Book excerpt: "Ruling Peasants challenges this dominant paradigm of the closed village by investigating the ways peasants engaged tsarist laws and the local institutions that were created in a series of contradictory legal, administrative, and agrarian reforms from the late 1880s to the eve of World War I. Gaudin's analysis of the practices of village assemblies, local courts, and elected peasant elders reveals a society riven by dissension. As villagers argued among themselves in terms defined by government, the peasants and their communities were transformed. Key concepts such as 'custom,' 'commune,' 'property,' and 'fairness' were forged in such dialogue between the rulers and the ruled."--BOOK JACKET.