This book, Justice in Russia: Languages, Concepts, Practices, is edited by Dr. Nikolaj Plotnikov from the Seminar of Slavistik/Lotman Institute of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. As reviewer, I was glad to notice the connection with the Lotman Institute in Bochum because I still remember the moment when our history of law professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia, Peeter Järvelaid, came to his lecture at the end of October 1993 and announced sadly that Iurii M. Lotman, his famous university colleague in semiotics, had just died. (Thus, many people can say where they were when JFK was assassinated or when the terror attacks of 9/11 happened; this reviewer can also say with full certainty where he was when he learned about the death of Iurii Lotman.) Oddly, there are not that many references to the work of Lotman in the reviewed book, which surprised me a bit because Iurii Mikhailovich had interesting things to say about the differences between west European and Russian (legal) cultures.

The voluminous book reviewed here constitutes Vol. 1 of the new book series with the publisher Wilhelm Fink, called “Cultures of Justice.” The main idea of the book is to approach to concept of justice in Russia from various disciplinary angles. The book has four parts, entitled “Languages,” “Concepts,” “Practices,” and “Contemporary Debates.” Altogether, it has nineteen contributions that are indeed interdisciplinary as a whole: linguists, philosophers, lawyers, historians, and political scientists. Moreover, the book ends with drawings of notable political court proceedings in contemporary Russia, from the Bolotnaya case to Pussy Riot to several others.

The main part of the book could have borrowed more from the clarity and concreteness of the drawings. The book does a good job in integrating various voices and in particular including authors from Russia (usually, their contributions have been translated from Russian to German). At the same time, when studying this book I had to repeatedly think that in terms of points and “take aways” it is too scattered here for my taste. The book does not have a conclusion—perhaps as sign of respect for the disciplinary and other kind of diversity among authors. However, this makes the job of the reader and student more difficult because in the end the narrative is quite loose and fragmented. On the other hand, it is fair to mention that some of the observations that Dr. Plotnikov makes in his introduction could also serve as conclusions, generalizations in advance of sorts.

To a large extent, there are many associations and anecdotes regarding the concept of “justice” in the book. The idea seems to have been that these associations from different disciplines would start to meaningfully talk with each other, but this does not seem to be the case in reality. Too often one gets the feeling that chapters in the book are mainly just individual performances. For example, within the field that I happen to understand the best among the ones represented in the book—law—a better result could have been achieved if more discursiveness and debate would have been created between the contributions on law. The dichotomy of law and justice is central in jurisprudence but somehow this thematic part did not successfully manage to answer the central question: considering that the dichotomy of law and justice is universal, does the situation in Russia then fundamentally differ from western Europe or not? Some discrepancy between formal law and the ideal of justice can be discovered everywhere and each country would have its own writers, philosophers, and politicians to express this. Perhaps the otherwise laudable fact that some Russian authors could submit their texts in the Russian language, which then was translated into German was also an obstacle for a more substantive dialogue in some parts of the book. Some things get lost in translation, after all.

What I was also missing in the book was a rigorous sociological perspective in terms of understanding contemporary values in Russia, and their possible change in time. For example, including data and analyses based on the World Values Survey could have contributed to our understanding of which ways values in Russia (or perhaps more generally in eastern Europe) differ from values in other regions. This would have had significant implications for the context in which breaking down the concept of justice took place as well.

To want to be truly interdisciplinary about the concept of justice is a tall order and a high threshold. On page 16, Plotnikov, Dagmar Heller, and Christoph Mühl make interesting references about religious (theological) interpretations that might differ in eastern and western Christianity, again with possible implications for the concept of justice. The link with other fields such as politics or literature, however, is again something that the reader must make for himself or herself.

The book is to be recommended when the reader wants to understand how the concept of justice has been addressed in Russia. However, the reader should approach the book not impatiently and with enough time at his/her disposal. In that way, it is surely possible to understand better and more deeply than previously how (in)justice has been conceived in Russia.