PLAYING THE JURAL GAME: RUSSIAN PEASANTS OF THE EARLY XX CENTURY USING LEGAL LOOPHOLES TO MAINTAIN THEIR INTERESTS (the Confrontation Between Migrants and Old Residents at Novo-Shulbinskoye Village)

Abstract

The article is a contribution to studying the gap between the upper and the lower estates of the Russian society at the early XX century. In particular, peasants' perception of law is taken as the subject of the investigation. One of the striking examples of conflicts between peasant migrants an old settlers in the course of the famous "Stolypin's migration" to Siberia provides ground for this research. The authors aim at detecting peasants' readiness to defend their interests using legal loopholes to circumvent legal barriers. Documents from a file of the governor's office (gubernskoye upravlenie) of State archive of the Tomsk region let us have an all-round impression of the case as far as they represent views of the both struggling sides (migrants and old settlers), opinion of the local authority (krestyansky nachalnik) and the motivated decision of the governor's office. Compared to the legislation and to the other similar cases, these documents allow us to make out the hidden motive (old residents' wish to keep their plough-land) for the formal subject of the struggle (rent payment for the right to live in the village cottages). The facts discovered by the authors prove that the struggle over cottages was only a legally competent form for the struggle over plough-land. The result obtained corrects the currently understated evaluation of the Russian emancipated peasants' readiness to maintain their interests by legally competent methods.

Keywords

• stolypin's siberian migration
• priemny prigovor (admission act)
• poletki (annual rent)
• peasants' sense of justice
• conflicts between peasant migrants and old residents