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
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Notes
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.
See John Lawrence, A History of Capital Punishment (New York: The Citadel Press, 1960), 10.
On this broad trend, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979);
Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
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);
David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974);
Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982);
Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978);
William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, 1830–1900 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987);
W.J. Forsythe, Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1991).
Joseph Viaud, La peine de mort en matière politique: Étude historique et critique (Thèse pour le doctorat, University of Paris, 1902), 380;
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).
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.
John LeDonne, “Civilians under Military Justice during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies7 (Summer 1973): 171–187;
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, see
Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), ch.1.
S.S. Ostroumov, Prestupnost’ i ee prichiny v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1960), 123.
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.
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.
William C. Fuller, Jr., “Civilians in Russian Military Courts, 1881–1904,” Russian Review 41 (July 1982): 289–290.
Myra Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984).
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.
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.
Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 4th ed. (New York: W. W Norton, 1987), 216–218.
B.S. Utevskii, Vospominaniia iurista (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1989), 33.
Ruth Pike, “Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain: The Galleys,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 198–200.
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).
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.
Philip Jenkins, “From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England,” Criminal Justice History 7 (1986): 66–67.
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.
Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1787–1868 (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1959), 9;
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).
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;
A.D. Margolis, Tiur’ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii, issledovaniia i arkhivnye nakhodki (Moscow: Lanterna i Vita, 1995), 32;
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.
P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-kh gg. (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1964), 186.
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.
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.
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.
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;
Daniel R Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 221.
A. Tyrkova-Villiams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York: Izd. imeni Chekhova, 1952), 347–348.
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© 2005 Susan P. McCaffray and Michael Melancon
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Daly, J. (2005). Russian Punishments in the European Mirror. In: McCaffray, S.P., Melancon, M. (eds) Russia in the European Context, 1789–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982261_10
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