Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/71

 Rh first and foremost, for levying taxes; the repression of crime is, above all things, a financial operation. Even though cognizance of certain crimes, such as murder and brigandage, is reserved to the State, it is all a question of cash, even there. These affairs bring in more money, and the State keeps the best morsels for itself.

Wherefore, in the Code of 1497—after the Rousskaïa Pravda, the earliest copy of which dates from 955 or 962, legislation has come to a standstill—the provisions for criminal cases rank first. In civil cases the legislator generally defers to custom. He hardly mentions the relations and obligations arising out of family ties or contracts, and is absolutely silent concerning all other judicial relations. As regards public rights, he gives nothing, or hardly anything. There is some dim conception of a right of guardianship over the common people, vested in the State, evidenced by an injunction that no man must be deprived of his liberty without the Sovereign's consent. The legislator's chief anxiety has been to organize the work of justice, and organization, in his view, consists in the reckoning up and allotment of expenses and taxation. The Soudiébnik is a penal code and a book of profits, very little else.

In the number and severity of the penalties suggested, the Tartar influence is clearly seen. The Rousskaïa Pravda was a far gentler Code, and a more liberal one, too; it gave the culprit power in many cases to buy himself off. The new Code ignores this privilege. The words bity knouty, biti batogy, recur in almost every line. In the application of these penalties, and in the whole of its legislation, the idea of equality, which is very apparent and accords with the democratic tendencies of the Code, is at war with the contrary principle of vested rights claimed by the Byzantine spirit of the Church. Judicial practice itself was thus drawn from the civil sources of the Greek legislation—from the laws of Constantine the Great, Justinian, and Leo the Philosopher, from the Eclogues of Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus; so that if these tribunals are responsible for the peasant as well as for everybody else, the peasant will be hanged, and the boïar only whipped or put in prison. In most cases, too, he will be tortured to make him confess his crime. The accused person is always put to slow torture: his ribs are broken in, nails driven into his flesh. This is the sixteenth century!

Up till the seventeenth, this same Code, lingering far behind the rest of Europe, will accept the judicial combat, also part of the habits of the country. At Novgorod the law even permitted such combats between two women who accused each other, while at Pskov a more gallant statute allowed the fair