As for capital punishment, while at this time in Europe states deployed horrific, theatrical "spectacles of suffering" in a form of rule by terror, as Pieter Spierenburg, Michel Foucault, and others have shown, Muscovy staged rudimentary executions. It did not build elaborate scaffolds or viewing stands, nor precede execution with religious ritual, formal last meals, and supplementary tortures on the scaffold, as was the practice in London and Amsterdam. The terror of Muscovite executions was likely in their speed. Once a corporal or capital verdict had been handed down in the tsar's name, the law required the judge to carry out the sentence promptly, "not delaying the tsar's order." Judges were to delay only long enough to give the condemned a few days for repentance (the 1649 Lawcode mandated six weeks, but that was rarely enforced) and to gather a crowd "to deter those watching from similar crime." Executions were generally by hanging or beheading (women who murdered their husbands were buried in the ground; witches and heretics were burned).
In its violence, Muscovite criminal practice—torture and punishment—was comparable to its European counterparts. All were painful and cruel. Muscovy's diminished use of capital punishment constitutes some mitigation, but the alternatives—knouting and exile—were hardly benign. Knouting could be mild or death-dealing depending upon the judge's order to the executioner, while travel to exile alone could kill, as could harsh conditions in the new land.
Early modern Russia constantly balanced the use of official violence with the benefits of mercy. In the criminal law, judges routinely mitigated sentences in the name of the tsar's favor and mercy. Rulers awarded amnesties for special occasions such as birthdays in the dynasty and holydays; they distributed alms on pilgrimages and travels around their realm. How the state punished public unrest perhaps demonstrates best its measured use of official violence. In 1648, 1662, and 1682 when urban uprisings rocked major cities in the center, the state responded with massive investigations ofsuspects, but meted out punishment in gradations ofguilt. Ringleaders were publically executed in prominent spaces and scores were knouted and/or exiled, all "to deter others" in the words of court transcripts. But hundreds of rioters were not punished, the state perhaps realizing the futility of arresting everyone and the greater benefit of mercy. Even in the massive Stepan Razin rebellion on the lower Volga (1670-1), large groups of rebels were hanged in prominent places to shock and deter, but at the same time, whole villages were forgiven and left unpunished ifthey were willing to renew their oath ofallegiance to the tsar. Moscow's rulers strove for a balance between the deterrent effect of pain and the integrating possibility of forgiveness.
EMPIRE-WIDE CONTROL: BUREAUCRACY
Like the army and the criminal law, bureaucracy represents an institutionalization of the state's right to control and coerce. Empires had been ruled by bureaucracies connected by networks of communication since before the celebrated Roman empire. Certainly in the energetic state building of early modern Europe and Eurasia, systematic recording of material and human resources—what Anthony Giddens calls "surveillance"—and effective communication networks were essential. In Europe, monarchs and municipalities emulated the Catholic Church's record-keeping practices; professional lawyers and notaries evolved in the late medieval period. As state apparatuses developed in early modern England, France, German principalities and states, and Prussia, civil service became an acceptable career, although military heritage retained superior social status. The power of early modern states depended upon the strength of their bureaucracies as much as the power of their armies.
Not surprisingly, offices to record the state's finances, human resources, and international relations accompanied Muscovy's rise to regional power in the late fifteenth century. The first officials to be mentioned were Ivan III's treasurers from the Greek Khovrin and Trakhaniotov families. Before then only a few bureaucratic records survive—grand-princely wills, treaties among the ruling family, a few administrative charters. By the sixteenth century, the court was keeping essential military records: land cadasters for the growing service-tenure land system (pomest'e), rosters of officer assignments in campaigns (razriadnye knigi), and official genealogical books of the highest clans. References to offices (initially "desks," eventually chanceries) begin to be encountered in the early sixteenth century—Foreign Affairs, Military and Land Offices. Thereafter their number grew rapidly with state and empire building. Some were multi-functional (judicial, financial, administrative) over territories (chanceries for Kazan, Siberia, and northern provinces) or social groups (musketeers, gentry, new model troops). Others did a single function empire-wide (criminal law, revenue collection). Some lasted through the seventeenth century, others only a few decades.
At mid-sixteenth century, Moscow enhanced centralized control by leaning on local traditions of collective responsibility. Two important functions were decentralized into locally elected boards, one oflocal gentry for arresting and prosecuting bands of recidivist robbers and thieves (guba reform of the 1530s) and one of peasants for collecting direct land taxes (zemskii reform of the 1550s). Both boards constituted unpaid service to the tsar and were under central controclass="underline" overseen by the central judicial chancery, the criminal law "elder" used grand-princely judicial procedure and laws (1497 and 1550, 1550s criminal charters); the "land" boards had no autonomy to spend locally the taxes they collected. But the state was able to enforce such uncompensated labor because of East Slavic traditions of collective responsibility (communities were used to working together for local interest) and because these institutions served local needs. Criminal law posses were patrolling their home area; putting tax collection in peasant hands allowed collective distribution according to locally perceived needs.
From mid-sixteenth century Muscovy began to establish a bureaucratic framework that endured through the eighteenth century, an empire-wide network of military men appointed as governors as part of their mandatory military service. Jacks of all trades, governors worked with scribes who provided specialized fiscal, administrative, or judicial expertise. Governors had numerous incentives to perform: they depended upon the state for land, labor, and cash support; the law threatened harsh punishment for malfeasance. The state tried to limit corruption or the emergence of local satrapies by keeping terms short (two years), by mandating sufficient material support (from the community), and by not assigning governors to their native regions. Over the seventeenth century, governors folded criminal law and tax collection boards under their purview, streamlining central control.
Central chanceries in Moscow oversaw this local network and kept it functional. They kept meticulous records of personnel, from which a fascinating picture emerges. From 44 in 1626 the number of chanceries grew to 55 in 1698, and clerical staff increased accordingly: senior secretaries (d'iaki) from 656 in 1626 to 2,762 in 1698; undersecretaries (poddiachie) from 575 to 2,648. Local offices expanded with empire—in total in 1626 there were 185; in 1645, 212; in 1677, 295; in 1698, 302. Regionally, their number in the center remained at 54 and in the north around 20 throughout the seventeenth century, but in the northwest and western borders (including Ukraine) numbers rose from 25 in 1626 to 45 in 1698; local offices on the southern steppe rose from 44 in 1626, 84 in 1664, to 95 in 1698; those to the southeast, down the Volga and in Siberia increased from 42 in 1626, to 77 in 1664, and 87 in 1698. Thus, local government offices almost doubled on the western frontier and more than doubled on the south, southeast, and east. Still, Kremlin-based bureaucrats outnumbered all local ones. In the 1640s 1,611 bureaucrats were divided between 837 in Moscow and 774 locally; similarly, in the 1690s, 2,739 Moscow bureaucrats and 1,918 local officials made up the 4,657 total bureaucrats. The bureaucracy had grown, in other words, 2.4 times in those five decades, with expertise clustered at the center. Russia's bureaucratic network was a light spider-web cast over a vast space.