SOCIAL CATEGORIES IN RUSSIAN IMPERIAL HISTORY

The author begins by noting that since the 1960s social historians have achieved a good understanding of Imperial Russia's official social order, but not of the Russian people's social attitudes and aspirations. Sensitive to the limitations of the official and elite sources that currently define the historiography, she focuses on what legally defined social categories make knowable about the development of Russian society. Wirtschafter uses judicial cases concerned with falsified identities, illegal enserfment, and popular disobedience to show how the meaning(s) of social categories could change depending on historical circumstances and human purposes. She conceives of Russian social categories as a form of social process, which leads to further analysis of how the changeable and amorphous social definitions promoted both social insecurity and societal integration.