12 Angry Peasants

Trial by jury: November 1864

unscrupulous judges, arbitrary rulings, bribery—all this was part of daily reality in 19th century Russia, if we believe what we read in our literature, which abounds with images of a corrupt judicial system.

Early in the 19th century, when Ivan Pushchin (friend to Alexander Pushkin, member of the Union of Prosperity, and a future conspirator, Decembrist, and convict) decided to abandon a promising career as a officer in the Imperial Guard to become a judge—an honest and fair judge. His move was seen as an act of madness. Years passed, one tsar died and another took his place. Pushchin and his friends carried out their failed rebellion on Senate Square, placing them on the wrong side of the law, and were sent to Siberia. Those who lived to see their amnesty 30 years later found that the system of justice had not changed in their absence.

There was always plenty of talk about the need to fundamentally change the judicial system, but no one knew how to achieve such reform. How could a just, legal system be instituted in a country populated largely by serfs who had no legal rights and who lived at the mercy of their landowners?

Then came 1861: serfdom was abolished and the peasants were given freedom. Clearly now that one component of Russian life had been changed, all the others would have to be changed as well. So began the era of the Great Reforms. Self-government was instituted at the provincial, district, and municipal level, censorship was virtually eliminated, there were changes in the military, and something completely novel appeared—trial by jury.

In November 1864, when Alexander II signed the order to introduce new courts, few understood how these courts would work. For the first time in Russian history, trials would be public—and the public came in swarms to witness the boisterous criminal and political trials the new system produced. The new courts featured contention between two opposing sides, with the prosecution and defense vying for the hearts and minds of twelve jurors selected from lists of the province’s property owners.

“How can this be?” exclaimed opponents of judicial reform. “Is it right to place justice in the hands of people with no legal education or even no education at all? Jurors will be manipulated, their prejudices or sense of compassion will be exploited!” Jurors, indeed, did not always conduct themselves as well as they might have. They almost always acquitted those accused of vagrancy—after all, what if someone just doesn’t want to stay in one place, if he doesn’t want to or can’t settle down to life with a home and a job and put down roots? That sort of thing was seen as forgivable, deserving of understanding.

Juries also tended to be merciful when it came to violations of a woman’s honor. Jurors, of course, were all men, and they were apparently always ready to take pity on someone who had “succumbed” or was “tempted”—maybe the woman intentionally tempted him? On the other hand, they did not go easy on horse thieves, especially if there were a lot of peasants on the jury. Stealing a horse was a much more serious crime than violating a woman’s honor. And if a trial fell during Great Lent or right before a major religious holiday, then the number of “not guilty” verdicts would surge—surely in the eyes of God it was better to be charitable at such times.

Was this a good thing or a bad thing? How are we to judge? The fact that people were meting out justice less according to the letter and spirit of the law than to the dictates of their conscience is testament to the fact that, for most Russians in the late 19th century (and not only then), the law and their conscience dictated two different things. But perhaps it was not such a bad thing if there were a lot of acquittals? As the old saying goes, it is better to acquit 50 guilty people than convict a single innocent person.

Another criticism of jurors was that they were too susceptible to the florid rhetoric of the lawyers. The speeches of the renowned jurist Plevako packed the house as well as any opera tenor. Once he even made a bet with his friends that he could, within two minutes, secure an acquittal for a man on trial for killing his wife. When it was his turn to speak, Plevako said, “Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury, esteemed members of the public…” Everyone froze in expectation of a brilliant speech. “Gentlemen of the jury, your Honor, esteemed members of the public…” the lawyer repeated. “Esteemed members of the public, your honor, gentlemen of the jury”—by the time Plevako repeated these words for the tenth time, there was growing indignation in the courtroom. “You see, gentlemen,” the lawyer calmly addressed the jury. “I spoke for just two minutes and you are already unhappy, but over the course of many years, my defendant heard over and over from his wife, ‘monstrosity, numbskull, numskull, monstrosity.’” A “not guilty” verdict quickly followed.

Ridiculous? Manipulation of the jury? Perhaps. Yet, in 1878, when the authorities tried their best to influence the court, demanding it convict a young woman named Vera Zasulich, who had fired a gun at St. Petersburg’s Mayor Trepov, the jury did not hesitate to issue a “not guilty” verdict. Today it is hard for us to understand why Russian society was so exultant when the terrorist was acquitted, but what the court saw in Zasulich’s action was not an act of terrorism, but an attempt to protect human dignity—Trepov had ordered a political prisoner to be whipped simply because he had not removed his hat in the mayor’s presence. The girl was carried out of the courtroom by a jubilant crowd and showered with flowers. After this, political trials were conducted at a safe distance from juries.

A few decades later, a jury in Kiev had to decide the fate of a Jew named Menachem Beilis. He was accused of killing a boy named Andryusha Yushchinsky, and the murder was supposedly carried out for ritualistic purposes. The entire country was riveted by the Beilis trial, and journalists were baffled to see that, in Kiev, a university city, there was not a single educated person among the jurors—just peasants and members of the petite bourgeoisie, as if they had been specially selected from the segments of society where anti-Semitism abounded and where stories about ritual murders were actually given credence. The trial went on for a long time and there was testimony by experts on religion, doctors, scholars, rabbis, and numerous witnesses. Anyone would have had trouble keeping all the testimony straight. Nationalists were preparing to launch Jewish pogroms as soon as the guilty verdict was announced. But the jurors unanimously found Beilis to be innocent.

Trial by jury was abolished by the Bolsheviks in 1922 and revived only in December 1993. And today its opponents are saying the same things they did 145 years ago: jurors can be manipulated; jurors are full of prejudices and preconceived notions; trial by jury cannot be considered fair.

In 1881, seventeen years after trial by jury was introduced, Alexander II was blown to bits by a terrorist’s bomb. Who knows—maybe if political trials had not been taken out of the hands of jurors in 1878, after the Zasulich trial, there would have been less anger in the country and the tsar might have lived to old age.

And Russian history might have taken an entirely different course.