Yesterday

Yesterday: Memoirs of a Russian-Jewish Lawyer by O. O. Gruzenberg, edited and introduced by Don C. Rawson, offers an extraordinary insider’s view of the Russian judiciary during the last half-century of the tsarist regime. Gruzenberg (1866–1940), one of the empire’s most prominent defense lawyers, wrote these memoirs in exile after the Bolshevik revolution, reflecting on a career that unfolded in a paradox: an autocracy with one of Europe’s most independent judicial systems. His recollections illuminate not only the workings of Russian courts but also the tensions of Jewish assimilation, liberal politics, and personal identity in a society marked by anti-Semitism and revolutionary upheaval.

Rawson’s introduction situates Gruzenberg at the intersection of law, liberalism, and Jewish experience. Born in Ekaterinoslav to a family steeped in the Jewish haskalah (enlightenment), he was raised to be Russian as well as Jewish, producing an enduring identity conflict—never fully at home in either world. His memoirs recount struggles with professional exclusion under tightening anti-Jewish restrictions, his celebrated defenses in ritual-murder cases, and his role in political trials of figures such as Trotsky, Gorky, and the Beilis affair, which made him internationally known. Equally vivid is his account of a judiciary both modernized and compromised after the Great Reforms of 1864: courts formally independent, with trial by jury and professional advocates, yet still pressured in political cases. Gruzenberg’s liberal commitments—civil liberties, individual rights, and constitutional reform—were eclipsed in 1917, when Bolsheviks dismantled the legal institutions that had defined his life. Exiled in western Europe, he reflected on the irony that he had flourished more under tsarism than under the revolutionary regime he once welcomed.

Both memoir and testament, Yesterday captures a liberal lawyer’s devotion to justice and the fragile space carved out for law in an autocratic state. It is essential reading for scholars of Russian legal history, Jewish emancipation, and the fate of liberalism on the eve of revolution.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.