Peasants fled to Siberia from the Russian north, the heartland, the middle Volga area and southern frontier. They farmed their own land and a portion of the tsar's grain fields (which provided military grain supplies). Enserfment did not develop to any great extent, although the Church did own some peasants (by the end of the century about 1,500 peasant households belonged to Siberian monasteries). Russian peasants in Siberia governed themselves in local communes (on the model of the north discussed below) and were subject to the local governor in criminal affairs. Because of the sparseness of settlement and distance from Moscow, governors in Siberia were given longer terms (two to three years) and broader authority than governors in the centre. They were renowned for corruption, ruling like satraps far from Moscow's controlling hand.[145]
Siberian governors also oversaw a far-flung, sparsely settled population of ethnic groups, who were taxed primarily in precious furs. In economy these peoples ranged from settled forest exploitation and hunting to pastoral nomadism of horses and cattle in the steppe to reindeer pastoralism in the Arctic to hunting ocean mammals. Their communities were tiny, their languages numbered in the hundreds, most Paleo-Asiatic, unrelated one to the other. Siberian governors prosecuted natives for major crimes and made Russian courts available to Siberian natives as they wished, often making concessions to native customs, even in criminal cases. For petty crimes, governors allowed native communities to govern themselves with native elites, laws and councils.
The situation was equally complex in Russia's relations with the Bashkirs south of the Urals in the seventeenth century. The area was diverse in economy and ethnic groups. The more northern area was primarily agricultural, while Bashkirs settled to the south in the steppe practised pastoral nomadism. The judicial landscape was highly complex. Newly arrived Russians, Tatar peasants and military men, Chuvash, Udmurts, forcibly transferred Polotsk noblemen, all settled in the northern agricultural area, each with different social and political statuses. Some, like the Russian cavalrymen and Polotsk noblemen, received pomest'e with serfs. Service Tatars were equated with contract servitors and farmed land that they rented from native Bashkirs. Russian peasants fell into serfdom to military men or the Church, or settled state lands. Bashkir peasants, meanwhile, maintained their traditional customs, institutions and elites.
When Moscow acquired significant lands in left-bank Ukraine and Belarus' in the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising and the subsequent Russo-Polish wars (ended by peace treaties of 1667,1687), it faced an administrative challenge far different fromthatposedby the sparsely settled farming, forest and steppe communities east of Moscow. The Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, previously part of the parliamentary noble democracy ofthe Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, were densely and diversely populated. The cossack state, or hetmanate, governed most of the left bank from 1648 into the last third of the eighteenth century. Muscovy placed governors in key centres such as Kiev, Chernigov and Pereiaslav and administered Ukraine through the Little Russian Chancellery, or Malorossiiskii prikaz (to 1722). But through treaties renegotiated with each new hetman Moscow allowed the cossack administration to remain essentially unchanged. The hetmanate was divided into approximately sixteen regimental units, run by cossack colonels, who served as head appellate judges for the regional courts in their area. In adjudication they used diverse law codes - decrees of hetmans and tsars, Lithuanian Statutes of 1566 and 1588 and customary law. The result was so complex that the cossack administration commissioned a codification of laws in 1728. The new code - submitted to the Russian Senate in 1743 but not approved - was nevertheless used in the Ukrainian lands in the second half of the eighteenth century.[146]
Pockets of judicial practice outside the hetmanate still existed in Ukraine. Landlords operated their own manorial courts with authority over civil and minor criminal affairs; so also did the Church, which was the largest single proprietor of land. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (led by the Metropolitan of Kiev) maintained ecclesiastical courts for clerics, using Church law, and also for general issues of marriage, divorce and morality. Uniate Church institutions were almost unknown in this part of the Commonwealth.
Outside the hetmanate Muscovy ruled more directly through governors in Sloboda Ukraine and Zaporozhia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries municipal self-government through German law was granted to major towns in Ukraine and Belarus'. About twelve towns in the hetmanate enjoyed such privileges, while smaller towns were privately governed by landlords or ruled by cossack administration. Magdeburg law was maintained for at least a century after Muscovy took over, finally falling into disuse in favour of the hetmanate's law codes by the end of the eighteenth century. After Moscow acquired the Smolensk and upper Oka areas in Belarus', it revoked municipal privileges and transferred the areas to governor control. But tsars affirmed the landholdings and privileges granted to Smolensk noblemen by Polish kings; special rights for the Smolensk nobility were revoked only in 1761.
So, large areas and groups stood beyond the tsar's courts. The judicial arena that was covered by the tsar's centralised system reflected his claims to power. A principal area was criminal law - murder, robbery, theft with material evidence, treason, heresy, arson. The tsar also claimed authority over immoveable property, dispensing land in service or hereditary tenure. Accordingly, great attention in seventeenth-century law codes was devoted to the issues of ownership and inheritance of land. By the same token, to support the landed cavalry and to produce steady revenues for state expansion, the state concerned itself extensively with social legislation. Not only did it enforce enserfment but it also regulated slavery and limited the mobility of the urban populace. These key areas - criminal, property and social law - were adjudicated by the tsar's governors.
As judge the governor in the seventeenth century tried civil cases.[147] Governors with large jurisdictions who were accompanied by a state secretary (d'iak) appointed by Moscow could judge cases beyond 20 roubles in value and also land and slave disputes. Governors of smaller towns, without a state secretary, were limited to cases up to 20 roubles in value, after which their corresponding chancellery took over (Ulozhenie chapter 13: article 3).[148] In theory criminal cases were done by locally elected criminal officers - the guba elders and swornmen. But by the mid-seventeenth century the guba system was falling under the authority of governors. Guba officers might develop a case and turn it over to the governor to judge, or resolve it jointly with him. Whole areas of the realm did not have guba institutions, and often did not want them. V N. Glaz'ev shows that in the seventeenth century communities often refused to support both a governor and a guba apparatus, since it was too
expensive. [149]
The legal system embraced by the system of governors was uniform across the state in law and procedure, but not in judicial venue. Leaving aside the many areas of immunity discussed above, legal jurisdiction was complex even within the tsar's system. F. Dmitriev argued that the Ulozhenie of 1649 had simplified legal jurisdiction from sixteenth-century complexity to three principles -jurisdiction by residence, by social status or by type of crime.[150] His simplification is deceptive: the resulting system still provided multiple court systems and judicial personnel, resulting in frequent transfer of venue and quarrels between centre and periphery over jurisdiction.
145
V A. Aleksandrov and N. N. Pokrovskii,
146
A. I. Pashuk,
147
Two classic surveys oflocal government and the
148
Hereafter references to chapters and articles in the
149
V N. Glaz'ev,