Gordeeva Mariia A.,
Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Rural Society Against Rural Inhabitants: Episodes of Struggle in the County Courts at the Beginning of the 20th Century (Tulinskoye County, Barnaul District, Tomsk Province)
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2018-2-16
The article considers court proceedings involving rural societies and their individual members as one of manifestations of emerging independent bodies of power at the rural level. While studying the official documentation of Tulinskoye county court of 1914 the author discovered nine proceedings initiated after statements of rural societies against individual peasants. They concerned monetary reimbursement for woods cut illegally and crops damaged by cattle, arguments over payments for cattle pasture and farmstead places rent. Each case is given a brief characteristic including evidence of the parties and witnesses, decisions made by court, information about their execution and the submitted appeals. It is established that the county court was quite critical about the evidences presented by plaintiffs in cases of this kind: a half of the considered cases was lost by rural societies, sometimes because of inaccurate paperwork during investigative actions. It is shown that cases initiated by the petitions of societies made a small part of the total number of cases considered by Tulinskoye county court during the same period; their distribution over different villages of the county was very uneven. Based on this, the author concludes that such cases were not typical, and this practice was only beginning on the eve of the World War I to become a part of the everyday life of West Siberian village.
Publishing: 19/12/2018
How to cite: Gordeeva M.A. Rural Society Against Rural Inhabitants: Episodes of Struggle in the County Courts at the Beginning of the 20th Century (Tulinskoye County, Barnaul District, Tomsk Province) // Historical Courier, 2018, # 2. Article 16. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2018/ISTKURIER-2018-2-16.pdf
Links: Issue 2 2018
Keywords: rural society; peasant community; county (volost) court; rural self-government; Tomsk province