The Mechanism of Complaints Prior to the Revolution: What Did

What Did the Bolsheviks Reform?

Substantial attempts at reforming the judiciary as it existed under the monarchy took place in the nineteenth century. Significant transformations in Russia’s judiciary occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most importantly due to Alexander’s II 1864 reform. Among other things, the reform greatly simplified the system previously based on the estates of the realm. Prior to the reform, every estate used to have its own court. Instead, a unified judicial system was created, comprised of two kinds of courts, general and local. The Justices of the Peace and Volost’ Courts⁹ operated at the local level. District Courts and Courts of Justice constituted general settlements.

The Governing Senate, made up of two cassation departments—in civil and criminal cases—remained the highest authority. Most important political cases were dealt with by the Supreme Criminal Court, which would only took up cases at the emperor’s extraordinary command (Solomon 1996:20–21).

The 1864 reform postulated the fundamental principles of the judiciary:

that a court of justice was to be independent, judges could not be removed from office, and procedural transparency and competitiveness of justice were to be observed. Besides, the reform instituted the jury, attorneys-at-law, and prosecution.¹⁰ Altogether, 105 district courts and 14 courts of justice operated in Russia by the early twentieth century.

9 Before the administrative reform of 1923–1929 volost’ was a small rural area, subordinated to the city. The union of several volosts (including the city or village as a center) formed an uyezd.

10 During Alexander’s III reign there occurred something of a setback: local justices of the peace were replaced by zemstvo bailiffs elected from among the gentry. Some case categories were withdrawn from the ambit of the jury, and political cases were made less transparent.

A fifteen-volume Code of Laws of the Russian Empire prepared by Michael Speransky served as a regulatory framework. A special emperor’s manifesto of January 1, 1835, signed this Code into law. No other code was adopted in Tsarist Russia. Despite considerable efforts by many Russian scholars and jurists, by 1917 the Civil Code (Grazhdanskoe Ulozhenie) was not yet ready for adoption. A draft of the Criminal Code had been prepared in 1903, but it was also not adopted. The rule of law did not become a universal practice.

At the lowest levels of the judiciary, custom still played a vital role in conflict resolution (Burbank 2004).

Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century a universal and rather modern judicial system came to be in Russia. The courts’ function was to resolve conflicts and restore justice. However, a court procedure was subject to the Tsar’s control up to the very last days of the monarchy, and this control was always a one-way street. In the words of John Quigley, “Under the tsars, no representative institutions of any consequence were established, and the courts did not exercise any significant control over the monarchy (Quigley 2006: 224).

Besides, a court of justice was not the only institution to protect citizens’

rights and interests. Popular notions of how due order was to be restored were firmly linked to a patriarchal tradition of appealing to the Tsar, to the ideas of truth and justice, the Tsar’s omnipotence and mercy, and the monarch’s charismatic resistance to abuses of power by bureaucrats and the aristocracy. A hierarchical mechanism of complaining, including a (restricted, but still available) option to address the monarch directly, continued to play an important role as a means of restoring justice, as well as a way to affirm an established relationship between society and the state.

Similar to the judiciary, by late nineteenth century the mechanism of complaints also went through multiple transformations and acquired consistency. An authority closest to the Tsar was Emperor’s Applications Committee. Next in the system of bodies dealing with citizens’ petitions was the Special Tribunal for the preliminary consideration of complaints about the Senate’s departments’ resolutions. It was created simultaneously with the Committee and, in essence, was one of the agencies acting on the Committee’s behalf. The Committee, the Special Tribunal, and the General

Assembly of the Senate were among the authorities to review complaints about the highest officials of the Russian Empire (Kabashov 2010:84). These three government bodies discharged an important function of compensating for the administrative injustice, for which Tsarist Russia did not have an independent institution (Pravilova 2000).

At the top of the system of bodies receiving complaints about the actions and resolutions of officials at a lower—governorate (gubernia)¹¹—level, which stood one of the Senate’s departments. This body considered appeals against resolutions by gubernia authorities, as well as final determinations by gubernia-level land surveys and other cases appertaining to the jurisdiction of the Second department. Ministries also received complaints about the actions and resolutions by gubernia and district officials. At the lowest level among the organs receiving citizens’ complaints there were local authorities. They looked into complaints by private individuals, associations, and institutions about the actions and resolutions of county-level (zemstvo)¹² institutions and municipal governments as stipulated in the Statutes for the Provincial and County Institutions (1864).

In the late nineteenth century the discrepancy between the mechanism of complaints and the newly forming judiciary was felt acutely. In a broader sense, one could speak of a conflict between the judicial and administrative powers.

The judicial system evidently clashes with the mechanism of complaints both at the institutional level and as far as its function of restoring justice is concerned. The Senate, performing executive, lawmaking, and judicial functions all at once, controlled both the courts and administrative bodies responsible for receiving complaints. Besides, by the very logic of monarchic governance, the Emperor was the source of supreme power capable of influencing both the court and complaint resolution.

11 A governorate (gubernia) was a major and principal administrative subdivision of the Russian Empire and the early RSFSR. In 1917 there were 78 governorates.

12 Zemstvo—an institution of elected  local government, established under the reform of 1861. After the October Revolution the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced with a multilevel system of workers’ and peasants’

councils (‘soviets’).

The norms and practices used when working with complaints also demonstrated affinity to court procedures. For the Committee to consider a complaint about some department of the Governing Senate, the complainant had to indicate what laws they thought were violated and list all the evidence and proofs in support of their argument (Kabashov 2010:89). Thus, to an extent the mechanism of complaints emulated judicial procedure in that it took into consideration and passed resolutions on breaches of the law.

An awareness of these contradictions had immediate consequences for the Emperor’s Applications Committee. In 1879 the Special Tribunal raised the question of the Committee’s right to exist. It was suddenly discovered that the Applications Committee as an ancient institution for dispensation of royal mercy stands in glaring contradiction to the new judicial regulations adopted in 1864. Sergei Kabashov writes: “Open debates regarding the future of the Committee took place in the State Council in April 1884. As a result of the ministers’ pressure, on June 9, 1884, Tsar Alexander III issued a decree dissolving the Applications Committee” (2010:84).

This did not, however, stop the stream of complaints. They kept coming in large quantities and demanded consideration. Over centuries, the practice of complaining to the Tsar turned into an important symbol of autocratic power.

As one of the archetypes of public conscience, the idea of a ‘fair ruler’ capable of solving every problem had defined the rules of political game in Russian society throughout the fifteenth to nineteenth century. It was impossible to just give up on such a vital means of support for the royal authority. Consideration of complaints submitted to His Majesty was delegated to the Chancellery for applications within the Emperor’s headquarters, in whose jurisdiction it remained until March 20, 1895. This transfer of responsibilities indicated a return to archaic models of royal mercy from the past reigns (ibid.: 84).

In 1895 Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar, restored an independent central administrative organ—His Majesty’s Own Chancellery for Receiving Applications, submitted in His Majesty’s name. The same year saw the adoption of the Rules on the Order of Accepting and Redirecting Applications and Complaints Submitted to His Majesty (The Rules 1906). The jurisdiction of the Imperial Chancellery for receiving applications was greatly restricted by the end of the nineteenth century as compared to that established at the

time of Alexander I. Only those solicitations could be submitted directly to the Tsar that could be resolved by means of granting royal mercy. A substantial part of complaints was transferred into the jurisdiction of ministries and department heads. This is important insofar as it shows that the Emperor’s role in addressing complaints ceased to be practical and became more of a symbol. In turn, the mechanism of complaints transformed into a functional tool affirming the Emperor’s power and mercy. This approach generally agreed with the logic of transitioning from patrimonial governance to a bureaucratic system of administrative and judicial institutions authorized by law to pass independent judgments (Kabashov 2010:87–88).

Increasing tensions between the development of legal practices and the mechanism of complaints were tangible not only at the royal chancellery’s level. The same issues arose at the lowest levels. For instance, the institution of zemskie nachalniki (bailiffs) stood in radical contradiction to the principles of rational judicial organization resulting from the judicial and administrative reform of 1889. This counter-reform in the sphere of judicial administration was carried out in most provinces of the European part of Russia based on the County Heads Law from July 12, 1889 (County Heads Law 1889).

The reform reduced to naught one of the most important principles of the 1864 reform of the judiciary—the separation of the lowest court from local administration. Instead of separate administrative organs (district offices of peasant affairs) and judicial organs (elected commissioners of the peace and their councils), an institution of bailiffs was introduced to carry out both judicial and administrative functions in relation to peasants (Shatkovskaia 2000:47). The law allowed referring to local customs, which led to lack of procedural unity in similar cases and the judges’ negligence and arbitrariness.

Prior to the Revolution, court procedure and the mechanism of complaints are still very similar both institutionally and as regards their normative base. While the very existence of the mechanism of complaints supported custom as a source of norms and justice, the court lacked resources to fully give up applying the same norms to practice. Both the court and the mechanism of complaints were dominated by the monarch. Attempts at legal modernization notwithstanding, royal mercy remained the mightiest of powers. The population’s lack of literacy and strong traditions of Christianity

further bolstered this situation. A strengthening of institutions, whether judicial, or executive, leads to their differentiation. The late nineteenth-century confrontation between the judicial institutions and the mechanism of complaints proved to be vital for the understanding of tensions escalating within the systems of governance, justice, and society as a whole. It also demonstrated the readiness, the possibilities, as well as the problems related to modernizing the sphere of law and state administration.

Multiple attempts at reducing the efficiency of the mechanism of complaints, and just as many efforts to keep it up manifested clearly that by the end of the nineteenth century, it remained in demand. The practice of complaining was an integral part of society’s everyday life and remained a relevant way of restoring justice, especially among the mostly illiterate masses. Making this mechanism less relevant would require political will and further modernization of judicial institutions.

Thus the mechanism of complaints presented itself as a powerful means of supporting autocracy and its respective model of relationship with society.

Sergei Kabashov dubs the mechanism of complaints, “a mechanism for creating an organic unity of the monarch with the people” (2010:85). The mechanism of complaints was perfectly justifiable as a tool of centralizing power. From the principle ‘the monarch is the father of the people’ it followed that the Tsar as a God’s anointer and as a fighter against the bureaucrats’ lies can never remain indifferent to his subjects’ suffering, even if a show of mercy contradicts the law. The monarch’s sustained efforts at safeguarding the mechanism of complaints testify that he was, among other things, expected to serve as a constituent supporting the actual model of autocracy.

The very first attempts at reforming the legal system showed that the mechanism of complaints stands in conceptual contradiction to modernization of the court and the judiciary on the whole. A strengthening of the law inevitably resulted in the weakening of the monarch’s significance and undermined his authority as the principal, supreme source of justice and a religious figure. Despite all attempts to involve the mechanism into a general process of modernization, it remained an institution rooted in an archaic, patriarchal societal structure. A weakening of the mechanism’s role undermined the entire model of autocratic power and, simultaneously, the

established contract between power and society. It was the decentralization of power, previously concentrated in the Tsar’s hands, and the multiplication of power institutions capable and legally authorized to pass judgment on many administrative issues, that led to the final demise of the sacred patrimonial principle. Attempts at safeguarding autocratic institutions revealed a tendency to oppose legal modernization, which would push society into a certain pathway that would be difficult to turn away from.

Ultimately, the pre-revolutionary experience made it clear that the mechanism of complaints functions as an instrument of support for an autocratic power only when there is an actual monarch at the end of the line, and communication is effective. A mechanism of complaints that does not generate a response does the opposite: it weakens the legitimacy of the royal rule. All that reforms of the mechanism of complaints, intended to expand autocracy’s social base, could do against the backdrop of the judiciary’s growing power was create an illusion of influence and greatly complicate the system of state governance. The newly formalized institutions had limited access to actual administrative issues, whereas informal institutions enjoyed an unduly large range of powers. As a result, the mechanism of complaints lost much of its efficiency, with an immediate detrimental effect on autocracy’s prestige.