Legality and justice in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: An interview with Stefan B. Kirmse

Stefan B. Kirmse talks to us about his ERC-funded project, In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’ – Minority Struggles in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (JUSTIMINO). To learn more about the project, visit the JUSTIMINO website.

Andrea Talabér (AT): Before we delve into your project, In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’ – Minority Struggles in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (JUSTIMINO), could you say a few words about your academic background?

Stefan B. Kirmse (SBK): I started with European Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, which meant languages (Russian and Spanish in my case), the history of ideas, political science, and sociology. The Russian-language programme was amazing in Dublin, and by the time I returned from my ‘year abroad’ in Moscow, which was an obligatory part of European Studies with Russian, I felt comfortable operating in Russian. I should add that, prior to that, I had already done five years of Russian at secondary school. My family lived in both West and East Germany, but I grew up in the west, and in many West German towns and schools, there was considerable interest in Russian in the 1990s, an enthusiasm almost, which had something to do with a general sense of optimism and the feeling of moving ever closer together. It sounds rather odd when you look at it from today’s perspective.

For my M.Phil. at St Antony’s College, Oxford, I moved into politics, with a focus on social and religious movement theory, and especially Islamic radicalism. That was very fashionable at the time, shortly after 9/11. I chose Central Asia and started travelling to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for interviews and other types of research. My PhD was formally registered in Development Studies (at the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, in London), though to be honest, as a study of youth culture in Kyrgyzstan, my thesis ended up being more rooted in cultural studies and the anthropology of youth. The focus was lived globalisation and thus I documented religious (Islamic) practice as much as media consumption, gaming, and even breakdance. I loved this research, and among the books and volumes I have published so far, the book that came out of it (Youth and Globalization in Central Asia, 2013) is still the one closest to my heart. Certainly it is the most personal thing I have written so far.

In Germany, the second book project is always radically different from the first, but in my case, the shift was even more striking because it was not only a change of topic but also a change of discipline. Humboldt University offered me to do a project on law and legal practice in the Russian Empire, in other words, a project firmly rooted in history and archival research. History as a discipline teaches you important lessons – for example, about the finite nature of sources. As an anthropologist, you don’t have to worry about that. Maybe it was the wonderful places I regularly visited for this book project (The Lawful Empire, 2019), especially Kazan and Crimea, maybe it was the thrill of working on criminal court cases, but over time I learnt to love this historical work. One thing I always held on to is the look at society ‘from below’. That’s the ethnographer in me, and it’s probably never going to go away. Who cares about decision-making at the top? In the end, what matters is how these decisions were felt by ordinary people. This belief has certainly informed all of my research.

Before joining my current research institute ZMO, I was a fellow in the ‘Legal Cultures’ programme of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. There I was surrounded by lawyers and legal anthropologists, who worked on similar questions but used very different methodological approaches. So over the years I’ve retained a fair share of interdisciplinarity. I know that some colleagues roll their eyes when they hear this word but I have always thought of it as helpful and inspiring. 

AT: Could you give our readers a brief summary of the project? Where is it based and who is involved?

SBK: JUSTIMINO is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the European research Council (ERC). It explores the legal situation of ethnic and religious minorities in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, roughly from the 1860s to 1991. The focus is certainly on history as a discipline, especially human rights and minority history, but the project is also inspired by ‘law and society’ research, along with social and cultural anthropology. I am the head of the research group, which is now based at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, an independent research institute that is part of the Leibniz Association. The project kicked off last autumn, and so far, we have worked with a core group of 7-8 researchers, at different career stages. We have also had several guests and fellows, so there are often around 10-12 people at our meetings. This includes other ZMO researchers who are not formally part of the ERC group but work on related regions and questions.

With such a large group, there is obviously much theoretical and comparative discussion at these meetings. At the same time, everyone has their own research projects. Right now, I am in the middle of an investigation of antisemitism and blood libel in the Caucasus and the wider Black Sea region in the long 19^th century, and the ways in which the accused managed, or failed, to use legal institutions for their own ends. If things go smoothly, I should have a book draft next year. In the second half of the project, I will examine cultural practices that came to be framed as ‘traditional crimes’ in Central Asia, from the 1890s through the Soviet era to the present, including bride kidnapping and the payment of bride price. There was a lot of change over time in how these were treated, criminalised, de-criminalised, tolerated, and even encouraged.

We have three doctoral researchers on the project. Lucien Turczan-Lipets focuses on the Ukrainian and Jewish ’60ers’, a dissident and artistic movement between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s in Kyiv and Lviv. He asks why a small group of intellectuals moved from a vehement defence of legalistic Leninist principles to a broad advocacy for ‘universal human rights’, carrying with them a reinterpretation or defence of Ukrainian national culture along the way. Ketevan Sartania’s dissertation examines Georgian dissident activities and Stalin’s influence on Georgian identity from 1950 to 1980, analysing how Georgians increasingly demanded cultural preservation and national rights following de-Stalinisation. Leo Hedrich focuses on Muslim parliamentary representation in early 20th-century Russia, tracking interpretations of ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ among Muslim deputies while exploring legal debates on land rights, migration, and related issues in the State Duma.

Our postdoctoral researchers offer additional angles and case studies. Aikaterini Lykoudi examines the unique legal status of Karaite Jews in the Russian Empire and their struggle for recognition and autonomy. Her work discusses Karaite efforts to navigate imperial law while asserting cultural distinction. Said Gaziev studies Crimean Tatar activism from their 1944 deportation to the glasnost’ era, documenting how their legal struggle evolved into an international rights movement. And Gevorg Avetikyan’s research on post-Stalinist Armenia explores national activism, focusing on legal campaigns for civic freedoms, recognition of the Armenian genocide, and the preservation of Armenian culture.

The JUSTIMINO team is supported by our coordinator Maija Susarina and our student assistant Archil Longurashvili. 

As far as the numerous guests are concerned, their short-term projects covered important subjects such as ideas of ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ among Georgian intellectuals in the late imperial Caucasus, Soviet-forced resettlement policies among the Khevsurs and Chechens, decolonisation and the young generation in modern Kyrgyzstan, and national minorities in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, to mention just a few. 

In short, there is a lot going on, and so far we have very much enjoyed the exchange.

AT: What are the main questions you want to answer with this project?

SBK: While there is no set definition of the ‘rule of law’, there are over half a dozen international indicators competing for recognition in this field. It is clear, though, that the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union would not score high on any of these indicators. And yet, the notions of ‘legality’ (zakonnost’) and ‘justice’ (spravedlivost’) greatly mattered in both: political and cultural elites invoked these notions as much as the wider citizenries, with outcomes that could not be scripted. Existing literature has addressed both ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ in studies of state policy and intellectual opposition, but there is little recognition of how important and instrumental they both were to ethnic and religious minorities. 

Non-Russians made up over half of the population in the late Russian Empire (thus ironically constituting a majority, if taken together) and just under 50% of people in the Soviet Union. Whereas religion was one of the key determinants of rights, privileges, and obligations in the empire, ‘nationality’, understood in ethnic terms, replaced religious affiliation in this capacity under socialism. Our JUSTIMINO – Justice & Minorities – project therefore explores the ways in which ethnic and religious minorities, from the ‘Great Reforms’ of the 1860s to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, routinely invoked and employed ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ to further and enforce their rights. 

What did Muslim and Jewish groups in the Russian Empire, and Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Armenians, and others under Soviet rule expect when they called on ‘justice’ and ‘legality’? And what did they achieve? How did this strategy help them defend their rights in two highly authoritarian systems? 

AT: How do you define ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ in the context of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union?

SBK: Frankly, we don’t. Maybe that is the social anthropologist in me… this conviction that there is little point in deciding or defining something ‘from the top’, and rather to explore the ways in which people on the imperial ‘ground floor’ understood and used these terms themselves. ‘Legality’ and ‘justice’ are discourses and as such, they’re both in the eyes of the beholder. One group’s ‘justice’ can be another group’s ‘injustice’. 

In some early presentations, I heard members of the audience object that ‘legality’, unlike ‘justice’, could not qualify as a discourse. It was simply another way of saying ‘doing things by the law’. The trouble is – and this is becoming increasingly obvious in our research – that there were always multiple ways of ‘doing things by the law’. For many late imperial lawyers, the appeal to zakonnost’ was more like a check on state power, a reminder that even the authorities had to respect certain rules and that, for example, ethnic and religious minorities could invoke these rules and hold violators accountable. At the same time, for the tsars, senior statesmen and many conservative thinkers, ‘legality’ mostly meant that the law enabled them to implement their autocratic visions. So legality, like justice, was never just one thing. That’s even true for ‘socialist legality’: certainly before and after Stalinism, there were many takes on what it was and what it implied, within and between communist parties, and far beyond them.   

The other thing is that for us, as a project, discourse analysis is only a small part of our research. We are actually more interested in the practice of ‘legality’ and ‘justice’: the ways in which people relied on these concepts as practical tools to fight for their rights: in the courtroom, at party meetings, or in the street. So for us, these notions were not so much abstract ideals as concrete strategies and blueprints for action.

AT: Your project examines how various minority groups — Muslims, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Armenians — understood the definition of these two concepts. How did these views develop?

SBK: As I said, we are mostly interested in the ways in which the groups used, rather than defined, these concepts. We also need to keep in mind that our discussion is not limited to these exact concepts. There is a whole number of terms – equality, truth, lawfulness, and many more – that would be used with significant overlap in meaning. Second, the opposites of such terms are just as important – perhaps ‘injustice’ and ‘illegality’ (‘inequality’, etc.) were invoked even more commonly to mobilise people. 

Then it’s crucial to remember that there was a diversity of meanings and strategies at virtually any time, both between and within religious and national groups. I don’t think that, in the end, we will have identified the ‘Jewish’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Uzbek’, or ‘Armenian’ approach. While we zoom in on religious and national categories, we also differentiate and problematize them.

Indeed there were changes in the ways in which ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ were utilised, which had much to do with internal group dynamics and with evolving political circumstances. But there were also striking continuities. Most importantly, all groups were dealing with highly authoritarian regimes, and thus they were forced to play by the rules of the game. Muslims and Jews in the Russian Empire, for example, and here I’m referring to lawyers as much as to ordinary litigants, witnesses, or injured parties, invoked religious notions of ‘justice’ (from the Qur’an or Torah) in family and inheritance law disputes – in other words, in social and legal spheres where these notions mattered. When they were advancing their general rights as a group, however, or when a crime or a land dispute were at stake, these religious notions moved into the background. Jewish and Muslim actors knew they lived in a Christian-majority society, and thus they also knew that their approaches to ‘justice’ and ‘legality’ had to engage with broader imperial debates if they wanted to be taken seriously.

For good reasons, there is often a focus on change and disruption in comparisons of the imperial and the Soviet periods, but continuities mattered as well. In the 1920s and once again from the 1950s, we encounter minority discourses and strategies (invoking both the justice/injustice of actions and their legality/illegality) that are strikingly similar to precursors in the late imperial era.

In the end, the key challenge of the project as a whole is to identify and compare such continuities and ruptures, while acknowledging continuing diversity.

AT: Members of these minority groups participated in the policy-making process and public debates in various roles from activism through to being involved in the judicial system. How successful (or unsuccessful) were they in defending their rights?

SBK: This question goes to the very heart of what we’re trying to find out, and it’s difficult to respond in general terms. Each individual project will find its own answers, and perhaps these answers will be rather different from each other. I assume that there will be elements of success and failure in all cases. My tentative hypothesis is that while many minority groups were perhaps more ‘successful’ than generally assumed (as they are discussed mostly in terms of repression), they could not change the system as such. And thus, we must discuss whatever achievements we identify in the context of violence and continuing power asymmetries. The challenge will be to get the balance right: to show the agency of minorities, to give them voice, but to highlight the constraints and persisting inequalities at the same time.

For the imperial period, we can safely say that ethnic and religious minorities were very active participants in the judiciary, in organs of local self-administration, and also in the short-lived State Duma. There were plenty of constraints concerning this participation. And yet, their words and deeds made a difference – and should be given proper attention. For the Soviet period, the matter is made more complicated by widespread assumptions about ‘Soviet nationality policy’. I am not sure this term is very helpful. When you look at the different groups discussed in our projects, you’ll quickly notice that there were vastly different experiences: from systematic repression and exile, as in the Crimean Tatar case, to considerable degrees of territorial autonomy and cultural homogeneity (for example, for Soviet Armenians), to plenty of complex in-between cases. We may have to move beyond the categories of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, certainly in broader comparison, because the aims, expectations, and options available to the groups were hugely diverse. 

AT: How different or similar was the Russian Empire’s and the Soviet Union’s view on minority rights?

SBK: First of all, few people in the Russian Empire ever talked about ‘minority rights’. This notion is rooted in international law and diplomacy, and specifically, the idea that vulnerable groups needed protection. It’s hardly surprising that few empires recognised such groups within their own borders, and the Russian Empire is no exception. ‘Minorities’ were only of interest to great powers when they came up elsewhere, and when they could be used as bargaining chips in international politics. So the Russian Empire’s position mostly was: we have no ‘minorities’ in need of rights and protection. Still, cultural ‘Others’ – whether singled out as ‘inorodtsy’ (those of other descent), as belonging to a ‘foreign faith’, or as ethnic ‘Others’ – could have specific rights and obligations. What mattered most under the empire was admittedly social position (nobility, merchant class etc.), but to a degree, legal position was also shaped by religion and ethnicity. There was also change over time, however, and from the 1860s, civic-mindedness and universalist efforts helped to increase the integration of non-Christians and non-Russians. Equality came to be invoked as a principle and ideal even if, in practice, it was never fully implemented.

Things changed radically in the early Soviet Union: suddenly ‘national minorities’ were the talk of the town, a natural part of the national-territorial delimitation of the 1920s because there were nearly 200 recognised national groups but a much smaller number of nationally defined territorial units. All units thus ended up with numerous ‘national minorities’ on their territories, some of whom would be granted constitutional rights (republican and/or all-Soviet). This reflected the international zeitgeist insofar as protection for national minorities was a pillar of the Versailles system introduced after the First World War. Needless to say that in many respects, along with the League of Nations and the interwar Permanent Court of International Justice, this system failed dismally, and the gap between discourse and practice was also pronounced in the Soviet Union.

AT: ERC applications are extremely competitive. Do you have any advice for prospective applicants?

SBK: I think writing applications is a rather specific form of academic writing. Many academics are used to writing for peers. Sometimes it seems that peer review is all that matters. And of course, that’s how the academic publishing world works! The thing with the ERC (and with a number of other funding bodies) though is that accessibility and public accountability are key. Peer reviews are taken into account but you will mostly be judged by scholars who are not specialists in your field. Can you convince these people? Will they agree that European taxpayers’ money should be spent on your project? Try to imagine a dinner party where you have three minutes to make a case for your project, without assuming much (or any) background knowledge among your listeners. Then you’re on the right track.