Russia under the Old regime

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the interests of the ruling class. Historical experience indicates the contrary to be true. Those in power have no need of courts and laws to have their way; it is the poor and the weak who do. Anyone who doubts this proposition has only to compare the general condition and the sense of security of the lower orders in areas with weak legal traditions, as for example south-east Asia, with those like western Europe and the United States where they are deeply entrenched.

Until the 1860s Russian jurisprudence did not even recognize the distinction between laws, decrees, and administrative ordinances, all of which, once approved by the sovereign, were treated with equal solemnity and in 1830 entered in pitiless chronological order in the Full Collection of Laws. An edict introducing a new order of succession to the imperial throne or one permanently freeing dvoriane from compulsory state service was treated, from the formal legal point of view, on a par with an ukaz authorizing the construction of a manufacturing plant or granting the petition of some retired officer from the provinces. Indeed, most of the fundamental laws affecting Russia's system of government and the status of its citizens were never at all promulgated in any formal way. Among them were: the fixing of peasants to the soil and of urban inhabitants to the cities (i.e. serfdom); the principle that all secular land had to bear service; the introduction of the oprichnina; the authority of landlords over their peasants; the rule that civil servants were to be automatically promoted on the basis of seniority; the founding of the first centralized political police organ, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz; and the introduction of limited residence rights (the 'Pale of Settlement') for Jewish inhabitants. Others were promulgated in highly casual fashion. For example, the legal basis of autocratic power exercised by Russia's rulers was formulated in an incidental phrase in Peter's Military Regulation, while the laws governing the persecution of political criminals until 1845 were for all practical purposes legally undefined. A corollary of this kind of disrespect for legal procedure was the lack of awareness of clear distinctions among the constitutional, criminal and civil branches of the law, such as had been common in the west since the Middle Ages. Failure to discriminate among types of legal acts as well as among the various branches of the law contributed greatly to the confusion which reigned in Russian jurisprudence until the 1860s. To make matters worse yet, until the 1860s Russian laws need not have been made public to go into effect; they were often promulgated in confidential memoranda known only to the officials charged with their execution. This practice outlived the 1864 Reform. As will be pointed out below, the Ministry of the Interior in the 1870s and 1880s often introduced measures affecting the life of every citizen by means of secret circulars, many of which remain unpublished to this day.