Book Review

In her detailed and vivid account of social identities, Elise Kimberling Wirtschafter describes an imperial Russian society that is not backward, isolated and static, but vital and dynamic. The author highlights the porous boundaries, indeterminate definitions, and flexible structures that characterize imperial Russian society in her thorough account of juridical categories—from the nobility and clergy to the intelligentsia, peasants, and townspeople. Imperial Russia was a fragmented "society" that consisted of "bundles of amorphous, changeable, and often contradictory legal rights and social identities" (171). While she admits that the juridical categories shaped people's everyday lives, they failed to do what some might have hoped or expected, that is: 1) integrate people by providing them a place in the imperial framework; 2) overcome local identities and extend state power and control; 3) provide the basis of a civil society through the development of cohesive social groups capable of articulating collective interests.	1
The tsars attempted to integrate the diversity of their subjects by delineating social categories that dictated everything from education and job opportunities to tax and military obligations. Yet, in actuality, each of these juridical categories was difficult to define. With the exception of the highest aristocratic, service, and episcopal elites, lesser nobles, lower military ranks, petty officials, and parish clergy blended imperceptibly into the general population. The boundaries delimiting factory workers from other laboring groups such as lesser townspeople and peasant migrants were indistinct, indeterminate, and changeable even after large-scale industrial development got under way in the late nineteenth century. Military regiments and parish clergy, due to their economic dependence on local resources, remained deeply embedded in civilian and lay communities. The noble estate, in the words of one important official, "is so boundless that at one end it touches the foot of the throne and at the other is almost lost in the peasantry" (67). These categories hardly reflected social reality or the existence of groups with distinct, coherent identities.	2
If this description of social identities makes the imperial Russian empire look fragmented, fragile and unstable, the author maintains nonetheless that the dynamic prism of juridical society helps to explain the stability and effectiveness of the autocratic system. Fluctuating definitions and porous institutions gave people a certain freedom to violate official boundaries and change legal identities in order to survive, define a social position, and perhaps even prosper. The tsar's subjects took liberty to evade official obligations, disregard legal prescriptions, and violate formal and informal social boundaries whenever they considered policy unjust or impractical. For example, in order to survive, soldiers collaborated with officers to "cheat" the state by neglecting service duties so that they could earn money to simply keep themselves fed.	3
What gave the system coherence was simply the person of the monarch, the sole point of system-wide administrative integration. Personalized authority remained in place for two centuries (and, indeed, into the Soviet period and beyond) because many believed that it was preferable to compete for access and conduct informal consultations and negotiations rather than to set limits on autocratic power. There were obvious advantages to personalized authority for the tsar who defined administrative and social power, and for the tsar's various administrators who (in an enormous empire where administrative oversight was difficult) were de facto lawmakers as well. But while everyone appeared powerful in this system, they were all also strikingly vulnerable, as the author brings out well. On the one hand, the ruling classes were always vulnerable to downward mobility. For the nobility, "formal rights and service obligations were never contractual but discretionary and hence provisional" (35). On the other hand, the autocrat's authority disintegrated when people lost faith in the myth of the good tsar. During and after the emancipation of the serfs, it became clear to both peasants and landowning nobles that they no longer could expect a benevolent monarch to protect their rights and privileges. As they became more disillusioned and resentful over the years, belief in the monarch's good intentions faded and the myth of the good tsar began to unravel, thus inviting revolution.	4
When considering the disintegration of the imperial system, Wirtschafter emphasizes the failure of personalized authority. Throughout the imperial period, the basic obligation of the tsars was to be good and merciful, to respond to their subjects' grievances and offer protection, while the basic right of all imperial subjects was to present complaints and petition their ruler. In this context, the events of Bloody Sunday in 1905 are especially significant. "The gunning down of peaceful petitioners seeking to address the sovereign made it painfully clear that the efforts of ordinary people to use paternalistic images to protect themselves and effect positive improvements in their lives had come to naught" (157). This dynamic and fluid society, held together only by a trust in the personalized authority of the monarch, began to disintegrate. The history of legal-administrative society, the author argues, is one of localized and fragmented communities that by the early twentieth century could neither replace the desacrilized monarch nor mediate mass discontent.	5
If the absence of stable formal structures hastened the collapse of the imperial order, the flexibility and vitality of informal structures nonetheless held it together for centuries. Wirtschafter urges historians to look closely at the particulars of the Russian environment—one where economic activity involved risk, where resource allocation and shortage required rule breaking, where the diversity of local circumstances required personalized authority. In such an environment, informal ties often served the needs of people better than formal rules. What is especially valuable about this book is how it describes the complex reality that existed beyond the juridical categories of social identity, and its suggestion that historians might have more to learn about Russian society from its informal structures than its formal ones.	6
Golfo Alexopoulos University of South Florida

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