In tsarist Russia, as in medieval western Europe, customary law was an important boundary-setting institution. Formal arrangements of rights, duties, powers, privileges, and forbearance in regard to the land were for the nobility. The core of larger social arrangements among rural producers of rights, duties, powers, privileges, and forbearance in regard to the land, however, could not be identified without reference to both authorities, formal, or codified, and customary rights. The authority of custom in Russian law was reinforced rather than diminished as land markets developed after the abolition of serfdom. As T. Shanin (1985) shows, Russian law formalized its system of dual authority by recognizing customary law in peasant courts. Non-peasant social groups, or “estates,” were governed by codified law. This chapter explores the evolution of dual law and its historical impact on land arrangements.

Confidence in property and in the political order was traditionally secured in Russia by overlapping producer use rights and owner rights. Despite this discrepancy, it was not the case that there were no rules of inheritance for producers in late tsarist Russia. By customary law, households and collectives had precedence over individuals, and resources were governed by risk pooling. The collective had a voice over the purchase, rental, and allocation of assets. Boris Mironov summarized the constrictive nature of these customary property rights: “customary law decisively guaranteed the communal order, which limited the accumulation of assets and personal rights of peasants – land dealings, inheritance, contracts, migration, exit from the Commune.”