rather than genuine state-sponsored courts. While some scholars maintain that the Russkaya Pravda was in force over all of ancient Russia, others argue that its effect was much more limited to only a few principalities. Where it was enforced, the Russkaia Pravda remained in effect until the seventeenth century.
During the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, Russian law was modified to support the emerging Muscovite autocracy. In particular, the legal status of the peasants was reduced to serfdom. During this same period, several important written collections of law were adopted dealing with criminal, civil, administrative, and commercial law and procedure. Under the Sudebnik of 1497, torture was institutionalized as a normal tool of criminal investigations. The Ulozhenie of 1649, which remained the principal basis for much of Russian law for two centuries, consisted of 967 articles covering most areas of the law. The criminal law sections of the Ulozhenie were noted for introducing more severe punishments into Russian law (burying alive, burning, mutilation). These documents were not well-organized, systematized codes of law, but were merely collections of existing laws, decrees, and administrative regulations.
RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Beginning with Peter the Great, several tsars attempted to rationalize the Russian legal system by introducing Western innovations and bolstering their autocratic rule by improving the efficiency with which Russian courts went about their business. Toward this end, Peter established the Senate to supervise the courts and punish corrupt or incompetent judges as well as the office of the procurator-general, which was established in 1722 to oversee the Senate and to supervise the enforcement of laws and decrees. The office of the Russian procurator- general continues to this day.
One of the most intractable problems facing Russian legal reformers was the morass of unorganized and undifferentiated laws and decrees in effect. The Russian legal system sat on a foundation of out-of-date or half- forgotten laws, decrees, and procedures, and judges and government officials were hard-pressed to know which laws were in effect at any given moment. In the nineteenth cenLEGAL SYSTEMS
A guard stands by the defendant in a 1992 murder trial in St. Petersburg. The accused is kept in a cage inside the courtroom. © STEVE RAYMER/CORBIS tury, Russian specialists under the direction of M. M. Speransky attempted to rationalize this material by collecting and distilling it into a fifteen-volume digest, the Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, published in 1832.
The most significant tsarist-era legal reforms were adopted in 1864, when a modern, Western-style judicial system was introduced in the aftermath of the emancipation of the serfs. The new judicial system introduced professional judges and lawyers, trial by jury, modern evidentiary rules, justices of the peace, and modern criminal investigation procedures drawn from Continental models. Reaction to these liberal judicial reforms set in during the reign of Alexander II after the acquittal of several famous dissidents, including the assassin Vera Zasulich, and the independence of the courts in political cases was significantly eroded after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Despite this reaction, the institutions established by the Judicial Reforms of 1864 remained in effect until 1917.
SOVIET REGIME
A decree adopted in late 1917, On the Court, abolished the tsarist judicial institutions, including the courts, examining magistrates, and bar association. However, during the first years following the Bolshevik Revolution, legal nihilists such as E. Pashukanis, who advocated the rapid withering away of the courts and other state institutions, contended with more pragmatic leaders who envisioned the legal system as an important asset in asserting and defending Soviet state power. The latter group prevailed. Vladimir Lenin, during the New Economic Policy, sought to re-establish laws, courts, legal profession, and a new concept of socialist legality to provide more stability in society and central authority for the Party hierarchy. The debate between the legal nihilists and their opponents was definitively resolved by Josef Stalin in the early 1930s. As Stalin asserted control over the Party and initiated industrialization and collectivization, he also asserted the importance of stabilizing the legal system. This process culminated in the 1936 constitution, which strengthened law
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and legal institutions, especially administrative law, civil, family, and criminal law.
The broad outlines of the legal system established by Stalin in the 1930s remained in effect until the late 1980s. Reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, however, made significant changes in the Soviet judicial system. Gorbachev sponsored a lengthy public discussion of how to introduce pravovoe gosudarstvo (law- based state) in the USSR and introduced legislation to improve the independence and authority of judges and to establish the Committee for Constitutional Supervision, a constitutional court.
In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has adopted a wide array of legislation remaking many aspects of its judicial system, drawing heavily on foreign models. Most of the legislation that has been adopted was foreshadowed in the 1993 constitution and includes new laws and procedure codes for the ordinary courts and the ar-bitrazh courts, which are courts devoted to matters arising from business and commerce, new civil and criminal codes, and a new land code, finally adopted in 2001. See also: COOPERATIVES, LAW ON; FAMILY LAW OF 1936; FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF 1906; GOVERNING SENATE; PROCURACY; RUSSIAN JUSTICE; STATE ENTERPRISE, LAW OF THE; SUCCESSION, LAW ON; SUDEBNIK OF 1497
MICHAEL NEWCITY
44; industrialists, 7; chancery clerks, 19; tribesmen, 54. Deputies brought instructions, or nakazy, from the bodies that selected them. Catherine’s Nakaz (Great Instruction) was read at the opening sessions and provided a basis for some of the discussion that followed. The commission met in 203 sessions and discussed existing laws on the nobility, on the Baltic nobility, on the merchant estate, and on justice and judicial procedure. No decisions were made by the commission on these matters, and no code of laws was produced. The Legislative Commission was nevertheless significant: It gave Catherine an important source of information and insight into concerns and attitudes of different social groups, through both the nakazy and the discussions which took place, including a discussion on serfdom; it provided an opportunity for the discussion and dissemination of the ideas in Catherine’s Nakaz; it led to the establishment of several subcommittees, which continued to meet after the prorogation of the commission, and which produced draft laws that Catherine utilized for subsequent legislation. See also: CATHERINE II; INSTRUCTION TO THE LEGISLATIVE COMMISSION OF CATHERINE II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dukes, Paul. (1967.) Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1981). Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
In December 1766, Catherine II called upon the free “estates” (nobles, townspeople, state peasants, Cossacks) and central government offices to select deputies to attend a commission to participate in the preparation of a new code of laws. The purpose of the commission was therefore consultative; it was not intended to be a parliament in the modern sense. The Legislative Commission opened in Moscow in July 1767, then moved to St. Petersburg in February 1768. Following the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in January 1769, it was prorogued and never recalled. The selection of deputies was a haphazard affair. The social composition of the assembly was: nobles, 205; merchants, 167; odnod-vortsy (descendants of petty servicemen on the southern frontiers), 42; state peasants, 29; Cossacks,
LEICHOUDES, IOANNIKIOS AND SOPHRONIOS
Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios (secular name: Ioannes, 1633-1717) and Sophronios (secular name: Spyridon, 1652-1730).
The two brothers Leichoudes were born on the Greek island of Kephallenia. They studied philosophy and theology in Greek-run schools in Venice. Sophronios received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Padua
