Nancy Kollmann,Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia

Reviewed by: Robert Collis, University of Helsinki, Finland

In recent years the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Pussy Riot have attracted widespread media coverage. Many Western commentators have been quick to pass judgement on the Russian legal system, rekindling a historiographical narrative dating back to the sixteenth century, in which Europe’s ‘rule of law’, based on its Roman heritage, is contrasted to Russia’s ‘despotism’ and brutality (5).

However, before resorting to old, condescending tropes, Western journalists should take stock of Nancy Kollmann’s new monograph. Continuing in the same vein as her acclaimed By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999), Kollmann turns her gaze to the Russian judicial system in the same period. The result is a work that cites a compelling weight of evidence in order to demonstrate that the Russian legal system was ‘not one of unbridled satrapies, vigilante justice or controlled brutality; Russia was not a despotism’ (426). More specifically, Kollmann grounds her study on the meticulous analysis of case law for the Beloozero and Arzamas regions, preserved at the Russian State Archive for Ancient Documents (RGADA). This scrupulous attention to detail provides a firm foundation upon which Kollmann is able to lay out a fascinating analytical account of how written law for serious crime – ostensibly the law codes of 1497, 1550, 1649 (the Ulozhenie), 1669 and the 1715 Military Articles – was put into practice.

Kollmann develops her arguments by addressing four principal themes. First, she uses John Brewer’s concept of ‘sinews of power’ – states’ creation of infrastructure to support military reform and territorial expansion – in order to illustrate how early modern Muscovy sought to ‘construct and maintain a centralized bureaucratic and judicial apparatus with limited finances, manpower and judicial expertise’ (8). Kollmann’s aim is to refute the perception that early modern Russia was ‘a peripheral outsider employing unique forms of governance and development’. Instead, the ‘state-building experience’ of this era should be viewed as part of a ‘broader early modern continuum of change’ (2).

The second (related) theme investigates how the central authorities relied upon local communities to implement the law. Thus, in Chapter 1, Kollmann provides a valuable account of local judicial culture, centred on the activities of brigandage boards (composed of locally elected elders, scribes and wardens). Each community would also nominate executioners, town criers, prison guards, as well as hundredmen, fiftymen and decurions, who were selected to police the local area. What is especially interesting in this chapter is how Kollmann reveals that many communities adopted a flexible approach to complying with the law, whereby they could decide to cooperate with, manipulate or even resist the tsar’s judiciary.

The third theme of the monograph constitutes an in-depth study of the development of judicial expertise in Muscovy. As Kollmann notes, the Muscovite state lacked law schools, universities and a legal profession, but still had to inculcate judicial expertise within the system. In Chapter 2, scribal assistants emerge as ‘the linchpin of the system’, as these trained bureaucrats proved indispensable to the overworked and unqualified regional governors (47). Moreover, so-called town-square scribes are also shown to have played a pivotal role in the local legal system. These educated individuals were employed by litigants to write petitions, contracts and other documents. Without recourse to lawyers, the accused relied on such scribes to present their case in the best possible light.

Lastly, Kollmann studies the practice of state-sanctioned violence, by making excellent use of Petrus Spierenburg’s concept of ‘spectacles of suffering’. In other words, an examination of the symbolic use of violence is undertaken, with an emphasis on the interactions between tsar and people at times of crisis. Thus, citing the theory of René Girard and Giorgio Agamben, Kollmann presents ‘spectacles of suffering’ as a ritual demonstration of the sovereign’s sole right to kill for the sake of social stability. Such spectacles were relatively rare in pre-Petrine Russia, with executions normally consisting of beheading by axe in a largely unceremonious manner. A notable exception was the Cossack rebel Stepan Razin in 1671, who was paraded through the streets of Moscow before being quartered on Red Square.

Whilst rebels, such as Razin, were treated extremely harshly, Kollmann also highlights how Muscovite rulers in the seventeenth century were prepared to acquiesce to crowd demands for the heads of corrupt officials. Hence, sacrificial offerings of prominent boyars were made to the riotous mob in 1648 and 1682, in order to appease their wrath and to reaffirm social stability. The Petrine period witnessed no such conciliatory gestures to the crowd. Indeed, Kollmann powerfully demonstrates the irony of Peter the Great being influenced by ‘civilized’ Europe in his adoption of the violent enactment of the gruesome ‘theatre of horror’ (408). The Muscovite ideology of consultation and patrimonial interaction, as Kollmann states, was replaced with ‘bare coercive power’ befitting Peter the Great’s goal of forging a well-ordered police state (415).

I thoroughly recommend this exceptional piece of scholarship for those interested in the legal history of early modern Russia, as well as the complex socio-political dynamic at work in matters of crime and punishment. What is more, Kollmann’s analysis of criminal law in Russia provides a valuable addition to our wider understanding of European state-building.