Representing Justice

Visual representations of the law in Russia are few but fascinating. In Europe the visual proliferated in public spaces. As monarchical, episcopal, parliamen­tary, municipal and other courts proliferated, so did courthouses and other spaces consciously dedicated to adjudication; they often featured imagery that inspired respect for the judicial process and instilled sobriety in legal partici­pants.

Similarly, in much of Europe print culture disseminated images of legitimate justice. The classical statue of Justice as a blindfolded woman holding scales symbolising impartiality and a sword connoting just punishment was a familiar figure in public art and printed sources. Particularly in state broadsheets of executions, legitimacy was indicated by fixed conventions: surrounding the scaffold with portraits of presiding officials and buildings of state; putting judges, priest and doctor on the scaffold; surrounding it with an attentive crowd acting as the affirming body politic. But Russia lacked such visual print culture. A few eyewitness European travellers (most notably Adam Olearius, Erich Palmquist and Johann-Georg Korb) provide the sole representations of Russian judicial practice, and they depict disorderly and violent scenes of punishment (knouting in particular). Published in Vienna in 1700, for example, Korb's depiction of Russia's first ‘spectacle of suffering’ - the mass execution of over 600 musketeers in 1698 - notably lacks the conventions of legitimacy familiar to his engraver and to the European audience.

Russian art did not produce images of such day-to-day subjects as courtrooms and executions; it was controlled by the church and depicted religious subjects in icons and frescoes. (Although Peter I introduced secular art in the eighteenth century, it took more than a century for artists to move beyond portraiture to genre scenes.) But the few images of criminal justice produced in early modern Russian art - in frescoes, Last Judgement imagery and illustrated histories - present a harmonious, legitimising picture. They are neither brutal nor violent. Done in iconographic style, gestures are stylised, emotions sublimated and violence not graphic. The imagery of the Last Judgement, often frescoed on a church's western wall, celebrated the salvation of the righteous more than the sufferings of the damned. From the mid sixteenth century onwards allegories of justice in the figures of Kings David and Solomon were featured in the frescoes of an important Kremlin reception room visible to the elite.

Literate members of the court elite (particularly clerics) might also have seen a unique illustrated work of history compiled at the Kremlin court in the mid sixteenth century. In over 10,000 folio pages with approximately 16,000 images, the Illuminated Chronicle visually displays the tenets of faith, social ethics and justice. Each scene of the ruler pronouncing a sentence of corporal or capital punishment rehearses the tenets of Russia's political ideology.^[593] The ruler is seated on a throne, often with sceptre and always in consultation; he is surrounded by his boyars and often also by clerics (particularly for religious crime). Sentences are carried out by the tsar's emissaries and the condemned accept their fate with calm demeanour, as if accepting a legitimate verdict.

Two hundred years later, Catherine II had herself depicted in statue and portrait as a virtuous lawgiver but, like the massive Illuminated Chronicle (which was never reproduced and never left the Kremlin), these evocations of justice would have been seen only by the court elite. Ironically, a more widespread source on the judicial system came in satirical broadsheets in the eighteenth century. Broadsheets featured popular satires on corrupt courts, including ‘Shemiaka's Trial', a tale of a peasant lad who outwitted a corrupt judge, and another tale in which fish play the roles of venal judge and litigators in a dispute over the ownership of Lake Rostov. These spoofs suggest that judicial corruption was more the experience of Russian subjects than the serene justice of the Illuminated Chronicle.