The second half of the XIXth century in Russia was a time of rapid development of literary and journalistic magazines aimed at a wide and diverse audience. Thanks to such journals, which, due to their relatively large circulations, were in every sense more accessible than purely academic publications, the discussion of various public issues in the country took on new forms and reached a new level of publicity. The understanding of socio-economic realities in the journalism of this period, the approaches and arguments used in this process, are of great interest in the context of studying the history of Russian economic thought. The paper discusses the work by Russian writer and publicist N. Leskov, who continued and expanded the research started by another Russian publicist of that time, V. Guryev. Their essays, devoted to the investigation of the causes of ineffectiveness in Siberia of the XVIII–XIX centuries of a specific legal norm introduced under Peter I, namely the obligatory regular confession, the omission of which was punishable by a fine, can be considered as a kind of prototype of the approaches to analyzing norms and institutions that were developed much later (in the form known to us). Leskov, developing and deepening Guryev's analysis, does not use such terms as transaction costs, opportunism, incompleteness of contracts and regulatory documents, failure of the state, etc. (which were subsequently widely used by institutionalists and neoinstitutionalists). However he turns to the phenomena behind these terms to explain the reasons for unsuccessful attempts to implement the norm, which did not take into account objective local realities.