The Orthodox Church, which had possessed enormous property and power in medieval Russia, underwent profound change in Imperial Russia. Although the medieval Russian Church had constructed an administration to exercise its broad spiritual and temporal authority, it exhibited the same organisational backwardness as did the secular regime. The 'clerical estate' that served the Church consisted of three categories: the ruling episcopate, celibate monastic clergy and married secular clergy. Given the dispersion of population, the heterogeneity of local cultures, and the institutional backwardness of the medieval Church, Russian Orthodoxy was actually Russian Heterodoxy, with kaleidoscopic variations in local customs, superstitions and religious practice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church undertook to standardise and purify popular religious practice, but as yet lacked the instrumentalities to make a fundamental 'reformation' in popular religious practice. Parallel with the 're-christianisation' of the folk, the Church began to develop and articulate its social and political teachings.

This chapter explores a single but significant dimension of women's experience in Imperial Russia: the transformation of their legal status from the Petrine reforms to the eve of the 1917 Revolution. It investigates the origins of competing definitions of gender in the realms of property, family and criminal law. The pre-Petrine law of property was characterised by unequal inheritance for sons and daughters and limitations on women's use and control of landed estates. For all that Muscovite law codes allowed women a surprising degree of independence in matters judicial, elite Russian women shared many legal disabilities with their European counterparts. Criminal law, as well as the law of property, made few concessions to female weakness in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in cases of adultery or spousal murder, the law displayed far less leniency for women than for men.

Imperial Russia had an overwhelmingly peasant population and its economy was largely agricultural. The peasants' ways of life evolved in the different regions and over the three time periods in processes of interaction with the nobles and state authorities that exploited them and the environments in which they lived. In order to support their growing numbers, cope with the environmental conditions and meet the demands of the state and landowners, Russia's peasants, sometimes in collaboration with landowners or the state authorities, developed practices and customs to ensure their subsistence and livelihoods in the present and the foreseeable future. This chapter considers, in turn, the peasantry's ways of life in: central Russia in the hundred years prior to the late seventeenth century, central Russia between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, the outlying regions over this second period, and Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.