Customary Regulation of Obligations from Contracts among the Peasants of the Russian North in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries

Abstract

The article analyzes the issues of customary legal regulation of obligations from contracts among the peasants of the Arkhangelsk province during the most ambiguous period in the history of the Russian Empire – the period of bourgeois reforms of the second half of the XIX century. At a time when the Napoleonic Civil Code has been in force in France for half a century, and in Germany the preparation of the German Civil Code is rapidly underway, in Russia there is an urgent need not only for further development of bourgeois relations, but also for legal regulation of this process. The difficulty of creating a civil code in the Russian Empire was that after the abolition of serfdom, it was necessary to include free rural inhabitants in the general legal field, who for centuries regulated communal legal relations by custom. After the peasant reform of 1861 introduced a volost court for peasants, which judged on the basis of local customs, their study began, which is relevant in our time, since many analogies with peasant customary norms can be found in modern Russian civil law. Based on the theoretical conclusions drawn in pre-revolutionary historiography, as well as the conclusions of modern researchers in the field of legal history, the authors of this article have made reasonable conclusions using the protocols of the volost courts stored in the State Archive of the Arkhangelsk region about the specifics of the customary legal regulation of the relations of obligation among the peasants of the Russian North. With the help of data from archival documents that have not been published anywhere before, it was possible to draw valuable conclusions for historical and legal science about the conditions of validity of contracts, their types and form, the subject matter of transactions, guarantees of fulfillment of obligations and ways to terminate them. Due to the rather fragmentary state regulation of peasant legal relations, the customary law of the peasants of the Russian North developed local customs, the stable functioning of which was facilitated by volost judicial practice.