Degeneracy and Abuse: Attitudes to Violence Against Parents in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Muravyeva, Marianna

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-94997-7_4

Marianna Muravyeva⁵

Part of the book series: World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence ((WHCCV))

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Abstract

‘Degeneracy and Abuse: Attitudes to Violence Against Parents in Nineteenth-Century Russia’ by Marianna Muravyeva picks up on the consequent changes in the understanding of parricide as a mental and medical problem. Muravyeva highlights the shift in explanations of parricide that occurred in the nineteenth century, when it became a focus of degeneracy theory. Treating parricide as a consequence of the perpetrator’s mental illness due to the possession of a degenerate heritage provided a pacifying explanation for both the community and the authorities, meaning they would not have to deal with the greater problems brought about by changes in family organization and relationships occurring at the heart of the modernizing society.

It is often the case that husbands kill their wives’ lovers, sons…their fathers, frequently conspiring with their mothers and friends after they had caught them in flagrante with another woman; a brother-in-law kills his sister’s husband upon her request and together they dispose of the body…One sister stabs another for reporting her lewd behaviour to their mother; she confesses that originally she wanted to hack her to pieces but then planned to use a pestle to beat her [to death]…The body of a dead infant is floating in the nearby lake…

Sergey Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga (1871)

The most frequent victims of criminal accidents are the people closest to a morbid criminal, those he loves most of all…

Valerian Volzhin, Zakon i zhizn’ (1891)

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Notes

1.
‘Karachaevskaia khronika. Vlast’ t’my’, Orlovskii vestnik no. 261 (1898), 3.
2.
See, for example, A.S. Gatsisskii, ‘Materialy dlia ugolovnoi statistiki Nizhegorodskoi gubernii’, Nizhegorodskii sbornik 1 (1867): 121–171; Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia: 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
3.
Marianna Muravyeva, ‘Between Law and Morality: Violence Against Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, in Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture, ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: Open Books Publishers, 2011), 209–238.
4.
See, for example, seminal rhetoric in other post-emancipation and reforming societies such as Brazil: M.K. Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985) or the American South: E.L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
5.
Marianna Muravyeva, ‘Family Authority, Violence Against Parents, and Parricide in Russia, 1600–1800’, Journal of Family History 41, no. 3 (2016): 294–317.
6.
On the monopolization of violence by emerging nation-states, see Jean-Claude Chesnais, Histoire de la Violence, en occident de 1800 à nos jours (Paris: Laffont, 1981). On violent crime in Russia, see Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice; on domestic violence, see Barbara A. Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); and on representations of murder and penal policy, see L. Reynolds, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
7.
Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii. Vol. XV: Svod zakonov ugolovnykh (St. Petersburg: v tipografii II otdeleniia, 1832), 332–346.
8.
Nikolai Shreiber, Sbornik statei ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh (St. Petersburg: tip. Imperatorskoi AN, 1869), 188; German Trakhtenberg, Ukazatel’ po iuridicheskim voprosam, razreshennym ugolovnym kassatsionnym i obshchim sobraniem kassatsionnykh departamentov Senata (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Ministerstva Iustitsii, 1878), 825–826; Dmitry Lutkov, Sbornik svedenii, raz’iasniaushchikh primenenie na praktike Ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh (Moscow: tip. T. Ris, 1872), 198.
9.
Muravyeva, ‘Family Authority’.
10.
Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound; Muravyeva, ‘Between Law and Morality’.
11.
‘Sobornoe Ulozhenie 1649 goda’, in Akty zemskikh soborov, ed. A.G. Man’kov (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1985), XXII: 2–3.
12.
Muravyeva, ‘Family Authority’.
13.
Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (hereinafter PSZ I), 45 vols (St. Petersburg: v Tipografii II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi EIV Kantseliarii, 1830), 21, no. 15379 art. 41.
14.
PSZ I, 27, no. 20519.
15.
For parents: PSZ I, 27, No. 20519; 37, no. 28121; 38, no. 29411; Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (hereinafter PSZ II), 55 vols (St. Petersburg: v Tipografii II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi EIV Kantseliarii, 1885), 1, no. 568; 2, no. 883; 4, no. 3023; 25, no, 24328; for children: PSZ II, 36, no. 37743a.
16.
PSZ I, 27, no. 20519.
17.
Russian State Historical Archive (hereinafter RGIA) f. 1398 op. 1 d. 3632.
18.
Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh (St. Petersburg: tip. II otdeleniia, 1845).
19.
On peasant disturbances in the aftermath of 1861, see Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach and Tricia D. Olsen, ‘Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence from Russia’s Emancipation of the Serfs’, Comparative Political Studies (2015): 0010414014565887. See also Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society (London, New York: Routledge, 2008).
20.
On the post-emancipation family, see Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On social thought, see Gary M. Hamburg, ‘Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought: The Case of Boris N. Chicherin’, Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (1991), 890–904; Ben Eklof, ‘Worlds in Conflict: Patriarchal Authority, Discipline and the Russian School, 1861–1914’, in School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, ed. Ben Eklof (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 95–120; Nathaniel Knight, ‘Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 4 (2006): 733–758.
21.
See, for example, M.I. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Dmitry Bulanin, 2000), 2, 67–78.
22.
‘Obshchee polozhenie o krest’ianakh, vyshedshikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti (1861)’, in Dokumenty krest’ianskoi reformy, ed. O.I. Chistiakov (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1989), art. 93–110.
23.
On the volost’ court and peasant legal culture, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, ‘Legal Identity and the Possession of Serfs in Imperial Russia’, The Journal of Modern History 70, no. 3 (1998): 561–587; Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (Urbana-Champaign: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); Gareth Popkins, ‘Code Versus Custom? Norms and Tactics in Peasant Volost Court Appeals, 1889–1917’, The Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 408–424; Cathy A. Frierson, ‘“I Must Always Answer to the Law…” Rules and Responses in the Reformed Volost’ Court’, The Slavonic and East European Review 75, no. 2 (1997): 308–334; Richard Wortman, ‘Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations of the Court Reform of 1864’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (2005): 145–170.
24.
Sudebnye ustavy 1864 goda (St. Petersburg, 1864), art. 132.
25.
On justices of the peace, see Wortman, ‘Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law’.
26.
Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 1, 58.
27.
Vasiliy Lukin, Pamiatnaia kniga politseiskikh zakonov, dlia chinov gorodskoi politsii (St. Petersburg: tip. Eduarda Pratsa, 1856), 47.
28.
Ibid., 164.
29.
Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice.
30.
Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 1, 236–249; cf. France: David G. Troyansky, Old age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
31.
Trudy komissii po preobrazovaniiu volostnykh sudov (hereinafter TKPVS), 9 vols. (St. Petersburg: v tipografii II otdeleniia, 1873), I, 170.
32.
TKPVS, I, 547–458.
33.
TKPVS, I, 362.
34.
See, for example, Sudebnaia gazeta, 1 January 1883, no. 1, 2–4.
35.
Delo A. Kara (ubiistvo materi i sester), podrobneishii otchet ob oboikh sudebnykh sledstviiakh…(Moscow: Izdanie I.A. Solovieva, 1903).
36.
Witness depositions in ibid., 18–19.
37.
Delo A. Kara, 22.
38.
Ibid., 4.
39.
Ibid. See also description of this case in McReynolds, Murder Most Russian, 74–76.
40.
On crime reportage and sensation, see Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation: Interdisciplinary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004); Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg, Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820–2010 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Thomas Cragin, Murder in Parisian Streets: Manufacturing Crime and Justice in the Popular Press, 1830–1900 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006).
41.
Sudebnye ustavy 1864 goda, art. 353–355. On the state of Russian medical forensics, see Elisa M. Becker, Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011).
42.
Isaak G. Orshanskiy, Sudebnaia psikhopatologiia dlia vrachei i iuristov (St. Petersburg: tsentral’naia tipo-litogtafiia I. Ia. Minkova, 1900); Feodosii A. Patenko, Opyt rukovodstva k sudenbo-meditsynskomu analizu (Khar’kov: tipografiia and litografiia M. Zilberger and sons, 1904).
43.
Pavel P. Malinovsky, Pomeshatel’stvo, opisannoe tak, kak ono iavlaetsia vrachu v praktike (St. Petersburg: v tipografii Karla Krailia, 1847), esp. 51–66; Orshanskiy, Sudebnaia psikhopatologiia, ch. iv.
44.
L.A. Dobkevitch, Nastol’nyi politseiiskii slovar’ (Odessa: tipo-litografiia shtaba Odesskogo voennogo okruga, 1904), 198–230.
45.
А. Lubavsky, Russkie ugolovnye protsessy, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: tip. Tovarishschestva ‘Obshschestvennaia pol’za’, 1866–1867), 3, no. 50.
46.
Delo A. Kara, 25.
47.
PSZ II, 1, no. 568.
48.
Criminologists such as Dmitry Dril (1846–1910) were great supporters of Morel. On Morel and Lombroso in Russia, see Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
49.
Delo A. Kara, 62.
50.
Tseitlin presented this case to his colleagues shortly after the trial ended: Samuel L. Tseitlin, Degenerativnaia psikhopatiia (Otseubiistvo. Sudebno-meditsinakaia ekspertiza) (Moscow: tip. Shtaba Moskovskogo voennogo okruga. 1913); Beer, Renovating Russia, 97–98. See also Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
51.
RGIA f. 1363 op. 5 d. 1648.
52.
Ibid., ll. 3–5.
53.
PSZ I, 37, no. 28121: at 32.
54.
Muravyeva, ‘Family Authority’.
55.
Delo A. Kara, 62.
56.
Dobkevitch, Nastol’nyi politseiiskii slovar’, 50–51.
57.
Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
58.
Nikolai I. Grigoriev, Alkogolizm i prestupleniia v St.-Peterburge (St. Petersburg: tipografiia P.P. Soikina, 1900), 27–29.
59.
Pavel I. Kovalevsky, Dushevnye bolezni. Kurs psikhiatrii dlia vrachei i iuristov (St. Petersburg: Vestnik dushevnykh boleznei, 1905), 210.
60.
Aleksei N. Pushkarev, O dushevnykh bolezniakh v sudebno-meditsinskom otnoshenii (St. Petersburg: v tipografii voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii, 1848).
61.
RUP, 3, no. 38.
62.
See the gallery of generate criminals in Mikhail Gernet, ed., Prestupnyi mir Moskvy (Moscow: Pravo i zhizn’, 1924).

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Faculty of Law, National Research University Higher School, Moscow, Russia
Marianna Muravyeva

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University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Marianna Muravyeva
University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Raisa Maria Toivo

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Muravyeva, M. (2018). Degeneracy and Abuse: Attitudes to Violence Against Parents in Nineteenth-Century Russia. In: Muravyeva, M., Toivo, R. (eds) Parricide and Violence Against Parents throughout History. World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94997-7_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94997-7_4
Published: 10 September 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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