Criminal Justice in Early Modern Russia

The current energetic research on criminal justice in Russia reflects broader trends in the field away from central autocratic power to the study of locality, empire and subject people and to microhistory and examination of lived experience. Case law (extant from the seventeenth century) reveals legal culture and is the best angle into the study of crime per se, since statistics are lacking (modern police forces developed only late in the nineteenth century). Russian historians are less engaged in a debate animating scholars of early modern Europe, namely the relative rise or fall of crime rates and impact of humanitarian thought, a paradigm raised by Michel Foucault, Pieter Spierenburg, Steven Pinker and others. Rather, historians of Russia are focusing on how the law was practiced in conditions of autocracy across an empire of tremendous diversity, placing criminal law and practice in comparative context with European and Ottoman experiences where appropriate.

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