Hetmanate support Russian troops and pay some taxes. As discussed in Chapters
3 – 5, these areas each organized their own government, used their own laws and
courts, collected and deployed their own taxes, and were not yet integrated into the
judicial orfiscal systems of empire.
Paying direct taxes constituted one element of cohesion across the empire;
another element in empire-wide cohesion was the tsar’s criminal justice network.
As noted in Chapter 7, in Muscovy all subjects of the tsar engaged in the legal
system through thefiction of personally petitioning the tsar. All the tsar’s subjects
(save the highest criminals) were considered to have honor and could litigate to
defend it in court; similarly, all social groups, regardless of social status, gender,
religion, or ethnicity, could and did initiate cases, testify, put up surety, and
otherwise participate in the law. Even indentured slaves (kholopy) used the legal
system, even though as slaves they did not pay taxes.
To fulfill his theoretical obligation to protect his people from evil and pragmat-
ically to maintain law and order, the tsar offered courts for highest crime—felonies,
recidivist crime, treason, heresy—as well as courts for disputes over land and other
productive resources. Like the Ottomankadicourts, they were open to all subjects
of the ruler individually and collectively. In a multi-ethnic empire, the tsar’s
courts—a governor’s court in the provinces, chanceries at the center—provided
venues for resolving inter-ethnic or inter-confessional group conflict, enforcing the
tsar’s monopoly on violence to prevent vendetta and private violence. Non-Slavic
subjects did use the tsar’s courts on equal footing with East Slavs. Ample surviving
court records from the Middle Volga in the seventeenth century demonstrate that
Tatars, Mordva, and other natives regularly sued Russians and non-Russians alike.
For example, in 1674 a Russian man serving as a Cossack in the Kadom garrison
was convicted of murdering a Tatar woman; in 1670 a group of Cherkass mer-
chants sued a group of Russian peasants for assault and robbery. Russians worked
with non-Russians in suits, as in 1680 when a Russian peasant listed Tatar and
Mordva neighbors as witnesses in his suit. When judges ordered community
inquests to seek out facts and reputation of accused parties, Russians and non-
Russians were interviewed, the Russians taking an oath on the cross, the non-
Christians swearing“by their own faith.”
Such access to the courts was not unique to the Middle Volga; in Siberia as
well,iasak-paying natives grieved against Russians and non-Russians alike when
the issues were serious enough. In 1639/40, for example, a group of natives sued
their local governor for not giving them appropriate gifts, bringing“shame”on
them; in 1673 a Iakut sued another Iakut for raping his wife; in 1680 two Tatars
in Russian service (sluzhilye Tatare) went to court in a land and dishonor dispute.
When non-Russians sued each other for major crime, the trials showed no
influence of local traditions but followed empire-wide procedures and punish-
ments. This was the case in two murder cases of 1675 and 1685 involving Tatars
accusing other Tatars; the principle was explicitly stated in a homicide case of
around 1649. A Russian had shot a Tunguz prince, pleading self-defense, and the
Tunguz community demanded that he be handed over to them“to hang or kill.”
The court ruled that the guilty party should be punished according to Russian
232 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801