengthen the autocracy. Codification served the “needs of the state,”
as Nicholas i’s 1833 manifesto declared – “justice and orderly rule.”^11
As in other old-regime states, inequality was legally sanctioned by
the judicial system. Different courts existed for each of the different
estates.^12
A challenge to this Russian version of the “well-ordered police
state” was the rechtsstaat, or a state governed by the rule of law.
Russian officials in the early and middle nineteenth century sought
new methods to improve the administration of the empire, and in the
process they contested the historical traditions of the police state.^13
Officials in the Ministry of Justice in particular, as Richard Wortman
has shown, developed a “legal consciousness” that informed the im-
plementation of the judicial reforms during the Great Reform pe-
riod.^14 The concern of officials and members of educated society with
the question of zakonnost’ (legality) suggested a limitation upon the
unlimited authority of the monarch.^15
This latter tradition was complicated by the fact that the concep-
tions of the European-educated bureaucracy did not necessarily cor-
respond to the judicial practices or conceptions of the Russian people.
Students of the Russian peasantry were well aware that peasant judi-
cial norms differed from the ideas and expectations of regime officials
and legal specialists.^16 Throughout the nineteenth century, peasants
often ignored the reformed township (volost’) courts and continued to
resolve their disputes according to customary law, or the practices of
samosud (self-adjucation).^17 For some Russians such practices were a
source of curiosity and fascination and a matter of national identity,
in the tradition of the fascination with the legends, songs, and folk
tales of the unique Russian “people” that Hans Rogger dates from the
later eighteenth century.^18 For Slavophiles like Khomiakov, custom-
ary law practices were another crucial reservoir of “originality,” an
expression of Russia’s native soil far preferable to the rational
abstractions and legal formulas that he associated with the Roman
heritage. In contrast to the artificial character of law, wrote
Khomiakov, custom “reflects within itself the most fundamental
unity of society... The deeper the sphere of custom, the stronger and