Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914. By Stephen P. Frank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xxii plus 252pp. $55.00/cloth).

None of the innovations during Russia's era of great reforms has been so ignored by historians as the special peasant courts created in the wake of the emancipation of 1861. Stephen P. Frank addresses this lacuna and seeks to characterize the experience of rural Russia with the new judicial system. He describes the ...