By Axe, Rope and Bullet

160 years ago, in May 1744, Tsarina Elizabeth imposed a ban on the death penalty. It was the first such ban in Russia and it lasted sixty-nine years. The anniversary offers a pretext for reviewing Russia’s history of the death penalty.

Pagan Rus’ did not know the death penalty as such, but tribes did engage in private vendettas. Blood feuds were later replaced with a system of fines that varied by social rank.

The Charter of Dvina (1389) is the first written Russian law that mentions the death penalty. The penalty was imposed only for the third incidence of theft.

In the Charter of Pskov (1467), the death penalty was enacted for the crimes of treason, theft from churches, arson, horse stealing, and three convictions for theft. The absence of murder from the list is easily explained: it was more profitable to impose fines for murder than to apply the death penalty.

In the Sudebniks (“Codes of Law”) of 1497 and 1550 the list of crimes punishable by death was significantly lengthened. It now included treason, robbery, murder, riot, surrendering a city, falsification of documents, arson, and more.

By the second half of the 16th century, punishment for crimes began to have the motive of deterrence, rather than simply punishing the criminal. This, combined with the cruelty of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, led to the torturing of condemned criminals before they were
put to death.

In the Penal Code of 1649, crimes covered by the death penalty again spread. There were now 63 crimes punishable by death, including blasphemy, theft, treason and arson. Under Peter the Great (1696-1725), 123 crimes brought the death penalty. The methods of execution were regulated in detail and differed depending on their purpose: they were either aimed at torturing a criminal and making an example of him or at safeguarding society from the criminal.

Against this backdrop, Tsarina Elizabeth’s decree of May 7, 1744, temporarily banning the death penalty, was a path-breaking reversal of centuries of state policy. A permanent decree abolishing the death penalty was issued in 1753.

Still, not all was as it seemed. Elizabeth replaced the death penalty with other (often horrendous) types of punishment (like beating and drubbing) that nonetheless lead to death. And, in the 18th century, the death penalty was often used extra-judicially, in response to peasant revolts.

The moratorium came to an end in the Penal Code of 1813, which introduced new systems of punishment, including the death penalty, deprivation of all political and civil rights (so called “civil death”), fines, etc. Rulers began to use the death penalty to rid themselves of political enemies. The execution in December 1825 of five Decembrists, aristocratic conspirators who attempted a coup against the tsar, shocked society. Noblemen were previously largely immune from the sentence of death.

At the Decembrists’ hanging, the ropes tore, and the condemned, including Sergey Muravyov, fell to the ground. While Muravyov’s injured leg ached severely, he moaned: “Poor Russia, they can’t even hang a person properly here!”

The Penal Code of 1832 (introduced in 1835), restricted the death penalty to military crimes, treason and crimes committed during quarantine situations. In general, there were few death penalties in the 19th century, even revolutionaries and terrorists were rarely sentenced to death (Lenin’s brother, Alexander Ulyanov, being a notable exception; in 1887 – he was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Alexander III).

Revolution changed everything. From 1905 on, the number of executions increased. Statistics show that, between 1826 and 1905, 612 persons were executed, while between 1906 and 1912 the number grew to 4,098. In the beginning of 1906, 6,791 persons were executed.

Of course, these numbers pale in comparison to the victims of Lenin and Stalin’s terror. According to official data, between 1921 and 1954 some 643,000 people were executed – this does not include victims of GULAG labor camps. While it is hard to estimate the exact number of people who perished during the first four decades of Soviet rule, the human rights group Memorial and other experts have credibly shown that over 20 million persons were executed, perished in the GULAG or were murdered by state-imposed famine.

There was a rather “utilitarian” aspect to the death penalty in Russia during the 20th century. Repeated reversals in policy gave an indication of what the leadership considered to be the gravest societal ills, while behind the legal façade political executions followed no rules.

After the February Revolution, the death penalty was immediately abolished (March 12, 1917), but on July 12, 1917 it was restored once again in an attempt to keep soldiers at the front from deserting. On October 26, 1917, the day after the Bolshevik Revolution, the new government prohibited the death penalty, while carrying out executions in secret.

On February 21, 1918, the death penalty was restored for certain groups of criminals (spies, hooligans, etc.). And in September 1918 the “Red Terror”decree was issued, proclaiming the penalty of death for all “counter-revolutionaries.” Some 5,496 people were executed between June 1918 and February 1919. In January 1920, the death penalty was abolished again, on the initiative of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the secret police head, only to be restored again in 1922.

In the 1930-1940s, 42 crimes were punishable by death. After WWII, on May 26, 1947, the death penalty was replaced with a 25-year prison term, in consideration of peacetime. But, with the renewed threat of war (the Cold War), just three years later, on January 12, 1950, there was a new decree legalizing execution for treason, espionage and sabotage. On April 30, 1954, premeditated murder was added to the list of crimes punishable by death. And a decree of May 6, 1961 extended the death penalty for crimes of misappropriation and currency speculation. Less than a year later, on February 15, 1962, it was further extended to include murder of a militia officer, rape and bribe-taking.

Between 1962 and 1990, in the USSR as a whole, according to Anatoly Pristavkin, who was the head of the State Pardon Committee under President Yeltsin, 24,500 persons were sentenced to death and 21,000 executions were carried out. During this period, and throughout the Soviet era, the primary form of execution has been by gun.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of executions in Russia fell significantly. In 1990, just 76 persons were executed. In 1992, just one person was put to death. But, by 1995, the number was on the rise again (86), dipping somewhat in1996 (53).

The Russian Constitution, ratified in 1993, states that, in the future, the death penalty must be abolished, and that one can only be sentenced to death by a jury. On May 16, 1996 (252 years and nine days after Elizabeth’s decree) Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree that put a moratorium on the death penalty – a requirement for Russia’s entry into the Council of Europe. Three years later, in June 1999, Yeltsin commuted the death sentences of all of Russia’s death row inmates. While the Council of Europe insists that Russia must legislatively abolish the death penalty, that reality does not seem to be in the immediate future.

Public opinion hardly favors such a move. In a nationwide poll conducted by Levada Center in March 2002, just 12% said that the death penalty should be permanently abolished; 12% favored the current moratorium; 49% said capital punishment should be reintroduced on the scale it was employed in the early 1990s; 18% said the use of capital punishment should be broadened. In February of this year, 42% of those Levada polled said they supported the death penalty for convicted terrorists.

– Dasha Demourova