Tsar Alexis, His Reign and His Russia. by Joseph T. FuhrmannReview by: Ann M. KleimolaSlavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 324-325Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496351 .

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324 Slavic Review

essentially a matter for the parties directly involved" to a situation in which a third party enters as an official mediator. In the diarchic process the victim must himself seek redress. Resolution takes the form of blood revenge or restitution. Norms are established by custom and maintained by consensus. In the triarchic system the intervening third party is the state - in this case the prince and his agents. By defining the ground rules and imposing physical sanctions of no direct benefit to the injured party, the prince presumably expresses the interests of society and manifests his power over his subjects. Thus the transition from one legal system to the other is also an aspect of the growth of state authority.

At its chronological extremes the change is clearly marked. Kaiser convincingly argues the minor role of the prince in the Expanded Version of the Pravda. Even homicides were not normally dealt with by his courts. Except in special cases, monetary sanctions went to the victim, not the prince. Specialized judicial agents apparently did not exist. In contrast, the first Sudebnik prescribes corporal and capital punishment for criminal offenses, treating recidivists with particular severity. It codifies an elaborate hierarchy of judicial levels and officers and is keenly concerned with procedural matters. A parallel evolution is observed in the forms of evidence: from oral to written, from character witness to factual testimony. The important implication is that elements of statehood in Kievan Russia were far weaker than Soviet historians, following B. D. Grekov, have commonly held (the Leningrad scholar I. Ia. Froianov is a notable exception). But the intermediate steps are hard to trace. Between the Pravda and the Sudebnik we have little except ecclesiastical codes - difficult to date with any certainty and in any event peripheral to the book's major concerns - and regional codes (Dvina Land, Novgorod, Pskov), which come late and may reflect regional or urban peculiari- ties. As for actual court records, there are some materials on fifteenth-century civil suits, ably analyzed by Ann Kleimola in Justice in Medieval Russia (Philadelphia, 1975), but little which tells us how criminal cases were resolved.

What we do know is that the Expanded Pravda was copied and recopied long after the Kievan period came to an end, throughout the fifteenth century and beyond. Its norms continued to be widely used as even the birchbark documents from Novgorod suggest. Here perhaps lies the key to the author's hypothesis that changes in legal relations are often associated with changes in social structure. The difficulty is that the medieval Russian case shows a very imperfect correlation. Urban society may have become more complex and impersonal and increasingly Christian in culture, but among the rural majority, kinship continued to be the organizing principle and paganism the basic outlook. There were practical limitations on the new system as well. The prince's administration was still too primitive to deal with more than a fraction of all legal cases. In any event, a large part of the countryside - secular and ecclesiastical estates - en- joyed judicial immunities which exempted its population, wholly or in part, from the prince's jurisdiction. Thus, the state created new judicial forms, but their sphere of operation was circumscribed. The prince could issue a new law code, but in many areas custom continued to reign. Daniel Kaiser reminds us how long it took the state to establish its control over the vast and thinly populated Russian land.

BENJAMIN UROFF University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

TSAR ALEXIS, HIS REIGN AND HIS RUSSIA. By Joseph T. Fuhrmann. Russian Series, vol. 34. Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1981. viii, 250 pages. Illustrations. Map.

Joseph Fuhrmann's account of the life and times of Aleksei Mikhailovich, tsar of Muscovy from 1645 to 1676, is intended for students, general readers, and "non-Russian

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Reviews 325

speaking people." The model for the format is evidently the Soviet "scholarly-popular" biography, a genre well represented by R. G. Skrynnikov's Ivan Groznyi. This is a particularly difficult kind of book to bring off successfully, since the author must combine biographical detail with essential contextual background.

The book has its merits. Within a relatively brief space, the author covers the major events of Tsar Aleksei's reign and provides the reader with many of the everyday details that help convey a sense of life in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Those acquainted with the period will find many familiar anecdotes, including my favorite about a socially prominent enemy of the patriarch who named his dog Nikon and taught him to imitate the head of the church. The author's explanation of developments is basically a synthesis of standard interpretations. And while there are no footnotes, frequent references are made to the individual specialists whose views are presented.

In other ways, however, the study is not so successful. The portrait of Aleksei Mikhailovich is a somewhat one-sided picture of a rational Westernizer, with no refer- ence to other aspects of his personality, for example, his fear of witchcraft or the sometimes bizarre duties he assigned the Secret Chancellery for "maintaining state security." The account of his reign leaves some rather startling gaps, such as the absence of any discussion of events in the Ukraine after its annexation by Moscow. A more serious problem is the lack of adequate historical and comparative perspective. Was the zemskii sobor, for example, in fact an elective representative body with which the ruler had to deal (pp. 23-24, 154-55)? No one would dispute the fact that the tsar's favor was an important element in the attainment by his former tutor, B. I. Morozov, of influence and wealth; yet his was not nearly the "rags to riches" story that the author makes out. Morozov, the son and grandson of Muscovite boyars, would probably have demanded recompense for injury to his honor had he heard himself described as "a minor aristocrat" who was "born to a minor noble family" (pp. 4, 16). The chancellery system was perhaps "not the rational product of a genuine bureaucratic scheme." But how does the Musco- vite solution to administrative problems, namely, "to create yet another bureau" (p. 105), differ from that of more "modern" and "efficient" systems? At least the seventeenth-century Muscovites abolished several chancelleries (prikazy) which had completed their tasks. This is probably more than can be said of most twentieth-century governments.

The author's objective "to capture the passion, drama - even the coarseness- which so often escape scholarly studies of seventeenth-century Russia" (p. vii) leads at times to a certain exaggeration and imbalance. Seventeenth-century Muscovy clearly had no corner on "almost unbelievably coarse" popular songs (p. 80). The desire to capture passion and drama may also account for some of the stylistic excesses, as in "Their gentle spirits radiate a mellow charisma which move [sic] and elevate people" (p. 37) or "The ladies relished walks through scenes of breath-taking natural beauty" (p. 118).

Given the intended audience, the author's decision to avoid Russian terms is understandable. Yet his English equivalents may at times be misleading to the general reader while specialists are left guessing until the Russian terms are provided or clarified through context. An okol'nichii, a royal counselor of the second rank, for example, is termed a "lord in waiting" (p. 98), while the voevoda, a military governor, is a "district lord" (pp. 112-13).

Overall, the book is longer on personalities and detail, shorter on the "big picture." The general reader will probably enjoy the biography more than will the specialist who tends to qualify generalizations, correct details, and add personal views and interpreta- tions. Unfortunately, the average reader will come away with only a hazy impression as to where Tsar Aleksei and his reign fit in the larger pattern of Russian development.

ANN M. KLEIMOLA

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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