Because, by and large, the metropolitan and provincial bureaucracies did not mix, the public spirit which began to make its appearance among the former did not communicate itself to the country at large. For the overwhelming majority of officials, self-seeking and bribery were a way of life to which they could conceive of no alternative. The conservative historian Nicholas Karamzin had them in mind when he used to say that if one were to answer with one word the question:' "what goes on in Russia?", one would have to reply "thieving".'7 Public corruption, ubiquitous in Russia of the Muscovite and imperial periods was a symptom of a deeper malaise, lawlessness, of which it is always a faithful companion.
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Until the Judiciary Reform of 1864, but in some respects (which will be specified later) even after it, Russia knew nothing of independent justice. Justice was a branch of the administration, and as such its foremost concern was enforcing the government's will and protecting its interests. Nowhere is the undeveloped sense of the public order more evident in Russia than in the tradition which up to the very eve of the contemporary age treated crimes perpetrated by one private person against another or of an official against a private person as matters of no public concern.
In Rome, justice had been separated from administration by the second century BC. In countries with feudal traditions, that is in most of western Europe, this separation occurred in the late Middle Ages. In England, by the end of the thirteenth century the king's judicial councillors were distinguished from his administrative and fiscal agents. In France, too, the court known as the Parliament of Paris established itself by this time as an institution in its own right. Russia in this respect resembled rather the ancient oriental monarchies where royal officials typically dispensed justice as part of their administrative obligations. In Muscovy, each prikaz had its own judiciary section operating according to its private system of justice under whose authority came all within its administrative competence, exactly as had been the case earlier, during the appanage period, on large private domains. In addition, voevody dispensed justice on their territories. So did the church. Major cases of crimes against the state came before the tsar and his Council. As might be expected, efforts to establish a separate judiciary were made by Peter 1 and especially Catherine 11, but they ran into insurmountable difficulties of all sorts, not the least of which was the absence of a law code. The only existing Code, that of 1649, had become largely irrelevant in post-Petrine Russia, and in any event it provided very little guidance as to how to deal with grievances of one subject against another. Even if by some remote chance he happened to care enough to look, an eighteenth-century judge could not put his hands on the laws applicable to the case before him. This situation continued until the reign of Nicholas 1 when the government at last published a collection of laws issued since 1649 and then followed it with a new Code. But since court procedure continued to follow tradition, Russians still avoided legal proceedings like the plague. Until the Reform of 1864, the government did not initiate legal proceedings except where its own interests were concerned; ordinary criminal and all civil trials began at the instigation of the injured party. They usually took the form of an auction at which he who offered the all-powerful secretary more money won. All of which had a very debilitating effect on the quality of life. There exists a fashionable theory, derived from Marx, which holds that law and courts are there to protect
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the interests of the ruling class. Historical experience indicates the contrary to be true. Those in power have no need of courts and laws to have their way; it is the poor and the weak who do. Anyone who doubts this proposition has only to compare the general condition and the sense of security of the lower orders in areas with weak legal traditions, as for example south-east Asia, with those like western Europe and the United States where they are deeply entrenched.
Until the 1860s Russian jurisprudence did not even recognize the distinction between laws, decrees, and administrative ordinances, all of which, once approved by the sovereign, were treated with equal solemnity and in 1830 entered in pitiless chronological order in the Full Collection of Laws. An edict introducing a new order of succession to the imperial throne or one permanently freeing dvoriane from compulsory state service was treated, from the formal legal point of view, on a par with an ukaz authorizing the construction of a manufacturing plant or granting the petition of some retired officer from the provinces. Indeed, most of the fundamental laws affecting Russia's system of government and the status of its citizens were never at all promulgated in any formal way. Among them were: the fixing of peasants to the soil and of urban inhabitants to the cities (i.e. serfdom); the principle that all secular land had to bear service; the introduction of the oprichnina; the authority of landlords over their peasants; the rule that civil servants were to be automatically promoted on the basis of seniority; the founding of the first centralized political police organ, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz; and the introduction of limited residence rights (the 'Pale of Settlement') for Jewish inhabitants. Others were promulgated in highly casual fashion. For example, the legal basis of autocratic power exercised by Russia's rulers was formulated in an incidental phrase in Peter's Military Regulation, while the laws governing the persecution of political criminals until 1845 were for all practical purposes legally undefined. A corollary of this kind of disrespect for legal procedure was the lack of awareness of clear distinctions among the constitutional, criminal and civil branches of the law, such as had been common in the west since the Middle Ages. Failure to discriminate among types of legal acts as well as among the various branches of the law contributed greatly to the confusion which reigned in Russian jurisprudence until the 1860s. To make matters worse yet, until the 1860s Russian laws need not have been made public to go into effect; they were often promulgated in confidential memoranda known only to the officials charged with their execution. This practice outlived the 1864 Reform. As will be pointed out below, the Ministry of the Interior in the 1870s and 1880s often introduced measures affecting the life of every citizen by means of secret circulars, many of which remain unpublished to this day.
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