Defining the Criminal Law
Russia's rulers reserved the area of criminal law for themselves, in fulfilment of Muscovy's theocratic tenets of legitimacy.[583] The good tsar was pious and merciful, a patron of the faith, protector of tradition and a just judge.
Peter I (r. 1682-1725) introduced from Europe a new, more dynamic absolutist rhetoric but did not displace these expectations around justice. Russia's legal system was built on a heritage quite different from Europe's fertile combination of Roman, Germanic and canon law. Russia's dynasty and political structures were descendants of the Kyiv Rus' state that flourished on the Dnieper from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Kyiv's princes took Christianity from Byzantium (988) and thus received, in Slavic translation, religious texts, historical chronicles and some Orthodox Church law. But Byzantium's rich heritage of Roman law barely penetrated; secular law was embodied in the eleventh-century Rus' Law (Russkaia Pravda), similar to Germanic customary law. From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries neither Kyiv Rus' nor its successor states (principalities and urban republics) created secular institutions of learning or law, in part because control by the Mongol Empire deeply drained manpower and resources. The sole institutions of learning were monastic scriptoria; until the judicial reforms of the 1860s Russia had no juridical faculties, no bar and no notaries. Thus, as Moscow centralised power starting in the fifteenth century, rulers had little jurisprudential expertise or apparatus on which to draw.Thus, they created law codes (1497, 1550, 1589, 1606) that were workaday handbooks with few definitions or generalisable norms, but rather hyper-detailed citations of specific situations. They focused on policing officialdom (defining fees and legal procedure to prevent official corruption and judicial abuse), punishment and issues such as landholding and slavery.
The apex of Russian legal codification - the Ulozhenie or Conciliar Law Code of 1649 - maintained this practical, unlearned approach even as it expanded the scope of the law. In contrast to the 1497 Code's 68 articles and the 1550 Code's 100, the Ulozhenie contained twenty-five thematic chapters with 967 articles covering state crime, judicial procedure, landownership, serfdom and slavery, capital punishment and other themes. All these codes were supplemented by individual decrees, but since printing was not used widely, particularly in local courts, knowledge of the full legal corpus was sketchy. Throughout the eighteenth century rulers commissioned codification projects (Peter I, three times between 1700 and 1719; Elizabeth I in the 1750s; Catherine II in 1767), but they came to naught for lack of legal expertise. Russia went into the nineteenth century relying by and large on procedure and punishment from the 1649 Ulozhenie.The sphere of the criminal law was never theoretically defined but courts focused on a few very important issues: high political crime, defined broadly to include religious offences such as heresy and blasphemy as well as treason; major crime such as arson, murder and kidnapping; and recidivist felony (theft and robbery). Already in the mid sixteenth century a system of local criminal officers had addressed recidivist crime; they were charged with rooting out and trying bands of robbers, deploying torture, corporal punishment and even execution without referral to a higher court. Following the Lithuanian Statute of 1588, the 1649 Ulozhenie introduced three chapters on political crime, starting with crimes against the faith and the church and moving to crimes against the person of the tsar and his embodiments (palace, presence, courts and officials, documents), as well as treason and rebellion. The Lithuanian Statute and a revival of Byzantine Church law inspired a greater reliance on capital and corporal punishment and greater brutality in the 1649 Ulozhenie and a criminal code of 1669. In addition to felony theft and robbery and intentional murder, the Ulozhenie added capital crimes (a total of 122), including varieties of homicide (parricide, infanticide, homicide in court), arson, forgery, possession or sale of tobacco, poisoning and conversion to Islam. Peter I's military codes defined sixty more capital crimes.
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