prince’s servitors as well as compensation for various property and criminal offenses. Separate articles establish provisions for the prince’s “bloodwite” (wergild) collector, as well as a tithe for the church from the prince’s fees. A final article somewhat incongruously establishes payments for bridge builders.
The Expanded version is much more detailed and survives in many more manuscripts; the oldest copies date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but numerous other copies originated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Whereas the Short version included no more than forty-three articles, the Expanded version includes at least 121 articles and betrays a much more consciously rational form of organization, highlighted in many copies with special headings. The first articles repeat many of the measures of the Short Pravda, but overall the Expanded version establishes a much more detailed inventory of offenses and their resolution. Separate groups of articles examine slavery, commercial transactions, and loans, as well as inheritance disputes.
The Abbreviated version, which survives in only a handful of copies, none older than the seventeenth century, seems to have been the result of a conscious reworking of the Expanded version, adapted to the circumstances of early modern Russia. Several traces of the Short Pravda remain, but the scarcity of copies along with the fact that Muscovite Rus generated its own legal codes has persuaded most scholars that this Abbreviated version had little practical importance.
The emphasis of the law in both the Short and Expanded versions is to entrust the process of conflict resolution mainly to the persons directly involved. The first article of the Short version, in fact, authorized blood vengeance by relatives of homicide victims and provided for monetary compensation only in the absence of kin. According to the second article of the Expanded version, the sons of Yaroslav outlawed vengeance justice when they met to revise the law sometime in the 1070s, after which homicides were redeemable by payment of compensation to the victim’s kin, along with a fine payable to the prince. In general, compensation alone appears as a remedy in the Short Pravda, but both fines and compensation figure in the Expanded Pravda-an indication, some have argued, of a growing political apparatus that controlled litigation in later medieval Rus.
Both the Short and Expanded versions make scant reference to judicial process, however, and describe instead a self-help process that indicates the minimal role played by judicial personnel. In cases of theft, for example, the codes describe a process of confrontment, according to which the victim who recognized his stolen property was to announce his loss, and seek the help of the current owner in finding out from whom he had acquired it, and so on, all the way back to the original thief. The Expanded version articulates an identical process for slave theft, using the slave as a witness in tracing the transactions that separated the original thief from the present slaveowner.
The Pravda provides considerable information on the economy of Kievan Rus. Few articles examine farming, despite the obvious importance of agriculture to the economy. The code does establish, however, compensation for livestock either lost or stolen, and also protects some farming implements. By contrast, the Expanded version dwells at length on trading and commercial transactions, suggesting to some scholars that this law served a primarily urban and commercial society. The prominence of slavery in the law indicates that the economy and society of Kievan Rus depended upon various forms of involuntary labor, much of it probably provided by war captives. Inasmuch as
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the code mainly considers men rather than women, some students of Kievan society have questioned the status of women in Kievan Rus. One controversial provision seems to provide a penalty for killing a woman that is only half as large as the penalty that attached to the homicide of a man. See also: KIEVAN RUS; NOVGOROD JUDICIAL CHARTER; PSKOV JUDICIAL CHARTER
Kaiser, Daniel H. (1980). The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaiser, Daniel H. (1991). “The Economy of Kievan Rus’: Evidence from the Pravda Rus’skaia.” In Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretive Essays, ed. I. S. Ko-ropeckyj. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaiser, Daniel H., ed., tr. (1992). The Laws of Rus’: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries. Salt Lake City, UT: Charles Schlacks, Jr. Shchapov, Yaroslav N. (1993). State and Church in Early Russia, Tenth-Thirteenth Centuries, tr. Vic Shneierson. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas. Vernadsky, George. (1969). Medieval Russian Laws. New York: New York: Norton.
DANIEL H. KAISER
cated a foreign policy that would confront the United States, which was depicted as controlled by Jewish capital, and would be dedicated to ensuring Russia’s world supremacy.
Russian National Unity operated as a paramilitary organization, rather than an orthodox party. Members were organized into detachments, underwent military training, and wore uniforms. The Party claimed that its symbol, the left swastika, had been worn by medieval Russian knights and conferred mystical powers on party members. Though Party membership probably never exceeded ten thousand, local organizations were particularly active in Moscow and several other regions. In some cities sympathetic local officials allowed party detachments to operate as informal druzhiniki (volunteer social monitors), a practice often accompanied by acts of violence and intimidation against ethnic minorities. In the few instances in which the party put forth candidates in elections, they were soundly defeated. After 1999 the party suffered a decline, the result of increased criticism of its program and tactics and feuding among the leadership. The party’s electoral bloc, called Spas, was denied registration in the 1999 Duma elections, and court orders banned local organizations in Moscow and other key regions because of their advocacy of racial hatred and their use of Nazi symbols. See also: PAMYAT
RUSSIAN NATIONAL UNITY PARTY
The Russian National Unity Party (Russkoe na-tionalnoe edinstvo) emerged in the fall of 1990 and subsequently became one of the most active of the small fascist-style parties that sprang up in Russia in the first post-Soviet decade. Founded by disaffected members of Pamyat, the party was led by Alexander Barkashov, a former electrical worker and Pamyat activist. The party espoused an ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic ideology. Its program, as set forth in Barkashov’s Azbuka russkogo national-ista (ABC of Russian Nationalism), advocated the establishment of a “Greater Russia” encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The rule of ethnic Russians would be assured through a national dictatorship that would preside over a council dominated by ethnic Russians representing labor, management, the intelligentsia, and other groups. Non-slavic peoples would be confined to their “historic homelands” and the state would protect the genetic purity of the Russian nation through the prohibition of mixed marriages. The party advoBIBLIOGRAPHY Jackson, William D. (1999). “Fascism, Vigilantism, and the State: The Russian National Unity Movement.” Problems of Post-Communism 46:34-42. Shenfield, Stephen D. (2000). Russian Fascism: Traditions Tendencies Movements. London: M. E. Sharpe.
WILLIAM D. JACKSON
In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev adopted Eastern Orthodoxy from Byzantium and inaugurated a gradual Christianization of his realm. First affected were elites, with churches and observance limited to cities; several centuries elapsed before the church could penetrate the hinterland. Although the devastating Mongol conquest of 1237-1240 temporarily interrupted this process, the Mongols’ religious tolerance (and tax exemptions) enabled the
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church to resume the building of parishes and monasteries. Simultaneously, the church emerged as an important political force, symbolizing Slavic unity amidst inter-princely conflict; the relocation of the metropolitan to Moscow played a key role in the triumph of Muscovy. There it was instrumental in formulating a new political culture based on the “Third Rome” theory, with Muscovy-after the fall of Constantinople in 1453-claiming leadership over Eastern Orthodoxy. Church councils codified the new Russian Orthodoxy, defended ecclesiastical ownership of lands and peasants, and achieved formal autocephalous status for the church (with its own patriarch) in 1589.
That triumph turned to schism (raskol). The conflict erupted in the 1650s when reformist clergy attempted to
