How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals
illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political
expectations. In Murder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds uses a
fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place
in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II
to understand the impact of these reforms on Russian society before
the Revolution of 1917. For the first time in Russian history, the
accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in
courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of
sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian
society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a
personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of
perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time
at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her
diamond earrings.
As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively,
transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for
deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural
and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she
analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional
criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses
about what made a defendant's behavior "criminal." She also deftly
connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of
crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples
of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this
period.
Murder Most Russian will appeal not only to readers interested
in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study
criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in
forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the
psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the
modern media.
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