Of the various functions of the peasant self-government
the judicial are perhaps the most frequently and the
most severely criticised. And certainly not without
reason, for the Volost Courts are too often accessible
to the influence of alcohol, and in some districts
the peasants say that he who becomes a judge takes
a sin on his soul. I am not at all sure, however,
that it would be well to abolish these courts altogether,
as some people propose. In many respects they
are better suited to peasant requirements than the
ordinary tribunals. Their procedure is infinitely
simpler, more expeditious, and incomparably less expensive,
and they are guided by traditional custom and plain
common-sense, whereas the ordinary tribunals have to
judge according to the civil law, which is unknown
to the peasantry and not always applicable to their
affairs.
Few ordinary judges have a sufficiently intimate knowledge
of the minute details of peasant life to be able to
decide fairly the cases that are brought before the
Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient
knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical
notions of the peasantry. These are often very
different from those of the upper classes. In
cases of matrimonial separation, for instance, the
educated man naturally assumes that, if there is any
question of aliment, it should be paid by the husband
to the wife. The peasant, on the contrary, assumes
as naturally that it should be paid by the wife to
the husband—or rather to the Head of the
Household—as a compensation for the loss
of labour which her desertion involves. In like
manner, according to traditional peasant-law, if an
unmarried son is working away from home, his earnings
do not belong to himself, but to the family, and in
Volost Court they could be claimed by the Head of the
Household.
Occasionally, it is true, the peasant judges allow
their respect for old traditional conceptions in general
and for the authority of parents in particular, to
carry them a little too far. I was told lately
of one affair which took place not long ago, within
a hundred miles of Moscow, in which the judge decided
that a respectable young peasant should be flogged
because he refused to give his father the money he
earned as groom in the service of a neighbouring proprietor,
though it was notorious in the district that the father
was a disreputable old drunkard who carried to the
kabak (gin-shop) all the money he could obtain by
fair means and foul. When I remarked to my informant,
who was not an admirer of peasant institutions, that
the incident reminded me of the respect for the patria
potestas in old Roman times, he stared at me with
a look of surprise and indignation, and exclaimed laconically,
“Patria potestas? .
. . Vodka!” He
was evidently convinced that the disreputable father
had got his respectable son flogged by “treating”
the judges. In such cases flogging can no longer
be used, for the Volost Courts, as we have seen, were
recently deprived of the right to inflict corporal
punishment.
