Abstract
This essay discusses criminal law theories in late Imperial Russia. It argues that, although the political climate of Reform and Counter Reform effectively undermined attempts to implement new legislation premised on the idea of the ‘rights-enabled person’ (pravovaya lichnost’), paradoxically, it fostered the growth of juridical scholarship. Russian criminal law theorists engaged critically with Western juridical science, which, beginning in the 1870s, witnessed a shift away from absolutist theories inspired by the classics of philosophical idealism towards various strains of positivism arguing for the restoration of the person as a concrete, physiological being. However, while Russian scholars were drawn to these new trends of criminal anthropology and the sociology of crime, they were also obliged to take stock of an indigenous legal culture that scarcely differentiated between pravo and zakon, together with a long tradition of customary practices that equated crime and punishment with sin and redemption.
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Notes
See, for example, Mokrinsky, S. P. (1906). Sistema i metody nauki ugolovnogo prava. Vestnik Prava, kn3, 21–53; Petrazhitsky, L. (1905). Vvedenie v izuchenie prava i nravstvennosti. St Petersburg.
See, in particular, Poznyshev, S. V. (1908). Uchenie o karatel’nykh merakh. Moscow and his ‘Ob izuchenii prestupnika v nauke ugolovnogo prava’, Voprosy prava (1911), kn. VI–VIII.
For a more detailed account of developments in Russian pre-revolutionary criminal law theory, see, Nethercott F. (2007). Russian legal culture before and after communism: Criminal justice, politics and the public sphere. London and New York: Routledge. See also: Gordon Smith (1996). Reforming the Russian legal system, Chap. 1. Cambridge; Kaiser, F. B. (1972). Die Russische Justizreform von 1864: Zur Geschichte der Russischen Justiz von Katharina II bis 1916. Leiden; Kucherov, S. (1974). Courts, lawyers, and trials under the last three tsars. Westport/Conn; Solomon, P. H. Jr (Ed.) (1997). Reforming justice in Russia, 1864–1996: Power, culture, and the limits of legal order. New York; Jörg Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz. Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914, Ius Commune/Sonderhefte. Studien zur Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, 78 (Frankfurt a.M., 1996).
Works by German authorities frequently cited in Russian early reform literature included: Feuerbach, A. (1801). Lehrbuch des gemeinen in Deutschland gultigen peinlichen Rechts; C. Köstlin (1845). Neue Revision der Grundbegriffe des Criminalrechts; System des deutschen Strafrechts (1855); Berner, A. (1857). Lehrbuch der deutschen Strafrechts. See the entry by K. Arsen’ev in the Brokgaus-Efron Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’, Vol. XXXIV(a), 1902, Headword: ‘Ugolovnoe Pravo’, 504–509.
In Russia, followers of Liszt included L. S. Belogritz-Kotlyarevsky, S. V. Posnyshev, S. K. Gogel’, B. I. Vorotynsky, and M. I. Chubinsky. For a comprehensive overview of absolutist, psychological and sociological theories of punishment, see the entry by Vul’fert, A. (1897). Brokgaus-Efron Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’, XX, 469–479 (headword: ‘Nakazanie’). Critical accounts of positivism include: Spasovich, V. D. (1891). ‘Novye Napravleniya v nauki ugolovnogo prava’. Vestnik Evropy, published integrally in Sochineniia V.D. Spasovicha, Vol. 8 (SPb., 1896), 211–300; Sergeevsky, N. D. (1882). Anthropologicheskoe napravlenie v izsledovaniyakh o prestuplenii i nakazanii. Yuridicheskii Vestnik, 2, 209–221. Also by Sergeevsky (1879). Prestuplenie i nakazanie, kak predmet yuridicheskoi nauki. Yuridicheskii Vestnik, 12, 877–904, ‘Sovremennye zadachi ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva v Rossii’, Zhurnal grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo prava, 3 (1883), 107–133, and ‘Osnovnye voprosy nakazaniia v noveishei literature’, [pamphlet, 24pp] (SPb., 1893). For a positive appraisal, see, for example: Belogritz-Kotlyarevsky, L. S. (1892). Zadacha i metod nauki ugolovnogo prava. Yuridicheskii Vestnik, Sept., 41–51.
A leading representative in Russia of the anthropological school was Dmitry Dril’. See his Prestupnost’ i prestupniki: ugolovnye psikologicheskie etiudy (SPb., 1895). Also by Dril’: ‘Antropologicheskaya shkola i eya kritiki. Zametki po povodu statei g. Obninskogo, Yuridicheskii Vestnik, 12 (1890), 579–599. See also Zakrevsky, I. (1893). Ob ucheniyakh ugolovno-antropologicheskoi shkoly. Zhurnal grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo prava, 1, and note 5 above.
Barshev, S. (1841). Obshchie nachala teorii i zakonodatel’stv o prestuplenijakh i nakazaniakh (pp. 2, 9). Moscow. Despite upholding the accepted retributive function of justice, Barshev did, exceptionally for the pre-reform generation, analyse in some depth the concept of liability. See, Arsen’ev, ‘Ugolovnoe Pravo’, Brokgaus-Efron, Vol. 28 ‘Rossiya’, 847–850.
See Presnyakov, A. E. (1925). Apogei samoderzhaviya: Nikolai I (p. 13). Leningrad, cited in Kapustina, T. A., & Nicholas, I. (1996). In D. J. Raleigh (Ed.), The emperors and empresses of Russia. Rediscovering the Romanovs (p. 262). Armonk, New York, London.
See also Naumov, A. (2001). [Introduction] N·S. Tagantsev, Russkoe Ugolovnoe Pravo (p. 13). Tula.
A review of juridical literature dating from the first decade of the 20th century suggests that inclusion of the ‘moral component’ by legal positivists was, in part, inspired by Vladimir Solov’ev’s call to admit the ‘right to a dignified existence’, an idea that found its most powerful resonance in Opravdanie dobra and Pravo i Nravstvennost’, both published in 1897. Solov’ev’s resolute defence of the ‘moral integrity of the person’, and of the need to account for this in the elaboration of positive laws underpinned his recommendations, made en amateur, concerning punishment, which like those of his positivist peers, consisted in placing the criminal, as opposed to the crime, in the spotlight.
Chubinsky, M. I. (1912). Kurs ugolovnoi politiki, 2nd edn (p. 281). SPb. See also Esipov, V. V. (1907). Nravstevennost’ i Pravo (p. 52). Warsaw.
Lyublinsky, P. I. (1915). ‘Gosudarstvo i svobody lichnosti’, Na Smenu starogo prava. Sbornik Statei po voprosam tekushchei pravovoi zhizni (p. 24). Petrograd. Fortunately, Lyublinsky notes, this preposterous proposal got no further.
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Nethercott, F. The concept of Lichnost’ in criminal law theory, 1860s–1900s. Stud East Eur Thought 61, 189–196 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-009-9074-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-009-9074-2