The National Question in Russian Judicial Reforms of the Late 18th — Early 20th Centuries

This article proposes a new conceptual framework for analyzing the judicial reforms in the Russian Empire from the late 18th to the early 20th century. The authors examine the history of judicial transformations not as a series of disparate, ideologically driven acts, but as a single, consistent process of the empire’s search for the most effective model of legal integration for its heterogeneous population. The study shows that the management of ethnocultural diversity was not a secondary problem but a central challenge that determined the design and logic of the reforms at all key stages. Analyzing the reforms of the late 18th century, the authors show how the first, estate-based model of integration was constructed, combining unification with managed particularism. Next, using the example of the 1864 Judicial Statutes and the institution of the jury trial, the article examines the ambitious project to create a common civil justice system and its internal contradictions. Finally, the 1912 reform of local justice is considered the culmination of the late imperial search for a complex hybrid model designed to overcome the legal cleavage created by the preceding transformations. The study demonstrates that all three stages reveal a similar internal logic: the initial unificationist project was inevitably adjusted toward the preservation of particularism, forming a complex institutional structure that can be characterized in terms of Alfred Rieber’s concept of a “sedimentary society”. Thus, the evolution of judicial policy emerges as the story of a fundamental contradiction between the ideal of a unified nation-state and the reality of a composite, multiethnic empire — a contradiction that was resolved each time not through a definitive choice, but through the creation of complex, hybrid institutional compromises.