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Updated: June 26, 2025
"The elder gave orders that he was to be informed when the police superintendent or the examining magistrate came," he said, "so I suppose I must go now.... It's nearly three miles to the volost, and the storm, the snowdrifts, are something terrible maybe one won't get there before midnight. Ough! how the wind roars!" "I don't need the elder," said Lyzhin. "There is nothing for him to do here."
Few ordinary judges have a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the minute details of peasant life to be able to decide fairly the cases that are brought before the Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical notions of the peasantry. These are often very different from those of the upper classes.
Its largest unit was the Volost, which comprises merely a few contiguous Communes, and its action is confined exclusively to the peasantry.
Briefly, then, the peasant has to pay three kinds of direct taxation: Imperial to the Central Government, local to the Zemstvo, and Commune to the Mir and the Volost; and besides these he has to pay a yearly sum for the redemption of the land-allotment which he received at the time of the Emancipation.
Under their supervision and control some abuses may have been occasionally prevented or corrected, and some rascally Volost secretaries may have been punished or dismissed, but the peasant self-government as a whole has not been perceptibly improved.
And certainly not without reason, for the Volost Courts are too often accessible to the influence of alcohol, and in some districts the peasants say that he who becomes a judge takes a sin on his soul. I am not at all sure, however, that it would be well to abolish these courts altogether, as some people propose.
The territory was the common property of the whole. No hay could be cut nor fish caught without permission from the vetché. Then all shared alike the benefit of the enterprise. The communes nearest together formed a still larger group called a Volost; that is, a canton or parish, which was governed by a council composed of the elders of the communes, one of whom was recognized as the chief.
And they were all in uniforms in the court, I mean. I can tell you, your honor, my duties for anyone not used to them are terrible, absolutely killing; but to me it is nothing. In fact, my feet ache when I am not walking. And at home it is worse for me. At home one has to heat the stove for the clerk in the volost office, to fetch water for him, to clean his boots." "And what wages do you get?"
He was evidently convinced that the disreputable father had got his respectable son flogged by "treating" the judges. In such cases flogging can no longer be used, for the Volost Courts, as we have seen, were recently deprived of the right to inflict corporal punishment.
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