this century, but it provided an additional tool to the state for its most important
initiatives.
As a rule, Russia maintained a seventeenth-century judicial structure until the
1775 administrative reforms, despite a very successful but brief (1718–24) period
when the judiciary was separated from administrative andfiscal offices and person-
nel. These courts were judged too expensive to maintain, and Peter’s successors
reverted to the Muscovite model in 1727. Courts, as well asfiscal, military, and
administrative authority, were housed in governors’ offices at the provincial
(gubernia) and district (uezd) levels, with appeal in theory to the Justice College
(founded 1717) and the Senate (1711). In practice, however, litigants often venue
shopped, skipping over lower level courts for higher, going directly to the capital,
bypassing local jurisdiction, and the like.
Adjudication suffered from the same, or more, lack of professionalism of the
personnel. Judges had no judicial training and depended upon learned scribes. As
the judicial apparatus grew with empire, it became more difficult to staff local
offices with knowledgeable bureaucrats. Most crucially, in 1726 and 1727 decrees
abolished salaries for all but the highest civil officials, leaving local officials living on
fees for service; corruption was an unavoidable result. It is no surprise that folk tales
lampooning judicial corruption originated in the late seventeenth century and
enjoyed wide popularity in the eighteenth. Disseminated in illustrated broadsheets,
The Trial of Shemiakaextolled a clever peasant getting the best of a corrupt judge
(Figure 16.1); in theTale of Ersh Ershovich,fish go to court over possession of Lake
Rostov, parodying scurrilous litigants.
The administrative reforms of 1775 significantly improved the empire’s judicial
structure by creating a uniform hierarchy of courts at district and gubernia levels in
each offifty gubernii and eightoblastiacross the empire. This reform accomplished
the separation of judicial from other functions that Peter I had strived for. As noted
in Chapter 14, native groups used their customary laws at lower level courts
(rasprava), while at higher levels Russian law was applied but often combined
with local legal traditions. The latter was particularly the case after the acquisition
of western borderlands that enjoyed established German, Swedish, or Polish-
Lithuanian legal systems. The 1775 reforms did not require professional expertise
in judicial staffs, relying on noble appointees and locally elected panels, but the
higher level of noble education perhaps improved judicial quality over the amateur
Muscovite judges. Semen Desnitskii, a Russian trained in Glasgow, taught Russian
law and jurisprudence at Moscow University from 1767 to 1787, providing a small
source of judicial expertise, but no other formal institutions of legal training were
founded in Russia until the nineteenth century.
The state enhanced its judicial power at the expense of the Orthodox Church
over the century. Peter I reduced the range of the Church’s jurisdiction, already in
1692 impinging on the judicial autonomy of patriarchal properties and in 1701
creating a Monastery Chancery with secular jurisdiction over laymen and clerics
from all church properties—patriarchal, diocesan, monastic, and parochial. With
the creation of the Holy Synod in 1721 and theEcclesiastical Regulationin 1722,
the Orthodox Church’s judicial authority over religious affairs—blasphemy,
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