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Between State and Village: The Court Bureaucracy and the Problems of Representing Soviet Values in the Countryside, 1921-1939

Sat, November 23, 4:00 to 5:45pm, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Floor: 5, Sierra F

Abstract

This paper will examine how court bureaucrats handled being sandwiched between the state that they were supposed to represent and villagers who they were supposed to serve. I argues that judges, as well as inspectors, secretaries, lawyers, and lay assessors created a foundation for the Soviet state to build upon. Often criticized by the upper-level state and Party officials who used traditional tropes to describe them as benighted peasants, many court personnel actually worked to be model emissaries of the Soviet state and instill Soviet values, as they understood them, in the countryside. This paper will challenge binary categories of state and village to see court bureaucrats as independent actors of the Soviet ideals in the countryside.

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