Punishment By Penance In 18th-century Russia: Churchpractices In The Service Of The Secular State

Abstract

This study focuses on the process by which the state actively came to rely on church practices, especially penance, and religion-oriented values in prosecuting serious felonies committed by lay people in Russia in the second half of the 18th century. This trend - strongly evidenced in legislation, official pronouncements and declarations, judicial proceedings and sentences - was conditioned by a great many factors. The spectrum of punishment for serious crimes was significantly curtailed during the age of Enlightenment: the nobility, the upper two guilds of merchants, “eminent citizens,” and members of the clerical estate were exempted from corporal punishment. In addition, a moratorium on capital punishment, secretly introduced by Elizabeth in 1741, was confirmed in these years. Addressing the topic of the humanization of criminal law promises to help scholars reinterpret such important conceptual problems as the relationship between church and state; mechanisms of social control; the role of the monarch’s personality in shaping government policy; and the compatibility, as contemporaries perceived it, between God’s commandments and state law.

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