Authors

Discussion

The revolutionary movement in the reign of Alexander II emerged amid a simmering legal and constitutional crisis precipitated by the Judicial Reforms of 1864. The reforms ushered in a new legal culture of jury trials with an independent judiciary and adversarial advocacy even as the autocracy refused to abandon its own legal prerogatives and continued to wield the law extra-judicially. The tsar could decide to override verdicts, either extending clemency or in some cases increasing prison sentences or even replacing them with the death penalty. The prosecutions of revolutionaries for crimes large and small prompted them to articulate their political claims in a legal language of rights denied and powers abused. The revolutionaries thus came to fashion an alternative legal order that was partially rooted in the (as they saw it, betrayed) promise of the Great Reforms and partially rooted in a fundamental critique of sovereignty in the Russian Empire. 

As a result, trials of revolutionaries in the 1870s and 1880s witnessed a collision of competing legal orders: the tsarist courts, the court of public opinion and the court of history. The question was which of these settings should enjoy primacy and what judgements would be discarded as they were passed from one set of judges to the next. The courtroom became the site of arguments over not merely the guilt or innocence of the defendants, but the legal and political architecture of the entire post-reform order.