An American historian on the legal culture of Russia

Abstract

In the monograph of N. Kollmann, “Crime and punishment in Russia of early modern time” (2016) is a sociological study of the judicial practice in cases of “thieves and wicked people” of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries. Sociology of law is the dominant type of law in Anglo-Saxon legal family but to the Romano-Germanic legal family, which includes Russia, the dominant is the normativity type of law. This cultural barrier has not been overcome by N. Kollmann, which resulted in annoying errors, despite the undoubted merits of her research. Among the weaker points is, at first, to highlight the lack of definition of those offences which it considers to be criminal offences. The modern legal construction of criminal law only appears in the Enlightenment. Second, N. Kollmann does not understand that the acts of lawmaking by princes and the king do not match the characteristics of a modern regulatory act, the modern concept of law and the rule of law appear in Russia in the epoch of Peter the Great. Third, the characteristics of adversarial and investigative process forms are not generally recognized in the theoretical approaches to the science of procedural law. However, a study in N. Kollmann, has undoubted advantages. She described relations between the authorities and society in counteracting “thieves and desperate people”. Its merit is the criticism of E. Anisimov’s absurd hypothesis of the arbitrariness of supposedly typical for Russia. On The Contrary, N. Kollmann, comes to reasonable conclusions about how law and law enforcement in Russia corresponded to the level of Europe, possessed the property of legal certainty: “the judge followed the prescribed judicial procedures, and punishments; the practice of criminal law has been a constant and consistent”. Refs 22.