Regulation of the Administration of the Indigenous Population of the Transcaspian Region of the Russian Empire
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article analyzes the role and significance of the organizational measures taken by the Russian administration to ensure order among the indigenous population of the youngest of the Central Asian regions, the Transcaspian Region of the Russian Empire.Since during the period under review , crimes against the order of government were most often defined as disobedience to the Transcaspian administration and crimes against justice, the author provides numerous pieces of evidence that the concentration of administrative and judicial powers in the hands of regional, county, and bailiff officials was generally in line with the Turkmen mentality, facilitating their adaptation to the new legal realities and minimizing such violations.At the same time, along with changes in the rules of the people's judicial procedure of all instances (codification of folk customs in the form of collections of decisions and processes of Extraordinary congresses of people's Judges, written recording of sentences and decisions, keeping records of protocols of cases considered at each court), there were other innovations: criminal liability was established for false swearing, perjury, slander, non-fulfillment of judicial decisions and other crimes against justice; the administration of the region gradually introduced a selective attitude towards certain norms of customary law (adat) into the legal consciousness of people's judges due to their inhumanity and injustice; penalties were modified, instead of "blood feud", "revenge", self-punishment and other adat rules prohibited by the imperial government, arrest was applied, imprisonment, fine, expulsion, exile, which contributed to a change in the Turkmen view of crime as a socially dangerous act and punishment; the previous principles of collective responsibility and collective protection were losing their significance, and the principle of individual responsibility for committed crimes, including those against the order of government, was being introduced.
Source: Bylye Gody
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7164398464