Elite Women on Trial in Post-Reform Russia, 1866-1884

Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself. Sergei Antonov is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in Moscow and came to the US in 1992. Antonov earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and his J.D. from NYU Law. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Harvard, 2016), won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. His second book, Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History.