Russian Populism, the Tsarist Judicial Courts and the Battle for Socio-Political Legitimacy, 1874-1894
School: School of Humanities
Supervisors:Dr Thomas Marsden (University of Stirling), Professor Holger Nehring (University of Stirling), Professor Emma Macleod (University of Stirling)
About Amy’s Research:
The state repression of revolutionary Populism (narodnichestvo) in late nineteenth-century Russia saw the transformation of political justice, which was intended to affirm autocratic authority, into a theatre of revolutionary struggle. Experience of political trial, punishment and repression underpinned the movement’s self-identity and was fundamental to the radicalisation of Populist propagandists into revolutionary terrorists by the end of the 1870s.
This research seeks to underscore the centrality of political trials, and the judicial and penal systems and institutions which surrounded them, in the battle for legitimacy between the state and radicals in nineteenth-century Russia. It investigates how they contributed to, and shaped, the development of Russia’s emergent civil society, to whom the Populist movement preached new socio-political values. Moving beyond the courtrooms of St. Petersburg, it will demonstrate the far-reaching geographical impact of political justice upon the radical movement and Russian society, challenging the historiographical focus on a handful of major trials in the capital. Drawing on the history of space and place and European scholarship on the performativity of the courtroom, it will examine how revolutionaries subverted state institutions and transformed displays of imperial justice into those of revolutionary rebellion. Seeking to understand how state prosecution of political crime radicalised both revolutionaries and wider society by introducing competing visions of legal, moral and national authority this explores how political polarisation undermined the social foundations of the autocratic regime.
