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Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia

Online ISBN:
9780801465901
Print ISBN:
9780801451454
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia

Louise McReynolds
Louise McReynolds
Professor of History, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Published online:
18 August 2016
Published in print:
29 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780801465901
Print ISBN:
9780801451454
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. This book draws on a series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. The book reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings. As the book shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, the book analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant's behavior “criminal.” The book connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period.

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