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Vagrancy in Modern Russian Law and Culture examines vagrancy in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as a historical, legal, and cultural phenomenon. Beginning with vagrancy laws, Olga Seliazniova traces the rich cultural use of vagabondism that permeated nineteenth-century Russian and Soviet literature and art. Seliazniova analyzes laws, literary texts, paintings, and films, arguing that vagrant stories produced in the nineteenth century had a long-lasting impact on culture and were instrumental in shaping collective views on poverty, freedom, and mobility that persist in Russia today.

Historically, vagrancy in Russia was a serious criminal offense, as hundreds of legal decrees and hundreds of thousands of convicted vagrants prove. Seliazniova discusses why vagrants sparked Russian writers' interest and how representations of vagrants evolved over the nineteenth century. The Soviets claimed they eradicated vagrancy, but they simply renamed it and covertly continued arresting people. Vagrancy in Modern Russian Law and Culture shows how one country, despite the changes of its government through the centuries, consistently profited from the poor, using unhoused itinerant people as free laborers and soldiers.