Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

domain even the most rudimentary apparatus of surveillance, it had to have recourse to cruder methods.

Of these, the most effective and most widely used was denunciation. It had been noted above that the Code of 1649 made one exception to the rule forbidding peasants to complain against landlords, and that was when the complaint concerned actions detrimental to the gosudar and his gosudarstvo. The range of such anti-state crimes was broad; included were offences which in the language of modern totalitarian jurisprudence would be called 'economic crimes', such as concealing peasants from census-takers or misinforming the Office of Pomestia about the true extent of one's landholdings. The Code placed great reliance on denunciation as a means of assuring that the state obtained the proper quantity of service and tiaglo. Several of its articles (e.g. Chapter II, Articles 6, 9, 18 and 19) made denunciation of anti-government 'plots' mandatory under penalty of death. The Code specified that families of 'traitors' (including their minor children) were liable to execution for failure to inform the authorities in time to prevent the crime from being committed.* In the seventeenth century crimes against the state (i.e. against the tsar) came to be known as 'word and deed' (slovo i delo gosudarevo), that is, either expressed intention or actual commission of acts injurious to the gosudar. Anyone who pronounced these dreaded words against another person, caused him to be arrested and subjected to torture; as a rule, the accuser suffered the same fate, because the authorities suspected him of having concealed some information. 'Word and deed' often served to settle personal vendettas. Two aspects of this practice require emphasis, because they foreshadow a great deal of later Russian jurisprudence dealing with political crimes. One is that where the interests of the monarch were concerned, rio distinction was drawn between the intention to commit a crime and the deed itself. Secondly, that at a time when the state did not concern itself with crimes committed by one subject against another, it laid down very harsh punishments for crimes directed against its own interests.

Denunciation would not have been half as effective a means of control were it not for the collective responsibility inherent in tiaglo. Since the taxes and labour services of anyone who fled his tiaglo community fell on its remaining members (until the next cadaster, at any rate), the government had some assurance that tiaglo payers would attentively

* This legal monstrosity was revived by Stalin in 1934 when he was about to launch his terror. Supplementary clauses to Article 58 of the Criminal Code added that year provided for a minimum sentence of six months of imprisonment for failure to denounce 'counterrevolutionary crimes'. In one respect Stalin went beyond the authors of the 1649 Code in that he established severe penalties (five years of prison) for members of families of citizens guilty of particularly heinous anti-state crimes, such as desertion abroad, even if they had had no prior knowledge of the culprit's intentions.