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Book Review
| Abby Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia, Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. 278. $40.00 (ISBN 0-87580-289-3).
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| In her book, Languages of the Lash, Abby Schrader traces the development of Russian penal policy from the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. She argues that penal policies and reform "provide a window on large issues of statecraft and political practice, notions of law and legality, questions of ethnicity, empire, religion, and the emergence of new ideas concerning gender and the integrity of the human body" (6). Schrader links Russian practices to those of Europe, describing how imperial authorities consulted Western legal and medical sources, appealed to Enlightenment or Romantic philosophies, and responded to discourses about the body that emerged in contemporary Europe. At the same time, the author highlights how penal policy largely reinforced (although at times also challenged) the social structure of Imperial Russia. |
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The author's central point is that penal legislation constructed social, ethnic, and geographical hierarchies; punishment played a role in structuring Russian society and ordering the state. Schrader uses the penal system to shed light on the state (how it defined and ordered its subjects) and on imperial officials (their views towards deviance, hierarchy, and punishment). For example, the Russian elite's exemption from flogging had an impact on the development of policies regarding the lashing of the masses. As elites became exempt from certain punishment, the lower classes were subjected to even harsher penalties as if to demarcate the two orders more effectively. Punishment was also used to separate ethnic minorities from other groups. Harsh penalties were reserved for non-Russians. Penal legislation "reflected and defined an individual's rank within the polity...." (78). Persons from different estates (those privileged by birth, education, or state service, or those from the lower orders), non-Russian ethnicities, and exiled convicts were all subjected to different forms of punishment based on their social status. |
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Schrader argues that in addition to social hierarchies, the state established biological hierarchies as well, establishing different forms of punishment for people depending on their age, illness, and gender. For example, the 1845 Penal Code abolished hard labor for the elderly and spared the ill from the lash, a change that illustrates, according to the author, how "officials had come to believe that it was just as important for punishment to be tailored to the physical condition of the body as it was for it to be correlated to social status" (121). In some of the more interesting sections of the book, the author describes how social status did not serve as the sole or primary determinant of punishment, but that gender, infirmity, ethnicity, and age played an important role as well. |
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Schrader maintains that her study "privileges the continuities that characterized the structure and rhetoric of punishment" (186) in Imperial Russia. Specifically, she argues that while scholars typically place efforts at penal reform in the late imperial era, reformist trends "were underway much earlier on" (7). The potential for reform was rooted in official political culture and not just capitalism and modernity of the late nineteenth century. For example, official discussions in the early nineteenth century concerned how to make punishment more humane or whether to abolish certain forms of punishment deemed excessively cruel and painful. |
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Although the author describes penal reform as an ongoing process and not simply the consequence of the mid-nineteenth century Great Reform era, Schrader acknowledges that penal reform acquired greater urgency in the 1860s. Still, the penal reform of 1863 curtailed the use of corporal punishment, but it did not abolish the lash. For example, the use of flogging continued to reinforce the inferiority of the rural masses. The author maintains that reformers "never intended to subvert well-established autocratic policies" (152) and instead continued to view punishment as a tool for refashioning society and distinguishing the privileged from the underprivileged. The great reform of corporal punishment was "by its very nature conservative and limited" (153), although reformers increasingly highlighted the ambiguous effects of spectacular beatings, brandings, and lashings. Especially interesting is Schrader's discussion of how late imperial opponents of the lash criticized beatings as socially and sexually dangerous— for the witnesses, practitioners, and victims alike. Many feared that corporal punishment could produce serious negative effects, that is, incite rebellion, obstruct civilization, or hinder the development of a modern army. |
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The book's treatment of the Siberian exile system is particularly fascinating and detailed. Schrader's sources do not provide the voice of convicted criminals, but the author does try to analyze their behavior. According to Schrader, the fact that exiles refused to abandon lawlessness and flight is highly suggestive. "Flight represented one type of protest. Continued engagement in criminal activity can also be construed as a form of resistance: by committing felonies and misdemeanors, exiles mocked the judicial system, challenged officials' capacity to use punishment to repress outlaws, and contested the bases of the imperial penal system" (103). The author examines Siberian exile from a new perspective and describes how the branding of fugitive exiles and vagrants was justified "to prevent deception on the part of exiles" (91). Schrader details how corporal punishment grew less severe in the middle of the nineteenth century within Russia itself, but not in Siberia where penalties on recidivist and fugitive exiles became harsher. |
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The book is a very innovative and compelling account of the imperial penal system, especially from the perspective of Russian officials who grappled with the system's contradictions and ambiguities for two centuries. |
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| Golfo Alexopoulos
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| University of South Florida, Tampa |
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