CODIFYING RUSSIAN LAW 329not been alone in drafting and issuing laws (especially before Catherine
II). Though up to the reign of Alexander I the Senate had been the
major source of imperial legislation, a great number of other bodies
and ad hoc institutions, for example the Supreme Secret Councilor the
Cabinet of Empress Anne, also had made laws for the Empire. Speransky
was quite right in saying that only a thorough and reliable history of
Russian law could provide the codifier with an adequate standard for
selection. But such a history had not been written yet, and there was
no time to wait until one had been completed. As a result, almost
arbitrarily, Speransky included in the Collection of Laws only the acts
issued by the Supreme Sovereign Power, i.e. the Emperor, or in its
name, whether they dealt with general issues or specific cases. His
excuse for the inclusion of decrees bearing on individual special cases
was that they illustrated the conditions of the past. But in fact, his
arbitrary standard of selection led to a disregard of the juridical rank of
the documents he included in the Collection. In short, the set of
criteria that guided the editors in their selection of the laws for inclusion
was not a satisfactory one in the light of the legislative practices of
the 18th century.^1
We have mentioned the fact that it was difficult to locate accurate
copies of the laws and have pointed out that not all archives were
searched with equal thoroughness. Speransky did request various
depositories of official documents, for instance the Moscow archives of
the Ministry for External Affairs, the archives· of the Holy Synod, and
the Ministry of Justice, to submit registers of their holdings. On the
basis of these registers, the Second Section selected the documents it
wished to see. This procedure put the Second Section at the mercy of
the archives and ministries. The registers sent to the Section, if sent
at all, were neither complete nor did they give a satisfactory description
of the documents. The Second Section obviously could not undertake
a thorough verification of the registers to dete~mine which of the
documents listed were of relevance to its task. As a matter of fact, it
merely looked at the information that was sent to it and disregarded
all those materials that seemed to present too many complexities. It
did not go out of its way to search for material; it was largely satisfied
with what it found in the archives of the Commission on Laws, the
Senate, and whatever was sent to it. In all fairness, though; Speransky
and his collaborators cannot be blamed entirely; at the time historical
1 Filippov, "K voprosu 0 sostave pervogo PSZ," loco cit., pp. 25, 30, 118; A.
Filippov, "Speranskii kak kodifikator russkogo prava," Russkaia Mysl', 101 (1892).
pp. 215-216.