Containing the spectacle of punishment: The Russian autocracy and the abolition of the knout, 1817-1845

Slavic Review

Volumn 56, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 613-644

  Schrader, Abby M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248112028     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2502115     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. In Russian, a single word, palach, refers to the individual who fulfilled capital punishment and corporal punishment sentences. Although the equivalent English word, executioner, is an imprecise translation of this term, I find it smoother to use the English rather than the Russian in this article.
2. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 1260, op. 1, 1818, d. 661 (O razsmotrenii zakonov, predpisyvaiushchikh nakazanie za vazhneishiia prestupleniia), ll. 2ob., 4-6, 7ob.-8; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 1, 1818, d. 6 (Delo o nakazaniiakh za vazhneishiia prestupleniia), l. 1-1ob.; for a more detailed definition of the knout, see E. F. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (St. Petersburg, 1895), 15:464-65.
3. The death penalty was still used to punish both lower military personnel who had committed serious offenses and those in the civil sector who committed state crimes, i.e., political crimes threatening the tsar, his or her family, or the autocratic system. This provided the rationale behind Catherine the Great's sentencing of Emelian Pugachev to drawing and quartering and Nicholas I's hanging of some of the most prominent leaders of the 1825 Decembrist revolt. On the abolition of the death penalty, see Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (PSZ), 1st series, #10306 (St. Petersburg, 1832).
4. When the Senate and Empress Elizabeth abolished the death sentence for most crimes and replaced it with public corporal punishment by knout in 1754, they ordered that female criminals be sentenced to exile at hard labor without first being branded. The only explanation they afforded was that branding had been instituted to prevent criminals from escaping hard labor and that they believed that far fewer women escaped than men. The central and local officials who discussed strengthening supervision over exiles and advocated branding escaped convicts during the 1830s and 1840s repeatedly referred to this "fact" without offering empirical evidence substantiating their position. Contrary to official contentions, there is ample evidence that female convicts did attempt to escape from exile. Although there is a general paucity of reliable data on exiles' repeat offenses, the data that do exist show that, in Irkutsk and Enisei provinces in eastern Siberia in 1833 and 1834, escape attempts constituted the majority of repeat offenses committed by women: one-fifth and one-third of the women apprehended in 1833 and 1834 in Irkutsk and Enisei, respectively, had attempted to flee incarceration. On the replacement of the death penalty with knouting accompanied by facial branding for men, see PSZ, 1st series, #10306.
5. On the prevalence of escape among female exiles, see Statisticheskiia svedeniia o ssyl'nykh v sibiri za 1833 i 1834 gody: (Izvlechenie iz otcheta o delakh Sibinkogo komiteta) (St. Petersburg, 1837), 23-26.
6. RGIA, f. 1260, op. 1, 1818, d. 661, l. 7; N. N. Evreinov, Istoriia telesnykh nakazanii v rossii (St. Petersburg, 1913), 35-38;
7. J. Richter and C. G. H. Geissler, Chatiments usités en Russie representés dans une suite de dix gravures enluminées et accompagnées d'une explication (Leipzig, n.d. - after 1800), engraving 8.
8. RGIA, f. 1260, op. 1, 1818, d. 661, l. 8.
9. Ibid., ll. 5-6.
10. RGIA, f. 1260, op. 1, 1818, d. 661, l. 43.
11. Exemption or subjection to corporal punishment did not constitute the sole arena in which early nineteenth-century Russian officials constructed this binary relationship between the upper and lower estates. Other "negative" privileges that the autocracy granted to only the upper estates included exemption from paying the poll tax and being recruited to perform military service. These three "negative" rights functioned as a unit and constituted one of the chief ways in which privilege was marked in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia. As I discuss below, Catherine the Great established the terms of this complex in her 1785 Charter to the Nobility and Alexander I and Nicholas I upheld the parameters of this unit in the legislation they subsequently enacted.
12. For nineteenth-century statesmen's attribution of the amelioration of corporal punishment practices to the gradual influence of the Enlightenment in Russia, see the general comments of the committee convened in 1861 to review penal practices under the Second Section of His Majesty's Own Chancery in Ob otmene telesnykh nakazanii (St. Petersburg, 1862), especially sees. 1 and 2. Also see similar comments by the State Council in RGIA, f. 1149, t. 5, 1863, d. 47 (Ob otmene telesnykh nakazanii). Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich makes a similar claim in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GA RF), f. 729, op. 1, 1860, d. 521 (Mnenie Velikogo Kniazia Konstantina Nikolaevicha o proekte II Otdeleniia S.E.I.V.K. ob otmene telesnykh nakazanii). Finally, the governors-general of western and eastern Siberia, in their comments on corporal punishment in the exile system also attribute their desires to restrict the use of harsh instruments of punishment to the fact that punishment in Russia was gradually becoming more humane.
13. For their comments, see Ob otmene tiazhkikh telesnykh nakazanii za prestupleniia sovershaemiia ssyl'nymi (St. Petersburg, 1867), l. Many western scholars have accepted at face value the idea that the gradual amelioration of corporal punishment was attributable to the spread of the ideals that characterized the European, and specifically the French, Enlightenment. Bruce Adams's treatment of the movement to abolish corporal punishment reflects this opinion. He argues that the Enlightenment, westernization, and urbanization led educated Russians to believe that corporal punishment was inhumane and barbaric.
14. See his discussion in Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996), 12-36.
15. James Downey sees the movement to abolish corporal punishment in Russia through a similar lens in "Civil Society and the Campaign against Corporal Punishment, 1863-1904" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1993). Although I am not arguing that the Enlightenment did not have an impact on Russian thought, I am suggesting that, even as they attributed their decision to so-called enlightened and civilized ideas, officials were motivated by other factors when they decided to abolish the knout in 1845.
16. On this, see Downey, "Civil Society and the Campaign against Corporal Punishment."
17. For provocative discussions of how the high must incorporate the low for the mapping of social hierarchies to have cultural meaning and of the dangerous potential that such mapping has for the cultural order, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), introduction,
18. and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 1966).
19. For an elaboration of how autocratic officials used penal legislation as one means of structuring Russian society, see Abby M. Schrader, "The Languages of the Lash: The Russian Autocracy and the Reform of Corporal Punishment, 1817-1893" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996).
20. See Korkunov on the different bases of rule of law in Russia and in western Europe. N. M. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 8th ed. (St. Petersburg, 1914), 216-17.
21. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 188-89;
22. Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh: vnesennyi v 1844 godu v Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (St. Petersburg, 1845), v.
23. From the era of Peter the Great through the reign of Alexander I, Russian autocrats consistently vacillated between two approaches to legal codification. They convened ten legislative commissions during this period, charging some with the task of compiling existing Russian laws and others with the mission of devising entirely new codes based on Roman law or western legal traditions. Ultimately, all of this work came to naught. Although all of these tsars recognized that it was essential to modernize and regularize Russia's legal and judicial systems, it was only during the reign of Nicholas I that legal codification became a matter of urgency. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic challenge to European state systems and the balance of power, and the Decembrist revolt, Nicholas opted for the nationalist approach to codification that theoretically and apparently precluded the assimilation of western legal norms. Yet, Nicholas I remained faithful to the cameralist approach to legal codification. Thus, the policies and practices of nineteenth-century tsars, like those of their eighteenth-century counterparts, continued to be informed by central European norms and notions of the well-ordered police state. For a fuller development of this thesis see Schrader, "Languages of the Lash," 22-71.
24. Also see Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 216-17, 275;
25. I. I. Solodkin, Ocherki po istorii russkogo ugolovnogo prava, pervaia chetvert' XIX veka (Leningrad, 1961), 50-57;
26. Vtoroe otdelenie sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva kantseliarii, Obozrenie istoricheskikh sviedenii o svode zakonov s 1700 do 1826 goda (St. Petersburg, 1837);
27. and Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976).
28. For an analysis of cameralism and the conceptualization of the well-ordered police state, see Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, 1983),
29. and Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Ithaca, 1996).
30. Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, 1981), 295.
31. Also see David Griffiths's introduction, "Of Estates, Charters, and Constitutions," in David Griffiths and George E. Munro, eds. and trans., The Laws of Russia. Series II: Imperial Russia, Volume 289: April 21, 1785. Catherine II's Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns (Bakersfield, Calif., 1991), xxii-lii.
32. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 275.
33. V. O. Kliuchevskii, Istoriia soslovii v Rossii (kurs, chitannyi v Moskovskom universitete v 1886-om godu), 2d ed. (Moscow, 1914), 2-11;
34. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 274-75.
35. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 295-98;
36. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 237-41;
37. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 218-19.
38. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 275.
39. Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh, xv, xvii.
40. Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh, Ibid., xxv, xxvi.
41. Although this part of my article is devoted to an analysis of the roots of the two estate-based languages of punishment, it is also significant that the penal legislation codified in 1845 both reflected and constructed other kinds of difference, such as that based on gender, ethnicity, age, or the health of a criminal. For a more complete treatment of these issues, see Schrader, "Languages of the Lash."
42. Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh, xxxii-xxxiv, xl.
43. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1829-1844, d. 147 (Bumagi po ugolovnomu ulozheniiu i zapiska o nikh), ll. 70-71.
44. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1829-1844, d. 147, ll. 83-84; Spisok grazhdanskim chinam pervykh chetyrekh klassov po starshinstvu (St. Petersburg, 1845), 106. I am grateful to Tom Trice for helping me locate information about Karniulin-Pinskii's career.
45. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1829-1844, d. 147, ll. 87-88.
46. Ibid., ll. 70-71, 84-85.
47. William Wagner employs this productive terminology to discuss the autocracy's use of law as a means of ordering society in his discussion of family law in late imperial Russia. William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1994), 3-6.
48. Laura Engelstein makes a similar point regarding criminal law in The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992).
49. S. V. Pakhman, "Zadacha kodifikatsii," Vestnik evropy, November 1876, 453.
50. This tension, evident in the 1845 Codex, is something that officials never quite resolved; it consequently continued to characterize their approach to revising penal legislation even during the era of the Great Reforms. For more on this issue, see Schrader, "Languages of the Lash," 349-66.
51. The Charter to the Nobility did not grant the personal nobility - those who occupied ranks 9 through 14 - the same privileges enjoyed by nobles who occupied a higher rank. Charter of the Nobility, Point 19, Statute 92, PSZ, 1st series, #16187;
52. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 300-303, 556;
53. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 242; RGIA, f. 1260, op. 1, 1814, d. 620 (Delo po voprosu: deti kuptsov 1 i 2 gildii podlezhat' li telesnomu nakazaniiu), l. 8-8ob.;
54. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 289-92.
55. The idea of reconfiguring privilege resulted from a complex set of negotiations between the autocracy and its subjects. The cases considered by the State Council and the Commission for the Compilation of Laws make it clear that at least some merchants actively sought this revision. They understood that exemption from corporal punishment constituted a substantial privilege and resented the fact that their own family members were subject to floggings for committing crimes, whereas the families of hereditary nobles were not. Nonetheless, this demand for reform from below does not fully explain the tsar's receptivity. RGIA, f. 1260, op. 1, 1814, d. 620.
56. Ibid., l. 3-3ob.
57. Ibid., ll. 11-14, 15ob., 16.
58. Ibid., ll. 17, 17ob., 20-25.
59. During the first half of the century, officials also granted this immunity to students and graduates of various educational institutions. RGIA, f. 1400, op. 1, 1818, d. 136 (O nakazanii plet'mi i otdache v soldaty iskliuchenye iz Mediko-Khirurgicheskoi Akademii studenty), ll. 2ob.-3.
60. In 1847, the autocracy also freed from corporal punishment students enrolled in other educational institutions. In 1853, cadets in the merchant marine received the same privilege. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1833, d. 61 (O razreshenii voprosa, osvobozhdaiutsia li ot telesnago nakazaniia detei lichnykh dvorian), ll. 1-3; RGIA, f. 1261, op. 2, 1852, d. 63 (Ob osvobozhdenii uchenikov Rizhskago Uchilishcha Torgovago-Moreplavaniia ot rekrutstva, telesnago nakazaniia i podushnago oklada), ll. 1-3, 13-15; A. G. Timofeev, Istoriia telesnykh nakazanii v Russkom prave (St. Petersburg, 1904), 138.
61. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudantvennoe pravo, vol. 1, Obshchaia chast', 302.
62. RGIA, f. 1261, op. 2, 1852, d. 63, ll. 1-3, 13-15.
63. The Second Section reaffirmed this ruling in 1853. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a (Perepiski i zamechaniia na proekte ob ulozhenii o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh), ll. 262-63; RGIA, f. 1261, op. 2, 1853, d. 29 (Po voprosu: sleduet li Zasedatelei Volostnykh Pravlenii podvergat' telesnomu nakazaniiu), ll. 5-7.
64. Gregory L. Freeze's 1986 article on the estate paradigm in nineteenth-century Russia remains one of the most significant works on this issue. Freeze asserts that "the modern notion of soslovie arose only in the early nineteenth century" and "that the estate system was dynamic and still actively developing (not disintegrating) in the nineteenth century." Gregory L. Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (February 1986): 14, and 11-36 generally.
65. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 23-24.
66. As Spierenburg asserts: "The laws ... authorities enacted had to be implemented visually through the public punishment of violators. The observable fact that punishments were indeed meted out constituted a necessary prerequisite for the preservation of a shaky position of authority. People had to see that 'justice reigned' in a particular city or country." While Spierenburg takes issue with Foucault on several points, his view of the spectacle of punishment resembles Foucault's. Foucault maintains that "the public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular." He goes on to state that this is not merely an "economy of example," but instead "a policy of terror to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power." Finally, he concludes that "the ceremony of the public torture and execution displayed for all to see the power relation that gave his force to the law." Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering; Executions and the Evolution of Repression, From a Pre-Industrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 55;
67. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 48, 49, 50.
68. This conception of the social division of society did not go unchallenged. Nikolai S. Mordvinov launched the strongest objection to the policy of punishing the lower estates differently. A participant in the 1817-1825 secret commission, Mordvinov criticized Alexander I's retention of the knout. Born in 1754 into a prestigious naval family, Mordvinov was a member of Alexander I's "unofficial committee" and had served as naval minister (1802) and as a member of the Noble Assembly. He was then appointed to head, first, the Department of State Economics (1810) and then the Department of Civil and Administrative Affairs (1821) of the State Council. In his official capacities, Mordvinov had spent time in England, America, France, Germany, and Italy; spoke five foreign languages fluently, and was married to the non-Russian-speaking daughter of the British Consul in Russia. He was a confirmed Benthamite and was widely read in the major works of the Enlightenment. A member of the highest Petersburg aristocracy, Mordvinov was one of the "young legislators" who surrounded Alexander I during the first part of his reign. Mordvinov was well respected, but his was a minority opinion. V. S. Ikonnikov, Graf N. S. Mordvinov: Istoricheskaia monografiia sostavlennaia po pechatnym i rukopisnym istochnikam (St. Petersburg, 1878), 62-85;
69. Solodkin, Ocherki po istorii russkogo ugolovnogo prava, 49-50.
70. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1817-1827, d. 22 (Mnenie Vysochaishe utverzhdennago komiteta 1817 goda ob otmene nakazaniia knutom i vyryvaniia nozdrei), l. 3.
71. Ibid., l. 17-17ob.
72. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 403. Emphasis in the original.
73. Ibid., ll. 5-6.
74. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844, d. 279 (Po otnosheniiam k gubernskim i drugikh mest prokuroram o dostavlenii svedenii, kakoe iz orudii kazni ustrashaiut bolee prestupnikov), l. 59.
75. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844-1845, d. 279, l. 62; RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 340.
76. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844-1845, d. 279, l. 13; RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 340. Emphasis added.
77. Kiev prisoners believed that the state had recently altered the dimensions of the knout, making it less harsh. Prince Ol'denburg remarked in 1828 that there was no standard blueprint for constructing a knout. This, along with variations in executioners' strength, made the knout particularly capricious. Ol'denburg complained that the state had not instituted "any regulations" concerning the knout and asked the minister of justice to issue a circular to the provincial leaders mandating that the knout be standardized. I was unable to locate this circular during my archival research. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844-1845, d. 279, l. 17; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1835, d. 91 (O dopolnitel'nykh pravilakh k obshchemu polozheniiu o palachakh), l. 5.
78. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844-1845, d. 279, l. 21.
79. Ibid., l. 28.
80. GA RF, f. 109, 1-aia ekspeditsiia, 3-ego otdeleniia, 1845, d. 99 (Mnenie Grafa Alekseia Orlova o proekte novogo ugolovnogo ulozheniia), ll. 3-4ob. Emphasis in the original.
81. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1817-1827, d. 22, l. 3ob. Emphasis added.
82. Ibid., l. 4-4ob.
83. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844-1845, d. 279, l. 44.
84. Ibid., l. 72.
85. Ibid., l. 47-47ob.
86. Ibid., ll. 6-7, 22, 40, 45, 57, 65, 346.
87. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 57-58.
88. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Ibid., 58-63.
89. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 404.
90. Many of those who attended floggings were accidental witnesses. In other words, they were in the vicinity of the scaffold for other purposes, such as trade or marketing. As I elaborate below, officials suggested that many of these accidental witnesses had no interest in paying attention to the knouting. It is therefore impossible to deduce precisely what average witnesses thought of the spectacle of punishment. Given low rates of literacy in Russia generally and among the popular estates particularly, it is unsurprising that few, if any, audience members left records of their responses. Any written testimony that they might have provided was not collected in the major archival holdings that I surveyed. The best records of audience reception that survive are those that were collected by the Ministry of Justice in its survey of the popular impact of various instruments of punishment. This survey was undertaken on the eve of the codification of Russian penal law in 1845. I have been able to glean additional information concerning audience responses from materials presented to the State Council, the Commission for the Compilation of Laws, and the Second Section of His Majesty's Own Chancery. Additional information concerning spectators' responses to public floggings may be contained in the Police Executive files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Unfortunately, this material has been unavailable for the past four years due to structural problems at the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg.
91. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1824, d. 488 (Mneniia Nikolaia Semenovicha Mordvinova o smertnoi kazni i telesnykh nakazaniiakh), l. 28ob. Bludov included Mordvinov's comment in Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh, lv.
92. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1824, d. 488, l. 28.
93. Ibid., ll. 3ob.-4. Emphasis added.
94. Ibid., l. 29ob.
95. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1820, d. 493 (Zapiska neustanovlennago litsa "opyt' sblizheniia k umereniiu publichnykh nakazanii prestupnikam"), ll. 2ob.-3.
96. Ibid., l. 2ob.
97. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, ll. 268ob.-269.
98. Ibid., l. 269-269ob.
99. "Sobstvennoruchnaia vsepoddanneishaia zapiska tainago sovetnika Novosil'tseva o nakazaniiakh," in Sbornik istoricheskiikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva Pervago Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi Ego Imperatorskago Velichestva Kantseliarii, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1876), 308-9, 314.
100. Ibid., l. 269-269ob.
101. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 1, 1841, d. 159 (Ob otmene telesnago nakazaniia prestupnits v musul'manskikh provintsiiakh), ll. 4ob.-5. Officials in the Caucasus were unquestionably afraid of rebellion. Russia had recently conquered the region and officials considered their authority tenuous among the local, ethnically non-Russian, and primarily Muslim population. Whether this fear was founded is difficult to determine. This issue is further examined in Schrader, "Languages of the Lash," 288-300.
102. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 1, 1841, d. 159, ll. 3-3ob., 9-9ob.
103. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 534, 1844, d. 279, l. 79.
104. Ibid., ll. 87-88.
105. RGIA, f. 1251, op. 1, 1817-1827, d. 22, l. 3ob.
106. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 404.
107. "Nechto o nakazaniiakh: Zapiska barona Shteingelia," in Sbornik istoricheskiikh materialov, 305-6.
108. Proekt ulozheniia o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh, lvi.
109. "Sobstvennoruchnaia vsepoddanneishaia zapiska tainago sovetnika Novosil'tseva o nakazaniiakh," 311.
110. "Sobstvennoruchnaia vsepoddanneishaia zapiska tainago sovetnika Novosil'tseva o nakazaniiakh," Ibid., 311-17.
111. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1824, d. 488, l. 29ob.
112. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 267.
113. "Nechto o nakazaniiakh: Zapiska barona Shteingelia," 301-3.
114. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1824, d. 488, l. 28.
115. RGIA, f. 994, op. 2, 1820, d. 493, l. 3.
116. GA RF, f. 109, 1-aia ekspeditsiia, 1832, d. 326 (O kuplennom v Moskve synom Marshala Ekmiul'skago knute, koim nakazyvaiutsia prestupniki), ll. 1-5.
117. Ibid., l. 1.
118. Ibid., l. 9.
119. GA RF, f. 109, 1-aia ekspeditsiia, 3-ego otdeleniia, 1845, d. 99, l. 3.
120. RGIA, f. 1187, op. 1, 1845, d. 19a, l. 403ob. Emphasis in the original.
121. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1833, d. 71 (Po voprosu: Iz kakikh prestupnikov opredeliat' v palachi? i o snabzhenii ikh kormovymi den'gami i odezhdoiu, dlia arestantov opredelennym), ll. 2ob.-3.
122. According to Statute 35 of Volume 15 of the Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, those crimes subject to sentences of hard labor included murder, the forceful conversion of a Christian to a non-Christian religion, preventing someone from officiating in a Russian Orthodox church service, sacrilege, desecrating a grave or stealing from a corpse, committing an act that harmed or intended to harm the tsar or a member of his family, intentional disruption of state security, taking up arms against the state, intentional acts of murder, kidnapping a free individual and selling him or her, child snatching, counterfeit, sodomy accompanied by rape, brigandage, premeditated arson, and theft accompanied by violence. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1836, d. 94 (O dopolnitel'nykh pravilakh k obshchemu polozheniiu o palachakh), l. 4; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1835, d. 91 (O dopolnitel'nykh pravilakh k obshchemu polozheniiu o palachakh), ll. 5ob.-6ob.
123. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1835, d. 91, ll. 10-11; RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1836, d. 94, l. 11-11ob.
124. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1835, d. 91, ll. 6ob.-7ob.
125. Ibid., l. 15ob.
126. On 15 March 1798, Paul I instituted legislation mandating the settling of executioners 60 versty from a provincial city. The state altered these laws, adding clauses concerning the supervision of retired executioners, on 8 October 1836. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1836, d. 94, ll. 11ob.-13.
127. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1833, d. 71, ll. 2-3ob.
128. The broader significance of Baltic exceptionalism in the sphere of penal law is explored in Schrader, "Languages of the Lash," 107-77.
129. RGIA, f. 1149, t. 2, 1833, d. 71, ll. 3ob.-4.
130. For a fuller development of this theoretical approach, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1-6.
131. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 65.
132. The impression that the autocracy sought to regulate the scaffold in the era of legal codification is further substantiated by several laws instituted immediately following the introduction of the 1845 Codex of Punishments. During the mid-1840s, officials drew up blueprints for a standardized lash, scaffold, and "shameful hearse" (variously referred to as pozornye drogi or chernye drogi) for transporting convicts. The combined force of these orders indicates that the autocracy placed a premium on standardizing and overseeing corporal punishment. The state's preoccupation with regulating the scaffold persisted until the very moment when corporal punishment was abolished: central officials continued to supervise the provincial police and courts carefully to make sure that the instruments of punishment they were using complied with standard regulations. When they uncovered instances of noncompliance, they ordered that local-level officials destroy nonstandard lashes, brands, and other instruments of punishment and issued secret circulars to provincial officials underscoring the need to uphold central directives. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 9, 1845, d. 552 (Po otnosheniiu Gosudarstvennogo Sekretaria o poriadke ispolneniia prigovora pri nakazaniia arestantov v katorzhnuiu rabotu i k ssylke na poselenie: Zdes' i ob ustroistve eshafota), ll. 2-4ob., 28-33; RGIA, f. 1286, op. 9, 1845-1846, d. 535 (Po otnosheniiu Tovarishcha Ministra Iustitsii o pletakh upotrebliaemykh v Ekaterinoslavskoi Gubernii), ll. 1-3, 5-7, 189ob.-190, 209-10, 218-19, On the continued supervision of the scaffold see RGIA, f. 1286, op. 18, 1857, d. 602 (O vysylke nachal'niku Simbirskoi gubernii dvukh novykh pletei dlia nakazaniia prestupnikov i o drugikh orudiakh telesnago nakazaniia: Tut zhe o poriadke snoshenii ob ispolnenii i razsylke kleim i sostavy upotrebliaemogo dlia natiraniia onykh).
133. This "coexistence" was not limited to Russia. Spierenburg makes this point clear in his discussion of the spectacle of capital punishment elsewhere in Europe. He argues that the Dutch, for example, began to regulate the scaffold in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by mandating that punishment take place in a single, circumscribed location. Yet Holland did not abolish public corporal punishment until 1854. Similarly, in England, flogging was moved outside the city walls in 1783, yet beatings continued to be administered in public, and even after the privatization of floggings in England in 1863, prisoners continued to be beaten and hung in private within prison walls. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, 45-48, 183-99.