The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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towns such as Pustoozero, Kholmogory, Kol^0 skii ostrog; to the south, the northern
Caucasus (the Terek).
While in exile, criminals were not imprisoned; governors simply had no resources.
As discussed in Chapter 3, most Siberian exiles, accompanied by families, were sent
to serve in farming, artisan work and trade, and garrison duty. Governors counted
on distance to keep exiles from escaping. After a brief stage in the late seventeenth
century whenfingers and ears were severed to mark the criminal, less debilitating
branding or tattooing was used. The law direly warned that if a person so branded
showed up outside of Moscow, he would be subject to immediate capital punish-
ment as an escaped capital criminal.
As for capital punishment, while at this time in Europe states deployed horrific,
theatrical“spectacles of suffering”in a form of rule by terror, as Pieter Spierenburg,
Michel Foucault, and others have shown, Muscovy staged rudimentary executions. It
did not build elaborate scaffolds or viewing stands, nor precede execution with
religious ritual, formal last meals, and supplementary tortures on the scaffold, as
was the practice in London and Amsterdam. The terror of Muscovite executions was
likely in their speed. Once a corporal or capital verdict had been handed down in the
tsar’s name, the law required the judge to carry out the sentence promptly,“not
delaying the tsar’s order.”Judges were to delay only long enough to give the


Figure 7.2The ethnographic illustrations of the travel account of Adam Olearius, secretary
to Holstein missions to Moscow in the 1630s and 1640s, were based on his eyewitness
sketches; here he depictsfive types offlogging as judicial punishment. Courtesy of Dartmouth
College Library.


The State Wields its Power 171
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