The Landed Property in Representations of Modern Russian Peasants

Abstract

The “unwritten laws” (“shadow law”) play an important role in legal culture of modern Russia, governing the actual behavior of members of society in many situations. These “laws” are often at odds with state laws, forming a phenomenon that is known as “legal nihilism”. The reason for this lies in the fact that Russian law borrows legal norms from Western legal codes that do not correspond to notions of “justice” prevailing in the Russian legal culture. This is particularly true of property relations because during the Soviet rule the institution of a private property did not exist. In 2001 after a fierce debate in Russian society the new Land code introducing private ownership of land was adopted. Large demonstrations were held in front of the State Duma with banners like «to sell the land is to sell his own mother». The article deals with the process of reproduction of customary law representations in the mentality of modern peasants identified during land survey in the Leningrad region (2003). During the debate about land ownership actors resorted to reasoning peculiar to the peasantry of the pre-revolutionary period (according to the ethnographic research of those years). Furthermore, officials, acting as arbitrators, resorted to the same arguments, ignoring, in fact, a new Land Code of the Russian Federation.