heresy, magic, marriage, and divorce—was affirmed, but other issues were moved
to secular courts, such as sexual offenses (rape, fornication, incest), bastardy, and
some illicit marriages. Inheritance disputes were assigned to joint church and
secular panels. Other religious denominations (Catholics, Lutherans, Muslims,
and Buddhists in particular) continued to adjudicate according to their own
customs in religious areas.
In the practice of the criminal law, seventeenth-century procedures and punish-
ments endured, with major innovation only in the area of capital punishment.
Here, legal practice went in two directions. For highest state crime, primarily under
Peter I who assiduously prosecuted corrupt officials and traitors, new forms of
capital punishment were introduced. As noted in Chapter 7, in Muscovy as a rule
executions had been simple and prompt affairs by beheading or hanging, with
minimal delay and minimal ritual. While this remained the practice for routine
executions, for highest crime when he wanted to make an exemplary lesson of a
corrupt official or traitor, Peter I introduced a“spectacle”of execution like one he
had witnessed in Amsterdam in 1697. Crowds were assembled by drummers
throughout the city, dignitaries and state officials were forced to attend, scaffolds
and viewing stands were constructed, pamphlets were published excoriating the
crimes of the punished, and bodies and body parts were left on display for years.
This sort of brutality, however, was exercised relatively rarely in Russia in the
eighteenth century because of a countervailing trend in criminal practice. Under
Peter I law and sentencing began to limit the use of capital punishment: all capital
crimes were to be reviewed and affirmed by higher courts, and punishment norms
for recidivist crime required more instances of felony before the death penalty was
invoked. Lifetime exile was used more regularly, for settlement of new lands
(particularly Siberia) and hard labor projects (katorga) that could involve textile
factories for women and construction sites for men. Russia did not develop a
European-style prison system in this century, using jails for short-term detention
and on the rare occasion sentencing religious offenders to lifetime imprisonment in
dreary, often underground, keeps in monasteries.
As noted in Chapter 7, exiling capital offenders posed the problem of contain-
ment. They were escorted under guard to their places of exile, but once there, they
were to live and work in communities without confinement. Exiles guilty of capital
crimes were branded to keep them in place: tattoos marked their faces with letters
connoting their crime (theft, robbery) or names of the towns to which they were
exiled; sometimes facial disfigurement (slitting nostrils) was also included. If a
person so disfigured appeared in the Russian center, he or she would be immedi-
ately identified as liable for execution for deserting exile.
On the one hand, the evolution from capital punishment to exile can be
construed as a pragmatic capturing of the labor power of criminals rather than a
principled retreat from judicial violence. Corporal punishment, primarily knout-
ing, after all, continued into the middle of the nineteenth century, as Abby Shrader
has chronicled. But on the other hand, humanitarian values, from Orthodoxy and
from the Enlightenment, also encouraged aversion to judicial brutality. Religious
motivations might be behind Empress Elizabeth’s move to abolish the death
Surveillance and Control 351