children from the privileged social estates predominated in the latter.
Over time, the severity of sentences was eased, and some forms of punishment were even abolished. For instance, the use of the knout ended in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The knout was the most deadly means of corporal punishment; an experienced executioner could kill a person with three blows. The 1845 Code of Punishments established the upper limit for sentences using the lash and birch rods to 100 blows. Exceptions for the sick and the elderly were under way, as were additional measures to protect the health of individuals undergoing punishment as much as possible. For instance, sentences would not be carried out in extremely cold and windy conditions. Beginning in 1851, a physician was present at the scene of corporal punishment. From 1863 on, corporal punishment was greatly curtailed. Women were entirely exempted. Men were subject to it in only five cases stipulated by law: (1) District courts (volostnye sudy) were permitted to sentence peasants to up to twenty blows of the lash, a sentence that earlier had been considered appropriate only for children. (2) With the permission of the governor of the province, prisoners were allowed to be punished with up to 100 blows of the birch rod for various violations of the established order. (3) Those serving sentences of hard labor in exile and those in exile as penal settlers could receive between 100 and 300 blows of the birch rod for various violations. (4) Those serving sentences of hard labor in exile who committed an additional crime could receive up to 100 blows of the lash. (5) Those serving on vessels at sea could be punished with up to five blows of the whip, and apprentices could be given between five and ten blows of the birch rod.
Not until 1903 were all forms of corporal punishment abolished for those serving sentences of exile at hard labor or sentences of exile as penal settlers. The following year, corporal punishment was officially abolished for all peasants, soldiers, sailors, and other categories of the population. See also: LEGAL SYSTEMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Bruce F. (1996). The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Kucherov, Samuel. (1953). Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars. New York: Praeger. Schrader, Abby M. (1997). “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817-1845.” Slavic Review 56(4): 613-644. Shrader, O. (1922). “Crimes and Punishments, Teutonic and Slavic.” In Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings. New York: Scribners. Vernadsky, George, tr. (1947). Medieval Russian Laws. New York: Columbia University Press.
The Russian government chartered the first company, a whaling and fishing enterprise, in 1704.
Although Peter I encouraged the formation of trading companies based on the European model, early Russian companies engaged primarily in fishing, textile production, or mining. The Russian-American Company, formed in 1799, expired in 1868, a year after the United States purchased Alaska.
Limited liability, crucial to corporate enterprise, received legislative sanction in 1805 and 1807. A law promulgated on December 6, 1836, defined the general characteristics and functions of corporations. Each corporate charter (ustav) took the form of a law published in the Complete Collection of Laws or its supplement from 1863 onward, the Collection of Statutes and Decrees of the Government. The government occasionally considered replacing the concessionary system with one permitting incorporation by registration, but it never implemented this reform.
Bureaucratic regimentation and tutelage kept the number of corporations relatively low: 68 in 1847, 186 in 1869, 433 in 1874, 614 in 1892, 1,354 in 1905, and 2,167, plus 262 foreign companies, in 1914 (Owen). Another 1,239 companies were founded between 1914 and 1916. In November 1917, 2,727 Russian and 232 foreign corporations were in operation. Banks, railroads, steamship lines, mines, and machine plants generally maintained their corporate headquarters in major cities, so that, despite the introduction of modern technology by large corporations in the half-century before World War I, most of the population of the Russian Empire considered the corporation an alien form of economic enterprise. See also: CAPITALISM; GUILDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Owen, Thomas C. (1995). Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika. New York: Oxford University Press.
Although in English “cosmopolitan” means a citizen of the world or a person who has no permanent home, “cosmopolitanism” in the Soviet Union meant a rejection of Russian and Soviet values. However, after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, “cosmopolitanism” became a code word for “Jewish” and marked a period of lethal state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union designed to eliminate Yiddish culture, Jewish intellectuals, “nationalists,” and Zionists. After permitting greater freedoms during the war, the Soviet regime in 1945 tried to reimpose control in face of a new Cold War. “Cosmopolitanism” became a “reactionary bourgeois ideology” more akin to capitalism than communism. Artists and intellectuals came under attack for subservience to the West and for not expressing adequate Soviet/Russian patriotism.
During the 1920s “cosmopolitanism” had been synonymous with “internationalism,” one of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. However, in the 1930s the regime turned toward Russian nationalism, and cosmopolitanism became more closely associated with capitalism-the antithesis of communism. Before 1948, culture chief Andrei Zhdanov led condemnation of many intellectuals for favorable portrayals of Western culture without mentioning the grand achievements of the Soviet experiment. In literature, architecture, biology, philosophy, and many other disciplines, the regime singled out people for “kowtowing” to the West and not showing adequate patriotism. In biology, for example, this led to the rejection of modern genetics, and reaction in many other disciplines was likewise destructive. Apart from enforcing intellectual conformity, “cosmopolitanism” engulfed internationalists and Jews charged with bourgeois nationalism, such as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), who raised money, awareness, and support abroad during World War II.
In early 1949, a Pravda article railed against an “unpatriotic group of theater critics,” signaling the first attempt to assign collective, rather than individual, guilt for not sufficiently glorifying the Soviet system. Because most of the critics named were Jewish, this is often noted as the beginning of the anti-Semitic stage of the anticosmopolitan campaign. Articles soon followed about “rootless cosmopolitans” and “passportless wanderers,” which clearly referred to the Jewish diaspora outside the new state of Israel. Jews and other cosmopolitans, according to these press attacks, were isolated and/or hostile to Russian and Soviet culture and traditions. The unspoken assumption was that cosmopolitans, because they were allegedly unpatriotic, would not be loyal when the Cold War turned into an armed conflict.
The anticosmopolitan campaign destroyed the careers and lives of many of the Soviet Union’s intellectual elites and separated Soviet culture and
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learning from much of the rest of the world. When combined with the campaign against “bourgeois nationalists,” both assimilated Jewish intellectuals and Yiddish culture suffered irreparable harm. For example, when the JAC collected information on wartime atrocities against the Jews, it led to charges of nationalism. Moreover, contact with Jewish groups abroad and calls for a Jewish homeland in Crimea and contact with foreigners were “unpatriotic” and brought charges of treason. In short, doing the regime’s bidding in World War II led to the imprisonment, execution, and silencing of many of the Soviet Union’s leading Jewish artists and intellectuals between 1949 and 1953 after the JAC was closed in 1948. Moreover, many JAC members were executed in August 1952 in what has been called the Night of the Murdered Poets. The investigation into the activities of these JAC members seems to have been the prelude to the Doctor’s Plot, which aimed at the execution of many Jews and physicians in 1953. The trials and executions were aborted after Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953. See also: SLAVOPHILES; WESTERNIZERS; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunmore, Timothy. (1984). Soviet Politics, 1945-1953. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hahn, Werner. (1982).
