body. Over the eighteenth century the state did not waver in its control of major
judicial issues; as discussed in Chapter 14, judicial institutions underwent major
restructuring under Peter I and Catherine II, but little changed in substantive law
and practice.
Russia’s“well-ordered police state”ruled with barrages of individual directives,
but few major new codifications in this century, not for lack of trying. Peter I
commissioned Military (1716) and Naval (1720) Statutes, based on Swedish models
that provided military courts with more elaborate procedure and much harsher
practices of punishment. But civil courts continued to use the Conciliar Lawcode
of 1649 for procedure and punishment. Regularly through the century rulers
called for complete codifications. Three times between 1700 and 1719 Peter I
appointed legislative commissions, but each failed, primarily due to lack of judicial
expertise for so immense a project. His immediate successors issued similar
directives—in 1726, 1728, 1729, 1730—to no avail. Empress Elizabeth commis-
sioned a codification of criminal and property law in 1754; the panel made major
progress on the criminal law, but never completed its work, perhaps stalled by the
Seven Years War. That project was then superseded by Catherine II: she sum-
moned representatives of most social and ethnic groups in the empire (save for
serfs) to a Legislative Commission in 1767 to advise on a new compilation. To
guide the Commission’s work (and demonstrate to the European audience her
Enlightenment credentials), she published an outline of the laws (theInstructionof
1767) based on contemporary European theory, published in twenty-five editions
in nine languages between 1767 and 1797. Although the cahiers submitted by
each group proved helpful indicators of local conditions, the legislative work was
interrupted by rebellion (Pugachev 1773–5) and war (Turkish campaign
1768 – 74) and was never completed. Legal codification awaited the systematic
efforts of Alexander I’s minister Mikhail Speranskii (who oversaw theComplete
Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire, 1649– 1825 in 1830, followed by several
thematicDigests).
Simon Franklin notes that some might call these repeated failures to codify the
law an indication of a fundamental weakness in the state’s entire project of rule. He
cites Viktor Zhivov’s argument that the eighteenth-century state’s assertion of rule
by laws was so poorly executed in practice that it constituted more“culturalfiction”
than legal reality. It is certainly true that Russia’s bureaucratic infrastructure was so
skeletal and its jurisprudential expertise so underdeveloped that the law was known
and enforced unevenly across the realm, but nevertheless the legal system func-
tioned in day-to-day reality. Furthermore, Franklin counters Zhivov’s pessimism
by noting that over the century, the state made significant progress in disseminating
the law in print. A law of 1714 mandated that tsarist and Senate decrees be
distributed in printed form, with the intent of broader distribution (in addition
to traditional oral pronouncements and posting in public places), avoiding fraudu-
lent or inadvertent change in the law by copying mistakes, and perhaps most
significantly to project the state’s power and authority with the“aura”of print.
Catherine II repeated similar mandates in 1764 and 1773. Print by no means
replaced manuscript transmission of laws, directives, and state communications in
348 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801