Criminal Law in Muscovy

On the last page of this monumental and important work Nancy Kollmann summarizes some of her principal conclusions: “This research also shows that Russia in the early modern period possessed a defined law and functioning legal system. It was not excessively violent in the European context, nor was it arbitrary in applying the law. Justice could be slow in coming or suborned, but the system was not one of unbridled satrapies, vigilante justice or uncontrolled brutality. Russia was not a despotism” (426).

Thirty years ago, the claims that the early modern Russian legal system was not arbitrary and that Russia was not a despotism might have been greeted with disbelief and derision. But scholarship on Russian law in the last three decades has pointed toward Kollmann’s conclusions, which she fully supports with thorough and meticulous research into the actual practice and application of criminal law in the 17th century and Petrine period.¹

Kollmann’s principal data base is homicide and serious felony cases from two regions: Beloozero in the north and Arzamas in the Middle Volga. The Beloozero archive consists of the records of 128 “litigations” (“criminal actions” might have been a more suitable term), of which 53 are homicides but only 23 are complete (extending through judgment, sentence, and punishment), including 13 homicides. The Arzamas archive contains records of 100 criminal actions, of which only 12 are complete, including 8 homicides (11). “To counterbalance the dearth of completed cases,” Kollmann also looked at 152 criminal actions from the Military Service Chancellory and two other archives, which include 72 homicide cases, of which 30 were complete. In sum, her data base consists of 380 total criminal actions, of which 51 are complete homicide cases. Any doubts about how representative this data base is are removed by Kollmann’s inclusion of countless other cases and evidence from published sources, including a register of 158 cases from Tobol´sk listing the crime, social status of the accused, and the punishment (218–22). Kollmann incidentally explains the scarcity of complete case records by the loss of records over time and the possible abandonment of cases by the litigants (128). Although Kollmann’s data base of criminal actions is the largest studied to date, one hopes that future scholarship will locate and analyze more complete cases. It is, of course, difficult to judge how fairly justice was dispensed without knowing the sentence and punishment.

One particularly valuable contribution of this superlative work is to compare Russia’s legal system with contemporary systems in states of Western Europe, generally assumed to have been more sophisticated and advanced. Kollmann, however, concludes that “Russia essentially fit into the pattern of statebuilding, local governance and adjudication seen in some of its early modern peers” (425). Russia was so vast and sparsely populated that it, like its early modern peers, had to rely on the local population to support centrally assigned officials. Coopting the local community meant that community norms played an important role in the administration of justice.²

Kollmann’s book is divided into two parts. The first deals with “Judicial Culture.” In this part she describes the various judicial organs or courts, both in Moscow and the provinces, and how they were staffed. She argues that judicial expertise resided in the scribal class (d´iachestvo), who assisted members of the upper service class heading the central chancelleries and serving as governors. The scribes would receive essentially “on-the-job” training in the law throughout their often decades-long service. They would master and follow a uniform model of bureaucratic language and paperwork. That they developed legal expertise is evidenced by the written reports of cases, which generally show familiarity with the Conciliar Law Code (the huge codification completed in 1649) and other statutes. Indeed, this Law Code itself is the best evidence of the vast accumulated expertise of the Muscovite legal system: it was one of the most comprehensive codifications of its time.³

Kollmann, however, perhaps overstates...