One of the most influential personages in each government, is the colonel of the gendarmerie, who is completely independent of the governor. He is the head of the secret police, corresponds directly with the minister, and has it in his power, if he is an honest man, to do much good by the rigorous control he can exercise over all the employés of a province.
This justiciary scheme is in itself very liberal, and ought, one would suppose, to satisfy the wants of the population; but like the governors, the judges of the different tribunals are in fact but puppets, moved at the discretion of the subordinate clerks, who alone are masters of the tricks and quibbles of Russian jurisprudence, and legal practice. The lowest clerk in a chancery has often more influence than the president himself, and the suitor who refuses to be squeezed by him may be quite certain thathe will never see the termination of his cause. It is impossible to imagine with what adroitness all these fellows, many of whom receive for salary only sixty or a hundred rubles a year, manage to sweat the purses of those who require their assistance. Justice is continually violated in favour of the highest bidder, and thanks to the number of contradictory ukases which pass for laws, the most audacious robberies are unblushingly committed without the possibility of redress. It may be asserted with truth, that the jurisdictional authority in Russia resides in the offices of court rather than in the persons of the judges. The secretary is the omnipotent arbiter of sentences, and dictates them under the influence of money and the bureaucracy.
Nothing can give an idea of the arts of knavery and chicane put in practice to fleece the unfortunates who have to do with the underlings of justice. The rigorous stickling for forms, and the multitude of papers, are a curse to the country; no business is done by word of mouth in Russia.[12] All law proceedings are carried on in writing; the slightest question and the most trivial explanation must be put down on stamped paper according to the appointed forms. Hence it may be conceived that with the horrible spirit of chicanery that characterises the employés, and the readiness with which they can find a flaw (a krutchuk as they call it), in every paper, legal proceedings are spun out to an indefinite length, and scarcely end until both parties are ruined, or until the one prevails over the other by dint of money and corruption. I have often known a document to be sent back from St. Petersburg after a lapse of six months, merely because this or that phrase was not written according to rule. The government of Bessarabia alone paid 63,000l. for stamps, in the course of four years, and the population of that province does not exceed 500,000. The want of publicity, moreover, has the most pernicious influence on the administration of justice. All judgments are made up in secret; there are no open pleadings; law processes consist from first to last in piles of paper, which enrich the judges and their subordinates, but in no-wise affect their opinions, which are always based on the most advantageous offers.
This woful state of things is further aggravated by the fact that the judges are secure from all responsibility; in whatever manner they decide a cause, they always do so in accordance with the laws, provided they observe the due forms; but what is really incredible, is the impudence with which the lowest tribunal of a district town presumes to annul both the decrees of the emperor and those of the general assembly of the senate. I will mention in illustration a certain suit brought against the heirs of a rich landowner in Podolia, who was deeply indebted at his death to the imperial bank of St. Petersburg and to several foreign bankers. These latter having become creditors before the bank, naturally claimed to be paid in the first instance. The consequence was a suit, which had been going on for twelve years when I arrived in Russia. The foreigners were defeated in the district court, but they gained their cause successively in the governmental court and the general assembly of the senate, and finally they obtained a decree in their favour from the emperor himself; but the district tribunal, under pretext that certain regulations had been violated, took upon itself to annul all the decisions of the senate, and to make the whole suit be begun over again.
It sometimes happens, however, that the imperial will is declared in so positive a manner, that all the tricks and subterfuges of judges and secretaries must give way to it. Here is an anecdote that conveys a perfect notion of what law means in Russia. In Alexander's reign the Jesuits had made themselves all-powerful in some parts of Poland. A rich landowner and possessor of 6000 peasants at Poltzk, the Jesuit head-quarters, was so wrought on by the artful assiduities of the society that he bequeathed his whole fortune to it at his death, with this stipulation, that the Jesuits should bring up his only son, and afterwards give him whatever portion of the inheritance they should choose. When the young man had reached the age of twenty, the Jesuits bestowed on him 300 peasants. He protested vehemently against their usurpation, and began a suit against the society; but his father's will seemed clear and explicit, and after having consumed all his little fortune, he found his claims disowned by every tribunal in the empire, including even the general assembly of the senate. In this seemingly hopeless extremity he applied to a certain attorney in St. Petersburg, famous for his inexhaustible fertility of mind in matters of cunning and chicanery. After having perused the will and the documents connected with the suit, the lawyer said to his client, "Your business is done; if you will promise me 10,000 rubles I will undertake to procure an imperial ukase reinstating you in possession of all your father's property." The young man readily agreed to the bargain, and in eight days afterwards he was master of his patrimony. The decision which led to this singular result rested solely on the interpretation of the phrase they shall give him whatever portion they shall choose, which plainly meant, as the lawyer maintained, that the young man was entitled exclusively to such portion as the Jesuits chose, i. e., to that which they chose and retained for themselves. The emperor admitted this curious explanation; the son became proprietor of 5700 peasants, and the Jesuits were obliged to content themselves with the 300 they had bestowed on their ward in the first instance. Assuredly the most adroit cadi in Turkey could not have decided the case better.
We have already seen that litigants can appeal to the governmental court, and again to the general assembly of the senate, in all suits for more than five hundred rubles. This privilege instead of being advantageous, appears to us to be highly the reverse. In France, where distances are short, and where justice is administered with a promptitude and impartiality elsewhere unexampled, the appeal to the court of cassation affords the most precious guarantee for the equitable application of the laws. Besides this, it only gives occasions to a revision of the documents in the case, and to a new trial before another tribunal if there have been any error of form; but in Russia, where distances are immense, and where all things conspire to render suits interminable, litigants from the provinces can only ruin themselves by using their right of recourse to the tribunals of St. Petersburg. I have known landowners who spent twenty years of their lives in prosecuting a suit in the capital, and who died without having obtained judgment. It must be acknowledged, however, that appeals to St. Petersburg are justified to a certain extent by the deplorable nature of governmental justice.
The last radical vice we have to mention has its origin in the nobiliary system of Peter the Great, in inadequate salaries and the want of a special body of magistrates. We have seen the necessity entailed on all freemen of entering the service of the state and acquiring a more or less elevated rank, the consequence is, that all the public departments are overburdened with employés; and as most of them have no patrimony and are very scantily paid, sometimes not paid at all, they are of course driven to dishonest shifts for their livelihood. Even the heads of departments are not sufficiently remunerated to be safe from the many temptations that beset them. The government has indeed augmented their salaries at various times, but never in a sufficient degree to produce any desirable reform in their conduct. The office of judge, too, is not regarded with sufficient respect and consideration to make it an object of ambition to the high nobility; it is filled in all instances by the lowest privileged class in the empire, or bestowed as a recompense on retired military men. This will no doubt appear extraordinary; but it must be remembered that there exists as yet in Russia no distinct corps of magistrates, nor any official class of lawyers; the members of the several tribunals, whether elected by the nobles, or nominated by the emperor, are by no means expected to be acquainted with jurisprudence and the laws, and if any among them have studied law in the universities this is a mere accident. Those of them who are honest, judge according to their conscience and their common sense; the others give their voices for those who have bought them.
It is the same with the senate, the supreme judicial court in the empire. It consists only of military veterans, and superannuated servants of the state; in a word, of men who know nothing whatever of law. Hence it is easy to conceive the unlimited power exercised in all these courts by the government secretaries, who, when they know by heart the some thousands of ukases that form what is called the imperial code, pass for eminent lawyers in the eyes of the Russians.
The same evil affects, to an equal degree, all the administrative departments. In Russia, no calling or profession has its limits strictly defined; a man passes indifferently from one service to another. A cavalry officer, for instance, will be nominated as director of a high school, an old colonel as head of a custom-house, and so forth.
In addition to the laws which are peculiar to it, Russian legislation evidently comprises two foreign elements, the German and the Roman. Germanic law was introduced into Russia by the Varengians, a branch of the Northman stock. To the leaders of those warriors the country owes the origin of its feudal system. Subsequently, when the Russians were converted to Christianity, Vladimir adopted certain parts of the Roman law as modified by the Byzantines. But if we may judge from the documents furnished by the Nestorian chronicle, it would appear, that previously to that epoch, the Russians had already borrowed some particulars from the Roman code, and blended them with their customary law of indigenous and German origin.