The
story behind my research on law and legal practice in late imperial Russia is
also a story about archives. For me, as someone who had mainly worked with
anthropological methods before, the extensive archival research that went into
"The Lawful Empire" (for details, click here) was a major change, a change that greatly
enhanced my respect for historical work due to the finite nature of sources. In
the past, when in doubt, I had returned to the field for more
participant observation or focus group interviews and I could always be sure that this
would lead to fascinating new data. With archival research, life turned out to
be a lot less predictable. Sometimes you discover that one document that (you
think) will change the world, only to realize later that its contribution is a
lot more modest; and sometimes, you simply don’t find the documents you need.
Or you find them with considerable delay, as I will discuss next week in a blog
entry on my book’s final
chapter.
Research between Kazan, Crimea, and St. Petersburg
What
made matters more challenging in my recent project, which documents legal
reform and court practice on two of the Russian Empire’s interior peripheries,
Crimea and the Volga-Kama region, is that the relevant archives are
geographically scattered across the vast Eurasian landmass. The bulk of the
research was carried out at the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan
(NART) in Kazan, about 600km east of Moscow, and at the State Archive of the
Autonomous Republic of Crimea (GAARK) in Simferopol on the Black Sea peninsula,
which during my
archival research (2010-2013) was not only de iure but also de facto part of Ukraine. Trips to the two locations were not easily
combined; and as it turned out, whenever I entered the field, I stayed in
either Kazan or Crimea, never in both. However, as the years passed and the
project’s focus became more refined, it also became clear that this regional,
bottom-up perspective, as rewarding and innovative as it was, had to be
complemented by work at the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St
Petersburg, where the ministry of justice and other key institutions held their
records. The point was not so much that this central archive offered a
top-down perspective but that its documentation also contained many local
voices (either because locals had written to St. Petersburg or because central
investigators had conducted enquiries in the regions and taken their results
back with them).
Doing
a project in three locations that are thousands of kilometers apart from each
other is logistically difficult (and expensive), but also very
satisfying because every location and every archive comes with its own challenges
and rewards (not to mention quirks). The same is true for the specialized
libraries that I used for their collections of newspapers, journals, and other
publications, especially the Slavonic Library in Helsinki (priceless because
many publications from imperial Russia, to which Finland belonged, are on the
shelves and thus easily accessible) and the library of the Russian
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (with far easier work conditions than the
Russian State Library). Last but not least, the library of Kazan University
with its extensive collection of imperial newspapers and its department of
‘rare books’ proved to be incredibly rich. That some of its newspapers were
part of heavy folders that no library assistant felt comfortable to lift led me
into the basement of the Kazan library stacks, and left alone among those
endless shelves of dusty old papers, you could not help but feel excited (I’m
an explorer!) and appalled (how on earth did my life end up in this basement?)
at the same time. In archives, you quite literally dig deep.
I
should add that I have the terrible habit of arriving unannounced, the first
reason being that local archives, libraries, and museums tend not to send you
away if you are already there (as opposed to telling you by email that they
have nothing of interest for your project, which is not always true), and the
second and probably more crucial reason being that I am simply not organized
enough for doing things differently. I avoid travelling in July and August – when
many Eurasian archives are closed – but other than that, I tend to just go and
play things by ear.
When I first arrived at the Crimean archive in April 2010,
I found the front door locked. An ominous sign told me of a "technical break
until further notice". As it turned out, they were rearranging their
collections inside, an understandable and necessary endeavor. The following six
weeks were still incredibly productive because once I
had got hold of an employee and explained the purpose of my stay, they were
extremely welcoming and had no objections to me being the only person in the
reading room while they were going through their files. In fact, the person
in charge of this room, a Crimean Tatar, and I enjoyed countless conversations
over the next few weeks, sometimes jointly brooding over old files, sometimes discussing aspects of local history. That the Crimean archive always
closed at 1.30pm on Fridays for the entire weekend was a blessing in disguise, for it enabled, in
fact encouraged, me to explore this small peninsula and its geography on foot
in considerable detail. When the Karaite prayer houses in Evpatoriia on the
peninsula’s western shore, the khan’s palace at Bakhchisaray, or the pass
across the coastal mountains and the small vineyards and orchards between
Alupka and Yalta, exalted by so many nineteenth-century writers, suddenly become
alive, you begin to develop a very different relationship with your written
sources.
Handwriting, photography, and being back in school
Back
at the archive (in both Crimea and Kazan), nineteenth-century handwriting
proved to be a particular headache. It was rarely an issue when local litigants
or court officials wrote their requests or reports to institutions higher up
because they invariably wanted to make a good impression. The response from the center was
often far less ceremonious and more difficult to make sense of; it tended to look like scrap paper
with indistinct scribbles on them. In both regional archives I therefore spent
many hours with the local archivists comparing and identifying individual letters and words,
gradually developing a more trained eye for reading such correspondence. I certainly
learned never to underestimate how much work you spend on deciphering, rather
than just reading files.
Another
lesson was always to expect the unexpected. Once the person
usually in charge of the Crimean reading room had other business to attend to, and so someone
from the administration replaced her for a day.
It was a day to remember. “YOU UNPLUG THAT LAPTOP OF YOURS RIGHT NOW, DO YOU
HEAR ME?!” was the new supervisor’s way of introducing herself to me. Her face
was trembling with anger while I was still trying to work out what the issue
was. Then she turned at everyone else in the room. “AND YOU LOT AS WELL! PULL
THOSE PLUGS OUT! NOW! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH WE PAY FOR ELECTRICITY?” Actually,
we did, as many archives charge you for the use of laptops in Russia and
Ukraine. The Crimean archive didn’t. But rather than kindly ask us to make
contributions, the administration decided to go for a good old verbal thrashing
(which continued for the rest of the day). At 35 years of age, I felt odd
to sit there again like a schoolboy. Still, I kept telling myself that at least it wasn’t as
tough as Saratov on the Volga River. A colleague of mine had done research there
in the middle of February in what turned out to be a tiny archive with very few
seats, which forced her to wait in line every day at 7am in minus 20 degrees
Celsius to secure a desk. That’s real dedication! And perhaps a good reason for
focusing on Russian ties with Africa or Latin America in the next project.
A final note on the conditions that archives
offer when it comes to photography. Given the logistical challenges outlined
earlier, photography played a crucial role in my project. While the first trips
to the different locations were more exploratory and focused on getting an
overview of the kinds of sources that existed, follow-up trips tended to be far
shorter and more focused. This was facilitated by the fact that both the
Crimean and the Kazan archives allowed you to take as many pictures of archival
documents as necessary (provided you told them which ones you needed and paid a small fee).
From one trip I returned with 1,200 pictures; from another with 800. It was an
arrangement that helped foreign researchers, who are more dependent on the
visual material you can gather in shorter periods of time. Things were far more
regulated (and expensive!) at the central archive in St. Petersburg, where taking
time-consuming notes turned out to be the only feasible option. Unfortunately,
by now, local rules have also become stricter, with high
fees and new rules introduced for photography in Crimea and Kazan. I am not sure that these new
rules protect the historical material any better; they certainly impose
constraints on researchers who are not constantly in the area.
On the whole,
then, my research in "The Lawful Empire" not only offers a snapshot of life and
legal practice in late nineteenth-century Crimea and Kazan, but it is itself a snapshot
of how historical research was possible in these two regions roughly between
2009 and 2015.
-- Stefan Kirmse
