Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689

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The practice of the law

The 1649 Ulozhenie declared itself authoritative over ‘all people of the Mus-

covite state, from highest to lowest rank’ (10: 1). In practice we see the full

social range active in litigations. Even slaves could initiate suits, testify and

offer evidence. Landlords also represented their dependants in court. Women

could participate in court cases, although they were often represented by male

kinsmen and spouses whensuch wereavailable. Widows could litigate on their

own behalf. Some limitations were introduced in this century: minors could

not take an oath or sue (10: 185; 14: 5); the mentally incompetent could not

litigate; peasants could not sue their landlords, nor spouses their partners, nor

children their parents; freed slaves could not sue their former masters (10: 174,

176–7).

A striking aspect of Muscovite judicial practice in the seventeenth century

was the lack of a specialised class of lawyers serving as judges or advocates.

Muscovy had no professional legal schools. Most judges did not specialise in

judging – provincial governors were jacks of all trades and relied upon the

expertise of local under-secretaries or state secretaries assigned from Moscow

chancelleries.Thesituationwassomewhat differentinthe chancelleries,partic-

ularlybythe second halfofthecentury, whenjudgesbegantoserveconsistently

in one chancellery, building up expertise.

Moscow’s bureaucratic stratum – state secretaries (d’iaki) and under-

secretaries (pod’iachie) – constituted a repository of practical judicial knowl-

edge.

These men wrote the documentation for stages of a suit, selected

relevant excerpts from law codes to advise the judge and hired themselves

out to write petitions for litigants. We also ﬁnd parish priests writing petitions

and signing documents in place of illiterate litigants. But in the seventeenth

century these literate judicial experts did not develop into a notarial class or a

stratum of lawyers and legal advocates.

Corruption and bribery were constants in this judicial system, so much so

that we do well to reorient our thinking on the topic. Local governors lived off

fees collected in judicial and bureaucratic activities and from payments in cash

and kind from their communities. They stood in a gift-exchange relationship

with their community: they expected gifts from their subjects and the subjects

17 Good surveys include A. G. Man’kov, Zakonodatel’stvo i pravo Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVII v.

(St Petersburg: Nauka, 1998); V. S. Nersesiants (ed.), Razvitie russkogo prava v XV–pervoi

polovine XVII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), and E. A. Skripilev (ed.), Razvitie russkogo prava

vtoroi poloviny XVII–XVIII vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1992).

18 N. F. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia v Rossii XVII v. i ee rol’ v formirovanii absoliutizma

(Moscow: Nauka, 1987).

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in turn expected attention and concern. Muscovites recognised several types

of gifts to judges and ofﬁcials, only one of which – excessive fees for services

not rendered – was considered illegal. The others – gifts at holidays, gifts to

the ofﬁcial’s family – were just considered the cost of doing business.

For reasons of lack of specialisation, or the press of other duties, or conﬂicts

over venue, or corruption or a host of other causes, the law was not a highly

professional arena in seventeenth-century Russia. Delay was endemic, as well

as complaints against judges for favouritism and enmity. Moscowchancelleries

were responsive to replacing a judge when a litigant complained, and law

codes are replete with exhortations, incentives and punishments to ensure

speedy and honest justice. The late seventeenth century saw several efforts to

reform governors’ authority to make it less predatory on the taxpaying and

merchant populations, and in a few celebrated cases governors were punished

for excessive graft and corruption.

Muscovite law in the seventeenth century knew two types of procedure –

accusatory (sud) and inquisitorial (sysk), the latter being used primarily but

not exclusively in criminal cases. In an accusatory trial, litigants presented wit-

nesses and evidence, while in the inquisitorial the judge directed the search

for evidence. Accusatory suits, discussed in Ulozhenie chapter 10, were used

primarily for material loss – land disputes, damage to crops and farm equip-

ment, contracts and debts. A typical litigation began, even in criminal cases,

with a complaint that listed the circumstances and value of the loss. The

plaintiff couched his petition in formulaic language suggesting his personal

dependency on the tsar. Each social class used a self-deprecating diminutive to

describe itself – servitors styled themselves the ‘slaves’ of the tsar, clergy, the

tsar’s ‘pilgrims’, peasants and urban taxpayers, the tsar’s ‘orphans’. Litigants

used the diminutive version of ﬁrst names: Ivan presented himself as ‘Ivashko’,

Vasilii as ‘Vaska’. The conceit was that the tsar was personally bestowing his

justice and mercy on the litigant, through his representative, the judge.

In an accusatory trial, the judge summoned the litigants, itself a complex

process due to the expanse of the realm and demands of military service.

Laws of the seventeenth century established detailed rules about time limits

for appearing for trial, default for late appearance and norms for delay of trial.

19 Brian L. Davies, ‘The Politics of Give and Take: Kormlenie as Service Remuneration and

Generalized Exchange, 1488–1726’, in Ann M. Kleimola and Gail Lenhoff (eds.), Culture

and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584, UCLA Slavic Studies, n.s. 3 (Moscow: ITZ-Garant,

1997), pp. 39–67, and P. V. Sedov, ‘Podnosheniia v moskovskikh prikazakh XVII veka’,

Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1996,no.1: 139–50. See also Chapter 20 in the present volume.

20 Christoph Shmidt, Sozialkontrolle in Moskau : Justiz, Kriminalit

at und Leibeigenschaft, 1649–

1785 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1996), pp. 76–92.

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Once assembled, both sides of the story were heard and the litigants presented

evidence. Written documentation was preferred; each side could also present

witnessesand rejectanyof the other’sproposed witnesses.

Thelawmandated

that if they agreed on a small number of witnesses, they were to abide by that

testimony. In the absence of documents and deﬁnitive witnesses, judges put

litigants into a face-to-face confrontation (ochnaia stavka), or as a last resort

asked the litigants to submit to an oath, which usually resulted in one side

settling with the other before taking the oath.

Many cases were not carried to conclusion, judging by extant records. Some

of this might be loss of records over time. But a great proportion of cases were

settled out of court, demonstrating the persistence of traditional concepts of

distributive justice. Community sentiment valued social harmony and stability

over strife and vindication. Even criminal cases were settled, contravening the

law. Murder cases, for example, might be settled so that an aggrieved widow

wouldbe provided with upkeep for herselfand her children. Other cases would

be abandoned before conclusion because of expense, or preoccupations of

military service, or waning of interest.

In an inquisitorial suit, the judge took the active role. When a complaint

of major crime came to him, he swung into action, ordering the arrest of

the accused, the investigation of the crime scene, corpse or injured party, and

the defendant and other important parties to be put on surety bond (poruka;

whereby a group of friends, neighbours and/or kinsmen guaranteed that they

will show up for trial). Depending upon the alleged crime, the defendant was

held in jail or released on surety.

The judge collected evidence through a few means of questioning. Wit-

nesses could be questioned individually or the judge could order a survey of

the community. Traditionally reputation and standing in the community had

been a factor in assessing guilt and punishment in Muscovite litigation. By

the mid-seventeenth century, however, the community inquest was declining

in signiﬁcance in favour of more ‘rational’, that is, eyewitness, evidence. The

inquest was ﬁnally abolished in 1688 because of abuses.

The judge’s most powerful weapon in questioning the accused and others

implicated by him was torture, regarded as an ordeal of God. Such question-

ing proceeded in stages: simple questioning, questioning in the presence of

executioner and instruments of torture and under torture. The goal was to

21 George G. Weickhardt, ‘Due Process and Equal Justice in the Muscovite Codes’, RR 51

(1992): 463–80.

22 For more detail on trial procedures, see my By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early

Modern Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3.

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elicit confession and information about intent and accomplices. The methods

of torture were not ornate, usually ﬂogging, but for very serious accusations

burning with ﬁre was done.

A judge resolved a case after the entire transcript of the proceedings had

been copied afresh and read to him. This lengthy document included copies

of the initial and subsequent petitions presented by litigants in the course

of the trial, all the judge’s orders to subordinates, all their reports, copies of

surety documents, excerpts of relevant laws and transcripts of torture sessions

and community investigations. In most criminal trials the governors or guba

authorities sent the case to Moscow for decision, although the 1669 Criminal

Articles allowedinvestigators (syshchiki)forvery serious crimes to resolve cases

and carry out punishments, including execution, on the spot.

In criminal cases, judges rarely invoked the full terror of the law. They

often sentenced felons to punishments less severe than prescribed by law,

taking into account the circumstances of the crime, intent and community

standing. In 1650, for example, a woman who admitted conspiring to murder

her husband was spared execution because the community vouched for her

character and maligned that of the deceased.

Extending the ﬁction that the

litigant was appealing to and being judged by the tsar, after sentencing judges

often proffered ‘mercy’ in his name, reducing punishments. Exceptions to

this ﬂexible sentencing pattern concerned the most serious crimes – political

treason, heresy and witchcraft and the like – for which punishments were very

severe.

In cases where material damage was at stake, losing defendants paid court

fees, the value of the suit and sometimes a ﬁne for losses incurred in the trial

process (volokita). In cases of physical or symbolic harm (dishonour), sanctions

ranged from ﬁnes to short periods of incarceration, exile to hard labour and

a range of corporal punishment from beating to ﬂogging to execution (var-

ious types of corporal punishment in this period are illustrated in Plate 21).

Punishment was not administered equally across social classes. Although the

military servitors did not enjoyexplicitprotections from corporal punishment,

de facto they were rarely subject to it, either because of a provision of ‘mercy’

or because the law avoided it.

When cases were appealed, it usually took the form of judges applying to

a higher instance – for example, from the governor to his chancellery to the

boyar council and the tsar – to resolve a disputed or difﬁcult case. Corporal

23 Nancy S. Kollmann, ‘The Extremes of Patriarchy: Spousal Abuse and Murder in Early

Modern Russia’, RH 25 (1998): 133–40.

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punishment,even execution,wasadministeredpromptly.Thecollectionoffees

and ﬁnes could drag on for years, either because of poverty or vindictiveness.

Many case transcripts end with repeated appeals to the court to force a losing

litigant to settle his obligations.

Muscovite judicial practice was in many ways more medieval than early

modernin itsdistributivejustice: it widelyused settlementoutofcourt,counte-

nanced reputation and community standards as evidenceor mitigating factors;

it bestowed mercy to lessen sentences and considered torture a credible form

of evidence collection. Nevertheless, as the century developed, similarities

with contemporary European practice emerged, such as a rationalisation of

forms of evidence, standardisation of norms and procedure, a heightening of

punishments and a more extensive claim of tsarist power.

Codiﬁcations of the law

Theseventeenth centurywasremarkableforthe generation and codiﬁcation of

secular law. Going into the seventeenth century, judges had available to them

several codes of law. The Russian Law (Russkaia pravda), dating to Kievan

times, was edited in an abbreviated version around 1630, but where and how

its norms, that emphasised debt, slaveholding and punishments, were current

is unclear. The Law Code (sudebnik)of1550 of 100 articles, which extended the

1497 Law Code and was later extended by over seventy-three supplementary

articles, clearly remained in force. It was primarily an advisory to judges,

setting fees for services in an attempt to limit judicial corruption, decreeing

punishments for some crimes and setting out procedural rules and standards

of evidence. The 1550 sudebnik was followed by a longer (231 articles) edition of

1589 for the north and a compiled sudebnik of 1606–7 that added later decreeson

landholding, debts and enserfment and developed the inquisitorial procedure.

It was notable for being divided into thematic chapters, a ﬁrst step towards

more rational codiﬁcation.

In addition, the Lithuanian Statute of 1588 was

translated and disseminated in Moscow chancelleries, and Byzantine secular

law became inﬂuential by the 1620s.

In the seventeenth century the law proliferated. Moscow chancelleries kept

books of laws and precedents that guided their work; these were occasionally

24 Three sudebniki: PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi lit-

eratury, 1952–63), vyp. iv: Pamiatniki prava perioda ukrepleniia russkogo tsentralizovannogo

gosudarstva XV–XVII vv., ed. L. V. Cherepnin (1956), pp. 229–350, 409–570.

25 I. I. Lappo (ed.), Litovskii statut v moskovskom perevode-redaktsii (Iur’ev: Tipograﬁia K.

Mattisena, 1916).

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compiled and then added to; at mid-century they became the basis for relevant

portions of the 1649 Ulozhenie. Such ustavnye knigi from the ﬁrst half of the

seventeenthcenturyareknownfrom theFelony,Slavery, GreatPalace,Moscow

Administrative, Service Land and Postal chancelleries.

Local governors made do with handwritten copies of the sudebniki and of

decrees they received from the centre. The 1649 Ulozhenie was the ﬁrst law

code to be issued in print (about 2,500 copies by 1651) and it was distributed

to local governors. Another body of law relevant in the seventeenth century

comprised charters granting immunities and privileges to various corporate

entities, as we have seen.

The 1649 Ulozhenie codiﬁed the preceding half-century of law and added

some innovations, based on legal sources enumerated above. It was massive –

in twenty-ﬁve thematic chapters, it included 967 articles. The second half of

the century sawfeverish legislation, presaging Peter the Great’s legislative blitz

of the early eighteenth century. By one count, 1,583 new decrees were issued

in the second half of the seventeenth century, reﬂecting the state’s desire to

regulate society and mobilise resources through the law. Many new decrees

concerned public order, reﬂecting European concepts of Polizeistaat.

New compendia appeared in various ﬁelds: in 1653 and 1667, tariff and trade

regulations; in 1669, a new criminal code; in 1676, 1680 and 1681, codiﬁcations

on service tenure and hereditary land.

General codiﬁcations to replace the

Ulozhenie were ordered in 1681 and 1695, to no avail. In 1700 Peter the Great

created a commission to codify the laws but it too was fruitless. The Ulozhenie

remained the standard in most areas of the law until late in the eighteenth

century.

Themost signiﬁcant changes in positivelaw were made in the realm of social

legislation.

Laws deﬁned social groups and limited access into privileged

ranks and egress from dependent ranks. The Ulozhenie’s list of compensation

for insult to honour is telling: longer (almost eighty articles) than those of the

1550 and 1589 sudebniki, it included ecclesiastical and lay social ranks from the

patriarch and boyars to peasants and slaves (10: 26–99). Its guiding principle –

that all people have honour, but higher ranks deserve greater compensation –

reﬂects the law code’s resolute emphasis on social hierarchy.

26 PRP,vyp.iv,pp.353–405 and PRP,vyp.v: Pamiatniki prava perioda soslovno-predstavitel’noi

monarkhii. Pervaia polovina XVII v., ed. L. V. Cherepnin (1959), pp. 185–532.

27 1669 criminal lawand land decrees: PRP,vyp.vii: Pamiatniki prava perioda sozdaniia absoli-

utnoi monarkhii. Vtoraia polovina XVII v., ed. L. V. Cherepnin (1963), pp. 57–100, 396–434.

28 Richard Hellie, ‘Muscovite Law and Society: The Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reﬂection of

the Political and Social Development of Russia since the Sudebnik of 1589’, unpublished

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1965.

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The military service class cemented its position with the Ulozhenie by the

full enserfment of the peasantry, a particularly direct beneﬁt to the provin-

cial gentry, strapped for land and labour. Wealthy landholders (including the

Church) were inconvenienced by the Ulozhenie’s new prohibitions on their

taking in runaway peasants or purchasing lands in the provinces, but were by

no means severely hampered in their social and economic ascendancy.

The Ulozhenie devoted signiﬁcant attention to the needs and duties of the

privileged military elite, Moscow-basedand provincial.Chapter 7 of the Ulozhe-

nie concerned itself with their conduct during service, including strict punish-

mentfordesertionfromserviceandfrombattle.Laws prohibiting gentrytosell

themselves into slavery were repeated, as was the requirement of mandatory

service (it was gradually reduced in the last quarter of the century, only to be

reinstated by Peter I). Landed servitors enjoyed economic and legal privileges:

preferential access to the grain market in time of shortage, lower tax rates on

many commercial transactions, a higher rate of ransom if captured in war.

Major attention was given to landholding in the Ulozhenie (chapters 16 and

17) and legislation of 1676, 1680 and 1681. Norms, generally more theoretical

than enforceable, were established for land grants to servitors. Over the course

of the century service tenure and hereditary types of land converged in law and

practice; there was an active market in the sale, mortgaging and devolution

of service-tenure land and purchased hereditary estates. Norms of inheritance

recognised this, and widened women’s access to landholding despite legal

attempts to limit it. By law widows and minor children and unmarried daugh-

ters were granted portions of their deceased husband’s or father’s pomest’e for

upkeep but had very limited access to hereditary lands. As Valerie Kivelson has

shown, however, families disregarded the law to ensure that widows, sons and

daughters were taken care of. Practising partible inheritance, they awarded

almost as much land of all types to women for upkeep or dowry as to male

kin.

Other groups – the Church, merchants – beneﬁted from legal change in the

seventeenth century. Since the mid-sixteenth century the state had been legis-

lating against donating votchina land to the Church; these laws were repeated

in the Ulozhenie, but ignored. Church landholding boomed in the seventeenth

century. Church institutions continued to enjoy immunities from the local

courts, despite the brief tenure of the Monastery Chancellery. Laws of the

seventeenth century extended the privileges of Moscow merchants (gosti)and

29 Valerie A. Kivelson, ‘The Effects of Partible Inheritance: Gentry Families and the State

in Muscovy’, RR 53 (1994): 197–212.

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the other two merchant corporations (gostinnaia and sukonnaia sotni). Of the

three groups, only gosti could trade abroad. Otherwise, all enjoyed the right

to own hereditary land, to be immune from governors’ courts, to distil and

keep spirits and to enjoy various tax breaks and privileges. The tax privileges of

the musketeers and cossacks were afﬁrmed in the Ulozhenie as well (chapters

23–4).

The townsmen, like the provincial gentry, received signiﬁcant attention in

theUlozhenie (chapter 19), resultingfromtheirpersistent petitioningtothestate

in the ﬁrst half of the century. It provided that townsmen who had ﬂed to join

other social groups – musketeers, cossacks, merchant corporations – should

be returned to their taxpaying town commune. Laws forbade townsmen to

put themselves in dependent status. Most importantly, the Ulozhenie abolished

the tax-exempt neighbourhoods of Church and wealthy landlords that had

caused unfair competition to urban taxpayers, awarding taxpaying townsmen

monopolies on urban trade, manufacturing and landholding. But, on the other

hand, townsmenwere in effect enserfed by the Ulozhenie – they wereregistered

in their town commune and the statute of limitations to track down runaway

townsmen was abolished. They had become a hereditary social class, but, like

the peasants, an immobile one.

In the area of trade the seventeenth century saw signiﬁcant codiﬁcation,

in response to Russian merchants’ petitions against foreign competition and

as manifestation of the state’s developing mercantilism. The Ulozhenie of 1649

devoted little attention to foreign trade, but it addressed some domestic trade

andtaxationissues.It regulatedtolls,ferryfeesand bridgefees,assuring exemp-

tion from them to servitors and foreigners and prohibiting fraudulent tolls

(chapter 9); it established a sliding scale of rates to ransom Russian captives in

waraccording to social status (chapter 8); it regulatedillicit taverns, production

of spirits and sale and use of tobacco (chapter 25).

Soon after the Ulozhenie, trade regulationsof 1653 addressed issues of foreign

trade. Theyinstitutedasingle tradetariffforthetransitofcommercialgoodsfor

domestic merchants, and a higher, uniform rate for foreign merchants. These

norms were included in the much broader 1667 New Commercial Regulations.

Authored in part by the progressive reformer A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the

articles also removed trade and the customs service from the jurisdiction of

localgovernors,and furtherrestrictedforeignerstotradingat the bordertowns

in a limited range of goods and onlyat certain times of the year. Its protectionist

norms remained in force until 1755.

30 1667 Trade Regulations: PRP,vyp.vii,pp.303–28.

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Peasants and slaves suffered most from seventeenth-century social legisla-

tion. The Ulozhenie culminated the process of enserfment that began in earnest

in the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, laws forbade peasants

to move from their landlords; the Ulozhenie capped the process by ending the

statute of limitations on the recapture of runaways (chapter 11). Thereafter the

state committed signiﬁcant resources into sending investigators (syshchiki)to

chase down fugitive serfs and townsmen. In the second half of the seventeenth

century peasants could sue and be a witness in courts; they paid taxes, could be

tried for crimes and could hold local elected ofﬁces. But gradually, in a process

that reached its apex in the eighteenth century, peasants fell into more servile

dependency on their lords. Serf owners could judge and corporally punish

their peasants for all but criminal offences, they could force their serfs and

slaves to pay their debts and, although serfs were legally supposed to be tied

to their lands, de facto landlords moved them at will.

Even more dependent on their lords were slaves. Of the many categories

of slavery cited in Muscovite sources, in the seventeenth century the most

common was limited contract slavery (kabal’noe kholopstvo). In the seventeenth

century this was hereditary slavery for the life of the owner. The state’s interest

in slavery in the seventeenth century was to reap fees from the registration of

slaves and to limit the phenomenon, since slavery deprived the state of labour

power and tax revenues. The Ulozhenie devoted its second-longest chapter

to slavery (chapter 20). After 1649 the state captured more of the productive

power of slaves by including rural slaves in taxation when the household basis

was introduced in the late 1670s and by merging household slaves with serfs

in 1722.

Social legislation in the seventeenthcentury mobilised productive resources

by binding people to a limited number of social ranks. Practice, however, often

contradicted this trend. Slavery persisted, despite attempts to keep individuals

from selling themselves into it. Peasants ﬂed from serfdom to the frontier and

to Siberia; contract servitors on the frontier transgressed the monopolies on

landholding, serf ownership or trade guaranteed to other groups. Fanatic in

the heartland at tracking down runaway serfs and townsmen and ﬁxing people

to social categories because of its great needs for labour and income, in the

colonies the state tolerated social and legal diversity. Seventeenth-century leg-

islation did not pursue a single goal of social control or Polizeistaat uniformity,

but proﬁted from an expedient diversity.

Nevertheless the state’sambition to aggrandise its stature through the law is

strikinginseventeenth-centurylegislation.Theﬁrstseveralchaptersofthe1649

Ulozhenie constitute an innovation. Borrowed from the 1588 Lithuanian Statute

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Law and society

and motivated most likely by the social unrest of the 1640s, they introduce the

concept of l

ese majest

e, focusing on assaults to the state’s dignity, embodied in

the Church hierarchs and cathedrals, the tsar and his palaces, and in seals and

ofﬁcial documents representing his authority (chapters 1–6).

Criminal law became harsher in comparison with sixteenth-century codes,

under the inﬂuence of foreign, probably Byzantine, law codes (Ulozhenie chap-

ters 21 and 22; 1669 New Articles). Harsher corporal punishments were intro-

duced – burying alive, nose-splitting, branding and other forms of mutilation.

Torture was prescribed more widely, the death penalty was applied to over

sixty crimes (almost twice that number in codes of Peter the Great’s time).

Public ﬂoggings and executions were prescribed to deter others but the death

penalty was not used as widely as in some West European countries of the time

and was not carried out with such ‘spectacle of suffering’.

Executions were

usually performed by hanging within a day of sentencing. The Church schism

in the second half of the century elicited an escalation in corporal punishment.

Secular courts judged schismatics as traitors as well as heretics and inﬂicted

extreme punishments. Similarly punishments for witchcraft and sorcery, as

well as for recidivist crime, were harsher than those for less charged criminal

acts.

For lesser crimes, the death penalty was often commuted to exile to capture

the labour power of criminals. Long-term imprisonment was rarely used as

punishment, but towns kept jails for the detention of criminals awaiting trial

and people could stay in prison many years paying off ﬁnes from court cases

(21: 92).

In the seventeenth century various principles affecting responsibility for

crime were introduced into Russian law that were developed more thor-

oughly in the eighteenth century. Notions of intent, negligence and malice

ﬁrst appeared; the law found defence of self and property to be exonerating,

and punished unintentional assault and homicide more leniently than inten-

tional. Drunkenness was considered a mitigating circumstance (21: 69, 71, 88).

In the realm of civil law, unlike criminal, much regularisation but little sub-

stantive change occurred. Chapters in the Ulozhenie (14, 15, 18) concerned oath-

taking, settled cases and fees for documents. The Ulozhenie’s longest chapter

(10) addressed judicial corruption, courtroom procedure and civil suits. By the

end of the century Moscow’s legal heritage wasrich and complex, but scattered

in a panoply of thematic compendia and individual decrees and precedents.

31 PieterSpierenburg,TheSpectacle of Suffering. Executionsand the Evolution of Repression:From

a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge and London: Cambridge

University Press, 1984).

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