Russian Punishments in the European Mirror

  • Jonathan Daly
Chapter

Abstract

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, governments in Western and Eastern Europe gradually undertook to abolish the remaining forms of body mutilation and to lessen the use of other assorted physically violent punishments, such as burning people at the stake, for they appeared barbarous to modern sensibilities.1 This reform movement was part of a broader effort to make punishment not only less inhumane but also more regular, efficient, and proportionate to the crime.2 In some regards, the Imperial Russian government appears to have been at the forefront of this trend. A decade before the publication of Rousseau’s Contrat social (1762) and Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna strictly limited the legal scope of capital punishment. As the French legal historian Joseph Viaud has written, perhaps only a despot can do something so radical, so unpopular. For the next 70 years, only about a dozen people were executed on court orders in the Russian Empire (though a few times that number of people were summarily executed during the Pugachevshchina). Indeed, for several decades before 1845, capital punishment was considered an exceptional measure in Russia.3 In England and Wales, by contrast, the yearly number of executions as late as the first decades of the nineteenth century was just under one hundred, before falling to roughly ten in the late 1830s. In France, the numbers were even higher in the late 1830s.4

Keywords

Capital Punishment Corporal Punishment Western European Country Penal Code Criminal Punishment 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. In the late eighteenth century, the criminal punishment regimes in nearly every country of Europe were barbarous. See Max Grünhut, Penal Reform: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 33–34. In England, e.g., people were burned at the stake until 1789.Google Scholar
  2. See John Lawrence, A History of Capital Punishment (New York: The Citadel Press, 1960), 10.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    On this broad trend, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979);Google Scholar
  4. Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);Google Scholar
  5. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);Google Scholar
  6. David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974);Google Scholar
  7. Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982);Google Scholar
  8. Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, 1830–1900 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987);Google Scholar
  10. W.J. Forsythe, Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
  11. 3.
    Joseph Viaud, La peine de mort en matière politique: Étude historique et critique (Thèse pour le doctorat, University of Paris, 1902), 380;Google Scholar
  12. 4.
    M.N. Gernet, Smertnaia kazn’ (Moscow: Ia. Dankin i Ia. Khomutov, 1913), 73, 82. Ironically, British penal reformers in the late eighteenth century often argued that the death penalty was “the natural offspring of monarchical governments” (Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, 74).Google Scholar
  13. 8.
    Norbert Finzsch, “‘Comparing Apples and Oranges?’ The History of Early Prisons in Germany and the United States, 1800–1860,” in Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, eds., Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213–214.Google Scholar
  14. 9.
    John LeDonne, “Civilians under Military Justice during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies7 (Summer 1973): 171–187;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. Donald C. Rawson, “The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia: An Investigation of Judicial Procedures,” Russian History 11 (Spring 1984): 34–35. On the laws governing nonjudicial authorities, seeCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), ch.1.Google Scholar
  17. 11.
    S.S. Ostroumov, Prestupnost’ i ee prichiny v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960), 123.Google Scholar
  18. 26.
    Rchard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 270. See also Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz, 57–58, 615–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. 27.
    For an elaboration of this argument, see Jonathan W. Daly, “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 54 (Fall 1995): 602–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. 28.
    William C. Fuller, Jr., “Civilians in Russian Military Courts, 1881–1904,” Russian Review 41 (July 1982): 289–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 31.
    Myra Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984).Google Scholar
  22. 32.
    J.J. Tobias, Nineteenth-Century Crime: Prevention and Punishments (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), 139. The British army abolished flogging only in 1889, although its use fell dramatically during the first decades of the century. See J.R. Dinwiddy, “The Early Nineteenth Century Campaign Against Flogging in the Army,” English Historical Review 97 (April 1982): 308–331. An executive order of 1885 allowed governors in Russia to carry out mass floggings of peasants to quell popular unrest, but it was conceived as an exceptional measure and was applied relatively rarely: P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Politicheskaia reaktsiia 80-x-nachala 90-x godov) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 170–172; Frank, “Emancipation and the Birch,” 415.Google Scholar
  23. 41.
    See, e.g., Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 115–119.Google Scholar
  24. 48.
    Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 4th ed. (New York: W. W Norton, 1987), 216–218.Google Scholar
  25. 55.
    B.S. Utevskii, Vospominaniia iurista (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1989), 33.Google Scholar
  26. 57.
    Ruth Pike, “Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain: The Galleys,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 198–200.Google Scholar
  27. 62.
    Edmond Henri, Étude critique de la transportation en Guyane française: Réformes réalisables (Paris: Librairie de la Société du Recueil Sirey, 1912), 16. The rules regulating the treatment of convicts, adopted on June 18, 1880, were subsequently considered too magnanimous and were replaced with harsher rules on September 4, 1891 (ibid., 17, 24–28).Google Scholar
  28. 73.
    Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Prisons under Local Government (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963), 181–182; Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons for the Year 1890–91, pt. 1:xviii; Christopher Harding et al., eds., Imprisonment in England and Wales: A Concise History (London: Croom Helm, 1885), 195.Google Scholar
  29. 75.
    Philip Jenkins, “From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England,” Criminal Justice History 7 (1986): 66–67.Google Scholar
  30. 76.
    P.W. Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars, and other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1992), 1–3, 48.Google Scholar
  31. 77.
    Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1787–1868 (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1959), 9;Google Scholar
  32. A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other Parts of the British Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 153. Stealing an article worth a shilling or more from a person’s pocket was a crime punishable by penal exile in the mid-nineteenth century (ibid. 226–228).Google Scholar
  33. 79.
    Edward H. Judge, “Peasant Resettlement and Social Control in Late Imperial Russia,” in Edward H. Judge and James Y. Simms, Jr., eds., Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia: Essays in Honor of Arthur P. Mendel, (New York: East European Monographs, 1992), 77; Google Scholar
  34. A.D. Margolis, Tiur’ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii, issledovaniia i arkhivnye nakhodki (Moscow: Lanterna i Vita, 1995), 32;Google Scholar
  35. A.G.L. Shaw, A Short History of Australia (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 94; idem, Convicts and the Colonies, 148. In 1846, Australia’s European population was just under 190,000: A. Wyatt Tilby, Australia, vol. 5 of The English People Overseas (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 86.Google Scholar
  36. 90.
    P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-kh gg. (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1964), 186.Google Scholar
  37. 95.
    Adams, Politics of Punishment, 133, 175, 183; Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System,” in Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ed., Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 33–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. 110.
    Ben Eklof, “Worlds in Conflict: Patriarchal Authority, Discipline, and the Russian School, 1861–1914,” in School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, ed. Ben Eklof (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 106–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. 113.
    Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3–9.Google Scholar
  40. 114.
    On this problem, see Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” in The Structure of Russian History: Interpretative Essays, ed. M. Cherniavsky (New York: Random House, 1970), 341–380;Google Scholar
  41. Daniel R Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 221.Google Scholar
  42. 115.
    A. Tyrkova-Villiams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York: Izd. imeni Chekhova, 1952), 347–348.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Susan P. McCaffray and Michael Melancon 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jonathan Daly

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations