Russia's criminal justice regime in the early modern centuries might seem paradoxical.

Known in the West for a brutal exile system and for corporal punishment by the deadly knout, Russia did not stage executions as theatrical ‘spectacles of suffering' and abolished the death penalty in the mid eighteenth century.

In the early modern centuries Russia grew from a regional principality to a vast empire stretching from Poland to the Pacific, from the White Sea to the Black Sea and encompassing the western steppes of the great Silk Road. It took over two centuries to assemble the empire,^[581] beginning in the fifteenth century with conquests of neighbouring principalities and expanding into non-East Slavic, non-Orthodox territories in the mid sixteenth century with the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan (both predominantly Islamic in popula­tion). Expansion across Siberia from the 1580s through the seventeenth century brought myriad ethnic groups and religions including Islam, Buddhism and varieties of animism. From the mid seventeenth century Russia also pushed steadily south into the steppe and west, culminating by the end of the eighteenth century in control from the Polish border to the Black Sea steppe, Crimea and lands north of the Caucasus. Here, too, diversity reigned, including German, Estonian and Latvian Lutherans in the Baltics, Polish Catholics, Orthodox Ukrainians and Protestants in modern- day Ukraine and Belarus, and Islamic Tatars in the Black Sea littoral.

Conquering and governing such a large realm demanded violence. Racing across Siberia to claim fur bounty, bands of Cossacks killed natives and razed villages, barely held in check by Russian officials. Scattered in small, often nomadic bands, forbidden to own guns, Siberia's native peoples did not organise united opposition but regularly revolted and were brutally put down. A line of fortresses along Siberia's southern edge maintained a credible threat of violence. Since the steppe frontier presented steeper challenges with paramilitary bands of steppe nomads, Russia here adopted a gradualist policy of seemingly equal alliances (with Kalmyks and Bashkirs in the seventeenth century, Kazakhs in the eighteenth), while it fortified a line of garrisons against nomadic raids. Over the eighteenth century, with its fortress lines, aggressive in-migration of East Slavic-speaking peasants to native lands and greater bureaucratic and military capacity to control, Russia subjugated many of its steppe nomadic neighbours, brutally putting down uprisings in Bashkiria and by the Kalmyks. Some conquests required international war, as Russia won territory from the Ottoman Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Violence and the threat thereof by military presence were constant tools of governance, but in so large a realm with so diverse a population, coercion alone was insufficient. Russia's rulers and elites devised a governing structure grounded in a dogged commitment to centralised control, a minimal approach to power and a ‘politics of difference' approach to governance.^[582] Throughout the early modern centuries Russia's rulers focused single- mindedly on mobilising the realm's scant human and material resources. They created a skeletal bureaucracy across the realm, a single law code and single bureaucratic language and defined central power minimally. Moscow insisted on, and charged its local governors with, three basic functions: mobilisation of resources (taxation, military recruitment), defence of the realm and criminal justice.

Across the realm, local law and justice varied widely: there was Sharia law; German, Polish and Swedish codes; Cossack law; Siberian native customs and courts, and those of the East Slavic peasant communes. The Russian Orthodox Church had jurisdiction over church crimes in bishops' courts and partnered with the state on crimes that involved corporal punishment (heresy, blas­phemy, sacrilege, witchcraft). The church hierarchy and monasteries also exercised secular jurisdiction over peasants and servants on their extensive lands. Justice in all these lower courts involved corporal punishment, rendered according to customary law by East Slavic peasant communes and/or their landlords or by Siberian and steppe peoples, or enshrined in the Swedish, Polish and German law codes applied in the Baltic and former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as in Cossack regimental justice.