Russia under the Old regime

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Until the Judiciary Reform of 1864, but in some respects (which will be specified later) even after it, Russia knew nothing of independent justice. Justice was a branch of the administration, and as such its foremost concern was enforcing the government's will and protecting its interests. Nowhere is the undeveloped sense of the public order more evident in Russia than in the tradition which up to the very eve of the contemporary age treated crimes perpetrated by one private person against another or of an official against a private person as matters of no public concern.

In Rome, justice had been separated from administration by the second century BC. In countries with feudal traditions, that is in most of western Europe, this separation occurred in the late Middle Ages. In England, by the end of the thirteenth century the king's judicial councillors were distinguished from his administrative and fiscal agents. In France, too, the court known as the Parliament of Paris established itself by this time as an institution in its own right. Russia in this respect resembled rather the ancient oriental monarchies where royal officials typically dispensed justice as part of their administrative obligations. In Muscovy, each prikaz had its own judiciary section operating according to its private system of justice under whose authority came all within its administrative competence, exactly as had been the case earlier, during the appanage period, on large private domains. In addition, voevody dispensed justice on their territories. So did the church. Major cases of crimes against the state came before the tsar and his Council. As might be expected, efforts to establish a separate judiciary were made by Peter 1 and especially Catherine 11, but they ran into insurmountable difficulties of all sorts, not the least of which was the absence of a law code. The only existing Code, that of 1649, had become largely irrelevant in post-Petrine Russia, and in any event it provided very little guidance as to how to deal with grievances of one subject against another. Even if by some remote chance he happened to care enough to look, an eighteenth-century judge could not put his hands on the laws applicable to the case before him. This situation continued until the reign of Nicholas 1 when the government at last published a collection of laws issued since 1649 and then followed it with a new Code. But since court procedure continued to follow tradition, Russians still avoided legal proceedings like the plague. Until the Reform of 1864, the government did not initiate legal proceedings except where its own interests were concerned; ordinary criminal and all civil trials began at the instigation of the injured party. They usually took the form of an auction at which he who offered the all-powerful secretary more money won. All of which had a very debilitating effect on the quality of life. There exists a fashionable theory, derived from Marx, which holds that law and courts are there to protect