Legal Alignment in Disrupted Times: The Fall of the Tsarist Regime and the 1917 Extraordinary Investigation Commission of the Provisional Government

Léo P Henry, University of Toronto
Ron Levi, University of Toronto

On 5 March 1917, in the wake of the fall of the Tsarist Regime, the Russian Provisional Government set in place an Extraordinary Commission for investigation of illegal actions of former ministers, leaders, and high-ranking officials. The Extraordinary Commission was soon overtaken by the October Revolution that same year: yet in just seven months, the Commission convened 88 interrogatories and questioned 60 individuals, most of whom were accused of illegal activity during the Tsarist Regime. The Commission enjoyed extensive powers to prosecute all former high-ranking Tsarist officers, with the power to both investigate and to judge these officers. But for one former minister found guilty of colluding with the Germans during WWI, the Commission did not, in the end, produce legal judgments. Yet we seek to investigate how the Commission articulated its concerns over the Tsarist Regime, by analyzing the questions asked of Tsarist officials by Commissioners throughout this seven month window. We construct a digital database of all the interrogations held by the Commission. Through computational analyses, we highlight how the Commission's concerns varied -- at times focusing on financial wrongdoing, conspiracy, judicial corruption, or military action. We build on these to follow how Commissioners shifted the questions they asked of Tsarist officials over the course of these seven months. We find that while the Commission emphasizes legal language throughout its tenure, it is also attentive to rapid political changes throughout 1917, thereby avoiding casting aspersions on the provisional government by asking about the sorts of violations that may have been too politically salient in the present. In other words, the questions of the Commission about the past are also aligned and attentive to political stakes of the 1917 provisional government in the present -- with the Commission both normatively autonomous and attentive to aligning to power at once.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 200. Consolidating and Subverting Authorities in Asian and Eurasian Empires