Murder Most Russian True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia by Louise McReynolds Book Read Online And Epub File Download
Overview: How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. In Murder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds draws on a fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings.
As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant’s behavior "criminal." She also deftly connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period. Murder Most Russian will appeal not only to readers interested in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the modern media.
Murder Most Russian True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia by Louise McReynolds Book Read Online Chapter One
LAW AND ORDER
“The main point of every criminal trial is to discover every detail of the absolute truth.”
—Notes from the men who reformed the legal code, 1864.
“What is law in the books is largely determined by history. What is law in action is chiefly determined by public opinion.”
—Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, 1930.
Drunken ne’er-do-well Alexei Volokhov was last seen about 2 a.m. on August 17, 1866, lurching along the streets of the Sadovskaia settlement not far from Moscow with another fellow in similar condition. Five days later his brother Terentyi found Alexei’s corpse in the cellar of the latter’s house, chopped in two, the upper half stuffed into a bag. The pieces of the torso lay partially covered with rocks under the muddy water that had flooded the space. Suspicion fell quickly upon his wife, Mavra, known to be unhappy in her marriage vocally. Their five-year-old son Grigorii told an investigator that he had seen his mother hacking his father, though the axe that he identified had no blade. Other than the boy’s somewhat specious eyewitness testimony, the best evidence against her was circumstantial, based on the supposition that no one else but she would want him dead.1
The murder trial of Mavra Volokhova in Moscow in February 1867 would be one of the first to go before a jury, the macabre nature of the crime adding spice to the intrinsic interest of an open trial. The peasant woman found herself defended by a prince. Fresh from the law school at Moscow University, this only his second case, Prince A. I. Urusov is recognized as Russia’s first influential defense attorney, or zashchitnik. He faced newly the minted assistant procurator M. F. Gromnitskii, both men educated in the culture of rule of law (zakonnost’) that had blossomed in the prereform atmosphere. The two debated before a jury. Without direct evidence, Gromnitskii had only probable cause, which jurors interpreted as a continuation of the old, inquisitorial ways, when the prosecution operated in secret. Zashchitnik Urusov won them over with a fundamentally new approach when he raised the issue of “reasonable doubt.” Urusov accomplished what had been unimaginable before the judiciary had been reformed in 1864: he scripted a narrative of both crime and criminal that contradicted the state’s version. This chapter explores how trials for murder, beginning with the investigations of the crimes, gave depth and breadth to the judicial reforms.
The Judicial Reform in Context
Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881) signed the declaration of independence for the Russian judiciary on November 20, 1864, with the promise to make justice “swift, righteous, and benevolent.”2 The system he replaced was so scandalously corrupt that even ministers of justice had resorted to bribery.3 The most penetrating satirist of the era, Nikolai Gogol, created vivid images of wholesale judicial abasement, for example, in the judge who desires to have his bribes paid in greyhound puppies rather than geese, which honk too noisily in the hallways.4 Playwright Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin was the pre–Reform Era’s most famous alleged murderer, charged in 1850 with the murder of his French mistress. Still in prison, before paying the hefty bribes that would secure his acquittal, Sukhovo-Kobylin mocked the system in Krechinsky’s Wedding (1854), a play that today still retains its edge.5 The parochialism saying “do not fear the court, fear the judge” summed up attitudes toward the legal system that stretched from the peasant izba (hut) to the Winter Palace.
Keenly aware that the legal system lacked both public confidence and the efficiency mandatory to achieve his goal of modernizing Russia, Alexander nonetheless continued to worry about an independent judiciary. Initially he entrusted D. N. Bludov, chairman of the State Council’s Department of Laws, to reform rather than to reconstruct the legal system. Richard Wortman’s skillful depiction of the many processes that led up to the judicial reforms need not be retold here.6 Wortman fleshes out how a cadre of youthful Gromnitskiis and Urusovs became educated to appreciate “rule of law” as a philosophy capable of delivering justice. Coalescing around assistant minister of justice D. N. Zamiatnin, they persuaded the young tsar to support their project of sweeping reform. After several years of studying Western legal systems, the Russians borrowed more features from the French than any other. Adopting specific functions, however, must not be confused with the cultures of justice that the two countries developed in the nineteenth century. The Heidelberg jurist Karl Mittermaier (1787–1867), whose prolific writings connected the peculiarities of each country’s history with its judicial system, exercised the single greatest influence on Russian legal theory in practice.7
How, though, had tsarist Russia developed a system so roundly despised and mistrusted? One paradox of Russian legal history lies in the inability of its most powerful autocrats to clean it up. The foundation of Russian legality dated back to the Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, the most fundamental provision of which was the enserfment of the peasantry.8 Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) included legal issues among the many structures he borrowed from the West, but his notion of mitigating abuses of power meant beefing up the written proofs required by the inquisitorial court system then in operation. Never envisioning an adversarial courtroom, he coined the term iabedniki, “slanderers,” for those who practiced law. His bitter distaste for lawyers prompted him to exclude them from criminal trials.9 To establish some form of public law, he set up a procuracy in 1722 that, despite its Western varnish, extended rather than limited his autocratic prerogatives. The Ober-procurator oversaw the fulfillment of edicts issuing from both the tsar and the Senate, which made him second only to the tsar.10
Peter’s most ambitious successor, Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1795), shared his antipathy for the venal and inefficient judicial system. She convened a legislative assembly in 1767, intended to rewrite much of the 1649 code on the basis of Enlightenment principles. Her instruction (nakaz) to the commission, however, came to naught, and was disbanded after two years of failed negotiations. Influenced by Cesare Beccaria’s enlightened rationalism, Catherine responded to the failure of her assembly by expanding the procuracy into the provinces. Catherine’s procuracy reflected the tension between center and periphery, as procurators responded first to the Ober-procurator in Petersburg, then to the local governor.11
Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I (r. 1800–1825), redesigned the administrative system, replacing Peter’s collegial system with ministries. His minister of justice assumed those “formidable” powers previously held by the Ober-procurator.12 Aware that the succession of tsars and tsarinas had issued laws, mandates, and rescripts that often contradicted or overturned one another, Alexander appointed the extremely capable Mikhail Speranskii to begin the process of codifying the collection. Speranskii continued his work into the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855). The first Digest of Laws (Svod zakonov) was published in fifteen volumes in 1835, and redacted in 1842 and 1857. Complementary to this, the Codex of Criminal and Correctional Punishments (Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh), which detailed punishments for specific crimes, appeared in 1845. The Statutes of Criminal Procedure (Ustav ugolovnogo sudoproizvodstva) promulgated in 1864 did not change laws or punishments, but rather restructured the ways in which crimes were investigated and prosecuted.
Circuit courts provided the first port of personal entry into the reformed system. Established initially only in the European provinces of Russia, the circuit court system included nine circuits that divided among themselves jurisdiction over 106 districts (okruzhnyi sudy). Circuit courts had civil and criminal departments that subdivided trials according to those judged by a jury or by crown (koronnyi) courts comprised of three estate representatives.13 The personnel assigned to each circuit included a presiding judge supported by two members (chleny). The office of the procurator, also formally a part of the circuit court, would include prosecuting attorneys and judicial investigators. Circuit court decisions could be appealed to the fourteen Judicial Chambers (Sudebnye palaty), which functioned as a sort of grand jury and also tried some political crimes, though their competence here was ill defined.14 The Governing Senate sat atop the legal system, the highest level of cassation. Although the Senate’s decisions on cases appealed to it did not carry the force of law, the code mandated that the senators’ explanations of their decisions be published and included in law school textbooks.15
The appeals process proved critical to the negotiation of justice between state and society. Gogol had complained that the “law is wooden; man feels that it contains something harsh and unbrotherly,”16 but the use of juries and the possibilities for cassation endowed it with considerable flexibility. Technically, Russians enjoyed the privilege of double jeopardy and if acquitted could not be tried for the same crime, not even with new evidence.17 However, cases could be appealed if either side could show that violations of the statute had occurred during the trial, which would result in a new trial with a different jury.18 Violations were rarely difficult to prove. The code’s article 746 held that “the defense, during the pleadings and debates preceding the verdict, shall refer only to legal statutes that assist in further defining the exact nature of the offense in question,” but no successful defense attorney limited his speeches to the statutes. Retrying the case before a different jury, however, seldom resulted in a different decision.19 Ironies abounded: if the judges agreed that jurors had convicted an innocent party, instead of setting the accused free they called for a retrial with a new jury.20
Emancipating the serfs ipso facto subverted the Law Code of 1649, which mandated that at least parts of it would have to be rewritten. Regardless, the emancipation in and of itself did not provide a cause-and-effect rationale for why the new statutes took the shape that they did. Like the emancipation, the judicial reforms would not go fully into effect for two years, giving the ministries and local governments time to fill positions with qualified staff. The first jury trial was held in St. Petersburg on April 17, 1866, and six days later one was held in Moscow. Cities had to find space for courtrooms, or even places to build them. Enthusiasm ran high.21 Now Russians charged with serious crimes were guaranteed the right to be tried in public, before a jury, and represented in court by an attorney. The well-meaning reformers had intended to replace personal decision making with procedural objectivity. What they had failed to recognize was that laws themselves were inflected by subjective culture, and murder itself proved quite malleable.
Murder: The Crime
Yahweh kept it simple when he burned “thou shalt not kill” onto one of Moses’s tablets. Local cultures, however, from villages to empires, have long recognized the deceptive simplicity that underlay this commandment. It might be a law of nature, and of some religions, that all humans are created equal, but such equality is rarely either politically or socially feasible. Tsarist Russia, like other countries administered by a law code, had a gradient for murder that took social concerns into consideration and was gauged according to the level of intentionality. What in the United States is measured by degree, in Russia had three points: an intentional killing that was plotted before being committed (obdumannoe namerenie); one in which the killer intended for his or her victim to die, but was not calculated so coldly (umyshlennoe); and one that happened in a burst of anger or passion (v zapal’chivosti ili razdrazhenii).22 The severity of the punishment slid down the scale.
Nor were all victims created equal. Laws give insight into societies that codified them because of what they emphasize and how they differentiate among murders. Articles 1449–1471 of Russia’s 1845 codex identified various forms and gradations of murder (smertoubiistvo), including those actions that might result in death but were not criminalized, such as self-defense. The importance of family and procreation to the social structure stands out, as the first and most severely prosecuted article forbade the intentional murder of a parent.23 Pregnant woman were mentioned in six separate articles; the intentional murder of one was severely punished, but an unmarried woman who either killed or abandoned her newborn “from shame or fear” faced a comparatively light punishment.24 Abortion, defined as “expulsion of the fetus,” was punished more harshly if accomplished “without the knowledge or consent of the pregnant woman.”25 The persistence of canon law, with its religious precept for remorse, emerged in the five articles that punished for death as the result of brawling, which required church penance in addition to limited jail time.26
In 1873, the Ministry of Justice began compiling statistics on crimes, and calculated criminality according to the cases that came to court. Numbers offered the false security of scientific veracity, but nonetheless reveal patterns of prosecutorial interests.27 The category of “murder” comprised approximately 5 percent of all crimes, but 40 percent of crimes heard by juries. The statistics included vital information about verdicts, the sex of defendants, and whether or not a jury decided the case.28
E. N. Tarnovskii, the chief statistician at the Ministry of Justice, oversaw the assembly of data. In his summary of the first twenty years, the patterns that he identified do not surprise: Russia’s most common killer, as elsewhere, was the adult male. Females were charged with fewer than 10 percent of all murders, and their victims tended to be relatives, especially babies, aborted or otherwise.29 Poison was everywhere a woman’s weapon.30 The numbers graph murder trials inching upward, only to explode after the 1905 Revolution. For example, excluding infanticide, 1,154 accused killers were brought to trial in 1880; 1,302 in 1890; 1,640 in 1900; up to 2,244 in 1904. After the revolution, the numbers more than doubled to 4,857 in 1907, rising to 7,531 in 1910.31 These numbers refer to trials, not the actual dead, and the ascent reflects multiple factors, including increased urban populations. Before suspected killers could be prosecuted, however, they had to be caught. Reforming the law had resulted in the need for new institutions to enforce it.
Law: Investigating the Crime
Russia’s police enjoyed perhaps less public confidence than did its judges. Charged to “maintain public welfare,” a hopelessly broad assignment, numerous policemen exercised power arbitrarily. Salaried very poorly by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, many profited from their easy access to bribes. Dvorniki, such as the one charged in the Gusev Lane case, were at times commandeered to inform about the neighborhood.32 Russia’s national force was one of political police, established first under Nicholas I in 1826 as the Third Section of His Imperial Chancery. Alexander II supplanted the Third Section in 1871 with the corps of gendarmes.33
Central to the reform of the judiciary was the transfer of criminal investigations away from the police to the office of the judicial investigator (sudebnyi sledovatel’), established in 1860 but not fully operational until the new courts began convening in 1866.34 Required to be educated in jurisprudence, the investigators were judicial personnel who often used this entry-level position to advance into the procurator’s office.35 They swore an oath of office and could not be fired without legal cause.
The overwhelming importance with which the reformers invested the judicial investigators can be gleaned from articles 249 through 542, which covered their competence. The reformers left notes on how they reached some of their decisions, commenting that they transferred the preliminary investigations from the police to the new procurator’s office because they were specifically concerned with “eliminating arbitrariness,”36 a nice euphemism for graft. Sharing the same educational background as the reformers, investigators would presumably share their respect for the law. Taking the lead in all investigations, these men also assumed authority in deciding questions of autopsy, expertise, and other matters of forensic medicine.37 A stipulation that would acquire controversy with the advent of psychiatry required investigators to be able to recognize when a person was insane, and if so, to conduct all interviews in the presence of someone from the local medical inspectorate.38 Professionally oriented physicians welcomed these men, “young and educated in the sciences,” qualities that made them superior to local doctors who “often sin against science, and limit their autopsies to superficial descriptions.”39
Inspectors also had obligations to suspects. Foremost, they had to “examine without prejudice those circumstances that exculpate the accused as well as those that incriminate.”40 Additionally, once the investigator had charged a suspect, he had to seek out and verify evidence that could result in acquittal.41 Justice must be swift; the lawmen would work Sundays and holidays if the situation demanded.42 Searches were conducted in the presence of witnesses, and investigators had to account for all material evidence taken from its owner.43 Anyone arrested by mistake had to be released with a protocol explaining the reason for the accusation, and all interrogated suspects had to know what they were being accused of.44 Citizens could protest incompetent investigators.45 And this they did.
The Russian population did not embrace the investigators with the hoped-for enthusiasm, nor did the officials always respect the public. An editorial in Sudebnyi vestnik reminded aggressive investigators that they needed official summonses to call witnesses.46 Some citizens subjected to questioning filed slander charges against investigators, citing the law against false accusations.47 Numerous cases against investigators for fabricating interviews, sloppy investigations, and overstepping their authority ended up on the Senate’s docket of appeals, and the senators tended to side with the complainants.48 One enterprising woman filed charges against an investigator who had refused her demand for an autopsy after she accused a neighbor of poisoning her chickens. She won her case, at the expense of his heretofore promising career.49 Several years later another investigator, having learned this lesson, ordered a postmortem examination on a chicken found dead of a shattered rectum in a case of a gendarme charged with kurelozhestvo (sex with chickens). Sobered up to find the dead foul next to him, the corporal could not remember any details. The absence of semen in the hen resulted in acquittal.50
More damaging to the investigators than public hostility was their postreform boss, Minister of Justice K. I. Pahlen. Despite having a law degree, Pahlen had made his career at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and in 1870 he acted upon his concerns about the independence that investigators enjoyed.51 Removing the requirements of both a legal education and the oath of office, he undercut their professionalism. Pahlen established a new position of “judicial investigators in important cases,” men not restricted in their activities to the circuit court to which they were assigned. This gave the minister of justice a group of investigators immediately responsible to him, overriding local procurators. In 1875 the ministry added an upgrade, the “investigator in especially important cases.” The effects were multifold: more judicial investigators in place, but many were now seen more as bureaucrats (chinovniki) rather than specialists in law. More significant, they lost the promise of job security, which ensured their dependence upon those higher up.52 Gromnitskii, who had begun his judicial career as an investigator, recalled the bitterness with which his colleagues met the changes.53
The investigator’s legal obligation “to examine those circumstances that exculpate the accused as well as those that incriminate” put him in a bind. Law professor Ivan Foinitskii, who also served in the Senate’s Criminal Cassation Department, commented on the paradox: “psychologically, as he pieces the evidence together, the investigator comes to believe in the guilt of the person he accuses.”54 V. P. Danevskii and I. G. Shcheglovitov, jurists leaning left and right, respectively, objected as “illogical” that one person be both the prosecution and defense in the same case.55 Yet the reformers had placed their bets for cleaning out corruption in the belief that the “impartial actions of the investigator will secure respect for judges from both government and private persons.”56
P. N. Obninskii, longtime presiding judge of the Moscow circuit court, sympathized with the task before judicial investigators: “they are given flour and told to imagine from this a wheat field.”57 He complained that jurors saw them as “predators” rather than disinterested professionals.58 The ideal investigator walked on water: he was “educated,” but also “conscientious,” “independent,” “self-reliant,” and “knowledgeable in the human psyche,” not to mention “honest” and “hardworking.”59 Readers of Crime and Punishment will recognize Porfiry Petrovich, the judicial investigator who realized that Raskolnikov was the killer but could never prove his case. Fictionalizing the intelligent and reflective type of investigator imagined by the statute, Petrovich attempted to cajole a confession psychologically rather than to beat it out physically.
Within a few years of taking the lead in investigating crimes, several of these new law enforcement officers published memoirs that skirted the boundary between fact and fiction: N. M. Sokolovskii, Jail and Life: From the Notes of a Judicial Investigator, was first serialized in Dostoevsky’s journal Vremia (Time) in 1866. Other memoirs included P. I. Stepanov, The Innocent and the Guilty: Notes from an Investigator (1869); K. Popov, The Guilty and the Innocent: Stories of a Judicial Investigator (1871); and N. P. Timofeev, Notes of an Investigator (1872). Sokolovskii’s and Timofeev’s were both best-sellers in their year of publication.60
Setting a sympathetic tone, Sokolovskii opined that “I doubt that anyone has had to listen more often to tragic confessions (ispovedy), that anyone has had so many tears shed before him, [that anyone] has observed so much that makes one sick with sorrow.”61 Locating himself on the side of the accused, he wrote that
someone who has committed evil, in all of its deformity stands before you…even keeping in mind that the most sacred personal rights have been violated, your hand is nonetheless shaking when it grabs the stone and readies to throw. The “accursed questions” arise. Who is guilty? An idée fixe spins in your head…society, with the clumsy way it poses and decides life’s most vital questions? or the person, affected by physiological defects? or an inexorable fate?…You cannot give a straight answer.62
Timofeev echoed this sentiment:
The psychological and moral aspects of every society leave their prints on the crimes committed by its members…. No one is born a criminal, but criminals are formed from life,…poverty, passions, and tribulations.63
One case that Timofeev recorded was particularly compelling for its tragic dimensions, and his conduct, more like a priest than a policeman, underscored the complexity that the role of confession played in the reformed legal system. Investigating the failed suicide of a peasant woman, he believed her to be concealing the true motive for her attempt, that poverty alone had not driven her. Piecing together the tragedy that was her life, he discovered that her father had raped her, then her brother did, and had fathered her children. The woman found peace when she confessed to Timofeev that she had murdered her depraved sibling.64
These stories appeared before Pahlen’s reforms had achieved their full effect, before investigators “breathed the reactionary air.”65 Popov’s are particularly interesting in their depictions of life in small provincial towns, where his arrival was more welcomed as a new face than feared as an officer of the state. Outstanding for their literariness, these stories differ markedly from those written twenty-five years later, which were “practical advice for discovering the guilty and understanding the psychology of the accused.”66 This first generation would inspire a wave of fictional exploits of investigators, which would set the tone for Russia’s crime fiction (see chapter 4).
The investigators’ handbooks show their workaday world. Emphasizing the writing of protocols that would assure efficient trials, these books expanded to include relevant laws and clarifications derived from how the Senate had interpreted them in appeals.67 Statistics on the investigators’ activities recorded for the years 1874–1894 charted a rise in the numbers of cases, from approximately 100 to 120 cases per year. Most of these were “resolved,” which meant closed with or without an arrest. At least in the years 1889–1893, murder had the highest percentage, at 50 percent, of any crime to be resolved quickly, one way or the other.68
Significantly, the number of investigations that resulted in trial declined, from a high of eighty-six per one hundred in 1877 to only fifty-eight by 1894. This might suggest that investigators were growing less prone to rush into court without having first put together a credible case, although conviction rates did not rise accordingly.69 Professionalism changed with the times. When the paranormal began to confront science in the second half of the century, one investigator from Simferopol recounted how someone appeared in his dream and helped him to identify a corpse.70 N. K. Ogolovets added psychiatric analyses to his investigations by 1895.71
An incident from 1902 brought into focus the mistrust between public and law enforcement that continued to plague postreform Russia. Investigator P. F. Prusepp stood accused of the rape and murder of a young woman in the Northern Caucasus. He had charged the daughter of a local shoemaker with theft onboard a train and prostitution. She died in his custody, killing herself by drinking carbolic acid.72 The public outcry against Prusepp came from railroad workers, and also from local nobles led by Prince Mikhail Andronikov, who despised officials who abused their positions. E. E. Ukhtomskii, editor of the semi-official Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St. Petersburg Gazette) took up Andronikov’s position. The Ministry of Justice tried to hush the scandal with a quick cover-up, but the aggrieved would not be silent. The ministry dispatched special investigator A. V. Burtsev to conduct a comprehensive inquiry.73 Ultimately, Burtsev closed the case for lack of direct evidence against Prusepp.74 But the official protocols included considerable testimony that “the judicial powers who conducted this investigation initially took every measure to hide the truth and shield the criminals.”75 The empire would soon be engulfed in revolution in part because of the failure of the government to police itself.
The Police and the Procuracy
The procurator’s office enjoyed control over the investigation, but it needed cooperation from a police force that often chafed at being subordinate to it.76 If an investigator was not immediately available, the police had to begin questioning witnesses and collecting evidence, but everything had to be turned over once the proper official arrived.77 Not just beat cops but also gendarmes and detectives reported to judicial investigators.78 Mounting tension between the investigators at the Ministry of Justice and the police at the Ministry of Internal Affairs can be read between the lines of an 1867 editorial in the Ministry of Justice’s Sudebnyi vestnik cautioning procurators to remember that their investigators needed permission to travel in districts not their own.79 The Senate affirmed in 1872 that the investigators were to direct their requests for help to the local police headquarters, not to give orders to individual cops. A circular from the Ministry of Justice in 1878 addressed another irritant when it advised investigators not to order locals to complete assignments of “second-degree importance,” such as delivering summonses.80 Four years later the ministry sent an official inquiry to governors asking about conflicts between the two law enforcement agencies, but only a scattered few were reported.81 Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Tolstoi objected that his corps of gendarmes, who policed the growing number of railway lines, would be subordinate to the Ministry of Justice.82
However, an investigator new to the job in 1866, when stumped by a particularly savage slaying of an elderly brother and sister in the Moscow suburb of Mytishchi, turned to the local bailiff ( pristav) N. Rebrov for help. Rebrov personified the old ways, and his name popped up at more than one of Moscow’s early jury trials. The investigator needed to make an arrest, and Rebrov found two men whose background in petty crime, vodka, and confusion about their whereabouts on the night in question made them easy targets. These two never confessed, and they faced Gromnitskii following his unsuccessful prosecution of Mavra Volokhova. Proclaiming that “rarely does the prosecution find itself in such a strange situation,” Gromnitskii nonetheless explained why he believed the accused to be guilty, despite the lack of evidence against them. Gromnitskii found himself arguing that “poverty is a vice,” a proposition that flew in the face of common empathy. The defense made quick work of the bill of indictment, and the jury needed no time to acquit.83
Levying its power over corrupt cops gave the jury immediate credibility. The police needed some public confidence of their own. F. F. Trepov, famous for the shot that Vera Zasulich wounded him with in 1877, began his tenure as the police chief of St. Petersburg in 1866 with certain reformist ambitions. Appointed in the wake of an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Trepov’s name became synonymous with repression. However, his directives also reveal a chief keen to the problems of public perception. For example, he ordered beat cops (gorodovye) to circulate in their neighborhoods, hoping to establish a constructive presence that would improve communications between people and police, as Robert Peel’s “bobbies” had in London. In 1868 he established the capital’s first department of detectives, appointing as chief Ivan Putilin, remembered for his role in locating Daria Sokolova in the Gusev Lane killings.84
A Ukrainian who spoke accented Russian, Putilin began his extraordinary career in Petersburg’s Tolkuchii Market district in 1853. As he remembered it, his ambition had always been to clean up the corruption and arbitrary violence that made the police significantly more feared than respected. Putilin claimed a degree from St. Petersburg University, though a jurist with whom he worked remarked that his “education was shrouded in mystery.” Putilin assumed his post as the court reforms were taking effect, and that he held his position until poor health forced his retirement in 1889 bespoke considerable success.85
Putilin received posthumous praise in 1907 from then-senator A. F. Koni, who had risen to iconic status as the presiding judge in Zasulich’s trial. Koni had solidified his liberal credentials when he counseled her jurors to vote their conscience, and then accepted their acquittal. Approval from him carried significant social weight. Recalling his years with Putilin when he worked in the procurator’s office in the early 1870s, Koni pointed out that Putilin never hid the fact that before joining the detective bureau, “his life was often risky both legally and morally.” Putilin had impressed Koni deeply when he caught the man who killed a bishop at the Alexander Nevskii Monastery from the blood evidence at the crime scene, retold later as “Murder at the Cloisters.”86 “He knew his world,” noted Koni approvingly.87
|
Full Complete This Book Epub File Download 5 Usd |
Note :- This Download File Is Epub Format So This File Open For Download EPub File Viewer Software. This Software Download For Go Website https://calibre-ebook.com/ Or Second Website Is (www.epubfilereader.com)
Thanks for commenting on Magazine All World. If you have any doubt, please let us know.