The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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Muscovy’s legal infrastructure was rudimentary compared to the sophisticated
courts, personnel, and jurisprudence of Byzantium and its European contempor-
aries. Chanceries in Moscow and governors in the provinces constituted an empire-
wide judicial network. Governors were not trained in the law, but were advised by
scribes trained in Moscow chanceries; there were no professional lawyers or
notaries, no law schools. For capital cases, central chanceries supervised local courts
each step along the way, as time-consuming as that was. Procedure was followed
and recorded in case transcripts, which also included the legal bases of verdicts.
Justice was not arbitrary. Punishments in local criminal cases often tilted towards
the lenient, particularly because reputation was included as evidence. Invoking“the
tsar’s mercy,”judges regularly reduced sentences prescribed by written law, defer-
ring to social class or local sentiment. But when professional criminals, particularly
strangers, plagued a community, locals welcomed the court’s punishments. At the
highest levels the state did not hesitate to use tremendous force in prosecuting
political crime; Valerie Kivelson has chronicled the sickening excesses of torture in
witchcraft cases.
Like that of their European contemporaries, Muscovy’s written codes and
practice were infused with violence. Evidencing some influence of the resurgence
of Roman law across Europe in the sixteenth century, Muscovy developed a form of
the inquisitorial procedure in which the state controls arrest, investigation, and
resolution (as opposed to the accusatory procedure used for non-criminal disputes).
But, reflecting Muscovy’s lack of professional jurisprudence, the process was less
secret and less centered in judges, jurists, and written documents than in European
practice. As in European criminal law, Muscovy used torture to win confessions
and provide information of co-conspirators and intent. In Muscovy torture was
uncomplicated—a knouting usually in strappado position—withfire or even water
torture used occasionally for the most serious cases. Criminal punishments could
includefines and brief prison sentences (jail was generally used for custody during
trial), but were primarily corporal, especially in the 1649 Lawcode influenced by
the Grand Duchy’s norms. This took the form of whippings by the heavy knout or
the lighter bastinadoes (Figure 7.2). With the influence of Byzantine versions of
Roman law in the 1669 Criminal Code, bodily mutilation is prescribed, but this
was a relatively short-lived phase because of the evolution of exile.
Exile became a common form of punishment in the seventeenth century when
the law began to defer capital punishment for recidivist felons. In the sixteenth
century, exile had been primarily used for disgraced politicalfigures, in lieu of
killing high ranking men and/or kinsmen. Towns and monasteries in the center
(Iaroslavl’, Uglich) and the north or in Perm’and Viatka lands hosted such exiles.
By the end of the sixteenth century, however, paralleling European practice, the
state began to use exile (preceded by knouting) to capitalize on the labor power of
felons, even capital criminals. The death penalty was narrowed to the worst
offenders (traitors, ringleaders of rebellion, witches, unrepentant heretics, hardened
recidivist felons) and exiles were sent across the empire: Tomsk, Ufa, Tobolsk or
“on the Lena”in Siberia; southern frontier towns from Belgorod to Kyiv; Kazan
and Middle Volga towns to Astrakhan; the Northern Dvina basin and northern


170 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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